“I was talking about you having sex in Mrs. Haggerty’s.”
“Says the woman who still has her own bed! Can we please focus on what’s important here? Penny had that same book of old mysteries in her house.”
“So?”
“So the woman owns a library of pristine contemporary romance novels. She keeps them in a glass-enclosed case in her living room, so why is there a ratty old collection of Agatha Christiemurder mysteries hidden in her closet? And why does Mrs. Haggerty have the same exact book in her nightstand?”
I hadn’t mentioned a word of it to Nick last night. I couldn’t, not without revealing how I knew about Penny’s book. But it might be possible to convince him that Mrs. Haggerty and Mrs. Dupree had both lied when they’d claimed they didn’t know each other. “All I need is some thread of evidence connecting the two of them,” I told Vero. “I just can’t figure out how the book fits into the case.”
“Maybe you need to stop thinking about this as a case and start thinking about it like a story. Maybe it’ll make more sense to you that way.”
“What do you mean?”
She turned sideways on the bench seat to face me. “You’ve got all these little random plot threads, right? All you have to do is figure out how those plot threads connect. Ask yourself, what do Mrs. Haggerty and Penny Dupree have in common with that book? Figure it out, and that’s the solution to your mystery. Anything else is just a red herring. What else did you find?”
“Just a letter from her late husband and a stack of her old neighborhood watch diaries. They were in an evidence box the police left in her house. They must have already searched them all.” Vero’s eyes went wide. “Not the most recent one,” I assured her before she could ask.
“You think Tran has it?”
“God, I hope not.”
We both jumped at a loud knock on the window. I craned my head above the captain’s chairs to see my sister’s face pressed up against the glass. She cupped her hands around her eyes, squinting to see through the tinting. “What the hell are you two doing in there?”
I reached between the seats and unlocked the door. Georgia slid it open and frowned at us.
“The car has to be running for a suicide pact to work, you know.”
“We’re hiding from Mrs. Haggerty,” I explained.
“Don’t bother,” Georgia said, climbing in with us. She knelt on Delia’s booster seat, leaning over the back of the chair to see us. “Mrs. Haggerty was the one who told me you were out here.”
“How’d she know we were out here?” Vero asked.
“She said she heard you screaming that it was cold in the garage and why the hell was Finn making you sit in the van in your pajamas.”
“Right, that was probably it.”
“We might as well not all freeze to death,” I said. “Let’s go back inside and I’ll make everyone some breakfast.”
Georgia stopped me before I could wedge myself out of the bench seat.
“You might want to stay put for a minute. I’ve got some news, and it’s probably better if I tell you out here.”
I sank back onto the bench, my stomach growing a little queasy at the look on her face.
“Joey called Nick this morning. Nick called me. He thought I should be the one to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“Steven’s bond hearing was this morning. The judge decided to hold him.”
Julian had told me to expect that much. “Is that all?”
“Also, some true-crime podcast did a whole episode about Steven last night. They talked up his involvement with Dupree’s wife, then rehashed the night we found the dead mafia guys on Steven’s farm. They’re spinning some serial-killer angle out of it. Apparently, the episode got a lot of attention. Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS… they all had reporters sniffing around the station this morning, wanting toknow if the sod-farm case was being reopened in light of new evidence. Brendan Haggerty’s campaign manager got word of it and called the station. He’s putting pressure on Tran to nail Steven for this, probably to get the Haggertys out of the spotlight before the election this fall.”
I threw up my hands. “Great. Anything else?”
“Yeah, Mrs. Haggerty says you’re out of toaster waffles. And your literary agent just left.”
