Thread and Buried

by Janet Bolin

  “Phew,” Haylee said. “Those things stink.”

  I heaved a sigh. “Tell me about it.”

  Sally wagged her tail.

  “Why did you come this way?” I asked Haylee. “Now we have to pass that cottage to get back.”

  “I didn’t want to lead anyone to our apartments.”

  I had to admit that her idea had merit.

  “Besides,” she continued, “if we go up to Beach Row and walk west, we’ll come to the road to the wharf, the marina, and the driveway to the Elderberry Bay Lodge. That road will take us to Shore Road. We can walk back to Threadville along Shore Road.” She glanced at my hands clasped over my pregnant-looking T-shirt. “No one could guess you’re hiding something.”

  I groaned. “Let’s go. Act nonchalant.”

  Hanging on to Sally’s leash, she strolled toward Beach Row. “And you’re just casually clutching your stomach. Maybe you’ll pass for a victim of food poisoning.”

  “I’m beginning to feel like one.” And not only from the lingering fumes of used kitty litter. Letting Sally tear into someone’s garbage was bad enough. Absconding with some of the garbage was worse. I told myself I’d throw it away after I examined whatever might be written on it, and then I’d take a nice long bath.

  Before we reached Beach Row, we stopped and listened. There was no sign of a car or a murderer sneaking along after us, so we turned and sauntered along Beach Row as if we were doing nothing more interesting than walking a dog.

  The ice cream stand had closed for the evening. We passed more cottages. The Lazy Daze Campground office was dark, and a gate barred the driveway.

  “Latecomers don’t get in?” Haylee whispered.

  “There’s a number pad.” I could barely make it out in the moonlight. “We could duck under the gate to search for Cassie.”

  Haylee laughed. “And if we found her?”

  “We’d know she wasn’t lying about where she was staying. But we don’t know what kind of car she drives, so unless she’s outside with a light shining on her face, I’m not sure how we could figure out which campsite is hers.” I lowered my voice. “More likely she did lie about where she’s staying, she’s in that cottage where we saw her shirt, and she’s scared stiff because someone was just prowling around it.”

  Although walking west on Beach Row to get ourselves east and home seemed counterintuitive, we kept going. Neither of us wanted to meet up with the person who’d been driving the car that could have been Max’s.

  In the harbor, the wharf was protected from the wilder waves out beyond the jetties. The moon peeked between scudding clouds, illuminating fishing boats and the backs of boathouses. The boathouse behind Tom’s fish market had two garage-type doors, pulled down to just above the water. Sally found the odors around the wharf interesting, but they were a bit too fishy for me. Poor Tally was missing all the fun.

  Beyond the wharf, sailboats, yachts, dinghies, and motorboats of every size clung to the marina docks. Breezes jangled metal fittings against masts. Inside one sailboat, a couple at a candlelit table shared a bottle of red wine and a card game. Music, laughter, and chattering voices came from the deck of a massive yacht moored farther out. We continued west until we saw the Elderberry Bay Lodge. Beyond the wide, pillared porch stretching the entire length of the building, lights made the lodge appear cozy and welcoming. We’d be back Friday night, dressed to party. With Clay.

  By then, I hoped to have lost this strange paunch and washed off the kitty litter odors.

  We turned onto the road leading uphill. Max’s BMW wasn’t among the few vehicles in the lodge’s parking lot. Where was it, near the gray cottage? I was glad that Haylee had led me this way, and not into the arms of the person who had been driving along Beach Row.

  Shore Road ran high above Beach Row, and more or less parallel to it. Finally, we were walking toward Threadville—and home. Trees on the slope below us sheltered us from the wind and diminished its sound. Breaking waves were farther away. Hearing each other became easier.

  “Why did you want all that garbage?” Haylee asked. “To find out what Cassie has been doing around Yolanda’s cottage when she was supposedly staying at the campground?”

  “Partly. Also, I suspect that the kittens who were dumped in my yard the night Neil was dragged there may have come from Yolanda’s cottage. Sally was very interested in kitty litter that spilled from the bag. She also dragged a catnip mouse and a kitten-sized pet bed out of the bag.”

  “People throw those things out. Especially kitty litter. They may have nothing to do with Mustache and Bow-Tie.”

  “The pet bed and catnip mouse looked new. Vicki is understandably curious about where those kittens came from.” I patted my stomach. “Maybe I’ll find the name and address of whoever left them behind. I won’t have to tell Vicki I helped myself to garbage unless something important is written on the paper.” But did people tear up unimportant garbage?

  At the foot of the hill below us, the roofs of tents and trailers peeked between trees in the Lazy Daze Campground.

  On the shoulder ahead of us, the tops of signs suddenly glittered. I whipped around.

  On Shore Road behind us, headlights crested a hill.

  Maybe the driver who had been near Yolanda’s cottage was searching for us. His lights hadn’t touched us. Yet.

  We sprinted to a drainage ditch leading toward the campground. Sneakers dislodging rounded stones, we clattered down its sloping side. Sally seemed quite pleased to join us in a new and different adventure.

  Breathing heavily, we crouched, our fingers on the ground. The paper in my impromptu kangaroo pouch shifted, but my shirt stayed in place, and none of the scraps fell out. Sally flopped down between us and panted, her tongue hanging out and her eyes bright in the moonlight.

  Haylee muttered, “If anyone saw us run, we could be in worse trouble than if we’d just kept walking.”

  We waited, watched, and listened. No lights approached. What had happened to that vehicle? Sally’s panting made it hard to hear anything else, but I thought maybe tires crunched on gravel as if a vehicle had stopped beside the road not far from us. And had turned its headlights off.

  I didn’t know who might be chasing us or if he knew that I’d helped myself to some of the garbage outside Yolanda’s cottage.

  An enormous concrete pipe ran underneath the road, from the far side to the drainage ditch we were in. What if I crept into the culvert and left the bits of paper under a stone, then came back later with a bag to collect it all?

  What if someone reported to Vicki that two tall women, dressed in black and walking a distinctive black and white dog, had rifled through someone’s garbage?

  Someone’s? Cassie’s, probably. I was positive I’d seen Cassie in that cottage on Monday evening, and a shirt like hers had been hanging on the back of a lawn chair a little while ago. Yet Cassie had told Mona—and Haylee and me—that she was staying in the campground.

  At that cottage, had Sally smelled the kittens she had adopted, or other cats?

  Cassie didn’t seem like a murderer, and she didn’t seem like someone who would dump kittens.

  While all this was spooling through my brain, I tensely and silently waited with Haylee for the sound of a car door, maybe for footsteps on the shoulder of the road.

  I mentally prepared to crawl into that culvert.

  I’d been staring at it blindly, but my eyes adjusted to the darkness under the road.

  Something was in the culvert, something lumpy and bulky.

  29

  I GASPED.

  “What?” Haylee whispered. She still had Sally on a leash. If my dog had noticed the thing in the culvert, she wasn’t particularly interested. She stared up toward the road. The vehicle still hadn’t passed.

  I pried my flashlight out of my pocket and shined it into the culvert.

  I told myself that the black plastic garbage bag was only litter tossed from a car, but there was something disturbingly organic abou
t the lumps in the bag. And if it had been only tossed, it probably wouldn’t have ended up neatly underneath the middle of the road.

  Still squatting among rounded stones, Haylee and I stared at the thing. Haylee’s breathing sounded as uneven as mine. Sally just went on panting in her slaphappy, grinning way.

  What was that other sound? A furtive footstep on the gravel shoulder above us?

  I flicked off my light and steadied myself with one hand flat on the ground. My position cramped my lungs. Holding my breath became painful.

  Vicki Smallwood’s voice rang out. “This is the police. Come out with your hands up.”

  “Vicki!” I shouted, finally letting my breath out in one whoosh. “Don’t shoot. It’s just me.”

  “And me,” Haylee added.

  “Who’s ‘me’?” Vicki demanded, her voice still sharp.

  I called back, “Willow and Haylee. And Sally-Forth.”

  “Is anyone else down there with you three?”

  I glanced at the bag. “Not that we know of.” No one who was alive, anyway.

  We clambered up the stony slope.

  Vicki took one look at us and shook her head in apparent disbelief. “What on earth were you two doing, running off the road and hiding from an approaching police car?” She shined a flashlight on our clothing. “In black again, too. Snooping? After we told you not to?”

  I defended our actions. “We didn’t know it was you. We didn’t hear a siren or see flashing lights.” Vicki could undoubtedly hear the tremors in my voice. Trying to calm myself, I added, “And you never know who might be coming along this dark, deserted highway.”

  “There’s been a murder,” Haylee contributed, as if that explained our actions. And as if our intrepid police chief didn’t already know about Neil’s death.

  “If it’s that dangerous, why were you out here in the first place?” Vicki asked.

  This time, I answered. “Walking the dog. We went to the beach and were taking a different route home.”

  Vicki peered down at Sally-Forth. “Only one dog?”

  I couldn’t blame her for being suspicious. I had never walked only one of the dogs before. Siblings, they were devoted to each other. Tally-Ho was probably going into deep mourning alone in our apartment. Well, almost alone. Would the kitties’ presence comfort him? I waved my hand in dismissal. “It’s a long story, and not important compared to . . . something in the culvert. I think you should see it.”

  “What is it?” she asked me.

  “I’m not sure.”

  As far as I could tell, she didn’t even try to hide her impatience. “Show me.” In her police-issue boots, she negotiated the gully’s clacking, rounded stones as if they were pavement. “Is Tally-Ho okay?”

  I kept my answer short. “He’s fine.”

  We didn’t go into the culvert. She swept her powerful flashlight over the garbage bag. “Good thing Detective Gartener is on his way.” Lit from below, her grin looked more devilish than she probably realized. “There might be maggots.”

  I shuddered. “Oh, please.”

  Vicki sniffed in the direction of the garbage bag. “I don’t smell anything terrible coming from it. Do you?”

  We had to admit that we didn’t. I added, “And Sally isn’t acting like anything in that bag is interesting to a dog. But I was freaked out because—” Oops, I didn’t want to tell her I’d been scared that someone was chasing us after perhaps seeing us root through garbage. Let Vicki think that finding Neil’s body in my yard was still freaking me out. Actually, it was.

  Vicki turned her head toward me and sniffed again. “Maybe I do smell something. It’s like used kitty litter, but it seems to be coming from you, Willow.”

  Not good. “Could be.”

  She crouched at the edge of the culvert. “Let’s have a look. Hold my flashlight for me?”

  Haylee hung on to Sally’s leash and stayed back while I aimed Vicki’s flashlight at the garbage bag. “It can’t have been there long,” I pointed out. “It’s not dusty.”

  Vicki put on gloves, duckwalked into the culvert, untied the bag’s red drawstring, and opened the top.

  Something white puffed out. A sweater?

  In the confines of the culvert, Vicki hefted the bag. “I think we’ve found the yarnbomber’s cape. Except that the part I can see of it is all white, it’s knit like the thing that managed to get itself onto my car inside my garage. And the bag is about the right weight for a garment that size made of bulky yarn.” Leaving the bag behind, she scooted out of the culvert and aimed her flashlight at Haylee. “Know anything about who hid this here?”

  Haylee blinked and shaded her eyes. “No, but I’m guessing that she didn’t want her husband finding her disguise—or is it her next yarnbombing project?—in an upstairs closet. Which lets Willow and my mothers and me off the hook. We each live alone.”

  Vicki shined her light down on the ground. “Except when my car was yarnbombed, Willow had a temporary roommate—me. Maybe Willow was going to take this back home after I left, and hadn’t gotten around to it? Maybe you two were here to pick it up tonight?”

  Naturally, I defended myself. “I’d have brought a car. Besides, Haylee and I were talking to Detective Gartener when your car was yarnbombed.”

  Vicki snapped her fingers. “That’s right.”

  I was sure she’d remembered all along. Police college had probably taught her how to keep people on edge. I added, “Besides, Trooper Jeffers said that the person in the cape ran like a man.”

  Above us, a car door slammed. “Vicki?”

  Detective Gartener’s deep melodious voice. Great. Now we’d really be on edge.

  “We’re down in the gutter, Toby!” Vicki was, perhaps, a little too cheerful.

  “Are you okay?” He slipped and slid down to join us.

  “Sure, we’re fine,” she answered. “Haylee and Willow were searching for maggots, but all they found was the yarnbomber’s cape.”

  “They did?” The admiration in that resonant voice was patently fake. “Let’s see.”

  She showed it to him. “What do we do,” she asked, “leave it here for the yarnbomber to retrieve later?”

  “Sure! And deputize Willow and Haylee to hide in the culvert twenty-four-seven watching for him. It might keep them out of mischief.”

  Uh-oh. Did he know what else we’d been up to that evening?

  He radioed for troopers to come check out the bag in the culvert, then turned to me. The flashlights gave him a devilish grin, also. “Where’s your other dog, Willow?”

  I might have known he’d come up with the question Vicki had asked.

  “She said it’s a long story,” Vicki told him. “We have time, Willow, while we wait for the troopers to show up. I don’t think anything is about to jump out of that bag at us.”

  I’d left Tally behind because I was afraid we’d be more than twice as noticeable with two dogs, but I’d had another reason for taking only Sally, and I gave it, rather tentatively. “On our walks to and from the ice cream stand, Sally had seemed very interested in one of the cottages. I thought maybe the kittens had come from it, and I didn’t bring Tally along because he might distract her.” I made up the last part, but in retrospect, it was a pretty good excuse for leaving Tally at home.

  “Let me guess.” Vicki pinched her nose. “Sally found some kitty litter.”

  I said in a small voice, “Yes.”

  Gartener folded his arms across his chest. “What else did your dog find?”

  Confession might not be good for the soul, exactly, but it was a relief. “She ripped open a garbage bag that was outside that cottage. Kitty litter spilled out, and she hauled a catnip mouse toy and a small pet bed out of the bag, too.”

  “Before you could stop her.” Vicki hadn’t lost her sarcastic touch.

  This time, I had my excuse ready. “You asked me to let you know if I found out where the kittens came from.”

  “I also asked you—told you—to let u
s do the investigating,” she scolded me.

  But Gartener still seemed interested in our exploits. “Where did your dog find all these things?”

  Haylee quickly rattled off the address.

  I held my breath. Would they know that the street number wasn’t on the back of that cottage, and that we’d paid particular attention to the front? Would we have to confess that we’d done a reverse lookup on Yolanda’s number?

  Gartener stared at Vicki. “Isn’t that—” He paused.

  “Yes. Same address.” Her answer was clipped.

  “Same address as what?” I asked, hoping I wouldn’t have to divulge what I already knew.

  Both officers stared at me. “Might as well tell her,” Gartener said, finally. “It’s not exactly a secret.”

  Vicki heaved a sigh. “That’s the address for the phone number you gave us for Yolanda, the woman who made the salads at the picnic.”

  “You’ve talked to her?” Haylee put a friendly, interested smile in her voice.

  Vicki shook her head. “She doesn’t answer that number, or the door.”

  I leaped into the fray with an obvious statement. “You need a search warrant for that cottage.”

  30

  “WHAT WOULD WE BASE A SEARCH WARrant on?” Gartener challenged me.

  It was probably the scraps of paper in my shirt that gave me the sudden desire to fidget. “To find out if the kittens came from that cottage, in case someone dumped them along with Neil’s body? They showed up about the same time.”

  Vicki turned to Gartener. “Assuming that Yolanda Smith concocted her world-famous bacteria and bocconcini salad there, can’t we ask to search for rat poison?”

  Thinning his lips, Gartener nodded.

  I should have been proud of myself—and of Sally-Forth—for discovering that those kittens might have once been in Yolanda’s cottage. Instead, I felt like the scraps of paper in my shirt were probably glowing or something, and I might as well make a complete confession before Vicki and Gartener noticed them. I offered in a small voice, “Bits of paper blew out of the bag.”