Sleight Of Paw

19

There were a few flakes of snow blowing around when I headed down to the art studio. Ruby got to her feet and came over to me as soon as I walked into the room.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice husky with emotion. “I didn’t think I needed a lawyer, which wasn’t very smart.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “But all I did was make a phone call. The credit should go to Everett.”

“I already thanked him.” She slid a stack of brightly colored, knotted bracelets up and down her arm. “Kathleen, I didn’t hurt her.”

“I know that,” I said. “They’ll find out what really happened.”

We walked over to Maggie’s worktable. Mags was in the middle of an animated conversation with one of the other artists who shared studio space on that floor. She gave me a smile and kept on talking.

“How can anyone think that I would hurt Agatha?” Ruby asked, as I shrugged off my coat. “She changed my life.”

“Ruby what were you doing that night? Is there anyone who saw you or talked to you?” I was pretty sure I knew the answer: If Ruby had talked to anyone or been with anyone, the police wouldn’t have arrested her.

“I was home by myself, just watching a DVD,” she said quickly.

I looked at her without speaking. She flushed and looked away. “That’s a lie. I was sitting in the dark, eating cookie dough,” she said in a small voice. “I wasn’t on my computer. I didn’t answer the phone.” She let out a breath. “I had a fight with Justin. He drove me home and we got into it. He left, and I was going to walk down and get my truck but instead I just sat around eating half-frozen chocolate chip cookie dough.” She finally looked at me. “Pretty stupid, wasn’t it?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t help remembering my first few weeks in Mayville Heights after I’d left Andrew back in Boston. I’d spent a fair amount of time sitting in the dark, eating raw cookie dough myself. And ice cream and gobs of jam on English muffins. “It’s not stupid,” I said.

“If I had answered the phone or I checked my e-mail I’d at least be able to prove I was there.”

“We’ll figure something else out.” I looked around the room. Maggie was still talking. Justin was deep in conversation with a man whose suit and tie pegged him as Ruby’s lawyer. I was surprised to see Peter standing by one of the tall windows. In his dark suit and white shirt, his hair back in a ponytail, I almost hadn’t recognized him. Maybe he was there to represent Agatha’s son. I took a deep breath. “Ruby, I need to ask you something,” I said.

“Sure, what is it?”

“Last week, I saw you in the parking lot of the library with Agatha.”

She stiffened. “You probably did,” she said carefully.

“You were arguing about something.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with her death,” she said with an offhand shrug. “It was nothing.”

I knew that wasn’t true. She’d answered too quickly. I was getting so sick of hearing that the arguments and the envelope meant nothing when it was so clear they did.

“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “That brown envelope she was holding on to so tightly? It’s disappeared.”

The color drained from Ruby’s face. “Agatha’s death was an accident,” she said. “Someone was driving too fast or driving when they’d been drinking and they ran her down, panicked and took off.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But maybe not.”

Ruby looked stricken. “You think . . .” She had trouble getting the words out. “You think someone killed Agatha deliberately?”

“I don’t know.” What I left unsaid was that Marcus Gordon thought so, and that was what mattered.

“Even if that’s true, it couldn’t have been because of what was in the envelope.” She shook her head emphatically.

“Why?” I didn’t even try to keep the aggravation out of my voice. “What was in that stupid thing, anyway?”

“I can’t tell you,” she said.

“Ruby,” I said, leaning closer to make my point. “The police think you killed Agatha. This is a very bad time to be keeping secrets.”

“It’s not my secret to tell,” she said stubbornly.

“Well, whose secret is it?”

She took a long moment to think. “You should talk to Harry Taylor,” she said at last.

All roads led back to the old man. “Old Harry?”

She nodded. Harry had a secret. Ruby had a secret. Agatha had a secret. And now it looked like it was the same secret. All this secret keeping was a very, very bad thing to do. You just had to watch a couple of episodes of The Young and the Restless to know that.

Justin was looking in our direction and I knew I didn’t have much more time to make my point. “Agatha had some secret that Harry apparently knew, that you knew, and who knows how many other people knew.”

“No one else knew.”

I thought about Eric and realized that probably wasn’t true. “Agatha is dead. The police don’t think it’s an accident. That envelope with whatever was in it is gone. And you, who just happen to be one of the secret keepers, have been charged with Agatha’s murder. That’s four too many coincidences.” And way too many secrets.

“Harry didn’t hurt Agatha,” Ruby said, her mouth set in a tight line, hands on her hips. “First of all, he’s too old, and second, he’s not strong enough. And even if none of that stuff was true, I can promise you he would never ever hurt Agatha.”

“Ruby, I know that,” I said. “I know Harry didn’t kill Agatha any more than you did. But I can’t help but to keep thinking that whatever she had in that old envelope had something to do with her death.”

“It didn’t. You just have to trust me on this. It didn’t.” She made a dismissive wave with a hand. “Talk to Harry, Kathleen,” she said. And then she walked back to the others.

For a moment I thought about turning around and leaving, but Maggie was on her way over to me. “Everything all right?” she asked,

“Ask me later,” I said, watching Ruby go over and hug another one of the building’s artists who had just come in.

“Okay.” She linked her arm through mine and walked me toward the food. “Come have some soup,” she said. “It’s tomato vegetable, and there’s fresh Parmesan and those sourdough croutons you like.”

Maggie got me a bowl of soup and sprinkled cheese and croutons on top. I picked up a spoon and took a stool at the end of her worktable. I’d eaten about half the bowl when Justin came over, hooked the rung of an empty stool with his foot, and pulled it close so he could sit down.

“Hi, Kathleen,” he said. “I wanted to thank you for helping Ruby, so”—he held out his hands—“thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.

We sat in silence for a moment. Then he said, “This doesn’t feel real, you know. Ruby being arrested and me suddenly getting all this money from someone I didn’t know.” He shook his head. “I got something that will do so much good from Agatha Shepherd’s death, and Ruby—who loved her—got a load of trouble.”

So it was definitely true. “No one thinks Ruby killed Agatha.”

“The police do.”

“And they’ll figure out they’re wrong and find the real killer.”

Justin put his fingers flat on the table. And stared at them. “The funding fell through and I thought it was the end of the project. I was out of ideas. I’d begged for money. I’d literally begged for it. And then I found out a stranger had left me what I needed to get started. A stranger. I thought it was a dream or some kind of sick practical joke.” His eyes went to Ruby before giving me his attention again. “I’m thinking about not taking the money.”

“Because of Ruby.”

“Yeah.”

I could actually feel the energy coming off of him. It didn’t seem like he ever stopped moving. Some part of him—hands, feet—was always in motion. Right now it was his right foot moving up and down on the rung of the stool.

“Turning down that money isn’t going to change anything for Ruby,” I said. “And she’d hate your doing it.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, I know. But it would ease my guilty conscience.” He gave me a small smile.

I could sympathize a little on the guilt.

Justin shifted in his seat, picked up his coffee and set it down again. “Kathleen, what do you think happened in that alley?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“It could have been an accident,” he said slowly. He was still playing with his cup. “Maybe it was, I don’t know, someone who panicked, someone who was drinking. They ran and now they’re afraid to come forward. Otherwise . . . why would anyone want to kill an old woman?”

I shrugged.

“I just don’t buy that someone her age, who’d just come from rehabilitation hospital, for God’s sake, would have any enemies.”

“So maybe it was an accident and the driver panicked.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That had to be it. And it’s a stupid shortcut, you know. I walked through it.”

I’d thought the same thing myself. The alley didn’t really save any time or any distance, but if someone were driving it would help him avoid the stop sign at the corner.

“I feel bad for Eric, too,” Justin said, looking past me toward the high windows of the former school classroom behind us. “This can’t be good for business, and he made a hell of a lot of sacrifices to get that place off the ground.”

“You two are friends?” I asked. I glanced over at Maggie. She dipped her head in Justin’s direction and raised her eyebrows, code for Do you need rescuing? I gave a slight head shake.

He shifted on the stool again, pulling it a bit closer to me. His foot was tapping to some rhythm only he could hear. “We go way back,” he said. “We used to hang out together.” He laughed. “We got into a fair amount of trouble together.”

“Eric?” I said. That didn’t quite fit with the man I knew.

“Oh, yeah,” Justin said. “Kids I work with? Kids I want the camp for? I used to be one of them. I drank; I used. There’s a big chunk of time when I wasn’t straight for even an hour.”

I wasn’t sure what to say, although I was starting to see the reason for his intensity. “I was shoplifting,” he continued, “swiping stuff out of cars. You know that straight stretch of highway just outside of town, headed for Minneapolis?”

“I do.”

“Raced out there more times than I can count or remember. Pretty much every time with Eric riding shotgun.” He gave me a wry smile, almost like he had a bit of pride for the memory

“So, what changed?” I asked, leaning my elbow on the table and propping my head on my hand. “I take it you’re not still doing that anymore.”

He laughed, “Nope. Sober and straight for seven years now. No dope, no booze, although I do admit to still having a bit of a lead foot on the highway. What happened is I got arrested. I got sent to juvie.”

“Where you’ve learned . . . ?” I prompted.

“How to hot-wire a car and pretty much nothing else.” He fingered the silver skull bracelet on his right arm. “It took a couple more trips there and a couple of kick-ass counselors to turn me around. It’s why the camp’s so damned important. Some of us need a kick in the ass and a lot of help to get it all together.”

He drummed his fingers on the edge of the stool between his legs. “Eric, on the other hand, he got it together by himself. With Agatha Shepherd’s help.” He laughed. “Of course, it probably helped that I wasn’t around.”

His face got serious. “When I drank I was just mostly looking to have a good time, you know, but Eric, he was”—he hesitated—“destructive.”

I was still having a problem picturing Eric as the young man Justin was describing.

“He had blackouts when he had no idea what he’d been doing.” Justin looked at me. “It’s good that he doesn’t drink anymore. Period. I just don’t want what’s happened to mess up everything he’s worked so hard for.”

I thought about seeing Eric at the rink and how my first thought was that he looked like he’d just come off a binge. “Are you saying that something like Agatha’s death could start Eric drinking again?”

“No,” he said. “I mean, she was one of the few people who stuck by him when he was still drinking, so her death had to hit him hard. But start drinking? No.”

He fiddled with one of the silver skulls again. “Stress is not good for an alcoholic. There’s the impulse to have a couple, you know, just to take the edge off.” He exhaled slowly and noisily. “But that’s not where Eric is anymore. He has a wife and kids.” Justin traced the edge of the stool’s curved seat with his finger. “And he’d never do something and let Ruby or anyone else take the blame.”

Abruptly he got to his feet. “Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes I talk too much. I need to go see how Ruby’s doing. Excuse me.”

I watched him walk over to where Ruby seemed to be saying good-bye to Peter and slide his arm around her waist. I slipped off my own stool and went to Maggie. “I have to get back to the library.”

“Did Justin talk your ear off?” she asked.

“No, I, uh, learned a couple of things,” I said.

“Anything you want to share?”

“Later,” I said.

Maggie studied my face, but all she said was, “All right.”

I grabbed my coat and left. As I walked, I thought about what Justin had said, his insistence that Eric wouldn’t drink. I thought about Eric’s appearance, his evasiveness, and Susan’s out-of-character excuses. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he had been drinking. And now I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I didn’t know better.

I stopped at the corner. Peter was farther ahead of me, already on the other side of the intersection. All at once I was frozen in place, watching him making his way down the sidewalk in a black woolen Winterfest hat . . . and Ellis Slater’s aviator jacket.