“Mina doesn’t know anything because he never kept his date with her last night,” I reluctantly admitted. “I know because she came back to the store late. They were supposed to meet for pizza, but he never showed up, so I waited with her while her roommate drove over to pick her up and take her home. I’ve already spoken to her about it.”
“Was Johnny at your bookstore at any time last night?”
“Johnny came to the store, stayed awhile. But he left before we closed and, as I said, never came back to pick up Mina.”
“He left alone?”
I felt cornered. But I couldn’t lie about something that had been witnessed by people other than just me. “No,” I said in a soft voice. “He was on the sidewalk outside the store . . .” I looked down, hating Ciders for making me admit it. “He was talking to Angel Stark the last time I saw him.”
I heard Bud release a disgusted breath. I couldn’t meet his eyes.
Ciders cleared his throat. “Bud, maybe you and I should finish this conversation somewhere in private.”
Bud exhaled again, but this time in defeat. He shook his head. “There are no secrets in this town, and Pen and Sadie already know some of what’s going on, as you just figured out.”
Then some of the old fire rekindled behind Bud’s eyes. “We’ve leveled with you, Ciders. Now it’s time for you to level with us. What is going on? Why did you want to search my truck?”
“Bud, we just found a body floating in the pond. The body of a young woman. From the condition of the corpse, the State forensics people say she hasn’t been in the water more than ten or twelve hours, maximum, which means she died late last night or, more likely, very early this morning.”
“What does this have to do with me? With Johnny?”
“We found a length of yellow rope around the dead woman’s neck. The same stuff you sold at your hardware store,” Ciders replied. “It appears the killer used that rope to strangle her.”
Bud pointed in the direction of the pond. “That construction site out there has a length of that same damn rope. Anyone could have gotten it from there.”
“I checked the rope at the site,” the Chief said evenly. “There’s only one bolt securing the area. Both ends of that bolt of rope still have the plastic tabs attached—which means that length of rope has never been cut. So the killer probably got that yellow rope from somewhere else.”
“Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that rope. But anyone could have bought yellow rope like that,” insisted Bud. “Maybe the killer bought it last season when yellow rope was everywhere, or in another town that still sold it . . .”
“Bud,” Ciders began. “I know all about your nephew—the conviction, the parole, and about the suspicion of murder charges that were leveled at Johnny in that big Newport heiress death last year. The Bethany Banks case.”
I was surprised. So was Bud Napp.
“We’re not all Keystone Kops,” said the Chief, “despite what our local letter carrying Jeopardy! genius here thinks.”
Seymour harrumphed, and Chief Ciders continued, “Bud, when your nephew moved here, his parole officer notified me of Johnny’s criminal record and his place of lodging and employment. I never bothered the kid out of respect for you . . .”
“You and I both know that those murder charges were dismissed,” Bud pointed out.
“That’s right, Bud,” Ciders replied. “But they were dismissed on a legal technicality, not for lack of evidence.”
Bud’s face reddened. “There was no real evidence or they would have tried Johnny anyway!”
Chief Ciders nodded. “I know, and I understand how you feel. But the woman in the pond . . . she was strangled. Just like Bethany Banks. And until we locate Johnny, and have a long talk with him, he’s the main suspect now, which means I have no choice but to issue an All Points Bulletin for the arrest of your nephew on suspicion of murder.”
“Wait a minute!” Bud cried. “Murder of who?”
Angel Stark, of course, I thought to myself. She had to be the lady in the lake—unless, of course, some other woman had been carrying around Angel’s room key, which was technically within the realm of possibility. So I wasn’t surprised when the Chief said . . .
“Angel Stark, of course. Technically she’s not yet identified. But since Mrs. McClure volunteered to help ID the body, we can settle the matter of the woman’s name right here and now.”
Then Chief Ciders faced me. “Penelope, you and I are going to take a little walk . . .”
CHAPTER 13
Lady in the Lake
“I still ain’t heard who killed Muriel . . .”
“Somebody who thought she needed killing, somebody who had loved her and hated her . . .”
—Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake, 1943
THE LESS SAID about the next half hour, the better. Suffice it to say that a corpse that has been strangled in summer and submerged in water for “only about ten or twelve hours” has pretty much lost all resemblance to anything human.
Black swollen tongue, blue-gray skin mottled with angry red-black patches, stringy, mud-soaked clothes and hair, and the incongruity of a bright sunflower-yellow rope embedded deep into the puffy flesh at the throat—the victim was not a pretty sight. And I’m not even bringing up the insects.
Through features like hair (long and copper), eye color (brown), and items like clothes the woman was wearing (that one-of-a-kind Betsy Johnson pink and green sundress with the lace-up corset and gauzy skirt), I became convinced the corpse belonged to Angel Stark, and told Chief Ciders and two officers from the Rhode Island State Police crime scene unit exactly that.
“From her fingerprints and dental records, the crime lab people should be able to positively confirm her identity within a few hours,” Ciders told me as we walked back to the Inn together.
“Sadie and I really have to get back to the bookstore,” I told the Chief. “We left poor Mina on her own for the last two and a half hours.”
A few minutes later, Ciders released us all, saying he’d be over to the bookstore soon to get a corroborating statement from Mina. Bud offered Sadie and me a lift back to the store. Seymour decided to tag along as far as the post office. Fiona returned to nurse her stricken husband, whom she’d “put to bed for a long nap.” It was a solemn, quiet group who trudged out to the Inn’s parking lot and piled into Bud’s Ford Explorer.
After we dropped Seymour at the local post office, Bud pulled up in front of Buy the Book. I was surprised when he cut the engine and followed Sadie and me into the store.
For a summertime Saturday afternoon, the place was fairly busy, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I spied a familiar face at the register alongside Mina. After bagging a bundle of paperbacks and passing them to the customer, Linda Cooper-Logan gave us one of her big, open smiles. In her late thirties, Linda still wore her short platinum hair in the spiky, punkish style she’d first worn in the eighties. These days, she usually favored long flowered skirts and a copious amount of silver bracelets, but on this warm afternoon she wore cut-off denim shorts and a chocolate-brown “Bakers Do It Early” T-shirt, which was dusted with flour.
“Boy am I glad to see you,” I gushed.
“Not half as glad as I was,” said Mina.
Linda dismissed my thanks with a wave of her hand. “I brought the pastry over for tonight’s meeting and saw a line of customers, so I volunteered to fill in until you guys got back.”