Tippy Toe Murder (2 page)
“I’m sorry, but she’s not here.”
“Where is she? She missed an important
meeting yesterday.” “I don’t know where she is, but I think there’s someone you
ought to speak to,” said Kitty, looking up as Culpepper arrived and handing him
the receiver.
Culpepper had just finished talking with
Asquith and was folding his notebook shut when Tatiana O’Brien appeared at the
kitchen door.
“What’s the matter?” she demanded, shocked
at finding a police officer in Caro’s kitchen. “Where’s Caro?”
“Dunno yet,” Culpepper told her. “All we
know right now is that she’s not here.”
“Not here? That’s ridiculous.” The young
woman tossed her glossy long black hair back over her shoulder in a graceful
gesture. “I’m supposed to have lunch with her today.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me all about it,”
said Culpepper, opening his notebook to a fresh page.
“There’s not much to tell. We were going to
discuss the show. It’s a week from Friday, you know, and there are only a few
rehearsals left. I called to ask her opinion on a few things, and she invited
me to lunch.”
“You’re sure she invited you for today?”
“Absolutely.” Tatiana’s bright blue eyes
flashed. She was not used to being doubted.
Culpepper tapped his notebook against the
back of his hand and considered the situation. He knew Tatiana taught ballet to
most of the little girls in town, and her show took place every year just as
predictably as the Fourth of July parade.
“I can’t imagine what’s happened,” said
Kitty. “I think poor George is hungry.”
All three looked at George, who was
sniffing at his empty food dish. He gave a hopeful wag of his tail and then
collapsed on the floor, putting his chin down between his paws.
“I better inform the chief,” said Culpepper,
reaching for the phone.
On Wednesday, Chief Oswald Crowley took a
call from Hancock Smith, the chairman of the board of selectmen.
“Crowley, what’s all this I’m hearing about
Caroline Hutton? They say she’s missing. What are you doing about it?”
“I’m following the usual policy, that’s
what I’m doing.” “Enlighten me, Crowley. What’s the usual policy?”
“Well, sir,” drawled Crowley, “the usual
policy is business as usual unless there’s a ransom note or some indication of
violence. Chances are this lady went off on a little vacation and forgot to
tell the neighbors.”
“You mean you’re not doing anything at all?”
“I wouldn’t say that. No, sir, I’d say we’re
monitoring the situation. Waiting for developments.”
“That’s not good enough, Crowley. I’m warning
you, you’d better get on this fast or I’ll have your fat ass, understand me?
Let’s start questioning her friends and neighbors, conduct a search. The poor
old woman could be lying in the woods somewhere. A lot of very influential
people are interested in this, Crowley. I just got a call from the state rep’s
office. And one from Asquith over at the college. And Miss Julia Ward Howe
Tilley is expecting me to return her call as soon as possible. Are you getting
the picture?”
“You’re coming in loud and clear, Hancock,
but what I wanna know is where’s the money gonna come from?”
“What money?”
“Money for man-hours, that’s what money.
There’s no line item in the budget for tracking down missing old ladies.” “Just
do it. We’ll figure that out later.”
“Okay,” said Crowley, shrugging and picking
his teeth with his fingernail. “But remember, when she shows up in two weeks
with a bright-orange Florida tan, you’re the one who authorized this nonsense.”
Hearing a commotion outside, Kitty Slack
went to investigate and discovered two uniformed policemen wearing surgical
face masks and rubber gloves tipping the contents of Caro’s garbage cans onto a
large sheet of plastic. As she watched they began sorting carefully through the
pile of trash.
Working in her garden a bit farther out of
town, Miss Tilley was startled when she heard the sound of sirens. Looking up,
she was distressed to see several cruisers and an ambulance speeding down the
road.
In her farmhouse, nestled in the mountains
out beyond the town, Lucy Stone heard the sirens come closer and closer. She
went out on the porch and saw a procession of official vehicles go bouncing
down the old logging road.
“Hey, Mom, what’s up?” asked Toby, her
ten-year-old son.
“I dunno, let’s go and see,” said Lucy, who
remembered chasing fire engines with her father. She was so small, and the
seats in his Buick were so big, that she went sliding every time he took a
turn. Those were the days before seat belts, of course. She was just about to
share her memory with Toby when she realized he was already quite a way ahead
of her.
“Not so fast,” she called. “Wait for me!”
Now six months pregnant, Lucy was finding it hard to keep up with Toby.
Toby slowed just enough to remain in sight.
When he reached the clearing that contained Blueberry Pond, he paused and
waited for his mother. Together they surveyed the scene.
A K-9 patrol consisting of one officer and
a large German shepherd was checking the edge of the woods, and a group of
uniformed policemen were launching a small boat in order to drag the pond. Lucy
spied her friend, Officer Barney Culpepper, among the group and waved at him.
As soon as the boat was afloat, he approached them, crunching across the pebbly
beach in heavy black rubber boots.
“What’s going on?” asked Lucy.
“We’re searching for Caroline Hutton,” he
said, pulling out a handkerchief and mopping his sweaty forehead. “We gotta
check all the places she was known to go. Haven’t turned up anything so far.
Seems like one minute she was here, next thing anybody knew, she wasn’t.”
“Like in a magic show?” asked Toby.
Culpepper scratched his chin. “Yeah,” he
finally agreed. “Just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.
Gerald Asquith unfolded his paper on
Thursday morning and saw the question everyone was asking, in stark black
letters two inches tall:
“WHERE’S CARO?”
“‘Search for missing prof continues,’” he
read, scanning the front page. A grainy photograph of several men in a small
motorboat, one of them holding a grappling hook, was prominently featured.
He switched on the TV, and immediately he
saw a long line of volunteers walking slowly through the woods, searching for
Caro.
Driving to work, he heard several callers
offer their ideas about Caro’s whereabouts on WMVL talk radio.
“This is Susan from Portland. I bet she was
raped and killed by some sexual psychopath. They’ll probably never find her
body. Maybe he ate it, like that Jeffrey Dahmer.”
“That’s an interesting idea, Susan. Next
caller, you’re on the air.”
“My name’s Irma and I live in Tinker’s
Cove. I think she was probably kidnapped by Satanists. Didn’t they find signs
of Devil worship in the woods over near Gilead last summer? Pentagrams and
altars and sacrificed animals? Everybody said it was just kids, but I wonder.
Maybe they’ve graduated from animals to humans.”
“Well, Irma, let’s hope nothing like that
is going on. It’s almost summer and we wouldn’t want to scare away the
tourists, would we? Next caller?”
“Yeah, this is Jim from Lakewood. I was
reading in the paper just the other day about how these aliens from outer space
abduct people. There was an interview with a fella who said he was taken away
by these weird little dudes with bug eyes and floated around in their spaceship
for a coupla weeks. They brought him back, and he can remember some of it, but
not everything. He said they usually zap your memory, but in his case the
zapper must not’ve worked too good. Don’t laugh, I read it in the paper.
Aliens. Happens all the time.”
No food or drink is allowed in the
Auditorium during rehearsals or performance.
As she drove down Main Street, Lucy Stone
couldn’t help noticing how deserted it seemed. After Caroline Hutton’s
disappearance last week the town had been overrun with state and local police
officials, volunteer searchers, and reporters and TV camera crews. All the
excitement soon fizzled, however, when the intense investigation failed to
produce any trace of Caro.
Now, the search had been called off “pending
further developments,” as Chief Crowley explained in a final news conference.
Caro was no longer headline news; she hadn’t even made page 3 in the morning
paper but was only mentioned in a two- inch follow-up story on the same page as
the obituaries.
Lucy pulled the little Subaru into one of
several vacant parking slots in front of Slack’s hardware store and struggled
out. The car had certainly not been designed for a woman who was six months
pregnant. She crossed the sidewalk and then paused for a moment outside the
store to read a handwritten notice that had been tacked on the door,
press
not
welcome,
it
read. Then she planted her feet firmly and yanked the sticky door open.
She hardly ever shopped at Slack’s. The
place was an absolute relic and the prices were outrageous. But today she didn’t
have the time or the energy to drive thirty miles to Portland just to buy a bag
of fertilizer.
The store was a fixture on Main Street. In
fact, some people believed Tinker’s Cove had been named after the first Slack,
a tinsmith named Ephraim. While some Chamber of Commerce members would have
eagerly seized on such a link to the past, cultivating an old-fashioned
atmosphere for the benefit of the tourists who arrived in droves every summer,
Morrill Slack never even considered it. His store was old-fashioned because he
was too cheap to modernize it.
Nothing newfangled here, thought Lucy,
glancing around. This was not the sort of hardware store that sold salad
spinners. Nails were still kept in wooden kegs and sold by the pound. Little
wooden drawers behind the long counter were filled with nuts and bolts, and
customers had to ask for what they wanted. Pity the poor soul who didn’t know a
wood screw from a machine screw or a female fitting from a male. If you didn’t
know exactly what you wanted, and weren’t prepared to pay retail plus for it,
Morrill Slack certainly wasn’t going to waste his time helping you.
“Hi, Lucy,” said Franny Small, the
round-faced little cashier. Everyone in town knew Franny; whenever illness or
tragedy struck, Franny followed, bringing a foil-covered dish of Austrian
ravioli. Franny was thirty-five years old, lived with her mother, and had
worked in the store for years.
“Gosh, it seems so quiet in town it’s
almost spooky. Where’d everybody go?”
“After that bomb scare at Kennebunkport on
Saturday they all cleared out real fast,” said Franny. “It’s kind of a relief,
really. I got sick of being interviewed, especially since I didn’t have
anything to say. Of course, they were all after Mr. Slack ‘cause he’s Caro’s
neighbor and all, but they didn’t get much from him, that’s for sure. He
finally put a sign up. Did you see it? Told me not to let any reporters in the
store.”
“No reporters interviewed me,” said Lucy, “but
the police did. Barney Culpepper came by, along with that state detective,
Horowitz, but I couldn’t tell them much. I saw Caro a week ago Friday, walking
George as usual. I slept in a bit on the weekend, so I don’t know if she went
walking or not. Last Monday was the first time I missed her. They’ve had search
parties and dogs all over the woods and down to the pond, but they haven’t
found any sign of her.”
“And now they’ve stopped searching,” said
Franny.
“I’m sure they’ve got bulletins out,”
speculated Lucy. “They’re probably contacting police departments all over the
country.”
“Don’t bet on it,” said Sue Finch,
appearing from behind the paint display and setting a quart of white enamel on
the counter. “Got to paint the Adirondack chairs,” she explained, smiling a
greeting to Lucy.
“What do you mean?” asked Lucy. “Why don’t
you think they’ll keep looking for her?”
“She’s an old woman with one foot already
in the grave. Old women are practically disposable.”
“Sue, that doesn’t sound like you!” Lucy
was shocked.
“I’ve been volunteering over at the women’s
shelter in Portland and I guess it’s getting to me.” Sue shrugged and pulled a
rather elegant French purse out of the leather backpack she used as a shoulder
bag. Sue had a natural flair for clothes and accessories that Lucy admired but
had long ago given up trying to emulate. It took too much energy.
“It’s an epidemic,” she continued angrily. “Women
beaten, raped, killed, and by the time the police and the courts do anything,
it’s almost always too late.”
Franny fumbled taking the bill Sue
proffered, and her face suddenly lost its color. While Franny was occupied
ringing up the paint on the antique cash register, Lucy shot Sue a warning
glance, then placed her order.
“Franny, I need a bag of five-ten-five for
the garden. Have you got any?”
“Sure. Let me have Ben put that in the car
for you. You shouldn’t be lugging around heavy bags of fertilizer.”
“Thanks,” said Lucy, reaching around to rub
her aching back. In answer to Franny’s call, a scruffy, skinny teenager
appeared from the back room. He was dressed in the uniform of his tribe: long,
baggy shorts and an oversized Guns ‘N Roses T-shirt. He was wearing an
extremely expensive pair of athletic shoes, the same style that Lucy’s son Toby
had unsuccessfully begged her to buy for him. An officially licensed Red Sox
cap sat on his closely shaved head.
“Whatcha want?” he asked Franny. There was
a hint of defiance, or maybe just defensiveness, in his stare.
“Mrs. Stone wants fifty pounds of
fertilizer—it’s the green bag over there. You can put it in the silver Subaru
out front.”
“I’m supposed to be sweeping the back room,”
he said, shifting his weight impatiently from one foot to the other.
“This will only take a minute,” said Franny
mildly. “You can hardly expect Mrs. Stone to lift it, in her condition.”
The women were amused to see a blush spread
over Ben’s pimply cheeks, and watched as he shuffled over to the neatly stacked
bags of fertilizer and hoisted one onto his shoulder. When the door finally
slammed behind him, Franny spoke.
“He’s Mr. Slack’s grandson,” she said,
tilting her head toward a door containing a pane of frosted glass marked “Office”
in peeling black letters. “He’s been coming in to help out for the past two
weeks. The old man’s thrilled to pieces that he’s taking an interest in the
business. Let’s see, that’ll be six ninety- five.”
“Are you sure?” asked Lucy, raising her
eyebrows. “It was only two ninety-nine in the K mart flyer.”
“I don’t know what K mart is charging,”
announced Morrill Slack, who had suddenly appeared in the office doorway.
Dressed in a sober black suit and a snowy-white starched shirt, he looked like
an apparition from the past. “I do know that my price is six ninety-five, take
it or leave it.”
The old man took his heavy gold pocket
watch out of his vest pocket and stroked it lovingly with his large, flattish
fingers before flipping open the lid to check the time. He shut it with a snap
and held it in his hand a moment, savoring its heft before replacing it
carefully in his vest pocket.
“Well, do you want the fertilizer or not?”
he demanded abruptly, impatiently clicking his dentures back and forth with his
tongue. He glared through his wire-rimmed glasses at Lucy and Sue. “You’ve
already taken up quite enough of Franny’s time with your gossiping.”
“Oh, I want it,” said Lucy hastily. “Ben’s
already put it in the car. I really appreciate the service.”
“He’s a fine boy,” observed the old man as
he returned to his office.
Franny allowed herself a moment of
rebellion and rolled her eyes for her friends’ benefit before ringing up the
transaction.
“See ya, Franny,” said Sue. She took Lucy’s
elbow and steered her out of the store. “Have you got time for a cup of coffee?”
“Sure,” said Lucy, stepping nimbly to avoid
the heavy door. “Good, ‘cause I’m dying to know what that was all about.” “What
do you mean?”
“Why’d Franny act so funny when I mentioned
working at the shelter?” They paused at the curb, waiting for a lobster truck
to rumble by, then crossed to Jake’s Donut Shop.
“Franny was a battered wife,” said Lucy as
the two settled down at a table.
“Franny?” exclaimed Sue. “I can’t believe
it. I never even knew she’d been married.”
“It was a long time ago, fifteen years or
more. Bill and I had just moved here. It was quite a scandal. He died falling
down the stairs, and some people thought Franny gave him a push.” “Franny? I
can’t believe it. Was there a trial?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t remember why.
Maybe it was an accident. I know he drank a lot. I’m kind of fuzzy on the
details, but I do know most people thought he got what he deserved.” She paused
to consult the menu. “I can’t decide what to order. Doc Ryder’d kill me if he
ever found out I was even in this place.”
“Lucy, don’t change the subject. Tell me about
Franny’s husband.”
“Honest, Sue, I told you everything I know.
It was a long time ago. How many calories do you think a Bavarian crème
doughnut has?”
“Forget calories,” advised Sue with the
nonchalance of a perfect size eight. “Pregnancy’s the one time you ought to be
able to indulge. Do you have any cravings?”
“Not really. Mostly I’m just tired. I’m not
twenty-five anymore. It’s harder as you get older. My back’s been bothering me
this time.”
“Then you need Jake’s Tiger Milk shake,”
advised Sue. “You can hardly taste the brewer’s yeast.”
“I’ll have a glass of grapefruit juice,”
Lucy told the waitress. “And I’ll have iced coffee,” said Sue.
“So what’s this about working at the women’s
shelter? It doesn’t seem like your sort of thing.”
“I know. I guess my consciousness got
raised a little late,” agreed Sue. “Somehow hitting all the sales and snapping
up the bargains lost its luster. I wanted to do something, well, I really hate
this word, meaningful.”
“Why don’t you go to work?”
“Raising two kids, cooking three meals a
day, and keeping a clean house doesn’t give you much of a resume,” she said,
pausing while the waitress placed their orders on the table. “I thought this
might help me get something more interesting than cashiering at the IGA.”
“Or answering the phones at Country
Cousins,” said Lucy, referring to her former job at the giant mail-order
company. “Bill swears I got pregnant just so I could quit.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“No. He’s right. But next time I’m going to
sign up for a course. It’s gotta be easier on the back.”
The two women shared a laugh and sipped
their drinks. Sue poured some milk into her iced coffee and watched it swirl
through the dark liquid.
“I don’t really like it with milk, but I
can’t resist seeing it change color like that,” she admitted. “Lucy, you love a
good mystery. What do you think happened to Caro?”
“I don’t know. It’s scary, isn’t it? I
think about her all the time. She was so nice, you know?”
“Do you think she was murdered or
something?” “According to Barney Culpepper there’s no sign of any foul play.
The police think she either went away of her own accord, on a trip or
something, or she killed herself. He said they’re not seriously considering
suicide, since no body’s been found.” “Sounds to me like they’re just making
excuses. Do you think they’re really looking for her?”
“I think they’ve done as much as they can.
A case like this really needs a full-time investigator.”
“Someone like you?” asked Sue with a
mischievous smile.
“I don’t think so,” said Lucy slowly. “Bill’s
been difficult enough lately. He’d have a fit if I started playing detective
again.”
“Are you two having problems?” Sue’s tone
was sympathetic. Lucy shrugged. “You know how it is. We didn’t plan this
pregnancy—it just happened. I know he’s worried about money. I mean, he’s a
carpenter and this will be our fourth kid. It’s more than that, though. There’s
no time anymore just for us. Little League practices, ballet lessons, PTA
meetings. There’s always something. I can’t blame him for losing his temper now
and then.”
“Does he hit you?” asked Sue in a low
voice.
“No!” exclaimed Lucy. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“I’m warning you, Lucy, it’s a continuum.”
Sue drew an imaginary line with her fingers. “At one end there’s verbal abuse,
then there’s physical abuse, and finally there’s ultimate abuse. That’s when he
kills you.”
“I think I’m safe enough,” said Lucy. “That
crisis center seems to be making you awfully cynical.”
