A Drunkard's Path

by Clare O'Donohue

  “No sign of our Kennette, I see,” Oliver said as he handed me one of the wooden models.

  “I don’t know what happened to her.”

  “She’ll come next week, I hope. It’s our last class and I have a surprise for her.” His eyes twinkled and he moved on before I could ask what he meant. Instead I focused on what was in front of me—a tiny wooden man. I made him stand with one arm on his hips, with one leg bent, and then with his legs crossed over each other as if he were meditating. I found it easy to focus only on the proportion, the line, and the shadow without adding the emotion that’s hard to escape with a real model—and in life. Maybe that was my problem with the investigation. I felt like the answer was out there, in hard lines and cool shadows, but I couldn’t get past my emotions and see it.

  It didn’t help that halfway through class my phone beeped. When I checked, I saw that it was a text from Powell. It read: “It’s a match.”

  I looked up at the happy professor at the front of the class, advising one of the students on a new pose for his wooden model. It was odd. Now that I had exactly the information that could finally finish this investigation and answer the questions I’d been nagged by for weeks, I felt, well, disappointed. I had wanted to “let myself be wrong” but there was little doubt that I hadn’t been.

  “Why the long face?” Oliver smiled at me as I gathered my things after class. I had been slow to finish; I’d lost my motivation after the text message. Now nearly everyone in class was already gone.

  “You’re Lily’s grandfather,” I said flatly.

  Oliver turned white. “Why don’t you come to my office?”

  I followed him out of class, down the hall, and into his office without either of us saying another word. Once he closed the door behind me, I realized I’d left my purse, and my cell phone, back in the class. A decision I deeply regretted. I positioned myself near the door in case I needed a quick escape.

  “I’d ask you how you know something like that but obviously you have a very curious mind,” he said.

  “So you don’t deny it?”

  “No. It was brought to my attention recently. Too late for me to do anything to help the child.”

  “After she was dead?”

  “Apparently. Though I didn’t know it at the time. Sandra was acting as liaison. She told me about Lily and showed me a photo of my former wife, Lily’s grandmother. But she told me that Lily wasn’t willing to come see me,” Oliver sighed. “Sandra was trying to talk her into it.”

  “Sandra sent you the text. The one about needing more time.”

  He seemed confused, but then nodded. “How have you figured this all out? I thought I had hidden it well,” he said. “Sandra told me about Lily, not that she was dead, but that she was my granddaughter, after the first class. She told me Lily was angry and didn’t want to see me. Sandra was quite upset about it. She said she needed money to help pay for expenses—Lily’s expenses. Perhaps I was gullible but I thought she was trying very hard on my behalf. I think now that she wasn’t.”

  If Sandra had killed Lily, which now seemed likely, then Oliver was giving himself a good motive for having killed Sandra. Maybe Susanne’s hope that Oliver had killed out of grief over the loss of his granddaughter was true. And maybe it was reason enough to let him off the hook. The only problem was that Powell now had evidence against Oliver, evidence I’d supplied.

  “Do you think Sandra was conning you?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I think that’s a fair assumption. She knew I had quite a bit of money and that I was donating it to the school. Of course the papers hadn’t been finalized yet.”

  “And you backed out of the deal.” I suddenly remembered the signs that read “On Loan” in the gallery.

  “I chose several of my more personal paintings to remove from the endowment. If I had a family, then I wanted certain paintings to go to them.”

  “Why care now? You abandoned your wife and daughter more than fifty years ago.”

  Oliver sank into a chair. “I did.”

  “Is that why you killed Sandra, because she killed Lily?”

  Oliver looked up at me. “You think Sandra killed Lily? Oh God, if Lily came here looking for me and died as a result, then . . .” His voice trailed off.

  The man who only twenty minutes before had been so happy, now seemed broken and old. I wasn’t afraid of him, nor was I willing to be the one to call the police, but that didn’t mean I liked any of his answers.

  “How could you do it?” I asked.

  Oliver just shook his head, “I thought the past should stay in the past. I guess that’s not possible.”

  “I think you should stay away from my grandmother,” I said.

  He nodded. “I’m sorry, Nell. I did not intend to cause you, or Eleanor, any pain.”

  It was an unsatisfying end to a puzzle I’d been working on for more than a month. I walked out of his office, and the school, feeling as though I was somehow guilty too. Not of murder, obviously, but of stirring up ghosts and breaking my grandmother’s heart. And somehow, at least at that moment, my crime seemed worse than Oliver’s.

  CHAPTER 43

  When I got to the shop, I noticed that it was quiet. One customer was finishing up her purchase as I walked in. Bill Vogel, the artist from Spuyten Duyvil, was pulling bolts of bright solids that had just arrived.

  “I’m doing something Amish but not,” he was telling Eleanor. “It’s a whole new direction for me.”

  Eleanor was listening, but she didn’t seem enthusiastic. “You’re always testing boundaries,” she said flatly. It was unlike her to be anything but excited about what might happen to her fabric once it left her shop. But Bill didn’t seem to notice.

  “I suppose artists are always testing boundaries.” He smiled. “That’s what makes great art.”

  “Perhaps it’s not such a great quality in people, though,” Eleanor said. She looked up and saw me standing near the front counter. “Ring up Bill, will you, Nell?’

  I nodded. As I finished Bill’s sale, I noticed that Barney was following Eleanor around. When she walked toward the office, he followed. When she walked to the cutting table or the checkout desk, or to straighten a bolt of fabric, he followed. I knew what it meant. He was worried. And it made me worried too.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Eleanor looked at me. Her eyes had the glassy brightness of someone who had just been crying.

  “Slow day,” she said. “I’m thinking of making kits of that Irish chain you’ve been working on. You picked really lovely colors, and I think the customers would like it. Of course you need to finish it.”

  “You’re rambling.”

  “Am I? I thought I was making a point. Well you would know better than I, Nell. You seem to know better than anyone about everything.”

  Ouch. “You talked to Oliver.”

  Eleanor picked up a twelve-inch acrylic ruler as if she were about to slap my hand with it. “Why do you feel the need to protect me? I’ve been around awhile, you know. I’ve done a fair job of keeping myself fed and clothed without your help.”

  “He was lying to you.”

  “About what?”

  “Well, he killed someone for starters.”

  “Which he admitted?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “But you have proof?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But it adds up. I know that Lily, the first victim, was his granddaughter. I know he abandoned his pregnant wife in England.”

  “She was not pregnant with his child. At least that’s what she told him. She said she had an affair with the man she later married. So he left. Maybe it was foolish, but they were young and the marriage was difficult. When he discovered that the child was his, he tried to find them, but Violet had remarried, the child had a father, and Oliver felt that perhaps it was best to leave things alone. It nearly destroyed him to let go of his only child. That’s why he took up drinking.”

  “He told yo
u that?”

  “The first night we had dinner.”

  I hadn’t expected that. I had worked so hard to uncover all of it that I assumed it was a secret. “But he’s lying about his name. Maggie found out—”

  “So that’s what all those secret meetings were about.”

  “You knew we were meeting secretly?”

  Eleanor laughed, but there was no joy in it. “At Bernie’s pharmacy, at Susanne’s house, and Carrie’s. Honestly, Nell, I know all your cars, all your schedules.”

  I was losing, so I changed tactics. I sat on the stool near the cash register and shrugged. “We were trying to protect you, whether you needed it or not. And we found out that Oliver’s last name—”

  “Is Lyons,” she finished the sentence. “He changed it to White when he came to the States because he felt like a new life needed a blank canvas. Nothing sinister in it.”

  “I told him to stop seeing you,” I admitted. She knew everything else. There was no point in hiding it.

  “I’m aware of that,” she countered. “I told him that you don’t have the authority to determine who my friends are, but he already felt that somehow his past and my . . . ‘lifetime of decency,’ he calls it, make him unworthy of me. I thought we were finally getting to a place where he was making peace with it. But now he feels that without your blessing it would be a mistake to continue our friendship.”

  Even if I was right, even if Oliver was a killer, it crushed me to see the look in my grandmother’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered.

  She dismissed me with a wave of her hand and walked toward the office, with Barney close behind. I sat in the shop, hoping that no other customers would come in for the rest of the day. As upset as Eleanor was, I knew she would never close the shop early for anything as mundane as a broken romance, but I couldn’t stand to wait on anyone, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave.

  Within minutes the door opened.

  “Where were you today?” I asked.

  “I wanted to finish this.” Kennette pulled her drunkard’s path quilt out of a bright pink backpack. “I wanted to finish the binding.”

  She held up her large, colorful quilt with a meandering path of blues and purples.

  “It’s really beautiful,” I said.

  “I can’t believe it’s mine. It’s like what you said about Carrie’s quilt. It’s a little piece of my imagination turned into reality. And now I want to give it to someone special.”

  For a second I thought she was going to hand it to me, but instead she stuffed the quilt into her backpack.

  “That’s new,” I said.

  She held up the bag. “Yeah. I used to have one just like it but it got lost. Now that I have a paycheck, I figured I’d get a new one. Good for traveling. Of course now I need traveling money.”

  “Are you going somewhere?”

  She smiled. “I think so.”

  “But we have one more class with Oliver.”

  “That’s okay. It’s not like I was going to be an artist or anything.”

  “But you’re so talented.”

  Kennette wasn’t listening anymore. She was watching Barney circle by the office door. “Is Barney still upset?”

  “No. He’s fine. He’s just worried about Eleanor. She and Oliver broke up. Well I sort of broke them up. Long story,” I blurted out.

  Kennette dropped her bag and rushed back to the office. I could hear her talking to Eleanor but I didn’t want to listen. Instead I walked out into the street and watched as people gathered in Jitters, drinking coffee without a care in the world.

  I decided it was time for one final meeting of my group of detectives before we handed the investigation, or what was left of it, over to Jesse and Powell and went back to being quilters.

  CHAPTER 44

  “This was not how it was supposed to turn out,” Susanne said quietly.

  “But he didn’t admit it,” Natalie protested. “Maybe he’s innocent.”

  “He has exactly the motive we thought he would,” I pointed out. “Just because he didn’t confess doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. It just means he’s smart enough to try and keep himself out of jail.”

  “Well, I thought being a detective would be more fun,” Bernie sighed.

  Meeting at Carrie’s coffee shop had gotten more complicated since it opened. Lucky for her, the café was already a popular hangout, but it made it hard for us to speak openly. We were stuck whispering in the corner near the front, waiting for the velvet couch to open up.

  “What now?” Maggie turned to me.

  “We let it go,” Carrie answered. “We’ve done enough damage. I mean, it would have been bad enough if Jesse or Chief Powell found this out, but for Eleanor’s friends to have done this to her . . .”

  “And she knew we were up to something.” Natalie smiled. “You have to give her props for that.”

  I nodded but I wasn’t really listening. I had gotten into the bad habit of keeping an eye on the entrance to Someday Quilts, but at the moment it was paying off.

  “I have to go,” I said suddenly. I handed Carrie my coffee and ran out the back door.

  I went down the alley to the end of the block and peered around the corner so I could see Someday Quilts. I had just seen Kennette walk out of the shop, look around, and then stuff an envelope in her coat. Or, really, Eleanor’s coat. She had been acting weird lately, all the disappearances and then not showing up at Oliver’s class. And she was leaving town. Now, after all we had done for her, was she stealing money from my grandmother?

  As I watched from the corner, she walked toward me, looking around nervously. She got within inches of me and I pushed up against the wall. If she turned the corner, we would have run into each other and I would have to explain why I was there. But Kennette didn’t see me. She just kept walking up the street and toward, of all places, the police station.

  I let her get several yards ahead, and then I followed. She seemed about to go up the stairs and into the station when she paused. I hoped she’d turn around and go somewhere else so I could stay on her trail. I knew that there was no way I could follow her into that building without encountering Jesse, and I wasn’t brave enough for that.

  Just as it seemed I might be out of luck, she turned toward the parking lot. She walked over to one of the five squad cars that belonged to the Archers Rest Police Department. After looking around one more time, she opened the driver’s side door, slipped behind the wheel, and disappeared from view.

  “What are you doing?” I muttered. I wanted to run over and stop her from apparently stealing a police car, but I was too confused and too riveted by the scene to do anything.

  My eyes kept darting back between the police station and the cars, waiting to see if anyone would come out and find her before she inexplicably committed a serious crime. Then, just as suddenly, Kennette’s head popped up. She slid out of the car, looked around once more, and closed the door.

  I ducked into the pizza place and watched her walk from the police station back toward the quilt shop. When she was far enough ahead of me, I left the pizza place and followed her as she went back toward the shop. I stopped in front of Carrie’s coffee shop and watched as she ducked back into Someday Quilts.

  I was tempted to go into the shop and confront Kennette then and there, but I came up with what I hoped was a better plan. I dialed my phone, and on the third ring I heard Bernie pick up.

  “Go over to Someday and watch Kennette. Watch everything she does. Don’t let her leave the shop. I’ll explain later.”

  Before she had a chance to respond, I hung up. I darted back up the street toward the police station. It seemed quiet outside. I glanced at the window to make sure there wasn’t anyone about to walk out the door, but there didn’t seem to be much activity. When I felt sure it was safe, I headed toward the parking lot and to the police car Kennette had broken into. I slowly opened the door and slid behind the driver’s seat. Just as Kennette had done, I leaned
down in the seat. But then I ran out of ideas.

  “What were you doing?” I asked no one.

  I felt around under the seats. I found two candy wrappers and the cap of a pen. I moved my hand further back. At the tip of my fingers I felt a thick piece of paper. Maybe it was the envelope that Kennette had stuck in her pocket when she walked out of the shop. I stretched my hand and reached as far as I could, grabbing the paper between my fingers. I slowly pulled it out from under the seat.

  “What are you doing?”

  I froze. I didn’t need to look to know who was talking to me. There didn’t seem to be much chance of escape so I straightened up in the seat and, before I dealt with the man outside the car, I quickly looked at the paper in my hand. It was a crumpled parking ticket.

  I rolled down the window.

  “Hi,” I said, a forced smile on my face.

  “Hi?” Jesse snapped. “Tell me what you’re doing.”

  “I found this,” I held up the ticket as if it were a prize.

  Jesse yanked me out of the car and slammed the door behind me. He grabbed the envelope out of my hand.

  “You lost a parking ticket?” he barked.

  “I didn’t say I lost it. I said I found it.”

  “Oh, you’re on the case, aren’t you?” His voice dripped with sarcasm. “My favorite detective is busy following the clues. I thought we were past this.”

  “I’m being a concerned citizen.”

  “So, what kind of clue is this ticket?”

  “It’s not a clue, but . . .” Suddenly I decided not to tell him anything. Either way I was in trouble, so why help him? I stood there looking defiant and feeling stupid.

  “Nell, I could put you in jail for this.”

  Suddenly I noticed something scribbled in pen on the ticket that made me feel my adventure hadn’t been for nothing. “There’s some writing on it,” I said.

  Jesse turned the ticket around and looked at it. “March 1,” he read. “Mean anything to you?”