by Lucy Ness
“I know the job was supposed to be mine!” Yes, she actually stomped her foot. “My grandmother said—”
“Your grandmother may have been president of the club. That doesn’t mean she had final say in hiring decisions. That’s a responsibility of the entire board. You want this job? Go for it. But you’ll have to wait until I’m ready to leave before you get the chance at it, and just for your information”—I lifted my chin—“right now I’m thinking I’ll be ready to quit right about when hell freezes over.”
Her laugh was silvery. But then, she struck me as the kind of woman who had a lot of practice when it came to the silvery-laugh department. She flounced her way around my desk. “Well, I can already feel it getting colder in here. You’ll leave, all right, and I’ll tell you why. Because the Sadlers are important in Portage Path. We’ve got lots of friends in high places. And if you don’t leave?” She fluttered eyelashes that were in no way real. “If you don’t leave, remember what I said. I’m going to make sure to tell our important friends, and our important friends are going to tell the police. And then everyone is going to know you’re the one who killed my grandmother.”
If ever there was a time for a snappy comeback, this was it, and in the thousand times I replayed the scene after it happened, I had one. It was on point. Brilliant. It cut Kendall off at the knees.
Only in reality, I never had time to deliver it.
And not just because I couldn’t think of anything to say.
Something upstairs clunked.
And it wasn’t something in the Lilac Lounge or in Marigold, where Jack was working. Those rooms were at the back of the building, and this noise came from right above us.
Right where Muriel’s office was located.
“Stay right here,” I ordered Kendall, and I raced to the stairway and took the steps two at a time.
I found Tab Sadler right where I thought I’d find him: outside Muriel’s office. He was a sneaky one, all right. He’d come up the back stairs and he’d bumped into a nearby table and knocked down a lamp while he was trying to shimmy through the strips of crime scene tape hung over the office doorway. He had one leg through a gap between two strips of tape, one foot in Muriel’s office and one foot out.
“Mr. Sadler!” I closed in on him. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I . . . uh . . .” What he was doing was pretty darned obvious. Trouble was, he wasn’t doing it very well. Tab was no spring chicken. Balanced on one foot, he swayed, he wobbled.
Unlike so many of Aunt Rosemary’s cockamamie friends, I do not consider myself psychic. But I did know what was going to happen. No doubt about it.
I threw out a hand to steady him before he fell over, and when I gave him a yank he had no choice—he pulled his leg out of the office and landed on both feet back in the hallway.
“The police don’t want you in there.” I mean, really, I shouldn’t have had to point it out; the yellow tape pretty much did that. “I told you not to wander the building.”
“You did. But I . . .” Tab craned his neck, the better to check out Muriel’s desk, the file cabinets on the far wall, the credenza where a wilted aspidistra stood beside a heap of papers. Like he hadn’t been caught red-handed, he cleared his throat and lifted his chin.
“I am her husband, after all,” he said. “Her next of kin. And there are certain family treasures Muriel kept in her office. I need to retrieve them. To us . . .” He hung his head in a way that was supposed to make me feel sorry for him. Actually, the only thing it did was make me realize that though his wife had been murdered just a few hours earlier, Tab Sadler didn’t look upset at all. “Those mementoes are precious,” he murmured.
“Which is exactly why Oz . . . er . . . the police . . . It’s exactly why the police will make sure you get back everything that was Muriel’s personal property.” I wound my arm through his. He was a tall man and I could tell he’d once been broad and burly, but hey, he was getting up there in years and I had spent plenty of time waiting tables. Hauling trays and slinging dishes does wonders for the biceps. When I tugged him down the hallway, he had no choice but to follow.
We stopped at the stairway. “They’ll call you, Mr. Sadler. I know they will. They’ll let you know when you can come in and get what belonged to Muriel. But for now . . .”
For now, what the members of the board had said earlier in the morning came back to me. This was the victim’s husband, and I had an opportunity to find out more.
“Where were you last night?” I asked Tab.
He opened his mouth to answer. At least until outrage blocked his words. His jaw worked up and down. Until he found his voice, that is.
“How dare you! Do you think . . . Can you possibly think . . . Young lady, are you insinuating that I am a suspect?”
“Not my job,” I told him and oh, how I wished that was true. Too bad the board had kicked the ball clearly into my court. “You know the cops are going to ask,” I told him. “You’re going to tell them, so you might as well tell me.”
“Oh, I’ll tell you all right. I was home, that’s where I was. Home all night. I was waiting for Muriel to come home for dinner. She never showed.”
And with that, Tab marched down the stairway.
I had every intention of following him and showing him to the door, and I would have done it if I didn’t hear a familiar voice coming from the Lilac Lounge.
It wasn’t Jack.
“Kendall Sadler,” I ground the name out from between clenched teeth, peered over the bannister to make sure Tab Sadler was where he was supposed to be, and headed to the Lilac Lounge.
That’s where I found Kendall perched on the desk Quentin, Jack, and I had struggled to get into the room the day before. Her arms were braced back against the desktop, she had one leg bent up under her, and the other swung back and forth as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
And a recently murdered grandmother.
“What part of ‘stay put’ and ‘don’t wander the building’ don’t you understand?” I asked her.
She pouted and slid off the desk.
“You can’t possibly think that applies to me,” she said.
And at the same time, Jack blurted out, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I thought maybe she shouldn’t be here, but—”
I shot him a look. “But what?”
“Oh, come off it.” Kendall stepped around me and out into the hallway, where she stopped and pursed her lips. “Bye, Jack. Don’t forget dinner tomorrow.”
Once she was gone, I shook my head. “Dinner? She sure moves fast. You’re having dinner? With her?”
He had the good sense to look embarrassed. Jack Harkness, he of the shaggy cuteness, hung his head. “She’s not all bad.”
“Really?” Three of the smoke-damaged books from Marigold were on top of his desk, and though I didn’t dare touch them, I could see the dates on their spines: 1941, 1942, 1943. I looked up from the books and pinned Jack with a look. “Is that why you said terrible when you saw her pull into the parking lot?”
Jack pushed his glasses up his nose. “Kendall, she can be a little . . .” He searched for the right word. “A little pushy sometimes.”
“Like about having dinner with you.” I backed away, both from Jack and from the conversation, holding up both hands as I did, a show of surrender. “Hey, it’s none of my business who you have dinner with. It’s just that I thought—”
His head came up. “What?”
“Well, I figured you had better taste than that. But then, like you said, I’m sure Kendall has her positive points.”
He smiled. “She likes horses.”
“That’s a real plus.”
He shrugged. “Our families have known each other a long time and—”
And whatever else he was going to say, he was interrupted by a commotion downstairs.
I got there as fast as I could, and downstairs I found Gracie, Agnes, Valentina, and Patricia coming in the front door just as Tab and Kendall were walking out. For women who’d been up half the night, they looked mighty chipper.
“We thought you should be the first to know,” Gracie told me as soon as my feet were off the stairs.
“It is, after all, of vital importance to the club,” Valentina added.
“And it means there’s plenty to do.” Full steam, those bruises on her arm covered by a long-sleeved emerald-green sweater, Patricia sailed past me and toward the club office in the Daisy Den, just off the main ballroom. “We’ve got to get busy.”
Before the rest of the board had a chance to disappear along with Patricia, I raised my voice. “Someone want to tell me what’s going on?”
They had the good manners to stop in their tracks and the good sense to realize they’d left me out of the loop and owed me an explanation.
“It’s Agnes, of course,” Gracie wrapped an arm around Agnes’s waist. “We’ve had an emergency meeting of the executive board. And we’ve elected Agnes president.” Gracie grinned and squeezed Agnes in a hug. “Your mother would be so proud!” she told her.
Agnes’s eyes welled and she burbled, but far be it from Patricia to allow time for emotion.
“Come on, ladies!” She headed toward the office. “We’ve got a presidential inauguration to plan!”
CHAPTER 8
She looks like a flapper. You know, from the roaring twenties.”
I can be excused from not saying a word in response to this comment. I was pretty busy staring slack-jawed at the face that stared back at me from the computer screen in the Portage Path Police Department. Yes, it was the face of the woman I’d encountered in the club basement. No doubt about that. As for her looking like she had stepped out of the roaring twenties, there was no doubt about that, either. Still . . .
“She must have been going to a costume party.” It was the only logical explanation, so I grabbed it and held on tight.
“Well, if she was, she did her homework. My wife, she took me to one of those murder mystery dinners once, and the theme was the Prohibition era. She did all the research and got our costumes together, and this girl . . .” The cop who’d run the facial composite program chuckled. He was a middle-aged guy named Dave, and he nodded toward the computer screen. “My wife would be so jealous. This girl’s got it all down pat, from the makeup to that feathered thing on her head.”
When he looked at the face on the screen again, I did, too.
There she was. The woman I’d been invited to headquarters to describe to Dave, the department’s sketch artist. He’d made her come alive, thanks to the magic of computer programming. The same dark, sleek bobbed hair. The same Cupid’s bow lips and smoky eyeliner. The same pert nose and those pale cheeks dotted with rouge. The same pencil-thin eyebrows. A little cheap. A little flashy. But pretty. And very young. Sitting there and watching her face materialize right before my eyes was incredible.
Hearing Dave say she’d stepped out of the roaring twenties, though . . .
Well, come on, that was nothing short of preposterous.
I told myself not to forget it, even as Dave asked, “You want me to print out a copy of the picture for you?”
I popped out of the chair next to Dave’s desk to distance myself from the very idea. “No thanks! I don’t need the reminder. There’s no way I can forget what she looked like.” Unfortunately, true. After the Portage Path Women’s Club board disappeared into the club office the day before to discuss the ceremony that would make Agnes’s presidency official, I’d ducked upstairs with the hopes of getting in a few hours of shut-eye.
It never happened.
One look at the mess that was my rooms and my stomach shimmied.
One minute of closing my eyes and I saw the face of the mysterious woman.
Right before a picture of Muriel’s battered body popped into my imagination.
“Well, if this looks enough like her”—Dave looked to me for confirmation—“I’ll get the picture over to Sergeant Alterman.”
At the same time I gave him a nod of approval, I told him, “Oz doesn’t believe she was really there.”
No doubt Dave had already talked to Oz and all the other cops who’d come to the scene. He scratched a hand behind his ear. “They searched the house.”
“And didn’t find her. Yes, I know.” Another thing I needed no reminder about. When I did finally manage to quash those disturbing pictures that popped into my mind and drift off to sleep, I woke at every little noise. After all, the cops never found the woman. And I swear, she was there. Really there.
So how had she avoided being discovered?
Where was she hiding?
And would she come back to my rooms?
Here at the Portage Path Police Department, with autumn sunshine flowing through the windows and the combined noises of voices and clattering keyboards from the cops working at the desks crammed in all around us, it seemed like a crazy thing to worry about. But at home, all alone on the third floor and desperate for sleep, the problem pounded through my brain and sent goose bumps flashing up my arms.
“Ooh, electricity shooting through you!” I could just about hear Aunt Rosemary coo the words as she had done so many times back home. “That means the spirits are trying to get your attention. No doubt about that at all!”
I ignored the voice, thanked Dave for his help, gathered my jacket and my purse, and headed outside. Too bad it wasn’t as easy to shake away the thought of Aunt Rosemary and everything she believed.
What if . . . ?
I got into the car and yeah, it was crazy, but I surrendered. Maybe I was as nuts as Aunt Rosemary. Maybe I was just too tired to try and think my way through the problem of the woman in the basement. This was a unique situation and there was one person who could help me make sense of it.
Maybe.
My finger was already poised over the call button and the photo of my aunt—resplendent in a purple caftan and hoop earrings the size of circus rings—when I told myself to get a grip. There was no use putting any more goofy ideas into Aunt Rosemary’s head. For years, she’d been trying to convince me that I shared her Gift, that I could receive messages from Spirit—just like she believed she did—if only I would open myself up to the possibility. There was no use enabling her. Besides, PPWC already had enough to deal with, what with the fire and the murder. The last thing any of us needed was for Aunt Rosemary to show up at our doorstep—which I knew she would if she suspected something Otherworldly might be up—eager to commune with the ectoplasm in the flapper dress.
“Costume,” I grumbled, coming to my senses. “She was going to a costume party,” and I shoved my phone back into my purse.
If I hoped to get a break from the thoughts of murder and mysterious intruders when I got back to the club, they were dashed. The place was in an uproar! The board was worried that news of Muriel’s death would drive members away? Oh, how wrong they were! Once word of the murder became public, club members came out of the woodwork. When I stepped through the front door, there was a line of women (many of them with guests) waiting to be seated in the dining room for lunch, and the card room beyond (Carnation) was packed with chattering club members. There were more noises coming from upstairs. I checked the schedule on my computer. Book discussion group. According to our log, no one had registered for the program, but apparently that too had changed now that PPWC was the center of local media attention. I could hear chattering from the Geranium Room at the top of the stairs.
Murder was apparently good for business.
I told myself the thought was unworthy of me and hurried into the kitchen to make sure Quentin and Geneva had everything under control. They didn’t, and who could blame them? They�
��d spent so much time expecting no one for lunch, there was no way they were prepared to be slammed.
For the next couple of hours, I prepped salads, bussed tables, poured ice water, and ferried lunches from the kitchen to the tables, where members had their heads together and I heard talk of “poor Muriel” and “how terrible for Muriel” and even “dear Muriel,” though something told me this last comment came from a club member who really didn’t know Muriel very well. By the time the crowd was gone and Quentin had the last of the pots and pans in soapy water, I dropped into a chair at the kitchen table, Geneva plopped into the one next to me, and Quentin grabbed a gallon of vanilla ice cream from the freezer. He loaded three bowls, drizzled hot fudge over the ice cream, and added whipped cream to all.
“We deserve it,” he said, setting a dish of ice cream in front of me before he sat across from me. “We all deserve it.”
“Amen!” I raised my spoon in salute.
“You think it’s going to be like this every day now that we got a murder here?” Geneva wanted to know.
“I think it will die down eventually.” Yeah, bad pun, but they either didn’t notice or didn’t have the energy to point it out. I swallowed down a spoonful of yummy ice cream and glanced Geneva’s way. “But for now, I think we’ll have to be ready. It could stay busy for a while. Is that good news? Or bad?”
Geneva reached into the pocket of the apron she had looped over her neck and fished out a wad of bills. “It’s great news.” She beamed. “I ain’t seen this many tips in as long as I’ve worked here!” She counted out the money, then divided it into three piles. She slipped one pile across the table to Quentin and the second to me.
“Oh no.” I sent the money back in her direction.
“But we always share tips,” Quentin explained. “And you worked as hard as we did, that’s for sure.”
“And I get a salary, remember.” When neither of them took the money, I grabbed it, counted it, and added half to Quentin’s pile and half to Geneva’s. “I hope this crazy busyness lasts long enough to make both of you rich.”