by Laura Alden
“My methods are top secret.”
He led me down the hall not to his office, but to the small lab-type area where the fingerprinting was done. I was mildly disappointed not to have the pads of my fingers stuck on a pad of ink.
“Haven’t done that for years,” he said, rolling my thumb across the glass of what looked like a small copy machine. “Besides, I always got more ink on me than on the people I was fingerprinting.” He studied a small screen and nodded. “One down. If I get the rest done without a redo, do I get another cookie?”
“Maybe I should check with Winnie first.”
He smiled. “My wife trusts me implicitly.”
In most ways, I was sure that Winnie did. In others, I was certain she absolutely did not. After the fingerprinting—which seemed a misnomer to me, since there were no prints, only digital images—we adjourned to Gus’s office, where he waved me to the visitor’s chair, which Winnie had refinished so recently that it still smelled faintly of polyurethane.
Gus sat behind his desk, pulled out a drawer, and propped his feet up. He smiled his not-quite-a-smile, the one that meant I wasn’t going to like what was coming. “You want the good news or the bad news?”
I slid down in the chair. “Bad.” Always best to hear the bad and get it over with.
“Wrong answer,” Gus said. “Because the bad news won’t make sense unless you hear the good news first.”
“Then why did you give me a choice?”
“Just to see how far you’d slide down in that chair. Remember the time you almost fell onto the floor?”
“No. What’s the good news?”
“I talked to the sheriff’s office this morning, and they won’t be taking over the investigation into Cookie Van Doorne’s death.”
“Okay.” Most times murder investigations went straight to the much larger county sheriff’s office with its experienced staff and deeper technological capabilities. “Why?”
“That’s the bad news.” Gus looked at me straight on and I prepared myself for a blow. “They’re not convinced Cookie was murdered.”
I shot up out of the chair. “They what? That’s nuts! Cookie would no more have committed suicide than”—I scrambled for an analogy—“than I would have turned down the corners of a first-edition Secret Garden instead of using a bookmark. She hadn’t shown any signs of depression, and someone said she left a knitting project half-finished.”
Wise man that he was, Gus didn’t tell me to calm down, but let me rant and rave as long as my breath held out. When I was done and settled back in the chair, he asked, “Were you good friends with Cookie?”
I slid back into a slouch. Didn’t say anything. His next question was as inevitable as it was unwelcome.
“So,” he said, “if you didn’t know her all that well, how can you say with any credibility that she wouldn’t have committed suicide? And before you get all up in arms, I’m just whistling in the dark. Convince me. You know I’ll listen.”
I thought back to the previous year when I’d kind of sort of not on purpose proved that a death from two decades earlier hadn’t been the suicide so many people had thought it was. It had been murder, but people had seen a reason for suicide and leapt to the wrong conclusion.
“Last May,” I said. “Remember when—”
“Yes. But that was the opposite situation.”
“I’m just saying that you never know what’s in someone’s head. How can anyone really know anything about someone else’s motivations?” Because I wasn’t even sure about my own motivations most of the time. How could I guess at the whys and wherefores of someone I’d hardly known?
“You do realize you’re not convincing me of anything,” Gus said.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said stubbornly. “I’ve heard that pills are the most common form of suicide in women, but that doesn’t prove anything. And why on earth would she do it at a PTA meeting?”
Gus shrugged. “Maybe she was hoping someone would stop her. Maybe it was an impulse. Maybe she was driven to it by having to listen to May Werner for an hour.” He looked at me. “That last one was a joke. It would probably take two hours.”
“Was there an autopsy?” I asked. “Was she sick, otherwise?”
He opened a folder on his desk and flipped through papers. “No sign of substantial heart disease, no sign of any cancer, no sign of anything except an overdose of acetaminophen.”
I let my head drop back and stared at the stained ceiling tiles. “Are you ever going to spend some money on updating this place?”
“Not on my budget. Beth, have you realized that a suicide would be a lot easier to deal with, considering where that pill bottle was found?”
Of course I’d considered it. I’d considered it half the night. Why did he think my eyes were so bleary and why I was too tired to keep my head up? “What is convenient shouldn’t be a consideration,” I said heavily. “What matters is the truth.”
“You know what might happen.”
I knew. If Cookie’s death wasn’t suicide, it was murder. If it was murder, it was committed by someone I knew, even someone I liked. Perhaps someone I trusted and considered a friend.
“Maybe I’m leaping to the wrong conclusion.” I slid down a little farther in the chair.
“But you don’t think so,” Gus said.
“No.” We sat in silence a moment. “Do you?” I asked.
He shut the folder. “There will be an investigation and I will keep an open mind to all possibilities. But there’s something you can do for me,” Gus said. “Let me know if you hear anything.”
“What I hear right now is the wind howling at your window.”
“Listen carefully if you hear anyone talking about Cookie. Pay attention to anyone who is acting out of character. Watch to see if relationships change. You listen,” he said, “and you pay attention. That’s two major skills for law enforcement officers.”
“Last I checked, I was a children’s bookstore owner, not a detective.”
He let his feet drop to the floor and put his elbows on the desk. “Beth. Do you think Cookie was murdered?”
I closed my eyes. Relived the car ride from school to her house. Remembered the phone call. Went through the visit at the hospital and—
“What?” Gus leaned forward. “You’ve remembered something.”
“At the hospital, when I visited her. I’m not sure how I could have forgotten. It was when she said she was being poisoned.”
“What else did she say?” His voice was calm but held an underlying edge. “Keep your eyes closed. Go back to the hospital room and remember what she said. She was lying in the bed and . . .”
“She said that evil walks around with us. She said it’s our duty to make things right.” My eyelids snapped open. “I didn’t take her seriously. You know how she exaggerated, how she took everything so seriously.” My lower lip trembled. “Why didn’t I take her seriously? If I had . . .”
“If you had,” Gus said, “nothing would have changed. By the time she was admitted to the hospital, the damage had been done. There was nothing you could have done to change what was going to happen.”
He was wrong, of course. I could have stayed at the hospital. I could have gone back for another visit. I could have held her hand. I could have believed her.
Gus reached for another cookie. “How’s Pete doing these days? I hear you’re seeing a lot of each other.”
“I haven’t seen him for a few days,” I said as heat rushed around in my head.
Gus grinned. “Your ears are turning pink.”
I snatched the bag of cookies from underneath his outstretched hand. “You’ve already had two. Any more and Winnie gets a phone call.” I picked up my purse, stood, and headed for the door.
“Beth?”
I turned. Warily. “What?”
“My opinion, for what it’s worth. Pete’s a good man.”
The warmth of a spring thaw coursed through my skin and down into my bones.
I swallowed once, then twice, but still couldn’t get my voice to work properly. So I went back, tipped the rest of the cookies out onto his desk, and left.
• • •
My walk back to the store wasn’t far, but the wind made it feel like a twenty-mile trek. How the wind could have been in my face both walking to and walking from the police station, I wasn’t sure, but my bright red nose attested to the situation’s reality.
With my head down, all I saw were the brick pavers that made up most of the downtown sidewalks. I didn’t see the mishmash of architecture that somehow made the Rynwood storefronts into one lovely whole, I didn’t see Alan Barnhart out sweeping the bricks in front of the antiques store until I almost ran into him, and I didn’t see or hear the SUV roaring past me until the slush it sprayed out splattered all over my pant legs.
I also didn’t see that Lois and Flossie were in the middle of an argument. If I’d been paying attention, I would have seen through the storefront window that they were arguing fiercely. As it was, I didn’t get a clue until I walked in, jingling the front doorbells.
They both flicked me a quick glance, but their voices continued.
“How could anyone think The Little Princess is a better book?” Flossie asked fiercely. “That Sara is the definition of insipid.”
Lois glared at her. “She’s kind and considerate, which is more than I can say about some people around here. And I’d rather have my characters be kind and considerate than be like that brat Mary Lennox.”
I could see Flossie’s chin go up and her mouth start to open. Quicker than speech, I made my thumb and middle finger into a circle, put them in my mouth, and blew an earsplitting whistle.
When the echo faded, I gave them both hard looks. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I want it to stop. Now and forevermore.”
Lois’s face had a mulish expression. Flossie looked abashed. “I’m sorry, Beth,” she said. “We shouldn’t have been arguing in the store, even if it’s empty. It won’t happen again, I promise.”
“Yeah, me, too. Sorry, Beth.” Lois bumped Flossie’s arm. “Next time we’ll go out back in the alley, okay? Say, have you ever read The Lost Prince? Now, there’s a classic.”
I didn’t know what was more odd, two grown women arguing about children’s books written a century earlier, or the fact that Lois and Flossie were arguing at all. Before I’d hired Flossie, I’d talked at length with Lois, Yvonne, and Paoze and they’d all been happy at the idea of working with her. What had changed in the last three months?
“Flossie?” I asked. “Would you mind going to the grocery store and getting some milk for the tea? We’re almost out.”
When she was out the door, I turned on Lois. “All right, what were you two really fighting about? And don’t tell me it was about Frances Hodgson Burnett’s books.”
“What makes you think anything is wrong?” Her mulish expression was still there.
“Sara Crewe and Mary Lennox?” I asked dryly. “Come on.”
“Anyone who doesn’t like Sara Crewe needs some serious counseling. There’s nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by making a certain person write a comparison paper between The Secret Garden and The Little Princess. Mary Lennox. As if.” She huffed and stomped off.
Midstomp, she turned around and pointed at me. “And quit worrying about this kind of stuff. It’s not on your recovery agenda and we’re only halfway in.” She returned to her former program of stomping and made her way to the graphic novel section.
“They’ll be okay,” a soft voice said.
I hadn’t noticed Yvonne coming into the store, but there she was, standing at my left shoulder. “When did you get here?”
She smiled. “At the insipid remark.”
“What were they really fighting about?” People fought about everything from the origin of the universe to the best way to wash a floor, but if you took away the argument from the other day, I’d never seen Lois and Flossie speak a cross word to each other, not even during the week before Christmas.
Yvonne straightened a stack of bookmarks. “I really don’t know.”
Which could be interpreted two ways. Either she didn’t know or she didn’t know for absolutely sure but could guess and wasn’t going to tell me. And judging from how diligently she was straightening the bookmarks, I was pretty sure it was that second one.
“Well,” I said, “maybe Paoze knows.”
Yvonne tilted her head to one side and surveyed the bookmarks from a slightly different angle. She made a tiny adjustment. “Maybe.”
And if he did know, he’d be the employee most likely to spill the beans.
I retreated to my office. Not even ten o’clock in the morning and I was already tired. Lois was right. I should stop worrying about this kind of stuff. If coworkers couldn’t work together, one of them would have to go. After all, I’d fired people before. Well, person. I’d fired one person and I’d hated doing it, but if that’s what it took to keep the store running smoothly, that’s what would have to be done.
And then I’d have to hire a new employee.
Ick.
I leaned back into my creaky wooden chair and rubbed my eyes.
Had I done the right thing in hiring Flossie? What had seemed so right was now turning sour in a big way. I wondered how to fix what was wrong. But since I didn’t know what was wrong, figuring out how to fix it would be hard.
Then I wondered how to fix Jenna’s problem. But there was little I could do about that, other than comfort and support her. Same with Oliver and his crush on Miss Stephanie.
Then I got to wondering about Cookie and bitter white power and coffee.
And then I spent a long time wondering about the line between what could be done—and what should be done.
Chapter 9
That evening when we stopped at Marina’s to pick up Oliver, Jenna ran ahead of me, then turned around. “Do we have time for me to play Zach’s new video game?”
“You’re not playing the shoot-everything-in-sight game,” I said.
“I know, Mom. But he has that new football game, too. Can we play?”
Dinner was already in the car in the form of nice tidy white containers, and the only thing I’d have to do was warm it up in the microwave. The ready-made meals were the one thing I was truly going to miss when my rest period was over.
But although dinner was waiting for us, Oliver’s homework was undoubtedly not done, and Spot needed a nice long walk. “You can play until halftime,” I said. Then, seeing the imminent protest, I added, “A full game takes at least an hour, and it’s already almost half past five. Do you really want to wait until seven to eat?”
“We could have a snack,” she said in a wheedling tone. “Please?”
“You can play until halftime. And if I hear any whining when I pull the plug, there won’t be any video games for a week.”
She kicked at a piece of snow. “Okay,” she muttered, then ran ahead into the house, her long hair fluttering behind her.
I stopped on Marina’s back deck and looked up at the darkening sky, trying to focus on the wonders of the universe.
It’s a wonderful world, I told myself. Don’t let what happened to Cookie drag you down. Look at the stars, those tiny pinpricks of light, and think about all the fantastical things that could be out there.
Marina’s back door opened. “What are you doing out there?” she asked.
“Looking at the stars,” I said dreamily.
“Most people look at stars when it’s not three hundred degrees below zero. Get in here, silly, before you freeze to death.”
Hearing Marina call me silly lifted my spirits. Maybe she hadn’t been feeling well yesterday when she’d run off on me. Maybe everything was fine and I’d been, once again, taking things too personally.
I knocked the snow off my boots and entered the warmth of her cozy kitchen. Before I’d even hung my coat on the back of my normal chair, Marina had swooped in with a mug of tea.
; “Sit, sit, sit,” she said. “We have lots to talk about and not enough time to do it in. Put what I assume are your freezing cold hands around that mug and listen to what I have to tell you.”
A small knot somewhere in my middle relaxed and disappeared as if it had never been. Finally, I’d find out who she’d been with in the mall. I’d find out why she’d acted so oddly, and I’d find out what the heck was going on.
“Gladly,” I said, smiling at her. “I’ve been waiting for this.”
“You have?” She gave me a puzzled look. “What Ah mean,” she said, sliding into Southern belle mode, “is of course you have, mah deah.” She dropped into the chair opposite me. “Ah am the imparter of all local news and Ah do have news, why, yes, Ah do.”
The mug suddenly didn’t feel as warm as it had a few seconds ago. “You want to talk about local news?”
“That’s the best news of all.” She blew the steam off her mug. “Much better than news about things that are happening in countries we’ve barely heard of. I mean, does anybody actually know where Nauru is? Geography for four hundred, Alex.”
I knew Nauru was in the South Pacific, but I also knew she was trying to get me off track. “Seems to me we should be discussing something other than news, local or otherwise.”
“What I want to know is if you’ve heard what I’ve heard.”
Suddenly, what I wanted to do more than anything else was to go home and crawl into bed. The world wouldn’t end if I did absolutely nothing until the next day. It might even be better off if I stopped poking a stick at it. What had ever made me think that it was my job to fix everything?
“Beth?” Marina asked. “Are you okay?”
I opened my eyes. Somewhere in the midst of my reverie I’d closed them. She’d asked me a question; what had it been? Oh, yes. “Until you tell me what you’ve heard, there’s no way I can know if it’s what I’ve heard.”
“Well, then.” Marina glanced toward her living room, whence came kid cheers and groans. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I had to call the bank this afternoon and I got talking with Ashley—you know, the one who always worked next to Cookie? Well, she said that Gus came in and talked to her.”