The Devil's Puzzle (21 page)

“No,” I conceded. “It just doesn’t seem like something she’d do.”

“Old friends now, are you?”

“No. But how could she blow up city hall if she doesn’t leave her house?”

“She did then. The hermit thing started after that. I’m not sure when. For years she would wander through town, mostly at night. I know some of the older women sought her out for advice and stuff,” he said. “The rumor is she would cast spells for them and read their future. But not like one of those storefront psychics. What she predicted was real.”

“She pretty much told me she’s just sharing gossip she’s heard.”

He shook his head, unconvinced. “I don’t know, Nell. She knows things.”

“She said you’re afraid of getting married.”

“She did?”

“And she thought that you and I should put the idea on the back burner for a while.”

He took a breath before speaking. “At this point, any remark I make will somehow get me in trouble.”

“Look at that.” I laughed. “You know things, too. Maybe you’re a witch.”

“Me, Mary Shipman, John Archer. The whole town is full of them.”

Glad might not have been on Jesse’s suspect list, but she was on mine. And if anyone in town was a strange, broom-and-pointy-hat witch, my vote was for her. Something had to explain why the whole town, including Jesse, would be afraid of crossing her, and a spell was as good an explanation as any. I headed down Main Street, figuring I’d grab her at one of her usual hangouts, but Glad, as it turned out, was not an easy person to track down. I called her house, but there was no answer. I called her cell phone, and it went straight to voice mail.

After stopping in at the library, the local hair salon, and Chic, the only shop in town that sold designer goods, I gave up and started for home. But I didn’t get any farther than the park.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” I said to Oliver, who had a canvas set up on an easel, with paints around him and a very familiar furcovered face looking to somehow make it into the painting.

“Hey ya, Barney,” I said as I patted the dog. Barney jumped up and licked my face, as though he hadn’t seen me for years. “What are you doing, Oliver?”

“Painting the gazebo with the river in the background. Maggie is auctioning it off at the church fair.”

I glanced at the canvas, which so far had a primer coat of white and some soft blues mixed into the background, with a light pencil sketch of the gazebo over the paint. “How’s it going?”

“Look, Nell, don’t think you can get any information from me, okay? I’ve made a promise and I’m keeping it,” Oliver snapped.

“Promise about what?”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You go talk to your grandmother.”

“I would, but I don’t think she came home last night.” I grinned.

“Should I stop by the shop with a bottle of champagne?”

“No. Listen, just forget the whole engagement. Eleanor and I are fine as we are. That’s the end of it.”

“Did you ask her? Did she say no?”

“I didn’t ask her. I changed my mind, and that’s the end of it.” Oliver’s voice was shaking.

I reached out and took his arm. “It’s fine,” I started to say, “it’s—”

“Hey there, folks.” The mayor was walking toward us, with Molly right beside him. Barney walked forward to greet them, but I stayed where I was.

“Hi,” I called out. “Oliver’s doing the painting for the auction.”

Oliver’s shoulders stooped and he picked up a brush, halfheartedly painting a streak of blue on the canvas.

“You two have gotten chummy,” I said to Molly as she and the mayor reached us.

“The mayor’s been telling me all about himself. Did you know he was the gardener over at my house—Grace’s house—when Winston was alive?”

“I did,” I said, letting it slide that she called Eleanor’s house “my house.”

The mayor seemed enchanted with her. “I think you’ve got competition here, Nell. This one has been asking a lot of questions about the old days, about her uncle.”

“What have you told her?”

“Well, everything.” He laughed. “I was just so pleased to find out that we had a Roemer in town. A member of one of our most prominent families back for the anniversary! It’s kismet.”

“So you told her . . .” I prompted.

“I told her how Winston knew the Latin names of all the flowers I planted. I also mentioned, though I said it meant nothing, that I once overheard Winston and his mother have harsh words about Eleanor.”

I looked at Molly, who stood expressionless but still seemed rather pleased with herself. “What do you mean, ‘harsh words’?” I asked Larry.

“I don’t remember what they said. It was some years ago. But I do remember the tone. He was very angry, and he said something about how Eleanor was the cause of it.”

I glanced toward Oliver, who was uncharacteristically quiet. Oliver had always jumped to Eleanor’s defense whether she needed it or not. For him to be silent now made me even more curious about what had happened between my grandmother and him.

“Nell, I want a word with you.” Larry grabbed my arm and walked me a few yards from the others. “I have something very important, and very delicate, to discuss with you.” He whispered—though the mayor’s whisper was still loud enough for anyone to hear. “I need you to talk with Eleanor for me.”

“What about?”

“I was thinking that we could have tours of her house during the anniversary weekend.”

“It’s an old house, Mayor, but it’s not really historical. It’s been remodeled and the furnishings—”

“It’s not the house I was thinking of.”

“The hole in the backyard.”

He nodded. “Would generate a lot of interest.”

“There’s no way Eleanor will allow you to do that.”

“But if you ask her.”

I laughed. “Not a chance.”

“Okay. Maybe you’re right about that. It would be a little intrusive to have people walking around her backyard,” he conceded, “so maybe we just have a few people go up there now and take some pictures.”

“The police already took pictures.”

“Nell,” he said, his frustration with me boiling up. “We could get a lot of press about a possible Revolutionary War soldier found in a leading citizen’s garden.”

“Mayor, you know that isn’t true . . .”

“Look, Nell, this town needs something more than a beautiful spot on the Hudson if we’re going to get tourists up here. I’d like to see that happen, as the mayor and as a business owner. I’ll bet if you ask any shop owner in town, your grandmother included, if they’d like to see more people coming here to spend their money, the answer would be yes.”

“I know that. But making up some story about a soldier and getting my grandmother to play along isn’t the way to bring tourism dollars to Archers Rest.”

“Don’t be so sure about that. I’ve already gotten some interest from several newspapers. Regional newspapers. They want to come up and take some photos of the place. All I need is for you to get her to say yes.”

“I can ask, but I don’t think—”

“That’s fine. Nell, thank you. I’ll call the newspapers and tell them you will expect them in week or so.”

“Mayor, you probably should talk to Jesse before you bring a bunch of reporters up here.”

“I don’t need the permission of my chief of police.”

“I’m not saying that. It’s just that he’s getting a DNA sample from Winston’s sister.”

“I know a way to talk to these reporters that hints at something without saying anything. And unless Jesse has a one-hundred-percentpositive identification of the skeleton . . .”

“Not yet, but . . .”

“Then all I need is Eleanor’s permission. And I’d rather you got it for me. Talking to Molly has brought up a lot of old memories of my time at the Roemer house. I haven’t shared them all with Molly. Not yet. But I think if Eleanor and I spoke now, it might naturally come up.” As he spoke he looked back toward Molly. “And I think we’d all rather forget any unpleasantness from the past, don’t you?”

CHAPTER 33

I
walked from the park in a daze. The mayor had threatened me. At least it felt like he had. And Oliver was backing away from a future with Eleanor. Whenever I got involved in an investigation I always searched for the truth. Now what I wanted more than anything was a time machine to go back to the day when Oliver and I came up with the stupid idea of digging up Eleanor’s garden.

I went toward Someday Quilts. At the last minute I decided I wasn’t ready to face my grandmother, so I ducked into Jitters in the hopes of talking things over with Carrie. Instead I walked straight into the one person I’d been looking for all afternoon.

“Nell, dear. You do spend a lot of time in this place.”

Glad’s voice dripped with a combination of concern, sarcasm, and condescension. If I spent years trying to imitate it, I wouldn’t have managed to pull off such a trifecta of superiority.

“Most of the town hangs out in here.” I pointed toward the full tables and long line of people in front of us. “Carrie makes the best coffee.”

Carrie, at the mention of her name, widened her eyes and stared. She had a message for me; that much I could figure out. But since Carrie had a half-dozen caffeine-hungry patrons waiting for her, it would have to wait.

I settled into the line next to Glad and smiled as friendly a smile as I could. “I’ve been looking for you,” I said.

“There’s a problem with the show?”

“No. Everything’s going well. I’m working on my quilt. I have promises now for more than twenty others, and most of the local businesses have agreed to let me display quilts outside their windows.”

“It’s going to be outside?”

“Yes. Won’t that be nice?” I asked, more rhetorically than as an attempt at approval. Not that it mattered; I could see Glad wasn’t approving.

I tried again. “We’ll have quilts up and down Main Street and on several of the side streets in the downtown area. I’m looking for a couple more slots, and of course I have to secure the permits, but I think it will dress up the whole town, making it very bright and colorful for the anniversary celebration.”

“Assuming it doesn’t rain.”

I counted to three before speaking. “Well, if it rains, that spoils more than the quilt show,” I reminded her. “The parade, the carnival, and the fireworks are all taking place outside.”

“Which is why it would have been nice to have the quilt show indoors. So people would have somewhere to go if it rained.” She sighed and looked at me with pity and sadness. “Still, I know you’re only doing your best, Nell. And you’re not very experienced with an event of this importance.”

“Is that why you called my grandmother?”

She looked puzzled, then her gaze hardened. “I didn’t call your grandmother.”

It wouldn’t be worth challenging her directly. I knew that much about Glad. I simply smiled. “I’ll do my best with the show,” I said.

“That’s all I ask.”

“Thanks for understanding,” I said, trying to keep my voice light and friendly. “That’s not actually why I wanted to talk to you. I just wanted to see if you were okay after what happened last night.”

“Of course I’m okay. Nothing happened last night.”

“I nearly ran into your car.”

She glared at me. “When?”

“When I was pulling out of the cemetery at about two this morning,” I said. “You drove right past me, and you were driving pretty fast. I only missed your car by inches.”

“I was in bed at two in the morning, Nell. And my car was in my garage. You must be mistaken.”

“You drive a yellow BMW, don’t you? It’s the only one I’ve ever seen in town. That was the car that drove past me last night,” I said. “It’s kind of hard to miss.”

“It wasn’t mine.”

“Could it have been your husband driving?”

I rarely saw Glad’s husband, an executive with an electronics company who traveled for business. Or, if I believed the rumor, just to get away from his wife.

“It wasn’t my husband,” Glad said. “He’s in London. He wanted me to join him, of course, but I’m here working on the celebration and absolutely couldn’t get away.”

“You didn’t loan your car to anyone?”

“No. And anyone I would trust my car to wouldn’t be out at that hour. Only people looking for trouble are out at that hour.”

“That may be,” I said, ignoring the implication. “Especially considering what happened to John Archer’s headstone.”

“What happened?”

“Someone threw a can of red paint on it. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard.”

“When?”

“Right about the time your car drove past me.”

“You mean, right before you exited the cemetery?”

I smiled. “I
found
the red paint, Glad. I didn’t put it there. In fact, I reported it to the police.”

“You and Jesse must have the most interesting pillow talk.”

Just as she and I were about to get to the front of the line, Glad tapped her foot impatiently as if she couldn’t wait a second longer, then turned and walked out of Jitters.