Mac and I had come across some great finds that week and had bought a few more from the pickers we regularly did business with.
“Can you describe her?” I asked.
Paul frowned and looked at me. “I’d say she’s a bit shorter than you, swimmer’s build—you know, wide shoulders and strong legs.”
“Long curly hair?” I finished.
“You know her?”
“We do,” Rose said.
“Her name is Teresa,” I said. “I’ve bought some things from her for the store. Do you remember when you last saw her over at the Hall house?”
I shifted a bit uneasily from one foot to the other. I hated to think that Teresa Reynard might be involved in Ronan Quinn’s death. I didn’t know her well, but she’d always brought me good-quality items—no junk—and she’d always been fair in the prices she asked.
Paul blew out a breath. “Let me see. Four or five days before . . .” He paused. “Before, you know, what happened, I saw her with Ethan. She was putting a couple of concrete planters and a small concrete statue—I think it was a lion—in the back of her van. It’s an old Volkswagen van. Blue.”
It was definitely Teresa whom Paul had seen. She called her old van Mitch. It always made me think of the little clown cars at the circus when she started unloading it. She somehow managed to put far more inside than the laws of physics decreed should fit.
“Was that the last time you saw Teresa around here?” Rose asked.
“Actually no,” Paul said. “That morning we drove down to Portland, I saw her van go by. Sometime before six.” He glanced over in the direction of the swing. “Alyssa is an early bird. She was in the living room watching a video. I’d just slipped into the kitchen to make a cup of instant coffee.” He rolled his eyes. “My wife thinks I drink too much coffee.” His expression grew serious. “You don’t think this Teresa person killed that man, do you?”
“Heavens, no!” Rose gave her head a slight shake. “But she might have seen something when she was in the neighborhood.” Her eyes darted to me for a brief second. “We’ve taken enough of your time, Paul. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said.
Rose looked in Mr. P.’s direction and raised a hand. He nodded, then said something to Alyssa before giving her one last push. He walked over to us.
“You have an enchanting daughter,” he said to Paul.
“Thank you for entertaining her,” Paul said.
“The pleasure was mine.”
Alyssa was still swinging, pumping now with her legs to go higher. She waved at Mr. P., who waved back.
There was no one home at the blue bungalow that belonged to Sharon Marshall or at the white Cape Cod on the other side of Edison Hall’s house.
We walked back to the SUV.
“Sarah, do you have an address for Teresa Reynard?” Mr. P. asked once he was settled in the backseat.
I was buckling my seat belt and I half turned to look at him. “Don’t tell me you can lip-read at that distance?” I said.
He frowned and looked a little confused. “I can’t lip-read at all, my dear,” he said. “Although I can read upside down, which has proved very useful a time or two. Why do you think I was lip-reading?”
Rose was smiling. “The little one told you, didn’t she?”
Mr. P. smiled back at her, the puzzled look gone from his face now. “And her father told you,” he said.
“Yes, he did,” Rose said. “He’s a pleasant young man, but I’d forgotten how literal-minded he could be.” She gave Alfred an inquiring look.
He held up a hand before she could speak. “And before either of you worry that I interrogated that lovely child, I didn’t. I just happened to notice that she had one of those little old wooden toy jeeps that you”—he tipped his head in my direction—“bought from Teresa about two weeks ago. All I did was ask her where she got it.”
“Teresa gave it to her,” I said.
He nodded. “She said the nice lady with the rolly hair gave it to her.”
“Rolly” was a good description of Teresa’s mass of dark curls. I checked for traffic and pulled away from the curb.
“Then she asked me if I liked to play hide-and-seek,” Mr. P. continued.
“Children that age have a very short attention span,” Rose said. Rose had been a teacher for a lot of years. Not only did she know a lot about kids, but she also knew pretty much every scheme or scam a kid between the age of five and eighteen could come up with.
“Alyssa is very bright for her age,” Mr. P. said. “And very observant.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror and he gave me a Cheshire cat smile. “For example, she noticed Teresa, over at the Hall house the morning of the murder, playing hide-and-seek. Or to be more exact, hiding by the side of the garage.”
Chapter 5
“We have to talk to her,” Rose said at once. I could feel her eyes on me. “Sarah, where does Teresa live?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Somewhere just outside town, I think.”
“It doesn’t matter, dear,” she said. From the corner of my eye, I saw her pull out her phone. “I’ll Google her address.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I need to get back to the shop and . . .” I hesitated, not wanting to get any more involved than I already was and, even more important, not wanting to insult either one of them by pointing out the obvious.
“And what?” Rose asked.
I stopped at the corner, checked the traffic in both directions and took the opportunity, while we were stopped, to look at both of them. “And have you considered the fact that your information came from a four-year-old?”
“She’s very bright,” Mr. P. said immediately, leaning forward and placing one hand on the back of my seat. “She has the vocabulary of a much older child.”
Rose turned partway round to look at him. “Sarah was the same way,” she said. “She could read before she started school. Isabel used to get her to read everyone’s horoscope out of the newspaper.”
I flashed to sitting at my grandmother’s table in a red plastic booster chair with a cookie in one hand and the newspaper spread out on the round wooden table.
“I remember that,” I said, smiling at the memory as I turned left.
“I don’t doubt that you do,” Rose responded a tad tartly. “You were a very bright child, too.”
“And I’m smart enough now to see you’re trying to play me like a piano.”
“I’m disappointed that you would think that,” she said. I didn’t have to look over at her to know she was sitting at attention in her seat, her shoulders squared, chin jutting out just a little. The tinge of self-righteousness in her voice told me that.
“Because I’m right,” I said lightly. I did shift my gaze right for a moment then.
Rose blushed and ducked her head.
“We need to go back and talk to those other neighbors,” Mr. P. said from the backseat. “Which doesn’t mean I think Alyssa made up what she told me. No offense, Sarah.”
“None taken,” I said. “And for the record, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to talk to Teresa. I just don’t want to see her ambushed.”
“She won’t be,” Mr. P. promised.
When we got back to Second Chance, Rose and Alfred went into their sunporch office and I walked through the workroom to the store. While we were gone Mac had brought in two blue rattan egg chairs that we’d picked up at the curb of a house two streets over from the store the night before the spring-cleaning pickup Paul had spoken about. Jess had made cushions for them with heavy, dark blue canvas removable covers. Elvis was sitting on one of them, methodically washing his face with one black paw. My brother, Liam, was sitting on the other.