by Annie Knox
I hadn’t done that much over the past couple of years. When Casey had packed up his boxes and moved out, I’d filled the space he left with friends and family: Rena’s biting wit, Taffy’s gentle chatter, Packer’s silly antics, Jinx’s insistent snuggling, my mother’s endless stories, my sisters’ toothless bickering, Ingrid’s bluff advice. The constant stream of words and laughter kept me upright during some challenging times. But I’d forgotten the singular pleasure of solitude.
Now that I had taken this first tottering step into a future that was mine and mine alone, I felt like I could bear the silence again, like I could be alone without feeling lonely.
Another crash from inside broke my moment of quiet meditation. If I wasn’t careful, Dad and Paul would get tipsy and start “fixing” things.
I shared a Dumpster with Richard Greene, who sold rare books and military memorabilia out of the house next door. As I picked my way across the uneven brickwork in that direction, I found myself up on my tiptoes, careful not to disturb my curmudgeonly neighbor.
As gently as I could, I flipped the lid of the container open and heaved the bags up over the side.
I sidled around the trash container to get a good grip on the lid so I could close it without making an almighty racket. The light over Richard’s back door flickered on when I stepped into the range of its sensor.
And I froze.
The new light revealed a still form sprawled across the alleyway. At first, I mistook it for a bundle of rubbish strewn across the bricks, as though perhaps an animal had ripped open a trash bag and rifled through the contents, looking for something choice.
But then I saw a hand, its fingers curled upward, as though grasping for something just out of reach.
As I slowly approached, I began to make out additional details: a brown paper bag discarded by the body, dark shadows, pieces of something spilling forth. A loose purple scarf trailed over the outstretched arm. A curl of dark red hair glowed in the harsh yellow light. A shoe—thick-soled and square—dangled off a foot clad in woolly tights.
Another step brought me close enough to make out the features on the still, pale face. Sherry Harper, her face contorted in a rictus of pain, her eyes glassy and flat in the harsh glare.
I couldn’t tear my eyes from her face.
While I stood there, trying to process what I was seeing, the motion-sensitive lights suddenly flicked off.
And I screamed.
CHAPTER
Five
MacArthur arrived on the scene first, bounding from Richard Greene’s back door the instant he opened it. As usual, the dog didn’t bark, but in his excitement, his breath rushed from his body in deep, rasping pants. He took up a position at my side, head raised, alert for danger. Normally, the proximity of such a huge dog would have sent me into a tailspin, but I found myself grasping his collar and holding on for dear life.
“Who’s there? What’s going on?” I found Richard’s sharp demands strangely reassuring.
By that point, other doors onto the alley had opened, including 801 Maple’s, and security lights had snapped on everywhere.
“Call nine-one-one.” There’s no way anyone heard my faint plea, but all around me the cry of “Call nine-one-one!” rang out.
Richard leapt from his back stoop, not bothering with the stairs, and rushed toward me. I felt a momentary flicker of worry for the impact of his old joints on the cold, unforgiving bricks, but age didn’t seem to slow him at all. He drew up short when he reached my side. “Sweet mercy,” he muttered.
His big, callused hand wrapped around my upper arm, and he gently tugged me away from Sherry’s body. “What happened here?” he barked.
“I don’t know. Is she dead?”
Richard glanced past me, to Sherry’s still form, and nodded. “I’m no doctor, but I’ve seen enough corpses to know one when I see one.” He frowned. “Is that Sherry?”
I nodded weakly.
“What on God’s green earth is she doing in our alley?”
“I don’t know. She was protesting in front of Trendy Tails earlier, but I thought she’d gone home.”
He cursed under his breath. “That girl never could mind her own business. Should have known she’d meet a bad end.”
I could hear sirens now, and a small crowd had begun to form, keeping a respectful distance from Sherry’s body.
“Do you know her?” I asked Richard.
He nodded grimly. “Her father was a regular customer of mine before he passed. Collected first edition military histories. Knew more about the French and Indian War than anyone I ever met. Good man. Sherry’s shenanigans caused him no end of grief. But he loved her more than his own life.”
With an ear-splitting crescendo of sirens, the police and paramedics arrived simultaneously, the cruiser pulling into the alley from the south side and the ambulance pulling in from the north.
Richard kept his grip on my arm and angled his body between me and the approaching officers. I knew Richard didn’t exactly like me. Not only did he worry that my business would destroy the peace and order of his world, but he’d made it clear he thought I didn’t have the sense God gave little bunny rabbits. That animosity made his chivalrous behavior all the more touching.
While I normally thought of myself as a twenty-first-century independent woman, I gladly let Richard deal with the first responders, only answering questions aimed directly at me.
Yes, I’d found the body. Yes, I knew Sherry. No, I hadn’t seen anyone else in the alley. No, I didn’t know what had happened to her.
As the police shepherded Richard and me away from Sherry’s body, I glanced over to the little knot of people who’d spilled out the back door of Trendy Tails. Their reactions, written plainly on their wonderful, familiar faces, ranged from Lucy’s morbid curiosity to my mom’s hand-wringing concern. But two people—Ken and Rena—stood apart from the others, and they were the ones who drew my attention.
I couldn’t read Ken’s expression clearly, but I could have sworn I saw the ghost of a smile brush his lips. And that seemed like a very strange reaction to a crime scene.
But Rena’s reaction seemed stranger still. The strobing lights from the ambulance glittered as they struck her face. My feisty friend wept for Sherry Harper, a woman she claimed to despise.
• • •
Mom and Ken West passed around warm mulled cider while the police took statements from everyone still lingering around Trendy Tails. Most were short and sweet: Everyone had seen Sherry acting like a crazy woman early in the evening, no one knew where she’d gone after she gave up on picketing Trendy Tails, and no one had the faintest idea how she came to be dead in our alley.
Poor Rena sat tailor-style on the floor by the big oak armoire, Jinx curled in her lap and Valrhona draped across her shoulders. She looked so forlorn, I finally suggested she take the animals up to my apartment until it was her turn to give a statement.
When it was my turn, my mom, Aunt Dolly, and Ingrid formed a feminine phalanx around me, each resting a gentle hand on me as I sat at the cheery folk-art table. Officer Jack Collins, who’d stolen the valentines from the brown lunch bag taped to the back of my chair in third grade, tried to ask me pointed questions, but every time he got a hint of steel in his voice, my bodyguards stared him into blushing silence.
“It’s okay,” I insisted. “I want to help. I just don’t know anything. I mean, how did she die? Did she have a heart attack or something?”
“The coroner will have to determine the cause of death.” Jack cut his eyes to the side, like he wanted to make sure it was safe to share a secret. “No blood, though. Hard to say.”
“So you don’t suspect foul play?” Aunt Dolly asked. Aunt Dolly read a lot of mysteries, and I’m sure her mind was racing through a list of possible whodunits and howdunits.
“We can’t rule anything out at this point. But really, I should be asking the questions here.”
“I think we have a right to know what happened,” m
y mom chimed in, her voice ringing with the righteous indignation she’d used on many a school board member who had threatened to cut funding for the humanities. “Sherry Harper was in my honors English lit class when she was a junior. She worked with Dolly on the committee that planted all those flowers on Main Street. That child was a part of our community, and we have a right to know what happened to her.”
“Mom,” I soothed, “Jack’s not trying to keep a secret. He just doesn’t know. He’s trying to do his job.”
“Maybe I could speak with Izzy alone,” Jack suggested.
“Young man,” Ingrid barked, “are you trying to eject me from my own dining room?”
Of course, the room hadn’t been a real dining room in years, and Jack would have been well within his rights to ask Ingrid to leave so he could interview a witness in peace, but that didn’t stop him from blushing to the roots of his buzz-cut hair.
“No, ma’am. I j-j-just . . .” he stuttered.
“We’ll hush up while you go on and ask your questions,” Ingrid said, more than a hint of old-fashioned schoolmarm in her voice. “But we’re going to stand right here while you do it. Taffy! Go make Izzy a cup of that stress-relief tea of yours.”
And with that, Ingrid declared me too distraught to handle the police on my own. I gave Jack an apologetic smile and nodded encouragingly.
He started with simple questions, getting the order of the evening’s events down on paper. He took careful note of the time of Nick’s fight with Sherry, when Rena took out the plate of food, when we noticed Sherry had left, and what I’d seen (absolutely nothing) when I took out the trash.
“So the last person at the party to actually speak with Ms. Harper was Rena Hamilton?”
I felt a twinge of nameless unease.
“As far as I know. I, uh, don’t remember anyone leaving between then and when we noticed that Sherry had left, but I might have missed someone. It was a big party.”
“Uh-huh,” he muttered, making a note in his spiral-bound notebook. “And Miss Hamilton and Miss Harper had words earlier in the evening?”
The sense of unease intensified. “Well, yes. We both had words with Sherry. We weren’t happy about her making a ruckus during our grand opening.”
Jack nodded and made another note in his book. I craned my head, trying to read his scrawl upside down. I glanced back up to find him glaring at me.
Busted.
I offered him a smile. “It was just a disagreement. We were okay with the picketing. Or mostly okay. But the screaming match with Nick? That was just too much.”
I had noticed that the tenor of his interrogation had changed from simple who-when-where sorts of questions to questions about feelings and fights. That sense of unease coalesced.
“You don’t think she was murdered or anything, do you?”
He sighed.
“Right,” I said. “Too early to say.”
My mom shook her head. “I can’t imagine anyone hurting Sherry. She was a bit of a pill, but everyone knew she was harmless.”
She wasn’t harmless to Ken West’s business, I thought . . . but I had the good sense to keep my mouth shut.
At that moment, Taffy came bustling in with a tray bearing a half dozen stoneware mugs and a teapot covered with a quilted cozy. She offered cups all around.
“This is a special blend,” she said. “Chamomile, valerian, and just a hint of lavender. Very relaxing.” Taffy’s tea shop sold all manner of traditional and herbal teas, and she could usually be counted on to have some blend to treat whatever ailed you.
Officer Collins declined her offer—truthfully, he would have had a tough time asserting a commanding presence while grasping a steaming mug of tea—but the rest of us accepted. Jack tapped his pen impatiently while we passed around sugar and wedges of lemon.
“Now,” he said, trying to regain control of the situation, “who was still here when you found the body?”
“Sherry,” my mom insisted. “When she found Sherry. Don’t call her a body. She was a person.”
Jack blushed. “Sorry, ma’am. Who was here when you found Sherry?”
“Everyone here in the room, my dad and Paul, Ken West, Xander, and Rena,” I said.
“No,” Taffy interrupted. “Rena was out with Packer.”
Jack paused midnote. “Miss Hamilton wasn’t here?”
“No,” Taffy continued, apparently oblivious to the hard edge of his question. “She’d been in a funk after the whole brouhaha with Sherry, and then she got a text that irked her even more, and she offered to take Packer for a walk.”
“A text? Who from?”
“She didn’t say,” I responded. “But I’m sure it wasn’t from Sherry. I don’t think the two of them had spoken in years.”
“Uh-huh. And why hadn’t they spoken in so long?”
I felt a blush licking up my neck and across my cheeks. “They just hadn’t,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound defensive. “Besides, if Sherry texted Rena, you can just check Sherry’s phone.”
“We didn’t find a phone with her,” Jack said . . . and then he blushed, because surely he shouldn’t be providing us with such details.
Jack frowned and flipped back through his notes. “Miss Hamilton threatened Miss Harper earlier in the evening, didn’t she?”
“What?” I gasped. “Absolutely not. Like I said, she was peeved, and so was I. But there were no threats.”
“‘Or just plain kill them,’” Jack read from his notes.
This time, Taffy gasped. “Oh dear. I think you’re taking that too literally. It was just a joke, I’m sure.” She shot me an apologetic look. “He asked about our conversation after the scene with Sherry, and I just happened to remember that I said the way to deal with nut . . . uh, people like Sherry, was to kill them with kindness and Rena said ‘or just plain kill them.’”
Taffy had an almost surreal ability to remember snippets of conversation. It made it great fun to gossip with her, because she remembered every bit of dirt she heard in perfect detail, but at that precise moment her memory proved highly inconvenient.
She leaned across the table to snag Jack’s attention. “But it was just a joke, I swear. I only mentioned it because I wanted to emphasize that we were already laughing about the incident.”
“Uh-huh.” Jack nodded. “Maybe. But I think it may be time for me to talk to Miss Hamilton.”
CHAPTER
Six
Before we could fetch Rena from my third-floor apartment, someone rapped sharply on the glass door of the shop, the knocks like Morse code—two long, two short, one long.
My subconscious recognized the sound first, sending all the blood from my brain and leaving me lightheaded. I knew that knock.
I hopped up to go answer the door and saw a figure standing on the other side, the overhead porch light casting deep shadows over his face. Still, there was no mistaking that long, lanky physique, or the posture: a strange mix of nervous energy and casual attitude, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his parka, head down as though he were contemplating his shoelaces, whole body rocked up on the balls of his feet.
I paused with my hand on the doorknob, the door half open, and he raised his head to meet my gaze. Black coffee eyes beneath straight heavy brows; a wide, mobile mouth now bracketed by deep laugh lines; a mop of unruly dark curls.
Sean Tucker.
• • •
Sean Tucker had pledged his love for me the week before we graduated from Merryville High. And with that pledge, he killed the friendship we’d shared since he’d moved to Minnesota in the fourth grade.
I still remember every detail of that night. A sudden storm had blown through, dotting the sills of my open windows with droplets of water and leaving a scent of ozone in the cool damp air. I’d pulled my favorite pink and green quilt up to my chin and was trying to drift to sleep, visions of my perfect future with Casey Alter dancing in my head.
The soft twang of a pebble hitting my window screen jolted me
alert. A second pebble hit the side of the house with a thunk that sent me scrambling out of bed.
“Hush,” I called down, expecting to see Casey in my yard. In my girlish fantasy, he would be standing beneath the apple tree, a single rose in his hand, ready to serenade me softly.
But instead of Casey’s head of wavy blond hair, I saw Sean’s dark, rumpled curls. His ten-speed leaned against the apple tree, and the rainwater had plastered his T-shirt to his scrawny body. Even from the second floor I could count his ribs.
“Sean?”
“Izzy.”
“What the heck are you doing here in the middle of the night?” I hissed.
“Izzy, I love you.”
I glanced over my shoulder, as though he might be talking to someone else.
“No, you don’t.”
He flashed a smile, there and gone like a streak of lightning. “Yes. Yes, I do. And I think you love me, too.”
My breath caught.
“No. No, I don’t,” I repeated more forcefully, letting my voice rise above a whisper. I looked over my shoulder again, this time worried that all our chitchat might attract my parents’ attention. Or, worse, attract Lucy’s attention. If my bratty baby sister heard even a bit of this conversation, she’d never let me live it down.
I dropped to my knees and rested my elbows on the damp windowsill.
“I mean, Sean, of course I love you. But like a friend, you know? I’m in love with Casey.”
He braced his legs apart and clenched his fists at his sides, like he was itching for a fight. “You just think you love Casey. I know he’s smart and handsome and all, but he doesn’t treat you the way you deserve to be treated. He takes you for granted. You’re like his sidekick, not his partner.”
“No,” I breathed, mortified that he would even suggest a crack in my rock-solid relationship. Though, to be honest, a tiny part of my brain immediately called up the image of Casey soliciting a drink refill by tapping an empty glass against my arm, not even looking at me or breaking the flow of his conversation. But that was just a comfortable relationship, I told that rebellious bit of gray matter, like we didn’t even need words to communicate with each other. That wasn’t him taking me for granted at all.
