The Pickled Piper (6 page)

“Would you keep your eyes and ears open here? There's a chance you could overhear something useful.”

“You got it.”

“One of the things I'd love to know more about is how Gordon Pfiefle got the scratches I saw today on his neck and face. They looked pretty fresh.”

“I'll see what I can learn. If any of Gordon's friends stop in, I'll try to get them talking.”

“Just be careful,” Piper warned. “Discreet. We don't want anything getting back to him. And Gordon's only the beginning. I'm sure there are others in this town who wanted Alan Rosemont dead.” As she said that, Piper wondered about Dennis Isley. Tina had shared at least one reason he didn't like Alan. Perhaps there were more?

Before she could throw out the thought to Tina, a young couple with two small children walked in. Tina straightened up and greeted them as they headed toward one of the tables, and Piper turned to polishing off the last of her meal. As she settled her bill, Tina thanked her, adding, after a careful glance at the nearby customers, “I'll be in touch, Piper.” She pulled at one ear, wiggling it, and gave a quick wink. Then she picked up menus and headed over to the young family.

“Hey, guys,” she said. “Nice to see you. Been to the fair?”

“I
should start writing a list of all the people who had something against Alan Rosemont,” Piper said.

“You'll need a big sheet of paper,” Amy advised. She was shelving a shipment of spices that had arrived early Monday morning.

“Wasn't there anybody who liked the man?”

Amy paused, thinking. “Mrs. Franklin, I suppose. She showed up at A La Carte a few times with him for dinner.”

Piper remembered Aunt Judy mentioning a Brenda Franklin. “Mrs.?” she questioned.

“She's a widow. I don't remember a Mr. Franklin, but I think he was killed a long time ago in some kind of accident. He must have left her pretty well-off, because she lives in that big house on Willow Street and fills her time with things like the garden club and stuff. Maybe she likes antiques and that was why she and Alan got along.”

“Maybe,” Piper said. “I—” Amy suddenly dropped a jar of curry powder, which bounced but luckily didn't break.

“Oh! I'm such a klutz! I was doing stuff like that at the restaurant all last night.”

“Your mind is understandably on other things. How is Nate doing?”

“Not good.” Amy picked up the spice jar and sat down, shaking her head. “He's a wreck, I know, though he won't admit it. It showed, though, in his performance last night at the restaurant. I'm worried he might lose his job there if the management decides he's losing them business.” Amy hesitated, her pretty face wrinkling worriedly. “And something more has come out.”

“To do with the murder?”

Amy nodded. “More motivation, if you want to look at it that way.” She sighed. “It seems Alan Rosemont blocked another job that Nate wanted besides the talent show. Something Nate applied for when he first arrived in Cloverdale—teaching at the summer music camp for kids. Again, he would have been perfect for it. He plays lots of other instruments besides the guitar, and he's great with kids. The elementary school music teacher practically begged for Nate to be hired as her assistant. But Alan made sure Nate didn't get it.”

She paused. “Now this is where it gets tricky. Someone who was there at the time apparently told Ben Schaeffer that Alan laughed in Nate's face when he let him know he'd been turned down, and that Nate was furious. Nate doesn't remember it that way. He says Alan, who he barely knew at the time, simply told him he didn't get the job, and Nate shrugged it off thinking something like, ‘win some, lose some.'”

“Hmm. Ben's version makes Nate look much worse.”

“I know! Who could have told Ben something that wasn't true and put Nate in such a bad light?”

Who indeed?
“Maybe we could ask Ben?”

“We could. But I know Ben. Even though he's an auxiliary police officer, he'll get as official sounding as my Dad and say things like ‘he's not at liberty to say,' or ‘he can't discuss an ongoing case.' He can be really pigheaded when he wants to be.”

Plus he's really in love with you
, Piper thought,
and probably highly biased against his rival
. “Well,” she said, “although I believe Nate's telling the truth, unfortunately Ben's version of how Alan handled it sounds credible. In fact, the more I hear about Alan Rosemont, the more surprised I am he lasted this long. How did he grab so much influence?”

Amy shook her head. “Beats me. Maybe he just started volunteering for jobs nobody else wanted and worked his way up. I knew a kid in school who did that, taking on things like study hall monitor. Before we knew it he was student council president, even though nobody much liked him. They just got used to seeing him be in charge.”

“That could have been the case with Rosemont, I suppose,” Piper said. “Or he might have simply lucked out by settling in a town full of nice people who never encountered someone as nastily manipulating before.”

Piper grabbed a large spiral notebook from behind her counter and flipped it open. “Okay, here's the people I know of so far who might have liked to kill Alan Rosemont. There's Lyella Pfiefle, and her husband Gordon Pfiefle. I'm also putting down Dennis Isley, although all I know about him is that he's done work for Alan and wasn't treated well. Do you know anything else?”

“I think he's kind of creepy,” Amy said. “But people hire him, so they must trust his work. Or maybe it's just that he works cheap. I don't know.”

“If he's worked for a lot of people in town maybe someone can tell us where he was Friday night. We can ask around. Who's next?”

Piper's shop door opened and a woman about Aunt Judy's age walked in. “Good morning,” she said with a dimpling smile. “I'm hoping you have more of those delicious sweet-and-sour zucchini pickles. My family loves them.”

“Hi, Mrs. Peterson,” Amy said. She pulled a jar of zucchini pickles off the shelf and handed it to Piper.

“Wonderful!” Mrs. Peterson cried. “You know, I did canning and pickling a few years ago but got away from it, what with one thing or another. But these reminded me how good ‘homemade' can taste—so much better than store-bought. Though I never did anything this exotic.”

“This recipe's as easy as anything you've done,” Piper assured her. She opened the cookbook that had her sweet-and-sour zucchini pickle recipe in it and let Mrs. Peterson look through it awhile.

“You know, I'm going to take this book, too, and study it at home. I just may talk myself into doing this again. I'm sure I still have my canning things. Wouldn't some of these relishes be wonderful to serve when I have the whole family over for Thanksgiving?”

“Definitely,” Piper said, bagging up the pickle jar and cookbook. “And if you need anything new in canning equipment, we have that, too.”

Mrs. Peterson beamed, her interest in pickling again obviously revived, and handed over her credit card. “I went to your booth yesterday,” she said, as Piper totaled up the sale, “for these pickles. That's when I found out about Alan Rosemont. Terrible thing.”

Piper nodded but could see that the woman wasn't too broken up about it. As she slid over the receipt for Mrs. Peterson to sign, she asked, “Did you know him?”

“Oh, I went into his antique shop once or twice.” Mrs. Peterson scribbled her name on the dotted line. “He carried a nice collection of carnival glass for a while.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “But then I heard what he did to poor Mrs. Taylor.”

The way she said it, Piper was almost afraid to ask, but this wasn't the time to get squeamish. “What was that?”

“Ah!” Mrs. Peterson lifted her chin and straightened her shoulders, looking about as indignant as a cat in a bath. “The Taylors have been in this county for generations, you know, and scads of their things have been passed down through the family. Most of it ended up in Dorothy Taylor's big attic. It was a real jumble, and she's getting old and grew awfully tired of dealing with the mess. Alan Rosemont got wind of that and offered to look through her attic and see if there was anything of value.”

Uh-oh.
Piper could guess what was coming.

“Well!” Mrs. Peterson exclaimed, then went on to describe how Alan had convinced Dorothy Taylor that the contents of her attic was more trash than treasure but out of the goodness of his heart he was willing to pay her a modest sum and take it all off her hands. She agreed, believing she'd at least saved the cost of hiring someone to haul it away. “I remember her telling me how glad she was her son wouldn't have a mess of a house to deal with after she passed on, poor soul. Her son, Robby, lives in Poughkeepsie, you know.”

Mrs. Peterson dropped her receipt into her purse before continuing. “When Robby came to visit and learned what she did, he was terribly upset. Poor Dorothy didn't realize there were things he cared about in her attic. But children do that, don't they? They think of their parents' house as their personal museum and their parents as caretakers.”

Did they? Piper thought guiltily of the piles of school yearbooks and other memorabilia she'd left behind after college, blithely assuming they would be preserved without question. But with archeologists as parents, perhaps that wasn't such a bad assumption?

“Was Robby able to retrieve those things?” she asked.

Mrs. Peterson shook her head with much drama. “Alan Rosemont sold off the smaller items—toys in good condition, trunks of wonderful vintage clothing—as fast as he could. Some of the larger pieces like antique furniture in good condition were still in his shop but with astronomical price tags attached. Alan told Robert he had interested buyers but that Robert could make a bid if he liked. Imagine that! Asking him to buy back his own family's things.”

“Robby must have been unhappy,” Piper said.

“Furious is more the word for it. Not only did he lose family mementos, but Robby felt his mother had been fleeced. He complained to Sheriff Carlyle, but that didn't get him very far. Apparently, since Dorothy is of sound mind, the contract of sale she signed was valid.”

“Too bad Mrs. Taylor didn't consult with her son before signing it. I guess living in Poughkeepsie, she doesn't see him all that much?”

“Oh, Robby visits fairly often,” Mrs. Peterson said. “And since this episode, he's stepped it up. Worried, maybe, that Dorothy might sign away her house next. Dorothy entered her quilts in the fair, you know, and he was here to cheer her on.”

“Was he, now?”

“Oh yes. He's a good son.”

Mrs. Peterson picked up her purchase and took her leave. Once the door closed behind her, Piper turned to Amy.

“Well, I think I have a name for line three on my list.”

• • •

L
ater that afternoon, Amy had taken off for her job at A La Carte, and Piper was in her back room, checking that she had a good supply of white vinegar, jars, and other items for her next pickling project. Her radio, still tuned to the classical station, played Gilbert and Sullivan, and Piper started humming along as Yum-Yum sang about the sun and moon in a song from
The Mikado
.

Since she was alone, her hums progressed to singing, and she soon became a Japanese maiden in full costume.

“—I mean to rule the earth as he the sky,” she warbled. “We really know our worth, the sun and I.”

“Must be a nice feeling!” a male voice said from the front of the store, startling Piper to immediate silence. She clicked off her radio and peeked out. Will Burchett stood there, grinning. He'd chucked the white apron and had exchanged the tee and shorts for a plaid shirt and khakis. But his eyes were just as blue as she remembered and currently were crinkled in high amusement.

“I didn't hear you come in,” Piper said, wincing and aware of heat rising in her cheeks.

“Your singing may have drowned it out. But don't stop on my account. It was good.”

“You're too kind. Way too kind. I sing with enthusiasm, and that's the best that can be said of it.” She cleared her throat and came out to her front counter, setting down her clipboard. “So, how did the youth group concession go? Did they raise a good amount?”

“Enough to buy some new basketball equipment and maybe sponsor a hiking trip.”

“Great! That was good of you to pitch in like you did.”

He shrugged, then laughed. “I got roped into it at the last minute. Their regular grill man came down with some sort of bug. Who knows how many others Bill Vanderveen ran through before he called me, but he sounded pretty desperate. I wasn't too sure about handling it, but it turned out fine. They're a good group.”

“Now you'll be at the top of their list, you know.”

He laughed. “I know.” He glanced around and said, “Nice shop.”

“Thanks. I'm pretty proud of it, but I couldn't have set it up without help from a lot of generous people. I hear you bought the Andersons' tree farm?”

“Christmas trees. Right. Ever been out there?”

“Once or twice a long time ago.”

“I've made a lot of changes. You might not recognize it.” He leaned over to read the label on one of Piper's pickle jars. “Zucchini?”

“The Peterson family loves them.”

“Ah. Well, there you go.”

His lingering look of skepticism prompted Piper to grab a jar and hand it to him. “On the house, just to prove you'll like them.”

He took the jar from her, studied it, then looked up at her. “I'll try them, but only if you'll let me show you around my tree farm.”

“Oh! Well, ah, that's fair.” She smiled. “Deal.”

“Great. How's tomorrow evening?”

Piper thought that sounded pretty good, and they agreed that Will would pick her up around seven. He took off with a firm hold on his jar of sweet-and-sour zucchini pickles, and Piper watched as he headed toward a Christmas tree–colored van and climbed in. Then her cell phone dinged, signaling a text message. Piper turned from the window to check the phone.

“Saw this beautiful statue. Reminded me of U,” a text from Scott read. The photo he attached, possibly of an ancient Indian goddess, was graceful and lovely in itself but looked nothing whatsoever like Piper. Still, it made her smile. Just like Scott, she thought, to come up with such a ridiculous comparison.

And with such an uncanny sense of timing.