Black Thursday Read online

  “Let’s see,” she said looking at the master calendar. “We have a twelve forty-five, and it looks like Susan’s coming in at one. Oh, and we have L’Raine coming on at one thirty. She—”

  “L’Raine from Xtreme Fitness?” I asked. Not that there could be another L’Raine who happened to be both a massage therapist and work for the Xtreme chain.

  “She’s usually at our other gym, but we have her on schedule today because of the promotion.” The counter girl asked, “Should I book you with her? She’s one of our very best.”

  If L’Raine was, in fact, seeing Griff as I suspected, the last thing I wanted to do was spend fifteen minutes trying not to pump her for any pillow talk tidbits she might have gleaned from him about Cathy Carter or Bargain Barn. If she wasn’t, she was likely headed on an evening date with my brother-in-law, another topic that wasn’t exactly relaxing to think about.

  “One thirty is a little long to wait. How about the one o’clock?”

  She smiled. “Perfect.”

  And, thankfully, perfect pretty much summed up my next hour.

  I slipped into yoga pants and a T-shirt, headed for an elliptical machine, and plugged my headphones into the satellite radio dock. Willing my mind to relax while my body got in gear, I somehow managed to block out everything but working up a sweat to Classic Soul radio.

  I spent the first nine minutes of my chair massage having the knots worked out of my neck and shoulders and even had a few preliminary thoughts about what I might eventually say to Frank before I had to politely pass on the offer to extend my massage to a full sixty minutes.

  By the time I’d showered and was presentable enough to walk out of the gym, I even had something of an opening for a discussion with Frank. I really don’t know that I can ever fully recover from the nuclear bomb you’ve dropped on our marriage, but given we will always be co-parents to our terrific kids I’m willing to at least consider the possibility of trying …

  I even managed to circumvent an awkward hello with L’Raine, who was turned away from me and busily working her thumbs down the spine of whoever had taken the one-thirty slot as I made my way out the front door and over to my car.

  I started the engine and backed out of my space. As I began to exit the lot, I happened to spot a silver sedan just nondescript enough to be an unmarked police car. Inside, a stocky young man with a close-cropped goatee and a uniform was keying something into his phone. His cap hid what I suspected was a rookie crew cut and obscured his cute, boyish face to the point where I couldn’t be positive. Still, it didn’t take a seasoned investigator to figure out it was Griff.

  I may have bumbled my way through the DeSimone investigation (and once FJ got back with some information, I’d be well on my way to doing the same with another), but it wasn’t hard to deduce that Griff and L’Raine had to be an item.

  Clearly he’d dropped her off for work and was in the lot sending a message before he took off toward the police station or wherever it was he was heading.

  Not that it was any of my business, but somehow, she hadn’t struck me as his type when I’d introduced them at her request a few months ago.

  As for my business, I wanted and needed to talk to him, but I definitely couldn’t.

  He looked up and spotted me as I rolled by. Considering his car was in an empty row practically facing mine, I also couldn’t just drive off.

  Instead, I pulled up along beside him, willed my heart to stop thumping, and rolled down my window.

  Griff smiled his dimply smile. “Twice in two days!”

  “What are the odds?” I smiled back. “Do you work out here now, too?”

  “Actually—” His police radio bleeped. “Hold that thought,” he said, answering the call with a string of acronyms and abbreviations.

  “Are you going to Higgledy’s commitment ceremony tonight?” I asked as soon as he hung up, not necessarily wanting to hear exactly why he was at the gym, even though I’d asked the question in the first place.

  “I’m afraid I already have plans,” he said. “Glad I ran into you here, though.”

  Before I could manage a So you and L’Raine, huh? he added, “Since I missed you down at the station.”

  “How did you know I was at the—”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Turns out cops are like a bunch of gossipy school girls.”

  “Apparently so.”

  “I heard you were there and talking to McClarkey, but I never heard exactly why you’d stopped by.”

  I wanted to fill Griff in more than anything. He’d know exactly what to think not only of the email I’d received from someone signing off as CC, but of Alan’s crazy but increasingly plausible story.

  Which was the problem.

  If Alan was right that whoever was behind this was dangerous, ruthless, and had connections, I couldn’t risk the story becoming stationhouse gossip.

  “It was dumb of me to have gone running down there,” I said. “I just wanted to let someone know about the coincidence between the name of the person that died and this person whose been a pest on my website.”

  “Doesn’t sound dumb to me,” Griff said.

  “I wouldn’t have said anything. It’s just that she goes by CC.”

  “Seriously?” Griff asked immediately. “Like Cathy Carter?”

  “Yeah. But Detective McClarkey assured me the incident was an accident and there’s nothing more there.”

  Griff shrugged. “He’s the boss.”

  “Definitely,” I said, wishing I could say more.

  As I was wondering what Griff would make over the All’s well that ends well message, his radio bleeped again.

  “Speaking of which,” he said.

  “McClarkey?” I felt my face flush with his nod.

  “Gotta run,” he said. “But if anything else comes up, be sure and let me know.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “I mean it,” Griff said. “McClarkey is a smart detective, but he can be a little hard to talk to sometimes.”

  “You think?” I asked.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Good to see you again,” I said.

  “You too,” he said, flashing his sweet dimpled smile. “With any luck, maybe we’ll make it a hat trick.”

  _____

  As luck would have it, FJ and Trent hadn’t gone with their father to lunch and a movie (or even down the street to their friend’s house) but had lingered in the driveway playing basketball just long enough to hear the wife of the couple that had come through sniff and say something along the lines of Bigger isn’t always better.

  Because the prospective buyers were in and out, both boys had gotten to work trying to track where the email from CC had originated.

  “So we entered the email address on this site that tells you who it’s registered to,” FJ said, sitting behind the desk in my office. “But for a registrant, we only get ‘Domains by Proxy’.”

  “Which means what?” I asked.

  “The owner’s name is blocked,” Trent said, still clutching a basketball under his arm. “Which is sort of common.”

  “But we did figure out another thing or two,” FJ said, staring at the computer monitor.

  “Like what?”

  “The email message came from a different account than the comments from CC on your website.”

  “And did you look into that email address?” I asked, trying to sound calmer than I felt.

  “Addresses,” Trent said. “There were like three or four different ones.”

  “As in, CC was writing from more than one email account?”

  “Sure looks that way.”

  “And they were all blocked too,” FJ added.

  “All of them?”

  Trent nodded.

  If emails were coming from various sources all c
laiming to be Contrary Claire, it was suddenly way more likely that CC somehow stood not for Cathy Carter, but Conniving Corporation.

  Crazy as it still felt.

  “Thanks, guys,” I finally said. “I need to make a call or two.”

  “Before you do,” FJ said, pulling up my email and pointing to the message from [email protected]. “You wanna tell us what’s really going on?”

  “I’m just trying to figure out who CC actually was,” I said, still hoping I sounded relatively nonchalant.

  “Mom,” Trent said, and in that drawn out exasperated teenager way. “We saw the new email.”

  “But I have my own—”

  “Password?” FJ asked. “You used to use some variation on the words frugal or bargain, but now you use one of the cat’s names and a number from one to five.”

  “Applebee4 ring a bell?” Trent asked.

  “You shouldn’t be trying to open my private emails in the first place!”

  “We wouldn’t,” FJ said, “under normal circumstances.”

  “But we were worried,” Trent said.

  Why had I thought the boys could track down CC’s web address but wouldn’t think to crack my apparently rudimentary password combinations? “You still shouldn’t be snooping on my email account.”

  “But it’s okay to snoop into CC’s?”

  Touché. I kept that comment in my head.

  “So, what is going on?” FJ asked.

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  Since it was useless to try to keep anything from the boys, I proceeded to fill them in on everything from the suspicious nature of the accident to the various theories about CC’s identity.

  “Seriously?” Trent asked when I finished.

  “Interesting,” FJ said, pulling up MrsFrugalicious.com. Trent and I watched as he logged into the admin section and began to peck away on the keyboard. “CC’s comments did start appearing right about the time Bargain Barn began to advertise,” he finally said.

  “So Alan is on to something?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Trent said.

  “We’ll keep looking into it,” FJ said.

  “I really appreciate it,” I said as the door from the garage squealed open and the combined chatter of various Michaels family members echoed through the front hall.

  “Listen,” I said, lowering my voice with the sound of approaching footfalls. “Everything I’ve told you or that you guys find out is entirely between us for right now. Okay?”

  “No problem,” FJ said.

  “What about Eloise?” Trent asked, in his less than quiet indoor voice. “I mean, she’s part of all of this, too.”

  “I don’t want to get her all worked up and then have to send her back to school tomorrow worried before things get figured out.”

  “And she will get all worked up and worried,” FJ said.

  “True that,” Trent added.

  “I just think it’s better to give her the all-clear message once it really is all-clear.”

  “Hey there,” Frank said from outside the door to my office. He entered the room smiling, almost expectantly, as though he’d been listening and thought he’d heard something he wanted to hear. “What’s doing?”

  He stopped beside a framed snapshot of himself. Taken in happier times during a family trip to Hawaii, I’d left the photo on my bookshelf for “Feng Shui purposes” at the realtor’s insistence. When I compared the current humbled Frank with the tan, handsome, cocky man I’d fallen in love with, and then glanced over at the boys who looked so much like him, I realized the anger I’d held all these months was giving way to something else.

  What that something was, I couldn’t entirely say.

  Not yet.

  “Nothing to report,” I said.

  _____

  There was plenty to report to Alan, however.

  As soon as I shooed all three guys out of my office, I dialed his number. When he didn’t answer, I left a voicemail followed by a text, both with a generic call me when you get this message.

  Just in case.

  I needed to rest before I had to gear back up for the Higgledy-Birdie nuptials. But hoping Alan would get back sooner rather than later and too keyed up to actually close my eyes, I turned to my computer, opened my spreadsheet program, and updated my Questions & Answers spreadsheet instead:

  Why would CC write to me from as many as four different email addresses?

  1. She had various emails and simply used whichever one struck her at the moment she felt compelled to write.

  2. She was crazy.

  3. She wasn’t a she at all, but a big corporation bent on bankrupting and taking over Bargain Barn.

  As Alan’s theory rolled around in my head, I logged onto Mrs. Frugalicious. I checked for any noteworthy follow-up comments and returned the business correspondence that had been rolling in over the past two days (including no less than six advertising inquiries, all of whom mentioned they’d seen me on the news and wanted to do business).

  I emailed back with advertising rate cards and was just finishing up a response to the message Wendy Killian from Here’s the Deal had left on Friday when my phone rang.

  My stomach flip-flopped when I read Payphone on the caller ID, but I figured it had to be Alan calling me from a “safe” phone.

  “It’s Alan,” he said, confirming my suspicions. From the traffic noise and what sounded like wind in the mouthpiece, I assumed he was calling from the last remaining coin-operated gas station phone in the whole city. “Returning your call.”

  “I’m not sure what to make of this,” I said by way of hello. “But CC was writing from four different email accounts.”

  “Did you say four different emails?”

  “And the message I got last night was different from the other three.”

  “Holy,” he said, over a honk. “This confirms everything I thought.”

  “Maybe so,” I said. “But why would CC, whoever she or they might be, send that last email? Wouldn’t it just make more sense to let the accident be an accident?”

  “That’s been nagging at me too,” he said.

  “Don’t you think its time we alert the police?”

  “Not yet,” Alan said. “Whoever’s behind this is clearly ruthless. If they get wind that we’ve given the police what at this point are only leads—”

  “Okay,” I said, not entirely sure that was the right course of action. “But—”

  “But I plan to spend the rest of the day holed up here in the office viewing store security tape from Thursday night.”

  “There’s tape?”

  “Not from up high enough to see how that pallet fell, but there has to be something or someone of interest.”

  _____

  Before I finally, blessedly, rested my head for a long overdue nap, I posted a message on MrsFrugalicious.com:

  Dearest Frugarmy,

  As most of you know we lost one of our own under the most awful of circumstances. If you are a friend or relative, a fellow shopper from Bargain Barn, or just want to support the family of Cathy Carter, please join me in celebrating her life and commitment to bargain hunting at the North Suburban Church tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.

  With love,

  Mrs. Frugalicious

  28. Don’t be afraid to turn lemons into lemonade when things go “wrong” at a restaurant, service, or retail establishment. Reputable businesses have procedures in place to keep customers happy and coming back. Whether it’s a free appetizer on your next visit or a full refund if you’re not satisfied, it’s worth letting management know when you’re not happy. But don’t forget—you’ll almost always get more bees with honey.

  29. While spa treatments can be an ill-afforded luxury, they make ideal gifts. If you find yourself entitled to a discount you
won’t be using, reap the savings by purchasing the service for someone else.

  sixteen

  The processional music was already playing when we arrived and split up into twos and threes to fill the random remaining seats among the plastic palm fronds and flowers in the central courtyard of the South Highlands Valley Mall. I managed to wave to a few familiar current and former mall employees before the “Wedding March” began to filter through the speaker system and we all stood.

  Bedecked in a tiny veiled wreath and perched on the shoulder of Pete from Pet Pals, Birdie the parrot started down the aisle toward a grinning, tuxedo-clad Higgledy the monkey.

  Joyce stood beside me, dabbing her eyes. “I just love weddings.”

  “Me too,” I said, although I couldn’t quite shake off thoughts of the funeral I’d also be attending in the next twenty-four hours. Still, the inherent joy of a commitment ceremony, even one as surreal/absurd as to unite two different species, was a welcome diversion.

  Birdie hopped from Pete’s shoulder onto the flower-covered perch beside her grinning, love-struck groom. This was an odd diversion, but admittedly a touching one.

  Mr. Piggledy—complete with Bible, black robe, and online minister’s license—joined the happy couple at the altar.

  “I’m glad you finally got some rest this afternoon,” Joyce whispered.

  “Me too,” I repeated. I’d slept through my alarm and finally awoke hitting my snooze button in the middle of a dream where I was being pecked by a squawking parrot. “It’s been a challenging few days.”

  “Don’t you mean months?” Joyce whispered.

  I glanced back at Barb, seated behind and to the right of us with her kids and Gerald, and Eloise and the boys in front and to the left, and wondered how, despite effort on my part to avoid being alone with my mother-in-law, I’d veered off to leave a present at the gift table 30 and ended up sitting with her.

  “Months,” I managed to agree.

  “Dearly beloved, we have come here on this crisp fall evening to surround Higgledy and Birdie with our love and best wishes for the journey they’ve chosen to embark upon together. While this may be the first ceremony of this type you have witnessed, its purpose, like all commitment ceremonies, is to celebrate deep spiritual union.” Mr. Piggledy paused to smile lovingly at the happy couple and then at Mrs. Piggledy, who was dressed in mother-of-the-bride pink chiffon and a matching pale pink cast, and was seated in a flower-covered wheelchair parked in the front row. “From myself, my wife, and the bride and groom, we thank you for being here tonight. We are truly blessed to be able to celebrate this passage in the presence of so many good friends and family.”