Ill-Gotten Panes (A Stained-Glass Mystery) (5 page)

Carrie ranged up beside me, slipping her emery board back into her bag and casually checking her watch in the process. Guilt washed over me. “I’m sorry,” I said, grabbing the first set of little bowls I could reach even though they weren’t pink. “I’m keeping you from the shop. Just some food and we’ll be out of here.”

I rolled the cart forward, yanked a small bag of crunchy kitten food from the shelf, and tossed it into the cart.

“I told you,” she said, “people won’t be banging down the door of the shop. They never do during weekdays.”

Nodding in sympathy, I powered out of the aisle and turned for the registers at the front of the store. “But if there’s no business during the week, why stay open? Why not take the days off, do something else?”

In a voice that sounded of surrender, she said, “Not a whole lot else to do.”

“Come on. There’s got to be something. Wenwood’s quiet, but there’s more to life than . . .” Than what? I’d spent most of my own time settling into Grandy’s and sleeping like a drugged princess, sleeping away the weeks of stress and heartache I’d left behind. Surely there was more to life than that as well. Maybe I was looking for a clue.

“Business will pick up when the summer travel season starts. Families passing through on their way to Lake George. Everyone loves poking around an antiques shop. And then, Good Lord willing, once the marina opens, we can all get back in the black.”

All? “What do you mean—” I began, but the upbeat tune on Carrie’s cell phone cut short my question. She picked up the call while I guided the cart to the entrance of the checkout lane.

According to Carrie, it was Sergeant Steve on the phone telling us we could return to the station at any time. Grandy had finally lawyered up and was ready to go home.

*   *   *

T
he first words out of his mouth were, “Where are my clothes?”

While Sergeant Steve, Carrie, and Grandy’s lawyer looked on, my memory flashed me an image of Grandy’s khaki slacks and green button-down folded neatly on the front seat of his SUV, the SUV parked perhaps a tad haphazardly across the street from Aggie’s Antiques.

“You forgot them, didn’t you?” he grumbled.

I didn’t realize it was possible to feel any guiltier. “Sorry, Grandy. Carrie gave me a ride up here and your clothes . . .”

“I’ve had a long day already, Georgia. And now you’re going to tell me the one thing I asked you to do was the one thing that escaped you?”

And even guiltier still. How low could I go?

“Don’t worry about it, Mr. Keene,” Carrie put in. “My car’s right out front.”

Despite Carrie’s attempt at being helpful, Grandy turned his glower on me. He might have growled.

“Perhaps,” his lawyer said, “we could exit out the back. Less uncomfortable for all concerned.”

Grandy huffed and made the introductions. His lawyer, Drew Able, Esquire, took my hand in a firm but unremarkable grasp, his bland brown-eyed gaze sweeping me head to toe with no apparent conclusion drawn. I felt the same about him, in fact. Mid-forties, medium height, slim build, brown hair . . . his appearance gave me no insight into the type of man he might be.

“I suppose I have you to thank for making sure my grandfather isn’t spending the night here?” I asked.

He flashed a surprisingly merry grin. “I think it’s the officers who owe me the most thanks.”

I glanced back to Grandy. He stood straight as a decorated soldier, clad in his blue thinning dressing gown, faded plaid pajamas, and Ozzie Nelson slippers. He held his chin high, his jaw clenched, his eyes piercing as he gazed into the cracked Sheetrock horizon of the waiting area. I couldn’t keep back the smile or the sigh of relief. Nothing about spending the morning in a police station had impacted Grandy’s pride. He was a tough old bear, even if he did have a bit of egg stuck to his lapel. Lawyer Drew was no doubt correct—Grandy would have made the officers in the station house miserable if he’d had to spend the night.

“Well, let’s get you home in a hurry and then you can give me a lecture on forgetting things, okay?” I suggested. Turning to Sergeant Steve, I motioned for him to hand me the box in which a kitten reportedly slept curled up on an old Pace County PD T-shirt.

“Just one thing.” Waving a manila envelope, Detective Nolan strode into our midst, a pair of uniformed officers on his heels. “Search warrant. We’ll be going along with you. I have a murder weapon to find.”

W
e trailed in a convoy behind a Pace County PD squad car, like little sedan ducklings imprinting on a parent figure. Grandy rode with his lawyer, Detective Nolan took his own car, and I rode with Carrie back to her store, where I moved my pet shop haul and new fluffy kitten into Grandy’s Jeep, thanked Carrie profusely, and hauled axle back to the house.

When I reached the house, I found Grandy and Drew reclining in Adirondack chairs on the front porch. Well, Drew reclined. Grandy managed to sit back in the chair and still look like he was prepared to attack. Steering the car into the driveway, I spied Detective Nolan overseeing his uniformed colleagues poking through the trash cans on the side of the house. Poor guys. There were sun-spoiled cantaloupe seeds in there.

I slid out of the Jeep with the beer carton in my arms. “What’s going on?” I called.

Grandy stood from his chair. “I’m not in the habit of keeping spare house keys in my dressing gown.”

He could have just said he was locked out. For the first time that day I got the uneasy sense perhaps Grandy wasn’t taking things as calmly as he appeared. Yes, he could be formal, he could be proud, and he could be angry when crossed, but he wasn’t the sort to be mean. He’d been short with me in the station. My own guilt had prevented me from seeing how out of character that was for him, how strange.

I crossed the lawn quickly, jogged up the few steps to the front door. Again bracing the box against one hip, I slid my key into the lock.

“Is that really beer in the box?” Drew Able asked.

Did I hear a hopeful note in his voice? Or was I imagining? Grinning, I pushed the door open. “Sorry, no beer.”

“What is it?” Grandy asked as he shuffled to the door. He waved me in ahead of him, ever the gentleman.

“Small nuclear device.” I set the box down on the worn, wingback chair to my left that demarcated the living room.

As the front door clicked shut, Grandy ranged up behind me. “What about my clothes?”

“In the car,” I said. “Or upstairs in your room.” White ball of fluff draped limp in my hand as I lifted its sleeping softness from the box.

“Georgia,” Grandy growled.

Perhaps I should have given some thought to his reaction to having an almost-cat in his house. But the kitten was a bright spot in what, at its core, had the potential to be a day from hell.

I lifted the kitten into Grandy’s line of sight. A little
meew
of impending awareness broke free of the fluff.

“No.” Grandy turned his back on the kitten and me and strode toward the staircase. “Tell Detective Nolan I’ll be dressing,” he said, reaching for the banister. A tremor shook his fingers in the split second before he closed his hand around the aged wood, a tremor that hadn’t been present previously.

I tucked the kitten close and swallowed down the lump of uncertainty clogging my throat.

“Don’t worry,” Drew Able, Esquire, said. He slipped his hands in the pocket of his tan trousers, rocking back on his heels. “He’s not himself right now. He’ll be okay with the kitten. You’ll see.”

I sighed. It was kind of Drew to try and console me, but him explaining Grandy’s behavior to me chafed a bit. Mumbling an excuse to Drew, I grabbed the PCPD T-shirt from the corner of the beer carton and carried it and the kitten into the bathroom. No way was the house ready for a kitten to run around unsupervised, so it needed to be safely confined somewhere—especially with the potential for police poking around.

I curled the shirt into an approximation of a bed in the corner where the wall met the bathtub. Lowering the kitten onto the coil of fabric, I admonished her to stay put, steeled my heart against her wide, innocent, please-love-me eyes, and ducked out of the bathroom.

With the door shut tight behind me, I returned to the living room just as Detective Nolan and his cohorts strode through the front door. Drew had taken a seat in a battered leather club chair that he’d turned to face the door. He stood as the detective approached, holding his hand out. “I’d like to see the warrant,” he said.

Detective Nolan’s brow crumpled and his lip curled in a disbelieving scowl, but he withdrew the warrant from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and passed it over to Drew.

“Aren’t you hot in that jacket?” I asked.

The detective opened the left side of his jacket wide, revealing a shoulder holster and the gun snug inside.

“I can’t ask any more questions or you’ll shoot?” I guessed.

His scowl deepened. “Are you aware of the seriousness of this situation, Miss Kelly?”

Of course I was aware. Did he think I routinely watched my grandfather get accused of murder? Thing was, the whole situation, viewed from the comfort of the living room with its mixed generation furniture and worn-edged rug, reached a level beyond absurd. Given a few more moments, it would have started to feel like a waste of time.

But just out of sight of Detective Nolan, Drew Able, Esquire, moved his head a millimeter to the right, a millimeter to the left. That very slight motion warned me against straining the detective’s patience.

I sucked in a loud breath. “Sorry. I can be inappropriate when I’m nervous.”

I didn’t know if that was the truth. My former fiancé had accused me of being flippant when I needed to be serious, but after he revealed himself as one-sixteenth of the man I thought he was, everything he told me was cast in doubt. The me I understood myself to be when I was with him was a shadow now, and the person I truly was, yet to be discovered.

Drew refolded the warrant and passed it back to the detective. “Everything seems to be in order,” he said. “You’re searching for a murder weapon of unknown dimensions and bloodstained clothing.”

The detective looked to me. “You have a utility space downstairs? Washer, dryer, tool bench, things of that nature?”

“Sure.” One step was all it took for the memory of the washer full of my sweaty, grimy clothes to return to me. A twinge of embarrassment curled through my gut. I envisioned the thinner of the uniformed officers lifting the lid on the washer. The emanating fumes—somehow tinted green in my imagination—rise like coiled snakes to wrap around his head, the foul fragrance bringing him swiftly to his knees.

Heck. These were police officers. Surely they’d encountered worse aromas than that which might have been lurking in my laundry.

With a heavy sigh leaking out of my nostrils, I led the way down the half flight of steps, through the door to the garage. “Washer and dryer are that way.” I pointed down the next half flight of stairs, tipped my head to indicate the work bench to my right. “Tools and whatnot are here.”

Detective Nolan instructed the officers to split up—one going downstairs, the other crossing to the workbench. Using the folded warrant as a pointer, he indicated the ground-floor art studio. “What’s going on in here? Break something?”

I nearly smiled. “It came that way.” The Tiffany-style lamp glinted atop its corner-set table, the missing section gapping like a broken heart. “The plan is to restore it, but I have to pull more of it apart before—”

“Detective.” The skinny uniformed officer came to the foot of the stairs, looked up to meet his superior’s gaze. “There’s a bunch of clothes in the washer.”

The embarrassment waiting in my gut spread from my belly, sent heat to my cheeks and flamed the back of my neck. “They’re mine. From yesterday. I didn’t turn the washer on yet.”

Skinny officer shook his head. “Ma’am, these clothes are wet, possibly washed. Looks like a pair of boxer shorts sitting on top.”

Okay, I didn’t make it a habit to wash my prettier undergarments in the machine, even if it did have a cycle it pretended was gentle. But I would hardly describe my utilitarian cotton numbers as resembling boxer shorts. And I was sure I’d passed on starting the wash.

Feeling my forehead wrinkle as I fought for the memory, I hustled down the basement steps and double-timed it to the washer.

“Ma’am, please don’t touch that,” Skinny said.

I peered inside the old-school agitating cylinder machine.

“Ma’am.” The officer was at my back, one hand hovering near my elbow as I took in the sight within the washer.

“I won’t,” I said on a breath. Just as he’d said, a pair of boxer shorts leered up from the depths of the washer. Woven among the tangle created by the spin cycle, my T-shirt twisted around Grandy’s Dockers, my shorts peeked between the coiled sleeves of the blue and white shirt he’d worn the day before. His things must have been in the machine when I’d tossed my clothes in. I hadn’t bothered to check.

Despite the presence of the officer, my promise not to touch anything, I reached forward, gripped the edge of the washer while I waited for the world to make sense. I hadn’t started the washer, I was sure. Grandy’s clothes weren’t in there when I threw mine in with the cleaning rags, when I added the detergent. So he’d come home somewhere around 1 a.m. and started a load of wash?

“Anderson,” Detective Nolan said. “Go out to the car and grab a couple of the large evidence bags, will ya?”

I turned, found Nolan lurking just over my shoulder, too far for me to have been aware he was standing there. “Evidence bags?”

Skinny Anderson strode across the room and bounced up the stairs.

“My laundry is evidence?”

Nolan grimaced. “A perpetrator commits murder, there’s a good chance that perp got blood on his or her clothing.”

I should have focused on that, on the belief neither I nor Grandy were perpetrators of anything more than the occasional bad pun. But two thoughts fought for priority in my mind: uppermost, the question of what the laundry said about Grandy’s guilt; second, and better to obsess over since it was a much less world-shattering issue, the knowledge that my lavender bra with the Pink Panther emblem would be seen by potentially half the population of the Pace County PD.

“You’ll be able to know if there was blood even though the clothes have been washed?” I asked.

Nolan’s smile was grim. “You’d be amazed how many times you can wash something and blood residue remains.”

Well, that would be true if I weren’t prone to cutting myself when getting careless with stained glass. I knew what it was to try and clean bloodstains from clothing. The fact that residue remained failed to amaze me.

The thump of footsteps overhead made the ceiling above us creak. Grandy was headed to the living room.

Without a word to Detective Nolan, I ducked out of the utility room and dashed up the steps. Grandy had gone through to the kitchen. He was rooting in the refrigerator, the cool air rolling through the heat of the room like a breeze off an iceberg.

“Georgia, where did you put the roast beef slices? You didn’t throw them out, did you?”

“The police are searching the house and you want a sandwich?”

He glanced at me over his shoulder. “I’m hungry.”

“Lunch can’t wait?”

“I haven’t even had breakfast,” he said. “Let the police look. They’re not going to find any of this evidence they’re looking for. While they’re searching for their unicorn, I may as well eat.”

Drew Able, Esquire, ambled into the kitchen. He leaned his back against the edge of the corner sink and crossed his arms, as if this were his accustomed place, as if he were home.

“How can you be so calm?”

“Like I explained to your grandfather, he can’t let any of this get in the way of his usual routine. It’s best he go about his business as usual.”

Grandy scowled at Drew. “Stop sounding like a therapist.”

“Sorry, Pete. But I don’t want you to forget how important it is for you to keep doing what you always do. Don’t talk about the situation, but don’t hide from it, either.”

“I don’t hide from things.” Grandy swung shut the refrigerator door, a final burst of cold air pushing through the room. He smacked a jar of mayonnaise and a package of deli meat onto the counter. “I’m going to get myself a bite to eat and go to work.”

“Work?” Jaw hanging open, I dropped into a kitchen chair. Though I heard every word Drew said about keeping things normal, I couldn’t believe Grandy would have the desire to go to the dine-in, much less the energy.

For this outburst, Grandy turned his back on his lunch and leveled a disapproving gaze at me. “I have a business, Georgia, and a work ethic that I thought I’d managed to instill in you. I’m not about to skip out on my staff because I’ve had an unexpected morning.”

An unexpected morning? Being hauled into Pace County PD for questioning regarding a murder was unexpected?

“So I am going to the office tonight,” he said, wrenching open the bread drawer, “and you are going to spend the evening finding a home for that feline you brought into my house without asking.”

I gave him back the patented family scowl. “I don’t think so,” I said. “You’re going to work, I’m going with you.”

*   *   *

T
he Downtown Dine-In was not, in fact, located in downtown Wenwood. Instead, the restaurant/theater anchored one end of a strip mall forty-five minutes down the highway. An office supply store sat at the other end, with a string of predictable, if dull, stores in between—dry cleaners, foot doctor, insurance agency . . . the usual.

“I don’t see why you insisted on accompanying me, Georgia.” Grandy drove with his hands at ten and two, the radio tuned to the all-news station so he could be advised of a traffic jam before getting caught. Traffic reports aired every fifteen minutes. Between them, Grandy lowered the radio volume and turned his attention to me. “I’m not some weak old man who needs a nursemaid.”

“I know you’re not. I’m just worried about you.”

“What’s to worry about? So the police asked me a few questions. I answered them. End of story.”

I wanted to remind him the police had custody of my Pink Panther bra, but even I knew that wasn’t the important element.

“But why did the police need to ask you questions? What happened between you and Andy Edgers?”

He took his eyes off the road long enough to shoot me a quelling glance. “I’ve already told you that’s not your business.”

“It wasn’t my business yesterday,” I said. “But don’t you think today’s a little different?”