The Ghost and the Dead Deb (14 page)

“Dana thought maybe Angel had run off with . . . some guy she met at the reading.”

Ciders gave me a sidelong glance. “Local guy?”

“Er . . . Not really.”

Again, Chief Cider’s hat slapped against his trousers.

“I should have known you’d be involved,” he barked.

“So who’s the stiff you just fished out of the lake?” Seymour asked.

“Don’t you have mail to misdeliver, Tarnish?”

“All finished for the day, just like you . . . Now that the Staties are here to do your job you can go back to issuing littering tickets.”

Chief Ciders shot Seymour a withering look that was formidable enough to intimidate Seymour into silence, at least temporarily. Unfortunately for Ciders, that look did not work on me.

“So who is it?” I asked. “Do you have any clue? Do you want me to try to identify the body?”

“It might come to that,” Ciders conceded. “But right now I need the phone number of that woman you mentioned. This Dana Wu.”

Keep pushing
. I could almost hear Jack’s voice back at the store. “Do you think you’ve found Angel Stark’s body?” I pressed. “The author I told you about? You can’t tell me there’s nothing to go on.”

“The corpse was missing any ID.” Chief Ciders admitted with a frustrated sight, “but we did find something in her pocket.”

So it’s a
her
, I thought, relieved for Bud and Mina’s sake that it wasn’t Johnny Napp.

Ciders reached into his jacket and drew out a small clear plastic evidence bag. Inside was an old-fashioned long-stem brass key attached to a small wooden placard. Burned into the wooden tab were the words “Finch Inn” and the number nine.

“Can you identify this, Mrs. Finch?” said the chief, almost mechanically, since it was obvious that anyone who lived within twenty miles of Quindicott could.

“That’s one of our keys,” Fiona cried. “Room nine . . . The room where Angel Stark was staying.”

Thanks to you and yore meddlin’, we finally got us a clue.

—Merle Constiner, “The Turkey Buzzard Blues,”
Black Mask
magazine, 1943

 

 

 

I’D BARELY DIGESTED the surprise of seeing the key before I was rocked by another shock. Bud Napp rushed through the Inn’s open doors, looking nearly as pale as Barney Finch.

Chief Ciders hitched his fingers in his belt and faced him. “Thanks for coming in, Bud.”

“You said it was urgent,” Bud replied. Then he noticed the rest of us standing around with funereal faces. “What the hell is going on here, Chief ?”

“Bud . . . are you still selling that bright yellow lawn rope?”

“You hustled me over here for an inventory report?”

“Just answer the question.”

“No,” Bud replied. “I told you last week when you came to buy some to tie up your tomatoes, the company stopped making it. Some issue with the dye. They’re switching to neon orange.”

“Have you sold any yellow rope in the past week?”

Bud shook his head. “I have a few bolts in my truck, that’s all. And I’m using them for my building business.”

“Let’s go on out into the parking lot, Bud. I need to get a look inside of your truck.”

“Are you looking for something in particular?” Bud asked suspiciously. “Maybe I should ask to see some kind of warrant?”

“You can give me permission to search your truck now, or wait until the State Police get a warrant issued,” Ciders replied wearily. “Getting that warrant should take all of about five minutes—and then the Staties might want to do more than search your truck. If they have to go to all that trouble for the paper, they’ll probably include your garage, your business, your home.”

Bud swallowed. “I didn’t bring the truck. I drove over in my Explorer.”

Now it was Ciders who was suddenly suspicious. “Where is your truck, then?”

“Johnny has it,” Bud replied uneasily. “He had a date last night, I told him he could borrow my truck.”

“And where is Johnny right now?”

When I saw the look in Ciders’s eye, I knew this was the question he’d been itching to ask all along. I still didn’t figure out how a yellow rope was involved, though I’d seen some of it strung around the restaurant’s construction site—no surprise since Budd was supplying the crew.

“Johnny . . . He hasn’t come home yet.”

“What about his date? Who was she? Was she staying at this inn?”

“Hell, no. Johnny was dating a local girl. Mina Griffith. Works at Pen’s bookstore.”

Now Ciders turned to me. “And is Mina at work today?”

I nodded. “But she doesn’t know where Johnny is either.”

“And why is that?”

I snapped my mouth shut and kept it that way. Ciders was grilling me, and I didn’t like it. He studied me—and obviously didn’t care for my attempt to remain uncooperative. “Okay, don’t answer,” he told me. “I’ll just have to track down Mina and ask
her
.”

My eyes narrowed on the Chief. Mina was in an emotional state as it was. I couldn’t let him upset her even more.

“Mina doesn’t know anything because he never kept his date with her last night,” I reluctantly admitted. “I know because she came back to the store late. They were supposed to meet for pizza, but he never showed up, so I waited with her while her roommate drove over to pick her up and take her home. I’ve already spoken to her about it.”

“Was Johnny at your bookstore at
any time
last night?”

“Johnny came to the store, stayed awhile. But he left before we closed and, as I said, never came back to pick up Mina.”

“He left
alone
?”

I felt cornered. But I couldn’t lie about something that had been witnessed by people other than just me. “No,” I said in a soft voice. “He was on the sidewalk outside the store . . .” I looked down, hating Ciders for making me admit it. “He was talking to Angel Stark the last time I saw him.”

I heard Bud release a disgusted breath. I couldn’t meet his eyes.

Ciders cleared his throat. “Bud, maybe you and I should finish this conversation somewhere in private.”

Bud exhaled again, but this time in defeat. He shook his head. “There are no secrets in this town, and Pen and Sadie already know some of what’s going on, as you just figured out.”

Then some of the old fire rekindled behind Bud’s eyes. “We’ve leveled with you, Ciders. Now it’s time for you to level with us. What is going on? Why did you want to search my truck?”

“Bud, we just found a body floating in the pond. The body of a young woman. From the condition of the corpse, the State forensics people say she hasn’t been in the water more than ten or twelve hours, maximum, which means she died late last night or, more likely, very early this morning.”

“What does this have to do with me? With Johnny?”

“We found a length of yellow rope around the dead woman’s neck. The same stuff you sold at your hardware store,” Ciders replied. “It appears the killer used that rope to strangle her.”

Bud pointed in the direction of the pond. “That construction site out there has a length of that same damn rope. Anyone could have gotten it from there.”

“I checked the rope at the site,” the Chief said evenly. “There’s only one bolt securing the area. Both ends of that bolt of rope still have the plastic tabs attached—which means that length of rope has never been cut. So the killer probably got that yellow rope from somewhere else.”

“Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that rope. But anyone could have bought yellow rope like that,” insisted Bud. “Maybe the killer bought it last season when yellow rope was everywhere, or in another town that still sold it . . .”

“Bud,” Ciders began. “I know
all
about your nephew—the conviction, the parole, and about the suspicion of murder charges that were leveled at Johnny in that big Newport heiress death last year. The Bethany Banks case.”

I was surprised. So was Bud Napp.

“We’re not all Keystone Kops,” said the Chief, “despite what our local letter carrying
Jeopardy!
genius here thinks.”

Seymour harrumphed, and Chief Ciders continued, “Bud, when your nephew moved here, his parole officer notified me of Johnny’s criminal record and his place of lodging and employment. I never bothered the kid out of respect for you . . .”

“You and I both know that those murder charges were dismissed,” Bud pointed out.

“That’s right, Bud,” Ciders replied. “But they were dismissed on a legal technicality, not for lack of evidence.”

Bud’s face reddened. “There was no
real
evidence or they would have tried Johnny anyway!”

Chief Ciders nodded. “I know, and I understand how you feel. But the woman in the pond . . . she was strangled. Just like Bethany Banks. And until we locate Johnny, and have a long talk with him, he’s the main suspect now, which means I have no choice but to issue an All Points Bulletin for the arrest of your nephew on suspicion of murder.”

“Wait a minute!” Bud cried. “Murder of who?”

Angel Stark, of course, I thought to myself. She had to be the lady in the lake—unless, of course, some other woman had been carrying around Angel’s room key, which was technically within the realm of possibility. So I wasn’t surprised when the Chief said . . .

“Angel Stark, of course. Technically she’s not yet identified. But since Mrs. McClure volunteered to help ID the body, we can settle the matter of the woman’s name right here and now.”

Then Chief Ciders faced me. “Penelope, you and I are going to take a little walk . . .”

“I still ain’t heard who killed Muriel . . .”

“Somebody who thought she needed killing, somebody who had loved her and hated her . . .”

—Raymond Chandler,
The Lady in the Lake
, 1943

 

 

 

THE LESS SAID about the next half hour, the better. Suffice it to say that a corpse that has been strangled in summer and submerged in water for “only about ten or twelve hours” has pretty much lost all resemblance to anything human.

Black swollen tongue, blue-gray skin mottled with angry red-black patches, stringy, mud-soaked clothes and hair, and the incongruity of a bright sunflower-yellow rope embedded deep into the puffy flesh at the throat—the victim was not a pretty sight. And I’m not even bringing up the insects.

Through features like hair (long and copper), eye color (brown), and items like clothes the woman was wearing (that one-of-a-kind Betsy Johnson pink and green sundress with the lace-up corset and gauzy skirt), I became convinced the corpse belonged to Angel Stark, and told Chief Ciders and two officers from the Rhode Island State Police crime scene unit exactly that.

“From her fingerprints and dental records, the crime lab people should be able to positively confirm her identity within a few hours,” Ciders told me as we walked back to the Inn together.

“Sadie and I really have to get back to the bookstore,” I told the Chief. “We left poor Mina on her own for the last two and a half hours.”

A few minutes later, Ciders released us all, saying he’d be over to the bookstore soon to get a corroborating statement from Mina. Bud offered Sadie and me a lift back to the store. Seymour decided to tag along as far as the post office. Fiona returned to nurse her stricken husband, whom she’d “put to bed for a long nap.” It was a solemn, quiet group who trudged out to the Inn’s parking lot and piled into Bud’s Ford Explorer.

After we dropped Seymour at the local post office, Bud pulled up in front of Buy the Book. I was surprised when he cut the engine and followed Sadie and me into the store.

For a summertime Saturday afternoon, the place was fairly busy, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I spied a familiar face at the register alongside Mina. After bagging a bundle of paperbacks and passing them to the customer, Linda Cooper-Logan gave us one of her big, open smiles. In her late thirties, Linda still wore her short platinum hair in the spiky, punkish style she’d first worn in the eighties. These days, she usually favored long flowered skirts and a copious amount of silver bracelets, but on this warm afternoon she wore cut-off denim shorts and a chocolate-brown “Bakers Do It Early” T-shirt, which was dusted with flour.

“Boy am I glad to see you,” I gushed.

“Not half as glad as I was,” said Mina.

Linda dismissed my thanks with a wave of her hand. “I brought the pastry over for tonight’s meeting and saw a line of customers, so I volunteered to fill in until you guys got back.”

Linda and her husband, Milner Logan, operated the Cooper Family Bakery, a small but profitable bread and sweet shop down the street from Buy the Book. Linda handled the comfort foods, and Milner the fancy French stuff. (He and Linda had met when Milner was teaching a cooking school class in Boston on the art of French pastry.)

“Honestly, I can’t thank you enough,” I told her.

“So what’s going on? I’ve got to know,” Linda asked.

Yeah,
said Jack Shepard.
I’m with the blonde porcupine
—
What in hell happened at Bird-Woman’s lace-doily nest?

I was about to reply when I looked beyond Linda’s shoulder, to see the look of worry and apprehension on Mina Griffith’s face. Mina, in turn, was watching Bud Napp and Sadie head toward a set of comfortable chairs near the back of the store, speaking in hushed tones as they went.

I took a deep breath and broke the news to Linda and Mina about the discovery of Angel Stark’s body along the wildlife trail near Finch Inn. I also told them that Victoria Banks, Bethany’s sister, was also missing. Linda was intrigued, but as I expected, Mina took the news hard. Harder still was the next bombshell I dropped on the poor girl.

“Chief Ciders believes Angel was strangled, murdered—and he thinks Bud’s nephew Johnny had something to do with it.”