Chapter Thirty-Two

Something wasn’t right.

She’d noticed it when she traced the pattern on paper, and now she was seeing it for sure on the muslin fabric.

Sophie studied the cloth in front of her, trying to figure out where she’d gone wrong. The little doggie neck-to-tail measurement simply didn’t line up. Was it a shorter jacket, perhaps? Mid-back? But as she peered at the printout of the pattern again, she reconfirmed that the coat was supposed to cover up the belly and back, as a coat should do.

Bright morning sun streamed through her living room window. It was an early morning for a notorious late sleeper, but her day was packed, especially since she needed to squeeze in this sewing project before she began her final preps for the benefit tonight. Ryan had departed at the crack of dawn to take care of his dog, and she’d dusted off her sewing machine, setting up on the table by the window, ready to tackle this gift.

He’d emailed her a photo he’d taken of the printed pattern, and she’d grabbed some fabric she had on hand from a few years ago when she’d made a mod retro skirt.

Grabbing a new section of fabric, she followed the measurement once again.

Whoa. That definitely was wrong. Wrong size. Wrong shape. Wrong everything.

Had it been that long since she had sewn? No, it was only two years ago when she’d made that skirt. This pattern didn’t seem so complex as to throw her off like this, even with a dog bone design on the back.

Staring at the pattern again as if it would reveal its secrets, she spotted something odd in the first row of instructions, then her brain turned it around. A light switch flicked on.

“Ah!” she said, tasting victory.

She’d just reverse a few of these steps to make the pattern work. Easy enough. Grabbing her pencil, she jotted down the correct order of the steps.

She blinked.

She peered more closely at the numbers in the first row. They lined up precisely with the reverse letters of the alphabet.

She counted off in her head, quickly transposing the numbers into letters, her analytical mind easily sliding into coding mode.

James Street.

A hotbed of crime once upon a time.

Studying the numbers more closely, they clicked into place, sliding like puzzle pieces.

This pattern wasn’t a dog jacket.

The measurement was wrong because the first row spelled out a street name, then what appeared to be two addresses on James Street. Her mind raced back to a few weeks ago when John had let slip a small detail from the case.

‘Today was like a goddamn puzzle. You know the math problems you can’t solve? And this was over addresses. Fucking addresses from years ago.”

Oh God.

She dropped the paper as if it were on fire. She scrabbled back in her chair, standing up, then backed away from it as if it would curse her.

Could it be? Did that pattern hold the clues to what her brother was looking for in the case? Was this dog jacket pattern from Ryan’s mother something else? Something more? Something that revealed…

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

She inhaled sharply, remembering what her brother had told her the very first day, before either of them realized her Ryan was his Ryan.

“Something that would help me find the other guys I think were involved.”

John was looking for accomplices. He’d thought Ryan was hiding something. But if this pattern unfolded into code, as she reasoned it would, then Ryan wasn’t hiding anything at all. He couldn’t possibly know there were addresses buried inside his mother’s “prize” dog jacket pattern.

Only a seamstress would know this pattern wasn’t a pattern. Only a man or woman who attempted to make this jacket would be able to tell it wasn’t for a dog.

Pacing in circles in her living room, she tried to settle her galloping heart. She worked to calm her overactive brain. She didn’t want to jump to conclusions. She needed to check, and double check. That was what she’d done in school. That was always her strategy. Make certain. Make sure.

She headed to her desk, flipped open her laptop, and started plugging in the two addresses on Google Maps. They showed up near each other in the same neighborhood—a dangerous section of town years ago that had since been gentrified. Sophie wanted to know who lived there. Property records weren’t hard to find—everything was online these days in realtor databases. She plugged the addresses into a realtor search. But the records revealed only when the homes were last sold—a few years ago. Nothing showed the owners’ names now, or from when this pattern was made, nearly two decades ago.

But she’d spent a lifetime solving problems. Cracking codes. Creating her own damn codes.

Grabbing the pattern again, she started writing out notes, trying to figure out the rest of the rows of instructions and what they meant. But only that first line translated neatly. The code seemed to shift in each row. Something was missing from the next line. Sophie peered more closely, and it seemed a letter had been turned into a symbol. On the next one, a number was simply missing, like a dropped stitch. She’d have to deal with those at another time.

For now, she zeroed in on the first row of instructions, puzzling over how to find out who these addresses belonged to. She could easily call John and hand him this information in its current form. Or she could tell Ryan what she’d discovered. But she’d never been one to turn in her homework half-done. This code was only partially cracked, and her job was to smash it wide open. Whatever she had in her hands—whether it was a cold, hard clue, or a dead end—she was determined to figure it out.

She tapped her fingers against her temple, as if she could coax out the way to find the names of the inhabitants. In seconds, she had it, because she had friends everywhere in this city, including in the county records office—her friend Jenna’s aunt worked there.

Ringing Jenna, even though it was early on a Saturday morning, she gave her only the barest details, adding that discretion was key.

“I’ll see what she can do,” Jenna said, and five hellishly long minutes later, she called back to say her aunt would be home shortly from a hike and would log into her work computer to check the records for those addresses. “Give me an hour.”

“I can’t thank you enough,” Sophie said, then tried valiantly to keep herself occupied.

But fifteen minutes of checking and double-checking that her shoes, jewelry, lingerie, and evening dress were ready for tonight did nothing to cool her mind.

A deep obsession kicked in, telling her to do something.

To understand.

To look.

To see.

She tried to shove all those urges away, and simply exist in this state of waiting. Maybe some tea would help. Maybe she should bake something. Maybe another long shower would keep her focus off of waiting for Jenna’s call.

But something insistent was knocking around in her skull, telling her not to sit still.

Her mind was a pinball machine, whirring and whizzing with crazy silver flippers, sending dozens of balls in new directions. She weighed her options. She could stay here and wait. Or she could conduct some recon on her own.

Twenty minutes later, she drove along James Street, her sunglasses on, as if that would hide her from the kids playing in driveways, the men and women walking dogs, the average, every-day feel of this suburban stretch of street that had been riddled with crime years ago. Following the path of addresses in her hand, she drove past the two homes from the pattern.

Two clean, neat, modern standard-order suburban family abodes.

They gave no clue as to why on earth Dora hid these addresses in a pattern many years ago. She gritted her teeth, wishing she truly understood what she’d uncovered.

Her phone rang.

She nearly jumped out of the driver’s seat, then settled herself when she saw Jenna’s name.

Swiping the screen, she turned her phone on speaker, then pulled over near a park and cut the engine.

“Hey girl,” Jenna said. “I’ve got what you’re looking for.”

“Tell me,” she said breathlessly.

“So, eighteen years ago, one was owned by a family named Stefano,” Jenna said, and Sophie cringed, squeezing her eyes shut at that name—the name she knew belonged to the shooter. “The second was a rental. Owned by a guy named Carlos Nelson at the time. But he didn’t live there. He rented it to his two cousins, T.J. Nelson and Kenny Nelson.”

“T.J. and Kenny Nelson,” Sophie repeated, as if she could decode the names by saying them out loud.

But they meant nothing to her.

Of course they meant nothing to her. She wasn’t investigating a crime. She wasn’t the detective. She wasn’t the victim’s family.

She was, however, the woman stuck between the two.

After she said goodbye to Jenna, she didn’t move. She stayed behind the wheel of her parked car, staring ahead at the swing-set, the world around her fading as she realized that she had the names of the two men John could be looking for in the murder of Ryan’s father nearly twenty years ago.

Ryan had no idea he’d been holding onto evidence all these years. He’d thought his mother had given him a memento, a symbol of her hopes and dreams for safekeeping. Instead she’d asked him to hide something that was clearly evidence, and managed to do it without anyone being the wiser.

Her insides roiled. Her head pounded with frustration and so much aching sadness. But underneath that storm of emotions was another one, rising up. Excitement. She had something in her hands that might help solve the murder.

The trouble was she was stuck, and Sophie understood precisely why she’d been so consumed with the need to keep herself busy for the last hour.

She didn’t know who to tell first.

Her head told her John. Her heart said she should call the man who’d given her the clue he didn’t even know he had.

She tossed her phone in the backseat and headed home.