Gone Gull

by Donna Andrews

  “Just the person I needed to talk to,” Cordelia said as I sat down. “The chief’s going to give us back the lower floor at eight, and the rest of it as soon as she can—but we need to come up with a plan for the other six classes.”

  “Grandfather’s photography class is easy.” I found it was a relief to have something practical to focus on. “He and Baptiste can just take them on a photo expedition all day, instead of only in the afternoon.”

  “And Rose Noire has offered to take her class on an all-day herb-gathering trip.” Cordelia was making a chart. “So someone can use her studio. I’m thinking what’s-his-face—the leather worker. Julian?”

  “Valerian,” I said. “Yes, his equipment’s the most portable.”

  “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to take my crew out on the terrace and teach them about hand looms and maybe even do a little spinning,” Amanda said. “So as long as there’s no rain in the forecast—”

  “The forecast is for partly sunny but dry, and the terrace is all yours,” Cordelia said. “Meg, that will leave you and Gillian’s pottery class and the painting students to share the barn, for this morning at least. Assuming you can figure out some way to teach without all your equipment.”

  “I’ve got my portable forge in the van,” I said. “The one I used for that open air demonstration. And a couple of anvils. I can have them work on their hammer technique.”

  “I’ll go make sure Gillian can figure out something to do with her potters,” Cordelia said.

  “And we’ll need a replacement for Prine,” I asked. “Michael had some ideas.”

  “Yes, he already recruited a colleague of his from the college—actually, he bribed her with an offer that she could enroll her nine-year-old daughter in the kids’ theater class.”

  “Do you mean Frankie?” I asked. “That would be great.”

  “If Frankie’s real name is Francesca Zambrano, then yes,” Cordelia said. “I take it you approve.”

  “She’s awesome, as the boys would say.”

  “Then we’re lucky that she originally planned to take the whole summer off to paint and finds that she can’t get a thing done with a nine-year-old underfoot.” Cordelia sounded amused. “Apparently this is as much of a godsend for her as it is for us.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Though let’s not mention that in front of Chief Heedles, shall we? Because I can almost see the need for childcare as a motive for murder, so I’m sure she’d be all over it.”

  “Right.” Cordelia smiled at the thought. “Oh, good. Here’s Horace. Chief Heedles needs all the help she can get.”

  Horace ambled over to our table. His stocky figure was clad in blue jeans and a gray t-shirt with I LOVE HERBS! printed on it. He was holding a carryout box and a travel mug and nibbling a slice of bacon.

  “This is a prank, right?” He held up his phone.

  The screen showed a text from Cordelia, telling him “Report to the studio wing ASAP to help chief with murder investigation.”

  “No,” Cordelia said. “I meant it. What are you doing still standing here?”

  “Really?” His eyes bugged, and he took a big gulp from the mug. “Rose Noire said you wanted me to help investigate the vandalism. She didn’t tell me anything about a murder.”

  “We didn’t have a murder when you arrived last night,” I said. “We only found him an hour ago.”

  “Aha!” Horace’s face brightened, and then fell again. “It’s not anyone we know, is it?”

  That was the peril of police work in small towns. Most of the culprits and victims tended to be friends, relatives, or at least people you nodded to when you passed them on the street. And a fair number of Horace’s friends and relatives had migrated up to Riverton for the summer to teach or help with the craft classes.

  “No one you’d know,” I said. “And quite frankly, no one whose demise is going to cause general consternation.”

  “Good,” Horace looked relieved. “I don’t mean good about the murder but—oh, you know. So where is the studio wing?”

  “That door.” Caroline pointed.

  “I know the murder is more important, but don’t forget about my vandal,” Cordelia said.

  “Isn’t it probably the same person?” Amanda asked.

  “Possibly the same person,” Horace said. “But we have to keep our minds open.”

  Just then the door opened and the tall young Riverton police officer strode out. He smiled when he saw Cordelia.

  “The chief’s ready for you, ma’am,” he said.

  Cordelia followed him out, with Horace tagging along behind.

  Chapter 9

  We all watched until Cordelia had disappeared. Then we looked at each other. I took another deep, calming breath. Amanda and Caroline seemed to be doing the same thing.

  “I guess that means I get to organize the class locations.” I stood and picked up my tray to take it to the service hatch.

  “I can help you till it’s time to take off on the nature photography hike,” Caroline said as she followed my example.

  “I’ll go haul my stuff onto the terrace,” Amanda said, as she brought up the rear.

  When we got to the service hatch we found Marty standing on the other side, peering out into the dining room. He frowned as we set our trays down.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Caroline said. “Breakfast was fabulous.”

  “The highlight of my morning,” Amanda said.

  “Yeah, right,” he said. “I mean, why are there cops crawling all over the place?”

  “Someone killed Edward Prine last night.” I didn’t see any reason to mince words with Marty.

  “That loudmouth painter?” Marty asked.

  “That’s him.”

  “Hmph.” Marty nodded, turned on his heel, and disappeared through the door that led to the back stairs.

  “I suppose a token exclamation of ‘how terrible’ would be too much to ask,” Caroline said as we headed toward the studio wing.

  “Cordelia didn’t hire Marty for his social graces,” I reminded her.

  By shortly after eight we had installed Valerian, the leatherworker, in Rose Noire’s studio. He seemed to find his temporary quarters slightly unsettling. Rose Noire had gone a little overboard in decorating her studio. Dozens of crystals and suncatchers hung in the enormous windows, whose sills were crammed with pots full of herbs and flowers. The walls were bedecked with at least a dozen inspirational sayings, hand calligraphied in flowing cursive, encrusted with glitter, and festooned with flowers and curlicues painted in pastel shades of blue, green, pink, and lavender. Bunches of fragrant drying herbs, tied with pastel ribbons, hung from the ceiling. The ambiance was utterly feminine and New Age, and in his tattered jeans, work boots, and faded denim shirt, Valerian looked distinctly out of place.

  “She does know I use real leather, right?” he asked. “As in, deer and cows died so we could have this class.”

  “I don’t think she’s focused on that,” I told him. “If it occurs to her to be upset about it, I will explain that you only use deer and cows of advanced years that have died happy, peaceful, natural deaths.”

  He looked as if he wasn’t sure whether or not I was kidding. I wasn’t entirely sure myself. So I just left him to unpack his dead animal skins on the tables where Rose Noire’s students had been making potpourri and sachets on Monday. She could always do an herbal cleansing of some sort if Valerian’s intrusion disturbed her.

  Rose Noire’s herb-gathering students and Grandfather’s nature photography students set off en masse in the official Biscuit Mountain bus, aiming to find a promising trail high atop one of the nearby mountains. The understanding was that they’d amble along together until one group or the other found something worth lingering over. I suspected Grandfather would be steering his group in the direction of what he referred to as a “promising mountain lake.” Since he couldn’t yet find out where Prine had taken the gull photos, he’d
decided to operate on the theory that perhaps the painter had taken them somewhere near Biscuit Mountain. He’d been spilling maple syrup and strawberry jam on several local maps all during breakfast, trying to figure out the most likely locations.

  “Don’t let him go chasing gulls at the expense of giving the class a good outing,” I told Caroline.

  “I’ll do what I can.” She gritted her teeth, so I deduced that she did not expect this to be an easy task. But she was the only one who could do it—well, apart from me, and possibly Cordelia, and we’d be back here, doing our jobs for the day and keeping an eye on Chief Heedles’s investigation.

  The Slacker hung around the great room all morning, watching the police officers come and go. I was half-expecting him to pass up the herb class’s expedition for the day in favor of kibitzing on the investigation. But when the driver bellowed “last call,” he scuttled out to the bus.

  Although the last to board were Victor, sporting his impressively large cast, and Rose Noire, who was fussing over him with what looked to be several vials of essential oils and an earthenware mug of some steaming liquid. A healing herbal tea, no doubt. Given how vile-tasting most of Rose Noire’s herbal teas were, I hoped he found an opportunity to pour it out while she wasn’t looking, the way most sensible people did. I waved good-bye to the bus with genuine relief, knowing several people who might quickly try Chief Heedles’s patience were out of the way for the time being.

  By shortly after eight, the barn was humming with activity. Actually, banging more than humming, at least at my end of the barn, since I was using cold iron to give my students practice in hammering techniques. Gillian’s pottery students were at the far end, working on hand shaping. And in the middle, a grad student, sent up as a kind of advance guard by Frankie, the new painting instructor, was teaching the art students how to make their own canvases. They were contributing their fair share of the noise, nailing one-by-two wood slats into rectangular frames, stretching sheets of canvas over them, and then nailing the canvas into place.

  I found it interesting to watch how Gillian adapted to our makeshift classroom. Her own work tended to be large-scale—among her most popular pieces were enormous planters, three or four feet in diameter and almost as tall—large enough to hold small fruit trees. I wondered if she hired teams of bodybuilders to haul them into her kiln, and for that matter, where she’d found a kiln large enough to fire them. But today she had her students working on a very modest scale. Their pots weren’t quite Barbie doll-sized, but awfully close. Did she always do this with beginning students? Or did she have only a limited supply of clay not barricaded behind the yellow crime scene tape.

  “Think you can hold out for the rest of the day?” Cordelia asked me when she stopped by a little before ten.

  “We’re doing fine. But ask the potters. This is pretty tough on them. Not sure how well they’re going to survive today, and what if this goes on for the rest of the week?”

  “Shouldn’t have to,” she said. “Mo Heedles has set up her interrogation room in Fabian’s studio. That’s a good sign.”

  “Fabian?” I echoed. “We don’t have a Fabian.”

  “Leather guy.”

  “Valerian.”

  “Valerian. Valerian. Why can’t I get that man’s name into my head? It would help if he wasn’t quite so nondescript. Do you suppose that makes him a good suspect? Being the sort of nondescript character nobody remembers?”

  “Only in those mystery books that I suspect Dad has been sharing with you,” I said. “Why is it a good sign that Chief Heedles is interviewing people in Valerian’s studio?”

  “She wouldn’t be doing that if Horace and Lesley Keech hadn’t cleared it. If she’s okay with dragging dozens of suspects into it, she shouldn’t give me a hard time about releasing it tonight so we can go back to having classes in their usual spots tomorrow.”

  “Except for the painters, I suspect,” I said. “Odds are she’ll want to keep the actual crime scene intact for a little longer.”

  “They can work out here,” she said. “Mo wanted me to warn you that she’d be interviewing the students one by one. Starting with the painters. Here comes Lesley Keech now to collar one of them.”

  Officer Keech’s tall form appeared in the doorway. She probably wasn’t any taller than my five foot ten, but she was much skinnier than me, which made her seem taller. Or maybe it was the uniform. She consulted a sheet of paper she was carrying and studied the three ongoing classes. Then she strode over to the painters, cut one student out of the herd, and escorted her out of the barn.

  The chief had worked her way through the painters and started on the potters by the time we broke for lunch.

  “Don’t we get to be interrogated?” one of my students asked as we packed up for the break.

  “I’m sure you will,” I said. “Obviously the chief wanted to start with the painters, since they knew Mr. Prine best, and I expect they’re doing the potters next because their studio is right across from his. I’m going to check with the chief and see if I can find out when she expects to get to our group.”

  They hurried off in a much better mood. Of course, now I had to find a way to talk to the chief, who was probably a bit too busy to bother with me. Maybe I should start by checking in with Cordelia.

  But when I arrived in the great room, I saw the chief standing just outside the door to the studio wing.

  “Ah, Meg,” she said when she saw me. “I was looking for Cordelia.”

  “So was I,” I said. “I expect she’s either in her office or the dining room.”

  “Actually, for my purposes you’ll do just as well. Can you come and talk with me for a few minutes?”

  I didn’t wait to be asked twice. I followed Chief Heedles into the studio wing, and then into Valerian’s leatherworking studio. The chief had claimed one of the long work tables as her desk. She sat behind it, motioned to me to take one of the stools on the other side, and pulled out her notebook.

  “So what can I do for you?” I asked.

  “This vandalism you’ve been having.” The chief pulled out her notebook. “I want to make sure I know about all of the problems you had last week.”

  “You think they could have something to do with Prine’s murder?”

  “No idea,” she said. “But just in case they do—review the list of incidents for me.”

  “Okay.” I pulled out my own notebook and flipped it open to the page where I kept my list. “Monday morning we had the slugs in the clay in the pottery studio.” The chief shuddered at that, from which I deduced she had some experience with touching slugs. “Tuesday morning we found the rain damage to some of the student watercolors. Wednesday morning we found all the student pottery ruined because someone messed with the thermometer on the kiln. Thursday someone scattered ball bearings all over the dance studio floor.”

  “And since that was not only mischievous and destructive but dangerous, that was the point when you called me,” the chief said, nodding. She seemed to be ticking off items in her notebook. That was one of the reassuring things about police officers, from my point of view. They usually came wielding notebooks. I could relate to someone with a notebook, or at least a well-organized to-do list.

  “Friday was the double event—red paint all over Prine’s studio, and the soy sauce and ketchup splashed on Baptiste’s prints. Finally, Saturday, my nephew Eric checked the sound system one last time before the kids’ dance recital began and caught the fact that someone had altered the playlist so instead of ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ the six-year-olds would have made their entrance to George Carlin’s ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.’”

  “Yikes.” She looked up from her notebook. “You never mentioned that one.”

  “Well, it was a close call rather than anything really destructive,” I said. “And we were pretty crazed Saturday and Sunday, what with helping all the first week’s students pack up and check out and then having to clean everything up
before this new batch arrived, so I guess I forgot. And we were hoping whoever was doing it was one of the outgoing bunch, rather than someone who was staying on for more classes this week.”

  The chief nodded, and made a few more notes.

  “By the way,” I said. “As part of our effort to figure out who’s behind the vandalism, I put together a list of everyone who was here last week as well as this—students, faculty, and staff. No idea if last week’s residents are of any interest for the murder investigation—”

  “This isn’t exactly Fort Knox,” she said. “If someone who was here last week had something against Prine, there’s no reason they couldn’t sneak back to knock him off when we wouldn’t suspect them as much. So yes, I’d like to see that list.”

  “I’ll send it to you.” I scribbled a reminder to myself. “I also asked one of my computer-savvy nephews to do some research for me—to figure out which of them had any kind of connection with Jazz Hands, that rival craft center that’s been harassing my grandmother.”

  “The one she suspects is behind the vandalism?”

  I nodded.

  “I’d be interested in that information, too,” she said. “Did Prine have any enemies here?”

  “He had nothing but.” I didn’t see any reason to sugarcoat my opinion of Prine. “By the end of last week, if we’d asked the faculty and students to vote on who was the most likely to get bumped off and have his killer acquitted on grounds of justifiable homicide, Prine would have won by a landslide.”

  “So just about everyone here is a suspect—except possibly your grandmother—I doubt if she’d have done something like this, given how big a problem it’s going to be, losing one of her faculty in the middle of a class week.”

  She was smiling slightly when she said it—for her it was probably the equivalent of a broad grin—so I was pretty sure she didn’t really suspect Cordelia.

  “Actually, you should probably keep her on your suspect list,” I said. “Because if she wanted to knock him off, she’d have known that between my contacts on the craft fair circuit and Michael’s friends in the college, we could come up with a substitute for Prine if we really tried. In fact, one of Michael’s colleagues is already on her way to wrangle the art students for the rest of the week.”