by Sofie Kelly
“Simon, you don’t actually think your mother’s accident and what happened to your father are connected, do you?” I said. I didn’t say that I did.
“I don’t want to, but . . .”
“But what?”
The lines around his mouth tightened again. “He told me he’d hired an investigator. The day before the funeral I went all through his apartment. Victor had asked Everett if he could stay there for a few days. He said it made him feel closer to Dad.” He sighed softly. “I didn’t want Victor to know what Dad had been doing. I found the contact information for that investigator and I called him. He said my father told him that he’d found something out about my mother, something that was key.”
“But he didn’t say what that was.”
Simon shook his head. “I hired him, Kathleen, the detective. He says there may have been a witness, a woman who was walking her dog the night my mother’s car went off the road. If there’s any chance what happened to my father is connected to my mother’s death, I have to know.”
“Have you considered talking to your uncle?”
He shook his head. “Not a chance in hell. My father may have been giving Victor a second chance but that didn’t mean he would have ever confided in him.”
I put a hand on his arm. “Simon, tell the police,” I said.
A smile pulled at his mouth but there was no warmth in it. “I already did. I don’t think they’re taking me very seriously.”
I raked a hand back through my hair. I cared about Mia and I cared about Simon. “How can I help?”
Simon glanced down the hallway. There was no sign of Marcus. “I don’t want to interfere in your life,” he said.
“How can I help?” I repeated.
He looked over at his daughter again and his face softened. “I know that Dad and Mary Lowe go way back. Someone saw them together at a place out near the highway. They looked like they were having a pretty serious conversation.”
“The Brick,” I said, nodding my head.
Simon frowned. “How did you know?”
Mary may have looked like the stereotypical sweet, cookie-baking grandmother, which in fact she was, but there were a lot more layers to her, including her love of dancing, corsets and feathers. “That’s a story for another time,” I said.
“Would you talk to Mary?” he asked. “See if she knows anything? I think she’d be more likely to tell you before me.”
“I can do that,” I said. “She’s working tomorrow. I’ll see what I can find out.”
Simon smiled then. “How many times are you going to come to my rescue?” he said.
I smiled back at him. “How many times do you need?”
Mia had gotten to her feet and now she walked over to us. “Excuse me,” she said. “Are you done? Because I’m hungry.”
“Yes, we’re done,” I said.
“Thank you for coming to get me,” she said, wrapping her arms around me in a hug.
“Anytime,” I said.
“Thank you,” Simon said. “For everything.”
I smiled. “Like I said, anytime.”
Hercules was waiting for me in the truck. “Thank you for being so patient,” I said, sliding behind the wheel. He yawned and I realized he’d probably been napping the whole time I was gone.
We headed up the hill and I filled Hercules in on what Simon had told me about his father hiring an investigator to look into Meredith Janes’s death.
“This means something,” I said.
“Merow,” the cat said.
I glanced over at him. “Okay, so now all we have to do is convince Marcus.”
• • •
We’d only been home about twenty minutes when my phone rang. Hercules was just eating the last of the four crackers I’d given him. He meowed at me but didn’t even lift his head.
“Yes, I heard that,” I said.
It was Marcus.
“Hi,” I said. “Where are you?”
“At the station,” he said, “wrestling with paperwork.”
He sounded tired. I tucked one leg underneath me. “You want to know what I was doing at Simon’s office.”
“I do, but I don’t want to sound like a suspicious boyfriend or an equally suspicious cop by asking. You can see I’m on the horns of a dilemma.”
I laughed. “So you were going to do what, just dance around the subject?”
“Pretty much,” he said. “I’m tired; all my creativity has checked out for the night.”
“It’s not that complicated,” I said. “Simon was supposed to pick up Mia out at Harry’s. I went to get her.”
“That was nice of you,” he said.
I wondered if he was at his desk or leaning against the wall in the hallway for a bit more privacy.
“Marcus, have you looked into the possibility of a connection between Leo Janes’s death and the accident that killed his wife?”
“Simon mentioned that.”
I pulled up my other leg and propped my chin on my bent knee. “You didn’t answer my question,” I said.
“No, I didn’t.”
“What if there’s a connection?”
“A connection how?” he asked.
I blew out a breath. “I don’t know how. Simon told me his father had hired someone to look into his ex-wife’s accident. Don’t you think it’s an awfully big coincidence that Leo Janes started asking questions about what happened all those years ago and suddenly he’s dead?”
“Coincidences do happen, Kathleen.” I recognized that reasonable tone. When we’d first met it had frustrated me.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” I said.
“So you think what?” Marcus asked. “That Meredith Janes’s death wasn’t an accident and now after twenty years the killer decided to get rid of her husband?”
The idea sounded better in my head than when he said it out loud.
“How do you know Victor Janes didn’t do something to his brother?” I said.
The idea had been in the back of my mind like a wisp of a song.
“He has an alibi. He was in a cancer survivors’ chat room when Leo was murdered.”
“Which he could have accessed from his smartphone,” I countered.
“Victor had one of those phones with the battery problems. His actually overheated and stopped working that day. The company had to overnight a replacement. He was close to twenty-four hours without a phone.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling a little deflated.
“I know you care about Mia, Kathleen, and I know you like Simon.”
I got the sense that he was choosing his words carefully, which told me I probably wasn’t going to like what he said next.
“Simon didn’t kill his father,” I said, speaking each word slowly and carefully.
Marcus cleared his throat. “Look, Kathleen, I trust your instincts. You have to know that by now. But I can’t just ignore the evidence because of those instincts.”
“And I can’t ignore what my instincts tell me just because you believe your evidence says something else.”
There was silence for a moment, then he said, “I’m sorry I called your cell phone.”
I hadn’t expected him to say that. “Umm, why?” I asked.
“Because you could have hung up on me. Regular phones can be very satisfying to hang up . . . so I’ve heard.”
I laughed. “I wouldn’t hang up on you,” I said. “Pour coffee on your shoe? Maybe.”
He laughed as well. He’d gotten my reference to a time in our past when I’d come very close to doing just that.
“I love you,” he said. I could feel the warmth of his smile as though he was in the room with me.
“I love you, too,” I said.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he said. �
�Sleep well.”
I set the phone on the table and sighed. Hercules was watching me, pensively it seemed, his head cocked to one side. “How am I going to convince Marcus that there are other people who could have wanted Leo Janes hurt if not dead?”
“Mrr,” the cat said, his green eyes narrowing a little.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m thinking about Elias Braeden.”
“Merow?” Hercules said. It almost seemed like there was a question in the sound.
“I know what Ruby said and I’m not saying Elias wanted Leo dead. Maybe . . . maybe things just got out of hand. He was killed with that piece of sculpture. It wasn’t premeditated.” I picked up my mug. It was empty. I set it back on the table again. “What I’d like to do is talk to someone other than Ruby about Elias.”
Hercules yawned and stretched, seemingly bored with the conversation. He made his way over to the refrigerator and used one paw to push his food dish toward me.
“You just had a snack,” I said. “That’s it until breakfast.”
He stared at me without blinking, his green eyes locked on my face for a good thirty seconds.
I got to my feet, picked up the empty bowl and set it back beside the refrigerator. “Like I said, that’s it until breakfast.”
As I turned around my gaze passed over the front of the refrigerator. I had a coupon for half a dozen cupcakes from Sweet Thing stuck there along with a notice about a Christmas arts and crafts market in Red Wing and a flyer about the holiday cookie-decorating contest being sponsored by Fern’s Diner.
Fern’s Diner, where I’d had breakfast with Burtis Chapman more than once. Burtis, who had also worked for Idris Blackthorne as a young man and likely knew Elias Braeden.
I scooped up Hercules. “You are a furry genius,” I said.
He nuzzled my cheek and tried to look modest but didn’t quite get there.
• • •
By five forty-five the next morning I was on my way over to Fern’s Diner. Burtis’s shiny black truck was in the parking lot behind the squat, brown-shingled building. I found Burtis inside perched on a stool with his elbows on the counter and his hands wrapped around a heavy china coffee mug. He was wearing a blue plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled back over a long-sleeved gray T-shirt and his Twins ball cap was sitting on the counter at his elbow.
Burtis Chapman was a massive man, with wide shoulders and a barrel chest, intimidating if you didn’t know him. His face was lined and weathered and the little bit of hair he had left was snow white. He was good friends with Marcus’s father, Elliot Gordon. In fact, the two of them had gotten more than a little intoxicated just a few weeks ago when Elliot had been in town. They’d hijacked the jazz trio playing in the bar at the St. James Hotel and sung Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll.” The other bar patrons seemed to enjoy the impromptu concert; hotel management, not so much, and I’d had to go rescue them before the police were called.
Burtis looked up and smiled when I stepped into the diner. “Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” he said. He slid off his stool and gave me a hug.
“Feel like some company for breakfast?” I asked, shrugging out of my jacket.
“You, girl? Always.”
He patted the empty stool beside his, then took my jacket and hung it on a nearby hook.
Peggy Sue came out of the kitchen and slid an oversized oval plate in front of Burtis. “Hey, Kathleen,” she said with a smile. “What can I get you besides a cup of coffee?” She was wearing her regular uniform of red pedal pushers and a short-sleeved white shirt with Peggy Sue stitched over the left breast pocket. Her red-framed glasses had been replaced with a black cat’s-eye style a lot like Susan’s pair. Her hair was in a bouffant updo with sidewept bangs, lacquered in place I was guessing with half a can of hair spray.
I pointed at Burtis’s plate. “That looks good to me.”
“It’ll be ready in a jiff,” she said. She relayed my order to the kitchen and poured me a cup of coffee. Peggy and Harrison Taylor (Senior, not Junior) had been, as he liked to call it, “keeping company.” The age difference between the two had made his family a little nervous, especially Harrison’s daughter Elizabeth, who was fiercely protective of her biological father. But they—and the rest of us—quickly came to see how good Peggy was for the old man. She made him laugh, and she got him to have his blood pressure checked more frequently. She hadn’t been able to get him to cut down on his coffee consumption, but that was an impossible task no matter who was trying.
Burtis had already started in on his breakfast. I added cream and sugar to my coffee and took a long sip. It was hot and strong, just the way I liked it.
“What are you doin’ here so early?” he asked. “And don’t tell me it’s for the pleasure of my company, because I may have been born at night but it wasn’t last night.”
“I do like your company,” I said, “but there is something I wanted to talk to you about. Actually, someone.”
“Leo Janes.” He nudged a bite of scrambled egg onto his fork with the half slice of toast he was holding in his massive left hand.
“Sort of,” I said.
That got me a smile. “Now, how exactly are we ‘sort of’ going to talk about Leo Janes?”
“By talking about Elias Braeden.”
“I heard he was in town on some kind of business,” Burtis said, spearing a chunk of fried potato. It disappeared into his mouth.
“Did you know him when you worked for Idris?” I asked.
Peggy came back with my plate then. It held bacon and sausage, fluffy scrambled eggs, Yukon gold potatoes fried with onions and whole wheat toast. She topped up our coffee and then headed toward the booths with the pot.
“I knew Elias back in the day,” Burtis said. “We don’t run in the same circles now.” He grinned at me.
“Do you think he could have had anything to do with Leo Janes’s death?” I asked. I picked up my fork and started eating. The eggs were fluffy and the potatoes tasted of onion and dill.
“Not likely,” Burtis said. “From what I know of Elias now, he’s more likely to bury you with lawyers and paperwork than he is to just have you buried somewhere.” He reached for his coffee cup. “I take it Leo was still playin’ cards.”
“Enough to get banned from more than one casino in the state.”
“And one of them belonged to Elias.”
I nodded. “Leo had some kind of system worked out. And it looks like there were other people involved.”
“He was smart as a whip, you know. He’d figure the odds of a certain card turning up in his head and then bet according to that. It gave him an edge, not to mention he had a hell of a poker face. How much did he take Elias for?”
“Around a million dollars.”
Burtis shook his head. “I don’t care for cheaters myself and I can imagine how Elias felt. It’s a wonder he left Leo with a pot to”—he gave me a sideways glance—“bake beans in,” he finished. “So you think what, Kathleen? That Elias had Leo killed over what he won?”
I reached for my coffee again. “I don’t know. Elias told me what he wanted to know was how Leo was cheating. He’d figured out that Leo had some of his students involved but beyond that . . .” I shrugged. “Do you think it’s possible they had an argument and things just got out of hand?” The image of the back of Leo Janes’s head flashed in my mind. “Tell me I’m crazy,” I said.
“You’re not,” he said. “Elias has come a long way from the days when he used to move beer through the back wood for old Blackie. I told you before, it wasn’t what the old man did, it was what people thought he did that kept ’em in line. Elias learned that lesson. He’s a respectable businessman now—more or less—but just because you take the boy outta those woods doesn’t mean you take the lessons he learned outta him.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “Thank y
ou.”
We ate in silence for a couple of minutes. Then I felt Burtis’s eyes on me. “I hear you’ve been bragging about hanging around a few arcades in your younger days.”
I knew he was referring to my telling Marcus I could beat him at PAC-MAN. I gave an offhand shrug. “My mother always said it’s not bragging if you can do it.”
Burtis gave a snort of laughter. “That it isn’t,” he said.
We finished our breakfast and I told him about the box of photos from the old post office that the library had “inherited.” I lost the argument about paying for my own breakfast and I promised Burtis I would come out to the house to play a game of PAC-MAN with him, although I may have said I’d come out to beat him at a game of PAC-MAN. He left with a promise that he’d stop by the library once the photos were on display to see if he recognized anyone.
• • •
I took Celia Hunter’s scarf with me to the library and Marcus called midmorning to tell me she’d arrived at the station first thing, just the way she’d said she would. “It wasn’t her,” he said. “She’s too tiny to have hit Leo Janes.”
I made a face, glad that he couldn’t see me. Everything seemed to point back at Simon.
Mia came in right after school. Mary had brought in an album with the photos of Meredith Janes that she’d promised to show Mia.
“Is that your mother?” I asked Mary, pointing to a young woman leaning on a hoe and squinting into the sun in one photograph. It wasn’t so much that they looked alike, it was something about the way the young woman in the photo was standing, her unselfconscious stance, that made me think of Mary.
“Yes, it is,” she said. “She lived to be ninety years old, you know, and she was sharp as a tack until the day she died. In fact, if she’d stayed off the roof of the barn when it was raining she’d probably have made it to one hundred.”
Mia and I exchanged looks.
“But that’s a story for another day,” Mary said, making a dismissive gesture with one hand. She flipped several pages in the album. “That’s your grandmother, Mia.”
Mia and I both leaned in for a closer look. Meredith Janes looked to be about sixteen in the photograph. She reminded me of Simon. She had the same challenge in her dark eyes.