At ten pm on the dot, Calder pounded on my front door.
“You’d better make yourself scarce,” I told Flynn, remembering Calder’s reaction to the rat. “Just in case you startle him, and he takes another shot at you.”
Flynn didn’t need to be told twice, scampering up the stairs as fast as his fat little body would allow. I sincerely hoped eating all those cookies wasn’t bad for his health.
Calder had his hat in his hands when I opened the door and stood back, inviting him inside. “Lovely weather,” I joked, but Calder didn’t so much as crack a smile. He twisted the hat in his fingers.
“The rock?” he prompted.
“Oh, sure. I put it in a Ziplock bag. It’s in the kitchen.” I led the way, my walking boot thumping in an off-beat rhythm across the floor. “I’ve been baking all evening. Want a snickerdoodle? They’re proving to be quite popular.”
“No thanks.” He brushed past me when he spotted the Ziplock bag on the counter, the black pebble with the gold rune inside. Picking up the bag, he squinted through the plastic at the rune.
“Do you know what it means?” I asked. Of course, both Doris and I took photos of the rune and planned to look it up in Doris’s books tomorrow. I’d be astonished if Calder had managed to unearth its meaning before we did.
“No. Do you?” His hazel eyes watched me intently.
I shrugged. “Nope.” For once, it wasn’t a lie. But I lied by omission. I knew the rune was a hex. A deadly one. Which meant that when the forensics came back on Seth Saltzman’s body, they’d find no apparent cause of death. He hadn’t been shot, stabbed, or strangled.
Calder shoved the plastic bag into his pocket, then eyeballed me.
“What?” I protested. “Are you mad I took it? Honestly, I don’t remember taking it. It wasn’t intentional. All I remember is touching it, and then my allergy kicked in. I have no idea what happened to it after that.” Lie, lie, lie. He’d been right with his initial assessment that Doris had pilfered it.
Calder’s chin rested on his chest as he let out a breath. I could only describe his expression when he lifted his head as resigned.
“There’s been a tip-off,” he said.
“There has?” Fantastic. A lead.
But his face said he didn’t think the lead was all that fantastic. In fact, his face said the information was bad news. For me. Resigned, I sank onto a kitchen chair. “I’m not going to like it, am I?”
It was a rhetorical question, but he answered anyway. “Probably not.” I caught the way his eyes shifted from me to the kitchen doorway and the staircase beyond. “Look. You can tell me to leave and get a warrant, or you can let me take a look around.”
I rolled a shoulder and quirked a brow. “By all means. Look around. You’ve already searched this place once. Like I said, I’ve got nothing to hide.” Except for the bones taped to the cedar elm in my back yard, but I hardly thought Calder intended to go tree climbing in this weather. No. Whatever the tip-off was, it was something inside this house.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly, as if embarrassed he had to do this.
“Can I ask what the tip-off was?” First, the bones planted at my house, now a tip-off. Someone really didn’t want me in Gravestone.
“I have to follow procedure,” he hedged.
“Sure.” I shrugged again. So, he wasn’t going to tell me. Fine. I could live with that. When he headed for the stairs, I promptly got up and followed him. He went straight for the spare bedroom and my open suitcase on the floor. I stood watching while, with a pen, he began moving items of clothing around. Then he froze.
“What? What did you find?” I limped to his side and looked down into my trashed suitcase. I wasn’t a particularly neat person, and rummaging through my suitcase on a daily basis had left it a red hot mess. He pointed, and I crouched by his side, leaning forward to get a closer look.
“What? That pen?” I was aghast. The evidence was a pen? “That’s not even mine,” I added.
Retrieving an evidence bag from his back pocket, he shook it open and then scooped up the pen, sealing it inside the bag before holding it aloft.
“Gold Posca paint pen,” he announced.
“Appears to be.” I nodded in agreement. “And the relevance?”
“Same type of pen used to make the markings on the rock.”
“The rock that I only just gave to you? The one we found last night with Seth’s body? The same one no one else knows about?”
He nodded. “The same.”
“And you know that that makes no sense. How can you possibly have a tip-off about evidence you haven’t examined or logged yet, let alone forensically identify the marker used?”
That’s when he smiled, and my insides did a flip-flop. An honest to God somersault. Taken aback, I lost my balance and toppled onto my butt. While Matt Casey was eye candy personified, Joshua Calder had a rugged handsomeness impossible to ignore. I resisted the urge to fan myself, cursing my hormones for deciding to wake up at precisely the wrong moment.
“Hey, you okay there?” Shoving the evidence bag into his jeans pocket, he stood, reaching out to help me to my feet. As soon as his hands closed over mine, a zap of electricity shot across my skin, making my heart skip and my breath catch in my throat. I stood there, hands in his, heart beating double time, lost for words.
“Holly?” he quizzed, bending to peer into my eyes. “You sure you’re okay?”
Tugging my hands from his, I took a step back and sucked in a deep breath. “Yeah. Sure. Sorry.” Clearing my throat, I indicated my suitcase. “I assume you’re thinking the same thing I am. That someone planted that evidence in an attempt to make me look guilty.”
“Yep. But what that person didn’t know was that I didn’t have the rock with the symbol drawn onto it in evidence yet, so I hadn’t examined it.”
“So, you wouldn’t have discovered that the symbol was drawn with a gold Posca pen. Which is oddly specific.”
I led the way from the bedroom and back down the stairs. “You didn’t mention any of this when I called.” I was thinking out loud. “Which means the tip-off didn’t come in until… what? After nine?”
“Ten past,” Calder confirmed.
I stopped and turned. “I’m guessing you’re not going to find any prints on that pen. So, it’s purely circumstantial that it was found in my suitcase.”
“Correct on both counts.” Rather than heading toward the front door, he headed for the kitchen. “Any chance of getting some coffee?”
“Oh! Sure. Want a snickerdoodle to go with that?”
“If it tastes anything like this kitchen smells, then yes, please.” His grin was back, and I really didn’t know what to make of it. I was used to Calder grumbling and being annoyed with me, not this sense of comeraderie I felt between us.
I busied myself pouring coffee from the almost empty pot. “I find it very interesting that you got a call just after nine with a tip-off that I have evidence tied to Seth Seltzman’s murder,” I said. “Because I had three unexpected visitors this evening between eight and nine, and any one of them could have planted that pen.”
“Who?” Calder was all business, taking a seat at the table and pulling out a small notepad to make a note of what I was about to tell him.
“Matt Casey dropped in to check on the roof.”
“Not unusual for Casey to do something like that.”
“Exactly what I thought,” I agreed. “Especially as I’m hiring him to do some repairs to this place.”
“Who else?”
“The mayor. Kerris Jones.” I glanced over my shoulder, keen to observe Calder’s reaction to the mayor’s visit. He didn’t disappoint, his brows shooting up, his head cocking to the side.
“The mayor? What did she want?”
“To offer me an outrageous sum of money to sell her this house.”
“And it couldn’t wait until morning? She had to come out in a storm?”
“I asked myself those same questions.”
“Did you answer yourself?” he teased.
“Actually,” I tapped a finger to my lower lip, “I’m wondering if she didn’t want anyone to know she was here. The storm is the perfect cover.”
“Hmmm. Plausible, I guess. Did she have the opportunity to plant the pen?”
“She did go upstairs to use the bathroom, which I found odd in itself, given she’d just been screeching at me about how unhygienic it is to keep a pet rat and that she’d have this place condemned.”
At the mention of Flynn, Calder glanced around uneasily.
“Relax. He’s sleeping somewhere. He’s no more keen to be shot at than you are.”
Calder lowered his head and cleared his throat. “Sorry about that. So, who was the third person?”
“Denise Hurt. Apparently, John had promised to lend her a book on the history of Gravestone.”
“And coming out in a storm seemed like the perfect time to collect it?” Calder drawled.
“I figured maybe since the weather was bad, it gave her something to do?” I shrugged, placing a coffee in front of Calder along with the container of snickerdoodles. “Was the voice male or female? The tip-off,” I added when he looked at me, confused.
“Disguised. One of those voice synthesizer things.”
Compressing my lips, I cradled my coffee and sat opposite Calder, lost in thought.
“I’ll get warrants for phone records tomorrow,” Calder said. “Assuming that whoever called in the tip-off used their own phone and not a burner.”
“In the meantime, there’s actually something I wanted to ask you.”
“Oh?” He took a mouthful of snickerdoodle and rolled his eyes. “This is good!”
“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” I complained.
“I meant it as a compliment.”
Not used to receiving compliments, I decided the best course of action was to ignore it. “I wanted to ask you about John Smith’s death.”
“What about it?”
“I heard it was ruled a suicide, but almost everyone I’ve spoken to doesn’t believe that.”
Calder stopped chewing and stared at me for a full five seconds before his jaw started working again.
“I was on vacation,” he stated, voice devoid of any hint of emotion. “I didn’t handle the case. From what I’ve seen and heard, it was open and shut.”
“I don’t mean to imply anything,” I reassured him. “But I’m sorry, I just don’t see how a man of John’s age and physical limitations could haul himself into that tree and hang himself. And Doris tells me his ladder is missing.”
“His ladder?”
“Yes. We talked about how it is improbable John climbed that tree. If he did hang himself, the logical way would be to use a ladder—or a chair—but a ladder makes more sense because the branch he was found hanging from is high off the ground. Anyway, if you were going to kill yourself, you’d use a ladder, throw the rope over, secure it around your neck, then kick the ladder away.”
“Only there was no ladder,” Calder said.
“No ladder,” I agreed. “But again, I’m only going on what Doris told me. Could you check the report?” If I could convince Calder to examine John Smith’s suicide, maybe, just maybe, we’d learn if a rune had been left on his body too.
“I’ll look into it.”