The Curious Case of the Cursed Dagger (Curiosity Shop Cozy Mysteries Book 3)

by Constance Barker

  "You want one of us to run for the office?"

  He grinned sheepishly. "I don't think an actual election would be necessary. They are rather tiresome and expensive. We’ve had so many. Under the circumstances, the town council would just appoint you."

  "Just like that?" Clarence demanded. “Because we asked for the job?”

  He nodded. "Pretty much. They’d be happy to. It would be awfully good of you to accept the nomination."

  I shook my head. "We aren't qualified to be mayor of anything. And neither of us even lives in this town."

  Billy Walker looked around nervously. "Residency is such a minor technical issue, don't you think?"

  "A minor technical issue?"

  "Sure. I mean, suppose I said you had to live here for a year and you’d been here 300 days. Not letting you hold office would be awfully picky, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “So we agree there is flexibility. The question is where a reasonable line should be drawn.”

  “Okay. I can see that once you decide your residency requirement isn’t rigid...”

  “Exactly. And how long have you been in town?"

  "Part of a day, more or less."

  He looked thoughtful. "While I'll admit that's a little under the usual requirement, it isn’t insurmountable. I imagine we can pass an exemption just in case anyone questioned it. The council could do that as a one off to squeak you in.”

  “They’d do that?”

  “I think everyone would be happy to do that."

  "I take it you are having trouble finding candidates?" Clarence asked. "Are people showing an unseemly fear of dying in office?"

  “Oh.” He looked crestfallen. “You’ve heard.”

  “We have.”

  "But not every mayor was killed in office," Billy Walker said. "One or two managed to resign rather quickly, and I think one disappeared completely.”

  “That’s not what we heard, and read,” I said.

  He looked like he’d eaten something unpleasant. “There is so much speculation... And here's a thought: Perhaps one of you could become mayor just long enough to take care of some business for us. You could sign some documents that only the mayor can sign. We are going to lose some funding from the State if we don't file the documents soon. Once they are signed, you can resign." He looked far too pleased with himself for dreaming up that scenario. “I’m sure no one would even have time to decide to kill you.”

  "Why don't you do that yourself?" I asked.

  His eyes darted around. "Well... it would be a conflict of interest, you see. I'm the town manager and have fiscal responsibilities that require..."

  "In short, you are terrified of being killed," Clarence said caustically.

  "I’m not thinking of myself,” he said. “I have three kids."

  "Life seems to be continuously offering me chances for a career change without ever giving me enough time in a job to succeed or fail," I said.

  "So what's one more?" Billy asked. He opened the folder he was clutching and handed us each a piece of paper. "That's the application for becoming mayor. Fill it in and I can get an answer from the council within an hour. Heck, just put in your name and sign it and I'll be delighted to fill it in for you. If you each fill one out, we'll pick one of you as mayor and make the other vice mayor."

  "A woman politician?" Edgar snorted. "I've seen and heard of some strange, annoying, and even appalling things since you came to open that pen box and let me out, Cecelia, but that would be a new low."

  I glared at him. "Who knew ghosts could be misogynistic, chauvinistic, narrow-minded pigs?"

  "Excuse me?" Billy stepped back slightly. "Did I..."

  Clarence touched the man’s arm. "She wasn't talking to you, Billy. She has an invisible friend. I assume that disqualifies her from holding public office?"

  He looked flustered but pulled himself together. "No, not at all. In fact, we prefer candidates with imagination."

  "You would insist on someone with a pulse though, I suspect," I said, glancing at Edgar. It had occurred to me that electing him would eliminate the possibility of the mayor dying in office.

  "Yes, I'm afraid we do need that, at a minimum.” He paused. “Brain dead might be okay, as long as the person can actually sign his or her name. Did you have someone in mind? I can visit the hospital."

  “It was just a thought.” I looked Edgar in the eye and stuck the application in my back pocket. "Right now we have some work to do, Billy, but I'll get back to you."

  "I wrote my cell number on the applications. Call me anytime, day or night. I can be anywhere in town within minutes, and as I am a notary, I can make the document official."

  As we left, Clarence giggled. "I have to give them credit. In their desperation, they've gotten the pitch down to a science."

  "Let's go to the hotel and talk about what we've learned... compare notes. I think the next order of business is to see if we can't find out who this Cabal operative really is, and what he’s like. We need to know who or what we are up against."

  Chapter Ten

  How do you locate a stranger in a strange town? Have you ever thought about that? Until I got involved in hunting artifacts, I hadn’t. But I’d learned that when you are on your own turf, that kind of search is definitely easier. You can immediately eliminate the regulars, the known faces. You are looking for the unknown stuck in a matrix of the known. In a strange town, you don’t have those references... every face is an unknown. Familiarity takes time and we had barely been in Traverse long enough to find the diner.

  “If we just knew his name,” Clarence said.

  “Kenneth didn’t have a clue,” I said. I knew Clarence was thinking the way I was. If you have a name you can ask around. “Anyone seen a man named Charlie Ryan?” We didn’t have that either.

  Fortunately, we had a good description of him, and although we didn't know a thing about him, the description made it sound like the man the Cabal had sent to Traverse would be a hard person to miss.

  “What do we do when we find him?” Clarence asked.

  “Talk to him. Confront him,” I said.

  “Tie him up and put him in the trunk of your carriage,” Edgar said. We ignored him.

  “If we can find him, talk to him, maybe we could learn something.” I knew I’d feel more comfortable if I had some idea of what he was up to.

  In this situation, one useful characteristic of small towns is that they have hubs, places where people hang out. Well, that’s true of cities too, but cities have more of them. When you are away from home and looking for someone, you need to find one of the hubs, a place where people watching is commonplace, yet developed into a refined art. You want to find out where people watching, conversation, gossip has been woven into the social fabric. In cities, the hubs are often one of the hot spots... a bar or dance club. In small towns, it's more often a barber shop, beauty salon, or a tavern.

  But diners work well too. Everyone needs to eat and diners attract a broad cross-section of the population, both locals and transients. As a bonus, the people who serve the food can usually dish up gossip, news, and idle speculation to go along with it. The gossip about strangers is among the juiciest and freshest. I was sure that by now there had been a lot of talk about us and our business here. That was fine. We didn’t care what they thought about us. I was after the scoop on a certain tall, bald, kind of weird man.

  Fortunately, we hit pay dirt quickly.

  "I know just who you mean," Betty Anne said.

  The charming Betty Anne was the waitress at the diner, our guide through our first culinary experience in Traverse, the very same woman who had introduced us through the diner’s myriad miasma of dull specials. Despite the quality of the food that ultimately arrived, which was not her fault, I'd tipped her adequately and now she was glad to see us again.

  “He’s been in here?”

  “He’s almost a regular now. He showed up about three days ago. He parked a si
lver Ford out front. That tells me he must be on an expense account because it's a mid-size rental sedan. The tourists who come here usually stick to smaller, cheaper cars.”

  “And he’s been in here since that first time?”

  She laughed. “He comes in several times a day." She shook her head. "Always orders a glass of milk, never a fool thing to eat. I was starting to wonder if he ever eats. He turned down a slice of apple pie when it was fresh out of the oven too. Who can say no to fresh apple pie, hot out of the oven?"

  "No one human," I said.

  "Exactly." She smiled.

  “Did he say anything about himself, like why he’s in town?”

  "Nope. He’s real quiet and didn't say much about anything. He seems okay enough, though. He tips well, asks for his milk nicely and was even pleasant about turning down fresh apple pie." That last part really had her perplexed. "I know what you mean about the sort of weird part. In fact, those were almost her exact words."

  "Whose?"

  "That's exactly how Linda Blakely described him just the other day. 'He seemed sort of weird to me,' she said. She didn't like being around him much. I don’t know what about him bugs her though."

  We thanked her and I ordered a slice of day-0ld apple pie with a dollop of ice cream (French vanilla) on it, more to make her feel better than because I wanted it. It tasted better than I expected.

  "We might as well hang around here and wait for him," Clarence said. "Then you won't have to gobble your pie." He was proudly, self-righteously, nursing a cup of tea.

  "Seeing as he comes in several times a day..." I said, pausing to chew my pie and ice cream.

  "The not eating part sounds odd," Clarence said, looking meaningfully at Edgar.

  "I don't drink milk either," he protested.

  "Could you?" Clarence asked. "If you wanted to not look suspicious? Could you fake eating or drinking to fit in?"

  "If I wanted not to look suspicious I'd probably do best to just stay invisible," he said.

  "Good point. And you wouldn't waltz into Linda Blakely's office tossing questions at her."

  "Not that either."

  "So we wait for him to show?" I asked.

  Clarence looked at my plate. "If that's code for asking whether or not you have time for another piece of pie, well, my guess is that you have plenty of time."

  I gave him an embarrassed grin. I thought I’d been picking at it.

  AS THE DINER WASN’T the least crowded, Betty Anne didn’t mind us loitering in our booth while we waited for our target to show up. Even after we’d paid our bill she swung by to refill our coffee cups. Happily, I managed, just barely, to talk myself out of ordering another piece of their pie. Part of me was hinting that eating pie was a good excuse to sit around the diner, but I knew doing that would be me using the excuse as an excuse... and I hate being self-referential.

  “Here it comes. I think...” Edgar said suddenly. He looked uncomfortable.

  “What is it?” Clarence said, looking concerned.

  “Something is getting close.”

  “What kind of something?” I asked

  “It feels like an artifact type of something. A bad something, or at least an off-putting something.” He looked around, sniffing the air. “I feel it getting stronger. Strange. It isn't calling to me, the way some artifacts reach out to you. It's just that I feel a power emanating from something and it is growing stronger.”

  Now Clarence shifted uncomfortably, probably empathizing with Edgar. “I wonder if our guy knows we are here?”

  I had wondered that myself. “But how would he?”

  “Magic?” Edgar asked unhelpfully.

  “Even if he knows... then he should know that we only intend to talk to him.”

  “On our terms,” Clarence said. “He might not like us leading the discussion.”

  “I think that must be our guy,” Edgar said, nodding toward the door.

  We turned and watched a tall, thin, very white bald man, almost albino, walk into the diner. He didn’t look at us. He walked straight to the counter, put his hands flat on it and slid onto a stool. That gave us a chance to check him out. He wasn’t young, but I didn’t see any wrinkles either. Looking closer, he appeared to be ageless, or at least what I thought ageless would have to look like. Okay, I mean I couldn’t guess his age if my life depended on it. Nothing about his attire gave me any clues about him—he wore plain, casual clothing, jeans and a Western shirt, and trainers. They fit him perfectly.

  “He’s got a good tailor,” Clarence muttered, echoing my thoughts. “And who wears tailored jeans?”

  He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the counter to talk to Betty Anne. Even though their faces were inches apart his voice carried to us. “I’d like a glass of milk,” he said.

  Betty Anne laughed. “I never would’ve guessed, sweetie."

  "By now, I would've thought..."

  "I was teasing sweetie.”

  “Oh.”

  “I sure do know exactly what you want, what you always want. I don’t suppose I could tease you into ordering real food though, could I?”

  “Just milk,” he said. There was no expression in his voice at all—that struck me as creepy.

  “Is the artifact in here?” Clarence asked Edgar in a hushed voice.

  He nodded. “If it is an artifact at all. Whatever I’ve been feeling, it’s pretty strong and coming from him.”

  When Betty Anne put a glass of milk in front of him, the bald man picked it up and drank it straight down, not gulping it, but drinking it as if he was thirsty and had places to go.

  “Barney is making donuts early tomorrow so we’ll have fresh ones first thing in the morning, if that floats your boat,” Betty Anne told him.

  He shook his head. “No donuts, thank you. Just the bill please.”

  Smiling, she wrote a ticket and handed it to him. “Never met a man who didn’t like donuts before.”

  Without glancing at the bill, he handed her a bill. “Keep the change,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said as he stood up, wiping his mouth with a napkin. He dropped the napkin on the counter, turned, glanced in our direction for a moment and then walked out the door again.

  We got up, and Clarence took our check and the money to Betty Anne, handing it to her. “Save me a chocolate donut in the morning,” he said.

  “Gotcha, honey,” she said. “I’ll put one aside for you.” With that, we followed the bald man out onto Main Street.

  Chapter Eleven

  For a tall man with long, lanky legs, that I’d think could reach out to eat the ground up with long strides, the bald guy walked pretty slowly. We kept our distance the way they tell you to on all the television shows about how spies follow people. I know it was my first time, but I have to say it got boring really fast.

  Clearly, our guy wasn’t in much of hurry and he didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular. I suppose it’s one thing to shadow someone who is going to a meeting or something, but despite the way he’d seemed to be in a rush to drink his milk and leave the diner, this guy was just wandering and it seemed pretty aimless wandering to me.

  We watched as he stopped in front of a number of stores selling clothing, hardware, sheets, and towels. He would stop to peer in through the windows at the displayed merchandise but never go inside; he stood at the windows with his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels and forward again. I wondered if he was making up his mind. “Do I want the sheets with stripes or the little flowers on them?”

  Okay, given that he was a Cabal agent, I'd been expecting something a lot more sinister from him than a bout of window shopping. If I’m being honest I have to admit that I was sorely disappointed. I mean, the guy might be a serial killer of mayors or anyone else, but he sure didn’t seem like it. He acted more like a man with a house in the suburbs, semi-retired maybe, with nothing on his mind and too much time on his hands. Maybe looking for a yard ornament, some new flamingos, or a gift for a
grand kid.

  “I’m officially bored,” Edgar said.

  "We need to get closer to him," Clarence said.

  "Why?" I asked.

  "To see what we are missing. Something has to be going on.”

  “It does?” Edgar asked. “The energy from him hasn’t changed at all. I’d say nothing is what is going on.”

  Clarence gave him a sneering look. “Of course he makes it seem that way. He’s probably trained to look like he’s doing nothing. But if he works for the Cabal he must be up to something.”

  “Is that some kind of rule?” Edgar asked.

  Clarence turned his attention to me. “I think we must be too far away to see him when he communicates with his men."

  "How would he do that with his hands in his pockets?" I asked. “Do you think he has people working inside the store?”

  Edgar sniffed at the idea. "His men? What makes you think he has men? If he did, extra people would be rather noticeable in this town. Besides, he doesn't look like a leader type. I think he's a lone wolf."

  I was a little put off by Edgar being so logical. It didn’t seem right. “He drinks milk,” I said.

  "Well I’m suspicious," Clarence said, growing impatient. “And we have to get closer if we are going to find out anything, don’t we?”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  The reality was that we probably didn’t need to get any closer to him. In fact, I was pretty sure that wasn’t any more to see that what we’d already seen. But boredom is a terrible thing and, for the naturally, almost terminally, impatient, such as our unholy trio, often dangerous. When our tall quarry stopped to admire a display of garden equipment in the hardware store window, we moved closer to him. This time we got too close. I pretended to look in the window noting that they had a pretty good price on garden hoses. Not having a garden, or even a lawn, was all that kept me from succumbing to the temptation.

  "Why are you following me?" he asked without even looking at us.