“Roma, something’s wrong,” I said. “What is it?”
She turned to look at me then, leaning against the side of the ladder. “It’s just, I was running a little late Thursday night. I stopped to check on that dog I told you about. So I was probably one of the last people to arrive at the Stratton.” She let out a breath. “When I came in I saw Dayna and . . . Burtis, just off to the side of the stage. They were . . . talking.”
“Talking or arguing?” Maggie asked.
Roma hesitated. “Arguing.”
I saw Maggie swallow. She cared a lot more about Brady Chapman than she was admitting, probably even to herself.
“But I saw them later,” Roma said, “just before the chocolates were handed out, and everything seemed fine between them then.”
I stopped painting for a moment and looked from Roma to Maggie. “Look,” I said. “I know the kind of reputation Burtis has around town. I know that not everything he does is on the up-and-up, but he wouldn’t kill anyone, especially not the mother of his children. Seriously, would Lita be going out with him if there was any possibility Burtis was that kind of person?”
“Lita?” Roma said.
“And Burtis?” Maggie finished.
So much for me not spreading Burtis’s business all over town. Although I’d had a feeling after they’d shown up at the fundraiser together that it was pretty obvious they were a couple, it was apparently not as clear to Roma or Maggie.
“Lita and Burtis,” Roma said. “How long has that been going on?”
“A while,” I said, working my way across the stretch of wall she’d just moved the ladder away from.
“How did you know?” Maggie asked, hanging her head almost upside down once again as she worked her way along the bottom of the window.
I put more paint on my roller and turned back to the wall. “I saw them together at the library, a while ago.”
“Were they holding hands over by the DVDs?” Maggie asked. “I know Lita is a Clint Eastwood fan.”
“No, they weren’t,” I said. “Although I did catch Everett giving Rebecca a kiss over by the magazines earlier this week.”
I remembered how the two of them had smiled at each other a bit like two unrepentant teenagers when I walked around the shelves and surprised them. Neither one of them had seemed embarrassed at being caught in a public display of affection.
“That’s what I want,” Maggie said.
“You want someone to kiss you in the library?” Roma asked.
I was glad the conversation had shifted away from Burtis and his ex-wife.
“No,” Maggie said. “I want to be crazy about someone the way Rebecca and Everett are about each other when I’m their age. Or right now, for that matter.” She glanced over at me. “Your parents are that way, aren’t they?”
“My parents are crazy, period,” I said. “And yes, they’re still crazy about each other.”
We spent the next hour painting and talking about great love affairs and thankfully nothing more was said about Burtis or Dayna Chapman. I tried not to think about what Roma had said, that she’d seen the two of them arguing. I’d meant what I’d said. Burtis was many things, but he never would have deliberately hurt his ex-wife. And he wouldn’t have asked me to look into her death if he’d had anything to do with it. Would he?
With three of us working, it didn’t take long to get the walls finished. Then we sat around the kitchen table and Roma showed us the rough sketches she and Oren had made for the work she wanted to do outside in the spring.
The sun was low in the sky when I looked at my watch. “I should get going,” I said. “Who knows what Owen and Hercules have been doing?”
Roma hugged us both. “Thank you,” she said. “It would have taken me the next two weeks to get this all done if I’d had to do it by myself.”
“Anytime,” I said.
Maggie nodded her agreement. “When you decide what you want to do upstairs, we’ll come back.”
“Let me know about Smokey,” I said as I pulled on my boots at the back door.
“I will,” Roma promised.
She waved as we started down the long driveway.
I headed for Maggie’s apartment. “I like Brady,” I said as we drove down the hill.
“I hope you’re wrong,” she said.
I knew she didn’t mean about liking Brady.
“Me too,” I said.
“Could you imagine you and Marcus and Brady and me on a double date?” she said after another silence.
Marcus, the straight-arrow police detective, and Brady Chapman, defense attorney and son of the alleged town bootlegger, breaking bread together?
“That could be . . . interesting,” I said.
She laughed. “Uh-huh.”
The idea kept us laughing the rest of the way to her apartment.
“Thanks for the drive, Kath,” Maggie said. “Give my love to my furry boyfriend.”
“I will,” I said.
My cell phone rang just as I pulled into my own driveway. I put the truck in park and looked at the screen. It was Marcus.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m running a little late, but supper is in the slow cooker.”
“I’m sorry, Kathleen,” he said. “I’m not going to get there.”
I knew what he was going to say before the words came out.
“It looks like Dayna Chapman was murdered.”
9
Marcus told me he’d stop by later just to say good night if he could. Then we ended the call and I tucked my phone back in my pocket. At least I had Owen and Hercules for dinner companions.
Except neither cat was anywhere to be seen. They weren’t in the kitchen. They weren’t in the living room. I went upstairs to change my paint-spattered clothes, and there weren’t any cats nosing around in the closet or sitting in the big chair by the window, either.
The bulb had burned out in the ceiling light at the top of the stairs. As I padded down the steps in my sock feet in the dark, I made a mental note to ask Marcus to put in a new bulb for me.
Three-quarters of the way down the stairs, I saw movement just inside the living room doorway next to the bookcases. There was enough illumination from the streetlight outside that I could catch a glimpse of gray fur.
Owen was so focused on what he was doing that he didn’t notice me come behind him until I flicked on the light. He started and looked up at me, guilt written all over his gray tabby face.
He was standing on his back legs, one paw on the first shelf up from the bottom of the bookcase. I’d seen him drop whatever he’d been carrying in his mouth on the shelf and put one paw on it. Now he tried to casually rest his other front paw next to the first one. If he’d been able to lean against the side of the bookcase and whistle, I think he would have done that, too.
I looked down at him. “Hello,” I said.
“Murr,” he said softly, his golden eyes not quite meeting mine.
“What’s that?” I asked, nodding my head at whatever he was trying to hide with his front paws.
“Merow?” he said, blinking at me as though what I’d said made no sense at all to him.
I wasn’t fooled. “Nice try,” I said, folding my arms over my chest. “What’s under your paws?”
He lifted a paw, giving me his confused-kitty expression. At the same time he seemed to be surreptitiously trying to bat whatever he was hiding toward the back of the shelf. Sometimes I thought that if Owen hadn’t been a cat he could have been some kind of criminal mastermind—Lex Luthor or the Joker, maybe.
“Owen!” I said, sharply.
To his credit he knew when he was caught. He dropped down onto all fours and dejectedly hung his head. I leaned over to see what he had been trying to hide from me. Sometimes he liked to swipe things from Rebecca’s recycling bin, although I was fairly sure there was too much snow on the ground for him to do that now.
A tiny purple mouse lay on its side on the dark wooden shelf.
“What are you doing with that?” I asked sternly, narrowing my eyes and glaring at him.