The house looked as dark from the back as it had from the front. Olivia walked through the back yard, which needed mowing, and toward Heather’s large barn. The door was latched from the outside. She lifted the latch and pulled open the barn door, which required her full weight to accomplish. She stepped inside, called out Heather’s name. A horse neighed and several cats meowed, but not with the desperation of starvation. In fact, Olivia saw several bowls half full of dry cat food lined up along one wall. One small black cat ran up to her and wound around her ankles before heading for the food.
Olivia closed up the barn and circled the house. She saw no lights, either upstairs or downstairs. She pressed her nose against the kitchen window, the only one without a curtain. The kitchen had that lived-in look, with dirty dishes piled next to the sink and a coffee mug on the table. The mug looked like the same design as the one Olivia had found in the small barn.
If Geoffrey King had been hiding out in Heather’s small, rarely used barn, he might also have picked the lock to her house and taken a mug. Perhaps more. Olivia’s worry increased as she imagined Heather walking into her kitchen and finding King brewing himself a cup of coffee. King was a violent man. Heather had been calling in sick to the library every day, so she probably wasn’t dead or dying, but she might be black and blue. Maybe she was simply staying out of sight until her bruises healed. Maybe she was hiding from King, not yet aware he couldn’t hurt her any . . .
Wait a minute. None of this makes sense. . . . Heather Irwin might be quiet and solitary, but she was also strong and athletic. And smart. She had to know by now that Geoffrey King was dead. If she could open her heavy barn door and feed her animals, then she wasn’t bedridden. What if Heather’s mysterious boyfriend was Geoffrey King? Heather was shy and hadn’t been in a relationship for some time. King could be charming, especially with women who were insecure about their attractiveness. Suddenly, it made sense that no one had seen this boyfriend, including Heather’s good friend and neighbor, Gwen Tucker.
Geoffrey King stayed out of sight, operating in the darkness. Maybe he stashed stolen items in Heather’s small barn because he knew she rarely went into it. But what if she’d found the loot? Olivia remembered Charlene Critch’s black eye. If King had become violent with Heather, he wouldn’t have been careful about it. Heather’s face would undoubtedly tell the tale. And King had been murdered.
Olivia left the kitchen window and headed up the gravel driveway toward her car, dialing the police station number with her thumb. Del answered before the first ring ended. “Del? Listen, I think I might have something for—” Olivia heard the roar of a powerful engine and spun toward the sound. Heather’s green truck exploded from the garage and sped straight toward her. Olivia leaped sideways off the gravel driveway, onto the lawn. Losing her balance, she collapsed into a ball and rolled, the way a ski instructor had once taught her. It had become second nature to Olivia. She had never become a confident skier, so she’d had plenty of time to practice falling.
Taking it slow, Olivia rolled to a sitting position. Heather’s green truck was already out of sight. Olivia checked for broken bones. Her injured shoulder felt sore but, on the whole, not too bad. She heard a tinny voice yelling from the grass and realized her cell had flown from her hand when she fell. At least it still worked. She followed the voice, picked up her phone, and said, “Who is this?”
“Olivia? Are you okay? You called me, remember?”
“Del, of course. I’m fine, really, only a bit shook up. However, I am pleased to report that our murder suspect list has just increased by one.”
Chapter Seventeen
“How come you get to have all the excitement?” Maddie said. She opened the box of cookies Olivia had taken with her to Heather Irwin’s farmhouse. “We might as well eat these. Good thing you stashed them in your car before Heather could run over them. What a waste that would have been.”
“Thanks for your concern about my person,” Olivia said, reaching into the box. She pulled out a pink book-shaped cookie dusted with darker pink sugar sprinkles. “They say reading is broadening,” she said.
“Try not to think about it,” Maddie said before biting the roof off a library-shaped cookie. While she chewed, she retrieved her laptop from the kitchen desk. “We weren’t too busy today, which was bad for our bottom line but good for research.” Depositing her cookie on a plate, Maddie opened the lid of her computer. “I bookmarked the good stuff.” When her bookmark list appeared on the screen, Maddie hooked her ankle around a chair and dragged it next to Olivia’s at the kitchen table. She set the computer between them. “I had to do a lot of digging to get to this point, for which I want adequate appreciation.”
Olivia reached back to the kitchen counter, grabbed Maddie’s half-eaten library, and handed it to her. “Have a cookie. Hey, your cookies are the best on earth. What appreciation could be more adequate?”
Maddie slid the box out of Olivia’s reach. “Brat. No more cookies for you. Now concentrate.” She clicked on a bookmark and up popped the website for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, based in Manitoba.
“Manitoba, wow,” Olivia said. “How do they stay warm in those skimpy costumes?”
“Oh, the ignorance. Ballet is hard work. Sit up front at a ballet sometime; you can watch the dancers sweat.”
“Sounds like fun, but I’ll pass. What have you found?”
“Wait’ll you see, Livie, you will beam with pride. At first I thought it was a mistake on the Internet—and really, how could that be? But then I figured it out. Don’t fidget, I’m getting there. Presentation is everything. Okay, first we have to go back some years. For that I had to find an obsessive-compulsive ballet blogger, which wasn’t hard. Ballet is easy to obsess about.”
While Maddie squinted at her bookmark list, Olivia inched closer and closer until she could reach around and grab the cookie box. “Brain food,” Olivia said in response to Maddie’s glare.
“Here we are,” Maddie said. “I found this blogger who has collected the names of principal dancers and soloists for every year going back more than fifty years, almost to the troupe’s beginning. I skimmed through all of them. Just when I felt blindness begin to descend, I found this.” Maddie scrolled back to 1980 and tapped her fingernail against one name on the screen, listed under the category “Principal Players.”
Olivia leaned close to make out the tiny print. “Lara Larssen. You don’t think . . . ? The last name is spelled the same as Raoul’s, but couldn’t that be a coincidence?”
“I found a short bio on another website that mentioned Lara was married to a Latin dancer. How many Latin dancers named Larssen can there be on the earth at one time? Lara would have been twenty or so at that time, and I’d guess Raoul to be in his mid-fifties right now, so it fits.”
Thinking back to her conversation with Constance Overton, Olivia said, “Raoul told Constance his wife was dead, but we have only his word for that. Maybe she’s in hiding for reasons relating to the scar on her cheek.” She did some quick math. “But would our ballerina in the park really be so old? Lara Larssen would be pushing fifty. Could she do all those leaps?”
“Maybe,” Maddie said, “if she’d kept dancing and hadn’t suffered a major injury. The question is, why? Who dances outdoors in the middle of the night?”
Olivia selected a rectangular cookie decorated as a library card. “Someone who still longs to express herself? Not that I know anything about this artistic expression stuff.”
“However, you could be on to something, in your own fuzzy way.”
“Or she could be mentally unbalanced,” Olivia said.
“Also not unheard of in the artistic world. It would explain why she stays hidden during the day.” Maddie scrolled up to 1982 and pointed to the screen. “I have a suspicion that the young Lara Larssen’s ballet career was cut short. First, read this list.”