Lye In Wait: A Home Crafting Mystery Part 25

She shook her head.

"What are you talking about?"

"Richard has a copy in an old photo alb.u.m. His mother had it taken when he was a baby. He loves this picture."

Looking at the gorgeous baby, I could understand how it would support Richard's ego. "Why would Walter have a baby picture of Richard? Where would he get...?"

We stared at each other, minds racing. "No ... that's crazy," I said.

But Meghan was already rummaging through the box, extracting the picture of Cherry.

"That's why she looks familiar," she said, holding the photograph close to her face.

"You think that's...?"

She nodded. "Richard's mother. Grace Thorson and Cherry Hanover are the same woman."

I leaned over, peering at the woman's face in the picture. "I don't know. It could be her. But it's so hard to tell. We need a more recent picture."

"Of Cherry? Or of Grace?"

"Either one. Both. You don't happen to have any pictures of Grace, do you?"

She shook her head. "I wonder if Tootie would have any of Cherry. Even if they were old, they might be clearer."

Walter's smiling face gazed back at me from the picture. It still looked familiar, and now I could see why. "Richard has Walter's cheekbones," I said.

Meghan said, "And the chin. The same as Walter, and the same as w.i.l.l.y, a.s.suming this is w.i.l.l.y." She pointed to the man with his arm around Cherry's shoulders.

I sat down on the stairs. Meghan sat beside me, still holding the picture. I heard her swallow once. And then again.

"You okay?" I asked.

"No" She swallowed again. Inhaled deeply and blew out her breath through pursed lips.

"Well, this puts a different light on things," I said.

"Yeah." She did the breathing thing again.

"But we have to be absolutely sure."

"Yeah. Are you?"

Reluctantly, I shook my head. "Not absolutely."

"I guess we tell Detective Ambrose," she said. "Does he know about Cherry and w.i.l.l.y, that whole story?"

"Not from me. It was ancient history." A thought struck me, and I turned to face Meghan. "Mrs. Gray! She could tell us if Grace is Cherry. She knew her way back when."

"But she's never seen Grace"

"Detective Ambrose can pick up Grace and then have Mrs. Gray come in and make an identification. But we'd better not be wrong. Remember how Richard and his mother reacted last time they saw Ambrose?"

"Oh, G.o.d. You're right. And Grace is a particularly nasty hornets' nest to stir up," Meghan said. Then she narrowed her eyes. "On the other hand... having Ambrose pick Grace up and take her to the station might get her to back off. I'd have to put up with some c.r.a.p from Richard for a while, but it'd be worth it if Grace left Erin alone as a result. I know the woman's her grandmother, but no way will I let her be alone with my daughter"

"Do you think she killed Walter?"

Meghan closed her eyes, grimacing at the thought even though it had been hovering in the back of both our minds. "I don't know. But don't you think it'd be a heck of a coincidence if she wasn't involved somehow?"

I agreed. "So, we need to tell Ambrose the story about Cherry and Walter and w.i.l.l.y, and about our suspicions about the picture. If he wants to haul Grace into the police station, fine. If not, we can figure out something so Mrs. Gray can get a look at Grace in the flesh. And we should show her this picture, make sure it's really Cherry."

"Tootie could tell us that, I bet," Meghan said.

"You're right. Let's see what Barr has to say about this, first."

"Okay." She looked at her watch.

"Is Richard involved?" I asked.

"Richard? Involved in murder? Can you see that?" She laughed, a slightly hysterical sound edging toward tears.

"I suppose not. Petty stuff, but not murder. On the other hand, it's easy to believe Grace capable of five murders before breakfast, just to whet her appet.i.te"

I called Barr Ambrose's cell phone again.

"Sophie Mae?"

I'll never get used to caller ID. "Meghan and I discovered something that may help solve Walter's murder."

"I'm in the middle of something right now. If it's not an emergency, meet me at the PD at two and fill me in."

I looked at my watch. It was just past noon. "Okay," I said. "See you then."

Meghan was unhappy with the delay, but I hurried down to my workroom, determined to plow through a big chunk of my todo list before I had to leave. I sped through four hours of work in under two, plowing through bookwork and answering email, and then running out to move my truck around to the alley. Loading orders onto the two-wheel hand truck and then into the campersh.e.l.l-covered bed of the Toyota made my abused muscles ache at first, but after a while my body shed some of its stiffness. Still, my elbow throbbed when I'd finished shuttling the boxes, and my jeans, though my comfiest pair, creased painfully against the ma.s.sive bruise on my hip when I slid behind the wheel.

And the puzzle of how the long-gone Cherry fit into Walter's death fermented in the back of my mind. The first question was, of course, did Grace's sudden presence in Cadyville have anything at all to do with Walter's death? At this point there was no way to know, but as Meghan pointed out, it was an unbelievable coincidence if the two events weren't connected. I was willing to a.s.sume they were. Given that, why would Grace have wanted to kill Walter? Not that I didn't think she had it in her; the woman was a viper. If Walter had stood between her and something she wanted, she'd eliminate him with no compunction.

So how would Grace Thorson/Cherry Hanover have managed to get Walter to drink the lye? Had she been trying to make it look like a suicide? And why would she have done it in my workroom?

A horn honked on the edge of my awareness, then louder. I'd slowed to a crawl. Accelerating, I returned to thinking.

Was Meghan right about Richard not being involved? Did he even know Walter was his father? For that matter, was Walter his father, or was w.i.l.l.y? I hoped he didn't have anything to do with Walter's death, for Erin's sake, but if the motive were the lottery money, d.i.c.k would have his fingers in the pot somehow. His relations.h.i.+p to money was like some kind of congenital defect.

I pulled into the parking lot of an L-shaped strip mall and shut off the engine. Walter had doted on Erin. Had he known she was his granddaughter? And if he did, would he have left her his lottery winnings? I swore under my breath. If only we'd found a will, we'd know. But Grace might have thought so, and that would explain both Meghan's intuition about protecting Erin from her grandmother and Grace's odd, ungrandmotherly behavior.

The more I thought about it, the less I trusted d.i.c.k to be any kind of safety barrier between his piranha of a mother and his daughter. I hoped we wouldn't have to ask them to the house in order to identify Grace, but it might come down to that if Ambrose didn't think what we had discovered merited official action. As excited as I was about finding a significant clue, a real wowser that might be able to solve the mystery of Walter's death, I had, in the course of the last week, at least learned to tread a bit more carefully and not a.s.sume too much. Jacob and Debby had turned out to be brother and sister, not the erstwhile lovers I'd posited. For all we knew, Cherry, or Grace, could have a sister or a doppelganger.

I unloaded the boxes at the UPS drop-off counter and sped home. Before I left again I had time to call Kyla at home. She'd just come in the door and sounded breathless on the phone. I told her I was caught up for the moment and asked her if I could commission a painting. Though she insisted she only dabbled, the girl had talent, and had done murals for two of our friends. I wanted a big acrylic painting to hang over or behind the Winding Road booth. She agreed with alacrity, full of ideas for what to paint. I said as long as it had the logo and conveyed the kinds of products we made she had free reign.

"Don't worry, Sophie Mae. I know just what we need."

Her adolescent surety amused me. But I knew she'd do a good job.

"By the way, Kyla. Did you happen to mention where we keep the spare house key to anyone?"

"The house key? Oh, you mean the one under the rock? No." The last word came out sounding defensive. I couldn't blame her.

"Okay, just wanted to check. I'll let you know when we figure out a new place to keep it. Until then I'll make sure someone is always here to let you in." Meghan had told me she'd briefly explained why the key wasn't under the rock by the side of the house anymore.

"Okay. Urn, Cyan was wondering if maybe she could help with the bazaars."

"Yes, and double yes. They'll be long, and you'll need someone to spell you. We can talk later about specifics."

Technically the booths don't have to be manned all the time at most holiday bazaars. But I'd sell twice as much if someone were there to chat with the customers, answer questions, and keep the display in top shape all the time.

The phone rang seconds after I finished talking with Kyla: Meghan calling from the clinic where she was setting up for her infants ma.s.sage cla.s.s that evening.

"I'm running late for the meeting with the detective," she said.

"I'll wait for you."

"No, go on over. I'll meet you there."

"Will you be long?" I asked, reaching for my wallet.

"No-I'll be finished here in ten minutes or so."

"See you at the station."

THIRTY-TWO.

I HAULED WALTER'S MEMENTOS out to my truck and buzzed over to the police department. Inside, I maneuvered the awkward box back to Ambrose's pristine desk. "There it is, for what it's worth."

He opened the cardboard flaps and peered inside. Took out the chicken bank and shook it, removed the rubber stopper and peered inside. Pried open the locket and showed it to me: nothing. Flipped through the book on baseball collectibles, the Bible, the field guide.

"I already looked to see if something was hidden in those," I said, lifting out the photos and stacking them on his desk.

He grinned. "I bet you did." He put the box on the floor and spread the pictures out on the desk. "So this is all you thought his mother might want."

I nodded. "Kind of sad, isn't it?"

"It is. Kind of... pathetic."

"No. Please don't say that. Walter wasn't pathetic. He did the best he could with what he had."

Ambrose looked up from the images on the desk. "Sorry." Like I had with the picture of Walter and Cherry and his brothers, he slid the backs out of the other photos, then removed the photos themselves, looking at all the surfaces. "Sit down. I found out something you should know." His voice was low.

I sat. Looked around. The other desks were empty, except for a cadet doing paperwork across the room. Didn't any of the other officers ever need to fill out paperwork?

"What did you find out?" I asked. Had he found the truck that almost ran me down?

"First off, I flat-out shouldn't be telling you, but knowing may increase your safety, so I'm telling you anyway. Deborah Silverman has a history of mental instability. She's been in and out of treatment, and her last stint in an inst.i.tution ended about two years ago."

"My G.o.d. She's sort of out there, but I wouldn't call her loony. What kind of mental instability?"

"She's manic-depressive. With at least two violent episodes. She has a criminal record for a.s.sault."

I wrinkled my forehead. "I didn't know manic-depressives were dangerous. Except to themselves."

Ambrose said, "I don't know if her mental illness had anything to do with the a.s.sault charge, to be truthful. But she has a mental condition that requires medication, a record for a.s.sault, and a fiance who died violently. I don't care for the combination."

Neither did I.

"Okay, thanks. I'll keep it to myself."

"Go ahead and tell Meghan," he said.

"Okay. You said you had Walter's bank records. Did he have any of that lottery money left?"

"Not much. A little over thirty thousand."

"Sheesh. He really went through it, didn't he? But thirty thousand dollars would be a lot to some people," I said. "Like me, for instance."

"Me, too" He started putting the photos back in their frames.