Chapter 23
Not knowing how much time she had before Mack returned, she grabbed her coffee and led the way to the spare room, with her three-animal family following close behind. She stood in the doorway of the spare bedroom, remembering her promise. No matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t go in there.
So the boxes would have to come out. Craftily, she studied the layout of the room, then went downstairs and outside to the back garden where she snatched up the hoe and raced back upstairs. Those last couple boxes were just close enough that she could snag them with the hoe and drag them over to the doorway.
“Ha,” she cried out with the flush of success. Now she could go over the boxes’ contents and not break her promise. Quickly she sorted through the remaining two boxes. They contained collections of souvenirs, photographs, books, even an odd pair of shoes tucked on top of everything else. As if there was no room for them anywhere else. The second box contained only shoes.
She went through each box, looking for something that would identify what had happened to Jeremy but found nothing here. At least nothing she could find. Mack might have an entirely different view on that. She put the photos off to one side and stacked the boxes together on another side.
She’d cleaned out the attic but maybe Mack would want to go up on his own, and that was fine with her. He might see something she’d missed.
Back downstairs again she looked at the photos under the bright kitchen light. Names and dates were on the back, like Rose ’79, and Jeremy and Tom ’76. All of them appeared to be in their forties back at the time these pictures were taken. Nothing was more recent than 1982, and she didn’t recognize any of the people in the images, although the name Jeremy sure rang a bell. Possibly Tom and Rose were his siblings. Their approximate ages would seem appropriate for that.
And, if this Jeremy in the 1976 photo was the man who later disappeared in 1988, he would have been about fifty to sixty years old at the time he was last seen, or some eighty to ninety years old today. That put Jeremy roughly in the same age bracket as Nan.
There didn’t appear to be any photos of Nan. Doreen didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. She was rather desperate to clear Nan of all wrongdoings. But it was still a little hard to understand how all this stuff had come to be here.
She wanted to go to the library. She glanced at her watch. She wouldn’t sit here and wait for Mack. He’d said he wouldn’t make it back that afternoon anyway. Surely he would have no problem with her running to the library, looking up any information on this Jeremy Feldspar.
She snatched up her car keys and purse and ran outside, locking the animals in. “I won’t be long,” she called out to Mugs.
She turned on the engine and quickly backed out the driveway. She still had boxes of clothes to drop off. She’d have to fit that into her day too. As she swept past the neighbor’s house, she saw Cindy waving at her. She caught sight of her too late to react with a wave of her own, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to either. Something was very odd about that couple. Was there such a thing as too much sunshine in someone’s world?
With all the supposed neighbors forming a crowd in front of her house, few had introduced themselves to Doreen. Just the too-happy couple, Cindy and Josh. Oh, yeah, and Ella had earlier. But Doreen hadn’t seen Ella since their first encounter. That was a shame because Ella was at least normal.
At the library, Doreen walked into the massive new-looking building, and, with the librarian’s help, she was quickly set up, looking at the old records on microfiche. She went back to the early ’70s, the same years as documented in the photos, searching for anything on Jeremy Feldspar in the newspapers.
Then she did a search for her grandmother, from approximately age twenty—her Nan wasn’t exactly forthcoming about her actual age—until Jeremy went missing, so covering the thirty years from about 1958 to 1988. She found the odd mention of Nan, who was always very active in community events. So her name came up a couple times. But never in relation to Jeremy. The only time Doreen saw Jeremy’s name was in an article about a court case, where he was suspected of killing his mother in the 70s, as mentioned in the newspaper clipping found in the envelope taped under the spare bed. She read this article thoroughly, just in case it had any additional information. But it appeared to be a rehash of the same material.
She searched other newspapers, hoping to find other mentions of him. But found very little. Back then the local newspaper ran more human-interest stories.
She looked through the rest of the years—the 1970s and early 1980s—but she didn’t find anything more on Jeremy or her grandmother. Doreen closed down the machine, picked up her notepad and went to the librarian. “Excuse me. Are there any other resources that would allow me to track down somebody here?”
“Did you check the obituaries?” asked the librarian, Linda Linket, according to her name tag. “We do have a long list of those.”
With the librarian’s help, Doreen brought up the obituary list and checked through the late eighties and into the late nineties, but no mention of Jeremy was found anywhere.
After thanking the librarian, she got in her vehicle and returned home. As she pulled up, she saw Mack pounding on her front door.
She got out and said, “It’s only common sense, but if my vehicle is not here, I’m not here.” She climbed the front porch steps to join him.
He glared at her. “Why weren’t you here?”
“Because I was at the library, looking for information on Jeremy Feldspar.”
He fisted his hands on his hips, and his glare didn’t diminish one bit.
She glared back as she unlocked her front door and let him inside. “You can rest easy,” she said. “I didn’t find anything. And how stupid is that?”
“What did you expect to find? A line saying, Jeremy Feldspar was murdered by your neighbors?”
She shot him a look and said in a dark voice, “You wouldn’t joke about that if you had met them.” She headed to the kitchen, scooping up Goliath as she went. She gave him a great big hug and a cuddle and placed him on the kitchen table. She had left the coffeemaker on. She stared at it and wondered if that was a fire hazard, then shrugged. She hadn’t been killed by it yet. She refilled her coffee cup, filling one for Mack. She turned to look at him. “What did you find?”
In a cool voice he said, “Remember this is police business, and it’s confidential?”
She stared at him in outrage. “If you want any information from me, I give it to you.” In a casual movement, she tossed her notepad on top of the photographs on the table. If he wasn’t sharing, well, neither was she.
But she had never been any good at lying.
“What did you find?” he snapped.
She gave him an innocent look and smiled. “What makes you think I found anything?”
He snorted and settled into his chair. “You look guilty as hell.”
When Thaddeus hopped up on the kitchen table, Goliath jumped down and stalked off. She stroked Thaddeus’s feathered neck, but he cocked an eye at her and said, “Liar. Liar.”
She glared at the bird. “I don’t need any comments from the peanut gallery, thank you very much.”
Mack leaned forward and glared at her. “What did you find?”
She leaned forward and shoved her face into his. “None of your business.”
He let out an exasperated sigh. “Are we back to that again? You really want me to get a warrant, search this place from top to bottom?”
“It might be best,” she said. “I keep finding stuff. I don’t know if I found all of it or just part of it.”
“What did you find? You went through the rest of those boxes, didn’t you?” he roared. “After you promised not to go back in there.”
She gave him a flat stare and said, “I didn’t go in. I pulled the boxes out into the hallway.”
He snorted.
She lifted her chin. “Besides, no harm done. They were mostly full of shoes.”
“Both?”
“The other was mostly full of knickknacks.”
“Anything else?” he asked suspiciously.
Just then Thaddeus walked between the two of them. He gave her that look again, as if waiting for her to open her mouth. She glared at the bird. “You don’t know anything.”
He made a funny cuckooing sound. She had never heard it come out of him before. Then he did it again. The bird constantly surprised her.
“If only that bird could really talk,” Mack said, “I imagine he would have quite the story to tell.”
“Especially since so many activities would’ve been done in and around him while he was here. He would’ve seen and known what was going on,” she admitted.
“Like what you’ve done today?” Mack snapped. “So, give.”
But he was still withholding anything about what he had found in Jeremy’s safe-deposit box or about his account at the bank. She opened her mouth when Thaddeus fixed her with that odd glare of his. She raised both hands in surrender. “I can’t keep any secrets from that dratted bird. He’s against me.”
She glared at the two of them, and both just stared back at her.
“Fine.” She looked at the notepad and used it to push the photographs toward Mack. “These were inside the second box.”
“Photographs,” he noted. “Anything of value?”
“I was going to let you have them and decide.”
He shot her a look that confirmed he understood her a little more than she liked. He spread out the images carefully, picking one up at a time, studying the features of the people in each photo. He read the names and dates on the back before placing each one down again.
“Before you ask, no, I don’t know any of the faces, considering those photos were taken before I was born. And the only name I recognize is Jeremy, for obvious reasons.”
He nodded. “What if Nan does?”
Doreen shrugged. “I don’t know any of the landmarks in the images. For all I know, these could’ve been taken in Europe.”
“I doubt it,” he said. “Some of these are from the city beach in Kelowna.”
“How can you tell? It could’ve been any beach anywhere as far as I’m concerned.” She sat back and sipped her coffee. “By the way, did you check out my neighbors concerning the body in my back garden?”
He lifted his head and pierced her with that hard gaze of his. “What about your neighbors?”
“It’s silly.” She shrugged. “But that one couple is just so dang happy.”
That startled a grin out of him. “Is your world so dark you can’t appreciate other people being happy?”
“No, they were too happy. Too bright. Too cheerful. Too ingratiating. It’s not like they came by before, like the other lady—Ella, I believe her name was. She was at least normal.”
“You’ve barely been here three days yet. Isn’t there a rule about waiting at least seventy-two hours after a newcomer moves in before you welcome him to the neighborhood? So they have a chance to settle in, unpack some boxes?”
She shot him a flat stare. “I have no idea. Are there rules for things like this?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it.” He chuckled. “But just because they were extremely friendly, it doesn’t make them killers.”
“I know,” she said morosely. “So far, they are the only ones who were over-the-top friendly.”
“Were you friendly back? Did you bring them inside and have tea, spend an hour with them socializing?” He studied her and then shook his head. “Of course not. You probably stayed in the doorway, not even letting them get comfortable on the front porch.”
“If I knew there were rules about things like that,” she snapped, “then I might have. How was I supposed to know there was a right and wrong way to handle neighbors who were just too darn happy to be comfortable around?”
He stared at her, then despite himself, he laughed. “You might want to consider how that would’ve been a good way to get information from them. Information about whether Jeremy had ever been here. Information about strangers around the house lately.” He settled back after looking at the last picture. “They might have answered your questions. When the police question the neighbors, the officers tend to get those lovely noncommittal kinds of answers. But, when a neighbor questions neighbors, well, that’s a whole different story.”
She stared at him in surprise and with a growing realization. “Well, consider me about to get friendly with my neighbors.”
Thaddeus spoke up right then, once again repeating his earlier lines. “Liar. Liar.”
It was a heck of a position to be in when even the bird knew her so well.