By mid-afternoon Mesa had recovered from the astonishment of meeting Adrienne DeBrook enough to compose two hundred words for the editorial page. She picked up the office phone and dialed Irita. “I want you to pull the new editor story, the photo too,” Mesa said. “We can run it next week, if need be.”
Irita was in Mesa’s office in a flash. “You want to pull a story now?” Irita said. “What are we going to run instead?”
Mesa handed her a hard copy of a short editorial titled “News that’s Always Fit to Print,” which extolled the virtues of the Messenger and how any upcoming changes in the editor’s chair would not affect the quality of the paper.
“But I thought you were going to be all about change,” Irita said when she finished scanning the article. “That’s what Chance has been saying your grandmother wants.”
Mesa sighed. It had taken a mere day and a half for her to remember why her grandmother had always liked working with Irita. She was as straightforward as they come. Mesa was awash with the uneasiness that came with trying to dodge such frankness. Finally she said, “Look, Irita, I need to tell you something, and I need you to keep quiet about it.”
Irita shook her head and collapsed on the sofa. “Jeez, you know I’m no good at keeping things quiet. Look how easy it was for you to whittle that stuff about Chance and that DeBrook woman out of me.”
Suddenly, the tone of her voice changed. “What do you mean, ‘if need be.’ What are you trying to tell me?” Her voice had become a whisper. She spoke quickly, as if racing through the words might save her from their impact. “The paper’s not folding, is it?”
“That’s the last thing I want,” Mesa said in her most encouraging voice. “It’s just that my level of involvement with the paper might decrease, which I’ll know more about after I fly to Portland on Friday. And I need you to cover for me while I’m gone.”
Irita’s eyes were now the size of cow pies. “What’s in Portland?”
Mesa gave a quick rundown of the Portland situation, although she skimmed over the two weeks of sex with Derek. Instead, she said that her former boss thought highly of her work, which was true, and expected her to come out as the top candidate.
“If I do get the job, I may have to leave in a relatively short time.” She watched the color drain from Irita’s face. “Hopefully, I can convince Derek to give me a couple of weeks to make the transition.”
“Just when I thought this job was picking up again,” Irita said, making no effort to hide her disappointment. “I thought it was too good to be true when Chance said you were coming back.”
“That was my original intention, Irita. And I wish like hell that the timing on this Portland job could be different. If I could be here for a couple of months, I think that you could be more than ready to take over as editor yourself.”
* * *
Chance hustled up Washington Street into the marble-walled foyer of the Virginia Apartments and pressed each of the doorbells for the third-floor apartments. On the fourth doorbell, an elderly woman answered. “Yes?” she said in a lilting voice.
He read the name on the mailbox and said, “Mrs. Penmarron?” Then, in case she didn’t like the sound of his voice, he quickly introduced himself and said, “I’m with the Mining City Messenger.”
“Are you the young man who has been knocking on doors about that airplane?” she asked. The women spoke with a soft English accent.
Chance smiled, sure that he had found himself a witness, albeit an elderly one, judging from the sound of her voice. She must have been watching him canvassing the street, even noticing him point to the plane. “That’s me,” he said triumphantly. “Mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“Do you have any identification?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said in his most proper voice, and he heard the buzz to signal that the foyer door had unlocked.
Chance had read about the Virginia Apartments, along with every building on the Historic Register in Butte. He stopped to admire the art deco lamps in the hallway and delighted in his ride to the third floor in the fully functional 1921 Otis elevator with its accordion door.
Mrs. Edith Penmarron, slightly stooped but still tall and thin, answered the door on the first ring. “You’re with what paper?” she asked through the narrow opening of the chained door.
“The Mining City Messenger,” he said, and then quickly adding to reassure the woman, “I’ll bet you know my grandmother, Rose Ducharme. She owns the paper.”
Penmarron was a Cornish name, and while Mrs. Penmarron’s accent wasn’t the distinctive Cornish, he knew she was English, in which case she surely knew Nana. After World War II, more than twenty war brides had immigrated to Butte and they had started a club. His grandmother had been invited to join when she came to Butte in the fifties.
“Oh yes, how is she doing these days?” Mrs. Penmarron said and closed the door for a second to unchain it. “I knew she had the heart attack.”
“She’s well on her way back to her former self,” Chance said and hoped this wouldn’t get immediately back to Mesa. Not that Nana was completely out of the woods, but he wanted Mesa to have every reason to stay in Butte.
He followed Mrs. Penmarron past an antique hutch filled with china teacups and an array of bric-a-brac covered in Union Jacks and likenesses from Winston Churchill to Princess Diana. “Penmarron is a Cornish name, isn’t it?” Chance asked.
“My husband was descended from Cornish tin miners who immigrated here in the 1890s. But I myself am from Buckinghamshire, not terribly far from where your grandmother was born. Would you like some tea? I’ve just put on the kettle.”
Chance knew better than to refuse. He was sure Edith would be on the telephone to his grandmother after this visit, and he didn’t want to be found wanting. He sat on the sofa and drank hot, milky tea from a fine bone-china cup with a pink rose on it and listened to Edith’s story.
She had lived in her present surroundings for the last twenty years since her husband had died of a stroke.
“He never recovered from what the Anaconda Company did to Butte,” she told Chance. “It broke his spirit and nearly the town’s too.”
Her lovely family of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren lived all over Montana, with a few still in Butte. But she enjoyed living on her own. She didn’t want to be a burden. And since she’d had her cataract operation, she had plenty of reading to keep her busy. She motioned to two walnut bookcases jammed with books. Mysteries were her favorite she told him with a smile.
“My distance vision is still quite good,” she assured him. She invited him to the window where he had seen her ten minutes before.
“I didn’t see the plane crash, but I certainly heard it. I was putting marmalade on my toast. I came over to the window to see what the noise was. Haven’t heard anything like it since the Blitz. It sounded like a building collapsing.”
The Blitz? If Mrs. Penmarron could remember the bombing of London, she had to be more than eighty. He hoped her short-term memory was as good. He looked down on the street from the window. Mrs. Penmarron had a clear view of the street, but he was doubtful how much she might have seen of the cockpit of the plane. Still, he listened.
“I can’t tell you much except there were two men, and I think they were both hurt but not so badly they couldn’t walk. The dark one held his right elbow like this.” She let her right arm go limp and then grabbed her elbow at the joint with her left hand.
“Dark one?” Chance asked wondering if maybe, she meant Native American.
“His hair,” Edith waived a thin, veined hand toward her head then continued. “He walked right away, quite deliberately. He crossed Washington Street and walked toward the hospital. Didn’t stop to see if anybody was hurt in the house or anything. Maybe he was delirious, do you suppose?”
Chance shrugged but had wondered too. No one from the crash had come into the emergency room of the hospital. He and Noah had both checked there.
“The other fellow was lighter, sandy-haired, and taller,” Mrs. Penmarron said softly. “He seemed to have a bit of trouble walking and he held his wrist.” Again, she demonstrated by clasping her left wrist with her right hand. “At least he took the time to look inside the window on the porch of the house, to see what damage had been done, I think. But he didn’t stay long.”
If they knew Butte, Chance thought, the direction they headed might help him narrow down who the jerks were. “Which direction did the second man go?”
“Toward Montana Street, away from the other man.” She turned and walked back to her rocking chair. Over her shoulder she said, “I don’t think they were friends. They’d been through a frightening experience, and they didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with one another.”
Mrs. Penmarron sat down slowly, and Chance sat on the sofa across from her. “Maybe they had already discussed what to do before they exited the plane?” Chance offered.
Mrs. Penmarron held her hand under one elbow, the other hand touching her chin. She was seeing the moment all over again. “Well, I do think they knew where they were going.”
“What makes you say that?” Chance asked. This old girl was well schooled in mystery all right.
“They didn’t even look around. That’s what most people do, isn’t it, when you need to find your bearings? But they simply took off on their own as though they’d walked the streets every day.”
Chance thanked Mrs. Penmarron, promising to remember her to his grandmother, then left her with the sheriff’s phone number and told her she should call his office right away. He didn’t want the feds accusing him of withholding information. Then he trotted up along Silver, to Montana Street and over Park, all the while thinking about what Butte’s own Miss Marple had told him.
He put little credence in the likelihood that Lowell Austin, at 54 years old and four days out of prison, had died of a heart attack, or that his two companions had done anything to give aid to him if he had. He wondered what they had planned to do with the stolen plane and what complications had occurred, now that the crash had obviously thrown a wrench into their plan. Or had it?
He had barely worked up a sweat by the time he reached the Imperial Building. Cast-iron columns, graceful upper story arches and decorative brickwork reflected the elegant details of another time. As architecture went, it was classy, just like its owner.
He saw her standing behind the work counter at the back, holding a sample frame against a matted drawing. Classical music played in the background. He looked to the right of the L-shaped shop to the section where she displayed greeting cards and small-framed pieces. No customers. Afternoons were often slow.
The Imperial’s previous owner, an antiques dealer from Minnesota who had to sell fast when he’d been diagnosed with cancer, had gutted the building’s upper floors. After years of living in San Francisco, Adrienne knew a good deal when she saw one. She had grabbed the Imperial up the week she came to town.
She had been persuasive convincing Chance to oversee the restoration of the upper floors, not that he needed convincing. His involvement with the Messenger when Nana ran the show was light enough that he had spent five months happily overseeing a crew of pre-releasers who finished the renovation of its first floor into an art gallery and the construction of her loft apartment upstairs—a rush job so she would have somewhere in town to live.
She had developed the habit of coming upstairs each evening after closing the gallery to check on the construction progress. Then one night she picked up a hammer and started helping out. He found himself staying longer and longer each evening, and so did she. They talked about everything—construction, architecture, history, Butte, art, life.
One evening when the rest of the crew had gone home, he was tearing out a rotted joist and she was telling him about her medical practice. A joist buckled and snapped, hitting him across the brow.
He had staggered back. Immediately she became the doctor again, giving him the once-over, making him watch her finger as she moved it in front of his eyes. “Why did you stop being a doctor?” he had asked.
“You never stop being a doctor,” she said with a smile. “You just stop practicing. I still have a license. I could go back to it tomorrow if I wanted.” She put a Band-Aid on the abrasion on his forehead and pronounced him fit to return to work.
“But you don’t want to?” he asked.
She shook her head. “In the second half of my life, I’m going at my own pace.”
And now, four months later, she was in the gallery business.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Chance said and walked up to the counter. Adrienne looked up and gave him a smile like the sun breaking through clouds.
“Why Mr. Dawson, what brings you here on this fine Butte afternoon?”
“A medical question.” He leaned on the counter and thought about the previous Saturday night they had spent together. She was not like any woman he had ever known. She felt no need to have a hold on him, didn’t call him, or expect to be called. Didn’t want to make plans or dates. She was completely spontaneous.
“If it’s not too complicated, I might be able to help you.” She leaned toward him to listen.
He couldn’t help himself when her low-cut blouse allowed his gaze to take in her cleavage. “I’m listening,” she said and lifted his chin so his eyes were level with hers.
Her eyes were bright with curiosity and she moved with ease. No games. He felt so comfortable around her that he was disarmed by it. Sometimes he didn’t feel the need to talk at all.
“A medical question?” she said with a grin.
“Right,” he said, recovering his train of thought. “It’s about this plane that crash-landed on Sunday. Since there was so little blood, the sheriff thinks the victim might have died before the crash. What could cause that?”
She shrugged her shoulders in conjecture. “Any number of things in flight—heart attack, cerebral hemorrhage, diabetic coma, maybe a drug interaction. God knows they kill more people than doctors would like to admit.”
“Hmm. What about if it was a homicide, like if somebody killed the guy and then left him in the plane to make it look like he died in the crash? How would you do it so that it didn’t look like he had been murdered?”
“Chance, you’re such a gentle soul,” Adrienne said. “Why such sinister questions?”
Chance did not like to admit to his morbid curiosity, though it did seem plausible that an ex-con who died in a likely stolen plane hadn’t died of natural causes. “It’s background for a story for the paper. That’s all.”
“I thought you didn’t like that tiresome stereotype that Montana is full of anti-government types who like to take the law into their own hands?” Her voice was earnest but laced with a dash of sarcasm. “I can think of a lot more likely possibilities than murder. Maybe this man went into cardiac arrest or had a stroke. Maybe the pilot was his son, and he lost control of the plane when he tried to help his father.”
Chance considered this for a moment. Of course, Lowell Austin had not even been married according to the stories Chance had read online in the Idaho Statesman at the Messenger office. He shook his head. “Good, but if that’s the case, why did the son do a disappearing act?”
She wagged a finger at him and smiled, “Not a medical question.”
“Plus, in this case, I think we can rule out the family angle. The victim was an ex-con who is sure to have had serious enemies.”
She tapped her lips with her first two fingers and considered these implications. The gesture took him back to the first time he had kissed her a month ago.
It was early August, the last night of the Irish festival. He had just finished the final touches on her loft apartment. Sanding the joint paste on the drywall, he had spent much of the evening wondering how he might manage to see her again. He had almost convinced himself that she probably wouldn’t care if she ever laid eyes on him again, when she reappeared.
She carried a four-pack of Guinness she had won from a street vendor. Blushing, she told him how people in the crowd had teased that she should find a man to share her winnings. “At this point in my life, you’re the only man I seem to share anything with. So I came back to see if you’d like a Guinness.”
He had never seen her drink anything stronger than herbal tea. They drank to his job well done. Then, as if she were reading his thoughts, she said she would miss him.
The Guinness must have gone to his head, because finally, he told her, “You know, I’ve wanted to kiss you every day for the last month. Since I don’t officially work for you anymore, would it seem too forward of me to kiss you now?” Pondering his question, she had tapped her fingertips to her lips then too.
“Strangulation,” Adrienne said, thinking out loud. “But you’d see bruises around the neck probably. Spinal shock of some kind, maybe?” she mumbled, and then looked up at him. “Aren’t they doing an autopsy?”
It was Chance’s turn to shrug. “They’re working on the preliminary report. But they still need the tox screens. They’ll have to wait for the logjam at the state lab to break,” he said, his voice trailing off. “Who knows if they’ll ever figure it out.”
“Speaking of mysteries, guess who I met today?”
Before Chance could answer, Adrienne announced proudly, “Mesa.”
“She showed up here, did she?” Chance wondered offhand what had prompted her visit. “How did it go?”
“Fine,” Adrienne said. “She seemed a little shy. Why? How would you expect it to go? She likes your painting.”
Chance said a silent prayer of thanks. The last thing he wanted was for Adrienne and Mesa to get off on a bad footing. “There seemed to be some confusion about the Mountain Gallery’s account with the Messenger.” He gestured toward a stack of bills on a large oak desk behind her. On it, he could see a stack of unopened mail. “Planning to get to those anytime soon?”
She turned quickly to follow his gaze and then sighed. “Check’s in the mail, honest.”
“I’m teasing. It came today,” he said, his mind no longer on Mesa. “Too bad, too. I was thinking about taking what you owed in trade. Just as well. I wouldn’t want to have to explain it to Anna Takkinen.”
“Maybe I should hire her to be my business manager,” Adrienne said. “You really think that’s why Mesa came to the gallery?” She feigned a grimace when he didn’t answer. “Guess I blew my chance for a good first impression.”