Pouncing on Murder (28 page)

“Not sure.” I watched as a large woman barreled across the lawn toward me. Her arms were pumping, her hair was flying all around her head, and there wasn’t a single obvious ounce of that kind intelligence that had been so obvious when I’d met her two days ago.

“Are we all set?” I asked, easing away from Gordon. Because whatever Larabeth had to say to me, I was guessing no one else needed to hear it. “I’ll be back later, to see how things are going.” And then, before he could say anything and just before Larabeth got close enough to start talking—or yelling, as the case might be—I stepped away from Gordon and all the people who were milling about.

“I need to talk to you!” Larabeth shouted, making me wince; she was so close that I could have heard her if she’d whispered.

“Sure. How about over here?” I gestured for her to follow me. We went around the corner of the library into a shaded and secluded nook where, now that it was warm, flowering plants were starting to leap out of the ground. Soon there would be an abundance of lilies and all sorts of other pretty flowers I couldn’t name. Even now, with only a few leaves sprouting from the shrubs, it was a soothing place and I hoped that it would calm Larabeth.

“Let’s sit.” I took one end of a teak bench and nodded for her to join me.

“Can’t,” she said through gritted teeth. “Too mad.” She strode back and forth, arms still pumping, her hands in fists, her face bright red.

“At me?” I asked.

“What?” She whirled around to face me and it was then that I noticed that it wasn’t just her face that was red. “Of course not you,” she said, smearing at her reddened eyes with her knuckles. “I’m only here because I need to find out for sure and you’re the only one I can talk to. You don’t know me, so it’s okay, you’ll tell me the truth, you don’t have any reason to lie, and besides, you’re a librarian.”

How the librarian occupation followed with the rest of her rambling sentence, I wasn’t sure, but it was nice to think that my profession was considered a trustworthy one. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

“It’s . . . it’s . . .” A tear trickled down her cheek. She turned away, muttering, “I’ll be right back,” and strode off.

I sat back and looked up at the sky. Clouds were moving in, but it was still a lovely day. The birds were singing, the grass was growing green, and the book fair was going to happen regardless of whether I ran around like a madwoman these next few hours trying to make sure everything was perfect. So why not take a few minutes to enjoy the day? Why not breathe in the smell of damp dirt and clean air and—

“All right.” Larabeth sat down hard on the other end of the bench. “I’m better now. And all I really have is one
question for you. I can see that you’re busy and I’m sorry to take up your time. Normally I would have called first, but I had to get out of the house and next thing I knew, I was on my way here.”

She was almost to the rambling stage again, so I jumped in when she stopped for breath. “You have a question?”

“When you stopped by the other day . . .” Her hands gripped each other. “The other day,” she said carefully, “when you stopped by you asked . . .”

I had a sudden, sick feeling that I knew where she was going. “I asked if your husband had been up North the first weekend in April.”

Larabeth gave a sharp nod. “That’s right. And I told you . . .”

I waited, but when she didn’t say anything, I gave her her own answer. “You told me that Cole had been out West skiing.”

“And that’s what he’d told me,” she said stonily. “That it was going to be the last good skiing weekend, so he and his buddies were going to fly out to Colorado, to Vail, and do nothing but ski and sit in the hot tub. That maybe this would be the time he’d try telemarking, that he wished I could go, but he was glad I understood. Understood!” She snorted. “Took me long enough, but I understand, all right. The rat was up here the whole time.”

She turned and looked straight at me. “That’s the question I have for you. He was up here, wasn’t he?”

Over the years, I’d developed the ability to not tell
people everything I knew, but I was a horrible straight-out liar. “Yes,” I said. “He was.”

She nodded, thumping her fists on her thighs. “For months I’ve tried to hide from this. Late nights, long weekends out of town, big batches of money gone. He’s having an affair and this is the proof. There was no reason for him to lie about going to Vail if he’d been coming up here for anything else other than cheating on me.”

I remembered what Adam had said, that he’d seen a redheaded woman that weekend, but kept quiet. That was secondhand information and I didn’t need to add fuel to Larabeth’s fire; she was stoking it along all by herself quite nicely.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had no idea that my question would lead to this.”

“Don’t be sorry.” She banged her fists on her legs one more time and stood up. “I should thank you.”

“For what?”

She flashed a wide smile that reminded me of how Kristen could sometimes look. Sharklike. Predatory. Dangerous.

“Thanks again, Minnie,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”

I watched her stride purposefully across the lawn, then stood up slowly. Larabeth had been so focused on her husband and her hurt that she hadn’t realized the potential significance of her husband’s April weekend at their cottage.

But I did.

I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and dialed the sheriff’s office. From memory. It startled me that the
number was stuck in my head, but I decided not to think about that fun fact.

“Tonedagana County Sheriff’s Office.”

Not for the first time, I thought that while it was nice that the region’s founders had chosen a Native American name for the county, it would have been even nicer if they’d been able to come up with one that was shorter than five syllables.

“Hi,” I said. “Is Detective Inwood available?”

“One moment, please.”

I was treated to a bout of silence, during which I wondered whatever happened to the ubiquitous hold music that everyone used to enjoy complaining about so much. I’d decided to believe it had been a victory of good taste over poor when the detective himself came on the line.

“Inwood.”

“Good afternoon, Detective, this is Minnie Hamilton.”

“Ah, Ms. Hamilton. Please tell me that you are calling to brighten my day.”

Though I was talking to a sheriff’s detective, I was also watching two of Gordon’s many minions tie bright pink strips of plastic to the tent stakes and guy ropes. The pinkness fluttered prettily in the wind. “That should do it,” I murmured, now sure that no one paying the slightest amount of attention to where they were going would walk into a tripping hazard.

“Excuse me?” Detective Inwood asked.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was talking out loud, but I do have some information of interest for you.”

He exhaled loudly. “Please say this isn’t going to turn into more work for me.”

Probably. If I was right, almost certainly. I told him everything I’d learned the last few days, about Irene’s likely mistake about Seth’s presence in the area, about Felix’s shaky financial status, and that Cole Duvall had been at his cottage the weekend Henry died.

I hesitated, then added the critical part: Larabeth’s certainty that her husband was having an affair. Spreading gossip went against everything my mother had ever taught me, but this was information that could be critical to an investigation.

After I said all that, I waited for a response. When I didn’t get one after roughly a year, I asked, “Detective? Are you still there?”

“Hang on,” he said. “I’m writing . . . okay, got it.” There was a creak and I imagined him leaning back in his chair. “Good leads, Ms. Hamilton. You sure you don’t want to join the department?”

“Not a chance. I think I might be scared of Sheriff Richardson.”

He made a noise that might have been a tired laugh. “We all are. Now, I have to tell you that we’re still understaffed. It might be a couple of days before I have time to track down Duvall and talk to him.”

“Sure,” I said. “I understand. Besides, I don’t see how a day or two could make any difference.”

At the ripe old age of thirty-three, you’d really think I’d know better than to say things like that.

•   •   •

“Gordon,” I said, “you are amazing.”

He grinned. “Can I quote you to my wife?”

“Give me her phone number and I’ll tell her myself.”

The two of us were standing on the sidewalk that ran in front of the library, surveying the assemblage of canvas. Gordon has masterfully set up the tents of varying sizes to entice the fairgoers further up and further in by placing the smallest one closest to the main street and decorating it to the hilt with streamers and a huge sign that proclaimed to one and all that this was the “First Annual Chilson District Library Book Fair.” The tents grew larger and larger as you walked through, inexorably drawn to the largest tent of all, where Trock would be in all his glory.

The visual spectacle alone was enough to draw in anyone who happened near the library. All day, cars had been slowing down long enough to see what was going on, and many had stopped to ask. I was hopeful that word would spread to anyone who hadn’t seen the last-minute notice in the paper or the social media blitz we’d been pushing the last few days.

“Well,” Gordon said, “since I can’t think of anything else to do, I guess I’ll head home. I’ll be here at daybreak to make sure everything’s still good.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” I asked, and glanced at him.

He wasn’t looking, as I’d supposed, at his expensive tents. Instead he was studying the sky. “Weather,” he said. “There’s something coming in.”

These days, I rarely paid attention to the forecast. Driving the bookmobile across the county had shown me that the weather in Tonedagana County could change dramatically from one side to the other and the best I could do was to be prepared at all times for three seasons of weather, if not four.

“Rain?” I asked.

He sniffed at the air and shrugged. “Let’s hope.”

I was going to ask him what he meant, but he headed off before I could frame the words.

At home, I asked Eddie about it. “What do you think he meant? Better rain than . . . what? Snow?” The thought was painful, but a May snowfall wasn’t unheard of. “Hail?” I hoped not. Gordon had insurance, but the hassles would be hard for him and his business.

“Mrr.”

Eddie jumped up onto my lap. I was sitting at the houseboat’s dining booth, watching the sky. I had no idea what Gordon had been watching, but all I was seeing was the sun setting over the ridge of land that separated Janay Lake from the waters of Lake Michigan. The sun was a soft glow above the dark ridge of treetops and—

“Wait a minute,” I said, going very quiet and very still. “That’s not trees. That’s clouds.”

As I watched, the line of black clouds rushed past the sun, turning the evening’s soft glow to darkness in a matter of seconds.

“Oh, jeez . . .”

I dumped Eddie onto the floor and ran outside. “Eric!” I shouted. “Eric, are you in there?” I didn’t wait
for an answer, but rushed about my small foredeck, picking up seat cushions and feeling a little like Dorothy when the tornado was headed straight for Auntie Em and Uncle Henry’s farmhouse. “Eric!”

“Hey, Minnie,” he said, poking his head outside the side door of his boat. “What’s up? Need a doctor?” He grinned.

I pointed westward. “Storm’s coming. Better batten down your hatches.”

He laughed. “I’m not sure I have any. Or that I’d know what one would look like if—” A gust of wind tore his words away, sending them east at about thirty miles an hour. “Good Lord,” he said, or at least that was what I imagined him saying, because I couldn’t hear a thing he said over the noise of the wind and waves.

“Will you be okay?” he shouted, pointing at my boat, which suddenly seemed very tiny.

Clutching my cushions to my chest, I nodded. My boat had seen decades of storms, including the famed summer storm of 1968. Of course, I’d never been on board during a big one, but it was too late to do anything about that now.

Crack!

Eric and I both jumped as lightning struck Janay Lake. Electricity sizzled in the air, and I didn’t even reach a count of three before the thunder boomed.

“Inside!” Eric shouted.

But I was already halfway through the door. I didn’t need some surgeon to tell me to stay inside during a wind-driven lightning storm.

“Mrr!”

I dropped the cushions on the floor and picked up my cat. “Sorry, pal, but I’m afraid it’s going to be a wild night. Thunder and lightning and wind and—”

Crash!

Somewhere outside, a tree thumped to the ground. I hoped it wasn’t the big maple outside Rafe’s house. With the wind, that tree could easily have fallen straight onto the front porch.

The houseboat rocked back and forth and up and down. I sat at the dining bench, told myself that we were tied up firmly to the dock at four corners, and snuggled Eddie close. He didn’t purr, but he didn’t pull away, either.

We stayed like that, waiting for the storm to pass. The electricity went out thirty minutes later and I carried an unprotesting cat to bed.

Soon enough Eddie was purring, and then snoring, but I lay awake for hours, listening to the wind and the lightning and the thunder.

Chapter 19

I
fell asleep at some point during the night, but when morning finally came, I felt as if I hadn’t slept at all. Fatigue filled my eyes, and my arms felt twice their normal weight.

Of course, that could have been because I was lying on my side and Eddie was flopped across both of my arms.

I kissed the top of his fuzzy head and slid out from underneath him. “Thanks for staying with me,” I whispered. The night had been grueling, but at least I’d had the comfort of a cat to keep the worst of my fears at bay.

Now, however, I had to face those fears.

Fear number one, that there’d no electricity and I’d have to go to the book fair unshowered and grungy, was happily untrue. The bathroom light went on, I had hot water, and in a few minutes I was dressed and blotting as much dampness as I could out of the curly mess that was my hair.