Chapter
three
Why in the world would I want to put dark chocolate and red pepper in my mouth at the same time?” Nikki Clarkson demanded the next afternoon. “If I want to eat a red pepper, Britt, I’ll order chili at The Griddle. And you know how suspicious I am about dark chocolate on principle. I like my chocolate with plenty of milk and plenty of sugar, thank you very much.”
“Don’t you think it’s good for the soul to try new things?” Britt asked. It was good for her soul, heaven knew. She’d wither away from boredom if she had to do the same thing and eat the same thing and look at the same things every day.
“What’s good for my soul at this particular moment is a milk chocolate pecan turtle.” Nikki pointed a long French-manicured fingernail at Sweet Art’s display case. “I’ll take that one there, third from the end, because it’s the biggest.”
Britt grumbled about unadventurous customers as she reached for the chosen turtle.
Nikki worked for Nora as the office manager of Merryweather Historical Village. She’d been widowed twice, dressed her curvaceous figure in clothes reminiscent of her ’80s heyday, and was one of Britt’s most regular customers.
Today she’d caught the sides of her dyed brown hair into a barrette, sprayed her bangs, and let the permed strands corkscrew around her shoulders.
“Don’t mind Britt’s grumbling,” Maddie said from her position at the cash register, where she’d recently finished ringing up a newlywed couple with a fondness for white chocolate macadamia popcorn. “Britt has always been too impatient with routine for her own good.”
Maddie, Britt’s high-school-friend-turned-employee, ran the business side of the shop. She waited on customers, managed the online store, handled accounting, ordered supplies, organized their weekend staff, and more.
“Nikki,” Britt said sweetly, “do you want a job here at Sweet Art? Maddie’s position is about to become available.”
Nikki released a throaty guffaw. “You don’t want me working here, believe you me. I’d become distracted every time a halfway decent-looking man walked in. Why do you think Nora keeps me shut away upstairs at the Library on the Green like I’m some kind of nun or a person with an infectious disease? Which I’m not!”
“The nun or the person with an infectious disease?”
“Neither!”
“Speaking of halfway decent-looking men . . . Have you seen Zander since he got back into town?” Maddie asked Nikki.
“Mercy, yes. I happened to be in the office the other day when Zander stopped by to say hello to Nora.” Nikki hadn’t paid yet, a truth that didn’t stop her from extracting the turtle from its bag and taking a bite. She moaned while chewing. “Zander’s always had a special place in my heart. He’s so somber and watchful! He reminds me of a Dickens orphan. Tragic and brooding and gorgeous.”
Britt couldn’t wait to tell Zander that Nikki had likened him to a Dickens orphan.
“Those tattoos on his arms make me wonder about the tattoos I can’t see,” Nikki said.
Britt’s eyebrows sailed upward.
Nikki grinned. “The tattoos on his upper arms, I mean!” She threw a balled napkin at Britt. “If I can’t have Zander for myself—because, let’s face it—he might be a little too young for me . . .”
If Nikki’s “a little” meant thirty years, then she was right on the money.
“. . . then I’d like for him to end up with you, Britt,” Nikki finished. “When you bottle your sassiness, you’re actually not half bad.”
“Yes!” Maddie exclaimed. The gold highlights in her brunette curls caught the light. “Thank you.”
“Are you thanking her for labeling me as not half bad?” Britt asked.
“I’m thanking her for agreeing with my belief that you and Zander should end up together.”
Britt made a dismissive sound. Why couldn’t people accept that a man and woman could be friends? Just friends? Over the years many, many people had suggested that she date Zander. Maddie had been advocating for it for eons, and Britt sensed that her sisters would jump on the bandwagon, too, if she gave them a chance.
It irked her, because they all seemed to think that dating a man was superior to friendship with a man, when Britt’s experience had confirmed the opposite.
From the day she’d met Zander, with his reserved personality encased in hard-to-know armor, she’d wanted him as her friend.
Perhaps because boyfriends were so transient and so . . . fluffy. Ultimately, inconsequential.
Perhaps because, as fun as it was to feel sexually drawn to someone, she hadn’t felt sexually drawn to Zander at the start. There had been some exceptions to that since. But why dwell on the exceptions when they only proved the rule? She and Zander were friends. That’s how they thought of each other. That was their dynamic. And their dynamic had been in place, unchanged and unbreakable, for a long, long time.
She trusted him. She appreciated every facet of him. She both liked him and loved him. And all of that, all the things she did feel—trumped lust. Friendship wasn’t a consolation prize. It wasn’t less than. It wasn’t second best!
“Is Zander hiding back there in the kitchen by chance?” Nikki asked. “I could use a little pick-me-up.”
“Nope, he’s not here.” More’s the pity. Time passed much more slowly when Zander wasn’t around. “I’m not in the habit of stashing men in my kitchen, FYI.”
“Maybe we should get in the habit of that,” Maddie suggested. “I’ll gladly volunteer Leo for the position.”
For more than three months, Maddie had been dating handsome history professor Leo Donnelly.
The two were crazy about each other. Just like Willow and Corbin and Nora and John. Britt had been an early proponent of each of those romances. Now that they were all so disgustingly moony over each other, though, she sometimes had to indulge in hidden eye rolls. “I refuse to pay my employees to be sidetracked by their boyfriends,” Britt said.
Maddie sighed and sailed toward the kitchen. “She’s a brutal taskmaster,” she told Nikki before vanishing from sight.
“You haven’t met any handsome new bachelors in their fifties or sixties lately, have you?” Nikki asked Britt.
“No, I—”
Sweet Art’s front door opened to admit a long-haired, six-foot-tall man.
“Clint!” Britt called happily.
“Hey there.” He wore a leather vest sans undershirt, a cowboy hat decorated with a peacock feather, jeans, and boots. The getup was purely an expression of taste since he’d never lived in a cowboy state, only in a cowboy state of mind.
Nikki slid her the evil eye. “I just this minute asked you if you’d met any handsome new bachelors,” she accused.
“Clint’s not new to town. He works at . . .” Britt raised her voice to include Clint in their circle of conversation. “I was just going to say that you work for my parents at Bradfordwood as landscaper.”
“Don’t forget that I also work as the inn’s maid.”
“You mean to tell me,” Nikki said, “that you’ve been keeping a man who knows how to garden and how to clean all to yourself?” She managed to look both outraged with Britt and appreciative of Clint simultaneously.
“I didn’t know I was keeping him to myself,” Britt shot back. “I assumed you two had met.”
“Are you single?” Nikki asked Clint.
“I am.”
Nikki whistled. “Today is my lucky day.”
“I’m Clint Fletcher.” He proffered his hand.
“I’m available. So nice to meet you.” Nikki preened as if she’d said something terribly witty while they shook hands.
Despite the bravado that Clint’s clothing and hair suggested, his personality could be described as tentative. He was sometimes unsure of himself and always eager to please. He appeared to be taking Nikki in with a combination of interest and naked fear.
“Clint,” Britt said with a grand hand gesture, “it is my very great honor to present Nikki Clarkson to you. I thought you two might know each other because Nikki works for Nora at the library.”
“Do you come to the Historical Village often, Clint?” Nikki asked.
“Not often at all. This is probably only my second or third time here.” He slid a paper from his back pocket and handed it to Britt. “Casey would like to give chocolate to all of the inn’s guests on Easter Sunday. I volunteered to stop by with his order form.”
Casey worked as innkeeper at the Inn at Bradfordwood. “Awesome. Thanks.”
Nikki rested her arm against the top of the display case and swept out an imposing hip. “How old are you, Clint?”
“Sixty.”
Her heavily made-up eyes enlarged, and Britt almost laughed. Watching Nikki in action had long been the best entertainment in town. “I’m the same age!” Nikki exclaimed. “When’s your birthday?”
They exchanged birthdays and realized that Nikki was just two months younger than Clint. “Well, that’s perfection right there, that’s what that is,” Nikki said. “How do you stay in such good shape?”
“Well, I was once a professional performer—”
“What kind of performer?”
“An actor,” he answered shyly. “But interpretive juggling paid the bills.”
“Interpretive juggling,” Nikki said, awed.
“I still act, in addition to the work I do for the Bradfords. Since I don’t juggle anymore, I had to find another way to stay fit. So I took up Pilates.”
“Fabulous,” Nikki replied. “I gave up exercise in 1992, but I’ve recently been thinking that I’d be excellent at Pilates.”
“Britt?” Maddie’s voice drifted from the kitchen.
“I’ll be there in a minute. The show I’m watching out here is too good to miss.”
Britt’s words brought Maddie out immediately. “What’s too good to miss?”
Britt nodded at Clint and Nikki. “The interaction between these two.”
“Some privacy would be welcome right about now,” Nikki said.
“You’re in my shop,” Britt reminded her. She set her palms beneath her chin and blinked several times. “Don’t mind me.”
Maddie set her palms beneath her chin and blinked, too. “Don’t mind me, either.”
Nikki gave a huff and turned to Clint. “Is it any wonder that Britt doesn’t have a boyfriend?”
“I’ve had lots of boyfriends,” Britt said.
“But you haven’t managed to keep a single one.”
“I haven’t wanted to keep a single one.”
“Anyway.” Nikki gave Clint a these-immature-people-are-so-tiring expression. “When is your next Pilates class? I’d love to join you.”
For Zander, arriving at Frank and Carolyn’s house when he was a teen had been like arriving at an island of calm after a long, stormy voyage at sea.
The small bedroom with the twin bed and navy-and-white striped bedspread had held peace. The acres thick with trees that surrounded the house had brought comfort. The food they’d served him—casseroles and stir-fries and tacos and chicken salads—had steadied him. So had Carolyn’s reliability and Frank’s sense of humor.
On the days when Daniel had baseball practice after school and couldn’t drive Zander home, Carolyn had always been waiting for Zander in the carpool line in her Subaru Outlook. Not once had she forgotten.
Frank had insisted that Daniel and Zander watch funny movies with him on Sunday nights. He’d felt duty-bound to give them an education in films like Blazing Saddles and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Looking at Carolyn and Frank’s house now through adult eyes, Zander could see its modesty. The house had been built more than twenty years ago without the use of imagination. The front was flat. Its sides, gray. Black shutters. Two utilitarian stories. Neither Frank nor Carolyn had a green thumb, so nothing more interesting than hedges accessorized the exterior.
Inside, however, the house overflowed with color. Carolyn collected stained-glass windows. All sizes and shapes of them covered every inch of wall space. Sitting inside the living room felt like sitting inside a greenhouse.
When Kurt Shaw had arrived and Carolyn had ushered him in, he’d chosen to sit in Frank’s weathered TV-watching chair.
Courtney and Sarah, Frank and Carolyn’s daughters, occupied the sofa. The identical twins looked just like their father would’ve if he’d been female and thirty-two years old. Both had Frank’s dark hair, his hazel eyes, and his sharp-cornered smile that dug into the apples of their cheeks. Not that he’d seen a smile out of either of them over the past days.
They lived ten minutes apart from each other in Seattle, attended the same church, and spent a great deal of time together.
They’d been incredibly gracious about sharing their mother and father with Zander and Daniel. Especially because, having only spent time with Courtney and Sarah five times during their childhoods, Zander and Daniel had been near strangers when they’d moved into the girls’ former bedrooms.
Carolyn sat across from Zander, looking as fragile as she had when they’d visited the police station. Was her neck strong enough to support the rope of peach-colored beads she’d coiled around it?
Zander had tried to soften the news the best way he knew how when he’d told Carolyn about Nora’s suspicions concerning Frank’s identity. Even so, it had still sent Carolyn, Courtney, and Sarah reeling. All three looked shell-shocked, as if unsure when they’d receive the next blow.
“Zander told you that he found information on a second Frank Pierce, correct?” Kurt asked Carolyn.
“Yes.”
“Two people were using one birth certificate,” Kurt said, “which meant the birth certificate had been paired with at least one of them incorrectly. I had your husband’s fingerprints processed, and it turns out that he’s not the one the birth certificate belongs to.”
Zander’s attention honed on Kurt like a camera focusing.
“Then . . .” Carolyn’s voice trailed away to nothing. She cleared her throat. “My husband wasn’t Frank Pierce?”
“No.”
“Who was he?”
“James Richard Ross. Have you ever heard that name before?”
Bewilderment filled her eyes. “I’ve never heard that name before in my life. James Richard Ross, did you say?”
“Yes.”
“Are you . . . are you completely sure about this, Detective Shaw? That my husband was this other person?”
“Yes, ma’am. Very sure.” He extracted three pages from the file and spread them across the coffee table. “He was born in 1954 in Chicago. His mother had five other children, some older, some younger, with a total of three different fathers.”
Carolyn and her daughters stared at Kurt, faces glazed.
“Your husband dropped out of high school after his sophomore year,” Kurt continued. “It wasn’t that his grades were bad. In fact, from what I could tell, he was bright. I’m guessing that his desire to make money overrode his desire to get an education. He wasn’t listed as part of his mother’s household in the 1970 census, which means he’d left home by the age of sixteen.” He leaned over and pointed to a mug shot of a teenager. The black-and-white picture showed an expressionless kid with a John Lennon haircut. “Is this your husband?” he asked Carolyn.
The paper shuddered slightly in her hand as she picked it up and studied it. Zander knew—no doubt everyone here knew—what her response would be. The teenager in the photo was undeniably Frank.
“Yes,” Carolyn finally said. “This is my husband.”
“He was arrested three times,” Kurt said. “Once for underage consumption of alcohol when he was seventeen. Once on a drunk and disorderly charge when he was twenty-four. And once for robbing a gas station when he was twenty-six.”
On the kitchen counter, an incense stick that smelled of cloves burned.
“What did he steal from the gas station?” Sarah asked.
“All the money out of the cash register and safe, as well as food and beer. He and a friend named Ricardo Serra committed the crime together. Does the name Ricardo Serra ring a bell?”
They shook their heads.
“James and Ricardo both served time for the crime,” Kurt said. “Your husband was released from prison in November of 1983.”
“I met him a year and a half later,” Carolyn said.
“I found documents confirming that James Richard Ross was working in Seattle around that time. But after that, he vanishes from government records.”
Courtney knotted her hands together on the upper ridge of her pregnant stomach. “You think that my dad turned his back on everything that had come before and started over?” she asked Kurt.
“Yes. How did he explain his lack of family to you?” Kurt asked Carolyn.
“He said that his father abandoned his mother when he was four. That his mother died when he was eleven, and that he was then raised in the foster care system.”
So many lies. The revealing of them made Zander feel as though the foundation of this house might be torn in half at any second by an earthquake.
Today was Friday, and on Monday, he, Carolyn, Courtney, Sarah, Daniel, and many others would be attending Frank’s funeral. The programs had already been printed and they clearly stated his birth year as 1955 and his name as Frank Joseph Pierce. What was Carolyn supposed to put on her husband’s headstone now?
Would Carolyn still be able to trust, in retrospect, the relationship she’d had with Frank? Could Frank’s girls still trust the relationship they’d had with their dad? Could he still trust the relationship he’d had with Frank? Or did Frank’s lies force everything into question?
No.
He’d had so few good family relationships in his life. He needed to hang on to his belief in Frank’s love for him.
“You mentioned when we met at the station that a bullet had been removed from Frank’s leg,” Zander said to Kurt. “Could testing the bullet potentially provide us with useful information?”
“Useful information concerning the circumstances surrounding the shooting?” Kurt asked.
“Exactly.” If Zander could understand the shooting, which had happened around the time when Carolyn met Frank, perhaps he could understand Frank’s change of identity.
“It’s unlikely. Ballistics information will only provide us with details on the weapon the bullet was fired from. Also, I’d only have cause to analyze the bullet if I was investigating a crime.” He addressed Carolyn directly. “Which I’m not, since we know that Frank’s cause of death was a heart attack.”
“I understand,” she said.
The detective stood and said his good-byes.
“I’ll walk you out.” Zander fell in step with Kurt as they made their way down the front walkway. “Do you think Frank’s change of identity could have had anything to do with his death?”
“Are you concerned that it might?”
Zander gave a grim nod. “I don’t see anything in the paper work you brought that might have motivated a man to change his identity. What if he got involved in some kind of dangerous situation after his release from prison that caused him to take the extreme step of becoming someone different?”
“And?” They came to a stop near Kurt’s GMC.
“And that situation came back to haunt him last Friday?”
Kurt spun his key ring around his index finger once. Twice. “After lying dormant for thirty-five years?”
“Maybe.”
“I’d be willing to look into that possibility if I had evidence that pointed to murder. But I don’t. Frank died of a heart attack.”
“Possibly brought on by extreme stress?”
“But far more likely brought on the old-fashioned way, by a blood clot. While we were waiting for the autopsy results to come back, the chief and I went through Frank’s truck from top to bottom. We dusted for prints and searched for fibers. We hunted through his phone, his phone records, his work and home computers, his browser history. We didn’t find anything out of the ordinary.”
In other words, Kurt had completed his responsibilities concerning Frank. He’d gone above and beyond, in fact, by researching James Richard Ross and bringing his findings to them. Kurt couldn’t spend any more of the Merryweather Police Department’s time digging around in Frank’s distant past.
“What about the fact that Frank was missing for several hours before he died?” Zander asked. “Does that raise any suspicions in your mind?”
“It’s strange, but no, it doesn’t really raise suspicions. It’s not extremely unusual for people to stay out all night or go off the grid for a day.”
“It was extremely unusual for Frank, though.”
“I hear you. However, Frank was a grown man, free to stay out all night if he wanted to.”
Zander thanked the detective and returned to the now-empty living room. His aunt and cousins had moved to the kitchen. The subdued tones of their conversation drifted to him in snatches. The pages containing information about Frank stared up at him from what had once been a benign coffee table.
Zander memorized the sheets one by one, grief gathering in his chest. Grief because he’d never see Frank again, but also grief for the difficult childhood his uncle had faced.
What had happened to the teenager in the photo? What had his eyes seen once he’d become an adult? What could have occurred after his release from prison that might have motivated him to abandon his true identity as James Richard Ross?
Zander wasn’t on the Merryweather Police Department’s time. He couldn’t run ballistics on a bullet, but he could contact Frank’s relatives in Chicago and ask them for information on his uncle. He could search newspaper reports for shootings that occurred near Enumclaw in 1985.
He’d do his best to dig up Frank’s secrets. Because Carolyn had asked it of him. Because his sense of unease concerning Frank’s death wasn’t shrinking, but growing. Because there was a chance that Frank’s secrets might help him keep Carolyn, Courtney, and Sarah safe.
Text message from Britt to Zander:
Britt
I forgot to mention earlier that Nikki Clarkson came by the shop the other day and told me that you remind her of a Dickens orphan. Isn’t that hilarious? And also somewhat apropos?
Zander
A Dickens orphan?
Britt
Tragic and brooding and beautiful, she said.
Britt
I believe she said beautiful, anyway. It might have been gorgeous.
Britt
Maybe it was gorgeous.
Zander
I’ll take gorgeous, because that’s the honest truth.
Britt
It really is.
Zander
I’ll also accept orphan and brooding.
Britt
But you take exception to tragic?
Zander
I do. It sounds needy. How about you let Nikki know that I’m a giant celebrity now?
Britt
Sure. Right after I finish doing every other possible thing I could do in the universe.
Zander
At the very least Nikki should upgrade me to wealthy Dickens orphan.
I like wealthy DickenSIAN orphan better.
Britt
I’m going with Dickensian. I like saying it. Dickensian.
Britt
Zander Ford, wealthy Dickensian orphan.