by Jean Flowers
Sunni was alone in the building when I knocked on her office door around seven thirty Friday evening.
“I hope you brought food,” she said, not raising her head from the files on her old oak desk.
“How does Thai chicken with cashew sauce sound?” I asked, lifting the container over my shoulder, waitress-style.
She looked up and I noticed dark circles under her eyes, her red hair falling out of her usually neat bun, her face almost as gray as her uniform shirt. “You wouldn’t tease me about something like that, would you?”
I lowered the bag that contained my lunch, waving it slightly to release the aroma, proud that at the last minute before heading over here, I’d remembered that it was in my fridge and made a detour to my office. “It’s the real thing,” I said, not bothering to mention that the meal came courtesy of Cliff Harmon.
“Hand it over. I can’t talk until I’ve had something to eat.”
“That kind of day, huh?”
“Instant oatmeal goes only so far.”
I followed Sunni to the small, windowless break room at the other end of the building and set the round table with plastic utensils and napkins while she nuked the plate.
It wasn’t like Sunni to whine at such length. She continued. “As if there weren’t enough on my plate”—she pointed to the container spinning in the microwave—“and I don’t mean this kind of plate. Ross will be leaving us in about a week.”
Reason enough to be cranky. “I’m sorry to hear that.” Officer Ross Little was a capable, likable young man and I knew Sunni would miss him. His departure would also reduce her staff to four officers, including herself. “Why is he leaving?”
“He got a better offer from the Springfield PD. I can’t blame him. He’s not really a small-town guy.” She smiled. “Maybe the last straw was his assignment to Girls’ Hockey Day two years in a row.”
I wanted to ask why a murder investigation, now in progress, wasn’t enough to hold the interest of a sworn officer of the law, but I thought it was too soon to bring up the Daisy Harmon case. The success of the idea I would be presenting depended a great deal on proper timing.
We took bottles of water from the fridge and sat with our dinner, most of which I dished out to my hardworking friend.
“This is delicious,” she said. “I’m really not in the mood for a restaurant. In fact, I hate stepping out of the office these days.”
I knew Sunni was referring to the press corps, small but persistent, who followed her around at times like this. Even worse, the murder in North Ashcot had drawn reporters from surrounding towns as well. We gave thumbs-up to the Thai sauce and decided to visit the restaurant in person when things were more settled, whatever that meant.
I let Sunni go on about how she and her soon-to-be-reduced force of officers were stretched to the limit. She ticked off the issues. Bullying in the elementary school yard, requiring a new program of seminars and training for the teachers, as well as talks with the student body. A string of smash-and-grab robberies at a strip mall on the border with South Ashcot. A rash of Peeping Tom incidents in a neighborhood in the southeast corner of town.
“And, not that I don’t love our citizens,” she said, “but our building is the go-to place for any kind of complaint. Your neighbor sprays your dog when he waters his lawn? A passerby left a candy wrapper on the sidewalk in front of your house? The parking meters are too close together? Tell the police.”
“People actually report these things?”
She nodded. “Sometimes they file a report, sometimes they just want to vent. We try to steer this kind of thing to a civilian volunteer, but most want someone in uniform to listen to them, taking up an officer’s time.”
I tsk-tsked in sympathy, figuring that every problem she listed was an argument for my idea as the most logical course of action. Help was on the way, in the form of Cassie Miller, Postmaster and Sometime Sleuth, I thought, as Sunni went on.
“We also had a request from Brookside to help with their security. The storm ravaged their shopping district, landing on them minutes after skirting our own Main Street. The storm hit them so much harder than it hit us.” She paused. “Well, not as hard in some ways. No one died there.”
Although Sunni seemed to give all items on her to-do list equal emphasis, it was clear from her drawn face and shaky voice that Daisy’s death and its aftermath were weighing on her. “And, as if we needed one more little project, we have two Brookside men in custody in our jail, since the perimeter of their facility was compromised during the storm.”
I was ready to move in, convinced that the litany of Sunni’s overload was the ideal setup for me to make my case. Especially since she opened the door, as the lawyers on TV said, to talking about Brookside.
“You know, they’ve closed the post office there,” I said. Casually, of course.
“I saw that as I drove by the other day. I thought I was on the wrong block for a minute. Then I figured they were remodeling. It’s really gone?”
“It’s a pet-grooming place now.” I tried to imbue the statement with as much of a heavy, dramatic tone as Ben had given it earlier.
“Sad,” Sunni said.
“Makes me realize I need to keep my options open and my résumé polished,” I said.
“Don’t say that. They’d never close North Ashcot.” Said with such authority I decided to let it stand. “What’s for dessert?” she asked, causing me to lose my nerve.
“Coming up,” I said, clearing away the trash from our meal.
“You’re kidding.” Her eyes widened. “I was kidding.”
“No kidding. It’s not much but”—I pulled out a package of two chocolate cupcakes that had been included with lunch—“better than fortune cookies, which would require our presence in a restaurant.”
Sunni seemed overly pleased by the poor excuse for dessert, and led the way to the more comfortable chairs in her office, around a small conference table. I quashed unpleasant memories of a similar arrangement in Jules’s office earlier this evening. The packaged cupcakes were no match for those from our bakery, but washed down with excellent coffee from Sunni’s superb top-of-the-line equipment, they weren’t too bad.
“This is nice, Cassie. You know, I’ve never had a close friend. I mean, as an adult.” She took a bite of cupcake, a swig of coffee. “There’s the quilting group, and I love that, but it’s not the same as one-on-one.”
“With a job like this, you don’t have a lot of free time. You’re practically on call all the time,” I said.
“It’s not only that, but also no one ever wants to hear what I do all day.” She chuckled. “I’m starting to sound like my undertaker brother-in-law in Maine.”
What did it say about me that I loved hearing what cops did? And undertakers. I didn’t know one personally, but I had a feeling I’d find her or him fascinating. Much more exciting than the time I uncovered mail fraud when I found a teddy bear in a media-mail-only package.
“I’m surprised,” I said. “Don’t people always want to hear cops talk about their adventures?”
“Like whose cat was in the tree and why did it take all day to get it down? Or, worse, as I just poured out all my woes on you?” She shook her head. “Nuh-uh. Sometimes a case will capture their attention, but then I’m not at liberty to talk about it, am I?”
“Like with a murder,” I said.
“Exactly. I remember when I was working in a big-city department. Hartford PD. And at the end of the day one of my girlfriends would be complaining that the copy machine in her office was on the fritz. And I’d be thinking how I’d nearly gotten shot, stranded in an alley with a guy high out of his mind.”
“Wow,” I said, to keep her going.
“Yeah, this one time, my partner and I were stranded in the worst part of town. This was before GPS, and the bad guys knew we depended on street sig
ns to call in our location. What they’d do is remove the signs in the neighborhood to make it almost impossible to get backup in the middle of a war zone.”
“Clever, when you think about it. But how awful for you.”
“You said it. But who’s going to let me whine about how tough a cop’s job is, like I’m doing now? Except you just did, so thanks.”
Another opening? If not now, when? It was the first I’d heard that she’d once worked in Connecticut and that she had a brother-in-law. Sunni was in a sharing, perhaps vulnerable mood. As her friend, I owed it to myself to take advantage of the situation and offer to help.
“My pleasure,” I said. I gazed up at the large framed portrait hanging on the wall over a file cabinet, of North Ashcot’s first chief of police, one Joseph Lemuel Tanner. He seemed pleasant enough, encouraging me. “I have an idea,” I said. More like croaked.
“Oh?” Sunni sounded curious enough but didn’t pause in her nibbling at the edges of the decorative cupcake frosting. “Is this going to ruin a nice evening?”
Maybe she wasn’t that vulnerable. I shook my head, though I wasn’t sure. “What if I could help you?”
She spread her arms to encompass the table and the evidence of a meal shared. “You are helping. That’s my point.”
“I mean really help. You have so much going on, and Ross is leaving in the middle of it,” I said, my palms sweating.
She smiled. So far, so good. “You want to replace Ross?”
“No, no, I’m just saying that there must be some way you can use me, temporarily, to help with the biggest case you have to deal with right now. You wouldn’t have to pay me, of course.”
She ran her hand across her brow in a mock gesture of relief. “Whew.”
“I have a few things to offer,” I said, buoyed by the fact that she hadn’t cut me off yet. Or pulled her gun on me. “Did you know that the postal service has an extensive investigative branch? Much of our inspectors’ work is like police work. They have to sort through communications from all kinds of people. It could be a report from a supervisor, a lead from a suspicious customer or coworker—or a tip from a man on the street.” I threw up my hands, as if to surrender to a great truth. “It’s truly detective work.”
“Did you work for that department? As an inspector?”
I cleared my throat. Why did I think Sunni might have let that little attempt at deception slip by? She was no longer hungry and she wasn’t that tired. “No, but I’ve heard postal inspectors speak, and seen them in action.” Sunni laughed out loud this time, and I couldn’t blame her. But I forged ahead. “I’ve been called to take over a post more than once when an inspector has come to arrest a supervisor. I even had to testify a couple of times. I can’t tell you the details of the cases, but—”
“Not exactly frontline action,” Sunni said.
“Sorry—I wasn’t trying to put something over on you. Not completely, anyway. But I do believe I have the skills and at one time I thought of applying. And in the job I have, I have to know a lot about postal rules and regulations, and a law is a law, right?”
“A lot of homicides in the Boston postal system, were there?”
Since Sunni was still in a relaxed frame of mind—maybe it was the low-end cupcakes—I chose to chuckle at her comment and continue, sticking closer to current reality this time. “I’m close to this case,” I said. “And even though I’m in the quilting group only because of you, there are some members who might be intimidated when they have to deal with you professionally, whereas I’m just another fellow gossiper.”
“So you’ve decided that Daisy’s killer was a member of the quilting group?”
I blew out a breath, my stress level having caught up with me. “Sunni, you know that’s not what I mean. I have a feeling you know exactly what I’m proposing.” I took another breath and went all out. “Yes or no?”
The silence nearly strangled me. Sunni took her time. Another bite of cupcake. Another sip of coffee. At least she still hadn’t gone for her handcuffs, I reminded myself. Her face gave nothing away, which I chose to interpret as her giving my words serious consideration.
“You know,” she finally began, “I have to give you credit for not throwing it in my face that you helped immensely on a case last year.”
“I didn’t do all that much,” I said, softly, recalling with reluctance an upsetting time when I’d been back only a couple of months.
“Tell you what,” she said, replacing her mug on the table. “I could use a serious brainstorming session. Why don’t we start with that and see where it gets us?”
“Great,” I said, feeling better than I had all week. “Maybe I’ll be deputized before the night’s over.”
“Don’t push your luck.”
* * *
I was glad Sunni had suggested a break before we got down to the details of the investigation. She needed to make some calls and agreed to meet me at my house in an hour, at nine o’clock.
“It’s about time I got out of this office,” she’d said.
I sent a quick text to Quinn before starting my car.
1 mtg over, another starting. Skype later?
I turned my key and got on the road for home, glad I’d have time to get my thoughts organized. So far this week, I’d scribbled things in my notebook as they’d occurred to me, intending to put them in order. Now was the time. I didn’t want to ruin the chance I had to work with Sunni by appearing amateurish. Never mind that I was, in fact, an amateur.
There was still light left to the day as I pulled into my driveway, excited to be on this new path of cooperation. I’d climbed three or four steps before I saw a piece of white paper sticking out from under my door. More ads, I thought. I played a guessing game with myself. The opening of a new Japanese restaurant. A discount on dry cleaning. A coupon for breakfast cereal. An offer for housekeeping service.
I reached the landing, unlocked my door, and entered, dodging the rest of the eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet. I continued my internal guessing. A lost kitty, a kid looking to mow my lawn at a reasonable rate.
I bent down and picked up the sheet.
And the winner was: another handwritten note, with only a few words.
One last warning. Back off.
I slammed the door shut and turned the key in the lock. I hoped I hadn’t locked myself in with a madman.
12
I leaned against my front door, breathing hard, clutching the second note. With a stab of fear, I realized I couldn’t presume that the messenger had left the note and disappeared. He might be in my house right now.
I pushed myself away from my door, opened it, and stepped outside. I took a breath. Should I call Sunni? Was I becoming one of those frantic, pesty-citizen stories she’d be relating to someone next month? I tried to override my fright and think.
The first note, the do your job admonition, had been sent through the postal system—addressed to Postmaster, stamped, and delivered to my office via the usual route by the mail truck. It could have come from anywhere. This second warning was not in an envelope. This time, the sender, assuming it was the same person, had made a brazen move—a sheet of paper stuck under my door. It was just now turning dark, so the culprit must have marched up my front steps in the daylight. He was telling me he knew where I lived and didn’t care who saw him. But if he’d broken in, the note wouldn’t have been sticking out the door; it would have been inside.
Now that I’d settled that, I reentered my living room, treading softly, and carrying Aunt Tess’s old cast-iron frying pan. Confidence and bravery aside, I crept through my rooms, holding my breath at each new threshold, checking corners, looking for anything out of place.
Not that I had a clue what I would do if a person with a knife or gun leaped out of my closet, or pulled my feet out from under me from a hiding place under my bed. I couldn’t shake the c
reepy thoughts. All I could do was make sure my windows and doors were locked. I made the rounds, doing a three-sixty spin now and then to be sure there was no one over my shoulder. The fact that locks were in place and that nothing seemed disturbed didn’t calm me as much as it should have.
Back in the living room, I took my phone from my purse and sat on my rocker, tempted to call Sunni and ask her to rush over. I wished I’d told her about the first note. At the time, I believed the note had nothing to do with the investigation of Daisy’s murder. Now I wasn’t so sure.
Still, I resisted sounding the alarm. No need to overreact. I was safe; my house was locked up, and I could use the next forty-five minutes before she was due, to pull my thoughts together. So what if I was jittery and jumped at each shadow created by the lights of a passing car, at every old-house creak and refrigerator noise? Suddenly, the ice cube maker had all the crashing sound effects of a B&E and the ticking of Aunt Tess’s grandfather clock was louder than a Boston club on a Friday night.
It took a few minutes to adjust to the fact that I was now operating with permission from Sunni. There was nothing I had to hold back from the chief of police. I knew there would be caveats and limits attached to what she could tell me, but I felt I’d finally made the team. I waited for the feeling of safety that should give me. It wasn’t speeding toward me.
* * *
By eight forty-five, with the help of a large mug of coffee, I’d almost finished a list of people I had reason to suspect in Daisy’s death. I couldn’t bring myself to call any of them murderers or even potential murderers; they were citizens of my hometown. Friends, acquaintances, customers; not killers. I jotted down names and what I called their suspicious behavior.
First, there was the note writer. The words and phrases themselves should not instill fear in a typical reader of thrillers like me. Do your job, go home, warning, back off. These were phrases associated with mild outbursts, not ransom notes or bomb threats. But in the context of my snooping around, being seen with the victim’s husband, entertaining the chief of police in my home (and feeding her), the note writer, Anonymous, had to be considered at least a person of interest. Thus, my first entry listed a specific suspicious behavior, but no name. Not the best start.
