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Ivy smiled over her shoulder at us, then got up and slipped down the hallway. In her brown skirt and brown sweater, she seemed to disappear into the shadows after a few steps. But oddly enough, she didn’t seem drab like Linda. More elfin.
“If we’re bothering you, we can leave,” I called out.
“Just going to the basement to mix some more pigments,” she said.
I heard the basement door close.
“I don’t think we’re bothering her particularly,” Sarah said. “She just needs a lot of time alone. It’s not quite the same thing.”
I nodded.
“Hell of a night last night,” I said.
Sarah nodded but didn’t say anything.
“What I wouldn’t give to have been anywhere but here,” I said.
Sarah giggled.
“Meg, if you’re trying to find out whether or not I have an alibi for the time when Clay was killed, you could just ask me,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “I gather you do have an alibi.”
“Yes,” she replied. “I was neutering tomcats.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that.
“Actual feline tomcats,” she went on. “Not Clay’s kind. And spaying the females.”
“I didn’t know you moonlighted as a vet,” I said.
“I was helping Clarence Rutledge. He’s been doing a lot of pro bono work down at the animal shelter, spaying and neutering that whole feral cat colony that lives in the woods behind the New Life Baptist Church.”
That made sense. Clarence was Caerphilly’s most popular veterinarian. And although his appearance was intimidating—he was six feet, six inches tall and almost as wide, and usually wore leather and denim biker gear, even under his white lab coat at the clinic—he was a notorious softie when it came to any kind of animal.
“His clinic’s so busy during the day that the only time he can do the surgeries is after hours,” she said. “And we’d trapped a lot of feral cats. We were ru
“That’s great,” I said. “Best alibi I’ve heard all day, in fact.”
“There is one thing I’m worried about,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“My fingerprints might be on the murder weapon.”
Chapter 10
My jaw fell open, and I couldn’t think of anything to say for several moments.
“How did that happen?” I asked finally.
“I don’t know for sure,” she said. “But there’s a gun missing, and for all I know, it could be the murder weapon, and if it is, my fingerprints will be on it.”
“Missing where?”
“From the house,” she said. “From my room.”
“You were keeping a gun in your room?”
“Not on purpose,” she said. “It’s not even mine—it’s Kate’s.”
Kate—her business partner, the one Sarah had been having such an angry conversation with the day before—Kate saying “keep it” and Sarah saying “I don’t even want it around me.”
“Her husband got it for her when he started having to commute to Tappaha
“She was afraid of Clay?”
“He’s got a temper,” Sarah said. “He had a booth near us at the Caerphilly Home and Garden Show last year, and he was just a pill the whole time. Flirting with us, and smirking at us, and then snaking people away from us the whole time, and then at the end of the show, during the teardown, someone ticked him off and he just went berserk. Wrecked part of his booth and the booth next door. He was like a crazy man. And Kate freaked. Ever since then, she’s wanted nothing to do with him. He works out of his house, which isn’t that far from our office, and for a while he kept trying to drop in and schmooze. Until Bailey tried to bite him.”
“Bailey?” I echoed. “The third partner in Byrne, Banks, and Bailey?”
“Bailey’s an Irish setter,” she said, with a giggle. “And he pretty much hates Clay, too.”
“Dogs can be good judges of character,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” Sarah agreed. “Anyway, when Kate heard Clay was part of the show house, she wanted us to pull out. And I didn’t think that would be good for our rep. I said she could pull out, but I’d do it myself. We had a pretty big fight over it.”
“And then she brought her gun over here.”
“Yesterday morning,” she said. “I was off ru
“And you think someone took it while we were moving everything out from under the flood?”
Sarah nodded.
“Damn,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“What kind of gun was it?”
“I have no idea.”
“How big was it?”
She held her hands out about eight inches apart. Then moved them out to ten inches. And down to six. And then threw them up in frustration.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Gun-sized. Kind of small, I guess.”
Her inability to identify the gun very accurately might have been more frustrating if I knew more about guns myself. Or if we knew what kind of gun had killed Clay.
“Anyway—I figure I should probably tell the chief.”
“Absolutely.”
“Even though it will make Kate a suspect, and she’ll be mad at me, and maybe her husband will be mad at her for losing the gun?”
“Even though.”
“Damn,” she said.
We waited in silence for a while, and then the door opened. Alice came out, looking relieved to have gotten her interview over with.
“Ms. Byrne?” the chief said.
Sarah stood up and slowly walked toward the study.
My phone rang. I answered it, my eyes still on Sarah and the chief.
“Goose or turkey?”
“What’s that?”
“I said, goose or turkey?”
I looked at my phone. The number showing was Michael’s and my home phone. But the voice—
Wait—it was Michael’s mother. Who evidently had arrived, and was starting the preparations for Christmas di
Last year, my mother and Michael’s had each decided to cook a Christmas di
One of the saving graces of Mother’s involvement in the show house was that it would prevent a recurrence. Even the mothers realized that last year’s excess had been over the top, and while we’d made progress on getting them to join forces, I’d been more than a little worried about the possibility of conflict in the kitchen. Not that Mother cooked, of course. She usually drafted one or two relatives whose culinary skills she admired and got them to cook for her. But while most of her family were quite willing to let Mother order them around in the kitchen, I didn’t think Dahlia Waterston would be as patient.
So I’d been very relieved when Mother a
Michael’s mother not only forgave her, she rejoiced in the opportunity to plan the di
Evidently I wasn’t going to be completely uninvolved.
“I tend to prefer turkey,” I said. “But goose is also nice.”
“And goose is traditional,” she said.
I decided not to say “So’s turkey.”
“But many people find goose a little too greasy.”