for anyone who asked.
“Hey.”
There was a tug on the lower corner of my apron. I looked down. A kindergarten-sized child was looking up at me. “Hi, there,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Avery Olsen.”
“Hi, Avery.” My brain went
“My mommy is over there.” She pointed to Marcia’s reading circle. “My daddy’s gone. But he’s almost home.”
“I see.” Or not. “What can I do for you, Avery?”
“Potty.”
Clearly, Avery was a girl of few words. “I’ll take you there, okay?”
She nodded solemnly. I put my hand on the back of her head and guided her toward the back of the store. On the way past Isabel and her son, Neal, I tapped Isabel’s shoulder and nodded at Avery, whispering, “Bathroom. Do you want to . . . ?”
“Go ahead,” she said. “She’ll be fine.”
That hadn’t been what I meant. I’d meant for her to take responsibility for her daughter; I’d meant to imply that I wasn’t a babysitter and that I had a store to run. “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
I shut the bathroom door behind Avery. “Do you need any help?”
“No.” She stood tall. “I’m a big girl now. I’m
“That is a big-girl age, isn’t it?”
“Yup.” She began bathroom preparations and climbed aboard. “My daddy says when I’m big enough, I can go and shoot things with him.”
“Really?”
“At first it won’t be real things. Just paper.” She sounded disgusted with the idea. “But when I get biggerer, I can shoot real things.”
“Oh. How nice.”
She nodded emphatically. “Neal doesn’t like guns, but I do. I want to go with Daddy next time he goes away. He’s far away now.”
“He is?”
“Yup.” She hopped down and finished the job. “But he’ll be back soon. I bet he got lots of real things. He shoots good.” She pushed the toilet’s lever with both hands. “I want to be just like him when I grow up.”
Job done and hands washed, we went back to the party. Marcia had finished the story and was glowing at the enthusiastic applause. I handed Avery over to Isabel. “Your daughter says Kirk’s out of town. Is he on a hunting trip?”
Isabel nodded. “A two-week guided hunt in the Canadian Rockies. It’s his thirtieth-birthday present. Everyone chipped in: his parents, his brothers, a bunch of his friends, everybody. You should have seen his face when we told him.”
I tried to figure out the dates in my head. “So he’s been gone two weeks.” That would put him in Rynwood the day Agnes was murdered.
“Almost three. He decided to get there early and spend some time getting used to the altitude.” She dug into her purse. “The guide e-mailed me some pictures, and I made lots of copies. Want to see?”
I called Marina that night and gave her the news. “Kirk Olsen was in Canada on a hunting trip the night Agnes was killed.” I turned on my computer and scanner.
“Maybe he sneaked home early,” Marina said, “killed Agnes, then sneaked back.”
“Nope.” I put Isabel’s photo on the scanner and clicked the appropriate buttons. “His wife gave me a date- stamped picture. I’m e-mailing it to you right now.”
“Hang on . . . Oh, eww,” Marina said. “He’s got a dead thing. A big dead thing.”
“Male moose weigh more than a thousand pounds.”
“Hokey Pete.” Marina whistled. “But, say, maybe it’s not a real picture. You said there’s a computer up at that hunting camp. Maybe Kirk Photoshopped it for a perfect alibi.”
“Are you serious?” Kirk was prodigious in his computer illiteracy. I’d once seen him puzzling over an ATM machine.
Marina sighed. “Okay. It’s not Kirk Olsen. And I have more bad news. It’s not Dan Daniels, either.”
“No?”
“Nope. I was talking to CeeCee, and she said her sainted husband—she didn’t say that, but that’s how she feels about him, you know—has hockey league on Tuesday nights, and he had a late game. Didn’t even get on the ice until eleven.”
“Lucky,” I muttered.
“Your time will come, my sweet. Another five years and the kids will be old enough for you to risk life and limb by playing something as silly as hockey.”
“Hockey isn’t silly.”
“And neither is my writing the blog.”
I started to protest, but my computer dinged as an e-mail came in. It was from Marina, and there was a single word in the body of the text: “Hypocrite!”
Okay, so she had a point.
“Silly is in the eye of the beholder,” she said. “Put that in my obituary, will you?”
Thinking about Marina’s obituary was pretty much the last thing I wanted to think about. I’d rather think about writing my own. I was halfway through the second paragraph when Marina interrupted.
“Who’s left? You know, on The List?” She capitalized the words.
I pulled the by-now-tattered piece of paper out of the inside pocket of my purse. “Cindy Irving, Joe Sabatini, Erica, and Harry.”
“That’s not very many,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“You don’t want it to be Erica, do you?” she asked softly.
Not in the least. I got out my pen and crossed off Kirk and Dan. “What matters is keeping you safe and getting the killer into prison. What I want really doesn’t matter.”
Seven down, four to go.
“Did you see WisconSINs this morning?” Lois asked.
I almost dropped the load of books piled high in my arms. What had Marina done now?
“You know,” Lois said, rescuing a stack of Magic Tree Houses before they cascaded to the floor, “if you used the book cart, these things wouldn’t happen.”
“Too far away,” I said vaguely. “What’s on the blog?” I asked. Friday night I’d told Marina that it might be good to take a few days off from blogging. So much for my powers of persuasion. Her identity had become intertwined with that of WisconSINs, and it would take an act of Congress to separate her from the blog.
“Brand-new suspect for Agnes Mephisto’s murder.” Lois grinned. Today she was wearing a flowing white poet shirt over pale pink wide-legged slacks and black ballet slippers. I didn’t have the figure for the pants, but I coveted the shirt. “If I still had kids at Tarver, I’d probably be hauled down to the police station myself.”
“What?” Aghast, I stared at her.
“Not that I’d kill anyone,” Lois said, “unless she was after me or mine, but if she got me all riled up, who knows what might happen?”
“No, no.” I shook my head impatiently, and another book started sliding. “The blog. What does it say?”
“You know how it doesn’t name names, but it says the police should look at the mob connections in town.”
“The mob?”
“They’re everywhere,” Lois said seriously. “WisconSINs says there’s a restaurant in town that the police should look at. And that’s got to be Sabatini’s. It’s the only place in town even close to Italian.”
