by Ryan, Sofie
Nick nodded. “Yeah, he told me he’s gotten involved with the small-house movement.”
“I didn’t know you guys stayed in touch,” I said. I wondered why Liam hadn’t told me.
Nick shrugged. “Off and on.”
I hung the guitar back on the wall and turned to face him. “I’m thinking the reason you’re here isn’t because you wanted a tour of the shop or to catch up on my family.”
“Yeah, I do have a few questions.”
Elvis had wandered in from wherever he’d been. He twisted around my legs and I bent down and picked him up. “No offense,” I said, “but isn’t that Michelle’s job?”
Nick leaned over to give the cat a scratch under his chin, which pretty much earned him a friend for life. “It’s mine, too,” he said. “The police are trying to figure out whether or not a crime’s been committed. I’m trying to figure out how and why Mr. Fenety died. We overlap a little.”
I explained about the workshop and Maddie not showing up. Elvis was leaning sideways, his head nestled in the crook of my elbow. I shifted him slightly in my arms and he turned his head just enough to shoot me a look. “I knew Charlotte would go over there to check on Maddie. I went with her, just in case.”
I recounted how we’d tried the front door and then decided to see if Maddie had been working in the backyard and just lost track of time.
“What did the body look like?”
I narrowed my eyes and pictured Arthur Fenety’s body in my mind. “It . . . he was slumped to one side and his eyes were closed. There was something at the corner of his mouth.” I raised a hand to my face.
“Where was Maddie?”
“She was just sitting there,” I said. “I think she was in shock.”
Elvis started to purr. Nick smiled at the cat. “Do you have any idea how long she’d been sitting there?”
“I don’t know. A couple of minutes, I guess. She said she’d been making an omelet for the two of them. Then the phone rang.” I paused for a moment, picturing the table and running Maddie’s words through my head again. “When, uh, she went back outside Arthur Fenety was dead.”
He caught my hesitation and his brown eyes narrowed. “What is it?” he asked. “Did you remember something else?”
“I just realized that I’m going to have to tell all of this to Gram over the phone.”
Nick gave me a sympathetic smile. “Your grandmother and Maddie are close.”
“They’ve been friends as far back as I can remember.”
My left arm was starting to fall asleep. I set Elvis down on the floor again. He shook himself and started washing his face but I saw him dart little glances at Nick and at me, almost as though he wanted to listen to the rest of our conversation but didn’t want us to know. I reminded myself that he was a cat and what he was probably thinking about was how he could get another scratch.
“Is there anything else you can tell me?” Nick asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said, brushing cat hair off my sleeve.
“If you think of anything, will you call me?” he said, pulling his keys from his pocket. “Please. You have my cell, don’t you?”
“I do,” I said. Elvis stretched and headed for the stairs.
“So, tell me about your new job,” I said as we headed toward the back door. “You’re not like the kind of crime-scene investigator I’ve seen on TV.”
He laughed. “No one’s like the crime-scene investigators on TV.” He pulled a hand back through his hair. “I told you I’m working for the medical examiner’s office.”
I nodded.
“My official job title is medicolegal death investigator. It’s my job to figure out the cause and manner of death when someone dies in this part of the state. Sometimes I have to investigate, like today. That means taking pictures, talking to witnesses, collecting evidence, working with the police. Other times it’s as simple as taking a basic report and having the deceased’s doctor sign the death certificate.”
We stepped out into the parking lot. “So you’re doing this because you’re trained as an EMT?” I asked.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he said with a shrug. “But I actually took a course in St. Louis.” He narrowed his gaze. “Mom didn’t tell you.”
“She left out a few details.”
Nick shook his head. “She wanted me to take the teaching job. And she still has this fantasy that I’ll go to med school eventually.” He pulled a hand back through his hair. “She likes the sound of my son the doctor.”
“She just wants you to be happy,” I said, as we stepped outside.
He smiled. “I am.” He still had that great mischievous little-boy smile, but I could see lines etched into the skin around his eyes. “How about dinner sometime down at Sam’s? We can catch up.” The smile widened into a grin. “And maybe it’ll get my mother to stop asking not so subtle questions about my love life.”
I smiled back at him. “Somehow I don’t think it’ll work, but dinner sometime would be nice.”
“I’ll call you, then.” He pulled his car keys out of his pocket. “Have a good night, Sarah,” he said, and then he headed for the street.
I went back inside. I found Elvis in my office, sitting next to my bag. “Ready to go home?” I asked.
“Meow,” he said, and then he licked his whiskers in case it hadn’t occurred to me that he was hungry.
Elvis rode shotgun all the way home. In the few months I’d had the cat I’d discovered that he liked riding around in the truck. It made me wonder what his past life had been like. When I’d driven him back to the shop from Sam’s after he’d become my cat, I couldn’t help laughing at the way he’d watched the traffic at every stop sign and how he’d twisted to look over his shoulder as I backed into my parking spot.
When I pulled into the driveway he jumped out of the truck without waiting for me to lift him off the seat and headed for the backyard. “Supper’s in about fifteen minutes,” I called after him.
He meowed in acknowledgment and kept going.
I gathered the mail and I let myself into the house. Standing in the entryway I found myself wishing Gram was upstairs in her apartment instead of in a van somewhere in the wilds of eastern Canada.
My house was an 1860s Victorian that had been divided into three apartments probably thirty-plus years ago. It had been let go when I bought it, but I could see that it had good bones. Liam, my dad, and I had done almost all of the work on my main-floor apartment and Gram’s second-floor one. My mom had helped me decorate with yard-sale chic. The third small apartment at the back of the house still needed a little more work. It was where my parents or Liam stayed when they came to visit.
The house had been an incredibly good deal and for a while I’d told myself that’s why I’d bought it: as an investment. But really North Harbor was the place that most felt like home to me and deep down I’d always known it was where I’d end up.
I unlocked the apartment door and dropped my things on one of the high-backed stools at the kitchen counter. Then I opened the refrigerator door, hoping that somehow it had become magically filled with food. It hadn’t.
I didn’t feel like another egg and tomato sandwich for supper. I wanted to sit at the round wooden table in Gram’s green-and-white kitchen and eat meat loaf with mashed potatoes or baked beans and brown bread. And I really, really wanted to talk to her about Maddie.
I looked at my watch. That I could do. But first I needed to let Elvis in. I found him sitting on the small verandah by the side door. There was a dried leaf stuck to his tail and a prickly brown burdock clinging to the fur on the middle of his back.
“Hang on,” I said, as he tried to make his way around me. He made annoyed sounds low in his throat but he stood still, tail flicking through the air, as I worked the little spiky ball from his fur. “If you’d stay out of that back corner of t
he yard you wouldn’t get these things in your fur,” I said, for maybe the tenth time. “Why are you back there, anyway?”
He licked his lips.
“Well, in that case you don’t need any supper.”
He didn’t even dignify my comment with a snippy meow; he just headed for the kitchen and I managed to grab the dead leaf from his tail as he went by. My kitchen, living room and dining room were one big, open space with tons of light from the double bay windows at the front of the house. The bedroom overlooked the backyard, which would have been nothing but grass if it hadn’t been for Gram and her friends. Instead I had a raised flower bed full of perennials and two hanging baskets by the back door.
I followed Elvis to the kitchen and gave him his dinner and a fresh bowl of water. Then I wandered in the living room, dropped onto the sofa and reached for the phone.
Gram answered on the third ring. “Hello, sweet girl,” she said.
I couldn’t help smiling at the sound of her voice. “Hi, Gram,” I said, “How was your day?”
“Wonderful. I had the best blueberry pancakes I’ve ever eaten. I wish you’d been here.”
“I wish I were there, too,” I said, tucking my feet up underneath me.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I took the elastic out of my hair and shook out the braid. “How do you do that?” I said.
“Grandmother’s intuition,” she said. “What is it?”
I sighed, softly. “It’s not me. It’s . . . do you know Maddie’s gentleman friend?”
“Arthur,” she said. “I’ve met him twice, I think.” I could hear the caution mixed with curiosity in her voice.
“I’m sorry, Gram,” I said. “He’s dead.”
“Oh, my word,” she said. “Poor Maddie.” I heard her turn to John and repeat what I’d just said. “What happened?” she asked when she came back to the phone. “Was it an accident? Did he have a heart attack?”
I took a deep breath, let it out slowly and gave her the short version of what had happened. About halfway through my explanation Elvis wandered in, jumped up on my lap and laid his head on my chest as though he was listening to me breathing.
“Are you all right?” Gram asked.
“I am,” I said. Just talking to her made me feel better. “And Maddie is with Charlotte.”
“What can I do?” I could hear her moving around and guessed that she was looking for a piece of paper and something to write with. That was Gram. Whenever something was wrong the first thing she did was look for a pencil and make a list.
I put one arm around Elvis and stretched out my legs. He tipped his head and his green eyes looked up at me. I started to stroke his fur and he closed them and began to purr. “There really isn’t anything you can do,” I said. “Maybe you could call Maddie. She’d probably love to talk to you.”
“Okay, I’ll do that,” Gram said. “Now what can I do for you?”
“You’ve already done it,” I said.
“Anytime, sweet girl,” she said. I could feel the warmth of her smile coming through the phone somehow. “So, tell me how the workshop went?”
“It went very well.” Elvis was purring so loudly I was surprised Gram couldn’t hear him through the receiver. “I could have done without seeing Mr. Peterson naked, though.”
For a moment there was nothing but silence. “Naked?” Gram finally managed to choke out. “Alf was . . . naked?”
“As the day he was born.”
“Did he have some kind of breakdown or a stroke?”
I laughed. “No. It’s a long story, but there was an art class in the room next door. Mr. Peterson was the model but he got the dress code and the room wrong.”
“Oh, sweet girl, that would be enough to put a person off their food,” she said. “No offense to Alf.”
“Mr. P. doesn’t strike me as the type of person who takes offense that easily,” I said. “And it would take a lot more than the sight of his wrinkly backside to get rid of my appetite.”
She laughed. “I miss you,” she said.
“I miss you, too,” I said. “Tell me more about your day.”
Elvis suddenly lifted his head and licked the edge of the telephone receiver.
“And Elvis just sent you a kiss.”
“Give him one from me.”
I spent the next five minutes hearing about Gram and John’s adventures along the coast of Nova Scotia. When I hung up I was still hungry, but not nearly as lonely.
I’d come to North Harbor to figure out what I was going to do next after my job had disappeared. I’d spent a week with my mom and dad, mostly feeling restless and out of sorts. My mother had suggested coming to Gram’s. Mom had walked up behind me while I was standing, looking out the kitchen window, and put her arms around my shoulders.
“I love you, pretty girl,” she’d said. “But I’m kicking you out.”
I’d turned to look at her. “What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
She’d kissed the top of my head. “Your grandmother is expecting you for supper. North Harbor is where you need to be. You have a house there and, more importantly, that’s where your heart is. Go figure out what you want to do next. Your dad and I are only a phone call away.”
The next morning Gram had brought me breakfast in bed. She’d told me I had exactly one week to wallow. That had been a Wednesday. I made it until lunch on Thursday. I hated having unwashed hair, I’d gotten crumbs in the bed and my pajama bottoms had a hole in one knee.
How could I lie around feeling sorry for myself with Gram around? A lot worse had happened to her. She’d lost my grandfather. She’d lost my dad, her only child. And she could still find joy in the world. She’d told me once that it would be an insult to my dad’s memory to give up on life because he’d been the type of person to grab onto it with both hands. And since I could still grab onto life pretty well with both hands that’s what I was trying to do. Which was why, in the end, I hadn’t told Gram what I also hadn’t told Nick: I didn’t know what had happened at Maddie’s house this afternoon. I just knew she wasn’t telling the truth about it.
Chapter 6
I couldn’t cook. Whatever the cooking equivalent of a green thumb was, I didn’t have it. In middle school I was voted Most Likely to Set a Kitchen on Fire after a term of culinary arts classes in eighth grade. But I did like to eat and I paid a lot of attention to food. I’d seen the glass bowl of fruit in the middle of the teak table in Maddie’s backyard. And Arthur Fenety had had a cup of coffee, about half-full, at his place. What I hadn’t seen was the omelet that Maddie had said she was making for the two of them to share.
Maybe I couldn’t make an omelet—okay, definitely I couldn’t make an omelet—but I knew they weren’t something you whipped up, stuck in the refrigerator and then popped in the microwave later to warm up.
“So, where was it?” I asked Elvis. “Presumably she would have brought it outside to serve it to Arthur.”
The cat stopped purring long enough to lift his head and give me a blank look. He didn’t know, either.
I closed my eyes and pictured the round table again, set with sunny red, orange and white place mats and matching napkins. There hadn’t even been any plates at either of their places, which made sense. When the omelet was finished, she would have just slid it onto the plates and served it. But she didn’t. Why?
I didn’t think for a moment that Maddie had killed Arthur Fenety. She wasn’t that kind of person.
“She’s hiding something,” I said. “What? And why?”
He didn’t have an answer to that question, either.
I looked at the phone. Should I call Michelle? And tell her what? That I knew Maddie wasn’t telling the whole truth because she let some eggs get cold? What difference did that make, anyway? It was a police investigation. It was none of my business.
&nbs
p; I was still hungry. I reached for the phone and punched in my friend Jess’s number.
“Hey Sarah, what’s up?” she said.
“Have you had supper?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Not unless you count three Tic Tacs fused together that I found in my pocket about an hour ago.”
Unlike me, Jess could cook. It was just that she’d get busy sewing and forget. “How about supper at The Black Bear?”
“Umm, yes,” she said. I pictured her at her sewing table, tucking her long brown hair behind one ear.
“Twenty minutes too soon?” I asked.
“Not for me. I’m doing over a wedding dress and I’m out of ideas. Maybe supper will inspire me.”
“Nothing screams ‘Marry me,’ like a pub with a house band named The Hairy Bananas,” I said, dryly.
Jess laughed. “You joke, but a couple of years ago a guy actually proposed to his girlfriend at Sam’s place. It was one of those elaborate public proposals and he did it during halftime of the Superbowl.”
“Please tell me you’re making this up.”
“I am not,” she said, a bit of indignation in her voice. “All I can remember is that it involved tortilla chips, bean dip and a pretty expensive diamond ring.” She paused for effect. “The ring turned up a couple of days later.”
I groaned. “Now I know you’re making it up.”
She laughed again. “I’ll see you in a bit,” she said, and ended the call.
I hung up the phone and gave Elvis a little nudge. He opened one green eye and looked up at me without lifting his head. “I’m going to meet Jess for supper,” I said. “You have to get up.”
He sat up, yawned and stretched and finally jumped down to the floor and headed to the bedroom. I went into the bathroom to wash my face, and when I walked into the bedroom Elvis was sitting on the white faux-leather lounger, looking expectantly at the TV.
I changed into a black sweater and my favorite pair of gray suede pull-on boots. A loud meow came from the chair by the window.