I went to the counter, pulled out the phone book, and dialed.
“Lakeview Animal Shelter, how may I help you?” a woman asked.
I introduced myself and asked about the donor who had funded their new building.
“It was an anonymous donation,” she said. “No one knows who was behind it.”
“Yes, I understand. But the checks had to come from somewhere.” I tried to sound reasonable. Jovial, even. “Were the checks written by the Tarver Foundation?”
There was a long pause. “How did you know?”
I gave a broad and vague answer, then hung up.
So. Two big projects, one foundation. I didn’t know much about foundations, but I was pretty sure they could be funded by a large group or they could be created by a single person.
Somehow Agnes had been involved with the Tarver Foundation. Maybe the money-as-motive theory was workable. I might as well try it out because I didn’t have diddly else to work with. Marina’s blackmail theory seemed about as unlikely as her short-lived theory that Agnes was an embedded FBI agent. No, the only money involved was held by the Tarver (Ezekiel G.) Foundation, and the next step was clear.
Ick.
Lois noted my change of expression. “You look pale. Are you sure you’re feeling okay? I know you normally only get sick in January, but I hear the new flu that’s going around is a tough bugger.”
I felt my cheeks with the back of my hand and was surprised at the chill. “Just hungry.” Which was probably true, but any appetite was gone, because today was Wednesday. Tonight the kids would be with Richard, and I’d be free to do stuff.
The evening moonlight cast long, creepy shadows. Dry leaves skittered across lawns and down sidewalks. The noise was loud enough to cover my footsteps and, I hoped, had covered the thunk of my car door shutting. Late October; a perfect night to do stupid things and scare myself out of my silly wits.
With cold, bare fingers I inserted the key into Agnes’s back door. I stepped inside, shut the door, and stood in the kitchen, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. Turning on lights didn’t seem like a good idea. The last thing I wanted was Marina to barge on over here, pound me with questions, then broadcast the answers all over her blog.
The house smelled stale and empty. I wondered who would live here next. Would the pink bathroom or the Minnesota Wild basement be the first thing to go?
After a few minutes of imagining new color schemes—warm earth tones in the bathroom, with the obvious choice for the basement being the green and gold of the Green Bay Packers—I could make out the dim outline of kitchen cabinets. Arms spread wide in the dark, I grandpa-shuffled across the linoleum and tripped when the flooring switched to carpet. Rats. Nancy Drew never seemed to run into problems like this. Of course, Nancy never had to go to the bathroom, either.
I went into the study and shut the door. Agnes had a tall wooden fence in the backyard that would hide any light that escaped around the thick curtains. Wouldn’t it?
Shuffling again, I went across the hallway, grabbed a blanket that was folded across the guest bed, then spent an awkward couple of minutes in the dark, jamming it over and around the study’s curtain rod.
When I flicked on the overhead light, the sudden brightness stung my eyes. There was a gap underneath the door, but I decided that not even eagle-eyed Marina could detect that small amount of light from across the street.
Even so, I turned on the desk light and flicked off the overhead fixture. I put my hand on the back of Agnes’s desk chair, then paused. If there were ghosts, if Agnes was a ghost, would she haunt me for sitting here? I tried to imagine solid, no-nonsense Agnes as a ghost. She looked the same; just transparent.
I held out my hand, palm up. “Do you mind?” I asked. The imaginary ghost shook her head. Her lips, thin and colorless, moved, but I heard no sound.
“What’s that?” I tipped my head. Lipreading was not one of my strong suits. Once again she spoke, and again I had no idea what she said. Most people wouldn’t have imagined a ghost they couldn’t manage to communicate with, but then again, most people would never have tried to make a go of a children’s bookstore in a town with a population under ten thousand.
The imaginary Agnes ghost didn’t look threatening, so I went ahead and sat in the wooden chair. As soon as I landed, the casters rolled fast across the hard plastic chair mat. “Whoops!” I grabbed the edge of the desk.
In her gravelly voice, my ghost Agnes said, “Just oiled those wheels last month.”
Agnes had a sense of humor. Who knew? “Gee, thanks.” My voice startled me. There I was, sitting at the desk of a murdered woman, hearing her imaginary ghost, and talking back to it.
I shook my head. “Get a grip,” I said. There was a reason I’d sneaked back into this house, and frightening myself with made-up ectoplasm wasn’t helping. I was here to snoop.
The desktop held a few books: two dictionaries; a thesaurus; a world almanac; two foreign-language translation dictionaries—English-Finnish and English-Czech. I puzzled over the foreign dictionaries until I remembered the hockey team’s roster.
Other than the lamp and books, the only other thing on the desk was a worn leather desk blotter complete with calendar. I hunched down and looked for any indentations in the paper. In old movies, investigators were always finding clues via forceful penmanship, but I didn’t see a thing. I ran my hand flat across the blotter. Still nothing.
The calendar was tucked into the blotter’s triangular corners. My grandfather had often slid notes into corners like that. I flipped out October back through January.
Nothing.
I retucked the calendar corners. So much for doing stuff the easy way. I stared at the desk. The desk stared back. Maybe Agnes’s ghost would help me out. “Don’t suppose you want to just, you know, tell me about the Tarver Foundation?” I asked. “Simple things. I’m sure you have the answers. How old the foundation is, who sits on the board, where the money came from. Any of that would be great.”
My lunchtime had been spent trolling the Internet, looking for information on the Ezekiel G. Tarver Foundation. Old Ezekiel popped up on a few genealogy Web sites—he was quite the seed-sowing patriarch, and the G stood for Gunther—but I discovered absolutely zero about the foundation. Hence, my bizarre conversation with an Agnes I didn’t believe in.
“How about it, Agnes?”
The ghost didn’t reply.
“Well, how about an office location? That shouldn’t be a secret.”
Nothing.
“Did you hear the joke about the Dutchman and the canoe?”
Either she had and didn’t think it was funny, or she didn’t want to hear it. Not that she was there at all, but if she was . . .
“Get on with it.”
“Fine,” I snapped, and yanked open the skinny middle drawer. All the normal supplies were there, collected in tiny cups and lined up in rows—pencils, erasers, pens, paper clips, stapler, stamps. I looked at it with a small heap of jealousy on my shoulder. The closest I came to an orderly desk these days was when I visited the local office-supply store.
I pulled the drawer out as far as it would go, but the only interesting thing I found was a slide rule. Its leather case opened so easily, I wondered if Agnes actually used the thing. Which made sense—Glass Wax, powdered laundry detergent, slide rule.
Onward and downward.
The top drawer on the right held note cards, greeting cards, and stationery. Other right-hand drawers held mailing supplies, packaging tape, and maps of various states and cities.
It was in the left-hand drawer, the very bottom-left-hand drawer, that I finally found something. In retrospect, I should have looked there first. The only twenty-twenty vision I had was hindsight.