“You don’t.” Eve snapped the visor back into place. “I don’t know how you’re doing it, Annie. I mean, with the way you feel about cooking and all. And I miss you at Bellywasher’s.”
“I miss being there.” Who ever would have thought I’d say that about working at a restaurant! My grin stayed firmly in place. “I just don’t fit in at Très Bonne Cuisine. Sure, the shop is gorgeous, and most of the customers are nice. Except for the ones who come in just to see the place where Greg died.”
After a week, I should have been used to the scenario, but it still gave me the creeps. We were headed south and the early morning sun was blazing through my window. My air-conditioning was on the fritz so it wasn’t nearly as cool in the car as I would have liked. Still, I shivered.
“We need to get to the bottom of this,” I told Eve. As if she didn’t know. “The whole thing is weird, and it’s driving me crazy. Has Tyler said anything…”
OK, so subtle, I’m not. Since Eve was being less than forthcoming about her contact (or lack of it) with Tyler, it was only fair for me, as her best friend, to force the subject.
“You mean about Greg? About Greg’s murder?” Even though she’d just checked her makeup, she checked it again. “The only thing he’s said-”
“Aha! You have talked to him again!” I was so proud of my detective skills and so jazzed about catching Eve in my little trap, I didn’t realize how hard I was pressing on the accelerator. It wasn’t until I saw my speedometer inch up to seventy-five that I caught myself, and slowed right down. Sure, everybody on I-95 exceeds the speed limit. All the time. But I am not everybody. Especially when it comes to driving.
Careful to keep my speed exactly where it belonged, I moved over to the far right lane to stay out of the way of the speed demons on the road with me. The driver of the dark sedan behind me must have been gauging his own speed against mine. He slipped right behind me into the lane.
I gave Eve a sidelong glance. “You’ve been seeing Tyler.”
“That’s exactly why I haven’t told you. I knew this was how you’d take it.”
“Take it? Take what?” My heart thumped like the bass line in the music of the overloud stereo of the Hummer that whizzed by us as if we were standing still. “Eve, you and Tyler… you’re not…” I swallowed hard. No easy thing, seeing as my mouth was suddenly so parched I could barely get the words out. “You’re not engaged again, are you?”
Eve’s only reply was a squeal of laughter.
It wasn’t much, but it did make me feel better, and my heart rate ratcheted back. If Eve was laughing at the very idea of marrying Tyler, then it couldn’t really happen.
Right?
I never trust cars that actually drive slower than me. Or maybe I should say more accurately, I never trust the drivers of those cars.
As I was thinking all this, I checked my mirrors-twice-before I passed the red Camry crawling along in the right lane. The car behind me did the same. It wasn’t until I settled back in the lane and well in front of both the red Toyota and the dark sedan that I felt safe giving Eve another probing look.
“You didn’t answer me.”
“About being engaged? To Tyler?” Eve picked at her white linen pants. Not that there was any lint on them or anything. “Don’t be silly, Annie. Tyler is still engaged to Kaitlin. Technically. And even if he wasn’t… my goodness, Annie! Even if he wasn’t, a man who’s been engaged, then gets unengaged, he wouldn’t be ready to get engaged again.”
“Would you?”
“To Tyler? My goodness, you don’t have any faith in me at all, do you?” Eve sniffed in the way she always does when she’s put out.
I guess I couldn’t blame her.
Tyler had sliced and diced her heart. He had pureed her self-esteem, stir-fried her self-confidence, and served it all up on the platter of his own huge ego.
Maybe I was starting to think like I worked in a gourmet shop after all.
“So let’s go over our plan.” I figured I owed Eve for questioning her judgment, and I engineered the change of subject without any fanfare. “I’m glad you’re investigating with me, Eve. Want to grab that file folder I gave you when you got in the car?”
She did, flipped it open, and squinted at the copy I’d made of one of the licenses we’d found at Monsieur’s. “The name on the driver’s license is Bill Boxley.” Thinking, Eve cocked her head. “Do you think Monsieur’s real name is Bill Boxley? If it is, I can’t say I blame him for changing it.”
“I think it’s a distinct possibility that Bill Boxley and Jacques Lavoie are one and the same person. That would explain why he has the license, right?”
“Yeah, but…” Eve hesitated.
I was negotiating my way past a van driving too slowly in the left lane and an eighteen-wheeler in the right that didn’t seem to recognize that such things as speed limits exist. Only when we were safely by the van and watching the truck disappear into the distance in front of us, did I feel safe getting back to the conversation.
So safe, in fact, that I barely noticed that when I maneuvered my way between the van and the truck, the dark car behind me did, too.
I’d heard the uncertainty in Eve’s voice, I knew where she was headed. “Yeah, but…,” I echoed her comment. “You don’t think Monsieur might really be Bill Boxley? Or Bill might really be Monsieur?”
“I don’t know what to think. And I’m not sure I understand what you’re thinking. What are we trying to prove with a trip to Fredericksburg?”
The answer was simple enough. “ Fredericksburg…” Without taking my eyes off the road, I pointed to the photocopy of the driver’s license. I’d meant to point out the address, but instead, I poked Bill Boxley in the nose. “ Fredericksburg is the home of Bill Boxley. Of all those driver’s licenses we found at Monsieur’s, Bill Boxley’s is the most recent. Check it out. It expired just a couple years ago. All those other licenses are older.”
Eve squinted at the picture of Monsieur that graced the license. In it, his hair wasn’t quite as silvery, and he was a little thinner than the man we knew. “And…?”
“And I chose the newest license because it seems to make more sense starting there than it does starting with the older ones. My guess…” I paused here because, after all, it was something of a ta-da moment. “My guess is that we’re going to go to the address on that license, and we’re going to find Monsieur Lavoie there.”
“You mean Bill is Monsieur? Or Monsieur is Bill? But why?”
I knew Eve’s question had nothing to do with my logic, and everything to do with why people thought the way they did and did the things they did. That’s why I shrugged. “Who knows. I mean, maybe Monsieur has a wife and seven kids living out here in Fredericksburg. Though why he wouldn’t want anyone to know it, I can’t imagine. Maybe he’s gay. Or maybe-”
“Maybe he’s a spy or an agent for a rogue government.”
Just like the first time Eve had raised these possibilities, I was not about to let them distract me. “It’s the whole Vavoom! scam thing that got me thinking in this direction, Eve. I’ll bet Monsieur is up to something. Maybe not something as illegal as being a spy or the agent of a rogue government, but something he shouldn’t be up to. I’ll bet that’s why he’s got a couple of different identities. Theoretically, I suppose it’s none of our business. Unless Monsieur’s involved in something that’s going to get him into a whole bunch of trouble. Considering what happened to Greg, I think that’s a very real possibility. And even if it isn’t…” I chose to think of the problem from this angle because thinking about the myriad illegalities I didn’t even understand scared me so. “We can at least talk to him. We need to let him know we’re worried about him. And if there’s anything we can do to help him get out of whatever trouble he’s in, we need to do that, too.”