Paws and Effect

7

I made it to tai chi just as Maggie formed the circle. I hurried across the room, hopping on one foot as I pulled on my shoes, and slid in next to Roma. She smiled a hello, already swinging her arms along with Mags and the rest of the class.

It was good to set aside everything else that had been on my mind and just concentrate on the form and my Push Hands for the duration of class.

“How are you?” Roma asked after we’d finished the form at the end. “And how’s Marcus?”

Roma had been out of town at a convention for several days. Marcus and I—along with Harry Taylor—had taken care of the cats while she was gone.

“We’re both okay,” I said, patting my face with the edge of my shirt. “There’s something I wanted to ask you. Do you have a second?”

“Sure. What is it?”

I led her over to the windows at the end of the room. “Do you know anything about some guy living in an old truck somewhere near Long Lake?”

Roma nodded. “His name is Ira. He’s been out there for the last five or six months. Do you think he had something to do with what happened to Marcus’s friend?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. How has he managed to stay out there for so long?”

“He claims his family owns some piece of land out there—nothing that’s part of the development. I heard there’s some kind of court case and that’s why he hasn’t been forcibly evicted.” She reached over and picked a clump of cat hair off the front of my shirt. “You could try talking to Oren. I think the guy is related to the Kenyons somehow.”

“I’ll do that,” I said. “Thanks.” I studied her face for a moment. “How are you, really? Rebecca told me that Eddie is going to be working with Everett.”

Eddie was Eddie Sweeney, former all-star player for the Minnesota Wild hockey team, now retired, and Roma’s former boyfriend. Their relationship had ended when he proposed and Roma turned him down. She was older than Eddie and that, plus the fact that it was too late for her to have children, was the reason she’d said no. Eddie was crazy about Roma and he wasn’t giving up.

Roma sighed softly and played with the wide silver ring she wore on the index finger of her right hand. I could see part of the chain from her rose gold locket peeking out from the neck edge of her long-sleeved T-shirt. Eddie had given her that locket. “It’s harder than I thought it would be, having him here in town.”

Eddie had retired at the end of the season and moved to Mayville Heights just a couple of weeks earlier.

“You could say yes and put both of you out of your misery,” I said lightly.

She gave me a sad smile. “You know I can’t do that.”

I leaned over and gave her a hug. I knew that she could do it. I just didn’t know how to make her see that.

I called Hope when I got home and told her what I’d learned from both Simon and Roma. “Nice work,” she said. “Marcus said you had a way of getting people to tell you things.”

“I think it’s just because I ask a lot of questions,” I said. “I’ll try to talk to Oren tomorrow. I’ll let you know what I find out.”

“Sounds good,” she said. “How’s Marcus?”

I was sitting in the big chair in the living room, rubbing a knot in my left calf with one hand. “You know him, Hope. He doesn’t say a lot. He’s been helping Eddie do some work on his new place the past couple of days. I think it’s making him crazy that he can’t investigate.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something and this will all be over.”

“I hope so,” I said. I didn’t add that in my experience things rarely went that easily.

* * *

I woke well before my alarm Wednesday morning and since I was up so early, decided to drive out to Long Lake to see if I could find Ira the squatter and his truck. There was no sign of him or the vehicle. Instead of going back home I stopped at Eric’s for a breakfast sandwich and coffee, which I took to the library and ate at my desk, my chair turned around to the window so I could look out over the water.

I was halfway up a ladder with a set of pumpkin lights when Eddie Sweeney walked into the building after lunch. He was six-four with broad shoulders and muscles in all the right places, the walking definition of tall, dark and handsome.

“Kathleen, what are you doing?” he asked, grinning up at me.

“Getting ready for Spookarama,” I said. I draped the lights over the top step of the ladder and climbed down so I was at Eddie’s level, more or less.

“That has to have something to do with Halloween.”

“It’s a party for the little ones. It’s safer than them being out on the streets on Halloween night.”

“Could I help?” Eddie was good with kids. It was part of the reason Roma insisted he needed to marry someone who could give him more children. Eddie had a daughter, Sydney, who lived with her mother, Eddie’s ex. I knew that part of the reason Eddie had bought the loft that Marcus was helping him work on was so that Syd could spend more time with him now that he wasn’t playing.

I leaned back and studied him, squinting my eyes and trying to see him with green skin and neck bolts. “How would you like to be Frankenstein? I’m thinking more Herman Munster than Mary Shelley.”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Abigail will call you.” I gave him a hug. “Thank you. The kids are going to love this.”

He nodded and his smile faded. “Kathleen, how’s Roma?”

“She misses you.”

He nodded. “I miss her. I went out to see her. She said I was just rubbing salt in the wound. I told her I wanted to be friends.”

“Do you?” I asked even though I knew the answer.

Something flashed in Eddie’s dark eyes. “I want to be her husband.” He took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “You know she’s staying in touch with Syd.”

I smiled. “It doesn’t surprise me. That’s Roma.” I knew that Roma and Sydney had bonded over their shared love of animals. Roma would never cut the child out of her life. I also knew that Sydney was all for her father marrying Roma and was probably pleading his case.

“Syd’s working on her,” Eddie said as if he could read my mind. “She’s crazy about Roma and so am I. And I know she still loves me.”

“She does.” It was written all over her face whenever his name came up.

He jammed his hands in his pockets. “I’m not going to get all weird and follow her around town. I’m just going to camp on the edge of her life until she figures out that we’re better when we’re together.”

“I hope that happens,” I said.

Eddie smiled then. “Don’t tell anyone, because it would blow my tough-guy hockey-player image, but I kinda believe in all that happily-ever-after stuff.”

I thought about Everett and Rebecca, who had spent a big part of their lives apart but who had gotten their happily ever after in the end. I hoped it wouldn’t take Roma and Eddie that long.

* * *

I was crossing the parking lot at the end of the day when my cell phone rang. It was Hope. “We need to talk,” she said.

“All right,” I said. “Where are you?”

“In the parking lot at the marina.”

“Stay there. I’m standing beside my truck. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

Hope was parked at the far end of the marina parking lot. I pulled in next to her car. I could see her standing by the rock wall that ran from the wooden dock around to the point. Just from her body language I could tell that she didn’t have good news to share. I walked over to join her.

“Hi,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I talked to Foz—Bryan—a little while ago,” she said. The breeze off the water tousled her dark curls and she pushed them impatiently back from her face. “He was pretty close-mouthed but I did find out that they’ve found more evidence that seems to implicate Marcus.”

My throat tightened. “I don’t understand. He didn’t do this. How can they find evidence of something that didn’t even happen?”

“I don’t know,” Hope said. “This whole thing is off.”

“Did he tell you what this so-called evidence is?” I couldn’t help the sarcastic edge to my voice.

“Someone—I have no idea who—saw Marcus and Dani arguing outside the motel.”

I shook my head. “That’s not new evidence. We already knew they were there. Maggie saw them.”

Hope pushed her hair away from her face again. “Motel, Kathleen,” she said. “Motel. The Bluebird Motel, where all three of them were staying.”

“Whoever saw them is wrong,” I said flatly. “If Marcus had been out there arguing with Dani he would have told us.”

Hope didn’t answer me right away. Her mouth moved as though she was trying out the feel of what she wanted to say before she said it.

“Are you sure?” she finally asked.

“Of course I’m sure,” I retorted. “Why aren’t you?”

“You know better than most people how private a man Marcus is.”

I nodded.

“And you know how important trust and loyalty are to him.”

“I know,” I said. They had almost derailed our relationship before it got started.

“There’s something he hasn’t told us in all of this.”

My stomach clenched as though some giant hand had grabbed it and started squeezing. “Hope, he’s what you two like to call a person of interest in his friend’s death and you think he’s keeping secrets?”

She exhaled softly. “I think he’s protecting someone—I don’t know who—that he cares about.” She looked down at the ground for a moment and kicked a rock, skittering it across the grass. Then she met my eyes again. “Can you tell me with one hundred percent certainty that Marcus has told us everything? Absolutely everything?”

The hand on my stomach squeezed harder and harder. Because I realized that I couldn’t. That little niggling feeling that had been burrowing in the back of my brain wouldn’t let me.

“I don’t know what he’s holding back,” Hope said. “But we need to find out.”

All I could do was nod. I wasn’t sure what felt worse: the thought that Marcus didn’t completely trust me, or the thought that I didn’t completely trust him.

I cleared my throat. “I’ll talk to him.”

“I’m sorry to put you in this position,” Hope said. I believed her. I could see the sadness in her eyes and the downturn of her mouth. “I can’t let Marcus be arrested for something we both know he didn’t do.”

She pressed her lips together and it suddenly hit me that she loved him. Not as a partner. Not as a friend. She loved him. Why hadn’t I seen it before? Or maybe I had and I just hadn’t wanted to admit it.

“It has to be done,” I said. I looked past her to the lake. The water looked rough and troubled—exactly how I felt. “What else did you find out?”

“I didn’t get this from Bryan,” she said. “I have a . . . contact in the prosecuting attorney’s office—he’s keeping a close eye on this—and anyway, it looks like Marcus doesn’t have an alibi for the time that the medical examiner thinks Dani was killed.”

I held up a hand. “Wait a minute. The prosecuting attorney’s office is where he was. Remember? He went for a meeting. The prosecutor had been held up. He went to talk to Dani and then he went back to the prosecuting attorney’s office.”

“Where the meeting lasted all of about five minutes,” Hope said. “Which means there’s an hour unaccounted for.”

“Did you ask Marcus where he was?”

“Uh-huh. He was evasive. Finally he said he went for a walk. He said he had a lot on his mind and just wanted to figure some things out. When I asked him what things he said they had had nothing to do with the case.” She looked past me, at the water, and for the first time I saw a flicker of fear in her eyes. “Keeping secrets is the worst thing he could be doing right now.”

The words hung in the air between us. “I’ll find out where he was,” I said, working to keep the emotions that were swirling in my chest from getting out. “I’ll find out all of it.”

Hope looked away again for a moment. “I don’t want this to come between the two of you.”

I believed her. She loved him and I should have seen that a long time ago but I could also see that she wanted him to be happy.

“It isn’t going to come between us.”

“I have to go,” Hope said abruptly.

“Wait,” I said. “Did you find anything more about Dani’s family?”

“I’ve got a line on someone who might be able to give us some inside information.”

I nodded. “Good. I’m going to out to see Marcus and I’ll stop and talk to Oren about the guy in the truck.”

“Okay, I’ll talk to you later, then,” Hope said. She walked back across the grass to her car. I was about to head back to the truck when my phone rang. It was Marcus. He had been planning to make dinner for us. I had thought I might stop to talk to Oren on the way out to Marcus’s house. If I left now I could still do that.

“How do you feel about spaghetti at Eric’s?” he asked.

“Okay, but what happened to spaghetti at your house?”

“My stove won’t work. Larry Taylor is coming to take a look at it in the morning. I told him it wasn’t an emergency.”

I started for the truck. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the café in about an hour. There’s something I need to do first.”

Oren’s house was a renovated farmhouse not a lot different from mine, with the same steeply pitched roof and bay window. His house had an addition on the left side, set back from the main house. A covered veranda ran along about half of the front of the main house and all the way across the front of the extension.

I could see his truck in the driveway as I got close to the house. He was on the veranda painting what looked like a long wooden bench with a hinged seat.

I pulled my truck in behind his and got out. Oren waved his paintbrush in greeting and got to his feet. He was tall and lean, in his mid-fifties, with sun-bleached sandy hair. He minded me of actor Clint Eastwood with a little quiet farm boy thrown in.

“Hello, Kathleen,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Oren,” I said with a smile. I craned my neck to get a closer look at the bench. “Is that going in Roma’s porch?”

He nodded. “It gives people somewhere to sit down and take off their boots in the winter time and it gives Roma some storage space.”

The bench was about five feet long and he was painting it a pale gray that reminded me of foggy mornings down by the water. “You’ve done a beautiful job,” I said.

Oren was a very talented carpenter. He was an even better musician. He could have been a famous concert pianist but it wasn’t the life he’d wanted for himself. He could play the piano by the time he was four and he’d started composing music at six, using his own method of notation because he hadn’t learned to read music at that point.

As he had once explained to me, “I could—I can—make music with almost any instrument: piano, guitar, bass, mandolin. If I look at a piece of music, just once, I can remember it and play it. Years later I can play it.”

As someone whose musical ability was limited to making sounds with my armpit and not very well at that, I was in awe of his talent.

“Roma showed me the bench you and Maggie found for the upstairs hallway,” he said, reaching down to set his brush on the edge of the painting pail. “You did a beautiful job on that.”

“Thank you,” I said. “All that took was paint and sandpaper. You built this.”

He smiled again and ducked his head. “My father was a good teacher.”

I cleared my throat. “Oren, I need to talk to you about something.”

He didn’t ask me what, he just nodded. “All right. I just need to put the paint back in the can and wash the brush.”

He put one more stroke of paint on the front of the bench seat, then bent down and picked up the plastic pail.

“It’ll only take me a minute,” he said. “C’mon in.”

The extension attached to the main house was Oren’s workshop. The space was completely open from floor to ceiling. There were high windows on the back wall that flooded the room with light even on the darkest winter days. More windows on the end of the room overlooked the long workbench. There was a counter with cupboards underneath and a sink at one end over on the other side of the room. Everything in the room was neat, clean and perfectly organized.

I stood in the doorway and remembered the first time I’d seen the space. My mouth had literally gaped open. Oren’s father, Karl Kenyon, had worked as a carpenter and a house painter. But he had the soul of an artist. In his spare time he made massive metal sculptures. The first one I’d ever seen was an enormous metal eagle with a wingspan of at least six feet. It had been suspended, in flight it seemed, from the ceiling beams at the back half of the room. Even though the sculpture was nothing more than pieces of metal welded together somehow I’d felt I could see the bird flying, its powerful chest muscles making those huge wings slice through the air. Now the beautiful bird, along with another of Karl Kenyon’s pieces, was touring museums on the East Coast.

Oren looked over his shoulder at me. “It still looks a little empty when I come out here,” he said.

“Those pieces deserve to be seen,” I said.

“It’s happening because of you.” He shook the wet brush in the sink before setting it in an empty ice cream container on the counter.

“Actually it’s happening because of you,” I said. “I’m glad you said yes to letting them be exhibited.”

Oren poured the paint back into the can, hammered the lid back on and set the pail in the sink. He walked back over to me, wiping his hands on his overalls.

I looked around the room. Something else was missing besides the metal eagle.

“What happened to the harpsichord?” I asked.

Oren looked down at his feet for a moment. “I sold it,” he said. “I’m going to build a guitar. Burtis is clearing part of his woodlot. He promised me first choice of the wood.”

I smiled. “I’m looking forward to seeing and hearing it.”

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Kathleen?” he asked.

It felt awkward being here to ask Oren if he had a cousin living in the woods who just might have killed a woman. It would be good to have something to keep my hands occupied. I nodded. “Yes, I would.”

Oren indicated the two stools at the counter, then poured a cup for each of us. There was a carton of milk and a little bowl of sugar cubes on a tray by the coffeemaker. After we’d both doctored our coffee, he folded one hand around his mug and looked at me. “I heard about Detective Gordon’s friend,” he said. “I’m sorry. Does what you want to talk to me about have anything to do with that?”

“In a way,” I said.

He nodded, took a drink from his mug and set it on the counter again. “Ira. He’s been living in his truck out by the lake. That’s who you want to talk to me about.”

“Yes.”

For a long moment Oren didn’t speak, didn’t move. Then finally he said, “You think he might have been the one who hurt that woman.”

I wanted to reach out and somehow push the words away but I couldn’t. Because that was why I was there.

“I want to know if you think he could have.”

Oren studied his own hands for a moment. “I want to say no,” he said. “But the truth is, I don’t know.”

I nodded, hoping he’d keep talking.

“The thing is, Kathleen, that piece of land out there. It doesn’t belong to the Kenyons anymore. It hasn’t for a long time, but Ira can’t seem to get his mind around that. He’s managed to find more than one lawyer who takes his money and starts a lawsuit that isn’t going to amount to anything. I don’t think Ira would have hurt Detective Gordon’s friend on purpose . . .”

He left the end of the sentence hanging.

“Do you know where he might have gone?” I asked.

“You mean he’s not out there anymore?”

I shook my head. When I’d driven out to Long Lake before work, I’d checked out every dirt road in the area where Roma had said the squatter’s truck had been parked. There had been no sign of him.

Oren sighed. “He could be anywhere. The last time Ira disappeared he turned up in Clearwater Beach in Florida but for weeks no one knew where he was. I go out to check on him every couple of weeks and he was talking about Clearwater the last time I saw him. That’s all I know.”

I hadn’t touched my coffee and now took one long drink and then set the cup back on the counter. “I better get going,” I said. “Thank you for talking to me.”

Oren got to his feet. “If I hear anything about Ira, I promise I’ll call you.”

“Thank you,” I said. I walked back to the truck thinking that I was no closer to answers in Dani’s death and I really had no idea what to do next.

Marcus was already at our favorite table in the front window when I got to Eric’s Place. We gave Nic our order—spaghetti and meatballs—and after he’d headed back to the kitchen Marcus smiled across the table at me. “How was your day?” he asked.

“All right,” I said. “Owen climbed in the laundry basket and got cat hair all over the towels again. At least this time it wasn’t the clean ones. And we started decorating for Spookarama. I think Eddie is going to be Frankenstein.”

He laughed. “I’m looking forward to seeing that.”

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t sit there and make small talk while we both pretended everything was fine when it wasn’t. “Do you trust me?” I said.

His blue eyes widened. “Where did that come from?”

If I’d had even the tiniest bit of doubt that Hope was right that Marcus was keeping something from us it disappeared like a balloon popping.

“That question only has two answers,” I said, struggling to keep the maelstrom of emotions I was feeling from sneaking into my voice. “Yes or no.”

“Why would you think I don’t trust you?”

I didn’t say anything. I just continued to look at him. Finally, he sighed softly. “Of course I trust you, Kathleen,” he said in a low voice.

My heart was pounding so hard it felt like there was a steel band playing in my chest. “Then tell me what it is you’ve been holding back. I know it has to do with Dani.”

To his credit he didn’t pretend he didn’t know what I was talking about. He reached across the table for my hand. “I can’t. Not because I don’t trust you, because I do. I trust you with my life. But I gave my word and it’s not my secret to tell.”

“Whatever this secret is could get you arrested,” I said, this time not even trying to keep the emotion from my voice.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with Dani’s death. And I don’t know if it will make any difference to you, but this . . . information goes way back to before you and I got together. If it was now, I would say no to anything I had to keep from you.” He had that look on his face that told me it wasn’t going to be easy to change his mind.

“How do you know it doesn’t have anything to do with Dani’s death?”

The muscles along his jaw tightened. “I gave my word, Kathleen,” he said again. “If I don’t honor my commitments or keep my promises, what kind of a man am I?”

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. The words of Shakespeare’s sonnet came unbidden into my mind. In this case nothing about Marcus had changed, I realized. He’d always been a man of principles, a man of his word. He hadn’t changed and how I felt about him wasn’t changing, either.

I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Okay.”

“Really?” he asked.

“I think this is a bad idea, but for now I’m not going to push.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with Dani getting killed. I swear,” Marcus said, giving my hand a squeeze before letting it go.

“I hope you’re right,” I said.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the door to the café open. I didn’t recognize the man who walked in but I knew he was a police officer. It was clear in the way he stood, in the way he surveyed the room before walking over to us.

“Marcus,” I said softly.

He turned and his face hardened.

The man stopped at our table. “Hello, Marcus,” he said.

Marcus gave him a tight smile. “Bryan,” he said with a nod.

This had to be the detective from Red Wing, Bryan Foster. He was about average height, a couple of inches shorter than Marcus. He had smooth brown skin and dark hair clipped close to his head.

“We need to talk,” the detective said. “I need you to come to the station.”

Marcus shifted in his seat, propping one arm on the back of the chair. “Sure,” he said. “We just ordered. I can be there in”—he looked down at his watch—“about an hour.”

The other detective shook his head. “I’m afraid it can’t wait that long.”

“Like I said, I can be there in about an hour.” Marcus raised his voice slightly. I’d seen the challenge in his blue eyes before.

“I don’t want to make this embarrassing for either one of us,” Detective Foster said, keeping his voice low. “Don’t put me in that position.”

Marcus pushed back his chair and stood up. I could feel the anger coming off him.

At the other end of the room Eric came around the counter.

“C’mon, man,” Foster said softly. “Just come with me.” His eyes flicked in my direction for a moment. Behind us the door to the café opened again and I caught a glimpse of a white-haired man.

“I’m sorry about dinner, Kathleen,” Marcus said. His eyes never left the other man’s face.

“It’s all right,” I said, my voice suddenly hoarse. “Go.”

“My client isn’t going anywhere,” a voice said. It belonged to the white-haired man who had just walked in. The color drained from Marcus’s face. “Don’t say a word,” the man told him.

“And who might you be?” Detective Foster asked.

The smile he got was a mix of arrogance and condescension. “Elliot Gordon, attorney at law. What do you want with my son?”