Twenty-Nine

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal; love leaves a memory no one can steal.

— Irish saying

“MADDIE! You look like yourself again!” I dropped my tote and leaned in to hug her. Gently.

“Is it true?” she said. “What the liaison officer just said? They’ve arrested Jake for shooting me and killing Patrick Halloran?”

Liaison officer? Between the SPD and crime victim patients, or their families? So that was why Lovely Rita had been in and out of the ICU the last week. Holy saffron.

I’d waited with Officer Clark until the detectives arrived, then spent a good hour explaining how I’d fingered Jake Byrd as both Smoking Man and the two-time shooter. I described how I’d thought I could trick Byrd into admitting he didn’t know much about the movie he’d bought the ticket for, but then realized he knew it too well, far better than I did. Tracy and Armstrong seemed impressed when I suggested they check his streaming history; I was sure they’d find he’d seen Lady Bird twice, shortly after Pat’s murder and again after Maddie’s shooting. They were less impressed at my takedown—what Tracy called my antics— although Armstrong did give me points for creative use of a cup of a coffee. The coffee had been too hot to drink, but not hot enough to hurt Byrd, although he’d been treated for a sprained ankle before being hauled off to jail. The same nurses who tended him had been concerned about my knees and hands, but while I knew they might sting after the adrenaline wore off, I didn’t mind. I’d caught him; what were a few cuts and scrapes?

When Officer Clark returned from the cafeteria with coffee for the detectives and a sandwich for me, she’d given me a nice “atta girl.”

“Oh,” I said. “You were here today to keep an eye on Jake Byrd.”

It all made sense. She nodded and slipped upstairs to talk with Maddie and Tim. To liaise.

Finally, Tracy had cut me loose. He offered to have an officer drop me off in the Market. But I’d had another stop to make before getting back to work. Maddie’s condition had improved so much that the nurses were getting ready to wheel her to the medical floor when I arrived. Tim had gone ahead with the latest flowers. She asked them to give us a few minutes and close the door behind them.

“That’s one thing I hate about this place,” she said. “Everyone is so nice and so good at what they do. But unless they’re baring your backside, they leave the doors open 24/7, exposing your life to everyone who walks by.”

“I’m afraid I’ve made that worse,” I said, perching on the edge of the bed. “Exposing your family secrets.”

She exhaled heavily. “Ironic, isn’t it? I never would have learned the truth about my family if Jake hadn’t been so determined to destroy us. The way he believes my grandmother and great-grand-parents —our great-grandparents—destroyed his family.”

“Your grandmother’s photograph album was the key. Unfortunately, it’s now part of the police file. Detective Armstrong—”

“The tall one?”

“The tall one. He says they may be able to make a digital copy for you, since resolving all the criminal charges could take a while.” I slipped off the bed and into the chair. “When did you figure out who Byrd was?”

“At the first public meeting he and Deanna Ellingson held, more than three years ago. I wanted to know who’d managed to convince Mr. Barut to sell, and what his plans were. I heard him tell Barut’s son that his grandfather had once owned the property and that he wanted to bring it back into the family. It was our great-grandfather . His grandfather lost the place. My father had been trying to get it back for years, then I tried, but no luck. Bad timing, I guess.”

I had my own theory about that, but no point resurrecting the old Turkish-Armenian tensions.

“I’d always known about Jake,” she continued. “Though I never knew his last name or where he was. I pored over those albums with Grandma Rose when I was little, and then again in the last few weeks of her life, when she was looking back. If she knew what had happened to him, she never said.”

“It’s not a pretty story,” I said, but she wanted to hear it, so I recounted what Jake had told me outside the hospital.

“All that anger and bitterness,” she said softly. “No wonder he hated us. He was raised to hate us.”

“When you couldn’t get him to work with you, or to change his plans for the property, you went to Pat Halloran for help. That was kind of brilliant, by the way.”

“Other way around. Pat knew my efforts to persuade Byrd to scale back were doomed, and he offered to help. At a soccer practice. I was skeptical at first, because he was part of Neighbors United and they can be pretty outspoken. But he convinced me it would work. That’s why I went to his house the day he was killed. I was horrified when I heard what happened, but I never imagined it had any connection to the project. The police said his murder was connected to his work as a prosecutor, and I was sure they were right.”

“Byrd figured you and Pat were in cahoots, though why he thought killing Pat would stop you, I can’t imagine. Nothing ever stops you.”

She smiled wryly. “He almost did.”

“But meeting at Pat’s house was risky, wasn’t it? I mean, he lived next door to Deanna Ellingson.”

“We were supposed to meet Saturday at my office. Turned out I’d put the weekend at the island place with Kristen and Eric on my phone for the wrong day. I had to take the chance that Pat would be home, and that the neighbors wouldn’t see me.”

“Bruce Ellingson did see you, through the hedge. But he thought it was his wife. With all you knew about Byrd, why did you agree to meet him at the building last week?”

“I had no idea he was dangerous. He said he had some sketches he wanted to show us. My builder was supposed to meet me—he didn’t know we were meeting Byrd—but he got stuck in traffic on the wrong side of the drawbridge. By the time he got there, Byrd had already left. Thank God, or Byrd would have shot him, too, and we’d both be dead.”

With no witnesses, and no chance at justice.

“You are the smartest, bravest woman I have ever known,” she said. “How can I ever thank you for figuring all this out?”

“Those are some powerful drugs you’re on.”

“Pepper, don’t joke about this. My whole life, I’ve admired you, envied you, and I’ve let it get in the way of our friendship.”

felt like all the air had been sucked out of my lungs. “You admired me? Maddie, that’s nuts. I dropped out of college, wasting the internship you wanted. I got divorced. I lost my dream job. You’re the one who was the star of every class, married a great guy, took over the family business. Heck, you figured out a way to buy back the family property, something even your dad couldn’t do. And don’t tell me that was Pat. He may have thought up the plan, but you had the guts to make it happen.”

“No.” She shook her head, the bandage smaller, the shaved hair turning to stubble. “Maybe it took you a while to figure out what you wanted, but you followed your heart. You made your own life. Me, I was the good girl who followed the path my family laid out.”

“And this wasn’t it?” I gestured, but I didn’t mean the hospital room, the monitors and the beeping machines. I meant what I’d seen as her picture-perfect life.

“I love Tim. I love our kids. I like helping people create the right space to make their dreams come true. Keeping neighborhoods vibrant and alive. It’s good work; I know that. It’s the work my father raised me to do.”

“You wanted a career in social services. I heard you say so.”

“I chose my family legacy over my dreams, Pepper. That was my choice, not your fault.”

The door opened and a nurse poked his head in. “Five minutes. Then we’ve got to get you moved.”

I reached for her hand. “It’s not too late. You can scale back. Sell the company. Hire a manager and work as much or as little as you want. Get that degree in social work. Take up pottery or hothouse yoga. Spend a year in Italy learning to make cheese.”

“Petrosian Parmesan,” she said. “I know exactly the place to put it in the new corner grocery.”

SOME shopkeeper I am, I thought as I angled across the intersection of First and Pike Place. I had missed most of the busiest day of the week.

It’s always amazes me how two people can remember the same incident, or the same time in our lives, so differently. Me and Maddie. Me and Tag. Me and Tag and Kimberly Clark. We view what happens through our own lens, and that lens tints our memories as well. Maddie might never be able to fully piece together what happened in her family all those years ago, but she might glean enough facts from Jake Byrd’s account, if she could see through the film of his bitterness, to clear the picture.

And that, I hoped, would give her a better vision of what her future could be.

Despite the crowds on the sidewalks, I could see the old lady perched on her stool outside the Asian shop. She wagged her head and Lily came rushing toward me. “Pepper,” she said. “We had tea and I helped walk the dog.”

“I’m so glad. Arf loves going for walks.”

“Guess what else? My daddy’s going to stay. He’s getting a green car. He and my mama are getting married. On my birthday.”

Green car. “Oh. You mean his green card? The paper that means he’s a permanent resident of the U.S., even though he isn’t a citizen?”

Lily bounced up and down. “Yes! We’re going to have a party to celebrate. Will you come? You and Arf.”

I glanced at her mother, smiling at us from behind the front counter. “We’d be delighted.”

Two blocks down the street, on the corner outside my shop, I spotted a tall, dark, and handsome guy talking to a blond with pink and orange streaks in her hair. By the man’s side stood a dog. My guy, my dog.

Nate and I embraced and kissed. I ran my hand through his dark hair. “You’re here. You’re really here.”

He kissed me again.

“I take it you two have met,” I said when I came up for air and saw Jamie beaming at us.

“You’ve been making new friends while I was away,” Nate said.

“Plus reconnecting with old ones,” I said. “Have I got stories for you.”

Nate took Arf home. Inside, in between helping customers, I told my staff what had happened.

“So Cody’s parents had nothing to do with it?” Reed asked.

“Looks that way,” I said, though it would be a long time before the Ellingsons’ family life returned to anything like normal.

Minutes before closing, the two detectives arrived.

“You look like you could use a pick-me-up,” I said, and poured cups of spice tea. We sat in the nook.

“Byrd confessed to both crimes,” Tracy said. “It would have taken us a lot longer to nail him without you.”

A weight I hadn’t known I was carrying slipped off my shoulders.

“He was waiting for an opportunity to get into the ICU, wasn’t he, to take another shot? When the guard took his afternoon break.”

“Looks that way,” Tracy said. “He was armed, and we’re pretty sure it was the same gun that shot both Mr. Halloran and Ms. Petrosian. We also found a burner phone, probably the one he used to set up the meeting with Ms. Petrosian.”

Making sure no one could track him.

“We’ve informed Mrs. Halloran,” Armstrong said, “of the arrest and confession. We’ve also made sure she knows Ms. Petrosian confirmed your theory about Pat Halloran’s role devising her property buy-out scheme.”

I hoped this put an end to Laurel’s nightmares.

“What about the Ellingsons?” I asked.

“We were wrapping up our interviews with them when Officer Clark called,” Tracy said. “For three years, he feared she’d killed Halloran. Turns out she thought he’d done it.”

What a tangled web.

“I ran into a very happy little girl down the street. I take it Special Agent Greer’s investigation lets Joe Huang off the hook.”

“Not completely, not yet,” Tracy said. “But it appears to be headed that way. Seems her birthday explains the timing of his presence in the country. He’s cooperating with the feds and has implicated his boss and others in the organization. Something to do with imported goods and trade secrets—that’s about all we know at this point.”

So all suspects were present and accounted for. All was right with the world.

Or would be. Shortly.

THE fragrance of a deep simmer, of fish and stock and bay leaves, greeted me when I unlocked the front door to my building.

And a fuzzy dog and a gorgeous man greeted me at the front door of the loft. From the living room came the sounds of Diane Schuur singing Cole Porter. “So nice to come home to.”

Nate took my face in his hands and kissed me. Then he took my red, scraped hands and kissed my palms.

“Can you stand one more bowl of soup?” he asked. “All that soup talk early this week got me in the mood.”

“When it smells this good, you bet.”

I was halfway to the bathroom when I stopped and turned around. “By the way, Mr. Fisher Man, I don’t think I’ve told you lately that I’m madly in love with you.”

“It goes both ways, Spice Girl.” A slow sweet smile crossed his face. “It goes both ways.”

I took a quick shower to rinse off the remains of the day. In the bedroom, I put on a clean T-shirt and glanced around. Two walls redbrick, two painted a soft caramel. The bed covered with the black-and-white antique quilt Kristen and I had found in a shop up near the Canadian border. The rolling doors, the tansu, the neon lips on the wall. Nate’s sweater tossed over the wooden chair.

I didn’t need to expand into the unit beneath this one. Maybe Glenn and his Nate could rent it during their construction project. My loft was perfect just the way it was. I’d rather leave it alone and gain a new neighbor. Throw more potlucks and cocktail parties for the building. Start working on that rooftop garden.

Then the music stopped and the broadcasters started their World Series pregame chatter. I stepped into a fresh pair of yoga pants and smiled.

Everything I wanted, everything I loved and needed, was safe and warm and dry, right here, between these four walls.