Duck the Halls: A Meg Langslow Mystery (Meg Langslow Mysteries)

by Donna Andrews

“No,” I said. “But someone was suspicious enough of Lightfoot to start checking him out.” I explained what I’d seen on Riddick’s computer, and what I’d heard from Michael’s friend the college registrar.

  “Now that’s interesting,” she said. “And I purely don’t know if the search committee did the kind of check you’re talking about. In fact, knowing who was on the committee, I’d be surprised if they did. They spent a lot of time interviewing him, and a lot more time praying for guidance.”

  “Both very good things to do,” I said.

  “But we fell down on the practical part,” she said. “Although I do know they called all his references, and they all gave him a glowing report.”

  “Which is why he picked them,” I said.

  “And of course we only have his word for it that they’re really people from his old church,” she said. “I will certainly have a thing or two to say when we start forming the committee to find Mr. Lightfoot’s replacement. Right now we’re arguing over how soon to tell him. Some people think we should wait till August, when his contract’s up, but I think we need to start a lot sooner than that. And yes, we should check out his credentials—properly, this time. Won’t do us any good now, of course, but if we were bamboozled, I’d like to know the whole of it.”

  “Better yet, if he got the job with false credentials, you might be able to get rid of him a lot sooner than August,” I said. “Most contracts have escape clauses in case one party’s committing fraud.”

  She blinked for a few moments, and then a smile slowly crept across her face.

  “So how do we go about vetting his files?” she asked.

  I was about to fish in my pocket for the slip of paper Charles Gardner had given me. Then a thought hit me.

  “You know,” I said. “I bet the chief could find out today. Seeing as how this could be related to a homicide.”

  Her face fell.

  “It’s an interesting theory,” she said. “But I’m not sure I see Lightfoot as a killer. He’s a blowhard.”

  “He didn’t dislocate your arm,” I said, glancing down at my sling.

  She flinched slightly, and nodded.

  “Look, I agree,” I said. “I can’t see Lightfoot carefully plotting something and flawlessly executing it. But losing his temper?”

  She nodded.

  “And lashing out at Vess?” I went on. “Striking him down in the heat of anger and then, when he realized what he’d done, starting that fire in the furnace room as a clumsy attempt to make the whole thing look like a prank?”

  “You’re right,” she said. “It’s a possibility. I’ll call Henry.” She pulled out her phone but remained pensive, looking at it.

  “But?” I asked.

  “Obviously you think Barliman Vess is the one who was looking up Lightfoot on the computer.”

  “You don’t think so?” I asked. “Why not? Was he not very computer savvy?”

  “Oh, he was savvy enough,” she said. “Surprisingly so for such an old … old-fashioned person.”

  I suspect she’d been about to say “old codger,” or possibly “old coot.”

  “According to Henry, he was always sending things he’d printed out from the Internet to justify all his suggestions and complaints,” she said. “But I can’t imagine why he would care that much about Lightfoot.”

  “I suppose it could have been Riddick, since it was his computer, but I think he’d gone home by then,” I said.

  “Or it could have been one of those Shiffleys,” she said. “The two who were hanging around after the construction finished. Cleaning up, they said. Seemed to take them a right long time for a simple cleanup job.”

  “Perhaps they had to move slowly to keep the noise level down when the choir was singing,” I suggested. “Mr. Lightfoot doesn’t like noise during his rehearsals.”

  “I caught one of them coming out of that hallway where your office was,” she said. “Duane Shiffley, I think it was. Maybe it wasn’t my place to say anything, but he looked a little furtive, so I asked him what he was looking for, and he said the bathroom. I pointed it out to him and kept an eye on him till he went in.”

  “You think Duane was up to something?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “What if he did come back Sunday night to snoop around some more, and Mr. Vess accosted him the way I did?”

  “We should tell the chief,” I said. “Not our job to sort all this out.”

  “Thank the Lord!” With that she began dialing.

  I hurried out to my car and set out.

  Barliman Vess lived along the Richmond Road—so called not because it led all that directly to the state capital, but because before the interstate came through north of town, it was the first road you took on your long, roundabout journey there. Thanks to the interstate, Richmond Road had remained a pleasant country road, winding around hills through mile after mile of rolling green farmland.

  Vess’s house was small and unpretentious but well maintained. It had obviously once been a farmhouse, and had just as obviously been sold off separate from the farm itself—not unlike the much larger farmhouse Michael and I now lived in. A neatly whitewashed picket fence separated a modest yard from the pasture that surrounded it on three sides. A detached garage sat to the right of the house, and to the left about a third of the yard was set off from the rest by its own stretch of picket fencing—no doubt the garden, in summertime. The bushes around the house looked tidy and well pruned under their caps of snow. The driveway and front walk had been neatly shoveled before last night’s light dusting of snow had fallen on them.

  I walked carefully up to the door in case there was any ice hidden under the dusting, because I had a good idea how much it would hurt if I fell on my shoulder and undid whatever healing it had done. No lights in the house. I knocked on the door, hoping Mother was inside. No answer.

  Maybe Mother hadn’t gotten here yet. Or had come and gone.

  No, there were no footsteps on the walk or the front stoop other than my own. And none marking the expanse of virgin snow around the house.

  I pulled out my cell phone and called. Mother’s voice mail answered.

  “I’m at Barliman Vess’s house,” I said. “I need to talk to you before you get here. Call me.”

  Should I go back to town or wait here for Mother?

  Or should I see if I could get into the house myself?

  I looked under the doormat to see if he had left a key. No luck. But then when I dropped the coconut-fiber mat back down it hit the brick stoop with a dull but metallic ping. I flipped it up again and looked at the underside. A key was neatly affixed to the bottom of the mat with a small strip of duct tape. A slight improvement over just tucking the thing under the mat, I supposed.

  What I was contemplating was, of course, trespassing. But I could always say that I’d misinterpreted some message from Mother and believed she had asked me to feed Mr. Vess’s cat. Minerva would back me up.

  I pulled the key off the mat and unlocked the front door.

  I’d half expected the cat to greet me at the door, but the front hall was empty and unnervingly still. The loud ticking of a huge antique grandfather clock to my left only emphasized how quiet everything else was. Was there really a cat, or was Mother just making one up as an excuse to come out here?

  I closed the door behind me and locked it. I reached for the light switch, then stopped. Why advertise my presence? I began fumbling in my purse for the flashlight I always carried.

  Of course, with my car parked in the driveway, I was already advertising. I gave up the flashlight search and flipped on the lights.

  My first thought was that Mr. Vess clearly had taste and money, but his life must be a little lonely. Well-worn but expensive-looking oriental rugs covered small patches of the polished hardwood floors. The furniture all looked either antique—mostly Colonial—or of good quality, if very understated. But while I couldn’t put my finger on the reason, I had the strong sense that not a lot of people eve
r came here.

  To the right of the door was the living room, which looked chilly, underused, and a little brittle, as if everything might crumble if I turned even one of my boys loose in it for a few minutes. To the left, a small dining room that looked a little less as if everything was glued in place. Over the sideboard hung a modern oil painting of an attractive woman in her fifties. The late Mrs. Vess, no doubt. She was smiling slightly and her eyes looked warm and kind. If the artist had accurately captured her personality …

  “Poor man,” I said aloud. She was clearly someone who had been missed.

  The kitchen was also small, with no breakfast area, so Mr. Vess probably had to eat in the dining room. It was neat and functional, but not very personal. Maybe it was sexist of me, but I couldn’t help thinking that a woman would have had more decorations in her kitchen. More individual touches.

  Upstairs were two bedrooms and a small bath. One bedroom was clearly Mr. Vess’s. The bed was covered with an old-fashioned white chenille spread. The bedside table to the left held a lamp, a vintage fifties electric alarm clock, a small water carafe with a top that doubled as a glass, three library books, and a pair of reading glasses. The right bedside table held only a lamp identical to the left one.

  The other bedroom was fitted up as a study. A comfortable-looking reading chair stood by the front window, and the table beside it and the floor around it contained more books. At the other side of the room was a small mahogany secretary with a sleek modern laptop perched incongruously on its writing surface. A wooden file cabinet sat nearby.

  I couldn’t resist scanning the books first. They were a mix of well-worn literature, apparently from Vess’s own library, and brand-new spy thrillers in plastic library covers. Then I made a beeline for the desk.

  Not surprisingly, most of the papers had to do either with Mr. Vess’s investments—which were not unimpressive—or his work with the Trinity vestry. Fat files of paperwork from the search for the new rector. Notebooks full of financial reports going back fifteen years. More fat files of memos Vess had sent to the vestry about various issues, like the cost savings to be gained from installing lower wattage lightbulbs in the hallways and the shockingly extravagant use of toilet paper in the ladies’ toilets.

  I wondered if Vess had built his comfortable home through lightbulb and toilet-paper economies. I hadn’t noticed any dimness in his lights, and I checked his bathroom and found that he had used fairly cushy double-ply toilet paper.

  His desk file drawer contained what I assumed were his active projects—a series of files, each in its own neatly labeled hanging folder. LIGHTING USAGE SURVEY—that must be his project of hiding in the closet to see who was leaving lights on. COSTS/DAMAGES FROM CHRISTMAS INCURSIONS—good grief; he had already started a file with his complaints about our church-swapping activities. RECTOR PERSONNEL EVALUATION NOTES—I glanced through that to see that it was a laundry list of petty or imaginary transgressions by Robyn. He also had files on all the vestry members—including Mother. I had to leaf through that one. The gist of it was that he found Mother extravagant and much too insistent on having her own way, so he wasn’t completely incompetent at judging character.

  I hoped his executor consigned these files to the shredder. I had trouble reconciling their pettiness with this house, with its mix of elegant functionality and quiet, understated beauty.

  Maybe the house was Mrs. Vess’s creation. I remembered Mother talking about how Vess had fought the rest of the vestry tooth and nail over the very minor expenditures involved in sprucing up Robyn’s study—mainly a few gallons of paint, to be applied by volunteer labor.

  “The man doesn’t seem to understand,” Mother had said. “Even if the styles haven’t changed, things just wear out.”

  Maybe he’d kept the decor here untouched after his wife’s death. I hadn’t seen anything that couldn’t have been here for ten years, or even twenty. I could see him living here, blind to the house’s beauty but well aware of its comfort. Keeping everything unchanged not out of sentimentality but because that was the cheapest and easiest option.

  Odd that one hanging folder was completely empty—the one marked THORNEFIELD INVESTIGATION.

  I searched the rest of the file cabinet and the desktop. No THORNEFIELD INVESTIGATION misfiled under OFFICE SUPPLY INVENTORY or HOUSEKEEPING SAVINGS PROPOSAL or any of the other projects.

  I was deeply immersed in the files when I heard a loud bang outside and started.

  Chapter 30

  I slipped over to the window on the side of the house where the sound had come from and peered out, careful to stay back far enough to minimize the chances that I’d be seen.

  The back windows of Mr. Vess’s offices had a sweeping view of rolling pastures leading down to a large pond and a series of long, low, whitewashed sheds. One of the barns had a faded sign on the side reading PLEASANT VALLEY DUCK FARM.

  A tall, lean figure in jeans and a faded corduroy coat came out of one of the sheds and I heard the loud noise again—it was the shed door being slammed closed.

  I was willing to bet that I was looking at Quincy Shiffley’s farm, with one of his cousins dropping by to tend the ducks. A cousin who was slamming doors in a bit of a temper because he really didn’t want to be out in the cold feeding a bunch of ducks.

  I was a little alarmed when the cousin began striding across the snow-covered pasture in my direction. But I soon realized he wasn’t aiming for the house. Two large white ducks were perched on the fence between Vess’s yard and the duck farm. In summer, no doubt they’d have fluttered down into the garden and begun foraging, but now they merely stared down at the snow as if disappointed. I watched from behind the curtain as the visiting Shiffley captured them—they looked cold and not really all that eager to escape—and strode back up the hill to the barns with one under each arm.

  I peered out the front windows to make sure there was nothing there, and then went back to hunting.

  Vess hadn’t been prone to clutter, so it didn’t take long at all to search the small house and confirm that the missing file wasn’t anywhere else. Not in the office. Not in the dresser or the bedside table. Not in any of the closets. Not in the attic, which was actually empty. Not in the garage, which contained only a bare minimum of lawn and garden tools.

  Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean the file was missing—only that it wasn’t here. Perhaps Vess had left it in his car. Or had lent it to another member of the vestry, seeking their support.

  I drifted back up to his office and wondered it I should turn on his computer. Not that I would expect to find much there—I’d already noticed that apart from the occasional letter or memo, most of the contents of his complaining files were handwritten.

  And I was no computer forensics analyst, so why muddy the waters if the chief eventually did send someone to check the laptop. I left the laptop alone. It was time to go.

  Though not before I fed the cat. If there even was a cat.

  I went back to the kitchen. There, on the floor of the utility room, was a beige plastic mat with two bowls on it, both empty. You couldn’t even tell which was the food bowl and which was the water—both had been licked clean and dry.

  There was dry cat food in a cabinet overhead. I rinsed out both bowls, shook a decent amount of food into one, and filled the other with water.

  Just then the doorbell rang. I hurried to peer out a window and spotted Mother’s car. I opened the door to let her in.

  “Hello, dear,” she said, giving me a peck on the cheek as she came in. “Did you also come to look after poor Barliman’s cat?”

  “I came to look after you,” I said. “Given the fact that we don’t have any idea who killed Mr. Vess, don’t you think it was a little foolhardy to make such a fuss about continuing his quest, once you found out what it was, and then letting the whole world know you were coming out here by yourself to feed his cat?”

  “I knew you’d come after me as soon as you heard,” she said. “And did
n’t it give you a lovely excuse to come out here and poke around? Did you find anything interesting?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

  I led her up to the office and pulled out the drawer containing Mr. Vess’s files.

  “Good heavens,” she said. “I wish I could say I was surprised, but I’m not. Someone should destroy these files—the way J. Edgar Hoover’s blackmail files were destroyed after his death.”

  “I was thinking more about Sherlock Holmes burning Charles Augustus Milverton’s files,” I said. “And I’d be in complete agreement except for the small fact that there might be some clue in these files to help the chief find Vess’s killer.”

  “Then why are you taking this file?” she asked, tapping one manicured nail on the hanging folder labeled THORNEFIELD INVESTIGATION.

  “I’m not,” I said. “It was already missing when I came. Do you have any idea what it could be about?”

  “He usually kept his little investigations close to the vest,” she said. “I have no idea. But if he thought there was anything the least bit suspicious about Mrs. Thornefield, he’s very much mistaken. She was a gracious and generous lady with impeccable taste.”

  “If you say so,” I said, thinking of that heavy furniture in the church basement. “Maybe Vess was inspired by her generosity and was investigating how she went about arranging her legacy to the church. Maybe he was thinking of following suit.”

  “Maybe.” She glanced around with an appreciative air. “It would be nice, of course, but I’m not holding my breath. Maybe he has—had—some bee in his bonnet about the legacy causing us a tax problem. Or an insurance problem, from storing all that stuff in the undercroft. Though that would be his own fault—he was the one who vetoed short-term storage, even though the Shiffley Moving Company would have given us a bargain rate.”

  “Keep your eyes open, then,” I said. “And let’s get out of here before someone catches us trespassing.”

  “Did you feed the cat, dear?”

  “Yes,” I said. I walked down the hall to the kitchen and poked my head in. I could see, in the utility room beyond, the hindquarters and tail of a small gray cat, and by the sound of it she was bolting down her food. I backed away as quietly as I could.