Framed (2 page)

“Did she pick up her last paycheck?”

“No. It’s still sitting—” Lois broke off and stared at Ronnie. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m not sure.”

“The check doesn’t amount to much. She probably just blew it off.” Lois turned to the Rolodex, pulled a number, and jabbed the phone. After a moment, with a taut look on her face, she set it down. “Number’s disconnected,” she said.

Silence.

“I wish I had money to call a lawyer,” Ronnie said.

Lois gave her a thoughtful look. “Honey, let’s you and me take the day off and go bar hopping.”

* * *

They made a disreputable pair in T-shirts and jeans mottled with frame stains; put walnut and mahogany and cherry all together and it looks like dog doo, that’s all. About the same color as Lois’s old Saab. “You don’t need to worry about a lawyer yet,” Lois said, sounding not quite sure, as she chugged the Saab out of the parking lot. “If they really thought you did anything, they wouldn’t have let you go.”

Ronnie knew better. They just needed evidence to hold her, that was all. They wanted to wrap this thing up. “How much does a lawyer cost?”

Too much. They talked about money, about how people got by, Tim and his child support payments, Tiffany and her kids and their asthma medication. Bar hopping meant looking for Melinda; they checked her apartment first. None of the mailboxes were tagged with her name. Lois pushed buzzers at random until she found a tenant at home. Melinda had skipped, he said.

“If you find her,” he shouted over the intercom, “tell her come get her stuff. It’s still in the basement.”

They found the basement stairs, went down and looked at Melinda’s worldly goods through the bars of the storage cage. At good washable-silk dresses thrown in there still on their hangers. At Melinda’s jewelry box teetering on top of the pile.

“I’ve got a really sick feeling about this,” Ronnie said as they got back into the Saab.

Lois nodded. “I know.”

“Should we go to the cops?”

“Nuh-uh. Let them figure it out. I’m not going to look at a dead person. In pieces.”

They checked a couple of the bars where Melinda hung out, just in case. Nobody had seen her. She had so many boyfriends, no particular one of them was looking for her.

“Dead end,” Ronnie said, then shuddered as she realized what she had said.

“Yeah.”

“Let’s try looking for whatshisname, the Tedder guy.”

They drove to the address, and it wasn’t there.

A nice old neighborhood, and the house number just wasn’t there. They drove up and down the block twice, looking, and finally pulled over and asked a woman collecting her mail at the curb where Horace Tedder lived.

“Who?”

“That name, Horace, he sounds like an old guy,” Ronnie suggested. No go. They drove away, silent. “Maybe Tim typoed the address?” Ronnie ventured.

Lois snorted. She had a very expressive snort.

“What now?”

“Dead end.”

“No, not quite.” Mentally Ronnie grasped for the last straw. “The artist.”

“Huh?”

“The artist. Do they keep records of who buys things?”

“I dunno.”

“He might have. It’s a signed limited edition.”

Lois sat bolt upright behind the steering wheel. “That dinky litho is a signed limited edition?”

“Yeah. The numbers, the rag paper, the whole routine. Which is another weird thing, why did someone slap plain paper mats on it?”

Lois subsided back against her wooden-bead seat pad. “Tim took the order.”

“But Tim would never have done that. And if the guy was too cheap to spring for acid-free mats, Tim would remember.”

Lois took a long breath and let it out with eyes elevated heavenward.

Ronnie said, “Somebody hides a key inside a job for a guy with no address who puts puce and fuchsia paper mats on a signed limited edition—”

“Hey! Maybe the artist found out about the mats and killed the framer. Just joking,” Lois said hastily. “Just joking.”

* * *

Few artists had actual studios, in Ronnie’s experience, but this one did. Rather, the tasteful wooden sign said STUDIO GOROG, but really the place was a sales gallery. In a remodeled schoolhouse, bell and all. How very quaint. How very locked up and closed. SHOWINGS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY, said a placard on the door.

“Jeez. Well, excuuuse us.” Shading her eyes, Ronnie peered in through a schoolhouse window. “Jeez,” she said again, louder, for displayed at the window was a litho identical to the one she had framed, with a hand-calligraphy price tag: one thousand dollars.

“A thousand bucks!”

“Huh?” Lois came over, looked, and said, “Holy catalpas, I was going to put it out for thirty-nine ninety-five with frame.”

“Who on earth would pay that much for a—”

“For that piece of garbage?”

“—for a litho of a barn and some cows?”

“Around here? Nobody! He’s got himself priced right out of the local market.”

“This whole place advertises For Snots Only,” Ronnie complained. “Do you think he’d let us in if he was here?” Lois rolled her eyes and copied the phone number on the door placard.

On the way back to the car, Ronnie said, “And I always wondered how artists made a living.”

“Most of them don’t.”

“Maybe it’s like the kid with the lemonade stand, a thousand bucks a cup. All he has to do is sell one.”

Lois shook her head and headed the Saab toward the frame shop.

Ronnie said, “And this Tedder guy paid that kind of bucks? And put puce and fuchsia mats on it and didn’t pick up the order and has a false address?”

“And you think he’s old from his name but those are definitely not old-person colors.”

“So why should anything make sense?”

When they walked into the shop, there sat Detective Llewellyn in the swivel chair at Lois’s desk, waiting to take Ronnie in for more questioning.

* * *

Ronnie handed the photo back to Llewellyn, feeling a bit sick. “Yeah, it’s her. Melinda.”

He nodded and settled back into his desk chair. “How well did you know her?”

“Not very well. Listen, can I make a couple of phone calls?”

“You’re entitled to one.”

“Not to a lawyer. If I can just talk to a few people, I think I can clear this whole thing up.”

“No. That’s my job.”

“But—”

“Tell me about this Doerfler woman.”

Melinda, he meant. Melinda Doerfler. “I only knew her to work with her. But I got the impression she was kind of wild—”

The phone on Llewellyn’s desk rang. He picked up, listened, tightened his lips in a sour look and handed the phone to Ronnie. “It’s for you.

“Ron?” Lois’s voice came across so breathless and loud that Ronnie felt sure Detective Llewellyn could hear it; he appeared to be listening. “The people down at the art center say this Gorog guy is a joke. He travels all over the place with those barn-and-covered-bridge lithos; he’s in Panama right now doing a show at some vanity gallery. The respectable galleries won’t touch him. Nobody understands who buys the stuff or what keeps him going.”

The detective sat back, his expression thoughtful. Ronnie did not mind his eavesdropping in the least. She said to the phone, “Lois, I love you. Buy yourself a gigantic hot fudge sundae.”

“I would if I could afford it.”

Ronnie hung up the phone and looked at Detective Llewellyn, who stared back at her across his desk. She said, “Suppose a kind of shady artist needed a framer to hide something or other that he’s smuggling? Something small that could be sandwiched between the mats?”

Llewellyn said nothing, but his stare intensified to the same pitch of interest it had shown when he had first noticed her callused hand.

Veronica said, “I don’t think the Tedder guy ever existed. People who buy signed limited editions don’t just disappear without a trace. ‘Tedder,’ isn’t that German for manure or something? Horace Tedder. Horse crap.”

“Are you German?”

“No, but Melinda was. I think Melinda made up the Tedder order.” I’ve almost been framed, she thought, by a dead framer whose plan went wrong. “I think she felt that she was in danger, so she arranged revenge. She used those awful mats because she knew if she didn’t come back, sooner or later we’d open up the job to reframe it.”

After she finished, nothing moved, least of all Detective Llewellyn’s face. But then, still with the same intent look, he stirred and spoke. “So she wanted you to find her body? How’d she know he’d put her there?”

“She didn’t. No, not the body. That’s what messed everything up. We were supposed to find whatever else he stored there.”

“Such as?”

“How should I know? That’s your job.” Ronnie stood up. “You’re welcome,” she added, hinting.

“Huh?”

Oh, what was the use. Men—hopeless. “Can I go now? I oughta get back.”

“Back where?”

He was just being obnoxious. Ronnie allowed some edge in her tone. “Back to
normal
?”

He dismissed her without a sign of a smile

* * *

The next week Ronnie was puzzling over an asymmetrical multi-opening mat—the lines on the back had to show the openings in mirror image—when Detective Llewellyn walked into the frame shop. He pushed open the door with his elbow because in each hand he carried a large hot fudge sundae. Without a twitch of greeting or facial expression he handed one to Ronnie and one to Lois.

“Huh?” Ronnie said.

“You got him!” yelled Lois.

Llewellyn nodded. “Met him at the airport with the customs officers. Found an interesting selection of contraband in his so-called artwork.”

“So he’s under arrest.”

“Better. He’s confessed.”

“Whoa!”

“Some people don’t hold up well after murder,” said Llewellyn, “and he’s one of them. He told us all about it.” The detective looked at Ronnie. “You pretty much nailed it except he didn’t need or want a framer as a partner. Melinda became involved by accident. What happened was, somebody actually bought one of Gorog’s pictures—”

“How unfortunate,” Lois said.

Llewellyn gave her a blank look. “There was a mix-up, and they got one with packets of cocaine in it. And they brought it in here to get different mats put in, and Melinda found the stuff.”

“Whoa.” Ronnie whispered it this time. She still felt a bit sick, remembering the photo of Melinda’s dead face.

“She figured it out the same way you did, and she followed Gorog to his stash at Groat’s, and she wanted a cut of the take. For a while he went along with her, treated her like a partner, gave her a key, etc. But of course she kept wanting more.”

Which sounded just like Melinda.

“So he killed her, and now she’s killing him. End of story. Eat your sundaes.”

“Oooh!” cooed the all-too-attractive Tiffany from across the shop. “Detective, are you going to be on the news tonight?”

Detective Llewellyn swiveled his handsome head to look at Tiffany, and for the first time Ronnie saw him smile.

He had a sexy smile. And a sexy butt. For a moment Ronnie spooned ice cream and studied his butt as he bantered with Tiffany. Then she sighed, smiled, put her sundae aside and penciled the next line on her multi-opening mat. Things were definitely back to normal.

Edgar Award-winning author Nancy Springer,

well known for her science fiction, fantasy, and young adult novels,

has written a gripping psychological thriller—smart, chilling, and unrelenting...

available in paperback and e-book in November 2012

from New American Library

Dorrie and Sam White are not the ordinary Midwestern couple they seem. For plain, hard-working Sam hides a deep passion for his wife. And Dorrie is secretly following the sixteen-year-old daughter, Juliet, she gave up for adoption long ago. Then one day at the mall, Dorrie watches horror-stricken as Juliet is forced into a van that drives away. Instinctively, Dorrie sends her own car speeding after it—an act of reckless courage that puts her on a collision course with a depraved killer...and draws Sam into a desperate search to save his wife. And as mother and daughter unite in a terrifying struggle to survive, Dorrie must confront her own dark, tormented past.

“A darkly riveting read...compelling.”

—Wendy Corsi Staub, national bestselling author of Nightwatcher and Sleepwalker

“A fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller that will have you reading late into the night and cheering for the novel's unlikely but steadfast heroine.”

—Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times best-selling author of The Weight of Silence and These Things Hidden

Learn more about all of Nancy’s titles at her website, www.nancyspringer.com.