Part 8 (1/2)
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 a.s.sumed 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 gossipawise, but instead, he c.o.c.ked 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.
Chapter Nine.
THEY SAY NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS, BUT WHEN THE NO news is no news from anyone in the b.u.t.ton community about that beautiful red fish b.u.t.ton, the no news turned out to be not so good.
Back in Chicago and behind my desk at the b.u.t.ton Box the day after the funeral, I clicked off my phone call. ”That's the last of them,” I told Stan, who'd volunteered to come in and do some dusting and vacuuming even though I told him I'd be happy to do it myself. ”I've called every b.u.t.ton dealer I know. Not one of them has heard from anybody trying to sell that enameled b.u.t.ton.”
”Bad luck, kiddo.” Stan was just coming by with a dust rag and a bottle of beeswax furniture polish and he stopped next to my desk. I knew he understood my frustration. Years on the job, and no doubt, he'd seen more than his share of this sort of dead end.
Which is why I asked, ”What do we do now?”
I had hoped for something definitive. Instead, he scratched a hand through his thinning white hair. ”We can always move on to Plan B.”
”Yeah. If there was a Plan B.” Too disappointed to sit there doing nothing, I got up and grabbed the bottle of window cleaner he'd left nearby along with a roll of paper towels. While Stan tackled the nearest old library catalog file drawer where I stored b.u.t.tons-first applying a liberal coating of polish, then letting it dry, then wiping and buffing-I worked on the nearest gla.s.s-front display case.
”There was nothing else on that charm string worth stealing,” I said, attacking a fingerprint smudge especially hard, not because it needed it, but because activity helped chase away some of my frustration. ”The only other b.u.t.ton missing is that metal one with the picture of the building on it, and just to cover all my bases, I asked all the dealers I talked to about that b.u.t.ton, too. Not that I needed to bother. Believe me, Stan...” I was bent at the waist, running the paper towel over the front of the case, and I looked at him through the gla.s.s. ”There's no way that b.u.t.ton was worth killing for.”
”Well, you know b.u.t.tons better than anybody else, that's for sure. I can't argue with you. So maybe...” He stopped the buffing for a moment. ”Maybe the person who killed Angela didn't care a bean about b.u.t.tons. Maybe that person had some other reason to kill Angela.”