Buy a Whisker (13 page)

“Thanks,” he said. “I'll be in touch.” He headed for the front door.

Rose gave Mac and me a self-satisfied grin. “I think we solved Lily's murder,” she said.

I looked at Elvis, who was poking his nose in a box Mac had set on the workbench.

“I don't think so,” I said.

“What do you mean, you don't think so?” Rose frowned at me.

“The hair,” I said, gesturing to the cell phone she still held in her hand. “It looks fake. But before we get to that, where did you get that video? How did you get it?”

“I have my sources,” she said. Her eyes met mine, and there was a stubborn set to her shoulders.

I tipped my head in Mr. P.'s direction. “I'm guessing your source is sitting over there.”

“If you think you know, then why did you ask?”

I counted to five, took a breath and let it out slowly. “I told you I wasn't going to fight with you about your investigation, but you can't keep hacking into people's computers when you want information.”

“We didn't,” Rose said placidly. “After Carl
Levenger was here yesterday, I remembered what Charlotte had said about the bookstore having an old security camera that recorded Caleb Swift the night he disappeared. So I went to see him.”

“So Carl gave you that video?”

She shook her head. “No. The police already have it. I don't think there was anything on it that was any use.” She held up her phone. “This came from the gift shop on the other side of Carl.” The look she gave me was more than a little smug.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

She leaned over and patted my arm. “You're forgiven, dear. Now tell me why you think that hair isn't real.”

Rose played the video again, and Mac leaned over to watch it with her.

“You think it's a wig?” she said.

I nodded. “I do. I know it sounds crazy, but watch.” I pointed at the small screen. “See? There. Whoever that is just adjusted their hair.” The person in the video put his or her hand up and moved their entire head of hair slightly forward. “That hair is probably not real at all.”

Rose studied the video as she weighed my words. “I can't tell,” she said finally, “but I trust your judgment.”

“So if that's not Jon West, someone put in some effort to make it look like he was at Lily's,” Mac said.

Rose took off her glasses and cleaned them on the hem of her sweater. “I think Alf and I need to do a little more digging.” She bustled back toward Mr. P.,
who had been diligently typing on his laptop for the previous ten minutes while sneaking little peeks in our direction.

Mac leaned over and scratched the top of Elvis's head. “Stay out of that,” he said quietly. The cat immediately dropped his paw and stopped rooting in the box.

“Why does he listen to you when you tell him to stay out of something but ignore me when I tell him?” I asked.

“It's a guy thing,” Mac said.

Elvis meowed his agreement.

“So are you going to tell Rose the other reason you think Jon West is innocent?” Mac asked.

“What would that be?” I said, feeling my cheeks get warm.

Elvis, with his uncanny sense of timing, meowed loudly.

Mac didn't say a word. He just looked, pointedly, from the cat to me.

“Fine. I was watching while Jon was petting him.” I glanced at Elvis, who seemed to smile at me. “I don't think Jon West had anything to do with Lily's death because my cat, the feline lie detector, told me so. Nothing crazy about that.”

“It's not so far-fetched,” he said. “Elvis has better night vision than we have. He has a better sense of smell. Why is it so crazy that he can sense the physiological signs that someone is lying?” He nudged me with his shoulder. “You think it was a
coincidence that Elvis seemed to know who killed Arthur Fenety before the rest of us did?”

“I was kind of hoping it was,” I said.

Mac laughed. “Elvis being able to tell when someone is lying is
not
the strangest thing that's happened around here,” he said. We headed out into the shop.

Avery and Charlotte were standing by the front window. Actually, Avery was standing in the window, gesticulating wildly while Charlotte nodded from time to time. Mac raised his eyebrows.

“Point taken,” I said.

I went back up to my office and spent the next hour putting together an offer for the items we wanted to buy from Malcolm Thomas's family. When I came back downstairs, Charlotte was waiting on a customer who was holding two quilts and Avery was dusting a set of bookshelves that Mac and I had made from an old pantry cabinet.

I was glad I'd said yes to her window display idea. I didn't know a lot of the details behind Avery's problems at home, but I could see it had been good for her to be with Liz and spend time with Rose and Charlotte as well, just the way it had been good for me when I'd been her age.

Avery came over to me. “I talked to Sam,” she said. I could see from the grin on her face that he'd said yes, she could borrow the KISS costumes. I made a mental note to thank him the next time I saw him.

“And he said yes?” I said.

She nodded.

“I can't wait to see what you and Charlotte come up with.”

Her expression grew serious, and she slid the stack of bracelets up and down her arm. “If you like it, could I maybe do a window all by myself sometime?”

I nodded slowly. “Yes.”

She threw her arms around me. “Thank you, Sarah,” she said.

I hugged her back. “You've been doing a good job,” I said. “I'm glad I hired you.”

She pulled back out of the embrace and rolled her eyes at me. “You mean because Nonna forced you into it.”

“Your grandmother didn't make me hire you, Avery,” I said.

She looked surprised. “Really? I thought maybe she knew some embarrassing story about you or something.”

That idea made me laugh. “Avery, there are dozens of embarrassing stories about me floating around. So many there's no blackmail potential left. Nobody made me hire you.”

The woman at the cash register had picked up one of the teacup gardens. “Look,” I said. “Your teacup gardens sell out as fast as we get them made. They were your idea.”

“I'll bring the rest of them out as soon as I finish this shelf,” she said.

I nodded and headed for the storeroom.

Mac was still at the workbench talking on his
phone. The top of a mantel clock was lying in three pieces, and I could see he'd gotten a couple of clamps out. The clock had been another yard-sale find, the wooden case in several pieces, but for two dollars it seemed worth the investment of a little time. Mac set his cell on the workbench, pulled one hand over his neck and uttered a couple of swearwords almost under his breath.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

He made a face and shook his head. “The place where I've been renting my apartment has been sold. I have six weeks to find a new place.” He gave a humorless laugh. “Maybe I should see if Rose is interested in being roommates.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “If I had another apartment, I'd let you have it. If I had any space other than the little storage closet you saw under the stairs, it would be yours.”

Mac managed a smiled. “Thanks. I appreciate the thought.”

“Why don't you let Mac move in here?” Avery was standing behind us, probably on her way to get the tiny planters.

I looked around the space. “Avery, this is a storage room,” I said. “Mac can't live here.”

She gave me the look teenagers have been giving adults for millennia. That “how dumb can you be” expression.

“Not down here, duh,” she said. “There's that big space upstairs that we don't even use half of for storage. Why can't Mac live there?”

Mac said, “No,” at exactly the same time as I said, “What do you mean?” He spoke first the second time. “No,” he said again.

I pictured the second-floor storage area Avery was talking about. The big room that faced the side parking lot was actually two rooms with doors that slid back into the wall. In one of the building's previous incarnations, it had been a private smokers' club. There had been a wet bar at the end of the bigger of the two rooms, and the plumbing was still in place.

“Hang on a minute,” I said. “Avery might be onto something.”

“I am,” she said. She didn't lack confidence in her ideas. “There's not that much stuff up there. I know because I was just upstairs to get a couple of the quilts for Charlotte—nothing really big because it's too hard to get big stuff up the stairs in the first place. And we still have under the stairs and even the sunporch until spring because the Angels have their office in here now anyway. And Mac could even use
the back staircase because it's only sort of blocked off, and then he wouldn't have to go through the store all the time.”

I held up both hands. “Avery, take a breath.”

“No,” Mac said for the third time.

It could work, I realized. “Mac, we should at least take a look.”

“We should,” Avery echoed. She tucked her dark hair behind one ear. “I already have some ideas for how you could do the layout.”

“And I'm sure they're good ones,” I said. “But we're just going to take a quick look. I need you down here with Charlotte for now.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

“Come take a look,” I said to Mac, inclining my head in the direction of the stairs.

He shook his head in resignation. “All right.”

He didn't say a word until we were at the top of the stairs. Then he turned to me. “Okay, we're here. Just count to ten and then we'll go back downstairs and say it won't work.”

I pulled my keys out of my pocket and took a moment to study Mac. He looked uncomfortable, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “You want to keep your work life and your private life separate. I understand that,” I said. “As you pointed out a little while ago, this isn't a typical workplace. But if you're interested at all, I think Avery might be onto something.”

After a long moment, he nodded slowly. “I guess it doesn't hurt to take a look.”

I unlocked the door and we stepped inside. Overall, the space was bigger than the studio apartment Jess had lived in downtown before she found her current place. It was definitely bigger than the first apartment she and I had shared in university. And Avery was right. We really didn't have much stored up here at the moment because it was just too much of a hassle lugging things upstairs and then having to cart them back down again a week or so later.

“I know those sliding doors work,” I said. I walked across the room and looked at the space on the other side of the two panel doors. “There's room for a bed and a dresser in here. Maybe even a chair.”

Each of the rooms had a good-sized window that let in lots of light. And the old house had been well insulated during the original conversion years ago from a home to a business, so it was warm.

“The floors are in decent shape,” Mac said, reaching down and swiping a hand across the wide wooden boards.

I pointed at the end wall. “There's plumbing in that wall. It wouldn't be that hard to make a galley kitchen there and then go through that closet and connect to the bathroom in the hall.”

“What would we do for a staff washroom?”

“Do a little work on the one downstairs. We could put in a new sink and a new toilet, maybe find an end of vinyl or some tile for the floor and let Avery paint the walls.” I pulled a pen and a scrap of paper that had a short grocery list scribbled on it and sketched out a rough floor plan with a tiny galley
kitchen on the back. I handed him the piece of paper. “Could you build that?”

Mac studied my drawing for a moment, pulling a hand over his mouth.

“We worked pretty well together on Rose's apartment,” I said.

He smiled. “Yeah, we did, didn't we?”

“So can you build it?” I repeated.

He nodded. “Uh-huh. Except for the basic rough-in of the plumbing, I can do this.”

“So now the big question—do you want to do it?” I said.

Mac looked around the room. I knew he was intrigued by the way he was eyeing the end wall as though he were picturing a run of cupboards. “We could think about it,” he said. “On the condition that I pay the going rent. No special deals, Sarah.”

I nodded. “Agreed. And I have a condition.”

“What is it?”

“If this arrangement doesn't work out for either of us for any reason, we say so—no hard feelings.” I held out my hand. “What do you say? Do we have a deal?”

Mac hesitated, but only for a second or two. He took my hand, smiled and said, “We have a deal.”

Mac and I spent about an hour after the shop closed measuring the storage space and roughing out a floor plan with measurements scribbled on the side. Avery had wanted to stay and help, but I'd promised she could help us work on the downstairs washroom.

That evening, after a scrambled-egg sandwich and a clementine for me, and some Tasty Tenders for Elvis, I got a pad of grid paper and a pencil and started turning my rough drawing into a rudimentary floor plan. Elvis sat beside me, craning his neck and poking his head in my field of vision every few minutes. He put his paw on the page at one point and looked at me. “There for the sink?” I asked.

“Merow,” he answered.

I took a look at the spot on the drawing where he'd rested his paw. He was right. I set my pencil down, stretched my right arm over my head and reached for the phone. Elvis stretched as well and then sprawled over the floor plan as I punched in my parents' number.

“That's not helping,” I said. He gave me a look that seemed to suggest he wasn't trying to help.

My dad answered the phone. “Hi, sweetheart,” he said. I knew he was smiling, and it seemed to me that I could feel the warmth of that smile coming through the receiver.

“Hi, Dad,” I said. “Is it cold there?” My parents lived in New Hampshire, where my dad taught journalism at Keating State College.

“It's two-flap weather,” he said.

“That's some serious cold,” I said with a laugh. Dad had a mangy pile-lined leather aviator hat with earflaps, which he wore only when it was really, really cold. My mother hated that hat. She said it made him look like he'd been out in the bush about a week too long. She and I had both bought him other hats
over the years, but he liked his aviator hat more than any of them.

It had disappeared once under mysterious circumstances, and the entire neighborhood had been treated to the sight of my dad in a holey sweatshirt, pajama bottoms and unlaced Red Wings racing down the street after the garbage truck and then striding back, triumphantly holding the hat over his head like he was some kind of marauding Viking with a head on a pike. The hat had never been safer after that.

“Is Mom around?” I asked.

“She is,” he said. “Hang on and I'll get her.”

“Love you,” I said.

He'd already set the handset down, but I heard him call, “Love you, too!”

After a few moments of silence Mom picked up the phone. “Hi, baby,” she said.

“Hi, Mom,” I said. “Dad said it's cold there.”

“You've heard the expression ‘a three-dog night.' Well, we had an ugly-hat day.”

“I heard that,” my dad called out in the background.

Mom and I both laughed.

“So what's new with you?” she asked.

I explained about Mac losing his apartment and Avery's idea to create an apartment up above the shop. “That could work,” she said, and I pictured her reaching across the kitchen counter for a pencil and a pad of paper. “What were you thinking of for a layout?”

I shifted Elvis with one hand and pulled my drawing from underneath him while he muttered and murped with annoyance. I described my plan, and Mom made a couple of suggestions for the galley kitchen. I managed to scribble them on my sketch without having to make Elvis move altogether. He'd rolled onto his back and was watching me with a bemused look that seemed to say, “I'm not going anywhere.”

“I talked to your grandmother this morning,” Mom said. “She's going to call you later. She's worried about Liz.”

“She doesn't need to be,” I said, stroking the fur under Elvis's chin, which immediately put me back in his good graces. I explained what Michelle had told me.

Mom gave a soft sigh of relief. “Isabel will be happy to hear that.”

We talked for a few more minutes and then we said good night.

I was about to set the phone up on the counter when it rang. “Gram,” I said to Elvis. He reached over and put a paw on the phone, cat for “well, hurry up and answer it.”

I picked up the receiver. “Hi, Gram,” I said.

“Hello, dear,” she replied. I found myself smiling all over again.

“Before you say anything else, Liz isn't a suspect anymore in Lily's death,” I said. “I had supper with Michelle, and they know Liz wasn't anywhere near the bakery that night.”

“Thank heavens!” Gram exclaimed. “Liz would never hurt anyone. She's all bark and no bite.”

“That's because her bark is usually enough,” I said.

She laughed. “So are the Angels dropping the case?”

Elvis butted my hand with his head, and I began to scratch behind his left ear. “Not likely. Rose is determined to figure out who killed Lily.”

“She was a lovely girl,” Gram said quietly.

“Yes, she was,” I agreed. I swallowed a couple of times because all of a sudden there was a lump in my throat. This was the first time I'd let myself acknowledge that I missed Lily. We'd started to make a connection, as far as I was concerned, and I was sorry it was never going to become more than that now.

I cleared my throat. “Gram, what do you know about the Swift family?”

“What do you want to know?” she asked. I pictured her leaning forward, propping her elbows on her knees. “You're thinking about Caleb Swift, I'm guessing.”

Elvis had started to purr. “Charlotte gave me the bare bones. And I seem to remember you mentioning it when Caleb went missing.”

“He seemed to just vanish off the face of the earth,” Gram said. “They found his sailboat drifting just past the mouth of the harbor the next day.”

“Liz said that Daniel Swift believed Lily knew more than she was telling.”

She sighed softly. “The Swifts founded this town. They're old money, and sometimes with old money there's a certain sense of entitlement. Or maybe ‘arrogance' would be a better word.”

“Elspeth called Caleb a jerk,” I said. I started scratching behind Elvis's other ear. There wasn't even a momentary break in the purring soundtrack.

“I can't really say about Caleb,” she said. “But his grandfather, Daniel, he's an arrogant, entitled man.”

I'd seen Daniel Swift over the years. He was a tall, imposing man with a lined face from years of being out on the water and a deep voice. I knew his son and daughter-in-law had been killed in a plane crash years ago. Caleb was his only grandchild.

“Daniel couldn't accept the fact that the police weren't able to figure out what had happened to Caleb. He hired his own investigators, but they didn't turn up anything either. He refused to even entertain the idea that Caleb had staged the whole thing and just walked away from his life, which was the speculation around town. Daniel was certain there was some kind of foul play.”

“Do you think he was right?”

She hesitated. “I don't know,” she finally said. “I don't buy the idea that Caleb got bored with the money and the influence being a Swift gave him. I think it's possible he was drinking and fell off the boat, but Daniel wouldn't even think about that possibility. He'd always had blinders when it came to that boy. Understandable, I guess. Caleb was all he had left.

“Lily was one of the last people to see Caleb, and Daniel became obsessed with the idea that she knew something she wasn't telling. He kept pushing the police to search her bakery. Finally, one day Lily just got fed up. She stopped Daniel on the street, probably much the way I hear she did with Liz, and told him he could search the building anytime he wanted to because she had nothing to hide.”

I remembered the anger in Lily's voice when she'd accosted Liz. I wonder what it had been like when she'd confronted Daniel Swift.

“Did he?” I asked.

“He had the good sense not to,” Gram said. I could picture her ruefully shaking her head. “But that didn't mean he let it go, either.”

I talked to Gram for a few more minutes and then we said good-bye. “Stay safe, my darling,” she said.

“I will,” I said. Just because the Angels were still in the private detective business didn't mean I still was.

I took my floor-plan drawings to the shop with me in the morning. Mac had only a couple of tweaks. “Want me to start pricing materials?” he asked.

I nodded. “I'll go down after lunch and do the paperwork for the building permit. Do you have any plans for Friday night?”

“Are you asking me out?” he said, the beginning of a smile playing across his face.

“No,” I said. “I'm asking you in. Do you want to start moving things out of the space upstairs?”

“You mean you don't have a date?” he teased.

“Only with a furry guy whose idea of a good time is getting scratched under his chin while watching
Jeopardy!
.” Elvis was sitting in the middle of the love seat, working on a knot in the fur on his tail. He paused long enough to meow his acknowledgment that it was him I was talking about and went back to it.