Authors: Betty Hechtman
While Eric felt for the pulse on her neck, I got the purse, found the cream, and slipped it to her. A moment later, she pushed back his hand and sat up. Then she stood and announced to all that she was okay.
“My fiancé saved her! Isn’t my Cutchykins wonderful?” Adele said proudly. The crowd hesitated a moment, then gave him a round of applause. Meanwhile, the woman slipped out the side door. I crumpled up the sign-up sheet I’d had for her. I didn’t think we could count on her being a student.
I had finally thought to look at my phone as I was clearing up after the end of the preview. We’d gotten quite a few sign-ups, so I considered it a success. As I scrolled through the messages, I noticed one from Mason saying he couldn’t wait to see me and that he had a surprise for me. I finished up quickly and headed for his place. I was really curious about the surprise. It couldn’t be too much with his ex and daughter around. It was dark when I parked in front of his house. I still felt funny about using the key he’d given me, so I rang the bell. Instantly Spike began to bark and I could track Mason’s progress to the door by the increase in volume of the yipping.
“Sunshine, you’re here, at last,” Mason said with a happy grin when he opened the door. “Come in.” He made a flourish with his hand as he scooted back, giving a couple of tugs on the bell on the scooter handle. “Hooray, Molly is here.”
I walked and he pushed himself on the scooter as we
went down the hall to the den. Spike was running along, trying to stay in the middle of things. I told him about the Yarn U Preview, and he laughed when I got to the end.
“It sounds like first responder Eric was having an adrenaline rush. That poor woman.”
“I have to admit that I got a little nervous myself when I saw him take out the pen, since he’d just talked about tracheotomies. But it turned out he was just going to write down her heart rate.”
“I wish I could have been there. I wish I could have been anywhere.” He looked skyward with frustration. “I hate being stuck here.”
“You mentioned having a surprise,” I said, trying to change the subject. It seemed like a better thing to say than my usual,
Don’t worry, you’ll be back on both feet soon.
“Where is it?” I asked, looking around.
“You’ll see,” he said. We’d reached the room that faced the yard and pool, and there was no burst of confetti or a net of balloons falling down. Everything looked the same as usual. The TV was on, and Spike had already reclaimed his seat on the arm of the leather sofa. Just to be sure I hadn’t missed anything, I gave the room another once-over and then shrugged.
“I give up. I don’t see anything different.”
Mason chuckled. “You’re looking at it the wrong way. It’s not what is here; it’s what is not here.” My brow furrowed, and I checked out the room again, wondering what was missing.
“Never mind guessing. I’ll tell you. The surprise is we have the place to ourselves. I gave Jaimee an invite I had to a charity dinner. Jaimee heard that some of the people from
The Housewives of Mulholland Drive
were going to be there, and she talked Brooklyn into being her date.”
He had a merry expression as he glanced around his house. “It’s like we’re teenagers and our parents are away. We can get into all kinds of trouble. Although we could have gotten into much more if you’d gotten here earlier,” he teased.
A new show started on the TV and captured Mason’s attention. “Do you want to watch it?” I asked. He seemed mesmerized by the screen.
Mason seemed distressed. “It isn’t the pain meds I have a problem with. I’m addicted to these shows! They’re all glorified soap operas that forever leave you hanging. This one is about a PI whose life is a mess. He’s gone over to the dark side.” Mason sat down on the sofa, continuing to explain the program to me.
“The PI started working for some guy, laundering money. You’d think the writers would be more creative than having them launder money by owning a bunch of coin-operated laundry centers.”
Mason watched for a few more minutes then shut off the TV. “I’m recording it. I can watch it later when I don’t have you here all to myself.”
He patted the spot next to him on the couch. “All I can do is say how sorry I am that things are the way they are. I can’t believe I bent your ear about a stupid television show when you’re in the middle of a real mystery. How about we order an Indian feast and then you tell me everything?”
It sounded like a good plan to me. I let Mason do the ordering, and in no time there was a man at the door with bags of fragrant food. It had been an eternity since lunch, and I was starved.
Mason had been scooting around too much, and I knew that the pain was always worse at night, so I insisted he sit on the couch while I brought out the food. There was a mountain of tandoori chicken and vegetables in orange
masala sauce; spicy spinach with cubes of mild cheese; rice with peas, raisins and cashews; and a circle of bread called paratha that had buttery layers. We made it into a mini buffet on the coffee table. Mason insisted on filling his own plate.
“Where to begin?” I said between bites. “You know I found out the identity of the victim.” I didn’t mention it was because Barry showed me a photo. “The cops are all over CeeCee now, asking her what Delaney Tanner was doing in her guest apartment. CeeCee is insisting she doesn’t know the woman, but it seems like everyone else does. I know her from way back when the boys were in school, and I found out she used to work at the bookstore. Then, when I went to make the bookstore’s deposit at the bank, it turned out Delaney was a teller there.”
Mason listened with interest as I mentioned meeting Delaney’s daughters and how they’d insisted she wasn’t depressed and told the cops so.
“It sounds like they still haven’t decided if it was suicide or foul play,” he said.
“It also could have been some kind of accident. The real question is who invited her to the guest quarters. I’d like to talk to Tony and the housekeeper, Rosa. One of them had to let her in.”
“Is Tony living there?” Mason said.
“CeeCee isn’t broadcasting it, but he is. I think it is just temporary.”
“Maybe someone left one of the gates open and this woman was some kind of stalker and slipped in,” Mason offered. “And maybe in spite of what her daughters said, she was depressed and she was looking for somewhere to die. She had pills and booze with her and stuffed something in the heater vent and got ready to say good-bye. She chose CeeCee’s because it would get a lot of attention and she would be the somebody in death she hadn’t been in life.”
“You need to get back to work. You are definitely watching too much television.”
“Tell me about it,” he said with a melancholy smile. Mason sopped up some of the masala sauce with a piece of the paratha bread and fed it to me. “Or it could have been an accident. She was drunk and on pills and wandered in there and was cold and turned on the heat.”
“There’s something that doesn’t fit,” I said. But when he asked what, I had to tell him I didn’t know.
Even with all his casts and sore spots, we’d managed to cuddle quite close together, and he sighed with pleasure. “This is how it’s supposed to be.” He leaned forward and set his plate on the coffee table and then moved even closer, so that our cheeks were touching. “We could adjourn to the other room,” he said.
A door slammed in the distance, and Spike instantly awoke from his nap. He took a guard dog stance on the couch cushion and began to bark. Mason and I reacted like two naughty teenagers and instantly pulled apart. A moment later, Jaimee marched into the den, giving off a prickly vibe.
“Ha! So those Housewife people thought there was no drama in my life,” she said. She took one look at us on the couch and squeezed into the space between us. Spike gave her a token bark before taking off for another part of the house.
“Where’s Brooklyn?” Mason asked.
“She went into the other room to change,” Jaimee said.
“I’m sure you’re very tired from your evening out. . . .” Mason said. He let it trail off, hoping she would get up, but either he was too subtle or she simply chose to ignore it. All her attention seemed to be on the remains of our takeout on the table.
She pulled off a piece of the tandoori chicken and nibbled
on it. “The dinner was inedible,” she said, as if it was Mason’s fault. “Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“Not really,” Mason said with a grin. “But I bet you’re going to tell us anyway.” He put a little emphasis on the
us
since Jaimee seemed to be doing a good job of totally ignoring my presence.
I had been to enough of these charity dinners to be able to picture the setting. It would have been at a ballroom in one of the nice Beverly Hills hotels, filled with round tables. There were always celebrities there since they got publicity for the event and were a draw for guests. There was usually a silent auction with things like walk-on parts on sitcoms or scripts signed by the cast of a current hit show, items with studio logos and donations that were advertisements for assorted businesses. I’m sure there was an open bar, a lot of networking and, as she’d said, an inedible dinner, followed by some entertainment.
Jaimee wiped her fingers on an extra napkin. She let out a sigh. “Todd was there.” This was the point where she acknowledged that I was there by making sure I understood that he was her ex-boyfriend, who was much younger than she was and an athlete, and that she had broken up with him. “He made a big scene right in front of the Housewives’ table, saying that he wanted me to give him a chance to make things right with us. He said he wanted to see how the work on my house was progressing.”
“Maybe you should give him another chance,” Mason said. “It sounds like he really wants to win you back.” I knew Mason was hoping she’d take his suggestion immediately.
“He’s going to have to do a lot more than that for me to give him another chance. Ha! I said I wasn’t born yesterday and that I knew it was all about him wanting to get back his stuff. I bought most of it and I told him that all his equipment
was my property and that I had it in storage with the rest of the things from my house.” She seemed pleased with the last part and pulled out her cell phone to lay it on the table. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Housewives people called me tonight and wanted me back on the show. Maybe they’ll even want us to recreate the moment.”
“If you want drama,” Mason said, “Molly was in the group that found the body at CeeCee Collins’s house. We were just talking about what we think happened.”
It was pretty clear Jaimee couldn’t care less, and I was already gathering my things. Mason saw what I was doing and tried to get me to stay, but a moment later Brooklyn came in the room, dressed in loose-fitting white pants and a kimono-style top.
“I’m going to get your meds, Dad. Then we can do some tai chi.” She glanced in my direction. “It helps him sleep.” I offered to help. “Thanks,” she said halfheartedly, “but we have a whole ritual.” Her eyes went toward the hall leading to the door, and her message came through loud and clear. I was the odd man out.
Mason pulled himself off the sofa and rode the scooter along with me to the door. He winced a few times. “The pain gets worse at night.” He looked back to the ruckus going on in the den and turned to face me. “It seems to be important for my daughter to handle things. She hasn’t said anything to me, but I think she was looking for a reason to leave San Diego. You know how they say you never retire from being a mother? Well, the same is true for being a father, at least for me.”
How could I possibly find fault with that? We went outside, finally getting some privacy, and he gave me a good night kiss that promised things to come.
I dreamed about yarn again. No surprise. This time I was crocheting. I couldn’t remember the details, just that it felt like a fever dream. The yarn was full of bumps and thorns, and the stitches kept coming out wrong. At one point I think I picked up the ball of yarn, threw it in the air, and hit it with a bat, sending it sailing off into space, but it kept coming back, and each time the ball of yarn was bigger. I was relieved to wake up, though I was twisted in the sheet. I fell out of bed trying to untwist myself.
I rushed through my morning chores, already thinking about what I had to take care of at the bookstore. I certainly wanted to call Kelsey Willis and confirm everything about her daughter’s shower. I remembered I’d given her a card and then she’d given me one in return. I hadn’t paid attention to it at the time because I didn’t really expect her to book her daughter’s shower at the bookstore. I’d never been so happy
to be wrong. If it went well, we were sure to get other business. I definitely wanted to stay on top of it.
I searched the house and couldn’t find it. I was just about to see if one of the dogs had carried it off somewhere when it came back to me—it was still at CeeCee’s. I had managed to get the cops to give me the purse I’d left in the dining room, but I’d forgotten all about the tote.
It was probably still sitting on the floor in CeeCee’s dining room. I thought about calling CeeCee, but it seemed easiest to just swing by. I handed out treats to the animal crowd at my feet and rushed out the door. The air smelled cold and damp but also incredibly sweet from the orange blossoms on the row of trees in the yard.
I would have liked to linger and relish how green the yard was and the way the sun sparkled in the dewdrops hanging from the leaves, but I needed to get my tote bag and get on to the bookstore.
I parked in front of CeeCee’s and was glad to see there were no cop cars or news vans. I rang the intercom, and Rosa answered. I asked if CeeCee was there.
“No,” Rosa said curtly. I thought she was going to shut off the intercom.
“Wait,” I said quickly. “I left something the other day, and I wanted to pick it up.”
Rosa seemed to hesitate, but I really wanted to get the bag with the card. We went back and forth a few times, and she finally buzzed the gate open. As soon as I got inside, I couldn’t help it—my eye went right to the garage and the stairway. A piece of yellow tape still hung from the railing, and I gathered it had been released by the cops.
When I’d walked through it before, I had always just taken in the yard as a whole. I’d noticed there was a small
forest of trees, but my perception of the rest of it was just green with no details. Now I saw that it had been landscaped to make the outside world seem almost nonexistent. There were trees arranged along the sides of the lot, and the space between them was filled with bushes. Flowers had been added to give bursts of color. When I’d walked around the outside of the property with Babs, I’d noticed there was a wall of green created solely out of bushes and ivy that was separate from what I was seeing. So much more attractive than seeing the fence that surrounded the property.
Rosa had the door open, and the two Yorkies ran outside, barking. She corralled them, and we all went inside. I’d never been there when CeeCee wasn’t home before, and it seemed very quiet. I had said to Mason that I wanted to talk to the housekeeper, and it seemed like I was going to get my moment. I figured she knew all the inside information, what skeletons were in the closet and where the bodies were buried, to borrow a couple of figures of speech. Not that it would be easy to pry it out of her. My impression of Rosa was that she was rather stoic, but then if you wanted to keep your job as a celebrity’s housekeeper, it was better not to be too chatty.
“Where did you leave the tote bag?” she said, standing so that I couldn’t move beyond the entrance hall. I pointed toward the dining room, and she stepped aside to let me walk in. She seemed a little nervous, and I sensed she wanted me out of there as fast as possible.
“It must be different having Tony living here. More work for you. I suppose he wanted you to get the guest quarters cleaned up.”
“No. It is okay. Mr. Tony didn’t want me to deal with the guest apartment, before or after.” Her voice faltered on
after
, and I knew she meant after the other day.
“After?” I said with a question in my voice. “Do you mean like clean up after the crime scene?”
“Yes. He said he would take care of it all. He wants the vent replaced right away so there won’t be the chance of another accident.” She paused and seemed to be considering her words.
“I know Miss CeeCee can’t even make a cup of tea for herself, but she is a very kind person. When she found out how long it took me to take the bus to and from here, she gave me a car to use.” I thought she was finished, but then she added, “I worry for her with Mr. Tony. I think maybe she is too kind to him.”
I wanted to ask what she meant and get into whether she had any ideas how Delaney had gotten in, but she made it very clear she was done talking and led me into the dining room. “Please,” she said, gesturing for me to check the room. Of course, the purple tote was on the floor just where I’d left it. Rosa ushered me right back outside and closed the door.
Maybe Tony wasn’t the Prince Charming we all thought he was.
* * *
I waited until it was quiet in the information booth at the bookstore before I took out Kelsey’s card. You better believe this time I looked to see what it said. It listed her name and title—executive VP—and the company was Willis Industries, Inc. It appeared she’d started a new chapter in her life, too. When I called to go over the choices her daughter had made for the shower, I asked her what Willis Industries, Inc., did.
“I don’t see why you need to know that to put on a shower,” she said with a little edge in her voice.
“No problem. I was just making conversation. As long as
you pay for the shower, whatever you do is okay with us.” I punctuated it with a friendly laugh. She didn’t join in. Now it came back to me. She had never had much of a sense of humor, and certainly had none about herself.
Mrs. Shedd overheard my end of the conversation and figured out who I was talking with. “Molly, we don’t want to rile the customers. She didn’t cancel, did she?”
I assured my boss that Kelsey was still on for the shower, and then I moved on to other tasks. I had been gone so much over the past couple of days that I worked straight through until the evening. I stopped by Mason’s on the way home. His other daughter, Thursday, was over, and she answered the door. I had a much better relationship with her than with Brooklyn, but still, when I realized they were all having dinner together, I begged off. There was no way I wasn’t going to feel like an intruder.
I called Dinah when I got home and laid it all out to her.
“And here I thought you two had just the relationship I wanted,” she said when I filled her in.
I mentioned that I had stopped over at CeeCee’s and talked to Rosa. “She didn’t say much, but if you read between the lines, it’s very interesting.”
“Okay, you got me curious. Are you up for company? We can sit and crochet and forget about the problems of the men in our lives. Let’s talk about murder instead,” she said with a cheery laugh.
I’d barely changed into a pair of sweats and a T-shirt when I heard a soft knock at my kitchen door. The menagerie heard it, too, and raced me to the door. The cats were silent, but Felix and Cosmo seemed to be having a contest over who could be the louder watchdog.
I opened the door, and before I could stop their escape, the whole crew ran into the dark yard.
“Sorry, I would have stopped them, but they were too fast for me,” Dinah said, coming inside. She dropped her tote bag on the table.
“The dogs aren’t the problem,” I said, peering out into the darkness past the patio illuminated by the floodlights. “It’s the cats.” The two of them had rushed out to the back of the yard and were already out of sight. My backyard was wide but not too deep, ending in a row of redwood trees with ivy and bushes between. I knew there was a fence behind all the foliage, but it was ancient. It had been there long before we moved in, and I had no idea of its condition and often worried there might be a hole somewhere. Mr. Kitty ran past me and went back into the house, but I could hear rustling in the bushes along the back of the yard. Cat was quite the huntress, and I could only imagine what she was doing in the undergrowth. Or finding, I thought with a shudder. I shined my flashlight along the redwood trees and saw some of the ivy moving.
“I have to get her out of there,” I said, running across the grass. I followed the sound and then plunged into the ground cover. I grabbed her at the base of the fence. I had never really seen it before, since it was virtually covered by the bushes and ivy. Chain-link fence certainly lasted, though it probably had gotten shorter with the thick ivy vines weighing it down.
While I was back there, I shined the flashlight into the foliage. “I’m not sure I like that,” I said when Dinah had joined me. It was almost impossible to see with all the growth, but the flashlight had illuminated a gate in the old fence. The property behind mine was on a cul-de-sac, and I didn’t know the people.
“I don’t think you have to worry about them using it,” Dinah said, giving it a push. It seemed to be rusted in place.
“Didn’t you find a similar gate on the fence that runs along the side of your property?” my friend asked. I thought for a moment and realized she was right.
“That gate doesn’t matter anymore. The neighbor next door put up a wood fence on his side that blocks it.” Cat was beginning to squirm at being held, and any moment she would start using her claws to break away, so I quickly carried her across the yard and brought her inside. “You didn’t know that gate was there, and they probably don’t, either,” Dinah said, following me inside.
I put Cat on the floor, and she went off looking for Mr. Kitty. A moment later Felix and Cosmo came to the door and wanted to come in, too. I kept looking through the window toward the back of the yard. It had stirred something in my mind.
“Are you up for an adventure?” I asked, grabbing my keys.
“Are you kidding? I live for our adventures. Where are we going? What’s up?” Dinah said.
“I just want to check out a hunch,” I said. We got into the greenmobile. By now it was late enough that there was no traffic on the back road I took. I drove right past the front of CeeCee’s and kept going around the side of her property until I got to the street at the back of it. I pulled the car to the curb, and we got out.
The temperature had dropped into the low fifties, and there was a bite to the air. The street seemed dark and deserted, but then again, all the houses were on the other side of the street hidden behind high fences and mature foliage. The only light came from some fixtures on the gates.
Our footsteps were absorbed by the asphalt as we walked along the back of CeeCee’s property. The light on the gate across the street illuminated the wall of bushes. There was no sidewalk, just a strip of dirt with ivy covering it, and
instead of a concrete curb, there was a raised layer of asphalt. I kept shining my flashlight on the greenery, looking for some kind of opening as we walked the whole length of it.
“I see where you’re headed,” Dinah said. “You think there’s a gate somewhere in the fence, like at your place. Wouldn’t the cops have looked for one?”
“Maybe not. If there is one, I don’t think CeeCee knows about it. If, according to Rosa, she can’t make a cup of tea for herself, I doubt she knows much about her fencing.”
“Speaking of Rosa, what did you find out?” Dinah asked.
“Mostly that she’s a loyal employee who is protective of CeeCee and not a big fan of Tony, though she didn’t offer any details. It seemed a little suspicious to me that he wanted to take care of everything with the guest apartment.”
We had reached the place where CeeCee’s property ended and the neighboring lot began. “I could be wrong about a gate,” I said.
“I hate to bring this up, but you found the gate at your place by looking at the fence. It might be more helpful if we went in.” She stuck her hand in the greenery. “It looks like a wall, but these are bushes.”
“Wait a second. I have an idea.” I trained the flashlight on the strip of ivy growing between the street and the bushes. Then I spotted it. “There’s an indentation in the asphalt curb, like this was a driveway once,” I said, getting excited. I turned toward the wall of green and began to examine it more closely. Dinah was right. The planting only looked like a wall, and I noticed a slender opening. I slipped in and once I was behind the tall bushes saw that despite the fanciness of CeeCee’s place, the fence was just ancient chain-link covered in ivy. The flashlight reflected off two metal poles sticking up out of the ground that clearly belonged to a gate—a rather large gate. “This must have been a back entrance,” I called in a loud
whisper to Dinah, who was still outside the green wall. “C’mon,” I beckoned.
“The flashlight looks really weird coming through the bushes,” she said when she joined me. I gave the gate a push, expecting the resistance I’d had with the gate at my place. But this one moved easily, as if it had been used recently. All I had to do was move back the thin vines of ivy that covered it and push it open. I slipped inside, and Dinah was close behind.
“Where are we?” I said in a soft voice. The large trees with their spreading branches made the area seem even darker. I shined the flashlight around, trying to orient myself. The ground was covered with patches of ivy and some bald spots. Nothing like the beautiful landscaping of the rest of CeeCee’s. My light hit a row of tall bushes, and I heard a soft swishing sound coming from the area to one side. “That’s the pool, which is right behind the house.” My flashlight illuminated a wall and, as I pointed it upward, windows from a second story. “That’s the garage and the upstairs apartment. This must be sort of a no-man’s-land. I wonder if CeeCee even knows it’s here.”