Chapter 19
CHAPTER 19
Mrs. Haggerty had gone straight to bed when we got home, looking a little tipsy and complaining of a headache. Cam’s text message had come just before midnight, a barrage of screenshots from the department of motor vehicles, one for each license plate number Vero had sent him earlier that evening. His final text had simply said, When do I get my spaghetti ?
I texted him back, Tomorrow night .
Vero and I took our phones, her laptop, and a bottle of wine upstairs to her bedroom and quietly shut the door. We sat on her floor, sharing what was left of Vero’s bag of potato chips. She sat cross-legged on the carpet, squinting at the front of my sweater. She reached over and picked a chunk of brownie off my boob. “Don’t eat that,” I said, confiscating it and tossing it in the trash can behind me.
“Maybe I should do the googling,” I suggested, reaching for her laptop. It had been nearly six hours since Vero had eaten her brownie, and though she insisted she was already sober, her eyes were still lacking their usual razor-sharp focus.
She slapped my hand away. “I’ve got it,” she insisted. “I could eat twelve brownies and still be better at this than you.” She opened her laptop. “Who are we investigating first?”
The plan was to learn as much about the book club members as possible, then look for any connections they might have to the library or Penny Dupree. I read through the list of their names.
“Try Viola Henry,” I said. “I think she hosted the first meeting we went to.”
Vero typed Viola’s name into the search bar. “Says here she’s the director of human resources for some tech company in Reston. The bio on their website says she enjoys hiking and reading, and in her spare time she volunteers with several women’s advocacy groups. She has two grown children. No mention of a husband.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s deceased,” I said, remembering the urn I had nearly knocked over in her house. “Any links to Penny in her social media?”
Vero typed and scrolled for a minute. “Viola doesn’t seem to have any social media. And Penny hasn’t updated hers since Gilford went missing.”
I read the next name on the list. “Try Gita Chaudhary.”
Vero typed in Gita’s name. “She owns a flower shop. According to her website, she specializes in formal events and deliveries of large arrangements. All I’m finding is her business page. No personal stuff. You don’t think that’s weird?”
“You don’t have any social media either,” I pointed out.
“Because I don’t want anybody to find me,” she reminded me.
“Let’s try the others.” I fed Vero one name at a time until we’d nearly exhausted the list. Lola de la Rosa was a nurse practitioner at a nearby hospital, and Kathy Sanderson owned a commercial cleaning company. Neither of them had social media pages, but both women had active profiles on various dating apps. Destiny Roth had an Instagram account. Her grid was mostly photos of her twin daughters, who were cheerleaders at the local middle school.
“Any mention of a partner?” I asked.
“None that I can find.”
“Where does Destiny work?”
“Looks like she has two jobs. One in information management at the Office of Vital Records in Richmond and a side hustle doing embroidery and custom engraving for her own Etsy shop.”
“I don’t get it. The only thing these women have in common is the fact that none of them are married.” They were all different ages, different nationalities, with different careers and wildly different interests. And I already knew from seeing Penny’s vast collection of romance novels that even her book tastes ran very different from Mrs. Haggerty’s. So how had these women all found each other?
“What about Elizabeth Chen?” I asked, reading the next name on the list. “Her car was the one I saw parked in the driveway at the book club meeting tonight. She must have been the host.”
Vero started typing. “According to Loudoun County, she’s the only person listed on the deed to her house. No social media profiles except for a LinkedIn page. It says she’s been working as a vet tech at the county animal shelter for the last eighteen months.” That explained the Hello Kitty scrubs and the gift bag with the paw print on it. “Before that, she worked at a shelter in Fairfax… Oh .” Vero angled her screen toward me. “Isn’t this the same shelter where Patricia Mickler used to volunteer?”
I scrolled down to the bottom of the page. Vero was right. The address of the animal shelter where Elizabeth Chen had previously worked was the same one we had visited when we were investigating Patricia Mickler’s husband. “If Patricia and Elizabeth both worked there at the same time, they probably knew each other.” It wasn’t a huge shelter, judging by the number of lockers we’d seen in the staff lounge when we’d snuck into the building last fall. And the employees and volunteers there had all seemed pretty chummy. It’s not like the internet was giving us much else to work with.
“Maybe Patricia can tell us something useful about at least one member of Mrs. Haggerty’s freaky little circle of friends.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” I said, closing Vero’s laptop and corking the wine as she yawned. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow, we’re going on a field trip.”
It was nearly one in the morning when Vero and I said our goodnights and retired to our beds. I headed to the rollaway in my office, turned off the light, and slipped under the thin blanket. As I lay there in the dark, I could have sworn I heard a door open in the hall. I sat up, ear tipped toward the sound of the telltale squeak in the riser on the third step.
The footsteps were too heavy and slow to belong to the kids. I threw off my blanket and got out of bed, poking my head out into the hall just as Vero opened her door and peeked down the stairs.
Both children’s doors were closed. Mrs. Haggerty’s door was cracked.
We listened as the front door downstairs quietly opened and shut.
Vero met me in the hall and whispered, “Do you know where she’s going?”
“I have a hunch.”
“I’ll stay here with the kids. You follow Mrs. Haggerty and see what she’s up to.”
I put my coat on over my pajamas, slipped on my shoes, and hurried out the front door, following the same path Mrs. Haggerty had walked the last time she had snuck out for her late-night walk. I avoided the streetlamps, careful to stay a block behind her.
Mrs. Haggerty paused in front of the same house she had before. I hid behind a tree trunk as she turned on a small pocket light and flashed it twice at the window. Then she strode to the mailbox and tucked a note inside.
A curtain parted in the window upstairs. Mrs. Haggerty closed the mailbox and started walking back the way she’d come.
I didn’t dare to breathe as she strolled past my hiding spot and headed home.
When Mrs. Haggerty was gone, the front door of the house cracked open. A woman I’d seen at the book club meeting stepped out—the one who had dropped her book in her hurry to get home. She shuffled to the mailbox in her slippers and robe, darting cautious glances at the windows of her own house as she retrieved the slip of paper Mrs. Haggerty had left. It occurred to me then that I didn’t know the woman’s name. But why? Vero and I had looked into every license plate of every vehicle that had been parked on the street near Elizabeth Chen’s town house that night, and yet somehow, we had missed the one that belonged to their guest of honor.
Had the woman taken an Uber? Or had she parked so far down the street that I hadn’t seen her car?
She read the note, folded it into her pocket, then looked furtively around her as she hurried back into her house. When her door finally closed, I pulled out my phone, dimming the screen and angling it close to my body to keep any of her neighbors from noticing the light.
I typed the woman’s street address into a search bar. The home was owned by Robert and Sally Mullen. According to the county department of revenue, they only paid property taxes for one car—a luxury sedan listed solely under Robert’s name. I googled him and found a LinkedIn page featuring a robust profile. Robert Mullen, CPA, was employed at a large local accounting firm. When I googled Sally Mullen, I found no more than a brief mention in a church newsletter where she was listed as a volunteer. No Facebook or Instagram accounts. No LinkedIn. Not even a chat group.
Robert doesn’t know I’m gone. He’ll be angry if I’m not back by the time he gets home.
Sally must have found a ride and sneaked to that meeting to avoid upsetting her husband. That explained all of Mrs. Haggerty’s cloak-and-dagger visits to the woman’s mailbox, but why come again tonight? What had the note said? The book club had already met twice that week. What more could they possibly have to talk about?
On Saturdays, we discuss. On Tuesdays, we vote.
But what did they do after that?