Interrupting what I thought was turning into one of the most interesting conversations regarding a sport I’d never paid any attention to, the doorbell rang again.
“You want me to get it?” Marion asked.
“No, I got it,” I said.
I hurried to the front door again and saw only the very top of Jodie’s blond head through the window.
“This should be everyone,” I muttered to myself before opening the door.
“Hey, Clare,” she said as she walked in and directly past me. “Omar told me about your ideas regarding the doors on the shelves. Can you explain better?”
Again, before I could speak, the buzz of conversation reached us from the dining room.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m interrupting,” Jodie said. “Who’s here?”
I smiled. “You want some lasagna?”
“No, I ate.”
“Come on back anyway,” I said.
“Jodie! Come on in. There’s plenty. Want some dinner?” Chester said.
Once Jodie was seated and after she made sure that I knew she was pleased about Seth’s appearance (she did this with an obvious eyebrow lift my direction—everyone else saw it and Seth smiled too), I repeated the ideas I’d shared with Omar.
“Maybe another piece of the puzzle, but I don’t know how it all fits together,” Jodie said. “We’re getting a list of the old mine locations, and we’ll see if the number combinations work with any of them. What do you think, there’s a mine out there waiting to be mined? Full of silver or something?” Jodie gave in and spooned a serving of lasagna onto a plate.
“And someone killed for the location?” Marion said.
Everyone was looking at me. “I really don’t know, but it sure seems like something to be explored.”
As if we’d all been cast in a black-and-white comedy film from the last century, the doorbell rang again.
“I have never been so popular,” I said as I stood and excused myself once more.
As with Seth and Jodie, I recognized the person on the other side of the door by the small part of them that I saw through the window. Creighton’s uniform-clad shoulder told me that the dinner party was about to become too crowded.
“Hi,” I said as I opened the door.
“Hi, Clare. Is Jodie here?”
“Yeah, you want to come in?”
“No,” he said. I was sure he heard the noises from the other room too. “I just wonder if you could send Jodie out here.”
“Sure. One second.”
I gathered Jodie and sent her to the front porch. I closed the door behind her, leaving them alone, but I didn’t want to. Something was up. Creighton could have called Jodie. He came and got her. It seemed like a sign of a big deal.
I could hear their voices but couldn’t distinguish their words. There was no laughter, just seriousness. Just as I turned away from the door to give up trying to eavesdrop, Jodie swung it open and stuck her head through.
“Gotta go,” she said.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Something out at Homer Mayfair’s. I’ll have to give you more details later.”
She shut the door again before I could comment. I hurried to the front window and watched as both she and Creighton got into his police car. The second the engine started, Creighton also turned on the flashing lights atop the roof and the siren. He made a quick, tire-squealing turn and then zipped down the hill, I assumed toward Purple Springs Valley and Homer’s house.
“What’s going on?” Chester said from behind me.
“Creighton was here to pick up Jodie. There’s something going on at Homer Mayfair’s.”
Chester’s eyebrows came together. “They rushed out of here?”
“Yes.”
“That’s worrisome.”
“I agree.”
Chester said, “I don’t think I should call Homer and ask what’s up. Until this morning when he came in, he and I hadn’t talked in quite some time. It might be more intrusive than friendly to make that kind of call now.”
“I’m sure we’ll know what’s going on soon enough. Come on, let’s have dessert. I have enough even if a few more people stop by,” I said, trying to add a little levity to a suddenly serious moment.
“Excellent,” Chester said. He looked over his shoulder to confirm no one was behind him before he continued in an exaggerated whisper, “He’s back, I see. Told you. And before twenty-four hours were even up.”
I smiled and led the way back to the pleasantly crowded table.
24
Dessert was just as good as dinner. Tony’s chocolate chip bread pudding rendered us all blissfully silent as we chewed and swallowed. I asked Ramona if bread pudding was a southern dish. She said that it was and that Tony had figured out how to make even his American dishes sweet, creamy, and delicious.
Shortly after dessert and coffee, Chester, Ramona, and Marion all seemed to become very tired. Marion performed an exaggerated stretch and yawn to punctuate her sheer exhaustion.
“They weren’t too obvious, were they?” I said as I closed the door behind them.
“Not at all,” Seth said.
“Coffee on the porch? It’s a great night.”
“That sounds perfect. What can I do to help?”
“Go on out. I’ll be right there.”
Only a few moments later, we were on the front porch, sitting side by side in the same spot Jodie and I had sat the night before, sipping from freshly filled mugs. It was another perfectly cool summer evening, and I’d put on the same sweater I’d worn to Seth’s apartment.
“Even with the lights from the town, the stars here are stunning,” Seth said.
“I know, I have a great spot,” I said.
“You do,” he said as he peered up from under the porch roof at the sky.
“Hey, Seth, I’m so sorry about . . .”
“No need to apologize again. Let’s just move forward, Clare. We can start by you telling me if you have any sort of criminal record so I can hold it against you someday when we’re having a big fight.”
I laughed. “I’m clean. Way clean. So boring that I’m sure my high school teachers thought I was just one big act. I did what I was supposed to do. I even did all the extra credit.”
Seth looked at me. “I was that way too, except I wasn’t a pretty blonde.”
“Glasses back then too?”
“More back then than now. I only need them now after my eyes get tired and I want to see small things close up. Back then I needed them for everything, and I even had tape holding them together over the nose. Lasik, it’s a great thing.”
“I’m too chicken,” I said as I looked his direction and pushed my glasses back up my nose.
For a long moment, we looked at each other, me staring at Seth’s face in the mostly dark. Him staring back. I wondered what he was thinking, but I guessed he was also wondering what I was thinking. We probably weren’t all that complicated.
Just as we both leaned in toward each other, hopefully for another shot at that first kiss, my phone buzzed, vibrated, and played the Star Wars Stormtrooper theme. Jodie had programmed the ringtone into my phone to announce that she was calling.
“Sorry,” I said as I reached for the phone I’d placed on the side table.
Seth smiled.
“Jodie, what’s up?”
“Hate to bother you, Clare, but could you meet me at the station? Right away?” Jodie said.
“Uhm. Sure,” I said. There really was nothing else I could say, even if I was in trouble again.
No matter if Jodie was calling as a police officer or as my best friend, she wouldn’t want me to meet her if it wasn’t important.
Leaving the mugs on the porch as I shut the front door, I explained to Seth what I was doing.
“You
sure you don’t want me to go with you?” he said as we stood next to my car.
“No, it’ll be okay. Hey, I might have a record after tonight.”
“And we’ll have so much more in common,” Seth said.
The typically awkward good-bye moment wasn’t all that awkward. I was in a hurry and Seth knew it.
“Call me when you’re done,” he said as I got into the car.
“It might be late,” I said out the open car window.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said.
I told him I would call, and then I turned the car around almost as well as Creighton had turned his, and headed down the hill.
25
“I don’t understand,” I said as I sat, my knees weakening with the news. It was a good thing there was a chair behind me.
“I’m sorry, Clare,” Jodie said.
“He’s unconscious? They don’t know if he’ll make it?” I said.
“Yes, we found him in his office.”
“Oh, no. I’m so sorry. I saw him just this morning, Jodie. Just this morning. And yesterday, I sat in his house and we chatted. What happened?”
Jodie had taken me into the same interrogation room I’d visited recently. She’d met me at the front door of the station, immediately took my arm, and guided me toward the room. We’d passed Creighton, Omar, and Kelly, all of them with concerned frowns below too-bright, anxious eyes. I’d seen that they were all upset about something.
Jodie shook her head. “Head injury, but you don’t need those details. I brought you here for a couple reasons, Clare. Bear with me, okay?”
I blinked at her tone. “Okay.”
“Look, Homer was found in his office, left for dead. The office had been torn apart, a really big mess.”
I nodded.
“And, well, there was a note on his desk. We think it was written by Homer himself, but of course we can’t be sure. We’re having a handwriting expert look at it, but we can’t know for sure at the moment.”
“You said that twice—that you can’t be sure. I hear you.”
“Right. Well, the note mentions you. It says . . . It’s like a journal entry, actually, in a notebook that we think he used as a journal. He has a number of them. Does that make sense?”
“Come on, Jodie, just tell me what it says.”
“Specifically, it says, ‘Clare Henry, typewriters, dangerous.’”
“Well, that could just be a note that I stopped by, that we talked about the typewriters. I have no idea what ‘dangerous’ means. Do you think it has something to do with me or with whoever hurt him?” My voice was pitched too high, my breath a little shorter than normal, and I felt like I might start to cry.
“There’s a little more.”
“Go on.”
“It looks like the item that they hit him with was left behind, and again I hate to go into too much detail, but it was an old Underwood. We think it was Mirabelle’s.”
“What?” I couldn’t understand how Mirabelle’s typewriter got to Homer’s office, let alone the fact that it might have been used to try to kill Homer. “Oh no, are you going to tell me something happened to Mirabelle?”
Jodie took a deep breath and then put her hands over mine on my lap. “We can’t find her, Clare. She’s not at her house.”
My thoughts went into high gear, and I spoke even more quickly, not making complete sense. “Happens. She goes places. Salt Lake City? Happens. Her car, the Subaru?”
“Right. Her car’s not at her house. She doesn’t have a cell phone. But, and this is good news, there’s no indication that anyone broke into her house or that any violence occurred there.”
“You brought me here to tell me all of this?” I said as I stood. I wanted to search for Mirabelle, but that would have been impossible, of course. I would have gone to her house and found a way in, but after that I wouldn’t have had any idea what to do. I also wanted to make sure Chester and Marion had made it home okay. Marion. Maybe Marion wasn’t out of danger. I was suddenly concerned about my entire family.
“I need to check on people,” I said.
“I know. Chester’s fine. Marion’s fine too. We even made sure Seth is fine. We’ve got that covered. I asked you here, of course, because I wanted to give you all the news in person, but I also didn’t want us to be interrupted so you can give me some information I need.”
“Anything,” I said, but I still didn’t want to sit back down.
“I need to you tell me about Homer and Chester’s friendship from all those years ago, whatever you can tell me. And I also need—really need—you to tell me about your building. Is there anything more about the carved doors that you remember?”
I sat slowly.
“I don’t know much about their friendship, except that I know they were friends at one time,” I said. “But that was way before my time. You’ll have to ask my dad maybe.” I looked at Jodie. “What’s going on? Why do you need this?”
“We’re trying to solve a murder and an attempted murder. Homer, Chester, Mirabelle—they were friends back in the day, right?” she said, though I didn’t think she’d answered my question of why she needed the information in the first place.
“Chester and Mirabelle have always been friends,” I said. “But I don’t know anything more than that. Mirabelle got the typewriter from Homer back when he was the editor of the paper, but that was a long time ago and no one remembers the details.”
“Were Chester and Mirabelle or Homer and Mirabelle ever more than just friends?”
“No! I mean, no for Chester and Mirabelle. Chester was with my grandmother forever, since they were thirteen, I think. When Homer and I were talking, he mentioned how much he admired Mirabelle, but I didn’t get any sense that hearts had been broken, if that’s what you’re asking. I have no idea who Homer was married to, but he’s been a widower for as far back as I can remember.” I thought back to what Homer had said about the newspaper article and how he was angry at Chester for talking to the Salt Lake City reporter. Had that really been the reason for his irritation? But I had no doubt that Chester and Mirabelle hadn’t been more than friends. It just wasn’t possible. I didn’t quite know what I didn’t know, and my imagination was beginning to get carried away. “There was a newspaper article about the press that Chester built. He did the interview with the Salt Lake paper instead of Homer. Homer’s been angry about it for years, but they seem to tease each other now. Ask Chester.”
“Okay, we will,” Jodie said.
“Okay.”
“Now, is there anything else you can tell me about those doors?” Jodie said.
“No, nothing. The stories that Chester tells people are just silly things he makes up. He mentioned that the mining company made up stories too, but he wasn’t sure about any of those other than they were pretty fanciful, trolls and things. Marion might be able to tell you something. She might have recognized a real place attached to one of the doors. I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her. Why do you care about that?”
Again, Jodie didn’t answer my question directly. “Do you know if any of the owners of the mining company are still alive and around Star City?”
“I have no idea, but Chester might know. Wait, Jodie, I never asked you if you tracked down Brian O’Malley or if you confirmed if he was the one who broke into the empty store. Please don’t dodge my question again. Did you?”
“Yes, I tracked him down. Yes, I talked to him, but he denied breaking in. There are so many fingerprints there that we’ve only started with the ones on and around the back door. No match to Brian O’Malley yet.”
“Thank you for answering,” I said. “Now what, Jodie? What do we do next?”
“We do nothing. You go home, and I start searching other avenues. We have an advantage. I doubt anyone could have predicted that we’d visit Homer today, but we did simply because
you showed me the typewriters he brought in, and the notion that he brought in five typewriters that mostly only needed a little dusting just kept bothering me. You helped, Clare, by letting me know about them. It’s too bad we didn’t get to his house sooner, but that’s on us. His attacker probably thought no one would find him for a long time. If he wakes up, we’ll learn more, but with Mirabelle unaccounted for . . . well, we just have to keep at it.”
“Jodie, what about any Mayfairs at the goat relocation? Did you find them?”
“Mutt confirmed that there were no Mayfairs on his list of attendees. It means that none were truly there or that they snuck in. We’re still trying to put it all together.”
“Oh, Jodie, I still haven’t looked for the cards.”
“It’s okay. We’re operating on the idea that they were there.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re helping, Clare. I promise you are. Look, I’m going to get you home. Try to rest. I’ll call you the second we find Mirabelle, and I have no doubt that we’ll find her, safe and sound.”
“There’s nothing else I can do? Come with you? Wait here?”
“No. I’m sorry I had to call you back in, but it was important. Thank you.”
Jodie escorted me back through the station. I didn’t pay attention to any other faces as we marched through, but there were no sounds of cheerfulness.
“Go directly home, Clare,” Jodie said as she closed my car door. “We’ll be checking on you.”
“You think I’m in danger?”
“No, but it’s always good to be careful.”
“You are worried about me.”
“I’m always worried about you, Clare. You’re kind of a nutty girl, but just . . . well, just be safe.” Jodie tried to smile, but it looked more like a pained squint.
As I drove back up the hill, I took deep, cleansing breaths, but I still didn’t feel better. Homer was attacked and nearly killed? Mirabelle was missing? And there was nothing I could do about either of those situations. My stomach hurt and I shivered.
I’d been so deep in my thoughts that I didn’t notice Seth crossing the street until he met me as I got out of my car.
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