by Kylie Logan
Charles cast a sidelong glance at Nev, who was standing on the other side of the room, his arms crossed over his chest. “He said you wanted to talk to me, Josie. He didn’t say…” Charles’s gaze slid from Marci to Larry. “He didn’t say it was about the murders. What’s going on?”
“Good question.” Larry finished off his tiny glass of wine and set the empty plastic cup on the display case next to my purse. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m ready to call it a night.”
“I’m sure we all are.” My smile was as bright as if I were one of the docents and welcoming the little group to the museum. “It’s been a really busy day. For all of us. But before we go, I think there are some things we need to clear up.”
“Oh, give me a break!” Marci downed the rest of her wine in one chug. Something told me it wasn’t her first glass. Marci’s cheeks were the same color as her hair, and she swayed just a little on her platform heels. Recovered from the surprise of hearing the bell—or maybe it was the wine that gave her courage—she made a face. “You’re not going to start with the interrogations and the accusations again, are you?”
“Absolutely not. Scout’s honor.” Just like a Scout, I held up one hand as if that would prove it. “In fact, I don’t need to. No more questions. No more wondering who did what and why. You see, I’ve finally got the whole thing figured out.”
Charles had been busy picking bruschetta crumbs off the front of his gray sweater, and his hand stilled over his stomach. “You mean…” In the reflected light of the spotlight trained on Thunderin’ Dan’s exhibit, I saw his Adam’s apple jump. “You know who killed Angela?”
“And Susan,” I told him just in case he’d forgotten we needed to address that problem, too. “And why.”
“Impossible.” Marci waved away the idea with one hand. “And if you’re going to say it was me—” Her slim shoulders shot back. “I didn’t have any reason to kill anyone.”
“Well, you did, actually.” I hated to be the one to remind her, but after all, we were there to find the truth. “You had a motive to kill Susan because you wanted her job. And as for Angela…well, if she found out you were taking things from her home and putting them on display at the Little Museum—”
“Stealing from Angela? Really!” Disgusted, Larry stalked away and something told me he actually might have kept right on going if not for the fact that, quickly and quietly, Nev had stationed himself at the door. Apparently, Larry knew a losing cause when he saw one. His jaw tight, he spun around and came back to join our group.
“You’ve always been a suspect,” I told Marci. “For exactly those reasons, and truth be told, my money was on you. At least until yesterday. When we were talking in there…” I gestured toward the room that featured the old photos of Ardent. “You mentioned Susan, and you looked all around. Like you didn’t know exactly where the body had been found.”
“I didn’t!”
“Exactly. I’ve always said you had the smarts and the guts to do it, Marci, but after I saw that, I had to admit it couldn’t have been you. Even though you did have one heck of a motive.”
Ever since I’d mentioned Marci’s pilfering ways, Charles had been opening and closing his mouth, trying to find the words to express his outrage. They finally came out in a sputter. “Angela’s things…Angela’s things are my things now…and if you’re…you’re not stealing from Angela. You’re stealing from me. How dare you! I’m going to file a police report. Right now.”
“Not necessary.” I stilled him with a lift of one hand. “Marci returned everything. And besides, now that we know all those priceless antiques are really nothing more than good reproductions…”
I let Charles figure out the rest for himself.
By the time he was done, there was a little more color in his cheeks. “So Marci killed Angela and Susan. Good. Now we know. We can leave.”
“Not so fast.” I was prepared to clamp a hand on his arm if it came to that, but luckily, I didn’t need to get physical with Charles. My words were enough to keep him in his place. “We need to talk about your motives, too, Charles.”
“Me?” He was back to opening and closing his mouth. “You can’t possibly think—”
“You cut her brake lines.”
Larry got in Charles’s face so fast, I thought Nev was going to have to break up the altercation. Luckily, Larry’s fuse was short, but it didn’t burn long. He stopped just short of doing something he may have regretted, his arm cocked. “You? You risked my Angela’s life. For…for…”
“For what I thought was a fortune.” Charles hung his head. “I’ve told Josie everything. She knows I couldn’t—”
“Actually, Charles, I know you could.”
Charles went pasty again.
“Trick is,” I comforted him, “while I could find plenty of reasons for you wanting to kill Angela, I couldn’t find any for you to want Susan dead. Well…” I’d been standing in front of the pirate display and I stepped aside and waved a hand toward the diary. “That is, until we figured out that Ben’s diary has been stolen.”
“Stolen?”
“Really?”
“Preposterous!”
Their voices overlapped, and as if they’d choreographed the move and practiced it to perfection, all three of them moved forward to peer at the display.
“You see,” I said, “we thought the murder could be about love.” I glanced at Larry. “Or about envy.” I looked at Marci. “Or jealousy.” When I looked at him, Charles looked at his shoes. “But what it all comes down to is greed. The murderer was looking for Ben’s treasure.”
“Treasure.” Larry’s grumbled word echoed in the gallery. “That’s just a lot of nonsense. Nothing more than a story. It’s no more real than Angela’s silly curse.”
“Well, that’s just the thing, see. The curse…” I looked from Charles to Marci to Larry. “Turns out that curse was real, too.”
Again, a chorus of protests and questions went up, and since I knew there was no use trying to talk above it, I waited until the noise died down.
“It took me a while to figure out,” I said, when I finally had their attention again. “And that’s really too bad. If I’d realized what was going on sooner, Susan might still be alive.”
I’d gotten this far on nothing but nerve and adrenaline, but I didn’t know how much longer I could maintain the cool facade. I slipped between Marci and Charles and walked to the other side of the room and back, eager to dispel the nervous energy. On the way over, and again on the way back, I glanced Nev’s way. There wasn’t any hint of emotion in his expression, but his eyes told another story. He was rooting for me. And I was doing a good job. He had my back.
It was time to finish what I’d started.
I stayed where I was, forcing my suspects to turn around when I said, “If it wasn’t for the charm string, I guess I never would have figured out what happened.”
“First the diary. Now the charm string.” Larry expression was sour. “I’m sorry, but you’re just not making sense.”
“That’s because curses don’t make sense. And Angela’s curse was getting that charm string in the first place. Just like it was Aunt Evelyn’s before her. The charm string with two touch buttons.”
I was pretty sure none of them knew what this meant, but I let the words fill the silence between us for a little while before I explained.
“A touch button,” I told them, “was the button a girl used to start her charm string. It’s usually bigger than the other buttons on the string. And Angela’s charm string had two. One of them was a rubber button and the other was a button that showed the scene of a town. I didn’t know it at first, but I know it now. It was Ardent. How did it get there?”
No one had asked, but hey, I knew they would eventually so I told them the truth. “I don’t think we’ll ever know. Not for sure. But my guess is that if we did a little snooping, we’d find out that Angela’s great-grandmother had some connection with Thunderin’ Be
n’s family. When Ben needed a place to stash the button, he hid it in plain sight. He slipped it onto the end of her charm string. Who would look for a button among all those other buttons? Well, nobody. Not for a very long time. Until our murderer realized he needed the button along with Ben’s diary. Without both, he wouldn’t have been able to find the treasure.”
“You mean there really is a treasure?” Marci peered at me through bleary eyes. “Angela and Susan, they were killed because somebody wanted to get their hands on…what?”
I hated admitting I didn’t know for sure. “I can’t say. Not yet, anyway. Maybe it was coins. Or gold bars. We won’t know until the cops get back here. You know, after they’ve executed their search warrants. The only thing we can be sure of is that it’s been hidden in the Moran family mausoleum all these years. That, and that with the reservoir being drained, our murderer saw the perfect opportunity to finally get his hands on it.” I had strolled a couple steps nearer and I turned to face Larry.
“Angela suspected, didn’t she?” I asked him. “She had an inkling of what you were up to. That explains why she had those books about Ardent town history in her house. And maps of the area, too. She realized you were looking for the treasure, and that for reasons she probably didn’t understand, you needed the button to find it. Her button. Did you try to talk her into giving you the Ardent button, Larry? I mean, before you strangled her and stole it?”
“That’s…” Larry’s smile froze in place. “That’s crazy.”
“Yeah, exactly what I was thinking. But not as crazy as a curse, right? The fire at Angela’s, the break-in, all engineered by you so that she’d take the curse seriously and get rid of the charm string. Only you never counted on her wanting to dump it in Lake Michigan. That’s when you convinced her to donate it.”
“And she said she was going to donate it to me.” Leave it to Marci not to miss out on speaking her piece.
Actually, I was grateful. “Exactly,” I said, turning her way. “Angela offered you the charm string first. But that wasn’t going to work, was it, Larry?” I swung my gaze his way. “Because the Little Museum has a state-of-the-art alarm system, and you knew if the charm string went there, you’d never get your hands on it. You’d read enough about Ben’s life to hear rumors about a secret key that would help you find the treasure. You knew Angela had a button with a picture of old Ardent on it. You had to get that button. And she wouldn’t give it to you, would she?”
Larry’s chin came up a fraction of an inch. “If I’d asked, she would have given me the button. Angela would have done anything for me. But I didn’t ask.” His eyes snapped to mine. “I couldn’t ask for a button when I didn’t know anything about the button or the treasure, for that matter.”
I figured he’d object, and I was ready for it. “That’s what you and Angela fought about the morning she was killed, right? She figured out that you didn’t love her, you were just pretending so you could get your hands on the charm string. And you didn’t kiss and make up before she came to Chicago. She was still upset when she arrived at the Button Box. And you followed her. You confronted her. You fought and you grabbed for the nearest weapon. Did you rip the Ardent button off the charm string before you strangled her with it? Well, you must have. That would explain how it didn’t get lost in the dark. Poor Angela must have been heartbroken when she realized what you were up to.”
Larry crossed his arms over his chest. “And poor Susan? I suppose you have some lame theory about her death, too.”
“Well, my guess is your feelings for her were just as phony as your feelings for Angela. You dated Susan originally because you wanted to get your hands on Ben’s diary. Then when you realized you’d never get the button unless you were close to Angela, you switched your affections. Once Angela was out of the way, you were free to start wooing Susan again. And it almost worked, didn’t it? You would have gotten away with it if she didn’t walk in here that Sunday morning looking for her purse. Once she found you with your hand in the Thunderin’ Ben exhibit switching one of the old books you found at Angela’s for the real diary…” I looked at the display case, picturing the horrible scene. “You had no choice but to kill her, too.”
“Absolutely not!” Larry stomped one foot. “None of it is true, and I won’t let you repeat a word of it. Not to anyone. There are laws about slander, you know, and if word of this gets around in Ardent Lake, my business will be ruined. You can’t prove it.” He stalked toward the door. “You can’t prove any of it.”
Nev stopped him with one simple phrase. “We will,” he said, “once the police are done searching your house and we find the treasure. And the diary. And the button.”
“And even if we didn’t have that…” I walked over to where I’d set my purse. “There is the whole thing about Aunt Evelyn.”
Larry went as still as if he’d been flash frozen. “How dare you bring up the memory of that nice, old lady? Evelyn was a dear.”
“And you were a dear to humor Angela and take Evelyn along on so many of your outings.” I opened my purse and pulled out the photograph of Larry and Evelyn in the park that I’d originally seen in Angela’s bedroom. “You were kind to Evelyn.”
“Of course I was.”
“And you did it just to humor Angela. Not because you wanted to get the button from the string when Evelyn owned it?”
“I told you that’s not true!” At the same time Larry took a step toward me, Nev moved in my direction, too. Even that wasn’t enough to get Larry to back off. His hands curled into fists and his arms tight at his sides, Larry bent to look me in the eye. “You’re lying.”
“Pictures don’t lie.” I showed the photo to Larry and, since they were leaning forward to try and get a glimpse, I held it out so Marci and Charles could see it, too. “This picture shows you with Evelyn,” I said, though Larry certainly didn’t need a reminder. “I found it in Angela’s room along with the other pictures of you she’d taken down from her wall.”
Larry sniffed. “She was repainting.”
“She was as mad as hell. Because I’ll bet anything that Angela found this picture when she cleaned out Evelyn’s house, and when she cleaned out Evelyn’s house…” I gave Larry another chance to fess up, and when he didn’t, I had no choice but to go on. “Angela realized you were romancing Aunt Evelyn two years ago.”
“I…” Larry’s jaw went slack and he blinked rapidly. “I wasn’t…I didn’t…I…”
“You can explain it all down at the station. If there’s any way to explain.” Jimmy Carns stepped in from the hallway and slapped handcuffs on Larry.
THE NEXT MONDAY, I was back at the Button Box and grateful for it. I was back where I belonged, lost in a world of buttons, and as happy as any button-a-holic can be.
I was just finishing switching out a display of calico buttons for one of clear glass (mostly because I hadn’t played with my clear glass buttons for a while and I was itching to get a look at them) when the bell over the front door chinked and Nev stuck his head into the shop.
“Just got a call from Jimmy Carns,” Nev said. “Larry confessed.”
“Poor Susan, and poor, poor Angela. She had the charm string with one thousand buttons on it, and her Prince Charming finally came along. Too bad he wasn’t the man of anyone’s dreams.” I’d been on my knees, checking the lower shelves of the display case to make sure everything was perfect, and I got up and walked to the front of the shop. “But at least a confession saves a long, drawn-out trial.”
“Well, it’s not like Larry could do much else. He didn’t hide the diary very well, or that missing button. As for the treasure…”
Nev’s voice drifted off, and I knew exactly how he felt. It still took my breath away to think that the Ardent Lake police had found a jewel case filled with old gold coins hidden in Larry’s attic.
“Maybe they’ll put the treasure on display at the Big Museum,” I suggested.
Nev grinned. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
&n
bsp; He was still positioned half in, and half out of the shop, and I was just going to ask what was going on when he jerked to the side, as if his arm had been pulled.
“What…” I got as far as the door, and when LaSalle saw me, he let out a bark. He was still wearing that bright blue collar and he was tethered to a blue leash. Need I say that the other end of that leash was in Nev’s hand?
“What?” He acted like this wasn’t any big deal.
“Bring him in.” I waved cop and dog into the shop and LaSalle ran over to greet me, paws on my knees and ears flapping. “So, you’ve got a new best friend, huh?” I asked the dog. He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
“He’d only get in trouble out on the street,” Nev said, rubbing the dog’s head. “And when I suggested he might want a permanent home—”
I laughed. “You don’t need to explain. LaSalle’s had plenty of opportunities to go home with the merchants and the workers from the neighborhood. He was never interested. I guess he was just waiting for the right person to come along.”
Nev dropped the leash and LaSalle wandered over to stick his nose in the trash can near my desk. With the dog busy, Nev propped his hands on my hips. “I think that’s what we’re all looking for, don’t you?”
I couldn’t have agreed more. I slipped my hands around Nev’s waist.
“Except, I hope you understand…” he said. “You know…” I looked up just in time to see the tips of his ears turn pink. “I mean, about the B and B.”
I wiped the smile from my face. I wasn’t actually mad about what had happened in Ardent Lake on Saturday night. In fact, I was actually pretty relieved. But it didn’t hurt to tease a guy, just a little. “You mean about how Mary Lou offered us that room for Saturday night and we turned her down?”
“Yeah.” A look of regret crossed his face. “I just…well, we’d just caught a murderer, and let’s face it, murder isn’t exactly romantic.”
“No, it is definitely not.”
“And I…” Nev tightened his hold. “When it happens, Josie, I want it to be perfect.”