Pouncing on Murder (6 page)

I blinked. “You mean Henry Gill?”

Adam blinked back. “You knew him?”

“He was a regular. I first knew him at the library, but when the bookmobile started up, he decided it was easier to let the books come to him instead of him going to the books.”

Adam’s smile was faint. “Sounds like Henry. I was there . . .” His voice faded away to nothing.

I didn’t understand, and then suddenly I did. “You were there the day Henry died?”

“Yeah,” he said quietly.

“That must have been awful.”

“Yeah.”

We sat there, each thinking things that were probably similar, thoughts along the lines of sudden death, of pain and suffering and tasks left undone, of tender feelings never spoken and wonderful places never visited.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

Adam shook his head, then started talking. “I met Henry early last summer. I’d gone out for a long bike ride and was in the far southeast corner of the county, you know, where the land isn’t quite as hilly but there are all those little lakes?”

I nodded, but he wasn’t paying attention to me, he was back in time, watching his memory spin out.

“There must have been some glass in the road or who knows what? I ended up with a really flat tire, so I stopped on the side of the road to fix the tube.” He gave a wry smile. “I’d checked my patch kit before I left, but I hadn’t made sure the glue was still good. Stuff was hard as a rock.”

My knowledge of bike tube repair was hazy, but even I knew that hard glue was bad. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything.” Adam grinned. “I was sitting there, staring at the tire, feeling like an idiot. I had my cell phone, but Irene was at work and there wasn’t anyone I could call.”

This, I knew, was what often happened when people moved north. New folks would have a few friends, usually coworkers and neighbors, but it could take a long time to forge relationships that allowed you to call
someone half a county away to come save you from your own stupidity.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Henry,” Adam said promptly. “He was out in that beater pickup of his. He slowed down, took a good look at me, and stopped. Asked where I lived, and when I said, he gave that grunt of his, you know?”

I certainly did.

“Anyway, he said he’d drop me off at my house, then told me to put my bike in the bed of his truck.”

I smiled, knowing what was coming.

“Took Henry fifteen minutes to get it strapped down the way he wanted. I told him it wasn’t an expensive bike and not to worry about it, but he said driving with an unsecured load was dangerous.” He smiled. “Then we got into the truck and headed southeast.”

“Um . . .”

“Yeah,” Adam said. “The opposite direction from here. Henry had a guy he needed to talk to about a part for a lawn tractor and he wasn’t about to quit the errand just because I wanted to get home.”

“How long did it take you to get back?” I asked, laughing.

“About as long as it would have taken to walk.” Adam gave a crooked smile. “After the tractor part, Henry stopped to see a guy whose dog had just had pups. Then it was close enough to lunchtime to eat at the restaurant out there. And you know what that means.”

I nodded. “Coffee. Lots of coffee.” A discussion regarding what made the perfect cup of coffee had been the first real conversation Henry and I ever had.

“Henry didn’t drink it hot,” Adam said. “And he wouldn’t dream of diluting it with a single ice cube. We sat at that greasy table for more than an hour, drinking coffee, eating ham sandwiches, and hardly saying a word.”

Classic Henry. I felt my eyes mist up. Cranky and crusty as he’d been, I would miss him terribly.

“And you know what happened next?” Adam asked.

“Yep,” I said. “Henry wouldn’t let you pay the bill, he thanked you for the best lunch he’d had in a dog’s year, and he slapped you on the back so hard you almost fell over.”

Adam’s chuckle was quiet and deep. “So you’ve been out to eat with Henry, too.”

“A couple of times.” Chilson’s downtown diner, the Round Table, was a congregating place for the entire area, and I’d run into Henry once or twice at Sunday morning breakfast. He’d wave me over, make me sit, and we’d have the same type of silent conversation. “He was one of a kind,” I said.

Adam sighed. “I’ve felt awful about the whole thing.”

“I’m sure you did everything you could.”

“It wasn’t enough,” he said, looking at a vacant spot in the air. “And I wish the sheriff’s office . . .” He stopped and shook his head.

I frowned. It wasn’t that I believed the Tonedagana County Sheriff’s Office didn’t know what they were doing—in fact, I knew very well how dedicated and capable they were. It was more that I knew a little too much about the department.

For instance, I knew one of their two longtime
detectives had recently retired and the new guy wasn’t quite ready to roll out on his own. And thanks to my friend Rafe, who knew everything about everything in the city of Chilson, I knew that a number of deputies were out sick and on short-term disability. The whole place was understaffed and if that didn’t change soon, the busy summer months were going to become a large problem for the sheriff.

“What’s that about the sheriff’s office?” I asked.

Adam looked at me. “Do you really want to hear this?”

Not a chance
. “Yes, please.”

His gaze drifted past me. “That day, out in the woods. The sap run was over, so I’d stopped by to help Henry clean up the sugar shack. He went out to stack some wood and when he didn’t come back, I went out to find him.”

I knew where Henry had lived, on a forty-acre parcel covered with maple trees. It was a beautiful piece of rolling land, not on the water but next door to it and bordering numerous cottages that fronted Rock Lake, most of which would be empty at this time of year.

Adam put his palm flat on his chest. “Henry was under a tree,” he said, the words tumbling out. “I tried lifting it, tried pulling him out, digging him out, but then my heart kind of exploded. Next thing I know, I’m falling to the ground. I’m flat on my back. Could hardly breathe
and the inside of my chest is on fire. I know my cell phone’s in my pocket, and when I reach around for it, my head turns, and I swear, I swear . . .”

I was on the edge of my seat. “What?”

Adam’s eyes focused on my face. “I swear I saw someone. Running away.”

Chapter 4

A
s soon as the bookmobile had been stowed away for the night and Eddie returned to the boardinghouse, I marched straight to the sheriff’s office and, standing at the tall front counter that almost reached the underside of my chin, gave my name, and asked if I could see Detective Inwood.

“Hang on,” said a deputy. With no speed whatsoever, he reached for the phone, pushed a few buttons, and turned away to talk. He murmured a few words, glanced back at me—I smiled brightly—flipped back around, laughed, then hung up the phone. “Hal says to send you back to the interview room.”

“Thank you,” I said politely, trying not to wonder what had caused the laughter.

The deputy buzzed open the locked door that led to the interior offices. “It’s down the hall, third office on the right.”

“Thanks,” I said, though I didn’t need the directions. If this had been baseball, someone would have been keeping track of the number of times any given honest law-abiding private citizen had sat in the small windowless room. Last fall I’d lost count after using up all my
fingers and had decided it was a silly number to try to remember anyway.

I sat primly in the chair that I’d long ago come to think of as mine, and kept my attention away from the stains on the ceiling tiles, especially the ones near the door. If I stared at them too long, they’d turn into fire-breathing dragons and fly into my dreams. As it was, I had enough problems with animals in dreams, thanks to Eddie’s tendency to sleep on my head when the outside temperature dropped below sixty degrees. Why the outside temperature should cause a change in his inside behavior, I didn’t know. All I knew was that it was true.

“Ms. Hamilton.” The tall, rangy, and gray-haired Detective Inwood entered the room and stood next to the scratched laminate table. “Do I need to sit down for this?”

He showed a number of signs of a man with too much to do and not enough time to do it in. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Tapped his leg with his fingers. Glanced out to the hallway. If I tried to talk while he was standing, I’d never get his full attention.

I slid down and reached out with my toes to push out the chair opposite from me. “How nice to see you, Detective Inwood. Did you have a nice winter? And how were your holidays?”

“Ms. Hamilton,” he said, his patient tone slipping, “please don’t tell me you’re here for a social call. Devereaux retired last month and Wolverson isn’t a detective yet, so I’m dealing with a double caseload. I have half a dozen cases going and—”

“It’s about Henry Gill.”

Inwood’s tense impatience fell into lines of fatigue. He went to the chair and sat heavily. “Henry. I still can’t believe the old bugger’s gone.”

Too late, I realized what I should have considered earlier, that the detective and Henry were near contemporaries, that Tonedagana County didn’t have all that many people in it, and that the odds were good that any two men from the same generation knew each other. Hundred percent odds, really, if Inwood’s reaction was a guide. It had been poor judgment not to think about the possibility, and I was sorry I’d been flip in the way I’d changed the subject.

After a moment, I said, “I was talking to Adam Deering earlier today.”

The detective nodded. “The guy who found Henry.”

“He was saying that he saw someone running away from Henry, after that tree fell.”

“Thought that he saw a male figure,” the detective corrected.

I bristled at the dissing of my new friend’s reputation. “Well, he was having a heart attack.”

“Exactly,” Detective Inwood said. “Eyewitnesses are unreliable in the best of cases, and this certainly wasn’t best.”

“But—”

Inwood held up his hand against my protest. “Point number one. Mr. Deering was having a heart attack. Point number two. He was in an area with which he was not familiar. Point number three. The weather was windy with gusts up to thirty miles an hour, two inches of rain had fallen inside the previous twelve-hour period, and
the heavy cloud cover made the light quality very poor. None of these created optimal conditions for observation.”

Grudgingly I gave him credit for not ending the point-number-two detail with a preposition. “Okay, but—”

The hand went back up. “And point number four, the most pertinent point. Mr. Deering’s statement was inconsistent.”

My spine lost a little of its starch. “But that has to happen all the time. It’s easy to get a couple of details mixed up, especially in . . . in a situation like that.”

Detective Inwood didn’t appear to care. “Initially Mr. Deering claimed there was thunder and lightning that day. Later, he said there’d been none. Then Mr. Deering said he went out to check on Henry because he thought he’d heard a strange noise. Later, he said he went outside to get some fresh air. At one point Mr. Deering said he’d seen someone else in the woods, someone wearing a brown jacket. Later, he said the jacket was dark green. Even later, he said it was navy blue. Later yet, he said it was plaid.”

The intellectual part of my brain knew that what the detective was saying made sense, that Adam’s emotional and physical state had been clouding everything to the point where his statement couldn’t be trusted, but the other part of my brain, the part that cared deeply about puppies and kittens, wasn’t convinced at all.

“But none of that means he was wrong,” I said, trying to be calm and rational. “Even if he’d said the man’s coat was bright purple with fluorescent green polka dots, that doesn’t mean a man wasn’t there.”

Inwood smiled. “I’m surprised at you, Ms. Hamilton. Of all people, I would have thought you’d be open to gender possibilities.”

I felt my cheeks warm. “Adam said he’d seen a guy. I was just going with his impressions.”

“The same impressions that seemed to change every time we talked to him?” The detective sighed and looked at the ceiling. I wondered if the dragon looked like something else from that side of the table. Maybe next time I’d break out of my rut and sit in his chair.

A man about my age—a very good-looking man—hurried into the room. “Sorry I’m late. I got a phone call and . . . oh.” Deputy Ash Wolverson looked at me. “Hi, Minnie. Is something wrong?”

“Ms. Hamilton stopped by to tell us that we should pay more attention to our eyewitnesses.” Detective Inwood stood. “Please show her out.” He gave me a marginally polite nod and left the room.

Ash settled into the vacated chair. “Is that why you’re here? Did you witness a crime?”

Once again, I wondered how such a stunningly handsome man could be so unaware of how his good looks could affect the women around him. I, of course, was immune since I was dating Tucker, but surely Ash had grown up with girls throwing themselves at him. In my experience, that tended to make men annoyingly sure of themselves, but Ash came across as humble and almost shy.

I smiled at him. “No, I stopped by to drop some books off for Adam Deering and heard what he’s saying about Henry.”

Ash folded his hands on the table and stared at them. “Mr. Deering stated, in various ways, that he’d seen a figure running away from Mr. Gill and himself.”

“And you don’t believe him,” I said. “At least that’s what Detective Inwood implied.”

“Inwood is—” Ash stopped abruptly. Looked at his hands some more.

“Is what?” I asked. “Encouraging and sympathetic? Willing to take the time to teach you all you’ll need as a detective? Supportive?”

Ash laughed. “Have you had Hal as a boss? Because it sounds like you know him pretty well.”

No, but I did have a boss named Stephen. “I’m sure he loves his wife and children dearly and wouldn’t dream of kicking a dog.”

“Grandchildren, too,” Ash said. “Have you seen the pictures? Cute kids.”