Roses Have Thorns, page 7
I showered after cleaning up my breakfast dishes and dressed for church in a mulberry-colored sweater Joss had knit for me the previous Christmas, a black calf-length wool pencil skirt, and knee-high buttery-soft black leather boots. I left my hair down so that it curled around my shoulders, applied minimal makeup, and added simple gold jewelry.
After stopping to pick up my parents, who didn’t like driving in the snow, we headed down Penobscot Street to Wabanaki Avenue, turned west and arrived some five minutes later at the corner of Wabanaki and La Tour Road. Trinity Anglican Church was located on the eastern outskirts of Whippoorwill Woods, which were still dressed in their autumn colors, though they were looking muted and tatty now that we were at the end of the season. Across the street, the Congregational parish’s early services were just letting out, and there was a minor traffic jam while their parking lot emptied and the Anglican lot filled.
Since we were a little late, Mom, Dad, and I were forced to share a pew with Agnes and Walt Moore. They were lovely people, but Agnes’s singing voice reminded me of an atonal fog horn that was somehow always flat, and Walt’s snoring during the sermon could wake the dead. I missed Hazel’s presence, but she had converted to Catholicism so she and Mike could get married at Our Lady of Hope Roman Catholic church, leaving me with no one to whisper and giggle with about the Moores.
The sermon delivered by Reverend John Walker, Trinity’s vicar, was inspired by Jesus’s Sermon on the Plain, where the Lord told his followers to treat others as they’d like to be treated and to love our enemies. While Reverend Walker spoke, I thought about Rob and wondered who hated him enough to kill him. Was it a former legal client? Someone in his constituency? Or was Sawyer right? Had Julian Paquet actually killed Rob? What had Sawyer found that led him to suspect Julian?
Julian was a dog breeder, just like Rob, though his dogs couldn’t be more different from the Awen corgis. Browning Kennels bred and trained champion gun dogs, English Springer Spaniels, that were working dogs for serious bird hunters. Rob’s corgis were pampered housepets. There couldn’t be any jealousy or competition between the two. Maybe Julian and Rob had fallen out over some political point instead. But Julian was right; he and Rob and my dad and Dr. Steve were good friends who spent a lot of time together, both during village council meetings and on the golf courses and open waters during the summer. I couldn’t see Julian killing Rob or anyone else for that matter. It didn’t fit with his refined personality.
My parents and I lingered after the service just long enough to chat with some of the other faithful and to compliment the vicar on his sermon. It seemed that everyone was talking about Rob’s murder and wanted to talk about it. More than a few of the faithful knew that I had been the one to discover the body, and after I answered the same questions at least thirty-nine times, I decided it was time to go. I passed on lunch with my parents and went to home to change into jeans and a Boston Red Sox sweatshirt, then went to pick up pain perdu from Last Magnolia to take over to Hazel’s house.
Mike and Hazel lived just up Penobscot Street from the sheriff’s station and the fire station, and as I drove past, I could see Sawyer’s truck parked in the shared lot. He’d been working a lot since I found Rob’s body. It made sense, though; it was Dawn Cove’s first murder in decades. I’m sure he wanted to solve it quickly and get a killer off the streets. I just hoped that he was taking care of himself, too.
Hazel and Mike had bought their home shortly after their marriage. It was one of the first permanent dwellings in Dawn Cove, built back in 1697, and had been almost destroyed twice—once by fire in the mid-nineteenth century and then again by a lightning storm in the 1980s. It was a cute little wood-framed saltbox with two and a half stories, mustard-colored siding, and sage green trim, shutters, and front door. There was a formal parlor in the front of the house, and an expansive kitchen-dining-family room in the rear with a breathtaking view of La Tour Pond and Whippoorwill Woods out the banks of windows. A beehive oven that was original to the house kept the large room warm and doubled as a bread oven when Hazel made her amazing peasant loaves once or twice a week.
When I arrived with brunch, Mike was packing out for the turkey hunting trip he was going on with Brad and Joss’s twin, Jason. It was a forty-year tradition, dating back to the mid-1970s when my dad and Dr. Steve were freshmen at Dartmouth. They were roommates and since my father was from Scotland, it was difficult for him to go home during school breaks. Dr. Steve invited him to Dawn Cove, and while they were there, they went on a turkey hunt with Steve’s father. The boys had such fun that they returned the next year and the year after that, and soon they included their sons and then their sons-in-law. Steve and my dad rarely went on the week-long excursions anymore, so Brad, Jason, and Mike went alone. Some day, they’d take Noah with them, continuing the tradition for a third generation.
Hazel and I sat at the breakfast nook near the beehive oven and enjoyed Grand Marnier-flavored, mascarpone-stuffed, strawberry-dotted French toast while we watched Mike unroll, inspect, and re-roll his tent and subzero sleeping bag, as well as his fluorescent-orange safety equipment.
“I feel slightly guilty,” Hazel said as she took another bite of the tangy, sweet, citrusy confection on her plate. “He’s being very industrious and I’m just sitting here, watching and stuffing my face.”
I laughed. “You could help him if you want. I’ll finish your food.”
“No, mija,” Mike said. “You eat. Sit and rest. I’ve got this.” He gave her a Significant Look before going back to packing.
I glanced back and forth between them, brows raised in question. After a moment, Hazel gave me a huge, stunning smile. “What are you doing in early May?” she asked. Mike stopped what he was doing and sat back on his heels, the expression on his face matching Hazel’s.
“Early May?” I said, thoroughly confused. “That’s like six months from now...” I trailed off and gasped, my hands flying to my mouth. “No. You’re... You’re having a baby?” Tears pricked at my eyes, and when Hazel nodded, I leapt out of my seat and threw my arms around her. We were both laughing and crying now. Behind us, still on the floor, I could hear Mike sniffling, too.
When I finally got hold of myself, I sat back down and reached to take Hazel’s hand. “Do Mum and Dad know?” I asked, my eyes ping-ponging between Hazel and Mike.
“No, just you and Dr. Steve,” Hazel said. “We’re going to tell them when Mike gets back. So you cannot tell them. Or Joss.”
“Or Sarah or Sawyer, either,” Mike added, going back to his packing and inspecting.
I crossed my heart with the tip of my index finger and nodded solemnly. “I won’t tell a soul. Well, I’ll probably tell Cornbread and Dundee, but they’re excellent secret-keepers.”
Hazel smiled and went back to her breakfast. “Speaking of Cornbread and therefore poor Rob Baker, does Sawyer have any suspects?”
“Aside from Dad and Dr. Steve and Brad and Mayor Julian, you mean?”
“Dad? Are you serious?”
I shrugged and polished off my food, taking a deep draught of my coffee before answering. “Sawyer took all them in for questioning last week some time. He said it was routine and he’d never really suspected them. Well, except for Julian.”
“He suspects Julian killed Rob?” Mike said, sitting back on his heels again. “Dios mi. Why would he think that?”
“He said he found something that made him want a closer look at Julian, but he won’t tell me what it is.” I frowned. “The man’s a closed book. He won’t tell me anything about the investigation. It’s frustrating.”
Mike chuckled and shook his head. “I’m glad he won’t. I’d hate for the Dawn Cove gossip mill to get the scoop. It puts those magazines of yours to shame, June.”
Hazel snickered and went back to eating. After finishing the last few bites, she sighed happily and laid her hand across her belly. I watched for a moment, a small smile settling on my face. “Do you know what you’re having yet?”
Hazel glanced past me at Mike, who shrugged in response. Apparently he was leaving the decision to tell me up to his wife, a very good choice on his part. “She’s a girl,” Hazel said. “We were thinking about naming her Lara Cecilia.”
“Really? Cecilia?” Fresh tears flooded my eyes and I bit my lower lip. Cecilia was Joss and Jason’s mother. She had been a second mother to Hazel and I when we were growing up. “Oh, they’ll love that. I do, too.” I turned to Mike. “Wasn’t Lara your sister’s name, too?”
“Sí, es verdad,” he answered in a tight voice. Mike’s sister had died young of an aggressive form of childhood cancer. She had been only seven and Mike ten.
“Well, I think that is the perfect name for a perfect baby with the world’s most perfect aunt,” I said with a little smile. “I’m so excited and happy for you guys. And I available for babysitting anytime you need.”
I stayed for another hour or so, talking with Hazel and helping Mike load up his battered old Toyota 4X4. He wouldn’t let Hazel lift a finger, instead making her sit with her feet up, a cup of ginger tea in her hands. I left when Hazel drifted off, headed home with my heart filled with happiness that was tinged with just a touch of sadness. I missed Joe acutely. We’d never had a chance to start a family before his death, and now it seemed that almost everyone I knew was starting families, while I was still recovering from the destruction of mine.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
After I got home, there were still a few hours before my date with Sawyer, so I decided to bundle the dogs up and take them for a long walk around village. The snow had melted away from the roads and sidewalks but remained on lawns and gardens and rooftops. I had an ulterior motive in wanting the walk: to go to Awen Kennels to check in on Teresa Baker. Her pain was something I was intimately familiar with, and I wanted to do anything I could to lessen it for her.
The sprawling property was silent when the dogs and I arrived. A pall hung over the trees and neat lawn, almost as if the land itself was mourning Rob’s passing. I knocked on the door and a moment or two later, it swung open, revealing one tri-colored corgi and a grieving widow. Teresa, who was typically neat as a pin, was dressed in flannel pajamas and a ratty powder-blue bathrobe. Her greying blonde hair was pulled back in a sloppy bun and her eyes and nose were reddened. My heart felt like it had been squeezed in a vice.
“Oh, Teresa,” I whispered, tears flooding my eyes. She blinked when she saw me, and her lower lip trembled. I stepped forward and encased her in a tight hug. The dogs sat quietly at our feet, their furry bodies leaning against us, lending us warmth and unvoiced compassion as only dogs can. We cried together for a moment or two, then Teresa stepped back and crouched to ruffle Cornbread’s ears. Dundee gave her arm a lick.
“Come in,” she said, straightening and taking a step back. The dogs and I followed her back into the kitchen. I was stunned by the number of cards and bouquets and casserole dishes that covered the counters and breakfast table. “Want some tea?”
“You sit,” I said, stripping off my coat and gloves and taking the dogs’ leads off, leaving them in their harnesses. “I’ll make tea. Maybe some toast, too? Have you eaten today?”
Teresa perched on the edge of a bench that was pulled up to the breakfast table. The three dogs immediately settled around her, Dundee with his head in her lap, his soft, sweet eyes rolled up and resting on her face. The two corgis sat at her feet, their sturdy, furry bodies pressed tightly against her legs. “I don’t remember,” she said in a hollow voice. “I think I had some oatmeal this morning. But maybe that was yesterday.”
I nodded and bustled around her kitchen, putting the kettle on the stove and popping some thick slices of sourdough into the toaster. In the refrigerator, I found a jar of my mother's wild blueberry jam and took that out, intending to put it on the toast when it was done. While things were heating up, I ran a load of dishes in the dishwasher and tidied up the counters. Teresa watched all this with dull eyes, her hand stroking Dundee’s head automatically.
“When does it stop hurting?” she asked.
I paused in the act of spreading jam over a slice of toast and looked across the room at her. “It doesn’t ever stop hurting,” I said. I gave her a sad smile. “But the hurt lessens eventually. I promise.”
She nodded and looked down at Dundee’s head. The tip of his tail flicked back and forth hopefully, and Teresa smiled a bit. “I had Grace, the owner of Blue Hill Kennels, come pick up the puppies and Kerry. I just couldn’t take care of them.”
I brought the tea and toast over to the table and sat down across from her. “I understand. You need time to concentrate on grieving your husband. What can I do for you? Run you a bath? Do laundry? Scrub your bathroom?”
She took a sip of the tea and a bite of the toast before answering. “I don’t know, Junie. I’m in a fog. People keep asking me what they can do, and there’s just... There’s nothing I want. Except for Rob.” She broke down then, covering her face with her hands and sobbing almost silently. The weight of her grief bowed her shoulders and shook them like a tempest-tossed forest. I rose from my seat and went to kneel next to her, laying my hand on her arm, not saying anything, just letting her know I was there.
Teresa cried herself out and I fished a tissue out of my pocket and handed it to her. She gave me a grateful, watery smile and wiped her eyes before blowing her nose. I returned to my seat across from her and watched her quietly as she attempted to gather the splintered parts of herself back together. When she sat back and exhaled deeply, I gave her a perkier smile. “So, then. How about that bath?”
“After tea and toast.” She ate a little and some color and animation came back into her face. “Your mother tells me you’re seeing Sawyer Livingston.”
I chuckled and nodded. “I am. Has he been round to talk to you?”
“Twice. He was here on Tuesday, after I got back—”
“You were gone?”
“I was in Minnesota, looking into a new bitch. I actually cut my trip short. They... They called me Monday night and told me...” She trailed off, her chin trembling, eyes closed tightly against the memories of that horrible phone call. After a moment, she forcefully sat up, shoulders straightening and chin coming up. “Anyway. He came by on Tuesday, just briefly to see how I was. Then he was here again on Thursday to speak to me for longer and so he could poke around where... Well, you know.” She waved a hand in the vague direction of the back of the house.
“Yeah. I know.” I sipped my own tea and watched as Teresa ate more of her toast, polishing off one slice and immediately starting on the other.
“Has he said anything to you about suspects?” she asked.
I shook my head. “He’s not particularly forthcoming with his information. I guess I can understand that, though. I mean, I’m not a sheriff’s deputy or anything. Although...” I trailed off and debated the wisdom of telling her what Julian had said to me at the dance on Friday night.
“Although?”
“Well, I’m not sure I should be saying this, but Julian told me on Friday night that he was under suspicion. Sawyer had called him in for questioning.”
Teresa’s brows went up but not in surprise. In fact, she didn’t seem shocked by the fact that Dawn Cove’s mayor—a man who had served in that capacity for the past 16 years—was a murder suspect. “Sawyer found letters from Julian to Rob,” she said. “Threatening letters.”
“What? Julian... Julian threatened Rob? But I thought they were friends!”
“They are. Were, I guess now. But... Well, Julian thought Rob wasn’t being entirely truthful about Roddy’s lineage, so he threatened to turn Robbie into the AKC. They’d have taken away our certification and all of Roddy’s awards.”
I stared in shock at Teresa, having a hard time wrapping my head around this news. It didn’t matter to me that Cornbread might not be from a long line of AKC champion corgis—she was just my companion dog, not a show dog—but it probably would matter to the owners of the rest of Roddy and Kerry’s litters. “So was he? Fudging records, I mean.”
“No. There was a clerical error in the registration of Roddy’s great-grandam. They caught it and fixed it, and Rob was actually grateful to Julian. I told Sawyer all of this. I even showed him the letters from the AKC informing him that they’d corrected the mistake.”
“So Julian’s not a suspect anymore.”
“I don’t think he was ever a serious one. But it sounds like he’s been the only one.”
I made a sad noise of agreement and we fell silent as we finished our tea. I cleaned up our dishes and went upstairs to the master bathroom to run a bath for Teresa. I added some lavender bath oil to the steaming tub, and as it filled, gathered up all the dirty clothing from the floor of Rob and Teresa’s bedroom. Their laundry room was located on the second floor of their house—a convenience I thought made a lot of sense, since the majority of laundry was generated from bedrooms that were typically located on the second floor—and as Teresa soaked, I ran her laundry, vacuumed both upstairs and down, and began going through the casseroles. Most of them would fit in the freezer, and the ones that couldn’t would go nicely in the fridge.
When I was finished with the domestic duties, I returned upstairs and found Teresa asleep on her bed. Roddy was curled up at her feet and my dogs were laying side by side on the floor next to the bed. I called them softly, and after leaving a note on the kitchen counter, we headed back home. The weather had made a turn for the worse. It was blustery and even more frigid now, and I wondered if my date with Sawyer was still on. More snow was definitely in our future, maybe even a large amount.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As I walked home, I thought about what Teresa had said about Julian and his threatening letter to Rob. Something as simple as a clerical error certainly wasn’t worth threatening a close friend, was it? I knew the world of competitive dog shows was sometimes cut-throat, but surely not between breeders who weren’t even showing the same breed of dog, let alone competing for the same kinds of awards. Julian and Rob were friends outside of the show ring; couldn’t Julian have talked to Rob about his concerns face to face? Or maybe he had tried and Rob had blown him off. Rob was stubborn, often when it was to his detriment. Teresa said that Sawyer had eliminated Julian as a suspect after she showed him letters from the AKC clearing up the error, but there must have been something awful in the letter from Julian to consider him as a suspect in the first place. I wondered what else Sawyer had found at the scene of the crime. Surely he must have other suspects by now, better suspects than one of Rob’s closest friends. What about the driver of the Yankees truck? Had Sawyer ever tracked them down?
