Lattes, Ladyfingers, and Lies Read online

  “Damn right she was. I told you not to—” Mike stopped, blinked hard, and stared at the wall. If I hadn’t before, I knew now that at least half the reason he told me to stay out of his cases was to protect me. The rest of it was definitely that he didn’t want me interfering with his investigations as much as I didn’t want him interfering with my coffee.

  “So what are they charged with? I know it was in the paper but—” Rhonda asked.

  “Felony murder and possession of stolen goods for Sabine. Diane got attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, accessory after the fact, obstruction of justice…” Ryan thought for a second. “Did I miss anything?”

  Mike shook his head.

  “Mike kind of pushed the DA to throw everything he could at Diane. Some of the lesser ones will probably get dropped later.”

  Rhonda looked outraged, but Ryan cut her off before she could say anything. “It actually helps get a conviction on the higher counts. If they have the option to acquit a guilty guy or convict him of murder one, they’ll convict. If they have the choice between murder one, murder two, or acquittal, they’ll go for murder two. Juries are soft.”

  Rhonda nodded. I knew she wanted Diane in jail for as long as possible. She’d told me as much when she visited me in the hospital during my overnight-for-observation stay. She wanted Sabine in prison too, but it was personal with Diane. I suspected it was the same with Mike.

  “The thing I still don’t understand is,” Sammy said, “what was she going to do with it? It’s not like she could wear it around town without anyone noticing.”

  I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Rhonda looked at Mike.

  “I don’t think she thought that far ahead,” he said. “Maybe she just thought she’d wear it around the house or something?”

  “For me, that’s what’s most tragic,” Matt said. “She went to all this trouble, took someone’s life, is probably—hopefully—going to jail for the rest of her life, and she wasn’t even going to be able to wear the thing.”

  “What did she think Sean was going to think?” Sammy asked. “He wouldn’t notice a fifty-thousand-dollar ring on his fiancée’s hand?”

  I shrugged again.

  “You better believe I’d notice it if Sandra was suddenly walking around with a new luxury car on her hand,” Mike said.

  “Besides, have you seen that thing?” Ryan asked. All of us except Mike shook our heads. “Thing would blind you if you looked at it in sunlight. You could probably shine a flashlight at it and use it as a spotlight.”

  I’d only seen the picture, and I believed him, despite the look Mike gave him. I knew Mike disapproved of Ryan’s editorializing about the case and the ring, but also that it couldn’t bother him too much since he kept Ryan around. Not that he would fire him over something like that, just that he wouldn’t invite him to work on the big cases or socialize with him. It was obvious that Mike had taken Ryan under his wing, and I guessed that the looks he kept giving him were more to help guide him than to chastise him. Still, it was fun getting the extra details Ryan liked to provide—when they didn’t involve bloody murder weapons anyway.

  “Where was she even keeping it?” Rhonda asked.

  “In a box of old clothes in the back of her closet. Loose. She could have lost it just by forgetting which sweater it was tucked into and shaking it out,” Mike said.

  “So she couldn’t even look at it,” Rhonda said.

  “Nope,” Mike replied. “Not unless she wanted to play contortionist and climb over the fifty or so other boxes she had in there.”

  Rhonda shook her head like she was mourning the invisibility of the ring Sabine had gone to so much trouble to steal. No one else said anything either. I was thinking about the senselessness of it all, and I assumed they were too.

  “Are you two excited about your trip?” Rhonda asked Matt and me after a respectable lull in the conversation.

  Matt’s face lit up immediately, and I couldn’t help smiling. I was already excited, but his excitement ramped it up even more. I loved spending time with him no matter where we were, but spending two whole weeks in Italy with him would be incredible. And knowing that he was thrilled to spend that time with me practically made my heart flutter in my chest.

  “Oh, I can’t wait!” Matt said.

  “Have you planned out your wardrobe for every second of the trip?” she asked him.

  His forehead wrinkled up. “No?” He glanced at me. “Was I supposed to?” I shook my head.

  “This one has.” She jerked her thumb at me. “She has put more thought into her wardrobe for this vacation than you would believe.”

  “Really?” He looked back at me.

  “Only sort of,” I said.

  “You didn’t know? Has she been hiding it from you? Fran, have you been wardrobe planning in secret again? Haven’t we talked about this?” Rhonda leaned over to Sammy. “Do we need to stage an intervention?”

  Sammy, to her credit, realized this time that Rhonda was messing with her and played along. “I don’t know. We might.”

  “Fran,” Rhonda said in a deadly serious tone of voice. She reached over and laid her hand on top of mine on the table. “Did you pack anything that wasn’t black?”

  I rolled my eyes and laughed. “Maybe one or two things.”

  “Good.” She patted my hand. “Good.” She leaned back in her chair and took a sip of her tea.

  Sammy smiled and shook her head then looked over at Matt and me. “Fran’s told me some, but what do you guys have planned?”

  “Everything we can pack into two weeks,” Matt said. “We’re spending about three days in each of the cities we’re going to.”

  “Is that enough time?”

  “No!” I said adamantly.

  Sammy laughed.

  “It’s enough to hit the highlights,” Matt said. “We picked out a few places we really want to see in each city, so we’ll go to those and then anywhere else we can fit in.”

  “It’s so exciting, Fran! How do you stand it?” Sammy asked.

  “I haven’t been able to sleep for days. And not just because someone tried to kill me on Saturday.”

  “I really don’t know how you stand that,” Sammy said.

  “You were lucky to get away alive. You know that, right, Fran?” Mike asked.

  I nodded. “Trust me. I know.” I really wasn’t lying when I said that my anticipation of the trip was keeping me up at night, but it didn’t help that when I did drift off, I saw Diane hovering behind me with a brick raised over my head. I would start awake, barely suppressing a scream and soaked in sweat.

  It terrified me more now that it was over than it had when I was actually in the moment. It was probably a good thing, though, since when I woke up at night, I was frozen with fear. It took me five or ten minutes to calm myself down, which I’d usually do by thinking about the Italy trip. That would get me excited, which would make it hard to fall back asleep, and the whole vicious cycle would start over again.

  Mike looked like he wanted to say something else but didn’t. I guessed he was trying not to lecture me yet again on leaving police work to the police, but that wasn’t anything he had to worry about. I didn’t plan on getting involved in any more murder investigations. In fact, I hoped I didn’t even have the opportunity. It wouldn’t hurt for Cape Bay to have its citizens stay safe and alive for a while.

  “So, Mike…” Rhonda said.

  Mike looked at her like he was expecting the worst. “Yes, Rhonda?”

  “Out of curiosity—”

  Mike rubbed his forehead as if whatever she was about to ask him was already hurting his head.

  “How come Fran managed to solve this before you?”

  Mike rubbed his head harder. He sighed and looked at Ryan. “Leary?” Apparently even Mike saw some benefit to Ryan’s editorializing.

  “Really?” Ryan asked.

  “Why not?”

  “All right.” Ryan shrugged.
He leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table. “So we pretty much eliminated Dean because he’s not that much of an idiot. He’s a lot of things, but not a total idiot. Even though Alex had a history with the vic—” He cringed and looked at me. “With Georgina, I mean, and he owned up to the two of them arguing, he was obviously pretty torn up about her death. We couldn’t find anyone who had seen him around Georgina in the past few months. Besides, as Fran knows, he had a solid alibi. So we were working on Sean. His alibi was as weak as they come. ‘Home alone with my girlfriend’ is impossible to prove and is the same thing every lying murderer says. What we knew wasn’t enough for a search warrant, so we were working the pawn shops and the fences and—”

  “The fences? What does that mean? Like the fringes of society or something?” Sammy could be so adorably innocent sometimes.

  “No,” I said. “A fence is a person you take your stolen goods to so you can get rid of them. He pays you up front and then resells it. You get less money than you would have if you sold it yourself, but you don’t get caught selling stolen goods either. They also say you’re fencing the goods when you sell them to a fence.”

  “Wow, Fran,” Rhonda said. “Do you have a little side business you’d like to tell us about?”

  I laughed and turned back to Ryan. “Please continue.”

  “Basically, we knew the ring would be hard to get rid of. Like Sam said earlier, it’s not as if he could give it to Sabine to wear around town. Everyone would notice it. So we were checking in with pawnshops and jewelers up and down the coast. Our best guess was that he’d try to sell it off somewhere out of town or overseas, but we couldn’t find any evidence of Sean making contact with anyone who could have helped him. That’s where we were—working the angles. Turns out Fran got lucky by not having the same resources we did. If she had, she might have gotten bogged down in the same details we did.” Ryan raised his coffee cup to me in a toast.

  “You have good instincts, Fran,” Mike said.

  “Thanks.”

  “It was a tough case though,” Ryan said. “Obvious suspects, but almost no physical evidence anywhere. It’s not like we can pull fingerprints off a brick to check against the system.”

  “Basically, we’re lucky there’s not still a murderer wandering the streets of Cape Bay,” Matt said.

  “She’s got good instincts,” Mike repeated.

  We sat around and talked for a while longer before Mike got up to leave. “Sandra won’t be happy if I’m not home to tuck the kids into bed.” He slapped Ryan on the back and shook Matt’s hand before he left. “Have a safe trip, man.”

  “Thanks,” Matt replied.

  “Franny.” Mike turned to me. He opened his mouth then closed it. “Have a safe trip. Thanks again for your help, and if we ever have another murder, for Pete’s sake, stay out of it.”

  I laughed. “Don’t worry. I will.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it.” He bent down to give me a hug.

  “Thanks again for taking care of me,” I whispered.

  “No thanks necessary. It was just a concussion. I didn’t do anything.”

  “You didn’t know that though.”

  He looked at me and clenched his jaw a few times, looking like he was trying to control his emotions. We’d been friends for a long, long time, since we were kids, and I knew that when he saw me lying on the ground at Diane’s house with blood pouring from my head, he’d thought that I was going to die in his arms. “Just doing my job,” he said then turned back to the rest of the table. “Rhonda, thanks for the coffee. Sammy, I’ll see you bright and early for another cup.”

  They waved goodbye, and Mike strode toward the door. A few feet from the trash can, he tossed his cup into it, getting it in cleanly.

  “Nice shot!” Matt called.

  Mike waved an acknowledgement over his shoulder and let himself out.

  “I guess that’s my cue to get out of here. Hopefully, Dan and the boys found something better to eat than Fritos for dinner again.” Rhonda shook her head. “One of these days, I’m going to have to teach them to boil water. You’d think they could figure that out on their own, but they haven’t succeeded yet.” She said goodbye to everyone, gave me a hug, wished Matt and me bon voyage, then grabbed her jacket and headed out.

  “Does that mean it’s time for us to get going too?” Matt asked.

  I yawned. “Yeah, probably.”

  “Will you be okay getting home, Sammy?” Matt asked just to make her answer.

  “Yeah, I’ll be okay.”

  “Are you sure? Franny and I can walk you if you want.”

  Sammy started to stutter as she tried to form the response we knew was coming.

  Ryan jumped in and saved her. “It’s out of your way. I’ll walk her.”

  Sammy blushed and looked down at the table. She knew that we knew that her apartment was even farther out of Ryan’s way than it was out of ours.

  “If you guys want to go ahead, I want to talk to Sammy for a second,” I said.

  Sammy sunk farther down in her chair, probably afraid I was going to try to talk to her about the birds and the bees or something. Matt and Ryan graciously stood up and went to stand outside on the sidewalk.

  “So, Sammy,” I started, intentionally putting a tone in my voice that I knew she would interpret as starting a conversation about her relationship with Ryan.

  “Yes?” Her face screwed up like she expected to hear the worst.

  I dropped the teasing tone. “You’ve been working here for a few years now, right?”

  She nodded. “Going on—” She tapped her fingers as she counted up the years. “Oh, wow, twelve years! I started when I was fifteen!”

  “I knew it was a long time. How long have you had a key?”

  She laughed. “Oh, at least ten.”

  “That’s what I thought. You know, in a lot of places, only people in management are key holders.”

  She nodded slowly, looking like she was back to being afraid of where this was going. I wondered if I was dragging it out too long.

  “And I think it’s high time we fixed that.”

  She looked like she was going to cry. It was so like Sammy to be so humble as to assume I was going to take her key away. Definitely dragging it out too long.

  “I think my mother never did this because she didn’t put a lot of stock in titles, but Sammy?”

  She nodded.

  “You deserved to be made a manager a long time ago.” I pulled the little stack of business cards I’d had made for her out of my pocket and pushed them across the table to her. There wasn’t much use for business cards in running a small coffee shop in a coastal Massachusetts town, but I thought she’d appreciate the gesture.

  She looked down at the stack printed with “Samantha Ericksen” and underneath that “Manager.” Tears spilled down her cheeks. “Thank you!” She stood up to give me a big hug.

  “Thank you for all your hard work.” I hugged her back. “By the way, you can still take care of Latte while I’m gone, right?”

  Sammy laughed. “Yes, of course. I’ll be over in the morning to pick him up. And don’t spend your whole trip worrying about him. I’ll take good care of him.”

  I wasn’t worried. I knew he and my café were in excellent hands.

  Chapter 20

  It seemed like a year later that I sat with Matt at a café table in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, but it had been just over a week since Sabine was arrested for Georgina’s murder. I felt a world away from Cape Bay and the murder investigation, and I supposed that, in a way, I was. I was sleeping better and not waking up during the night. I could walk down a street paved with bricks and not feel nauseous. I felt relaxed and happy.

  We’d already traveled through Sicily, Naples, and Rome, and had arrived in Venice for the second half of our trip, an exploration of Northern Italy. We’d be in Venice for a few days before heading to Verona, the home of Romeo and Juliet. It was silly, but even after everyth
ing we’d already seen—Mount Etna in Sicily, Pompeii outside Naples, St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome—I was practically beside myself with excitement to see Juliet’s balcony. The fact that the most famous setting from Shakespeare’s play was a real site that I could visit practically blew my mind.

  Not that I wasn’t thrilled to be in Venice—Venice!—with its canals and gondolas, its bridges and food, its incredible architecture, and all the art it had inspired. There weren’t even any cars on the collection of islands that made up the city! No wonder I felt like I was a world away. It seemed as though I’d been transported one hundred and fifty years into the past. Yeah, the place smelled a little, and some of the buildings were a little less well maintained than they could have been, but I didn’t care because it was Venice!

  Matt had somehow arranged for us to arrive in the city by sea. We took a train from Rome almost to Venice then got on a boat that went out into the Adriatic Sea before turning back toward the city. It seemed like an odd path at the time but only until the city came into view. Then I understood why Matt had insisted we do it that way. I almost cried when the buildings of Venice appeared. I figured it still counted as almost if the tears weren’t actually rolling down my face. My eye makeup got a little smeared, but I avoided black streaks down my cheeks.

  There aren’t words to describe that moment when you first see a centuries-old city basically appear on the water. It looks like it’s floating there, which I suppose it is, in a manner of speaking, but you can’t even see the land under it as you approach. It looks like something out of a dream or a movie. A mirage maybe. A Fata Morgana.

  I’d been exhausted by the time we got on the boat and wanted to sit on one of the moderately comfortable chairs in the enclosed area of the ferry and maybe doze off a little. I wanted to see Venice as we arrived. I’d heard it was beautiful, but I couldn’t imagine it would be that different looking at it through the window. Matt dragged me out to the railing at the bow though, arguing that he hadn’t paid for the boat ride just to have me ignore the experience.

  “What? Are you trying to Titanic me?”