by Clover Tate
“Comet,” I said. “It’s a comet.”
“Yeah, well it doesn’t have the surface area to catch the wind. Your updraft won’t be strong enough to hoist the whole kite. I get where you’re going with it, but maybe you should try a different shape. Something three dimensional. Maybe a sock.”
“You don’t know it won’t fly,” I said. I didn’t want to admit that I’d had the same concern. I had to try, anyway.
“Then give it a go.”
Smart aleck. I made a production of turning away from him and lifted the kite in both arms. Walking briskly backward, I let the kite go, silently begging it to lift. It held on a few feet off the ground, but I knew that was only because I was walking so fast. The kite clumped to the sand.
I looked at Jack with a stern expression. If he said “I told you so,” I’d send Bear to his house to hide all his shoes and chew up the best ones.
Instead, he said something worse. “So I hear Avery is down at the jail.”
“Where did you hear that?” I practically shouted.
“I guess someone saw her and the sheriff headed north to Astoria, and Lenny listens to the police band twenty-four seven.”
“She won’t be there long. Sheriff Koppen will figure it out.”
“It’s his job to find who murdered Miles,” he said.
I stared at him. “That’s right. It is.”
“And he thinks it’s Avery. Word is that someone saw Avery down at the dock the night Miles died.”
“Did you see her?”
“No, but—”
“Then you should be quiet.” I cast him a look that might crack stone. “I happen to know exactly where she was. At home, in bed.” Young man Sullivan was ten times worse than old man Sullivan.
“Is that so?” he said. “People don’t get charged with murder for no reason. Dave told me that the two of you were down at the bonfire most of the evening.”
“And Avery was in bed. She had a headache. I’m sure he told you that, too.” God, he was irritating. How could I have ever found him attractive? “Back off. Go back to wherever you came from, and leave me alone.” Bear had wandered down the beach to play with a golden retriever. “Bear!” I yelled. I was getting out of there.
“Look,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. Don’t go. I’m being a jerk.”
I paused and examined his face. He bit his lip. Maybe he did have a conscience after all. “Why, then? Why be a jerk?” I asked.
He looked toward the ocean, squinting into the wind. “I just want Miles’s killer caught, that’s all.”
“And I don’t?” I was so mad I was on the verge of tears, but I’d be damned if he’d see it.
“He was my friend. I can’t stand it that someone did this to him and is going free.”
All at once, I saw the strain around his eyes. He was hurting, too. I still didn’t trust myself to speak. Bear ran up and nuzzled my palm with his wet nose.
“Miles and I had been friends since grade school. When he died, and they said he was murdered—” He thrust his hands deeper into his pocket. “I just want whoever did it put away for good. That’s all.”
“You know Avery didn’t kill him.”
He caught my gaze and held it a moment. A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I believe that the truth will come out.” His voice had softened.
It was an imperfect truce, but one I could accept. “Yes. It will.”
He zipped his jacket up a few more inches and turned to climb the bluff toward town. The gray morning blew around me, and the surf crashed deep, then gentled as it unrolled over the sand.
I would find the person who killed Miles. I would. By God, I would.
Bear lifted a leg and peed on the comet kite.
* * *
Stella was at Strings Attached at nine o’clock, just as she’d promised.
“Come in.” I held the door open. “Would you like some tea? I put water on.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Stella said. Today she wore a modern dress cut as simply as a T-shirt. It swished around her calves. A chunky knit shrug kept her shoulders warm.
I led her into the kitchen-slash-workshop and took two mugs from the cupboard.
“I know you’ve seen the store before—” I began.
“But not as if I were responsible for it,” Stella finished. “Is this the tea?” She reached for the Lapsang souchong tin where I’d stashed Mom’s Lassitude Tea.
“Not that one,” I warned. “That stuff will knock you out. It’s one of my mother’s herbal remedies.” I moved the tin to the back. “The others are labeled correctly, though. How about Darjeeling?”
“Sounds lovely.”
“While it steeps, let’s go back into the shop, and I’ll show you around.” I pointed to a wall of simple kites packaged in long bundles. “Those are the diamond kites. They’re the easiest to fly and the least likely to get out of hand in the wind. Best for children and for people who haven’t flown a kite since they were kids.”
“Probably a lot of your customers.”
“Right. I order those kites. But here”—with a flush of pride, I pointed to the ceiling, where I’d suspended the kites I’d designed—“are the custom kites. I make each one by hand. They’re quite a bit more expensive than the prepackaged kites, and not everyone will understand why, but real kite fanatics will get it.”
“I certainly get it.”
“Kite lovers seem to fall into two camps: people who want to maneuver their kites, do tricks; and people who love flying a beautiful kite.” Jack didn’t understand her need to fly the comet kite just to watch it sail through the sky, its tail stretched behind it. He probably liked kite fighting, where people tried to slice the line of their opponents’ kites. To me, that was not what kites were about.
“And we have the beautiful kites,” Stella said. I loved her use of “we.”
“You can send people really into sport kites to Sullivan’s.” Maybe Jack was more about kite engineering than art, but his attachment to Miles Logan was real. My attention slipped to Avery. “Over here . . .” Avery, alone in jail.
Stella looked toward where my hand pointed and waited. “Over here what?”
“Sorry. That’s where the stakes are for anchoring kites in the sand.”
“Emmy, what’s wrong?” Stella asked. God bless her no-nonsense approach.
“It’s Avery,” I said. “The sheriff took her in.”
“Oh, darling,” Stella said, and touched a hand to my arm. “I’m so sorry.”
I stood for a moment, unable to respond. “Let’s get our tea,” I said finally. I pushed open the door to the kitchen and filled our mugs. “Avery found a fil—” I stopped myself before I gave it away. “A knife under her bed, and Sheriff Koppen thinks it was used to kill Miles. He’s so wrong. I have no idea where the knife came from.”
“Avery didn’t have a knife like that?”
“No. Besides, even if she did, why would she hide it under her bed?”
“Good point. If I killed someone, the first thing I’d do is get rid of the murder weapon.”
I fell into a chair. “If I could understand Miles better, maybe I could get an idea of who else might have wanted to kill him. Get Koppen on another trail.”
“I didn’t really know Miles well. I worked at the front of the house, and he was in the kitchen.” She kept her gaze on her mug.
“But what about his personality? Was he quick to anger, or could he have made someone else mad?”
“I didn’t find him any angrier than anyone else. He was an odd man, though. In the best way. Followed his own star.” She smiled. “I admired that. I saw him as a fellow artist. He even lived like an artist, in a cabin apart from other houses.”
I set down my mug. “Apart? What do you mean?”
“He had a place in the woods south of town.
Off Myers Road. I think he liked the peace and quiet.”
“I see,” I said. His cabin probably told a lot about how he lived his life, what was important to him. Maybe it even held clues as to why he died. I lifted my eyes to Stella’s.
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re not thinking of going out there, are you?”
“Why would I do that?” Neither a yes nor a no.
“Because you want to find something to get Avery off the hook.”
“That sounds foolish. I’m sure the sheriff has been out there, and he’d have my hide if he knew I was planning something like that.”
“And don’t forget it, either,” Stella said. She brushed a foot over the kitchen’s old linoleum floor. “Of course, if you were thinking of going down there . . .”
“What?” I held my breath. I planned on visiting Avery that night but had a few empty hours between when the shop closed and my slot for visiting her opened.
“Maybe we could go together.”
chapter eleven
After the shop closed, I dropped Bear at home and drove up the hill to Stella’s house. Madame Lucy’s white face peered from the living room window above, but Stella was waiting for me by the garage door.
“You’re sure you don’t mind driving?” I asked.
“It’ll save us time to take my car.” She pointed the opener at the garage door, and the door lifted, revealing a James Bond–worthy sports car. Its sleek lines looked like they’d be right at home hugging the curves of a road twisting through the Tuscan hills. Or maybe dashing after a jewel thief who’d just carried off a heist in the Riviera. Better yet, driven by the jewel thief.
“Wow.” I hoped I didn’t sound too shocked, but this car was not what I’d expected.
“Corvette,” she said. “Nineteen sixty-seven. I was glad to find one in black. Red is so clichéd, don’t you agree? Get in.”
I slid into the leather seat, and Stella expertly backed out, her fingers light on the gearshift. In minutes we were on the highway headed south of town. I ran my fingers over the Corvette’s dashboard.
“How fast can this car go?”
A smile spread over Stella’s face. “You want to find out?”
“No, I was just—”
She nudged the gearshift, and the car’s engine tightened. We thrust ahead, fast and low to the ground, while the speedometer climbed to seventy, then ninety miles an hour. Centrifugal force pressed me against the seat, and my smile turned into a full-on laugh.
And then we heard the siren.
“Damn.” Stella shifted down and pulled the Corvette to the shoulder. A policeman parked behind us, his lights still pulsing. Stella tapped my knee. “Don’t worry. It won’t be my first speeding ticket.” She rolled down the window.
“License and registration,” the officer said. If he was surprised to see a gray-haired woman behind the wheel, he didn’t show it. Reading the license, he rose to return to his car, then stopped. He came back to the window. “Mrs. Hart?”
“Yes,” Stella said in a ladylike voice.
“Did you teach at Carsonville Middle School?”
“Yes. Yes, I did.” Recognition came over her face. “You’re one of the Dolby twins, aren’t you?”
Officer Larry Dolby, his name tag read. I was waiting for him to break into a smile, maybe reminisce over some eighth-grade antic, and let us go. Instead, he pulled a pad and pen from his breast pocket.
“You flunked me in history,” he said.
Uh-oh.
“Oh dear,” Stella said.
Not that my Prius was in danger of breaking any land-speed records, but I knew speeding tickets were serious business on the coast. The stretch we were on was straight and fairly safe, but each year speeding along the coastal highway totaled several cars and cost a few lives. I shouldn’t have asked Stella about the Corvette’s speed. And if she had prior speeding tickets, there was no telling how steep this one would be.
Officer Dolby glanced at Stella’s license again and scratched something else on the pad. He ripped the top sheet off and handed it through the window. “Best thing that ever happened to me, flunking history,” he said. “I met my future wife the next year when I took it again.” He winked and touched the brim of his hat. “That’s a warning, not a citation. Keep an eye on the speedometer, Mrs. Hart.”
“Yes, Officer Dolby. I will.”
Once the policeman pulled away, Stella shoved the warning into the glovebox. “I always did like that boy. Didn’t know William the Conqueror from William McKinley, but he was a good kid.” She turned the key in the ignition and shrugged. We were a few miles down the road before we stopped laughing.
* * *
The highway dipped into the forest, leaving the ocean view behind. Stella slowed and pulled into an unmarked road. Good thing she was driving. I would have missed it.
“Myers Road,” she said.
“I barely noticed the turnoff. You must have been here before.”
“What? Oh no.” She didn’t look at me. “It’s an old logging road. Leads up to Myers Lake. They say there’s good fishing up there.”
She’d slowed the Corvette to a crawl, circumventing a few potholes that might have earned “lake” designation on their own. Nearly half a mile in, we approached a mailbox by the side of the road. “Logan,” it read in painted-on block letters.
“Here,” Stella said, and took the rutted driveway next to it.
Miles’s cabin—it had to be his; a stretch of yellow police tape cordoned off its front entrance—was dark. And small. Standing outside the car, I realized how isolated it was, too. The ocean was too far away to hear, as was the highway to the west. The air was piney instead of tinged with salt.
But something was strange about the cabin. Instead of being a simple shoebox, a bulbous metal shape protruded from the side. I stepped around the cabin’s side and nearly laughed out loud. Miles had built his cabin around an old Airstream trailer. He must have intended to live in the Airstream, then decided to build it a canopy to keep out the damp, then eventually enclosed the canopy. And added at least one more small room. The trailer’s end poked from the cabin’s side as if it had been driven, nose-in, to a building.
“What do we do now?” Stella asked.
I wasn’t sure I had an answer to Stella’s question. It had simply seemed like a good idea to see Miles’s place for real. “Let’s try the door.”
I pulled my sleeve over my hand to protect it from fingerprints, and I rattled the doorknob. Locked. Naturally. We couldn’t go inside—not with the police tape. The tape had sagged on one side. And yet, surely Sheriff Koppen was finished with the cabin by now. He and his team had searched it and were done. What could it hurt if we looked around a bit, too?
“We could break in,” Stella said. She was full of surprises tonight. I wondered if the school board had any hint of what they had been getting when they’d hired her.
“I didn’t know Miles, but from what I’ve heard, he didn’t seem the type to have Fort Knox–level security measures in place,” I said. “Maybe we won’t have to break anything.” And maybe we wouldn’t have to cement our spots on the sheriff’s blacklist.
“I’ll try the windows,” Stella said.
“Good idea. I’ll see if he hid a spare key anywhere.”
I scanned the clearing around the cabin. If Miles were to hide a key, where would it be? To the left was an oak tree with a clearing under it, probably for sitting in summer with a beer and a friend. Nothing was there now except a large can—looked like it had once held pickles—with a few cigarette butts in it. I wandered to the cabin’s rear. A lean-to storage cabinet clung to its back. The padlock had been clipped off, probably by the sheriff. I opened it. Two tall, white PVC cylinders—razor-clam guns—and a rusted portable barbecue were shoved against the back.
Would a chef leave his barbecu
e in such decrepit condition? Not likely. I lifted its lid and poked in the ashes with a stick. Bingo. A key. This was too easy.
“Stella, I think I found it.”
“Good.” Stella’s voice came from around the corner. “The bathroom window was open a crack, but I wasn’t looking forward to squeezing through it.”
Around front again, we surveyed the door. If Miles’s construction techniques were standard—no guarantee—the door should open in. Then all we’d have to do is duck under the police tape. The key turned smoothly in the lock. I pushed the door and heard a ripping sound as the door hit resistance, then swung open.
“What was that?” Stella said.
A thick strip of shiny tape dangled from the wall. Shoot. “They must have sealed the door from the inside and left through another door.” Inside, I pulled my sleeve over my hand again and tried to press the seal flat against the doorjamb.
“Well, we’re in now. It won’t hurt to look around.” Stella stood next to me as we took in the cabin’s layout. She looked as blatantly curious as I was.
It didn’t take Margaret Mead to figure out that a bachelor had inhabited the cabin. The room was simply furnished with a sagging leather club chair in one corner and a side table stacked with books and a lamp shaped like a horse’s head. Shelves bulging with books lined the walls on the side of the room. Against the opposite wall was a desk with a computer mouse sitting forlornly at its edge. The sheriff must have taken the laptop. Above the desk hung a seascape.
“I’ll check the kitchen,” Stella said.
“All right.”
I examined the painting. Thick brushstrokes sculpted each wave with shades of charcoal and smoke. This was definitely Stella’s work, although it looked simpler, maybe earlier. On instinct, I lifted it from the wall and flipped it over. I’d seen movies where people hid things on the backs of paintings. Nothing was hidden here, but Stella had inscribed the painting to Miles personally. “May this painting live in your home as you have lived in my memory.” Thoughtfully, I returned the painting to the wall. “Memory,” it had read. What did that mean?