by Kate Flora
“Tall and…uh…strong-looking. You know.” He spread his hands. “Big shoulders. Dark hair. Gray suit. Sunglasses. And instead of those shiny shoes they wear on TV, he was wearing cowboy boots.”
This kid would make a good detective. “Did you see his vehicle?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ma’am makes me feel ancient, but I liked that Albie’s parents had taught him such good manners. “Car or SUV?”
Another of those fabulous grins. “Black SUV, like you see on TV. It didn’t have government plates, though.”
“Did he see you watching him?”
“Nope.”
“You did well. Thank you for the information, Albie.”
Albie, short for Albert, gathered up his books and left.
“I’m glad you’re here, Thea,” Jeannine said, giving me a curious look. “I’ve been so worried about that poor girl. The pregnant one who was moving into that cottage near you. Jessica. Did she ever come and introduce herself? She looked awfully forlorn the day she was in here. I thought she could do with a friend, so I suggested you. Believe it or not, she was looking for a book about plumbing, which, given what a wreck that place is, shouldn’t have surprised me. Only I was trying to imagine her working under a sink in her condition.”
“You won’t find me under any sinks, that’s for sure. I did paint the baby’s room with some supposed to be nontoxic paint, and even that was a challenge. Andre was not happy about me being up on a ladder.”
I realized I hadn’t answered her question. “I did see her a few times. She stopped in. Told me you had suggested we meet. I liked her. We had tea and made plans to go shopping for baby things, which we did, and had a great time. Then those two people got killed at her cottage, and she has disappeared.”
“You don’t know where she’s gone?”
Why did she sound so suspicious? Jeannine and I usually chatted in a very comfortable way. I shrugged. “No idea. I don’t think she’s familiar with the area. You have any thoughts about that?”
Jeannine looked uncomfortable. “You really don’t know where she is?”
Now I was uncomfortable. Why would she think I knew Charity’s whereabouts? I studied her face, wondering what was going on, and whether a visit from the mysterious fellow Bob had described was behind this.
I decided to lob the ball back to her. “Was she in here a lot, enough for you to get to know her? There must have been some reason, other than we’re both pregnant, for you to suggest she get to know me.”
I waited. Silence makes people uneasy. Often, when people don’t want to tell you things, silence will get them to talk.
Although, of course, she was a librarian. They’re supposed to like silence.
After a pause awkward in its length, she said, “I just figured, since you’re a detective, that maybe if she was in trouble, you would help.”
“Gosh,” I said, carefully picking such a girly word, “Jeannine, I had no idea poor Jessica was in trouble until…well, until those awful murders happened and she’d disappeared. Before that, we were just two women having our first babies, having fun shopping for baby things. It makes me awfully uneasy, thinking there might be strangers around here bent on doing harm. Especially in my condition.”
I gave it a beat and said, “You know I’m a consultant to private schools, right? My partner and I run a business called EDGE Consulting, which keeps me plenty busy. I have no idea why anyone would think I’m a detective.”
I shook my head in wonder and said in a puzzled voice, “Did someone tell you I’m a detective?”
It sounded like something the soft, pathetic heroine of a book might say. I had to suppress adding a breathy giggle. I watched her face as I said, “And then that nice young Albie says there have been strangers around my house. Andre’s out on a case, and I’m almost afraid to go home if he’s not there. Jeannine, you are pretty plugged in to what happens around here. Have you seen anyone strange around town?”
I knew she had. Bob said he’d seen that guy heading for the library. Again, I waited. Was she going to lie to me? If so, why?
“No. Not other than the summer people who are renting camps. They come in for books and videos when they realize those rentals don’t have cable.”
I kept my sweet, girly avatar as I asked, “I’m curious though, really, why you would think I’m a detective.” I repeated my unanswered question. “Did someone tell you I am?”
She blushed. She actually blushed and looked down at her feet. Of course, she deserved to be embarrassed, since we’d had multiple conversations about my job and the challenges of working with teens and young adults and helicopter and snowplow parents. We’d even talked about young adult books and how to communicate with a population raised entirely in a digital world. She’d shared her challenges trying to attract teenagers to the special area she’d set up for them and how to get them to use the library for anything beyond logging into social media.
Clearly, she wasn’t going to come clean. Maybe the mysterious guy had scared her? I stopped waiting for revelation and asked a direct question. “Bob over at the market says there was a man, a stranger, in earlier today asking questions about me. Did he stop in here as well?”
Confronted with the choice of believing a pushy stranger or a friendly new neighbor, she became the Jeannine I was used to. “There was a man in earlier asking about you.”
She described a man I suspected was Malcolm Kinsman. I was puzzled. He couldn’t have been looking for my house. If he’d found me on the plane, he clearly had resources behind him that could locate me. Was he checking to see what he could learn about me from my neighbors? Trying to learn whether I had other properties where I might have stashed Charity?
Whatever he was up to, it was disturbing.
“I thought it was odd,” she said, “and you know, we librarians have a code about protecting the privacy of our patrons, so I didn’t tell him anything.” She paused. “What would I tell him anyway? That you’re new in town and fixing up a house and having a baby and your husband is with the state police?”
“But something he said made you suspicious, didn’t it?” I suggested. “Made you wonder if I was somehow involved in Jessica’s disappearance.” Charity’s name hadn’t been reported anywhere. I wasn’t about to call her that, despite the two Jessica problem.
“I’m sorry, Thea,” she said. “He was kind of a scary guy, and he showed me his government ID and made it seem like finding you was critical to finding a missing woman.”
Government ID, huh? He’d showed me a Texas driver’s license. “They can be that way, people who work for the government, can’t they? Do you know what agency he’s with?”
She was almost wringing her hands as she said, “I didn’t look that closely. Just that it was an ID card and it said U.S. Government. I guess that was pretty trusting of me, wasn’t it? I suppose he could have gotten something like that on the internet.”
“What Jessica’s story is surely is a mystery,” I said. “All you did was suggest she meet her pregnant neighbor. All I did was invite her in for tea and take her shopping. Both times, she was very careful not to reveal anything about herself. Now we’ve got strange men going around town asking questions, and if Albie is telling the truth—and he seems like a truthful boy—and his description is accurate, there’s another strange man besides the one who spoke to you prowling around my house while I’m at work. Unless your stranger was wearing cowboy boots?”
She shook her head.
I dropped my voice. “This isn’t good, Jeannine. Andre is gone a lot and I’m home alone. I’m going to give you my number. Please call me if you see any more of these strangers, or if the man comes back. Can you do that?”
Jeannine didn’t say anything. She seemed to be debating about whether she should tell me if strangers were asking about me. I didn’t think there was anything to debate about. I lived here. This was my local library, while a transient man asking questions about locals was owed nothing.
I wasn’t sure what was bothering her—maybe she was intimidated by authority—so I decided to pull her into my camp.
I put my hand protectively over MOC. “Frankly, Jeannine, this whole business is frightening me just when my doctor says I’m supposed to be avoiding stress. I saw that woman, Jessica, exactly three times. Once for tea, once for shopping, and for one minute to drop off a pot of annuals from Agway. It spooks me to think anyone believes I might have had something to do with her disappearance. I mean, you’ve seen her more than I have. It’s like saying that she came into the library a few times and spoke to you, so you must know all about her. Like you must somehow be involved in what happened to her.”
She was still wavering. I doubted the guy would be back, but something in my perverse nature made me need to win this thing. Guess I’d reached my quota of liars and suspicious people. I dropped into a chair, cradling my basketball, and lowered my head. “Jeannine,” I said, “Please. Two people were just murdered right across the street from me. That makes it hard to feel safe. It would help if I knew I could count on you.”
“Sure,” she said. “Yes. If anyone comes asking about you, I’ll call you.”
“Thank you.”
I took a breath. I needed to get home. It was summer, and hot in the car, and I’d left my groceries there. But I had one more question for her. “I’m really worried about her. Jessica. Can you think of any place around here where she might go? To hide out? Were there any places the two of you discussed?”
I was ignoring what Jeannine had said about librarians keeping their patrons’ secrets. She’d been hesitant about keeping mine, hadn’t she? But Jeannine knew the ins and outs of this town in a way I didn’t.
She shook her head. “Not really. When she told me where she was living, I was surprised. It’s not a nice place. It has been kind of a bottom-of-the-market rental and hasn’t been taken care of. There are other, better places to rent. I may have suggested some of them—some cottages out on the lake with weekly rentals, things like that. Sylvia Harris’s cute B&B where at least she could stay until she could make the cottage livable. There are those new condos down on the river. I don’t think they’re all rented yet.”
She shrugged. “It just bothered me, you know, thinking of someone bringing a newborn to that place. Have you seen it?”
“I was only in the driveway when I picked her up and when I gave her the plants. It looked awfully rundown.” She didn’t need to know I’d been inside when I found the real Jessica’s body.
“Right. You said. Maybe I was too pushy. She was so upbeat about the place when it needed so much work and…well, frankly, she didn’t look like she had that much time left before the baby. I told her my husband’s cousin has a little A-frame up on Morse Mountain that he rents. I think I even gave her his name and number. But that’s all. Nothing she couldn’t have found in an internet search. Except for Brad’s place.”
I was trying to think of a way to ferret out Brad’s last name when she said, “And in case you really are a detective, despite what you say, or you just care about finding that poor girl, Brad’s last name is Twitchell.”
I still thought she was holding something back, but nothing in my toolkit was prying it loose. She’d patted her pocket a few times, which made me wonder if she had someone’s business card in there. I gave up. I wasn’t about to tackle her and wrestle it away from her. It was only speculation anyway. Or my suspicious nature, honed by years of dealing with liars and bad guys. And bad gals. The bad world is an equal opportunity place.
I didn’t bother to ask her why she thought a detective would buy a house in rural Maine. Or what kind of detective she thought I was.
A mother and two small children came in, and Jeannine used them as an excuse to end our conversation.
I took my cue and left, puzzling over whether Jeannine was still suspicious of me. Maybe she’d pull out the mystery man’s card and call him as soon as things quieted down.
A younger, more energetic me who didn’t have groceries waiting in a hot car might have done some driving around, looking for a gray Volvo with Virginia plates. I was going to go home and order a batch of tee shirts declaring, I Am Not A Detective. If they arrive and I get to wear them before MOC is born, people are going to wonder what the heck they mean. I guess they will anyway.
I doubted they would do much good. A newspaper article once labeled me a detective, and the label is harder to shake than a burr.
I went back across the Common, looking left and right, half expecting Malcolm Kinsman to leap out from behind a tree.
I reached my car unscathed.
Twenty-One
I am not a detective, but I do have a tendency to get involved in matters that affect my life. Otherwise, why would I have tangled with a northern Maine militia group? Or tried to comply with my mother’s request that I get her protégé, the young woman who was everything she wanted me to be, out of jail after she was accused of murdering her husband? So despite not being a detective, I stopped in at the post office and asked Barry, the regular guy behind the counter, for an address for Brad Twitchell’s A-frame.
I wished I could avoid thinking about Charity or her husband, David, who might be in serious trouble. Her beyond-irritating brother. And people like Fred and Alice, people who kept turning up and asking intrusive questions. But how could I, when strangers were snooping around my house and even my local librarian was acting odd and evasive? If I ever wanted my peaceful life back, it seemed like the best course was to find Charity myself. Not that I knew what the heck I would do with her when I found her.
Bless Barry, he bought my story of a friend looking for a place to rent without a blink. I drove home with no idea what I was going to do with my new information. No one followed me, and I found no suspicious cars parked in the yard. By the time I got inside, my feet were screaming to be released. I dropped the groceries on the counter, wiggled my shoes off, and searched the house.
I was alone.
I stowed the food in the refrigerator, exercised willpower and didn’t immediately gobble the whoopee pie, and put on flip flops. Despite visions of sinking into a chair on the back deck, I found myself picking up my purse, locking the door, and heading back out to my car. I knew where those condos out by the lake were, and cruised past them first. No gray Volvos with Virginia plates. Searching summer rentals was best done with the internet and some calls, so I saved that for later and plugged the address for Twitchell’s A-frame into my phone.
Morse Mountain wasn’t a mountain, of course, it was just a high hill, but as I rose higher on a winding road with crumbling tar that was not much better than gravel, I felt like I was far from civilization. I passed a rusty trailer with three dead cars in the yard, and an abandoned farmhouse with a half-collapsed roof and a spooky barn.
By the time Siri announced I’d reached my destination, I was feeling uneasy. The A-frame was set in an untended clearing. The small, brown structure was surrounded by a deck perched in the air with no railing. There was no car in the drive, but I parked and climbed the steps to the deck, peering in the large windows. The inside was pleasant, decently furnished, and clean. A lot better than the cottage, except for being so isolated. There was no sign that anyone was living there.
I went around the back, but the curtains were drawn, and I couldn’t see in.
The trash barrels were empty.
There were no clothes on the line.
Disappointed, I trudged back to my car. For no good reason other than intuition, I thought I’d find her here. On the gravel where I’d parked, I found a crumpled receipt from the local market from three days ago. It might be a clue, but it was for two six-packs of beer, and a handful of scattered cans suggested someone had parked here to drink.
I looked for tire tracks, but the gravel was thick and dry and showed nothing.
Not finding her had amped up my anxiety level. Reminding myself that I was supposed to avoid stress, I started the car, rolled down the window to let
in some warm summer air, and headed home. Silly me. I hadn’t wanted to look for her, felt compelled to, and was now genuinely depressed that I hadn’t found her.
Mentally I put away my magnifying glass and hung up my deerstalker hat and went inside.
I poured myself a glass of lemonade, tied on an apron, and shredded the rotisserie chicken into a bowl. I added walnuts, celery, and cranberries, and stirred in some mayo. It would be a perfect dinner for a warm summer night. Then, because I hadn’t eaten since my morning scone, I fixed myself some cheese and crackers and carried them out to the back deck.
I set my phone on the wide arm of the Adirondack chair, put my feet up, and looked out over our back forty, actually more like two acres before the open space ran into woods. I grew up in the suburbs, and it still seems odd to own so much land. I like it, though. I could already imagine MOC toddling across the lawn on chubby legs, bent on escape. My mother says that I was always trying to escape. Given the lifelong difficulties in our relationship, I can understand why my baby self wanted to get away.
MOC gave me a few “notice me, Mom,” kicks before settling down, leaving me to doze peacefully in the sun. Before I’d been out there twenty minutes, I’d dropped off to sleep. I woke with the eerie sense that someone was watching me. When I looked around, though, I was alone, except for that frustrated mama deer and her baby. They were peering through the deer fence like they were visitors to a zoo and I was the exhibit.
I clapped my hands, and they skittishly moved a few feet away. But only a few feet.
Wondering how long it would take them to accept the fence as a deterrent, I settled back and closed my eyes.
My phone rang. Andre.
“Hey,” I said. “No bad guys around here. It’s a perfect afternoon and I made us a delicious salad for dinner.”
He sighed. I can read his sighs so well he didn’t need to say what came next, which was that he wouldn’t be home for dinner. He didn’t know when he would be home, but would I please keep my phone with me, just in case.