Pleating for Mercy

Chapter 11

The Sheriff’s Department still looked like a church with its faded brick siding and peaked roofline. The building had been around since the late 1800s. A fresh coat of paint, some stain, and a few nails couldn’t shake the worship out of the old building.

We walked into the vestibule. To the left was the old sanctuary, which still looked like a . . . sanctuary. Even the pews were still there, though they were pushed up against one wall. The whole place retained a solemn air and I got the sense that the town officials didn’t know what to do with it or how to make it feel like government offices. I wondered if they had much leeway. It seemed likely that the building was part of the historic registry.

Josie and I stayed a step behind Sheriff McClaine. Even his walk was lazy, his bowed legs making him look like he belonged on a horse rather than in a police car. Josie clutched my arm, slowing me down. “What do you think he wants to ask me?” she said in a feathery voice that still seemed too loud for the former church.

I couldn’t even speculate. Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead and The Murder at the Vicarage had not prepared me for a real murder. “Routine questioning?” I said, hoping I was right and that McClaine just wanted to fill in whatever gaps his deputy might have left from the night before.

“He’s not going to arrest me, is he?”

“I’m sure he’s not,” I said, praying that I was right.

“So I’ll just answer his questions and he’ll let me go. Not cooperating would be bad, right?”

She seemed to need reassurance. I offered what little I could. I nodded.

It seemed enough to bolster her. As she shuffled to catch up to the sheriff, I glanced over my shoulder. Still no sign of Nate screeching to a halt just outside the door, ready to barrel in, Josie’s knight in shining armor.

It was quieter outside than a field of cotton.

We walked up the ramp across from the sanctuary, turned right, and made our way down a hallway that used to lead to the church classrooms but now seemed to house all the actual city offices. Brown placards engraved in gold identified the occupants of each space. We passed the mayor’s office, the council members’ offices—one for each of them—animal control, business services, public works, personnel, and finally, at the end of the hallway, law enforcement.

There was a separate entrance with a counter and a clerk who probably dealt with traffic violations and such. Poor Josie. By the look on her face, the scenic route through the building had done a number on her.

We stopped in front of McClaine’s office. He took the toothpick from his mouth and used it to point to a hollow aluminum-framed chair. “You can have a seat there,” he said to me.

Humph. I’d naively thought I would be able to stay by Josie’s side when he questioned her, for moral support as much as to stay in the loop. The murder happened on my property, after all. “Tell Nate where I am when . . . when—” She broke off, her voice trembling. “If he comes,” she finished.

I squeezed her arm. “He’ll come,” I said to reassure her. Then they disappeared into the office and I sank down onto the uncomfortable chair, wishing I had been blessed with the ability to hear through walls. That was a Cassidy gift that would come in handy right about now.

No matter how close I pressed my ear to the wall, I couldn’t hear a thing.

“Ms. Cassidy?”

I jumped, knocking my cadet hat askew. Madelyn Brighton stood in front of me. I noticed she was shorter than she’d seemed the night before. Up close, her skin was the color of sable, the black of her short hair several shades darker. It didn’t look as perfectly coiffed, more like she’d poked her finger in an electrical outlet, sending stray strands on end. It reminded me a little of Alfalfa from The Little Rascals, only instead of one wild hair, she had them all over. Oddly, it worked for her.

“I’m Madelyn Brighton. I work for the department.”

“The photographer, right,” I said. “My mother said you’re working on a town brochure?” I was still trying to connect the dots between a Madelyn Brighton, crime photographer and Madelyn Brighton—

“Freelance,” she said, answering my unasked question. “I contract out with the city, do weddings and graduations.” Her British accent landed somewhere between Eliza Doolittle and Dame Judi Dench. “You name it,” she said, “I photograph it.”

I took her extended hand. She pumped up and down exactly three times before dropping mine. “I saw you last night . . . taking pictures of . . . of Nell Gellen.”

“It’s a bit of a coincidence seeing you here.” She smiled. “I was going to phone you today, actually.”

A knot formed in the pit of my stomach. Our town pseudo medical examiner or crime photographer or whatever she was phoning me up about something didn’t sound good. “Oh?”

“Do you have a minute, by chance?”

I glanced at Sheriff McClaine’s closed door. I hadn’t been able to hear a thing through the wall and there was no way to tell how long he’d keep Josie in there. “I guess so,” I said, reluctant to leave my post but curious about why Madelyn Brighton had planned to call me.

She led me along the hallway to a little conference room. Her wide-legged pants flopped around her calves as she walked and her square jacket hid any shape she had. She was like a blank canvas. Too bad she wasn’t asking me for a fashion consult.

I sat down at the little circular table and waited while she pulled a black laptop out of the computer bag slung over her shoulder. “I have to tell you,” she began, “I’m something of an American crime buff. I’ve watched every episode of Law and Order, The Closer, Cagney and Lacey, and Supernatural. You name it, I’ve seen it.”

Her accent was thick and I had to concentrate a touch more than normal as I listened to her. She probably felt the same way about Texans. “I’m more a Project Runway , Dancing with the Stars, and Iron Chef kind of girl,” I said. The photographer and I didn’t have much in common. Too bad. There was an inherently likable quality about her.

“I wanted to show you something in the photographs from last evening,” she said, sitting across from me. Her laptop sat between us.

I was immediately apprehensive, but I’d faced worse than Madelyn Brighton flashing pictures in front of me. Even photos of Nell’s body. My immediate supervisor at Maximilian, for example, had dressed like Tim Gunn, but had acted like Attila the Hun. All bite, no bark. I could handle whatever Madelyn threw at me.

But then I noticed that Madelyn’s pudgy cheeks had a rosy sheen and she looked more like a kid in a candy store than a warrior out for blood. Whatever it was she wanted to talk about was giving her a giddy little thrill.

Be noncommittal and give nothing away. Those were the rules I’d learned to live by in New York. Let others lead the conversation. They’d either tell you what they wanted, or they’d tell you what they hadn’t intended to just to fill up the dead air.

“I noticed flowers,” she said.

“Flowers,” I repeated.

“Specifically the flowers around the body.”

“And . . . ?” I asked, but of course I knew just what she’d seen. My mother’s emotions at work.

“At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but after a while I was quite sure they weren’t. When I started taking pictures, the flowers were small. But—”

Was that a smile tickling her lips?

“—by the time I was done,” she continued, “they looked like this.”

She ran her index finger over the touch pad of her computer and tapped it with her fingers a few times. Bringing her gaze back up, she spun the computer around to face me.

My breath caught in my throat and for an instant I lost track of my surroundings. My mother’s green thumb had gotten the better of her—and Madelyn Brighton had caught the evidence on film. I thought I’d stopped her from making the weeds and flowers sprout before anyone could notice, but I’d thought wrong. Now I understood Madelyn’s emphasis when she’d said “supernatural.”

But it wasn’t the flowers that struck me about the picture. It was the swirl of white, like a wispy cloud, at the edge of the frame. It reminded me of . . .

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said, tapping the screen with the pad of her finger. “The rumors are true, aren’t they?”