Going Through the Notions (A Deadly Notions Mystery)

by Price, Cate

  Stop it, Daisy.

  The yellow-haired dog sat in an ungainly stance behind Joe, one back leg straight, one sprawled out the way some puppies sit, in rapt attention at the saffron-and-fish-scented mist swirling through the kitchen.

  Joe disappeared down the basement steps and came back with a bottle of 2009 Montrachet, a very nice white burgundy. We’d bought it a couple of years ago on a trip to our favorite wine shop, in Lambertville, New Jersey, just across the bridge from New Hope, Pennsylvania, and it had been gathering dust ever since.

  “I thought we were saving it for a special occasion,” I said beneath my breath. Sarah was engrossed in her cell phone as usual.

  “It is. Our daughter came home.” He set it down on the butcher block table that was well over six inches thick and pulled a corkscrew out of his pocket with a flourish.

  I looked at him, in his blue-striped apron, a faint flush on his high cheekbones from the heat of the stove, and the excitement in his dark eyes, and wondered why I couldn’t be as uncomplicated. Dear Joe.

  “You know what? You’re right. Let’s open it!”

  Sarah and I watched as he set three goblets on the table and poured an inch or so of the golden liquid into each one.

  “Buddy chewed up Daddy’s slippers today,” Sarah said, sliding a glance at me.

  Joe chuckled and handed us both a glass. “That’s okay. I needed a new pair anyway.” He reached down and ruffled the puppy’s ears.

  I stifled a pang of guilt for working so much and not paying the dog enough attention, but hey, it wasn’t even my dog. And for all his laissez-faire treatment, he seemed content enough.

  Joe touched his glass to mine. “You worry too much,” he said, smiling.

  Third person today.

  I took a slug of the gorgeous wine because I didn’t feel up to dying from a stroke right now.

  “So. How did you come up with the name Buddy for him, Sarah?”

  “Hmm, I don’t know. Had to call him something, and I haven’t had time to think of anything else.”

  I looked down at the happy-go-lucky dog, whose tail immediately starting waving when he sensed my appraisal. “He reminds me of a history professor I once knew called Jasper Weckert. He was so exuberant, so full of life, and yes, a little annoying sometimes, but you couldn’t help but like him.”

  “Hey, Jasper!” Joe slapped his knee.

  The dog wagged his tail even harder.

  Sarah nodded. “He likes it. It’s cool. And a more stylin’ name than Buddy anyway.”

  After dinner was cleared away, we played a game of Monopoly, just like the good old days, and as usual, Joe spent his money first. I bought railroads, and Sarah ended up with Park Place. She built a row of hotels on it and bankrupted her parents.

  I sipped my wine and watched the candlelight dance up the exposed brick wall in the kitchen and tried to let it all go. Maybe everyone was right. Maybe I did worry too much.

  I’d color my hair tomorrow night.

  *

  “The next morning was Wednesday, visiting day again for Angus’s section of the prison. I woke up without the alarm, got dressed in a hurry, and arrived in the parking lot of the correctional facility at a few minutes before 8 a.m.

  Angus came into the room, his hands bandaged and his hair neatly combed, but his expression somber. I rushed up and hugged him. Angus gave the best hugs. Kind of like hugging a friendly bear, or a live boulder.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Okay, I guess. I still have a damn headache that won’t quit.”

  “Will they give you some aspirin?”

  “Took some, but it’s not helping.” He frowned as he looked beyond me. “Where’s Betty?”

  I sighed. “She had hip surgery, don’t you remember? It’s still hard for her to get around. And hey, what am I—chopped liver?”

  His face relaxed a little. “No, and I still can’t believe you eat that stuff. It’s disgusting.”

  I grinned. Ah, the good old New York delis. They were the best—with their smoked salmon, corned beef, pastrami, and pickled herring in sour cream. I loved it all. “I can’t believe you eat scrapple,” I countered.

  Scrapple is a Pennsylvania Dutch delicacy, and I use the word lightly, that’s made of a mush of pork scraps formed into a semisolid congealed loaf. It’s not for the faint of heart.

  “What’s the status, Angus?” I asked as we sat down. “When’s your preliminary hearing? Have you talked to Warren?”

  Angus shrugged. “I think it’s scheduled for early next week. I dunno. I’m beginning to feel like I’ll never get out of here. Seems like everyone’s made up their minds about me already anyway.”

  I made a mental note to visit Warren and see if I could get some sense out of him, if not from Angus or Betty. If I wasn’t satisfied, I’d try to get another lawyer in place before the hearing.

  “Angus. Look, I’m doing my best to help you, but I have to ask you a few questions.”

  He sighed. “We’ve been through this before. I told you I don’t remember much about that night.”

  I waved a hand impatiently. “Not about the night of Jimmy’s murder. Now, this might sound a little off base, but I was wondering if someone might have killed Jimmy simply to get you in trouble?”

  He snorted, but I persevered.

  “Someone with a grudge against you. Like the Perkins boys, for instance.”

  His cheeks reddened. “I gave that family a good deal, fair and square. They were in such an all-fired rush to get their paws on the cash, they didn’t want to wait for an auction. I gave it my best guess in the time they gave me, but yes, it’s true, I didn’t go over everything as carefully as if I’d brought it back to the auction building and gone through it one item at a time.”

  He shifted his chair closer to the table, the legs scraping against the floor. “Those boys act as if they made no money that day, Daisy, but they got a good price for everything, and the old lady’s house, too. They used the money to open their feed store. It’s not my fault they pissed a lot of it away at the bar.”

  He pointed at me. “In fact, remember the stuff I gave you when you opened your shop?”

  I nodded, a sinking feeling in my chest.

  “A lot of it came from that buyout.”

  Great.

  “And what about the fight that got you in trouble when you were younger? The one that got you arrested the first time?”

  Angus rubbed a large hand across his face. “What is this, Daisy? The Spanish Inquisition?”

  “Yeah, well, you know me when I’m on a roll. Take no prisoners. Oops, pardon the pun.”

  We grinned at each other, in a ghost of the old camaraderie.

  His face grew serious again as he stared past me as if seeing the long-ago scene in his mind.

  “It was a Saturday night. Betty and I had gone to the movies in Sheepville. We were coming out afterwards, and this guy backhanded his wife right in front of us. Smacked her straight across the face. Guess he didn’t like something she said.”

  I sucked in a breath, memories like dark shadows hovering over my shoulder.

  “I couldn’t stand by and let him treat a woman like that, Daisy. I saw red. Bright, fricking fire engine red. I could hardly see, I was so mad.”

  “So you beat him up?”

  “Hell, yeah. I beat the living crap out of him.” Angus pounded one fist into the palm of the other hand, making a loud smacking noise in spite of the bandages.

  I gripped the edges of my plastic seat.

  “I kept hitting and hitting and hitting him, and his face was just mush at that point, but I couldn’t stop. They had to pull me off of him. What was left of him.”

  His eyes were full of remembered fury. As I stared into those blazing eyes, I wondered how well I really knew Angus Backstead. This man, capable of uncontrolled violence, was a complete stranger.

  Whether it was a hot flash or an anxiety attack, I wasn’t sure, but a surge of panic swept
over me, and sweat prickled across my face and down my back.

  I fought the urge to jump up and get the hell out of the room.

  Angus suddenly started the loud chanting thing, like he did last time.

  I wiped a hand across my forehead. “Damn it, Angus, stop it!” My voice cracked, but I managed to get the words out.

  The guard at the door took a step closer.

  “Don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Angus mumbled. “It’s your fault. You’re getting me upset.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, both to Angus and the guard, holding up a shaking hand. “Look, we’ll talk about something else, all right? Just relax. Relax.”

  My heart was still pounding, but I plastered a bright smile on my face.

  “Hey, you’ll be glad to hear Betty’s going ahead with the auction this weekend. But don’t worry, we’ve got it covered. We’re all helping out.”

  He was still muttering, staring at his hands, lost in his own despondent world. The dear friend I knew was gone, to a place where I couldn’t touch him.

  Come back to me, Angus.

  “Patsy has agreed to step in for you with the bid calling. Can you picture that?”

  A faint smile appeared.

  “I told her about the filler words and to practice counting numbers backwards and forwards, but do you have any other tips for her?”

  At that, his eyes seemed to regain their focus. He took a deep breath. “The thing is, you have to move an awful lot of stuff in a short period of time, and the chant is how you keep people’s attention. It’s almost like singing. It’s faster than normal speech. You sort of hypnotize the bidders with the rhythm, the cadence of it.”

  “Okay. And how do you keep track of what the bid is?”

  “Every auctioneer has his own way. Palms up can mean odd numbers, palms down for an even hundred-dollar bid. Tell Patsy not to worry about trying to go too fast when she’s starting out. At the end of the day, the main job of an auctioneer is to communicate. If the audience can’t understand him, he’s not doing a good job.”

  Talking about auctioneering was calming him down.

  I was still uncomfortably warm, my shirt clinging to my back with perspiration, but I could feel my heartbeat slowly returning to normal.

  What a mess we were. Angus and me.

  Staring across the table at my friend, I realized how much I had always depended on Angus—on his enormous strength, on his boisterous devil-may-care attitude that made me feel as though we could bulldoze our way through anything.

  Now he needed me, whether he knew it or not, and I would be there for him.

  “Angus, what about the time we went picking in Lancaster? Remember that? When you sent me up into the rafters of that decrepit barn?”

  He laughed. “Yeah. You were smaller so you could climb better than me. I gave you some good advice, right? Don’t fall through!”

  “Thanks a lot. I was glad I was wearing jeans and sneakers that day.”

  I’d clambered like a monkey up a rickety ladder into the hayloft to retrieve a box of Buddy L toy vehicles that the owner told us were up there. I still remembered the joy on Angus’s face upon seeing the old toys made of pressed steel. Like a kid on Christmas morning. He also had a passion for automotive and gasoline signs, and he’d found a couple of Esso Motor Oil signs outside the barn.

  I’d done well, too. I’d picked up an antique dress form that was now proudly displayed in Eleanor’s shop and a box of Standard sewing machine accessories and buttons. Plus a rare Singer leather sewing machine that Joe had later painstakingly oiled and restored, and that I’d sold for a big profit to a collector.

  People in the country are savers, even hoarders. In New York, with space at a premium, you had to be ruthless about what you kept, but here, where farmhouses were passed down through generations, if no one had the energy to clean out the recesses of the attic each time it changed hands, the stuff built up.

  It seemed like Angus wanted to talk about the old days and our adventures in picking, so I let him ramble. How mentoring me and taking me out on the road had reignited his passion for collecting. About the mint Baldwin Tidioute bone-handled jackknife with excellent blades that was one of his favorite finds.

  We were quiet for a moment, reliving our memories. Doing rock, paper, scissors when it was something we both wanted. How we’d slap each other five on the way home, flushed with success.

  Angus grinned at me. “I remember dragging your lazy ass out of bed more than once and listening to all the moaning and groaning until I got you a cup of coffee.”

  He would insist on picking me up at 5 a.m. on auction days, saying that the early bird got the worm. He wanted to be there on the dot of preview time to have a chance to look at every item. To me, it was still the middle of the night.

  I’d be struggling out of bed to the sound of Joe mumbling, “What time is it? Thought the point of being retired was that we didn’t have to get up early anymore.” School days had been crazy early in order to make the commute into downtown Brooklyn.

  But it didn’t take me long to learn to jump out of bed when the alarm went off, the adrenaline already rushing through my veins.

  The lights flickered, signaling the end of the visit. As the guard motioned that we had to leave, I was almost at the door before I realized I had forgotten to ask the most important question of all.

  “Wait—Angus—who was the guy? The guy that you almost beat to death?”

  “Oh, didn’t I tell you? Hank Ramsbottom. Detective Frank Ramsbottom’s father.”

  Chapter Six

  I stumbled out of the prison, the memory of Angus’s wry, defeated expression burned into my brain. No wonder he felt as though the situation was hopeless. If the detective on your case held a major grudge against you, did you really stand much of a chance, no matter how good your attorney? In a small community like this, where the police, the judge, the DA, and other officials were so tight, it made the odds against him stacked even higher.

  On the way home, I stopped for gas on the outskirts of Sheepville.

  Betty’s brother, George Hildebrand, owned the garage, and he came over to the car when he saw me, wiping his hands on a rag.

  I told him about visiting Angus at the prison.

  “How’s he doing?” he asked.

  “He’s okay, I guess, I—”

  “Oh, it’s just terrible, isn’t it? Terrible situation. We’ve had Betty over a lot lately. Don’t want her to sit home brooding by herself. I go and pick her up, you know. She doesn’t like to drive at night. Neither does my Annie. It’s really something to get older, isn’t it? Everything starts going on you. The knees, the hips, the eyes. No idea why they call it the Golden Years . . .”

  George was one of those people who could talk and talk, and talk some more, whether he had an audience or not. I watched the dollar amount on the gas pump click higher and higher. I pulled the nozzle out when I couldn’t stand it anymore, even though the tank wasn’t completely full.

  He was still carrying on, something about Angus bringing the car in for an oil change on Friday. “Don’t you know he forgot to pay? Good old Angus. But that’s par for the course lately.”

  “Wait—what did you just say?” I stared at the sticker on my windshield and its mileage reminder for the next service.

  “About what? Not paying?”

  “About Angus coming in for an oil change? On Friday?”

  “Yes. Friday afternoon.”

  Before he went to the pub with Jimmy Kratz.

  “Thanks, George. Thanks for your help!” I barely remembered to rip my credit card receipt off the machine before I jumped in my car and waved good-bye to a startled George.

  I clicked my odometer to zero, drove to Angus’s house, and turned around. I drove back to Sheepville, stopped in front of the pub, and drove back to his house again.

  Exactly 2.1 miles.

  I got out of the Subaru, ran over to Angus’s Ford F-150 pickup, and peered throug
h the window at the odometer and the sticker. About two miles difference between the two, which proved that he didn’t drive the half mile to Jimmy’s the next morning and back again.

  “Yes! Daisy Buchanan, you’re a genius!”

  Hold on, genius. If Jimmy walked home, why couldn’t Angus have walked to Jimmy’s, too? That’s what the police will say.

  I frowned, smoothing out a patch of kicked-up gravel with the bottom of my shoe.

  But why would Angus walk? His first instinct would be to jump in the truck and get there as fast as possible, assuming he’d found the pens missing and was pissed off at Jimmy. He’d have sobered up enough to feel like he could drive, and wouldn’t be thinking about subtleties like oil change stickers.

  I glanced at my watch. I still had time to visit the detective and tell him about this new discovery. Knowing what I knew now, I wasn’t assured of a great reception.

  *

  “The desk sergeant punched a button on his phone, and held a muttered brief conversation before gesturing to the hallway behind the reception desk. “You can go on back.”

  I hurried down the hall toward an open doorway at the end. Ramsbottom didn’t actually have an office, more like a piece of the back room. I ran the gauntlet of the other officers glancing my way—some with casual interest, others with more pointed stares—as I picked my way through their desks to where the hefty detective sat in the far-right-hand corner.

  “Well, this is a pleasure, Mrs. Daly,” he said, his tone indicating the opposite. To my surprise, he wasn’t sitting around stuffing his face today. Only nursing a giant plastic cup of iced coffee with a straw.

  He waved for me to sit down in front of the desk as his cell phone rang. “Lemme call you back,” he murmured to whoever was on the other end and slipped the phone into the holster on his belt.

  I quickly explained about the oil change and how it proved that Angus never drove back to Jimmy’s on Saturday morning.