Love the Sinner Read online

  Oh, no, here were tears again. “Honestly, I’m fine. Or as fine as I’m going to be today. But it’s so kind of you to ask. I’ve just got a lot of sorting out to do. More now with Dennis’s…accident.” I couldn’t say the “d” word yet, and wasn’t about to let anybody else know it might be murder.

  “Well, if you need any help, call me. Do you have a roster or even a church directory yet?”

  “Not yet. I could sure use one.” It would have Linnette’s number in it, and Heather’s—the one I needed most.

  Dot gave her husband a look and he handed her Hondo’s leash and was heading across the parking lot before she could open her mouth. “Buck’s the head of the evangelism committee at the chapel. We always have a few extra directories in the van.”

  “So what are you doing here with a couple of dogs?”

  “The vet’s on the other end of the row. We have to keep their shots up extra good, and have their nails clipped regularly. We do volunteer work with them, but it’s fun. Buck is probably one of the top dog trainers in the county, and these two are trained to be therapy dogs. We go up to the children’s ward at the hospital on Thursdays, and the Alzheimer’s wing at Conejo Board and Care on Tuesdays.”

  This was something that sounded good. Maybe when life got a little less crazy I could ask Dot how such things were done. Before I could open my mouth, we had a minor commotion. “Dixie, no! I hope you were done with breakfast.” Dot was hauling back on the other leash as the remains of my maple bar disappeared into the belly of the smiling dog. I was pretty much done with the doughnuts, anyway, and Dixie looked like a very happy camper as she settled back down with a sigh.

  Buck came back with a sheaf of papers with a gol denrod cover, stapled into a booklet, and handed it to me. “Thanks, I appreciate it.”

  Dot looked at me sharply again. “And you’ll call if you need anything?”

  “I’ll call,” I promised, and meant it. We said our goodbyes over protesting dogs and they got on their way to the vet’s. I went back and got another two doughnuts to take home. Dixie had made them look pretty good.

  It was still going to be the most wretched of days, but at least now I had Heather’s number, and Linnette’s. And my cell phone hadn’t rung once. There was something to be said for all that, even on a day like this one.

  It was still morning when Detective Fernandez called back, but it was a whole lot later than I expected. I’d gone back to the house and scrubbed the kitchen before the phone rang. There were actually a couple of notes on my list of things to do today and tomorrow. Maybe the amount of sugar and caffeine I’d put away wasn’t a bad thing after all. Not to be repeated daily, but for today it worked.

  The detective was actually pleasant on the phone today, a characteristic I hadn’t associated with Ray Fernandez up until now. “I really appreciate you leaving me a second number. And answering it so promptly.”

  “I promised that if you let me go last night, I’d be easy to get hold of. I’m still home alone, though. Edna hasn’t shown up here. How about there?”

  “Not to my knowledge. No phone messages from her, either. Ms. Miller did come in and leave her fingerprints, though. Of course she managed to come in so early this morning that I didn’t get to speak with her.” He sounded aggravated about that. I could have told him that Becca was kind of aggravating, but decided to keep that to myself. I’d only met her once, under lousy circumstances. Maybe under the right conditions she was a delightful person. Given her heritage, I doubted it.

  “What about Ms. Taylor?”

  There was a silence on the phone for a minute. “Oh. She went home last night about an hour after you did. I think we had one of the uniformed officers drive her home.” Bet that made a great impression on Sandy. If she thought her daughter needed help before, getting driven home in a black-and-white was only going to make things worse.

  “Am I allowed to be in the same room with Ms. Taylor now and actually speak?” It was probably pressing my luck, but at least he was a few miles away.

  “I guess so. Can I ask why you’d want to be in the same room?”

  “Seeing as how she’s my husband’s fiancée, you mean?” It was hard to put my explanation into words, especially words a man might understand. I tried for the practical tack. “I’m hoping she has answers to some of my questions. Such as where the thirty thousand dollars I poured into Dennis’s business might have gone.”

  There was a short bark of laughter or dismay on his end of the phone. “Yeah, well, good luck. I have a feeling Ms. Taylor may have the same kinds of questions for you.”

  I had that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach again. It was getting more and more common these days. “Hey, maybe together we can come up with something. In the meantime, do you need me back at the station this morning?” I prayed silently that he didn’t. The sheriff’s department was the last place I wanted to be, even lower on my list than this empty house.

  “Not right now. By Monday we will need both of you in here again. I’m hoping the lab will have all its answers by then, and perhaps we’ll even get things squared away with Mrs. Peete. Why don’t you plan on coming in about nine Monday morning unless you hear differently from me, all right?” He was taking charge of the conversation and being all official again.

  “All right, Detective. I’ll see you then.” I hung up, hoping that his optimism on the lab work, and Edna’s reappearance, would be justified. I didn’t have any idea on the lab work, but I wouldn’t want to bet with him on Edna showing up today. With every hour of daylight that she was still away, it felt less likely that she was coming back here anytime soon.

  I looked around the kitchen, trying to figure out what I did next. I didn’t really feel like sticking around in the house. It echoed weirdly with just me in it. There were still hours before I could talk to Ben either by telephone or computer. He’d taken the news of Dennis’s death harder than I’d expected him to, but insisted he was going to school today anyway. I almost envied him the ability to do so. There was no way I could focus on something like school right now. This semester wasn’t starting off too well for me.

  I wondered if it was too late to drop my classes and recoup most of my tuition. Or should I go through with things, assuming that everything might get more normal soon and I’d want the distraction of classes to keep me thinking about the fact that I was a very broke widow? I certainly had more questions than answers.

  At least I had an idea of what to do with the rest of my day. I wrote another note for Edna and grabbed a jacket. Somebody at Pacific Oaks would probably have answers for my questions, whether it was a paid counselor or Linnette. It certainly sounded better than sitting here staring at the empty kitchen.

  In an hour I was settled in at what I was beginning to think of as “our” table at the Coffee Corner, sipping a virtuously fat-free decaffeinated latte. Linnette was on break to listen to me, and to add to the confusion, Heather was there, as well. She’d apparently come in search of the same kind of help I was looking for, going straight to Linnette instead of making a fruitless stop at the counseling office.

  “So tell me about it,” Linnette said, stirring her coffee. She’d gone with regular high-test, adding a little half-and-half and sugar for sustenance.

  “She looked twelve.” Everybody in the counseling office had. I felt like adding “present company excepted” on my diatribe on how young and inexperienced the helping staff at the college looked. I knew Heather was on sabbatical from a college job herself, and she didn’t look much older than the kids in the counseling office, even though I knew from what she’d said that she was over thirty. “It was confusing her that I was dealing with the death of a spouse. Most of the people she talks to are apparently upset because their grandparent has died, or maybe a parent.”

  I guess that was why I’d always felt so comfortable in the office at the community college when I’d worked there. The mothering instincts I’d picked up over the years worked just as well on the st
udents and most of the staff as they did with Ben at home. It was rough being on the other side of the desk and being a student, especially a non-traditional one.

  “I think it’s because this is a four-year college, and private.” It was Heather who was chiming in sympathetically, much to my surprise. “At the community college like the one where I’m on sabbatical, they’re used to a wider range of students. Here the vast majority of the students are undergrads straight out of high school, still on Mommy and Daddy’s money.”

  “It sure seems like it.” The counselor, who had been all of twenty-five if I was being generous in my assumptions, just had no idea how to answer me. I silently thanked God and my grandmother’s wisdom for leading me to the right place at the right time. I looked around the table, thinking that if Detective Fernandez could see this little coffee klatch he’d probably gag. Fortunately he wasn’t here to see it.

  Linnette looked thoughtful. “If you’re going to drop your class, you basically have to do it today. Next week you’ll get a lot less back, and the week after it’s almost useless. Personally I might say stick in there. The profs are usually pretty understanding about major stuff like this, and you could always take an incomplete if you needed to.”

  Heather nodded. “I know I’d cut you a break if you were in one of my classes.”

  “What do you teach?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Comparative religion mostly. I’m the low woman on the totem pole, so I get the freshman breadth classes where there’s two hundred kids in a lecture hall.”

  I felt sympathy for her. “And they’re all rolling their eyes and raising their hands every twenty minutes asking ‘Is this going to be on the final?’”

  “Yes!” She was so emphatic she almost knocked over her hot chocolate. “How did you know that?”

  “I worked at the community college in Missouri for years.” And couldn’t begin to say how much I missed that mundane, calm life right now. Tears sprang up again just thinking about it. It seemed like far too long since my life had been either calm or mundane. Of course, then I’d wanted more excitement. That was part of why I fell so hard and so fast for Dennis. Now excitement was the furthest thing from my mind; just coping sounded great.

  “I think we ought to get the Christian Friends together more often than usual for a while,” Linnette said. “Half the group didn’t get to say anything this last time, and those of you that did get to say something need to say a lot more. I’ll make some calls and see what I can do. That all right with you?”

  I couldn’t speak for Heather, but didn’t have any qualms myself. “I’ll be there with bells on, no matter when you set up the meeting.”

  Heather was nodding. “Me, too. But from now on I’m not bringing my mom. She means well, but I can only take so much of her sniping.”

  Linnette grinned. “I know as a mother, I should be horrified, but my first response woman-to-woman is ‘good for you.’ Don’t you dare tell your mom I said that, though. I have to work with her on committees at church and she’ll make my life miserable.”

  “Better you than me,” Heather grumbled. For the first time in days I felt like laughing about something. Now why did that make me anticipate my cell phone ringing any moment with more bad news?

  Half an hour later Linnette had gone back to work, but Heather and I were still sitting and talking to each other. I wanted to blame the nausea I felt on all the coffee I was drinking, but I couldn’t.

  “So how much money are you out?” she asked bluntly once Linnette left the table. “I figure if I’m as far in the hole as I am and I was only Jack’s fiancée, you must be out a bundle.”

  My heart sank. I had been hoping against hope that my missing money would show up with Heather somehow. At least she was the person I would have begrudged the least, with no fiancé and a baby on the way. “Thirty thousand. I’ve been looking for bank accounts but so far no luck. How about you?”

  “Wow, I was right. You have me beat by a long shot. I’m only down six grand so far, once I paid off the charges and stuff. Four of that went to the business, supposedly. Of course I’ve never been able to find the business.”

  “That makes two of us. The briefcase that I got back after the accident was full of invoices and computer-generated forms, but when I went looking for the address on the letterhead, it didn’t exist.”

  “For me it was even worse.” Heather slumped toward the tabletop. “All I had was a phone number on business cards, and I knew it was Jack’s cell phone. And that, of course, promptly stopped working once he disappeared. And then there was the Web site I’d set up for him myself, so I knew what good that was.”

  “There was a Web site for the franchise?” This was getting interesting. Maybe I could track something down from this after all.

  Heather looked confused. “Franchise? No, this was for his own company. The pet weight loss by hypnosis thing.”

  There was hysterical laughter building in my chest again. Not only did my husband have two names, he had made two totally different lives to go with them. And he’d taken us both in so beautifully. I wanted to throw my coffee cup across the room, but I held back. There was no way to pay for the damage if the university sued me.

  “Pet weight loss by hypnosis. Guess that isn’t any worse than the franchise I thought he was going into.”

  Heather’s face fell. “You mean we didn’t even have the same business we were putting money into? Oh, great. What kind of franchise are we talking about?”

  “Non-UV tanning beds with built-in aromatherapy. It was supposed to be the next big thing.”

  Now Heather looked like she wanted to give her mug a toss with me. “I think I can tell you what the next big thing was. It was us, or at least our money. And we fell for it, all the way to the bank.”

  6

  I don’t know what Heather did all weekend, but it was very quiet for me. The biggest thing in my weekend was finally making it to church at the Conejo Community Chapel on Sunday morning. I managed to avoid the service most of my Christian Friends buddies went to, it seemed, but it was still a nice place to be. And at the coffee and goodies time held after the early service I attended, they even had lots of things that weren’t chocolate-chip cookies.

  Edna didn’t ever surface and I wondered how long it would be before I should think about filing a missing-person report. I’d finally broken down and told my mother the truth when I talked to her again on Sunday night, even though it meant dealing with her concern that I was there all alone.

  The admission that Edna had been missing since Thursday afternoon when Dennis died got me plenty of concern. It even earned me a phone call back, not just from my mother but from my son. “You need somebody out there with you, Mom,” he said, sounding so adult that tears sprang to my eyes.

  I assured him that I was fine, and reminded him that I’d been on my own plenty of times in Missouri when he’d been at his dad’s for long summer visits or camping trips with scouts. Still, he pressed me. “I want the number of that detective out there you told Grandma about, so that I can call if I’m worried about you.”

  I started to tell him that he should worry more about the detective getting me into trouble than anybody else, but stopped myself. Just because Ben was sounding like an adult didn’t mean that he was one. I got Ray Fernandez’s card and read the numbers on it off to Ben while he copied them. “I’m putting this right by the phone and the computer,” he said, sounding more confident now.

  It turned out to be a good idea that even calmed my mother down. I knew she had no desire whatsoever to come to California, especially since it meant getting on a plane, so she was happy to hear I was being looked out for. I assured her that I was, and we hung up again.

  Once I was there alone again, I started thinking about whether I should call Ray Fernandez myself, and start the process of filing a missing-person report on Edna. Could I even do that? She was healthy, sane as far as I knew and in no one else’s care. I wasn’t a blood relative o
f any kind, so maybe I couldn’t even file a report.

  On Monday morning Heather and I marched into Ray Fernandez’s office, positive we’d cracked the case for him. It didn’t take long for him to disillusion both of us. Seems he knew all about most of Dennis’s shady financial dealings, and they even had a name.

  “What we have here, ladies, is a small but efficient Ponzi scheme,” he said, sounding more like a college professor than Heather did. He even had his hands steepled on the desk like a lecturer. “Does that phrase ring any bells with either of you?”

  He had a wry smile when both of us shook our heads. “I didn’t think it would. Forgive me for speaking ill of the dead, but your deceased husband and fiancé has shown most of the marks of an accomplished con man. And con men usually look for the same kind of victim over and over. For some guys, vulnerable women who can be charmed out of their life savings are the perfect mark.”

  I couldn’t very well argue with him. In this case he was right. Dennis had always been perfectly charming; it was the nicest thing I could say about him. At least it was the nicest thing I could repeat in public. He’d always been so convincing about the piles of money he was going to make with his business deals.

  Fernandez went on explaining Dennis’s schemes to us. “A Ponzi scheme is like a pyramid. There have been a few big ones that have gone around the country any number of times in the past few decades. One of the biggest ones right now is something called ‘gifting circles’ that all too often involve women in dire situations.” The detective’s eyes darkened as he spoke, and I wondered if somebody close to him had been part of one of these ‘gifting circles,’ as he put it. “Mr. Peete doesn’t seem to have ever operated on anything like that kind of scale. He just married women, or nearly married them, and took their money one or two at a time.”

  “So where did it go?” Heather looked like she was ready to pound the table. “If this was a pyramid, there had to be a top to it. If that was Jack, or Dennis, where’s our money?”