A car door slammed and we jumped. Looking guiltily at each other, we scurried toward the door, moving awkwardly with our hands still dug into our pockets. I was afraid it was Hart, but when we looked outside, we saw a heavyset Indian man unloading boxes of toilet paper from a pickup truck near the small office. As we watched, he hefted two of the boxes and disappeared through the office door, presumably headed for a storage area. Ten seconds of watching him made me decide that running a mom-and-pop motel operation was not the way I wanted to make a living. I did my share of hauling stuff around as an event organizer, but I’d never had to stockpile toilet paper. Lola and I stepped onto the sidewalk in front of Eloise’s room not four seconds before Hart’s Chevy Tahoe came around the corner. I waved, as if we’d been standing there merely to help him find the right room.
He gave us a speculative look as he got out of the SUV. “I’m not even going to ask you if you’ve been inside. I see you were at least smart enough not to touch anything.”
Lola and I jerked our hands out of our pockets. I felt mildly foolish.
“Wait here.”
Even though the room’s door was open, he approached the Indian man and had a short conversation with him. The man paused in his toilet-paper unloading, nodding several times, and Hart returned to us. I enjoyed watching his long stride, the way the sun sparked chestnut highlights off his brown hair, and the way his brown eyes crinkled at the corners against the glare. “Tell me how you found Hufnagle.”
I explained about spotting her at the copy shop and following her back to the motel. I emphasized the fact that we hadn’t approached her, that she’d spotted the Bloomin’ Wonderful van parked at the coffee shop, and bolted. “We called you as soon as we were able to confirm it was her,” I said virtuously.
“I’ll nominate you for Citizen of the Year,” he said drily, and ducked into Eloise’s room. Lola and I hovered in the doorway while he checked out the place, trying to gauge his reaction to the corkboard displays. He came out after five minutes, poker-faced, and made a call from the radio in his Tahoe. When he was done, he returned to us.
“Good work,” Hart finally said. He smiled and I let go the breath I’d been holding with a loud whoosh. I hadn’t wanted him to be pissed off at us. “We’ll keep an eye on the place as manpower allows. The owner says he’ll call me when Hufnagle returns. I can’t see her abandoning all of her research and photos, so she’ll probably sneak back at some point. When she does, we’ll ask her a few questions.”
“Do you think she’s the killer?” I asked.
“If the victim were Mary Stewart, I’d look at her really hard,” he said, rubbing his chin. “As it is, there’s no photo of Van Allen in there, and no reference to him. That doesn’t mean they didn’t know each other, but there’s no evidence of it.”
I hadn’t thought to look for photos of Van Allen and I let my shoulders slump with chagrin. Kinsey Millhone would have keyed in on that immediately, as would all my favorite sleuths. Well, maybe not Stephanie Plum. Her car would probably have blown up before she could take a close look at the photos. Or she’d have ended up in a tussle with Joe or Ranger on the motel bed. I felt marginally better.
“If Van Allen knew about Eloise’s obsession with Mary Stewart, he could have capitalized on it in some way,” Lola said thoughtfully.
Hart eyed her with interest and lifted a brow that invited her to continue.
“He might have offered to spy on Stewart for her. It must have gotten more difficult for her to keep track of Stewart after the restraining order. Or he might have offered to injure her in some way.” Lola’s brow puckered at the ugly thought. “I hate to think that about Eloise, but she could have wanted to punish Stewart for stealing her manuscript, and not been willing to harm her herself. I have a feeling that flinging paint is about the outer limit of Eloise’s violent tendencies.”
“You could be right,” Hart said noncommittally.
I thought it was interesting that Lola was so sympathetic to Eloise Hufnagle, whom she called by her first name, and clearly less tolerant of Mary Stewart, whom she referred to by last name. Hart’s radio squawking interrupted my thoughts. He bent to graze my lips with his, and said, “Duty calls. Talk to you later?”
The look in his eyes, and his openness about our relationship, warmed me. I nodded, and he climbed into the Tahoe. Lola and I started back across the parking lot to her van. She gave me a gently inquiring look. “Things are going well with Lindell?”
I couldn’t suppress a smile. “You could say that.”
Where Brooke would have said, “How well?” and pressed for details, Lola merely nodded and said, “I’m happy for you. It’s about time you found a good man to get involved with. I was afraid when Doug got jilted in May that you and he—”
I shook my head. Not that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind; I mean, you can’t be hung up on a guy for half your life and not think about getting back together with him when his fiancée leaves him at the altar, but no. I was done with Doug Elvaston for good, at least romantically.
“What about you, Lo?” I asked, climbing into the van. It smelled richly of loam and the sharp bitterness of marigolds. “Any interesting men on your horizon? Lucas Stewart is gorgeous,” I hinted, thinking about the way she’d seemed interested in him last weekend.
“He gets less handsome the more you talk to him,” she said. “That Dorian Gray costume was perfect.” She thought for a moment. “It’s hard to find time for men,” she hedged. She started the van and we pulled out of the lot, headed back toward downtown Heaven. “Bloomin’ Wonderful takes up twelve or more hours a day—well, you know how it is, running your own business. And then there’s Axie and my grandma. It’s too bad teens don’t come with implanted GPS trackers. Then I wouldn’t have to worry so much.”
“You don’t have to worry about Axie,” I said. “She’s a good kid.”
“I know she’s a good kid, but I love her so much. . . .” Lola trailed off. Her thin brown fingers flexed around the steering wheel.
“Think how good you’ll be at parenting when you have your own kids,” I said. “And you can leave them with their aunt Axie whenever you need a break.”
Lola chuckled. “I might at that.”
Back at the nursery, Lola’s grandma came on to the porch when we drove up. She waved at us. “I just made a pound cake,” she called. “Come in and have a piece with warm peach topping.”
I couldn’t say no to Mrs. Paget’s pound cake, so I accepted the invitation and spent a pleasant half hour catching up with Mrs. Paget and enjoying the rich cake. I tried to tell myself that the peaches made it practically health food, but I was sure my scale would reveal the truth when I got on it in the morning.
Chapter 17
My event Friday night was a bake sale with a twist—the goodies were being auctioned off to the highest bidder. The event was sponsored by the First Baptist Church of Heaven and the proceeds were going to pay for their new sanctuary. I’d orchestrated a major publicity push and I was pleased to see the parish hall was full to overflowing by the time I’d checked the sound system and coordinated the arrangement of the various baked goods (some of which were truly scrumptious looking), beautifully displayed on tables lining three sides of the room. Most of the room’s space was filled with folding chairs laid out in neat lines, with an aisle down the middle. The high-ceilinged room, frequently used for wedding receptions, had a fully equipped commercial kitchen at the back, and a small dais at the front.
The bakers, several of them professionals from Heaven and its surrounding towns, had brought samples, and knots of people clustered around each table, scarfing down bite-sized morsels of cakes, breads, cookies, and pastries. The women of the church were selling beverages (nonalcoholic, of course) to wash down the sweetness and were making a mint if the lines in front of the coffee urn and the lemonade cooler were anything to go by. The pièce de résistance of the auction
was a wedding cake—flavor and design to be determined by the winning bidder—supplied by Nona, hands down the best baker in town, who was notoriously hard to book because she was so busy and apt to go off to visit her grandkids in Dallas whenever she felt like it. She had brought a sample cake, four glistening tiers of lemon-colored frosting and bright fondant flowers. It looked divine. I noticed at least twelve engaged couples in the gathering audience. Perhaps I could get more business out of this, too. I’d left a business card on each padded folding chair, so maybe I’d get some calls.
With three hundred people crowded into it, the room was uncomfortably warm and I found a church staffer with a long-handled gadget to open the high windows. I was at the back of the room, propping doors open with hymnals, since I couldn’t find rubber stoppers, when Cletis Perry, my go-to auctioneer, hobbled in, swinging awkwardly on crutches. A bulky cast encased his left foot and leg almost to the knee.
“Cletis,” I said, hurrying over to hold the door wider. “What happened to you?”
He gave me his trademark grin. “I had a disagreement with a car and the car won. Broke my leg in three places, so the docs had to put a rod in. I’ll be keeping the TSA folks busy from here on out, setting off the metal detector every time I pass through it.” He looked a little pale under his tan, and the way he suddenly tensed made me think he must be in pain. Before I could ask, he beckoned to an assistant I hadn’t noticed, and the young man (who had Cletis’s slightly hooked nose and looked like he might be related) handed him a sheet of paper and then went forward to check out the setup and put Cletis’s gavel on the podium.
“Dang crutches are a pain in the patootie,” he said, trying to balance himself, hold on to the page, and extract a pair of reading glasses from the pocket of his pearl snap shirt.
“Let me.” I drew the glasses out of his pocket and positioned them carefully on his face.
“Thanks, Amy-Faye. So we’re selling cakes tonight, eh? Should be easier than my gig next week—I’m auctioning off the contents of storage containers whose owners haven’t paid their fees. People store a lot of crap in those places.” He made a dismissive face. “Why buy something if you’re only going to hide it away in a storage place? Stupid. People today got too much stuff. But it makes me a tidy living, so who am I to get all judgmental on them?” He used a crutch to gesture toward the nave of the church, a dimly lit space opposite the brightly lit and noisy parish hall. “Maybe it’s this place bringing out my holier-than-thou side.” He chuckled.
“I hope your car wasn’t totaled,” I said, walking him past the wares toward the front of the room.
He crinkled his sunspotted brow. “My car? Oh, I get you. No, I wasn’t in my car. Some fool tried to run me down in a crosswalk. He musta been texting or something, because he blasted through like he didn’t even see me. Didn’t even slow down. Luckily I’m spryer than I look and I heard him coming in time to jump forward, so he only clipped my leg. Otherwise, you’d be looking for a new auctioneer for your shindigs.”
“Don’t even joke about that,” I said severely. “I hope he paid your doctor bills.”
“Didn’t stop.” Cletis bit the words off. “It was a hit-and-run. A lady standing on the sidewalk who saw the whole thing and called nine-one-one, bless her, said it looked like he was gunning for me. That’s ridiculous, though. I’m an easygoing guy, not much of one for making enemies, excepting my father-in-law, Howie Godfredson, who never did think I was good enough for his daughter, my Lisa. But he’s been in his grave for coming up on eighteen years now, so I doubt it was him. And no one much benefits from my early demise, except young Clay up there”—he jerked his head toward the man who’d come in with him—“and he loves his old granddad too much to run him down.” He watched his grandson fondly. The young man apparently felt his gaze and looked over at us, beaming a smile at Cletis and circling two fingers in an “okay” sign. Cletis returned the smile and turned back to me. “It was probably a kid, too panicked by what he’d done to pull over. Afraid he’d lose his cell phone or car privileges. No one teaches their kids to be accountable anymore.”
A sudden chill made me shiver. Maybe we shouldn’t have opened all the windows. “I’m just glad you’re okay,” I told Cletis. “You’re sure you’re up to this?”
“This is nothing,” he scoffed, tapping the cast lightly with the tip of one crutch. “I once conducted an auction with a fever of a hundred and four. Turns out I had meningitis. Never had such a bad headache in my life, but netted twenty percent more than the pre-auction estimates, and didn’t pass out until I brought my gavel down on the last item.” He mimed the gesture. “Sold!”
Refusing my offer of help, he made his way to the dais, exchanging greetings with six or eight people as he crutched his way forward. He went into his patter, and I watched from the back of the room, not really paying attention to the numbers or who won what. My mind was worrying the phrase “gunning for me,” batting it around like a kitten with a catnip mouse. Cletis seemed to think the witness was mistaken, that the accident was simply an accident—a criminal one, since the driver didn’t stop to help. What with Van Allen’s murder, and the strange mix-up of items at last Saturday’s auction, I wasn’t so sure. Still, Cletis hadn’t been at the costume party. He couldn’t have seen anything that would threaten the killer. No, I was letting my imagination run away with me. Cletis was right: His broken leg was an accident, pure and simple.
* * *
Despite my late night, I arrived at the Columbine early Saturday morning to discuss the upcoming sorority reunion with Sandy. Hers was one of three Heaven B and Bs hosting the women involved, and she wanted my help coordinating van service between the B and Bs and the various event locations, setting up a spa day for the women, and putting on a dinner dance that would mimic the Greek events of their 1960s college days. She’d told me to come early because it was the one time she could guarantee we wouldn’t be interrupted by guests. “Find me in the kitchen,” she’d said.
Accordingly, I parked on the street at seven a.m. and hurried up the walkway to the door, chased by the chilly temps. It had dipped into the twenties overnight and the sun wasn’t yet high enough to warm the air. I noticed Sandy had taken in the mums that had flanked the porch steps the last time I was there, probably to keep them from freezing. September in Heaven was the time of year when potted plants came inside for the winter. I let myself in through the front door. I closed it quietly, not wanting to disturb any of the guests. The potted mums on the entryway table drooped slightly and I hoped Sandy planned to water them soon. I was following the enticing aroma of baking scones toward the kitchen, when a small sound from the dining room caught my attention. Thinking I might find Sandy in there, placing fresh blooms in the bud vases on the breakfast tables, I detoured toward it.
“I’m sick and tired of this,” a man’s voice said as I neared the door. It sounded like Lucas Stewart. “You said we’d only have to pretend for a couple of months.”
“The case has dragged on longer than anyone could have expected,” Mary said, her voice soothing, “but the payoff will be worth it. You know that. We’ve been so careful. We can’t afford to blow it when the money’s practically in our grasp. The judge should hand down a final decision in a week or two. Then we can—”
“I don’t want to wait for ‘then.’ I want now.” Lucas’s voice was a growl. Mary’s faint, “Not here—” answered him, and then there was silence. I leaned my upper body forward so I could peer through the six-inch gap between the door and the jamb.
What I saw almost made me gasp aloud. Mary Stewart and her brother stood in profile to me, their arms wrapped around each other, kissing passionately. It was definitely not a kiss anyone could term sisterly or brotherly. No, it was a full-on, “let’s hop into bed and make whoopee” sort of kiss; a potboiler-romance-cover kiss, complete with silk robe sagging off Mary’s shoulder to show a swoosh of collarbone and a valley of cleavage;
a nighttime-soap-opera-caliber kiss. It wouldn’t have surprised me greatly if they had swept the chafing dishes off the buffet and gone at it right there in the dining room. A wisp of steam rose into the air and I wasn’t sure if it was from a chafing dish or the hot-blooded couple.
I backed away silently, glad I was wearing athletic shoes. I felt uncomfortably warm, embarrassed by what I’d witnessed, appalled and puzzled by it. Mary and her brother . . . eew. Actually, incest was beyond “eew,” and I blinked my eyes hard to try to rid myself of the images seemingly seared onto my eyeballs. Before I could open them, a hand clamped onto my upper arm, fingers digging in like iron vises. My eyes flew open and I saw Lucas Stewart standing in front of me, expression grim.
Chapter 18
Before I could do more than squeak, he dragged me into the dining room and shut the door, turning the lock. It rasped and slid home with a muted thunk.
“I told you I heard someone,” he said over his shoulder to Mary, who was holding the robe closed at her neck, like a virginal heroine from a gothic novel, but her swollen lips and the flush on her pale skin betrayed her assumption of innocence. “She was practically peering through the keyhole.”
“Amy-Faye! What’s she doing here?”
“Spying on us.” Lucas’s full lips thinned into a straight line, and his square jaw jutted forward.
Recovering from my surprise, I waved the hand that wasn’t controlled by Lucas. “Hey, I’m right here.”
Mary’s slit-eyed gaze landed on me. “Why were you spying on us? Who put you up to it? Eloise Hufnagle? You’d better see if she’s got a camera,” she told her brother.
“I wasn’t spying—not on purpose—and I don’t have a camera. You lay one finger on me,” I said to Lucas when it looked like he was going to pat me down, “and I’ll scream this place down.” I opened my mouth to demonstrate my willingness to carry through with my threat.
The Readaholics and the Gothic Gala Page 15