Panic Button Part 8

His answer was begrudging. "I saw them around together a few times. At some of the restaurants in town. And last summer at the big band concert."

"So they were dating?"

Charles shrugged. "If that's what you'd call it, I guess so."

"And then Angela caught Larry's eye."

Charles was certainly shy, but I'd never a.s.sumed he was stupid and he proved it when his eyes popped wide. "You think Susan was angry. That she killed Angela!"

I stood up straight, my arms at my sides. "I didn't say that. But it's only natural to wonder who might not have liked Angela." I didn't add besides you. If Charles couldn't see how guilty he was making himself look with all this talk of how he couldn't wait to get his hands on Angela's possessions and what he saw as Angela's fortune, I wasn't about to point it out. Not when I was alone with him, anyway. "And if Angela stole Larry from Susan, then maybe Susan had her reasons for disliking your cousin."

I was hoping Charles would fill in the blanks, Ardent Lake gossipawise, but instead, he c.o.c.ked his head, screwed up his mouth, and did some serious thinking. "Except if Susan was angry, it didn't stop her from accepting the donation of the charm string."

He was right.

"Unless Susan swallowed her pride for the sake of the museum," I suggested. "Or maybe once Larry was gone, she realized she didn't miss him all that much."

Charles grunted.

I pounced. "She did miss him."

He threw me a sidelong glance. "I heard she was pretty broken up."

"And angry at Angela?"

He shrugged.

End of the gossip party. I knew it as surely as if Charles had hung out a sign: "Not saying another thing."

I bided my time, turning back to the framed photographs and promising myself Charles and I would revisit the topic at another time. The next picture in the stack was an eight-by-ten in a frame that was studded with colorful rhinestones and faux pearls. A special frame for a special picture, and it apparently showed a special occasion-Angela and Larry were dressed in formal clothes and posed in front of a sparkling Christmas tree.

"Her company Christmas party." Charles supplied the details. "Angela just loved to play Lady Bountiful for her employees."

"And that's a bad thing?"

"It is when you're just doing it to show off," he said, his words ringing with conviction. "Angela didn't really care if anyone had a good time or a bad time at that party of hers every year. She just wanted to show everyone that she could afford to throw a bash. And just for the record, she never invited me."

I actually felt a momentary stab of sympathy for Charles. Which is saying a lot. "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize you worked for Angela."

"I didn't." He walked away and poked through a pile of magazines on the nightstand next to the bed, taking each one out and flipping through the pages as if he expected to find a treasure trove's worth of tens and twenties tucked inside. "I wouldn't have worked for Angela even if she asked me. Which she never did. And you'd think it was the least she could have done since we only had each other, family-wise."

Rather than question his convoluted reasoning, I went right on looking through the photographs. Each one showed Angela and Larry, always smiling, always happy.

Cradling one photo of them dressed for Halloween (she was Wilma and he was Fred), I glanced around the room, wondering where all the pictures had come from and why they'd been piled on the dresser. Something on a nearby wall caught my eye, and I walked over there for a closer look. "There's an empty picture hanger here. And here." I moved to the next wall. "And more over here. It's like she had the photos hanging, then took them all down."

"She was probably getting ready to redecorate. As if the rest of us common folks have that luxury. Then again, Angela was rolling in dough, she could afford it."

"That would certainly explain why the pictures were taken off the wall. She wouldn't have wanted anything to happen to them. But..." I glanced around again. Having just redone my own apartment, I knew a thing or two about redecorating. No, Angela and I did not have the same taste. But something told me she wasn't a woman who changed things just for the sake of change. And the bedroom...

I ran a hand over the wall.

"It's as clean as a whistle, and it looks like it was painted not that long ago," I told Charles.

He was paging through an issue of National Geographic and didn't respond.

Left on my own, I shuffled through the rest of the photographs on the dresser. I got to the last one and turned around to show it to Charles. "This photograph..." He closed the magazine and tossed it back on the pile it came from. "This is Larry again, but this sure isn't Angela." I took a good look at the slim, elderly lady sitting on a park bench next to Larry. She had a cap of silvery curls and she was wearing a pink sweater over a white turtleneck. Like Angela in all those other photos, her smile was a mile wide. "Who is she?" I asked Charles.

"That's Evelyn." Charles walked around the bed to stand in front of me and tapped a finger against his great-aunt's nose. "Taken in town, it looks like. In the park. See." He pointed to a building in the background. "There's the historical museum. Look." He latched on to my arm and turned me so I was facing the windows that looked out over Angela's front yard. "From here, if you look across the park, you can see the building."

I peeked around the damask draperies and narrowly avoided getting bonked by the yellow witch ball. From the bedroom, I could see the facade of the square tan-colored stone building on the other side of the park. Even in the sunlight, the front of the building looked dour that day, while in the photograph...

I took another look.

The day the picture of Evelyn and Larry was taken, there was some hoopla going on at the museum. There were people all around, and a bright banner hung across the entrance. "Thunderin' Ben..."

"Thunderin' Ben Moran," Charles said, which was a good thing, since there was a shadow over the rest of the banner and I wouldn't have been able to read it. "That picture must have been taken when the exhibit about that pirate opened at the museum. Everyone in town made a big deal out of it." The tone of Charles's voice told me he wasn't included in that everyone. "I remember there was an ice cream social and historical reenactments. Susan's convinced Moran is Ardent Lake's one and only celebrity, and she's going to make the most of him. You know, to keep people coming to the museum."

"But why were Larry and Evelyn there together? Where's Angela?" I asked.

Charles didn't hesitate. "Angela probably took the picture. See, when Angela and Larry first started dating, that was before Evelyn died. Angela and Larry, they used to invite Evelyn to go all sorts of places with them."

"It's nice they wanted to include her."

His mouth thinned in a way that told me I was stupid if I didn't see the truth. "Angela was sucking up. And it paid off, didn't it?"

Actually, not so much.

Angela was, after all, the one who'd been murdered.

Chapter Nine.

THEY SAY NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS, BUT WHEN THE NO news is no news from anyone in the b.u.t.ton community about that beautiful red fish b.u.t.ton, the no news turned out to be not so good.

Back in Chicago and behind my desk at the b.u.t.ton Box the day after the funeral, I clicked off my phone call. "That's the last of them," I told Stan, who'd volunteered to come in and do some dusting and vacuuming even though I told him I'd be happy to do it myself. "I've called every b.u.t.ton dealer I know. Not one of them has heard from anybody trying to sell that enameled b.u.t.ton."

"Bad luck, kiddo." Stan was just coming by with a dust rag and a bottle of beeswax furniture polish and he stopped next to my desk. I knew he understood my frustration. Years on the job, and no doubt, he'd seen more than his share of this sort of dead end.

Which is why I asked, "What do we do now?"

I had hoped for something definitive. Instead, he scratched a hand through his thinning white hair. "We can always move on to Plan B."

"Yeah. If there was a Plan B." Too disappointed to sit there doing nothing, I got up and grabbed the bottle of window cleaner he'd left nearby along with a roll of paper towels. While Stan tackled the nearest old library catalog file drawer where I stored b.u.t.tons-first applying a liberal coating of polish, then letting it dry, then wiping and buffing-I worked on the nearest gla.s.s-front display case.

"There was nothing else on that charm string worth stealing," I said, attacking a fingerprint smudge especially hard, not because it needed it, but because activity helped chase away some of my frustration. "The only other b.u.t.ton missing is that metal one with the picture of the building on it, and just to cover all my bases, I asked all the dealers I talked to about that b.u.t.ton, too. Not that I needed to bother. Believe me, Stan..." I was bent at the waist, running the paper towel over the front of the case, and I looked at him through the gla.s.s. "There's no way that b.u.t.ton was worth killing for."

"Well, you know b.u.t.tons better than anybody else, that's for sure. I can't argue with you. So maybe..." He stopped the buffing for a moment. "Maybe the person who killed Angela didn't care a bean about b.u.t.tons. Maybe that person had some other reason to kill Angela."

This was what I'd been thinking, too, and I can't say it cheered me up. After all, greed is an unpleasant and petty motive, but it's not nearly as nasty as hate. "Well, there is Susan," I said, reminding Stan of everything we'd discussed on the drive home from Ardent Lake including about how Susan had once dated Larry. "And Cousin Charles, of course."

"And we never did catch up with Larry," he said.

I finished with one display case and moved on to the next. "Yeah, but Nev did. He told me he talked to Larry the day before the wake."

"And found out nothing helpful."

"You got that right." I sprayed and rubbed and sprayed some more. "Missing, missing, missing," I grumbled. "The two b.u.t.tons are missing. Information is missing. Kaz is missing."

I grimaced as soon as the words fell out of my mouth, but by that time, it was too late to call them back. All I could do is keep spraying and rubbing and hope Stan didn't make too big a deal out of what was sounding a little too much like obsession, even to me.

"Still no sign of him, huh?" Bless Stan for not making it sound like they were recasting Misery and I was first in line for the Kathy Bates role. "He hasn't even left you a voice mail or anything?"

"Aha! See?" I straightened up and pointed a finger in Stan's direction. "It's not so crazy for me to wonder what's going on and why I haven't seen Kaz, and where he is. You think it's odd, too."

Maybe there was too much fire in my eyes. And too much conviction ringing through my words. Maybe that's why Stan looked at me as if I'd just started speaking fluent Martian. "You really are worked up about this," he said.

"Worked up? Me?" I marched over to my desk so I could throw away the used paper towels in the garbage can that I'd once decorated with hundreds of glued-on b.u.t.tons. "I am not worked up," I insisted, my voice loud because I was, after all, pretty worked up. "I'm just-"

"Grateful?" Stan flashed me a smile that said he wasn't trying to be mean as much as he was trying to get me to see how unreasonable I sounded.

He was right.

I dropped into my desk chair.

"It just doesn't make sense," I said, not trying to a.s.sure him as much as I was trying to convince myself. "It doesn't make sense that Kaz has fallen off the face of the earth. And it doesn't make sense that I care."

"Well, sure it does." Stan set down his rag and bottle of polish. "You two have history."

My laugh contained zero amus.e.m.e.nt. "Not good history."

"Maybe not. But it's not like you hate Kaz or anything. He did bad things, sure, and he did bad things to you, but I know you don't wish anything bad on him in return. You're not that kind of person."

I gulped. "Do you think that's what's happened to Kaz? Something bad?"

"More like something with long legs, blond hair, and big-" Stan swallowed the rest of what he was going to say. "My guess is Kaz is busy. You know, with a woman."

There was a time just thinking something like that would have shaken me to my core. Now it was oddly comforting. I drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. "You're right. Kaz is a big boy. He can take care of himself."

As if it would prove I really meant it, I slapped the arms of my desk chair and got to my feet. Good thing I did because it made me look calm and in control when a customer walked in the door.

"h.e.l.lo, welcome to the b.u.t.ton Box." I moved to the front of the store. The woman was in her sixties with a sleek dark bob and wearing jeans, ankle boots, and a red leather blazer over a neat dark tee. She looked familiar. "You've been here before," I said.

"Well, no." She was carrying one of those reusable shopping totes, and she switched it from one hand to the other. "We've never actually met. I'm Mary Lou Baldwin. I saw you. Yesterday, at the funeral."

My memory jogged, I realized the woman looked familiar because she was one of the people who helped with lunch at Charles's house. I told her how much everyone appreciated the food and all the work Angela's friends had done and asked the inevitable, "What can I do for you?"

"Well, your friend..." Mary Lou looked past me to wave at Stan. "He told me how you two were in Ardent Lake because Angela had been one of your customers, and I..." As if it might somehow explain, she hoisted the tote bag in both hands. "My mother left me some b.u.t.tons. I thought you might be interested in looking through them, and maybe buying them if they're worth anything."

I do not need to say how much this cheered me. Finally, I could get down to business. My real business. Which-just for the record-has nothing to do with murder, and everything to do with b.u.t.tons. Besides, every b.u.t.ton stash brings with it the tantalizing possibility of a newly discovered treasure.

My fingers itching to get started and my blood singing with the endless possibilities of unearthing some gorgeous b.u.t.ton that had been ignored for years, I ushered Mary Lou into the back room, and when she refused a cup of coffee, I put on a pot of water for tea and settled her on one of the stools pulled up next to the worktable.

An hour later, we'd been through the b.u.t.tons and two cups of Red Zinger, and I had a small pile of choice b.u.t.tons on the table in front of me.

"You're sure about selling?" I asked one last time.

Mary Lou nodded. She was a pleasant woman who'd told me about how she met Angela through the Ardent Lake Garden Club. They weren't close friends, she admitted, but that didn't stop Mary Lou's eyes from filling with tears when Angela's name came up.

I liked Mary Lou.

"I've got enough of my mother's things to remember her by," she said. "It's not like I need those few b.u.t.tons. Plus..." Her shoulders shot back and she sat a little straighter. "I'm saving for a cruise to the Caribbean. It's a surprise for my husband for our fortieth anniversary."

I grimaced. "If you're thinking these b.u.t.tons-"

"Oh, no!" Mary Lou laughed. "Don't worry. It's not like I think they're worth enough to pay for the entire cruise. But every little bit helps."

"As little as seventy-five dollars?" I asked.

She grinned. "I was sure you were going to say fifty. Sold!"

Truth be told, seventy-five dollars was a tad too generous on my behalf, but that didn't stop me from writing out a check and gladly handing it over to Mary Lou. I hoped knowing she'd made something of a b.u.t.ton killing would keep Mary Lou's spirits up.

Especially since I was about to launch into a not-so-pleasant subject.

"So..." I sorted through the b.u.t.tons I'd chosen, making small piles. Clear gla.s.s to my left. Fabric b.u.t.tons on my right. Realistics right in the middle. I have a special place in my heart for realistics, those cute b.u.t.tons that are made to look like actual objects. I fingered a small yellow squirrel. "You knew her, Mary Lou. What do you think about Angela's death?"

She wasn't expecting the question, and Mary Lou's bottom lip suddenly quivered. I was almost ready to throw in the towel, admit that I was poking my nose where it had no business and apologize for upsetting her, when she said, "I've never known anyone before who was actually...you know...murdered." She gave that last word all the gravity it deserved.

Mary Lou folded her hands together in her lap. "It's hard to imagine everything that happened to her that night." Apparently, not that hard, because her eyes filled with tears. She glanced away. "I'm sorry. Like I said, Angela and I weren't close, but just thinking about anyone dying that way..."

"I absolutely know how you feel." Now that I'd gotten her talking, I didn't want Mary Lou to get any ideas-like about leaving-so I filled the electric kettle again and plugged it in. I got out two fresh teacups and plopped a tea bag in each, and when the water boiled, I poured and carried the cups back to the table. "I saw Angela that night. Just before-"

"Of course! I'm so sorry." Mary Lou put a hand on my arm in sympathy. "Here I am getting all mushy and I hadn't talked to Angela since the Garden Club Christmas luncheon. And you saw her that night. Just before..."

Neither of us needed to elaborate.

After an appropriate minute of silence that filled in for all the details neither of us wanted to mention, I fished the bag out of my teacup with a spoon and added some honey. "So what are they saying in Ardent Lake?" I asked. "Any theories?"

"About Angela?" Mary Lou had fixed her own tea moments before and she was in the middle of blowing on it. She paused, the cup at her lips. "You know she thought she was cursed."

"And I think we can both be pretty sure the curse had nothing to do with her murder."