Софи Райан - A Whisker Оf Trouble

“Why do you know that and I don’t?” he asked.

“Probably because I make it to dinner at your mom’s more than you do.”

Nick laughed. “Speaking of dinner, can you and Liam meet me at Sam’s tonight?”

On my lap Elvis stretched, yawned and then looked expectantly at me. He made an exhalation that sounded a lot like a sigh of contentment.

“Sorry,” I said. “Liam had plans.” I realized my brother hadn’t told me what his plans were.

“So just you and me?” Nick said.

I couldn’t keep mooching meals from Rose—well, maybe as far as she was concerned, I could—and I didn’t feel like going grocery-shopping after work. “Sure,” I said. “But there’s something I need to tell you first. You might want to rescind that invitation.”

“Mom already told me that they’ve started their investigation.”

“And you’re surprisingly calm about that,” I teased.

I heard him exhale slowly. “I give up,” he said.

I had a metal image of Nick holding up both hands in a gesture of surrender.

“They just ignore me,” he continued. “They smile sweetly, pat my cheek and do what they damn well want.”

I laughed. “Welcome to my life,” I said. “And by the way, what took you so long?”

He started to laugh as well. “I don’t know. I guess I’m a slow learner.”

I heard other voices in the background. “I have to go,” Nick said. “How’s six work for you?”

“That’s fine.”

“Do you want me to pick you up?”

“I’ll meet you there,” I said.

We said good-bye and I ended the call. “Time to get up,” I said to Elvis. I gave him one last scratch behind his left ear and then I picked him up and set him on the floor. “Go see if we have any customers.”

He shook himself, took a quick pass at his face with a paw and disappeared around the half-open door. Elvis knew customers generally meant lots of attention for him, especially if he did his Sad Kitty face and made sure the long scar that cut diagonally across his nose was in the right light.

I stood up and brushed cat hair off my pants. Seeing Liam and talking to Nick had distracted me, albeit briefly, from dealing with what we’d learned from Paul Duvall and his adorable daughter.

It was easy for people to feel a little uncertain about trash pickers like Teresa. Both Teresa and Cleveland, the other picker I bought from regularly, lived pretty much outside the conventional work world. They bartered, traded, scavenged and Dumpster-dived for everything from furniture and car parts to clothes and food. They were both quick to make a deal if it would make them a profit and equally quick to share whatever they had with anyone who needed it. Cleveland and Teresa had always been fair with me and I’d tried to do the same with them.

I thought about Teresa. She was quiet and serious, but she had a good eye for small things like clocks, jewelry and old general store fixtures. I ran my hand over the cigarette case on my desk that I used to hold pencil leads and paper clips. I’d bought it from Teresa because it had reminded me of a similar box my dad had used to hold guitar picks and extra strings.

I couldn’t put Rose and Mr. P. off forever. They were going to talk to Teresa sooner rather than later and I hadn’t exactly been straight with them. It wasn’t that I was afraid she’d get railroaded, because I knew there was no way she would have been sneaking around Edison Hall’s house looking for something to take. It was because I knew there was at least a possibility that she had been.

Chapter 6

When I went downstairs Elvis and Charlotte were with two women who looked to be interested in an old card file cabinet that Avery had found in a Dumpster behind the library. Mac was in the workroom with the parts of . . . something spread across the workbench.

“I take it you saw Liam,” I said.

He held a small metal gear up to the light and frowned at it. “I did. He’s going to give me a hand with the rest of the drywall out in the workshop, probably on Sunday.”

I’d had plans to turn the old garage into a workshop from the very beginning. Aaron Ellison, who plowed the parking lot in the winter, also owned a roofing company and he’d given me a good deal on a new roof after Mac got his mother’s old grandfather clock working again. We had a woodstove for heat and several massive shelving units that had come from an old warehouse Liam had been renovating for storage.

Mac and I had insulated and drywalled three of the walls. All that was left was the fourth and part of the ceiling and now it looked as though that would be finished soon as well.

“How did the detecting go?” Mac asked, settling the gear on a piece of cloth by his left elbow and turning to give me his full attention.

“All right,” I said with an offhand shrug.

He studied my face for a moment without speaking.

“Do you remember that gray Cape Cod diagonally across the street from Edison Hall’s house?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“It turns out a friend of Josh Evans’s just bought it a few weeks ago.”

“Someone you know.”

I nodded. “Paul Duvall.” I was taking way too long to get to the point, but I knew Mac wouldn’t rush me. “He saw Teresa at the house a couple of times and she was around last week as well.”

“A lot of people would have been around last week,” Mac said. “We were all over town. It was the spring pickup.”

“I know,” I said, fidgeting with a button on my shirt. “The thing is, it looks like Teresa might have been at the house the morning we found Ronan Quinn’s body.” I blew out a breath. “And she might have been trying to avoid being seen.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes and no.”

Mac reached for a rag on the bench and wiped his hands. “Tell me the yes,” he said.

“Paul saw Teresa’s van driving down the street sometime before six in the morning.”

“And the part that makes you not so sure?”

“The person who thinks Teresa was hiding by the garage is four.” I folded my arms over my midsection.

Mac tossed the rag back onto the bench.

“You know some of Teresa’s background,” I said. “You know she was arrested more than once when she was a teenager. And you’ve seen what a black-and-white person she is.”

“I’m guessing Rose wants to talk to her.”

I nodded. “She does.” Through Jess I knew that Teresa had had several run-ins with the police when she was younger, all stemming from Teresa taking things that she believed were rightly hers. I also knew something a lot of people didn’t, that she’d spent some time in a psychiatric hospital after the death of her mother when she was twelve. Maybe it was because we’d both lost parents when we were young that I felt a kinship, a connection with her. Maybe if I hadn’t had Rose and Charlotte and Liz to wrap their arms around me—and my mother and Gram—when my father died, the same thing might have happened to me.

“I don’t know how much they know about Teresa’s background and it’s not really my story to tell,” I said. I raked my hand back through my hair and watched a few strands fall to the floor. Why did it seem as if that happened a lot more when the Angels had a case?

“So tell Rose that,” Mac said. He picked up a small spring between his thumb and forefinger, studied it for a moment and then set it down again. He looked at me and just a glimpse of a smile played across his face.

“Tell me what?”

Rose was standing at the far end of the workroom. She always claimed she had ears like a wolf, and I was inclined to believe her.

I smiled at Mac. “Thanks,” I said softly. I’d told Nick more than once that sometimes he underestimated his mother and her friends. Mac had just (nicely) pointed out that I was doing the same thing.