Dying to Read (6 page)

“I was going to call, but there was no listing in the phone book.”

“That’s because this is all I use now.” Beverly indicated a cell phone tucked into an embroidered holder on the wheelchair.

Mitch read the letter, frown lines cutting between his dark brows, then handed it to Beverly. “Did you write this?”

Beverly read the letter more slowly than he had. “It was written on my old typewriter, that’s for sure.” She traced a fingertip across a line of irregular print. “It always makes those funny
e
’s. And Willow was a really good worker, just like this says. She made the best ever meat loaf. But then she left so suddenly, and my ring was gone too . . .”

“So you didn’t write the letter?” Mitch asked.

“I don’t actually remember writing it, but maybe I did. Sometimes it seems like my brain doesn’t work any better than my legs anymore.” She snapped the paper with a forefinger. “But that’s definitely my signature.”

Mitch took the paper back. “She could have typed the letter on your typewriter, then got you to sign it in with something else.”

“That’s not fair,” Cate accused. “You didn’t actually know her. If you did, you wouldn’t have mistaken me for her and attacked me.”

“I didn’t attack you! I merely . . . restrained you. I thought you were trying to harm Beverly.”

“I gather from this that neither of you has any idea where Willow might be now?” Cate asked.

“No. But if you find her, get her meat loaf recipe for me, will you?” Beverly sounded wistful, as if she really missed that meat loaf. “Great spaghetti too.”

“I’ll take you out for meat loaf or spaghetti anytime you want,” Mitch offered. “I know a great Italian place over near the mall.”

Beverly reached over and patted his arm. “You do enough for me already. How’s the bedroom coming?”

“One more wall. I can finish it tomorrow. Then I’ll get the furniture in the other bedroom pulled away from the walls and covered so I can do that room.”

“You’re going to church in the morning, aren’t you?” Beverly asked him.

“Well, uh . . .”

Obviously not an enthusiastic yes.

“I need a ride. Marcie can’t take me tomorrow.”

“Oh, well, sure. I’ll pick you up and take you then.”

Cate saw a satisfied smile, close to a smirk, on Beverly’s face, and she realized what the woman had just done. Sweetly coerced a foot-dragging Mitch into going to church. Cate stood up to leave, then thought of an additional question.

“How did you acquire Willow as an employee?”

“After I got hurt, I was in a nursing home for physical therapy for a couple months. When I came home I still needed help, so my son came up from LA to get me settled. I think he saw an ad she ran in that little free paper that comes out every week.”

“So you don’t know if she had references from previous jobs to show him?”

“It’s not easy to find someone for a job like this when you can’t pay a lot, so he may have figured he was lucky to get her and not even asked.” She held up a forefinger. “Wait, I remember now. She said she didn’t have a reference from her most recent employer because the woman was dead.”

Cate felt a cold trickle of uneasiness. “Dead?” she repeated.

“A fall off a balcony or deck, something like that.”

A fall. The uneasiness increased from a trickle to a stream.

“Then, by the time she picked up and left,” Beverly continued, “my son had got laid off from his job and couldn’t afford to hire someone else for me. But the church has this Helping Hands thing going, and they send someone to do house cleaning and other stuff. I appreciate everything they do. But no one makes meat loaf like Willow.”

“How long did she work for you?”

“Couple of months, I guess.”

“Why did she leave?”

“I don’t know. One day she just said she had to leave, and she went. That very day.”

“And you really think she stole your wedding ring?”

“She’s gone and the ring’s gone,” Mitch cut in.

“Circumstantial evidence,” Cate muttered. Then she blinked at her own unfamiliar words. She’d read or heard them somewhere, sure, but they’d certainly never come out of her mouth before. That inner PI surfacing again?

Cate was at the door before she had one last question. “Did you report the theft to the police?”

“I guess I should have, but I never did. I kept thinking, oh, maybe the ring just accidentally got in with her things, and when she realized it, she’d bring it back.”

Roll of eyes from paint-blobbed Mitch. “Beverly is the kind of person who always sees the best in people.”

“Unlike you.” Cate’s neck still felt kinked where he’d put a mugger’s hold on it.

“Well, not always me either,” Beverly said. “I was kind of hasty thinking you were sticking your fist in my mouth. I’m sorry about that. If you find Willow, maybe you could ask her about the ring?”

“I’ll do that.” Cate headed out the front door, wind chime tinkling. “Thanks for your help. Give me a call if you think of anything. The number’s on the card.”

“Oh, wait,” Beverly said. “I want to give you something.” She wheeled to the shelf, grabbed a teddy bear, and handed it to Cate. “That’s Rowdy.”

“I couldn’t—”

“That’s what I do with my time. Make teddy bears. I’d like you to have him. Helping Hands gives them out to kids in families they help sometimes.”

“Well . . . thank you very much then.”

Mitch followed her outside, hands in the pockets of his paint-daubed khaki coveralls. Apparently the painting was a fairly lucrative occupation. Cate noted now that the SUV was a Cadillac Escalade. They didn’t come cheap.

“What will you do now?” he asked.

“Check out some of Willow’s other former employers.” Cate glanced at her watch. Time to get out to the hospital to see how Uncle Joe was doing and pick up Rebecca. “But not today.”

“Got to rush home to the husband?”

For a moment she thought he was fishing for personal information. Another look at his scowl and she decided he was simply still skeptical about her. Did he think she had some scam going? Convincing little old ladies she was a private investigator so she could make off with their teddy bears?

When she didn’t respond, he added, “Look, I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t have grabbed you like that. But you have to be suspicious of almost everyone these days.”

“Right,” Cate muttered as she opened her car door. She slid into the car and set Rowdy on the passenger’s seat. After a moment’s thought, she buckled him in.

“Maybe he’s a suspicious type person because he’s a person to be suspicious of,” she suggested to the teddy bear as Mitch returned to the house. “What do you think?”

 5 

Cate went directly to the hospital. She found Uncle Joe had been transferred to a regular room. He appeared to be asleep when Cate tiptoed in. Rebecca sat by his bedside.

“He’s doing okay,” Rebecca whispered. “They had him up walking earlier, but he’s on heavy pain pills now.”

Cate certainly wasn’t glad Uncle Joe needed pain pills, but it meant she didn’t yet have to tell him her efforts to find Willow had stalled. Or that she’d stumbled into various awkward complications. A dead body. An overweight deaf cat now spreading cat hair around his house. An encounter with a strong-armed painter.

Although on the way home she had to tell Rebecca about one of those situations. She couldn’t hide the creature in her bedroom indefinitely. Rebecca took the news well, a cat newcomer apparently low on her worry list. Cate was especially glad she’d told Rebecca about Octavia when the cat greeted them at the back door with a yowl that plainly said, “Finally!” as if Cate, as her personal servant, had been derelict in her duties.

“Octavia! How’d you get out here? I left you in my room.” She looked at Rebecca. “Cats can’t open doors, can they?”

“I’ve heard about some that can flush toilets, so who knows?” Rebecca patted her arm a bit absentmindedly. “You don’t need to lock her away. It’s okay if she has the run of the house.”

“She’s only temporary,” Cate assured her.

Somehow, the cat, now perched on the windowsill like a furry queen surveying her domain, didn’t look all that temporary.

Cate and Rebecca went to the early service at church the next morning. Uncle Joe was already on the weekly prayer sheet, and numerous people asked about him. Afterward Cate took Rebecca to the hospital again.

“Give Uncle Joe my love, and if he’s feeling up to it I’ll see him tonight,” Cate said when she dropped Rebecca off.

She briefly wondered what church Beverly had trapped Mitch Berenski into attending this morning. Of course, she had to admit, it was a small point in his favor that he
could
be trapped into going. Most guys she’d met could slither out of such a trap faster than a snake slithering over hot rocks.

Back at the house she found Octavia had adopted the teddy bear as a buddy and was curled up with him on the bed. Cate decided to use the phone numbers she’d collected from Amelia’s little red book and call the Whodunit ladies. She could use as an excuse that she needed to find out who owned the house key she had, although a stronger motive was to see what information she could pry out of them. They were still high on her list of murder suspects. But a little inner voice asked,
What are you doing making a list of suspects? Not your business. Finding Willow is your one and only job as a toe-dipping PI.

It turned out to be an unproductive effort anyway. Not a single Whodunit lady was home answering the phone. So much for senior citizens sitting around stagnating, with nothing to do.

Okay, back to the missing Willow. She again examined Uncle Joe’s file on Willow. She didn’t find anything new. She wandered over to his bookshelves. Maybe he had a
Finding Missing People for Dummies
book. No, nothing like that, but she did see one on death and autopsies.

She sat at Uncle Joe’s desk and skimmed through the book until she came to a section on rigor mortis. About two to three hours after death, the muscles of the face and neck start going rigid, with stiffness moving on down the body until rigor mortis is complete in about twelve hours. Then the process begins reversal, with all signs of rigor mortis usually gone after thirty-six hours. Cate glanced up from the book. That meant, in regard to Amelia’s body—

She slammed the book shut. She was not interested in this. A real PI might need to know this stuff, but she was no PI. Even if that unfamiliar “inner PI” did seem to surface every once in a while, and even if right now it wanted to keep on reading about something called livor mortis.

No, no, no.

She went for a short but fast run. Uncle Joe’s office phone was ringing when she unlocked the front door at just past 5:00. She picked it up.

“Belmont Investigations. Cate Kinkaid speaking.” She tried not to sound breathless.

“Hi. This is Mitch Berenski. We met yesterday?” He said it as if the meeting had been a social occasion and he wasn’t certain she’d remember him. He was mistaken. She never forgot a man who clamped his arm around her throat as if she were Public Enemy #1. She was mildly annoyed that she’d been thinking of him only a moment earlier, as if her very thoughts had yanked him out of some paint-splattered cyberspace.

“Yes?” she said, deliberately giving no hint whether she remembered him.

“Are you okay? You sound—”

“I’m fine.”

“You asked that we call if we remembered anything helpful about Willow?”

“I asked Beverly to call,” Cate corrected. “Since you never knew Willow, I don’t know what you could remember.”

“That’s true,” he conceded. “But when I was moving furniture away from the walls in Beverly’s second bedroom this afternoon, the bedroom that was Willow’s when she worked for Beverly, I found something.”

“The missing wedding ring?”

If he noted the snideness of both tone and question, he ignored it. “It’s an envelope addressed to Willow. There’s no name, but there is a return address here in Eugene.”

“Okay, what is it?” Cate grabbed a pen.

“It’s kind of blurry. I was thinking we might get together and see if we can figure out what it is. Maybe have dinner tonight, if you have time?”

Cate drew back to look at the telephone, momentarily astonished. He was suggesting a dinner date? Then he added an explanation.

“I’d really like to help Beverly get her ring back. If you can find this Willow woman, maybe, even if she pawned or sold the ring, I could find out where. It would mean a lot to Beverly.”

No, not a dinner date. Just a joint effort to find Willow.

Okay, she could go for that. On second thought, however, dinner sounded a little too intimate. “How about a sandwich somewhere?” Cate suggested. “Arby’s on Silver Lane? That’s not far off Beltline.”

“I know the place. They make great curly fries. Meet you there in, say, forty-five minutes?”

“Okay.”

Cate recognized the blue SUV when she turned into the parking lot. Mitch was sitting at a booth by the window when she walked in. Jeans and a blue turtleneck, suede jacket. He stood up as she approached. Blue eyes, which she hadn’t noticed yesterday. A dazzling sea blue, if you wanted to be romance-novelish about it.

Cate slipped into the booth. “It’s nice of you to be so helpful to Beverly. Does she know you’re here?”

“No. Maybe I can surprise her by getting the ring back. What would you like to eat?”

“Plain roast beef sandwich. Curly fries. Jamocha milk shake.”

She thought about saying she’d pay for her own, but he was already striding up to the order counter. Okay, maybe he owed her a sandwich and fries for trying to choke her yesterday. He was back with a tray in a few minutes. Cate didn’t waste time when he slid into the other side of the booth.

“Let’s see the envelope.”

He pulled the envelope out of a pocket and set it on the table. Cate couldn’t make out the postmark date, but the return address was plain enough.

“That isn’t hard to decipher,” she said. “2782 Lexter Drive.”

“I couldn’t tell for sure if that was a seven. Maybe it’s a nine.” He pointed to the address with a solid forefinger, now paintless. “See, there’s kind of a loop at the top, so it could be a nine. And it might be Hexler Drive. Or maybe Laxton or Lester.”

She studied the envelope again. No, not Hexler, Laxton, or Lester. Not even close. Definitely Lexter. And definitely 2782, not 2982. She couldn’t see how he could possibly have thought either street name or number was different. “Okay, I’ll check it out tomorrow.” She looked at her watch. “I have some other business to take care of this evening.”

“Private investigator business?”

“Kind of.” She saw no reason to tell him about Uncle Joe’s broken hip, or that Joe was in the hospital. What did she know about Mitch Berenski anyway, except that he had a strong right arm and a suspicious nature? Well, so did she. The suspicious nature anyway. She unwrapped her sandwich.

“Horseradish sauce?” He held up a packet of sauce.

“Sure.” She opened the sandwich and doused the roast beef liberally. He did the same. “Have you been a painter long?” she asked, mostly to make polite small talk.

He, apparently feeling no need for tactful tiptoeing, said bluntly, “Longer than you’ve been an assistant private investigator.”

She rejected an impulse to aim the packet of horseradish sauce at him and squirt. “What makes you think that?”

“You didn’t ask for a description of the missing ring. Someone with experience would have done that.”

And she hadn’t. And a description of the ring was something she should know, wasn’t it? Groan. Reluctantly, somehow already knowing the answer, she asked, “Do you know what it looks like?”

“I asked Beverly.” Smug.

He pulled another scrap of paper out of his pocket. A sketch showed a wedding band with two rows of diamonds, four stones in each row. “She said the stones aren’t large, but they add up to about one carat total weight. Enough to make it worth something in a pawn shop. There’s nothing strikingly individual about the design, but she says the inside of the ring is engraved with ‘Love you always, G.’ Which should make it easily identifiable.”

“G was her husband?”

“Right. Gerald. He died of a heart attack about ten years ago. They’d been married forty-two years.”

Cate forgot her annoyance with Mitch in a rush of sympathy for Beverly. “No wonder the ring means so much to her.”
And you’d better not have taken it, Willow Bishop
, she thought with sudden vehemence. “I appreciate your, um, thoroughness. Getting a sketch of the ring was very clever.” Right at the head of the one-upmanship parade.

“I read some detective novels.”

Which meant he probably knew more about PI work than she did, Cate had to admit. She changed the subject. “Did you take Beverly to church this morning?”

“Yes. Then out for spaghetti afterward.”

“But you don’t usually go to church?”