by Maia Chance
“Wait,” I said. “Someone broke into your house last night?”
“If I were you, I’d mind my own beeswax, young lady.” Dorrie slammed the door.
“Agnes, dear,” Effie said, “who taught you to lie so badly?”
Chapter 16
We got back in the car, and I directed Aunt Effie to a pizza place out on Route 20. It took some convincing, but I pointed out that it had a salad bar—salad was the only food Effie ever seemed to eat—that it was frequented more by travelers than by gossipy townsfolk, and that Jentry wasn’t likely to find us there.
We settled ourselves onto vinyl chairs and ordered.
“So Dorrie’s house was broken into too,” I said after a few bracing sips of Diet Coke. “That makes three break-ins: Dorrie, Megan, and you.”
“Mine wasn’t a break-in, sweetie. It was a ghost.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine. But Dorrie and Megan? And don’t forget that Jodi’s kitchen at the farm looked like it had been ransacked too. I’ll bet someone—the murderer, maybe—is looking for something.”
“For the Rolodex.”
“Huh,” I said. “Yeah. Could be. I guess this eliminates Dorrie, Megan, Jodi, and Jentry as murder suspects, right? I mean, if their houses were broken into by the murderer . . .”
“No. One of them could have staged the break-in at their own home to cover their tracks.”
True. Shizap. “Don’t people keep addresses in Rolodexes?” I asked.
“They used to, before computers and smart phones.”
“So Dorrie wanted to know if the police had seen Kathleen’s address collection?”
“She denied any knowledge of the Rolodex, Agnes.”
“I’m sure she was lying. She was so defensive. I mean, who slams doors like that unless they feel threatened?”
“Bitches do, darling.”
I sipped more Diet Coke. “Oh, and did you notice how Megan was all sentimental about her mom? She doesn’t seem to be aware that her mom’s unsigned will was going to cut her out of everything.”
Effie snapped her fingers. “What if Kathleen wrote Megan out of the will because of the Budzinski affair? To punish her.”
“You know, that’s a really good theory.”
“Don’t sound so surprised, sweetie.”
I dug my phone out of my backpack. “What did Megan say was the name of her dad’s insurance company?”
“Sentinel Insurance.”
I Googled Sentinel Insurance on my phone and pulled up the number for the main headquarters in Rochester. I dialed. While it was ringing, Effie said, “Why are you calling?”
“Didn’t you think Megan’s story about her mom being an orphan was a little weird?”
“Not especially.”
“Well, I did. That thing she said about her mom’s life starting when she met her dad. It sounded like something from a soap opera—as in, fake.”
“That’s how things were in the seventies, I’m afraid.”
“Like a soap opera?” I pictured a bunch of people in bell-bottoms and wrap dresses talking about amnesia and long-lost twins.
“No, I mean, many girls didn’t feel like they had a purpose in life until they were married.”
“Okay, well, I still want to—hello?” Someone had picked up at Sentinel Insurance.
After twenty minutes of getting the runaround—I was pretending to be a newspaper reporter—I finally got connected to someone who had access to the company records from the seventies. Kathleen had worked there as a secretary, yes, for almost two years back in 1975. She’d quit to marry John Todd. Her maiden name was Brown, and she’d attended Pressley Secretarial College in Syracuse. “Thanks,” I said. I hung up and told it all to Effie.
“I’d keep it down if I were you,” Effie said. She sipped her water. “Mr. and Mrs. Bingo Night are all ears.”
I glanced over to the next table. Two seniors slumped over crossword puzzles with that too-still look that eavesdroppers get. “I’m going outside for a second,” I said.
Standing outside and poking at my phone, I found the number for a place called the Pressley Program in Syracuse and, mentally crossing my fingers, called.
Yes, it was formerly the Pressley Secretarial College, the chirpy guy who answered told me.
“Great,” I said. “I’m an investigative reporter for the Boston Herald, and I’m writing about the murder of Kathleen Todd in Naneda.”
“I saw that on the news,” the guy said. “Strangled, right?”
“Yes. I’m trying to track down some information about her past, and I learned she attended Pressley Secretarial College in the early seventies. Her maiden name was Kathleen Brown.” This sounded plausible! I was starting to feel rather awesome, despite the onset of hypoglycemia. “Is there any way you could confirm this for me?” I really wanted to know about the orphanage Kathleen had supposedly grown up in, but baby steps.
“I can try. Our database is actually superupdated because one of the instructors has students log in old records as part of a data entry course.”
“Great.”
The guy mumbled to himself, and I heard computer keys ticking for a minute or so.
“This is weird,” he said. “The database is updated all the way back to 1967, but I don’t see a Kathleen Brown listed anywhere.”
“Really?”
“Let me try some different spellings.”
I waited.
“Nope,” he finally said. “Only a Katharine Murphy. And she graduated in 1969.”
“Rats,” I said. “That was a good lead.”
“I could try to look into it some more,” the guy said eagerly. “I always wanted to be an investigative reporter. Maybe you could give me some tips on how to get started. It would be great to have connections with the Boston Herald.”
I winced. “Sure!” I said. I gave him my number. “What’s your name?”
“Eric Tanaka.”
“Okay, Eric, you dig around some more and give me a call if you find anything. In the meantime, I’ll see what’s going on with internships at the Herald.”
“Really? Awesome!”
“Yep. Awesome,” I said dully. I hung up. My upper lip felt damp. What kind of horrible person had I become? Stomping on the dreams of youth.
When I went back inside, a steaming sausage-and-black-olive pizza was waiting for me. After wolfing down a slice, I told Effie about how there was no record of Kathleen Todd in the Pressley Program’s database.
“Oh, really?” Effie forked up some lettuce.
Maybe she was hallucinating ghosts at the inn because all she ate was rabbit food. Just a thought.
“But the insurance company confirmed that that’s where she’d gone to school?” Effie asked.
“Well, that’s where she said she’d gone to school. Maybe she lied to them.”
“Surely they would’ve checked with the school before they hired her.”
“Not necessarily. She was probably really pretty when she was young. Maybe they just hired her on sight. I’ve heard what things were like back then.”
“Another possibility is that she did attend Pressley but under a different name.”
“But there wasn’t even a Kathleen in the database.”
“Which would indicate that she was quite invested in the name change. You’ve really got skeletons in the closet when you change not only your last name, but your first.”
“Do you think Kathleen was another ex-con?”
Effie speared a cucumber slice. “She certainly had cold eyes.”
“Maybe we should, you know, break into her house and have a look around.”
“That would be foolhardy, Agnes. We’re already dodging trespassing charges.”
I shrugged. I couldn’t tell what was foolhardy and what wasn’t anymore.
Effie pointed at my dress with her fork. “We’ve got to do something about your disguise for tonight.”
“Disguise? For Club Xenon? No.”
“You’ve
got to wear club clothing. Should we drive to the shopping mall in Lucerne?”
“No malls. They make me tired. My friend Lauren’s vintage shop would be okay. I need to catch up with her, anyway. It’s long overdue.”
* * *
After we finished lunch, Effie and I drove to Lauren’s shop on Main Street. Lauren had gotten a fine arts degree at an obscure college in Vermont and then returned to Naneda and started up Retro Rags.
The storefront was conservative enough, in keeping with the town’s historical flavor. Inside, however, the walls were birthday-cake pink, and wild vintage clothing and accessories burst from gold-painted armoires. The oversized chandelier was constructed of mannequins’ legs and blazing lightbulbs.
“Agnes! Hey!” Lauren said. She was sitting on a stool behind the counter, a thick paperback book in her hand. I made out the dragon and castle on the cover. Lauren inhales fantasy novels. “You’ve been avoiding me.”
“Not on purpose,” I said. I led Effie over. “Lauren, this is my Great-Aunt Effie. Mrs. Winters.”
“Nice to meet you,” Lauren said. She was a tall, translucent-fair redhead with a prominent nose, glasses, and Jane Russell lipstick, and just then she looked a little nervous.
“Call me Effie—and don’t mind the rumors about me. Only half of them are true.” Effie flicked expertly through a rack of blouses.
Lauren gave me a stern look over her cat-eye glasses. “Why didn’t you stop by and tell me about Roger and, oh, I don’t know, how you discovered a dead body? I heard those things from customers because you’re not taking my calls.”
“I had to get a new cell phone charger.”
“I called your dad’s and talked with Cordelia.”
“She never told me you called!” Cordelia. “And things have been kind of . . . crazy.” Understatement of the decade.
“Roger is . . . well, honestly, Agnes, I never liked him.”
“Now you tell me?”
“You can’t tell people you don’t like their boyfriends until after they break up,” Lauren said.
“Everyone knows that,” Effie said.
Lauren went on, “I took a Pilates class with that blonde strip of Sizzlean once.”
“You did?” I said. Lauren was effortlessly skinny, and she claimed that her vintage clothes wouldn’t fit right if she put on muscle mass.
“I had a coupon from Downtown Daze.” Lauren shrugged. “It was awful. People aren’t supposed to roll up and down like Fruit Roll-Ups.”
“Tell me about it.” Secretly, I wouldn’t mind having a six-pack. Even a two-pack would be pretty great. But I will admit this aloud only if suspended over a pit of red-hot coals.
“Are you going to be okay?” Lauren asked me. “I heard you could be a person of interest in the murder case?”
“Yeah.”
“If you ever murdered someone, Agnes, you’d plan it out so you never got caught.”
Lauren knew just how to compliment me. “Anyway, thanks to Roger, all my clothes have been sent to the Goodwill center in Rochester, so I need some new clothes.”
Lauren clapped her hands. “Yay! Finally.”
I went limp like a cat dressed in doll’s clothes. For the next forty-five minutes, I allowed Effie and Lauren to choose outfits for me while I stood in my underpants and sports bra behind the flowery-gold changing room curtain. Luckily, Lauren didn’t have fluorescent lightbulbs back there. She knows a woman doesn’t need to commune with her lumps just because she wants to try on a skirt. Effie and I filled Lauren in on our murder investigation, falling silent whenever other customers came in.
By the time we were done, I had three cute day dresses and one silk cocktail dress that looked like something a femme fatale from 1971 would have worn to a drunken pool party, with red passionflowers and a plunging neckline. This could only be worn, according to Lauren and Effie, with the strappy gold pumps that Lauren gave to me as a “gift” since she knew I’d refuse to buy them. I had a fifty-fifty shot of being able to walk in them. I never wear heels.
“Could I come tonight?” Lauren asked. “Please? I’ve never set foot in Club Xenon—it’s just full of Greek system kids from the university, I heard—but this detective stuff sounds like a hoot.”
“Sure,” I said. “Just to warn you, my cousin Chester might be there, and as you know, he can be El Creepo with the ladies.” Lauren knew Chester; he’d been only three years ahead of us in school.
Lauren’s eyes narrowed. “Chester? I can manage him.”
* * *
A huge steel rent-a-dumpster had been parked at the back of the inn when Effie and I returned. Chester was in the kitchen, covered in grime and making a sandwich.
“Hi,” he said, smearing mustard on bread. “Guess what the rent-a-dumpster guy told me?”
“What?” I said.
“Susie Pak’s house was broken into last night.”
“Are you serious?” I said. “How does he know?”
“Because he’s Susie’s nephew, that’s how.”
“That makes four break-ins!” I said.
“Three,” Effie corrected. “Mine was the ghost, remember?”
I spotted a bag of sour-cream-and-chive potato chips on the counter and stress-ate a handful. “Okay, so what’s the common denominator with the break-ins?”
“Duh,” Chester said. “They all knew Kathleen Todd?”
I shook my head. “This is a pretty small town. Everyone knows everyone, or at least knows of everyone. What if it’s about that Rolodex?”
“Explain,” Chester said, piling baloney on his sandwich.
I explained about the Rolodex mentioned in Albright’s notes.
Chester snorted. “So someone is desperate to get their hands on Kathleen Todd’s Christmas card list?”
I shrugged. “For all we know, that Rolodex is full of drug clients’ names and numbers. Tonight we might be staging the biggest bust in Naneda’s history.”
“That sounds awesome, Agnes,” Chester said, “but you licking sour cream and chive powder off your fingers is kind of ruining the Vice Squad effect.” He went off with his sandwich.
* * *
Chester and I spent a couple hours hauling old wires and chunks of plaster out of a bunch of rooms and chucking them into the rent-a-dumpster. Effie sorted through stuff upstairs. Then it was time for a coffee break.
Effie fired up her laptop at the kitchen table. “I keep thinking about how Roland Pascal is an ex-con,” she said. “That must be relevant, don’t you think?”
“You mean, like he’s linked to Jentry and Gothboy’s drug business?” I sipped the vanilla latte Effie had brought me from the Black Drop.
“Or he’s behind the spate of house break-ins. Let’s see about that last town in which he said he was working.” Effie lit a cigarette. “What was it again?”
“Caraway, Vermont,” I said. “You have Wi-Fi on your computer?”
“Chester installed it—it’s somehow running through my cell phone.”
“Yeah, Agnes,” Chester said, making yet another sandwich at the counter. “I’m handy. Oh, and I texted Otis Hatch to see if he wants to come to Club Xenon tonight—”
“Don’t!” I cried.
“—so you can have two men looking after you.”
“Jerk,” I muttered.
“Why, thank you,” Chester said.
“Children, please,” Effie said.
Fifteen minutes of Googling turned up no spate of break-ins in tiny Caraway, Vermont.
“It might be a good idea to try to get ahold of Roland Pascal’s portfolio,” Effie said. “We could call his references.”
“That reminds me,” I said. “Remember how Roland ripped out the page of references and crumpled it up when he was showing us the portfolio?”
“No.”
“You were probably busy with your wine. Anyway, he did. Suspicious, if you ask me. There must be something—or someone—on that list that he didn’t want us to notice.”
“Well then, we can’t call his references. They’re probably at the recycling center by now.”
“Not necessarily. Roland doesn’t clean. I’ll bet that crumpled list is still in the corner of his trailer where he left it. Okay, I’m going to call Susie Pak. I want to know why she didn’t tell us that her house had been broken into when I ran into her at the bank this morning.” I found the business card Susie had left the previous morning and dialed.
“Why would I tell you that?” Susie said when I got her on the line. It sounded like she was driving. “Why should I talk to you at all after you refused a ten percent discount for Susie’s Speedy Maids? Buh! You two are snoops, that’s what I think!” Silence.
“She hung up on me,” I said, staring at my phone.
“Susie Pak is angry about something,” Effie said.
“It’s her ex-husband,” Chester said. “She used to be married to this famous chemistry professor at the university, but they divorced maybe three years back. That’s when she started Susie’s Speedy Maids.”
“Susie drives a very expensive car,” I said.
“Yeah well, there was alimony.”
“Mmm,” Effie said in a buttery, approving way.
“Maybe it’s only her ex-husband that Susie’s so ticked off about,” I said. “But maybe it’s something else.”
Chapter 17
After putting in a couple more hours hauling junk at the inn, Chester gave me a ride back to Dad’s in his beyond-crappy Datsun. I planned to have a shower and dinner and then rest a little before Effie picked me up to go to Club Xenon at ten. I could only pray that Otis wasn’t really going to show up too. That many people over twenty-five at the club, and the college kids would stampede for the exit.
Dad and Cordelia were both out. I knew this because the security system was still armed when I let myself into the kitchen. Their being out was a major relief since I was pretty sure Megan would have made good on her threat to tell Dad that Effie and I were pretending to set up a mayor’s office–endorsed neighborhood-watch thingie.
I showered, ate some leftovers, and then stretched out on the leather couch in Dad’s den to watch TV. Fifteen minutes into The Real Housewives, I dozed off. The housewives were soothing. They made me feel like my life wasn’t such a disaster.