Going Through the Notions(32)

I’d meant to ask Angus about the estate company that had consigned the pens, too, but after he got so upset, I didn’t dare push it. Tonight I planned to go over and help Betty after work, so I’d dig around the auction building and see what information I could find.

Although how the heck would I research this company, even if I did find out who it was, without jeopardizing Reenie? Call them up and say, “Hey, how are you doing? Are you the people who were cooking up some underhanded scheme with Jimmy Kratz, and when he double-crossed you, you decided to do him in?”

Crap. I had absolutely no clue how to go about it. It was the same feeling I’d had when I questioned Cyril. I wasn’t a detective, for God’s sake. I was simply a former schoolteacher who now owned a sewing notions store.

No one had come into Sometimes a Great Notion yet today. The brutal humidity was as effective as a blinding snowstorm in deterring shoppers. But for once I was grateful the store wasn’t busy. The lack of business would give me a chance to get my act together and unpack some new merchandise.

If I could ever find the strength to get off this damn stool, that is.

Another image popped into my mind. Years ago, when he was still working construction before he devoted himself to the auction business full-time, Angus had brought home a bucket of baby blackbirds. They’d been abandoned by their mother on the construction site. He showed me the sorry little group at the bottom of the empty five-gallon paint bucket and said he planned to take them to the nature center when they opened the next day.

He’d fed the birds with a baby dropper and nursed them through the night, but when I stopped by in the morning, they had all died.

Angus was sitting there, on a wooden bench in his workshop, tears streaming down his ruddy, weather-roughened face that he didn’t even bother to wipe away. Sick at the loss myself, I sat there beside him, not knowing what to say.

After some time had passed, I whispered that I didn’t know what I could do to help.

“You were here and you cared,” he said finally. “That’s good enough for me.”

How was I supposed to reconcile the man I knew, gruff, unbelievably generous, protector of the weak, to someone everyone believed to be a killer?

I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment and then hauled myself to my feet.

Come on Daisy, make the coffee. Stat. And lots of it.

Perhaps I’d pay another visit to Reenie and pressure her into telling Ramsbottom about Jimmy’s deal to bid on the pens. The detective might listen to her, if not me. I knew she was scared, but so was I. For my best friend, Angus.

It seemed as though there were other more compelling suspects than the estate company anyway. Like the Perkins family. Like Ramsbottom. Like Fiona Adams.

And what about Hank Ramsbottom’s wife? Was she still around? She wasn’t in any of the photos on the wall. I also needed to go see Warren Zeigler, the attorney, and satisfy myself that he was doing everything possible to get Angus acquitted.

As the coffee brewed, I brought a couple of boxes down from the bedroom upstairs.

I liked to display merchandise so that it didn’t look too “organized.” So a buyer could still feel the same thrill of the hunt that I’d felt on our picking adventures. The idea was that you could walk around the store several times and still spot something new. I set an apothecary cabinet near the counter with an inlaid rosewood box on top. On a small table nearby, I grouped some thimbles, lithographed paper packages of hand sewing needles, and sixty-year-old German sequins.

“What do you think, Alice? Do you like it?” Over in the corner, Alice the mannequin kept her expression carefully composed.

“Wait, you don’t have to say anything. You’re right. Too formal.” I added a whimsical note with a pincushion in the shape of a large strawberry.

I stood back to admire my tableau. Much better. Alice was often helpful like that.

I still remembered with fondness, and more than a little longing, the twenty yards of fine French satin I’d found in the trunk I’d bought at auction that fateful day a year ago.

A glorious deep blue with a peacock design. It killed me to sell it, but the profit from the sale had paid the rent for the next three months, which was a huge help for a fledgling business. I’d kept a scrap of the peacock fabric in a two-inch photo frame next to the register as a remembrance.

I had worried at first that I would have a coronary each time I made a sale, but I’d come to the way of thinking that I had these treasures only for a short while. That they were in my safekeeping until they went to a good home.

Often I wondered who had sat in the child’s scarred wooden school desk, or who had labored over the tiny stitches in a needlework sampler. Out of the next box, I picked up a slim burgundy glass perfume bottle with a silver stopper, and when I held it up to my nose, I caught a faint hint of the fragrance that had once been inside. I tried to picture the woman who’d worn it; the scent a connection between us through time.