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“No, Selena’s just catching me up on a few bits and pieces,” she told him. “And I was about to start getting my things together when she got here, so I’ll be ready to go soon.”
She sent me a questioning glance then, as if asking whether I had anything else to add.
It had been on the tip of my tongue to mention that Chief Lewis really didn’t believe in her guilt, but I decided to keep quiet for now. If it had been just the two of us, she might have accepted that piece of information and carefully tucked it away, but I knew if Archie had heard that kind of declaration, he would have marched right over to the police station and told Henry he needed to do whatever he could to get the charges dropped.
True, Henry probably wasn’t even there, since it was now well past five and, unlike Calvin, he kept a pretty regular eight-to-five schedule. Clearly, he thought his rank afforded him that privilege.
But since I doubted Archie would have let the matter go so easily, I had to believe he would have been right in Henry’s face first thing the next morning.
“No, that’s pretty much it,” I said. “If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.” My gaze strayed to the stacks of sample books and notes on the table, which Victoria had already started gathering up. “I thought you weren’t going to work past Wednesday.”
“I’m not,” she replied. “That’s part of the reason why I wanted to take some of this stuff home, just in case.”
“By which she means she can pretend to be taking the time off, but actually be working at the house,” Archie observed dryly. “But that’s all right — I plan to hide it all so she can’t focus on anything except the wedding.”
She lifted an eyebrow, but since her mouth curved in amusement at the same time, I got the feeling she knew he was joking.
Mostly.
And I could understand why she’d want to distract herself with her work. The wedding wasn’t going to be some huge, over-the-top sort of event, but a quiet ceremony in their backyard, with a small reception to follow. She was only expecting twenty-five guests, and I guessed she could probably have put together that sort of event in her sleep and with her hands tied behind her back.
I rose from my seat and said, “Well, I’ll get out of your hair. If I don’t see you before then, I’ll meet you at five-thirty on Thursday at Paradise Nails.”
“Absolutely,” she replied.
As I left, I couldn’t help wondering about those uncanceled reservations for their honeymoon. I’d believed Victoria when she’d said it was too late to get their deposits back, but if they were no-shows at the last minute, wouldn’t they lose the entire cost of their lodgings?
I supposed it depended on the policies of the various places they were staying. All the same, I couldn’t wait to get home and hear what — if anything — Calvin had discovered during his stakeout at Jeffrey Sellers’ apartment.
More than I’d expected, actually. Because I’d started a batch of chicken cacciatore in the crock pot before I left that morning, there wasn’t much to do to prepare the meal except boil the spaghetti and throw a salad together. Calvin had already texted me to say he was on his way home and would be there a little before seven, so I was just setting down the big bowl of pasta when the front door opened.
He kissed me on the cheek, said, “That smells amazing,” and then headed into the powder room so he could get washed up before our meal.
But then we were both sitting down at the table, and I sent him an expectant look. “Well?”
“Well, I learned a couple of things,” Calvin replied, and waited for me to hand him the bowl of tossed green salad.
“Such as?”
He helped himself to some romaine and tomatoes, and said, “Jeffrey Sellers definitely sounds like he was a player. The woman who rents the apartment next to his is really young, a student at ASU. She told me she and her roommate were both hit on by him several times, even though they made it as obvious as possible that they weren’t interested.”
Definitely not. He had to have been at least thirteen or fourteen years older than they were. I decided that saying “ew” wouldn’t be very mature, so I settled for asking, “Anything else?”
Calvin’s mouth quirked, and he took a bite of salad before replying. “Kaitlyn — the girl I talked to — said she thought Sellers had two different women coming and going from his place. Her description of one of them definitely sounds like it was Sara Tilden, but she said the second woman had blonde hair and looked like she was maybe in her early thirties. Problem is, Kaitlyn never got a very good look at her, so she couldn’t give me much more of a description than that.”
I ate a grape tomato, pondering this latest development. It was too bad that Jeffrey’s next-door neighbor hadn’t been able to notice much beyond the second woman having blonde hair, but at least that told me we were talking about two different people here, since Sara Tilden’s hair was obviously brown.
Then again, NancyAnne Nielsen had blonde hair, although it was the dark dishwater kind that some people might have described as light brown.
“How blonde was the woman?” I asked.
Calvin had been right in the middle of slurping up a piece of spaghetti, so I had to wait until he was done before he could reply. “Kaitlyn said she had very light blonde hair, almost platinum. So…sounds like pretty blonde to me.”
Then that definitely wasn’t NancyAnne. Which meant the person Jeffrey’s neighbor had seen must have been the “other” woman.
Unless she was an acquaintance, or a client, or someone else from the ballroom dance community. Just because Jeffrey Sellers seemed as though he was always on the prowl didn’t mean there might not have been a perfectly innocent explanation why the blonde woman had been spotted at his apartment.
Yeah, right.
