The Outsmarting of Criminals: A Mystery Introducing Miss Felicity Prim (24 page)

“I’ve heard that bathing in Epsom salts can help if you’re constipated,” Spike put in. “Can someone explain how that works? I mean, sit in salt water and all of a sudden …”

“Spike,
not now
,” Dawes said, more sternly than Miss Prim had ever heard him speak. “Lorraine, you were saying?”

“
Before I left Ridgemont, I told Lucian about the break-in at the historical society. But I’m afraid that’s not much to go on. For Lucian, references to history can spur thoughts of anything from ancient Ur and Mesopotamia to the Arab Spring.”

“Anything else?”

“I bought him a book of English crossword puzzles, which he’s quite enjoying, even if the words he’s writing into the blocks are strictly of his own coinage. I hadn’t realized he likes puzzles so much, so I told him about tavern puzzles and promised to get some for him.”

“Tavern puzzles?” Miss Prim had never heard of these.

“You know, Felicity. Those puzzles that have two pieces of metal intricately intertwined, and you have to separate them. Lucian is quite hopeless at anything like that, so I thought they might keep him occupied and out of trouble for a few weeks.”

A light bulb seemed to illuminate in the heads of Lorraine and Ezra simultaneously.

“Tavern puzzles,” Ezra said. “Maude’s.”

Ezra and Lorraine took off
—really, Miss Prim thought admiringly, Lorraine was as spry as a much younger woman—while Martin Reed, Spike Fremlin, and Miss Prim brought up the rear.

Ezra sent Lorraine and Spike into the tavern, directing Reed to join him as he unlatched the gate leading to the tavern’s rear yard.

“Any time Lucian’s disappeared, we’ve found him outdoors,” Ezra explained. “Miss Prim, you’d better wait here. Come on, Reed.” The detective and the police officer disappeared into the rear yard.

Wait here?
Miss Prim should have known this moment would come: the moment in which the professionals direct the
amateur
, the
neophyte
, the
tyro
to mind her own business
and not interfere with an official police investigation. Miss Prim wondered at Detective Dawes’s naïveté. Did the man
really
believe that this particular amateur would behave as directed? Minding one’s own business is
not
the way to develop experience in criminal outsmarting.

S
he tiptoed quietly into the yard and watched as Dawes and Reed inspected the dumpster and storage shed. Another gate in the rear of the yard gave onto a service road running behind the businesses on the square’s north side. But the gate was locked and the fence too high for Lucian to climb.

Miss Prim nearly jumped out of her shoes when she felt a stirring in the pine trees behind her. Could Lucian have sneaked up behind her? She wheeled around and cr
ouched into a self-defense pose only to discover a calico cat rubbing against her leg and meowing loudly. She suspected Bruno would not appreciate this interloper’s efforts to charm her, but she could not stop herself from getting down onto her haunches to pet the cat, which rolled happily on her back and grabbed Miss Prim’s hand gently with her paws. It was surprising, Miss Prim thought, that it had taken so long for a cat to show up; everyone knows that cats are a staple of locked-room mysteries taking place in New England villages populated by kooky individuals, and they (both cats and kooky individuals) are frequently the chosen companions of aging spinsters.

“He’s not here,” Miss Prim heard Dawes say. “Let’s see if Spike and Lorraine have had any luck.”

They hadn’t. Maude had helped the two women inspect every inch of the tavern, from the basement through the cramped attic, but Lucian Koslowski was nowhere to be found.

The members of the police force regrouped in front of the tavern. Dawes gave the orders. “
Spike, you and I will check the lake. Reed, check the square. Lorraine, Miss Prim: Go back to Ridgemont. Call us if Lucian comes home. We’ll be in touch as soon as we find him. Try not to worry, Lorraine. He always manages to take care of himself.”

“Thank you, Ezra,” Lorraine said sincerely. “I’ve been thinking about getting him one of those GPS-type devices so that we can track him when he gets loose. This time I’m going to do it. I’ll tell him it’s a secret crystal offered to
special humans chosen by the inhabitants of Atlantis. That’ll give him incentive to wear it.”

“Lorraine,” Miss Prim said, “may I meet you at Ridgemont? I have a few things I need to discuss with Detective Dawes.”

Lorraine winked at Miss Prim knowingly. “I’ll leave the door unlocked, Felicity. I’m going to search the house again, starting in the basement. If you could take care of the second-floor rooms and the attic, that would be so helpful. Come get me if you find him. He might be disoriented, and I’ll know how to deal with him.”

As
Lorraine began walking quickly toward Ridgemont, Miss Prim turned to Dawes.

“Detective, I know you are busy, and I won’t take too much of your time, but I wonder if I might ask your advice. I don’t wish to be alarmist, but I have seen too many people”
—and by
people
, she meant
characters
—“ignoring danger signs and not informing the police. I don’t wish to be one who discounts ominous portents, only to regret my decisions later. At first I thought I should not bother you with these matters, but I am growing increasingly alarmed.”

“You don’t strike me as the alarmist type, Miss Prim. I’m all ears.”

So Miss Prim told him about the telephone calls and the hang-ups, the person (?) she saw lurking in her backyard, and the unknown/unnamed men who had been asking about her and Dolly at the bookstore.

Detective Dawes narrowed his eyes.
Here it comes
, Miss Prim thought. Here is where a law-enforcement professional discounts everything I have just said, implying that I am fanciful, perhaps paranoid. Here is where Detective Dawes, in keeping with genre traditions, suggests that I am lonely and inclined toward the dramatic; that the telephone calls were simply random wrong numbers with no meaning; that the creature in my yard was a deer, not a person; that I will soon discover the identities of the men asking about me and Dolly, and that they will turn out to be well-wishers. In short, that I am rather silly, even though the mounting evidence shows that some person, or persons, may have malicious intent toward me.

T
o Miss Prim’s surprise, Dawes did nothing of the kind. Instead, he said, “Hmm. If just one of those things happened, I’d say it was no big deal. But there seems to be a pattern. Can you think of anyone who might … ?”

Miss Prim knew he was thinking of a polite, non-
scaremongering way of saying
want to hurt you
.

“I can think of two possibilities, Detective.” She told him about Dolly’s impending visit and the unresolved situation with Benjamin and his possible clandestine activities. “As for the other,” she continued, “I fear I have made an enemy of Miss Lavelle. She is compelled to believe the worst about me and has taken to haranguing me, quite loudly, in public places. During our most recent donnybrook, she accused me of trying to coax Faye and Kit Cotillard into my ‘web,’ to use her infelicitous phrase, when in reality I have hired Kit to walk Bruno, and Faye, Kit, and I are fast becoming friends.”

“That’s Gladys for you. She’s so unhappy here, I don’t even know why she stays. She should go somewhere else, make a fresh start.”

“Yes, Detectiv
e, but as my mother used to say,
Wherever you go, there you are
.”

“I’ll talk to her, Miss Prim. She’s a bully,
and she’s jealous of you. She hates that an attractive woman has moved into town and has made more friends in a week than she has in a lifetime. She thinks of herself as Queen of Greenfield and she doesn’t like having a rival.”

Miss Prim’s cheeks became rosy.
Being called attractive often has that effect on a modest woman.

Dawes handed her a card. “
This has my cell number on it, Miss Prim. Call me, or 911, if you feel seriously threatened. Will you be all right in the meantime?”

“Thank you for your kind offer, Detective,” Miss Prim responded, taking the card and tucking it into her pocket. “And thank you for taking me seriously. That kind of respect is not often given to people in my position, at least not in fiction.”

Dawes smiled. “Fortunately, this isn’t fiction.”

*

Henry and Albert greeted Miss Prim as she walked tentatively through Ridgemont’s front door. Both dogs seemed subdued; perhaps they understood intuitively that something was amiss. Miss Prim patted them as they stuck their heads out the door, searching for Bruno. To reward their good behavior, she made her way to the kitchen and gave each a treat from the jar.

She carefully climbed the junk-laden staircase and began methodically searching each room of Ridgemont’s second
story. At the head of a staircase was a large office with a leopard rug in the center of the floor. Miss Prim wondered if Lucian had killed the animal on safari; she hoped not. Lucian’s diplomas hung on the wall behind the desk, but the other walls had been stripped of their adornments; bright, unfaded bits of wallpaper stood out in marked contrast to the remainder of the faded and peeling wallpaper. A closet held a suit of chain mail and a ball of twine about two feet in diameter, but no Lucian.

Two other rooms appeared to be unused guest bedrooms. The first
room held hundreds of jars of nuts and bolts, with each jar containing one specific type or size. Someone—Lucian, surely—had arranged the nuts and bolts so that each lay at the bottom of the jar, in the same position, with no two touching each other. The second bedroom held what appeared to be the world’s largest pillow collection: round, square, overstuffed, beanbag, triangular, patterned, monochromatic, multicolored. As a child she would have loved playing in the room, jumping on the cushions for hours alongside Celia and Noel; now, however, she feared she might sink into the cushions and never emerge, like a character in an Edward Gorey cartoon.

The large room at the end of the corridor was clearly Lorraine and Lucian’s bedroom. Lorraine had asked Miss Prim to search the second
story, and she hadn’t declared any room off limits, but Miss Prim’s decorum and modesty prevented her from entering and searching the homeowners’ private suite.

The door to the attic was open on its hinges.
As she began climbing the stairs, Miss Prim pushed back thoughts of Tippi Hedren in
The Birds
entering an attic space she knew she should not have entered. She expected to find a dusty, musty attic filled with old steamer trunks and dressmaker’s mannequins. Instead she found a movie paradise. Luxurious pink couches and divans sat along the walls; fluffy white rugs appeared to float over the floor like clouds. Movie magazines sat neatly stacked on shelves and on small tables.

And the walls! A veritable
Who’s Who
of Hollywood’s most beautiful, from Theda Bara and Clara Bow, through Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn, to Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway. On the men’s wall, Clark Gable and Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weismuller and Brad Pitt, all in glorious black and white to maximize their glamor.

“I see you’ve found my sanctuary,” said Lorraine, wh
o had miraculously materialized. Miss Prim nearly jumped out of her skin.

“Lorraine! It’s simply stunning. What a beautiful space.”

“I come here when I need a break from reality. It’s relaxing to be surrounded by beauty. Inspiring, too. I don’t suppose you’ve found Lucian, have you?”

“Sadly, no. I checked all the rooms on the sec
ond floor, except your bedroom of course.”

“He’s not on the
main floor, in the basement, or in the yard, either. Come on, let’s have a cup of coffee. Or tea. Then I’ll get the car and we can go out searching until it gets dark. Maybe he’ll be home by then. He’s pulled that trick before. I’ll look up, and there he is, as if he’d never been gone.”

“I’d be happy to drive, Lorraine, so you can focus on the search.”

“Thank you for the offer, Felicity, but my nerves are much too frazzled as it is.”

In the kitchen, Miss Prim took notes while Lorraine brainstormed a list of Lucian’s possible whereabouts. The women hastily drank their beverages and then climbed into Lorraine’s huge black Cadillac.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

Lorraine and Miss Prim spent two hours driving around Greenfield in search of Lucian, but their efforts
met with no success. As dusk descended, Miss Prim suggested that Lorraine might be better off at home, waiting for the police to call and Lucian to return.

“Would you like me to stay with you tonight, Lorraine?” Miss Prim asked. “If you’ll
leave me at Rose Cottage, I’ll pack an overnight bag and meet you back at Ridgemont.”

“That’s sweet of you, Felicity, it really is. But it would only make more work for me. I’d have to get one of the guest rooms ready, and I’m stressed enough as it is.”

“As you wish, Lorraine. Please call any time you need me, and I shall be there. And do let me known as soon as Lucian is found. I will rest so much easier.”