Naomi Hearst was steaming a pair of pants when I entered Boho Soul. She was dressed in white leggings and a long, flowy, patterned shirt. Her cat-eye glasses with red frames topped things off with a vintage vibe. The longer I stared at her, the more she reminded me of Amy Winehouse.
“Welcome,” she said. “Anything I can help you find today?”
I glanced around. The majority of the shop contained vintage clothing and handbags, except for a smattering of trinkets lining the shelves at the back. A gold artisan photo frame caught my eye, something I knew would look great in Maddie’s house. I pointed it out and said, “How much for the frame?”
“Hmm. Can’t remember. Should be a tag on it somewhere.”
I picked up the frame and flipped it over. “There isn’t one.”
“Huh. How about thirty bucks?”
“I’ll take it.”
I walked over to the counter and handed it to her. She grabbed some tissue, began to wrap it, and said, “You’re the detective, aren’t you?”
“I am. How did you know?”
“Jamie said you’ve been making the rounds.”
“Did you know he’s in police custody?”
She nodded. “I heard the Amber Alert. I feel bad for the guy. He made no mention of his plan when he stopped by a couple days ago. If he had, I would have tried to talk him out of it. What do you think will happen to him?”
“Hard to say right now. When’s the last time you saw Rebecca?”
I expected her to say they hadn’t seen each other in years. She didn’t. She said they’d gotten together a few days before Rebecca died.
“I thought the two of you had a falling out over your husband?” I asked.
“Ex-husband. We broke up.”
“What happened?”
“He met a woman he liked more than he liked me. The worst part is Rebecca warned me, years ago, that it might happen. Back then, I convinced myself she was wrong. I placed all the blame from the night she and Calvin hooked up on her. I shouldn’t have. It was wrong.”
“Meadow Summers said you and Rebecca hadn’t seen each other for a long time.”
“She’s right. We hadn’t. When I kicked Calvin out four months back, I reached out to Rebecca, and we met up.”
Meadow mentioned she had been on a road trip around the time Rebecca died. It was possible Meadow didn’t know Rebecca and Naomi had reconnected.
“Why doesn’t Meadow know you reached out to Rebecca?” I asked.
“We’ve never been close. I was Rebecca’s friend, not hers.”
“When you saw Rebecca last, did she talk to you about the man she’d been dating … a man she’d nicknamed Bunny?”
“I mean, I know a little about the guy.”
“Any chance Bunny is your ex-husband?”
Naomi burst out laughing. “Calvin? No way. He’d rather die than allow a woman to call him by a pet name.”
She paused, crossed her arms, and stood a moment, thinking. I wondered if she was second-guessing herself. Perhaps Calvin had made an exception for Rebecca.
“Did your husband tell you he’d started seeing someone else?” I asked.
Naomi shook her head. “She came by the store.”
I was aghast. “The woman he was cheating with came to your work?”
“Yeah. She told me the affair had started a few months earlier. She came clean to her husband, and she told Calvin he had to do the same. When he didn’t, she did it for him.”
“Must have been a hard discussion to have in person.”
“At first, I wanted to slap her across the face. By the end of our conversation, she was in tears. It reminded me of a similar talk I’d had with Rebecca years before. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I called her.”
“What did Rebecca tell you about the man she’d been seeing?”
“I mean, we’d just started talking again, so she was cautious about sharing her private life.”
Naomi may have been one of the last of Rebecca’s friends to see her alive, which meant it was possible she knew something she didn’t know she knew.
“Did Rebecca say anything about dating a politician or someone who made a lot of money?” I asked.
“She didn’t.”
I reached into my bag, pulled out a photo, and showed it to her. “When you saw Rebecca, was she wearing this ring?”
Naomi studied the ring. “She wasn’t wearing it, but I saw it sitting on her bed. She’d never been big on nice jewelry, so I asked her about it. She said the guy she was with gave it to her. He had a matching one, I guess.”
And there it was.
Not one ring, but two.
“Did she say anything else?” I asked.
“She missed him. He wasn’t taking her calls. I suggested she should write him a note, tell him how she felt. I’m not sure if she took my advice though.”
“She did. I found several drafts of it. I’m just not sure whether she gave one of them to him.”
Naomi slipped the picture frame she’d wrapped into a paper bag and handed it to me. I paid her and said, “I’d like to talk to Calvin. Where can I find him?”
“The last I heard, he was gambling in Las Vegas. I’ll give you his cell phone number.”
She wrote the number down for me, and I exited the shop. On the way to my car, I tried to give Calvin a call. He didn’t answer. His phone didn’t even ring. It went straight to voicemail.
As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I’d started to doubt myself. Sure, I’d found out some things the police hadn’t over the last week, but nothing concrete. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to investigate homicides after all. Maybe Coop was right, and I needed to stick to basic investigations, ones that didn’t involve dead bodies, a quip he’d made the first time we met. He may have been an ignorant, pigheaded jerk at times, but I thought about what it would be like if roles were reversed. How would I have felt if I had been in his position for a long time and in walked a private eye who thought she could solve a case better than I could. I saw no scenario where it wouldn’t have pissed me off.
And because Oliver had just been through what Judy felt was a “traumatic ordeal,” she didn’t want me to show him the pictures I’d printed off. It was hard not to feel like a failure.
I set the bag on my passenger seat along with my purse and a folded piece of paper slipped out of it onto the floor. I picked it up, unfolded it, and stared down at the printout I’d made of the cover of the book Bunny gave Oliver.
What was I missing?
What had Oliver been trying to tell me when he showed it to me?
I stared at it for a while and gasped. I’d been so fixated on Mr. Mayberry when I’d first looked it over, I’d failed to see who else and what else was going on in the background. Heart pounding, I made a call, then a stop, and then I drove to a place where I hoped I’d find answers.