Chapter Six

I did wake up feeling good, much better than I thought I would. There had been no nightmares, no reliving over again the moment of finding Father Roderick or hearing again in my mind Ossie DelGardo’s hooded threats.

I didn’t know what all Scott put in the toddy, but it was what I needed. Sherman was a nice way to wake up. He’d climbed on my bed, licked my cheek. Then Ida Plum. What would we do without her? Funny, in a small town like Littleboro, where everybody knew everybody else, I didn’t know all that much about Ida Plum Duckett. Just that she’d worked for Mama Alice, cooking and serving, the last several years. Years I’d been away when I should have been in Littleboro, making up to my grandmother for all she’d done for me. Instead I’d gone my selfish way, sometimes not even coming back to Littleboro for a few weeks in the summer. Ben had been my life. And then one day he wasn’t.

Funny, though, Ida Plum seemed to know something about everybody and more than a lot about some people. She wasn’t a gossip, or didn’t seem to be, worked hard and was more than dependable. She read situations, like this morning, and stayed two jumps ahead of them.

“If you’re going to that auction,” Ida Plum said, “eat a big breakfast first.”

“Sounds like you’re mothering me,” I teased, and refilled my own coffee cup.

“Somebody’s got to. You go running around in the dark, finding dead people and getting hauled into the police station in the middle of the night.”

So I ate and dressed and was brushing my teeth when I heard Scott’s truck, and his two-note whistle, at the back door.

“Ida Plum Dumpling.” He circled her waist as she stood at the stove. “How come you never got married again?”

“Well, it wasn’t because I wasn’t asked,” she said. “Maybe they never said it in the right way. And with the right jewelry.” She laughed.

Scott poured himself juice. “Oh, I see. Mr. Right has to say it the right way at the right time in the right place.”

“I didn’t say that,” Ida Plum said as I came in the kitchen. She set a place on the sunporch for Mr. Lucas. One end was straightened up and he’d have a view of the back garden. Maybe he wouldn’t notice the screen I had hiding my small collection of unpainted tables and chairs. They sat stacked in an assortment of styles and finishes.

On the way to the auction Scott drove down country roads in a part of the county I didn’t know or, if I did, had long ago forgotten. Dust stormed up behind him and James Galway played flute on the tape deck. Somehow I expected guitar or ballads or Willie Nelson, something in bluegrass. This was a paradox. There was a lot I didn’t know about Scott, a whole book, a lifetime.

That gap of years when I had been away in that foreign land “up North.” Where had he been? What had he been doing?

But the way he steered me through the crowd he seemed to know auctions and people. The auctioneer tipped his white straw hat as Scott and I walked past the crowd already seated under the trees.

We inspected chairs in a row beside the barn. There were two sets of four that matched, plus some odd ones missing rungs and seats. “I can’t afford to have the seats caned,” I said.

“Not to worry,” Scott said. “I know the county’s best caner and he’s reasonable. Plus he takes MasterCard.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, trying to check out the condition of some tables heaped high with glassware. One table had a tin top and turned legs.

I straightened up and stepped back into someone walking past. “Oops, sorry,” I said. The woman in black slacks pushed past the crowd. A beefy-type fellow in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt followed close behind her, holding her elbow. He brushed past so close I felt the hair on his arms and got a whiff of yesterday’s sweat. Somewhere I’d seen the woman before. But where? I hadn’t been that many places lately in Littleboro.

Scott had gone to register for a bidding number and I tried not to stare at the couple, who stood away from the crowd in the shade of the barn.

Father Roderick. I remembered suddenly. That woman was with Father Roderick in the vestibule after Miss Lavinia’s funeral. She was the one brushing lint off his jacket in that strange wifely intimate way.

“What?” Scott came up beside me. He poked his bidding card in his shirt pocket, left the number showing.

“That woman by the barn,” I said out loud. “Don’t look now, but in a minute.”

“The one in black?” Scott said. “That’s Father Roderick’s housekeeper, Debbie. Debbie Delinger.”

“Oh,” I said, as if that explained something. Maybe even half of something. When I looked again, they were gone.

Scott got the bid on the chairs. Ten dollars each, but the long tin-covered table was $250.

“It wasn’t worth fifty,” I said. “You’re nuts to pay that much.”

“Those things are considered primitive pieces,” Scott said. “And the only way you can get a buy is if nobody at an auction knows what it is.”

“Wonder what Father Roderick’s housekeeper thought she’d find at the auction?” I asked as Scott and I unloaded chairs in the backyard. The first thing we’d do was scrub and hose down years of accumulated crud off the chairs, then sand and mend and tighten legs and rungs, and finally the chairs would be ready for paint.

“Some people go to auctions just to be going,” Scott said. “It’s entertainment.”

“That housekeeper and her sidekick didn’t look like the type on the prowl for that type of entertainment,” I said, remembering the housekeeper’s tight pants and top, her long ropes of limp and greasy hair, the blue bruised-looking tattoos on her companion’s arms.

Scott laughed. “Who knows what goes on in this town?” he asked as he hooked up the water hose.

Ida Plum swept up the walk. “You been spied on,” she said.

“Mr. Lucas?” I had a sinking feeling. “That’s not fair.”

“He sat in his car in front of the house a long time this morning,” Ida Plum said. “And I think he took a photograph.”

“I wasn’t even here to do the hostess bit, bid him good-bye, ask how he slept and all those gold-star things,” I moaned. “Do you think it was one of the B-and-B directories, a guidebook or what?” I had written them all for a listing, begging for a visit, a call, a notation. I didn’t dream they’d come on the sly.

“I think he slept well, enjoyed your pineapple muffins, approved of your ‘Think Pink’ tearoom and liked your grandmother’s house in general.”

“You did all the hostess things,” I said, and hugged her. “Thank you.”

“He even poked around the attic,” Ida Plum said. “And looked in Miss Lavinia’s bedroom. I heard him.”

“But that’s not—”

“They said it was okay to clean it, so I did. The detective was through with it. Thank goodness I didn’t have to explain a locked door and tell anyone the life and death story of Miss Lavinia Lovingood.”

I took the broom from Ida Plum and swept cobwebs off the chairs. “What if he wasn’t from anything connected with a bed-and-breakfast at all?”

“Don’t think about it,” Scott said. “Scrub that chair, fill that pail, kill that spider—”

“What spider?” I lifted my broom high, wished I’d been home to aim it at this Lucas guy, the nerve of him looking in my attic, taking pictures. And if he wasn’t with a bed-and-breakfast directory, who was he?