I had a shower and went to bed.
In the morning my shoulder actually felt a little better. On the other hand, it looked worse. I felt a bit like a circus contortionist, trying to look at my back in the bathroom mirror. There was a black-and-purple bruise, about the size of a slice of bread, on my right shoulder blade. Seeing it made me angry with Will Redfern all over again, and at myself for being nice a lot longer than I should have been.
The cats followed me around while I dressed, dried my hair and then sighed at my reflection, regretting, the way I did every morning, my ill-advised haircut. I fed Owen and Hercules, and when I was ready to head out to meet Maggie they were both waiting by the back door.
“I’m not going to be that long,” I told them. “Stay in the yard. No going over to Rebecca’s to mooch treats.” I glowered at Owen. “Or anything else.”
Maggie was already at Eric’s at a table by the window. Our waitress appeared with coffee before I’d even settled into my seat. Eric waved from behind the counter. I waved back.
“How’s your shoulder and why didn’t you call me?” Maggie demanded.
“Good morning to you, too,” I said. “I’m fine. Thank you. And, yes, it’s a lovely morning.” I put cream and sugar in my coffee, stirred and took a long sip.
Maggie waved her hand as though shooing away a fly. “Okay. Good morning. Nice day. I’m fine. Is your shoulder all right?”
I set the cup on the table. “I’m fine. I have a bruise but nothing’s broken. Roma checked me over and I went to the clinic and I had X-rays. I’m fine.” I stage-whispered the last two words.
Mags twisted her teacup in its saucer. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“Because all I wanted to do was go to bed.” I took another sip of my coffee. “How did you know, anyway?”
“Mary told Susan. Susan told Eric. Eric told me.”
“Ah yes, the information superhighway,” I said wryly.
The waitress came back to take our orders. While Maggie changed her mind half a dozen times about what she wanted in her omelet, I looked around the café. It was mostly families stopping for breakfast before or after a trip to the farmers’ market. So much for questioning people involved with the festival. Not that it was a really practical idea. What was I going to do? Go from table to table saying, “Good morning. Did you kill Mr. Easton?”
Maggie finally settled on tomatoes and asparagus. While we waited for the food I brought her up-to-date on what had been happening at the library.
“I’m glad you’re going to talk to Everett,” she said.
“I should have done it before now.”
“Will’s always been the type to start late and finish early. If I didn’t know better I’d say he doesn’t want the job to get finished.”
“Susan said the same thing,” I said. “But there’s no reason for Will to want this job to go badly. In the end, the only person that’s going to be hurt is him.”
Maggie edged her chair sideways into a patch of sunlight. “Will’s always been the kind of person who takes the easy way, but he wasn’t always so careless. A little lazy, but not irresponsible.”
“Maybe he’s having a midlife crisis.” I looked around for our waitress so I could get more coffee.
“You could be right about that,” Maggie said. “He’s dyeing his mustache.”
“What?”
She nodded.
“How do you know?”
Eric came over with the coffeepot before she could answer. He was a much more serious person than his wife. Eric and Susan seemed to prove the old adage that opposites attract. “Hi, Kathleen. How are you?” he said, filling my cup.
“I’m good, Eric,” I said. “I owe you for the breakfast you sent to the hotel for Mr. Easton.”
Eric shook his head. He’d cut his salt-and-pepper hair very short and it suited him. “I never sent it. I called over there to get Easton’s room number—we do their continental breakfast, so I thought I’d send everything at once—and they said he’d gone out the night before and hadn’t come back. The next thing I heard, he was dead.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Your order will be out in a minute,” Eric said, heading for another table with the coffee.
So, after Easton had been at the library he hadn’t gone back to his hotel room. Did that mean he’d gone directly to the theater? And had he been alone? More questions to add to my list.
I turned my attention back to Maggie. “How do you know Will dyes his mustache?”
She took a sip of her tea. “Ruby saw him buying a box of L’Oréal Excellence number forty-six at Walgreens.”
“It could have been for his wife,” I said, adding cream to my coffee.
“Forty-six is Copper Red, and Will’s wife is a blonde,” Maggie said. “He dyes his mustache, Kath. It’s not even the same color as his hair. And he traded his old truck for that huge thing he drives now—long bed and extended cab. How Freudian is that?” She held out both hands. “Midlife crisis,” she said, lightly banging the table to make her point.
Our breakfast arrived then, which meant, thankfully, that we didn’t have to talk about Will Redfern’s midlife crisis—real or not.
After breakfast we walked down to the farmers’ market, one street up from the hotel. The market was actually open all week. Like the artist’s co-op that Maggie was part of, the farmers’ market was a cooperative—vegetables, fruit, a small bakery, a butcher and a tiny cheese shop. But on Saturday morning the market expanded out into the parking lot, weather permitting. Farmers sold directly to customers from the backs of their trucks. Maggie was looking for Swiss chard and new potatoes. I wanted carrots for salad and maybe muffins.
“I think I see potatoes over there,” Maggie said, pointing to the far end of the lot.
“Okay, I’ll be there in a minute.” I’d caught sight of what I hoped was rhubarb jam being sold from the tailgate of a dusty old Ford.
I was trying to decide between plain rhubarb jam and rhubarb-strawberry jam when someone said, “Good morning, Ms. Paulson,” by my left ear.
I turned and looked up. Way up. “Good morning, Detective Gordon,” I said.
He looked different in jeans and a gray T-shirt. He had a flat stomach and wider shoulders than I’d noticed before, and . . . What the heck was I thinking?
“Looking for something for your sweet tooth?” he asked.
I flashed back to Andrew teasing me about my habit of putting jam on everything. Andrew, who’d married someone he’d only known two weeks. I wondered what Detective Gordon would think if he knew how many nights I’d sat in the dark in the living room and eaten jam right out of the jar.
I pulled my hand away from the bottles. “Umm, no.” I cleared my throat and caught sight of several dozen bunches of fat, red radishes, farther back in the truck bed. “I was looking for radishes.” Why had I said that?
“Oh, well, let me reach a bunch for you,” he said. He stretched over the side of the bed and handed me a clump of plump radishes, each about the size of a jawbreaker.
“Well, thank you,” I said.
“My pleasure.” I waited for him to walk away so I could put the radishes back, but he just stood there, smiling at me. “I think you can pay right there,” he said, pointing to the other side of the truck.
“Ah, great.” I handed over the money for the radishes, tucking them in my bag next to a bunch of carrots and some peas. Then I turned. “Have a nice day, Detective,” I said, with a not exactly genuine smile.
“You too, Ms. Paulson.”
I threaded my way across the parking lot. He didn’t follow me. I found Maggie, who’d found her potatoes.
“Did you get your jam?” she asked.