Pouncing on Murder Read online

  “You’ve been here before?” Irene asked.

  “Never in handcuffs,” I said, and was rewarded with a glimmer of a smile.

  Outside, the April sun was doing its meager best and I shied away from wondering how cold it would get that night. Irene got her car keys out of her purse. “Thanks for all your help, Minnie. I didn’t know who to talk to about Seth, that day a couple of weeks ago. I guess I just tried not to think about it. But now that someone might be trying to . . . trying to . . .”

  I took the keys from her fumbling hand, beeped the car doors unlocked for her, and handed back the keys. “I understand why you didn’t want to tell Adam about Seth.”

  She looked at me ruefully. “That detective didn’t.”

  “Mr. Sympathy? No. He didn’t. But then he’s not a wife who’s stretching herself thin to hold her husband and their life together. You were trying to protect Adam and I don’t blame you a bit.”

  Her shoulders released some of their tension. “Thanks, Minnie. That means a lot.”

  A brilliant idea sparked into my brain. Hooray! I’d been wondering how to tell her that I’d promised her husband I’d do a little Minnie-type investigating, and here was the perfect opportunity. “Tell you what,” I said. “I can do a little research on that Seth guy. See what I can find out.”

  “Minnie, you’ve already done so much for us.” She shook her head. “I can’t let you do that.”

  She and her husband were definitely two of a kind. “Ha!” I said. “Try to stop me. I’m a librarian, remember? Research is one of the things I do best.” That and collect Eddie hair upon my person. “From safe and sound inside my snug office, I’ll do a little digging. If I can find out that Seth was in, say, Australia last weekend, we’ll know he had nothing to do with that car.” And likely not with Henry’s death, either.

  Irene reached out and gave me a hard hug. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  I watched her get into the car and drive away, glad to given her a little peace of mind.

  Then I walked back to the library and went to work.

  • • •

  After leaving the library the next day, I walked back to the marina, wondering how private investigators did their investigating. I’d spent part of the previous evening with my laptop, browsing the Internet for information about Seth Wartella, and had found essentially nothing. I’d found an eighty-two-year-old Seth Wartella in Phoenix and an eighteen-year-old version in the greater Washington, D.C., area, both of whom were interested in dating active women who enjoyed long walks and sunsets, but I’d found nothing about a forty-something Seth. Admittedly I didn’t spend too much time online, because the marina’s Wi-Fi connection was abysmally slow, but to not find anything seemed strange.

  “What do you think?” I asked Eddie after opening the front door.

  He was sitting on the dashboard, studying the passing seagulls, most of him in the evening sunshine, some of him not, and was apparently too busy to talk to me.

  I looked at him. “You know, if you went to the effort of sliding forward three inches, all of you would be in the sun.”

  He opened his mouth in a large yawn.

  “None of that,” I said through an answering yawn. “There’s work to do.”

  “Mrr,” he said, still looking outside.

  “Ha.” I walked into the bedroom, texting Tucker, Home at the houseboat cleaning the deck, wouldn’t mind some help and got back a text reading, Love to, but have chance 2 assist on emergency knee surgery. Next time? Smiling, I changed out of school clothes and into grungy apparel, then came back to the kitchen and reached under the sink for the plastic bucket and scrub brush, talking to my cat the entire time.

  “Just because you don’t have thumbs doesn’t mean you can’t contribute to the running of this household. Oh, don’t give me that innocent look. I know you’re perfectly capable of cleaning.” Not that I wanted my socks washed with Eddie spit, but he didn’t need to know that. “There are all sorts of things you could do around here and it’s past time that you started doing your share. I mean, did you catch a single mouse for Aunt Frances last winter?”

  He turned to stare are me, and once again I was glad that cats didn’t have the power to summon spontaneous combustion.

  “Oh, come on.” I added a little soap to the bucket and ran it full of hot water. “I’m just giving you a hard time.” I went to kiss the top of his fuzzy head. “To tell you the truth, I don’t blame you about the mice. They can’t taste very good.”

  “Mrr.”

  “Better with mayonnaise? You’re probably right.” I lifted the bucket out of the sink. “Ready, Eddie Freddie? It’s time to swab the decks.”

  For the next hour, I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the deck clean of the dust and grime it had accumulated while in storage. How a flat surface that was under a tarp and inside a building could get so dirty I didn’t know, but the dark gray color that the water was turning was clear proof.

  “Or not so clear,” I said to Eddie, who was supervising from the small table I’d brought out for him to perch upon. I sat back on my heels and pushed my hair out of my eyes for the zillionth time. My hands were encased in thick plastic elbow-length gloves, so my dexterity was limited and I was undoubtedly getting soapy water all over my hair, but Eddie was the only one around to see and he wasn’t overly critical of my looks. “Get it? The water is dirty, so it isn’t clear.”

  Eddie blinked at me.

  “Not sure what that meant,” I said. “Do you think I’m not very funny, or do you not understand the joke? Because I could explain it again, if you’re not sure about parts of it.”

  “More of a pun than a joke, isn’t it?”

  I spun around—which is hard to do while you’re kneeling—lost my balance, and flopped over onto my back with a loud thump. From my new position, I could see blue sky and the beginnings of a setting sun. And if I waited long enough, maybe Ash Wolverson would go away and forget everything he’d seen.

  “Are you all right?” Ash vaulted the boat’s railing and crouched down beside me. “You’re not hurt, are you?”

  So, not going away. “I’m fine.” I rolled onto my side and sat up. “Honest. You just startled me, that’s all.” I felt dirty water seep into the seat of my sweatpants. There was no way I was going to stand up in front of Ash Wolverson with a wet hind end, so I kept talking and tried not to think about my tangled wet hair and the dirty soapsuds on my face. “What brings you down to the marina? Any news about Henry or Adam?”

  “Oh.” Still in a crouch, Ash leaned back onto his heels and held his arms loosely across his thighs. It looked like a comfortable position for him, but I was pretty sure that if I tried it, my legs would start screaming at me within seconds. “No, sorry. No news.” He looked at the wet deck. “Detective Inwood did tell me that Mrs. Deering had stopped by, with information about a Seth Wartella. So I’ll be looking into that.”

  “Oh. Good.” I almost told him that I hadn’t been able to find a trace of Seth on the Internet, but decided to keep quiet. That might be considered interfering in police business and . . . then I decided to heck with it. “Just so you know—”

  But Ash’s words ran over mine. “Minnie, I heard your boyfriend moved downstate a few months ago. It’s not like I was stalking you,” he said hurriedly. “I just happened to hear from a friend. And I’m sorry things didn’t work out between you, but if you’re doing okay and you’re ready to go, you know, go out again, I was wondering if maybe you’d like to go out with me.”

  For a moment, the only thing I heard was the soft wash of waves against the side of my boat. A few months ago, when Tucker was still living in Charlevoix, Ash had asked me out and I’d had to tell him I was seeing someone else. And now I had to tell him all over again.

  Or . . . did I?

  The instant the thought oozed into my head, my mother’s voice chased it out. Minnie, don’t you dare think about cheating on that doctor of yours. You agreed to a long-distance
relationship, didn’t you? Well, then you’d best keep that agreement. Hamiltons don’t go back on their word.

  Mom’s words zipped in and out of my thoughts in a heartbeat. I looked up at Ash and tried to smile. “Thanks so much for asking, but—”

  He stood up fast. “But you’re not interested. Hey, don’t worry about it. I just thought maybe there was a chance. I won’t bother you—”

  “Mrr!”

  Ash whipped around. “Hey, Eddie. Sorry, big guy, I didn’t see you there.” He scratched my cat behind his furry ears. “How are you doing these days?”

  “Just fine, thanks.”

  Ash and I turned to see Rafe grinning at us from the dock, his teeth white against a skin that appeared tan even in April. Of course, his distant Native American heritage helped that look, but it still seemed inherently unfair. “How are you?”

  I glanced from the slim, black-haired Rafe to the near-movie-star square-jawed looks of Ash. “You two know each other?”

  “My man Ash?” Rafe saluted him with an index finger shaped into a pistol. “We go way back. Say, how’s your sister doing?” He waggled his eyebrows. “Still hot as ever?”

  “Please tell me you’re here for a reason,” I said. “If you’ll notice, I’m trying to get some work done.” I’d had time to clean the houseboat’s inside before moving, but hadn’t had time to touch the outside until now.

  Rafe looked down at the dirty, soapy mess I’d made. “Huh. You know it might freeze tonight, right? Better get that cleaned up or it could be nasty slippery in the morning.” He pointed at Ash again. “You doing anything? Because if we don’t get out of here, Ms. Hamilton here is going to dragoon you into helping her clean.”

  Ash almost, but not quite, looked at me. “I was just leaving.”

  “Perfect!” Rafe gave him a thumbs-up. “Tell you what. I could use some help drywalling a ceiling. Pizza and a six-pack of whatever you want when we’re done.”

  “Sounds good,” Ash said. Then, not quite looking at me: “I’ll, uh, see you later, Minnie.”

  “Yeah. Later.”

  I stood there, watching them go, listening to their male banter as they went down the dock and onto the sidewalk that would, in a couple of hundred feet, take them straight to the front door of Rafe’s fixer-upper.

  “Mrr,” Eddie said.

  “You’re a male,” I said. “You tell me: Why are guys convinced to help a friend with a construction project at the mere mention of pizza and beer, but all they can think of when faced with a friend’s cleaning project is to leave as quickly as possible?”

  Eddie turned his back to me and didn’t say a thing.

  Men.

  Chapter 7

  “Why, why did I ever try to do this?” I grabbed two fistfuls of my hair, a move I would regret almost instantly for what it would do to what might be loosely called a hairstyle, and I pulled tight enough to thin my vision to slits. “Why?”

  Once again, I looked at the computer screen. Sadly, the flyer design I’d come up with still looked downright awful, even with my skewed eyesight.

  I released my hair, and my vision went back to normal. Flopping back against my chair, I stared at the dragonless ceiling and tried to think. The flyer had to be to the printer absolutely no later than Monday noon. If today was Wednesday, that meant . . . I counted on my fingers . . . there were three business days in which to get this done.

  “Three days,” I said to the computer in the deepest, most threatening tone I could summon. The computer ignored me and I tried not to consider its continued display of my absolutely awful flyer design as a taunt.

  At that point, I realized I’d been ignoring my own hunger pangs.

  I got up, grabbed my coat, wallet, and cell phone, and headed out. Everything would look better after a walk and some lunch. And even if it didn’t look better, at least I would get outside for a little bit and get some food in my stomach, a win-win situation if there ever was one.

  • • •

  Half an hour later, my tummy was happily full with an Italian sub and chips from Fat Boys Pizza, but I still didn’t have any idea how to figure out if Seth Wartella had ever set foot in northern Michigan, I still couldn’t think of any reason why someone would want to kill both Henry and Adam, and I still hadn’t a clue of how to get a designed flyer.

  “Hello, Minnie.”

  I looked up from my contemplation of the sidewalk to see Pam Fazio. Her short black hair was as smooth as ever, and even though she had to be in her mid-fifties, not a single wrinkle showed on her face. She was standing just outside the door of her antique shop, Older Than Dirt, wearing a cheerful dress in a flower pattern topped with a shawl, and smiling at me with an odd expression.

  “Do I have tomato sauce on my face?” I rubbed the corners of my mouth, just to be sure.

  “No, it just that’s the third time I said hello,” she said. “You seem a million miles away.”

  Henry’s house was a little more than ten miles southeast of Chilson, actually, but I didn’t make the clarification. “Just thinking,” I said.

  “Nice footwear.” Pam nodded at my shoes.

  I turned them this way and that, displaying each foot proudly. “Yes, indeedy, thank you very much.” Last winter I’d purchased the high-topped black lace-up shoes from Pam and they were my favorite footwear of all time. Whenever I put them on I felt like Laura Ingalls Wilder but without the locusts and the scarlet fever and the backbreaking labor.

  “What are you thinking so hard about that you didn’t hear me calling?” she asked.

  Most of it wouldn’t be appropriate to tell her, but there was one thing I could share. “I’ve just come to the conclusion that I am, without a doubt, the worst designer of a book fair flyer in the history of the world.”

  Pam laughed. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  I eyed her. “Hang on.” I’d e-mailed myself a copy of the flyer so I could look at it while I ate. I’d taken one look and decided it would give me indigestion, but it was still on my phone. I opened the image and showed it to her.

  She took the phone from my hand, peered close, and snorted with laughter.

  “Gee,” I said dryly, “thanks for the support.”

  She grinned. “If you want, I could try my hand at a little redesigning.” She looked at the image, turning it this way and that. “When do you need it?”

  “Monday noon.” I winced, preparing myself for her reaction.

  “No problem. I’ll send you something Monday morning.”

  It sounded good, but then so had Amanda’s offer. “Are you sure you want to do this? I don’t want to take up a lot of your time. You have a store to run.” Because I could always make a flyer of text on brightly colored paper. It was what the library had always done before and no one would think twice about it; I’d just hoped for something outstanding for our first-ever book fair.

  Pam made a rude noise in the back of her throat. “It’s April. I was warned about the April lull up here, but I didn’t know I was going to get so bored. I’ll be glad for the chance to do something other than dust all my merchandise. Again.”

  I thanked her and, as I walked back to the library, I wondered what talents and skills might be hidden inside the people I thought I knew. Then I wondered if talents and skills might be hidden inside cats. Eddie, for one.

  “Something funny?” Cookie Tom was in front of his bakery, cleaning the windows and looking at me.

  I tucked away my Eddie-induced laughter. “Almost everything,” I said, and headed back to the library.

  The next day, I spent my lunch hour deep in the bowels of the Internet, chasing down any wisps of information about Seth Wartella. When I’d come up completely dry for anything since his incarceration, I hunted down what I could find for Henry and Adam and added everything I found to a spreadsheet.

  Once the spreadsheet was as full as I could make it, I categorized every item at least two different ways, then sorted and resorted the data in an effort to jig
gle useful thoughts out of my brain.

  Sadly nothing jiggled loose by the end of my lunchtime, but when five o’clock came, I was officially off the library’s clock. I closed my eyes and ears to the work-related things I could be doing and plunged even deeper into the two separate worlds of Henry and Adam, trying to find something that might connect them.

  My rumbling stomach chased me out of my office, but I continued thinking about the problem the entire evening, was still thinking about it as I went to sleep, thought about it first thing when I woke up to another chilly morning, and then as I walked into Cookie Tom’s to get a dozen doughnuts for the staff. It was a Friday, after all, and I’d skipped breakfast because I couldn’t face eating a bowl of cold cereal when the houseboat’s interior temperature was only fifty-one degrees.

  Eddie, of course, had no such compunctions and stared at me gravely until I poured him a tiny bowl of milk to replace the leftovers that he usually got from the bottom of my bowl.

  The smell of baked goods had me salivating the second I walked into Cookie Tom’s. “Morning, Minnie,” Tom said cheerfully. “What do you need today?”

  It was more a question of want than need, but I wasn’t going to enter into that kind of debate with the guy who gave me a deal on cookies for the bookmobile. And, in summer, sold them to me from the back door, letting me avoid the long lines.

  “Box of doughnuts,” I said. “A dozen, any kind you’d like.”

  He surveyed the contents of his glass cases. “Apple fritters, custard-filled long johns, glazed doughnuts, cinnamon twists?”

  There was no way I was going to be able to choose. “Let’s do an assortment.”

  “No problem.” He unfolded a white cardboard bakery box and got to work, whistling as he went.

  I watched him place the bakery yummies in the box, wondering how on earth he could run a bakery and stay so skinny. If it had been me, I’d have put on so many pounds that—

  “Good morning, Ms. Hamilton.”

  I looked up. “Detective Inwood.” I started to make a bad joke about cops and doughnuts, but stopped—Mom would have been so proud—and said, “How are you this fine morning?”