by Laurie Cass
* * *
Late in the day, my cell, which I’d set in a prominent position on the corner of my desk, started vibrating.
I knew this because the papers that had accumulated on top of the phone started rustling and sliding and were in danger of descending to the floor.
Holding the papers with one hand, I pulled out the phone with the other and looked at the screen. Not Ash and not Detective Inwood. I thumbed it on. “Hey. What’s up?”
“I need you.”
“Of course you do,” I told Kristen. “Why this time? No, wait. Let me guess. It’s my soufflé expertise.”
“Right. That’s about as likely as you needing me to . . . to . . .”
“To come up with an appropriate analogy?”
She laughed. “What are you doing for dinner tonight? If you stop here after seven, I’ll feed you.”
“How about seven-oh-one?”
“Done deal.”
We hung up, I put the cell phone on top of the papers this time, and went back to what I’d been doing.
* * *
After work, I walked home, changed into shorts and a T-shirt, and took Eddie out to the front deck for some fun in the sun. He enjoyed a game of Attack Minnie’s Shoelaces When She Moves, but the wind came up—which, according to Eddie’s glare, was my fault—and he wanted back inside.
“Sorry about that, pal,” I told him, but he wasn’t mollified until I gave him some treats. I watched him scarf down the tender morsels, and wondered if I’d accidentally created a very bad habit that I would never be able to erase.
As I let myself out, I tried not to think about a future that included a constant stream of “Mrr. Mrr. Mrr. Mrr,” whenever Eddie wanted something, and instead tried to think about what I’d learned from Mrs. Panik. I still hadn’t heard back from Ash or the detective, so I hadn’t had the opportunity to hear them pooh-pooh my new theories.
“Hey, Minnie. You in there?”
I jumped and looked around. Rafe was on the steps of his front porch, along with Skeeter and a medium-sized cooler. Skeeter was a marina rat and couldn’t have been much older than I was. Where his name had come from and what he did for a living that enabled him to spend every summer on a boat in Chilson, I had no idea. I’d always meant to ask, but somehow direct conversations with Skeeter were difficult. This made him an ideal companion for Rafe.
“What’s up with you two?” I asked.
“Guess what’s in here.” Rafe slapped the top of the cooler. “Want to bet on it?”
“You’ve spent the day picking strawberries, and now you’re about to start making jam.”
The two men looked at each other. “How did she know?” Skeeter asked, his voice full of artificial wonder.
I rolled my eyes. “It’s either beer or fresh fish.”
“Nope.” Rafe flipped back the cover and reached in with both hands. “It’s both.” He brandished a Miller Lite and what was probably a trout. “Want some?”
While it was tempting to say yes, just to see the look on his face, I shook my head. “Kristen asked me over for dinner. I’ll see you guys later.”
They called out dinner suggestions to my back until I couldn’t hear them any longer. “Morons,” I said to myself, but I was smiling.
And I was also early. I’d tried to time my walking pace to arrive at exactly one minute past seven, but something had gone wrong and I was a few minutes early. I didn’t want to barge in on the end of the dinner rush, so I decided to extend my walk.
The homes in this area weren’t large, but they were old and many had been in the same family for decades, DeKeyser style. I went back to thinking about the implications of Andrea Vennard being in the Friends’ book-sale room the Saturday before her murder. Had she intentionally done so to look for the book? While in the sale room, had she discovered something that led her to—
“Hey, Minnie.”
For the second time that night, I jumped and looked around. Over to my right, I saw Mitchell Koyne standing behind a running lawn mower. “Hey, yourself. Don’t tell me you’re working yet another job.”
Mitchell turned off the mower and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Nah. I’m just helping out.” He shoved the damp cloth into his back pocket and put his baseball hat back on his head. “Mr. Wahlstrom doesn’t get around as good as he used to, and I figured I could mow his lawn, at least.”
“That’s nice of you. Have you known Mr. Wahlstrom for a long time?”
“He was my third-grade teacher.” Mitchell glanced at the house. “He gave me a prize at the end of the year. I never got a prize before, you know?”
Part of me wanted to ask the reason for the prize, but the rest of me didn’t want to hear that it had been for good grammar. “He sounds like a good teacher.”
Mitchell nodded. “Well, I’d better get back at it. See ya.” He pulled the cord on the mower and it roared to life.
I slid out my cell phone, checked the time, and hopped up into a fast walk. When I walked in the back door of the Three Seasons, Kristen was standing there, arms crossed, and looking pointedly at the clock on the wall, which indicated clearly that it was three minutes past seven.
“Sorry,” I said. “I got talking to Mitchell.”
Kristen’s blond eyebrows went up. “Mitchell Koyne’s conversation is more interesting than my food?”
“I didn’t know it was a competition.”
“Everything’s a competition. I thought you knew.” She turned and studied her busy kitchen staff. “Okay, guys. If there are any problems, let me know before they happen, yes?” Half a dozen heads bobbed up and down. “Harve, you’ll bring us a couple of specials when things slow down?”
“You bet, Kristen,” he said, nodding.
We went down the hallway that led to her office. She plopped herself into the chair behind her desk, and I settled into the much nicer guest chair. “So, what’s the problem?” I asked. “You said you need me?”
“Oh, yeah.” She pulled out a drawer, pushed back, and put her feet up. “It’s more that I have something to tell you.”
My ears perked. “Scruffy proposed again, and this time you accepted.” For the past three months, on a biweekly basis, he’d been asking her to marry him.
“As if.” Kristen slid down in her chair and put her arms behind her head. “The first time he might actually be serious, I might consider it. But he’s not, so I haven’t, and won’t until something changes.”
“And what might that something be?” This was where things were going to get a little tricky. Scruffy had started texting me, asking what he could do to get Kristen to take his proposals of marriage as a serious offer because he was, in fact, serious about marrying her. “It’ll take some figuring,” he’d said when I’d called him. “She has that restaurant, I have this job in New York, but we could make it happen. I know we could.”
“You love her very much, don’t you?” I’d asked.
“More than the morning sun,” he’d said quietly, and I’d vowed then and there to help him in any way I could, because I knew how much Kristen loved him.
Now she shrugged. “How will I know when he’s serious? I’ll know it when it happens.” She nodded at her computer. “What I needed you for was this. Take a look.”
I squinted at the monitor. “Looks the same as always.”
“No, you idiot. There’s a video clip I want to show you. Here.” She swung her feet to the floor, made some mouse clicks, and turned the monitor so I could see it. “Watch it and weep with me.”
Curious, I hitched my chair forward. The blank screen dissolved into a moving image of sparkling lake waters. The camera was close in, then pulled back, and pulled back more to show the far side of a lake. I blinked. “Hey! That’s—”
“Just wait,” Kristen said morosely.
The camera panned Chilson’s
shoreline, then magically shifted off the water and onto the street, moving along at a pace slow enough to see everything, but not fast enough that it made me queasy.
Soon we were in front of the Three Seasons. Kristen and her staff were smiling and waving in a friendly manner. They stepped aside for the camera, and it came in through the front door and into the restaurant, where a smiling hostess stood with menus in hand.
The screen dissolved to black and I looked at Kristen. “And?”
“It’s awful,” she muttered, slumping down. “They’ll add the sound later, but I don’t see how it’s going to help.”
“Um . . .”
“Didn’t you see?” she demanded. “There was gunk in the water next to the boat launch. There was dirt in the street gutters; I asked the city to sweep the streets before the filming, but did they? Oh no, we can’t change the schedule for the sake of some little thing like a national cooking show. And I can’t believe you didn’t notice the dirt on that window of the restaurant, the little one above the stairway. This whole thing was a horrible idea, and I’m sorry I ever agreed to it.”
Kristen had been right. She did need me.
“Play it again,” I said, and watched it a second time. At the end, when I still hadn’t seen any of the things she was obsessing about, I told her to play it a third time. And a fourth.
Finally, I sat back.
“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “There was one piece of debris in the water. A leaf, I’d say. There was a little bit of sand on the streets closest to the beach, and that window did indeed have a speck of dust in one corner.”
“Told you.”
I ignored her. “It also took me four times through to see that stuff, and that was when I was looking for it. Your average viewer isn’t going to watch it more than once, and even then they won’t be assuming that they’re going to see the fantasy version of Chilson. The average person recognizes that lake water contains the occasional leaf, you know.”
Kristen looked at me, a grin starting to quirk up one side of her mouth. “And that streets near beaches might have sand on them?”
“And that windows might have a speck of dust.”
My friend’s grin went wide. “See? This is why I needed you. You’re the absolute best at making fun of me to my face without me knowing I’m being made fun of until it’s too late.”
In a convoluted way, I followed her sentence structure. “When will the show be ready?”
She shrugged. “I’ve decided not to ask for updates. It’ll make me nuts.”
“How self-aware of you.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” She twisted the monitor back. “But it’s summer. I’m getting too busy to obsess about anything except running this place.” She pointed to the kitchen. “Now that you’ve taken care of me, what can I do for you? I know you don’t want any cooking pointers, but how about career advice? Romantic tips?” She waggled her eyebrows.
I thought a moment. Gossip was an unreliable source of information, but it often held a kernel of truth. “Have you heard anything about Kim and Bob Parmalee?”
“Why?”
“Her name came up, that’s all.”
“Right,” Kristen said. “That sounds about as likely as me not obsessing about that video.” She turned her hands palm up and made fluttery “talk to me” gestures with her fingers. “Talk, or I’ll tell Harvey to wait on dinner until you do.”
That was a cruel thing to threaten, but I knew she’d carry it out if pressed. And it wasn’t like I wasn’t going to tell her everything, anyway. “It had to do with Andrea Vennard’s murder . . .”
We were done with the salad and halfway through the main course of seasoned pork tenderloin with mashed sweet potatoes and the last of the season’s asparagus by the time I finished talking.
“So.” Kristen, who had scooted her chair around to the small table Harvey had brought in with our food, pointed at me with her fork. “At this point, you have four suspects. Kim Parmalee. Jared, the used-book store guy. Paul Utley, the attorney. Shane Pratley, the angry guy. Anyone else?”
“Steve Guilder, the old boyfriend.”
“And have you told Ash or your detective friend about this?”
I shook my head, first because it sounded just wrong to hear Detective Inwood spoken of as a friend, and second, because neither the detective nor Ash had returned my calls.
When I said as much to Kristen, she sighed and speared another piece of asparagus onto her fork. “The only thing I know about Kim and Bob Parmalee is that they haven’t been in here since I opened for the summer and they used to be regulars.”
I nodded thoughtfully. Eating out, especially eating out in a fancy restaurant, was the first thing to go when people had money troubles.
After a moment, our talk turned to other topics, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I didn’t find out something soon, Chastain’s book—and the killer—were going to disappear forever.
* * *
The sun had dropped below the horizon by the time I left the restaurant, my tummy full of fine food and my face hurting from laughing so hard at Kristen’s stories. How much was pure truth and how much was embellishment, I didn’t know and wasn’t sure I cared. Kristen wasn’t one to let the truth get in the way of a good story, and her winter in Key West had given her a healthy supply.
In the gloaming, I walked along the waterfront, nodding to the occasional passerby, usually a hand-in-hand couple, and thought about what I’d told Kristen.
I’d tried to tell her everything I’d learned in the past couple of weeks, but there was bound to be something I’d forgotten. Kristen had a knack for distilling vast amounts of information down into a single sentence, and she’d done it again tonight, just as I was heading out the door.
“It’s not about the book, you know,” she’d said.
I’d squinted at her. We’d been talking about her dad, which was the reason we’d had to skip last week’s written-in-stone Sunday-evening dessert. Her father was coming along nicely from a recent bypass surgery, but he was getting bored, and I’d been telling her about the books I’d drop off for him to read when she’d interrupted me.
“It’s not?” I’d asked, cocking my head. She was wrong, of course. Books were the only thing that mattered.
“No,” she said. “It’s the value of the book. That wildflower book.”
“Well, sure.” As in, “duh.”
“What I’m saying,” she said, a little exasperated, “is that not everyone puts the same value on things. That book, for instance. It had sentimental value to the DeKeysers and monetary value to whoever is trying to find it. But maybe somebody is attaching another kind of value to it, a kind that we’re not thinking about yet.”
Although I was sure the monetary value was the only thing that counted—because who couldn’t use more money?—it was an interesting idea, and I said so.
“Yeah,” Kristen said, already turning back to her kitchen. “That and two bucks will get me half a coffee at Starbucks. Harvey! Have you started the stock for tomorrow?”
But it was interesting, and it sent my thoughts back to the era when Robert Chastain had given away copy of his not-yet-famous book. In those days, the streets would have been dirt. There were no cars. No electric lights. No refrigeration.
And so it was, when the voice came out of the darkness, that my mind was both miles and years away.
“Hey, Minnie.”
I jumped, gasping out a silent shriek. After my feet came back to the ground and my breaths returned to normal speed, Rafe said, “You know, if you started paying more attention to where you are and what you’re doing, people saying hello won’t scare the snot out of you.”
Throughout my youth, my mother had told me much the same thing. Not that Rafe needed to know.
“Bet your mom used to tell you that,” he said.
>
“She told me a lot of things,” I replied. “Have you been sitting on your porch all night?”
“Far as you know, sure. What’s up with Kristen?”
“She’s nervous about being on Trock’s TV show.”
“Figures. She has about the least reason to be nervous as anyone in the history of that show.”
True, but I wasn’t going to discuss my best friend with Rafe, no matter that he’d known her longer than I had. “I saw Mitchell Koyne tonight,” I said. “He was mowing the lawn of his third-grade teacher.”
“Yeah? Who was it?” Rafe opened the cooler that was still sitting on the same spot on the porch and peered in. “Want one?”
“Beer or fish?”
He flashed me a grin, his white smile brightening the darkness, Cheshire Cat–like. “Which one would you prefer?”
“Neither, but I wouldn’t mind a water.” I sat down next to him.
“There should be one in here somewhere,” he said, rummaging around in the cooler. “Hah!” He held it out to me triumphantly. When I reached out, our hands touched and an odd shiver went over me. I put it down to the cold of the water bottle, but when I looked at Rafe’s face I saw an expression I couldn’t interpret. He’d felt the same chill, probably, and was getting ready to make a rude comment about my chilly personality.
“Mr. Wahlstrom,” I said quickly. “That was Mitchell’s teacher.”
“Wally Wahlstrom,” Rafe said, sipping at his beer. “Sure, I remember him. He looked about a hundred years old when we were in grade school, but he didn’t retire until after I started teaching at the middle school.”
“Mitchell said Mr. Wahlstrom had given him an award at the end of the year.” I squinched my nose at the beery smell wafting down the steps. “He seems to have left a big impression on Mitchell. Whatever the award was, I bet Mitchell kept it for years.”
I half closed my eyes and saw Mitchell’s award. A certificate of some sort, framed by Mitchell’s proud mother, for best speller. Or the fastest times-table reciter. His mom would have hung it on the wall in the living room, in a place of honor for everyone to see. What a nice thing for a kid. He would have been bursting with pride.