Collared For Murder (11 page)

“I was still nervous.”

“So when are you going to do it? What are the plans?”

“There are still a lot of decisions to make, but we’d like to get married in October. We were thinking of a destination wedding. Renting a couple of cabins on the north shore of Lake Superior for a few close friends and family and getting married on the beach with a bonfire.”

I sighed. “That sounds so romantic.”

“Way to set the bar, ladies,” Jack said.

I caught his eye, and we both blushed.

“Do you want to see the design for the rings?” Jolly asked. She was already out of her chair and rummaging in her purse.

“Dang it.”

“Is the drawing missing?” Rena asked.

“Yes. I swear it was here.”

Rena sighed. She got up from the table and walked over to the big oak armoire in the front room of the store, dragging her chair behind her.

“Val?” I asked.

“I imagine so.” When we’d first opened Trendy Tails, Rena had brought Val with her all the time. Packer got along fine with the ferret, and other than a mutual raising of hackles when they both wanted to sleep on top of the armoire, Jinx and Val basically ignored each other. But like many ferrets, Val was a tiny thief. Eventually, she stole one too many wallets from our customers, and Rena started leaving her at home during the days. In the evenings, though, she brought Val so the beastie wouldn’t get lonely.

Rena climbed on top of the chair to reach the top of the armoire and felt around up there for a few seconds. While she was searching the top of the cabinet, Val herself leapt onto the chair Rena stood on and climbed Rena like a tree. She sat on top of the armoire, looking offended, while Rena looted the space.

Rena returned to the table with a handful of goodies she’d found: a scrap of paper, a fountain pen, and a round gold locket without a chain.

“There it is,” Jolly said, taking the scrap of paper from the pile.

She handed it to me. On it she’d sketched a beautiful ring: two vines loosely entwined topped by a single rose blossom that held a gem at its heart.

“Oh, Jolly. It’s gorgeous.”

She blushed. “Thank you. It’s us, the two vines. Wrapped around each other but with space between us, and the rose is our love. Beautiful but, like all things in this world, fragile.”

As she explained her work, she gently stroked the back of Rena’s head. Rena reached up a hand so they rested their clasped fingers on Rena’s shoulder. My heart melted for my dear friend.

“What else did you find?” I asked.

“The fountain pen looks like something Richard Greene would own. I’ll walk it over to him in the morning, see if it’s his. The locket, I have no idea.”

Jolly reached down to take the locket from the table. She
tsk
ed softly. “See, that’s just sloppy work,” she said. “The jump ring that held the locket to a chain is bent. That’s why I like to fuse everything.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, like that collar dangle I crafted for Phillip Denford. I hung it by a jump ring from the top of the wire cage. But instead of just bending the jump ring into place, I soldered it. Once it was awarded to the winner, I would have had to snip the ring apart so the dangle could be removed for evaluation by the gemologist, but in the meantime—while it was hanging
on that table where people and animals were jostling it—it would stay in place instead of knocking against wires and possibly marring the finish on the platinum.”

Rena smiled up at her. “You’re so talented.”

“Oh, shush. I’m just careful with precious things.”

Okay, as happy as I was for the two of them, the goo-goo eyes and sweet nothings were getting to be a bit much. I took the locket from Rena’s hand.

The outside of the locket was etched with the profile of a cat. I popped open its catch. Inside, there was no picture, just an engraving.
G.A. from P.D. Always.

I closed the locket and handed it to Jack. “Does that look familiar to you?”

He turned it over in his hand. “No. Should it?”

“I swear I saw Pamela Rawlins wearing a locket just like this.”

“But her initials are P.R.”

“Exactly. And she hasn’t been in the shop since the cat show started. So who does this one belong
to?”

Twelve

A
fter dinner, the four of us lolled at the table, nibbling on Jack’s luscious tart. If I hadn’t been stuffed from all the food that came before, I would have wolfed down half the dessert. As it was, I was already thinking ahead to how delicious the tart would be for breakfast the next morning.

“So. About that locket,” Jolly said. “I confess I’m intrigued.”

“Well, I checked the armoire the last time Val was here, the day before we started setting up for the cat show, so it has to belong to someone who visited recently. Very recently.”

I sighed. “We’ve hardly been here. If anyone would know who came in, it would be Wanda.”

“Really?” Rena remarked. “You think Wanda would know?”

“No, not really.”

The bottom line was that Wanda was a lovely girl who was generally on time. I trusted her to be polite to the customers and to call 911 if anything caught on fire. But she was seventeen. Trendy Tails was just a job for her, and a low-paying job at that. Even when we had customers, she spent as much time on her phone as actually helping them. And she was none too bright. She’d friended me on social media, but posted all the time about the smelly dogs and sheddy cats at “TT.” Like I needed a code breaker to know what she was talking about.

Ingrid might have been right that Wanda was on track to be a teen mom, but I hoped she dodged that bullet. Poor child could barely keep her own life together. I couldn’t imagine her being able to care for a child. And if she moved into the house? I’d never be able to hire more competent help.

In any event, the odds that Wanda could remember who had come into the store over the past few days were slim to none.

“Well,” Jolly said, “it’s probably someone related to the cat show. Maybe those lockets are some sort of Midwestern Cat Fanciers’ Organization baubles. The equivalent of the gold watches that corporations used to give to long-serving employees.”

“No. They were more personal than that. Inscribed. But I think you’re right that it must be someone who is involved with the M-CFO. Otherwise, Pamela Rawlins having a similar necklace is just too coincidental.”

I tapped the tines of my fork on my plate. “G.A. Who could that be? I’ve met a Sharon Andrews, a Donna Avilar, and a Toni Ackerson. All A’s but no G’s.”

“And why would anyone from the cat show come to the store when they could do their shopping right there in the middle of the ballroom? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Well, the one person from the show who has definitely been here, other than Phillip Denford, of course, is Marigold Aames.”

“But she would be M.A., not G.A.,” Rena said around a mouthful of tart. Jolly frowned at her, and Rena grinned, showing off teeth covered in cookie crumbs. “Oh, come on. You don’t love me for my table manners.”

“G, G, G,” I muttered. “Wait, Jack! When Mari Aames was here, you called her Goldilocks.”

“Oh right,” he said. “Old bad habit. When she was in high school, everyone called her Goldilocks, back when she had a bad perm and braces. She hated the nickname, but I picked it up from her high school friends who also attended UMD. She spent so much time trying to retrain us all to call her Mari.”

“See,” I said, “that’s even more intimate. Not only is the locket engraved, but it’s engraved with an old pet name. The sort of thing a lover would know about.”

Rena looked at me cockeyed. “Are you suggesting that the locket was a token from a lover? Because if so, that suggests that Pamela Rawlins and Mari Aames both had flings with the same man. The two women couldn’t be any more different from each other. I can’t imagine the man who would be attracted to both of them.”

“I can,” I said. “Phillip Denford. P.D. He was attracted to everything with two X chromosomes. Lord knows he ogled me enough when he came by Trendy Tails.”

Jack stopped with his fork halfway to his mouth. “He did what?”

I smiled and patted his arm. “Easy, tiger. The man’s already dead.”

He grumbled but went back to eating his tart.

“Ah, but what did they see in Phillip Denford?” Rena asked.

“I don’t know. He certainly wasn’t my cup of tea. But Ruth Kimmey told me that there were rumors about Pamela and Phillip last year. I don’t like to put too much stock in gossip—”

“Really?” Jack asked.

I scowled at him. “Really. On its own, I wouldn’t
have thought there was anything to Ruth’s rumor, but when you combine the rumor with the matching lockets and the inscription from “P.D. . . .”

Rena leaned back in her chair and reached out to clasp Jolly’s hand. “If Pamela and Mari were both having affairs with Phillip Denford, that gives them matching motives to go along with their matching necklaces.”

*   *   *

We all pitched in to clean up the detritus of our feast, and then Jolly and Rena took their leave.

Jack leaned against the kitchen counter, an enigmatic smile on his face.

“Do you have to get going?” I asked.

“Only if you want me to.”

What did I want? Jack and I had been dating for several months, and we’d managed to become more physically comfortable around each other with every passing day. If I’d thought for an instant that Jack was looking for a cup of tea or a beer, I would have ushered him up to my apartment already. But that slow, hot smile coupled with the way his body had relaxed, like he didn’t want to appear threatening, told me that Jack Collins was looking for more than tea.

It had been years since I’d been physically intimate with a man—since my fiancé, Casey, left me. I didn’t know what to do.

Finally, something in me broke. I enjoyed the
relationship Jack and I had built so far, but I wanted more. From him.

“Stay.”

I took him by the hand and led him up the back stairs to my third-floor apartment. The dormer ceilings and small rooms made it difficult for a man Jack’s size to negotiate the landscape, but he did his best.

We sat on my couch, a thrift-store find that I’d covered with patchwork pieces to hide the threadbare canvas beneath.

He slipped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me in so my cheek rested against his solid chest. I could hear the syncopated rhythm of his breath and his heartbeat.

“You’re tense,” he said. “You know you’re safe, right? That I won’t hurt you.”

“Of course,” I replied, lifting my head to look him in the eye. “I know you would never physically hurt me.”

“Gee, thanks. I would have thought we could take that for granted. I didn’t mean just physically. I meant what I said the other night. I love you. I will protect your heart as well as your body.”

“Oh.”

“You know I love you and you know I want you, but I’m the one who’s in the dark here. Where do you see this relationship going? Do you love me back?”

I rested my head back down, more to hide from his
intense gaze than to cuddle. “You have to understand. I’ve made plans before, and they all fell apart. It’s hard for me to forget that.”

He pulled away, putting a little distance between us so I couldn’t hide from his eyes. “But you have to. Casey was a fool to give you up, and he’s gone now. I’m the man standing before you, pledging his love and asking for some sense of where our next steps will take us.”

I took a deep breath. I thought of Ingrid and Dolly and Rena, throwing themselves into the fray of life, craving the good so much that they were unafraid of the potential heartache. “I . . . I care for you deeply. I think of you all the time. I’m happiest when I have you in my sights. If that’s love, then I love you, too.”

“And what do you want out of life? We’ve never talked about this, always just putting one foot in front of the other.”

“I want to be happy. I’m not particular on how happy happens.”

“Kids?”

“I think my mother would kill me if I didn’t at least try. And, yeah, I think I would like to be a mom. You?”

“Oh, absolutely. I want to coach soccer and teach a kid to fish and help him with dioramas of dinosaurs for middle school science class.”

I grinned. “What if you have a girl?”

“Same plan.”

My grin melted into a giggle.

Jack pressed his fingertips to his forehead, eyes closed, like a medium receiving a message from the great beyond. “I think I see happiness in our future.”

“How far in the future?” I teased.

“That’s going to depend on a number of factors,” Jack said, his voice a husky growl. He leaned forward to graze my earlobe with his teeth. “But let’s get started soon.”

Thirteen

M
ari Aames or Pamela Rawlins. That was the question.

The next day of the cat show brought with it a front from the south: low-hanging clouds, perpetual drizzle, and the occasional rumble of thunder from afar.

As soon as we got the booth set up, I went off in search of Pamela Rawlins, planning to pick her brain—subtly of course—about her relationship with Phillip Denford. I’d be having lunch with Pamela, Peter, Mari, and Marsha later that day, but I wanted to catch Pamela alone so I might catch her off guard.

I knew that the Siamese, Burmese, and Tonkinese cats were showing in ring six first thing that morning, so I headed in that direction, expecting to find Pamela
showing Tonga. The ring was packed, but I thought tall, black-clad Pamela would stick out.

I was wrong. Pamela was nowhere to be found.

On my way back to the Trendy Tails booth, I swung by Ruth Kimmey’s table to ask if she’d seen Pamela that day. I noticed that Ranger had accrued a number of multicolored ribbons that were now attached to his hutch.

“Pamela?” Ruth asked.

“Yeah. I thought she’d be showing Tonga, but she’s not at the ring.”

“Oh, she can’t show Tonga,” Ruth said, chin tucked to keep her words from traveling.

“Why not? He’s a beautiful cat. I thought that was the whole purpose of her helping coordinate this show.”

Ruth clucked softly. “No, ma’am. Tonga is a beautiful cat and was building up enough points to be a grand champion, but then he bit a judge.”

“No!”

“Yes. Burmese are playful cats. The judge was trying to engage Tonga, but she was using a cat toy held between her finger and her thumb instead of one on a dangle. Tonga went for the toy, but got the judge’s finger instead.”

“So he wasn’t aggressive or anything. Just playing.”

“Doesn’t matter. Phillip banned the cat from competition. Tonga’s strictly a pet now.”

“If she’s not showing Tonga, why is Pamela even here? I haven’t seen her with another cat.”

Ruth shook her head. “No. No other cat. She’s here in her capacity as a breeder.”

“I didn’t know she ran a cattery.”

“Oh my, yes. Exotipaws. She breeds both Burmese and Tonkinese. I’ve tried to tell her to stop bringing Tonga to competitions, but she just won’t listen to me.”

“Why should she leave him at home?”

“Because he comes from her cattery and, rightly or wrongly, he’s been banned from show for being overly aggressive. That cat is a constant reminder to potential buyers that Exotipaws cats are a gamble.”

“I still can’t believe I didn’t know about her breeding business.”

“As I said, Pamela is not the best businesswoman. The cat-breeding business is largely word of mouth, and that’s not doing her any favors. She’s already got a strike against her because she’s so unpleasant to be around. What’s more, she hasn’t come up with a strategy to separate herself from the biting incident and, in fact, keeps making matters worse by carrying Tonga everywhere she goes. I’ve told her again and again: no one wants a biter. I can’t imagine she’s making much money off of her breeding operations.”

“So if she’s not showing and she’s not a reputable breeder, why on earth did Phillip Denford put her in charge?”

“Pamela has been lobbying to coordinate one of the annual shows for years now. I think that’s one of the
big reasons she had her little fling with Phillip, to butter him up. Phillip’s not really the sentimental type, so I can’t imagine that swayed his mind any.

“To be perfectly honest, I think Pamela may have blackmailed him just a scooch. Not that their affair—or any of Phillip’s affairs—was really secret, but there are secrets and there are secrets, you know?”

“No.”

“Well, for example, we all know most politicians are corrupt, but we let it slide. But when there’s a news story about one of them doing a specific corrupt thing, we get all mad about it. It was that way with Phillip’s affairs. As long as he was discreet, everyone else—and I mean everyone else—was willing to be discreet, too. Act like it didn’t really happen. But if Pamela came forward, no one would be able to deny the truth anymore. The M-CFO would be forced to confront Phillip’s . . . lapses, shall we say. There would have been an outcry to have him step down as chair of the committee.”

“I get it.”

“What’s more, it would mean that Marsha Denford couldn’t keep pretending she didn’t know either. She’d have to decide whether to publicly support a cheating spouse or get a divorce.”

With that, Pamela Rawlins’s motive shriveled. If she’d had the affair to get the position of coordinating the cat show, she’d gotten what she wanted. And if
she wanted anything else from him, the threat of exposure would be her currency. There was certainly no need to kill the man.

That left Mari as my prime suspect . . . the young girl having a fling with her boss. But how would that fling lead to motive for murder? I’d have to keep pressing if I hoped to find out.

*   *   *

Red, White & Bleu was Merryville’s newest restaurant, the creation of erstwhile caterer Ken West. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Ken—though he had been good to and good for my dear friend Taffy, who had started dating him about the same time I started dating Jack—but the restaurant was a huge asset to our little historic neighborhood. Ken served steaks, chops, hearty salads, and delicious home-style desserts in a relaxed, publike environment. I tended to have my favorites at the various eateries in town, and at Red, White & Bleu, I could happily devour a dish of their truffled mac and cheese and a slice of their house-made raspberry-studded almond pound cake every day of the week.

I met Peter, Marsha, and Pamela at the restaurant. As soon as we took our seats around the rough-hewn pine table, I realized that I was a bit of an outsider. These people weren’t all just involved in the cat show; they were part of Phillip Denford’s inner circle.

“How nice you could join us,” Marsha said, the slight slur in her words unmistakable.

“Yes. I’m surprised to see you here.” Pamela didn’t sound surprised. She sounded annoyed.

“Peter invited me,” I said, laying my napkin in my lap and leaning back so the server could fill my glass with water from a large glass pitcher he left on the table.

Peter smiled at Pamela. “I’ve been talking to Izzy here about theartisanway.com.”

“Oh?” Pamela responded.

“Yes.” Peter caught my eye. “Pamela was one of the first artists to sign up for the Web site. She is an amazing quilter.”

“Really? I’d love to see your work sometime,” I offered.

“It’s on the Web site.”

Okay, so Pamela did not have the warm fuzzies for me. I couldn’t imagine why she would be upset that Peter had invited me to consider selling my wares on his Web site. Unless she was an owner? But even then, one would think she’d want more storefronts on the site, and the marketability of my product had been proven in my brick-and-mortar store.

Maybe she just didn’t like me. To be fair, I might not like me either, if I were her.

“Your town is really quite lovely,” Marsha said, breaking the sudden, inexplicable tension.

“Thank you,” I said. “I may be a little partial since
I grew up here, but I actually like living here better than I did in Madison.”

“How long were you in Madison?” Peter asked.

“Eight years,” I responded. The number always took me by surprise. My time in Madison seemed so brief and long ago, yet Casey and I had been there for a significant percentage of our lives. “I went to the U and then stuck around while my then-fiancé attended medical school.”

“Are you a small-town girl, then, coming home after so long in the big city?” There was a note of condescension in Marsha’s voice, but I chose to ignore it.

“I never really thought of myself as a small-town girl. I had plans to move to New York, in fact. But Merryville now caters to such an upscale tourist trade that we have all the amenities of a big city but without the traffic.”

Marsha and Peter chuckled politely, but I couldn’t even get Pamela to crack a smile.

“I have to admit,” Peter said, “when Pamela reported back to my father that this might be a suitable town for the M-CFO’s silver anniversary, I thought she might have lost her mind.” Pamela blinked at him slowly, clearly not amused. “But I’ve been pleasantly surprised.”

“Me too,” Marsha said. “Why, your little coffee shop . . . What is it called?”

“Joe Time,” Peter said.

“Right. So clever. Joe Time. They make their own flavored syrups, and I’ve been able to keep up my lavender latte habit. It’s the hot new flavor, you know.”

Peter shivered theatrically. “I don’t know how you can muck up perfectly good coffee with all that milk and sugar and candy flavoring.”

Marsha reached across the table to bat playfully at his arm. “We can’t all be coffee purists like you, Peter.”

“Sorry I’m late.” Mari Aames bustled up to the table and slid into the last remaining chair. “I had some things to take care of.”

“Really, darling?” Marsha oozed. “Are we working you too hard?”

Mari flushed. “No. It was, actually, uh, personal.”

I fought to keep my hand from trembling as I took a sip of my water. I knew where Mari had been. She’d been having coffee with Jack. For more than two hours. Jack had assured me I had no reason to be jealous, and I trusted him more than I trusted myself, but a little corner of my mind wondered just how personal that coffee date had been.

“So maybe we’re not working you hard enough?” Marsha asked with a small smile.

“I . . . uh . . . You know I love working for you, Mrs. Denford. I love being busy. I promise. I just needed to
pop out to pick up a couple of things. It only took a couple of minutes.”

“Oh, relax, Mari,” Pamela said. Her patience for the younger woman seemed especially short.

“Yes, relax dear,” Marsha crooned. “I am just teasing you. You’ve been working yourself ragged the last week. You’re entitled to have a few hours to yourself.”

I wondered about Mari’s comment about working for Marsha Denford. I’d been operating under the assumption that she was Phillip’s girl Friday and that she had little to do with Marsha. It seemed that Phillip’s death had changed Mari’s employment situation pretty dramatically. The question was whether Mari would rather report to Phillip or to Marsha.

When the server came to take Mari’s order, he brought a round of prosecco to the table. “Compliments of the house,” he said.

I looked to the bar and saw Ken standing there, a portfolio open in front of him, a pencil poised in his hand. He raised the other hand in a jaunty salute, and I waved back.

“How lovely,” Marsha exclaimed.

“Yes. Ken West, the proprietor, is a friend.” Of our own accord, he and I probably wouldn’t have had much to do with each other, but thanks to his romance with Taffy, we were friends-ish—by default.

Once the glasses were passed around, I raised mine in toast. “To Phillip. May he rest in peace.”

“To Phillip,” the others muttered, and then there was a moment of silence as we all sipped at the bubbly.

As we set our glasses down, I saw that Peter, Pamela, and Marsha had drained their glasses in a single gulp, while Mari and I had each taken only a sip. You could tell who at the table actually had to work that afternoon.

“If it’s not too painful,” I said, “what was Phillip like? I met him a few times during the planning of the show, but those meetings were brief and all business.”

Peter cocked his head and smiled at me. “
All
business?”

“Yes. I mean, for me the show is all business.”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

“My husband was a shrewd man. He had a passion for cats and for business, and he didn’t mess around with either one,” Martha said.

We put the reminiscing on hold then while the server passed around our orders. I didn’t eat meat, but I could appreciate the rich aroma of Marsha’s lamb chops and Peter’s shepherd’s pie. Outstate Minnesota caught a lot of guff for bland, unsophisticated food, but everything on the table looked like it could have come from a high-end restaurant in Minneapolis or Chicago.

As I tucked in to my mac and cheese, a homely dish elevated by the use of an especially sharp aged cheddar and earthy truffle oil, I thought about what Marsha had said.
Shrewd
. That struck me as an odd adjective for a woman to use to describe her newly departed husband. So unsentimental. But given that Phillip seemed to have been something of a cad, too, I could imagine that their relationship had not been as romantic as most other marriages.

Peter’s smile spread into a grin. “Well put, Marsha.”

The happier Peter seemed, the more annoyed Pamela got. “I was honored that he trusted me with coordinating the show this year. He had high standards, and being chosen to lead the twenty-fifth anniversary of the show meant the world.”

Mari narrowed her eyes. “He let you pick the place, Pamela. Everything else, he left for me to decide. I’m the one he trusted. He might have given you the title of coordinator, but I’m the one who actually made all the arrangements. He didn’t even let you see the design for the prize before the jeweler delivered it the first day of the show.”

“Hush, now, Mari,” Marsha crooned. “No one is doubting how much work you put into the show. We’re all aware of what you did for my husband. Every last thing.”

I got the sense that there was a whole lot more
being communicated at that table than a simple observer such as myself could comprehend. The relationships between these people ran deep and, it seemed, so did the resentment. I wanted nothing so much as to crawl inside their heads and understand why Peter was so amused, why Pamela was so annoyed, why Mari was so defensive, and why Marsha was so . . . whatever Marsha was.