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“Really, it’s fine,” I assured her. No way in the world would I mention the way Henry had come barging in here; she was clearly stressed out enough as it was, and I didn’t see the need to create any more friction in their marriage. “I won’t even be putting out most of my holiday stock until a week or so from now, so you have plenty of time.”
She thanked me again, and we ended the call with a promise from her to have the candles to me no later than midweek. I hung up the phone and wished all my problems could be solved so neatly.
Right before closing, Calvin texted me to ask how my day was going. What I wanted to tell him wasn’t the sort of thing I thought I should send in a text message, and so I only wrote back,Fine. Missing you. Wish you didn’t have to work late tonight.
Me too,he replied.How about you stay over tomorrow? I’m off at 6.
Perfect,I told him.Be there at 6:30?
It’s a date. XOXOXO
Just looking at that silly row of letters made me feel a little better about life. I wasn’t sure whether I deserved someone as awesome as Calvin Standingbear, but I was definitely going to enjoy every single moment I spent with him…and do my best not to feel guilty about our issues with his parents. About all I could do was hope that the passage of time might begin to smooth things out between us.
The clock on my phone said it was five o’clock. Time to close up.
Feeling more tired than I probably had any right to be, I went to the front door and locked it, then adjusted the “be back at” sign to indicate a return of 10 a.m. on Monday morning. Duty satisfied, I headed over to the counter so I could retrieve my purse from the shelf where I kept it underneath the cash register.
As I straightened, Danny Ortega appeared a few feet away. “Hey,” he said, sounding almost listless.
“Hey,” I replied. Actually, I was glad to see him. Now I could tell him about my suspicions and see if he thought I might be on the right track. “Are you okay?”
He shrugged. “I guess so. I think this whole funeral thing is getting to me more than I thought it would.”
I wished I could reach out and give him a reassuring hug. Since I knew my arms would go right through his incorporeal body, I settled for saying, “It’s going to be okay. I got a really good lead today.”
That news perked him up immediately. Brown eyes now shining, he said, “You did?”
“Yes.” I paused, then figured I might as well just blurt it out. “I think Kimberly Parker is the person who put the poison in your wine.”
At once, his eyes flared wide, eyebrows lifting. “The school nurse?”
“Former school nurse,” I corrected him. “She’s working for Dr. Maxwell now.”
“Oh, right.” Danny was silent for a moment, thumb running over the stubble on his chin in a gesture I’d come to recognize. “She left at the end of the last school year.” Another pause, and he sent me a puzzled glance. “Kimberly is the last person I’d suspect of doing anything like this.”
“Well,” I said, “if my theory is correct, the whole thing was a terrible accident. I don’t believe she set out to kill you.” I stopped there and sent him a level stare. “Did you have any idea she was interested in you?”
“None,” Danny replied promptly. Because he was a ghost, he didn’t have an aura I could read, but something about the way he’d answered the question so quickly told me he wasn’t lying. “I mean, she was always kind of quiet and shy around me, but she was like that with almost everyone, so I really didn’t think much about it. When she tendered her resignation at the end of the last school year, I was surprised — I thought she was happy with her job. The kids liked her. But I figured she was going to make more working in the private sector, and so I wished her well and thought that was the end of it.”
“Apparently not,” I said, and he actually grinned.
“I wish she’d talked to me,” he said next, his tone almost musing. “I mean, technically it’s not kosher to date one of your employees, but I was never one to care much about the rules.”
Clearly, or he would have seen something just a bit wrong about dating one of his students on the side, even if she was of age and technically legal. “You would have gone out with her?” I asked, not quite able to keep the surprise out of my tone.
“Well,” Danny replied, “Kimberly wasn’t really my type, but she’s attractive. I think I would’ve given it a try.”
Would that have been enough to convince her they really weren’t compatible, or would the inevitable breakup have made matters that much worse?
Then again, I didn’t know for sure whether they actually would have split up at some point. Opposites did attract. Maybe a quiet, intense woman was exactly what Danny required.
But I’d really need to take a good look at their astrological charts to know for sure, and I had a feeling that sort of activity wasn’t in the cards, so to speak. Also, I knew I was basing my judgment of Kimberly’s personality on what Danny had just told me about her and my own impressions from looking at her photo in the yearbook, and all of that could have been dead wrong.
“Do you know where she lives?” I asked. “I tried looking up her address, but she’s not listed anywhere.”
At once, he shook his head. “It would be in her personnel file at the school, but I don’t know how you’d be able to access that.”
Not without reaching out to Calvin and seeing if his deputy with the computer-hacking skills was able to dig up that particular piece of information for me. Since the man in question had been able to ferret out the little detail that Miriam Jacobsen had been behind the trust that tried to buy the Bigelow mansion, thus initiating a bidding war that had inadvertently ended up in Brant Thoreau’s murder, I guessed Calvin’s deputy probably wouldn’t have too hard a time getting into Globe High School’s personnel database.
