Six Geese A-Slaying (13 page)

Chapter 19

Caroline waved cheerfully at us, as if her midnight arrest for burglary were merely a continuation of the day’s festivities.
Clarence looked a little more serious, which meant that the grim reality of their situation had begun to sink in with him.
Then again, perhaps Caroline, like Dr. Blake, had become accustomed to the occasional brush with the law in her years of rescuing
and defending animals. Clarence would get used to being in hot water if he kept hanging around with Caroline and Dr. Blake.

Curiosity got the better of me, and I began to inch a little closer to the action.

Clarence and Caroline were both dressed entirely in black—black coats, pants, hats, shoes, and gloves—though the foot-and-
a-half difference in their heights made the effect more comical than threatening. As I moved closer, I could see that Clarence’s
black garb was largely wool and leather, while Caroline had donned a quilted black velvet coat with faceted jet buttons and
a fuzzy black crocheted scarf and hat set. What the well-dressed felon wears to an evening crime. Caroline had also smeared
eyeblack under her eyes, the way football players do on sunny days, though presumably it was intended to reduce her visibility
rather than to protect against glare. Apparently Clarence had decided that his beard made the black paint unnecessary.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to take you down to the station for questioning,” the chief was saying.

“Oh, dear,” Caroline said. “In this weather?”

The chief scowled at her but said nothing. I couldn’t help myself.

“If you’d wanted better weather for your arrest, you should have picked better weather for your burglary,” I said. “Do you
need anything? Like the name of a good criminal defense attorney?”

I had pulled out my notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe and flipped to the back, where I keep a list of useful phone numbers—including
two local lawyers who had represented wayward friends and family members in the past. I ripped out a clean sheet and began
copying the names.

“Thank you, dearie,” Caroline said. “But I’m sure we can work this out amicably.”

Clarence gave her a startled glance and stuck out his hand. I gave him the numbers. The chief looked annoyed, and Caroline
shook her head as if sorrowful over his lack of confidence, but Clarence tucked the paper away in his pocket and seemed a
little less stunned.

“Thanks,” he said. “Say, could I leave my motorcycle at your house for the time being? I don’t think the chief can spare anyone
to ride it into town, and there’s no place here to lock it up.”

“Fine with me,” I said. “Maybe Michael would be willing to try riding it back to our house.”

“Absolutely,” Michael said, stepping forward. “Happy to oblige.”

The chief nodded.

“Sammy,” he said. “It’s getting colder by the minute. Why don’t you check out that motorbike so Meg and Michael can be on
their way?”

Sammy went over and removed the saddlebags from Clarence’s motorcycle. We watched as he gave the bike itself a cursory once-over,
then nodded. Clarence pulled his keys out of his pocket, held them up so the chief could see them, and then, after the chief
nodded his permission, tossed them over to Michael.

“I should get going,” Michael said. “In case the snow starts up again earlier than predicted. And while there are still some
people coming along behind me to dig me out if this thing gets stuck.”

“We’ll have someone here for another hour or so,” the chief said.

Michael nodded. He climbed aboard the motorcycle, started it, and began riding it slowly across the snow-covered parking lot
toward the only slightly less snow-covered road.

I watched while the officers guided Clarence and Caroline into the back seat of one of the cruisers. The cruiser followed
in Michael’s wake, with the chief’s car bringing up the rear.

There were still two police cars in the parking lot, though, along with an enormous truck that I recognized as Caroline’s—the
one she’d brought the elephants in.

Had she driven the truck out here in this weather? Or did they have another partner in their scheme, whatever it was?

Where was the animal angle in all this? With both Clarence and Caroline involved, there had to be a bird or animal welfare
issue behind the burglary. In the several years we’d had a storage unit at the Spare Attic, before moving to our enormous
house, I’d never seen any wildlife other than mice in the walls and birds nesting in the rafters. There were probably whole
colonies of birds and mice there still—while Doleson might not cherish them and want to protect them, he would never have
bothered spending money on extermination. No wonder the Spare Attic was rapidly emptying.

If the place had been a cosmetics testing lab, a fly-by-night puppy mill, or a dog-fighting ring, I could understand their
interest in burgling it. In fact, if that had been the case, I’d have been surprised that they’d left Dad and Dr. Blake behind.
But the Spare Attic?

Was the burglary related to the murder or just a distraction?

I wasn’t going to get any answers here, and I wasn’t getting any warmer, either. The inhabitants of the Pines were starting
to drift back indoors, and I saw that Ainsley Werzel had taken refuge in his car and was talking to someone on his cell phone.

Make that trying to talk to someone on his cell phone. As I watched, he threw the phone violently onto the floor and I could
see him mouthing what I suspected were curses. Cell phone reception in the remoter parts of Caerphilly County was unreliable
at the best of times, and tended to shut down entirely in bad weather.

I got back in the truck and headed slowly for home.

Michael was just wheeling the motorcycle into our barn when I pulled into the driveway. I spotted a cluster of vehicles farther
toward town, where the road wound through a small stand of trees. I went out to the middle of the road to get a better view.

Michael strolled up beside me.

“Motorcycles are definitely a lot more fun in the summer,” he said. “I’m chilled to the bone. What’s going on down there?”

“No idea,” I said. “Should we go and see?”

“Not me,” he said. “My teeth are chattering. I’m going to go in and build up the fire. You should join me.”

“In a minute,” I said. “There’s someone heading this way.”

Apparently Michael’s curiosity was as strong as mine. Even though his teeth really were audibly chattering, he stayed with
me until we recognized Deputy Sammy trudging toward us through the snow.

“Are your phones working?” he called.

“Went out with the power hours ago,” Michael said. “And I haven’t tried my cell phone recently, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Darn,” Sammy said. “Ours aren’t working either. And a big old tree fell across the road while we were out at the Spare Attic.
No way to get over or around. Do you have a chain saw?”

“Sorry, no,” Michael said. “We’ve got a couple of bow saws.”

“Thanks,” Sammy said. “But the trunk is two feet in diameter. I don’t think a bow saw’s going to be much use.”

“I’m really sorry,” Michael said. “I’ve been meaning to get a chain saw, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.”

News to me. I wasn’t even sure Michael had ever used a chain saw in his life, and I couldn’t think of anything he ever did
that seemed to require one. Then again, chain saw cravings were definitely Y-chromosome linked. Michael and Sammy were shaking
their heads solemnly, as if Michael were confessing and Sammy graciously absolving him of a serious moral failure. If only
I’d known, I’d have given him a chain saw for Christmas instead of the llama.

“Maybe we can borrow one from a neighbor,” I said. “Seth Early’s only a mile away.”

Sammy and Michael looked at each other, then shook their heads, as if admitting that even a chain saw wasn’t worth floundering
another mile through the snow with temperatures in the teens.

“Meanwhile, invite whoever’s trapped on our side of the tree to come in and warm up,” I added.

“You’re got heat?”

“We’ve got a fire in the fireplace,” I said. “And blankets. And we can make instant coffee on the camping stove. If you’re
hungry, we could even grill something.”

“I’ll go tell the chief,” he said. He trudged back toward the cluster of vehicles.

While Michael stirred up the fire and started the water for coffee, I readied beds for the overnight guests we’d probably
be having. I changed the sheets in Rob’s room and the guest room, added extra blankets, and dragged the rest of the available
bedding to the living room. Anyone who valued privacy more than heat could drag his bedroll into one of the empty bedrooms,
and the rest could have the two sofas or bivouac at the foot of the Christmas tree on our camping mattresses.

“Do you think we’ve got enough blankets?” Michael asked.

“Probably not, but this is all we have,” I said. “And it’s not as if we can go out in the middle of the night in a snowstorm
and buy more.”

“We could borrow some gear from the Boy Scouts—I doubt if they made it back out to their campsite tonight.”

“Great idea,” I said.

Just then the door opened, and our guests stumbled in. Caroline, Clarence, Chief Burke, Sammy, two other Caerphilly officers,
and Cousin Horace. The officers were all carrying plastic garbage bags and powerful flashlights.

“Meg, do you mind if we take the truck and the van into your barn,” the chief asked. “We can’t leave the evidence unguarded,
and I can’t ask anyone to stay outside with it. The temperature must be in the teens by now.”

“Fine with me,” I said.

“And I’d like a private room where I can talk to Mrs. Will-ner,” he said.

“How about the dining room?” I suggested.

He thought about it for a moment.

“Fine,” he said.

I followed him to the dining room. He flicked the flashlight around, inspecting the room, while I tidied some of the gilded
fruit and greenery off the table so he’d have room to work, and lit a few of the oil lamps we kept handy for our frequent
power outages. Caroline came in and sat down. Clarence followed her and hovered nearby.

“We don’t want to talk to you,” Clarence said. “Do we, Caroline?”

“I’m sure we can clear this up,” she said. She looked ashen, and I wanted to order her to bed.

“But we don’t want to—” Clarence began.

“Fine,” the chief said. “You’re not talking. You can not talk to me some more later, but right now it’s Mrs. Willner’s turn
not to talk.”

“Coffee?” Michael said, appearing with a trio of cups. Clarence grabbed one and fled to the living room after one last pleading
look that was wasted, since Caroline was sitting back with her eyes closed. She smiled faintly as Michael handed her the second
cup. He handed the third to the chief and left.

“Anything else you need?” I asked.

The chief walked over to open a small door in our dining room wall, pulled the rope until the dumbwaiter was level with the
opening, and then ostentatiously propped the door open. Clearly he hadn’t forgotten the time last summer when I’d used the
dumbwaiter to eavesdrop while he was questioning suspects in another case.

“This will do fine,” he said. “Thank you.”

I walked out and closed the door.

“I’m going to do some laundry,” I called to Michael. Which wouldn’t sound implausible to him or anyone who knew me. I clean
under stress.

“With no power?” he called back.

Rats. There was that small flaw in my cover story.

“I can still sort the dirty stuff and fold the clean,” I called back. And I did go down and throw a load of sheets in the
washer, so it was ready to run when the power returned. Then I waited until I heard Michael and Sammy going out the back door.

“We’re off to burgle the Boy Scouts!” Michael called downstairs.

As soon as the door closed, I crept up out of the basement and dashed into the powder room off the kitchen. The powder room
had originally been a short servants’ hallway between the kitchen and the dining room. When indoor bathrooms became popular
and servants too expensive, the owners had put a door at the kitchen end of the corridor, installed a sink and toilet, and
blocked off the dining room end with built-in china shelves. But since only the back of the shelves separated the powder room
from the dining room, sound traveled rather well. And given how much the boards at the back of the shelves had warped over
the years, I easily found a chink to peek through.

Chapter 20

Caroline Willner sat at one end of our dining table. The coffee had revived her. She had clasped her hands over her stomach
and was smiling benignly at the chief, as if this were a social visit rather than an interrogation.

“So of course, when Dr. Langslow asked me to bring the elephants, I thought it was a wonderful idea,” she was saying.

“Yes, I understand that,” the chief said. “I mean what were you doing at the Spare Attic this evening?”

“Loading our truck,” she said.

“Yes, we noticed that,” the chief said. “But according to the records in Mr. Doleson’s office, the storage bin where we found
you belongs to Mr. Norris Pruitt. You want to tell me why you were burgling Norris’s bin?”

“We weren’t burgling,” Caroline said. “We were helping Norris empty it.”

“At 10 P.M. in the middle of a snowstorm?” the chief said. “What’s so all-fired important that it couldn’t wait till morning?
He got snowshoes and a generator stowed away there?”

“We were rather busy earlier,” she said. “With the parade and all. And I have to go back to the sanctuary tomorrow with the
truck, so this was the only time we could do it.”

She sat back, folded her hands in her lap, and smiled innocently at him.

“And Mr. Pruitt will confirm this if I call him?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, but her voice sounded a little anxious.

“And you never considered that maybe this wasn’t the right time to help Norris with his bin? Right after the building’s owner
had been murdered?”

Caroline shrugged.

“I’m not from around here,” she said. “How could I even have known Mr. Doleson owned the facility without you telling me?
I just knew it was Norris’s bin.”

“And the reason you brought this with you?”

The chief held up a pair of bolt cutters,

“Norris had lost his key,” she said. “So careless of him. That was one of the reasons he needed our help.”

She sat back and smiled calmly at him. The chief asked her the same questions several times over, in slightly different ways.
Caroline remained steadfast and showed no further signs of anxiety. She even smothered the occasional yawn, which meant she
was either a consummate actress or not too worried.

Or maybe just exhausted. I was yawning myself.

I heard noises on the back porch—stamping noises, as if several people were shaking the snow off their boots. I tiptoed out
of the powder room and set another pan of water over the camping stove to heat as Michael and Horace came in, laden with sleeping
bags.

A minute or two later, Caroline Willner strolled into the kitchen.

“Would you like some more coffee?” I asked.

“I don’t suppose you have the makings for a martini?” she asked. “I would kill for a martini. That wasn’t a confession, by
the way, just a cliché.”

Michael grinned.

“I could throw one together,” he said.

“Make it two,” I said.

“Three,” he corrected.

“Extra dry, with an olive,” Caroline said. “In fact, under the circumstances, I wouldn’t say no to an extra olive. Thank you,
dear.”

Michael went into the pantry to rummage for ingredients. Caroline sat down, leaned back in her chair, and closed her eyes.
For a few seconds, she looked every minute of her age, and I wondered if we shouldn’t be urging her to go to bed instead of
plying her with alcohol. Then her eyes opened and I felt reassured by the slight twinkle in them.

“Your phones really are out?” she asked.

“Afraid so,” I said.

“Pity,” she said. “I really would like to get word to Norris. He’ll be a nervous wreck.”

I already suspected that it was Norris she’d been berating back at the courthouse. I deduced from her mentioning Norris that
she either thought I knew what she and Clarence had been up to or was too tired to remember that I wasn’t supposed to know.

“Just why were you . . . helping Norris Pruitt empty his storage bin in the middle of the night? Why didn’t he come himself?”

“Too terrified,” she said. “Nerves of butter, that’s Norris. Of course, he’s wonderful with wounded animals. I’ve seen him
stay up all night nursing an injured falcon or feeding orphaned wolf cubs. But to come out here by himself in the middle of
the night? Never happen.”

“Why would it have to happen?” I asked. “It’s his storage bin. Why couldn’t he just come out in broad daylight to clear it
out?”

“Your martinis, madams,” Michael said, handing us each an elegant stemmed glass. I took a sip and decided we should have inaugurated
this particular wedding present a lot sooner.

“Excellent,” Caroline proclaimed. “This one’s a keeper, dear. To your first Christmas together.”

We all drank to her toast. Technically it wasn’t the first time Michael and I had spent Christmas together, but I’d stopped
fighting the world’s tendency to start the clock on our relationship with the day we’d eloped, forgetting all the interesting
times that preceded it.

“Getting back to Norris,” I said. “Why couldn’t he just clean out his storage bin himself?”

“Didn’t have the key,” Caroline said.

“He couldn’t have just asked Ralph Doleson for another key?”

“Doleson’s the reason he doesn’t have a key in the first place,” she said. So much for not even knowing Doleson had owned
the Spare Attic. “Changed the locks on poor Norris, and wouldn’t give him a new key.”

“Was he behind on the bin rental?” Michael asked.

“No, he was paid up a year in advance, the way Doleson always made people do,” Caroline said. I nodded.

“Then what happened?”

Caroline took a long sip of her martini, savored it for a moment with closed eyes, and then swallowed.

“Norris has a little problem,” she began. And then she left the sentence hanging, as if she’d said enough for us to deduce
her meaning.

“When Mother says someone has a little problem, she usually means the person she’s gossiping about is a galloping dipsomaniac,”
I said. “Is that Norris’s problem?”

“Good heavens, no!” she exclaimed. “He’s as sober as a judge.”

Clearly she hadn’t met some of Caerphilly County’s justices.

“Then what’s his little problem?” I asked.

“He . . . tends to borrow things.”

“Oh, that little problem,” I said, nodding. “Another kleptomaniac.” We had a few of those in the family, too.

Caroline winced.

“Oh, I’m sure that’s not it,” she said. “He’s just curious—always picking things up to look at them. And so easily distracted.
He . . . wanders off with things. I suppose the police would call it kleptomania.”

“The police would call it larceny,” Michael said. “Grand or petit, depending on what kind of things catch his eye.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “The bin was where Norris stashed the stuff he’d wandered off with while distracted.”

“Exactly, dear,” she said. “Every few months, we help him empty out the bin and return everything.”

“Every few months?” I echoed.

“We have to do it fairly often,” she said. “Before he forgets where he’s found everything. I suggested labeling everything,
but he really isn’t very methodical about it. Sometimes, we have a fair number of things we can’t identify well enough to
return.”

“So what do you do with that stuff?” I asked.

“Donate it to Purple Heart,” she said. “We used to do the Salvation Army, but Purple Heart picks up—so convenient.”

“I should go see if the rest of our guests have everything they need for the night,” Michael said.

I suspected what he really wanted to do was find a quiet corner to howl with laughter without hurting Caroline’s feelings.
I wondered what Purple Heart and the Salvation Army would think when they learned they’d been obliviously receiving stolen
goods.

“Ralph Doleson found out about Norris’s little problem,” Caroline went on. “And he changed the lock on Norris’s storage bin
and has been forcing the poor man to pay him money not to tell the police.”

“He was blackmailing Norris.”

“Oh, dear,” she said. “That’s such a nasty word.”

“It’s a nasty crime,” I said. “So you decided to take advantage of Ralph Doleson’s death to steal back the incriminating evidence.”

“No, we planned to take advantage of Ralph Doleson’s absence during the parade to steal back the evidence,” she said. “Since
I would be down here with the truck, and Doleson would be stuck for several hours in town, giving out presents. It seemed
like the perfect opportunity.”

“Until Ralph Doleson was murdered.”

“Yes,” she said. “That came as a horrible shock to us, and we almost gave up our plan. But Norris was afraid the police would
start combing through all the bins in the Spare Attic and become suspicious, so we went ahead, a little later in the day than
we planned. I suppose that wasn’t such a good idea.”

I didn’t argue with her.

“Does Norris have an alibi for the murder?” I asked.

“He was helping me with the elephants.”

“Doing what?”

“Helping put on their trappings,” she said. “And fetching hay and—”

She fell silent.

“Running errands?” I suggested.

She nodded.

“And he was wearing the goose costume?”

Caroline nodded. She probably realized the goose costume was too multicolored to show blood spatter and heavy enough to protect
the clothes beneath. She sipped the last bit of her martini and sighed.

“Would you like another?” I asked. “I’m sure Michael would be happy to bartend again.”

“No, thanks,” she said. “One’s my limit after midnight, or should be. Is that offer of a bed still open?”

I showed Caroline to our guest room and made sure she had more than enough blankets. When I came back down, Michael and one
of the police officers were unrolling the Boy Scouts’ sleeping bags in the living room, as near the fireplace as possible.
They’d doused the oil lanterns, but the fire reflected off all the tinsel and lit the room with a flickering golden glow.
Someone’s battery radio was playing Christmas carols.

It would have been such a peaceful heartwarming scene if our uninvited guests had been relatives instead of cops, and if the
back yard wasn’t still festooned, under the snow, with crime scene tape. And if we didn’t still have an unsolved murder in
town.

At least I assumed it was still unsolved. I decided to risk seeing what I could learn from the chief.