Paws For Murder

by Annie Knox

  “Hasn’t her family cleaned the apartment out yet?” Sean asked.

  “Doubt it,” Nick answered, retrieving an unadorned key ring from his pants. “Sherry’s rent was always paid up front, every three months, so the landlord won’t be in any hurry to dump her stuff. Besides, she’d never let her family have keys to her place, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let them in. They’ll have to go through the proper channels.”

  I didn’t have the faintest clue what those proper channels would be, and I doubted Nick did either.

  “Heck, I doubt her effing family will even bother. They always pooh-poohed Sherry, like she was no-account and a loser. They’ll probably just let the landlord throw out her stuff. So, anyway, it should all still be there, and you can have a look around if you want.”

  “Don’t we need to go through the proper channels, get permission to go into her house?” I asked.

  Sean pulled out his phone. “I can ask Carla. I don’t know why I didn’t think to ask her to look around the apartment before. She must be next of kin—or at least know who is—and I’m sure they can arrange something with the landlord to get us in.”

  “Carla? Carla Harper?” Nick sneered. “Aren’t you paying any attention to me? Sherry hated Carla. You don’t need to ask that prissy bitch for anything.” I shot Sean a worried glance. His lips tightened at the slight to his girlfriend, but he didn’t take Nick’s bait.

  “I can give you permission. I’m on the lease,” Nick added, a hint of pride in his voice.

  “Why would Sherry have put your name on the lease? Don’t you live with your mom?” There was a hint of contempt in Sean’s tone, but Nick was too blotto to notice.

  “Yeah, but last year Sherry and I had this big blowup and I went on a bender. My mom was getting all into this intervention bottom line crap, and she threw me out for a while. Sherry felt so bad about me spending a night down at the shelter at St. Stephens that she put me on the lease so I’d always have a home.”

  “Why not just give you the key?” Sean asked.

  Nick dropped his chin and stared up at Sean as though Sean had just asked Nick why he liked liquor. “Because she didn’t want anyone hassling me when I used the key. But, like I said, I wasn’t supposed to use the key except for emergencies, but being homeless . . . that was an emergency. And I guess this is, too.”

  Nick sniffed. “That’s how she was, you know? Effing heart of gold. Anyway, if you’ll give me a lift, I’ll let you in.”

  CHAPTER

  Eleven

  Sherry lived on the second floor of a Victorian mansion on Birch Lane, just across Dakota Park from Trendy Tails. Her apartment overlooked the park, with its picturesque band shell and dozens of oak and maple trees. As predicted, Saturday’s snow had melted in the late-afternoon sun, leaving the trees bare of their white frosting, but the dark web of the limbs held its own beauty in the crisp morning light.

  When we unlocked the door to her apartment, the scent of patchouli and jasmine wafted into the hallway like Sherry’s ghost come to greet us. I shivered, even as Sean flipped the switch by the door and flooded the expansive space with light.

  The walls of the apartment were painted a warm, buttery yellow with accents of deep moss, the floors and molding all darkly shining wood. A chandelier of patinated brass and milk glass hung from a plaster ceiling medallion that had been painted a dozen sunrise colors. Yet in the midst of that stately beauty, Sherry had accumulated a vast array of clutter.

  Every surface of the apartment—from the Mission-style dining table to the battered brass daybed in the corner—was covered with stacks of paper. Empty margarine tubs, jelly jars, and whipped topping containers littered the small counter that separated the galley kitchen from the rest of the space.

  Nick made a beeline for the daybed, picking up a red chenille throw draped over its side and burying his face in it. His shoulders jerked, and I realized he was crying.

  Sean and I left him to his grief, taking a quick turn around the apartment. We were in search of a clue about Sherry’s alleged lover, but I was trying to keep my mind open, in case any other potential clue jumped out at me.

  Sherry’s apartment was a beautiful space, with generous rooms, but it consisted only of the combined living and dining room, a single bedroom, and a bath. I stepped into the bathroom, which actually reminded me of my own: claw foot tub fitted with a shower and a circular curtain rod, the floor covered in white hexagonal tiles, the mirror on the medicine cabinet clouded with age. Sherry had painted the walls a deep azure that contrasted nicely with the white of the tile.

  Even the bathroom was cluttered with stacks of towels and old magazines, but I couldn’t help noticing that the tile, the sink, and the toilet were sparkling clean. I happened to glance at the paper holder and saw that the end of the roll had been folded into a neat triangle, like you see when you first check into a hotel room.

  Sherry had a cleaning service.

  I tried to imagine the workers shifting all the stacks of paper to scrub under them, the monumental effort of cleaning around so much stuff.

  I wandered back to the living room to find Nick sprawled in an oversized armchair, the chenille throw tucked around his shoulders.

  “Was Sherry packing or something?” I asked.

  Nick opened one eye and gave me a bleary smile. “Because of all the stuff? Nah, Sherry was a conservationist, you know? Didn’t want to waste anything.”

  More like a hoarder, I thought.

  “But surely she could have recycled this stuff. The newspapers and such.”

  Nick shrugged. “I guess. But she always said ‘I could use this,’ or ‘this might come in handy.’”

  This explained why Sherry had held on to the paper plate Ken had sent out. She must have thrown away the food and kept the plate, the way she kept stacks of newspapers and old margarine tubs, figuring she’d find some use for it later.

  “Her family had a lot of money,” Nick continued, “but Sherry was thrifty.”

  “But she didn’t have to be, right? I mean she could afford household help so she must not have been poor.”

  My mother would have had my hide for asking such a tacky question about the finances of a dead woman. But my mother wasn’t present, and Nick didn’t seem to mind.

  “Oh, I guess she had money. I mean, she didn’t have a job or anything, but she did okay. She said once that the family trust was split equally among all of Gene and Pearl’s grandkids. Sherry got her piece of the pie when she turned thirty.”

  Gene had been the patriarch of the Harper family, careful steward of its fortune, for decades. He had the bad fortune to outlive all of his own children, so I guess all the money went straight to his grandchildren. Gene’s eldest child was Sherry’s dad, George, and Sherry was an only child. Gene’s second son was Carla’s dad, Kevin. Kevin and Virginia Harper had two kids, Carla and her teenage brother, Jeff. The baby of the family, William, had had twin boys. A total of five grandchildren. If Sherry had an equal share of the Harper family fortune, she must have been stinkin’ rich.

  “But Carla handled all that,” Nick said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I don’t think Sherry even had a checkbook. Didn’t trust banks. Didn’t think too highly of the way the family had earned all that cash, raping the land and such. Carla gave Sherry cash when she needed it. Like I said, Sherry was thrifty.”

  I didn’t bother to point out that Sherry’s livelihood, no matter how thrifty she was, depended on all those trees her family had whacked down to make lumber and paper, just as surely as if Sherry herself had wielded the ax. Besides, I’d seen Sherry’s clothes. It took a lot of money to look that disheveled. It sounded to me like Sherry was able to rationalize the source and size of her income by dealing solely with Carla and cash. She played at poor, but she was still a trust-fund baby through and through.

  “Hey, Izzy?” Sean called from Sherry’s bedroom. “Nick? Can y’all come back here?”

  Nick followed me down the short hal
lway. Sherry’s room looked like a National Geographic had exploded onto the walls. Fabrics in every hue and texture, from silks to homespun cottons, covered the walls and the massive four-poster bed. Woven baskets overflowed with colorful scarves and strings of beads and Sherry’s eclectic clothing was strewn about every surface.

  Sean stood in the midst of that vibrant chaos with a stack of papers in his hands.

  No, not papers, photographs.

  “Nick,” Sean said, “did Sherry take all these?”

  “Yeah, man. She was always taking pictures. She used to have a dark room set up in her closet, but now she’s strictly digital.”

  Sean waggled the stack of pictures. “Maybe she took a picture of her mystery man.”

  “Oh, dude, if she did, I don’t want to know, okay? You all do what you gotta do, but I’m going to just hang in the living room.” Nick ducked out and left us alone in Sherry’s room.

  “There are stacks and stacks of these prints,” Sean said. “Why don’t you start on that side of the room?”

  I found a dozen or so eight-by-ten photos weighted down by a jade figure of the Buddha and began leafing through them. They were beautiful landscape shots, close-ups of flowers and reeds, some more panoramic shots of water and lush vegetation.

  Another stack of photos, tucked between two hardbound books, yielded similar shots, though this time I recognized the location: They’d been taken down by the old Soaring Eagles Adventure Camp. I saw the familiar pale blue cabins and the zigzag pier jutting into Badger Lake.

  Just about every kid in Merryville had gone through Soaring Eagles in one capacity or another. At the insistence of Grandpa Gene, all of the Harper children and grandchildren had been sent to the camp to experience “roughing it.” Priscilla Olson—then Glines—had practiced her mean girl skills by terrifying an entire cabin of ten-year-olds into giving her their pin money. Even Nick Haas had gone to camp, his fees paid by some well-meaning anonymous donor. I remembered him sneaking off into the woods with the older counselors to smoke weed after curfew.

  I’d spent nearly every summer in those rotting cabins, first as a camper and later as a counselor. Rena, Sean, and I had shared our deepest secrets on the end of that pier. Casey Alter and I had fallen in love and planned our lives in the clearing behind the longhouse. Heck, I’d even been kissed for the very first time right beneath the Soaring Eagles flagpole.

  I’d heard that the Andersons, who owned the camp, had gone bankrupt. Kids had stopped wanting summer camps where they made lanyards and learned to tool leather and instead wanted summer camps where they learned to program computer games and practice being crime scene investigators. Soaring Eagles hadn’t kept in step with the times and had paid the price. Last I heard, the city had seized the property because the Andersons hadn’t been paying their taxes. Now the sky-blue cabins were sinking slowly back into the earth.

  I flipped through the pictures slowly, feeling the deep pull of nostalgia. The last two pictures, aerial shots of the camp that Sherry simply could not have taken herself, were marked up with a Sharpie. The outlines of the camp were picked out by a quavering line, and a couple of spots on the campgrounds themselves had been circled.

  Strange. Probably another one of Sherry’s wacky conspiracy theories. Sites of alien abductions? Secret government nuclear testing ground? As Nick had said, she’d had a lot of irons in the fire.

  “I can’t stand it,” Nick said. He’d returned to the doorway to Sherry’s room. His feet remained in the hall, and he’d braced his hands on the lintel, letting his body curve into the room. “Did you find him?”

  “No,” I replied. “Just tons of pictures of Soaring Eagles.”

  “Aw, yeah, man. Sherry’s family owns the property right next to the camp. They have a cabin”—he sketched quotes in the air with his fingers—“on the water. Place is big enough to house the whole Harper clan. Carla was always complaining about what an eyesore the camp had become, but Sherry liked it. She wandered all around there with her Aunt Virginia, taking pictures of the birds and stuff, picking wildflowers. All that nature stuff.”

  “What about you, Sean? Any sign of our mystery man?”

  Sean looked up from a stack of photos he’d been thumbing through. “No. I got squirrels, a robin, a beaver, and three shots of Virginia’s corgi, Sir Francis, but no mystery man.” He looked back down at the photo in his hand. “Well, in this one it looks like there’s another person.”

  He walked the photo over so both Nick and I could see what he was looking at. “See here,” he said, pointing to a blurry splotch at the edge of the frame. “That looks like part of a person. Maybe a pair of chinos?”

  “Great. A man in Minnesota who owns a pair of khakis. That doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”

  “Besides,” Nick said, “that’s a woman.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked.

  “That’s the curve of a hip. Men aren’t built like that. And up here”—he pointed to a spot just above the alleged pants—“that looks like the ruffle of a blouse to me. Something frilly with flowers on it.”

  I looked more closely at the photo and was startled to realize he was correct.

  “Well, then, that gets us exactly nowhere.”

  It seemed our search of Sherry’s apartment hadn’t yielded a thing.

  CHAPTER

  Twelve

  “Nothing,” I reported to Rena. “Just some wildlife photos and the blurry edge of a woman. No mystery man.”

  “Why are you assuming it’s a mystery man?” Rena asked. She was frosting a tray of banana pupcakes with peanut butter icing. “Sherry liked men and women. Did she specifically tell Nick she was seeing another man?”

  I mentally kicked myself. “I never thought to ask.”

  “So maybe the woman in the photo is the mystery lover after all.” She looked down. “Just another minute, buddy, I’ll give you one when they’re done.”

  Packer sat at Rena’s feet, head cocked, ears up, licking his lips with anticipation, whining softly and shifting anxiously every time it looked like Rena might hand down one of her treats to him.

  “We still didn’t get a picture with a face, nothing to actually tell us who the woman would be.”

  “But if Sherry was involved with a woman, the number of possibilities is dramatically reduced,” Rena pointed out as she put the finishing flourish on her tray of canine confections. She proffered one of the treats to Packer, who wolfed it down in a single joyous gulp.

  “Also, if Sherry was involved with a woman, someone else must have known about it. The gay and lesbian community here is very small. You can’t sneeze without the entire community saying ‘God bless.’”

  I finished folding a stack of dog sweaters and placed them on a display stand in front of the white molded plastic doggy mannequin. The sweaters were a red-and-green Argyle pattern, and I expected them to sell like gangbusters as we moved into the Christmas season. “Well, did you hear anything?”

  “No. What with the store opening and all, I wasn’t really keeping up with the latest. But I know who would know.”

  “Who?”

  “Jolly Nielson.”

  “Taffy’s sister? I didn’t know she was gay.”

  “Dork. You didn’t even know I was gay until a few days ago.”

  Rena was right. Heck, Nick Haas—whose brain was positively pickled with booze—had been more observant in studying those photographs than I had been. If I was going to figure out who killed Sherry Harper, I was going to have to step up my game.

  “By the way,” Rena said, “Sean’s going to be stopping by in about half an hour. I don’t know how much new information he has, but he’s promised to make regular reports and keep me in the loop.”

  My hand jerked and I knocked the whole stack of sweaters onto the floor. I bent down with a sigh to pick them up and start folding them all over again. “That’s fine,” I responded.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be sure?”<
br />
  “Well, thanks to this whole murder thing, you two have gone from twelve years of silence to near constant contact basically overnight.”

  “So?” I ran my hand briskly across a fold in the sweater I was holding, making sure it was neat and crisp.

  “So, you’re folding those dog sweaters like they’re origami, and your left eye is twitching.”

  I reached up to touch my face. Sure enough, the corner of my left eye jerked in tiny spasms.

  “Still don’t see your point,” I said, returning to my military-style sweater folding.

  “Well, you were totally relaxed five minutes ago, and the minute I mentioned Sean, you wound yourself tight as a top.” She walked to my side and laid a hand on mine, forcing me to stop my folding. “Look at me, Izzy.”

  I looked at her, but my lips were drawn tight. I was losing patience with this conversation.

  “Don’t you think it’s even possible that you’re a little shaken by Sean coming back into your life like this? I mean, you two didn’t really resolve anything that night he came to your house. And all that business with Casey has left you pretty vulnerable.”

  Rena patted my hand softly. “I’m just worried about you.”

  I felt tears welling in my eyes. Rena was looking at a possible murder charge, and she was worried about my stupid feelings.

  “Oh, I’m fine. I guess it’s a little tough. That night, I felt sorta sorry for Sean. I had my life with Casey, and he wasn’t even dating anyone. Now the tables are turned, with him practically engaged to Carla and me still looking all pitiful because Casey played me for a fool. For fourteen whole years. It’s just a little embarrassing.”

  “Just a little embarrassing,” Rena echoed. She sounded like she wasn’t entirely convinced that my reaction to Sean was purely embarrassment. Heck, I wasn’t sure it was purely embarrassment. But now wasn’t the time to hash it out with Rena. My Sean issues would wait until she was in the clear, legally speaking.