Nabbed in the Nasturtiums Page 19

  “And that’s getting to be a really bad habit,” he said, shaking his head.

  She laughed. “I know. I know. It’s not exactly what I was planning on either. But at least I’m safe now.” She walked over to the big truck, opened the door, and waited while Mack spent a few minutes cuddling Mugs.

  He looked over at her and asked, “How’s Thaddeus?”

  Thaddeus poked his head out from behind her hair and crowed, “Thaddeus is here. Thaddeus is here.”

  “He’s been really quiet the whole time,” she said. “Not sure if that’s just because he doesn’t like the scenario or if he’s just really tired.”

  “If he’s smart,” Mack muttered, “which I know that he is, then I’ll say that he just doesn’t like the scenario.”

  “Maybe,” she muttered. “They’re all wary.”

  “Did you see anybody else following you?”

  She shook her head. “Not that I could tell. I think, as soon as I left the area, they left me alone. I felt kind of watched, but it might have just been in my head.”

  “Hard to say. We also don’t know if other players are involved here.”

  “I was wondering about that,” she said. “If you think about it, somebody else could have dropped off that ransom note.”

  “But why?” he asked.

  “It takes me back to the original question. Why did the wrong brother end up in jail in the first place?” she asked. “All of it seems suspicious.”

  “It is,” he said. “But that still doesn’t give us any answers.”

  “Are you going to talk to Denise?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Alone, as in, without you.”

  “Ah,” she said, shaking her head. “Any way to keep me out of that discussion, like how you got that video?”

  “Maybe. At least I hope so. I’ll take a look at that video again and see if it identifies you at all.”

  “I hope not,” she said, frowning at that thought.

  “It depends on if the animals are in the frames,” he said, looking at her. “Those are the kinds of things that you have to watch out for when you take photos like that.”

  “And I didn’t even think of it,” she said in horror, staring at him. She looked at the animals. “You guys are okay, right?”

  Mugs just woofed at her and laid his head back down. “I think that was a long walk for them,” she muttered. “Everybody is tired.”

  He laughed. “Why wouldn’t they be?” he said, smiling at her. “You went quite a few miles.”

  She nodded. “It wasn’t planned though.” Before long, he pulled up in front of her house, and she smiled when she saw it. “It’s so good to be home,” she muttered. The animals made absolutely no argument about getting out and heading inside. If anything, it looked like relief flashed on their faces. She smiled as she walked in and said, “Coffee would be lovely.”

  “Will you stay home now?” he asked, standing at the doorway.

  She nodded. “I will,” she said. “I’m really tired. My legs are sore, and I might even have blisters.”

  “Walking uphill like that can play havoc on your ankles too.”

  She nodded. “Go off and do your thing,” she said. “I don’t know if what I ended up with helps or hinders you.”

  “At this point in time what you did was find more pieces to a very confusing puzzle,” he said, “but we will get to the bottom of it.”

  “Good,” she said, smiling. “Go for it.”

  He repeated, “And you’ll stay out of trouble?”

  “I’ll absolutely stay out of trouble,” she said. “I’ll go back to the Bob Small stuff. I kind of like cold cases. Everybody is dead and gone, and they can’t come after me.”

  “That’s not true. What about family members, friends, partners?” he asked, shaking his head at her. “You need to remember how people did come after you an awful lot of the time. So stay safe, please.”

  She watched as he left, feeling a sense of relief to be home and also a warmth in her heart that Mack had once again come to her rescue. It shouldn’t have happened, but it had, and she was grateful. As soon as he was gone, she looked at the animals and said, “We need food.”

  She gave them all a few extra treats and filled up their food and water dishes, and, while everybody tucked into their food, she made herself an omelet. She wanted something even heartier but was too tired to make more. With everybody sitting down outside, she happily sat in her little corner of her new deck, until her phone rang. She looked at it and responded, “Hi, Nan. How are you?”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. Why?”

  “I just—” Nan stopped and said, “I’m not sure. I’ve just had a terrible feeling today.”

  “I was in a little bit of a rough spot this morning, but Mack bailed me out again,” she said, “so I’m fine now.”

  “Details,” her grandmother demanded immediately. “I want details.”

  She laughed. “You can have a few of them,” she said, “but I don’t really have a ton of them.” Then she explained what had happened.

  “Oh my,” Nan said. “I know those houses up there. Let me think about it. Maybe I don’t know the exact house. An awful lot of big orchards are out there now, and they’ve changed hands over the years. Of course it used to be that the orchards weren’t making very much money, but they sure are now,” Nan said.

  Doreen kept eating, while Nan mulled it all over. Finally Doreen said, “Anyway, I’m quite tired. I’ll just chill here for the afternoon.”

  “Please stay home and out of trouble.”

  “I promised Mack that I would,” she said. “He wasn’t very happy with me.”

  “Of course not,” she said. “You really don’t understand how much he cares, do you?”

  “I’m not going there right now,” she said.

  “You don’t have to. You just need to realize that what he does comes from caring.”

  “And I get that,” she said. “Oh, and my ex called while I was walking too.”

  Nan groaned. “You need to ditch him.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice?” she said. “I need to touch base with Nick.”

  “And you need to stop answering phone calls from that horrid man you married,” Nan said. “He’ll be nothing but trouble.”

  “That could be. I’m not exactly sure how to get out of any of this right now. I wish none of it had happened.”

  “That won’t help,” Nan said, and she hung up not long afterward.

  With a cup of coffee and sitting in the safety of her garden area, Doreen looked at the work that needed to be done and said, “I need to get back to Millicent’s.” Ever since she’d fallen out of the habit of going every Friday, it seemed like it was hard to get back into that same routine. Sometimes it was a Thursday. Sometimes it was a Saturday. Last time was probably two Saturdays ago since Doreen had been there, and she didn’t like that the random days made things much more awkward for her.

  But also she could only fit so much into a day, and she’d been so tired lately. She knew that was a bit of a cop-out, but it was kind of hard to not find excuses. But she also needed something to take her mind off of all that had happened today. So she contacted Millicent and said, “Millicent, I’m so sorry. I should have been by again last week, before now for sure. Do you want me to come by today and work on your gardening?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind, that would be good,” she said. “Some weeds in the front yard are bothering me.”

  “Sure. We’ll walk over in a few minutes then.”

  She felt better knowing she would do something helpful for somebody, while giving herself something to work on. Even though she was tired, it wasn’t the exhaustive kind of tired, so she headed over to Millicent’s place. Her animals were in tow, all seemingly restored in spirit. Once there, Doreen smiled to see Millicent had a teapot out and waved her over.

  “I figured we might have a cup of tea before you started.”
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  Doreen laughed. “You know I’m always up for a cup of tea.”

  “And it’s nice of you to spend time with an old woman,” she said. “I admit that I do get lonely.”

  “I think that’s pretty normal for everybody sometimes,” she said.

  “Maybe. My life used to be so full, and then it just becomes so much less,” she said, with a half smile.

  “I’m not sure that’s a problem either,” Doreen said. “Sometimes my life is too busy.”

  Millicent asked her, “Are you helping out my son on any cases?”

  “Honestly, right now, I’m sure he thinks I’m more of a bother than anything.” Then she launched into a little bit of an explanation about Denise and the gardener who was kidnapped.

  “Oh my,” Millicent said, “I don’t think Mack wants you to get into any trouble.”

  “I don’t want to get into any trouble either, but somehow I got asked to go.”

  “And did you think about that?” she asked. “Like maybe why that would even happen?”

  “She said it was because she’d heard about my cases.”

  “And you know what? That could very well be it. It’s just an interesting thing, particularly if she turns out to be guilty of something.”

  “But I don’t know that she is at this point,” Doreen protested.

  “I just don’t want people to use you to get to Mack or to plant seeds of things that have gone wrong or that they want you to believe because of it.”

  “I certainly hadn’t considered that,” Doreen said, looking at her.

  “You probably need to now, just because you are getting famous.”

  She winced. “I don’t feel famous,” she muttered. She tossed back the rest of her tea and said, “Okay, show me where those weeds are.”

  And, with that, they got down to the business of cleaning up Millicent’s flower garden again. It didn’t take much. By the time Doreen had it weeded, she got out the edger and worked on trimming up the edges a bit. Millicent had a beautiful garden, and she’d spent a lot of time over the years keeping it perfect, so this was just little bits and pieces that Doreen needed to do to keep it that way.

  As Doreen was leaving, Millicent asked, “It wasn’t that house with the weird gables, was it?”

  Doreen thought about it and said, “I don’t know what you mean by weird.”

  “Kind of like there should be an extra gable, like one was missing.”

  “Kind of,” she said, “in a blue trim, I think. I don’t really have much of a memory of it.”

  Millicent nodded. “You know what? I think one of your grandmother’s friends did the siding on that house.”

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” she said. “If anybody in Nan’s group does siding, it’s not that huge of a town. I mean, I know it’s a city, and I keep calling it a small town because it feels so much more that way.”

  Millicent laughed. “And for those of us who have been here forever, it’s gotten too big for our comfort.”

  “I’m sure that’s true too,” Doreen said, with a smile. “It’s way smaller than the city that I come from. I get that too. Anyway I’m sure the size of Kelowna doesn’t make a bit of difference in this murder case.”

  “I think the siding repairs were fairly recent.”

  “I still don’t understand. What difference does it make?” Doreen asked.

  Millicent shrugged. “I’m not sure, but just something was off about it.”

  “This whole thing is off,” she said, with a laugh.

  “Some things are like that, aren’t they?”

  “They definitely are,” Doreen said, smiling. “I feel like I’m running around in circles on this case, and nothing concrete has been sorted out. I have no files to look up. There’s nothing.”

  “I guess it depends on if you’re looking up the uncle. But what if you should be looking up, you know, the guy who was hitting him? I wonder who that would have been.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “That whole family up there is a bit weird.”

  “They’ve got an awful lot of family history online now, though. So, if you could get a family tree lined up, you might recognize somebody.”

  On that note Doreen looked at her in surprise and said, “You know what? That’s a good idea. I haven’t done that yet,” she said. “I’ve been tired and off-balance a little bit because of all these other Bob Small cases. I never really had a chance to get focused on this one.”

  “That can happen all the time in life,” Millicent said, with a giggle, “but it might be time to go find some family history.”

  Doreen nodded and waved a hand at the garden and asked, “What else am I doing here?”

  But Millicent just waved her hand. “We’re good,” she said. “It’s gorgeous as usual. Go off and do your stuff.”

  And, with that, she laughed. “In that case, if you don’t mind, I will.”

  And Doreen headed back home again.

  Chapter 26

  The minute Doreen walked into the house, she sat down at her laptop. Mugs curled up at her feet, obviously tired and worn out. Thaddeus headed straight to his roost in the living room and slept. Of Goliath, there was no sign. He’d disappeared. She looked around and said, “I’m sorry, guys. Our walk today was a bit much, I know.”

  Thaddeus opened an eye and shut it immediately.

  “Ouch,” she said, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  She kept working away on her laptop, figuring out just what she needed to do here. Because apparently something was going on, and she hadn’t done all her basic research stuff. With a pen and paper at the ready, she looked up the guy who was supposedly missing. She found the missing uncle had a brother in the archives and stopped because of a mention of his brother being simple. Not retarded, which is something that they would have said in the olden days, but he was on the autistic scale, yet was highly functioning. That was interesting, and, if so, she wondered how the jails had let him into the system. But, as she continued to read, she saw that he’d passed whatever tests he’d taken in school, so there was some doubt on that simple diagnosis as well. It was later mentioned that he was also dyslexic. She frowned at that too.

  “That’s hardly a jail-sentence diagnosis.” She also found a sister to the two brothers, but one of the brothers is dead in the morgue, and she confirmed that the parents were long gone. So now she had three older siblings accounted for, and she wondered about that because she hadn’t seen any sign of a sister in that age group at the house by the orchard. Of course she might not live here or even still be alive, for that matter. Further research pointed out that the sister had moved back east and had passed away back there some time ago.

  “Doesn’t mean she didn’t have kids though,” Doreen murmured. By the time she worked her way through the family tree, she found the dead sister had had two children, one son and a daughter—Denise. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” she said. “So Denise’s mother is dead, and she has a brother, which Mack tried to tell me about earlier.” Obviously their family kept fairly close, otherwise there would be no connection between the uncle and Denise. But who was the other stranger? That’s the one Doreen wanted to identify, and she had no other way to figure it out without Mack’s help. She texted Mack and asked if he would share what happened to Denise’s mother and father.

  He sent back a question mark.

  Just following the family history. Two brothers—Dicky and his dead brother in the morgue—and a sister. Sister is dead, but she had a son and a daughter, Denise, who is here. So the two brothers are her uncles. That’s the relationship to the guy who was kidnapped, but I wonder whether the mother and/or parents died of natural causes. Plus you never told me more about Denise’s brother.

  She got no answer for a long moment, and she finally put down her phone and went back to her research. Only in one small article did Doreen read something about Denise’s uncle Dicky having been charged with theft. And that brought Doreen back to the question
of what was it that Dicky had stolen? Like the blackmail note had mentioned $100,000? What if that note was from somebody completely different? What if this started out as a way for this Dicky to disappear, and whoever was looking for Dicky found the “simple” brother instead and killed him?

  She sat back, as slowly some of the pieces began to make more sense. She started writing it down. Two brothers, one goes to jail for the other. The supposedly simple guy goes to jail for Dicky, the brother who stole something. Whoever it is that Dicky stole from finds out he’s free from jail and living in Kelowna, but the simpler of the brothers is living at the family’s country home, while the other brother, Dicky, supports himself by being a gardener for the city on a contract basis and lives elsewhere in town.

  The contract gardener finds out that the guy he cheated is in town, so Dicky fakes his own kidnapping to disappear, but this guy who’s after him finds his simple brother and kills him instead. Now they have the cops looking for the one brother, and they have this victim of the theft looking for the same brother—Dicky. And the guy who did all the time and was innocent of everything is now dead.

  She nodded, spoke out loud. “So who’s the stranger at the house though? Who’s the guy beating up Dicky? How does Denise play into this, and who is after them?”

  With that written down, she sent Mack an email with her thoughts. Then she sat down and sent him a text. I need to know who Dicky supposedly stole from way back when.

  He replied right away. A huge data company.

  So he was their accountant? she asked.

  He was part of an inventory audit that was done, but he was a computer geek.

  So did he steal funds or information?

  We don’t know exactly.

  I need more information on it, she replied.

  She hoped he would get it and share that with her but had no guarantee that he was too interested in helping her out at this point. Although sharing this info with her should be helping him out too. She smiled when he texted back.

  He sold data, email addresses, banking information, security information.

  She nodded and, speaking to nobody in particular, said, “White-collar crime, nobody physically hurt, loss of data, no responsibility. Yada, yada, yada.” So he wouldn’t feel bad about what he was doing but obviously some of that information went into the wrong hands. And who knows what was stolen? Maybe he found something else when he was in there too.