“Is Mrs. Finch around?”
“Oh, Chief, let me get her for you,” Seymour declared.
On the carved wooden counter Fiona had placed a decorative antique brass bell. Seymour bounced his hand up and down on it several times. With each strike the bell clanged loudly.
“Innkeeper! Innkeeper!”
Fiona hurried through the doorway that led to the kitchen. “What is all that noise about?” she demanded.
Then Fiona saw Chief Ciders and her spine stiffened.
“Can I help you, Chief ?” she asked as she tactfully moved the bell away from Seymour’s reach.
“You can tell me if you have any guests missing,” the chief replied, almost accusatorily.
“Hmm. . . . what sort of guest?” Seymour asked, as if he were back at his contestant’s podium on Jeopardy! and trying to clarify a question from Alex Trebek. “A man? A woman?”
“Not talking to you, Tarnish,” said Ciders tersely. “Besides which: I do questions, you do answers.” He speared Fiona with his gaze.
“Well, ah, that depends on what you mean by ‘missing,’ ” Fiona replied.
“Come on, Fiona,” Seymour goaded, “this isn’t an impeachment hearing. Do you have a missing guest or what?”
“Well . . .”
“One guest is missing,” I interrupted. “Her name is Angel Stark. She didn’t sleep in her room last night, and she was supposed to check out an hour ago but she hasn’t turned up to do that as yet.”
Chief Ciders slapped his hat against his knee. “Dog-gone it, Pen, that is not the answer I wanted to hear.”
“Of course not,” I replied, deciding to take a leap. “You were hoping the young woman you just pulled out of the Pond was Victoria Banks, the Brown University student who vanished from the Comfy-Time Motel last night around midnight.”
Suddenly the foyer got so quiet you could hear the buzzing of a fly tapping the window, and the sound of the wind rustling the willows outside.
“How in hellfire did you know that?” Chief Ciders said.
My shrug obviously didn’t satisfy Quindicott’s top cop.
“This Angel Stark,” he said, continuing to eye me. “Was she in town for a particular reason?”
“She’s an author. She gave a reading of her new book with us last night. Her publicist, Dana Wu, dropped by this morning when I opened up and reported Ms. Stark missing.”
“Yet this Dana Wu didn’t drop by my office and file a missing person report. Now why is that?”
“Dana thought maybe Angel had run off with . . . some guy she met at the reading.”
Ciders gave me a sidelong glance. “Local guy?”
“Er . . . Not really.”
Again, Chief Cider’s hat slapped against his trousers.
“I should have known you’d be involved,” he barked.
“So who’s the stiff you just fished out of the lake?” Seymour asked.
“Don’t you have mail to misdeliver, Tarnish?”
“All finished for the day, just like you . . . Now that the Staties are here to do your job you can go back to issuing littering tickets.”
Chief Ciders shot Seymour a withering look that was formidable enough to intimidate Seymour into silence, at least temporarily. Unfortunately for Ciders, that look did not work on me.
“So who is it?” I asked. “Do you have any clue? Do you want me to try to identify the body?”
“It might come to that,” Ciders conceded. “But right now I need the phone number of that woman you mentioned. This Dana Wu.”
Keep pushing. I could almost hear Jack’s voice back at the store. “Do you think you’ve found Angel Stark’s body?” I pressed. “The author I told you about? You can’t tell me there’s nothing to go on.”
“The corpse was missing any ID.” Chief Ciders admitted with a frustrated sight, “but we did find something in her pocket.”
So it’s a her, I thought, relieved for Bud and Mina’s sake that it wasn’t Johnny Napp.
Ciders reached into his jacket and drew out a small clear plastic evidence bag. Inside was an old-fashioned long-stem brass key attached to a small wooden placard. Burned into the wooden tab were the words “Finch Inn” and the number nine.
“Can you identify this, Mrs. Finch?” said the chief, almost mechanically, since it was obvious that anyone who lived within twenty miles of Quindicott could.
“That’s one of our keys,” Fiona cried. “Room nine . . . The room where Angel Stark was staying.”
CHAPTER 12
Fall Guy or Felon?
Thanks to you and yore meddlin’, we finally got us a clue.
—Merle Constiner, “The Turkey Buzzard Blues,” Black Mask magazine, 1943
I’D BARELY DIGESTED the surprise of seeing the key before I was rocked by another shock. Bud Napp rushed through the Inn’s open doors, looking nearly as pale as Barney Finch.
Chief Ciders hitched his fingers in his belt and faced him. “Thanks for coming in, Bud.”
“You said it was urgent,” Bud replied. Then he noticed the rest of us standing around with funereal faces. “What the hell is going on here, Chief ?”
“Bud . . . are you still selling that bright yellow lawn rope?”
“You hustled me over here for an inventory report?”
“Just answer the question.”
“No,” Bud replied. “I told you last week when you came to buy some to tie up your tomatoes, the company stopped making it. Some issue with the dye. They’re switching to neon orange.”
“Have you sold any yellow rope in the past week?”
Bud shook his head. “I have a few bolts in my truck, that’s all. And I’m using them for my building business.”
“Let’s go on out into the parking lot, Bud. I need to get a look inside of your truck.”
“Are you looking for something in particular?” Bud asked suspiciously. “Maybe I should ask to see some kind of warrant?”
“You can give me permission to search your truck now, or wait until the State Police get a warrant issued,” Ciders replied wearily. “Getting that warrant should take all of about five minutes—and then the Staties might want to do more than search your truck. If they have to go to all that trouble for the paper, they’ll probably include your garage, your business, your home.”
Bud swallowed. “I didn’t bring the truck. I drove over in my Explorer.”
Now it was Ciders who was suddenly suspicious. “Where is your truck, then?”
“Johnny has it,” Bud replied uneasily. “He had a date last night, I told him he could borrow my truck.”
“And where is Johnny right now?”
When I saw the look in Ciders’s eye, I knew this was the question he’d been itching to ask all along. I still didn’t figure out how a yellow rope was involved, though I’d seen some of it strung around the restaurant’s construction site—no surprise since Budd was supplying the crew.
“Johnny . . . He hasn’t come home yet.”
“What about his date? Who was she? Was she staying at this inn?”
“Hell, no. Johnny was dating a local girl. Mina Griffith. Works at Pen’s bookstore.”
Now Ciders turned to me. “And is Mina at work today?”
I nodded. “But she doesn’t know where Johnny is either.”
“And why is that?”
I snapped my mouth shut and kept it that way. Ciders was grilling me, and I didn’t like it. He studied me—and obviously didn’t care for my attempt to remain uncooperative. “Okay, don’t answer,” he told me. “I’ll just have to track down Mina and ask her.”
My eyes narrowed on the Chief. Mina was in an emotional state as it was. I couldn’t let him upset her even more.