Ten
I couldn’t sleep that night, considering that my friend and mentor Manny Chapman was dead and gone, and my ex’s latest girlfriend, Faye Tilley, had been found dead in my kayak. Not to mention the fact that someone was trying to frame me for Faye’s murder and doing a bang-up job of it.
Worse yet, the most obvious suspect in Faye’s death was the man I’d married and divorced: Clay Lane. He could have argued with Faye. I froze, suddenly recalling the loud voices I’d heard in the night. I remembered the scream that I’d chalked up to a bad dream. Only instead of a nightmare, it must’ve been Faye.
Could Clay have killed his girlfriend?
But even if the pieces fit together regarding means and opportunity, I couldn’t come up with a motive strong enough. Why would Clay go to all the trouble? Sure, he messed around on me and on every other woman, too, but when his flings ended, he didn’t really care. He was all passionate and lovey-dovey at the beginning, cold and impersonal at the end.
If anyone should be dead, it should be Clay. Some woman should have killed him by now.
Which led me to wonder at the possibility of one of his other women committing the crime. There are all kinds of nutcases in the world; maybe some crazy woman was picking off her competition? Even if, in my opinion, she’d have to be totally insane to go to those drastic measures for someone as superficial as Clay. But whether the killer was Clay or one of his women, based on what Johnny Jay told me about the tip he’d received, someone was trying to pin this on me!
By the time the sun rose, I was cranky from lack of sleep and ready for hand-to-hand combat with Clay.
But my number one priority every morning, the very first thing I did even before coffee, was go check on my bees. I did a quick buzz past my honeybees. They were happy and busy.
Then I banged on Clay’s door until I noticed that his car was missing from the drive. I never was at my sharpest when operating on zero sleep. Clay wasn’t exactly an early riser, so my guess was he had stayed someplace else last night. Was there another woman already? That would be rotten, even for that scum.
I was so crabby at the moment, I couldn’t stand myself.
Annoyed that Clay wasn’t home but knowing he never locked his door, I let myself in. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but figured I’d know it when I saw it.
One thing I will say for the man, Clay kept his lair clean and tidy. Sexy feet and neatness were two attributes I had admired in him once upon a time. But now I’d take a sloppy, loyal man over one like my ex any day of the week.
Clay lived in several rooms in the back of his jewelry shop. The space wasn’t large—small bedroom and living room, and a very tiny kitchen—so I was through it in less than a few minutes, ignoring the array of sex toys in the nightstand and girly magazines stacked in the closet and next to the toilet. The man needed therapy. Sex addiction is a major relationship buster, as he should have figured out by now.
His wire-making jewelry workshop would take longer to search. There were a zillion hiding places. His workbench looked like a carpenter’s table—pliers, file hammers, vises, torches, wire cutters—and the shelves above the bench were stacked with containers filled with supplies he needed to create his art: wires in copper, silver, yellow brass, gold, beads, gems. Half-finished projects took up another major section.
Then there was the showroom where he displayed his pieces, some of which, and I really hated to admit this, were fabulous.
I had hardly started rummaging through the workshop when I saw his car pull into the driveway. Clay got out and headed for the door. I didn’t have the energy to panic or to hide. Instead, I met him in his living room.
“What are you doing here?” He said, surprised to find me on his sofa. Clay looked like he’d had a bad night, too. His eyes were puffy and red-rimmed. He moved past me like a sleepwalker and sank into the sofa next to me without waiting for a response. “This is hell,” he said.
“At last we agree on something.” I was on guard, ready for anything, convinced that I could take him, what with all that rage I’d worked up through the night. But seeing Clay like this, all messed up and miserable, reminded me of his nonviolent, albeit totally selfish, nature. He just wanted to be loved. And loved. And loved.
“Did you kill Faye?” I blurted.
Clay bent forward and buried his hands in his face, ignoring me. “I can’t believe she’s dead,” he said, or at least I think that’s what I heard. The sound was muffled.
“I’m sorry for her and for her family. And for you,” I said. “But did you know the police chief pulled me in last night and all but accused me of killing her?”
Clay uncovered his face and focused on me for the first time. “I didn’t see you down there. They kept me all night. Police Chief Jay thinks I killed her.”
“I thought Johnny Jay had me in his scope.”
“He does,” Clay said. “He thinks we’re in it together.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I said. “Everybody in town knows how I feel about you. I just threw a party celebrating our divorce! I’d never do anything with you. I wouldn’t even share the same side of the street with you if I could help it, let alone murder your girlfriend with you.”
“That’s what I tried to tell him.”
I had a few more accusations to throw his way before I went back home. “Why did you tell me Faye was in your bedroom when I came asking about my kayak?” I said. “She must’ve been already dead.”
“We had a fight and she left. I never said she was here.”
“I’m pretty sure you did.” Or he’d implied it, at least, with his gestures and facial expressions. Would that hold up in court?
“We argued,” he said.
“About what?”
Clay’s eyes went to the ceiling, a sure indication that he was concocting a lie. “Um.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
His eyes came back down. “I’m not talking about it.”
“Okay, fine, you argued with her. Then what?”
“She stomped out. At first, I thought she was outside cooling off. When she didn’t come back, I figured she’d walked down to Stu’s and called for a ride home.”
That seemed reasonable. I assumed she’d had friends who would have picked her up.
Clay tucked his feet in and rolled up in a ball.
“Clay, look at me,” I said.
Clay glanced up.
“Meet my eyes.” Toward the end of our rocky marriage, I’d perfected the ability to sense when he lied to me. His mouth told all sorts of stories, but his eyes didn’t know how to play along. “Did you or did you not murder your girlfriend?”
His eyes never left mine. “I did not kill Faye. There, are you happy? Besides, I wouldn’t have made love to her in your kayak if I planned to kill her in it. That would take a crazy man!”
“What? You had sex in my kayak?”
“In the afternoon. While you were having your divorce party at the store.”
“You are so gross!”
I slammed out of his house, disgusted and thinking of a zillion names to call Clay. But I was 99 percent certain killer wasn’t one of them, which meant I’d wasted a whole night’s sleep for nothing. It also left the field wide open, if I was right. Did Faye have any enemies who hated her enough to kill her? Did I have any who hated me enough to frame me for it? I tended to blurt out things without thinking them through sometimes, but I’d never intentionally hurt anybody. Well, nobody other than Johnny Jay, but that was mutual.
I showered, made a pot of strong coffee, poured it into a carafe, and carried it down the street to open up The Wild Clover.
Milly Hopticourt, my recipe tester, arrived at the store at the same time I did, carrying a cardboard box filled with bouquets of flowers from her garden—cosmos, sunflowers, Russian sage, borage, Shasta daisies, globe thistles, baby’s breath.
“Every last bunch I brought in yesterday sold,” Milly said proudly.
“They are so beautiful. Come on in.” I held the door open for her then set the carafe on a counter.
After turning on lights and flipping the open sign around, I helped Milly arrange the bouquets in a big bin. I added a few inches of water to them, wiped my wet hands on my jeans, and surveyed my dream come true.
Everything was bright and shiny and inviting. Buying the church and opening the store had been the right decision.
“What recipes should we put in the next newsletter?” Milly asked. “I should start testing soon.”
“I found some wild grape vines next to the river bank, in my secret place. How about whipping up something with ripe grapes as the main ingredient? I’ll pick them for you tomorrow.”
“Perfect. I’ll start with that.”
“Tell me, Milly, were you at the library yesterday afternoon?” I poured a cup of coffee and handed it to her.
“Me and the rest of the town,” she said, taking the cup.
“That many people came?”
Milly nodded. “Tons. It was so much fun even with the rain, because we were all dry there under the tent. But when the news came about Faye, the place cleared out like there’d been a bomb threat, with everybody running to the river by Stu’s for news. You can imagine what we all thought when we heard you were out on the river with your ex-husband’s dead girlfriend’s body.”
“Yes, well, that must have kept everybody busy.” I’d gotten out of there just in time, thanks to Grams.
“You bet. And now we hear that she really was murdered.”
“We did?”
“It’s all over town that she drowned, and it wasn’t an accident, either.”
Secrets don’t last long in a town this size. If Johnny Jay wanted to hold back information, he’d have his hands full. And I had to hope our conversation at the police station didn’t leak out. That’s all people needed to hear, rumors that I’d been overheard fighting with Faye before her death.
“Was Clay at the library, too, when you found out about Faye?” I reached for another cup to pour coffee for myself, waiting for her answer. The false tip had to have been made sometime on Saturday, after Faye was found but before the library closed for the day. If Clay hadn’t been there, he couldn’t have used the computer to send the e-mail and he was totally clear in my book.
Milly scrunched her forehead. “Um, I don’t think so. But there were so many people in and out.” She paused. “No, he definitely wasn’t outside when Larry Koon came rushing over to tell us the awful news. Wouldn’t that have been a terrible shock for him? Not that it wasn’t bad enough for him later, I’m sure.”
“I’m relieved I wasn’t the one to have to tell him,” I said.
“Now I remember,” Milly said. “Emily told me later about how pleased she had been to see Clay because he’d never set foot in the library before. And I said to her, maybe he was turning over a new leaf, a book leaf, and how he would need some distractions to help him get over this and reading might help.” She took a sip of coffee. “Emily said she went inside after the news came, but he was gone by then. What’s wrong with you?”
The coffee I was pouring missed the cup and splattered across the top of the counter.