Chapter 12 #2
“We talked about it earlier. If someone used the florist to lure Savannah back to the store that night, it’d be a little … elaborate, for Benny.”
“Mm.” Ziya nodded. “Yeah, makes sense. But maybe he was working with someone. Remember Elena heard someone yelling at him the other day? Maybe that was his accomplice.”
Amie sucked in a sharp breath. She’d been so focused on Benny being in the Harlows’ apartment that day that she had completely forgotten why Elena had gone to investigate in the first place.
“What did the other person say to him?” Ziya asked.
Amie wracked her memory. “All she said she heard was ‘you did it.’ ”
“Hm. Would’ve helped us more if they said, ‘We did it.’ Are we sure that wasn’t his ex-girlfriend?”
“She’d just broken up with him two nights before,” Amie said. “In my experience, you don’t go to visit your ex so soon after a breakup.”
“Gotta give it three months,” Ziya agreed knowingly.
Or two years. “But it could’ve been her. Or his accomplice. Speaking of, since we learned that Raina hadn’t wanted Madeline to buy the store before Savannah died, they probably didn’t work together to kill Savannah.”
David suddenly let out a low groan, wincing.
“Oh my god, what?” Amie asked, alarmed.
Ziya swiped his plate away. “No more pizza.”
“No.” David rubbed his face. “I’m fine. I just remembered something. I wasn’t going to mention it because I knew it’d set you two off. And to reiterate, I don’t condone continuing this investigation—”
“Sure, yeah, we get it,” Amie said impatiently. “What is it?”
It was clear that David was trying his best to downplay the news, but there was a gleam of intrigue in his eyes that was impossible for him to disguise.
“I stopped by Eons on my way home from the hardware store,” he said. “While I was waiting for my drink, I saw a man taking measurements of the wall across from the counter.” He sat back in his chair, “my work here is done” scrawled across his face.
Amie and Ziya exchanged a look of confusion.
“Who was the man?” Amie finally asked, not sure if that was the correct question.
It was not.
“The man doesn’t matter!” David exclaimed, apparently realizing that his work was not, in fact, done.
“That’s harsh,” Ziya said. “I’m sure he matters to someone. At the very least, he probably matters to whoever told him to take those measurements.”
“And who would that have been?” David prompted.
“Madeline?” Amie asked. A thought struck her as she pictured the interior of the café. “The wall across from the counter is between Eons and Shelf Starter.”
“Bingo.” David crossed his arms, satisfied.
“You think she was getting measurements to combine the businesses?” Amie asked. “She still thinks she could buy the bookstore?”
“That’d be optimistic,” Ziya commented drily. “Andrew hates her ass.”
“Maybe she thinks he’ll come around,” Amie suggested.
“Do you think he would?”
“No. He hates her ass.”
Ziya cackled.
“Andrew could sell to someone else,” Amie said as David took his plate to the sink and returned to his work table. “Raina mentioned that man … John … something.”
“Jonathan Oakland,” Ziya said.
“Right.” Amie hadn’t had the chance to take notes like she had after her conversation with Andrew. She was grateful for Ziya’s memory to back her up.
“He wanted to buy the store, too,” she continued. “I think I saw his business card when I was at the Harlows’ apartment.”
“I’ve heard of him,” David called from across the room. “He bought that pizzeria on Harvest Street.”
“That’s where we got this pizza!” Ziya exclaimed. “He owns it?”
“Brought it back from the brink of bankruptcy, I heard.”
“It’s thriving now,” Amie said. “They were packed.”
“I read an article about it a few weeks ago,” David said. “Apparently, he loves buying failing businesses and turning them around.”
“Makes sense why he was interested in Shelf Starter,” Ziya said.
Amie stood from the table. “David, can I use your laptop? I want to look him up.”
“What’s wrong with your phone?”
“This is a big screen task. Please?”
“Fine. It’s on the couch. Don’t disturb my track.”
A minute later, Amie and Ziya were sitting side by side on the couch, scrolling through search results for Jonathan Oakland.
They were both leaning forward to avoid disturbing the wooden track David had set up on the back of the couch, and Amie was leaning to the side to avoid the accelerant to her pulse caused by Ziya’s body heat.
They skimmed through the news article David had referenced, as well as a couple other interviews with websites centered on business and entrepreneurship.
“He just seems like a normal rich white guy,” Ziya commented as Amie navigated back to the search results. “As normal as one of those can get, at least.” She snickered, pointing at one of the results. “He calls himself ‘The Dream Saver.’ ”
“Oh!” Amie sat up straight, the title jostling a memory loose.
More than one memory, as her sojourn in the time loop tended to produce those in multiples.
“The Dream Saver. I heard someone listening to a podcast he was on. I spent the whole bus ride to our dinner listening to these guys talking about business because the person was blasting it from their phone.”
“Nightmare,” Ziya said as she took over scrolling. “Here’s his website.”
“He was talking about his entrepreneurship course,” Amie murmured, remembering. “And then he started telling a story about …”
Her breath caught as the familiar tale was suddenly cast in a new light.
“A while back, I began talking with a woman whose business I was interested in acquiring,” Oakland had said. “I’ll call her ‘Susannah’ for her privacy.”
“And to keep your lawyers from calling,” cracked one of the podcast hosts.
They’d all laughed.
“ ‘Susannah rejected my offer to help with her struggling business,’ ” Amie recited.
Ziya glanced over at her. “What?”
“That’s what he said on the podcast,” Amie explained.
The words came to her like a well-loved song.
“ ‘I wasn’t bothered at all—in fact, I offered her a generous discount for my entrepreneurship course to encourage her to keep fighting for her dream. Since then, Susannah has visited me three times under the guise of friendship. I immediately realized that she was trying to attain my hard-earned knowledge for free.’ ”
Amie waved a hand. “And then one of the hosts says something about Oakland’s good business sense, blah blah—”
She continued with the story. “ ‘Instead of turning her away, I began giving her bad business advice. She—I know, I know, but she wanted to learn, didn’t she? I was just teaching her a lesson. No such thing as a free lunch. Anyway, she took the advice to heart, believing that I was unknowingly giving her my entrepreneurship course for free. It was easy to convince her to take the poor advice, because I was validating and building upon concerns and ideas she’s already had for her bookstore. ’ ”
In her periphery, Ziya had gone very still, likely coming to the same conclusion Amie had come to.
“The hosts joke about his lawyers calling him for sharing too many details,” Amie recalled, “and then Oakland says, ‘My point is, some businesspeople can be easily convinced, often by their own minds, that everything they are doing with their business is correct, and that everyone else is the problem, not them. Susannah is without a doubt one of those people.’ ”
She looked at Ziya. “And then they cut to an ad read. But he’s gotta be talking about Savannah, right?”
“How did you do that?”
Oh, fuck. Amie’s stomach dropped as she realized that Ziya’s stunned expression wasn’t due to the story, but because of Amie’s delivery of it.
She wasn’t ready to try to have the time loop conversation again. Things had been going so well between them.
“I … I have good recall for these kinds of things” came Amie’s weak excuse.
Ziya wasn’t buying it. “Since when can you perfectly recite—”
“It wasn’t perfect,” Amie hurriedly interrupted. “Sorry, I made it sound like that was word-for-word, didn’t I? It was just something like that. Not perfect at all.”
“It does sound like he was talking about Savannah,” David called from his work table in a merciful attempt to rescue Amie.
He waved three conjoined toilet paper tubes like a lecturer’s pointer stick.
“Someone who owns a bookstore and believes that everyone other than her is the problem? That has ‘Savannah’ written all over it.”
“And Raina said she’d been making strange decisions lately,” Amie added, giving him a grateful look. “This must have been why.”
“Do you think Oakland was doing it on purpose to tank the bookstore faster so she’d sell it to him?” Ziya asked.
Amie relaxed, relieved that they were moving past her uncanny feat. “He said he wasn’t bothered by her rejection,” she remembered. “But maybe. Could have been an added bonus to the lesson he was trying to teach her, at least.”
A twinge of pity sparked in her chest. Amie summoned a memory of Savannah screaming at a barista to keep herself from feeling too bad for the woman. “I wonder if he knows she’s dead.”
“I wonder if Andrew will try to sell to him,” Ziya added.
“I wonder if one of you will come hold this while I finish taping it,” David said.
Ziya leapt to her feet. “Me! I’ll help.”
“I doubt Andrew would sell to him if he knew how Oakland was treating his wife,” Amie said as Ziya went to assist David.
Oakland’s website was open on the laptop screen.
She clicked on the large Contact button in the top-right corner.
A page popped up with a contact form, showing spots for a name, an email address, and a message.
If “Susannah” was Savannah Harlow, that meant Oakland had spoken with her at length multiple times. Would she have mentioned blackmailing Benny, seeing it as a savvy move to save money she could put into her business? Could this man help prove that Benny had a motive to kill Savannah?