by Amanda Lee
“Gifting it? Really?”
“Cross my heart and hope . . . Well, not quite yet.” He winked.
“Mr. Padgett, you’re going to have to stop joking like that.”
“Ah, my dear, as author Elbert Hubbard once said, ‘Don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive.’”
I laughed. “You’re incorrigible!”
He turned serious again. “I do hate that the collection was stolen. Now no one will get to appreciate it.”
“I remember Geoffrey Vandehey saying something similar in the confession letter he signed after taking Chad Cummings’s Cézanne,” I said.
“I saw something about that when it happened,” said Mr. Padgett. “I never met Dr. Vandehey, but from what I’ve read about him—combined with what I’ve come to know of Mr. and Mrs. Cummings this week—I do feel that Dr. Vandehey took the Cézanne from the Cummingses’ home because it wasn’t valued there.”
“I never met him, either,” I said. “I found his body, and sadly, that was the only encounter I ever had with the man. But I feel that he was unjustly vilified in the matter of the Cézanne. I believe he was a good man at heart.”
“I imagine you’re right, Marcy.”
* * *
I didn’t have time to go back and get Angus before I went to the shop. I felt bad about it, but by the time Mr. Padgett and I had looked at everything in the museum, I barely made it to the shop by ten o’clock.
I rushed inside and was making sure the Stitch was tidy and that the shelves and bins were properly stocked and in order when someone came in. I turned to see that it was Simon Benton.
“You look a bit flushed,” he said. “Are you all right this morning?”
“I’m fine. Just running late. I had coffee with Mr. Padgett before coming to work, and I lost track of time.”
“That’s easy to do with Andy. He’s quite the talker,” said Mr. Benton. “I was on my way to MacKenzies’ Mochas and thought I’d drop in and see if you’d like anything.”
“I appreciate your offer, Mr. Benton, but I’m fine.”
“Where’s your companion this morning?”
“He’s at home,” I said. “I’m hoping to run back and get him later. It can be lonely here without him.”
“I imagine so. I see your neighbor began taking her threats seriously and flew the coop. I don’t want your dog to desert you as well.”
“My neighbor?” I asked.
“Ms. Davis.”
“Oh! She’s always closed on Mondays,” I said. “But I do believe she took some time off to spend with her sister.”
“Well, I won’t keep you. I’ll go on down to the coffeehouse and get my usual. See you later!”
“Take care, Mr. Benton!”
Before I could get back to business, Ted called.
“Hey, babe. I was thinking about you and wanted to tell you this weekend was wonderful,” he said.
“Thank you, sweetheart.”
“What’s up? You sound a little down.”
“I started thinking about Mr. Padgett this morning and how he’s probably lonely, so I called and asked if he’d like to have coffee,” I said. “He asked if I’d bring the coffee and meet him at the museum. I did, and we walked around looking at everything, and I stayed too long to go back home and get Angus . . . and I’d already told Angus I’d be back to get him, so now I feel like a liar.”
Ted gave a low chuckle. “I’ll go get him and bring him to the Stitch at lunchtime. Will that work?”
“Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Not in the least,” he said.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’ll get us something from MacKenzies’ for lunch so we can eat when you get here,” I said. “What are you in the mood for?”
“Can’t say . . . This might not be a secure line.”
I laughed. “How about pasta salad?”
“Not exactly what I had in mind, but it’ll do,” he said. “And hey, I’m really glad you finally met my mom. I’d been dreading that and had put it off for far too long. I was afraid you’d hate her and tell me to get lost.”
“I liked her,” I said. “But even if I had hated her, I wouldn’t have told you to get lost . . . unless you’d take me with you.”
“I’m not planning on going anywhere.”
As we were talking, I saw Special Agent Brown walking up the street.
“Huh,” I said.
“Huh, what?”
“Special Agent Brown is still here. You must’ve been mistaken about his plan to take off to Seattle after Chad and Sissy Cummings.”
“That’s one of those curiouser and curiouser conundrums,” he said. “They’re still in town, too.”
“I really did think they’d leave in a huff after they were both hauled in for questioning,” I said.
“Yeah, so did I. Gotta run. See you at lunch.”
We said our good-byes.
A delivery truck stopped outside, and the guy dropped off a box of stamped tote bags a local church had ordered for their youth group to make for a fall festival sale. I called the youth director and left a message on her voice mail, and then I slid the box into my arms and set it on the floor.
The bells over the door jingled. I straightened and saw that Special Agent Brown had come up to the counter.
“Good morning, Ms. Singer,” he said. “Are you doing all right today?”
“Yes. I’m fine, thanks. How are you?” I doubted Special Agent Brown had come by merely to engage me in small talk, so I immediately followed up with “What can I do for you?”
“I wondered if you might have a key to the Scentsibilities shop.”
I did a double blink. “You think I might have a key to Nellie Davis’s shop?”
“Well, oftentimes neighbors do that, don’t they, give neighbors spare keys in case they lock themselves out, or forget something, or the place catches fire?”
“Is Nellie’s shop on fire?” I automatically sniffed to see if I smelled smoke. I did not. I wondered if a fire in an aromatherapy shop might smell different from, say, a fire in the Seven-Year Stitch, where there weren’t all those distinct odors.
“No, Ms. Davis’s shop is not on fire.” He huffed. “Do you or do you not have a key?”
“Of course I don’t have a key,” I said. “Neighbor or not, Nellie Davis would absolutely not trust me with a key to her shop. Why do you need one?”
“Because it’s locked, and she isn’t there,” he said.
“Which raises the question, why do you need to go into her shop when she isn’t there?”
“I need to look around. I want to—” He broke off, then came back with, “It’s none of your business.”
“Your best bet is to call Nellie at her home or at her sister’s home,” I said. “I believe she intended to stay with her sister for a few days, but you never can tell how quickly Nellie is going to change her mind on something.” Like giving you a candle and then taking it back.
“Yeah. Thanks. I’ll call her.” He turned around and stalked toward the door.
“All right. I do think that’s your best bet.”
He didn’t answer and he didn’t turn back. He just went out the door and once again headed toward Nellie’s shop.
I immediately called Ted. As soon as he answered, I told him about my visit with Special Agent Brown.
“Why he thought Nellie and I were Mr. Rogers and . . . whoever Mr. Rogers’s neighbors were is beyond me,” I said.
“Why he feels the need to go into the woman’s shop without her being present is beyond me,” he said. “Special Agent Brown is getting ready to have some backup whether he wants it or not. Sit tight and stay in your shop. Manu and I are on our way.”
Chapter Twenty-five
I saw Ted and Manu arrive at N
ellie’s shop. I so wanted to know what was going on. I hurried to the bathroom and got a paper towel and some window cleaner. The door was so smudgy! Well, it was!
As I cleaned the window—I did!—I saw Nellie and Clara arrive at Scentsibilities. I wondered who’d called them, Special Agent Brown or Manu and Ted.
“Good morning, Marcy!”
It was Christine Willoughby coming from the direction of MacKenzies’ Mochas.
“Hi!” I went back inside and held the door open for her.
“What’s going on up there?” she asked.
“Oh, is something going on?” I took one last look in the direction of Nellie’s shop. “I have no idea.”
“But you’re dying to know, aren’t you?”
“Yes!” I said.
We both started laughing.
“I came to get a couple more of those angel ornament kits,” she said. “I got the hang of it and really enjoyed it. In fact, I finished it up last night and wanted to get one the same style to make for my neighbor and a different one for myself.”
As Christine was picking out her ornaments, George Vandehey came in.
“Hi, George. I’ll be with you in just a minute.”
“Thanks.” He went to the sit-and-stitch square and sat down. “Where’s Angus?”
“I was wondering that very thing,” Christine said.
I explained to them that I’d had somewhere to go before work this morning and didn’t have time to go home and get him. “Ted said he’ll pick him up for me at lunchtime.”
Christine paid for her angels, told me to hug Angus for her, and then she left.
I joined George in the sit-and-stitch square. “How are you this morning?”
“As a matter of fact, I have some exciting news. I went by the police station before coming here, and I was told that Manu and Ted were out,” he said. “When I saw Ted’s car, I hoped he was here.”
“He and Manu both are up the street at Nellie Davis’s shop at the moment. I’ll text him and ask them to come talk with you when they finish up.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that.”
I took out my phone and sent the text.
George leaned forward. “There was something else on the flash drive . . . something I’d dismissed before.”
“Having to do with the Cézanne?”
“No. It had to do with the theft of the Padgett Collection.” He spread his hands. “Here’s what happened. I opened the file when I first started decoding the information on the drive. It was all text, and I went on to the photographs. I was so eager to find something to at least partially exonerate my father that I latched onto the photos and the coded messages that corresponded to each one.”
“Of course,” I said. “That’s perfectly understandable.”
“But then last night as I was thinking I needed to get back home, I missed Dad so much. I wanted to remember him and dwell on some of the good memories we had.” He paused, collecting his emotions. “Anyway, the message in that first file was composed using a double-transposition cipher.”
“I’ve never heard of that.”
“It’s one of the most difficult ciphers to decode, but Dad taught me and my best friend how to do it when we were in middle school.” He smiled. “It let us send notes to each other about girls without the fear that anyone other than the two of us would know what was being said.”
“That’s cool.”
“It is. In fact, my friend and I still send Christmas greetings to each other using the cipher every year. But I’m getting myself off track. I immediately recognized Dad’s message as a double-transposition cipher. It took a few hours, but I was eventually able to crack the code.”
“What does it say?” I asked.
“It’s odd. With the exception of the title, the message is actually a series of quotes from Act III, Scene I of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.” He took a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Here. Take a look.”
At the top of the page was written Treachery—Anderson Padgett Textile Collection.
Beneath that was this passage:
Caesar: The ides of March are come.
Soothsayer: Ay, Caesar; but not gone.
Caesar: No, not gone, Langford.
I frowned. “I don’t remember a Langford being in that play.”
“I looked it up. The entire line is bogus,” said George. “My sister does live in Langford on Vancouver Island. That’s why at first I thought this message pertained in some way to the theft of the Cézanne, even though the title makes it clear it refers to the robbery of the Padgett Collection.”
I was still wondering why Geoffrey Vandehey would have added an extra line to his message as I read the next passage.
Caesar: Et tu, Brute?
—
Brutus: Where’s the teacher?
Cinna: Here, quite confounded with this mutiny, as are Beatrice, Benedick, and the guard.
“‘Where’s the teacher?’ is a misquote,” George said. “In the original, it says, ‘Where’s Publius?’”
“So when he says ‘the teacher,’ he’s talking about himself,” I said. “He’s telling us that Anderson Padgett was betrayed by his friend . . . Simon Benton.”
“But how could Dad possibly know that?”
“There is no Beatrice or Benedick in Julius Caesar,” I said. “Beatrice and Benedick were tricked in Much Ado About Nothing when they overheard that each was in love with the other.” I paced as I thought. “I think your dad is telling us that during one of his visits to the museum, he overheard Simon plotting with one of the security guards. They were both spending a lot of time there prior to the exhibit opening.”
“You’re right!” George exclaimed. “Dad had to have overheard that other man plotting against Mr. Padgett.”
I saw Simon Benton getting ready to come inside the shop. “Mr. Benton!”
“Yes . . . yes, that’s it,” George, whose back was to the door, said as Mr. Benton walked inside. “Mr. Benton must’ve stolen his friend’s collection with the help of at least one of the security guards.”
“You must believe yourself to be very astute,” said Mr. Benton.
George stood and whirled to face him. “I know what you did! You stole from someone who considers you a friend, and you killed my father!”
“You have no proof,” Mr. Benton said.
“I’m getting ready to talk with Chief Singh and Detective Nash, and they’re going to find enough proof to put you away for a long time,” George said. “In fact, they’re at Nellie Davis’s shop right now. What did you leave there when you threatened her? Does it have your fingerprints on it?”
“She saw you,” I said. “That Friday night . . . Nellie looked out into the alley, and she saw you. That’s why she acted so weird every time she caught the merest glimpse of you. She recognized you.”
“You couldn’t simply let well enough alone, could you, Mr. Vandehey? Neither could your father.” He took a small pistol from the pocket of his linen jacket. “And now you’ve dragged poor Ms. Singer into your misfortune. Ms. Singer, if you please, stand and precede Mr. Vandehey to the back door of your establishment.”
“Let’s talk this over,” I said. “Neither Mr. Vandehey nor I want this to go badly.”
“Please don’t insult my intelligence by promising not to tell,” said Mr. Benton.
He waved the gun in a gesture that I knew very well meant that I was to stop talking and start walking. I got up and began slowly moving toward the back door of the shop. I knew that George and I were in a no-win predicament. If we cried out in the hope that Ted and Manu would hear us two buildings away, we risked getting shot and having Simon Benton escape out the back. If we did nothing, we would assuredly be shot at some remote location where help was much farther away than Nellie Davis’s aromatherapy shop.
> “You don’t want to be rash, Mr. Benton,” I said. “Please take us somewhere, lock us up, and then escape. At least, give us a fighting chance.”
“That much I can do,” he said. “Now, let’s go.”
I wasn’t foolish enough to think he’d actually give us that fighting chance. I lifted up a silent prayer that either George or I would figure out a way to get us out of this predicament alive.
Suddenly, from the direction of the counter, a woman screamed. In my hysteria, my first thought was that it was Jill and that she’d come to life to save us.
The woman screamed again. It was Mom. She was calling me.
As Mr. Benton spun around to see who was at the counter, George Vandehey saw his opportunity to wrap his arms around the slender man, pinning them to his sides. They continued to struggle as I tried to both stay out of the way of the gun and find something with which to disarm Mr. Benton.
In the meantime, the phone kept screaming.
I ran to the door and screamed, “Help us!” as loudly as I could. Ted came running, and Manu wasn’t far behind.
Ted drew his gun on Mr. Benton. “Drop your weapon. Now! Don’t make me shoot you.”
Mr. Benton dropped the gun onto the floor.
“Mr. Vandehey, get over here out of the way, please,” Manu said as he walked over to Mr. Benton. He brought Mr. Benton’s hands around to his back and handcuffed him while Ted kept the gun trained on Benton.
As Manu walked Benton outside and put him in the car, Ted holstered his gun and pulled me to him.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I am now.”
Epilogue
It was my first trip to Vancouver Island. Langford was a beautiful wooded area, and the rehabilitation center where Elizabeth Vandehey Hart resided was secluded and peaceful. Ted and I had gone to visit Libby at George’s invitation.
The three of us stepped into the great room, where Libby awaited us. Classical music played softly over a speaker system. There was no television in this room, but George told us that the center had a projection room where residents could watch movies two or three times a week. It was believed that most of the patients would find news programs upsetting, so regular television was prohibited. George was glad of that. His sister had never learned of their father’s theft.