Marred only by an old-fashioned murder.
“You all right?” Ted asked.
“Yes, just thinking.”
“Well, stop it. Do you want a ride?”
“Thanks, but we’ll walk. I could use the exercise. Maybe I should join the gym.”
“Not until this murder has been solved, you don’t. I’d rather you fat and out of shape than stalked by some steroid-pumped potential killer.”
“Am I?”
“Not even close.”
Liv sighed. “You know what the saddest part of this is?”
“What?”
“That poor man’s presents left in the trunk of his car. He was planning to have a nice Christmas with someone, friends or family, or both. They won’t even know what’s happened to him. They’ll never know he’d thought of them.” Her voice cracked. She shook herself. “Maudlin.”
“’Tis the season. Go home. Have some eggnog. Play some carols. Maybe Whiskey will sing along with you.” Ted gave her a quick, one-armed hug.
“Thanks. See you tomorrow.”
Ted touched the brim of his hunter’s hat and took off toward the employee parking lot behind the building.
Whiskey tugged at his leash.
“Are you cold? I told you, you should wear those cute little booties I bought you.” She stepped off the curb. “My feet are perfectly warm in my boots.” Even if Chaz made fun of them.
Which sent her mind on a different path of what had happened to Chaz Bristow that made him so—she couldn’t even think of a word. He was smart, good-looking, if a bit scruffy. He’d had what looked like a brilliant career. And he’d given it all up to come back to a little country town to run the family paper and report on 4-H fairs and fishing conditions.
Whiskey wasn’t cold. He just wanted to climb a mound of hardened snow left by the snowplow and anoint the edge of a parking meter. Then he was ready to cut through the park toward home.
It was still early in spite of the dark. And as Liv passed the houses along her way, she thought of the families who lived in them. Some still at work, some retired, children and parents and pets, all getting ready for the holidays. Some grieving but carrying on for the sake of others, some giving in to despair—the loneliest time of the year for some.
She was feeling pretty down by the time she came to the Zimmermans’ Victorian, lit up like there was no tomorrow. She could see the big spruce through the front window.
Liv had a wreath, but the rest of her house was bare of decorations. And she’d forgotten to get a tree—again. No matter what happened during the night, first thing tomorrow morning she was going to do some Christmas shopping, then drive out to Dexter’s to get a tree.
She unlocked the door, and Whiskey shot in, stopped on the mat to dry his feet, then trotted to the little kitchen at the back of the house. Liv fed him and changed into sweats and a sweatshirt that Miss Ida had bought for her at the Baptist Christmas Bazaar. Actually, Miss Ida had bought three—one for herself, one for her sister, and one for Liv. Liv’s had angels on hers.
She hadn’t worn it outside her own house yet. It was festive, but more like something Ted would wear.
She heated a can of tomato soup, poured it into a mug, and took it into the living room, where she curled up on the couch and reached for the remote. At least she had cable. Hearing the television, Whiskey trotted into the room and made a couple of attempted leaps to the couch.
Liv put down her soup and lifted him up. He waited for her to pull a throw rug over her feet and retrieve her soup before he burrowed a place next to her and settled down for a long winter’s nap.
It only took once through the stations to find three holiday movies. The first sounded too sappy, the second, too sad, but the third seemed safe. A movie with Whoopi Goldberg as Santa Claus. That should lift her spirits and make her laugh. She was crying in the first three minutes.
Whiskey snuggled closer. He was used to her blubbering over movies. But tonight he must have sensed more than Liv’s compassion for a fictional child who had stopped believing in Santa.
But she was soon rooting for Santa to make the adult believe again. Whoopi had just discovered that the Santa hat lit up when she wore it and was dancing around her apartment, when Liv saw a light of her own. The headlights of someone pulling into the driveway and stopping near her door.
Whiskey slid off the couch and raced to the window to peer out. A car door slammed; there was a knock at the door.
Whiskey ran to the door. His tail was wagging, but since he was Mr. Congeniality, Liv was taking no chances. She wiped her eyes, smoothed her angel sweatshirt, and peeked out the window. A Jeep. Just about everybody in town had a Jeep, truck, or SUV. But she recognized this one. It belonged to Chaz Bristow. What was he doing here?
Another knock.
She padded over to the door, running fingers through her hair.
“Who is it?” she called.
“Chaz.”
“What do you want?”
“I’ve come a-wassailing,” he said through the door.
Liv tried not to laugh; she was angry with him and a little depressed. But she was also curious.
She opened the door.
Chaz had struck a pose like the caricature of an Italian waiter, a pizza box held in his palm, a wine bottle in the crook of his other arm. The only incongruous part of the picture was the laptop case slung over his shoulder.
“And I brought pizza. No anchovies. No onions . . . in case I get lucky.” He waggled his eyebrows at her.
She stepped aside to let him in.
“Did you eat already?” he asked, crossing the foyer, Whiskey gamboling at his feet. He put the pizza box on the coffee table, shed his canvas jacket and tossed it on a chair, and placed his laptop on her desk. He picked up her mug of congealed soup and made a face. “Please tell me this wasn’t your dinner.”
Liv shrugged. It did look pitiful, but she was just too tired to explain that she’d been too tired to make anything else.
He carried it into the kitchen, where he put it in the sink and began rummaging through the utensil drawer.
“Make yourself at home.”
“Thanks. You do have a corkscrew, don’t you?”
“Second drawer.”
While he continued to rummage, Liv got down two wineglasses, a couple of plates, and a roll of paper towels.
She put them on the table. “Sorry, I don’t have any napkins.”
Chaz was grinning at her.
Liv took quick stock of what he was seeing. Her hair was okay, though it tended to go really straight in cold weather. Then she remembered the movie; her makeup was probably smeared, her eyes swollen and no doubt red. He’d either feel sorry for her that she was taking the murder so badly or laugh at her if she told him she’d been watching a movie.
Better to be laughed at, she decided. “I was watching a Christmas movie.”
“Is that why you look like Rudolph?”
She rubbed her nose and sniffed. “I guess.”
He pried the cork out of the wine, slipped the glasses between two fingers, and carried them back to the living room. Liv grabbed the plates and a dog treat to save their pizza from greedy Westies and followed Chaz to the living room.
Whiskey was waiting expectantly by the pizza box.
“Not happening, buddy. It’s bad for you. But look, I brought you a treat.” She held out one of Dolly’s gourmet dog biscuits.
Whiskey cocked his head and looked at her hand.
“Suit yourself.” She took back the treat.
Whiskey eyed the pizza box, clearly torn. Then came to sit in front of her. “Arf.”
“Good choice,” she said and handed him the treat, which he took to the other side of the room where he was still within easy reach of raining pepperoni.
Chaz poured out two glasses and handed one to her.
“You know, I’d never have figured you as a red-nosed, angel-sweatshirt-wearing kind of girl.”
Liv che
eks heated. She’d forgotten about the angel sweatshirt. “I’m just full of surprises.”
His playful expression turned to one of quick interest.
“Stop it and open the pizza.”
A wonderful aroma wafted straight to her nose as he lifted the lid. He slid a piece onto one of the plates and handed it to Liv, just as music from the television swelled and Whoopi and her eight tiny reindeer swooped into the air.
“And they all lived happily ever after.” Chaz picked up the remote. “Do you mind?”
Liv shook her head. Her mouth was filled with a big bite of cheese, pepperoni, and olives.
The screen went black, and the room suddenly seemed very quiet. Liv swallowed and took a sip of wine. “Dare I ask if this is a social call?”
“That’s up to you,” he said, at his smarmiest.
“Do you hit on every woman that moves to town?”
“Hmm.” Chaz scratched his head. “Let me think.”
“Did you put up a Christmas tree?”
“What?”
“I said—”
“I heard you. How did we go from seduction to Christmas trees?”
“Just curious.”
“Your mind is an amazing contraption. The answer would be . . . no. And no.”
“Oh.”
“But in your case, I might make an exception.”
“Thanks, but if this isn’t social, why are you here?”
“Well, I just got curious about Arbor Day.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Liv gave him a speculative look. “That’s what the computer is for?”
“Yeah, in case we got bored with whatever.”
Liv gave him a sardonic smile, but she couldn’t keep it from morphing into genuine humor. He was so ridiculous, it had to be an act. Didn’t it? “So what did you learn?”
“Well, a lot of shit happened that year. I’m just wondering what you know about it.”
“Why didn’t you ask me earlier?”
“I wasn’t interested earlier.”
Liv helped herself to another slice of pizza. “It might not have anything to do with Cosgrove’s death. Maybe he was just passing the time.”
“Or he might have stumbled onto something that would hasten his demise.”
“Something that happened in nineteen sixty-nine could come back now?”
“You’re asking me? After this past fall? I think we both know that it can, and might—and did. So tell me everything.”
“You’re helping with the investigation.”
“No. I’m just passing the time.”
“Liar.”
“Yeah, well, I told you before, curiosity is a curse.”
Liv gave him a look. “What you said was that investigative reporting was a curse.”
“That, too. And don’t ask me again why I moved back here.”
“All right, then, let’s look at nineteen sixty-nine.” Liv put down her plate and carried her pizza crust to her desk, where she opened her laptop with one hand.
“This is what I have.” She punched in some keys and the front page of the Chicago Tribune came up.
Chaz followed her over and opened his computer. A search engine displayed several archive sites, some that dated back to the eighteen hundreds.
“Serious search engines. For some reason I didn’t take you as a history buff.”
“You know me, a little of this, a little of that.”
“You’re just a whichever-way-the-wind-blows kind of guy.”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Whichever way the wind blows,” Liv repeated. “David Bowie? Right? Never mind, it isn’t important.”
“It wasn’t Bowie. He wrote ‘When the Wind Blows.’ Have I said before, your brain—”
“Is detailed and eclectic.”
Chaz laughed. “I wasn’t going to put it quite like that, but okay. Anyway you’re probably thinking of Bob Dylan. ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.’”
Liv gave him a look. “And you think my mind is eclectic?” She frowned, moved him over, and sat down at her desk. Scrolled through the newspaper archive.
“What are you thinking?”
Liv shrugged. “I don’t know, talking about the weather made me think of being in the library.”
“Something that Cosgrove was reading about?”
“I don’t know. It’s gone now.”
“Did Ms. Bangs say what papers he was reading?”
“I asked her. She helped him log on to the Trib. But after that he could have been looking at anything.
“Though I can’t imagine that something happening in Chicago could have anything to do with Celebration Bay, New York. Maybe you could look at the back issues of the Clarion and see if something correlates.” She managed to say it with a straight face. The Clarion had never been put on microfilm or on the Internet, and all the back issues were stored in boxes in the musty, dust-covered basement of the Clarion office.
“Hmm. You’re just getting back at me for making you look through all those back issues. But hell, you’re probably right. I wonder if the police found the copies Cosgrove made. That would cut down on a lot of reading.”
And sneezing, Liv thought.
“I don’t suppose you wheedled any information out of Bill?” he asked her.
“I do not wheedle.”
“Whatever. Did he say anything?”
Liv thought back. Stifled a yawn. She was tired. She’d been going nonstop since she’d arrived in September. Her brain was not at its best. She didn’t tell Chaz that.
“He said that he’d talked to Lola Bangs. I told him about seeing Clarence with a folded newspaper—Saturday night at the Dumpster.”
“One of my fonder memories.”
“I told him about Cosgrove’s little black book.”
“It just keeps getting better.”
She scowled at Chaz’s smarmy expression.
“He didn’t find a book. And why do you do that?”
“What?”
“Act like a bonehead surfer dude all the time.”
His expression froze, then dropped away to no expression at all. “Surfer dude? I don’t know how to surf.”
“Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. It’s just when I first saw you, that’s what I thought. Blond, suntanned.” Lethargic, but she didn’t say that.
“I fish. That puts me in the sun a lot. I need more wine.”
He refilled their glasses, then pulled up a chair to sit next to her.
They started with Chicago. The Tribune was filled with articles concerning the war raging in Vietnam, sit-ins at colleges, and riots in the street.
“It sounds horrible,” Liv said.
“It does.” Chaz kept reading.
“What about that? The Chicago Eight?” Liv leaned closer to read a headline.
“They caused a riot at the Democratic convention a year before. Old news.”
“Oh.”
“Look for something less newsworthy. Like a mass murder or arson.”
Liv stared at him.
“I wasn’t kidding. Keep looking.”
She kept looking. “A murder of a farm family? Four children, a woman, and a man.”
“That looks promising. Write it down. We’ll make a list. Here’s something. Arson at a shopping center.”
Liv wrote it down. “But how does any of this relate to us?”
“You have to follow a lot of trails—many of them false—before you get to the truth.”
“We don’t have time.”
Chaz gave her a look. “Write. Bombing at a chemical factory in Wisconsin. One apprehended, three at large.”
“I thought they made cheese.” Liv wrote it down, but her eyes were getting heavier by the second. Even Chaz grew quiet. After a while she leaned over to see what he’d discovered. He was reading the sports page.
“Really? Sports? At a time like this?”
“It’s Lou Piniella.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Sacrilege. How about this? . . .”
They gave it up at one o’clock. Liv could barely keep her eyes open. She pushed herself out of her chair and handed him his jacket.
“Are you really sending me out into the cold, dark night?”
“Yes. Do you really want to stay here?”
“Well, yeah. I’m a guy.”
“Thanks, but I need a little more incentive than that.” Especially if she had to put up with gossip and innuendo.
“You’re right. It’s probably not a good idea. Maybe after you’ve been here longer. Say fifteen years.”
“You’re so weird.”
“Not normally, just with you. I really don’t get it.” He put on his jacket and went to the door. Liv let him and Whiskey out. Chaz left; Whiskey came back after two minutes.
“Too cold for you, buddy?”
Whiskey raced inside and into the bedroom. Chaz backed out of the driveway and drove away. Liv closed the door.
“Oh the weather outside is frightful,” she sang, only slightly maliciously, as she carried the pizza box and glasses to the kitchen. It wasn’t that cold. It wouldn’t hurt Chaz to be a little uncomfortable on his ride home. Though he had spent hours doing research, even if it was fruitless. And she could use a little fun.
But not with Chaz. The less she thought about him, the better. They were oil and water. “A” type and no type. Overachiever and slob. The odd couple.
And even though nothing had happened, Liv had no doubt the sisters had seen his car and would have questions in the morning. She sighed. All the suspicion and none of the fun.
*
Morning came all too soon. Despite sleeping late, Liv woke feeling dragged out. She’d spent the night dreaming about wars, explosions, and Bob Dylan songs. Definitely an extra-vitamin-C-and-zinc day.
She found some Christmas music on the radio and put in a call to Ted, who told her to take the whole day off. But that was way too much free time for Liv. When Christmas was over . . . no, when New Year’s was over, she’d take a week off to regroup and start planning the next events.
When she let Whiskey out, she saw there were ominous clouds hovering low in the sky. Snow was expected. She always kept up to date on the weather forecast, but this looked like more than the promised accumulation of three to four inches. This looked like it held the potential for several feet.
Silent Knife (A Celebration Bay Mystery) Page 23
