At 8:15 p.m. Hannah and Maggie were in Margie Estep’s attic bedroom, having gone over every inch of the house without finding anything.
“This is discouraging,” Hannah said.
“If she was blackmailing someone,” Maggie said, “she had to hide the goods somewhere.”
They pulled out every piece of furniture, but there were no doors into the crawlspace under the eaves of the attic.
“That seems odd,” Hannah said.
“What?”
“We have an attic room at our house, and so do your parents, don’t they?”
“Yeah, so?”
“We keep all kinds of junk under the eaves, and there is a little door to get in there,” Hannah said. “It’s the same at the Rose and Thorn. We keep the extra paper goods up there.”
“So there should be an access door here somewhere,” Maggie said.
“But there isn’t.”
“Maybe they just didn’t put one in.”
“Maybe Margie hid it.”
They went from one corner of the low wall to the next, all around the small room, examining the paneling that covered the wall, picking at the seams. Every panel appeared to be securely nailed to a two-by-four stud behind it, until they got to the panel behind the chest of drawers. There were no nail heads in the paneling. Hannah helped Maggie pull the dresser further out and Maggie found the seam where one piece of paneling met the next piece exactly. To the naked eye and touch, it looked and felt almost seamless. When Maggie hooked a fingernail behind it and pulled, however, she discovered the whole panel was held in place with hook-and-loop tape attached to both the panel and the two-by-four studs behind it. When Maggie gave it a firm tug the whole piece came away from the wall with a scratchy ripping sound, and there was a dark, empty space behind it.
Maggie felt the hairs rise up on her arms.
“This is creeping me out,” Hannah said.
Maggie and Hannah pushed the chest of drawers completely out of away so the ceiling light would shine into the room.
“I see stuff in there,” Hannah said.
Maggie brought a lamp over from Margie’s bedside table and plugged it into the nearest outlet so they could see inside the crawlspace.
“Bingo,” Hannah said.
With the light from the lamp she was holding, Maggie could see another lamp sitting just inside the crawlspace. She crawled in and turned it on, illuminating the area.
Hannah crawled in behind her, and they both sat cross-legged in the small space.
“Jiminy Christmas,” Hannah said.
The crawlspace was filled almost completely with stacks and stacks of envelopes, periodicals, and packages.
“This is twenty years worth of stolen mail,” Maggie said.
“There doesn’t seem to be any kind of organization,” Hannah said, looking at a few envelopes nearby. “The dates and names are all different, and they’re just stuffed in here any old way.”
“We’re not going to be able to get through all this tonight.”
Just then Maggie heard someone coming up the pull-down stairs to the attic, and looked frantically at Hannah, but her cousin was paralyzed with fear. There was nothing they could do, and no way to hide. The footsteps crossed the room, and both women held their breath, eyes wide. Maggie’s heart was pounding so hard she was sure whoever it was could hear it.
“I guess if I wait long enough in any murder investigation, you girls will do all the hard work for me,” Scott said as he stooped down at the entrance to the crawlspace.
“Oh, thank God,” Hannah said.
“Sarah’s not with you, is she?” Maggie asked him.
“No, lucky for you, it’s just me,” Scott said.
He looked all around the crawlspace and whistled low.
“I should be embarrassed I didn’t find this first,” he said. “But then Sarah doesn’t have to know I didn’t.”
“You’re not mad?” Maggie asked him.
“What’s the point?” Scott said. “I’ll just have to remind myself in the future to keep a closer eye on you two every time someone’s murdered. You’re better than a pair of bloodhounds.”
Hannah crawled out past Scott, not trusting this sanguine attitude to last.
“I think I hear my mother calling,” she said, and was quickly gone.
Maggie was still not convinced Scott wouldn’t haul her to jail just to make some point. He was looking all around at the stacks and stacks of envelopes, padded mailers, and boxes of every size.
“I’ll have to get Skip and Frank down here to take all this to the station,” he said. “It’s going to take days to go through it all.”
“Will you return it to the intended recipients?”
“It’s all potentially evidence right now,” he said. “I’m not going to think any farther ahead than that.”
Scott backed out of the crawlspace, stood up, and offered Maggie a hand up as she crawled out. He pulled her to her feet, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her soundly for a long while.
When Maggie finally wriggled loose, she felt dizzy and disoriented.
“What’s wrong, Maggie,” he asked her, grinning.
“We shouldn’t do this here,” she said a little hoarsely, heading for the ladder steps.
Scott just laughed.
“Chicken,” he called after her, and then followed her down.
Ed and Tommy were playing Scrabble while Mandy put three frozen TV dinners in the oven and then set the table. Ed was beating Tommy, but the young boy was quickly getting the hang of the game.
“Hey,” Mandy said. “Mr. Barrett met our new neighbor today.”
“An old lady and a baby,” Tommy said.
“No,” Mandy said. “It’s a man. Mr. Barrett said he helped him shovel out all the walkways this morning after he got home from workin’ the night shift at the power plant. Mr. Barrett said he was real friendly.”
“Mr. Barrett works at the power plant, or the new neighbor works there?” Ed asked.
“Mr. Barrett does. I don’t know where the new guy works. He didn’t say.”
“He’s staying in Phyllis’s trailer?”
“Yeah, he said he’s renting it.”
“What color hair does he have?”
“What?” Mandy asked him. “Why?”
“Did he have long red curly hair and a beard? An earring?”
“I don’t know, he didn’t say. What’re you talkin’ ‘bout?”
Ed told Tommy and Mandy about the man that tried to take Timmy.
“I couldn’t stand that Brian,” Mandy said. “He was always flirtin’ with me in a way that made me feel like I needed a shower afterward.”
“He might have come back to try and get that money Theo left Ava.”
“Well, that’s just awful,” Mandy said. “What’s Scott doin’ about it?”
“Looking for him, of course,” Ed said. “But there’s a lot going on just now.”
“Bonnie never mentioned it.”
“I don’t think she knows.”
“Well, somebody better tell her before she hears it through the grapevine, or there’ll be hell to pay.”
When Maggie got to her parents’ house she walked right into the middle of her mother giving Patrick a verbal spanking for not telling her about the “pirate” who approached Timmy.
“I had to hear it from a customer, Patrick, a customer! Do you know how stupid that made me look? My own grandson.”
“I’m sorry, Ma,” Patrick said.
“And you!” Bonnie said, pointing to Maggie, who stood frozen in the doorway. “You had all day to tell me about it, so what’s your excuse?”
“I thought it was probably Brian, and I didn’t want to tell you.”
Her mother’s mouth was open, ready to immediately reject whatever excuse Maggie offered, but she hadn’t expected that one.
“What?” she said in a whisper.
Patrick groaned.
Maggie’s father had tuned out ear
ly in the argument, but now he was back in.
“What’s this about Brian?”
“Timmy said the man had long red curly hair, and whoever broke in the bakery must have had a key, so I was thinking it might be Brian.”
Maggie waited for one or both of her parents to bless her out, but it didn’t happen. Bonnie sank down into a chair by the door to the kitchen and Fitz turned as far as he could in his recliner to look at Patrick.
“Son,” he said, “do you think it could be Brian doing these things?”
“Curtis and Ian are keeping it quiet, but someone got in both the bar and the gas station last night and took some money,” Patrick said. “Whoever it was used a key at both places.”
“It’s not true,” said Bonnie, looking from Patrick to Maggie. “Why wouldn’t he come home if he needed money? Why wouldn’t he come to us in the daylight and ask us for help? He’s our son, not some common criminal. He may have done wrong by Ava and the children, but I’m his mother. Why wouldn’t he come to me if he needed something? No, it was someone else.”
“Who else has keys to every Fitzpatrick family business?” Patrick asked the room.
“One of Curtis’s boys then,” Fitz protested. “Why does it have to be one of mine?”
“Red curly hair,” Maggie said. “The man who approached Timmy had red curly hair.”
“Those two things may not even be connected,” Bonnie protested.
Everyone started talking at once and no one was listening to anyone.
Maggie noticed Grandpa Tim was trying to say something, but everyone was talking over him.
Maggie went over and bent down next to him.
“What is it, Grandpa?”
Grandpa Tim’s voice was little more than a hoarse whisper, ravaged as it was by emphysema and throat cancer. He could barely speak, but Maggie understood what he was saying.
“Shut up everybody,” she said. “Grandpa Tim says Brian was here.”
Everyone immediately stopped talking and listened carefully as Grandpa Tim struggled to get the words out.
“He was here,” he said, in a hoarse whisper. “In the night.”
Bonnie jumped up and began pacing and praying, “Oh my Heavenly Father, oh my Holy Mother, oh my Lord in Heaven…”
Fitz grumbled that the old man was probably dreaming.
Patrick and Maggie exchanged looks. Patrick put his arm around his mother and coaxed her into the kitchen. Maggie kissed Grandpa Tim and held his hands in hers.
“Did he have long curly hair?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Did he ask you for money?”
He nodded.
“Did he take anything else?”
Grandpa Tim gestured toward the kitchen, and Maggie felt sick at her stomach. She thanked him again and slipped into the kitchen, around Bonnie and Patrick, who were sitting at the kitchen table. Bonnie was crying into a tea towel and a scowling Patrick had his arm around her. He watched Maggie remove the cookie jar from the top of the Hoosier cabinet as quietly as she could. She looked in and just as she feared, it was empty. Patrick saw the look on her face and understood, nodded.
Maggie pointed to their mother and mouthed, “Should I tell her?”
Patrick shook his head and mouthed, “No way.”
Maggie let herself out the back door and ran up to the next block, to her Aunt Delia’s and Uncle Ian’s house on Iris Avenue. Delia was folding laundry in the kitchen when Maggie knocked on the back door. She made some tea while Maggie told her what happened.
“How much money was in there?” Delia asked.
“I’m not sure. She’s been saving for that trip for years.”
“Your mother’s been saving for a trip since Ian took me to Philadelphia to see Tony Bennett five years ago,” Delia said. “Sometimes she says it’s to see Tom Jones in Las Vegas, and sometimes she says it’s for a trip to the Holy Lands. It was the money she earned making wedding cakes, and she only makes, what, four or five of those per year? She charges a hundred dollars for them.”
“So she may have had twenty-five-hundred dollars in there.”
“Do you think I should go over?”
“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “It would either be the perfect thing to do or the worst thing, and either way it will be my fault if anyone else knows about it.”
“Well, whatever I can do to help, you know I’m glad to.”
“Here I am carrying on about a couple thousand, and he probably cleaned you guys out of much more.”
“We put a night deposit in the bank last night on account of it was so much money. All he got was the base fund in the till.”
“And at the station?”
“I don’t know. Curtis isn’t saying.”
“Will you check on Mom later? You could just happen to drop by…”
“Sure, sweetie.”
“I’ve thought of something else,” Maggie said, “but I’m afraid to say it to anyone but you.”
“What’s that?”
“What if Brian killed Margie?”
“But why would he?”
“Maybe Margie knew something about him we don’t know. Maybe she saw him first and threatened to tell someone.”
“What I don’t understand is why he’s hiding if he’s here.”
Maggie didn’t feel like airing the rest of her family’s dirty laundry where Brian was concerned.
“I think he may be in trouble for something else he did somewhere else, and is hiding here,” was all she said.
“Your brother Brian was always too clever for his own good. If he had used that brain for good purposes, he could have done as well as Sean.”
“I bet Sean is sorry I convinced him to come back this weekend.”
Delia hugged Maggie and kissed her forehead.
“You’re a good girl, Mary Margaret,” she said. “I know your mother doesn’t often say it, but she thinks it.”
Maggie felt tears fill her eyes and she blinked them away.
“I’ve got to get back to Sean,” she said. “He’ll be wondering where I am.”
“When is he going back?”
“Early tomorrow morning.”
“It was a blessing he came back this weekend,” Delia said. “That will help Bonnie and Fitz deal with the other.”
A Greyhound bus pulled in the parking lot outside the Dairy Chef, and when the doors wheezed open, a group of men dressed in orange robes and sandals got off. Caroline ran up to meet them, and took turns bowing to each one in turn. She directed them to the church van, which was waiting with the engine running in the parking lot, and the monks filed on in an orderly fashion. A harried-looking woman followed them off the bus and started ferrying their luggage from where the bus driver was unloading it over to the van.
“You must be Rachel,” Caroline said. “It’s such an honor to meet you.”
Drew and Caroline rushed to help her carry all the suitcases, duffel bags, and boxes tied with twine.
“Well, it’s hi and goodbye, I’m afraid,” the woman said when they were done, with an odd smile on her face. “You’ll have to cope from here.”
“What do you mean?” Caroline said. “I thought you and your husband were going to come with them and see to everything. You said on the phone…”
“My plans have changed,” Rachel said, handing Caroline the last two bags. “My husband has been very accommodating of my devotion to the order, but he has a good job in California and isn’t leaving it to live in this, well, to live here.”
“But doesn’t he understand what an honor it is to enable these monks to do their work?”
“My husband is a very good man, and he loves me very much,” Rachel said. “But he’s not about to leave a good job with health benefits and a 401K to wait hand and foot on a bunch of monks in the middle of nowhere, for no money. He paid for their travel to get here, but now we’re done.”
“But who will look after them?” Caroline asked.
“I guess you will,
” Rachel said as she jogged back toward the bus.
“Wait!” Caroline yelled, running after her. “I don’t know how to look after them. What do I do?”
Rachel stopped at the door to the bus, pulled a folded piece of paper out of her purse and handed it to Caroline.
“I almost forgot to give this to you,” she said. “This is their schedule and a list of some things that might be helpful to you. They’re vegans, and they don’t prepare food, serve food, or clean up after food is served. They don’t buy things or handle money. They don’t drive or operate machinery of any kind. They don’t do laundry, make beds, or clean bathrooms. It’s considered an insult to show them the bottom of your feet, so don’t cross your legs in front of them. They get up at four in the morning and go to bed at nine at night, and it’s mostly meditation, chanting, and Dhamma instruction in between. They don’t talk unless it’s in class or absolutely necessary and you shouldn’t touch them. The altar stuff is in the big blue bag, but Bhante Sujiva will set that up. If you have any other questions, call me. My number’s on there.”
“Wait! What if I pay you and your husband? I’m rich, I can do that.”
“The truth is, I’m worn out,” Rachel said. “I’m going to go home, sleep for a week, and then my husband and I are going on a real vacation, one in a hotel with room service. Good luck.”
Having said all that she got back on the bus, the doors closed, and the bus pulled away from the Dairy Chef parking lot. Caroline walked back to the church van, where Drew was stowing baggage anywhere there was room. All the monks were sitting quietly, looking at Caroline expectantly. Caroline bowed and they all bowed back.
“We’re going out to Pine Lodge, which is your new home,” she said, not knowing how many of the monks spoke English. “You’ll have to forgive me if I do or say something that is incorrect. I expected Rachel to be here to help me learn all this, but I guess she’s going home.”
Drew looked at her in a kind of panic.
“What are you going to do?” he whispered.
Morning Glory Circle Page 19
