“Knock, knock,” I said as I hovered at the threshold to Kay’s office.
“Come in,” she said without looking up. Kay was always doing the jobs of at least three people, and this necessitated her dropping all extraneous pleasantries like greetings and eye contact.
I sat in the chair opposite her desk. “I think I’m ready to take on—take back—my usual workload.”
Kay put down her blue editing pencil and looked up at me. She lowered her chin. “You sure?”
I nodded.
“Good.” She paused and then added, “Where are you with the other stuff?”
By “other stuff,” I knew she meant my unofficial investigation into Flick’s so-called accident.
“I’m still in touch with Sheriff Clark, but he says there’s not much more he can do at the moment. The case is still open, and he acknowledges that this doesn’t feel like an accident to him, but without any witnesses or cameras in the area, he says they’ve hit a brick wall. I’ve got a call into a guy at the Department of Transportation who used to be on a forensic crash investigative team in Maryland. I’m hoping to pick his brain about what places with bigger budgets do in these situations.” Flick had the misfortune to be murdered in one of the poorest counties in Virginia, which made finding his killer that much harder.
“Good thinking,” Kay said.
The connection to the guy in the DoT was tenuous at best, a friend of my ex-boyfriend Jay, who also worked for the government. I’d left Hank Jorgensmeyer a rambling message reintroducing myself and asked if he might give me some insight into how he would have handled a case like this back in the day. I was waiting for him to call back.
Kay tapped the blunt end of her pencil on her desk. “And the file?”
Before his death, Flick had entrusted Kay with a tattered, brittle manila folder held together by rubber bands and tenacity. He instructed her to give it to me “in the event something happened to him.” She gave it to me the night of the crash.
“Safe and sound.”
“Do you want to tell me where?”
I shook my head. The file contained notes about what Flick was working on, presumably what got him killed. I figured the fewer people who knew the whereabouts of that file, the better.
“You sure?”
I knew Kay well enough to know this wasn’t a challenge. It was a genuine offer of help. I smiled. “Yes.”
“Okay then,” she said, looking back down at the proof sheet she’d been working on when I walked in. “Talk to Henderson and find out where he is with the bridge-repair story. You can pick it up from here. And Skipper Hazelrigg is supposedly announcing his candidacy for sheriff soon—you might want to track that down. Oh, and Holman has been covering the new botanical poisons installation at the Apothecary Museum for you. You can let him know you’re back, though he might want to keep it.”
“Holman does love that place,” I said with a small laugh. I started to leave, then turned around before walking out. “Thanks for being so understanding, Kay.”
She made some sort of noncommittal sound and kept her eyes down on her work. Someone else might have misinterpreted this as dismissive, but I also knew Kay well enough to know she was terribly embarrassed by any show of emotion, even gratitude. It was one of the qualities she shared with Flick—probably why they worked so well together. The second that similarity struck me I left, lest my misty eyes reveal that I might not be quite as ready to move on as I’d claimed.
CHAPTER 2
I spent the morning getting up to speed on my assignments and thanking the people who covered for me over the past few weeks. Everyone had really pulled together. Even Gerlach Spencer, who is the closest thing I’ll ever have to a nemesis, had been uncharacteristically helpful.
“Let me know if you want me to finish up that piece on the grand opening of The Grind coffeehouse,” he’d said. I felt a rush of unexpected warmth toward him a split second before he added, “The lady that runs that place is suuuuper hot. I wouldn’t mind giving her something to grind on!” He stretched his hand over his cubicle wall to high-five Bruce Henderson, who (unfortunately) responded by saying “booyah.”
When I refrained from pointing out to them that if they weren’t such misogynistic pigs, they might not die alone, I considered us square. That level of restraint constituted repayment of my debt as far as I was concerned.
Around noon, Holman stopped by my cubicle and asked if I wanted to go to lunch at Mysa, formerly Rosalee’s Tavern. Ridley and Ryan bought the restaurant from the bank after its former owner, Rosalee Belanger, went to prison. “Rosalee is synonymous with murder, and murder is unappetizing,” Ridley reasoned. So she chose a word from the Swedish language, her mother tongue, as a start of the rebranding process. “Mysa doesn’t have an exact translation in English—kind of like me,” she explained with a giggle to a small group of regulars who gathered out front the day they hung up the new sign. “Snuggle is closest but not quite the same. Mysa is the act of being cozy. You can mysa by yourself, with friends, family, lovers. Technically, it’s a verb, but it’s more like a feeling.”
“Ohhhhh, okay,” Betsy Norbitt had said with a furrowed brow. “So…Mai-zah?”
“Actually, it’s Mee-sah,” Ridley corrected.
“Meeza.”
“No, it has a hard ‘s.’ Mee-SAH.”
“Mee-SAHHH!”
“Well, you don’t actually accentuate the ‘sah.’”
“Okay, mm-hmm.” Betsy looked more confused than ever, but being the good Southern girl that she was, she added brightly, “That’s a real pretty shade of blue on your sign there, sweetie.”
As the group turned to leave, Charlotte Van Stone—another good Southern girl—whispered loudly, “Honey, just call it Rosalee’s. No one’s ever gonna remember that new name anyhow.”
I told Holman I couldn’t go to lunch with him because I had an appointment, which strictly speaking wasn’t exactly true. The real reason was that I already had lunch plans with Ash, the new director of Campbell & Sons Funeral Home. I would have told Holman the truth, but lately I’d gotten the feeling he wasn’t a member of the Ash Campbell fan club. He’d never said anything directly, but a few times over the past month when I’d mentioned Ash’s name, either in the context of funeral arrangements for Flick or just times we’d hung out, I’d felt a distinct chill from Holman. Better he should think I was at the dentist.
Ash and I planned to meet at my house for lunch so I could walk Coltrane before going back to work. My sweet dog had gotten spoiled over the past month by having me home, so I wanted to ease him back slowly into being alone for hours during the day. Plus, if there was ever a cure for the midday blues, it was a ninety-four-pound German shepherd looking at you like you were a combination of steak, bacon, and a slow-moving squirrel.
When I pulled into my driveway, Ash was sitting on my front porch swing holding a bag from Landry’s.
“Hey,” I said as I walked up.
“Hey.” He gave me a big smile and moved like maybe he was going to follow it with a hug, but I buzzed past him to unlock the door before he had the chance.