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Back in my office, I stare at the sheet of paper that Cliff handed me, detailing Melanie’s travel plans.
A one-way ticket to Hawaii. Constant crying. Hm.
Even without doing one lick of investigating, I’ve started forming conclusions about the case.
Melanie clearly isn’t happy in her marriage; not talking to her husband, secretly booked tickets, and chronic crying jags do not equal a happy wife.
My shoulders slump.
I do not want to be the one to tell Cliff that his wife is not happy.
After a few minutes of dwelling on this, a phrase from Jumper Strongheart, my personal development guru, comes to mind: Are you a worrier, or a warrior? I can imagine him pacing the stage, asking the audience this question. I’ve never seen him live, but I’d love to. I imagine him in my little office, pacing back and forth and speaking into a headset. ‘Are you a worrier, Penny Banks, or a warrior?’ he’d ask.
“Warrior!” I say out loud
The sound of my own voice jolts me, and I start tipping backwards on my Swiss Ball. Then I fall backwards off the exercise ball, and land with a thud on the floor, my dress up around my waist. I am so glad that didn’t happen when Mayor Haywater was in the room.
I silently curse Jumper Strongheart and his ‘Strong Spine—Strong Life’ protocol, which forbids chair-sitting.
I prop myself up onto my elbows. My feet are still high up on the ball. From down here, I can see the yarn that I tossed onto the floor, along with the empty mechanical pencil. It reminds me of how pitifully I handled the ‘intake’ of my new client.
I am cringing as I struggle to my feet. On the blank piece of paper, I jot down a few notes to myself, so that I can learn from the situation.
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There. I think that about covers it. I think I’m about done for the day. I’ll tackle this again in the morning, when I feel fresh.
Though it’s been a rough day—a learning experience, as Jumper would call it—there is one good thing that happened. I have three hundred dollars! I can pay my rent.
I happily stuff the cash into my wallet, and then go about emptying coffee mugs.
The supply closet has one little window, which opens and doesn’t have a screen. When I poke my head out of it, I can see down to the sidewalk below. I pour mug after mug of stale coffee and tea out onto the empty sidewalk, where there’s always a brown stain in between rain storms (thanks to me).
Once this is done, I stuff three of the empty mugs, into my cross-body messenger bag. Then I carefully don my bag and head for the door.
Soon I’m at home, scrubbing coffee stains out of mugs. I’m elbow deep in suds when I hear a knock on the door.
I have a feeling it’s Chris, and I’m right.
When I open the door, he’s standing there. He immediately leans in and gives me a kiss on the cheek.
I’m wearing bright yellow rubber dishwashing gloves that are dripping with soap suds, so I don’t wrap my arms around his neck like I want to. Instead I grin and accept the kiss.
Chris Wagner is my boyfriend. He’s also a police captain for the Hillcrest Police Department. It's a small department of four, and he’s a star player.
It’s a position he’s good at.
In fact, when I first developed a crush on Christopher Wagner, he was the captain of the Hillcrest High School Boys Basketball team. I was a girl four years younger than him, drooling from the bleachers. All these years later, he’s still handsome as heck, and I’m still his biggest fan.
Chris is tall and in great shape, with blue-grey eyes and sandy blonde hair. Tonight, he’s dressed in basketball shorts and a black tee shirt. Best of all, he has a six pack of beer in one hand, and a pizza in the other.
“Hungry?” he asks, as I reach for the pizza.
“Starving!” I say. “I was about to pour a bowl of cereal. This is so much better!”
Chris laughs. As he enters the apartment, I smell his body wash. I see now that his hair is also still a bit wet, like he just stepped out of the shower. I know what that means.
“Did you just get home from work?” I ask.
Chris has two looks: either he’s dressed in his police uniform, or he’s just peeled it off, and is unwinding so that he can perform well in his next shift. His life is totally centered around his work. He loves being a police officer.
I don’t blame him. I wanted to be one, too. I went to college for my criminal justice degree, and then entered Hillcrest’s police academy immediately after. That’s actually when Chris and I first hooked up. He was the trainer of my academy class. We kissed on day one, and in the days that followed, we did more than kiss.
A lot more.
Looking back now, I see what a mistake it was. I should have ignored my feelings for Chris, and tried to get through the academy without bedding my instructor. Maybe then, Academy would have gone better for me. As it was, I was an emotional mess, and I failed out of it. Not long after that, Chris and I broke up.
Needless to say, I thought my life was over.
I had to say goodbye to my dream career and my dream guy, all within one week. I was crushed.
However, the saying is true: Every dark cloud does have a silver lining.
In the months and years after I hit rock bottom, I found Zumba, knitting, and my PI program. And look at me now! I’m running my own not-so-successful PI business, and almost-knitting an Icelandic sweater! Plus, Chris and I got back together—sort of—a few months back. We’re taking it slow; maybe things aren’t as passionate as they were the first time around, but we’ve gotten into a comfortable sort of groove. Does it get any better than that?
You don’t really have to answer that.
With a hissing sound, Chris cracks open a beer and hands it to me.
“Thanks,” I say, accepting it. “How was work? Did you just get off?”
He nods, and then opens a beer for himself and takes a swig. “Twenty minutes ago,” he says. He opens the pizza box and a cloud of steam billows upwards.
“That was fast,” I say, trying to calculate in my head how in the world Chris managed to ride his mountain bike home from the police station, pick up cold beers, order a pizza, take a shower, and make it over to my place (which is right next door) in twenty minutes. Sometimes it takes me that long just to wash my hair.
I do have really long, thick hair, while Chris’s is only slightly longer than a buzz cut, but still.
“I’m getting the routine, down,” Chris says, grinning as he pulls a slice of the pie towards him. A long string of cheese stretches out from the slice, and he has to sever it with his fingers.
“I ordered the pizza before I jumped in the shower,” he explains. “Plus, I started getting a few six packs each time I’m at the store, so that I don’t have to run out every time.”
“You’re a wise man,” I say, reaching for a slice myself.
Chris laughs. “How was your day?” he asks.
“Good,” I say. Then, before I think too much about it, I say, “Mayor Haywater visited me, at my office.”
“Was he lost?” Chris asks.
I glare at him, while chewing my pizza. Yes, I thought the same thing, but that doesn’t mean he can think it.
“No,” I say, once I swallow the pizza and wash it down with beer. “You really have no respect for my PI career, do you? He wanted to see me. He wants me to spy on his wife,” I say. “She ordered a one-way ticket to Hawaii, but never went. He’s worried.”
Chris gulps down some beer. Then, after a minute of thought he says, “Be careful with that, Penny. It sounds messy. He might think he wants to know what’s going on with Melanie, but I doubt he’s going to be happy when you present him with the facts. People tend to shoot the messenger.”
“I know.” My shoulders slump. “It’s not good. But he offered cash, and I couldn’t pass it up.”
We eat in silence for a bit. Turkey, my calico cat, joins us and I toss him occasional bits of cheese, which he scoops up with his tongue while his tail twitches happily.
As I eat, I’m thinking about my conversation with Cliff. “Hey, Chris,” I say. “Remember how Joe Gallant was found in the walk-in freezer, at The Place?”
“How could I forget?” Chris asks. He stops eating. “It was horrible.” He places his piece of pizza down on the box top, which reminds me that I didn’t get out plates for us.
I hop off of my barstool and round the counter to grab some plates.
The cupboards are empty. Did I forget to run the dishwasher again?
I reach for paper napkins instead, and push a few over towards Chris. Then, I search the cupboards for glasses. I find one clean recycled mason jar, and one juice glass. I fill each with water and carry them back towards my stool. I’ve learned long ago that if I’m going to drink beer up here in the mountains, I need to drink water along with it.
“How did he get stuck in there?” I ask.
Chris shrugs. “It was an old freezer. The handle from the inside jammed, and the thermostat was all screwy as well. When we got there, the thing was at negative two. My chief thinks, that’s what made the handle jam—maybe the lower temperature froze the release mechanism.”
“Why did the temperature go down so low?” I ask.
“Who knows?” Chris says. “Old machines malfunction all the time. It’s hard to say.”
“What if someone turned it down,” I say.
Chris shoots me a warning look. “Penny, don’t go imagining things,” he says. “We checked out the security footage, from The Place. No one out of the ordinary went in or out of the restaurant.”
“Who did, then?” I ask.
Chris looks reluctant to tell me, so I ask again. “Come on, Chris, you can tell me. Who went into the restaurant that day?” I ask.
He’s still thinking.
I ask a third time.
I think that there’s a reason for that saying, ‘the third time’s the charm,’ because this time he answers me.
“Let’s see...” he says, looking up and to one side as he recalls the footage. “Joe went into the kitchen first, around ten A.M. Then there was Ralph, Cliff’s assistant, at about eleven. Then, Glenn, the assistant cook. He was in and out a few times. After that, Cliff, at about two thirty. Last, there was Melanie. She went in at around three. That was it. The medics and police were called in at about three thirty, when the body was discovered.”
“Did the medics say how long he’d been dead for?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “They couldn’t determine that, without performing an autopsy. We didn’t think that was necessary.”
“Chris... what if....? What if one of those people murdered Joe Gallant, and made it look like an accident? And what if that’s connected, somehow, to Melanie’s one-way ticket?”
“How could the death of Joe be connected to Melanie’s trip to Hawaii?” Chris asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. But I’m going to find out.