And that put Cat and me back on good terms. Especially once I had her promise that she wouldn’t try anything so crazy as to kidnap me ever again. Well, that and Cat brought out a series of gorgeous hand-carved canes for me right before I left. “I know you’re working to walk without one, honey, but I thought we could have one of these on hand as a backup, just in case,” she’d whispered kindly.
I selected a white walking stick with a silver spiral handle, which was actually quite elegant and probably wicked expensive. “Ooo,” Cat said, eyeing my choice. “That’s exactly the one I would’ve gone with. I ordered it from Comoy’s of London. And if you have to use it at the ceremony, I think it’ll blend in with your gown and no one will even notice. Take it home with you tonight and test it out. If you like it, its yours.”
Sometimes, my sister can be just wonderful—the best sister ever. Other times, she can drive me completely crazy…but that’s family for you.
Candice offered to take me home and I accepted. “How you doin’?” she asked when I’d fallen silent.
“I’m okay,” I said, staring out the window with an unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“You worried about Cat?”
I rubbed my arms. I had a sudden chill. “Partly.”
“Partly?”
“Partly I’m worried about her and partly I can’t shake this feeling like something’s going to go wrong at the wedding.”
Candice chuckled. “Well, it wouldn’t be a wedding if something didn’t go wrong, Sundance.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I guess.”
“And Cat’s in the best of hands,” she assured me. “Milo says he sent us his top guys in Austin, and he’s got another team assigned to her in Boston. She’ll be protected at all times.”
The truth was that I wasn’t that worried about Cat. I’d done a thorough check of the ether around her, and I could see some threatening communication, but there didn’t appear to be any follow-through.
Still, I thought it pretty smart to surround her with big, beefy men who could keep her out of trouble and talk her out of harebrained ideas like kidnapping her sister, unlike Shrek and his ass for a partner. (Swearing doesn’t count if you can turn it into a pun.)
Even though I knew Cat would now be safe, I couldn’t shake the disquieting feeling that had taken root and was twisting me up inside. I felt edgy and nervous without knowing why. “Is it too late to stop by Jamie’s?” I asked, needing a distraction.
Candice glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “It’s after eight,” she said. “We’d be pushing it, but I’m up for it if you are.”
“I’m game.” I was too wound up to go home.
“Cool.”
We found our way to Jamie’s house, which wasn’t too far away, as it happened, and pulled to a stop in front of a terra-cotta orange home with bright white trim. “Not quite red or yellow, but a nice in-between,” Candice commented as we got out of her Porsche.
I will admit that the minute I spotted the color, I’d smirked smugly just a bit. It’s nice to be right.
As we approached the house, we could see in through the front window, and it appeared that Jamie was still in the unpacking stage. Candice rang the bell and I grinned again when an excited yippy bark answered.
The porch light came on and Candice winked at me, then turned toward the door so that Jamie could clearly see who was on her front step. The door opened slowly and a young, bright-faced woman with freckles looked at us with curiosity. “Yes?”
“Jamie?” I said, taking the lead.
She focused on me. “Oh, my God! Abby Cooper?”
I flashed her a smile. “You remember!”
Jamie opened the door wider. “Well, of course I remember! What’re you doing here, though? Did you sense that I’d just bought this place?”
“Sort of. This is my business partner, Candice Fusco. She and I work private investigations together. Can we come in and talk to you for a few minutes?”
Several more yippy barks pulled our attention down, and Jamie blushed while she reached for her dog. “I adopted him the day after I came to see you,” she admitted, stepping back to allow us to come inside. “His name’s Gismo.”
I held up my fingers so Gismo could take a sniff and he gave my hand an enthusiastic lick. “He’s adorable!”
Jamie waved us into her cluttered living room, blushing again when she had to swipe away packing paper and bubble wrap so that we could all take a seat.
“How cute is this place?” I said to Jamie, looking around the small but cozy living room with approval.
“Oh, Abby, I can’t thank you enough for telling me to buy a house over a condo. You know, I sorta fought the idea for a few weeks after my reading, but then I had this sudden urge to call my Realtor and tell her that I was open to a single-family home. She sent me the link to this listing, like, five minutes later, and the second I saw it I could just picture myself living here! Plus, it’d been on the market for a while, so I got it for a great price!”
Candice sat back on the sofa next to me and crossed her legs leisurely. “It really is charming,” she said sweetly. “And you and Bailey should share moving supplies, now that you’re moving in and she’s moving out.”
Jamie’s face turned quizzical. “Bailey?” she said. “You mean Bailey Colquitt?”
Candice nodded. “Abby and I went to visit with her last week.”
Jamie’s brow furrowed. “You did?” she said, turning her attention back to me. “Did you do a reading for her too?”
I shook my head. “Not exactly. Candice and I are looking into Kendra Moreno’s disappearance.”
Jamie bit her lip. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “I didn’t even think of that. Abby, do you know when she’ll come back home?”
I hesitated, not knowing what to say to that, and Jamie seemed to read into the prolonged pause. Her face drained of color. “Oh, God!” she repeated. “You know what’s happened to her!”
I held up my hand. “I’m not certain, Jamie. I have a feeling, and I could be wrong.”
Jamie hugged Gismo to her chest. “But she’s…alive, right?” Again, I didn’t answer her, and Jamie’s eyes began to water. “Oh, no!” she whispered. “Oh, no, no, no, no!”
I got up and went to sit next to her, wrapping my arm around her shoulders as she dissolved into a puddle of tears. “Why?” she cried. “Why Kendra? She’s such a good person!”
I looked up at Candice, and her face held such sympathy. I knew this case was tugging at her insides just as much as it was tugging at mine. When Jamie had settled down a little, I brought her a tissue and started to question her. “Jamie,” I began, “do you know of anyone who might want to harm Kendra?”
Jamie shook her head and dabbed at her eyes. “No,” she said hoarsely. “Not Kendra. She didn’t have an enemy in the world!”
I glanced at Candice again and noticed the skeptical look in her eyes. “Jamie?” I said next. “Do you remember the part during your session where I talked about two women that you knew, one brunette and one blonde, who maybe should be kept away from each other?”
Jamie gasped a little. “Oh, my God! I totally forgot about that! But yeah, I do remember it! You were talking about Kendra and Bailey, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I think I was,” I agreed. “But, Jamie, I still don’t have much of a context for the insight. I mean, there’s a limit to what I can see. Now that we have some hindsight, can you tell us why I might’ve hit on the fact that Bailey wasn’t the friend Kendra thought she was?”
Jamie’s face seemed to register something, and she looked up at me with alarm. “You don’t think…?”
She didn’t finish her thought, and I decided to wait her out. I wasn’t going to feed her my impressions. I wanted her to tell me.
Jamie bit her lip again. “Kendra and Bailey have been best friends since high school,” she said. “They did everything together, and you could never say that they didn’t genuinely like each other. None of that frenemy stuff yo
u see with other girls. They were tight.”
“But something changed,” I prompted when Jamie paused again.
She looked down at Gismo, curled up in her lap. “Yeah,” she said. “Something did change. Kendra met Tristan her senior year of college.”
“And Bailey got jealous that Kendra wasn’t spending so much time with her, right?” Candice guessed.
But Jamie shook her head. “No,” she said softly, still not raising her eyes. “Bailey fell in love with Tristan too.”
My breath caught. I hadn’t picked up on that at all. “Was it mutual?”
Jamie shook her head, but it was halfhearted. “No,” she said. “I mean, at least, I don’t think so. Not at first at least. Kendra’s just this really good person. She’s so sweet that you can’t help falling for her, you know? She’s the kindest person alive, I think.”
Jamie’s voice hitched as she thought on what she’d just said, and she began to cry again. Finally she looked at me and said, “You’re positive she’s really dead, Abby?”
“No, Jamie, I’m not,” I lied. “Until we find Kendra, there’s always hope.”
Jamie swallowed hard and continued. “Anyway, Kendra wasn’t the beauty queen that Bailey was, and I think it got to Bailey that such a good-looking guy like Tristan picked Kendra over her. She would try to flirt with Tristan, but never in front of Kendra. We all saw it, but none of us said anything because Tristan seemed to be so devoted to Kendra. Then I found Tristan and Bailey making out the night of his bachelor party.”
That confession surprised me a little. “Did you say anything to Kendra about it?” I asked.
Jamie’s lower lip began to tremble. “No,” she whispered. “Tristan had his bachelor party at his best friend’s house, and Bailey talked me into going over there to crash the party. The guy I was seeing at the time was going to be there, and I think I agreed because I was starting to get pretty insecure about our relationship, and I wanted to make sure the guys weren’t doing anything crazy with some strippers or anything.
“Anyway, we got there pretty late, and Tristan was already pretty drunk. The guys didn’t want us to be there, ’cause they did have two strippers and they knew we’d report back to Kendra, so they wouldn’t let us inside, but Bailey, she insisted that we sit in the car and watch to make sure nothing too wild went on. She kept telling me we needed to have Kendra’s back.
“Then we saw Tristan come out of the house alone—probably to get some fresh air, and Bailey told me she was going to go talk to him to make sure he was okay, and while she did that, I did something stupid.”
Jamie paused, and I said, “What, honey? What’d you do?”
“I snuck around back and watched the guys through the big bay window. Like I said, I was really insecure about my relationship with my boyfriend, and I thought the guys might be up to no good with the strippers inside the house, but all I saw was most of the guys involved in a poker game and even the strippers were sitting around looking bored.
“When I came back to the front of the house to tell Bailey that we should go, I found her and Tristan over by the garage making out, and I was so pissed off that I left her there and went home.
“I felt bad about leaving her there, so about an hour later I went back to the bachelor party, but she was already gone. I called and called her, but that night she never picked up. The next morning I went to her house and saw a cab drop her off at her front door. She was still wearing the clothes she’d had on the night before, and sticking out of her purse was her bra. I knocked on her door after she’d gone inside, and when she answered I apologized for leaving her at the party, but then I confronted her about what she’d been doing with Tristan, and she swore up and down that she’d made this big mistake and that she was really, really sorry, and that nothing like that would ever happen again.”
“You believed her,” I said, more statement than question.
“Yes,” Jamie said. “Especially when I saw the way Tristan flat-out refused to look at Bailey from that point forward, and he even broke down and cried in the middle of his wedding vows. I thought he might’ve been really sorry that he hooked up with Bailey, and you could see that he loved Kendra so much! So I never said a word to anybody about it. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do, but I really wanted Kendra and Tristan to work out.”
I sat back in my seat and considered Jamie. “Do you think that Tristan would ever hurt Kendra?” I asked bluntly.
Jamie shook her head. “No!” she said. “Tristan’s this really great guy! I couldn’t see him hurting anyone.”
“Okay,” I said, “then how about Bailey? Do you think she’s capable of hurting Kendra? Or hiring someone to hurt Kendra?”
Jamie’s eyes returned to her lap. “I don’t know, Abby,” she said. “Bailey can be sweet when she wants to be, but if you’ve got something she wants, she’ll find a way to get it. All these years since the wedding I’ve kept my eye on Bailey when Tristan’s around, and you can see that she still has a thing for him. So could she have hurt Kendra to get her out of the way? I may be a bad person for thinking this, but yeah, maybe.”
“Were you ever suspicious that Bailey and Tristan got together after the wedding?” Candice asked.
“I don’t know,” Jamie said softly, and I picked up something in the ether around her. Something that suggested she was holding back.
“What?” I asked. “What is it that you’re not saying?”
Jamie sighed. “A couple of weeks ago, right when work was really crazy and I was in the middle of going through all the mortgage stuff, trying to buy this place, Kendra left me a voice mail. She said that she’d had a long talk with Bailey and that she was thinking about leaving Tristan and she really needed my advice.” Jamie paused again and began crying in earnest once more. “I…I…never returned her call, Abby. My life was just filled with stress and pressure back then, and I didn’t want to get involved and add one more thing to my plate. I mean, I just didn’t think I had the energy or the time.”
“You think Kendra found out about the night of Tristan’s bachelor party?”
Jamie wiped her eyes, but the tears of guilt continued to flow. “Yeah,” she said in a choked whisper. “I mean, why else would Kendra even consider leaving Tristan? He’s a great guy, works his butt off so they can afford to live in that house, and he loves her and Colby like crazy. The only reason I could think of that she might want to leave him was because she found out about Bailey and him together that night. So when she turned up missing, I figured that she really had found out about Tristan cheating on her, and she just sort of bolted. I’ve been thinking all she needs is a little time to sort things out, and she’ll come back. I mean, she’d never permanently turn her back on her son.”
“That’s why you haven’t been overly worried about her disappearance,” I said. Jamie nodded and her eyes welled up again.
“I thought she was off on a mini-vacation, just trying to clear her head a little.”
The room fell silent while we all considered what she’d said; then Candice asked, “Jamie, did you know that Bailey is getting divorced?”
My brow rose. We didn’t know that for sure; it was just something I’d picked up in the ether. “She is?” Jamie asked.
Candice nodded like it was a known fact. “She’s moving out of her house. She’s leaving her husband.”
Jamie sniffled loudly. “Well, that’s not much of a surprise. Chase Colquitt is a total douchebag.”
I couldn’t help it; I snickered but quickly covered it by clearing my throat. “How long have Bailey and Chase been together?” I asked.
Jamie thought for a moment. “Not long. Bailey met Chase about a month after Kendra and Tristan got married. The two got serious real quick. They were married in the same year they first got together.”
“That’s fast,” Candice said.
Jamie nodded. “I know it sounds weird, but I always felt like Chase was the rebound guy for Bailey after she hooked up with Tristan.”
“Rebound guy?” I asked. “But I thought they only hooked up that one night.”
Jamie stroked her pup’s ears. “As far as I know that’s true,” she said. “But like I said, it was pretty obvious to me that Bailey was in love with Tristan. It’s still obvious, actually. Every time I talk to her, she winds the conversation back to Tristan. It’s like she’s obsessed with him, which was one of the reasons why I stopped talking to her. It was always Tristan, Tristan, Tristan.”
I turned my gaze to Candice, who was looking back at me with a raised brow. Could Jamie have just provided us with a motive for Kendra’s abduction and murder? Candice stood up, making a point to note the time. “We should get out of your hair.”
I got up too. “Thanks so much for letting us talk to you, Jamie.”
“Sure,” she said as she set her pooch on the floor and walked us to the door. “And if you have any more questions about Kendra, please just call or come by. I can’t imagine what her parents must be going through. Or little Colby.”
Jamie began to well up again, and after giving her a brief supportive hug, we left her in peace.
Chapter Ten
The next morning Dutch and I had an argument. It was one of those fights that starts off being about one thing and turns into a squabble about every little issue that’s been bugging you both for the past four years.
By the end of it, I was storming (aka hobbling with emphasis) out of the house, suggesting he go…er…make love to himself. (Swearing doesn’t count when you’re having a big blowup with your fiancé.)
The moment I slammed the door behind me was the instant I realized my car was still at the office.
“Son of a…!” I growled. Rummaging around in my purse yielded another unpleasant surprise: My phone was missing. I muttered a few more choice expletives (swearing doesn’t count when you’re furious with your fiancé and you can’t find your phone) and puffed out a couple of big breaths, knowing I’d have to go back inside and hunt for my cell. As I mentally went back through the previous evening, trying to find a moment when I could last remember seeing my phone, the memory of Cat waving it triumphantly came back to me.