Going Through the Notions (A Deadly Notions Mystery) (20 page)

“Yes, sorry, please excuse me.” He scurried off down the hallway as I struggled to suck in enough air.

Dimly I heard the murmurs of those behind me.

I blinked to clear the black spots in front of my eyes. “Damn it. I knew I should have found a good criminal attorney for Angus.” My throat was so constricted I could hardly grind the words out.

Cyril shook his head in dismay. “Aye up. Thought Angus were in trouble before. He’s really buggered now.”

“Thank
you
, Mr. Mackey.” Martha glared at him. “Good God, man. There are ladies present.”

“Oh, Martha, he’s right!” I ran my hands through my hair. “Is Warren out of his tiny mind? What the hell was he thinking?”

She squeezed her fingers together in a choking motion. “Let’s go see that boll weevil and shake some sense into him.”

I ran out of the building, Martha hard on my heels. Down the hill from the courthouse on North Broad Street was a collection of Federal-style buildings called Lawyers Row. Warren Ziegler’s offices were located in an ornate brick-fronted building with an elegant black and gold carved sign hanging on the wall outside.

“Good morning,” his receptionist greeted us. She sat at the far end of the room behind a mahogany desk and an expanse of oriental carpet.

“Good morning,” I replied politely as we hurtled past, ignoring her squawks of protest, and straight into Warren’s bookshelf-lined office.

He didn’t seem inordinately surprised to see us.

“Just give me one good reason why,” I said, gasping for breath.

Warren sighed softly and templed his small pale hands together. “It was not in Angus’s best interest to go through a hearing at this time.”

“What in the hell kind of answer is that?” Martha demanded, striding up to his desk and towering over him.

He blinked calmly behind his round spectacles. “I deemed it best to eliminate the rehashing of allegations without any new evidence to clear the defendant.”

“Huh?” She turned to me, breathing heavily. “Daisy, what’s this bow-tied worm talking about?”

Warren took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes, showing a hint of weariness, or maybe he was just trying to block the blinding view of Martha’s décolletage.

He looked directly at me, almost pleading. “We have nothing to refute with. It would simply be more bad publicity in the court of public opinion. If this goes to a jury trial, we’re going to need all the sympathetic jury members and character witnesses we can get.”

Damn it, he was right. The number of people who still believed Angus was innocent was growing alarmingly small.

“And to warn you both, I might waive the arraignment, too. Perhaps a bench trial is our best hope in a case that offers little hope.”

I nodded glumly. He didn’t have to spell it out. Obviously Warren had also talked to Angus lately and seen his fragile, confused state of mind.

I’d been so sure that Warren had made some huge blunder. Now in his calm, measured way, he actually made some sense.

“Perhaps by the time this comes to trial, you’ll have cracked the case, Ms. Buchanan.”

I smiled wanly back at him.

He straightened his bow tie a fraction. “At least we might get some concessions. Reduced jail time and the like.”

I nodded to Martha, calling off my rabid dog, and we trailed out of his office and onto the street.

“Now what?” I asked.

“You can leave me here. I need a mani and pedi after all that drama. They have the best salon up on East State Street. I’ll grab a cab back to Millbury.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, yes.” She waved her fingers at me. “I don’t plan on doing any more strenuous physical activity today, other than taking out my credit card.”

Jeez. Martha seemed in a hurry to get rid of me. Maybe I’d pushed her a little too hard.

Doylestown was a beautiful town, full of great stores and restaurants. It had become the county seat in 1813 and the resulting buildings clustered together along the walkable Main Street were an interesting mix of styles from late Federal to Colonial, Italianate, and Victorian. Residences with wooden decorative porches were set back from the street with mature trees shading the wide sidewalks. Black gas lamps held overflowing flower baskets.

The courthouse was the only odd man out in the historic district, but it was set apart on its own triangular block at the top of the hill.

There were the typical art galleries, antique and gift shops, but also contemporary high-end apparel and home furnishings stores. Quirky used bookshops and cafés snuggled in between only added to the charm. Even the Starbucks was tastefully housed in an old tavern.

If I didn’t have to work, I’d have loved to stay and spend the day with Martha. I’d hung a sign on the door that Sometimes a Great Notion would open late today, but I needed to get back.

Once in Millbury, I was heading for the store when Joe called and asked me to come and take Jasper off his hands. He sounded rattled.

Hey, join the club.

I had my second shock of the day when I saw the state of our kitchen.

All the cabinets had been pulled off the walls. Countless haphazard piles of dishes and pots and pans were crammed together on the tiled floor of the adjoining sunporch, blocking the entrance to the room. Joe was sanding the uneven patches on the old kitchen floor and a fine dust lay over everything.

It wasn’t how I would have organized it, of course. I’d have put the contents of the cabinets in covered boxes—labeled—with neat walkways in between. I’d need to rewash every single one of these dishes when he was done.

God, what a disaster! How long was it going to be a mess like this?

I mustered all the goodwill I could find. Joe was bare-chested and sweating from his hard work, and I could see he was on his last nerve, too.

He’d hung some plastic sheeting at the kitchen doorway to stop dust traveling throughout the rest of the house. Guess I should be grateful for small mercies.

Jasper was snuffling around, his paws and nose covered in sawdust, as he checked out the power tools lying on the floor.

Joe grabbed the sander. “You can see why I need you to keep him out of my hair.”

I deliberately kept my voice light. “Where’s Sarah this morning?”

“She’s gone with Debby to Philadelphia to see that famous violinist—what’s his name?”

“Robin Tague.”

“That’s right. I guess he’s performing at the Kimmel Center, and there’s some kind of private reception afterwards. Sarah pulled some strings to get them an invitation, so Debby’s over the moon.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful.” I clipped the leash on the dog. “Okay, come on, Jasper.”

It was all so very pleasant and polite. I wanted to cry.

The puppy trotted behind me, peeing on every tree from the house to the store. He peed on the geranium-filled cauldron on the porch for good luck.

What the hell was I supposed to do with a rambunctious dog inside a sewing notions store filled with valuable antiques and precious fabrics?

Calm down, Daisy.

If there was one thing I’d learned from being around Jasper, it was that he was hypersensitive to my moods. If I was happy, he was ecstatic. If I was down, he was miserable. He was like some kind of canine empath.

I brought him into the store, grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, and took a long, cooling swig.

As he casually sniffed at the dollhouse, I decided he needed some kind of toy. I stuffed an old sack with scraps of fabric and tied a tight double knot at the end. He grabbed it and happily lay down next to me as I went on-line and checked out the latest web orders. I updated the site by removing the sold items, and made a list of the new items I needed to photograph and upload.

On a whim, I typed
Robin Tague
into my browser. His official website popped up, a Wikipedia listing, several newspaper articles, a fan site, and an interview he’d done a couple of years ago with
BBC Music
magazine.

I took another deep swallow of my water and settled down to read. Mr. Tague was fairly cagey. He didn’t give the juicy uninhibited answers that celebrities usually did in these interviews. If he decided to change careers, he could be a politician.

I was skimming through toward the end when I found one answer that made me grip the water bottle and lean closer to the screen.

They’d asked about his creative process and how he set about composing some of the wonderful, haunting pieces for violin that were fast becoming classics.

First, he said he needed a room where there was no color. Everything had to be in shades of gray or black. Not even a red flower or a blue coffee mug.

I rolled my eyes. Sounded like a bit of a nut to me. Second, he had to have absolute quiet. He’d added soundproofing and a second interior wall to his home so no outside noise could penetrate. Third, he fasted for three days before working on a new piece.

And fourth, it turned out he was very superstitious and only ever used one particular type of writing instrument to compose—a rare Magical Black Widow fountain pen.

*

“A
round 4 p.m., the weather reports were calling for another thunderstorm, and since I hadn’t had a customer in over an hour, I decided to close early.

Cyril’s words about going back to the scene of the crime still resonated inside my head. Knowing that Ramsbottom would not have been thorough in his search, to say the least, was it too much to hope I’d spot something the police had missed?

I gently pulled the soggy sack from Jasper’s mouth, took him outside, and let him water all the trees on Main Street between the store and the house.

“Jasper, you can come with me to Reenie’s, but I’m begging you, please don’t pee in the car?”

He looked up at me panting, his mouth split open in a wide grin.

I opened the passenger-side door to the Subaru and he hopped in. I walked around to the driver’s side, only to find him sitting in my seat.

“Come on, buddy, move over.” I opened the door a crack and slid in, not giving him room to escape, and nudged him over to the passenger side.

When I started the engine, I watched him carefully for any reaction to the unfamiliar noise, but he sat up, his ruffled chest held high, gazing out the window as I eased away from the curb.

When we got to the Kratz farm, Jimmy’s pickup truck was gone. The cornflower blue sky darkened as somber clouds swept in, passing over the sun. I’d need to make this fast.

I stepped out of the car and Jasper jumped out after me. I grabbed hold of his leash and knocked on the kitchen door, but there was no answer.

Jasper pulled hard, going crazy from the barnyard scents. He was straining to explore, wrenching at my shoulder, so I let him have his head, zigzagging across the farmyard, which still hadn’t dried out from the torrential rain the day before. I grimaced as his oversized paws made deep prints in the mud. I tried to step on the drier patches, glad that I was wearing boots with my jeans, not sandals. Hopefully I still had an old blanket in the trunk.

I wanted to take another look inside the barn and was trying to steer him in that direction, but he seemed determined to head for the henhouse. The chickens protested, squawking at the sight of the enthusiastic golden puppy. I stopped him a couple of feet away so he could look and smell but not get pecked.

The chickens were immaculate and healthy looking. White leghorns with red coxcombs, black cochins with their gorgeous plumage, Rhode Island Reds and pretty grayspeckled Sussex chickens all milled around inside the wooden structure.

Reenie took better care of these guys than she did her own kids.

Suddenly Jasper starting digging furiously at the ground, mud flying up behind him in a high spray. I stepped to one side to avoid the gritty shower.

“Jasper, stop it!” In a few seconds of scrabbling, he’d turned up an impressive pile of dirt.

I was kicking it back into the hole he’d made and smoothing it down with the sole of my boot when a dot of yellow caught my eye. I bent over and picked up a slim, dirt-encrusted object.

With shaking fingers, I brushed the muck off as best as I could. Fresh in my memory from the visit with Fiona was her description of a Parker Duofold Lucky Curve mandarin yellow pen.

The killer must have dropped it in his haste, and it had been squished down unnoticed into the mud. Until now.

I grinned at my dog.
“Good boy!”

Jasper wagged his tail so hard his whole gangly body swayed back and forth.

I stood there for a moment staring at this new development. A crack of thunder sounded in the distance. “Jeez. I guess we’d better get going.”

I wrapped the pen in my handkerchief and stuck it in the back pocket of my jeans. I opened the trunk of the car and thankfully there was a blanket stuffed in between the reusable grocery bags, flashlight, and umbrellas. I laid it on the passenger seat and installed the panting puppy with his mud-caked paws carefully on top. This time he stayed put as I got in on the driver’s side.

As I was turning the car to head back down the driveway, Reenie raced up in the pickup truck, not slowing down, as if she hadn’t even seen me.