Murder in a Basket (An India Hayes Mystery) (16 page)

“
Eight at the co-op. In my forge. I’ll be waiting.”

“
I’ll be there.”

“
And come alone.”

That I did not agree to.

As Jerry walked away, David ambled up. “I’m surprised Jerry is here today.”

“
I think work keeps his mind off of things,” I said.

David looked dubious.
“I’m glad I caught you before you left. I’m really impressed with your work, India. You have a signature style. I can see it in these landscapes of the town.”

“
Thank you. That’s very nice of you to say.”

“
I’m sure you want to paint more than just landscapes and portraits of people’s pets.”

“
I do, but these seem to be the paintings I’m able to sell at the moment.”

“
Most people wouldn’t know a real piece of art if it bit them in the behind. If we had a place for you in the cooperative, you’d have the freedom to paint more of what you wanted than what sells the easiest. I’ll talk to the members tonight to see what they think about you joining.”

I thanked him
, and he left. I knew I should be excited by David’s potential offer, but I was too preoccupied with my meeting with Jerry.

I hoped I wasn’t making a mistake.

Maybe I should have brought Mains along to Jerry’s forge that evening rather than Ina. Shoot, even Bobby might have been a better choice. I didn’t ask Mains to come along because he was a cop, and Bobby was working the late shift at the library, which left me with Ina.

Ina didn’t disappoint with her outfit
, either. She wore the kelly green trench coat over a lime green polyester pantsuit, taking a neon approach to detective noir. Instead of pairing the ensemble with a gentleman’s detective hat, she wore the mobcap from the festival. She called the look, “pioneer meets sleuth.” More like pioneer meets frog, if you asked me. I was sure Ina’s look would be all the rage in London and Milan the next fashion season.

She squirmed in her seat, giving the small SUV a little extra hop to its roll.
“Juliet is going to die when I tell her you brought me along to face the killer.”

“
Ina,” I said for the umpteenth time, “Jerry might not be the killer.”

“
Pshaw! He’s the jaywalker, isn’t he? And he confessed to stealing antiques from Victor’s house. Small crimes lead to big ones. It was only a matter of time before he moved on to murder. Tess must have found out about the antique thievery and threatened to report him to the police. And whammo! He hits her on the head with the basket mold to shut her up.”

Is it even legal for someone over seventy to use the term
pshaw
? I wondered.

I’d followed the same logic myself
, although a little less exuberantly. Her summarization of Jerry’s motive and opportunity made sense, but he’d insisted he didn’t kill his wife. I don’t know if his earnestness amounted to much. I’d been lied to before. And if I suspected him of murder, seriously suspected him, why was I meeting him at night at his forge with a geriatric sidekick when I should be calling the police?

“
I doubt there is any direct correlation between jaywalking and murder,” I said, trying to talk both of us out of thinking Jerry was the murderer. “Remember, we are just here to talk, not to accuse him. Whatever he asked me to come out to his forge to hear, he’s not going to share it if you go in there in attack mode.”

The trees bent in the glare of the co-op security lights. They had an eerie skeleton glow about them. I shivered. I was letting
my imagination run away with me. It was close to Halloween. Perhaps I could blame my trepidation on that.

Ina glanced out the window.
“Looks like a storm is coming in.”

I leaned over my steering wheel and deduced that she was right.

“The weather girl said it would rain,” Ina offered. As soon as she said it, a crack of thunder rocked the car. “At least she was right, for once.” She grinned and pointed up beyond the co-op. “There’s his forge. I see the smoke coming out of the chimney.”

The rain came, pelting the windshield in
pinball-sized drops. “I’ll drive closer to the forge. There’s another small parking lot behind the co-op.”

In the sma
ll members’ lot, I put the car in park. Ina rifled through her expansive bag.

“
You wouldn’t want to get your mobcap wet,” I commented, watching the rain. “We’re going to get soaked.”

“
What? Are you going to melt?” Ina questioned. “Don’t be such a sissy.”

I glanced over at Ina and was amazed
to see she’d already traded her mobcap and trench coat for a new getup. Ina was decked out in full-on hurricane gear: slicker, puddle boots, rain hat, and umbrella. All green. She looked like a stout plastic frog. Luckily, I knew better than to say this aloud.

“
That’s easy for you to say,” I said.

“
It’s your own fault for not watching the weather report. You should be more prepared for the weather.” The smile on her face took the bite out of her words. It always did.

“
Yeah,” I muttered. I wore a wool sweater, barn coat, jeans, and running shoes. I’d look like a drowned rat, smell like black mold, and probably have a serious case of chafing before I reached the forge.

“
Here.” She handed me her umbrella.

As I watched the rain roll down the windshield, I began to have second thoughts.
“This is a really, really bad idea. What if Jerry is the killer, and he’s waiting to finish us off? We should call the police and let them sort it out. Or at least we could call Mains.”

Ina snorted.
“I’m not letting that Englishman take all the glory.” She jumped out of the car and scuttled across the lawn. She could move pretty fast for her age.

I followed. A rumble of thunder shook the air, but no lighting came. The eye of the storm wa
s a long way off. Hopefully we would be back at the duplex by that time.

I caught up with Ina as she slipped on wet grass. I caught her before she fell.

“For crying out loud, be careful. I don’t want to have to drive you to the hospital with a broken hip.”

Ina waved my complaint away.

I pulled the umbrella low over my head, as Ina and I trudged over the soggy ground. “Careful.” I advised. “Watch out for gopher holes.”

Ina glanced down.
“Gopher holes?”

What did I know
? I was a city girl. “Just watch where you’re going.”

Despite the umbrella, my legs from the knees down and my sneakers were soaked through by the time we reached the forge. I felt my toes curl from the dampness and the cold. I hated wet feet.

The smithy barn doors were wide open, letting white plumes of smoke escape. Smoke also rose out of the roof through an aluminum chimney.

Once inside, Ina shook off her
raingear like a dog. Most of the flying raindrops landed on me. The smithy was warm. Inside the mouth of the forge, coal smoldered red-hot. A bar of iron stuck out of the coal. Tools sat in disarray on the workbench. On the anvil a decorative shepherd’s crook for the garden waited cold and incomplete.

“
Jerry?” I called.

“
Doesn’t seem responsible of him to leave with his fire going, if he’s not here,” Ina mused.

“
Something is not right.” I said. My skin tingled.

Artists might have a bad rap for being forgetful and disorganized, but really that wasn’t true. Whe
n it comes to our tools, we artists take meticulous care of them because they are so expensive to replace. One misplaced fan brush could set me back fifty dollars. I knew Jerry wouldn’t have left his forge in its current state.

Above us, the rain danced on the centurion shingles.

“Stay here,” I told Ina, and for once she listened to me.

I stepped around the workbench and found Jerry.

He was lying face down on the gravel ground, a sledgehammer gripped in his hand and bloodstain on his back.

I froze
, unable to scream.

A groan snapped me out of my gruesome study.

“Is someone else here?” my voice squeaked. I gripped my furled umbrella like a saber.

The groan came again.

“Is someone here?” I tried to hold back the panic rising in my throat.

Ina poked her head in.
“What’s going on?”

“
Stay out. Jerry’s dead. I think someone else is here. Go to the car and call the police.”

“
But . . .”

“
Go!”

To my surprise, Ina went.

The groan came again. I walked further into the forge. The heat radiating from the furnace was almost too intense to bear. When I rounded the corner of the large anvil in the middle of the room, I saw Celeste, lying on her side, holding her head. In her other hand, she held a bloody iron spike.

“
Don’t move,” I said, showing her my umbrella. Not that it was much of a weapon compared to all the sharp objects in the room.

Celeste rolled over and threw up on the dirt floor.

Ina rushed back into the forge a few minutes later. Celeste lay on her side and looked as if she’d be sick again at any moment. I kept my umbrella trained on her. “Did you call the police?”

“
Yep. Oh, my!” Ina exclaimed when she saw Jerry’s body. Much of her bravado evaporated. The color drained from her small face, making her look like all of her seventy-odd years.

“
Come over here,” I said.

Ina stumbled in my direction. She looked down at Celeste, who still had the spike firmly gripped in her hand.
“Is that the beader?”

“
Yes,” I said and handed her the umbrella. “Watch her while I check on Jerry.”

She took the umbrella and held it like a baseball bat.
“He looks dead to me. Really dead.”

I touched the side of Jerry’s throat
, searching for a pulse. I didn’t feel one. Not that I expected one with the wound on his back, but I didn’t want to be reprimanded for not checking, as I had been when I discovered Tess’s body.

Ina recovered quickly.
“Juliet is never going to believe this. I bet none of her fabulous grandkids have found a dead body.”

I wasn’t sure what to do about Celeste. She was still lying on the floor behind the anvil. I told Ina not to get too close.

Ina tsked. “Lost her cookies, did she? Well, that’s what you get for killing somebody.”

Luckily, I heard sirens and wasn’t forced to make a decision. My plan was to give my statement, hand the whole mess over to the police, and get out of there. It was my second dead body of the week, and I was through playing super sleuth. It w
asn’t nearly as fun as it seemed in books.

Two Stripling Police Department cruisers, an ambulance, the
medical examiner’s black car, and two SUVs from the sherriff’s department pulled into the members’ parking lot. Behind them, I saw Mains’s unmarked sedan.

The techs and deputies got ri
ght to work and booted Ina and me out of the forge. “Careful,” Ina advised. “There’s a murderess in there.”

Ina and I stood under the small overhang just outside of the forge’s barn door. It did little to keep the rain off. Cold rainwater fell in rivulets from the cracks in the weathered wood and into the collar of my coat. Ina in her El Ni
ño getup looked perfectly comfortable though.

When Mains stepped out of his car in a tan trench coat, he jogged through the rain and under the overhang. He shook the excess water off of his coat and onto me.
“Thanks,” I said. Not that I could get much wetter at this point. I was already soaked to the skin.

He misunderstood my meaning, which was just as well.
“I got here as quick as I could. I see I didn’t beat the cavalry though.”

“
Yup, I’m expecting Custer to gallop up next.”

“
Are you okay?” He squinted at me in the dim light.

“
Peachy.”

“
Really?” He was dubious.

“
I’m fine. Shocked, but fine. You’d think I would be getting used to this kind of thing.”

“
When you get used to it, then I’ll get worried.” Mains ran his hand through his rain-soaked hair. “This is going to be a nightmare. The case started in Stripling, but this far out of town the county guys are sniffing around, and maybe the state troopers will want a piece.”

I was glad it wasn’t my headache.

All business now. “Give me the outline.”

So I did. I told him about Jerry asking me that afternoon to stop by the forge because he had something to tell me about Tess. Ina interjected every couple of minutes when she thought I needed correction.

Mains grimaced at this. “So you brought Ina?”

Ina adjusted her rain hat so
that the water collected there fell onto Mains’s shoes. “I resent that, Mr. Detective.”

Mains ignored her.
“Why didn’t you call the police or me?”

“
Because you would have insisted on coming along, and then Jerry wouldn’t have told me anything.”

Irritation crossed Mains’
s face, but like the gentleman he was, he pushed it back. “I’d better get back there and fight for my piece. Anything else I should know before I head back?”

I told him about Celeste and the bloody spike.

Mains’s eyes widened. “Geez, you should have led with that. That’s my arrest.”

“
You think she did it?”

Mains gave me a look.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Ina shook her head.
“That’s what I told her. Celeste has to be the killer. The evidence is pretty damning.”

“
You two wait here. I’ll send out Knute to record your statements.”

It would have to be Knute, wouldn’t it?

Knute appeared at our side and was not too happy to be assigned to witness-recording when there was a fresh dead body and a suspect caught literally red-handed within fifty feet.

Ina was in the middle of a longwinded version of our adventure when one the sheriff’s deputies came out, holding a handcuffed
Celeste by the arm. Celeste, fully conscious, had tears streaming down her face. “I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. I loved him! I love him!”

The officer didn’t even blink as he pulled her along. He loaded her into the back of his cruiser, and they drove away. Knute finished with us and went back inside the forge.

I shivered as a cold trail of rainwater slid down my collar.

The plastic of her raincoat crackled as Ina moved.
“What’s wrong with you?”

“
I’m fine,” I said without emotion.

“
You’re not fine,” she insisted.

A tear slid down my cheek.
“What if it’s my fault?”

Ina grabbed my hand.
“Your fault for what, honey?”

“
What if it’s my fault Jerry’s dead? I should have let the case go. Why do I always get involved where I don’t belong?” Another tear followed the first.

Ina’s face was stern.
“First of all, if this Jerry character was going to get himself killed there was nothing you did or didn’t do that would have caused it. You didn’t stick him, did you?”

I shook my head.

“And second of all, you poke where you don’t belong because that’s the way you are. That’s the way you’re made. I’m the same way. It’s better if you just accept it than fight your nature.”

Was that
supposed to make me feel better? Because it was doing one heck of a job, I thought.

Mains came out with two other cops.
“Next of kin?”

“
Just the stepson, sir.”

The stepson, I thought. Derek. How much more could the kid bear? How much more could anyone bear
in a situation like this, no matter what their age? This was the third parental figure for him to lose in violent death.

Mains sighed and echoed my thoughts.
“Poor kid. I’ll tell him. You guys get everything you can on Ms. Berwyck. We need this to stick.”

I cleared my throat. Mains looked at me.
“You and Ina can go home. Stop by the station tomorrow morning to sign your statement.”

The crime scene techs wheeled out the body bag on a gurney. I looked away, but Ina followed them to the ambulance
, peppering them with questions about chain of evidence and rigor mortis.

“
I think it will be easier for Derek if I’m there when you tell him. That’s where you are going, isn’t it?”

He nodded.
“Does this include your sidekick?” He gestured to Ina.

“
No.”

He sighed.
“I’ll swing by your house on my way there. It might be pretty late.”

“
I’ll stay up.”

Mains smiled, and I felt my shoulders ache.