“Always?” And Harold chuckled.
“Harold!” Alice went prim again.
“Rachel never did find the boots,” Leon said. “But she recognized Abner’s bare feet sticking out of a pile of corpses. I don’t know whether it was because of finding Abner or being mad about losing the boots, but the way Grandma told it, Rachel carried on loud enough to wake the dead. And I guess she did. The feet moved.”
“They what?” Joan couldn’t help it.
“They moved. Stacked like a piece of cordwood, Abner was still alive!”
“Half-dead is more like it,” Alice said. “But Rachel took him home and nursed him back to health. They ended up with six or eight children. Kitty came down from them somehow—I’m not sure how.”
Joan saw Harold repress a grin. We all know how, she thought, but he’s not going to risk saying so. What kind of marriage must that be?
“Wasn’t there something in the family about a Lincoln letter?” he asked instead. Joan could almost see the dollar signs gleaming through his glasses. “Your mother used to hint at it.”
“She hinted at a lot of things,” Leon said. “Mom played her cards pretty close to her chest. You couldn’t take everything she told you as gospel.”
“Leon!”
“Look, Alice, it’s not what you’d call likely. After all, old Abner was fighting on the wrong side. About his only claim to fame back then was getting pulled out of that pile. And they say later on he was a high muckety-muck in the Klan.”
“Leon! You don’t have to tell everything!”
“Oh, loosen up, Alice. How long has Harold been in the family? And I don’t imagine we’re shocking Joan with ancient history.”
A left-handed compliment, Joan thought, but I’ll take it. She shook hands all round and got out before they started in on each other again.
Indiana Puzzle
All Thursday morning Fred had played phone tag with the coroner and Warren Altschuler.
At half past twelve he was biting into a ham on rye when the phone on his desk rang. Chewing, he picked it up left-handed.
“Lundquist,” he said indistinctly.
It was Dr. Henshaw, with the autopsy results.
“I won’t waste your time,” he said. Fred translated: I won’t waste my own. “Cause of death is blunt force. She had depressed fractures of the right parietal bone near the lambdoid suture.”
“In plain English?”
“Multiple downward blows cracked the back of her head. Your old iron could have done the job, though we weren’t able to match the fractures to it or see any pattern on the skin when we shaved the hair. It didn’t break the skin, probably because her hair was so thick. There’s no blood and virtually no hematoma—she died instantly.”
“When?” Fred licked mustard off his right forefinger.
“Sometime between about ten Tuesday night and four Wednesday morning. That’s based on rigor and body temperature in an unheated room. Tell me how late she last ate, and I can narrow it down from the remains of the ham on rye in her stomach.”
Fred laid his sandwich on his desk—he knew better than to look at it just then. Leaning back, he stared at the ceiling.
“You said no blood. What about cuts?”
“They showed me those little scissors. But she didn’t have a scratch on her. No defensive wounds. I did find some light facial contusions, though, consistent with falling forward after being hit on the back of the head.”
“Forward?” Fred was sure Mary Sue had been flat on her back for hours by the time he saw her.
“I couldn’t swear to it in court. But I think so, from the angle of the blows—and the marks on her face bear me out. If she’d bumped her face any earlier, you’d have seen them yourselves.”
Had anyone noticed? Maybe even while she was still alive? Joan had seen her in the inn. So had the family. Fred leaned forward to scribble “marks” in his notebook, and then “last meal.”
“Could the whole thing be an accident?” he asked. “Suppose she just fell and hit her head.” Top-heavy as she was, he could easily see Mary Sue falling off one of those ladders.
“Then the fracture would extend up from below, not down from above. By the way, the blows were right-handed.”
Great, Fred thought. That limits it to eighty-five percent of the population. But maybe less. Mary Sue was tall. With downward blows, he was looking for someone taller yet—or a short guy who brought along his own baseball bat.
“Besides,” Dr. Henshaw was saying cheerfully, “you’re going to have to account for that plastic. It doesn’t look as if she asphyxiated—you can almost never be sure about that, but I didn’t see any petechiae in the scalp or larynx—and she sure didn’t pull up the covers.”
“Yeah.” Or put the ladders away. “What can you tell me about that?”
“From the postmortem lividity, someone rolled her over soon after death. All the discoloration was on the back. That’s why the facial contusions were hard to spot.”
“Anything else?”
“Only negatives. No bullets, no drugs, no poison, no disease, no sexual assault, no pregnancy.”
Fred had finally finished the sandwich and was fighting sleep in the old swivel chair when his office door creaked. His feet hit the floor and he jerked fully awake. Captain Altschuler’s bulk filled the doorway.
“Relax.” Warren Altschuler shut the door behind him and dropped heavily onto the wooden chair by the desk. “I got your message—and a call from the mayor. He’s calmed down since last night. Seems his daughter overheard him chewing me out for not taking care of his baby. She gave him what for. Told him she was nobody’s baby—old enough to make her own decisions, that sort of thing. Made him promise to apologize.” He grinned. “Deckard’s so button-busting proud of her, he gave it to me word for word.”
Fred tried to imagine either of those big-eyed little girls intimidating the mayor. He shook his head and sat back down. “That’s good news, anyway.”
“Yeah. But he’s thinking about not opening the show to the public until we clear up the homicide.”
If we clear it up, Fred thought gloomily. Talk about cold trails. Deckard will think again when the economic implications of that little decision hit.
“We’ve let them go on setting up over there today,” he said. “There was no point in sealing anything but that one room. People had been tramping through the rest of the inn all day yesterday, with her up there the whole time.”
“You get time of death from Henshaw?”
“He says between about ten Tuesday night and four yesterday morning. The Elletts say she was alive after midnight.”
“You believe them?”
“On that, yes. I’m not ready to think the whole family jumped her. But they may be hiding something. Leon stopped the women from answering my questions. Johnny Ketcham’s over there trying again. He’s got the best chance of getting through to them.”
“Alone?”
“Yeah. They’ve known each other for years. Last night Alice welcomed him like a long-lost brother. If Leon isn’t there to stop her and I’m not there to remind her who he is, I think she might open up to him.”
“Could be. But don’t stop there. Familiarity may make him accept something you’d question.”
“Mmm.” A new tune altogether from last year, Fred thought, when his superiors had considered him least likely to succeed.
“Just don’t let the time slide by. What else?”
Fred filled him in on the rest of Dr. Henshaw’s conclusions. Altschuler closed his eyes and shook his head.
“It’s a damn shame they didn’t find her sooner. Anything more from the scene?”
Fred pulled a report out of the rapidly growing file and passed it across the desk.
“Her keys are missing. They found her handbag with ID, charge cards, even cash—all there—covered by a quilt in a corner a few feet from her. But no keys.”
“You check her house?”
Fred nodded. “Both the h
ouse and the car were unlocked. The guys who looked in said the house was so messy they couldn’t guess whether anything was missing. We’ll have to ask the family.”
Flipping through the crime-scene report, Altschuler said, “I’ll give you good odds there’ll be more doors locked in Oliver tonight than there have been all last year. Some people live in the past.”
Fred leaned back, feeling the wall behind his head.
“Trouble is, Mary Sue wasn’t one of them. Oh, maybe at home—I don’t really know. But not about the quilt show—and that’s where she was. So where’s her key to the Sagamore Inn?”
Digesting the implications, Altschuler groaned.
“You’ve posted someone at the door.”
Fred nodded. “Deckard’s little girl can sleep at home from now on.” Sleep—he wished he could afford it. Forcing his feet back onto the floor, he stretched his cheeks around a close-mouthed yawn, but it got away from him. “I’m heading back over there to see what I can learn from the day people.”
“Keep me posted.” Altschuler got up.
Fred dragged himself out of the swivel chair and saw him out. Time to get moving. With Ketcham still at Edna Ellett’s, he beckoned to Kyle Pruitt.
“Come on, Sergeant, let’s go play detective.”
The mood at the inn was anything but playful. Not that Fred heard anyone mourning Mary Sue. The woman at the chair inside the door probably came closest. The pillowcases and bags that had hidden her two days ago had been replaced by papers.
“How was it here yesterday?” he asked her.
“Hectic,” she said. “We had enough to do without this. Nobody could find her all day—well, now we know she was lying there dead, but I spent half the day thinking, just you wait till I get my hands on you, Mary Sue Ellett. I didn’t know somebody already had, of course. I thought she’d skipped out at the busiest time, on the day of the judges’ reception and all. It wasn’t like her to leave us in the lurch like that, but it didn’t occur to me that anything had happened to her, just that it was a major nuisance not to have her here. Now that we’re having to decide things without her, we’re finding out how much we depended on her good sense. She wasn’t perfect—who is? But she knew how to run a show all right.”
“How come nobody looked in that room?” Kyle waved toward it as if they could see through walls and ceiling to the yellow police barrier tape.
“Far as I know, the door was closed all day—not that I could see it. But even if somebody went in to look for her, they wouldn’t have messed with a few quilts on the floor. We all had more than enough to do—that room was Mary Sue’s problem. Well, her family’s problem.”
“There were quilts on the floor?” Fred asked softly.
“That’s what I heard. Didn’t you know?” She looked at him incredulously.
“I didn’t,” Kyle said, and it was true. “How did that happen?”
“Who had time to find out?” She waved her hands at the papers in front of her. “I told you, we were going crazy in here yesterday.”
“Someone must have told you, then,” Fred said. “Can you remember who?”
“Oh, everybody was talking about it when I came in this morning,” she said. “I heard it first thing.”
Great. It was the kind of detail only the killer might be expected to know, but already “everybody” was talking about it.
The killer—and Joan and Eddie, Fred reminded himself. Who’d spilled the beans? Personally, he’d put his money on Eddie, once the kid got past his first, shocked incoherence. One of the techs could have leaked it, but they were a well-disciplined lot. A far more likely possibility was that one of the white-gloved workers had looked into the room on Wednesday—maybe even entered it—and that now that she knew the significance of what she’d seen, she was afraid to come forward to the police but couldn’t resist telling her friends.
“We’d better talk to those folks,” he told the woman. “Who was here when you arrived?”
“Let me think. Mabel? No, Mabel came in later, with the judges. Esther? Could be Esther, I suppose, but I’m not sure just when she got here.” She was starting to dither, but the dithering suddenly stopped on a practical note. “I don’t see why you don’t just ask one of your officers,” she said. “They took our fingerprints before they let us in today.”
“Thank you,” Fred said. “We’ll do that.”
She looked relieved.
“If you’re done with me, then …” Her voice trailed off.
“Unless you can think of anything that might help us.”
“I can’t imagine what. I mean, why would anybody want to kill Mary Sue?”
Resisting the temptation to remind her that she had spent the previous day wanting to do just that, Fred left her to whatever she was doing.
He set Pruitt to checking out the early arrivals.
“Don’t get anybody’s back up, Kyle,” he warned. “Right now all we want to know is who got here early today and when the talk started. Let them bring up whatever they’ve heard.”
“You suspect one of them?”
“No. But it’s possible. Come to think of it, check this lady’s list of who was here Tuesday. It would have been easy for a worker to hang around late, after the doors were locked. From the sound of it, they all knew the Elletts were up there.” The screech of electric saws echoed in his mind. “There should be men on that list, too—I saw carpenters here Tuesday.”
“Yessir.”
“Oh, and Kyle—I’ll talk to Catherine myself.”
“Yessir.” Kyle sounded relieved, and not without reason. The two redheads had struck sparks before.
It was a short walk from the inn to Catherine’s Catering, a tiny kitchen that didn’t hint at the quantity and quality of what she produced from it. As the jangling bell announced his presence, the pungent odors assailing Fred announced a wonderful stew. Catherine turned to welcome a potential customer. Her smile frosted over when she saw him.
“Slumming?”
“Catherine, I—”
“Don’t you Catherine me. You haven’t so much as called for months. You can’t drop me flat for another woman and expect me to welcome you back when she doesn’t have time for you anymore.”
She was getting a good running start—but on what, he didn’t know. Burned first by his wife’s infidelity and then by Catherine’s jealousy over Joan Spencer last fall, he had indeed avoided her, but he’d steered clear of becoming involved with anyone else, including Joan. Damn, he thought. You’ve kept on controlling what I do, and I didn’t even know I was letting you do it. That’s going to stop right now.
He wiped all expression from his face, pulled his badge out of his breast pocket, and laid it on the showcase above the chocolate truffles.
“Police business.”
That stopped her. She closed her mouth and wiped her fingers on her apron, carefully, one after the other. Finally she said, “I’m sorry, Fred. What’s the matter?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Mary Sue Ellett’s been killed. I can use your help.”
“Fred, I don’t know a thing about it. You can’t think that I—” She seemed truly distressed.
“No, of course not. But you probably know more than you think.” He tucked his badge back in his pocket and took out his notebook. “When did you see her last?”
“I—I don’t really know.” She was still flustered. He pressed her.
“When were you at the inn?”
“I’ve been there every day this week except Monday. The judges’ reception …”
“Right. So think back. What was the last day you saw Mary Sue?”
“I saw her on Tuesday, I’m sure.” She was avoiding his eyes now. “I couldn’t tell you what time.”
“Was it before or after you spoke to Joan Spencer?”
“What did she tell you?” Catherine was ready to attack again. He should have known.
“Don’t worry about that. I’ve taken her statement. Now I’m i
nterested in what you can tell me.” Still, she hesitated. “Catherine, this is a homicide investigation. What’s between me and Joan has nothing to do with it. And it is absolutely none of your business. Not now, and not ever again.”
Her face crumpled. Damn. He was letting his personal affairs interfere with an investigation—exactly what he was accusing her of doing.
“I didn’t mean …” A tear rolled down one cheek. Feeling heartless, but not taking it back, he handed her a clean white handkerchief. She dabbed at her mascara and blew her nose loudly.
“Thank you,” she said in a muffled voice.
“You’re welcome,” he said, and waited until she had herself together again. When she looked up he asked softly, “So, what time did you see Mary Sue?” Her face was blotchy, but to his relief, she answered.
“I went upstairs and talked to her before I started working there. Sometime around four, I expect.”
“Get paid?” Mary Sue would have signed her check, he knew.
“No. Well, I went back, but she was gone.”
His antennae went out.
“How do you know?”
She responded with some of her old steam.
“For heaven’s sake, Fred Lundquist, I called her name and she didn’t answer. I figured I’d catch her the next day.”
“And on Wednesday?”
“Same thing.”
“You went into the room where the Elletts had been working?”
“No, I just opened the door and looked in. Nobody was there.”
“What time was that?”
“Wednesday morning? Oh, about ten.”
“How did it look?”
“I could see they hadn’t finished. So I figured I’d try her at the reception. But I didn’t see her there either.”
He leaned on the case, careful not to put his weight on the glass. Having blown it once, he didn’t want to distract her again from the business at hand.
“Think about what you saw in the room on Wednesday. Can you describe it?”
“Well, the walls looked done, but not all the quilts in the middle were hanging yet. There were a few on the floor—that surprised me, as fussy as quilt people are.”
He let it pass without comment.
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