“We have coffee, bacon, chocolate and Fancy Feast,” I told the cat, who had waited patiently in the back of the SUV while I shopped. “I think that covers the major food groups: sugar, salt, fat, caffeine and cat.”
He licked his whiskers and then went over and sat beside his bowl.
“You’re not exactly subtle, you know,” I said. I put the groceries away, fed Elvis and made myself a scrambled egg and tomato sandwich. I jazzed it up a little with a dill pickle and some black olives. It was a nice night, so I took my supper out on the small verandah. I sat in my favorite wicker chair and put my feet up on the railing. Elvis prowled around sniffing things, probably checking to see if there had been any squirrels in his territory.
It was a quiet Saturday night. Not that Saturday nights ever got rowdy in my neighborhood, or anywhere else in town. I’d finished my sandwich and was trying to decide if I wanted the brownie I’d bought badly enough to get up and get it, when a dark blue car pulled in at the curb. It took a moment for me to remember where I’d seen it before and by then the driver was getting out. It was Michelle. I dropped my feet and stood up. “Hi,” I said as she walked across the grass.
“Hi, Sarah,” she said. She stopped at the top of the steps and leaned against the railing post.
“Is everything all right?” I asked. I was very aware that she was a police officer—even though she was dressed in jeans and a hoodie, which suggested she was off duty—and we weren’t exactly friends anymore.
She smiled, although it looked a little tentative to me. “I wanted to tell you that the charges haven’t been dropped against Maddie but we are expanding the investigation.”
I nodded. “Thank you. It wasn’t what I was hoping for, but it’s something.”
She looked around. “I like your house. You’ve done a lot of work on it.”
“I couldn’t have done it without Liam and Gram,” I said.
“How is Liam?” she asked, tucking her hands into the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie.
I smiled. “He’s good. He’s at a solar-energy conference in Montreal right now.” My brother designed solar houses. His specialty was small houses that used passive solar technology.
Elvis came up the steps, stopped in front of Michelle and studied her for a moment. Then he meowed softly, his way of saying, “I remember you.”
She bent down to pet him. “He looks like he’s probably used up at least one of his nine lives,” she said.
I nodded. “Sometimes I wonder what the other guy looks like.”
Michelle straightened up. Elvis looked around as if he were confused about why anyone would want to stop stroking his fur or scratching behind his right ear.
“I didn’t come here to tell you about the investigation,” she said. “At least not just about that.”
“So why did you come?” I asked. Elvis came to sit beside me, leaning against my leg.
She took a deep breath. “I came to say I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” I said, folding my arms over my chest. “Arresting Maddie is part of doing your job.”
She tucked her auburn hair behind one ear. “That’s not what I came to apologize for. I came to tell you I’m sorry for cutting you out of my life.”
It was the last thing I was expecting her to say. For a moment I just looked at her. Then I found my voice. “What did I do?” I asked. “One day you were my friend and the next day you wouldn’t speak to me. I didn’t understand then and I don’t understand now.”
“Do you remember that summer?” She looked down at her feet. “My father went to jail.”
I tried to swallow down the lump that had suddenly formed in my throat but it wouldn’t go. I remembered that summer like it had just happened. It was the summer I’d gotten my dad’s guitar from Maddie and lost my best friend. Michelle had been a summer kid, just like I was, coming to spend two months with her grandparents, long dead now. Then her dad had gotten a job as director for the Sunshine Camp. The camp, for kids with seriously ill parents, had been bought by the Emmerson Foundation, the charitable organization started by Liz’s grandparents. Rob Andrews had had the job less than a year when a routine audit showed there was money missing.
“I remember,” I finally managed to say.
She looked past me, over my shoulder into the darkness, or maybe into the past. I wasn’t sure. “I kept thinking I was going to wake up and it would just be a bad dream,” she said, her gaze coming back to my face.
Michelle’s dad had died in prison, less than three months after he’d been sentenced, from a fast-moving form of cancer that no one had known he had.
“Nobody seemed to understand how I felt.” She stopped and swallowed. “Except you. And then I heard what you said about him to Nick.”
And just like that I understood why Michelle had stopped talking to me. Just like that it suddenly all made sense. Why hadn’t I figured it out before?
The night Maddie had given me my dad’s guitar, and two months after Michelle’s father had begun his four-year prison sentence for embezzling from the Sunshine Camp, Nick and I had sat on the rock wall at the back of my grandmother’s yard and I’d told him that Michelle’s father was a horrible person and that it wasn’t fair that he was still here and my father was gone. And then I’d said, “I wish he was the one who was dead!” A couple of minutes later I’d taken it all back, but obviously Michelle hadn’t stayed around long enough to hear that. And a couple of weeks later, her father was dead.
“I don’t understand,” I said rubbing the palm of my right hand with the thumb of my left. “You had chicken pox. You were in bed.”
She ducked her head. “It was your birthday. I wanted to bring you your present. So I waited until everyone was asleep. Then I snuck out.”
The next day Michelle had ended up in the hospital when she’d come down with some kind of secondary infection—probably from wandering around town late at night. I’d been baffled when she didn’t want to see me and when she wouldn’t even look at me during her father’s funeral sixteen days later.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was a thoughtless, self-absorbed teenager.”
She gave me a small smile. “I think that’s part of the job description. And you’d just gotten your father’s guitar. You were missing him.”
“You were my best friend,” I said. “I was supposed to be on your side and I wasn’t.”
A strange look came over her face. “I think someone set him up,” she said. She straightened up and brushed her hair back from her face. “I’ve been trying to figure out who it was.”
“Have you found anything?”
“You’re not going to tell me I’m tilting at windmills?” she asked, running a hand over the railing.
“I’ve been driving a group of senior citizens who think they’re Charlie’s Angels all over town. I’m the last person who’s going to tell you that.” I chose my next words with care. “And I’d like to be a better friend than that.”
Michelle hesitated and then she leaned forward and hugged me. It was clumsy and awkward but it still felt pretty good.
“Could we have dinner some night and catch up?” I asked when she let me go. I was hesitant because it had been a lot of years since the two of us had been friends.
She nodded. “I’d like that.” Her mouth moved as though she was testing out what she was going to say next.
I bent down to pick up Elvis to give her a minute.
“I’ll do what I can to help Maddie,” she said. “I’ll look at every piece of evidence a second time. I give you my word.”
I nodded. “I know that,” I said.
She let out a breath as though a load had been lifted off her shoulders. “I have to get going.” She leaned over and gave Elvis a scratch on the top of his head. He tipped his head to the right, looked up at her and murped. “Good night, Elvis,” she said.