Софи Райан - Telling Tails

“Okay, she did suggest I not say that I think Michelle is probably right about Rose.”

Jess groaned. “I swear, Nick, sometimes you’re about as smart as a bag of hammers.” She sat down, gave me a look of sympathy and rolled her eyes.

Nick shook his head and gestured with one hand. “Both of you seem to be ignoring the fact that Rose could have had a stroke. A stroke. If she did, she needs to be under a doctor’s care.” He made a motion in the air between Jess and me. “You think you’re the only ones who care about her? Yes, when you called I’d already talked to Michelle. I saw a chance to have a couple of blood tests run to make sure Rose is all right. And yes, the toxicology tests are being done as well.”

“Rose was examined by a doctor at the hospital. And they ran some tests. She didn’t have a stroke, Nick.” I struggled to keep my voice down.

“Oh, c’mon,” he said. “Do you really think Rose saw Leesa Cameron dragging her husband’s body across their kitchen floor? Or are you going with Cameron and some mysterious girlfriend staging some kind of elaborate setup?”

I swallowed down the sour taste at the back of my throat. “I’m going with taking Rose at her word until I see some real evidence that tells me something else happened.”

“Well, I’m not willing to let something bad happen that I could have prevented.”

Jess touched my arm. “Please let me take this one,” she said. She didn’t wait for my answer. She fixed Nick with her blue eyes. “First of all, you’ve taken one too many hockey pucks to the head if you think misleading or pretending or whatever you want to call it with Sarah is a good idea. And second, who exactly appointed you the guardian of all the rest of us, the all-knowing, all-seeing oracle who knows what’s best?”

Nick kept his eyes on me. “Stay out of this, Jess,” he said. “This has nothing to do with you.”

She gave a snort of laughter and moved her chair back a couple of inches. “I’m moving out of the way because I figure there’s a good chance you’re going to get hit with lightning for being such a hypocrite.” She glanced at me. “You should move out of the way, too, Sarah.”

Anger flashed across Nick’s face. Jess didn’t give him a chance to speak. “You’re right about one thing. This”—she made a motion in the air with one hand—“doesn’t really have anything to do with me. Just the way Rose’s health has nothing to do with you. She’s a grown adult perfectly capable of making her own decisions, even if no one else likes them.”

Nick opened his mouth and closed it again. Jess was on a roll and wasn’t about to stop until she was done.

“You keep doing this,” she said. She made a fist with her left hand and moved it up and down in a chopping motion. “Beating your head against the wall when all you have to do is walk around. You think you know better, better than Rose, better than your own mother, because they’re old. And maybe you do. I don’t know. The thing is, even if you do, you don’t get to choose because it’s not your life. We don’t want to hear it. We want to screw up our own lives our own way.” She took a breath and let it out; then she looked at me. “Can I get a ride home?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

She smiled. “Thanks.” Then she scouted the room, found Tina and pointed at the empty beer bottle on the table, holding up a finger.

Nick leaned toward me, resting one hand on the back of my chair. “Sarah, I’m sorry I wasn’t straight with you, but I can’t apologize for caring about Rose.” The marimba ring tone of his phone interrupted before I could answer him. He stood up, took a step away from the table and pulled the phone from his pocket.

Tina came then and delivered Jess’s beer. “Could I get you anything else?” she asked.

“Another order of chips and salsa,” Jess said. She glanced at me. “This one’s on me.”

Nick ended his call and came back to the table. From the corner of my eye I saw Sam and the rest of the band making their way back to the stage. Around us people began to clap and cheer.

Nick leaned over my chair. “I have to go,” he said. “But this isn’t over.”

I watched him walk away. I knew it wasn’t over. I just wasn’t so sure we had even gotten started.

Chapter 10

I woke up the next morning feeling like I hadn’t slept at all, the sheet and a cotton blanket both wrapped in a tangle around one leg. After I’d gotten home from the pub I’d been too wired to watch TV. I’d spent some time searching around online, trying to learn more about Jeff Cameron. I’d remembered his sister saying he’d disappeared once before, after their grandmother died. I called Chloe Sanders, who told me Jeff had mentioned his grandmother only once. She was fairly certain the woman’s name had been Catherine, but that was all she knew. I didn’t have any luck finding an obituary for the woman.

I made coffee, scrambled an egg in the small cast-iron skillet Rose had insisted I needed, and ate it with a dish of stewed rhubarb that had grown in my backyard. Charlotte had been horrified that I’d been pulling out the plants and composting them because I thought they were a weed. Elvis hopped onto my lap to mooch a bite of egg.

My cell phone rang. I slid it across the counter and checked the screen, smiling when I saw who was calling. “Hi, Mom,” I said. I leaned back, shifting Elvis sideways on my legs. He made a grumble of annoyance.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she said. “How are things?”

“Things are fine,” I said. I’d just talked to her and Dad less than a week ago. I had a feeling I knew what had prompted this call. “Have you been talking to Gram?”

I heard her laugh on the other end of the phone. “Guilty as charged. I just wanted to hear it straight from you that Rose was all right.”

Elvis had jumped down to the floor to investigate what I’d put out for his breakfast.

“Rose is all right, Mom, I swear,” I said.

“Isabel said someone hit her over the head with a boat fender?”

“Liz claims the fact that it was Rose’s head is what saved her.”

Mom laughed. “Not that anyone would ever suggest that Liz herself can be a little hardheaded.”

I laughed, too. “Oh no, never.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Not you, but maybe Dad. Is he around?”

I heard her take a sip of her tea, iced, I guessed, because of the time of year. “He went out for a run, but I can pass on a message. What do you need?”

My stepfather had been an award-winning newspaper reporter for many years. Now he taught journalism and writing at Keating State College in New Hampshire.

“Would you ask him if he could find out anything about the death of a Catherine Cameron? He’d be looking about three years ago. I don’t know if that’s Catherine with a ‘C’ or a ‘K.’ She would have been about eighty and she had two grandchildren, Jeff—probably Jeffrey—and Nicole. I don’t know where in New Hampshire they lived.”

“Does this have anything to do with what happened to Rose?” she asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “Rose was doing a favor for a customer. I’m not sure whether or not he was being straight with her. I’d just like to know a little bit more about his background. Mr. P. has been searching online, but sometimes face-to-face works better.”

“I’ll give your father all the information as soon as he gets home.” I heard a squeak, which told me she was at her desk in her office, which overlooked the backyard.

“Are you working?” I asked. Mom wrote an elementary school series of books that featured a talking gerbil named Einstein.

“Copy edits,” she said. “Where do you stand on serial commas?”