Maddie. Of course, it had to be Maddie. Granted, she wasn’t usually so quiet, but she had packed away a fair quantity of merlot the previous night. Several glasses more than Olivia, and she wasn’t feeling all that perky herself. Maddie was lucky she still lived at her Aunt Sadie’s house, so she could walk home.
Olivia yanked open the kitchen door and said, “Hi there—” Someone was indeed standing at the sales counter, leafing through a pile of opened mail Olivia had left for later attention, but it wasn’t Maddie or a customer. It was Sam Parnell, decked out in his mail carrier uniform and holding a small clutch of envelopes in his left hand. From the expression on his face, he hadn’t heard her movements in the kitchen.
“What are you doing? That is private mail, and you of all people . . .” Olivia was so angry the words got stuck in her throat.
Even in the dim light, Olivia could see the fiery flush that covered Sam’s face. The paper in his hand fluttered to the counter. “I wasn’t . . . I mean . . .” Sam Parnell’s voice wasn’t deep to begin with, but now it had slipped into high tenor. He cleared his throat and said in a more controlled tone, “Your door was unlocked, the inside door to the store, I mean. It’s always locked on Mondays. I usually come in the front door and slip your Monday mail through the mail slot.” He twisted around and pointed to the slot in the middle of the store’s door. As if she might not have been aware of its existence.
Olivia mentally prepared to slice him in half with a few well-chosen words. She had to admit some satisfaction as she watched Sam’s bony face take on the look of a rat that had found itself cut off from all available methods of escape. And then a thought poked through her righteous rage—Sam loved gossip. He might be useful.
Olivia stepped into the store and flipped the light on fully. “Let’s start over,” she said. “I was about to make a pot of coffee. How about joining me? I’ve been back in town all these months, and we haven’t had any chance to chat.” That one minor role in a high school melodrama had been time well spent.
Sam had the dazed look of someone dropped into an alternate universe. “Well, uh . . .” He waved his hand at the mail sack hanging over his left shoulder.
Olivia decided to misinterpret. “That thing must weigh a ton. Why don’t we go into the kitchen; you can leave it on the table while we have coffee.” She gave him a delighted smile. “Isn’t this the most perfect timing? I mean, I’m almost never in the store on Monday mornings, and here you are, ahead of schedule. You usually don’t reach here until about ten, and it’s . . .” Olivia pushed up the sleeve of her sweater to check her watch. “It’s not even eight o’clock.” She opened the kitchen door and waved him inside.
“Okay, sure, thanks,” Sam mumbled. He slid the mail sack off his shoulder as he shuffled into the kitchen.
Only minutes earlier, Olivia would have laid odds that Sam Parnell would never willingly enter her kitchen for a chat, let alone thank her for inviting him. However, she had watched Sam’s expression transform while she delivered her spiel. The sharp edges of his face seemed to soften, and his small, pale eyes assumed a puppylike quality. At a certain point, Olivia had stopped acting. However, empathy aside, she fully intended to learn what she could from Snoopy Parnell.
A few minutes later, Olivia had the Mr. Coffee fired up and dripping. “I think I can produce a cookie or three,” she said, glancing over at Sam. He’d pulled his chair right up to the edge of the kitchen table, where he sat like a schoolboy with his hands on the tabletop, fingers interlaced.
When the coffee was ready, Olivia filled two mugs. “Do you take milk or sugar?”
“Black,” Sam said. “None of that muck for me.”
“Here you go,” Olivia said, setting a steaming mug in front of him. She placed a plate holding six decorated cookies within his reach. She added milk and sugar, lots of both, to her own mug. “I go for the muck, myself,” she said lightly.
Sam made no comment.
“I have to admit,” she said, as she pulled up a kitchen chair opposite Sam, “I envy you your job. I mean, you get to be outside all day, plenty of exercise, lots of contact with people. You must have seen and heard everything by now.” Olivia sipped her coffee, watching Sam over the edge of her cup.
Sam’s shrug conveyed agreement rather than modesty. “Folks have no idea how much we see and hear. We’re sort of invisible to most people, like a doorman or a waiter or something.” An edge of resentment had crept into his voice. “Hardly anyone knows they’re supposed to tip me at Christmas.”
Olivia clucked her sympathetic disapproval and silently vowed to tip anyone who ever delivered anything to her. “I guess I’ve been one of those people,” she said. “I hope you will accept these cookies as a late Christmas gift?”
To Olivia’s relief, Sam gave her a broad grin and selected a second cookie. She noticed his teeth were crooked, especially his two upper-front teeth, which virtually overlapped. Had he grown up too poor for braces? She couldn’t remember.
“Ms. Chamberlain, now,” Sam said, his mouth still full of emulsified cookie. “Mind you, I’m real sorry about what happened to her and not to speak ill or anything, but she wouldn’t so much as look me in the eye, let alone offer me a cookie.” A chunk of his cookie broke off and dropped to the tabletop. Sam picked it up and ate it. “Bertha, though, she sometimes invites me in for warm stew on cold days.”
“Let me warm up that coffee for you,” Olivia said. Sam relaxed against the back of his chair and allowed himself to be served.
After refilling cups, Olivia slid onto her chair and leaned toward Sam. “I imagine the police were eager to pick your brains after Clarisse died. I mean, you’d be in the best position to know all sorts of things, like whether she’d received any mail that might have upset her? I think there was some speculation about whether her businesses were suffering in this economy, so maybe she was getting overdue bill notices or letters from collection agencies.” A blatant lie, but at least it was a place to start. “Clarisse could have hidden those things from Bertha or her family, but not from you.” Olivia held her breath, hoping she hadn’t gone overboard.
Sam responded with a short, angry “Ha.” Resentment puckered his face and seemed to taint the sweet orange air in the kitchen. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you.” It wasn’t a question. “That Sheriff Jenkins, he looks right through me like I’m nothing but smoke. He was like that in high school, too. Thought he knew all there was to know and nothing else was important.”
Olivia hadn’t realized that Del and Sam were the same age. Sam looked ten years older, perhaps from being outdoors so much. His skin looked dry and rough, deeply wrinkled around his eyes. It must not have occurred to him to wear sunglasses. Olivia had no recollection of ever seeing him smile or laugh with delight. His mouth seemed to have frozen somewhere between a frown and a sneer.
“High school kids can be thoughtless,” she said.
“Yeah, well, seems to me most folks never change. Nobody listened to me then, and nobody listens to me now.”
“Which is foolish of them,” Olivia said. “Especially when a death is involved.”
Sam drained his coffee cup and twisted in his seat as if to stand. She was losing him, and he’d shared nothing about Clarisse’s mail. Well, she wasn’t about to let that happen.
Olivia scraped back her chair and grabbed Sam’s empty cup. “Let me get that for you,” she said. “You do enough walking about; you don’t need to fetch your own coffee.”
Sam sat down. While Olivia drained Mr. Coffee’s contents into Sam’s cup, she sneaked a glance at his profile. He looked relaxed and smug. Maybe she still had a chance to coax some information from him.
“Here you go,” Olivia said, setting the cup near Sam’s hand. “You better have these, too.” She slid the last of the cookies onto his plate. “I’ve downed too many already. I don’t get the exercise you do, and I’m afraid it’s beginning to show.”