Dead Men Don't Eat Cookies

by Virginia Lowell

  “I’ve told you over and over, my name is Alicia, not kid. Besides, I’m nineteen years old.” With a sulky frown, Alicia snatched the tissues from Calliope’s hand.

  “Yeah, I know.” Calliope removed her hardhat and ran her fingers through her matted hair. “I just wanted to make you mad. Mad is better at a time like this. Believe me, I’ve been through it, and I was a lot younger than you. Why don’t you go home? You only work half days, anyway.”

  “You’re only saying that because I don’t do anything but fetch stuff,” Alicia said. “You never let me do any real work. I need the money, you know. I won’t make enough waitressing.”

  Calliope sighed loudly. She was not a small woman, but she hopped to her feet with no apparent effort and ambled back toward the other workers.

  “Mom, what the heck is going on here?” Olivia asked Ellie in a low voice. “Why were the police called?”

  Calliope heard the question and joined them. “It looks like we’ve got ourselves another murder here in Chatterley Heights,” she said.

  Alicia wailed into her wad of tissues.

  “I’ll go comfort Alicia.” Ellie glanced toward the east end of the room, where a sheet of plywood leaned against the wall. “I’ve already seen what there is to see. Come on, Spunks, we are needed.” The little Yorkie followed her eagerly.

  Calliope motioned to Olivia and Maddie to follow her across the room. “Alicia is convinced it’s her father in there,” Calliope said, nodding toward the plywood.

  “Her father is inside the wall?” Maddie exchanged a quick glance with Olivia. “Is Alicia . . . I mean . . .”

  “Sane?” Calliope shrugged her broad shoulders. “She’s emotional, that’s for sure. Won’t stop bawling.” When they were a couple of feet away from the wall, Calliope signaled them to stay where they were. Olivia glanced back at her mother, who was sitting on the floor next to Alicia, an arm around the girl’s shaking shoulders. Spunky gazed at Alicia, his head tilted, as if he were trying to puzzle out what the sobbing sounds meant.

  The workers had begun to chat among themselves. Jason broke away from the group and crossed the room to join Calliope, who spoke softly to him. Jason nodded. He positioned himself at one end of the plywood. Calliope took hold of the opposite end, and together they eased it away from the opening in the wall. Olivia assumed they were trying not to disturb the site any more than necessary. When the plywood scraped against the floor, Olivia heard a cry from across the room. Probably Alicia, Olivia thought, but she didn’t turn around to check. She couldn’t drag her gaze away from the wall.

  “Livie, dear,” Ellie said, “Alicia and I will be downstairs in the kitchen making sandwiches and coffee. Did I hear you mention you’d finished baking some cookies?”

  Olivia answered her mother’s question without turning her head. “Oh, sure, Mom, eat the cookies, drink the coffee. There’s plenty of both.”

  “You’ll need to move some dough off the table,” Maddie said. “Just wad it in a towel and stick it in the fridge.”

  The workers shuffled closer to the wall to get another look inside. “You guys clear out,” Calliope said. “You can take the rest of the day off, with pay. Stop for lunch on your way out. Wait for me in the kitchen and don’t leave before I get there.” The men whooped. “And if I find out you’ve told anyone about what we discovered in that wall, I’ll fire you on the spot. Understood?”

  The workers all nodded vigorously and filed out of the room.

  “Everyone in Chatterley Heights will hear about these bones by sundown at the latest,” Maddie said. “You know that, right?”

  “Sure, I know that,” Calliope said. “But I’m betting my threat will slow them down, maybe make them think twice. I’m paying them well, and they need the work.”

  Jason and Calliope leaned the plywood against the wall, revealing a cavity more than a foot deep. The area seemed generous for a wall, but Olivia knew that walls had often been thicker in the past. No one spoke for a time. There wasn’t much to say because there wasn’t much to see beyond some bones. Olivia was too embarrassed to admit, at least in public, that she’d envisioned a skeleton more like the plastic one her family had hung on their front door every Halloween.

  “Huh,” Maddie whispered. “Is that all there is?”

  “Jeez, sorry to disappoint you guys,” Jason said.

  Olivia felt something brush against her ankle. She glanced down to see Spunky sneak toward the cavity. His fluffy tail swished with eager curiosity as he sniffed the air. “Spunky, no!” Olivia grabbed him and lifted his tiny body to her chest. “Those bones are not for you,” she whispered in his ear. He squirmed in her arms, clearly not convinced.

  Olivia ran her finger over several small holes along the outer edges of the wall. “Are these nail holes? So that plywood was actually nailed to the wall?”

  “It was,” Calliope said. “Sloppy job. I’d have re-plastered the whole wall. No one would have been the wiser, at least until the site was cleared for development. Even then, the bones might have been crushed by a bulldozer before anyone saw them.”

  Olivia peered into the wall cavity, taking care not to step inside. “This area seems large for an inner wall,” she said. “Shouldn’t there be insulation or something?”

  Jason snorted. “Inside walls don’t need insulation. However, despite the dumbness of your question, I agree that the space is larger than I’d have expected. My guess is this might originally have been a shallow storage closet. It goes along half the wall. There would have been another closet in the room sharing this wall to fill in the other half. For some reason, the closets in both rooms got plastered over to make them into walls. Don’t ask me why. Maybe the closets were disintegrating. Anyway, the building was abandoned years ago. Somehow the wall got damaged, and someone covered the whole thing with plywood. That’s all I can figure.”

  “Let me have another look.” Calliope peered around the cavity. “You might be right, Jason. I’d say this wall has been through several renovations, mostly on the cheap. It started out good and solid. Then maybe somebody decided it used up too much valuable space and tried to make a closet out of it. Not a very good closet, but by then the inhabitants were probably too poor to need much storage space.” Calliope shook her head. “Too bad. This was a decent building once. I hate to see good construction go bad.”

  “Forgive me for interrupting such a fascinating and poignant discussion of wall design,” Maddie said, “but I thought someone said the police were on their way. Did you give them the right address? Won’t they be here soon, and shouldn’t we put the plywood back?”

  “Mom called 911,” Jason said. “The dispatcher said it might be some time before someone could get here. I guess there’s been a huge accident between here and Twiterton. That’s what’s occupying all the available police from several towns. The dispatcher decided that finding some old bones wasn’t a big emergency, so it could wait.”

  “I know Del has been in DC at a conference,” Olivia said. “Did anyone get hold of him?” Sheriff Del Jenkins was, as her mother put it, Olivia’s “special friend.” Ellie was a sixties flower child who had once lived in a commune, but when it came to her daughter, she’d turned traditional.

  “I called Del on his cell,” Calliope said. “He said he’ll drive back to town this evening, after he does some talk or other. He warned us not to touch anything, and we haven’t, except for removing the plywood covering. Del wants to look at the scene first before he calls in the experts. I mean, this guy’s been dead for years. Anyway, chances are he sneaked in here and died of natural causes.”

  “But then why was he hidden in the wall?” Maddie asked.

  Calliope shrugged. “This was a hangout for vagrants. My guess is they didn’t want any trouble, so they stuffed the body into a rotting wall, found an old piece of plywood, and nailed him inside.”

  Maddie grimaced.
“Wouldn’t it, um, smell?”

  “The place probably didn’t smell great to begin with,” Calliope said. “A passed-out drunk might not care, especially if he had nowhere else to sleep.”

  “Where is Cody?” Olivia asked. Chatterley Heights’ deputy sheriff, Cody Furlow, was an eager investigator, though he could be indecisive at times. Olivia also knew that Del wanted to give Cody a chance to gain confidence and experience.

  “Cody’s dad had a heart attack during the night,” Jason said. “I heard about it from Ida this morning at Pete’s Diner. Ida said Cody took off early this morning. She knew that because he’d left a message ordering a take-out breakfast, which he picked up just after the diner opened at five-thirty a.m. He had it half eaten before he got out the diner door. Ida was impressed.”

  “Ida doesn’t impress easily,” Olivia said. “Poor Cody. He probably just wanted to get to his dad as fast as possible. So Chatterley Heights is currently without any police protection?”

  “Jeez,” Jason said, “don’t be such a wimp. This town doesn’t need 24–7 police protection. Besides, you’ve got me and Cal.”

  “So good to know,” Olivia murmured. “Why is Alicia so convinced those are her father’s remains?” Olivia directed her question to Calliope.

  “I’ll show you.” Calliope squatted down and pointed toward some thin, curved bones that Olivia guessed were ribs. She and Maddie leaned in as close as they could without disturbing the scene.

  “Is that a necklace?” Maddie asked. “I think I see a thin piece of chain.”

  Calliope nodded. “When I mentioned seeing a chain, Al burst into sobs. She refused to come over and take a look, but she said she’d given her father a necklace with a silver chain. That’s all it took to convince her these bones were his. Maybe Ellie can get more out of her.”

  “Mom has a talent for wheedling information.” Olivia arched her neck to get a better look at the chain. “I don’t suppose someone brought a flashlight?”

  “I never leave home without one. Hang on a sec.” Calliope returned with a hefty cordless spotlight.

  Olivia held her breath as Calliope aimed the spotlight at the narrow floor inside the wall. For an instant, the pile of bones seemed to brighten and stir, as if light were all they’d needed to restore them to life. The thin length of chain, on the other hand, looked dirty and dull. Olivia leaned forward to follow its path over a rib and behind a thicker bone she couldn’t name. “I think something might be attached to that chain,” she said. “Calliope, can you shift the light a bit to the right so I can see behind that bone? Good, that helps.”

  “I’m about to explode,” Maddie said. “What do you see?”

  Olivia craned her neck. “I’m not positive, but I think it’s . . . Maddie, you won’t believe this. I think it’s a tiny cookie cutter.”

  “Be serious,” Maddie said.

  “Really, it looks like a tiny cookie cutter with a back.”

  “Let me see.” Maddie nudged Olivia aside.

  “I’m five-seven, and I can barely see it,” Olivia said. “You’re shorter than I am.”

  “Only by an inch, and besides, I’m more flexible.”

  “I’m five-eight,” Calliope said. “That makes me taller than both of you. Step aside.” She left the spotlight on the floor pointing toward the remains.

  In the interests of fact finding, Olivia and Maddie yielded to Calliope’s superior height. Besides, Olivia reasoned, Calliope knew a cookie cutter when she saw one. Olivia retrieved the spotlight and aimed it directly at the area where she had spotted the tiny object nestled among the sad bones.

  Calliope dropped to her hands and knees, her neck muscles straining as her eyes followed the path of the thin chain until it dropped out of sight. “Lift the light higher,” Calliope ordered. With a curt nod, she said, “Livie was right.”

  “A cookie cutter on a chain?” Maddie asked. “That sounds really uncomfortable, especially for a guy. Are we sure these bones belonged to a man? Shouldn’t we ask Alicia’s mother about what happened to her husband before we leap to conclusions? Not that I don’t enjoy speculating, of course.”

  Calliope sat back on her knees and brushed dust off her hands. “Her mom doesn’t care what happened to him, as long as he is gone forever. Anyway, that’s what Alicia says. She and her mom don’t get along. Alicia is living at home until she can save enough money to afford an apartment of her own. Meanwhile, she tries not to be home when her mom is there. They rarely speak to each other.”

  “Wow,” Maddie said. “You’ve lived in Chatterley Heights for less than a year, and already you know more about the place than I do.”

  “Ellie told me,” Calliope said. “Once I decided she was worth listening to, I started picking up all sorts of interesting stuff. I don’t listen much when she tells long stories, though. I get bored.”

  “I hear you,” Olivia said. “Although there’s usually a point to those stories, if you can hang on till the end.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.” Calliope rolled off her knees and stood up, demonstrating an agility that made Olivia feel old, even though she was at least a decade younger. “About that necklace,” Calliope said. “It looks like a sappy Valentine’s Day cookie cutter shaped like a heart with an arrow through it. I don’t think it’s a real cutter, though. It’s even smaller than a fondant cutter, and it isn’t deep enough to cut through rolled dough. I’d say it was meant to represent a cookie cutter but thin enough to function as a charm. I’ll bet Jason’s farm—for which I hold the mortgage, at least until he pays me back—that the pierced heart shape had a personal meaning for whoever once owned those bones.”

  “I agree,” Olivia said. “Why else would a man, assuming these bones do belong to a man, wear a cookie cutter image of a pierced heart around his neck?”

  Calliope leaned against the wall. “Alicia told me something right before she started all that crying. She said her father was ‘wearing her heart,’ like he’d promised her. Mind you, she hadn’t seen the charm. None of us had at that point, but it sure looks like this necklace could be the one her father wore. Of course, for all we know it was her dad who killed the person these bones belonged to, and then he threw the necklace in there to convince everyone he was dead. He might have assumed it was worthless costume jewelry.”

  “Maybe it is,” Maddie said.

  Calliope shook her head. “The charm is tarnished, just like the chain, but it has held up well. From what I can see, it looks well crafted. I’m betting the whole thing is made of silver. It isn’t gold, but still, he could have gotten something for it, enough to buy a meal, anyway. For a vagrant, that’s a lot.”

  “If those bones really are Alicia’s father, whoever nailed his body inside that wall didn’t take the necklace,” Olivia said. “Why not, I wonder.”

  “The real question,” Maddie said, “is do we wait for Del to get here, like good little girls, or do we start asking questions on our own?”

  Olivia grinned. “Do you even have to ask?”

  Chapter Two

  Before joining Calliope and her crew for lunch, Olivia and Maddie felt they should try to secure room number eight, where the skeletal remains lay as they’d been found, untouched. The lonely bones could rest for another day or so, at least until the police removed them for analysis.

  While Olivia held Spunky, Maddie rifled through a satchel slung over her shoulder. “There’s no way to lock the door to this room,” she said, “so I asked Calliope for a roll of duct tape and scissors. I’ll stretch some tape across the door as a warning to stay out. That’s the best we can do for now. Hey, when we see Del, we should ask him to requisition some crime scene tape for us. You know, for next time.”

  “There will be no next time,” Olivia said.

  “You said that last time.” Maddie cut long strips of duct tape and crisscrossed the closed door in three places. �
��That ought to do it.” She stood back to admire her work. “No, wait a minute.” Maddie drew a rag from the pocket of her jeans and used it to wipe off the doorknob. “If anyone besides Del breaks through the tape and goes into the room, we’ll have their fingerprints.”

  Olivia arched one eyebrow at her best friend since age ten. “You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?”

  “You bet,” Maddie said. “Solving a crime is almost as much fun as baking and decorating cookies. This time I don’t feel so sad. Those are old bones, so it’s not like finding the body of someone who was alive just a little while ago. But, Livie, maybe we’ve jumped the gun a bit . . . if I may mention a gun or any other weapon, which, by the way, we didn’t find with those bones.”

  “It could have been removed.” Olivia paused on the staircase to look up at her friend. “If that was your unique, roundabout way of saying this might not have been an actual murder, then I agree we can’t be sure. Only it does seem odd that someone would stuff a body inside a wall and nail up a sheet of plywood to cover the hole. The building had already been abandoned. If the death was natural, the body could probably have remained out in the open. To me, it looks like someone wanted to hide the body but didn’t have much time.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Maddie said. “Still, even if this was murder most foul, it didn’t happen recently, or we would have found a body instead of bones, right? So this feels more like we’ve stumbled upon an archeological site. It doesn’t upset me.”

  Olivia wasn’t sure she agreed. She had felt a rush of sadness when she’d first seen those bones, even though she hadn’t known Alicia’s father . . . assuming they belonged to him. Discovering a recent murder victim, especially if she’d known the person, would have disturbed her more deeply. Yet Olivia couldn’t forget that those bones had once been a living person. At the same time, she had to admit she’d always experienced a surge of satisfaction whenever she and Maddie helped bring a murderer to justice. Okay, maybe a tiny thrill, too . . .