Panic Button (20 page)

We both knew what all this meant. For his part, Nev would do the official digging.
And me? I’d get on the phone again and make all the calls I’d made the week before
to all the button dealers and collectors who might have come across someone trying
to unload a particularly pretty button. Maybe the killer had laid low for a bit. But
sooner or later, he’d try to sell the button. I was sure of it. It was the only thing
that made sense.

I reached for the binder I kept in my top desk drawer that included a listing of all
the phone numbers I’d need. “I love buttons,” I said. Not that this was news to Nev.
“But I can’t imagine killing for one.”

“And it was worth…what? Maybe a thousand bucks or so? It just doesn’t seem worth risking
life in prison for a thousand bucks.” Nev slipped on his coat. I was about to walk
him to the front of the shop when something smacked against my front door.

Automatically, we both looked that way.

No customer coming in. No one standing on the sidewalk.

But again, we heard another thump.

Nev got to the door first, and the moment he opened it, he rolled his eyes and smiled.
“Friend of yours?” he asked.

LaSalle stood on the stoop, his tail thumping against the door.

The dog had never been inside the Button Box and I wasn’t much for setting that kind
of precedent, but hey, it was cold and rainy outside, and the poor dog was drenched.
I urged him into the back room, closed the door so he couldn’t cause any damage to
the front of the shop, and looked for a towel to dry him.

Nev had followed us and he pointed at the mutt. “He’s got something in his mouth.”

I watched the way LaSalle worked over the whatever it was and imagined all sorts of
disgusting things. “I’m not sure I want to find out what it is.”

“Except that it’s crunching.” Nev knelt next to the dog. “Come on, good boy.” He held
out his hand. Yeah, like he actually expected LaSalle to just spit out whatever the
tasty prize happened to be.

I had other plans. I’d brought a tuna sandwich for lunch, and I got it out of the
fridge and ripped off a piece. “How about this?” I dangled the morsel in front of
LaSalle’s nose. “I’ll trade you, buddy. What you have in your mouth for tuna with
mayo, celery, and sweet pickle.”

It was, apparently, a deal.

LaSalle spit out whatever he’d had in his mouth and it rolled under my worktable.
He was happily munching on tuna before I even had a chance to bend down and retrieve
what had almost been his breakfast.

It was a good thing I did.

“Uh, Nev.” When I stood up again, I held out my hand so he could see what was in my
palm.

Nev’s eyes popped open. “Is that—”

“Yup. Gorgeous aqua water. Beautiful underwater greenery. Brilliant red fish. The
enameled button.” Another thought struck and I dropped the button on the worktable.
“One very wet enameled button.” I ran to the sink and washed my hands. When I turned
around again, Nev was ripping the rest of my sandwich into chunks and feeding it to
LaSalle at the same time he was giving the button a close look. “I can’t imagine how
the crime-scene techs missed it,” he said. “It must have rolled under something.”

“And LaSalle knew just where to look.” In spite of the fact that he was swallowing
the last of my lunch, I gave the dog a pat on the head. “No wonder no one’s ever tried
to sell it. The button’s been here all along. That’s good, right?” Like I had to ask?
I’d just rescued a valuable button from being eaten. In my world, that makes me something
of a superhero.

Which meant Nev should have looked a little happier. “There goes our motive,” he muttered.
“If Angela wasn’t killed for the button—”

“But maybe she was. Maybe the killer just didn’t find the button.”

Nev scraped a hand through his hair. Since it was still damp and as shaggy as ever,
it stuck up at funny angles. He didn’t have to say a word. I knew exactly what he
was thinking. I grabbed a towel and rubbed down LaSalle, and I bet I looked just as
miserable as Nev did when I grumbled, “We’re right back where we started from.”

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS
S
ATURDAY, AND
I
VOWED
I
WOULD
spend it where I belonged—at the Button Box.

I kept that promise, too, arriving early and staying late at the shop, keeping busy
with the minutiae of button sales and collecting.

I rearranged one of the display cases, replacing a shelf of tortoiseshell buttons
with cute little realistics with a springtime theme, bunnies and flowers and even
a couple Easter eggs. I filled an order for military buttons that came in from a group
of Civil War reenactors in Philadelphia. I waited on a couple customers, thanked the
gods of button dealing for foot traffic, and paid my electric bill and my heating
bill and my phone bill. I even balanced my business checking account, going through
the motions and fighting to keep my mind on buttons.

And off murder.

I should have known from the beginning that it was a losing cause.

The moment I stopped to sit down and rest, I had the photos of the buttons from Angela’s
charm string out on the desk in front of me, and I was staring at the one picture
of the one still-missing button.

“No way anybody killed Angela to get this button.”

It was Nev’s day off, and he’d called earlier in the day to say he’d stop by in the
evening so we could go out and grab a sandwich. It was a sweet offer, and since I
was starving, I was more than ready to take him up on it. But button dealer or not,
I apparently still have the heart of a detective—I suspected he had an ulterior motive.

But then, when he showed up at the Button Box, there was a dog biscuit sticking out
of the back pocket of his jeans.

That wasn’t my only clue. Yesterday’s rain had stopped, see, but it was still unseasonably
cool. I couldn’t help noticing that Nev brought a duffel bag with him (not exactly
a necessity for a sandwich date, is it?). And that the duffel bag had what looked
like a fleece blanket sticking out of one corner where it wasn’t zipped closed.

He’d been looking out the front display window, and when I tossed out that comment
about the button, he turned around. “Which button? You mean the missing button?”

I lifted the picture so he could see it. Not that he needed to. Nev has a mind like
a steel trap, I knew what he knew, and he knew exactly what that button looked like.
“It’s small, it’s metal, it’s worth about a dollar fifty,” I said. “Yet it’s the only
button that’s missing.”

“The only button we think is missing,” he corrected me. “There’s always a chance it
will turn up. Like that fish button did thanks to LaSalle. Say…” I’ve always said
cops are too down-to-earth to be very good at pulling the wool over anybody’s eyes.
Maybe that’s why I thought Nev sounded way too casual when he tried to sound way too
casual as he said, “You haven’t seen that dog around today, have you?”

“He left here last night when we did, after he spit out the button and finished my
tuna sandwich you gave him all of,” I reminded Nev, and watched him express not one
iota of remorse. “I haven’t seen him since.”

“But it’s cold.” Nev was wearing a hoodie with the Chicago Bears logo on it, and he
chafed his hands up and down his arms. “How’s a dog supposed to live outside when
the weather’s like this?”

“He’s apparently been doing it for a while, and as far as I can see, he’s as happy
as a clam. As happy as we would be if we figured out who killed Angela.” OK, this
wasn’t exactly subtle, but it was one way to get Nev’s mind off LaSalle and back on
the case. I liked LaSalle, too, but I’d learned a lesson about him soon after he showed
up in the neighborhood: He was a street dog. He liked being a street dog. My fellow
merchants and I could feed him all we wanted, but no way did he want to be pampered.
Or pestered. LaSalle had a mind of his own.

Kind of like a certain button dealer who didn’t like unanswered questions. Or murder.
“I was talking about this button.” I waved the photo. “You know, the one that isn’t
valuable enough to steal.”

“Which is probably why nobody stole it.”

So much for getting a professional opinion.

“I dunno.” I took another look at the photo I’d taken the night before Angela was
killed. It showed the metal button in question, and the picture in raised relief on
it. “Small building, low to the ground,” I mumbled, obviously talking to myself since
Nev was so busy scanning the neighborhood through the front window, I knew he wasn’t
listening. Just to be sure of what I was looking at, I grabbed a magnifying glass.
“It might be a log cabin,” I said.

To which I got no answer.

My mumbling dissolved into something that sounded more like grumbling. “There’s a
bigger building in the distance, behind the log cabin, a schoolhouse.”

I was talking to myself.

“And to the right of the schoolhouse…” Whatever was shown in the scene, it was so
small, I squinted to try and focus my eyes. It looked like…“A cemetery,” I said. “Or
at least a few headstones and behind them, a little building. Who would want a button
with a cemetery on it?”

Even if Nev had been paying attention, this was a question meant only for myself,
and I knew the answer even before I asked it. Over the years, button themes went in
and out of fashion, just like clothes did. For instance, back in the late nineteenth
century, girls wore buttons with photos of their beaus on them. And when celluloid
came into common use for making buttons—it was one of the first synthetic plastics
and could be made to look like ivory or ebony or other more expensive materials—those
were all the rage. Nothing I saw on a button ever
came as a surprise so the fact that someone had immortalized this little scene—cemetery
and all—really wasn’t all that unusual. In fact, I suspected the button commemorated
some event in a town’s history, like the anniversary of its founding, and as such,
would have made a prime souvenir for a young lady looking to add it to her charm string.

As unlikely as it seemed that someone would have swiped this particular button and
put it up for sale, I got onto the Internet and checked all the usual auction sites.
I’d just clicked off the last one when Nev grabbed the duffel bag, blurted out, “I’ll
be right back,” and headed outside.

Left to my own devices and with my stomach growling for that sandwich he’d promised,
I messed around online awhile longer, automatically checking the weather (it was supposed
to improve—hurray), my daily horoscope (which unlike Angela, I promptly forgot the
moment I closed the page), and the latest listing of antique shows and sales in the
area.

Hey, a button collector never knows when something primo might become available.

The newest listing I found was for what was being called a presale showing. That wasn’t
nearly as interesting as the address of where the preview was being held.

“Angela’s house!” I sat up like a shot, remembered I was talking to myself, and didn’t
much care. Cousin Charles, it seemed, had been one busy little beaver. He was hosting
a showing of “Antiques and collectibles of interest to dealers and collectors.” Out
loud, I read the words written in Old World–looking script. “Including
a vast collection of Royal Doulton figurines, exquisite artwork, books, ephemera,
and glassware.”

It wasn’t a sale. The page made that very clear. But if dealers wanted to come have
a first look before the items went on sale, they were welcome at Angela’s the next
day.

The sound of the little brass bell over my front door startled me back to reality
and I found Nev looking sheepish and poking one thumb over his shoulder and toward
the street. “I just had to go out for a minute,” he said. “I thought I saw somebody
I knew.”

Yeah, and I saw that the blanket was no longer sticking out of his duffel bag and
the biscuit was gone from his pocket.

If I wasn’t so focused on what Charles was up to, I would have stopped to realize
just how incredibly cute this was. Not to worry, I did that later in the evening,
and decided that even if he didn’t want the world to know—especially because he didn’t
want the world to know—Nev was a sweetie.

I stood up and turned off the lamp on my desk. “We’re going to Ardent Lake,” I told
him.

“Now?” Nev slipped on his jacket and waited for me to get mine.

“No. Tomorrow. Now…” I turned off the rest of the shop lights and locked the front
door behind us. “You’re taking me to dinner.”

C
OUSIN
C
HARLES DIDN’T
look especially surprised to see me, but then, his preview of the antiques in Angela’s
house was looking like old home week.

Susan was there. I saw her in the dining room standing next to the wooden Indian.

Marci was there, too. She was avoiding Susan by staying in the living room and pretending
to be interested in the statue of that Greek god.

I thought I saw Larry duck into the kitchen.