Free Final Sentence by Daryl Wood Gerber Page B

out. Did you come here to eat? See, I’m new to town. Well, not new. I grew up here. But I’d been living in San Francisco for years. So many unique places have cropped up in Crystal Cove since I left for college. This scone is fabulous. Is the regular food any good?”
    “No,” he said.
    “No, it’s not good or, no, you and Desiree didn’t come here?”
    “I don’t know about the food. We went to the Crystal Cove Inn.”
    “And checked in, of course.”
    “Yeah.”
    Except I had called there before giving up my search for Desiree, and the clerk said they hadn’t checked in. J.P. was lying. Again.
    “Actually, we didn’t register right away,” he said. “We went to the courtyard restaurant, the one where you can see the ocean.”
    “A View with a Room?”
    “That’s it. Des said she needed to decompress before tomorrow’s”—he coughed—“ today’s soiree.”
    I didn’t have the courage to tell him that Desiree’s fans were flocking like vultures to the store. He hadn’t seemed to notice during his quarrel with Sabrina.
    “Des held high hopes for this new cookbook,” he went on. “The reason she wanted to launch it in August was to promote the upcoming season of our show. Our ratings fell flat last season.”
    I ran my finger along the rim of the coffee cup. “What did you do after you ate?”
    “That’s when we checked in to the hotel. Des was dog-tired. Me, I was wired. I took one of Des’s sleeping pills so I could get some shut-eye, but Des got a call, and she left.”
    “A call from whom?”
    “I don’t know. I asked her, but she wouldn’t say.” He scraped his fingers through his Mohawk. “Man, I should’ve gone with her.”
    “Did you think she was meeting some guy?”
    “Nah.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Even if she was, it was cool. I trusted her. She loved me.” His defensive pose would have made a prosecuting attorney squeal with excitement. Jealousy was a powerful motive for murder.
    “When did she return?”
    “I don’t have a clue. I fell asleep. When I take a pill, I’m Rip Van Winkle.”
    Call me crazy, but I didn’t believe him.
     

Chapter 6

    A S I LEFT the coffee shop, I thought about Desiree’s phone call. Truth or fiction? If it was the truth, who had called her? Did Desiree meet that person and end up walking on the beach, only to be strangled?
    And buried . . .
    A queasy feeling coursed through me. I tamped it down and urged myself to think logically. Desiree’s purse hadn’t been tucked beneath the sand with her, and the deputy hadn’t discovered it with the sand tools. Where was it? Was her cell phone in the purse? Maybe the call list would reveal the killer’s name.
    Eager to find out, I returned to The Cookbook Nook, which was still jammed with people clamoring for Desiree’s recent release, and sneaked into the office at the back. I perched on the corner of the laminate desk and telephoned the precinct. While waiting for the clerk to connect me to Chief Pritchett, I inspected cookbooks that Aunt Vera had set aside for me to take home. To the few she had selected earlier, she had added The Best One-Dish Suppers , Gourmet Meals in Crappy Little Kitchens , Betty Crocker’s Dinner for Two Cook Book , and Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything: The Basics , which was a hefty book . “Each recipe is so easy and simple,” Aunt Vera said of the stack, “even a child could manage the dishes. Not that you’re a child. You’re an adult. A mature, responsible adult.” So why didn’t I feel like an adult right now? Why did I feel like stuffing myself into a file cabinet under the heading: To be opened at a later date? A golden oldie that used to rouse my mother to sing, full voice, played through my mind: “Don’t they know it’s the end of the world ’cause you don’t love me anymore?”
    I heard a click through the telephone receiver.
    “Miss Hart,” Cinnamon said. Formal. Brusque. “What’s up?”
    Without