The Outsmarting of Criminals: A Mystery Introducing Miss Felicity Prim (4 page)

Miss Prim
reached into her handbag, pushed the Laser Taser 3000 aside, and found a few tissues with which to wipe the drool from Bruno’s mouth.
A characteristic of the breed
, Phoebe had warned her. Well, Miss Prim had few worries about
that
. She had studied the classic psychological experiments in college and knew a thing or two about behavioral conditioning. If Pavlov could train his dogs to begin salivating at the sound of a bell, surely she could teach Bruno to
stop
drooling by using the same technique.

As Bruno explored the cottage, Miss Prim retrieved her
to-do list, scratched out “adopt trusty animal companion” and added
purchase ringable hand bell
. As she was dotting the
i
in
ringable
, the telephone began jangling. When furnishing the cottage, she’d chosen the telephone with care, eschewing the modern plastic electro-boxes for a sturdy, working Ericsson telephone from the 1940s, much like the one that had dominated the desk in Papa’s study. The phone’s ringing stimulated a quite unexpected level of glee in Miss Prim. Here she was, in
her house
, on
her property
, about to answer
her phone
, in
her parlor
, and it was all just too wonderful for words.

“Hello,
Rose Cottage,” Miss Prim announced brightly into the receiver, expecting to hear the voice of Celia or Dolly on the other end of the line. But all she heard was dead air.

“Hello?” Miss Prim repeated tentatively, fearing that the connectio
n was not quite as it should be and that a call to the phone company might be in order.

More silence, and then a gentle
click
.

He or she will call back
, Miss Prim thought, hanging up the receiver and going in search of Bruno, who was eyeing her bed and the comforts it would undoubtedly provide. “Don’t even
think
about it,” she said, lightly, while Bruno pretended to have been scoping out the bedroom for burglars.

*

Several hours later, as Miss Prim napped on her overstuffed couch, Bruno had an opportunity to prove his mettle. The doorbell rang and Bruno leaped to his feet, barking a deep, menacing woof.

Peering out the window to the side of the
cottage’s front door, Miss Prim spied a moving fan in the driveway and a young, burly moving man holding a clipboard. She opened the door, her hand on Bruno’s collar. The Boxer continued to growl satisfyingly.

“Hey, I’m Josh,” said the mover
. Upon close inspection, he looked more like an extremely large 14-year-old boy than a full-grown man. “I got a bunch of boxes for a Miss Felicity Prom. Are you her?”

“
Yes, I am Miss Felicity
Prim
,” Miss Prim replied, enunciating the last syllable slightly as Josh thrust the clipboard at her. The manifest showed fourteen cartons of books, all shipped from her storage facility in Manhattan. “May I ask—would you mind bringing the boxes up to the attic for me? That would so incredibly helpful, and I will of course offer a gratuity for your services.”

Always a planner, Miss Prim had thought this request through.
Going through all the boxes would require several weeks, and at the end of the process many more books would end up stored in the attic than displayed on the main floor’s built-in bookcases. Thus it seemed sensible to sort the books in the attic and then carry a few of them to the main floor, rather than sort all the books on the first floor and then carry the majority of them to the attic.

“No prob,” Josh
said, sticking two fingers into his mouth and whistling to capture the attention of the other movers, who all seemed completely absorbed in miniature electronic devices that kept their fingers (especially their thumbs) moving rapidly.

Miss Prim led the way into the attic, clearing
a few cobwebs here and there. She hadn’t spent much time in the attic yet; too many other tasks had taken precedence as she prepared the cottage for full-time occupancy. The movers galumphed up the stairs behind her, Bruno trailing at their heels to ensure their proper deportment.

“Right along that wall, if you
would be so kind,” Miss Prim directed. “And not stacked on top of one another, if you please. I would like to minimize the lifting,” she added, with a smile.

“I don’t blame ya, lady,” said one of the movers. “These boxes weigh a ton. Hey, do you want me to
move this stuff?”

Miss Prim swept her glance over a few boxes that
the previous owner had left behind. She hadn’t remembered seeing the boxes during her final walkthrough of the cottage with Olivia Abernathy a couple of months earlier, but no matter. Perhaps they contained materials about the cottage’s history or other antiquarian delights.

“Would you mind moving them
to the center of the room? Under the light bulb, please. That’ll be convenient when I start looking through them.”

“You got it,” said the young man, and within ten minutes all the boxes
had been deposited on her attic floor. After signing the manifest, Miss Prim slipped a $20 bill into Josh’s hand. He reminded her of her beloved late brother, Noel, who’d died, far too young, of a disease whose name Miss Prim didn’t like to say.

*

When Miss Prim was a girl, her mother had trained her in the proper methods of managing her time. First you do what you
have
to do, Mrs. Charity Prim had said, and then you do what you
want
to do. Now, fifty years later, Miss Prim
wanted
to look through those fourteen boxes of books that had been in storage for years, but first she
needed
to clear out the materials left behind by the cottage’s former owner.

So, after
baking a batch of cinnamon rolls, and then brewing a cup of tea and adding a packet of Mrs. Mallowan’s Lemon Sugar to it, Miss Prim returned to the attic to begin sorting through the left-behind boxes.

If she
had expected the boxes to contain fascinating bits of material culture from times gone by—and she
did
expect just that—she was sorely disappointed. Several boxes contained modern paperbacks and celebrity magazines instead of the old issues of
Look
and
Life
that she’d been hoping for. The paperbacks included installments of long-running mystery series.
Fabulous Fifty-Nine
and
Sensational Sixty-Five
focused on the exploits of an old woman who had been juggling two suitors for the better part of forty years, while
Here Comes a Chopper to Chop Off Your Head
and
She Cut Off Their Tails with a Carving Knife
featured a Washington, DC-based African-American detective who seemed to receive an inordinate amount of attention from serial killers. Flipping through the latter two books, each of which contained 300 pages divided into 500 chapters, she marveled at the modern reader’s attention span, or lack thereof, before placing them in a “Donate to Library” pile.

Another box contained jars
filled with assorted screws, nails, nuts, and bolts. The previous owner of Rose Cottage must have been a craftsman; the box also contained old tools, including a chisel encrusted with red paint, a ball-peen hammer, a hacksaw with a dull blade, and screwdrivers of the flathead and Phillips-head varieties. Miss Prim had limited experience with such hardware but decided to keep all of it, at least for the time being. One never knew when such items might come in handy.

A
s she returned the tools to the box, her hand brushed against something she had missed. She reached into the box and pulled out a wooden block in the shape of an eight-pointed star. She turned it over in her hands, wondering why its shape seemed so familiar. Then it hit her: An eight-pointed star was carved into the kitchen wall, just next to a built-in cupboard. She’d found the detail moderately interesting when she’d first visited the cottage, but it had not fully captured her imagination. So, while furnishing her new home, she’d covered up the star-shaped crevice with a clock that had belonged to her great-grandmother Prim.

She carried the star down the stairs and placed it on the kitchen table
, then removed the clock from the wall, exposing the star’s outline. She inserted the wood carving into the outline and took several steps backwards. Hmmm. There was something to be said for old-world craftsmanship, not to mention the return of the star to its intended location, but the star lacked aesthetic appeal. No, she liked her antique clock much better. She would keep the star, of course, and perhaps use it as a wall ornament somewhere—the history of Rose Cottage must be preserved—but the clock must return to its rightful place next to the cupboard.

She grabbed
at the star, which seemed to have become wedged in the depression, with all five fingers of her right hand. In attempting to extricate the star, she lost her balance slightly. In doing so, she pitched forward a bit and applied much of her weight to the star.

She heard a click behind her. As she turned around to determine the source of the noise, she saw a panel of the kitchen wall spring open to reveal a staircase leading downward.

The Body in the Basement

T
his was a most unexpected development. A secret basement? For secret it surely had to be. Olivia Abernathy certainly had not been aware of it; had, in fact, deflected Miss Prim’s question about basement space with a precision acquired by only the savviest of real-estate professionals. “No basement space, and thank God! That means no water problems, no mold, no hidden places for termites to set up shop!”

Miss Prim ran her hands
along the walls of the staircase and found a light switch. She flipped it up, and a few weak light bulbs illuminated the space below. Dust motes glinted in the dirty light as a musty smell traveled up the stairs and into the kitchen.

Miss Prim did not
closely study the staircase itself, and this error was to be the first hard lesson she learned in her new career. For if she’d examined the stairs, she would have noticed recent footprints on the dusty treads, and it might have occurred to her not to disturb them. But, excited about exploring the basement and not feeling the least trepidation about doing so (for this was Greenfield, population 1,400, with a crime rate close to zero), she slowly descended the stairs, holding onto the handrail to ensure a steady footing and partially obliterating key pieces of evidence.

Miss Prim
hoped to find old furniture and other household implements (perhaps an ancient spinning wheel, perhaps a long-unused wheelbarrow that could be turned into an outdoor planter) and boxes of less-than-useful flotsam and jetsam, not unlike the contents of the cartons she’d found in the attic. What she did
not
hope to find was a body in the center of the floor.

Miss Prim
moved quickly to the body, which was lying face down. The shape of the form seemed to be male, and when she turned the body over, she discovered that her suspicion was correct. She felt for a pulse, but she knew she would find none: The body was cold and stiff. The poor man’s intense blue eyes stared at her, in shock and horror, as if the last thing he’d seen before dying had frightened him immensely. His mane of salt-and-pepper hair was wild and unkempt, his beard untrimmed. Dirt was caked under his fingernails. His denim jeans, flannel shirt, and work boots were those of an outdoorsman.

Was the person a tradesman who’d
locked himself into the basement accidentally? While working, had he fallen and hit his head? No, these explanations were illogical, for surely the man’s truck (or other means of transportation) would have been discovered in the driveway long before now. Olivia Abernathy, or some other real-estate person, would have found the basement door ajar during a house tour and gone downstairs to take a look, thus discovering the injured (or dead) man.

Miss Prim rose from her knees to
get a better look at the corpse. She knew not to move it again, as the authorities would want to use tape to outline the body if they suspected foul play. She ran upstairs and retrieved a flashlight from the kitchen, then used it to shine a beam slowly down the length of the body. She caught her breath when the beam alit on the man’s abdomen. A dark, crusty material had formed on the shirt. Miss Prim suspected this material was congealed blood.

She let out a small cry and fled up the stairs.

*

In English novels, police officers use the
cup of tea for many purposes. That liquid panacea not only loosens tongues and stimulates cooperative behavior but also calms the nerves. Which, if she thought about it, was a bit counterintuitive, for doesn’t tea contain caffeine, and isn’t caffeine a stimulant, not a depressant? No matter; Miss Prim was not one to argue with four hundred years of British conventional wisdom. Right now she needed a soothing refreshment, so she put the teapot on while considering the almost fictional quality of her situation. She’d left (some might say
fled
) her home in Manhattan to begin a career in criminal outsmarting in Connecticut; and here, on her first day in her new home, she’d stumbled upon a dead body. In a novel, would readers accept such a coincidence? They might, or they might not. But that was fiction and this was
real life
.