by Ann Charles
“To see if it’s battery operated,” which I very much doubted. What I really wanted to see was if she’d hidden anything inside the back panel, and having Cooper prove the clock was not battery driven seemed a good way to get him to open the back without showing my hand.
“I’m ninety-nine percent sure this is a mechanical clock that needs to be wound by pulling on the weight chains one at a time.” His gaze skated over the whole wall. “I’m betting all of these operate that way. They look like authentic Black Forest cuckoo clocks.”
“Humor me this once.”
“Just do it, Cooper,” Hawke attached himself to my side again, his arm bumping mine. The man seemed to have no perception of personal space, because he kept tromping over the boundaries into mine. “The sooner she looks at the clock, the sooner we can move on to more important areas in here.”
Cooper pulled a pair of neoprene gloves from his inner jacket pocket, tugging them on. “Which one?” he asked me.
I pointed at the one with the wolves.
With a slow, steady hand, Cooper lifted the clock off the wall. I shined the light on it. “Turn it around.”
He obeyed without comment, shifting the clock with care, keeping it level. I flicked the clasp holding the back panel in place. Inside there was no battery, just the mechanical workings, the cuckoo sleeve and mechanism, and what looked like German writing, which I guessed was the clock’s name or its maker’s signature. No hidden treasure, no skeleton keys, nothing but clock guts.
Cooper clasped the panel closed. “See,” he said, hanging it back on the wall, “you wind these kinds of clocks.”
“Show me how.” I knew how, but I wanted Cooper to wind it up. I was curious if it had wound down or was broken.
“I don’t think it’s a good—” Cooper started.
Hawke nudged me aside with his hip. “Like this.” He showed me, pulling one chain at a time.
“Careful, Hawke,” Cooper said, his face tight with what looked like disapproval.
When Hawke finished, the clock sat there, quiet and still as before.
“Did you wind it all of the way?” I asked.
“I think so,” Hawke said.
Cooper leaned closer, frowning at it. “I don’t think any of us should mess with it anymore. We don’t want to break it.”
“It appears to be broken already.” I looked over the rest of the clocks, counting five others that weren’t moving either. Were they broken, too, or just wound down?
“So the clock is broken,” Hawke crossed his arms over his barrel chest. “Big deal. That doesn’t tell us who killed the victim or why. We need to be looking for something in the bedroom, I’m betting.”
“Now who has OCD?” I asked, stepping back from the wall. I wanted to try winding the other clocks, but knew better than to suggest it with Detective Impatient-pants sulking in the wings.
How long did a wound clock take to unwind? If Cooper was right, they would each slow to a stop before long since Ms. Wolff wasn’t around to keep them moving.
“Why the interest in the clocks, Parker?” Cooper asked.
I didn’t know why. Maybe I was fascinated by them, by how many there were, by the reasoning behind none of them being quite the right time. I’d love to spend some time with a ladder and flashlight, looking over the workmanship and theme of each one, but I knew there was no way either detective would be having any of that today.
“It’s just odd,” I ended up telling him.
“Everything in this town is just odd,” Hawke said, trudging back toward the window. He pulled the curtains aside and frowned. “Always has been. I’ve never understood why you came back here, Cooper. You were on your way to becoming something big down in Rapid, following in my footsteps.”
“That’s not important right now,” Cooper said. I could hear how clenched his teeth were. Hawke’s attempt to bolster Cooper seemed to have pissed him off instead. “Parker, are we done with the clocks?”
For now. “Sure.”
I walked over to the chalk outline on the floor, skirting it to take a closer look at the old fashioned phone. “Why did you guys take a picture of the phone?” I asked Cooper.
“No reason. It’s standard procedure.”
I shined his flashlight on it, bathing it in a bright halogen glow. It reminded me of one I’d seen Bogie use in The Big Sleep, with its square base, pyramid-shaped body and curved hand piece. An industrial cord wrapped in black braided fabric ran out the back and down the wall, disappearing behind the end table. “Is there any way to confirm this is the phone she called me from?”
“It’s not the phone she used,” Cooper said.
“You’re certain?”
He nodded. “It’s just for looks. The plug in doesn’t fit the outlet in the wall.”
I pointed at the pen in Cooper’s breast pocket. “Can I borrow that?”
“You’re not going to stomp on it, too, are you?”
“Just give me the damned pen.”
Cooper obliged.
I pulled my sleeve down over my hand, using it as a glove so that I could pick up the handset. It felt solid, heavy in my hand. I held it close to my ear without touching it. Sure enough, there was no dial tone. I used the pen to spin the rotary dial. It spun back to start position, moving slow like the one my grandmother had owned back when I was a kid.
I handed Cooper back his pen. “So she kept it for decoration only, you think?”
“That’s my guess,” Cooper stuffed the pen back into his pocket.
Detective Hawke shifted over by the window. “So we have authentic German wall clocks and a genuine antique phone. We’re really cooking on finding clues now. If this is your usual modus operandi, it’s no wonder it’s taking you so long to solve these murders.”
I ignored Hawke, turning my back on him. “She liked antiques,” I told Cooper.
He nodded.
“And not the cheap ones. Do you have any idea what Ms. Wolff did for money?” Because Social Security checks did not cover the cost of these pieces.
“From what I can tell so far, she never had a taxpaying job.”
Never? “Was she a widow?”
“There’s no marriage license on record for her.”
“She must have come from money then.”
“I’m still working those details out.”
What did that mean? That he couldn’t find anything about Ms. Wolff in any official records?
I thought about asking him to clarify, but something in the way he kept shooting gunslinger glares at his partner made me hold my tongue. I wanted to know the lowdown on the history between Cooper and Hawke.
“Let’s move to her bedroom,” I said. That should make Hawke happy.
“Finally!” The other detective rubbed his hands together. “Now we’ll get to the bottom of things.”
I followed Cooper through the doorway. The bedroom was about ten square feet smaller than the living room. A twin-sized bed split the room in half, with two doors on the opposite wall. One doorway led to the bathroom, the other door to the closet I had seen in the photos Harvey and I looked at in Cooper’s house yesterday. The bedroom walls looked gray in the dimness. I flicked on the overhead light, but the room still appeared shrouded.
Detective Hawke skidded to a halt inside the bedroom door, whistling through his teeth as he looked around. “You’re kidding me. More clocks in here, too? This dame had a real hang-up.”
Freesia, the owner of the Galena House, hadn’t been telling tall tales when she talked about how many clocks Ms. Wolff had. The wall on my right was covered with them. How did the woman sleep with all of the ticking?
My focus zeroed in on the dresser. I skirted the bed, wanting to see Layne’s picture with my own eyes, yet dreading it at the same time. Sure enough, there it was stuck in the mirror frame, the photo I’d taken of Layne.
In it he held up his glass dinosaur egg sculpture in front of his smiling face, Aunt Zoe’s workshop in the background. I could see
the reflection of my own arm and the camera flash in the old family heirloom mirror hung on the wall behind Layne. The snapshot of me that Aunt Zoe always kept stuffed in the mirror’s corner was just visible in Layne’s picture.
The photo within a photo scene reminded me of standing in a house of mirrors, how my reflection went on and on. Did the irony of a snapshot stuck in a mirror that was showing in the background of another snapshot stuck in Ms. Wolff’s dresser mirror mean anything?
Even though Cooper had told me the photo of Layne was here in her bedroom, seeing it made my hands clammy. Pictures tucked into a bedroom mirror seemed like such a personal thing. Why was it my son? Why was his picture the only one on her dresser? How had she gotten that photo?
Did this have anything to do with Rex being in town? Was Ms. Wolff somehow related to Rex? I didn’t remember him talking about having relatives in the hills, but then again we really didn’t waste a lot of time talking back then.
“Are you okay?” Cooper asked, coming up beside me without bumping into me like his clod-footed partner.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I can’t make sense of it.”
“That’s unfortunate, because I was hoping this was a clue to why she called you. It seems too odd to be happenstance.”
“Can I have that picture back?” I asked.
“We’ll want to keep it in evidence for some time after we finish with the crime scene details.”
“Can you make a copy of it?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Cooper said.
“Hey, Coop, did your camera guy get a shot of this?” Detective Hawke pointed into the closet.
“The heads?” Cooper asked.
Hawke nodded. “She must have twenty of them lining that shelf. Has anyone cut one open?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Coop and I once worked on a drug trafficking case where they kept the goods hidden inside mannequin heads similar to these. We got a nice commendation when we solved that one, didn’t we, buddy?”
“Yes, you sure did,” Cooper answered, his lips barely moving. His whole face seemed to have hardened into a veneer. “But those are not mannequin heads in the closet, they’re styrofoam heads.”
“Same thing.” Hawke waved off Cooper’s distinction and stepped inside the closet.
“Drugs?” I asked Cooper. “You think an old woman like Ms. Wolff would be mixed up with a drug cartel?”
Hawke poked his head out of the closet. “We’ve seen weirder things happen down in Rapid, haven’t we, Coop?”
Cooper didn’t reply.
“Is that where he lives?” I asked Cooper.
“Yep,” Hawke called out before Cooper could reply. “I’m here only for as long as it takes to fix Coop’s messes.”
I heard Cooper swear under his breath and looked up in time to see him shake his head and turn away. He moved over to another antique dresser on the other side of the room.
“So you two used to work together?” I asked loud enough for either man to answer.
“We were partners for a few years.” A thump came from the closet along with Hawke’s voice. Two more thumps followed. “Two of the best detectives in western South Dakota, ain’t that right, Coop?”
Cooper grunted, sounding a lot like his uncle when Harvey ate and used caveman vernacular for our dinner conversations. Something had happened down in Rapid, something that made Cooper leave and move back home. Did it have anything to do with getting involved with a witness, as Hawke had accused him of doing earlier? Or had something else gone down that had driven him out of Rapid?
I shifted my concentration back onto the task at hand. Cooper’s ancient history could be saved for this evening at the dinner table with Harvey. Following in Cooper’s footsteps, I pointed the flashlight on the dresser drawer he’d opened.
“She had nice dressers, they match the headboard.” I admired the construction of the drawer, noting the handcrafted details. Then I shined the flashlight inside of it, running my finger over a soft cotton nightgown. “Didn’t you go through all of these drawers already?” I couldn’t imagine Cooper being any less thorough than a proctologist.
“Yes, but you haven’t.” He reached in and pointed his gloved finger at something in the back of the drawer. “What do you make of that?”
I leaned closer, aiming the light beam on the back panel of wood. Weird looking scrolls, wavy dashes, and dots were written on the wood in black ink—not the ball point pen kind, but rather the ink that comes from an inkwell. “You think those markings have some kind of meaning?”
“I have no idea. They’re only on the back of this drawer, not the others.” He shut the top drawer and pulled out the second, having me shine the flashlight in it, too. Sure enough, the wood was unmarked.
Two more loud thumps came from the closet.
“What’s he doing in there?”
“Looking for a trap door. Hawke assumes all closets come with trap doors.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Too long.”
“Does he have something to do with why you left?”
Cooper shut the drawer hard enough to rattle the crystal hair brush lying bristles up on the matching mirror. The hairs sticking out of the bristles looked thick, coarse and wiry, reminding me of my hair. “That’s not relevant to our purpose here.”
“A simple yes or no would suffice.”
“Nor is it any of your business, Parker.” He waved his hand around the room. “Do you see anything else that connects you to Ms. Wolff in one form or another?”
Detective Hawke stepped out of the walk-in closet, a scarf dragging behind him. “There’s no trap door in that one.”
“I believe I told you that in the car on the way over here.”
I snagged the scarf from Hawke and folded it. “May I look in there?”
“Have at it,” Hawke said. “You won’t find anything besides old dresses that stink like mothballs and boxes full of fancy hats.”
I stepped through the closet doorway and paused, taking my time looking up, down, and everywhere in between. The overhead light was bright enough that I didn’t need Cooper’s flashlight, so I switched it off, careful not to get zapped.
Moving to the wrap-around racks full of clothes, I started pushing back hangers, checking out clothing tags. The dresses and outfits were dated, but most were still in tiptop shape, looking as if Ms. Wolff had purchased them in decades past and stored them in here. By the fifteenth or so tag I checked, I noticed something that made me pause and double-check a few, then I moved forward through several more.
“What is it?” Cooper asked from the doorway, where he stood watching. I figured he probably was observing my search techniques critically, itching to tell me how I was doing things wrong.
“The sizes are different.”
“Maybe she gained or lost weight and kept her old clothes.”
“Maybe,” I said, continuing.
The sizes continued to fluctuate in grouped increments, getting larger and larger. Some of the more dated pieces had no tags at all and looked hand sewn. She must have been a clothes hoarder. By the time I’d gone through the lion’s share of her outfits, I’d learned something else. I thought about keeping it to myself, but I had told Doc and Harvey that I’d let the law solve this mystery and I had sort of meant it. With Rex showing up in town, I had enough on my shoulders.
“I don’t think these were all her clothes,” I told Cooper.
“Why?”
“They not only vary in sizes but style as well.”
“Maybe she liked to change it up periodically.”
Hawke’s head appeared over Cooper’s shoulder. “I thought all you women like to buy whole new wardrobes on a whim?”
“How many women have you lived with Detective Hawke?”
“A couple.”
“Not including your mother or any sisters?”
“Enough to know women like to shop,” he said, his cheeks darkening
.
“What’s your point, Parker?” Cooper asked. “That Ms. Wolff liked to play dress up?”
Possibly. Or maybe she’d supplied the opera house in Lead with several outfits from her closet for their historic plays, which could connect her with Jane and Jane’s murder, which kind of led to me—Jane’s employee. It could be one of those six degrees from Kevin Bacon deals, only starring me.
“Or she had another woman living with her at one time,” I threw out my original idea. Or several.
Cooper moved his jaw back and forth, seesawing on that. “Duly noted. What else do you notice in here?”
I turned the flashlight back on and shined the light on the racks of shoes. “The shoes range in size, too.” Style as well, some reminding me of what flappers used to wear back in the 1920s, others from an even earlier era, the leather stiffer, hardened with age.
I looked up at the hat boxes. “I assume you went through those.”
“Of course.”
“Are they actual hats?”
He nodded.
“Do the brands on the hat tag match the box brand?”
“We didn’t note that detail.”
I turned to Hawke. “Will you get me a chair from the kitchen?”
“I could lift you up,” Hawke offered, cracking his knuckles, his eyes sizing me up. “What do you weigh? A buck fifty? Sixty?”
If he had been closer, I’d have stomped on his other foot just for bringing up the subject of my weight. “Or you could get me a chair from the kitchen. I’m a bit prickly to the touch.”
“You look soft in all the right places to me.”
“As soft as a porcupine,” Cooper said. “Go get her a chair, Hawke.”
“That wasn’t a very nice thing to say about me,” I jested while we waited.
“It’s not my job to supply you with compliments.”
“You do a great job of delivering insults.”
“Those are on the house.” Cooper stepped aside to make room for Hawke and the chair.
I climbed up, careful to balance. “Can I touch a lid without screwing up anything?”
“Be my guest.”
I lifted and peeked, reaching inside. Sure enough, the hat matched the box. I looked into several of the hat boxes, the results the same each time.