Panic Button

by Kylie Logan

  No way it was a coincidence.

  I closed the distance between me and Larry. “When was the last time you saw Susan?” I asked him.

  Under any other circumstances, I was sure he wouldn’t have had to stop and think about it. But stress does strange things. To our brains and to our bodies. Larry’s breaths were coming hard and fast, and when I spotted a water fountain near the entrance, I went over there, took one of the little paper cups from a dispenser on the wall and filled it, and brought it back to him.

  He drank down the water in one gulp. “Thank you,” he said. “You’re very kind.”

  “I’m very curious.” There was no use hiding the fact, especially since—dead girlfriend or no dead girlfriend—I wasn’t planning on letting up on the questions. “When did you say you saw Susan last?”

  He passed a hand over his eyes. “This morning,” Larry said. “When she got to Angela’s. I got there a few minutes ahead of her and I waited for her on the front porch. When she arrived, we went into the house together, but…well, you can understand how easy it was for us to get separated in that house of horrors. Before we did, though, we talked about what we’d do the rest of the day. We said we’d go to lunch together after the preview.”

  “And did it seem like anything was wrong?” I asked.

  “With Susan?” Larry paused to think about it. “It’s hard to say,” he admitted. “What I mean is, we’d been apart for a while. You know that. You know I was dating Angela. Susan and I were just finding our way back to some sort of relationship. We were taking small steps. Sometimes…” He drew in a trembling breath and let it out slowly. “Sometimes, she seemed distant. Not that I’m saying I blame her. After all, I’m the one who made the mistake of breaking up with her and going to Angela.”

  “Did Susan feel any resentment?”

  Larry shot me a look. “Resentment is a strong word.”

  “It’s a strong emotion,” I reminded him.

  I thought he might argue, but honestly, I don’t think Larry had the energy. He drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t think Susan so much resented what happened between me and Angela as much as she was hurt by it. And honestly, I couldn’t hold that against her. I was heartless. Not to mention stupid. And now…” His voice cracked. “Now I’ll never have a chance to prove to her how wrong I was to ever let her go in the first place.”

  “But you and Angela, you said you were solid that day she died.”

  Larry’s breathing stilled. “Yes, we were. Just like I told you. Angela and I had a little tiff, but we settled things. The last time I saw her, we were in a good place.”

  “A good place that you’ve since decided was stupid.”

  Larry pinned me with a look. “I didn’t say it was stupid.”

  “You said it was stupid to ever break up with Susan in the first place. That must mean it was stupid for you to date Angela. But now you’re telling me you were happy with Angela. Which is it, Larry?”

  “Are you trying to send me over the edge?” I don’t think Larry was actually expecting an answer to this question. One hand on either side of his head, he raked his fingers through his thick hair. “What difference does it make now, anyway?” he asked. “I’ve lost Angela. And I’ve lost Susan. Two wonderful women. Gone. Gone, too soon.”

  “And now all we can do is wonder why. And who did it.”

  “Yes.” Larry bobbed his head. “Yes, we have to do everything we can to bring this monster to justice.”

  I couldn’t have agreed with him more, but I didn’t have a chance to tell him. The hallway door—the one we’d come in just a short time before—opened, and Marci stuck her red, spiky head into the museum. “What’s going on?” The rest of her followed, wobbling on heels as high as any I’d ever seen. “I was just driving by and I saw the police cars.” The cops were all gathered in the room across the hall with the body and a noise from that direction made Marci glance that way. “Something happened? Something bad?”

  The worst, and I told her all we knew and watched Marci’s face turn a sickly green. One arm out, she braced herself against the wall. “Oh my God, poor Susan. I just saw her. Over at Angela’s. She was…she was fine.”

  Who was I to be the voice of cynicism and point out that that’s the way murder usually works: fine one minute, dead the next.

  Instead, I stuck to facts. “We were all at Angela’s,” I pointed out. “Larry, I saw you in the kitchen. Did you leave at any time?”

  “Me?” He poked a finger at his chest. “I…well, yes…If you consider going out to Angela’s garage leaving. There was a collection of old tools out there that I wanted to take a look at.”

  “Was anyone out there with you?”

  “Are you implying…” At his sides, Larry’s hands curled into fists. A muscle jumped at the base of his jaw. “As a matter of fact,” he said from between clenched teeth, “there were three other fellows out there. No one I knew, so I can’t give you their names. Maybe you’d better have your police friends issue an all-points bulletin to find the guys so you can ask them if I’m lying.”

  I was a theater major back in college; I’m pretty immune to sarcasm.

  I turned the other way. “Did you leave Angela’s house during the preview, Marci?”

  Her shrug was so casual, it was as if we weren’t discussing life and death. “I arrived, I left,” she said. “But you can be sure I didn’t slip out somewhere in between so I could race over here and kill Susan.”

  “Except you did know about the side door being unlocked.”

  Her breath caught. Marci’s mouth opened and closed. “Everybody…” She stammered. “Everybody in town knows that Susan leaves that door open.”

  “But not everybody in town just happened to show up right after Susan was murdered.”

  My comment had been as casual as can be, but Marci went up like a Roman candle. “You think I killed her? Why would I? And don’t say it’s because I want her job. I’ve got my own museum and it’s better…” Just for good measure, she kicked the wall with the toe of one pointy shoe. “It’s better than this place.”

  That left Charles.

  I strolled over to where he sat, his head in his hands. “You were certainly at Angela’s,” I said, and I think it was the first he realized I’d drawn near.

  His head came up, and Charles sat back. “Of course I was. I was the host. You don’t think I could have—”

  “Who knows what could have happened?” I made sure my shrug was as casual as Marci’s had been. “All that junk. All that commotion. Anybody…” I glanced at my companions. “Anybody could have come and gone and come right back before anybody else missed them.”

  “Well, it certainly wasn’t me.” Larry stalked to the door. “Tell Chief Barnstable I’ll be at home,” he said. “I’m sure he’ll want to talk to me. Tell him…” He looked over his shoulder to the other room and his anger dissolved in a wash of tears. “Do you…do you think there really was a curse? That Susan was killed because she’s agreed to bring the charm string into the museum?”

  I couldn’t answer, because honestly, I couldn’t say. In fact, at that moment, all I could think was that the real bad luck was that Larry kept losing his girlfriends.

  IT WAS HOURS later and Charles had gone home. So had Marci. By then, someone had come and taken Susan’s body away, and the room where she’d been killed had been cordoned off with yellow tape.

  Too edgy to sit still, I had spent the entire time walking around the Big Museum and thinking.

  Both actions resulted in me ending up exactly where I’d begun, in the entryway just inside the front door with no more answers than I had when I started my trek. I could tell from the mumbled conversation going on in the photo room that Nev was wrapping things up with the local cops, and I went into the room with the pirate exhibit to wait. With no one around, I finally had a chance to read that poster about Thunderin’ Ben.

  “Great Lakes captain…pirate…gambling, prostitution, thie
very.” I scanned the poster, reading the important words under my breath. “Buried treasure…life of crime…Ardent’s most colorful son.”

  Certainly interesting, and in light of everything that had happened at the museum that day, a welcome diversion. While I was at it, I looked again at the exhibit that included Ben’s diary and that mini-buoy, thinking—

  “Ready?”

  When Nev came up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder, I jumped.

  “Sorry.” He backed away instantly. “I should have known better. The murder has us all on edge.”

  “It’s not that, it’s just…” I turned and pointed to the exhibit. “I was just absorbed, that’s all. And thinking that something here doesn’t look quite right.”

  “Really?” Nev stepped forward for a closer look. “It doesn’t look like anything’s missing.”

  It didn’t. And it had been a few days since I’d first seen the exhibit. For all I knew, the Big Museum owned lots of Thunderin’ Ben memorabilia and rotated what it put out and what it put away. I shrugged off my reaction to the exhibit as inconsequential and suggested we get out of Ardent Lake and Nev agreed.

  “It’s too bad about Susan,” he said once we were back in the car. “And I’m sorry you were the one who had to find her. That’s never easy.”

  “No.” As we drove out of town, I stared out the window, wondering what was going on inside each of the houses with their perfect exteriors. “But at least we know one thing. I think we can be pretty sure Susan wasn’t our murderer.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  IT WAS NOT A GOOD WEEK, AND I WAS NOT IN A GOOD mood.

  For one thing, Nev caught another case and it was a particularly sticky one, what with it having to do with a dead hooker and a prominent businessman. Nev had been busy, and we’d barely had time to talk except to plan a quick trip to the festival in Ardent Lake on Saturday when he was hoping to get away for a few hours. Just for the record, there was no mention of the charming B and B where we’d been invited to share a room, and truth be told, I think that accounted for some of my grumpiness, too. It wasn’t like I was ready to commit—to a night with Nev or anything else for that matter. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t have liked him to mention it. Just so I’d know he was thinking what I was thinking and that what we were thinking was something that maybe we both wanted to think about.

  In fact, if there was any silver lining to the gray cloud that had been hanging over me, it was that buttons did not enter the picture in Nev’s new case, so I was not called in to offer my expert advice.

  So far, me being an expert was getting us nowhere fast when it came to Angela’s murder, or Susan’s; I didn’t need to be reminded.

  Two dead women. One charm string. One thousand buttons.

  And one stumped button expert.

  “There’s Charles, of course,” I mumbled, talking to myself about the short list of suspects since it was right before closing time and there was no one in the Button Box except me. “There’s Marci. There’s even Larry. There’s…”

  In the silence that surrounded me, my sigh echoed.

  “There’s nobody and nothing, and all I’m doing is wasting my time.” I wailed, and dropped my head onto my desk.

  It had been that kind of week, and I was getting tired of it.

  And then, of course, there was Kaz.

  With a groan, I got up to start through my usual closing routine. At least if I kept myself busy, I wouldn’t (maybe) be so embarrassed to admit that just a couple days earlier, I finally gave up, gave in, and called Kaz’s supervisor down at the Port. Sam Podnowiak remembered me from back in the day when I was Mrs. Kazlowski, and he assumed I was looking for Kaz because…well, because I couldn’t live without him, I guess.

  I did not contradict this theory, mostly because it didn’t seem worth the effort. Instead, I told him I was worried, and asked Sam if he knew what was going on.

  “Sure.” Sam is a big guy with a big voice, and even bigger opinions. When he chuckled and said I must have come to my senses and I was ready to get back together with Kaz, I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere to ask what the heck kinds of rumors my ex had been spreading. Instead, I clenched my teeth around a smile Sam couldn’t see since we were talking on the phone, and said, as sweetly as I possibly could, “Of course I want to know, Sam. I wouldn’t have called otherwise. Kaz is missing, and I’m worried.”

  “Missing?” Something about the bray of laughter on the other end of the phone actually helped loosen the knot of tension inside me. “I don’t know about that,” Sam said. “But I can tell you he took some vacation time.”

  “This much vacation time?” Kaz hadn’t even taken two weeks for our honeymoon in Barbados.

  “He had a lot of accumulated overtime hours coming,” Sam informed me. “Said he wanted three weeks. What the hell! The guy works hard. I told him, sure.”

  “And did he say what he was planning on doing with those three weeks?”

  Since there was silence on the other end of the phone, I knew Sam was thinking. The way I remembered it, this was not an easy thing for Sam, so I cut him some slack.

  “He didn’t say,” Sam finally answered. “Said he was going away, but didn’t say where. Or for what. Actually, Josie, I figured maybe you and him were…you know, going off together somewhere on account of how Kaz, he’s been telling us boys around here how you two might be getting back together again and I figured you were, like, you know, hooking up.”

  I am certain I’m not a rude person. So as not to contradict this opinion of myself, I bit my tongue before I could remind Sam that Kaz has the annoying habit of being something of a liar, and made an excuse about a customer coming into the Button Box.

  “Vacation.” I’d switched off the lights in the shop and put up the “Closed” sign, and I was in the back room grumbling while I retrieved my jacket and purse. Good thing, otherwise, I never would have heard the scratching on the back door.

  A note about logistics here: There is a travel agency upstairs from the Button Box, and while I generally come and go through the front door of the building that leads directly into the shop, Emilie, my upstairs neighbor, always uses the back. The door from my back workroom leads into a postage-stamp-sized hallway, and that’s where the stairs are, too, that go up to Emilie’s place. From there, the back door opens onto that little courtyard behind the building.

  To my knowledge, Emilie was as good as gold when it came to making sure that back door was always locked behind her.

  Then again, if my theory was right about Angela’s murderer trying to steal the charm string (and at this point, I wasn’t sure anything was right), the murderer had gotten in that way—and into the basement—the day Angela was killed.

  “Emilie?” I called out, partly because if Emilie was out there and needed help, I didn’t want to ignore her, but mostly because whoever it was, that person needed to know I was still around, and the shop wasn’t empty. “Did you lock yourself out?”

  No answer.

  Except for a tiny rap on the door.

  “I’ve already called the police.” Yes, it was a lie, but it was all for a good cause. I grabbed the broom that sat in a corner by the back door, and holding the handle like a Samurai sword, yanked the door open and—

  “Kaz?”

  He hotfooted it into the workroom and slammed the door behind him.

  “Boy, am I glad you’re here.” Kaz was breathing hard. He leaned against my worktable. “I thought I was going to have to break into the place.”

  “Security system.” I pointed toward the unit by the back door.

  He fought to catch his breath. “Damn, yeah. I forgot. That would have made things a little tricky. I guess if you weren’t here, I would have just had to go over to your place.”

  “Really?” I crossed my arms over my chest and stepped back, my weight against one foot. “Just like that?”

  “Well, sure.” Like he actually belonged there, Kaz went over to the fridge, got out
a bottle of water, and downed it. “Thanks,” he said, tossing the empty into my recycle container. “I owe you one.”

  “You owe me a lot. An explanation might be a good place to start.”

  “Oh, you mean for…” He glanced at the back door and gave me one of the patented smiles that had attracted me to him in the first place. Sweet as peaches and as hot as an August day. It was a heady combination, and I had succumbed in record time. “I didn’t want to come in the front door,” he simply said.

  “Because the front door is too—”

  “Public.” He looked in the fridge again. I kept a small stash of yogurt in there, as well as a carton of orange juice, a loaf of bread, and a limited supply of deli meat for those days when I was busy and it was impossible to leave the shop. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked, but since he already had the bread and the turkey out, as well as a pack of cheddar cheese slices and a jar of mayo, there didn’t seem to be much point. He slapped together a sandwich and wolfed down half of it before he said anything else.

  “There’s this guy,” Kaz began.

  And I knew exactly where the story was going to end.

  “And he’s looking for you because you owe him money.” I threw my hands in the air.

  So much for proving to my ex that nothing he did surprised me because he never did anything surprising. “Well, yeah,” he said, unfazed and starting in on the second half of the sandwich. “You see, I was up in Wisconsin—”

  “Wisconsin?” Call me crazy, but somehow, I’d expected something a little more exotic to explain his long absence. “All this time, I’ve been looking for you, and you’ve been in Wisconsin?”

  The sandwich partway to his mouth, Kaz stopped. His grin was as bright as the sudden gleam that twinkled in his dark eyes. “You were looking for me, huh?”