Butter Off Dead

by Leslie Budewitz

  “What does it need?” I asked the nearest cat. “Ah. That’s good. Thanks.” A few chopped fennel fronds made the perfect garnish. And one of Wendy’s ciabatta rolls for a taste of heaven.

  When the weather turned, we’d hauled the café table and chairs in and settled them next to the French doors so I could pretend to eat outside without freezing my tush off. I sat there now. Sandburg took over my chocolate brown leather chair and Pumpkin stayed on the back of the couch, her eyes watching me.

  “Tomorrow,” I told her. “We’ll find you a new home.”

  But despite the refreshing salad, the delectable wine, and the roll’s crisp chewy crust and soft spongy inside, I could not stop thinking about Nick and Christine. My big brother was keeping a secret, and I feared it would cause big trouble.

  Worse, it was clear that law enforcement considered him a viable suspect. And if he wasn’t being truthful with me, I doubted he’d been more forthcoming with them.

  Deception only deepens the danger.

  I refilled my wineglass and started pacing. The secret wasn’t his relationship with Christine. Didn’t take long, after Nick came home from the field last fall, to realize they were hanging out. The pool games were their first public pairing. Understandable. Easier to take another run in private than under the double scrutiny of village and family.

  And I had sensed no shade of guilt in his grief.

  The will. Now that was strange. Obvious enough to name him her heir during their engagement, especially with her family history. But in those days, she’d been flat broke. And she’d broken things off. Why not change her will then? Inertia, or the lack of close relatives? Or hope for reconciliation?

  Or had she’d rewritten her will recently? Iggy died in early September, a month or two before Nick’s return. Made sense for Christine to make plans for the future, just in case.

  But why Nick? And why not tell him?

  I couldn’t answer the first question, not for sure, but the answer to the second was plain enough: None of us expects something to happen. Even in a family already tainted by tragedy.

  And maybe she hadn’t wanted money to be a factor in his decision about their relationship. Which was ridiculous. But she might have wondered.

  “Enough hypothesizing,” I said. Why was I bothering? To stifle Sally’s gossip?

  Admit it, Erin. My doubts about Nick’s whereabouts on Saturday had me questioning everything he’d said. I hated that.

  A faint ringing pierced my thoughts. I scooped my phone out of my bag, on the bench in the entry where I’d dropped it.

  “Erin, Larry Abrams here. You won’t believe this.”

  I caught my breath. Had Zayda been arrested?

  “We got all the movies up and running, to check for glitches. Sorry to tell you, instead of Chocolat, we got this—thing. This kinda porn, trio of women fooling around with chocolate and, well, other things, and . . . I think there might be some parents upset with me, but I stopped it as soon as I realized what was going on.”

  “What? Back up. Instead of Chocolat, we got what?”

  He explained again. “Somebody’s idea of a joke, in some warehouse. Switching the labels on the disc. It’s almost funny, but not really.”

  “No,” I said. “Not really. I’ll call the distributor in the morning and ask them to overnight us a new copy. Chocolat is scheduled for Saturday night. Valentine’s Day.”

  “Make sure they check it first. We can always show four films instead of five if we have to.”

  “I’d hate to change the schedule again. If people show up for the wrong movie or miss one they wanted to see, they’ll get cranky.” We’d already changed the night of the student film, to avoid a conflict with a basketball tournament. The distributor factored how long we kept each movie into the charge, and had assured us we’d get them in ample time. Ha.

  I loaded the dishwasher and put on jammies. Checked Pumpkin’s bowl—she ate less than her figure suggested. Stress has the opposite effect on me.

  On the couch with my laptop and wineglass, I pulled up the Spreadsheet, cells blank. Love spreadsheets. They give an illusion of tidy order to a messy world.

  This one wasn’t playing nice.

  In a management class at SavClub, we’d learned a system of problem solving using circles and arrows. It reminded me of those cartoon ice cream cones with half a dozen scoops in different colors piled on top of one another. Tempting, and impossible to eat.

  But when what you’re doing isn’t working, do something else. I scrounged up a notepad and colored pens, and drew two concentric circles. Labeled the doughnut hole “Christine.” Around the edges, sprinkled everyone connected to her. Nick. Zayda, who’d arrived early, lost her eyebrow ring, and clammed up. Sally, ticked and now re-ticked over the inheritance.

  Iggy. Gone, but not forgotten, and she might provide a valuable link. I drew a blue arrow between Iggy and Sally.

  The neighbors had hinted at another beef. What had Frost said to Christine Friday night at Red’s? I hadn’t heard and fat chance Nick would tell me. If he knew. I made a note to quiz J.D.

  Frost had also sparred with Iggy, though nothing that I knew linked him to the others. Zayda, too, seemed connected only to Christine.

  Before long, I had a mess of arrows and interlocking circles—Venn diagrams, the most useful thing I learned in third grade, besides how to kick Bobby Hughes where it hurts.

  It might be cheating to transfer the circle connections to my spreadsheet, but I did it anyway. My attitude improved instantly.

  It improved even more after a bowl of vanilla ice cream—two scoops—drizzled with chocolate-Cabernet sauce.

  Time to spy on my friends and family. I knew little about Frost, beyond what I’d heard in the last few days. In small towns, we think we know everything about everyone, but some folks fly under the radar. And sometimes what we think we know is wrong. Jack aka Jacob and Sherry—his wife?—owned twenty-two acres immediately east of the church, in a higgledy-piggledy pattern that, if I read the map on the property tax website right, included a house, outbuildings, and forested land.

  His name appeared in the local paper once, when he protested the Rotary Club’s plan to build a walking trail on the north side of the highway near his place, and in the Pondera Post, at a meeting to discuss the state’s proposed wolf management plan. That article included a shot of Frost shaking his fist in the face of a state wildlife biologist.

  Nick had never mentioned him. Had Frost gone after Christine to get to Nick? Had she given Frost a piece of her own mind on the carnivore conflict? Or did the changes she’d proposed to the neighborhood worry him that much? Change is rarely easy, but it makes some people downright nasty.

  That appeared to be the end of Frost’s short electronic trail.

  Next up, Christine. “Look to your veec-tum,” as Hercule Poirot put it. I hated this. It made my teeth hurt. But I’d waded in this far.

  We were Facebook friends, so following her tracks there was easy. She didn’t tweet, but kept up a lively blog and fabulous Pinterest boards, thick with images of her paintings and faves from other artists, many from around here. I got lost in her Etsy shop, enjoying pieces I’d always loved and others I’d never seen. I found myself smiling—a good thing when remembering a friend.

  Not so good when you remember you’re trying to track her killer.

  Next, Google fed me a couple of arts websites, a Belgian woman of the same name, and another American who spelled their shared first name with a K. Yahoo! wanted to show me a pioneer graveyard in Oregon, and photos of a bodybuilder named Christopher Vandenberg, but I shuttered both attempts.

  I dredged up the name of her Vermont hometown and narrowed the search. Found her high school graduating class, and photos of her senior art show. Her parents’ obituaries, and a news account of the head-on collision on icy roads that had killed t
hem.

  Ohmygod. I had never known she’d been in the car, too, and spent a month in the hospital.

  A shiver of sadness slipped through me. When I was a teenager upset with a friend over a minor slight, my mother had told me to always be kind, because you never know what burdens people carry.

  A spoon clattered against china. “You like ice cream?” I asked Pumpkin. “Sorry I didn’t leave you much, but it isn’t good for you. Let’s find you a kitten treat.” She let me scoop her up, and I carried cat and bowl to the kitchen, then poured her a few tuna tidbits. The sound of the treat tin summoned Sandburg. “We should share, don’t you think?”

  I watched the cats eat, side by side. She shot him a few nervous glances, but he behaved himself.

  I took the opportunity to reclaim my chair and moved to the next name on my list.

  Do you need to do this? I asked myself. Yes. Kim or Ike might well be running the same searches, right this minute. My advantage was knowing the people and the community in a way neither of them did. Kim lives here, too, but as she’d observed about dating, the uniform and gun separate her from the rest of us.

  I reminded myself that I might not like what I found.

  Better that than seeing my brother blamed for murder.

  First obstacle: his name. I had to sort out Nick Murphy the film director and Nick Murphy the Irish screenwriter, Nick Murphy the ex–NFL punter, and two Nick Murphys who had played professional soccer in England, twenty years apart. Using Nicholas yielded another soccer player, several dentists, and a gaggle of lawyers. I added Montana to the search and up popped a picture of an astronomy professor at U.M. and finally, my guy, posing with last year’s field assistants in an alpine meadow in Glacier National Park.

  Google served up references to studies he’d participated in. Comments he’d made on proposed wolf management plans across the West. His role in tracking the legendary OR-7, a collared wolf who’d wandered hundreds of miles in Oregon, taking in the sights. His testimony against a Washington couple convicted of poaching and attempted pelt smuggling.

  “What’s this?” I skimmed the article titled “Grad Student Triggers Debate—Do Statistics Lie?” The piece triggered a vague memory of Nick snared in a controversy while working on his Ph.D. I jumped back to the top and began reading slowly. He’d been lead author on a study of wolf migration and predation—attacks on livestock—that enraged the anti-wolf lobby. Several U.S. congressmen challenged his university and its research funding because the conclusions were unpopular in their districts.

  Nick doesn’t rant or rave much—unlike the female side of the family—but one sure way to get him rolling is to interject politics into science.

  He always says he chooses to work independently so he can stay out of the classroom and in the field. But I had to wonder whether this episode had left scars.

  Next up, an interview at the height of the controversy. “The study results are sound,” Nick had told a national newspaper. “We used reliable methods of fieldwork and statistical analysis. Nothing that hasn’t been done dozens of times. But rumors get repeated until they gain traction. People believe what they want to believe, and make me out to be some rogue tree hugger. A team of a dozen scientists did this work, but I won, or lost, the coin toss to be named first and handle the P.R. Ultimately, the extra attention is giving us the chance to show other scientists what we’re seeing and let them reach their own conclusions.

  “I understand politicians have to make decisions and that’s fine, but if they choose to ignore the science, they need to accept that responsibility. And don’t attack the scientists.”

  I stood and paced between the couch and kitchen island. An academic and political dustup ten years ago may have influenced Nick’s choice of career path, but what possible connection could his work have had to Christine’s murder?

  My phone rang again as Google spit up the goods on Sally Grimes.

  “Hey, there. So the cats haven’t clawed you to death yet?” Adam asked.

  “They’ve actually spent most of the evening in the same room.” I set my laptop aside. “Turns out Pumpkin adores ice cream. How’s the class?”

  He gave me the rundown. “Every time I think, I already know this stuff, we learn a new technique, or hear about a tragedy avoided. So, I hate being away, but it’s good.”

  I filled him in on the film snafu and he laughed and assured me I’d work it out. Then I told him what I’d uncovered about Nick not being where he’d said he was on Saturday, and Adam did not laugh. He did not respond. I felt my throat tighten and my hackles—whatever hackles are—rise. I’d ended one relationship before it got rolling when a guy tried to keep me from investigating. Maybe I had overreacted, but when Chiara had said Mr. Right might not like my habit of sticking my nose in other people’s business, I’d told her if that’s what he thinks, he isn’t Mr. Right.

  And I still feel that way. I want to call my own shots. But even more, I want a partner who supports my choices. Who trusts that I’m not going to jump off the deep end just because it’s there, that I look before I leap, and land on my feet more times than I fall. Who will help me, with love and respect, to work my way through life’s challenges and come out stronger, and expect me to do the same for him.

  High hopes. But not impossible ones.

  “So why would Nick lie?” Adam said after a long silence, and tension I hadn’t realized was gripping me drained out of every cell.

  “That’s what I can’t figure,” I said, the words rushing out. “It may not have anything to do with what happened to Christine, but . . . I thought you were going to tell me to stop asking questions.”

  “Would you?”

  Truth or dare. “No.”

  “Right. So, why bother?” Though he was a hundred miles away, I pictured his crooked smile. “Hey, I wish we were having this conversation in person. I won’t pretend not to worry. You’re trying to expose a secret that somebody killed to protect.”

  For a microsecond, I stopped breathing. Blunt way to put it, but true.

  “But that’s one of the things I love about you,” he continued. “You follow your heart. You may jump when you see a mouse, but when it comes to the people you care about, you have more courage than anyone I’ve ever met. Why would I want to interfere with that?”

  “That class better be a good one,” I said, and the warmth in his laughter carried me all the way to sleepy time.

  Good night, Adam. Good night, Mr. Maybe Right.

  • Twelve •

  I slept like a rock.

  Like a rock tossed by waves on the shore, or kicked by giants who’d lost their soccer ball. Like a rock tumbling down an avalanche chute.

  Alas, I was a stone gathering moss in the morning, stumbling around my cabin bleary-eyed and foul of mood. Even an extra-strong dose of Cowboy Roast barely boosted me out of low gear.

  And that was before Pumpkin decided to sit on the chocolate leather chair and Sandberg decided she was an interloping Ferengi to be chased under the bed.

  “Truce, you two.” I waded through the snarling, hauled Sandburg back to the living room, and shut the bedroom door. Pumpkin hopped onto the chaise and buried her head in her paws, less from embarrassment than irritation at having her fight broken up. My interpretation, anyway. I may not be fluent in cat, but I get by, with a strong human accent.

  Tuesday had dawned bright and clear, which meant too cold and too dry to snow. Dressing as if it were spring wouldn’t make it so, so I pulled on my favorite black pants, then pulled them off and grabbed black fleece-lined tights and a purple corduroy skirt. A long-sleeved T-shirt in a red-and-orange print similar to Jo’s Nordic knits, and a fleecy plum vest whose texture reminded me of my grandmother’s Persian lamb coat.

  And because winter’s ice keeps my red cowboy boots tucked away for special occasions, comfy black boots that fit like a sweater but don�
��t make my feet sweat in the shop.

  I studied myself in the mirror. The eyes gave it away. “Desperate nights call for desperate measures,” I said, and reached for the makeup.

  The problem, I realized on the drive into the village, was that helping my big brother meant taking him off his pedestal. The one where I’d put him to keep him safe.

  In the Merc’s back hall, I flicked on the heat and lights. Paused to study the paint chips taped to the wall and realign them in order of this morning’s preference. Started coffee. Grabbed a banana from the fruit bowl on the counter—seventy-five-cent bananas are a big hit among shoppers and my downtown neighbors.

  Lacking Christine’s magic notebook with our customer ID info, I slogged my way through the film distributor’s multiple-choice voice mail system till a human answered.

  A human who had not had enough coffee.

  “Yes, that’s the code number on the box and the disc,” I told the customer service rep, struggling to keep my tone snark-free. “But that’s not what you sent.”

  She repeated, as if to a preschooler, that they’d sent us a disc with the code number of the film we’d ordered and that was all they were obligated to do.

  “Listen, I don’t give a fig about your code numbers. We didn’t order a code number. We ordered a copy of Chocolat, and that’s not what we got.”

  Round and round she went, until I asked for a supervisor. Two and a half, maybe three seconds later, I had the promise of a new disc, and profuse apologies.

  “I’ll watch the first few minutes myself to make sure it’s right,” she assured me. “We’ll expedite it, at our expense, and we won’t charge you for this film. We’re delighted to be part of a new festival, and so sorry about the mix-up.”

  That’s how customer service ought to work. But I’d fret until I had the right film in hand.