Dirty Tricks: A Kate Lawrence Mystery Page 5

  She sagged back against her chair and stared past me out the window. “Well, the short version is, some bats got into my house last night through an unscreened window. Tommy—that’s one of the young men who are workin’ on the house—took that screen out to be repaired yesterday, and I guess he left the window open a few inches, although that surely doesn’t sound like Tommy. He’s a real stickler about makin’ sure everything is locked up tight before they leave for the day. I think I remind him of his mama, and it makes him a tiny bit protective,” she smiled. “Anyway, by the time I stumbled downstairs to find out what was bangin’ into things in my living room, the poor thing had knocked itself out and was just lyin’ there on the floor.”

  “That must have given you a start, all right.”

  “Well, I’m basically a country gal, and critters don’t give me the vapors, for the most part. I can do without snakes, though. It’s something about the way they slither. I don’t wish them any harm, mind you, but catchin’ them does give me pause.” She frowned and closed her eyes.

  “May? What happened to the bat? Was it alive?”

  Her eyes flew open. “Oh, sure. I scooped him up on a paper plate and carried him out the back door and put him on the lawn. After about a minute he started movin’ around and got airborne. He flew around in a loopy circle a couple of times and then straightened out and went on his way, thank goodness.”

  “Wow, good for you! Not one woman in a thousand would have done that, especially all alone in the middle of the night. No wonder you’re tired out.”

  She chuckled drily. “Oh, there’s more to the story than that.” She got up from her chair and started pacing briskly, pumping her arms up and down. “Got to do something to get the blood moving, or I’ll never get any work done today. Anyway, I came back inside and got myself a drink of water, and would you believe it? There was another bat flappin’ around the downstairs. I didn’t want him to knock himself unconscious like the first one, so I closed the door between the living room and the kitchen and opened up the unscreened window as wide as it would go. Sure enough, he went right out in a minute or two, so I closed the window and went back to bed. For a while, that is.”

  “Oh, no. Don’t tell me there was another one,” I groaned in sympathy.

  “I won’t bore you with the details of my activities between then and dawn. Suffice it to say there were many, many more bats in my house—at least a dozen.” She stopped pacing and put her hands on her hips. “You can’t tell me they all found their way in through a cracked-open window. Why would they even want to? It’s still perfectly warm outside, and the mosquitoes are plentiful. No, that’s what’s got me riled up, Kate. Those bats were put into my house quite deliberately by a person or persons unknown to frighten me. It’s the only explanation, but the question is, who would want to scare the bejesus out of a sweet little ol’ granny lady like me? I don’t even know anybody around here well enough to have gotten on their bad side.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at her self-portrait. “I really can’t imagine anyone taking you for a little old grandmother type, sweet or not, but this does have the earmarks of a prank.” I thought for a minute. “You don’t think one of your workmen did it, do you?”

  May grimaced. “See, that’s the trouble with this sort of thing. Without any idea in the world about who might have it in for you, you have no choice but to suspect everyone. In answer to your question, no, I don’t really think one of those nice young men did it. In fact, when Tommy and the others showed up this mornin’, they all put on a darned good show of being outraged on my behalf. I thought poor Tommy was going to cry, he felt so bad about leaving that window open. I told them all I actually have a soft spot for bats, and if any of them had a spare hour or two one of these days, I would surely love to have them build me a couple of bat houses and nail ‘em up for me.”

  “Which not only made Tommy feel better but let them all know that if one of them was responsible for this little caper, it didn’t succeed in frightening you, right?”

  “Right,” she agreed, “just in case. That’s what I mean. Now suspicion is my constant companion.” She sighed and dropped back into her chair, replacing her computer glasses on her nose. She tapped a few keys idly, scanning the material on the screen. “If I was still in Atlanta, I’d have some thoughts about suspects. As Margo has probably told you, I’m not one to sit quietly by if something is happening in the community that I don’t agree with. I have a big mouth, and I’m not afraid to use it, as my Douglas used to say. I’ve ruffled more than a few feathers in my time south of the Mason-Dixon Line, but up here? I can just about find my way to the supermarket, let alone know anything about local politics.”

  Watching her at her computer, I had a thought. “Wait a second, try this one on. Didn’t you tell me you’re in the middle of an open submissions period for Romantic Nights, where anybody can send in a romance manuscript to be considered for publication?”

  She nodded, clearly perplexed. “Yes, and it’s been a doozy, too. Wanna-be authors are comin’ out of the woodwork. I get tired just thinking about the number of submissions I still have to screen. Why?”

  “Well, you obviously don’t plan on publishing all of them, so that means you have to reject some, doesn’t it?”

  “Some!” She emitted the famous Farnsworth snort of amusement. “Let’s see, I’ve gotten more than a hundred submissions so far with another week to go, and I have four open slots on this year’s production schedule. So yes, I’m rejectin’ some. Your point?” She peered at me over the top of her specs.

  I considered the wisdom of what I was about to say but decided to say it anyway. “You’ve told us quite a lot about writers’ sensitive egos and general touchiness. Is it possible that one of the ones you’ve rejected is vindictive enough to want to get even in some way?”

  May’s jaw dropped. “You have got to be kidding me. For one thing, that’s just insane. For another, this is a virtual business. I operated it in Atlanta, and it’s still registered in Georgia, but now I’m runnin’ it here in Yankee territory. I do almost everything on line and via email, so about ninety-eight percent of these submissions are coming from people who have no idea in the world where my office is, let alone where I live. Thank God,” she added almost to herself. “Anyway, the idea of one of them creeping around my neighborhood in the dark, stuffin’ bats through my window, is just too …” and here she burst out laughing.

  I joined in. “Anyway, you’d have to have some kind of bad luck as a vengeance seeker to choose the one woman in Connecticut who not only isn’t afraid of bats but actually likes them. If this is the work of a disgruntled aspiring author, he or she is having a lousy week on a number of fronts.”

  May laughed so hard at that thought, she had to fish around in her desk drawer for a tissue to blot her eyes.

  “Oh, it’s not as dramatic as I’m makin’ it sound. It’s a simple matter to reject the really bad submissions. I just express a little boilerplate regret that our beta readers weren’t sufficiently intrigued by the three-chapter sample to request a full manuscript and wish them the best of luck placing their titles elsewhere. Send the reply, delete the original submission, end of problem. It’s the almost-but-not-quites that have me reaching for the Tums.”

  “Is that one of them?” I asked, gesturing at the sheaf of papers she’d been reading when I entered.

  She wrinkled her nose. “It is. Oddly enough, it’s from somebody who lives right around here.” She flipped back to the first page. “The woman—at least, I assume it’s a woman—is obviously using a pen name. I mean, Desirée L’Amour, seriously? But she has a post office box in Rocky Hill. That’s right next door to Wethersfield, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “She sounds as if she has an exotic streak, all right. What’s the problem?”

  “As I said, it’s almost right, but not quite. The descriptive passages are lovely, and the dialogue rings true, but the romantic encounters are a little clumsy and forced. She wr
ites about passion like someone who’s read about it but never actually experienced it. I’ll show you what I mean.” She shuffled through the sheets of paper and selected one to hand to me. “Here. Read this, and then tell me what you think.”

  I accepted the page with reluctance, hoping I wasn’t about to read anything too explicit; but after I’d scanned a couple of stilted paragraphs, I saw what May meant. I handed the sheet back to her.

  “Hmm, yes, technically correct but kind of detached emotionally. It’s not likely to fire a reader’s imagination.”

  “That’s it exactly. After all, the whole point of readin’ a sexy romance is vicarious enjoyment, and if you can’t imagine yourself in the heroine’s strappy sandals, you may as well turn out the light and get a good night’s sleep instead of staying up late to read.”

  “Uh huh, and you definitely want your customers staying up late to read. I get it. So why are you struggling over rejecting this one?”

  May laughed a bit sheepishly. “The thing is, this lady can punctuate a compound sentence correctly. She can spell and capitalize proper nouns and use a semicolon in the right place. She uses ‘me’ instead of ‘I’ as the object of a preposition. Do you know how rare all of that is?” She groaned and dropped her head into her hands. “I can hardly bear to cut her loose. This would be one manuscript we wouldn’t have to spend forty hours massaging into publishable shape. She can compose a gorgeous sentence. She just can’t write, do you see?”

  I sympathized with her dilemma. “It does seem a shame not to be able to use her considerable skills,” I agreed. “Say, maybe you could soften the blow by offering her a job as a freelance editor or proofreader or something. You have those, don’t you?”

  “All over the country,” May acknowledged, “but I can’t see a woman who bills herself as Desirée L’Amour bein’ thrilled about editing someone else’s novel.”

  Sighing, she tapped the papers in her lap into a neat stack and tossed them into the blue recycling bin that stood next to her desk. “Oh, well. Best get it over with.” She retrieved her computer spectacles from the top of her head and prepared to lower the boom on poor Desirée.

  Hearing the office phone ring, I waved goodbye and headed down the stairs to my own unpleasant tasks waiting in the Mack Realty office.

  Half an hour or so later, Strutter returned from her stroll, all smiles.“Get yourself outside now,” she said, shooing me out of the desk chair. “It’s one of the ten best days of the year weather-wise, and this year’s line-up of scarecrows is first rate. Emma and Jimmy loaned out the Law Suit to Blades Salon this year, and he looks just fine. Don’t miss the one by Olivia’s nursery school. Just look for the brooms that don’t have witches on them,” she grinned. “Go along with you now.”

  I was happy to allow myself to be chased out of the office and let myself out of the Law Barn’s big front door. For years I’d been accustomed to having my daughter Emma share the building with us. As an accomplished real estate paralegal, she ran the small shop of her lawyer boss, Jimmy Seidel. Our professional relationship had been good for us all, but it was the personal give-and-take on a daily basis I so sorely missed. Since she and Jimmy had relocated to Glastonbury, we’d hardly seen each other. My summer walks for exercise and my winter walks to feed the local water fowl and songbirds were now solitary. I missed my girl, although at nearly thirty years of age, she hardly qualified as that any longer.

  The sunshine cheered me immediately, as did the warm breeze and the sight of happy strollers nibbling bag lunches from The Cove Deli and Village Pizza, licking ice cream cones from Main Street Creamery, my destination, and enjoying the outdoor patio at Lucky Lou’s. I took my time walking down Old Main Street toward Wethersfield Cove, the better to enjoy the annual display known as Scarecrows Along Main Street. It was sponsored by the Old Wethersfield Shopkeepers Association and had become a beloved event for tourists and residents. Individuals and community groups alike participated, hoping to win prizes from the judges and having a lot of fun putting their exhibits together. I welcomed back perennial favorites such as The Roof Fiddler, who was perched on a house top; Fright Attendant and Passengers, guaranteed to elicit chuckles from white-knuckle flyers; a family of stick-mounted Booligans along a picket fence; and of course, our old friend Law Suit, a braying ass dressed entirely in a suit fashioned out of legal documents. The dozens of broom-wielding ghosts playing on a lawn were called Baby Broomers and had to be the display Strutter had been talking about.

  As I strolled along, events of the past few years crowded my memory, many of them having to do with informal investigations into which I’d been drawn along with my loyal partners. Some had involved unexplained deaths, including one not-so-recent demise, all of which had come to light during various real estate transactions in which Mack Realty represented buyers or sellers. There’s something about the transfer of property and the circumstances under which it changes hands that seems to provoke—or sometimes unearth—family dramas. Fortunately, all had been resolved fairly satisfactorily, and we’d made many more friends than we’d lost as a result of our investigations.

  This train of thought led me back to May’s story of bats in the night, as bizarre a tale as I’d ever heard. I walked into the Creamery and waved absentmindedly at one of the volunteer docents from the Keeney Memorial Cultural Center. I could never remember her name, but fortunately she was preoccupied with her cherry vanilla double-dip, so conversation wasn’t required. As I stood in the considerable line of customers waiting for service, I replayed May’s story of last night’s events from memory, hoping for an “Aha!” moment that would solve the mystery of the bats in her house. One bat might have been lured by the warm air seeping out of the slightly open window, but a dozen? No way.

  There was no doubt in my mind that the incident had been deliberately engineered to frighten May, but why? As she herself had said, she hadn’t become sufficiently acquainted with any of her new neighbors to provoke animosity; and no one else who might wish to make life unpleasant for her, such as a rejected author, could know where she lived as yet. Even more puzzling, whoever had put those bats in May’s house, either through the unscreened window or before leaving the house that day, didn’t really know Maybelle Farnsworth at all, if they thought a few harmless bats would give her the willies. I accepted my single scoop of maple walnut and squeezed past the still-waiting customers to make my exit, licking contemplatively.

  The whole thing simply made no sense, I thought, lifting a hand to Abby Stoddard, the owner of the Village Diner, as I retraced my route back to the Law Barn. I wondered if May had mentioned the prank, if that’s what it had been, to Margo and if so, what she thought about it. Probably not, since Margo had been at Vista View all day. I made a mental note to call her this evening, if she didn’t make it back to the Mack Realty office before I left for the day. I wanted to know what she thought about Isabelle Marchand anyway. Maybe I’d try to get Emma on the phone, too, although lately my calls went straight to voice mail. She had a way of cutting to the chase in these matters, and perhaps she could help us figure it out. It had been several days since we’d spoken, and this could be my excuse to touch base with her.

  Licking the last of the ice cream off my fingers, I let myself back into the Law Barn with a sigh. I threw May what I hoped was a cheerful smile as I passed her doorway and headed down the stairs to give Strutter a hand. May was right about one thing: with no hard and fast suspects at which to point a finger, it was necessary to suspect everybody, and that was no way to begin life in a new neighborhood. A second sigh escaped me as I accepted the fact that one way or another, I was about to be drawn into another investigation. At least this time, it didn’t involve a dead body.

  Five

  Armando worked odd hours, going to the Telecom offices in mid-morning and returning around eight in the evening, to accommodate communications with company clients scattered throughout the world’s time zones. Lately he had been leaving for work earlier in the mo
rning and returning later, which I assumed meant yet another difficult client in some far-off corner of the earth. I couldn’t be sure, because he wasn’t talking, sagging into his favorite seat and reaching for the TV remote in a single movement. I knew better than to grill him on the latest crisis, trusting that when he was ready he would let me know what was going on. Latinos operate differently than men of other ethnicities, and I had learned to bide my time and hold my tongue. Well, for the most part.

  Like the trampy lady in the old song, I got too hungry to wait that long for my dinner, so I ate mine earlier and left him a plate in the microwave. We exchanged cheek pecks and a little chitchat about domestic matters, but once he was settled in his half of our double recliner with his food and a cup of tea, I dashed up the stairs to my office and punched in Emma’s cell phone number. Once again, my call went directly to voice mail. I debated leaving a message. I didn’t want to become one of those sitcom mothers who stalk their adult children by telephone. On the other hand, I was beginning to be sincerely concerned about her silence. The decision was made for me when her voicemail got tired of waiting for me to speak and disconnected.

  “I don’t get it,” I complained to Margo, who picked up my call after the first ring. “She used to seem to enjoy sharing things with me, and all of a sudden, it’s radio silence. What could I possibly have done to offend her?”

  “Don’t be silly, Sugar. Whatever is causing her to hole up has nothin’ to do with you. I’m almost sure of it. You two have always been closer than bedbugs. My honest opinion is, it’s a man. That’s the only thing I can think of that a girl doesn’t always feel like sharin’ with her mama.”