Carol shook her head in defeat and turned back to Ruston. “The sad part is, she’s right. But what she’s not telling you is that she started making me sell things for what I could get for them instead of ten percent more than I’d paid for them. God, I was so dumb until Ashley came along — she should be running the shop herself.”
“And put in the hours you do?” Ashley said, pulling back in an exaggerated show of horror. “No thanks! I’d much rather mind your business than my own.” She turned to Ruston. “So now you know far more about me than you ever wanted to know, unless you’re as much of an antiques freak as Carol and I are. It’s nice to meet you. My husband—”
“Actually, I met your husband earlier.”
She nodded. “He dropped me off here on the way to your office. I trust he and Dan Brewster didn’t make too much of a nuisance of themselves?”
“They were no problem at all,” Ruston assured her. “And thanks for being here,” he said, his eyes shooting toward Carol Langstrom for an instant.
“I couldn’t be anyplace else.”
“Okay, then,” Ruston said, rising to his feet and wincing at the pain in his knees.
Carol stood up, too. “You’ll call me?” she asked. “As soon as you hear anything at all?”
“Of course. You’ll know everything almost as soon as I do.”
Carol sank back onto the sofa as Rusty made his way to the door. “I can make it until Monday,” she said quietly. “This is Saturday. I can make it until Monday.”
“Of course you can,” Ashley replied, once more taking Carol’s hand in her own. “We’ll just take it a day at a time. We’re all here to help you do whatever needs to be done.”
Carol gazed once more at all the people who had come to her aid. “I keep thinking about all the things that need to be done, and I keep making all these lists in my mind, and—”
“And you don’t need to take care of anything right now. You don’t need to think about cooking, or cleaning, or anything else. We can take care of everything.”
“Everything except the shop,” Carol sighed.
“The shop?” Ashley echoed. “Why are you worried about it? You’ll leave it closed over the weekend — all week, if you need to.”
Carol shook her head. “And lose the busiest weekend of the summer? I can’t afford it, Ashley — I’ve got so much inventory in the back room I can hardly move around in there, and if I’m closed next week it’ll all sit there for the rest of the summer. And I can’t afford to just keep it all in inventory.”
“Then I’ll do it,” Ashley said.
Carol stared at her. “You?”
“Didn’t you just tell the sheriff I could run it as well as you? In fact, didn’t I hear you tell him I
“But—”
“No buts,” Ashley declared. “I’m not really doing you much good sitting around here holding your hand, and Lord knows you’ve got enough people in the house that you don’t need me. So until further notice, I’m running the shop. I’m assuming the key is in the usual place under that awful Chinese import urn you think makes such a great planter?”
Carol’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know where the key is?”
“I found it one day when I was poking around. So that’s that — I’m running the shop until you feel like coming back. Deal?”
“Are you sure?” Carol asked, her eyes again glistening with tears.
Life would go on, even after Monday.
Ashley nodded. “Whatever you need, we’ll take care of it.”
“I wish—” Carol began, then cut off her own words as she felt herself beginning to sink back into a morass of grief.
“I know, honey,” Ashley said softly. “We all wish it. But these things happen, and all we can ever do is try to cope.”
“I know,” Carol cried, “but why did it have to happen to Ellis?”
No one had an answer for that question, and it hung, unanswered, in the air.
Chapter 24
ERIC CAST THE spinner out from the dock, watched it arc through the air and splash into the water, and slowly reeled it in. Yet when a big bass rose out of the depths to nibble at the lure, he barely even noticed it, let alone tried to jig it into snapping at the hook. Instead he merely sat down on the dock, let his bare feet dangle in the water, and reeled in the rest of the line. Next to him, Tad was still rummaging through the tackle box, supposedly looking for just the right lure that would bring a nice walleye home for dinner, but in reality paying no more attention to the fishing gear than Eric was to the fish that had nearly taken his hook. For his part, Kent Newell was sprawled out on the dock, staring silently up at the cloudless sky.
No one who happened to look down at them from the house would suspect that there was anything on their minds other than fishing and lying in the sun. But Eric’s stomach was still faintly queasy from the nightmare he’d had, and out of the corner of his eye he could see that Tad’s face was still pale from the violent nausea his own version of the dream evoked. And though Kent hadn’t actually said anything, his very silence this morning had told Eric that he had something on his mind.
Then, as the spoon on Eric’s line came out of the water, Kent said: “I had a dream last night.”
As Tad’s head snapped up and their eyes met, a cold knot formed in Eric’s stomach.
Kent sat up, pulled his knees up against his chest, and wrapped his arms around them. When he spoke again, his voice was little more than a whisper. “I dreamed that Ellis Langstrom’s arm was in that box.” He looked first at Tad, then at Eric, knowing he didn’t need to tell either of them he was talking about the white box they’d found in the hidden room yesterday.
“S-So?” Tad stammered, refusing even to meet Kent’s gaze now.
“So have you guys ever wondered how come Dr. Darby took all that stuff apart?”
It was the last thing Tad had been expecting Kent to say, and now he finally looked at him. “Took it apart?” he repeated. “What are you talking about?”
“All of it,” Kent said. “The table that was missing a leg. The hacksaw frame with no blade.”
“M-Maybe they weren’t even together when he bought them,” Tad suggested, but even as he spoke the words, he knew they rang hollow, and even though he was looking at Kent, he could see out of the corner of his eye that Eric was shaking his head.
“They wouldn’t ship the table with only three legs, would they?” Kent asked. “I mean, if they were going to take the legs off, they’d have taken all of them off, right?”
Tad said nothing.
“And what about the scalpels?” Kent pressed. “Who’d put them in another box if you were going to send the doctor’s bag anyway?”
Tad shrugged, though his skin was starting to feel cold and clammy despite the warmth of the day. “Okay, so let’s say he took them apart. So what?”
Kent’s eyes flickered between Tad and Eric. “Haven’t you guys noticed that ever since we started putting that stuff back together, things started to happen?”
There was a silence as the full meaning of Kent’s words sank in.
“Tippy and the scalpels,” Eric finally breathed. “And the hacksaw — we put the blade in the hacksaw, and Langstrom’s body was missing an arm.”
A fresh wave of nausea broke over Tad as the still fresh memory of last night’s nightmare leaped up in his mind.
He’d been sitting at a table.
