“Yes, but not because I went to the clinic. I just feel better because I took a day off from everything yesterday, so whatever it was, is probably mostly gone by now.”
“Except you’re not yourself yet. You’re picking at your food instead of jamming it all into your mouth at once.”
She tried to glare at him, but she was much happier exchanging taunts and barbs with him than watching him look so burdened. Maybe it was his workload. It just seemed like something else was bothering him. To her, whatever was weighing him down like this was very obvious, if to no one else.
But it was such an effort today, so hard to keep her end of the conversation going, and she had looked forward to this break, for him as much as for her. He needed this break, if only for a half hour, and she knew she was definitely letting him down whether he showed it or not.
While Connor and Laura enjoyed their lunch and a brief thirty minutes together, café owner Marie Vandergard noticed a man across the street in front of Second Treasures. She knew him well and watched as he peered inside the front window, shielding both eyes with cupped hands.
Did he think that Laura was hiding in there with the Closed sign turned outward and the door locked? No, this man was spending far too long staring into the shop. Why?
Vandergard glanced over at Connor and Laura enjoying their lunch. Those two deserved a few minutes like this. She wouldn’t bother them with what she’d seen.
Only now it grew more interesting. For Dr. Colin Anderson turned around and looked toward the café across the street. He seemed to be staring right at Connor and Laura at the table in the front window.
Vandergard knew it was possible to make out faces from across the narrow street. She glanced at the angle of the sun. Yes, it was the right time of day for that. But she couldn’t figure out the look she saw on Anderson’s face while he stared at the couple.
She didn’t like Anderson, didn’t trust him. She hadn’t liked his parents, either. Cold, distant people. Colin seemed different than they had been, but was he? He was still pretty arrogant and full of himself, she thought. Something just didn’t sit right with her, and she watched as he slowly turned toward his car, parked in front of the shop. As he opened the door and got in, he shot another glance at the couple in the window, and then drove off in the direction of his clinic.
Vandergard went back to her customers. She hadn’t noticed the cat in the front window of Laura’s shop. The empress was watching Anderson and now his car, her tail sweeping grandly back and forth, back and forth, and then turned to look at Connor and Laura.
The cat hopped out of the store window, into the dark interior, and vanished just as the snow began to fall from the sky, starting first in tiny, dry, innocent flakes before it got serious.
twenty-four
Alison Fitzpatrick made spice muffins every Valentine’s Day for the elderly folks in Saint Bartholomew’s assisted living home just outside Raging Ford. Laura’s mother, Frannie Keene, had always made apple butter and given it to Alison for the muffins.
During the past eleven years, Alison had done without her friend’s apple butter, sometimes making her own and sometimes using store-bought varieties, but the muffins just never tasted the same. Laura wanted to fix that. After all, Laura and her mother had often made the apple butter together from the Rage Family Apple Butter recipe during her youth. So she was very familiar with it and made up the batch in Maryland when the best apples were available last fall, bringing it up with her when she drove to Minnesota in early November.
The winter storm which had begun so innocently on Monday had left a good two and a half feet of snow on the town throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, but all major roads and highways were cleared by the big, heavy plows by Thursday night. On Friday and Saturday, they cleared the rest of the side streets and alleys.
Laura stood at the front window of her apartment on Sunday morning, sipping coffee, in her slippers and robe, gazing at the winter wonderland. Over the past few days she had watched folks on snowmobiles, cross-country skis, and snowshoes traveling up and down the edges of the road, making their way out and around snow plows and all the others who were opening up driveways and sidewalks. Most places were closed during the snow storm and Laura had taken the opportunity to rest and heal.
Cars were out and about when Laura and her neighbors began shoveling the sidewalks in front of their shops, but she stopped and didn’t argue when Harry sent her back indoors. She watched from inside as they all joined together, moving down the block, clearing one or two parking spaces in front of each shop. The crisp, snowy air invigorated her, but her recent illness sapped her long-term energy. She marveled as always at the morning sun which sparkled on the fresh white blanket and lit the crystal blue sky now empty of clouds as if to deny that anything up there had been responsible for the scraping and shoveling.
Today Laura’s plan included pulling from the store room a heavy box filled with quart jars of the Rage Family Apple Butter for Connor’s mother’s muffins. She opened a second sturdy box and put the four quarts and two pints into it for Alison, keeping two pint jars for herself on the kitchenette counter. Once she packed and loaded Alison’s box into her car, she used the snow blower to clear her driveway and a broom, her car. Then she locked up the shop and headed out for the Fitzpatrick house, grateful the alley behind the shops had been cleared by the big trucks as well.
The Fitzpatricks had lived next door to the Keenes, but Laura had already been past her old house several times since her return to Raging Ford. She didn’t hesitate as she drove past it, now the home of Connor’s older sister, Shannon, her husband and baby, and pulled into the cleared driveway of 124 Algonquin Street behind the Fitzpatricks’ and Connor’s SUVs. She hadn’t known Connor would be here, but she was glad of it.
Laura juggled her box of the apple butter as she carefully trod the cleared narrow sidewalk stacked with mounds of snow on both sides and up the five steps to the Fitzpatricks’ front door. She elbowed the doorbell. The door swung open and Connor stood before her. She shifted her load.
“Is your mom here?”
Connor took the heavy box from her and called over his shoulder.
“Mom! It’s that annoying brat from next door trying to sell us more Girl Scout cookies!”
Laura heard a call from the kitchen in the back of the house.
“Connor, invite her in!”
“Did you come to help me build a snowman?” he asked.
“Do you need help building a snowman?”
“No, I was looking for someone to delegate my assigned task to, and you showed up on the doorstep. Looking better than you did a few days ago.”
He stepped aside for her to enter the foyer.
“I actually came to bring your mom the apple butter–”
“I know,” he interrupted, “so she can make the muffins for the seniors at St. Bart’s.”
Connor’s mother was delighted at seeing four quarts of the famous Rage Family Apple Butter. It felt good that Frannie’s daughter had continued the tradition. She’d missed the extra touch these last eleven years. She had tried to make her own apple butter, but it just didn’t taste the same as Frannie’s.
Connor disappeared into the kitchen with the box and returned, minus the jars of apple butter.
“Are you helping Connor build our snowman? It would be a shame to waste so much nice, wet snow. We get it so rarely. And all the children do these days is listen to music or text messages and share pictures on smart phones when they should be out building snowmen. The children are all so concerned about what the others are doing when they should be concerned with what they’re doing. They’ve forgotten how to go out and have fun.”
Connor put on a blank look as his mother was apparently including him in “the children.”
“He said he doesn’t need my help,” Laura said. “He just wants me to do his job fo
r him.”
He shot a look of pretend betrayal at her.
Alison’s eyes crinkled in good humor.
“He needs your help.”
“I just need some grunt labor so this won’t take all day,” Connor said.
“When you’re done,” his mother continued, ignoring him, “I have some lumps of coal and a lovely carrot. Michael can find you a nice hat for the snowman’s head. And if it turns out that it’s a snow lady, let me know, I’ll find a pretty scarf and a different hat,” Alison continued, ignoring her son, and heading back to the kitchen.
Once Connor suited up and got on his boots, the pair went outside. “I’m not really dressed for making snow-people. I had no such plan in mind when I left the shop,” she pointed out.
He looked her over.
“You’ve got a hat, gloves and boots. All you need.”
They both started compacting and rolling balls, but neither could agree on which part they were making—the bottom or the middle.
“It will be a snowman. I’m already beating you. Mine’s getting bigger faster; therefore, mine’s the base. And mine’s better,” Connor declared.
Laura stopped and straightened from her work.
“Are you trying to tell me that because of a gestational accident of nature that gave you longer limbs, denser bone structure and stronger muscles, that you make better snow-people? Hah!”
He stood up, his face ruddy from exertion and the subfreezing temperature. “Yes. And I don’t want to argue about it.”
That was when she pegged him in the face with a big, slushy snowball. It took him about one-tenth of a second to recover, grab his own snowball and pitch it at her, somehow a more compacted and harder one.
In that moment, Laura turned to run behind the porch, so it landed on the back of her head, some of it slipping down the neck of her coat behind the scarf. She shrieked as the cold hit her skin. It was followed by a volley of snowballs that she found hard to dodge or defend against. As she ran to the back yard, she grabbed snow off the porch railing and turned back to hurl it at Connor, but she missed him and caught his latest smack right in the face.
Inside, Deputy Chief Michael Fitzpatrick looked at them through the side window. “You set this up, didn’t you?”
His wife continued to read through her muffin recipe and finish her grocery list.
“You know fresh air and exercise are healthy. You said that Connor needed to unwind and relax more. Have a little fun.”
They could hear Laura’s shrieks and Connor’s laughter. Fitzpatrick watched the two outside wildly plastering each other with snow as they gave up all pretense of actually forming snowballs, until Connor pulled Laura out of view in a small breezeway near the door entry by the garage, the only spot where nobody could see them from the house or the street.
“Please tell me when the last time was you heard our son laugh like that?” Alison asked.
twenty-five
In the breezeway, Connor leaned back against his house and Laura stood facing him, gloves off, trying to clear the snow and ice from her face and hair. When she finished, she found him staring at her.
“What?” she asked, pulling a glove back on, but before she could pull on the second one, Connor pulled her to him.
And kissed her, melting the remaining snow from her face.
She took a breath.
“You know I really like doing this.”
“Me, too,” Connor said. “And I know we agreed, but I’m not sure taking it slowly is working for me.”
Laura looked him in the eye.
“Slowly? I thought you said snowly.”
He scooped a small dollop of snow from a holly branch extending into the alcove and plopped it on Laura’s nose.
“There’s your snowly. How’s that working for you?”
Their faces ruddy, eyes bright, snow-packed hair and clothes, the pair glowed at each other. For once, she had nothing to say.
“Can we agree to revisit this whole thing?” Connor asked.
Laura looked thoughtful.
“You’re telling me we’re not moving fast enough for you, and actually, with all the space you’re taking up in my head, I’m thinking…”
Connor shut his eyes briefly and sighed, bracing himself for the coming diatribe of logic.
“Maybe that we’re not making much progress in catching up and filling in the gaps, especially since, how many stories have you told me in the past three weeks—two? And both having to do with your brother’s 21st birthday bash? And me? Quite possibly one story about—”
“Your Aunt Rose in her rose garden,” he finished for her, hoping it would speed things up. He decided she did this deliberately to annoy him, but he was glad she appeared to be recovering from her malady.
“And I was thinking that at the rate we’re catching up, with a rough estimate of how many newsworthy items there are to share, and that would be two or three per week during high school years, and you had two years left, and I had three left, and then in college, it would drop—as it would over the summer—to about one per week, and then the years afterward, maybe one item every other week or so. Well, at the rate we’re going, I calculate we’d be caught up by the time you’re 123 years old and I’m 122. So, I agree with you that neither slowly nor snowly is working.”
“Isn’t that what I just said with fewer words?”
She nodded. “But I had more fun with my more words than you did with your few.”
“I bet you did.”
He kissed her and held her tightly.
“You know, we really should finish up that snowman before your parents come looking for us.”
He looked incredulous.
“They’re not coming looking for us. We’re adults.” But he looked up at the sky, just in case, as if expecting a thunderbolt strike from Lieutenant Keene.
Connor’s father tapped on the garage door window and they both jumped, with Connor secretly glad he’d caught them in between kisses instead of in one. Being the youngest child in his family, he’d had no privacy and greatly valued it. It was the one reason he had moved to Duluth: privacy.
“Hot chocolate’s ready,” Michael announced then turned back to the house.
Connor swore under his breath. “He’s still here,” he mumbled.
She tilted her head.
“He lives here.”
“Not my father, your father.”
She just smiled, put on her second glove and pulled him by the hand back to the front yard.
“How did you know that was going to happen? You heard him, didn’t you? You saw him coming, right?” Connor shot at her.
She shook her head and kept walking, pulling him along.
“Logic and detection,” she tossed over her shoulder. “He lives here, we disappeared from view, he worried that we had fallen into a deep crevasse in your yard or something.”
“Deep crevasse…yeah. You heard him. I know you did.”
Connor kept it up all the way to the snowman and throughout its completion. Near the end, they decided it would be a snow zombie with arms stuck out front. Alison had left the pieces of coal and a carrot on the front porch. The pair decided the snow zombie would also have three eyes and an off-center nose.
“You saw him out of the corner of your eye. I know you did,” Connor insisted. He looked up to the sky once and whispered that “rest in peace” really meant give it a rest.
Around the corner of the Fitzpatrick house and past their yard, in the small woods where the town held its annual haunted forest party at Halloween, a man walked his dog. He watched the snow-play and the laughter between Connor and Laura with interest, watched them disappear from sight.
He was about to continue his walk about fifteen minutes later when they reappeared. Something stayed his movements, however; something m
ade him remain, still as a statue, against the snowy bark of a big old elm tree. As long as his dog was happy, jumping about in the snow, he continued to watch the couple finish building their snowman.
When they went into the house, he waited a few minutes, and then continued on his way, away from the house, in the direction from which he had come.
twenty-six
No sooner had they taken off their boots when Laura went directly into the kitchen and put on her whiniest voice. “Mrs. Fitzpatrick, Connor put snow down my back.”
He followed her in.
As his mother turned to peer at him, he said to Laura, “You started it. You got exactly what you deserved.”
Laura was undaunted.
“Connor’s being mean.”
He narrowed his eyes at her.
“You threw the first snowball. When you play with fire and snow, you can expect to get burned.”
“Connor’s mixing metaphors.”
Finally his mother spoke.
“Connor, stop mixing metaphors.”
Laura seemed mollified that her friend had finally been admonished. But the look he gave her was one she recognized from the past. Somewhere between amazement, remembrance, and I’ll-get-even.
“Connor, would you mind carrying Laura’s hot cocoa to the living room and saving her a seat? I need to ask her something.”
After he left the two women alone, Alison jumped right into it.
“I heard you weren’t feeling well a few days ago? What was that all about?”
“Oh, I’ve no idea. I saw Dr. Anderson, but he didn’t think it was anything. Probably just a virus. He told me to take better care of myself and get some rest. Isn’t that what they always say?”
“Are you really feeling better? You still have circles under your eyes.”
“Much better. The fresh, snowy air was great today, very invigorating. I’ll be fine.”
Alison smiled and linked her arm in Laura’s on their way to the living room.
“You’ll tell me,” she whispered in Laura’s ear, and it was not just a suggestion, “if you need anything or aren’t feeling well again.”
Priced to Kill Page 11
