I should have seen that. I put down my plate and began gathering myself to rise.
“Sit down,” Mother said. “I’ll tell her.”
“I’m not going in to welcome The Face,” I said. “It’s getting near my bedtime. Don’t let Rose Noire know you’re doing it for her own good.”
“I will convince her that making the president feel welcome is of the utmost importance.” Mother strode off with her head held high.
“It very well might be,” I muttered.
I put down my plate and made my way to the barn door. I had to go the long way around, skirting the edge of the dance floor. On my way past the buffet I snagged an empty Tupperware container and filled it with a few delicacies for later.
Then I donned my hat, gloves, and scarf and went to haul the barn door open far enough for me to slip out. And then a little farther, since I realized I hadn’t allowed for how big Tom and Jerry had become.
It was fully dark now. I pulled out my cell phone and glanced at it. 5:30. Early for me to go to bed, but this had been a long day.
I stepped outside.
“Meg! Where are you going?”
Michael appeared in the doorway.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Close the door, quick. You’re letting all the heat out.”
“There’s no real heat in here,” Michael said. “It’s just not quite as frigid as outdoors.”
“You’re letting out all the not-quite-frigid air, then,” I said.
“I’ll make sure you get safely back,” he said. He pulled the door shut after him and held out his arm to steady me.
The air had grown much colder, or perhaps it was only the rising wind that made it seem that way. Halfway back to the kitchen steps we had to stop and turn our backs to the wind to ride out one particularly strong gust. I was relieved when we reached the garbage bag gauntlet, since it would partially shield us from the next gust.
And then I realized that the top of one bag was flapping open in the wind, sending bits of trash skittering across the frozen ground.
“Damn!” Michael gave chase to the flying garbage. “I’ll have to tell everyone to be more careful.”
I’d have said that everyone was already being rather careful. None of the other bags was flapping open, and I didn’t remember this one doing so when I’d walked by it earlier. Perhaps someone had opened it to add more garbage and forgotten to tie it up again.
But why choose this one, which was already full and in the middle of the lineup to boot?
I stepped closer to the bag, peered in, and sneezed several times.
“Let me do that,” Michael called from across the yard.
But I was already reaching into the bag. My hand slid through several squishy things that I tried not to think about. I burrowed a little deeper and my hand encountered the butter-soft texture of expensive leather. I grabbed the leather object and pried it out of the surrounding goop.
“What’s that?” Michael strode up with his arms full of trash.
I held the object up so we could see it in the light from the kitchen windows. It was a rectangular black leather clutch purse. It was large for a clutch purse—perhaps six by eleven inches. Even considering its size it had a remarkable number of nonfunctional buckles, straps, zippers, and other bits of metal. And it was too flat to be very practical. It wouldn’t even have held my wallet, much less all the gear I toted every day. The sort of purse you could afford to carry if you spent most of your day in your office and had a briefcase to carry any larger items when you left it.
“I think it’s Dr. Wright’s purse,” I said. “We need to take this to the chief.”
Chapter 20
“Are you sure it’s Dr. Wright’s purse?” Chief Burke asked. He had set the purse on our kitchen table and he, Horace, and Dad were peering at it.
“Not a hundred percent sure,” I said. I was sitting a few feet away, where I could see but not smell the purse. “I’m not much of a fashion expert. It’s a pity Mother didn’t see Dr. Wright arrive. She’d not only know whether it was Dr. Wright’s purse or not, she could tell you the brand, the model, how much it cost, and whether you could possibly buy one like it in any of the local stores.”
“Just knowing it’s hers would be sufficient,” the chief said.
“It’s not mine, and I can’t imagine any of the women students throwing away a perfectly good purse like that. See—it’s a designer brand.”
I pointed to the word “Coach” embossed onto a leather patch on one side—probably one of the few designer purse brands I’d have recognized.
“But what convinces me that it’s hers is the smell,” I went on.