A Crafty Killing (3 page)

“The roof was in bad shape, and the bank wouldn’t give Ezra another loan,” Chad had calmly explained, as though jeopardizing their financial security was nothing for them to worry about.

The Bonner marriage had foundered after that. For years they’d scrimped and saved, dreaming of owning and operating an upscale bed-and-breakfast—the English Ivy Inn—on or near Victoria Square, with Chad the amiable host and Katie serving as the power behind the scenes, managing the financial end as well as the day-to-day operations. The derelict Webster mansion on the east end of the Square was the perfect location. They’d plotted and planned for more than two years to buy it and had been on the verge of submitting a bid when dear, sweet, gullible Chad had fallen for Ezra’s sales pitch, convincing him Artisans Alley would quickly return their investment tenfold.

So far, Katie hadn’t seen a dime.

Not that Chad hadn’t worked at improving Artisans Alley’s bottom line. The addition of something as simple as arranging for the business to accept debit cards had made Artisans Alley more profitable within a month. But Chad had had to choose his battles carefully. Although a businessman for more than half a century, Ezra wasn’t eager to adopt newfangled ways. And he’d decreed the business remain an artisans-only arcade, which kept the booth rental at only seventy-five percent of capacity, at least during a good month.

“Mrs. Bonner?”

Katie turned. An elderly lady, her carefully coifed, honey blond hair covered by a plastic weather bonnet—more, Katie suspected, in deference to the wind than any threat of rain—had broken away from a knot of other old women on the fringe of the parking lot. Her wrinkled face gave testament to her decades on the planet. Pretty blue-and-white beaded earrings hung from her earlobes, with a matching necklace just showing at the base of her neck. Though lithe and spry in body, the old lady’s watery blue eyes were shadowed with grief. She held out her heavily veined hand. “I’m Rose Nash, one of Artisans Alley’s artists.”

Katie gingerly took the woman’s hand, careful not to exert any pressure for fear of crushing the delicate bones under the crepe-like skin.

“Everyone’s saying Ezra was murdered,” Rose said, her voice shaky with suppressed tears.

“I’m afraid it looks that way.”

Rose let out an anguished sigh, her brows puckering. “I’ve been at Artisans Alley since it opened twelve years ago. I speak for a lot of the artists when I say this place means more to us than just a business or a hobby. It’s our lives. Our social club. We’re family. What will we ever do without Ezra?”

Katie didn’t know how to respond. Chad had been friends with these people—had socialized with them—while she had been intent on getting her degree and working and reworking a viable business plan for the English Ivy Inn. She sensed another pitch to keep the place open was on its way and wasn’t up to hearing it. “It’s too soon for me to make any decisions. I’ll have to wait to hear Ezra’s will and find out who the heirs are. For now, I’d like to keep the place open.” She didn’t add,
until I can find a buyer.

Rose’s look of joy was to be short-lived.

“Only I can’t manage it,” Katie said.

“Why not?” Rose asked, sounding almost childlike.

“I have to support myself. My husband Chad’s investment in Artisans Alley never paid off. That’s why he had a full-time job teaching English at the McKinlay Mill High School.”

“But there must be something we can do to keep it running,” Rose cried.

“I suppose I’ll have to hire a manager. There’s still the problem of paying one. I haven’t had a chance to go through the books. All I can tell you is—”

Rose’s look of anguish nearly broke Katie’s heart.

“I’ll try.”

Rose reached out, squeezed Katie’s shoulder. “God bless you, Mrs. Bonner.”

“Call me Katie,” she insisted, feeling like a rat.

Rose’s lips trembled and she glanced at the ugly old hodgepodge of a building. “We were all so sad when Chad passed. He loved Artisans Alley as much as the rest of us.”

Katie’s throat tightened.
Don’t weaken. Don’t let her—or anyone else—persuade you not to sell the place. You’ll end up living in your car if you do.

Rose patted Katie’s arm and turned away, heading back to her waiting friends.

Katie ducked under the crime-scene tape and reentered Artisans Alley. A pensive Deputy Schuler stood next to Detective Davenport. A six-by-six-foot chunk of carpet was missing at the bottom of the stairs where Ezra had fallen. Evidence, no doubt. What was left was a toe-snagging hazard for patrons who’d head for the twenty or so booths upstairs. She’d have to duct-tape the rough edges before they could open the store again.

“You can go in the office now, ma’am,” Detective Davenport said. “I found a list of the artists and made a copy. Besides the cash, nothing else appears to have been taken or disturbed—but in a place like this, who can tell?”

Who indeed. Every booth seemed to contain hundreds of items.

“Of course, half your vendors will be calling us back, saying they’ve been robbed and demanding police reports to file with their insurance companies.”

Katie frowned. “That’s a pretty cynical statement, Detective.”

“Ma’am, I’ve been on the job twenty-eight years. I’ve seen it all and then some.”

Katie squelched the sharp retort on her tongue. Instead she asked, “Did you find any fingerprints?”

“A few. But they might turn out to be the victim’s—or any of the other artists who might have used the register yesterday. Can you come up with a list of likely candidates?”

Katie shook her head. “I know in the past Vance Ingram was usually Ezra’s backup. I’m surprised he’s not already here. You could ask some of the other artists how to contact him. There still may be a few of them out in the parking lot.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Already Davenport’s bored monotone and his overuse of the word “ma’ am” began to annoy Katie.

“Call me if you think of anything that might help us,” he said and handed her his card. He glanced up at the timbered ceiling. “Damn fire trap,” he muttered, shook his head, and took his leave.

Katie scowled, suddenly feeling protective of the sprawling old building—Chad’s nightmare investment.

“Are you leaving, too?” she asked Deputy Schuler.

“I’ll be around, ma’am,” he said, and a ghost of a smile raised the corners of his mouth. “McKinlay Mill is part of my assigned patrol area.”

Katie followed him into the wan sunlight. Sure enough, the group of elderly women was still camped out on the edges of the parking lot, and they seemed only too eager to answer any question Detective Davenport posed for them.

Katie watched as Schuler got into his patrol car and drove away; then her attention turned back to Detective Davenport, who consulted his list of artists during his talk with the ladies. He spent only a couple of minutes conversing with the women, and then he turned for his own unmarked car.

Rose Nash considered the people at Artisans Alley to be family. Why didn’t the detective try to wrangle the family gossip out of those women? He said he’d been on the job for twenty-eight years. If he was anywhere near retirement, he could just be going through the motions—not caring if he ever found out who killed Ezra. Was his lack of interest a symptom of short-timer’s syndrome or was he simply burned out—or worse, incompetent?

Katie couldn’t help glaring at the detective as he pulled out of the parking lot. She and Ezra had never been pals, but even he deserved better than the disinterest this cop displayed.

As she turned toward Artisans Alley, a curtain of depression settled around her shoulders. In addition to her regular job, Artisans Alley and all it entailed would be her responsibility, too.

Swell.

Ezra’s desk more resembled a junk heap than a place of business. Stacks of paper teetered precariously close to old cups of half-drunk coffee that grew science experiments and begged to be spilled. Katie itched to tidy the place, but first things first. She searched through the mess until she found a file marked “Accountant,” hauled out the Yellow Pages from under stacks of rubber-banded Artisans Alley’s brochures, opened it to the section marked “CPAs,” and hunted for the accountant’s name.

The call to James Morrison didn’t go well. He outlined Artisans Alley’s long list of creditors, and advised her to take a good look at the books. Unless the Alley turned around in the next few months, it would go under—taking Chad’s investment with it—and probably all of Victoria Square as well. The chances of a buyer taking on that kind of debt were nil.

Katie thumbed through more of Ezra’s files, finding three loan payment books. It didn’t take a financial genius to see that Ezra was behind on two of them.

“Oh, boy,” she breathed, wishing she’d taken more of an interest in the place since Chad’s death.

A coffee-stained ledger proved to be a record of rent checks collected. Listed by booth number, each vendor’s name had been carefully printed in what had to be Ezra’s own hand. Quite a few of them were in arrears: Donner, Frances, Hingle, Mitchell, and more.

Good grief! Two or three of them were almost a year behind in their payments. How could Ezra have let the situation deteriorate like that? Why hadn’t he hounded the vendors to pay up or make them leave Artisans Alley?

Her stomach twisting with anguish, Katie set the ledger aside and tackled the stack of bills, most of them at least a month overdue. The cash flow—or what there was of it—was definitely out of kilter.

Chad had told her that when Ezra first bought the building, the old apple warehouse had been divided to house up to four small businesses, as well as Artisans Alley. Ezra figured with that space leased, there’d always be income, since his artist vendors only paid on a month-to-month basis. All but one of those rental spaces was currently empty. It housed a photography studio. Apparently the previous lease holders had been so successful, they’d moved into larger quarters on Victoria Square.

Chad had wanted to hire Fred Cunningham of Cunningham Realty to list the vacancies, but Ezra wouldn’t hear of it. Fred represented the owners of the old Webster mansion, and she and Chad had consulted with him on many occasions as they’d saved to buy the old colonial-style building. Unfortunately, miserly old Ezra felt he was perfectly capable of renting the space himself. He’d been wrong, and the little shops had sat vacant for months—some more than a year. If Katie couldn’t fill them with retail establishments, she’d let them out as office space. And she would hire Fred to do it PDQ.

It was after two when Katie opened the middle drawer of Ezra’s desk, looking for a pen that didn’t skip, and found a brass key with a card tag attached. By now she recognized Ezra’s handwriting. It read, “Chad’s pad.”

Her heart raced, and she clasped the key so hard it bit into her palm.

After a ferocious argument that sent Chad flying out their apartment door, he’d lived in a storeroom somewhere on the Alley’s second floor, which had been totally illegal, and definitely not safe, given the age and condition of the building. How many times had Ezra encouraged Katie to come by to empty out that room? How many times had he invited her to become more involved with Artisans Alley?

She hadn’t, of course. For a long time she couldn’t even think about the place without anger boiling through her. Artisans Alley—and Ezra—had ruined her marriage. The place had seduced Chad with its siren’s song. It had caused him to empty their bank account, to abandon their dreams of running a bed-and-breakfast for an interest in this ... this decaying money pit.

Katie unclenched her fist, staring at the key and the dents it had made in her hand, her anger flaring once again.

If it hadn’t been for Ezra and his unnatural need to keep this sorry excuse of an enterprise going, Chad would still be alive.

Katie’s throat tightened and tears threatened as she remembered her last sight of Chad laid out in his casket—dressed in his best suit, his waxy face lax, his hands folded over his abdomen, looking like no one Katie had ever loved; certainly not the man she’d lived and shared so much with. Six months later, the memory continued to haunt her dreams.

Pocketing the key, Katie got up from her chair. The vendors’ lounge was just outside her office. “Lounge” was a definite misnomer, for it was not a place to hang around and pass the time idly. “Stark” was a better description. There was a table, where lunches could be eaten, an apartment-sized fridge, a microwave, and a coffeemaker. An out-of-date calendar hung on one of the drab brown walls, but there was no other decoration.

Katie crossed the room in a hurry and entered the main showroom to wander Artisans Alley’s aisles, hoping to shake off the restlessness that prickled beneath her skin. Poor lighting made the area look dingy. Already she could see so many ways to improve the operation—and its bottom line. Had Chad seen the same things? Had Ezra been just too stubborn to take her husband’s advice?