The Black Cat Steps on a Crack

by Kay Finch

  We climbed into the car and I clicked my seat belt, then looked at Hitchcock. “If you heard what I heard in there, you probably know exactly what I plan to do next.”

  Hitchcock gave me a blank stare.

  “Maybe you weren’t paying close enough attention.” I started the engine. “It’s time to ask Ashley point-blank what the heck she’s doing here in Lavender.”

  “Mrreow,” he said.

  “I knew you’d agree,” I said with a grin.

  When we got back to the cottages, I decided to drive straight to Ashley’s place. Better to go in determined and unwavering. I braked hard in front of the cottage when I realized the parking spot was empty.

  “Well, that’s disappointing.”

  Hitchcock had been dozing on the passenger seat as if he’d just left the most strenuous meeting of his life, but he lifted his head at my comment.

  I turned around and went back the way I’d come, this time taking the bend to Aunt Rowe’s house. Her car wasn’t in the driveway either. They should have been back from zip-lining by now. I parked, and we went inside.

  Glenda was in the kitchen, singing “I’ll Fly Away” as she cooked.

  She had a nice voice, and I paused to listen to the clear melody. At the end of the chorus, I said, “Is that on your bucket list?”

  “What’d you say?” She twisted away from the deep soup pot she stirred.

  “The song?”

  “Oh. I don’t have any list. If I did, that might be on it, in a manner of speaking.” She looked toward the cat dishes on the floor, where Hitchcock lapped at the water. “Hello, Mr. Hitchcock.”

  I sat on a stool at the island where she’d left two pans of cornbread to cool. “Where is everybody?”

  “Rowe called and said one of the women spotted the new sushi bar in town and wanted to eat there, so they stopped before they head home to work on those scrapbooks.”

  “I didn’t know Lavender had sushi, and I will never feel the need to check the place out.”

  “Neither will Rowe,” Glenda said. “That’s why I’m cooking a pot of chili. You joining us for dinner?”

  “Maybe.” I shrugged. “I’m not hungry yet. I need to talk to Ashley, but I guess she’s out with the group.”

  Glenda looked at me over her shoulder. “I’m not so sure about that.”

  I frowned. “Her car’s not at her cottage.”

  “Neither is anything else,” Glenda said.

  I jumped off the stool. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, ma’am.” Glenda left the spoon in the pot and turned to face me. “She cleared out.”

  “When?” I said.

  “Sometime today,” Glenda said. “She simply up and left.”

  “Did she go zip-lining?” I said.

  “Don’t know.”

  I sank back onto the barstool. The back door opened and Thomas walked in with his nose in the air, as if the scent of chili had drawn him inside. He went to the stove and stood near the pot to inhale deeply. “You’re the best, Glenda.”

  “Don’t let your wife hear you say such a thing,” she said, “and why don’t you tell Sabrina when you last saw Ms. Ashley?”

  “Maybe an hour after the others left,” he said. “I was on the mower when I saw her rush out with a suitcase. She threw it in the trunk and took off.”

  “Hope she paid in advance,” I said.

  “Rowe always takes credit card information to secure payment,” Glenda said. “You know that.”

  “Let’s go look.” I jumped off the stool again.

  I heard Glenda’s tongue clucking behind me as I headed for Aunt Rowe’s office. Thomas followed and stood next to me as I touched Aunt Rowe’s computer to wake it up.

  “Is Fred Costello still here?” I said.

  “Yup, last I knew.”

  I opened Aunt Rowe’s software and clicked on Ashley’s “guest info” button. She’d given the Santa Fe, Texas, address. There wasn’t much else listed besides a Texas driver’s license number and a phone number.

  Thomas pointed at a tab on the screen. “Payments are here.”

  I clicked where he indicated and scanned the screen. “Huh. She paid in cash.”

  “Got another couple days’ credit,” he said.

  I thought about that for a second. “Maybe she’s coming back.”

  “Wouldn’t hold my breath.”

  Glenda had come up behind him. “Sabrina may be right. Ashley’s scrapbook is still here with the others.”

  I closed the computer program and stood. “Let’s see what she has in her book.”

  I had made the comment rhetorically, not as a command for Thomas and Glenda to come with me. Curiosity was likely what prompted them to tag along to the dining room.

  “Take a breath, Sabrina,” Glenda said. “What’s going on?”

  “Ashley interviewed for Jane Alcott’s library job,” I said, “only it was more like she interviewed Doreen Krenek to get information about Jane.” I walked around the table as I tried to identify which one of the books belonged to Ashley.

  “What kind of information did she want?” Glenda said.

  “Nobody knows.”

  “That’s spooky,” Thomas said. “Why’s she care about a dead woman?”

  “I don’t know, Thomas.”

  “This one is Ashley’s.” Glenda pointed to a book covered with sequins and fake gemstones. “You know, Fred asked questions about Jane, too.”

  “Yeah.” Thomas nodded. “I noticed that. He’s one of those weirdos who likes knowing all the gory details.”

  There was more to Costello than that, but I didn’t comment. I sat in front of Ashley’s scrapbook and flipped to the first page. “Ashley’s Bucket List” was printed at the top. She’d listed only four activities, as if the woman had already achieved most everything she wanted in life.

  Glenda read over my shoulder. “Travel to Switzerland, adopt a Great Dane, go up in a balloon, solve a crime.”

  “Maybe she’s off helping the sheriff solve the crime that isn’t solved yet,” Thomas said.

  “I doubt that.” I continued to leaf through the book. Ashley had spared no expense on the supplies she used to fill the pages—an ideal customer of Marge Boyd’s, no doubt. “There’s nothing here but doodads glued to the page. Nothing personal.”

  “Maybe she’s not the creative type,” Glenda said. “I need to get back to the chili.”

  We all traipsed into the kitchen and Thomas excused himself to go back to work after Glenda promised to let him know when the chili was ready.

  I brewed some coffee and filled a mug, then leaned against the counter and sipped.

  “What’re you thinking?” Glenda said.

  “Ashley didn’t want anyone to know her personal details. In that way, she’s a lot like Jane Alcott.” I told Glenda about my visits to Jane’s house in Emerald Springs and the garage apartment Jane lived in behind Mrs. Honeycutt’s house. “Jane didn’t have any personal mementoes. She had furniture in the house, and there’s a friend living in that place now. The friend doesn’t know any of Jane’s personal details. Mrs. Honeycutt rented Jane the furnished apartment here in Lavender. She kept a few books there, but no other personal items besides toiletries and a few clothes.”

  “Everybody has stuff,” Glenda said. “Some more than others, some way too much. Jane had more than some books, mark my words. If it’s bothering you this much, I’d ask Mrs. Honeycutt again. She might remember more than she shared.”

  “I know Jane ordered a couple cases of wine—they were delivered to Mrs. Honeycutt’s house, addressed to Jane.”

  Glenda grinned. “You think that wine’s good for cooking?”

  I smiled. “Maybe, but I guess it technically belongs to Jane’s next of kin.”

  “And that would be—?” Glenda paused.

  “Lord only knows.”

  Glenda turned the chili pot down to simmer and went into the laundry room, where I heard her opening and closing the washer a
nd dryer. I finished my coffee and was putting my empty mug in the dishwasher when my phone buzzed with a text. I pulled it out and saw the message came from Tyanne.

  Remembered why Jane seemed familiar. A customer jogged my memory.

  I wanted to hear this story in person.

  I pulled out my car keys, then saw Hitchcock waiting expectantly by his food bowl. He knew it was his dinnertime as surely as if he could read the clock.

  “I’m feeding Hitchcock here,” I yelled to Glenda as I poured food into his bowl, “then I need to run into town. Do you mind keeping an eye on him?”

  Her head poked out from the laundry room. “Tall order, but I think I can handle it. If I leave before you get back, I’ll take him to your place.”

  On the way to town I put in a call to the bookstore to confirm that’s where Ty was when she texted me. Ethan answered the phone and told me yes, Tyanne was at the store for the next thirty minutes.

  “Don’t let her leave,” I said. “I’m on my way over.”

  “Saw your aunt earlier,” he said. “She was with a group of women.”

  “Yeah, her bucket list friends,” I said.

  “They mentioned the bucket list,” he said. “One of them came in special to buy a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. I tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t be swayed.”

  Good Lord. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know which one of the women he had talked to. I could probably find out by further investigation of the scrapbooks, but that wasn’t close to the top of my priorities.

  Knead to Read had an unusually large number of customers for so late in the day. People milled around the store and stood in line to pay for their selections.

  “Tourist bus,” Ethan whispered to me by way of explanation.

  Tyanne continued to ring up purchases and chat with the customers. I impatiently strolled up and down the aisles and saw the bus Ethan spoke of parked in the alley near the store. I reminded myself that patience is a virtue, though at the moment I couldn’t remember why.

  I found Tyanne’s tabby, Willis, lounging in an armchair in the reading nook and squeezed onto the cushion next to the cat. I stroked his back, an activity soothing to me and to him, judging by his purr.

  Finally, Tyanne came around the corner and saw me sitting with the cat. “I didn’t expect you to drive over here. We could have talked on the phone.”

  “I couldn’t wait. My patience is all used up for today.”

  Ty flopped onto the chair next to us. “Like you ever had any.”

  I sat forward on the cushion and made a hand motion for her to speak. “C’mon. Spill.”

  “This customer, Annie Hart, she’s one of the Harts from Mayfair. You may know—” She paused when she saw me speeding up my rolling hand motion. “Okay, okay. Annie read this page-turner she really liked and was giving me a blow by blow. The gist of the story is a wife disappears with the family fortune and the wicked husband pulls out all the stops to search for her. She said it was like the woman from Long Island who married that much older man, and he died. The story was in all the tabloids, and featured in news shows on TV.”

  I faintly remembered hearing the story. “She had stepchildren.”

  “That’s right,” Tyanne said. “I think their name was Russo.”

  “Did you look it up?”

  “Not yet.” She pushed herself out of the chair. “We can do that now.”

  I hurried after my friend into her small office and waited, again impatiently, for her computer to wake up. She searched for “Russo family in New York” and several good possibilities popped up. She clicked on one of the sites that opened with a shot of Natalie Russo on the arm of her husband, Lorenzo Russo, an older gentleman with white hair and a close-cropped white beard.

  “See,” Ty said. “I know you only met Jane that one day, so you might not see the resemblance.”

  Natalie Russo was a blonde with her hair worn in a dressy updo. She wore a sparkly black dress with long flowing sleeves. I squinted at the picture.

  “I’ve seen her as a brunette, too.” Ty went back to the search engine and looked for Natalie Russo images. A row of photos of the same woman filled the screen. Tyanne scrolled over the pictures and selected a brunette Natalie Russo. She enlarged the picture.

  “You’re right,” I said. “She does favor Jane. Let’s go back to the articles.”

  Tyanne pushed the mouse toward me. “Here, you can look. I need to check on Ethan. It’s time to close.”

  She left, and I took over her chair. I scanned an article that gave me a good summary of the situation. Natalie married Lorenzo when he was sixty-three and she was thirty-one. They had what the writer described as a glowing love affair, marred only by Lorenzo’s two petulant children from a prior marriage. The article included more than twenty pictures that required extreme patience because they were slow to load. I was ready to close the page and look for something easier to navigate. A niggling little voice told me to stick it out. Eighteen pictures into the set, I knew why.

  This was a group shot of family paying respects at Lorenzo’s funeral. He had died at seventy-four after suffering through pancreatic cancer.

  I tried to enlarge the image, but that wasn’t even necessary. I had no doubt I was looking at a picture of Jane Alcott, standing by her husband’s casket, next to the stepchildren, Anthony and Celeste Russo.

  Mr. X and Ashley.

  Chapter 32

  When I explained my findings to Tyanne, she immediately put in a call to the sheriff. He was eating dinner at McKetta’s Barbeque, so we didn’t have to wait long for him to arrive at the bookstore.

  The Closed sign was in the window, but Tyanne was ready and waiting to fling the door open when she saw him get out of his car. She could barely contain her anxiety as we waited for him to come up the sidewalk and into the store.

  “Sheriff Crawford, thank you so much for coming,” Ty said. “What we found—what Sabrina found—is a huge key to the murder investigation. You’ll be able to clear everyone who worked at the construction site after you see this.”

  She shouldn’t have gone that far, but I understood she couldn’t help herself. She was eager to confirm that Bryan was no longer a suspect.

  The sheriff looked from Tyanne to me. “You ladies do know we have nine-one-one here in Lavender, don’t you?”

  “Sorry, Sheriff,” I said, “but I think you’ll be glad we called you directly.”

  “I’ll be the judge,” he said. “Let’s see what you have.”

  We showed him into Ty’s office, and I motioned for him to take the desk chair. I’d left the computer on the picture that told the biggest part of the story.

  The sheriff moved the mouse and the black screen morphed into the picture I wanted him to see first. Natalie Russo, aka Jane Alcott. I stood beside his chair and leaned over to place my index finger beside the screen.

  “This is Jane Alcott.”

  The sheriff took a package of chewing gum from his pocket and opened a piece, then offered the package to us.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  Tyanne took a piece.

  The sheriff chewed his gum and studied the screen carefully. Finally, he said, “The caption says Natalie Russo. Jane could be a relative or a random look-alike.”

  “I would agree,” I said, “but the next picture is more telling.”

  I went to the photo of Natalie, Anthony, and Celeste Russo standing by the casket at the funeral of Lorenzo Russo, who I had learned made his fortune in the shipping industry.

  I pointed to each of the people on the screen and explained where I had seen each of them in Lavender over the past few days. I took out my phone to show the sheriff the close-up I had of Ashley. He held my phone next to the computer screen to compare the images and nodded. Then he handed the phone back and began to read more of the article I had already scoured.

  “Celeste was going by Ashley and staying at the cottages until earlier today, when she took off. Anthony is the man I saw
in Emerald Springs watching Jane’s house.”

  “Natalie’s house,” the sheriff said.

  I nodded. “The house where Kylie Renfrow is living. Anthony was also the man Thomas and I heard talking to Fred Costello at the Barcelona cottage. Costello told Anthony to stay away. He might have known Anthony could be recognized from these stories.”

  Tyanne said, “I must have seen something about the Russo family on TV, and that’s why Jane seemed so familiar to me.”

  “Does Costello have a second name, too?” Sheriff Crawford said.

  Ty looked at me, and I shrugged. “I didn’t find any mention of him in these articles. I was so shocked by what I found I didn’t think about him.”

  “Where is Costello now?” the sheriff said.

  “As far as I know, he’s still staying in the Barcelona cottage. Ashley, I mean Celeste, seemed to know Fred. I guess it’s possible they met because they were each staying at the same place. She might have talked to him as a cover.”

  Sheriff Crawford looked up at me. “Cover for what?”

  My shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. Maybe so she wouldn’t draw attention to herself. So no one would discover she’s really Celeste Russo, a very rich woman.”

  “One who’d be a lot richer if her stepmother hadn’t absconded with the family fortune,” he said.

  “She inherited the money,” I said.

  “So the reporters who wrote these stories would have us believe.” The sheriff rolled his chair back.

  “Do you think one of these people killed Jane? I mean Natalie?” Ty said.

  “It’s possible.” The sheriff wasn’t going to jump to conclusions, and I didn’t blame him. He stood and stretched his neck, leaning back until he faced the ceiling. His Adam’s apple bobbed in time with the gum chewing.

  “If one of the Russos killed Natalie, why stick around Lavender and wait to be caught?” Ty said.

  “Celeste didn’t stick around,” I said. “She took off today.”

  The sheriff jerked toward me. “She’s gone?”

  “Sorry, Sheriff,” I said. “She left the cottage, but I doubt she’s totally out of the picture. They’re looking for something.”