I snorted, because I knew for a fact it was Theodore. “You probably don’t carry your cell in case of accident, do you? I bet it’s in that dusty mess you call a bedroom.”
He popped the empty caulk tube out of the gun and held out his hand for a fresh one. “Did you stop by just to give me a hard time, or do you have another, even more nefarious purpose?”
I watched as he took a utility knife from his tool belt and sliced off the tube’s plastic tip. Sitting down on a stack of lumber, I said, “I brought cookies.” The smell of Cookie Tom’s wafting through town had compelled me to buy half a dozen coconut chocolate chips.
He grinned, pointing the loaded caulk gun at the ceiling. “That was my second prayer, you know.”
I watched him bead out the caulk in a smooth line. “Is there anything you want me to do?”
“Entertain me. My iPod ran out of juice ten minutes ago.”
“How about if I ask you some questions?” Except for his college years, Rafe had lived in Chilson all his life, and if he didn’t know everything about everyone in town, it meant someone had only recently moved in.
“My wallet’s downstairs next to last night’s pizza box,” he said. “But I know there’s at least two fives in there.” Rafe and I had a long history of making five-dollar bets, and one of these days I was going to have to start keeping track of who won most often. Rafe assured me that he had, but since he had memory issues with anything that didn’t concern his school or major-league baseball, I wasn’t about to take his word for it.
“Different kind of questions,” I said.
“Fire away.”
The caulk gun clicked as he kept an even bead flowing, and I reflected on how many references we used on a daily basis that had to do with firearms and weaponry.
“Don Weller still teaches at your school, right?” Don was a neighbor to Denise. On his list, Mitchell had noted Don as Roger’s neighbor and a sixth-grade teacher, and he was a man Denise had named as an enemy.
“Sure,” Rafe said. “Good guy, even if he does cheer for the Green Bay Packers.”
“Do you know what Denise Slade has against him?”
“Yup.”
I waited. Waited some more. I decided against picking up the circular saw and cutting off the legs of the ladder. “Are you going to tell me?” I asked, spacing out the words.
“Do I get a cookie first?”
“No.”
He sighed and moved to the other side of the window frame. “It’s typical Denise stuff. He’d put up a few extra sections of fence on the property line between his place and the Slades, not thinking much about it, but she called the city zoning administrator and turned him in for a zoning violation.”
“You need a zoning permit to put up a fence?”
“In Chilson, yeah, if it’s within eight feet of a property line. Anyway, it was Don’s bad luck that there’s a new zoning administrator all hot to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, and he got fined a hundred bucks.”
A hundred dollars seemed like a lot, but since I didn’t know the least thing about zoning, I kept my opinion to myself.
“But what really got him mad,” Rafe went on, “was he had to show up in front of the Planning Commission for a permit review on a night the Red Wings were playing in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Against Chicago.”
“Now, that is truly horrible,” I said dryly.
“Didn’t someone say that sarcasm is the lowest form of humor?”
“That’s puns.”
He grinned over his shoulder. “You know what’s really funny? Denise had better never put a foot wrong ever again, because if she does, Don will be on her faster than flies on dog doo-doo. If she’d kept her mouth shut about the fence, maybe told Don he had a violation but that she wasn’t going to say anything to the city if he went and begged for mercy, she’d have made a friend for life. As it is, she’s got an enemy forever.”
I didn’t say anything, but thought about Denise all alone in her house. How hard could it be for someone to break in, especially a next-door neighbor?
“It’s too bad about Roger, though,” Rafe said. “He was a good guy.”
To Rafe, most people were good guys, women included. Only somewhere out there, someone wasn’t good. Someone had killed Roger, and someone, I was sure, had tried to kill Denise.
The litany of professions recited by Detective Inwood came back to me. A local attorney, a middle-school teacher, a retail-store owner, and the director of a nonprofit organization.
Shannon was the attorney and Don Weller was the teacher. Was Pam Fazio the store owner? And who was the nonprofit director?
“Say, is it cookie time yet?” Rafe took out the caulk tube, now empty, and tossed it into an open cardboard box.
I shook my head, trying to clear the fluff out of my brain. But, as usual, all that happened was my hair rearranged itself.
“Sure,” I said. “Cookies coming right up.”
* * *
I spent the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon hanging out with Rafe, alternately helping and being annoyed by him, sometimes both at the same time.
“Why is it,” I said with exasperation, frowning at the clamp that didn’t quite fit around the pieces of wood they needed to fit around, “that you never get annoyed like I do?”
“Because,” he said, taking the clamp out of my hand and replacing it with one he’d fetched from another room.
I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. “Because? That’s it?”
“What, you want me to say it’s because you’re a girl? I can, you know. It’s because you’re a—”
“No,” I interrupted quickly, “I don’t want you to say that.”
“Then don’t ask questions that you don’t want the answers for.”
I stood there, clamp in one hand, wood bits in the other, thinking about questions and answers, about things I didn’t want to know. About asking the right questions. And about the cost of finding the answers.
“Hey, Minnie. You going to clamp that wood before the glue dries?”
“I think so,” I said absently, and tried to focus on what I was doing.
Half an hour later, Rafe kicked me out. “I’m done for the day,” he said, stretching. “I’m headed over to a buddy’s to watch the Lions lose another football game.”
“And drink beer and eat junk food?” I asked.
He slapped his flat stomach. “Dinner of champions,” he said. “Want to come?”
I squinched my face. “As much as I want to bang my fingers with a hammer.”
After I washed up in the kitchen sink (such as it was) and dried my hands on my pants (since there was no towel and the paper towels were upstairs) I poked my head into the bathroom where Rafe was showering and yelled good-bye.
“See ya,” he yelled back. “Hey, thanks for the help.”
“No problem. I’ll send you a bill.”
“Sounds good. You’ll get paid as soon as this place gets finished,” he said, and so I was laughing as I left his house.
* * *
During the hours I’d been inside, snow had started to drift down. The light was mostly gone from the sky, and the glow from the windows of the Round Table was like a beacon.
I stomped my feet free of snow in the entryway and slid into a booth. In my life with Aunt Frances, I was on my own for Sunday food after breakfast, and the cold slice of pizza Rafe had handed me for lunch wasn’t going to tide me over until tomorrow morning.
“Menu?” the middle-aged waitress asked. For once, it wasn’t Sabrina.
“No, thanks, Carol. I’ll have an olive burger with a side salad.” I wanted fries, but chose the vegetable route. My parents would be on their way back from Florida right now, and my mom’s imminent entry into the state was making me aware of my eating habits.
I sat back, uncomfortable at my bookless state, and looked about for something to read. A cast-aside newspaper would do, even if I’d already read it.