by Sofie Kelly
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Do you have your cell phone with you? I don’t have one.”
“It’s right here.” I pulled the phone out of my pocket.
Oren wiped his hands on his brown work pants and then looked at them. They were streaked with dirt. “Kathleen, would you mind calling the police?” he asked. “I was moving some of the booths—getting them leveled and secured a little better. I found something that might be important. I don’t know.”
“What was it?”
Oren glanced at the tent again. “I thought I saw a glint of something shiny by one of the end tent pegs when I was tying back the sides to let some sun in, so I went to take a look.” He made an apologetic shrug. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but it looks like there’s a knife stuck in the ground.”
“A knife?”
“A butter knife, I think. I’m not sure. It’s small with a thin blade.” His shifted his weight from one side to the other. “Thing is, I tied that line myself and there sure as heck wasn’t any knife in the ground when I did.”
I nodded slowly. “I’ll call Marcus,” I said.
I punched in the number with a strong feeling of déjà vu, thinking maybe I should put Marcus on speed dial. The phone rang half a dozen times before he answered it. I explained where I was and what Oren had found.
He exhaled loudly and mumbled something I didn’t catch. “Okay, I’m on my way.”
“Do you need me to stay here?” I asked. I could hear voices in the background.
“Can you?” he asked.
I looked at my watch. “Yes,” I said. “But I do have to open the library and I’m walking.”
“I won’t be long. I promise,” he said, and then he ended the call.
“Marcus is on his way,” I told Oren, putting my phone back in my pocket.
“Thank you,” he said. He tried to brush more of the dirt off his hands. “I know the police are still investigating Mike Glazer’s death. I don’t know if that knife means anything or not.”
I looked past him at the tent. “Oren, could you show me where it is?” I asked. I held up both hands. “I won’t touch anything.”
“All right,” he said.
I followed him across the grass. He lifted the canvas flap and pointed. “Right there. I’m not sure if you can see it.”
“I see it,” I said. With the other flaps tied open, the tent was flooded with early-morning sun. The light was glinting off the rounded end of what looked like a knife handle, the blade jammed down into the earth, less than a foot away from where Owen had dug up that brass button from Alex Scott’s jacket. How had it gotten there? I’d checked the area very carefully after Owen had discovered the button and there hadn’t been a knife, or anything else, stuck in the grass.
Oren looked at me. “You think it’s a butter knife?”
“Looks like one,” I said. We took a couple of steps away from the tent, and I set my bag on the grass at my feet.
“Doesn’t make a lot of sense. If someone was trying to hide it, they didn’t do a very good job.”
“Maybe it’s a coincidence,” I said, stuffing my hands in the pockets of my hooded sweater. “Maybe that knife has nothing to do with Mike Glazer’s death.”
He gave me an appraising look, eyes narrowed. “Do you really think so?” he asked.
I was spared having to answer because Marcus’s SUV pulled up at the curb then. He got out of the car and walked over to us. “Hi,” he said softly to me before turning his focus on Oren. “Kathleen said you found something in the tent.”
Oren nodded. “I was opening things up so I could get some light inside and see what I was doing. Looks like someone stuck some kind of a knife down in the ground.” He made the motion with one hand.
“Show me, please,” Marcus said.
Oren led him over to the open end of the tent and pointed inside. “See it? Follow that line.”
Marcus leaned forward, ducking his head. “Got it,” he said after a moment. He straightened and turned back to me. “Why were you here?” he asked.
“I wasn’t,” I said.
“She was just headed up the street,” Oren said. “I waved her over because I don’t have a cell phone.”
“All right,” Marcus said, pulling his own phone out of his jacket pocket. “You can go, Kathleen.” He looked at Oren. “I’d appreciate it if you could hang around for a few minutes, though.”
“I can do that,” Oren said. He smiled at me. “Thank you, Kathleen.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, picking up my briefcase.
“I’ll be over to talk to you about the planters. Maybe after lunch.”
“I’ll be there all day.” I nodded at Marcus and cut across the grass to the sidewalk.
Once I was far enough down the street that Marcus couldn’t see me, I jaywalked across Main Street, heading for the library as the crow flies instead of how the streets were laid. Abigail and Mia were waiting on the steps and Susan was hurrying along the sidewalk.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said as I unlocked the doors and deactivated the alarm. “I had to take Maggie my truck.” I didn’t say anything about the latest find at the tent. There was enough speculation around town as it was about what had happened to Mike Glazer. I didn’t want to add to it.
“You’re not late,” Abigail said. “It’s only five to.”
Susan pushed through the door behind us; her topknot, secured precariously with two bendy straws, waved at us like the top of a bobblehead doll. “I thought I was late,” she wheezed, half out of breath.
“You’re fine,” I said, flipping on the lights. Mia headed for the book drop without even being asked. She was turning out to be the most conscientious student intern I’d ever worked with. Abigail crossed her arms and squinted at the bag Susan was carrying.
“What’s in the bag?” she asked, wiggling her eyebrows and grinning.
Susan swung it from side to side with a grin of her own. “Eric’s experimenting again. Cheese and bacon muffins.”
Abigail’s smile got wider. “You do know that I love your husband, don’t you?” She put one hand over her heart. “I seriously love him.”
Susan started for the stairs, shifting the bag up onto her shoulder. “He snores,” she said dryly.
Abigail followed her. “Music to my ears,” she said.
“He leaves his dirty socks all over the house.”
“I would be honored to pick them up and wash them,” Abigail countered.
“He has belly button lint. Lots of it.” They were headed up the steps then and I didn’t hear Abigail’s response, but I pretty much knew what it was going to be. They’d done this routine before.
It was a busy morning. I did a presentation to a group of seniors about the library’s e-lending program and got my notes ready for an upcoming meeting with the library board, fortified by one of Eric’s muffins that, incredibly, tasted even better than it smelled.
Unlike a lot of small-town libraries, we were doing well, but that was only because Everett Henderson had funded the building’s renovation as a gift to the town. Now that the building looked so good, I was determined to keep it running well.
Maggie brought the truck back right after lunch. “Thank you,” she said, giving me a quick hug. “I have a meeting, but I’ll see you tonight at class.”
Oren showed up about midafternoon, and Abigail and I walked around the library grounds with him, looking for the best place to put a raised planter box. Abigail had had the idea to start a small garden with the story time kids in the spring. Oren was going to build the box now so planting could start as soon as the snow was gone and the ground had thawed.
Abigail explained her idea and Oren listened and nodded, asking a few questions and making a couple of suggestions. Once we settled on the best place for the planter, Abigail went back inside. I held the end of Oren’s metal tape while he measured and made notations on the tiny sketch he�
�d drawn in the small black-covered notebook he kept in his shirt pocket.
“I should have a drawing for you in a couple of days,” he said. “And some idea of what it’s going to cost.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I’m sorry about this morning.” He pulled off his cap and raked his fingers back through his sun-bleached hair.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I was here in time. Did Marcus keep you very long?”
Oren shook his head. “No. I got the feeling he doesn’t think that knife really means anything.”
I brushed some dried grass off of my pants. “Why do you say that?”
He shrugged and fingered the brim of his cap. “He asked me twice how sure I was it wasn’t there when we were setting up the tent.”
“It wasn’t,” I said.
His gaze narrowed. “You found . . . the body, didn’t you?”
I nodded. “I did. And something else that turned out not to be important. There wasn’t any knife stuck in the ground there. I’m certain of it.”
“It was probably just kids or someone goofing around in there.”
“Probably,” I agreed.
Oren left with a promise that he’d get back to me in the next few days, and I went inside again.
Hercules was sitting on one of the Adirondack chairs in the backyard when I came around the side of the house after work. “What are you doing out here?” I said. He squinted up at the big maple and meowed. I leaned over and scooped him into my arms. “Is Professor Moriarty back?” I asked.
The grackle seemed to think Herc should sit somewhere other than the small wooden bench under the maple tree and dive-bombed the cat to make its point. Herc had pretty fast paws, and more than once he’d almost grabbed the bird. That hadn’t dissuaded it at all.
I’d thought that maybe the grackle had a nest in the tree, and once the babies were gone it would give up on trying to chase the cat, but so far that hadn’t happened. Hercules made a point of sitting on the bench at least once a day, and the bird, for its part, made at least one low-flying pass over the cat’s head whenever they were both in the yard, with appropriate sound effects from both sides. Both the grackle and the cat seemed to know how to hold a grudge.
One of these days one of them was going to win. I still wasn’t sure which one to put my money on.
“How was the rest of your day?” I asked as I carried Hercules into the house. He muttered and murped the whole way, so I guessed it had been busy. I set him on the kitchen floor, hung up my sweater and put my briefcase on one of the chairs.
The basement door opened and Owen appeared. He had the end of my favorite purple scarf in his mouth. I’d been looking for the thing for more than a week. He dragged the scarf across the floor and dropped it at my feet, looking up at me with a self-satisfied expression on his gray face.
I picked up the length of woven fabric. “Thank you,” I said. I reached down and patted the top of his head. “I searched everywhere for this. It didn’t enter my mind to check in the basement.” Owen ducked his head. “You don’t have any idea how this scarf ended up down there, do you?”
His furry head dropped even lower over his paws, as though they were suddenly the most fascinating appendages he’d ever seen.
“That’s what I thought,” I said.
I filled the boys in on Oren finding the knife inside the tent. Mostly I just wanted to say everything out loud to see if it made any more sense than when I just rolled what had happened around in my head.
“The knife wasn’t there when you found the button,” I told Owen. He was trying to snag part of a Funky Chicken that was poking out from under the stove and lifted his head only long enough to murp his agreement.
“Oren thinks it was probably just kids goofing around.” I picked up my fork and then set it back down again. “You know, I can see the attraction of sneaking into the tent for a look around, but what was the point of sticking that knife or whatever it is in the ground? What kid carries something like that around?”
Hercules had been carefully washing his face. He gave one last pass behind his right ear; then he walked over to the coat hooks, jumped in the air and with one swipe of his paw pulled down the scarf that his brother had brought up from the basement. He grabbed one end with his teeth and dragged it across the floor to me. He gave me what I would have called a pointed look if he’d been a person and not a cat, and then he went into the living room.
“Is this supposed to mean something?” I called after him. Since he was a cat and not a person, I didn’t get an answer. “Does this mean something?” I said to Owen. He was too busy eating to do more than just glance at me. In other words, “You figure it out.”
I picked the scarf up from the floor. I knew Owen had swiped it for cat knows what reason. I suspected he’d pretended to discover the scarf in the basement to divert suspicion from himself. Cat or not, he was more than capable of doing that.
I stared at the woven tangle of purple fabric shot with silver in my hand. If Owen, a cat, was capable of a little subterfuge and diversion, why not the person who had killed Mike Glazer? It felt a little like something from an old Nancy Drew mystery, but maybe that silver-handled knife was a plant designed to reroute the police’s interest on to someone else. It was a little outlandish—okay, it was a lot outlandish—but it didn’t mean I wasn’t on the right track.
“I get it,” I called. After a moment there was an answering meow from the next room.
Maggie insisted that she talked to Owen and Hercules like they were people only because I did. I wondered what she’d say if she knew that not only did I talk to them as though they were people, but sometimes I was pretty sure they were answering. I headed upstairs to get ready for tai chi, taking the scarf with me.
I had enough time, so I walked down to class. Taylor King was coming along the sidewalk as I turned the corner. “Hi, Taylor,” I said.
“Hi, Ms. Paulson.” Her purse slipped down off her shoulder as she reached for the door.
“You can call me Kathleen,” I said.
She smiled. “Okay.”
I gestured at her bag. “I like your purse. It’s vintage, isn’t it?” The little copper satin handbag had a gold clasp and fabric strap.
“It’s from the nineteen fifties,” Taylor said, running her fingers over the smooth fabric. “I collect old purses. I like to think about the women who used to own them—what they were like, what their lives were like.”
“The bags have a story,” I said.
She nodded. “Yeah, they do.”
“I like old things, too,” I said, smiling back at her. We started up the stairs. “How do you like tai chi so far?” I asked.
“I like it.” She shrugged. “But I don’t see how I’ll ever learn all one hundred and eight movements.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I thought I was never going to get beyond Cloud Hands.” I fluttered my hands in front of myself and she laughed. I laughed too. “But I did and so will you. You’re a lot better than I was. And I’m not just saying that to be a polite adult.”
“Are there any books about tai chi at the library?” Taylor asked as we got to the top of the steps.
“Four or five,” I said, peeling off my hoodie and sitting down to change my shoes. “Would you like me to leave a couple for you at the front desk?”
She nodded, pulling her hair back into a high ponytail. “Yes, please. Sometimes when I get home I can’t remember one of the parts of a movement. It would help if I could at least see a picture.”
“I’m going over to the library after class. I’ll see what we have.”
Taylor gave me a little-girl grin, lacing her fingers together. “Thank you. I work for my dad on the weekend, but I’ll try to leave early on Saturday and come get them.”
“I could take the books home with me and you could stop by my house and pick them up, if that would help,” I said, hanging my hooded sweatshirt on one of the hooks and setting my shoes on the
floor underneath.
“Seriously?” she asked.
“Seriously,” I said, smiling as I straightened up.
“Well.” She hesitated. “If it’s not too much trouble. I’m trying to show my dad that I’m responsible because I’m going to start driving soon, so I don’t really want to ask to leave work early. I promise I’ll come get them on Sunday.”
“It’s no trouble.”
“Okay, then, thanks.” She hung her little bag on an empty hook and we went into the studio. Ruby waved Taylor over, and Maggie walked over to me, carrying her before-class mug of tea. “I heard that Oren found something in one of the tents this morning,” she said.
I tried to keep my face neutral. “I heard the same thing.”
“Ruby says Marcus and his cohorts were there all morning.”
I couldn’t stop myself from smiling at her. “You’re fishing,” I said.
“Okay, I’m fishing,” she said. “I saw you cross the street to speak to Oren this morning. What was going on?”
“He found something. He wasn’t sure if it was important or not, so I used my phone to call Marcus because Oren doesn’t have one.”
Maggie sipped her tea and watched me over the top of her cup. “Was it important?”
I pulled a hand over my neck. “I saw Oren this afternoon and he didn’t think that Marcus thought so.”
“Do you think so?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Maggie sighed. “I’ll be glad when this is all over—not just the investigation, but everything: the food tasting, the art show, the whole pitch to Legacy. This entire project has a bad energy to it.” She looked up at the clock. “Time to get started.” She moved to the middle of the room, clapped her hands and called, “Circle, please.”
I slipped in place between Rebecca and Roma. They both smiled at me. Before I could do anything more than smile back, Maggie was calling out instructions.
I worked hard the entire class. It was a good distraction from thinking about Mike Glazer and what had happened to him.
“Good work, everyone,” Maggie said when we finished the form at the end of the class. “Work on bending your knees and shifting your weight.”