Pouncing on Murder (13 page)

Cade cracked open a peanut shell and popped the nut into his mouth. “We were wondering how long it would be before you involved yourself in another one.”

“Another what?” I asked. But before either one of them could say anything, I spotted Irene Deering. “Sorry, I see someone I have to talk to. I’ll be right back, okay?” I scooted the bentwood chair back and got up before they could exchange another communicative glance.

“Hey, Minnie.” Irene smiled at me from behind the long wooden bar. She was pulling back on a tap and filling a tall glass with beer. “I saw you over there a minute ago. Are those your parents?”

As if. My parents left Dearborn only on holidays, and not even many of those. And since I was growing less and less inclined to leave the calm of northern Michigan for the noise and bustle of the Detroit area, our face-to-face visits were growing few and far between. There were regular phone calls, but I hadn’t seen them since Christmas and wasn’t sure when I was going to see them again.

“Friends of mine,” I said to Irene. Most people knew that an internationally famous artist lived in the area, but I wasn’t about to broadcast his present location. “I wanted to tell you that I ran into Detective Inwood this morning.”

Irene looked up, her face suddenly taut and still. “Any news?”

Sort of, but not really. “He said it would be very unusual for someone like Seth Wartella, a white-collar criminal, to start doing violent crimes.” I nodded at the glass in her hand. “You’re about to overflow there.”

Shaking her head at herself, Irene released the tap. “So, is that good news or bad?”

“Good in that even if it was Seth you saw, he most likely didn’t have anything to do with the car that almost hit Adam. Or anything to do with Henry’s death.”

As my friend pulled in a slow breath, I saw how her cheekbones poked out sharply into her skin. The woman was working too hard, worrying too much, and not taking care of herself.

“But it’s not unheard of,” she said. “For a guy who did tax fraud to branch out. Into worse crimes, I mean.”

I hadn’t pressed the detective for statistics, but I had the feeling that even if there was even the tiniest percentage, she would lie awake tonight, worrying that she’d put her husband in danger by not reporting her maybe-sighting of Seth.

“No,” I said. “I’m sure it’s happened at least once. But maybe it wasn’t Seth that you saw. You said you just caught a glimpse, and you haven’t seen him for years, so maybe it was just someone who looked like him.”

She frowned, thinking it over, but I could tell she wasn’t buying it. “Promise me you won’t worry for, say, seven days,” I said, holding up the requisite number of
fingers. “Business days, mind you. Weekends don’t count. I’m bound to find something by then.”

Irene actually smiled. “Thanks, Minnie. Very, very much.”

“She won’t take thanks,” Cade said, slinging an arm around my shoulder. “Never has, probably never will. It’s a horrible character flaw, you know.” He nodded at Irene. “Just let her go ahead and do whatever it is she wants, and force gifts upon her later. It’ll be easier for both of you.”

I put my chin up. “I can take a thank-you just as well as anyone.”

Barb, who had joined us at the bar, smirked. “Oh, really? Minnie, let me tell you once again how grateful we are that you and Eddie got Mr. McCade here to the hospital so quickly. Without you, I don’t know what I would have done.”

Cade nodded solemnly. “And without your assistance with finding an attorney, I might have—”

I put my hands over my ears and fled from the McCades.

But Irene had been laughing, so it wasn’t all bad.

•   •   •

The next morning. I woke to sunlight streaming in through the white curtains of my bedroom. I twisted my head around to see what I could of the sky and saw nothing but blue, blue, and more blue. A full-out sunny day in April? A giddy first-day-of-summer-vacation kind of feeling filled me with happy expectation.

“And it’s Saturday,” I told Eddie. “What are the odds?”

My cat, who was curled up between my right hip and the wall of the houseboat, didn’t move any muscles except the ones that were beating his heart and helping him breathe.

“Look,” I said, putting my bare hand outside the covers. “It’s not even cold out there. See, no goose pimples.”

Eddie still didn’t care, so I slid out of bed and tiptoed to the shower without any more disturbance of his beauty sleep. But even after I was clean and dry and dressed, Eddie showed no inclination to take part in any morning activities. Since I was a considerate kind of person, I decided that making my own breakfast would be too noisy for him. Clearly it would be best to go out.

Sabrina, the Round Table’s forever waitress, brought me a glass of water and a mug of coffee.

“I don’t get a menu?” I asked.

She snorted. “When was the last time you ordered anything other than sausage links and either cinnamon apple pancakes or cinnamon French toast?”

“I might if I ever get a menu. I don’t even know what else you have.”

Sabrina wrote something on her waitress pad and tucked her pencil into her bun of graying hair. “About what you’d expect. Now, do you want me to turn in your order for sausage and French toast, or do you want to go hungry because you’re trying to make a point?”

I grinned. “Good to see that marriage hasn’t changed you any.”

She put a hand on one of her padded hips. “Did you really think it would?” she asked, and sashayed away.

Smiling, I watched her go, remembering the events of
last summer. She and Bill D’Arcy, a restaurant customer and newcomer to Chilson, had gotten engaged after a short romance. They’d married at Thanksgiving and, as far as I knew, were still happily in the honeymoon phase.

Sabrina came back, going from booth to booth with a fresh pot of coffee. When she came near, I pushed my mug to the edge of the table and asked, “How’s your Bill doing these days?”

Her soft smile told me everything I needed to know. “The new treatments are helping him so much that he’s looking to invest in the company. Not that he’ll ever get his old vision back, but they might be able to stop the deterioration.”

Bill, at age fifty-six, had an advanced case of macular degeneration. He made scads of money by doing complicated things with financial markets, and for a while the talk around town had been that Sabrina would quit working at the Round Table. After all, why would anyone keep working if she didn’t need to?

I’d kept my opinion to myself but hadn’t been surprised that, as the months passed, she showed no signs of leaving the diner. No matter how deep and true the love she shared with Bill, there was no way his taciturn self would satisfy her need for human contact.

“That’s great,” I said, thinking about the time Bill crashed his car into the side of a building. “My fingers
are crossed for him.” I looked around at the mostly empty restaurant. “Say, do you have a minute?”

She scanned the room. “Got an order coming, but until then, sure. What’s up?”

“Do you remember seeing anyone new in here the last few weeks?” I wouldn’t have bothered asking the question during the summer, but April wasn’t exactly top tourist season. “A guy in his mid-thirties, red hair, with ears that stick way out.” I cupped my hands around my ears and flapped them around.

But Sabrina was shaking her head. “Why, did he skip out on paying library fines?” She grinned. “What is this world coming to?”

“No, he’s . . .” How to explain this one? “He’s someone that a friend of mine knew a long time ago. She thought she might have seen him around, that’s all.”

Sabrina’s face lit up. “A blast from the past? Do I smell the revival of an old flame?”

Not in the least. “If you see anyone like that, will you let me know? It’s important.”

Sabrina winked. “Gotcha. Anything else?”

I stared at my coffee. “Still sad about Henry Gill, I guess. I know he was kind of a pain, but there was something about him I really liked.”

“And what might that be?” she asked, starch in her voice. “That I couldn’t ever bring him a cup of coffee that was good enough, or that no one could ever cook him hash browns as good as the ones his wife made?”

“He liked Eddie,” I said.

“Anyone with a lick of sense likes Eddie.” She rolled her eyes. “And don’t mind me for speaking ill of the
dead. Henry was a grumpy old man after his wife died, but he was one of ours. We’re going to start up donations, you know, to fund a scholarship to the high school in his name.”

Tears pricked at my eyes. “That’s great. Let me know when you have it set up.”

“You know,” she said musingly, “he was different when his wife was alive. Back then, the only person who didn’t like him was Davis Thumm. And that was because Henry bought the same color truck he did.” She grinned. “In 1975.”

I blinked. As a motive for murder, surely that was the lamest one ever, but you never knew.

Sabrina put more coffee in my mug. “But Davis moved downstate to be closer to his kids back in the nineties. He died last year, I heard, the old bugger.”

“Did you ever see Henry in here with Adam Deering?” I asked.

“Adam who?”

I started to explain the relationship between Henry and Adam, but before I got all the way through, she was shaking her head again.

“Last couple of years, I never saw Henry sitting with anybody other than you,” she said.

Which pretty much destroyed the Round Table theory I’d proposed to Detective Inwood the day before. “Well,” I said, sighing, “after what happened to Adam, I was just wondering, that’s all.”

“What do you mean?”

And that was when I remembered that Sabrina never read the local paper. She didn’t need to, she’d said time
and time again. “Right here is where I get all the news I need, and a lot that I don’t.” But since Adam was new to the area and lived out of town, he wasn’t yet connected to the town’s talk.

I told Sabrina about Adam’s near miss with the car and she was appropriately shocked. “That’s Irene’s husband, right?” Because, since Irene worked in Chilson for her regular job as a bank’s loan officer, she was connected to the town.

Nodding, I almost started talking about the oddness of Henry’s being killed by a tree one week and, less than two weeks later, the guy who’d been with Henry that day being almost killed by a car. But then I remembered where I was and to whom I was talking. There was a time and a place to encourage the spread of rumors, but this wasn’t it. Not yet, anyway.

A bell rang in the kitchen. “Order’s up,” Sabrina said. “Got to go.”

I wrapped my hands around the warmth of my mug and opened the book I’d brought to read, but even Louise Penny’s evocative prose couldn’t keep me from thinking about Henry and Adam and what might really have happened that day out in the woods.

Chapter 8

U
p above me, trees were just starting to bud. Tiny bits of color showed at the ends of thousands of branches, and if I squinted, the entire forest canopy fuzzed out to a light green, the color of spring.

I tried not to think that, downstate, spring had sprung almost three weeks ago and that it was still possible, up here, to get another snowfall. Late springs were a hazard of Up North life, and it didn’t do to whine about the situation, since we were all in the same metaphorical boat. And at least it was sunny and warm. Well, nearly warm.

My hands, encased in warm wool gloves, were shoved into my coat pockets, and my feet were inside high hiking boots. I’d stuffed a fleece hat onto my head, knowing my obstreperous curls would be escaping all around in an unattractive manner, but I didn’t expect to run into anyone out here at Henry’s.

It had been while I was swiping the last piece of my Round Table sausage in the last of the maple syrup that the idea to come out to Henry’s house had popped into my head. Maybe I wouldn’t find anything, probably I wouldn’t, but how could it hurt to have another pair of eyes taking a look at the place where he’d died?

Besides, it was a glorious April day and I wasn’t
scheduled to work. If I didn’t go somewhere and do something, it was likely that I’d end up in my office, and all work and no play might make Minnie a miserable mess.

“
M
words,” I said out loud, and shook my head at myself. Barb and Cade had infected me with their word game and I had the feeling it was a permanent contamination.

I studied Henry’s house. The curtains on the two-story home of fieldstone and white clapboard were drawn tight and it had that forlorn look houses get when they’re not being lived in. In my fanciful moments, of which I had many, I was sure that houses could feel the difference between their people being on vacation and never coming back.

This house knew. And Henry’s front door? It knew for sure.

Turning away, I hoped I’d remember to never say any of that out loud to anyone, because I’d get a patient nod and, soon afterward, concerned phone calls about my well-being would be exchanged.

I looked up the hill. Somewhere up there was Henry’s sugar shack. Which meant there had to be a trail, because there would be a lot of traipsing back and forth. I wandered around the yard for bit and found a narrow path by the back of the garage.

The winding way took me up the hill by a circuitous route, around this big tree and that big tree, and it wasn’t until I noticed a dribble of damp coming out of a small hole in a tree trunk that I realized I was following in Henry’s ghostly footsteps.

I stopped and fingered one of the holes, which were
smaller than the diameter of my finger and about four feet off the ground. In the cold of February, Henry had drilled those holes, inserted a small metal spigotlike thing, hung a bucket on the spigot, and waited for the weather to warm. When the sap started to drip, he’d lugged pails from tree to tree, emptying the tree buckets into the bigger pails and hauling it all to storage vats.

I laid my gloved hand over the hole and wished for things to be different. Henry shouldn’t be dead. Adam shouldn’t have had to watch a friend die to learn that he himself had a heart condition. And Irene shouldn’t have to be so worried about her husband and their finances.