He Will be My Ruin
Page 36

“Uh . . .” I follow him to her desk, where he grabs the sheet of passwords I set out, and then he yanks cables out of the back of the computer tower and sets it inside the crate.
He holds out a hand. “And the phone?”
“Still nowhere.”
“You sure you checked everything? Her purses? Dresser drawers?”
“Yup.”
“Pockets?” He’s sticking his free hand in the coat draped over the couch arm as he asks, dumping tissues and receipts out.
“That’s my coat, and yes, I’ve checked every pocket.”
His lips pucker in thought and then finally he taps the computer tower. “Well, if she backed it up, we should be able to pull information off of here. Otherwise, my tech guy, Zac, will see if he can get into her phone records.”
I cross my mental fingers, hoping that Celine would know to back up her phone. She was never the most technologically astute person.
“By the way, the flowers were sent in October, but otherwise it’s a dead end. The sender paid cash and left no personal information. The person behind the register was on her second day of the job and wasn’t going to push.”
I chew on my lip. Is Jace the kind of guy to go into a flower shop and order flowers himself? Or would he get his assistant to do it, calling in the order with his credit card?
I’m thinking the latter, which means maybe they weren’t from him at all . . . “Listen, about that hedge fund manager—”
“Keep up appearances with him. I’ll call you soon.” And then he’s testing the dead bolt on my door before charging out, leaving the door swinging open and me stunned.
“My, he was in a rush.” Ruby stands in the hallway between our doors, watching him go.
“I think that’s just how he is.” As opposed to Detective Childs, Doug Murphy seems to operate on fast-forward at all times. I don’t know how he catches anything important as he speeds past. “Did you need something?” I notice the tray with a tea set within her trembling grasp.
“I used to have tea with Celine sometimes, when she wasn’t working,” Ruby says timidly, shifting on her feet, just outside my threshold.
I finally clue in. Hans is coming by in half an hour to collect a few boxes, but I have a lonely old woman on my doorstep, waiting for an invitation, and I’ve blown her off too many times. “Would you like to come in and have tea with me, Ruby?” When was the last time I even drank tea?
Her face instantly lightens and she nods, shuffling in to set the tray down on the trunk coffee table, as I’m guessing she’s done many times before. “Would you be a dear and bring that over?” She points out a weathered teak folding chair leaning against a wall. “If I get into that couch, I’ll never get out.”
Holding the top of the teapot with one hand, she carefully pours steaming hot tea into one of the matching teacups. She even has the creamer and sugar pot, and a set of tiny silver tongs at the ready for a sugar cube. “Celine got me this set last Christmas. It’s a Crown Staffordshire from 1938 that she found at a garage sale.”
“It’s lovely,” I murmur, passing on the sugar and milk, picking up the cup to study the delicate burgundy-and-pink floral pattern. “Do you have children, Ruby?”
She chuckles. “No. No children. No husband . . . I’ve always marched to my own drummer. Never could find a man who could handle marching along with it.” She sighs. “I really enjoyed having Celine next door.” Her clouded eyes wander over the half-empty shelves, countless boxes already marked and stacked on one side of the living room. “Things look different since I was here last.”
“And when was that?”
“Just the day before she passed.” She takes a dainty bite of a cookie. “What are you going to do with her collection?”
“Sell them and then start a foundation in her name. That’s what her mother wants.”
She nods slowly, chewing. “She was such a good girl.”
I avoid answering by taking a sip of my tea. I don’t know what I think anymore. Was Celine still a good person, despite what she did for money? Yes, I believe so. And yet my memory of her has been tainted. No wonder she never told me. I’ve never been in a position where I felt that my best option to survive would be to sell what I was born with—myself—to get ahead. I’ve never pined for money. I’ve never felt the frustration of not being able to buy something that I wanted or needed.
I could argue that I face limits, too. I can’t afford to buy all the things I’d like for every child in every poor village across the world.
But if we’re being honest, I can’t possibly understand what it’s like to feel trapped. To have to decide between paying my rent on time or flying across the country to care for my terminally ill mother, my only living relative.
I was so quick to judge.
I’m trying to understand now, to be more open-minded. To accept that perhaps Celine was fundamentally a different person from me.
Or that perhaps, faced with the same limitations, I might have found myself doing the exact same thing.
Look what I’ve been willing to do to get information from Jace! Keeping up these business pretenses, handing over more money than most people will see in their lifetime.
And what has keeping up these pretenses gotten me so far? Besides trapped and almost screwed in an elevator . . .
“Who was that man earlier, taking Celine’s computer?” Ruby asks.
“Just a guy doing some research for me.”
She leans closer, like what she’s about to say shouldn’t be overheard. “You don’t think it was suicide either, do you?”
She said “either.”
I set my teacup down carefully, afraid I’m going to break it, as my heart pumps a rush of blood through my body. “You don’t? I mean . . . why don’t you?”
She smiles softly. “When you’ve been alive as long as I have, you know when a person has no plans on dying. That girl was ambitious. The only plans she was making were for living.”
That’s always how I’d seen Celine, too. “You don’t think that maybe she wasn’t in the right frame of mind at that particular moment?”
“She’d seemed down lately, true. More emotional than usual. But I’d talked to her earlier that day, in the hallway. She had just come back from one of her little treasure hunts, with an antique rosary for her mother. She was so excited to give it to her for Christmas.”