Lost and Fondue (34 page)

“She has been arrested again. Urso discovered a letter she wrote to Harker about Julianne. In it she wrote that she wished Harker would choke on his inflated ego.”

Oh, my. How incriminating, seeing as Harker was strangled. And yet I still didn’t believe Quinn was guilty. She couldn’t be. But how could I convince Urso?

Pépère gestured toward the annex, where Matthew cradled a crying Meredith in his arms.

At the sight of them, my heart grew as tight as if it had been shrink-wrapped. I had to help Meredith. If I could prove that Sylvie was involved ...

I kissed my grandfather and started again for the office. Before I’d gone three paces, the front door opened and Prudence Hart marched in.

“Charlotte, stop this instant!”

Why should I? I continued toward the office.

“Charlotte, please stop.”

The
please
caught me off guard. I hesitated.

“I want a word with you.” Raising her left arm overhead, Prudence strode through the shop and behind the counter as if she owned the place. She wore a green charmeuse cocktail dress—totally inappropriate for the temperature. In her hand she clutched something that resembled a torch. The Statue of Liberty couldn’t have looked any more righteous.

On closer inspection, I could see Prudence’s torch was a sheaf of rolled-up papers. Flyers. The ones she had been posting around town.

“Truce,” she said.

My mouth opened. I snapped it shut. Didn’t a truce require two sides being at war? I hadn’t done a thing to counteract her initial assault other than offer not to shop in her store if she stayed out of mine.

“I do not need your friends saying bad things about me,” she said. “Don’t deny it. They’re insinuating that I’m crazy.”

“Who?” I sputtered.

“Tyanne, for one.”

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. Prudence shouldn’t have lambasted Tyanne’s little boy. When challenged, a mother bear always defended her cub. I said, “Anyone else?”

“That Sylvie Bessette, too.”

Oooh, interesting. Sylvie had switched allegiances.

“I want a truce.” Prudence thrust the flyers at me and offered a conciliatory, alligator-with-a-sour-stomach grin.

Something about her smile made me pause. I gaped at her teeth. They were so straight and smooth. I flashed on the picture of Barton Burrell in the theater program and realized what had bothered me about it. “Prudence, you were in here the other day.”

“I’m allowed to roam our fair city,” she hissed.

“Time out.” I formed a T with my hands. “You mentioned how upset you were with the college people visiting the museum.”

“Riffraff.”

“You said they were scruffy. Did one have a beard?” I remembered thinking that I wouldn’t have recognized Barton if he’d had a beard in his photograph. Not that I believed Barton was one of the riffraff. I was focused on Sylvie.

“If that’s what you’d call it.” Prudence instinctively stroked her chin. “It was so thin and sparse it looked fake.”

“Could one of these so-called riffraff have been a woman?”

“I guess so.”

I pictured Sylvie at the black-box theater, on the night of the murder, prancing about the stage dressed as Fagin.

“The other was shorter, sort of hunched,” Prudence added.

“You said that they tracked in snow. We don’t have snow right now.”

“It was during the winter. January, I believe.”

And Prudence was still upset about it? I let that slide.

“By the way,” she went on. “Why were they here in January?”

Why
, exactly.

I recalled the tourist who had come into the shop in January—long hair, scruffy beard, wide nose. At the time, he’d struck me as a little odd, standing hunched over like he was tall and trying to be smaller. He’d snagged a slice of Morbier from the cheese-tasting counter, but he hadn’t purchased anything. Was it one of the riffraff Prudence had seen? Was it the same person who had stood on the sidewalk outside my house? Was it really a man? He hadn’t spoken. He’d loitered and left. Sylvie said that she’d read about Meredith’s intent to convert the winery to a college way back in December. Had she come to town in January and disguised herself as a man to—as Rebecca would say—case the joint? On the night of the winery event, had Harker stumbled upon Sylvie while she was looking for treasure? To cover her tracks, had she strangled him? I still couldn’t fathom a reason for her to build a brick wall, but I pushed that detail from my mind. For all I knew, the bricks could have been filched from Meredith’s by a team of high school hellions and the wall built as a prank.

I said, “I’ve got work to do, Prudence. Nice talking to you.”

“What about our truce?”

Impulsively I pecked her cheek. “Truce, yes, fine. We’ve got a truce.”

She fanned herself with the flyers.

Once inside the office, I nudged Rags to the back of the desk chair. He waited until I was settled, then tiptoed around me, nestled into my lap, and yowled his
pet me, pet me now
sound. Like a well-trained human, I obeyed.

While stroking him, I hit the return button on the computer keyboard. The monitor came to life. At the top of a series of Internet searches was a
London Evening Standard
article Bozz had pulled up. Eager to see if Sylvie was in Providence in January, I read it word for word. As it turned out, not only had Sylvie not lied about her parents being broke, but during the entire month of January, she had been by their side in court. There were photographs of her and public statements outlining her deals with creditors. She wouldn’t have had a spare moment to fly across the Atlantic to visit Providence. Despite my dislike of her, I was relieved to learn that the twins’ mother was not a murderer.

Exhausted and ready to close up shop, knowing my time would be better spent comforting Meredith, I clicked on the X at the upper-right corner of the Internet page. Beneath it were layers of other Internet search pages. I groaned. What was I going to do with Bozz? I hoped I wouldn’t stumble upon any teenage boy searches that might make me blush.

The first was Bozz’s genealogy project that he was doing with Philby. So were the next two. The Jebbses had come from Derby, England, and the Bozzutos had come from Castelpagano in Italy. There was no possible connection between the two families. Lucky Bozz.

A few pages later, I came upon Bozz’s discovery about Dane and Edsel’s volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity. A photograph of the students involved in the project appeared in the center of the page. Dane and Edsel stood together, each carrying tools and layered with perspiration. I halted, my finger hovering over the X that would close the page as I remembered something Prudence had said. One of the scruffy riffraff who had come to town in January was hunched. Had Edsel Nash and Dane made a trek to Providence together? They were rooming together at Lavender and Lace. They did volunteer work as a team. Edsel said they had been the first two to enroll in the art class.

Or better yet, had Dane come to town with someone else and pretended to be Edsel? That would have been the sly thing to do. Although he was smooth-faced, I remembered thinking a few days ago that, with a little makeup, he might look like Johnny Depp in
Pirates of the Caribbean
. Scruffy. Had he plotted Harker’s death back in January? Given his volunteer experience, he could have learned how to put together a brick wall.

I replayed a conversation between the students at the onset of the event at the winery. To defuse Harker’s anger at Bozz, Dane had suggested they take a tour of the mansion. He told Harker that he’d heard the layout was cool. When Harker asked how he knew that, Dane replied that his parents were Ohio architecture buffs. What if he had lied about that to cover up the fact that he was personally intimate with the winery’s structure? Except at the pub, when a group of us were discussing that the wall looked new, Dane hadn’t played it down. He’d reiterated that his parents knew the ins and outs of the structure. Had he hoped his openness would deflect suspicion from him?

I flashed on something else. The stranger who had come into The Cheese Shop in January had tasted the Morbier. The first day that Freddy and the students had visited Fromagerie Bessette, Dane had asked for Morbier. It was an unusual request.

As I moved my finger, ready to close the Internet page, I paused yet again, my gaze riveted by the picture of volunteers. I zeroed in on Dane. As I peered at his somber face, I stiffened. I’d seen eyes like his before. In a portrait. At the Ziegler Winery. Zachariah Ziegler’s eyes and his son’s eyes were like Dane’s. Deep-set and dark.

Could it be?
Was Dane a Ziegler?

I worked through the theory. He said he was from New York, but he also said his parents were originally from Ohio. In the 1950s, Ziegler’s daughter Cecilia had moved to New York. Had she married someone named Cegielski? Dane would be about the right age to be her grandson.

A genealogy search like Bozz’s was in order. I typed the name
Cecilia Ziegler
into a Google search line, added a plus sign, and typed
ancestry
. Up came Zachariah and his wife as Cecilia’s parents. Cecilia married in the 1960s, but like many hippies, she kept the maiden name of Ziegler. She bore one child, whom she named Zeb. She died in the 1970s. There was no mention of anyone named Cegielski.

I typed
Dane Cegielski
into a search line. Over two hundred thousand Cegielski references emerged. The first specific one for Dane Cegielski was the same article that Bozz had found about volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. I was ready to dig deeper, when I noticed another article, about halfway down the first page of search items, that read:
Cegielski: surname.
The first line of the article:
Cegielski, in Polish, means tiler or bricklayer.

The killer liked leaving clues. Had Dane built the wall to telegraph that he was the killer?

Fingertips tingling with excitement, I double-clicked the article and couldn’t believe what I found. According to the website, during the Middle Ages, as people moved north, surnames adapted to the languages of the people.
Cegielski,
a Polish name, became
Ziegler
in Germany. Was Dane the grandson of Cecilia Ziegler? The son of Zeb? Had he changed his name to Cegielski to hide his identity? Had he come to the winery to claim the treasure that he believed was rightfully his?

I typed
Dane Ziegler
plus
ancestry
into a Google search. A host of articles appeared. One made my teeth tingle. Dane’s mother had committed suicide. The journalist who wrote the article noted that Dane’s great-grandmother had committed suicide after killing her son. The journalist added that, of course, a history of insanity could not be concluded because Dane’s mother was not a Ziegler. But the coincidence was bizarre.

I sat back in the chair, my breathing shallow, certain that Dane killed Harker. But why? I couldn’t chalk it up to mere family insanity. By my estimation, there was a tremendous amount of premeditation. One: Dane came to town in January. He stole the bricks in small increments—possible because snowfall had hidden the theft. Two: He built the wall. Three: On the night of the event, Dane toyed with Quinn. He tried to get her to taste the fondue. He must have known about her allergy. He purposely dripped cheese on the scarf, hoping she’d abandon it. All along, he planned to use her scarf in the murder. Four: He placed fake jewels around Harker. That was the capper. If they’d been real because he’d been searching for treasure, I could have seen Dane leaving them in haste. But the jewels were fake. That made them significant. I believe they represented Harker’s ex-fiancée: Jules. Dane had known about her.

A tremor of anxiety shot through me as I realized Dane could have been the stranger who had stood outside my house. He might have thought that I had put two and two together. He would have been wrong, of course, unless he believed I’d seen something when I’d stolen through his room to get to Freddy’s—something linking him to Harker’s murder.

Rags yowled his
I’m starved
squall.

I scratched his ears and whispered, “Good idea. I’ll take you home and feed you. Then I’m going next door to snoop, okay?”

To make my visit to the B&B look legitimate, I would take a basket of cheese for Lois.

With Rags trailing me, I raced from the office and fetched a basket from the shelves behind the cheese counter.

“Whatcha doing?” Rebecca strode from the kitchen with a fresh white towel to clean the counters. Soft afternoon light bathed her in a radiant glow.

“I’m making a basket.” My voice sounded a little too singsong. I cleared my throat.

“I can see that.”

“Time to close up.”

“I’m on it.” She waggled the towel.

“Of course you are.” I set the basket on the cutting board and swiped rounds of Camembert and Brie from the cheese display. Lois preferred soft cheeses.

The Cheese Shop was empty of customers. So was the annex. I spotted Meredith and Matthew sitting at a booth in the Country Kitchen across the street. Jordan and his sister sat in the booth next to them. As if sensing me watching him, Jordan looked up and smiled in my direction. I remembered our last delicious kiss in the co-op garden, and my insides turned warm, like the center of a molten lava cake made doubly rich with a powdered sugar and crème fraîche center.

Soon, I reminded myself. We would leave for our getaway soon.

“Where’s Pépère?” I asked.

“He went back to the theater,” Rebecca said. “What’s up? You’re acting funny.”

“Nothing’s up.”

“Liar.”

How could she tell? I was the model of calm. Chin high, shoulders back. My hands weren’t even trembling.

“You’re doing that lip thing. And your eyes ...” She twirled a finger. “They’re all glazed over. You’re keeping something from me.”