Authors: Christine DeSmet
Her shoulders heaved in a sigh. “Good point.”
“Somebody planted that shovel in their shed.”
“But it was locked.”
“I doubt that. My market is always locked, but I doubt that a mere garden shed is locked all day and even at night. Most of us don’t lock our sheds and barns.”
“So somebody stole their shovel?”
“It might not even be their shovel. A pointed shovel or spade is standard equipment around here.”
“So Fontana bought or found a shovel, whacked Cherry, then snuck it back to Kjersta’s garden shed?”
“Maybe.” I hesitated voicing my next thought. “Kjersta told me she thinks Jonas was involved. It wouldn’t take much for him to walk over to the Dahlgren place. But . . .”
“Jonas is a nice guy.”
I told Pauline what Kjersta had said about Jonas writing to Cherry’s dean two weeks ago, and that Fontana enjoyed fomenting jealousy between Jonas and Cherry over dating her.
Pauline turned at the intersection in Brussels. “Being upset with the professor doesn’t strike me as much of a motive for whacking him over the head with a shovel. And think of all Jonas has been through after his parents were killed in that car accident years ago.”
“I know. He held on to the farm by himself through his hard work. But I’ve noticed he seems nervous or odd lately, not himself. When I was looking at his roadside church earlier today, he came down his lane on his bike with a letter for the mailbox, but then he didn’t put the letter in the box. And just now, back in his field, he got off his tractor and looked first at the car tires and not us, as if he wanted to avoid direct eye contact.”
“He has a right to be nervous, don’t you think? He didn’t like Cherry dragging his feet about the research. Jonas must realize he’s as much a suspect as you are.”
“Thanks.”
“Ava, you make Jonas nervous. You would make me nervous, too. In fact, I don’t even want to be with you right now. I’d rather be like your mother—doing something like sweeping. By the way, send her over to my classroom. The school doesn’t have enough budget for a janitor.”
Although she was speaking the truth about the school budget, that lightened our mood. We checked the rearview mirror a few times to make sure Maria wasn’t following us, then stopped in the blacktopped parking area next to Saint Mary of the Snows in Namur. Pauline grabbed her bag. I checked my pocket for my cell phone.
A corn chopper was grinding through the field north of the church, but there wasn’t anything else going on around us. Nobody was outside the handful of buildings on the east side of the church or across the road.
The redbrick church had yellow tape across all the doors, including the side door next to the parking lot.
Hefting her purse onto her shoulder, Pauline asked, “So, what are we looking for? Footprints outside in the grass?”
I held up a key. “We’re going inside. My grandmother’s key.”
“Does she know you have it?”
“Of course not.”
Pauline shook her head as if I’d be getting detention for this.
After I reached around the yellow tape, we ducked under it to enter the church. We passed the space for the wheelchair lift and went up the short stairs and past the restrooms.
The taint of smoke still hung in the air. The smudges on the wall up near the loft stairs were still evident, reminding me of the days ticking away before the prince would arrive to visit the church. The low sun pushed through the stained glass windows that needed to be washed, giving the interior a sepia tinge.
I led the way to the loft stairway where yellow tape remained.
Pauline grabbed my arm. “There’s going to be soot all over up there. They’ll be able to tell we’ve been here.”
“Nobody’s going to look for us here today. It’s Jordy’s dinnertime.”
“We’ll get dirty.”
“Did you forget you’re still wearing your classroom clothes?”
She peered down at her red blouse and black slacks. I had on my usual blue jeans and a long-sleeved pink T-shirt and sturdy athletic shoes. I twisted my hair into a knot at the back of my head. Then I ducked under the tape.
The tap of Pauline’s black flats on the stairs echoed behind me.
In the choir loft, there was smoke residue everywhere, which saddened me. All our cleaning earlier had been for naught. It would take a lot of elbow grease to get the church back into shape before the royal kermis.
The piano bench was charred, with the lid closed.
“Don’t touch it,” Pauline said. “It could still have John’s blood in it.”
I opened it anyway. There was nothing inside. The sheriff had taken all the music sheets, ashes and all. “There’s no blood, Pauline.”
“So why was the knife tossed in there? And by whom?”
“My dad said that anybody could have stolen it from the farm. I’m sure he gave the list of visitors we keep to the sheriff. But I suppose anybody could sneak around our farm in the dead of night and take a knife if it were left out in the barn or creamery and the doors had been left unlocked.”
“Wouldn’t you hear people? What about your dogs?”
“The dogs sleep with Mom and Dad.” We had an old cattle dog that snored louder than Mom and lay on the bed, and a tiny white, fluffy bichon frise that burrowed under Dad’s pillow to sleep. “But Mom said she heard a car out on the road around midnight on Saturday night.”
“That could have been somebody on your place who was leaving, roaring as they hurried out of your driveway, making a fast getaway.”
I hadn’t thought of that. “Thanks, A.M., that’s brilliant.”
“Just trying to keep up with you, P.M.”
“What if Cherry and Fontana were on the road and coming up behind the person who’d been at our farm? Fontana lives only a few miles away, by her market.”
Pauline began to tiptoe carefully between the smoky choir loft pews toward the staircase. “So you’re thinking the person sneaking around your parents’ farm thought Cherry had taken down his license plate? Then when Cherry and Fontana stopped at the church for whatever reason, the person followed Cherry and Fontana into the church, and the person killed Cherry.”
“Supposition totally, but plausible. You’re getting into this, Pauline.”
“No. I’m eager to make sure John isn’t pulled into this murder thing. That was his blood, after all, in that bench.”
“Yes, but we found the knife on Saturday morning and Cherry was killed on Saturday night. Until we find a connection between the murder and the knife, John’s free, though the sheriff may have questions.” I held back telling her that Jonas had seen John in the church Saturday morning early. “I’m sure he must have done some errand in the loft before we went up there, cut himself, freaked about finding a knife, and now he doesn’t recall it because of the bump on his head.”
“If only he’d get his memory back. The bits and pieces he recalls aren’t reliable.”
We went back down the staircase to the nave.
On our way to the basement, we had to go through the kitchen. We found it ransacked.
“This is ridiculous, rude, and wrong,” Pauline said.
Tomorrow was probably an R day in school. “It sure doesn’t look like anything the sheriff or his crew would do.”
Flour and sugar were spilled out of their sealed containers. Every box had been tossed out of the cupboards.
Pauline asked, “Do you suppose they were looking for the recipe?”
“Maybe,” I said.
I tiptoed around the mess, trying to avoid the flour so I didn’t make tracks. Pauline stayed at the door to the nave clutching her purse.
A banging suddenly resounded from below us.
Chapter 15
M
arc Hayward called to us, “Who’s up there?”
I yelled back as I hurried to the basement, “What are you doing here? How did you get in? And where’s your car?”
We soon stood together in the doorway to the room where Cherry’s body had been found. My manager—and now John’s manager—was holding the steel cap that went over the vent in the wall.
“Hi, Ava.” He wiped off a hand covered with a white substance, then reached out to Pauline. “You’re Pauline, right?”
After her nod he said, “Isn’t this a great place for filming?”
I panicked. “This is a crime scene. What are you doing down here, or even in this church?”
“I have to ask you the same thing.”
“Trying to . . . get myself off the hook.”
“Ah yes, but John explained that it was your mother who found the body down here.”
I gave Pauline an evil look for spilling that secret to John, then said to Marc, “You’re not going to tell anybody, are you?”
“Heck no.” He pulled a roll of masking tape out of his pocket. “Can you show me exactly where your mother found the body? I’ll mark it for the actor so he knows where to lie.”
“Actor?”
“For John’s travel and food show. It’s imperative that we make a short trailer right at the scene of the crime in this church for authenticity. It’ll be a great way to introduce this tourist site and the hunt for the fudge recipe. We need a trailer to show around to the executives in order to sell the show. Nothing too involved, really. We’ll be in and out of here in no time, upload it to the Web, and then send it to a head of development or two or six.”
I wanted to grab Pauline’s purse and bop Marc on his bald head. “Get out of here or you can be arrested.” And then my mother and I would probably be found out. “Did you cause the damage in the kitchen?”
I got my answer when he abruptly turned to put the steel plate back in place in the furnace chimney hole. The white substance on his hands had to be flour from the kitchen.
Pauline filched about in her purse, probably to rub those darn holy buttons again.
Marc said, “The kitchen is set up for filming a scene about this story.”
“But that’s a lie. There was no messy kitchen when my . . . when I found the body. And how did you get in here?”
He held up a key.
Pauline sighed. “Does everybody in the county have a key to this church?”
Marc put it back in a pants pocket. “John had one.”
Pauline asked, “Where’s John?”
“Over at the school looking around. We thought we’d film that, too, with an actress pretending to be Sister Adele Brise. We could use a stand-in. Want to help?”
A headache threatened to throb in my forehead. “Marc, please, get out of here before you get us all into serious trouble.”
“You’ve changed since you moved back to Door County.”
His words gave me pause. “How?”
His gaze flicked up and down my person. Finally, he said, “You seem taller.”
With that, he marched up the stairs. Footsteps shuffled about in the kitchen, then echoed across the nave.
Pauline had a way of raising one dark eyebrow that made her look like an eagle about to scoop up a fish off our bay.
“Pauline, I didn’t invite him here, so don’t blame me.”
“He’s going to end up getting you into deep trouble. I feel it coming.”
“Never mind me. What about him? He was snooping for the recipe. Why else would he be looking inside that pipe? He and John have gold fever.”
“Don’t go blaming John for the mess upstairs in the kitchen.”
I headed for the basement wall and the blood smear that was still evident on the concrete. With care, I braced myself with my hands on either side of it for a close look. The smear wasn’t much, it seemed to me. Cherry could have been pushed back against the wall and hit his head, but I wondered if he’d come off the wall and fought back. If he had, I didn’t see how Fontana on her own could have gotten Cherry to turn around again so that he could be whacked on the back of the head before falling facedown on the floor. But it could happen if somebody had been helping her.
I told Pauline my thoughts, then added, “I don’t think Cherry was killed here at all. I think he was placed here and this smudge is from somebody’s hand.”
“Whose hand? Not John’s.”
“Of course not John’s. But whose?” I splayed a hand and fingers out in the air above the stain to size it up.
Pauline ventured near me to peer at the bloodstain on the gray concrete. “It’s awful to think that somebody was wrestling down here with Cherry when John and Marc came into the church Saturday night.”
As we ventured from the old furnace room, we noticed the electric breaker panels on the south wall. I hadn’t noticed them before because we’d been intent on stepping around overhanging cobwebs.
I opened one of the two-hundred-amp panels. “Go upstairs, Pauline.”
“Why?”
“Do you have to question everything?”
“Yes. Sometimes you do stupid stuff. Like wreck my car.”
“Just go upstairs. And give me a tissue. I want to see which breakers take out all the lights in the nave and choir loft.”
Pauline handed me a tissue, then trundled up the basement steps. Soon, she hollered, “I’m in the nave!”
I yelled, “Turn on all the lights!”
“They’re on!”
With her tissue over my fingers, I nudged one circuit breaker switch after another. Between each flip, I waited for her to respond. On the fifth try, we knew which ones had been flipped to cut any lights. We knew which one cut all the lights at once.
When I rejoined Pauline in the kitchen disaster, I called the sheriff. “Hey, Jordy. Did your team look at the circuit breakers for fingerprints?”
I had to hold my phone away from my ear. He was yelling at me. I put my cell phone on speaker mode.
Jordy yapped, “What the hell are you doing in that church? I’m going to arrest you. You’re tampering with evidence, which suspects often try to do. Don’t you move. You Oosterlings are a big bunch of bothersome Belgians!”
I grinned at my BFF, then said to him, “Pauline just gave you an A for that.”
Jordy barked, “You got that right because it’s
A
for aggravation.”
“Listen, Jordy, I think the person who killed Cherry had to know how to work the church’s breaker box in a pinch. They didn’t have time to think. I don’t think Kjersta was in this church much at all, and Daniel’s pretty tall, so I don’t see how his hand could cause that smudge on the basement wall. He and I reach up higher than that when we brace ourselves against the wall. Have you thought this through?”