Chapter 4

I was the one who fell into the disaster. And all I was doing was being conscientious. Or maybe nosy.

When a building is being remodeled, one of the problems is keeping track of what’s going on with the construction without getting in the way.

Six months earlier TenHuis Chocolade had bought the building next door. It had previously been occupied by a business aimed at the tourist trade, a gift and novelties shop with the theme of clowns. The store had offered clown costumes, clown tricks, clown books, clown cards, clown candy, clown makeup, and any other clown paraphernalia manufactured. The owner had even performed as a clown.

After his unfortunate demise, his family put the building up for sale, and Aunt Nettie, with urging from her niece and business manager, had purchased the structure. Because of its history, we all still called it the Clown Building.

It wasn’t very fancy. Like much of the downtown of Warner Pier, the narrow brick structure had been put up in the last decade of the 1800s. It hadn’t been kept up well during much of its hundred-plus years. When we got it, it had needed new wiring, a new roof, new plumbing, new everything. The building was going to double the size of TenHuis Chocolade—and we did need the room—but making the Clown Building useful was going to require a lot of work.

We were just getting started on the project. The only part of the work that was finished so far was updating the apartment upstairs. In a resort town like Warner Pier, nearly all the downtown buildings have apartments upstairs. These are usually rented by summer workers—sometimes year-round workers—and provide a little extra income to the building owners. The previous fall Joe and I had taken off from our respective jobs for a week and completely redone the four-room apartment in the Clown Building. A very pretty girl named Chayslee Brett Zimmerman now lived there. She worked for a downtown restaurant. Not as a waitress. No, Chayslee was a chef.

Aunt Nettie was the official owner of the property, of course, but as her representative, I was in charge of spending a lot of the money. I was responsible for seeing that the renovation went according to plan and for making sure that the plans were going to work. If the tile wasn’t the right color or a door opened the wrong way, I had to see that the problem was corrected.

So I needed to tour the place every day, or so I thought, and I tried to do it at a time when I wouldn’t annoy the workmen. But most days the workmen came around seven thirty or eight. I wasn’t so devoted to my job that I showed up at six a.m. so I could look around before they came. Instead I often made a tour at lunchtime. But on Saturdays, when no workmen were there, or at least very few of them, I tried to do a longer walk-through early in the day.

That was my excuse for showing up that morning.

I had parked on the street, next to the pickup of one of the construction crew chiefs, Mike Westerly.

Mike and I often arrived around the same time. He was a burly guy, at least six foot four, with hair as red as Dolly Jolly’s. In contrast with his striking appearance—huge guy with bright red hair—he spoke very quietly. I always had to try hard to hear him.

“Can you get in through the front, Mike?” I asked. “If not, you can cut through our building.”

I could see Mike’s lips move, but as usual I could barely hear his voice. “I have a key,” he said.

The whole front of the Clown Building was currently gone. Mike put on his orange hard hat and opened a makeshift door in the boarded-up front. I opened the street door at TenHuis Chocolade, went in, and locked the door behind myself. We wouldn’t be admitting customers until ten o’clock.

I’d barely hung up my jacket when the yelling started in back of the building.

The only people expected there that day were the construction workers, so my first fear was that some sort of accident had occurred. Choosing the quickest way to the sound, I ran through our workroom and break room, opened the alley door, and peeked around it. Mike was standing in the alley, and he seemed to be looking directly at me.

“Hey! Hey! Come see!” His soft voice was gone. Now his shouts were echoing off the brick walls that lined the alley.

Mike had walked through the building and changed from a calm, almost sleepy guy to one who was close to panic.

“Jack! There’s a dead body in here!”

I realized Mike was calling for the contractor, Jack VanSickle.

A dead body? In the Clown Building? I couldn’t take it in. I stepped out the door and turned into the alley, determined to figure out what was going on.

A voice came from behind me. “Anybody we know?”

I turned to see Jack VanSickle walking down the alley toward me.

In contrast to Mike, VanSickle looked calm, as if he found a dead body every morning when he showed up for work.

“It’s not a homeless guy,” Mike said.

I’d been told that homeless people sometimes broke into construction sites, maybe because they weren’t always securely locked up. So I guess that had been Mike’s first expectation.

He spoke again. “It’s some old gal.”

“Does she need CPR?” Jack asked.

“Too late for that.”

Still acting cool, Jack gave me a casual nod as he passed, and I followed him over to the Clown Building’s back door. He and Mike went in the door and knelt about ten feet inside. It was not very light there, but I could see that they were staring at a heap of blue and black fabric. This was apparently the body. I could see the soles of a pair of boots, side by side, with the toes flopped out limply. But I couldn’t see a face. The body was lying absolutely flat on its back.

Neither Jack nor Mike said anything. Then Jack reached in his pocket and brought out a cell phone. He hit three keys and spoke to the 9-1-1 operator, reporting the discovery.

“We’ll wait outside,” he told the phone. “No, it doesn’t look like a homeless guy. It’s an older woman, nice jacket, warm clothes. But I don’t recognize her.”

I couldn’t resist. I walked in the back door and approached the body closely enough to see the face. I guess I gasped, because both Jack and Mike looked up at me.

My voice was a whisper when I spoke again.

“It’s Abigail Birdsong,” I said. “What else can harpoon? I mean, happen!”

My twisted tongue had tripped me up again. I tried to ignore it.

I think I just stood there, my mouth gaping. I know I felt as if I’d been hit by one of the two-by-fours that were lying around the site. Hit right in the head.

Jack VanSickle and Mike gently pulled me out the back door, muttering about law enforcement and other important factors. I didn’t argue; they were perfectly right. I offered to let them wait inside our back door where it was a bit warmer, but they shook their heads and zipped their jackets.

“The cops won’t be long,” VanSickle said.

“I’ll leave our back door unlocked,” I said. “Come in if y’all change your minds.” Then I went into our break room, made a pot of coffee, and thought. My heart was pounding and my head spinning.

How on earth had Abigail Birdsong wound up dead, and what was her body doing in the Clown Building?

And what had happened to her? Did she drop dead of a heart attack? Keel over from a stroke? My glimpse of her had shown no sign that she had died by violence. There was no blood, for example. But if she simply died of natural causes, why was she laid out neatly on the floor of the Clown Building? That made no sense.

Unlike the loosely secured type of construction site that invites the homeless or other prowlers, the Clown Building was locked up tight when everyone left. The front door, the back door, and the door into our building—all were tightly secured every night.

Had Mrs. Birdsong been moved into the Clown Building after she was dead? That would probably make it homicide.

And what should I do? Should I call Beau? Was he Abigail’s closest relative? But Abigail seemed to be friendlier to Bunny. Should I call her instead?

I definitely felt that I should Do Something—with capital letters. I mean, a body had been discovered on property I was responsible for. I needed to react. Didn’t I? Or did I?

And what about witnesses? A lot of the apartments in our block were empty for the winter, but Dolly Jolly lived over TenHuis, the pretty Chayslee lived over the Clown Building, and Andrew Hartley lived over the wine shop, where he was manager. Was it possible that some of them had seen something?

My thoughts were tumbling around. Then I heard a siren in the alley and peeked out to see a Warner Pier police car pull in. It was the one with CHIEF OF POLICE painted on the doors. This, of course, made me think of the building’s official owner: my aunt, who was the wife of the chief of police.

“Aunt Nettie needs to know about this,” I said aloud. “If she doesn’t already know.” Hogan might have told her.

I poured myself a cup of the coffee I’d made, took five deep breaths, and called her.

As usual, she took the crisis calmly. Aunt Nettie looks sweet and gentle, as if a strong blast from a fan might knock her over. Actually she can withstand a hurricane. When I told her that a prominent local citizen had been found dead in our building, all she said was, “My goodness.”

Then she added, “I guess that explains why Hogan ran out of here so quickly.”

I realized that being married to the police chief—as Aunt Nettie was—had certain advantages. She might well know more about the situation than I did. But her next words shattered that illusion. “Have you seen him?”

Obviously Hogan hadn’t taken time to tell her about the body on her property before he left.

“I think Hogan’s here,” I said. “Of course, I know better than to get in his way.”

“Me, too.”

We were both lying, of course. We’d been known not only to get in Hogan’s way, but even to cause him quite a bit of annoyance. But that morning I was trying to be good.

Aunt Nettie spoke again. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she said.

I also called Joe, and he came down, his hair still wet from the shower. I filled both Aunt Nettie, when she arrived, and Joe in on what I’d seen in the Clown Building. Then we sat. And we sat.

Oh, something happened now and then. Hogan came in through our back door once, for example, and looked at the padlock that held the door between our shop and the Clown Building closed. He also asked us not to tell anyone who the victim was. The van that held the crime lab from the Michigan State Police showed up; its crew assists small municipalities such as Warner Pier with investigations. They went into the Clown Building and began their exotic activities with tape measures and cameras and the more complicated equipment they used.

Then the phone began to ring.

Warner Pier is a small town, after all. People wanted to know why we had police on the premises. The banker, the baker, the baby doll maker—they all called to find out what was going on.

As Hogan had asked, all Aunt Nettie and I said was that a body had been discovered by workmen that morning. Police were investigating. That was all we knew, we lied.

I did spot Mike at one point, sitting in his pickup truck in front of our shop, and I went out to ask one question.

But he asked me one first. “That Ms. Jolly—is she all right?”

“I’ll check,” I said. “But I think she was going out of town this weekend.”

Mike looked relieved. He didn’t ask anything else. So I asked my question. Was the back door of the Clown Building locked when he came that morning?

Mike assured me that the heavy padlock on the alley door had been in place.

“I’d seen Jack turn into the alley,” he said. “I nearly fell over that old gal when I walked through. I had to unlock the back door to call Jack.”

I thanked him, but Mike’s answer left me with a question: How had either Abigail Birdsong or her killer (if she’d been killed) gotten into the building?

Of course, the Clown Building could be entered from the TenHuis Building. But the alley door to TenHuis Chocolade was held by two solid locks, one in the door handle and a second, a dead bolt, above it. On the front, the building’s street door led into our retail shop, and that door was also locked.

Normally show windows lined the fronts of both buildings, though the Clown Building was boarded up at the moment. The simplest way to break into either building would be to knock out a window in our building and climb through, then cut a hole in the temporary partition separating us from the Clown Building.

In Michigan, in winter, I can guarantee, a hole in the window would be noticed immediately, simply because of the draft.

There was a temporary door linking the TenHuis side and the Clown Building side. It was held shut by a sturdy padlock hooked through a heavy hasp. It would take a pry bar of some sort to get that hasp off, and the first person in for work at TenHuis would notice the resulting damage.

I checked; the padlock was in place and was still locked.

We had tried to make it all secure. So how did someone get into the Clown Building without leaving evidence of how they did it? I hoped the police knew.

I remembered a conversation with Jack VanSickle when work first began. A lot of people would be going in and out, he said.

“We’ll need to secure your side of the building, to keep your equipment and stock safe,” he told me. “But it’s not easy to keep a construction site locked up. Especially one on a city street. Not with an alley like this one.”

“Surely you can board up the front of the Clown Building,” I said.

“The front isn’t the problem. The problem is the number of people coming in and out, both front and back.”

“Padlocks and keys?”

“It would take a dozen or more. Too many to control. So until we get the back and front of this building walled in and can install good doors, I’m going to limit access from the current building to the Clown Building to one door, and I’m going to close that door with a solid bolt.” And he had done that.

Eventually the wall between the buildings—actually walls, one for each building, shoulder to shoulder—would be taken down. Pillars would be left to hold up the second floors, but there would be open spaces between the pillars. But while the new building, the former Clown Building, was being gutted, the area between the buildings was solidly locked. Or so we thought.

As we waited that morning, Joe kept wandering in and out, trying to keep an eye on whatever was happening next door. This wasn’t an easy chore, since he couldn’t go into the building.

Aunt Nettie and I got tired of hearing the phone ring, and I pulled the plugs of the front office, retail store, and break room extensions. Joe had stepped outside again, and Aunt Nettie and I were sitting in my office, both of us in states of near unconsciousness, when a new noise began.

We both jumped. “Someone is banging on the front door,” Aunt Nettie said.

I went to the glass door and peeked behind the shade.

“It’s Bunny,” I said. “I guess I’d better let her in.”

“Okay,” Aunt Nettie said. “But don’t tell her her aunt’s dead. Hogan needs to handle that.”

I unlocked the door and opened it. Bunny rushed in. “Lee! Mrs. Jones! Why are all the police back in the alley? What’s happened?”

She looked frantic. She looked so frantic that I tried hard to look and sound calm when I answered her.

“The early workmen found a body in the Clown Building,” I said. “The police are here. We don’t know much yet.”

“Oh my gosh!” Bunny’s voice was anything but calm. “In the Clown Building?”

“Right.”

“Oh golly! And just think. I was over there last night.”