Page 11 of Wham Line (The Last Picks #10)

“Indira, we’re—” I almost said trying to help . But Fox jerked their head in a no, so I changed it to “—we’re trying to consider all possibilities. Have you thought about the fact that someone might be trying to frame you?”

“How would someone frame me?” she snapped. “Nobody knows I live here.”

“But that’s not true. We all know you live here.

And tourists come through. They buy from you at the farmer’s market and during the holidays.

You’re using your legal name. People write reviews online.

They share travel tips on social media. It’s not impossible that someone was raving about an amazing baker and chef named Indira on the Oregon Coast. It’s not like Seattle is on the other side of the world. ”

Indira’s lips parted. Then she shut her mouth again, the muscles in her jaw flexing.

“Sparkie certainly seemed interested in you,” I said.

“She spent a lot of time chatting me up after we found Mal. At first, I thought she just wanted the inside scoop, but she spent a little too long trying to convince me she was helping me, and then she was a little too sloppy when she started asking about you. I don’t know if she knew you were in Hastings Rock before she came, but she definitely recognized you. ”

The wind wrapped itself around the coach house, rising to a howl before dying away again.

Indira’s color worsened, but her voice was firm as she said, “Sparkie can do whatever she wants.”

And then I realized what was going on. “Indira,” I said.

“We’re not trying to pry into your life.

I know you’re a private person. I hate that we’re in this situation.

I know you’ve been through a lot in the last twenty-four hours, and I know you already had to go through this with the sheriff, and I know you hate having to give up the things you’ve protected for so long.

I’m your friend, and I love you, and I’m being honest when I tell you that I’m worried you’re still in a lot of trouble.

But I also think you should know that whatever you don’t want to tell us, people will probably find out anyway.

I’m not saying that as a threat; I’m telling you so that you can prepare yourself. ”

Indira looked away. Her cup chittered on its saucer, and when she returned it to the side table, her movements were uncoordinated, and tea slopped onto the wood.

“I don’t think there’s anything left to talk about,” Fox said. They reached to take Indira’s hand and sent a challenging look in my direction. “You should go.”

“No,” Indira said. She patted Fox’s hand, but she didn’t pull away. “No,” she said again. “It’s all right. I’m acting like a child.” She drew a deep breath and said, for a third time, “No.”

The waves broke out against the cliffs. Where the water sprayed above the line of the bluffs, it caught the day’s light and burned white hot. The same white lines burned farther out on the water, like everything to the horizon was roiling metal.

“Mal and I met when I was young,” Indira said.

“Younger than you, Dash. Almost as young as Nalini, as a matter of fact.” A hint of a smile touched her voice, if not her face.

“And nearly as silly. He was handsome, even though he was barely more than a child too—he was still breaking out, even into his twenties, and he hated that it made him look like a teenager. You didn’t meet Mal, did you? ”

I shook my head.

“He’s—he could be very charming. Smart, knowledgeable, interested in you. He had money, and he was on his way to becoming wealthy, which has its own appeal. And he was—” She stopped, and this time, a bent little smile did curve her lips. “He was a bad boy.”

Fox groaned.

“Stop,” Indira said with a laugh, but her hand tightened around Fox’s. “No one’s thinking clearly at that age.”

The comment must have meant something because Fox groaned again, the tone slightly different, and said to me and Bobby as though in explanation, “A red-faced tuba player. My God, I dressed up like Willy Wonka for him.”

I laughed, as much out of surprise as anything. Amusement flitted across Bobby’s face. And just like that, whatever strange tension had been growing broke.

“In my defense,” Indira said, “at that time, Mal didn’t have the same reputation.

He’d only barely gotten started, you understand.

There were rumors—a restaurant he burned down for the insurance money; a young chef who killed herself after he forced her out; even stories that he would get the servers pregnant and pay exorbitant sums to make the babies disappear.

But as I said, I was young and silly, and the rumors were only rumors. And Mal was very handsome.”

“You fell in love,” I said.

“ We fell in love. Or so I thought. And it all seemed perfect—like something out of a modern-day fairy tale. I’d made something of a name for myself in Seattle. I wanted to open my own restaurant. And Mal wanted to invest. Partners in love and in business. What more could anyone ask for?”

“What happened?” Bobby asked.

“The restaurant did quite well.”

Fox shook their head. “She’s being humble. It was a phenomenon; you can still read the articles about when it opened.”

Waving a hand, Indira said, “It was a different time. I wasn’t doing anything all that special, but the moment was right.”

“She was on her way to a Michelin star,” Fox said.

Indira turned a gentle look on them, and Fox harrumphed and settled back on the sofa. (Just so you know, they literally said, Harrumph, which goes to show Fox never misses an opportunity.)

“You said things were going well,” Bobby said.

“They were. We were in love. We were happy. We were young, we had money, we made a dashing couple, and life seemed limitless.” She turned her cup on its saucer, china scraping against china. “And then I miscarried.”

Gulls banked and turned, a dizzying, dark scattershot against the bright sky.

“Indira,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

She nodded. “It was a long time ago.”

The room lapsed into silence again. Fox was holding on to Indira’s hand for dear life. Bobby squeezed my knee—not a warning or a message, just this iron grip like he was afraid I might fly away. The faint earthiness of the tea soured on the air.

“It’s hard to explain,” Indira said, her gaze now directed out the window, looking south, toward the forest of spruce and hemlock and pine, “what happened next. The grief.” She stopped again. Her fingers, dancing along the rim of her cup, stopped.

Bobby saying, I’m fine .

Bobby rolling onto his side.

Those horrible hours in his parents’ kitchen with the silence building like static electricity.

“Looking back,” Indira said, “I think I didn’t understand how much he was hurting.

He wanted a child so badly. Of course, now I suspect that, like many things in his life, Mal would have lost interest quickly; for Mal, it was always about the acquisition, not about the thing itself.

But that didn’t make his pain any less real, and at the time, I don’t think I knew that. ”

“You’re not being fair to yourself,” Fox said quietly.

“No,” Indira said, “I’m not trying to excuse him.

And I don’t blame myself; in my whole life, I’ve never felt pain like that, before or since.

It was so much that there wasn’t room for anything else.

Even if I’d wondered what Mal was feeling, I don’t think I could have brought myself to find out.

” Her fingers were still poised on the cup, tented above it, tense.

“I turned in on myself. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep.

” A spiky laugh, low in her throat. “I couldn’t work.

Mal was the opposite. He threw himself into the restaurant.

Other nights, he went out, trying new places, looking for more investment opportunities.

Some of it, too, was an excuse to drink.

And eventually he got tired of a wife who wouldn’t open the bedroom door to him, and so then it became an excuse to spend his evenings with pretty, uncomplicated girls.

He was never there.” That thorny laugh again. “And in my own way, neither was I.”

“Indira—” Fox began.

“It’s all right,” Indira said. “It’s over. I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me; I worked hard to build the life I have now, and I’m happy. But I need you to understand this so that you’ll understand what happened next.”

And all of a sudden, I did know. Because of what I’d seen the night before at Mizzenmast. Because of what Sparkie had said. Because of Indira’s own story about the early rumors surrounding Mal.

“He took your restaurant.”

Indira’s startled look morphed quickly into a fresh assessment of me, but she nodded her head.

“Yes. Very good, Dashiell. He had invested most of the money. He’d drawn up the paperwork to make sure he had the upper hand.

He moved out of the house and fired me.” Indira gave a one-shouldered shrug.

“I thought I couldn’t—” She stopped. “I had to leave.” She stopped again. “I left.”

South of us, the trees rippled in the wind off the ocean, branches shaking in violent tremors.

“Did you talk to a lawyer?” Bobby asked.

She shook her head. “I wasn’t thinking clearly, to say the least. I wanted to be away from him.

Away from everything. I considered it later, but so much time had passed that I knew I didn’t have a chance.

I divorced him. At the time, I was living in Portland.

I had a very good lawyer, and by then, I was very angry.

And then—” That little twist of a smile came again.

“—faster than I could believe, it was over, and I was very well off and still very angry. Mal had done quite well for himself. He was eager to have the divorce finalized. I think, too, he felt guilty—”

Fox snorted.

“—because he had made a great deal of money off the restaurant we’d started together.”

“Did you ever think about starting your own restaurant again?” I asked.

Indira shook her head.