Olivia shook her head. “Let’s get out of here.”
As they headed north up the alley, Olivia paused and looked back. She could see the second-floor window of Valentina’s room. A small figure, dressed in pink, was observing their escape. For reasons she could not name, Olivia felt a flicker of hope.
Chapter Nineteen
The phone began ringing the instant Olivia stepped out of her shower, and it stopped in mid-ring as she reached for the receiver. She still felt hot after her race home from the dance studio. Even her lightest outfit, taupe pants and a matching blouse in the thinnest possible fabric, weighed on her skin like wool. However, wearing a bikini to work was not an option.
She threw her sweaty jeans and T-shirt into her clothes hamper and headed toward the kitchen, Spunky at her heels. As she bit into a slice of cold pizza, the phone rang again.
“Livie? It’s Mom. I can hear you chewing, so don’t try to talk. Everything is fine in the store, but Heather Irwin is in the kitchen, sobbing her heart out. I gave her coffee and some tissues from my bag.”
Olivia swallowed. “Good, she’s on my list.”
“List? Never mind, I don’t want to know.”
“I’ll be right down.”
Spunky circled her ankles, disturbed by the unusual morning schedule, which had not included an outing. “Come on, little guy. Bertha will take care of you for a while.” Spunky did not seem happy with this information, but an extra treat helped.
As Olivia entered The Gingerbread House, she imagined she could feel a heaviness in the air that was more than heat. Her mother was showing a customer the elegant embroidery stitches on a handcrafted apron. Ellie’s shoulders rolled forward as if she were carrying a backpack filled with rocks. Olivia knew how she felt. When Ellie glanced in her direction, Olivia blew her a kiss and pointed toward the kitchen.
Heather Irwin sat bent over the kitchen table, her head on her arms. At the sound of the door opening, she raised her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, and her lips looked chewed. “Oh, Livie, you’re really okay?”
Olivia poured herself a cup of coffee, refilled Heather’s cup, and sat across from her. “I’m fine. How about telling me what’s been going on with you lately?”
Heather gave a slow nod but didn’t speak.
Olivia reached over to a tray of ballerina cookies, selected a classic toe shoe iced with shiny raspberry luster dust, and handed it to Heather. “A cookie for your thoughts.”
The gesture coaxed a sad smile from Heather, followed by a deluge of tears. “How . . . how can you be nice to me, after what I . . . ? I almost killed you. Only I didn’t mean to, honestly, it just . . . I sort of . . .” She bit the toe off her cookie.
“I know you weren’t aiming your truck for me, or you’d have hit me.” This wasn’t quite true, but recriminations would only waste time.
“Still, it was unforgivable.” Heather sniffled. “Sheriff Del is talking about pressing charges for reckless driving. I deserve that. But mostly, I don’t want you to hate me forever.”
“I try to avoid the ‘hatred forever’ thing,” Olivia said as she slid the plate of cookies in front of Heather. “However, if you want to speed up the forgive-and-forget process, there is something you could do for me.”
“Anything.”
“Tell me everything you know about Geoffrey King. I know it’s a painful subject, but I’m trying to save my brother from prison, and I don’t have much time.”
Heather picked up a cookie shaped like a ballerina performing an arabesque. With a grim smile, she laid the cookie on a napkin and said, “That’s fair. Embarrassing, but fair. As it happens, I know a lot. It’s a mistake to lie to a librarian, you know. Some people assume we’re shy and gullible, but we know how to dig up the dirt.” Blinking back tears, Heather nibbled on her ballerina’s pale blue toe.
Olivia refilled their coffee cups. She could feel the time pressure in the tightness of her shoulders. Since Heather owed her, she could afford to be blunt. “King hit you, didn’t he?” Olivia could see a hint of yellow under Heather’s foundation.
“Yes,” Heather said. “I’ve never felt so humiliated, so angry. No man has ever hit me before. I could have killed . . .” She bit off the ballerina’s shin.
“You aren’t alone,” Olivia said. “Did he think he had a reason to hit you?”
With a shaky hand, Heather wiped a crumb off her upper lip. “I’d gotten suspicious because he didn’t want to meet any of my friends or go out with me in public. I started noticing some of my kitchen things were missing, and I couldn’t find my new iPhone. When a hundred dollars disappeared from my wallet, that’s when I knew Geoff had to be stealing from me. Nobody else had access to all that stuff.”
“So he hit you when you confronted him?” Olivia asked.
With a lopsided smile, Heather said, “Not exactly. First I searched for him on the Internet. He told me his name was Geoffrey Lord, which didn’t match anyone in my search. I did find a blog discussion about a Geoffrey Duke, though, so I tried every royalty-related name I could think of, and that’s how I found out his real name was King. Geoff was charming and cunning, but he wasn’t exactly a creative genius.”
“Wow,” Olivia said. “Never mess with librarians.”
“You bet.” Heather’s round face relaxed to its normal friendly diffidence. “I found out Geoff had a history of stealing from girlfriends. He also gave stolen gifts to girlfriends. He seemed to pick shy women who were too embarrassed to report him to the police. They sure unloaded online, though. They all said he was charming at first, and then he became demanding and critical and usually violent.”
“Did any of the women mention whether he used weapons?”
Heather nodded. “Several women mentioned he’d threatened them with a knife. One woman needed a couple stitches in her chin. He didn’t use a knife with me because . . . well, when I confronted him in my kitchen about the stealing, I’d locked away all my sharp utensils. He knew right where they belonged because he opened the drawers to look for them. When he realized I’d hidden them, he really lost it. He hit me in the face, and I fell down. I thought he was going to kill me. But he just smiled and left. I changed all my locks, just in case.”
One driving purpose consumed Olivia’s mind—to clear her brother of murder charges—and she had less than twenty-four hours to do it. Calming and questioning Heather Irwin had taken more than an hour, but it had been worth the time. Olivia hoped Heather hadn’t killed Geoffrey King. She had a strong motive, though, and no alibi. And she was one smart cookie.
Maddie, Bertha, and her mom could handle the store, in case curiosity brought in more than the usual number of Friday customers. Olivia gulped down the rest of her coffee, took a filled Gingerbread House bag from the refrigerator, and exited into the alley.
The Vegetable Plate, right next door, was Olivia’s first planned stop. To avoid being seen entering sugar-phobic Charlene’s store holding what looked like a bag of cookies, Olivia followed the alley to the rear door. Charlene would probably be in her kitchen. She had help who worked the sales floor much of the time, so she could experiment with healthy recipes.
Olivia peeked through the small kitchen window. She was in luck. Both Charlene and her brother Charlie sat at the worktable, their heads tilted toward each other as they talked. If she knocked, Olivia was afraid they might disappear. She tried the doorknob. It turned easily in her hand. She slipped inside so swiftly that the Critch siblings had no time to scrape back their chairs.
“I’m so glad to find both of you here,” Olivia said as she closed the alley door behind her. “We need to talk.”
“What the . . .” Charlene twisted to her feet. “A civilized person would knock. You of all people should remember that someone broke into my store.”