by Jean Flowers
I looked around my bedroom, tapping my pen while I thought, pausing now and then to doodle. Without consciously applying myself, I found I’d drawn what could pass for a tree branch and part of a quilt. It wasn’t hard to figure out how my mind worked.
I was distracted by the dusty surfaces of my room and the pitiful state of the décor. It was past time to take down tattered posters that were from trips to Boston’s MFA more than a year ago. Linda would have had her favorites matted and framed; I still acted as though I lived in a dorm room. I’d thought about removing Aunt Tess’s old, busy lilac wallpaper and painting the room a fresh off-white or pale yellow for a change. Maybe I could talk Quinn into helping. As a woodworker, as well as an antiques dealer, he had a practiced eye for interior decorating. Or maybe I could just declutter and dust before committing to a bigger project.
When my glance landed on my purse, in its usual place on a chair next to my bed, I felt a plan taking shape.
I knew that Eileen Jackson, who’d hosted the quilting meeting the other night, was a night owl. She’d mentioned it in connection with an all-night radio talk show she listened to. I scrolled through my phone contacts and called her. To my relief, she sounded chipper, and ready to chat.
“No apology necessary. You know I was up,” she said when I mentioned the late hour.
“I think I left my new sunglasses at your house,” I said, after our greetings. “It was still sunny when we arrived at your house, but dark when we left, so I didn’t notice.”
“Do you remember where you might have left them?” Eileen asked, sounding eager to help, thus bringing about a sour taste in my lying mouth. I cleared my throat, now nervous about prolonging my fiction. I should have checked on whether it had rained on Tuesday evening, for example. “I’m pretty sure I put them on the table with that beautiful stained glass Tiffany-style lamp.”
“Oh yes, I love that lamp. The shop where they made them is gone now. I guess I’m not the only one who’s allowed to retire.” She paused, possibly reflecting on all the cool shops that were no longer with us. “I think I would have seen your glasses, since that’s my reading corner, but let me check. Maybe they fell behind the chair. Can you hold?”
“Sure.”
I felt really bad sending Eileen on a wild-goose chase, since I knew for a fact that my sunglasses were in my purse. Did real cops rely on this kind of trick? Did Sunni ever pull something like this? Did she train Ross Little, the young officer I’d come to know, in these wily ways? Had she ever pulled a fast one on me? I didn’t want to believe it.
Eileen was back. “Sorry, Cassie. I don’t see them. I’ll check again tomorrow, when it’s light, and I’ll also check with Buddy. He might have found them and moved them. I’ll call you if I find them.”
Great. Now Eileen’s husband would be enlisted in this fool’s errand. I thanked her for her trouble, thinking I should bring her some candy or flowers to make up for my deceit.
I realized I hadn’t quite thought through the next step. I’d created a believable excuse to contact Eileen, but how was I supposed to get from her useful information for the murder investigation? I couldn’t exactly ask her whereabouts during the storm. The category-zero storm that hit the town on Monday was already old news to most of North Ashcot’s citizens. The wind and rain had done little damage, except to provide a fleeting cover for Daisy’s murder.
Cliff’s idea had been to ask Daisy’s friends if they noticed anything unusual or if Daisy had fought with anyone recently. I had no idea how to approach that topic with Eileen. It was clearer than ever why someone with training in interrogation techniques should be left alone to do her job. I should go back to perfecting my skills at the job I already had. What had that note said? Do your job.
Contrarian that I was, I made a stab at prolonging the conversation with the accommodating Eileen.
“Thanks for checking, Eileen. I suppose I might have left them in another purse.” She had no way of knowing that I never changed my large, roomy leather purse, unless it was to switch to a small clutch for a wedding or, in Boston, for clubbing with Linda (who changed purses with each outfit). “And thanks for hosting us the other night, by the way.”
“It was the least I could do to honor Daisy and try to keep her passion alive. It’s such a shame, what happened.”
A nice thought from a nice lady. One who didn’t deserve to be manipulated. “I wonder what will become of the shop,” I said, as if I didn’t have a direct line to its owner.
“That’s a good question. Of course, I’m happy to have the group here on a regular basis,” Eileen said.
“Or we could rotate so no one has the burden every week.” In a record-breaking round of questionable connections, I thought of Molly and her lameness, how she’d told us a different story from the one she offered in the post office today. “We could give Molly a pass for a while, however, until her ankle heals.”
“Oh, for sure,” Eileen said.
“I saw her today at the post office,” I said. “She’s doing much better. Which reminds me. You wouldn’t happen to know if she still has her cat, would you?”
“Not anymore. She swore last winter, when the last of her three tabbies died, that she wouldn’t get another one. Why do you ask?”
“Mentioning her reminded me that my friend’s cats passed on also, and she’s looking for someone to give their toys to.”
“Well, not Molly. And not me, I’m afraid. I’m a dog person. Bitsy is a very shy little chow chow, so I tucked her away in our bedroom the other night when the group was over, but I know you two would get along really well.”
After a minute or two of pet talk, we were ready to end the call. I thanked her again for searching for my sunglasses and for her great hospitality. I looked forward to meeting Bitsy, I told her, as my final fabrication.
By now I was upset with myself and a little frightened at the ease with which I’d come up with falsehoods. Would I ever be able to look Eileen straight in the eye again? Or myself in the mirror?
As if I’d conducted a real interview, I inserted a check mark next to Eileen’s name on the Daisy page of my notepad.
And a question mark next to Molly’s. Why had she lied to the curious barista in the post office? Did it mean anything in the larger scheme of things? Maybe Molly was a chronic teller of white lies, and both stories—blaming first the Adirondack chair and then the cat for her tripping—were fiction. I didn’t know Molly very well; maybe she was a private person, not wanting to share her personal life with a casual acquaintance or a stranger as the barista might have been, and made it a practice to make things up as she went along.
Aunt Tess always said one reason not to tell lies was that you had to have a very good memory to keep them straight, whereas if you always told the truth, you had nothing to worry about. I felt a flush across my face as I thought of what she’d have to say of my dealings tonight.
Of course, Aunt Tess didn’t have a murder to solve.
But then, technically, neither did I.
I made quick calls to Quinn and Linda, who’d texted me while I was on the phone with Eileen. I was glad I was able to end the evening with honest exchanges and a few smiles.
Quinn didn’t press me for how I was handling Cliff’s recruitment efforts. Instead, he teased with news of something special he’d picked up for me. I made a few guesses, but he stuck to his plan. I’d have to wait till he returned to find out.
Linda kept me distracted for a while, talking about a possible career change. An opening had come up for a job as postal inspector. It would mean more travel and she’d miss the group she now supervised, but maybe she was ready for that change. What did I think?
“Do I really want to be the ‘Postal Police’?” she asked.
“What’s the best thing and the worst thing about the job?” I asked, pulling out the kind of question we always asked each othe
r before a big decision.
“Best: An amazing variety of challenges. Mail fraud. Identity theft. Credit card fraud. Robberies that involve our employees or facilities. Mailing of contraband. The variety is endless.”
“But you’d have to specialize.”
“Right. And believe it or not, I’m attracted to the education programs, teaching kids especially how to use the Internet wisely—it’s now considered a form of ‘mail’ and therefore falls under our mission.”
“Wow. Do we even need to get to the worst part of the job?”
“A lot of new training, for one thing.” I heard a partial yawn. “Maybe more tomorrow night?”
“Okay, if you must go.”
Linda sensed my need for an upbeat ending and hit me with an old joke.
“Did you hear the one about the unstamped letter?” she asked. Then gave me the punch line, though I’d already started to laugh. “Never mind. You wouldn’t get it.”
With two large doses of happy talk, I was ready to call it a night, grateful to have both Linda and Quinn in my life.
I inhaled deeply, turned out my light, and slid under the covers.
9
My commute to work should have been uneventful. The skies were clear, traffic normal. But my head ached, as it did when I was a kid and had a chocolate hangover the day after Halloween. And many other days in the year, I recalled.
Stopped at a light, I reached to massage my lower back. I’d twisted my spine somehow, possibly while rechecking the condition of my car in my driveway. I’d wanted to take advantage of the daylight to look for scratches or other marks, and to be sure I hadn’t had any unwelcome visitors during the night.
I had a moment of embarrassment over the lies I’d told Eileen. Would a confession to her make it better or worse? Or was it enough that I promised myself I’d never carry out such a charade again? I blamed Cliff in part, for talking me into sleuthing. I blamed Quinn for not being here to stop me. And I blamed Sunni for not inviting me to share in the investigation in an open way.
As I drove I kept looking at the empty passenger seat, trying to picture how my property was stolen yesterday. Whose hands had snatched my dinner and my files from the gray cushion? A hungry homeless man? A masked man, a killer who was a stranger to the town? I doubted it as much as I doubted that such a drifter was responsible for Daisy’s murder. I preferred to believe I’d been the victim of a couple of kids with sticky fingers from oversized soft drinks, or teenagers high on their parents’ stash of something stronger.
I replayed my actions on parking the car yesterday evening. I wanted to convince myself that I had left the car unlocked in my agitated state at the time, from following the intruder into the fabric shop, and therefore, my car was easy pickings. It was nothing personal, I told myself over and over. Just as the nasty do your job note was nothing personal.
Still, as I parked in my spot today, I scanned the area in a way that was different from yesterday. Later, as I hoisted the flag, I glanced across the lawn at my car, the only one in the lot at this hour. I hurried into the building through the side door, locked it, and headed for the sorting area, my heart rate returning to normal only after a few minutes of routine stuffing of post office boxes.
I focused on filling the boxes with letters, flyers, and postcards, pausing a few times to fill out a form for pickup at the counter when an oversized piece came through. I resisted the temptation to stand at the window and keep watch over my car. I knew I’d be nervous until it was time to open the doors and get caught up in new activity in the building.
No personal (or not personal) hate mail today. That was a break. As if to teach me a lesson (“you’re not off the hook yet”), the universe sent me a person of interest in a homicide as my first customer. Jules Edwards was at the head of the line when I unlocked the front doors for business. Not that I had assigned a motive to him—I’d scrapped the idea of an affair between him and Daisy as soon as it formed—but they had seen a lot of each other during her last eight or ten days on earth.
Jules and I stood, eye-to-eye, across my counter. “Hey, Cassie,” he said. “One good thing about having to do my own errands today since my assistant is out sick—I get to say hi to a lot of people I seldom see.”
I greeted him with a weak smile, aware of his name in my suspect column. “How are you doing?” I asked, assuming he’d know what I meant: now that one of your clients is no longer with us.
Jules’s face took on a sad expression. I’d estimated that he was middle-aged, possibly in his mid-fifties, Cliff’s age, ten years older than Daisy. “It’ll never be the same, will it?” he said.
I shook my head. “I hope the police are making headway in the investigation. Whoever did this needs to be caught,” I said.
“For sure.”
While we were talking, I weighed and stamped a dozen thick envelopes that were over the one-ounce limit for first class, all from Jules’s accounting practice to businesses in Berkshire County. I wondered if the packets contained informational literature, solicitations offering his services, now that he had an opening for a new client.
“Have you been able to help them at all?” I asked, affixing an extra-weight stamp to an envelope headed to Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
“Excuse me?” Jules looked confused. “Help to . . . ?”
“The police. I just assumed they would have talked to all of Daisy’s employees and business associates.”
“Yeah, yeah, of course, they interviewed me,” Jules said. “I’m sure they’re doing their best.”
I noticed his nervous twitch and wondered if there were any forensic studies linking criminal activities to peculiarities like twitching. On one of our more interesting lunch dates, Sunni had taught me about anthropological criminology, the early attempts to link physical appearance, like the shape of one’s head and the distance between one’s eyes, to criminal behavior. I wished I had time to examine Jules for some of the correlations made in those early days. Large sinuses, sloping shoulders, large chest, and small forehead with wrinkles were a few that I remembered—features that it seemed everyone in line today exhibited. And what exactly was a “large incisor”? No wonder the “criminals are born” theory hadn’t made much headway.
As I responded to my own need to scratch my nose, Jules leaned a bony elbow on the counter. “I just remembered—Cliff wants to meet with me to go over some accounting points for the fabric shop, and he suggested that you be there, too, Cassie. Do you have any idea why?”
“I guess it’s because Daisy handled the financial aspects of the business, and Cliff wants to get up to speed,” I offered.
“Sure, sure. But I mean, why would he want you there?” His expression gave every indication that he thought it would be a dumb idea. Or that he thought I was dumb. Or both.
If I believed in vibes, I’d have called the one coming from Jules chilly, as if he were daring me to defend my right to be at the meeting. A meeting I didn’t want to go to in the first place. But Jules’s challenge gave Cliff’s invitation a new twist, and in my special perverseness, I made up my mind to be there.
“I guess we’ll find out,” I said. I took Jules’s money, handed back his change and receipt, and addressed the woman behind him, who’d been showing signs of impatience. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” I said to her, holding out my arms to receive her oversized package. Jules gave me a slight frown and a salute of some kind and left the counter.
I could hardly wait for our meeting.
* * *
I shouldn’t have been surprised when Cliff came by at lunch with another copy of his files and another set of white take-out boxes, the latter oozing the aroma of cashew nut chicken.
“You don’t always have to bring food,” I said, thinking especially of the hard time I had holding on to it. Or ever tasting it. The earlier chicken dinner had gone to the starving chief of polic
e, and the shrimp scampi went the way of stolen goods never to be recovered.
“I’ve been meaning to try the new Thai place at the other end of Main,” Cliff said as we made our way to the community room. Once more we took advantage of volunteers setting up for an event and entered through the unlocked door from the outside. A large banner across the stage welcomed freshmen for orientation. Cliff addressed a high school student who seemed to be part of the team preparing for the program.
“We usually have lunch here at this back table,” Cliff told him, setting down the now-familiar plastic boxes and folders he’d carried in.
The young man, who had my vote for Cutest Homecoming King, scratched his head through his blond buzz cut. He looked around, anxious, but apparently saw no one above his pay grade. “I don’t know,” he said.
Cliff continued to set our table, so to speak, oozing authority, an attitude probably linked to his training as a security guard. “Don’t worry; you won’t have to clean up after us. We always take care of it ourselves.”
I wanted to come out to the cute guy and admit that we’d done this only one other time, that it was not the regularly scheduled event Cliff made it out to be, and that we had no more permission to use the room as a lunchroom than any other citizen of the town. Since our students shared one high school with students in South Ashcot, where the school was located, I guessed the cute guy was from there and didn’t recognize either of us.
The boy slinked away. I hoped he wasn’t on his way to find a legitimate authority figure.
“Aren’t you a little ashamed of pulling rank like that, buffaloing a poor teenager?” I asked Cliff, half teasing.
“Shouldn’t they be in school anyway?” he countered.
“It’s summer. And anyway, I think schedules today are more flexible than when we were in school.”
“You mean me. I guess I’m an old man. But”—he pointed to the young man, busily placing literature on the rows of chairs—“as long as I can make my muscle work for me . . .” He ended with a smile and a shrug.
