by Donna Doyle
“Carmela seemed a little bit less anxious after you talked to her.”
“I don’t think she’s a killer, or the killer,” he said, taking the menu from the rack in the booth.
“I don’t either. But people are giving her funny looks. Everyone knows that she and Mrs. Knesbit were at odds.”
“That wouldn’t turn her into a killer, although I suppose she could get pretty tough if she thought someone was holding back money that wasn’t theirs.”
“You should hear her calling on overdues,” Kelly acknowledged with a grin.
They gave their orders to the waitress, who didn’t bother to write down their choices.
“We’re becoming predictable,” Troy said, surprised that the waitress had known he was going to order the roast beef sandwich.
“Everyone in town is. There aren’t a lot of restaurants.”
“Maybe we need to broaden our restaurant horizons.”
“Maybe. What did Carmela say?”
“Lyola Knesbit told her she thought Mia Shaw had taken the money from the bus trip envelope. Carmela spotted Mia Shaw in the crowd and went to ask her about the money. On the way, she saw someone carrying a purse that looked like Mrs. Knesbit’s, so she tried to take it. He turned, saw her, pushed her hand away, her glove came off.”
“I noticed that,” Kelly said thoughtfully, dipping her spoon into the bowl of wedding soup that the waitress had brought. “It’s cold up there. But Carmela didn’t really answer me when I asked where her glove was. I don’t know why she’d have avoided answering me. I mean, there wasn’t any reason to be furtive. No one knew that Lyola had been murdered yet.”
“No one except the killer.”
“Which was certainly not Carmela.”
Troy didn’t think Carmela was the killer either. Nonetheless, he thought it odd that the state police hadn’t come to Settler Springs to continue their investigation, unless they had found a suspect they were watching in Punsxutawney. “Did anyone else on the bus act strangely that day? Carmela was looking for this Mia Shaw person to ask her about the missing money. What about her?”
“Oh, she didn’t look like a murderer to me,” Kelly objected. “She came into the library to get books for her kids.”
“And that’s the litmus test? Anyone who gets library books for their kids is innocent of a crime?”
“No, that’s not what I meant, but she looked kind of beaten down. I was annoyed when Lyola made those insinuations against her and I don’t know why she told me what she thought.”
“She told Carmela, too, that’s why Carmela was looking for her. If Mrs. Knesbit told you and Carmela, she probably told other people. And she ended up dead.”
“I didn’t notice her,” Kelly said. “It was cold, and I was trying to stay warm. That’s why it seemed so strange to see Carmela with just one glove on. She’s very particular about her appearance that way. Besides, it was cold.”
“Now we know why she only had one glove on. I wonder what the Punxsutawney police have found out,” Troy mused. He caught the waitress’ gaze and handed her his coffee cup for a refill.
“Is there any way that you can go up there and find out?”
“I can’t see them telling me anything.”
“Not even police officer to police officer? Don’t you guys have a fraternity or something?”
“I don’t know anyone in Punxsutawney, officers included.”
“You’ll have to learn to call it Punxsy,” she joked. “No one says Punxsutawney around here. Do you think Leo would let you go?”
“No,” Troy answered bluntly. “We’re short staffed and he says the mayor won’t hire anyone to replace Chief Stark because the mayor wants his brother-in-law to get his job back. Besides, there’s no real reason for me to go up there. The state police are handling it. We don’t really have a direct role in this.”
“That’s not true!” Kelly exclaimed. “Lyola Knesbit was a local resident. I would think the police force definitely has cause to be involved.”
“If the state police want our input, they’ll ask for it. Stark called on them for everything but parking tickets,” Troy said bitterly.
“That still doesn’t make sense to me,” Kelly said, diverted from the topic of this murder. “You and I know that he was involved in the same drug trade that his son was involved in.”
“We don’t have proof,” Troy reminded her wearily.
“Yet.”
“We’re not investigating Stark.”
“Yet.”
He had to laugh. There was such animation in her brown eyes that he couldn’t think of anything to say that would overrule her.
“Now, about Punxsutawney—”
“I thought no one called it that,” he reminded her.
“I’m being official. Why don’t you ask Leo if you can go up there and ask a few questions?”
“And what reason do I have for being so curious?”
“A local resident was killed. What more reason do you need?”
Troy expected that he would need quite a few reasons, but when he stopped in the office the following morning, hours before his shift, to suggest the idea, he was surprised that Leo was enthusiastic.
They were alone in the office. Kyle was out issuing parking tickets; he didn’t let the cold weather interfere with his task. Leo was at the main desk shared by the officers, reluctant as usual to occupy the office that belonged to the police chief.
“Go up to Punxsy . . .” Leo rubbed his jaw in contemplation of the idea. “Maybe there’s something to that,” he said. “You might be able to find out a few things.”
“Yeah . . .” Troy replied warily, taken off guard by the alacrity with which Leo had concurred with his idea.
“After all, we don’t want an innocent person charged with this crime.”
Troy thought of Carmela. Argumentative, dour, and judgmental though she was, it was only a matter of time before casual remarks made by a patron turned into deliberate insults made by people she knew. Waiting for a murderer to be identified was hard on a community. “No,” he agreed.
“Do you think a local person did it?” Leo asked.
That seemed like a strange question to come from a police chief. “I don’t know,” Troy said honestly. “It doesn’t make sense that a stranger in Punxsutawney would just kill a person from another town, does it?”
“You never know. I told you, Punxsy is like anywhere else. They have their troublemakers, the ones the police go to whenever something has happened.”
“You mean the way the Krymanskis here always get suspected of everything?”
“Half the time, the Krymanskis are guilty.”
“Not of murder.”
“No, well, not so far. But there might have been someone up there who killed Mrs. Knesbit just because, well, maybe he robbed her and then killed her,” Leo suggested. “Maybe it was a random killing. All those tourists, you know, someone might have figured it was easy pickings. It doesn’t have to be a local person who did it.”
Troy couldn’t blame Leo for wanting the killer to be from somewhere other than Settler Springs. The Halloween murder had been more than enough drama for the small town, and the killer turning out to be the son of pillars of the community was an aberration no one had expected. The residents of Settler Springs had all been quite content to think that fourteen-year-old Lucas Krymanski was the killer, implausible though it had seemed even in the beginning. Troy knew that if he and Kelly hadn’t been determined to find the real killer, Lucas would have readily been sacrificed so that the small town could keep its sanctified image. He wasn’t like Kelly, Troy knew; he tended to be cynical about people and their motives.
“Yeah, you go on up there,” Leo said. “Don’t worry about the work here, I can cover things while you’re up there. I don’t imagine it’ll take long, anyway. I haven’t heard anything, but I probably won’t.”
Troy didn’t understand why Leo was so passive in his acceptance of being kept outs
ide the circle of information that the state police were surely compiling. If he were police chief, Troy knew that he would be making sure that he knew what was going on in the investigation.
But you’re not the chief, Troy reminded himself as he went home to check on Arlo and to ask his neighbor if she’d let the dog out while he was away. And you don’t want to be the chief. You want to work on the police force until you get your degree, and then you want to leave this little town with all its secrets behind you and go somewhere where people aren’t getting murdered when they go out of town to watch a groundhog predict the weather.
As he got in the police car and headed north, he resolutely refused to consider the fact that Kelly Armello lived in a town where going on a trip to see a groundhog predict the weather was exactly the sort of thing she wanted to do, and he wasn’t quite sure if any other place besides Settler Springs would mean anything at all to him if Kelly didn’t live there.
8
In Groundhog Territory
The state police officer was voluble and friendly and more than willing to share what he knew with a fellow officer. He didn’t seem to find it odd that a police officer from the town of the murder victim would show up to investigate the place where she was murdered.
“It looks a lot different now,” Trooper Joe Cavendish explained to Troy as he led him to the creek where Lyola Knesbit’s body was discovered. “All the tourists are gone, so the population is back to somewhere under two thousand.”
“Around eighteen thousand less than were here on Saturday.”
“That’s right. The week started out cold, but then there was a thaw mid-week. Enough to unfreeze the creek.”
“If the creek had been frozen, the killer couldn’t have drowned her,” Troy deduced.
“That’s what we figure, too. So, he either killed her on the spur of the moment when he saw that the ice over the creek was softened, or he revised his plans.”
“You’re sure a man killed her?”
“We were looking at a couple of the women in the group who seemed suspicious, and whose whereabouts can’t be accounted for during that time. But with so many people . . . here it is, here’s where we found her. We figure he must have held her under the water until she died. That’s what makes us think it must have been a man. But it could have been a woman and a man together. That’s where we found the purse.” The police officer pointed to a spot ten feet away. “And we found the glove a few feet away from that.”
“Glove?”
“Yeah, a glove with a stain on it. The stain was from the purse. The lab says it was something called re-tanning. It had happened recently, recently enough that it would stain anything it came in contact with. One of the women on the bus had a stain on her jacket from the purse, but she said it happened before they left the bus. She was telling the truth, we checked. Others had seen it.”
That was Kelly, with an alibi for the evidence that could have been damning otherwise. Troy thought of Carmela. Did the police not know that she was lacking a glove by the time she returned to the bus?
“How do you account for the glove?”
Trooper Cavendish shrugged. “We thought it might be the victim’s glove; hers were gone. It’s a woman’s glove. It doesn’t really go with her coat, though, and from what we’ve learned, the victim was fussy about her appearance.”
Carmela’s glove. Carmela was equally fastidious about her appearance. Kelly had commented on thinking at the time how odd it was that Carmela wasn’t wearing her gloves, until she learned that the man who accosted her had taken it when the two tangled over the purse that Carmela was so sure belonged to Mrs. Knesbit.
“Nothing left in the purse, I suppose?”
“No money. I don’t know how much cash was in it. The victim was a widow, her children live out of state, so no one knew how much she had with her, although several people on the bus said she generally preferred to carry cash.”
“And she had the money envelope for the trip,” Troy mused. “I wonder if the bus driver got his tip?”
“He did, but I guess it wasn’t as much as he expected. The members of the bus took up a collection to give him the tip. The killer must have taken the money in the envelope along with whatever cash she had.”
“I wonder if it was worth murder.”
“If the killer is a drug user, he’d think a dollar made murder worthwhile,” Cavendish said cynically.
“Any leads?”
“We were so busy that we haven’t had a chance to get down your way. You ever try to pin down a murder suspect in a town full of tourists who are in for a day?”
“Not so far,” Troy said sympathetically. “Settler Springs is pretty small.”
“So is Punxsutawney, most days of the year. You wanna grab a late lunch and you can fill me in with what you know?”
Troy agreed. He didn’t know much but, from the sounds of things, neither did the state police in Punxsutawney.
They went to a restaurant where Cavendish was obviously a regular. The waitress laughed away the idea of writing down his order. “But you’re new in town,” she said. “What can I get you?”
“Burger and fries,” he said. “Well done. Coffee.”
Troy was struggling with himself over what he should divulge to Cavendish as the pair discussed general topics in a desultory fashion. After their meals were served, Troy made his decision.
“I don’t know much about this case,” he said, “but I know who owns that glove that you found.”
Cavendish’s eyes didn’t leave Troy’s face as he waited for an explanation.
“She’s not the murderer,” Troy said quickly. “But she might have seen the murderer.”
“Tell me about the glove.”
Troy relayed to Cavendish what Carmela had told him. “She couldn’t give much of a description of him,” Troy finished. Carmela had told Troy that the man was dressed in a dark winter jacket, his features obscured by a knitted scarf pulled tightly around his lower face, a tassel cap on his head, worn low on his forehead, and the hood of the jacket closed tightly. “She said he looked like a hobo.”
“Meaning?”
“I’m not sure.” Carmela, Troy knew, was quick to categorize people. The sight of a single tattoo on an arm was evidence enough that the person belonged to a gang. A hobo, in her estimation, could be anything from someone dressed casually to someone dressed improperly and only Carmela would know the nuances.
“It sounds like we’d better broaden our investigation sooner than we thought,” Trooper Cavendish said.
Troy wasn’t sure how Kelly would feel about that. She had wanted him to talk to Carmela to ease the older woman’s anxiety, but if the state police were coming to Settler Springs to find out more about what she knew, the anxiety levels might just be on the rise.
But he nodded. The case had to be solved, and Carmela was involved. As a witness. He hoped not as a suspect.
“Why didn’t she tell us this when we talked to her?” Cavendish pressed. “Now it makes her look suspicious, like she was withholding evidence.”
“She was afraid, I guess. And she was with a church group. She wouldn’t want the church people to think she was a suspect.”
“At the point we were interrogating them, they were all suspects. There was another woman in the group, too. She fainted when she learned that someone had been killed. We hadn’t even disclosed the victim’s identity yet. But she didn’t have any connection to the victim, so why the reaction? We learned that she was a new member of the church, so she didn’t have any strong ties to the victim that we’re aware of.” Cavendish’s eyes were relentless in their scrutiny. “There’s some talk about money being missing. Did you hear anything about that?”
“I heard, but it can’t have been a lot of money. They’d already paid the main expenses and what was left was for the driver’s tip, extras . . . Carmela was keeping the records and she’s the one who told them they were short. Mrs. Knesbit was from the other church, and she an
d Carmela were sparring over the money, the logistics . . .”
“That’s the impression we got, too. Two ladies who wanted to be in charge. This third woman, she’s younger. Mia Shaw,” Cavendish recalled. “What do you know about her?”
“Not much. Nothing, really. Just what you learned from the Settler Springs librarian.” Keep the relationship out of it, Troy told himself. Keep it matter-of-fact. He couldn’t call Kelly his girlfriend, and describing her as a friend was misleading. They were friends, but this was an investigation.
“So, we’ve got a mystery man who was actually seen holding the purse that belonged to Mrs. Knesbit, and was later found not far from her body, all cash gone. That’s according to this Carmela, who knew all this but didn’t tell us when we were asking everyone questions. We’ve got Carmela Dixon, who’s very involved in the whole thing from the beginning when the trip was planned to the day of the murder. We’ve got Mia Shaw, who might or might not be involved. We were planning on coming down your way next week to ask around. I think we’ll be moving that up.”
Troy nodded. “We’ll be expecting you.”
9
Shrove Tuesday Suspects
By the time that Shrove Tuesday arrived and Kelly was taking a day from work to help in the kitchen with the all-day pancake breakfast that her church was serving for the community, the murder investigation had accelerated. Carmela had been interrogated twice by the state police officer, with the result that she greeted Troy with a baleful stare whenever he appeared in the library.
Kelly, although disappointed that his trip to the scene of the crime hadn’t resulted in immediate exoneration for Carmela, was more understanding. But she was dismayed at the level of speculation that was engrossing the residents of Settler Springs as they came to the church fellowship hall for their Shrove Tuesday fare.
Cajun music played in the background and Mardi Gras colors decorated the social hall. Green, gold, and purple table coverings were on the tables, which were decorated with strands of beads.