“Yes. It’s the perfect solution. Cosmo can continue living at my house, and you can come over and take care of him. And if we run into each other like this, we can be cordial. No problems, no expectations, no commitment.”
“And no sex,” Barry said, looking disgruntled to say the least.
“Well, yeah, that is sort of the line drawn between friends and something more.”
“It’s because of the other guy your mother mentioned, isn’t it?” Barry said. His eyes had gotten that piercing look.
I felt a woosh of air as Dinah rushed up, holding some papers. “There you are. I found some more pictures.” As an afterthought she noticed Barry and the fact that we were standing adjacent to the men’s room.
She looked at Barry and at me. “Is this a bad time?” He said yes, and I said no. I noticed he didn’t make a move to leave as I examined the prints she’d brought.
“See, there’s Camille. Doesn’t it look like she’s staring at Mary Beth?” Dinah said, pointing at the trajectory of Camille’s gaze.
Barry’s head shot up at Mary Beth’s name. “Molly, what are you doing? Heather told me you were in custody on Catalina, but she seemed to think you had learned your lesson and dropped your detective game.”
“It’s not a game. I’m telling you this crochet piece is definitely . . .” Then I stopped. I didn’t want him to take it from me.
“There’s a problem in there,” a man said, coming out of the men’s room. Just then, I noticed water seeping out from under the door and the rest of the group made a hasty exit. The author came out last and with his head down in embarrassment mumbled something about how I should have told him we had faulty toilets and he’d changed his mind about the signing.
I looked at Barry. “There’s another thing about friends. They fix things.”
CHAPTER 19
I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO ABOUT CAMILLE. She had admitted to knowing Mary Beth only in relation to the dance lessons. Yet there she was not ten feet away as Mary Beth wrote her note. Maybe Mary Beth had sensed she was being watched—that whole thing about feeling eyes looking at you. Maybe Mary Beth had looked up and seen her and panicked and stopped writing. In any case, there was definitely more to the relationship than Camille had said.
Still grumbling about his new designation as friend, Barry had stopped the flood in the men’s room and fixed the author’s error. Dinah had helped me mop up and had reminded me that the caretaker of the Catalina house had said the woman with Mary Beth had resembled her.
“Camille doesn’t look like the picture of Mary Beth I saw in the newspaper,” Dinah said as we put away the cleaning supplies.
“True, but Purdue was talking about over twenty years ago, and he said something about long dark hair and loose sweats. And he’s a man. If we both had long hair and sweats on now he’d probably think we looked alike,” I said, standing almost a head taller than my friend.
“What are you going to do?” Dinah asked.
“I can’t lock Camille in an interview room and interrogate her like the detectives do. I’m going to have to find another way to get information. In the meantime, I’d like to find out what all the discord at the dance studio was about. I have an idea, but I need your okay.”
“YOU HAVE MY BLESSING, BUT I DON’T KNOW IF it will help,” Dinah said the next morning as we walked through the Beasley campus to the bungalow where Dinah’s class was held. Vincent stood out from the clump of people waiting outside the prefabricated building.
Unlike his fellow students, who looked as though they picked their clothes from the dirty laundry, he had a sense of style. He was all in black with a red bandana tied over his wavy dark hair. Men sure had a lot of head options these days. When I was Vincent’s age, everyone just had long, often straggly hair. Now men’s heads ran the gamut from dreadlocks or tiny little braids to the intentionally bald look. Then they covered it all up with all kinds of caps, hats and scarves. I wondered if their goal was the same as that of male birds with bright plumage.
Vincent straightened when he saw Dinah and made a little dance move. He snickered when she dismissed it with a wave. I stayed behind as Dinah unlocked the door and went into the classroom. This was one time she was glad to be left out. I was still hearing about how much her teacher advantage had been ruined by taking the dance lesson with Vincent.
I snagged him as he was starting toward the stairs to the bungalow. He gave me a puzzled look as I pulled him off to the side.
“What? You want a dance lesson now?” He had an amused smile.
“No. I’m more interested in information. It looked like there was some disagreement between the managers of the studio and Matt Wells. Do you know what it was about?”
“Is this because of the dead chick?” He regarded me with new interest. “Are you some kind of cop?”
“No, just an interested party. So, what were they arguing about?”
Vincent shrugged. “I’m just a hired hand. I try to stay out of stuff. Just like I never really listened when the dead chick came to the studio and started arguing with Roseanne. Hard to believe those two are sisters. Mary Beth Wells was sure hot, for an older babe.”
“Arguing? About what?” I tried not to sound too eager.
He shrugged. “Look, Mary Beth Wells was an owner, but Roseanne Klinger was my boss. I didn’t want to get in the middle, if you know what I mean.” He glanced toward the door to the classroom. “I gotta go. Ms. Lyons won’t cut me any slack, even for talking to you. If you want information, talk to Matt Wells. He knows more than I do anyway. He always has breakfast at Le Grande Fromage. Just don’t tell him I told you.”
It was already too late for this morning. Besides, I had to get to the bookstore. Someone was coming from the production company to figure if they were going to need to bring in plants and extra power, and since Mrs. Shedd considered the TV shoot an event, it had become my baby.
When I walked into the bookstore, the people from the production company were already moving around, checking light levels and angles. I introduced myself and offered my services, but they seemed almost annoyed by my presence. Finally, I excused myself and said I’d be in the event area if they needed me. Between Barry’s surprise arrival and the disaster in the bathroom, I hadn’t had time to clean up things from the aborted signing.
As I walked by the children’s area, I saw Adele. Story time had ended and the kids were gone. She was sitting at one of the tables working on a filet bookmark. Even if I hadn’t known the morning’s book was Being with the Bee Family, I could have guessed by her outfit. Yellow had become her color of choice lately. She looked like a beehive with the golden yellow cropped pants and long tunic, topped with an oddly shaped hat. I watched the rhythmic motion of her hook for a moment, recalling how I’d tried working on a bookmark at home.
I had finally gotten the hang of working with the tiny hook and fine thread and actually done a couple of rows of filet. It had taken me some time to adjust to working on so small a scale, but once I had gotten going I really liked it. And when I saw what I had done, I was impressed. The fact that the work went so slowly made me appreciate how much time Mary Beth had put into making the panel piece.
I had taken to carrying Mary Beth’s panel piece with me all the time. When I’d put away all the unsold books, I pulled it out of my tote bag and laid it on the table. I skipped over the panels I’d already deciphered and went over the rest. The vase of flowers was at least a recognizable motif, though I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean. But some of the other pictures just seemed like odd shapes. I tried stepping back as sometimes the images in this kind of crochet work were hard to make out. But even halfway across the event area, they still made no sense. The panel piece reminded me of one of those puzzles where you have to unscramble the letters and figure out a phrase. When I succeeded at those puzzles, the answer always seemed to come in a flash of inspiration. It just wasn’t happening here.