Pouncing on Murder (18 page)

“Did she tell you what I found out about Seth?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Not that weird, I suppose, but here I thought all that social media stuff was supposed to make it easy to find people.”

“Not if you don’t want to be found,” I said. “And if . . .” My voice faded away.

“What?” Adam asked.

“Where did Irene think she saw Seth?” I couldn’t remember her saying, and I’d neglected to ask.

“Chilson,” he said. “Downtown, somewhere. She was driving through town and saw him on the sidewalk.”

Downtown? Excellent. It would take time, but I could work with that.

“Why?” Adam asked.

“Another possible area of investigation,” I said vaguely, sounding even to myself as if I were spending too much time with law enforcement officers. Then I remembered the other thing I wanted to tell him. “I think I found one of those wooden boats that you and Henry found.”

Adam immediately brightened. “Where? Do you know what kind it was?”

I told him about my bumpy, rutting time and finding a tarped-over Hacker-Craft on the side of Chatham Road.

“Sounds right,” he said, nodding. “Was there a cranky old lady with it?”

“She came at me with a gun,” I said crisply.

“What?” Adam’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re kidding. Neva?”

“You know her?”

Adam shook his head. “Henry did. Back in the day, she used to date his older brother. He went downstate to college and really never came home. Got married and moved to Virginia, Henry said, and died a few years ago of a heart attack.”

“Neva didn’t come at you with a gun?” I asked. “Did you look at the boat?”

“Henry did, mostly. Once I saw that hull rot I got a little nervous.” He stared off into space. “But now that I think about it, what’s a little rot? That could still be restored to a beautiful boat.”

I headed back to the bookmobile, thinking.

Maybe Henry had earned the wrath of Neva because of her long-ago failed relationship with his brother. It seemed odd that a romance from fifty years ago could have anything to do with what was happening now, but who knew? And though Adam had said he didn’t look at the boat, he’d been close enough to note the hull rot. If he’d been that close, Neva would surely have seen him, and who could say what she might be capable of?

Frustration pulled at me and I lengthened my stride, trying to outdistance it.

All I was finding was more questions. I was going to have to start finding answers. And sooner would be much better than later.

•   •   •

I swallowed the spoonful of clam chowder. “You’re nuts. There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s the best I’ve ever had.”

Kristen frowned mightily and tossed the spoon by which she’d fed me into the nearest kitchen sink. “Why do I even ask? You’re the worst taster ever.”

“Because I like the food you make?” I looked around for a stool and pulled one up to the restaurant’s kitchen island. It looked as if the preopening dinner Kristen had invited me over to eat wasn’t going to materialize, not if she was still tweaking tomorrow night’s recipes. Ah, well. It wasn’t as if we’d go hungry.

“You like anything you don’t have to cook.” She stirred the chowder, reached for a jar of some spice I couldn’t identify, and added a couple of shakes. “That
might do it.” She grabbed another spoon and tasted. “Ha! Now,
that’s
the best clam chowder ever.”

“Let me try.” I found a clean spoon and reached forward to fill it with the thick, chunky chowder. “Mm,” I said. “You’re right. That is the best ever.” To me it didn’t taste any different from the previous spoonful, but why tell that to the cook, especially if there was a chance she might ban me from the crème brûlée that was coming up later?

She ladled two bowls almost to the brim and dragged another stool over to the island. As we sat side by side, companionably slurping up chowdery goodness, I felt warm and cozy and content with life in general. Clam chowder did that to me.

“So, what’s going on in your life?” she asked, when the bowls were half-empty.

My contentedness snapped away. “I told you about Adam Deering almost getting hit by that car, right?”

Kristen nodded. “You never told me the whole story, though. You never told me how close you came to getting hit.”

“Me?” I blinked at her. “It was aiming for Adam. Anyway, I’ve been trying to find Seth Wartella. The guy from Chicago.”

“Seth who?”

I frowned, midslurp, which was harder than I thought it would be. “I haven’t told you about him?”

“Busy, busy, busy.” She waved at the kitchen around us. “Maybe, but if you did it got mixed up with the staff
schedule or the produce delivery schedule or that asparagus soup recipe I’ve been working on.”

Or maybe I just hadn’t told her, knowing that she was wacky busy with the restaurant opening. But she was relatively calm right now, so I told her about Irene’s possible sighting of the man her husband had helped put in prison.

Kristen was frowning. “Why do I know that name?”

“Seth?”

“No, Wartella.” She drummed her short fingernails on the stainless steel counter. “Wartella . . .” She grinned. “Got it. Tony Wartella. He’s a conservation officer. Didn’t you come across him last year?”

“That’s right,” I said slowly. “I’d forgotten.” Last Thanksgiving, I had indeed talked to an Officer Wartella about what might have been a hunting accident. “I wonder . . .”

“If Tony and that Seth are related? You could be right. I think Tony is originally from the Chicago area.” Kristen pointed south, in the direction of far-off Illinois. “I can find out, if you want. Tony and his wife are regulars on Tuesday nights.”

That was the night she offered a special—buy one dinner, get another half off—something that a lot of locals appreciated. “That would be great,” I said, then went on to tell her about not finding any trace of Seth on the Internet, at which she shrugged.

“My mom’s not on any social media, either, and the only crime she ever committed was the time she stayed too long in a parking space.”

“That’s not a crime,” I said.

“Tell that to my mom.” Kristen scraped up the last of her chowder. “She got a ticket and had to pay a fine, so now whenever she has to fill out a form that asks if she’s ever been convicted of a crime, she says yes.” She looked over. “You going to finish that?”

I pushed my bowl toward her. “There’s one other weird thing.” When I told the story of the recent out-of-town Mitchell sighting, she was suitably surprised, but when I told her about stopping to look at the wooden boat and being threatened by a gun-toting senior citizen of the female persuasion, she looked appropriately frightened and indignant on my behalf.

“Why do they let people like that have guns?” she asked.

“I reported it to the sheriff’s office,” I said. “But she didn’t fire the gun, she was on her own property, and I have no proof there was ammunition in it.” I shrugged. “But she did scare the daylights out of me.”

“What’s was her name?”

“Neva Chatham.”

“Huh. There are lots of Chatham stories floating around.” Kristen scooped out the last of my chowder and spooned it into her mouth. “I wonder how many of them are true. Can’t say I know any Chathams personally.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I said, then started thinking about families. About family resemblances and
family traits and how while sometimes if you know one member of a family you know what they’re all like. Then again, sometimes members of the same family, even siblings within a year or two of each other, are very different, and not always in a good way.

“What’s the matter?” Kristen asked.

“Just thinking,” I said, then started to tell her my exact thoughts.

But before I got halfway through, she rolled her eyes, stacked our dishes, and got up. “Sometimes you think too much,” she said. “And you can quit with the protest; you know it’s true.”

“Do not,” I muttered.

“Well, you’re wrong.” She opened the door to the closest refrigerator. “And if you want dessert, you’ll admit that you’re wrong.” Grinning, she pulled out two ramekins of crème brûlée, both already topped with local greenhouse strawberries and sprigs of mint.

Clearly blackmail, but it was blackmail of the most excellent kind.

“You were right,” I said mechanically, “and I was wrong.” When she continued to hold the ramekins out of reach, I sighed and finished our time-honored litany. “I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted.” She slid the desserts down the counter. “So, are you going to try to stop thinking so much?”

“Don’t see how that’s going to happen.” I picked up the spoon that was sliding toward me.

Kristen plopped onto her stool and picked up her own spoon. “Just as well. If you didn’t overthink
everything, you wouldn’t be you, and then where would you be?”

On a count of three, we plunged our spoons through the crackly sugar crust and I knew there was absolutely nowhere else in the world I wanted to be at that moment other that sitting next to my best friend.

•   •   •

It was when I was walking home, post-dessert, that my cell rang with Tucker’s ring tone. While we’d been texting almost every day, or nearly, we hadn’t actually talked since I couldn’t think when.

“Hey,” I said, smiling into the phone. “I was just at Kristen’s, eating way too much excellent food. What did you have for supper?”

“Leftover pizza, I think. Although that might have been yesterday.”

I laughed. “Doesn’t your mother feed you?”

“I’ve been taking extra shifts,” he said. “There’s a lot to learn here, and the more hours I work, the more I learn.”

Which sounded good, but I was suddenly getting a bad feeling about the turn the conversation was taking. I stopped walking and sat on a nearby bench. The sun was down, the streetlights were on, and the sunset’s afterglow filled the west part of the sky with a fading golden blush. “So you’re working a lot,” I said carefully.

“It’s the best way to learn.”

“Yes, you said that.”

The silence between us grew long and thick. I sat there for so long, not talking, that I almost forgot who was on the other end of the phone.

“So,” Tucker said, “it looks like I won’t be able to make it up there in June.”

“Yeah.” I suddenly couldn’t stand to sit any longer. I got to my feet and started walking. “I had a feeling you were going to say that.”

“Minnie, I’d come up if I could.”

“Sure. I know.” Sort of.

“It’s just that I don’t want to miss any opportunities. If I’m going to go anywhere and do anything, I need to make the most of this fellowship.”

“Sure. I know.” Which I’d already said, but Tucker didn’t seem to notice my repetition.

“Why don’t you come down here?” he asked.

And do what, sit and talk to his parents while I waited for him to come home from the hospital because he couldn’t turn down a chance to take an extra shift, even when it was the first time he’d seen his girlfriend in months? No, thanks.

“It’s a really busy time for me,” I said. “With the book fair and all the summer people coming and vacations starting, it’s going to be really hard for me to get away.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I kind of figured, but I thought I’d ask.”

I squinted at the sky’s last light and wondered exactly what he’d meant by that. Had he hoped I’d say no? Because that was what it sounded like. “You know I’d come down if I could,” I said, echoing his own statement. And again, he either didn’t notice the repetition or chose to ignore it.

“Sure.”

We made stilted small talk for a little longer, and by
the time I got back to the houseboat, my phone was back in my pocket. I opened the door and was greeted by the sight of my cat sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor and staring straight at me.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You overheard that entire conversation and are now ready to offer romantic advice.”

He didn’t move. Didn’t even blink.

“Strike one.” I tossed my jacket onto the pilot’s seat. “Second guess. You were deeply lonely without me and have been sitting there for hours, pining for my return.”

Eddie lowered his head slightly but didn’t break eye contact.

“Strike two, huh?” I leaned down to scoop him up. “Third guess. When you woke up from your most recent nap, you realized I still wasn’t home and have been sitting there for the last thirty seconds, wondering if your food supply will ever be replenished.”

“Mrr!” He nudged the side of my face with his head.

“You are such an Eddie,” I said, nudging him back, and as his purr started, the sting of Tucker’s phone call faded away almost as if it had never been.

Almost.

Chapter 12

M
y sleep that night was interrupted by sporadic dreams that featured a book fair attended by a total of zero people, and a wooden boat that had sunk under me the first time I launched it in Janay Lake.

I woke up with Eddie’s body snuggled around my neck and his tail tangled up in my hair.

“You know,” I told him, “if you stayed down by my feet, I’d sleep a lot better.”

He rearranged himself slightly and didn’t say anything.

It probably wasn’t fair to blame him for my poor sleep, but I hated waking up while I was still tired, and at the time, it seemed entirely reasonable to point fingers at the furry creature who was on my face.

“Off, already, will you?” I gave him a shove.

“Mrr!” He rolled around in a lengthwise somersault and lay there, looking up at me.

I should have apologized right then and there, but I didn’t. Instead I flung back the covers and trudged up to the shower without a word to my furry friend. By the time I was dry, he’d retreated to the back of the closet and wouldn’t come out, even when I tried to tantalize
him with the last of the milk at the bottom of my cereal bowl.

“Come on, pal. I said I’m sorry.” I swirled the milk around. “You were right and I was wrong and I’m very, very sorry.”

Sadly what had worked with Kristen didn’t do anything for Mr. Ed.

“Tell you what. How about I leave the bowl here and you can finish it up on your own schedule?” I put the bowl on the floor and peered into the closet’s depths. He was back there behind my boots, but all I could see of him was the furry arch of his spine. “I’ll see you tonight, okay? And I am sorry.”