by Maddie Day
Stephen tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “A couple of days ago I saw Jake and a young woman eating together at Yoshinoya.” He looked at Zane next to him. “It was that day I got takeout sushi for dinner, remember?”
“Right. Monday,” Zane said.
“And she wasn’t from here, either,” Stephen added.
“Had you seen her before?” I asked. “Like around town?”
Stephen shook his head. “But they both looked, I don’t know, happy.”
I didn’t think Jake had the money to go out to eat. Maybe his guest was treating him, whoever she was. A young woman. My eyebrows went way up as I snapped my fingers.
“Was she sort of thin? Light hair?” I asked.
Stephen nodded. “You must have seen her, too.”
“She walked by the bike shop when I was having lunch outside around twelve-thirty. I think she’d been crying.”
Zane added, “And she came into the store today. She looked sad to me, too. Maybe she knew Jake and is upset he’s dead.”
“But she’s not staying at your place.” Flo directed her words to Gin.
“No. Since the rooms share a bath, if someone rents the bigger room, I keep the smaller one vacant. I only fill both when it’s a family or other folks who are together.”
“She could be with a friend, or in one of the motels,” Tulia said. “It’s not like we have any shortage of lodging around here.”
“If anybody sees her again, try to figure out how to stop her and have a conversation.” I gazed around the room, laughing inwardly at myself. It looked like I was getting into this amateur sleuth thing after all. “Figure out how she knew Jake, anyway.”
Norland gave a thumbs-up, while Gin said, “Sure,” and Zane tapped out a note on his phone.
Stephen raised his hand. “I was in Barnstable at the county courthouse for some town business and I saw Jake there. That was on Monday, as well.”
“Was he alone?” Flo asked.
“I don’t know. When I saw him he was talking with a woman in a blazer, but he might have just been asking directions.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. Heads turned in my direction. “Tim saw a woman in a blazer out on the point. Talking with Jake. He told the police, of course.”
“I wonder if they’ve found her.” Norland looked like his brain was on overdrive.
“Or if it’s even the same person.” I looked at our retired police chief. “Norland, question for you. Victoria responded to the scene after I called 911.” I shifted my position on the couch, which had long since lost its comfy cushioning.
“As she would. As I would have.”
“But a man named Lincoln Haskins interviewed me this afternoon. He’s with the state police, and the news that night said the Barnstable criminal unit, or something like that, was also going to be investigating. How come the local police have these other departments working on the murder?”
“Ah, the curious workings of our criminal justice system. Big cities, like Boston and Worcester, have their own homicide detectives, crime scene techs, the works. But little towns like Westham? First of all, we simply don’t get murders here. Well, almost never. Which leads to second,” he ticked his points off on his fingers, “we don’t have the resources to keep trained homicide investigators in the department. So we call in the big guns when a murder occurs within our boundaries.”
“Is this Detective Haskins a good guy?” Zane asked. “Competent?”
“I can’t speak to the competence, but I’ve known him since he was little,” Tulia said. “He’s a member of the Tribe, too.”
“Wampanoag?” Zane asked.
“Yes. His mama isn’t, but his daddy is. Linc is honest and a sweetheart. Had some grief in his past but he’s dealt with it. You can trust him.” She sipped her seltzer.
“I agree with Tulia,” Norland said. “And I can vouch for his skill as a detective. He’s busted some tough cases in the past. We’re in good hands with Lincoln.”
A click sounded from the hall. A moment later Suzanne Wolanski poked her head in. “Solved this week’s ‘cozy’ murder yet?” She put quotes around the word cozy with her fingers. “Or, wait. You guys did that last night. Stepping up the pace of your reading, are you?” Her lip almost curled as she leaned against the doorjamb rubbing one earlobe.
Suzanne held a very low opinion of our chosen genre. I glanced at Flo, whose cheeks were red. Must be tough to have an adult daughter who insulted one of your favorite genres. Suzanne often scheduled big-name literary authors to speak at the Book Rack, but deliberately booked them on our book group night so none of us could attend. She did deign to order the paperbacks we planned to read if we gave her the list with enough advance notice, but the mystery section in the store consisted of only a couple of shelves of mostly hardcovers with names like Patterson, Cornwell, and Child on the spines, and cozies were so sparsely stocked as to be almost invisible. I had no idea why she treated cozies with such disdain, or why she still lived with her mother, for that matter.
“We’re talking about the very real murder in town, Suze,” her mother answered.
“Give me a break.” Scorn poured from her face as she scanned the room. “You really think a bunch of rank amateurs can figure out who stabbed Jake Lacey?” She uttered an obscenity under her breath and turned away.
Footsteps clattered up the stairs. I gazed at the empty doorway. The news hadn’t said anything about a stabbing, and Flo had said she’d heard it from Suzanne. So how did she know?
I surveyed the room. Stephen also focused on where Suzanne had stood. He looked at me.
“Stabbed? Is that true, Mac?” He wrinkled his nose. “Did you see the weapon?”
Norland caught my gaze and almost imperceptibly shook his head. So he knew, too.
“I was asked not to talk about the crime scene. I’m sorry, Stephen. I’m sure it will all be in the news soon.” My answer didn’t seem to please him, but I couldn’t help it. I just hoped my brother’s name wasn’t going to be in the news along with pictures of the knife.
Chapter Ten
Finally I was home. I’d had two fly-by stops here, the second between talking to Pa and heading to Flo’s, and they’d been exactly that. Feed the bird, use the facilities, and change out of work clothes. Now at nearly nine o’clock I made myself a wine spritzer with seltzer, Cape Cod Winery Pinot Grigio, sweetened cranberry juice, a dash of Grenadine, and a squeeze of lime juice, and sank down on the couch with my phone. Belle, as always, hopped onto my shoulder and asked for a kiss, so I obliged. She scooted into my lap.
“Give Belle a cuddle.”
I stroked the soft feathers on her head and neck, but my brain was bursting with questions. Who was the young woman several of us had seen, and what was her connection with Jake? How about the woman Stephen saw with Jake at the county courthouse, and the one Tim spied with him out on the point? Were they the same? Who was Wesley Farnham and how did he know Jake was here? And how did Suzanne know Jake had been stabbed?
But my primary concern was Derrick’s whereabouts. I’d muted my phone during the meeting and had missed a call from Pa. I didn’t waste time with the message and decided to phone my brother directly. Much to my surprise he answered and greeted me in a subdued voice.
“Derrie, where have you been?” Why go subtle when you can cut straight to what’s important?
“Nice to talk with you, too.” His already deep voice was a pitch lower and his words came out slow and tired.
“Are you home?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I waited for more but it didn’t come. “With Cokey?”
“She’s sleeping over at the parsonage.”
“You know we were all worried about you. And I needed you in the shop.”
“Yes, and sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Mac, I need to get some sleep.”
“But Derrick, you have to—” The call went dead. I held my phone out, staring at it. He hung up on me. I shook my head, but let it g
o. I supposed I could drive over there right now and demand to know where he’d been and if the knife I’d seen was his. But I was tired too and I knew from experience when Derrick needed sleep, waking him never went well. The Mystery of the Disappearing Brother was going to have to wait until tomorrow to be solved.
“Are you home?” Belle squawked. “Are you home?”
“I’m home, Belle. Derrick is too. No worries.” Not really, but a bird wasn’t going to solve my problems for me.
“Gimme a kiss, Cokey.”
“Later, Belle, later.” Smart bird. She knew the words Derrick and Cokey were linked.
I sipped the cool fizzy spritzer and frowned, picturing Suzanne’s scorn for our genre. She was younger than I was by eight or ten years. I didn’t really care if she liked cozies or not, except that she barely stocked them and special ordered what we wanted only reluctantly. More important, why did she have such an important position in the bookstore? I realized I didn’t know the current owner. The old lady who had owned it when I was a kid had to have died some time ago. Certainly Suzanne herself wouldn’t have had the resources to buy a thriving business. Or would she?
I plugged Suzanne Wolanski into Google and peered at the display. She’d won swimming trophies in high school. Graduated from U Mass Dartmouth, the campus of the state university about an hour away on the way to Rhode Island. After that I couldn’t find much about her. She was thanked in a quote from an article about the time she’d brought Elizabeth Strout to the bookstore for a reading, quite a coup for a small town like ours. Maybe she’d inherited a chunk of money and had bought the store. I kept digging but didn’t see a transfer of property to her. Or maybe the owner didn’t want to have any part in running the store and handed all the responsibility to Suzanne.
The more pressing question was how she knew Jake was stabbed. I was pretty sure that information hadn’t been made public. Surely Suzanne wasn’t our murderer. Flo’s own daughter? No. Could she have some in with the police department? I dug into Google. Nope, at least nothing the world’s biggest search engine knew anything about. No part-time job with the Westham Police, no internship with the state police. Nothing. On the other hand, she could have a friend in the police department who blabbed the details.
Time to move on to the other people we’d discussed at the meeting. I didn’t know Sad Young Woman’s name, or Blazer’s. I tapped in Wesley Farnham instead. Sure enough, he owned a number of buildings in New York City, and several apartment complexes in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the river from the Big Apple. I hoped he wasn’t thinking of building a McMansion here in Westham, or a developing a resort. We prided ourselves on still being a small and mostly tasteful Cape Cod village.
The “tasteful” part had led to conflict in the past, when summer people complained about the smells coming from the lobster pier, for example. Hey, you want a seacoast vacation, you have to take the smelly with the delicious, the junk with the scenic. It was like people inland who bought houses next to a decades-established pig farm and then griped about the stink of the pigs. I shook my head. Back to Mr. Farnham. I couldn’t find any link with Jake Lacey nor any sordid criminal past. A Wes Farnham did graduate from North Providence High School, with a Yale acceptance in hand. Jake or Jacob Lacey didn’t appear to be on the list of graduates, though. Maybe he’d dropped out before finishing.
An incoming text vibrated the little computer in my hand. Finally something to smile about. I pressed Tim’s speed dial button and said, “Guess who?”
We chatted for a couple of minutes about his day, which had included the success of his new cranberry-orange-nut bread recipe and a ten-mile afternoon run.
“But what about you?” he asked. “How’d book group go? And why are you meeting twice in one week?”
Tim barely read any fiction, and had no interest in cozy mysteries, so he’d never been part of the group. I explained about the gathering of so-called sleuths.
He laughed. “Really? Florence thinks you guys can figure out the murderer yourselves?”
“I know, it’s crazy. But they all seem excited about the prospect.”
“Mac, you need to be careful.” The laugh was gone from his voice. “This is real crime. A real killer.”
“I know, Tim. Don’t worry, I’m watching my step, locking my doors. My only goal is making sure that if one of us learns something, we turn it over to Detective Haskins. Like ASAP.”
“Good.”
“One person you could keep an eye out for, though, is that woman you saw on the point with Jake. Let me know if she comes into the bakery, okay?”
“I guess. But why?” His voice went up as if he was puzzled.
“Because she might be a link to Jake. I mean, she’s a stranger, and you saw them together. None of us knows who she is.”
“And you think she killed him? Seems like a stretch, hon.”
“I don’t know.” I stroked Belle’s smooth head. “I think we need to learn what her connection with him was, that’s all.”
“Okay. I’ll keep my eyes open. I didn’t see her on my run today, though, as a point of information for you.”
“Thanks.” I fell silent, thinking about somebody I hadn’t seen.
“Earth to Mac. Penny for your thoughts?”
“Sorry. It’s my absent brother who’s still something of a mystery. Derrick went missing all day today. He’s home tonight but he wouldn’t explain. I hope I can get him to talk tomorrow.” And I hoped he’d come to work, too.
“For sure I’ll give you a buzz if he comes into the bakery. Let me know if there’s any other way I can help you with him. You know, have a little man to man. I like the dude. I’d ask him out for a beer, except . . .”
“He doesn’t drink. And good for him.” Derrick had struggled with an addiction to alcohol, but he’d been sober for six years now. As far as I knew, anyway. “By now he’s comfortable having a soda at a bar. You could still ask him.”
“Maybe I will. So,” he lowered his voice to sexy husky, “can I get you to come over for dinner tomorrow, Ms. Almeida?” The audible smile was back.
“Twist my arm, Mr. Brunelle. Or actually, don’t. Just tell me what time.” I couldn’t wait.
Chapter Eleven
At our usual seven o’clock meetup the next morning, Gin and I once again were walking the bikeway sans earbuds. The investigation was too urgent to ignore.
“I googled your Mr. Farnham last night,” I said.
“Yeah? And?”
“And nothing, unfortunately. The guy is a real estate magnate. But no ties to crime that I could dig up, no past murders, and no link to Jake. That I could find, anyway.” I pulled my sleeve cuffs down over my hands. It was supposed to warm up later but for now the air still held the nip of late spring, not the heat of summer.
Gin, in a sensible windbreaker and cotton gloves, shrugged. “I guess he’s simply a paying guest who loves the Cape as much as millions of others. Nothing wrong with that. Although it’s kind of funny he wanted to rent a room above a candy shop and not somewhere swankier.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. I learned he graduated from a high school in Providence, but I couldn’t find Jake in the list of graduates. Maybe they were childhood playmates or something. But how did he hear Jake was living here?”
“Dunno. He must have heard by now about the murder. If he hasn’t, I’ll tell him when I put out the breakfast.”
“I’ll send Haskins a text and tell him Farnham has a room in your bed and breakfast, if that’s okay.” A text I probably should have sent last night.
“Sure.”
We strode in silence for a couple of minutes, swinging our arms, inhaling the fresh air, and thinking. Except my thinking didn’t get me any further than it had last night. A woodpecker hammering away on a dead cedar tapped at my memory.
“Gin, what do you know about Suzanne?”
“Besides that she doesn’t like cozies, and that she runs a successful bookstore?”
“Righ
t.”
“She’s enough older than my daughter that Lucy didn’t know her in school. I think Suzanne got a degree in library science thinking she’d follow in her mom’s footsteps, but then the bookstore job opened up and she took it.”
“So she doesn’t own the store?”
“Own it? I don’t think so. But I guess I don’t know for sure.” Gin stopped walking. “Hang on, have to retie my shoe.”
I took the time to lean on a tree and stretch my calves. “Have you seen or heard anything in the news about Jake being stabbed?”
She straightened. “No, I don’t think so.”
“And you didn’t tell anyone about that?” I asked as we resumed walking.
“No. You asked me not to. Why?”
We arrived at a small cross street and waited to be sure an approaching car would stop for us before continuing. “Last night Suzanne mentioned that he was stabbed. I wondered how she knew.”
Gin sucked in a noisy breath and clapped a hand to her chest. “Suzanne killed Jake. That’s the only way she’d know, Mac!”
“Hey, relax.” I gently elbowed her. “I know that’s how it goes in the books we read. But this is real life.”
“But how else would she find out?”
“That’s the thing. She must have a friend in the police department who leaked the news. I tried to see if she’d ever worked for them in the past. If she did, it’s not public knowledge.”
Gin snapped her fingers. “Alibis. We haven’t been talking about alibis. All we have to do is find out where Suzanne was when Jake was killed. That should be easy, right?”
“Maybe. She wasn’t at book group with us, of course. I don’t know exactly what time Jake died, but it had to be after the fog came in. Otherwise somebody else using the path would have come across him. But nobody was out once the pea soup descended.”
“I don’t remember about the fog, but I’ll ask around, see what time Suzanne closed the bookstore.”
“And I’ll figure out the fog bank. I don’t remember watching it come in from the lighthouse. Somebody in the group will know.”