“Rumors,” she snorted. “I thought you would be the last person to fall prey to rumors, Kate.”
“I’m being cautious. Did you know Clifford did time?”
Clara’s voice hitched in her throat, and when she answered, her tone was too high. “I don’t know anything about him.”
It sounded like a lie.
“Clara, I’m trying to help you. If you haven’t noticed, I’m the only person trying to clear your name, but if you keep things from me, if I don’t know the whole truth, then there won’t be anything I can do for you.”
“What are you saying, Kate?” she challenged. “Are you saying I’m lying to you?”
She held her gaze, as tension rose between them, and Kate pressed, “I wonder if you are.” After a beat, she added, “What are you really doing here at the inn?”
Clara said nothing, though her widening eyes seemed to have a lot to say.
“Look, Clara. Right now Scott thinks you did it. I think Clifford Green did it. But if you protect him, if you withhold information, then I’m going to start to think you both did it together.”
“I told you I don’t know him.”
“Then what were you doing kissing him in his room?”
Clara’s jaw dropped.
“He’s staying here. I saw you. Explain.”
“You’ve got it all wrong, Kate. You’ve lost your touch.”
Clara motioned to get to her car, but Kate grabbed her arm, and when Clara jerked free, she said, “I’m going to find out whether you tell me or not.”
“I told you I didn’t do it.”
“Stop telling me what didn’t happen and start telling me what did,” she demanded.
“All right,” she said, tiring. “Clifford didn’t come to town to hurt Cookie. And Cookie didn’t buy a gun to protect herself from Clifford.” She sighed, folded her arms, and came out with it. “I asked Clifford to come. I asked him to help me with Cookie. I knew she was still in love with him, and I knew she would listen. It’s my own fault I got involved with Clifford. I suppose I shouldn’t have, but we didn’t make that leap until after Cookie was killed. The point being...” she trailed off, collecting her thoughts. “Cookie had been acting weird ever since she became close, secretive friends with Becky Langley.”
“What?” Kate asked, astounded.
“That’s right. Becky,” she repeated. “Becky who drives a red Fiat. A red Fiat that looks a hell of a lot like Cookie’s red VW bug.”
“Cookie was killed the night before Becky was taken,” said Kate, thinking this through.
“My guess is that whoever ran her off the road that night thought she was Becky. And when they realized she wasn’t, they couldn’t simply let her go on living.”
“Becky and Cookie look nothing alike,” she countered.
“Which tells you that the killer and the kidnapper don’t know either of them—other than their names and cars.”
After holding Kate’s gaze for a long moment, Clara diverted her eyes, walking briskly to her car and climbing in. Kate watched her drive off. Was Clara telling her the truth, or creating a smokescreen that she and her secret boyfriend could hide behind? The notion that Cookie’s death was at all related to Becky’s abduction was mind-bending, and yet, she couldn’t help but sense it was true. It would be too much of a coincidence that two major crimes could’ve taken place within a day of each other and not be connected. She had thought that from the very start, but for some reason hearing Clara suggest the connection out loud made it seem all the more ludicrous.
Kate felt her cell phone buzzing in her front pocket, but when she glanced at the screen she didn’t recognize the number that was flashing. She swiped it anyway, answering the call.
“Mrs. Fix It, Kate speaking.”
“Kate, hi! It’s Marly Jones, how are you?”
Kate hadn’t spoken to Marly in nearly a year. The woman lived on the outskirts of town near the Pennsylvania State Game Lands, kept to herself, and rarely ventured along Main Street. Every call Kate had received from Marly was in regard to her chicken coop, which foxes and other small scavengers had various ways of damaging in their attempts to get to her hens. In a few short words, Marly indicated this was the reason she was calling.
“Do you have any time today?” she asked, hopefully.
“I can squeeze you in,” she said, wracking her brain for her schedule. “I have two quick fix-it jobs at Daisy’s Luncheonette, but I can swing by after. How bad is the damage?”
“I think it was a fox,” she mentioned. “The little sucker tore up an entire wall of chicken wire, so it needs to be put back in the ground, but the actual wall of chicken wire is intact, so no need for new materials.”
Kate wasn’t sure if that would be true. She’d probably need to bring a few wooden posts to anchor the chicken wire to, but that would be easy enough.
“I’ll see you in a few hours then,” she said, and once Marly thanked her, Kate hopped off the call and stared at the entrance to the inn.
Clifford Green was upstairs, and she might as well dig deep and see if she couldn’t get an answer or two out of him.
Kate passed through the entryway and found Amelia behind the desk. Pausing at the counter, she asked, “Do you happen to know how Clifford Green found out about the inn?”
“I really don’t. I’m usually not here,” she said frankly, “but sitting at home was driving me crazy and I don’t have the stomach to join one of the search parties. God willing they’ll find what they need to locate Becky, but I don’t have it in me to witness directly what they come across.”
“I understand. Do you know if Becky was close friends with Cookie Halpert, the baker?”
Amelia blinked and appeared to be at a loss. “The only person Becky ever talked about was Jason and how thrilled she was to be getting married.”
“Right,” said Kate. “Well, if you could look into which of your employees was doling out that nightly discount, it would be a huge help.”
With that, Kate started for the stairs where she climbed to the second floor and began checking the doors for Room #5. Remembering where Clifford’s window was situated from outside, she made an educated guess to turn left, and soon she found his door.
First, she leaned her ear against the door and listened. The sound of footsteps crossing the room was apparent, and then she heard Clifford closing the window. Drawing in a deep breath, she knocked on the door.
“I don’t need my room straightened,” he called through the door.
“This isn’t the maid service,” she said.
For a moment, the room on the other side of the door fell silent, and then she heard a few footsteps and the door sprang inward, revealing Clifford on the other side. Up close, he looked like the rugged version of his driver’s license photo, and it wasn’t hard to see why two women would be charmed. But Kate wasn’t like most women.
“Who are you?” he asked, furrowing his brow and looking down his nose at her.
“I’m Kate Flaherty, the local handy woman,” she announced, to which he became instantly confused.
“There’s nothing wrong with my room, and no one told me a fix-it person would be coming by.”
“That’s not why I’m here.”
Clifford only looked more confused.
“You were involved with Cookie Halpert, who was killed, and now I see you’re involved with Clara, who was arrested. Why are women falling into trouble after getting involved with you?”
He rolled his eyes. “I don’t have to talk to you.”
“But you should.” After a beat, she pressed, “Where were you the night Cookie was killed?”
“Like I said, I don’t have to talk to you.”
“If you came to town to help Cookie, then you should care about catching who killed her, and if you don’t, that gives me all the more reason to wonder if you did it,” she stated firmly.
“And you’re the local fix-it woman?” he challenged. “What exactly are you trying
to fix?”
“This town. I don’t take kindly to outsiders who show up right before people get killed.” Feeling bold, Kate barreled into his room while he grumbled objections, and then she shut the door.
“It sounds like you know everything I do,” he pointed out, but she wasn’t buying it. “I came to town because Cookie was in trouble according to Clara.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Just that she was acting strangely,” he said.
“Other people have said she started acting strangely because you came to town. She all but ran out of Drake’s Firing Line when she saw you walk through the door.”
“That was for a different reason,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I had been direct with her that I was interested in Clara,” he stated plainly. Though it didn’t exactly coincide with Clara’s account, it also didn’t contradict it.
“Clara just told me—”
“You talked to Clara?”
“Yes, does that surprise you?”
He looked bewildered.
“If you had any idea how small Rock Ridge is, you wouldn’t look so shocked. I know Clara well. And I also knew Cookie. Clara suggested that Cookie had been confused for Becky Langley. Do you know Becky?”
“Look,” he said, sighing. “I used to live in this town, and I know a thing or two about it, but my perspective is a hell of a lot different. From where I’m standing, the outsiders aren’t the problem. The police are. And the worst one of all is Scott York.”
Chapter Nine
Kate slogged through the rest of her day, unnerved that Clifford Green, the prime suspect in Cookie’s murder in her opinion, had suggested that the Rock Ridge Police Department was corrupt and that her very own husband was the worst of it.
As she laid down new tiles in the men’s room at Daisy’s Luncheonette, she reminded herself that it made sense an ex-convict wouldn’t be the biggest fan of the Rock Ridge Police Department. As she moved on to fixing the locks on the stalls in the ladies’ restroom and waiting for the tile putty to dry in the men’s, she told herself not to get rattled by all that Clifford had said, and instead she ought to turn over what she’d learned, even if amounted to mere gossip, to Scott so that he could look into it.
But she couldn’t let it go. And the conundrum was at the forefront of her mind as she handed her invoice over to Daisy, the owner of the luncheonette, and received her check in return.
“Here,” said Daisy, handing her a to-go bag that was steaming hot. “A little lunch for the road.”
“Thank you so much,” she said, immediately lifted out of deep thought by the smell of a fresh hamburger and a cup of coffee. She had been getting lax about eating lunch on time and a proper breakfast for that matter, so when she climbed up behind the wheel of her truck, she was sure to take four big bites of the burger and wash it down with hot coffee before setting the cup in the cup holder and easing out onto the street.
It was a long drive south to Marly Jones’s ranch-style house near the Pennsylvania State Game Lands, and Kate challenged herself not to ponder the strange, convoluted facts as relayed to her by Clifford and Clara.
As she arched around the eastern bend, driving along the old campground site, she noticed there were a number of bulldozers spanning the area, as well as a high stack of materials—wood and concrete blocks and piping set out near the tree line.
If the Mayor, Dean Wentworth, had told the town his office was in the midst of organizing a day where the residents could vote on the issue, he had lied. Clearly, Dean had decided to move forward on the project regardless, and Kate became furious because of it.
Soon Kate was pulling up to Marly’s house, and as she did, she spotted Marly darting across the yard after a handful of chickens that were squawking and sprinting this way and that.
“Marly?” asked Kate, as she stepped out of her truck and jogged over.
“The coop came down!” she yelled, scooping a chicken into her arms as it fought and clucked. “Don’t worry about me. They won’t get far. If you could get that chicken wire back in the ground, then I’ll toss them in one by one.”
“No problem,” she said, rushing to the coop with her toolkit in hand.
Assessing the chicken wire, Kate saw where the wall had been torn up from the earth, and Marly was right that it had been a fox. Kate could see claw marks in the dirt, but at least the soil was loose enough that she would be able to wedge the grate back into the ground and pack dirt around it tightly. She did just that, which took a little less than ten minutes, and then she began angling wooden stakes into the ground from where they had fallen haphazardly across the grass.
Once she was finished, it looked stable, so she fashioned a number of support beams against the stakes and nailed them together.
Marly began tossing her chickens back into the coop, and soon the yard was free of roaming hens.
“To prevent this from happening in the future,” said Kate, eyeing the coop carefully. “I would suggest you let me dig a little trench along the wall. If I fill it with cement then angle the chicken wire in, there will be no way for a fox to dig under it and get into the coop.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” said Marly, considering the proposition.
“Tell you what, if you can email me an estimate, I’ll let you know when I have the extra cash.”
“Sure thing,” she said. “But I wouldn’t wait too long. The hotter it gets out here, the more aggressive the scavengers will become at night.”
After Marly wrote out a check and handed it to Kate, Kate set off towards Meredith Joste’s art deco house, eating the rest of her hamburger as she went.
She worked on the outdoor patio until dusk settled across the landscape, and as she was packing up, she gave Jared a quick call.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Hey, how did the rest of the search for Becky go?”
“In terms of the police dog picking up her? Good. In terms of how Jason handled the long morning? Terrible.”
“Where is he now?” she asked, concerned.
“At home. He’s completely shut down.”
“Why? Didn’t he find it promising that you found Becky’s necklace?”
“I guess not.”
“All right. I’m going to stop in on him, make sure he’s eating and not wallowing too badly.”
Kate didn’t want Jason to shut her out, which meant that there would be no point in calling ahead to see if he’d be up for a visit. Instead, she drove to his house and parked along the curb.
Night had fallen, and as she walked to the front door, she noticed the lights were off inside the house. Jason hadn’t even bothered to turn on the floodlights outside. His house looked as depressed as he was.
She knocked on the door then called out Jason’s name, adding, “It’s Mom. Honey, please come to the door.”
A long moment passed before the outside light flipped on overhead, and then the door open, revealing Jason, who looked as though she had woke him from a long nap.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, groggily.
“I thought you could use a drink,” she said, giving him the once over and breathing a sigh of relief that he was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt—albeit a slightly rumpled one. “When was the last time you were at The Rail?”
Convincing Jason to hop in her truck to head to her favorite bar was less challenging than she would’ve thought. Either Jason was resigned and didn’t see the point in fighting her, or he was in need of a frothy beer, but he went easily, and soon they were pulling up to the entrance where there was a vacant spot.
Inside, Kate suggested a table in front of the windows, and when Jason sat down, gazing vacantly into the dark parking lot, she stole away to the bar where the owner, James Banks, was lazily drying off glassware with a towel.
“Hey, Kate,” he said, glancing up at her with round eyes. “Any leads finding Becky today?”
James had been in another search group that m
orning at the dog park and probably heard about the necklace, but like Kate, didn’t know much beyond that.
“Not that I’m aware of,” she said, before ordering the usual.
James filled two-pint mugs with a stout IPA from the tap and told her it was on the house. After thanking him, she carried the mugs to Jason and set his in front of him.
“I need to ask you a few things,” she said, sliding into the chair across from him.
“I really don’t feel like being interrogated. I already talked to the police... again.”
“You did?” she asked, surprised.
“Yes, they went over all the same questions with me about Becky and the guy who broke in, and honestly, the fact that they were going over all this stuff I’d already answered gave me a really bad feeling.”
“You think they don’t believe you?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Well, what do they think happened if they don’t believe your account?”
“I don’t know, but one thing’s for sure, the result of the drug test came back, and I didn’t have anything in my system.”
“Is it possible you weren’t drugged?”
“You think I’d confuse something like that? A person knows when they’ve been drugged, Mom.”
“Then why did your test come back clean?” she asked.
“I have no idea, but because it did, Scott now thinks it’s suspicious that I took so long to contact the police after Becky was taken.”
“Jason, let me just set your mind at ease. Scott believes you. He wouldn’t think you’re a suspect. Period. He’s known you far too long to even consider such a thing.”
“You weren’t in that interrogation room, Mom. I was. And so was Scott.”
So Clifford Green had his reservations about Scott and how he ran the police department, and now Jason was questioning her husband’s ability to pull clues together. It didn’t bode well, but rather than challenge her son, who seemed beyond exhausted as he drank his beer and stared through the window at times, she decided to offer Jason her friendly company instead.
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