Crunch Time

“Who?” Boyd and I asked in unison.

Tom shook his head. “Don’t know, and whoever it was didn’t visit Osgoode in jail, either. Only the lawyer came, and he was a high-priced criminal defense attorney who managed to wangle a plea deal. Osgoode got a ten-year prison sentence, suspended, and only spent eighteen months in jail. Apparently the DA figured all those drug users wouldn’t make very good witnesses.”

I shook my head. Tom stood, cleared our dishes, and said, “I need to get down to the department.”

After he left, Boyd and I finished cleaning the kitchen. When he went into the living room to watch the news, I quietly pulled Lolly’s photocopy out of my pocket. Ferdinanda and Yolanda were talking in low tones in the dining room, so I crept down to the basement and loaded pink and yellow photocopy paper into our printer, slipped in Lolly’s paper, and let ’er rip.

Inspecting the result, I didn’t know if they’d fool anybody. But as I scissored away to make the copies look like actual receipts, I resolved that I was certainly going to try.

As I walked back up the stairs with the fake receipts in my pocket, the memory that had disturbed me early that morning resurfaced. The part of Humberto’s house that had been weird was an aspect of the decor.

Lolly had told me Humberto had redecorated the house at a fast clip. It had begun the day after Ernest broke in and stole the necklace. Why redecorate then? Okay, he wanted to put in surveillance cameras, but you could do that without painters and a whole bunch of new furniture.

That elusive memory was still flashing, but it was out of reach. I decided to make my first stop the Aspen Meadow Library.

I put four frozen homemade coffee cakes into my canvas bag. Food bribes usually worked if someone balked at helping me, and I couldn’t let that happen. Then I asked Boyd if he would accompany me to my van. When we were walking down the ramp, he asked me where I was going.

Surprised, I said, “Just running a few errands.” He lifted his eyebrows questioningly, but there was no way I was going to tell him what I was really up to.

In the van, I glanced across the street to see if Kris or Harriet was anywhere around. Neither was. I realized I didn’t even know what kind of car Harriet drove. Would Tom be able to find that out, if I didn’t know her last name? Or would he say if I continued to try to snoop into Harriet’s life, I’d be stalking her?

Ten minutes later, I breezed through the library doors and headed right to the reference desk. I didn’t know the new reference librarian, a young, slender woman who wore a khaki pantsuit and had black hair with red streaks. Didn’t anybody lucky enough to have black hair just wear it au naturel these days? I guessed not.

I offered her a coffee cake for the librarians’ break room, and she gratefully accepted. Then I asked my question, and she brightened. She said she loved a challenge, and I had the distinct feeling that she would have helped me out, food bribe or no.

She moved with alacrity to the website archives of the Mountain Journal. I certainly did not know how to search for the articles I needed, the ones that asked, “Can you guess whose view this is?” The following week, the answer was given, complete with a picture of the home’s owner.

Miss Black and Red Hair found the answer by swiftly pressing buttons, and soon I was looking at Humberto Captain’s view, which the librarian had put next to a photo of Humberto proudly pointing to the vista. In fact, I was interested in neither of these views. What did capture my attention was that memory that had been wriggling out of reach. Above Humberto’s head, there was not a light fixture in the shape of a wagon wheel. There was something else entirely.

I thanked the librarian and revved my van in the direction of Frank’s Fix-It Shop, which I thought was the most likely of my receipts to turn up what I wanted.

Frank’s Fix-It, next to Aspen Meadow Bank, looked as run-down as the bank appeared modern and immaculate. I made a U-turn, parked directly in front of the shop, then banged on the door until a heavy young man wearing torn jeans and a scruffy sweatshirt opened up. The scent of marijuana wafted out around him.

“We’re closed,” he said, looking at his wrist that was without a watch. He blinked and slowly turned his head to squint at the bank’s clock, which indicated it was half past ten.

“Your advertisement says you open at ten,” I lied smoothly. The guy looked around for a sign with his hours, but in fact he didn’t have that, either. I figured it was better to play on his sympathies than to piss him off. And wait: If he’d been smoking grass, shouldn’t he have the munchies wicked bad? I pulled another coffee cake out of my big canvas bag. “Would you like to eat a homemade coffee cake?”

The fellow eyed the cake greedily. “Well—”

“Here.” I handed him the cake in its zippered bag. “And, please, please can you help me?” I pulled the pink receipt out of the bag and thrust it under his nose. “My boss says I have to get this today, as early as possible. If I don’t, I’ll lose my job.”

Now the stoner stared at the receipt, his mouth hanging open. Drool trailed from his lower lip as he clutched the coffee cake to his chest. After a few long moments, he said, “We have this?”

“Please help me,” I begged. “It’s your receipt.”

“Awright.” He pushed the door halfway open and lumbered into the darkness of the store. I quickly stepped through and followed him.

The place positively reeked of weed. The wooden floor was worn through to concrete in a number of places, and Frank, or his son, or someone, had sprinkled sawdust on top. The counters were so dusty it was hard to tell if the glass cases actually held anything. But when the guy rounded the corner and ducked behind a curtain, I followed him there, too.

The fluorescent light he turned on did not help. He put the coffee cake on a cluttered table and again gaped at the fake receipt. With more clarity than he had mustered so far, he said, “I have no idea where in hell this is. Or even what it is.”

“Oh, I know,” I said cheerfully. “Why don’t I find it?”

“I can’t leave you here with the stuff,” he said dully. “We’ll lose our insurance if I do.”

I almost choked at the idea of them even having insurance. “I won’t break anything.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said stubbornly.

We seemed to be at an impasse. But a torn red plastic chair offered a solution to our problem. I said, “Why don’t you sit down while I hunt? Then you can eat the cake and keep an eye on me at the same time.”

“Well, I do got the munchies.”

“Go for it. But may I have the receipt back, please?”

“Awright.” He handed it to me, then made his way to the chair. He sat down heavily, opened the bag, and broke off a hunk of cake. Well, I didn’t mind if he dispensed with the whole utensil thing. I just didn’t want to watch.

I surveyed the vast, untidy storage room. Shelves at odd angles were filled to bursting with dusty articles. Damn it, I thought, why can’t anything be easy?

Half an hour later, I realized I was hungry, too. All I had found in searching through the first two-thirds of the shelves was an assortment of toasters with frayed cords, pots missing handles, clocks without hands, and broken, functionless tchotchkes.

The stoner had finished half the cake, and now he was openly smoking a joint.

Well, great. This was another one of those situations where the fact that I was married to a sheriff’s department investigator did not look so hot. I was unlawfully searching for something that I was pretty sure was valuable but that did not belong to me. Meanwhile, the man entrusted with the care of said article was huffing away on an illegal drug. If a reporter from the Mountain Journal came in, I’d be, as they say, screwed.

On the last set of shelves, my hands closed on a large, dirty plastic bag. Inside was what looked and felt like a bunch of dirty rocks. But the receipt number, oh, the blessed receipt number, was the same as the pink one in my hand. And the rocks, I suspected, had been carefully coated with mud, in order to hide what they really were.

“Got it!” I yelled. But the stoner had slipped sideways on the chair and appeared to be asleep.

I tiptoed past him with the bag going clunkedy-clunk. He seemed not to notice. I wrapped up the remains of the cake and stuffed it into my catering bag. I didn’t want to leave any trace of myself. Then I picked up both bags and walked out the door, gently closed it behind me, and heaved the bags into the back of my van.