After we closed I took Elvis home. I had a plate of sundried tomato and chicken pasta salad that Charlotte had made. Elvis had a little chicken and then headed for the bedroom to get settled for Jeopardy! I put my dishes in the dishwasher, brushed my teeth and put on a little lip gloss. The TV in the bedroom was on a timer, set to come on for Jeopardy! and shut off when the game show was over. I had no idea why Elvis liked to watch the show. Maybe it was something he’d done with his previous owner. I kept thinking he’d get tired of the routine but after more than a year of living with me he was still a faithful viewer.
“I’m leaving,” I called from the living room. I was going to pick up Jess. We were taking part in a trivia/Pictionary–style contest at McNamara’s. It was a charity challenge and Jess and I were playing for the hot lunch program at the elementary school.
“You ready for this?” Jess asked as she climbed into my SUV.
“Well, I can draw a pretty wicked stick man,” I said as I pulled onto the street. “You, on the other hand, were born for this.” Jess had a head for odd bits of trivia. The odder, the better.
She grinned and nodded in agreement. “Yes, I was.” I could see her eyeing me out of the corner of my eye. “How many planets are there?” she suddenly asked.
“Nice try,” I said. “But I know this. Eight. There used to be nine and then Pluto got demoted.”
“Pluto was reclassified.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“No,” Jess said, vigorously shaking her head. “Pluto didn’t meet all the criteria to be a planet.”
“In other words the cool planets didn’t want Pluto hanging out with them anymore.”
“The International Astronomical Union altered the definition of what constitutes a planet.”
“Like I said. The cool planets didn’t want Pluto hanging out with them so they changed the rules.”
Jess nodded. “Pretty much.” She shifted in her seat. “How many dwarf planets are there?” she asked.
“Are you going to quiz me all the way there?” I flipped on my blinker to turn right.
“That was my plan,” she said. “How many dwarf planets?”
“Seven,” I said.
“No!” Jess said. “Seven dwarves is Snow White. There are five dwarf planets. You’re not taking this seriously.”
I nodded in agreement. “You’re right. I’m not. I don’t need to know any of this because you do and you’re on my team. All I have to do is draw great stick men and be gracious when we win.”
And that was all I had to do. Although I did ace the question “How many planets are there?” We moved on to round two in two weeks.
“You two are a great team,” Glenn said.
“We pretty much clicked from the moment we met back in college,” Jess said. “Sarah stuck an ad up looking for a roommate.”
“Which Jess immediately took down because she didn’t want anyone to answer it before she could,” I finished.
Jess tilted her head in my direction. “If Sarah were a guy I would have broken her heart at least once by now.”
“Or maybe you would have had a great romantic love story,” Glenn said.
Jess and I looked at each other. “Nah,” we both said at the same time.
Glenn had half a dozen blueberry muffins for the two of us for winning our first round.
“Thank you,” I said. “You didn’t have to do that.” Glenn’s blueberry muffins were delicious, full of juicy berries with a hint of lemon and a crumbly streusel topping.
“I figured you deserved some sort of prize,” he said with a shrug. “You could stack them up and make a little trophy with them.”
“A trophy I can eat. I like that,” Jess said. Something across the room caught her eye. “There’s a customer I need to talk to,” she said, making a vague gesture in my direction. “Just give me two minutes and I’m ready to go.”
“Take your time,” I said. I turned back to Glenn.
“Rumor has it that there’s a connection between Mac and the woman whose body was found down on the boat dock,” he said. “Is everything all right?”
I rubbed the back of my neck with one hand. “Yeah, for now.”
“So the Angels are on the case?”
“You couldn’t pry them away from it with a crowbar,” I said.
Glenn brushed crumbs from the front of his apron. “I don’t know if this is important or not, but the woman who was killed was in here just a few hours before she died. She was looking for directions to your shop.”
“Did you see anyone with her?” I asked. I knew it was a long shot even as I said the words.
Glenn shook his head. “No.”
He hesitated, just for a moment before he answered.
I squinted up at him. “There’s something you’re not saying. What is it?”
“It’s probably nothing.”
I gave him a half smile. “I’m pretty sure Rose has some words of wisdom about this but I can’t think of them. Please, just tell me what ‘probably nothing’ is.”
“Okay,” he said. “I gave the woman directions. I was standing right there.” He pointed toward the front window. “I saw her head up the street. There was a car parked on the other side, just down a bit. A gray Toyota. The driver turned and went the same way.”
“Did you notice whether the driver was a man or a woman?”
“Man, I think,” Glenn said. “The body type was right and he was wearing a baseball cap. It’s probably just a coincidence the guy happened to turn and head in the same direction.”
“Probably,” I said, because most likely it was a coincidence. They did happen sometimes. On the other hand maybe there were security cameras somewhere on the street that Mr. P. could get a look at.
Jess came back then, we said good night to Glenn and left.
I’d told Alfred and Rose that I wanted to hit the road at quarter to eight Saturday morning. I stepped into the hallway five minutes before that to find Rose coming out of her apartment with Mr. P. I decided I didn’t want to know if he’d walked over early for breakfast or spent the night. Liam liked to tease that Rose had more of a love life than I did. I was pretty sure she did, but I didn’t need confirmation. It seemed like everyone had more of a love life than I did. Liam’s solution to the problem was, as he’d put it while he sprawled on my sofa, to “lay a wet one on Nick.”
Nick. I hadn’t heard from him since his confession that he was Michelle’s witness. Maybe he was just tied up with the case that had called him away. Maybe he was avoiding me.
Stevie Carleton’s home was off the grid outside the Carrabassett Valley ski area in the western part of the state. The weather was gorgeous, not too hot or too humid and we made good time. It was about quarter after ten when Mr. P. directed me to turn left. We drove down a tree-lined road and pulled into a cleared parking area.
Off to the right I caught sight of the house. “Oh wow,” I said.
Stevie Carleton’s home was two stories, built of stone with a saltbox roof and wide, high windows. Beyond it I could see cultivated fields and beyond them trees. It was a beautiful spot.
We got out of the SUV, grateful to stretch and shake the kinks out of our legs. A curvy woman in her early thirties wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and gray cotton shorts was coming down a path from the house to meet us, wiping her hands on her shorts. Her dark, curly hair, streaked with blond highlights, was pulled back into a messy knot at her neck. She had the same dark eyes and light brown skin as Leila did in the photo Mac had shown me. This had to be Stevie Carleton.
“Alfred, you found us,” she said.
Mr. P. smiled. “Your directions were excellent.” He indicated Rose and me. “Stephanie, this is Rose Jackson and Sarah Grayson.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said.
“Your house is beautiful,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”