Dyeing Wishes (17 page)

“A what?”

“I think it’s in my pocket. And it’s a legit press pass. Well, almost, anyway. Class ends next week, though, and I really need to finish this up. And with the stuff I’ve already got, and after tonight, I’m pretty sure this will get me an A.” Pen jabbered on, eyes wide and innocent. But there was a hint of something like satisfaction or cynicism tickling the corners of her mouth.

“I don’t think that’s the way a press pass works,” Debbie said, nose wrinkled. The barrel of the gun was beginning to droop, and she looked as though she’d like to scratch her head.

“I can show you the pass if you want to see it,” Pen said. She started to lower her hands.

“Keep your hands up, Pen,” I cut in, “and keep your gun up, Debbie. Don’t let her stun you with her twaddle. Of course that’s not the way a press pass works. You must think we’re a couple of idiots, Pen. Talk about insulting. And where’s your buddy? Where’s Sylvia? I thought you were working on this project together. Are you two splitting the research or are you cutting her out of your scoop?”

That’s when I wondered about the flashlight. The bobbing, probing light that had alerted me to her presence. Where was it? Not in her hand. Not next to the camera
on the island. It sure wasn’t tucked into the waistband of her snug black superspy pants.

“Where’s the flashlight, Pen?”

Pen didn’t answer any of my questions. She didn’t move or shift her weight. There was no infinitesimal flick of her eyes to the area of floor we couldn’t see behind the nice, solid, four-foot-wide, six-foot-long work island. Pen stood still, her face blank. And she was quiet. Too quiet.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said, figuring out what was going on and instantly furious. “You have got to be kidding me. Nice try, Sylvia.”

“You mean there’s another one here?” Debbie asked.

“Yes,” I spat, and I stormed around the end of the island knowing I’d find Sylvia crouched behind it. Probably in a matching head-to-toe snoop suit. And probably with a voice-activated snooper spy recorder. She’d be smiling at me cordially on the outside and snickering on the inside. “Darn it!”

“Where?” Debbie asked.

Nowhere.

“Darn, I was sure she’d be here.” But as hard as I stared at the floor behind the island, Sylvia wasn’t there. Double darn. When would I learn that my instincts for surprising people red-handed were pitiful? Although…although there was a double-door cupboard on that side of the island. “Aha!” I yanked the doors open—and terrified an entire stack of enamel pots and another of plastic tubs.

“I could’ve told you no one would fit in there,” Debbie said over my shoulder.

“I was so sure,” I muttered. “Whoa, wait a second. What are you doing over here? Where’s…darn it!”

We were victims of my own misdirection. Debbie had followed me around the island and now Pen was gone.
So was the camera. Debbie looked at me, spirits sinking and shotgun drooping. She swore more colorfully than I had and started for the door.

“Don’t bother, Debbie. We won’t find her in the dark.”

She swore again.

“But I
did
see a flashlight,” I said. “So where is it?”

“At this point, who cares? It was probably something like this, though.” Debbie pulled her key ring from a pocket and I walked over to see something no bigger than one of her keys. “She probably tucked it in a pocket or up her sleeve.”

“The light I saw was bigger than that.” By then we were both sounding petulant.

“This is brighter than you think. Here.” She flipped the overhead lights off. “See? All you do is squeeze it. It’s plenty bright. You could sneak around anywhere with one of these.”

She flashed the light toward the window in the end wall, then lit up the stove and sink along the back wall and played it over the island. I was about to grumble agreement when the hair on the back of my neck prickled and I was aware of movement in the dark near the open door behind us.

“Hands where I can see them, and freeze!”

Debbie’s micro flashlight, while adequate for the casual cat burglar, was nothing compared to the industrial explosion of light Deputy Dunbar blasted into our eyes. I knew it was Clod behind that nuclear torch only because I recognized his barked order. He’d barked it at me another time when it also hadn’t been necessary. To be fair, he was doing his cop thing, following his stiffly starched cop training. To
me
, his adherence to cop procedure cemented my opinion of him as a knee-jerk clod.

My eyes were still dazzled, so I couldn’t see the look
on his face when he realized whom he’d bagged, but I did expect to hear some sort of swallowed oath or at least a groan when he recognized us. I didn’t. I also expected him to quit shining the light in our eyes and he didn’t do that either. He drilled the blazing beams farther in. I screwed my eyes shut and put my left hand on the island because my head was starting to swim.

“Deputy, for God’s sake, will you take that light out of our eyes? Please?” I refused to cringe in front of Clod, but I might have been whining by then.

A voice fortified with honeysuckle offered respite. “Turn your back to him, hon, and the light won’t be in your eyes anymore.”

“Oh yeah, good thinking, Ardis.”

“Don’t move,” Clod snapped.

“Sorry, too late.” I made the mistake of looking at him over my shoulder and received another blast of light.

“Put that flashlight down, Cole Dunbar,” Ardis said. “Can’t you see these girls aren’t who you’re after? Here, give that thing to me.”

I heard a scuffle, a grunt, an indignant “well,” and a low growl. The grunt was Clod and the “well” had to be Ardis. The growl sounded like Bill, the border collie, giving his opinion of Clod. I agreed with him. Someone was smart enough to flip on the overhead lights. I turned around. Ardis stood with one hand on the switch and the other behind her back. She scowled at Clod. Clod was not a healthy shade of any natural color.

“Hey, Bill,” Debbie said. A happy tail whapped my shins. “How did Ardis get past you, huh, big boy? How’d you let that happen?” She still had the shotgun in the crook of her arm as she bent to rub his ears.

“I believe I was a dog whisperer in a previous life,” Ardis said. Her face softened as she watched Debbie
with Bill. “It just took finding the right words and the right tone of voice and then we got on like a house on fire.”

An ear-piercing whistle popped our little bubble of pleasantries.

“Stop talking. All of you,” Clod said. “Stop. No talking. No moving. Ms. Buchanan, return my flashlight.” He held out his hand.

“Do not turn it back on,” Ardis said. She looked down her nose at him and made him nod before she brought the flashlight from behind her back and handed it over.

“Ms. Keith,” Clod said, turning to her. “You will slowly and carefully put that shotgun on the floor and step away from it.”

“Best do as he says, hon,” Ardis said. “No telling how long we’ll be here otherwise.”

Debbie shrugged. “It’s not even loaded.”

“It’s not?” I said. “Yow. We came out here with a gun that wasn’t loaded? We jumped in here and accosted a person or persons unknown with our bare hands and an empty shotgun?”

“Well, really, you’re the one who did the jumping,” Debbie pointed out fairly enough, “and you seemed to know what you were doing, so I just went with it. But you”—she turned on Clod—“what took you so long getting here? We had the prowler cornered and she got away. Oh, sorry.” She’d inadvertently pointed the shotgun, still in the crook of her arm, at Clod. “I’m sorry. I’m putting it down. It’s down. There. And now I’m being quiet.” She backed away from the shotgun and folded her hands. “There.”

Clod stood, eyes closed, pinching the bridge of his nose between a thumb and index finger. That wouldn’t be part of his meticulous cop training, but it seemed to
help him cope. Ardis started to say something. Feeling uncharacteristically kindly toward Clod, I shushed her with a finger to my lips.

“So the prowler got away.” Clod opened his eyes and gave me a sour look. “Considering Ms. Rutledge is involved, that sounds about right.”

“Hey!”

“Hey, yourself, Ms. Rutledge.”

“I wasn’t saying hello.”

“No, but it’s always a pleasure running into you in the course of an official inquiry. Your involvement generally saves me time. There’s less chance of there being an actual perpetrator and quite often no facts to sift through. That means there isn’t so much to put in a report and I can go home early. I like that.”

“You are such a negative person. You need to work on that. And for your information, I know who the prowler was. Her name is Penelope Ledford. Hair to the middle of her back, straight and dark. Tall. About like this.” I held my hand above my head. “Slim. Late twenties to early thirties. Dark eyes. She’s taking a journalism class at a community college in Asheville. It’s the same class an older woman named Sylvia Furches is taking and I bet her car was parked out there on the side of the road just before the curve. So there.” That last part slipped out, but I meant it, so I let it lay.

“And what was she doing?” Clod didn’t show he was impressed by my recitation, but he looked less pained and more cop-like.

“Sneaking around in here with a flashlight,” Debbie said. “Kath saw the light from the house.”

“Do you keep this place locked?”

“Always. Door and windows both. Unless I’m in here.”

“Who has keys?”

“I’ve got mine right here.” She pulled out the key ring with the tiny flashlight and separated out a door key and held it up.

Clod nodded and sidestepped Ardis to study the door and frame.

“What about your neighbor across the river?” I asked when Debbie jammed the keys back in her pocket and didn’t say anything else. “Remember? You said she was going to drop off the spare when we were locked out on Monday. And, oh, gosh, in all the confusion, maybe she left it for you, but you forgot to look for it, and then Pen found it.”

I joined Clod at the door. “I don’t see any gouges or scratches, so it probably wasn’t jimmied. So maybe she did have the key. Unless she had lockpicks. Or can you really open a door like this by slipping a credit card in there? I’ve always wanted to try that. Would you be able to tell if someone did that? Is that officially called loiding, or is that only in books? But you know, Debbie”—I turned back to her—“if Pen found the key and she still has it, you should probably get your locks changed.” Maybe I was overexcited. I wasn’t usually such a chatterbox. I moved back and stood next to Ardis. She patted my shoulder and mouthed, “Good job.”

“Thank you,” Clod said. Whether he was thanking me for offering my insights or for closing my mouth and stepping out of the way, I couldn’t tell.

“Adrenaline,” I said, feeling compelled to apologize. “Caffeine and sugar, too. Too much cake and tea too late in the day. Mind if I run back to the house?”

“If you can wait another minute or two, I’d like to clear up a couple of quick things and then we can all be on our way,” Clod said.

“Hmm. Okay.”

“Ms. Keith,” he said, turning to Debbie, “I take it you did find the spare key? And you let yourself in and retrieved the keys now in your pocket?”

“Yes.”

“Did you return the spare key to your neighbor?”

“Um.”

“You didn’t. You found a hiding place for it here.”

She nodded.

“If it’s gone, Ms. Rutledge is right and you should get your locks changed. Do you know what this woman was looking for?”

Debbie shrugged and bent to rub Bill’s ears. I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and say she was tired or depressed by then, or overwhelmed, but if I’d had training in police interview techniques, I might have thought she was hiding something. I looked at Clod. He watched her, his head tilted very slightly. If I’d had training in Clod interpretation techniques, I would have said he thought she was hiding something, too.

“Ms. Keith? Any ideas?”

Debbie straightened and looked Clod in the eye. “No.”

I wanted to jump in at that point and ask Clod if
he
had any ideas. I wanted to find out what the two of them had discussed in the study. And I wanted to know why Debbie’s attitude toward Clod had changed. Why was she looking at him like a sheepdog facing down a threat instead of like a mooncalf the way she had earlier in the week?

Lucky me, though. I didn’t need to ask about their conversation in the study because I had my secret weapon. My personal surveillance system—my fly on the wall in the form of a nosy ghost in the attic—would fill me in later.

Clod studied the three of us, settling his gaze on me. I
did my best to keep any secret smiles concerning secret surveillance systems off my face. Also not to stare at the twitch he seemed to have developed around his left eye. He started to open his mouth, maybe to finish clearing up his couple of things by asking me another question or two. But he’d missed his chance to be quick—I was almost beyond desperate. I shoved him aside and scampered for the house.

E
rnestine, Thea, and Mel all called me that night. Each was anxious for a report on our visit with Debbie, though each expressed a different reason for her concern. Ernestine worried that Debbie had no ready shoulder to cry on if she was still upset and needed one. She also wondered if we’d found out what exactly had prompted Debbie’s tears that afternoon.

“Was it because of the last few questions you wrote on the whiteboard, do you think? Or was she already crying when she came banging into the room? That’s one of those details my sorry old eyes miss.”

“I think she was already upset. I don’t know if she was already crying.”

“You should write everything down that happened tonight,” Ernestine said. “Any new questions, too.”

Wise Ernestine. When Thea called, I’d located a mostly empty spiral notebook and was absorbed in re-creating a timeline of the events since we’d walked out into that field. I could transfer everything to my laptop later, but for now I liked the idea of using one of Granny’s notebooks the way she had to keep track of ideas and to map out a project. Thea’s interruption was brief. She said she wanted to be sure Debbie wasn’t angry with any of us, that she didn’t want the equilibrium of Friday Fast and Furious disturbed, or the pleasant atmosphere in the shop.