French Fried Read online

  The book hefted in both hands, I crept closer to the wall, farther from where the person would see me if he—or she—looked into the parlor from the doorway. My back to the framed and autographed picture of Charles de Gaulle, a photo of the Eiffel Tower, and the framed copy of the article about Rocky that had appeared in a local newspaper in the spring, I stationed myself to the right of the doorway and raised the book in both hands, ready to strike.

  The moment I heard a movement outside the door, I pounced and after that, the sensory impressions came hard and fast. My gut instinct was to hit and hit hard. But my brain told me the intruder was someone familiar, someone safe, and at the last second, I pulled up and only struck a glancing blow.

  Good thing.

  “Really?” His arms over his head to protect himself from another assault, Declan scooted past me and to the other side of the parlor and when he was sure he was safe, he rubbed the top of his head and winced. “Did you really think that was going to work?”

  I tossed the book down on the nearest chair. “It would have worked perfectly on someone whose head wasn’t so hard.” I watched him for a moment, grateful I hadn’t hit him full force at the same time I hated it that I might have caused him even a little pain. “I’ll get you ice,” I said, and even though he protested, I scooted into the kitchen, loaded a plastic bag with ice cubes, and wrapped it in a towel. When I got back to the parlor, Declan was sitting where he had been when Tony Russo arrived the night before. I plunked the makeshift ice bag on top of his head.

  “Ouch!” He grabbed the bag and repositioned it. “If I’ve got a concussion, I’ll sue. I’m an attorney, remember. I could do it.”

  I took the seat where I’d been the night before, facing him and next to the chair in which we found Rocky. “If you’ve got a concussion, it’s your own fault,” I told him. “Why didn’t you yell to me when you came in? And why didn’t I hear your motorcycle?” I could see only a small strip of the driveway from where I sat, but I checked it out, anyway.

  “I brought Uncle Pat’s car. After I dropped him and Kitty and Mom and Dad and a whole passel of nieces and nephews over at the Terminal for lunch. You can thank me anytime. Those kids eat so much, your profits are bound to go through the roof.”

  “Thank you,” I said, but only because I felt I had to. “And the reason you were sneaking around?”

  “I wasn’t sneaking.” Declan removed the ice bag long enough to touch a finger to the top of his head. He made a face and put the ice bag back where it started. “I thought you might be upstairs and I was going to call to you from the bottom of the steps. I only looked in here because . . .” His gaze strayed to that empty chair between us. “I don’t know. I was thinking about last night and about Rocky and I just wanted to see the room again. You know, to prove to myself that what happened was real.”

  “How did you even know I was here at Pacifique?”

  “Sophie didn’t give it away, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said. “She didn’t have to. I knew you wouldn’t wait for me. You should have seen me in church, squirming my way through Father Walsh’s sermon. I figured you’d try to do something stupid and—”

  “Stupid? You mean like coming up with a suspect in Rocky’s murder?”

  Declan’s dark brows rose a fraction of an inch.

  From him, it was the equivalent of a high five, well done, you go, girl!

  “Minnie Greenway,” I told him. “A neighbor. She practically confessed.”

  “Practically isn’t one of those things that stands up in court.”

  “Well, maybe she will confess once your friend Tony talks to her.”

  “And did she happen to spill her guts and mention why she killed Rocky?”

  “She didn’t actually say she did kill Rocky,” I said in the interest of full disclosure. “But Minnie did say she did something to Rocky. That’s practically the same as a confession, isn’t it? Minnie said something about how she knew what Rocky had done and how Rocky couldn’t hide from her.”

  Declan pursed his lips and glanced around. “And where is this deadly neighbor?”

  “Her husband came and collected her before I had a chance to get all the details. And just so you know, I mean, in case it’s important, I think Minnie might be a little mentally unbalanced. Or maybe a lot mentally unbalanced.”

  “This just gets better and better.” He was about to toss the ice bag on the nearest table, thought better of it, and dropped it on the floor. “Still, it might be worth mentioning to Tony.”

  I gave him a smile. “Already done.”

  “Well, you have been busy, haven’t you? So . . .” Declan slapped the arms of the chair and stood. “What do we do next?”

  It was the same question I’d been asking myself, yet somehow, knowing Declan was there to work through the mystery with me made things seem a little easier to handle. “I guess we look around. Maybe for a date book that would tell us who might have been here with Rocky last night. Or for a diary. You know, because of that little key Rocky gave Sophie.”

  He didn’t look convinced. “I’m thinking safe deposit box,” he said.

  It made a world of sense.

  Grateful for the insight, I asked the next logical question. “Which bank?”

  Declan made a face. “That’s the thing with safe deposit boxes. They never put the name of the bank on the key. And customers are urged not to keep their keys with any of their bank information. You know, for security reasons.”

  “Then how do we find out which bank it’s from so we can see what’s in the box?”

  Again, he glanced around the room. “I guess we can start with what’s in front of us. We’ll look through the house, room by room. There are bound to be bank statements or, like you said, a calendar of some kind. Maybe something will give us some clue as to where the safe deposit box might be and maybe something will help us make sense of what happened here last night.”

  We started our search there in the parlor which, come to think of it, might not have been the wisest plan in the world. Rocky’s parlor was crammed with pictures and furniture and bric-a-brac. The drawers of every bureau were stuffed full with account books and receipts. It was overwhelming.

  “Rocky always talked about her home office,” I told Declan. I was on my knees finishing with the last of the papers I found in a marble-topped dresser with a pumpkin on top of it and a glittery black cat beside it, Rocky’s homage to the upcoming Halloween holiday. “I pictured some room upstairs, something more formal, but something tells me this was her office.” I hadn’t found anything of interest and I sat back on my heels and sighed. “I don’t know about you, but I think we’re getting nowhere fast.”

  Declan had taken a pile of papers from a one-drawer table near the window and sat down with them, and he was just about at the bottom of it. “Receipts for organic fertilizer, receipts for flower pots, receipts for peat moss and seeds and the plastic containers she used to package her herbs,” he said, shuffling through the last of the papers. “Nothing here says murder to me. But there’s no sign of cyanide, either, and if Rocky administered it to herself, you’d think there would be.”

  Finally, someone was talking sense!

  I put everything back where I’d found it and stood. “And will Sophie have to go through all this?” I asked him. “You know, as executrix?”

  He nodded. “Knowing Sophie, it will take her a while.”

  “Is that your way of saying we need to keep looking?”

  He stood, stretched, and pressed a hand to the small of his back. Halfway through the pile of papers he’d just been through, he’d stripped off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He looked like a man who was ready to get down to business. Not to mention handsome and sexy as hell.

  I batted the thought away.

  After all, I wasn’t staying in Hubbard and there was no use starting s
omething I knew was going to end too soon.

  “I’ll check the kitchen. You check the dining room,” I said, and I’m pretty sure I managed to make it sound like a logical plan rather than a tactical retreat from all that deliciousness. Before he could even begin to suspect, I dashed into the kitchen and got to work.

  I checked the cupboards and the pantry. I even looked in the dishwasher. The good news is that I didn’t find any papers I needed to look through, so the search went quickly. I did find a good many wineglasses, including the match to the one we’d found tipped on the table next to Rocky’s chair the night before. I could tell from the etching and the thin weight of the glass that it was an antique.

  “You know . . .” I took the glass down from the cupboard and twirled the stem in one hand at the same time I walked over to the dining room door. Declan was just about done looking through the china cabinet and he looked up when he heard me. “If Rocky had a guest last night, both these glasses would have been out, don’t you think? I mean, you wouldn’t have one wineglass out and not another, and if you were going to have two out, you’d use matching glasses, right?”

  “Maybe.”

  It wasn’t the ringing endorsement of my reasoning I was looking for.

  “What?” I demanded.

  When Declan shrugged, his shirt pulled over his broad shoulders. “If there was a person here with Rocky last night . . .” He made sure I understood this was just a hypothesis. “Maybe that person didn’t want any wine. Maybe that person did use that matching glass and since he—I’m just calling him he, I’m not saying we know that for sure—since he didn’t want anyone to know he was here, he washed the glass and put it away.”

  So much for brilliant theories.

  Declan went right back to work so the face I made at him went to waste. I went back into the kitchen, put the glass where I’d found it, and looked around some more. Unlike the parlor, the kitchen had been pretty simple to search and I was hoping for the same from the other rooms of the house. There was only one piece of furniture I’d yet to check out, a thigh-high wooden cupboard near the back door. It had two doors at the front that swung outward, and eager to finish the kitchen and get upstairs, I opened it. The cupboard was filled with candles. I wasn’t surprised. Rocky had been a big proponent of ambience, which always made me wonder why she hadn’t talked some sense into Sophie when it came to decorating the Terminal.

  I wouldn’t have felt I was being thorough if I didn’t look through the cupboard so I started with the bottom shelf, where boxes of tea lights were stacked one on top of the other.

  Good thing I did.

  “Declan!” I guess he heard the urgency in my voice because he came into the kitchen just as I pulled a desk calendar out of the cupboard. “It’s a date book,” I said, waving it at him. “For this year.” The calendar featured pictures of garden plants, was about eight by ten inches big, and spiral bound. It showed a week at a time, spread over two pages, each day marked off by a rectangle.

  I took the calendar to the table and sat down and Declan came up behind me and braced his arms on either side of me, the better to see over my shoulder.

  I ignored the heat of his body and the scent of his bay rum aftershave (which, I should mention, wasn’t easy) and flipped the calendar to the right week, automatically smiling when I saw that Rocky had lived up to her reputation for style and spunk, even when it came to her calendar. I remembered her telling me that she insisted on always writing with a French-made Oldwin fountain pen and she added a flourish to every letter.

  “She’s got the book signing marked,” I said, pointing at Friday. “And this evening’s talk at the library by Andrew MacLain. See?” I read what Rocky had written on that day’s square. “‘Tonight! A chance to hear Andrew speak. Starts at seven, but I’ll get there early for a front-row seat!’ That should prove to Tony that she couldn’t have killed herself,” I told Declan. “The fireworks last night, the library talk tonight. Rocky had plans.”

  “And she’s got nothing written on yesterday’s date except for the parade in the afternoon and the fireworks in the evening.” Declan’s voice reflected my own disappointment.

  I tapped a finger against the calendar page. “So she wasn’t expecting anyone here last night, at least not anyone she’d put on her calendar.”

  “But what about this?” Declan wasn’t even looking at the entry for Saturday. He had a finger on Thursday, where Rocky had written something in teeny little letters.

  I squinted and put my nose closer to the calendar, reading Rocky’s note. “‘It doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand. Someone in the house last night? Or was I dreaming? Nothing taken, but I swear, I heard—’” The last word was impossible to read because the ink was smeared. My blood ran cold.

  “Someone here? In the house?” Yeah, I got it. If it was true, that someone was no longer there. But that didn’t keep me from looking into every corner of the kitchen, just to make sure we were alone, that we were safe.

  Like I’d been punched in the gut, I sat back in my chair. “No wonder she was distracted Friday when she came to the book signing. She thought a burglar was in the house on Thursday night. She was nervous. And upset. Why didn’t she say anything?”

  “Why didn’t she call the police?” Declan took the chair next to mine, and he knew I was going to ask, so he explained before I could. “If she’d called about a break-in, Tony would have known about it. Rocky’s death would have made more sense to him if he had this piece of the puzzle. Still . . .” Thinking, he wrinkled his nose. “Poison doesn’t seem like something a burglar would use, does it? I mean, a burglar might shoot someone or knock them over the head. But cyanide in a wineglass? To me, that seems more . . .”

  “Personal?” I filled in the blanks for him with the word he refused to say and turned my attention back to the calendar. “Look at the weeks before this week,” I told Declan, because he was seated on my left and it was easier for him to turn the pages back to the weeks before Rocky’s death. “Let’s see what else she has to say.”

  As it turned out, Rocky said a lot.

  The notations started two months earlier.

  “Hang-up phone call,” the first of them said.

  That same note appeared on five other days; Rocky’s neat script a little heavier, a little more worried, each time.

  “Saw someone on the property,” she’d noted just a couple of weeks before the night of the event at the Book Nook. “Maybe just Minnie Greenway. Not sure if I hope it was . . . or wasn’t.” I poked at the page. “Minnie Greenway! See, I told you she was a suspect.”

  “Maybe,” Declan conceded, but not in a way that made me think he was convinced.

  “This is all evidence,” I said, and dared him to find an objection, and when he didn’t I said, “We need to get this calendar to Tony.”

  And still, he didn’t look convinced. “I’m not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here,” Declan said, the voice of gloom and doom. “But I know cops. Even good ones like Tony. There’s always a chance he could say that we wrote those notes there, just to try to disprove his suicide theory.”

  “But we wouldn’t do that.”

  “I know that. And Tony knows it, too. But I’m just telling you, cops have to be careful and they have to be sure. If they’re going to build a case on evidence, they have to know it’s rock solid. This isn’t going to prove anything to them.”

  “Unless they’re the ones who find it.” I snatched up the calendar and put it back exactly where it came from. “If we tell Tony we saw a calendar in the cupboard and pulled it out and when we saw what it was, we put it back right away . . . if we tell him we think it’s something he might want to look at . . .”

  Declan nodded. “It might work.”

  “Admit it, it’s a brilliant plan.”

  This, he was not willing to go along with and rather than press
it, I asked, “So what do we do next?”

  Declan glanced at his phone. “It’s after noon. I’ll call Tony and let him know we’re here and that we found something he might want to look at and that we didn’t find any cyanide. Bet he didn’t find any cyanide, either, and he’s just too stubborn to admit it. Cops.” The spin he put on this last word told me exactly what he thought of the law enforcement profession, even when the cop in question was a friend. “Then I don’t know about you, but I think I’ve had it with digging through Rocky’s things today. We can always come back another time.”

  I had to agree. In the meantime, there were plenty of other things to think about: those notes in Rocky’s calendar, the key that might belong to a safe deposit box, Minnie Greenway.

  And someone in the house just a few nights before.

  “Help me check the doors, will you?” I asked Declan, and I didn’t even need to explain; he checked the windows, too, and when we were sure everything was locked up good and tight, I peeked into the parlor one more time.

  That Statue of Liberty book was on the chair where I’d dropped it and since it was something Rocky valued, it seemed wrong to leave it there. I picked it up, ready to set it back on the table where I’d found it, but like I said, it was a big book full of color photographs, and heavy. I bobbled the book and when it slipped out of my hands, I made a grab for it right before it hit the floor.

  I saved the book from damage but there was nothing I could do about the papers that fluttered out of it and landed all around me.

  “Newspaper clippings,” I told Declan, making a grab for the first piece of paper. It had been neatly cut not from a local paper, but from the New York Times, and was dated a few months earlier. “Andrew MacLain,” I said, waving the article and the photograph that accompanied it at Declan. “A profile piece about how he spearheaded the restoration project on the Statue of Liberty.” I reached for the next piece of paper. “This one is about MacLain, too.”