Chapter Ten
The next morning, Sunday, was visiting day at the prison.
Joe and Sarah were still lingering over breakfast when I left the house. I’d gotten a late start, but I couldn’t wait to tell Angus what a success the auction had been. It would be a weight off his mind.
When I got there, however, the officer on duty told me that Angus was not available for a visit, because he was undergoing some kind of medical evaluation. I pressed him for details, but he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, elaborate.
All the way home, I alternated between annoyance over the wasted trip and worry about Angus. Had the infection in his hand from the splinters worsened? Had he gotten in a fight in the prison and was being treated for his injuries? Had his mind finally snapped, and it was some kind of psychiatric testing?
I tried to talk to Joe about it when I got home, but he just sighed and pulled me into his arms.
“I’m concerned about Angus, too, but can’t we have a day to ourselves? Seems like you’re always working, or helping Betty, or doing your investigations. I miss my wife.”
“I miss you, too.” I hugged him back, the comfort slowly flowing through me as our bodies melded. God, I was tired. Maybe I could take one day off.
We checked the local paper and, for the rest of the morning, drove around to yard sales. I bought a baby gate for three dollars so Jasper could have the run of the kitchen and not be shut up in his crate, and also some toys to keep him busy. Joe picked up a cookbook published by the Sheepville Women’s Club. He also grabbed a vacuum cleaner with a FREE sign on it from the side of the road, saying he was sure he could fix it. Sarah found a pretty wooden tray with pressed flowers under glass for the store and a box of assorted costume jewelry that she bundled together and paid five dollars for both.
It was a perfect June day, the brutal humidity of the day before swept away by the gentle breeze that rustled through the butterfly bush in our back garden and swayed the orange heads of daylilies turned up toward the sun.
We ate a long, lazy lunch on the patio. A simple feast of a French baguette, cheese, salad, and white wine. Joe flipped through his new cookbook and read some of the more inviting recipes out loud to us. It was also typical of a French déjeuner in that we were talking about what to have for dinner while still eating lunch. We finally decided on a Chicken Saltimbocca with spinach and prosciutto.
While we relaxed, Jasper occupied himself by digging up one of the flower beds behind the shed. He trotted back with a yellow Matchbox car. By the end of lunch, he’d found a rusty pair of pliers, two marbles, a gold cufflink, and a heart-shaped cookie cutter.
“I can’t believe he found all this stuff in our own backyard!” Sarah exclaimed.
Joe was delighted with his finds. “We should give him his own box in the store, Daisy.”
Jasper’s paws were filthy, so I hosed his feet down and dried him with an old towel, while Joe cleared away the lunch and Sarah checked the messages on her phone.
*
“On Monday, I stopped by the diner, picked up some coffee for Cyril, and headed over to the salvage yard. He was in a particularly recalcitrant mood. His good humor from Saturday night had vanished, and he was back to the cantankerous old man I knew.
He basically ignored me, so I sat and watched him work on his crossword puzzle as I drank my own coffee. My attempts to inquire about his past were met with frosty resistance, although I did manage to glean the fact that his family had owned a farm back in Yorkshire, England. He commented that a farmer’s life was a hard one, with the farm chores never done.
Such as milking cows early in the morning.
Before I left, I amused myself by telling him the solution to 14 across. I chuckled as I peeked in my rearview mirror and saw him glaring after me and muttering to himself. I could just imagine the epithets hurled in my wake.
I drove back to the store, deep in thought, picturing the Kratzes’ farm on the morning of the murder. When Sarah showed up, half an hour later, I decided to ask her a few questions to see if my misgivings were correct.
“Okay, Sarah, picture this scene. Like it’s from one of your film scripts. Early morning. Our house. You come downstairs to the living room and you find Dad dead on the couch. What do you do?”
“Jeez, Mom.”
“Come on, humor me.”
“Well, I guess I’d scream, I’d yell for you. I’d see if I could help him. Make sure he was really dead.”
“Good. What else?”
Sarah sighed. “I don’t know. Call 911?”
“What else?”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
Usually I would back off when she inserted that note of irritation in her voice, but not today.