The Minstrel & The Beagle

by Lila K Bell

  I raised an eyebrow ever so slightly, and he cleared his throat, straightening his tie. “Aside from the obvious, of course.”

  “That’s sort of why I’m here,” I said. “You know my mother is a huge gossip, right?”

  “Everyone knows that about Rose Gates. The woman might as well have a pull string on her back that anyone could tug when they want to hear something juicy.”

  I narrowed my eyes a fraction, and his cheeks flushed pink. My mother and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but as far as family ties were concerned, I didn’t allow just anyone to put her down. Especially when I was lying about her to satisfy my curiosity.

  “In this case, her big mouth might just be what saves your reputation,” I said. “Did you know there are stories going around town that you weren’t at the banquet all night? That you left in the middle of dinner and were gone until the after-dinner drinks?”

  The flush crept out of his cheeks, leaving him on the other side of pale. He sat up straight and smoothed his tie against his chest. “That’s what people are saying? Like who?”

  “She heard it from Susan Featherby. Apparently your dear president wasn’t too impressed with you playing truant.”

  “That’s not good,” he said, and passed a hand over his face. “The truth isn’t going to make me look good, Fi.”

  I dropped down in the chair on the other side of his desk and crossed one leg over the other. “The police are going to find out about it soon enough, so what’s the story? Where did you go?”

  He hesitated, and for a moment I thought I was done. What purpose did I have for coming here and asking him? Warning him, sure, but what right did I have to the truth? I could only hope he wanted to get the story off his chest, test it out on someone not wearing a badge to see how well it played out.

  And for once this week, my hopes were rewarded.

  He puffed out his cheeks with a heavy sigh, and leaned forward, clasping his hands on the desk, tapping his thumbs together.

  “I was meeting with a lawyer. He was supposed to be gathering information for me about how to get my dad in a home so we could transfer the house to my name.”

  I watched the corners of his eyes, searching for the faint crinkle that always let me know when he was lying. No, Fi, I swear I didn’t tell everyone we made out behind the bleachers. Honest.

  Either he’d learned his tell and corrected for it, or he was telling the truth.

  “So you met with him at nine o’clock at night?”

  “It was the earliest appointment I could get, and I was desperate.” He took a sip of his drink and set the glass down with unnecessary force, sending the water sloshing over the sides. “You have no idea what I was dealing with. My father was losing his mind, and he wouldn’t listen to anyone when we told him.”

  “He was?” I asked. This was the first I was hearing about any major health issues.

  “The whole town knows he was in debt, but the deeper I looked into it, the more I saw how bad the situation was. He was just shy of needing to declare bankruptcy. His accounts showed ridiculous purchases costing insane amounts of money — furniture, old collectibles, the dog, whatever else you can think of. It was like he’d gotten himself addicted to the Shopping Channel for the Wealthy. He was haemorrhaging cash, spending all my inheritance in ways I would never get back.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Jeremy sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “That was just the beginning of it. He knew he was in trouble, see, so he decided to work his way out of debt by selling off the family garbage, polishing it up so it looked like gold. He basically reduced himself to a criminal, potentially ruining our family name in the process. I mean, he sold a vase that had been sitting in our living room since I was a kid. He told the buyer he’d purchased it from a Moroccan prince on a business trip, and that it was worth fifteen thousand dollars. And it sold! You know where he bought it? That furniture store on Carlson Street that burned down ten years ago.”

  I had no idea the situation was as bad as this. If Coleman had been conning people, there could be a whole slew of people who had a grudge against him. I was beginning to understand why some of these cases were never solved.

  “He didn’t even use the money he got from these sales to pay down his debt,” Jeremy continued, as though it were a weight off his shoulders to get it all out. “The loanshark he’d been stupid enough to get into bed with had started leaving nasty messages on his machine, threatening to come after the house if he didn’t start seeing a return. My house. I was right there in the kitchen, playing through dad’s messages, when I heard one of these calls last week. Dad told me it was nothing. That it was just talk and a few letters he’d gotten in the mail. But that was the last straw for me. The house is the only thing left that was worth anything, and I wasn’t about to stand by and let him lose that, too.”

  He released a breath and sagged into his chair, spent.

  I stared at him, wondering just how far he would have gone to protect what he perceived to be the only thing his father was good for. With Barnaby dead, the debts could no longer be chased down, which meant the house was safe. Jeremy had what he wanted.

  While I believed him when he said he was with his lawyer that night, the alibi didn’t necessarily put him in the clear. If anything, Jeremy’s motive had become an even tighter noose around his neck.

  10

  Dinner was a distracted affair, not helped by my mother nattering away about the poor state of the Artistic Society renovations.

  “Laminate, Hayden, can you believe it? I just about died.”

  My father nodded over his evening edition paper and grunted occasionally in agreement. I wasn’t sure whether he’d actually heard her or if he was so used to the routine that it came as naturally as the way he spooned his soup into his mouth without looking.

  Gramps kept trying to catch my eye to share a conspiratorial grin over the table, and I did my best to return it, but I could not for the life of me focus enough to share the joke. From the disappointed glance I spotted later on, I knew I’d let him down, but I suspected he’d forgive me if he understood the reason why.

  I felt as though I were standing over a forty thousand-piece puzzle with all of the end pieces missing, and the picture was a circuitous route of the same image over and over at different angles.

  How did the police make sense of these things?

  I mean, sure, they had years of training and resources and, well, legal permission to dig deeper into the facts than I did, but still. It was all such a jumbled mess.

  To the minute of his father’s death, Jeremy was working against him to take the house out from under his feet and throw him in some kind of retirement home. Up to a point, I understood. It was a beautiful house, and if Jeremy was right about his father’s spending habits and deteriorating cognitive ability, then likely it would have been the next thing to go. But to kill for it? Then again, by the sounds of it, Barnaby was taking the family’s name down as quickly as his savings account, and for someone like Jeremy, always so eager to climb the ranks, he might have seen the loss of his reputation as a threat to his career.

  An even greater loss than the house.

  Was that something people killed for? Hard to say, but, to quote almost every single crime drama I’ve ever watched: People have killed for less.

  Jeremy had pointed the finger at Roger Hardwick, but I just couldn’t see it. The guy was devastated by the loss of his friend, and while grief could cover all manner of sins, was he really that good of an actor? He’d genuinely seemed content at the prospect of puttering around on his boat, fixing it up, and making it run. If the man had owned a first edition Darwin, then he could likely handle the costs involved with getting the craft seaworthy.

  As for Ed Fraser, well… I saw his point. As much as I wanted it to be him, because he was the least sympathetic of the three and gave me an uncomfortable and rare feeling of inferiority, I really didn’t see him snapping in the middle of a conver
sation and driving scissors through someone’s chest. If he killed someone, I suspected he’d make it slow and meticulous. No mess to clean up and no evidence to come back his way

  Then again, I’d only met the guy once.

  I also had to wonder about the threats Jeremy said the moneylender had left on Coleman’s answering machine. It didn’t sound like Fraser’s style, but it was possible he had a looser, angrier side that hadn’t come out in the fifteen minutes I’d spent in his office. Maybe he was in a bad place and needed Barnaby’s debt settled quickly before his business went under. I didn’t believe that theory for a minute, but there was something I wasn’t seeing.

  It could also be that one of the hundred other people Barnaby ripped off with his sour deals had realized they’d been conned and swung by his house to make a point. In which case, I didn’t see how I would make any headway. Had he kept a list? Written receipts? If so, the police were probably following up on that particular line of inquiry. If not… I still had no idea how I would start down that path.

  It was possible I was out of the game.

  The thought didn’t fill me with a whole lot of joy, so I decided to set it aside for the rest of the evening. Tomorrow I would come at it again, and hopefully a good night’s sleep would help make the image a little less foggy.

  After dinner, I went into the living room with my book, and Gramps followed me. He dropped down on the couch beside me and patted my knee.

  “Long day?” he asked.

  “Extremely,” I said. “I can’t remember the last time I ran around so much for a reason I couldn’t begin to explain. None of it seems to be working out, and I’m just…ugh.”

  I tugged on my hair and sagged into the couch with my book tented over my leg.

  Gramps put his arm around my shoulder and tugged me to him. “Tell me all about it, chickadee.”

  That was just what I needed, all of my snooping and nosing around spread on a table in front of me, open to judgement. For now, I thought it best to keep my secrets to myself.

  “There’s not really anything to say,” I said. “It’s all kind of up in the air and nothing’s confirmed, and I’m afraid if I talk about it, I’m just going to wind up even more confused.”

  It was the kindest way I could think of to discourage him from digging deeper into my bad mood. How could I tell him what I was up to? If he didn’t know about my book thieving, I didn’t want him knowing about my poking into someone’s murder, either.

  But somehow, as always, he seemed to suspect I wasn’t talking about helping to organize this year’s Founder’s Day.

  “Does it have anything to do with Charlie?”

  I started. “The dog? Why do you ask.”

  “I might be old, Fiona, but I still have a few brain cells firing. You said we’d be watching over him for a day, but here he is, still in the house.” He pressed a hand to his chest. “I’m not complaining. He’s a great pup, and you should see him run in the park. He had Bea in a laughing fit yesterday with the size of the stick he tried to bring home. But you haven’t made any mention of him leaving us, no mention of where he’s from… I just had to wonder.”

  “It’s possible we might need to hang on to him longer than planned,” I said. “The guy I thought would take him home has voiced a very strong opinion against it, so at the moment he has nowhere to go.”

  “Then he’ll stay upstairs with me. Fortunately your parents hardly spend any time at home and so far neither of them have noticed the his tail slapping against the floor. I can’t guarantee we’ll be able to keep him hidden forever, but we’re not in the doghouse yet.”

  “Thanks, Gramps. I promise I’ll get it sorted soon. Charlie, at least. The rest… well, I can hope for the best.”

  “Just tread carefully, chickadee,” he said, and although there was a touch of concern in his voice, it was buried under thick layers of empathy and compassion. “We don’t want to lose the best hope this family has for a good future.”

  “I love you, Gramps.”

  “Love you, too, baby girl,” he said, and pressed a kiss on the top of my head.

  We stayed there until my phone rang, and it was with a great deal of reluctance that I pulled away and checked the name on the screen.

  Sam Robinson.

  Oh no.

  “I’d better take this upstairs,” I said, giving Gramps a smile. “Wild night for you?”

  “You know it. I think I’m going to snuggle up with Charlie and tackle the latest book of Sudokus you got me.”

  “Whoa. Don’t do too many. I wouldn’t want the excitement to push your heart too hard.”

  He chuckled, and I winked at him as I left the room and answered the call.

  “Officer Sam,” I said, keeping my voice low so Gramps wouldn’t hear me, but injecting as much cheer as I could muster. “How can I help you this evening?”

  Did he know? Had I been found out in my nosiness?

  “Where were you this morning?”

  I pressed the heel of my palm against my forehead. In my eagerness to speak with Susan Featherby, I had once again forgotten to go to the station. Honestly, I was surprised Sam wasn’t yelling at me over the line.

  “I am so sorry, Sam. Things have been really busy for me and I completely forgot. I swear I’m not putting it off on purpose.”

  “The dog still alive?”

  “Of course. Happy as a clam.”

  “That’s something at least. Look, I’m giving you the head’s up. Detective Curtis wants to speak with you. She’s not too happy you haven’t stopped in to give your statement. She wants to know why you were at the house that night, and there’s only so long I can put her off. Can you come in tomorrow before she really starts breathing down my neck?”

  “Sure. Of course. That’s not a problem,” I said, hoping all the while that he couldn’t hear the edge that had slipped into my voice. It was everything I could do to keep from panicking. I’d drawn the attention of the detective, exactly what I’d wanted to avoid. Sam would have taken my statement and we’d have been done with it, but how deep would Curtis dig into the minute details? Not good. “I have a few errands to run in the morning, but I’ll be there first thing in the afternoon, all right? I promise.”

  “Thanks, Fi. If you’re not, I’ll bring you in myself so you don’t forget,” Sam said, and he laughed. “You really don’t have anything to be freaked out about. She’s not going to arrest you for jogging. And I kept your other little visit to myself because I’m a good person. That’s your favour called in for taking the dog home.”

  I forced a laugh and wished him a good night as I closed the door to my bedroom and sagged against it.

  It didn’t matter that I couldn’t see my way through this maze, I was going to have to pick a direction and follow it. I couldn’t go in there tomorrow and sit through Detective Curtis’s questions without having somewhere to send her. Something that would distract her from me.

  The cops were closing in and my time was running out.

  I paced my bedroom, striding back and forth across the cream carpet, trying to figure out what to do with my evening.

  Gramps thought I should tread carefully, but careful was boring. I’d known that since I was fourteen years old. But right now, exciting was far too risky.

  What I did know was that I couldn’t stand to spend another minute cooped up in my room. I needed a drink.

  Grabbing my leather jacket and Bessie’s keys, I slipped out the window and headed to the Trove.

  11

  By the time I got to the Treasure Trove, the party was in full swing. Most of the Jewels were there, dressed in their sparkles and bright colours. Diamond and Ruby greeted me with wide smiles when I came in, which I returned with a wave, and every table was home to at least one patron, all in various states of inebriation.

  I steered my way toward the bar, and my smile grew on finding Ryan already there. A dripping pint glass sat in front of him, his attention directed at the hockey game playing
on the small television mounted above the bar.

  “Well, hey there,” he said when he spotted me. He grabbed his leather jacket off the stool beside him. “Wouldn’t have expected to see you tonight. I thought you had social things to go to on Wednesdays.”

  I stuck out my tongue in distaste. “Oh, how you love to tease me so.”

  He grinned, his grey eyes catching the light. “Normally you put up with it better than this. What’s up, buttercup?”

  I shoved my hands through my hair and propped my elbows on the bar. “It has been a hell of a day, Clark.”

  “Tell me about it, Gates,” he said. When I didn’t reply right away, he nudged my arm with his elbow. “I mean it. Tell me what’s going on. I hate to see you so mopey.”

  I made a face at him, then sent my attention down the bar, searching for Troy. “There’s no point saying anything until I’ve had a—”

  “Whiskey sour,” Troy said, planting the drink on a coaster. He’d come up from behind me, tray balanced on his hand. Mine had been the last drink on it.

  “You have been sent down from the heavens and are merciful,” I said. I brought the glass to my lips and savoured the first sip as it traveled over my tongue and down my throat. “So wonderful.”

  “Now that you’re on your way to being properly intoxicated, are you going to tell me what’s up? How’s dog ownership treating you?” Ryan asked.

  “It’s fine. That’s the easy part, actually. Gramps fell in love with him, so I haven’t had to lift a finger. I’m just frustrated,” I said. “I took on a project, and it’s not going the way I expected.” I frowned. “If I’m being honest, it’s not going at all. I was trying to help. To do something for the good of the community for a change, and instead of being able to sweep in and save the day, it looks like I’m going to have to take the bench and sit out the final period.”

  Ryan blinked. “Was that supposed to be a hockey metaphor?”