Buy a Whisker

Chapter 6

I was lying on the couch with Elvis sprawled across my chest, trying to read—and failing because someone’s big, furry head kept getting in the way—when my cell phone rang later that evening. I put the book on the floor and reached for the phone while Elvis raised his head and glared at me.

“You could always go lie somewhere else,” I said.

He narrowed his green eyes at me and flopped back down again.

It was Nick on the phone. “Hi,” he said. “Am I taking you away from anything important?”

I folded one arm behind my head. “No. I’m just basically being a lounge chair for a cat. What’s up?”

I heard him exhale slowly and pictured him swiping a hand over his chin. “I didn’t know if you’d heard: Lily’s death has been ruled a homicide.”

“I know,” I said. “Jess told me.” I’d been trying not to think about what she’d said, but I hadn’t really succeeded. “Do you think it could have anything to do with the development proposal?”

“That’s not really my job,” he said. “That’s Michelle’s department.”

Elvis yawned and rolled partway onto his side.

“I know,” I said. “But you have to have an opinion. C’mon, Nick. I’m not going to tell anybody.”

He sighed. “At this point I don’t know.”

Neither one of us said anything for a moment. “Someone pushed her down those stairs,” I said after a moment of silence.

“You know I can’t tell you that,” Nick said.

“I didn’t ask you anything,” I said, sliding up into a halfway-sitting position. That was too much moving around for Elvis. He jumped down to the floor and stalked away, flicking his tail at me because he didn’t have fingers. “And I’m not going to repeat any conversation we have. I’m just saying, hypothetically”—I put extra emphasis on the last word—“someone must have pushed her.”

“Hypothetically, yes,” Nick said dryly.

I stretched out one leg and then the other. “But whoever it was didn’t just come up behind her and give her a shove. Hypothetically.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked, and I could hear a note of caution in his voice.

“She was lying on her left side. If she’d been starting down the steps and someone had given her a push, she most likely would have landed on her right side.”

For a moment he didn’t say anything. When he did finally speak, it was just one word. “Because?”

I grabbed a pillow and stuffed it behind my back. “Lily went up and down those steps a dozen times a day. So she probably didn’t use the railing. I go up and down the stairs at the shop easily that many times in a day, and I know I don’t.”

“Okay,” he said.

“If someone had pushed Lily, her instinct would be to grab for the railing. It’s on the left side. If she couldn’t get her balance, she’d be leading with her right side as she fell and she’d land on that side. Which she didn’t.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Someone hit her,” I said slowly, the idea just occurring to me, making my heart sink. “She was at the top of the stairs. She was turning, and whoever killed her hit her on the back of the head. The momentum and the fact that she wasn’t turned completely around means that she would most likely have ended up landing on her left side.”

I waited for Nick to say no, to tell me I was wrong.

He didn’t.

“But how do you know she didn’t just hit her head on one of the steps?” I asked. I knew Nick was very good at his job, and if he said Lily’s death was murder, then it was. I just didn’t want it to be. I hated to think that the last moments of her life were filled with fear.

Nick let out another breath. Was he stretching his arms up over his head? I wondered. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s say someone did hit Lily over the head—and I’m not saying that’s what happened, just to be clear.”

“I know,” I said, nodding even though he couldn’t see me.

“The injury wouldn’t be up in the same place as it would be if she’d fallen, and it wouldn’t look the same.”

“What do you mean it wouldn’t be in the same place?” I asked.

“Did you take any anatomy classes?” Nick asked.

“In high school.”

“So you don’t know any of the bones in the skull.”

“Yes, I do,” I said a little indignantly.

My high school biology teacher had had a full-size skeleton in the lab that he’d named Clyde, which we’d all thought was made of some incredibly realistic plastic or resin. There was a bit of an uproar my senior year when it came out that Clyde had been a real person and an alumnus of the school—and really had been named Clyde.

I’d always liked Clyde. Once I’d even done the Macarena with him when the teacher was out of the room.

I pictured the skeleton’s bony head now. “The bone in the front where the forehead is, that’s the frontal bone,” I said. “The bottom part of the jaw is the mandible. The top of the head and the upper part of the back of the head are all parietal bone. And below that is the occipital bone.”

“Very good,” he said.

I couldn’t help smiling as though I’d just gotten a gold star from the teacher. “Thank you.”

“If Lily had slipped and hit her head, we’d expect to see an injury where the occipital bone and temporal bone meet or a bit above that, but not a lot above that area.” He didn’t even bother to say “hypothetically.”

“So if the injury was higher than that, it suggests someone hit her,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Okay, but you said the injury wouldn’t look the same,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Did you ever hit a piñata with a baseball bat?”

“Liam’s tenth birthday party. Samurai Pizza Cats.”

I heard something fall in the bedroom. I was guessing that Elvis had jumped up onto the small table I kept beside the bed and had nosed one of my books onto the floor. He’d done that before when he felt my attention was focused somewhere other than on him.

“Pizza what?” Nick asked.

“Samurai Pizza Cats. They were three cyborg cats—”

“Let me guess,” he interjected. “And they liked pizza.”

“Close,” I said. “They worked in a pizzeria.”

“Of course. How could I have missed that?” Nick laughed then. “I can’t wait until the next time I see Liam.” He cleared his throat. “When you swing, the end of the bat is moving faster than the part closer to your hands.”

“Right.” I heard what was probably another book hit the floor in the bedroom.

“So when it makes contact with the piñata, it does more damage than the shaft does farther down the length of the bat.”

“Because it has more momentum.”

“Exactly.”

I couldn’t say anything for a moment as I tried not to think about the fact that we were really talking about Lily and not a papier-mâché container shaped like a cat.

“You okay?” Nick asked.

“Uh-huh.” I swallowed down the lump that had suddenly tightened in my throat. “Help Michelle catch whoever did this, please?” I whispered.

“I will,” he promised.

I cleared my throat. “Nick, you know that Rose and your mother and—”

“I know.” I could hear a combination of frustration and resignation in his voice. “I’m beating my head against the wall, thinking I can find a way to convince them to stay out of this—aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

He laughed. “You couldn’t hedge even a little bit? Throw me a bone?”

“Your mother, Rose, Liz—they’re all stubborn women. You know that. Put the three of them together and they become an immovable object.” I pulled my legs up and wrapped one arm around my knees. “You saw what happened when Arthur Fenety died and Maddie was a suspect. Nothing you or I said made any difference.”

I imagined him grimacing and raking a hand through his hair. “And after that little experience, you know what I found?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Gray hair. A little clump of gray hair, right in the front. You can’t see it, but it’s there. My mother is giving me gray hair.”

I smiled. “She says the same thing about you.”

He laughed.

“I’ll keep an eye on them,” I said. “I promise.”

We said good night and I ended the call. I got up and went into the bedroom to check on Elvis. He was curled up on the lounge chair, head on his paws. Two paperbacks had mysteriously fallen onto the floor.

“I know you’re awake,” I said quietly. One ear twitched, and then he opened one eye, looked at me for a moment and closed it again. I bent down and picked up the books. One of them was a small cookbook Rose had given me full of simple recipes.

“They just use basic ingredients,” she’d said. “The kind of things you already have in your kitchen.” After she’d looked around my cupboards and refrigerator, she’d amended that to “things most people already have in their kitchens.”

I was certain Rose wasn’t thinking about cooking right now. She was probably sitting with a cup of tea and Alfred Peterson, figuring out how the Angels were going to investigate Lily’s death. I’d told Nick I’d keep an eye on them. I just wasn’t sure how I was going to do that and not get sucked into their investigation, because I definitely wasn’t getting involved in a murder investigation again.

Famous last words.

* * *

When I got to the shop in the morning, Rose and Alfred Peterson were waiting for me. Mr. P.’s pants were tucked into pile-lined lace-up boots. He was wearing a faux-fur trimmed hat with earflaps, a heavy gray wool overcoat with a green-and-blue fringed scarf I knew Rose had knitted for him wound around his neck and at least two pair of mittens, as far as I could tell. He looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy on his first time out in the snow.

“Hey, Mr. P.,” I said. “What are you doing here?” It wasn’t like I didn’t know the answer to my question.

“Rose and I are going to start working on the case,” he said.

I pulled the key out of the lock and looked at Rose. “You have a case?”

She squared her shoulders. “I know you have to have heard that Lily’s death wasn’t an accident.”

“I have,” I agreed, kicking snow off my boots before I stepped inside and turned on the lights.

“We’re going to investigate,” she said.

“Do you have a client?”

I saw a look pass between Rose and Mr. P. She wiped her feet on the mat before looking at me again. “Not yet.”

“Rose, the police are going to be investigating, along with the medical examiner’s office. Both Michelle and Nick are very good at what they do.”

It was the wrong thing to say, which I realized as soon as the words were out.

“And we aren’t?” Rose said. She held her head high, chin stuck out a little.

“I didn’t say that,” I said, trying to keep the frustration I was already feeling out of my voice.

“But you were thinking it,” she countered.

“Rosie, I don’t think Sarah meant any harm,” Mr. P. said gently.

“You don’t think we can figure out who killed Lily,” Rose said, her tone more than a little indignant. She looked so tiny in her blue coat with the collar turned up and her blue-and-red cloche pulled down over her forehead to her eyebrows, but I knew she could do just about anything when she set her mind to it.

“Nice try,” I said, “but you’re not going to guilt me into saying I think what you’re doing is a good idea.” Elvis squirmed in my arms, and I set him on the floor. He headed for the doors into the store.

“I wasn’t trying to guilt you, dear,” Rose said. She gave me her innocent, cookie-baking grandma look.

“Good to know,” I said mildly.

Elvis was standing not very patiently in front of the double doors, and I knew that if I didn’t start the morning routine soon, he’d start protesting more aggressively. And loudly.

“I have a list of parcels that need to be packed,” I said to Rose. “Would you start on that, please?” I glanced at Alfred. “Mr. P., would it be too much trouble for you to go up to the staff room and put the kettle on?”

“I’d be happy to, my dear,” he replied. He sat down on the old church bench Mac had put by the back door and started taking off his boots.

I headed for the store. After a moment Rose followed me. She touched my arm as I flipped on the lights.

“I see what you’re doing,” she said.

“What I’m doing is turning on the lights.”

She made a face at me. She looked like a little gray-haired elf with her cheeks rosy from the cold. “You think I’ll give up if you don’t argue with me. Very sneaky.” She was trying to look angry but couldn’t manage it.

“I learned at the feet of the masters,” I said. I leaned over and kissed the top of her head and then headed for the stairs trailed by my furry sidekick.

Elvis climbed up on the credenza I used for storage in my tiny office and watched me while I took off my outside things and put on my shoes. I kept a bag of cat kibble in my desk. I fished out a couple of pieces and gave them to him, leaning against the long, low piece of furniture while he ate and then gave his face and paws a quick cleaning. Once he was finished, he rested his head against my arm and looked up at me with his green eyes. I reached over to rub the side of his face.

“I didn’t win that one, did I?” I said.

He made a soft murp that either meant “No, you didn’t,” or “Don’t stop what you’re doing.”

After a minute I picked the cat up again and set him on the floor. “Time to earn your keep,” I told him.

He headed for the main floor like a cat with a purpose, stopping only to pull the door open a little wider with one paw.

Downstairs I gave Rose the list of items that needed to be packed, and she headed out to the storage room to get started. “Mac’s out back,” she said. “He says he may have a customer for those hammered-tin ceiling panels you two salvaged from Tucker’s farm.”

The tin panels she was talking about had come from the kitchen ceiling of an old farmhouse that was about to be torn down. The owner had told us we could have whatever we could carry out of the house for free. Mac had immediately zeroed in on the kitchen ceiling. He’d carefully pried down all the three-foot-by-three-foot squares, insisting that they hadn’t been painted but were just covered in a layer of dust, grease and grime, baked into place by the heat of the old kitchen woodstove. If he had a possible sale for them, we’d soon be finding out if his guess was right.

Mr. P. touched my arm as I stood there deep in thought. I turned and he held out a blue mug decorated with a grinning Cheshire Cat. “I thought you might like something a little stronger than tea,” he said with a smile. He had another mug in his other hand. I was guessing that one was for Mac.

“Thank you,” I said, taking the cup from him.

I took a sip. The coffee was strong and hot, just the way I liked it. “You make a good cup of coffee,” I said.

“I’m good at all sorts of things,” he said. Then he winked at me and headed for the back room.

I watched him go, trying to decide whether he’d just flirted with me or if it was just my imagination.

I managed to spend the next forty-five minutes working on my trash-picked hutch. Mac was right that the piece was in horrible shape, but I still felt confident that with work—and a lot of sandpaper—I could turn it into something that would catch a customer’s eye.

Nick showed up about ten thirty. I was hanging a banjo up on the wall with the other instruments.

“Nice,” he said, leaning over my shoulder for a closer look. “Where did you get it?”

“Would you believe it was trash-picked?”

He frowned. “Seriously?”

I nodded, turning the banjo a little to the left so it was hanging straight. “I have a couple of Dumpster divers who come in pretty regularly—trustworthy guys, at least so far. One of them brought this in just before Christmas. I had to have it restrung, but otherwise it was in good shape.” I smiled at him. “You didn’t come here looking for a banjo, did you?”

He brushed a few flakes of snow from his hair. “I was hoping I could talk to you. It’s about Lily. There are a couple of questions that have come up . . .” He let the end of the sentence trail off.

“Sure,” I said. “Hang on. I’ll get Mac to watch things here and we can talk in my office.”

“Thanks,” he said.

Mac was spreading the hammered-tin panels on a tarp on the floor. Mr. P. was down by the far wall, doing something on his computer that I fervently hoped was legal. Rose was stuffing shredded paper curls into a small box at the workbench.

“Good morning,” Mac said when he caught sight of me. “I’m just about set to try your magic degreaser potion on these.”

I took a couple of steps closer to him. “Could you watch things out front for me?” I asked, keeping my voice low. “Nick’s here. He has more questions about Lily.”

“No problem,” Mac said, brushing off his hands. He followed me back into the store.

Nick was studying our collection of Valentine’s Day cards from the fifties and sixties. Avery had arranged them between two thin sheets of plexiglass that Mac had mounted on the wall with mirror clips.

“Do you remember when we were in school we used to give little cards like these to each other?” Nick asked. “And those little heart-shaped candies with sayings in the middle.”

“I remember those,” Mac said with a smile. “Never give one that says ‘Be Mine’ to three different girls.” He shook his head.

Nick nodded in sympathy. “Yeah, it’s pretty much the same deal with cards that say ‘My Sweetness.’”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “See? That’s why little girls grow up to be big girls who stay home on Valentine’s Day with a chocolate cheesecake and a Ryan Gosling movie marathon.”

Nick put a hand to his chest in mock woundedness. “It’s not our fault. We were wild stallions. We couldn’t be tamed with just one saddle.”

“Absolutely,” Mac agreed.

I rolled my eyes at the two of them. “We’ll be up in my office,” I said.

Mac nodded. “Take your time. Good to see you,” he said to Nick.

Nick smiled. “You too.”

With Nick in my office, the space seemed even smaller. I gestured at the love seat. I’d finally surrendered my red womb chair to the store, where it had sold in two days, replacing it with an armless chair I’d reupholstered in a vivid green-and-black-geometric print. I pulled it closer and sat down. Nick took off his wool topcoat, tossed it over the arm of the love seat and sat down as well.

He was wearing a charcoal suit with a crisp white shirt and a red tie. Avery would have said he looked so fine. She would have been right. He was a very handsome man, but he still had a bit of the small-town-boy quality.

“I’m just trying to clear up a few loose ends,” he said. He pulled a notepad and a pen out of the pocket of his coat. “You said that Lily had a routine she followed in the morning.”

I nodded. “She did. I think she had routines for everything. She told me once that she got everything ready the night before so she could start baking as soon as she got in the next morning. I think that was one of the reasons she hired Erin Lansing as an assistant baker. They worked the same way.”

Nick wrote something on the notepad and looked up at me again. “Tell me about the argument Lily had with Liz the night before she died.”

I should have guessed someone would have told the police about that. “Isn’t it your job to figure out how Lily died and Michelle’s to catch the bad guy—if there is one?” I asked.

“It is,” he said, “but there is some overlap in what we do. Tell me about the argument, Sarah.”

“It wasn’t really an argument.”

“So what was it?”

Before I could answer, there was a tap on my door and Rose bustled in carrying a cup of tea in one hand. One thin, star-shaped ginger cookie was tucked onto the saucer.

“Hello, Nicolas,” she said. “It’s awfully cold outside. I thought you might like a nice, warm cup of tea.”

He smiled and took the cup from her. “Are you sure this isn’t a bribe so you can pump me for information?” he asked.

“If I were trying to bribe you, I would have brought more than one cookie,” she said, smiling sweetly at him.

“How did you know Nick was here, and why didn’t you bring me a cookie?” I said.

She reached into the pocket of her apron, pulled out something wrapped in a red-and-white-polka-dot napkin and handed it to me. I could see the curved edge of a round cookie peeking out the top.

“I knew Nick was here because I heard you tell Mac when you asked him to watch the front of the store.” One eyebrow went up. “People underestimate me because I’m old.” She smiled sweetly at me and left.

“How could she have heard me tell Mac you were here?” I said to Nick.

He’d broken his cookie in half and was about to dunk it in his tea. “I don’t know,” he said.

“I have ears like a wolf,” Rose called from the hall.

Nick laughed and put the entire piece of cookie in his mouth. I shook my head in defeat, leaned against the back of my chair, broke off a bit of my own cookie and ate it.

“Lily and Liz, that Tuesday night,” Nick prompted.

“Right,” I said. “I was walking Liz to her car. We’d had supper together at Sam’s. When we came level with the bakery, Lily saw us through the front window and came out.” I stopped and exhaled slowly. “She was very angry.”

“About?”

“Liz had gone to her mother to see if Caroline would agree to talk to Lily about selling the bakery for the development.”

“What happened when Lily confronted Liz?” Nick asked, taking a drink of the tea. The cup look very small in his large hands.

“Nothing really,” I said. “Liz apologized. Lily had her say and went back inside. The whole thing was over in less than a minute.” I broke another piece off my cookie and ate it. Then I leaned sideways to peek out my office door and make sure Rose wasn’t still lurking in the hallway. There was no sign of her.

I straightened up. “Seriously, Nick. Liz isn’t really a suspect, is she?”

He finished writing in his notebook, closed it and put it and the pen back in his coat pocket. “I can’t tell you that,” he said, softening his words with a smile.

“How about blink once for yes and twice for no?”

“How about I need to get back to the office?”

He stood up and so did I.

I saw his gaze flick to the door. “She’s not there,” I said. I reached over and closed the door. “Better?”

He nodded and reached for his coat. “Sarah, I know you said that it’s pretty much impossible to keep Rose and my mother and the rest of them out of this case, but it would be a really bad idea for them to get involved. There’s a lot of emotion tied up in this whole development proposal. Things could get ugly.”

“Hang on. You think Lily’s death is tied to the development?”

His mouth moved. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer me. Then he sighed and said, “I didn’t say it had anything to do with the North Landing proposal.”

“All right,” I said.

It didn’t seem like a good time to point out that he hadn’t said it didn’t, either.

“This is something ‘the Angels’ should keep their wings out of,” Nick said as he wound his scarf around his neck.

I rolled my eyes at him. “And you and I have had so much success convincing them to stay out of things in the past.”

The collar of his coat was folded under on one side. I reached over and fixed it, smoothing it flat with my hand. He smelled wonderful. Hugo aftershave, of course, and something else. Oranges?

Nick smiled down at me. “Thanks,” he said. “I never quite mastered getting all dressed up.”

“I think you mastered it just fine,” I said.

Suddenly the room seemed too warm, and I took a step back from him. I still had half a cookie in my hand, and it seemed like a good time to finish it.

He smiled. “When you talk to Jess, tell her the nachos are on me this week.”

I laughed. “I think you’re going to regret that offer.”

There were no customers in the store, but Liz and Charlotte were downstairs, both wearing their coats, standing by the big front window and talking to Rose. The three of them turned to look at us.

“Hi, Mom,” Nick said, smiling at Charlotte. “I didn’t know you’d be here.” He started toward her. She met him halfway, reaching out to put a hand on his arm.

I joined them. I could see by her stance and the expression on her face that Rose, to use an expression of my grandmother’s, was loaded for bear. Her eyes were fixed on Nick.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Charlotte glanced back at her friends.

Rose pulled her gaze away from Nick to me. “The police have a suspect, and we have a client.” She put a little extra emphasis on the word “client.”

“Who?” I asked.

Liz turned to face us. “Me.”