Chapter 12 #2
She said yes within four minutes, which either meant she had nothing to hide or meant she was the kind of woman who never turned down free coffee. Dorothy did say the divorce had wrecked her finances.
We met her at a little café on Royal, the kind of place with marble tabletops gone soft at the corners and a ceiling fan that had clearly been fighting a losing battle against the heat since the Eisenhower administration.
Hollis installed himself two tables over with basketball playing on his phone, but muted.
Hyacinth arrived in linen, sunglasses pushed up into hair that looked freshly blown out. She slid into the chair across from me with a smile that didn't quite make it all the way up.
"This one’s yours.”
Hyacinth was nothing if not efficient. When I texted her “here” she’d given me her latte order.
"Thanks. I haven't been sleeping." She wrapped both hands around her cup like she needed warmth despite the fact that it was eighty-one degrees outside and the coffee was iced. "It's been a horrible weekend, Harper. God, what a disaster."
"It has." I let a beat sit there, the way Dorothy had over her ranunculus, the way Maggie did on mic. "I keep thinking about the bracelet."
Her hands went very still around the cup. "I told you. It was an earring, and I told the detective—"
"I know what you told him." I kept my voice soft. "I also know somebody wired you fifteen thousand dollars two weeks before the gala. And another two thousand three days before Evelyn died."
The color went out of her face so fast it was almost theatrical. For one wild second I thought she might actually slide out of the chair onto the floor. Two tables over, I watched Hollis not look up from his phone, which was its own kind of impressive.
“How the bleep do you know that?”
She actually said bleep.
It struck me as hilarious.
Who was hilarious now, Hyacinth?
“A little birdie told me.” God, I had always wanted to say that.
"That's private," she finally managed, barely above a whisper. "Divorce sucks. Don’t do it.”
"Noted. Somebody overheard you and Evelyn fighting about an arrangement twenty minutes before the toast," I said, as my pulse climbed. I knew I was pushing her too hard right out of the gate but I was a woman possessed. I wanted answers.
Besides, she’d been a mean girl in high school and I wasn’t over it.
"You were telling her she couldn't keep doing this to you. Her telling you that you knew the terms."
Hyacinth's eyes filled, fast and sudden, and for a second I felt like the worst kind of person, needling a grieving woman over iced coffee.
Then I remembered the bracelet in the hedge and reminded myself that grief and guilt could wear the same face, and I still hadn't figured out which one I was looking at.
"It wasn't what you think," she whispered.
"Then tell me what it was."
She didn't.
Instead, she sat up straighter. “Who is that guy?” She pointed to Hollis. “That’s the detective!”
“What do you mean?” I said vaguely. “That’s my boyfriend.”
It sounded false even to my own ears.
Hyacinth narrowed her eyes. “Really? I guess I could see that. You’re definitely a beer and band T-shirt kind of girl.”
All true and yet she made it sound so unsavory. “Yep. My boyfriend. Hollis.”
“Harper and Hollis? It sounds like a clothing store.”
It did. I picked at the sticker on my coffee cup. “It does.”
I’d lost control of the conversation.
“Why is he just sitting over there?”
“We’re going to dinner right after this. So why the fight then, with Evelyn?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. It’s very painful. We had a falling out after my ex-husband asked to borrow money from Evelyn without my knowledge. We were just on the cusp of reconciling.” A tiny sob escaped her mouth.
“I’m sorry.” I didn’t quite know what else to say. She wasn’t going to confess to anything.
“Is he really your boyfriend?” she asked. “Yoohoo, Hollis, can you come over here?”
I wondered if Hollis had ever been “yoohooed” in his life. I tried not to grin.
He actually stood up and came over. “Uh, hi, you must be Hyacinth.”
“Nice to meet you. So Harper is your boo?” she asked, sounding cagey and skeptical.
“My what?”
I knew he knew what a boo was. He was being cagey too.
“Your girl.”
“Yes.” His hand landed on my shoulder. “My little pumpkin patch.”
What the…
Hyacinth got a text. She read it and stood up. “Gotta run! Lovely to see you! Pleasure to meet you Detective Hollis.”
The woman was smarter than I’d given her credit for. She’d just run circles around me.
“Little pumpkin patch?” I demanded, when Hollis took her abandoned chair.
“I don’t know. It was the first thing that popped into my head.”
“Like, I don’t even know what that means. I have black hair and fair skin. Am I the vines, creeping along the ground?”
“You’re not anything, stop. It doesn’t matter.”
Well, that was painful.
"She's good for it," he said. "Money, motive, opportunity to plant a bracelet at the scene like a woman with something to hide. I'd put money on her myself."
"I know," I said, reluctantly. And I did know.
Everything lined up too neatly not to know it — the payments, the fight, the burial in the hedge, the years of quiet resentment Dorothy had described.
It made sense in the specific, satisfying way a good podcast episode made sense, all the loose threads gathering into one clean knot.
Except.
It was too easy.
"She modified a spring mechanism into an antique silver straw," I said slowly. “Narrow enough to fit inside a cocktail stirrer, precise enough to trigger on pressure, and she did it with the kind of hands that get a manicure every ten days."
"People surprise you," Hollis said. "Skills don't always show."
"Sure," I said.
Something about it sat wrong. But I was annoyed with Hollis for saying I wasn’t anything.
So I just agreed, because I wanted to go home and not be in his presence.
“Hyacinth. It had to be Hyacinth.”
“Look, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
I shoved my chair back and stood up abruptly. “All good in the neighborhood,” I said brightly.
The only thing I’d learned today with any certainty was that I was a terrible actress.