Look Again - Lisa Scottoline [65]
Yikes!
Ellen turned on the ignition, hit the gas, and found a place in the brisk line of traffic to the causeway. Her heartbeat stepped up. Carol was two cars ahead as they picked up speed and soared over the causeway, the wind off the water blowing her hair around. She kept an eye on the white car as they wound through the streets, which grew increasingly congested, but she stayed on Carol as she turned into a strip mall and pulled into a parking spot.
Ellen parked several rows away and cut the ignition, then held her breath waiting for Carol Braverman to emerge. She remembered the photos of her online but was dying to see her in person, to see if she looked like Will, or vice versa.
The next moment, the driver’s door opened.
Chapter Forty-seven
Ellen couldn’t see Carol Braverman’s face because she had on large black sunglasses and a hot pink visor, but she still felt a tingle of excitement at the sight of her. Carol got out of the car, tall and shapely in a white cotton tank top and an old-school tennis skirt. Pink pom-poms wiggled from the backs of her sneakers, and a bouncy dark blond ponytail popped out of her visor. She slipped a white quilted bag over her shoulder and hurried to the gourmet grocery, where she picked a shopping cart and rolled it inside the tinted glass doors of the store.
Ellen grabbed her keys and purse, got out of the car, and hustled through the parking lot to the grocery, snagging a shopping cart for show. The entrance doors slid aside, and the air-conditioning hit like January, but two women shoppers stood bottlenecking the entrance, looking at the green stand for cut flowers. She kept an eye on Carol but didn’t want to draw attention to herself, especially when she realized how out of place she looked. Nobody else had on a thick white turtleneck, Mom jeans, and brown clogs accessorized with Pennsylvania mud.
She ducked into the back row of the flower department, going around the shoppers, and fake-lingered at the bird-of-paradise plants, then glanced over her shoulder. In the next minute, the women moved, leaving Carol right behind her, using the ATM machine, and so close that Ellen could almost hear her humming. She couldn’t risk Carol seeing her and maybe recognizing her later, so she kept her head down and her sunglasses on her nose. The ATM beeped, and the humming grew fainter, so she knew that Carol had moved on.
Time to get stalking.
Ellen never knew when she’d get another opportunity and she had to see Carol’s face, close up. She drifted sideways past a wall of nuts in plastic scoop-it-yourself canisters and fake-browsed the roasted unsalted almonds, raw salted almonds, and raw unsalted almonds. For a minute, she couldn’t even fake-decide. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Carol looking at the peppers, her back turned.
Ellen pulled a plastic bag from a perforated roll, picked up a plastic scoop, and dug out some raw almonds, then spotted Carol moving around the perimeter of the produce department, bagging a head of romaine and putting it in her cart, her back still turned. Ellen got a twist tie for her almond bag and crossed nearer to Carol, keeping her head down in the apple aisle, where rosy galas, fat Macintoshes, and Golden Delicious sat mounded like Egyptian pyramids. She positioned herself midway down the aisle, so that she could get a good look at Carol’s face if she turned around.
Ellen picked up a Granny Smith and examined it with ersatz absorption, and in the split second she bent over to put it back, Carol spun around with her cart.
No!
The rest happened even before Ellen could process it. Carol’s cart crashed squarely into Ellen’s hip, startling her so that she backed into the apple pyramid, and before she could stop them, Gala and Fuji apples were rolling toward her in a pesticide-free avalanche.
“Oh no!” Ellen yelped, punching up her glasses.
“I’m so sorry!” Carol tried to catch the apples, but they hit the lacquered floor and shot off in all directions, like billiard balls.
“Oh, jeez!