The Readaholics and the Falcon Fiasco (9 page)

I shifted on my pillow, trying to keep my butt from falling asleep. Realizing I still held the popcorn, I passed it up to Brooke.

“And don’t forget wanting to keep something secret or avoid humiliation,” Lola put in softly. “Maybe Ivy knew something that her murderer didn’t want to get out.”

We pondered that for a moment, and then Maud put the volume up again, maybe to distract us. It was unsettling to speculate on what Ivy might have known that could get her killed. Did I know anything that could get me murdered if I revealed it? I didn’t think so. Although . . . I’d overheard one of the Ford brothers accuse the other of insider trading when I was setting up for their party two weeks ago, and I’d surprised Victor Ingersoll coming out of the Zooks’ house, shoes in hand and shirttail untucked, when I arrived early in the morning to clean up after the Zooks’ annual backyard tax-day bash. I knew Peter Zook had left for the airport before the party ended, needing to make an early meeting at his CPA firm’s headquarters in Chicago. Victor and I had mumbled embarrassed “good mornings” and never mentioned it again. My job gave me access to people’s intimate
moments, sometimes, because I was in and out of their houses and interacted with them during times when emotions tended to run high, like weddings, significant birthdays, funerals, and big dos that were important to them. Still, I didn’t think my life was in danger.

Bogart’s gravelly voice grated from the screen: “I’ll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I’ll always remember you.” The credits rolled and Maud clicked on the lights with a remote. I blinked in the sudden brightness.

“We should search Ivy’s house,” Maud announced, rising with audible creaks and pops from her knees.

“Whatever for?” Brooke asked.

“The Maltese Falcon,” I quipped.

“Clues. A diary. Her computer. A calendar to tell us if she was supposed to meet anyone the morning she died.” Maud waved an all-encompassing hand, tanned, callused, and obviously used to hard work.

“She was,” I said.

They all looked at me.

“Me.”

Maud made an impatient gesture. “
Besides
you.”

“We shouldn’t invade her privacy like that,” Lola said. Her narrow shoulders hunched in as she leaned forward to make her point.

I put an arm around her. “Ivy’s beyond caring about that, Lo,” I said.

“I guess.” She still didn’t look happy.

“I’m sure the police have already searched her
house,” Brooke said. She twisted a lock of dark brown hair around one finger, a nervous habit she’d had since we were in grade school.

I didn’t know if she meant to reconcile Lola to the idea or suggest we shouldn’t bother since the police had already covered that ground. Her next words made it clear she was arguing the latter point.

“Besides, what are we going to do—bust a window to get in? We’d end up in jail. I can just see Troy’s face if he had to come down to the jail to bail me out. Or Troy Sr. and Clarice’s faces if they turned on the news and saw me being shoved into the back of a police car. There really would be a murder then: They’d kill me.”

She shuddered and everyone laughed, but I didn’t think she was kidding. Not much, anyway.

Maud nodded reluctantly as she took in the logic of Brooke’s objections. “It was just a thought,” she said. She growled with frustration. “Seems to me like friends ought to do
something
for a friend who’s been murdered by some coldhearted jerk.”

Kerry, who had been silent up until now, spoke up. “I could get in,” she said with a triumphant smile, “without breaking a single window or doing anything illegal.”

The four of us goggled at Kerry.

“How?” I asked finally.

“I’m a Realtor,” she reminded us. “You said Ham wants to sell the house. I call him, offer my services, tell him I need to see the house before we can settle on an asking price, and he hands over the keys. I’ve never been one of those
ambulance-chasing Realtors who are phoning the next of kin trying to get a listing before a body’s buried, but I could do it for Ivy.”

“Brilliant!” Maud slapped a hand on her thigh. “Let’s do it tomorrow.”

“I can’t let a whole herd of people tromp through the house,” Kerry said, sounding tetchy. Her arched nostrils flared. “I could lose my license. I have to do this on my own.”

“What if Ham wants to go with you?” I asked. “How will you search then?”

Kerry narrowed her eyes in thought. “Good point. You can come, Amy-Faye. I’ll keep Ham with me while you search. We can say you wanted a couple of photos of Ivy to display at the funeral or something.”

“That’s good,” I said, giving Kerry an admiring look.

“You don’t think I got to be mayor based only on my good looks and intellect, do you?” Kerry asked wryly. “A certain degree of sneakiness comes with the job.”

I was glad Maud let the comment go without saying anything.

We broke up shortly after that, without even discussing the movie. The death of our friend made cinematic murders almost distasteful. We’d have done better, I thought driving home, to delay watching the movie for a few weeks. Maybe our next book should be something lighter; I made a mental note to ask around on some online forums for a suitable title. It was my turn to choose a book since Ivy had suggested
The Maltese Falcon
.

A slight headache reminded me of the margaritas and happy hour with Doug. I downed a couple of aspirin, but I knew they wouldn’t alleviate the sadness I felt whenever I thought of Doug’s upcoming wedding (which I had to do a lot since I had stupidly agreed to plan it).
Snap out of it,
I told myself, brushing my teeth hard enough to make my gums sting.
Get over him, already.
WWKMD? Hm, Kinsey wasn’t much of a role model in the romance department. I’m pretty sure she last had sex twelve or fourteen books back. Okay, then, what would Stephanie Plum do if Ranger or Joe got engaged? Buy tarty lingerie. Blow up a car. Too expensive to be practical for me with my mortgage and barely solvent business.

I grimaced at my reflection in the mirror and wondered if doing something new with my hair would make me feel like a new me, a Doug-less me. I’d been Doug-less for a couple of years, of course, but my appearance hadn’t changed greatly in that time. Nothing in my life had changed greatly. I lived in the same town. I did the same work. I was still pet-less and significant other–less. I still ate with my parents on Sunday evenings. My hair was the same. Weight ditto. I was in a rut. I made a face at my reflection and resolved to do something about it.

Tomorrow I would make a list of things to do to shake up my life. I remembered I was lunching with Detective Lindell Hart and smiled. That would be item one on my list. Item two would be sneaking into Ivy’s house and searching it, definitely not a “rut”-type activity. Item three . . . I fell asleep before I came up with a third task.

I
managed to keep my nose to the grindstone all Friday morning, even after Kerry called to say Ham was enthusiastic about listing Ivy’s house and would meet us there at two. That would leave just enough time for my lunch with Detective Hart. By noon, I had completed preparations for Ivy’s funeral tomorrow, checked fourteen items off my to-do list for the Boy Scout picnic Sunday, resolved a minor catering crisis related to the Finkelsteins’ fiftieth, and made an appointment with Sheena to do something new with my hair. I left to meet Detective Hart feeling like I’d accomplished a lot.

We arrived at the Munchery simultaneously and exchanged greetings. His smile warmed me, as did the admiration in his eyes as they swept over me. I was glad I’d worn the moss-colored blouse that made my hazel eyes more green than brown and somehow brightened my complexion. We entered the café side by side to be greeted by the clang of cutlery and the babel of dozens of
conversations from the packed room. I turned toward Hart.

“Why don’t we get sandwiches to go and take them up to Lost Alice Lake?” I suggested. “It’s a beautiful day, and if you’re hiring me to be your Heaven tour guide, I might as well start earning my pay.” I laughed.

“Your pay is a free lunch,” he said promptly. “Excellent idea. I’m hoping you can tell me where the lake got that strange name. It’s not a morbid story, I hope.”

I merely grinned and said, “I’ll tell you when we get there.”

To-go bags in hand, we got into his official Tahoe with
HEAVEN POLICE DEPARTMENT
on the sides and headed up the narrow road to Lost Alice Lake on the southern side of town. On a perfect spring day, exercisers, picnickers, and hardy sunbathers dotted the trail around the lake and the expanse of grass sweeping down to it. A lone kite flier struggled with his kite as we got out of the SUV. A strong breeze created some chop on the lake, roughing up the reflection of the mountains on the blue water. The wedding gazebo where Doug would get married in two weeks shone whitely from the left, surrounded by a copse of aspens. I turned my back on it and headed toward a picnic table occupied only by a pair of scavenging magpies. Their black wings gleamed bluely iridescent against their white chests.

“This
is
heaven,” Hart said, drawing in a deep breath of the pine-scented air. “I think I could live here forever and never get used to how clear the air is.”

I was pleased by his admiration for my town. “It’s a beautiful place,” I said. “I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

Shooing the magpies off the table, I inspected the seat for debris and sat, opening my lunch. The smell of warm pastrami drifted out and I lowered my nose into the bag, making Hart laugh. He maneuvered his long legs over the bench and said, “So tell me the story behind the lake. Did someone named Alice drown here?”

I shook my head while I finished chewing the first spicy bite of my sandwich. “Nope,” I mumbled. “Nothing so depressing. For a start, Alice wasn’t a person. She was a goat.”

“A goat?”

“Uh-huh. According to local lore, the town’s founder, Walter Walters, arrived here in the late 1800s, intending to do a little prospecting. He set up camp on the lakeshore. His letters home—you can read them at the historical society—make it clear he wasn’t having much luck and was planning to move on to what’s now Nevada come the spring. Apparently, he had this goat with him—depended on her for milk, I guess—and she was in the habit of wandering off. One day, she was lost as usual, and he followed her bleating until he found her stuck in a crevice halfway up that mountain.” I nodded toward the nearest mountain peak. “Some people say there was a cougar about to pounce on her and that he fired his rifle to chase it away. At any rate, as he dug Alice out, he noticed a glint of silver and realized he’d found what he’d been looking for. They mined silver
from his strike until the mid-1970s. They still give tours of the mine. It’s interesting.”

“But the name?”

“Oh, yeah. In his last letter home, when he summoned his family to join him, he said something like, ‘If I hadn’t lost Alice, I’d never have found the treasure,’ and so his family—his wife and ten sons, if you can believe it—christened the lake Lost Alice Lake when they arrived to help with the mining. The town itself, when it grew up, was called Walter’s Ford. That’s what it was until fifteen years ago when the council voted to rename it Heaven, hoping to attract more of the tourists who tended to pass us by as they zipped between Denver and Grand Junction and some of the ski areas. It worked, too.”

“That’s quite the story,” Hart said, his tone saying he suspected at least part of it was fiction.

“Don’t you go dissing our local legends,” I said with a mock glare.

He held up his hands in a surrender gesture. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Do you miss Atlanta?”

He gave it some consideration, and I was struck again by his quality of stillness. No fidgeting fingers, jiggling foot, or facial tics. A man who was comfortable in his own skin.
Or a hunter in a blind, staying still so as not to startle his prey,
I heard Maud’s voice in my head.
He is a cop, after all.
I told Maud to shush.

“I miss some things about living in a big city, and about the South. I can’t get a decent biscuit anywhere in this state, and I’d like to be closer to
a major airport, but all in all, I like the pace of life here better and I sure as heck don’t miss the traffic or the gang problems.”

We crumpled up our lunch bags and rose to dump them in the bear-proof trash can. Without talking about it, we turned and strolled toward the lakeside trail. Close to the water, I could see the pebbled bottom and spot fingerling trout lurking in the waving lake grasses. A border collie running with her master galloped up to sniff at us and we patted her. She loped away when her master whistled.

“Leave anyone important behind?” I asked casually. Just because he didn’t wear a ring didn’t mean he hadn’t left a live-in girlfriend behind. Or worse, had a live-in girlfriend planning to follow him out here as soon as she sold their place or found a new job.

“My folks moved to Montgomery, Alabama, when my sister’s husband died in a fire. He was a firefighter. She was pregnant with her second and they moved to help her after the baby was born.”

“How awful!” I said, almost unable to imagine how horrible it would be to lose a husband that way.

“It was grim, but it’s three years ago now and she’s doing better. The boys keep her too busy to think about it much, as far as I can tell. Other than that, I’ve got a brother in England with the air force, and that’s it. No other ties.” The look he slanted me told me he knew what I’d really been after. “You?”

“You haven’t looked me up in some police
database?” I kidded, half hoping he had, because that would show he was interested. My record was clean, other than a parking ticket or two.

He laughed. “I prefer getting to know my friends in person. Our computers don’t have any of the good stuff, anyway, like what you majored in and why, or who your favorite band is, or why you live in Heaven, or what you’d do if time and money weren’t factors.”

“Wow. All that on a first da—lunch? Let’s see. English, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I’ve always loved books. It was a default major, mostly. I added up my credits when CU told me I had to declare a major and I had more English classes than anything else, so voilà.” I shrugged one shoulder, feeling a bit sheepish about not having been more focused, not having more of a plan. “Favorite band: Maroon 5. Yours?”

“Garth Brooks.”

“That’s not a band.”

“Performer, then.” He stooped to pick up a stone, drew back his arm, and skipped it. It hopped six times before sinking.

I clapped lightly. “I live in Heaven because it’s home. I did a semester in Italy, and I tried working in Chicago right after college, but I felt . . . alien. I lasted nine months with an ad agency before coming back here. I don’t think I could live anywhere else.

“Mom and Dad live here in town and I see them regularly, although I have my own house.” I didn’t want him to think I lived in their basement and mooched off them. “Three sisters and a brother.
One sister here, one in Grand Junction, and one in Denver. My brother, Derek, brews beer. He and a partner just bought a building that’s been about fifteen restaurants over the past ten years and they’re going to open a brewpub.” I’d invested in it and I was keeping my fingers firmly crossed that it wouldn’t fail as quickly as the other restaurants had. I’d have to declare bankruptcy—okay, not quite—and Derek would be crushed. “Grand opening’s in August. I’m in charge of the party. You’re invited. Actually, everyone in town’s invited.”

“Wow, I felt special there for a moment.” Hart grinned down at me.

“You are special,” I assured him, returning his grin. “You’ve got a personal invitation from the master brewer’s sister. Most other people will just get the announcement in the
Herald
.” I looked at my watch and realized I needed to get going if I was going to meet Kerry at Ivy’s place. Suspecting Hart wouldn’t be pleased to hear I was headed to Ivy’s house, I said, “I’ve got to get going. Appointment.”

“Yeah, me, too,” he said. “Duty calls.”

As we walked up the hill to his SUV, I asked, “Anything new on Ivy’s case?”

His face tightened and for the first time I felt him draw back. “That case is closed.”

“But the tea I brought you!”

“Is being tested. It’s not like we’ve got access to a lab that can turn things around in a day. This isn’t New York or Atlanta. Not that we got results quickly there, either”—he grimaced—“but that was due to backlog, not lack of facilities and experts. Anyway, the case—I’ll call it dormant
instead of closed. We’re not actively working it. Everything points to suicide.”

Hart opened the door for me and touched my arm as I got in. “I’m sorry, Amy-Faye. I know it’s hard.”

I nodded. We didn’t say much on the drive back down to town. Hart pulled to the curb outside my office and said, “I enjoyed it. Any chance you’d like to be my tour guide again sometime?”

I shook off my sadness about Ivy and smiled. He was easy to be with and attractive in a way that was growing on me. “Sure. Heaven’s bigger and more complicated than you would expect,” I said, acting all serious, like he was in danger of wandering into gang territory or a red-light district, neither of which existed in Heaven. “It’s best to have a reliable tour guide.”

“Exactly what I was thinking. I’ll call you.” He smiled as I closed the door and stepped onto the sidewalk.

I watched as he drove off and then dashed for my van, parked around back. If I didn’t hustle, I’d be late. I might have exceeded the speed limit a tad, but I arrived at Ivy’s town house in time to see Kerry emerge from her old Subaru Outback. There was no sign of Ham. Kerry held up a key ring as I approached and explained.

“Ham dropped these by my office. Said something came up and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get here.”

“Hot damn,” I said. I hadn’t been looking forward to another encounter with Ham Donner. “Let’s get to it.”

We approached the blue door and paused on the stoop. Shoving her sunglasses atop her head, where her short, gray-flecked brown hair kept them secured, Kerry gave me a doubtful look. The skin at the corners of her eyes crinkled. “I’m not so sure about this, Amy-Faye.”

In truth, I was having doubts as well. Still, we were here. “We’re not going to hurt anything,” I said. “It can’t hurt to look.”

“I guess.” Kerry fitted the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed the door open. She gestured for me to go first.

I froze for a moment, remembering the scene when I was here last. Would someone have cleaned up the vomit? Holding my breath, I stepped into the hallway. A pile of mail, mostly advertising circulars, had been swept aside by the door. At first, everything looked normal. No sign of Ivy’s last moments marred the hallway. A faint odor of disinfectant stung my nostrils, and I realized Ham had hired someone to clean up. Thank goodness. I moved farther into the hall and Kerry entered behind me, pulling a clipboard from her tote. Something in my peripheral vision caught my attention and I turned to my right. The living room–dining room combo looked like a yeti had run amok.

All the couch and chair cushions were on the floor, their stuffing spilling out where someone had slit them open. I tried not to think the word “intestines” and vowed to quit reading serial-killer books. The furniture was shoved out of place and the drawers of the buffet hung drunkenly. A pile of
table linens and place mats mounded in front of the buffet testified to what the drawers had held. A splatter of cranberry glass from a broken candy dish winked redly in the sunlight slanting through half-drawn blinds. It looked too much like blood and I took an involuntary step back, bumping into Kerry.

“What in the world—?” Kerry surveyed the chaos.

“I’d say either Ham needs to get his money back from the cleaning crew, or we’re not the first people to think of searching Ivy’s house.”

“It is just criminal the way people take advantage of other people’s tragedy,” Kerry said, her voice hard with anger. “Look at this! Some lowlifes heard about Ivy’s death and took the opportunity to break in and rob the place. And they didn’t even have the decency to do it neatly. They had to wreck the whole place. What is it with people these days? I’ll bet the kitchen’s a disaster.”

Before I could say anything, she bustled off in the direction of the kitchen. I followed. She was right. We stood on the threshold and looked at the mess. The cupboards and drawers hung open with their contents scattered around the room. Shards of colorful Fiestaware mingled with shattered glass and dented pots. Worse than that, all the canisters had been dumped on the floor, along with the food from the fridge. Open cartons of ice cream and containers of yogurt oozed onto the floor, mixing with flour and sugar and cornmeal to form a gelatinous mass. A bruised apple rested by my foot. A sour odor suggested that the mess had been there for at
least a day. It was going to take a keg of Lysol and an army of cleaners wielding shovels, mops, and scrub brushes to muck this place out.