Beware False Profits Part 18

"And there's a reason you can't do it?"

I just looked at her.

"You're hopeless." She shook her head, turned on my phone, and punched in the number.

Lucy reached him, which surprised me. I think either Hank forgot to check caller ID, or none of my other calls had gone through, which was more likely.

"Hank, this is Lucy Jacobs. Aggie and I are over at the Victorian on Bunting Street..." She stopped talking and just listened for a full minute. She finally answered. "Hold on a moment would you?"

She covered the receiver. "He hasn't been here since the day they started building the island in the wrong place. He's apologizing. He says he'll try to get here this weekend and see what he can do about fixing it."

We stared at each other. "Let me fire him," Lucy said. "I know it's your phone, but if I hand it over to you, who knows what will happen."

I nodded magnanimously. She uncovered the receiver. "You're fired, you son of a-"

I covered my ears. I uncovered them when she closed the phone.

"Well, that went well," I said.

"So who's been remodeling the house?"

I didn't know, but I did know that we'd yet to check the bas.e.m.e.nt or attic. Clearly we weren't on the trail of a fiend. How many people have a mystery contractor? Our guy wasn't breaking and entering. He was building and entering.

"Maybe we should just go away." I walked over to the bathroom and pushed the door open wider. Tile adhesive perfumed the air. Sure enough, the tile wasn't yet grouted, but it had been perfectly laid. "Do we really want to catch him before he finishes? We'll never find anybody this talented again."

"We have to figure out what's going on here. We'll finish looking through the house."

We struck gold in the attic. Somebody was living here. Hidden behind boxes Junie had moved here from her camper, we found a sleeping bag, neatly rolled and tied, a small camp stove, a store of dried food, and copies of Field & Stream that had been well thumbed through. Behind a couple of pieces of old furniture salvaged from the house, I found a backpack with a few toiletries, a towel, and some work clothes. Size forty-two.

"A big homeless guy?" Lucy asked.

I thought of my experiences with the homeless. They never seemed to travel this light because they were carrying an entire lifetime with them. This guy had packed for a short camping trip.

"We have to talk to him," I said. "I don't think we have a thing to worry about. He clearly means us no harm. He's doing a great job here. If nothing else we definitely owe him wages."

"How do you propose we arrange that?"

"We could leave him a note. We know he reads."

"That might scare him away."

"Then we have to confront him."

"How do you propose we do that?"

The answer seemed all too clear. "We have to come back later tonight and catch him. We can enter through both doors so he doesn't escape the way he did today."

"And you think Ed will be in favor of this?"

"I think Ed will believe that you and I have gone to a movie."

"Now you'll spend the rest of the day trying to figure out how to word that so you aren't exactly lying to him."

But I'd already come up with a scheme. "Nope, I'll just tell Ed there's a movie you and I have always wanted to see, and I'll be home late. I just won't mention that those two thoughts aren't necessarily connected."

"I think we may have created a monster."

I let Lucy worry. After all, I was learning these skills from her. But of course I was going to tell Ed the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. I just hoped I didn't have to tell him before we confronted the Victorian's new resident. And the chances were good. Because I happened to know that Ed had a board meeting tonight.

Lucy and I made a list of what still needed to be done, although we had no idea who would complete the work for us. I was hoping that once confronted, our attic dweller would agree to stay and finish the job. We could move in some furniture to make him more comfortable, set up a microwave and toaster oven, and stock the fridge. I wanted to keep this guy.

Since it was lunchtime, she followed me home and we made omelets to eat with blueberry m.u.f.fins Junie had baked for yesterday's breakfast. Afterwards, while Lucy washed the pans, I cleared the table. Still vaguely sneezy, I opened a drawer to rummage for a pack of tissues and saw the envelope of Hazel's things that had been stuffed inside.

"When's your next appointment?" I asked.

"I need to go back to the office at some point to do a little paperwork. Why?"

"I found a clue, Nancy Drew," I singsonged.

We settled in the living room with big cups of spiced tea, and I opened the envelope, having given Lucy all necessary information while it brewed.

"So Brownie said he didn't want any of this, without even knowing what was here?" Lucy sounded skeptical.

"Except the money. Don't you think if he was really guilty, he'd want to see every sc.r.a.p, just in case?"

"Unless there's nothing he could have left behind."

"He's not behaving sensibly." I told her about Va-Va-Voom and the four-in-hand tie with matching handkerchief. "Next up, hair plugs," I said.

"Is he trying to look suspicious?"

"Would he know how?"

"Brownie was more or less the lap dummy, and Hazel was the ventriloquist. Who knows what he'll be like without her running his life."

This was an interesting thought. If we could keep the little guy out of jail, then watching what he made of himself in the years ahead might be interesting. I was betting he'd ditch the mayor's office lickety-split. He would need lots of free time to deplete Hazel's family fortune.

I ripped open the envelope and dumped the contents on the coffee table, which was getting something of a workout these days. First Joe's past, now Hazel's.

"You couldn't throw away the old tissues?" Lucy asked, wrinkling her nose. "You thought we'd need to check DNA?"

"I missed a few, okay? I was working at top speed."

Lucy got up and came back with a plastic grocery bag. She dropped the tissues inside, along with an empty package of cough drops, a tube of lipstick, and an Estee Lauder metal compact with just a residue of powder.

"Now that you've tidied up, can we get down to business?" I began to stack papers. Lucy took my cue and a.s.sembled everything else into piles. There was more than I'd remembered.

"Okay, what have you got?" I asked.

"A gold-plated bracelet with a broken clasp. It's not worth much, but you could sell it at next year's rummage sale."

"Try not to bring that up, okay?"

"Keys, a comb..." She dropped the comb in our trash bag. "A leather organizer, a book of stamps, a pocket calorie counter-"

"Hazel was on a diet?"

"Or pretended to be."

I told her what Keely had said about Hazel's addiction to chocolate.

"Living proof." Lucy held up one miserly square of a chocolate bar, then dropped that into the trash bag, too.

I retrieved it, pinching the wrapper between my fingers and avoiding the chocolate. "Maybe we shouldn't be so hasty. She was poisoned, remember?"

"You think she was poisoned by a chocolate bar?"

"Let's not take chances." I set it to one side, although it looked so old I doubted it had come from recently worn clothing. "Anything else?"

"I wish."

"Except for the extremely remote possibility that we have the murder weapon in our possession, nothing seems particularly helpful. Except maybe the organizer." I picked it up and thumbed through, hoping for a calendar filled with information like "Met with So and So today who wants to murder me." Instead I saw that the organizer was from 1999. Apparently, Hazel had only rarely cleared out her closet. I gave it to Lucy, who dropped it in the bag.

"Okay, your turn," she said.

"You take half, I'll take half." I handed her a stack of papers.

"This feels familiar. Didn't we just do papers?"

"Those were Joe's, and a good detective knows repet.i.tion is part of every case."

"I'm beginning to worry about you."

We worked in silence, but by the time we finished, only one thing had really jumped out at me. Hazel had folded several pages of handwritten notes about food bank supplies into her pockets. I remembered Cilla saying she was convinced Hazel had been out to get Joe. Hazel had spent a lot of time poking around his office. I wondered what Hazel had hoped to find and if this innocuous listing of ears of corn and sides of beef had been part of it?

"Is this evidence of some food bank problem?" I asked, handing it over to Lucy. "Or are these just some notes Hazel needed as board chairman?"

"Who knows? We'd have to talk to somebody there. I could show it to Cilla."

"Of course if something is going on, Cilla could be part of it."

"We do have Hazel's keys, you know. Didn't Cilla say Hazel had keys to the offices?" Lucy jingled the ring enticingly.

"What, you mean break in and go through their files without having any idea in the world what we're looking for?"

Lucy's eyes were shining. "Now you're talking like a detective."

"No way. Not happening. Not going there. Better to take a chance on Cilla. The way she feels about Joe, I doubt she would ever do a thing to jeopardize his job."

We were interrupted by my mother, who came in the front door carrying a cardboard box that nearly didn't fit through the opening.

I jumped to my feet to help guide her, taking the box out of her arms. I looked down and saw neatly folded fabric that looked vaguely familiar. "What's this?"

"Felted wool. For the penny rugs the girls and I are making."

"Oh. You went to buy fabric?" The closest store was miles away, which was part of the reason Junie's quilt shop was bound to be a success.

"No, precious, I've been at It's a Wash all morning. I didn't want to use your machines for felting. It's messy."

I set down the box and picked up a folded square. "Why does this look familiar?"

"I bought bags of wool skirts, pants, and blazers at the rummage sale. Maybe you saw them when you were there. The girls and I took them apart, then this morning I washed the pieces in hot water and put them through the hottest cycle on the dryer. Heat shrinks everything and tightens the weave. Now the fabric won't ravel when we cut and st.i.tch it."

Hazel Kefauver's skirts, pants, and blazers. Shrunk almost beyond recognition.

Junie sounded delighted. "I'll dye most of the fabric because the colors are unbelievably dreary. But you have no idea what this would have cost anywhere else. It was high-quality wool, quite a find. I'm so glad I moved here."

I kissed her cheek. "Aren't we all?"

"Oh, I did find one odd thing in a pocket. I've been meaning to give it to you. Can you wait a moment?" She started upstairs.

"Is that fabric what I think it is?" Lucy asked.

"No point in telling Junie and spoiling her fun."

"You missed something in a pocket?"

"I told you what a hurry I was in."

Junie returned and held out her hand. Resting on her palm was a small plastic object about an inch square.

I saw why I had missed it. "What is it?"

Lucy was peering over my shoulder. "It's a photo card for a digital camera. Tell me you know what a digital camera does."

"Of course I do. I just don't choose to use one myself. My little Brownie box camera works great. When I can load the film." I took the photo card and turned it over. "I'm a.s.suming this didn't go through the laundry?"

Junie picked up her box of fabric. "No, I found it when I was cutting up a skirt. It was caught in a seam. You girls have fun."

"Luce?" I held out the card once Junie was gone. "What equipment do we need so we can see if there's anything useful on this?"

"A computer and a few minutes."

"Let's go."

Ed is not technology challenged. He has a USB universal media hub plugged into our computer, something he hadn't-for obvious reasons-bothered to tell me. Lucy found the correct slot and inserted the card. In less than a minute we were looking at a strip of three photos. Lucy clicked on the first one.

"Can you tell anything?" I squinted at the photo. I guessed it was a dark city street with a collection of street-lamps. The photo was blurry, as if Hazel or someone had moved the camera when she shot it.