But if Amy thought Ebony had loaned out the use of her backseat and she—Amy, not Ebony—caught her rich boyfriend of two years with her married boss back there, she would be angry. Angry enough to confront said boyfriend in the kitchen of the party? Angry enough to wield a knife? Angry enough to stab him and leave him for dead? I didn’t know. What I did know was that it all boiled down to one thing: Amy had a motive.
I excused myself from her table and rejoined Tak at ours. A small bowl with two scoops of half-melted ice cream sat in the middle of the table. Tak held a spoon in one hand. There was a dent in the side of the scoop closest to him. A clean spoon sat on my place mat.
“I thought you’d like to split some ice cream,” he said. “Better hurry, though. It’s almost melted through.”
I picked up my spoon and then set it back down. “Amy Bradshaw is sitting at the booth in the back corner. Sunday morning she came to the store and tried to sell me her costume from Saturday night. She was wearing a giant diamond ring and she made it seem like Blitz had given it to her. Today she not only says that I misunderstood her, but admitted that she caught Blitz and Gina Cassavogli in the backseat of Ebony’s car at the party.”
Tak stared at me with open admiration. “You found all that out in, like, five minutes?”
I felt pretty good about it myself. I picked up the spoon and scooped a sizable amount of ice cream into my mouth. I savored the sweet creaminess of it and swallowed. “What flavor is this?”
“Cherry vanilla.”
“Mmmmmm.” I took another scoop and closed my eyes. When I opened them up, Tak was grinning.
“What would you have had for dinner if we weren’t here?” he asked.
“A bowl of Fruity Pebbles, probably,” I said. “Daily supply of vitamins and minerals.”
“I don’t think the son of a restaurant owner can be seen in public with a woman who eats Fruity Pebbles for dinner.”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”
We finished off the ice cream and the waiter brought the bill. I snatched it from the table before Tak could get to it and made a show of leaving cash in the black folder.
“I thought this wasn’t a date?” he asked.
“It’s not. If it was a date, we’d go dutch.”
The tension from the spilled water incident had dissipated and Tak and I were back to the comfortable getting-to-know-you feeling from earlier at the store. Sadly, the tension came back when he pulled his SUV up in front of my store, because someone else was already parked there.
Detective Nichols.
She was dressed in a pair of black stretchy yoga pants, a sports bra, and an open zip-front sweatshirt. As if she hadn’t already won the employment round (detective trumps magician’s assistant in almost everybody’s world), she pulled ahead in the body-fat round too. As in, a lot less than I had. Whereas I was far from comfortable in my own skin, the detective proved she was not only comfortable in hers, she wanted everybody to see it. She unpacked my scooter from the back of an old, beat-up pickup truck.
“Tak,” Nichols said.
“Nancy,” Tak said.
Detective Nichols turned to me. “How’s Jerry?” she asked.
“He’s still at the hospital in Moxie. I’m hoping he comes back by the end of the week.”
“Are you going back up there to visit him tomorrow?”
“No, I need to be here to open the store. I didn’t count on the lost business from today.”
She nodded as if she understood. “I finally had a chance to get your scooter.”
“Thank you. You didn’t have to bring it here.”
“Don’t mention it,” she said with a wave of her hand.
I looked back and forth between Tak and Detective Nichols—Nancy—and felt more tension than I had when I’d knocked over the glass of water at Catch-22. Whatever the terms of their breakup were, I sensed they were unresolved. Now hardly seemed the time to get on the officer’s bad side.
“Thanks for helping me out in the store tonight,” I said to Tak. I pulled out my keys. “Detective Nichols, do you have a couple of minutes? I think we need to talk.”
Tak looked surprised but recovered quickly. The same could not be said for Detective Nichols, which caused me, at least internally, to smile. Tak climbed back into his SUV and drove off, leaving us two gals hanging out on the sidewalk. I unlocked the store and she followed me inside. I turned on the lights and set my keys on the counter.
“If I remember correctly, the reason you were at Christopher Robin Crossing on Monday was because somebody robbed Black Jack and Linda Cannon’s house, right?” I asked.
“Hold up,” she said. She put her hands up, palm-side out. “You want to talk to me about the investigation?”
“What did you think I wanted to talk to you about?”
She looked at the door and then back to me. “Yes, that’s right. Linda Cannon called the police when she came home. The place had been tossed.”
“Do you know what was missing?”