by Kylie Logan
Unless someone followed us.
Like it or not, I knew it was time to tell Kaz about the guy who chased me through the fair.
I did.
Predictably, he freaked.
“You should have told me, Jo. You could have been in danger. At least if I knew you were worried about that guy, I could have—”
“What? Stayed outside my room last night to make sure no one broke in?” I sounded whiny. And like I cared. I regretted it instantly. “I’m sorry. Whatever you did last night . . . Wherever you went . . . Whoever you were with . . . It’s none of my business.”
He didn’t ask how I knew. He just slid me a look. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I’m not upset. Why would I be? We’re not married anymore. I have my life and you have yours.”
“Sure, and that’s great and all, but if you still care—”
I poked the car into drive and turned onto a side street I thought would take us around the Main Street festival detour. “I don’t. Not like that.”
“Then maybe like a friend would care.”
We were on a dead end street. I grumbled and turned around. I took the first left turn I came to, and we found ourselves in the parking lot of Bent Grove Elementary School.
I grumbled some more, but truth be told, deep down inside I was grateful for the diversion. Driving through an unfamiliar town was a lot like maneuvering my way through this conversation: frustrating, exasperating, maybe even dangerous if I wasn’t careful.
When we stopped at a red light, and I took the opportunity to look up and down the cross street and saw the sign for the local library, I regained some of my legendary control. I remembered seeing the library the evening before. I knew we were back on track. “It’s none of my business,” I said.
“Sure. Like that cop back in Chicago is none of mine.”
I turned to face him. Not such a good idea considering I was driving. I told myself not to forget it, got my eyes back on the road, and glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. “Nevin and I aren’t . . . It’s nowhere near the same.”
“Then how is it?”
“We’re working together on this case. Because of the button. That’s it.”
“Then it’s not like me and—”
“No. Not at all.” Perfect timing. I honestly didn’t want to know if Kaz was going to name Tiffany or Betty, so when we got to the library, I turned into the lot and parked.
Apparently, Kaz was relieved to get away from personal and back to business, too. He got out of the car when I did and followed me inside. “We’re here to . . . ?”
“See what we can find out about Lois Buck, of course.”
As it turned out, that wasn’t very much.
There were no yearbooks for the elementary school, so there was no finding Lois there, and though she was mentioned a couple times in the town newspaper and there should have been photos to go along with the articles—
“Somebody’s cut out every one of them.” I pointed a finger toward the hole in the newspaper and the caption that said Lois Buck was at the top of a cheerleader pyramid pictured above. “Somebody doesn’t want us to know what Lois looked like. Why?”
Kaz stuck his entire fist through the gaping hole in that newspaper page, then flipped to another edition of the newspaper, where Lois’s name was mentioned in connection with the spelling bee at Bent Grove Elementary School in 1986. According to the article, seventh-grader Lois Buck had received a ribbon for third place. Maybe she was proudly displaying that ribbon in the picture. Hard to say since all that was left of that page above the caption was a jagged edge where the paper had been ripped.
Kaz sat back and folded his arms across his chest. “Maybe we could ask her mother for a picture of Lois,” he suggested, but he knew he was barking up the wrong investigative tree even before the words were out of his mouth. He made a face. “No way that nasty woman would have kept a picture of the girl. Not with the way she feels about her own daughter. Can you imagine anyone being like that? I mean, think back to when we talked about having kids. We never would have—”
I wasn’t going there. “Lois has been missing for nearly twenty-five years,” I said, my mind on the case and not on the misguided plans I’d once had for a happily-ever-after with Kaz. Still thinking through the scenario, we left the library and went back to the car. “She’d be an adult by now. If she’s still alive. Why would it matter to anyone if we find out what she looked like?”
Good thing Kaz’s cell rang. It kept us from dwelling on the fact that neither one of us had any answers.
He brightened up as soon as he heard the voice on the other end of the phone. “Hey, Tiffany!”
Well, that answered one question.
“What’s that?” Listening, Kaz held up a finger to signal that whatever she was saying, it was something important. “Really? That’s terrific. What’s that you say? You’re off at three? Sure, we can be over there then.” A truck rumbled by, and Kaz pressed one hand to his right ear and asked, “What’s that?” He listened some more, turning his back on me. Yeah, like that could actually keep me from hearing when he said, “No, it’s her car so she’s got to come along.” When he looked back at me, his smile teetered between nervous and embarrassed. “Yeah, we’ll see you later,” he said and hung up.
“You’ve got a date with Tiffany. At three.”
“We’ve got a date with Tiffany at three, and that means we’ve got time for lunch first. Good thing.” He wound an arm through mine. “I’m starving.”
We’d finished breakfast not too long before, but I wasn’t about to argue. I needed a chance to sit down and process everything that had happened. We were close to Main Street, so rather than driving, we walked to the nearest greasy spoon. “So . . .” I waited until we were seated at the Formica table and had ice teas in front of us, biting my tongue to remind myself to keep on track—and off anything that even smacked of me sticking my nose into Kaz’s personal life. “We’re going to pay a call on Tiffany just to be sociable?”
“Never underestimate the power of my charm,” Kaz said. Grinning, he added sugar to his tea. “Tiffany tells me she was thinking about what we talked about at the Dew Drop last night and that got her reminiscing about the good old days. She spent some time going through her old school things this morning. She says if we’re interested, she’s got some stuff set aside for us. Including pictures of good ol’ Lois Buck.”
I LET KAZ drive, and don’t think I didn’t notice that even though he didn’t ask Tiffany for directions when they talked on the phone, he knew exactly how to get there, anyway. He took us out the same street we’d been on the night before, past the Dew Drop and onto an impossibly twisted road up an even more improbably steep mountainside.
Tiffany’s house sat at a V-shaped kink in the road, a neat, white bungalow with a long drive, a garage out back that looked big enough to hold a semi, and a brick walk up to the maroon front door. There was a well-tended plot of veggies just off the driveway to the left of where we parked, and the front walk was lined with marigolds. Tiffany did not strike me as the gardening type. Go figure.
We were only halfway up that walk when the door swung open, and Tiffany raced out. “Oh, Kaz!” She threw her arms around him. “I’m so glad you’re here. Oh, Kaz, honey . . .” She grabbed his hand, dragged him into the house—and left me standing there like the last wallflower at the high school dance.
OK, so I remembered Kaz’s bedroom technique as being stellar but not being able to wait even long enough to say hello . . . This seemed a little extreme, even to me.
“Uh, Jo!” Maybe Kaz wasn’t all excited about Tiffany getting her clutches into him and getting him all to herself. Just inside the front door, he waved me closer.
I can’t say I was all that thrilled, but I followed him into the house. The first thing I saw when I stepped into the living room was that though the outside of the house was as cute as a picture out of Good Housekeeping, the inside left a lot to
be desired. In fact, it rivaled Masie Buck’s in the disaster category. The cushions were off the couch. The flat-screen TV was tipped. There were magazines strewn across the powder-blue carpeting, and the drawers of a nearby desk were pulled out and emptied on top of them.
“It was like this when I got home.” Tears streamed down Tiffany’s face. Funny, all that water didn’t keep her from batting her eyelashes. “Oh, Kaz, honey. I’m so scared! What if the burglar’s still in here?”
It was a good question, and I, for one, didn’t want to find out the answer. I pulled out my cell.
“Oh, I already called the sheriff,” Tiffany said. Bat, bat, bat. “I’m brave like that.”
I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.
The mantra floated through my head while I watched Kaz take a look around. “Is anything missing?” he asked Tiffany.
She shrugged. “It’s kinda hard to say. ’Cept for the stuff I had out on the table over there. You know, the stuff I told you about.”
My heart sank, and believe me, it wasn’t because Tiffany grabbed Kaz’s hand. “The photos of Lois Buck?” The words were bitter in my mouth, and I gulped them down. “They’re gone?”
Tiffany nodded. “Can’t imagine why anyone would take those silly old things.” She was a pouter of epic proportions, and she pouted for all she was worth. “There’s plenty more valuable things here. But ’cept for the mess, it looks like nothing else has been touched.”
Kaz extricated himself from Tiffany’s death grip and rubbed one hand across the back of his neck. “Well, we’ll find out more when the sheriff gets here.”
As if on cue, we heard the sound of a car in the drive.
Tiffany went to the door, and her face turned as pale as the skintight white top she was wearing with her cutoff shorts. “It ain’t the sheriff,” Tiffany wailed. “It’s Buzz. My husband!”
“Husband?” Kaz’s expression turned as sour as his voice. “You didn’t tell me you had a—”
Tiffany was not in any condition to discuss the matter. She grabbed onto Kaz and tugged him across the room. She threw open a closet door and braced her hands on Kaz’s back to shove him inside. “Oh, Kaz, honey, you better hide!”
He locked his legs. “I’m not going in there. Besides . . .” He whirled away from Tiffany and scooted to my side. “There’s no reason for me to hide. Buzz doesn’t know—”
His reasonable comment died in a groan when Tiffany nodded.
“He does.” Tiffany wrung her hands. “You see, Buzz, he wasn’t supposed to be home from his over-the-road drivin’ job for another couple days yet. And when he’s gone like that from me . . . Well, I sometimes tell him about the guys I’ve been with. You know, as a sort of way of making Buzz real anxious to get home to me. I talked to Buzz this morning and—”
“Told him everything?” Kaz’s face went green.
Another nod from Tiffany. “Includin’ a real good description of you, I’m afraid.”
The back door slammed shut, and a man’s voice called out, “Who’s that parked in our driveway, Tiffany? If it’s that no-good, wife-stealin’ city man you talked about, he better know I got my shotgun here and—”
We didn’t wait to hear any more. In seconds, Kaz and I were in the car. A quick stop at the Debonair for my suitcase, and we were on the road back to Chicago.
Chapter Seventeen
“REALLY, JO, YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS.”
It wasn’t the first time Kaz had said that. Like the last time and the time before, I ignored him—and the little thread of relief in his voice that told me he was saying one thing and hoping for something else—and kept on writing the check. I ripped it out of my checkbook and handed it across my desk to him.
“Let’s get this straight. I’m not paying your gambling debt,” I said. There was no way I was going to establish that sort of precedent. “I’m paying you for helping me out in West Virginia. For your time. And your effort. It’s a business arrangement, nothing more. What you do with the money is up to you, though if you were smart, you’d use it to make sure you don’t get kneecapped. But don’t think you can come to me every time you need—”
“No worries!” Kaz folded the check and tucked it in his pocket. His smile was as bright as the Chicago sunshine. “You’re the best, Jo.”
“Not the best at figuring out what I’m supposed to be figuring out.” When I got to the shop the morning after we returned from West Virginia, I’d made two lists: one of what we knew about the case and one of what we didn’t.
Guess which one was longer.
I nudged the legal-pad pages spread across my desk. “None of it makes sense,” I grumbled.
“Except that we’re sure Lois Buck killed Kate Franciscus.”
Kaz’s use of the word we’re was poetic license. On the drive from West Virginia to Chicago, he’d decided this was the one and only valid explanation, and he was sticking to his conclusion.
Me?
“I wish I knew for sure,” I said.
“What we need to find out is who Lois Buck really is. That’s the key to this whole thing, Jo. Obviously, she’s living under an assumed name. That’s why we can’t find her anywhere on the Internet.” Kaz knew this for sure because I told him how I’d tried searching every which way and sideways and had come up empty. “We also know that she knows we’re onto her. That’s why she got rid of all those pictures at the library and why she broke into Tiffany’s home and took everything Tiffany had set aside for us. She doesn’t want us to recognize her.”
“But how did she know that Tiffany was going through her old stuff and pulling out pictures of Lois? And what about the guy who followed us from Chicago?”
Kaz’s shrug said it all. He wasn’t even going to consider these things, because if he did, they would blow his theory out of the water. Instead, he stuck to his guns.
“Think about it, Jo,” he said. “Lois was in eighth grade in 1987. That means she’s in her thirties.” He’d been standing, and he dropped into my guest chair, the better to give me a searching look. “Who do we know who fits the bill?”
“Besides me?” His expression told me he wasn’t going to let me off with a smart-aleck answer, so I actually took some time to think. “Wynona and Blake are too young,” I said. “And Estelle Marvin . . . My guess is she’s too old, even though I bet she’d never admit it. She’s too well known, too. If she was Lois, someone would have noticed by now. But Margot and Sloan . . .” I thought about the two assistants. “They’re both about the right age.”
“See?” Kaz perked right up. “It’s not such a crazy theory after all, is it? Think about it! Lois Buck leaves Bent Grove and changes her name. That’s why she doesn’t want us to find any pictures of her. Because if we did, we’d recognize her as one of Kate’s assistants.”
I thought this through. “OK, so if we think it’s possible—”
“We know it is!”
I stayed on track. “If we think it’s possible, then the next question we need to ask is why did Lois kill Kate?”
“Come on, Jo, there must have been plenty of reasons for either Margot or Sloan to hate Kate. You said it yourself. She treated them like they were unappreciated servants.”
“And they did each have a personal grudge against Kate.” It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought of it before; it was just that I was reconsidering. “Margot, because Kate had ruined the vacation plans she had with a man, and Sloan, because of some silly mix-up about lipstick. It was nothing, really, but Kate embarrassed Sloan in front of the production crew, and before it happened, Sloan was planning on applying for a job on Hugh’s staff.”
“Which means the nothing was really something.” Kaz was all fired up. “See, Jo, we haven’t gotten nowhere. We’ve got something to go on. All you have to figure out is if Margot or Sloan is really Lois Buck.”
“All.” He missed the significance of that one little word. In fact, Kaz looked at his watch and popped out of the chair. “I’ve got to get g
oing,” he said. “And about that check . . .”
I waved him away. He didn’t need to say thank-you again, and I didn’t need to hear it.
Once he was gone, I did a turn around the store, dusting off the display cases and making sure every button in them was shown to perfection and while I was at it, I thought about the murder. I wished I could be as sure as Kaz was about Lois Buck. But there was still the matter of the big guy. And the button.
Too preoccupied to sort and pack the order I’d gotten in that morning from a dealer in Honolulu who had a customer interested in an entire collection of sweet calico buttons, I went over my list again.
And got to the same old nowhere I’d been to before.
My disheartened sigh echoed in the silence of the shop.
I spent a few minutes wandering and thinking and a few more minutes helping out a customer (hallelujah, foot traffic!) who bought four lovely enameled buttons for a jacket she was making and promised she’d tell her friends who sewed all about the Button Box. Once she was gone, I settled down and looked through the press clippings that Stan had assembled pertaining to the case. Still doing his best to prove he wasn’t washed up, he went over all the details each day and gave me an envelope full of the articles he found in various and sundry newspapers and magazines not only about the crime, but about Kate’s life and her work as an actress. With nothing else to do (except for those buttons getting the aloha, and I promised myself I’d get to them as soon as I was finished), I read through the clippings, steadfastly ignoring the ones that included that picture of me with my butt sticking out from under the desk.
I found nothing new.
Nothing helpful.
Nothing.
I tapped the articles into a neat pile and would have slid them back into the envelope they came out of if the item at the top of the stack didn’t catch my eye. Actress, Artist, the headline read, and I knew the piece was a retrospective of Kate’s career because I’d just read through it. What I hadn’t done was paid a whole lot of attention to the photo that went along with it.
