Chapter 16

Jack VanSickle stood on the top step, staring down at Mike and me.

“What are you two doing down there in the dark?” he asked.

I tried to stop huddling against the basement wall and regain some dignity. “I don’t know what Mike is doing,” I said. “I’m trying not to feel like a foal. I mean, a fool! I fell on the step.”

Continuing my idiot act, I moved my foot. I kicked my flashlight, and it fell off the step where it had landed. It bounced down the stairs, fell through the space at their back, then rolled underneath them.

“I didn’t know where the light switch was,” I said.

Proving that he was more intelligent—or perhaps more poised—than I was, Mike Westerly didn’t try to explain himself. He simply grunted and turned away.

“Actually,” Jack said, “you must have turned the light off when you came through the door. It’s kind of tricky.”

“I wasn’t down here in the dark,” Mike said. “The light went off all of a sudden, and someone was fooling with a flashlight.”

“I guess that was me,” I said. “Sorry. Jack, what did you want me to look at down here? Some sheep? I mean, shelves?”

Gradually we straightened the scene out. Like a gentleman, Mike crawled under the stairway, found my flashlight, and handed it to me. I thanked him. Jack came on down the stairs, then led me over to some rough framing in a corner. This, he said, would become one of the main storage cupboards. Reading from the note I’d made upstairs, I described the size of the current shelving. I twisted my tongue only one more time, turning “gallon buckets” to “galosh buckles.” I didn’t even try to repeat it correctly.

Mike went back to doing whatever he’d been doing when I destroyed his routine. Now and then he eyed me, frowning.

Now that I got a good look at him, I realized he wasn’t monstrous. Not scary like the figure who had loomed up in the dark basement. No, he was just a really tall guy, six-four or even six-five, with hair that stuck up every which way, blunt features, a chin firmer than John Wayne’s, and a build like a bale of hay. One of the big round bales.

But when he had approached in the dark, with his flashlight casting crazy shadows—I would have been happy to nominate him for an award for Best Actor in a Horror Film. My imagination had run away with me completely.

Jack and I toured the basement, discussing which sections of storage could be used for foodstuffs—those must be built of special materials—and which for nonfood items such as molds, bowls, and shipping boxes. Then we headed for the stairway. Halfway up, I paused. I could see Mike over at the worktable, and I called to him.

“Mike, were you going to ask me a question?”

He growled his answer. “I’ll do it later.”

Jack and I went on up the stairs. As we moved out into the first floor, he grinned at me. “I hope Mike didn’t scare you.”

“He was perfectly polite and helpful.” I didn’t answer his question directly. Yes, Mike had scared the something or other out of me.

“I’ve never seen him do anything he shouldn’t, but he is big.”

“I’m big, too, Jack. Five-eleven and a half.” I didn’t point out that I was about three inches taller than Jack was. “My husband is six-two and my dad is six-four. I’m not intimidated by big men. Mike did sort of loom up in the gloom down there, and I stumbled on the step. He startled me, and I imagine I startled him.”

“Mike seems to be afraid of women.”

“Why?”

“Because he is so big, I guess. I think he does scare a lot of them.” Jack grinned even more widely. “The only one he seems confident with is that Ms. Jolly.”

“Dolly?”

“Is that her first name? She’s kinda like Mike, I guess. So big that people are—well, a little afraid of her.”

“Dolly is big. But she’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. I can’t imagine anyone being afraid of her.”

I asked about the remodeling, then went back to the shop with my mind filled with question marks. Was Mike just a friend to Dolly? Was that why he was asking about her all the time? Or was he the “friend” she had mentioned, the one she didn’t want to “squeal” on?

I was careful not to mention what Jack had said about Mike and Dolly to anyone around the office. I did decide to tell Hogan, when I had a chance.

It was nearly lunchtime when Mike phoned me. “Miz Woodyard, I’m sorry if I scared you this morning.”

“It was fine, Mike. With the nutty lights, I didn’t recognize who you were. I’m sorry if I reacted sort of strangely. But you said you had a question.”

“Well, it’s Dolly. Miz Jolly. I called that number they were giving out, but all the news I got was—well, just kinda general information.”

“Yes. That line was set up by the police, and that’s all they can do.”

“Yeah, I get it. But I thought you might know more. How is she really doing?”

“Mike, they’re not telling me anything more than what you already heard.”

“Oh.”

“But if she was getting worse, I think they’d announce it.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“No, I don’t know that either.”

“I thought I’d send her, you know, some—well, a card or something.”

“I’m sure she’d like that, Mike. If I hear anything about her . . .”

I stopped talking. What more could I say? I wasn’t going to promise that I’d tell Mike where Dolly was. In fact, I was sure I wasn’t going to do that.

I stumbled on. “Anyway, Mike. I’ll tell you anything I can.”

Which wouldn’t be much. I wrote Mike’s cell number down and hung up.

It was an interesting situation. Was Mike interested in Dolly romantically? As a friend? Or was he her attacker? After all, it seemed as if the attacker would have to be a big man. And Mike sure fit the bill on that front.

His questions had also made me wonder again about where Dolly was. Hogan had been so careful not to mention which hospital she was being moved to, for example. He’d had a case a year earlier in which a murder attempt was made in a hospital. He knew it’s easy to find a patient who’s confined to bed.

That was one reason I hadn’t done any active looking for Dolly. Finding her might endanger her. And I still found Mike pretty frightening. He might well be the person who attacked Dolly.

Although the person who had chased me hadn’t seemed particularly big. But it’s hard to judge the size of someone who’s chasing you.

I decided to add Mike to my suspect list. Then Bunny came in to ask me a question, and I realized that list was fairly long.

There were my favorite suspects—Beau and Anya. Plus, let’s not leave off Anya’s brother, Andrew. They might not have any reason to harm Dolly, but they had plenty of reasons to kill Beau’s aunt Abigail—if they hadn’t known that she’d already changed her will to leave everything to Bunny. And there was no reason that they should know that.

The problem with those people as suspects, of course, was that whoever killed Abigail needed to be able to get into our building and into the Clown Building. And there was no reason to think any of those three could have done that.

The keys were important to the crime. Unless the killer knew how to get hold of the keys, he or she was unlikely to be able to get from one building to the other without leaving clues—such as tools used to break locks or other evidence.

And if they didn’t have keys to Dolly’s back stairway, then the whole crime was off. Because the detectives seemed to feel certain that the lock hadn’t been jimmied.

Besides Beau, Anya, and Andrew, all the construction workers on the remodeling project were suspects. They had access to keys—both Jack’s keys and, possibly, Aunt Nettie’s and mine.

In fact, someone from TenHuis Chocolade was a lot more likely to have killed Abigail than Beau, Anya, or Andrew. The only person at TenHuis who admitted she hated Abigail, of course, was Janie. She was just a young girl! I had trouble picturing her as a murderer. But it certainly wasn’t impossible.

Bah. Humbug. I brushed Janie aside as a suspect. But it seemed impossible that such a disreputable pair as Beau and Anya had no motive for killing Dolly.

Or perhaps I should say, no apparent motive. Could there be something that either of them was concealing?

But the most obvious motive for an attack on Dolly was that someone thought Dolly had seen something that linked the guilty party to Abigail’s death.

I had felt sure that Abigail’s will, or the threat to make such a will, was the motive for her death. But, heck, there were a million other reasons for killing people.

Revenge, for example. I recalled the story that Janie had told me. According to that, Abigail had ruined her father’s livelihood by starting gossip calling his honesty into question. If that were true, Janie’s whole family could be suspect.

Abigail could have had other types of questionable business dealings. And as a gossip, she could have started other vicious stories harming other Warner Pier people.

She could have done almost anything, I told myself. And it was not up to me to figure it out.

Being nosy, I told myself sternly, was no excuse to speculate and ask questions about the guilt or innocence of my neighbors.

But I sure was curious about some of them.