I got up and stretched and had some water, then prepared another three-row grid. The last series read: QSBPHIBO.
“Paige!” I exclaimed.
I resumed my decoding of the message.
“Wow!” I whispered, hurrying now.
Paige and Rosalie. Sisters and friends. I picked up the phone to call Paige.
“Yes, I know,” she said when I had her on the line and reported the message. “After she put it up, she showed me how to figure it out.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Yeah,” she said in her tiny voice. “It was.”
After telling her that I’d just begun the appraisal, and would be in touch soon, I hung up the phone. I spun toward my window and looked out toward the distant woods, frustrated and disappointed. I’d had such hopes that Rosalie’s code would provide a clue about her treasure.
I remembered the boxes of Rosalie’s folders and papers I’d left downstairs. I’d ask Fred to go through them one by one. So far, it was my best shot at finding something of value.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A
s Officer Brownley and I walked into Heyer’s together, I told her about the message I’d decoded in the kitchen.
She shook her head, but didn’t comment.
Una, at her regular position behind the chest-high reception desk, looked at Officer Brownley, openly curious, and I introduced them as we signed in, but didn’t explain the purpose of our visit. Instead, I turned to Officer Brownley, and said, “This way.”
I felt Una’s eyes on my back as we made our way down the hall, an odd sensation, and as we rounded the corner that led to Gerry’s office suite, I looked back.
She raised her eyebrows and mouthed, “What?”
I raised my shoulders to convey uncertainty.
“Tricia,” I said as we stepped into her office, “have you met Officer Brownley? She’s investigating Rosalie’s death.”
Officer Brownley looked around, taking in the wood paneling, soft lighting, oil paintings, and thick rugs.
“How do you do?” Tricia said. “If there’s anything I can do to help, please let me know. Rosalie was a remarkable young woman.”
“Thanks. Someone will be talking to you about her soon.”
To me, Tricia said, “Gerry thought that under the circumstances we ought to lock Rosalie’s office. He asked me to give you the key.”
“Sounds smart,” I agreed, accepting it.
Gerry was on the phone, his voice booming. We could hear him clearly. I stuck my head into his office and nodded hello. He smiled at me as if we were old friends, and waved me in. When he saw Officer Brownley, he nodded politely, and gestured that she should join us.
We stood there, unable to avoid listening to his side of the conversation with someone he called, “Dougie, Dougie.” He was leaning back, and he looked like he was having a ball.
He winked at me. To avoid eye contact, I shifted my gaze to the picture window in back of him. As he spoke, I watched a big brown bird circle and glide until it disappeared from view, and then I tried to estimate how far the trees were from the building.
“Dougie, Dougie,” Gerry said, “you can’t be missing deadlines, not if you want to play in the big leagues. . . . Tell me in one sentence what the problem is. . . . Fair enough. I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you until tomorrow noon, how’s that? . . . You betcha! . . . No can do, nope, nada, not a chance. . . . Dougie, Dougie, come on now, be realistic. . . . Sounds like a plan, my man. . . . Okay then . . . Mañana.”
He punched the button to disconnect the call, sat forward, and said, “Sit, sit. Tell me what’s going on.”
I looked straight at Gerry as I introduced Officer Brownley. His eyes were guarded, no longer warm and encouraging. “I’m here to inventory Rosalie’s things. For her sister’s lawyer.”
“Helluva thing,” he said, standing up. “When you’re done with the appraisal, you okay with finishing the installation?”
“Sure,” I said. “I should have time in between things and for sure next week, if that’s all right.”
Gerry clasped my arm, gave a squeeze, and said, “Josie, doll, whatever’s good for you is good for me.”
I edged away. His touch wasn’t improper, but it made me super-uncomfortable. I was tempted to tap him on the arm, and shout, “Cooties, no touch back!” the way we did in grade school.
“Are we interrupting?” Ned asked in an irritatingly coy tone, entering the office just ahead of Edie. He smirked, and I nearly stamped my foot, I was so annoyed. He sounded like a twelve-year-old with a dirty mind.
“What was that about?” Edie asked wrathfully.
“Nothing!” I exclaimed.
“Girls, girls!” Gerry interjected, chuckling. “Edie, doll, you know you have nothing to be jealous about. Josie here is just a good ole girl doing her job. She’s wearing her appraiser hat.”
Edie wasn’t mollified. She’d heard it all before, yet astonishingly, she wasn’t mad at him, she was mad at me. In fact, she looked like she wanted to kill me. She thinks he’s putting the moves on me, I thought, and she’s worried. I wished I could reassure her that I had no designs on her husband, but there was nothing I could do or say that wouldn’t simply fuel her wrath. Her viperlike expression was terrifying.
“An appraisal?” Ned said with a nasty sneer, and I could almost hear his unspoken, Is that what they call it these days? He turned to Officer Brownley, extended his hand, and said, “Hello, there. I’m Ned Anderson, the CFO.”
I mumbled, “Excuse me,” and nipped out of Gerry’s office into the anteroom. Officer Brownley followed close behind and was standing beside me near Tricia’s desk as I unzipped the video carry case.
“What’s up, Ned?” Gerry asked, his booming voice audible through the open door.
“I need a few minutes to go over some numbers.”
“Not today, I’m afraid. I gotta run. I’ve got an appointment.”
Seconds later, Ned stepped into the outer office. “Well, that was fun, don’t you think?” he said to me.
“Gerry,” Edie said, in an arctic tone. “I just heard a news report naming you as a suspect in Rosalie’s murder. Is it true?”
“Edie, sweetheart, we’ll talk more tonight. Not now.” He strode through the anteroom and down the corridor, a man on a mission. “See ya later,” he called to no one in particular.
Edie followed close on his heels, and after a moment, I exhaled, relieved that they were gone.
“Tricia, can he fit me in tomorrow? He’s such a busy man,” Ned scoffed.
Tricia didn’t rise to the bait, although I wouldn’t have blamed her a bit if she had.
It was awful to see Gerry treat Edie with such cavalier disregard. And I knew the truth about his urgent departure. He wasn’t going to a business meeting as he’d implied. He was off to his regular appointment at the tanning salon.
“We’re here to look through Rosalie’s things,” I explained to Tricia. “My firm’s been hired to appraise everything.” I pointed to Rosalie’s little cubbyhole and spoke to Officer Brownley. “This is—was—Rosalie’s office.”
She nodded and watched as I began the recording process. I flipped through the jamboree of papers and files, and all of the reference books stashed in a cabinet mounted over the desk, and I found nothing personal. There were neatly organized notes of conversations she’d had with Gerry, along with related documents like copies of his birth certificate and school report cards.
There were only two personal items—a recent photo of the two sisters on a sofa with bowls of ice cream raised in a mock toast to someone out of sight and a porcelain artichoke on top of a pile of folders and papers—a makeshift paperweight.
When I was done, I locked the door and gave Tricia the key.
The entire process took less than fifteen minutes.
Officer Brownley followed me to the health club, located on the lower level overlooking the pond. I showed my letter to the woman on duty. She was tall
and thin, sinewy and healthy looking with a mane of red hair and an easy smile. Her name tag read MANDY.
“Her locker’s over there,” she said as she pushed open the door to the women’s changing room. She pointed. “Number eight. Do you have the key?”
I pulled out the ring and held it up. “You tell me. Do you recognize it?”
“Everyone brings her own padlock. Could be that one, though,” she said. “Or this one. Those are about the right size.”
The padlock came off easily. Officer Brownley was right next to me when I swung open the door. A blue cotton robe hung on a hook at the back. Dirty white sneakers and sky blue flip-flops sat on the floor. There was a toiletry kit on a shelf. I took it to the counter, and as I extracted the contents one by one—shampoo, conditioner, mascara, foundation, powder, and eyeliner—a bulge on the bottom caught my eye. I touched it gently. Something hard had been placed under the satin liner.
“What is it?” Officer Brownley asked, watching me.
“I don’t know. Some kind of bump.” Using a fingernail, I peeled back the fabric and gaped. “Look,” I said, pointing to a key under the cardboard bottom.
Before touching it, I recorded everything. Then I removed the key and compared it to the others on the ring—it didn’t match. It was an ordinary-looking brass key, a house key, maybe.
“I just thought of something,” I said, picking up the key ring. “Have we used all the keys on the ring?” I slid each one around the metal circle as I recounted its use. “Front door, car, file cabinet, this locker . . . look! These two are extras,” I said, indicating a standard-sized silver-colored key and a small brass-colored one.
“So we have three that we don’t know what they go to, right? The two on the ring and the one you just found.”
“Right. I bet this one goes to the back door of her house,” I said, wiggling the unused standard-sized key on Rosalie’s key ring. “I didn’t try it because we were already inside. I didn’t think of it.”
She nodded. “But we should. We need to know what all the keys open.”
“Agreed.”
“What do you think it goes to—the one you just found?”
Our eyes met and I shook my head. “I don’t know . . . maybe a friend’s house—in case the friend locked herself out.”
“Not real convenient.” She shrugged. “How about the other one?”
“Another padlock?”
“We have no way of knowing without testing them. Let’s go to the house and check them out.”
I took one final look throughout the locker, added the new key to the ring of Rosalie’s keys, and thanked Mandy, the attendant, on the way out.
I couldn’t imagine what lock the key fit or why Rosalie had felt it necessary to hide it away. A man, I thought. There’s got to be a man involved. Maybe she and Gerry had rented an apartment somewhere. A private place, just for the two of them. What else could it be?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
C
limbing the stairs that led to the lobby, I said, “I just need to check something about next week’s schedule with Una.”
“I’ll wait outside.”
When Officer Brownley was out of sight, I walked over to Una’s station. I did want to let her know my schedule, but mostly I wanted to hear the scuttlebutt. Una always knew the skinny on everyone and everything.
Her desk was tucked behind a chest-high, mottled gray granite counter faced in walnut. Her chair was positioned toward the front so she could track people’s comings and goings. “Hey,” I said as I approached. “How you doing?”
“Okay. How about you?”
I shrugged. “A little upset, to tell you the truth.”
Una nodded and made a face. “Me, too.”
“I’ll be coming in next week sometime to finish the installation, so I’ll see you then.”
“Good. So,” she asked, lowering her voice, “how come you’re here with that police officer?”
I decided that there was no reason not to tell her the truth, so I explained that I’d been hired to appraise Rosalie’s estate. Then, to shift the focus from me, I asked, “Have you heard anything?”
“Who tells anything to the receptionist?” she replied with a self-deprecating chuckle.
Maybe, I thought, if I pose specific questions, I’ll get more information. “Have you talked to the police?”
“Yes. Twice. Mostly they asked about the flowers. From Rosalie’s secret admirer.”
“What did you tell them?” I asked, the image of the greeting card that had been left on my porch vivid in my memory.
“I figured out that she’d been getting them for about three months.”
“October?” I asked, counting back from January. “They started in October?”
“As near as I can remember,” she said, nodding, “the first bouquet came just before Halloween. I remember because Rosalie made a joke that it was probably a warlock sending them as some kind of Halloween prank.”
That was about the same time she and Paul broke up, I realized, and in all probability, just about when she and Gerry got started. “What did you say?” I asked Una.
“I said that if she was right about it being a warlock, I had a really good guess about who it was—my ex.”
I laughed, picturing Rosalie as she joked with Una. “Do you think she had any idea who it was for real?”
“No, and it drove her crazy, not knowing.”
“How about the florist?” I asked. “Were you able to help the police determine where the flowers came from?”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure it was helpful. There were, I don’t know exactly, but about half a dozen deliveries here, and the flowers were sent from different places.”
“Like where?” I asked, curious.
“Taylor’s, for one, here in Portsmouth, near Patty’s Pantry. They have beautiful flowers.”
I nodded, recognizing the name of the restaurant on Route One. “Where else?”
“Lillie’s Garden in Rye, Floral Vision in Dover, and Blossoms in Greenland,” she listed, naming three nearby New Hampshire towns.
“You have a good memory!”
“Not really,” she replied, laughing. “The police pestered me into remembering, and now I’ll never forget.”
I smiled. “So some of the florists were used more than once?”
“That’s right.”
“Any online vendors?”
“If so, I didn’t notice,” she said, shaking her head. “How about you? Did Rosalie ever say anything to you about them?”
“Just that time you brought them in when I was there. She got mad.”
Una shook her head again. “Who can blame her?”
“Absolutely. At first, though, I thought it was kind of cute.”
“Ick.”
“I know,” I acknowledged. I could no longer imagine how I ever could have thought it was cute.
“Are you ready to hear something awful?” Una asked, sounding disgusted. “Gerry told HR to begin searching for a replacement.”
“You’re kidding! Rosalie just died—she hasn’t even been buried yet.”
“ ‘Shame on you, Josie, for not understanding the urgency of the situation!’ ” she said in an altered voice, her eyes dancing. “Gerry is too important to let the book languish. Just ask him. He’ll be glad to tell you all about it.”
I smiled and shook my head. “Amazing. Well, listen, I better get going. You take care, okay?”
Outside, I paused to take in a deep breath of the winter-fresh air. All of Heyer’s walkways and most of the parking lot were cleared of snow, leaving only small patches of black ice and a thick coating of rock salt. As I picked my way to my car, I noticed that Officer Brownley had pulled up next to the exit and sat with her flashers on, talking on her cell phone. A man I recognized as a sales manager jogged toward his car, a worried look on his face. I waved to him, but he didn’t see me. Edie sat in her BMW. She looked enraged and coiled tight, like a snake poised to strike. I s
lipped into my car, scrunched down, and looked away, relieved that she hadn’t seen me.
Officer Brownley spotted me in her rearview mirror, killed her flashers, and pulled out onto the street. I followed close behind.
As we turned onto I-95, I called Gretchen. “Hey,” I said. “Anything going on?”
“Sasha has news,” she said, barely able to contain her excitement. “Let me transfer you.”
“Sasha,” I said, “are you about to make my day?”
“Well, no, but I’m not going to ruin it.”
“Fair enough. What do you have?”
“The Southwick paper is good.”
No wonder Gretchen was excited. Authenticating the palette Lesha had left us had just cleared its first hurdle. “Tell me,” I said.
“They call the paper Momentous—it was introduced in nineteen fifty-six.”
“When did they discontinue it?”
“They didn’t. It’s still produced.”
“Which means we have neither confirmation nor refutation.”
“Exactly. It’s not bad news.”
“Does Southwick have any way of identifying it? Codes woven into the fiber or something?”
“No. I asked, of course, but I wasn’t surprised that they don’t mark it. Most of the stock is sold in small lots packaged with envelopes as résumé kits. You know what I mean . . . a hundred sheets of paper and fifty envelopes, that sort of thing. It’s not used for archival purposes or anything like that.”
“Oh, well. Anything on Whistler’s work habits?”
“Not yet.”
“Okay. Let me take another look at the letter when I get back to the office.”
“I’ll put it on your desk if I leave before you get here.”
“Thanks. Anything else going on?” I asked.
“Fred has some not-so-good news.”
Antiques to Die For Page 12
