Thread and Buried (15 page)

28

H
AYLEE AND I STOPPED AT THE EDGE OF
the low wooden deck, but Sally-Forth never had concerns about people’s notions of etiquette or privacy. She leaped onto the deck and sniffed the pink plaid shirt as if she also recognized it, then strained toward one side of the deck, where bulging plastic bags leaned against overflowing recycling bins. The tops of the bags were gathered into twist-tied ruffles that bobbed and rustled in the wind.

Elderberry Bay’s garbage was usually picked up on Wednesday mornings. Either someone had forgotten to put their garbage out, or they had accumulated this much during the day. Sally jumped off the deck, pulled me to one of the bags, and nearly buried her nose in the plastic. Before I could stop her, she raised a front paw and tore the bag from top to bottom.

Bits of paper fluttered out into a gust that swirled them upwards. Most of the scraps somersaulted between the gray cottage and the robin’s-egg blue one. Haylee took off after them.

Sally, however, had no interest in the storm of paper scraps. She sniffed at the growing pile of sand at our feet.

I didn’t need the olfactory sensors of a dog’s nose to realize that the sand falling from inside the bag stunk. A rolled aluminum edge of a turkey roasting pan clued me in to what I was smelling and why.

I wasn’t the only one who used disposable aluminum baking pans as kitty litter trays, but while I had filled my turkey pan with nicely deodorized kitty litter, the person who’d filled this pan had simply walked out her back door and scooped up beach sand.

My cute little Sally-Forth smelled cats, and probably thought she had to mother every one of them. Another scrap of paper floated out of the bag. I lunged, but Sally refused to budge, except to paw more sand out of the bag, and I missed. The scrap flew off toward where Haylee had disappeared.

Because of the wind and waves, I couldn’t hear anyone inside the cottage, but what if someone inside heard us? Explaining that I was only walking my dog wouldn’t pass muster, since we were so close to the cottage’s rear wall that we were practically inside.

Sally nosed something out of the bag and dropped it beside me. Moonlight reflecting off clouds showed me a catnip mouse. Sally stuck her snout into the bag again, and this time, I was nearly as curious as she was and didn’t stop her.

She hauled out a tiny pet bed upholstered in sheepskin-like fleece. She snuffled it, whimpered, and wagged her tail. Now she wanted to adopt a pet bed? She was going overboard with her motherly instincts.

Remembering Gartener’s comment about searching people’s trash for empty rat poison containers, I pulled Sally away from the gashed bag.

Haylee zipped out from between the cottages and pointed back toward Beach Row. Grasping bits of paper like a pale bouquet in one fist, she pretended to turn a steering wheel. I got the message. Someone was driving on Beach Row near the gray cottage.

Haylee bent as if to deposit the scraps she’d collected in the gaping garbage bag. I shook my head violently. With my free hand, I grabbed the bouquet of torn-up paper from her.

Headlights raked the side of the robin’s-egg blue cottage. Was someone turning a car around in one of the driveways? Maybe they were parking at the gray cottage.

Hoping that Sally wouldn’t yip in excitement about our sudden flurry of activity, I plodded as quickly as I could through deep sand, away from the cottage and toward the water. Still leashed, Sally had to come along.

Haylee zoomed ahead and led us west, away from Threadville, past the backs of cottages. When we were close to the walkway that led to Beach Row and the ice cream stand, we stopped.

“That car,” Haylee panted, “could have been Max’s.”

No one was visible on the moonlit beach, but anyone could be tiptoeing close to the cottages or running along Beach Row, spying between cottages and keeping up with us. I imagined a faceless murderer speeding ahead to ambush us.

Waves crashed. Wind rattled shutters and roared in our ears. We wouldn’t have heard a front-end loader or a truck, let alone the engine of a new and probably well-tuned BMW. I saw no reflections from headlights, which wasn’t reassuring, since I’d driven without them on a recent moonlit night.

Breathless from adrenaline and running, I handed Haylee Sally-Forth’s leash. Thanks to Sally, I had already used both of the stoop-and-scoop plastic bags I’d brought along, and had tossed them in one of the beach’s trash barrels before we came to the gray cottage, so I didn’t have a convenient way of carrying the bits of paper that Haylee had collected. I untucked my T-shirt in the front to make a sort of kangaroo pouch, thrust the scraps into the pouch, tucked the shirt in with the loose section hanging down over my waist, and hoped that no one besides Haylee would see me. Or would come close enough to smell me, either. The paper had apparently absorbed some of the odors from inside that garbage bag.

“Phew,” Haylee said. “Those things stink.”

I heaved a sigh. “Tell me about it.”

Sally wagged her tail.

“Why did you come this way?” I asked Haylee. “Now we have to pass that cottage to get back.”

“I didn’t want to lead anyone to our apartments.”

I had to admit that her idea had merit.

“Besides,” she continued, “if we go up to Beach Row and walk west, we’ll come to the road to the wharf, the marina, and the driveway to the Elderberry Bay Lodge. That road will take us to Shore Road. We can walk back to Threadville along Shore Road.” She glanced at my hands clasped over my pregnant-looking T-shirt. “No one could guess you’re hiding something.”

I groaned. “Let’s go. Act nonchalant.”

Hanging on to Sally’s leash, she strolled toward Beach Row. “And you’re just casually clutching your stomach. Maybe you’ll pass for a victim of food poisoning.”

“I’m beginning to feel like one.” And not only from the lingering fumes of used kitty litter. Letting Sally tear into someone’s garbage was bad enough. Absconding with some of the garbage was worse. I told myself I’d throw it away after I examined whatever might be written on it, and then I’d take a nice long bath.

Before we reached Beach Row, we stopped and listened. There was no sign of a car or a murderer sneaking along after us, so we turned and sauntered along Beach Row as if we were doing nothing more interesting than walking a dog.

The ice cream stand had closed for the evening. We passed more cottages. The Lazy Daze Campground office was dark, and a gate barred the driveway.

“Latecomers don’t get in?” Haylee whispered.

“There’s a number pad.” I could barely make it out in the moonlight. “We could duck under the gate to search for Cassie.”

Haylee laughed. “And if we found her?”

“We’d know she wasn’t lying about where she was staying. But we don’t know what kind of car she drives, so unless she’s outside with a light shining on her face, I’m not sure how we could figure out which campsite is hers.” I lowered my voice. “More likely she did lie about where she’s staying, she’s in that cottage where we saw her shirt, and she’s scared stiff because someone was just prowling around it.”

Although walking west on Beach Row to get ourselves east and home seemed counterintuitive, we kept going. Neither of us wanted to meet up with the person who’d been driving the car that could have been Max’s.

In the harbor, the wharf was protected from the wilder waves out beyond the jetties. The moon peeked between scudding clouds, illuminating fishing boats and the backs of boathouses. The boathouse behind Tom’s fish market had two garage-type doors, pulled down to just above the water. Sally found the odors around the wharf interesting, but they were a bit too fishy for me. Poor Tally was missing all the fun.

Beyond the wharf, sailboats, yachts, dinghies, and motorboats of every size clung to the marina docks. Breezes jangled metal fittings against masts. Inside one sailboat, a couple at a candlelit table shared a bottle of red wine and a card game. Music, laughter, and chattering voices came from the deck of a massive yacht moored farther out. We continued west until we saw the Elderberry Bay Lodge. Beyond the wide, pillared porch stretching the entire length of the building, lights made the lodge appear cozy and welcoming. We’d be back Friday night, dressed to party. With Clay.

By then, I hoped to have lost this strange paunch and washed off the kitty litter odors.

We turned onto the road leading uphill. Max’s BMW wasn’t among the few vehicles in the lodge’s parking lot. Where was it, near the gray cottage? I was glad that Haylee had led me this way, and not into the arms of the person who had been driving along Beach Row.

Shore Road ran high above Beach Row, and more or less parallel to it. Finally, we were walking toward Threadville—and home. Trees on the slope below us sheltered us from the wind and diminished its sound. Breaking waves were farther away. Hearing each other became easier.

“Why did you want all that garbage?” Haylee asked. “To find out what Cassie has been doing around Yolanda’s cottage when she was supposedly staying at the campground?”

“Partly. Also, I suspect that the kittens who were dumped in my yard the night Neil was dragged there may have come from Yolanda’s cottage. Sally was very interested in kitty litter that spilled from the bag. She also dragged a catnip mouse and a kitten-sized pet bed out of the bag.”

“People throw those things out. Especially kitty litter. They may have nothing to do with Mustache and Bow-Tie.”

“The pet bed and catnip mouse looked new. Vicki is understandably curious about where those kittens came from.” I patted my stomach. “Maybe I’ll find the name and address of whoever left them behind. I won’t have to tell Vicki I helped myself to garbage unless something important is written on the paper.” But did people tear up
unimportant
garbage?

At the foot of the hill below us, the roofs of tents and trailers peeked between trees in the Lazy Daze Campground.

On the shoulder ahead of us, the tops of signs suddenly glittered. I whipped around.

On Shore Road behind us, headlights crested a hill.

Maybe the driver who had been near Yolanda’s cottage was searching for us. His lights hadn’t touched us. Yet.

We sprinted to a drainage ditch leading toward the campground. Sneakers dislodging rounded stones, we clattered down its sloping side. Sally seemed quite pleased to join us in a new and different adventure.

Breathing heavily, we crouched, our fingers on the ground. The paper in my impromptu kangaroo pouch shifted, but my shirt stayed in place, and none of the scraps fell out. Sally flopped down between us and panted, her tongue hanging out and her eyes bright in the moonlight.

Haylee muttered, “If anyone saw us run, we could be in worse trouble than if we’d just kept walking.”

We waited, watched, and listened. No lights approached. What had happened to that vehicle? Sally’s panting made it hard to hear anything else, but I thought maybe tires crunched on gravel as if a vehicle had stopped beside the road not far from us. And had turned its headlights off.

I didn’t know who might be chasing us or if he knew that I’d helped myself to some of the garbage outside Yolanda’s cottage.

An enormous concrete pipe ran underneath the road, from the far side to the drainage ditch we were in. What if I crept into the culvert and left the bits of paper under a stone, then came back later with a bag to collect it all?

What if someone reported to Vicki that two tall women, dressed in black and walking a distinctive black and white dog, had rifled through someone’s garbage?

Someone’s? Cassie’s, probably. I was positive I’d seen Cassie in that cottage on Monday evening, and a shirt like hers had been hanging on the back of a lawn chair a little while ago. Yet Cassie had told Mona—and Haylee and me—that she was staying in the campground.

At that cottage, had Sally smelled the kittens she had adopted, or other cats?

Cassie didn’t seem like a murderer, and she didn’t seem like someone who would dump kittens.

While all this was spooling through my brain, I tensely and silently waited with Haylee for the sound of a car door, maybe for footsteps on the shoulder of the road.

I mentally prepared to crawl into that culvert.

I’d been staring at it blindly, but my eyes adjusted to the darkness under the road.

Something was in the culvert, something lumpy and bulky.

29

I
GASPED.

“What?” Haylee whispered. She still had Sally on a leash. If my dog had noticed the thing in the culvert, she wasn’t particularly interested. She stared up toward the road. The vehicle still hadn’t passed.

I pried my flashlight out of my pocket and shined it into the culvert.

I told myself that the black plastic garbage bag was only litter tossed from a car, but there was something disturbingly organic about the lumps in the bag. And if it had been only tossed, it probably wouldn’t have ended up neatly underneath the middle of the road.

Still squatting among rounded stones, Haylee and I stared at the thing. Haylee’s breathing sounded as uneven as mine. Sally just went on panting in her slaphappy, grinning way.

What was that other sound? A furtive footstep on the gravel shoulder above us?

I flicked off my light and steadied myself with one hand flat on the ground. My position cramped my lungs. Holding my breath became painful.

Vicki Smallwood’s voice rang out. “This is the police. Come out with your hands up.”

“Vicki!” I shouted, finally letting my breath out in one whoosh. “Don’t shoot. It’s just me.”

“And me,” Haylee added.

“Who’s ‘me’?” Vicki demanded, her voice still sharp.

I called back, “Willow and Haylee. And Sally-Forth.”

“Is anyone else down there with you three?”

I glanced at the bag. “Not that we know of.” No one who was alive, anyway.

We clambered up the stony slope.

Vicki took one look at us and shook her head in apparent disbelief. “What on earth were you two doing, running off the road and hiding from an approaching police car?” She shined a flashlight on our clothing. “In black again, too. Snooping? After we told you not to?”

I defended our actions. “We didn’t
know
it was you. We didn’t hear a siren or see flashing lights.” Vicki could undoubtedly hear the tremors in my voice. Trying to calm myself, I added, “And you never know who might be coming along this dark, deserted highway.”

“There’s been a murder,” Haylee contributed, as if that explained our actions. And as if our intrepid police chief didn’t already know about Neil’s death.

“If it’s that dangerous, why were you out here in the first place?” Vicki asked.

This time, I answered. “Walking the dog. We went to the beach and were taking a different route home.”

Vicki peered down at Sally-Forth. “Only
one
dog?”

I couldn’t blame her for being suspicious. I had never walked only one of the dogs before. Siblings, they were devoted to each other. Tally-Ho was probably going into deep mourning alone in our apartment. Well, almost alone. Would the kitties’ presence comfort him? I waved my hand in dismissal. “It’s a long story, and not important compared to . . . something in the culvert. I think you should see it.”

“What is it?” she asked me.

“I’m not sure.”

As far as I could tell, she didn’t even try to hide her impatience. “Show me.” In her police-issue boots, she negotiated the gully’s clacking, rounded stones as if they were pavement. “Is Tally-Ho okay?”

I kept my answer short. “He’s fine.”

We didn’t go into the culvert. She swept her powerful flashlight over the garbage bag. “Good thing Detective Gartener is on his way.” Lit from below, her grin looked more devilish than she probably realized. “There might be maggots.”

I shuddered. “Oh, please.”

Vicki sniffed in the direction of the garbage bag. “I don’t smell anything terrible coming from it. Do you?”

We had to admit that we didn’t. I added, “And Sally isn’t acting like anything in that bag is interesting to a dog. But I was freaked out because—” Oops, I didn’t want to tell her I’d been scared that someone was chasing us after perhaps seeing us root through garbage. Let Vicki think that finding Neil’s body in my yard was still freaking me out. Actually, it was.

Vicki turned her head toward me and sniffed again. “Maybe I do smell something. It’s like used kitty litter, but it seems to be coming from you, Willow.”

Not good. “Could be.”

She crouched at the edge of the culvert. “Let’s have a look. Hold my flashlight for me?”

Haylee hung on to Sally’s leash and stayed back while I aimed Vicki’s flashlight at the garbage bag. “It can’t have been there long,” I pointed out. “It’s not dusty.”

Vicki put on gloves, duckwalked into the culvert, untied the bag’s red drawstring, and opened the top.

Something white puffed out. A sweater?

In the confines of the culvert, Vicki hefted the bag. “I think we’ve found the yarnbomber’s cape. Except that the part I can see of it is all white, it’s knit like the
thing
that managed to get itself onto my car inside my garage. And the bag is about the right weight for a garment that size made of bulky yarn.” Leaving the bag behind, she scooted out of the culvert and aimed her flashlight at Haylee. “Know anything about who hid this here?”

Haylee blinked and shaded her eyes. “No, but I’m guessing that she didn’t want her husband finding her disguise—or is it her next yarnbombing project?—in an upstairs closet. Which lets Willow and my mothers and me off the hook. We each live alone.”

Vicki shined her light down on the ground. “Except when my car was yarnbombed, Willow had a temporary roommate—me. Maybe Willow was going to take this back home after I left, and hadn’t gotten around to it? Maybe you two were here to pick it up tonight?”

Naturally, I defended myself. “I’d have brought a car. Besides, Haylee and I were talking to Detective Gartener when your car was yarnbombed.”

Vicki snapped her fingers. “That’s right.”

I was sure she’d remembered all along. Police college had probably taught her how to keep people on edge. I added, “Besides, Trooper Jeffers said that the person in the cape ran like a man.”

Above us, a car door slammed. “Vicki?”

Detective Gartener’s deep melodious voice. Great. Now we’d really be on edge.

“We’re down in the gutter, Toby!” Vicki was, perhaps, a little too cheerful.

“Are you okay?” He slipped and slid down to join us.

“Sure, we’re fine,” she answered. “Haylee and Willow were searching for maggots, but all they found was the yarnbomber’s cape.”

“They
did
?” The admiration in that resonant voice was patently fake. “Let’s see.”

She showed it to him. “What do we do,” she asked, “leave it here for the yarnbomber to retrieve later?”

“Sure! And deputize Willow and Haylee to hide in the culvert twenty-four-seven watching for him. It might keep them out of mischief.”

Uh-oh. Did he know what else we’d been up to that evening?

He radioed for troopers to come check out the bag in the culvert, then turned to me. The flashlights gave him a devilish grin, also. “Where’s your other dog, Willow?”

I might have known he’d come up with the question Vicki had asked.

“She said it’s a long story,” Vicki told him. “We have time, Willow, while we wait for the troopers to show up. I don’t think anything is about to jump out of that bag at us.”

I’d left Tally behind because I was afraid we’d be more than twice as noticeable with two dogs, but I’d had another reason for taking only Sally, and I gave it, rather tentatively. “On our walks to and from the ice cream stand, Sally had seemed very interested in one of the cottages. I thought maybe the kittens had come from it, and I didn’t bring Tally along because he might distract her.” I made up the last part, but in retrospect, it was a pretty good excuse for leaving Tally at home.

“Let me guess.” Vicki pinched her nose. “Sally found some kitty litter.”

I said in a small voice, “Yes.”

Gartener folded his arms across his chest. “What else did your dog find?”

Confession might not be good for the soul, exactly, but it was a relief. “She ripped open a garbage bag that was outside that cottage. Kitty litter spilled out, and she hauled a catnip mouse toy and a small pet bed out of the bag, too.”

“Before you could stop her.” Vicki hadn’t lost her sarcastic touch.

This time, I had my excuse ready. “You asked me to let you know if I found out where the kittens came from.”

“I also asked you—told you—to let us do the investigating,” she scolded me.

But Gartener still seemed interested in our exploits. “Where did your dog find all these things?”

Haylee quickly rattled off the address.

I held my breath. Would they know that the street number wasn’t on the back of that cottage, and that we’d paid particular attention to the front? Would we have to confess that we’d done a reverse lookup on Yolanda’s number?

Gartener stared at Vicki. “Isn’t that—” He paused.

“Yes. Same address.” Her answer was clipped.

“Same address as what?” I asked, hoping I wouldn’t have to divulge what I already knew.

Both officers stared at me. “Might as well tell her,” Gartener said, finally. “It’s not exactly a secret.”

Vicki heaved a sigh. “That’s the address for the phone number you gave us for Yolanda, the woman who made the salads at the picnic.”

“You’ve talked to her?” Haylee put a friendly, interested smile in her voice.

Vicki shook her head. “She doesn’t answer that number, or the door.”

I leaped into the fray with an obvious statement. “You need a search warrant for that cottage.”