“Oh, good, you are here,” came a loud voice. A woman’s voice.
Doris’s voice.
I locked eyes with Bob. We didn’t move.
The loud Doris voice continued. “I was here a couple of weeks ago and saw something that I've decided I want to buy—”
“I sold it,” Kay snapped out. The bell on the door jangled a little, as though Kay had tried to close the door and been stopped.
Doris said, “I haven’t even told you what it was. How the hell would you know if you’d sold it?”
Only someone who knew Kay as well as I do would have heard the minute pause before she said, “I remember what you were looking at. It's been sold.”
Doris could have been cross examining a hostile witness. “Oh yes? And just what do you remember me looking at two weeks ago, when you barely noticed my presence in this store?”
And where were you on the night of last January twenty-third at 9:42 p.m. when the crime was taking place? I added mentally.
“You strolled through my store in a counter clockwise circle, pausing before any piece of furniture made of pine. You picked up a silver cocktail shaker and put it down in a different place, and you handled a couple of porcelain figurines. But I imagine the piece you’re talking about is the painted pine handkerchief box that you looked at for several minutes, set down, and returned to twice before you left the store. I sold it to the next person who walked in, a widow from Milwaukee who remembered her mother having one like it in Pennsylvania. The piece is gone. Rare items like that do not wait for your convenience. Now, my store is closed for the day. Goodbye.” I heard the thump of the door closing, the click of the locks being set again.
Bob looked at me in astonishment. “Good lord, your cousin is amazing,” he managed, as Kay’s footsteps came back toward us.
I could have told him that.
“Did you hear that?” Kay demanded as she came back into our view. “Doesn’t that woman ever go home? She lives in Seattle, for goodness’ sake! What the hell is she doing in my store all the time?”
“She has clients all over,” I told her. “She’s famous for her knowledge of import and export law. She’s always jetting somewhere. Roger used to complain about it. I think he was jealous.”
“Well, let her jet somewhere else,” Kay said crossly. “Now, what was I doing when we were so rudely interrupted? Oh, I know. I was about to call Ambrose.” She turned again to go to the phone.
The next thing I knew I had burst out laughing. I felt decidedly out of control. They stared at me. I flapped a hand at them. When I could catch my breath enough to speak I said, “Sorry, sorry, it's just…the last twenty four hours have been so ridiculous. All of us moving around in our own little circles, me lost in the woods and hiding in the barn and trudging through suburbia. Bob tied to a chair being grilled by a beautiful blonde and sneaking away. Ambrose in here carting away the Albatross. What’s his name looking for the tape which is now in a restaurant somewhere in High Cross. The way things are going we’ll probably learn that the restaurant is next door to the bank they stole the original tape from. And now Doris has circled her way back here to buy a wooden box that you sold two weeks ago…” I faltered at Kay’s expression.
She shook her head. “If I had time I’d slap you out of this hysteria,” she sniffed. “You ought to know our inventory better than that. The box hasn’t been sold, it's sitting about three feet away from you on that dresser. I told you I don't take money with cooties on it.” She marched back to her office. I looked at the dresser, and saw the box. My laughing jag was over. I hiccupped.
Bob took my hand between both of his. “Would she really slap you?” His look of concern made my breath catch in my throat.
I managed a shrug. “Probably not unless she thought I was really out of control. I'm okay now. You were right earlier when you said things like this don’t happen to people like us.”
“I don’t know what I'd have done if you hadn’t found me in the barn,” Bob said, shaking his head. “Gone on the run again, maybe. Or gone blundering back into that woman’s hands.”
“Well, we can’t have her catching you again,” I said. “You should have called me as soon as you got loose.”
“Call me old fashioned,” he smiled, “but I never got into the habit of calling a lady at three a.m. And I do not want you involved in this thing. I can't believe how I've put you in danger. If Walsh had found you in the barn, I don’t think he’d have been as polite as my kidnapper was.”
I was silent as I imagined some distinctly unpleasant scenarios. I remembered another detail we had not yet covered. “I need to know something else,” I told him.
“Anything.”
“Who is Trixie?”
Kay bustled back into the room. “Ambrose is coming, but it’s going to take him a while to get here,” she announced. I saw one of her eyebrows go up as she noted Bob holding my hand.
“Oh, good,” Bob said, glancing over at her. Then he turned back to me. “Trixie? I don’t think I know anyone with that name.”
“I found a book of matches on your kitchen table. ‘Trixie’ and a phone number were written inside.”
“On my kitchen table?” His brow puckered. He shook his head. “I have absolutely no idea. I rarely use matches, and I don’t know any Trixie.”
“Oh. Okay,” I said, taking my hand from his.
While we were waiting for Ambrose, Bob said he’d like to take a shower. I made him hand out his clothes so that we could give them a quick wash and dry. “You’ll find new toothbrushes and disposable razors in the medicine chest,” I told him through the door. I heard him thank me as the shower started.
Kay put laundry soap in the washer and I dumped in Bob’s clothes. As she fiddled with the dials I turned to her. “Kay, I want to ask you about something.”
“Yeah?”
“I should have asked a long time ago, and I'm sorry I’ve been so self-centered that I didn’t do it before now.” I spun the dial on the washer and pushed it in to start the wash cycle.
She looked surprised and a little wary. “Yeah? What?”
“What happened with you and Ed?”
“What do you mean, what happened? We went out for a while and then we stopped.”
I know Kay as well as she knows me, and I knew that stonewalling tone of voice. “Uh-uh. Nope. There’s more to it than that. I remember some of your phone calls to me in Seattle when the two of you were first going out. You sounded like a teenager. You were having a really great time together. But about the time my life got complicated—”
“That’s one way to put it,” she inserted.
“When my life got complicated you stopped talking about yours. When I moved back to Willow Falls, no Ed to be seen, and any time his name comes up you practically spit. Of course now that I've met him, the question is what you ever saw in him in the first place—”
“I should think that at least would be perfectly obvious!”
“What?”
“Well, Louisa, you’ve seen him. You have to admit he’s pretty darned gorgeous.”
“Oh. Oh yeah, that,” I said. An amazed voice in my head said, oh my god, she is still in love with this guy. Where I saw slightly tubby middle aged cop, she saw Adonis.
“Okay, looks aside,” I tried tactfully, “he is pretty maddening—”
“But you’ve only met him once,” she leapt to his defense. How could she not see what she still felt for him? “He takes his job seriously, and he’s good at it. You should see all the letters of commendation he’s gotten, and he solved some very complicated cases when he was with the state police.”
“Well, if you say so. I happen to think a really good cop would never call you ‘lady’ in that sarcastic tone of voice, but you know him better. But how did you go from being a teenager in love to so pissed you can't talk to him on the phone for two minutes?”