ON MY WAY back to the Inn with Seymour, I spotted Ashley McClure-Sutherland and Kiki Langdon in the parking lot. They had just piled some luggage into Ashley’s silver BMW and were about to depart. I hung back a minute until they had rolled down the drive and out of sight.
From Fiona’s front desk I phoned the bookstore to let Mina know she hadn’t been forgotten. The girl didn’t answer until the sixth ring, so I figured the store was busy. When she finally did pick up, I could hear customers’ voices in the background.
I explained to Mina that we were delayed, but would be getting back to the store within the next hour. She gamely reassured us that things were under control. I could hear a strain in her voice, as if she suspected—or feared—that something was amiss with Johnny. I kept my mouth shut, figuring that this wasn’t the time or place to tell Mina that a corpse was found floating in the inlet, especially since I hadn’t a clue as to the identity yet. Not even if the body was male or female.
I’d no sooner hung up the Finch’s phone than in strode Chief Ciders, his big black boots clomping officiously along the Victorian inn’s polished hardwood floor. Typically, a large, commanding presence, Ciders was meaty but not fat, his dark blue uniform fitting snugly around a barrel chest. He was in his fifties, and he’d been on the Liliputian Quindicott police force for thirty years now. He had a broad nose and small eyes, and his graying hair had receded, leaving a round visage tugged down at the jowls by time, gravity, and a repeated disinterest in lifting his expression into anything remotely resembling a happy face.
Why his manner was seldom pleasant, nobody could say. He was, by all accounts, in a long-standing, happy marriage with three children and a number of grandchildren. My own theory was that he’d spent too many years devoted to the kind of petty law enforcement that trained him to constantly suspect somebody of being up to something. To put it bluntly, after so many years on the job, his immediate response to any violation of the law, small or large, appeared to be not a gleam in the eye for the thrill of a crime-solving challenge, but a weary scowl as he calculated how much time the confounded case would end up taking away from his poker nights and fishing trips.
“Mahnin’,” said the chief, removing his battered hat.
“Hey, Chief, what brings you here?” said Seymour. “Let me guess . . . you saw all those leaves blowing around outside and decided to slap Fiona with a littering citation?”
The chief narrowed his pale blue gaze at Seymour as if he’d just watched a dog owner stroll away from a public sidewalk without pooper scooping. Then he saw me and his expression changed. Now he looked like he’d accidentally swallowed a wad of chewing tobacco.
“Is Mrs. Finch around?”
“Oh, Chief, let
On the carved wooden counter Fiona had placed a decorative antique brass bell. Seymour bounced his hand up and down on it several times. With each strike the bell clanged loudly.
“Innkeeper! Innkeeper!”
Fiona hurried through the doorway that led to the kitchen. “What is all that noise about?” she demanded.
Then Fiona saw Chief Ciders and her spine stiffened.
“Can I help you, Chief ?” she asked as she tactfully moved the bell away from Seymour’s reach.
“You can tell me if you have any guests missing,” the chief replied, almost accusatorily.
“Hmm. . . . what sort of guest?” Seymour asked, as if he were back at his contestant’s podium on
“Not talking to you, Tarnish,” said Ciders tersely. “Besides which: I do questions, you do answers.” He speared Fiona with his gaze.
“Well, ah, that depends on what you mean by ‘missing,’ ” Fiona replied.
“Come on, Fiona,” Seymour goaded, “this isn’t an impeachment hearing. Do you have a missing guest or what?”
“Well . . .”
“One guest is missing,” I interrupted. “Her name is Angel Stark. She didn’t sleep in her room last night, and she was supposed to check out an hour ago but she hasn’t turned up to do that as yet.”
Chief Ciders slapped his hat against his knee. “Dog-gone it, Pen, that is not the answer I wanted to hear.”
“Of course not,” I replied, deciding to take a leap. “You were hoping the young woman you just pulled out of the Pond was Victoria Banks, the Brown University student who vanished from the Comfy-Time Motel last night around midnight.”
Suddenly the foyer got so quiet you could hear the buzzing of a fly tapping the window, and the sound of the wind rustling the willows outside.
“How in hellfire did you know that?” Chief Ciders said.
My shrug obviously didn’t satisfy Quindicott’s top cop.
“This Angel Stark,” he said, continuing to eye me. “Was she in town for a particular reason?”
“She’s an author. She gave a reading of her new book with us last night. Her publicist, Dana Wu, dropped by this morning when I opened up and reported Ms. Stark missing.”
“Yet this Dana Wu didn’t drop by
“Dana thought maybe Angel had run off with . . . some guy she met at the reading.”
Ciders gave me a sidelong glance. “Local guy?”
“Er . . . Not really.”
Again, Chief Cider’s hat slapped against his trousers.
“I should have known you’d be involved,” he barked.
“So who’s the stiff you just fished out of the lake?” Seymour asked.
“Don’t you have mail to misdeliver, Tarnish?”
“All finished for the day, just like you . . . Now that the Staties are here to do your job you can go back to issuing littering tickets.”
Chief Ciders shot Seymour a withering look that was formidable enough to intimidate Seymour into silence, at least temporarily. Unfortunately for Ciders, that look did not work on me.
“So who is it?” I asked. “Do you have any clue? Do you want me to try to identify the body?”
“It might come to that,” Ciders conceded. “But right now I need the phone number of that woman you mentioned. This Dana Wu.”
“The corpse was missing any ID.” Chief Ciders admitted with a frustrated sight, “but we did find something in her pocket.”
So it’s a
Ciders reached into his jacket and drew out a small clear plastic evidence bag. Inside was an old-fashioned long-stem brass key attached to a small wooden placard. Burned into the wooden tab were the words “Finch Inn” and the number nine.
“Can you identify this, Mrs. Finch?” said the chief, almost mechanically, since it was obvious that anyone who lived within twenty miles of Quindicott could.
“That’s one of our keys,” Fiona cried. “Room nine . . . The room where Angel Stark was staying.”
CHAPTER 12
Thanks to you and yore meddlin’, we finally got us a clue.
