Prize and Prejudice

by Miranda Sweet

  Her pain must have shown on her face, because Tabitha clasped her arm firmly. “I’m sorry about your friend. I don’t believe I’ve had a chance to say that yet.”

  “Thank you.” Angie forced herself to keep it together. She had a job to do. “Tabitha, I still haven’t managed to…to sort out exactly what happened to him. I keep dwelling on it. I don’t know even when he arrived. I have to go to the ferry station later and see if they’ll tell me when he came over.”

  “And you want to know when he checked in with us,” Tabitha said. “I’ll go check, sweetie, and call you right back.”

  “Thank you, but Marlee said she didn’t remember seeing his name when she entered the registration slips into the computer this morning.”

  Tabitha hummed in acknowledgment, but she didn’t look quite convinced. “I’d better double-check, just to make sure. Marlee typed it all up in a rush after Jasper collapsed this morning, so she might have missed something.”

  Angie finished ringing up Tabitha for the bill, entered it into the computer, then checked the time again. Half an hour had passed, and Detective Bailey still hadn’t arrived. All right, something must have come up. If she hadn’t heard from him by the time Tabitha had called back about Reed, then she would call again to remind him to retrieve the briefcase.

  In the meanwhile, however, she wanted to go through Reed’s papers a little more thoroughly.

  She did another lap around the bookstore, checking on customers. Janet had come in at some point and was watching the café counter, and Aunt Margery was discussing something with a customer who held a knitting book in one hand and a cozy mystery in the other. Angie smiled at her and went around the rest of the store.

  Still no Detective Bailey.

  But Mr. Motorcycle—the man from Indiana who had lost his marriage and job and decided to travel the country—had returned. He was sitting in one of the café chairs and staring out the window. His to-go cup of coffee sat next to him with its lid removed, and a plume of steam curled toward the ceiling.

  Angie walked back to the café counter and said to Janet, “Card or cash on that one?” She nodded toward Mr. Motorcycle.

  “Debit.” Janet reached down into the trash and picked up a curl of paper. He hadn’t kept his copy of the receipt.

  Mr. Motorcycle’s name was apparently Wyatt Gilmore.

  “How was he?” Angie asked.

  “Fine. He seems down. But he wasn’t rude or anything,” Janet said.

  “Thanks.”

  Angie checked the back room to see if Detective Bailey had somehow appeared there. No dice.

  She made up her mind abruptly and walked over to Wyatt Gilmore. Just a few moments earlier, she had worn the same blank expression that she was seeing on his face now, and she abruptly felt worried for him. Maybe she was just being overdramatic, but it seemed like he was nearing the end of his rope.

  She sat in a chair at an angle to his and said, “Nice day out, isn’t it?”

  He started, looking at her as though she were some kind of ghost.

  “It is,” he said carefully.

  “I can’t help but notice that you’re staring out the window and letting your coffee get cold,” she said. “Is something wrong?”

  His eyes widened and he seemed to hunch into himself guiltily. “How did you know?”

  “I don’t know anything,” she said gently. “You just look like you need someone to talk to, and I’m in the mood to listen. I guess I’m feeling a bit paranoid lately. A friend of mine passed recently. He was such a private man…I have so many questions.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Gilmore said politely, but nervously—as if he suspected this conversation were a setup.

  “And while I have to admit that I’m genuinely nosy, I also have to admit that I’m a little worried about you. This is the second time you’ve come in here looking for… I don’t know. Something.”

  She was putting her foot in her mouth, she knew it. He was going to march out of here and not look back—the crazy nosy bookseller could stuff it!

  “Desperate,” Gilmore said. “That’s the look you’re seeing. Desperate.”

  She didn’t say anything. Often all you had to do once you got someone talking was shut up.

  But not today. Today she and Wyatt Gilmore stared at each other as if they were on either side of the Grand Canyon.

  The front door opened, and a tall, loping figure burst through it carrying big white pastry flats. Mickey. He was whistling.

  Gilmore gave Mickey’s back a ghost of a smile. “That guy,” he said.

  “What about him?”

  “He reminds me of when I was younger.”

  Angie couldn’t see it. They didn’t look anything alike, and she hadn’t heard a single goofy, off-kilter thing come out of Gilmore’s mouth. But she wasn’t going to argue with him. “Oh?”

  “I played basketball when I was younger. Back before I met my wife, when I was in college.”

  Smoothly, he transitioned the discussion over to his college years. He had played college basketball for the Hoosiers, and apparently it had been the highlight of his life. Since then, everything had gone downhill.

  In the middle of a sentence, he cut himself off and said, “My name is Wyatt. Wyatt Gilmore.”

  “Angie Prouty.”

  They shook hands. Wyatt laughed and said, “You must think I’m a complete loser, talking endlessly about my basketball years.”

  “I think you’re going through some hard times right now,” Angie said.

  “Thank you for listening. I feel better, even if I haven’t said a word about what’s actually bothering me. But I suppose that’s not too hard to guess, from what I told you the first time I came into the bookstore.”

  She agreed. “You did lay down some pretty big hints.”

  “I’ve been turning it over and over in my mind, but I can’t find any answers. What to do next? I don’t have a clue. It feels like I need to keep riding my motorcycle across the country until…”

  “Until what?”

  “Just until, I guess. Not a lot of what I think makes any sense.”

  “Isn’t there anywhere that you want to be? Anything you want to do?”

  “No,” he said.

  She wasn’t sure she believed him. She’d had friends who had gone completely mental after a breakup before. She had almost turned into one of them herself when she and Doug had split up. But then again, she had always had a home and family to go back to, here on the island.

  Suddenly, there was another person sitting on the other side of Wyatt Gilmore. Mickey had swung one lanky leg over a chair and slid into it, bouncing off the thick cushions.

  “Looks like a serious conversation,” Mickey said. “Time to stop that. How’s it going?”

  “Rough,” Angie admitted.

  “I heard,” Mickey said. “Jo sends her love and all that, she’ll see you later and make sure you’re okay. As for me, I’m giving you my sympathy in the best way I know how. With cupcakes.”

  She laughed. She couldn’t help it.

  “And you, sir?” Mickey said. “You look like death warmed over.”

  Wyatt Gilmore gaped at him.

  “Let me guess,” Mickey said. “Your wife is gone, your farm is gone, someone ran over your dog, and the truck won’t start.”

  “How…?”

  “Oh, man. I have a couple of friends from college back on the mainland who are going through a divorce right now. From each other. I could recognize that look a million miles away.”

  Angie hadn’t heard about the friends divorcing—whoever they were—and immediately suspected that Mickey had quickly grilled Janet or Aunt Margery for details while her back was turned. Mickey could be quite the con artist, and in college he had regularly scammed money off bar patrons to pay his tab. In short, he was probably lying.

  “Anyway,” Mickey said, “I really came to tell you that Jo finally broke down and let me look in the attic of the bakery to see if the
painting was up there. Spoiler alert, it wasn’t.”

  “That’s too bad,” Angie said politely.

  “It is, it is,” Mickey said. “But probably not such a bad thing. I mean, what if it had been up there? I’d have to donate the damn thing to the Chamber of Commerce, in exchange for what? Maybe a stupid party?”

  “You could have told me, and then I’d get the prize money,” Wyatt said.

  “Split it fifty-fifty? No way. Jo would find out for sure, because the first thing I would do would be to buy a new oven for the bakery. I guess other people might notice, too.”

  “Like the IRS,” Angie said.

  “There is that,” Mickey admitted. “Anyway, no painting, no problem, right?”

  “Not from my point of view,” Wyatt said.

  “Sure, sure. Did your ex take all the money or something?”

  “Not really. I just lost my job at the same time.”

  Mickey took in Wyatt’s leathers and the helmet under one arm. “So you’re driving across the country just going where the wind takes you? Cool.”

  “It’s terrible,” Wyatt admitted. “I worked myself to death…I don’t know anyone outside of my job.”

  “It’s just a job,” Mickey said. “Throw it away and start over. It’s not like you owned the place, is it?”

  The two of them started talking about Wyatt’s situation in greater depth, both of them going over the details pretty intensely. Angie stood up and started to sidle away. When she was out of Wyatt’s sight, she gave Mickey a thumb’s up. He rubbed his eye to wink covertly at her.

  She walked back to the café area, made herself a cappuccino, and claimed a cupcake with tiny marshmallows on it. Hot chocolate. And, unlike the one Aunt Margery had brought her earlier, it wouldn’t go cold in twenty minutes.

  Where was Detective Bailey?

  Angie’s phone buzzed in her pocket. “Hello, Pastries and Page-Turners, Angie Prouty speaking. How many I help you?”

  “Tabitha from the Chamber of Commerce,” Tabitha said. “I double-checked the entries for…well, the person you wanted to know about.”

  “And?”

  “We don’t have any records of your friend from yesterday. I’m sorry, Angie.”

  “I thought not,” Angie said with a sigh.

  Tabitha paused for a moment, then said, “Do you need me to come back to the bookstore?”

  It was very thoughtful of her, but Angie had several good options if she needed a shoulder to cry on, and everyone at the Chamber of Commerce had to be busy. She swallowed. “No, it just hit me hard for a moment. I’ll be all right.”

  “Call me if you need me.”

  “Thank you, I will. You, too.”

  “If we all survive the gala this weekend, I just might.”

  Detective Bailey still hadn’t called. Angie found herself back in the stock room, standing in front of the table where she’d stashed the briefcase. Tempting.

  Too tempting.

  Angie flipped through the other papers in the briefcase. She found more information on famous paintings and forgeries of those paintings. Angie wondered what made Reed so sure that the painting was a forgery. But then, she might have it all wrong. He might not have thought the lost Monet was forged. All she knew for certain was that he was investigating forgeries that had been discovered in Boston.

  She pulled out her phone to re-read Reed’s email. He mentioned an impostor, Angie had assumed he was referring to a forged painting. But what if he was actually referring to the forger?

  She sighed out loud. Without Reed, she couldn’t know for sure.

  By the time Angie had finished re-reading the email and trying to sort out what it meant, her eyes felt dry and itchy. She called the police station. “Detective Bailey was supposed to stop by earlier,” she told the person at the reception desk. “Have you seen him?”

  “Is this Angela Prouty speaking?”

  “My name is Agatha, but I go by Angie. It’s me.”

  “Then he left you a message. ‘Following lead, will try to be there in half an hour. Bailey.’”

  “When did he leave the message?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  Her phone beeped.

  “I have another call coming in, I think it might be him,” Angie said. “Thank you, I’ll call back if it isn’t.”

  “Welcome.”

  She switched to the other call.

  “Miss Prouty? Detective Bailey here.” His voice sounded excited.

  “What is it?”

  “Using gloves, wrap up the briefcase in a garbage bag and tape it shut. Then drive down to the location where you found the briefcase. Can you do that?”

  “Be there in ten minutes,” she promised.

  Chapter 10

  Who You Know

  As soon as Angie drove up to the beach with the black trash bag in the back of her little red VW Golf, she realized what Detective Bailey was about to tell her: that if Reed had gone into the water here, it couldn’t have been an accident. There were no hard surfaces where he could have struck his head, and no elevated surfaces he could have fallen from. The only exception was a deck attached to an apartment building that overlooked the water at high tide, but public access was blocked to keep tourists from wandering up the stairs at all hours.

  An unmarked car was parked along the street, and Detective Bailey was standing out on the sand. The wind had picked up and was ruffling his short hair.

  She left the bag in her locked car and joined him on the beach.

  Detective Bailey was standing next the hole in the sand where Angie had found the briefcase a few hours earlier, making notes on his notepad. He looked up at Angie as she got close to him.

  “We’re assuming that he fell. What we know is that he hit, or was hit, on his forehead with blunt force trauma that would be consistent with either falling off something or being hit with something.”

  “Can you get more specific than that?”

  “I could, but not to you.”

  She made a face. “So you know more about the bruise than you’re saying, but you’re willing to admit that it was caused by some kind of blunt force.”

  “That is correct.”

  “And…” She looked around, squinting to help keep the sand out of her eyes. “You’re trying to figure out what killed him.”

  “Just so.”

  “Which is why you called me out here,” she joked, “because if anyone should know about hitting someone with a blunt object, it’s a bookseller. We smack around our customers all the time.”

  He rolled his eyes and turned away from her.

  Why had he called her?

  Was he considering her as a suspect? And he wanted to gauge her reaction to being here. Would she try to steer him away from something? It still seemed like a nice gesture. The two of them hadn’t exactly hit it off the last time he’d questioned her.

  She cleared her throat. “I…uh…looked through Reed’s papers.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “Let me tell you what I think he was doing. Unless you’re just going to arrest me now, in which case I want a lawyer.”

  “Walter Snuock coming back to the island for the gala, eh?”

  The sting had come out of nowhere. She practically jumped. Not that she really minded being razzed a little. It was just so unexpected.

  “Am I under arrest, officer?” She held her wrists in front of her.

  He waved a hand, not bothering to look at her. “I’m sorry. This case. It was already touch and go with the sudden influx of tourists from this treasure hunt thing. To have to sort out a probable murder in a situation like this, where people are coming and going all the time, well, I won’t lie. We’re all a little tense down at the police station anyway.”

  “At least you’re not having the screaming fits about it,” she muttered.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing important. Just…” She took a breath and let it out. “I’ll try to stay focused, sorr
y. What I think Reed was looking for was information on a forged painting.”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t say to me specifically, but he mentioned something about an impostor in his email to me, and his briefcase is full of information on forgeries. He doesn’t have any personal notes explaining any of it, or course, but that’s what I think. He was very private.”

  “All right,” Detective Bailey said. “He thought the Monet was forged?”

  “I’m not sure about that, but I think so.”

  “Angie, that’s a pretty flimsy lead. It’s not proof, but sometimes a flimsy lead is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”

  She blinked. Now there was a colorful metaphor.

  She stared across the beach toward the water. The sand was even and free of rocks and trash. The boats had been moved off the beach for the winter, and the little building had been practically nailed shut against the storms. Not a single window was in sight.

  In other words, nothing that could cause blunt force trauma was in sight. Which meant that whatever had caused Reed’s bruise was somewhere else.

  The most obvious place to hide a weapon would be in the water. And they already knew that the killer had come near the water, both to bury the briefcase in the sand and to drag Reed’s body away from shore.

  “Do you know about Locard’s Exchange Principle?” Detective Bailey said suddenly.

  “No, what is it? Who was that?”

  “The Sherlock Holmes of France. One of the pioneers of forensic science. His idea was that every contact leaves a trace. Not just murderers, but everyone, everywhere. Everything. But he focused on criminals. They leave something, they take something with them.”

  “You think the murderer took the murder weapon with him and didn’t just drop it into the harbor? If he buried the briefcase, why wouldn’t he bury the murder weapon?”

  “I think that if the victim was murdered here, of all places, then he had to have come here on foot. I think he, or she for that matter, meant to come back for the briefcase,” Detective Bailey said. “We’ve been able to establish that he didn’t rent a car. And why would he have ridden with someone he didn’t know?”