Photo, Snap, Shot (15 page)

I was right.

Vicky Ventner made me
sick. She was obnoxious and arrogant. Black holes leave more substance in the universe than Vicky after they collapse. She’s an energy vampire who sucks the life-blood right out of your veins—all the while flashing a smile with as many falsehoods as teeth.

This visit was no exception.

“You aren’t ready!” This was a crow of pleasure. “You need to plan your time better.”

Vicky, you see, is the Empress Supreme of Unrequested Advice. She doesn’t converse, she dispenses. The All-Knowing, All-Seeing, All-Wise Vicky condescends to help us mere mortals muddle through our miserable lives, secure in the knowledge she could do everything better than we can.

I nodded and ran out the back door to grab the cream cheese and bagels from my car. I dashed back inside, letting the heavy back door graze my heel and take a layer of skin off the top. The blood trickled into my shoe. I did not stop.

I set out the food, plugged in the toaster, and thanked God Above that Vicky had brought two unfortunate souls with her to the homecoming crop. This meant she had a captive audience of two poor dopes to lecture. And lecture she did. They were treated to her thoughts on albums: “Strap-bound is the only way to go!” And paper: “You must buy kits or you are simply wasting your money.” And tools: “Insist that one of the clerks open the package and test items for you first.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. Then Bama screwed up my evening. She decided to demonstrate inking the edges of a project. When my co-worker pointedly ignored Vicky’s chatty attempts to take over, Vicky wandered over to pick on me.

“I heard Anya saw Sissy’s body. Have you signed her up with a good psychologist? She’s going to need one or she’ll be scarred for life. Here’s a name,” and Vicky jotted down a reference in the middle of the back of a piece of paper I’d been using for journaling boxes.

Rats. That ruined a perfectly good sheet of 8½ by 11 cardstock.

“She’ll probably need multiple sessions. You really can’t neglect having her speak to someone. That would be criminal.”

I nodded. Here we go, I thought. Vicky, the busybody, is on duty to save my life. I wondered how to maneuver the conversation so I could find out what Vicky had told the police. But I needn’t have worried.

She pulled up a seat to watch me distribute the page kits. “Of course, the police have been very interested in what I have to say about the investigation. You might say I’m an invaluable resource. I belong to the Sherlockian society, you know. I’ve studied all the Sherlock Holmes books in depth, and I consider myself a keen observer of human nature. My father used to say, ‘Vicky, no one can put anything past you.’ And he was so right, dear Papa was.”

Despite my aversion to rolling eyes, I fought the urge to do just that. It was hard, Really hard. Instead, I crossed them and said, “So who did it, Vicky?”

She smirked prettily. “Of course you’d like to know.”

“Who killed Sissy, Vicky?”

“I’m confident Jennifer Moore did it. And who could blame her? You know, that cougar Sissy made a play for Stevie. You do know what a cougar is, don’t you? A vulgar older woman who has the hots for a much younger man. That detective you hang around with, he’s younger than you, right?”

I stifled a groan. I wanted nothing more than to run to the back and bang my head against one of our concrete walls. Instead, I smiled politely. “So you’re sure Jennifer Moore is the killer?”

“Either that or Sissy Gilchrist’s ex-husband did it. He’s a cop, you know. It’s a fact they are prone to violence. Which you should think of, Kiki. Really you should.”

I made a mental note to ask Detweiler if they’d thoroughly checked out the ex. I also hid my smirk. Detweiler is not younger than I am. Bingo! Vicky was WRONG. But I couldn’t tell her. Not now.

I could, however, gloat silently. Which I did.

The places around the table filled up quickly. I showed each of our guests how turning a punch upside down allowed you to perfectly position it on a piece of paper. Merrily they punched out a variety of shapes and sizes of flowers. The chatter filled the room as the women discussed the different homecoming events scheduled around the area.

I squirmed with tension. The person I wanted to confront worked quietly. I checked my cell phone. Still no return call from Detweiler. I reviewed my arguments against confronting her. The sight of her easy demeanor and her slight smile gave me pause. What if I was wrong?

Throughout the two hours, I helped clients ink the flower petals, stack the flowers, secure them with a brad and curl the petals. Customers got up and helped themselves to the food. The page I’d designed was incredibly simple. Strips of coordinated paper in different patterns were stacked on top of each other to form a wide band through the center of the page. A large matted photo went in the center. An arrow moved from the page title at the top of the page to the journaling block at the bottom. A cascade of flowers followed the arc of the arrow.

After a couple of hours, most of the women were finished. They ooohed and aaahed over their work, which was usually the best part of the crop for me. One by one they left the worktable, wandered around the store, purchased supplies, and let Bama ring them up.

“Could you stay after?” I asked my suspect. “I need help with a project for the CALA alumni newsletter.”

Meanwhile Vicky Ventner proceeded to tell everyone how to improve their lives. She corrected several customers as they worked hard to put together their pages. She explained how her son Frankie had been asked twice to consider early admission to Harvard. “They value his mental acumen. But then so does Stanford. Both have offered him scholarships, which we don’t need, of course. Really, as one admittance officer told me, Frankie is an example of a superlative child, and my husband and I are to be commended. You know he had a perfect score on the SAT. Plus, he’s a straight-A student. And on the school council. That’s not to minimize his musical talents. Or his acting ability.”

We’d all heard this ten thousand times before. Vicky had this narrow bandwidth of topics she could chat on, and she and her son’s perfection were on her Top Ten List.

I’ll give her this, she was a constant source of new customers to our store because no one she brought with her could stomach her for more than one visit. For the life of me, I don’t know why she doesn’t tape record her “my Frankie is perfect” speech and put it on an endless loop to save her voice. I was so happy to see Vicky leave I briefly considered running back to the refrigerator and breaking out the bottle of champagne Dodie keeps for special occasions. In fact, if I’d had the time, I would have, because I was that happy to see the woman go.

By nine-fifteen Bama had rung everyone up. By nine-thirty the place was empty, except for the person whose secret I had uncovered, and me.

___

“Ella, you have three children. Frederick, Natalie, and Corey, right? Corey Johnson is your son, isn’t he?”

The newspaper photo I’d found of Ella was taken on July 4th, 1982. She and her fellow protesters were reacting to a racially motivated fight at the V.P. Fair that left two people dead. As I examined the protest picture more carefully, I noticed Ella’s blouse covered an obvious bump. The records in the alumni office showed that Ella graduated from college a full year after most of her CALA classmates.

But the real giveaway had been a peculiar family trait, the very pointed chin that both Frederick Walden and Corey Johnson shared. When I held a picture of Coach Johnson right next to one of Frederick, the resemblance was unmistakable.

I’d delivered my bombshell without any preamble or subtlety. I clamped my mouth shut and prayed I hadn’t blown the investigation.

Detweiler still hadn’t called me back. I knew I should have waited and talked with him, but I was too keyed up. After three hours of having Vicky Ventner correct me, marginalize me, and embellish my instructions, I wanted desperately to be right about something! Anything! Yes, Vicky had irritated me mightily, and now I blurted out my suspicions. I dropped a bomb on the woman I’d considered a friend.

Ella tipped her head back to stare at the layouts we’d run along the top of the wall, between display racks and the ceiling. Her arms were crossed tightly across her chest, and her fingers gripped the back of her biceps hard.

“Jim Hagg warned me people like you would come out of the woodwork like cockroaches!” said Ella. “But I didn’t expect it of you, Kiki. You totally pulled the wool over my eyes. So let’s put an end to the charade.”

Then she reached into her handbag and rummaged around.

Oh, boy, I’d done it now.

What if she had a gun? The panicky thought blazed through my mind. My gut did an elevator slide toward my feet. Would she really shoot me here? I backed away.

She dug around in her purse a little more. “I know exactly how to fix this.”

Would Bama open up tomorrow and find my bleeding body? Was Ella willing to ignore the fact the neighbors might hear the gun go off? Was she planning to shoot her way out of this? Go down in a blaze of gunfire?

My feet were rooted to the spot. I willed myself to run, but I couldn’t. I was frozen. My whole innards went liquid. Except for my mouth. That was so dry I couldn’t shout.

I was about to die.

With a stupid flower punch in my hand, no less.

Crud.

Ella’s shaking hand pulled
out a slim striped rectangle that matched her Kate Spade purse.

I must be coming up in the world, I thought, because I’m about to be murdered by a woman with a designer handbag.

Ella flipped open the checkbook. Her Montblanc pen paused over a blank check.

“How much?”

She should have shot me. It would have hurt less. I’d spent most of my adult life leaving behind the poverty I’d grown up in. No matter where my daughter went to school, or who I’d married, or where I’d lived, I would always be a poor kid from the wrong side of town. A vortex opened in the space time continuum, and I was propelled back to a grubby house on a scabby patch of grass bordered by a cracked and buckled sidewalk. I saw my dad and smelled the whiskey on his breath. Heard his rant, “People are no dang good.” Wondered if he’d spent his whole paycheck at the Dew Drop Inn bar, or just part of it. I watched my mom let down the hem on my best dress, leaving a faded white line that blazed a trail to our poverty. I felt the pinch of wearing shoes I’d outgrown. I recalled the worry my classmates would figure out why I brought peanut butter sandwiches from home and drank water from the fountain instead of buying a carton of milk every day as my classmates did.

The pain must have shown on my face. Ella had ripped away my protective bandages and exposed my secret self. Growing up poor never leaves you. Never.

“I don’t want anything from you.” I spat out the words.

Ella gulped. Slowly, she closed the checkbook and put it away. With a trembling hand, said, “Sorry. Old habits die hard.” Turning away from me, her body sagged. “I’ve had a bad week.” She pivoted to face me, her eyes wet and red-rimmed. “Sorry.”

My heart eased its way out of my throat. “So … did you kill her?”

A hurt expression crossed her face. A slow shake of her head, “No,” followed. “How could you think that?” Her eyes filled with tears. One coursed down her elegant cheekbones. Her lower lip quivered.

“Sorry.” My turn to apologize. During the crop I’d been distracted. I’d practiced all sorts of elegant ways to pop the question of Corey’s parentage. I’d skirted around the question of whether Ella might have killed Sissy. But then she hurt me, and I struck back. I was ashamed of myself.

“Guess we’re even,” she said.

“I guess so.”

Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. The lump in my throat positively ached. I’d lost a friend. In my eagerness to solve a crime, to feel important and powerful, I’d put two and two together and come up with three. Still, what else could I have done? I knew that by talking to her here, catching her off-guard, I would get an honest response. No, I reprimanded myself, you got a costly response. A response that cost you a friend.

Next time, I’d leave the questioning to the police.

Ella stepped closer to me. A long fingered hand plucked at my sleeve. “I can see why you’d think I did it. You thought I was protecting my son. You probably heard about Jim Hagg and figured out I hired him. If I were you, I’d have thought I was guilty too. But I’m not. I understand why you asked what you did.”

“Why didn’t you tell me Corey was your son? That night we did the family trees. You left a tag blank for him.”

“Actually, I planned to tell you about Corey. I just couldn’t find the right time. He’d only agreed to meet with me a few months ago, and for a while, a delicious while, he was my secret, and I didn’t want to share. Do you remember when you first learned you were pregnant?”

I did.

“It was a lot like that. That sense of feeling such a private joy. He was lost to me for years. My dad and mom promised to place him with a good family and watch over him. Then Dad had the strokes and Mom’s health failed. I buried Dad first and Mom soon after, and I discovered my baby had been adopted but that the records were sealed. I thought I was being punished for giving him up. But I tried to do what was best for him! You have to believe me! Back then, experts said that black children needed black families to form their sense of identity. So I sort of gave up on the idea of raising him. And I gave up on the hope of ever finding him. Walter urged me to hire an investigator. My husband saw how it preyed on me, wondering what happened to my firstborn. But I care about Corey, and I wanted to go slow. It took him years to forgive me. And more years to understand that I …” and she choked, “I gave him up, but I never gave up loving him.”

She went on to explain that it took time to wade through the Department of Social Services documents to find out where Corey was placed. After her first private investigator died of a heart attack, Ella had to start over. Once Corey was located, he refused to talk to his birth mother. He wanted nothing to do with her. He refused to meet with her.

Then there was the issue of Corey’s father, who had been killed in a drive-by shooting shortly after his son was born. Like many adopted kids, Corey was angry. He never wanted to meet the white woman who’d given birth to him and, in his mind, forgotten him. Meanwhile, Ella had worked behind the scenes to get Corey the college scholarship. She claimed she’d done nothing to help him win a job at CALA as basketball coach. “He did that all on his own,” she said proudly. In fact, Ella had backed off of all attempts at communication after Corey was hired. The investigator she hired would contact Corey twice a year repeating an offer for him to meet his birth mother. Only recently had Corey decided to forgive and meet the woman who’d given him up for adoption.

I marveled at Ella’s story. Some women would have only felt guilt, some would have worried about lost reputations. But all along, Ella had tried to improve her son’s life—even while he was rejecting her. She had managed the hardest of all parenting tricks, waiting patiently. And when Corey decided to give her a chance, she took it. Her eyes brightened as she told me the story. Clearly she gloried in finding the child once lost to her. She’d accepted that he would have to move ahead at his own pace rather than hers.

“Ella, I am happy for you. This will go away and—”

“And Corey will leave town.”

“No!”

“Yes. I wouldn’t want him to stay here and put up with all the whispering. But he didn’t kill Sissy. I didn’t either. After he was lost to me for all those years, do you think I’d care who he married? Once he accepted her—with her checkered past—he softened toward me. I didn’t have the right to say anything to him about his choices. Sure, I would have liked someone better for him, but what right would I have to tell him what to do? After all the mistakes I’d made? After getting a second chance? I would have turned myself in, I would have confessed to a crime I didn’t commit, to absolve myself, but where would that leave Natalie and Frederick?” A long sigh floated from her. “And my husband? I couldn’t do that to Walter. He’s known about my lost boy from the beginning and supported me in my search. I couldn’t do that to him.”

I could see what she meant. I could also tell she’d given this a lot of thought.

Then she surprised me.

“Besides, I was desperately happy to be a grandmother.”

“You mean to say—”

“Sissy was pregnant.”