by Cass, Laurie
“I’d like to speak to Caroline Grice, please.”
“This is she.”
“Really?” I blurted, then winced at myself. Even the Grice staff must get a day off once in a while.
“I’m quite certain, yes. How may I help you?”
“This is Minnie Hamilton. We spoke a couple of years ago when the Friends of the Library were working on a fund-raiser.”
“Yes, I remember.” Still the polite voice. “Stephen Rangel’s work, if I recall correctly. The man is tireless.”
“Yes, ma’am. But I’m calling you regarding a different matter. I’ve been doing some genealogy research and I’ve come across an ancestor we might have in common. Would it be possible to meet with you?”
“How interesting.” So polite. “But I’m afraid I must disappoint you. The only relations about which I know anything are my parents and my children. My cousin Richard, however, has been doing extensive research into the family. Shall I give you his number?”
• • •
I dumped my backpack on the kitchen counter. “Hi, honey, I’m home!”
No Eddie came running to greet me. I wandered around, looking.
A faint snore came rattling out of the closet. I slid open the door and found a black-and-white cat nestled in among my shoes. His body lay across my hiking boots and his front paws were wrapped around a blue flip-flop. The right one.
“You are the weirdest cat ever,” I told him.
He opened his eyes to thin slits and opened his mouth in a soundless “Mrr.”
I picked him up. “Come hang out with me, okay?”
We went to the kitchen and I deposited him on the back of the bench seat. I pulled the stack of mail I’d picked up from my post office box out of my backpack. “Junk mail, more junk mail, and a reminder from my mother that Thanksgiving isn’t far away.” Mom was nothing if not aggressive when it came to holiday plans. “Cool note card, though.” I propped the reprint of what the card said was a Diego Rivera mural up on the kitchen counter. “Maybe if you wrote letters, you’d get some mail.”
Eddie’s nose twitched.
“No fish tonight,” I said. “You’re probably smelling the salmon Skeeter gave to Louisa.”
Louisa was, once again, harboring matchmaking tendencies. “There’s plenty for four,” she’d said when I’d seen her at the post office. Though I’d begged off, citing bills to pay and a report to write for work, she had that glint in her eye. She’d had it last summer, too, when she’d tried to pair me up with Rafe Niswander. Great guy, and now a good friend, but no sparks, same as Skeeter, no matter how cute a couple Louisa thought we’d make.
“Where do you think Skeeter got his nickname?” I asked Eddie.
He yawned and starting licking his chest.
“And my first attempt at investigating was a complete failure, by the way.” I leaned against the kitchen counter and explained my brilliant idea of trying to talk to Caroline about mutual Hamilton ancestors. Somehow saying it out loud helped me think it over. “But she’s not into genealogy. So now I’m back to having no ideas.”
Eddie sent me a look that clearly said, You are so stupid, and went back to work, now licking his right paw.
I opened the refrigerator door, didn’t see anything worth cooking, and shut it. “Tell me I’m dumb, but when’s the last time you had a good idea?” I opened kitchen cabinets, looking for dinner inspiration. “Maybe eating that salmon would have been a good idea—hey!” I yelped because Eddie had launched himself across the space from bench to kitchen counter, skidded across the plastic laminate, and knocked my mail to the floor.
“What’s the matter with you?” I picked him up, dumped him onto the floor, and stooped down to pick up the mess. “You know you don’t belong up there. If Kristen saw that, she’d . . . oh.”
In my hand was the card from my mother.
And suddenly I knew how to arrange a meeting with Caroline Grice.
• • •
The rest of the week was busy with covering for vacationing library staff and last-minute reshuffling of the bookmobile schedule. On Saturday, the paperwork on my desk had piled so high that I skipped Saturday’s boardinghouse breakfast and went in to work early.
Happily, by Sunday noon I caught up with life in general and left the houseboat with a clear conscience.
I bought a small bag of cookies from Tom, probably the last time I’d do so until after Labor Day when the summer crowds left for home, and headed for the Lakeview Art Gallery.
A couple of blocks later, I walked into the gallery for the first time ever. My mom’s card had reminded me of Caroline’s long-running support for the arts. Thanks to the reporting of the local newspaper, I knew that it was mainly Caroline’s money that had allowed the nonprofit arts association to rent this side street storefront.
Inside, artwork of all shapes and sizes hung on walls painted a light blue-gray. Large landscapes, small portraits, wall sculpture, photographs. Acrylics, watercolors, oils, pastels. The sheer variety made me blink in surprise.
“Welcome to the gallery,” a young woman chirped from behind a jewelry showcase. “I’m Lina. Let me know if you have any questions, okay?” Lina had long flowing honey brown hair and wore a loose top that looked like something hauled out of the back of my mother’s closet, circa Mom’s high school graduation class of 1969.
“Busy today?” I asked.
“Let’s see.” She plopped her elbows on the glass. “The first person who came in wanted directions to the fudge shop, the second person who came in wanted to use our bathroom, and you’re the third person.”
“Sounds a little boring.”
“Dull as fifth-grade math class, some days. Other days it’s pretty cool.” Her thin face grew animated. “Last week? On Tuesday? You’ll never guess who came in that door.” With an index fingernail painted with daisies, she pointed at the door I’d just walked through. “That hot guy from that new show? Everyone’s talking about it.”
She named a cop show I’d heard Josh and Holly discuss, but since I didn’t have a television on the houseboat and watched very little at the boardinghouse, I couldn’t offer a sound opinion on the actor’s hotness.
“That must have been exciting,” I said.
“Yeah, I keep hoping somebody else famous will walk in.” She looked at me hopefully. “I don’t suppose . . .”
“Sorry. I live here in town.”
“Oh.” She deflated. “Have you ever met anybody?”
“Nope. Famous people don’t hang out at libraries very often.”
“You work at the library? That’s pretty cool.”
She didn’t sound sarcastic. “I think so. And I just started driving the bookmobile.”
“The bookmobile?” Her enthusiasm was back, better than ever. “That’s really cool! You really drive it?”
“Forward and backward.”
Lina giggled. “I can hardly back up our Mini Cooper without hitting something. You must be a really good . . .” She stopped and looked at me with a changed expression. “Hey, wasn’t it someone on the bookmobile who found that dead guy? Was that you?”
This wasn’t how I’d expected to lead into a conversation about Caroline, but hey, I could adjust. I nodded.
“Wow, that must have been awful.”
“Yes, it was.” Then, “Thank you for saying that. Most people are just curious.”
“Oh, I’m curious.” She grinned. “I just have really good manners.”
I laughed. “My mother always said manners will take you places you can’t get to any other way.”
“Sounds like my mom. So do the police know who killed him?”
“As far as I know, they don’t have any suspects.”
“That’s too bad.” She sighed. “Mrs. Grice is pretty upset about it.”
“I heard they’d been seeing each other.”
“Yeah, for a little while now, but not—” She came to a screeching halt.
“Not what?”
It was time to bring out my big gun. The Librarian Voice. “Lina,” I said sternly. “If you know something, you have a duty to share it.”
“Yes, but—”
“This is murder. There’s nothing worse.”
She gripped her hands tight. “Okay. Okay, you’re right. It’s just . . .”
“I know,” I said much more softly. “It can be hard doing the right thing.”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “This was like the week before Mr. Larabee died, right? Mrs. Grice stopped by to check out some new art. She’s standing right there”—Lina gestured at a spot on the wood floor in front of a large abstract painting—“and Mr. Larabee comes in the door, all loud and big.”
That was Stan.
“He walked real fast over to Mrs. Grice and started saying something about how she needed to listen to him. Mrs. Grice, she’s always so nice? But she went all cold. She said, ‘If you wish to discuss a personal matter, I prefer that we do it in private.’ So they went in the office and shut the door behind them.”
“So you didn’t hear what they were talking about?”
Lina colored. “I did kind of walk over that way. I mean, Mr. Larabee’s nice and all, but he was so much bigger than Mrs. Grice and I thought if he got mad and she got scared, that I could . . . do something.”
As good a justification for eavesdropping as there could be. “But you didn’t hear anything.”
“Just that Mrs. Grice was talking a lot and Mr. Larabee hardly got a word in.” Lina half smiled. “It was kind of funny until . . .” Her smile fell away.
“What?”
She looked at the office door. “Until they came out. The door opened and Mr. Larabee said something I couldn’t hear. Then Mrs. Grice said, clear as anything, ‘Not if you were the last man on earth. I daresay the next time I see you will be at your funeral.’ And she left. Mr. Larabee stood there a minute; then he left, too.”
Lina hugged herself. “But she didn’t mean it. I mean, that’s just something people say. You never mean something like that. You just don’t.” She looked at me, fear on her face. “Right?”
• • •
I spent most of Sunday night trying to figure out what to do about Lina’s story. The girl flat-out refused to go to the police. “I can’t do that, not to Mrs. Grice. She’s so nice. I’m an art major and working in a gallery is going to look great on my résumé. I mean, if the police go to her, she’d know I told and she’d fire me for sure.” So if the police were going to find out about the incident, they’d have to find out from me.
• • •
Monday morning, the air of the public entry to the Tonedagana County Sheriff’s Office smelled stale and confined and vaguely threatening. I knew it was all in my head, but even still, in the short time I stood there, waiting for someone to come to the window, I decided that if no one showed up in the next ten seconds, I was out of there.
I counted down fast to two and was turning to leave when a woman’s square face appeared in the window and gave me a quick once-over before the glass slid open. “Can I help you?”
“Hi. I’d like to talk to Detective Devereaux or Detective Inwood.” She made no move, so I added, “It’s about the murder of Stan Larabee. I have some information that might be useful.” Or not. Since they were the trained professionals, they were the ones who would be able to figure it out.
“Your name?”
“Minnie Hamilton.”
“I’ll see if one of them is available.”
I hummed the Jeopardy! song to myself a few times and eventually the tall and thin detective came out into the entryway. Devereaux or Inwood? I couldn’t remember.
“Miss Hamilton. You have something for us?”
“Hi, Detective. I heard a story yesterday that I think you should know about.” I looked around. There wasn’t anyone else in the small lobby; there also weren’t any chairs. Not even a bench. “Should we go somewhere else?”
“A story,” he said flatly.
“Not a made-up story. Something I heard.”
“Secondhand knowledge, then.”
Irritation started to climb up the back of my neck. “A young woman overheard a conversation between Stan Larabee and a woman. The woman made a statement that could be construed as a threat.”
“Uh-huh. Construed as a threat. So it wasn’t really a threat.”
“She said, and I quote, ‘Not if you were the last man on earth. I daresay the next time I see you will be at your funeral.’”
“So you’re quoting the girl who was eavesdropping on the woman who was talking to Larabee?”
Said like that, it sounded lame. Still. “Yes,” I said.
He looked at me. Down at me, since he was more than a foot taller. “Their names?”
“The young woman’s name is Lina. I don’t know her last name, but she works at the Lakeview Art Gallery.”
“Uh-huh.” He made no move to take out the notepad I could see sticking out of his shirt pocket. I itched to yank it free and write the information down myself. “And the woman’s name who made the purported threat?” he asked.
“Caroline,” I said. “Caroline Grice.”
He blinked once, then said, with zero inflection, “You think Caroline Grice killed Stan Larabee.”
The irritation zoomed up into my skull and exploded in my brain. “What I think is that last week I was told to pass on any information about Stan’s murder. So I’m passing along what I heard. What you choose to do with it is up to you.”
He sighed. “Miss Hamilton, thank you for coming in. But we hear stories like this all the time. Sometimes they’re true, sometimes they’re not. We’ll sort it out, though, don’t you worry about that.”
“I’m not worried. I’m just trying to help.”
“And we appreciate it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment.”
He nodded and left, abandoning me to wrestle with my irritation all by myself. I felt head-patted and . . . and managed. I hated that feeling. Just because I was young and female and short didn’t mean I was brainless.
“Or clueless,” I added, walking out of the building with fast yard-swallowing strides, thinking furious thoughts.
What a waste of time that had been. He hadn’t taken anything I said seriously. Maybe—I smiled a cruel smile—maybe I should send him a copy of Little Girls Can Be Mean. You’d think police officers would be glad to listen. You’d think they’d be happy to hear anything that might help an investigation. You’d think—
I stopped short.
An appointment, he’d said. Some appointment.
I watched the tall, thin detective get out of his car and walk through the front doorway of the most popular diner in town.
Chapter 9
It was almost nine p.m. when I left the library, but thanks to the time of year and the combined geographic facts of being north of the forty-fifth parallel and being at the western edge of the Eastern time zone, there was still almost an hour of daylight left to me.
I walked home through the backstreets of Chilson, avoiding the busy main downtown blocks, thinking about dinner. There might, just might, be some spaghetti sauce in the freezer, and I was pretty sure there was a box of spaghetti in the cupboard. Yesterday I’d picked up salad-type items, so the only thing I needed would be—
Thud!
A man’s voice called out. “Ow!” (Pause.) “That freaking hurt!” (Pause.) “A lot!”
I was close to the marina, just outside Rafe’s house. Or what would be a house when he finished redoing the roof, siding, wiring, HVAC, and plumbing of his century-old fixer-upper. I stepped gingerly onto the warped porch floorboards, wood creaking underneath me, went up to the front door, and knocked. “Rafe? It’s Minnie.”
“I’d rather suffer without an audience,” came a strained voice. “Go away.”
“You know I’m not going to.” With that as warning, I opened the
door. One quick glance was all it took. “I’m getting my car,” I said. “And then we’re going to the hospital.”
• • •
The lovely little town of Chilson had many things—outstanding views, a fine school system, a wide variety of stores and restaurants, and a top-notch library—but it did not have a hospital. Or an urgent care clinic. At first Rafe had pushed for me to take him to his doctor’s house. “It’s Monday, right? He’ll be out golfing, but he’ll be home by dark. A few beers in him isn’t going to hurt his sewing skills any.”
But as we argued, the wad of paper towels I’d made Rafe hold to his forearm started turning red. “We’re not waiting,” I said. “Pick a hospital.”
“Lots of choices.” He shifted to let me buckle his seat belt around him. “The Traverse City hospital is sweet, but it’ll take an hour to get there. Last time I got stitches, I went to Kalkaska and they did a good job, but my buddy Carl works at the Gaylord hospital and I haven’t seen him in a while. Then again, they say Petoskey has really hot nurses.”
By this time I’d started the car and pointed its nose north.
“I thought I got to pick,” Rafe said.
“You took too long, so we’re going to Charlevoix. It’s closest.”
“Oh.” He made a “huh” noise. “I didn’t think about that. Charlevoix will be okay, I guess. The view’s not as good as Petoskey. View of the bay is half the pay, you know?”
“Keep pressing on the paper towels,” I said.
• • •
Both the Charlevoix and Petoskey hospitals were built next to Lake Michigan. How you could rate one as having a view better than the other, I wasn’t sure, but since there was no lake view from the emergency room of either hospital, there wasn’t much point in starting a comparison chart.
“Nice slice,” the ER doctor said. He’d lifted the reddened paper towels and was studying Rafe’s forearm. “How did this happen?”
Rafe grinned at the doctor. “Little problem with the reciprocating saw. It wanted to go left when I wanted it to go right.”
“The saw won,” I muttered.
“Saws usually do,” the doctor said. “A few stitches and you’ll be good to go.”