by Jessica Beck
"Well, I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but they’re ten apiece in town at the card shop," Ron explained with a grin, "but Sally thinks that anyone who drives all the way out here for one should get a price break. Besides, she only gets five each from Mary Anne, so she’s making more money off this deal."
I counted the arrangements on the table and said, "We’ll take all ten of them."
Moose looked at me as though I’d lost my mind. "You’re kidding, right?"
"Not at all. These will look beautiful in the diner. I’ve been looking for something to freshen things up a little in the dining room to match the season, and these are perfect."
Moose just shrugged as I handed Ron sixty dollars.
After we loaded them into the back of the truck, Ron said, "Thanks for stopping by. Sally will be pleased with the sale. You two have a nice day now, okay?"
Moose looked at him and said, "All evidence to the contrary, we’re here for more than a little shopping. Do you have a minute to talk?"
"Sure, I suppose I can take a break. What do you need?"
"We’d like to talk to you about Wally Bain," I said.
Ron’s face immediately tightened. "Sorry, but that’s a topic I’m not interested in discussing."
"Ron," Moose said. "You really should reconsider. Folks are talking about how he ran you off his land not long before he was murdered. It doesn’t look good, you know what I mean? Wouldn’t you like a chance to tell your side of it?"
As far as I knew, no one was talking about that at all yet, but then again, word did manage to spread quickly around Jasper Fork. For all that I knew, Moose was right on the money with his claim.
"Who’s saying that?" Ron asked defensively.
"At this point, who’s not?" Moose asked. "What happened between the two of you, anyway?"
Ron looked down at his hands as though he wanted to cry, and I felt bad that we were pressuring him, but it couldn’t be helped.
"I told you, I don’t want to talk about it, and you can’t make me."
"Ron, where were you when Wally was murdered?" my grandfather asked pointedly.
The farmhand just shook his head and scowled.
This was not going well at all.
I looked at Moose, and then made a quick jerking gesture with my head. He understood immediately that I wanted to try questioning Ron myself, and to my delight, my grandfather complied with my request. "Okay, that’s fine. I completely understand. If you two will excuse me, I’ve got to make a phone call."
"Who are you calling, the sheriff?" Ron asked, clearly agitated by the idea of Moose bringing in reinforcements.
"No. Martha wants me to stop off at the grocery store on the way back home, and I forgot what she told me to pick up."
Ron accepted this, and after Moose was a distance away, I said, "All of this must be horrible for you. You were close, weren’t you?"
"At first we were," Ron said. "But lately, I guess over the past three months, it was like I didn’t even know the man anymore. He got so short tempered with me that he’d yell at me for buttering my toast on the wrong side."
"How could you even manage to do that if you tried?" I asked.
"Beats me, but whatever I did, he found a way to find fault with it," Ron said.
"So, you left him on your own," I said.
"No," he said a little reluctantly as he shook his head, "but if he hadn’t fired me, I was going to quit, anyway, so I don’t guess it matters. Victoria, to be honest with you, I felt bad about the produce he was sending you and Dave over the past few months. It wasn’t right taking your money and then giving you something that he knew just wasn’t very good. I said something about it one too many times, and that’s when he told me to get out."
"That must have hurt," I said softly.
"Like I said, I was half-expecting it."
"Is there any reason that you could see for his change in behavior?"
"You bet there was," Ron said. "Ever since Penny Rusk started coming around, he lost interest in just about everything else, including his farm."
"Was he that infatuated with her?" I asked. I knew Penny offhand, and I doubted that many men would lose their heads over her.
"Not that you could tell. It was like she had some kind of hold over him, though. It’s hard to explain, and I never did really understand it."
That was interesting.
He continued, "It was almost as if…"
Ron stopped abruptly, and I was about to ask him to finish his sentence when Sally drove up in a flatbed truck that had probably first seen service around World War II. She was a bit on the heavy side, with hair the shade of corn-silk and a faded face that had spent too much time in the sun over the years. "Hey there, Victoria. What’s going on?"
I wasn’t about to tell her that I’d just been quizzing her hired help about her recently deceased neighbor. "Moose and I were driving by and we saw your arrangements. I loved them so much I bought you out."
Sally looked pleased by my compliment, and even more by my purchase, as Ron handed her the cash I’d paid. With a smile, she said, "If I’d known you liked them that much and were buying them in bulk, I could have knocked a dollar off each one."
"I think six dollars apiece is more than fair," I said. "I had no idea you had such a creative knack, Sally."
"Well, it’s not all farming around here, and everything we do helps pay the bills. I do my best to get away to agricultural conferences a few times a year, and things like this help pay for my travel." She glanced at Ron, and then asked, "Don’t you have some chores to do back at the barn?"
"Yes, ma’am," Ron said quickly, and before I could even manage to say goodbye, he was gone. What had he been about to tell me before Sally appeared? I’d have to find out sometime soon, but it was clear that our conversation was over, at least for now.
Moose walked over and smiled at her as he offered her his hand. "Sally Ketchum, how the heck are you?"
"Moose, you are truly a sight for sore eyes. Is it possible that you’re getting even more handsome with each passing day?" As Sally spoke, she held onto his hand and put the other on my grandfather’s shoulder. It was hard not to notice that she was also smiling a lot brighter for him than she had for me.
"I always try to look my best," he said, preening a little with the compliment.
"Well, you don’t need to try that hard. No other man in the county is going to have a chance if you get any better looking than you are now."
Moose looked a little flustered by her praise, but then he managed to shift gears as he said, "It was a shame about what happened to poor old Wally, wasn’t it?"
Sally nodded as her smile disappeared altogether. "I’m still having a hard time believing it myself. With him being gone, who am I going to argue with now?"
"Did you two fight a lot?" I asked.
Sally smiled sadly. "It was more a way to pass the time than anything else. Ron and I liked to fuss at each other about our property lines. He’d mow ten feet on my land one time, and I’d plow up five feet of his, just to be ornery. Most folks would have thought it was strange, but that was just the relationship we had, you know? I’ll miss him more than most, I can promise you that."
"Who do you think might have done it?" Moose asked.
"I don’t have a clue," she said. "I figure it’s not my place to guess, either. Let the police handle it. That’s why they make the big bucks."
"Aren’t you worried, being out here all by yourself?" I asked.
"Not the slightest bit. I have my friend, Winchester, hanging around, and my buddies, Smith and Wesson, are never far away, either. I’m fairly certain they’ll protect me if anybody decides to take a run at me."
I didn’t doubt that she was more than capable of taking care of herself. "How’s Ron taking the news?" I asked her.
"I suppose he’s just fine. As a matter of fact, I don’t believe that we’ve even discussed it."
That was odd. "How can that not have come up in con
versation?" I asked.
"We’ve been too busy working the farm to get much gabbing in. Now, if you two will excuse me, I’ve got to get back to work. Thanks for stopping by, and your purchases. Come back again any time."
Sally got back into the truck and drove off toward her barn, raising a little dust behind her as she went.
"That didn’t go as well as I’d hoped on my end," Moose said. "Did you get anything out of Ron before Sally showed up?"
I told him what Ron had said, and my grandfather whistled softly. "So, old Wally had a thing for Penny. You just never know, do you?"
"I’ve got a hunch that there’s more to the story than that."
"She’ll be someone we need to talk to next, then," Moose said.
"What do you think about Sally?" I asked as we got back into the truck.
"What about her?" Moose asked.
"She should go on our suspect list, don’t you think?"
My grandfather looked surprised by the suggestion, and then he asked, "Why would you think that?"
"Well, it was pretty clear that she didn’t want us talking to Ron without her around, and she came right out and told us that she and Wally used to fight all of the time. It’s almost as though she was trying to lay a rumor to rest before it had a chance to spread, do you know what I mean?"
Moose stroked his chin, and then said, "I don’t know. I personally have a hard time seeing it."
"Is it because she likes to flirt with you so shamelessly?" I asked.
"I don’t know what you’re talking about," Moose said, but there was a hitch in his voice as he said it. "You know Sally. She was just being friendly."
"I’m willing to bet that she wouldn’t have acted that way if Martha had been standing beside you instead of me."
"You have an overactive imagination, granddaughter," Moose said.
"Maybe so, but that doesn’t make what I said any less true. I think she should at least go on our list, Moose, no matter how long a shot she is."
"Then by all means, put her on it," he said. "But for now, let’s focus on how we’re going to handle Penny Rusk."
"I sort of thought we’d just barge in and start asking questions like we always do," I admitted. "If you’ve got a better game plan than that, I’d be glad to hear it."
Moose seemed to think about that, and then he said, "No, the ‘bull in a china shop’ method seems to have worked for us so far. Let’s just keep poking around and see what we can uncover. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good, anyway."
"That seems to be our credo," I answered. "Why mess with a successful formula?"
"Exactly."
Chapter 3
"Hey, Penny. Do you have a second?" I asked as Moose and I walked into The Suds Center. The laundromat offered three walls of do-it-yourself coin-operated machines, but they also provided a service that allowed customers to drop off their dirty clothes and come back for them later, freshly cleaned and pressed.
It appeared that Penny Rusk was working on one such order when we interrupted her. She was short, probably not even five feet tall, but Penny had a shape that offered plenty of curves. It was almost as though a full sized woman had been shrunk down to a smaller size.
As she folded a T-shirt using a special plastic folding device, she said, "I never expected to see you two here. Where’s your laundry?"
"At home in the hamper," I admitted. "We’re not here to do our wash."
"Then why are you here, the ambiance?" she asked as she waved a hand around the room.
"Actually, we were hoping you’d be willing to talk about your relationship with Wally Bain with us."
"What relationship are you talking about?" Penny asked as she slammed the folder this way and that, turning out a surprisingly neat garment when she was finished.
"There’s no reason to be coy with us about it. We heard that you two were dating up until recently," Moose said.
Penny frowned when she heard that. "Sure, we went out a few times, but I’d hardly call it dating. It was never all that serious between us, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not upset that someone decided to kill the poor guy."
Funny, she didn’t look all that upset to me, and I had a hunch that she was lying about her relationship. It had been more important to her than she was letting on, according to what Moose had heard, and what Ron had told us from his own firsthand experience. "He dumped you, though, and that could not have felt very good."
Penny frowned at me for a full second, and then went back to her folding. "I don’t know who your source is, but it never happened that way. I was the one who told Wally that I was ready to move on. The poor guy wasn’t all that pleased about it, I can tell you that much, but there were no hard feelings by the time I left him. We decided to stay friends, and I still can’t believe that someone killed him."
"We’re all pretty shocked by it," Moose said, and then he asked, "Since you were the one who cut Wally loose, have you been able to replace him yet, or did you already have someone else waiting in the wings?"
Penny gave us a grin that would have made the Cheshire Cat proud. "I’m too busy sampling the field to settle on just one guy," she said.
Moose’s phone rang, and he excused himself for a second. For a man who proclaimed his hatred for new technologies, it hadn’t kept him from getting a cell phone.
While he stepped away to have a little privacy, I looked at our suspect. Penny could have been telling the truth about her version of the breakup, but for some reason, I doubted it. She wasn’t homely by any means, but neither would anyone ever come right out and call her pretty. If she’d had a more vibrant personality, I was sure that it wouldn’t matter nearly as much, but there was a constant underlying mean streak in everything she said, and I was willing to bet that Moose’s version of what had happened between Penny and Wally was closer to the truth than the story she was trying to sell us at the moment.
"I’m curious. Penny, do you happen to have an alibi for when Wally died?"
"I haven’t even heard the time of death yet," Penny said. "Myrtle Ransom told me about his murder half an hour ago, but she was fuzzy on the details." Was her folding growing louder? It appeared that she was slapping the plastic pieces so hard together that I’d be amazed if something didn’t break soon.
"It was between midnight and noon today," I said.
"That’s a pretty big range to account for," Penny said. "I can’t believe that it just happened a few hours ago."
"Or much earlier," I corrected her. "Do you have anyone who might have been with you during any of those hours?" I was asking her point blank if she’d had male company the night before, as much to get her reaction to the question as the answer itself.
"From midnight to nine, I was in bed, alone. I got dressed, ate breakfast, and then came in to work. I’ve been here all day, but unfortunately, I don’t have anyone to vouch for me for much of that time. Not that it matters. I didn’t do it."
I wasn’t sure what to say to that when Moose returned from his telephone call and asked softly, "I’m curious, Penny. When was the last time you saw Wally?"
"It was yesterday afternoon," she said, though she was clearly unhappy about sharing the information with us.
"And where exactly were you?"
Penny looked at him angrily, and then she finally said, "We were downtown in front of The Clothes Horse."
What was Moose doing? Did he have some information that I wasn’t privy to myself?
"Would you say that it was a friendly conversation?" my grandfather asked her.
"You obviously already know what happened, or you wouldn’t be asking me," Penny said. "Okay. I confess. We were arguing, but it had nothing to do with us dating, or breaking up, for that matter."
"Then what was it about?" Moose asked.
"I left my favorite sweater at his place, and he claimed that he couldn’t find it," she said. "I had a hunch he was hanging onto it as some kind of trophy, and I wasn’t going to stand for that. So what? We
argued. It happens. Now, if you’ll both excuse me, I’ve got work to do." Penny shot a look at my T-shirt and said snidely, "If you ever get tired of that stain, bring it in and I’ll take care of it for you."
She disappeared in back after she said it, and Moose jerked his head toward the outside as he looked at me.
I followed him out, and then I asked him, "First, how did you find out about the argument between Penny and Wally, and second, why didn’t you tell me about it?"
"Take it easy, Victoria. I just found out myself. I called Hank Brewer earlier, and he was just getting back to me."
"But how could you possibly know that she was ever fighting with Wally out in front of Hank's shop yesterday?" My grandfather had remarkable connections in town, and he also had some pretty good hunches, but this went beyond rational explanation.
"I didn’t have a clue about it," he said with a grin. "I was hitting Hank up to buy tickets for the Thanksgiving turkey giveaway for the Old Soldiers Club, and he happened to mention in passing that he’d seen them out there squabbling. You know how that man loves to gossip."
How could Moose even say that with a straight face? He was a bigger gossip than any ten men or women I knew, and that was combined, but if he wanted to operate under that kind of massive delusion, I had no desire to set him straight.
"Did he say how bad it got?" I asked.
"Well, evidently she slapped him hard enough to leave a mark," Moose said. "When Hank went outside to see what was going on, they both took off in different directions. He was going to chase Penny down to see what it was all about, but he didn’t feel comfortable leaving Margie at the shop all by herself." Hank and Margie were still technically newlyweds, and Hank was slowly getting her to work some hours at the clothing shop he’d opened with his late first wife, but from the talk around town, she was reluctant to step into her predecessor’s shoes.