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Still, I’d take it, if it meant I could have a relatively quiet day at the shop and not have to go chasing hither and yon. I wanted to do whatever I could to help Victoria out of this mess, but at the same time, I needed to think of my baby’s health.
“It’s a deal,” I told my husband, glad that we had some kind of plan of action.
Even if I wasn’t sure whether it would yield any useful information.
One good thing was that I did manage to schedule mani/pedis for Victoria and Hazel and me at a local nail salon late Thursday afternoon, so that was one less thing to worry about. Maybe it would be a subdued celebration because of this mess of a murder case, but at least we’d all have pretty toes at the wedding.
“Thank you for doing that,” Victoria said. We were upstairs at her studio in her workroom, where she was surrounded by sketches and swatches and little boards with various tile samples mounted on them. It was just a little after five, and I’d closed up the shop and sent Melanie home. I hadn’t heard anything yet from Calvin, who’d texted me to say things were quiet at the station and so he was going to drive out to Mesa to see what he could find, but honestly, I guessed he would wait until we were both back home so we could discuss his findings — if any — over dinner.
“Oh, it was the least I could do,” I told her. Because of all my running around, I hadn’t had a lot of time to tell either her or Archie what I’d found out so far, which admittedly wasn’t much. However, letting Victoria know that at least our manicures weren’t at risk gave me the opportunity to also fill her in on the little we’d discovered about Jeffrey Sellers’ past, as well as our possible subjects. “I’m still not sure whether it was even Sara Tilden or NancyAnne Nielsen, though,” I concluded. “Calvin’s trying to find out about the mystery woman, the one Jeffrey was supposedly seeing. Maybe she’s our real culprit.”
“Does Henry Lewis know about any of this?” Victoria asked. She’d listened to my recitation with the faintest of lines between her perfectly arched brows, telling me she was probably more disturbed by all of it than she wanted to let on.
“Some,” I said. “Not everything. If I’d picked up even the slightest hint that one of those women might have been the person who spiked your creamer with atropine, then I would have passed along the information to him. As it is, I didn’t really see the point.”
“I guess not,” she replied, and released the faintest of sighs. “It’s all so frustrating.”
“It is,” I agreed. I reached for the glass of water she’d poured for me, took a sip, and then gave it a speculative glance as a sudden thought struck me.
Victoria must have noticed where I was looking, because she said, “What?”
“The creamer,” I said slowly. “You never use it, right?”
“No,” she replied at once. “I don’t even drink coffee. Just plain black tea for me, either hot or iced. I keep the coffee and creamer here for my clients.”
“Which means the killer must have known there wasn’t a chance you would have drunk the poison,” I told her. “Otherwise, it was a pretty risky method of murdering someone, since there would always be the chance that you’d use the creamer yourself before you even had a chance of pouring it into a guest’s coffee.”
She blinked. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Neither had I…until right now. What it meant, exactly, I didn’t know for sure, except that it seemed clear the murderer had targeted Jeffrey specifically, using a method that would leave Victoria unscathed.
Physically, anyway. She was still in a lot of legal trouble.
But what about Victoria’s clients? True, it wasn’t as though she had people coming and going from her studio all the time, and now that she was occupied with the model homes for the Mariposa Heights development, she was focused on that. It sure seemed to me like the killer must have been aware of that, and therefore had been confident that no one except Jeffrey Sellers would be at the studio…and therefore be the beneficiary of Victoria’s hospitality.
That idea disturbed me more than anything else. It meant that whoever it was, they were familiar enough with my friend’s schedule and her client roster that there hadn’t been too much danger of anyone else consuming that atropine-laced creamer.
Someone on the Mariposa Heights team? They knew all about Victoria’s comings and goings, although again, I couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone who worked for the company would want to kill Jeffrey Sellers.
Unless one of his private investigations had destroyed that person’s marriage? After all, he’d boasted to Sara Tilden about doing that very thing.
“What’s wrong?” Victoria asked, clearly noticing the shift in my expression.
“I’m not sure,” I said. Because all I had was an underlying sense of unease, I really didn’t want to upset her by commenting that I thought the murderer must have been paying a lot of attention to her comings and goings…or to make her suspect that one of the very people who’d hired her might have had something to do with Jeffrey Sellers’ death. “I guess I’m just trying to put all the pieces together and not getting very far.”
Even though it was her freedom on the line if this all went horribly sideways, Victoria was still quick to defend my efforts. “I think you’ve collected a lot of information in a very short period. You shouldn’t beat yourself up because this isn’t going as fast as you want it to.”
I managed a wan smile. “Are you forgetting that if I don’t get this figured out in the next couple of days, you aren’t going on your honeymoon?”
“No, I hadn’t forgotten,” she responded at once, giving me a smile that was much more cheerful than the one I’d sent her way only a moment earlier. “But I’m just going to keep hoping. Archie and I haven’t canceled our reservations because we were already past the point where we could have gotten our deposits back. So even if you don’t identify the murderer until the moment when Archie and I are saying, ‘I do,’ it’ll still be fine.”
I definitely had to admire her optimism. Somehow, I doubted I would be feeling the same way if our situations had been reversed.
But I got the message. Victoria planned to keep sailing ahead no matter what happened, and I knew I needed to take my cues from her.
Before I could reply, the studio door opened, and Archie came in. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of days, and although he looked a little more strained than his fiancée, I could tell he was trying to keep his chin up for her sake.
“I hope I’m not interrupting — ” he began, and Victoria shook her head.
