Bury the Hatchet in Dead Mule Swamp (21 page)

“Time to go,” she said.
“I’ve got another showing at three. And you can stop playing games.
I know you and your son have no intention of buying this
place.”

We began the long climb
back to the top of the bluff.

Chapter 30

Back in town, I stopped at
Volger’s Grocery. It seemed more likely to me that Adele would know
what kind of medication Cenestin was, rather than Cora. Virginia
Holiday’s attitude had made me suspicious. Almost every woman has
some sort of medication they are taking, or some bottle of an
outdated prescription lingering in a purse. Why did the realtor
seem upset that I had seen this particular one?

There were no customers in
the store, but Suzi Preston was rearranging small items near the
checkout lane. She looked up and greeted me. Since she was wearing
a green apron with “Volger’s” embroidered on it, I gathered that
Adele had hired her after the Pine Tree closed so
abruptly.

I found Adele standing in
the office holding a pile of printed sheets of paper in her left
hand and slowly checking off items on another paper with a sparkly
purple pencil. She looked up when I knocked on the door frame and
smiled.

“Ana! How nice to see you!”
She exclaimed. She laid the pencil and papers down, and sat heavily
in her chair. Although Adele wasn’t really fat, she was certainly
matronly with a generous middle-age spread. She pointed at a tall
stool by the door. “Take a load off your feet.”

“Thanks. I think I will.” I
sat.

“You look like you’ve been
up to something,” Adele suggested, squinting at me.

I never understood how this
woman managed to take one look at people and figure out what was
going on inside their heads. And then, she usually managed to
verify her suspicions by convincing them to reveal specific
details. Sometimes it put me off, even though I liked Adele. But
today, I was more than willing to discuss my adventures with
her.

“Hmmm,” I pondered aloud.
“Where shall I begin? I’ve been snooping around a bit. I’ll admit
it.”

“Do tell,” Adele said, with
a conspiratorial lift of both an eyebrow and her voice at the end
of the phrase.

For the better part of an
hour I explained how I’d just spent the day. We talked about the
possible ways to spirit a body out of town. It was common knowledge
by now that it had probably been dragged down the basement hallway
on a large piece of cardboard that was left by the door, but then
what?

We agreed that it would
take someone quite strong, or else two people, to pull a body up
the stairs and load it in a vehicle. It must have been transported;
the river just wasn’t deep enough behind the school. We searched on
her office computer for river level monitoring station data, and
learned that at all three locations closest to Cherry
Hill—Centerline Road, just upstream from the mill race, and
Jalmari—the river was shallow, rarely exceeding two feet even
during spring floods. The school was between the old mill site and
Jalmari, but much nearer the race. But the river between Cherry
Hill and Jalmari at Chippewa Lodge had to be much deeper for
frequent use by power boats. Technology didn’t seem to be much help
in answering our questions.

If someone had dragged a
body through the loose fence section it also seemed likely some
fibers, or flesh, or something would have caught on the rough and
rusty wire. Surely the crime techs would have checked for
that.

And with the amount of
blood involved, the corpse must have been wrapped in something,
since no blood had been found anywhere except the school basement.
At least not that we’d heard about. Since Adele kept one ear glued
to the police scanner, as did many other townspeople, unless law
enforcement people were extremely tight with their facts most
details made it into public consciousness.

I began to tell Adele about
the beautiful Chippewa Lodge, but she cut me off.

“Isn’t that quite the
place?” she interrupted. “It was built by Tor Pedersen, before
1900. Opa, my
großvater
, used to talk about playing there with the Pedersen
children.” She looked at me closely. “They would swim there all
summer, so I know the water is much deeper than two feet. Did you
find something interesting?”

“Not really.” I sighed.
“But I didn’t have time to look at anything closely. The boat was
pulled up into the hoist. I couldn’t see in it at all.”

“That might be worth
another look when you are alone,” she urged.

“I don’t see how. The
boathouse is locked up tight. Listen, here’s a question I bet you
do have the answer to,” I posed.

Adele perked right up. She
liked having answers.

I told her about Virginia
Holiday spilling her purse on the floor by accident, and the odd
way she’d acted when I saw the medicine vial. “The label said
‘Cenestin.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

“Sure, but it’s not very
mysterious,” Adele said. “It’s estrogen. HRT—Hormone Replacement
Therapy treatment.”

“That’s all?” I said.
“Huh.”

“Maybe she’s embarrassed
about it,” Adele suggested. “She’s not exactly a raving beauty.
Kind of gaunt, you know.”

“One thing’s for sure.
She’s older than I realized. When I was close to her today that
fact was obvious.”

“That’s got to be it. She’s
aging and doesn’t like the process very much. Realtors have to sell
themselves as well as houses.”

“That reminds me,” I added.
“She said something about having relatives who lived here in the
past. Do you know who that might be?”

“Now,
that
I find very interesting.” Adele
nodded vigorously. “I have no idea. There are no Holidays in the
county that I know of. She must have come by that name through
marriage somewhere.”

I remembered something else
I wanted to ask Adele. “I’ve been thinking about Mavis Fanning,
what you said about her interest in the old school.”

“And?”

“You know the crank call I
got was made on a phone she bought, right?” I asked.

“She’s the person who
called you?”

“Maybe. It didn’t sound
like her. Her daughter had the phone last, but no one knows were it
is now. Anyway, I wondered if you knew any more about why she
wanted that building.”

Suzi stuck her head into
the office. “May I leave early today?” she requested. “Things are
really dead out here. I straightened stuff up, but I could use the
time to study if there’s nothing else.”

“Sure, honey. Go ahead,”
Adele said. “Tomorrow’s Friday. Come at nine; you don’t have class
on Friday, right? There will be steady traffic pretty much all
day.”

“No Friday classes; I can
be here.”

I was surprised. “I thought
you graduated in June,” I said.

“I did. Now I’m a freshman
at Sturgeon Community College. It’s the closest place,” she
added.

“What are you studying?” I
asked.

“Just general stuff for
right now, till I decide. Mom thinks we should expand the catering
business, but I’m not sure I want to cook my whole life, and I’m no
math whiz. She doesn’t want me keeping the books; that’s for sure,”
Suzi said with a light laugh.

“Good luck,” I
offered.

“Thanks.”

Adele pointed at the wall.
“Don’t forget to check out.”

Suzi turned and pulled a
manila card from a rack on the wall. She picked up the purple
pencil and began to write, but the lead broke. She stepped around
the corner to use the sharpener that was mounted just outside the
office door.

“I haven’t been able to
figure that out at all,” Adele said over the grinding of the pencil
sharpener, turning the conversation back to Mavis. “She’s not
really involved in real estate dealing.”

Suzi came back in the
office. “You’re talking about Mrs. Fanning, right?” she
asked.

“Yes, Mavis Fanning,
Harold’s wife,” Adele said, in a tone designed to extract more
information.

“She’s really into fitness
stuff.”

“We know that, but lots of
people exercise,” Adele pointed out.

“True,” Suzi agreed. “But
she actually teaches Yoga classes at the college in the evenings,
and does Reiki.”

“You’re not serious?” Adele
said forcefully.

“I am. She wears all those
fancy clothes in public, but the way she keeps that killer body is
exercise. I think the classes are extra, like for the community,
not part of the regular curriculum.”

“Thank you for telling us,”
Adele said, as if this were some huge revelation.

“Sure,” Suzi said with a
shrug. “It’s no big secret.”

Chapter 31

Adele treated us to cold
bottles of pop and some sandwich cookies while we discussed the
importance, if any, of Mavis’ apparent obsession with health and
physique. I remembered that Jerry had said something about Harold
Fanning when he told me he’d bought the school building. Or did the
name come up just because Harold was the city manager? I couldn’t
remember. Would the Fannings have any reason to want me to stay
away from the building? Maybe they knew about the blood in the
basement and wanted to forestall anyone else finding it for as long
as possible. The longer one could keep a forensics team away from a
crime scene, the less able they would be to pinpoint dates and
times, we decided.

Although the call about the
note in my car had come from a Fanning-owned phone, it wasn’t clear
at all where that phone was, and it didn’t seem as if Mavis was the
last one to have it in her possession.

And, as far as anyone knew,
there was simply no connection between Jared Canfield and anyone
from Cherry Hill, except a business card from Holiday Realty. He
was probably thinking about buying a house, so what? Or, did he
plan to move here, and someone needed to prevent that from
happening so badly the only alternative was to kill him? Who was
he?

Where did the hatchet sent,
or not sent, to Cora fit in? It was a complete muddle of
possibilities. Adele and I gave up trying to figure it out, and I
headed for home when she closed the store at six.

One thing was certain;
Jerry and I needed to get serious about making more plans for the
Harvest Ball. As soon as I walked in the door, I called him. Since
the
Cherry Hill Herald
came out on Wednesdays, he was usually less busy at the end of
the week.

“Jerry, we have to talk.
Soon,” I blurted without any preliminaries.

“Great!” Jerry sounded
upbeat and excited. “How about breakfast at my house tomorrow?
Fairly early.”

Early is not my time of
day. “That soon?” I stammered.

“It will be perfect. We
aren’t doing anything at all toward the goal of making Cora
jealous. We haven’t had any dates, or been seen together enough.
Breakfast is intimate. I’ll make sure Tom sees you here. Other
people should see you leave here after we’re done, too.”

It was probably true that
if Tom saw me at Jerry’s, Cora would hear about it. Tom wasn’t a
gossip, but he did visit with his mother regularly. She didn’t
drive, and he did most of her shopping. I agreed, groaning
inwardly, to be at Jerry’s house at six-thirty the next
morning.

The sun wasn’t yet coloring
the horizon when I pulled out of my driveway. My eyes were sticky,
despite the fact that I’d showered. This was going above and beyond
for Cora’s sake as far as I was concerned, and I didn’t even know
if it was going to work.

I arrived at Jerry’s front
door at the assigned hour. He was wearing pajamas with a rich, navy
blue satin robe over them. He stepped out onto the porch, grasped
my arms, leaned over and kissed me warmly, then pulled me into the
house.

“Jerry! What are you
doing?” I hissed.

“Plenty of neighbors are up
getting ready for work. That should get some tongues wagging.” He
grinned sheepishly. “You didn’t mind too much, did you?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t want
people thinking we’re sleeping together.”

“They’ll think that anyway.
Come have breakfast.”

He led the way to his
modern kitchen. Since I’d had several other opportunities to visit
with Jerry in his home, I was no longer intimidated by the
expensive décor and appliances. The custom, light wood cabinets
with black trim, and gray granite countertops were spotless, as
always. The programmable coffeepot had filled its carafe with hot
brown liquid, and the smell alone made my head start to feel
better. I pulled a stool out from beneath the edge of the center
island and sat down, resting my face in my hands.

“I hope you appreciate
this,” I said.

“I do, believe me I do,”
Jerry responded, filling a large black mug with the coffee and
placing it in front of me. Next he opened the refrigerator and
pulled out a pitcher of orange juice and a carton of eggs. “Eggs,
or French toast?” he asked.

“Oooh, French toast. I
never bother to make that for myself,” I admitted.