I texted him back,Tomorrow night.
Vero and I took our phones, her laptop, and a bottle of wine upstairs to her bedroom and quietly shut the door. We sat on her floor, sharing what was left of Vero’s bag of potato chips. She sat cross-legged on the carpet, squinting at the front of my sweater. She reached over and picked a chunk of brownie off my boob. “Don’t eat that,” I said, confiscating it and tossing it in the trash can behind me.
“Maybe I should do the googling,” I suggested, reaching for her laptop. It had been nearly six hours since Vero had eaten her brownie, and though she insisted she was already sober, her eyes were still lacking their usual razor-sharp focus.
She slapped my hand away. “I’ve got it,” she insisted. “I could eat twelve brownies and still be better at this than you.” She opened her laptop. “Who are we investigating first?”
The plan was to learn as much about the book club members as possible, then look for any connections they might have to the library or Penny Dupree. I read through the list of their names.
“Try Viola Henry,” I said. “I think she hosted the first meeting we went to.”
Vero typed Viola’s name into the search bar. “Says here she’s the director of human resources for some tech company in Reston. The bio on their website says she enjoys hiking and reading, and in her spare time she volunteers with several women’s advocacy groups. She has two grown children. No mention of a husband.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s deceased,” I said, remembering the urn I had nearly knocked over in her house. “Any links to Penny in her social media?”
Vero typed and scrolled for a minute. “Viola doesn’t seem to have any social media. And Penny hasn’t updated hers since Gilford went missing.”
I read the next name on the list. “Try Gita Chaudhary.”
Vero typed in Gita’s name. “She owns a flower shop. According to her website, she specializes in formal events and deliveries of large arrangements. All I’m finding is her business page. No personal stuff. You don’t think that’s weird?”
“You don’t have any social media either,” I pointed out.
“Because I don’t want anybody to find me,” she reminded me.
“Let’s try the others.” I fed Vero one name at a time until we’d nearly exhausted the list. Lola de la Rosa was a nurse practitioner at a nearby hospital, and Kathy Sanderson owned a commercial cleaning company. Neither of them had social media pages, but both women hadactive profiles on various dating apps. Destiny Roth had an Instagram account. Her grid was mostly photos of her twin daughters, who were cheerleaders at the local middle school.
“Any mention of a partner?” I asked.
“None that I can find.”
“Where does Destiny work?”
“Looks like she has two jobs. One in information management at the Office of Vital Records in Richmond and a side hustle doing embroidery and custom engraving for her own Etsy shop.”
“I don’t get it. The only thing these women have in common is the fact that none of them are married.” They were all different ages, different nationalities, with different careers and wildly different interests. And I already knew from seeing Penny’s vast collection of romance novels that even her book tastes ran very different from Mrs. Haggerty’s. So how had these women all found each other?
“What about Elizabeth Chen?” I asked, reading the next name on the list. “Her car was the one I saw parked in the driveway at the book club meeting tonight. She must have been the host.”
Vero started typing. “According to Loudoun County, she’s the only person listed on the deed to her house. No social media profiles except for a LinkedIn page. It says she’s been working as a vet tech at the county animal shelter for the last eighteen months.” That explained the Hello Kitty scrubs and the gift bag with the paw print on it. “Before that, she worked at a shelter in Fairfax…Oh.” Vero angled her screen toward me. “Isn’t this the same shelter where Patricia Mickler used to volunteer?”
I scrolled down to the bottom of the page. Vero was right. The address of the animal shelter where Elizabeth Chen had previously worked was the same one we had visited when we were investigating Patricia Mickler’s husband. “If Patricia and Elizabeth both workedthere at the same time, they probably knew each other.” It wasn’t a huge shelter, judging by the number of lockers we’d seen in the staff lounge when we’d snuck into the building last fall. And the employees and volunteers there had all seemed pretty chummy. It’s not like the internet was giving us much else to work with.
“Maybe Patricia can tell us something useful about at least one member of Mrs. Haggerty’s freaky little circle of friends.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” I said, closing Vero’s laptop and corking the wine as she yawned. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow, we’re going on a field trip.”
It was nearly one in the morning when Vero and I said our goodnights and retired to our beds. I headed to the rollaway in my office, turned off the light, and slipped under the thin blanket. As I lay there in the dark, I could have sworn I heard a door open in the hall. I sat up, ear tipped toward the sound of the telltale squeak in the riser on the third step.
The footsteps were too heavy and slow to belong to the kids. I threw off my blanket and got out of bed, poking my head out into the hall just as Vero opened her door and peeked down the stairs.
Both children’s doors were closed. Mrs. Haggerty’s door was cracked.
We listened as the front door downstairs quietly opened and shut.
Vero met me in the hall and whispered, “Do you know where she’s going?”
“I have a hunch.”
