"Blood on the saddlebagst'Tuckcr yipped.
"Well, he can't be the only man in the country with a black leather vest." She stopped a minute and shrugged. A chill overcame her. "Damn, he about ran me over coming out of Sugar Hollow. Covered from head to toe in leather."
"Better talk with Cynthia."
"Did you tell her what you thought?"
"Yeah." He stared at the huge tractor wheel. "He was a little strange. The wheel of fortune, you know."
Harry watched the sun vanish. "Someone's up and someone's down—or dead."
"Won't somebody listen to me? There's evidence on the motorcycle's saddlebags!"
"Tucker, hush, I'll feed you in a minute."
Dejected, Tucker sat on Blair's foot. Blair reached down to pet her.
Blair's lustrous hazel eyes bored into Harry's. "Do you ever get a feeling about somebody? A real sense of who they are?"
"Sometimes."
"Despite his appearance and his manner that day, I just felt he was an okay guy."
"Blair, he can't have been so okay, or he wouldn't be dead."
11
A small crowd gathered at the post office parking lot. Harry, Mrs. Hogendobber, Reverend Jones, Market Shiflett, Aysha, Norman, Ottoline, Kerry, the Marilyn Sanburnes—senior and junior, Blair, Mrs. Murphy, Tucker, and Pewter watched as the sheriff's men loaded the motorcycle onto a flatbed gooseneck. Hogan Freely, president of the Crozet National Bank, with his wife, Laura, walked over and joined the crowd.
Cynthia supervised.
Reverend Jones spoke for all of them. "Do you know anything, Cynthia?"
As Cynthia replied, Susan Tucker pulled in. "Wait, wait for me."
"What is this, a town meeting?" Cynthia half joked.
"Kind of." Susan slammed the door of the new Saab. "Fair's on call. He can't make it, but I'll see that your report gets to Fair and BoomBoom, who has a doctor's appointment."
"There's not much to report. A decayed body, a white male most likely in his early thirties, was found in Sugar Hollow yesterday, late afternoon. We have reason to believe, thanks to Blair's accurate description, that the body is that of the owner of this motorcycle. We're running dental checks and we hope to know something soon. That's it."
"Are we in danger?" Mim asked the sensible question.
Cynthia folded her arms over her chest. "There's no way to accurately answer you, Mrs. Sanburne. We suspect foul play, but we don't know for sure. At this point the department isn't worried that there's a killer on the loose, so to speak."
But there was a killer on the loose. The little gathering felt safe because they didn't know the victim and therefore falsely believed they couldn't know the killer.
As Deputy Cooper drove off behind the truck with the motorcycle, the assembled folks squeezed into Market's for some drinks. The motorcycle had conveniently been removed during lunch hour. The sun beat down on them. An ice-cold drink and air-conditioning were welcome.
The animals scooted between legs.
"Come back here. "Pewter led them to the back shelves containing household detergents. "If we get up here we can see everything." She jumped onto boxes from the floor to the top shelf. Mrs. Murphy followed her.
"Raw deal, "Tucker grumbled.
"You can go behind the counter. Markets so busy, he won't notice."
"All right." Tucker, happier now that she could participate in gleaning information from the humans, worked her way back through the legs to the counter.
Susan, a born organizer, addressed the gathering. "Any of us that've seen the motorcycle before it was parked at the post office ought to write it down for Sheriff Shaw and Deputy Cooper. Obviously, anyone having contact with the deceased should do likewise."
"Contact? He barged into Ash Lawn and made such a scene!" Laura blurted out.
"Well, did you tell Deputy Cooper?" Mim inquired.
"No, but I will. I mean, how could I tell her? We just this instant found out—if it really is that same man. Could be someone else."
Miranda happily watched as people bought her doughnuts, brownies, and tarts—today's batch of goodies. Each day she baked larger quantities and each day they disappeared. She tore herself away from her own products to say, "Those of you who were up at Ash Lawn can go see Sheriff Shaw tomorrow. It would save him time if you go together."
"What happened at Ash Lawn?" Herbie Jones asked the obvious.
"This disheveled man, this dirty biker, pushed open the front door after we were closed—" Laura started to say.
"He wasn't that disheveled," Blair interrupted.
"Well, he certainly wasn't well groomed," Laura protested.
"Jeez." Market brought his hand to his face. "If you can't agree on how he looked, I can't wait to hear the rest of it."
"I was in the back, so I can't add anything." Aysha bought a lemon curd tart. She couldn't resist despite her mothers glowering gaze.
Harry added to the picture. "Blair and I were in the living room. We didn't see him come in but we heard him. He wasn't rude, really, but he was, uh, intense."
"Intense? He was cracked." Kerry put her hands on her hips. Kerry was a bit of an overreactor. She'd only come in from the slave quarters to catch the tail end of the incident. "He wouldn't leave, and Marilyn, who was in charge that day—"
"I asked him to leave," Little Marilyn chimed in. "He wouldn't go. He said he wanted Marin—"
"Malibu," Harry interrupted.
"Yes, that was it. He wanted this Malibu and he claimed she was at Ash Lawn. Well, of course she wasn't. But he was so insistent."
"Who's Malibu?"
"An old girlfriend," Blair told them.
"That doesn't tell us who she is." Mim, as commanding as ever, hit the nail on the head.
Ottoline sarcastically said, "With a name like Malibu, I suggest we look for someone in a tube top, high heels, short shorts, and with voluminous hair—bleached, of course."
n
The sheriff's office, drab but functional, suited Rick Shaw. He disliked ostentation. His desk was usually neat since he spent most of his time in his squad car. He disliked desk work as much as he disliked ostentation. Mostly he hated being stuck inside.
Today files cluttered his desk, cigarette butts overflowed in the large, deep ashtray and the phone rang off the hook. He'd been interviewed by the local television station, the local newspaper, and the big one from Richmond. Those duties he performed as a necessity. He wasn't a sheriff who loved seeing his face on the eleven o'clock news. Sometimes he'd make Cynthia juggle the interviews.
The coroner worked late into the night taking tissue samples.
No driver's license or identifying papers were found on the body. Cynthia knew the plates were registered to Michael Huckstep. But was the body that of Michael Huckstep? They could assume it was, but until they had a positive ID, they wouldn't know for certain. After all, someone could have killed Huckstep and posed as him.
Rick asked for a list of missing persons as well as stolen motorcycles to be made available to him. They were. Nothing on either California list matched the abandoned Harley or the dead man.
Cynthia scraped into the office. He held up his hand for her to wait. He dispensed with his phone call as soon as he could.
"Mim," he said.
Cynthia emptied the ashtray into the wastebasket. "She wants to be the first to know." She replaced the ashtray. "We went over the bike. Nothing there. No prints. Whoever drove it to the post office wore gloves."
"Bikers usually wear gloves."
"Wonder what he was doing in Sugar Hollow?"
Rick held up his hands as he twirled around in his swivel chair. "Sightseeing?" He twirled in the opposite direction, then stopped. "Makes me dizzy."
"If it weren't for drugs, we'd be out of work," she joked. "I bet he went in there to make a deal. Sugar Hollow is pretty but not exactly a tourist attraction. He was in there with someone who knows the county—I betcha."