A Midwinter's Tail

8

The journal-making workshop was just as successful as Vincent Starr’s talk had been. I wasn’t surprised. Ruby was a natural teacher—good at explaining her techniques in simple terms. When the class was over, five different people sought me out to ask if we were planning more workshops.

Maggie showed up about ten to twelve—dropped off by none other than Brady Chapman. The library closed at lunchtime on Saturdays. We climbed into the truck and headed for Wisteria Hill to have lunch with Roma and help her continue to fix up the place.

“How did Ruby’s workshop go?” Mags asked as I started up Mountain Road.

“Really well. All but two people put their e-mail addresses on a list to be notified about more workshops, and they were tourists from out of state.”

Maggie clapped her mittened hands together and smiled at me. “I knew people would love her class. I wish I’d been able to get there, but Oren and I spent the morning going over the plans for the changes to the store.”

Maggie had gotten a grant to renovate the artist co-op store and add a small space for demonstrations and courses in the summer and fall. Oren was going to do the work.

I glanced over at her. “What did he think about your drawings?”

Maggie pulled off her fuzzy hat and ran her fingers through her blond curls. “He had a couple of suggestions for changes—he thinks we should move the half wall about a foot to the right and he suggested glass block for the other wall.”

I tried to picture the sketches Maggie had made for the proposed changes to the main floor of the store. “I do like the idea of using the glass block,” I said. “It would let in more light.”

“I do, too,” Maggie said. “Oren says that costwise it should work out about the same.”

We talked about the renovations all the way out to Wisteria Hill. I wondered when Mags was going to tell me that Brady had dropped her off at the library. There was something going on between those two. I knew she’d tell me about it eventually.

As I flicked on my blinker to turn into the driveway of the old estate, I thought about all the changes that had happened since Roma bought the property from Everett. The house and grounds had been empty for so long. I’d always thought the whole place had an air of sadness. Now that Roma was getting ready to live in the old farmhouse, it somehow seemed alive again.

I had a big soft spot for Wisteria Hill. It was where I’d found Hercules and Owen—or to be more exact, it was where they had found me. It was where Marcus and I had become friends—and then more than friends.

Once Roma was living there full-time, she wouldn’t need her group of volunteers who made sure that the feral cat colony in the old carriage house was fed and cared for. I was going to miss watching Lucy and the other cats.

Roma waved from the kitchen window as we got out of the truck. This was my first chance to see the kitchen since Oren had finished installing the new cupboards.

We took off our boots in what used to be the old side porch. Now it was a combination mudroom/laundry/storage area.

“Ready?” Roma asked, eyes sparkling.

Maggie and I both nodded.

Oren had done a beautiful job on the new cupboards—not that I’d ever had any doubt of that. Maggie and I had helped Roma steam about a hundred years’ worth of wallpaper off the kitchen walls. Before training camp Eddie had patched and repaired them and Maggie and I had spent a weekend helping Roma paint the kitchen a creamy shade of palest yellow. The new kitchen cupboards were a simple Shaker style, painted white, and they went beautifully with the buttery walls and the wide boards of the refinished hardwood floor.

“Oh, Roma, it’s beautiful,” I said.

Maggie put her arm around Roma’s shoulders and gave her a hug. “It really is,” she agreed.

Everett and Rebecca had left Roma the original farmhouse kitchen table as a kind of housewarming present. It sat in the far corner, surrounded by a bank of windows.

“Hey, where did you get the chairs?” Maggie asked, pointing to the corner.

I looked across the room and realized Roma had four new-to-her chairs that looked as though they’d been made to go with the big table.

“Eddie and I found them at a flea market,” she said. She smiled at me. “Marcus said he’ll spray-paint them black for me in the spring.”

“Isn’t he a sweetheart?” Maggie said, giving me a saccharine grin. She was never going to let me forget she’d thought Marcus and I were perfect for each other about ten minutes after we’d met.

“Yes, he is,” I said, making a face at her.

“So you like the kitchen?” Roma asked. “Really?”

“Very much,” I said.

“Me too,” Maggie agreed, running a hand over one of the cabinet doors. “The energy of the entire house has changed.”

She was right. The lonely feeling the old place used to give off was gone.

Roma had made minestrone soup for lunch and there were thick slices of brown bread and a wedge of cheddar cheese. We ate at the kitchen table.

“This is Rebecca’s brown bread, isn’t it?” I said.

Roma nodded. “Yep. She brought it out this morning along with two new shelters for the cats.”

Since the cats were feral, they lived in the old carriage house year-round. Harry Taylor Junior had strengthened and added insulation to one corner of the old building, where hay had once been stored. Rebecca and several other volunteers had made warm sleeping shelters for each cat out of large plastic storage bins with straw for insulation.

“How are Lucy and the others?” I asked. Lucy was the smallest member of the feral cat family, but she was its undisputed leader. We seemed to have a rapport. Maggie liked to call me the Cat Whisperer.

Roma looked out the window toward the carriage house. “I’m going to put the cage out for Smokey.”

“Why?” I asked.

She shifted her gaze to me. “He was moving a lot more slowly yesterday and he didn’t eat very much.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

Smokey was the oldest cat in the colony as far as Roma could tell. The scar above his right eye and the missing tip of his tail made me wonder what his life had been like before Roma had discovered the cats and taken over their care.

She gave me a half smile. “Thanks. There isn’t anything you can do right now. I’ll let you know how he is once I get him down to the clinic.”

Maggie shot me a look of sympathy and I picked up my spoon again. “What about Micah?” I asked.

Micah was a small ginger tabby that had been wandering around Wisteria Hill since early fall.

Roma broke a slice of bread in half and dipped a piece in her bowl. “She shows up to eat about every second day. But it doesn’t matter what I put in the cage; I can’t catch her.”

Maggie’s head was bent over her bowl, but she inclined it in my direction. “You need to use the Cat Whisperer and her sidekick, the Cat Detective,” she said.

Roma laughed. “The Cat Detective?”

Maggie smiled. “Marcus is the one who found Desmond and brought him to the clinic, which is how you ended up discovering the cats up here. That makes him the Cat Detective.”

“Very funny,” I said.

“And Marcus managed to figure out that Micah was a girl cat and not a boy cat, something that had stymied the best veterinary minds in town,” Maggie added teasingly.

When Roma first spotted Micah she’d thought the little cat was male. Later, when Marcus and I encountered him, he quickly saw that “he” was in fact “she.”

Roma squared her shoulders, and her chin jutted out. “I wasn’t wearing glasses,” she said.

“That’s because you don’t need glasses.” I reached for the cheese.

She crinkled her nose at me. “I mean my sunglasses,” she said. “It was a very bright day.”

“Oh, of course,” I said, nodding solemnly.

Roma stuck her tongue out at me and then she laughed.

“Seriously,” I said. “Would you like Marcus and me to try to catch Micah?”

Roma nodded. “Please. I’m not having any luck and I’m worried about where she’s sleeping, especially since it’s been so cold.”

“Okay,” I said, dropping a chunk of cheese into my soup. “Let me know once you have Smokey and then I’ll see if we can get Micah for you.”

After lunch Maggie helped Roma load the dishwasher and I changed into my old jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt.

We covered the hardwood floors with cardboard that Harry Junior had saved for Roma from the recycling bins at the community center. Then Maggie settled in with a brush and a small foam roller to paint around the big bay window. Roma started in on the brushwork on the adjacent wall, and I followed her with the roller. This was the second coat and we wanted it to look good.

Eddie, with some guidance from Oren, had stripped and refinished all the wide oak trim and baseboard in the room. Roma had carefully taped off all the wood before Maggie and I had arrived.

“Eddie did a great job with this trim,” Mags said as she worked her brush along the edge of the big window.

“He has more patience than I do,” Roma said. She was working on a small stepladder above my head, cutting in with her brush where the wall and ceiling met. “Eventually, he wants to do all the woodwork in the house.”

Maggie looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “Eventually?”

“You know what I mean,” Roma said.

“It’s none of our business,” I began.

“But that’s not going to stop you.” Roma looked down from her perch on the ladder and smiled at me.

“No, it’s not,” Maggie agreed, her head turned almost upside down as she worked underneath the window.

“Does that mean you and Eddie have talked about the future?” I asked.

Roma continued to paint along the top of the wall. “We have. Well, sort of. It’s just . . .” She stopped painting and turned to look down at Maggie and me. “You know that Eddie’s been divorced for a long time.”

“Uh-huh,” Maggie said.

I nodded.

“He has a good relationship with his ex, Sydney’s mother.”

Sydney was Eddie’s ten-year-old daughter from his brief marriage to his high school sweetheart.

“He gets to spend a lot of time with Syd in the off-season, but even so, I know he wishes he had more time with her.” Roma sighed softly. “I don’t want him to regret giving up the chance to have more children.”

I opened my mouth to tell Roma that from what I’d seen, what Eddie wanted was a life with her, but she spoke first, inclining her head toward Maggie. “What I really want to know is what’s happening with Maggie’s love life.”

“I don’t have a love life,” Mags said, keeping her gaze focused on the stretch of wall in front of her.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Roma said teasingly, shaking her head. She looked at me again, raising an eyebrow. “The night of the fundraiser I saw Maggie and Brady Chapman this close together.” She held up her thumb and index finger maybe a couple of millimeters apart.

“It’s not what you think,” Maggie said.

I leaned my roller on the edge of the paint tray. “You don’t know what we think,” I said, smiling sweetly.

“Brady had a little grease mark on his tie. I had one of those detergent pens in my purse. All I was doing was cleaning his tie.”

I looked up at Roma. “She was cleaning his tie,” I said.

Roma closed her free hand into a fist and pressed it to her chest. “Awww, isn’t that sweet?”

“I was,” Maggie insisted, still focusing on her painting.

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” I said.

Maggie sat back on her heels and looked over at me. “Brady and I are just friends,” she said, enunciating each word slowly and carefully.

“Marcus and I started out as just friends,” I said.

Above me on the ladder, Roma cleared her throat.

“Sort of,” I amended.

“Eddie and I were just friends at first,” Roma offered.

I remembered how Maggie had squeezed Brady’s hand at the fundraiser, urging him to go to the hospital. “You like him, Mags,” I said.

She couldn’t hold my gaze.

“You do!” Roma crowed.

“He’s not my type,” Maggie said, pulling her painting pail a little closer. “He’s so serious and competitive. He wears suits. He’s a lawyer, for heaven’s sake.”

“So?” I said.

“So I like the sensitive type—artists, musicians, guys whose idea of dressing up is putting on a clean T-shirt.”

“Brady has a sensitive side,” I said. “When Marcus’s sister needed a lawyer, he took her case. He’s been helping Ruby get the last of Agatha’s estate settled and I know he’s only charging her for his expenses because the money’s all going into art scholarships.”

I held up a finger before she could interrupt me. “And he stepped in to be goalie for the first responder team because Derek isn’t going to be able to get back for Winterfest.”

“He sounds like a nice guy,” Roma said.

“Brady is not interested in me romantically,” Maggie insisted.

Roma and I exchanged a look, which Maggie caught.

“Now what is it?”

“You’ve been out of the dating pool a little too long, Mags,” I said.

“You really haven’t noticed the way he looks at you?” Roma asked.

Maggie was clearly surprised. Then she shook her head. “No. Anyway, things are too complicated right now, with his mother coming back and then dying the way she did.”

Roma looked down at me. “Does Marcus know what happened yet?”

I shook my head.

“That was such a bizarre accident,” Maggie said, pushing back the sleeves of her gray T-shirt.

“I know,” Roma agreed, turning back to her painting. “What are the chances that Dayna Chapman would come back to town and then end up dying from an allergy attack the same day she got here?”

Maggie had glanced over at me and she must have seen something in my face, or maybe it was just the fact that I didn’t immediately agree.

“Kath, no,” she said quietly.

Roma turned around again and looked down at us. “What is it?” she said.

“You think that Dayna Chapman’s death wasn’t an accident,” Maggie continued, as if Roma hadn’t spoken.

“What?” Roma said.

“Why?” Maggie asked.

“I could be wrong,” I said, looking from one to the other. “I probably am wrong.”

Maggie made a face. “Sure, because you’re always wrong about this kind of thing.”

“The police are still investigating and so is the medical examiner’s office.”

“Why would anyone want to kill the woman?” Roma asked. “She hasn’t been here in more than twenty years.”

“I don’t know,” I said, leaning over to put more paint on my roller. “And maybe no one did. It just seems like an awfully big coincidence that Dayna would show up and then eat the one thing that could kill her. And Olivia has been so insistent that there were no nuts of any kind in the chocolates she made. At least none that she put there.”

“She could just be trying to cover herself,” Maggie said.

“Why?” I said. “If she had put nuts of any kind in the chocolates she made for the fundraiser, why lie about it? She hadn’t made any promise that they would be nut free. And then she picked up that other chocolate from Dana’s box and ate it and had a reaction herself. Not very smart if she knew there were nuts in it. She could have died, too.”

Maggie shook her head

“Mags, it doesn’t mean I’m right,” I said. I turned back to the wall with my paint roller.

Roma had come down the ladder and was moving it to the right. She didn’t look at me and I realized she hadn’t said a word. My stomach gave a little twist.

“Roma, something’s wrong,” I said. “What is it?”

She turned to look at me then, leaning against the side of the ladder. “It’s just, I was running a little late Thursday night. I stopped to check on that dog I told you about. So I was probably one of the last people to arrive at the Stratton.” She let out a breath. “When I came in I saw Dayna and . . . Burtis, just off to the side of the stage. They were . . . talking.”

“Talking or arguing?” Maggie asked.

Roma hesitated. “Arguing.”

I saw Maggie swallow. She cared a lot more about Brady Chapman than she was admitting, probably even to herself.

“But I saw them later,” Roma said, “just before the chocolates were handed out, and everything seemed fine between them then.”

I stopped painting for a moment and looked from Roma to Maggie. “Look,” I said. “I know the kind of reputation Burtis has around town. I know that not everything he does is on the up-and-up, but he wouldn’t kill anyone, especially not the mother of his children. Seriously, would Lita be going out with him if there was any possibility Burtis was that kind of person?”

“Lita?” Roma said.

“And Burtis?” Maggie finished.

So much for me not spreading Burtis’s business all over town. Although I’d had a feeling after they’d shown up at the fundraiser together that it was pretty obvious they were a couple, it was apparently not as clear to Roma or Maggie.

“Lita and Burtis,” Roma said. “How long has that been going on?”

“A while,” I said, working my way across the stretch of wall she’d just moved the ladder away from.

“How did you know?” Maggie asked, hanging her head almost upside down once again as she worked her way along the bottom of the window.

I put more paint on my roller and turned back to the wall. “I saw them together at the library, a while ago.”

“Were they holding hands over by the DVDs?” Maggie asked. “I know Lita is a Clint Eastwood fan.”

“No, they weren’t,” I said. “Although I did catch Everett giving Rebecca a kiss over by the magazines earlier this week.”

I remembered how the two of them had smiled at each other a bit like two unrepentant teenagers when I walked around the shelves and surprised them. Neither one of them had seemed embarrassed at being caught in a public display of affection.

“That’s what I want,” Maggie said.

“You want someone to kiss you in the library?” Roma asked.

I was glad the conversation had shifted away from Burtis and his ex-wife.

“No,” Maggie said. “I want to be crazy about someone the way Rebecca and Everett are about each other when I’m their age. Or right now, for that matter.” She glanced over at me. “Your parents are that way, aren’t they?”

“My parents are crazy, period,” I said. “And yes, they’re still crazy about each other.”

We spent the next hour painting and talking about great love affairs and thankfully nothing more was said about Burtis or Dayna Chapman. I tried not to think about what Roma had said, that she’d seen the two of them arguing. I’d meant what I’d said. Burtis was many things, but he never would have deliberately hurt his ex-wife. And he wouldn’t have asked me to look into her death if he’d had anything to do with it. Would he?

With three of us working, it didn’t take long to get the walls finished. Then we sat around the kitchen table and Roma showed us the rough sketches she and Oren had made for the work she wanted to do outside in the spring.

The sun was low in the sky when I looked at my watch. “I should get going,” I said. “Who knows what Owen and Hercules have been doing?”

Roma hugged us both. “Thank you,” she said. “It would have taken me the next two weeks to get this all done if I’d had to do it by myself.”

“Anytime,” I said.

Maggie nodded her agreement. “When you decide what you want to do upstairs, we’ll come back.”

“Let me know about Smokey,” I said as I pulled on my boots at the back door.

“I will,” Roma promised.

She waved as we started down the long driveway.

I headed for Maggie’s apartment. “I like Brady,” I said as we drove down the hill.

“I hope you’re wrong,” she said.

I knew she didn’t mean about liking Brady.

“Me too,” I said.

“Could you imagine you and Marcus and Brady and me on a double date?” she said after another silence.

Marcus, the straight-arrow police detective, and Brady Chapman, defense attorney and son of the alleged town bootlegger, breaking bread together?

“That could be . . . interesting,” I said.

She laughed. “Uh-huh.”

The idea kept us laughing the rest of the way to her apartment.

“Thanks for the drive, Kath,” Maggie said. “Give my love to my furry boyfriend.”

“I will,” I said.

My cell phone rang just as I pulled into my own driveway. I put the truck in park and looked at the screen. It was Marcus.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m running a little late, but supper is in the slow cooker.”

“I’m sorry, Kathleen,” he said. “I’m not going to get there.”

I knew what he was going to say before the words came out.

“It looks like Dayna Chapman was murdered.”