Pouncing On Murder

Chapter 7

“Why, why did I ever try to do this?” I grabbed two fistfuls of my hair, a move I would regret almost instantly for what it would do to what might be loosely called a hairstyle, and I pulled tight enough to thin my vision to slits. “Why?”

Once again, I looked at the computer screen. Sadly, the flyer design I’d come up with still looked downright awful, even with my skewed eyesight.

I released my hair, and my vision went back to normal. Flopping back against my chair, I stared at the dragonless ceiling and tried to think. The flyer had to be to the printer absolutely no later than Monday noon. If today was Wednesday, that meant . . . I counted on my fingers . . . there were three business days in which to get this done.

“Three days,” I said to the computer in the deepest, most threatening tone I could summon. The computer ignored me and I tried not to consider its continued display of my absolutely awful flyer design as a taunt.

At that point, I realized I’d been ignoring my own hunger pangs.

I got up, grabbed my coat, wallet, and cell phone, and headed out. Everything would look better after a walk and some lunch. And even if it didn’t look better, at least I would get outside for a little bit and get some food in my stomach, a win-win situation if there ever was one.

• • •

Half an hour later, my tummy was happily full with an Italian sub and chips from Fat Boys Pizza, but I still didn’t have any idea how to figure out if Seth Wartella had ever set foot in northern Michigan, I still couldn’t think of any reason why someone would want to kill both Henry and Adam, and I still hadn’t a clue of how to get a designed flyer.

“Hello, Minnie.”

I looked up from my contemplation of the sidewalk to see Pam Fazio. Her short black hair was as smooth as ever, and even though she had to be in her mid-fifties, not a single wrinkle showed on her face. She was standing just outside the door of her antique shop, Older Than Dirt, wearing a cheerful dress in a flower pattern topped with a shawl, and smiling at me with an odd expression.

“Do I have tomato sauce on my face?” I rubbed the corners of my mouth, just to be sure.

“No, it just that’s the third time I said hello,” she said. “You seem a million miles away.”

Henry’s house was a little more than ten miles southeast of Chilson, actually, but I didn’t make the clarification. “Just thinking,” I said.

“Nice footwear.” Pam nodded at my shoes.

I turned them this way and that, displaying each foot proudly. “Yes, indeedy, thank you very much.” Last winter I’d purchased the high-topped black lace-up shoes from Pam and they were my favorite footwear of all time. Whenever I put them on I felt like Laura Ingalls Wilder but without the locusts and the scarlet fever and the backbreaking labor.

“What are you thinking so hard about that you didn’t hear me calling?” she asked.

Most of it wouldn’t be appropriate to tell her, but there was one thing I could share. “I’ve just come to the conclusion that I am, without a doubt, the worst designer of a book fair flyer in the history of the world.”

Pam laughed. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

I eyed her. “Hang on.” I’d e-mailed myself a copy of the flyer so I could look at it while I ate. I’d taken one look and decided it would give me indigestion, but it was still on my phone. I opened the image and showed it to her.

She took the phone from my hand, peered close, and snorted with laughter.

“Gee,” I said dryly, “thanks for the support.”

She grinned. “If you want, I could try my hand at a little redesigning.” She looked at the image, turning it this way and that. “When do you need it?”

“Monday noon.” I winced, preparing myself for her reaction.

“No problem. I’ll send you something Monday morning.”

It sounded good, but then so had Amanda’s offer. “Are you sure you want to do this? I don’t want to take up a lot of your time. You have a store to run.” Because I could always make a flyer of text on brightly colored paper. It was what the library had always done before and no one would think twice about it; I’d just hoped for something outstanding for our first-ever book fair.

Pam made a rude noise in the back of her throat. “It’s April. I was warned about the April lull up here, but I didn’t know I was going to get so bored. I’ll be glad for the chance to do something other than dust all my merchandise. Again.”

I thanked her and, as I walked back to the library, I wondered what talents and skills might be hidden inside the people I thought I knew. Then I wondered if talents and skills might be hidden inside cats. Eddie, for one.

“Something funny?” Cookie Tom was in front of his bakery, cleaning the windows and looking at me.

I tucked away my Eddie-induced laughter. “Almost everything,” I said, and headed back to the library.

The next day, I spent my lunch hour deep in the bowels of the Internet, chasing down any wisps of information about Seth Wartella. When I’d come up completely dry for anything since his incarceration, I hunted down what I could find for Henry and Adam and added everything I found to a spreadsheet.

Once the spreadsheet was as full as I could make it, I categorized every item at least two different ways, then sorted and resorted the data in an effort to jiggle useful thoughts out of my brain.

Sadly nothing jiggled loose by the end of my lunchtime, but when five o’clock came, I was officially off the library’s clock. I closed my eyes and ears to the work-related things I could be doing and plunged even deeper into the two separate worlds of Henry and Adam, trying to find something that might connect them.

My rumbling stomach chased me out of my office, but I continued thinking about the problem the entire evening, was still thinking about it as I went to sleep, thought about it first thing when I woke up to another chilly morning, and then as I walked into Cookie Tom’s to get a dozen doughnuts for the staff. It was a Friday, after all, and I’d skipped breakfast because I couldn’t face eating a bowl of cold cereal when the houseboat’s interior temperature was only fifty-one degrees.

Eddie, of course, had no such compunctions and stared at me gravely until I poured him a tiny bowl of milk to replace the leftovers that he usually got from the bottom of my bowl.

The smell of baked goods had me salivating the second I walked into Cookie Tom’s. “Morning, Minnie,” Tom said cheerfully. “What do you need today?”

It was more a question of want than need, but I wasn’t going to enter into that kind of debate with the guy who gave me a deal on cookies for the bookmobile. And, in summer, sold them to me from the back door, letting me avoid the long lines.

“Box of doughnuts,” I said. “A dozen, any kind you’d like.”

He surveyed the contents of his glass cases. “Apple fritters, custard-filled long johns, glazed doughnuts, cinnamon twists?”

There was no way I was going to be able to choose. “Let’s do an assortment.”

“No problem.” He unfolded a white cardboard bakery box and got to work, whistling as he went.

I watched him place the bakery yummies in the box, wondering how on earth he could run a bakery and stay so skinny. If it had been me, I’d have put on so many pounds that—

“Good morning, Ms. Hamilton.”

I looked up. “Detective Inwood.” I started to make a bad joke about cops and doughnuts, but stopped—Mom would have been so proud—and said, “How are you this fine morning?”

He held up an empty travel mug. “Looking for my first fill-up of the day.” He glanced at the work Tom was doing. “I suppose I could make a bad joke about librarians and doughnuts, but I think I’ll let it go.”

I was simpatico with a man who was at least twice my age and probably hadn’t read a work of fiction since high school. The idea was a little frightening. “So, I’ve been thinking,” I said. “About what could possibly connect Adam and Henry Gill.”

“And?” Detective Inwood walked around the end of the glass cabinets and filled his mug from the half-full pot on the back counter. Clearly the man knew his way around the bakery. “Any conclusions?”

“Nope.”

He added two spoonfuls of sugar to his mug, screwed the top on, and walked back around. “Wolverson got the same results. I’m sure he’ll be pleased that he wasn’t bested by an amateur.”

I’d never thought of it that way, but perhaps I should have. So I considered it for a moment. Then I stopped worrying. After all, if I found something they didn’t that led to the jailing of a killer, how was that a problem?

I also briefly considered telling the detective about the connection theories that I’d kicked around. Very briefly. The briefest of briefs. Inwood did not need to know that I’d tried to research the notion that Adam was Henry’s illegitimate son and that Henry’s legitimate children were out for revenge because Adam was trying to steal their inheritance. Melodrama was all well and good in its place, but it didn’t fit comfortably inside the borders of Tonedagana County.

Inwood put the mug on the counter next to the cash register and pulled out his wallet.

“Do you think,” I asked, “it’s at all likely that Seth Wartella tried to kill Adam?” And, I didn’t add, might have killed Henry by mistake?

The detective looked at me with a completely blank expression.

“Seth,” I said a little louder. “Wartella. The guy Adam put in jail for tax fraud.”

Inwood nodded as he pulled out a bill and put it next to the cash register. My respect for him went up a notch, because Tom willingly gave free coffee to police officers. “It’s extremely unusual for white-collar criminals to commit violent crimes. Not unheard of, but certainly on the far end of unusual.”

I wasn’t surprised. “The only thing Henry and Adam seem to have had in common, other than being friends, was they both regularly had breakfast at the Round Table.” Tom held up the box of doughnuts for me to approve and I nodded absently. “Maybe,” I said, “maybe the restaurant itself was a contact point. Maybe one morning they ate together and heard somebody say something.”

Inwood gave me a pained look and picked up his mug of coffee. “All avenues of investigation—”

“Will be explored,” I said, finishing his sentence for him.

He nodded once, said good-bye to Tom, and headed out into the crisp spring air.

“Anything else?” Tom asked, sliding the flat white box onto the counter with one hand and ringing up my total with the other.

I blinked away from my own exploration avenues. “All set, thanks.”

Then I noticed the money that the detective had left on the counter for his ninety-five-cent cup of coffee.

A ten-dollar bill.

I pushed it over to Tom. “The detective left this for his coffee. I can run after him with his change, if you want.”

Tom smiled and put the bill in the register’s drawer. “That’s what he always leaves. I gave up trying to return his money years ago.”

• • •

“A fine celebration this is,” Russell McCade said, startling me out of my reverie.

“Yes,” said Barb McCade, his wife of many years and the mother of their children, who were grown. “I was thinking the same thing a mere moment ago.”

“Are we doing M words?” he asked. “Let’s start with Miss Minnie.”

“Sorry,” I said, laughing. I’d met the McCades last summer when Barb ran in front of the bookmobile, waving me down because her husband was having a stroke. We’d bundled her husband into the bookmobile and raced him to the hospital, and it wasn’t until I was relaying patient information to the emergency room via my cell phone that I realized my male passenger was none other than painter Russell McCade, more commonly known as Cade to his thousands upon thousands of fans.

His critics dismissed his work as sentimental schlock; his fans defended it as accessible art. I’d loved his stuff since I was a kid, but had never dreamed I’d actually meet the famous man, let alone get to be his friend via the hospital trip and a murder investigation and the letter D.

For reasons now lost to the mists of time, the McCades had a habit of randomly choosing a letter and then finding words starting with that letter to fit into the ongoing conversation. This had happened the first time I’d visited Cade in the hospital, and when I’d joined in the game, our acquaintanceship moved into solid friendship.

The McCades, in their late fifties, owned a home on a small lake not too far from Chilson, but spent the winters in a place with plentiful sunshine and no snow. They’d returned to Michigan a few days ago, and the Mitchell Street Pub in Petoskey was their restaurant choice for a return celebration.

Now Barb looked at me keenly. “You seem distracted, my dear.”

Cade clicked his tongue. “Not an M word in the bunch. You’re going to get behind.”

She ignored him. “Is it Tucker? I know you told me you were working things out, but long-distance relationships are difficult at the best of times.”

“We’re fine,” I said, trying not to think how long it was going to be before we saw each other. “It’s just . . . well, there’s this friend of mine who’s in a little trouble and . . .” The McCades looked at each other, exchanging one of those glances that long-married couples can use as communication. “What?” I asked.

Cade cracked open a peanut shell and popped the nut into his mouth. “We were wondering how long it would be before you involved yourself in another one.”

“Another what?” I asked. But before either one of them could say anything, I spotted Irene Deering. “Sorry, I see someone I have to talk to. I’ll be right back, okay?” I scooted the bentwood chair back and got up before they could exchange another communicative glance.

“Hey, Minnie.” Irene smiled at me from behind the long wooden bar. She was pulling back on a tap and filling a tall glass with beer. “I saw you over there a minute ago. Are those your parents?”

As if. My parents left Dearborn only on holidays, and not even many of those. And since I was growing less and less inclined to leave the calm of northern Michigan for the noise and bustle of the Detroit area, our face-to-face visits were growing few and far between. There were regular phone calls, but I hadn’t seen them since Christmas and wasn’t sure when I was going to see them again.

“Friends of mine,” I said to Irene. Most people knew that an internationally famous artist lived in the area, but I wasn’t about to broadcast his present location. “I wanted to tell you that I ran into Detective Inwood this morning.”

Irene looked up, her face suddenly taut and still. “Any news?”

Sort of, but not really. “He said it would be very unusual for someone like Seth Wartella, a white-collar criminal, to start doing violent crimes.” I nodded at the glass in her hand. “You’re about to overflow there.”

Shaking her head at herself, Irene released the tap. “So, is that good news or bad?”

“Good in that even if it was Seth you saw, he most likely didn’t have anything to do with the car that almost hit Adam. Or anything to do with Henry’s death.”

As my friend pulled in a slow breath, I saw how her cheekbones poked out sharply into her skin. The woman was working too hard, worrying too much, and not taking care of herself.

“But it’s not unheard of,” she said. “For a guy who did tax fraud to branch out. Into worse crimes, I mean.”

I hadn’t pressed the detective for statistics, but I had the feeling that even if there was even the tiniest percentage, she would lie awake tonight, worrying that she’d put her husband in danger by not reporting her maybe-sighting of Seth.

“No,” I said. “I’m sure it’s happened at least once. But maybe it wasn’t Seth that you saw. You said you just caught a glimpse, and you haven’t seen him for years, so maybe it was just someone who looked like him.”

She frowned, thinking it over, but I could tell she wasn’t buying it. “Promise me you won’t worry for, say, seven days,” I said, holding up the requisite number of fingers. “Business days, mind you. Weekends don’t count. I’m bound to find something by then.”

Irene actually smiled. “Thanks, Minnie. Very, very much.”

“She won’t take thanks,” Cade said, slinging an arm around my shoulder. “Never has, probably never will. It’s a horrible character flaw, you know.” He nodded at Irene. “Just let her go ahead and do whatever it is she wants, and force gifts upon her later. It’ll be easier for both of you.”

I put my chin up. “I can take a thank-you just as well as anyone.”

Barb, who had joined us at the bar, smirked. “Oh, really? Minnie, let me tell you once again how grateful we are that you and Eddie got Mr. McCade here to the hospital so quickly. Without you, I don’t know what I would have done.”

Cade nodded solemnly. “And without your assistance with finding an attorney, I might have—”

I put my hands over my ears and fled from the McCades.

But Irene had been laughing, so it wasn’t all bad.

• • •

The next morning. I woke to sunlight streaming in through the white curtains of my bedroom. I twisted my head around to see what I could of the sky and saw nothing but blue, blue, and more blue. A full-out sunny day in April? A giddy first-day-of-summer-vacation kind of feeling filled me with happy expectation.

“And it’s Saturday,” I told Eddie. “What are the odds?”

My cat, who was curled up between my right hip and the wall of the houseboat, didn’t move any muscles except the ones that were beating his heart and helping him breathe.

“Look,” I said, putting my bare hand outside the covers. “It’s not even cold out there. See, no goose pimples.”

Eddie still didn’t care, so I slid out of bed and tiptoed to the shower without any more disturbance of his beauty sleep. But even after I was clean and dry and dressed, Eddie showed no inclination to take part in any morning activities. Since I was a considerate kind of person, I decided that making my own breakfast would be too noisy for him. Clearly it would be best to go out.

Sabrina, the Round Table’s forever waitress, brought me a glass of water and a mug of coffee.

“I don’t get a menu?” I asked.

She snorted. “When was the last time you ordered anything other than sausage links and either cinnamon apple pancakes or cinnamon French toast?”

“I might if I ever get a menu. I don’t even know what else you have.”

Sabrina wrote something on her waitress pad and tucked her pencil into her bun of graying hair. “About what you’d expect. Now, do you want me to turn in your order for sausage and French toast, or do you want to go hungry because you’re trying to make a point?”

I grinned. “Good to see that marriage hasn’t changed you any.”

She put a hand on one of her padded hips. “Did you really think it would?” she asked, and sashayed away.

Smiling, I watched her go, remembering the events of last summer. She and Bill D’Arcy, a restaurant customer and newcomer to Chilson, had gotten engaged after a short romance. They’d married at Thanksgiving and, as far as I knew, were still happily in the honeymoon phase.

Sabrina came back, going from booth to booth with a fresh pot of coffee. When she came near, I pushed my mug to the edge of the table and asked, “How’s your Bill doing these days?”

Her soft smile told me everything I needed to know. “The new treatments are helping him so much that he’s looking to invest in the company. Not that he’ll ever get his old vision back, but they might be able to stop the deterioration.”

Bill, at age fifty-six, had an advanced case of macular degeneration. He made scads of money by doing complicated things with financial markets, and for a while the talk around town had been that Sabrina would quit working at the Round Table. After all, why would anyone keep working if she didn’t need to?

I’d kept my opinion to myself but hadn’t been surprised that, as the months passed, she showed no signs of leaving the diner. No matter how deep and true the love she shared with Bill, there was no way his taciturn self would satisfy her need for human contact.

“That’s great,” I said, thinking about the time Bill crashed his car into the side of a building. “My fingers are crossed for him.” I looked around at the mostly empty restaurant. “Say, do you have a minute?”

She scanned the room. “Got an order coming, but until then, sure. What’s up?”

“Do you remember seeing anyone new in here the last few weeks?” I wouldn’t have bothered asking the question during the summer, but April wasn’t exactly top tourist season. “A guy in his mid-thirties, red hair, with ears that stick way out.” I cupped my hands around my ears and flapped them around.

But Sabrina was shaking her head. “Why, did he skip out on paying library fines?” She grinned. “What is this world coming to?”

“No, he’s . . .” How to explain this one? “He’s someone that a friend of mine knew a long time ago. She thought she might have seen him around, that’s all.”

Sabrina’s face lit up. “A blast from the past? Do I smell the revival of an old flame?”

Not in the least. “If you see anyone like that, will you let me know? It’s important.”

Sabrina winked. “Gotcha. Anything else?”

I stared at my coffee. “Still sad about Henry Gill, I guess. I know he was kind of a pain, but there was something about him I really liked.”

“And what might that be?” she asked, starch in her voice. “That I couldn’t ever bring him a cup of coffee that was good enough, or that no one could ever cook him hash browns as good as the ones his wife made?”

“He liked Eddie,” I said.

“Anyone with a lick of sense likes Eddie.” She rolled her eyes. “And don’t mind me for speaking ill of the dead. Henry was a grumpy old man after his wife died, but he was one of ours. We’re going to start up donations, you know, to fund a scholarship to the high school in his name.”

Tears pricked at my eyes. “That’s great. Let me know when you have it set up.”

“You know,” she said musingly, “he was different when his wife was alive. Back then, the only person who didn’t like him was Davis Thumm. And that was because Henry bought the same color truck he did.” She grinned. “In 1975.”

I blinked. As a motive for murder, surely that was the lamest one ever, but you never knew.

Sabrina put more coffee in my mug. “But Davis moved downstate to be closer to his kids back in the nineties. He died last year, I heard, the old bugger.”

“Did you ever see Henry in here with Adam Deering?” I asked.

“Adam who?”

I started to explain the relationship between Henry and Adam, but before I got all the way through, she was shaking her head again.

“Last couple of years, I never saw Henry sitting with anybody other than you,” she said.

Which pretty much destroyed the Round Table theory I’d proposed to Detective Inwood the day before. “Well,” I said, sighing, “after what happened to Adam, I was just wondering, that’s all.”

“What do you mean?”

And that was when I remembered that Sabrina never read the local paper. She didn’t need to, she’d said time and time again. “Right here is where I get all the news I need, and a lot that I don’t.” But since Adam was new to the area and lived out of town, he wasn’t yet connected to the town’s talk.

I told Sabrina about Adam’s near miss with the car and she was appropriately shocked. “That’s Irene’s husband, right?” Because, since Irene worked in Chilson for her regular job as a bank’s loan officer, she was connected to the town.

Nodding, I almost started talking about the oddness of Henry’s being killed by a tree one week and, less than two weeks later, the guy who’d been with Henry that day being almost killed by a car. But then I remembered where I was and to whom I was talking. There was a time and a place to encourage the spread of rumors, but this wasn’t it. Not yet, anyway.

A bell rang in the kitchen. “Order’s up,” Sabrina said. “Got to go.”

I wrapped my hands around the warmth of my mug and opened the book I’d brought to read, but even Louise Penny’s evocative prose couldn’t keep me from thinking about Henry and Adam and what might really have happened that day out in the woods.