Sophie hadn’t even known she was hungry until she smelled the lasagna. She’d found enough mismatched plates and silverware to accommodate everyone. The tiny table in the kitchen sat only two, however, so they’d carried their food into the living room.
Really, the meal turned into something like an Irish wake. They all wanted to talk about Doreen – her accomplishments, her energy, the nice things she’d done for everyone she knew.
“I’m the newcomer,” Hannah said. “I bought the bookstore here in town only a year ago. I was divorced and wanted to get away from the city. I hadn’t been here a day when Doreen stopped by with a huge pot of vegetarian chili and a whole lot of advice. My expanding into chocolate was her idea.” When Sophie blinked in surprise, Hannah laughed and explained that, along with books, she sold truffles, fudge and hot cocoa in her store, a hugely successful sideline.
Sophie had decided almost immediately that she’d like Hannah, who looked about her own age of thirty. She was tall, red-headed, freckled, buxom and a little plump. Sophie had heard one of the other women ask what she’d done about babysitting, so she knew Hannah had children.
Sophie was less sure she was going to like the second woman, Elaine Terwilliger. Elaine had let her know right away what a long-standing friendship she had with Doreen. “I barely knew she had family!” she exclaimed, then pasted on an expression of chagrin. “Oh, of course she talked about you, Sophie. But since she didn’t see you very often…”
Physically, she reminded Sophie of Marge without Marge’s good humor. Sophie had met several of Doreen’s closest friends, and Elaine hadn’t been among them. That said, it quickly became apparent that she had been working very hard on the auction. She had been involved in a couple such efforts down in Arizona, where she and her sister spent winters, and had a better grasp of some of the realities than Doreen had had.
The third woman was so quiet, Sophie couldn’t come to a quick conclusion about her. Her name was Naomi Kendrick, she apparently owned a small café that served breakfast and lunch but not dinner, and she’d made the lasagna, which was amazing. She was skinnier than Sophie thought anyone who cooked for a living ought to be. Her skin was very pale and the pixie cut of her brunette hair gave her an otherworldly air. At first glance, Sophie had put her in her mid-twenties, but she decided she’d been wrong after watching the way Naomi listened without committing herself. She seemed perpetually wary. Sophie was reminded of some of the girls she’d met at the teen shelter. What first appeared to be shyness was something else altogether. Pain? Fear? Or else she was being completely ridiculous, and the poor woman was beat after a long day and upset by the news about Doreen. She did smile when Sophie said, “This is the best lasagna I’ve ever tasted. I know where I’m going to be eating from now on.”
Not until they’d put their plates in the dishwasher and the leftovers away in the refrigerator did they get down to business.
Elaine had been writing countless letters seeking donations. Hannah had hit up locals, and Naomi had been the liaison with the Governor Hotel in Portland for the event itself. She’d chosen the menu – “after I got input, of course,” she added hastily, with a glance at the other two – and she’d found the artist who had donated the artwork for the invitations, catalog and poster.
“Aunt Doreen showed me the poster last night. It’s gorgeous,” Sophie assured her, and her face brightened.
The painting was beautiful, evocative, perfect for its purpose…and Sophie’s stomach had turned upside down at first sight of it. The watercolor had a dreamy quality. It captured a peek-a-boo view between dunes of the beach where it curved to meet Mist River. A clump of seashore lupine in the forefront provided vivid color, and Sophie had all but been able to feel the coarse texture of the beach grass. She would swear she knew the exact spot where the artist had placed his easel.
It was in one of those dips between dunes that she’d found her mother. Perhaps even that dip. It was years before she could make herself go to the beach at all – any beach. The mere idea of a walk in the dunes on the other side of Mist River was still, twenty years later, enough to make her skin prickle and her stomach seize up. Sophie had never been sure whether Doreen had noticed her excuses and alternate suggestions for outings during visits. Last night, as Sophie had smiled after barely glancing at the painting and said, “Oh, that’s lovely,” to Doreen, she’d barely resisted the need to race to the bathroom and throw herself to her knees in front of the toilet.
As she lay in bed later, tired from the preparations she’d made to be away from home for a month as well as from the drive, yet unable to sleep, she hadn’t been able to get that painting out of her mind. Had Doreen forgotten where Sophie’s mother had died? Or maybe she’d never known, since Sophie’s family were strangers to her until months later.
It was ridiculous to think that watercolor was a taunt aimed directly at her.
It was twenty years ago. None of them know.
The name of the artist niggled at her, but she couldn’t seem to put a face with it. She’d forgotten so much. She didn’t know if she wanted to meet him or not.
Hoping the other women wouldn’t see the shadow on her mood, she briskly explained her intentions for handling the donations and overseeing the remainder of the preparations for the auction, and was glad when no one argued. She’d been afraid there would be some resentment that she was so obviously taking over, especially now that Doreen wasn’t here to back her. Elaine, she sensed, might not be altogether happy, but she kept her mouth shut, and the other two women appeared to be grateful rather than rebellious.
“Once Misty Beach becomes a refuge,” Hannah said sturdily, “I think it should be dedicated to Doreen. There can be a sign, telling any visitors about the woman who saved that beautiful piece of land.”
For the first time all day, Sophie was betrayed by tears. “Yes,” she whispered. “That’s how Doreen would have liked to be remembered.”
Although still nearly a stranger, Hannah hugged her.
CHAPTER THREE
Daniel had seen some impossible crime scenes in his time, but this twenty by twenty-five foot storage unit might top the list. Usually he – and most cops – dreaded outdoor scenes most. Trace evidence was easier to recover indoors, fingerprints were there for the finding, the damn scene was contained.
The problem in here was an over-abundance. Fingerprints, hair, you name it. Damn near everyone in town had probably traipsed through here. Which made recovering a fingerprint or anything else a joke. Why collect it at all?
He was too good a cop not to, of course, and you never knew. A fingerprint on the glass vase would be good, or a hair that wasn’t Doreen’s stuck in the blood. Otherwise, it would probably all be a waste of everyone’s time and generate paperwork to thicken the murder file.
Well, what was new about that? TV shows to the contrary, most murders weren’t cleared by the lab. The killer did something stupid – that was the biggie, praise the Lord. Eyewitnesses willing to come forward, even confessions when an investigator leaned on a suspect. Those were good. Fingerprints on the butt of the weapon? Pretty rare.
But Daniel had a bad feeling clearing Doreen Stedmann’s murder wasn’t going to be easy. Why not cling to at least faint hope the evidence techs would come up with something good?
He grimaced. Sophie Thomsen was right – letting anyone and everyone in here whenever they felt inclined had been a dumb thing to do, with worse consequences than any of them could have foreseen.
He had no hope at all for the cord around Doreen’s neck. It was garden variety stuff, the kind sold off the the roll at any decent hardware or home improvement store to be laundry line or tie down a load in a pickup truck. This didn’t look to be new, either. It was interesting, too, that the cord had been a lot longer than needed for the purpose. Good bet it had already been here in the storage unit. Used to tie a package together, maybe? If so, someone would remember.
He sketched the scene – stick figure, but, hey,
he wasn’t an artist - then took his own photos, dozens of ‘em from every angle, to be sure he had what he wanted, with the idea of being able to lay them out into a whole on a board, a picture puzzle put together. He’d use markers, pointers, numbers. These fingerprints were found here, that one there. A foot had stomped down exactly…there. As everything was moved, he could add notations. Why had the killer searched in these boxes and not those? Which was the first place he’d looked? The last? Daniel would really like to know whether Doreen had already been dead when her murderer began to search, or whether the search was the point and she was killed because she’d caught someone tearing the storage space apart.
But if that was so, how was it the killer had happened to have the new lock on hand?
Daniel called Sophie again that evening, hoping he wouldn’t wake her but wanting to give her a heads up. She answered the phone immediately, sounding alert, and he said, “This is Daniel. I don’t see why you can’t get started tomorrow morning, if you’re ready. By the way, I asked Marge, and she has another unit the same size vacant. We’re lucky, too, because it’s not far away. Close enough we can carry things back and forth on foot.”
We? he asked himself. Where had that come from? He had plenty of angles to pursue on this investigation, and couldn’t abandon the rest of his job, either. He wouldn’t be the one watching her inventory the auction items. Or, at least, no more than for brief stretches.
“That’ll be a big help,” she agreed. “I’ll be out there at ten, then, if that’s okay. I think that’s when Marge opens.”
“It is,” he agreed. “I’ll meet you there.”
“Thank you. Um…you did lock the place up again, I hope.”
He laughed. “I did. Marge didn’t even ask me to pay for the lock.”
He heard her chuckle, although, not surprisingly, it sounded subdued. “That’s probably because I’d already told her I’d pay for a lock to replace the one I was having her cut off.”
“You all right?” he asked.
“As all right as I can be.” She told him that three of the other auction volunteers had spent part of the evening with her.
“I’ve had the most to do with Elaine,” he said. Elaine Terwilliger was a pain in the butt. Probably every police department had one or more of her kind. He’d swear she averaged a complaint a week. Somebody was parked illegally. A teenage kid was playing his music too loud. She spent a lot of time outraged because her next door neighbor, Conrad Neufeld, liked to start shedding clothes as he wandered through his house on his way to bed. Some nights he didn’t pull his bedroom blind until he was stark naked. Daniel would rather wrestle down and cuff a two hundred and fifty pound biker hopped on crack than visit Conrad yet again to discuss how he might avoid offending his spinster neighbor’s delicate sensibilities. Daniel had begun to suspect that Elaine settled down every night at her window to enjoy the show, and that Conrad was either thumbing his nose – not to mention something else – at her, or else he was enjoying putting on the show. Either way, Daniel was not fond of Elaine Terwilliger, and getting less so by the week of Conrad Neufeld, too.
“I know Hannah, too,” he said. “I buy a lot of books. And, damn, but she makes incredible caramel truffles. Seems like a nice lady. Naomi Kendrick, though, I don’t think I’d ever met.” Even her voice on the phone hadn’t rung any bells for him. He’d eaten in her café – she or whoever was in the kitchen made the best French toast he’d ever had in his life – but the waitress who’d waited on him there was a middle-aged woman whose husband was an insurance agent and he’d never caught even a glimpse of the cook.
“She made fabulous lasagna.”
“I’m glad somebody thought to feed you.” The minute he said it, he felt a little embarrassed. He was going to have to be careful not to get too personal with Sophie Thomsen. It had been a mistake, earlier, to beg lunch off her. Friends ate together. Investigators didn’t dine with people they were interviewing.
Keeping an appropriate distance, he’d been discovering since he took this job, was one of the toughest parts of small town policing.
It was going to be harder yet keeping that distance from Sophie. A voice in him was saying, You know she didn’t kill her aunt, so why not get personal?
Since he came to Cape Trouble, he hadn’t had anything but a couple of one-offs with women staying at a local inn for a weekend of sand, sun, fog and – it turned out – sex. Mostly that suited him. He wasn’t interested in getting serious, investing that much of himself in a wife and children. People died, or couples split up. Why invite pain? was his philosophy. But Sophie not only attracted him, she came with an end date. She was in town for four weeks. After that she’d have no reason to return except to close out her aunt’s estate, assuming she really was the heir – finding out for sure was on tomorrow’s to-do list.
You can’t sleep with her until you’ve eliminated her as a suspect once and for all, he argued with himself.
So do that, was the easy answer.
And then find out if she was interested.
As they ended the call a little awkwardly, Daniel liked knowing he’d be seeing her tomorrow morning.
Even if a brutal crime was the excuse.
*****
He could give her a few hours, Daniel told her when they met out front of the office at the storage facility. He claimed to want to see for himself her system, but Sophie suspected he was also being nice. He had to have been aware of her shock and distress yesterday, and wanted to be sure she could actually handle working here so soon after discovering Doreen’s body.
No uniform today – he wore dark brown chinos, athletic shoes, and a sweater over a T-shirt. The casual attire did nothing to reduce his impact or air of authority. Somehow she couldn’t imagine anyone having the nerve to give him orders.
He was driving a dark SUV today, too, not a marked city police car, when he followed her out to 4079, then led the way around the corner to the new unit, currently unlocked. This one took a cylinder lock instead of the traditional padlock type, Sophie saw with approval. Nobody would be lopping this one off. Daniel lifted the door to expose the bare concrete interior with open wall studs. Sophie assessed the space before she turned away and said, “I’m glad this was available.”
They walked back to 4079 in silence and he produced the keys to unlock, then took one off the ring and gave it to her. “It goes without saying I don’t want anyone else in here.”
“Nobody else should be in here anyway,” she said firmly.
Oh God oh God, she thought, as he hefted this door up, too. The morning was foggy as it had been yesterday, making the light in here murky again. Her heart was drumming hard, and everything in her revolted at the idea of stepping inside. But under Daniel’s watchful gaze, she made herself.
There was a bare bulb overhead, she saw gratefully, and she pulled the long cord to turn it on. A swift glance at the back corner told her that Doreen’s body was gone as well as the rope and crystal vase. Nothing else had been cleaned up, including the blood. In fact, if anything the mess was greater now, with a nasty dark powder coating too many surfaces.
His gaze followed hers and he shifted, as if uneasy. “Sorry, I should have thought. We’ll get someone out here to clean that up.”
“I’d appreciate that,” she admitted. “I don’t mind the rest, but the blood…” She had to swallow. “Tomorrow I’ll bring a broom and dust pan.” Yes, think about something besides blood, please do. “Maybe some other cleaning supplies, too. If that’s okay?”
“Yeah, we didn’t help matters, did we?” He delved in the pocket of his dark blue windbreaker and handed her a pair of latex gloves. “To keep your hands clean.”
“Thank you. You came prepared.”
“I always carry some.”
Well, that made sense if he was often handling evidence at a crime scene, but how often was there a crime scene in the bucolic town of Cape Trouble? He’d said San Francisco P.D., though. Something about his automatic as
sumption of authority from the moment he’d arrived yesterday made her suspect he hadn’t been only a patrol officer. She imagined him getting dressed in the morning, grabbing his wallet, putting on his watch, scooping loose change into his pocket, tugging a couple of pairs of latex gloves from a box that lived on his dresser. She gave her head a bemused shake.
“What’s the plan?” he asked, surveying the space.
Focus. “I’m going to carry everything on one of the set of shelves over to the other unit, then move the shelves themselves. I’ll sit over there, open each and every box, note the contents, write a description, repack the item or items, then label the box clearly. Put it on the shelf. When I finish that batch, I start over.”
“You won’t be taking things out of here.”
“Yes, I probably will,” she said frankly. “I’ve got a card table and folding chair in the car, along with my laptop. I see there’s an electrical outlet there and I can plug in. I’ll enter items on the laptop as I look at them. But to write good catalog copy, I need to come up with appealing descriptions. For a lot of items, I can borrow off the internet. Say,” she glanced around, “that Keurig single cup coffee maker.” She saw him look, nod. “I’ll note the model number, and tonight I can look it up, write down the great features, use those to create the catalog copy. I don’t need to take the coffee maker with me.”
“Okay,” he said cautiously.
“But some of the artwork might be another story. As much as possible, I’ll try to describe it without removing it. I don’t want to risk scratching a frame, breaking the glass, whatever. For small, portable stuff like jewelry and collectibles, though, it makes a lot more sense for me to take them back to the cottage, study them in better light, do any research I need to on the internet, package each piece separately, and bring it all back the next day. One of the challenges,” she told him, “is assigning a retail value to each item. That’s not quite as important for live auction items, but for silent auction, the bid increments are based on the value. And while some donors give an accurate value, others inflate it and some haven’t a clue and don’t even guess. I can’t imagine what people putting on an auction did before the internet.”
Shroud of Fog: (A Cape Trouble Romantic Suspense Novel) Page 4
