“Not bad,” he said, “so much as annoying.”
I glanced at Barb and, judging from the tight expression on her face, I wasn’t sure she agreed with him. “Anyway,” I went on, “Detective Inwood and Ash aren’t telling me much. It is an active investigation.”
“Ah, but you have some ideas, don’t you?” Cade eyed me. “You are full of the things. Ideas ooze out of you.”
I made a face. “Ooze? You make me sound like a mud puddle.”
“Flow? Gush? Emanate?” Cade asked. “Exude. Escape. Discharge.”
“Oh, ew.”
“Percolate,” Barb said.
“Excellent!” Cade exclaimed. “And a P word to boot. You win this round, my darling.” He toasted his wife. “And now,” he said, turning to me, “your idea. No denials; I can see it in the set of your shoulders, and slumping like that will not change the facts.”
I sighed and straightened. It wasn’t fair that a man who’d grown famous painting landscapes could see into my head by looking at my posture.
“And now, young lady, it’s time to share.” Cade made a come-along gesture. “What’s your idea?”
“It’s about books.”
The McCades frowned, exchanged a quick glance, then looked back at me.
“What’s about books?” Barb asked. “The break-ins or the murder?”
“Both.”
“How do you figure that?” Cade asked.
I looked at him closely, but saw no trace of the Patient Look, the expression that meant I was being humored and coddled and been found amusing in a condescending way. My previous boyfriend had used that expression too often, and I was still sensitive to its use.
“There were three break-ins,” I said, holding up the requisite number of fingers. “The Friends’ book-sale room, the bookmobile, and Pam’s antiques store. During each incident, every book was tossed onto the floor, but according to the records of both Pam and the bookmobile, no book was stolen.”
“And the book-sale room?” Barb asked.
I shrugged. “No way of knowing. They don’t need to track books the way we do. But someone was clearly looking for something, and since the bookmobile and Pam’s store were both broken into after the sale room was, I figure he didn’t find whatever it was.”
“Or she,” Cade murmured.
“Or she,” I agreed, a little chagrined that a male had had to correct my gender usage.
Barb frowned. “But what about Andrea Vennard? How does she fit in?”
“That’s when it all started,” I said in a low voice, leaning forward. “Andrea was killed. Then the library was broken into, then the bookmobile, then Pam’s store. In a town this size, it’s hard to believe that all those crimes aren’t connected somehow. My guess is that someone is looking for a book worth a lot of money, and Andrea got in the way. Maybe,” I said slowly, thinking of a new possibility, “a book that’s been in a family for a long time and no one realizes its value.”
“Isn’t there a new used-book store?” Cade asked. “Have they had a burglary?”
Ash had told me that they’d been incident free, and I told the McCades so.
Cade sipped his beer. “You think Andrea’s murder was committed by the same person who’s responsible for the break-ins.”
I nodded.
“Does anyone know,” Barb asked, “why Andrea was in Chilson?”
“Oh, we know why.”
“We do?”
“Well, sure,” I said. “She came up for her great-aunt’s funeral. Talia DeKeyser.”
It was as if I’d tossed a restrictive force field over them just after they’d witnessed a shocking sight. Both stared at me, unblinking and unmoving. Just at the point where I was beginning to wonder if time had indeed stopped, Barb turned to her husband.
“You’re going to have to tell her.”
“Yes,” he said, breaking the spell I’d unwittingly cast.
“Tell me what?”
Cade pulled in a long breath. Then, instead of doing the expected thing and letting it out in a long, gusting sigh, he picked up his beer. When the only thing left on the inside of the glass was a sticky foam, he returned it to the table. “Sorry,” he said to his wife, “but I do believe I needed that.”
“Wanted, not needed.” She patted his arm and half smiled. “It’s all right. I have the car keys.”
There was a long pause. I tried to be patient, but was on the verge of using my foot to whack at someone under the table in the hopes of kick-starting the conversation, when Cade started telling the story.
“This was when Cal, Talia’s husband, was still alive. About five years ago, I’d guess.” He turned to Barb, who nodded confirmation. “Barb and I had bought our lake house the year before, and we were still getting to know the area and the town. Still meeting people and getting to know the neighbors.”
It was a familiar story. Newcomers, if they didn’t use some sort of method to establish a social network—volunteer work, church activities, whatever—took a long time to develop friendships.
“We were in Benton’s,” Barb said. “Mr. Smart Alec here was at the candy counter, trying to guess how many jawbreakers he could fit into his mouth before his jaw actually broke, when this tall, old guy spoke up and said he could take in fifteen.”
Cade laughed. “And then an elderly woman, who was standing next to him, said his mouth was much bigger than that, he’d be better off guessing twenty, and did he want to try an experiment?”
I smiled. “That was Talia and Cal?” All the stories I’d heard about them, I’d never once heard they were funny.
Barb nodded. “We were instant friends, despite the age difference.” She smiled at me. “One of these days we’re going to have to get some friends our own age.”
“Age is nothing,” Cade said, waving off the issue. “What matters is that you laugh at the same things.”
“I laugh at you every day,” his loving wife told him.
He ignored her and said, “We went out to dinner with Talia and Deke a few times—”
Barb saw my puzzled look and interrupted. “Deke was Cal’s nickname. From DeKeyser, and from his playing pond hockey into his sixties.”
Cade barely slowed down. “One day they invited us to dinner at their home. Barb insisted on bringing salad and bread, so when we arrived, she and Talia went back to the kitchen, while Deke and I mixed drinks in the dining room.”
It was an easy picture to summon; women and men in separate rooms, all four chatting easily and comfortably. Of course, the picture I was bringing to mind was incomplete, since I had no idea where the DeKeysers had lived, so I asked.
“Just a few blocks from downtown,” Barb said. “In the historic district.” She described a house I had seen many times, a Victorian home of gingerbread trim, lace curtains, and creaking wooden floors, the kind of house where grandmothers grew up, the kind of house that could almost make you smell lilacs and taste homemade ice cream.
“In the dining room,” Cade said, bringing me out of my historical fog, “the bottles and glasses were on a sideboard. Also on the sideboard was a stack of books.”
Books?
Cade gave me a crinkly smile. “You are suddenly a little more interested in this story, I see. Yes, there was a stack of books. Picture books was what I noticed. Books to read to the grandchildren on a rainy day. Blueberries for Sal, Stellaluna, Make Way for Ducklings, The Little Engine That Could.”
I nodded at the names, all as familiar to me as the back side of my teeth.
“At that moment,” Cade continued, “I just glanced at the pile. But then Talia called for Deke’s help to reach a dish on a high shelf, and I was left alone.”
“You looked at the books.”
“Exactly,” he said, nodding. “I was in the home of an acquaintance and didn’t feel free to finish mixing the drinks, and I didn’t want to sit uninvited. Yes, I could have stood there and been bored, but why do that when there are picture books at hand? An artist can always learn something from other artists. Our research never ends.”