by Maia Chance
“Okay, great,” I said. “Then we should definitely avoid any more trips to the police station. At least until we have concrete proof that Jentry and Jodi had a motive to kill Kathleen. I mean, right now all we have is hearsay about the will.”
“Proof of a motive? How are we going to get proof?”
“Well,” I said, “if—theoretically—we managed to take a peek at Kathleen’s will—”
“Take a peek at the will?”
“I know it sounds crazy. But listen. Jentry doesn’t know who we are—at least, not yet—so he can’t find us as long as we lie low, and this is a stolen car, so he can’t trace it to you even if he did see the license plate.”
“What if we tipped off the police—anonymously, I mean—about that marijuana operation?” Effie said. “Then they would arrest Jentry, and we’d be safe.”
“No way. Even if the police couldn’t for some reason trace the tip back to us, Jentry would.”
“But he’d be arrested.”
“Maybe, but not necessarily. And maybe not that creepy Gothboy—you saw him at the farm, right?”
Effie nodded.
“And,” I said, “not Jodi.”
* * *
Effie dropped me off at Dad’s. Dad and Cordelia were both out—thank goodness—and I had the place to myself. Amid the colonial furniture, swagged drapes, and brass knickknacks, the idea of a pot farmer shooting at me seemed impossible.
Also impossible-sounding was the two-pronged plan Effie and I had hatched during the rest of the car ride back, which went something like: number one, make an appointment to see Mr. Solomon the lawyer under false pretenses and, once in his office, somehow manage to locate and read Kathleen Todd’s unsigned will; and number two, visit the code-compliance officer at City Hall and beg him to reconsider razing the inn. Effie was making the appointments. All I had to do was hope that Jentry didn’t murder me in my sleep so that I could show up at the Stagecoach Inn in the morning, ready for more insanity.
I was eating lemon meringue pie straight from a Tupperware pie keeper in the fridge when Cordelia came home and caught me in the act.
“Oh,” I said through a mouthful. “Hi.” I suctioned the lid back onto the pie and shut the fridge.
“I heard about Kathleen Todd,” Cordelia said, setting grocery bags on the counter. “And about you and your great-aunt?” This was an accusatory question of some kind that I had no intention of answering.
“Yeah, crazy, huh?”
“Your poor father has been just frantic, you know. He started calling me a few hours ago from the golf course because Police Chief Gwozdek called him and told him about Kathleen and you and your great-aunt. He said you weren’t answering your cell phone. Where have you been?”
“Oh, out and about. The farmer’s market. The um—” I swallowed. “The Pour House.”
“Drinking during the day?” Cordelia pursed her lips. “Well.”
If only she knew what else I’d been up to. “Where is Dad now?”
“At his office in City Hall. He said he should be there in case he was needed. People don’t get murdered in Naneda. We need his strong leadership at a time like this. Now you go and call him and tell him you’re all right.”
“Okay.” Oh, the guilt. I headed for the door, still holding my fork because putting it in the dishwasher would be like confessing to having hoggish manners.
“Oh, and Agnes,” Cordelia said, “Roger called earlier.”
I stopped in my tracks. Hope curled in my heart like a wisp of smoke. “What did he say?”
“He only said he wants you to call him.”
“Oh.” There was a telephone in the kitchen, but I went to the one in the entry hall. I dialed Roger’s cell.
“Roger?” I said when he picked up.
“Agnes. I’m glad you called.”
Really? Was he going to tell me he’d made a mistake and that he couldn’t play G.I. Joe to Shelby’s Skipper any longer? That it’s brains that count, not toned bellies? That—
“I’ve boxed up all your belongings. I’m going to leave them in the mudroom so you can pick them up at your leisure.”
Roger pronounced leisure like leh-zhur. I’d once found that refreshingly correct. Now it seemed dumb.
“That way,” he said, “we can avoid any . . . unseemly encounters.”
“Um, okay . . .” Hope was replaced by the urge to scream.
“But I do look forward to working as your academic advisor. We can start by fixing some of those stylistic problems you have in your scholarly writing.”
“Just make sure my contact lenses and phone charger and wallet are in those boxes, okay?” I slammed the phone into its cradle. I hesitated, and then I dialed Dad at the mayoral office.
No one picked up. Maybe he was already headed home. I went upstairs for a shower.
Did Roger think I had a rhinoceros-thick skin? Yeah, maybe he did. Maybe I’d always been so busy playing it sardonic and smart with him that I’d never shown my sensitive side.
Or maybe he was just a total jerk.
In the bathroom, I washed the stupid pie fork I’d brought all the way from the kitchen and put it on the sink. I peeled off my too-tight jeans and band camp T-shirt, and then, all of a sudden, I felt paranoid. I did one of those spy-movie peeks out the bathroom curtains, half expecting to see Jentry’s white pickup truck down in the driveway.
Nope.
After my shower, I collapsed on my pink princess bed and fell instantly to sleep.
* * *
Dad woke me up at dusk to tell me that Aunt Effie was on the phone. “And you’ll be having dinner here tonight?” he asked.
“I was planning on it.”
“Great.” Dad forced a smile, but his eyebrows were knitted. We were going to have a heart-to-heart about me being a murder suspect.
Every parent’s dream, I’m sure.
I waited until Dad left, and then I got up and went to the upstairs hall telephone.
“Yeah?” I mumbled into the receiver.
“I managed to get us an appointment with the attorney Solomon for ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” Effie said.
“Someone was at his office on Sunday?”
“He has an answering service. So we can go tomorrow and try to see that will.”
“Oh. Good.” It was beyond trippy to be talking about this, especially while staring down at the fuzzy chick slippers that I’d had since I was twelve.
“And after that, we’ll go and see the code-compliance officer,” Effie said. “But come to the inn earlier in the morning, if you can, to help Chester with the rewiring. The police said they’re all done photographing and fingerprint dusting and all that, so we’re good to go.”
“I’ll head over after breakfast,” I said and hung up.
Dinner was lasagna, green salad, and margarine-soaked garlic bread. His high cholesterol was one hundred percent Cordelia’s fault.
Dad didn’t broach the topic of murder until we were both on our second slab of lasagna. “Sounds like you and your great-aunt Effie got into a little bit of a pickle today,” he said, trying for a lighthearted tone.
“Yeah. Someone started a pretty nasty rumor about Aunt Effie and me, and unfortunately, the police are buying into it.”
“I know you were here last night, Agnes, but the police do have sworn testimony that you, er, threatened Kathleen Todd at the library—”
“I’d just gotten dumped by my fiancé! I wasn’t really feeling like Little Miss Rainbows and Unicorns, and she was so rude.”
“Okay, Agnes, okay.” Dad patted the air with his hands. “I don’t believe for a minute that you did anything wrong, but the fact is, you threatened to wring her neck, and, well, her neck was wrung. So what I want to do is hire a lawyer—”
“What?” I screeched.
“As a precaution. For you and for Aunt Effie.”
“Hiring a lawyer would blow this whole thing out of proportion! The police are still in their preliminary bun
gling stage. Pretty soon they’ll unearth a suspect with a real motive, and then they’ll forget all about Aunt Effie and me. Please, Dad. Don’t hire a lawyer. Not yet. It’s bad enough that I’m suddenly living with my dad again and sleeping in my pink bed and wearing clothes left over from my adolescence. Having daddy intervene on my behalf . . . it’s just too, I don’t know, too demeaning. Besides, you’re the mayor. It’ll make you look bad if you get involved.”
“I’m already involved, Agnes.”
“Let me be an adult, Dad. Please. I’m twenty-eight. Let me deal with this by myself.”
“You really should have a lawyer present if the police question you again.”
“I know.”
“By the way, Aunt Effie never told me where she’s staying while she’s in town.”
Luckily, I was chewing garlic bread, so all I could say was “Hmgh.”
“I sure hope she’s not staying at the inn, because technically, she could be arrested for trespassing.”
“Glamorous Aunt Effie staying in that dump? Pfftt!”
“I heard a strange rumor—although I don’t like to give rumors any credence—”
“She’s staying at some fancy B and B on the other side of the lake. I forgot the name.”
“And she hired a licensed electrician to do the rewiring work?”
“Is there any other kind of electrician?” I smothered my guilt for lying to Dad with more garlic bread and then said, “So . . . who do you think killed Kathleen Todd?”
“Well, her husband is dead, and she didn’t have a gentleman friend that I know of. She had her two daughters, and she was close with the older one, Megan—Megan married a doctor, and her house is always featured in the historical society’s Holiday Home Tour fundraiser. The younger daughter, Jodi—well, I think she was a bit of a disappointment to her mother. She didn’t go to college, and she had a child out of wedlock. Kathleen had all the members of the historical society wrapped around her little finger, and she had a way of getting people to do what she wanted for the most part, but she did step on toes by enforcing the historical district ordinances pretty aggressively.” Dad looked at me closely. “You’re not . . . you’re not poking around in this, are you?”
“What? Me? No.” I scoffed.
“Good. Because I can’t help remembering how much you loved those Nancy Drew books when you were younger.”
“Huh.”
Dessert was the remains of the lemon meringue pie I had worked on earlier. Cordelia didn’t say anything about how I’d broken into the pie, but I could tell she was annoyed because she gave me a Weight Watcher’s–sized slice. She also informed me with a smile that she’d found the fork in the upstairs bathroom in case I was wondering, and she was of course not upset in the least.
Uh-huh.
To make matters worse, when Cordelia walked out of the dining room with a trayful of dirty plates, Dad’s eyes lit on her butt. Cordelia swayed her hips a little, and as she passed through the swinging door to the kitchen, she tossed him a flirtatious look over her shoulder.
I sneaked a peek at Dad. He was smiling down into his pie.
Oh, Gawd. Say it ain’t so.
* * *
I said an awkward good-night to Dad. Before going upstairs to bed, however, I fired up the computer in his study and looked up the New York State trespassing laws on the Internet.
What Effie and I had done, going onto Jentry and Jodi’s clearly posted private property, was considered trespassing in the third degree. It could carry up to ninety days in jail.
That would ruin Dad. Totally ruin him.
While I was online, I also Googled five dots tattoo hand.
The results page popped up. I blinked.
Five dots on the hand, like Roland Pascal had, was a common French prison tattoo. Well, what do you know. Charming Roland Pascal was, in all likelihood, an ex-con.
The sad thing was, if I got arrested and convicted of criminal trespassing, I’d be an ex-con someday too.
I carefully deleted the browser history on Dad’s computer before going upstairs to bed.
Chapter 10
After breakfast the next morning, Cordelia drove me to the Stagecoach Inn in her impeccable Mazda sedan—it was so impeccable, I worried that I was dribbling muffin crumbs on the freshly vacuumed floor mats. I felt like a teenager getting a ride to the mall from mom.
“It’s not my place to say it,” Cordelia said, hunched over the steering wheel as she maneuvered around some sort of auto part abandoned in the inn’s driveway, “but your great-aunt, well, she may have bitten off more than she can chew. If she wants to go into the hospitality business, why doesn’t she just buy a Comfort Inn franchise?”
Yesterday, I would have heartily agreed. But now? I looked at the hulking gray inn. “Great-Aunt Effie marches to the beat of her own drum,” I said. “I can’t picture her even setting foot in a Comfort Inn. But this place? Well, if she did somehow manage to bring it back to life, it would be pretty special. And it would be so her.”
Cordelia’s lips puckered. “I don’t think she can do it.”
I opened the car door. “We’ll see. Thanks for the ride, Cordelia.”
“Oh, and Agnes?”
“Yeah?”
“Just be careful around your great-aunt, okay?”
“Sure.” I nudged the car door shut.
I let myself through the inn’s front door and went back to the kitchen, where I heard voices.
“Oh dear,” Effie said when I walked in. “What are you wearing, Agnes?”
“Clothes?” I stumped over to the paper cup of coffee on the counter that said Agnes on it in marker.
Cousin Chester, across from Effie at the kitchen table, snickered. “Looks like wearable birth control to me.”
“Children, enough,” Effie said. “Auntie’s got a headache.”
This is the problem with going back home and hanging out with your family. Everything seizes up in a time warp where we’re all the most unflattering versions of ourselves.
Unflattering, you ask? Okay, how about this: I’d dug into my high school wardrobe again since I hadn’t had the foresight to launder the outfit I’d been wearing when Roger had booted me out of the apartment. I wore gray sweat pants (not cute yoga pants, oh no—the baggy, gray Rocky kind, high-waisted and with a tendency to wedge in crevices) and a green T-shirt that read Naneda High School Debate Squad!!!! The number of exclamation marks was directly inverse to the actual excitement of being on the squad. I suppose the T-shirt was overcompensating.
“Guess what,” I said once I’d swallowed half of my coffee. “Roland Pascal is an ex-con.”
That got their attention. Effie lit up. Donut crumbs stuck to Chester’s soul patch. I told them about the five-dots tattoo.
“You should tell the police,” Chester said.
“No way.” I gestured with my coffee cup at Chester. “Does he know about our investigation?” I asked Effie.
“Yup,” Chester said. “Ill-advised. Adorably madcap. You’ll wind up dead.”
“Okay, well Aunt Effie and I are still persons of interest in their murder investigation, and now we’re an inch away from being arrested for criminal trespassing. The less we interact with the police, the better.” Actually, since Effie was sleeping at the inn and driving a stolen car, she had three potential criminal charges hanging over her head.
“Should we ask Roland about it?” Effie said.
“Um, no?” I said. “Because he’s an ex-con? Anyway, Jentry is our man, right?”
“Probably. Let’s get to work, shall we?”
Aunt Effie gave me a tour of the inn, starting with the stuffy attic that smelled like rodent. Next, she whisked me through the dozen shabby guest rooms on the second floor.
“See how spacious?” she said, sweeping her hands around a corner room. “Just picture it with the hardwoods refinished and an antique four-poster bed with luxurious linens. Custom drapes. Thick rugs. Oooh—those scrumptious thick spa robes.
Local artwork on the walls. We’ll have an authentic-looking gas fireplace installed in each room, and fresh flowers every day, and claw-foot tubs and marble tile in the private bathrooms—”
“Um, what private bathrooms?” I asked.
“Well, a little remodeling is in the cards—but can’t you just see it, Agnes? Restful. Elegant. Pure vintage class and charm.”
My imagination hurt, but I could picture it. What I couldn’t picture were all the steps necessary to get from point A to point B.
“Come downstairs,” Effie said.
As she led me along the upstairs hallway, I glimpsed a room containing Louis Vuitton trunks and a camping cot spread with a sleeping bag. Her room. It seemed so sad and weird that I pretended I hadn’t noticed it.
We went down the supercreepy, cobwebby back stairs to the lofty public rooms on the main floor. First stop: the long, narrow, glassed-in porch overlooking the lake.
“This will be the restaurant, of course,” Effie said. “Tables along the row of windows, see? It’ll be world-class, a culinary destination. We’ll feature locally sourced foods, and of course the local wines, and the menu will be seasonal and absolutely exquisite. We’ll need to hire a chef, naturally. I must start looking into that immediately. Now. Come along through here—these French doors lead to the sitting room.”
In the sitting room, water stains blotched the floorboards, dangerous-looking wires dangled where a chandelier once must have been, and the flocked green wallpaper stank of mildew.
Aunt Effie seemed blind to the room’s trashed-out appearance, though. She almost purred as she pointed out the elaborate millwork along the tops of the walls, the pocket doors, and the—admittedly lovely—view of the lake through tall, dirty windows.
“We’ll have cocktail hour every evening in here,” she said, “and this will be the place for weddings—just in front of the fireplace, I think—when it’s cold outside. In good weather, people will want to say their vows on the lawn.”
I read once that people will spend more money restoring an old building than it would take to build a new one from scratch. Maybe salvaging a wreck of a building is a metaphor for salvaging the wreckage of our own lives. It’s like we’re telling ourselves, See? It can be done. It’s never too late. I’m not sure if it’s tragic or inspirational.