Priscilla chattered on. “Will you come back and take pictures of the filming tomorrow? It should be an interesting time, I imagine. I do hope Ruth will be feeling up to it.”
“I’d love to be here.” McCarthy assured her.
We waved goodbye to Priscilla and got into his car.
“It’s amazing that Priscilla remembered your specific photographs. I always thought her memory was dicey.”
He revved his engine and pulled out of the circular drive. “Well, that robin was something special. I’ll show you sometime. Then it sounds like she knew Francisca Toumay pretty well. It was a shocking thing when her silver was stolen between her death and the estate sale. There was one piece that I remember in particular: a silver platter made by Paul Revere himself. It must have been worth upwards of half a million dollars. I did get some beautiful pictures of it.”
I checked the tightness of my seat belt when he accelerated around a corner. “Nice job finessing an invitation to come take photographs of the filming tomorrow.”
McCarthy grinned. “Nothing like the homeowner’s permission to give me legitimacy. You’ll stand as my witness, right?”
“I’m sure you’ve got this—you don’t need anyone to back you up.”
He laughed and zoomed on to the mall. He dropped me off at the door before circling around the parking lot to find a spot. “I can take you home if you’re fast, but I have a job at noon.”
I can be fast on demand if it means I won’t have to take the bus home. I chose Louise’s dark blue fabric in record time, and was in the cutting line when McCarthy came into the store. But it didn’t matter in the end, since the woman in front of me had seven bolts of fleece and as many bolts of flannel. We were in for the long haul here.
“What’s going on at noon today?” It sounded better if I asked it that way, instead of saying, “Who are you meeting for lunch?” I didn’t want him to get the impression that I was keeping tabs on him in any way. I’d suffered through enough of that with Randall.
“There’s a panel discussion at the university about the impact of history on modern-day financial markets. A friend of yours is part of the presentation, as a matter of fact.” He picked up a spool of thread and tossed it back and forth between his hands. “Noah Webster. Maybe you could introduce me afterward?”
“So I’m going with you, am I?”
He shrugged. “I figured you couldn’t pass it up, right?” He elbowed me gently. “Nosy seamstress!”
I laughed, and dodged past another laden customer who was about to cut in front of me. I thumped my fabric bolt down on the counter. “I’m next. Twelve yards, please.”
Ignoring the woman muttering behind me, I said to McCarthy, “Why, yes, I’d love to go with you.”
* * * *
The panel discussion was just about to start by the time we arrived. The university library had rows of chairs lined up facing a long table set with three tabletop microphones. I paused in the doorway to take stock of the scene. A sparse crowd had gathered, mostly older folks for whom this presentation was probably the high point of their day. I noticed Mrs. Wirdle seated near the front, in pursuit of knowledge as usual. She sat next to a man wearing a classy gray felt fedora, even inside the library. Something about the set of his shoulders looked familiar, although I couldn’t place him. This wasn’t unusual—when you lived in a small town you were used to seeing the same people over and over, and you would recognize them even when you didn’t know them.
Noah sat at the front table, along with a middle-aged man wearing a blue suit and a necktie covered with bright green dollar signs, and a woman swathed with jangly scarves who spoke with an Australian accent. I wasn’t at all interested in the topic, but I could have listened to her talk all day long.
McCarthy prowled around the edge of the room, snapping pictures for the paper. The discussion lasted for forty-five minutes, and then the panel opened the floor for questions. After close to an hour in the warmth of the room the crowd was practically comatose, and questions were few. The presentation concluded well in time for the handful of students present to make it to their 1:00 classes.
I hung back while McCarthy greeted the other two presenters and took a few posed shots of them for good measure. Then I joined him when he introduced himself to Noah.
“Noah. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.”
He glanced sideways at McCarthy and said, “So nice to see you, Daria. Thank you for coming.”
McCarthy shot me a swift glance, ever attuned to the nuances of any conversation.
I groaned inwardly. I needed to talk to Noah, to find out how his conversation with the police had gone. But he evidently didn’t want to talk in this setting. I couldn’t very well ditch McCarthy to get Noah to myself. McCarthy called me nosy, but I knew that he would never rest until he got to the bottom of whatever he was curious about. I guess it was up to Noah to keep McCarthy from publishing Professor Burbridge’s research for all the world to see.
“Noah, I’d love to talk with you more about this topic. Can we get together to talk?” I smiled at McCarthy, resigned to accepting him as a witness to our conversation. “Maybe the three of us could go get some lunch or something.”
Noah glanced from me to McCarthy and back again. Then he nodded. “We could go to the Station again. I have a class at two forty-five, but I’m free until then.” He turned to greet a couple more members of the crowd.
McCarthy drew me aside. “Something’s up, my seamstress sleuth.”
I nodded with a conspiratorial wink. “You are about to be let in on the secrets of history.”
“Are you telling me that you’ll trust me with said secrets?” He said it lightly, but I could sense a bit of tension behind his words.
I tried to play it off with a shrug. “I don’t have much choice. You’re the chauffeur, after all.”
He laughed. “I promise I’ll behave myself as befits a proper chauffeur.”
“That’ll be the day.”
Noah led the way to the Station. The cozy coffee shop was comfortably crowded even though the lunch hour was over, but we had no trouble finding a private table. We ordered sandwiches and settled down for a talk.
I saw the man in the gray felt fedora sitting at a table by the counter. Fedoras were my very favorite style of hat for men. I wondered what McCarthy would look like in one paired with a matching overcoat. More like a classy private eye than a chauffeur, I imagined.
Noah seemed uncomfortable with McCarthy’s presence. He straightened the condiments on the table and fussed with shimming up the teetering table with a folded-up napkin, all the while avoiding eye contact with either one of us. Finally I leaned over and laid a hand on his arm. “Noah, relax. Tell me what’s been going on since I last saw you.”
He glanced sideways at McCarthy again, and took a big bite of his ham and cheese sandwich, rendering himself speechless.
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes in frustration. “McCarthy’s a good friend of mine, Noah. He knows all about the professor’s death and the fact that you might be at risk as well.”
Although I intended to reassure him, my words had the opposite effect. Noah gulped and almost choked on his sandwich. He coughed and sputtered for a few minutes, trying to catch his breath.
McCarthy gave me the barest wink. “I remember one time when I was at risk. I was traveling with a circus for a couple weeks, photographing the elephants as they went about their daily routines.” He leaned back and grinned at me. “This was before I washed up in Laurel Springs on the local beat. I’d gotten on the wrong side of the lion tamer after I made the mistake of chatting with his very attractive girlfriend. I didn’t think much of it when he threatened me, until the night we had all the tents staked out in an open field bordered by woods. I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of an enormous animal snorting just outside my tent. I w
as petrified. Finally I whacked up the courage to take a peek out the tent flap, sure that I would see a lion waiting to maul me.” He paused a beat. “What do you think I saw?”
I looked at Noah and shrugged. With McCarthy, it could be anything.
Noah blinked, and looked at the sandwich in his hand as if he’d forgotten all about it. “Was it a lion?”
McCarthy’s eyes twinkled. “I peeked out that tent flap to see a white-tailed deer looking at me with those big doe eyes you always hear about. It snorted right in my face, sounding like the fiercest predator alive. I almost knocked the whole tent down trying to get away from it.”
Noah and I both laughed, tickled by the picture of McCarthy cringing away from a harmless deer. McCarthy grinned, clearly satisfied with the success of his story. “I packed up my gear and took off the next morning. All I could think of was, next time it’s gonna be the lion.”
We laughed some more, so hard that several heads turned to look at us. I fought to control myself.
Noah wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeve. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have doubted you. I was getting hang up calls, but now they’ve morphed into threatening calls. It’s a man, but it’s definitely not you. I guess I just needed to hear your voice more.”
This surprised me, but nothing could faze McCarthy. “Yeah, no, I don’t make it a habit to place threatening phone calls. Too much room for misinterpretation.”
“What does the man say?” I wasn’t sure I really wanted to hear it, but at the same time I wanted to know what Noah was up against.
He shrugged. “It’s disgusting. There’s a lot of profanity, and ‘I’m coming to get you’ kind of stuff.”
“That’s awful,” I said.
“Have you called the police?” McCarthy pulled out his own phone, clearly ready to do just that.
“No, I haven’t called anyone. I... It could be a prank or something. I don’t want to overreact.”
“Noah, your professor is dead and we don’t know why. Calling the police about threatening phone calls is not overreacting.” I tried to put as much conviction into my voice as possible.
“No!” Noah grabbed McCarthy’s hand to stop him from dialing his phone. “I don’t want to talk to any police. I can handle this without them.”
McCarthy laid his phone down on the table, lifting both hands away from it. “What have you got against the police?”
Noah put his head in his hands. “I’m afraid of the police. I’m afraid they’ll look at me as a suspect. I’m the only one who knows about Professor Burbridge’s revolutionary research. Now that he’s gone, I could publish his conclusions under my own name and no one would know any different. It would be a fantastic career move for me. I could walk into any history department in the country. I have a lot of student loans, so I need a good job once I finally get my dissertation. There are lots of ways I could profit from Burbridge’s death. Why wouldn’t the police see that as motive for murder?”
“Well, maybe they would,” I said. “All the more reason to tell them about the threatening phone calls. You can’t threaten yourself, so those calls point to someone else as the murderer.”
“What if they don’t believe me? What if they think I made up the threatening calls to throw the scent off myself? Look, I don’t want to talk to the police. Okay?”
I sighed and bit my tongue. There was clearly no convincing him.
“So what is there in Professor Burbridge’s research that would put your life at risk and cost him his?”
Noah looked at McCarthy in surprise. “Daria didn’t tell you about Major Samuel Compton and the Battle of Laurel Springs?”
McCarthy shot a quick glance at me. “Not really. I understand he was a hero and the whole town loves him.”
“Well, let me tell you—”
I cut him off, my heart starting to pound. “Noah, you do realize that McCarthy works for the newspaper, right? He’s always on the lookout for a scoop for the front page.”
McCarthy’s jaw dropped. He stared at me in silence. I could hear the ticking of the clock across the room, ticking to the beat of my heart’s thudding. The seconds dragged on as he stared at me with that look of stunned disbelief on his face. I couldn’t stand to look at it. He usually covered up his feelings with a joke or a clever tale, so the sight of naked emotion on his face was more than I could take.
Noah’s words died on his lips. He looked from me to McCarthy and back again. Then he scrambled to his feet. “Excuse me, I have to use the restroom.” He disappeared in a flash.
Still McCarthy said nothing. He broke eye contact with me, and focused on the table in front of him. One hand came up to cover his mouth. I could see his jaw muscles working.
“Sean.”
He looked up and said in an unsteady voice, “Have I ever...?” He looked away again, biting off whatever else he was about to say. He got up and walked out of the café.
Chapter Eighteen
I snatched up my shoulder bag and ran out after him. “Sean!”
He was striding across the quad, both hands shoved in his pockets, head down. I had to run to catch up to him.
I fell into step with him, and we walked in silence for a few minutes. We reached the edge of the quad, and he swung around and started back the way we’d come. Still not a word. I held my tongue until his pace slackened a bit. “Sean, I’m sorry I upset you.”
He came to a stop and turned to face me. “Wow, you took me by surprise back there. I had no idea you considered me such an untrustworthy bastard that you have to warn people about me.”
“Stop. That’s not what I think.”
“That’s exactly what you think.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I just wanted him to know that you work for the newspaper, so he could make up his own mind about how much he wanted to tell you.”
“He knows I work for the newspaper. He just met me taking pictures of his presentation for the newspaper. I guess what he didn’t know was that I have no kind of integrity or sense of journalistic ethics whatsoever, so I can’t be trusted not to print every damn thing I ever heard. But you let him know that. Thanks for setting the record straight.” He started walking again, faster than ever.
This time I let him go.
I stood frozen in the middle of the path, watching him stride off as if the lion really was coming after him. I’d never seen him this upset. The worst part was, it was all because of me.
I spied an unoccupied bench under an oak tree. I went and sat down, chagrined to note that my legs were a little shaky. I truly hadn’t expected McCarthy to react so strongly to my comment to Noah. I thought he might make some joking remark about my not trusting him, but I had no idea he would think I was maligning his integrity.
I had never really considered McCarthy in terms of integrity. He was a charming, obnoxious photographer who loved to go around snapping pictures of everything he laid eyes on. That was how I’d always experienced him. He was a lot of fun to be with, and he could be kind in a lackadaisical sort of way, but I would never have guessed that he valued integrity, of all things. You learn something new every day.
I guess I owed him an apology, if he’d ever speak to me again for long enough for me to make it. I heaved a mighty sigh. I’d prefer not to have to grovel quite so soon, but my fabric was in his car, and I needed to make that dress today. I stood up and walked back toward the parking lot.
I was almost there when I remembered Noah. Poor guy, first we’d erupted into a fight in front of him, and then we’d both abandoned him at the café. Plus our fight centered around his story of Professor Burbridge’s research. He might even feel responsible for the altercation. I heaved another sigh of resignation, and turned back to retrace my steps to the Station.
Noah was gone by the time I got back. It looked like he’d left in a hurry—his lunch was unfinished and his napkin lay on the flo
or. I couldn’t blame him. If it were me, I wouldn’t want to stick around to face an awkward conversation with either one or both of the recent quarrelers. I’d have to contact him later and apologize for our rudeness. But first I had a more important apology to make.
I walked back to the parking lot, hoping that McCarthy was waiting there for me, while at the same time dreading the conversation we would have to have. When I saw his bright yellow Mustang in the lot, I didn’t know whether to feel relief or apprehension.
But he wasn’t inside. I scanned the area—no McCarthy. I stifled a feeling of annoyance. I really needed to get started on Louise’s gown, and all this drama wasn’t helping in the slightest. At the same time I felt like I’d been reprieved from an awkward conversation.
I waited at least ten minutes, pacing up and down the sidewalk and wishing I’d never heard of Major Samuel Compton. I thought about calling McCarthy, but decided to just leave him alone. I checked the time to see that the bus was due in a few minutes. My fabric store bag lay on the backseat of the car, tantalizing me. On the off chance that it was unlocked, I tried the car door. It opened right away.
I grabbed the bag and ran for the bus stop, just in time to catch the bus home. I settled in my seat and sent a text to McCarthy: “I’m taking the bus home.” I pressed Send before I thought about how that must sound to him. I followed up with “No worries.”
He responded within a minute: “I’ll take you home. Don’t mean to leave you stranded.”
I texted back, “I’m already on the bus. It’s all good.” But I knew it wasn’t. I was probably making things worse by leaving like this, but I just didn’t have time to engage in a long, drawn-out discussion about integrity and trust. I had an entire eighteenth-century gown to cut out and assemble before tomorrow morning!
McCarthy’s response was “K.” That was all. I stared at the phone screen for a long time, hoping there would be something more, but there was nothing.
I toyed with the idea of texting, “I’m sorry,” but I didn’t. There was nothing worse than carrying out or resolving an argument by text message. There would be time later to talk and make things right between us. I pushed all thoughts of McCarthy out of my mind, and concentrated on the steps I would need to take to get Louise’s gown under way.
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