Sherri toyed with the idea of going back and confronting him, but she was ready for a little time away from the case herself. He was probably just brooding about Zara anyway. Love! It sure could mess up the thought processes.
Glancing at her watch, Sherri fixed her mind on Adam. It was three thirty on a Friday afternoon. If she hurried, she’d have a whole hour to play with her son before supper.
Chapter Sixteen
By seven Friday evening, Liss gave up on hearing from Sandy. He wasn’t going to contact her. He didn’t want to talk to her.
Tough. She had a few things to say to him and this was the ideal time. Lee Annie was in the library with the door closed, reading. Zara had gone up to her room right after supper, pleading a headache.
Liss punched in Sandy’s cell number but he had turned off his phone. Muttering to herself, she called the office at Fallstown Motor Lodge. She had received reports from both Mr. Carrier and Sherri. She knew where Sandy was staying. She was also well acquainted with the owner of the motel, and she’d recently sent enough business his way that he barely balked when she asked him to keep ringing Sandy’s room until he answered. She didn’t want voice mail. She wasn’t about to leave a message with the desk clerk. She wanted to talk to her “best pal” and she wanted to talk to him now.
It took twelve rings, but he finally picked up the phone.
“Don’t hang up!” she ordered.
After a long silence on the other end of the line, she heard a deep sigh. “What do you want, Liss?”
“You. Here.”
“I’m not coming back to Moosetookalook.”
“Tonight or ever?”
“Don’t snarl, kid.” He sounded tired. “I need to be on my own for a bit.”
“What about your things? What about Zara?”
“I already bought a new toothbrush.”
Whoa! That didn’t sound good. “Uh, Sandy, what—”
“Look, Liss, I gotta go. I appreciate you getting me a lawyer and all, but I just can’t—I don’t—Ah, hell. I’ll call you later.” And he disconnected.
She called him right back. “Don’t you dare cut me off again, you jerk. Talk to me. This is no time to hole up and stare at your navel.”
What might have been a snigger sounded in her ear. Liss carried the phone over to the Canadian rocker in the bay window and settled in, setting it in motion with one foot.
“I mean it, Sandy. The last thing you need is to be alone. You think too much when you’re alone.”
“I’m just not ready to see Zara again yet.”
“Why not? She loves you, you big doofus.” In the silence that followed, Liss started to put two and two together. “Okay, let’s try this on for size: Gordon Tandy showed you that letter Zara wrote to Victor. The one with no date on it. And you thought the same thing he did, that Zara wrote it recently. That she was going to dump you for Victor. Idiot!”
“I know it was stupid, but Tandy was so sure . . .”
His voice, full of misery, trailed off into another long silence. Liss was about to speak when he starting talking again.
“I did think she might have decided to dump me in order to keep her job. I didn’t think it for long, but I thought it. The idea never really made sense, but that just makes it worse . . . that I believed it was possible, even for a second. I lost faith in her. I’m supposed to love her, to trust her without question. I failed her, Liss.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! You’re not a saint, Sandy. So you had a moment’s doubt. So what?” Too agitated to sit still, she left the chair and stood at the window, looking out at Dan’s house. Everybody had lapses, didn’t they?
“How can I face her?”
“How can you not? You love her. She loves you. Get on the damn bus tomorrow when it heads up here for rehearsal. First chance you get, confess your great ‘sin’ and ask her forgiveness. She’s not going to dump you, Sandy. I repeat: she loves you. Everything will work out just fine, but you have to talk to each other.”
This time she hung up on him.
Men! What on earth had Sandy been thinking to go to the motel instead of coming straight back here when he got out of jail, especially with a bum ankle? Was he keeping it elevated? Putting ice on it? Sherri had said he was supposed to use a cane for the next few days.
A car passed by, momentarily blinding her with its headlights. Liss blinked. Come to think of it, how had Sandy managed to get a room at the motel? They should all have been taken. She’d booked every room in the place herself.
Frowning, Liss contemplated motels, hotels, B-and-Bs, and cabins. What with one thing and another, she was becoming very familiar with what was available for lodging in the area. After a few more minutes of careful consideration, she reached for the phone once more and made two calls. Then she grabbed her coat and an umbrella—it had started raining an hour earlier—and headed for Dan’s house.
“Good news,” she told him when he opened the carriage house door to her knock.
“You know who killed Victor?”
“Not yet, but I have solved your mystery.”
Dan felt like a character in a Scooby Doo cartoon. Followed by Liss and Pete, the latter in full uniform and armed, he crept along a shadowy corridor at The Spruces. The only light came from the narrow beam of the flashlight he carried. Outside a storm raged. Wind howled. Rain pounded against the windowpanes. Eerie drafts had the hair on the back of his neck standing straight up.
The previous evening, he and Sam had driven to the hotel in separate trucks to investigate reports of lights moving on the second floor. Neither that search nor the one he’d made earlier today had yielded any evidence that the hotel had been broken into. If teenagers had been using one of the rooms, they’d been extraordinarily neat.
This time they approached with stealth. They’d parked some distance away and walked to the front entrance. They were searching for intruders in semidarkness, switching on lights only after they’d already entered a room and closed the door behind them. He wondered what the neighbors would think of that.
Lightning flashed, making Dan jump. He heard a muffled squeak from Liss. Great. That would be all they’d need, to have the power knocked out by the storm. The hotel had its own generator, but Dan wasn’t about to fire it up just to hunt for . . . what—ghosts or squatters? He liked the second choice better.
Liss touched his arm. When he turned to look at her she pointed to her nose and made sniffing motions. The smell was faint, but recognizable. Someone had been cooking in one of the rooms. Frying something with garlic in it.
Still fanciful in the darkness, his thoughts leapt from Scooby Doo to the Scoobies. Liss as Buffy, the Vampire Slayer? Highly unlikely, he thought with a grin, though she did have that female empowerment thing down pat.
They rounded a bend in the hallway and spotted what they’d been looking for. A thin strip of light showed faintly beneath one of the doors ahead. A suite. One of the more expensive ones. The intruders had good taste.
As they’d agreed back at Dan’s house, they let Pete go in first. After all, Liss couldn’t be a hundred percent sure she knew the identity of the squatters. When the time came, though, Dan took the precaution of catching her by the waist to make sure she stayed back. She squirmed out of his grasp and burst into the room only seconds behind Pete. By the time Dan went through the door, the deputy had two men lined up against the wall and was patting them down.
Liss was doing what looked suspiciously like a victory dance.
When Pete told his captives to turn around, Dan saw that her guess had been correct. The hotel’s unofficial guests were Charlie Danielstone and Jock O’Brien.
Danielstone looked worried . . . until he recognized Liss. “Busted,” he said, grinning at her.
Pete managed not to laugh as he started reciting charges: “Trespassing. Breaking and entering. Theft of services. You—”
“Hey!” Jock O’Brien objected. “We didn’t have to break in. We were already here.”
<
br /> “Let me guess,” Liss said. “You wanted to save the price of a couple of nights in the motel?”
“Well, yeah.” Jock gave her a look that said that much must be obvious. “Why pay for something we could get for free? You were pretty generous about offering some people a place to stay, Liss. We figured you’d have extended the courtesy to us, too . . . if you’d thought of it.”
“It’s not her courtesy, it’s mine.” They were so earnest, so cocky in their assumed innocence, that Dan was also having trouble keeping a straight face. He had to give them credit for ingenuity. He just didn’t want to do it out loud.
“Oh, come on, man. You’ve got this whole big hotel just sitting empty. We didn’t hurt anything.”
“I notice you chose to camp out in one of the luxury suites. Shall we say two fifty a night? That’s a discount rate, you understand, because you’re friends with Liss.”
Danielstone went pale. O’Brien’s jaw dropped.
“You’re not open yet!” Charlie Danielstone objected when he got over the shock. “No services. We had to cook our own supper.” He gestured at the hot plate on the floor near an electrical outlet.
“No furniture,” O’Brien chimed in. “Nice carpet, but hard.”
“You’re breaking my heart,” Dan told them.
“If you want to get off the hook,” Liss said, “we want a full confession. How come Dan and his brother didn’t find you guys here last night when they searched?”
“Have you looked at this place? There’s like a gazillion rooms. And lots of good hiding places.”
O’Brien backed up his buddy. “We had to improvise last night. We got lucky. They couldn’t search every nook and cranny. They didn’t find our stuff and we kept moving, always a little ahead of them. But today we had time to work out a plan. If we’d seen headlights or heard you coming, we’d have been able to scatter ourselves and all our possessions in five minutes flat. You’d never have known we were here.”
“How did you know we were here?” Charlie asked.
“Neighbors saw lights.”
“No, I mean how did you know it was us?” He pointed an accusing finger at Liss. “You weren’t surprised to find us here.”
“Sandy was able to move into a room at the motel—long story—and that made me wonder who’d left. It wasn’t too hard to find out. The manager’s a friend of mine. Then I called Paul and asked him where he’d been dropping you two off the last two days.” Paul Roberts, sole member of Ray’s stage crew, doubled as the company’s bus driver. “He said he hadn’t. That you’d told him you’d made your own arrangements. Add the reports of someone here late at night and it was elementary, my dear Charlie.”
As one, they stood up straight and clapped their hands together, a sort of mock salute to her achievement. Liss grinned and, bouncing on the balls of her feet, bowed to them in acknowledgment.
Apparently, modesty was beyond Liss’s capabilities. She was tickled to have solved this one small mystery. She had been clever about it. Dan had to admit that much.
“Do you want to press charges?” Pete asked.
“No, but I want these two out of here.”
“First thing in the morning,” Jock O’Brien promised, “but you’ll have to find us somewhere else to stay.”
“Not a problem,” Liss told him. “As of rehearsal tomorrow, I’m pretty sure your old room at Fallstown Motor Lodge will be available.”
Liss awoke on Saturday morning to find Lumpkin’s tail in her face. She pushed him away and tried to get back to sleep. Bouncing cheerfully out of bed was beyond her. Sure, she’d solved one small mystery, but she didn’t have a clue who had killed Victor, nor did she have any idea how to proceed next.
With a groan, she rolled over and buried her head under the pillow. It didn’t help. She couldn’t escape the unpalatable truth: there was no way the investigation of Victor’s death would turn out well, not when someone she knew was bound to be his murderer.
Liss sighed deeply as her thoughts took a side path. She’d given her word to both Dan and Sherri that she would be careful. She’d fully intended to avoid being alone with any of the “suspects” when she questioned them, but she hadn’t done a very good job of sticking to her promise. It was too hard to remember, let alone accept, that her efforts to solve the crime might put her in jeopardy from one of her old friends.
Then again, they might not be her friends much longer, not if she continued to alienate them by asking intrusive questions.
Liss tossed the pillow across the room and sat up. Tempting as it was to contemplate abandoning her investigation and letting Gordon Tandy find the killer, she knew she couldn’t do that, nor could she spend the entire day in bed.
She hesitated one last time when she remembered that it was the Ides of March, an unlucky day by anyone’s reckoning. It wasn’t as if the Emporium would be awash with customers. She could sleep in . . . except that she couldn’t sleep. She threw her legs over the side and stood. If she was just going to lie in bed and worry, she might as well get up.
She found Zara already in the kitchen and more wired than Liss was.
“Can I borrow your station wagon?”
Liss sent a quelling look over her shoulder as she reached for the coffeepot.
“You have to work, right? That means you don’t need it.” Zara could barely sit still.
Liss wondered if it was too late to crawl back into bed and pull the covers over her head. “Give me a minute,” she begged, all but inhaling the first life-giving gulp of the coffee and scalding her tongue in the process.
Zara toyed with the salt and pepper shakers. She realigned place mats that were already perfectly straight. When she tried to wipe away the wet ring Liss’s mug had just left, Liss gave up the struggle to ignore her.
“What is wrong with you this morning?”
“Not a thing. I feel great. Can I borrow the car?”
“Sheesh! You sound like a teenager with a hot date.” The penny dropped. “Oh, good grief! That’s it, isn’t it? You want to go to Fallstown to see Sandy.”
“I’ve decided to forgive him for his momentary lapse of faith.” A grin spread slowly over Zara’s face. “Trust me when I say that the make-up sex is going to be great!”
“That is such a bad idea.”
“Why?”
“The guy asked for time alone. You can’t invade his privacy.” At Zara’s crestfallen look, Liss relented. “Besides, if you let him grovel first, the make-up sex will be even better.”
Brightening, Zara allowed that she might be right. “But that means I’ll have hours to wait,” she lamented. The next practice session at The Spruces wasn’t until one o’clock, and even though Sandy wouldn’t be able to dance with a bum ankle, Zara would be expected to participate in the rehearsal.
“What you need is a distraction. Come to think of it, we could both do with something to take our minds off things.”
Lee Annie timed her entrance perfectly. Five minutes later, she’d agreed to mind the store again . . . if Liss would make her a gift of another piece of heather jewelry.
“Done.” That settled, Liss went to the phone and punched in the number for Angie’s Books. “Can Beth come out and play?” she asked when Angie answered.
Zara’s face lit up. “What a good idea.”
Once it was arranged that Beth would come over for a lesson, Liss relaxed over a second cup of coffee, then changed into practice clothes. She’d been neglecting physical therapy for her knee since she’d had guests in the house and was determined to make up for the lapse. She came back downstairs to find that Beth had arrived and she and Zara had moved all the furniture in the living room. There was now a bare space large enough for all three of them to do floor exercises.
A dancer’s warm-up routine and post-knee-surgery physical-therapy exercises had much in common, but when Zara and Beth stood to use the back of the sofa as a bar, Liss removed a pair of adjustable ankle weights from the drawer of an end table. She
was supposed to do the leg lifts every day. If she skipped more than a few sessions, she’d have to drop down to a lower weight. The equipment she used could be adjusted in one-pound increments, but she’d worked too hard to reach the five-pound level in the first place to allow herself to backslide now.
At the sound of Velcro separating, Lumpkin magically appeared. Liss shoved him away and fastened the first weight to her right ankle. He was back before she had the other one in place.
“What’s his problem?” Zara asked, lifting her head from her knee as she stretched her leg out along the makeshift bar.
“He likes Velcro.” As if to prove her point, Lumpkin tried to grab the end of the flap with his teeth. “Cut that out!”
“He likes to chew on things,” Beth chimed in. “Once, before Liss lived here, he tried to eat a shoe. The tongue had all these little teeth marks on it and some of the leather was missing.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Liss jerked Lumpkin’s prize away from him, avoiding his claws when he tried to get it back. “He gnawed right through one section of my first set of weights. His teeth punctured the one-pound bag of sand inside. Talk about a mess!”
Liss stretched out on her back and began to do leg lifts. Her knee was strong now, almost normal. She stared at the ceiling and willed her mind to go blank as she fell into the routine. Sometimes a good workout helped her think more clearly. She sincerely hoped that would be the case today.
Slowly, she lowered the leg with the bad knee and lifted the other. Five pounds felt much lighter on this side . . . until Lumpkin wrapped both front paws around her foot and tugged. She yelped when her heel landed on the carpet with a bruising thud.
“That’s it!” She reached for Lumpkin—she’d swear he was smirking at her—grabbing him just as he tried to take off. A moment later, he was safely confined in the library and she was back on the floor, ignoring Beth’s giggles and Zara’s outright laughter as she resumed the exercise.
Scone Cold Dead Page 20
