PW02 - Bidding on Death (16 page)

“Oh, all right,” she said reluctantly. “But isn’t it nice to be doing something, and not waiting around for The Authorities to take care of things, which they obviously aren’t doing?”

“That sounds dangerously like vigilantism,” I cautioned.

“If I’d come home when that creep was breaking into my house, you would have seen me go vigilante all over his ass,” she boasted.

“Oh, don’t!” I begged. “Remember, that might have been what happened to Rose!”

“Ouch.” She was silent for a few moments, other than muttering to the eighteen wheeler hogging the left lane on the interstate.

When she spoke again, it was to ask, “What do you think of the auction theory? That the murder is connected to the break-ins?”

I thought about it, and concluded, “If not the auction, what is the motive? Three break-ins on the same day and one with murder included? If the auction didn’t drive the break-ins, what did?”

“I know,” Julia said. “That’s probably why I like the theory. I don’t want to think I have anything else in common with Rose, other than that we both hauled a lot of boxes home from the auction.”

“The only thing is, whatever the house-breaker was looking for must have been really valuable,” I argued. “Because that box of Ruba Rombic that Amy has is worth a few thousand at least, all together, and that wasn’t touched. And if something is that valuable, how could nobody know what it is?”

“That’s the problem, all right,” Julia admitted.

I watched the road signs and looked at the directions I’d printed out from Yahoo Maps. “We exit in ten miles.”

Julia shivered. “I’m not looking forward to this,” she admitted. “ ‘Assisted living’, brrrr.”

“Luther says it’s nice. And his gran seems to like it.”

“We’ll just see about that,” she said darkly.

But when we pulled up to visitor parking at Hallowdale Manor, I wondered if we’d taken a wrong turn and wound up at a country club. The sight of the rolling greens and bustling golf carts in the distance reinforced the image.

“Wow,” said Julia weakly. “How much does this cost, you suppose?”

“No idea.”

We got out of the car and entered the lobby of the main building, where we found Luther talking to a tiny older woman who was wearing a beach cover
-up and briskly towe
ling her short white crop.

“Come meet my gran!” Luther called to us.

His gran slapped him. “Heavens, Luther, I’m not decent. Let me run change and I’ll meet you in the dining room.”
She gave us a wave and scurried away with a briskness I could only envy.

“Well!” Julia was impressed. “She certainly seems – fit.” Julia was probably twenty years younger than Lacey.

“Fitter than I’ve ever seen her,” Luther replied. “She used to wear those print house dresses and just potter around the house, you know. There’s a lot to do here, and she’s jumped in feet first.”

In a few minutes, Lacey joined us, wearing white shorts that displayed surprisingly shapely legs. “Come on, kids,” she told us, “tee time in two hours.”

“Tea right after lunch?” Julia murmured to me.

“Tee eee eee,” I murmured back, spelling it out. “As in golf.”

“Oh, right.”

We followed Lacey into the
dining room, where she led
us
to
a table by the windows. “I do a lot of cooking in my own condo,” she told us as we deployed menus. “But this is the place to bring guests. Someone else does the dishes and the food is really good.”

It was also the most extensively footnoted menu I’d ever seen, with hearts and stars and arrows, and a legend at the bottom to explain which selections were heart-healthy, which were recommended for diabetics, and a whole host of other medical concerns.

I got the bison burger and sweet potato fries. Julia went for the whole wheat spaghetti. Lacey opted for the egg-white omelet, and told Luther, who went with the baby back ribs, that it was never too early to start thinking about his cholesterol.

“This from the woman who served me chicken-fried steak with sausage gravy my whole life,” he grumbled.

“I didn’t know any better,” Lacey said.

We chowed down. The conversation consisted mostly of appreciative grunts. When we reached the last few bites and were slowing down, Lacey brought us back to business. “Now,” she said, as if calling a meeting to order. “Luther tells me you folks think someone got murdered over something from my estate sale.”

“That’s the theory we’re working on,” Julia said. “Th
ree houses were broken into two
day
s later
, and they were all people who’d bought a lot at the auction.”

“I can’t believe that,” Lacey said.

“What can you tell us about the house and contents?” I asked.

She shrugged. “It was a farmhouse. I married Paul in ’49, and his family had been there for a hundred years. But it was just an old farmhouse. The Beaumonts were well-off by local standards, but nobody ever called them rich.”

“Did you regret leaving?” I wondered.

“Not really,” Lacey said. “It was a nice house, especially when the kids were young. Plenty of room, you know? But Paul died in ’77, and I stayed on. There wasn’t much for me to do around there, I rented out the acreage to a neighbor and he farmed it. But one day last year, suddenly it just hit me. Paul had been sentimental about the place, but that didn’t mean that I was. I looked around and asked around, and realized that none of my kids or grandkids had any notion of living there themselves. All that stuff would just be sold after I was gone, so why spend the rest of my life tending a family heritage that no living person wanted anymore?”

“That’s the spirit,” said Julia. “Carpe diem.”

“There was some old glassware that our friend Amy expects to make a few thousand on,” I mentioned. I couldn’t get over that Ruba Rombic.

“Well, good for her,” Lacey said.

“Do you wish you’d known that those were valuable?” I persisted.

“Honey, there was a house full of stuff,” Lacey said. “I looked it over and kept what I wanted.
If I’d researched everything before letting it go to auction, I’d still be there working through it, and for quite a while to come. If anyone got a windfall out of the auction, that’s fine, because I didn’t want to fool with it.”

“What could we have missed?” Julia wondered, frustrated. “I would have thought with both Amy and Rose there, anything really valuable would have been spotted and snapped up.”

Lacey shook her head. “I can’t imagine. The real value was the land. I got enough from that to live comfortably to the end of my days and still leave a little something to remember me by. The contents of the house was just stuff, as far as I was concerned.”

I was still trying to think of items of value. “Does anyone else watch Antiques Road Show?” I asked. “I saw an episode once where an old bronze statue that was being used as a doorstop turned out to be worth a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Huh!” said Lacey. She thought for a moment. “No, no statues, bronze or otherwise.”

“Stock certificates?” Julia suggested. “Maybe Paul or his parents bought something like IBM back when they were just making cash registers.”

Lacey shook her head. “Paul always considered the stock market to be a more respectable casino. Any money he had put by went into bonds and Treasury bills, and those went to the safety deposit.”

“Autographs?” I suggested wildly. “A signed first edition Mark Twain, or anything like that?”

But Lacey just shook her head again.
She turned to Luther. “
I think you’re barking up the wrong tree, Luther, honestly. It was just normal house contents, some older, some newer. But t
ell me about this woman who died.”

“Oh, you remember her, Gran. Rose Jackson.”

Lacey frowned. “Rose. Jackson.”

“From County Admin.”

“Oh!” The lightbulb went on. “Ms. Jackson From County!” Lacey chuckled. “Sorry, forgot she was dead. But what a pure pill that woman was. Luther, you remember that go-round your Aunt Loretta had when she wanted to turn her three-season porch into a grooming salon?”

“Lori Bishop?” I asked. Lori Bishop is Queen Anne’s main dog groomer.

“That’s her,” Lacey said. “She got the permit eventually, but not before having to jump through all these hoops about parking and something about an easement, whatever that is. Lordy lordy, I still remember Loretta coming by my place just spitting fire about ‘Mzzzzzz. Jackson’!”

She realized she was talking about her daughter’s feud with a murder victim, and hastened to add, “But that was a long time ago.”

“Don’t worry, Gran,” Luther told her. “If running foul of Rose’s notion of regulation made a person a murder suspect, we’d have hundreds of them. And Aunt Lori did get her permit, after all.”

On the drive home, I expected Sherlock Barstow to want to review the murder and ruminate over her deductions. But Julia had another topic on her mind. “I can’t get over
the change in Lacey,” she marve
led.

“Oh, I hadn’t realized you knew her.”

“Not to say ‘knew’,” Julia said. “Just to say hi to. But I
always
thought she was sort of a boring person, if you want to know the truth.”

“I guess being a widow living on a farm doesn’t give a person a lot of scope to be interesting,” I suggested.

“You may be right. But man, that place! I always thought of assisted living as the place you go to die, but that’s more the place you go to live it up.”

“And why not?” I said. “Spend your kids’ inheritance, I always say. It’d only spoil them anyway.”

“That’s the spirit.”

When I got back home, I expected to hear Paco’s shrill complaints as I came in the back door. I’d left him in the laundry room, which I’d taken to doing when I wasn’t around to referee between him and Tough Stuff. But not a peep from him.

Polly mugged me at the door of course. (“It’s been so long, I thought you were dead!”)  “Settle down, Pol,” I told her, making my way past her into the kitchen. “Paco?”

But the baby gate was down. And Paco was gone.

ELEVEN

Paco was gone! I went to the laundry room door. Maybe the gate had fallen down, but he certainly wasn’t in there.

“Polly?” I stupidly asked the dog. “Where’s Paco?”

She grinned at me, tail whisking.

I went through the house. “Paco?” I looked in the office, which was the animals’ favorite hangout. Tough Stuff was on his high shelf, curled into a ball with his tail over his nose. But no Paco.

I searched the house, increasingly worried. He wasn’t under the beds. He wasn’t in the closets. He wasn’t in the cabinet under the kitchen sink. I looked everywhere he could get into and a lot of places he couldn’t.

Maybe Jack took him somewhere? As if he would! Although, who knows? – maybe the little guy had some sort of a fit, and Jack had to take him to the vet? I buzzed the intercom to the barn, and then tried
buzzing
the shop/tasting room. No answer. (See why I want a cell phone?)

Was it possible that Paco
not only got past the baby gate, but also found a way out of the house?

But behind all this speculation was the real wor
ry. It had dawned on me
that there was a
murderer at large in Queen Anne
and Paco was the only witness. Had I left the poor orphaned mini-canine trapped in the laundry room, served up on a platter for a ruthless killer? Of course, it’s not as if Paco could be put in the witness stand, to point a little paw at the defendant and yelp, “That’s the man! He did it!” Or describe the perp to a police artist. Was I getting hysterical here? Anyway, the point is that once you’ve killed someone, you’re probably not thinking rationally anymore, and whoever did it might have concluded that for their own safety and continued freedom, Paco had to go.

I went to the back door to examine the latch for signs of a break-in. Of course there were none. Because if I’d been thinking clearly I would have realized – middle of the day, Jack in and out, of course the back door had been left unlocked. If the murderer was after Paco, he could have just waltzed right in.

I sank down into a kitchen chair, trying to decide what to do next. Polly came over and stood beside me, grinning. I ruffled her ears. “Where’s Paco, Pol? Where is he?” (No, I wasn’t expecting an answer! I talk to my pets – doesn’t everybody?)

Try to think. Where hadn’t I looked? I’d looked everywhere inside. Maybe Paco somehow slipped out (having already dealt with the baby gate) when Jack came in sometime or other, and Jack, not wanting to keep the dog anyway, had just let him run. I couldn’t imagine Jack, who was a responsible person, doing such a thing. But what else could have happened?

I stood up. Might as well look around outside.

But through the kitchen window, I saw Craig coming toward the house. And frisking around him was – Paco!

I sagged with relief and took a couple deep breaths before flinging the door open. “There he is! Craig, where did you find him?”