Chapter 18
Tracy Prentiss had been gone for only thirty minutes when another woman from Josh’s past waltzed into Yeast of Eden.
Sharon Steward swept into the bread shop with her shoulders back. She stood tall and proud, and could have easily played the part of one of the immortal Amazonian women who lived on Paradise Island in the Wonder Woman movies. She wore a black dress—still in mourning, I supposed, despite Josh’s lies and deceit.
I spotted her, but she hadn’t yet spotted me. What was she doing here? Had she somehow tracked me down, like Tracy Prentiss had? Or maybe she was just here to see the place Josh had spent so much of his time.
I stood at the coffee bar, in plain sight, but turned my back so she wouldn’t spot me. If she wasn’t here actually looking for me, like Tracy had been, then I had a chance of evading her. I quickly considered my options. I could duck my head and hightail it to the kitchen, but I’d have to pass right by her. The odds of escaping her notice were not in my favor.
I could try to walk backward through the dining area toward the kitchen, but that would be a bit on the conspicuous side. I nixed that plan.
The only other option was to keep my back turned and hope she would be in and out without recognizing me.
I turned my back to the door and crouched down, using the damp towel in my hand to wipe the front of the cabinet. The bell on the door tinkled, and my heartbeat surged. Maybe she’d been following the news articles and had simply come to Yeast of Eden to see the place Josh had spent so much of his time. I took a chance and glanced over my shoulder, my heart constricting when I saw her staring right at me.
She blinked, and her face took on an odd expression. It was as if she was trying to place me, given the out-of-context setting, but at the same time, it was clear she knew exactly where she’d seen me. “Ivy?”
I feigned surprise as I stood. “Sharon? What a . . . wow! What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” She registered the apron I wore with the Yeast of Eden logo embroidered on the bib. “You work here?”
I looked around, wide-eyed, as if I was seeing the bread shop for the first time. “Here?”
“Yes. Here,” she said, her tone effectively conveying how ridiculous the question had been.
“I . . . yes. Part-time.”
She came closer, suspicion and anger commingling on her face. “You said you met Josh on Meet Your Mate dot com,” she said, accusation heavy in her voice.
I racked my brain for a way to talk myself out of the lie, but there wasn’t one. It would be too unbelievable to say I’d met Josh online and then coincidentally met him here, too. I had linked myself with the five grieving and betrayed women, pretending to be one of them. Now I had to come clean. For the second time that day, I led a heartbroken woman to the table by the window.
Esmé was working the counter this morning, although, at the moment, she was leaning against the back counter reading a book. I caught her eye and held my hand up, opening and closing it twice to indicate I was taking ten minutes. She nodded at me, then went back to her book.
“Would you like anything to drink or eat?” I asked Sharon before I sat down.
“No,” she practically snarled. “What I want is for you to tell me who you are. Are you really one of Josh’s victims?”
She cut right to the chase. I had to admit, I liked that about her. “Look, I’m going to be honest with you.”
“Oh, please do,” she said, her sarcasm thicker than a heavy layer of morning coastal fog, but then a lightbulb seemed to go off in her head. She chastised herself. “Oh my God. How stupid. I remember reading your name. You’re the one who found him, aren’t you?”
Me and my very memorable name. “My dog, Agatha, actually made the . . . uh . . . discovery.”
“The news said Josh came here to work. Almost every day. That he was poisoned here.”
“He did work here, but our bread did not poison him,” I said. I pointed to his regular table. “He came around eight in the morning, and worked until about eleven. Sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little later.”
She stared at the empty table as if she’d conjured up his ghost. After a few seconds, she blinked. “Uh huh. And what was he like when he was here?”
I got the sense that she was trying to piece together who the real Josh Prentiss was. How much of the man she knew was authentic versus a part he’d played. Her question was tough to answer, given the new information I had about his online dating ruse and the women he’d duped. “I always thought he was very friendly. Charming. He usually ordered a particular thing on each day of the week.” I went through his Tuesday through Friday routine.
“So he had a sourdough roll the morning he died.” She looked down, musing. “It would be difficult to lace that with poison.”
Exactly. “It sure would.”
“He spent the night with me Monday,” she said out of the blue. She stared out the window at the cars driving just twenty miles per hour through town. The news vans were gone. No more holdouts for more dirt on Olaya. Not even Marcus Brolin. The narrative had already shifted, and the media had begun telling the story of Josh Prentiss and his deceptions. His favorite-son status was tarnished. Like Tracy had said, carrying Josh’s revised story was now the burden of his family.
I considered Sharon Steward more closely. The perfectly put-together black dress. The low-heeled black pumps. The understated makeup and wavy dark hair, a thin line of gray at the roots. No tears. No bags under her eyes. Could she have discovered Josh’s game and poisoned him? Was she here playing a game? Was I sitting across from a killer? “So you saw him Tuesday morning?” I asked. “You got to eat breakfast together?” I asked.
She snapped her attention back to me. “No. I live in Santa Barbara. He always had to leave early to get to work. I only saw him on Monday nights. I thought it was all the traveling he did. Or said he did. Now I know the truth. He was with someone else on each of the other nights. Probably during the days, too.”
“Is that what the other women said? Linda and Peggy and Betsy and Darlene?” And Jeanne and Martina, I added silently.
“Linda said she saw him on Tuesday nights. She’s in Morro Bay. That’s all I know, but with that many women . . . I don’t know how he kept it all straight. I imagine he had women up and down the coast. He must have put miles and miles on his car. And being back with his wife? He was . . .” She trailed off and hung her head, her stoic façade cracking for a moment. She looked up at me, her face resetting. “He took advantage of lonely women. He was a horrible human being.”
I couldn’t disagree. And she was right. The fact that some of these women were not from Santa Sofia explained how they didn’t run into him at the bread shop or around town. I bet most of his women were from ritzy places like Malibu and Los Feliz. That also explained why he left the bread shop around noon. He probably spent his afternoons getting to those locales. “Sharon, you said you gave him eleven thousand dollars?”
“So stupid, right? You’re lucky you didn’t actually fall for him. And Peggy, with fifty thousand?”
“If the other women gave him money to invest, too—”
“You know they did. Clearly, that’s all he was after.”
Even with all the evidence against him, it was still difficult to reconcile this new version of Josh with the man who’d been a Yeast of Eden patron for the past few months. Still, I knew she was right. “Why did you come here?” I asked Sharon.
She sighed. “I couldn’t sleep last night. I just tossed and turned, fuming about how idiotic I was to trust him. Of course, I wasn’t the only one, so it wasn’t just me, but that really does not make me feel any better.”
“Josh was very good at conning people.” I reached for Sharon’s hand, covering it with mine. “You might even say he excelled at it. You can’t blame yourself.”
Once again, her stoic façade cracked. Her lower lip quivered, just slightly, but enough to reveal how hurt she really was underneath her anger and self-flagellation. She pursed her lips and cleared her throat. “He really did,” she said. “He really did excel at it.”
I hated to ask, but curiosity got the better of me. “Sharon, how did he get you to give him so much money? What was it for?”
“It was an investment. A sure thing, he said.” She made air quotes around the words sure thing. “It was some company with new technology they were patenting. He said it was going to revolutionize something with cell phone battery life, I think? He said it was a complicated business model, but they had a high rate of return. And returns were guaranteed.” She shook her head, that self-reproachment back.
Hearing Sharon explain what little she knew set off alarms in my head. I’d overheard enough of his phone conversations to have heard some of the same investment nomenclature: high rate of return. . . complicated . . . guaranteed returns. “He sold it well,” I said. And it sounded to me as if he’d been selling it well for a good long time.
“I trusted him,” she said. My mind circled back to my earlier conversation with Tracy. She’d trusted him, too.
Unfortunately for anyone who knew him, Josh Prentiss, it seemed, was wholly untrustworthy.