“ARE YOU SURE you wouldn’t like some tea, dear?” Irene Rutherford smiled sweetly at me from across the little table in her bedroom.
“No, thank you. I’m fine.” I placed my notebook on the table to help clue her in that this wasn’t a social call.
“Birgit would be happy to pour another cup.” Irene beamed at her caregiver.
The sturdy woman with the blunt silver shag draped a throw blanket over Irene’s lap and then turned to me. “It would be no trouble, miss.”
I detected another Scandinavian accent. “Really. I’m good.” And didn’t need to take the chance of sloshing anything over my notes.
Birgit gave Irene an affectionate pat on the shoulder and started to step away.
“Actually, do you mind staying?” With Irene’s memory issues, I figured she might need some assistance filling in the blanks.
“It is not a problem,” Birgit said, sitting six feet away at the edge of the neatly made double bed.
Before I was allowed to step into Irene’s room, Juliette and Roman had made it clear that they didn’t want his mother upset.
Actually, Juliette was the one who had done the talking. Roman nodded and curtly repeated what she had said, but the message had been quite clear: Ask your questions carefully and don’t expect much in return.
“It’s very nice to see you today,” I said to Irene. “I understand you had a visitor on Friday, a mutual friend of ours—Emmy Lee Barstow.”
Irene nodded. “Oh, yes. Such a lovely girl.”
“Do you remember her staying and chatting for a while?”
“We had tea and cookies.” She picked up one of the two oatmeal cookies from the dish in front of her. “Delicious. Birgit makes them,” she said, pushing the dish toward me. “Want one?”
“No, thanks.” I wasn’t about to deny this nice old lady one of her cookies. “Do you remember if Emmy Lee mentioned where she planned to go after she left here?”
Irene turned to Birgit. “Did she say something about shopping?”
The caregiver got up from the bed. “Nei, my dear, that was me.” She eased closer to me. “I said I needed to go grocery shopping.”
“Did you happen to see when Emmy Lee left the house?”
Birgit shook her head. “I may have been in the kitchen then.”
“Was there anyone else here at the time? Maybe the person belonging to the Volkswagen in the driveway.”
“Nei, that is my car.”
Then that was that. “Birgit, may I have your last name for our records?”
“Of course. It is Granquist.”
“And you live here?”
“Ja.”
Her accent was so similar to the younger Scandinavian in the house that I had to ask. “Are you any relation to Juliette?”
Her lips curled, her weathered cheeks plumping. “She is my niece.”
Really. “And you’re both from…”
“Norway, but I’m an American citizen now,” she said proudly.
“How is it that you both got jobs here?”
She sighed. “Long, complicated story that does not make my sister happy. Last year, Juliette came to this country to work, but the man…. It was not good. She called me from the New York airport not knowing what to do. Mr. Roman was kind enough to allow her to stay here, even gave her a job.”
That didn’t sound like the Roman who had barely been tolerating my presence the last half hour. It also seemed like Birgit was doing a little too much explaining, but up until now the woman hadn’t said or done anything to set off a ping on my liedar.
“They…how do you say it? Hit it off.” She smiled contentedly.
Yeah, it looked like a real love match. “And now they’re getting married.”
“Who’s getting married?” Irene asked me, her slender hand shaking slightly as she set down her teacup.
“Roman’s marrying Juliette.”
“No, he’s not.”
I figured this was just one of the many things that had escaped Irene’s failing memory bank.
“My Roman is…special and will probably never marry. He has…uh…what’s it called? High functioning…” Knitting her wrinkled brow, she fell into silence and grabbed the other cookie.
She might not be able to recall the word for his special condition, but I’d heard enough. Everything I’d observed in Roman now made perfect sense.
Birgit hovered over the table. “More tea?”
Irene shook her head. “What were we talking about?”
“Roman getting married,” I said.
“Oh, yes.” She nibbled on her cookie. “That’s not something my boy would do. Don’t get me wrong, he likes girls.”
So I’d noticed.
“He just doesn’t want anyone to touch him.”
This was going to be a very complicated marriage.
* * *
I had almost an hour to kill before my meeting with Dr. Osborne, so I decided to stop in at Tuttle’s Printing since it would be on the way. This also gave me an opportunity to do a drive-by of Tolliver’s Funeral Home, the mortuary that contracted with the county to double as the local morgue.
Turning on 9th Street, I spotted Dr. Zuniga’s white canopied truck in the parking lot. Despite the fact that I had the heat cranked up in the car, my skin crawled with gooseflesh.
Emmy Lee Barstow’s autopsy was underway.
I parked in front of the print shop two doors down, and buttoned my coat all the way up to my neck before I headed inside. I needed the warmth, but I also wanted maximum coverage before facing Parker Tuttle for the second day in a row.
With the knowledge of what was happening up the street, I had no stomach for the oily smile Parker aimed at me the instant I came through the door. Unfortunately, I didn’t see Katelyn, so it appeared that he was the only Tuttle family member I had to choose from this afternoon.
He leaned on the counter. “Couldn’t stay away, huh?”
I forced a smile.
“I like that in a woman.”
Gag.
I saw someone step in from a back room and prayed it was Katelyn.
Nope. It was Yvonne, a cocoa-skinned grandma who had worked here for as long as I could remember.
She gave me a little wave. “Hey, girl. Just wanted to make sure you were being helped.”
“I’ve got this,” Parker said dismissively before lavishing his undivided attention on me. “And how may I help you today?”
I noticed that Yvonne didn’t leave. Instead, she lingered at a copier that faced the counter. To keep an eye on Parker when Katelyn wasn’t around? That would have been my best guess.
Fine by me. I couldn’t believe that I was at risk of anything beyond a little slime, but why push my luck? “Would you be able to tell me who made a delivery last Friday?”
“Of course.” The darker and slightly taller Tuttle straightened. “Me.”
“This would have been a delivery to Roman Rutherford’s house.”
“On Conifer Ridge. Yeah, it was my first delivery of the day—a rush job.”
“Did you see Emmy Lee Barstow when you were there?”
Parker’s smile vanished. “This is about Emmy Lee?”
“The coroner’s office is trying to put together a timeline of her whereabouts Friday.” I had already used the timeline excuse once today. Might as well run with it.
“I didn’t see her. I only saw the chick that ordered the announcements. I saw Emmy Lee’s car in the driveway though.”
“What time?”
“Around three.”
Which matched Roman’s statement.
“Did you happen to see her car later, when you were making your other deliveries?”
“Nope. Can’t help you there.”
“How about running into Emmy Lee somewhere later? The grocery store, a tavern?”
“When I say I didn’t see her, I didn’t see her. Period.”
Parker couldn’t have made it any clearer. He also hadn’t twitched so much as an eyelash to indicate that this was anything but the truth. “Okay, thanks for your time.”
“I smelled her though.”
“Excuse me?”
“At the door, when I made the delivery. I could smell her. She always smells great.” He cringed as if he were self-aware enough to realize that he’d made a faux pas. “She did anyway. I keep telling Yvonne that she should buy that perfume. Spice up her love life.”
She glared at his back. “I’m plenty spicy just the way I am, thank you.”
I’d always thought Emmy Lee’s perfume was a little too spicy. I didn’t know if it had a base of cloves or nutmeg, but I didn’t want to walk around smelling like pumpkin pie concentrate. I also didn’t want to wear a perfume that hung around long after I left a room. My mother’s signature jasmine scent was like that, and I’d always sworn that would be one of the many things we would never have in common.
Parker leaned over the counter and sniffed me. “A little subtle but I like it.”
“I’m not wearing anything,” I said, regretting the words the instant they leaked out of my mouth.
His lips stretched into a wolfish grin.
Yvonne stepped to the counter as if sensing that I needed backup. “Parker, don’t you have a delivery to make?”
“Always a pleasure, Charmaine,” he said with an officious little bow as he headed for the back room.
Once we were alone Yvonne heaved a sigh. “I swear that boy has all the sense of a box of rocks. Katie’s talked to him about his inappropriate behavior more times than I can count, but to him it’s all hot air.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t mean any harm. It’s just a little much when someone gives you the sniff test.”
“Don’t I know it. Emmy Lee hated when he did that. It got so that she wouldn’t come into the shop to see Katie anymore. Sniffin’ women like some darned hound dog. It’s just plain creepy.”
If Parker hadn’t passed my own sniff test when he said he hadn’t seen Emmy Lee, the hair on the back of my neck would have been standing at attention by now. Not only did he have the short brown hair that matched Anita Stivek’s description of the guy with the ball cap, he didn’t look that much older than me.
“How old is Parker?”
“He’s forty! You’d think that would be old enough to know better.”
I was quite sure he knew better. He just enjoyed being a bad boy a little too much.
The back of my neck tingled as I wondered just how bad.