Лори Касс - Pouncing On Murder

“Better now,” he said, reaching for Buried Prey . “Thanks for stopping by. Irene said you might.”

“Did she tell you what I found out about Seth?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Not that weird, I suppose, but here I thought all that social media stuff was supposed to make it easy to find people.”

“Not if you don’t want to be found,” I said. “And if . . .” My voice faded away.

“What?” Adam asked.

“Where did Irene think she saw Seth?” I couldn’t remember her saying, and I’d neglected to ask.

“Chilson,” he said. “Downtown, somewhere. She was driving through town and saw him on the sidewalk.”

Downtown? Excellent. It would take time, but I could work with that.

“Why?” Adam asked.

“Another possible area of investigation,” I said vaguely, sounding even to myself as if I were spending too much time with law enforcement officers. Then I remembered the other thing I wanted to tell him. “I think I found one of those wooden boats that you and Henry found.”

Adam immediately brightened. “Where? Do you know what kind it was?”

I told him about my bumpy, rutting time and finding a tarped-over Hacker-Craft on the side of Chatham Road.

“Sounds right,” he said, nodding. “Was there a cranky old lady with it?”

“She came at me with a gun,” I said crisply.

“What?” Adam’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re kidding. Neva?”

“You know her?”

Adam shook his head. “Henry did. Back in the day, she used to date his older brother. He went downstate to college and really never came home. Got married and moved to Virginia, Henry said, and died a few years ago of a heart attack.”

“Neva didn’t come at you with a gun?” I asked. “Did you look at the boat?”

“Henry did, mostly. Once I saw that hull rot I got a little nervous.” He stared off into space. “But now that I think about it, what’s a little rot? That could still be restored to a beautiful boat.”

I headed back to the bookmobile, thinking.

Maybe Henry had earned the wrath of Neva because of her long-ago failed relationship with his brother. It seemed odd that a romance from fifty years ago could have anything to do with what was happening now, but who knew? And though Adam had said he didn’t look at the boat, he’d been close enough to note the hull rot. If he’d been that close, Neva would surely have seen him, and who could say what she might be capable of?

Frustration pulled at me and I lengthened my stride, trying to outdistance it.

All I was finding was more questions. I was going to have to start finding answers. And sooner would be much better than later.

• • •

I swallowed the spoonful of clam chowder. “You’re nuts. There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s the best I’ve ever had.”

Kristen frowned mightily and tossed the spoon by which she’d fed me into the nearest kitchen sink. “Why do I even ask? You’re the worst taster ever.”

“Because I like the food you make?” I looked around for a stool and pulled one up to the restaurant’s kitchen island. It looked as if the preopening dinner Kristen had invited me over to eat wasn’t going to materialize, not if she was still tweaking tomorrow night’s recipes. Ah, well. It wasn’t as if we’d go hungry.

“You like anything you don’t have to cook.” She stirred the chowder, reached for a jar of some spice I couldn’t identify, and added a couple of shakes. “That might do it.” She grabbed another spoon and tasted. “Ha! Now, that’s the best clam chowder ever.”

“Let me try.” I found a clean spoon and reached forward to fill it with the thick, chunky chowder. “Mm,” I said. “You’re right. That is the best ever.” To me it didn’t taste any different from the previous spoonful, but why tell that to the cook, especially if there was a chance she might ban me from the crème brûlée that was coming up later?

She ladled two bowls almost to the brim and dragged another stool over to the island. As we sat side by side, companionably slurping up chowdery goodness, I felt warm and cozy and content with life in general. Clam chowder did that to me.

“So, what’s going on in your life?” she asked, when the bowls were half-empty.

My contentedness snapped away. “I told you about Adam Deering almost getting hit by that car, right?”

Kristen nodded. “You never told me the whole story, though. You never told me how close you came to getting hit.”

“Me?” I blinked at her. “It was aiming for Adam. Anyway, I’ve been trying to find Seth Wartella. The guy from Chicago.”

“Seth who?”

I frowned, midslurp, which was harder than I thought it would be. “I haven’t told you about him?”

“Busy, busy, busy.” She waved at the kitchen around us. “Maybe, but if you did it got mixed up with the staff schedule or the produce delivery schedule or that asparagus soup recipe I’ve been working on.”

Or maybe I just hadn’t told her, knowing that she was wacky busy with the restaurant opening. But she was relatively calm right now, so I told her about Irene’s possible sighting of the man her husband had helped put in prison.

Kristen was frowning. “Why do I know that name?”

“Seth?”

“No, Wartella.” She drummed her short fingernails on the stainless steel counter. “Wartella . . .” She grinned. “Got it. Tony Wartella. He’s a conservation officer. Didn’t you come across him last year?”

“That’s right,” I said slowly. “I’d forgotten.” Last Thanksgiving, I had indeed talked to an Officer Wartella about what might have been a hunting accident. “I wonder . . .”

“If Tony and that Seth are related? You could be right. I think Tony is originally from the Chicago area.” Kristen pointed south, in the direction of far-off Illinois. “I can find out, if you want. Tony and his wife are regulars on Tuesday nights.”

That was the night she offered a special—buy one dinner, get another half off—something that a lot of locals appreciated. “That would be great,” I said, then went on to tell her about not finding any trace of Seth on the Internet, at which she shrugged.

“My mom’s not on any social media, either, and the only crime she ever committed was the time she stayed too long in a parking space.”

“That’s not a crime,” I said.

“Tell that to my mom.” Kristen scraped up the last of her chowder. “She got a ticket and had to pay a fine, so now whenever she has to fill out a form that asks if she’s ever been convicted of a crime, she says yes.” She looked over. “You going to finish that?”

I pushed my bowl toward her. “There’s one other weird thing.” When I told the story of the recent out-of-town Mitchell sighting, she was suitably surprised, but when I told her about stopping to look at the wooden boat and being threatened by a gun-toting senior citizen of the female persuasion, she looked appropriately frightened and indignant on my behalf.

“Why do they let people like that have guns?” she asked.

“I reported it to the sheriff’s office,” I said. “But she didn’t fire the gun, she was on her own property, and I have no proof there was ammunition in it.” I shrugged. “But she did scare the daylights out of me.”

“What’s was her name?”

“Neva Chatham.”

“Huh. There are lots of Chatham stories floating around.” Kristen scooped out the last of my chowder and spooned it into her mouth. “I wonder how many of them are true. Can’t say I know any Chathams personally.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I said, then started thinking about families. About family resemblances and family traits and how while sometimes if you know one member of a family you know what they’re all like. Then again, sometimes members of the same family, even siblings within a year or two of each other, are very different, and not always in a good way.