“Yes. And then the private service. In the church?”
“If that’s what you want.” The frown between her eyebrows almost disappeared.
“What do I have to do about his ashes?” she asked.
“Have to?” Eric said.
“You know, are there any laws in Indiana about them?”
He smiled. “Only one that I know about, and nobody obeys it.”
She looked startled.
“There’s some form you’re supposed to file to tell the state where you’ve put them. But the only people I knew who tried to follow it came back laughing. They said the official they asked for the form had never heard of such a thing and wouldn’t know where to file it if she got it. I wouldn’t worry about it. What were you thinking of doing?”
“I don’t know. Maybe scatter them on Dave’s land? There must be woods, if he was finding out about selling his timber.”
“Probably yours by now,” Fred said.
“Maybe. Unless he willed it to someone.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how to find that out, either.”
“You have a family lawyer?” Eric asked.
“I haven’t talked to a lawyer since my husband died.”
“I can recommend one in our church. If you like, I’ll be glad to ask her how to find out what you need to know about whether Dave’s left a will.”
“Thank you. I don’t know where to start.”
They talked a few minutes more. Eric agreed to keep the service simple and not try to speak about the man he hadn’t known. “If you want to say something, you could.”
She shook her head.
The simple private service made sense, Fred thought. It also lessened the chance that Dave’s killer would attend. He wondered whether Ketcham would want to come. Joan might welcome a police presence as security. He could suggest it to her that way. Or let Ketcham ask her. Not that he wasn’t police presence himself.
Eric didn’t linger or pray when he left, but Fred thought the visit had done its job. Giving him a brief hug, Joan climbed the stairs to the little desk in what had been Rebecca’s room to write Dave’s obituary.
* * *
On Monday morning, she was relieved to get up and go to work, leaving the whole weekend behind her.
“Fine thing,” she told Fred. “I ought to be happy for Rebecca, and I am. But the whole weekend feels like a bad dream.”
“You sure you’re up to working?”
“No, but I don’t want to stay here and climb the walls. You’d be just as bad.”
He nodded. “Worse. But if you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
“Thanks, Fred.”
“You want me to walk you there?” He said it casually enough, but his peaked eyebrows gave him away.
“I’ll be fine. Don’t mother-hen me!” She hadn’t meant to snap. Could she make it through a day of even well-meant questions from all sides? Maybe not, but she had to try.
“I know you will.” He kissed her and shooed her out the door.
In the park, the untouched beauty she had shared with Fred was now much trampled, rabbit tracks replaced by the trails of kids’ sleds, and snow no longer clinging to every twig. Still, the crisp air and almost blinding blue expanse overhead restored her spirits.
But in the senior center, she was bombarded.
First and least offensive was Annie. “Joanie! It’s good to have you back. We didn’t dare hope to see you this morning.” Beaming, she stopped sorting the mail and relinquished Joan’s desk chair to her.
“Good to be here, Annie. Anything I ought to know?”
“Pretty quiet this morning. I think people are still leery of driving. Walking, too. It’s treacherous on those sidewalks.”
Joan sat down and pulled off her snow boots. She slid her feet into the shoes she kept under the desk for such days. “You made it yourself.”
“I got a ride. Dropped me off right by the ramp. And my grandson shoveled that for us. And the front walk.”
She hadn’t even noticed, much less thought of arranging for that essential job to be done. She’d have to line someone up for the rest of the winter—Bert Barnhart probably would be glad of the work. This snowstorm, the first of the season, and coming on the heels of Dave’s murder, had sneaked up on her. It might even be the last, but you never knew what to expect in southern Indiana. She’d better be ready for more. “Please thank your grandson for all of us.”
“I already did. Told him he didn’t have to fuss, but he insisted.”
“Good.” Joan picked up the letter opener. It was going to be all right, she thought. An ordinary day.
Gradually, the regulars drifted in. Some greeted her with brief, uninquisitive words of sympathy. Just right, Joan thought. Trust old people to understand. But then she began to overhear conversations taking place around her.
“I don’t care what you say.” Cindy Thickstun’s voice rose. “He was a lovely man. So good-looking. And her brother, for goodness sake.”
“No smoke without fire,” Vernon Pusey told Cindy. “People don’t get killed less’n they been doin’ something they oughtn’t. The man didn’t go to prison for nothing.”
“That don’t mean he deserved killing,” Cindy argued.
“You don’t know what else he done,” Vernon said.
“Shhh!”
Joan couldn’t tell who shushed him, but whatever he said next was too soft for her to hear. It didn’t last, though.
“Man couldn’t keep his hands outta other folks’ pockets. I don’t care if he was a pretty boy, he was a crook. Once a crook, always a crook.”
But he was going straight, Joan wanted to yell. And Cindy’s right—even if he wasn’t, you don’t kill people for the kind of thing Dave did. You don’t kill people, period.
“All I can say is, if he done me thataway, I’d go after him, for sure,” Vernon was saying.
“With a knife?” Cindy said.
“More like my bare hands.”
Now someone really did succeed in shushing him. Joan was so used to hearing Vernon shoot off his mouth that she was surprised at how much it bothered her when he did it about her brother.
She tried to focus on the mail, but it was a lost cause. Putting it down as a bad job, she looked up to see Mabel Dunn standing at her desk.
“Hi, Mabel. Something I can do for you?”
“Oh, no. I just wanted to say how sorry I am about your brother. You mustn’t pay old Vern any mind.” If Mabel had been wearing an apron, Joan thought, she would have been twisting it.
“Don’t worry about Vernon, Mabel. Sit down and tell me how you’ve been.”
“I’m all right.” Mabel did sit on her straight visitor’s chair, a little uneasily, Joan thought. “You’ve had such a week, though. I don’t know how you hold it together.”
“Duct tape, Mabel.” Joan suddenly felt better. “I’m one big fake.”
“It was the murder that hit the paper.” Mabel didn’t flinch from the word, and Joan was grateful to her for it. “But how was your daughter’s wedding, with all that?”
“Amazingly okay, would you believe it? But I don’t envy her that new mother-in-law.”
“If Rebecca’s anything like you, she’ll give that woman what-for when she needs to.”
“Thanks, Mabel. That’s one of the nicest things anyone’s said to me all week.”
Mabel shook it off. “Even so, seems to me you’ve got more on your plate than you need right now. I hope you’ll remember not all of us here think like old Vern. If you need any kind of help, anything at all, I want you to call on me. Even if it’s just a shoulder to cry on when you’re by yourself, or in the middle of the night. All this is gonna hit you sometime. I’d be proud to listen.”
Joan got up and came around the desk to hug Mabel. That this shy woman, usually such a mouse, even after being elected secretary of the board at the center, could offer her such comfort touched her in a way she didn’t understand. “Thanks. That means—I
can’t tell you how much that means to me.”
Mabel hugged her back, her brief foray into speech over, and faded back into the woodwork.
Sitting by herself now, Joan couldn’t help wondering whether someone hadn’t done what Vern said—come after Dave in retribution for something he’d done. Did that mean something he’d done here in Oliver, in the distant past? Or had someone followed him here?
Someone he’d known in prison, maybe. How had he known the man who owned the print shop? She didn’t know. There was so much she didn’t know about her brother.
Would their parents have known more? But Joan couldn’t wish they had lived to see their only son murdered.
Chapter 17
As the morning wore on, nothing much happened, and Joan began to settle into the routine, at times almost forgetting. But then some new thought would hit her.
Or an old one. Suppose whatever had sent Dave to prison had left someone so bitter as to come after him. Did victims of crime ever do that? Was Vern right? What did Ketcham think? She couldn’t bring herself to ask him, but she could feed the thought to Fred, who would know what to do with it.
In a way, it would be a relief. Surely no one that angry at Dave would take it out on his innocent sister. Or was someone who was angry enough to kill rational? As quickly as it arrived, her relief disappeared.
She forced herself to pay attention to her job. Bert Barnhart did indeed welcome snow shoveling when she got around to calling him. “Just put it on your list of things to do,” she told him. “Come when it snows.”
“And I’ll scatter salt, too,” he said. “You got some, I know.”
She hadn’t bothered to look, but Bert probably had put it in an appropriate spot when he’d organized their storage area after painting the railing, back in warmer weather. She and Bert agreed that he’d submit his hours to her and keep them supplied with salt when they ran out. He was good about submitting receipts, she knew.
She’d planned to eat lunch at her desk, but when Fred called, she was glad to escape. He picked her up, and they walked over to Wilma’s Café. As usual, Fred chose the booth against the back wall and parked her so he could sit with his back against that wall. Joan had always figured it came from a cross between wanting to see everything and everyone and not wanting to be surprised from behind.
Wilma poured their coffee. “The usual?” she said.
Fred nodded, but suddenly Joan wished for anything but the usual. “Give me a burger like Fred’s,” she said.
Wilma raised her eyebrows but didn’t say a word.
When the food came, Joan bit into the huge, juicy burger and wondered how she could possibly finish it. Juicy or not, it tasted like sawdust.
“You okay?” Fred asked.
“I don’t know.” Her eyes filled with sudden tears. Why did this have to happen in a public place? At least nobody but Fred could see her face.
He held out another big handkerchief, and she blew her nose. “Thanks.”
“Something happen?”
“Not really. Oh, people talked. But I expected that.”
“Say anything?” He asked it oh-so-casually, but she knew better.
“Not really. Vernon Pusey was shooting off his mouth about how Dave was a crook and somebody probably wanted revenge for whatever he’d done that sent him to prison. Then I got scared again. Scared they’d come after me next.”
“I wondered when that would hit you.”
“It doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“Sure. But the odds are in your favor.”
“What odds?” Her burger forgotten, Joan stared at him.
“I don’t mean whole families don’t get killed, but not for that kind of reason.”
“So why do they? I mean, the whole world knows we’re family. Now they do, anyway.”
“I shouldn’t have said that. People who go after whole families have all kinds of crazy reasons. It never makes sense.”
“Not to you, maybe, but I’ll bet it does to them. And I don’t want to be on the receiving end, much less Andrew and Rebecca.”
“They’re adults, Joan. Rebecca’s miles away, and Andrew can take care of himself.”
“So could Dave, but look where it got him.” She chomped down on the burger, taking her anger out on it.
He reached a hand toward her, but hers were fully occupied, and she didn’t feel like hand-holding.
“Fred, what would you think of going to see Pete?”
“Who?”
“Pete. I don’t even know his last name. The print shop guy Dave worked for. Maybe his only friend.”
“I thought you were going to invite him to the funeral.”
“I was—I am. But it occurs to me that Pete might know where Dave’s will is. He might even have the key to Dave’s place. We could look for ourselves.”
“You sure?”
“No. But I’m going nuts as it is. You think you could get time off to go with me?”
“Long as I call it looking out for my wife instead of working on this case.”
“Call it whatever you need to. Besides, it would be true. We don’t know anything about the man really except that he gave Dave a job when he needed one.”
“When do you want to go?”
“I’ll call Pete after work. But soon, I think. The center will be fine. They weren’t expecting to see me back yet anyway.”
“And I’ll check with Ketcham and Captain Altschuler. We can leave Andrew to hold down the fort.”
“Thanks, Fred.” On her next bite, juice ran down her chin. “You know, this is good.”
“Mm-hmm.” His eyes crinkled at her.
“But I’m not going to have the pie with you, too.”
“Suit yourself.”
Her good humor and appetite restored, Joan finished more lunch than she’d eaten in months. She had no trouble resisting Wilma’s flaky apple pie, but drank another cup of coffee while Fred polished off a huge slice topped with vanilla ice cream.
They walked back to the senior center together. Most of downtown Oliver had been shoveled early enough, but here and there the foot traffic had packed the snow into ice before the storekeeper had reached it. Salt and sun would help eventually. For now, Joan was grateful for Fred’s arm on the slick spots.
When she walked into her office, the phone was ringing. Shucking her coat, she answered it.
“Mom?”
“Rebecca? Are you all right?”
“Yes, of course. I wanted to see how you’re doing.”
Joan’s shoulders relaxed. She tossed the coat onto her visitor’s chair. “What’s up? You’re supposed to be on your honeymoon, not calling your mother!”
“Oh, Mom, we had to come straight back here. I couldn’t take any more time off, so I’m working, and Bruce is moving boxes. So am I, after work.”
“Into your new place?”
“Fast as we can. We took possession yesterday, and we can’t keep paying for three apartments at once! But we have to leave the old ones spotless. Soon as we empty a room, I clean like you wouldn’t believe.”
Joan smiled into the phone. “You sound like an old married woman.”
“I look like one. A really, really old one.” But she sounded happy.
“You want Elizabeth and me to come help?”
“Argh!”
“Just a thought.”
“Spare me.”
“So you’re calling from the bank?”
“No, on my lunch hour. And using my cell phone, not the bank’s phone. Actually, that’s what made me think of you.”
“Oh?”
“The cell phone, I mean. I had a weird call on it awhile ago. A nasty-sounding man climbed down my ear, wanting to know where I got off calling him, anyway, only that’s not how he put it.”
“What did you do?”
“Told him he had the wrong number, and hung up.”
“Good thing I didn’t borrow your phone. That guy sounds like someone I reached when I was checking
out the calls Dave made from our phone.”
“Uncle Dave had some weird friends. You think he met that one in prison?”
“It crossed my mind. But he might just be an impatient jerk. Isn’t that what you have a lot of in the big city?”
“You’d be surprised. I’ve met some of the friendliest people in New York.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Are you okay, Mom? This has to be hard on you.”
“Right now I’m doing fine, thank you. Fred and I may go visit the place where Dave was living—meet his boss, who did sound like a friend.”
“You sure you want to do that?”
Joan paused. Was she? “It beats sitting around here waiting for I don’t know what.”
“You sound . . . I don’t know, scared?”
“I am, a little. I don’t have any idea why someone went after Dave. Or what’s coming next. You know, Rebecca, it would be a good thing to keep your new address kind of private.”
“Really?”
“I don’t know, but it couldn’t hurt. For a while, anyway.”
“Okay. Bruce’s agent will have it, and I can give it to you.”
“I don’t need it yet. Not till you’re ready for me to send the wedding gifts.”
“More boxes! Not yet, Mom. All I don’t need are more boxes.”
“Let the post office forward your mail from the old place.”
“I already did that. My phone number won’t change, so I don’t need to tell my boss yet, even. But what about you and Andrew? Everyone knows where you live.”
Joan couldn’t answer her.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t need to make it worse.”
“You didn’t. At least we have a cop in the house.”
For whatever that’s worth, she thought when she hung up. Maybe it was time to put a peephole in her front door. In Oliver, she’d always felt perfectly safe opening the door. But now . . .
Still, she was glad to have heard from Rebecca. She hadn’t wanted to call her daughter, not now, but it was good to feel connected again.
She hung up her coat and dug into the pile of mail on her desk with new energy. How could so much junk accumulate in such a short time? She’d almost finished separating the wheat from the chaff when a light tap on her open door made her look up.
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