Chapter 12
Twelve
Hollis showed up after brunch with a manila folder and an appetite.
“Hey, Harper.” He let himself in via the backdoor while I was bringing all the platters and leftover food into the kitchen.
“Your timing is unreal,” I told him as he reached up in the cupboard for a plate and started loading up.
"I have many skills. Impeccable timing is one of them." He set the folder on my counter and opened the cutlery drawer. He got out a fork and started destroying a poached egg.
“You’re in jeans,” I commented.
“I’m flattered you noticed,” he said around a mouthful of food.
“I meant you’re not on duty.”
"Nope. Here unofficially." He flipped the folder open, turned it so it faced me. "Financial records. Evelyn's accounts, going back two months. Don't ask how, and don't repeat anything to your guests."
I looked down. It was mostly numbers that just jumbled together. Though Evelyn had some cash. “Who inherits all this money?”
“A niece in Texas.”
That hit a little too close to home.
Somebody had highlighted two lines in yellow on the bank statement.
"There's a wire transfer," he said. “Two weeks before the gala. Fifteen thousand dollars, from Evelyn's personal account to Hyacinth Maxwell's."
I set my coffee down slowly. My hand had gone just a little shaky. "Fifteen thousand."
"And a second one." He tapped the lower line, smaller, tidier, the kind of number that seemed like an afterthought. "Three days before the gala. Two thousand."
"Three days before Evelyn died. That’s…wild."
"Give or take."
"That's not a birthday gift." I'd meant to sound clever about it, but it came out flat.
“Not in my family,” Hollis said.
"That's not Evelyn quietly smoothing things over out of guilt, or being the fairy godmother of an estranged protégée. Fifteen grand and then a second, smaller payment right before she died. That's a pattern."
"That's what it looks like," Hollis agreed.
"So what's the theory? Blackmail?" I said it the way Dorothy hadn't, out loud, and it landed heavier now that there was a number attached to it. "Hyacinth had something on Evelyn? Something worth fifteen thousand dollars to keep quiet, and then, right before the gala, worth a little more."
“Why kill the golden goose then? It couldn’t be Hyacinth if that’s the theory.”
“True.” I bit my lip. Then tapped it. Teddy wandered out of the laundry room, took one look at Hollis, then retreated again.
"Or Evelyn was paying Hyacinth to do something," Hollis said. "Not to keep quiet about something. To go do a thing. The second payment being closer to the event matters. Retainers don't usually come in installments like that unless the job's got a deadline."
I hadn't thought of it that way, and I didn't love that he had. "You think Evelyn hired her."
"I think two payments, two weeks apart, with the second one landing three days before a woman turned up dead at her own gala, is not a coincidence I'm willing to file under generosity.
" He said it evenly, the way he said everything, but there was something underneath it, a kind of grim satisfaction that told me this was the piece he'd been waiting on.
"Doesn't tell me what the money was for.
Doesn't tell me who ended up doing what.
But it tells me Hyacinth Maxwell was lying to you at that gala, about more than a bracelet. "
“Was Evelyn trying to kill someone else? And it misfired?” That actually seemed logical to me. The silver straw as a weapon was Evelyn-coded, not Hyacinth. Clever, pretentious, confident…that all read Evelyn to me. “And either Hyacinth found out or Hyacinth was helping her?”
Teddy ambled back into the kitchen, like he approved of the direction of our reasoning. Hollis, without breaking eye contact with me, reached down and scratched behind his ears, which undercut the whole grim-detective energy considerably.
"I need to talk to her," I said. "Properly. I need her across a table with nowhere to go."
"That's the detective’s job, Harper."
“Detectives make people lawyer up the second you flash a badge. My sunny and trustworthy disposition gets people to tell me things over mimosas because they think I'm harmless."
“Trustworthy is a stretch.”
“Come with me as a friend. It will disarm her."
Hollis didn't say no immediately, which was surprising.
While I waited for him to come to his Hollis senses and say no, I pulled my phone out of my pocket.
I needed to text the server, Patrick, back. I couldn’t just leave a good-looking server on read because I was inserting myself into a murder investigation.
Hey, sorry this is so late, been meaning to write back since the gala. Thanks for the heads up.
He answered right away.
No worries. You doing okay?
I'm okay. Can I ask you something about Friday night?
Sure. What's up?
I chewed my lip, glanced at Hollis, who was eating but also watching me. Why did I feel guilty texting a guy? Hollis and I weren’t a thing and neither were me and Patrick. I was just being polite.
While simultaneously pumping him for information.
Did you see or hear anything weird before Evelyn collapsed? Anyone arguing, anything off?
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again, which meant he was drafting and redrafting, which meant whatever was coming had some weight to it.
Or he was going to tell me he wasn’t into talking murder.
Actually yeah. I was resetting the bar cart maybe twenty minutes before the toast and Mrs. Carrington and some woman were right on the other side of it.
The woman said something like you can't keep doing this to me and Mrs. C said something about the arrangement and how she had known the terms. I wasn't trying to eavesdrop, but it was tense.
Mrs. C walked off first. The other chick looked like she'd been crying.
I wasn’t a fan of guys referring to women as “chicks” but that was a footnote to worry about later if we kept texting.
What did the crier look like?
Idk. Brunette. Our age.
I had to assume that was Hyacinth.
I read it twice. Then I turned the phone around and held it up for Hollis, who leaned in and read it.
"Who is Patrick?”
“Server from the gala.”
“Why does he have your number?”
My eyebrows shot up. “That’s what you got out of this? Not that Hyacinth and Evelyn argued?”
“We don’t know that it was Hyacinth.”
"Arrangement. That's basically a receipt."
"It’s a server who saw two women fighting about money twenty minutes before one of them died," Hollis said. "It's not a confession. It's not proof anybody brought a weapon. But it's not nothing.”
“Thank you.”
“Screenshot that and send it to me. And share your new boyfriend’s contact info with me so I can let the detectives know.”
New boyfriend? Was Hollis jealous?
And I was gleeful at the prospect?
Yes and yes.
“I’m not sharing that information without asking Patrick first.”
“Oh, Christ,” was Hollis’s opinion.
I’d pushed too far.
"I'll get it to you." I typed back a quick thanks to Patrick, promised to explain everything over coffee sometime and set my phone face down, because I could feel myself wanting to spiral into whether that promise had been flirting or not.
And if I had done it because I was attracted to Patrick or if I wanted to make Hollis jealous.
He eyed my face down phone then looked at me.
There it was. That thing he did. Where he just stared at me and waited.
I verbally vomited.
“I’ll text Hyacinth and we’ll meet up with her today. Coffeeshop? Or a happy hour? She looks like a wine girl. Maybe it will loosen her tongue? She’ll say yes out of curiosity.”
I paused for air.
"And you need me there because..."
"Because I want a witness."
He considered that, jaw doing the thing it did when he was weighing whether to indulge me or lecture me, which were, in my experience, roughly a coin flip.
"I'm not going in as a detective," he said finally. "She clams up the second she clocks a badge, just like you said. If I'm there, I'm there as something else."
"Okay. Like I said, you can be my friend.”
“That’s stupid. Why would I be hanging out with you like that? Crashing girl dinner?”
I could think of one reason but he wouldn’t like it so I kept my mouth shut.
“Fine. Then you can be what, my accountant? My contractor? My sober coach?"
"I was thinking your boyfriend."
My brain froze. I nearly choked on the last of my coffee. "Excuse me?"
"It's simple. Believable. Nobody questions a boyfriend sitting at the next table looking at his phone. Nobody clams up in front of a boyfriend the way they do in front of a cop." He said it like he was reading off a very reasonable checklist.
Which it was.
But pretend Hollis was my boyfriend? It made me…weird.
"It's tactical."
"Tactical," I repeated.
"Very."
"Uh-huh." I narrowed my eyes at him, and he looked entirely unbothered, which made it worse. "And you just landed on boyfriend. Not cousin. Not an old family friend. Boyfriend."
"All of those are dumb. Boyfriend explains proximity." He shrugged, infuriatingly logical. "It's the cover that requires the least amount of lying."
"Sure," I said. "The least amount of lying is us pretending to be a couple."
"You want my help or not, Bergeron?"
I did. Desperately.
And I was frighteningly intrigued by what it would feel like to pretend to be his girlfriend. My heart was hammering away at my chest way too fast.
"Fine," I said. "Try to look like you like me."
"I'll have to dig deep," he said.
That wasn’t a great start.
Teddy chittered his agreement from somewhere near Hollis's ankle.
I texted Hyacinth from the porch twenty minutes later, keeping it breezy, the way you'd text someone you were only mildly curious about instead of someone you suspected of taking money to help kill their childhood friend's grandmother's best friend, or whatever tangled knot of relationships that actually was.
Hey, it’s Harper! I need caffeine and girl talk. Coffee today? My treat, penance for being nosy at the gala.
She wouldn’t be able to resist the exclamation point.