Priced to Kill

by Margaret Evans

  Charlie, the eldest of the boys by an hour, owned and managed the Raging Ford Bulletin, a newspaper that wobbled on a fine line between truth and fiction, often touching both at the same time, in the interests of staying in business. He loved a big splash both on paper and the Internet, and his readers gobbled up every word.

  They were into their second pastries, Harry digging into the chocolate-covered doughnuts, and Laura, her favorite chocolate éclairs, all products from the bakery of delights belonging to Will, the youngest of the Kovacs triplets by fifteen minutes following Harry, the middle child.

  They were also on their second cups of Laura’s now-famously-awesome coffee. Something about her freshly ground French roast coffee beans and the coffee press drew friends often to her kitchenette behind the shop.

  “These are dreamy,” she mumbled between bites, her eyes closing momentarily to focus on the taste.

  “William has a baker who has been there a couple of years, I think. Divine things come off her fingertips. That’s why I brought this other little treat for you,” he said, holding the small package of sea salt caramel fudge. “But of course, this is just a sample. Make sure you’re near the bakery when you try it so you can run in and get more. Will makes the éclairs himself, won’t let anyone else touch the recipe. But you’ll have to try the fudge to understand just how valuable his baker is.”

  “Anybody I know?” Laura thought about a treat that just might be more delightful than the chocolate éclair she was enjoying.

  “No idea. Name’s Kitty-something and she lives in Eagle Junction or Belton or somewhere else not too far, but I think she’s originally from the south. She’s got one of those drawly accents. Actually met her a couple of times but can’t remember what she told me.”

  “So I’ve just missed her when I stopped at his shop. I’ve only ever seen Grumpy Gus,” she responded, referring to Will’s cross, ever-scowling cake baker and pastry chef.

  Harry nodded.

  They both sipped again.

  “Okay, Harry. What’s up? Nobody needs haircuts today?”

  He looked at her, innocence covering his face.

  “You don’t bring me chocolate éclairs from your brother’s bakery knowing I can’t resist them, ask me to close my shop for a cup of coffee, which, by the way, puts my ability to pay you my rent in jeopardy, for nothing, not to mention harming your own business, again for nothing.”

  A slow grin spread across Harry’s face.

  “Well, it just so happens, I had two cancellations and no queue at the moment, and I have a bit of gossip I thought you might want to hear.”

  Laura took the last bite of her éclair and leaned over the little table on her elbows, eyes wide, and wondered if there was anyone in Raging Ford who wasn’t dying to share information with her today. Whatever the tidbit was, it had to be pretty good to drag Harry from his barbershop and over to his brother’s bakery across town, which wasn’t really that far away but far enough to require Harry to pull out his old Buick to drive there and back in this cold weather. Harry looked as if he would explode if he didn’t tell her.

  “So what’s the gossip?”

  “I heard a solid rumor that your rent is not going up next fall.”

  Laura burst out laughing and almost choked on the last bite of éclair. After a swallow of coffee, she coughed a couple of times.

  “Wait—you said this was a rumor. That makes it gossip. Does that mean it might not be true?”

  “It’s true,” Harry said and picked up the last doughnut. “I just can’t tell you how I found out. Also heard, and I think this is true, too, that the good peace officers of this wonderful State of Minnesota have been knocking out cards from the Cold Case Deck, many, by the way, at the courtesy of our own small and over-worked constabulary right here in Raging Ford. I heard they’re about to make an arrest from Card No. 2. They’re making progress and thinking of reopening another old closed case, but I don’t know which one. They’re not talking.”

  Laura took a moment to digest the information. She knew the death of a police officer always went to the top of the Minnesota’s famous deck of cold cases, and her parents’ murders were still on Card No. 1, even after eleven years, with not much more than a heap of dead ends. Card No. 2 could also be a police officer’s death, but it didn’t look as if Harry was going to share more than this teaser. She’d have to find out another way. Maybe Minnesota’s website?

  “And you found this rumor out how? From your brother’s newspaper?”

  He frowned slightly.

  “I will ignore your slight on the truth of what my brother prints.”

  As he stood, she feared he would leave without telling her more. She knew Connor wouldn’t tell her. How else was she supposed to find out? Did she need to wait until it appeared on the news or the Internet? Or, heaven forbid, from everybody else in town?

  “Where are you going now?”

  “Back to the shop. Got some barberly things to do, like sweeping up hair. And I can see from here,” he said, turning the knob on her front door and glancing through its glass toward his shop on the left, “that I have another customer approaching. Enjoy your day, Laura. Hope you sell lots of things.”

  Sometimes Laura thought folks in the town grossly overestimated her abilities to figure out puzzles and mysteries. It couldn’t be done out of thin air. Had to be at least two real facts or pieces of information—more were better. Harry had given her nothing.

  She checked the Minnesota website on her laptop and found the Cold Case Deck page was down for maintenance, so no help there. The deck of cards from the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension not only put out unsolved crimes but also unidentified victims’ and missing persons’ pictures on the playing cards. It had proved helpful in recent years in identifying at least one unknown adult homicide victim who had turned out to be a woman who went missing at the age of ten. Card No. 2 had to be another such high profile case.

  With the page down and the very real likelihood that they didn’t even post the actual cards on their website for the public to see, that meant Laura had to reach out to Connor at lunch today, regardless of whether he wanted to tell her or not. It was likely the cards only went to the police departments. So Connor it was.

  five

  Connor’s attention hadn’t wandered from his phone for more than a second or two as he sipped coffee with Laura at the Valencia Café across the street from her shop. There was less bustle with the holidays over, but it had still taken them over a week to find a time when they were both available, or rather, when Connor had a few minutes. Although, when Laura called him following Harry’s morning visit to remind him of their lunch, he tried to cancel, so she pressed him to settle for coffee. While she waited for him to show up, she ordered him a double cheeseburger and a brownie anyway.

  They were supposed to be talking about the eleven years Laura had been living with her aunt in Maryland. And she had hoped to find out more about Harry’s hints earlier this morning regarding a pending arrest in a Cold Case Card No. 2. All she’d gotten from Connor were nods and mumbles. She tried another tack.

  “Oh, Connor, we decided to put the floor on the roof of the shop because it protects the roof.”

  No response.

  “But Harry thought it would be a better idea to take the glass out of the shop’s front window so we could air out the store.”

  “Mmm.”

  Laura kept chatting nonsense, but it wasn’t until she stopped talking altogether that he looked up.

  “What?”

  “Cold Case Card No. 2. I hear there’s about to be an arrest?”

  He ignored the question.

  “What did I miss? Sorry.”

  Laura just smiled. She was getting nothing out of him about cold cases, reopened closed cases, or anything else, for that matter.

  Connor wolfed down
his cheeseburger, took two gulps of coffee, and eyed the brownie.

  “You know I can’t talk about open cases,” he said, muffled by a hand covering his full mouth.

  “Harry told me this morning that this one is about to be closed. How can that count? It came from a non-confidential source. So no confidentiality applies.”

  “Why do you need to know?” he asked, swallowing the last of the burger followed by the last of his coffee.

  She stopped to think.

  “He made me curious.”

  Connor just shook his head, wrapped his brownie in his napkin and jammed it in his pocket, threw some bills on the table for their brief lunch and shoved back his chair.

  “I promise you that you’ll find out very soon what’s going on, and the next time we meet for lunch, I’ll actually partake in a conversation. Today’s just not turning into a good day.”

  As Fitzpatrick climbed into his SUV, hit the gas and raised a hand to wave at her with his attention already on the road, Laura reflected on her childhood with a police officer for a father and a psychologist/profiler for a mother. She saw her father as often as her next-door neighbor and close friend Connor Fitzpatrick saw his own police officer father. The pair had formed a deep and unique bond of friendship that was ripped apart when her parents were murdered.

  Connor now had almost a double work schedule that interfered with their brief coffees and lunches. For budgetary reasons, the Raging Ford police force had the lowest number of staff it had ever known to keep the peace for the highest population level the town had ever had. The small but dedicated staff did their best. With the new police chief frequently out of town on political jaunts to try and boost the budget, the day-to-day responsibility for running the force and keeping peace in the town fell onto the shoulders of its senior officer, Sergeant Connor Fitzpatrick.

  Thus far, Laura and Connor had exchanged perhaps a half dozen brief stories about the lost years, and mostly to do with Laura’s aunt and Connor’s siblings. Laura wondered why she and her friend hadn’t been able to exchange even one personal incident or event to do with themselves, not even once. What was it that was keeping them apart? Why didn’t they feel as close as they once were?

  And she had no clue as to how long it would take the pair to feel comfortable enough with each other again so they could share everything, as they had always done in the past. But she knew the day would come when they would both have to share.

  six

  With the shop closed on Monday as usual, Laura was at the used car lot lusting after a shiny black, four-year-old Jeep Cherokee and knew that was the vehicle she wanted and needed. But her wallet reactivated her thinking and pulled her away to another category of used vehicles. The salesman was in the middle of telling her about the great deals he had on used Sentras, Civics, Corollas, Ford Focuses, et cetera. She had learned not to listen to most of what used car salespeople told her, and she felt confident she knew enough about cars, thanks to her father, that she could take a look and a test drive, and ask the right questions to get a reliable used vehicle that she could afford.

  When the salesman’s pitch started sounding like the blah-blah-blah of the adults in Charles Schultz’s Peanuts stories, Laura thanked him and said she’d seek him out after poking around through the cars herself. Every vehicle she saw was shiny and clean. Each had a colorful sticker on a front or rear window filled with promises of this special deal, while actual money details were on a side window.

  She had gone three cars past a five-year-old dark blue Ford Focus before she stopped, turned around to look at it again, and returned to check out the sticker price and details. The salesman, who had never really vanished, was suddenly beside her.

  “Want to look under the hood?” he asked.

  The moment the hood went up, she was flooded with good memories of her dad and the times they’d spent together checking out “things” under their car’s hood. She knew what to look at and for, found it.

  “May I take this one for a spin?”

  She took it out to the highway, getting used to its feel, sound and operation. The seat was comfortable, more so than the Civic had been. It handled well, though not quite as well as the Civic, but she couldn’t bear to drive the Honda anymore, not since someone had kidnapped her in it a few weeks ago. It was tainted. Had to go. Fresh start. This one would do just fine. And the price was right.

  She finished up the paperwork at the dealership, wrote a check, left the Civic with the dealer, and headed to the library in her new, older car for a book about quilting and after that, plans to retrieve her father’s service weapon from the police department which had arrived from Maryland. Everything that had belonged to Laura’s parents had either gone with her to Rose’s house or was later packed and shipped to a nearby storage unit.

  Pushing open the very familiar door to the New Library, which wasn’t really new but newer than the Old Library that Samuel Rage had built nearly a century ago during the boom of the 1920s, brought back tons of memories to Laura, as did everything she did in Raging Ford since she’d come back. Some of the notices and posters had changed, but everything was pretty much exactly as it had been when she left. She spotted the new computers with flat screens, a blessed change from the clunky old monitors of the past. But before she hit those new computers, she smiled at the librarian behind the desk and asked if Melba Coombes was in and could see her.

  Melba was the head librarian now, but Laura remembered her reading to the children and sponsoring special activities twice a month as a graduate student in Library Science. She had brought her toddler along, but that little girl was likely in middle or high school now. Laura had enjoyed watching Melba in action and chose a table near her whenever she had research work to do.

  The lady who came out of her office smiling and holding her arms open to hug Laura hadn’t changed that much in eleven years, but she declared that Laura had.

  “All grown up!” she cried. “And we’re all so glad you came back! But what took you so long to get to the library?” Harry’s Rules had kept Coombes from running straight to Laura’s shop upon her arrival in Raging Ford in the fall.

  “I was busy with the holidays…and Harry’s Rules,” Laura responded. “Today I need some help, so hang the Rules.”

  “What do you need?”

  “I have a new shipment of quilts from several estate sales that I would like to sell in my shop, and I think I should know a little something about quilts in general to help my customers or maybe even giving them details to entice them to buy some. I also need to make sure I’m pricing them right.”

  “Let me get you started. By the way, I have three children now, and I’m very busy, but Madelynne at the front desk does the little children’s activities. It’s such fun to watch her. I’m jealous because I had so much fun doing that. We get a few high school girls to come out and help, just like you used to.”

  “Those activities you led were neat, the mask-making and the crafts from different cultures. You had a line out the door once.”

  “Oh my, I remember that day. Native American culture and crafts are always so popular; I had to schedule two more sessions to get everyone in that time. Okay, quilts and quilt-making are in 746 which is textile arts. We have several very good beginner books. They should give you a lot of background on the craft.”

  “Do you have anything that shows popular patterns so I can learn the names of the quilts I have?”

  “Sure, but the more interesting designs that tell of someone’s family story or a social or historical cause are the best. Then you have to go back to the family or the community to find out the story or the historical significance. You talk to people, check old newspapers, discover the story behind the designs. That’s the fun part.”

  But at this point, Laura was only looking for general information about traditional patterns, so she could at least speak kind of knowledge
ably to her customers about the ones she was trying to sell and the most appropriate pricing. She flipped through one of the books that showed with hand-drawings exactly how the stitches should look, and their variations. At that point, she decided she should mend the flawed quilt herself. A year of sewing classes ensured Laura knew her way around a needle and thread. And if nothing else, Rose’s cadre of career and skill teachers had taught Laura that there was little she couldn’t learn to do well.

  She could look for more specific information on the other “more interesting designs” later, after taxes were done for the season, and she was preparing for the next winter’s crop of quilts hoping her investment would pay off, if many were available. As long as this year’s crop sold, that is, considering the investment she’d made in the quilts. Otherwise, she might be out the door looking for another livelihood or place to live. She knew her tax return business could not subsidize her second-hand goods store. It was just not good business to mix different companies’ monies. Besides, her C.P.A. was supposed to help her build up some capital for the long run, maybe even buy a small house one day.

  Laura stashed her armful of books in the car’s trunk. It had taken her too long at the dealership and the library, and with a dinner planned with her friends Erica and Kelly, she put off picking up her father’s Glock at the police station until the next day. Connor had texted her that the gun had arrived from Maryland and all paperwork was completed. She could easily run down there before the shop opened in the morning. There were just too many things on her list today to get everything done.

  As she turned onto 4th Avenue, her eye was caught in the rear view mirror by a car looking very much like the silver Civic she had just traded in a few hours before. She stopped at the red light and stared harder. It was now two cars behind her, but she couldn’t see who the driver was. When they all started up at the green light, the Civic pulled out and passed them both, and Laura turned her head to make sure a jaywalker wasn’t in her pathway and missed seeing the driver of the Civic. But she didn’t miss the scrape and small dent in the right rear passenger door. They were either giving it a road test or they’d sold it in a matter of the three hours since she’d traded it in. What were the odds on that?