Лори Касс - Tailing A Tabby

None of which made much sense if you thought about it for any length of time, but I was finding out that if you spoke well and sincerely, people tended to believe what you told them.

“So you and Carissa had known each other for a while?” I asked.

Jari sipped her water. “She started doing sales at Talcott, oh, around three years ago, I guess. I’ve been there since I graduated high school.” She took another, deeper sip. “Probably be there until I die,” she muttered.

Our server approached, carrying a platter laden with Kristen-directed food offerings. “Here you are, ladies,” he said. “We’re starting you off with Waldorf salads and rolls fresh from the oven.”

I pushed the bowl of rolls over to Jari’s side. “Have you had these before? Melt-in-your-mouth good.”

She reached for her knife. “Oh, I shouldn’t,” she said, taking a roll and buttering it. As she took her first bite, her eyes closed and she gave a slight moan. “Oh, wow, this is so good.”

Exactly. “You and Carissa were good friends?”

Jari dabbed at the corner of her buttery mouth with a white cloth napkin. “We ended up as friends the first week she started at the dealership.” She looked at the roll in her hand as if she had no idea how it had gotten there. “Carissa was so much fun. One of those happy people, you know? It’s just so wrong that she’s dead.” Her lower lip started to crumple.

I waited a short moment, then said, “Don’t let your food get cold. I know for a fact the owner hates it when that happens.” This was true. In the privacy of her office, Kristen had been known to stomp and rave at the top of her lungs about good food gone to waste. My hope, however, was that the eating and drinking process would keep Jari talking. My library friend Holly always talked when she held a beverage of any kind. I wondered briefly if her young children were aware of that quirk, and decided it was up to them to figure it out on their own.

“You know the owner?” Jari took another bite, then swallowed. “That’s pretty cool.”

It was, but I wanted to talk about her friend, not mine. “What did Carissa like to do? Did she have a boyfriend? Did she ski or have a boat or anything like that?”

“Ski?” Jari smiled. “The only place Carissa would have been at a ski resort was in the bar. You know, I bet she would have made a great bartender.” Her pensive look was back.

I took a roll and pushed the bowl back in her direction. “No boyfriend?”

Jari’s hand crept forward, hesitated, then snatched another roll. “She’d had a bad breakup just before she started at Talcott. She said she’d sworn off men her own age, that she was going to try dating older men and see if she had better luck.”

Could this be… a clue? “So, was she? Dating an older man, I mean?”

Jari shook her head. “I’m not sure. When I was on vacation back in June, some guy came into the dealership. She said they went out a couple of times, but I’m not sure it was anything serious.”

“What was his name?”

Jari kept buttering her roll. “She never said.”

My eyebrows went up, and Jari sighed. “Yeah, I know. I thought it was weird, too. I mean, you always tell your girlfriends the name of the guy you’re dating. Always, unless…”

She stopped talking, so I filled in the blank. “You think he was married?”

“I don’t know.” Unhappiness crowded onto her face. “I can’t think that Carissa would date a married man. That just wasn’t like her.”

I hoped not. “What did she say about him?”

“Not much. Only that he was kind of loaded, moneywise, and that he didn’t look anything like the last guys she’d dated.” Jari gave a vague smile. “She said it was time to break out of the lean build and sandy brown hair rut she’d fallen into.”

So I had a wealthy older man as a suspect, one who was potentially married. Plus the bad-breakup guy. “Who was the guy she broke up with?”

“You mean the Weasel?”

I laughed. “Please tell me that isn’t really his name.”

“That’s what she always called him.” Jari gave a wan smile. “I never knew what his name was.”

Our waiter scooped away the empty dishes and promised that our stuffed whitefish sandwiches would be out soon. I waited until he’d gone to ask the Big Question. “Do you have any idea who could have killed her?”

Jari clutched her water glass. “I wish I did. If I knew who did that to her, I’d go to the police so fast my head would spin around in circles.”

“Do you know if anyone hated her? Or”—a brilliant idea came to me—“was really jealous of her?”

“She wasn’t like that. I mean, she was pretty, so I suppose some wacko could have been jealous, but she was just fun. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to… wanting to…” She sighed and took another roll.

I couldn’t imagine it, either, and I hadn’t even known the woman. Sorrow leached into and through me, another death diminishing me. What we needed was something for undiminishing purposes. A brand-new baby might work, although preferably not right here in the restaurant.

“There is one thing, though.” Jari pleated her napkin. “She was big on Facebook. Always posting on there, real personal stuff. I kept telling her that she was opening herself up to trouble. I told her over and over that her house was going to be robbed, what with her posting where she was all the time and what she was doing and who she was doing it with. But she just told me not to be such a worrywart and laughed it off.”

Jari’s voice shook. “She said she was careful about her privacy controls and who she friended. She was all fun and games and she hardly ever took anything seriously. I wish… I wish I could be more like her.”

I reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “That’s a lovely thing to say and I’m sure that somewhere, somehow, Carissa is smiling down at you.”

Jari swallowed a sob. “Do you think so?”

I did. But I also wondered if Carissa’s Facebook page was still online.

• • •

That night the dinner menu was takeout Thai (me) and cat food (Eddie). A stiff breeze had whipped up out of the northwest and eating outside would have meant chasing napkins and keeping hair out of my mouth, so we were eating inside for the first time in days. Eddie had settled onto the top of the opposite dining bench and was studiously not paying attention to me.

“I’m sorry it’s not nice enough to eat outside,” I told him, “but you don’t like the wind. You know you don’t.”

His mouth opened and closed in a soundless “Mrr.”

I ignored him and turned the page of the book I was trying to read. It was the latest release from James Lee Burke, something I’d been looking forward to reading for weeks, but even Mr. Burke’s lyrical prose wasn’t capturing my attention.

I closed the cover. I probably shouldn’t be reading a library book while eating something as slurpy as pad Thai, anyway. If I sprayed even the slightest spot of sauce on a page, I’d feel obligated to buy the book and my monthly book budget had taken a serious hit during the library’s Fourth of July book sale. Two dollars a hardcover and a dollar a paperback are sweet prices to a bibliophile, but spend a couple of hours wandering the tables and you can still fork out a serious amount of money, no problem.

With no book at hand, I had two options. Read the newspaper or talk to Eddie. Since getting the newspaper meant I’d have to stand up, walk all the way across the room, bend down to get it out of my backpack, stand up, and walk all the way back again, I opted for Eddie.

“Not that you’re second choice,” I told him.

He turned his head and stared at me without blinking. I couldn’t tell if he was thinking about how best to punish me for being a liar or if he was wondering how my food would taste if I keeled over dead.