CHAPTER
thirteen 
I ASKED ALICE TO come to my apartment for an emergency meeting. Before my sister arrived, the cats had just decided to take refuge under the covers of my bed. And they had no intention of leaving.
“You’re an awful influence,” I told Marshmallow.
“Nimbus is suffering from PTSD. Have a heart,” he said.
Poor Nimbus did seem to be shivering. I stroked her. “It’s okay. Your old master won’t find you.” I wasn’t sure how I would keep my promise, but I had to try.
The doorbell rang, and I hustled to answer it and welcomed in my sister.
After hugging Alice hello, I asked, “Do you mind if we bake while chatting?” I thought it’d be better to keep our hands busy while we talked. It might also take the sting of discovery away. I knew I’d had a hard time, my hands shaking on my steering wheel, when I’d driven back from the country club.
“Sure. What are we making here?” she said.
“Doggie biscuits. We’re running low at the shop. I’ll stick the extra batches in the mini fridge at Hollywoof.”
Alice agreed, so I placed the printed recipe on my kitchen countertop and preheated the oven. Then I laid the dry ingredients out on the counter’s cracked tiles: whole wheat flour, oats, and baking powder.
I pulled out a mixing bowl and handed the egg carton to Alice.
“So, why the sudden meeting?” Alice cracked a few eggs into the bowl.
I handed her the whisk with a grumble. “I tried to track down Dad at his important golf game, the one he couldn’t pull himself away from.”
“It’s like Where’s Waldo? on that course. How did you ever find him?”
I added creamy peanut butter and nonfat milk to the beaten eggs. “He wasn’t anywhere near his putter. I found him and Walt in the juice bar.”
“It was pretty sunny today. Maybe we should’ve held the Family and Friends Day indoors.” Alice dumped in the flour and baking powder.
After mixing the oats into the batter, I added my special flavoring of chopped bacon bits into the bowl. “Found him scribbling a note at one of the tables.”
She stirred the ingredients together. “That’s so old-fashioned. What was it for?”
My fingers clenched into fists at my side. “I can only make an educated guess. He wrote, I’ve fallen in love with somebody else.”
Alice dropped the whisk. The batter sprayed across the counter. “That can’t be right. You must have misread it.”
I bit my lip. “When I had lunch with Ma the other day, she complained about feeling distant from Dad. No Valentine’s activity, remember? And you yourself remarked how there haven’t been any anniversary celebrations recently.”
My sister snatched up the whisk and whipped with fury. The bowl wobbled and half of the mix spilled out. Oh well. I didn’t need that many dog biscuits anyway.
I poured the batter into bone-shaped silicon molds and slid the tray into the oven. “We need to make a plan to fix this.”
Alice trudged to the sink and scrubbed her hands with soap and water. “But I know Ma and Dad love each other.”
“Maybe Dad’s lost some of the fire along the way.”
My sister dried up and twisted the damp dish towel in her hands. “Then we need to remind him.”
“Perhaps we could offer them a night out,” I said as I plopped the dirty bowl into the sink.
“We can re-create how they fell in love.”
“By renting a tour bus?” I soaped up the bowl, making the suds overflow and letting the hot water run over my fingers until it almost scalded me.
“We need something to help him remember their good times in Malaysia.”
I rinsed out the bowl, making it sparkling clean. “Knowing Dad, he’d love anything involving food.”
Alice whipped the towel up like a victory flag. “I’ve got it. Roti Palace.”
Ma had talked about taking Dad to an eatery specializing in flatbread back in Malaysia. “Wouldn’t we want a more intimate setting?”
“We could do a pre-anniversary Ultimate Date Night at home, but with catered roti.”
“Now you’re talking.” I gave my sister a high-five.
“I’ll be in charge of this.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Besides, I’ve got some sudden extra time on my hands.”
I raised my eyebrows at her.
“After you left, Principal Lewis asked to speak to me in private. Guess Detective Brown phoned him and mentioned something about the case.”
My eyes narrowed. “What did the cop say?”
“Whatever it was must have been negative.” A hint of pink crept up my sister’s cheeks. “The principal asked me to take a few days off until things settled down.”
Detective Brown. Always jumping the gun. I was glad Alice could keep her mind distracted by creating the Ultimate Date Night, but I’d need to hurry on chasing down a new lead.
There was one person who was still missing from the puzzle. I decided to take a quick jaunt to the beach and meet Helen’s fiancé.
When I checked into the All Tide Up office, I marveled at the display of waxed surfboards mounted on their walls. At the info desk, though, they redirected me to find Brandon on a stretch of beach about a block away. They assured me he would have finished his lesson by the time I showed up.
At the shore, I saw Brandon waving goodbye to a client in a polka dot bikini when I arrived. Slogging through the hot sand toward him, I assessed Helen’s fiancé. Artificially good-looking, but not the genuine handsomeness of Josh.
Brandon looked like the surfer model I’d found framed in her room—but in 3-D and dripping wet. Instead of using a towel to dry off, he’d slung it over his shoulders just so. The sea drops on his body glimmered.
The bottled blond hair combined with sea storm eyes warned me away from his exterior charm. His physical appearance screamed a perfection honed by the gym, waves, and a full-length mirror. I bet he had an equally sculpted ego to match.
“Hi, sugar,” he said when I approached. “You looking for me?”
“Brandon?”
He flashed me a radiant smile achieved with thousands of dollars’ worth of orthodontics. “The one and only. If you want a teaching session, weekdays at dawn are generally open. Or I can do a special predawn time slot for you.”
I put my hands on my hips. “You’re Helen’s fiancé.”
His shiny grin vanished.
“I’m one of Marina’s friends, and I . . . just wanted to see how you were doing.” I’d decided to keep the degrees of separation fewer. “I’m really sorry for your loss.”
He froze and cast his eyes down. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”
I dug into the sand with the tip of my shoe. “It must have been such a shock.” He looked like a man who still needed to process things. Maybe empathy would open him up and provide me more clues. People often shared without filtering their words while in the throes of grief.
He sank down in the sand with his knees up. “I just don’t understand how this could’ve happened.”
I blew out a breath. “I know the paramedics tried hard, but it was already too late.”
He stared out at the sea. I, too, glanced at the water, noticing the surfers riding the crests in the last rays of the sun. “So sudden. It doesn’t make any sense. She was super fit. I mean, we rode the waves together all the time.”
A small smile lit up his face as he continued, “That’s how we met, you know. I taught her over the summer. A natural, she absolutely shredded those waves.”
I calculated in my head. “So, you’ve been together for over six months. You two must have really hit it off for wedding bells to start chiming.”
He nodded. “Sometimes you just know, right?”
I thought about Josh and me. Could I imagine marrying him? Yes, but that milestone seemed far down the road. I loved the pure journey of being together in this moment, of having a stable relationship we could build on.
Brandon thumped a fist against his forehead. “I knew I should have checked in when I didn’t get a text from her. But I thought it was my phone. It’s been on the fritz ever since I got sand in it. But then the police called me with the horrible news . . .”
I thought about the date of Helen’s death. February thirteenth. I softened my voice. “Did you two have a Valentine’s outing planned?”
“We were definitely going to be busy . . . talking about wedding details.”
I bent down and drew a heart in the wet sand near the water. “Oh. When was the big day going to be?”
“Within the next month or two, when our schedules aligned. We’d intended to do a Vegas run.”
“No huge dream wedding?”
Brandon brushed some sand off his legs. “Helen didn’t want anything fancy. We only needed each other, not some crazy expensive ceremony.”
“I see.”
Brandon readjusted the drape of the towel around his neck. “Now it’ll never be. We ended up waiting too long.”
I offered my condolences again, but watching Brandon walk back to the surf shop, I felt the whisperings of doubt. The way he’d honeyed me with his words at first. And how he’d returned to his regular schedule so soon. Was it a way for him to cope with the fact that he was fiancée-less . . . or something else?