Josiah instinctively stepped back.“Why do you think that?”
“What’s the killer doing? Flying in and out of Charlottesville to murder his victims? It has to be a local.”
“Well, it doesn’t have to be someone from Crozet.” Josiah was offended at the idea.
“Why not? It’s not so strange when you think about it.” Fair ran his fingers through his thick hair. “Something goes wrong between friends or lovers; the hurt person blows. It can happen here. It has happened here.”
Josiah slowly walked to the door and put his hand on the worn doorknob.“I don’t like to think about it. Maybe it will stop now.” He left and for good measure circled around the post office to Mrs. Hogendobber’s house to make sure she arrived home safely.
“What can I do for you?” Harry, even-toned, asked Fair.
“Oh, nothing. I heard on the way to work and I thought I’d see if you were all right. You liked Maude.”
Harry, touched, lowered her eyes.“Thanks, Fair. I did like Maude.”
“We all did.”
“That’s it. That’s what I need to find out. We all liked Maude. We mostly liked Kelly Craycroft. To the eye, everything looks normal. Underneath, something’s horribly wrong.”
“Find the motive and you find the killer,” Fair said.
“Unless he or she finds you first.”
12
Harry paused before knocking on BoomBoom Craycroft’s dark-blue front door. She’d brought the cat and the dog along because when she left for her lunch break the animals carried on like dervishes. First the ficus tree, now this. Must be the heat. She glanced over her shoulder. Mrs. Murphy and Tucker, good as gold, sat in the front seat of the truck. The windows, wide open, gave them air but it was too hot to be in the truck. She turned around and opened the truck door.
“Now, you stay here.”
The minute Harry disappeared through the front door of the Craycroft house, that order was forgotten.
BoomBoom’s West Highland white shot around from behind the back of the house.“Who’s here? Who’s here, and you’d better have a good reason to be here!”
“It’s us, Reggie,” Tucker said.
“So it is.” Reggie wagged his tail and touched noses with Tucker. He touched noses with Mrs. Murphy, too, even though she was a cat. Reggie had manners.
“How are you?”
“As good as can be expected.”
“Bad, huh?” Tucker was sympathetic.
“She’s just grim. Never smiles. I wish I could do something for her. I miss him too. He was a lot of fun, Kelly.”
“Do you have any idea what happened? Did he take you places that humans didn’t know about?” Mrs. Murphy asked.
“No. I’m supposed to be a house dog. I’ve seen the concrete plant a few times but that’s it.”
“Did he seem worried recently?”
“No, he was happy as a dog with a bone. Every time he made money he was happy and he made lots of it. Bones to them, I guess. He wasn’t home much but when he was, he was happy.”
Inside, Harry wasn’t getting much from BoomBoom either.
“A nightmare.” BoomBoom snapped open her platinum cigarette case. “And now Maude. Does anyone know if she has people?”
“No. Susan Tucker offered to put up the relatives but Rick Shaw told her that Maude had no siblings and her parents were dead.”
“Who’s going to claim the body?” BoomBoom, having undergone a funeral, was keenly aware of the technical responsibilities.
“I don’t know but I’ll be sure to mention that to Susan.”
“I’ve gone over that last day a thousand times in my head, Harry. I’ve gone over the week before and the week before that and I can’t think of a thing. Not a sign, not a hint, not anything. He kept me separate from the business but I had little interest in it anyway. Concrete and pouring foundations and roadbeds never was my idea of thrills.” BoomBoom lit her dark Nat Sherman cigarette. “If he roughed a man up in business, I wouldn’t know.”
“Kelly might have crossed someone. He was very competitive.” Harry picked up a crystal ashtray with a silver rim around it and felt its perfect proportions.
“He liked to win, I’ll grant you that, but I don’t think he was unfair. At least, he wasn’t with me. Look, Harry, we’ve known each other since we were children. You know for the last few years Kelly and I were almost more like brother and sister than husband and wife, but he was a good friend to me. He was … good.” Her voice got thick.
“I’m so sorry. I wish I could say or do something.” Harry touched her hand.
“You’ve been kind to call on me. I never knew how many friends I had. He had. People have been wonderful—and I can be hard to be wonderful to … sometimes.”
Harry thought to herself that someone was being anything but wonderful. Which one? Who? Why?
BoomBoom mused,“Kelly would have been amazed to see how many people did love him.”
“Perhaps he knows. I’d like to think that.”
“Yes, I’d like to think that too.”
Harry put the ashtray back. She paused.“Have the cops gone over everything? His office?”
“Even his office here at home. The only thing on his desk the day he died was the day’s mail.”
“May I peek in the office? I don’t want to be rude, but I think if there’s anything that we can do to help Rick Shaw, we should. Perhaps if I poke around I’ll find a clue. Even a blind pig finds an acorn sometimes.”
“You’ve read too many mysteries sitting there in the post office.” BoomBoom stood up and Harry did also.
“Spy thrillers this year.”
“And for that you went to Smith College?” BoomBoom felt Harry should do more with her life, but who was she to judge? BoomBoom truly was the idle rich.
The walnut paneling glowed in the bright afternoon light. Neatly placed in the middle of an unblemished desk pad bound by red Moroccan leather was Kelly’s mail.
“May I?” Harry didn’t reach for the mail.
“Yes.”
Harry picked it up and rifled through the letters, including the postcard, the beautiful postcard of Oscar Wilde’s tombstone. She replaced the mail as she found it. At that moment she was more concerned with a certain evasiveness BoomBoom displayed toward her. She and BoomBoom got along well enough, but today there was something not right between them.
It wasn’t until later, when she had left BoomBoom and was rumbling past the tiny trailer park on Route 240, that she realized Maude had received a postcard of a beautiful tombstone as well. With the same inscription: “Wish you were here.” My God, someone was telling them, I wish you were dead. It was a sick joke. She put her pedal to the metal.
“Hey, slow down,” Mrs. Murphy said.“I don’t like to drive fast.”
Harry careened into Susan’s manicured driveway, hit the brakes, and vaulted out of the truck. The cat and dog hit the turf too.
Susan stuck her head out the upstairs window.“You’ll kill yourself driving that old truck like that.”
“I found something.”
Susan raced down the stairs and flung open the front door. Harry told Susan what she discovered, swore her to secrecy, and then they called Rick Shaw. He wasn’t there, so Officer Cooper received the information.
Harry hung up the phone.“She didn’t seem very excited about it.”
“They shag so many leads. How’s she to know if this is anything special?” Susan laced her sneakers. “Let’s hope another one doesn’t show up.”
“Damn, I forgot to look.”
“For what?”
“For the postmark on Kelly’s card. Was it from Paris?”
“Let’s go to Maude’s shop and look at the postcard she received.”
Maude’s shop, closed, beckoned the passerby. The window boxes burst with pink and purple petunias. The sidewalk was swept clean.
Susan tried the door.“Locked.”
Harry circled to the back and jimmied a window. The minute she got it open, Mrs. Murphy shot up on the windowsill and gracefully dropped into the shop. Harry followed and Susan handed Tucker to her and then followed herself.