Smugglers & Scones

by Talbot, Morgan C

  “We’ll need another approach, then. Keep me posted.” I continued into the front parlor, set the tablets on the tabletop next to Al’s scotch, and wished him a swift recovery. Then I started searching Moorehaven for my other injured guest and my uncle. They weren’t anywhere on the first floor, and I didn’t see them outside in the wet grass. I checked every public room on the second floor. Nada. On the third floor, the door of the Raymond Moore Gallery gaped open at the end of the short hallway. Glass glinted from the gallery’s floor.

  “No, no, no,” I moaned, bolting down the hall. I slid to a stop just outside the door, not wanting to get glass stuck in the bottom of my shoes or accidentally destroy evidence. Even in shock, my brain managed to remember the basics of crime-scene etiquette, thanks to years of discussion with my guests. I did push the door open fully with my knuckle, though, in order to see the full extent of the damage.

  Our three glass display cases, full of Raymond Moore’s handwritten notes, early typed drafts, and associated errata, had been shattered, their contents hurled around the room. Precious notebooks lay mangled, their pages folded and crushed. Typewritten manuscripts covered the room like paper snow, the unnumbered pages out of order. Souvenirs of Moore’s travels and small objects that had inspired him had been shoved out of the way and lay clustered in the corners of the broken cases. I had no idea if anything was missing or not. The room was worse than a disaster; it was a travesty.

  A long whimper escaped my lips. Uncle Hilt would be devastated. He had known Moore personally, had seen him making notes such as these in this very house.

  Unbidden, an image of Lake shattering the glass cases with a baseball bat sprang to mind. Oh, God, is that why I can’t find him? Then I remembered the sliding glass door, how it was slightly open. All that glass—there might be fingerprints from when the thief ran out. I spun and hurried all the way down to the main floor, skidding into my hostess station, where I snatched up the phone and dialed Chief Craig’s office to report the break-in. I must have sounded like a panicked idiot because his secretary started treating me like a shying horse, using soft, gentle words. She reminded me that the chief was still in the hospital, but she said she’d inform Sheriff Kettleman right away. I hung up the phone with shaking hands.

  My front door opened, and I frowned, trying to grasp how the sheriff could have arrived quite so quickly. But it wasn’t him. Lake, Uncle Hilt, and Chloe sauntered in, relaxed and chatting like the most precious items in Moorehaven hadn’t just been ruined and possibly stolen.

  “Where have you been?” I demanded. Screeched, more like.

  Everyone froze, surprised.

  “Moorehaven was empty! Why did you leave? Someone broke in and destroyed the gallery while you were all out having a nice amble along the promenade!” Oh, my God, why am I so angry with them? It wasn’t their fault. No one could have known the gallery would be raided the second everyone left. My eyes widened. No one could have known except the thief. He was watching the house!

  Hilt squawked and bolted up the stairs, muttering under his breath.

  I let him go, too caught up in my realization. “The thief was watching. As soon as you all left, he broke in! He was waiting for the opportunity. He wanted something from the gallery.”

  “Who did?” Lake clenched a fist.

  “I don’t know who he is, or I would have told the cops just now. Better yet, I would have beaten him senseless with a broom or something. Nobody touch the sliding glass door in back. It was ajar when I got back with Al, so it might have fingerprints on it.”

  Chloe clutched her coat tight around her and peeked around the corner into the front parlor. “Is he still here, do you think?”

  I reassured her with a quick hug. “This place usually has several people in it at any given time. He’d want to get in and get out as quickly as he could. He’s probably long gone by now.”

  Paul and Skylar thundered down the stairs and into the hallway, looking disheveled. Paul’s shirt was unbuttoned, and in place of her blouse, Skylar wore another of Paul’s shirts. She wasn’t big on buttons, either, it seemed, since she clutched it closed with one hand. In an intimate twinsies moment, they’d both forgotten their pants.

  “What’s going on? Is there a fire or something?” Paul looked from me to Chloe and Lake. “I keep hearing people running up and down the stairs like there’s a reason to panic.”

  Their midday tryst was far from the first writer hookup under Moorehaven’s roof, and at the moment, also not capable of distracting me from my crisis. “We had a robbery sometime in the last half an hour. Did you hear anything?”

  Skylar and Paul exchanged a worried glance. “We didn’t hear anything,” Skylar said, “but we were in my room. The front turret, second floor.”

  About as far as one could get from the gallery, which lay one floor up in the opposite corner. And no doubt, they had been making plenty of their own noise. That was not the moment to get into my opinion of Paul taking Skylar “under his wing,” as it were. Authors had to get their research in on romantic assignations somehow. Maybe I should make a bingo chart for the crazy stuff my authors get up to in this place.

  “Did he take anything? Did you call the police?” Paul asked.

  “I don’t know yet, and yes. Sheriff Kettleman should be here—”

  A siren wailed up, then cut out abruptly.

  “—pretty soon.” Guess he didn’t get far after his encounter with Dragon.

  Sheriff Kettleman eased his lanky frame through the front door and paused there, hand on his service weapon. While he stood poised like a gunslinger ready to draw at high noon, his eyes raked the hallway for criminals. Finding none, he asked, “You all right, Pippa?”

  “I’m pretty sure your perp bailed out the back. When I got here with Al, the sliding door was open. I didn’t go into the gallery upstairs, but Hilt will be pretty distraught over the loss and the damage, so he’s probably stomping on all your evidence right now.”

  The sheriff grimaced, a combination of sympathetic regret and frustration. He legged down the hallway toward the back door then returned shortly and took the stairs two at a time

  I admired his physical speed, though it felt a little like I was betraying Chief Craig by doing so. Kettleman wasn’t much younger than the chief, but he outpaced the poor man like a shark racing a penguin. I left the sheriff to his investigating for the moment and addressed Lake and Chloe. “Why were you guys all out at the same time? Lake, you were supposed to stay here.”

  Lake managed a brief smile. “Chloe found something. I wanted to go see it for myself, but Hilt wouldn’t let me leave alone, so I convinced him he needed to chaperon me. We were walking to the marina and back.”

  Despite Lake’s stubbornness and Hilt’s dislike of him, they’d been somewhat sensible. “What did you find, Chloe?”

  She briefly lifted her eyebrows at me. “My father’s letterhead in Mr. French’s inbox. I went ahead and ripped it open. Don’t worry,” she said, forestalling my protest, “I found some rubber gloves under the sink off the front room. No fingerprints. The letter was some legalese document I didn’t really understand, but it was just mailed a few days ago. It was asking something about altering a testamentary provision. Lake demanded to see it, so Hilt walked with him because he ‘needed to be watched,’ and ‘folks won’t be suspicious if they see a former lawman in charge.’” She squinted suspiciously as she quoted Uncle Hilt and even set her fist on her hip with old-man cockiness.

  I snorted a laugh, admiring Chloe’s mimicry skills, though I was pretty sure she wouldn’t have dared if Hilt had been in the room with us.

  She continued, “Once they showed up, Lake figured out that the paper was asking if Mr. French still wanted to change his will. But he died before he saw the question, so he couldn’t have given my father an answer. So…” She shot a saucy look at
Lake. “We decided to find out what his will said.”

  My eyes widened. “You asked your father?”

  Her reply was accompanied by a coy single-shoulder shrug. “Ish.”

  My heart thudded harder. “You broke into his office?”

  Lake snorted, and Chloe blew a raspberry. “Of course not. I just used my epic phone skills. I called up Amber and used a high voice with a thick Southern accent.”

  Lake imitated Chloe’s soprano Mississippi voice. “This is Peaches Jackson of Jackson, Jackson, and Lake.” His falsetto was impressive, and his Southern belle face was to die for.

  Chloe put on a smug face and pointed to herself with her thumbs. “I told them I represented Mr. French’s long-lost second cousin, who had heard of his death through a family friend and wanted to know if he had left her anything in his will. So she checked with my dad, came back, and told me that no, everything Cecil French owned was left to one Roderick Scott of Seacrest, Oregon.”

  My jaw dropped open. It seemed there was something to the old rumors after all.

  12

  “Frost said that good fences make good neighbors. But he was just a poet. Good fences make me curious.”

  Raymond Moore, 1936

  Lake shared his confused look with Chloe and me. “You guys seem to be getting a lot more out of Roddy inheriting Cecil’s stuff than I am. All I need is a new boss. What are you seeing?”

  Chloe passed the buck to me with a you-tell-him look. I didn’t blame her. No self-respecting teenager would rat on her elders to a stranger from out of town. So that left me, still half an outsider myself.

  I took a deep breath. “As I understand it, your boss, Cecil, had an affair with Roddy’s mom, Bridget, right before she married Mr. Jorik Scott. So all this happened, what, almost forty-five years ago? And the timing of Roddy’s birth did not clear up who his father was, so there have been rumors in town ever since. Roddy got teased at school as a child, and Cecil got teased, too. But no one ever proved it. And Roddy doesn’t look a lot like Cecil. He and Emily both look like Bridget. But now, there’s that will, a will in which Cecil leaves everything to a man pretty much everyone thinks he fathered.”

  Chloe’s wide-eyed gaze landed on Lake. “Kinda seems to clear everything up at last, doesn’t it?”

  Lake stepped closer to me. “So if Roddy knew he was going to inherit a successful business, he might have killed his own estranged father to get it. Wow.”

  I made a doubtful face, one I could see mirrored in Chloe’s expression. “Yeah, but that doesn’t sound like Roddy at all, does it?” I asked her. To Lake, I added, “Roddy has a degree in music. I haven’t seen him much at the marina.”

  Chloe shrugged. “He could sell it. I bet it’s worth plenty, and the boats aren’t cheap either.”

  Lake tipped his head in uncertain agreement. “Well, Blade and Boom has several boats, but Cecil only owned two of them, and I kind of sank the Mazu. Only the Darwin is left now. The other boats belong to a few local guys who run tours through Cecil. But the business has insurance, so there will probably be some cash later on. I don’t really know Roddy, but cold, hard cash is a pretty strong motivator for a lot of things.”

  I couldn’t shake that nagging feeling that I was missing something regarding the sliding glass door. “Excuse me,” I said and made my way to the back of the building. I stood in the formal dining room and stared at the glass door, now securely latched. Had I erased someone’s fingerprint from the lock when I closed the door?

  My eyes refocused, and Tyleen’s peaches-and-cream home came into clarity. Tyleen and her binoculars.

  “I’ll be right back!” I hollered. Not wanting to mess up the fingerprints on the door any further, I ran out the front door, along the edge of the parking lot, and across the backyard to the gate in the fence I shared with Tyleen’s property. I skirted her tiny, winter-leaf-laden fishpond and barely remembered to leap over the slumbering lawn gnome at the edge of her back patio. My knuckles rapped her glass door with what I hoped passed for a secret knock.

  Tyleen came to her back door wearing a pale-pink chef’s hat, a matching apron, a yellow floral dress, and a baffled expression. She slid open the glass and stuck her head out into the cool, fresh air. “Pippa? What’s going on?”

  “You have a minute, Tyleen?”

  She nodded, and a frizzy curl popped loose from her pink chef’s hat. “I have the afternoon shift at the Fork and Dagger today, so I’m making a big pot of chili for Sebastian when he gets off work. It’s stewing now. What do you need?”

  “Moorehaven just got broken into. Uncle Hilt is upstairs with Sheriff Kettleman, trying to find out if anything from the Raymond Moore Gallery was stolen. You are such a vigilant leader in the neighborhood watch program. Did you happen to see anything suspicious today, anywhere in the direction of Moorehaven?”

  Tyleen’s blue eyes filled with sudden purpose. She stood up straight, jerked her chin in an I-got-this nod, and said, “Come with me, and we’ll check my notes.”

  I followed her inside and immediately felt inferior. Her kitchen and dining room were not only spotless, but decorated in a timeless, classic style that I could never match under my own power. When Uncle Hilt signed Moorehaven over to me last year, its decorations had already been in place, its Art Nouveau theme set in stone, as well as in glass and wood. But Tyleen had a gift for taste and culture that I could never hope to possess. We traipsed through her kitchen and into a small parlor on the north side of her house. A tiny round table near a window with old-fashioned, wavy glass held a pair of binoculars, three pens, and a big notebook atop a frilly cloth with delicate lace edging.

  Tyleen picked the book up, brought it close to her nose, then moved it farther back. “Aha, yes! Here it is! Time: 10:47 AM. Event: man, cutting between your property and mine, acting suspicious. Description: tall, dark hair, carrying something in his hand.”

  My thief had broken into Moorehaven while I was up at the overlook. I frowned. “What kind of thing was in his hand? A lock pick? A gun?”

  “Definitely a gun.” She nodded soberly. “Probably one of those compact foreign types—small and dark. He was trying to hide it.”

  Knowing Tyleen’s losing streak for identifying suspects by their details so far that day, I felt comfortable hoping she was wrong. “Do you remember anything else about him?”

  Tyleen squinted again at her notebook, bringing it nearly to her nose. She shook her head slowly. “No, nothing else.”

  Hoping to eliminate Lake from the pool of tall, dark-haired suspects, I asked, “What about a limp? Did you see him limp?”

  Her pink chef’s hat shook vehemently in the negative. “Oh, no. No limp. My first husband, Sebastian’s father, God rest his soul, had a little limp. Tripped down the steps of our walk-up and got his leg caught in the railing. Broke it in two places. I could see him comin’ a quarter mile off because of that limp. I’m real good with limps. This burglar of yours, no limp.” She waggled her finger for emphasis.

  I sighed in relief. Tyleen was no expert with detail, but she knew her husbands. Lake was almost definitely off the hook for the burglary. “Thanks, Tyleen. As always, you’ve been immeasurably helpful.”

  My neighbor beamed. “Anything to help another member of Glaze and Gossip. I’ll tell you what. I’ll send over a big container of this chili. There’s no way Sebastian will eat it all by himself. Not even if he shares with all the pets, which is never a good idea, but you know that boy and his animals.”

  I had to smile at that. Her son was older than I was. And Tyleen’s homemade, award-winning chili would go perfectly with Raymond Moore’s classic corn bread recipe, which meant I had a nearly effortless supper in the bag.

  I ran back around the yard and came in the front door of Moorehaven in time to see Hilt and Sheriff Kettleman descending the stairs. My great-u
ncle’s face was so pale that he looked like a ghost.

  I hurried forward and grabbed his hand. “Hilt, what’s wrong? Is something missing upstairs?”

  He nodded. “Moore’s notes on The Crimson Kiss are gone. I’ve straightened everything up, double-checked every notebook and paper stack. That’s the only thing missing. And he took the whole notebook. I couldn’t find any of its loose pages lying around.”

  The sheriff pulled out a pocket notepad and began scribbling. “I’ll have someone come dust for prints ASAP. In the meantime, no one is to enter the gallery room or use the back door. Mr. Ivens, it’s my understanding that the chief considers you a person of interest in another case. I’d like to know your whereabouts during the time frame of the burglary.”

  Chloe took a step forward and opened her mouth, but Hilt waved the sheriff’s question away as if it were a gnat of no consequence. “Truth be told, Kettleman, the guy was with me. Had my eye on him the whole time.”

  The sheriff frowned in interest and jotted a note. “If you can’t trust a retired police chief, who can you trust?”

  I piped up. “I just asked Tyleen, my neighbor across the fence, if she saw anything. You should talk to her about that, too, Sheriff.”

  Sheriff Kettleman jotted a final note and slipped the notebook back into his pocket. “Will do. Don’t you worry, Pippa, Hilt. We’ll get to the bottom of this.” He nodded and headed for the front door.

  Chloe spoke up. “Do you think this has anything to do with Mr. French’s death?”

  Sheriff Kettleman paused and frowned, looking like a contemplative stick bug. “Probably not, but if it does, we’ll figure it out, and you folks will be the first to know.”

  He let himself out, leaving the rest of us standing around, stunned. Then I remembered Tyleen. “Chloe, Hilt, help me out in the kitchen for a sec.” I tried to saunter nonchalantly down the hall, but I could feel Lake’s questioning eyes on my back. Once we were all in the kitchen, I circled behind the island, put my palms on its butcher-block surface, and leaned toward the others in my best conspiratorial manner. “I know you just told the sheriff that you had your eyes on Lake the whole time, Hilt, but I just need to know if you guys definitely had eyes on him at 10:47 this morning.”