by Kathi Daley
“I guess we should get you home,” I said, remembering Lizzy’s four-thirty timeline.
“There are three houses down that little cul-de-sac. Let’s try them, and then we’ll go,” Lizzy suggested.
I couldn’t help but notice the moisture in her eyes.
“I really thought we’d find her today,” she said.
“I did too. Let’s try those three houses. It’s a quiet street with large yards. If I were a cat and wanted a safe place to hang out, I’d hang out there.”
As we approached the second of the three houses, Lizzy let out a happy squeal. “That’s her.” She pointed to a cat sitting in a window. “That’s Snowball.”
She ran to the door and rang the bell, but no one answered. I knocked hard enough to be heard if someone was upstairs, but still, no one answered. “I guess no one is home,” I said. “We can come back in a little while.”
“No!” Lizzy insisted. “I’m not leaving without Snowball. Call the cops. These people stole my cat.”
I stepped away from the front porch to get a better look at the window where the cat was sitting. “Chances are they didn’t steal Snowball. Chances are they saw the cat wandering around and thought she was a stray and let her in.”
“I’m not leaving without her,” Lizzy insisted.
I paused as I considered what to do. Maybe we could get a phone number for whoever lived here from one of the neighbors, or perhaps I’d just call Lizzy’s mother. I’d begun mentally ticking off my options when I noticed that Lizzy was no longer standing beside me. It was then that I saw the open door, which I headed toward just as Lizzy let out a blood-curdling scream.
Chapter 5
Once I realized that the reason behind Lizzy’s scream was a very dead body, I called Deputy Todd, and then I called Lizzy’s mother at the Rambling Rose and told her she needed to come and pick up both her daughter and her cat. Apparently, Deputy Todd had been close by because he arrived a couple minutes after I’d made my call. After I greeted him and filled him in as to what we’d found, he went inside, and Lizzy and I waited for her mother.
“What happened to that man?” Lizzy asked as she clutched her cat as tightly as she dared.
“It looked like someone stabbed him. I really didn’t get a good look, so I guess we’ll have to wait to hear for sure.”
“Do you know him?” she asked.
I had to admit that the girl was surprisingly calm considering what she’d just found.
“No. Did you recognize him?”
“No.”
Lizzy smiled, and I turned to look behind me. Her mother had just pulled up.
“Mom!” Lizzy ran toward the car and into her mother’s arms.
Her mother hugged her and then put both Lizzy and the cat into the car. Once they were settled, Lizzy’s mom headed in my direction. “What happened?” she asked.
I quickly explained that Lizzy had seen her cat in the window of the house we currently stood in front of, and when no one answered the door after we’d rung the bell and knocked, she’d let herself in and found the body before I could stop her.
Amy admitted that Lizzy was the sort to act on impulse. She asked me if I knew who the dead man was, and I responded that I didn’t recognize the man but that he appeared to be around twenty. He wore jeans and a t-shirt promoting a popular band, but now that I thought about it, I seemed to recall that his feet were bare.
“I have to say that Lizzy took the whole thing really well,” I said to Amy after I’d caught her up on the facts I had at this point. “I would have expected hysterics from a ten-year-old.”
“Lizzy is a practical and logical person,” her mom responded. “She really isn’t the sort to meltdown or become overly upset. If Lizzy wants or needs something, she figures out how to get it. If there’s a situation that’s out of her control, such as a dead man on the floor of a house she let herself into, she’ll generally just defer any sort of action or emotion to those better equipped to handle the situation.” She turned and looked back toward the car. “I’m sure she’ll be fine now that she has Snowball back. She’s her anchor. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to that cat. I really can’t thank you enough for helping Lizzy find her.”
“I’m glad we were able to find Snowball, and I’m sorry Lizzy ended up seeing what she did.”
“Like I said, it really wasn’t your fault.” She paused briefly as a look crossed her face that seemed to indicate that Amy wasn’t quite as relaxed about the whole thing as she let on. “I should get Lizzy home. I’ll send her around to your office later in the week to pay you and thank you personally.”
“Lizzy doesn’t have to pay me. I was happy to help.”
The woman shook her head. “No. I think it’s important for Lizzy to pay you for your services. That was the deal. I doubt there’s more than seven or eight dollars’ worth of coins in that jar, but entering into a contract and then fulfilling the terms of that contract will be a good life lesson for her.”
“Okay.” I supposed I could see that the woman’s logic made sense. “I’m looking forward to talking with Lizzy later in the week.”
I watched as Parker Peterson pulled up and parked across the street just as Amy made it back to her car. If there was one thing I’d learned to count on, it was Parker showing up to get the story if there was anything interesting going on.
“So what’s going on?” Parker asked, as soon as Amy drove away and an ambulance pulled into the drive.
“A dead man on the living room floor. I don’t know much more than that. I was in the neighborhood, helping my client look for her lost cat when she found the body. It appears he was stabbed.”
Parker tucked a lock of her long red hair behind her ear. “Anyone you recognize?”
I shook my head. “No. The victim is a male. I’d say he’s probably in his early twenties, although I didn’t get a real good look. Dark hair on the long side. He was lying on the floor, so I can’t say exactly how tall. Maybe six feet. He was lying on his stomach, so I didn’t get a good look at his face.”
“How long has he been there?”
“A day or two. Like I said, I didn’t get a good look, but I could tell the body had been there for a while, so we aren’t looking at something that just happened.”
Parker pulled out her cell phone and dialed a number. She spoke to someone named Connie, who must work for the county since she was asking about the identity of the homeowner. She looked at me after hanging up. “The house is owned by a man named Carl Weatherby. He lives in San Francisco and uses the home as a vacation rental.”
“Was the house rented this week?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out next.”
Parker then called another number and spoke to someone named Nancy. She gave Nancy the address and then asked if the house was one of the rentals she managed. It wasn’t. Parker hung up and tried another rental company where a woman named Heidi confirmed that the house was included in their rental inventory. She told Parker that the previous renter had left this past Sunday, and if there was someone in the house, they weren’t supposed to have been since the house hadn’t been rented since then.
“So maybe the man was a squatter,” I said.
“Maybe,” Parker agreed. “It does happen more often than you might think in these parts.” She turned and glanced around the immediate area just as the coroner pulled up. “Deputy Todd is going to be a while. I think I’m going to knock on a few doors.”
I knew that Deputy Todd was going to hate that. I figured I should stay around until he was done doing whatever it was that he was doing inside the house. I decided to follow Parker’s lead, and we walked side by side across the lawn to the front porch of the house next door. A tall man with salt and pepper hair answered. Parker introduced herself and then asked if he had seen anyone at the house next door in the past few days. He said he hadn’t. Parker then repeated the exercise at the house on the other side of the rental as well as the four houses
directly across the street. Of those houses with residents at home, no one claimed to have heard or seen a thing.
We’d just paused to discuss the possibility of spreading out a bit when Deputy Todd walked out of the house where the body had been found. We both headed in that direction.
“I should have known you’d be here.” He scowled at Parker and then turned to look at me. “And what is it with you and murder victims? You do realize that most people go their entire lives without stumbling over a dead body, and this is your second one in less than two months.”
“It was actually Lizzy, the young girl I was with, who found the body. She was trying to retrieve her cat from inside the house.”
“Yeah, about that...” He pulled out a notepad and pen. “I’d like you to go over exactly what happened one more time.”
Exactly what happened was actually pretty simple. Lizzy and I were looking for her cat, we saw her sitting in the window, no one answered the door when we rang the bell or knocked, so Lizzy opened the door and went in to get the cat. After entering the living room, she found the body, and I called 911. Lizzy went home with her mom, and Parker and I had been outside talking while we waited for him.
Once I said my spiel, Parker jumped in and began asking questions. We were able to find out that the man had been dead for about two days. He’d been stabbed twice in the back, which had caused him to fall forward. He didn’t have a wallet or any sort of ID on him. Todd suspected the killer might have taken it with them when they left. The coroner still needed to examine the body to list the official cause of death, but based on what Todd could see, it appeared to be a simple stabbing. He planned to run the victim’s fingerprints when he got back to the police station in the hope of getting a hit and determining his identity. Todd told us that the crime scene team would be by shortly, and he instructed that under no circumstances were Parker or I to go inside the house.
Parker wanted to get a photo, but Todd wasn’t letting her near the place. I decided to head back to my office to wrap up a few things and then home for the evening. Parker told me she’d call me once she had a chance to dig around and find out more about the identity of the body Lizzy had found. I was, of course, interested in who might have killed him, but I suspected the answer to that question wouldn’t be an easy one to answer.
By the time I’d made it back to the office, word of the murder had gotten around. I supposed Deputy Todd speeding through town with his lights on might have clued everyone in on the fact that there was something going on. Once that had been established, it wouldn’t have taken the local gossip line much time to discover the basic details of the emergency, jump into action, and fill everyone in.
“Did you hear the news?” Peggy Newsome asked as soon as I stepped foot in the beauty salon next door after storing my purse in my office.
“If you mean the news about the murder victim over on Oak Street, I did. In fact, I was with my client when she found him while we were looking for her cat.”
“Can you imagine walking into a house and finding a man dead on the floor like that?” the woman with the short brown hair having her hair styled by Peggy asked.
“I bet that client of yours is going to be traumatized for life,” Ella Joseph, who co-owned Hair Affair with Peggy, commented.
“She actually seemed to be okay after our encounter,” I informed the group. “Lizzy screamed when she first stumbled across the man, but once she got that first shriek out of her system, she seemed to focus her attention on the cat she’d just found and really did seem perfectly calm and only marginally affected. Her mother confirmed that Lizzy is the sort to take things as they come and not let things bother her that she can’t control.”
“If she’s able to maintain that quality, it will serve her well in life,” the woman with long blond hair in Ella’s chair commented.
“Have they identified either the victim or the killer?” Peggy asked as she used a curling iron on her client’s hair.
“No,” I answered. “The victim looked to be young. Early twenties. I have no idea who the man is or if he’s a local. A lot of college-aged visitors are in town right now.”
“There are a lot of them,” the woman with the short brown hair said. “Too many if you ask me. I appreciate the power of the tourism dollar but hosting events such as the fitness competition, which seems to attract a younger crowd, is just asking for trouble. Seems like all any of those kids want to do is get drunk and have sex.”
“There’s nothing wrong with either of those past times.” Peggy chuckled. “In fact, I, for one, could certainly use more of both in my life.”
“Maybe, but you aren’t a normal forty-five-year-old,” the woman sitting in Peggy’s chair argued.
“I’ve enjoyed the young energy this week,” Ella said. “Sure, there have been a few rowdy groups that needed to be broken up and sent home to sleep it off, but at times, this sleepy little town can be just a bit too sleepy for my taste.”
“Of course, you’re apt to enjoy the energy of the younger crowd. You’re still a babe yourself,” the woman with the dark hair said. “Once you get to be my age, you’ll appreciate our sleepy little town.”
The debate continued between the woman with the dark brown hair, who looked to be around forty-five, and the woman with the long blond hair in Ella’s chair, who looked to be in her mid-twenties. Ella, who was also probably around twenty-five, and Peggy, the saucy redhead, who I was willing to bet was actually the most outrageous of the group despite the fact that other than the dark-haired woman, she was probably the oldest of the group, joined in when the opportunity presented itself. It didn’t seem that I had a lot to contribute to the conversation at this point, so I said my goodbyes and headed back to my office. I had a few things to wrap up, and then I intended to go home to my cottage where I knew Kai and Kallie were waiting. I wasn’t sure if Jemma and Josie would be around tonight, but I figured that since I had some interesting news to share, I should call them and see if they wanted to get together. The three of us, along with Parker, had formed a team of sorts. I wasn’t sure exactly how the whole thing had evolved, but it did seem that if there was a mystery to solve, the four of us would work together to find the answers needed to bring the story home.
Chapter 6
As it turned out, Jemma and Josie weren’t home when I’d gone by their place the previous evening. They hadn’t mentioned that they’d had plans, but then again, there wasn’t any reason for them to share their plans with me. It had been a stressful day, and I felt at loose ends without a specific task to perform, so I’d decided to take the dogs for a long walk. By the time we got back to the cottage, I was exhausted, but despite the long walk, I’d slept restlessly.
I supposed the phone call that I was expecting from Adam this morning had been on my mind even though I’d tried to push it out of my consciousness. Given the time difference, I wasn’t sure what time he’d call, so I set my alarm for six-thirty, figuring I could sit by the fire and drink coffee while I waited.
Luckily, I didn’t have to wait long.
“Adam,” I said after only one ring. The call had come through around seven-thirty. By then, I’d downed three cups of coffee and was wide awake despite my sleepless night.
“I didn’t wake you, did I?” he asked, sounding somewhat uncertain.
“No. I’ve been up for an hour,” I answered honestly. “How’s your trip going?”
“It’s going fine. I finished the work I needed to get done, and I’ve met with everyone I needed to meet with. I had some extra time, and I’ve been missing my family, so I decided to head to England and spend some time with everyone.” He paused and then continued. “Actually, that isn’t entirely true. I did decide to head to England, but my visit had more to do with your mystery than my desire to visit with my family.”
“Oh?” He had my attention.
“When I initially called Olivia and asked if she knew anything about the two little girls who stayed at the house during the su
mmer of nineteen ninety-five, she told me that she had no idea who you were or how you came to be at the house on Piney Point. I didn’t challenge her answer at the time, but I will admit that her statement never rang true to me. Keep in mind that my mom and Olivia were close. In fact, I would say that my mom was closer to Olivia than she was to anyone else during the time you and Avery would have shown up at the house. It’s bothered me from the beginning that Olivia didn’t seem to know about what went on that summer. It is true that my mom was in England and not at home when you were visiting, but despite the fact that my parents didn’t get along all that well, they did seem to keep one another informed about whatever was going on in their lives, and as far as I know, they never lied to each other.”
“You were just a child. Maybe you didn’t know that lies were exchanged.”
“Maybe. But it seems to me that if Dad had been harboring a woman and two children who were in some way connected to the family in England, then my mom, being in England at the time, would have known about it. So would Olivia, for that matter.”
“So you decided to just show up and talk to Olivia in person.”
“I did. The one piece of information about Marilee that we’d managed to dig up was that she was somehow connected to the family in England. I asked Archie if he recognized the name, and he said he didn’t, and I’ve tried to remember if I ever met anyone named Marilee during my visits and finally decided that I hadn’t, but the name did feel familiar. The more I considered the situation, the more clear it became to me that if Marilee was indeed connected to the family in England, it made sense that Scarlett, the matriarch of that side of the family, or Olivia, her eldest child and the current epicenter of the family, would know who she was.”