Ill-Gotten Panes (A Stained-Glass Mystery) Read online

“Small nuclear device.” I set the box down on the worn, wingback chair to my left that demarcated the living room.

  As the front door clicked shut, Grandy ranged up behind me. “What about my clothes?”

  “In the car,” I said. “Or upstairs in your room.” White ball of fluff draped limp in my hand as I lifted its sleeping softness from the box.

  “Georgia,” Grandy growled.

  Perhaps I should have given some thought to his reaction to having an almost-cat in his house. But the kitten was a bright spot in what, at its core, had the potential to be a day from hell.

  I lifted the kitten into Grandy’s line of sight. A little meew of impending awareness broke free of the fluff.

  “No.” Grandy turned his back on the kitten and me and strode toward the staircase. “Tell Detective Nolan I’ll be dressing,” he said, reaching for the banister. A tremor shook his fingers in the split second before he closed his hand around the aged wood, a tremor that hadn’t been present previously.

  I tucked the kitten close and swallowed down the lump of uncertainty clogging my throat.

  “Don’t worry,” Drew Able, Esquire, said. He slipped his hands in the pocket of his tan trousers, rocking back on his heels. “He’s not himself right now. He’ll be okay with the kitten. You’ll see.”

  I sighed. It was kind of Drew to try and console me, but him explaining Grandy’s behavior to me chafed a bit. Mumbling an excuse to Drew, I grabbed the PCPD T-shirt from the corner of the beer carton and carried it and the kitten into the bathroom. No way was the house ready for a kitten to run around unsupervised, so it needed to be safely confined somewhere—especially with the potential for police poking around.

  I curled the shirt into an approximation of a bed in the corner where the wall met the bathtub. Lowering the kitten onto the coil of fabric, I admonished her to stay put, steeled my heart against her wide, innocent, please-love-me eyes, and ducked out of the bathroom.

  With the door shut tight behind me, I returned to the living room just as Detective Nolan and his cohorts strode through the front door. Drew had taken a seat in a battered leather club chair that he’d turned to face the door. He stood as the detective approached, holding his hand out. “I’d like to see the warrant,” he said.

  Detective Nolan’s brow crumpled and his lip curled in a disbelieving scowl, but he withdrew the warrant from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and passed it over to Drew.

  “Aren’t you hot in that jacket?” I asked.

  The detective opened the left side of his jacket wide, revealing a shoulder holster and the gun snug inside.

  “I can’t ask any more questions or you’ll shoot?” I guessed.

  His scowl deepened. “Are you aware of the seriousness of this situation, Miss Kelly?”

  Of course I was aware. Did he think I routinely watched my grandfather get accused of murder? Thing was, the whole situation, viewed from the comfort of the living room with its mixed generation furniture and worn-edged rug, reached a level beyond absurd. Given a few more moments, it would have started to feel like a waste of time.

  But just out of sight of Detective Nolan, Drew Able, Esquire, moved his head a millimeter to the right, a millimeter to the left. That very slight motion warned me against straining the detective’s patience.

  I sucked in a loud breath. “Sorry. I can be inappropriate when I’m nervous.”

  I didn’t know if that was the truth. My former fiancé had accused me of being flippant when I needed to be serious, but after he revealed himself as one-sixteenth of the man I thought he was, everything he told me was cast in doubt. The me I understood myself to be when I was with him was a shadow now, and the person I truly was, yet to be discovered.

  Drew refolded the warrant and passed it back to the detective. “Everything seems to be in order,” he said. “You’re searching for a murder weapon of unknown dimensions and bloodstained clothing.”

  The detective looked to me. “You have a utility space downstairs? Washer, dryer, tool bench, things of that nature?”

  “Sure.” One step was all it took for the memory of the washer full of my sweaty, grimy clothes to return to me. A twinge of embarrassment curled through my gut. I envisioned the thinner of the uniformed officers lifting the lid on the washer. The emanating fumes—somehow tinted green in my imagination—rise like coiled snakes to wrap around his head, the foul fragrance bringing him swiftly to his knees.

  Heck. These were police officers. Surely they’d encountered worse aromas than that which might have been lurking in my laundry.

  With a heavy sigh leaking out of my nostrils, I led the way down the half flight of steps, through the door to the garage. “Washer and dryer are that way.” I pointed down the next half flight of stairs, tipped my head to indicate the work bench to my right. “Tools and whatnot are here.”

  Detective Nolan instructed the officers to split up—one going downstairs, the other crossing to the workbench. Using the folded warrant as a pointer, he indicated the ground-floor art studio. “What’s going on in here? Break something?”

  I nearly smiled. “It came that way.” The Tiffany-style lamp glinted atop its corner-set table, the missing section gapping like a broken heart. “The plan is to restore it, but I have to pull more of it apart before—”

  “Detective.” The skinny uniformed officer came to the foot of the stairs, looked up to meet his superior’s gaze. “There’s a bunch of clothes in the washer.”

  The embarrassment waiting in my gut spread from my belly, sent heat to my cheeks and flamed the back of my neck. “They’re mine. From yesterday. I didn’t turn the washer on yet.”

  Skinny officer shook his head. “Ma’am, these clothes are wet, possibly washed. Looks like a pair of boxer shorts sitting on top.”

  Okay, I didn’t make it a habit to wash my prettier undergarments in the machine, even if it did have a cycle it pretended was gentle. But I would hardly describe my utilitarian cotton numbers as resembling boxer shorts. And I was sure I’d passed on starting the wash.

  Feeling my forehead wrinkle as I fought for the memory, I hustled down the basement steps and double-timed it to the washer.

  “Ma’am, please don’t touch that,” Skinny said.

  I peered inside the old-school agitating cylinder machine.

  “Ma’am.” The officer was at my back, one hand hovering near my elbow as I took in the sight within the washer.

  “I won’t,” I said on a breath. Just as he’d said, a pair of boxer shorts leered up from the depths of the washer. Woven among the tangle created by the spin cycle, my T-shirt twisted around Grandy’s Dockers, my shorts peeked between the coiled sleeves of the blue and white shirt he’d worn the day before. His things must have been in the machine when I’d tossed my clothes in. I hadn’t bothered to check.

  Despite the presence of the officer, my promise not to touch anything, I reached forward, gripped the edge of the washer while I waited for the world to make sense. I hadn’t started the washer, I was sure. Grandy’s clothes weren’t in there when I threw mine in with the cleaning rags, when I added the detergent. So he’d come home somewhere around 1 a.m. and started a load of wash?

  “Anderson,” Detective Nolan said. “Go out to the car and grab a couple of the large evidence bags, will ya?”

  I turned, found Nolan lurking just over my shoulder, too far for me to have been aware he was standing there. “Evidence bags?”

  Skinny Anderson strode across the room and bounced up the stairs.

  “My laundry is evidence?”

  Nolan grimaced. “A perpetrator commits murder, there’s a good chance that perp got blood on his or her clothing.”

  I should have focused on that, on the belief neither I nor Grandy were perpetrators of anything more than the occasional bad pun. But two thoughts fought for priority in my mind: uppermost, the question of what
the laundry said about Grandy’s guilt; second, and better to obsess over since it was a much less world-shattering issue, the knowledge that my lavender bra with the Pink Panther emblem would be seen by potentially half the population of the Pace County PD.

  “You’ll be able to know if there was blood even though the clothes have been washed?” I asked.

  Nolan’s smile was grim. “You’d be amazed how many times you can wash something and blood residue remains.”

  Well, that would be true if I weren’t prone to cutting myself when getting careless with stained glass. I knew what it was to try and clean bloodstains from clothing. The fact that residue remained failed to amaze me.

  The thump of footsteps overhead made the ceiling above us creak. Grandy was headed to the living room.

  Without a word to Detective Nolan, I ducked out of the utility room and dashed up the steps. Grandy had gone through to the kitchen. He was rooting in the refrigerator, the cool air rolling through the heat of the room like a breeze off an iceberg.

  “Georgia, where did you put the roast beef slices? You didn’t throw them out, did you?”

  “The police are searching the house and you want a sandwich?”

  He glanced at me over his shoulder. “I’m hungry.”

  “Lunch can’t wait?”

  “I haven’t even had breakfast,” he said. “Let the police look. They’re not going to find any of this evidence they’re looking for. While they’re searching for their unicorn, I may as well eat.”

  Drew Able, Esquire, ambled into the kitchen. He leaned his back against the edge of the corner sink and crossed his arms, as if this were his accustomed place, as if he were home.

  “How can you be so calm?”

  “Like I explained to your grandfather, he can’t let any of this get in the way of his usual routine. It’s best he go about his business as usual.”

  Grandy scowled at Drew. “Stop sounding like a therapist.”

  “Sorry, Pete. But I don’t want you to forget how important it is for you to keep doing what you always do. Don’t talk about the situation, but don’t hide from it, either.”

  “I don’t hide from things.” Grandy swung shut the refrigerator door, a final burst of cold air pushing through the room. He smacked a jar of mayonnaise and a package of deli meat onto the counter. “I’m going to get myself a bite to eat and go to work.”

  “Work?” Jaw hanging open, I dropped into a kitchen chair. Though I heard every word Drew said about keeping things normal, I couldn’t believe Grandy would have the desire to go to the dine-in, much less the energy.

  For this outburst, Grandy turned his back on his lunch and leveled a disapproving gaze at me. “I have a business, Georgia, and a work ethic that I thought I’d managed to instill in you. I’m not about to skip out on my staff because I’ve had an unexpected morning.”

  An unexpected morning? Being hauled into Pace County PD for questioning regarding a murder was unexpected?

  “So I am going to the office tonight,” he said, wrenching open the bread drawer, “and you are going to spend the evening finding a home for that feline you brought into my house without asking.”

  I gave him back the patented family scowl. “I don’t think so,” I said. “You’re going to work, I’m going with you.”

  * * *

  The Downtown Dine-In was not, in fact, located in downtown Wenwood. Instead, the restaurant/theater anchored one end of a strip mall forty-five minutes down the highway. An office supply store sat at the other end, with a string of predictable, if dull, stores in between—dry cleaners, foot doctor, insurance agency . . . the usual.

  “I don’t see why you insisted on accompanying me, Georgia.” Grandy drove with his hands at ten and two, the radio tuned to the all-news station so he could be advised of a traffic jam before getting caught. Traffic reports aired every fifteen minutes. Between them, Grandy lowered the radio volume and turned his attention to me. “I’m not some weak old man who needs a nursemaid.”

  “I know you’re not. I’m just worried about you.”

  “What’s to worry about? So the police asked me a few questions. I answered them. End of story.”

  I wanted to remind him the police had custody of my Pink Panther bra, but even I knew that wasn’t the important element.

  “But why did the police need to ask you questions? What happened between you and Andy Edgers?”

  He took his eyes off the road long enough to shoot me a quelling glance. “I’ve already told you that’s not your business.”

  “It wasn’t my business yesterday,” I said. “But don’t you think today’s a little different?”

  “It’s no different.”

  “Grandy, the man died. The police—”

  “His death had nothing to do with me,” he ground out.

  My phone rang at that moment, saving either me or Grandy or both of us from the conversation. I dug the device out from the bottom corner of my purse it always seemed to gravitate to and checked the identity of the caller. Unknown. I considered ignoring the call, reluctant to get trapped into a sales pitch. But of the friends I’d left back in the city, a few kept their numbers private. I tapped the green button to accept the call.

  The moment I heard the voice on the other end of the connection, I regretted the decision.

  “Georgia, why haven’t you returned any of my calls? Do you realize how late I’ve had to stay up just to be sure I’d get through to you?”

  “Sorry, Mom.” This was a habit. I’d long ago learned not to argue the question of responsibility. Far easier to assume the guilt for whatever her grievance was and apologize directly so the conversation could move along. “How’s the trip going?”

  “This is no simple trip, Georgia. This is my honeymoon. It’s not as straightforward as a weekend getaway.”

  “Of course not. You’ve already been gone for a month. Where are you this week?”

  Grandy harrumphed. “Your mother’s calling from her wedding trip?”

  “We’re on the overnight train to Italy right now. Very romantic.”

  I wanted only to nod to Grandy. I ended up making a sour face. On the one hand, yes, Italy equaled romantic. On the other . . . “Mom, I’d really rather not think about you and Ben in any romantic setting.” Eew.

  “Oh, of course. I’m sorry dear. I forget how painful it must be for you not to have your own honeymoon to look forward to anymore.” Her voice dripped with pity, and I cringed inwardly at her mistaken assumption over what troubled me. Up to that point I’d been mostly successful at burying the heartache that came with knowing my mother kept finding Prince Charmings and I succeeded only in finding the two-faced villain.

  Mom always said that my dad—my real dad—had been the love of her life. After losing him, she figured the best she could hope for was someone who made her toes tingle. Too bad she never seemed to learn that eventually the tingle would dwindle. Four husbands since my dad passed away and still she kept hoping that first blush of love would last.

  I may have envied her a little bit. Or a lot. But I’d never admit it.

  “What can I do for you, Mom?”

  “Not a word to her,” Grandy put in, “about what’s happening here.”

  I nodded again to show I’d heard him, even as Mom answered my question. “I just wanted to see how you were getting along in Wenwood. It can be a bit on the bland side after life in the city.”

  Outside my window, the highway bustled along. Cars roamed the parking lot of the big do-it-yourself home store and clustered around a chain restaurant known for steak and beer. And back in downtown Wenwood, the question of who killed Andy Edgers was likely hot on every tongue.

  “It’s . . . fine,” I said. “I’m enjoying the quiet.” This was true. The police station had a surprising hush that the city lacked.

  Her sigh came acros
s the phone in a tornado of static. “I wish you’d come to stay with Ben and I. You know the offer is still open.”

  Tough choice. Stick around Wenwood, where there was a killer on the loose, or meet my mother and her latest spouse in Italy. “Thanks, Mom, but I’m good here.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I say so.”

  “How is your grandfather?” she asked.

  I slid my gaze in his direction. He kept a loose grip on the steering wheel, his eyes shifting smoothly from the road ahead to each of his mirrors, back to the road ahead. But despite his protests about how he wouldn’t let the events of the morning slow him down, a vertical wrinkle bisected his brow, deep and stubborn and new. He didn’t want me to mention anything to Mom, though. Maybe he was right. She could do nothing from Italy, and heaven knows I didn’t want her and Ben descending on Grandy’s house.

  “He’s fine,” I said. My statement caught his attention and he glanced sternly at me, a reminder to tell her nothing. I scowled back. “He has a stash of devil dogs he thinks I don’t know about. And a lifetime supply of butterscotch candies hidden inside the pressure cooker.”

  Grandy signaled for a turn and mumbled something about never letting me in his house again.

  “See what you can do about that, Georgia. He needs to be careful with his sugar intake, not to mention his cholesterol.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m counting on you to look after him,” she said.

  Her words cut through me in a hot bolt of guilt. It was all I could do to assure her I’d keep an eye on him, without spilling the whole story of the Pace County PD. After that I rushed her off the phone. I shifted in my seat in an effort to look Grandy in the eye.

  “We can’t not tell her what’s going on,” I said.

  “She doesn’t need to know.”

  “She’s your daughter. She worries about you.”

  “She’s worried about me getting too fat for a coffin,” he snapped.

  “Grandy!”

  He gripped the steering wheel tightly, leaned forward in his seat. “There’s no need to tell her about what happened this morning, that’s all I’m saying.”