Then I had the perfect idea. We could check into FOKC, the charity Ashton delivered meals for. It’d be easy. We’d just go down to their headquarters and pretend we wanted to get involved, say we wanted to do the same route Ashton usually delivered to. We were her friends, we’d tell them, and we knew Ashton would want to make sure her people were taken care of until she could come back and do it herself. Not that I actually wanted to deliver any meals. I just wanted a good excuse to find out who she delivered them to. It was an idea worthy of the Andromeda Man himself.
“How about we go Friday afternoon after school?” I suggested.
Audrey frowned. “Friday? I don’t think I can do it Friday.”
“Why not? What else could you possibly have going on?”
She didn’t like that. “What?” she said. “You don’t think I could have something going on? You think you’re my only friend? I could have a date or something.”
“Yeah, right. You could have a date. And I’m marrying Princess Leia.”
“Hey, I could have a date.”
“Well, do you?”
She looked away, then back. “I’m not sure exactly. It’s just that Trix asked me if I wanted to get together this Friday for coffee.”
“You’re kidding. That’s great. Why didn’t you tell me?” I made a point to sound supportive even though the truth was I hadn’t scratched Trix off my suspect list yet.
Audrey fiddled with one of her French fries for a moment.
“The thing is, I don’t know if I really want to go. There’s, like, a catch to it.”
“Look, if you really like this girl, you shouldn’t worry about some little catch.”
“But it’s kind of a weird catch.”
“What is it?”
“Well, uh, she kind of said she wants you to come along too.”
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
This was awkward to say the least. It was just possible Trix was actually interested in me and not Audrey. But I’d already told Audrey—and myself—any kind of romantic deal between me and Trix was strictly taboo, so I had to walk a thin line here.
“You know what?” I said. “I’ll bet she’s not sure you’re g*y, so she didn’t want to ask you out on an actual date. If I’m there, she can get to know you better without things getting weird, you know? It’s the old ‘Let’s be friends so we can segue into a relationship’ strategy.”
“You really think so?”
“I’d say there’s about a seventy-five percent possibility.”
“So you’ll come?”
“If you think I ought to.”
“Yeah, I think you ought to.”
“Okay. On one condition—we convince Trix to go to FOKC headquarters with us.”
Audrey mulled on that for a moment. “That might work,” she said finally. “That just might work.”
I hoped it would work too, but I also couldn’t help wondering if maybe Trix had some sinister ulterior motive for wanting to get together, a motive that had nothing to do with liking either one of us.
CHAPTER 20
On Friday afternoon, we met Trix in a coffee shop on her side of town, an upscale place with men and women in suits chatting or working on their laptops. As for Trix, she was wearing the exact same thing she wore the day we met her. Or the exact same look, I should say. She explained that she had a closet full of identical outfits. “When you find a look that’s you,” she said, “you might as well stick with it.”
The coffees all had weird names, but I figured anything with the word mocha in the title couldn’t be all bad, and it wasn’t. Finding a place to sit was not a problem—the place was loaded with comfy chairs and little sofas gathered around coffee tables. I headed to one of the chairs, catching Audrey’s eye and nodding toward the two-seater sofa so she’d have a chance to sit next to Trix. Unfortunately, another chair was left open and Trix sat there.
So far she seemed perfectly cool and all, but I had to consider the possibility that could just be an act to hide the fact she was the psychopath who killed her little friend in California. Maybe her dad even knew she was a psychopath and that’s why he moved her to Oklahoma City. And this may sound paranoid, but sitting there, I even imagined a derringer tucked into her little black purse. Weirder things happen on Andromeda Man every week.
At first we traded some awkward small talk, but sooner or later the subject of Ashton Browning was bound to come up, and it did.
“So I guess you’re still working on your articles about Ashton,” Trix said after taking a sip of her cappuccino. “Word is you even showed up at one of those stupid Gangland parties.”
“You know about that place?” I said. “I thought it was supposed to be secret.”
“Everyone at Hollister knows about it,” she said. “It’s just that the people I hang with don’t really care about it.”
“We don’t care about it either,” Audrey said. “We just thought it’d be a good chance to get more of a feel for the crowd Ashton ran with. Or at least used to run with.”
“I hope you didn’t get the idea that just because I go to Hollister, I’m anything like Rowan Adams and Brett Seagreaves.”
“We never thought that,” Audrey assured her, although Trix didn’t seem like the kind of person who needed much reassuring.
“Brett was all right,” I said. “But Rowan’s definitely on my suspect list.”