A Midwinter's Tail

20

I beat Maggie to Eric’s Place for lunch by about five minutes.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said as she shed her coat, hat and scarf and dropped into the chair opposite me. “We had a pile of last-minute Christmas orders at the shop this morning.”

She put a hand flat on her chest, closed her eyes and took several slow, deep breaths. When she opened her eyes again, Claire was coming from the other side of the restaurant with everything for her tea.

“Thank you,” Maggie said with a smile.

“Have you decided what you want?” Claire asked as she set a pot of hot water on the table.

I nodded. “I’ll have the Wednesday soup and the Wednesday bread.”

Claire nodded approvingly. “Good choice.”

“I’ll have the same,” Maggie said.

“It should just be a few minutes,” Claire said. She headed back to the kitchen

Maggie started making her tea. “What did I just order?” she asked.

“Chicken noodle soup and honey sunflower bread.”

She smiled. “Oh, good.”

Once the tea was ready she leaned back in her chair and folded her hands around her cup. “How was your morning?” she asked.

“Good,” I said. “Remember the little cat out at Wisteria Hill that Roma was worried about?”

Maggie nodded.

“Marcus caught her.”

“You’re kidding,” Maggie said, eyes widening. “I thought you were Dr. Dolittle.”

I shook my head as I took a sip of my coffee. “I guess I’m not the Cat Whisperer after all.” I tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear. “Oh, and Roma got back this morning.”

Maggie added a tiny dab of honey to her cup and stirred. “If I’d known, I would have asked her to join us.”

“I did and she couldn’t,” I said. “So, how was your morning aside from the extra orders?”

Maggie picked up her cup again. “Good, actually. Oren brought over some preliminary drawings. He thinks we should move the cash register over to the other wall and then we could make the demo space a little longer.”

I tried to picture the inside of the co-op store. “That might work.”

Maggie ran a hand back through her hair. “Kath, do you think when we finally get the work done in the store that it might be possible to work out something between the library and the co-op?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She wrinkled her nose at me. “I don’t know exactly. Maybe a demonstration of a technique at the shop and then a talk at the library?”

I nodded. “That has potential,” I said.

Claire arrived then with our soup and bread. We ate in silence for a couple of minutes.

“You said Vincent Starr offered to come back,” Maggie said as she buttered a piece of the thick bread.

My mouth was full, so I just nodded.

“Maybe we could do something with him,” she said. “Rare books can be worth a lot of money, can’t they?”

“Depending on the book, yes,” I said.

She dipped the end of her bread in her soup. “Maybe we could get Starr back at the library to talk about what makes one book more valuable than another, and then he could do some kind of appraisal. You know, like Antiques Roadshow, at the co-op.” She’d dunked her bread two more times while she was talking and most of it was just a soggy lump in her bowl now.

“We could do that,” I agreed. I set my spoon down.

Maggie was talking too much and had barely touched her tea. Something was up. “Or you could just tell me what the heck is going on.”

She looked at me and sighed. “What’s going on is I’m not very good at lying.”

I nodded. “I noticed. And that’s not a bad thing, by the way.”

“It’s Brady. I know I said we were just friends, but we’re sort of turning into more than friends.”

“Okay,” I said carefully.

She looked at me a bit uncertainly. “You’re not surprised.”

I reached for a piece of bread from the basket between us. “I might have been just a little bit,” I said. “When I saw the two of you like this”—I held up my thumb and index finger pressed together—“last night, walking down here, not toward River Arts. It looked like more than two people who are just casual friends.”

She dropped her eyes for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I really was going over to my studio. Brady sent me a text right after you walked out to get your coat.” She slumped against the back of her chair. “Oh, Kath, I don’t exactly know what happened. He’s not my type.”

“I don’t think you can say that anymore,” I said with a smile.

Her cheeks flooded with color.

“You never really said how the two of you got to be friends.”

“Brady and I started talking at the reception after the opening night of the New Horizons Theatre Festival in the fall. I guess that’s when we really started getting friendly.”

She smiled when she said his name. Just the way I used to do with Marcus. In the almost two years I’d known Maggie, I’d never seen her do that.

“I don’t remember seeing you with Brady at that reception,” I said.

Maggie laughed. “That’s because you and Marcus had finally realized that I and everyone else was right about the two of you. I could have been dancing with a gorilla in a tutu and you wouldn’t have noticed.”

I felt my own face get warm and I reached for my mug and took a drink. “Why were you asking me about Vincent Starr? This has something to do with Dayna, doesn’t it?”

Maggie nodded. “Brady talked to his mother before the fundraiser.”

“I know,” I said.

“She told him she came back to town to see him and his brothers.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “You don’t think so.”

She shook her head and there was a touch of sadness in her green eyes. “I had Brady’s ticket for the party and I stopped by his office to drop it off to him because I was going to meet him there. I wanted to get to the Stratton early and double-check the table arrangement.”

I nodded without speaking.

“Brady was out by the reception desk talking to his mother when I got there. She took a pen and a piece of paper out of her bag and wrote down her cell phone number for him.” Maggie took a deep breath and let it out. “She had a ticket for the Vincent Starr lecture in her bag.” Her eyes met mine. “You told me it was sold out more than a week in advance.”

I felt something tighten in my chest. “It was.”

“You sent some tickets out by mail,” Maggie said.

“Yes, we did.”

“Dayna Chapman didn’t come here to see her sons. She came here because Vincent Starr was here. That’s what Brady thinks.”

“Do you think she had some kind of rare book?” I asked. I’d reduced half a piece of bread to a pile of crumbs on the plate in front of me without realizing it.

Maggie shrugged. “Maybe. Brady said she told him that his grandfather had died not long ago. Maybe . . . maybe she ended up with a book that belonged to him and wanted to sell it quietly so her sister wouldn’t find out.”

“Does Brady know if his grandfather was a collector?” I asked.

Maggie shook her head. She picked up her teapot and then set it down again, realizing that she hadn’t put any more hot water in it. “There’s one more thing that happened when Dayna was at Brady’s office. He said his mother dropped a piece of paper with an address on it and when he picked it up and asked her about it she grabbed it from him and told him it was none of his business.”

I caught Claire’s eye across the room and pointed at Maggie’s little hot water pot. The contents were probably cold by now. I waited until she’d brought a new one and topped up my coffee as well before I spoke. “Mags, did Brady see the address?”

“He did,” she said as she started the tea-making process again. “Tamera Lane. There’s no street with that name anywhere around here or in Minneapolis.” She stopped and looked at me across the table. “Kath, I don’t want to do anything to cause problems with you and Marcus. But you’re good at this. Please, could you ask a few questions? Brady’s a good guy.”

It felt as though the entire town wanted me to figure out what had happened to Dayna Chapman. I nodded across the table at her. “Okay,” I said.