We clattered down into Kay’s combination office and workroom. The unlit store was still and dim. The light she switched on sliced into the dark, brightening her sales desk. Bob strode into the store and looked around as Kay turned on more lights. He frowned and moved to the arched doorway into the larger sales room.
“Have you moved things around?” he turned to ask Kay. She shrugged, walking toward him. I was a couple of paces behind her.
“I’m always moving things around.”
“Where do you think she got those biceps?” I added. She threw me a look over her shoulder.
“Things sell and move out, and we rearrange to highlight other pieces. What are you looking for?”
“That big awful whatever it was,” Bob said, waving his arms to indicate size and awfulness.
“Not the Albatross—that ridiculous armoire-sideboard-wine cooler-secretary thing?” she said, stopping in her tracks. I walked into her back and bounced off.
“That’s the one,” he replied. Kay shook her head.
“I sold it,” she said.
His eyes widened. “But you said it was so awful no one would ever buy it. You were going to have to be buried in it.”
“Well, yeah, but that was before I knew of any people as tasteless as the owners of a restaurant in High Cross that Ambrose is decorating. He took them a picture of it and they loved it. He picked it up this morning in fact.”
“That’s where you hid the tape?” I broke in. “In the Albatross?”
Bob nodded. “You and Kay left me alone, and I saw a roll of mailing tape on the counter. I used it to attach the video onto the back of a drawer.”
Kay and I stared as Bob’s expression turned sheepish. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. I thought I'd seen a car like Walsh’s while Louisa and I were at the Bluebird and I had the tape in my backpack. I didn’t want him to catch me with it.”
“Geez,” Kay said. We looked at each other for a couple of heartbeats. She gave a broad shrug. “Well, I did say that no one was ever going to buy it. I’ll go call Ambrose. Maybe he can do something about getting it back.” She hurried toward her office and the phone.
A knock on the front door of the store made my heart begin to clamor. “Now what?” Kay exclaimed. The door knob rattled, followed by more knocking, louder this time.
“Do you want me to see who it is?” I called.
“No, I'll get it. I'm halfway there already.” I heard Kay’s footsteps cross to the door and the sound of the locks being opened. The pulled-down shade clattered like dry bones as she jerked the door open. Bob and I remained where we were, beside a big cherry armoire that blocked our view of the front door. “Yes, what is it?” she said in a decidedly uncordial voice. Not the way she usually speaks to a potential customer.
“Oh, good, you are here,” came a loud voice. A woman’s voice.
Doris’s voice.
I locked eyes with Bob. We didn’t move.
The loud Doris voice continued. “I was here a couple of weeks ago and saw something that I've decided I want to buy—”
“I sold it,” Kay snapped out. The bell on the door jangled a little, as though Kay had tried to close the door and been stopped.
Doris said, “I haven’t even told you what it was. How the hell would you know if you’d sold it?”
Only someone who knew Kay as well as I do would have heard the minute pause before she said, “I remember what you were looking at. It's been sold.”
Doris could have been cross examining a hostile witness. “Oh yes? And just what do you remember me looking at two weeks ago, when you barely noticed my presence in this store?”
And where were you on the night of last January twenty-third at 9:42 p.m. when the crime was taking place? I added mentally.
“You strolled through my store in a counter clockwise circle, pausing before any piece of furniture made of pine. You picked up a silver cocktail shaker and put it down in a different place, and you handled a couple of porcelain figurines. But I imagine the piece you’re talking about is the painted pine handkerchief box that you looked at for several minutes, set down, and returned to twice before you left the store. I sold it to the next person who walked in, a widow from Milwaukee who remembered her mother having one like it in Pennsylvania. The piece is gone. Rare items like that do not wait for your convenience. Now, my store is closed for the day. Goodbye.” I heard the thump of the door closing, the click of the locks being set again.
Bob looked at me in astonishment. “Good lord, your cousin is amazing,” he managed, as Kay’s footsteps came back toward us.
I could have told him that.
“Did you hear that?” Kay demanded as she came back into our view. “Doesn’t that woman ever go home? She lives in Seattle, for goodness’ sake! What the hell is she doing in my store all the time?”
“She has clients all over,” I told her. “She’s famous for her knowledge of import and export law. She’s always jetting somewhere. Roger used to complain about it. I think he was jealous.”
“Well, let her jet somewhere else,” Kay said crossly. “Now, what was I doing when we were so rudely interrupted? Oh, I know. I was about to call Ambrose.” She turned again to go to the phone.
The next thing I knew I had burst out laughing. I felt decidedly out of control. They stared at me. I flapped a hand at them. When I could catch my breath enough to speak I said, “Sorry, sorry, it's just…the last twenty four hours have been so ridiculous. All of us moving around in our own little circles, me lost in the woods and hiding in the barn and trudging through suburbia. Bob tied to a chair being grilled by a beautiful blonde and sneaking away. Ambrose in here carting away the Albatross. What’s his name looking for the tape which is now in a restaurant somewhere in High Cross. The way things are going we’ll probably learn that the restaurant is next door to the bank they stole the original tape from. And now Doris has circled her way back here to buy a wooden box that you sold two weeks ago…” I faltered at Kay’s expression.
She shook her head. “If I had time I’d slap you out of this hysteria,” she sniffed. “You ought to know our inventory better than that. The box hasn’t been sold, it's sitting about three feet away from you on that dresser. I told you I don't take money with cooties on it.” She marched back to her office. I looked at the dresser, and saw the box. My laughing jag was over. I hiccupped.
Bob took my hand between both of his. “Would she really slap you?” His look of concern made my breath catch in my throat.
I managed a shrug. “Probably not unless she thought I was really out of control. I'm okay now. You were right earlier when you said things like this don’t happen to people like us.”
“I don’t know what I'd have done if you hadn’t found me in the barn,” Bob said, shaking his head. “Gone on the run again, maybe. Or gone blundering back into that woman’s hands.”
“Well, we can’t have her catching you again,” I said. “You should have called me as soon as you got loose.”
“Call me old fashioned,” he smiled, “but I never got into the habit of calling a lady at three a.m. And I do not want you involved in this thing. I can't believe how I've put you in danger. If Walsh had found you in the barn, I don’t think he’d have been as polite as my kidnapper was.”
I was silent as I imagined some distinctly unpleasant scenarios. I remembered another detail we had not yet covered. “I need to know something else,” I told him.
“Anything.”
“Who is Trixie?”
Kay bustled back into the room. “Ambrose is coming, but it’s going to take him a while to get here,” she announced. I saw one of her eyebrows go up as she noted Bob holding my hand.
“Oh, good,” Bob said, glancing over at her. Then he turned back to me. “Trixie? I don’t think I know anyone with that name.”
“I found a book of matches on your kitchen table. ‘Trixie’ and a phone number were written inside.”
“On my kitchen table?” His brow puckered. He shook his head. “I have absolutely no idea. I rarely use matches, and I don’t know any Trixie.”
“Oh. Okay,” I said, taking my hand from his.
While we were waiting for Ambrose, Bob said he’d like to take a shower. I made him hand out his clothes so that we could give them a quick wash and dry. “You’ll find new toothbrushes and disposable razors in the medicine chest,” I told him through the door. I heard him thank me as the shower started.
Kay put laundry soap in the washer and I dumped in Bob’s clothes. As she fiddled with the dials I turned to her. “Kay, I want to ask you about something.”
“Yeah?”
“I should have asked a long time ago, and I'm sorry I’ve been so self-centered that I didn’t do it before now.” I spun the dial on the washer and pushed it in to start the wash cycle.
She looked surprised and a little wary. “Yeah? What?”
“What happened with you and Ed?”
“What do you mean, what happened? We went out for a while and then we stopped.”
I know Kay as well as she knows me, and I knew that stonewalling tone of voice. “Uh-uh. Nope. There’s more to it than that. I remember some of your phone calls to me in Seattle when the two of you were first going out. You sounded like a teenager. You were having a really great time together. But about the time my life got complicated—”
“That’s one way to put it,” she inserted.
“When my life got complicated you stopped talking about yours. When I moved back to Willow Falls, no Ed to be seen, and any time his name comes up you practically spit. Of course now that I've met him, the question is what you ever saw in him in the first place—”
“I should think that at least would be perfectly obvious!”
“What?”
“Well, Louisa, you’ve seen him. You have to admit he’s pretty darned gorgeous.”
“Oh. Oh yeah, that,” I said. An amazed voice in my head said, oh my god, she is still in love with this guy. Where I saw slightly tubby middle aged cop, she saw Adonis.
“Okay, looks aside,” I tried tactfully, “he is pretty maddening—”
“But you’ve only met him once,” she leapt to his defense. How could she not see what she still felt for him? “He takes his job seriously, and he’s good at it. You should see all the letters of commendation he’s gotten, and he solved some very complicated cases when he was with the state police.”
“Well, if you say so. I happen to think a really good cop would never call you ‘lady’ in that sarcastic tone of voice, but you know him better. But how did you go from being a teenager in love to so pissed you can't talk to him on the phone for two minutes?”
Her eyes dropped. She turned and closed the top of the detergent box and put it back on its shelf, fiddling to get it perfectly aligned. Then she wiped a few grains of detergent off the lid of the washer. At last she turned back and said, “I just hate to talk about it. It sounds so stupid. We broke up over a parking ticket.”
“A parking ticket?”
“Well, you know how crowded Maple Street has gotten, right? Some days you can't find a parking place for blocks, and all of us who have businesses here depend on people being able to get to our stores. Most of the people who work in the area drive as well. We’ve had a lot of hassle about employees parking their cars on the street. And the police station and city hall are only a couple of blocks away, and the people who work there need to park too.”
I nodded. Even in the daze in which I had cocooned myself for the past six months, I was aware of the parking problem. The city council made a couple of vacant lots into parking areas and put time limits on the street parking places a few months ago, and the police were quick to write tickets if you overstayed your two-hour welcome.
“So about the time everyone was so worked up about parking and that’s all we talked about at city council meetings, I noticed that Ed and the other cops parked their cruisers in the two hour spaces and sometimes left them half the day. They were out giving other people tickets for staying too long, but they weren’t willing to walk two blocks from the station or move their own cars. So I brought it up at a council meeting.”
“Did you talk to Ed about it before you brought it up at the council?”
She looked abashed. “Well, no. I was already kind of mad at him because of his mother and his daughter.”
I held up a hand to stop her. “Wait. Wait. I know you’re about to digress and I will never find out what happened at the council meeting. Keep going and we will come back for the mother and daughter.”
She laughed and leaned her hip on the now-vibrating washer. “I see you still have your meeting facilitation skills intact,” she teased. “Okay, we’ll take his mother and daughter under advisement.”
“Good.”
“I happened to mention at a council meeting that I thought it was unfair for the cops to be able to park their cars on the street all day while they gave tickets to other people for the same thing.”
“I’m just curious, did you casually mention it or did you raise a stink?”
“Okay, okay, maybe a little bitty stink. I wasn’t ranting and raving and waving my arms or anything. But it ended up with the council instructing Ed to tell his deputies they had to follow the rules too, and he was pretty peeved. And you’re right, he was mostly mad about me blindsiding him with it.”
“Yeah, I imagine so.”
She sighed. “I don’t know why I was so stupid. Of course I should have talked to him about it first, but I just blurted it out in public.”
“We all do stuff like that though. My mouth has gotten me in trouble plenty of times.”
A twinkle gleamed into her eye. “We’ll take that under advisement too. I'm going to want to hear about this. Anyway, about a week later, I had to run a quick errand. I started out but realized I'd forgotten to grab the mail and I was going near the post office. So I circled the block and saw a parking place right in front of my door. I ran inside for the mail, and the phone rang, and one thing led to another, and before I knew it a couple of hours had passed. I suddenly remembered my car was parked on the street instead of behind the building. So I went out to move it, and there was Ed writing a parking ticket.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Right. I told him I was moving my car and it could only been a hair over the two hours, but he kept writing that damned ticket and saying something about what’s good for the gander ought to be good enough for the goose.”
“He didn’t!”
“I wanted to smack him but he would have arrested me for attacking a police officer in the execution of his duty. So I grabbed the ticket and tore it into little bitty pieces and threw them at him and got in my car and drove it around back and parked it and practically busted the door slamming it when I got out. I stomped around kicking the walls for a few minutes until I was a little calmer. When I went back in the store, I found a new parking ticket lying on the counter, plus another ticket for littering. Which I have not paid, either of them. And we’ve barely spoken to each other since.”
“Wow,” I breathed. “I haven’t given him enough credit for bravery.”
“Damn straight. He’s lucky he’s still walking around. He could have ended up like that TV cop in the wheelchair.”
“When did all this happen?”
“Oh, about two seconds before Roger died, which is why you never heard about it. Didn’t seem right to be talking about parking tickets just then.”
I reached over and gave her a hug. The spinning washer vibrated us both. “I should have had the brains to ask, but as you know I haven’t been able to find my head with both hands for months. But I am better, mostly thanks to you.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t do anything that any upstanding and loyal cousin wouldn’t have done. I think Bob has made all the difference.”
“There you go again, changing the subject.”
“I'd say he is the subject, or at least his duds are. Looks like they’re ready to put into the dryer.”
I opened the dryer door and she threw the clothes in. As I set the timer I said, “Okay, so now to the tabled part of the agenda. What’s the deal with Ed’s mother and daughter?”
“I think they really started all the trouble between us. We were getting along okay. Not that we didn’t argue about stuff, because he’s really pigheaded sometimes, but that was okay. It wasn’t serious fighting, just some bickering.”
“Fun stuff,” I suggested.
She grinned. “Yeah, actually it was.” Then her expression turned serious. “You know his wife had died—”
“Cancer, I think you said?”
“Yeah, she had breast cancer. He still worked for the state police then, but after she died he took an early retirement. But that made him crazy with nothing to do so he came to Willow Falls. His mother moved in with him and his daughter Faith to keep house and take care of them. That’s her story, anyway. I think she just loves to tell people what to do. I don’t know how he stands her. Faith is a great kid though.”
“But what did they have to do with you and Ed?”
“Well, you can't get away from family, can you? Mrs. Johnson decided as soon as she met me that she hated me, so she was constantly pushing at Ed to break up with me. And Faith and I really hit it off, and she was pushing her dad to marry me. So with one of them pushing in one direction and the other in the other—“
“I bet he was wishing he’d never heard of you.”
“Right. And the thing with the parking just sent it right over the edge.”
“What about you, what do you want? Wouldn’t you like to try again?”
“Hell, no,” she said robustly. “My life is just fine the way it is. At least it will be as soon as we get hold of that tape of Bob’s and get this murderer taken care of. Come on, let’s go call Trixie’s number again, and tell Bob his clothes are drying.”