The Longest Yard Sale

by Sherry Harris

Stella unlocked the front door and went in. I picked up a base newspaper that was on the minuscule front porch before following her. A scrawny black-and-white cat met us and wove through our legs, purring its contentment.

  “This is Tux,” Stella said. “Dave rescued him a couple of years ago.”

  “You’re a sweet baby,” I told Tux, patting him on the top of his head. We busied ourselves with feeding Tux and putting out fresh water. When we finished, I picked up Tux and cuddled him to my chest. “I’d take you home with me, but my mean landlady doesn’t allow pets.” Tux licked my cheek with his little rough tongue.

  “I thought you said you’re allergic,” Stella said.

  “I am. Tux doesn’t understand that.”

  “But he understands I’m the mean landlady?”

  “I didn’t say you were my landlady.” Tux squirmed in my arms, so I put him down. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands thoroughly. “Are we done?” I asked.

  “I forgot the litter box. It’s upstairs. I’ll be right back,” Stella said as she trotted up the stairs.

  I picked up the base paper, and some ads fell out, along with a piece of paper. I stared down at it. “Stella, we have a problem,” I yelled.

  CHAPTER 18

  Stella and I stared down at the note. “Beware” was scrawled across the plain white sheet of paper. Stella bent to pick it up.

  “Don’t touch it.” I said it so loud that Stella jumped back. I took out my cell phone and snapped a couple of close-ups. Later I’d compare this one to the ones I’d taken at Anna’s house. Stella watched me but didn’t ask why I was taking the pictures. “I have to call the base security force.” I dialed the nonemergency number and gave a brief explanation of what had happened.

  “Who’s doing this to him?” Stella asked.

  I tapped my hand against my thigh. “I don’t know. Is there a room we can put Tux in? We don’t want him to slip out, and I have a feeling a lot of people are going to be in and out of here in a few minutes.”

  Stella picked up Tux and carried him to the upstairs bathroom. She murmured to him as she did.

  James, one of my favorites on the security force, showed up first. As we explained the note and its possible connection to McQueen, I studied James. His dark brown hair was shorter than he normally wore it, and his cheekbones were more pronounced. He’d been deployed and looked tougher than he had before going overseas. James was now the epitome of a lean, clean, fighting machine. He did a quick walk-through of the house, and then the party really started as the house filled with more security personnel and other base officials.

  Thirty minutes later, Scott Pellner and another guy in a suit, whom I recognized as one of the detectives from the EPD, pulled up and joined the already large crowd of security forces personnel milling around. The base had a memorandum of agreement with Ellington, so Ellington helped with some crimes on base. Since this might have something to do with Terry’s death, it made sense that Pellner and the detective were here.

  Stella and I had been questioned and told to wait in a corner of the living room. I hadn’t mentioned I’d snapped a couple of pictures of the note. Neither did Stella. Pellner’s eyes widened when he spotted me, and he said something to the detective, who then glanced at us. But they ignored us and went over to talk to James. I could see through the large living room window that a crowd of moms and kids stood out on the sidewalk talking as they tried to figure out what was going on. This time last year I would have been out there with them.

  Bubbles’s living room doubled as an office. A closed laptop sat on a desk next to some pictures of Bubbles with two kids who looked to be college-age. I wondered if they were his. A shelf above the desk held books about investing and war. Across from the desk was an overstuffed black leather couch. A large flat-screen TV filled a corner. Pictures of different places Bubbles had been stationed hung on the wall above the couch.

  Stella’s dark green eyes were large as she observed the goings-on. “This is why I don’t like to come on base alone.”

  “This doesn’t usually happen,” I said.

  James came over to us. “How’ve you been, Sarah?”

  “Good. I heard you were off on a four-month deployment.”

  “I just got back a couple weeks ago.”

  Things had been a bit awkward between James and me. After my divorce, he’d come around a few times, at first I thought as a friend, but I think he was interested, and CJ hadn’t liked it one bit.

  “You two can head out. We’ve got your contact information. I’ll walk you through the gauntlet out there so you don’t have to answer any questions,” James said.

  I waved at a couple of women I knew who stood off to one side. They’d been my neighbors before the divorce. One of them, Michelle Murphy, had a teenage daughter who always used to drop by when I still lived on base. I wondered how Lindsay was doing. James opened my car door for me.

  “Thanks, James. Take care,” I said. My phone was ringing before I’d pulled away from the curb, but I ignored it.

  Back at my apartment, I transferred the photos from my phone to my laptop. I studied each one. The white paper the notes were written on looked the same in each photo. But that wasn’t helpful since that kind of paper was available anywhere. Some were more smudged than others. The handwriting looked the same. Each note had different wording, but they did contain some of the same letters. I’m sure an expert could look at pressure points and loops to be more precise.

  But my uneducated eye told me the same person had written all of them. And from what I remembered of the note Bubbles had showed us the other night, the same person had written that one, too. Now, how to figure out who that person was.

  I assumed whoever it was had disguised their handwriting. The words leaned a bit to the left, but not a lot. After studying the pictures a while longer, I realized no answer was going to magically appear. I hoped Anna didn’t tell anyone I’d asked about them or taken pictures of them. CJ wouldn’t be happy to know I was snooping around, and neither would anyone else. But I was fairly certain that Carol was in more trouble than anyone was saying.

  I plopped a bag with two sandwiches from Ken’s Deli in Bedford on CJ’s desk a little after noon. I always felt like I was cheating on Angelo when I went to other restaurants, but Ken’s offered a mean chicken on pita that I knew CJ liked.

  CJ opened the bag and spotted the two sandwiches and bag of chips to share, like we’d always done. He looked weary or wary. It was hard to tell which.

  “Another attempt to get information out of me,” CJ said as he passed me one of the sandwiches. I sat across from him. His desk was back to its ordinary neat state. It made it darn hard to snoop.

  “No. An attempt to get you to eat because I know what happens when you have a lot going on. And you have a lot going on.” CJ would forget to eat for hours when he was busy. I’d always been the one to make sure he ate.

  “Do I?”

  “A dead man, mysterious fires, and an art theft. Oh, and Bubbles being threatened. It sounds like a lot to me.”

  “I heard you found another note,” CJ said, as he bit into his sandwich.

  I nodded. “Bubbles is out of town, and Stella asked me to go with her to feed the cat.”

  “Maybe Bubbles should stay out of town for a while.”

  “I thought the same thing.” CJ and I were so often on the same wavelength it frightened me sometimes.

  “But Bubbles isn’t one to run from trouble, so he’ll probably be back,” CJ said.

  We munched on our lunch for a few minutes. Until recently, everything had been so easy when it came to CJ that it made me question myself. We got along fine—better than fine. For months, CJ had wooed me with flowers, dinners, and day trips. He’d even surprised me last month by whisking me off to the fabulous flea market in Brimfield. He hated going to flea markets and garage sales. The last one he’d been to was on our honeymoon nineteen years ago. Now that I thought about it, our trip to Brimfield was the last
time he’d taken me out. I’d been so busy with the community yard sale, I hadn’t even noticed.

  “What?” CJ asked. “You sighed.”

  “Life’s complicated.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” CJ said.

  I wished I’d kept my big mouth shut. I saw a lot more shades of gray than CJ did. He followed rules of law and thought rules like those applied to everyday life.

  An officer stuck her head in the door. “Excuse me, Chief, but could you come down the hall for a sec?” She gave me the stink eye. I recognized her as the woman CJ had dog-sat for last spring.

  CJ glanced around his office as though he wanted to make sure nothing important was out for me to see. I guess I wasn’t the only one with trust issues. “I’ll be right back.”

  Another officer came in and laid a stack of files on his desk. After he left, I scooted closer, wondering what I could see upside down.

  Chanting “I won’t look, I won’t look,” I picked up the trash from our lunch. I walked around the desk to toss the trash in the wastebasket CJ kept in the kneehole under his desk. CJ’s computer chirped, announcing that a new e-mail had arrived. This place was a minefield of temptation. I swear I accidentally bumped the mouse, which lit up the screen. Clicking on it was a whole different story, and I chastised myself as I opened the message. It was a timeline of when they thought Battled had been stolen. The report surmised the crime had occurred during New England’s Largest Yard Sale. At that time, the police force was spread thin with traffic and crowd control and, worse, helping with the fires. The station had all but emptied to battle the blaze at the football field just down from the station.

  The report said a silent alarm had been triggered from the library, but by the time anyone had been able to respond, everything had seemed okay. It was written off as a system problem.

  I hurriedly clicked the file closed, marked it as unread, and returned to my side of the desk. So someone must have used the fires as a distraction to steal the painting. It made sense that the police would help save the new AstroTurf field. A lot of the guys had kids on the football team and had put in hours raising the money for the field. The fires created a perfect opportunity for a crime. And now that I thought about it, the library had had a big outdoor book sale that day, so it was probably understaffed indoors. How dare someone use my event to steal Battled? It made me even more determined to figure out what was going on. I stood up to leave as CJ came back in. His eyes went from the folders to me.

  “I didn’t touch them.” At least I could say that honestly. “I have to go. Take care of yourself.” I considered giving him a peck on the cheek, but he moved around to the back of his desk. Thankfully, the computer screen was dark again.

  “Thanks for lunch,” CJ said as he sat behind his desk.

  The timeline kept circling through my head as I walked to my car. And then I remembered that Nancy had disappeared from the yard sale about the time the fires were burning. My sandwich rolled a little in my stomach.

  CHAPTER 19

  At home, I sat on my couch, opened my laptop, and started searching for more information about Terry McQueen and his family. His dad had owned a sports agency for thirty years and represented a lot of Boston Celtics, Patriots, Bruins, and Red Sox players. He’d even worked with some of the Revolution pro soccer players before selling the business five years ago.

  Terry had run the Boston Marathon more than once and finished with pretty good times. There was an occasional mention of him at charitable events, so even though he’d moved away, he’d stayed a part of the community to some small degree. But there wasn’t any mention of him as a camp counselor or anything about the camp. Then I thought of someone who might know something.

  Fifteen minutes later I knocked on Herb Fitch’s bright red door. When it opened, I said, “They let me out.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said through the old wooden screen door. “I followed up. You’re Chief Hooker’s ex-wife.” He stepped out onto the porch, wincing when he moved his left leg.

  “Sarah Winston.” We shook hands. I was gentle with his arthritic one.

  Herb motioned to a couple of Adirondack chairs on the left side of the broad covered porch. He might have jumped the gun by calling the cops on me, but he was sharp enough not to let a stranger into his house.

  “I wondered if you saw anything the night McQueen was murdered,” I said.

  “It was one of the few nights my arthritis medicine actually worked, and I slept well. More’s the pity,” he said.

  It was worth a shot, but not my primary reason for coming. “I heard there used to be a camp for troubled kids in Ellington and that Terry McQueen was a counselor there.”

  Herb squinted up at the porch ceiling. “I started the program. Tried to keep kids on the straight and narrow. You thinkin’ that might have something to do with the murder?”

  “It was a thought. That’s all.”

  “It’s a pretty good thought. Some of those kids didn’t turn out so well. Wonder if anyone over at the Ellington PD thought of it. You tell ’em?”

  “Not yet. Nothing really to go on at this point.”

  “Terry spent a week there himself after his junior year of high school.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Record’s sealed,” Herb said. “He was a juvenile.”

  I guess that was Herb’s way of saying none of my business. “And then he got to be a camp counselor?”

  “After he straightened up. He only worked there for a couple of summers while he was in college. I thought at the time it might show those kids you can turn your life around.”

  “Sounds smart.”

  “Then he started working for his dad.”

  “I heard he and his dad had a falling out.”

  “Yep.”

  I waited. It took me a minute to realize Herb wasn’t going to add anything additional on that topic. “Gennie ‘the Jawbreaker’ Elder went through there, too.”

  “Another success story,” Herb said. “Too bad the program got swept up into a county program. It was more successful on a local level.” Herb pushed himself up out of his chair, so I stood, too. “Might be better for me to mention this theory of yours to the Ellington police.”

  I nodded. Anything that might take suspicion away from Carol was fine with me. “Thanks for your time.”

  I stopped over to see Carol after I left Herb. A class was just finishing up, so I had to wait a few minutes. Carol smiled and joked with the students in the class. After they left, she leaned against the door and shook her head.

  “You managed a class after having the place searched.”

  “I have to keep the business going,” she snapped.

  “I meant it as a compliment. That couldn’t have been easy.”

  “Oh.” Carol pushed herself off the door and started cleaning up. I helped.

  “What did they take during the search?”

  “Some of my painting supplies. Paint thinners. Turpentine. A couple of tubes of paint. They already had the computer. Not much else around here to take.”

  I thought about it for a minute. “Everything they took was flammable.”

  “I thought the same thing.”

  That didn’t sound good. None of what they took seemed like it had anything to do with the murder or the missing painting. I thought about the fires and the incendiary devices. Did they think Carol had some connection to those? For once I didn’t say it out loud.

  As I got back to the apartment, Stella pulled up.

  “You look dejected,” she said, climbing out of her car. Her arms were full of bags from a local crafts store. “Come in. I bought some frames for the sheet music I got at the yard sale last weekend. Want to help me?”

  “Sure.” We set up at Stella’s kitchen table and got to work. I took the frames apart and cleaned the glass while Stella assembled the sheet music and put the frames back together.

  “What is it with this town?” I asked her after we’d worked for a whil
e. “Either you hear everything or everyone acts like they’re guarding matters of national security.” Which in actuality, if they worked on the base, they could be.

  “What are you trying to find out?”

  “McQueen was in trouble in high school and got sent to a camp for troubled teens. He straightened himself out and became a counselor there during the summer while he was in college. During one of those summers, your Aunt Gennie was at that camp with McQueen. After college McQueen worked for his father’s sports agency. They had a falling out, Terry moved, and started working for the government.” It seemed that plenty of sources of trouble had circled around Terry. His own problems as a juvenile, his work with at-risk kids, and then some kind of conflict with his father.

  “And?”

  “And . . . I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with why he was murdered.”

  “Want me to call my mom? Maybe she remembers something.”

  “I’d be grateful.” I hesitated. “Do you remember any of this?”

  Stella finished framing the last piece of sheet music. She pursed her lips as she worked. “Not really,” she finally said. “I’m enough younger than Aunt Gennie that we didn’t hang out with the same people. My mom wasn’t that close to Aunt Nancy or Aunt Gennie. I think it’s one of the reasons she moved to Florida.” Stella picked up her phone and dialed her mom.

  After exchanging pleasantries, Stella put the phone on speaker and filled her in on McQueen’s murder. “Didn’t Aunt Gennie know Terry?” she asked.

  “Know him? She loved that boy. They met at a, uh, summer camp.”

  “Mom, I know Aunt Gennie got sent there because she was in trouble. She’s still trying to protect me from the ‘bad’ things in life.”

  “They were an item,” Stella’s mom said. “Then when Gennie went pro, Terry was her agent. But that didn’t last long. Things ended on a bad note. People should listen to that old adage: don’t mix business with pleasure.”