Getting Away Is Deadly (9 page)

Abby shook her head. “I know I’ve heard those words somewhere, but I can’t place them.”

“Back to the wedding thing,” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense. Wellesley’s not married.”

“Maybe she’s getting married.” Gina picked up her check.

“But why would she tell two different landscapers about her wedding?” Abby asked.

“To hire them to landscape for the wedding or reception?” I asked. “No, wait. She’s got her own referral company. She’d just use them.”

I noticed the time and hopped up. “I’ve got to run, too. I’m supposed to meet Summer.”

 

An Everything In Its Place Tip for an Organized Trip

 

Once you’ve found the flight that fits your schedule and budget, be sure to check the price directly on the airline’s Web site. You may find an even cheaper price if you book directly through the airline’s Web site instead of through the larger travel search Web sites. Airlines run Internet specials that are available only through their Web site. If there’s one airline that you always fly, check to see if they have a travel newsletter or e-mail so they can notify you of sales and special travel deals.

“Y
ou’re sure they didn’t mention my name?” Summer tossed a worried look at me as she hurried to the Archers’ back door.

“No, they didn’t.” We’d been in such a rush to get to their house that I’d barely had time to tell her about the news report.

“Well, at least that’s one good thing, I guess,” she said, but her eyebrows were lowered in a frown. “There’s no way anyone will know it’s me. No one else knows I checked into the restraining order.” She rapped on the screen door.

“Don’t you think the unnamed source could leak your name?” Then it hit me. “Or mine. Summer—”

She cut me off. “Let’s talk about it after we get done with Ms. Archer. She hates it when people are late. There’s just one other
little
thing I need to tell you about the organizing job.”

It was never good to hear those words “little thing.” Somehow that combination of words always translated into something enormous. Before she could let me in on the “little thing,” Vicki Archer opened the door.

“Good. You’re on time,” she said and gestured for us to come inside the small kitchen. Despite her being tall, thin, and blond, you’d call Vicki Archer striking, but it was more because of the force of her personality than her looks. Her features were a bit out of balance. Her nose was too big for her face and her eyes protruded, reminding me of a bug. Her lips were thin and, since I was closer to her today than I’d been in the Metro, I could see she’d outlined her lips on the outside to make them look bigger. I could also see the stiffness of her hair that had been shellacked into her signature upsweep. Summer performed a quick introduction. “This is my sister-in-law, organizer extraordinaire Ellie Avery.”

We shook hands and I said, “So nice to meet you, Vicki.” If I was going to work with her, I wanted to start off on an equal footing.

She smiled. Well, to be completely accurate, the corners of her lips rose a millimeter as she said, “Ellie, it’s a pleasure,” with a slight emphasis on my name, indicating she’d picked up on my informality. “I’ve heard such good things about you. Summer’s been singing your praises. I hope you can live up to them,” she finished severely.

Her tone bordered on threatening. Mentally, I put on my dealing-with-a-difficult-customer manner and said, “That depends on what you want, of course. Why don’t you tell me about your daughter and what you’d like to achieve in her room?”

“Emma’s four. She loves pink and princesses. I just want it to look great in the magazine. Something with clean lines. I’ll leave the details up to you and Ivan,” she said as she led the way up the stairs.

“Ivan?” I raised my eyebrows and looked over my shoulder at Summer.

She whispered, “Ivan Flint.”

The way she said his name indicated that I should recognize it, but I didn’t. “Who?” I whispered back, but before she could answer we followed Vicki into Emma’s room, stepping over toys.

Vicki said, “Ivan, here’s your helper, Ellen.”

“It’s Ellie, actually,” I said as I reached out to shake hands with the largest man I’d ever seen. His tight black turtleneck and leather pants emphasized his size. He was the size of a professional football linebacker. Except he looked like he could fill out a football uniform without the shoulder pads. He seemed to take up most of the space in the small room. My hand disappeared in his hug paw of a hand.

“Ivan Flint. Flint Designs,” he said and I realized he was an interior designer.

Vicki turned in a slow circle and said, “A fairly tale theme. Knights, castles, dragons, everything. Murals?” She switched her gaze back to Ivan. “You can do murals, right?”

He ran his hand with several rings over his shaved head and said, “Of course.”

Summer stepped closer and said, “Vicki decided this morning that you and Ivan would make a super team for the redo of this room.”

Great. That “tiny” thing had turned into collaborating with an interior designer. I kept my smile on my face, but inside I winced. It was hard enough to get my clients to make decisions about organizing, but now we were adding an interior designer to the mix. I could practically see the speedy job disappearing like fog in the morning sun. Well. Nothing to do about it now. I’d agreed to help Summer and I couldn’t back out now.

Vicki seemed to be edging toward the door, so I said, “Let’s go over a few things quickly. Storage? Would you like more? We could put in some window seats under the dormers.”

Vicki looked at Ivan and he nodded. Vicki said, “Great. Do it.”

“What about sorting through the toys? You could probably thin the amount of toys. Some look like they’re for infants.”

Vicki looked down, seeming to notice the toys for the first time. “Yes. In fact, toss them all. We’ll buy new ones to go with the room.” She took a few more steps to the door and motioned for Summer to follow her.

“Wait. What about Emma? Doesn’t she have some favorite toys she’d like to keep? And it would be really helpful to talk about how you use this room.”

Vicki’s eyebrows drew together over her buggy eyes. “Emma
sleeps
here,” she said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “She really doesn’t play here because she spends most of her day at school. On the weekends we have activities. Ballet, gymnastics, that sort of thing.” She tilted her head from side to side, like a metronome. “She’s not attached to any of these toys. She’ll love new toys. Now. I have five minutes. I’ll leave you here with Summer to work out the details, but I need to go over a report with her before I leave.” Vicki headed out the door and Summer hurried after her.

Summer wanted to work for this woman?
I shook my head and turned back to Ivan. He smiled and said, “Looks like we have carte blanche. I’m thinking black walls and ceiling.”

Maybe I hadn’t heard him right. “Black?”

He nodded, gazing up at the ceiling. “I’m thinking nighttime enchanted forest. Paint every thing black, string twinkle lights across the ceiling to simulate a starry sky, rip up the carpet, if there is carpet under all this mess, and paint the floor green for the forest floor. Midnight Enchanted Forest.”

I was speechless for a moment. It sounded more like the Brothers Grimm to me. Finally, I managed to say, “Do you have kids?”

“No. I’m single.” He took his gaze off the walls long enough to focus on me. He must have been able to tell it was going to be hard to sell me on his idea, because he continued. “It’ll be striking. Original. Unprecedented. No one else is going to have a room like it.”

“Ivan, kids don’t like the dark. I don’t think a four-year-old is going to like an all-black room. In fact, I think it sounds a little morbid. Now, if she were a teenager, it would probably be a different story. And what about the murals? You can’t have murals on black walls.”

“Of course we can do murals. We’ll use shades of brown and gray. They won’t stand out, but they’ll be there, lurking, so that when you look closely you’ll see a dragon wrapped around a tree or something.”

“Lurking. That’s a nightmare waiting to happen. You can’t paint that on a little kid’s wall. You’re going to have to come up with something else. What about pink? Emma likes pink.” I was all for using clients’ ideas as inspiration for organization. Surely the same principle worked for interior design.

“No pink. Pink is hackneyed. Blasé. Worn out. This space has to stand out. Be unique. One of a kind.”

Summer reentered the room and said, “Don’t worry about the toys. Emma’s got a few favorites and I’ll stash them away for her. How’s it going?”

“I can’t work with her.” Ivan threw his thick arm at me. “She has no vision. No inspiration. No insight.” He stormed out the door and pounded down the stairs.

“He’ll be back. Artistic temperament and all that. Seems he has to storm off every job at least once to keep his reputation.”

“So you’ve worked with him before?”

“Yes. He did Vicki Archer’s reception area. An ice cube was his inspiration.”

“Well, that explains the subzero temperature in there. Oh, Summer, I don’t know if this is going to work.”

“I know it looks bad but, please, just give it a try.”

“Okay. Let’s get everything down on paper.”

Two hours later, Summer parked her car in the lot next to the Metro station. “Are you sure you don’t want me to drop you at the hotel?” she asked.

“No, this is fine. I’m an old hand at the Metro now.” Summer had a night class and I didn’t want her to have to go out of her way to drop me off at the hotel. Emma’s room had occupied all our time up to this point. We’d made two exhaustive lists, one of things that needed to be done to Emma’s room and another of everything that needed to be purchased to get it organized. It seemed like Summer was focusing on Emma’s room so she didn’t have to think about her new designation as a person of interest.

I pulled Nadia’s photos out of my purse. “Here’s the pictures my friend took.”

Summer didn’t snatch them out of my hand like I expected. She took them gingerly and studied each one carefully. The first ones were photos of the crowds in the Metro, commuters and tourists mingled together.

The last one was the clear photo of Jorge with the redheaded woman nearby. “Ellie, that does look like me. I thought I’d be able to see something that proved it wasn’t me, but there’s nothing—the jacket looks like mine. I have a beret like that. It could be me.”

The paper trembled in her hand. “What am I going to do? I’m a ‘person of interest.’ If my name and face get on the news I won’t be able to get a job—probably ever. It won’t matter if it was me or not. All people will remember is that I was a suspect. I might as well be guilty. Four years—well, actually five—years of college for nothing. Wasted. No one will hire me.”

I didn’t have an easy answer for her. She was right. If her name got out and she was portrayed as a murderer, her career would be over before it had begun, never mind that no evidence would have reached a courtroom. This investigation had all the hallmarks that media cable shows gravitated to: young, beautiful woman in danger, a murder, a stalker. There was even alliteration,
murder in the Metro
. I cringed when I thought of what the text and graphics people at the cable news channels could do with that phrase.

But what troubled me even more was that I doubted the police would look too hard for other suspects since they had circumstantial evidence pointing to Summer.

“Look, Summer, we know someone near Jorge pushed him. The woman who looks like you is a coincidence.” There was panic in her face and I could tell she wasn’t really listening to me, so I used my calmest voice and asked, “Where did you get your denim jacket?”

That got her attention. “The Gap. Why?”

“Okay, there have to be thousands of jackets exactly like yours out there. Someone who had red hair happened to be standing beside Jorge when he was pushed.”

“Wearing a beret like mine.”

“That’s not as common as the jacket, but I’m sure there are lots of black berets in the D.C. area, too.” I realized I sounded like a defense attorney, so I quickly moved on. “We just have to find something that will convince the police that one of those other people around Jorge might be a better suspect than you.”

I pointed out Wellesley’s dress and told Summer about the conversation between Wellesley and Jorge as well as the encounter I’d seen earlier in the day. “We don’t have enough to take to the police right now. I don’t think they’d be very excited about a scrap of fabric in a photo, but I’ll see Wellesley again tomorrow and I’ll ask her about it. If nothing else, she might have seen something.”

Could Wellesley have pushed Jorge? I didn’t know. I did feel a bit guilty about searching the photo for someone else to throw to the police, but I steeled myself. I had to keep my focus on Summer. If Wellesley didn’t push Jorge she didn’t have anything to hide and she’d be able to dispatch the police quickly. Then there was also Irene’s face in the photo and her weird behavior. I shut off any mental speculation about Irene. She couldn’t be involved in Jorge’s death. Not Irene. She was too sweet, too motherly.

Then a thought jumped into my mind.
Unless it was an accident
. No. That couldn’t have happened. Irene would have said something if it had. She wasn’t the kind to hide things. She loved the news and would relish being part of the news. I closed off that line of thought and put my attention back on Summer.

Summer looked at the photo again. This time she focused on the faces. “You’re right. All we need to do is throw suspicion on someone else.”

She looked a bit more in control, so I brought up the other topic that had been bothering me. “I’m going to tell Mitch about the investigation.”

“Why? Do you have to?”

“Yes, I really do. I hate to hide things from him, and this is starting to feel a lot like hiding.”

“All right.” She sighed. “But can you keep it kind of vague? I promise if my name shows up on the news, I’ll tell him everything. I know you think this is crazy, me not wanting to tell him, but he’s always rescued me and I want him to see that I’m grown up now. If he knows about everything he’ll come charging in and take over. I need to work this out without him. Maybe he’ll see me differently then.”

“You’re always going to be his kid sister.”

“I know. I don’t want that to change, I just want him to see that I’m grown up.”

Later as I swayed with the rhythm of the Metro car, I thought about her response to the picture and the different conversations we’d had. Had she ever flat-out said that she wasn’t on the platform that day? I didn’t think so. And she hadn’t told me about Jorge stalking her until the police brought it up. Was there something else she wasn’t telling me?

The train slowed down and I braced my hand on the silver pole as I leaned back to counter the motion of the train. I checked the station. One more stop to go. A couple of people squeezed into the already crowded car, erasing a little more of our personal space. A man holding a little girl of about two in the crook of his arm shifted the girl from one arm to the other and changed his stance as the train sped up.