Sketcher in the Rye: (12 page)

Chapter 13

Within ten minutes of Rory's arrival, she and her parents were seated around the kitchen table eating hot tomato soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches. Her mother had also bought Rory's favorite potato chips and baked dense, chewy brownies for dessert. Hobo, who'd initially thought he was going to see his piggy love, managed to get over his disappointment in time to beg for food. He was stationed close to her father, having learned early on that Dan was the most easily suckered by a furry face with hungry eyes, as well as the most apt to drop bits of food during a meal.

“Almost worth a heart attack,” her father declared, sharing the last bite of his sandwich with Hobo.

“Take it easy on the chips with your high-blood pressure,” Arlene chided him. “You're not getting out of helping me with this move by landing in the hospital.”

“Ah,” he sighed, “sweet talk like that always leaves me weak in the knees. Who says there's no romance left after thirty-two years of marriage?”

Once they'd finished their brownies, Rory helped her mother clear the table, while her father headed off to the den to read the newspaper and watch TV. Hobo trailed after him, no doubt ready for a nap.

“Leave the dishes in the sink,” Arlene said. “I'll throw them into the dishwasher later. I want to show you the family heirloom I found.” Intrigued, Rory followed her into the study and sat on the tufted sofa that had been her favorite place to read growing up. The study was the smallest room in the house but also the coziest. Before she was born, her father had built bookcases across two of its walls, but they'd long since proven inadequate for the number of volumes the family amassed. As a result, there were books stored in every room. Electronic readers had come along just in time to keep the house from bursting at the seams with the surplus.

Arlene pulled a small photo album off the shelf where she'd tucked it after bringing it down from the attic. “I don't know if you remember your grandmother Betty,” she said, sitting beside her daughter. “You were barely five years old when she died.”

“A short, chubby woman with white hair and powdered cheeks who smelled like a flower garden?” Rory hadn't thought about her grandmother in years, but the memory had popped up readily at the mention of her name.

“That was definitely my mom,” Arlene said, clearly pleased that Rory remembered her. “Anyway, after she died, Helene and I had to dismantle her house. It was a huge job. Every closet and drawer was stuffed with papers she'd apparently been afraid to throw out. She must have kept fifty years of tax returns alone. There were also more than ten years' worth of
TV Guide
magazines. We could never figure out why she'd held on to those. Of course if September third, 1982, ever came around again, she would have been one up on the rest of us,” she added with a laugh. “By the time we'd finished going through all the papers, Helene and I had had enough. We just boxed all the other stuff like photos and mementos and put them up in our attic to go over at our leisure. Then we promptly forgot about them. I found them when I started throwing out stuff for our move. I'm determined not to leave you the same kind of mess to deal with when we shuffle off.”

“So this album was Grandma Betty's?” Rory asked, to derail any further discussion of the “shuffling off.” It was too hard, too weird to imagine a world in which her parents no longer existed. “It sure looks a whole lot older than that.” Threads dangled from the spine, where the binding was coming apart, and the burgundy material on the cover was faded and worn.

“I'm sure it is,” Arlene agreed. “Once we're settled in the new place, I'll have time to do some research on it, maybe even use one of those genealogy programs. You'll see by the clothing that some of the photographs must go all the way back to the nineteenth century. Unfortunately a number of them have faded to near oblivion, because they weren't properly preserved. I wonder if my mother knew the album was stored away in her attic.”

“But she must have brought it there with her when she moved in,” Rory pointed out.

“That's just it.” Arlene opened the album and set it gingerly on her daughter's lap. “The house originally belonged to my great
-
grandmother. Mom and her parents wound up living there with her. Eventually the house was passed down to her parents and then to her. So my mother spent her entire life there. There's a real possibility she never saw the album or even knew it existed.”

Rory took her time poring over the sepia images as if she could will them back to clarity, but a number were difficult to make out, some downright impossible. In the best of them, the people were formally dressed, rigidly posed and unsmiling.

“Don't they look terribly somber?” Arlene said. “I guess back then having your picture taken was an important event, and no one wanted to appear frivolous.”

“Or maybe no one back then had thought of asking them to say ‘cheese,'” Rory said, with a grin.

Arlene burst into laughter. “You and my sister—the same wacky sense of humor.”

As Rory made her way through the album, she could see how the quality of the pictures had improved as the science of photography advanced. It appeared that the family only had one or two pictures taken a year.
Her
family, she had to keep reminding herself. And there were some years with no pictures at all to mark their passage. What had happened during those times? War, financial problems, illness? “You know,” she said, closing the album and handing it to her mother, “they have amazing techniques for restoring photos today. I bet a lot of these could be enhanced. Even the worst ones might be salvageable.”

“I thought about that too,” Arlene said, putting the album back on the bookshelf, “but it'll have to wait until we're moved in and unpacked.”

Rory would have volunteered to tackle the job herself if there was some way to squeeze a few extra hours out of a day. Until someone came up with an app for that, she needed to devote her time to her livelihood. The odds were against Matthew's killer or the saboteur showing up at police headquarters with a bad conscience and a confession on his or her lips.

***

Rory had just walked in the front door when her phone started ringing. She turned off the alarm, threw her purse on the bench beside the stairs and grabbed the handset in the kitchen just before the call went to voice mail. She could really use an extension on her new table in the entry too.

“You sound out of breath,” BB said instead of hello. “Did I catch you after a marathon?”

“No, I just got home from lunch with my folks, but a marathon sounds like a much more interesting story.”

“You're quite interesting enough for me,” he assured her. “Speaking of which, Reggie stopped by my office a few minutes ago.”

“And?”

“Well, sorry to say the only prints on the note were yours.”

“I was afraid of that,” she said, feeling a bit disheartened about it anyway.

“However,” BB went on, “he did find a tiny hair lodged in the crease of the note.”

“Let me guess—it was red like mine.”

“As a matter of fact it was blonde,” he said, taking his time and obviously enjoying the drama of his revelation.

“Blonde?” she repeated.

“Yes, but dyed blonde. Do you think that might help at all?”

“It may,” she murmured, trying to absorb this unexpected but welcome news. As Zeke often said, “You never knew which tiny bit of information would break a case wide open.” Unfortunately every member of the Harper family was one shade of blonde or another. And given that most adults have lost the glowing blonde of their youth, there was a good chance the Harpers, like so many others, had turned to science to restore it. She'd have to check the photos in the info sheets from Gil, but to the best of her recollection, none of Harper Farms' managers were blonde.

“Do you think Reggie could match the DNA in the hair to samples I collect?”

“I wouldn't count on it,” BB said. “He told me the DNA was compromised and he didn't hold out much hope that it could be used as evidence.”

Rory felt like she was on a roller coaster—soaring one minute and diving the next. It was a ride she'd never enjoyed. “I understand,” she said, trying not to sound too deflated. Little as it was, it was more information than she'd expected. “Last question,” she said. “From what you just told me, it's not hard to determine if hair is dyed, right?”

“Correct,” BB replied, already a step ahead of her. “Drop off whatever samples you obtain and Reggie will test them for you.”

“Please thank Reggie for me. I can't tell you how much I appreciate his help as well as yours.”

“
De nada
, Rory girl,
pas de quoi.
You are most welcome.”

***

“What brought about this sudden wave of domesticity?” Rory asked. She was sitting on a stool at the breakfast bar in Leah's kitchen watching her friend mix the ingredients for pumpkin pie.

“It's Gary's favorite; he's always talking about the one his mother used to make for Thanksgiving.”

“In other words, he guilted you into it,” Rory said, stirring more sweetener into her coffee. Leah's coffee was always too weak or too strong. She seemed incapable of making it “just right.”

“He's racked up a lot of brownie points lately, so good wife that I am, I called my mom-in-law for her recipe. She swears it's foolproof, but with my dismal record in the preparation of food, I figured I'd better make a trial attempt before the big day.” She started laughing. “Do you remember the brownies I made for the Christmas party your first year at headquarters?”

“I broke a tooth on one of those bricks,” Rory said, dissolving into laughter at the memory.

“Well, no one told me they're supposed to come out of the oven when they're still soft in the center,” she said indignantly.

“If you'd bothered to read the directions on the back of the box, you would have known.”

“Picky, picky,” Leah giggled, pouring the contents of the mixing bowl into the frozen pie crust.

“I'm surprised your mother-in-law uses a premade crust.”

“Shhh,” she said, even though they were alone in the house. “She doesn't. But then I'll bet she's not as good with a gun as I am.”

“Say no more.”

Leah popped the pie into the oven and joined Rory at the breakfast bar with her own mug of coffee. “This is awful,” she said, grimacing after the first sip. “Why are you drinking it?”

“Because you're my best friend, and you already feel like you're missing the cooking gene.”

Leah snatched the mug away from her and poured all the coffee down the drain. “How about tea?” she asked. “I don't think there's any way I can ruin that.”

“Tea would be lovely.”

Leah set the kettle on the stove and dropped tea bags into two clean cups. “Now then, what have you come to confess?” she asked as casually as if she'd said, “Do you take milk or lemon?”

“What makes you think I have something to confess?” Rory said indignantly, although she knew it was pointless to evade the question. Her friend could sniff out ulterior motives better than a hound dog could sniff out foxes and moonshine.

“Just trolling. You do have an uncanny knack for getting into predicaments.”

Rory had been trying to decide how much to tell Leah about the note and the man following her. Withholding information from the police was a punishable offense, but she did have the right to pursue her own investigations as long as she didn't get in their way. It sounded simple enough, but there were a lot of gray areas, and lately she'd been finding every one of them. In the end, Rory opted not to tell her how close she'd come to being attacked. There was no new information she could pass along as a result of the incident, no license plate to run and no description of the would-be assailant, since she couldn't be sure it was the same man she'd seen in the mall. There was nothing Leah could do about it now but worry. The note was a different matter. It might have been written by the killer, so she didn't feel right about keeping it from her friend. As much as Rory enjoyed solving a case and racking up the free publicity it garnered her, she wished it didn't have to come at Leah's expense. “There is something I wanted to mention while I'm here,” she admitted finally. “I don't think it counts as a predicament, but I'll let you be the judge of that.”

“I'm listening.”

“I received an anonymous note.”

“Of course you did,” Leah said, shaking her head. “I've been a cop for eight years, and I've never received a single anonymous note in all that time. And you've already gotten . . . ,” she paused as if she was trying to do a quick tally, “. . . how many? I should probably be insulted.”

“I had the note checked out,” Rory went on, choosing to cut to the chase, “but there were no usable prints. There
was
a tiny piece of dyed blonde hair on it though.”

“DNA?” Leah asked hopefully

Rory shook her head. “Damaged.”

“What did the note say?”

“That I should leave police work to the police.”

“Sounds like it came from a weary guardian angel,” Leah said with a wry laugh.

“Or someone who knows my record for solving murder cases and figures they stand a better chance if I'm not on their trail.”

“Which also implies that the police are less of a threat to the killer—now I
am
insulted.”

“Hey, we both know I've just had a run of beginner's luck.”

The kettle had started whistling, so Leah took a moment to fill the mugs and carry them back to the breakfast bar. “If I didn't know better, I'd think you had a little help on the side. Other than BB and Reggie,” she added archly.