by Janet Bolin
“That could have been altered,” Gartener said.
I shot back, “It wasn’t.”
His face an alarming blotchy red, Uncle Allen glowered at me. He should have been enraged at his self-appointed sleuths, not at me, even if I had been brusque.
I glowered back. I wasn’t thrilled with his would-be local assistants for leaving a mess, either. Spools of yellow and green silk embroidery thread were mixed among spools of red and blue. I rearranged them. “Can I use my backyard yet?
Gartener crossed his arms and stared at me.
Uncle Allen said, “That’s what we came to tell you. You can go back in there. We’re done. That canoe paddle is the only evidence we have, so far, besides your gas can—”
“I never saw that can before early Wednesday morning!”
He went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Your blood-soaked coat—”
“It only had a few drops on it.” I placed the smallest wooden embroidery hoops where they belonged, in front of larger ones. To my annoyance, my fingers shook, rattling the hoops.
The good news was that Uncle Allen’s rage-fueled flush subsided. All I needed was the village’s only law enforcement officer succumbing to a heart attack on my property. The bad news was that my shaking fingers caught Gartener’s attention. “Your hands are bruised,” he accused. “Like you were in a fight.”
I held the backs of my hands out for their inspection. “I don’t see any bruises.” It was true.
“Turn them over.”
I did. Heat rose through my scalp. The color of last night’s slight bruise had deepened to twilight purple.
He pointed at it. “There.”
Uncle Allen leaned in for a look.
“I fell,” I said. “And if Dr. Wrinklesides reported my one tiny bruise, be certain to ask if anyone else came into his clinic with bruises, cuts, or scrapes, then go harass them, too.”
Uncle Allen straightened his shoulders and pulled in his gut. Trooper Smallwood had called him a detective. Would Uncle Allen discard his usual bumbling, just one-of-the-guys act and live up to his title because a state trooper was with him? “The evidence points to you. We’ve got the physical evidence I mentioned a few minutes ago. And we’ve also got the fact that Mike died in your yard, his last words, and your death threats.”
Did he have to emphasize those last three words so heavily?
Gartener cleared his throat. “Actually, we have more than that.”
I squealed, “You can’t!” This was getting worse. “Tell me what this supposed evidence is.”
Uncle Allen quickly looked up at Gartener as if he wanted to know, too, which made me wonder if the trooper was saying he had other evidence only to unnerve me. He was succeeding, and his continued silence didn’t help.
The silence must have stretched too long for Uncle Allen, too. Turning to me, he ordered, “Don’t go destroying more evidence because you’re afraid we’ll get a search warrant. We’ll find it all, anyway.” Or he’d send his unofficial assistants in their oversized snowmobile suits and hooded parkas. He stomped toward the door like he was headed off for a warrant to search my store and apartment. Let him. There was nothing to find.
“May I have the key to my cottage?” I asked.
His back to me, Uncle Allen dug around in pockets, then tossed a key onto my cutting table. Without another word, he slammed himself out.
Gartener stood ramrod stiff beside my front door, looking at me, waiting for me to say something.
“Please,” I said, undoubtedly sounding desperate. “I didn’t hurt Mike. Or anyone. Can’t you see? The people who live around here are trying to frame me because I’m new. And whoever murdered Mike Krawbach is still free.” Now I was slipping into hysteria. Desperation might have been more convincing.
Gartener gave me only the slightest nod. It was not reassuring. “Justice will be done.” The flat way he said it, despite the made-for-radio voice, wasn’t very reassuring, either.
After one last assessment from his almost black eyes, he left.
In stubborn anger, I balled my hands into fists. These investigators wouldn’t find proof that I’d killed Mike. It didn’t exist and never had.
Trooper Smallwood of the Pennsylvania State Police would talk some sense into them.
Meanwhile, Clay had wanted to know when we could go into Blueberry Cottage. I dialed his number.
“Is it okay if I come over now?” he asked.
“Sure.” He must really want the job. Badly enough to kill Mike and eliminate the barrier between the project and the requisite permits?
No, I told myself. Clay had returned my lost dogs to me. Even the dogs thought he was certifiably nice. But they also liked Uncle Allen and had tolerated Trooper Gartener. Only Mike had made Tally growl.
I charged downstairs for a coat, then returned to In Stitches, where I watched through my front windows. When Clay’s truck parked beside the curb, I ran outside to him.
My fences were still covered in yellow tape. We went down the slope to the apartment’s outside door and let the dogs out. They were ecstatic at being reunited with their hero. After mad sprints around the yard with him and head-on collisions with each other, they were willing to enter Blueberry Cottage. Sally mouthed Clay’s hand as if to make certain he would stay beside her. The investigators had relocked the door facing my apartment. I opened it, thrust my hand around the jamb, ran my fingers across the rough wooden wall, found a light switch, and turned it on. A chandelier constructed of a wagon wheel illuminated the cottage’s great room.
The air inside the cottage seemed colder than outside, with an eerie calm that made me want to wrap myself in a few of Opal’s afghans or Naomi’s quilts.
“Great bones,” Clay said. I assumed he was talking about the cottage. He snapped pictures and jotted notes on a pad of paper.
The cottage was not, perhaps, the gem he had expected. Years of carpeting and vinyl covered the floors. Layers of paint coated the walls.
In the great room, Clay checked under a corner of carpeting, then took out a pocket knife and scraped paint from a wall. He whistled. “You have a fortune in timber here.”
I pictured the plank floors in my shop and the hardware store. “Walnut?”
“What I can see of the floor is bird’s-eye maple. And the walls look like hickory.”
Next to the great room, the kitchen appeared to have been redecorated about sixty years ago and not touched since. Clay said, “This is great. Lots of space to put in everything you might want, and we won’t have to tear much out first.”
I pointed at the antique kitchen sink, a deep, white porcelain one, complete with integral drain boards and shapely legs. “I’d like to keep the sink and decorate the new kitchen to match it.”
He agreed enthusiastically. “You couldn’t buy anything like it today without taking out a second or third mortgage. You could sell it, but it goes with the carpenter gothic style of the outside of the cottage.”
“And the inside is carpenter rustic?”
He smiled. “We’ll fix that. We’ll need to dry wall the interior walls, for fire safety, but we can keep most of the look and feel of the place.”
Accompanied by enthusiastic dogs, we peeked into the final room, the bathroom. The toilet slanted so steeply that anyone who attempted to sit on it would slide onto the floor.
Clay seemed to have trouble controlling a grin.
“It’s okay, you can laugh,” I told him. “I had nothing to do with that.”
He let the grin out, a full-fledged smile. “Your bathroom could use some work.” The laughter in his eyes made Blueberry Cottage feel less alien and frightening. “What’s upstairs?”
I thought he was joking. “Upstairs?”
I didn’t see the trap door in the beadboard ceiling until Clay, who had to be at least six-four, reached up, unfastened a hidden latch, and lowered a sturdy set of stairs.
The dogs scrambled upstairs. Clay and I followed in a slightly more sedate manner. Th
e ceilings of the second story sloped almost to the floor. I could stand underneath the peak, where a partition divided the two rooms. Clay had to duck.
Now I understood why the cottage’s proportions gave it the look of a full-sized Victorian house. The second-story windows, which until this evening I had believed were only for an unreachable attic, went all the way down to the floor.
Blueberry Cottage was livable for anyone under six feet tall, and being inside it was fun, like walking around in a dollhouse. The cottage was next to a river where renters could canoe or kayak, and only a short walk along a pleasant trail to a beautiful sandy beach, so I’d figured I’d have no problem finding tenants even though they would have to sleep on pull-out couches in the great room. But the cottage actually had two bedrooms. If I could find a family whose members were shorter than Clay, I could rent the place for more than I’d planned.
Renovating those extra two rooms would cost more. I’d have to inspire more people to buy sewing and embroidery machines. Not a bad challenge. The renovations would also take longer. I tried not to linger on visions of Clay working in the cottage in my backyard day after day, week after week . . .
Luckily, he seemed to have no inkling of my toovivid imagination. He was uncovering an ash floor in one of the upstairs rooms and an American elm floor in the other.
“Different types of wood?” I asked him.
“This was one of the earlier Victorian buildings in Elderberry Bay. In those days, as in the days of the first settlers, it was common to use lumber from trees on the property. The owners must have had at least one large ash and one large elm.” I knew from the grove of elms I’d loved in Manhattan’s Central Park that American elms are nearly extinct, and Clay told me that invasive insects were threatening ash trees as well. Blueberry Cottage began to seem like a treasure.
Clay took pictures and wrote down measurements. “I’ll bring you an estimate. The cottage is definitely worth repairing, and it will be great to see this wood stripped and brought back to life.”
We went downstairs, and Clay tucked the staircase up into its niche, where it became almost invisible.
I asked, “Should we build permanent stairs?”
He considered the ceiling. “We could, but those stairs are close to code. They hinged the stairs and turned them into a sort of trap door so they could live downstairs and save on heating in the winter.” He pointed at the fireplace in the great room. “Though they probably burned their own firewood originally, too. If you like, we can completely winterize the cottage and you can rent it year round. If we don’t winterize it, being able to block off the upstairs would extend your rental season into spring and fall if your tenants didn’t mind sleeping in the great room.”
I’d have to think about it.
He must have noticed my frown. “I’ll give you quotes both ways.”
“Thank you.” I was liking this man more and more every minute. To keep him from reading the excessive appreciation on my face, I spun on my heel and headed toward the Victorian sink we’d been admiring. It was underneath the window looking out on the spot where Mike died.
Clay joined me beside the sink. “This is in great condition.”
“It is. On Monday, I was in here planning how the cottage might look eventually, and I scrubbed the sink. No scratches or chips.” I ran my hands over the smooth porcelain.
There was something in the sink, down near the drain, that hadn’t been there on Monday, the day before Mike was murdered.
A beetle in the middle of winter?
But it wasn’t a bug. It was a button.
13
IN WEDNESDAY MORNING’S BLACKEST hours, I’d sensed that someone might have been inside Blueberry Cottage.
This evening was as dark and nearly as cold as it had been then. Gripping the hard, rounded edge of the old sink, I imagined the attacker creeping away from Mike the moment my dogs started barking. I imagined him breaking into my cottage with one swift kick at the front door. Tiptoeing across the uneven linoleum floor. Stationing himself by the window.
Watching me run down the hill behind my dogs. Concentrating on us so intently that he hadn’t noticed a button falling off his jacket and sliding into the sink . . .
It was no more far-fetched than some of Uncle Allen’s oddball theories.
Did the attacker think I had seen him and would be able to identify him? Would he be back?
A draft snaked around my ankles. Something whimpered and nudged my knee. Although I knew it had to be Sally or Tally, I jumped.
“Willow? Are you all right?”
I’d been contemplating the inside of a sink. What must Clay have thought?
I stammered, “Sure.” I’d left my camera in its docking station in my shop. “Can you take a picture of this button?” It was probably one of the more peculiar favors anyone had ever asked of him.
He managed to act like I wasn’t nearly as strange as I felt. Without laughing at me or running away, very far and very fast, he took photos.
“It’s evidence,” I wailed. “The investigators should have taken it. There could be fingerprints on it.”
“Maybe they didn’t notice it, on the dark lip of the drain like that.”
Maybe the investigators mistook the button for a dead beetle like I had at first. It was an unusual button, possibly handmade, uneven around the edges and not quite round, like someone had sliced a branch about the diameter of a man’s thumb and drilled two holes in the disc. Wisps of brown thread trailed from the holes. At first glance, I’d thought they were antennas.
Clay asked, “Who makes buttons from black walnut?”
“I’ll ask Edna.” I searched the counter and floor near the sink for other threads that may have come off when the button did.
I didn’t see a thread, but I did find an aqua spot barely bigger than a nickel, and shaped sort of like Ohio. A trail of similar spots led to the riverside door. I followed the trail and touched the door. It creaked open. I usually kept it bolted.
Hackles rising, the dogs barked. I grabbed their collars and held on. If Uncle Allen and the investigators had missed the button and the faint trail of paint splotches, what other evidence might they have missed? Meanwhile, we’d been wandering through the scene, possibly contaminating it.
Clay strode across the room, examined the door, then turned to face me. A muscle twitched in his jaw. “Someone forced the door. The wood around the lock is splintered.”
More evidence. I had to get the dogs out of here before they compromised it. We took them out through the great room and up to the apartment and shut them in.
Back at Blueberry Cottage, Clay offered to nail the door shut, but I wanted to check on what else the investigators had missed. Or added. One of them could have lost the button. Another could have tracked paint around.
We checked the front porch, the one facing the river. My flashlight’s beam picked out two more, slightly larger, paint spots between the door and the thick blob of aqua paint that someone had thrown on my porch about twenty-four hours before Mike died. There was also a spot of aqua on the door, down low, where someone had kicked it open. Mike’s murderer, or an investigator?
It was easy to see where the sole of a boot had pulled an Ohio-shaped chunk of paint out of the thickest part of the paint blob. The paint must have been mostly dry when the boot landed on it. I could convince myself that I could detect a faint boot print on the surface of the paint, but I could also convince myself I was imagining it.
I told Clay, “I first noticed this paint on Tuesday. Someone must have thrown it here Monday night. Wouldn’t it have frozen by now?”
“A water-based paint would have.” He squatted down but didn’t touch the paint splash. “Even without the odor, I can tell this is an oil-based paint. They don’t cure or freeze in cold temperatures as quickly as water-based paints.” He stood and tapped my shoulder, his touch so gentle I barely felt it. “Are you sure you’re okay? You’re shivering.”
“I’m fi
ne. I don’t look forward to haggling with the state police about evidence they might have missed, though.”
We climbed the hill to the gate near the street. Clay touched the yellow tape. “I guess it’s just as well this stuff’s still here, if the police have to come back. But it can’t be good for business.”
“It attracted crowds. Not the sort of crowds who buy much, though.” I didn’t add that the yellow tape and the rumors flying around the community had brought accusations of murder.
He tilted his head and raised an eyebrow, and I had to tamp down the urge to concoct tales of astounding woe. I managed what I hoped passed for a confident smile.
He glanced up at the mottled charcoal sky. “Judging from the way those clouds are rushing east, we may get snow. I hope it doesn’t warm up too fast. Ice could jam the mouth of the river, and cause a flood.”
“It won’t.”
“Hope not.” He went out, waved, and strode to his truck. I locked the gate.
In my apartment, I had to calm the excited dogs before I could phone Trooper Smallwood.
Her voice was more clipped than last time I heard it. “Sorry I didn’t get to talk to you today,” she said.
“I found something you missed—”
She interrupted me. “The team is very thorough.”
I ignored her annoyed tone. “Somebody left a button at the scene. The killer’s fingerprints could be on it.”
“There were no buttons. They’d have noticed.”
But they didn’t. I let my silence say it for me.
After a few moments, she asked, “Did you touch or move it?”
“No.”
“Good. Don’t. Where was it in relationship to where the victim was?”
“Inside my rental cottage, in a sink underneath a window that overlooks where Mike died. The door near the river had been kicked in.”