Fortune Cookie (Culinary Mystery) (29 page)

“Who was Wendy sending the letters to?” she asked too loudly. “The only reason I can think of for Min to mail them for her is so that Wendy could stay anonymous. Not using her own return address supports that idea, and so does the unsigned letter I found. As for why she was sending the letters—it sounds like she was trying to convince someone that she was having a relationship with someone they care about, right?”

“Is Rodger involved with someone?” Pete asked. The touch of his fingers on her neck made her shiver, and she froze for a split second as a rush of heat filled her chest. He ran his fingers along the base of her neck, and she broke out in goose bumps, though the heat did not subside.

“H-he didn’t say. But he acknowledged that he was better after they broke up, though it was devastating at the . . . what was I talking about?”

Pete turned his hand and ran his fingers beneath the collar of her shirt.

She took a deep breath, entranced by the feelings his simple touch could trigger.

“You were talking about the possibility of Rodger’s wife or girlfriend being the target of those letters,” Pete prompted her.

“M-maybe.” She didn’t dare look at him, but closed her eyes and let her thoughts move to places she rarely let them go.

Pete reached forward and with one hand closed her laptop and moved it off her lap while he kissed her neck. For an instant, Sadie remembered the ground rules they’d set and the reasons they’d set them. In the next instant, she had no memory of those boundaries and reached a hand to the side of his face as he finally kissed her on the mouth. Delicious lightning shot through her as the kiss deepened. Pete’s arm around her waist pulled her closer, and they lay back on the bed together. She ran her hands over his shoulders, through his hair, down his back.

And then his phone chimed on the other end of the room, pulling the fog from her thoughts. She remembered the rules and the reasons for them and the ghost of his wife that had been haunting them for days.
Had the phone already chimed once and we’d ignored it?
Sadie wondered as they stared at each other for the space of two quick breaths. Then she worried that the passion they’d just shared would remind him of his wife for a very different reason.

Pete’s smile was like the rush of a wind, clearing out the fear and restoring some of her shaken faith. “I better get that,” he said, then kissed her one last time before rising from the bed and crossing the room.

Sadie smiled at the ceiling, then sat up and straightened her shirt. Her face was warm, and she put a hand on her cheeks. “Who is it?” she asked after several seconds had passed.

He didn’t answer, his back to her, drawing even more of Sadie’s attention.

“Pete?”

“It’s just Stan.” Pete’s voice was flat again, just as it had been when Stan called yesterday, just as it had been after he spoke with Brooke today.

Sadie felt the mood—which had been so nice a minute ago—shift into something different. A new place, too much like some of the other uncomfortable places they’d been on this trip. She waited for more information about the text from the realtor but Pete didn’t supply it. “I thought we had forty-eight hours to consider the offer?”

He didn’t turn toward her. “We do. He was just checking to see if we’d made a decision.”

Sadie counted five full seconds, giving him ample time to turn around and smile and say “Now, where were we?” but he said nothing at all, letting the silence lengthen between them. “
Have
we made a decision?” she asked. He knew as well as she did that “we” meant “him.”

Pete didn’t answer as he returned the text message, but his mood stayed heavy. She sat on the end of the bed and waited until he turned to face her. When he did, his expression was guarded and her patience was thin.

“You don’t have to accept the offer,” Sadie said, focusing on the business at hand. “We can live in your house and sell mine.”

Pete was shaking his head before she’d finished. “I think that would be just as hard.” His voice was soft enough that she could have pretended not to hear it.

There could be no pretending, however, that the words didn’t cut through her, and the breath she let out was an audible one. Pete swallowed as though having just realized what he’d really said:
he doesn’t want me living in Pat’s house.

He took his hands out of his pockets and let them fall to his sides. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Of course you did,” Sadie said, her voice quiet as she placed her hands, palms down, on either side of her as though that would help her stability. “You never say things you don’t mean.” She held his eyes, silently begging him to convince her that she was wrong. Instead, he just looked apologetic and uncomfortable. And then he began walking to the door. He was going to leave it like
this?

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Pete,” Sadie said as she stood. “Wait a minute. Let’s talk about this.”

“I can’t.”

Sadie caught up to him a few feet from the door and grabbed his arm. It was the second time today she’d chased after him like this.

He stopped but didn’t turn toward her.

“We have a wedding date in three weeks, Pete. If you’re not ready then tell me now.”

He finally turned toward her enough to meet her eyes. “It’s not that, it’s just . . .”

“Just what?” Sadie pushed when he didn’t finish his thought. She dropped her hand from his arm. “Need more time? Need less me? Need to talk to your kids, a friend, what? It has never been my intention to corner you into something, you know that.”

“Of course I know that,” Pete said. He paused for a few seconds as though searching for the words to say. “I don’t know how to explain it, but this isn’t about . . . you.”

“I know. That’s the problem. If Pat is stronger in your thoughts than I am right now, then you might not be ready to become
my
husband.” She couldn’t believe she was saying this; the very idea of canceling the wedding made her feel as though she were about to break out in hives. But if he wasn’t ready, the marriage wouldn’t work. She would rather have her heart broken now than see it obliterated after he’d made promises to her that he wasn’t prepared to keep.

Pete looked toward the door of the hotel room and took a breath. He didn’t look at her when he spoke. “Isn’t it hard for you?” he asked. “You had Neil.”

His words were like ice water for the growing rage and spurred insight that wasn’t entirely welcome—there was comfort in anger—but it wasn’t the same. Sadie had had Neil for such a short time, far shorter than the time she’d lived without him. Perhaps because of the short duration of their marriage, or maybe because of the years she’d spent alone since his death, she’d been able to work through his absence in a different way than Pete had after he lost Pat.

“I’ve had twenty-two years to get used to
not
having Neil,” she said quietly. “I’m not sure I could have remarried so soon after his death for the exact reasons you’re struggling with now. Are you not ready for this?”

He looked back at her. The mask was gone but pain was in its place, showing the battle he was waging, the reluctance and grief and the wish for something different. Was he wishing that Pat were here or simply that he wasn’t feeling this? They stared at each other for several seconds, Sadie internally pleading for him to take her in his arms and . . . what? Could he honestly reassure her? Could he say anything that would erase the last few minutes? The last few days?

When the seconds continued to tick by, Sadie backed away from him and waved toward the door. “Good night, Pete,” she said, turning toward the window and looking at the building across the street from her room. For a moment she wondered if he would follow her. He did not.

“I’m sorry, Sadie,” he said quietly. “I’m trying to figure this out.”

She heard the door open. A moment later, the door closed behind him, and Sadie was alone with her heavy heart and darkening fears.

Chapter 25

It was a long night, one of the longest Sadie had had in a while. She did not awake with any inspiration on how to ease the burden of Pete’s struggles and decided to deal with the inevitable awkwardness of the morning by running from it. She wrote a quick note to Pete, explaining where she was going and asking him to follow up on the leads for Mr. Green Shirt and the landlord. It made sense since the police could help him with both of those topics.

She took the elevator to the fifth floor of the hotel and slid the note under Pete’s door a little before 8:00. She could have texted him, but she’d said she’d give him his space and a text would be inviting a response. When he was ready to talk, he would come to her.

For her part, Sadie would focus on talking to the other tenants of Wendy’s building about Min and Ji. What she learned there would likely direct the rest of her day. Sadie hated that she had to check their stories—it felt like a betrayal—so she tried not to think too much about it and hoped that, if nothing else, having plenty to do today would help keep her mind off the events of last night.

Sadie went to the business center of the hotel; the binder in her room had said it had a printer. Min had a Facebook page, and though Sadie couldn’t access all of her photos from the hotel’s computer—privacy settings were a double-edged sword—she was able to print Min’s profile picture. It was a selfie likely taken in Min’s bathroom, but it was a good enough likeness to suit her purposes. Ji wasn’t on Facebook, and it took her several minutes to find a photo of him, finally tracking down a mutual friend of Min’s who had a picture of Ji with some people at a school function. Sadie had to download it onto her laptop, crop it, e-mail it to herself, and then print it from the hotel’s computer—not simple but still doable.

Sadie folded the pictures and put them in her purse, then asked the valet to help her get a taxi since the streets and sidewalks were already full of people rushing to work. As the cab pulled away from the hotel a minute later, she admitted to herself that she’d hoped the note she’d slid under Pete’s door would result in his calling her and wanting to talk about a breakthrough realization he’d had during the night. But it had been half an hour, and he hadn’t called. She reminded herself that Pete needed to do whatever Pete needed to do.
Sadie
needed to do the same. Tomorrow she would fly back to Colorado and confront what may or may not be the next step in her relationship with Pete. Today, she needed to focus on what had happened to her sister.

The taxi dropped her off at Wendy’s apartment building, and she let herself in. The clock on her phone showed that it wasn’t yet 9:00 in the morning, and though she disliked the idea of bothering people so early, she’d already accepted that she had a better chance of finding the tenants at home at this time of day. She really needed to talk to all of them if she wanted to verify that Min and Ji had told her the truth about when they’d been to Wendy’s apartment building. She approached apartment one and knocked.

A woman dressed in sweaty workout clothes pulled the door open. Sadie could hear the voice of Tony Horton in the background, and she wondered to herself which P90X workout the woman was doing. Sadie explained who she was and that she was trying to reconstruct what had happened to her sister.

The woman—Stacey—confirmed that she hadn’t been home when the fire happened, that she’d never really met Wendy, and that she had lived there for just five months. “I didn’t even know her name until after the fire.”

“Did you, by chance, ever see a Chinese girl around the apartment building?”

Stacey leveled her with a look that made Sadie review what she’d just said. “I believe you mean
Asian,
and there are a lot of
Asians
in this city.”

Actually, Min
was
Chinese, so Sadie wasn’t being politically incorrect by stating it that way, but she was embarrassed by the way the woman had interpreted the question. “This girl was seen
inside
the building—one of the tenants reported—”

Stacey put one hand on her hip. “Someone reported an
Asian
in our building?” she said with sarcastic concern. “By all means, let’s call the border patrol.”

“Ma’am,” Sadie said, wishing her red face wasn’t betraying her embarrassment. “I think you’re misinterpreting me. What I’m trying to establish is if you saw her here after May twelfth—inside the building, I mean. There were a couple of times that—”

Stacey didn’t let her finish. Instead, she cut off Sadie with a lecture on bigotry and ethnic stereotyping while Tony Horton yelled “Bring it!” in the background. When she finished her diatribe, she shut the door in Sadie’s face.

Sadie blinked at the closed door and raised a hand to her hot cheeks. She sighed and turned toward apartment two, reviewing how she’d said things to Stacey in order to make sure she didn’t give Jason the same impression. It wasn’t prejudicial to point out someone’s ethnicity, was it? And Stacy hadn’t even answered the question about Min or given Sadie the chance to ask about Ji. The day hadn’t started off very well. Sadie could feel the uncertainty of what she was doing and why she was doing it begin to creep up on her. Why had she even come to San Francisco?