Chapter 22
Dear Sophie,
I’m not much of a cook, but I would like to bring something to a family who just lost a loved one. I’m at a loss about what to give them. Could you make some suggestions?
Clueless in Deadmans Corner, Maine
Dear Clueless,
So many people focus on lunch and dinner dishes, that something the family can grab and eat for breakfast is often appreciated. Coffeecake, muffins, and the like are readily available at bakeries. One family I know was thrilled to receive a small Christmas tree complete with lights and ornaments because they couldn’t focus on the upcoming holiday.
Sophie
“Cindy!” I whispered to her. Who else would hide the murder weapon in the library? I had put her name at the top of my list of suspects. Poor Gavin! What would happen to him? His father was dead, and if his mother went to prison . . .
So Kelsey had been telling the truth. Unless, of course, someone was trying to frame Cindy.
“In one way,” Nina said, “it was a brilliant move. It could have gone undiscovered for years.”
“Or she could have removed them around Halloween when the hubbub about bees and foggers and Hollis’s death weren’t foremost in everyone’s thoughts. If she had thrown them in a Dumpster somewhere then, no one would have given them any thought.”
Nina tugged me toward Jay. “You’re in here every day. How come you didn’t notice these sooner?” she whispered.
Wolf looked up at us. I got the feeling he wanted to know the answer to that question, too.
“They keep collections of pamphlets—things that were sold, advertisements, and such down on that shelf. They aren’t directly related to my line of research.”
Wolf got to his feet. “What exactly are you researching?”
Jay shot me a desperate glance. “The history of my house.”
That appeared to satisfy Wolf. There was no need for him to know about the ghostly voices Jay was hearing.
“Are they the missing foggers from the Haberman house?” I asked Wolf.
“That would be my guess. I can’t think of any other good reason to stash empty foggers in a library. Anyone else would have thrown them into the trash,” said Wolf. “But this isn’t like finding blood on a knife that we can link directly to the victim. Unless there are fingerprints on the cans, it might be hard to prove that they are the foggers used in Hollis’s death.”
Unless, I thought, the accused happened to be a very popular librarian.
Additional police officers showed up and it was beginning to get crowded. “I think it’s time to make our exit,” I said to Nina.
She was reluctant to leave but finally acquiesced. “I can’t believe it could have been Cindy. She’s always so gentle and kind. I was certain Kelsey had killed Hollis.”
On the walk home, I filled her in on the entire saga of that night as Kelsey had relayed it to me. “So she was with Angus, but only to be nice and help him out.”
Nina stopped in her tracks. “That could have been me!”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the kind of thing I would do for an old friend.” She looked at me with a gleam in her eyes. “We really ought to bring Angus something, don’t you think?”
“You mean you want to pump him and verify what Kelsey told me?”
Nina feigned innocence. “Moi? Would I do that?”
“Why do I think it’s not a coincidence that we’re across the street from Big Daddy’s Bakery?”
“I do love his cupcakes.”
We crossed the street and bought two half-dozen boxes of cupcakes. One for Angus, and one for us. Nina selected peanut butter with chocolate buttercream, chocolate with chocolate frosting, vanilla with vanilla buttercream, strawberry with a lovely pink frosting, and two salted caramel cupcakes for each box because she knew we would both want one. Nina wasn’t a half a cupcake kind of person except in emergencies.
Armed with our excuse to visit, we walked down to Duke Street.
The two of us strolled up the stairs to the stoop at Angus’s front door, and I banged the octopus knocker.
There was no answer.
“I have to do this. I never saw an octopus door knocker.” Nina raised her hand and grasped the octopus head. She shuddered. “It’s a little creepy.” She banged it loud enough to alert the entire neighborhood.
“I guess he’s not home. We’ll have to try again later.” I walked down the steps.
“Sophie . . .” Nina’s voice was shaky. “The door’s not locked.”
I looked up at her. “Nina!”
She had already opened the door. “Angus!” she sang. “We brought you some goodies.”
By the time I reached the landing, she was already inside Angus’s house.
“Nina!” I hissed. “Get out of there.”
“It’s not breaking and entering if the door isn’t locked.”
“Actually, I think it is. And if it’s not, then it’s certainly trespassing.”
“It’s decorated in early man cave.”
“What does that mean?” I asked from the stoop.
“Sports stuff.”
“Will you get out of there?”
There was a long silence. Too long. “Nina?”
“Sophie!” she screamed.
I dashed inside, thinking the worst. Someone must have caught her inside the house. She interrupted a burglary or something. “Nina! Where are you?”
The house was very narrow. It wasn’t difficult to locate her. She stood near the doors of the living room that led to a brick patio. Angus lay at her feet.
I gasped at the sight of him. “Noooo!”
His hands curled limply near his neck. There was no sign of blood.
Nina grabbed my arm with a trembling hand. In the other hand, she still held the bag containing boxes of cupcakes.
I was pretty sure Angus wouldn’t be eating any more cupcakes. My hands quivered, too, as I punched 911 on my cell phone as fast as I could. The dispatcher asked if I hadn’t called about the same address earlier that day. I assured her this was a separate event.
I handed the phone to Nina and walked around Angus’s body. I knelt on the floor, reached for his neck, and tried to find a pulse. He was already cold. I had little hope of finding any sign of life but continued to search for a pulse and realized that his neck bore the imprint of something used to choke him.
“How can you touch him?” asked Nina.
“If he has a pulse, we need to do CPR. Maybe we should anyway.” I debated between rolling him over to try CPR and leaving him exactly as he was so I wouldn’t mess with the evidence. In the end, it was his cold skin that made me decide to wait for the authorities. “I think he was choked to death.”
It wasn’t long before we heard sirens. I rushed to the front door so they would know which house it was. A young police officer I hadn’t met before arrived at the same time as the EMTs. The name tag on his shirt said McGraw. He took a long look at Angus. For a minute, I thought McGraw might be sick. He regained his composure and pulled Nina and me aside while the EMTs calmly set to work.
When we told him our names, he wrote them down before looking at us curiously. “Why do your names sound familiar?”
Uh-oh. “We’re friends of Wolf Fleischman,” I explained.
I saw the spark of recognition in his face. “Ohhh. Yes, that’s why I’ve heard of you. Addresses, please?”
Suddenly I realized how spoiled I had become because Wolf and Wong knew me so well. They didn’t have to ask for my personal details. They knew where to find me.
“Name of the victim?”
“Angus Bogdanoff,” I said. That was more than we knew the last time we called 911 for him.
“He lived here?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know the victim?”
“We didn’t know him well. We helped him a couple of days ago when he was stung by bees.”
“How was it that you found him? He doesn’t look like he could answer the door.”
I sucked in a breath.
Nina held up the bag of cupcake boxes. “We brought him a treat. We knocked on the door. When he didn’t respond, we got worried about him, opened the door, and found him sprawled on the floor.” Nina responded so smoothly that it frightened me a bit. It wasn’t a lie, of course, but we really had no cause to go inside the house.
“And then?”
“And then Sophie called 911,” she said.
One of the EMTs walked up and very quietly said, “I’m calling the medical examiner.”
The cop blanched.
When the EMT moved away, I said, “Call Wolf. This is his case.”
“That’s not protocol.” McGraw stared at me for a moment. “Why do you think this is Wolf’s case when it hasn’t been assigned yet?”
“Because I’m pretty sure it’s directly related to the death of Hollis Haberman, which is Wolf’s case.”
His eyes grew large. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to follow protocol, but that’s good to know.”
“Can we go now?” I asked.
“Maybe you better hang around a little longer.”
McGraw walked away and phoned someone out of our earshot.
“I don’t see any ropes,” whispered Nina.
It was a small house. “Unless the killer took it upstairs or left it out on the patio, he probably took it with him.” I didn’t see anything that looked heavy and bloody lying around.
I sidled into the kitchen. Careful not to touch anything, I searched for signs of blood or anything unusual. There were stacks of empty pizza boxes on the counter along with a jar of instant coffee, a six-pack of sodas, and a bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips. Empty beer bottles cluttered the recycling bin. Angus hadn’t been a health food fanatic.
I edged around the counter to what would normally be a dining area and stubbed my toe on something hard. I cried out and everyone looked over at me.
Even though my big toe throbbed, I said, “Sorry. I’m fine.” I glanced down at the culprit. It looked like a cast-iron ball with a flat bottom and a handle on top. Next to it was a set of dumbbells in graduating sizes. And hanging off of some of them were small chains. “Officer McGraw,” I called.
He walked over to me and nodded. He squatted near them, his arms on his knees, and eyed them. “Thanks, Sophie. I think you’re on to something here.”
Wolf walked up behind him. “She has a good instinct for things like this.”
I wasn’t about to tell him I had literally stumbled into the mother lode of murder weapons. “What are the chains for?”
“They make the weight heavier as you lift it,” Wolf explained.
Nina and I ran through our story again for Wolf.
“Hollis and his handyman,” mused Wolf. “You two can take off. I’ll stop by if I have any questions.”
Nina grabbed my hand and tugged me out of there like a locomotive. When we reached the sidewalk, she stopped and sucked in huge gasps of air. “That poor man. Can you imagine? He probably thought, I’ll have a beer and watch some ESPN, then take a nap. He had no idea what was coming.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“He thought he was going to be murdered today? Seriously? Sophie, you’ve gone round the bend.”
“That’s not what I meant. I don’t think some stranger barged into Angus’s home and choked him. Look around. If you were burglarizing a house, is this the one you would have picked?”
“I see your point. The shabbiest house in the neighborhood probably isn’t where you’d find gold coins or something worth stealing. Somehow, he must have been more involved in Hollis’s murder than we know.”
“He might have had a hunch that he needed to watch his back.”
“Well, he didn’t do a very good job of that!” she said.
We started walking back to our block.
“Angus’s death points at Kelsey,” said Nina.
“You mean because a dead man can’t deny what she told me?”
“Exactly.”
I didn’t want to agree with her, but Angus’s demise was very convenient for Kelsey in that regard. Too convenient.
My cell phone buzzed. I glanced at it while we walked. It was a text from Mars.
Have news. On way to your house.
“Mars says he has news. He’ll meet us at my place.”
Nina lifted the cupcake bag she still carried. “I’m bringing dessert.”
In spite of the grisly scene we had left, I was getting hungry. When I unlocked my front door, I heard a voice behind me.
“Where have you been?” asked Francie. “I’ve been waiting for you to come home.”
The three of us and her dog, Duke, entered the foyer.
I stopped myself from reminding her that I had a cell phone and she could have called me. “Is everything okay?”
“I know who killed Hollis.”