by Nan Sampson
It was getting close to five and despite the fact that she’d done nothing of any use all day, she felt wiped out. Besides, she wanted to spend some time in her new home. So tonight she’d stay in and then tomorrow she’d get up at the crack of dawn and stake out his house. Maybe he’d go grab something to eat before going to work. Or get gas.
She resigned herself to this taking time – and time was something she didn’t have a lot of, not if she wanted to open her shop on time.
Bird song filtered through the open windows, taking the place of the constant traffic noise she’d heard through her windows in the city. Bird song and… nothing. No honking, no people talking or shouting, no sirens. The quiet was almost unnerving.
She half expected to see Artie appear, but he didn’t.
Pulling herself up out of the hole she’d made in the sofa, she forced herself over to a stack of boxes. It was time to finish unpacking. Time to get settled in. Time to make this place home.
Chapter 16
The next morning, she got up before first light, stepped out onto her porch and just watched in open-mouthed amazement as a rainbow of colors transformed the sky. It was like the 4th of July in pastels, first midnight blue, merging into lavender, then mauve and peach and pale yellow until the sun finally broke above the tall pines, washing her yard in warmth and energy. It was breathtaking. For the first time in over a year — in fact since she’d left her coven after her parents’ death — she felt close to the Goddess. It was like awakening from a long, nightmare-filled sleep, reconnecting to the rhythms and pulses of nature.
She did a series of Sun Salutations then went for a quick morning run, a habit she’d neglected for months. Finally, she showered and dressed, and sat on an old Adirondack chair on her front porch sipping a cup of coffee. The early morning breeze felt delightfully cool on her damp skin, and she took deep breath full of the scents of the pine, the earth, and from somewhere, the delightful fragrance of lilacs. She hadn’t seen any on her own property the one other time she’d been here, but they had to be close by to create such a powerful scent. She vowed she’d spend time that evening outside – it was a full moon tonight and she was excited to do her first ritual circle for an esbat - a full moon celebration - at her new home.
Back inside, she lit a meditation candle, and spent a few quiet moments, giving thanks, and centering herself for the day. She’d missed her morning routine and it felt good, and right, to get back to it.
She packed a light lunch of veggies and hummus dip, some fresh bread from Arabella, and a chunk of rennet-free cheese Patti had left her and headed out for her first ‘stake-out’.
At 6 a.m., the street in front of her quarry’s address was quiet. Huge trees lined the street, arching over the pavement, creating a cool, green canopy. The houses were smaller than the ones in her neighborhood growing up. They had a sturdy, old town feel, like they’d been there forever and would still be there a hundred years hence, all of them well-kept, with neat, small lawns and flower-lined walks.
The streets were laid out in a grid, which appealed to her sense of order, and she found a small cross-street from which she could watch the house. There were only two houses on the side street and she’d watched both residents leave for work a few minutes before.
She cracked open the window, to let in the pleasant morning breeze, then settled back in her seat to wait and watch.
From her vantage, she could see the clock tower on the blockish Town Hall, which sat next to the Police Station, just a couple of blocks away on Main Street. The minute hand on the clock moved with agonizing slowness, and she checked the time on her cell twice, thinking the clock couldn’t be keeping time correctly. It was.
Fifteen minutes crawled by.
Watching the clock reminded her of the end of the school year, sitting in her chair at the end of the day, waiting desperately for the clock hand to move ever closer to three o’clock and the release bell. She’d never been good at waiting. She was much better at doing.
Another half an hour passed. Then another fifteen minutes.
At that point, she was squirming constantly in her seat. She had no idea how actual real cops did this for hours on end.
At 7:00, she couldn’t stand it any longer. She got out of her car and stretched, then decided to take a jog up and down the street. Surely people jogged in this town, maybe she wouldn’t stand out too much.
She’d barely rounded the corner from the side street when the door on the small detached garage opened and an old Ford Taurus backed out.
Turning back, Ellie ran to her car and followed.
She had envisioned, in the worst case analysis, of having to spend days trying to meet this guy. But fortune – or the Goddess – was smiling on her, because the first place the guy went was the Kwik Trip six blocks away at the far end of Main Street.
Ellie pulled in and parked, then went into the store, picking up a handful of random items. He was at the coffee bar, filling up a to-go cup from a glass carafe and dumping in enough fake creamer to permanently harden his arteries in one go. She set down her couple of items and poured herself a cup, added a little real cream from the single-serve plastic containers, then sipped at it tentatively.
Gack. Still, she smiled, and caught his eye. “A little strong. I might need more cream.”
He smiled back at her. “Yeah, it’s potent stuff. But guaranteed to keep you going through the morning.” He raised his cup. “One of these and I can almost make it through third period.”
He wasn’t a bad looking fellow. Not movie star handsome, but in a small town, she could imagine he would be on the hot bachelor list. Wavy, sandy blonde hair, worn a little long, sherry brown eyes with long lashes. His features were ordinary, nothing to write home about one way or the other. But when he smiled, it lit up his whole being and made you want to smile with him.
“You’re a teacher?”
“High school English over at Horizon High. Home of the Daredevils.” He canted his head a little to the side. “Do I know you? You seem familiar.”
Ellie tried for a shy smile, doing her best to imitate the way Kate used to do it when flirting at the bars in college. “I doubt it. I’m new in town. I’m the one opening up the coffee shop.”
“Oh, right! Helen Cullen’s old place.” He shifted his newspaper from his right hand to under his arm, moved his coffee cup to his left hand and stuck out his right. “Todd Hertz. No relation to the rent-a-car folks,” he joked.
Ellie laughed and shook his hand. “Ellie Gooden. Pleased to meet you.”
“So you’ve come to check out the competition?” He gestured at her cup of coffee.
“Not really. I had to stop in for a couple of things, and I don’t have my own machine set up yet so…”
His gaze flicked to the things she’d set down and he got a puzzled look on his face. “Black shoe polish?”
She glanced down at one of the item she had grabbed at random off the shelf. “Oh this? I use this for, uh, craft projects. Antiquing. It’s one of my hobbies.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Really? Shoe polish, huh? I never would have thought.” He turned his wrist to glance at his watch, nearly spilling his coffee. “Oh, I’ve gotta run. It was really nice meeting you. Hope to see you around!”
He raised his cup to her in farewell then hurried off to the register.
Ellie watched him go. He seemed so nice. She had a hard time believing he was involved in a murder. But then, he didn’t seem the type to be involved with the likes of Louisa Cullen, either.
Chapter 17
There was a small park in the center of town, one block off Main Street. She found it by accident while wandering, holding her bag of odd items (which turned out to be a container of black shoe polish, a bottle of pain reliever and a candy bar) and wondering what to do with the rest of her day.
The park housed a beautiful flower garden, well-maintained -- the little plaque informed her -- by St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church’s Ladies Guild
. There was also a small gazebo, a bronze statue of a soldier with a commemorative Veterans plaque, and half a dozen benches scattered around pea gravel covered paths.
Ellie sat down on a bench near the gardens and tore open the candy bar. She didn’t normally eat them. She was not one of those naturally slim people like Kate and she knew the danger of putting sweets in her mouth. And the candy bar wasn’t even one that she normally liked. But she’d paid for it, damn it, and she was monumentally frustrated. Eating chocolate seemed like a pretty reasonable thing to do.
She was staring at the last bite forlornly when she was aware of approaching footsteps.
“Good morning, Ms. Gooden. You’re up and about bright and early. How’s that finger?”
She popped the last bit of chocolate into her mouth and chewed vigorously, while wiping her brown-stained fingers on her jeans. Her “Good morning, Chief” came out in a mumble, but then she swallowed and her next words were much clearer. “I could say the same about you. And the finger’s fine, thanks.”
He scrubbed his face. “Haven’t been to bed yet. There was an accident out on the county road last night. Pretty gruesome. Small car. Skidded, slammed into the side of a bluff. Rolled across the pavement and went over the side, up by Falcon Ridge. Posted limit is 25 for a reason. Probably going way too fast, couldn’t make the turn in time.” He bullet-pointed his summary in true cop fashion.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” It was a tragedy, but it had nothing to do with her. She couldn’t take on other people’s pain – she had enough of her own.
“Part of the job I suppose, although you never really get used to it. Makes you wonder how safe some of these small cars are – although even in my big old 4x4 I doubt I would have survived that roll.” He paused, gave her a peculiar look. “Just dawned on me. You drive a VW Rabbit, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“That’s funny. Same kind of car this woman was driving. Can’t be too many of them on the road anymore. Yours is… what color?”
“White.”
“Yeah. Just like this one.” He stared off at the statue of the soldier. “Odd, don’t you think?”
She shrugged. As a rule, she didn’t believe in coincidences. But surely this was one. “It is strange.”
Gruetzmacher forced a chuckle. “You been going around town pissing people off?”
“Not on purpose.”
Fixing her with a serious look, he asked, “Who have you told about this Bible thing?”
“No one,” flew out of her mouth, and she could see the disbelief in his eyes.
“Really.”
“Well, okay, I told my friend Kate about it. But she’s back in Chicago now, and if she’d wanted to kill me, she’d have done it years ago.”
“Anyone else?”
She sighed. “I did mention it in passing to Arabella Kemp.”
Gruetzmacher threw up his hands. “Great. You may as well have taken out an ad in the local paper.” He ran thick fingers through salt and pepper hair. “I thought I told you not to talk about it.”
“Actually, no, you didn’t. And I don’t think Arabella would have told anybody.”
“She would have told Patti Mough. Probably ran to the phone the second you left. And Patti probably told her daughter, and who knows who she told. They’ll be announcing it in the church bulletin next week.”
“I was just trying to find out whose Bible it was.”
Gruetzmacher pressed his lips together, blew a breath out through his nose. “Finding out about that Bible is MY job. And not something you should be sticking your nose into.”
It was becoming a familiar refrain. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would be a problem.”
He stood up, took off his hat and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve. Ellie thought he was going to chew her out and was picking his words. Instead, he squinted up at the sun. “Gonna be a nice day. Not too hot. You should take yourself up to Valleyview for a picnic. They’ve got a nice nature sanctuary there. Maybe spot yourself an eagle.”
“Does that mean I won’t be able to get into my shop today?”
“That is correct.” He replaced his hat. “Stay out of trouble, Ms. Gooden. And be careful on those roads. Wouldn’t want anything bad happening to you.”
She heard the message in that suggestion. “I appreciate the concern, Chief. I’ll do my best.”
With a slight shake of his head, he pursed his lips and looked off again towards the statue. “Yeah. That’s what’s got me worried.” He tipped his hat. “You have a good day, now.” Then he left her sitting alone on the bench again, wondering how to fill the rest of her day.
Chapter 18
She wound up back at her cabin. Puttering around, she unpacked a few more boxes, hung up the curtains she had picked out for the windows, then made her bed and put on a pot of coffee.
Sitting down on the couch with a fresh cup of French Roast, she stared into the fireplace, now filled with an arrangement of dried herbs and wildflowers, which she would burn in a blessing for her home two nights from now, on the New Moon, and puzzled over what she knew. If the Bible didn’t belong to Artie, then clearly it belonged to the killer. Since it was now MIA, the killer probably hadn’t meant to leave it, and therefore had come back for it. Which meant… what, exactly?
Well, for starters, she reasoned, the killer had easy access to the shop. He or she had to have keys to the place. They also knew enough about the ebb and flow of activity around the shop to know when they could get in unobserved. This meant they had to be a local – or, they had been a local at some point in the near past.
It also meant that they were religious – otherwise, why the Bible? So far that didn’t describe anyone Ellie knew. Although if Louisa was merely pretending to be gay, she could also be pretending to be unreligious as well. For Ellie, that made Louisa the best suspect.
Of course, there was also the high school English teacher, Todd Hertz. She wasn’t sure how he fit into this, other than he and Louisa clearly had something going on. Could the two of them be in on it together? Clearly she’d need to learn more about both of them.
The tar and feathering puzzled her too. Why set someone up in an old fashioned punishment? It sort of fit, in her mind, with the whole Bible aspect. Old time punishment – an eye for an eye kind of thing. Someone who held on to old fashioned concepts. So what kinds of things had people been tarred and feathered for, anyway?
Grabbing her laptop from the small roll top desk that had belonged to her father, she plugged her Wi-Fi adapter into the USB slot, hopped onto the internet and Googled “tarred and feathered”. Thousands of references came up, but she went straight to her favorite source. Thank the Goddess for online encyclopedia sites.
Tar and feathering, it told her, was a public punishment typically used to humiliate the victims. It was usually not legally sanctioned, but rather a form of mob justice. Popular in feudal Europe and then in the colonies, it had been used to deliver ex-officio punishment on people who wouldn’t conform. Thieves, gossips, tax enforcers, even a few adulterers had been publicly humiliated, although recorded deaths from this behavior didn’t seem to be documented.
Was Artie tarred and feathered because he was a thief? If so, who had he stolen from? Or was it because he was an adulterer?
Ellie shut down the laptop and pulled the afghan down around her shoulders, suddenly chilled. Was it really possible Louisa had hated her father’s indiscretions enough to kill him for them? Tar and feather him to humiliate him, and leave him to be found tied to a chair in his own shop, letting the whole world know what a vile human being he had been?
She frowned. Something just didn’t seem right about that. After all, everyone already knew Artie was a philanderer. Still, what she’d just learned made Louisa look like the prime suspect. At the moment, Ellie didn’t have anybody else.
She frowned, staring at the dried herbs in the fireplace. Clearly she needed to learn more about Louisa Cullen -- and about Artie too. Time for m
ore questions, she thought, but who to ask.
She was still pondering that, when there was a knock on her door. She jumped, the noise sounding loud in the silence.
She half expected it to be Gruetzmacher, come to chide her some more, but it was the person she’d least expected to see – her Norwegian mystery neighbor. She opened the screen door and took a step back as he came in, bearing in his oven-mitted hands a large, covered cast iron cooking pot.
“Mr. Gustafson! What a surprise!” She looked suspiciously at the pot. “What’s that?”
“A root vegetable stew. It’s more appropriate for winter, when all you really have left in the cellar are root vegetables, but I’ve thrown in a few early summer favorites too – tomatoes, zucchini, some pole beans, to lighten it up a bit. Not from my garden, still too early for that, but good. The stock is a vegetarian. Store bought, I’m afraid, all my homemade stocks are of the carnivorous variety. But a good organic base – nothing artificial and no GMOs.”
He brushed past her and back into her little kitchen, where he set the pot on the stove and turned on the burner.
“It could use a little warming up, and then we can drop the dumplings in.” He turned to her finally. “You do like dumplings, don’t you?”
“Um, yes, sure, I guess. I don’t think I’ve had them since… well, probably since my grandmother died. She used to make chicken and dumplings that I can still taste. But my mom was never much of a cook, so…”
“I assume that was in your meat-eating days. Ms. Kohler mentioned that you were a vegetarian. Hence the vegetable stock.”
“Thanks. I, uh, I’m not quite sure what to say.”
“Thanks will do.” He unpacked the basket he carried over his arm, unloading a large yellow and white striped ceramic bowl that contained the dumpling mix, and a little container of what had to be the most enormous strawberries Ellie had ever seen.