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“Tracy, you said earlier that you were anxious to have more information about Frank’s murder. I may be able to tell you something in a few days. Detective Fernandez called me this afternoon while I was getting ready to come here. He wants to meet me at the group home where Candace lives tomorrow morning.”

“What for?” Tracy looked puzzled. “She wasn’t anywhere near your house when this happened, was she?”

“No, she wasn’t. But the detective has questions for her anyway. He wants to talk to her and her roommate Lucy Perez, and he wants me present as well as Lucy’s sister Estella, her guardian. He has some reason to want to talk to the two of them and I certainly intend to be there.”

The rest of the Christian Friends might not know all the connections between Frank Collins and Candace that made Ray want to question her and her roommate. But I was sure it was going to be a difficult morning for Dot and her daughter. And depending on what her answers to the detective’s questions were, I was afraid it might be a bad day for Matt afterward.

T
here was no good reason for me to tag along to the group home in the morning. I really wanted to, just to see what Ray Fernandez was going to ask Candace and Lucy. In the end, however, I exercised good judgment and stayed home while Dot and Buck drove over to Camarillo. Once Buck heard about the need for Candace to be interviewed he insisted on going along. It made me feel more at ease to know Candace would have plenty of protection.

Not that she’d need that much protection. I had to admit that Ray was usually tough but fair in his investigations and followed the law to the letter. Since Candace had done absolutely nothing wrong, she wouldn’t have any problems with the detective.

As Dot and Buck drove away I finished up the kennel work by myself. Doing all of it for them this morning meant that Buck could take a shower and dress to go with Dot in the time he would have spent feeding dogs. He’d argued with me at first, but I felt it was the least I could do and told him so. In the end he got ready and I cleaned out kennels and fed dogs. The census was relatively low anyway; all the pups had gone to new homes already and a cold snap had moved Dixie, Sophie and Hondo inside.

When the kennel chores were finished I actually went out and spent money on something that wasn’t a necessity. That was a rare thing for me right now, but this year I wasn’t going to do without a Christmas tree of my own. Even with the limited space in the apartment I wanted this December to be special.

It would technically be my first Christmas without Dennis. Technically because last year he’d been comatose at the Conejo Board and Care this time of year. I’d gone there often in December and sat by his bedside. The piped-in Christmas carols in the facility sounded dreary, and the decorations looked tired. This year would be a time for my own CDs of upbeat songs and true rejoicing during the season.

Even though I don’t have a clue where it’s going to get stored in January, I bought an artificial tree. Real trees smell wonderful, but it always makes me sad to think of killing a tree just for a few weeks of it sitting in my living room. Besides, if I am going to keep having Sophie or one of the other dogs in here for company, an artificial tree will be much smarter. I can still remember learning new words when I was six from what my dad said when Buttons the puppy knocked over the tree trying to drink out of the water well of the tree stand. Dogs and a real tree inside the house just aren’t a good mix.

By the time the Morgans got back home I’d lugged the tree home from the discount store and set it up in the corner of my living room. Splurging on one with lights wired on turned out to be a good thing, because there were no working lights in the one box of Christmas decorations I’d carted around since the move from Missouri. The box hadn’t been opened since I moved it, because I’d spent last Christmas at Edna’s house. She hadn’t even considered sharing her Christmas tree for any of my decorations.

I heard Buck’s car pull into the garage beneath the apartment as I sorted through ornaments. It was funny to look at things like the preschool treasures from Ben’s younger years. I especially like the ornament made from an orange juice can lid with rickrack glued around the edge.

Hanging that one on the tree, I left the rest of the box and went outside to see how the morning had gone at the group home. “Come over and have lunch,” Dot called from the driveway. “I put soup in the slow-cooker to warm up before we left. And I want to tell you what went on.”

“Sure.” No sense in turning down a great offer. Food and information are my favorite combination. If Dot had any Christmas cookies baked for dessert, lunch would be perfect.

I went back inside to grab a sweater and my purse so that I could lock up the apartment. Even when I’m only across the way at the “big house” I don’t like leaving things unlocked without anybody there. Rancho Conejo nearly always makes the “ten safest cities in America” list for places its size, but I still lock my door. I figure it’s one less way to lead somebody into temptation if they’re prone to thievery.

There were three places set at Dot’s kitchen table, each with a cheery red-and-green placemat, crockery soup bowl, matching mug and a dog on the floor beside the chair. I don’t think the dogs were supposed to be part of the décor.

“This is your fault,” she said to Buck as she brandished a soup ladle. “If you didn’t feed Hondo from the table none of them would expect anything.”

Buck shrugged and sat down at his place. Once settled he gave a command to the dogs that at least made all of them lie down and stop begging, although there was a tail thump once in a while. Dot filled the soup bowls and reached over to take my hand so that Buck could say grace. I liked the tradition of table prayers with everybody holding hands. It’s a little late to start with Ben but I still may give it a shot.

“Heavenly Father,” Buck began, “we want to thank You for this food and ask You to use it to strengthen our bodies to Your service. Please guide us in what we say and do today, and be with Candace and Lucy and their friends as they go about the rest of their day. Thank You for upholding them and helping them tell the truth this morning, and give the sheriff’s department people discernment to sort out the right information. In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.” We echoed the amen and Dot gave my hand a squeeze.

Her soup was delicious and I told her so once I’d had a few bites. “So how did things go this morning?” I tried to be as casual as possible, but I’m sure Dot could see I was champing at the bit for information.

“I think they went well, wouldn’t you say so, Buck?” He nodded in answer to the question and kept eating his soup. “Detective Fernandez was there when we arrived, but he didn’t go inside the house until we went in with him. Lucy’s sister couldn’t make it, but she’d authorized Kirsten to be Lucy’s advocate if she needed one.”

“Was that okay with the detective?” I wondered if he felt he could still proceed, or if it changed his interview any. Neither question was one I was likely to get an answer to from Ray, even if I’d asked him point-blank.

“He said it was the best he was going to get,” Buck said. “Then he went on and asked his questions while we all sat around their dining room table. Candace and Lucy seemed at ease that way. Not much that he asked them seemed out of the ordinary. Mostly he just wanted to know how they knew Frank, and what kind of contact they’d had with him.”

“How much contact was there?” I figured there would be two answers to this one.

“More than I would have thought,” Dot interjected. “I knew what Candace would say. She still remembers Frank from when he did the renovations on her apartment out back the first time. She didn’t much like him then, and she didn’t grow any fonder of him recently.”

“What about Lucy? Overhearing her and Matt at the funeral, it sounded as if she knew Frank.”

“She did. I knew he’d gone into the restaurant where Candace works once in a while, mainly because it’s a buffet and it’s inexpensive.” Dot frowned. “What I didn’t know is that he seemed to have taken to visiting the movie theater in the same shopping center, where Lucy works. He must have made a pest of himself from what she said.”

“That’s putting it nicely,” Buck said. “Your cousin was always a hound where young women were concerned. No offense to present company.” He spoke the last bit down at Hondo, who whined softly.

Dot shook her head. “If it had been someone else they were talking about, I would have thought that the girls saying that Frank took them out for ice cream after work and dropped them off at the group home was perfectly innocent. But with him involved I would look twice at his motives.”

“Hopefully Detective Fernandez will, too. I’d hate to think Frank was trying to prey on somebody as defenseless as Lucy.”

Buck got up and got himself another bowl of soup, then sat down heavily at his place at the table, looking serious. “He may have done more than try, Gracie Lee. The one thing that Lucy said that was the most disturbing was that Frank hit on her, and that was why Matt hit him back.”

“Wow. I guess we know where the detective went after he talked to the girls.” When Buck refilled his bowl more soup sounded good. Now I’d lost my appetite. I didn’t want anybody else going through the kind of suspicion that Ben had, or even worse. But it sounded like things were about to get tough for Matt Seavers.

Dwelling on Matt and what happened to him was something I put aside for a while that day. At four I went back to school to take my final. When I came home from school I discovered that Sam Blankenship left a message on my answering machine. His message asked five or six more detailed questions about the investigation into Frank’s death. In the background while he talked I could hear rattling sounds that might have been a potato chip bag. Apparently junior reporters on the newspaper still didn’t make enough money to go out for lunch.

On the phone Sam sounded a little more seasoned now. I may have helped that seasoning process a little by insisting that he be the one to cover the story once we knew who’d killed Dennis. He’d been helpful and pleasant up to that point and I’d felt I owed him one. I couldn’t take credit for much, though. Most of his growth probably came from just covering the stories he needed to cover in nine months. His byline climbed up the ladder a few rungs in that time so that by now he wasn’t just covering three-alarm fires and suspicious deaths at nursing homes.

Listening to his message I decided that the reporter must not be any friendlier with Fernandez. The detective could have answered any of the questions Sam asked me, but he’d chosen to ask me about the details of Frank’s death and what had happened in the two weeks since.

I called Tuesday morning to talk to Sam but only got his voice mail. Either some story broke that they needed him to cover or he still wasn’t much of a morning person. Given that he was hardly older than Ben, that didn’t surprise me much. We might play telephone tag for another day or two, given my schedule. After returning his call I put in a shift at the Coffee Corner and took my last final.

When I finished and went home, Ben drove up to the apartment and proceeded to unload his car as I got out of mine. It took quite a while to help him unload, and involved three trips up and down the stairs for each of us.

“Are you sure you need all this stuff over winter break?” I asked him as I huffed and puffed under a comforter piled on top of a laundry basket.

“Yeah, most of it. I can’t go back into the dorm after today until the tenth of January when next semester starts. That means I had to pack up anything I wanted to use in the next month, and anything I was afraid might get stolen if somebody broke into the suite.” That apparently encompassed virtually everything he owned. I felt thankful the microwave and refrigerator that he and Ted shared didn’t get hauled to the apartment.

With what he brought home his bedroom soon looked like a war zone. It felt like his early high school years when I was always haranguing him to clean up his stuff. Given the lack of closet space in the apartment and the unfinished nature of the bathroom at this point, I wasn’t even going to bother to nag. As long as he kept most of it in his bedroom where he could close the door, I could live with the clutter for a month. It felt so good to have him home. I’d missed him even though he had spent a lot of weekends here with me.

After an hour or so of things moving around behind the closed bedroom door, Ben opened it and came out. He had changed into his usual baggy shorts and a hoodie and looked very comfortable. “Now that you’re here does this mean I’m cooking supper for two?”

He looked a little sheepish. “Not tonight. There’s a bunch of people going out to celebrate the end of the semester. I want to have a little bit more time with some of them before they take off for home.”

“Okay. Maybe tomorrow night, then.” Having a teenager had made me fairly flexible. With Ben, plans were always in flux until the last moment.

Ben grimaced. “Maybe Thursday? There’s a movie opening tomorrow I promised a friend I’d see with her.”

Hmm. This was a new development. I fairly burst keeping more questions to myself. The first mention of a female friend to see movies with wasn’t the time to grill him on their relationship. If this mystery woman was more than a casual friend, I’d start hearing her name soon enough. That or see her number show up on the cell phone bill. I made a mental note to look more carefully when the bill came this month.

“Okay.” I hugged him, marveling at the maturity and height my kid had gained. “Drive carefully, make everybody wear their seat belts—”

“And nobody smokes in the car and call you if I’m going to be later than one,” he finished up. This wasn’t a new litany of requests. So far he nearly always remembered them. I didn’t have to add a caution about drinking because I knew Ben didn’t drink. Lots of freshmen celebrated their independence that way, but we already had more than one conversation about alcohol since he’d come to California in June.

We’d had an ongoing series of conversations about drinking from middle school on up, and Ben’s answer was always the same. He thought it was stupid, much to my delight. There’s a lot to be thankful for in having a stubborn kid. It makes reasoning with them difficult from the time they learn to talk, but it also has its pluses in the teen years. Few of their peers can sway them into bad behavior if they aren’t prone to it in the first place.

Ben left and I got back to decorating the tree. By the time my stomach started reminding me I was hungry I was alone in an apartment lit only by the glow of the tree lights I’d plugged in. It felt peaceful to sit there that way, not needing to study for a change or go into work. I decided to have a real treat and go over to my favorite place for fish tacos and actually stay there and eat at a table for a change. Normally I got carryout and ate it at home, but tonight I wanted to have some contact with other grown-ups.

The atmosphere at the small mom-and-pop restaurant about two miles from the apartment was festive. It was warm inside and strung with Christmas garland, white lights and bright decorations. There was a sign behind the cash register that said they were taking orders for tamales for Christmas. That was a tradition I hadn’t gotten into yet although I knew a lot of Californians even made their own. I wasn’t about to do that for two people. From what I understood it was a massive undertaking best suited to having a family’s worth of women and a large kitchen.