Murder Served Cold (7 page)

“Did Colleen know you were in her house?” I asked. The whole situation was odd — on both of our ends.

“Does she know you’ve taken to skulking in her backyard?” he countered. He checked his watch and jingled his keys. “I’ve got to be off.” His eyes darted around the neighborhood. “Don’t tell Marina I was here.”

I made no promises, mostly because I didn’t want to be responsible for keeping such a strange secret, and partly because he left before I could respond.

I went back over to Colleen’s and this time, I rang her doorbell. She answered with dish gloves on and a bandana over her curls. “Yes?”

“Hi. We met yesterday,” I began.

“Right.”

“And I was wondering if you could answer a few questions,” I finished.

Colleen’s mouth twitched. “Are you undercover or something?”

“No.” I went with the truth instead of saying I was conducting a survey for the Girl Scouts. Ruben was out of touch on that one. “I want to know what’s going on, and I think you could help me.”

Her mouth spread into a smile and she opened her door all the way. “Come on in.” She showed me to her sofa as she hurried into the kitchen. “Let me turn the dishwasher on real fast.”

Her living room was painted in a soft creamy white, with red accents and leather furniture. It was a far cry from her dying yard.

“This is my mother’s furniture,” Colleen said when she returned.

“I was wondering what you could tell me about your work with Rodger,” I said. I started with an open-ended question because I didn’t really know what I was trying to find out.

“Rodger, huh?” She smirked. “Have you ever heard of me?”

“Well, no,” I said. “I’m not familiar with everyone in this town, though.”

She leaned forward. “Let me tell you a little something. Even if you knew every last person here, you wouldn’t necessarily know
about
everyone. You gotta get to know someone in order to know them.”

“I...what?” I was lost.

“No one here really knows me,” she said in a somber voice. Then she brightened. “They can now. Do you want to know me?”

“Sure,” I said, at a loss for words. There was something askew with Colleen’s behavior. She sounded like she was off her medication. I sure hoped Colleen took some form of medication that was causing her to ramble on like she thought I knew what she was talking about.

“My last name is Byrd, but that’s not my birth name.” Colleen pulled off her gloves and set them in her lap. “My original last name is Becker.”

I gasped. “You’re related to Rodger?”

“He’s my high and mighty younger brother. That’s right, younger. I should be the one telling him what to do, not the other way around. I changed my name to be like the pretty bird that came to my window every morning when I was younger — until Rodger knocked the bird right out of the air with a baseball. My bird never saw it coming.” Colleen’s body tensed and her teeth chattered. “One of these days, I’m going to tell him off for good. He can’t have all of my things. My house was nice once, you know.”

“I’m sure it was,” I said encouragingly.

Colleen perked up. “I had a mirror that hung across the entire wall until it broke in an earthquake. I had green grass until it changed color overnight.”

“I’m sure your brother would have been here more if he knew how much it meant to you.” I wasn’t sure of that, but I thought it was something she needed to hear. That someone cared about her.

She scowled. “Rodger would never have — wait. ‘Would’?”

I said it as gently as I could. “He didn’t wake up this morning.”

Colleen tugged her dish gloves on and scrubbed a lamp with her fingers. “Good. Good, good, good.”

I brought her attention back to my questions before she could shrink deeper into herself. I wanted to give her time to grieve, so I kept my question short. “This is important, Colleen. Do you know who attacked him?”

Her shoulders raised and fell. “I don’t know.” She continued to scrub, completely forgetting that I was there.

“Thanks for your time,” I said. Colleen didn’t hear.

I let myself out as Colleen continued to rub the lamp with all of her might.

I spotted a slightly familiar car at the end of the street and I went over there. Realizing it was Tim Becker’s car, I peered into the windows and saw him lying across the backseat with a baseball cap over his head. I knocked on the glass.

He woke up with a start. Coming out of the car, he said, “You’re Jade’s friend, right?”

“Right. What are you doing?”

He shrugged. “Catching some sleep. It’s hard with all the commotion at home. Everyone’s in my front yard or the hospital parking lot. I can’t hear myself think. My aunt lives on this street and my mom will think I’m visiting her, but really, I just wanted some rest.”

“How are you doing?” I asked sympathetically. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

He brushed it off. “It’s all right. We didn’t have that father-son relationship that my friends and their fathers have.”

“It can still be hard to realize that, now that the relationship can’t be fixed.”

Tim laughed without humor. “It wouldn’t have been fixed anyway.”

I crossed my arms and leaned against the car. “Is this a good thing, then?”

He stretched. “Yeah, I suppose it is. Last week, I was looking to the future and I saw myself taking over the family business because I had no choice in the matter. Now... Now, I can take the swim scholarship I was offered. That’s crazy.”

“Crazy good?”

“Crazy good,” he confirmed, fully waking up. “It’s funny when you think of your future in one way all your life and in an instant, everything changes.”

I knew the feeling. I was going through the same thing. “You’re going to do well,” I said.

“What makes you say that?” Tim frowned. “I don’t know what I want in life. I didn’t realize that I had so many choices and opportunities. I just took what came my way and stayed out of trouble. What if I make the wrong choices?”

“I say that because you want to make the right choices for yourself. You’re questioning this because you want to live.” I smiled at him. “There aren’t any wrong choices, just different paths. They all lead to where you want to go. Some are just more scenic than others.”

He thought about that. “Yeah, I guess so. I get to do what I want. It’s a strange concept, isn’t it?”

I nodded. People did what they wanted all the time. A lot of the time, however, what they wanted was easily obtainable. Doing what you wanted when you had to reach for it was a challenge worth undertaking, in my opinion. “Hey, even though you felt like you couldn’t do what you wanted to do earlier, that doesn’t mean you have to feel guilty about it. You did the best you could under the circumstances.”

Tim hesitated. “Did I? I don’t know.”

“Was working at Scoop your idea or your dad’s?”

“Mine. He wanted me to work in a law office, but I couldn’t do it because that would have been too boring for me. I wanted to be with people, not holed away in a tiny room surrounded by books and stuff.”

“See? You couldn’t simply follow orders. You had to follow your heart. You’ve always done the best you could, and now you get to do it without looking over your shoulder.”

Tim grinned. “I can’t wait.”

“The waiting’s over.” I laughed. “You get to do what you want.”

After talking with Tim for a little longer, I headed to Ruben’s office. Tim had left our discussion with an extra spring in his step, which made me feel good. I was glad that I could help him at such a tragic time.

I couldn’t believe Rodger’s actions. Who wouldn’t want a bright, positive son like Tim?

Stepping into Ruben’s office, I nearly tripped over a house of cards. Ruben was placing the final card on a basic house structure on the floor.

“Wouldn’t it be easier on your desk?” I asked.

“I wanted to see if this would work on carpet. It’s dense, flat, and an ideal alternative to my sturdy desk.” He took his hands off the house of cards and held them in the air. “There we are!” He then tore down the house and shuffled the cards. “What did you find out?”

Before speaking, I mentally went over what I knew about Ruben. People seemed to respect him, he didn’t betray confidences — from what I had heard — and he kept to himself. I decided he could keep a secret, if it was a secret at all. “Colleen’s Rodger’s older sister.”

Ruben did a double take. “No,” he said in shock.

“That’s what she told me,” I replied.

“They do have the same nose...”

“She was pretty bitter about it, to tell you the truth. I think Rodger just pay her the absolute minimum, judging by her place.”

Ruben’s eyes sharpened. “What do you mean?”

“Her place is in ruins. I get the feeling that Rodger took care of paying for the house and nothing else. I didn’t find out why she was in his office yesterday because she was acting... different. Like she was off her meds. Does she take medication?”

“I could see it,” said Ruben. “Sometimes she’ll walk past here muttering to herself manically. I checked up on her job, by the way. It’s clerical work, nothing major.”

“That’s weird that Rodger didn’t introduce his sister to people when they come to his office.”

“He goes to meet people,” Ruben offered. “It’s rare that people find him. Rodger would go find them.”

“Hmm… Why hide your sister?” I asked. “Why does no one know about her?”

Ruben furrowed his eyebrows. “I’ve got nothing.” He grabbed his keys. “Thanks for the update. I knew I could count on you. I’ve got to pick up some things at The Friendly Mart for dinner.”

“Aren’t you afraid someone will see you?” I asked with a grin.

He gave a boisterous chuckle. “I’ve fine-tuned my everyman image to perfection. No one flags me down or recognizes me on the street. I look like everyone else. I don’t stand out. I get to blend in and it’s excellent.”

“Come on, people have to recognize you. I’d recognize you if I saw you on the street.”

“I have cultivated my image to such a degree that you might not give me a second glance.” He raised his eyebrows, impressed with his own dedication.

I didn’t buy it. “I’ll see you out and about one day.”

“No, I don’t think so.” He whistled as he locked his door. “You don’t live here, remember?”

The sun was high in the sky when I passed by Scoop. I went to the bench overlooking the ocean and thought about what Ruben had said.
You don’t live here, remember?

I didn’t live here. I didn’t live anywhere at the moment, which was hard for me to imagine. I grew up in one house, moved to the dorms for college, and kept the same apartment for several years after that. I lived a steady, stable life, one that didn’t have as much excitement as I’d experienced over the last couple of days. I hadn’t felt alive,
I realized as I looked back on my life. Here, in Red Palm, I felt awake. I felt curious. I felt like I could do whatever I wanted, like Tim was now feeling.

I was twenty-four and had my whole life ahead of me. Why should I stay content with how things were when I knew they could be better? When I had proved they could be better by taking the leap and starting over?

In the midst of having witnessed a terrible crime, having my face plastered all over town as the stabber, and trying to help Jade bring back her failing business, I felt more confident. If I could handle all of that, I could do anything.

I smiled wryly to myself as I wondered if Taryn Horn would change the flyers to “killer” instead of “stabber,” after the recent turn of events.

“Hey.”

I looked up. Kevin joined me on the bench with a stack of flyers. Sadness seeped out of him and he listlessly sat there for a few minutes before speaking.

“Here I was, tearing down flyer after flyer with your face on it. For me, it was like ripping you from my life one sheet at a time. I relived our breakup each time I saw you and I finally got to the point where enough was enough. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t keep searching for you only to remove you.” He looked at me with bright eyes. “I’m sorry. I know I said I was going to win you back, but I think everything hit and I realized what had happened. I can’t do this anymore.”