An Ex to Grind in Deadwood (Deadwood Humorous Mystery Book 5) Paperback – September 4, 2014 (16 page)

Hawke nodded. “She must have twenty of them lining that shelf. Has anyone cut one open?”

“Why?” I asked.

“Coop and I once worked on a drug trafficking case where they kept the goods hidden inside mannequin heads similar to these. We got a nice commendation when we solved that one, didn’t we, buddy?”

“Yes, you sure did,” Cooper answered, his lips barely moving. His whole face seemed to have hardened into a veneer. “But those are not mannequin heads in the closet, they’re styrofoam heads.”

“Same thing.” Hawke waved off Cooper’s distinction and stepped inside the closet.

“Drugs?” I asked Cooper. “You think an old woman like Ms. Wolff would be mixed up with a drug cartel?”

Hawke poked his head out of the closet. “We’ve seen weirder things happen down in Rapid, haven’t we, Coop?”

Cooper didn’t reply.

“Is that where he lives?” I asked Cooper.

“Yep,” Hawke called out before Cooper could reply. “I’m here only for as long as it takes to fix Coop’s messes.”

I heard Cooper swear under his breath and looked up in time to see him shake his head and turn away. He moved over to another antique dresser on the other side of the room.

“So you two used to work together?” I asked loud enough for either man to answer.

“We were partners for a few years.” A thump came from the closet along with Hawke’s voice. Two more thumps followed. “Two of the best detectives in western South Dakota, ain’t that right, Coop?”

Cooper grunted, sounding a lot like his uncle when Harvey ate and used caveman vernacular for our dinner conversations. Something had happened down in Rapid, something that made Cooper leave and move back home. Did it have anything to do with getting involved with a witness, as Hawke had accused him of doing earlier? Or had something else gone down that had driven him out of Rapid?

I shifted my concentration back onto the task at hand. Cooper’s ancient history could be saved for this evening at the dinner table with Harvey. Following in Cooper’s footsteps, I pointed the flashlight on the dresser drawer he’d opened.

“She had nice dressers, they match the headboard.” I admired the construction of the drawer, noting the handcrafted details. Then I shined the flashlight inside of it, running my finger over a soft cotton nightgown. “Didn’t you go through all of these drawers already?” I couldn’t imagine Cooper being any less thorough than a proctologist.

“Yes, but you haven’t.” He reached in and pointed his gloved finger at something in the back of the drawer. “What do you make of that?”

I leaned closer, aiming the light beam on the back panel of wood. Weird looking scrolls, wavy dashes, and dots were written on the wood in black ink—not the ball point pen kind, but rather the ink that comes from an inkwell. “You think those markings have some kind of meaning?”

“I have no idea. They’re only on the back of this drawer, not the others.” He shut the top drawer and pulled out the second, having me shine the flashlight in it, too. Sure enough, the wood was unmarked.

Two more loud thumps came from the closet.

“What’s he doing in there?”

“Looking for a trap door. Hawke assumes all closets come with trap doors.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Too long.”

“Does he have something to do with why you left?”

Cooper shut the drawer hard enough to rattle the crystal hair brush lying bristles up on the matching mirror. The hairs sticking out of the bristles looked thick, coarse and wiry, reminding me of my hair. “That’s not relevant to our purpose here.”

“A simple yes or no would suffice.”

“Nor is it any of your business, Parker.” He waved his hand around the room. “Do you see anything else that connects you to Ms. Wolff in one form or another?”

Detective Hawke stepped out of the walk-in closet, a scarf dragging behind him. “There’s no trap door in that one.”

“I believe I told you that in the car on the way over here.”

I snagged the scarf from Hawke and folded it. “May I look in there?”

“Have at it,” Hawke said. “You won’t find anything besides old dresses that stink like mothballs and boxes full of fancy hats.”

I stepped through the closet doorway and paused, taking my time looking up, down, and everywhere in between. The overhead light was bright enough that I didn’t need Cooper’s flashlight, so I switched it off, careful not to get zapped.

Moving to the wrap-around racks full of clothes, I started pushing back hangers, checking out clothing tags. The dresses and outfits were dated, but most were still in tiptop shape, looking as if Ms. Wolff had purchased them in decades past and stored them in here. By the fifteenth or so tag I checked, I noticed something that made me pause and double-check a few, then I moved forward through several more.

“What is it?” Cooper asked from the doorway, where he stood watching. I figured he probably was observing my search techniques critically, itching to tell me how I was doing things wrong.

“The sizes are different.”

“Maybe she gained or lost weight and kept her old clothes.”

“Maybe,” I said, continuing.

The sizes continued to fluctuate in grouped increments, getting larger and larger. Some of the more dated pieces had no tags at all and looked hand sewn. She must have been a clothes hoarder. By the time I’d gone through the lion’s share of her outfits, I’d learned something else. I thought about keeping it to myself, but I had told Doc and Harvey that I’d let the law solve this mystery and I had sort of meant it. With Rex showing up in town, I had enough on my shoulders.

“I don’t think these were all her clothes,” I told Cooper.

“Why?”

“They not only vary in sizes but style as well.”

“Maybe she liked to change it up periodically.”

Hawke’s head appeared over Cooper’s shoulder. “I thought all you women like to buy whole new wardrobes on a whim?”

“How many women have you lived with Detective Hawke?”

“A couple.”

“Not including your mother or any sisters?”

“Enough to know women like to shop,” he said, his cheeks darkening.

“What’s your point, Parker?” Cooper asked. “That Ms. Wolff liked to play dress up?”

Possibly. Or maybe she’d supplied the opera house in Lead with several outfits from her closet for their historic plays, which could connect her with Jane and Jane’s murder, which kind of led to me—Jane’s employee. It could be one of those six degrees from Kevin Bacon deals, only starring me.

“Or she had another woman living with her at one time,” I threw out my original idea. Or several.

Cooper moved his jaw back and forth, seesawing on that. “Duly noted. What else do you notice in here?”

I turned the flashlight back on and shined the light on the racks of shoes. “The shoes range in size, too.” Style as well, some reminding me of what flappers used to wear back in the 1920s, others from an even earlier era, the leather stiffer, hardened with age.

I looked up at the hat boxes. “I assume you went through those.”

“Of course.”

“Are they actual hats?”

He nodded.

“Do the brands on the hat tag match the box brand?”

“We didn’t note that detail.”

I turned to Hawke. “Will you get me a chair from the kitchen?”

“I could lift you up,” Hawke offered, cracking his knuckles, his eyes sizing me up. “What do you weigh? A buck fifty? Sixty?”

If he had been closer, I’d have stomped on his other foot just for bringing up the subject of my weight. “Or you could get me a chair from the kitchen. I’m a bit prickly to the touch.”

“You look soft in all the right places to me.”

“As soft as a porcupine,” Cooper said. “Go get her a chair, Hawke.”

“That wasn’t a very nice thing to say about me,” I jested while we waited.

“It’s not my job to supply you with compliments.”

“You do a great job of delivering insults.”

“Those are on the house.” Cooper stepped aside to make room for Hawke and the chair.

I climbed up, careful to balance. “Can I touch a lid without screwing up anything?”

“Be my guest.”

I lifted and peeked, reaching inside. Sure enough, the hat matched the box. I looked into several of the hat boxes, the results the same each time.

“Well?” Cooper asked.

“They match.”

“Does that mean anything to this case?”

“It means she could afford to buy expensive hats and took as much care with them as she did her pricey clocks.”

I sighed and placed my hands on my hips, peering down at the closet contents from my aerial stand. Who was this woman? Where had she come from? Where had all of her money come from? Why did she hone in on me and my kid? Why did she have so many foam heads and yet kept her hats in boxes? Did she collect the heads like she did the clocks?

“Are we done here?” Hawke asked. “Because I’m as hungry as a bear in spring and you said something about getting lunch when we finished.”

Cooper’s eyebrows lifted. “Are we done, Parker?”

“I guess.”

I climbed down and slipped past the two detectives back into the bedroom. I was stumped. I returned to the mirror that held Layne’s picture. What was the connection here? Why my son, damn it?

My gaze drifted, taking in the books on the long bookshelf over by the window. My feet followed. Freesia had mentioned Ms. Wolff had a collection of historical books on Deadwood. I ran my fingers over the spines. Layne had an obsession with Deadwood’s history. He’d spent many hours at the Deadwood library over the summer, boning up on the town’s past. Was that the answer? Had he met Ms. Wolff there, struck up a conversation on history, and … then what? Given her a picture of him holding the glass dinosaur egg?

No, that didn’t fit this puzzle.

I glanced back. Cooper waited in the doorway, his shoulder resting on the jamb. He gave the appearance of being relaxed, but his steely gaze missed nothing.

“Did you guys go through these books?” I asked.

“We dusted them for prints.”

That wasn’t exactly what I meant. There could be something stashed inside them or a clue within the pages. I needed more time in here to go through it all. I was missing something; I could feel it in my gut.

“Look who I found lurking inside the front door,” Detective Hawke said, dragging Freesia into the bedroom by her wrist. “She claims to own the building.”

“She does,” Cooper said, pulling Freesia’s arm free from Hawke’s grip. “Sorry about that, Freesia. Hawke is new.”

Once again, I noticed how courteous and kind Cooper was with Freesia, whereas I received teeth gnashings regularly.

“I’m not ‘new,’ just not local.”

“Hi, Freesia,” I said, glad to see her again. “Are these the books you were telling Harvey and me about the other day?”

Freesia’s smile brightened the room, her yellow T-shirt and white capri pants even more so. “Yeah, those are the ones.” She joined me, smelling like fresh wildflowers, and pointed out two in particular. “This one has my great, great-uncle mentioned in it, and this one was a favorite of hers. I often found it out in her living room when I’d stop by.”

Hawke shouldered his way between us, and grabbed Ms. Wolff’s so-called favorite from the shelf. “I’ll take this one and go through it.” He pulled the other book and held it out for Cooper. “You can look through that one.”

Cooper shook his head. “I don’t have time for light reading. Give it to Parker.”

Hawke and I both hesitated, me in surprise that Cooper would let me take something from the scene of the crime, Hawke for whatever reason—probably because I was female and blonde. He gave me the book with a shrug. “It’s your funeral, Coop.”

I held the book close to my chest and nodded my thanks to Cooper. There was one guy I knew who could find the needle in this haystack—Doc. He knew Deadwood inside and out. His library of local history books was three times the size of Ms. Wolff’s. I’d be handing this little number off to him later tonight.

But that wasn’t enough. There was something more here.

Could it be that I was feeling Ms. Wolff’s ghost following us around? Nah, I was still a dud when it came to the paranormal. Nothing there had changed, at least not that I could tell in spite of what Cornelius believed.

Somehow I needed to get Doc inside this apartment. He was better at seeing things hidden in plain sight than I was. He could also see if Ms. Wolff was still hanging around, trying to dust her clocks.

However, while Cooper was being extra generous today, I had a feeling this was the limit on his sharing. There was no way I could explain to the detective why I thought Doc needed to come in here. I was pretty certain that Cooper would find the idea of Doc being a medium amusing at best.

“Ms. Parker,” Freesia said, peeking over her shoulder at the detectives waiting in the doorway. She lowered her voice, “I need to talk to you when you have a moment.”

“If it’s about the case,” Cooper said, his hearing working very well, “you need to let me know as well.”

“Both of us,” Hawke added.

Freesia’s cheeks darkened. “It’s … it’s not about Ms. Wolff. It’s about this place.”

“What about it?” I asked, wondering if she was going to tell me that it was haunted. Knowing the story from years back about the shrunken heads, I wouldn’t blink twice if she mentioned there were wispy, headless forms floating around.

“I think I want to put it on the market.” She cast a nervous glance over her shoulder again. “As soon as the police will allow it.”

And there it was—the golden opportunity to drag Doc in here when nobody else was looking.

I hooked my arm in hers. “Let’s talk outside, shall we?”

Chapter Nine

Thursday, October 4th

I was afraid to open my eyes.

After yesterday’s debacle the idea of facing what today might dish up and leave behind steaming on a plate made me whimper and wiggle deeper under my soft cotton sheet.

The smell of bacon and eggs wasn’t going to lure me out either. Nope. I had problems that not even bacon was going to solve.

I curled into a ball, flitting through yesterday’s events on fast-forward, trying to make sense of it all—Rex, Ms. Wolff’s closet, Detective Hawke and Cooper’s history, Layne’s picture, clocks upon clocks. The little snow globe I lived in had been shaken up again, just when it had seemed like the last flake had fallen and life might settle down.