But whatever Oliver is about to say is interrupted by the tinkling of the bell as the door is pushed open. Abruptly, they all fall silent and stare as Officer Gray walks into the shop. Officer Gray is so far from who Oliver expects to see that for a split second, his brain short-circuits and goes, Wait, am I at the police station again, waiting to identify my brother’s body?
“What the hell is going on here?” Officer Gray demands. She definitely does not look pleased to see the three of them.
Oliver scrambles to his feet. Something about Officer Gray makes him feel like he needs to stay on his feet. It’s probably the uniform. Or the gaze that kind of reminds him of Vera. Or maybe the fact that he can very much see the gun that she carries in her holster. Or maybe all of the above. Being the oldest of the three of them, Oliver feels like he needs to be the one who answers her question. “Uh, hi, Officer.” He tries to come up with something better. “How’re you doing?” Oh god, that came out so wrong, like Joey from Friends’ sleazy come-on line.
Officer Gray narrows her eyes. “I said, what is going on here?”
“Uh . . .” Oliver looks around helpless at Sana and Riki, both of whom are wide-eyed with obvious fear. “Well, we were cleaning up Vera’s shop?” he squeaks.
“Why?”
Oliver grasps the first answer that comes to mind. “Uh . . . because . . . we’re nice?” He cringes inwardly. That was quite possibly the stupidest answer anyone could have come up with.
Officer Gray nods at Sana, then at Riki. “You two, aren’t you the reporters I saw at Julia Chen’s house the other day?”
Riki’s face pales. “Uh, yes?”
“I’m not a reporter,” Sana says quickly. Then, quietly, she mumbles, “I just have a podcast.”
“Right,” Officer Gray says, “and now here you two are, together with Marshall Chen’s brother, in Vera’s teahouse.”
The mention of “Marshall Chen’s brother” turns something in Oliver’s stomach. How pathetic that even after Marshall’s death, Oliver would still be known as just his brother.
“Anyone care to explain to me why the three of you are together? Is it a book club? A coffee club?”
The thing is, Oliver isn’t even sure why he feels like Officer Gray has just caught them doing something illegal. Surely cleaning up an old woman’s shop that was burglarized counts as an actual good deed? The realization makes him stand a bit straighter. He looks Officer Gray in the eye and says, “You see, Officer, Vera’s shop was broken into a few days ago, and so we thought we’d help her out a bit by tidying it up. There was a huge mess, and—”
“Back up,” Officer Gray says, and Oliver’s mouth snaps shut. “You said her shop was ‘broken into’?”
Oliver nods hesitantly.
“And nobody thought to report this to us?”
Oliver’s mouth drops open. “Uh, well—”
The answer, of course, is no. Nobody thought to report it to the police. And why the hell not? My god, now that Officer Gray is pointing it out, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world, and yet only Julia suggested it, and when it was shot down, no one insisted that going to the cops was the right thing to do. Whyyy? Oliver’s mind wails.
Because Oliver doesn’t want anything more to do with the cops, that’s why. He has enough to hide from them. The less he has to do with them, the better. But what about the others? They’d all been there that day, when Vera had called them over to show them the catastrophic destruction of her store. And out of all of them, only Julia suggested calling the cops.
Maybe it’s because they, too, have something to hide.
The skin on the back of Oliver’s neck prickles, and he looks at Sana and Riki in a new light. A light he really doesn’t want to see them in, because he’s growing to like them, to see them as friends, almost. And now he can’t shake off the feeling that they know something. What could they be hiding?
TWENTY-FIVE
SANA
Sana has never been so nervous in her entire life. She feels light-headed. She’s never felt light-headed before. She didn’t even understand what it means to “feel light-headed,” couldn’t even imagine it, and now here she is. It feels a lot less pleasant than it sounds. She’d thought that maybe it would feel like her head was weightless, but no, actually, it feels like the insides of her head have been replaced by nothing but water and everything is now sloshing around and she feels like she might either faint or puke or both.
Officer Gray is going on and on about how irresponsible they all are for not reporting the break-in to the police, especially since a death occurred in the shop not long ago.
“But you guys said Marshall’s death was an accident,” Sana hears someone say. To her horror, she realizes a moment too late that the someone was her. Stop talking, mouth. But her mouth has grown a mind of its own and continues blathering. “Vera said so.”
“Oh, Vera said so, did she?” Officer Gray throws her hands up. “And is Vera a cop?”
The three of them are silent.
“Is Vera a private detective, maybe?”
Riki raises a tentative hand. “I think she counts as an amateur sleuth?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Officer Gray turns her back on them for a second, taking in a deep, frustrated breath. Then she turns back around to face them. “Let me make this very clear. Vera does not have any authority to do or proclaim anything about Marshall Chen’s death, you hear me?”
Sana feels her head nodding mechanically.
“So when something like this happens,” Officer Gray continues, “I don’t want to hear about it from her neighbor.”
“Her neighbor?” Oliver says.
“Probably the owner of the bakery next door,” Riki says.
“Oof, Vera’s not going to be happy about that,” Sana mutters, recalling Vera’s vitriol about the French bakery next door.
“Are you three musketeers done? Yes, Winifred next door was the one who called us to let us know that it seems like everything inside Vera’s shop has been smashed up.”
“Winifred must’ve been peeping through the window,” Riki says.
“She would’ve had to press her face right up against it,” Sana says. “It was so grimy before I cleaned it, there was no way she would’ve been able to look inside unless she was, like, this close to the glass.” It’s starting to dawn on Sana why Vera might not like Winifred, even though Winifred’s French pastries are decent.