It was true. I had befriended Caroline, I’d had drinks with her on more than a few occasions, I was a former television producer (read ambitious, unscrupulous wench), and I was getting a reputation in Springfield as an amateur sleuth and a busybody. And it was no secret I wasn’t rolling in dough. No wonder Grant Sturgis thought I’d informed on his wife. He probably thought I had sold her story for big bucks and was already casting the lead for the eventual movie of the week.
But I never had a chance to explain. To him or to anyone. Grant stopped taking my calls, probably on the advice of his attorney, and I noticed a distinct chill in the air at the Paradise Diner whenever I arrived. As we’d all learned when Caroline had been arrested, bad news travels fast in a small town. My phone had stopped ringing. The leaf cleanup jobs had evaporated. No one had said anything-they didn’t have to. The suggestion that I’d been the one to drop a dime on Caroline Sturgis had rippled through Springfield. That and the fall weather were enough to make me a pariah.
Some hard-liners must have secretly supported the tipster; once or twice I thought I saw a little smile from people who thought that I’d been the informer. One woman, Althea Tripplehorn, the self-appointed moral compass of Springfield, had even started a petition that all newcomers should somehow be vetted by the real estate agents who sold them their homes. A little thing like the Constitution didn’t bother Althea. I knew sex offenders had to register in some towns, but former media execs? Ex-New Yorkers?
It got particularly quiet when I entered the diner and the Main Street Moms were in attendance. Caroline might no longer have been one of their own, but I doubt they appreciated an interloper coming in and shattering their nice neat little world.
After three years of hard work, I’d reverted to being an outsider again, except to Babe, who stuck by me. I took to going to the diner at off-peak hours so I wouldn’t see anyone I knew.
“I’m screwed. Not only does Grant Sturgis hate me, but half my clientele thinks I put the finger on one of the nicest women in Springfield. She volunteers, she carpools other people’s bratty kids, she does all those craftsy things for charity events. Come gardening season I’m going to be unemployed, broke, and a social outcast. I’m going to have to start a victory garden just to eat.”
Babe was sympathetic. She herself was a local who’d returned after a long absence, and even then it took a few years for her to rejoin the fold.
“They don’t hate you. They’re just nervous,” she said. “And that Althea. She hasn’t had a good cause to get up in arms about since the seventies. If it was up to her, the whole town would be gated. What about O’Malley? Can’t he do something?”
“Please-the man doesn’t know how close he came to being throttled the other night, but we were in the police station and a little too close to those benches with the shackles.”
Besides, there was nothing the Springfield police could do. They hadn’t received the tip, the Michigan police had. The locals had no jurisdiction in Caroline’s case and had only been notified as a courtesy less than an hour before federal marshals came to arrest her. The tipster didn’t break the law. Caroline did.
“You are screwed,” she said, “unless you can find out who really did it and why.”
“Me? How is that my job?”
“Fine. You can keep avoiding people and coming here for breakfast at nine o’clock in the evening. Doesn’t bother me.”
Yeah, that’s all I had to do-and there weren’t any place mats to help me out with that. Just like the cops in Michigan, I needed a tipster.
Outside, a vehicle crawled by the diner, disappearing at the far end of the lot. Then it appeared a second time, hanging a U-turn and pulling into a space. I thought it might have been the last of the intrepid reporters, but most of them had moved on to Bridgeport where Caroline, in a orange jumpsuit, had been transferred to a larger facility. It wasn’t.
Becka Reynolds, one of the Main Street Moms, peered through the glass door. She surveyed the few other customers in the diner before coming in, and Babe and I waited to see if she was friend or foe.
I’d never worked on her property but recognized her as one of Caroline’s neighbors. She came and sat on the stool beside me, even though there were plenty of empty places a safe distance away from Springfield’s new least-popular person.
“This is kind of late for you, Ms. Reynolds,” Babe said. “What can I get you?”
“Nothing. No, a decaf, please.”
“Gotta make a new pot.”
“That’s fine, I’ll wait. And it’s Becka.” She pulled off a pair of buttery leather gloves and carefully, needlessly, flattened them out on her thigh but still said nothing. The silence was getting weird. Finally we both started to speak at the same time.
“You go,” I said.
“No, you.”
As nervous as she was, this was more than a how-deep-to-plant-the-bulbs question. What did she want to ask me? Or tell me?
Always perceptive, Babe offered us some privacy. If we wanted to have a less public chat, we could use her recently violated office, an inner sanctum I’d been in only once before when I was showing her gardening Web sites online. Again Becka and I answered in unison. “Yes.” Becka gave a nervous laugh. Babe left one of the waitresses in charge of the diner and the three of us walked outside and around to the back of the building. The new key stuck, but finally worked.
Years ago, the diner’s previous owner had added a small room onto the back. It had a view of the lake and the Dumpster depending on where you sat, but neither were visible at this hour of the night. A small woodstove provided the only heat. Two loveseats faced each other and were covered with throws and Indian print pillows, a comfortable place to take a break or put your feet up after a long day behind the counter. The tainted mattress had been deflated and tossed in a corner of the room until Babe decided whether or not she could still live with it. She drew the bark cloth curtains together and told us to sit down.
“I’ll bring the coffee when it’s ready.” Then she left.
Becka spoke first. “I haven’t known who else to tell. My husband told me to stay out of it, and he’s right, of course.”
Becka Reynolds looked too young to be so submissive, but I’d been wrong about my neighbors before. She fiddled with her expensive gloves again, matching up the seams. If she wasn’t careful she’d stain them with the oil from her long, tapered fingers. She had something painful to spit out and for some reason had chosen me as the recipient.
“Some of the other women are a little uncomfortable around you. Especially now…”
“Me? I’m a pussycat. What have I done?”
Was that what this was about? Was I being run out of town by a Junior Leaguer? Was this the suburban equivalent of the Old West’s tar and feathers?
Becka explained. I’d done nothing, that was it. No husband, no kids, not much makeup, no pearls, no “every strand in place” helmet hair. Half of them thought I would try to steal their husbands and the other half thought I was gay. This was going to be hard to address without putting myself firmly in one camp or the other.
“And now they think I’m the bigmouth who called the cops on Caroline, right?” I said. She smiled almost apologetically.
“Why,” I said, “because I’m madly in love with Grant Sturgis and wanted her out of the way?”
“You’re not, are you?” she asked, the color draining from her face.
“I was joking. How can you think that?”
Then I saw how she could. Perhaps I wasn’t the only one Caroline had confided in when she thought Grant was having an affair. I’d been at her place a lot, and until recently Grant and I had been pretty chummy-even being discovered canoodling in the greenhouse by two of Springfield’s finest. At least that was the way it might have been described on the bush telegraph. By whom, one of the cops? The civilian office worker? So Grant thought I was a snitch and everyone else thought I was a slut. Excellent. Forget having breakfast at night. I’d have to sell my house, leave town, and get a real job. And what had I done?
“Put it out of your head. I don’t want anyone’s husband and it’s not because I’m gay. Grant hired me to try to find out who tipped off the cops about Caroline.”
Becka seemed relieved. Maybe she hadn’t really believed I was guilty, but she needed to be sure.
“Did you know about Caroline before this all happened?” I asked.
“Absolutely not. I knew there were things she didn’t like to talk about, but we all have those. If…if I tell you something, you can’t say you heard it from me.” I felt like screaming “get on with it,” but Becka had to do this in her own excruciatingly slow way.
“Go on.” I nodded and patted her forearm to encourage her, then pulled back so she wouldn’t resurrect the gay theory.
“It was last week-no, two weeks ago-when we had our last morning ride together.”
Becka told me Caroline had been on a roller coaster the entire morning. She’d gotten a ticket for running a stop sign on the way to the stables. Becka was amused that she was inordinately concerned about it, but Caroline kept repeating she’d never gotten a ticket before as if it were the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
“I told her it’s a rite of passage. Everyone gets a ticket on Chesterfield Road at some point in time, especially at the end of the month, when the cops have their quotas to make. It’s as if they have a roulette wheel and just decide whose turn it is. I was surprised it hadn’t happened years ago.”
I made a mental note to be super careful on Chesterfield.
On top of that, Becka said, something odd had happened at the stables.
Now we were getting somewhere. “What was it?” I asked.
“Something rattled her. In the lounge area outside of the women’s locker room.”
“Another rider?” I asked.
“I don’t know, possibly.”
“Did you recognize the person?”
Becka shook her head. She didn’t see who it was, but thought it might have been a new early morning regular. It was unusual for a man to be riding alone at that time, but they’d seen the newcomer from a distance twice and had gotten to the stage of polite nods and waves.
“Something he said troubled her. She wouldn’t tell me what it was. Then we came to the diner, met the others, and she was so happy to see you, I assumed she was fine. When she came out, she was pale as a ghost. She made up some flimsy excuse and left right away.”
And that must have helped fuel the rumor, at least among the Main Street Moms, that I’d been connected to Caroline’s arrest, that I’d said or done something to upset her.
Someone or something was scratching at the door. Finally, Babe pushed it open butt first, balancing a tray with two coffees and a small round of biscotti.
“Pete is outdoing himself,” I said, jumping up and holding the door for her. “Are they twice baked?”
“Yeah, he’s getting good.” Babe bunny-dipped the tray onto the coffee table. “How are you girls doing?” she asked. “Playing nice?”
I didn’t want Becka to regret having confided in me, so I kept mum. She did the same.
“Right. Don’t leave any food in here, okay? The raccoons are killing me. I’m this close to getting a pellet gun. I’ve only got one key to the new lock. Just press the button to lock the door when you leave.
Babe left us, and Becka and I picked at the biscotti and used the coffee mugs to keep our hands warm. She hadn’t given me much to go on, just one or two details about the new rider’s habits and schedule, but I planned to talk to O’Malley about what information could have been gleaned from Caroline’s driver’s license. Then I’d visit the stables to ask Hank Mossdale about his new customer.
I went to Mossdale’s regularly during the gardening season for free horse manure. Hank might open up to me-maybe I’d even get to meet the man who had spoken to Caroline.
“Was there anything or anyone else new in Caroline’s life that you know of?” I asked. “Had she signed up for any new classes?” I remembered her telling me about all the craft projects started, then tucked away on her garage.
Nothing. Apart from the ticket and the brief encounter with the man at the stables, Caroline’s life had been stultifyingly routine, detailed and color-coded in erasable marker on the large whiteboard in her otherwise pristine kitchen. Soccer, dentist, when to pick up this one, when to drop off that one. As far as I knew, there’d been no new entries since she’d been arrested.
When we finished we locked Babe’s office and brought the tray inside. I walked Becka to her car.
“I’m sorry we never talked before,” she said, shaking my hand. “We will, I promise. And I can use some help with my garden next season if you have the time. I know how pleased Caroline is with your work. She was so excited about the venture you two were starting. I confess I was jealous. She might have asked any of us to go in with her, but she asked you. And Chiaramonte’s is a perfect location for a gift shop and small garden design center. I guess that won’t happen now.”
“Grant said me someone else was interested in the property,” I said, “unless Roxy was just trying to push him into making an offer. I wouldn’t put it past her to do that.”
“Oh no, it’s probably true,” Becka said. “I think you met him. Attractive man, around fifty years old? He spent a lot of time at the Paradise Diner the day you worked on the planters. He asked if we happened to know of a nursery for sale. Can you beat that for coincidence? I guess he’s the one.”
Now I had two mysterious strangers on my suspect list, so that’s where I started looking for my tipster.