by Tamar Myers
“Anyway,” Lynne said, “this may be one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities, but in many ways it is still a small town. I’m sure you’ll be hearing rumors about Tweetie and Roderick. We want you to know right now that they’re not true.”
I raised my right brow. “Oh? What kind of rumors.”
Lynne frowned, suddenly nothing at all like Doris Day. “Just rumor.”
“About an affair,” Roderick said. He laughed. “I never touched her. As you can tell, she wasn’t my type.”
Lynne’s frown produced creases deep enough to plant cotton. “Just what is that supposed to mean?”
“It means it’s time for me to skeedaddle,” I said breezily. “Que sera sera, and adios.”
Investigator Sharp seemed far more interested in chatting with Greg than interrogating me. Under more normal circumstances I might have been jealous—okay, so I was a tad jealous—but mostly I was just grateful to escape the third degree. About the same time I finished my meal Barb announced she was going over to Meredith’s table. Greg had to get back to the office anyway, so our little group disbanded.
Before we parted in the parking lot, Greg invited me over to his apartment for a seven o’clock supper. He also made me promise not to do any investigating into Tweetie’s death. I made that promise with my eyes closed and crossed, and two sets of fingers crossed behind my back. I tried crossing my toes without first removing my shoes, but couldn’t quite do it. I figured I was pretty much covered anyway. Then, as I still had Wynnell’s car, and a burning question to ask her, I headed straight for her house.
The Crawfords live on Glenkirk Road, an attractive but settled area. The lots are wooded and the houses have character, as do some of the people. The Crawfords have named their house Falling-water Too, and while it is only vaguely Frank Lloyd Wright in design, the somewhat boxy structure straddles an honest-to-goodness stream.
I parked Wynnell’s car on the street and hoofed across a noisy wooden bridge, half-expecting that at any moment a troll would pop out from underneath and demand payment. I have this Billy Goat Gruff fantasy every time I visit Wynnell, and it’s half the fun. This time, however, I was focused on business. There were answers I needed from Wynnell. Answers that were a matter of life and death.
17
Ed Crawford answered the door on the first ring. He was once a tall man, but now is slightly stooped by late middle age and sports a small paunch. His hair is thinning and has just regressed to the point that the B word might be applied. Whatever shot he has at being handsome has been compromised by a scraggly, multicolored beard. This clump of facial hair might serve a useful purpose if Ed had no chin. But he does. At any rate, it was hard to imagine what a young, nubile thing like Tweetie would see in an older man like Ed, beard or no beard. After all, the Crawfords are neither wealthy nor powerful.
“Hey Abby,” Ed said. He seemed happy to see me. “Come on in.”
There is almost no chance Ed could seduce me, but just to be on the safe side, I declined. “Is Wynnell here?”
“No, she’s at the shop.”
“On a Sunday?” The stream under the house was noisy, and for a second I thought I hadn’t heard right. Wynnell is a hard worker, and reasonably competitive, but she never goes to work on the Lord’s Day. It’s her Southern Baptist upbringing, I suppose.
He shrugged. “That was my reaction exactly. She said it was your fault.”
“Mine?”
Ed smiled. “Well, aren’t you open on Sundays now? Wynnell said she has to keep up with the competition.”
I bit my tongue. Wynnell does only a fraction of the business I do. Even a month of Sundays wasn’t going to make a difference.
“I’ll see her at the shop,” I said and started to leave.
“Abby, wait! Please.”
I turned. “Look, I know about you and Tweetie. I’m sure the police know by now as well. But I didn’t tell them.”
He blushed. “It’s not that. It’s about Wynnell.”
“What about her?”
“I love her. Can you help me make her understand that?”
“Hmm, let’s see. You love your wife, so you cheat on her—”
“I told her I was sorry. I told her the affair with Tweetie was over.”
“Of course it’s over! Tweetie is dead.”
Ed grimaced. “Yes, she’s dead, but it was over before then. Tweetie dumped me Labor Day weekend. I came clean to Wynnell last week when she got back from the cleaners.”
“What? I understood your affair was a one-night stand.”
Ed hung his head. “I had to tell Wynnell that. It would really have broken her heart to hear the truth.”
“Just how long had the affair been going on?” I demanded.
Ed’s scraggly beard mashed into his chest. “Six months. Give or take a week.”
I shook my head. “How terribly thoughtful of you, dear. You have an affair with a young blond bimbo—a faux blond at that—and you think you’re sparing your wife by lying some more?”
He looked up. “What do you want me to do? Make a list of all the times?”
“Of course not!”
“Abby, I know you won’t believe this, but I’m really sorry. Really, really sorry. Wynnell is the best thing that ever happened to me. I realize that now.”
“If you’re so sorry, Ed, then why don’t you show it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for instance, why didn’t you come with Wynnell to the party last night?”
“Because I knew Tweetie was going to be there.”
“Did Tweetie tell you that?” It was meant as a challenge. Ed’s claim that it was over didn’t mean squat if they were still in communication.
He blinked. “No, Wynnell told me. She said you told her.”
“Oh.” I could see now why Wynnell had been so disappointed in Ed’s refusal to come to my party. No doubt she’d wanted to rub Tweetie’s face in the Crawfords’ reconciliation, no matter how tenuous. Who could blame her?
“So, will you talk to Wynnell?”
“No.”
He blinked again. “Was that a no?”
“You better believe it. You two have to work this out yourselves.”
He took an anxious step forward, and I took a anxious step back. “But you won’t poison her against me, will you?”
“Interesting choice of words. But no, I won’t poison her against you. If she still wants you, that’s her business. If, however, she asks what I would do in her situation—well, the answer is obvious, isn’t it? I mean, Buford eventually came to his senses, too, and I didn’t take him back.”
Ed’s sigh of relief was downright pitiful. Even against the background of the babbling brook, it was loud.
“Tell me something,” I said. “What is it—I mean, what was it—you men saw in Tweetie. They weren’t real, you know.”
He blushed a second time. Maybe there was hope.
“She made me feel good,” he said.
“That’s disgusting.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. She made me feel special.”
“Special? Special how?”
“Like I was the only man in the world.”
“And Wynnell doesn’t make you feel this way?”
He shook his head. “She’s always too busy. With the shop—with you. A man needs to feel special.”
I turned on a tiny heel and started to leave. Then my irritation got the better of me.
“Do you make her feel special?” I demanded.
“Well—uh, I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s not a million-dollar question, Ed. Do you, or do you not, say or do the things she needs to feel special?”
He said something unintelligible. The running water was starting to get on my nerves.
“Speak up, Ed. I can’t hear you.”
“I said, it’s not the same. I need her to make my meals. To bring me a beer now and then. And to be there when—well, you know. When I’m
in the mood.”
“You’re old enough to make your own damn meals, Ed. You can probably fetch your own beer, too. As for the other, well—it takes two to tango. Maybe you don’t light her fire.”
He looked shocked.
Perhaps I’d been too rough. “Look, you said before that you really love her. Do you ever tell her that? Because that can go a long way to rekindle passion.”
“Of course I’ve told her that.”
“When was the last time?”
“Okay, so maybe it’s been a while.”
“Tell her every day,” I said.
It was time to go.
Wooden Wonders lives up to its name. It’s not that the merchandise is so spectacular that makes it remarkable, it’s the fact that Wynnell has it stacked to dizzying heights. Chairs atop tables and armoires, small beds on large beds, writing desk on bureaus—just getting from one end of the store to the other is like traversing a maze. It’s a wonder even Wynnell knows her way around.
I found my buddy on a stepladder trying to balance a magazine rack on top of a drop-leaf table, which was in turn precariously perched above a mahogany sideboard.
“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” I said.
“Very funny, Abby.” Wynnell made several critical adjustments to her teetering tower and descended. “If you’re going to yell at me, do it softly. I have a splitting headache.”
“Hangover?”
“Worst I’ve ever had.”
I helped her fold the ladder and lean it against another, more stable, pile. “Why would I yell at you?”
“Because—well, there really is no reason.”
I wasn’t born yesterday. I wasn’t even born in this century.
“Don’t give me that,” I said, my voice rising. “I want the whole truth and nothing but.”
“Okay, okay!” Wynnell had her hands clamped over her ears. “It’s just that this Investigator Sharp woman wouldn’t give up. Finally I had to tell her the truth.”
“What truth?”
Wynnell cringed. “Please, Abby. I’m not in the other room.”
Taking mercy on my friend I hissed softly. “Spit it out!”
Wynnell looked down at her feet. “I told her about Tweetie.”
I struggled with my vocal cords. “What about her?”
“I told her that you hated her.”
“But I didn’t!”
“You used to. You stood right here in this shop and said, ‘I’m going to kill that woman.’”
“But that was years ago. Just after she took Buford away from me. Wait a minute—you didn’t tell Barbie about that, did you?”
Wynnell nodded. “Abby, she was very persistent.”
I was shocked by Wynnell’s betrayal. We’ve been through thick and thin together. There was only one excuse for this breach in friendship etiquette that made any sense.
“You sold me out to save your own skin, didn’t you?”
Wynnell looked up, but she didn’t have the nerve to look at me. “Abby, it looked really bad for me. I had a motive, and I was alone upstairs where the body was found. Plus, she asked me how I felt about Tweetie’s death, and I couldn’t lie. Not very well. I told her I was kind of—well, glad.”
“So you shifted the blame to me?”
“Abby, please understand.” Wynnell was pleading like my daughter Susan did when she “borrowed” my car to run off to West Virginia to marry the “only man I’ll ever love.” Fortunately for Susan I was poor then and the car conked out going up the first mountain. Her one-and-only ditched her for a female biker who stopped to offer aid, and Susan went on to have three more “one-and-only” loves. So far.
“I’m trying to understand, dear. I’m trying to understand why my very best friend in the entire world would sic the fuzz on me.”
Wynnell laughed, but not inappropriately. “Abby, you’re a hoot. I haven’t heard the word ‘fuzz’ used that way since the sixties. And anyway, you have to admit, you sort of implicated me last night.”
“I did.”
“You better believe it. When you got back from your interrogation, I felt like a deer standing in the headlights.”
I sighed. “Well, we’re just going to have to stick together. We know neither of us did it. Now we just have to find out who did.”
“You’re the sleuth, Abby.”
“Yeah, some sleuth. I went to ask Widow Saunders if I could take a peek at her husband’s armor collection and, to make a long story short, now I’m under suspicion for another murder.”
“You’re kidding! Whose?”
“The widow herself.”
Wynnell backed into a tangle of tables that nearly toppled. “Corie’s dead?”
I nodded. “It happened just this morning. Apparently she was poisoned. I had the bad luck of being there just a few minutes earlier.”
Wynnell staggered to a tower of chairs, wrestled down the top one, and sat. “She was such a nice woman. I really liked her.”
“You knew her well?” I still could hardly believe my best friend was an expert on armor. That she might have been buddies with the crème de la crème of Charlotte society blew my mind.
“Not well, but we hit it off. I particularly like the fact that she had a younger, uh, boyfriend.”
“There seems to be a lot of that going around.”
The hedgerow eyebrows became one straight line. “Why Abby, you sound envious.”
“I’m not!” I wailed. “Greg is all the man I could ever want. It’s just that I never would have considered dating a man that much younger. Now everyone’s doing it.”
The hedgerow broke into clumps while she laughed. “That’s why I liked Corie so much. Because she was doing exactly what Ed was doing. With one difference, however; neither Corie nor Caleb was married. No one was getting hurt.”
“Did you know she was going to run off with him to Genoa?”
“Absolutely. She was far too excited to keep it secret. She kept telling me to ‘hurry up with that damn appraisal.’ She couldn’t wait to start her new life. Of course she swore me to secrecy, or else I would have told you.”
“Of course,” I said, perhaps a bit snidely. “But if she couldn’t keep her own secrets, why should you?”
“A promise is a promise, Abby.”
“Wynnell, dear, did you also happen to know that Buford was the person to whom she was selling the armor collection?”
My friend paled. “Your Buford?”
“You mean you didn’t know?”
She looked away. “Okay, so I knew. Abby, I would have told you, but—”
“But what? But you promised not to tell again?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
I stomped a size-four, forgetting yet again my sprain. My cry of pain made Mama, all the way down in Rock Hill, drop her can of spray starch.
“You all right?” Wynnell sounded like she genuinely cared.
“No, I’m not all right. My ankle feels like it’s on fire.” I hobbled over to Wynnell and made her scoot over. “So what other secrets do you have up your sleeves?”
“Abby, please don’t be angry. If you must know, I would have told you—promise or no promise, but I knew it would upset you.”
“Subterfuge upsets me.”
“Come on, Abby, be absolutely honest. You hate the fact that I was appraising something that Buford bought.”
“The man has too much money,” I mumbled. “At least half of it should be mine.”
“But look at it this way, Abby, the money he spent on the collection was going to be money Tweetie couldn’t have—not that it makes a difference now. But speaking of Buford, where is he?”
“On his way back from Tokyo. At least that’s what he claims.”
Wynnell stood. I’d made her scoot too far.
“So Abby, what made you want to peek at Corie Saunders’s—I mean, Buford’s—armor collection?”
“I wanted to study some samples of the real thing. I thought if I could prov
e that the piece in which Tweetie was found was indeed the real McCoy, it would help the police with their investigation.”
My friend shook her head. “That Sharp woman already asked about that. I told her the suit found under your bed wasn’t genuine.”
“And you’re sure about that?”
“Well, it’s not like I hung around to get a good look. But Abby, that stuff’s expensive. You don’t just wear it to a costume party. Besides, there are only three other collectors that I know of in Charlotte, besides the widow, who have real pieces. Two of them were at your party.”
18
I gasped. “Who were they?”
“This is supposed to be privileged client/ dealer information, you understand. It can’t go any further.”
“My lips are sealed with concrete.”
Wynnell sighed. “Captain Keffert is one of them. He buys mostly small pieces in Europe and brings them back for me to identify. To my knowledge he doesn’t have a three-quarter suit of—let’s see, from what little I can remember, it was meant to look like early seventeenth-century Italian armature.”
“That’s right,” I said. “The Rob-Bobs have confirmed it.”
“They have?” The left hedgerow shot up to meet her hairline.
“Well, not that this piece was genuine. But that it was seventeenth century in style.”
She smiled with satisfaction. “They may know a lot, but I didn’t think they knew everything.”
“Wynnell, I’m going to ask Greg if I can examine the piece. Is there anything—any telltale mark, I should be looking for?”
“You?”
“I’m not an idiot, Wynnell. If you tell me what to look for, I can find it.”
“Abby, you’ve been in this business long enough to know that there are generally lots of subtle clues that one goes by when judging the authenticity of just about anything. It’s not like I can just say, ‘Look for this, look for that.’ You really need the piece in front of you while I list all the possibilities. You need me there to point them out.” She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “But there is one thing a real piece would have that a tourist copy wouldn’t.”
“What’s that, besides a higher price tag?”
