I made a note on another blank card.
Jonathan Wilson has an interesting old map to share.
Pete was planning to check some maps at the city hall. Maybe I needed a separate category just for maps.
Scratching at the bedroom door broke my concentration. As I let the cat into the room, I checked my watch. I was supposed to be ready to leave in just a few minutes, but I was still in my stocking feet and the clothes I’d been wearing all day. Seconds later Aunt Ibby knocked.
“Maralee? Are you ready? It’s five forty-five.”
“Just give me a few more minutes,” I called, pulling my sweater over my head and peeling off my jeans.
“I’ll bring the car around to the front.” She didn’t sound pleased. My aunt liked to be punctual.
“Sorry,” I said. I took the world’s fastest shower, tore a navy blue skirt and a white blouse from a dry cleaner’s bag and put them on, donned tights and leather boots, did a speedy makeup job, and put on a gray midi coat. I dashed down the front stairs and checked my watch again. Six and a half minutes. Not bad.
I climbed into the waiting Buick. “We can get there in ten minutes,” I said. “It’s only over on Federal Street.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s just a matter of finding a parking space when we get there. Bill had a lot of friends.”
She was right. The funeral home’s lot appeared to be full, and cars lined the right side of the one-way street.
“We’ll drive around the block again,” she said. “Maybe somebody will move. Watch out on your side for a space.”
I lowered my window as we moved slowly along Federal Street. “Look,” I said. “There’s a car right across from the funeral home with the motor running and two people in it. Maybe they’re getting ready to leave.”
“Good,” she said. “I’ll go around once more, and they may be gone when we get back.”
The car was still there when we made the second pass. It was still running, and the two people were still inside. The man in the backseat had lowered his window, too, and as we rolled slowly past, I found myself eye to eye with Mr. Friedrich, the same man in black I’d met in the basement of the Tabby.
Slinking down into my seat was reflexive, involuntary, and pointless. The man had seen and recognized me just as surely as I had him.
“What’s wrong, Maralee?” Aunt Ibby asked.
I told her what I’d seen. “That man, Friedrich, must be watching to see who attends Bill’s wake. But why would Bill’s friends interest the government?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. Look, there’s a space.” She expertly parallel parked the Buick, and we walked a short block back to the building. I peeked across the street. The car was still there, but the rear window was closed.
The place was crowded, as we’d expected. Bill had made many friends over the years, and it seemed as though most of them had turned out this night. Aunt Ibby and I joined the group offering condolences to the Sullivans. We moved along in baby-step fashion toward the place where Bill lay in peaceful repose, clean shaven and dressed in his best suit. Mrs. Sullivan, pale and tired looking, brightened when she saw Aunt Ibby.
“Oh, Ibby. Thank you for coming. And you, too, Lee. It’s a wonderful turnout of Bill’s friends, isn’t it?”
It was certainly a wonderful turnout. But I wondered what they’d all say if they knew they were being watched by the occupants of the car parked across the street. My aunt and I spoke the usual consoling words one uses on such occasions.
Mrs. Sullivan whispered an invitation to come over to the apartment later. “I can’t invite everyone,” she explained. “Not enough room.”
“We’ll be there,” my aunt promised. “And I’ve made you one of those apple pies Bill always liked.”
That brought a smile to the wan face. We made our way to the guest book and left after signing. I was almost afraid to look across the street, but the black car was gone. No surprise there, I thought. They’re probably on the way to Bridge Street, looking to score a good parking space in front of the Sullivans’ place.
CHAPTER 18
As Aunt Ibby and I walked past the orderly row of beautiful homes lining Federal Street, she spoke thoughtfully. “About that man you saw . . . Friedrich, you say his name is?”
“Right.”
“Do you think that could be the same car that was following Primrose?”
“Quite likely,” I admitted. “Same model, same color, same year.”
“Are you going to tell Pete about those men being here?”
“I will, but I’m betting he already knows about it. He knew all about that episode in the basement and never mentioned it until I told him what had happened.”
“Don’t be timid about asking him questions, Maralee. You have an interest in figuring all this out, and situated as you are at the school, you’re literally right on top of the situation.” We pulled into a space marked GUEST behind the Sullivans’ building. “You may find that you learn things the police miss,” she said. “Pete’ll probably be glad for your help.”
She popped open the trunk of the Buick. I picked up the still-cold carton of goodies and closed the trunk, and then we started up the stairs to the Sullivans’ second-floor apartment.
We were among the first to arrive. Aunt Ibby quickly busied herself with Mrs. Sullivan and some of the guests, arranging the various food offerings on the dining room table. I joined a small knot of women I recognized from Aunt Ibby’s church, and listened politely as they debated the merits of the many floral tributes we’d seen at the funeral home. Their discussion, involving the comparative beauty and worth of carnations versus calla lilies, was less than stimulating, and I found my attention wandering. I stood next to a lace-curtained window overlooking Bridge Street. Trying not to be too obvious, I pulled the curtains apart. Streetlamps illuminated the area, and reflective patches of snow made the scene even brighter.
The big government car wasn’t there.
But that little green Ford was.
What in blazes is going on here? Is someone tailing me, too?
I wanted to tell Aunt Ibby about the car I’d seen on Oliver Street, and I very much wanted to talk to Pete, too. I needed to hear some of his coolheaded logic. There was probably a valid reason for the presence of the green car, and for Mr. Friedrich and his companion loitering outside the funeral home. But I couldn’t think of one.
I separated myself from the flower discussion group and headed to the dining room, where guests had begun to fill paper plates with goodies from the feast displayed on the Sullivans’ dining room table. I had barely eaten all day, and I was hungry. I chose a big square of beyond wonderful homemade lasagna and looked around for my aunt.
I found her in the kitchen, in an animated debate with one of the Sullivans’ teenage grandsons on the relative merits of social networking. I caught her eye and tapped my watch. She took the hint, excused herself, and joined me next to a Formica counter where assorted canned soft drinks shared space with a good-size bottle of Irish whiskey.
“Ready to leave?” she asked.
I swallowed the last bite of lasagna and dropped the paper plate into a nearby wastebasket. “I’d like to, if you don’t mind,” I said. “Something strange just happened.”
She raised one eyebrow. “Happened here?”
“Not in here. Out on the street. I need to get out there and check on something.”
She asked no questions but nodded her agreement. We excused ourselves, saying good-bye to our hosts and promising to join them for Bill’s funeral mass at St. Thomas’s in the morning. We hurried down the stairs and climbed into the Buick.
“I think there’s a car parked across the street that might be following us. Me, I mean,” I said as she backed the Buick out of the guest parking area.
She turned to look at me. “Is it that Friedrich person again?”
“I don’t know. Don’t think so. Go slowly so I can see. It’s a small green Ford.”
Sh
e took me literally. Doing barely five miles an hour, we rolled onto Bridge Street.
“If I can get a look at the license plate,” I said, “I’ll get Pete to run it through the DMV.”
“Do you see it?” she asked. “Is it there?” The driver behind us leaned on his horn. “I think I need to go a little faster.”
“Never mind. It’s gone,” I said, and we headed for home.
“What made you think it was following you, anyway?” she wanted to know.
“When I put the food in the trunk, I saw the same car parked on Oliver Street, across from our garage. I noticed it because of the parking ban.”
“Of course, you know more about automobiles than I do.” My aunt sounded thoughtful.
“I can’t tell one car from another . . . but . . .” She paused.
“But what?”
“Remember when O’Ryan and I waved good-bye to you from the window this morning?”
“Sure. That was cute.”
“When you were walking toward the common, a green car was driving along right beside you.”
“It was? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. And, Maralee, O’Ryan growled until it was out of sight.”
“At this rate I’m going to need another package of index cards,” I told my aunt as we pulled into the garage.
We hurried, almost running, through the backyard, past the vegetable garden, where dead cornstalks loomed like ghostly sentinels, to the back stairs, where a welcome pool of brightness glowed from the lantern-shaped light over the doorway.
“You get your feet warm,” Aunt Ibby said as we entered the back hall, where O’Ryan sat with an expectant look on his fuzzy face. “I’ll make a pot of tea and meet you in the dining room. You gather up your index cards, and I’ll get mine.” She smiled. “We’ll put all our cards on the table and see if we can make some sense of all this.”
“Good idea,” I said, bending to pat the purring cat. “O’Ryan, how do you always know which door to run to when somebody’s coming?”
I headed for my room, O’Ryan close behind me. Ten minutes later, warmly pajama and slipper clad, with index cards in hand, I took my place at the dining room table.
Aunt Ibby was already there, her stack of cards, smaller than mine, neatly fanned out in front of her. “Have you made your new notes yet?” she asked, filling my cup with fragrant chamomile tea. “I put down a few words about the car at the funeral home, and I noted what you said about that other green one. I made a card for the car I saw from the window this morning, too. That’s all I had for new entries.”
I hadn’t made mine out yet. I picked up a pen and pulled a few cards from a new package. The first three duplicated my aunt’s notes. “I’m separating mine by the names of people mentioned,” I said, “but I don’t think I need a special stack for you.”
“Probably not. Who has the biggest stack so far?”
“Primrose does,” I said. “And Duke has the smallest.”
“Duke is the man in the cowboy outfit?”
“Right. He seems to think he’s channeling John Wayne,” I said. “His cards say only that he was in on the early morning basement exploration, and that he left the bar that night before Pete could talk to him.”
“Duke’s not one of the people who lives in the dorm, I take it?”
“No. He says he’s staying with friends.”
“I see.” She cocked her head to one side. “With friends, hmm? And what attracted him to your course? Did he say?”
I thought for a moment, trying to recall what Duke had said when I asked him that question. “He said he’d been shooting a commercial in Boston when he read about the school and decided to sign up.”
“Just like that? What does he hope to learn? You say he’s already doing commercials.”
“Movies, too, apparently. Mostly Westerns,” I said. “But he’s interested in directing. He and Primrose are working together on the script for our documentary.”
“I see. Now, what about Sammy? What does he hope to learn?”
“Sammy is looking for a career in sports broadcasting,” I said. “He was injured in a fall and can’t work as a jockey anymore.”
“Makes sense,” she said. “He was along on the basement excursion?”
“Yes. He was.”
“Who do you think was the ringleader there? Duke or Sammy?” she asked.
“I haven’t thought about that,” I admitted, “but I’m sure the police and Mr. Friedrich have.”
“We’re back to him again,” she said. “Everything seems to point in that man’s direction.”
“Whatever direction that might be.” I gathered my cards into a neat stack and just stared at them.
“Oh, one thing Mrs. Sullivan told me tonight may be worth a card.”
“What’s that?”
“She said that the police had returned Bill’s things to her. You know, his ring and watch and such.”
“I’m sure they always do that. It’s a normal procedure.”
“I know. But she said that the coat they say Bill was wearing when they found him wasn’t his.”
“Wasn’t his?”
She shook her head. “Nope. She said she’d never seen it before in her life.”
“Funny, Pete didn’t mention that. I wonder where it came from.”
We drank our tea and nibbled on a few more peanut butter cookies. Then, satisfied that we’d done everything possible with what little information we had, we put away our cards and rinsed our teacups.
“I’m going to call Pete and ask him to come to the funeral mass with me tomorrow,” I said. “Then I guess we’ll go car shopping afterward.”
“Sounds like a good plan, dear,” she said. “And maybe Pete will give us a few tidbits of information for our card collections.”
“Maybe.” I was determined to ask him for help with my puzzle, but I was doubtful that he’d share much of anything with me. “He’s pretty tight-lipped about police work.”
“As well he should be,” she agreed. “But try, anyway. He may surprise you.”
I was snuggling comfortably in my bed, with O’Ryan stretched out across my feet, when I called Pete. He answered after the first ring.
“Hi. I was just thinking about you,” he said, his voice low and sexy.
“You were? That’s nice. I like it when you think about me,” I said.
“You must be thinking about me, too. That’s why you called.”
“I was. And it is. Want to go to a funeral with me tomorrow morning?”
He laughed. “Wow. That’s romantic. How can I resist?”
I laughed too. “Oh, Pete. I’m sorry. That was awful!”
“No, it wasn’t. It was honest. You want me to go with you to Bill Sullivan’s funeral?”
“Uh-huh. I do. Will you?”
“Sure. I was planning to go, anyway,” he said. “I really like that family. Sorry I never got to know Bill. Shall I pick you up, say, around eight? The service isn’t till ten. We can have breakfast, and then, after the funeral, we can look at some cars.”
“I’d like that a lot,” I said. “And maybe you already know about this, but remember that man who was in the basement with the chief when you saw me on the video? Friedrich?”
“Yeah. What about him?”
“He was in a parked car across from the funeral home tonight. And it could have been the same car we saw following Primrose—the one from the Treasury Department.”
There was a long silence on his end of the phone. Too long.
“Are you surprised I know who that car is registered to? You wouldn’t tell me, so I memorized the address and Aunt Ibby looked it up.”
More silence.
“Are you still there, Pete?”
“I’m here. Just thinking.” Sexy voice gone. Cop voice activated.
“Look,” I said. “Please don’t keep shutting me out. I seem to be right in the middle of something, and I need to know what’s going on. You know you can trust me.
”
Another silence. O’Ryan’s ears perked up, and his eyes opened slightly.
“You do know that,” I said. “Don’t you?”
“I do, Lee. It’s just, well, I don’t want you involved in something dangerous.”
“Dangerous? Damn it, Pete. I am involved.” My redhead’s temper began to flare. “And so are my students. Every day we’re all sitting right on top of a place that needs an armed guard to keep people away! Primrose is being stalked.” I heard my voice rising. “And maybe somebody’s stalking me, too.”
“What do you mean by that? You think you’re being followed?”
Is there such a thing as a sexy cop voice?
O’Ryan sat up straight, eyes locked on mine.
“Yes. I mean, maybe. I don’t know for sure.” I felt myself veer from temper to near tears.
“I’ll tell you about it in the morning. Okay?”
“Want me to come over now? I’ll be off duty in a few minutes.”
“No thanks, Pete. It’s late. Don’t worry. O’Ryan and I are safe in bed. I’m going to read a chapter in my criminology book and go to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning. Okay?”
His “Okay” was hesitant. “I’ll pick you up at eight. We’ll spend the day together. And, Lee?”
“Yes?”
“I do trust you. I care about you. A lot. Good night.”
“Good night, Pete.”
O’Ryan resumed his prone position at the foot of the bed and closed his eyes. I plumped up my pillows and picked up the Criminology 101 textbook. I propped the book against my knees, then opened it to the chapter entitled “Genetic Influence on Criminal Behavior.” I stared at the pages, trying to force myself to concentrate on the printed words. But my thoughts were too scattered for study.
I was achingly aware that Pete had just said he cared for me a lot. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or scared by that. It was awfully soon for any real emotion to have developed between us. We’d met only a few months ago, and Johnny had been gone for less than two years. But when Pete held me close and kissed me the way he did, I had to admit that I felt something pretty powerful—real or not.
Tails, You Lose (A Witch City Mystery Book 2) Page 15
