The Outsmarting of Criminals: A Mystery Introducing Miss Felicity Prim

by Rigolosi, Steven

  With that, Miss Prim turned heel and left Miss Gladys Lavelle standing in the doorway of Prothero’s market, white faced and speechless.

  *

  As Miss Prim began the walk back to Undercliff Lane, she worked at regaining her equanimity. Losing one’s temper rarely accomplishes anything productive, but she’d had quite enough of Miss Lavelle’s broadsides. To think, only minutes earlier, she had marveled at the softer side of Miss Lavelle, at her kindness toward Faye and her devotion to her career!

  As she passed Cambria & Calibri, Valeska Reed hailed her from the door.

  “Miss Prim! Come in for a chat?”

  A pleasant tête-à-tête with a burgeoning friend was just what Miss Prim needed after the encounter with Miss Lavelle. She left her wheelie-cart on the sidewalk and entered the store.

  “I was hoping to see you, Miss Prim,” Valeska was saying. “I have a treat for you.”

  Valeska went into the back room and returned with a small packet wrapped in aluminum foil. She handed it to Miss Prim, who gently peeled back the edge.

  “Oh,” Miss Prim whispered. “Are these … ?”

  “Kifli. Some apricot, some prune. For many years they were my specialty. I dusted off the recipe and made a batch last night.”

  “I thought you were adamantly opposed to selling baked goods here at Cambria & Calibri?”

  “I made them for Martin. They’ve always been a favorite of his.”

  Unable to resist temptation, Miss Prim nibbled at one of the apricot treats.

  “I can see why, Valeska. They are quite divine.”

  Valeska Reed smiled with satisfaction. “No one would guess they’re made with low-calorie cream cheese and sugar-free apricot preserves, would they?” She winked, and the two women shared a knowing glance.

  “Did Martin appreciate them as much as I do?”

  “Once he got over the shock, yes. Then again, I think he was in a good mood after eating the meatloaf I’d prepared for dinner. A nice change, he said, from the salads and vegetables I usually force on him.”

  No words were necessary. Miss Prim simply grabbed and squeezed Valeska’s hand. Valeska returned the gesture.

  “As I said before, Miss Prim, you really are quite miraculous. I can’t imagine how Greenfield survived with you. But there’s another thing I wanted to tell you. Someone was in here a couple of hours ago looking for you.”

  “Someone?”

  “I’ve never seen him before. Tall, young, unkempt, nervous. He wouldn’t make eye contact. It wasn’t just you he was asking about. He also inquired about someone named Dolly.”

  This was very strange. “Was it the same man who’d been inquiring after me a few days ago?”

  “No. The first man was one of those plastic-surgery aficionados whose attempts to fight aging make them look highly artificial. This man was much younger and much taller. He had one of those straggly beards that I so detest. You know, the type that looks as if it is harboring breadcrumbs and microbes. I didn’t like his looks or his demeanor, so I said I’d never heard of you, or of Dolly. Martin told me about your gracious invitation for Sunday—we accept, by the way—but I didn’t want to tell a stranger that I know you, or that I’d heard of Dolly but haven’t met her yet.”

  Miss Prim bit her lip. “I can’t imagine why anyone would be looking for her in Greenfield. She lives in New York City.”

  “I agree, it’s odd. There was something off about that young man.”

  Miss Prim shivered a little, not out of concern for her own safety, but out of concern for Dolly’s. Had Dolly told Benjamin of her plans to visit Greenfield, and had Benjamin repeated the information to one or more of his unsavory contacts? The man Valeska described could not have been Benjamin, who was well-kept and academic, not unkempt and slightly crazed.

  “Well, it is a bit of a mystery, Valeska, but I’m sure the truth will reveal itself.” She added, “At some point.”

  *

  Miss Prim was placing her purchases in the refrigerator when the telephone rang.

  “Hello, Rose Cottage.”

  “Dolly?” A voice she didn’t recognize.

  “No, who’s calling please?”

  Click.

  Miss Prim replaced the receiver. The hang-ups were becoming more and more nerve-racking, part of a disturbing pattern. So many wrong numbers and intentional or unintentional disconnections; two men asking around Greenfield about her and Dolly’s whereabouts; the intruder she’d seen in her yard. Her heat beat just a bit louder and faster.

  Perhaps it was time to take these concerns to a professional. Should she call Detective Dawes and share her concerns with him? No, she would not. She refused to become one of those hysterical women who overreact to bumps in the night. She would keep a close eye on the situation and involve the authorities when she had something more than vague suspicions and irrational fears to report. In the meantime, she had both Bruno and the Laser Taser 3000.

  As she was calming herself with soothing thoughts, the doorbell rang, not once, not twice, but three times in rapid succession. Sensing danger, Bruno let out several intimidating woofs and bounded to the front door.

  “Who’s there, please?” Miss Prim yelled over Bruno’s woofing.

  “It’s me. Lorraine.”

  Miss Prim opened the door to find a dripping Lorraine Koslowski. Miss Prim had been lucky enough to miss the rain, but the drops had begun falling almost as soon as she’d arrived at Rose Cottage.

  “Lorraine! Do come in. I almost didn’t recognize you.” Today Lorraine wore a form-fitting black dress and a shoulder-length brunette wig. She’d also applied a shockingly large amount of lipstick. The effect made her lips seem twice their normal size.

  “Do you like the new look, Felicity? I’m going for the Angelina Jolie effect. Long lines and easy on the eyes. With that glow you see on the silver screen.”

  “It becomes you, Lorraine. It really does.” Which may not have been perfectly true, but as Mrs. Charity Prim had often said, a tiny lie that pleases a friend is usually a lie worth telling.

  “Say, Felicity, I don’t suppose you’ve seen Lucian, have you?”

  “Lucian? No, I haven’t. I guess I had the impression that he doesn’t leave Ridgemont much.”

  “He doesn’t. But he’s gone, Felicity. Gone.” And with that, Lorraine Koslowski did something Miss Prim never would have expected. She burst into tears.

  25

  Tea and Sympathy

  As Miss Prim brewed the tea, Lorraine explained.

  “I thought I had Lucian’s wandering under control, Felicity. I told him I’d introduce him to the King of Siam if he promised not to leave the house without telling me. He’s not good with time, but he remembers that particular promise, and I keep the ruse going by telling him the King is expected any day now. But when I got home from running my errands downtown, I couldn’t find him anywhere. Not in the house, not in the attic, not in the basement, not on the property. God, I hope he isn’t naked somewhere! One time he left me a note saying he’d gone to visit the sulfur baths in Saratoga Springs. We found him frolicking au naturel in the woods near Lake Greenfield.”

  “How long were you out of the house, Lorraine?” Miss Prim asked.

  Lorraine raised her wrist to consult a watch that wasn’t there. “No more than a couple of hours.”

  In her most comforting voice, Miss Prim said, “That’s good news. He can’t have gone far in two hours. Finish up your tea, and we’ll go to the police station and ask for their help.”

  Lorraine grimaced. “It won’t be the first time. Fortunately, Lucian likes Ezra and Martin. Spike reminds him too much of my sister Lorna, so he steers clear of her. Says she gives him a headache. Spike does that to a lot of people.”

  As the two women scurried to the police station, Lorraine tried to console herself. “I don’t think he’d do anything dangerous or hurt himself. But Felicity, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, his mind isn’t it what it used to be. He gets confused m
ore easily, and sometimes he thinks the Hessians are stalking him. And let me tell you, he does not like the Hessians. He won’t let them take Ridgemont, he says, while making threatening gestures. If someone approached him the wrong way, I don’t think he’d hurt them, but …” Her voice trailed off.

  They found the full complement of the Greenfield police squad viewing something on Ezra Dawes’ computer screen. Dawes and Spike munched on crullers while Martin Reed—surprise of surprises—snacked on miniature carrots from a small Ziploc bag.

  Lorraine got straight to the point. “Ezra, Lucian’s gone again.”

  Ezra removed his half-moon glasses and stood up. “How long?”

  “Two hours max.”

  “Any ideas where he might be?”

  “Let me think for a minute.” Lorraine turned to Miss Prim to explain. “Sometimes Lucian will store up conversational details that he’ll get fixated on. The time he took off for Saratoga, for example, it was because a few days earlier I’d bought some new bath salts.”

  “I’ve heard that bathing in Epsom salts can help if you’re constipated,” Spike put in. “Can someone explain how that works? I mean, sit in salt water and all of a sudden …”

  “Spike, not now,” Dawes said, more sternly than Miss Prim had ever heard him speak. “Lorraine, you were saying?”

  “Before I left Ridgemont, I told Lucian about the break-in at the historical society. But I’m afraid that’s not much to go on. For Lucian, references to history can spur thoughts of anything from ancient Ur and Mesopotamia to the Arab Spring.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I bought him a book of English crossword puzzles, which he’s quite enjoying, even if the words he’s writing into the blocks are strictly of his own coinage. I hadn’t realized he likes puzzles so much, so I told him about tavern puzzles and promised to get some for him.”

  “Tavern puzzles?” Miss Prim had never heard of these.

  “You know, Felicity. Those puzzles that have two pieces of metal intricately intertwined, and you have to separate them. Lucian is quite hopeless at anything like that, so I thought they might keep him occupied and out of trouble for a few weeks.”

  A light bulb seemed to illuminate in the heads of Lorraine and Ezra simultaneously.

  “Tavern puzzles,” Ezra said. “Maude’s.”

  Ezra and Lorraine took off—really, Miss Prim thought admiringly, Lorraine was as spry as a much younger woman—while Martin Reed, Spike Fremlin, and Miss Prim brought up the rear.

  Ezra sent Lorraine and Spike into the tavern, directing Reed to join him as he unlatched the gate leading to the tavern’s rear yard.

  “Any time Lucian’s disappeared, we’ve found him outdoors,” Ezra explained. “Miss Prim, you’d better wait here. Come on, Reed.” The detective and the police officer disappeared into the rear yard.

  Wait here? Miss Prim should have known this moment would come: the moment in which the professionals direct the amateur, the neophyte, the tyro to mind her own business and not interfere with an official police investigation. Miss Prim wondered at Detective Dawes’s naïveté. Did the man really believe that this particular amateur would behave as directed? Minding one’s own business is not the way to develop experience in criminal outsmarting.

  She tiptoed quietly into the yard and watched as Dawes and Reed inspected the dumpster and storage shed. Another gate in the rear of the yard gave onto a service road running behind the businesses on the square’s north side. But the gate was locked and the fence too high for Lucian to climb.

  Miss Prim nearly jumped out of her shoes when she felt a stirring in the pine trees behind her. Could Lucian have sneaked up behind her? She wheeled around and crouched into a self-defense pose only to discover a calico cat rubbing against her leg and meowing loudly. She suspected Bruno would not appreciate this interloper’s efforts to charm her, but she could not stop herself from getting down onto her haunches to pet the cat, which rolled happily on her back and grabbed Miss Prim’s hand gently with her paws. It was surprising, Miss Prim thought, that it had taken so long for a cat to show up; everyone knows that cats are a staple of locked-room mysteries taking place in New England villages populated by kooky individuals, and they (both cats and kooky individuals) are frequently the chosen companions of aging spinsters.

  “He’s not here,” Miss Prim heard Dawes say. “Let’s see if Spike and Lorraine have had any luck.”

  They hadn’t. Maude had helped the two women inspect every inch of the tavern, from the basement through the cramped attic, but Lucian Koslowski was nowhere to be found.

  The members of the police force regrouped in front of the tavern. Dawes gave the orders. “Spike, you and I will check the lake. Reed, check the square. Lorraine, Miss Prim: Go back to Ridgemont. Call us if Lucian comes home. We’ll be in touch as soon as we find him. Try not to worry, Lorraine. He always manages to take care of himself.”

  “Thank you, Ezra,” Lorraine said sincerely. “I’ve been thinking about getting him one of those GPS-type devices so that we can track him when he gets loose. This time I’m going to do it. I’ll tell him it’s a secret crystal offered to special humans chosen by the inhabitants of Atlantis. That’ll give him incentive to wear it.”

  “Lorraine,” Miss Prim said, “may I meet you at Ridgemont? I have a few things I need to discuss with Detective Dawes.”

  Lorraine winked at Miss Prim knowingly. “I’ll leave the door unlocked, Felicity. I’m going to search the house again, starting in the basement. If you could take care of the second-floor rooms and the attic, that would be so helpful. Come get me if you find him. He might be disoriented, and I’ll know how to deal with him.”

  As Lorraine began walking quickly toward Ridgemont, Miss Prim turned to Dawes.

  “Detective, I know you are busy, and I won’t take too much of your time, but I wonder if I might ask your advice. I don’t wish to be alarmist, but I have seen too many people”—and by people, she meant characters—“ignoring danger signs and not informing the police. I don’t wish to be one who discounts ominous portents, only to regret my decisions later. At first I thought I should not bother you with these matters, but I am growing increasingly alarmed.”

  “You don’t strike me as the alarmist type, Miss Prim. I’m all ears.”

  So Miss Prim told him about the telephone calls and the hang-ups, the person (?) she saw lurking in her backyard, and the unknown/unnamed men who had been asking about her and Dolly at the bookstore.

  Detective Dawes narrowed his eyes. Here it comes, Miss Prim thought. Here is where a law-enforcement professional discounts everything I have just said, implying that I am fanciful, perhaps paranoid. Here is where Detective Dawes, in keeping with genre traditions, suggests that I am lonely and inclined toward the dramatic; that the telephone calls were simply random wrong numbers with no meaning; that the creature in my yard was a deer, not a person; that I will soon discover the identities of the men asking about me and Dolly, and that they will turn out to be well-wishers. In short, that I am rather silly, even though the mounting evidence shows that some person, or persons, may have malicious intent toward me.

  To Miss Prim’s surprise, Dawes did nothing of the kind. Instead, he said, “Hmm. If just one of those things happened, I’d say it was no big deal. But there seems to be a pattern. Can you think of anyone who might … ?”

  Miss Prim knew he was thinking of a polite, non-scaremongering way of saying want to hurt you.

  “I can think of two possibilities, Detective.” She told him about Dolly’s impending visit and the unresolved situation with Benjamin and his possible clandestine activities. “As for the other,” she continued, “I fear I have made an enemy of Miss Lavelle. She is compelled to believe the worst about me and has taken to haranguing me, quite loudly, in public places. During our most recent donnybrook, she accused me of trying to coax Faye and Kit Cotillard into my ‘web,’ to use her infelicitous phrase, when in reality I have hired Kit to walk Bruno, and Faye,
Kit, and I are fast becoming friends.”

  “That’s Gladys for you. She’s so unhappy here, I don’t even know why she stays. She should go somewhere else, make a fresh start.”

  “Yes, Detective, but as my mother used to say, Wherever you go, there you are.”

  “I’ll talk to her, Miss Prim. She’s a bully, and she’s jealous of you. She hates that an attractive woman has moved into town and has made more friends in a week than she has in a lifetime. She thinks of herself as Queen of Greenfield and she doesn’t like having a rival.”

  Miss Prim’s cheeks became rosy. Being called attractive often has that effect on a modest woman.

  Dawes handed her a card. “This has my cell number on it, Miss Prim. Call me, or 911, if you feel seriously threatened. Will you be all right in the meantime?”

  “Thank you for your kind offer, Detective,” Miss Prim responded, taking the card and tucking it into her pocket. “And thank you for taking me seriously. That kind of respect is not often given to people in my position, at least not in fiction.”

  Dawes smiled. “Fortunately, this isn’t fiction.”

  *

  Henry and Albert greeted Miss Prim as she walked tentatively through Ridgemont’s front door. Both dogs seemed subdued; perhaps they understood intuitively that something was amiss. Miss Prim patted them as they stuck their heads out the door, searching for Bruno. To reward their good behavior, she made her way to the kitchen and gave each a treat from the jar.

  She carefully climbed the junk-laden staircase and began methodically searching each room of Ridgemont’s second story. At the head of a staircase was a large office with a leopard rug in the center of the floor. Miss Prim wondered if Lucian had killed the animal on safari; she hoped not. Lucian’s diplomas hung on the wall behind the desk, but the other walls had been stripped of their adornments; bright, unfaded bits of wallpaper stood out in marked contrast to the remainder of the faded and peeling wallpaper. A closet held a suit of chain mail and a ball of twine about two feet in diameter, but no Lucian.