Murders and Metaphors

by Amanda Flower

  An idea came to me, and I asked, “Charles, would you be up for a visit?”

  “A visit?” he asked as if he had never been asked such a thing before.

  I felt sorry for the old gentleman. “Yes, I’m wondering if I could come over to your house and talk to you about the Perkins family.”

  “Will Daisy come with you?” His voice was so hopeful I almost wanted to ask my grandmother if she would tag along with me on my field trip, but I stopped myself. Someone had to stay back and mind the store while I was gone, and my grandmother had made it very clear on more than one occasion that she wanted nothing to do with Charles Hancock.

  “I’m afraid she can’t,” I said. “She has some very important business to attend to at the store, but I can be there in twenty minutes.”

  “My dearest Daisy works far too hard. It is time for her to retire and enjoy quiet days, but instead she won’t give up her work. It’s something I love most about her, but that infuriates me as well.”

  “Yes, well,” I said, not sure how to respond to that. “Are you home now? Can I stop by?”

  “It would be my great honor to have the granddaughter of the one I love in my home. Please do come.”

  I said I would and ended the call.

  The kitchen door swung closed at the back of the shop, and my grandmother walked toward the tree holding two mugs of fresh coffee. The heavenly aroma wafted my way. She handed me a mug. I took it gratefully in my chilled hands.

  “Did the books tell you something?” she asked. “You have a certain sparkle in your eye like you get when you are up to something. When you were young, the look always made me a bit nervous.”

  Little Woman lay in the middle of the long sofa where I had left it. “Nothing yet. It’s so strange. I know the shop’s essence wants me to read the book, but what part? It’s not exactly a short read.” I sipped the coffee. “But I am on to something else. I’m going to go talk to the Perkins’ neighbor who knew them when they were young. I hope that will give me insight into the sisters’ dynamics and maybe more understanding as to why they had such a terrible falling out.” I took care not to tell my grandmother that the neighbor was Charles Hancock.

  My grandmother put her hands on her hips. “You’re going to go talk to Charles Hancock, aren’t you?”

  “How on earth do you know that?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Violet, I have lived in this village all my life. Don’t you think I know where Charles lives? The man pesters me enough that I have to make a point of staying away from his street.”

  I sipped my coffee, hoping to buy myself some time.

  “You do know by doing that that you’re only encouraging Charles in his pursuit of me, don’t you?”

  “Maybe. Probably,” I admitted. “But if he knows something that can help Lacey, don’t I have to find out what it is?”

  “If you are going, then you must assume that Belinda’s death has something to do with the sisters.”

  I walked over to the couch and picked up Alcott’s novel. “This is what makes me think that.” I dropped the book back on the couch.

  “Fair enough.” She pressed her lips together and sighed. “I agree, you should go and hear what Charles has to say. However, don’t be surprised if it’s a whole lot of gibberish.” She straightened a book that was crooked on the bookcase next to her. “I care for Lacey too and feel terrible for the poor girl. She’s been through so much in her life. More than a woman of her age should.” She squeezed my hand. “You have too, my dear. I think deep down that’s why you are so determined to help her. You’ve been in her shoes before, both in the loss of a mother and being accused of doing something terrible when you were completely innocent.”

  I swallowed and leaned over to pick up the novel again. Before I touched it, the book flopped open and the pages fluttered.

  My grandmother and I watched in amazement. Even though we had witnessed this odd phenomenon many times before, it was still a wonder. Finally, the fluttering stopped, and the book lay open.

  I picked up the book. My eyes fell on the following line, which I read aloud in a shaky voice. “ ‘There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully, that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.’ ” I looked up my grandmother. “What does that mean? It’s not possible that Belinda Perkins would have been considered a Beth.”

  My grandmother shook her head. “Quite the opposite, I would say. She was brash, loud, and driven. Nothing like Beth March in the story.”

  I agreed. “If anyone is like Beth, it would be Lacey.” My heart constricted. “Are the books trying to tell me something will happen to her?”

  Grandma Daisy shook her head. “I don’t know, but if speaking to Charles Hancock will answer that question for you, you should go and go now.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  I left for Charles Hancock’s home on foot. Since Lacey had been my childhood friend, I knew exactly where to find Charles’s house with little thought. It was a path I had trod many times when I was young.

  Cascade Springs was a tourist village, and most of the neighborhoods near the historic downtown area where Charming Books stood had a theme. The neighborhood where Lacey had grown up had been the “tree neighborhood.” Every street in the small neighborhood was named after a type of tree. Lacey’s old home was on Black Walnut Street. The houses on the street were old historic homes, and I hadn’t been back to visit since returning to the village.

  To reach the neighborhood, I crossed River Road and took a shortcut between Midcentury Vintage and the candle shop next door to Sadie’s store. Usually I would have taken the long way around to the tree neighborhood, but I wanted to get to Charles as soon as I could. It had been almost twenty minutes since I’d told him I would see him. Knowing the old gent, he might storm Charming Books with that shield and sword thinking something terrible had happened to my grandmother and caused my delay.

  The snow crunched under my boots, and I left behind obvious tracks. I came out on the other side of the block in the tree neighborhood on the street. Before turning the corner, I looked back toward the river and saw a man carrying a guitar going in the opposite direction. Redding again. Was the private investigator following me? If he was trying to stay undercover, the guitar case was a poor choice.

  When I turned around again, the man and the guitar case were gone. I wondered if I should continue on to Charles’s house. I might just be leading Redding right to the old man. Then again, I decided that I should go. The sooner Lacey was free of any suspicions, the better.

  I continued on my way to Black Walnut Street. Even if I didn’t know where Lacey’s old house was, I would have easily found it, as Charles Hancock stood in the middle of his yard without a coat or hat.

  “Miss Violet,” he said in his booming voice, and threw up his arms. “I was just about to begin a search party for you. As you can imagine, I have been dreadfully worried about you, since you were supposed to be here a quarter hour ago. I had great fear in my heart that something terrible had befallen your grandmother, my one true love.”

  I hurried up the sidewalk toward him, taking care not to slip on any of the icy concrete. “I’m so sorry, Charles. It took me a little more time to break away from the shop than I expected. I can assure you that everything is fine, and my grandmother is fine too.”

  Charles lowered his arms. What was left of his white hair was combed over his pink dome of a head. “I am happy to hear it, because if my lady was in danger, I would be the very first to run to her side.”

  “I don’t have any doubt about that, Charles.” I turned and faced Lacey’s childhood home. As I stared at it, memories of coming to the house with Colleen flooded back to me in a rush. Colleen and I had traipsed all over the village together, so there weren’t many places in Cascade Springs where I didn’t think of her. How
ever, standing in front of Lacey’s house, it was especially strong. Colleen had always been there with me. I couldn’t remember ever walking up to that blue front door alone.

  The house that had once been Lacey’s was a small white Cape Cod that was almost invisible in all the snow surrounding it. While the other houses in the historic neighborhood stood out, with bright Victorian paint and decorative gingerbread, this house blended in. Charles’s home to the right stood in sharp contrast to the Perkinses’ old home. It was a large brick home. It was hard for me to believe that the old man had lived there alone all these years.

  “I spent a little bit of time at the house growing up,” I mused.

  “I remember seeing you here often with Colleen Preston.” He tried to smooth down the few wayward hairs on the top of his head. “I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I never believed you were behind that girl’s death, no matter what others in the village were led to believe by the Mortons. You did a good thing to cast Nathan Morton aside. There are much finer men who would raise up their arms to earn your affections. He was not worthy of you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, liking Charles more by the second. He wasn’t as bad as my grandmother thought.

  He smiled at me. “I was grateful when I called the bookshop today and you said that your grandmother was hard at work. That must mean that she is finally on the mend. I will go see her in a day’s time to give her more time to recover. I do know, too, like any true lady, she will want to look her best for her knight, and I must allow her that.”

  “Recover?” I asked.

  “Why yes,” he said, aghast. “I have called Charming Books a number of times in recent days, and every time I call, your sweet grandmother has been overtaken by a coughing fit and said she was too unwell to talk or take callers.”

  I’ll bet she did, I thought, trying my best to suppress a smile. No wonder Grandma Daisy hadn’t wanted me to meet with Charles when I first mentioned it. I was completely blowing her cover. “She’s much better now. A complete recovery.”

  He placed a hand to his chest. “That’s such good news! It does me good to hear it.”

  He seemed so relieved that I realized that Charles Hancock really did love my grandmother. It wasn’t one of his dramatic acts. He had been worried about her all this time. I felt sorry for him and promised myself that I would put in a good word for the older man with her. Maybe that would help.

  “Will you give her my good wishes for her health and prosperity?”

  “Oh, I will. You can count on that,” I said, realizing that I was picking up some of Charles’s flowery language in the process of speaking with him. If I wasn’t careful, I would be talking about knights and ladies before the end of the day.

  He shook his head. “What she needs is a life of leisure. She shouldn’t toil so in the bookshop. I could give that to her. My Social Security checks are quite good.”

  It was time to change the subject. “When the Perkinses lived here, what was the family like? When did they move away?”

  “It is quite cold out here. Let us go into my home, where we can discuss this at length by the warm hearth.”

  I frowned. I hadn’t planned for this little errand to take so long, and I most certainly hadn’t planned to go inside Charles’s house. However, the old man was visibly shivering. If we stood out here much longer, he was at real risk of catching pneumonia. “Lead the way,” I said.

  He bowed and walked forward. I followed Charles up the walk to his home. He moved surprisingly quickly.

  He opened the rounded front door of the home and stepped inside. I followed him and ran directly into the business end of a mace.

  “Ahh!” I hopped away from it and whacked my shoulder against the edge of the open door. I stared at the mace, which was in the hand of a full suit of armor. The knight holding the mace wasn’t the only one. There were three other full-sized knights in the corners of the room.

  I rubbed my hip. Luckily, I hadn’t run into the weapon hard enough to break the skin. “Are those real?”

  Charles raised his eyebrow at me. “Of course they are. I had them shipped here all the way from Europe. The one with the mace, I had to outbid a museum in Zurich to add to my collection.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Charles had never struck me as a particularly wealthy man, but he had to be doing quite well to outbid a museum for artifacts. I wondered what his career had been as a young man and what was in those Social Security checks he had bragged about.

  “These are just a few of my treasures,” Charles explained.

  His treasures. I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that.

  Charles led me around the suits of armor, and I kept my eye on them all the while. I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if they had started moving. That wasn’t something I would have thought a year ago, but since I had become the Caretaker of a bookshop with message-giving and flying books, I had been able to bend what was possible a little bit more. However, I was happy the suits of armor didn’t appear to have any magical properties and didn’t move an inch.

  I followed Charles into a room that I guessed was a library of sorts, but it would have been better described as a museum. The walls were lined with glass-enclosed cases that held every sort of ancient artifact I could imagine. There were Grecian busts, pieces of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan sundials. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. It wasn’t possible that all these artifacts were real.

  Charles seemed to accurately interpret my inability to speak, because he said, “I had been an archeologist for many years. I made my fortune that way. Now I’m an old man and just a collector.”

  I blinked at him. “Like Indiana Jones.”

  He chuckled. “Maybe not just like that.”

  I walked over to one of the display cases. “I thought archeologists find things for museums, not for private collections.”

  He smiled at this, and for the first time I caught a glimpse of the adventurous young man he’d once been. “It depends what kind of archeologist you are.”

  My eyebrows went way up. Had I come face-to-face with a geriatric tomb raider?

  “I plan after I die to will my collection to a museum, but until then, I do like enjoying the spoils of my more adventurous youth. When I was a true knight in the field and worthy of a fair lady such as my beloved Daisy.”

  “Does Grandma Daisy know about all this?” I knew my grandmother would be fascinated with Charles’s collection.

  “It is not a knight’s way to brag of his successes.”

  “Did the Perkins girls know about your collection?” I asked, thinking that this was a thing Lacey might have told Colleen and me when we were teens. Colleen and I had been a tight pair, and Lacey was always trying to break into our duo. Rarely did we let her in, and I regretted that now. If we had let Lacey be a part of it, I thought, we would have made a dynamic trio as friends. She certainly would have won us over with information about Charles Hancock’s collection.

  “Only Lacey knew. She was the quietest and sweetest of the girls. I knew I could trust her. I asked her not to tell anyone about my collection, and as far as I know, she never has.”

  I had been right in thinking that Lacey knew about the collection. The quote that the shop wanted me to read came back to me. Even though she was the second of the four girls, Lacey was very much the “Beth” in the family if they were all assigned roles from Little Women. She was not Jo, who was so sure of herself, or selfish Amy. It made me just that much more determined to prove her innocence of Belinda’s death.

  “Lacey came into the house?”

  He nodded. “I know the Perkins girls very well, very well indeed. I always knew from the start how they would end up. Belinda would be a powerhouse and a great success. She had a great determination about her and didn’t care who she stepped on in the process of reaching her goals. Lacey would have a quiet and happy life when she gave herself permission to have it. It took some time, and I am grateful to Adrien, who was th
e one to bring that to pass. Michelle would be happy as a wife and mother because she was always playing house and liked things in a certain order. Finally, little Adele would be the free spirit to go her own way and create.”

  “Where are Michelle and Adele now?”

  “Michelle is married to an accountant with just the kind of life that she wanted, and Adele has a little painting studio in the bird neighborhood.”

  My brows knit together. Again, I wondered how Lacey’s youngest sister could afford studio space in such an expensive neighborhood. There was no question that I would have to ask Lacey more about her youngest sister.

  “And their mother?” I asked.

  “God rest her soul. She was a good woman and did all she could for the girls. By the time they moved into that house, their father was out of the picture. I believe Adele was just a baby at the time, no more than three months old. Their mother worked like a dog for years raising those girls on her own. I never once heard her raise her voice or complain in all the time that I knew her. The girls all adored her.”

  “And it must’ve been hard on all of them when she died.”

  “Hardest on sweet Lacey, I daresay. Belinda, by that time, was off seeing the world, just like she always planned that she would. She left behind her younger sisters to fend for themselves.” He wrinkled his nose. “Of the girls, Belinda was my least favorite. She was a selfish girl, and it boggled my mind that she could have been raised by such a selfless mother and turn out the way she did. If anyone is most like their mother, it is Lacey, but she takes it to the other extreme. I never heard her defend herself to her sisters, when many times from where I was sitting it seemed to me that she was in the right.” He shook his head. “Poor girl.”

  “She always went along with what the others wanted?” I asked.

  “That’s not completely true. There was one time when she dug her heels in. It was with Belinda, of course, after their mother died. I remember it like it was yesterday. Belinda roared in here in her fancy car and yelled and screamed at Lacey for killing their mother and keeping their younger sisters from her. The whole neighbor heard, and half of them came outside to witness the trouble. I think Belinda expected that Lacey would hand over the two younger girls, but she didn’t. Lacey said the girls would stay with her because it was their mother’s wishes. Belinda was so taken aback by it that she promised she would never speak to Lacey again. I hoped that she didn’t keep that promise, because not speaking to someone is the worst kind of punishment you can inflict on another person, especially someone you were meant to love as a sister.”