Eddie was paying no attention to my explanation. The newspaper on the dining bench must have suddenly needed scratching, because he jumped off the seat’s back and onto the paper and started ripping it to shreds with his clawed feet.
“Hey! Cut that out!” His current paper of choice was a freebie supplement to the Petoskey newspaper. The Graphic was a guide to everything fun that was going on in the area, which mostly meant weekends, but there were—
My brain suddenly spun off into a direction it had never gone. Weekends. Greg Plassey had been whacked on the head with that golf ball at a weekend tournament. Trock Farrand had almost been run off the road when? On a weekend. Hugo Edel’s boat had blown up on a weekend, and it had been on a weekend, a Friday night, that Carissa had been killed. Okay, Greg’s ladder escapade was a weekday event, but the ladder could have been damaged on a weekend.
“Everything happened on a weekend,” I said softly. “Do you think it matters?”
Eddie opened his mouth in a silent “Mrr” and jumped back onto the back of the bench, where he sat and started cleaning his left front paw. To get the newsprint off, no doubt.
“Well,” I told him, “since you think it matters, maybe I should call a detective.” Eddie had no response to that. I took that as confirmation, found the number for the sheriff’s department, and dialed. Since it was getting close to ten at night, of course there was no detective around. I left a message to call.
“Think one of them will?” I asked Eddie. He stared at me, unblinking. “Yeah, I don’t think so, either.”
Which meant it might be time for another trap.
Chapter 19
A few minutes later, my cell phone rang. “Ms. Hamilton? Detective Devereaux returning your call.”
Within the hour? A new record, folks! “Thanks,” I said, and launched straight into everything I’d found out, from the visits of Carissa’s ex-boyfriend to Crown Yachts and Trock’s set. I told him about my suspicions regarding the accidents, and about what had happened yesterday to Greg Plassey.
I told him all that and about the weekends and everything else I could think of and when I was done, the detective said, “Thank you for the information, Ms. Hamilton. And we appreciate that you stopped by to drop off that note you received.”
Somewhere in there I heard the warning signs of an upcoming qualifying sentence. “But… ?”
“There’s been a development in the case against Mr. McCade.”
All the muscles in my body tightened. “It’s that nurse’s aide, isn’t it?” I blurted out.
For a moment I heard nothing from the other end of the phone. Then I heard the distant sounds of a file drawer slamming. Devereaux was still there; he just wasn’t talking. Which could only mean he didn’t know what to say, and to me that could only mean that I was right. They’d discovered that Heather, Cade’s aide the night Carissa was murdered, had lied.
“It’s not what you think,” I said fast. “Really, it’s not. See, there was a moon and Cade wanted to sit out in the courtyard and besides, there’s no way he could have left that note in the bookmobile and—”
“Thank you, Ms. Hamilton. Please be assured that we’re investigating the incident to the fullest extent possible, and don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any new information.” And he was gone.
Slowly, I put down the phone, my fear for Cade reaching a new level.
It was definitely time for another trap.
Trap number two.
• • •
I asked Eddie about the wisdom of setting another trap. “I don’t see what else I can do. What I need is proof, but all I have is suppositions and guesses and theories.” And redundancy, apparently, but I was so worried about Cade that I cut myself a little slack in the vocabulary department.
Eddie, who was lying on my lap, kneaded it gently with his claws. I wasn’t sure what that meant, other than my lap wasn’t quite what he wanted it to be, so I kept going.
“The fact that everything happened on a weekend doesn’t necessarily mean that it was the Weasel, whoever he is.” Or anyone else from downstate, for that matter. “Maybe the killer was using that as a red herring, or maybe the killer lives up here but has a long commute and only has weekends free.”
Eddie rolled partway over, purring and exposing his tummy.
I rubbed his soft belly fur and did some more thinking out loud. “Either way, I think setting up a second trap is the way to go.”
“And were you going to do this all alone?”
I twitched, Eddie jumped, and I turned to see Cade standing on the dock, leaning on his cane.
“You might as well check yourself out of Lakeview,” I said, “for all the time you spend outside the facility.”
He smiled. “I was cleared for all activities of daily living this morning. You are speaking to a man who will sleep in his own bed tonight.”
“That’s great!” I said. “But where’s Barb? Shouldn’t you two be out celebrating?”
He nodded in the direction of the parking lot. “She’s waiting for me. But we’d like to invite you to dinner next week, since it’s mostly due to you and your Eddie that I was able to recover so quickly.”
A happy warmth glowed inside me. “You don’t need to do that. I was glad I was in the right place at the right time, that’s all.”
“Ivy will be there, too,” he said. “And I would love a chance to see three of my favorite women in the same place at the same time.”
I laughed. “Then I accept. Thank you.”
“One condition.” He shifted his grip on the cane. “This proposal of a second trap. The entire escapade is far too dangerous. This is something best left to the police. They are trained for this sort of work and you are not. Perhaps they think I killed Carissa, but I didn’t, and they will at some point determine who did. Let them do their job.”
A sensible person would have agreed, but as many people had told me, I was not always sensible. I held my thumb and index finger an inch apart. “The police are this close to arresting you. Detective Devereaux as good as told me so. If they still think you did it, how hard are they going to look at anyone else?”
He shifted again. Didn’t say anything.
“Aren’t you the least little bit worried about being convicted for a murder you didn’t commit? Sure, we’d all like to believe in the infallibility of our justice system, but we also all know that mistakes are sometimes made.”
Cade looked out to the lake. He didn’t say anything.
I pressed on. “And how about the value of your paintings? About all the money so many people have spent, purchasing your work for a retirement nest egg? Or aren’t you concerned about them anymore?”
A half smile creased his face. “I totally withdraw my objection to Trap Number Two.”
We were clearly onto T words, but I didn’t have one ready. “Good.” Though I was going to set the trap no matter how many objections he put up, it was nice to have his tacit approval.
“Tomorrow night, then,” he said. “I’ll make the Facebook posts.”
I nodded, then remembered the long hours we’d spent in the first trap. “And I’ll bring snacks.”
• • •
At sunset the next night, I hauled the picnic basket down from the top of the kitchen cabinets and shoved every kind of quiet snack I could think of into it.
This turned into an interesting exercise, because I quickly realized that most of my favorite snacks were noisy. Or if not the food itself, then the wrapper. It wouldn’t do at all to scare away the killer because I was taking the wrapper off a bar of Hershey’s Special Dark.
In the end I included water bottles and a number of items in separate, nicely soft zippered plastic bags. Cheese cubes, fudge from the downtown shop, bananas, and grapes. I even remembered to tuck in something upon which to serve the food. Sometimes I was so smart I amazed myself.