by Clover Tate
“What if the sheriff has decided he’s found the murderer and stops looking?”
Avery leaned forward. “You think I haven’t thought of that?”
Satisfied she understood, I opened my mouth to reply, but she held up a hand.
“Drop it. Whatever you think of Sheriff Koppen, he’s fair,” she said.
I flattened my palm on the cold table, then drew it back. “All I want to do is see if I can point him in the right direction. It’s not like I’m setting out to bag a murderer on my own. Besides, Stella went with me.” I hesitated before going on with the story. “You know her, right?”
“Stella Hart? Sure. The hostess at the Tidal Basin. She was willing to break into his house?”
“We didn’t really break in. We found a key.”
“The one in the barbecue?”
I nodded. Maybe she knew Miles a little better than she’d let on.
“Stella and Miles had an interesting relationship,” she said thoughtfully. “They saw something in each other . . . I’ve known you a long time.”
“Yes?” I was wary.
“I know how you get obsessed with things. That’s fine when it’s a new kite design. In fact, it’s what makes you such an artist. But in this case, you’d better leave it to professionals. I don’t want to see you in here with me.”
“But I can’t just—”
“No ‘buts,’ Emmy.”
Of course she was right. I just couldn’t agree with her right then, so I changed the subject. “Speaking of which, what’s it like in here?”
She looked at me with suspicion. “All right, I guess. A couple of the other girls are nice, and the food isn’t as bad as you’d think.”
“But no Brandy Alexanders.” There. At least I’d made her smile. “Sit tight. You won’t be in for long. I can feel it.” Or so I wanted her to think.
chapter thirteen
First thing the next morning, I wheeled my bicycle to the post office. Stella had said that the postmistress, Jeanette, had her finger on Rock Point’s pulse. I wondered what she might know about people who had an interest in Miles Logan. Besides, I really did need to square away my mail. I hadn’t received anything at Avery’s house, and I kept getting mail at Strings Attached for the shop’s former occupant, Mildred’s Treasures.
The tiny post office was on the main drag. Inside was a wall of aluminum post-office boxes on the right and a short counter straight ahead. The left wall bore various notices, including the FBI’s most-wanted list and a local bulletin board, filled mostly with ads for vacation rentals. A woman stood behind the counter, tossing envelopes into different bins.
I knew about people like Jeanette. They loved gossip, and with a little flattery they’d speculate on anyone in town.
“May I help you?” the woman said. Her name tag read simply “Jeanette.” Yes, this was her. She was small and thin and probably well past retirement age. She must have some major clout with the postal-workers union to be hanging on to her job. Despite her thin face, her cheeks puffed like a squirrel’s full of nuts.
“Please. I’m Emmy Adler, and I’ve just moved to town.”
“At the Cook house,” she said promptly.
“Yes.” Wow. She really did know everyone’s business.
“Why haven’t you filed your change-of-address form?” she asked. She pushed aside the stack of envelopes she was sorting and put on the glasses hanging around her neck to examine me better.
“Well, I—that’s why I’m here now.”
She slid a form across the counter. “Here you go. Don’t forget to sign the bottom.”
“I also wanted to clear up the mail for my business, Strings Attached.”
She sniffed. “You’re receiving mail for Mildred’s Treasures, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“I knew it. Mildred moved out last summer. If you could see the garbage she called ‘treasures,’ you’d understand. Made-in-China ship models, imported seashells, ancient postcards . . .”
“If you knew she’d moved out, why are you delivering her mail to me?”
Jeanette looked at me as if my low IQ merited special attention. “That’s the rules. If you don’t fill out the forms, I can’t change the delivery.”
“Better give me a form for my shop, too.”
She slapped another on the counter and returned to her sorting. I waited for something—some hint that she knew I’d found Miles’s body or that I lived with the prime suspect for his murder. Surely she’d want to pump me for information. Isn’t that what everyone said? But she didn’t make a peep.
“Uh,” I said, struggling for something to say. “You sure have your work cut out for you, taking care of all of Rock Point’s mail.”
“Indeed I do.” Envelopes sliced the air as they settled expertly into their bins.
“You probably know just about everything that happens in town.”
I noticed a minute pause in her sorting. A vague smile played on her lips. “At the United States Postal Service, we’re sworn to protect our customers’ privacy. If I did know anything, I couldn’t share it freely.”
The “freely” stood out. So that’s the way it was, was it? “If you knew anything about a murder case, you’d surely share information about that.”
“A murder case? Whatever do you mean?” Jeanette wouldn’t win any Academy Awards for her performance.
“Come on. I mean Miles Logan. You know Avery is being held for his murder. Wrongly. What can you tell me about him? Did he have enemies? Did he receive strange mail or bills?”
Jeanette focused on her sorting. “I have no idea what you mean. I don’t go around and speculate like that. I don’t know who you think I am, but you’re mistaken.”
I clenched my pen, then tossed it to the side. Flip-flip-flip went the envelopes. I softened my voice. “I found his body, you know.” I stared to the side. “Yes, it was me. I’m the one who saw him washed up on the rocks. And what I saw—well, I wouldn’t repeat it to just anyone.”
Jeanette’s eyes tripled in size. “What did you see?”
I sucked in a dramatic breath. “I don’t feel comfortable talking about it.”
“But you can’t just keep it all bottled up.” Jeannette tossed her envelopes aside and leaned over the counter. “You need to talk to someone. Get it all out.”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m talking to someone sympathetic. Someone who understands how important it is to identify real suspects, not just the chef’s ex-girlfriend.” I did my best to appear tortured.
“Sam Anderson, Miles’s boss, is getting some ‘urgent’ mail,” she offered.
“Urgent?”
“You know, the special envelopes? Sometimes they’re blue or stamped with a message? Running a restaurant is a thin-margined business.”
So, the Tidal Basin had financial challenges. I let that soak in. Jeanette trained her gaze on me with laser precision. Time to uphold my end of the deal, the gaze said.
“Finding Miles was an awful shock. I didn’t even know who he was.” I wracked my mind for something to tell her that would be true, but not prurient. “It was my dog, Bear, who discovered the body. I had no idea what he was barking at until I—” The memory of Miles’s sea-bleached body stopped me cold. I caught my breath and turned away.
Jeanette nodded. Slowly, she picked up her envelopes again. “Don’t forget to sign the forms.”
* * *
Leaving my bicycle at Strings Attached, I walked down toward the bay. I figured the Tidal Basin’s owner and Miles’s old boss, Sam Anderson, would be at the restaurant taking care of business before the lunch rush. Thanks to Jeanette’s hints, I wanted to talk to him before I opened Strings Attached for the day. I’d even concocted an excuse on the way down.
The Tidal Basin looked different in daylight. More bustlin
g, less glamorous. At the rear entrance, trucks unloaded produce and seafood, and the restaurant’s employees came and went. I tried that door—practical metal rather than the ornate wooden door at the front—and it opened into a short hall that, in turn, let into a workroom. Past a Latina woman chopping onions and a man pulling the legs off of a Dungeness crab was yet another entrance, this one to the main kitchen that opened onto the restaurant itself.
The door I wanted looked to be just to the right of the one I’d entered. It simply said “Office.” I’d raised my fist to knock when the door burst open.
“For Christ’s sake,” Sam Anderson said. “Get out of the way.” Thin strands of faded red hair mixed with gray stretched over his scalp. His freckled redhead’s complexion seemed unusually pink.
I backed up a step. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you doing back here?”
“I wanted to talk to you about catering Strings Attached’s opening reception.”
He seemed somewhat mollified. Dollar-bill signs didn’t exactly light up his eyeballs, but at least I had his attention. “The new kite shop, right? I met you the other night. Isn’t it already open?”
“Sure. A soft opening. But I wanted to have something more formal once tourist season really heats up.” Of course, I hadn’t planned any sort of opening party at all, and if I did, it would be more along the lines of a few deli platters rather than the sort of spread the Tidal Basin put out.
“Listen, I’m busy now. You heard about our chef—”
“Yes. We talked about it, remember? Awful. At least the sheriff must have finished his work here by now.”
Sam narrowed his eyes. “Oh yes. Of course. I can give you ten minutes; then I’ve got to get back to work. The wine vendor will be here at ten thirty.” He stepped back into his office and invited me to follow. If anything, the office was smaller than Sheriff Koppen’s and infinitely more cluttered. “However, we like to make a presence in Rock Point. Tell me about your event.” As he spoke, he dipped his fingers into a bowl of sunflower seeds. He shoveled a few into his mouth and expertly divested them of their shells.
“Well.” I hadn’t thought this far ahead. “I’m anticipating about fifty people”—who those people were, I had no idea, unless Dad invited his Watergate-reenactment club—“and I’d like to serve hors d’oeuvres made with local ingredients.”
“Naturally. That’s what we do. Any ideas?”
“I was thinking about wild mushrooms. Lots of them. I adore wild mushrooms, especially morels.”
Sam’s pulse ticked in his temple, but his expression remained unchanged. “Sure. No problem. Won’t be cheap, but if that’s what you want—”
No problem? “I’d hoped you would say that. I remember hearing about some kind of dustup with mushroom hunters last week.”
“Oh, that.” He flipped his hand in a dismissive motion. “That’s over.”
“I heard they really got into it with Miles. You told me about it. Why would mushroom hunters threaten a chef?” I was pushing my luck, I knew it. While I talked, I examined Sam’s office for hints of unpaid bills. A shopping-mall-issue family photo—short-haired wife and three kids—sat next to his phone. A stack of invoices was at his right hand. Sunflower-seed shells littered the linoleum floor.
“Miles had some idea for a wild-mushroom ragout with a morel duxelles base,” Sam said. “You know how many pounds of mushrooms you need for a good duxelles?”
I shook my head. Truth was, I didn’t even know what a duxelles was. Training my gaze toward Sam, I tried to get a better look at the invoices.
“Pounds and pounds. Ridiculous. I told him to forget it, too expensive. Heck, it’d be cheaper to use truffles.”
“And the mushroom hunters were incensed because you didn’t want to buy their goods?”
“No. That wasn’t it. You have no idea how mushroom hunters get about their territory.” He picked up his coffee mug and, finding it empty, set it down again on a stack of packing slips. “When I told Miles it was a no-go on the morels, he went out and collected his own. Pigheaded, that man. Now if it was crab, well, I do a little crabbing. No problem there. But, no, he wanted morels.”
“And since Miles collected his own, the mushroom hunters were mad? Was it the lost sales?” A few pages down, the red ink of a “Last Notice” stamp stood out on an invoice. Jeanette would definitely have made a note of that.
Sam leaned forward, near enough that I could smell the soap he’d showered with that morning. “It would if he picked his morels on a plot they considered their own.”
“Oh. And he was picking someone else’s.”
“You got it.”
The situation began to crystallize. Miles had gathered mushrooms on someone else’s turf, and they were angry. Angry enough to threaten him. “I had no idea people had private mushroom farms here.”
Sam laughed to the point that he choked a bit. He picked a morsel of sunflower seed from inside his cheek. “Nope. You can’t farm morels. They grow where they grow, and nine times out of ten it ain’t in your backyard.”
I felt stupid, but pressed on. “They’re your regular mushroom hunters, then? I bet the sheriff was very interested in finding out more about them.” He’d better be.
“They’d supplied us a few pounds here and there over the past few weeks, but to tell the truth, I can’t even tell you their last names.”
I waved at the dog-eared invoices on his desk. “But you have to pay them.” Other than noting that the stack was fat, and at least one was overdue, I couldn’t make anything else from what I could see.
“Sure. I pay them. Cash. And all I need to know is that they’re Ron and Monica, and that’s all they want me to know. And no, the sheriff hasn’t asked me a thing about them, and I haven’t offered anything up.”
Got it. The Tidal Basin did a little under-the-table business with suppliers. That would explain why Sam didn’t advertise the mushroom hunters’ threats. “But if they had anything to do with Miles’s death—”
“They don’t. Feuds over mushrooming territory are old hat. There are lots of threats, lots of yelling, but nothing ever comes of it. Like anyone with any smarts, I let them battle it out and stay out of the way. Now, do you want a buffet, or will you pass the hors d’oeuvres?”
So, Sam hadn’t said anything to the sheriff about the mushroom hunters and their threats. This was a real lead he could work with. “I—uh.” I bit my lip in pretend worry. “I don’t want to get into any kind of mushroom war or anything. Are you sure morels are the right way to go? I mean, what about the threats?”
Sam sighed and pushed back from the desk. “All right. Look. Here’s what happened. This shaggy couple showed up at the kitchen door demanding to see Miles, right in the middle of dinner. I told them he was busy, but they busted in and started yelling at him.”
“Yelling?” This was getting juicier by the second.
“Saying he’d stolen their mushrooms, that it was their spot, not his.” He shook his head.
“What did you do?”
“Miles couldn’t shut them up. People in the dining room could hear them yelling. The dishwasher had to kick them out. You can bet he got extra tips that night.”
“You know them?”
“Nah.” His gaze wandered to his phone. “Not really. Like I said, just their first names.”
The ancient desk phone buzzed. One of its buttons flashed. A voice said, “Sam, it’s Vino Variety at the bar. I set him at table twelve.”
Sam punched the button. “Tell him I’ll be right out.” Then, to me, “Got to run, but let’s talk soon about your event.” He pushed his business card across the table. “Give me a call.”
“Will do.” Not. My next call would be on Sheriff Koppen. Now I had something solid to share.
* * *
Strings Attached was supposed to open in twenty mi
nutes, but I didn’t care. Sheriff Koppen had to know about the mushroom hunters. Avery had no motive to kill Miles. They did. Plus, Sam Anderson clearly had a few unpaid bills. If he suspected Miles was planning to open a new restaurant, who knew what he’d do?
I burst into the shop front that housed the sheriff’s office and silently groaned. Deputy Goff looked up with a frown, as if she could hear my dread at seeing her. “Sheriff Koppen, please,” I said.
“He’s out.” Deputy Goff sat among a stack of file folders at the desk behind the counter. She returned her attention to her computer screen.
“I need to talk to him. It’s superimportant.”
“Uh-huh. I’ll be sure to let him know.”
“Tell him it’s me,” I said. “Tell him it’s about the murder.”
“What else would it be about?” She rolled her eyes. “He’s up in Astoria with the suspect now. Do you want to leave a message with me?”
“She’s not ‘the suspect.’ She has a name, you know.” The thought of Avery in jail, badgered by Koppen, galled me. “Look. I might know who killed Miles, and it wasn’t Avery.”
The deputy raised her eyebrows. “Naturally.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. We’re following up on some leads ourselves.”
“And do any of those leads have to do with some mushroom hunters, Ron and Monica, who threatened Miles just last week?” I posed a hand on my hip. Take that, Deputy Goff.
“The sheriff knows all about the mushroomers.”
Her calm demeanor only fueled my frustration. “Then why hasn’t he asked Sam Anderson about them? Speaking of Sam, what about the Tidal Basin’s unpaid bills?” My heart beat a little erratically. It wasn’t every day that I challenged a police officer.
“What have you got against Sam Anderson?” Her voice became cold, focused.
“What have you got against Avery?” I countered.
The deputy grabbed a handful of her short hair and pulled. “Good lord.” She pointed to the dingy side chair across the desk. “Sit. Let’s cover the mushroom gatherers first. Do you have any idea how many people hunt mushrooms this time of year? The morels are coming up, and they can get fifty bucks a pound if they know where to market them.”