“Oh, no, sir. She’s the sweetest woman in the world. This is the latest I’ve ever worked for her, and she felt so bad about asking me to stay, she gave me car fare to get home.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “You’re not a live-in?”
“Miss Kerns likes to do for herself. I help out a few hours a day and also receive guests when she has ’em.”
“Does she get a lot of guests, then?”
“Over the past year, they’ve mostly been the ladies from the veteran’s charity.”
“Veteran’s charity?”
“Didn’t she tell you, sir?” The maid looked over her shoulder at the front door then lowered her voice to a whisper. “That’s why she gave all that money to Mr. Tattershawe. It was her idea to start up a special private foundation for disabled veterans in our area, help them in all sorts of ways. I was so proud. My brother lost his eyesight, you know, and she told me he would be one of the men she’d be helping.
“She and Mr. Tattershawe discussed it night after night. It was hard not to overhear them. Mr. Tattershawe believed he could turn her inheritance into a fortune and they’d have the funds they’d need to do anything they wanted.”
“What did you think of Mr. Tattershawe?”
“I liked him, sir. He seemed a fine man.”
“Seemed?”
The maid looked down. “Well, he run off with her money, didn’t he?”
CHAPTER 6
Open for Business
My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly…a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified…
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat,” 1843
OUTSIDE, A HORN blared. Spencer dumped his bowl and spoon into the sink. “That’s the school bus!”
I’d already run a brush through my hair and thrown on a pair of blue jeans and a powder-blue sweater before making oatmeal for Spencer. But I was still bleary-eyed from the terrible events of the night before…and, of course, that strange dream of Jack working a missing persons case in New York City.
“Wait a minute!” I called as Spencer raced for the door. “I’ll walk you downstairs.”
He wheeled, a look of horror on his face.
I raised an eyebrow. “Don’t worry, kiddo, I’m only going to unlock the front door for you. I’ll stay out of sight.”
Spencer nodded, his sense of relief visible. Together we walked down the stairs. “Do you have your Reader’s Notebook?”
“Duh! I worked on that all summer, Mom. Do you think I’d actually forget it now?”
“Apparently not,” I replied as we crossed the empty bookstore’s main aisle.
The school encouraged reading over the summer by running a contest every year. The student who read the most books would be awarded a grand prize. Spencer had completely filled one spiral-bound notebook with titles, authors, and short descriptions of every story he’d read.
He had nothing on poor Peter Chesley with his fifty volumes, but in my view Spencer’s work had been just as diligent and enthusiastic.
Of course, living above a bookstore might be seen as a blatant advantage, but I didn’t allow him to read a book in our store and put it back on the shelf. I wanted Spencer to get comfortable using the local library and took him there regularly to check out new stacks of books.
When we reached the front door, I unlocked it. “Your first day for the new school year.” I smiled. “Good luck.”
Spencer returned my smile, then darted across the sidewalk. I heard Danny Keenan and a few of my son’s other new friends excitedly shout his name when he entered the bus and I felt my own sense of relief.
My son had gone from a morose little boy who missed his father to a bright and alive young man. He no longer had nightmares about my leaving him like his daddy did. He hardly mentioned missing Calvin anymore.
The early days after his father’s suicide had been awful, and for a long time, I questioned the decisions I was making. But now I was convinced that moving away from New York City and back to Quindicott had benefited Spencer’s peace of mind. It had been the right thing to do—for both of us.
I now had about fifty minutes before our bookstore was scheduled to open, and I went back upstairs to check on my aunt. She was still sleeping. This was unusual for Sadie, who was always the early riser, but considering the previous night’s events, it made me happy to see her get some much-needed rest.
Since I had a little time, I decided to slip on a jacket and head down the block to Cooper Family Bakery for a nosh of something special. The oatmeal was warm but hardly satisfying—and although my size fourteen jeans certainly could have been looser, I sorely needed the fresh air as much as the sugar rush. On the way, I stopped at Koh’s Grocery and bought a Providence Journal.
It took me a few minutes before I found a small item about the accidental death of Peter Chesley. The sparse article simply stated he’d “fallen in his home” after “a long illness.” There were no surprises here. It was clear to me that Detective Kroll had made up his mind before he’d even arrived at the mansion. But I took a deep breath and told myself to stop thinking about it.
“This is Kroll’s case now,” I muttered, “not mine.”
When I got to the bakery, I saw that half the mothers in Quindicott had gotten the same idea I had—send the children off to school and head over to Cooper’s. There was actually a line out the door. I waved to a few mothers who were also good Buy the Book customers.
“Penelope, did you get the new Patricia Cornwell in yet?”
It was Susan Keenan, the thirtysomething mother of Danny, one of Spencer’s new friends. Danny had two siblings: seven-year-old Maura, who was in school at the moment; and two-year-old Tommy, who was sleeping in a stroller by his mother’s side.
“It’s in, Sue,” I called to her, “stop by anytime.”
“Come on, come on, move along ladies,” a man’s voice boomed from the center of the perfumed mob. “Let me out of the pretty store and one of you can get in!”
Holding high his cup of steaming-hot coffee, Seymour Tarnish struggled to escape the packed bakery. As the women moved aside, I could see into the store. Behind the counter, Linda Cooper-Logan looked harried.
She wore a rainbow bandana over her short, spiky, platinum blonde hair (she’d had a thing for Annie Lennox since we were kids back in the eighties), and her husband Milner Logan (fan of noir thrillers) was nowhere in sight. My guess—the talented quarter-blood Narragansett Native American was in the back, doing his best to whip up more of those famous fresh, hot doughnuts that people drove from miles around to snag.
“Hey, Pen.” Seymour looked down at me with a crooked smile on his round face. He jerked his head in the direction of the bakery. “If you’re looking to buck that crowd, beware. Hungry housewives cruising for pastry are a dangerous breed. I almost lost my arm putting cream in my coffee.”
(What Seymour actually said was “almust lahst mah aahm”—using the typical dropped R’s and drawn out vowels of our “Roe Dyelin” patois. We might be the smallest state in the Union but, by golly, we’ve got a sizable accent. Sadie speaks with the accent, too, along with most of the people here in Quindicott. I lost mine somewhere between college and living in New York although the occasional slip—e.g., “You can never find pahkin’ in this town!”—just can’t be helped.)
Not exactly resplendent in his natty blue postman’s uniform with matching coat, his hat askew, Seymour was obviously on his way to his day job.
Although thickwaisted, our big, tactless, fortysomething mailman wasn’t always thickheaded. He’d won quite a bit of money on Jeopardy! a few years back and ever since, the town had its own local celebrity. It was the main reason the people on Seymour’s mail route put up with him. Still, their descriptions of the man spanned from “irascible” to “obnoxious,” depending on how diplomatic they were in choosing adjectives.