by Janet Bolin
Haylee jumped in. “But I collected them.”
I patted my stomach. “And I have them here.”
“You ate them?” Vicki asked in exaggerated shock. Then at the expression that must have been on my face, she relented. “Just kidding. You tried to hide them in your shirt, right?”
I mumbled, “I guess I didn’t succeed.”
“Considering the odd bulges, not to mention the odor, no, you didn’t. Why did you stuff them into your shirt?” she asked.
“I didn’t have a bag, and they wouldn’t have fit in my jeans pocket. I would have thrown them in the trash, but I thought they could be important, and could maybe give us proof of who dumped those kittens.”
“You realize,” Vicki scolded, “that anything that you removed from a site can’t be used as evidence, even about dumping animals, no matter how ‘important’ it seems?”
I nodded miserably, waiting for her to add that I could be arrested for interfering in an investigation.
“I’d like to see what’s on those papers.” Gartener’s deep, warm voice could actually be comforting. “But the wind’s too strong and Haylee might have to retrieve them again. I’ll get them from you in the shelter of my car.” While he was hauling me off to jail, most likely. I decided that studying my feet, which seemed to need to wiggle around, was probably the most worthwhile thing I could do right then.
“Did you remove anything else from those premises, Willow?” Vicki asked.
I dragged my gaze back to her face. “No, but we saw a shirt hanging from a deck chair. It looked like the pink plaid shirt we saw on Cassie, the woman who was Neil’s assistant at the bakery.”
Both police officers became very still, and so did my feet, finally.
“And it hadn’t been there after supper,” Haylee chimed in, “when we went out for ice cream.”
I added, “On another of our outings for ice cream, I thought I saw Cassie in that cottage.”
“When?” Detective Gartener’s voice was as rich as ever, but his question sounded urgent.
I turned toward Haylee. “The night that Max and Zara caught up with us on the beach and we didn’t actually get any ice cream.”
“Monday night.” Her dry tone showed her scorn for her cousins.
“Did you also see Cassie at that cottage that night, Haylee?” Gartener asked.
“No,” Haylee answered. “I was in a hurry to get away from Max and Zara.”
“Why?” Vicki sounded on the verge of laughter.
“Max called me his aunt.”
Vicki covered her mouth.
“Max hadn’t seen his aunt Opal since he was three and Opal was sixteen,” I explained. “And Haylee does look older than sixteen.”
“And Max Brubaugh looks like a fake,” Haylee retorted. “Maybe he’s the real Max Brubaugh, my cousin, but he doesn’t act like Opal or me.” She swept her palm across an invisible surface. “We’re not that smooooooth.”
I defended him. “He had to learn that for his job.”
“Exactly.” Haylee turned to Gartener and Vicki. “You two must be good at telling when someone is lying. Have you interviewed Max and Zara yet?”
“No reason to,” Gartener said. “And I got a good look at both of them in Opal’s store.”
Haylee folded her arms. “But . . . they arrived in the vicinity right before Neil was murdered!”
“Lots of people were in the vicinity,” Vicki pointed out, “including all of us standing out here in a gully.”
Helpful.
“We may get to the Brubaughs yet,” Gartener said. “Meanwhile, Haylee and Willow, you two come with me and let’s have a look at the scraps of paper you found.”
Vicki muttered, “I’ll stay here in the ditch with the garbage bag until your team arrives to pick it up.”
“I’d wait with you,” Gartener said, a smile in his voice, “but I need to see what Willow found, and then I need to arrange for that search warrant.”
Vicki looked straight at me. Her eyes flashed in the moonlight. “At least the garbage bag in the culvert doesn’t stink.”
“Willow doesn’t, either,” Gartener retorted. “At least not much.” How magnanimous.
He scrambled up the slippery slope, with Sally close behind him and Haylee and me nearly keeping up.
At the top, he stopped and looked down the hill at the lights in the campground. “That’s Lazy Daze, right?” he asked us.
We said it was.
“So it would be simple for someone to haul a garbage bag up here in the dead of night and hide it in the culvert?”
Again, I agreed. “The yarnbomber took off in a boat, though. If she—”
He interrupted, “Or he.”
I went on, “If she or he took the boat to the marina, what did he or she do with the cape in the meantime?”
“Good point,” he said. “But it was dark when it all happened. He probably took that cape off, stowed it in the bag in the boat, and then tied up the boat and brought the bag here. Trooper Jeffers and I looked for him that night, but we didn’t find him or the boat or the cape. Or anyone walking along the road carrying a full trash bag.” He opened his passenger door, cleared notes and an empty paper coffee cup off the seat, and then stood back. “Here, Willow, you can put the scraps on the seat out of the wind.”
I leaned forward, untucked my shirt, and shook it over the car seat. One scrap blew out of the car, but Haylee, with help from my enthusiastic Sally, grabbed it.
Gartener put on plastic gloves. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle.” The paper had been hand-shredded into a slew of little pieces. He turned them right side up and shoved shapes together to fit, sort of. “There are two pages,” he said after a while. “And they were torn together, so we have two nearly identical jigsaw puzzles. Probably only the words on them will differ.” He lined up part of the top of a page, one with hand-printed capital letters across it. I made out: ILL AND TEST L ONDOV.
Gartener translated under his breath. “Last will and testament of Neil Ondover.”
Oh, no. Now I was really in trouble for removing evidence. “And someone tore it up and threw it out?” I asked. It was getting worse and worse. Wasn’t there some way I could teleport myself somewhere far away? The moon, perhaps?
“Looks like it.” He gathered the pieces and dropped them into an envelope. “You said you found these scraps in a bag near Yolanda Smith’s cottage? Can you give me an exact description of the location?” He took out his pen and notebook.
“On the beach side of the cottage, right behind it, under a window, to the right of the deck if your back is to the lake.”
Haylee added, “Some of the pieces of paper blew between that cottage and the next one. I was only trying to pick up litter, not collect evidence, so I may have missed a few bits.”
Gartener frowned at us. “I hope we find them. I also hope that most of the rest of the will is still in the bag and can be entered as evidence.”
Maybe I should aim myself toward Venus, not the moon. Venus was farther away. I asked, “Who was the beneficiary of the other will you found?”
But he was watching a vehicle speed toward us. A state police van pulled up behind his cruiser, and two troopers hopped out. “It’s going to be a long night,” Detective Gartener muttered. “I’ll have to go all the way to Erie, get that search warrant, and meet these guys back at that cottage. You two can go. But please, stay away from that cottage and from any investigating. Can we reach you at your home numbers tonight if we need you?”
We said he could and he wrote our numbers in his notebook. He gave Sally-Forth a pat, suggested to her that she could join a K-9 unit, pointed his colleagues to the gully where Vicki waited with a non-smelly garbage bag, and tore off toward Erie.
I took Sally’s leash. After Haylee, Sally, and I put a lot of distance between us and the officers, I murmured to Haylee, “He didn’t want us to know who Neil’s beneficiary was, did he?”
“He sure didn’t,” Haylee answered. �
��Whoever it was, I wouldn’t want to be in that person’s shoes.”
“Or in the shoes of the person who ripped up the will,” I said. I wasn’t overjoyed about being in the shoes of the person who had removed the will from the scene, either. I made a silent vow that I would never, ever, be curious about anything again. If I came up with a question, I would leave it to others to answer. I was through with sleuthing. Finished and done. Period.
“The mysterious Yolanda Smith threw out the will?” Haylee suggested. “Or Cassie, who has apparently been hanging around that cottage?”
“Cassie and Yolanda obviously know each other, or Cassie wouldn’t have given Yolanda’s number to Mona. And Yolanda fought with Bitsy from the Lazy Daze Campground office, who wouldn’t tell us anything about Cassie. But if Cassie’s staying in the cottage, not the campground . . .”
“She’s moved in with Yolanda?”
“Whom we haven’t seen since Saturday night,” I said. “Oops. We didn’t tell Vicki and Detective Gartener that we tracked down the woman who fought with Yolanda at the sidewalk sale, and that she supposedly used to date Neil and tried to get back with him.”
Haylee slanted an amused look at me. “Which is just as well, considering that our evidence is all hearsay, and we’d only get another scolding.”
I laughed. “You’re right. But those three women must be involved in something. Saying it was a conspiracy could be stretching it, but I’d sure like to know what their secrets are.”
“Thanks to us, the investigators already have all three women in their radar,” Haylee said.
Right. And I wasn’t doing anything resembling investigating, ever again.
The closer we got to home, the faster Sally walked until we, with our longer legs, were nearly running, while the dog seemed to be only hurrying.
Haylee said good-bye at The Stash. It was after two.
I unlocked the door to In Stitches and unleashed Sally-Forth. Downstairs, Tally-Ho barked. Sally rushed to the door leading to the apartment, and dashed downstairs as soon as I opened it. I followed at a less breakneck speed. Tally and Sally had an emotional—and very noisy—reunion, but where were the kittens?
I found them, their eyes approximately the size of saucers, peeking out from under the cabinet above the fridge. I hauled the kitties down and hugged them, but they didn’t purr. When Tally looked their way, they puffed up.
“Tally,” I said sternly, “did you chase Mustache and Bow-Tie?”
Tally wagged his tail and ducked his head, and he didn’t look any less dejected when Sally bounded to me and stood on her hind legs to sniff her charges.
I set the kittens on the floor. They arched their backs, hissed, and hopped sideways toward Tally.
The cute little guys didn’t frighten me at all, but Tally slunk away and curled up on his bed. I looked at him more closely. He had a tiny scratch on his nose.
I told the fierce kitties, “I think you’ve taught him what you wanted him to learn.”
Sally sat down and stared at the kittens in obvious bewilderment. They were still twice their normal size.
I patted Tally. “Sorry we didn’t take you along.” The kittens probably were, too.
He wagged his tail and snuffled at the hem of my T-shirt. Great. Whatever he might think of kittens, he seemed to relish the smell of used kitty litter.
I dumped my clothes in the laundry, took a shower, and went to bed. It was already Thursday morning, so Friday night, and my almost-date with Clay, was officially one day away.
31
ALL THE NEXT MORNING, I KEPT THINKING of Friday night’s outing with Clay and Haylee. I could hardly wait to see what happened when Clay introduced Haylee and Ben. Mona had said that Ben was widowed. Haylee had assumed that would put him into the same age group as Fred Zongassi, or maybe Snoozy Gallagher, but knowing Clay, I suspected that Ben would be closer to our age. I liked Clay more than I wanted to admit. If I agreed with him about Ben, I’d probably like him even more.
On the other hand, if Ben turned out to be horrid, I might be able to stop thinking and wondering about Clay.
Our students wanted to try hardanger embroidery on a finer weave than monk’s cloth, so Ashley and I helped them hoop an evenly woven mid-weight linen and try it on that. At lunchtime, I left In Stitches in Ashley’s capable hands and went off with the dogs to meet Haylee in the park.
Naturally, we had to plan our evening outing with the dogs. Haylee had nearly finished her dress and said she would definitely have time to go out for ice cream again. Although we were both curious what, if anything, we would find out by walking past Yolanda’s cottage, we agreed that we wouldn’t venture close enough to upset any investigators who might still be searching it.
Ashley’s and my afternoon workshop was a bit more challenging than the morning class. One of our students failed to make the linen in her embroidery hoop absolutely straight on the grain. She threw the crooked result down and muttered, “I see why they call it hardanger.”
Ashley apologized for not making sure the grain was straight, and then helped the woman hoop another piece of linen. That one came out fine.
After supper, the sun was still high overhead, and the dogs were quite happy to go for yet another walk on the beach. Because of the day’s warmth, the waves washing up on our feet had lost some of their chill, and we neither gasped nor shrieked.
The towel and pink plaid shirt were gone from the deck chairs behind Yolanda’s cottage, and the trash had been taken away. Sally seemed to expect me to ignore the yellow tape and let her explore the cottage’s backyard and deck, and probably the inside of the cottage, too.
Imagining running into Gartener and telling him, “The doggie made us do it,” I kept moving, and Sally, who didn’t have much choice since she was on a leash, came along, wagging her tail.
The coffee ice cream was delicious, and Haylee liked her butterscotch swirl.
We sauntered back along Beach Row. Catching a glimpse of Bitsy glaring at us through the campground office window, we sped our pace. Except for the crime scene tape, the front of Yolanda’s cottage looked the same as it had the night before, unoccupied and lonely. Not that I was sleuthing. I’d given that up.
Sensibly, Haylee focused on the gala. “Clay said he’d pick us up tomorrow night,” she said. “His truck doesn’t have an extended cab, so how will we fit?”
“I could drive. Or we could walk.”
“Carrying our heels?
“I thought I’d wear sandals.”
“Great idea. And the three of us can have a romantic stroll back home along the beach. Are you sure you want me to go?”
“Positive. Maybe Clay has a plan for getting us there and back.”
She laughed. “Knowing him, he does.”
“Renting a limo?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Actually, he did have a plan, introducing Haylee to the lodge owner, Ben Rondelson. Maybe Ben figured in part of Clay’s travel arrangements, too?
* * *
BUT THE NEXT EVENING, DEVASTATINGLY handsome in a navy linen suit, white shirt, and red tie, Clay arrived alone at In Stitches. I stepped onto the porch.
“Mmm,” Clay said. “I told you that you’d outshine jewelry.”
I laughed. “I’m not wearing any besides earrings, so it’s pretty easy to do.”
He ushered me toward a silver SUV. “You look lovely.”
I thanked him, and he helped me into the passenger seat.
Fred Zongassi was at the wheel. “Evening, Willow,” he said, “I’m your chauffeur tonight.” He wore a suit and polished leather shoes. No high-tops.
“I’ll be back in a minute with Haylee,” Clay said. He closed the door gently.
A determined look on her face and a gorgeous periwinkle silk dress hugging her curves, Haylee marched toward us. Did she fear that Clay had shut me into a vehicle with a murderer?
Smiling, Clay helped her into the seat behind Fred, and then went around the c
ar and sat behind me. “Fred offered to take us tonight. He said my truck wasn’t suitable.”
Fred said, “It’s not.” He drove to the lodge, pulled into the circular drive underneath the porte cochere, dropped us off at the front door, and drove away. Haylee looked puzzled, probably wondering if I’d lied when I’d told her that Clay and I weren’t trying to set her up with Fred.
Clay offered Haylee and me each an arm. “I’ll be the envy of every man at the gala tonight.” He led us around the side of the lodge to the long, wide porch that faced the beach.
Haylee darted a questioning glance at me.
I put on an innocent face. I could hardly wait to meet Ben. Would he and Haylee find each other interesting?
“Willow! Haylee! Claaaaaay.”
Only Mona could draw a man’s name out into that many husky syllables.
We turned around. Clinging to the arms of Ralph and Duncan, Mona wobbled on stiletto heels toward us. Her white sequined mini-dress showed off a substantial amount of tanned skin. She shook her head. “Haylee and Willow, you seem short of a man.” She dimpled. “But I’m not sharing either of mine tonight!”
Ralph winked at her, but poor Duncan pulled at the knot of his navy blue tie. It took me a second to notice that the tie was made from lightweight brocade, with tiny, detailed giraffes woven into the silk. Duncan must have inherited some of his father’s love of whimsy.
“I suppose we could all sit at the same table,” Mona conceded. “Unless—”
Duncan pulled the door open onto a vast, windowed sunroom that overlooked the porch and the beach.
A buffet table stretched along the lake side of the room. A dark-stained oak dance floor took up one end, and white-draped dining tables filled the rest. The architecture was Victorian, and although there was no red velvet or brocade—other than Duncan’s tie—in sight, the bouquets and gleaming silver candlesticks and cutlery on the tables all had a decidedly Victorian flair. The entire effect was of sparkling glamour. Whatever Ben Rondelson might need, it was not the decorating advice that Mona had hoped to give him.
Mona undulated into the hall first, and then stopped and squealed. “There’s Max Brubaugh! Excuse us, Willow and Haylee. I have to go meet him.” She teetered to a table where Max, in a retro white dinner jacket, sat by himself. Ralph rushed after her, but before he could catch up, she pulled out a chair next to Max and plunked herself into it.
