Chapter 18
CHAPTER 18
Mrs. Haggerty came into the foyer that evening at six thirty prompt. She carried her huge purse over one arm and a foil-covered plate in the other. Vero took a bottle of wine from the pantry. She grabbed hold of Mrs. Haggerty’s bag by the straps, nearly pulling the woman over as she tried to steal a glimpse inside.
Mrs. Haggerty gasped as they fought over the handles. “What are you doing?”
“I’m saving your reputation,” Vero said, peeking in the bag before dropping the bottle of wine in it. “It’s rude to go to a party empty-handed. Besides, everyone knows book clubs are better with booze. You’re not driving, so you might as well stay out late and have a little fun.”
Mrs. Haggerty looked scandalized as she snatched back her purse. Vero shook her head at me, letting me know the diary we were looking for wasn’t inside it. And since I already knew it wasn’t in Mrs. Haggerty’s house, hopefully that meant her diary was somewhere in mine.
“I would never dream of going empty-handed! I prepared dessert,” Mrs. Haggerty said, holding up her foil-covered plate. She slapped Vero’s hand when Vero pulled up the corner of the foil, revealing an assortment of cookies and brownies. Vero took one and stuffed it in her mouth before Mrs. Haggerty could insist she put it back.
“We should get going,” I said, nudging her to the door. “We know how you hate to be late. And you,” I said pointedly to Vero, “have lots to keep you busy while we’re gone.”
She licked chocolate crumbs from her fingers. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve got everything under control.”
Mrs. Haggerty tugged the foil back in place to cover the plate, watching me out of the corner of her eye as we walked to my van, as if she was expecting me to steal a brownie, too.
“Is your babysitter always so strange?” she asked as she fastened her seat belt.
“Trust me, you haven’t seen strange.” I programmed my navigation app to Viola’s address and set the phone in the cupholder on the dashboard.
Mrs. Haggerty scrutinized it through the narrow frames of her glasses. “That’s not where we’re going.”
“Where are we going?”
“Don’t be nosy,” she said, adjusting the plate of cookies on her lap.
“If you don’t tell me where we’re going, how will I know how to get there?”
“Just drive. I’ll tell you when you need to turn.”
“Right.” I snapped my seat belt and started driving, nearly killing both of us with every last-minute turn as Mrs. Haggerty fired directions at me like bullets. We made a circuitous route through western Loudoun County and ended up in a residential neighborhood I’d never been in before.
“Drop me off right here,” she said, pointing up at a towering three-story town house. I pulled along the curb, looking for signs of her friends. The short, narrow driveway contained only enough room for one car. Several others were parked at various points along the street.
The curtains inside the house were drawn shut, the main floor brightly lit from within.
“You can pick me up in an hour.” Balancing her foil-covered plate, Mrs. Haggerty helped herself out of the van and slammed the door. She looked both ways up and down the sidewalk, her wine-heavy purse swinging from her elbow as she navigated the concrete steps to the front door.
A woman answered. I recognized her from the last meeting. She’d been wearing a set of pastel-colored Hello Kitty scrubs. Tonight, she wore jeans and a sweater. She peered through the dark at the windows of my van, offering a tentative wave. I waved back, unsure if she could see me. Mrs. Haggerty handed her the plate of desserts and followed the young woman into the house.
I dialed Vero’s number. “Did you find the diary?”
“Not yet. I searched your entire room, your bathroom, and the inside of your toilet tank lid.”
“My toilet tank lid?”
“The woman spent a week in the slammer, Finn. Who knows what she learned while she was there.” The toilet flushed in the background. “Besides, Zach told me he had to go potty, so I was already in here anyway. I figured it couldn’t hurt to look.”
“Wait,” I said, certain I had misheard her, “Zach told you he had to go?”
“I think Mrs. Haggerty’s tactics might actually be working. We made it just in time.”
“Oh, thank god.” I might be arrested and thrown in jail tomorrow, but at least my child would be out of diapers, and today, I would take any victory I could get.
“Don’t celebrate just yet. He refused to put his pants back on after he did his business. When I told him he had to get dressed, he ran and hid in Delia’s room. He crawled inside her Barbie house and got himself stuck.”
I swore and checked the time. Maybe I could make it home and back before the end of Mrs. Haggerty’s meeting. “Did you try rubbing him in vegetable oil?”
“No. I used the lube in your nightstand to get him out.”
“Vero!”
“Relax. He’s fine. I gave him a bath before I put the kids to bed. And before you ask, the neighborhood watch diary wasn’t in your nightstand either.”
I put a hand to my temple. We only had an hour to find it. Two, at the most, if we stopped for groceries on the way home. “It has to be somewhere.”
“Whoa,” Vero whispered.
“What is it?” I asked, sitting up in my seat.
“I don’t know. I feel a little… strange.”
“Strange how?” God, I hoped Delia and Zach hadn’t brought home any germs from the playground. The last thing we needed was a case of the flu.
“I’m… not sure,” Vero said. “My head’s a little light. And I’m feeling… really, really hungry.”
Uh-oh. “When was your last period?”
“I can’t be pregnant, Finlay! I’m on the pill, and Javi and I haven’t had sex since… Oh . Oh, no,” she said. Her phone jostled, her breath coming faster as her feet shuffled quickly down the stairs.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, listening as she opened and slammed the refrigerator, the kitchen cabinets, then the pantry door.
“I think we have a problem,” she sang in a panicky voice. “You know those brownies I bought from Stacey? The ones I hid in the freezer? I think Mrs. Haggerty took them to her meeting.”
“No! Are you sure?”
“My lips are going numb and I’m getting the munchies.” A chip bag crinkled on the other end of the line, followed by loud crunching.
No! No, no, no!
I looked up at the town house and checked my watch. The meeting had only been going on for fifteen minutes. Maybe it wasn’t too late to stop Mrs. Haggerty and her friends before they started sampling the desserts.
I scrambled out of the van.
“What are you doing?” Vero asked as I hoofed it to the house. “You can’t go in there and tell them their brownies are drugged! Mrs. Haggerty will probably put it in her damn diary and report us for distribution of controlled substances! Oh, god,” Vero blurted between quickening breaths. “Do you think Mike Tran has an unmarked cop watching our house? What if he comes to the door and my pupils are dilated? What if I accidentally confess to something? He might look me up in his police database, see I’m a wanted criminal, and send me back to Maryland. I’ll spend the rest of my life in prison making license plates and shivs out of toothbrushes, all because of Stacey and her damn brownies!”
“Now you’re being paranoid.”
“I’m not paranoid,” she said around a mouthful of chips.
Still, she had a point. Those brownies were drugged and they had come from my house. This would not be the first time I had inadvertently drugged an unsuspecting person, and since it was entirely possible Mrs. Haggerty had written in her diary about the night I’d drugged Harris Mickler, it was probably not wise to let any of her friends eat those brownies.
Instead of knocking on the front door of the town house, I took the sidewalk to the end of the row. I checked both ways before darting behind it, then crept along the privacy fences, counting the units until I reached the right house.
“Oh, wow. Stacey wasn’t kidding,” Vero said. “Those are some killer brownies.”
I got down on all fours and crawled to the nearest window, bringing my eye up to the sliver of light that was visible under the curtain. I risked a peep inside. The women sat in a loose circle of armchairs and ottomans, as they had done before, their chairs pulled close, filling in the gaps around the sofa. The open bottle of wine rested on the coffee table.
“I don’t see the dessert plate,” I whispered. “What if they already ate them all?”
“That meeting is going to be one for the books.” Vero giggled at her own joke. It grew into a fit of hysterics.
“That’s not funny!”
“Maybe a little funny.”
“Vero!”
Her laughter died, the last few chortles bubbling out of her as she struggled to contain them while I shushed her.
I tipped an ear to the window, but I couldn’t make out any of the conversation happening inside. I could see all the women, except for a few whose backs were to the window. I recognized most of them from the last book club meeting. One of the women definitely hadn’t been there the previous Saturday, but she still seemed vaguely familiar to me. I didn’t know her name, but I was fairly certain I’d seen her walking her dog in my neighborhood. This must be the new member Mrs. Haggerty had signaled with her flashlight—the one whose note I had intercepted a few nights ago about joining the club.
The woman’s face was red and puffy. She sat in the center of the sofa, holding a wad of tissues. The women on either side of her rubbed her back and patted her shoulders, doting on her as she dabbed her eyes.
The woman who’d been wearing the Hello Kitty scrubs last week gave their newest member a pale blue gift bag with a shiny paw print embossed on the side. I couldn’t see what was in it, but the contents of the bag were heavy enough to strain the decorative paper. Viola passed her a mahogany keepsake box, topped with a red bow. Someone else handed the woman an envelope with a logo on the front. Her eyes welled with fresh tears as she peeked at the certificate inside.
The woman looked up at her new friends and smiled, her lips trembling as she thanked them, overwhelmed with gratitude.
I relayed everything to Vero as it was happening.
“That’s some welcome party,” she said, crunching on a chip. “I don’t remember you giving me any presents when you invited me to move in with you.”
“I didn’t invite you. You invited yourself. And you charged me forty percent of my income,” I reminded her.
“I should have held out for forty-five.”
A fourth and final gift was placed in the woman’s hands. She untied the ribbon and peeled back the tissue paper, revealing a paperback book. She held it to her chest. The women clapped and called out congratulations, and someone declared it time for a toast.
One of the guests got up and poured wine into plastic cups. Another went to the kitchen, returning a moment later with a charcuterie board in one hand and Mrs. Haggerty’s platter of desserts in the other. She set the food on the coffee table and the women attacked the snacks like circling hyenas.
“I see the brownies! I’m going in,” I told Vero.
“Finlay, don’t—!”
I shoved my phone in my pocket and sprinted to the front of the house. I jabbed at the buzzer and pounded on the door. The laughter abruptly died. Footsteps shuffled inside. After a prolonged silence, the door cracked open.
“Hi! So sorry to interrupt.” I smiled brightly and shouldered my way into the house. The women turned to gawk at me as I rushed into the living room. “I know your meeting just started, but I was waiting in the car, and I got hungry. I hope you don’t mind if I just help myself to some of your… Oh, would you look at that! Brownies.”
I hurried to the table, picking the brownies off the plate and stuffing them into my coat pockets. When my pockets couldn’t hold any more, I scooped the rest into the front of my sweater. I stole a brownie from one woman’s hand as she held it halfway to her mouth. “Thank you, that looks delicious! I’ll just take these back to the car so I don’t disrupt your meeting. Before I go, may I use your restroom?” I turned eagerly to the host, planning to lock myself inside her bathroom and flush the drugs down her toilet.
She pointed at a closed door with a dumbfounded expression. “Someone is using it. There’s another upstairs.”
“Great!” I held the front of my sweater closed as I start toward the steps.
“Not so fast!” Mrs. Haggerty called behind me. She turned me around sharply by my elbow. She held the empty cookie plate between us with the same uncompromising look she’d worn when she’d made Zach surrender the thick, black Sharpie he’d stolen off the kitchen counter that morning.
“Mrs. Haggerty,” I said, dipping my head close to hers, “I really don’t think I should give these back to you. It would be a very bad idea. They’re not what you—”
“I know what they are,” she snapped. “And I know you didn’t bake them.”
“You do?”
“Of course I do. Who do you think gave Stacey the recipe? If I’d thought you’d made the brownies, I wouldn’t have brought any. Now give those back.” She thrust the plate at me, looking impatient. “ You can’t have any. You’re driving.”
With a contrite smile (and more than a little shock), I lowered the hem of my sweater, releasing a cascade of brownies.
“Right, sorry,” I said, dusting the crumbs back onto the plate. “I’ll just be going, then.”
The weepy woman with the tissues shot to her feet, pale and shaken. “I should go, too. Robert doesn’t know I’m gone. He’ll be angry if I’m not back by the time he gets home.” She scooped up the envelope with the logo on it and stuffed it inside her coat. Her hands shook as she tucked her book under her arm. She picked the gift bag up in one hand and juggled the mahogany box in the other, struggling to carry it all as she hurried to the door. She averted her eyes as she raced past me.
“Your book,” I said as it slipped from her arm. I bent to pick it up. She scurried to retrieve it, but my fingers held stubbornly to the cover. It was a brand-new copy of The Tuesday Club Murders by Agatha Christie — the same collection of Miss Marple stories I had seen in Penny’s and Mrs. Haggerty’s houses. I stared at it, open-mouthed.
She jerked it from my hands and ran out the door.
I excused myself from Mrs. Haggerty’s book club meeting to wait for her in the car. The longer I waited, the more I regretted not using the bathroom while I had the chance. I hoped the woman who had been locked inside it the whole time I was there wasn’t having some horrible reaction to the brownies.
I also hoped there was enough of my sweater fuzz on the ones I’d dumped back on the plate to deter the rest of her book club from eating too many of them.
I tapped the steering wheel, unable to stop thinking about the book the woman had dropped. It was the third time I had stumbled across a copy of that book in less than a week.
That couldn’t have been a coincidence, could it?
The only thing that was different about this woman’s book was that her copy had been brand-new. The other two books had been old, with creased and faded covers. The breaks in their spines suggested they’d been read countless times. The tape was probably the only thing holding Penny’s copy together.
My fingers stopped tapping.
There had been tape on the spine of Penny’s book. I had assumed it was holding the cover in place, but what if it had served a different purpose? I thought back to the peeling spine label on the old paperback in Mrs. Haggerty’s bedroom. Then to the novel she kept on my nightstand with the sticker residue on its spine. Libraries put tape over their labels to keep them from peeling.
I sat up in my seat.
Penny’s book wasn’t covered in tape because it was broken. It was taped because it had come from a library.
So had Mrs. Haggerty’s.
I dialed Vero’s number.
“Why are there no waffles?” she asked in lieu of a greeting.
“Because I haven’t gone shopping yet. Listen,” I said, hoping she wasn’t too intoxicated to manage it, “I need you to go to the Loudoun County Public Library’s website. See if they have a book club.”
“Why bother?” she asked, the words coming more slowly than her usual rapid fire. “You and I can give each other presents and take edibles at home. But if you’re looking for more of a club vibe, Stacey brings samples to the HOA meetings, and some of the dads are actually kind of hot.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, willing myself to be patient. “I’m not looking for a book club for us. Penny’s Agatha Christie book came from a library. So did Mrs. Haggerty’s.”
“So?”
“What if Mrs. Haggerty and Penny were in some kind of book club together?”
“You think that’s the connection between them?”
“What else could they have in common?”
There was a prolonged silence as Vero slowly clicked the keys on her laptop. “There’s a book club at the nearest library branch. It meets once a month.”
“Are the books they’ve read archived anywhere?”
“Yup. They’re all right here.”
“Can you see the selections from the year Penny’s husband went missing? Is The Tuesday Club Murders anywhere on the list?”
More clicking. “Let’s see… Gone Girl was January, Nora Roberts in February, Kristin Hannah in March, The Poisonwood Bible was April, whoooooa… The Tuesday Club Murders was their selection in May.”
Four months before Gilford was murdered.
If Penny and Mrs. Haggerty had been in a book club together, then they had both lied to the police when they’d claimed they hadn’t known each other. Penny had obviously been lying to protect herself, but why had Mrs. Haggerty bothered? Who was she protecting? As far as I knew, the only person she cared that deeply for was Brendan.
I glanced up from my phone at the town house, then at the cars parked along the street. Was it possible that one of these other women had been in that same book club? If so, did they know Penny? All I needed was for one of them to come forward and confirm my suspicions.
“What are you doing?” Vero asked as I got out of my van.
“Taking pictures.” I slunk around the back of each woman’s car, snapped a photo of the license plate, and texted the images to Vero. “Send these license plates to Cam. Tell him I’ll give him twenty dollars each if he can get me the names and addresses of the women who own these cars. And tell him I’ll throw in a spaghetti dinner if he can get me the information tonight.”