“What’s your emergency, Meg?” Debbie Ann asked.
“I don’t know if it’s an emergency,” I said. “But I’m being followed by a Toyota Corolla—I can’t tell if it’s silver or white, but—”
“Where are you?”
“About two miles from my house,” I said.
“Horace and Vern are both on their way,” she said after the briefest of pauses. “I would ask if it looked like the same Corolla that was lurking in your neighborhood last night, but you’d only remind me that one car looks like another to you.”
“Especially if they’re both compact Japanese cars,” I said. “I’m going to drive past my house. I can go all the way to where the road dead-ends and turn around. That will give Horace and Vern more time to get to the house before I have to get out of my car.”
“Good idea,” she said. “And stay on the line.”
I deposited the phone in the little gadget designed to keep it in view when I was using it to navigate by and drove on. Behind me the Corolla appeared over a hill and slowed down drastically.
I reported this to Debbie Ann.
“Not reassuring,” she said.
I agreed.
I cruised sedately by the house. Not many cars there, and no humans in sight—not surprising, given the temperature, but it made my plan of driving on by seem all the wiser. I continued, well below the speed limit, until I reached where the road dead-ended at Caerphilly Creek. There was plenty of room to turn around, either in the parking lot of the Spare Attic or that of the Haven. The Spare Attic was self-service, like many storage facilities, so there was rarely anyone there. The Haven, which housed several dozen young Mutant Wizards employees, was a more likely prospect. If I’d seen any signs of life there I might have stopped, confident that its inhabitants would come to my aid. But this time of day most of them would still be at the office. And for that matter, although the place looked infinitely nicer than it had in its former life as a disreputable motel, it still wasn’t exactly a garden spot, and its residents tended to spend most of their free time in town.
So I turned around and headed back the way I’d come. Half a mile from the dead end, I encountered the Toyota. Definitely white rather than silver. But also definitely following me. The driver braked hard when she spotted me. I only caught a brief glimpse, but I was pretty sure it was a woman.
“I just passed my stalker,” I said. “She was definitely not happy to see me.”
“Horace is at your house,” Debbie Ann said. “Go ahead and park right beside his patrol car.”
“Will do.”
The house came into view. Horace’s cruiser was in the driveway, in the spot closest to town. The spot my cousins had removed Ian’s car from less than twenty-four hours ago. I parked in the spot closest to the house, leaving an empty space between us, so I could give Horace plenty of maneuvering room.
I waved at Horace. He nodded at me.
“Should I just stay here or what?” I asked Debbie Ann.
“Stay in your vehicle until the Corolla arrives.”
It wasn’t long, actually. The Corolla appeared in the distance. It seemed to speed up when it got near—speed up and then swoop into the middle parking space. Almost as soon as it came to a stop, the driver’s-side door—which was on my side of her car—flew open. A woman scrambled out, covered the short distance between our two vehicles, and plastered herself against the Twinmobile’s passenger-side window. Both of her palms were flat against the glass, and her face was almost touching it. She began shouting.
“Where is he? I need to see him! Where is he? I know he’s here!”
Horace appeared behind her. I figured he’d keep her busy on that side of the car, so I cracked my driver’s-side window so I could hear better.
“Put your hands in the air and step away from the SUV,” Horace was saying. “Ma’am! Put your hands in the air!”
The woman ignored him.
“I know he’s in there!” She began beating on my window with her right fist. “You can’t keep us apart.” She bent down, picked up one of the baseball-sized rocks that outlined the driveway area, and lifted it as if to smash the window.
Vern appeared at Horace’s side. The two exchanged a glance. Vern nodded. The two of them stepped forward, and each grabbed one of the woman’s arms.
She seemed startled, and struggled a bit, dropping the rock. But within a minute they had her handcuffed and sitting on the ground behind her car, with Vern standing guard over her.
I got out, the better to kibbitz on what happened next. She’d left the car door open. Horace was standing outside the car, peering inside, but not touching anything. I was about to ask why he was just standing there, when it came to me. She was a murder suspect. The contents of her car could be evidence. He wasn’t going to rush in and risk having that evidence thrown out of court.
“You can’t do this to me!” she was shouting. “It’s not fair! I wasn’t doing anything.”
“You were following me, and when I stopped you started yelling at me and pounding on my car,” I said. “Sorry, Vern,” I said. “I shouldn’t be butting in.”
“No harm,” Vern said. “We’re just waiting to see if the chief wants us to search her car.”
“You do not have my permission to search my car!” the woman said. “So there.”
“So we wait for the chief,” Vern said. “Or the judge. It’ll keep.”
“Just why do you want to see Ian, anyway?” I asked.
“Ian?” She frowned. “Who’s that?”
“Ian Meredith.”
She shook her head with what looked like genuine confusion.
“Aren’t you Katherine Anne Koenigslutter?” I asked.
“Who?” She looked even more puzzled.
“I thought Koenigslutter was in a silver Corolla,” Vern said. “This is white.”
“See?” the woman said. “It’s not me. You can let me go now.”
“Hard to tell white and silver apart in the dark,” I said. “And it was a rental car; you could have turned it in and gotten another.
“I’m not this Koenigslutter person,” the woman said.
“Then who are you?” I asked.
“Her name is Jerosha Fawn,” Horace said. “At least that’s what it says on the rental papers on the front seat.”
“Are you Ms. Fawn?” Vern asked.
“I have the right to remain silent,” she said. “And a lawyer.”
“You have a right to remain a lawyer?” I echoed.
“I mean I want a lawyer.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Vern was at his most courteous. “We’ll take you down to the station and get you a lawyer.”
“No!” she said. “I don’t want to go anywhere.”
“We can’t drag a lawyer out here in this weather,” Vern said. “You want a lawyer, I’m afraid we have to take you down to the station. That’s the rule.”
I drifted over to peer inside the Corolla. Apart from the papers on the front passenger seat, the car’s only contents were a large-sized McDonald’s cup in the cup holder and a backpack in the back seat. The backpack was made of a bright-colored anime-style print with dozens of cartoon cats in yellow, orange, blue, gray, tan, and white.
Enlightenment dawned.
“Oh, good grief.” I turned to Jerosha Fawn. “You’re Cat Lady, aren’t you? CatLady517?”
Fawn’s face set in a look of stubborn resistance.
“You know her?” Vern sounded puzzled.
“No, but if she’s CatLady517 I’ve heard of her,” I said. “I suspect she’s a fan of the Virginia Crime Time podcast. Kevin told me about a fan who’s stalking Casey.”
“I’m not stalking him,” the woman said. “We’ve connected on a very real level.”
“Then why’s she looking for him here?” Vern asked.
“He lives here!” Fawn shouted.
“Not last time I heard,” Vern said.
“He really doesn’t,” I said. “I should know.”
“He accepted the roses,” she said.
“If you mean that bucket full of red roses you left on the doorstep, I took them inside so they wouldn’t freeze. Casey hasn’t even seen them—because he doesn’t live here.”
“More lies to keep us apart.” Fawn crossed her arms and clenched her lips together in a way that suggested she had no intention of moving or talking.
Vern sighed.
“Horace,” he said. “You want to take her downtown or you want me to do it?”
“I’ll do it,” Horace said. “Let’s assist her into my vehicle.”
Since Ms. Fawn refused to move, assisting her into Horace’s vehicle turned out to mean picking her up and gently stowing her in the back seat.
“I’ll let them know you’ll be needing a hand down at the station,” Vern said to Horace. “And I’ll have Debbie Ann see if there’s a public defender available.”
“And lock up her car,” Horace said. “I’ll arrange to have it towed down to the station, so I can process it there.”
Vern and I watched Horace’s car disappear into the distance.
“She’s probably just a harmless crank,” I said.
“Probably.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“She’s definitely a crank.” He walked over to her car and closed the door, using his gloved hand at a spot very low on the door—I assumed he was trying to avoid smudging any fingerprints that might already be there. “What if she isn’t such a harmless one? What if she accosted Mr. Meredith like that and he just laughed at her?”
“And she lost it and whacked him with his own hockey stick?”
“Stranger things have happened,” Vern said. “She looks as if she could take care of herself in a scrap, especially with a whiner like Ian. Let’s let the chief sort her out. You need anything else?”
“I’m good,” I said.
Actually, I could have used help getting the groceries in from the Twinmobile, but I couldn’t very well ask Vern to pitch in with that. He went back to his cruiser, which was parked a little ways down the road, and got in, but he didn’t leave—he was probably guarding the car until the tow truck arrived. I was about to go around to fetch the wire mesh garden cart we used for hauling large loads of groceries when I suddenly noticed something I’d overlooked in the excitement of being stalked.
There were hardly any other cars here at the house.
Actually, I’d registered it when I first went past the house, since it meant that there weren’t many potential rescuers there. But it only just now struck me how odd it was. This morning the road had been lined with cars on both sides for half a mile in either direction. For that matter, there had been quite a few when I’d run out in my attempt to figure out who’d left the roses. Where was everyone now?
I was about to go inside to see what was happening when my phone rang. It was Randall Shiffley.
“I just talked to the chief,” he said. “He’s releasing the ice rink for y’all to play with.”
“Excellent,” I said. “But last I looked there was still blood on the ice in a couple of places—I think we need to clean that up first.”
“That’s why I called,” he said. “I’m going to send Janet and Fred over to take care of it. And while they’re there, they can show you how to use your machine.”
“Our machine?” I echoed. “We have a machine? Like a Zamboni?”
“Like a really small Zamboni, yeah.” He chuckled at the idea. “And you don’t ride around on it—I think you push it, like an old-fashioned lawn mower. Or maybe drag it along behind you. Fred and Janet will figure that out, and it’ll do the job.”
“Great,” I said. “Tell them to let me know when they get here. I’ll probably be in my office.”
“Will do.”
We hung up. I fetched the garden cart, managed to fit all the groceries on it, and dragged it around to the back door. I grabbed a heavy sack of flour and went into the kitchen. Nora was the only one there.
“Food’s here” I said. “Where is everybody?”
“Out at your grandfather’s zoo,” Nora said. “Let me help you with that.”
We made short work of emptying the cart. While we were doing so, I saw Osgood Shiffley’s tow truck driving away with Jerosha Fawn’s rental Corolla. Good riddance.
Nora hummed with pleasure at the renewed bounty that now filled the pantry. Actually, more than filled the pantry and overflowed into the kitchen. I’d haul some of it down into the basement later.
“So why has everyone gone down to the zoo?” I unbuttoned my coat, but I didn’t take it off. I’d be headed outside almost immediately. “And shouldn’t they all be coming home for dinner before too long?”
“We packed up all the food and sent it out there—a good thing coq au vin travels well. So they’ll all be dining with the wombats and koalas and such. The Canadians, too. A couple of state troopers went there with them. For protection, I’m told. Are they protecting the Canadians, or protecting us from them?”
“I don’t think anyone quite knows yet,” I said. “Still, they should have fun. But they left you holding down the fort here?”
“I wanted to get a head start on tomorrow’s dinner,” she said. “Delaney suggested that maybe some of the younger Canadians might be just as happy eating pizza, so I’m going to make a few for tomorrow’s dinner.”
A few? The entire kitchen was filled with pizzas in all stages of their life cycle—huge mounds of doughs being allowed to rise, already-shaped crusts lying on the counter waiting to be decorated, crusts filled with unbroken lakes of red sauce, and pizzas in the process of being festooned with various combinations of ingredients from the bowls lined up on the counter. I spotted sausage, pepperoni, ham, bacon, anchovies, shrimp, chopped chicken, three kinds of mushrooms, four kinds of peppers, onions, black olives, green olives, diced tomatoes, minced garlic, minced basil, shredded spinach, diced cauliflower, half a dozen different cheeses, and even pineapple chunks, which didn’t count as legitimate pizza toppings in my book, but I knew other people felt differently.
Luigi’s, our local pizza joint, was going to suffer as long as Nora was here.
“They’re all hoping the skating rink will be ready by the time they finish dinner,” she said. “I’m supposed to let them know if I find out when that happens.”
“Randall’s sending two of his workers to condition the ice.” I thought that sounded a lot better than “clean up the blood.”
Nora nodded. Then she sent a chunk of dough airborne and began shaping it into a hand-tossed pizza crust.
“They’re supposed to come to my office,” I went on. “If they show up here at the house, send them out to me.”
“Can do.” She frowned. “If everyone’s coming back here to the house, I should make a few more pies. We’re running low on pies.”
I liked her priorities. Anyone who considered an adequate supply of pies essential was welcome to take over my kitchen anytime. I buttoned my coat again and went outside, startling a great many birds from the feeders. Including juncos—at least a dozen of them.
And the juncos weren’t lying to us. On my way to the barn I spotted several dozen tiny snowflakes. The weather app on my phone still had the likelihood of snow at only 80 percent, but maybe it was time to stop paying attention to the weather app and trust what my eyes were telling me. My eyes and the juncos that were already swarming the feeders and the ground around them, even with me still standing there. We were getting a white Christmas after all.
While I was eyeing the juncos, I spotted a Corolla slowly cruising by the road in front of the house. This one was silver.
I pulled out my phone and dialed 911.