“He was trying to find out who killed that woman.”
“He was thinking about her again, maybe for the first time in years, because he was writing his memoirs.”
“That’s why someone killed him.”
“I don’t know that for sure, but I’m going to check out his house and see what I can find.”
As she leaned forward, her wings flapped backward, nearly touching behind her. “You must be very careful, Kate. You must promise me.”
My fear of Minette—and of myself for seeing her—began to melt a little. “I promise.”
“I will go with you to his house.”
“No, I’ll take Emily. You stay here.” Stay here? I was surprised as Minette was to hear those words come out of my mouth. But obviously I couldn’t stuff her in my pocket and risk Emily seeing her, and I needed a human-sized lookout to watch for anyone coming to Ray’s door while I snooped around. Ray had given me a key to his back door, so at least I couldn’t be accused of breaking and entering, but I doubted the police would look favorably on my digging around a crime scene—if they would deign to call it that.
“I will stay here.”
“I’ll go first thing in the morning. Hopefully before anyone else shows up at his house. His son lives in California, and I’m sure he’ll need to settle Ray’s affairs. In the meantime, I need to keep reading his memoirs.”
“Then I must have sleep time,” Minette said. “If . . .”
She hesitated, as if expecting a response, and I realized she was asking to sleep in my house, though I knew full well she could do what she pleased and I was powerless to stop her. Shooing a fairy out of a house was tantamount to evicting a fly. It wasn’t practical.
“Sleep on the couch,” I said. “Or wherever you want to.”
Her little face broke into a grin. “The pretty teacup.”
“Oh, well, sure. Whatever you—”
But she had already taken off, breaking the sound barrier, I was sure, as she flew for my kitchen.
So Ray had known about this creature for a year and had remained silent. As I sat there, thumbing the pages of his life story, I wondered if it was because I’d chuckled when he’d talked about fairies. Had he been testing me, judging if it was safe to tell me about his discovery? But how could I have known that he was serious?
“Well,” I said aloud, getting back to his memoirs. “I’m listening now, Ray. Tell me what you know.”
I carried on from where I’d left off, with Ray at a nearby house calling the police. “I talked to the homeowner for a few minutes and then decided to go back to the scene,” he wrote. “I couldn’t leave Alana alone because it didn’t seem right. But the first cops were already there when I got back: Detective Martin Rancourt and Officer Marie St. Peter. Officer St. Peter was already taping off the scene, and neither of them would let me anywhere near Alana. That was understandable and proper police procedure, even though I had stood right over the poor girl ten minutes before. St. Peter asked me to wait for her by her squad car, and soon, after two more officers arrived, she took my statement in her car. I remember looking at Rancourt through the back window. He had crouched down over the body. I could tell that like me, he was recording every element of the scene with his eyes. I told St. Peter everything. Every single detail, including the odd feeling that the killer was nearby when I first arrived. After that, I was asked to leave the area.”
When I flipped the page, I saw another handwritten note in the top margin: “Coffee.”
“That’s weird,” I said. Ray wouldn’t have started a grocery list on the page. His memoirs were too important to him. So what did “Coffee” mean?
As I read on, another puzzle niggled at me. How had Ray’s version of events differed from Detective Rancourt’s? Which of Rancourt’s facts had he disputed? He hadn’t underlined or circled anything on this page or the one before, so how would I find out? I flipped to the next page, and then the next and the next, but there were no more notes, no underlining—nothing. The most obvious solution was to ask Rancourt what Ray had said to him in Hannaford’s, but in addition to that being a nerve-racking prospect, I wasn’t sure I’d hear the truth in reply.
Returning to Ray’s story, I read, “At first I thought Alana was killed elsewhere and her body was taken to the woods, but the fallen leaves were barely disturbed—only as if a small struggle had taken place. There were no drag marks in the leaves and no soil on the heels of her shoes. Then I remembered my father telling me that murderers who knew the human body knew where to stab the internal carotid artery so that almost all of the bleeding is internal. I thought then that either a woman or a man could have killed Alana. It wouldn’t have taken great strength.”
It was astonishing. Except for the fact that Alana’s body was found in the woods, all this was news to me. The police had kept mum on the case, presumably because it was still open, and virtually none of what Ray wrote had ever been reported in the newspapers. Now Ray was talking about Alana for the first time in six years, writing down his version of the story. Had he been killed to keep him quiet?
CHAPTER 6
That night I slept well, even with Minette snoozing in a teacup in my kitchen. In fact, I dozed off while reading Ray’s memoirs and then toddled off to bed without checking on her. My fear of her had mostly disappeared, along with the fear that I was experiencing hallucinations. I felt comforted in a strange way, knowing that another living creature was nearby and for the first time in months I wasn’t alone at night. I thought having her in the house was rather like having a pet sleeping at the foot of your bed—though I didn’t dare tell her that.
As I headed into the kitchen the next morning, I called out a hello, but she wasn’t in the hutch or anywhere else I could see. What did fairies have for breakfast? I wondered. I hadn’t seen her eat a single thing. I had so many questions. Silly ones, like who made her clothes, and harder ones, like were there any more of her kind in the woods across Birch Street.
I made tea and toast, in case Emily forgot the croissants, moving with the sort of energy that came with a newfound purpose in life. This would not be an ordinary day spent puttering around my garden, much as I loved to do that. No, I was going to find out who had killed Ray. First I’d snoop around his house. Later, if I could work up the nerve, I’d talk to this Detective Rancourt. And I’d find out if Marie St. Peter was still on the police force.
When the doorbell rang, I whispered loudly for Minette to hide herself, though being a fairy in a human world she had to be more than adept at that. I found Emily standing on my front step, a box of pastries in her hand and a sour expression on her face. She headed for my kitchen, telling me she’d just spoken to Officer Bouchard. I braced myself for the news and invited her inside.
“What did Bouchard say?” I asked. “Want some almond tea?”
Emily plopped down at the table and opened her box of chocolate croissants. “A quick cup, yeah. Bouchard said the coroner hadn’t seen Ray yet.”
“So they’re not in any hurry,” I said, turning on my stove and getting the kettle going again. “Yesterday Bouchard said the report would come out tomorrow or the next day. That means we need to hit Ray’s house immediately. Like in five minutes. I don’t want the police to walk in on us.”
“What do you mean?”
I joined her at the table and grabbed myself a croissant before she could eat all four of them. And eat them she would. Emily’s sweet tooth was more voracious than mine. “I need to see Ray’s house for myself. I want to look at his house the way he looked at Alana’s murder scene. You have to read his memoirs. He noticed everything at the scene.” I proceeded to tell Emily what I’d read last night, making special note of Alana’s jacket, necklace, mud-free shoes, and scarf.
“And another thing,” I said. “He wrote the word ‘coffee’ on one of the pages.”
“That’s odd.”
I made us tea—my second cup—and checked my watch. We needed to get going. “Let’s walk through
the woods to get to his house.”
A minute later, stuffing croissants in our mouths, we were on the move. I found my cell phone in the living room and slid it into my jeans pocket. Then I grabbed my key ring from a hook on the back door and we headed outside. If the police were at Ray’s house, I could simply say I wanted to talk to them. Anyway, the police seemed confident Ray’s house wasn’t a crime scene, and if it wasn’t, they would have no problem with me, key in hand, checking out my friend’s house, making sure it was locked tight after his death.
To avoid neighbors’ prying eyes, we first marched into the woods behind my house and then cut left. Four houses down and still in the woods, we turned left again and strode to Ray’s back door. Seeing no one about, I slipped the key into the latch and stepped inside.
“Hello?” I called, shutting the door. “Anyone here?”
The morning sun, filtered through the sheer white curtains on the door and the window next to it, gave the large kitchen a bright, homey quality, despite Ray’s almost palpable absence. I scanned the room, my eyes darting from two open shelves neatly lined with quart-sized Ball jars to his weathered-looking kitchen table and his almost spare counters: a single pot of herbs, a canister labeled “Sugar,” and a coffeemaker. On top of his stove was a saucepan one-third full of mushroom soup.
“That’s the last meal he cooked,” Emily said, bending low and taking a sniff of the pot. “These mushrooms look and smell fine to me, even after sitting out all night. Do you think the police took samples?”
“If they intend to tell people Ray died from bad mushrooms, they’d better have taken samples. Don’t touch anything.”
I took my phone out and moved closer to the table. At one end of it was a cutting board, a knife, and a dozen or so slivers of beige-colored mushrooms, now slightly shriveled. To my eyes, they looked like grocery-bought button mushrooms after I’d scrubbed them of the browner parts of their skins. At the other end of the table, beneath a window, there was a white bowl half filled with soup. In it floated slices of mushrooms, though they were browner, darkened by cooking.
I snapped a photo and turned away, toward the Ball jars on the open shelves. Ray’s magnificent collection of nuts, berries, seeds, and herbs. “Look how he’s lined them up perfectly,” I said. “He had his fussy side.”
Each jar was labeled with black pen on a white sticker in Ray’s handwriting: “Roasted Hazelnuts,” “Ground & Dried Wild Leeks,” “Rose Hips,” “Roasted Chicory.” It was a forager’s grocery store, arranged not in alphabetical order but by type of food.
“Think of the hours of foraging those represent,” Emily said.
Starting on my left and moving right, I carefully perused the two long rows of jars. I’d been in Ray’s kitchen many times before, and to my eyes, nothing seemed amiss. Using a kitchen towel I found hanging by a loop on a cabinet, I took the jar labeled “Mushrooms” from the shelf and unscrewed the lid, trying as best I could to not erase possible fingerprints or leave my own behind. The mushrooms smelled earthy, like any dried mushrooms, but I was no expert.
There wasn’t much in Ray’s refrigerator. Milk, bread, eggs, orange juice, and what looked like half a homemade raisin pie. In the freezer were more of his foraging treasures, this time neatly stacked in labeled plastic bags: fiddleheads, dandelion greens, mustard greens, and more. Nothing out of the ordinary for Ray.
Next we headed into the living room. It too was bright—the police hadn’t bothered to shut the drapes—and it, like the kitchen, was a clean and uncluttered space, but that was Ray to the core. Neatness and order had been paramount in his life, even as a widower in his eighties. I’d always thought he’d caught the order bug from his father, who had been in the Marines before becoming a cop, and I’d often wondered if Ray had driven Donna half mad with his tidiness.
There was a writing desk in one corner of the living room, and on it sat a chrome lamp, his black electric typewriter, and a box of typing paper. Using the sleeve of my jacket, I opened the desk drawer. I found store receipts, mostly from Hannaford’s, paperclipped together, a brand-new ribbon cartridge for the typewriter, two letters from a woman named Sheila Abbottson of Central Maine Realty, and a pamphlet titled Fairy Lore and Horticulture in Smithwell by a woman named Irene Carrick.
If Ray, who evidently talked to fairies on the sly, thought the pamphlet was worth reading, then I too needed to give it a look. I folded it, stuck it in my back pocket, and returned to the desk drawer.
“Whatcha got there?” Emily said.
Shoot. My friend had been studying Ray’s single bookshelf, but still she’d seen me pocket the small booklet. “It’s a pamphlet on fairy lore published by the Smithwell Garden Society. I thought I’d give it a read.”
Emily laughed. “Ray and his fairies.”
My head jerked at her words.
She crossed the room and laid a gentle hand on my arm. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. But I want to know what happened to Ray. I don’t like that Bouchard was jumping to conclusions.”
“Like how mushrooms killed him? We don’t buy it.”
I walked over to his front window and directed my gaze at the woods across Birch Street. “Ray knew what was safe to eat and what wasn’t. He foraged for decades, Emily. He was incredibly knowledgeable, and he knew those woods inside and out.”
“I prefer to get my food from the supermarket, but you’re right. He knew his stuff.”
“He loved those woods. Spring or winter, it didn’t matter.”
Emily began to inspect the drawer of an end table, pulling it open using the hem of her brown heathered sweater. “That’s why he has that pamphlet. He used to tell me those woods were full of fairies.” She chuckled softly. “He had a vivid imagination. I think he half believed he could see them. He used to quote that line from Shakespeare—the one about there being more things in heaven and earth than we can dream of.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll miss him.”
“I’d sure like to talk to him now.”
“You two talked a lot.”
“But not much about fairies.”
“Because he knew you’re a cynic,” Emily said, again chuckling. “On the other hand, he knew I had a soft spot. Or is it a gullible spot?”
I twisted back. “Do you think that’s it?”
A frown creased Emily’s face. “You mean why he talked more to me about fairies?”
“Never mind.” I shooed the question with a wave of my hand, trying to make light of it. “I miss him already. I’d listen to him talk about anything right now.”
“I wonder when his son will get here. If he does.”
“He’s Ray’s only child, and since he lives in California, it may be awhile.”
“They have things called planes. They shuttle people quickly.”
“He’ll have to sell this house,” I said. “How’s he going to move all this furniture? And Ray’s books and all the food he collected?”
“There’s not really that much,” Emily said, giving the living room another scan. “He didn’t live a cluttered life, that’s for sure.”
“Selling the house,” I mumbled absentmindedly. It struck me then that Ray might have considered moving before. I went back to the desk drawer. “There are two letters from Central Maine Realty here,” I said. “I’m going to take a chance touching them.” Quickly as I could, I slipped the letters from their envelopes, read them, and stuck them back in.
“Was Ray selling his house?” Emily asked.
“This realtor, Sheila Abbottson, was urging him to,” I replied. “Reading the second of the two letters, she wasn’t having much success.”
“I can’t believe how neat his place is. Any realtor would love it.”
My eyes shot back to the desk, and from the desk to the couch and the console table behind the couch. “Emily, something is wrong. Did you touch the drawer in that other end table?”
“No yet.”
“It’s open sl
ightly. Ray hated open drawers and cabinets. He said they looked sloppy. And look at the bookshelves.”
“I didn’t touch anything there,” Emily said.
“He used to line up the spines, creating one neat line. And look at the console table. He never kept his address book on that, but it’s there now.”
“Oh, I see.”
I swung back to the desk. “And the lid on that box of typing paper is askew.” I strode up to the typewriter and flipped open the lid that covered the ribbon cartridge, again using my jacket to keep from leaving fingerprints. “There’s no ribbon cartridge in here. There’s a new one in his desk, but the one he was using is gone.” Taking a quick peek at the empty trash bin next to the desk, I said, “No cartridge in here.”
“Let me check the trash by the fridge,” Emily said, moving for the kitchen.
Lost in thought, I looked down at the empty slot in the typewriter where a cartridge should have been. By the time I heard the front door open, it was too late to run.
CHAPTER 7
Fishing through the enormous tote bag she carried, the woman at the door didn’t see me at first. She fished, kicked the door closed, and fished some more. When she looked up, she gasped and flinched—not in fear, it seemed to me, but in dismay at having been discovered entering the house. Her dismay grew when she saw Emily enter from the kitchen.
Yet the woman quickly recovered, and her dismay turned to belligerence. “What are you two doing in here? You have no business in Mr. Landry’s house. I’ll call the police.”
I held up my key ring. “Go right ahead. We’re neighbors with a key to Ray’s door. Who are you?”
“Oh.” The woman’s shoulders relaxed and dropped an inch or so. “I see. Well, I didn’t know anyone would be here. I’m basically responsible for maintaining this house. Or keeping it presentable and making sure it’s locked up.”
It was clear the woman was calculating how to present herself in the best of lights—and explain what she was doing in the house—and was coming up fairly empty-handed. “I’m Kate Brewer and this is Emily MacKenzie. And you are?”
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