After the band’s last song of the night, Sam made his way over to me, still carrying his guitar.
“I have a couple of boxes for you in my office,” he said as he reached the table. “You’re really going to let Liz’s granddaughter re-create a seventies hair band in your front window for Valentine’s Day?” he said with a smile.
“C’mon, where’s your sense of romance?” I teased.
He laughed.
“Is it all right if I pick them up in the morning?” I asked. “I didn’t bring the SUV.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Glenn McNamara told me you stepped in to help fill Lily’s place in the hot-lunch program,” I said. “Thank you.”
“It’s no big deal,” he said with a shrug.
“It is to the kids,” I said.
“How’s the detective business?” Sam asked with a sly smile.
He nodded. “Eric’s art class came for supper last night. Alfred Peterson was with them.” He leaned in a little closer. “Are he and Rose a couple?”
“They’re seeing each other,” I said, pushing my hair back from my face. “I’ve kind of been afraid to ask exactly how much of each other they’ve seen, if you know what I mean.”
Sam’s smile got a bit wider. “Hey, love’s grand at any age.”
Vince Kennedy had been working his way over to us. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said. He looked at Sam. “They need you in the kitchen.”
Sam made a face. “Please tell me it’s not the bread slicer again.”
Vince shrugged. “Sorry. I don’t know.”
Sam handed him the guitar. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said to me, and headed toward the kitchen.
Vince turned to me. He’d trimmed his gray-streaked beard into a goatee and he was wearing his hair a little shorter. It made him look a little younger, although I could see worry lines around his brown eyes.
Vince was a tall, wiry man who never seemed to be completely still. His hands or his feet were always moving. I sometimes wondered if he was keeping time to a song only he could hear. “I just wanted to say thanks for the deal you gave Asia on that guitar she bought from you last week.”
“It’s a good beginner guitar,” I said. “I’m glad she likes it.” We both looked over to the stage, where fifteen-year-old Asia Kennedy was talking to Eric, The Hairy Banana’s bass player when he wasn’t giving art lessons or creating graphic novels. Asia’s spiky blond hair was sticking out all over her head. I could see her strong rower’s shoulders and legs under her long-sleeved blue T-shirt and the argyle leggings Jess had made.
“I know you gave her the family rate and I appreciate that,” Vince said.
I turned back to face him. “I’m glad Asia likes music,” I said. “It got me through my teenage years more or less unscathed. She’s a good kid.”
Vince’s expression turned serious. “She really is,” he said. He shook his head. “I’d better get this back to Sam’s office,” he said, holding up the guitar. “Thanks again, Sarah.”
I smiled. “You’re welcome.”
I stopped at the pub in the morning to pick up the boxes of KISS gear for Avery, and Elvis and I had breakfast with Sam. The conversation eventually turned to the development proposal and Lily’s death.
“Do you think someone could have been that upset with her refusal to sell that they could have killed her?” I asked.
Sam raked his fingers through his beard. “On purpose? Nah. I can’t see it. Take Vince, for example. That development goes ahead, his problems are pretty much solved.” He reached for his coffee. “If he could just get market value for that old building of his father’s, the old man would be able to stay in that nursing home until he dies.” He took a sip from his mug. “But could you imagine Vince killing Lily—killing anyone—over that?”
I couldn’t.
“Or what about Liz? The Emmerson Foundation holds the mortgages on two buildings that would come down for North Landing and they’re both in default, but I don’t see Liz shoving Lily down a set of stairs.”
I didn’t say that wasn’t exactly what had happened. I just nodded in agreement.
* * *
Friday turned out to be a busy day at the store. The Angels spent most of the day working on a timeline for the last twenty-four hours of Lily’s life, when they weren’t waiting on customers. I saw Charlotte and Rose on their cell phones at different times. Mr. P. was still digging into Jon West’s background.
I’d waffled all morning, but in the end I hadn’t told them what Jess had told me. An unsubstantiated rumor that someone with enough influence to push through the expropriation of Lily’s Bakery and had invested in North Landing didn’t have anything to do with Lily’s death, as far as I could see.
I knew Mr. P. and Rose were up to something I probably wasn’t going to like, my new hands-off policy or not. They left so quickly at the end of the day that Rose left her big tote bag behind.
When she wasn’t waiting on customers, Avery spent all of her time cleaning up the mannequin parts and putting the figures together. By the end of the day, all four of them were assembled in the workroom. They gave me a start when I came around the corner and discovered the four figures standing there, naked except for their wigs.
Liz came to pick up Avery and Charlotte at the end of the day.
“There’s a meeting tonight about the status of the harbor-front project,” Charlotte said to me as she came down the stairs carrying her coat. Avery had taken her grandmother out back to see the mannequins. “I’m going with Liz.”
“I heard,” I said, holding her heavy wool peacoat so she could slip her arms into it. Jess and Nick had talked a bit about the meeting at The Black Bear. “Jess will be there, too.” Charlotte’s bright yellow scarf had fallen to the floor, and I bent to pick it up. “What do you think is going to happen?”
She took the scarf from me and tied it loosely at her neck. “I truly don’t know,” she said.
Mac and I agreed to meet back at the store at seven thirty to start clearing out the upstairs storage room. When I got back to the shop about twenty-five after, the Ellisons, father and son—whom I’d hired to do snow removal—were in the parking lot with a front-end loader and a dump truck, taking away some of the massive snow pile at the end of the small lot, so I had to park on the side street. A shooting star arced across the harbor, and I closed my eyes and made a wish. Aaron Ellison waved from the cab of the loader as I hurried across the empty lot.
Mac was waiting for me by the back door. “Where did you park?” he asked.
“Around the corner,” I said, pointing up the hill.
“I’ll walk you back to your car when we’re done,” he said.
I unlocked the back door, and when we stepped into the workroom, I gave a start of surprise. Avery had moved “the band,” and for a moment I thought there were two people standing at the far end of the room.
“They better be going in the window tomorrow,” I said to Mac. “I thought someone had broken in.”
“I know what you mean,” he said as he unzipped his heavy jacket. “I caught sight of one of them out of the corner of my eye this afternoon and for a moment I wondered why you and Charlotte were doing the wave.”
I laughed.
The first thing we did in the upstairs space was move the few pieces of furniture down into the workroom. “I think we should take all the quilts downstairs as well,” I said, looking at the stack of boxes by the door. “They’ve been selling like hotcakes.” I waved a finger at him. “Oh, and I forgot to tell you. Jess is making some kind of rock-and-roll quilt with those old T-shirts we sold her.”
“That sounds like something we could hang on the wall next to the guitars,” Mac said.
I nodded. “I thought the same thing.” One of the reasons Mac and I worked so well together was that kind of similar thinking often happened.
He picked up two boxes of glassware that were also going downstairs. Even under his gray T-shirt I could see his muscles move. He’d pushed back his sleeves, and I could see the smooth, dark skin of his forearms and smell his clean scent of Ivory soap and peppermints as I reached for one of the boxes of quilts. I wiped the back of my hand over my forehead for a moment. What the heck was I thinking? Maybe Jess was right. Maybe it had been too long since I’d been on a date.
When Mac came back upstairs, I was still standing in the same place, staring at the same box.
“Sarah, are you trying to move that with the power of your mind?” he asked.
I smiled and shook my head. “No. It wouldn’t get very far. I was just thinking.”
“About what?” He rested one hand on the top box of quilts.
“If we take the chair out of my office, we can move the credenza backward and over a little bit, which means we can access the storage space in the eaves.”
“That’s not going to give you a lot of seating space in your office,” Mac pointed out.
“I don’t think I’ve had a single customer up there in the last seven months,” I said, glancing through the open door to the hall. “Aside from Elvis, and he seems to think the desk chair belongs to him, the only other person who spends time in my office is you, when we’re working on a quote.”
“Okay. Let’s at least take a look,” he said.
We crossed the hall and went into my office. “See what I mean?” I said.
He nodded slowly. “And if we angled your desk just a little, that would give you a bit more space for the love seat.”
“Let’s try it.”
We set the chair in the hall, and then Mac adjusted my desk a little to the left so it was on a slight angle. The credenza was moved down and the love seat forward, and suddenly we had easy access to the storage space in the eaves.
“Perfect,” I said with a grin.
Then we heard the sound of something falling downstairs.
Mac and I exchanged a look and he went out in the hallway to listen. After a moment there was another sound I couldn’t quite identify.
“Stay here,” Mac said in a low voice. “And call 911.”
He was on his way down the stairs before I could tell him not to do anything stupidly heroic. I pulled out my cell and was about to call the police when I remembered Rose’s bag. She’d been in such a hurry to leave with Mr. P., she’d left it behind on the desk chair in the Angels’ “office.” It was probably her we’d heard. She’d borrowed my gram’s spare keys from Charlotte to get into the apartment. I knew there was an extra key to this building on that ring. Rose had probably borrowed the keys again.
I remembered how I’d launched myself into the apartment bedroom and almost knocked her head off. I didn’t want Mac to tackle Rose and maybe break her hip. And I certainly didn’t want her to be arrested for B and E. I hurried down the stairs, moving quickly and quietly just in case it wasn’t Rose moving around downstairs. Mac was just disappearing around the door to the storeroom.
“Hey!” he called out sharply. That was followed by the sound of a scuffle. I bolted across the shop, thinking this whole thing was stupid. We should have just called 911 and stayed put.
Mac had the intruder on the floor, one knee in the small of the person’s back. He looked up at me. “Sarah, what are you doing down here? Did you call 911?”
“I thought it might be Rose,” I said. I could see that it wasn’t and I felt my knees begin to shake. The intruder was taller and male, based on his build. I reached over and flipped on the overhead light.
And discovered it was Vince Kennedy lying on the storeroom floor.