by Dale Mayer
She smiled. “Even if I had to, it’s honest work, instead of stealing from my father. Did you kill him too?”
Everybody around her gasped. But Kid Burns had a different reaction—the color drained from his skin, and he spun around and took off. She looked at Mack. “Now that was an interesting reaction.”
Almost immediately the crowd around them tightened up. “You’re Doreen, aren’t you? Where are your animals? Is this a new case? Did he actually kill his father?”
Mack glared at her. “No,” he said, to the crowd. “We don’t have any information that leads us to believe he had anything to do with his father’s death.”
“Is it true he got everything and his sisters got nothing?”
Doreen nodded. “Apparently.”
“That’s not fair,” one man said. “Those girls looked after their dad the whole time.”
She smiled. “Seems to be the way of it.”
“Well, you should fix it,” said one older lady in outrage. “You need a new case anyway. You should take on the plight of the poor Burns sisters. They looked after their father and took care of that house. And, as soon as Old Man Burns was gone, the sisters moved out.”
“The question is, did they move out?” Doreen asked. “Or did they get moved out?”
“If the bratty son inherited everything, you can bet he didn’t let them stick around.”
“No love lost there, huh?”
Everybody around them shook their heads.
The group of concerned citizens collected around Doreen and Mack. “We’re surprised he got any of it. He hadn’t been around for years but came back just in the last year before his father died.”
“Not even a year,” somebody called out. “It was just a few months.”
“Interesting,” Doreen said, but she didn’t want to get into a big public discussion in the grocery store. This was already covering more than she had wanted to discuss. “I’ll take a look into it,” she promised.
At that, they started to cheer.
“Might not be easy,” she warned. “I might not find anything.”
“Nope,” said one older lady with relish, “it definitely won’t be. But we’d like to see him knocked down a step or two. Far too high and mighty, if you ask me.”
“But, if he didn’t do anything criminally wrong, then he doesn’t get knocked down,” Doreen said, not wanting everybody going crazy, but it was apparently too late.
“Do what you can do,” said one old lady with badly dyed hair. “Those two sisters, they need help.”
Doreen frowned. “Why?”
“Because they don’t have any money. They’re doing all they can to keep a roof over their heads. They’re probably eating dog food.”
Doreen stared at the old woman in horror. “I hope you’re joking.”
The woman shrugged. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” she said sadly. “Nobody gives a damn when we get older.” She took her meager bag of groceries and walked outside.
Doreen, even though she was in the wrong aisle, was urged on through by the cashier and then quickly paid for her purchases. When she got outside, Mack joined her. She asked him, “She was joking about the dog food, wasn’t she?”
“Hell,” he said, “I’m still trying to get over the fact that the patrons in the entire grocery store want you to gang up against this guy.”
“All I can think about are the two poor sisters.” She worried on that for a moment. “Do you know where they live?”
Mack shook his head. “No, and just because everybody thinks they’re in tough shape doesn’t mean they’re as bad as the gossip says.”
“No,” she said, “but sadly it could mean they’re even worse off.”
“True.”
Doreen loaded her groceries and then got inside her vehicle and smiled up at Mack as he stood outside her door. “You know what? If you were to come by now, I would give you some zucchini bread this time.”
He laughed. “I’m heading over to Mom’s. Some of these groceries are for her. I’m sure she’ll have something for me. You go ahead and eat it, even if just to make sure you don’t end up like the sisters.”
“Too late,” she said. “Remember? I already did end up that way. Maybe that’s why learning about them hurt so much.”
“You can’t fix everything,” he warned.
“No,” she said, “I can’t. But maybe I can fix this, at least.”
Chapter 19
Saturday Lunchtime …
Back home Doreen unloaded the groceries, put on coffee, and led all the animals outside. She took her laptop with her, sat down on the grass, and leaned up against the post of the little set of existing steps, even though they were dirty. She had no lawn chairs—something she hoped to rectify soon.
She proceeded to look up Ed Burns’s daughters. According to the articles she found, the Burnses were a religious family, and the girls had done their duty to their father well. But, somewhere along the line, he hadn’t done his duty to them. Even though he was a multimillionaire, he had left them nothing. Everything had gone to his vagabond son. Immediately, of course, there had been an outcry from the townsfolk, but, with the girls not having any money to legally fight their brother in court, and the brother not being of a generous mind-set to help them out, he’d taken everything and had stepped into his father’s role.
Doreen smiled at that. “You know something, you little egotistical sad excuse for a brother? We just might have to check into this. The fact that a set of special tools came from your father’s collection makes me deeply suspicious about you and all that you may have been up to.”
Her gaze caught on the corner of the ice pick. She walked over and took a look at it again. Then she texted Mack. Any chance this ice pick has bloodstains on it, not just rust?
She didn’t get an answer right away but could see the pick was so coated and so rusted that she didn’t know what the process would be to find blood on it. A lot of stains were evident here, but, whether that was just rust or other chemicals degrading over the years, she didn’t know. When her phone rang, she picked it up. “Yes, Mack, it was just a question.”
“You really think it’s involved in something?”
“It’s definitely dirty and covered in stains, but I have no idea what they are.”
“Who are you thinking about?”
“I was thinking of Ed Burns,” she said.
There was silence on the other end. “He’s dead now. You remember that? He had a heart attack. He was old, and nothing suspicious was ever considered about his case.”
She frowned as she studied the tool. “I’d still like the pick tested.”
“Lab resources and all that cost money,” Mack said. “I can’t imagine it’ll bear any fruit.”
“My gut says it’s involved in something,” Doreen said. And that, at least, was the truth. But she’d need scientific evidence to make Mack happy.
“I’ll think about it. I might do a couple quick tests to see if I find any human blood on it.”
“That’d be a good place to start. Do you have a mobile test like that?”
He stayed quiet for a moment.
“You do?” she cried out happily.
“It doesn’t take a whole lot,” he said. “I’ll talk to somebody and get back to you.”
She put her phone down on the step beside her, then returned to her research on the Burns family. Ed Burns had made his money in orchards, and the girls had worked beside him the whole time. According to the articles, they’d been a very close family. One of the sisters had married and had a son, but he had died young, and her husband had died not too long afterward. “That’s a terrible, grief-stricken life,” she murmured.
Then to realize what happened to the sisters later—that made her very sad. Burns hadn’t been dead for more than ten years. She thought about the ice pick being out there for that long and nodded. “It might not be connected to anything going on with Fred and Frank,” she muttered out loud, �
��but it could be something important surrounding the death of Ed Burns.”
About twenty minutes later she heard Mack’s truck pull up outside her house. She bolted to her feet and went to the front door. “This is becoming quite the habit.”
“You better have zucchini bread this time,” he threatened as he hopped out of his truck with a small kit in his hand.
She looked at it with interest. “What’s that?”
He motioned for her to go back inside, so she walked into the kitchen and waited for him to join her. She was curious about the small kit he’d brought, but he walked past her and headed out to the deck where the ice pick still lay. He opened his kit, took out a little spray bottle, and asked, “Coffee?”
She glared at him. “Do you get coffee anywhere else or just here?”
“I have to get something for making all these damn trips,” he muttered.
She sighed and went back inside to put on coffee.
As she returned, he asked, “Zucchini bread?”
She crossed her arms over her chest and said, “Get on with it. You’re not getting zucchini bread until the coffee’s ready.”
He nodded and sprayed part of the ice pick where the wood met metal and the sharp edges in two spots. There was also some inset wood piece too, which he sprayed as well. After a moment he took out three Q-tips and wiped off the residue at all three locations. He used a different Q-tip for each of the different places.
“I thought you were supposed to do it in reverse,” she said.
He held up the Q-tips and waited. Sure enough, they turned color.
She gasped and stepped forward. “What does it mean?”
His tone grim, he said, “Human blood. On all three spots.”
Chapter 20
Saturday Early Afternoon …
“You’ll take it away from me now, won’t you?” Doreen asked.
Mack nodded.
“I found it. It doesn’t mean it was used in a murder. It also doesn’t mean there was a criminal act.”
“No, but I’ll give it to forensics, and we’ll see if we can match the blood.”
“Oh,” she said. Then she nodded. “That makes sense. It would be a horrible way to die.”
“Yes, but, if this tool retained much blood, I highly doubt the person survived for long.”
“Unless it was a foot or something,” she muttered. She walked back inside, found her coffee cup, and pulled out a second one, placing them on the counter. When the coffee was done dripping, she poured it, but her mind was in turmoil. Something about seeing that test had cemented her gut feeling. As she brought the coffee out, she sat down beside Mack and said, “And, of course, we don’t know who the victim could be, or do we?”
“No, we don’t,” he said. “And I may not have any DNA in my database that we can match it to.” He looked at the coffee and then over at her face and said, “It really upsets you, doesn’t it? It means you’re right though.”
“Not quite,” she said. “Like we just said, it doesn’t mean it was a murder.” She groaned. “But really, how do I find this stuff? Did Thaddeus know? I mean, I joke about the four of us a lot, but …”
“I don’t know,” Mack said. “After this, you’ll have to show me where you found it.”
“If we have enough daylight,” she said, looking up at the clouds. “I hadn’t realized how late it was.”
“It’s not that late. Besides, if you’re not eating dinner, you’d better be at least sharing the zucchini bread.”
She went inside, pulled out the zucchini bread, grabbed a knife and a cutting board, and carried them outside. She then cut several slices. “Here you go,” she said. She looked down at it, her appetite slowly returning.
“We still don’t know what any of this means,” Mack said. He looked at the ice pick and frowned. “I’d like to know where the matching piece is.”
“Now you can go ask that snotty Burns kid,” she said with a triumphant smile. “Rattle his cage a bit.”
“I’m afraid you’ve rattled his cage enough,” he said. “You know what you did back there?”
“I don’t know that I’ve done anything,” she said.
“He was pretty upset in the grocery store. The crowd didn’t help.”
“You saw the color drain from his face too, didn’t you?”
“I did. He didn’t like your implication.”
“We’ll just have to see how that pans out,” Doreen said. She reached for a second piece of bread and motioned at him. “It’s good, isn’t it?”
He snagged up two more pieces and said, “Very good.”
They enjoyed coffee and zucchini bread and silence. Finally she said, “It’s really bad that he won’t share with his sisters.”
“People are people,” Mack said. “Just because we want them to behave better doesn’t mean they do.”
“People should be nicer to each other.”
Mack nodded. But then he added, “Even better is if they would be kind. We’re running amok in a world full of lies and criminal behavior. People need to find a way to be kind to the person beside them.”
“I guess there’s a world of difference between nice and kind, isn’t there?”
“There is, and I vote for kind.”
She smiled at him. “That’s because you’re a nice person.”
His eyebrows shot up. “I don’t know what to do with this quiet reflective person who’s being nice to me,” he joked.
She frowned. “Am I always so mean?”
“Not always,” he said.
Just then, Goliath hopped up into Mack’s lap and batted him in the chin with his paw. “Ouch,” Mack said, teasing, reaching up to rub his chin. “You pack quite a punch there, buddy.” But he obligingly scratched Goliath’s head.
At the same time, Mugs was determined not to be left alone, and he came over and jumped up so his front paws were on the chair where Doreen sat. She gently stroked his long ears. “You’re doing just fine, Mugs. He’s only getting a little bit of a cuddle.”
“A cuddle. A cuddle.” And Thaddeus hopped up on the café table. He gave her the eye and then turned his head and gave the other eye to Mack. “Thaddeus is here. Thaddeus is here.”
“I can see that, big guy,” Doreen said affectionately. As she went to pet him, he bent his head and snagged up a big piece of zucchini bread off her plate and backed up out of her reach.
“You could at least ask, you know?” she protested, but he was done with communicating because he was already eating the zucchini bread. He lifted his head, bobbed it a couple more times, and said, “A cuddle. A cuddle.”
“No, this is bread,” she said, “and it’s got sugar in it. You really shouldn’t eat it.” She tried to pull a little bit off the side from the piece in her hand and give it to him, but, instead of going for the piece offered, he went after the bigger piece she still held in her hand. And he broke off a large portion of it and moved off to the side again. At that, a huge woof erupted beside her. She glared down at Mugs. “You shouldn’t have zucchini bread either,” she said, but Goliath was already batting Mack’s hand for some too. She glanced over at Mack. “What is wrong with him?”
“Your nan didn’t put anything funny in this, did she?” he asked suspiciously, inspecting the piece in his hand.
“What? Like catnip or something?” she asked, laughing.
“Just so long as there isn’t any green stuff.”
“There’s zucchini. That’s plenty green,” she said and shrugged. “However, I know what you’re saying. And I highly doubt Nan laced it with marijuana.”
“It’s hard to say now that it’s legal in Canada, for both recreational use and medicinal. Everybody’s getting into the act.”
She couldn’t imagine her grandmother doing that, but, hey, Doreen did remember some laced cookies that Nan had shared with Doreen, but someone else had specifically made them that way—so who knew? She just smiled and reached for another piece. “Whatever she did, it’s very goo
d.”
And it must have been because Mack reached for a fourth piece.
When he was done with that, he gave a happy sigh. “Now I don’t have to cook either.”
“We’re pathetic,” she said. “We’d rather sit here and have zucchini bread now rather than a proper dinner later.”
“I would have had some dinner later too,” he said, “but I’ve been running around all day, so I forgot to take anything out to thaw.”
“I can’t eat any more now anyway,” she said. “Plus my mind is focused on how to help the sisters.”
“The sisters may not need your help,” Mack warned. “Just because you see them in a sad, broken light doesn’t mean that’s who they are.”
“True,” Doreen said, “and, indeed, it would make me very happy if they weren’t. I’d love to know they were running million-dollar businesses they started from the ground up themselves. That would be the best scenario because I think the best revenge is doing well.”
“Just like you did with your ex-husband.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Although I’m hardly a success.”
“You still haven’t brought up talking to my brother.”
“No,” she said. “See? I keep pushing it off.”
“Why would you do that?” he asked.
“Well, one, he’s a lawyer,” she countered with a smirk. “The other, I don’t want to go back to that nightmare.” She could feel her mood sinking. “I don’t like to speak about my ex. That’s part of my reticence in speaking with your brother about my biased divorce attorney.”
“I understand,” he said quietly. “But it might also help you get some resolution and some money to pay for your deck addition.”
“That’s a low blow. Even if I did get a little money, I wouldn’t see it for months. Everybody’s just dangling money out in the future that I don’t ever get into my present-day bank account.”
“Well, think about it,” Mack said, “and we’ll need to at least sit down and talk with my brother soon.”
She nodded. “I get it, but give me a couple days, will you?”
