May Cooler Heads Prevail (9 page)

Everything had been neatly taken off the shelves and out of the cabinets. Clay flowerpots were all stacked, one on top of the other, in a corner. Next to the pots, bottles of flower shine and a various array of plant food containers were all lined up. Flowers and a few baskets were the only things strewn around the floor. Whoever broke into the shop was certainly a neat freak.

Freedom, standing near the opened flower cooler, nodded for us to look inside. Aunt Connie and I walked over and peeked in. Inside the cooler was the only real chaos. The now headless and mostly un-stuffed scarecrow lay at an odd angle on top of wads of pink cellophane.

I took a few steps into the front of the shop. Like the workshop, everything had been taken off of shelves and out of windows and placed neatly on the floor. Why? I thought I knew why the mangled scarecrow, but why take everything off the shelves? What was he looking for?

“Aunt Connie, you don’t keep any money in the shop overnight, do you?”

Coming over to stand next to me, she shook her head and said, “Never have. If I can’t make a night deposit, I keep it upstairs in my safe, so they couldn’t have taken money—there wasn’t any. Nothing seems to be missing. What were they after?”

“I think whoever was in here was looking for Aaron’s body, Aunt Connie.”

“What!” Aunt Connie’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped. “You mean the killer came back to the scene of the crime? What would the killer want with Aaron’s body?”

Leaning on the door frame between the workshop and the storefront, Freedom answered, “I think Dixie’s right about the killer looking for Scott’s body. My guess is that since you didn’t get framed for his murder, the killer is now driving himself crazy trying to figure out why the body hasn’t surfaced yet. Which makes him a very dangerous person right about now.”

“But if he was looking for Aaron, why take all the stuff off the shelves and stack it all so neatly on the floor? Was he afraid we would hear him?” Aunt Connie asked.

“As long as I’m guessing,” Freedom said, “I’d say that once he couldn’t find the body, he took all that stuff off the shelves looking for the cutting shears he stabbed Aaron with. Maybe he was careful about it because he was trying to be quiet. He certainly took some anger out on that scarecrow. Doesn’t make a lot of sense that he would be so careful about where he put stuff then rip that scarecrow to shreds, but then murder isn’t a sensible act.”

“Where are the cutting shears?” I asked.

Freedom shrugged. “Rudd took the shears with him when he took Nissa and Connie home. I don’t know what he did with them after that.”

Aunt Connie waved an exasperated hand in the air. “I guess there’s no tellin’ what that murderin’ thief was thinkin’, so there’s no sense in worryin’ over it. Right now we got enough problems. We have to get this place cleaned up and put back together before it’s time to open up the shop.”

I grabbed her arm before she could even move a step. “Aunt Connie, what we need to do right now is call the sheriff and tell him about the break-in.”

Before I could state my case any further, Freedom countered with, “Or we could call Rudd and let him know what happened.”

The opportunity to debate the issue was settled by the tall, lanky form of Sheriff Otis Beecher standing in the doorway to the workshop.

With his hand resting lightly on his gun, Otis let out a low whistle. “Well, I’ll be! This is the second break-in we’ve had in less than five months. But this seems a might different than a couple of kids breaking into Hattie Goodwin’s cellar to steal a few apples.”

I was shocked to see him. Between that and guilt, I was surprised I could speak. “Otis, how did you get here so fast? We haven’t even called you yet, and I know Aunt Connie doesn’t have an alarm system.”

Otis shrugged, ducked his head, and walked on into the workroom. “Just making my regular rounds. I pulled into the alley, saw the door open and the lights on back here, and thought I’d better check it out.” Looking directly at Aunt
Connie, he added, “And if you and the other shopkeepers around here would put in alarm systems like I been askin’ you to at every shopkeepers’ meeting for the past several years, I might’ve been able to catch this thief red-handed.”

“Too expensive.” Aunt Connie folded her arms across her chest and stared defiantly back at Otis.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that argument umpteen times,” Otis replied. Then he looked at his watch, took a pen and pad out of his front shirt pocket, and mumbled out loud, “Official time of report, 6:18 a.m.” Then he looked up at us. “Okay, I need to ask the three of you some questions. Did anyone see or hear anything suspicious last night or early this morning?”

All three of us answered no. We were the only ones around that we knew of who were acting suspicious.

“All right, when and which one of you discovered the burglary?”

“Not too long before you walked in, maybe thirty or forty minutes ago,” Freedom answered. “I got up around five this morning to do some work on one of my wood sculptures. When I went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee, I didn’t have enough to make a pot, so I decided to run down to Bender’s and pick some up, and maybe a Danish or two for breakfast. When I came downstairs I noticed the door was open. At first I thought maybe Connie was up, but when I walked in, I found it like this. I went upstairs and woke Connie and Dixie up. They came downstairs, and then you came.”

Otis looked thoughtful for a moment, said, “Excuse me,” and went back outside. When he came back he had a clipboard in his hand. “This is the schedule for what time we make our rounds this week. I vary it from week to week so no one can figure out where my deputy and I will be at any given time. Take tonight, for instance. Billy made rounds at one o’clock this morning. He reported that he ran Dozer Moss in for drunk and disorderly, but everything else was quiet. I started my rounds at five thirty.”

“So you’re saying the burglar had to come sometime after one and before five thirty this morning,” said a voice with a nasal twang, coming from behind where we were all standing.

All of us turned around to find Truman Spencer, the owner/editor of the Kenna Springs
Bugle
standing in the doorway.

Truman bears an uncanny resemblance to a frog. His eyes almost pop out of his head, and he has a thin-lipped, extra-wide mouth. His head looks like it spent its formative years in a vice grip, and when he walks, his stocky body sort of hunches over.

“Truman! What are you doing here?” Otis grumped.

Holding his flat little nose in the air, Truman answered, “I happen to have the nose of a reporter. After all, I am an editor and a journalist.”

“That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here at this hour of the morning,” Otis said.

“All right, since you asked. As you should know by now, I am an early riser, as any newspaperman should be. I was driving by on my way to my office and noticed your patrol car parked in the alley. Thinking there might be a story, I stopped and came on in.”

There was something wrong with Truman’s story, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Before I could figure it out, Truman had the audacity to pull out his own notepad and pen and ask Otis, “So, do you think you might have any leads at this time on who could’ve burglarized the Red Carnations Flower Shop?”

Otis frowned. “What I think, Truman, is that you oughta get in your car and find somebody else to be bothering. I’m not about to answer any questions until I complete my investigation. Now, if you don’t want to see it that way, then I’ll give you a little incentive. I can call my deputy right now and have him haul you down to the jailhouse for obstructing justice. ‘Course, at the moment, only one cell has the new plumbing finished, so we’d have to put you in with old Dozer Moss. And right about now Dozer’s got himself one head-bashin’ hangover going on. Like as not he won’t feel like having any company around to irritate him. I imagine you could get in some pretty good exercise tryin’ to keep away from him.”

“Otis, sometimes you can be an impossibly crude human being.” Truman huffed as he fumbled with the lapels of his tweed jacket. “But since you are the sheriff of our fair
city, and hold the hammer of justice, as it were, I will have to defer to your judgment. However, I would like to stop by your office this afternoon and pick up what crumbs of information you might be willing to throw my way.”

Then without an ounce of surprise at my presence, Truman nodded at me. “Miss Dixie, nice to see you back in town.”

He turned slowly to Aunt Connie. “I want you to know that I am very glad that you are unharmed. If I may, I would like to interview you. At your earliest convenience, of course.”

Aunt Connie gave him one of her beady-eyed stares. “I know it won’t do a bit of good to say no. You’ll just keep pestering me till I give in, so we’ll make it easy on both of us. Come back later on today.”

He gave Aunt Connie a stranger than usual widemouthed smile, then he left.

When I heard Truman’s car door slam shut, it dawned on me what had been wrong about what he said to Otis. The route Truman Spencer would have to take from his home to the newspaper office does not go by Aunt Connie’s alleyway. I felt my stomach lurch. Maybe he had a good explanation, maybe not. For the time being I would have to file that piece of information away. Otis was asking us questions again, and Deputy Billy had just arrived with a camera and the equipment he needed to get fingerprints.

“You made good time, Billy,” Otis said. “I appreciate that. Go ahead and take pictures before you start lifting prints.”

Otis turned back to the three of us. “I radioed him when I went out to get the clipboard.”

Billy worked quietly, snapping pictures with his camera while Otis asked questions, wondered out loud about the torn-asunder scarecrow, and generally poked around the shop. It took more than an hour to determine that nothing had been stolen. Of course, any one of the three of us could have told him that.

Eventually, Billy got around to fingerprinting us. He told us that it would at least eliminate some of the multitude of differing prints around the shop. Other than a practice session on how to lift prints, Billy didn’t seem to think anything useful would come of his efforts.

Finally, Otis flipped his notepad shut and put it back in his front shirt pocket. Taking one last look around, he sighed. “It sure beats me if I can figure out what the thief or thieves wanted when they broke in here. Especially since you didn’t have so much as fifty cents worth of change lying around. Only thing I can figure is they must’ve thought it was an easy target and took the chance you didn’t make a night deposit. Which means they must be plumb stupid or from out of town.”

Otis was wrong on both counts. The person who broke into Aunt Connie’s shop was murderously intelligent, and he was somewhere right under our noses.

After Otis and Billy left, Aunt Connie looked at her watch and groaned. “It’s almost time to open up the shop. You all
straighten up the front.” She grabbed the phone with one hand and waved us out of the way with the other, adding, “I’ll take care of the workshop and call Rudd and let him know what’s going on. You kids go on now. I still have to make a living, you know.”

“Been a long time since someone called me a kid.” Freedom grinned.

“Me, too,” I said, grinning back. “And we’d better get to work, or she might take a switch to us.” Both of us laughed, and for a moment I marginally liked Mr. Freedom Crane. Or at least I didn’t dislike him as much as I had.

Since our thief/more likely murderer had been impeccably neat, it didn’t take us long to put the flower arrangements back in place, stuff the bins with the silk greenery and flowers, and put Aunt Connie’s fall arrangements back in the display windows.

Aunt Connie was stuffing what was left of the scarecrow and the wadded-up pink cellophane into a plastic trash bag when we walked back into the workshop.

“Here, let me finish that and take it out to the trash bin for you,” Freedom offered.

Aunt Connie handed him the sack then said to me, “Before I forget, and lately I’ve been doing a lot of that, I talked to Rudd, and he thinks it might be a good idea if you went on down to the library.”

“I thought Uncle Rudd wanted us to go get the body and
bring it back here first. We can’t just leave him in that cave!” Not that putting him back in the flower cooler was such a great idea, but it was better than the cave.

Aunt Connie shrugged. “Plans have changed, I guess. Rudd wants you to get on down to the library and check out that stuff you talked about last night.”

“What about helping you to get the flower shop ready to open?”

“For cryin’ out loud, Dixie June, if you keep flappin’ that jaw of yours, none of us will get anything done. We’ve just about got the place back in order, anyway. Freedom can help me with what’s left. You go on down to the library. It’ll be opening up soon, but you got time to grab you some breakfast upstairs before you go.” Then taking a sharp look at me, she added, “And while you’re at it, comb that hair and put on some makeup before you go out in public.”

With that piece of advice I went upstairs to do what she said, even sneaking in a quick shower. After I dressed, I sucked down a glass of orange juice, crammed a couple of graham crackers in my mouth, called it breakfast, and left.

The library was just off the town square, about two blocks from the flower shop. I could walk it. There is nothing like fall in the Ozarks. The morning air was cool and the brisk breeze across my face felt good. I took a deep breath and felt like I could run for miles and jump any and every fence that happened to get in my way. It was a heady feeling, and
I wished I could stay in that moment for a long, long time. But reality has a way of rearing its ugly head, and the reality was that I wasn’t out for just a pleasant walk.

CHAPTER
SEVEN