CHAPTER 13
DINAH TURNED ON THE LIGHT AS I SWUNG MY legs over the side of the bed. I needed to be sitting up to deal with bad news. Dinah had her eyes glued to my face, reading my expression and mirroring it. Judging by how she looked, I must have appeared pretty worried.
“What?” I said into the phone. Through the earpiece I could hear multiple people talking at once, and I couldn’t make out who they were or what they were saying.
“Molly?” Barry’s voice broke through the din. “Where are you?” he demanded in an upset tone.
Before I could answer my mother was on the phone saying something about almost having a heart attack, which was neither here nor there. She said stuff like that when the bag broke on some take-out Chinese and her egg foo young flipped out of the container.
Finally, there came the even voice of my father. “Don’t worry, honey, there was just a little incident.”
As I listened to the story of “the incident,” I could feel my expression change from one of concerned confusion to one of suppressed laugher. Dinah was trying to figure it out from my end of the conversation, but there was no way that my uh-huhs gave away what I was hearing.
As soon as I snapped the phone shut, she was on me like cream cheese on a bagel wanting to know what was going on.
I was smiling, picturing what I’d just heard. “Okay, Barry finally got back from his out-of-state trip. And he decided to surprise me . . .”
Dinah covered her mouth and started to laugh. “Oh no.”
“Oh yes. Apparently he used his key to come in the house, then he stripped and started to climb into bed with—well, he thought it was me, but it was my parents. My mother started freaking and called 911. My father has been taking some kind of martial arts classes and elbowed Barry in the face. You know how people always complain it takes the cops too long to get there? Not this time. They were there before Barry could get his pants on. And I guess he has a black eye.”
“Omigod,” Dinah said, laughing so hard she fell back on the bed.
My cell rang again. This time it was Barry only. He was sitting in his Tahoe, apparently with his clothes back on. The patrol officers—friends of his—had left after laughing their pants off.
“Don’t worry about the front door. I’ll fix it,” he said.
“Front door? What’s wrong with my front door?”
Barry sighed. “I’ll fix the doorbell, too, so that next time somebody rings it, you’ll hear it and they won’t have to kick in the door.”
“They kicked in the door?” I was incredulous.
“Yeah, when they get a call from a screaming woman who doesn’t answer the door, that’s what they do.”
“The dogs?”
Barry groaned. “They’re fine. They hid in the closet. I think your dog is turning my dog into a wimp. He didn’t even bark.” He stopped for a minute. Dinah was behind me trying to cover her face with a pillow to muffle the laugher. “I hear someone laughing. This isn’t funny.”
When he said that, I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing, too. I couldn’t stop picturing Barry coming into the bedroom with big plans on his mind and pulling back the covers to discover my parents.
“Where are you?” Barry said with an edge to his voice. He didn’t sound happy when he heard the answer.
“Catalina?” he sputtered. “Why didn’t you tell me your parents were sleeping in your bed? Why didn’t you tell me you were going to Catalina? And what are you doing there? Who are you with?”
“Hey there, Mr. Detective, I don’t know why you’re getting so testy with me. You were gone, remember, off on a case somewhere. When you called, you always had to get off the phone.”
A deep tiredness seeped in his voice. “I was working. What can I say?”
“What about Jeffrey?” I said, asking about his son.
“He’s spending some more time with his mother and her new husband.”
I could tell Barry missed having Jeffrey with him. He and Jeffrey argued over the boy’s acting ambitions, but Barry loved the kid.
“Don’t try to change the subject and get the spotlight off of you. Just cut to the chase. I hear somebody else in the room,” he said.
I told him it was Dinah, and then he started to ask why we were there but stopped himself.
“This wouldn’t have anything to do with Mary Beth Wells’s death?” he asked suspiciously. There was just some dead air on my end and he continued. “Heather told me all about it, but she made it sound like you were involved. Something about you playing detective and thinking some dishcloth had a secret code and belonged to the victim.”
“Is that what she said?” I felt my anger rising. I slowly explained that it wasn’t a dishcloth but it did seem to have a code. “And no matter what Detective Heather said to you, I am sure the piece belonged to Mary Beth Wells. Not only did I see an MB embedded in the image of a wishing well, but when I saw the inside of her Catalina house—well, there were pieces similar to it everywhere.”
“What were you doing in her house? Let me rephrase that. How did you get in her house?”
“The usual way, through the door.”
“Molly,” he said, dragging my name in that warning tone of his. “Let’s save time. You know how good I am at getting confessions, and you know how much better you’ll feel when you lay out the whole story.”
He was good at getting confessions, but I doubted I’d feel better telling him about my skirmish with the sheriff. I decided to skip over that part and only explain why I went to the house. I started at the beginning and told him about how we’d found the package at the sale and CeeCee had thought it had been left for her to take care of, but she had dropped it in my lap. I told him what was in the note and the diary entry.
“You know how you said you feel like you’re speaking for the victim when you investigate a homicide? Well, I feel like I’m speaking for Mary Beth Wells. I want to finish what she started.”
“I understand your motivation, babe. Your heart is in the right place.” His voice was soft, and I suddenly wished he was there with his arms around me. “But assuming the cloth really did belong to her and has some kind of code and there is some kind of secret—it’s probably why she got killed.”
“I suppose that crossed my mind,” I said.
“Did it also cross your mind that if somebody killed her to keep the secret a secret they won’t take kindly to you mucking around?”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I hadn’t really thought of that. But I knew he was right. “Nobody really knows I’m looking around.”
“Molly,” he said in a voice full of frustration. “Just let it be. When are you coming home? We can talk about it then.” His voice became husky. “Babe, I’ve missed you and I can’t wait to show you how much.”
The tone of his voice was a pretty good indication of what he had in mind. Even though I was sitting down, my knees suddenly felt wobbly.
I told him we were taking the early morning boat back. After telling me a few more times how much he was looking forward to seeing me, he finally hung up.
Dinah had fallen back asleep while I was talking. I curled up under the covers, looked out the window at the view of the harbor and thought about the day. I was too wide awake to sleep, so I leaned over the side of the bed and grabbed the bag of things I’d gotten at the drugstore. I pulled out the reporter-style notebook that was just like what I’d seen Barry and Detective Heather carry. I thought it would be so much more efficient than trying to keep everything in my head. I began to write down everything I knew so far. I fell asleep with the pen in my hand.