Piper left to gather up her purse and car keys. When she returned from her bedroom, Aunt Judy had just replaced the phone, a small frown puckering her brow.
“Nate didn’t answer. I’ll try again a little later.”
“I’m off,” Piper said. “Thanks a bunch for dinner.” She gave her aunt a quick peck on her cheek, then trotted down the front stairs and out to her car.
• • •
Aunt Judy hadn’t exaggerated when she’d described Brenda Franklin’s house as lovely. The white siding of the two-story colonial looked freshly painted, as did the black shutters that framed sparkling windows. A low stone wall edged a front garden filled with end-of-summer blooms with not a single weed mixed in that Piper could see.
Piper walked up to the wood front door with its stained glass insert and checked her watch. Six thirty on the dot. She smiled and pressed the doorbell, hearing the chime echo inside. She waited but heard no approaching footsteps or turn of lock. After a minute or so, she pressed the bell again, shifting her purse to the other side and listening. There was no response.
Piper frowned, not sure what to do. Had Brenda changed her mind? But why not call and cancel? Perhaps she’d simply fallen asleep, resting from her headache. But wouldn’t the doorbell rouse her?
Piper pressed the bell one more time, then decided to walk around the back, hoping to find Brenda there, out of earshot of her doorbell. She followed a flagstone path that led around the side of the house to the rear, ending at a thick, green lawn and a second garden, both dotted with bird feeders. A screen porch was attached to the house, affording a perfect place to sit and enjoy the view. Which was where Piper spotted Brenda. Except she wasn’t sitting on any of the pretty white wicker furniture. She lay sprawled on the floor.
“Mrs. Franklin!” Piper cried, thinking the woman had fainted. She ran to the screen door and flung it open but instantly pulled up short.
The trim, middle-aged woman stared sightlessly upward from the porch floor. Blood pooled around her head, matting the long brown hair that spread like a fan on the concrete. Scattered about were dozens of broken glass animals apparently knocked from a shelf that had been pulled down and now lay among overturned end tables.
Piper gaped, frozen in place. Then she spotted something that made her gasp. In the middle of all the shattered glass lay a bloodied, broken canning jar. The label could be seen clearly.
It was a jar of Piper’s honeyed bread-and-butter pickles.
29
“Okay, let me get this straight.” Sheriff Carlyle lifted his hat briefly to wipe the sweat off his brow with the edge of his sleeve and studied his notes. “You arrived at Mrs. Franklin’s house at approximately six thirty—”
“Exactly six thirty,” Piper said. “I looked at my watch before I rang her bell, and I know my watch is right.” They were standing beside the sheriff’s car in front of Brenda Franklin’s house in the fading light. The place was a beehive of activity as crime scene personnel swarmed over the house and yard, doing their jobs. Piper had calmed from her initial shock of finding Brenda Franklin dead, though the scene before her brought uncomfortable flashbacks of discovering Alan Rosemont’s body the morning of the fair.
She had related what she knew more than once already, to various officers along the chain of command, but she understood the need for repetition and expected to describe her actions many times more. After all, she was a potential suspect, wasn’t she?
The thought was grim but, Piper felt sure, accurate. She was, after all, the one who reported having discovered the body. How best to explain any possible blood on one’s clothing, or having left fingerprints and footprints, than by claiming to have innocently stumbled on the scene. And this time there’d been no Ben Schaeffer beside her to verify her statements as he’d done at the fair. Then there was the fact of her pickle jar lying there. Had it been the murder weapon? Piper dreaded to find out.
“And your reason for coming?” the sheriff asked.
“Brenda Franklin called and said she wanted to talk. She was upset over the fire at my place as well as the other things that have happened to me and said she understood I was only trying to help find Alan Rosemont’s real murderer.”
The sheriff coughed and cleared his throat at that but simply said, “Uh-huh. And you first arranged to arrive earlier?”
“Yes, she suggested four thirty. I agreed and called my aunt to watch the shop for me because Amy would be gone. Aunt Judy arrived around three or three fifteen. But then Brenda called and changed our appointment to six thirty.”
“When did she call that second time?”
“I think it was around three thirty or three forty-five. I can’t be a hundred percent sure of that, but Aunt Judy might remember.”
The sheriff nodded. “So you didn’t leave your place until what time?”
“Around six twenty, maybe six twenty-five. I knew it’d be a short drive. Aunt Judy and I had a quick dinner after I closed up a few minutes before six.”
“And your aunt was with you from the time of her arrival until you left around six twenty?”
“Uh-huh. That is, she was upstairs in my apartment most of the time, cooking, and I was dealing with customers in the shop, but, yes, she stayed with me.”
“And those customers were?”
Piper rattled off the names once again, not having to think as hard as she did the first time. She also knew she could back up her memory with the receipts at the shop. She had wondered, at first, why the sheriff needed that information. Then it occurred to her. He was checking her whereabouts minute by minute.
Piper knew now how Nate must feel to be under suspicion, and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. Every word she said and every expression on her face was probably being scrutinized, and though she was telling the simple truth, she began to worry that the way she said it might be misconstrued or that she would leave out a detail that could be pounced upon later on.
Except, this was Amy’s father talking to her, a man who was highly regarded by townspeople, including her aunt and uncle. But Sheriff Carlyle had acted unfairly, she believed, toward Nate. Would that now be turned on her?
The sheriff thanked her and headed over to Aunt Judy, probably to verify Piper’s story. Aunt Judy had rushed over to Brenda Franklin’s once Piper called with the terrible news but hadn’t been able to do more than give a worried wave to Piper, who’d been kept occupied answering questions. Uncle Frank, thankfully, had also arrived soon, and he stood with one arm around his wife while tossing concerned glances Piper’s way.
The usual gathering of the curious formed, and as Piper waited beside the sheriff’s car with a young deputy, she wondered what they all might be saying. She’d been at the center of several “incidents” in her short time in Cloverdale. So far, they’d provoked only sympathy—along with plenty of questions. Would things start to tip the other way and would townspeople begin looking at her with suspicion as many already did with Nate?
Piper remembered that her cell phone had rung at one point but she’d let it go to voice mail. She checked it, finding a message from Will.
“I’m in Rochester,” he said, sounding super-frustrated. “One of my tractors needed a part. I just heard what happened. Give me a call. I’ll get back as soon as I can.”
Poor Will, Piper thought. How tired he must be of getting bad news. If she were Will, she’d start spending a lot more time in Rochester. Piper saw the sheriff walking toward her and sighed, wondering if more questions and double checking lay ahead. To her surprise, however, Sheriff Carlyle said, “You can go on home, Miss Lamb, if you like.”
Really?
Aunt Judy and Uncle Frank were close on his heels. “Let’s go on back to your place,” Aunt Judy said. “I’ll fix a pot of tea and we can talk.”
Once Piper got over her shock she didn’t waste time. She made her way to her car and nudged it away
from the official vehicles and standing crowd as quickly as she dared. Uncle Frank was soon behind her, with Aunt Judy behind him, and all three arrived at Piper’s Picklings—which seemed strangely dark and quiet after what she’d been in the midst of—within minutes.
Inside her apartment, Aunt Judy set a kettle of water to boil as Piper, still puzzled, asked, “What happened back there? Why didn’t they take me back to the station for more questioning?”
“You told them everything you could, didn’t you?” Aunt Judy asked.
“Many times.” Piper pulled down a box of tea leaves. “But I was sure they’d still want more.”
“If you’re thinking they might have suspected you,” Uncle Frank said, “they probably did, at least routinely, for a while.”
“Oh, that’s ridiculous, Frank!” Aunt Judy said. “Suspect Piper? Why would anyone in their right mind think our Piper could have murdered poor Brenda Franklin.”
Uncle Frank held his hands up defensively. “I’m just saying they had to rule her out, Judy. It’s strictly procedure, as they say on TV.”
“He’s right,” Piper said. “And I admit I was plenty worried about that bloodied jar of my pickles that was lying next to Mrs. Franklin.”
“Oh!” Aunt Judy cried. “I didn’t know about that.”
“Me neither,” Uncle Frank said. He lifted the kettle of boiling water from the stove at that point and emptied it into Piper’s teapot himself. “Sit,” he said to both women, then found mugs, spoons, and sugar to bring over to the small table.
“I did happen, however,” he said, “by some strategic maneuvering, to overhear the doc giving his estimate of the time of death. Brenda Franklin was dead at least two hours by the time you found her, Piper. Maybe more.”
“Thank God!” Aunt Judy said. “I mean, I’m very sorry Brenda was killed, of course, but that rules Piper out, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” Piper said, pouring her aunt a cup of the steeped tea, then some for her uncle and herself. “That must be why Sheriff Carlyle was asking for so many details about my afternoon. I had a verifiable alibi for every minute up until the moment I went to Brenda’s house.” She stirred sugar into her tea, thinking. “And that would have still been the case if I’d gone over at the original time of four thirty. But Brenda wouldn’t have been dead as long, would she? It wouldn’t have mattered what sort of alibi I had before I got to her house if Brenda had been killed just before I found her.”
“Piper,” Aunt Judy said, “if you’d gone over at four thirty you might have run into the murderer! You might have been killed yourself!”
“No, I don’t think so.” Piper reached out to squeeze her aunt’s hand. “I don’t think I would have surprised anyone. I think the murderer may have expected me to arrive at the original time.”
Piper paused, looking back and forth from her aunt to her uncle.
“I think someone tried to set me up.”
30
Aunt Judy and Uncle Frank left at Piper’s urging, though they were both obviously torn between wanting to stay and keep watch over Piper and carrying her back with them to the farm where they could protect her.
“I’ll be fine,” Piper assured the two as she eased them out. “I’ll double-lock my doors, check all my windows, and promise to stay inside until the light of day.” Unless another fire breaks out, she thought but kept to herself. When she heard Uncle Frank’s truck and Aunt Judy’s Explorer start up then fade away, Piper opened her laptop and clicked it on. Though she’d implied she would immediately fall into bed—and heaven knew she was exhausted enough—there was something she needed to do to settle a niggling thought at the back of her mind.
Timing. The timing of Piper’s arrival at Brenda Franklin’s had made a huge difference. Timing, as the saying goes—and it was so true—was everything. But there was another instance where, looking back, the timing hadn’t been quite right. She didn’t realize it when it happened, what with all the stress and distraction going on at the moment. But now the particular incident took on much greater importance. Or seemed to. She could be totally wrong about what it meant. But if she could find anything that backed up her suspicion, the sheriff would be very interested.
Piper typed Alan Rosemont’s name into her search engine. It had sounded like a good idea when Tina offered to handle the chore of checking out Alan’s background. The investigation and the mounting vandalisms had been stretching Piper thin. It was time, however, to take that job over.
Unfortunately, Alan Rosemont’s name was not an unusual one. Several thousand results popped up, including Facebook pages that were obviously not his. How many “friends” would Alan have had, Piper wondered, if he’d actually set up a page? Piper sighed at the enormous sifting job ahead of her and went to her kitchen for coffee. The tea she’d drunk a few minutes ago wasn’t going to do it for her.
Back at her laptop, Piper clicked through website after website—some having Rosemont’s full name, some only “Rosemont” or “Alan.” Car dealerships, dental offices, high school reunions. She checked them all on the chance there would be a real connection to the right Rosemont. She found newspaper articles mentioning Alan Rosemont but only in connection with his town council work. Most articles appeared in the Cloverdale Chronicle, but a few made it into Poughkeepsie and Rochester newspapers. None were particularly useful.
After a couple of hours, the tedium on top of the fatigue Piper had started with was beginning to take its toll. What were the chances she’d find anything the sheriff or his staff had overlooked? But perhaps she’d been working from the wrong angle? One that the sheriff surely wouldn’t have considered? Piper typed in a new name and moaned as a matching high number of results popped up. Where to start? At the beginning, she sensibly answered herself and began clicking. Within a few minutes, though, she realized she was reading words but her foggy brain wasn’t translating them into anything that made sense. Perhaps if she just closed her eyes for a few minutes?
Piper laid her head on her arms and was aware of thick blackness quickly descending. In seconds she was dead to the world. However long she slept, she woke suddenly to the sound of loud cracking noises from outside. Gunshots! She waited, tense, then heard them again, this time farther away and accompanied by faint laughter. She relaxed. Teenagers with firecrackers, by the sound of it, and out much too late.
Though they’d caused her heart rate to triple, she didn’t begrudge them their fun. Without their noise who knows how long she might have slept? She stretched stiffly out of her awkward position, padded to the bathroom to splash water on her face, then veered over to the kitchen for a shot of orange juice. All helped chase some of the grogginess out of her brain. She hoped a large mug of strong coffee would take care of the rest, and popped the mug into her microwave to heat before heading back to her work.
Piper returned to the search engine results she’d pulled up earlier and began clicking once again. Alan Rosemont’s name had yielded nothing, but Piper had higher hopes with her new search. She clicked and read, clicked and moved on, site after site, stopping only to stretch occasionally to keep herself alert. As the night hours slipped by, the sun slowly peeked through her windows, brightening her living room until the lamp she’d had on became unnecessary.
The clock inched closer toward opening time for the shop, but Piper’s focus remained on the job in front of her: closing in on a murderer. She was getting there; she knew it. She could almost taste it. Maybe the next website. Or the next newspaper story. One link led to another in a seemingly endless trail, but she was sure she’d find her pot of gold before much longer.
Then she opened a website page that was filled with photos, pictures of well-dressed people at fund-raising dinners that spanned over twenty years. These events had apparently supported an athletic complex in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Piper scanned the photos carefully, stopping finally at one. She stared, not quite believing wha
t she was seeing. But the more she studied the photo, the clearer it became. Even though she’d never been sure exactly what she was looking for, she was convinced she’d finally found it.
Piper leaned back, still gazing at the screen, feeling at first triumph but changing soon to sadness. But, she told herself, at least it was over. The murders would end.
After sitting immobile for several moments, wrapping her head around the significance of what she’d found, Piper shook herself. It was time to get moving. She printed out the photo and the accompanying article, which she would take to Sheriff Carlyle immediately. A glance down at her disheveled self changed “immediately” to “very soon.” No use frightening the populace, but she could tidy up in a flash. And a little food might also be a good thing.
Piper grabbed a bagel in her kitchen, not caring that it was three days old, and ate as she pulled out fresh clothes. What was proper attire for presenting evidence of guilt? she wondered, then grabbed whatever looked clean. She hopped into her shower and scrubbed, dried, and dressed. Somewhat refreshed, though still feeling on the edge of exhaustion, she slipped her printed material into a nine-by-twelve envelope and grabbed her purse and keys.
As Piper stepped out of her front door and headed to her car, her thoughts were on what she would say to Sheriff Carlyle when she found him. It took a moment, therefore, for her to notice she wouldn’t have far to go. There, parked in front of Gil Williams’s bookstore, sat the sheriff’s patrol car.
31
Piper’s first concern when she saw the sheriff’s car in front of the bookstore was for Nate. Was he in for another grilling? If so, she was holding the perfect antidote. She hurried on over.
“Sheriff Carlyle,” Piper said as she pushed into the bookshop. “You can forget about Nate!”
The sheriff, who had been conversing with Gil Williams at his front counter, looked over, eyebrows raised.
The Pickled Piper Page 21
