And for another, he’s just sonice.
Maybe it’s wrong of me to assume, just because he’s Italian American, and in the private security business, and wears a loud suit and a lot of jewelry, that he’s even in the Mafia in the first place. Maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s just—
“Excuse me.” Mom Haircut is looking at me now. “Aren’t you Heather Wells?”
Great. Like I haven’t been through enough this morning.
“Yes,” I say, trying to maintain my pleasant smile. “I am. Can I help you with something?”
Please don’t ask for an autograph. It’s not worth anything anymore. You know how much an autograph from me gets on eBay these days, lady? A buck. If you’re lucky. I’m so washed up, I’ll be singing about sippy cups soon. If I’m lucky.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Mom Haircut goes on. “But I think you worked with my husband. Well, ex-husband, I should say. Owen Veatch?”
I blink at her. Oh my God. Rag Doll Sweatshirt Mom Haircut is the former Mrs. Veatch!
“Please hold.” Felicia puts down the phone and says, “Heather, sorry to interrupt, but Gavin McGoren is on the phone for you.”
“Tell Gavin I’ll call him back,” I say. I reach out and take Mrs. Veatch’s right hand. It’s rough and scratchy in mine, and I remember Owen mentioning once that his ex-wife was a potter, and “arty.” “Mrs. Veatch… I am so, so sorry about your husband. Ex-husband, I mean.”
“Oh.” Mrs. Veatch smiles in a sad way. “Please. Call me Pam. It hasn’t been Mrs. Veatch in quite some time. In fact, ever. That was always Owen’s mother to me.”
“Pam, then,” I say. “Sorry. My mistake. What can I do for you, Pam?”
“Heather,” Felicia says. “Gavin says you can’t call him back, because he’s not home right now.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “Of course I can call him back. Just take down the number where he is.”
“No,” Felicia says. “Because he says where he is, which is the Rock Ridge jail, he only gets one phone call.”
As I swing my head around to stare at her, the front door opens, and Tom comes in, looking as shocked as I feel.
“You’re never going to believe this,” he announces, to the lobby in general. “But that gun they found in that dude’s murse? It was a match for the one that plowed through Owen’s brain.”
13
I’m pushin’ the stroller
Can’t you see?
Or is my baby
The one pushin’ me?
“Baby Time”
Written by Heather Wells
Tom has apologized a million times for the plow remark.
“Honest,” he keeps saying. “If I’d known she was his ex-wife… ”
“It’s okay.” I have more important things to worry about than Tom’s faux pas. Like the fact that Gavin is apparently in jail.
“What’s she even doing here?” Tom wants to know. “Why didn’t she have the cab from the airport drop her at Wasser Hall, like everyone else from Owen’s family? What, she didn’t get the memo?”
“There was some business of Owen’s she needed to follow up on,” I say. We’re sitting in my office—well, Tom in his old office (now the former site of a grisly murder… thank God the housekeeping staff didn’t go on strike until AFTER they’d cleaned up the crime scene), and I’ve just returned, panting, to my desk in the outer office—just like old times.
Except for the whole Tom-got-a-promotion-and-is-just-filling-in-while-the-Housing-Office-searches-for-a-replacement-for-his-replacement-who-happens-to-have-gotten-shot-in-the-head-yesterday thing.
I don’t tell him the rest of it—like just how much Mrs. Veatch—Pam, I mean—didn’t know about her ex’s new life in the city. Or how much it turned out we didn’t know about Dr. Veatch. Because it’s still weirding me out a little.
Instead, I sit down and start clacking at my keyboard, Googling Rock Ridge Police Department. Come on, come on… I know the town is small, but they have to have cops, right?
Bingo.
Pam had just assumed that since Owen worked in a residence hall, he naturally lived in it, too, since most residence hall director positions are live-in.
I’d explained to her that her ex had actually been much more than just a hall director—that as part of his compensation package for his position, ombudsman to the president’s office, he’d gotten a swank, rent-free apartment in a neighboring building in which many of the college’s administrators, including the president himself, lived.
“So is it far?” Pam had wanted to know.
I had blinked at her. There’d been a lot of ruckus at the desk just then, what with Brian and Mr. Rosetti just leaving, and Tom having dropped his bomb about Sebastian’s gun having been a match for the one that killed Owen, and Felicia still waving the phone with Gavin waiting to have me take his call, and all.
“Is what far?” I’d asked intelligently.
“The building Owen lived in?” Pam had asked.
“Uh,” I’d said. All I could think was Gavin’s in jail? In Rock Ridge? The chic, exclusive bedroom community of New York, which can’t have more than five thousand people in it? Does it even have a jail? Has the entire world gone insane?
“Seriously,” Tom had chosen that moment to start in, for the first of what would prove to be the many apologies he would give over the course of the next half-hour. “I am so, so sorry, ma’am. I didn’t have the slightest idea—”
“It’s all right,” she’d said, with the briefest of smiles at him. “How could you know?” To me, she’d asked, “Well? Is it?”
“It’s a block away,” I’d replied.
She’d looked relieved. “So I can walk to it? I’m sorry to be such a pain… it’s just I’ve walked so much today—”
“Oh.” She wanted to see his apartment?Why? “It’s just down the block… ”
“I wonder if you can help me, then, Heather… ” For the first time, I noticed Pam was carting a wheelie suitcase behind her, and had one of those quilted overnight bags in a red and white floral pattern slung over one shoulder. “Surely you would know.” Her wide, friendly face—not pretty, exactly, and completely makeup free, but certainly pleasant-looking—was creased with concern. “Since you worked with Owen… Has anyone been giving Garfield his pills?”
“Uh… ” I’d exchanged puzzled looks with Tom. “Who, ma’am?”
“Garfield.” Dr. Veatch’s ex had looked at us like we were morons. “Owen’s cat.”
Owen had a cat? Owen owned—had made himself responsible for — another life? Granted of the four-legged variety—but still. It was true, of course, that Owen had been fond of the cartoon Garfield, to a degree none of the rest of us could understand.
But that he’d kept a cat, in his apartment?Owen, the driest, least warm person I had ever met, had owned a PET?
I’d had no idea.
It changed my perception of Owen. I’ll admit it. It sounds stupid, but it’s true: It made me like him more.
Well, okay: It made me like him, at all.
I guess my surprise must have shown on my face, since Pam, looking horrified, had cried, “You mean the poor thing hasn’t had any food or water since yesterday? He’s got thyroid disease! He needs a pill daily!”
I’d walked her to Dr. Veatch’s apartment myself while Tom scooted back to our office to hold down the fort. Then I’d waited with her for the building super, gone with her to the apartment, helped her with the key (the locks in these old buildings can be tricky), and waited tensely while she’d called, “Garfield! Garfield? Here, puss, puss.”
The cat had been fine, of course. A big, menacing orange thing, just like its namesake, it had needed only a can (well, okay, two) of food, some water, and a tiny white pill—kept in a prescription bottle Pam seemed to have no trouble finding, in a decorative blue and white sugar bowl that matched all the other china in the hutch in Owen’s dining room cabinet—before it was good as new, purring and contented in Pam’s lap.