“I am. I’ll be here until two when I’m supposed to head over to the pumpkin toss.” I glanced at the long line that led from the booth all the way back to the parking area. “Have you been here alone since opening?”
“I have. Wilma Goodwin was supposed to work with me, but I guess she had to go down to Cass’s office to speak with him about Bill’s accident. Hope’s been trying to find someone to take her place, but apparently, there are quite a few volunteers out with that flu that has been going around.”
I knew Wilma Goodwin worked at the post office. “Do you know why Cass wanted to talk to Wilma?” I asked as I opened the second ticket window, and began counting out the requested number of tickets.
“I’m not sure. I just know that Wilma called Hope early this morning and told her she’d be late, but she still hoped to make it after her interview.” Ida thanked the customer she’d been helping, and greeted the next woman in line. She then returned her attention back to our conversation as she took the money and began counting tickets. “Of course, Wilma lives across the street from Bill’s house, so I suppose Cass might have wanted to ask her about something she may have seen, or perhaps he wanted some sort of information relating to Bill’s habits.” Ida paused as the next customer approached the window. “I know it appears that Bill’s death was simply a horrible accident, but Cass is being thorough, which I think we all appreciate.”
“It does sound as if the vehicle simply swerved off the road, but it’s odd that Bill was all the way out on the old highway so late at night. I can’t imagine what he might have been doing out there unless he had been visiting someone and was on his way home.”
“I’m sure Cass will look into Bill’s reason to be out there so late in the evening. He might have been returning from dropping someone off, or I suppose he might have had something on his mind and decided to go for a drive,” Ida suggested. “The old highway is a good road to take if you just want to get out and think something through. There’s never any traffic to contend with.”
I supposed Ida had a point. If Bill had simply been going out for a drive with no destination in mind, the old highway would actually have been a good choice.
“Having said that,” Ida smiled at the woman she’d just handed twenty tickets to, “it does seem to me that Cass might believe there is at least a small possibility there’s more going on than a simple accident.”
“You think so?” I asked as I handed tickets to the woman I’d been helping.
“Mary Louise stopped by to buy tickets for her grandchildren,” Ida continued. “She mentioned that Cass had called and spoken to her about things, so I know he’s doing some digging around.”
“Cass spoke to Mary Louise because he heard that she’d seen Bill Thursday evening while she was out with her husband at that new steakhouse at the lake,” Josie Newsome, who’d been standing in line to buy tickets, informed us.
“Bill was at the steakhouse before his accident?” I asked after the woman Ida was helping stepped away, and Josie stepped forward.
She nodded. “According to Mary Louise, who I ran into when I stopped for brownies, she’d seen Bill dining with two people Thursday evening. A woman she described as having dark red hair and a man she described as having dark brown hair. Both were dressed to the nines, which seemed a bit overdone for Foxtail Lake even if they were dining in the only steakhouse in the area.”
“Did she say anything else?” I asked as I handed the man with two blond-haired children a roll of tickets and then smiled at the group of teenagers next in line.
“Not really. She was working the bake sale, and there was already a long line, so we couldn’t chat long. I guess you can ask Cass about it.”
“I guess I might do that.”
“You know,” Ida said after Josie completed her purchase and stepped away, “Darcy Rosenthal works out at that steakhouse. She might have seen Bill with the flashy couple as well. She’s working the pumpkin toss with you at two,” she informed me. “I suppose you might have a chance to chat with her while you work the event. Not that she necessarily noticed anything, but it is beginning to sound as if the couple with Bill at the restaurant might be the last people to have seen him alive. If the accident wasn’t an accident as Cass seems to think, maybe the red-haired woman and dark-haired man might know something about what was going on in Bill’s life on the night he died.”
By the time I made it to the pumpkin toss after completing a four-hour shift at the ticket booth, Darcy was already there. Running this fast-paced event left a lot less time for chatting than working the ticket booth, so I wasn’t sure I’d even have a chance to talk to the woman who told me that she needed to leave no later than four so she had time to go home and get ready for her shift at the restaurant. I supposed that if I didn’t have a chance to talk to her, I could simply mention to Cass that she might be someone worth chatting with if he hadn’t already. This was, after all, his investigation and not mine, but it seemed that anytime something interesting was going on in town, I was always smack dab in the middle of things.
As it turned out, Darcy and I were both relieved from pumpkin toss duty at the same time, so I decided to walk Darcy to her car before heading over to check in with Hope.
“That was crazy,” I laughed as we headed toward the parking area.
“The pumpkin toss is a fast-moving event,” she agreed. “I’m glad they only schedule two-hour shifts. It’s exhausting.”
“Do you have to work at the restaurant tonight?” I asked.
She nodded. “From six until close. Saturdays are always busy, but with the folks from the movie here, we’ve been even busier than usual.”
“Movie?” I asked. “I thought the film crew and cast were arriving Monday.”
“That’s what I heard as well, but some of the movie folks are here now. I saw Robert Harrison, who I guess is now going by Harrison Roberts, at the restaurant Thursday with Bill Fuller and a redheaded woman whose name I can’t remember offhand.”
I raised a brow. “So Bill was having dinner with Robert? I’d heard Bill was at the steakhouse Thursday, but I didn’t realize it was Robert he was dining with.”
She nodded. “Bill introduced me to the couple he was with when I went to the table to take their order. He said that he and Harrison were friends from way back. It was then that I realized that the total babe Bill introduced as Harrison, was actually Robert, from high school. Talk about an ultimate makeover. He still has those piercing blue eyes, but if it wasn’t for the fact that Harrison was with Bill, I would never have recognized him.”
“And the woman they were with — the one with the red hair. Did she seem to be with the cast as well?” I asked.
“I think so. I guess neither man actually said one way or the other, but I did get the impression that Harrison and this woman were together, and that they had met Bill at the restaurant to discuss something.”
“Did you overhear any of their conversation?” I asked as we neared the parking area.
“No. Not really. I can say that while the group seemed to be having a friendly discussion in the beginning, the exchange became a lot more intense as time went on. By the time the group left, I could sense a lot of tension.”
“And what time was that?”
“I guess they showed up at the restaurant around eight o’clock. They sat and talked until around ten. I don’t know the exact time since I wasn’t paying all that much attention, but they were there for a while.”
“Were they drinking?”
“Harrison and the redhead were. Bill was a recovering alcoholic, so he never drank. He came into the steakhouse often enough that I knew to bring him a non-alcoholic drink served in a glass normally used to serve alcohol when he was dining with others. I guess he didn’t like to make a big deal out of the fact he didn’t drink. In fact, everyone who works a regular shift knew that when Bill said to bring him his normal, he meant a gin and tonic minus the gin.”