Chapter 46
SOPHIE
When Nicholas and I arrived at Hamilton’s, we found Lily-Ann frowning at the buffet table.
I understood the feeling. Hell, Ocean was brokenhearted and Mrs. B had run away from home.
We needed to help CJ. Urgently. We needed to prove her innocence and free her from jail.
Which meant we needed to find the real killer.
Still, I hadn’t quite stopped smiling at Nicholas’s faux complaints about his new bathroom setup. “Everything is too damn convenient! It smells like a rose garden in here!”
I’d put my hair in a high pony, because Lily-Ann felt unnerved if I wore it any other way outside of work.
We had a special relationship. An unspoken one.
So unspoken that I was only halfway sure she knew it existed.
I saw her as sort of a big sister. I was an only child and I wondered what it said about me that I’d chosen her as an older sibling.
Probably that I valued sensible reliability with little emotion.
I went straight to where she was adjusting the stack of napkins and reported in about my research into the non-CJ murder suspects.
“I’ve been looking for donors for work,” I told her.
“So I asked around about Sunny Wheeler. It’s such a small town, all the rich people know each other.
He’s well-liked but not entirely trusted. ”
“Not trusted how?” Lily-Ann asked.
“Basically, Sunny Wheeler is a little too into Sunny Wheeler. Plus, he lost money in a big investment? Sounded like normal rich-guy stuff.”
“Mm,” she said. “Did you ask about Karina?”
I made a face. “She wasn’t involved in giving. Everyone knew Frank better, and liked him more. They made him sound old-fashioned, but in a good way? Though I guess he’d been declining pretty steeply the past year or two.”
“I did some investigating myself this afternoon,” Nicholas said, moving to stand beside me.
“What?” I squinted at him. “When? Where?”
“I, um, ran into Helene Kagant. Downtown, on my lunch hour. She was having iced tea and doing a crossword.”
“Details we didn’t need.” I eyed him suspiciously, because he sounded evasive. “What’d you find out?”
“Not much. Turns out Karina isn’t an engineer, she just worked with them. Uh, she’s apparently a killer on the bocce court.”
“So to speak.”
He bumped me with his hip. “Is bocce the same as lawn bowling?”
“No idea.”
“I don’t see the pertinence,” Lily-Ann said.
“Where exactly did you run into her?” I asked.
“Just, y’know, downtown.” Nicholas gestured meaninglessly. “Oh, and Helene’s a serious cat lady. She fosters for the local shelter. I took a picture of a kitten for Hamilton.”
“So you went to her house!”
He looked shifty. “What? No.”
“She happened to be carrying a kitten around?”
“I mean, I didn’t go inside her house. And she lives downtown, so—”
I narrowed my eyes. “Nicholas Perez! Did you bully her into reading my play?”
“Aw. You’ve never both-named me before.”
“You’ve never deserved it before. Would you stop undermining me?”
“I’m not undermining you. You’re undermining you! You’re amazing, your play is amazing. You just need to get more eyes on it.”
“Which I’ll take care of when I want to.”
“Okay, okay! I’ll stop.”
“Thank you.”
“After I follow up on the copies I already handed out.”
I felt my lips thin. “How many is that?”
“Oh, is that Mrs. B?” he said, turning away.
I reached to pull him back but it was Mrs. B.
She drifted in from the courtyard with a flutter of her silk muumuu and a bouquet of marigolds with overlarge round yellow blooms. Hamilton and I called her name and Nicholas smiled like a schoolboy.
Ocean gave her a relieved, wary, exhausted, adoring look that was extremely daughterly.
“You’re all here!” Mrs. B said. “Well, almost all. Not CJ. You didn’t invite the children, Ocean?”
Ocean set a pitcher of iced tea on the table, which she’d made after we’d all refused to run to the market for Hamilton’s egg yolk–flavored Italian syrup. “Not until I know where you disappeared to.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“For all I know, you were off getting boudoir photographs.”
“Oooh, I should look into that! Not photographs, paintings. If only there were an artist I could hire.” She gave the flowers to Lily-Ann and turned to Hamilton. “How about a glass of your kombucha?”
“She’ll have Ensure,” Ocean said.
Mrs. B made a face. “Fine, but only if you have butter pecan.”
“Of course he has butter pecan,” Nicholas said.
“My favorite kind of pecan!” Hamilton flip-flopped into the kitchen.
Lily-Ann arranged the flowers in the vase, and I opened my mouth to ask Mrs. B where she’d gone, but Ocean got there first. “Are you going to tell us where you disappeared to?”
“After dinner,” Mrs. B said.
Ocean said, “Golda, I am already on edge.”
“Please?” Mrs. B asked, then at Ocean’s expression of begrudging agreement she said, “Thank you. Now, where shall I sit?”
Nicholas pulled out a chair, and she gave him a buss on the cheek. “Such a gentleman. You’re a lucky woman, Sophie.”
“Lucky-ish,” I grumbled, still annoyed at his interference.
“I’m in trouble,” he told Mrs. B.
“Oh-ho!” Her brown eyes brightened with interest. “What have you done now?”
“Believed in her,” he said.
“Everyone sit,” Lily-Ann said. “Who wants wine?”
I said I did, and nobody shot me a dirty look, which I appreciated.
I knew I had to be careful with alcohol, but one glass at Hamilton’s house before strolling home across the courtyard with Nicholas?
Even I couldn’t get in trouble with that.
Lily-Ann had made enchiladas and Hamilton produced a nice, normal green salad.
In an obvious attempt to keep the conversation light—not about CJ or Mrs. B’s disappearance—Ocean told us that Miles was trying to get Anthony approved as a chaperone for his weeklong school trip to the Channel Islands.
“He’s considering picketing the principal’s office with a sign about felons’ rights.
He still spells ‘school’ wrong half the time, but ‘felon’ is no problem. ”
“He’s great in Realm of Rangers,” Hamilton said, helping himself to another serving of enchiladas. “And my friend, the cop who plays Cyntria? He’s so grateful for Miles’s healing that he’s still sending me an update every day.”
“Goodness!” Mrs. B said. “About CJ’s case? Have you learned anything important?”
“Not really, though I haven’t checked his message today. I made the salad instead.”
“It’s so good,” I told him.
“The snap peas are fresh from the farmers market.”
“Do they deliver?”
“I asked Anthony to pick them up.”
“You’re baking baguettes, drinking kombucha, and shopping at the farmers market?” Nicholas asked Anthony. “What have you become?”
Anthony’s eyes crinkled. “I’m doing yoga, too.”
“God help me,” Lily-Ann said. “He does the happy baby pose on my living room floor.”
Chuckles rippled around the table even before Mrs. B asked what on earth the happy baby looked like.
“When Anthony does it?” Nicholas said. “A joint venture of Pampers and Harley-Davidson.”
We laughed more, finished dinner, then passed around a box of See’s chocolates Ocean had picked up while looking for Mrs. B.
“Peanut crunch!” Mrs. B said, dipping into the box. “And here’s something even sweeter. CJ’s coming home.”
An uneasy silence spread around the table even faster than the chocolates had. Ocean lowered her gaze, though she gave a faint smile when Anthony, who was passing behind her, briefly squeezed her shoulder.
“That feels unlikely,” Nicholas said.
I looked away from my dark chocolate truffle. “They did arrest her for murder, after all. How is she coming home?”
“Well, I suppose,” Mrs. B said with another airy jangle of her bracelets, “that someone bailed her out.”
“Oh, shit,” Ocean said. “What did you do?”
“Nothing!”
“What did you do!”
“Well, I … I went to talk to her and everything fell into place.”
“Golda. Spill.”
Mrs. B huffed. “Stop looking at me like that! This is good news. Wonderful news. It’s exactly what you wanted! CJ will be home tomorrow.”
“How?”
“Well, you know, everyone really is trying their best. Nobody means harm, it’s just that sometimes we get muddled, so I went and tried to un-muddle things, that’s all.”
“Sure,” Ocean said. “Now explain using words.”
“My assumption,” Lily-Ann told Ocean, “is that Mrs. B used the Cottages as collateral to bail out CJ.”