“Why did I have a feeling you were going to say that?”
“Because in addition to your being my oldest friend, I’m yours.” He leaned forward. My eyes closed and his lips, feeling soft and warm as an August evening, touched mine.
The feel of Evan’s kiss lingered long after we went back to our respective stores. I found myself touching my mouth from time to time, reliving the moment, until Lois asked, “Getting chapped lips, huh? Have you tried that Burt’s stuff?”
I locked the door promptly at closing time and left the banking chores for the next morning. This evening, I had a Thing to Do.
Hot tomato sauce and garlic scented the parking lot and was positively overwhelming when I opened the door to Sabatini’s. “Hi!” chirped the teenager at the counter. Her plastic name tag gave her the unlikely name of Valley. “I’ll be with you in a sec, okay?” She handed change to a man standing in front of me. “Here you go, sir. Have a good night.”
The man picked up his pizza and turned. It took me a long second to come up with his name. Recognizing people out of their normal environment didn’t come easy to me. “Hi, Harry,” I said. “How are you?”
Tarver’s security guard and janitor looked at me over the top of the cardboard box. “Hello, Mrs. Kennedy.”
Harry’s eyes looked even darker and more sunken than normal. His hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, and grime was crusted underneath his fingernails. He was the embodiment of grief, sliding ever so slowly into depression. But at least he was eating. That had to be a good sign.
“The police were asking me if I did it,” he said. “They kept asking and asking, and nothing I told them mattered.”
Poor Harry. “Didn’t they believe you?”
“They wanted an alibi, and I was waxing the floors at the school. I usually do it Saturdays, but that Saturday the machine was broken, and I couldn’t do it on Monday because of the meeting, so I did it Tuesday.”
It was an ironclad alibi. Everyone knew how Harry was about the floors—everybody, that is, except the sheriff’s department.
“It’ll be okay.” I put a light hand on his arm. “Take care of yourself, Harry.”
“Yes.” He nodded slowly and left.
I sighed and turned my attention back to the business at hand.
“Can I help you?” The clerk looked positively perky.
I gestured at her name tag. “You’re probably tired of answering this, but . . . Valley?”
She crossed her eyes. “If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me about my name, I could buy my car instead of making all these stupid payments.” She heaved a world-class sigh. “My mom and dad are big skiers. I was born nine months after a trip to Sun Valley.”
So original, yet so banal. “At least they didn’t name you Sunny.”
Her grimace eased. “I never thought of that. At least Valley isn’t, like, gag-me cutesy.”
“And they didn’t end it with an i.”
We smiled at each other, rapport established. “I’d like to order a large pizza to go,” I said. “Pepperoni and sausage on half, cheese only on the other half.”
She had a pen and order pad at the ready and scribbled away. “Cheese only?” She looked up, grinning. “Kids?”
“A daughter who turns up her nose at any dinner without meat, and a son who is sliding toward vegetarianism.”
“Usually the other way around, isn’t it?” She spun around, tucked the order onto a circular rack, then turned back to me. “I mean, aren’t girls usually the ones who do the veggie thing?” She plopped her arms on the counter. “I tried to be a vegan once, back when I was little.” This from a girl who looked as if she might be seventeen. “But then it was Thanksgiving, and how can you have Thanksgiving without turkey?”
“Plus it’d be hard to be vegan in a place like this.” Clever Beth, manipulating the conversation. “How long have you been working here?”
“Joe hired me two summers ago, right when he opened.”
“That’s Joe Sabatini?”
She giggled. “Want to know a secret?” She looked left and right and motioned me close. “Joe’s last name isn’t Sabatini,” she whispered. “It’s Pigg.”
“Pig?”
“With two gs. P-i-g-g.” Her giggle went loud, and she clapped her hands over her mouth. “Isn’t that too funny?” she said through her fingers. “I could be working at Pigg Pizza.” Her shoulders heaved with the effort of not laughing out loud. “At Pizza for Piggs!”
“So where did the Sabatini come from?”
“The Pigg’s Pizza Parlor.” Tears of laughter squeaked out of her eyes. “Oh, geez. Sabatini is some sports person. Like baseball?”
Even I’d heard of that Sabatini. “Gabriela. She plays tennis.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Joe’s a big fan, I guess. He’s from South Dakota, came here to go to Wisconsin.” She shrugged. “All that school and money, and he ended up in dumpy Rynwood running a pizza place. Makes you wonder if college is worth it.”
I walked out with dinner. Joe wasn’t Italian, and he was from South Dakota. Okay, he could still have mob ties, but the likelihood had plummeted from “maybe” to “oh, please.”
And now I’d eliminated everyone Marina had mentioned as a suspect, which didn’t make sense. The bad guy wanted her to quit blogging, but if he wasn’t called out in WisconSINs, why would he care? Because Marina was poking around? What kind of sense did that make? None.
I drove to pick up Jenna and Oliver, pushing other ideas around in my head. Nothing jelled, nothing came together, nothing clicked. As a detective, I made a pretty good children’s bookstore owner.
The change in the evening’s meal plan from stew to pizza was a success with the kids—so successful, in fact, that I didn’t hear a single complaint when I said we needed to take Spot for a family walk. There was, however, a bit of jockeying over who carried the plastic bag. “We’ll put a schedule on the calendar,” I said. “Since I’m doing dog duty while you two are at your father’s, I’ll take one turn a week, no more. Yesterday was my turn. Tonight is Jenna’s.”
The “But, Mom” whines instantly quelled when I said, “You two wanted this dog, not me. If you can’t handle the responsibility of a dog, he’s going back to the shelter.”
It would have taken a court order to force me to return Spot, but they didn’t know that. He’d spent Saturday cowering in the laundry room, but by Sunday morning he’d turned into a real dog. He played catch with Jenna. He lay quietly on Oliver’s bed while stuffed animals were piled on top of him. He warmed my feet while I worked on the computer late at night. He’d even forged an early truce with the cat, who had taken one look at the interloper, hissed, and inflated to twice his normal size. A tail-wagging Spot just gazed at George, happy, tolerant, and unthreatening. George won the stare-down. Cats always did, but Spot didn’t care. Now that he had a family, he was a Happy Dog.
The sidewalk was unevenly lit by streetlights, but there was enough ambient light to let us walk without squinting at our feet. Oliver held the leash and ran to the corner. “C’mon, Spot!”
“He’s not such a bad dog,” Jenna said.
“Maybe even a good dog?”
“Maybe.” But she was cheerful, not cautious, or—much worse—sarcastic.
If I’d been the optimistic sort, I would have cheered the occasion as evidence of a lessening of Bailey’s influence. But I was more the wait-and-see type.
“What would you think,” I said, “if I asked someone over to have dinner with us?”
“Like Mrs. Neff? Sure. She’s fun.”
“No, more like Mr. Garrett.”
“Who’s that?” Jenna, who had been skipping, stopped dead.
“He’s a friend of mine.”