by Sharon Pape
“If you know who to call to get the ball rolling, I’ll be happy to help. No reason why you should have to do it all yourself.”
“As far as I know, there isn’t anyone to call, but I’ll speak to the newspaper and see if we can embellish a bit on the standard stuff.”
Jaye thanked Elaine for helping with the T-shirt and left there thinking that the mystery of Peggy’s death might well be equaled by the mystery of her life.
Chapter 5
Three unproductive interviews and half a pound of fudge later, Jaye arrived back at her shop to find a vanload of tourists from one of the many hotels in town parked in the lot waiting for her return. She was glad she’d posted a sign on the door indicating the time she’d be back; it would have been a pity to lose that many customers to another crystal shop.
The six women, who all appeared to be in their fifties or sixties, filed inside as soon as she opened the door. The young man in the driver’s seat remained in the van, hooked up to his iPod, no doubt grateful for the peace and quiet. By the time the women left, Jaye could empathize with him. But in spite of their constant chatter, she really couldn’t complain. In addition to buying items for themselves, they purchased gifts for family and friends back home, pushing the day’s receipts up to the highest yet.
***
After they left, Jaye thought about running upstairs for a minute to grab a quick snack, but a small, steady stream of customers kept her busy until closing time. Word about her expertise in all matters geological, both scientific and New Age, was clearly racing along the tourist grapevine. That day alone at least eight people told her they’d come because of a friend’s recommendation.
By closing time, she’d not only sold a lot of the loose crystals, but she’d also had to say good-bye to some of her favorite pieces of jewelry, including a daisy pendant fashioned out of citrine that sparkled like sunshine. Jaye chided herself about developing emotional attachments to her inventory. If she wanted to keep eating, she had to learn to let things go. And eating was high on her list of priorities at the moment. For the past hour, her stomach had been making some very inelegant noises to let her know that one little protein bar wasn’t adequate fuel for a busy life. If any of her customers had noticed, they’d been polite enough not to comment.
Glad her commute was only a set of stairs, she let herself in to her apartment, kicked off her flats and padded across the living room to the kitchen. When she opened the refrigerator, the nearly bare shelves were a glaring reminder that she hadn’t made it to the grocery store in close to two weeks. Her belly grumbled again, underscoring the sad truth. It didn’t take her long to assess her few options. She could either have grilled cheese on multigrain bread that didn’t appear to be moldy yet or peanut butter and apricot jam on the same iffy bread. She was reaching for the jam when she remembered there should be one egg left in the carton. But when she lifted the lid, the egg was gone. In its place was a single white sock.
She stood there staring at the sock in the egg carton for a full minute, too befuddled to react. When she finally picked it up, she saw that it was definitely one of hers, which was probably a good thing. What wasn’t quite so dandy was the fact that she had apparently put it in there. And what was worse, she had no recollection of cooking the egg or eating it.
Letting the refrigerator door swing closed, she sank onto one of the two chairs at the little kitchen table tucked into the corner. She turned the sock over and over in her hands as she tried to make sense of the nonsensical.
Could she be starting to lose her mind to early-onset Alzheimer’s? She had no idea if one or both of her parents had been headed in that terrifying direction when they’d died in their mid-thirties. It wasn’t the kind of thing they would have discussed in front of a seven-year-old. It occurred to Jaye that losing them had not only cut her off from the legacy of her past, but it had also stripped away the underpinnings of her future. She yanked her mind back from the edge of the “woe is me” abyss. She needed to focus on the present craziness.
First the wallet and now this—all in one day. Could the incidents be related? Not likely. The wallet had belonged to someone else; the egg and sock were hers. Was someone sneaking in to play pranks on her? Had they installed a tiny camera to record her reactions? Would she see it tomorrow on YouTube? She was so busy following her thoughts down the rabbit hole that the ringing of the phone made her jump as if she’d been poked with a hot iron.
“I’m here,” Sierra announced in answer to Jaye’s “Hello?”
“I’ll be right down,” Jaye said, not particularly surprised by her friend’s unexpected visit. It was just one of the many quirks that came with the deluxe Sierra package. “Why didn’t you just ring the bell?” she asked as she made her way down the steps still talking to her on the phone.
“This morning I rang the bell forever before you let me in. If I’d been injured, I would have bled to death and been a feast for maggots by the time you opened the door.”
Jaye clicked off the call and let her in. “That’s a bit of an overstatement even for you.”
Frosty walked in first, with Sierra on the other end of his leash carrying a shopping bag. “Hyperbole carries more weight.”
Jaye leaned down to give the dog a welcoming scratch around the ears. “Please tell me that’s food,” she said, eyeing the bag in Sierra’s hands. “I’m starving, and the cupboard’s bare.”
“A baguette and a wedge of Brie for the humans among us, kibble for the canine.” She plunked the bag into Jaye’s arms and let Frosty lead the way upstairs.
They sat at the little table, Frosty between them, his soulful eyes riveted on every bite they took. In return for his quiet patience, he was rewarded with bits of cheese until Sierra cut him off.
“No more, pal, or I’ll be up all night with your bellyache.” From day one, Sierra had insisted on speaking to him as if he were a child with a reasonably good grasp of the English language. In spite of many naysayers, including Jaye at first, Frosty actually seemed to understand her. Realizing no more cheese would be forthcoming, he sighed and ambled over to the bowls that Jaye had filled with his kibble and water.
With the worst of her hunger sated and her stomach too busy digesting to issue any more complaints, Jaye launched into a blow-by-blow account of her talk with Elaine Feldman. “Did you think Peggy was overly secretive?” she asked at the end.
Sierra shrugged. “How would I know? She never exchanged two civil words with me. She hated me from the moment she saw the ‘Coming Soon’ sign posted in my window. I don’t think it would have mattered if I’d turned out to be Lady Gaga or Mother Teresa.”
“We need to find someone else who had a troubled relationship with her, someone with a good motive to kill her.” The doorbell outside the shop rang, causing Frosty to jump up barking ferociously in guard dog mode. “Who on earth . . . ?” Jaye said, heading for the stairs.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Sierra called after her. “The Hinklemeyer twins are stopping by.”
Chapter 6
Jaye reappeared two minutes later with Esther and Edith Hinklemeyer right behind her. Still surprisingly spry for women who were well into their eighties, they weren���t even breathing hard. When Jaye had first arrived in town, she’d thought it was strange that people still referred to women of their advanced age as “the twins.” The designation seemed all the more ridiculous given that they were fraternal, not identical, twins who didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to each other.
Esther was petite, with a pixie face and pin-straight hair, while Edith was half a foot taller, with a long face, curly hair and an ever-expanding waistline. Even so, the two women seemed determined to do what they could to rectify the gross failure of biology that had made them sisters who shared a birthday instead of twins who shared every helix of their DNA.
According to local residents who’d known them fo
r several decades, they always dressed alike. Since they wore such disparate sizes, they had to sew most of their clothing, which eventually lead them to become expert seamstresses. When Esther’s hair turned gray, Edith, who’d been straightening her hair since junior high, immediately had it dyed gray as well. When Edith needed reading glasses, Esther purchased the same frames minus the prescription. And after Edith became allergic to shrimp, Esther stopped eating them, at least in public.
They still shortened hems, let out seams, mended rips and designed the occasional gown in their shop, called simply “Hinklemeyers.” Recently, they had added a new service to their enterprise along with a second sign that read “Eros and Old Lace.” If they’d been hoping to cause some buzz with the name, they’d succeeded. Curiosity had run rampant, and Jaye had not been immune.
“The name’s a takeoff on the play ‘Arsenic and Old Lace,’” Esther had chirped in response to Jaye’s question on opening day.
“Eros was the Greek god the Romans later called Cupid,” Edith expounded, adding proudly, “We’ve gone into the matchmaking business.”
“Computers have made romance so sterile,” Esther said. “There’s so much more to it than facts, figures and circuit boards. Where’s intuition? Where’s that certain something that defies explanation?” High on enthusiasm, the sisters seemed blissfully unaware of the irony that neither Eros nor their intuition had ever found matches for them.
After Sierra greeted the twins, Jaye invited them to have a seat in the living room. They perched together on one of the two dove gray love seats that faced each other over a glass coffee table. Sierra, Frosty and Jaye settled on the other one, Jaye still wondering why they were entertaining the Hinklemeyers this evening. Frosty, who didn’t seem to have any such questions, quickly fell asleep between them.
The four women sat and talked about the weather, the new resort under construction and the uptick in business, with its concomitant traffic issues, until Jaye aimed a subtle kick at her friend’s ankle bone.
“Ouch!” Sierra protested, pulling her foot out of harm’s way, waking Frosty, who’d been snoring peacefully, and ruining Jaye’s attempt to be discreet. “Okay, I’m getting to it,” she said. “I asked the ladies to stop by because they were friends with Peggy since the day she moved here. I’m hoping they might know something that can help us.” Her tone had a “so there” in it aimed squarely at Jaye.
Jaye was just relieved that the get-together had a purpose and that stress hadn’t addled her friend’s brain after all.
“We’ll do our level best to help,” Esther said.
“Yes, indeedy,” Edith seconded the pledge.
During the chitchat, Jaye had been having trouble staying awake, but the promise of useful information immediately gave her a second wind. “What was Peggy like when she first got here?” she asked, as a dozen other questions sprang into her head, jockeying for air time.
“Not so different from the day she died,” Esther replied.
“She was rarely ever what I’d call ‘happy,’” Edith added.
“But there were times she was less unhappy, if you know what I mean.” Esther again.
Edith nodded in agreement. It seemed to Jaye that the sisters were purposely taking turns. If so, it was probably a good thing they hadn’t been born triplets, or it would have been a whole lot tougher for them to keep track of whose turn it was.
“Did she ever talk about her past or say anything that would explain her unhappiness?” Sierra asked.
“No, that was one of the strangest things about her,” Esther said. Apparently a nod counted as a turn in the Hinklemeyer rule book.
“I don’t recall her ever talking about her past,” Edith added.
“Whenever the conversation turned in that direction she’d clam up.”
“Like she couldn’t bear to talk about it,” Edith said, picking up the thread.
“Or she was afraid to.”
“And there were no photos in her house, you know.”
“Not a one.”
“It was like she had no family or friends.”
“No one she wanted to remember,” Esther concluded.
“Did she seem especially nervous back then?” Jaye asked, chasing down an idea. “More than you might expect someone to be after a big move?”
Edith took a moment to respond. “Now that you mention it, I think she was kind of jittery those first few months.”
“But she did mellow out some after that.” Esther leaned closer to her sister, who was sitting barely two inches away, and whispered loudly, “I think we should tell them about last Thursday.”
“Yes, you’re quite right.” Edith turned back to Jaye and Sierra. “We went into her store to buy some jelly donuts and—”
“We would have bought some from you as well,” Esther interrupted, “if you made them.”
Sierra assured her she wasn’t insulted.
“Anyway,” Edith said, reclaiming her turn, “we offered her a free match from our new service.”
“And she got so nasty—she told us to keep our damn noses out of her business and her life.”
“Can you imagine that?”
“We were so taken aback we almost dropped the jelly donuts,” Esther said, still clearly troubled by the incident.
Jaye and Sierra spent the next half hour peppering the twins with questions, but they learned little else of interest except that Peggy had dated art gallery owner Adam Grayson for close to a year before it all went sour a couple of months back.
“Do you know who broke it off?” Jaye asked, thinking that love, or the loss of it, was often at the heart of murder.
“According to Peggy, he did,” Edith said, “but she really didn’t want to talk about it.”
Esther shrugged. “What else is new?”
“Same old, same old,” Edith agreed.
At that point Sierra redeemed herself in Jaye’s eyes by thanking the twins and promising to start making jelly donuts as soon as she perfected a recipe for them. Edith was particularly pleased by this news, requesting powdered sugar instead of granulated. Esther, of course, concurred.
“Any thoughts?” Sierra asked. The twins had left, and she and Jaye were sitting at the kitchen table sipping cups of green tea and discussing what the women had told them.
Jaye put down her cup. “Yeah, a whole bunch of them. It sounds like Peggy might have moved here to hide from law enforcement or, conversely, from someone she helped the authorities put away.”
“The Witness Protection Program—the same thing occurred to me.”
“But there’s always the possibility that the answer is ‘none of the above,’” Jaye pointed out. “Peggy might have just been an unhappy woman who ticked off the wrong person right here in Sedona.”
“It would be nice if we could narrow things down a little. Too bad we don’t have a friend in the FBI.”
“You mean you don’t?” Jaye asked in mock amazement, hoping to put a smile on Sierra’s face.
Sierra tried to oblige, but fatigue was chipping away at her optimism again. “I’m afraid not.”
Jaye jumped up from her chair and headed toward the bedroom. “But we do have the Internet, and I’ll bet we can access the FBI’s most wanted lists.”
An hour later she and Sierra gave up. They’d gone through all the lists they could find with no mention of Peggy or anyone who looked even vaguely like her but with a different name.
“Well, at least we know she’s not being hunted by the government for anything particularly heinous,” Jaye said, pushing back from the little desk under her bedroom window.
When she stood up, Sierra drew her into a hug. “You’re the best,” she said, “but Frosty and I are going home. People get cranky when their muffins and scones aren’t ready on time.”
Jaye locked up after them and trudged back up the stairs, fully exhausted herself. She changed into her favorite soft pj’s and cleaned the day’s grime off her face and teeth. On her way back to the bedroom she noticed she’d left the kitchen light on. She didn’t need a bigger bill from the power company, so she detoured through the living room to turn it off. But she stopped short when she reached the kitchen doorway. The refrigerator was open, an intruder standing in the wedge of light spilling from it.
Chapter 7
Jaye gasped, her mouth hanging open as if a scream were about to follow, but she was too startled and bewildered to make a sound. Her eyes were locked on the creature in front of her, who appeared every bit as surprised and frightened as she was. The size of a house cat, it had pale golden fur and the requisite nose, whiskers and tail for that species, but it was standing on its hind legs as if that was a normal posture for it. Then Jaye noticed that its front paws, which were presently holding the leftover chunk of Brie, weren’t paws at all but more like small, fur-covered hands with three articulated fingers and an opposable thumb. Its perky little catlike ears were set up higher on its head than those of any cat Jaye had ever seen, and they were swiveling a full hundred and eighty degrees back and forth as if trolling for other sounds of possible danger.
The “not-a-cat,” as Jaye’s brain instantly labeled the creature, seemed to be assessing its situation, perhaps calculating the odds of making it past her without being caught. Jaye was weighing her options as well. The animal hadn’t exhibited any signs of aggression beyond a penchant for stealing. Maybe it wasn’t dangerous. Seriously? What was she basing that conclusion on? The ninety seconds since their little standoff had started? For all she knew, its mouth was filled with piranha-sharp teeth that injected a lethal poison into its victim, instantly paralyzing or killing said victim. This was no time to be making impulsive, Sierra-like decisions, or she could wind up following the wedge of Brie for the not-a-cat’s dinner. She should call 911. If ever a situation called for a speedy response time, this one did. But she’d have to leave the doorway to get her cell phone, which was in the bedroom. The animal would escape. Hold on, was that so terrible? By giving it the opportunity to flee, she stood a better chance of surviving. But what if, instead of leaving, it hid out somewhere until it could attack her in her sleep? And if the creature did leave, who would believe her when she told them about it? Damn, without her cell phone she couldn’t even take a picture.