Varnished without a Trace

by Misty Simon

  “It’s possible, but that just makes everything that much more bizarre.”

  “I’m thinking we should leave that to your mom and go off on the Nathan-and-other-siblings angle. Someone killed Ronda, and that’s more important than finding Hoagie, unless they’re one in the same. Should we divide and conquer?” I’d often asked Gina to help with these things because the one time I hadn’t, she’d had a fit.

  “Dividing and conquering might be in our best interest at this point. But you’d better keep me in the loop this time.”

  I rolled my eyes at her in plain view. “Of course I will. We’re a team.”

  “But we haven’t always been . . .”

  Was she talking about the time I’d walked away to get married to that jerk Waldo and left all my friends behind, or the time I solved the murder of one of my former employers without her? I wasn’t sure I was ready to ask, so I let it go.

  “Look, I have dinner with the family tonight, and my uncle Sherman is going to be there again, along with my grandmother. Sherman tends to know what’s going on around town, so I’ll mine that info cave, and you keep at it with Mama Shirley and listen for gossip around the coffeehouse. Someone must know something about this guy. He’s been here for years. It’s just not possible that no one knows where he came from and who might have had it in for him.” I realized I’d left out Ronda just like everyone else had been and felt bad. “We also need to figure out who killed his wife, though the longer he’s gone, and with that body at the store, I wonder if it really was him that killed her. Do you think he found someone who looked like him and picked him up to throw us off the trail?” It seemed too weird to be a coincidence, so my mind was trying to slot it into a place that would make it make sense. It wasn’t working, but at least I was trying.

  “I have no idea. I guess that would make as much sense as anything, but how would he have known that there was someone who looked just like him in another state?”

  “I have no idea. And that’s a huge problem.” I was at a loss as to where to even start.

  “It is, but one I think we can handle if we put our heads together.”

  “You’re right. We can do this. I’m going to go start looking around and talking to people, seeing what I can find, and then we’ll reconvene.”

  Gina agreed and we went our separate ways after I grabbed my coffee and a doughnut to go.

  Crossing the street to my home above the funeral home, I quietly walked up the back stairs to my third-floor apartment. My mother was doing something in the office and I didn’t want to bother her. Of course, what that really meant was that I didn’t want her bothering me, or asking me what I was doing, when I was going to get married instead of just living with Max, when I was going to start having babies or telling me to keep my nose out of this or my dad wouldn’t be happy. All that could wait for dinner, later tonight. I’d been told to be at the house around eight o’clock. I was sure my grandmother would already be asleep by then, but my mother scoffed at me and demanded we show up.

  I found Max up to his elbows in vegetables. Large knife in hand, he turned to me with his eyes crinkling. I was going to assume that meant he was smiling about the vegetables and not considering how he could kill me. I kissed him on the forehead, the one spot that probably didn’t have any food debris on it, and went to go find Peanut.

  The dog and my cat had become fast friends, and they were often found entwined on some piece of furniture. I didn’t quite remember how I had lived without this big ball of fur. She was friendly and soft and generally well-behaved. Completely the opposite of Mr. Fleefers, who hissed at me when I went to pet him.

  “You can just calm yourself down, you rascal. I have things to do, but I wanted to say hi before I got down to them.” If the cat could have stuck out his tongue at me, it was a sure bet he would have. Instead, he circled on his perch on Peanut’s back where she lay in the sun, then turned his back on me.

  I petted Peanut anyway, ignoring the cat, and then went to the dining room table. It was wonderful to have more space up here. For a while now, I’d been living in what was essentially a studio apartment, complete with a Murphy bed that came down from the wall. But with Max taking up residence, we needed more space. Thank goodness we’d been able to expand, and all without killing each other. At least so far. I called a miracle on that.

  Of course at that moment, I heard a loud yelp and a thump.

  “You okay in there?” I yelled, not exactly wanting to go into the disaster zone to see what had happened.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he yelled back. “Just a little something I wasn’t expecting.”

  “We have dinner this evening at my parents, again.” And yes I had said that right. The leftovers in the fridge from Christmas were still good, but tonight was my grandmother’s old school meat loaf, and I wasn’t missing that for anything. I liked leftovers as much as the next person, but we were also celebrating some more tonight. We hadn’t done much of that when I’d married Waldo, but then, there hadn’t been much to celebrate because it was me running away from my family instead of bringing someone in who not only fit but made our family better. Waldo had certainly not done that.

  “What time do you want to stop your master cheffing and get ready?” I knew I was going to have to shower and assumed he would too. We had two full bathrooms now, but the water pressure was better if you only ran one at a time.

  “It’ll only take a few minutes. You go ahead and do what you need to, and then give me a holler about thirty minutes before we have to go.”

  I took a quick shower and left my hair to air dry in case Max was ready to clean up. Instead, the whine of a food processor or a mixer or something mechanical started up, so I put my mind to my notes and organizing my thoughts. What on earth was he making? I didn’t remember any big tools being used in the cookbook I’d gotten him for Christmas.

  I let it go to concentrate on what I had and what I still needed to know about this latest mystery in town.

  Burton agreed I was allowed in on this and appeared to actually want me on this case. That was different, but in a good way. I’d often been warned or cautioned, told and further cautioned, but this time felt different. Mama Shirley’s warning that she didn’t feel good about this one also gave me pause. On any other given day, she was knee deep in the mystery, but her mother’s intuition wasn’t to be ignored, or only ignored with caution.

  So what was going on?

  The facts were that Hoagie was missing and Ronda was dead. And we had a corpse with a dent in his head and a screwdriver in his back. But had he been put there after the fire alarm went off? And who had done it? I was still fighting naming Hoagie in all of this, but the more I heard about wills and inheritances, the more I wondered if I was just being naive.

  Then what did this tell me? I tried writing circles on my paper and doodling, writing out my name and drawing little cars, but nothing was sparking. I glanced up at the clock on the stove. I didn’t panic because we had time to spare, and I was going to take it to talk to Max about what I knew and what I’d like to know.

  Hoagie had been a good guy and he deserved everything. Ronda not so much, but even she hadn’t deserved being killed with a can of varnish to the head. I wondered if they’d bury her with her bingo bag full of good luck charms, the one she’d never been without.

  That made me smile and also made me wonder if we had her in house just yet. Along with the corpse named Jerry.

  Had Ronda’s effects been returned to her kids? Which one? I could always go check in with Chrissy again, but I would rather not. I much preferred her sister Caitlin. It wouldn’t take long to see if there was anything she needed. Burton would probably be grateful to me for getting involved by doing my job as an employee of the funeral home and providing the services we offered to those who knew us well . . .

  I had time to search for more information. I told Max I was running out for a few and he just grunted. I was aware I was not being as truthful as I expected him to be
with me, but I would own that if it came out later. Right now, I had a house call to make and a schedule to check downstairs.

  After a quick change into black pants and a turquoise, short-sleeved, shell top covered by a black cardigan, I ran down the stairs to the second floor, where the computer with the schedule was kept. Logging on, I checked the master list my dad had for every person who had ever signed up for our services. After I opened the file for the Hogarts, I scanned the items and found that no one had yet talked with the family beyond letting Caitlin know that it might be a few days before the body was released to us.

  Excellent. I left a note in the Comments section to say that I was taking the task of meeting with her in her home and seeing if she had an outfit picked out for her mother to be buried in.

  Someone would see it, or they would apologize to her when they asked twice. Either way was fine with me.

  I headed back down the street and walked the block to Hoagie’s house first to see if anyone might be there. I could have started at Caitlin’s, but my instinct was that someone had to be at the house, and she lived next door to her parents, so I’d pass it on the way.

  The hardware store did not have living quarters above it as so many of the buildings on Main Street did. Instead, Hoagie and his wife had bought the house four doors down and made it a home. I’d been over there for game nights when I was friends with their kids in high school. I played a mean round of rummy tile, if I did say so myself.

  Eventually, we’d drifted apart, but I might need to call up some of those old connections if I couldn’t get the info I was looking for. Like how Hoagie and his family were related to us, why no one seemed to be able to place him and who might have had it out for the man who had seemed to take immense enjoyment in selling nails, bolts, mailboxes and specially mixed paints. And why kill his wife? That was the most important question, and the one I seemed to have the least amount of information regarding.

  * * *

  Caitlin Rhodes answered the door in a black dress with swollen red eyes. Man, did I want to do this? It was one thing to interview and probe when the spouse was angry, or I thought they were the ones who might have done it. But this felt like stepping on a grieving daughter’s toes when she’d already broken them by kicking a doorframe.

  I stepped back and reassessed my motives in a split-second. I wanted to find out who had done this to Ronda and where Hoagie was. I wanted to help, but I was going to have to tread lightly, and I was going to have to do it delicately and nicely, and without any hint that I thought anything was wrong.

  With that, I took Caitlin’s hands into my own, patted her fingers and told her how sorry I was for her loss. “I can come back later if you want me to. I don’t want to catch you at a bad time.”

  “Oh, Tallie, I don’t know that there’s ever going to be a good time again. Come in, come in.”

  I held out the plate of snickerdoodles I’d thought to grab from the kitchen and the bouquet of flowers I’d stopped at Monty’s flower shop for. The blooms were beautiful, a small spray of roses and daisies mixed together.

  “They’re lovely,” she said as she opened the door wider and beckoned me in.

  “I can come back if you’d rather wait.”

  “No, it’s okay. Of course we knew Mom wasn’t going to live forever, but the way she went out was horrible, and now such a senseless accident in the store my dad loved is just hard for me to process, you know?”

  I didn’t know because I was almost positive that the scene outside the hardware store had been anything but an accident. And it hadn’t been Hoagie. Or was that what people still thought? I’d heard some people talking about his death at Gina’s, but I would have thought Burton would have quelled those rumors due to the fact that the corpse hadn’t been Hoagie. Was Burton allowing people to think Hoagie was dead when in fact it wasn’t him and he knew it? Was that what Burton had told her? Had Burton made up a story to see if he could get people to talk? Had he told her he’d been hit like Ronda? Strangled? That he’d died from smoke inhalation? Why would he have let the rumor perpetuate when it obviously wasn’t true?

  I had forgotten to track him down to ask him when Mama Shirley had hit me with the Hoagie’snot-on-our-family-tree thing.

  Regardless, I felt my blood boiling for a moment, then turned the burner down to simmer before I got too worked up. This could of course be the story she was telling herself to be able to get through the next few days. People often changed events to make them easier to manage if the truth was just too much to take in.

  I could work around this. And it was something I’d have to put in the computer as soon as I got back to the funeral home. Dad needed to know she was not currently dealing with reality so he could work with it too in the best way he knew how.

  “We are so sorry for your loss.”

  She led me to a floral couch done in primary colors. It was eye-popping and supercomfortable. If they had it in other colors, I might have considered it if we hadn’t already bought all the furniture we needed. I wasn’t buying anything again for a long time.

  “Thank you so much. And thank you for the flowers. Dad used to send them to Mom for special occasions. Then again, he’d say every day was a special occasion.” She sniffed and pulled out a handkerchief. I was not a fan of those things because they were always then stuffed back into a sleeve, a pocket or a purse after they’d been used, but who was I to judge?

  “He is sorely missed.” That was vague enough without playing into her wrong assumption that he’d died at the hardware store. “I remember working for him one summer and what a wonderful man he was.” I’d worked for nearly everyone in town at some point, anything to get away from working at the funeral home. And look where I ended up anyway.

  “He was a wonderful man. My dad. So kind, so giving, so generous with his time.” She stared into the bouquet as if lost in time and space.

  “You have your siblings to help you through this, right? And we’re here.”

  She scoffed. “Yes, the others are already squabbling about what to do with the hardware store. One wants it sold, the other wants it rented out, one wants the contents donated to some organization for charity and then to transform the space into an art gallery. They’re all ignoring the fact that Nathan already owns it outright. Dad had no intention of it going to any of us.” She looked perfectly okay with that, which surprised me. Out of all of Hoagie’s kids, she was the only one who was fine that she’d get nothing? I’d have to find out.

  But holy schnikes. Well, Chrissy had been right and yet was wrong when we’d talked earlier. Not everyone had an issue with Nathan getting the store. I just nodded and filed that away, along with the information that she thought her dad was actually dead instead of some other poor guy who was transferred hundreds of miles to be propped against the store.

  “Do you have any idea who would want your mother gone?” I waded in with the question that was haunting me, but in a gentle voice.

  “I think you should talk to Chrissy about that.” Her eyes hardened and she fisted her hand around the flowers.

  “Chrissy? I talked to her, and she seemed to think I should talk to Nathan.”

  One derisive burst of laughter came out of her before she scowled fiercely. “Nathan would never have done anything to our parents. He loved them. More than my sister did, in fact. Of course she’s going to point you to her old boyfriend. She’s still angry that she’s stuck with Todd.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. She wants the store but never put anything into it, and no matter how mean she told you our father was, it was nothing compared to the absolute lockdown he put on the rest of us when she went to Montana and wouldn’t come back.”

  Well, this was more information than I had, so I ran with it. “She didn’t seem to want the store and Todd made a point of telling her that they did fine without your father’s money.”

  She snorted. “They do not. My father paid their mortgage almost every month because all To
dd does is buy wine he never drinks so he can look like a more sophisticated person than he is. And my sister isn’t much better.”

  “So you don’t get along? I remember you all being friendly to one another. More than my siblings and I were.”

  Waving her hand in the air, she snorted again. “It was all a show, and one we were told to put on unless we wanted our backsides bruised. My dad had to keep up appearances and yet always wanted to stay under the radar.”

  “But he was always the one standing out front in our community.”

  “Ah, yes, the community. He embraced that and wanted to appear to have no problems, but I wasn’t kidding when I said we weren’t allowed to go anywhere after Chrissy left. It was like he put a barbed wire fence around this town. No one got out. And no one could come in.”

  “Any idea why?”

  She shrugged, and I wanted to scream. “I have no idea, but I will tell you that recently he was complaining because of some long-distance phone calls my mom was making. He burned a whole pile of letters while she sobbed her eyes out. Mom said we had an aunt somewhere in the south, and that was who she was calling, but Dad was against that and laid into her. No one else ever saw that side of him, but we did. I’d bet almost anything he had something to do with her death. I doubt he hit her with the varnish can, but he had his hand in other people’s pockets.”

  “Hoagie?” I just couldn’t take it in. After all these years, why would Hoagie want his wife dead? Unless it had to do with his disappearance.

  “Yes, the wonderful and generous Hoagie. You know that’s not even his real name? Who names their kid Hoagie anyway?” She sniffed and buried her face in her flowers. When she lifted her gaze, it was tear-drenched. “But no matter what, I still miss him and I can’t figure out why.” Sobbing, she doubled over.