was Charlie’s list of stew ingredients, inscribed in gold calligraphic letters, and, typically, without directions. As in the other paintings I’d seen, the perimeter of the painting was filled with fanciful decorations. Here the images looked like little rectangular blocks embellished with squiggles. With my nose almost on the painting, I squinted and finally made out tiny sticks of butter, animated with thin legs and arms and smiley faces, marching in a merry band around the deer and the stew ingredients.
Meg settled herself in a chair near the hearth. Her two couches and four chairs were all constructed of rough-hewn logs. Each one sported horsehair cushions and was piled with Native American woven blankets in shades of rust, sand, and gray. The decorator of the H&J reception area might have thought she was evoking the Old West, but this was the real deal. I picked out a chair near Meg and sat down.
“Goldy and I have a party to do in a little while,” Julian said from the doorway. “Why don’t you let me get the tea so you all can have time to talk?” Before we could respond, Julian trod quickly across a Hopi rug of the same weave and earth tones as the room’s blankets and cushions. “Don’t worry,” he said as he disappeared around a corner. “I’ll find what I need.”
I felt suddenly awkward, sitting in this Old West living room with a woman whom I admired but did not know very well. Meg, usually so forthright, smoothed imaginary wrinkles out of her jeans and stared at the ashes in the fireplace. “I don’t know where to start, and I know you can’t stay long.” Her voice trembled. “I talked to Sally Routt this morning, and I feel so disconnected…” She pulled a tissue from where she’d tucked it into her waistband, and began to weep quietly.
“I understand,” I said softly. I felt my own throat close. Maybe coming over to this house had not been a good idea.
Meg dabbed her eyes and nose. “Sally said you were trying to help figure out what happened to her daughter. She said you’d promised to keep the police and press out of it.”
“That’s not exactly—” I began, but stopped. “Look, Meg. I am trying to help Sally. Why don’t you start by telling me why you wanted to see me.”
“Well.” Meg cleared her throat and gave me the benefit of her clear brown eyes. “You remember my neighbor Charlie Baker.”
I nodded. “We were friends. We used to cook together sometimes.”
“He was a wonderful, eccentric old coot.” She smiled, remembering, then frowned. “You know how much Charlie adored our congregation, and the feeling was mutual. He always insisted on making all the pancakes for the Shrove Tuesday supper. He relished running the luncheon cafe at the church during the Episcopal Church Women’s home tour.”
I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice. “We did the baked goods for the bazaar together.”
“You remember how upset he was when Father Biesbrouck died.”
“I do.”
“But never mind,” she said brusquely. “That hurt us all. When Charlie found out he was sick, he had a lot to do, you know, legally. H&J was his firm, and they sent Dusty over to work with him, to get his affairs in order. She…she came every day. What a dear girl. She would help Charlie, then she would always come over here to say hello, bring me some warm whole wheat bread or something else that Charlie had made for me. Even though he was sick, he still baked. Dusty said he claimed it made him feel as if he could live forever.” She stopped talking for a moment. “Poor Charlie. He wanted to have one last show, in March.”
“I know,” I interjected. “I did the food for it—”
She waved this away. “People came from all over, they bought Charlie’s paintings. He sat in a chair and soaked it all in. But when I drove him home, he was in a foul mood, poor thing. There’d been an accident outside the gallery, and that slowed us down…but he hardly seemed to notice it. When I left him off, he asked me if I knew of any private investigators.”
“A private investigator? To find out what?”
Julian appeared, carrying tea things. After he’d set down the tray, he said, “Do you all want me to leave?”
“No, no,” Meg said, her voice distressed. “It’s all right.” Julian poured the tea and gave me a wide-eyed look, as in
Meg fixed me with that gaze of hers. “I told him to try H&J. He said he had other business to do there.”
“What kind of business?” I asked.
“I don’t know, he didn’t say.” She frowned, lost in her reminiscence. “I guess he meant his will, but that’s just conjecture.”
“Uh,” Julian interjected, “I don’t want to be rude here, but Goldy and I need to think about getting over to the Ellises’ house.”
Meg stood up. “All right, then,” she announced. “I didn’t ask you to come here because of Charlie. I wanted to see you because of Dusty.” She glared at the tea things, as if they were somehow getting in the way of her story. “Could you bring your tea into my workout room? I’ll show you…what has me disconcerted.”
Julian and I glanced at each other, then picked up separate mugs. Julian doused his with sugar, and then we dutifully followed Meg down a narrow hallway and into a small log room that had bookshelves on three sides and a wall of wavy-glassed casement windows overlooking the ridge. Incongruously, a treadmill and two weight machines were placed in front of the shelves and windows.
“Used to be my father’s office,” Meg said by way of explanation. She moved over to the treadmill, which had been placed next to the bank of windows on the far side of the room. “I walk here, and run a bit, too. Do my exercises, push-ups and working with weights. Looking out the window keeps me from getting bored.”
I peeked out the window, which had a view through the pines…to Charlie Baker’s house. In profile, the house looked like the glass prow of a ship, set at anchor overlooking Flicker Ridge. From the window, one also had a good view of the iron fence around Charlie’s house, and the gate to his driveway.
“That lot was empty for many years,” Meg told us. “When Charlie became successful, he asked me if I would mind if he bought the land from the Flicker Ridge developers. I told him if I was going to have a neighbor, it was better to have him than a member of the nouveaux riches. That’s a category that you can put your friends the Ellises in, by the way.”
“They’re not my friends,” I corrected her. “They’re my clients.”
“Touche,” said Meg. “So Charlie built that monstrosity of a house. Talk about people living in glass houses. Well. When I walked on my treadmill, I would see cars, trucks, repair people, anyone coming and going from that house. I knew Dusty’s Civic by heart. Whenever I saw it, it would make me happy, because I knew she was helping Charlie, and that she’d be coming over soon with fresh, warm bread.” Meg smiled faintly at the memory.
“So,” I prompted her, “you saw something having to do with Dusty?”
Meg lifted her chin. “Dusty told me, after Charlie died, that the law firm had put her in charge of picking up his mail on her lunch hour. She said that was part of settling an estate.” She shook her head. “I suppose I was wrong to expect her to keep coming over. I mean, Charlie wasn’t there anymore, so there was no bread to bring. And a young girl’s lunch hour is only sixty minutes, after all. But…well, it just used to comfort me to see her car in Charlie’s driveway every day. All of a sudden, after Charlie died, she began to pull into his garage and put down the door. I don’t mean to sound like an old woman, because after all, I
“Maybe she had other things to do for the law firm,” I offered. “Inventory Charlie’s stuff, that kind of thing.”
“Right,” said Meg, nodding. “That’s what I thought, because I asked a friend on one of my softball teams. Lots to do, check out bank account statements, find assets, and so on. But then…” She stopped talking.
“Then?” asked Julian, his voice betraying a hint of impatience.
“Then Tuesday
