Panic Button (13 page)

“Just take the garbage,” he said. “The cops didn’t think any of it was important,
and I can’t imagine it is, either, but hey, if you get rid of some of the junk, it
will mean one less thing for me to clean out once I get the all-clear from Angela’s
attorney and the place is officially mine.”

I tucked the receipts in my purse, and moved on to the table next to the desk. It
was covered with books, and since Angela owned a medical transcription service, I
wasn’t surprised to see that many of them had to do with specialized medical terminology.
Those books were neatly arranged between a set of stainless bookends. In front of
them, scattered over the table, were maps.

“Ardent Lake,” I said, picking up the top map and looking it over. “And…” I reached
for the map below it. This map showed a wider view of the area, with the town marked
by a star at the very center. Along with the maps, there were
more books on the table. Absently, I picked up one called
Early Illinois
, and set it back where it came from next to another slim volume titled
Ardent, The Lost Town.

With as little respect as Angela had for the charm string, I was surprised she was
interested in history. And speaking of the charm string—

My hand froze over the table.

Next to the pile of history books was another pile, photos of the charm string buttons,
much like the ones I’d taken, only not nearly as meticulous. I had taken photos of
each button individually. Angela had taken pictures of sections of the charm string,
and she’d done it right here in her office; the charm string was laid out on the desk.
Through the glass top I saw the champagne-colored carpeting at my feet.

I studied the picture on top of the pile. This particular section of charm string
included black glass buttons, a couple metal buttons, and a particularly sweet little
one in white china decorated with a blue floral pattern, what’s called a calico button.
Angela had circled each of the black glass buttons and in the photo’s margin, she
had scrawled…

I squinted and tipped the photo toward the window, trying to bring Angela’s cramped
handwriting into focus.

“‘A dime a dozen.’”

I was so intent on looking at the picture, I jumped when Charles read the words from
over my shoulder. “I’ve seen Angela’s handwriting before,” he said without bothering
to apologize for nearly causing me apoplexy. “I know it’s next to impossible to read.
‘A dime a dozen.’ That’s what she’s written on the photo.”

The next photo was similar. This one had arrows drawn on it, each one pointing to
one of the metal buttons.

“‘Fifty cents at the local thrift shop.’” Charles supplied the translation of the
tight script before I could even begin to decipher it, and pointed to the words, too,
just in case I missed them.

“She was doing her homework.” I set the photos down. “Just like you did.”

“Then I bet she found out the same things I found out. Those buttons weren’t worth
much. All that talk about curses. I think Angela was just blowing smoke. She probably
decided to donate the charm string to the museum because if she sold the buttons,
she’d get next to nothing, but if she took the cost of the charm string as a tax deduction…well,
you know all about that. How many thousands of dollars was she going to tell the government
that charm string was worth?”

He was trying an end run around the question he’d asked earlier about the value of
the charm string, and I wasn’t biting.

Fishing, though, was another matter.

“You’re right about one thing, she’d get next to nothing for most of the buttons,”
I reminded Charles. “Except the red enameled one, of course.”

I’d hoped to get something more out of him than simply a grunt, and when that didn’t
happen, I left the room and went into Angela’s bedroom.

It was a pleasant enough room, though hardly dramatic or inspired. The walls were
painted an icy blue that matched the embroidery on the white bedspread. The
furniture was utilitarian and unremarkable. There was a flat-screen TV on a stand
across from the bed, and more witch balls—a cobalt blue one in the left window that
looked out over the front of the house and a yellow one in the right window. Like
the office, the bedroom was free of clutter, and I was grateful. If we’d had to pick
our way through Aunt Evelyn’s antiques, I never would have seen the photographs that
were piled on the dresser.

Unlike the ones in Angela’s office, these had nothing to do with buttons.

“Angela and Larry.” I knew Charles was hovering at my shoulder, so when I picked up
the first framed photograph, I tipped it so he could see. Even though she was huddled
in a down coat and looked like her teeth were chattering, Angela was all smiles. She
was standing near a picnic table and behind her was a long, narrow lake, its waters
icy, its shoreline frosted with snow. His smile as wide as hers, Larry stood at her
side. He was a tall man with vivid blue eyes. His arm was around Angela’s shoulders.

From what I’d seen of him, I wasn’t sure Charles would know happiness if it came up
and bit him, but I offered my opinion. “They were a nice couple. They look good together.”

Charles’s shrug told me he didn’t know and he didn’t care. “She talked about him ad
nauseam. Larry did this and Larry did that. Larry said this and Larry said that. Honestly,
you’d think a woman her age—”

“It doesn’t matter how old Angela was. She was still entitled to happiness. And a
little romance in her life.”

I set the photograph down and threw out a line.
“So…” I leaned back against the dresser, my arms crossed over my chest. “Larry and
Angela, they look pretty happy together. Like the perfect couple. But I heard—”

“What?” Charles’s head snapped up.

I eased into the subject, the better to make it look like it was no big deal. “Well,
I don’t put a lot of stock in gossip. But I heard that Larry used to date Susan O’Hara.
You know, the curator of the historical museum.”

Charles rolled his eyes. “Ardent Lake! The Peyton Place of Illinois.” He glanced my
way, then looked away again quickly, his cheeks fiery. “You don’t seem to be the kind
of woman who’d listen to rumors.”

“Is that what it was, a rumor? Larry and Susan never dated?”

His answer was begrudging. “I saw them around together a few times. At some of the
restaurants in town. And last summer at the big band concert.”

“So they were dating?”

Charles shrugged. “If that’s what you’d call it, I guess so.”

“And then Angela caught Larry’s eye.”

Charles was certainly shy, but I’d never assumed he was stupid and he proved it when
his eyes popped wide. “You think Susan was angry. That she killed Angela!”

I stood up straight, my arms at my sides. “I didn’t say that. But it’s only natural
to wonder who might not have liked Angela.” I didn’t add
besides you
. If Charles couldn’t see how guilty he was making himself look with all this talk
of how he couldn’t wait to get his hands on Angela’s possessions and what he saw as
Angela’s fortune, I wasn’t about to point it out. Not when I was alone
with him, anyway. “And if Angela stole Larry from Susan, then maybe Susan had her
reasons for disliking your cousin.”

I was hoping Charles would fill in the blanks, Ardent Lake gossip–wise, but instead,
he cocked his head, screwed up his mouth, and did some serious thinking. “Except if
Susan was angry, it didn’t stop her from accepting the donation of the charm string.”

He was right.

“Unless Susan swallowed her pride for the sake of the museum,” I suggested. “Or maybe
once Larry was gone, she realized she didn’t miss him all that much.”

Charles grunted.

I pounced. “She did miss him.”

He threw me a sidelong glance. “I heard she was pretty broken up.”

“And angry at Angela?”

He shrugged.

End of the gossip party. I knew it as surely as if Charles had hung out a sign: “Not
saying another thing.”

I bided my time, turning back to the framed photographs and promising myself Charles
and I would revisit the topic at another time. The next picture in the stack was an
eight-by-ten in a frame that was studded with colorful rhinestones and faux pearls.
A special frame for a special picture, and it apparently showed a special occasion—Angela
and Larry were dressed in formal clothes and posed in front of a sparkling Christmas
tree.

“Her company Christmas party.” Charles supplied the details. “Angela just loved to
play Lady Bountiful for her employees.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“It is when you’re just doing it to show off,” he said, his words ringing with conviction.
“Angela didn’t really care if anyone had a good time or a bad time at that party of
hers every year. She just wanted to show everyone that she could afford to throw a
bash. And just for the record, she never invited me.”

I actually felt a momentary stab of sympathy for Charles. Which is saying a lot. “Oh,
I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you worked for Angela.”

“I didn’t.” He walked away and poked through a pile of magazines on the nightstand
next to the bed, taking each one out and flipping through the pages as if he expected
to find a treasure trove’s worth of tens and twenties tucked inside. “I wouldn’t have
worked for Angela even if she asked me. Which she never did. And you’d think it was
the least she could have done since we only had each other, family-wise.”

Rather than question his convoluted reasoning, I went right on looking through the
photographs. Each one showed Angela and Larry, always smiling, always happy.

Cradling one photo of them dressed for Halloween (she was Wilma and he was Fred),
I glanced around the room, wondering where all the pictures had come from and why
they’d been piled on the dresser. Something on a nearby wall caught my eye, and I
walked over there for a closer look. “There’s an empty picture hanger here. And here.”
I moved to the next wall. “And more over here. It’s like she had the photos hanging,
then took them all down.”

“She was probably getting ready to redecorate. As if
the rest of us common folks have that luxury. Then again, Angela was rolling in dough,
she could afford it.”

“That would certainly explain why the pictures were taken off the wall. She wouldn’t
have wanted anything to happen to them. But…” I glanced around again. Having just
redone my own apartment, I knew a thing or two about redecorating. No, Angela and
I did not have the same taste. But something told me she wasn’t a woman who changed
things just for the sake of change. And the bedroom…

I ran a hand over the wall.

“It’s as clean as a whistle, and it looks like it was painted not that long ago,”
I told Charles.

He was paging through an issue of
National Geographic
and didn’t respond.

Left on my own, I shuffled through the rest of the photographs on the dresser. I got
to the last one and turned around to show it to Charles. “This photograph…” He closed
the magazine and tossed it back on the pile it came from. “This is Larry again, but
this sure isn’t Angela.” I took a good look at the slim, elderly lady sitting on a
park bench next to Larry. She had a cap of silvery curls and she was wearing a pink
sweater over a white turtleneck. Like Angela in all those other photos, her smile
was a mile wide. “Who is she?” I asked Charles.

“That’s Evelyn.” Charles walked around the bed to stand in front of me and tapped
a finger against his great-aunt’s nose. “Taken in town, it looks like. In the park.
See.” He pointed to a building in the background. “There’s the historical museum.
Look.” He latched on to my arm and turned me so I was facing the windows that looked
out over Angela’s front yard. “From here, if you look across the park, you can see
the building.”

I peeked around the damask draperies and narrowly avoided getting bonked by the yellow
witch ball. From the bedroom, I could see the facade of the square tan-colored stone
building on the other side of the park. Even in the sunlight, the front of the building
looked dour that day, while in the photograph…

I took another look.

The day the picture of Evelyn and Larry was taken, there was some hoopla going on
at the museum. There were people all around, and a bright banner hung across the entrance.
“Thunderin’ Ben…”

“Thunderin’ Ben Moran,” Charles said, which was a good thing, since there was a shadow
over the rest of the banner and I wouldn’t have been able to read it. “That picture
must have been taken when the exhibit about that pirate opened at the museum. Everyone
in town made a big deal out of it.” The tone of Charles’s voice told me he wasn’t
included in that
everyone
. “I remember there was an ice cream social and historical reenactments. Susan’s convinced
Moran is Ardent Lake’s one and only celebrity, and she’s going to make the most of
him. You know, to keep people coming to the museum.”

“But why were Larry and Evelyn there together? Where’s Angela?” I asked.

Charles didn’t hesitate. “Angela probably took the picture. See, when Angela and Larry
first started dating, that was before Evelyn died. Angela and Larry, they used to
invite Evelyn to go all sorts of places with them.”

“It’s nice they wanted to include her.”

His mouth thinned in a way that told me I was stupid if I didn’t see the truth. “Angela
was sucking up. And it paid off, didn’t it?”

Actually, not so much.

Angela was, after all, the one who’d been murdered.