Death of a Dapper Snowman (16 page)

The young men gave my car an appreciative look, and then, to my surprise gave me an appreciative look as well. I was wearing my new lace-up boots, wool jacket, brown cords, and emerald green blouse. One of the bigger guys gave me a chin-lift gesture as he walked by, letting me know he liked what he saw. I smiled to myself, happy that my new “smart casual” clothes had been a good investment.

I walked inside the pawn shop and immediately started sneezing from the dust.

A young woman of about twenty, with a shaved head and multiple piercings, sat behind the main counter on a stool, oblivious to me as she thumbed her phone screen.

I sneezed again, and she didn’t even glance my way, let alone greet me.

I couldn’t help but say, “Your customers wouldn’t sneeze so much if someone ran a damp cloth over these display cases.”

She looked up at me like I was a fussy old woman who stuck her nose in everyone’s business. I realized, with horror, that I was exactly that sort of person.

I was no different from Pam, who’d said the same thing to my employee just a few days earlier. I made a mental note to be more appreciative of Pam, as well as another mental note to not let myself fully turn into her.

The employee gave me a dull stare and said, “Is there anything I can help you with?”

“I’m looking for some cufflinks. They’re probably vintage.”

“What are cufflinks?” She stared at me steadily, her expression unchanging.

Instead of explaining it to her, I reached into my purse and pulled out the envelopes and the checks. “These are from here, right?”

She shrugged. “Looks like it. What’s wrong, lady? Did your kid pawn your stuff for drug money?”

My eyes bulged. I wanted to tell her I was only thirty-three, and certainly not old enough to have a teenaged son. Furthermore, even if I did have a teenaged son, he wouldn’t be the sort of delinquent who pawned my things for drug money. My son would obey the law.

Or would he? Here I was, committing mail fraud with my murdered neighbor’s checks in my hand, so maybe the apple wouldn’t fall far from the tree after all.

“Sorry about your kid,” she said. “That’s a real bummer when they steal from you, but I can’t cash those checks.”

The dust was making my eyes water. I sniffed and rubbed my eye.

“Don’t cry,” she said. “I can maybe look up the lot number from the check, if you want.”

I wasn’t crying, but she didn’t have to know that. I sniffed and said, “Thank you so much.”

“I’ll have to look it up on the computer, but yeah, whatever.” She took the checks and walked over to a computer terminal that looked older than her, and started tapping away.

Her movements stirred up more dust, making me sneeze. With each sneeze, she gave me a suspicious look, like I was doing it on purpose to make her feel bad about not dusting.

The display shelves were really coated in grime, too. I could see a bottle of glass cleaner and paper towels sitting behind the counter, and it took some effort to just stand around doing nothing instead of grabbing the supplies and helping tidy up the pawn shop.

Finally, ten minutes and just as many sneezes later, she brought me a tray with four small items: a pair of cufflinks, a jeweled money clip, a man’s gold wedding ring, and a gaudy broach of a panther.

“I just want the cufflinks,” I said.

She held onto one check and handed the other three back to me. “I might be able to do a straight exchange for the check, since it’s been less than two weeks.”

I grabbed the check from her hands. “Actually, I’ll pay with my credit card. I need the checks for evidence.”

She cracked a smile. “Your kid is in some serious, deep trouble.” She stirred up some more dust on the way to the computer again and rang up the purchase.

While she was busy, I quickly got out my phone and took some pictures of the other three items, to pass along to the Misty Falls police department. According to the dollar amount of the checks, and the lax security of the store’s employee, it seemed that none of these objects was valuable enough to murder someone over. I wasn’t sure if they could even be clues.

The panther seemed like it could be useful. It looked similar in design to the necklace charm I’d seen Ruby wearing, which meant it could have come from her store. Maybe it had disappeared during the time her security cameras weren’t working.

I didn’t know what these potential clues meant, but I hoped they meant something.

While I was paying for the cufflinks, another customer came in and asked the employee if the owner was in that day.

“Never this early,” the employee answered. “He’s more of a night owl.”

“Can I leave a note?”

The employee excused herself from processing my transaction and brought a pad of paper and pen over to the other customer.

I turned my head, absent-mindedly watching the transaction, and was surprised to see a familiar face. The other customer in the store was the blonde, Harper, who I’d met at the Fox and Hound.

Busted!

She had denied knowing Mr. Jenkins, the costume shop owner, yet here she was, in the same pawn shop as his cufflinks.

“Harper,” I said in a friendly tone.

She didn’t look up from her pad of paper.

I tried again. “Hi there, Harper.”

She handed the paper to the employee, turned, and walked right out of the shop without acknowledging me.

The employee rubbed her shaved head and gave me a curious look. “Your friend didn’t want to talk to you.”

“She’s not my friend. She must not have heard me, or…” I didn’t finish my sentence out loud.
Or maybe she didn’t look over because her name isn’t Harper.

The employee printed out my receipt and handed it over with the cufflinks.

I thanked her and hurried out of the store, hoping to see the blonde whose name may or may not have been Harper.

What would I do if I saw her? Follow her? Corner her and demand an explanation?

I scanned the parking lot and looked along the other shops in the strip mall, but couldn’t see any sign of her.

She got away.

I vowed that the next time I spotted that girl, she wasn’t going to slip away without answering a few questions.

Chapter 21
 

After Harper disappeared
on me, I spent another hour walking along the nearby businesses looking for her. I got a few more appreciative glances and nods from young men who were not ideal dating candidates, but whose attention was still appreciated, nonetheless.

When I’d finished checking every neighboring storefront, I returned to my car and started driving back to the hospital. The afternoon rush hour was starting already and the trip took twice as long as it had taken in the reverse direction.

Sitting in traffic for even a few minutes made me regret the few complaints I had about Misty Falls. No matter how disappointing I found the sweet and sour chicken balls from the town’s only Chinese food restaurant, at least I could get to the restaurant in five minutes if the one light on that route was green.

By the time I got to the hospital, I was hungry enough to eat a whole plate of the Golden Wok’s sweet and sour chicken balls without complaint.

I took the elevator up to my father’s floor and walked down to his room. I was happy to see he was awake, and surprised that he already had company.

Sitting next to my father’s hospital bed was Officer Tony Milano, who greeted me with a solemn nod. My skin got clammy immediately. If Tony was here, that meant something awful had happened.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

My father was sitting up in bed, awake and alert. He almost looked like his usual self, except for the green hospital gown and a scruffy jawline in need of a shave.

“The usual,” my father said calmly. “The Misty Falls police department is trying to pin a murder on me.”

“Not again,” I said.

He shrugged. “It’s been a few years. I suppose this is their way of letting me know that just because I’ve been put out to pasture, I haven’t been forgotten.”

I went to stand next to the bed, on the opposite side of where Tony sat. I didn’t take a chair, because I wanted to remain standing, looking down at him threateningly.

Scowling, I demanded, “You’re not seriously going after my father for this one, are you? Don’t you have more important things to do?”

“More important than catching a murderer?” Tony’s dark eyebrows raised. “I’m just doing my job, Stormy.”

“It’s okay,” my father said to me, sounding defeated. “I’d come after me too, if I were him. And I did utter death threats on multiple occasions. The old man knew I was joking. Everyone did. But I still said what I said. Threats are threats.”

Tony flipped through the pages of a small notebook. “You said you would ‘choke some sense’ into Mr. Michaels. What did you mean by that?”

“Just what I said. That I wanted to choke some sense into him, because he had no right getting into my personal business.”

“You can’t go around threatening to choke sense into people, Finn.”

My father grinned up at Tony. “But I’m just a harmless retiree now, enjoying my golden years. Surely nobody takes anything I say seriously.”

I patted my father’s hand. “Dad, you don’t have to answer these questions now. We can talk to a lawyer.”

He swatted my hand away. “Don’t try to shush me. You’re as bad as Pam.”

“I am NOT as bad as Pam.” I turned to Tony and shook my head emphatically as I told him, too, “I’m
nothing
like Pam, and I certainly won’t be turning into her.”

My father laughed. “Let’s hope not.”

He found this amusing, but I wasn’t laughing.

Tony consulted his notepad then asked my father, “What did you and Mr. Michaels disagree over?”

My father scratched the gray scruff on his chin. “Hmm. What didn’t we disagree over? We’ve been neighbors so long. We started off on the wrong foot, right from the beginning. He kept asking what the girls’ real names were.”

I interrupted to say, “Did he really?”

“Yes. He thought I called you two Sunny and Stormy just to irritate him. One time, I showed him your birth certificates, and he said I had the connections to have fake ones made up.”

“I never knew about that.” My legs felt shaky with the weight of this news. The idea that our cranky old neighbor actually cared about me and my sister… it made me feel more upset about his death.

My father turned to me with sad eyes and said, “Take a seat. I have something to tell you.”

I pulled a visitor’s chair from the wall and took a seat next to my father’s bed, across from Tony. We both leaned in, waiting for what he was about to say.

My father took my hand, looked into my eyes, and said, “He was right about the birth certificates for you girls. I did fake them.”

“What?”

He took a deep breath and said, “Stormy, I’ve lied to you your whole life. You were named after your great-great-grandfather. Your real name is Ignateous.” He smirked. “And your sister’s name is Spalding, like the tennis balls.”

I yanked my hand away and rolled my eyes. “Oh, Dad. You’re the worst.” I shook my head and said to Tony, “Did he ever tell you about how he had Sunny convinced that our mother was Barbara Eden’s character from that old series,
I Dream of Jeannie
? Not the actress, but the character. We had an old Chianti bottle on the mantle, and he swore up and down that she lived in there and watched over us when he had to work nights.”

“Did it work?” Tony asked. “Did that make you girls behave? And if it did, can I borrow the Chianti bottle for my house?”

I gave Tony a big grin. “You can borrow it any time.”

“And he can take your imaginary friend, too,” Dad said. “What was his name? Jameson Green? Johnny Purple? Whoever he was, you were obsessed with him. I’d hear you chatting away in your room, all alone.”

I rolled my eyes again. “Oh, Dad. I didn’t really
believe
in imaginary friends.”

“You most certainly did,” he said.

Tony, who was looking very amused by this, cut in to say, “I remember that friend. He was the one who did all the bad things Stormy denied doing. I think he egged Mr. Michaels’ house at Halloween. What was that guy’s name?”

I sighed heavily “You guys. I didn’t think he was real.”

Dad look at Tony, and in all seriousness said, “He was real. I saw him once. Eating all the Girl Scout cookies Stormy was supposed to sell.”

I glanced around his room looking for medications. “What kind of pills have they got you on, Dad? I think they need to dial the levels down. How is the hip, anyway?”

Dad groaned and adjusted his position in the bed. “My hip? It’ll be better once I’m out of this bed and moving around again. Dora says I’ll have to walk with a cane. I told her I would, but only if it’s one of those super spy canes that turns into a sword.”

I shook my head. “That’s just what you need. A sword. For what?”

“Obviously to murder the rest of the neighbors on the block.” He covered his mouth with one hand. “Oops, was that out loud? The sword-cane would be to protect myself. There’s a serial killer on the loose, don’t you know?”

I grabbed his hand and squeezed it while I gave him a serious look. “Dad, don’t joke around. Would you just answer Tony’s questions about Mr. Michaels? I’m sure he has more important things to do, like chase down the actual killer.”