“But he’s not the killer, so it’s a dead end. Did you hear about that? He came in a couple times for questioning and then follow-up, but he’s not the one we’re looking for.”
“Let me take a wild guess. Rock solid alibi?” I held up my hand so he didn’t answer. “Actually, I ran into him this morning at the police station. I thought he was going to strangle me with his long strangling hands, but he was actually quite nice, and look at my neck.” I pointed to my neck.
“Not strangled at all,” Tony said.
We both laughed. I leaned in and whispered, “Am I the worst person in the world, that I make jokes about these awful things?”
“You’re not the worst,” he said. “It’s a coping mechanism. You have to laugh, because what’s the alternative? You should hear some of the things we cops say to each other.”
“Do you still have the quote board?”
He glanced around the hospital cafeteria, looking sheepish. The quote board was where they’d write down something particularly appalling yet funny that one of them said spontaneously. Taken out of context, the quotes were even more shocking.
“Officially, there’s no quote board,” he said with a wink. “Now, who’s this other suspect? You’ve got me curious.”
I took a moment to compose my thoughts. I’d already tried to tell him about Harper once, but we’d gotten sidetracked by a discussion about me returning home with my tail between my legs.
“That blonde I was telling you about. The pretty one. Harper. I guess that’s her first name, but it might be her last name. Or it might not be her name at all, because I just saw her, here in the city, and she didn’t turn around when I said her name.”
“She was here in the hospital?”
“No. At a pawn shop. The same pawn shop where Mr. Michaels was selling the things he’d been shoplifting.”
Tony gave me a wolfish grin as he finished off his Jell-O. “What were you doing in a pawn shop? Don’t you have enough cash in the bank to buy half the town?”
“I wish people would stop saying that. I cashed out, sure, but it was just enough to buy the gift shop and my duplex. And, by the way things are going at the gift shop, I’ll probably be broke by this time next year.”
“You’ve still got more than most people in town. We pulled the financials on Mr. Michaels. He wasn’t just shoplifting for the thrills, I bet. He was in debt up to his eyeballs. Apparently, he liked to gamble.”
I gasped. “He was murdered for gambling debts?”
“Not unless the Misty Falls Credit Union is putting out hits on people who are behind on their mortgage payments. When I said he liked to gamble, I meant on the housing market. He’d overextended himself with a second property, and when rates went up, he was barely getting by on his pension.” He glanced around the nearly-empty hospital cafeteria. “It explains why he was so petty over minor expenses, like the trimming of the hedge between his and your father’s property. It’s no wonder they’d been fighting more lately.”
“He was always cheap, though. Remember that year he put out a stack of dog-eared paperbacks instead of Halloween candy?”
Tony chuckled. “Remember it? I’m the one who got called to his house three times that night to chase away kids throwing rotten eggs.” His eyes twinkled at the memory. “I seem to recall a young woman by the last name of Day leading the rotten egg brigade.”
“Must have been my sister.” I batted my eyelashes innocently.
His expression got serious. “The town’s lost a little bit of its charm now that he’s gone.”
“Maybe these will help you catch the killer.” I pulled the envelopes from my purse and handed them over with my head bowed. “The mail carrier dropped these on my porch, and the moisture from the snow made the flaps accidentally come open.”
“Mmm. Accidentally.” He dug into the envelopes and had a look at the checks. “I can see by your face that you’ve been on the case, Stormy. Why don’t you save us both the hassle and just tell me everything you know?”
“Do I have full immunity for the, uh, mail tampering?”
He gave me a warm smile.
I had to look away quickly, because his smile, on top of sharing a meal, had erased a dozen years’ worth of time. I didn’t want to have my heart flutter over Tony. He was married, with kids, and that was sacred to me. I wouldn’t even pursue a friendship with him. We would just happily co-exist in the same town, ignoring each other, in between those times my father became a murder suspect.
“Full immunity,” he said. “What do you know about these checks?”
“They’re all connected to items he stole. Like these cufflinks.”
I pulled the cufflinks from my purse and held them out on my palm.
“Oh, no,” Tony said. “Don’t tell me you broke into Mr. Michaels’ house, too. That’s it, Stormy. Turn around and put your hands behind your back. I’m going to have to arrest you.”
I pushed my chair back in alarm. “Immunity! You promised!”
“Don’t be so jumpy. I’m not going to handcuff you. Again.”
My cheeks flushed as I remembered a moment from our past during which he had actually handcuffed me, during our brief fling.
I pulled out the receipt from the pawn shop as proof of my innocence. “I didn’t get these from his house. I went to R&F Brokers today and they tracked the invoice numbers from the checks. I bought back these cufflinks to do a good deed.”
“A good deed,” he repeated. “That was kind of you.”
“That’s not the juicy part,” I explained. “While I was there, that Harper girl came in and asked to see the owner. It would be an awfully big coincidence for she and I to both visit the same pawn shop, hours away from Misty Falls, wouldn’t it?”
“Well, you and I are both here in a hospital cafeteria.”
“Yes. Because there’s a connection. And that’s why I know there’s a connection between the blonde and the murder of Mr. Michaels.” I paused for a moment to let everything sink in before I told him the next part. “She might be that long-lost daughter some people are saying he had. And maybe she killed him, or had him killed, to get at his money.”
He tilted his head to the side. “That’s an interesting theory. Except it would make a lot more sense if Mr. Michaels actually had any money. Just to reiterate, he did not.”
“You’ll still look into this Harper girl anyway, won’t you? Something about her is not right.”
“Eventually, yes. And we’ll look into the transactions from these checks.”
That reminded me of the other three items I’d seen at the pawn shop, so I pulled out my phone to show him the image.
“I think that came from Ruby’s Treasure Trove.” I explained, again, what I’d overheard about the trouble with Ruby’s security cameras.
Tony frowned and rubbed his chin for a moment, deep in thought. “Hmm.”
“What? Tell me. You know I’m a good sounding board.”
“This Harper girl, she’s new in town, right? Ruby’s got that new girl working for her.”
He looked down at his notepad and flipped back a few pages. The pages were full of Tony’s usual swirling doodles—the ones he used to draw on everything while he was working out a puzzle.
“Ruby’s new employee is a young girl who just moved to Misty Falls recently, with her sister… Harper.”
“There you go,” I said.
“Motive?” he asked.
I looked up at the ceiling and let my mind wander. “Crime ring? The girls let him steal things from businesses where they work, and he fences the stolen goods and splits the cash with them?”
“And then they suddenly strangle him one night, just for kicks? Or over a few hundred dollars?”
“Have there been any major robberies in town? Maybe these small thefts were just practice. Where does Harper work? At a bank?”
Tony nodded and gave me an appreciative look for my input.
“I guess I’ll find out,” he said.
>
I beamed at him. “Thank you.”
“Stormy, your thought process is impeccable.”
“Thank you.”
“You think exactly like a criminal.”
I put my hands on my hips and gave him an outraged look. “What did you just say?”
He gave me a wink. “No wonder you made all those millions in the business world.” He pushed his cafeteria chair back and patted his stomach. “I should hit the road. See you in town.”
He got up and pushed his empty chair in.
I stayed seated. “I do not think like a criminal.”
He gave me a grin, then started walking away. He was out of hearing range, but I kept talking.
“Tony Baloney, you’re such a smarty pants. I’ll have you know I think like a business woman. A logical one.”
Someone put a cool hand on my shoulder. I whipped my head around to see my father’s pretty physical therapist, Dora.
“Are you okay, dear? You’re talking to yourself. We take that sort of thing seriously in a hospital.”
“Just thinking out loud.”
“Let me know if your thoughts start answering you back, okay?”
I gave her a smile. Dora’s concern seemed as genuine as it felt comforting. I could see what my father might find appealing about the woman.
“Your father seemed happy to see you,” she said as she glanced over at my empty dishes. “I’m just heading back up there now if you want to walk with me.”
“Sure.” I got to my feet and walked with her.
Chapter 23
Dora looked like she wanted to have a serious chat with me about something, but we were accompanied the whole way by other patients and nurses.
When we got to my father’s room, he groggily called out, “Sunny?”
Dora bustled past me, into the room.
“No, it’s the other one. Stormy.”
“The one who brings the storm clouds,” my father joked. His voice sounded thick, like he’d been napping the whole time I’d been having lunch.
“Look,” he said to Dora. “Right there over her shoulder. Thunder and lightning. Don’t make my Stormy mad, whatever you do.”
“Good grief, Dad. What sort of drugs are you on? By which I mean… which ones are you not on?”
He bobbed his head from side to side like he was five champagne toasts into a wedding reception. “This and that. Dora here takes care of me. Pink pills and blue pills.”
I flicked my gaze over and caught her blushing.
“Not any blue pills,” she said hurriedly. “I swear, Stormy. Not the little blue pills. Your father and I are just friends.”
“Good friends,” my father said.
I collapsed into a visitor chair next to his bed and dropped my face into my palms. “Dad, what have you done? Are you breaking up with Pam?”
“Already did. I broke up with her two weeks ago, but the woman won’t leave.”
I groaned into my hands. Two weeks ago? And he didn’t think to tell me?
He continued, “I never wanted Pam to move in with me in the first place, but now she’s all hunkered down, like a squatter. I thought she’d take a hint and salvage what’s left of her dignity. She’s still at the house, isn’t she? I thought while I was here at the hospital, she’d finally smarten up and pack up that damn cat and the rest of her stuff.”
I looked up, horrified. “Not Jeffrey!”
Dora and my father looked at each other, then said, in unison, “Who’s Jeffrey?”
“The cat. It turned out it wasn’t a girl, after all.”
My father took Dora’s hand and smiled up at her sweetly. “Ain’t life full of surprises?”
I replayed the events of the last few days in my head. Pam had been ranting about men always chasing younger women with long hair. Dora had shoulder-length brown hair. Of course Pam knew. She knew about all of this. But why hadn’t she moved out, or at least told me?
The realization hit me in a painful place. She didn’t tell anyone for the same reason I hadn’t told anyone the truth about my relationship, which had been over for years before I moved out. It was too humiliating to admit to people. And by ignoring the problem, there was always the slim chance it might suddenly get better, on its own.
As I fought the mental comparison of myself and Pam, Dora and my father started saying mushy couples’ stuff to each other.
I heard someone say the phrase “sponge bath,” and I was up on my feet faster than a good waitress in a truck stop refills your coffee.
I muttered a quick goodbye to both of them, and went off in search of that vending machine Dora had warned me about.
Chapter 24
Armed with vending machine coffee that was—surprisingly enough—not the worst coffee I’d ever had, I started driving back to Misty Falls.
With the dark ribbon of highway in front of me, and the honking traffic jams of the big city behind me, I started to breathe easier.
So what if my father had just nuked another relationship? It was his life.
And so what if there was a killer on the loose in town? It had barely been a couple of days since the discovery of the body. I could trust Tony and the rest of the force to catch the guilty party.
As of that moment, I was going to focus solely on my own business. Maybe I would figure out why the cash register at the gift shop was always out by three dollars at the end of the day.
I got back to Misty Falls a couple hours after sunset, just as I was starting to get hungry for dinner.
True to the promise I’d made to my best friend, I picked us up some pizza from the brick oven takeout place before heading straight to her place.
Jessica rented a top floor, corner unit in a three-story walk-up. We don’t have many apartment buildings in Misty Falls, and hers was neither the top of the market, nor the bottom. One of the units on the lower floor used flags as curtains, but at least they were colorful, international flags.
She buzzed me in, and when I got to her apartment, she was running around in just her underwear, her phone to her ear.
“Hang on, Mom,” she said into the phone, then, to me, “Stormy, can you give me a few minutes? Actually, here are my keys. Can you be the best friend any girl has ever had and grab my clothes out of the dryer so I don’t get a rude note from the building manager?”
I set the warm pizza box on the stove and took her keys. I hadn’t been to her building’s laundry room, but I had heard about her crazy building manager. He lived across from the flag-curtain unit and was obsessed with the laundry room.
On the basement level, I located the laundry room and walked in just as Jessica's dryer load buzzed that it was finished.
A big smile spread across my face. Getting to the dryer with perfect timing, just as it’s buzzing? Excellent. It was actually the best thing that had happened to me all day.
I pulled open the dryer and savored the hot, fresh-smelling towels. As I always do, I started folding the items immediately so they didn’t wrinkle, rather than stuffing them into the basket to be forgotten by Jessica.
Someone opened the door behind me and came into the laundry room, but I was in such bliss folding the hot towels and sweaters into tidy squares, I didn’t even turn to see who it was.
A female said, icily, “I see you’re following me.”
I turned to find a horrifying sight. Our number one murder suspect, Harper, stood no more than five feet away from me. She had no laundry in her hands.
She had a hammer.
I scanned the vicinity for a weapon to arm myself with. There was nothing within grasp, except for a warehouse-sized jug of liquid detergent and a box of dryer sheets. I grabbed the detergent and held it between us like a shield.
“People know I’m down here!” I yelled at Harper. “You won’t get away with this!”
Her mouth dropped open and her eyes bulged with what I interpreted to be fake shock. “Get away with what?”
“Murdering Mr. Michaels. I saw you today, in t
he city, at the pawn shop. I said your name, Harper, but you didn’t turn around. That’s because your name’s not really Harper, is it?”
She took a step toward me, her pale blue eyes narrowing to slits. “Who told you that? Who said my name’s not Harper?”
“Me. I did. And I told the police all about you. Officer Tony Milano is looking into you, right now. He’ll probably be here any minute to arrest you for murder.” I lifted the jug of detergent higher. “Now put down the hammer and take a step back.”
“What?” She gave me a dumbfounded look, but didn’t set down the hammer.
I did what seemed both necessary and prudent at the moment.
I chucked the nearly-full, warehouse-sized jug of detergent at her.
The heavy plastic container struck her in the mid-section.
She made an OOF sound and dropped the hammer inside an open washing machine, where it made an awful CLANG.
She stumbled backward in shock, making a wheezing sound. Eyes bulging, she looked at me and gasped, “Can’t. Breathe. Help. Can’t. Breathe.”
As she crumpled to the ground, I got the feeling I’d made a terrible mistake. How could she confess to the murder if I killed her with a jug of laundry detergent?
She kept gasping, making an awful wheezing sound.
I ran to her side and patted her back.
“You’re okay,” I said. “I just knocked the air out of your lungs. Try to calm yourself, and the breath will come to you.” And once you start breathing again, you can confess, you crime-ring murderer.
She kept wheezing, in a panic.
“There, there. It’s a shock to the system. I know it’s scary. This happened to me once when I was playing touch football and someone decided to turn the touch into tackle.” I kept patting her back. “Easy now. Just let it all out, pause, and then you’ll be able to breathe again.”
While I patted her back and waited for her to start breathing normally so she could confess, I scanned the laundry room. My gaze landed a entire tool box.
More weapons!
Or were they just tools? The tool box sat under a hand-written sign that listed all the rules for residents who wished to borrow tools.
Death of a Dapper Snowman Page 13
