"No," I said. "This isn't what I'm looking for."
"Promise you'll sleep on it."
At my side, Jeffrey woke up, walked across my lap like I was furniture, jumped to the arm of my father's recliner, then curled up in his lap.
My father reached for the remote control, careful to not disturb the cat, then flicked the volume back on.
I woke up to a mix of familiar and unfamiliar: Jeffrey's whiskers tickling my face, and me in a bed that was both too firm and too soft at the same time, in that quirky way of guest room beds.
My father and I had stayed up late, watching a funny movie about two mismatched cops. We didn't discuss the investigator's license again, but he did point out a few things during the movie, about how the cops were handling the investigation poorly. I pointed out that the bumbling officers were in pursuit of an alien artifact, then he pointed out that was no excuse for poor procedure.
I climbed out of bed and pulled on multiple layers of clothes.
"Dad's new timer shuts down the heat at night," I said to Jeffrey.
Curled in a tight ball on the pillow, where my head had warmed it, he shot me a no-kidding look. I was glad he seemed comfortable at my father's, but did he need to act that happy about my father's lap? Was it really better than mine? I suspected the little tramp had spent the night traipsing between both of our rooms.
I brushed my teeth in the downstairs bathroom, then went up the stairs, the scent of bacon and coffee quickening my pace.
He wouldn't let me help with breakfast, so I took a seat at the table in the kitchen and checked my phone for messages.
There was one from Logan: Since I've paid for that retainer, I wonder if you might do one small thing for me? Very small.
His message irritated me. Maybe it was just the lack of sleep and absence of coffee in my system, but he'd said I wasn't a real investigator. I planned to return the check, but now he wanted me to run errands? I had a bad feeling. Whenever someone says something is a very small favor, it's usually the exact opposite.
I replied: How small?
He responded within minutes: I hear you hosted the knitting club last week. Would you be willing to host again and ask a few questions?
The idea did not thrill me, but I still responded to say yes. Maybe the twelve ladies could help me with my knitting.
My father set a plate holding two perfectly round, perfectly golden pancakes in front of me.
"What's the message about?" he asked.
"I can't tell you."
He sat in his regular spot, across from me. "Can't, or won't?"
"I can and I will, but there are conditions."
"Like?"
"I'm working as a consultant to Logan Sanderson," I said. "The lawyer. You met him when he helped me climb into the car the other day, when your stupid Hobo Pride wouldn't let you accept free delivery of your rug."
"How's that coffee going down, Stormy?"
"Don't say my name like that," I snapped. "You know I hate it."
"Drink your coffee, then we'll talk."
I glowered at his insinuation that my irritation was unreasonable. I sipped some of the coffee, then grabbed a dollar bill from my wallet and slid it across the table toward him.
"I'm hiring you."
He frowned at the bill. "We're getting paid two dollars?"
I told him how much Logan's check was for, and he brightened up.
"But you don't have your license," he said. "Or do you?" He gave me a sidelong look that made me wish I had gotten my investigator's license already, just to surprise him. But I couldn't have gotten it on my own. In addition to sleeping on the idea, I'd also done some research the night before.
"Dad, the state of Oregon requires me to have fifteen hundred hours of investigative experience before I can apply for a license. But you knew that, didn't you? I need to apprentice with somebody."
He glanced up at the ceiling, his brown eyes almost as innocent as the green eyes of the cat sitting on the chair next to mine, eyeballing our bacon.
"This was your plan all along," I said. "Instead of just asking me to be your partner, you wanted me to think it was my idea."
He held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "My idea, your idea, it's still a good one."
"Why couldn't you just ask me? Sometimes you drive me so nuts, the way I have to drag stuff out of you. And you wonder why I'm grumpy sometimes."
He got up and tidied the kitchen counter for a moment, grabbed the coffee carafe, then came back to the table with a somber expression. I finished drinking my cup and held it out for a refill.
"I couldn't ask," he said. "Investigating can be dangerous. I nearly got you killed once already."
"Twice if we count the tub thing, but that wasn't your fault. You couldn't have known."
"But it was because of my choices. Bad choices. And other people paid the consequences."
He stood with the coffee pot in hand, not moving, the pain of his regret on his face.
"Dad…"
"The reason I haven't asked you yet is because I made a promise to someone a long time ago. She didn't want her girls doing anything dangerous."
"Oh."
He started pouring my coffee. The room was so still that I could hear the liquid splashing in my cup. The air around us felt thick, like time was frozen.
Not every significant moment of choice feels like one. I'd walked away from an engagement and a whole life without having one of these moments. Leaving Christopher and the business had just felt inevitable—the natural outcome of all the players and forces involved, without any choice.
This moment, however, felt like standing in the forest at a fork in the path. My mother wouldn't have wanted me to be an investigator.
As for me, I didn't know what I wanted.
"Forget about your promise," I said. "She's not here anymore. I get to do whatever I want. We both do."
Chapter 27
We were quietly finishing breakfast when I got another message from Logan: Who did you get this printout from? It's a fake. The website address printed on the footer gives me a blank page. I've searched the film company's name and found nothing.
I replied: Bernard Goldstein doesn't exist?
Logan: There are dozens of Bernard Goldsteins on the internet, but none of them are this guy. I did an image search and found his face on a stock photo site. Our voodoo lady was pulling a Ponzi scheme. I need to know where this printout came from.
Me: Don't worry about that. The website was real. I saw it myself when I made the printout on the day of the wake.
Logan: That means the site was taken down after her death.
Me: She did have a partner. OMG.
Logan: Did you really just say OMG?
Me: I'm hip, I'm cool, I say OMG. Especially when we get a big lead.
Logan: How did you come by this information about Bernard, anyway?
Me: It came to me through the grapevine. I'm not at liberty to discuss.
As I waited for him to reply, I really hoped he wouldn't press me for the name of my contact. I couldn't tell him the information had come through Ruby and her Secret Tearoom Ladies.
Two minutes later, Logan still hadn't replied to my last message. I sent him a smiley face to lighten my previous dismissal, but still there was no response.
"Why are you scowling?" asked my father.
I relaxed my face. "Scowling?"
"You have a terrible poker face when you're texting. Terrible. I saw at least five emotions on your face just now, and you weren't paying any attention to your surroundings. You were sucked into that little screen. I could have leaned over and read the whole exchange, if I wanted to. Was that the lawyer?"
I narrowed my eyes at him playfully. "That's information for my partner. Are you taking the dollar?"
He flung his hand in the air dramatically, swept it down to snatch up the dollar bill, then tucked the money into his shirt pocket.
"Partners," he said.
"Well
, partner, prepare to have your mind blown," I said proudly. "I found Dharma Lake. She's at my house, staying with Logan. He's defending her, or at least he will be, once she turns herself in."
"I knew that."
"You did not."
He grinned as he reached for the last piece of bacon. "You should put a better password on your phone than your cat's name."
I groaned. He did have a point.
I pulled up the option to change my phone's password, and tried to think of a new one. I'd only put a password on recently, after taking the crime scene photos at Voula's creepy house. I didn't want a friend grabbing my phone to check the time and accidentally getting an eyeful.
What would be a good password?
Security experts always tell you not to use birthdays or your pet's name, but they never give you ideas about what you should use. Given how suggestible the mind is, this leads to you staring at the password input screen unable to think of any word except your pet's name.
My father said, "Don't use your birthday, or 1234, and don't use the word password."
I glanced around for something basic yet memorable, then tapped it in.
"Your password is bacon," he said.
I stared at him in disbelief. "Are you a mind reader?" He couldn't have seen the screen, because I was careful to hold it facing away from his prying eyes. However, if my father did have supernatural powers, it would explain a lot.
"Yes, I am a mind reader. But it's a learned skill." He pointed his finger at my eyes. "I was watching your eyes. Your attention settled on the bacon plate, you raised your eyebrows, then tapped in a five-letter code. I might have guessed plate, which also fits, but plate wouldn't have made you lick your lips the way bacon did."
"Okay, that's pretty cool. I need to learn how to do that."
"You will."
I set the phone on the counter. "I'll leave the password as bacon. Other people won't guess, and it's okay if you have my password." I narrowed my eyes at him. "Should I be upset with you for looking at my phone last night while I was sleeping?"
"It was when you went to the washroom."
"Hmm."
He started clearing away the dishes and said, casually, "We'll go over the crime scene today. Not the photos. The actual crime scene."
"Has it been released? Do you have someone in mind who'll get us access?" My mouth got an unpleasant metallic taste at the idea of revisiting the creepy house.
"I haven't shown you how to pick a lock yet. This will be a good teaching moment."
"No." I crossed my arms. "Absolutely not. We're not breaking into anywhere. Can you imagine the ruckus if we got caught?"
He smiled, because he could imagine the ruckus, and that made it more fun.
"Let's just keep a low profile for a few more days, until the next knitting club meeting. Logan wants me to host again, and pump them for information. That reminds me, I should call Barbara and have her put out the word."
My father told me to go ahead. He got his new laptop out and checked his email while I called Barbara.
We set up the next knitting club meeting, to be held at my house again, and then she gave me an earful about her ex-husband being so difficult.
"That sounds really upsetting," I said after hearing some details. "Exes have a way of passive-aggressively getting under your skin."
"He says he's concerned about me," she sniffed. "He says the one thing in common with all my disasters is me. Like everything's my fault."
"Sounds familiar. Hey, what's his address? I'll go over and give him something to be concerned about."
To my surprise, she immediately gave me her ex-husband's full name and business address.
Hank Kettner had an insurance company, located in the business strip connected to the grocery store. I tried to tell her I'd only been joking about threatening him, but she'd already hung up, probably to blow her nose and then eat a box of cake mix by the sound of it.
I looked up at my father. "Anything good?"
"That fake film company's website is definitely gone, and they must have used tags to prevent the search engines from caching a copy of the pages, because there's nothing on the internet."
"You know about cached files?"
He sat up straight in his chair. "It's pretty simple, really, just a file called robots.txt that you upload to the root directory with a noindex, nofollow code." He closed the laptop lid. "Don't be too impressed by your father's hacker skills. The domain name is registered privately, and I don't know how to get past that."
"We could check with Marcy at Misty Microchips. And she might know something about the website, too. Marcy knew Voula Varga. Not well, I think, because they didn't talk to each other at the pub, but Marcy set up a custom email auto-responder for Voula's business."
My father's right eye twitched. "They didn't talk at the pub, yet they knew each other?"
"You think Marcy's somehow involved in the investment scheme? Hmm. She does complain about money issues."
"That meek little woman didn't strike me as the scheming type, but sometimes people surprise you."
"We can pay a visit to Misty Microchips today." I grinned. "My laptop's seen better days."
He leaned back and rubbed his hand lovingly over Lizzy, his teal laptop. "You're jealous. You can't handle me having a newer computer than you."
"Let's go see Marcy, and let's go by Barbara's husband's place. Hank Kettner. He's got an insurance place by the grocery store. We can ask him some bogus questions about insurance for investigators, then try to get a reaction on how he felt about our victim. Before we found Dharma's van at the junkyard, he was actually on my list as a suspect. Voula found some assets that Hank has, so he might have been angry enough to kill her."
"Hiding assets? Sounds like the scheming type."
Scheming? Sure. Hank Kettner could have been Voula Varga's partner in an investment scheme, but then something went sour, and she revealed his secret assets to his ex-wife for the low price of a few hours of fortune-telling mumbo jumbo. He shot her for revenge, or maybe because he had even more secrets. She could have been blackmailing him.
I explained my new theory while we finished clearing up the breakfast dishes. I called my employee to let her know the inventory job was delayed yet again, then we made sure Jeffrey was set with all his kitty supplies—the litter box was still in the back mudroom, where it had been when he'd lived there—and walked out to the car.
The day was bright, thanks to the gleaming white snow. The mountains rose around us in their majestic embrace. It was a beautiful day to chase down leads on our first day as the official paid research consultants to a lawyer.
Or a beautiful day to get ourselves arrested for harassing people.
Either way, it was a beautiful day.
Our first stop was Misty Microchips. We arrived just as Marvin was rolling up the exterior metal screen that covered the window and door overnight. Property crime wasn't a huge threat in town, but the security screens were still necessary for a few shops with the most high-value, easily resold goods.
Marvin had the couple's dog with him. Stanley was on a leash, and gave me a tail wag, but kept back a cautious distance. He was wearing a rainbow-striped dog collar, affixed to a rainbow-striped leash. Both items looked handmade, possibly crocheted.
I called to Stanley, "Here, boy! Don't be scared. We've met before, lots of times, when you came into my store. I gave you a dog biscuit. Remember?"
He gave me a bigger tail wag, so I extended my hand in a balled fist and let him have a sniff before I gave him some shoulder pats.
Stanley's fur was pleasantly soft and curly, the result of being the offspring of a Labrador Retriever and a Standard Poodle. This type of dog, called by the adorable name of Labradoodle, wasn't an official breed, but they were becoming more popular, or so it seemed to me. Stanley leaned in to my pets and offered me his chin for scratching. His fur matched the sandy brown hair of his parents.
"Stanley likes you," Marvin sa
id. I looked up to find him making intense eye contact with me. "He thinks you're a pretty lady."
"Thanks." I tried to keep my disgust at Marvin's flirtations off my face. "Is Marcy coming in today?"
"She's gone to pick up some coffee. The ol' ball and chain loves her lattes. That's four dollars, two or three times a day, but I guess things could be worse."
"That's right," I agreed. "It could be two or three bottles of wine a day."
He winced, looking guilty for an instant, then turned to my father. "How's the new laptop working out, Mr. Day? I hope everything's running smoothly, and you're stopping in to show me how that cane sword of yours works. Is there a button?"
My father smiled. "I'll show you, but not out here on the sidewalk. Sorta defeats the point of concealing a sword if you're flashing it all over the place."
"Let's go inside, then." Marvin tugged Stanley's rainbow-patterned leash, but the dog gave me a pitiful look and didn't move.
Marvin said, "What's the matter, boy? Not enough walking? Why don't you ask beautiful Stormy if she'll take you on a date?" Marvin offered the leash to me. "You could go meet up with Marcy. Hurry and she might even buy you a latte."
I exchanged a look with my father. He gave me the smallest nod, so I agreed to take the Labradoodle for a walk, so my father could go inside to chat about swords and laptops.
"Stanley doesn't like other dogs," Marvin said. "He's not aggressive or anything, but he's easily scared if he doesn't know them."
I took the dog's leash, and a minute later, I was strolling down the sidewalk with Stanley the Socially Awkward Labradoodle.
We'd gone all of a block when we encountered a man walking his dog, also a Labradoodle. The dogs greeted each other with wagging tails and then friendly sniffs. So much for Marvin's dire warnings, I thought. But then again, Stanley probably knew this dog from regular walks in the area.
We turned the corner, and were alone again. I reached down and ran my fingers through his delightfully fluffy fur while we walked.
Death of a Crafty Knitter Page 19