by Molly Macrae
“You didn’t know, and there wasn’t anything you could have done at that point.” I thought about her sitting on her steps in the dark. If it hadn’t been dark, if her eyesight were better . . . I’d stood on her front steps one day, in the summer, and admired the view of the creek running through the park behind the courthouse. “You couldn’t have done anything at that point, Ernestine, but now . . .”
Her head came up.
“Think back over last night,” I said. “Take your time, though. See if you remember noticing anything else while you were sitting on your steps.”
“Start with waking up,” John said. “Imagine yourself waking up and getting up.”
“Even better,” I said. “Thanks, John. Ernestine, he’s right. Start with waking up. Think about what you heard. Think about throwing on your robe, walking through the house, going out onto the porch. What did you see from your steps before you sat down? What did you hear? Or smell? Were there any other sounds besides the bagpipes? And when the piping stopped, it must have seemed quiet all of a sudden. Was it?”
Ernestine, knitting in her lap and eyes closed, moved her head as though trying to bring a sound or the memory of one into better focus. She ended up shaking her head. “I don’t even remember what tune he was playing.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Thea said.
“I’ll try it again when I’m home. Tonight. I’ll lie down on my bed and go through all the motions. And if a vehicle backfires, then all the better. That might help jog something loose.”
“Pesky things, those backfires,” Ardis said. “When did you hear it last night?”
“After the pipes quit and I realized how chilly it was. I pulled my bathrobe closer around me, and I pulled myself up with the railing to go back inside. Then I wondered if I’d been a ninny and locked myself out, but the doorknob turned, and as I went inside, I heard a backfire. I thought the piper must be on his way home to bed, too. And that he ought to take his car to my grandson at Ledford’s for a tune-up.”
“I can’t think when I last heard a backfire,” John said. “Modern engines and all.”
“Plenty of older vehicles around,” said Mel.
I could think of one in particular—a monstrosity of fuel inefficiency and pollution belonging to a handyman named Aaron Carlin. I liked Aaron; hated his green pickup. He didn’t live in Blue Plum, but he and Mercy Spivey’s daughter were a bit of an item a few months earlier. And he might have other business in town.
“Do you ever go hunting with your grandsons, Ernestine?” Thea asked.
“You don’t need to pussyfoot around, dear. If you’re asking whether I know the difference between a backfire and a gunshot, I suppose I could be fooled. But do we know if he was shot?”
The others looked at Ardis. Then all of them looked at me.
“Huh. Well, I guess that’s a good enough place to start the official case file.” I slipped the elastic off the leather journal with a satisfying snap and turned to the first blank page. But I didn’t put pen to notebook yet. I had a question for Ardis. “Do you think if we’d asked Cole how Hugh died, he would have told us?”
“There’s no telling, but I’m surprised at us for not asking him.”
“Shock,” Ernestine said. “You couldn’t be expected to think straight.”
“You’re too kind, Ernestine.” Ardis wasn’t being kind to herself. She beat the arm of her chair twice with her fist; it might have been her breast. “No. I made Cole tell me when and where Hugh died. How he died should have followed.”
“But we were distracted,” I said. “He told us about your name on that paper in Hugh’s sporran.”
“Whoa. Stop. Hold it,” Thea said. “What paper in Hugh’s what? This reminds me of some of the worst questions we get at the library. You two are treating information like flotsam and jetsam.” She smiled at John. “I threw in some nautical jargon for your sake, to show no hard feelings over your martial arts time zones or whatever. You should be threatening to keelhaul someone over this lack of precision. We’re sliding into the investigation sideways.”
“She’s got a point,” Mel said, “overexcited though she be. Arrrrrdis, you start from the beginning with the facts. Kath, you write them down. Then let’s figure out a preliminary round of questions we need to answer, and let’s finish up so we can get out of here. Not that I don’t love your company. But.”
“Fish to fry and cakes to bake?”
“Falafel,” Mel countered. “And black rice pudding with coconut milk.”
“Ooh.” I clicked my pen and smoothed the page. “Ardis already made a start on questions this afternoon.”
“And when were you going to tell us that?” Thea asked.
“Right now. I just did. You haven’t missed out on anything. I haven’t read through them yet myself. Let’s get the facts down. Are you ready, Ardis?”
The facts didn’t take much ink. Fact: Hugh had arrived in Blue Plum. Fact: He’d played his bagpipes on the lawn at the courthouse. Fact: He was presumed to be the midnight bagpiper. (We wrestled over whether we could call that a fact and decided that, although we didn’t know for a fact that Hugh was the midnight piper, we did know for a fact that someone had piped, and we knew that Cole Dunbar presumed the piper was Hugh.) Fact: Hugh was found dead, partially obscured by reeds along the creek, in the park behind the courthouse. Fact: A piece of paper was found in a book in his sporran. Fact: Cole Dunbar wondered why Hugh was in town for Handmade Blue Plum. Fact: Ernestine heard a presumed backfire after the bagpipes went silent. (Ernestine made me go back and add the word “presumed” before the word “backfire.”)
“Our facts aren’t much to go on,” Ardis said.
“Since when have we let that stop us?” I turned the page with a flourish, hoping it would have a bolstering psychological effect for her.
“And it probably isn’t all we know. I’m proof of that,” said Ernestine. “I’ll go home as soon as we’re through here, and I’ll try my best to bring back any other visual or auditory clues from last night that are stuck up here in my little gray cells.” She tapped her forehead. “In my case, though, the cells are old as well as being little and gray, so we’ll see how well that works.”
“I might be able to dredge something up,” Mel said. “Chopping onions usually does it. It’s amazing how onions and a sharp knife free the mind.”
“The library has old yearbooks,” Thea said. “I’ll troll through those.”
“And we all need to talk to customers and library patrons,” I said. “Casually, though, and we’ll see what people know or remember about him.”
“Customers, patrons, and casual go without saying, don’t they?” Thea asked. “As part of our usual bag of operating tricks?”
“I’m just keeping to this afternoon’s theme of being precise,” I said, “which moves us nicely into what we should do next—come up with specific questions. What do we need to know about Hugh McPhee to help us figure this out?”
“Read what you’ve got, Ardis,” Mel said. “It’ll prompt other questions, and there’s no point in duplicating your efforts.”
I put her notebook on the table and gave it a shove toward her. Ardis stared at it but didn’t reach for it.
“That’s okay. I can do it.” She watched me pull the notebook back across the table; then she looked at her lap. I opened the notebook and leafed through it to find the questions—found the “dabbling” page—found several pages of close writing past the “dabbling” page—none of it in the form of a list, not a question mark in sight. I started reading it—to myself, thank goodness. Ardis hadn’t written questions about Hugh’s death. She’d started an almost stream-of-consciousness story about a child, a class, a teacher . . . There were three or four unreadable splotches where her ink had blurred.
“Waiting, waiting, waiting,” Mel said.
I tucked Ardis’ no
tebook beside me in the chair and picked up my pen.
“Kath?” Mel asked. “Time is ticking.”
I watched Ardis for some kind of reaction. “That was a different assignment, Mel. A personal one. Let’s go ahead and brainstorm the questions.”
“We know so little,” Ardis said to her hands in her lap. “The unknowns are almost too much.”
“Then we’d better get started,” said John. “Top of the list is how did he die? After that, here are my preliminary questions. Was he here for Handmade Blue Plum? If so, why? In what capacity? As a craftsman? Who’s in charge of Handmade who can tell us?
“They asked Joe to step in and oversee booth setup,” I said. “If he doesn’t know anything about Hugh, he’ll know who to ask.”
“And who did he still know in Blue Plum?” John asked.
“He recognized Cole as a Dunbar,” I said after I’d gotten John’s questions down. “And he remembered that the brothers have unusual names, but he didn’t remember what they were. He didn’t know Cole was a deputy.”
“There might be a lot of people in town he knew once or knew in passing,” John said. “But who did he know better than that? Who did he keep in touch with? What about family?”
“It was never a close family,” Ardis said. “Olive Weems is a cousin, but she’s never had news to pass on. The grandfather outlived Hugh’s parents and Olive’s, but of course he’s been gone for decades. Anyone else I might have stopped in the grocery to ask about Hugh, over the years, and what he was up to . . .” She shook her head. “You know how people come and people go. Hugh asked about a few names, yesterday, when we had lunch.”
John turned to her. “That’s very good information. Who?”
She shook her head. “You’d think I’d remember. I talked my fool head off and I can’t tell you who he asked about and who I threw at him thinking he might be interested.”
“Was he interested?” I asked.
“Was he interested, or was he being polite?” Ardis pressed her lips into an annoyed line. “I don’t know. I wasn’t polite enough myself to notice. And the names he asked about? Gone.”
“The names will come,” Ernestine said. “Try the imagination thing, like I did. Did he say how long he was staying in town?”
“Did he say where was he staying?” Mel asked.
“Oh, that’s a good question,” Ernestine said, “and it makes me wonder. If I were to wear my Miss Marple, do you think I could convince whoever’s in charge of wherever he was staying to let me have a look at his room and belongings?” Ardis might be a lifetime member of the repertory theater, but Ernestine was a born-again Golden Age sleuth.
“Let’s hold off on entering places under false pretenses,” Thea said.
“At least for a day or two,” I added. “What other questions have we got? What else do we need to know?”
“Does his vehicle backfire?” Ernestine asked.
“Where is his vehicle?” John asked.
“And if it’s old enough to backfire, is it also old enough that we can use a coat hanger to unlock it?” Ernestine asked. “I used to get such a kick out of that.”
Thea tsked.
“It isn’t all that hard,” Ernestine said, “and it’s very satisfying being able to get yourself out of a pickle.”
“Or into one,” Thea said. “I’m trying to be the voice of reason and responsibility here.”
“I appreciate that. But you can find out a lot about a person by what he keeps in his car and how neat or messy it is. And I wouldn’t mind having a chance to practice with a coat hanger again. It was a useful skill.”
Ardis hadn’t said anything more. I glanced at her a few times as I caught the questions bouncing back and forth around the circle and got them down in the journal. From the furrow between her eyebrows and the return of thin lips, she was either thoughtful or unhappy. But if she was thinking, or trying to remember something, the usual energy of her thought process was missing—there was no jostle of knee, no pencil, foot, or finger tapping. None of the wrestling between one point and another that might be going on in her head was visible on her face. I tried to catch her eye, but she continued to stare at her lap. During the next lull, I nudged my way into her silence.
“Ardis, after you and Hugh had lunch together, you came back here to the shop alone. Did he say where he was going? Anything about his plans for the afternoon?”
“No.” The single syllable was a tangled knot of frustration and self-recrimination that she had to force out.
“Take it easy,” Mel said gently. “If he didn’t tell you, he didn’t tell you. Lots of people don’t volunteer their plans to me. I only know Kath’s plans for tonight because I asked Joe. She didn’t tell me.”
“I could have asked Hugh,” Ardis said. “I didn’t. I don’t know why he was here. I didn’t ask how long he was staying. I didn’t even ask him to come for supper. I wanted to. I meant to.”
“You aren’t the prying type,” Ernestine said.
“I thought I was.”
“You’re the caring type,” Ernestine said, “sometimes mistaken for the prying type. But you care, and that’s why you’re beating yourself up now. Please don’t. You were happy to see him again and to know that he remembered you.”
“He remembered some of the lines from the play I wrote for the class. After all these years, he remembered that. I could’ve asked him if he’d ever done any more acting. I didn’t.”
“Because you’re also the perceptive type,” Ernestine said.
“You’d know that if you were more perceptive, Ardis,” said Thea.
Ernestine shushed her. “If he’d wanted to let you past his facade, you would have known, Ardis. That’s what I’m saying. But he hadn’t been back to Blue Plum for years. There was a reason for that, and whatever the reason was, it wasn’t something he was giving away over lunch with a favorite teacher.”
“It was lunch,” John said. “You were happy. He was happy. You didn’t need to know more to be enjoying yourself. He wasn’t letting more out. Equilibrium. Stasis. Let’s move on.”
“Wait.” Ardis’ chin came up. “Was he happy?”
I jotted that question down and watched her lips shift left and then right—her thoughts creaking back into motion.
“Okay.” She rolled her shoulders and neck. “Yes. We need to find out what Hugh did yesterday afternoon and evening. And yes, let’s break that down into specifics. Where did he go? Who did he see? Who saw him? Did he spend time with anyone?” She gained momentum and my notes began to sprawl. “The bagpipe incidents—both of them—what prompted them?”
“We can’t get inside his head,” Thea said. “That’s a good question, but we need another entry point.”
“His car or his hotel room.” Ernestine’s eyes lit with the possibilities of coat hangers and tweed skirts.
Ardis wasn’t finished. “The piece of paper with my name on it. Was anything else on the paper? What kind of paper? A whole piece? A scrap? And the book where they found it . . . they found it in his sporran . . . what book? Does that even matter? And you—” She pointed at me. “You said something about him being a tourist. What made you think that?”
“The camera around his neck.”
“A camera, not a phone. Does that tell us anything? And where is his camera? And who, and/or what, did he take pictures of?” She stopped talking, but her eyes—not focused on any of us—moved as they prodded each corner of her memory.
I shook out my writing hand, ready to begin again.
“That paper . . . there’s something else about that piece of paper. You were there, Kath. What is it?”
“Name, book, sporran.” I shrugged.
“His sporran,” Thea said, rolling the word out. “What else does a man keep in his sporran?”
“Very good question,” Ardis said. “Cole wou
ldn’t necessarily tell us everything they found in it. In fact, he wouldn’t tell us. But it might be important.”
“It’s definitely important if we’re going to get a full picture of the man and the situation,” John said. “Whether or not it has anything specifically to do with the crime. We need to talk to someone.”
“Idiot,” Ardis exploded. “No, sorry, John. I’m the idiot. Not you. Cole said they’d send a deputy around to interview me about the paper. That’s what I was trying to remember, and they haven’t done it yet.”
“Low priority,” Mel said.
“No priority, as far as I’m concerned,” Ardis said. “I have no idea why my name was in the sporran.”
“I think I’ll try penning a naughty Nancy Drew,” Thea said. “The Clue in the Splendid Sporran.”
I scribbled a note in the margin about Thea’s fascination with sporrans. If I could find one that wasn’t too expensive, it would make a good Christmas present for her.
“As long as the sheriff hasn’t already sent a deputy over,” Ardis said, musing in her own way, “I wonder if I can request one. A specific one. A woman one.”
“One who’s almost one of us?” I liked where this was going. “One who has come over to the fiber side?”
“Yes, indeedy.” Ardis rubbed her hands, then mimed putting a phone to her ear and said, “Calling Deputy Dye. Calling Deputy Dye.”
By weird coincidence, my Batphone buzzed in my pocket. At the same time, we heard a light step in the hall, the floorboard at the door creaked, and the newest member of the sheriff’s department, and the only one with an unshakable enthusiasm for everyone she met, stepped into the room. Deputy Darla Dye smiled at us. “Hey, ya’ll. You rang?”
Chapter 12
The buzz of my phone was a text from Debbie letting me know Darla was on her way up. It wasn’t much of a warning, but for Darla it didn’t need to be. Argyle liked her, too. He trotted down from the study and gave her ankles an extra circuit.
“Deputy Darla, come on in and sit yourself down,” Ardis said. “I was just about to call Sheriff Haynes and see if I could track you down.”
