As I pulled out of the auto repair shop and turned toward the highway, the sheriff turned on his cruiser’s sirens and lights and sped back toward Old Firehouse Studio.
Tessa and I didn’t talk much after that. I spent most of the time concentrating on my driving and trying to figure out how to ask her the right questions.
“Are you sure you saw Marco? You are positive he was dead?”
“Yes,” was all Tessa would say.
“Could it have been something else?”
“No.”
“Do you need a cookie?”
“Yes.”
• • •
When we arrived at my house, we went immediately to Val’s front door, in search of a cookie for Tessa. My neighbor whipped the door open dramatically, her silky leopard-print blouse fluttering in the breeze caused by the door’s swift movement.
“Oh. It’s you,” Val said.
“Expecting someone else?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, but, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s okay, because we desperately need a cookie, and you can tell us who you’re waiting for some other time.” This was a smart move, because if Val started talking about one of her boyfriends, we could be standing on her doorstep all night.
“Oh! A cookie. I can do that. I have cookies,” Val said, trotting to her kitchen. She didn’t invite us in.
Val grabbed a zebra-striped cookie jar and jammed it into my outstretched hands. “As always, it’s faboo that you stopped by,” Val said, hurriedly closing the door. She opened it again and added, “Oatmeal raisin.”
“Is this your way of saying you’ve got someone coming over tonight?” I asked, holding the door before she could shut it again.
“No, it’s my way of telling you what kind of cookie is in the jar,” Val said, scooting us off the welcome mat. “Bye-bye.” She shut the door. How odd. She was usually delighted to see me. In fact, I often had trouble getting Val to stop talking and leave me alone.
“I wonder who she’s waiting for,” Tessa said.
“I’ll find out eventually. She always has trouble keeping her secrets from me, or anyone else, for very long.” On my side of the duplex, Tessa and I settled onto the sofa.
“Cookie?” I opened the jar and offered Tessa one.
“Thanks,” Tessa said, taking a bite.
“We need milk. We’ve got to have milk,” I said, finding the carton in the refrigerator and filling two glasses. As soon as Gumdrop heard the fridge door open, he was next to me, spinning between my legs and looking up at me with those big green eyes.
“Did Val come over and feed you?” My cat wasn’t going to say one way or another. If someone was willing to feed him, that was perfectly all right with him, even if he’d already eaten. I popped open a can of Gummie’s favorite Savory Salmon and plopped a couple of heaping tablespoons into his dish. For once, he didn’t just smell the food and walk away. He actually started eating it. The poor guy was really hungry.
I handed my friend a glass of milk and settled back down next to her. “Tessa, are you okay?” I asked. She looked as pale as the glass of milk she was holding. “Is it Marco? You have every right to be upset about him. It’s dreadful to have seen what you did.”
“It’s just that …” Tessa choked up and shook her head. She couldn’t continue.
“It’s okay. Everything is going to be fine. The sheriff said he’s going to take care of everything.”
“I miss my kids and Craig, especially since this disturbing thing with Marco happened.”
“I know. It’s horrible. You’ve got me this week. I’ll be your support, okay?” I said.
“You’re my support every week,” Tessa said, giving me a hug. “What do you think is going to happen with class?”
“I guess that’s something Dez and Abby are going to have to figure out. They’ll have to find another teacher, or refund everyone’s money, or reschedule, I guess,” I said.
“It’s impossible to reschedule when the teacher is not coming back…to life,” Tessa said.
“Another cookie?”
“Not even a cookie can help with this mess.”
SIX
The next morning I woke up with broiling feet. It was Gumdrop’s fault. Fortunately, I had trained him to stop sleeping on my head, but sleeping on my feet wasn’t much better. It made it hard to roll over, and I woke up feeling like I’d been wearing slippers all night. Gumdrop looked like a pair of fluffy gray slippers, so in my groggy, pre-caffeinated brain it seemed to make sense.
I padded down the hallway, Gumdrop at my heels, and made some coffee. There was no sign of Tessa. After the coffee finished brewing, Tessa still hadn’t appeared, and that was strange. Usually the smell of coffee would bring her running.
I tapped on the door of the guest room. “Tessa? Are you okay? Do you want coffee?”
“Ugh.”
“Are you all right?”
“Too…many…cookies…”
“We shouldn’t have eaten the whole jar. But, that was last night, and my mom always says you shouldn’t dwell on the past,” I said through the door.
“Ugh.” She opened the door a crack. “Is there coffee?” she asked weakly.
“Of course. I can’t believe you didn’t smell it through the door.”
“I think I’m in sensory overload. Too much oatmeal, too many raisins. Aren’t those things supposed to be healthy?”
“It’s the sugar that holds them together that might be the problem.”
Tessa shuffled out to the big oak table in the kitchen.
“Here you go,” I said, shoveling two heaping spoons of sugar into the cup, giving it a swift stir, and handing her the mug. “I bet you’re going to skip breakfast.”
“Ugh.”
“That’s what I thought.”
After half a mug of coffee, Tessa was starting to perk up. “I’m going to take a shower. We should probably get out to the studio before too long,” Tessa said.
“I wonder what it’ll be like out there today.”
“Probably a zoo with police and reporters everywhere. I’m calling Abby,” I said.
I called Old Firehouse Studio and Sam answered.
“Sam! Thank God I reached you. What’s happening out there?”
“No one else is here yet. Are you on your way?” he asked.
“Everything’s fine?”
“Uh, yeah. I’m going to start up the kilns in the hot shop.”
“No cops? No reporters?”
“Noooo. Should there be?”
“Okay, thanks. Tessa and I will be there soon.” I decided to wait until we arrived at the studio to see for myself what was happening, before telling Sam what Tessa had seen last night. When Tessa was dressed, I gave her an update, telling her Sam seemed to think everything at the studio was fine.
“Or maybe he’s clueless and hasn’t talked with Abby or the police yet. Don’t tell me Marco is alive and well. I know what I saw,” Tessa said, taking a sip of her second cup of coffee and giving me one of her fiercest glares.
“Let’s get out there and find out what happened. What are we waiting for?”
“For the coffee to kick in,” Tessa replied.
• • •
When we arrived at the studio, everything was oddly normal. We parked and went inside. The studio was empty. I hated to look into the hot shop, afraid of what I might see. I forced myself to glance over, but there was no dead body. Had we dreamed Tessa had seen a corpse? Was I now in a cookie-binge induced daze, imagining a scene in which a dead man had tidily cleaned himself up and walked away?
I found Abby in her office.
“Hey, Jax. How are you this morning?”
“Oh my God, Abby, the real question is how are you? How terrible…”
“Oh,
we’re okay, Dez and I, we’re always fighting. It happens after being married for all these years.”
“No, I mean, you know, with Marco.”
“Marco? Oh, I haven’t seen him yet today,” Abby said. “Probably still jet-lagged and sleeping in.”
“Because Tessa saw Marco, and he was—”
“Drunk?”
“No. Dead.”
“What? That’s crazy. He was probably out drinking last night with Dez.”
“Where’s Dez now? Maybe he saw what happened last night.”
“I haven’t seen Dez all night. You know, he and I get mad at each other, and he goes off drinking and disappears, sometimes for a couple of days. He’ll be back, hung over and apologetic later today. It’ll be fine. Are you sure it wasn’t you two who were out drinking last night? Seeing things in the dark?”
Although we were hung over this morning, it was from too many oatmeal cookies, not too much alcohol. Tessa joined us in Abby’s office.
“Abby, I swear, last night I saw Marco, and he was dead,” Tessa said, pulling Abby from her chair and marching her to the hot shop. “Right there, lying across the marver. Dead!”
“I think you might have seen me charging the furnace,” Sam said, coming in from the utility yard. “I fill it with these fifty pound bags of crushed glass and I set a few on the marver last night. Maybe you saw those? When the lights are off and the furnace is glowing, it casts some pretty weird shadows.”
“Look, I know what I saw. I don’t want you to tell me I saw shadows or bags of glass. I saw Marco and he was dead. His eyes were open—so was his mouth—his arms were pale and flung out on either side of his motionless body.”
“Let’s go find Marco, and I can prove to you he’s not dead. Okay? Oh, and here’s your phone. I found it in the kitchen after you left last night,” Abby said, handing Tessa her cell phone.
We followed Abby as she huffed down the steps to the field, convinced that once we saw Marco alive and well, the argument would be over. For our part, Tessa and I were convinced that once Abby saw Marco was missing, she’d be ready to believe something horrible had happened last night.
Abby banged on the trailer door. “Marco! You in there? Marco!” There was no answer. She twisted the doorknob and the door swung open. Not a soul was there.
“Maybe Marco went out for some breakfast,” Abby said, refusing to believe her instructor was gone for good.
“How can we find Dez?” I asked. “Maybe he saw something.”
“When Dez goes on a bender, we might not see him for a couple of days. Who knows which bar he’d be at,” Abby said. “I’m not worried about him. It happens all the time.”
The Twins stumbled out of their trailer about fifty feet from where we were standing.
“Are we starting class early?” they asked. I barely recognized them with no make-up and in their matching black footie pajamas. I would never have guessed they were the long john type.
Farther down the slope toward the river, Vance’s tent was barely standing. It looked like it had flooded all night long. Hearing the commotion, he pulled himself out of the tent. He was sopping wet.
“Vance!” I said, running through the soggy field to him. “Are you okay?”
“Ah-choo!” Vance let rip the biggest sneeze I’d ever heard. It nearly bowled me over.
“Oh, Vance, come on, let’s get you inside,” Tessa said, her maternal instincts taking over. “Maybe I can make you some tea.”
Vance, Tessa, and I sloshed through the field, with Sam and Abby bringing up the rear.
“Stand here, dude, next to the furnace. It will dry you out and warm you up,” Sam told Vance, once we were back inside. Tessa brought Vance a cup of tea and stood with him next to the furnace, trying to warm up as well.
Since I was cold and wet, too, I slid up next to Tessa and Vance, trying to get a sliver of the heat radiating from the furnace. The crack-off bucket was right in front of the furnace, so I dragged it a few feet to get it out of the way. The glass shards in the bottom of the pot glistened as the water sloshed from side to side.
“Did anything weird happen last night after we left?” I asked Vance.
“What kind of weird are we talking about?”
“We can’t find Marco this morning. Did you see him last night after we all went our separate ways?”
“No, I bundled up in my tent and tried to stay warm and dry. That wasn’t easy. I sure hope it doesn’t rain again tonight.”
“Were you out of your tent at all last night?” I was wondering if he’d seen anyone, or if it had been him we’d seen in the bushes at the side of the building.
“I went out at one point to use the bathroom. I was going to use the studio’s john, but the doors were locked. I ended up going by the river, but it was hard getting down there through all those bushes.”
“You didn’t see anything going on in the studio when you were up?”
“No, not a thing. I didn’t have my glasses on, so unless it was the size of a rhinoceros, I might not even have noticed it. Wait, come to think of it, I did see something. I saw a car speeding away from the studio.”
It was likely Vance had seen Tessa and me driving away last night. Or perhaps he’d seen someone else, like the murderer, making a quick getaway.
“Really? Do you know what kind of car it was?” I asked.
“Sorry, I couldn’t see much of anything in the dark.”
Abby picked up the studio phone. “I’ll call Dez. Maybe he’s crawled home by now and he can tell me what the hell is going on. Oh, wait. I have a message.” She listened to the message, then dialed her phone.
“Hey, Harvey. I got your message. Sorry you had to come out last night in the rain. You’d better get out here. We think our instructor might be missing,” Abby said. Tessa looked hard at Abby with big bulging eyes, “or dead,” Abby added with Tessa’s non-verbal encouragement. “Oh, and we can’t find Dez either. Can you hit some of the local places?”
Abby hung up. “The sheriff said he’d be out as soon as he’s finished breakfast and told me he’d stop at some of the bars Dez likes on his way over.”
“The sheriff didn’t see anything when he came out last night?” I asked.
“He said he showed up, no one was here, everything was locked up. No dead bodies. Nothing. He talked with a couple of women—must have been you two. He left me a message here last night. That’s the message I just heard.” Abby called the others in from the break room. “We’re going to start class a little later than planned,” Abby said. “We need to track down Marco and Dez, and then we’ll get started.”
“Why doesn’t everyone come with me and we can look at what we made last night, now that it’s all cooled down,” Sam said, opening one of the kilns and looking inside.
“Tessa and I’ll go out and get some pastries. That’ll help the situation,” I said. Pastries helped a lot of situations, but I didn’t think it would help us solve how a dead body could appear and then disappear into thin air. “We’ll bring back enough for everyone.” I figured a few carbs and a little caffeine could help all of us.
Abby mouthed the words thank you, and pressed her palms together in mock prayer, as we headed out the door.
“Wasn’t there a diner down here somewhere?”
“Yes, it’s about the only thing in town other than the studio and the car repair shop. Maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll find Dez and Marco there having breakfast.”
“You know it’s not possible,” Tessa said, shaking her head.
“Of course I do. I don’t know if you noticed, but Marco’s bed was made. He didn’t sleep in it last night.”
“That’s because he never made it back to his trailer.”
“You mean cottage,” I said with a smirk.
Tessa responded by playfully smacking me on the arm.
&nbs
p; We walked down Main Street and a few minutes later arrived at the Robin’s Nest Café. It was utterly still inside the restaurant. A man in his fifties stood behind the cash register looking smart and trim in a clean white oxford shirt with a red apron over the top of some well-creased khakis.
“Hi there, lovely ladies! May I get you a table?” the man asked with a bright toothpaste-commercial smile, putting down his paper to greet us.
“No, thanks. We’d like two of your largest coffees and a box of donuts. Do you have any?”
“No donuts, but, you’re in luck,” said the owner, “We have muffins, even better than donuts.”
“We’d like two dozen,” Tessa said, handing the man her credit card.
“All of them? That never happens around here,” said the man, chuckling. “We don’t get many visitors. Is this your first time in Carthage?”
“It is,” I said. And probably my last, but I wasn’t going to say it out loud.
“Vickie!” The man hollered over his shoulder. “Can you bring out all the muffins? We’ve got some takers.”
Minutes later, a woman came bustling out of the kitchen carrying two rectangular pink boxes.
“That’s my wife, Vickie. She’s my cook. She makes the best muffins in town,” the man said.
The only muffins in town, I thought. Vickie set the muffin boxes down on the counter in front of us.
“And I’m Carl, the owner of this fine establishment. Here are your muffins. I was looking forward to sneaking one of them later, but you get them instead,” he said, patting his flat belly. “That’s the good news.”
“Maybe I’ll make more.” Vickie slumped onto the stool behind the counter. The dark shadows beneath her eyes told me she was exhausted, but not simply from a poor night’s sleep. Instead, it was clear her exhaustion went much deeper, caused by years of hard work or heartache. “Enjoy the muffins. They’re chocolate chip. I make a different kind each day, so check back tomorrow,” she said, rubbing her neck and trying to smile.
Off the Beadin' Path, Glass Bead Mystery Series, Book 3 Page 5