by Sharon Pape
“You were cute as a button,” Zeke remarked with a wink. “At least till you turned nine.”
“Thanks,” she said wryly. “Nine through eleven were my awkward years.”
“Well, you did a mighty fine job of growin’ out of them, darlin’,” he said, taking a third album from the box.
“Hold on,” Rory said when she realized it was the album from her grandmother’s attic. “We need to be really careful with that one.” Even though Zeke had refined his technique for “handling” objects of different sizes and masses, it was far from foolproof. Just one elevated pulse of energy could cause irreparable damage to something so old and fragile.
“I’ll be careful,” he said, with the album hovering above his open palms. “Don’t be such a nervous Nellie. It’s been a long time since I’ve destroyed anythin’.”
Somehow the remark didn’t make her feel any better, but she bit her lip.
Zeke opened the album in exaggerated slow motion to make his point. A frown pleated his brow as he studied the first photograph. “It’s hard to make out much detail,” he muttered, holding it up to the light of the desk lamp and squinting at it from different angles.
“I know,” Rory said. “It’s a shame how those early pictures have degraded. According to my mother, that should be . . . ” She paused, trying to recall what she’d been told. “My great-great-great-great grandmother with her family. The photos near the end are a lot clearer.”
After going through the remainder of the album, Zeke put it and the other two he’d seen back in the box. “I believe I’ll turn in,” he said, doing a good approximation of a yawn. “I’ll have a look at the others another time.”
Rory wished him good night and took her teacup down to the kitchen. Hobo was still snoring away on the living-room couch, but if she didn’t wake him to go outside now, he was bound to wake her in the middle of the night. When she called his name, he opened one sleepy eye, which promptly shut again. So she used her guaranteed Hobo-waker. She took two small pieces of American cheese out of the refrigerator and held one under his nose. In two seconds flat, his eyes were open, along with his mouth. She used the second piece to lure him off the couch and over to the kitchen door. After swallowing the cheese, he trotted outside without additional bribery. Rory wondered how long it would take him to realize that he could wangle more cheese from her by holding out a little longer.
Once Hobo was back inside, she locked the door and turned off the lights, and the two of them climbed the stairs. Hobo hopped on her bed, circled a few times, and was asleep an instant after he lay down. It took Rory a lot longer to calm her mind after all the events of the day. She was finally drifting off when an intriguing thought tugged her back from the edge.
Chapter 22
Rory threw off the covers and padded into the study without wasting time to put on her robe. She grabbed her sketch pad from the top of the filing cabinets and opened it to the last sketch Eloise had insisted she draw. Sketch in hand, she sat down beside the box of albums.
She took the old album out of the box and opened it to the first of the faded photographs. Holding her sketch up beside it, she compared the two. It was no slam-dunk, but neither was it beyond the realm of possibility that her great-great-great-great grandmother was the woman Eloise had described to her. The shape of the head appeared to be the same, along with the general arrangement of the features. But in the photo, her hair was piled on top of her head, not loose around her face the way Rory had been told to draw it. She sat there on the floor for several more minutes trying to imagine why her ancestor from so long ago might have reached out to her through Eloise. Wait, she corrected herself. Eloise had said it was the woman’s daughter who had contacted her and shown her a photo of her mother. Why hadn’t her great-great-great-great grandmother simply contacted Eloise herself? Surely there was some reason behind it, and more important, behind the daughter’s need to communicate from the other side. But it was all getting too confusing for Rory’s weary mind. Besides, she wasn’t even sure the sketch depicted someone related to her. Until she had more information, it was nothing but pointless speculation.
***
She awoke the next morning more refreshed but with the same questions tweaking her brain and no answers in sight. Before she had a chance to climb out of bed, the phone started ringing. Hobo, who was lying stretched out at the foot of the bed, grumbled and drew himself into a furry ball as if that could insulate him against the intrusions of the world. By the clock on Rory’s nightstand, it was not yet seven a.m. Her heart did a little flip-flop in her chest. Since social convention dictated that you wait until a civilized time to make phone calls, it was generally bad news that rode the early morning hours. She picked up the receiver, wary of what awaited her. Gil Harper was on the other end.
“I’m glad I got you at home,” he said after a perfunctory hello.
“Well I’m generally home at the crack of dawn,” she responded, unless I have to meet your son Luke at some ridiculous hour. “What can I do for you, Gil?” It was hard to be polite before she’d had her coffee.
“I want you to stop investigating my wife.”
“I’m only investigating her because you told me to,” she pointed out.
“Well, now I’m telling you not to.” He was definitely not in a happy place.
“Has something changed with regard to the case?”
“Yeah—Ellen’s threatening to divorce me.”
On one hand, Rory was glad to hear that Ellen had found the courage to stand up for herself. On the other, if Ellen was the killer, eliminating her as a suspect would put them at a serious disadvantage. “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” she said to see if she could ferret anything else out of Grumpy.
“She’s taken exception to being investigated. She said a marriage is supposed to be based on trust, and if I can’t trust her, she doesn’t want to be married to me anymore. Listen, long as I have you on the phone, how’s the case going? Zeroing in anyone yet?” Gil was making her uncaffeinated head spin.
“Getting closer by the day,” she said, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt. They had enough suspects, but they were still a long way from naming Matthew’s killer or the farm’s saboteur. She promised him a detailed report in the near future.
When she hung up the phone, she saw Zeke standing in her bedroom doorway, respecting the privacy clause in their verbal contract. She related the salient points of the phone call to him, which he shrugged off in favor of addressing his own agenda.
“I’d be mighty obliged if you’d give Eloise a call on my behalf,” he said. Despite his progress in other areas, using telephones was still problematic for him “Tell her she needs to come over here ASAP.”
Zeke speaking in acronyms was generally enough to tickle Rory’s funny bone, but today Gil had tainted her perspective. “Why do you need to see her?”
“You know, not everything’s your business,” he said curtly.
Boy, everyone was in a foul mood today. And it was apparently contagious. Rory felt like pulling the covers back over her head and not resurfacing for twenty-four hours. But life refused to be put on hold. Hobo had given up trying to sleep with all the chatter. He jumped off the bed with a pointed huff of exasperation and headed straight for the stairs, which meant he needed to go outside. Rory knew from experience that ignoring a large dog with a full bladder was risky business. Given that her pj’s were less seductive than a nun’s habit, she dragged herself out of bed with the marshal still looking on. Since they’d met Eloise last spring, his attitude toward her had been in a constant state of flux. At first he’d forbidden Rory to have anything to do with her; then he’d collaborated with her in an effort to keep Rory safe, after which he’d gone back to banning her from the premises again. What was he up to now? “What if Eloise wants to know why you need her?” she asked, forgoing her robe and slippers in the name of expediency
.
“She doesn’t always tell you what she wants until you get over there,” he countered. “What’s good for the goose is—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” She had to squeeze past him to follow Hobo. “But Eloise doesn’t operate on logic, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Hobo was doing his little “let me out” tap dance when she reached the kitchen door. With just his four paws, he sounded like a whole Riverdance ensemble. The instant she opened the door, he spotted a squirrel at the base of a nearby oak tree and took off after it at warp speed. As usual the squirrel scampered up the tree to safety. One day Rory expected to find the dog clinging to a limb of a tree with no idea how to climb down.
“Then you’ll call her?” Zeke asked, having followed her into the kitchen.
“As long as I can have my coffee first.”
***
Twenty minutes later the doorbell rang—twice. Eloise always got miffed if Olga reached for the bell first. Rory opened the door, still in her pj’s. With Eloise’s impromptu visits at odd hours, she’d had to answer the door in as little as a towel. As a result, she no longer worried about her attire when entertaining her elderly neighbor and her aide.
Under her jacket, Eloise was sporting yellow pajama bottoms featuring teddy bears, along with an oversized navy sweatshirt. Red flip-flops completed the ensemble. Her hair was combed neatly on one side but was sticking up at strange angles on the other. The odds were she’d lost patience with Olga halfway through the grooming process. Olga was the most elegantly dressed of them all in pants and a sweater that went nicely together along with a neutral pea coat. She was in her usual state of nervous agitation. “Here are we,” she announced when Rory opened the door. “Is everything being okay?”
“Yes, I’m sorry to have bothered you so early in the morning,” Rory said. “I’m afraid the marshal can be very insistent.” Rory noticed how Olga’s eyes lit up at the mention of Zeke. It was obvious the woman still had a major crush on him. In spite of every effort to keep his existence a secret, Rory had had no choice but to introduce him to the aide several months earlier during one of Eloise’s visits. Luckily Olga had been so charmed by him that she hadn’t seemed to notice when he started to lose cohesion.
“I am understanding. Miss Eloise is top expert at being demanding,” Olga said as she stepped inside after her charge.
Rory took their coats and led them into the living room, where she asked them to make themselves comfortable. “Marshal, your guests are here,” she called once they were seated on the couch. Zeke walked in from the direction of the kitchen. He greeted them from a distance that made shaking hands impossible. Instead he dipped his head as though he was wearing a cowboy hat. Olga started blinking so fast that Rory thought she might swoon. And here she was with no smelling salts in the house.
“Mornin’ ladies,” he said pleasantly, but his expression was anything but cordial. He perched on the edge of the armchair diagonally across from them. Olga didn’t seem to have noticed his stony face. She blushed a feverish red, stumbling all over her “hello.” Eloise asked if she could have ice cream.
“Later,” Zeke said. He turned to Rory, who was hovering between his chair and the window, hoping to go unnoticed. “Some privacy, please.”
Although her curiosity was approaching critical mass, she excused herself to shower and dress. Marching up the stairs, she debated whether to risk eavesdropping on the conversation. Common sense and her conscience won out. She couldn’t expect Zeke to respect her privacy if she failed to respect his. But before she closed the bathroom door, she heard heated voices rising from below.
***
The women had left by the time Rory came back downstairs. Zeke was still in the living room, staring off into space as he absently scratched Hobo’s ears. “Eloise didn’t stay to have her ice cream?” she asked in surprise.
“She didn’t mention it again,” he said, looking up at her.
“Whoa—she must have been pretty angry. I’ve never seen her forget about her favorite treat. What were you arguing about?” she added casually.
“Let it go, Rory. Like I said before—not everything concerns you.”
“I guess I should start keeping secrets too,” she muttered, loud enough for him to hear. She was coming down with a serious case of too-much-togetherness. She headed for the closet beneath the stairs, grabbed her parka and stalked out the kitchen door to work in her office behind the house. She needed to get away from the marshal for a while. Of course he could easily pop in on her there too, but he preferred not to use up his energy that way.
He watched her leave without asking a single question. She would not have deigned to answer them anyway, and he probably knew that. She was halfway across the yard when she heard her business phone ringing in the house and in her office. Rather than backtrack, she ran the rest of the way to the office. It was barely nine o’clock, but there’d already been so much going on that it seemed like it should have been noon at the very least.
By the time she unlocked the door and picked up the receiver, Anya Dmitriev was about to leave a message. In a voice still hollowed by grief, she said she hoped it wasn’t too early to call and wondered if she could stop by. Rory assured her that would be fine, explained that the office was situated at the far end of her driveway and said she’d be expecting her.
Chapter 23
“I thought of something I didn’t mention when you came to see me,” Anya said. She was seated on the small sofa in Rory’s office, kneading the tissue in her lap. “It’s probably not important, but I’ll leave that for you to decide.”
Rory was at her desk, her chair turned to face her visitor. “Sure, you did the right thing.”
“You asked me if Matthew might have kept some kind of journal, either handwritten or on his computer. I told you I doubted it, because it wasn’t the sort of thing he generally went in for. I haven’t changed my mind in that regard, but as I was thinking about computers, I realized I’d never told you about the computer he bought for me.”
Rory found herself inching forward in her seat, as if shortening the distance between them would bring her the rest of the information more quickly.
“I had it until about a week before Matthew died,” Anya said. “He’d insisted on buying it months ago. He said, ‘Mom, technology isn’t going to slow down, and computers are not a fad. You can’t afford to get too far behind or the world will pass you by.’ I remember every single word, because he was so solemn about it. How could I say no? So he bought the computer and set up an e-mail account for me, even though I told him I had no one to write to. ‘You can write to me,’ he said. He showed me how, and I started writing to him. He wrote back every time, even from work. He was such a good, sweet boy.” Anya sniffled and started rummaging in her purse. Since she’d already shredded the tissue she was holding, Rory handed her the little box she kept on her desk. Anya thanked her and daintily blew her nose.
“After a while, I ran out of things to say in the e-mails,” she went on. “Besides, I didn’t want to keep interrupting his day, so I stopped, gradually, hoping maybe he wouldn’t notice.” She gave a little hiccup of a laugh. “But of course he did. I stood my ground and told him I wanted to cut down to twice a week. I guess he saw that I meant business, because he finally agreed. About a week before he died, I somehow gave the computer a cold by opening some spam. I don’t even understand what that means. Computer stuff is all gibberish to me.”
At another time Anya’s words would have struck Rory as funny, but not today. And although she would have liked to ask her to skip to the chase, she had a feeling Anya needed to tell the story her way. Listening patiently was the least she could do for her.
“Mr. Gil has a friend who fixes computers, so I brought it to him,” Anya said. “That was just a few days before Matthew died. So I didn’t have it in the house when you came by.”
“Have you gotte
n it back?”
“Yes, just yesterday. That’s why I wanted to speak to you. The man who fixed the computer was wondering why I never came to pick it up. When he heard what happened, he insisted on bringing it back and hooking it up again for me. But I don’t really have any use for a computer, so I’m going to tell him he can have it.”
“Wait,” Rory said as a thought occurred to her. “Have you checked your e-mail? There might be messages from Matthew that you missed while the computer was gone.”
“Oh,” Anya said, looking more anxious than hopeful about the prospect. “I didn’t think of that.” She hesitated a moment before going on. “I know how busy you are, but maybe you could stop by my house one day to take a look? I don’t know if I can bring myself to do it just yet.”
“I have an easier solution,” Rory said. “Do you remember your e-mail address and password?”
Anya looked perplexed. “Yes, but what good is that? I don’t have my computer here.”
“We should be able to access your e-mail account from my computer. I know it’s a long shot, but if Matthew did write to you, maybe there’ll be a clue about what was going on in his life right before he was killed.”
She gave Rory the address and password as she pulled another tissue from the box. Rory swiveled around to the computer, plugged in the information and crossed virtual fingers in her mind. When Anya’s e-mail popped up, she felt as if she’d been waiting hours rather than seconds.
“It’s still there and I’m in,” she said, tempering her excitement in the face of Anya’s grief. She turned to the older woman. “There’s one unopened message from Matthew. It’s kind of strange though; it’s through a greeting-card company.”