Chapter 7
Jack
Brenda was waiting for me in a back corner booth at the coffee shop, and I almost didn’t recognize her. I’d never seen the CPA in anything but her professional attire or softball clothes. Today, though, she wore a ragged old flannel shirt over jeans with a battered John Deere ball cap. Her eyes were red, like she’d been crying, and she was shredding a napkin into a pile of damp paper on the table next to her coffee cup.
I crossed to her table and saw her cup was empty. “Do you want another?”
“Thanks. Double shot of espresso. I’ve been up all night.”
After I brought our coffees to the table with an assortment of pastries—I hadn’t had time for breakfast—I sat across from her and silently drank my coffee. I’d learned over the years that the best way to get someone to open up is to give them the space to do so. Firing questions at her about what was so urgent in the life of a small-town accountant that she needed to call a private investigator at six in the morning would be counter-productive.
She stared into her coffee for a long time before she finally looked up at me. “Well. First, I should probably tell you I was dating Ace for a while. Maybe six months.”
She paused, but I just nodded for her to continue.
“You don’t have something to say? About why would someone like me go out with someone like him?” Her mouth twisted with bitterness.
“I don’t judge people and their relationships,” I said gently. “If I did, I’d have to wonder what in the world Tess sees in someone like me.”
She snorted. “Don’t think that a lot of people in Dead End haven’t gossiped about that since you came back. If you were here to stay. If you were going to break Tess’s heart. That kind of petty stuff.”
“People need to get lives.”
“Small towns.” She shrugged.
“So. You and Ace. I know you didn’t ask me to meet you here to talk about your dating life.”
She shuddered and clasped both hands around her coffee cup. And that’s when I saw it. A splash of red on the cuff of her sleeve. I instantly recognized that shade of brownish red.
“Is that blood?”
She raised her arm and stared down at it, and I was horrified to see tears welling in her eyes. It might be a guy thing, but I’d rather stare down a feral vampire than a strong woman crying, because I had no idea what to do.
“Brenda. Are you … can I …”
“I … I guess it could be blood. There was some on his floor and the wall …” She swayed in her seat, and I put a hand out to steady her, while my mind snapped to high alert.
“Whose floor? What is going on?”
“Ace’s floor. I went to his house last night. At maybe … three in the morning? He kept calling me and calling me. I didn’t?—”
“He called you? What did he say?”
“That’s just it. He didn’t say anything. They were just hang-up calls. He was harassing me, getting revenge for me breaking up with him, I thought. He said nobody breaks up with him, and I … Never mind. That doesn’t matter. I went over there to give him a piece of my mind, but he wasn’t there.”
This was going from bad to worse.
“At three a.m.?”
“Yeah. Something like that. I looked at my car clock when I got back into my car to go home, and it was three-twenty.”
“Are you sure he wasn’t there?”
She nodded, hunching into a ball of misery in her seat. “Yeah. I pounded on the door, and when he wouldn’t answer, I went inside.”
“The door was unlocked?” Everybody in Dead End left their doors unlocked, for the most part. It used to drive me nuts.
“What?” She blinked at me. “No, it was locked. I used my key.”
I resisted the urge to smack myself in the forehead. Worse and worse and worse.
“You used your key. And inside, you found?”
“It looked like somebody had sacked the place. Or there had been a big fight. Furniture was knocked over, and stuff was broken and all over the place. I mean, you’d be surprised to learn that Ace is actually pretty neat in his housekeeping. He?—”
“Brenda! I don’t want to hear about Ace’s housekeeping skills. What else did you see? Where did the blood come in?”
“Oh. Right. I’m sorry. I’m so exhausted I’m foggy. There was a smear of blood on the wall between the family room and kitchen, and some on the floor. I may have leaned on the wall with this hand?” She held up the arm in the bloody sleeve again and then dropped it into her lap. “I was worried he might be dead or unconscious in the kitchen or somewhere else in the house. But I searched the whole place, and he wasn’t there.”
“What did the police say?”
“The police?”
“When you called the police to report this, what did they say?” I asked slowly and carefully.
Her eyes widened. “I didn’t call the police. I went home and walked the floor for two hours and then I called you.”
Worst.
Bingo. We’d gone from bad to worse to worst.
“So, what do I do now, Jack?”
I took a deep breath and then slowly blew it out. “Now we call the police.”