“We couldn't find it,” Coombs said. “It used to be in a built-in bookshelf with glass doors. The police wouldn't let us look everywhere, and she could have moved it, but it's been in that bookcase since she bought the house. Everything else seems to be there, but the music box is gone.”
“Do you have a description?” Lucas asked. “Was it insured?”
“Wait a minute, I'm not done,” Coombs said, holding up an index finger. Lucas noticed that all her fingers, including her thumbs, had rings, and some had two or three.
“There was another woman, also rich, and old, in Chippewa Falls. That's in Wisconsin.”
“I know,” Lucas said. “I've been there.”
Her eyes narrowed. “To drink beer, I bet.”
“No. It was for a police function,” Lucas lied. He'd gone on a brewery tour.
She was suspicious, but continued: “Sometimes Grandma and Connie Bucher would go over to this other lady's house for quilt group. They weren't in the same quilt groups, but the two groups intersected. Anyway, this other woman-her name was Donaldson- was shot to death in her kitchen. She was an antique collector. Grandma said the killers were never caught. This was four years ago.”
Lucas stared at her for a moment, then asked, “Is your grandma's house open? Have the St. Paul police finished with it?”
“No. We're not allowed in yet. They took us through to see if there was anything unusual, or disturbed, other than the blood spot on the carpet. But see, the deal always was, when Grandma died, her son and daughter would divide up everything equally, but since I was the only granddaughter, I got the music box. It was like, a woman- thing.
I looked for it when the police took us through, and it was missing.”
Lucas did a drum tap with his pencil. “How'd you get down here?”
She blinked a couple of times, and then said, “I may look edgy to you, Mr. Davenport, but I do own a car.”
“All right.” Lucas picked up the phone, said to Carol, “Get me the number of the guy who's investigating the death of a woman named Coombs, which is spelled…”
He looked at Coombs and she nodded and said, “C-O-O-M-B-S.”
“… In St. Paul. I'll be on my cell.” He dropped the phone on the hook, took his new Italian leather shoulder rig out of a desk drawer, put it on, took his jacket off the file cabinet, slipped into it. “You can meet me at your grandma's house or you can ride with me. If you ride with me, you can give me some more detail.”
“I'll ride with you,” she said. “That'll also save gasoline.”
As they headed out of the office, Carol called after them, “Hey, wait. I've got Jerry Wilson on his cell phone.”
Lucas went back and took the phone. “I'd like to take a look at the Coombs place, if you're done with it. I've got her granddaughter over here, she thinks maybe something else is going on… uh-huh. Just a minute.” He looked at Coombs. “Have you got a key?”
She nodded.
Back to the phone: “She's got a key. Yeah, yeah, I'll call you.”
He hung up and said, “We're in.”
Coombs had parked on the street. She got a bag and a bottle of Summer Sunrise Herbal Tea from her salt- rotted Chevy Cavalier and carried it over to the Porsche. The Porsche, she said, as she buckled in, was a “nice little car,” and asked if he'd ever driven a Corolla, “which is sorta like this. My girlfriend has one.”
“That's great,” Lucas said, as they eased into traffic.
She nodded. “It's nice when people drive small cars. It's ecologically sensitive.”
Lucas accelerated hard enough to snap her neck, but she didn't seem to notice. Instead, she looked around, fiddling with her bottle of tea. “Where're the cup holders?”
“They left them off,” Lucas said, not moving his jaw.
Halfway to Grandma's house, she said, “I drove a stick shift in Nepal.”
“Nepal?”
“Yeah. A Kia. Have you ever driven a Kia?”
Being a detective, Lucas began to suspect that Gabriella Coombs, guileless as her cornflower eyes might have been, was fucking with him.
The streets were quiet, the lawns were green and neat, the houses were older but well kept. Lucas might have been in a thousand houses like Marilyn Coombs's, as a uniformed cop, trying to keep the peace, or to find a window peeper, or to take a break-in report, or figure out who stole the lawn mower. They left the car on the street at the bottom of the front lawn, and climbed up to the porch.
“Not a bad place,” Lucas said. “I could see living my life around here.”
“She got very lucky,” Coombs said. The comment struck Lucas as odd, but as Coombs was pushing through the front door, he let it go.
They started with a fast tour, something Lucas did mostly to make sure there was nobody else around. Marilyn Coombs's house was tidy without being psychotic about it, smelled of cooked potatoes and cauliflower and eggplant and pine-scent spray, and old wood and insulation. There were creaking wooden floors with imitation oriental carpets, and vinyl in the kitchen; brown walls; doilies; three now-dried-out oatmeal cookies sitting on a plate on the kitchen table.
An old electric organ was covered with gilt-framed photographs of people staring at the camera, wearing clothes from the '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s. The earliest were small, and black-and-white. Then a decade or so later, color arrived, and now was fading. The organ looked as though it probably hadn't been played since 1956, and sat under a framed painting of St. Christopher carrying the Christ Child across the river.
There was a blood spot, about the size of a saucer, on the floor next to the bottom of the stairway.
“They took the ball,” Coombs said, pointing to the bottom post on the stairway. The post had a hole in it, where a mounting pin would fit. “They supposedly found hair and blood on it.”
“Huh.”
He looked up the stairs, and could see it. Had seen it, once or twice, an older woman either killing or hurting herself in a fall down the stairs. The stairs were wooden, with a runner. The runner had become worn at the edges of the treads, and Coombs might have been hurrying down to the phone and had caught her foot on a worn spot…
“Could have been a fall,” Lucas said.
“Except for the missing music box,”Coombs said. “And her relationships with the other mysteriously murdered women.”
“Let's look for the box.”
They looked and didn't find it. The box, Coombs said, was a distinctive black-lacquered rectangle about the size of a ream of paper, and about three reams thick. On top of the box, a mother-of-pearl inlaid decoration showed a peasant girl, a peasant boy, and some sheep. “Like the boy was making a choice between them,” Coombs said, still with the guileless voice.
When you opened the box, she said, four painted wooden figures, a boy, a girl, and two sheep, popped up, and then shuttled around in a circle, one after the other, as music played from beneath them.
“Is the boy following the girl, or the sheep?” Lucas asked.
“The girl,” Coombs said, showing the faintest of smiles.
“I think we're okay, then,” Lucas said.
Although they didn't find the box, they did find what Coombs said, and Lucas conceded might possibly be, a faint rectangle in the light dust on the surface of the bookshelf where the box should have been.
“Right there,” Coombs said. “We need a light…” She dragged a floor lamp over, pulled off the shade, replugged it, turned it on. “See?”
The light raked the shelf, which had perhaps a week's accumulation of dust. There may have been a rectangle. “Maybe,” Lucas said.
“For sure,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“Only two possibilities,” Coombs said. “Grandma was killed for the music box, or the cops stole it. Pick one.”
