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And I made myself turn away from him and head toward the guest parking space where I’d left my Renegade. I didn’t know how long he stood there and watched me go, because I made sure not to look back until I was buckled in and pulling out of my parking place.
The whole time, though, my thoughts wouldn’t stop churning.
No laptop in Jeffrey’s office, apartment, or car. Maybe he really didn’t have one.
Or maybe he had a secret place for stashing his really important stuff. A storage unit, possibly?
That theory made some sense…except that all the evidence I’d gathered so far seemed to indicate he had next to no spare cash. Would he really have sprung for the fifty or sixty bucks a month that even a very small storage unit would have cost?
I didn’t have a clue. Little by little, I’d been gathering information about Jeffrey Sellers, formulating a picture of a man who was barely hanging on by his fingernails and therefore would have done whatever he could to avoid paying even the smallest of obligations, like the unpaid parking tickets Henry had found in Jeffrey’s abandoned car. All the same, what I’d put together so far was only a blurry mosaic, not a clear picture.
Besides, if he’d rented a storage unit, wouldn’t he have kept some paperwork about it in his filing cabinets at his office? Obviously, he didn’t have a problem storing sensitive information there, or he would have stashed all the information regarding his divorce and child support somewhere else.
Once again, all I could really think was “maybe.”
For all I knew, my initial impression that Jeffrey Sellers didn’t have a computer and conducted all his business on his phone was correct. If that was the case, I knew I’d never get access to that phone, because it must be stowed in an evidence locker at the police station, along with whatever other personal effects he’d had on him when he died. Eventually, his family would have to come and retrieve all that, or possibly they’d have someone local take care of it for them. Through all this, I really hadn’t heard anything about his immediate family. Were they estranged?
Considering the way he’d appeared to conduct his personal life, that theory seemed all too plausible to me.
Right now, I wasn’t sure what to do next. Well, except get to the shop and apologize to Melanie for returning so much later than I’d planned. It would be easy enough to manufacture a story about things being backed up at the specialist’s office, since she still believed I’d driven to Phoenix for some tests related to my pregnancy, but still.
I let out a sigh. I hadn’t pulled that particular card when trying to do a reading on this crime, but right then I felt a lot like the Hanged Man, in limbo while I couldn’t find a clear way to move ahead.
About all I could do was hope I’d be able to get myself out of this bind in the next couple of days. Otherwise, Archie and Victoria would have to get married with this terrible shadow hanging over them, not to mention a canceled honeymoon.
Well, sometimes the universe worked in mysterious ways. If we were all very, very lucky, maybe it would step in and save the day.
In the meantime, I’d just have to keep moving forward…even if I had no idea where exactly I was going.
12
A Shot in the Dark
Luckily, Melanie didn’t seem at all annoyed by having to work most of the day without me there at the shop to help her. “It’s fine,” she assured me. “We got a shipment from Hay House, but I just left it in the storeroom since I couldn’t unpack everything and keep an eye out here at the same time.”
The shipment wasn’t supposed to be here until Wednesday. Most of the time, I would have been glad to have it arrive a couple of days early, but right now, I felt mostly annoyed about the situation. If I’d known it was coming today, I would have at least warned Melanie that she might have to deal with it.
“Thanks for taking care of that,” I told her. “Have you eaten lunch yet?”
“No,” she said, and I lifted an eyebrow.
“You know it was okay to close things down while you grabbed something to eat.”
“I know,” she replied. “And actually, I was about to do just that, but then the UPS driver showed up, and I got kind of distracted.”
“Well, go ahead and get something now,” I said. “I can keep an eye on things here — and take as long as you need.”
She shot me a grateful smile, thanked me, and hurried out. I realized then that I was feeling pretty hungry, too, since of course I had eaten nothing since breakfast.
When Melanie comes back, you can go over to Cloud Coffee yourself, I thought, and quelled the urge to text her so she could pick up something for me as well. She was on a well-deserved lunch break, and didn’t need to be fetching and carrying for the boss.
A quick glance around the shop told me everything looked exactly as I’d left it, so it didn’t appear as if any hordes of marauding tourists had descended in my absence. To be fair, it wasn’t just tourists who could make a mess in the store; the groups of high school girls who came in to buy incense and candles and — when they could afford it — jewelry could cause their own form of havoc.
Luckily, though, while I’d been running late, I’d still gotten back to the store well before the local high school got out at three o’clock, so Melanie had been spared having to deal with the teenage shoppers all on her own.
Because I honestly didn’t have that much to do, I puttered around a little, re-shelving a few books that were out of place, rearranging the crystals on the table where they were displayed and basically making it look as though I was busy without doing much of anything in particular.
My cell phone rang from under the counter where I’d stowed my purse, and I hurried over to pull it out and take a look at the screen.
