But Alec had existed, and I would always love and miss him.
I parked the old Ford in the lot behind Deputy Donut and went inside. For our lunch guests, Tom had battered and deep-fried green pepper rings plus bocconcini with fresh basil. I snacked on cheese and bits of pepper while I described the day’s tragedy to Nina and Tom.
Nina readily agreed to the change of plans. “I’ll be glad to help the police, but I’m sorry about Rich and that he’s not going to see his place the way we envisioned it. He was kind of funny, the way he talked, even if he didn’t know he was funny and wasn’t trying to be funny.”
I agreed. “He meant well, in his occasionally insulting way. And I’m sorry that he’s not going to buy paintings from you or introduce you to influential people in the art world.”
“I wasn’t counting on any of that.” She sounded a little wistful. “I figured that was mostly bluster.” I wanted her to succeed in making a career of art, even if it meant she would no longer work with us at Deputy Donut. She was incredibly easy to get along with, as was our summer help, Jocelyn, who was now in college.
Jocelyn was coming home for Halloween weekend and was scheduled to help us on Saturday and Sunday. She hadn’t been home since late August. The previous summer, she and I had shared unexpected adventures after a murder. We had also helped solve the murder. The bond between us was strong, and I could hardly wait to see the enthusiastic twenty-year-old gymnast.
Around three thirty, a man came into Deputy Donut. He didn’t fit into any of our usual categories of customers. Our café attracted a lot of people besides our regulars and first responders. During summers, tourists often came into Deputy Donut. When the leaves were in their full glory in the autumn, we had a steady stream of leaf peepers. Now that most of the leaves had fallen, we could expect hunters. Winter would bring people who enjoyed all sorts of winter sports.
The newcomer’s suit appeared to have been tailored to fit his tall and heavily muscled body. His hair was dark. His nose was thin and pointed, and the skin of his closely shaven face looked like it had been pulled too tight. I guessed he was in his fifties. I asked what he’d like.
“Coffee.”
The suit made me wonder if he was a detective. Maybe Brent had already succeeded in getting a DCI agent to Fallingbrook. “We have a medium-roast Colombian, and today’s special is a lively roast from Ecuador with fruity overtones.”
“The latter.” One of his eyelids kept closing and opening as if he were winking.
I couldn’t see the bulge of a shoulder holster under his jacket. “Would you like to try one of our donuts? We have specials for Halloween week.”
He waved his hand as if he would never allow donuts past his pale, narrow lips. I turned toward the kitchen. Dep was standing on the back of the couch in the office. She had made herself huge and was twitching her puffed-up tail and staring straight at the newcomer.
I stopped in front of her window, bent to put my face close to hers, and gave her a super-frowny look through the glass. She merely arched her back higher. Hoping she wouldn’t make our new customer uncomfortable, I went into the kitchen for his coffee.
Nina whispered, “Who’s the mystery man?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a detective.”
“Or a murderer,” she said darkly. “Be careful.”
I sidled up to Tom, who was mixing dough for the next day. “Do you recognize that man who just came in, the one in the tailored gray suit? Is he a detective?”
Tom glanced toward the man. “I don’t know every detective in the state of Wisconsin.”
“Smarty-pants.” I poured a mug of coffee and turned around.
The man was not at the table where I’d left him. At first I thought that Dep must have scared him out of the shop. Then I saw him on the opposite side of the dining room, closer to the front. He was staring straight ahead.
Heading toward his table, I couldn’t see any gun-holster bulges underneath the ankles of his neatly pressed pants. His shoes looked new and expensive.
I set the mug in front of him. Maybe Cheryl had found another man through the dating site. I might as well learn as much as I could. “I haven’t seen you before,” I prompted. “Are you new to Fallingbrook?”
He continued staring straight ahead. “No.”
It was obvious that he didn’t want to be drawn into a conversation, and I didn’t want him to think that customers in Deputy Donut had to be chatty if they didn’t feel like it. Besides, his careful lack of expression was so cold that I felt like ice crystals were forming along my spine.
I took orders from regulars and served them.
The mystery man didn’t stay long. He went outside and turned south, walking quickly. If he’d been waiting for a date, it couldn’t have been Cheryl. She was too reliable and kind to stand anyone up. He had left half his coffee behind, along with a lavish amount of cash. He hadn’t waited for a bill.
In the kitchen, Nina confided, “He was staring at my painting. Maybe he’s the art collector that Rich said he’d called.”
I glanced toward the two different tables where the man had sat. “That could be it. He left one seat that might have been too close to your painting and went to one where he could get a view of it from across the room.”
She stuck her lower lip out. “And he hated it so much that he ran out, never to return.”
I held up one index finger. “He was hurrying, but he was walking south. Toward the Craft Croft.”
“And toward the bookstore and a dozen other shops. Or probably toward his car, so he could get as far from my painting as fast as he could.”
We closed the shop at our usual time and tidied for the Jolly Cops Cleaning Crew, who came in every night and did the heavy cleaning and replenished the oil in the deep fryers. Tom drove home to Cindy.
Nina had some calls to make and stayed in the dining area. I went into the office and sat on the couch. With Dep purring on my lap, I looked at the photos I’d taken in Rich’s party tent. Because of the feminine handwriting, I suspected that Terri had written the guest list and had put her name first. Derek Bengsen wasn’t on the list, and Terri had told Derek that he hadn’t been invited. My guess that about twenty names were on the list was close. There were twenty-two.
Why had Derek come to the party even though he hadn’t been invited? Had he been at Rich’s earlier that morning, carrying out his threat to make Rich sorry, and did he return to attack Terri, but I got in the way?
The to-do list didn’t tell me a lot except that Rich appeared to have checked off the caterers’ first delivery before he was attacked. According to the list, Rich had supposedly sent Terri away two minutes before the caterers had been due to arrive. Was Terri right that he had sent her away so that the arrangement in the tent would surprise her? Maybe he’d had another reason, like an expected visitor he didn’t want her to know about.
Had that person killed him?
On his to-do list, Rich had given a range of time for the caterers’ first visit of the day, ten thirty to eleven. Did that mean that he had expected them to arrive between those times or that they were supposed to arrive at ten thirty and leave at eleven? Either way, he had checked it off. A Cat’s Catering employee might have been the last person to see him alive.
I’d seen the Cat’s Catering van after it returned as scheduled, before twelve twenty-five. Returning to the scene made sense even if the caterer had killed Rich and guessed correctly that the party would be canceled. In order not to appear guilty, the caterer would have needed to pretend Rich’s death was a surprise.
Despite those conjectures, I couldn’t help picturing Derek, his rage when he was in Deputy Donut, and his obvious contempt for Terri when she confronted him after Rich’s murder. And the soot in the creases of his palms . . .
Nina came into the office. We put Dep into her cat carrier. Dep had a lot to say about that indignity, none of it repeatable in polite company. We took the vociferous cat out through the back door leading f
rom the office to the parking lot and slid Dep’s carrier into the rear of the donut car beside Rich’s carefully wrapped platter. Dep continued her disgruntled comments while I drove home and parked in my driveway next to my kayak-topped car.
We let Dep out of her carrier in the living room, said goodbye to her, switched the platter to the cramped rear seat of my small red sports car, and got into the front seats.
Out at Lake Fleekom, the mist was gone, but the sun had dipped below the trees. If mist rose now, would it be pinkish in the sunset’s afterglow?
Rich’s house was surrounded by police crime scene tape. Investigators’ vehicles were parked haphazardly in the circular driveway and the straight extension that led to Rich’s three-car garage.
We kept going, along the road as it curved right and passed the neighbor’s house. No one was in sight. The road made a curve to the left and entered the forest. We reached the unpaved section and bumped along the lakeside road past the county park and the two-rut lane winding into the woods. Trees loomed over the road the rest of the way to Rich’s cottage.
Two unmarked cruisers were parked outside it.
Chapter 9
I removed Rich’s wrapped sailboat platter from the rear seat.
Brent came around the corner from the side of the cottage. Behind him, a tall and slender woman confidently placed the stiletto heels of her boots on the pathway’s uneven flagstones. Her sleek silver bob and teal wool suit with its flared, knee-length skirt screamed professional success. I guessed she was close to Brent’s age, midforties. She was stunning, partly because of the premature silver, partly because of the perfect figure, and partly because of the authority in her posture and the way she moved. Brent introduced her as DCI agent Detective Gartborg. Unless the DCI had sent more than one detective, which they hadn’t done other times, that afternoon’s mystery man had not been a DCI agent.
Detective Gartborg said hello, didn’t offer to shake our hands, and didn’t tell us her first name.
She stared at the wrapped platter in my hands. “What do you have there, Emily?” Her voice was deep and musical.
“A platter that Rich Royalson asked me to bring to his party earlier today, but it turned out he didn’t need it.” That was an understatement....
The woman held one hand up like a cop stopping traffic. “You’re not to bring things into the scene.”
Brent held out his hands. “I told her to bring it tonight.” That was not exactly how he’d worded it. He’d only said he’d get it from me later.
Giving it to him, I hoped that in the shadowy woods no one saw my blush. I was a detective’s widow who spent lots of time around police officers and former police officers. I knew that civilians couldn’t bring anything into a crime scene during an investigation. It didn’t matter that Nina and I had taken the platter from the cottage only the night before, not that we could prove it. What mattered was that Rich’s death was being treated as suspicious. Even though he hadn’t died at his cottage, the skillet might have come from inside it. And Nina and I had seen those wills.
Brent carried the wrapped platter to one of the cruisers and placed it in the trunk.
Detective Gartborg gave Nina and me a stern look. “We have to establish some guidelines here. You two can come into the scene, but you are not to touch anything, remove anything, or leave anything behind.”
I nodded.
Nina did, too. “We won’t.”
Brent returned to the three of us waiting awkwardly for him. “Come around to the back,” he said. “We didn’t need the key you gave me, Emily. The back door was standing open.”
“We closed it last night,” Nina told him. “I remember because Emily had trouble locking it.”
Gartborg’s heels clacked on the flagstones, and I pictured Rich and his late wife deciding where to set each stone. They must have loved this cottage and these pine-scented woods sloping down to the lake.
Gartborg turned around and asked me, “Are you sure you locked it?”
“Yes. I double-checked. It sticks, but it was locked.” The lake was mirror smooth, reflecting the sky, which had faded to apricot.
Near the powder room window, Brent pointed at the ground. “Be careful. There’s broken glass.” Sharp pieces of glass littered the mossy dirt.
“That glass wasn’t there last night,” Nina said.
I added, “And the powder room window was intact.” That explained why the door was open. Someone must have broken the window and climbed into the powder room, but when it was time to leave, he or she unlocked the back door from the inside and went out that way, which would have been easier and safer than scraping past pieces of glass sticking out of the window frame, especially if they were carrying that huge skillet. And they would have been in too much of a hurry to close the back door behind them.
Gartborg asked, “How do you know it’s a powder room?”
Nina stared at her.
I answered, “I remember the layout. And I can see the top of the toilet tank from here.” The window was, as Nina and I had noticed the night before, surprisingly large and low for a bathroom window.
Gartborg pointed the toe of one boot at a stone. “What about this stone, was it here?” It was rounded, slightly larger than my fist would be if I made one. Neither Nina nor I remembered seeing the stone, and neither of us could say for certain that it hadn’t been there, either, but some of the other stones close to the cottage’s foundation were partially buried and moss covered. This one was bare, as if it had been carried up from the beach.
Studying the ground near the broken window, I thought aloud, “There are several stones about that size that also aren’t mossy lying around out here. There’s probably another stone on the powder room floor, one that went through the window after it broke. It’s as if someone stood back and heaved stones at the window from a distance. Some of them must have bounced off the house and landed here. The paint on the window frame is dented and chipped in places.”
“It looks that way to us, too,” Gartborg said. “Why would someone do that?”
She probably knew better than I did, but I guessed, picturing Derek, “He didn’t want to be hit by flying glass?”
Gartborg corrected me. “Or she. Would a man use a skillet as a murder weapon?”
Aha, I thought. The postmortem might not have been done yet, but Gartborg seemed to have concluded, as Brent had, that a blow from the skillet had killed Rich.
“Why not?” Nina demanded. “Men cook, too, and they might be more likely than women to cook with the skillet we saw in this cottage, probably over an open fire. That skillet was heavy.” She threw me a sorrowful look, and I remembered punning about the skillet being a kill-it or an overkill-it.
Those puns were no longer funny. I gave Nina a reassuring smile. I turned back to Gartborg. “Do we know that the person who broke the window was the person who attacked Rich? If so, that person might have been cut.”
Gartborg pulled on a pair of disposable gloves. “We don’t know. We couldn’t find the skillet you described inside this cottage. Maybe you can.” She opened the door to the screened porch and held it for us.
The door between the porch and the kitchen gaped open. Nina and I went inside ahead of the detectives. Together, the two of us said, “It’s gone!”
I pointed up at the bare hook. “The skillet was hanging up there.”
Gartborg asked, “Are you positive?”
Telling her I was, I showed the detectives the skillet-sized, soot-rimmed hole in the wall.
Gartborg asked, “Was that there yesterday before you two arrived?”
Nina and I both said that it was.
I added, “Flinging that skillet at someone with any amount of force would take strength. Nina and I worked together to lift it up to its hook.” Brent’s eyes were on me. I figured I might as well be the one to say what I guessed he was thinking. “Nina’s and my fingerprints will be on the skillet that was here last night. I’m guessing it’s the one I sa
w next to Rich’s body, but maybe other cottages around this lake have them, too. Maybe buying them was once a trend here. If the skillet I saw in the tent with Rich does have Nina’s and my fingerprints on it, then it’s the one from this cottage. And if it doesn’t”—I raised one shoulder and let it fall—“it’s inconclusive.”
Nina pointed at the sooty hole. “Whoever swung the skillet at that wall probably also left his prints on it.”
I eyed the broken and black-smudged drywall. “I’m guessing that would be Derek Bengsen or one of his friends. Maybe even Terri Estable. Which doesn’t mean that one of them didn’t also swing it at Rich’s head in his party tent this morning.”
Nina glanced around the kitchen. “Anyone who touched that skillet could have left sooty fingerprints other places. You won’t have to dust for prints.” She gave a wan smile as if not expecting her joking to go over well with the two detectives.
Brent smiled back at her. Gartborg stared at walls and counters as if hoping to recognize Nina’s and my fingerprints on them.
“Our prints will be in various places around this cottage,” I said, “but we did attempt to wash the soot off our hands after we hung up the skillet.”
Gartborg asked, “Why did you take it down?”
“I bumped into it,” Nina explained, “accidentally. It looked about to fall, and when I tried to put it more securely on its hook, it came all the way off. I was surprised at how heavy it was, and I got Emily to lift it, too. Both of us are strong.”
“It was heavy,” I agreed. “Derek or Rich’s neighbor could have swung it. Rich’s girlfriend, Terri, the one his will was made out to, is hardly bigger than I am, but she looks athletic. She was definitely strong enough to pull her canoe onto the sandy beach without a sound. And she flipped that canoe over and carried it on her shoulders up the hill to Rich’s house. Then she lowered it as if it were nothing and shoved it underneath his deck. I gathered that she often goes birding in her canoe.”
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