Pouncing on Murder (12 page)

Ash almost, but not quite, looked at me. “I was just leaving.”

“Perfect!” Rafe gave him a thumbs-up. “Tell you what. I could use some help drywalling a ceiling. Pizza and a six-pack of whatever you want when we’re done.”

“Sounds good,” Ash said. Then, not quite looking at me: “I’ll, uh, see you later, Minnie.”

“Yeah. Later.”

I stood there, watching them go, listening to their male banter as they went down the dock and onto the sidewalk that would, in a couple of hundred feet, take them straight to the front door of Rafe’s fixer-upper.

“Mrr,” Eddie said.

“You’re a male,” I said. “You tell me: Why are guys convinced to help a friend with a construction project at the mere mention of pizza and beer, but all they can think of when faced with a friend’s cleaning project is to leave as quickly as possible?”

Eddie turned his back to me and didn’t say a thing.

Men.

Chapter 7

“W
hy,
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.