Cat With a Clue (21 page)

“You're sleuthing!” Mrs. Panik exclaimed. “How wonderful! You young girls nowadays will turn your hand to anything.”

I didn't think I had a thing on Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. “Can you think of anything?”

“Well, now.” She hummed a tune that sounded a lot, but not quite, like the theme song to Dragnet. “I don't see how this could have anything to do with it, but I know that Monica had someone substitute for her.”

Monica? Who was Monica? Denise kept recruiting new volunteers, which was fantastic, but she didn't always bring them around to meet the library staff. I asked for Monica's last name, but Mrs. Panik didn't know it.

“Tell you what,” she said, lowering her voice. “I'll make a few inquiries. If I discover anything, I'll call you right back.”

I stood straight. “Mrs. Panik, please don't—”

“No trouble at all,” she said. “Good-bye, Minnie.” And she was gone.

For no good reason, I was uneasy at the thought of the petite, white-haired, and very proper Mrs. Panik playing Bess Marvin to my Nancy Drew. All those stories turned out okay in the end, but there was a time or two in every installment where you weren't sure.

“Well, rats,” I muttered. There was no help for it. I'd have to go clean the bathroom.

The shower was almost clean when the phone I'd shoved into my pocket rang. I dropped my sponge and pulled it out. It was Mrs. Panik. I thumbed it on fast. “How are you?” I asked.

“Just fine, Minnie. But how are you? You sound a touch breathless.” She paused. “And a little hollow.”

I stepped out of the tiny shower stall. “Is this better?”

“Much. Now, I have something to tell you, and it's a little disturbing. I hope you're sitting.”

Anyone who'd reached the age she had undoubtedly knew the best way to deliver bad news. I walked the few steps to my bed and slowly sat down. “What's the matter?”

“It's Monica Utley,” Mrs. Panik said. “I don't know if this is against the rules or not, but she asked someone to substitute for her the Saturday before the disturbance
at the sale room. Someone who wasn't a Friend of the Library.”

“Denise would know,” I said. “About the rules, I mean.” Not that I was going to ask her. “Do you know who Monica asked to substitute?”

“Yes, I do. Now, mind you, I didn't talk to Monica about this. I learned it from Stella, who heard it from Peggy, who talked to Edith about it.”

I'd had high hopes at first, but with each degree of separation, my hopes went lower. “I see.”

She took in a deep breath. “From what I hear, you have a nice relationship with that fine young Ash Wolverson, so I will assume that you'll take any pertinent information straight to him.”

“Yes,” I said cautiously. “Of course I will.”

“Then that's all right. Now, here's the difficult part.” Her words, which had been measured, began to run into each other. “The person who substituted for Monica was Andrea Vennard, that poor woman who was killed in the library, and I know you know all about that, you poor thing, and I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but it's best that you know. You have a good night, and now that I've passed on this information, I'll be able to sleep easier.”

I held the phone to my ear long after Mrs. Panik had hung up, thinking about what she'd said. Then I pulled out my laptop and did something a thinking person would have done days ago: used a search engine to look up Andrea Vennard's obituary. It didn't take long, and a paragraph in, I found the name of the business Andrea had owned downstate: VM and Associates. Which didn't tell me much, so I looked that up, too.

“No kidding,” I murmured, reading the screen. Andrea
and her business partner, Jayna Molina, owned a company that provided personal assistants and housekeeping staff. E-mail addresses were provided for the partners and key personnel, so I sent a short one to Jayna, telling her I was sorry about her partner's death, that I had been the one to find her, and that if there was anything I could do, to just call.

When the phone rang an hour later, Eddie and I had been about to turn in for the night. “Is this Minnie Hamilton?” a woman asked. “This is Jayna Molina. I wanted to thank you for your kind e-mail. It meant a lot to me.”

“Oh. Sure.” What, exactly, would Emily Post have recommended in a situation like this? Since I had no idea, I forged ahead on my own. “I'm sure Andrea's death was a shock.”

“To all of us.” Her voice was a little shaky. “The police told me they're doing everything they can to find her killer, but I thought I'd ask if you knew how that was going.”

“They're working on it,” I said, which was weak, but it was all I had. “They told me they were looking into her business. Was there anything you could tell them?”

“Nothing useful.” She sighed. “Our clients are wealthy and they value their privacy. Everything we do for them is confidential. If we breached confidentiality, we wouldn't have their business any longer. Andrea knew that better than anyone.”

“I'm sure she did.” I thought a moment, then asked, “Did you have any new clients? Someone who might have wound up with the wrong idea about Andrea?”

“That's funny,” Jayna said. “Your nice detective asked that, too.”

Nice? Detective Inwood? That wasn't a descriptor I would have used.

“I can't divulge our client list,” she was saying, “but I can say we had two new clients last month. One is a very nice lady who spends a lot of time in Europe, and I'm not sure Andrea ever talked to her outside of the time she called to hire us. The other is an elderly man who was an executive at one of the car companies. Andrea went out to meet him because he's not very mobile. She said he was very interesting.”

“Oh?” I asked. “Did she say why?”

“Well, he collected books,” she said. “Old and rare ones. She said his house was more library than house. But it was his cars that interested Andrea.” Jayna had a smile in her voice as she talked about the Duesenbergs the man owned.

I listened and made the right noises in the right places, but I was quietly working the keyboard. A few links later, I was reading about the retired Ford Motor Company executive who had turned from collecting old cars to collecting books, and who had been the last person to purchase a copy of Chastain's
Wildflowers
.

I sat back. Finally, I'd established how Andrea could have learned about the value of her great-aunt's book.

But what was I going to do about it?

T
he next morning, after kissing Eddie on the head and getting a sleepy “Mrr” in return, I stopped by the sheriff's office before heading to the library.

“Let me guess,” the deputy in the front office said. “You're here to see Inwood or Wolverson.”

I eyed him, not sure if he was trying to be funny, if he was trying to be a smart alec, or if he was merely being factual. “That's right,” I said. “Is either one of them here?”

“You're that librarian, right? The one going out with Wolverson?”

It was only natural that Ash's coworkers knew whom he was dating. A little creepy, but natural in a small town. “Correct.”

The guy's grim visage lightened, changing him from an intimidating uniformed officer you knew was carrying a handgun to a friendly neighborhood cop. “Okay, yeah. He's talked about you.”

Even creepier. Sure, I talked about Ash to my coworkers, but that was different. They were library people. “He has?”

“Sure.” The guy leaned forward, putting his elbows on the high counter. “He says he thinks you'll be doing buoys by August.”

“I will?”

“Not with a short rope of course. That'll take a while. But as soon as you're up to speed, he'll take you through the course. Wolverson figures you'll take to it easy.” He grinned.

Ah. Water-skiing. That's what he was talking about.

“Got a competitive streak in you, Wolfie said. Comes from being so short, I bet.”

I smiled politely. “Sorry, but I have to get to work. Is either one of them here?”

“Nope.” He shook his head. “Both out on calls. You want to leave a message or anything? I can get you into their voice mails.”

“Even though I'm not very tall,” I said, “I don't think I'll fit. But thank you.” I told him to have a nice day and had my hand on the door handle when he started laughing.

“You won't fit,” he said, chuckling. “That's a good one. No wonder Ash likes hanging around you.”

Once I was out on the sidewalk and moving along, I pulled out my cell phone and scrolled through the phone list until I found Detective Hal Inwood. As the phone rang, I wondered if he was a Henry kind of a Hal, or if his given name was Hal. Of course, I'd never figured out how Hal had become a diminutive of Henry in the first place, same as Bill from William, or—

“This is Detective Inwood,” said the recording.

I made a face and left a message, which, according to what I'd just heard, would be answered promptly, then called Ash. The same thing happened there.

I'd done what I could, so I went to work.

*   *   *

Late in the day, my cell, which I'd set in a prominent position on the corner of my desk, started vibrating.

I knew this because the papers that had accumulated on top of the phone started rustling and sliding and were in danger of descending to the floor.

Holding the papers with one hand, I pulled out the phone with the other and looked at the screen. Not Ash and not Detective Inwood. I thumbed it on. “Hey. What's up?”

“I need you.”

“Of course you do,” I told Kristen. “Why this time? No, wait. Let me guess. It's my soufflé expertise.”

“Right. That's about as likely as you needing me to . . . to . . .”

“To come up with an appropriate analogy?”

She laughed. “What are you doing for dinner tonight? If you stop here after seven, I'll feed you.”

“How about seven-oh-one?”

“Done deal.”

We hung up, I put the cell phone on top of the papers this time, and went back to what I'd been doing.

*   *   *

After work, I walked home, changed into shorts and a T-shirt, and took Eddie out to the front deck for some fun in the sun. He enjoyed a game of Attack Minnie's Shoelaces When She Moves, but the wind came up—which, according to Eddie's glare, was my fault—and he wanted back inside.

“Sorry about that, pal,” I told him, but he wasn't mollified until I gave him some treats. I watched him scarf down the tender morsels, and wondered if I'd accidentally created a very bad habit that I would never be able to erase.

As I let myself out, I tried not to think about a future that included a constant stream of “Mrr. Mrr. Mrr. Mrr,” whenever Eddie wanted something, and instead tried to think about what I'd learned from Mrs. Panik. I still hadn't heard back from Ash or the detective, so I hadn't had the opportunity to hear them pooh-pooh my new theories.

“Hey, Minnie. You in there?”

I jumped and looked around. Rafe was on the steps of his front porch, along with Skeeter and a medium-sized cooler. Skeeter was a marina rat and couldn't have been much older than I was. Where his name had come from and what he did for a living that enabled him to spend every summer on a boat in Chilson, I had no idea. I'd always meant to ask, but somehow direct conversations with Skeeter were difficult. This made him an ideal companion for Rafe.

“What's up with you two?” I asked.

“Guess what's in here.” Rafe slapped the top of the cooler. “Want to bet on it?”

“You've spent the day picking strawberries, and now you're about to start making jam.”

The two men looked at each other. “How did she know?” Skeeter asked, his voice full of artificial wonder.

I rolled my eyes. “It's either beer or fresh fish.”

“Nope.” Rafe flipped back the cover and reached in with both hands. “It's both.” He brandished a Miller Lite and what was probably a trout. “Want some?”

While it was tempting to say yes, just to see the look on his face, I shook my head. “Kristen asked me over for dinner. I'll see you guys later.”

They called out dinner suggestions to my back until I couldn't hear them any longer. “Morons,” I said to myself, but I was smiling.

And I was also early. I'd tried to time my walking pace to arrive at exactly one minute past seven, but something had gone wrong and I was a few minutes early. I didn't want to barge in on the end of the dinner rush, so I decided to extend my walk.

The homes in this area weren't large, but they were old and many had been in the same family for decades, DeKeyser style. I went back to thinking about the implications of Andrea Vennard being in the Friends' book-sale room the Saturday before her murder. Had she intentionally done so to look for the book? While in the sale room, had she discovered something that led her to—

“Hey, Minnie.”

For the second time that night, I jumped and looked around. Over to my right, I saw Mitchell Koyne standing behind a running lawn mower. “Hey, yourself. Don't tell me you're working yet another job.”

Mitchell turned off the mower and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Nah. I'm just helping out.” He shoved the damp cloth into his back pocket and put his baseball hat back on his head. “Mr. Wahlstrom doesn't get around as good as he used to, and I figured I could mow his lawn, at least.”

“That's nice of you. Have you known Mr. Wahlstrom for a long time?”

“He was my third-grade teacher.” Mitchell glanced at the house. “He gave me a prize at the end of the year. I never got a prize before, you know?”

Part of me wanted to ask the reason for the prize, but the rest of me didn't want to hear that it had been for good grammar. “He sounds like a good teacher.”

Mitchell nodded. “Well, I'd better get back at it. See ya.” He pulled the cord on the mower and it roared to life.

I slid out my cell phone, checked the time, and hopped up into a fast walk
. When I walked in the back door of the Three Seasons, Kristen was standing there, arms crossed, and looking pointedly at the clock on the wall, which indicated clearly that it was three minutes past seven.

“Sorry,” I said. “I got talking to Mitchell.”

Kristen's blond eyebrows went up. “Mitchell Koyne's conversation is more interesting than my food?”

“I didn't know it was a competition.”

“Everything's a competition. I thought you knew.” She turned and studied her busy kitchen staff. “Okay, guys. If there are any problems, let me know before they happen, yes?” Half a dozen heads bobbed up and down. “Harve, you'll bring us a couple of specials when things slow down?”

“You bet, Kristen,” he said, nodding.

We went down the hallway that led to her office. She plopped herself into the chair behind her desk, and I settled into the much nicer guest chair. “So, what's the problem?” I asked. “You said you need me?”

“Oh, yeah.” She pulled out a drawer, pushed back, and put her feet up. “It's more that I have something to tell you.”

My ears perked. “Scruffy proposed again, and this time you accepted.” For the past three months, on a biweekly basis, he'd been asking her to marry him.

“As if.” Kristen slid down in her chair and put her arms behind her head. “The first time he might actually be serious, I might consider it. But he's not, so I haven't, and won't until something changes.”

“And what might that something be?” This was where things were going to get a little tricky. Scruffy had started texting me, asking what he could do to get
Kristen to take his proposals of marriage as a serious offer because he was, in fact, serious about marrying her. “It'll take some figuring,” he'd said when I'd called him. “She has that restaurant, I have this job in New York, but we could make it happen. I know we could.”

“You love her very much, don't you?” I'd asked.

“More than the morning sun,” he'd said quietly, and I'd vowed then and there to help him in any way I could, because I knew how much Kristen loved him.

Now she shrugged. “How will I know when he's serious? I'll know it when it happens.” She nodded at her computer. “What I needed you for was this. Take a look.”

I squinted at the monitor. “Looks the same as always.”

“No, you idiot. There's a video clip I want to show you. Here.” She swung her feet to the floor, made some mouse clicks, and turned the monitor so I could see it. “Watch it and weep with me.”

Curious, I hitched my chair forward. The blank screen dissolved into a moving image of sparkling lake waters. The camera was close in, then pulled back, and pulled back more to show the far side of a lake. I blinked. “Hey! That's—”

“Just wait,” Kristen said morosely.

The camera panned Chilson's shoreline, then magically shifted off the water and onto the street, moving along at a pace slow enough to see everything, but not fast enough that it made me queasy.

Soon we were in front of the Three Seasons. Kristen and her staff were smiling and waving in a friendly manner. They stepped aside for the camera, and it came in
through the front door and into the restaurant, where a smiling hostess stood with menus in hand.

The screen dissolved to black and I looked at Kristen. “And?”

“It's awful,” she muttered, slumping down. “They'll add the sound later, but I don't see how it's going to help.”

“Um . . .”

“Didn't you see?” she demanded. “There was gunk in the water next to the boat launch. There was dirt in the street gutters; I asked the city to sweep the streets before the filming, but did they? Oh no, we can't change the schedule for the sake of some little thing like a national cooking show. And I can't believe you didn't notice the dirt on that window of the restaurant, the little one above the stairway. This whole thing was a horrible idea, and I'm sorry I ever agreed to it.”

Kristen had been right. She did need me.

“Play it again,” I said, and watched it a second time. At the end, when I still hadn't seen any of the things she was obsessing about, I told her to play it a third time. And a fourth.

Finally, I sat back.

“You're absolutely right,” I said. “There was one piece of debris in the water. A leaf, I'd say. There was a little bit of sand on the streets closest to the beach, and that window did indeed have a speck of dust in one corner.”

“Told you.”

I ignored her. “It also took me four times through to see that stuff, and that was when I was looking for it. Your average viewer isn't going to watch it more than once, and even then they won't be assuming that they're
going to see the fantasy version of Chilson. The average person recognizes that lake water contains the occasional leaf, you know.”

Kristen looked at me, a grin starting to quirk up one side of her mouth. “And that streets near beaches might have sand on them?”

“And that windows might have a speck of dust.”

My friend's grin went wide. “See? This is why I needed you. You're the absolute best at making fun of me to my face without me knowing I'm being made fun of until it's too late.”

In a convoluted way, I followed her sentence structure. “When will the show be ready?”

She shrugged. “I've decided not to ask for updates. It'll make me nuts.”

“How self-aware of you.”

“Yes, isn't it?” She twisted the monitor back. “But it's summer. I'm getting too busy to obsess about anything except running this place.” She pointed to the kitchen. “Now that you've taken care of me, what can I do for you? I know you don't want any cooking pointers, but how about career advice? Romantic tips?” She waggled her eyebrows.

I thought a moment. Gossip was an unreliable source of information, but it often held a kernel of truth. “Have you heard anything about Kim and Bob Parmalee?”

“Why?”

“Her name came up, that's all.”

“Right,” Kristen said. “That sounds about as likely as me not obsessing about that video.” She turned her hands palm up and made fluttery “talk to me” gestures with her fingers. “Talk, or I'll tell Harvey to wait on dinner until you do.”

That was a cruel thing to threaten, but I knew she'd carry it out if pressed. And it wasn't like I wasn't going to tell her everything, anyway. “It had to do with Andrea Vennard's murder . . .”