I thanked him.
“No problem,” he said with a quick smile. “Bridge gives lots of folks trouble.”
I gathered up the empty cups and donut bags and chucked them in the trash. “I should’ve picked up gas masks while I was at it.”
“You sure nothing died in here?” Paul asked as we cranked open the windows and let the arctic air blow through.
“Good question,” I said, gulping down the rest of my coffee. “You check the front, I’ll check the back. The boys can start washing down the walls with the bleach solution.”
The boys were good workers, same as their father, and I used the time we were together to ask my questions. All three told the same story about the night they found Suzanne’s body in the lake. They had been cutting through the woods with their father on the way home from their grandmother’s house on the other side of Snow Lake. They had just stepped into the clearing when the younger of the two saw a pair of women’s shoes on a bench near the closed skate rental shack.
“Anything unusual about that?”
Paul shrugged. “Not really. Full moon’s coming, lots of light. There’s always somebody looking to skate off a big dinner or a little tension.”
They were about to continue on their way home when Paul noticed something strange near the middle of the ice. When you grew up skating on lakes and ponds, you learned to read the ice. You knew the weak spots, the last areas to hard freeze. The places to avoid. In early December, the center of the ice was one of those spots you treated with respect.
Suzanne should have known better but those margaritas had probably blunted her judgment. By the time they found her, it was too late.
Jeremy and Johnny split for school around eight thirty. Paul went off to open the hardware store at nine. I cleared away an abandoned squirrel nest near the boiler and swept out the store rooms. The combination of bleach and fresh air began to erase the pungent reminder of monkeys gone wild.
I dragged a few loads of trash out to the Dumpster in the back and saw that the lights were on at Sticks & Strings.
I still couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened between Chloe and me last night or why. It was either the most powerful sexual chemistry on the planet or she was playing one damn strange game and I needed to learn the rules ASAP.
The one thing I did know, however, was that she had something to hide.
Everyone did. That was one of the first things I’d learned when I joined the force. We all had our secrets. There was no reason to think Chloe Hobbs was any exception.
I cleaned up in the reclaimed bathroom then crossed the yard to the knit shop and let myself in the front door. Penelope the cat wrapped herself around my ankles like a furry boa constrictor with an attitude.
Chloe appeared in the doorway, arms laden with what looked like half of a very colorful sheep.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” she said. “I have to get this shipment ready for UPS. You can set up your laptop at my desk until the workroom is free. And a fax for you came in. It’s in the machine.”
“Great,” I said. “Want me to pick up some bagels from Fully Caffeinated?”
“Not for me but don’t let that stop you.”
It wasn’t easy to look cool with a fifteen-pound cat on your foot but I gave it my best shot. “Listen,” I said, “about last night—”
“You don’t have to say anything. It was a mistake.”
“I shouldn’t have—”
“I didn’t mean to—”
We were in each other’s arms before we had finished our sentences. Whatever it was that had happened the night before was nothing compared to what was happening now. Sparks of gold and silver careened off the walls around us, lighting the room with their glow.
I knew it wasn’t real. The feel of a woman’s mouth against yours didn’t send sparks flying around the room like flaming confetti on New Year’s Eve, but it was one damn fine hallucination.
I don’t know how long we stood there in the middle of her shop making out like teenagers, but when a cell phone rang, it took us both a few seconds to emerge from the sex haze we were in.
“Yours,” she said, her mouth red and swollen from kisses. “Mine’s in the workroom.”
I unclipped my cell and glanced at the display.
“It’s Randazzo,” I said to Chloe. “I’ve got to take this.”
She nodded. Her sweater had slid off one shoulder. Her hair was tousled. The look in her eyes could have melted steel.
Joe wasn’t in a good mood. I stepped outside to talk. “I thought we’d see something from you this morning.”
“I had a long night.”
“Did you find anything out?”
“So far it’s looking pretty open and shut.”
“Accidental?”
“The stories are all consistent and they all point toward too many margaritas and bad judgment.”
“Sieverts and his people have been on my ass. Her family’s decided to have her body autopsied.”
“You’re kidding me.”
There was a long silence. I didn’t know Randazzo well but I had the feeling I wasn’t going to like what he had to say. “Sieverts sent some people to talk them out of it, but now they’re threatening to escalate the investigation.”
Which meant I had better get my ass in gear before all hell broke loose.
I made the usual promises, but beneath it I felt sad for Suzanne and how her life had ended.
Randazzo gave me the tracking number for the office furniture they were sending down and a contact for vouchers. I was about to hang up when he said, “Tell Hobbs to check her voice mails. They’re bugging my ass for those death records I asked for.”
That grabbed my interest. “Don’t they have those things digitized in Montpelier?”
“For every place but Sugar Maple. No records of births, deaths, marriages, it’s like the town slipped between the cracks a few hundred years ago and stayed there.”
“Nothing as in zero?”
“They’re on the tax roles. They vote. The town’s featured in those fancy travel magazines all the time. But as far as the state is concerned, nobody has ever been born or died in Sugar Maple since the date their charter was granted. Tell her to get on it before Montpelier does it for them.”
More proof that there was something weird about the town that went beyond the lack of crime and the extreme good looks of its residents. I couldn’t shake the sense that I had wandered onto a movie set.
I went back into the knit shop. Penny the cat was sleeping in the basket of fluffy stuff. Chloe was with a customer. Her back was to me as she explained something knitterly to the young woman. I’d catch her later.
Paul was standing in front of the pet store, smoking a cigarette. “Gotta air the place out,” he said. “Johnny knocked over a bottle of solvent that could take out a city.”
“Monkeys and petroleum by-products,” I said, shaking my head. “It just gets better and better.”
We agreed to meet up again later that afternoon after the latest stench had cleared.
I remembered seeing a cemetery somewhere beyond the Sugar Maple Arts Playhouse during my first drive-through. I didn’t know exactly what I expected to find there or how it would pertain to Suzanne, but Randazzo’s agitation over those missing death certificates had set the wheels spinning. Papers went missing. Digitized data got corrupted. People were born and they died. Even in beautiful little towns like Sugar Maple, death was a fact of life.
But I would feel a whole lot better when I saw the proof.
The day was cold but sunny so I figured I’d walk. I could use the exercise. As far as I knew, Sugar Maple didn’t have a gym or health club, which struck me as strange, considering the level of physical perfection I had encountered in town.
I had rounded the corner near the Playhouse when a male voice sounded behind me.
“Hey, Luke, I thought that was you. How’re you doing?”
It was one of the golden boys from last night.
“Not bad,” I said. “You?”
I didn’t have any trouble figuring out which twin I was talking to. I was happy to note that bright sunlight wasn’t his friend. He looked worse than he had last night in the restaurant. Dark purple shadows made the lines under his eyes stand out even more, and a multicolored bruise outlined his swollen left cheek. I’ll give him one thing though: even battered and bruised, he had that whole chiseled thing down cold.
“Holding steady. Where are you headed?”
They didn’t waste much time on chitchat in Sugar Maple.
“Thought I’d walk around and get a feel for the town.”
“Not much to see where you’re headed except for the cemetery.”
“I’m a history buff. I like old cemeteries.”
I started walking again. He fell into step with me.
“Sugar Maple must seem pretty tame after Boston.” It hadn’t taken him more than a handful of seconds to get to the point.
“I’m a cop,” I said. “Tame is good.”
“You don’t think you’ll get bored?”
It took me a while but I finally got the subtext. He was marking his territory in a beta kind of way. “I won’t have time to get bored,” I said. “This isn’t a permanent gig.”
“Then what?”
“Don’t know,” I said with a shrug. “I’ll see what comes up.” It was my turn to ask some questions. “So what do you do when you’re not subbing at the restaurant?”
“Starving artist.”
“Painter?”
“Painter, sculptor.”
“Ever sell anything?” I was in full-on cop mode.
“To my brother,” he said.
We both laughed. Or at least grunted in unison. It’s a guy thing.
“I met him last night.” I told him about seeing Dane (Dean? Dino?) coming out of the woods on cross-country skis.
“He’s the outdoorsman,” Gunnar said. “He wanted to play pro hockey when we were younger but it didn’t work out.”
We passed a few minutes talking about the relative worth of the NHL’s finest.
I gestured toward his cheek. “So what happened?”
He grinned. “My brother wanted his money back.”
It was a good line and we both laughed. But I knew that was his way of saying, “Back off.” He was right. His family squabbles weren’t any of my business.
“They told me at the Inn that you were working the kitchen the night Suzanne Marsden died.”
“One of the line cooks took the night off.”
“Got time for a few questions?”
“Sorry, dude. I’ve got a meeting with a gallery owner two towns over. I’ll catch you later.”
He peeled off like one of those fighter jets in
Top Gun
and disappeared around the corner. No problem. That wasn’t the last I’d see of him.
As it turned out, I couldn’t get near the cemetery. A county work crew had the area blocked off while they repaired some downed wires.
I asked the foreman when he figured the job would be done.
“Hoping for tomorrow,” he said, “but I said that two days ago and we still can’t get the son of a bitch up and running.”
Call me crazy but I was dead sure Chloe’s pal Goober was laughing his golden ass off right about now. Score one for the local boy.
I had some time to waste before the appointment with Janice Meany at Cut & Curl so I settled in to watch the work crew do its thing while bits and pieces of information I’d gathered so far formed and re-formed patterns that still didn’t make sense. But sooner or later they would.
“Hey!” the foreman yelled. “Look out!”
I barely had time to hit the ground as a cable sliced the air where I had been standing a half second ago.
“Holy shit,” one of the workmen said. “Is he dead?”
“He could’ve been fried,” another workman chimed in.
“Sorry,” the foreman said as I cautiously stood up and brushed off the snow. “You’ve got yourself some good reflexes, pal.”
I made all of those macho “no big deal” sounds that went with laughing in the face of danger, but the truth was Joe Randazzo had come damn close to getting his second death certificate in less than a week.
I wondered if he would have appreciated the irony.
With the cable snapping and crackling less than three feet away from where I was standing, I wasn’t sure I did.
CHLOE
Luke had been outside for a good ten minutes when I finally got tired of trying to eavesdrop and went into the kitchen to pour myself a cup of coffee. The same weird feelings I had experienced last night were back with a vengeance. A visit to WebMD had reassured me that I wasn’t approaching an extremely early menopause, but something was definitely wreaking havoc with my equilibrium. I felt dizzy and unsteady on my feet.
Then again, it was hard to breathe and kiss at the same time. I was probably still oxygen deprived.
I still wasn’t exactly sure how it had happened. I mean, my arms had been piled high with an outgoing shipment of kettle-dyed DK weight Blue-faced Leicester, and anyone who knew me knew that nothing short of nuclear Armageddon would make me sacrifice one fuzzy, fibery gram of the stuff for anything as fleeting and insubstantial as a kiss.
But when Luke MacKenzie walked into the shop this morning and looked at me with those bottle green eyes, I might as well have been carrying a load of acrylic for all I cared. The yarn went flying as I flew into his arms.
If Luke had been selkie or vampire or something normal like that, I would have suspected there was a spell at work creating the fireworks between us, the impossible-to-resist magnetism, but nobody in Sugar Maple, not even Isadora, would do anything to encourage a mortal to hang around any longer than necessary.
I poured a mug of coffee. I arranged some stale donuts on a platter. Today’s edition of the
Sugar Maple Gazette
arrived, and I flipped it open to the obituary page, which was an obituary page in name only. The space had been sold to Griggs Hardware to advertise their Christmas extravaganza sale.
How long a lead time did they have at the paper? Six hours. Ten? Anything could have happened since press time.