I waited at the salon long enough for my nails to dry and to learn the police had called because they had more questions. Trusting they were pursuing the likelihood of the connection between the fire and the break-in, and already imagining Detective Nolan’s displeasure should Melanie tell him I’d been by asking questions, I gave myself a moment to admire my first manicure in over a year while I tapped Herb Gallo’s address into the map app on my phone.
The Wenwood address Melanie gave me led to a road I was unfamiliar with in words, but I had my suspicions as I approached, and knew it by sight when I made the final turn onto Herb’s street, Berlin Road.
Berlin Road curved gracefully along the waterfront, sometimes parallel to, sometimes turning away from Riverside Drive—the road that functioned as a barrier between Wenwood and the river and led directly to the front gates of what was the old brickworks and what was becoming the new marina. The homes on Berlin were tiny compared to the near-palatial houses populating the lower Hudson Valley. These were homes built for brickworkers and their families nearly a century earlier, not for millionaires entertaining clients. And they possessed a charm that called to mind words like cozy, quaint, and homey, words that would never be applied to the showplace houses of other towns.
I flipped down the visor on the Jeep, blocking the worst of the early afternoon rays from blinding me as I searched for Herb’s house. Having approached from the north end of the road, I watched the numbers on the houses decrease, beginning at 102 and dropping by twos. When it became clear I was within three houses of Herb’s, my heart sank at the same time my breath stilled.
Two police cruisers were parked in front of Herb’s, number 44. Behind them, blocking the driveway, was an unremarkable silver sedan.
If the police were making the rounds of Russ Stanford’s staff and stopping by just to ask Herb some questions, why would there be so many? The large presence couldn’t mean anything good. And certainly meant I wasn’t getting any information on caseload from Herb Gallo anytime soon.
I should have kept a steady speed and cruised on by the little saltbox house. But reflexes are funny things, and as I gawked at the scene, trying to catch some clue as to what had drawn the police, my foot lifted off the accelerator. Just enough so that the moment Detective Nolan stepped out of the silver sedan, there was no way to stop our gazes from locking.
The muscles in his jaw bulged and rolled and I could only imagine he was grinding his teeth. When he lifted a hand from his side I half expected him to wave me past. When instead he continued to raise his hand until he’d achieved the “stop” position, I brought the Jeep to a slow halt.
Sliding down the window, I opted against a fake cheerful smile, opted against playing innocent, and asked straight out, “Everything okay, Detective?”
One hand on his hip, one hand on the Jeep’s door, he leaned close. “What are you doing here, Georgia?”
“I was hoping to talk to Herb Gallo,” I admitted. What good would it do to lie? Detective Nolan would either see right through me immediately or find out the truth later on.
He let out a heavy sigh, as though I’d just confirmed a fear he didn’t want to admit. “And what business would you have with Herb? You’re not going to tell me he’s your lawyer, are you?”
“That would be untruthful,” I said. “Why are you here?”
Leveling his immutable brown-eyed gaze at me, he said, “I’m on police business, Georgia. Now tell me why you wanted to talk to Mr. Gallo.”
I reached for the air-conditioning controls and increased the fan speed. What with the window open and Detective Nolan blocking the breeze, it was getting hot in the driver’s seat. “He’s Russ Stanford’s law partner. He might have some idea what Russ was working on that warranted someone burning down the office.”
His nostrils flared as he sucked in breath.
“And if I knew that, I might be able to figure out why that same someone would break into Carrie’s shop and shatter everything they could get their hands on.”
“You have no way of knowing if those two incidents are related,” he said.
I let my head drop back against the headrest. “Oh, come on, Detective. There’s no way they’re random. Just like there’s no way your presence here at Herb’s house is a coincidence.”
“Georgia.” He shook his head, gaze on the ground. “What am I going to do with you?”
So much for relaxing against the headrest. His words, the tone of his voice, brought me upright in my seat. “That sounded almost friendly, Detective. Like you care,” I teased.
He shot me the briefest half smile I had ever witnessed, then he slid back into stoic cop mode. “Listen, I’m not going to say anything stupid about only running into you when there’s trouble. It’s the nature of my job that I see people when the worst happens. But what I am going to do is ask you to head on home and stay there and not go poking around in Russ Stanford’s law business.”
“What about Russ’s law business impacting my friend’s business, and my business for that matter?” I asked. Visions of shattered stained glass danced through my head like serial-killer sugar plum fairies.
Detective Nolan huffed. “How about I do the police work on this one and you get busy re-creating stock for Carrie’s store?” He tapped the door of the Jeep with the flat of his palm. “Go home.”
“Detective, I drove all the way out here—”
“You’re not getting in that house, Georgia.” His voice, his glare, his stance—all were unshakeable. “Go. Home.”
With a hitch of his belt—very cowboy—he strode away, crossing the street and walking across the lawn of the little house.
I was dismissed. If I wanted to talk to Herb, I was going to have to wait until the police completed their questioning.
Unless they were questioning Herb because he was the number one arson suspect. But . . . Herb? With his classic fishing hat and fragile handshake? I supposed it was true that you never really know a person, but . . . hmm.
I powered up the window and stepped on the gas. Detective Nolan might have prevented me from pursuing one source of information that might help my friend, but lucky for me I had other sources.
* * *
“Oh, God, that’s so Nolan.” Diana rolled her eyes with such force she nearly toppled off the barstool.
The crowd at the Pour House, Wenwood’s single watering hole, wasn’t much of a crowd at all. A few long-term residents clustered at one end of the bar, elbows on its age-stained wood, eyes on the television above, showing a baseball game. At one of the four booths lining the wall opposite the bar, two couples shared a pitcher of beer and some manner of intense conversation.
Carrie, Diana, and I had taken our customary places at roughly the center of the bar and ordered our customary single glass of wine each.
I took a sip of my white, then said, “It’s not like I wanted to barge in on his interrogation or whatever. I just—”
“Oh, it wasn’t an interrogation,” Diana said.
“Okay, questioning,” I amended.
Carrie swirled the wine in her glass as though she were about to sip a more exclusive vintage than the House’s seven-dollar-per-liter red. “Yeah, questioning sounds more like something that could happen at home. Or in a coffee shop.”
But Diana leaned closer, pitched her voice low enough not to be overheard. “What I mean is, it wasn’t any kind of question and answer. It was a crime scene.”
“No no no no no.” Carrie held up a hand. “Don’t tell us anything that’s going to get you in trouble. If it’s official police business—”
“Don’t listen to her. This is exactly what I wanted to ask you about,” I said. “Tell us everything. What do you mean a crime scene? What happened?”
“It’s okay. It’s on the blotter. Public record, you know?” Diana paused to take a sip of wine, glance over her shoulder at the other patrons of the bar. “It will be in the news tomorrow. I just don’t want to be answering questions from all the benchwarmers here.”
“Fair enough.” I leaned in, Carrie doing the same, so our three heads formed a human cone of silence.
Diana rested an elbow on the bar, gazed at us both from beneath lowered brows. “So. Nolan’s been trying to get hold of Herb Gallo about the fire, right? But there was no answer at his house—at the door or over the phone. We’ve had a couple of uniforms checking during their shifts but there’s been nothing until this morning when they noticed”—she dropped her voice to a whisper—“a kind of a, you know, odor.”
“Oh my God,” Carrie and I said in unison.
I had met Herb Gallo only once, and in the brief exchange we had at the luncheonette I took him to be a kind man, a gentleman of the old guard. Guilt at thinking for even a second that he might have burned down the law office made me momentarily queasy. And an irritating lump lodged in my throat as I thought of that lovely man dying alone, his remains undiscovered for days. My heart squeezed with sorrow. For a moment I couldn’t meet Diana’s eyes and instead focused my attention on my hands, on the abundance of tiny cuts and scratches that a kitten and a stained glass hobby made unavoidable. Those cuts were as bad as it got for me, but poor Herb Gallo.
“You said crime though,” Carrie said, her voice small and shaky.
Diana nodded slowly, almost dramatically. “When the uniforms went in, they found the house had been tossed and old man Gallo murdered. He had his throat cut with a piece of broken glass.”
Carrie’s breath hitched and she put a hand to her throat. I grabbed at the bar, because the room seemed to tilt and threaten to knock me to the ground. Herb . . . murdered. A piece of glass. He’d told me his departed wife had collected glass, told me he never had the heart to pack her collection away. And now . . . Dear heaven.
“Glass?” Carrie echoed.
Both sets of eyes turned to me.
“What?” I asked, lifting my head, trying to focus as I glanced back and forth between my friends. “Just because there was glass you think I have some insight?”
Diana lifted a shoulder. “Glass is kinda your thing.”
“Yes, but I create things with glass. I don’t—” I paused, brought my voice down to a conspiratorial level. “I wouldn’t kill anyone with it. I wouldn’t kill anyone at all.”
“Oh, no, that wasn’t even a thought,” Carrie assured me.
“Point is,” Diana said, “Herb Gallo is dead. It can’t be a coincidence that Gallo and your ex were partners and the building they both worked in was—”
“I know,” Carrie said. “I know.”
She lifted her wineglass as the mood among us sank. I wracked my brain, looking for the right thing to say, looking for anything to say. But what was left that didn’t either sound like a platitude or come off like I wanted to revel in her hardship?
“So you, uh, you talked Drew into giving you a job, huh?” Diana nodded, her eyes wide with encouragement telling me to follow along.
“Uh. Yeah. He didn’t really take too much convincing. The man has paperwork everywhere.” I lifted my wineglass. “It’s not like his file room looked like something from Hoarders, but he really didn’t stand a chance of pretending he didn’t need help. Seriously, wildflowers are more organized.”
“You’ll still be able to help me clean up the shop, though, right?” Carrie asked.
My jaw fell slack. “Of course. You come first. How could you even doubt that?”
She turned the wineglass slowly in her hand. “You’d make actual money if you went to Drew’s, though, right?”
“Carrie, you sell my stained glass pieces for me. I make actual money through you, too. Pick me up in the morning and we’ll get the store put back together. I’ll start at Drew’s next week.”
“What about your glass work? Like the window you’re designing for Trudy Villiers? And pieces to replace what was . . . lost?” Carrie asked. “Will you still have time?”
“I won’t be at Drew’s every day,” I assured her. “And it’s not as if my nights are packed with romance and excitement.”
Carrie reached out and patted my hand while Diana asked, “How can you say this isn’t exciting?” She waved a hand to indicate the nearly empty bar and the old men intent on the baseball game.
“This isn’t romantic,” I clarified, and finally became aware of what I’d been saying. Was I really troubled by a lack of romance? Was I ready to start dating again? Or was it the wine talking?
I lifted my glass and held its rim against my lips. The pain of my breakup with my fiancée had seemed so acute only weeks earlier. But little by little, when I wasn’t looking, it seemed, the wounds had begun to heal. I spent less time lost in sorrow and regret and more time laughing and looking ahead to tomorrow. Maybe the time had come when I could be open to possibility again. Not to say that I was ready to risk reopening some of the deeper cuts, risk—gulp—falling in love, but I might have been ready to share my time again. I might even have been ready to fall in like.
“Romance is only in movies,” Diana grumbled. “In real life, someone has to do the dishes.”
“Here here.” Carrie raised her glass.
Diana obliged by tapping Carrie’s glass with her own, the thick, cheap glass making more of a clack than a ching. “How are you holding up?” Diana said. “You know, what with being caught up in your ex-husband’s mess and all.”
Even in the half dark of the bar—or maybe because of it—the flush of color in Carrie’s cheeks was obvious. She took a quick sip of her wine then half turned away. “Would you keep your voice down?” she asked. “Bad enough the whole town is talking about the break-in. I don’t need them talking about me and my ex-husband, too.”
“Are you kidding me? Have you forgotten you live in a small town?” Her tone was a bit too far into the realm of mocking, and I gave her a nudge. “What?” she asked me.
“Be nice,” I said. “You’re supposed to be being nice.”
She raised her brows at me. “I am being nice. This is me being nice. Me being angry is why I don’t carry a gun off duty.”
I huffed and did half an eye roll.
“Fine.” She turned back to Carrie. “Just so you know, I was on the desk the morning the call came in from the fire department about your ex’s place. That’s where I heard the news. It wasn’t gossip I picked up at the luncheonette, okay? I don’t know of anyone talking about it.”
“So being on the desk, um, have you heard anything else?” Carrie asked, her hesitant speech and soft voice in danger of being drowned out by sudden cheering from the baseball fans.
“What do you mean?” Diana asked.
“Any leads yet on who might have set the fire?” I clarified. It hadn’t taken the fire marshal long to officially declare the blaze the result of arson. But beyond that, Carrie had no further news. At least, none that she’d shared.
“Nolan has his theories. So he says.” She downed the remains of her wine and called a club soda order to the bartender. “But he wouldn’t tell me what they are since he knew I was meeting you two tonight and didn’t want me to divulge anything you couldn’t learn from the six o’clock news.”
I met Carrie’s gaze. The pinching around her eyes told me she was thinking the same thing I was thinking: If Detective Nolan didn’t want any information shared with us, he still considered Carrie a suspect.
Maybe it was the wine working—all four sips of it—but another thread of guilt passed through me. The guilt suggested I was somehow at fault for Carrie’s predicament. I was pretty sure none of my friends or family had been suspected of a crime prior to my relocating to Wenwood. And now, in three short months, my grandfather and my new best friend had become murder suspects, and a man I’d met only once had been killed. If I had just stayed put in the city, would any of this have happened? Mercy. How did Jessica Fletcher live with herself?
With a shake of her head, Carrie tossed her big brown curls back over her shoulder. “I’m sure Detective Nolan has reasons for managing the flow of information,” she said.
Diana pulled a face. “I don’t think he has any reasons. I think he just likes to act mysterious. But we can ask him if he shows up.”
I managed to swallow my wine rather than spit it out. “Shows up?”
Swirling the ice cubes in her club soda, she nodded. “After I told him we come here every Thursday he said he might stop by and check this place out.”
My stomach lurched. I didn’t want to see Detective Nolan. No, I certainly did not. If I saw him again, with my mind so recently on my lack of romance, would I experience once more whatever heat-induced madness I had fallen victim to outside the torched law office and decide he has soulful eyes and strong hands? No. It was definitely best to avoid the detective. No good would come of me being involved with a cop.
“Drink up,” I said, raising my glass. “If we can escape before he gets here we can still safely call this girls’ night.”
Of course, the problem with wine is that chugging it down is tactless. The problem with cheap wine is that chugging it down is nearly impossible; it was too sharp and bitter to be consumed at speed.
Despite a valiant effort from me, if I do say so myself, we were still bellied up to the bar when Detective Nolan arrived.
He stopped inside the door and took in the room in a sweeping glance. His gaze shifted quickly from patron to patron but I had no doubt that, if asked, he could recite a string of details about each one. When he returned his detective’s attention to where we stood, I feared not only would he see the green top and jeans shorts I wore, he would also see evidence of every single cat hair I had painstakingly removed.
“Well. There goes the fun,” Diana muttered.
The detective still wore suit pants, but he had discarded his jacket and tie and opened the top few buttons on his dress shirt and rolled his sleeves to his elbows. His clothes and his posture belonged to someone who was relaxed. His gaze remained intense.
He made no effort to pretend he had merely happened into the same bar where we were gathered. Instead, he greeted us with, “Good. You’re still here.”
This was enough to have Carrie and I check in silently with one another, trying to determine who it was the detective was addressing. By mutual, though still silent, agreement, we concluded he must be talking to Diana. Or maybe the conclusion would have been better termed as “hope.”
“Oh, sorry to say, we were just leaving.” Diana slipped her arm into the shoulder strap of her purse and pulled the strap up as she prepared to step off the barstool.
But Detective Nolan must have seen the move coming. He stopped behind her, blocking her escape, before her feet hit the floor. “Stay,” he said, smiling. “Next round’s on me.”
“Oh, but we only have one drink each.” Carrie lifted her glass, proof she had already reached the maximum.
Diana shrugged. “They’re lightweights. And you’re in my way. Sir.”
Nolan signaled the bartender, making a circling motion to encompass our little group—the kind of motion that said another round for everyone.
“Just a soda,” I called. Carrie echoed. Nolan grinned, and ordered a tap beer.
“Excuse me.” Diana folded her arms and faced the detective. There was nothing friendly, nothing relaxed in the way she stood. I wondered if Nolan had somehow forgotten about her trouble with temper. Part of what was making it possible for Diana and me to build a friendship was my awareness of her anger management and aggression issues. I learned early on when not to push, when not to tease, and when to keep my mouth shut entirely. Nolan, it seemed, hadn’t bothered with any of those lessons, and wasn’t afraid of her willingness to throw punches.
He sighed, though, and dropped his arms. “I’d prefer you stay,” he said, then shifted his gaze to include Carrie. “I only want to talk, see if you can think of anyone at all who might be holding a grudge. Someone’s going to some pretty drastic measures to put you and your ex-husband out of business. The sooner we can determine who, the happier I’ll be.”
“Are you sure a bar is the right place for that?” I asked.
“It’s informal.” He dropped his voice low enough to not be overheard, locked his gaze on Carrie. “I could come back to your shop in the morning. I could send a squad car to bring you up to the station. Those are both good options if you want the whole town talking and speculating. Or we can talk here.”
My chest froze, stilling my breath. I remembered too well the sense of being watched, the cold chill of knowing the folks of Wenwood were gossiping about me. I wouldn’t wish that feeling on an enemy, much less a friend.
“Maybe a booth?” I forced a smile, hoping to encourage Carrie.
“Maybe not,” she said. She turned in her seat, draping an arm over the backrest, and facing Nolan full on. “Look, Detective. I can’t help you. Russ never shared his business with me when we were married and he certainly didn’t start once we separated. And once we were separated, that was the end of me sharing my business with him. I don’t have any more information than what I’ve already told you. And if I have to go up to the station and tell you the same thing just to make you understand, then I will.”
Diana glared. “Nice going, Nolan.” She huffed. “You gonna get out of my way now?”
Blowing out a breath, the detective stepped back and to the side, allowing Diana to pass. “Georgia, you need a ride?” she asked.
I pointed to Carrie. “She’s driving me.”
“All right then.” Diana nodded. “I’ll call you.”
As the bartender set one beer then two colas on the bar, the detective moved into the space Diana vacated. He rested his arms along the backrest of the empty barstool and leaned in. “I don’t want to make you angry,” he said, face turned to Carrie. “And I don’t want to upset you. I don’t want to do that to a friend of Georgia’s.”
Before I could ask the meaning behind that newsflash, he continued.
“But Ms. Stanford, a building was burnt to cinders, your ex-husband is missing, your shop has been broken into, and—” He cut himself off, giving me the sense he was censoring his words. Maybe Carrie didn’t fill in the blank, but I filled it in with and Herb Gallo is dead as easily as if the words had been spoken.
“I’m a cop,” he said at last. “I need answers. And I’m going to get them.” He reached forward and claimed his beer. Straightening, he pressed his lips tight together and nodded at Carrie. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
As he turned, he gave me a short nod, then walked to the end of the bar. He slapped one of the old coots on the back and asked about the score. All-business to all-casual in the time it takes a fastball to cross home plate.
“Carrie,” I began, as gently as I could. “Maybe you should just humor him and answer his questions? Maybe something will come up that will help.”
Her eyes went from wide to watery. “But don’t you see? Of all people, you should understand. I don’t want to remember. I want to put everything about Russ behind me and leave it in the past. Nothing I can say will help Detective Nolan. It will only hurt me.”
A finger of sympathy poked at my heart. I reached out to rest my hand on her forearm. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
She laid her hand over mine. “He’s going to show up at the shop in the morning, Georgia. He’s going to ask more questions about Russ.” Eyes downcast, she sniffled. “Will you stay there with me until he comes, even if all the cleaning is done? I don’t want to face him alone.”
“Of course,” I promised. “Of course.” Because as Carrie herself had told me at the start of our friendship, no one should have to face the police alone.