Deadly Homecoming at Rosemont Read online

  “How’s Janice doing?” I wondered aloud.

  “You can just about guess.”

  And I could.

  Janice began her labored ascent along the concrete walkway to the lot. A competent worker, she thrived in the most boringly monotonous routine an office setting could provide. She liked everything to run smoothly: no bumps, no waves, no surprises. If Janice heard other professors dub history “the dead science,” she wouldn’t have been offended. She liked her world as silent as the tomb.

  Gideon left me to meet Janice halfway. I still held the exhibit’s guidebook. I wanted to peruse it from the beginning, but instead, dropped it into the car. Never, I thought, as I closed the door, has a people been studied like the Ancient Egyptians. The mask and their gold jewelry would be an attraction in any civilization, especially over mummification tools. Yuk!

  As Janice and Gideon approached, her round face focused on me. She leaned into him for support with pallor on her cheeks. Her eyes were owl-like, suited to her narrow, beaky nose. I fell in step beside her and her handbag, her heavily bejeweled fingers clamped onto its shoulder strap. Frazzled described her hair and her nerves.

  “Oh, gawd, Wrenn, am I glad that’s over. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go in that lab again. I just know I have blood on my shoes.” Janice made a face and took exaggeratedly high steps. “When I get home, I’m throwing these shoes away.”

  Completely overwhelmed at this point, I checked out her shoes and immediately worried about mine. “Blood? On your shoes?”

  “You don’t know?” Her owl eyes grew wide. “Bill Mackey was unconscious in the lab this morning when Adam and I arrived. I thought he was dead. His mother goes to my church, you know.” She said this last part to Gideon as if that vouched for him in some way. “Thank gawd Adam didn’t mind when I waited outside while he stayed with Bill.”

  Bill Mackey was the newest member of Eastwood’s police force.

  “I had to get out of there, so I rushed for the door. There was blood all over the concrete back there.” She released Gideon long enough to point a finger in the general direction of Blake Hall. Familiar with the layout of the building, I knew the closest door to her then would’ve been the farthest door from us now.

  Filling in a few salient points, Gideon said, “We’re assuming Mackey was hit over the head outside, then dragged inside to cover the theft for as long as possible.”

  Janice grabbed my arm. “When Adam opened that safe, I thought my heart would fall out of my chest. Muslin was all over the floor. Adam instantly knew the mask was missing, then he couldn’t find the jewelry. I was no help since I hadn’t seen any of the pieces. He was a wreck and didn’t know what to do. Well, I told him right away to call Gideon.”

  I pictured the closet-sized safe with its narrow aisle flanked by sturdy shelving. Unbleached muslin, an inexpensive fabric, can swaddle historic objects without transferring chemicals to them from the cloth.

  Beside me, Janice shivered. “When they put Bill in the ambulance, he was as white as the sheet they used. I’m sure I didn’t look much better.”

  Gideon and I made steady progress toward her green Taurus wagon, intent on putting her in it.

  “Adam and I completely forgot the building was supposed to be guarded,” she went on. “By the time I tossed my purse on my desk, he had the lab unlocked. We were just chatting away. We walked right through to the storeroom and never saw Bill. He lay behind all the packing crates.”

  “What made you look?” I asked.

  Throwing a hand up, she said, “We never would’ve seen him if Adam hadn’t gone over to use the wall phone to call Gideon, and there he was.” When she clamped her eyes closed, I wondered if she dwelled on the sight again. Then her eyes sprang open. “My nerves are shot. I’m going home.”

  “Slacker,” Gideon chided in his deep baritone.

  Twisting her head up, she saw his growing smile and added a meager one of her own. “Well, they’re shutting down the building anyway.”

  Gideon handed her into the station wagon, and I made her promise to fix some tea and rest.

  “And take a pill. I won’t get through this without taking a pill.” She released a nervously shrill cackle and started the car. Gideon closed the door, and we watched until she guided the wagon out of the lot.

  “How are you doing with all this?”HuHi His voice held a troubled quality while I remained fixed on the Taurus shrinking from view. Figuratively, I knew he shifted gears. The subject was now murder.

  Gently, he grasped my elbow. I turned to face him. His brows knitted as he searched my eyes. Something he saw made him pull me in.

  There against his chest, Trey Rosemont flashed in my mind—the blood, the flies, the nausea, his one dead eye looking up at me. It seemed a meaningless jumble, too much bombarding my head. Then again, I could have almost fallen asleep in his arms. The rush, the letdown, then another crime, just to have it all repeated. My last ounce of strength drained away while Gideon waited for an answer.

  “I’ve never seen so much blood,” I murmured, feeling those few words adequately summarized the whole story. His arms tightened around me. His lips met the top of my head. “And I think I said the wrong things about Clay to the lieutenant who questioned me.”

  “Did you tell the truth?”

  “It’s not as simple as that.” I would have told him about the bad blood between the two men, but Gideon’s name floated up to us. We separated to see Professor Adam Porter striding our way. Several yards behind Adam, a female officer moved across campus.

  “That’s Sherrie,” Gideon said. “Looks like she’s going over toward campus police. I guess that idea to talk with her about private collectors will have to wait.”

  We split the distance with the approaching man. Adam reached forty years of age still an eligible bachelor. I always felt he tried too hard to win the ladies. Tall, with a thin face and frame, he possessed average looks.

  “Hi, Wrenn. I didn’t know you were here.”

  “I’m sorry about all this, Adam. I know you worked hard on getting the exhibit here.” On the other hand, the white shirt, pleated pants, and dress shoes he wore gave me the impression he assigned himself the role of supervisor for the day’s work rather than getting his hands dirty pitching in.

  “Yeah. Me, too.” Adam tossed a look over his shoulder and ran a hand through black hair, thick and wavy. “Uh, Gideon, they’re closing the building for a few days.”

  His statement was backed up by an officer lacing police tape through the handles of a side door.

  “That’s what Janice said,” Gideon muttered.

  “One of the other officers wants to talk with you inside for a minute.” He pushed dark-rimmed glasses up his sloping nose. The bridge of his glasses found the place where his brows planned to meet someday very soon.

  “Sure, I’ll be right there.”

  Sluggishly, Adam nodded and turned. My sympathy rose for the man who tried to motivate with all the stuffing knocked out of him. I knew how that felt.

  “Well, I’d better go see what the officer wants,” Gideon said.

  “All this isn’t good, is it?” I asked in simplified understatement.

  “Any mishap with those artifacts and we’re out of the foundation’s program. Period.”

  “This might be considered a mishap.”

  “More than likely, it will be.”

  I caught my hand in his fingertips, and he gave it a reassuring squeeze. I watched him walk away, past the wooden sign staked in the ground identifying two-story Blake Hall. The glass door he pulled open caught a glint of abundant sunshine. While I was momentarily blinded, Gideon vanished.

  Behind me, I heard a throat clear. Turning, I received my first look at Sergeant Sherrie Lippincott. Her right hand rested casually on the butt of her gun.

  Intuitively, she answered the question I had not put into words and set the tone for what would follow. “Yeah, I’m the one he dumped for you.”

  Bef
ore I could respond, the radio on her shoulder epaulette squawked. Sherrie Lippincott added a little more distance between us while she checked in with Dispatch. She entered into a low discussion, providing someone with an interim report.

  Her manner was confident, decisive, and, as I just experienced, direct. She stood a few inches taller than I and a few pounds heavier. Part of that was due to her height and part because she worked out. Evidence of strength training showed across her shoulders and in the muscles of her arms. She wore a dark blue uniform with extra police gear stowed on her belt. Yeah, including handcuffs. I guessed her age to be thirty-five. Her long, thick, streaky-blonde hair was French-braided, then pulled up in the back, and barretted. And, of course, there was a strain on the button at midchest.

  At the close of her conversation, she looked me in the eye. We took a few seconds to size each other up. I don’t know about men, but women can do this right out of the box.

  This woman owned a long memory and a short fuse. At headquarters, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, it couldn’t have been easy when Gideon dumped her—to use her word. I experienced her type before. She was haughty about standards, which, of course, Gideon met. But now, all the wrong guys chased her. Every time that happened, she blamed him. She was a mud wrestler in the game of life: mean, strong, and she didn’t do it for the cheers of her audience. She did it purely for the battle itself.

  I could see her charms. Her eyes were big, her face bright, and her smile, when she used it on a man, would be captivating. She’d be bubbly with men and abrupt and bristly with women. She was the one other women called “a bitch,” and she reveled in the knowledge. And men didn’t understand why women couldn’t get along with her. She could throw herself into a pout, and men would scurry to set her world right again. She would’ve been too smart to play those games with Gideon. He got the girls too easily. Gideon was probably the one man she had worked hard to keep, and she lost him anyway.

  Those who rise above their enemies are those who remember the social graces in times of great discord. To this end, I spoke first. “I don’t suppose introductions are necessary.”

  There. That was done.

  “We can skip the niceties if you’d prefer. I know I would.” After a brief pause for mutual consent, she went on. “I’ve been waiting a long time to ask this, so I’ll get right to the point.”

  “Please do.” I thought my tone carried both civility and arrogance.

  “Gideon said he met you up at Dillon’s house at a cocktail party.” She referenced Stuart Dillon, Eastwood’s president for over a decade.

  “Wow. That was almost six years ago.”

  “I’m completely aware of that. Is that when he met you?”

  I didn’t see any harm in answering, so I said, “Yes, but what—”

  “So if the party was just for history department personnel, how did you end up there? Because that’s what he told me. Eastwood people only. No guests. I couldn’t go.”

  I tried to keep a smirk off my face, but may not have succeeded. “As I recall, only Eastwood people were there. Teachers, students, board members. They were celebrating the history department’s award of the grant for the new archeology program. That’s what brought about the Egyptian exhibit,” I explained, although I knew Gideon already did so. “As it happened, Mayor Tallmadge and I were in Dillon’s office late that afternoon, so our invitation was issued at the last minute. The mayor and Dillon just signed off on the agreement that established the police department here on campus, if you remember.”

  “Oh, I remember quite well. One day, I’m dating Gideon Douglas and literally twenty-four hours later, he’s fallen completely and irreversibly in love with a women he hardly knows. Those were his words,” she said, having inched forward, jabbing a finger my way.

  If she chose that moment to sling a little mud instead, it would have hit me full in the face. He talked with her about us, I thought, before an us really existed. “If it makes you feel any better,” I said honestly, “when I met him that night, I thought he was a jerk.”

  “It doesn’t, and he told me that.”

  No question, Gideon would have known my true feelings. I expressed them more than once that night, using that very word. I disapproved of Gideon Douglas from the moment he walked in fashionably late until the mayor hauled me off Dillon’s terrace two glasses of wine later. And quite frankly, it took me a while to alter that opinion. “Was he cruel in some way when he broke it off? Because that doesn’t sound like him.”

  She raised a contemptuous eyebrow. “No, to answer you, he wasn’t cruel. The man was absolutely giddy. I never saw him like that before. He said he was in love for the first time in his life. Please,” she crooned, dragging out the word.

  “But I refused to go out with him.”

  “Lady, that was beside the point, as far as he was concerned.”

  I let the little mud pie I held slip through my fingers. I couldn’t see pursuing this any further. If she hadn’t gotten past this by now, she wouldn’t change her tune because I rallied around the idea. So I moved on to the brief-but-telling survey I take at this point in these one-on-one meetings with Gideon’s old girlfriends.

  “Now, Sergeant, I have a question for you.”

  Her expression bordered on the indignant, like a commoner imposed upon royalty.

  “When Gideon wrote you a note or sent a card, did he sign his full name? Just his first name? Did he use his initials? Did he use two initials, or three?”

  “What? His first name. And before you ask, he didn’t turn the dot over the ‘i’ into a heart,” she said belligerently. For good measure, she leveled a look on me that said I was nuts.

  I gave her a satisfied smile. To date, not one of the answers any of the women provided matched the signoff Gideon used on his first note to me.

  Leaving her bewildered, I strolled off to the car.

  Open Assignments

  I scuffed into the city council reception area on the tail end of a second wind. Lucy Matthews, its sole inhabitant, crimped the phone between her shoulder and head. Scattered around the perimeter of her defined space are the mayor’s office, my office, and those belonging to six elected city council members. They sit alongside the mayor in chambers twice a month, setting policy and being good stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars.

  Mayor K.C. Tallmadge’s door was closed, but I saw him with the telephone receiver pressed to his ear, and he saw me. We traded glances through a window cut into the wall next to the door.

  For nearly a minute, I chugged at a rough idle, fiddling with Gram’s single pearl hung around my neck on a chain, which reminded me of our too-short visit this morning. Neither telephone conversation came to a close, but Lucy waved a note, getting my attention. The note said, Ohio Council of Mayors speech. I swore under my breath.

  I took K.C.’s draft home last night to smooth out several spots and forgot to grab it when I left the house so early to meet Clay Addison. K.C. would give the speech early next week, and he set time aside on this afternoon’s calendar to review the changes. I had to make time to run home and retrieve it. On that sour chord, I retreated to my office, only to greet another disaster.

  I forgot that I left my office in shambles after working late last night. A sea of black-and-white photographs with white scalloped rims covered every available surface. I stepped around a grid of pictures on the floor and safely reached refuge at my desk, also layered in photos. The wooden desk met the wall opposite the connecting door, which opened into the mayor’s roomy sanctum. My office was dwarfed by comparison. I always felt it was originally designed to serve the mayor as a closet. It does have two windows, though: one, to the street; the other, with a view of the back of Lucy’s head.

  Seated at my laptop, I roused it from its hibernation. I saw the icon denoting unread email messages and brought up the listing. The first message received was sent by Irv Hammer, my newspaper editor at the Havens Messenger. While it appeared another day would pa
ss without any official profits from the historian shingle, the occasional article I wrote for the Messenger added a few dollars to my bank account.

  I clicked on Hammer’s name. The screen changed, and I jumped. His words were typed in huge letters, all caps with a bold font. It started, GRAYSTONE. My shoulders sagged. “Grayson. Grayson,” I corrected aloud. The man has never once gotten my name right. I read on:

  PIEDMONT ALLEY. EVER HEARD OF IT? HERE’S HOW THE GAME IS PLAYED: YOU WRITE; I EDIT. ARE YOU WRITING ABOUT PIEDMONT ALLEY? I DON’T THINK SO BECAUSE I’M NOT EDITING. IRV HAMMER

  Back in late January, Hammer assigned me a three-part historical series. I was almost certain his underlying goal was to scare me off. It came at a time in my life when I needed a distraction. I still felt lost nearly a year after Grams’ death, so I told the sawed-off, cigar-chewing, crotchety old fart I’d do it. He doubted me from day one, but that only served to heighten my desire. As it turned out, I had a leg up on the first segment, which ran in March. I researched the old Baxter Opera House during my days at City College. I dug out those notes and retold a tale from 1906, complete with a love triangle, mysterious death, ghost in residence, and an exorcism performed sixty years later by an eccentric hermit.

  Hammer’s lecture today referenced the second piece of the series. I stepped to the window, photographs lining its ledge, to stare out at the subject of my story. Ironically, any hope of seeing Piedmont Alley was blocked by the newspaper building across the street. The building sat in its exalted position as watchdog over city government. That didn’t bother me. But supposedly inside, my editor’s neck twitched regularly, knowing I drafted not that first word on my current assignment.

  From the window, I could see the intersection of Snowden and Gatling. Those streets made up the north and east sides of the blocks surrounding Piedmont Alley. Several years ago, a group of downtown merchants with some capital to invest hatched the idea to turn the block inside out. Back entrances became main entrances along the now attractive and quaint alleyway. Shoppers were summoned onto the wide, brick-paved walkway by colorful awnings and flower baskets hung from turn-of-the-century-style street lamps. Small café tables were stationed outside lunch stops, the chairs regularly filled by downtown workers.