Marcia Talley - Through the Darkness

Clearly, I was supposed to agree with him. “You’re the expert, Wally,” I said, wondering where his French accent had gotten to.

“You think so?” mused the brunette, soon-to-be-redhead, in the chair. She studied her reflection thoughtfully.

While she remained paralyzed with indecision, I pulled out my photos and passed them to Wally.

Holding the photos between an elegant thumb and forefinger, Wally drew me behind the reception desk, looking serious. Once he saw the photos, though, his face lit up. “Sure, I know her,” Wally said, abandoning his fashionable lisp. “That’s Joanna Kerr. She went to Haverford with us.”

“Kerr? Not Barnhorst?”

“If she’s Barnhorst now, she could have married, I suppose. It’s been eight years since we graduated.”

“Have you seen Joanna here at the spa, Wally?”

“No, but I’m not exactly the beating heart of the enterprise, tucked away over here in Bellissima.”

Wally raised a just-a-minute finger and excused himself to send the lady wearing the tin hat off to sit under a heat hood. When I had his attention again, I asked, “Can you think of any reason why Joanna would show up here at Paradiso?”

Wally shrugged. “If she came to see anybody, it’d be Dante. Before he met Emily, he and Joanna were an item.”

“An item?” I repeated dumbly.

“Yeah, you know, they were going steady,” he explained, as if I were a doddering septuagenarian who didn’t understand the slang.

“I see.” My stomach clenched as it appeared that my suspicions about my son-in-law were about to be confirmed. “Does Emily know Joanna, then?”

Wally looked up from the sales slip he was filling out with pen in large block letters. “I doubt it. After Dante met Em, he continued dating Joanna for a while, but then he and Em got serious and he broke it off.”

“Was Joanna okay with that?”

Wally shrugged. “Who knows. She didn’t come gunning for Dante with an AK-47 or anything, so I suppose she was okay with it. She dropped out of school soon afterward anyway, and we lost touch.”

I thought about all the other Haverford alums Dante had gathered together to work at his spa. “Does François know her, too?”

“Probably. Why don’t you ask him?”

“I will.” I touched his arm. “Thanks, Wally.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I started to go, but then turned back to the brunette in the chair. “Ma’am?”

She raised a languid eyebrow. “Yes?”

“About the winse,” I said. “Go for it!”

I caught François, the chef, in the postlunch, preteatime lull, piping salmon mousse onto round rice crackers that he had arranged on a platter decorated with fresh pansies. When I walked in, he offered me one-a cracker, not a pansy.

“Thanks!” I snatched it off the platter like a starving orphan and slid it into my mouth whole. “God, that’s good,” I mumbled around a mouth full of crumbs. “Can I have another one?”

François grinned and proffered the platter. “Sure.”

“Wally says you might know this woman,” I said, still chewing. “I’m pretty sure she came to the spa last Monday.” I waved one of Joanna’s photos in his general direction.

François put down the piping cone, wiped his hands on his apron, and took the picture from me. “Joanna Kerr?”

“Apparently.”

“We went to Haverford together.” He passed the picture back to me. “Word got out among the old ’Fords about the good things Dante was planning to do at Paradiso, and she came to apply for a job.”

“What job did she apply for, then?”

François began arranging curls of red pepper on top of each artfully moussed cracker. “You’ll have to ask Dante about that. Joanna’s recently divorced, moved here from Baltimore. She needs to find work. You know the drill. A degree in philosophy from Haverford. Not exactly your most marketable skill.” He grinned.

I knew about marketable skills. My degree was in French literature from Oberlin. I had to earn a master’s in library science before I got a job that paid real money.

“But wait a minute,” I said. “Wally just told me that Joanna dropped out of school.”

François opened the refrigerator and slid the finished platter of crackers onto an empty shelf. “She did, for a semester. She came back and graduated a year later.”

“But, what could she do here, François?”

“Don’t know what she discussed with Dante, but when she stopped by the kitchen, she told me she’d be willing to do anything. Only opening I had was for a salad person. Would have given it to her, too, but when Emily got wind of it at staff meeting, she had a fit and fell in it.”

“Emily knows her, then?”

“Knows of her, but I don’t think they’ve ever met.” His eyebrows danced mischieviously. “Dante dated them both for a while, but when he got serious about Em, he broke it off with Joanna.” He began working on a second platter, this one covered with triangles of what looked like crustless cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches. “Em was at Bryn Mawr and Joanna at Haverford, so unless they had classes together, or got onto the Blue Bus shuttle at the same time, there’s no reason they would have run into each other.”

“I see,” I muttered, thinking that I may have just learned the reason for Friday’s argument outside Garnelle’s massage room door that resulted in damage to a certain valuable spa lounge chair.

“François, I’m pretty sure I saw Joanna here late Monday morning. When I was in the office, a woman who looked a lot like her stuck her head in and asked for Dante.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you think of any reason why Joanna would have taken Timmy?”

“Joanna?” François snorted. “No way. Unless she’s gone fucking nuts.”

And that was exactly what I was afraid of.

As I drove away from Paradiso, Georgina reachedme on my cell to say that Emily had finished terrorizing West Annapolis and was on her way home. I was heading that direction myself when my cell phone burbled again.

“I need to talk to you, Mrs. Ives.” It was Special Agent Amanda Crisp, and she sounded serious.

“Just a minute.” I figured she wasn’t calling with good news. Rather than have a heart attack and crash my car, I pulled into the Bay Ridge shopping center, parked in front of Giant, and cut my engine. “It’s bad news, isn’t it?”

“No, sorry. I didn’t mean to alarm you. It’s just that there’s something I’d like to discuss.”

“I want to talk to you, too, Agent Crisp,” I said, thinking of the envelope of photographs that sat on the car seat next to me. “When and where?”

“I haven’t had lunch yet.”

“Neither have I. Do you know Grumps?” I suggested, naming a quirky local restaurant in the Hillsmere shopping center nearby.

“I know it well,” she said. “We used to stop there for coffee when we were camping out at your daughter’s. I can be there in twenty minutes.”

“Can you tell me what this is about?”

“Order me a burger. See you in twenty minutes, Mrs. Ives.”

Grumps Café serves the best hamburgers in town. When I arrived there five minutes later, I marched straight up to the counter and ordered two cheeseburgers, ice tea, and chips. The cashier handed me a toy frog with 19 written in marker pen on his shiny rubber chest, and pointed me to a booth.

While I waited for the burgers, or Amanda, whichever came first, I worried. What could Amanda want to see me about? Privately? She’d once called me a loose cannon, and warned me to keep my nose out of FBI business. Perhaps she felt I needed a refresher course.

I studied my surroundings-the purposely (and generously) paint-splattered floors, the walls hung with assorted T-shirts, discarded window frames, Frisbees, surfboards, and various other hand-me-downs from Jimmy Buffett’s condominium in Margaritaville. Amanda Crisp had also accused me of nearly blowing a carefully orchestrated, multiagency sting operation, but I pleaded emphatically not guilty to that.