Chapter 4
“Why do you want to see this woman?” John asked as he double-checked the door behind them. “She seems to have told you everything useful.”
Abigail eyed the marshal as he triple checked the door. “Sounds a bit odd coming from an investigator. Aren’t you lot usually all ‘leave no stone unturned’?”
Byron’s brother laughed. “I’m more on the ‘get people out of harm’s reach’ side than the investigation, but I see your point. You’re sure you’re all right with Bee and Byron hanging out at your place while we go fishing with Mrs. Foggarty?”
Abigail shrugged. She would have been all right with it regardless of the situation but considering that keeping them together and with the other marshal meant that they were a lot safer than they might otherwise have been, she really didn’t mind.
“Yeah, of course,” she replied, “the only person there I don’t know is your guy, marshal what’s-his-name…”
“Stevens,” John supplied absentmindedly as he looked back over his shoulder at the front door.
“Are you all right?” Abigail asked, “you seem, uh, anxious…”
“No, no,” John said. “I’m fine, really.”
“So you normally check you’ve locked doors three times and then desperately want to go back and check a fourth time?”
John snapped his attention to her, “uh, well, actually yes. But normally it’s only twice—unless I’m unusually stressed, which I am. Not that I should be discussing it with you.”
The pair made their way to the car and Abigail planned her response. Climbing into the passenger side, she decided it was the better part of valor not to ask directly about compulsive checking. She spotted Cleo locking her own front door, she had insisted on being allowed to pop home to change, so Abigail spoke quickly.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not professional,” he said. “But the situation is… tricky. It would be tricky regardless of Byron, but with his addition into the mix, it’s super tricky.”
Abigail nodded and decided to let him drive the rest of the way to Mrs. Foggarty’s without talking. She was sure that she and Cleo would be chatting the whole way anyway. The older woman knew they were coming, so Abigail was less nervous than perhaps she should have been. The last time she had been here was to pick up a set of custom crochet sunflowers she had commissioned and had been nervous for a whole set of other reasons. That day felt so foreign to her now, almost like it had happened to someone else, when her biggest concern was whether Mrs. Foggarty liked her and the impression she had made on Byron.
The thought of Byron threatened to overwhelm her rumination on the last visit she’d made to Mrs. Foggarty, but she blinked away the swirling thoughts of his hand around hers for the entire plane ride mixed with the kiss they had shared and the way he had read her mind when they had arrived at the house.
The whole group had spent the night at Abigail’s house the night before, for much the same reasons Byron and Bee were sticking around there with Stevens. It was just easier and safer for them to all be in one place.
“Right,” John said as he pulled up to the curb outside Mrs. Foggarty’s house, “I’ll be here. You both have your phones and my number. If you ring me, I will come straight in without answering. I’ll assume it’s an emergency. If I call you, pick up straight away because it may or may not be an emergency. Okay?”
“Oh, yeah, I love two sets of rules for different people,” Cleo said sarcastically. “Don’t worry, Mr. Security Man; we’ll pick up.”
Abigail could see the restraint in John’s face as he forced a small smile and nodded at Cleo. He was trying really hard to keep his professional mask on around her—harder than he had been before.
She wondered why the pair of them were so at odds, but she also knew that Cleo would deny any tension and wave it off as her humor. Abigail decided that she would pay more attention to the pair’s interactions and try to figure out what it was that set the two of them off—at the very least, it might help her make their time together less prickly. It scared her to think that she wasn’t really sure what she meant by their time together—she had no idea how long they were stuck together.
Cleo reached the door first and knocked loudly, “Mrs. Foggarty?”
“Come in, girls,” Mrs. Foggarty’s voice emerged from the window to their left, making Abigail jump.
She waved at them from her sitting room, the one where she had told Abigail about Jacob’s true parentage. It seemed like a lot of Mrs. Foggarty’s time was spent in there, Abigail mused as she and Cleo made their way inside. She noticed that the hallway was almost identical to the way it had been on her first visit.
“Good morning,” Mrs. Foggarty said, “can I interest you in coffee? Cake?”
“Oh, please, we wouldn’t want to put you out—” Cleo started to say but was cut off by Mrs. Foggarty’s waving hand.
The older woman gestured to a neatly set up tray of little cakes and two carafes.
“That would be great, coffee for me, please,” Abigail said, looking to Cleo who nodded.
Mrs. Foggarty fussed with the beverages, insisting they each have a saucer as well as a tiny plate for the equally tiny cakes.
“I prefer these, these days,” Mrs. Foggarty said, gesturing to the tiny cakes, “less fuel for the body to turn into cushioning but you can still feel like you’ve eaten several whole cakes.”
Mrs. Foggarty’s comment came just as Abigail had indeed put an entire tiny cake in her mouth, and her laugh caused her to inhale the powdered sugar that coated the surface. Laughing as she coughed, Cleo and Mrs. Foggarty tutted but didn’t offer any assistance.
“Sorry,” she croaked, “I agree with you, actually, but it’s a little painful right now.”
“Yes, well, one does have to remember to be a lady even when eating entire cakes,” Mrs. Foggarty said.
So, choking on powdered sugar makes someone unladylike? Abigail wondered as she resisted coughing again.
Cleo laughed. “Well, powdered sugar is probably the most ladylike thing to choke on—if you had to choose that is.”
Mrs. Foggarty smirked but quickly hid it behind the coffee cup.
“Listen, Mrs. Foggarty,” Abigail started, but Mrs. Foggarty held up her free hand to stop her.
“Don’t try to butter me up. You’re not here to make friends with a vicious old lady; you’re here to ask her questions,” she said, “so don’t waste my time and just ask.”
“All right,” Abigail said. “We want to know everything you can tell us about Jacob Givens and his father—your brother.”
“Oh, well, yes I expect you do,” Mrs. Foggarty said, sipping her coffee. “My brother was… well, he was a terrible person. You’re not supposed to say that about family members, are you?”
“Not traditionally, no,” Cleo said with a small smile, “but sometimes it is warranted.”
Briefly, Abigail wondered if the understanding tone in Cleo’s voice was manufactured or if she was calling on some personal experience with a family member Abigail wasn’t familiar with. She thought she knew her friend fairly well, but if she had earned anything in the last few months, it was that you probably don’t know anyone as well as you think you do.
“Sometimes indeed,” Mrs. Foggarty said, “and in some families, it’s more often than you’d like. I think the men in my bloodline are cursed, not literally of course. The Good Lord wouldn’t stand for that. But when you look at it, it’s enough to make you wonder.”
“Really?” Abigail asked, earning a glare from Mrs. Foggarty.
“Yes, ‘really,’ Abigail,” Mrs. Foggarty replied, adding a little emphasis to the word ‘really’ that implied more disdain than a direct reprimand would have.
“Sorry,” Abigail replied, cringing at the look even that elicited.
“Anyway, as I was saying,” Mrs. Foggarty said with a glare, “my brother, and I only still call him my brother because he wasn’t always evil. He was once my lovely little brother who suffered just as much as the rest of us did under my father. Then, as he grew up, my father’s attention shifted to me and my mother. He often would try to defuse the situation, and for a while, it worked. I think he liked the power. Say something and we didn’t get the wrath—stay silent and we suffered. Then my father caught on, and we all suffered—no one else was allowed to have sway in that house other than him. I know it sounds crass, but the day my father died was a blessing, despite the furor that came afterwards. It was his own fault anyway, idiot man and his ridiculous obsession with natural health powders—as if some ground up beetroot would give him his youth back!”
Mrs. Foggarty chortled at her comment, clearly totally indifferent to her acknowledgment that her comments had been crass.
“Uh, right,” Cleo said, “yeah, that stuff isn’t what they say it is. Half the people selling it should be in jail, convincing people to stop actual medical treatment in favor of a veggie smoothie and a three hundred dollar sugar pill.”
Though Mrs. Foggarty’s eyes were usually sharp and focused, she had somewhat glazed over as she sat and listened to Cleo.
“Mmm, that’s true,” she said slowly, “his piece didn’t go to jail, though she probably could have. After he died, we were happy, though, for a while at least. It seems, though, that my brother had already been influenced beyond repair. Before my father, I had never stepped foot into a courtroom, but after him, I think I was there every couple of months for something my dratted sibling had done.”
A flash of recognition flared in the back of Abigail’s mind. She had recently read something written the same way.
“You were in court about your father? Was he a criminal?” Abigail asked, trying to tug on the mental thread.
A friend of the widow Engel was overheard by a juror saying that no matter what happened, at least he wouldn’t be laying a finger on her or the kids anymore…
“As a matter of fact, yes, he was,” Mrs. Foggarty said, “if you count beating your wife and children to be criminal, Ms. Clement. Unluckily for us, he was never tried for anything.”
Abigail knew the comment was designed to cut her but more of what she had read was coming back to her.
Unfortunately, it had already seemed to sink into Engel Jr, who had already been charged with numerous violent offenses by the time he was twenty and was dead just two decades later.
Engel’s Engines, she remembered. That was the name of the mechanic’s shop where Jacob’s biological father was found dead in his freezer.
Abigail could feel Cleo staring at the side of her face and somehow knew that Mrs. Foggarty wouldn’t say too much with an audience, even if she very clearly preferred Cleo to Abigail. With a glance, Abigail hoped she conveyed to Cleo that she needed to disappear for a moment.
“Mrs. Foggarty,” Cleo said, “I do apologize, but would it be all right if I used your restroom?”
“Of course dear,” Mrs. Foggarty said absently, still watching Abigail intently, “you know where it is.”
They watched Cleo cross the room and exit into the hallway. Abigail noticed that Mrs. Foggarty did not look away from the door until she heard Cleo’s footsteps grow faint.
“Can I ask—”
“You can ask,” Mrs. Foggarty said sharply, “but please understand that if I don’t want to answer, I very much will not.”
“I understand,” Abigail said, “your maiden name, it’s Engel, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Foggarty’s mouth twitched. “That’s a matter of public record.”
“Yes. As is, I’m assuming, both the ownership of his auto shop and the verdict at your mother’s trial.”
She held herself upright against Mrs. Foggarty’s steely gaze and waited for any kind of recognition on the old woman’s face.
“You’d be correct,” Mrs. Foggarty finally said, “do you have any other impertinent questions to pose to me?”
Abigail swallowed hard and leaned forward. “I know how your brother died, and ever since I heard about it, I wondered— how does someone get trapped in a walk-in freezer? Don’t they have safety releases?”
Now that she had said it out loud, there was no going back, but she wanted desperately to know, and now she had to brazenly say it. Mrs. Foggarty glared back at her, but as they sat there at an impasse, the older woman’s lips twitched into a smile.
“Upsetting to think about, isn’t it? He deserved his fate, and it was his own fault. It’s always a pity when someone takes to drink,” Mrs. Foggarty said, “though in this case, it probably saved a lot of people a lot of heartache. A little too much to drink, a little fall, or maybe he just sat down to rest and fell asleep in a drunken stupor. Maybe if my brother hadn’t mistreated every person he came across, he might have had someone who might have checked in on him that night, and he might have just survived. Choosing not to check on your own brother because you know how much pain he caused, that’s a hard thing to live with.”
Mrs. Foggarty smiled sweetly despite the venom dripping every time she repeated the words ‘might have.’
“I imagine it would be heartbreaking,” Abigail said, her mind racing.
“Yes, heartbreaking,” Mrs. Foggarty repeated.
“Knock knock!” Cleo announced herself as she arrived in the doorway, “Just got a call from our grumpy chauffeur—we need to go, apparently.”
“Is everything all right?” Abigail asked, her anxiety spiking.
“Everyone’s fine, just wants to get us all gathered around the campfire for a pep talk,” Cleo said sarcastically. “Sorry to cut our chat short.”
“Oh don’t worry about it,” Mrs. Foggarty said, “I think Ms. Clement understands all she needs to.”
“I do,” Abigail said, “thank you for talking it through with me.”
Mrs. Foggarty waved them both away as they said their goodbyes, Abigail’s thoughts swirling like a tornado around her head.
John’s face was serious as they climbed into the car, and he didn’t say a word as they made their way back to Abigail’s, which suited her fine—she needed to think.