THE ATMOSPHERE OF grief hanging over Carol Langstrom’s small house on Beech Street was almost palpable as Rusty Ruston climbed the three steps to the front door and rang the bell. He waited a few seconds and was about to press it again when he noticed that the door was slightly ajar. Easing it open, he leaned in, saw a knot of people in the small living room that opened off the tiny foyer, and stepped inside.
Leaving the door exactly as far open as when he’d arrived, he glanced down the hall toward the back of the house, saw three familiar faces among the half-dozen women who had managed to pack themselves into the tiny kitchen, and decided Carol was more likely to be at the center of the group in the living room than trying to make order out of the milling throng in the kitchen. He took off his hat as he stepped through the archway, glanced around for someplace to put it, and wasn’t surprised to see that every flat surface in the room was already filled with an array of casseroles, salads, cakes, and pies, as well as platters filled with cheese and crackers, cookies, muffins, and half a dozen varieties of pickles and olives. It seemed as if every woman in town had responded to Ellis’s death by heading directly to the kitchen.
Carol Langstrom herself sat on the sofa in front of the fireplace, a box of tissues next to a teacup on the coffee table in front of her. Next to her was a woman who looked familiar, though Rusty couldn’t immediately identify her. Carol appeared to have aged ten years in the past two days, yet she managed a wan smile when she saw him.
He dropped into a squat so his eyes were level with hers, and took her hand in his. It felt cold and clammy, and all the strength seemed to have drained out of it. “How are you holding up, Carol?” he asked.
Her gaze fixed on him for a moment, then wandered over all the women whose soft murmurings had slowly fallen silent as they realized the sheriff had arrived. They were now looking at him, one or two even edging closer to make certain they could hear whatever he might have to say. “I had no idea I even knew this many people,” Carol said, her voice breaking. “Let alone that they were such good friends.”
“That’s because you’re such a good friend,” Rusty said.
Carol’s eyes glistened with fresh tears.
“I’ve spoken with the coroner,” Rusty went on, dropping his voice in the hope that only Carol would be able to hear him, but knowing it was futile. “He’s going to do the autopsy this weekend.”
“Autopsy?” Carol parroted the word as if it had no meaning to her at all.
“Whenever there’s an unattended death, the state requires an autopsy,” Rusty explained.
Carol stared at him a moment, and when she spoke, her voice was flat and the words were not a question but a statement. “So you’ll find out that my baby was murdered.” There was a pause, and then she added. “Will you find out who killed him?”
Ruston chose his next words carefully. “At this point I don’t know what the report will show, Carol. We’ll have to wait and see. But I have every reason to believe that Dr. Bicks will be able to tell us exactly what happened. We’re doing everything we can until we know the exact cause of death.”
Carol took a deep breath, seemed to come to some kind of a decision, and finally let the breath out in a long sigh. “Can I bury him?” she asked, a sob breaking her voice. “I should do it on Monday.” She took another ragged breath, and her eyes beseeched Ruston. “Can I bury my baby on Monday? Please?”
Rusty nodded, and spoke more to the woman seated next to Carol than to Carol herself. “Tell the funeral home to call the coroner’s office. I’m pretty sure they’ll be able to—” He hesitated, then forced himself to finish the sentence. “—pick him up tomorrow, late in the afternoon.”
The woman nodded, then held out her hand. “I’m Ashley Sparks,” she said. Ruston’s eyes widened, and Ashley explained. “I met Carol years ago — actually, I think I was one of her first customers.”
Carol reached over and took Ashley’s hand, squeezing it affectionately. “The very first.” She turned to Ruston, dabbing at her eyes with a Kleenex. “I still have her check framed on the wall over my desk. And I should have all the rest of them up there, too — I think she single-handedly kept me in business that first summer.” For the first time since Ruston had arrived, a genuine smile finally curled the corners of Carol Langstrom’s mouth. “I’d buy something one day, and Ashley would come in the next morning and buy it from me.” She squeezed Ashley’s hand again. “The morning I opened, I didn’t even have enough cash left for food for our dinner, and even though a lot of people came in that day, Ashley was the only one who actually bought.”
“That’s not true,” Ashley interrupted. “I remember a little Spode figurine that Sandy Banks bought—”
“That was so badly damaged that I could only charge three dollars for it,” Carol shot back.
“You should have charged twenty-five, which I told you at the time. You were selling everything so cheap I felt like I was robbing you. Why do you think I kept coming back? I recognized a sucker when I saw one!”
Carol shook her head in defeat and turned back to Ruston. “The sad part is, she’s right. But what she’s not telling you is that she started making me sell things for what I could get for them instead of ten percent more than I’d paid for them. God, I was so dumb until Ashley came along — she should be running the shop herself.”
“And put in the hours you do?” Ashley said, pulling back in an exaggerated show of horror. “No thanks! I’d much rather mind your business than my own.” She turned to Ruston. “So now you know far more about me than you ever wanted to know, unless you’re as much of an antiques freak as Carol and I are. It’s nice to meet you. My husband—”
“Actually, I met your husband earlier.”
She nodded. “He dropped me off here on the way to your office. I trust he and Dan Brewster didn’t make too much of a nuisance of themselves?”
“They were no problem at all,” Ruston assured her. “And thanks for being here,” he said, his eyes shooting toward Carol Langstrom for an instant.
“I couldn’t be anyplace else.”
“Okay, then,” Ruston said, rising to his feet and wincing at the pain in his knees.
Carol stood up, too. “You’ll call me?” she asked. “As soon as you hear anything at all?”
“Of course. You’ll know everything almost as soon as I do.”
Carol sank back onto the sofa as Rusty made his way to the door. “I can make it until Monday,” she said quietly. “This is Saturday. I can make it until Monday.”
“Of course you can,” Ashley replied, once more taking Carol’s hand in her own. “We’ll just take it a day at a time. We’re all here to help you do whatever needs to be done.”
Carol gazed once more at all the people who had come to her aid. “I keep thinking about all the things that need to be done, and I keep making all these lists in my mind, and—”
“And you don’t need to take care of anything right now. You don’t need to think about cooking, or cleaning, or anything else. We can take care of everything.”
“Everything except the shop,” Carol sighed.
“The shop?” Ashley echoed. “Why are you worried about it? You’ll leave it closed over the weekend — all week, if you need to.”
Carol shook her head. “And lose the busiest weekend of the summer? I can’t afford it, Ashley — I’ve got so much inventory in the back room I can hardly move around in there, and if I’m closed next week it’ll all sit there for the rest of the summer. And I can’t afford to just keep it all in inventory.”
“Then I’ll do it,” Ashley said.
Carol stared at her. “You?”
“Didn’t you just tell the sheriff I could run it as well as you? In fact, didn’t I hear you tell him I should be running it instead of you?”
“But—”
“No buts,” Ashley declared. “I’m not really doing you much good sitting around here holding your hand, and Lord knows you’ve got enough people in the house that you don’t need me. So until further notice, I’m running the shop. I’m assuming the key is in the usual place under that awful Chinese import urn you think makes such a great planter?”
Carol’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know where the key is?”
“I found it one day when I was poking around. So that’s that — I’m running the shop until you feel like coming back. Deal?”
“Are you sure?” Carol asked, her eyes again glistening with tears.
Life would go on, even after Monday.
Ashley nodded. “Whatever you need, we’ll take care of it.”
“I wish—” Carol began, then cut off her own words as she felt herself beginning to sink back into a morass of grief.
“I know, honey,” Ashley said softly. “We all wish it. But these things happen, and all we can ever do is try to cope.”
“I know,” Carol cried, “but why did it have to happen to Ellis?”
No one had an answer for that question, and it hung, unanswered, in the air.