An odd noise emanated from the broom closet, whose door, I now noticed, was open a few inches.
“Detective Inwood and Ash were looking at all the employees that Dale had ever fired,” I told the closet, “and they’re talking to all his clients from the last few years.” When I’d talked to Inwood, I’d obliquely mentioned the possibility that Dale and/or Carmen had been having extramarital affairs. There’d been a long telephone silence, Inwood had sighed, then I’d heard noises I’d interpreted as a new page in his notebook being flipped and a pen being clicked to writing position.
I was pretty sure that Inwood figured I was just trying to distract him from making a case against Brad or Leese as the murderer, and he was probably right. Then again, since there was no way Brad or Leese had killed Dale, the detective should be thanking me for saving him time and effort.
“If Brad was going to kill his dad,” I said to Eddie, “it would have been while they were working together, not now. And Carmen and Dale had such an odd marriage, why would it explode into murder now? And it doesn’t seem like it was anyone involved in one of the lawsuits.
“And then there’s the building official, Rob Driskell. He was definitely not a fan of Dale’s. Him killing Dale in a fit of anger makes a lot more sense than Brad or Carmen doing it.” Not that murder necessarily made sense, but you had to start somewhere. “If the detective and Ash are going to keep looking at Brad, I’m going to have to work harder on—”
Zing!
A tiny toy car shot across the kitchen floor, caromed off a chair leg, and came to rest against my foot.
“I’m so glad,” I said to my cat, “you’ve finally found that Monopoly game piece. We’ve been looking for a year and a half.”
Eddie pounded across the floor, slid into a dive, and slammed into the table’s pedestal with a loud thump.
Wincing, I leaned over. “Are you okay? Because that sounded like it hurt.”
Zing!
The toy car skittered to the other side of the kitchen. Eddie scrambled to his feet and ran after it.
Rolling my eyes, I went back to my food. If Eddie wasn’t sound asleep, he was wide awake. There was no dozy middle ground. Were all cats like that? Or were—
I snapped my head around and stared at Eddie. Or more precisely, his new toy.
The car.
• • •
The jump my brain made had seemed reasonable when I’d explained it to Eddie, but the next morning, when I imagined an explanatory conversation with Detective Inwood, I wasn’t so sure.
“A toy car,” he’d say, his voice expressionless.
“No,” I’d say, already impatient with him. “That’s what made me think about it, is all.”
“Your cat is helping you with a murder investigation?” he’d ask.
If I managed to get through that without crawling under the table from embarrassment, I’d move on to the important part. “A while back, Dale Lacombe was responsible for a head-on collision. Have you looked into that accident?”
Inwood would click on his pen. “I’m not familiar with this. How long ago?”
“Twenty-three years.”
The pen would go back into his shirt pocket and I’d get a chillingly polite smile as I was ushered out of the interview room with an admonition to never again darken the door of the sheriff’s office.
“Well, maybe he wouldn’t tell me that,” I said to Eddie as I got dressed, post-shower. “But he’d want to.”
Eddie, curled up on my pillow, opened his eyes and picked up his head. “Mrr!” He closed his eyes and, a second and a half later, was snoring.
“No idea what that meant.” I patted his head and headed downstairs. “Thanks anyway, though.”
The kitchen was dark and empty, which meant that Aunt Frances had stayed at Otto’s overnight. I smiled, wondering if she was rethinking her decision to wait until spring to get married. Then I frowned, because I wondered what the gleam in her eye had meant after I’d encouraged her to sell the boardinghouse.
Putting that aside for the moment, I planned how I’d get solid information about Dale Lacombe’s car accident all those years ago. My most common sources for local history—Kristen and Rafe—weren’t even teenagers at the time and they wouldn’t remember much, if anything. Not to mention the fact that I didn’t really want to talk to Rafe right now. I’d woken up that morning from a dream that featured him as the romantic lead and I was sure my face would turn an embarrassing color of red if I stopped by. I could do it over the phone, but he had an uncanny knack for sensing my discomfort.
“All right, Minnie,” he’d say. “What’s your problem today?”
“Me?” I’d ask, trying to sound surprised. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Don’t give me that,” he’d say. “You’re a horrible liar. Tell me your problems and I’ll see if I can laugh at them hard enough to make them go away.”
No, talking to Rafe wouldn’t be a good idea, and Kristen was too preoccupied with the details of closing down the Three Seasons to be a good listener. I debated knocking on Otto’s front door to talk to my aunt, but shied away from the possibility of seeing him in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. Or worse, no slippers.
But there were other sources, especially for this particular kind of information.
Twenty minutes after I’d scarfed down a bowl of cold cereal and headed outside, I presented myself at the office of the local newspaper, just in time to see the editor unlock the front door and hold it open for me.
“Hey, Camille,” I said. “How are you this fine morning?”
Camille Pomeranz, a dark-skinned woman in her late forties, ran the newspaper office with a firm hand. She was a recent transplant, moved north after her large downstate paper slashed their staff by half.
Their loss and our gain, because the Chilson Gazette had gone from a lackluster publication little more than a gossip sheet to a news-gathering organization starting to win national awards. I knew Camille because I often sent her advertising for the library’s events, everything from author talks to book sales, and we’d struck up a solid acquaintanceship that could easily become a real friendship if given proper food and water.
Camille grimaced. “Fine morning, nothing. Have you seen the weather forecast?”
“Never,” I said. “Can’t change it, so why bother.”
“Wise woman.” Camille smiled. “Except don’t you find yourself dressed inappropriately for conditions every so often?”
I patted my backpack. “Travel umbrella, dry socks, and a fleece hat.”
She laughed. “The Boy Scouts have nothing on Minnie Hamilton. What can I do for you?”
“Archive every article from every issue of your newspaper into a searchable database. Please.”
Not missing a beat, Camille reached around and grabbed a small pad of paper and a pen from the nearby counter. “I’ll get right on that,” she said, scribbling. “What kind of time frame?”
“How about noon?”
“No problem,” she said, nodding and still scribbling.
Curious, I sidled up to look at the pad of paper and laughed when I saw that she’d sketched out a stick figure with curly hair and carrying a backpack. Above that Camille had written a single question: Has she lost her mind?!!!
She finished off with an arrow pointing to the curly hair. “I added the exclamation points when you said noon,” she said.
Camille often talked about the need for a database of the newspaper archives, but a lack of time, money, and personnel was going to keep it a dream for the foreseeable future. The only articles online were from 2009 forward, which was when the owner had made the leap into the twenty-first century. The library had the oldest newspapers, some of which were microfilmed, but the year that concerned me was housed here at the Gazette’s office.