21 Joey
Joey
Joey really doesn’t want to be wiping coffee splatters off the wall.
She wants to be cornering Tom Winter, shoving him into a chair, and yelling into his face.
Why did you kill her? This detective drama fantasy isn’t new.
She’s imagined herself doing it to the right person over the years.
The problem is, she never found the right person.
Now, they have him dead to rights, but there are still questions.
Why would he keep evidence in his spare bedroom for anyone to find?
And why did the police, the coroner, or anyone who examined Quinn’s body after her death not mention the stab wounds?
Something isn’t adding up. She resists the urge to pull up the photo of the sweatshirt on her phone.
When she gets home, she’ll check the notes she’s examined a hundred times, in case there’s something she’s missing.
She wipes the wall, then dips her rag back into the bucket and wipes again. When she finishes with that, she goes after the floor, where something sticky has formed a solid puddle. She may need a mop for this one.
Zach doesn’t do a great job closing up. There were cups in the sink when she came in a couple of hours ago, and she’s almost certain he hasn’t bothered to clean the espresso machine grates.
He’s fantastically reliable at showing up for work, and that’s about it.
But he’s all she’s got, and she feels like she owes him for taking off early today and yesterday.
The influx of customers over the past few days has strained day-to-day operations, and she wants to blame the film, but she can’t. This is on her.
A faint sound makes her look up. The door is closed and locked. She can’t see anything out there, though she has the sudden sensation that there’s someone there, just beyond the sidewalk where the light reaches. Her pulse vibrates in her throat.
But after a few seconds of silence, she sees no one and doesn’t hear the sound again.
She does her best to shake it off and gets back to wiping the floor.
Being in Tom’s house felt like crawling barefoot through a dumpster, and it sparked in her a sudden, irrepressible need to clean something.
Besides, no one but her is going to make sure this place is ready for the morning rush.
So even though she feels uneasy being here alone tonight, here she is.
A knock on the glass.
Joey jumps, sending water tumbling out of her bucket and bleeding across the hardwood. She rights the bucket.
A vaguely familiar woman bundled in a furry pink coat salutes her hand over her eyes and peers through the glass. In a moment, she spots Joey and throws a palm to her heart in an oh, thank god gesture. And then she smiles and mimes opening the door.
It’s Nicola Bianco. The actress. Joey has no idea what she’s doing here, but she guesses she’s about to find out.
She stands, peels off her rubber gloves, and cautiously walks to the door.
When Joey cracks open the door, Nicola makes a face like she’s just been saved from oncoming traffic.
“I am dying for a coffee,” she says with a barely detectable European accent that Joey assumes is Italian.
“It’s ten o’clock at night,” says Joey, glancing at the Closed sign that hangs from the door.
“Oh, it’s fine. I’m a night owl.” Nicola looks at Joey expectantly.
Joey presses her lips together, hoping to convey that she doesn’t negotiate with entitled movie stars, but in the end, she doesn’t have the energy to put up a fight.
She opens the door wider and gestures for her to come in.
Nicola, with no self-awareness whatsoever, saunters inside, shivering and pulling her coat tighter around her.
It’s fifty-five degrees out, Joey thinks, and at least seventy in here, but she says nothing.
Resigned, she ducks behind the counter and fires up the old espresso machine.
Zach has left beans in the grinder, she notices, and just as she suspected, the grate beneath sloshes with murky brown liquid.
She places a mug down, sees that it’s chipped, and replaces it with two unchipped mugs.
If she’s going to the trouble, she might as well have one too.
Then she gets out the mop and quickly cleans up the spilled water.
“You work here?” Nicola scrapes a chair across the floor and watches while Joey finishes mopping and begins to make the drinks.
“I own it.”
She looks around appraisingly. Joey guesses what she’s thinking. It’s the same thing she’d think if she was in Nicola’s shoes. Suddenly, she feels defensive. “We’re updating the decor soon,” she says.
“Ah,” says Nicola politely.
They fall silent as the machine whirs.
“How is the inn?” asks Joey. She doesn’t really care, but she figures making conversation is better than sitting in silence.
She’s trying to get a read on Nicola, and she can’t.
She appears girly and petite, and the request for coffee after dark from a closed café fits the entitled cliché.
But she also seems candid. Almost likable.
“It’s great,” Nicola says, surprising her. “To be honest, I thought I would hate it here. But everyone is so nice. And no paparazzi.”
Joey finds herself laughing. “Don’t be fooled. We have our own version of the paparazzi. They’re named Ingrid and Jasper Hardy, and they live on Third Avenue. They run the local online paper. I’m sure you’ve already been featured in Tuesday’s ‘Around Town’ column.”
“Oh,” says Nicola, reluctantly smiling. “I guess I don’t mind a little paparazzi now and then. It means I’m still relevant.”
Joey can feel herself softening to the low-stakes conversation.
In the hours since Tom’s house, she’s felt trapped by her own thoughts.
For years, she has known that Quinn didn’t just fall off that crag.
She’s known it like she’s known her own name.
And yet, after finding the sweatshirt she was wearing when she died, stained with her blood and slashed seven times over, she can hardly bear to think about it.
For the moment, Joey appreciates the levity of sitting with another soul who has no idea about Quinn or Tom or any of it.
She almost doesn’t mind that she’s making coffee this late at night for someone who, she just has a feeling, has no intention of paying.
“How’s the filming coming along?” Joey asks as she brings the drinks over. She hands one to Nicola, who takes a desperate sip.
“It’s awful. A toxic working environment. The director is…” She trails off. “He is a bully. I have never worked with him before this film but have heard rumors. Well, the rumors are not as bad as the real thing. Two crew members have quit because of his little tantrums.”
“That’s… Yikes,” says Joey. She tries to recall the name of the director. She knows Elena mentioned it, but she can’t fish it from her mind.
Nicola rubs a thumb along the side of her mug. “Men like him are everywhere. Especially in this business. But I suppose they’re not all like that. There are some good apples.”
Nicola has curtain bangs that are cut perfectly to frame her face, and Joey marvels at how put together she looks for this time of night, like she’s just come from a party.
Maybe she has. Her expression is dreamy, as if she’s thinking of someone in particular—one of the good apples, no doubt.
Joey’s about to agree. There are bad men everywhere.
There are bad men here. But she doesn’t. Because her heart stops.
As Nicola tips her cup to her mouth, Joey stares.
There. On her middle finger. A gold band with a witchy-looking black stone. In the center of the stone is an overlaid gold charm shaped like a droplet of water. Or blood. Instant recognition sends Joey to her feet, and Nicola looks startled.
“Where did you get that?” Joey sets her cup down and points at the ring with a shaking hand. She’s breathing fast, like a feral animal, both terrified and indignant. It’s impossible that Nicola Bianco has Quinn’s ring, but it’s right there.
Nicola looks caught out for a second and brings the coffee mug to her lap. “I found it,” she says finally. She looks at Joey from behind her curtain bangs.
Joey’s heart is hammering. She narrows her eyes. “Found it where?” Her teeth are clenched, and she thinks she might jump on top of this woman and pluck the ring off her finger herself.
There’s a long pause, and Nicola’s face eventually softens into a nostalgic smile. “At a vintage shop I love just off South Beverly. They have some really unique jewelry. This one is Victorian. Eighteen ninety-one, I think she said. It’s gorgeous, no?”
“Oh,” says Joey, feeling thrown. She’s studying Nicola’s face, but there’s nothing. No flinch, no sign of a lie.
“Are you alright?” asks Nicola. She’s peering at Joey inquisitively, and Joey realizes she probably looks unwell, the way she’s staring with heat and fear behind her eyes. She thought for a minute—
But it really does look like Quinn’s. It’s almost exactly the same.
Nicola tugs at her finger and twists the ring free. She holds it out. “Try it on if you like it that much. I will send you Marilyn’s website. Maybe she has something similar.”
Joey takes it in her hand and turns it around.
She slips it onto her finger. As much as she wants to feel something, as much as she is hoping for a sign from the ring that it is, indeed, Quinn’s, there’s nothing.
She’s even less sure now that she’s seeing it up close.
She can’t tell. Was Quinn’s this shape? Was it this heavy?
Nicola takes the ring back and stands quickly, looking uncomfortable. She sets her empty cup on the counter and waves a delicate, manicured hand. “Good night.”
Joey gives her as much of a smile as she can manage.
As she goes back to the storage closet to get more towels for the wet floor, she’s not thinking about the extra cleanup or the fact that Nicola did not, just as predicted, offer to pay.
Instead, she thinks about the ring. Not Nicola’s, but Quinn’s.
She strains to picture it on Quinn’s finger when she brushed her hair back or sipped on a Coke, but just like staring too hard at a faint star, the images go dark and blurry.
Joey is certain Quinn wore a bulky black and gold ring on her middle finger.
Then, her memory swerves from practical to morbid, and she squeezes her eyes tight.
She wishes desperately that she could be the kind of person who finds the positive in things, the kind of person who could celebrate her friend’s short, beautiful life.
But Joey is emotionally impotent. Optimism, if she ever had it, has been wrung out of her.
Now, all she can see—all she ever sees—are the things that go wrong.
Sophie’s right. She needs therapy.
She thinks she hears a noise at the front of the store, and she thinks Nicola might be back.
But when she rounds the corner, she realizes it’s just her growing unease.
The store is empty. Feeling the churning of espresso on an empty stomach, Joey cleans up quickly and flicks off the light before heading out and locking the door.
The street is dark, and she can hear an owl in the distance.
She thinks about turning left to her house but changes her mind and turns right instead.
She doesn’t want to be alone.