Panic Button (17 page)

“My museum,” she said, emphasizing that first word, “is an exact replica of a home
of the late nineteenth century. Authentic down to the last teacup. You can look around.
You can sit in the chairs. You can go upstairs to the nursery and play with the kids’
dolls and blocks if you like. The whole point of my museum”—there was that emphasis
again—“is to give people a genuine appreciation for what life was like in Ardent back
then. Not to make them stand behind a velvet rope and look at some exhibit that’s
behind glass.”

“You mean like the exhibits at Susan’s museum? The museum where you applied for the
curator’s job. The job you didn’t get.”

Marci’s hair was especially spiky that day. She tucked one stiff curl behind her ear.
“You’ve been talking to…who? Susan?” She brushed off her own question as inconsequential.
“Not that it matters. Not that the stupid job over at that other museum mattered.
I applied for it, yes. They didn’t give it to me. Yes, that’s true too. It’s also
true that it’s their loss.” She shrugged to emphasize the point. “And it’s true that
I’m far more qualified than Susan. I once did an internship at the Field Museum in
Chicago, you know. Susan…” Marci’s smile was as stiff as her hair. I waited to hear
the crack. “Susan has all the right friends. Like on the museum board. She got the
job because she has connections. And you know what? Not getting that job turned out
to be the best thing that ever happened to me. It gave me a chance to open this place.
I’m plenty busy.”

As if it would somehow prove it, she pointed to the calendar on her desk. “I’ve got
school groups scheduled to come in every day this week. Not to shuffle through some
stuffy museum and learn absolutely nothing, but to get a genuine feel for what life
was like for their great-grandparents. The kids love coming here.”

“I can see why.” I wasn’t trying to shmooze Marci. Honest. I did a quick turn around
the parlor and realized there was a lot to like about the Little Museum. If I didn’t
know that the town was fake, I would have thought I’d been picked up and dropped right
into the nineteenth century. Then again, though I knew the house wasn’t genuine Victorian,
it didn’t mean the furnishings weren’t.

There was a red velvet fainting couch in one corner that looked incredibly uncomfortable
but was as funky as all get-out. There were curio cabinets nearby filled with teacups
and teapots. There was a man’s top hat and cane in a stand by the door, and even a
stuffed pheasant on top of a china cupboard.

Victorian.

Oh, so Victorian.

No buttons, as far as I could see, and that was probably a good thing. I wasn’t there
to get distracted. I was there to pin Marci down. Was she telling the truth about
Susan and Larry? Or had her jealousy led her to concoct a story?

I strolled from the parlor into the dining room and stopped cold.

“That punch bowl.” I didn’t have to point—after all, the punch bowl in question was
in the center of the mahogany table and impossible to miss.

Gorgeous china antique. Exquisitely painted and decorated with red and purple grapes.

My mind flashed to my visit to Angela’s, and the punch bowl that had once belonged
to Aunt Evelyn.

And then it flashed to the park and the night I’d met Marci.

She was carrying a shopping bag that night, and it kerchunked when she handled it.

Like there was glass inside.

Not the punch bowl, surely. I hadn’t seen it at Angela’s until the next day. But something
Marci didn’t want me to see. Something glass.

I scanned the dining room and the gorgeous oyster plates on the sideboard, the fabulous
serving platters on the buffet, the cut crystal stemware, glistening in the morning
sun that streamed through the window on my left.

And I wondered how much of it might have been pilfered from Angela’s stash.

“That punch bowl is so distinctive,” I continued, hopefully as if I hadn’t been gobsmacked.

Marci smiled. “It’s hand-painted. One of a kind. I know it’s not exactly historically
accurate to portray a house in Ardent as having so many fine things, but I’ll tell
you what, I come across something like that punch bowl at an antique shop or an auction
and I can’t help myself. I have to buy it. I have to display it. Beautiful things
deserve to be seen and appreciated, not locked away.”

“And you bought the punch bowl in…”

She brushed aside the question. “Saint Louis, maybe.
Or it might have been last summer when I took a trip up to Milwaukee. I did quite
a bit of shopping there.”

I didn’t dislike Marci. She struck me as being a little flighty, and let’s face it,
she did admit to lying to her husband about jogging and not smoking, but hey, there
were worse crimes. The least I could do was cut her a little slack.

“I suppose,” I said, strolling closer to the table and touching a finger to the punch
bowl, “you’d have the receipt. You know, to show the cops when I tell them I think
this came straight out of Angela’s house.”

Her jaw went slack. Her face paled. Marci was wearing the same ridiculously high heels
she’d worn to Angela’s wake, and her knees knocked and her ankles gave way. She plunked
down on one of the green velvet-cushioned dining room chairs and I was glad. Yeah,
she was a petite woman, but I didn’t fancy the thought of hauling her up off the floor.

It seemed she was also a lousy crook. At least if covering her tracks and acting innocent
had anything to do with it.

“How do you…When did you…” Marci’s hands shook and a single tear trickled down her
cheek. “Are you going to turn me in to the cops?” she asked.

“That depends.”

She swallowed hard. “On…”

“On if you tell me the truth.”

“I have. I always have.” Like a bobble-head, Marci nodded. “Well, not about the jogging.
And the smoking. But I didn’t lie to you about the smoking, I lied to my husband about
the smoking. So that doesn’t exactly count.
And I didn’t lie about Susan. You’ve got to believe me. She did used to date Larry,
and she was as mad as hell when Larry broke up with her to date Angela.”

“I believe you.” I did. There was no use beating around the bush. Marci was sitting
at the head of the table, and I took the seat to her right. “But what about the punch
bowl, Marci? Why did you take it? And how much of this other stuff is Angela’s?”

“Well, none of it’s hers anymore, is it?” Marci’s voice was sharp. Until she remembered
that she was in over her head. The starch went out of her, and her bottom lip quivered.
“Angela inherited so much from Evelyn,” she said, her voice bouncing over the words
with each unsteady breath she drew. “She never even noticed some of it was missing.”

“So you’ve been doing this for a while? Since before Angela was killed?”

Marci stopped to think, and I could only imagine she was wondering what would make
her look guiltier.

I figured I’d help along her thought processes. “If you were stealing from Angela
when she was still alive, and she found out about it, she’d have a reason to be really
angry. And she might have threatened to go to the police and turn you in. On the other
hand, if you didn’t take anything until after Angela was already dead, then it’s going
to make you look like you were taking advantage of a really bad situation. Personally,
I’d go with the second option if I were you. The first one gives you a mighty good
motive for killing Angela.”

“Me?” Marci hopped out of her chair. “I didn’t! I couldn’t! I’d never…” She gulped.
“OK, I admit it, I’ve
been sneaking into her house for a couple months and taking some of the stuff Aunt
Evelyn left to Angela. But Angela never found out about it. I swear. She never missed
a thing. She didn’t know. So she couldn’t have turned me in to the cops for stealing.
She didn’t know about me stealing. And stealing…You’ve probably already figured it
out. That’s what I was doing in the park the night I ran into you. Teapots, that night.
I took a couple teapots. But I’d never…” There was so much of a green tinge in her
complexion, I couldn’t help believing her.

“All right, I admit it,” she said. “I thought about killing Angela a time or two.
But I never did it. I never would. Taking some of her stuff, that was different and
there’s not a person in Ardent Lake who wouldn’t say it was justified. After all,
Angela owed me.”

First things first. “You thought about killing Angela a time or two? You want to explain
that?”

The head bobbing started again. “Because she lied to me. And she owed me. You know
that, don’t you? You understand? Angela owed me big-time.”

“Because…?”

Marci dragged in a breath. “Because of the charm string, of course,” she said.

At this point, even a pretty intelligent woman was allowed to be confused. I was plenty
intelligent. And plenty confused.

I patted the table to invite Marci to sit back down, and when she did, I spoke slowly
and carefully. “Start at the beginning,” I suggested.

She flicked the tears from her cheeks. “Yes, that’s
what I need to do. I need to start from the beginning, and tell you what happened.
Then you’ll understand and you won’t…” Hope gleamed in her eyes along with the tears.
“Then you won’t have me arrested.”

“Talk,” I said instead of making any promises I wasn’t sure I could keep.

She actually might have if she didn’t jump out of her chair, hurry into the parlor,
and come back holding that date book I’d seen on her desk. “It started a couple months
ago,” she explained, flipping back the calendar pages. “That’s when…that’s when Angela
came to me.” She stabbed her finger against a Monday circled in red on the calendar.
“She offered to donate her charm string.”

“To this museum?” I didn’t mean to make it sound like I was dissing the Little Museum
so I scrambled. “What I mean is, that’s not what I heard. That’s not what happened.
Angela was donating the charm string to Susan’s museum.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s how things ended up. Only…” For the first time since I’d caught
her red-and-purple-grape-handed, Marci’s expression brightened. “Only as it turned
out, Susan never did get that charm string, did she? Serves the bitch right.”

“And gives you another motive.”

Her smile vanished. “That’s not what I meant. I just meant, well, Angela, she calls
me one day out of the blue. Says she’s got this authentic and complete charm string
and she’d like to see it displayed here. And I admit, I’d never even heard of a charm
string so I didn’t have any idea what she was talking about. But we agreed to meet
and discuss it, and before we did, I did some research. I realized she had something
special and I told her I’d be thrilled to accept her donation and display the charm
string here.”

“Only Angela apparently changed her mind.”

“And fast.” As if she still couldn’t believe it, Marci made a face and tapped her
finger against the very next Wednesday on the calendar. “We agreed on the donation
on Monday evening, and then on Wednesday, she calls again, says she’s changed her
mind and she’s going to give the buttons to the Big Museum.”

“And you were surprised?”

“That’s putting it mildly. The night before, I even talked to my volunteers about
where we were going to put the charm string. In the parlor.” Marci poked a thumb over
her shoulder toward that room. “And how we’d host a little party one evening. You
know, as a way to let people know about the charm string and to thank Angela for donating
it. We even planned a menu! And not twelve hours after all that, she calls me to tell
me she changed her mind. Oh yeah, surprised is putting it mildly. We’re not a fancy
organization, not like over at the Big Museum. But I do have some loyal supporters,
mostly the teachers in the local school system. I was so excited about the charm string,
I’d already sent out an e-mail to all of them telling them all about it. That Angela…”
Marci crossed her arms over her chest. “She made me look stupid and incompetent.”

Motive.

I didn’t say this out loud because, let’s face it, alone
with someone who has motive to be a killer isn’t the best time to bring up something
like that.

And it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Marci was on a roll. She wasn’t listening.
“Once Susan made the announcement that the charm string was going to the Big Museum
and there was an article about it in the
Ardent Lake Gazette
…well, that’s when I knew it was official, and that’s when I started going over to
Angela’s and picking up stuff,” she explained, as if
picking up stuff
was enough of a euphemism to excuse the stealing. “That charm string must have been
worth thousands. The way I figured it, that’s what Angela owed me. Thousands. One
way or another, I figured I’d get it from her.” She darted me a look. “You going to
turn me in?”

I pretended to think about it. Just to make her squirm.

“You going to return it all?” I finally asked.

The wistful look Marci gave the punch bowl was all the answer I needed.

S
O HERE WAS
the question, at least the question I was asking myself:

Why had Angela offered the charm string to Marci, then changed her mind and promised
it to Susan?

As far as I could see, there was only one way to find out.

The last I saw of Marci, she was getting out a roll of brown paper and a stack of
boxes to pack all her purloined exhibits. That taken care of, I headed to the Big
Museum.

Susan wasn’t in her office, so while I waited for a woman wearing a yellow T-shirt
that said “Docent” on it to find her, I took a quick stroll around.

Unlike Marci’s homey little place, the Historical Society museum was roomy, a broad
stone building that, according to a plaque on the wall, had once been a private—and
pricey—psychiatric clinic. It had a central entranceway with a marble floor and rooms
with tall ceilings that fanned out on either side. The first room to my right featured
a display about the “old” Ardent, including some photographs of the town before the
reservoir was built.