by Judith Ivie
“So much for high-tech police techniques.” She rolled her eyes. “Are you okay, ‘Cita?”
“I’m perfectly happy to sit here in peace for a little while, so you just go scribble your little heart out, Dearie,” I assured her and sank gratefully into a visitor’s chair in the cubicle outside the door, where I was issued a lined pad and pencil of my own.
Nearly two hours later, our signed statements were secured, and Detective Bernstein delivered us back to the Law Barn, where we sank gratefully into the familiar territory of our work day.
Compared to the hubbub going on a few blocks away, the Monday morning chaos of the Law Barn was relatively soothing. At least here the activity had to do with the business of living, as opposed to what was taking place in front of Blades. At least the ladies would have no shortage of gossip today, I thought, but I was afraid that Emma and I would feature prominently in the clucking. The thing was, this wasn’t the first time I had discovered a body. Just about a year previously, I had been involved in a murder investigation at the law firm where Margo, Strutter and I worked. At this rate it wouldn’t be long before I became a local pariah like that lady sleuth on Murder, She Wrote. Everywhere she went, murder was sure to follow. I had never been able to understand why anybody invited her anywhere after the first year.
After answering the inevitable questions from Jenny, who sensibly dealt with the situation by bringing us mugs of generously sugared coffee to make of for our abandoned diner brew, Emma and I separated in the lobby. She climbed the stairs to her nook in the loft, and I climbed the few stairs down to MACK’s quarters at the rear of the first floor. With Jenny screening calls from the merely curious, all was serene for half an hour as I scrambled to attend to my accumulated voice and email messages. I was prioritizing the latter when Margo sailed in from a morning showing, filled with sly glee. Rhett Butler padded beside her.
“Why, Kate, you little dickens! I know Prudy Crane kept you waitin’ for your coffee a time or two, but murder? Remind me never to get on your list.” She dropped her Gucci briefcase on the coffee table and draped herself elegantly on our small sofa, smoothing a stray blonde lock back into her chignon. It might not have been a trendy hairdo, but it suited Margo perfectly. Rhett sprawled at her feet and gazed at her shapely ankles with doggy adoration. “Tell me everything, Sugar.”
Between phone calls, both hers and mine, I brought her up to speed on the morning’s events. “Poor little Emma,” was her parting comment as we walked back through the lobby together an hour later, she to another showing and I to the restroom. Rhett had been consigned to his comfortable pen in the back yard, where he could belly down in the grass and keep a watchful eye on the neighborhood cats and squirrels for the remainder of the morning. “This must have been Emma’s first up close and personal experience with a corpse. She okay?”
“Poor little Emma is just fine,” I said dryly, glancing up the stairs to the loft, from which gales of laughter emanated. “After the initial shock, she reverted to norm, thanks to that nice young officer, Rick Fletcher. He had the good sense not to coddle her, even got her laughing.”
“Hmmm, Fletcher … Fletcher. I don’t believe I know the name.” As fond as Margo was of attractive men in general, she was even more devoted to men in uniform and was, um, personally acquainted with a number of our local law enforcers.
“Hands off, Margo. He’s barely my son’s age.”
“And your point is …?” She grinned lasciviously and swayed out the door, waggling polished fingertips at Millie Haines, who was apparently just arriving for work.
I hurried into the coatroom that occupied a niche to the right of the big barn door and approached the rear wall. Anyone unfamiliar with the Law Barn would have thought me daft, but we regulars were familiar with this architectural peculiarity. The barn itself had been built in the 1800s and then restored in the 1950s for the enjoyment of an eccentric and extremely wealthy engineer who fancied himself an artist. Since no gallery in the Northeast seemed interested in showing his watercolors, a collection of amateurish renderings of local vistas, he created his own gallery and spared no expense restructuring and decorating the place. Several times a year, he would invite one hundred or so of his closest friends to a showing of his latest works, events that were well attended more because of the lavish spreads of food and liquor than the art hanging on the walls.
What his guests didn’t know was that their host’s primary entertainment during these events was concealing himself in the very room to which I was now headed. The guest bathroom was located on the other side of the lobby under the stairs and was clearly marked. This was the facility used by Law Barn clients and most of the staff. The door to the other bathroom, which only a few of us frequented, was nearly invisible in the elaborate wall paneling of the coatroom and was further obscured by the coat rack that stood in front of it. There was no exterior doorknob. To get the door to pop open, which it did silently, you had to scoot around the left end of the rack and press the paneling in the right place. I did that now.
The room that was revealed was an elegantly equipped restroom, outfitted with a mahogany vanity and old-fashioned water closet with a pull chain. The exterior wall featured a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, well stocked with classic fiction, as well as pulp fiction of the ‘50s. A small but extraordinarily beautiful Oriental carpet covered most of the floor, and an overstuffed chair sat cozily in the corner along with a small end table and a lamp with a tasseled shade. When Emma introduced me and my partners to this plush hideaway, we fell in love with it immediately and vowed to keep it a delicious secret among the four of us—and Grace, of course, who kept it spotless along with the rest of the Law Barn and saw that it was stocked with fresh soap and towels. Dubbed the Reading Room, it became a welcome retreat to which we could repair to make private cell phone calls, coddle headaches and cramps, or just close our eyes for a few minutes on particularly hectic days.
It was some months after we had moved in that we discovered the reason for the secret room’s existence. According to a relative of the now deceased artist-cum-engineer, whose rather dreadful self-portrait hung behind Jenny’s desk in the lobby, it had been especially constructed by Mr. Watercolors to indulge his favorite pastime of hide and seek. In the middle of one of his parties, he would disappear from view, only to reappear disconcertingly next to some guests who had thought they were engaged in private conversation. Watercolors waited comfortably in his secret lair until his guests had consumed enough alcohol to be indiscreet. Then up he would pop, creeping about and eavesdropping. In this way he was able to glean not only his visitors’ real opinions of his paintings but many bits of gossip that came in handy in his business dealings.
My partners and Emma and I enjoyed the story and the room itself. It offered complete privacy and sanctuary from obnoxious clients. It was also enormous fun to have a hidey-hole into which we could vanish right under the noses of staff and visitors.
As I enjoyed the scent of the special tulip hand soap we kept on the vanity, images from the morning tumbled chaotically through my mind … the wild geese on the cove, Emma’s shocked face, Mavis Griswold’s pleased smile. It had been an odd reaction to the situation, to say the least. Had I imagined it? No, I had not. It had crept across Mavis’ face against her will, I was sure. I debated the wisdom of mentioning it to Lt. Harkness. Drying my hands on the fresh guest towel Grace had provided, I decided to consult Emma before making up my mind one way or the other.
As I always did before exiting the Reading Room, I listened at the crack of the door to make sure no one was in the coat room, then headed for the stairs up to the loft. One needn’t worry about startling Emma, whose desk sat in an airy but cluttered recess at the top of the staircase, since the old wood creaked at every step. In any event, she was on the phone, which was pretty much a chronic state of being during her workday.
“Hi, Icky,” I greeted the young field mouse who resided in a hamster cage on the credenza behind her desk. The o
ld building housed its share of mice, and my tender-hearted daughter was forever rescuing one or another from the next door neighbor’s cat, a bruiser named Jake, and rehabilitating it before releasing it behind the barn. Each mouse was named Icky, due to visitors’ tendency to cry, “Ooooh, ick!” when they noticed the rodent du jour. The current patient was not only alive but feisty, rushing around bumping into the glass sides of his enclosure.
“I think this one’s about ready to go,” I told Emma when she hung up the phone. “He’s starting to throw himself at the glass.” A wildlife biologist at the nature center had warned us that such behavior indicated release was warranted.
Emma nodded. “I know. I’ll take him out back on my way to lunch. Jake will probably eat him for dinner, but at least I gave the kid a second chance.” She shrugged philosophically. “What’s up?”
I told her about Mavis Griswold’s inexplicable reaction to the news of Prudy’s death and asked her opinion. “I’m inclined to mention it to the lieutenant, but I want to be sure I’m not just scandal-mongering. What do you think? Am I overreacting here?”
“Hard to say,” Emma replied thoughtfully. “Obviously, there’s a story there somewhere, but who knows what it might be? Maybe grinning is just a nervous reaction for Mavis, although one would hope not, her being a minister’s wife and all. Have you considered just asking her about it straight out?”
I hadn’t, but I did now. “Okay. I guess I could do that. It might be a little embarrassing for both of us, but it beats pointing suspicion at her if there’s no reason to do so.” I glanced around. Jimmy’s door was closed, as usual, and nobody else was in sight. “Where is everybody?”
“Out to lunch, of course. They got all the gory details they could out of me, so they went in search of fresh dirt and left me to hold the fort.” The phone rang again, and she grimaced. “Emma here,” she said into the receiver, then mouthed “See you later” at me. I retraced my steps to the first floor.
The rest of the day was filled with the usual end-of-month crises. Anyone involved with the business of transferring real estate knows that more closings are scheduled during the last week of the month than during the previous three weeks combined, and our personal lives get put on hold for the duration. With the ability to transfer documents electronically, and the repeal of the Blue Laws that used to protect our Sundays, weekends were no longer an exception. On the first of each month, our lives returned to normal, but until then refrigerators remained empty, laundry went undone, and errands accumulated while we tended nonstop to business.
Sharing office space with Emma and her boss was working well. Both businesses benefited from mutual referrals, and Emma had the patience I lacked with the nervous first-time property buyers who were my particular peeve. Bristling with self-importance and their cutting-edge knowledge of real estate practices, usually obtained from a 22-year-old nephew or a library book written in 1987, they entered into the transaction determined that nobody was going to pull the wool over their eyes but convinced that everybody was trying to do just that. My reassurances that the people with whom we worked were consummate professionals, and really nice folks besides, tended to fall on deaf ears, and I quickly lost patience with those clients’ bad attitudes. Emma, however, simply ignored their bullying and set them straight, quietly but firmly, and few could look into her honest brown eyes and doubt her word.
At nearly six o’clock I turned off my computer and rubbed my eyes, grainy from staring at a lighted screen all afternoon. I walked out through the lobby, which was windowless and thus almost dark, and stuck my head up the stairwell to the loft. As I expected, Emma’s lights were still on, and I could hear her soothing yet another jittery client on the phone. “Goodnight, Sweetie, don’t stay too much later,” I called and let myself out the big barn door, turning my key in the outside lock to keep the bogeyman away from my girl.
When I arrived at my condominium, I was surprised to see lights gleaming through the kitchen windows and two cars parked end to end on one side of the driveway—Joey’s Honda and Armando’s Passat. Uh oh. It had completely slipped my mind that Joey was coming for dinner tonight, and Armando’s visit was unscheduled. Guiltily, I pressed the automatic door opener on my visor and waited for the garage door to rise. Armando and Joey were uncomfortable in each other’s presence. It was partly age and ethnicity, I knew. After all, how much could a middle-aged Latino raised in South America and a twenty-something Caucasian raised in New England have in common? More than that, it was temperament. Armando was reserved and gentlemanly; Joey was open and flamboyant. They just didn’t get each other. For my sake, they made polite conversation when trapped in the same room, but their mutual confusion was always evident.
I eased open the car door and tiptoed to the top of the short staircase that led from the garage to the kitchen, where I pressed my ear to the door. I heard nothing but the hiss of something sautéing on the stove and the clink of a pet tag on the edge of Jasmine’s, or more likely Simon’s, kitty chow bowl. My beloved old cat Oliver had died the previous spring. While I was still grieving, my next door neighbor, an elderly woman named Mary Feeney, appeared one evening cuddling a furry mite to her chest. She had found the kitten dodging cars in the supermarket parking lot and brought him to me for temporary shelter. Within two days, I couldn’t give him up. The mite, named Simon, had made it a point never to miss another meal and currently tipped the scales at seventeen pounds.
I tiptoed back down to the car, chunked its door shut, and then clattered back up the stairs. “I’m home!” I announced cheerfully as I burst through the door. The kitchen was empty but for Jasmine, licking her whiskers after her dinner, but an enticing aroma of cooking wafted from a covered pan on the stovetop. Raucous laughter came from the family room. “What’s so funny?” I asked, coming into the room and dropping my raincoat over Joey’s blond head where he lay on the sofa with Simon sandbagging his broad chest. Armando, in office attire and groomed to perfection, as always, rose to give me a quick kiss, and I patted his backside appreciatively before Joey struggled out from under my coat. Both wore the guilty expressions of Men Caught in the Act … of what, I didn’t know. An off-color joke? Woman-bashing? I wrote it off to a little male bonding and didn’t pursue it.
An hour later, we finished up the tasty entrée concocted by Armando out of rice and some leftover chicken and fresh tomatoes he’d found in the refrigerator, and I finished telling them the surprising events of the day. Both greeted my news in character.
“I am sorry you had such a distressing day, Cara,” said Armando, taking my hand, “but at least this time you are not in any danger.” This last part referred to the murder that had occurred a year previously, which Margo, Strutter and I had helped to solve.
“Yeah, this getting involved in murder investigations is getting to be a habit with you, Ma. It’s a little kinky, but if you and the girls get tired of real estate, you can always get your P.I. licenses,” Joey chuckled.
I glared. “I am not involved in a murder investigation. I merely found the body. And ‘the girls’ are the same age as your mother, roughly speaking, so kindly show a little respect.”
Joey dumped Jas and Simon from his lap, where they had been jockeying for position, then stacked up our plates and headed for the kitchen to load the dishwasher. “Whatever you say, you old bat,” he agreed cheerfully.
“How did I manage to raise two completely disrespectful offspring?” I called after him.
“What goes around comes around,” he yelled back, and I let him have the last word. He probably had a point. After crashing plates and cutlery into the dishwasher, he rejoined us to make his farewells. “So long, Ma,” he said, enveloping me in his usual bear hug, and I wondered for the hundredth time how a colicky, six-pound infant had morphed into this strapping young man who routinely wrestled 70-foot tractor trailer rigs over the highways and byways.
“Be a good boy,” I delivered as my part of our silly farewell ritual, a gesture to the old
days. It was my personal talisman to keep him safe during the long night of driving ahead of him.
Releasing me, Joey turned to Armando and leaned forward as if to give him a smooch. Instinctively, Armando recoiled in macho horror, and Joey cracked up. “Gotcha, man,” he triumphed as Armando rolled his eyes. Then he rumpled the cats’ fur and was gone, leaving the house oddly quiet after the kitchen door banged shut behind him.
“So,” said Armando.
“So.”
“How are you doing with all of this?”
“Better now,” I said, enjoying his scent of soap and expensive cologne as I nestled against his cashmere-covered chest.
“And Emma? How is she doing?”
I considered. Being the center of a drama during the workday was one thing. How was she faring alone in her apartment after this difficult day? I reached for the wireless and punched in her number, but all I got was her recorded message. Between boyfriends at the moment, she was either out with one or another of her many girlfriends or sound asleep with the ringer off. Either way, I knew intellectually she was fine, but the mom part of me fretted a bit. “Guess she’s having an early night,” I concluded, replacing the phone in its charger.
“Probably a good idea,” Armando smiled. I smiled back, and without further discussion, we headed for my bedroom. The phone rang, and I groaned.
“Yes,” I answered distractedly, expecting to hear Emma’s voice. Instead, Abby Stoddard spoke into my ear.
“Sorry to bother you, Kate,” she apologized, “but frankly, I just didn’t know where else to turn, and you having experience with this sort of thing … well, I thought you might be willing to help me sort something out.” Abby sounded uncharacteristically flustered, as well she might after the day she’d had.
Inwardly, I cringed. As intriguing as the events of last year had been, they had left me with the fervent hope that I would never again be forced to delve into other people’s personal lives. I preferred to live in blissful ignorance. Still, Abby had been very helpful to us over the past year, filling us in on the vicissitudes of running a business in a small town, and a friend was a friend. “You bet, Abby. What can I do?”
