“Not on your life, Lemon Layne! Not for all the prawns in the sea!” Mom squawked at me as Jessica clung to her shoulder and groomed her hair.
See? I told you how she’d react, didn’t I?
“So you didn’t know anything about this alleged reconciliation, right?”
“Not a ding-dang thing, and you can bet a bag of prawns and some a shiny bracelet weren’t going to make me take him back,” she seethed with a shake of her finger, and then she softened. “But it sure is something to find out he wasn’t really married to Febreze, isn’t it? Crazy fool. Whatever possessed him to go off and marry a stranger like that anyway? I know he wanted a wife, and that was never gonna fly with this gal. Your dad was my one and only, but I still can’t believe he wanted one bad enough to marry somebody he met on the computer because he was mad at me.”
I often wonder what made Myron turn to a mail-order bride myself—even if Fabritzia was a morally decent enough, if not impulsive woman. My mother’s refusal to marry him was a given from the moment they’d begun dating.
She’d told him from the start she’d never leave the home she loved and she wasn’t sharing it with any man. Had he really been that spiteful? Or was it simply that loneliness and aging had begun to take a toll as the years passed? I guess we’d never know for sure.
I cocked my head in her direction, rolling up the sleeves of my flannel shirt. “Something else I haven’t mentioned until this point. Did Myron ever mention an accident he was in? Specifically, a shooting?”
Mom tilted her electric-blue head, worry spreading across her face. “You mean like in the war and all those stories he was always tellin’ us?”
That was when I remembered my proclivity toward insensitivity. Mom was in a good place right now. I didn’t want her to worry about this particular detail, so I decided to let it go.
I squeezed her hand with affection. “Never mind. I was just spitballing.”
Mom ruffled my hair, dropping a kiss on my forehead. “I can see what you’re doing. I’m just not sure what you’re doing’s any good for ya.” Brushing my hair from my cheek, she smiled at me. “You should be out doing things, Lemon. Youthful things. Laughing, having a drink with some smart lookin’ fella. Those big blue beautiful eyes of yours are just waiting to get goofy-eyed over a sweetheart. I don’t know why you insist on staying in the house with a bunch of pictures from some newspaper, talking about a dead guy. I want you to live, kiddo. Live big.”
My mother would never understand how different we were, but I did, and it was okay. I’m not much for parties and dating, and I’d come to terms with my awkwardness about both.
I gave her a return kiss and said, “You do plenty of living for both of us. One of us has to be the designated driver, right?”
She chucked me under the chin and snickered as I sat surrounded by the printouts of the pictures from Myron’s secret room on our kitchen island. I pointed to them” Speaking of, any thoughts on what the sticky notes mean.
She gave them a once over and scoffed, her electric pink lips pursing in distaste. “I think it means that old coot Myron never won any awards for penmanship.”
I threw my head back and barked a laugh. “Aside from his crappy handwriting, can you make out what any of these say?”
Pulling her glasses out of their case, she put them on and squinted at a picture. “The only one I can read is the one that says bullet.”
I nodded slowly, cupping my chin with my hand and leaning on the counter. “Same here. The rest look like a kindergartener wrote them. In all his tales, did Myron ever talk about a bullet? Mention a bullet?”
I knew I was likely grasping at straws, but that bullet meant something. Did it mean a bullet had shot him? But that was a given. So why would he write the word down?
Mom pushed my hair out of my eyes and examined my healing head wound with gentle fingers. “A bullet? Nope. Not unless you mean in reference to all his war stories. By golly, that man could talk.”
Another loose end I didn’t need. No one knew what kind of bullet was used to shoot Myron because the dang thing was still in his head. Maybe that’s all the sticky note meant and nothing more. He had a bullet in his head. Period.
Yet, that wasn’t sitting well with me. But I didn’t know where to begin with that vague clue. I guess I could randomly type the word bullet into a search engine and begin there. But I’d wait until Mom was gone.
“You know what else has been driving me a little crazy?”
“You mean besides me?” she asked with a chuckle.
“How in blue blazes did Myron get into the bathroom in the first place? Did someone dump him there, someone strong? Because Myron was no small man. Was he dumped after he had the heart attack or was he in there before he was killed?”
Mom gasped, covering her mouth, her blue eyes filled with worry.
I sat up straight, pulling JF close as she ran into my arms, spitting her purple boa from my mouth. “What’s wrong, Mom?”
“Oh, Sugarbuns,” she groaned and wrapped her fingers around her neck in worry. She always did that when she worried. “I can’t believe I forgot about this! I just remembered something when you said bathroom. Myron had a key to the bathroom! I gave it to him.”
“Why would you give him a key to the bathroom?” I asked, astonished.
But she gave me her cutest guilty look. “I think it was on the key ring along with the house key. We shared keys for a little while. You know, like couples do…”
“Well, that explains why it didn’t look like anyone had tampered with the lock.”
But it didn’t explain why he went in the bathroom in the first place.
“I’m sorry, Lemon-Meringue, I forgot all about it.”
“So you didn’t tell your lawyer about the keys?”
“No, but I will now. I’ll call him right away and leave a message,” she said, digging her phone out of the pocket of her tracksuit.
I bobbed my head, stroking JF’s back. “Good idea, and I’ll call Justice in a little bit.”
What worried me, and what I didn’t share with Mom was, likely no one found any keys at the crime scene. They’d have questioned Mom about them otherwise.
Which means the killer possibly still had them.
I shivered and cuddled JF closer, handing her the toothbrush she loved to play with as I stared at that word on the sticky note.
I was deep in thought when my mother waved her hand in front of my face; her expression said she was over this discussion about Myron.
“Are we done here, Lemon? If so, I’m gonna go celebrate my possible freedom with some hot yoga and a Chinese buffet with the girls. You can sit on your butt and watch the world go by, but not this girl,” she teased, ruffling my hair once more.
I reached over to give her a kiss and hug and smiled at her. “Make sure you have some lemon chicken for me. Have a good time, I’ll see you tonight.”
Dropping a kiss on my cheek and one on Jessica’s head, pink yoga mat in hand, she skipped out the door just as Coco entered and looked over my shoulder with a cluck of disapproval.
“So why do I get the feeling you’re not scrapbooking?” Coco asked as she dropped her purse on the counter and greeted JF with a scratch under her chin.
I guess I’d been caught, so I might as well tell her everything about the night before. “Before you blow a gasket, hear me out. All this,” I pointed to the pictures on the counter around my laptop, “is from a room at Myron’s house. I took pictures of stuff he had hanging on all four walls.”
Her eyes narrowed as she glanced at the pictures and pulled off her gloves. “And I can’t wait to hear why Myron had a room decorated with a bunch of—what are these? Newspaper articles? Boy, he just keeps getting crazier, doesn’t he?”
“That’s where I was last night while I was looking for the bathroom at Fabritzia’s. He had an entire room devoted to an incident he was involved in. I can’t prove that he was the victim of this bank heist because the press didn’t release the victim’s name, but I really think it was Myron.”
She planted a hand on her hip and pursed her lips. “A bank heist? Really?”
“Yep, the one where I’d bet he got that brain injury.” I briefly explained what I’d found at Myron’s and the room full of articles and how his marriage wasn’t legal. Then I sat back in my chair and waited for her to give me what for.
But she was eerily silent for longer than I was comfortable.
When she finally spoke, she asked, “I suppose it does me no good to tell you to knock it off right now, because I know this isn’t about your mother anymore. This is about the thrill of the chase.”
That was not a lie, I did get a thrill when I chased. “That’s very true, but I really just need you to hear me out. I need to bounce some theories off of you.”
Coco kicked off her taupe-colored heels and crossed the room, going to the refrigerator to pull out the makings for dinner. “Fine, go ahead and bounce. It’s not like I have a choice anyway.”
“First, the timeline for Myron’s whereabouts the day of his death. Myron did two things that day. He went to Lester’s and Francis’s. Somewhere in there, he found out he wasn’t married to Fabritzia and didn’t bother to tell her. I’m not sure if he knew before the day he died or not. Not that it really makes much difference.”
Coco’s snort dripped derision as she took the chicken wings out of their package. “I don’t know who I like less, Myron for not telling Fabritzia before he went off to buy bribes for your mother, or Fabritzia for making such a foolish, impulsive mistake.”
“That aside, he then went to Francis’s Fish Market, bought some prawns, and then went to Lester’s Pawnshop to buy Mom a bracelet. But where did he go between the time he left Lester’s? I have no timeline other than the afternoon. Did he make someone angry during that time between Lester’s and the fish market? Angry enough to hack a hole in his head?”
Coco lifted her shoulders in a shrug, mixing some salt and pepper on the chicken wings. “I don’t know. Maybe in his downtime, he was surfing the web for more mail-order brides as a backup in case your mother kicked him out on his ear.”
I laughed at that as I looked down at the pictures one more time and squeezed my temples. I’m not sure what I hoped to find. All the clues I had so far didn’t appear to want to connect. Bullets, and prawns, and reunions, and illegal marriages. None of it added up to a reason to kill Myron. Not an obvious one, anyway.
I held one picture up to the light, the one with the crowd lining the streets outside the bank—and my eyes widened.
I hopped up off the stool and went to dig out my magnifying glass. And yes, if you must know, it came with my Sherlock Holmes detective kit.
I dug it out of the drawer in the kitchen and held it over the picture. There was something about the hard look of one officer in a particular photo that made me examine him closer.
Holding the magnifying glass over his face, I gasped in surprise.
My mind raced. Hold on. Hadn’t Eugene said Haskell French was an ex-cop?
Because the cop in this picture sure looked like a much younger Haskell French.
I grabbed the picture and shoved it under Coco’s nose. “Who does this look like?”
Coco flapped her chicken-covered hands at me to shoo me away. “I don’t know. I do know if you don’t get that out of my face, you’ll mess dinner up. Chicken wings need love, so they’re crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside.”
“Have you ever seen Haskell French, the guy who owns Lester’s Pawnshop?”
“Only once after I looked him up when I found out you went to his place to stick your nose in where it didn’t belong. One tough-looking guy, if you ask me. All grrr and hard, you know?” And then she paused and cocked her head as her eyes widened, too, mirroring mine.
I nodded my head vigorously and shook the picture in the air. “Exactly. And that’s Haskell French ten years ago! I’d bet my life on it! So you want to tell me why he’s at the scene of a crime where Myron was shot in the head, and he’s been living here in Fig Harbor all this time and never said a word about knowing Myron, or the fact that he’s an ex-cop? Eugene said he didn’t like people knowing he was an ex-cop after Haskell admitted as much when he’d had too much to drink!”
Coco’s mouth dropped open, grabbing my hand to steady the picture. She gave Haskell’s face another look. “He’s an ex-cop?”
“Yes!” I shouted, making Jessica launch herself at me in fear.
“You think he killed Myron? But why? And why in all the whys in the wide-wide world would he cut a hole in his head?”
“I don’t know, but I’m gonna find out!” I threw the picture on the counter and looked at the correlating article to see if his name was mentioned as one of the officers on the scene, but no officer’s names were mentioned. “Shoot. Not a single officer listed.”
“Wouldn’t he be listed as part of the Seattle police force somewhere online?” Coco asked as she washed her hands then handed me a disinfectant wipe to clean the chicken from my wrist.
I typed in Haskell’s name and Seattle, but the only thing I got was his name associated with Lester’s. “Nothing! Argh, Coco! What did he do before he came to Fig? Did he just hatch? I’m close. I know I am. How long has Haskell owned Lester’s?”
Coco squinted into the room. “I think it’s been about a year, if I remember the date correctly for that going-away party they gave Lester.”
Jess wrapped her tail around my neck, sensing I was agitated. “Why didn’t he want anyone to know he was an ex-cop? Eugene specifically told me Haskell asked him to keep it to himself. There’s a reason he didn’t want anyone to know, Coco. He played like he didn’t know Myron all that well, too, when I talked to him at the store. But if he was at the scene of that bank robbery, he knew him plenty.”
“But that still doesn’t explain why he’d want to kill Myron, Lemon. Cops, ex or not, help people. Not kill them.”
As though a brick broke through a wall in my brain, everything became crystal clear. “Wait!” I shouted, making Jess squeal her distress and plant her tiny hands over my eyes. I peeled them off and clutched them in my palm. “Officers have guns and guns have bullets, don’t they?”
Coco’s gasp came out as an almost shriek. Her face went ghostly white. “No! You don’t think he shot Myron, do you? That his bullet was the one in Myron’s head? Oh, my God, Lemon! That would mean…”
Fear assaulted me in tremors like waves of terror slipping up my spine. “He moved here to kill Myron?” But no. “That makes no sense, Coco. If Haskell’s been here since Lester left, he’s been here a while. Why wouldn’t he have killed him long ago? But it doesn’t matter anyway. Myron had no memory of the shooting, according to the article.”
No, this wasn’t making any sense. None at all.
Coco made a good point when she said, “Besides, how would he even recognize Haskell with his face blindness?”
But then… I slapped my hand on the counter and almost screamed when something hit me. “Unless Haskell was the one who shot him and he remembered something about that day! I mean, think about it. He had an appointment with a neurologist in Seattle for headaches. Maybe he’d remembered things from the day of the heist? Fabritzia said he had that room when he married her. I’d love to know how long ago he turned that spare bedroom into private investigation headquarters, but don’t you see? Maybe something Haskell did or said jarred his memory recently?”
“Yep. That sounds about right,” a voice said from the darkness of the entryway.
An oddly familiar voice—one I knew.
Coco and I looked at each other, yet neither of us moved, our backs pressed to the kitchen island.
Good thing, too, because the next thing the gravelly voice did was order, “Don’t move, ladies. Not a single twitch.”
“How many times have I told you to lock that door behind you?” I hissed in a furious whisper.
Coco’s eyes were glazed and wide when she hissed back at me from the corner of her mouth, “As many times as I’ve told you to keep your nose out of things!”
My heart sank to my stomach as my pulse raced, but there was nothing to do when we heard the intruder cock the gun but squeak, “Haskell?”
He stepped out of the shadows of the entryway then, his hard jaw clenched before he pointed a gun at us. “Aren’t you a regular little detective, Lemon Layne?”