by Clover Tate
“Stella,” I said, testing the waters. “Miles has one of your paintings in here. Did you know that?”
“Oh, sure,” she said from the kitchen. “I think I gave it to him at some point.”
Her cavalier manner didn’t match the inscription’s emotion. Curious. I filed that away and moved on to the desk. It was fairly orderly, with the state parks and clamming permits tidily pinned to a bulletin board. Fishing poles leaned in the corner. The sheriff had undoubtedly searched all this, and if he found anything interesting—my gut clenched at the thought of Miles’s calendar—he took it with him.
The already-weak light filtering into the cabin was fading now. I wondered if we dared turn on a lamp. Maybe Sheriff Koppen would somehow be able to get records from the electric company showing power had been used tonight, and we’d be nailed. I decided not to risk it.
I was curious to see the kitchen. What kind of kitchen would the chef keep at home?
“Find anything in here?” I asked Stella.
Of course the Airstream’s kitchen was too small for him, so he’d built another kitchen around the trailer’s nose. He used its metallic shell as a sort of wall-sized bulletin board with magnets holding up drawings and photos. I leaned closer. There was a snapshot of Avery at the beach, her hair blowing around her head. From its central location, I could tell it would have been the first thing he’d seen as he turned from the stove. I removed it from under its magnet.
“That’s Avery, isn’t it?” Stella said. “She looks happy.”
“So strange.” I held my breath a moment before releasing it. “He put this photo in such a prominent spot. Now she’s being held for his murder.”
“It’s not right.”
Reluctantly, I left the photo and continued my search. Against the cabin’s outer wall was the stove, with a well-used cast-iron skillet on top, and a waist-high refrigerator. Beyond that was a small bathroom and the cabin’s back door.
“Nothing here,” Stella said. “He was working on a few mushroom recipes, but that’s all. Nothing points to a motive.”
“Mushrooms again,” I said. “I can’t help but think of the pickers who threatened Miles.”
“Oh, Emmy. You don’t want to get involved with that. Let the sheriff take that one. I’m serious.”
“If they’re that dangerous, it’s all the more reason to follow up,” I said.
“For the sheriff to follow up, you mean.” Hands on hips, Stella surveyed the kitchen. “I want to check the drawers before we’re through here. Why don’t you take the trailer?”
“All right.”
I ducked back into the cabin’s main room and through the Airstream’s open door. I stepped up into a small kitchen, now unused, next to a dining room table that looked to be put into service as another desk, only messier than the one in the main room. The sheriff would have searched the desk thoroughly, and he would have taken anything interesting with him. Still I poked through the papers. Mostly menu planning and food magazines.
Beyond that—the rear of the trailer—was a tiny bedroom wall to wall with mattress and pillows. The window at the trailer’s rear opened to the outdoors. Miles was a reader, as shown by his armchair and yards of books in the main room. He would have read in bed, too, I was sure. Might he have stashed notes there? Feeling self-conscious, I stepped up to his mattress and settled myself as if I were him. The clove-and-leather scent of a man rose from the quilt around me. It was cozy in here—a nest. A small lamp hung from the wall near my head. His reading light. Tiny cabinets, almost like the storage compartments in an airline, sat snug against the upper inside wall. Their bottoms curved in typical Airstream style.
I unclipped a cabinet and found an extra quilt and pillow. For a brief moment, I’d wondered if Avery had ever used it, and felt a mixture of sadness and shame at my intrusion. I groped the bottom of the cabinet. My fingers touched paper. Working by feel, I extracted the paper from the bottom of the cabinet and pulled it forward.
Electricity records be damned—I needed to know what it was that Miles kept here, so close to where he slept. I clicked on the lamp and unfolded the papers.
“Stella, I think I found something.”
She was at the bedroom door in a second. “What?”
“Look here.”
The papers looked to be some sort of floor plan. I put my fingers at what must have been the front door and moved through the rooms. A restaurant—plans for a restaurant. And it was attached to a larger sort of complex, although only the edges showed. Avery had said Miles had dreams of his own restaurant. Perhaps this was it.
“Restaurant plans,” Stella said.
“Yes. Does it mean anything?”
“Can’t say. I don’t know why anyone would kill him because he wanted his own restaurant.”
“True.” Maybe he looked at them from time to time when he was discouraged and needed that dream to give him a lift. In his cozy house within a house, he might have clicked on the lamp like I just did and pulled the plans from the cabinet. He would have spread them across the bed and dreamt of the world he planned to create with food and hospitality.
I returned the plans to the cabinet and turned off the light. The space’s intimacy reminded me again that I wasn’t supposed to be here. I smoothed the quilt behind me and slipped off the bed. Although the sun hadn’t yet set, the cabin, surrounded by fir trees, was dark.
“What do you think?” I asked Stella.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anything. I’m glad we came, though. It gives us a better idea of who he was, and that should help.”
Help what, she didn’t say. But I knew what she meant. Anything that helped us understand Miles might illuminate why he was killed.
“Let’s leave by the rear door, like the sheriff did.” We took the back door through the kitchen, circling to the cabin’s front, where the Corvette was parked.
I slipped the key into my pocket. I wasn’t sure what we’d found—or not found—in the cabin, but it might be worth looking into again.
chapter twelve
The house’s darkened windows as I drove up only depressed me further. Bear was happy to see me and danced around my feet as I clicked on lamps here and there, but Avery’s empty bedroom only drilled home what a dire situation she faced. I thought of Jack Sullivan’s accusations, and my chest tightened. He wasn’t right, of course he wasn’t, but I knew he wasn’t alone in his opinion of Avery. The whole town wondered—or would soon.
I wasn’t sure what I’d learned by breaking into Miles’s cabin, either, except that I think I would have liked him. The goofy way he built around the Airstream, the piles of books, how he lived his life the way he wanted—I admired all that. But I’d never met him in the flesh. I swallowed. Well, not alive, anyway.
“What next?” I asked no one in particular. “What should I do?” Bear, who thought that whenever I talked, whether on the phone or alone, it had to be to him, wagged his tail. I heaved a sigh and headed toward the kitchen. We still had some of Mom’s casserole left.
The phone rang. “Mamma Mia” again. I groaned.
“Emmy,” my mother said. “I have a bad feeling.”
She couldn’t have heard about Avery unless the Portland papers had picked up the news, which was all too possible by now.
“Indigestion again?” I asked. “Don’t you have a special tea for that?” There was no way I was going to tell her about Avery and finding Miles. Her fretting would only worsen things. Surely within a day or two the sheriff would see he’d been wrong, Avery would be released, and things would go back to normal.
“Not about me. About you,” Mom said. “I was just telling your father that you girls shouldn’t be alone up in that old house.”
I was more alone than she realized. I took the phone to the front porch and pulled a blanket over my knees while Bear trotted to the yard to do his business. “Bu
t we have Bear.”
“You’ve had a very protected life, honey.”
And whose fault was that? I added silently.
“Emmy. Are you listening?”
“Yeah, Mom. Why are you worrying about me now?”
“A mother’s sixth sense, I guess.”
“In this case, you have nothing to get excited about. Everything here is just fine.” I hated lying to my mother.
A moment passed, then two. “I just worry that if anything happened, you might make foolish choices that could come back to haunt you later.”
I hesitated, then asked, “Are you thinking of anything in particular?”
“No. Nothing special. But that’s how life is. Things come up, and you have to deal with them.”
If she only knew. “Mom, I’m not fifteen anymore. You have to let me live my life.”
“You’ve been living on your own since college.”
“Maybe technically, but when I was in Portland, a day didn’t go by when you weren’t around.” The strain of the murder and Avery’s arrest had found an outlet at last. Anger gathered in my chest. “You checked my refrigerator to see if I was eating all right. You talked to my neighbors when I wasn’t home and asked them where I was. You wouldn’t even let me buy my own sheets.”
“Those were unbleached, organic cotton sheets I brought you, honey—”
“Why not just stitch together sandpaper? It would have been more comfortable.”
“I’m not talking about little things like that. I mean bigger things. You’ve moved away and started your own business. You went to art school, not business school. How are you going to make it through the winter when you don’t have all those tourists for street traffic?”
She’d struck a nerve. I had a vague idea of trying to set up Internet sales and exploring the indoor-kite market, but I’d only begun researching where to advertise and which kite clubs to contact. Then I thought of Frank Hopkins, my landlord. Frank had said he’d help me flesh out my marketing plan. “I have a good business plan, plus I’m getting marketing advice from a successful businessman, Mom. Now, would you leave me alone? Can’t we have a normal mother-daughter thing?”
The silence on Mom’s end pierced more deeply than any words she might have chosen. I softened my voice. “I have to make my own choices. Maybe I’ll make a mistake from time to time, but that’s part of learning, right?”
“Honey, I worry. I can’t help it. You know it comes from love.”
“I know.”
“But you will tell me if you need our help, won’t you? It’s not a sign of failure to ask for help.”
I rose and opened the front door. Bear charged into the house and waited expectantly by his bowl in the kitchen. With my free hand, I dumped in some kibble.
“Sure. Of course. But for now things are fine. I have to go, Mom. Was there a reason you called other than to tell me how to live my life?” I had to leave soon if I’d make it to the Astoria jail in time to visit Avery.
“Don’t take that tone with me, Emmy.”
Of course, she was right. I was being awful. My anger deflated like a balloon. “I’m sorry. I guess the stress of—the stress of opening Strings Attached and all is getting to me.”
“Take care of yourself, hon. I mean it. Just take things a day at a time.” Lord, she was irritating, but I did love my mom. “Anyway, I called to give you a few names of attorneys your father recommended.”
“Thanks.” I grabbed a pen.
“He said your friend better have deep pockets. A good defense could set him back a hundred thousand dollars, easily.” Mom threw in one last piece of advice about how to make homemade toilet-bowl cleanser, and we said good-bye.
I set the phone on the kitchen table and heaved a monumental sigh. A hundred thousand dollars? Where would Avery get that kind of money? As I gathered my keys and purse to visit Avery, I repeated Mom’s advice aloud. “Take it a day at a time.” If only it were that easy.
* * *
The county jail in Astoria looked from the outside like a relic from a Dickens novel with its fortresslike walls and solid turrets. Fortunately, the inside was more up to date. I got on the list for the eight o’clock visiting session and sat uneasily in the waiting room, filling out paperwork. Around me, mothers shushed children, and other visitors browsed magazines or stared at the jabbering television hanging in the corner.
At last, a warden called my name and led me into a small room. Avery sat on the other side of a thick slab of foggy plexiglass. Other than a table, two chairs, and a clock audibly ticking on the wall, the room was bare.
“Avery,” I said. “How are you?” What a stupid question to ask someone wrongly jailed for homicide. Besides, the shadows under her eyes told me clearly that she wasn’t well.
“All right, I guess. Considering.”
“Mom says hi,” I said.
“You didn’t—?”
“Not a chance,” I said. We looked at each other uncomfortably for a moment.
Avery abruptly broke into a cheerful smile. “I’d offer you something to drink, but . . .” She lifted her palms in a What can I do? position and faked a search of the institutional green walls for cocktail makings.
“All right. I’d like a Brandy Alexander.” This was one of our old jokes from the first Mary Tyler Moore episode, one her mother forced us to watch whenever she caught it on television. I started to laugh, just a little, and then suddenly I was laughing so hard that I was crying, too. So was Avery. My throat hurt. “Have you thought about a lawyer? I got some names from Dad.”
Avery’s smile faded, and the shadows under her eyes darkened. “They assigned me a public defender. She’s okay, I guess.”
“Just okay? That’s all?”
“She seems to know what she’s doing.”
I folded my arms in front of my chest. “If you’re not out of jail soon, you need to consider hiring a real shark. I know it’s expensive, but it’s worth it.”
“I’m not guilty. It’s the guilty people who hire those guys. I—”
“I know, I know. I’m just saying.” The clock ticked as the minute hand advanced. “What happens next?”
“I’ll go in front of the judge, and he’ll set bail. If he decides to set bail, that is. Then at some point a grand jury decides if there’s enough evidence for it to go to court.”
“Oh, Avery.” I imagined the courthouse, the photographers, the judge. “I want you home.”
“The Brew House—”
“Don’t worry about the Brew House. I told Trudy you’d be away for a few days, and she’s taking care of things.” Avery looked at me. I knew she wanted to ask if I’d told Trudy the truth. “I didn’t see the point of telling her where you were.”
“I suppose she’ll know soon enough.”
“Not if you come home. Not if the judge sees how flimsy the case against you is.”
“Is it flimsy? They found blood on the boat. The knife. I feel like this is someone else’s life I’m living, a big joke. The house lights will come up, and we’ll go home, and everything will go back to normal.”
Just a few days ago, everything was normal. My biggest worry was running out of half-and-half for coffee. What I’d give to have the same old frustrations of daily life now. “I know.”
“The sheriff thinks I did it. He keeps asking me the same questions over and over again. Like I’m going to have new answers.”
“What does he want to know?”
“Where I was the night Miles was killed. If I was down at the docks. Things like that.”
“You were home.”
“I guess.”
She guessed? Of course she was home. “I told him you were in bed.”
She ignored me. “He asked a lot of questions about me and Miles. If we fought, what he was like. What we did together. You know.�
��
I didn’t know. Besides the day I found his body, she’d kept her relationship with him to herself. “You’ve never really talked much about Miles.”
She looked at her hands, clasped in front of her on the table. “I just—I just didn’t want to. That’s all.”
“I thought maybe you were going to say something about him; then you found the knife.” The knife with its rust-hued stains. I shut it out of my brain.
Silence. Just like before. I couldn’t tell what she was hiding or why.
“Did they find anything out about the knife?” I tried again.
“My lawyer says all they can tell is that it’s from a restaurant-supply store.”
“So it could be from the Tidal Basin,” I said.
“Or the Brew House.”
Damn it. This was infuriating. I leaned toward the plexiglass barrier and lowered my voice. “I went to Miles’s cabin today. Just to check it out.”
“You did what?” Her forehead nearly touched the barrier between us.
“Avery, keep your voice down.”
“You went to Miles’s cabin?”
“Calm down. I went just to check it out. That’s all.”
She leaned back. “That cabin. Isn’t it crazy? He built it all around that trailer. That was so like him.” And so unlike Dave, I thought. Her gaze had lost focus, turned wistful. She turned it to me again. “Why did you go?” Her eyes widened. “You didn’t go inside, did you? Tell me you didn’t go inside.”
“I had to do something. You shouldn’t be here.”
Her shoulders slumped. She knew. “Oh, Emmy. Leave it alone. I appreciate you trying to help me, but the investigation is up to the sheriff. Don’t mess it up for both of us.”
“But I—”
“I don’t need Sheriff Koppen saying I’m interfering with the investigation by having you stirring things up.”
“I haven’t stirred anything up; I just want to give him some helpful information. That’s all.”
“I appreciate it, Em. I just don’t think he would, and that could come back to hurt me. Besides, what if you did find something? Maybe the sheriff wouldn’t be able to use it. The prosecution would say you tampered with it.”