“Right,” Cate muttered as she opened her car door. She slid into the car and set Rowdy on the passenger’s seat. After a moment’s thought, she buckled him in.
“Maybe he’s a suspicious type person because he’s a person to be suspicious of,” she suggested to the teddy bear as Mitch returned to the house. “What do you think?”
5
Cate went directly to the hospital. She found Uncle Joe had been transferred to a regular room. He appeared to be asleep when Cate tiptoed in. Rebecca sat by his bedside.
“He’s doing okay,” Rebecca whispered. “They had him up walking earlier, but he’s on heavy pain pills now.”
Cate certainly wasn’t glad Uncle Joe needed pain pills, but it meant she didn’t yet have to tell him her efforts to find Willow had stalled. Or that she’d stumbled into various awkward complications. A dead body. An overweight deaf cat now spreading cat hair around his house. An encounter with a strong-armed painter.
Although on the way home she had to tell Rebecca about one of those situations. She couldn’t hide the creature in her bedroom indefinitely. Rebecca took the news well, a cat newcomer apparently low on her worry list. Cate was especially glad she’d told Rebecca about Octavia when the cat greeted them at the back door with a yowl that plainly said, “Finally!” as if Cate, as her personal servant, had been derelict in her duties.
“Octavia! How’d you get out here? I left you in my room.” She looked at Rebecca. “Cats can’t open doors, can they?”
“I’ve heard about some that can flush toilets, so who knows?” Rebecca patted her arm a bit absentmindedly. “You don’t need to lock her away. It’s okay if she has the run of the house.”
“She’s only temporary,” Cate assured her.
Somehow, the cat, now perched on the windowsill like a furry queen surveying her domain, didn’t look all that temporary.
Cate and Rebecca went to the early service at church the next morning. Uncle Joe was already on the weekly prayer sheet, and numerous people asked about him. Afterward Cate took Rebecca to the hospital again.
“Give Uncle Joe my love, and if he’s feeling up to it I’ll see him tonight,” Cate said when she dropped Rebecca off.
She briefly wondered what church Beverly had trapped Mitch Berenski into attending this morning. Of course, she had to admit, it was a small point in his favor that he could be trapped into going. Most guys she’d met could slither out of such a trap faster than a snake slithering over hot rocks.
Back at the house she found Octavia had adopted the teddy bear as a buddy and was curled up with him on the bed. Cate decided to use the phone numbers she’d collected from Amelia’s little red book and call the Whodunit ladies. She could use as an excuse that she needed to find out who owned the house key she had, although a stronger motive was to see what information she could pry out of them. They were still high on her list of murder suspects. But a little inner voice asked, What are you doing making a list of suspects? Not your business. Finding Willow is your one and only job as a toe-dipping PI.
It turned out to be an unproductive effort anyway. Not a single Whodunit lady was home answering the phone. So much for senior citizens sitting around stagnating, with nothing to do.
Okay, back to the missing Willow. She again examined Uncle Joe’s file on Willow. She didn’t find anything new. She wandered over to his bookshelves. Maybe he had a Finding Missing People for Dummies book. No, nothing like that, but she did see one on death and autopsies.
She sat at Uncle Joe’s desk and skimmed through the book until she came to a section on rigor mortis. About two to three hours after death, the muscles of the face and neck start going rigid, with stiffness moving on down the body until rigor mortis is complete in about twelve hours. Then the process begins reversal, with all signs of rigor mortis usually gone after thirty-six hours. Cate glanced up from the book. That meant, in regard to Amelia’s body—
She slammed the book shut. She was not interested in this. A real PI might need to know this stuff, but she was no PI. Even if that unfamiliar “inner PI” did seem to surface every once in a while, and even if right now it wanted to keep on reading about something called livor mortis.
No, no, no.
She went for a short but fast run. Uncle Joe’s office phone was ringing when she unlocked the front door at just past 5:00. She picked it up.
“Belmont Investigations. Cate Kinkaid speaking.” She tried not to sound breathless.
“Hi. This is Mitch Berenski. We met yesterday?” He said it as if the meeting had been a social occasion and he wasn’t certain she’d remember him. He was mistaken. She never forgot a man who clamped his arm around her throat as if she were Public Enemy #1. She was mildly annoyed that she’d been thinking of him only a moment earlier, as if her very thoughts had yanked him out of some paint-splattered cyberspace.
“Yes?” she said, deliberately giving no hint whether she remembered him.
“Are you okay? You sound—”
“I’m fine.”
“You asked that we call if we remembered anything helpful about Willow?”
“I asked Beverly to call,” Cate corrected. “Since you never knew Willow, I don’t know what you could remember.”
“That’s true,” he conceded. “But when I was moving furniture away from the walls in Beverly’s second bedroom this afternoon, the bedroom that was Willow’s when she worked for Beverly, I found something.”
“The missing wedding ring?”
If he noted the snideness of both tone and question, he ignored it. “It’s an envelope addressed to Willow. There’s no name, but there is a return address here in Eugene.”
“Okay, what is it?” Cate grabbed a pen.
“It’s kind of blurry. I was thinking we might get together and see if we can figure out what it is. Maybe have dinner tonight, if you have time?”
Cate drew back to look at the telephone, momentarily astonished. He was suggesting a dinner date? Then he added an explanation.
“I’d really like to help Beverly get her ring back. If you can find this Willow woman, maybe, even if she pawned or sold the ring, I could find out where. It would mean a lot to Beverly.”
No, not a dinner date. Just a joint effort to find Willow.
Okay, she could go for that. On second thought, however, dinner sounded a little too intimate. “How about a sandwich somewhere?” Cate suggested. “Arby’s on Silver Lane? That’s not far off Beltline.”
“I know the place. They make great curly fries. Meet you there in, say, forty-five minutes?”
“Okay.”
Cate recognized the blue SUV when she turned into the parking lot. Mitch was sitting at a booth by the window when she walked in. Jeans and a blue turtleneck, suede jacket. He stood up as she approached. Blue eyes, which she hadn’t noticed yesterday. A dazzling sea blue, if you wanted to be romance-novelish about it.
Cate slipped into the booth. “It’s nice of you to be so helpful to Beverly. Does she know you’re here?”
“No. Maybe I can surprise her by getting the ring back. What would you like to eat?”
“Plain roast beef sandwich. Curly fries. Jamocha milk shake.”
She thought about saying she’d pay for her own, but he was already striding up to the order counter. Okay, maybe he owed her a sandwich and fries for trying to choke her yesterday. He was back with a tray in a few minutes. Cate didn’t waste time when he slid into the other side of the booth.
“Let’s see the envelope.”
He pulled the envelope out of a pocket and set it on the table. Cate couldn’t make out the postmark date, but the return address was plain enough.
“That isn’t hard to decipher,” she said. “2782 Lexter Drive.”
“I couldn’t tell for sure if that was a seven. Maybe it’s a nine.” He pointed to the address with a solid forefinger, now paintless. “See, there’s kind of a loop at the top, so it could be a nine. And it might be Hexler Drive. Or maybe Laxton or Lester.”
She studied the envelope again. No, not Hexler, Laxton, or Lester. Not even close. Definitely Lexter. And definitely 2782, not 2982. She couldn’t see how he could possibly have thought either street name or number was different. “Okay, I’ll check it out tomorrow.” She looked at her watch. “I have some other business to take care of this evening.”
“Private investigator business?”
“Kind of.” She saw no reason to tell him about Uncle Joe’s broken hip, or that Joe was in the hospital. What did she know about Mitch Berenski anyway, except that he had a strong right arm and a suspicious nature? Well, so did she. The suspicious nature anyway. She unwrapped her sandwich.
“Horseradish sauce?” He held up a packet of sauce.
“Sure.” She opened the sandwich and doused the roast beef liberally. He did the same. “Have you been a painter long?” she asked, mostly to make polite small talk.
He, apparently feeling no need for tactful tiptoeing, said bluntly, “Longer than you’ve been an assistant private investigator.”
She rejected an impulse to aim the packet of horseradish sauce at him and squirt. “What makes you think that?”
“You didn’t ask for a description of the missing ring. Someone with experience would have done that.”
And she hadn’t. And a description of the ring was something she should know, wasn’t it? Groan. Reluctantly, somehow already knowing the answer, she asked, “Do you know what it looks like?”
“I asked Beverly.” Smug.
He pulled another scrap of paper out of his pocket. A sketch showed a wedding band with two rows of diamonds, four stones in each row. “She said the stones aren’t large, but they add up to about one carat total weight. Enough to make it worth something in a pawn shop. There’s nothing strikingly individual about the design, but she says the inside of the ring is engraved with ‘Love you always, G.’ Which should make it easily identifiable.”
“G was her husband?”
“Right. Gerald. He died of a heart attack about ten years ago. They’d been married forty-two years.”
Cate forgot her annoyance with Mitch in a rush of sympathy for Beverly. “No wonder the ring means so much to her.” And you’d better not have taken it, Willow Bishop, she thought with sudden vehemence. “I appreciate your, um, thoroughness. Getting a sketch of the ring was very clever.” Right at the head of the one-upmanship parade.
“I read some detective novels.”
Which meant he probably knew more about PI work than she did, Cate had to admit. She changed the subject. “Did you take Beverly to church this morning?”
“Yes. Then out for spaghetti afterward.”
“But you don’t usually go to church?”
“I go sometimes.” He sounded defensive. “That’s how I got the painting job for Beverly.”
“So basically, when you go to church, it’s so you can pick up painting jobs?” she suggested.
“I do other stuff besides painting. Yard work. Minor repair jobs.”
He’d answered a question she hadn’t asked, and skipped the one she had asked, but she let it go. “A general handyman, then.”
“I guess you could say that.”
She thought about Uncle Joe and the uncleaned gutters and his broken hip. “My uncle may be needing some handyman help before long, if you’re available.”
He blinked in mild surprise. “I don’t usually do outside jobs, but … yeah, sure, if he needs something done, I could do it.”
“You have references?”
“References? You saw my work at Beverly’s. I did her kitchen. And you want references saying … what? That I can tell white paint from green, or I won’t paint the family dog by mistake?”
“It wasn’t necessarily your painting expertise I was concerned about. It’s best to be careful about letting strangers into your home.” She realized that sounded prim and huffy, but being careful about strangers was something her dad had drilled into her when she left small-town Gold Hill in southern Oregon. “You didn’t answer my question about how long you’ve been painting.”
“When I was a teenager back in Tennessee, my uncle had a construction business. I was dangerous with a hammer or saw, and a major menace with a jackhammer, but I did learn to paint. And I picked up a few skills with plumbing and roofing eventually.”
How old was he now? Thirty, thirty-one, somewhere in there, she guessed. So he’d been painting quite awhile. What she’d seen in Beverly’s kitchen showed he did good work. “Do you have a business card I can give my uncle?”
“No. But I’ll give you my phone number.” He tore a scrap off the flap of the envelope, wrote a number on it, and slid it across the table to her.
“So why didn’t you go to work for the uncle in Tennessee? Why come out here to Oregon?”
“Look, I think it’s my turn to ask questions. And I have a big one.” He leaned forward, arms on the table, blue eyes intent. “Your employer, this Joe Belmont, he sends you out to these strange places by yourself? Where you don’t know what kind of situation or what kind of people you might run into?”
“Actually, Uncle Joe doesn’t know I’m doing this,” she admitted. “All I was supposed to do was go to a certain place and find out if that was Willow’s current address. But she wasn’t there anymore, and I didn’t want to tell him I hadn’t found her, especially when he has … other problems.”
She also didn’t want to admit failure. Failure as a PI might not be something she’d have to add to her written résumé, but it would go on her mental list. “So I’ve kind of expanded the search on my own.”
“A search that might well be dangerous.”
“So far, the biggest danger I’ve run into has been you,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, but there could be a lot worse guys than me out there. Maybe that’s why I don’t like to see you chasing around alone and running into them. And women can be dangerous too. What do you know about this Willow? Maybe she doesn’t want to be found. Maybe she’ll strongly object to being found. She left Beverly in a suspicious hurry, if you ask me. I’m not even convinced Beverly wrote that reference letter. Maybe Willow Bishop is a forger and a thief and who knows what else.”
“Actually, she left the other employer rather abruptly too,” Cate admitted. With a dead body in her wake. And more missing jewelry.
“I could go with you to find Lexter Drive tonight. Unless there’s that husband or boyfriend you have to get home to.”
Cate glanced up. That definitely sounded like fishing. But with Mitch Berenski she wasn’t sure. “I live with my uncle and his wife. He’s Joe Belmont. Belmont Investigations. But you were right when you said I haven’t been a PI long,” she admitted. “I haven’t been able to find a steady job here, so Uncle Joe hired me temporarily.”
“Then let’s go to this address together tonight. I just don’t think you should be chasing around to strange places where you don’t know what you’ll run into. I mean, what if I’d been a serial killer yesterday? And you had just wandered into my clutches? Anything could have happened.”
“Why do you care?” she asked, bewildered by what seemed an unexpected concern about her welfare.
“I don’t know.” He leaned back, took a bite of sandwich, and chewed as if he were angry at it. “Maybe I have some kind of knight-on-a-white-horse complex. Subconscious need to save beautiful damsel in distress.”
“You make a habit of damsel saving?”
“No. It’s brand-new.”
Mitch connecting with his inner knight-on-a-white-horse, the same as she was connecting with her inner PI? And not a connection he wanted to make, if his grumpy stab of curly fry into ketchup was any indication.
Still, it might not be a bad idea to have a male with a strong arm along when she visited a strange address. He’d made a good point about Willow perhaps not wanting to be found.
“I’ll have to make a phone call first.”
She left the table and pulled out her cell phone. Rebecca answer
ed immediately. She said Joe was awake now, cranky as a bear with a thorn in his paw, but he’d like to talk to her.
When he came on the phone she asked how he was doing, but Uncle Joe was not interested in giving a medical report and immediately asked about the Willow Bishop case. Cate gave him a highly condensed and edited version of her progress in finding Willow, leaving out dead body, unauthorized entry into Amelia’s house, missing jewelry, suspicions about Willow, a strong-armed painter, and a missing wedding ring. That didn’t leave much, but she firmly repeated to herself that there was no need to worry Uncle Joe with those details now.
“Anyway,” she ended brightly, “I’m on my way now to talk to a friend of Willow’s. But what I’m wondering is about Rebecca getting home. May I talk to her again?” Which got Uncle Joe off the phone before he could entangle her in incriminating questions.
Rebecca said she wasn’t sure how much longer she’d stay, but she’d just catch a taxi home. Cate dropped the phone back in her purse. It clunked against Amelia’s house key. She still had to see about returning that. When she returned to the table, Mitch had the address located on his smart phone.
“It’s not an area I’m familiar with,” he said, “but it shouldn’t be hard to find.”
She side-eyed him warily, weighing what she knew about him against the advisability of letting a strange guy into her car or getting into his vehicle. She didn’t see any knight uniform or accompanying white horse. “I’m taking my car,” she said.
“I’ll follow in mine.”
She guessed he knew what she was thinking. She gave him points for not trying to convince her of his noble intentions.
The plan went fine until they reached the street that was supposed to connect with Lexter Drive. It was blocked off, various hunks of yellow heavy equipment looming behind a lineup of sawhorses. She pulled up beside the barrier. Behind her, Mitch turned on the blinkers on his SUV and got out. She opened her window when he walked up.
“Looks as if they’re tearing up the street to widen it and put in a new sewer line,” he said.
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