by Price, Cate
Ramsbottom took a long suck of his drink. “Backstead could of walked to Jimmy Kratz’s place.”
“Could have,” I said. “But why would he? Angus would have sobered up enough by then to think he could drive. He’d want to get there as fast as possible. Assuming he went there at all. Which he didn’t.”
Ramsbottom shook his head. “You can’t know the exact route Angus Backstead would of driven that day. Sorry, ma’am, but it’s not a strong enough piece of evidence.”
His cell phone rang again. “Excuse me, I have to take this call.”
Staggered by his politeness in actually excusing himself for the phone call, I got up and took a few steps away from the desk to give him some space, although in this open room no one had much privacy.
I wandered over to the pictures and awards on a wall that had been painted white at one time. One of the photos caught my eye. It was a thinner version of Ramsbottom—about the same age as the detective was now. A picture of a handsome man with his young son. This must be his father, Hank Ramsbottom. The man Angus had almost beaten to death.
Ramsbottom was talking so low I could hardly hear. He was leaning away from me, the love handles on his back spilling over the top of his pants and testing the limits of his pale blue cotton shirt.
During school-exam periods, I had perfected the art of appearing to be engrossed in the work on my desk, but could pick up on the rustle of a note being passed, or even feel a glance or words being mouthed between students.
I did it now as I studied the photos and listened to Ramsbottom’s end of the conversation. Something about a big event going down on Saturday night. It sounded like he was making sure everyone knew to show up on time, and to keep the plans top secret. Must be a drug bust or something.
Another photo showed more clearly the young detective at his high school graduation, again with his father smiling proudly next to him.
A few moments later, I sensed Ramsbottom standing behind me.
“I know that your father was the man Angus had the fight with years ago,” I said quietly, staring at the pictures.
He cleared his throat. “My dad was never quite right after that. He was what they called ‘slow’ back then. Today, we’d say ‘brain damaged.’”
I felt queasy picturing the scene as Angus had described it. The man prone on the sidewalk, unconscious, his face a hideous bloody pulp.
“Angus Backstead couldn’t remember much about that fight either. Said he saw red, and next thing he knew, he was being led away in handcuffs. I’ve read the report. It’s like he blanks out about the part where he goes apeshit.”
I remembered Angus talking about seeing red.
“My father’s symptoms didn’t show up right away.” His voice was softer now. “It started with some slurred speech, occasional blackouts. Sometimes he’d just fall asleep without warning and then he’d be fine for a while. Then he started having epileptic seizures.”
I turned to face him. “Did the brain damage from the fight cause the seizures?” I whispered.
He shrugged. “The doctors said it was hard to tell. Irregardless, a few years later he had an accident with a combine harvester. I seen it happen. I was twenty-three years old.”
Ramsbottom looked over my shoulder, gazing at the pictures on the wall. “The starter motor stuck. He got down to fix it, but he forgot to leave the stopper out.”
I swallowed. I wanted to ask him to please stop telling me the story, but my throat closed up tight.
“A seizure dropped him to the ground and that’s when the machine fired up and ran over him. Took both his legs off. I managed to pull him free. My mother called the ambulance, and they were there in a matter of minutes, but there was nothing anyone could do. He died from a massive loss of blood.”
Oh no. Not now. I could feel myself spiraling down to that dark place—full of pain, terror, and premature, senseless death.
As those familiar black wings flapped around my head and the walls wavered, I gripped Ramsbottom’s arm.
“Jeez. Are you okay, Mrs. Daly? You’re white as a ghost. Here, sit down. Put your head between your legs.”
He lowered me gently to the floor, and I sat there for a minute, head between my knees, sweating and clammy, fighting the spinning of the room.
The other cops were around me now, too. One of them handed me a triangular cone of ice water and I gratefully gulped it down. “Ma’am? Are you ill?” he asked.
“I didn’t eat breakfast. Must be low blood sugar or something,” I mumbled.
“You want that I should get you a donut?”
I was too sick to correct his grammar. “No, thank you. I’ll be fine.”
A couple of minutes later, after I had sucked down more cold water, and I was okay apart from the sheen of sweat still covering my body, I accepted Ramsbottom’s help as he lifted me to my feet.
I clung to him for a moment. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I managed. “I had no idea.”
He nodded, his heavy-lidded eyes full of remembered grief.
For the first time I saw him as a person, someone else with a tragedy in their life. I’d dismissed him as an ignorant oaf, but now all I saw was a fatherless young man.
I stumbled over to the desk and retrieved my pocketbook from where I’d left it on the chair. Ramsbottom picked up his cup and drained the last dregs of iced coffee out of the bottom of it, the sound like water swirling out of the bottom of a bathtub.
“The man’s a menace, Mrs. Daly. For all intensive purposes, my father died outside the movie theater that day. Now you see why I could care less what happens to Angus Backstead.”
“You couldn’t care less.”
He stared at me. “That’s what I said.”
*
“When I got to Sometimes a Great Notion, it was well past opening time. Martha must have stopped by and left the covered plate that was sitting on the porch.
After the rain the day before, summer had returned, more determined than ever. The ninety-plus-degree humid air lay over the village like a hot, wet blanket, shutting down the supply of oxygen and making it difficult for its inhabitants to breathe. I hurried into the store, set the plate on the counter, and sank onto a stool behind the register.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, still struggling to process the events of the morning. I was convinced now that Ramsbottom would do nothing to try and find other suspects. If Angus was going to be saved, it would be up to me.
But seeds of doubt were prickling through my mind—from the last person I thought could have sown them. Things weren’t so cut and dried for me anymore.
Angus always talked about karma. This was karma with a vengeance.
Could the Angus Backstead I knew be the same person who, in a violent rage, had hurt someone so badly as to leave him brain damaged? Was it possible that Angus had mentally blocked out doing the same thing to Jimmy?
I squeezed my eyes shut against the insidious doubt creeping through my brain like the vines clambering over Reenie’s kitchen window.
The shop was blessedly cool. A UV film on the windows blocked the severity of the sun’s glare, providing filtered light to protect the fabrics. The hum of the powerful air-conditioning system Angus had installed was working full force.
Damn it, I needed coffee, but couldn’t seem to find the energy to get up and make it.
I glanced at the gold rococo mirror next to the counter. A reflection of an aging woman with swollen eyes, pale skin, and a thick gray stripe down the center of her hair stared back at me.
“But who the hell cares?” I said to her. I gathered my hair up into a bun, pulling the damp strands underneath off my neck and securing it all with a rhinestone hair clip.
I lifted up the edge of aluminum foil wrapped around the plate. Blueberry scones. They looked delicious. I folded the foil down again. Even though I hadn’t eaten breakfast, my appetite was gone.
It was silly, but I felt guilty for feeling sympathy for Ramsbottom, too.
&n
bsp; Was it too far-fetched to think he might have killed Jimmy to frame Angus?
Well, no more far-fetched than thinking the Perkins boys did it. And Ramsbottom certainly had a better motive.
The detective wasn’t in great shape, though. He looked like one of those guys who’d had the size and muscle to play high school football, but the years and weight had crept up and softened him. He certainly couldn’t wield a heavy barn beam.
Wait a minute. Could Jimmy have been beaten up somewhere else, with some other kind of weapon, and brought back to the crime scene? To the place where Ramsbottom knew Angus’s fingerprints would be all over everything?
But that still didn’t solve the problem of the only footprints around the barn belonging to Angus.
Although who had said that? Ramsbottom.
And who’d said Jimmy had been hit with a barn beam in the first place? Ramsbottom.
If you were out for revenge, as a police officer, there were probably plenty of ways to mess with the evidence.
All my life, I’d been brought up to respect those in authority. My own father had been a firefighter. It was hard to believe that an officer of the law would stoop that low.
I shivered. In spite of the heat and humidity outside, now that the damp sweat had dried on my skin, I was suddenly chilled to the bone.
I’d meant to ask Angus about the estate company that had consigned the pens, too, but after he got so upset, I didn’t dare push it. Tonight I planned to go over and help Betty after work, so I’d dig around the auction building and see what information I could find.
Although how the heck would I research this company, even if I did find out who it was, without jeopardizing Reenie? Call them up and say, “Hey, how are you doing? Are you the people who were cooking up some underhanded scheme with Jimmy Kratz, and when he double-crossed you, you decided to do him in?”
Crap. I had absolutely no clue how to go about it. It was the same feeling I’d had when I questioned Cyril. I wasn’t a detective, for God’s sake. I was simply a former schoolteacher who now owned a sewing notions store.
No one had come into Sometimes a Great Notion yet today. The brutal humidity was as effective as a blinding snowstorm in deterring shoppers. But for once I was grateful the store wasn’t busy. The lack of business would give me a chance to get my act together and unpack some new merchandise.
If I could ever find the strength to get off this damn stool, that is.
Another image popped into my mind. Years ago, when he was still working construction before he devoted himself to the auction business full-time, Angus had brought home a bucket of baby blackbirds. They’d been abandoned by their mother on the construction site. He showed me the sorry little group at the bottom of the empty five-gallon paint bucket and said he planned to take them to the nature center when they opened the next day.
He’d fed the birds with a baby dropper and nursed them through the night, but when I stopped by in the morning, they had all died.
Angus was sitting there, on a wooden bench in his workshop, tears streaming down his ruddy, weather-roughened face that he didn’t even bother to wipe away. Sick at the loss myself, I sat there beside him, not knowing what to say.
After some time had passed, I whispered that I didn’t know what I could do to help.
“You were here and you cared,” he said finally. “That’s good enough for me.”
How was I supposed to reconcile the man I knew, gruff, unbelievably generous, protector of the weak, to someone everyone believed to be a killer?
I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment and then hauled myself to my feet.
Come on Daisy, make the coffee. Stat. And lots of it.
Perhaps I’d pay another visit to Reenie and pressure her into telling Ramsbottom about Jimmy’s deal to bid on the pens. The detective might listen to her, if not me. I knew she was scared, but so was I. For my best friend, Angus.
It seemed as though there were other more compelling suspects than the estate company anyway. Like the Perkins family. Like Ramsbottom. Like Fiona Adams.
And what about Hank Ramsbottom’s wife? Was she still around? She wasn’t in any of the photos on the wall. I also needed to go see Warren Zeigler, the attorney, and satisfy myself that he was doing everything possible to get Angus acquitted.
As the coffee brewed, I brought a couple of boxes down from the bedroom upstairs.
I liked to display merchandise so that it didn’t look too “organized.” So a buyer could still feel the same thrill of the hunt that I’d felt on our picking adventures. The idea was that you could walk around the store several times and still spot something new. I set an apothecary cabinet near the counter with an inlaid rosewood box on top. On a small table nearby, I grouped some thimbles, lithographed paper packages of hand sewing needles, and sixty-year-old German sequins.
“What do you think, Alice? Do you like it?” Over in the corner, Alice the mannequin kept her expression carefully composed.
“Wait, you don’t have to say anything. You’re right. Too formal.” I added a whimsical note with a pincushion in the shape of a large strawberry.
I stood back to admire my tableau. Much better. Alice was often helpful like that.
I still remembered with fondness, and more than a little longing, the twenty yards of fine French satin I’d found in the trunk I’d bought at auction that fateful day a year ago.
A glorious deep blue with a peacock design. It killed me to sell it, but the profit from the sale had paid the rent for the next three months, which was a huge help for a fledgling business. I’d kept a scrap of the peacock fabric in a two-inch photo frame next to the register as a remembrance.
I had worried at first that I would have a coronary each time I made a sale, but I’d come to the way of thinking that I had these treasures only for a short while. That they were in my safekeeping until they went to a good home.
Often I wondered who had sat in the child’s scarred wooden school desk, or who had labored over the tiny stitches in a needlework sampler. Out of the next box, I picked up a slim burgundy glass perfume bottle with a silver stopper, and when I held it up to my nose, I caught a faint hint of the fragrance that had once been inside. I tried to picture the woman who’d worn it; the scent a connection between us through time.
As a child, I remembered hanging on to my grandmother’s every word, listening to her stories and memories of life as a milliner, soaking up as much history as I could. I was enraptured with the sewing notions used to trim hats: the ribbons, braids, glass beads, veiling, velvet and organdy flowers.
I slumped down again, the caffeine rush worn off, swallowing against a bittersweet longing for the past.
“Hey, Alice, you know I think my daughter would be hard-pressed to tell someone much about my life. And she certainly doesn’t understand my connection to all these beautiful old things.”
Alice, diplomatic as ever, didn’t comment, but there was a wealth of understanding in those almond-shaped eyes framed by impossibly long lashes.
I blinked when Sarah walked in the door, as if thinking about her had conjured her up.
“Who were you talking to, Mom?”
I could feel the flush heating up my neck and cheeks. “Oh, um, you know, just practicing my sales pitches.”
“Oh-ka-a-ay.” She wrinkled her nose and looked around the store. “You need help with anything?”
She must have been utterly bored out of her mind if she was asking me for something to do. But I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Not that Sarah would even know what that old-fashioned phrase meant.
I walked over to the computer and pulled up a file. “Well, I’ve been doing some after-hours open houses, about one every couple of months, specifically for interior designers and high-end collectors. I need to send out an e-mail blast for the next one. Would you like to create the flyer?”
“Sure.” Sarah skimmed through my file, which showed past events that featured French linens,
quilts and samplers, or vintage jewelry, bags, and clothing.
I pointed to some of the more recent images. “See, they usually have a specific theme, and I serve cheese and wine, and of course offer a substantial discount for that evening only.”
“This is actually a cool idea, Mom. I didn’t know you were doing this.”
Score one for old Daisy.
“What’s the theme this time?” she asked.
“I have quite a lot of children’s items right now. The auction this weekend will give me a chance to focus and acquire even more.” I thought about the dollhouse that would be up for bid and my pulse accelerated again.
“Ah, so that’s why you’re helping Betty Backstead with the auction. I see your ulterior motive!” Sarah grinned at me.
“Brat.” I grimaced and nudged her with my elbow.
I showed her some of the items in the corner of the store—a lithographed tin sand pail, an early 1900s Blue Onion toy silverware set, a Chautauqua home-schooling desk, and a 1930s heavy pressed steel toy metal stove that was green and white jadeite with an orange back panel.
She seemed to take a little more interest in the children’s toys than she ever did in the sewing notions.
I smiled to myself. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.
As I took photos of Mary Willis’s table linens for the website, I glanced surreptitiously at my daughter. Her blond hair fell in a shiny golden wave over her shoulder, and she bit her full bottom lip in concentration as she worked at the computer.
I couldn’t believe Sarah was still hanging around Millbury. She must be more burned out and upset than I’d realized.
As a child, she’d been fascinated with the movies, and she had a funny habit of dotting her speech with snippets of film dialogue. It was sometimes hard to tell where the movie left off, and where the real conversation began. In fact, she had named this store after the film Sometimes a Great Notion, starring Paul Newman, Henry Fonda, and Lee Remick.
Tears stung my eyes, but I willed them away. Sarah didn’t deal with my sentimentality too well. I remembered a conversation I’d had with her when she must have been about five, and I was in my thirties.
