Ch 1-10

Summary

Three octagenarians, one very young detective, and a murderer who everyone can identify but who always has an air-tight alibi—leads to the murder of Emily Magillicutty. After a nasty divorce, Phoebe moves in with her aunt on the same day as she becomes the newest department detective. Aunt Emily has a gardener and a cook, all three of them being over eighty years old, but none of them are quite ready to call their lives done. In fact, each has work they feel they have yet to complete: Emily, an actress her whole life, would like to have lines for once; the gardener, an ex-cop, wants to solve a last big case; and the cook, who’s family had many food allergies, wants to stretch her culinary skills to her French chef training. And all of them want to help young Phoebe get her feet under her again.

Chapter 1: In the Perp Chair

Phoebe Stuart sat outside Police Captain Johnson’s office on a perp chair. The old wooden upright’s rungs had deep scars where the backrest joined the seat from the many times handcuffs had been fastened there. It seemed an inappropriate seat for an officer of six years but no chair in the duty room was free of such unique wear marks. Phoebe had been waiting for Captain Johnson for well over half an hour. Not too happily, either. Great way to end this sucky day, she thought. In fact, waiting on a hard chair outside the captain’s office seemed almost the highlight of the day. With her divorce from Phil final, instead of having the freedom to celebrate, she had spent the day packing up all her belongings—what few she could call her own—and loading them into her Prius. She had hoped she’d have a few weeks to find another place, but, no, Phil had insisted she vacate immediately.

After four years of marriage, she thought, one would think I’d actually own more. But the apartment where she’d been staying since moving out of the Ten Oaks Estates house had been Phil’s, the furniture all his. She didn’t even own a single pot or pan. Depressing.

She shifted her body in the uncomfortable chair, her mood slipping into frustration. She fully expected to hear that her application for the detective position available had been turned down. Of course it had been. She was too young, too inexperienced. He’ll say something nice, something meant to be encouraging, then send me back to regular patrol duty, maybe for another six years. After her long day, it was hard not to think all men bastards to a certain extent—especially after dealing with Phil’s staff, who’d supervised her moving out. At that moment, she felt she’d been dumped on by all the men who had ever come into her life. And one of them had been dead since before she was born.

Phoebe looked across the duty room, a sea of desks, none neat or new. Most looked like salvage from a school auction. Some sat front to front so officers stared at each other writing their reports. Others had a grade-school arrangement. The one she had shared with two other officers sat in the middle of the crowded room under roughly stacked piles of paper and folders—work that needed completing and unfinished reports—as well as old cups of coffee, half-eaten lunches, and stale donuts. She had fought to maintain a semblance of neatness on that desk, but the two guys who shared the desk didn’t help. A few desks in the room had family pictures of spouses—rarely—but kids often enough. She’d already trashed Phil’s photo, glad she and he hadn’t had kids. One less mess in the divorce. One less pressure point Phil could have applied.

Each desk had a perp chair next to it for witnesses or suspects. The serious felons and murder suspects always ended up in holding or the interrogation rooms. But Phoebe had yet to have a case significant enough to be interrogated. Questioned in a perp chair sure.

Across the hall in the detective division, near the door, Detective Stan Bradley, a large, balding man who always seemed to be sweating through his worn sport’s jacket, was talking with a woman wearing way too much make-up and way too short a skirt. She was handcuffed to the chair. Prostitute, most likely, Phoebe thought. The woman slouched in that chair, knees open. Sweaty Bradley made no secret of looking at her large bosom stuffed inadequately and rather precariously into a black corset or down to that short skirt. Phoebe was just waiting for him to drop his pen so he could get a better angle to look up it.

Bradley worked vice a lot and really got into his work, so to speak. Phoebe rolled her eyes and looked away, catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror across the way. Though she wore a pants suit in dark blue, not some skimpy flame-red skirt the size of a napkin, she didn’t like the similarity between her body position and the prostitute’s. She slowly pushed herself up into a “proper sit,” channeling her mother at that moment. “Don’t slouch, Phoebe Ann. Only rough people slouch. Sit up proper. Knees together, ankles crossed under your chair, hands in lap. Shoulders back. Head high.” Yeah, thanks, Mom.

As a teenager, of course, she had always hated that directive, usually slouching worse as a response, which had made her mother tisk and shake her head. Then her mom had died. Phoebe had been barely out of college, less than a year into her first real job. Not that being dead ever kept her mother from popping into Phoebe’s head. Over time, Phoebe had become less balky. If she had to sit on a perp chair outside Captain Johnson’s office, she told herself, damn it, she wasn’t going to look like some hooker or druggy off the street. Not the association she wanted Johnson to make. But when she looked at that adjusted image of herself in the mirror, she sighed. Way too prim, maybe schoolgirlish, and that wasn’t the image she wanted Johnson to see either. Nope, can’t do it. Sorry, Mom, she thought, and slid a bit down in that unyielding wooden chair. She adjusted again, opening her knees just a bit, knowing pants revealed nothing as exciting as the hooker’s short skirt, and leaned a bit forward in the chair. The mirror translated that as eager—too eager maybe. Or nervous, which was worse. That’ll kill all my professionalism. Johnson wouldn’t like that in a detective. She wasn’t going to get the promotion this go around, anyway, of that she was sure, but she didn’t want to leave an impression of being inept. Then he’d never give her a chance at a step up.

Who knew there was a science to sitting? she asked herself. Damn. I do look nervous. I am nervous. Come on, Phoebes, get your head on straight. Oh, great, now I’m channeling Dad.

A glance at the big grade-school clock on the far wall let her know she’d been waiting fifty-five minutes. She sighed. And all for bad news. This sucks. Then she spied the coffee pot on the far end of the room. The coffee was never great, hardly better than roofing tar, and it didn’t usually improve after sitting around, but getting a cup was something to do. She got up and walked through the maze of desks. After pouring coffee into a foam cup, Phoebe took a sip, winced and immediately opened a little serving tub of creamer. Not that it lightened the black sludge much. Nasty stuff.

She heard a pen drop across the hall. She rolled her eyes. So predictable, Stan.

Phoebe walked back to the perp chair outside Johnson’s office and sat again, sipping at the coffee and trying not to grimace as she did so. Another glance in the mirror revealed an image she could tolerate: woman in pants suit, legs crossed, sipping at cup of coffee. Not schoolgirl or hooker. Not so eager or nervous as to call attention. She could live with that.

She finished the coffee, almost out of mercy to the foam cup and was just considering getting another dose of poison when the captain’s door banged open with enough energy to startle her. She snapped her head in that direction, knowing she suddenly looked all deer in the headlights, far from a good look.

“Officer Stuart,” said Captain Johnson.

Not warm. Not welcoming. No joy. Yup, I’m still a beat cop. Disheartened, Phoebe stood, adjusted her jacket, raised her head and smiled. She stuck out her hand. “Captain.”

He took her hand, gave it a quick waggle. The grip was crushing. When he released her, she followed him across the threshold of his office, decorated with hunting and fishing memorabilia—pictures of him with celebrities in hunting gear and holding rifles, standing over deer, elk, and bears, awards related to the Governor’s Fishing Opener, fly-fishing lures attached to burlap in a frame, an ancient pistol in a shadow box. The wall behind his chair held certificates, commendations, and a few framed newspaper articles. At sixty, Captain Johnson had amassed a good history of performance as a cop and, apparently, a man’s man.

Captain Johnson closed the door and walked around to his desk, easing his tall frame into a leather chair. “Please have a seat, officer,” Johnson said, his voice low, all business.

“Thank you,” Phoebe said. She sat at the edge of the leather straight-back in front of his desk. Suddenly she wished she had a mirror so she could see what kind of image she was projecting now. Edge of chair . . . too eager, too nervous. She eased back and crossed her legs. Better. More confident. She hoped.

Johnson picked up a folder and flipped it open, studying it. He lifted a few of the sheets stapled to the inside front cover, his eyebrows furrowed. Then he let the sheets settle and made eye contact. His steel-blue eyes were hard to read. Not cold exactly, but certainly not anything approaching warmth. Still, she knew the importance of good eye contact and held his gaze, hoping her face didn’t look too gawky.

“I see you’ve applied to be detective,” he said.

Her heart stepped up its beat. I’m so going back to patrol. She said, “Yes, sir. I’ve been a patrol officer for—”

“Six years. Yes.”

Phoebe reminded herself not to volunteer anything he could read for himself.

“Test scores are good, evaluation okay, recommendations adequate . . . hmm, but your pistol qualification . . . three tries? Really?”

She rolled her lower lip between her teeth and started to chew on the inside of her cheek. No, bad move. “Yes, sir. I apologize.” She almost went into a long explanation that her gun jammed on the first go round and she didn’t think it should have counted at all. The second time, because of the gun jam on the first try, she was just plain nervous. Luckily she’d gotten her act together on the third go and had a good score. But all that sounded like whining, and she had the good sense to hold her tongue.

Then, just past his head, in a prominent place on his awards wall, Phoebe saw that Johnson had no less than four awards for markmanship with a handgun and rifle. Great.

He closed the folder firmly. “I have three candidates for detective, Officer Stuart, and one slot open.”

Yup. Here’s where I get the thanks-for-applying line and the better-luck-next-time encouragement with a caviat to improve my shooting. Phoebe felt her face scrunching.

“Both the other candidates have better shooting scores,” he said, and she mentally started to leave the room, slinking away like a dog with her tail between her legs. “But I think your other tests were much better than theirs.” She mentally scooted back to the chair and sat perfectly straight, as if waiting for a doggy treat.

He stood. She wasn’t sure what that meant. Had she gotten the position or not? Had she missed something? He leaned toward her over the desk and stuck out his big hand. Then he grinned. He actually grinned. “Congratulations, Officer Stuart, you are now a detective.”

She stood, knees shaking, and took his hand. His grip finished crushing her hand to pulp, and he pumped her arm several times hard, shaking all her arm bones into her elbow. “Report to Detective McKenna Monday morning at eight.”

She was trying to catch up to what had just happened. Against all odds, had she just become a detective? Still working to survive the handshake, Phoebe tried to smile. “Thank you, Captain,” she said. “I won’t let you down.”

His smile widened, and she knew she’d traipsed into being ludicrous in the shock of the moment. He let go of her hand, which looked like a mangled pop can, and she took a step to the side of the chair in preparation of leaving.

“Oh,” he said, and Phoebe took the step back, trying not to make the move look obvious.

“Yes, sir?” she said.

“I see in your file that you’re recently separated.”

“The divorce was finalized today.”

“Sympathies, of course. Being a cop is hard on marriages, especially a marriage like that. The question is, are you keeping your married name or going back to your maiden name?”

Her mind caught on “a marriage like that.” What did that mean? Her husband—ex-husband officially now—was a state representative. Not a high ranking one, though his swelled ego saw it as a step to becoming governor. She flashed to the conversation when Phil had told her she wasn’t the kind of wife he needed for his political career. Maybe Johnson has a point.

“Um, I haven’t decided yet, sir.” Truth was, she hadn’t given her name any thought. To get to positive thoughts about her new life, she had to sort her current one. Step One. Get divorce. Done that. Step Two. Move out of Phil’s rental apartment to finish the separation from him. Done that just today. Big Step Three. Get long-shot promotion. Even done that. But she still had to complete Step Four. Move in with her aged aunt because Phoebe couldn’t afford an apartment of her own. Not after what Phil had pulled. Maybe it was a marriage like that.

“It’s Magillicutty, right?” Johnson asked, pulling Phoebe back to the moment.

“Yes.” And Phoebe flashed to an image of her dad, solving murder cases right and left. Was he the underlying reason she had aced out the other two in her bid for detective, even with poor marksmanship? Was her step up to detective just nepotism?

“Zephalon Magillicutty,” Johnson mused. “Who the hell names their kid Zephalon?”

“Not too many parents, I hope, sir.”

He chuckled. “I worked with your dad, of course. Since long before you were born. Old Zip Magillicutty was a hell of a cop in his day—smart detective, great all-around guy. The county attorney never had a problem with any case he brought to them. Sharp guy, that old Zip. Couldn’t get much past his careful eyes. I still miss him.”

“Yes, sir,” Phoebe said. “Me, too.” But she didn’t really. Yes, her dad had been a good detective—she had four boxes of awards and commendations to prove it. More than Johnson had spread out on his office walls. He’d hunted and fished, too, right along with the best of the man’s men. But as a father, he had been rigid. That was on a good day. She remembered him as scary, often mean, and impossible to please. She had never experienced any warmth from the man. He’d always seemed to look at her with a kind of permanent disappointment. She was never smart enough, skilled enough, good enough at anything to get a whiff of pride out of Old Zip Magillicutty. Maybe it was just that she wasn’t a boy, wasn’t—

“When Skip was killed,” said Captain Johnson, “it took all the stuffing out of Zip.”

—wasn’t Skip. She figured her father’s issue with her was that.

She had no memory of Zephalon Chancery Magillicutty, III. He’d died in Afganistan before she was born, after Zip’s divorce from his first wife. After his marriage to Gertrude, too, but certainly before Phoebe came on the scene. By that time, whatever Zip had been before his son died had long since died or dried up, and the detached disapproval she’d always felt from her father was all that had been left. Old photos showed Zip to be a vibrant, smiling mountain of a man, an avid hunter, great fisherman, even better detective. She’d never known that man. The photo albums handed down to her were filled with pictures of a stranger no more familiar to her than the half-brother who died three years before her birth. Skip looked like a younger version of her dad.

“Yes, sir,” Phoebe said. “He thought the world of Skip.”

“He lost the will to live after Skip died.”

Yet he’d had another child, not that Zip noticed much. Lung cancer set in before Phoebe started grade school. The last year of his life, Zip had been a shriveled hollow hulk of angry invalid, bitter and raging most of the time. At his death when Phoebe had been in junior high, her mom had breathed a sigh of relief—not because Zip was out of suffering but because she was free of him. At least that was Phoebe’s assessment.

“Yes, sir. He loved Skip.”

Captain Johnson eyed her. She knew she’d said that last bit as if Old Zip had loved Skip but hadn’t ever loved her, but . . . well, there it was.

“Whatever you do with your name is fine, of course,” Captain Johnson continued. “Your choice. But I’d decide sooner rather than later, if I can give you a bit of advice. A change in rank and duties is a kind of new start. You’ll be across the hall and under McKenna. If you’re going to switch back to Magillicutty, it’d be best to do it now and not down the road. Less confusing.”

“I’ll give that serious thought, sir. Thank you, sir.”

She reached out with her poor, crushed, mangled hand and went in for one last shake. He gripped her hand hard, harder than either of the other shakes, reducing that dented pop can to jelly. And he pumped it really hard for good measure, which came close to dislocating her shoulder—probably would have had she any bones left in her arm—and clapped her on the shoulder for good measure, which felt like he had completely detached her rotator cuff. She left his office wondering if she could get workers’ compensation for injuries sustained while getting a promotion.

Chapter 2: The Screamer

Amazement—the full measure of surprise—and euphoria gripped Phoebe as she galloped down the stairs of the government building. She actually had gotten the raise. She was actually a detective. Success had felt like a long shot at best, like winning fifty-million dollars after buying one’s first Powerball ticket. Only at the door to the street did she pause, tug her suit jacket into place. She was a detective! Yes. But her week had been a roller-coaster, and that made her cautious. The divorce had come through. No more dealing with Phil and his lawyers. That was a huge whoo-hoo. But then she’d been evicted from Phil’s rental apartment, given forty-eight hours to vacate. Not fun. He’d also presented her with a bill for staying in the unit that completely ate up the expected cash settlement she needed to get her own place. Bastard. So here I am, free of Phil but pennilesss, homeless and pissed. But I am a detective, though I may have gotten the raise because of nepotism. Now I’ve got to be beholden to my dad’s older sister. How good could that be? The entire time she had been in the apartment, she’d looked for a place that matched her settlement. Because it was spring and the college hadn’t let out, nothing much was available. But she’d made tentative arrangements for a little place near downtown. Then the settlement had evaporated.

Before she exited the building, another thought occurred to her. The captain’s office overlooked the street. What if he was looking out his window? She wanted to make sure he saw a professional new detective, even if her marksman score was low. She put her shoulder bag carefully in place, channeled her mom enough to stand straight—shoulders back, Phoebe Ann—and lifted her chin proudly, then pushed out the door. Here’s the young detective walking purposefully to the curb, intent on her car, she thought. “Image, Phoebe,” she said aloud, channeling her dad.

Her hoped-for impression might have gone better had the alarm from the fire station a block over hadn’t gone off just then and if, turning to the blare, the wind hadn’t caught her dusky blond hair and whipped it across her face, and, half blinded, she hadn’t stumbled into the street directly in front of a big, black SUV. She saw the danger at the last second and stepped back up onto the curb just in time. Still, she caught the wind of the SUV’s passing. The briefcase-sized passenger-side mirror missed her by maybe an inch, whipping her hair back out of her face.

Damn, she thought, that would have ended this week on a particularly bad note. The captain would have looked down at the sound of the screeching of tires and said, “I need another Timmy.”

Phoebe scowled at the ass-end of the SUV, recognizing it as a Fore Exursion. She hated the big environmentally unsound vehicles that got maybe eight miles per gallon coasting downhill, hated the sheer bulk of them. Like just a moment ago, their sheer size made it hard for their drivers to see pedestrians or even other drivers doing stupid things. This one hadn’t even slowed or beeped his horn, just barreled blithely on its way, actually coming up onto the curb as it took the corner to turn down Second. Probably never saw me. But the worst thing about them was that her ex-husband loved them, driving the biggest Ford Excursion ever made just because it was big. He could have driven a Hummer, she supposed. He loved his monster truck, kept it in a heated garage at his McMansion. But he had finally yielded to pressure—political, not hers—and recently gotten a Ford Explorer, a somewhat smaller SUV, but still a hulk in Phoebe’s estimation. And, since he’d never use either for off-road driving—would never consider getting it muddy or throwing a load of fence posts or bricks in their back ends—she saw the vehicles as ostentageous without purpose. Kinda like Phil.

Phoebe pushed the hair out of her eyes, looked both ways more carefully and crossed Twelfth. No other cars had to screech to a stop for her to draw the attention of people in the building, like the chief. She pressed the lock release on her key fob and turned as she opened the driver’s door, glancing up to the captain’s window. Blinds cut off the late afternoon sun. He hadn’t seen anything. He’d missed the spacy hair-in-face low-scoring newbie detective nearly running into an SUV as well as any semblance of the resolute young professional she’d hoped he’d see. Probably for the best.

She climbed into her Prius, sighing at the sight of everything she owned stuffed into the back and passenger seat. Mostly books and clothes. She’d had very little when Phil married her; now she had even less. Homeless, penniless, she told herself, but a detective. “Gotta keep that positive outlook,” she said, channeling her mother.

She glanced at the directions to her aunt’s house she’d left on the dash. Her father’s older sister had suddenly reappeared in her life when she had felt the absolute lowest, offering her a room in her house just that week. In many ways this was a godsend. Homeless, penniless. If it ­hadn’t been for her aunt timely offer, Phoebe might have had to live out of her car. That would have been a huge embarrassment, both to herself and maybe the department. Still, being rescued by an aging aunt felt like failure to Phoebe. Here she was almost thirty, and already her life was a bust. She was divorced and had nothing but an aging Prius, some clothes, and a few old books to call her own. Worse, she could fit all her worldly belongings in the car without even blocking the rear-view mirror. Godsend Aunt Emily might be, but needing to rely on the charity of an old woman felt like bitter defeat. At least you’re done with Phil the Pill. “Thanks for the perspective, Mom,” she muttered.

But how had Aunt Em known she was in need of help? Phoebe would have to ask if her offer was just coincidental good timing or . . . no. What could the old woman know?

Phoebe started the Prius and pulled out of the parking space, watching not only for traffic but for unsuspecting pedestrians doing stupid things. There was still a chance the captain might be watching, might have seen the near-miss with the SUV. No way did she want to compound her stupidity, or she might be back on patrol in a heartbeat.

She merged into what passed for rush-hour traffic for St. Cloud, a glut of vehicles filling the streets for about half an hour. She headed south on Ninth, turned east on Division and crossed the Mississippi River into east St. Cloud. Aunt Emily had a house on a lake south of town, on the Sherburne County side of the river. Here Phoebe would stay just until she “got her feet under her again.”

At a stoplight, she consulted her emailed directions a final time. She had to watch for a green mailbox on the left seven miles after she turned onto East River Road. Should be about a twenty-minute commute to and from work. Not much further than Phil’s Ten Oaks Estates mansion or his crappy Waite Park apartment.

Sooner than expected, Phoebe found the green mailbox and pulled into a gravel drive that meandered through a stand of oak and aspen just coming into leaf, getting glimpses of Long Lake as she got closer to the house. Not overly wide, the lake made a gentle S-curve through farmland and woods. The driveway followed the curve of the lake almost to within sight of the house, then straightened out, left the woods behind, and skirted a wide lawn punctuated by plantings of birch and aspen in tiny groves. The gravel road turned into a circle drive, the center of which was filled with a nice display of tulips and daffodils.

Phoebe pulled in to the smaller of the two attached garages, turned off the engine and just sat there a long moment as the door closed, cutting off the late afternoon light. She set the garage door opener on the passenger seat, and looked at it. Her aunt had sent it by messenger just that morning. Then she looked out the windshield at the door that led into the house. “It’s all about choices, Phoebes,” she said aloud.

Damn Phil. He had looked so exciting when they were dating, and being a politician’s wife seemed glamorous. Going to fancy restaurants and the opera and fundraisers had been fun, but then he’d tried to shape her, mold her into his idea of a politician’s wife. Maybe she should have known he’d do that; maybe he should have known it wasn’t who she was. You married a narcissist. You knew he was ambitious. She had and had learned what that meant.

She finally opened the car door and stepped out. “And choices have consequences,” she said. She grabbed one small bag with a change of clothes, night clothes, toiletries, and her laptop—the necessities of life as she knew them for the moment. In a way she was pleased she could function with so little, but she also knew to get her own apartment, she’d have to have money for all the accoutrements of living on her own, stuff people usually started accumulating with their first efficiency apartment and their first job out of college. At present, she owned neither bed nor couch nor a single plate or spoon. She’d have to have a lot more than first and last month’s rent and security deposit to be on her own again. Choices. So far in her twenty-eight years, she seemed to have accumulated more wrong choices than right ones. And Phil had been her worst choice. Channeling her dad or not, she’d have to do a lot better from there on out.

One of the two key Aunt Emily had sent her was to the door at the back of the garage. She keyed her way into the house and found herself was in a back hall that led past the other garage on its way to the living area. She hadn’t expected the hall would lead past a series of closed doors opposite the garage. Clearly the house wrapped around the back of the garages and was bigger than it appeared from the front view. She tried a door. Locked.

When she figured she had walked past the larger garage closer to the house, the hall changed angles, which made sense to her as the two garages sat at an angle canted from the line of the house. Here she encountered a set of stairs that looked like back stairs. Somewhere up there she figured she had a room. She looked longingly up, wishing she could just climb them to her room and slip inside unnoticed. It’d be such a relief to end this day, but she couldn’t do that. Not on her first day with Aunt Emily. She had to do better now, make better choices in life. Regardless of how tired and worn down she felt, she had to do the politically correct thing, smile and make nice, probably show she was beholding to her dad’s sister for giving her destitute niece shelter. If Aunt Emily was anything like her father, she had a long evening of foot-kissing ahead of her. Can I handle it if she talks about choices the way Dad did so often? She’d have to. God, I hope she doesn’t make me list my expectations out of life. Tonight I just don’t have any energy beyond going to bed. With a resigned sigh, Phoebe set down her overnight bag and laptop at the bottom of the stairs. She gave the stairs a last, longing look, but it was no use trying to escape. Anyway, she had no idea which room her aunt intended her to use.

She continued down the hall. A wide kitchen opened on her right. The whole opposite wall was windows and patio doors to the backyard, which was filled with flowers and patio tables and chairs. It actually looked inviting. A screened room sat just outside to the right. She could see an artificial stream bubbling along a garden path nearby ending in a pond with goldfish and lily pads. A water feature. Rich people love their water features. Phoebe remembered then her aunt telling her she had a gardener and a cook—pretty swanky for modern living. Something Phil had aspired to. But Phoebe also remembered that her aunt had been a Hollywood actress. Maybe that put her in a league above a two-bit junior state representative with asperations to be governor.

Emily’s cook was was an older worman. This much Phoebe could tell from her back. She wore orthopedic shoes, a somewhat shapeless gingham dress down to her calves and had her gray hair tied into a ponytail down her back. Phoebe liked seeing older women with long hair instead of the ubiquitous poodle cut. The woman was humming and intently stirring something on the stove, and, truthfully, it smelled very good, reminding Phoebe that she hadn’t eaten since a Poptart breakfast in her rush to get her stuff out of Phil’s apartment in the time allotted her.

The woman turned, reaching for the refrigerator door, and spotted her. “Ah, Miss Phoebe,” the woman said with a warm smile, wiping a hand on her apron before extending it to Phoebe. “I’m Emogene Beatenburg, your aunt’s cook. I’m so happy to meet you.”

The woman seemed genuine, and her smile prettied up her long, lined face. Emogene’s blue gingham dress had an apron over it that made her look right out of the fifties. She took Phoebe’s hand into both of hers, paused there, then gave Phoebe a hug. Her hands were large, somewhat reddened, but surprisingly strong, and she smelled of spices and flour. Phoebe guessed her to be pushing late seventies at least, which surprised her. Phoebe figured her aunt might want a younger woman as cook so she could help if emergencies arose. But maybe Emogene had been with her aunt a long time.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Phoebe said. “Whatever you’re cooking smells wonderful.”

The woman smiled widely again, which put a wealth of wrinkles around her mouth and eyes and made her look almost pretty. I bet she was a knock-out when she was young.

“Your aunt’s in the living room. Supper will be ready in about half an hour, if that’s okay with you?”

Phoebe blinked. “Okay with me? Surely it needs to be okay with Aunt Emily. Not me. I’m just a temporary boarder. My opinions don’t matter in the least.”

Emogene gave her a deeply sympathetic look that Phoebe sure could have done without. “Would you like something to drink?” she asked and opened the refrigerator.

“No . . . unless you have a can of sparking water or—”

The can of Mendota Springs lemon water—what Phoebe preferred—was popped open and in Phoebe’s hands in a flash, almost as if Emogene had been reading her mind and reaching for that can in particular, which Phoebe wasn’t sure she hadn’t. “Thanks,” Phoebe said.

“Would you like a glass?” asked Emogene. “Ice?”

“Um . . . no. This is just fine.”

Then the cook pointed and mouthed, “Living room,” and turned back to her simmering pot.

Phoebe took the direction Emogene indicated past a rather nice formal dining room. Beyond it she could see a wide foyer, clearly the official entrance into the house. She could already look through leaded-glass French doors, through which she saw a second set of doors and then the colorful center circle, the lawns, and drive. She caught just a glimpse of blue through the trees. The lake.

From the outside, the place hadn’t looked all that big—not a tract house, clearly, but not the ostentatious look-at-me-I’m-fucking-enormous kind of home Phil wanted when he outgrew the huge Ten Oaks Estates house, which Phoebe already thought was too big. Phoebe had seen from the outside that her aunt’s house—the main house at least—had two floors, which, in her mind was fairly modest, as Phil’s had three floors plus a walk-out basement in the back. Aunt Emily’s garages had been generous—a double and a one-and-one-half garage—but not the three to five doubles some top-end houses had so the owners could collect cars. Many garages said the owner had the wealth to fill them. Typically, they were lined up next to houses to add greater size to the overall structure, but Aunt Emily’s house had camouflaged its size. And, as her a unt’s house was at the end of a long drive shielded by woods, passers-by couldn’t marvel at her wealth the way Phil wanted people to do with his house, which was not only ostentatious but strategically placed on a hill, an artificial one, that made his house the highest in the subdivision. It made Phoebe think of the kids’ game “King of the Hill.”

Phoebe walked past the dining room, seeing that the table was already set. Four places. That gave her pause. She had no idea who was going to be eating with her aunt and her and despaired she’d have to be pleasant with strangers on top of everything else. She had hoped she’d only have to make nice to her aunt, then escape to her room. Now she saw company had been invited. Her heart sank. She hoped her aunt hadn’t invited some eligible man to try to distract her from her divorce. That would be horrible. Or her pastor to lecture her on the ills of divorce. Or some biddy friends. Phoebe almost backtracted to the garage, sure living out of her car would be preferable to suffering an old maiden aunt’s match-making proclivities, a priest’s lecture, or being fourth for endless games of bridge.

Phoebe pressed her eyes shut and worked to slow her breathing. Just tonight, she told herself. You’re too tired to sleep in your car tonight, Phoebes. And there’s no room until you unload half your stuff. Suck it up and be grateful for one night. Drawing in what she hoped was control, she squared her shoulders and crossed through the wide foyer with the double entry doors of the main entrance to her left and a long, curving main stairs to her right. The back wall of the foyer also had large windows overlooking the back gardens. Looking up, Pheobe saw the high ceiling and the balcony of the second floor. A nice chandelier hung down from the second-floor ceiling. Aunt Emily’s house was both spacious and grand, a house Phil surely would have aspired to own someday. If he could stick it up on a hill.

She entered the room on the other side of the foyer, but it was a library, a rather nice one, but clearly not the living room. She turned toward the back of the house, passing a small study, a guest bath, and a long hall leading off to a wing of rooms on that side of the house that she sure hadn’t envisioned coming up the driveway. Had that wing been blocked from view? The house seemed to be growing as she walked. Already it could almost pass for a country inn. Beyond that hall, at the back of the foyer, she finally reached the living room, an elegant but homey room featuring a large field-stone fireplace and an arrangement of couches and chairs, coffee tables, and end tables. Large, expensive paintings graced the walls, and an oriental rug defined the intimate space around the fireplace. The rest of the floor, like most of the floors in the house so far were oak planks. Not the typical “plastic” wood often used for flooring in modern houses, this was real wood, reclaimed maybe, old. It made the obvious large house less McMansion than Phil’s estate.

Phoebe hadn’t spent time with Aunt Emily as a child. The few memories she had didn’t include this house nor anything like this place . . . an apartment perhaps. But now that she thought of it, what she remembered might actually have been a hotel room. Her aunt had lived in California up until the year Phoebe’s dad, Emily’s brother, died. During the frantic years of negotiating high school and college down in the Cities, Phoebe hadn’t visited Aunt Emily, though once in a long while she spoke to her on the phone. Usually it was Aunt Emily calling her.

From what her dad had said in her youth, he and his sister hadn’t gotten along well. According to Zip, he lived in the real world, Emily somewhere else. Her world has a bit of money to it, though, Dad, Phoebe thought. You never told me that.

As lousy as Phoebe’s relationship with her father had been, even if she needed her aunt right then or be homeless, she was loathe to expose herself to another Magillicutty. If sister and brother were cut from the same cloth, she wasn’t likely to enjoy her stay in this big house. It’s just until I get money to leave. What should it take? A month? Two? Regardless Phoebe had to be at least a little bit in her aunt’s world until she could afford a place of her own again. Divorce sure sucked.

“There you are, dear,” Aunt Emily said when she spotted Phoebe standing in the living room doorway. The older woman was up on her feet, arms wide, and swept Phoebe into her embrace in that moment, enveloping Phoebe in lilac scent. Phoebe hugged her aunt back, determined to survive this evening and start out right with this stranger aunt. Better choices, remember, Phoebes?

Emily wasn’t tall, but she was younger looking than Phoebe thought she should be. To her recollection, Aunt Emily, her dad’s older sister, had to be near eighty, if not a few years into her eighth decade, but Emily moved like a much younger woman. She had a petite, trim body that a forty-year-old would kill for, a pretty face even with the wrinkles, and her hair, allowed to gray naturally, was long, full and loose.

“Come in, come in,” Emily chirped. “Come meet my friend and gardener, Jerusalem Emmett Brown.”

Still surprised by her aunt’s energy for one her age, Phoebe was equally surprised to find that her aunt’s friend with the odd name was a black man who was both tall and strong-looking, like an aging football linebacker. The name struck a cord in her memory, but she couldn’t place why. He rose and offered his hand. A little leary of a new bruising to the hand Captain Johnson had crushed, Phoebe reached out. His grip was secure and firm, but not about to put Phoebe into physical therapy afterwards. He cradled her fingers with surprising gentleness that had nothing to do with age or weakness. He was simply not one who thought a crushing grip equated to strength of character.

“I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, Phoebe,” he said. “I understand you’re in the St. Cloud Police Department.”

She nodded. “Yes, for six years. I . . . ah, well . . .” Allow yourself some pride in this lousy day, she told herself. “I made detective just today.”

Aunt Emily clapped her hands like a little girl, and Mr. Brown smiled warmly. “Your father would have been so proud.”

A connection seemed to exist between this gardener with the odd name and her father, still without clear grounding. Had Mr. Brown been a cop? “Yeah, maybe,” she said, but realized that sounded snorpy. She added, “He was hard to read in his later years.”

“Later years?” said her aunt. “Tisk. Zeph . . . Zip, is what he was called at the department, wasn’t it? Well, Zip was hardly sixty-six when he died. Poor man. It was hard for him to go like he did, weak and infirm. He always thought he’d die in some Tombstone-like shootout. Bringing bad guys to justice. Protecting people.” Emily paused, studying Phoebe. “I know you have some harsh memories of Zeph, but he was a good man and he did love you.”

“Oh, I’m sure he did. He just—”

“Had a hard time showing it. Yes, dear, I know.”

Phoebe got the impression then and there that expressing her opinion and true feelings about her father wasn’t going to sit well with Aunt Emily. She could deal. This living arrangement was one of necessity and temporary at that. Discussion of dear old Dad off the table. No problem. I can do anything for a couple of months.

“I was in law enforcement too,” Jerusalem said.

Phoebe looked at the gardener. “Really? Where?”

“Cities mostly. In later years, up here in St. Cloud. I knew your dad, of course.”

Connections solidified in her brain. Her dad had talked about his friend in the department, a black detective with a funny name. Oh, great. Another member of the Zip Magillicutty fan club. I might have to find that new apartment sooner rather than later even if I have to sleep on the floor and eat microwaved food off paper plates with plastic forks.

“Come sit down, dear,” Aunt Emily urged, drawing Phoebe to a brocaded couch that looked about as comfortable as a razor-backed hog but was surprisingly yielding. The fire in the field-stone fireplace felt warm and homey.

“You have a beautiful house, Aunt Emily,” Phoebe offered and almost meant it. “It’s a lot bigger than it looks from outside, too.”

“Oh, thanks, dear. And, yes, I agree that it’s much too big, but Jerry liked the property, and he’s the gardener. The house is way too full of fussy things—lamps and nick-nacks and memories—but it’s comfortable. We’ll go out to the gardens and the lake after supper. It’ll still be light enough, and the mosquitoes shouldn’t be too bad yet.”

Phoebe mentally sighed at the length of the evening ahead. Choices. She decided to make the best of it. “I saw a lot of flowers in the circle out front and through the kitchen windows for so early in the season,” Phoebe said. “You must be a wonderful gardener, Mr. Brown.”

“Thanks. I enjoy it. But, please, call me Jerry. Everyone does.”

The name Jerry Brown finally rang the bell that had been eluding her. He’d been a detective with her dad. “Now I remember my dad talking about you. He admired you a great deal.”

Jerry’s eyes opened. “Really? If he did, old Zip didn’t waste his complements, did he?”

Phoebe agreed. Dad didn’t waste complements or praise or encouragement either. Whatever he was saving them up for, they sure weren’t for me. “How did you get Jerry from Jerusalem? How did you even get the name Jerusalem?” Then Phoebe’s natural curiousity bumped up against her circumstances as the poor relation. She caught herself. “I’m sorry. That was rude.”

“Oh, posh, dear. It was not,” laughed her aunt, sidling a glance at Mr. Brown. “But it is a long story. Let’s just say it isn’t always wise to pick a child’s name from a hat.” Both she and Jerry chuckled.

Phoebe gaped. “Your parents picked your name from a hat? Really?”

“Oh, yes,” Jerry Brown said. “Our family thought Brown was ordinary, boring. I had brothers named Bob, Mike, Sam, and Matt. Sisters were Mary, Ellen, and Sue. I had uncles named Bob, Mike, Sam, and Matt, too. Also had an Aunt Mary, Mary Ellen, and Sue Anne. Among many others. Had maybe six Sams in the family and probably no less than eleven Marys. Seems like, at least naming-wise, my family was in a rut. My parents decided to spice things up. They had a contest among the relations to find a most unusual name to offset the ordinariness of ‘Brown.’ So all my family, my aunts and uncles—some twenty of them—cousins, and I had nearly forty then, and that’s just first cousins, mind you, my grandparents, and all eight of my great-grandparents, and a small army of more distant relatives got together to put names into a hat. My sister Sue got to pick the names because, at the time, she couldn’t yet read—she was four—and, therefore, couldn’t choose a name she liked.”

“And she picked Jerusalem?”

“Emmett came first. That was my middle name. Then she picked a folded piece of paper like all the others. Dad opened it and read ‘Jerusalem,’ but then he noticed that ‘Solomon’ was on the other side of the paper. We figure the name had been put into the hat by a great-granddad or a great uncle, some of which were going a little batty. We figure he meant to put in Solomon and had put ‘Jerusalem’ on the other side of the paper to describe that it was a good biblical name. He meant to say Jewish maybe. Then he folded the paper wrong. But Dad had read the Jerusalem first, and that became my first name. I can’t say that picking my name out of a hat was a great idea, but it ain’t a name I ever heard put together and slapped onto anyone else. That’s for sure.”

“Wow,” Phoebe said.

“I told you it was a long story,” chirped Aunt Emily.

“And I thought Zephalon was a tough name to grow up with. Dad talked about getting tough so he wasn’t beat up so much. Did you have trouble in school too.”

Jerry chuckled. “I did. Yup. I did a lot of fighting because of my name. Can’t say I got tough though. I was this skinny-ass, weighs-nothing kind of kid. I was way too easy to beat up. Didn’t hardly work up a sweat in the guys who did it, either, which is prob’bly why they did it regular-like. Didn’t grow to size ’til I was nearly eighteen. When I went out for football senior year, I finally got left alone.”

Emogene came into the living room. “You guys ready for supper?” she said.

“Sure thing, Miss Emogene,” Jerry said and started to get up from his chair.

“We’ll be right in, Gene,” Phoebe’s aunt said. “Come now, Phoebe. We have a lovely meal for you. I expect you met Emogene as you came through.”

Phoebe nodded and followed as the three headed back through the house to the dining room. Her mother had been a meat-and-potatoes kind of cook—some form of meat plus potatoes fixed in one of maybe three ways, rarely rice. Later, Phil and she seldom had eaten together unless politically adventageous or he had some event to go to where he wanted her on his arm. Since leaving Phil’s big house, she’d subsisted on Poptarts and fast food mostly. That history didn’t prepare her for Emogene at all.

Emogene served a spinach souffle first, followed by a truly amazing mushroom soup. Then came stuffed pork chops with scalloped potatoes and a spring salad. Food suddenly took on a whole new meaning for Phoebe. For dessert, Emogene brought out a flourless chocolate torte that Phoebe thought for sure she couldn’t fit into her belly because she’d had no idea she should have left room for it, but still ate and wanted more. No plastic chicken fundraiser meal, no restaurant fare, or any of her mother’s “homecooked” meals resembled this meal in flavor. Nor did she remember being so satisfied after a meal.

Phoebe had worried about who was joining them for supper. To her surprise, it was Jerry and Emogene. No priest, no potential boyfriend, no card-playing lady friends. Emogene served each course, bringing it in from the kitchen so it was right off the stove or out of the oven, then sat down at the table and enjoyed the course with them. Phoebe began to relax.

The talk around the table was light and chatty, about the gardens needing planting, freezers that needed sorting. Jerry asked how Captain Johnson had broken the news of Phoebe’s promotion. He chuckled and asked how many times she had shaken his hand. Phoebe told him.

“Three!” he exclaimed. “Oh, dear girl, and you can still maneuver a fork? He always had a vise for a grip. Just so you know, he has an exercise ball in his drawer he works half the day just to keep that grip rock hard, scared if he got weak, he’d lose his grip, to make a pun.”

They all laughed. Their easy banter eased some of Phoebe’s concerns about living with her aunt. She might be Zip’s sister, but Phoebe began to believe Emily hadn’t been cut from the same cloth. There had been precious little laughter at home. Of course, with her father getting ill when she was still in grade school, that made sense.

Nor was Emily’s house anything like Phil’s. Emily might have the bigger house, but Phoebe could already tell it was an older, more mindfully constructed place, one that didn’t try to show off its largeness or expense. The house at Ten Oaks Estates, unlike other McMansions in the division, was big only for the sake of size, and the materials used only looked expensive. She had pointed out to Phil how much plastic was masquerading for brass and gold and even wood. He hadn’t cared. Appearances meant everything to him. And even though the addition had been built on reclaimed swamp and, therefore, flat ground, Phil had insisted on that artificial hill. The fill soil had barely grown grass without tons of fertilizer, was rocky and poor in all respects. But that it set off the biggest house in the area made Phil happy.

When Phoebe’s thoughts tracked back to her previous life and threatened to overwhelm her, the three old people’s laughter and good company drew her back, and she’d cheer again. But, finally, that feast with so many delicious foods was over.

“That was an amazing meal, Emogene,” Phoebe said. “Thank you so much for going to all this trouble for me.”

Emogene looked startled and glanced to Aunt Emily, who giggled. “It wasn’t any trouble, Miss Phoebe,” Emogene said. “I’m glad you enjoyed it, but this was a fairly usual Friday night supper.”

“Usual? It was four courses.”

Jerry said, “Emogene loves to cook. It’s what she lives for. We’ve rightfully given her her way.”

“She’s a trained French chef, you see,” chipped in Aunt Emily.

Phoebe looked at this tall, angular woman who looked anything but French.

Emogene, a little apologetically, said, “I went to culinary school after college. Well, not right after. I’d tried out another occupation first. But I needed a change, and had always loved to cook. So culinary school in New York City, then a couple-years stint in Paris. I had this dream to be a head chef in a fine restaurant, but, along came Bill. Swept me off my feet. Got me pregnant ten minutes after we were married, too. Twins. He had a good job, so I stayed home with the boys. It seemed the best thing to do. Had five more kids, including another set of twins, a girl and boy that time. They were spaced just enough that I really never got the chance to be a professional chef, and darned if Bill hated most vegetables, and two of my kids were allergic to nuts. One was also allergic to milk. Messed up so many nice recipes. It wasn’t until the kids were grown and Bill up and died on me that I got my chance to cook the way I’d been trained. Miss Emily advertized for a cook and a maid. I didn’t care much for the housecleaning aspect of the job—maintaining a home with seven kids and a husband, all of whom couldn’t seem to pick up a sock to save their lives, had really worn me out—but Miss Emily let me have free reign in the kitchen.”

“It’s always wise to let a cook have her head,” Aunt Emily said sagely. Then she leaned closer to Phoebe, though surely not out of Emogene’s earshot. “I hired a lady to come in twice a week for the cleaning.”

“We did have to cut back on some of the calories, though,” said Jerry, patting his belly, which was barely spreading. “We were all getting a little tight for our jeans, so to speak.”

“I adjusted,” said Emogene with a shrug. “I can do well-balanced and reasonable as long as there’s also taste. And these two don’t have food allergies . . . I sure hope you don’t, Miss Phoebe.” She raised her eyebrow.

“Nope. Nothing. I can eat anything.”

Emogene smiled and gave her a curt nod. “Good. I know you’re not getting on in years the way the three of us are and maybe don’t need to watch your weight, not as skinny as you are, but maybe you’ll be happy to know that, except for the torte, which was, after all, a treat, that meal had about 975 calories.”

Phoebe was astonished. “Really. It was so . . . flavorful.”

“Flavor is preparation,” said Emogene, “not necessarily calories. I never use ‘substitute’ foods though. Everything I cook is real, organic, fresh, and, when I can manage it, locally grown. Getting food fresh really boosts flavor. That and when a recipe calls for butter, it gets butter. I’ll use honey when I can instead of sugar, but I won’t use sweetener. That crap’ll kill you.”

“And your food has always been delicious,” Aunt Emily said, patting Emogene’s hand.

Phoebe was beginning to see that these three were friends. They chatted and teased each other like old chums. It certainly made no difference that one was an employer and two employees.

After supper, Phoebe offered to help with clean up, but Emogene, looking startled, said, “Don’t give it a thought. I have two dishwashers, and the pans are already on. All the prep dishes are done. The kitchen is my domain. You should go out to the gardens and the lake with Emily and Jerry. Scoot now.”

Phoebe backtracked to the stairs behind the kitchen, retrieved her bag, found a bathroom just under the stairs and quickly slipped out of the office pants suit. By the time Phoebe had changed into jeans and a bulky sweatshirt, Aunt Emily and Jerry were already out back looking at a lovely planting of tulips and hyacinths.

“So, I thought we could put in a few more perennials this year,” Jerry was saying. “I’d like some bleeding hearts right there, and maybe some coral bells over there.”

“Sure,” said Aunt Emily. “What about foxglove?”

“Well, they’re biennials, so I’ll still have to start some each year in the greenhouse and grow them up in the junior bed their first year, then each year I can transplant some into the beds. I have some ready to move into the east garden this week.”

“I think I’d like that. Lupines?”

“Oh, Em, we’ve always had lupines. Center garden, lake garden, and out front.”

“Oh, yes. I just keep forgetting what they’re called. The boys have some too, right?”

Jerry seemed to give her aunt a warning look, but Phoebe didn’t understand that. Then he cleared his throat and Emily turned. “Oh, there you are, Phoebe. Good. Let’s walk.”

She hooked an arm around Phoebe’s elbow, and they started down a lovely cobbled pathway. Every now and again, Jerry would point out some of the plantings, prepared beds soon to be filled with transplants, or possible future garden locations.

“Columbines?” Aunt Emily said.

“We had a really nice large patch the last couple of years in the circle garden, but it died out in the center. I divided it last year, but it just petered out. We can get more.”

“Good. I like them.”

“I know you like them,” he said, chuckling. “You told me that every time you passed them last spring. I’ll order more or pick up a couple nice plants at Farmer Seed or Thompsons. I like the really long-spurred ones.”

“Oh, yes. Me too. What about you, Phoebe? What’s your favorite flower?”

Do people have favorite flowers? “Me? Oh, I don’t know. Roses maybe . . . or . . . what are those little white flowers they use a lot in borders? They smell real sweet.”

“Alyssum,” Jerry said. “Sure. I like using them in borders. And roses we got over that way, but not much is showing yet. They’re just waking up with this late spring. So, you like fragrant flowers then?”

Phoebe didn’t know what to say. She had hardly paid much attention to gardens as a child, and, as an adult, she had mostly lived in apartments where she was removed from gardens. In the Phil’s big house, he had a service come and maintain the lawns, but, other than foundation shrubs, he didn’t want anything but grass. Flowers were too fussy. Shrubs presented a stronger image, he said. As if plants denote strength. “I don’t know,” Phoebe said. “I guess when I’d be on partrol and pass a garden, I didn’t much notice except if something smelled nice.”

Both Jerry and Aunt Emily nodded knowingly, but Phoebe wasn’t quite sure what they knew. Then they looked at each other and said at the same time, “Tuberoses!” and both giggled like children.

Phoebe didn’t know if this were some kind of inside joke, but she chose not to show her ignorance by not knowing what a tuberose was. Instead she just smiled. The image the flower’s name put into her head wasn’t encouraging.

The maintained back yard seemed to go on a long ways, mowed grass winding around garden beds and shrubbery plantings until it suddenly opened up into a wide grassy space. A fair-sized greenhouse stood off to the left and a smallish bay of the lake lay to the right. A boathouse nestled just at the edge of the water and a short redwood dock extended over the cattails and lilypads into clear water. Across the lake Phoebe saw some Holstein cows grazing on a grassy rise, and the roof of a barn peeked from between two hills with a couple of silos alongside.

“Does anyone else live on the lake?” Phoebe asked, looking across at the farm.

Aunt Emily said, “That’s Stevensons’ Farms. It’s just us and them. We get milk and strawberries from Stevensons’. They have a truck garden, so we also get vegetables in summer. They grow better melons than we usually do,” she said, casting a raised eyebrow in Jerry’s direction.

“Well, they did last summer,” he said without rancor. “We got some mildew with all that rain. They get more of a breeze in that open land of theirs. Soil’s better over there for melons.”

They continued walking. The cobbled walk turned back towards the house as it rounded the greenhouse and came past the boat house and wove its way along the lakeshore for a ways through a wilder area of woods alternated with marshy meadows filled with marsh marigold in full bloom and young cattail stems. Phoebe could see ducks on the water. And an amazing number and variety of frogs croaked in various keys. They seemed to line the lake and the cattails with their spring calls. Some bird sang long and low from out on the lake.

“Oh, good,” said Aunt Emily. “The loons are back.”

“You have loons on your lake?” Phoebe asked, trying to spot the characteristic black-and-white of the Minnesota state bird. “I thought they only lived up north.”

“Oh, no,” said Jerry. “We almost always have a pair on the lake. If you look way over there to where the reeds get thick. See that platform?”

“Yeah,” Phoebe said.

“That’s a loon nest site. We had the DNR put it there where the farm dogs and foxes can’t reach them. They’ve had more breeding success the last few years because of that.”

“But I thought loons needed a lot bigger lake . . . something about not being able to take off.”

“Ten acres,” Aunt Emily said. “They need a lake at least ten acres. This one’s more like forty, so we’re good. It’s not wide, but it is long, so they’re able to take off.”

“Oh.” Phoebe thought it might be fun to listen to loons. In fact, she was very much enjoying the walk and the path and the gardens, and now the lake. Her life up to this point hadn’t included a lot of nature. “You really do have a lovely place here, Aunt Emily,” she finally said sincerely.

“Thank you, dear. We enjoy it. Don’t you just love the frogs?”

“Hmm? Oh, the frogs. Yeah, they’re nice. So many of them.”

“Frogs are environmental barometers,” said Jerry. “This is healthy land.”

Just by the scope of the house and property, Phoebe was getting an impression that her aunt was a great deal wealthier than she had thought. And that seemed to make sense. Emily had been an actress in Hollywood, though Phoebe didn’t know a single picture her aunt might have been in. She had done some research on that but had come up empty time and again. When she had asked her dad about this years ago, he’d just harumphed and said, “Not the real world, Phoebe. Don’t go there.”

“Um, Dad said you were a film star when you were young,” she said.

“Star? Oh, my, no,” said her aunt with that girlish giggle. “Nothing so fancy as a star. I could hardly be called an actress really. An extra maybe. Most of the time I was in and out of a movie in the first three minutes and nothing more.”

“What? I don’t understand. Why would that be?”

“I’d get killed.” Phoebe’s eighty-year-old aunt said this with complete aplomb.

“What do you mean? Killed? Like in more than one movie?”

“In forty-two movies. Got killed in all of them.”

Phoebe couldn’t wrap her head around this. “You were killed in forty-two different movies?”

“Yup, but actually I was killed fifty-four times total. In a few films I was killed more than once.”

“That’s nuts. Why would you be killed in every movie you were in?”

“I’m a screamer, dear.”

Phoebe paused on the path. “What?”

Jerry groaned and slapped his hands over his ears. “You should do the same,” he warned.

And then Phoebe’s small, eighty-something-year-old aunt drew in a long breath and let loose with the most shocking, most terrifying, loudest scream Phoebe had ever heard come out of anyone’s mouth. She clamped her hands over her ears at the sheer volume of that scream, and it went on and on, like her aunt had the longest breath on the planet. When Aunt Emily finally turned it off, every creature in the near vicinity had shut up. Not a single frog croaked, no birds chirped, and the loon had dived quite out of sight. The cows, an animal that Phoebe had seldom seen move at anything faster than an amble, that lived on the farm across the lake had found reason to gallop back over the hill to the safety of their barn.

Phoebe said, “What the hell was that?”

“I’m a screamer,” said Aunt Emily, who had somehow transformed back into her aged aunt from some shocking, other-worldly, terrifying monster. With that scream still echoing in Phoebe’s head, her aunt’s small, gentle voice surely must come from someone else. “The studios would hire me to scream in their movies. Some murderer would be attacking a young woman, and she’d scream. The monster showed up to kill its first victim while the opening credits played. The serial killer struck, triggering the events in the movie. The unseen werewolf, the evil butler, the drug lords, the vampire. I was gulped down by a dinosaur once. Then there were the times cars lost in fog went over cliffs, the foolish girl went into the attic or the basement or found her way into the haunted house or graveyard. The scenarios of murder have been endless over the years. Lots of times, if the woman was killed, I was the woman, but sometimes I was just the voice behind the sets. Did that another fifty or so times, but I don’t count them as actually being in a film. I mean they list the griffs and best boys in the final credits, and they never got into the film as such, but no one lists the screamer. Of course, some of my gigs weren’t actually even films. Some were shorts . . . cartoons. I screamed for maybe 100 cartoons and animated films. I was big in Monsters, Inc.”

“Aunt Emily, are you saying you were in over 200 productions of one kind or another?”

“That’s about right, dear. What I just demonstrated was my fall-off-the-cliff-a-long-ways-to-the-wild-sea-below scream. You’d see someone fall, and I’d be the long scream as they plummeted to their death. I can do male or female screams, and I’d cut it off mid-yell when they hit the water. In the films I was killed more than once, I wore a wig and did different screams. I have a large repertoire.”

Phoebe was struggling to understand. “And you made a living . . . screaming?”

“A good living. I mean, forty-two movies that I appeared in, another bunch I screamed for. All the animated stuff I did. For a while, I was the go-to gal for screaming. Disney and Warner Brothers loved me.”

“No way! Seriously? You got rich screaming?”

Now Emily met Jerry’s eyes in a quick glance. “Well, I made a decent living, and I lived frugally. Not being a high-profile actress, of course, I never commanded the big bucks, but compensation was surprisingly good. And once my reputation was established, I got lots of work. Still no one recognized me on the street or invited me to the Academy Awards. I so would’ve liked that, but it never happened. On the other hand, I never had the expenses of high-profile actresses. I didn’t need body guards, secretaries, assistants, a whole team of trainers, beauticians, clothing buyers, and I sure didn’t need a huge mansion in Bevery Hills like others just had to have. Saw no point to all that. For most of those years, I had a small walk-up in the valley. But I . . . I invested what I did make, and those investments went very well.”

“Invested,” Phoebe said, dubious. “Okay. But surely in the many recessions—”

“Oh, and I take the odd gig still,” her aunt said, maybe not hearing what Phoebe had said. “I did a demonstration on Prairie Home Companion a few months back.”

Phoebe tried to wrap her mind around that. “As . . . a screamer?”

“What else, dear?”

“Did Garrison Keiler . . . like your scream?”

“Oh, he wasn’t there, more’s the pity. It wasn’t live. I taped a segment for the radio. It should air next month.”

Phoebe was speechless and a little horrified. Her aunt was going to be on Prairie Home Companion as a screamer. How should I feel about that? “But with the recessions and stock market corrections, how could you—”

“It’s getting dark,” said Jerry. “We should head in.”

“Yeah, sure,” Phoebe said. She had been cut off. Twice. And though neither Aunt Emily nor Mr. Brown seemed irked by her inquiry, Phoebe had the strong impression that these two had secrets. She sighed. Maybe they do, but this is their life and home, and I need to respect that. I’m just a temporary boarder. After all they hadn’t been mean about it. Her dad might have told her to mind her own business, and Phil would have yelled at her, belittled her. Her aunt and the gardener had simply changed the subject. The light banter, mostly about gardens and food, continued as they cleared the woods and entered the back garden area again.

They followed the lakeside path as it curved back toward the house, viewing completely different gardens as they did so. The cobbled path joined the garden path just after the fish pond at the screened in porch just off the kitchen. As they walked, Phoebe realized that it was still really quiet. Maybe it was because the evening had settled in like a cloak around them, but the ducks weren’t quacking, the cows didn’t come back to the lake from the barn, the loon had gone silent, and lots of frogs that had been chirping and beeping all along the edge of the lake seeming to be hiding out. Since her aunt’s epic scream, it had gone quiet and a lot of the animals and birds had just stayed silent. Only by the time they reached the house did some of the frogs—a few—take up again and beep tentatively. Her aunt had some amazing lungs.

Chapter 3: The Guest Room

Back in the house, Aunt Emily and Jerry invited Phoebe to the living room for some after-supper brandy that Emogene was already pouring.

“Oh, gee, thanks, but I think I should unpacked the car. It’s been a long day for me what with packing up and waiting for the captain to give me the good news about my promotion. I’d like to settle in, if I could.”

“Of course, dear,” said Aunt Emily with sad eyes and sympathy. “I should have been more thoughtful. We can help you unpack if you like.”

“No. It’s okay. There’s really not that much stuff, books mostly, I guess.”

“Books?” Aunt Emily said. She cast an eye at Jerry, who nodded.

He got up, tipped his chin towards the backyard window and turned to Phoebe. “You’ll be needing shelves in your room. We’ve got several upstairs over the garage.”

Over the garage. She liked the idea of that. Anonymity. She pictured a little nine-by-ten room that could accommodate a twin bed with maybe a dresser tucked next to it. With the size of the garage, maybe she’d have room for a full-size bed. Not that she actually owned one. Still, she didn’t picture a lot of space. She was going to suggest that the books could just remain in their boxes, but Jerry was already striding out of the living room. She trotted after him. As he took the hall past the kitchen, she noticed that her bag and laptop were no longer at the base of the stairs.

“My bag and—”

“Emogene prob’bly took ’em up. No worries.”

So not a garage apartment? Jerry opened the door to the first garage. A big black SUV—one of the larger Fords—was parked next to a pale-blue Buick sedan, a nice red Toyota Camry, and a rusty old black Ford pickup. Somehow she had misjudged the garage. Clearly it was more that a double. That it parked four vehicles surprised Phoebe. Then she saw that the parking area for the vehicles was actually wider than the door. The garage wasn’t rectangular. Because of the placement of the garage in relation to the house, the back of the garage was wider than the entry. The end vehicles had come in the door, then turned into their parking spaces. No three of them could be in the doorway at the same time, but pulled into their spaces, all four fit comfortably. And the garage was deep enough to allow even the end vehicles to pull out. The angle the garage sat from the house allowed this and created the illusion of a smaller garage when viewed from the outside. It was clever, but Phoebe wondered why it had been designed this way. Usually builders of large houses wanted everyone to appreciate “big.” Clearly this architect didn’t. Not only did her aunt and Mr. Brown have secrets, but, clearly, the house did as well.

The SUV and the Buick were current models, the Toyota not very old, but the pickup had at least fifteen years behind it, maybe as many as twenty-five. Along one wall, next to the ratty pickup, a service door gave access to a stairway. And, as this stairway was just inside and against the wall that the two garages shared, Phoebe thought maybe it was one large space up there, spanning both garages. She almost kind of hoped her room was up there. And, to her delight, the upstairs of the larger garage opened up into a complete efficiency apartment—kitchen, living room, two bedrooms even, and a large bath. It was tastefully decorated, clean and open. And, while it had no fireplace, it did have a wood stove in the living room with a supply of wood already piled next to it.

“Wow,” said Phoebe. “This is lovely, and its way bigger than my first apartment. Do I stay here . . . or do you?”

“You? Nope. You got a room in the house. So do I. In the summer we usually hire a couple of guys or a married couple to help out with the gardening. They stay here. Couple other helpers, if we need them, stay over the other garage.”

He led the way to a door off the garage apartment’s living room that led to another set of stairs, steeper ones, that took them to an attic. Up there in a large single room under the eaves of the roof were lots of pieces of furniture—end tables, chairs, a bed frame, an assortment of lamps, and a number of very nice bookshelves. Phoebe had seen a few attics with their dusty piled boxes and broken furniture waiting for someone to make repairs or refinish ancient pieces with scratched tops or waiting around to be thrown out. This wasn’t that kind of attic at all. Even though it was a bit crowded in places and boxes did form somewhat uneven piles, the furniture she saw was far from broken, stained or scratched. Some of the pieces in Phoebe’s somewhat inexperienced estimation identified what might be valuable antiques.

“How many do you think you’ll need?” Jerry asked as he set aside some boxes in the way and shifted a nice oak four-shelf book case toward the stairs.

No less than seven identical, well-made oak book cases had been lined up where he was standing. “Oh, I don’t have that many books. Two ought to do it. Is there room in the guest room for two?”

“We’ll manage,” he said with a chuckle. “Don’t you worry about that.”

With the case tipped on its side and one of them at each end, they walked it down into the garage apartment, then down to the garage, then into the back hall of the house. Phoebe had thought for sure he would go up that set of stairs, but he didn’t. He walked the book case out into the foyer and up the long, curving stairs there. Phoebe followed behind him, bringing up the bottom of the case and working to make sure it didn’t scratch the wall or the banister and railing of the elegant front stairway, though they were plenty wide. She figured that he’d gone this way because of the width of the stairs and that this set of stairs had no landing to maneuver the case around. At the top of the stairs, she expected him to turn right to some room above the kitchen or the locked back rooms. But he didn’t turn that way at all. With the open balcony on one side and windows overlooking the back gardens on the other, he led her to a room over the living room where the house bumped out into the back yard.

“Oh, my God,” said Phoebe, nearly dropping her end of the book case. “This can’t be a guest room.”

The “room” was clearly a suite of rooms. She saw that right away. They entered into a lovely sitting room that had a loveseat, a couple of recliners, a baby grand in the corner, a grandfather clock, a fireplace already lit, and mounted on one wall, a huge flatscreen TV. A fan overhead slowly circulated air. Her laptop and overnight bag sat on the coffee table. This room led into a spacious bedroom with a queen-sized bed with a huge bath off that as well as a walk-in closet.

“It’s not a guest room,” Jerry said. “Not really, I suppose. It might even have been the master bedroom at one time, but there’s a suite on the first floor too, and Emily likes that one better. Stairs bother her knees. We thought for a time we’d put in an elevator for her, but she thought that might be excessive. No one’s used this room since she bought the house, so you might as well give it a go. Here, the bookshelf will fit nicely between the bedroom door and the closet. The other can go right behind the piano in the sitting room. That space of wall is perfect for it. What do you think?”

“Um . . .” Phoebe was lost for words, was beyond words. She had never been in such a nice set of rooms in her life. Having set down the bookcase so Jerry could maneuver it into place, she slowly walked around the sitting room, admiring the Persian rug, the Tiffany lamps, small statues, and family pictures. The mantle held a number of these old photos. She picked up one of her aunt and her dad when they had been young. Emily was in her late teens, a knock-out in a small package, and Zephalon was a mere boy of five or six but already stretching out to be the big man he would become. Clearly a good bunch of years separated the two in age.

Other photos on the mantle showed her grandfather, also in law enforcement, standing with his fists on his hips, in full deputy uniform and regalia—duty belt, gun, back up speed loaders, knife, handcuffs, and a couple other pouches on his belt she didn’t know what they might contain. He had his radio on his shoulder, a skimmer summer hat, and a duty jacket studded with sharpshooter pins and flag patches—the bling of law enforcement. The way his shirt lay, looking bulky and stiff, let her know he had a kevlar vest on as well. The whole works. That much paraphenalia had to add some twenty pounds to the man, and he was a “door filler” to start with, as her dad would say.

Something touched her arm, and Phoebe jumped. Jerry smiled. “Gathering wool, there, Miss Phoebe?”

She let out a breath. “I haven’t heard that expression in years. Sorry.”

Jerry reached for the photo of Emily as a teen. “She’s a lovely lady.”

“How long have you known her?”

“Oh, a long, long time. Five decades easy. My family’s from California. I went to high school with her. She got her GED out there after she started acting. Did you know that?”

“No. Actually, I know very little about her.” She paused then added in a low voice, “I don’t know much more about my dad really. He died when I was twelve, and he’d been ill for years before that. My brother Skip died before I was born, and everyone says Dad changed after that loss.”

Jerry nodded and set the picture back on the mantle. “Families have a way of seeming to keep secrets, but, really, they don’t. When you’re ready, you’ll know everything you’ll need to know.”

Phoebe didn’t know what to say, didn’t really understand what Jerry meant. Before the moment got awkward, though, Jerry said, “I was just saying, though, that the library downstairs has a wide selection of DVDs if you want to watch something. You’re welcome to borrow whatever you’d like, of course. We got satellite, too. HBO. Stars. The remotes are there on that credenza, and the DVD player is just inside it. Thought you’d like to know. Do you play piano?”

Phoebe looked at the baby grand. “No. Always wanted to learn, but no.”

He had the first bookcase placed. She admired it. “That’s a perfect location. I’ll come help you with the other one.”

“Nope. Taken care of,” he said and winked.

And just then two hefty teen boys walked the second bookcase into the room. They were both blond, both wide cheeked. Clearly brothers. They both looked mid-teens, maybe sixteen, so Phoebe thought maybe a year separated them in age.

“These are a couple of the Stevenson boys from the farm across the lake. Cole, and that’s Bill. Emily called them over. There are a couple more of them taking care of the book boxes in your car and should have them up here . . . ah, just about now.”

Book were heavy, even in the smallish boxes Phoebe had packed them in. One of the boys brought in three stacked boxes and was bigger than his brothers, late teens easily and brawny, but just as blond and handsome as the first two. The other, identical to the one introduced as Bill, carried two boxes.

“That Brad, twin to Bill, in case you thought you were seeing double, and that’s the eldest brother, Fynn.”

“It’s a family name,” said the tall boy with the four-day-old beard. He grinned. And though he was ten years her junior, Phoebe knew for fact that Fynn and his brothers could tug a teen girl’s heartstrings, maybe play them like a guitar. She remembered boys like this from her high school.

The first two vanished as the second pair of brothers set the boxes next to the one bookcase. “Do you want us to help you unpack them?” Brad asked.

“No, that’s okay. I need to organize them,” said Phoebe. How did one explain that books could be friends, companions even, and needed to be placed with care?

In a few minutes, the other boys were back with the last of the books. “Jimmy and Cory stacked the rest of the stuff from the car along the garage wall,” Brad said, not to her, but to Jerry.

Phoebe gaped. “Two more brothers?”

Jerry laughed. “There’s another four, but they’re prob’bly helping Pete with the livestock. Any 4H projects planned for this year, guys?”

Cole said. “We all got something, ’cept Fynn, of course.” He elbowed his older brother. I have two Angus steer calves. Brad’s got a Holstein heifer, really pretty little thing. Bill wanted to do sheep this year, so Pete . . . um . . . Dad got him some Hamptons. Jimmy has a couple Nubian milk goats that better learn to stay in their pasture. Cory will probably can beans and jelly or make bread again. Tom, one of the little twins, is doing chickens—he has a dozen Cochin chicks—and Little Pete is going for rabbits again, this time Flemish giants. As for the other little guys, well, Sam might raise pumpkins again ’cause he did that well last year and made a nice profit at the markets. Deek, I dunno, but Ted, the other little twin, wants to raise Guinea fowl ’cause he likes the sounds they make, and Fester wants to raise turkeys though we told him that a turkey would probably grow bigger’n him.”

Jerry laughed. “You boys are always so busy. Thanks for helping bring up the shelves and books and stacking that stuff for Emily’s niece. This here is Phoebe, by the way.”

Each of the boys tipped his head.

Jerry pulled out his wallet.

“Oh, no,” objected Phoebe. “I can pay them.” She started to calculate what ten minutes of work was worth.

“They aren’t your helpers,” said Jerry and proceeded to pass out folded bills to each boy, who grinned and quickly pocketed what he gave them.

“Any time, Mr. Brown,” said one of the younger brothers.

Fynn said, “Thanks, Jerry.” Phoebe could hear a lot of warmth in his words.

The boys looked very pleased with whatever Jerry had given them.

“Now,” Jerry said to Phoebe, “you can stay up here, if you like and settle in, or you can come down and have a sip of brandy before you call it a day.”

Phoebe agreed to come down. As she walked with Jerry down the curving main stairs, she was already coming to understand just how much of a force her aunt and the cook and the gardener were. These were people who had very specific ways of doing things, and she was not likely to make inroads in that. But while she was pleased to see people who knew their minds, she was also getting an inkling that she needed to be very forceful of mind as well or she’d be steamrolled by this threesome. And it did remind her of home before her dad was ill, but not in as bad a way as she had feared. Emily, with her girlish giggle, wasn’t as stone-faced as her brother, nor as disapproving—at least so far—of Phoebe. Life with her dad had run like clockwork, though she always seemed to be out of step somehow and in need of being reminded what she was supposed to be doing. This had been one of her fears in coming to live with her dad’s sister. That Magillicutty mentality had been overpowering at times at home, smothering other times. She feared it would happen here, too. And after Phil, she sure didn’t need that.

There was something else going on, though, but she just couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Jerry had been awful free with handing out bills, but what kind of a sum would bring the eager smiles she had seen to a bunch of teen boys’ faces? Would a couple of ones do it? Hardly. A fiver? Maybe, but those boys had pretty big grins. Even the oldest, Fynn, and Phoebe knew from her own life that an eighteen-year-old would rather be stung by yellow-jackets than admit something impressed him that the adults around him did. She thought that, for the ten-minutes’ work and trip over from their nearby farm, a ten-dollar bill to share between them might have been fair, but, surely, that wouldn’t have made them that happy. Ten dollars each, however, would have. But that meant that Jerry had given the Stevensons brothers a total of sixty dollars. For her. That was a lot. They had carried her book boxes, one of the shelves for her books and unloaded her car. She could have done that. It might have taken her longer, but she could have done all she needed to do in maybe half an hour.

The brandy was delicious, but it put a definite period at the end of Phoebe’s long and stressful day. She’d been up early to pack and cart out box after box of her personal belongings, and, of course, Phil’s henchmen were only there to make sure she didn’t take Phil’s stuff and not to help her load her car. They sat around drinking coffee and insisting she vacuum the living room, wash the kitchen floor and clean the bathroom as well. They’d locked her out of the apartment at noon so they could get lunch, and she had to stand around an hour for them to return. It made her feel like some kind of criminal. Then she had nervously waited for the captain after all that, eaten way too much of Emogene’s excellent food, walked probably close to half a mile to circle the gardens, and now drunk a quarter-snifter of brandy. By the time she had sipped the last of it, she could feel her body kind of shutting down, going to sleep in bits and pieces on her. Once that process got as far as her eyes, she knew they wouldn’t stay open no matter how much she might wish they did. Best to make a hasty retreat to her room. Room? Suite. Palace was more like it.

“Aunt Emily,” she said, setting her snifter down on the tray Emogene had brought into the living room, “I have to get some sleep. It’s been a really long day. I’d love to stay and chat, but I’m falling asleep on my feet.”

“Then you just head off to bed, dear,” said her aunt soothingly. “What time would you like breakfast?”

Phoebe thought about many of her “breakfasts” of late—a couple gulps of coffee, maybe a slice of toast or a Poptart. Occasionally one or two of the office donuts if they hadn’t been too picked over. She doubted this was what her aunt meant. She could hardly remember the last time she had actually eaten so much as a bowl of Wheaties or Captain Crunch.

“Just so you know,” Emogene said, as if she read Phoebe’s mind, “I don’t serve junk breakfast food. Tomorrow we’re having asperagus quiche with mushrooms and cheese.”

“Oh, wow. That sound heavenly. Um . . . I wanted to be in the office by seven, though, which is kind of early, so I can get something—”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” said Jerry.

“Oh, I know. I don’t really have to work, but I wanted to clean out my desk to move across the hall. I wanted to get there at shift change so I could get it done and not bother people. I start work as a detective on Monday.”

“Excellent,” said Emogene. “We’ll eat at six.”

Both Aunt Emily and Jerry were nodding, either easily agreeing or used to having breakfast at a very early hour. Jerry held up his snifter in a toast. “To early rising on a fresh May morn.”

Phoebe had accepted a splash more of brandy for the toast, then excused herself and went up to her room, slowly climbing the elegant staircase that swept around the foyer. In some ways she felt better about her situation. The roller-coaster week had ended out higher on her score card than she had dared hope. She was out of a bad marriage, out of Phil’s apartment even if the rent had wiped out all immediate hope of a new apartment, she had a new rank and work ahead of her, and had found the best housing she had ever enjoyed in her life, matched by meals that were an epicurian delight.

She smiled as she crossed over the balcony, impressed with the chandalier that centered the foyer, the big windows front and back, and the fine art on the walls. Sure she had lived for a time in a rather posh housing addition for St. Cloud, but, while some of the houses in the addition were elegant and richly appointed, Phil’s house only looked posh. Phoebe knew he had cut every corner he could to get the look he wanted. The flooring was cheap but looked like solid oak. Everything that could be was presswood with a veneer. The ceiling molding was cheap plastic glued in place. But the place made people’s eyes open in appreciation, probably believing all the crap was real wood, real plaster, real anything. Phoebe had come to believe Phil’s crowd was as plastic and artificial as the ceiling molding and seemed only to be impressed with the expensive look of things rather than their quality.

And while Phoebe feared ending up with a battle ax for an aunt, Emily, with her childlike giggles didn’t seem to be that. The screamer part would take some getting used to, though. On the whole, Phoebe began to believe that, maybe for the first time in her life, she was among people who might treat her well. Phil had been all about controling her and trying to reshape her for his betterment, it being adventageous to have a handsome woman on a politician’s arm, but he had been abusive when he didn’t get his way, mostly verbally, perhaps, but he did throw things. A few times, she had fear bodily harm.

But uneasiness also followed Phoebe upstairs. Clearly, she told herself, she had fallen into some sort of mad house. Kind of a pleasant mad house, to be sure, and elegant, but mad nonetheless. Her aunt was a professional screamer, for God’s sake. Who was a professional screamer? Who knew that screaming even could be a profession? And Jerry was an ex-cop-cum-gardener. That wasn’t so odd by itself. She had been impressed with the gardens. But she wondered about the arrangement between him and her aunt. He lived, not in a garden cabin or above the garage, as one might suspect or might be appropriate for a gardener, but in the house. Did people have live-in gardeners like that? And, clearly, he had money to give neighbor boys payment for doing work for him, though maybe that was her aunt’s money. What had he said? “They aren’t your helpers.” Clearly they were his helpers, then. That seemed to mean this live-in gardener didn’t even do all his own work. And Emogene was a frustrated chef living out her culinary dreams in her senior years, but for only two people, and she ate with her employer. That was odd. Where did she sleep? Not in the garage either, so also probably in the house. Or did she go home at night? Phoebe cancelled that idea. If Emogene was going to have breakfast ready by six, no way did she go home.

Phoebe gave some thought to the idea that Jerry and Emogene were somehow taking advantage of her aunt, getting much more than either job description ought to include. She’d have to pay attention to that. Aunt Emily was, after all, her last living relative and a senior citizen. Who knew if her mind had started to slip in places. But even as she thought this, she replayed some of their dialogue, the comfortable teasing banter between the three oldsters, their companionable walk along the lake with Aunt Emily’s arm around Jerry’s elbow at times. No, Jerry and Emogene and her aunt were friends who enjoyed each other’s company.

But I better not take advantage, she told herself as she opened her room and looked at the luxury she had fallen into. Just having that incredible suite of rooms seemed like taking advantage. Sure, Jerry said they were going unused, but that wasn’t the point. She resolved to set up a rental arrangement with her aunt in the morning. It was too much to ask that her aunt take her in gratis. Not for a space like this, and certainly not when food seemed to be included whether she wanted it or not. But nothing yet had been said about rent or even helping with some of the housework in exchange for her space. But that was when she thought she was going to cram into some small, out-of-the-way guest room in a chilly attic. She gave uncomfortable thought to the idea that she ­couldn’t afford what would be fair for the room and board considering the circumstances she had. Even a work trade was out of the question. She’d have to mop floors full time to earn that suite of rooms. She’d never earn money for her own place.

Phoebe showered and changed into her pjs in a bathroom more luxurious than any she had known. The toilet seat was heated, after all, and the shower had a wide head that “rained” on her, while other spouts hit her on all sides. The bath had two sinks, a stocked linen closet with thick, soft, matching towels, a changing room, and a really deep tub as well. She could also see that the tub was at least fitted with jets. It might be a full-on jacuzi for all she knew. She’d have to try that out when she wasn’t in danger of falling asleep in the warm water and slipping under and drowning. Her bare feet told her the floors were heated, too. She had never given the idea of heated floors a moment’s thought, but they sure felt wonderful.

She came back into the bedroom and pulled open the bed. “Silk sheets?” she instantly said as she ran her hand over the smooth surface, then dismissed this idea as ludicrous. “At least a really high thread count,” she concluded. The comforter was down, she was sure, and she had half a dozen down pillows at her back. At Phil’s they stripped off the gorgeous quilt each night. The bedding underneath came from K-Mart and Shopko.

Slipping her feet between those smooth, satiny sheets, however, was amazing. And the bed was queen-sized. She sighed and wriggled into a comfortable position, unable to keep herself from smiling. On the bedside table, she saw a remote. Upon inspection, it was clearly a television remote from Dish, but she saw no TV in the room. Another smaller remote lay next to it. She picked up this one and looked at it. Something custom. It had buttons for radio, CD player, DVD player, as well as TV and her overhead fan. She looked across the room, seeing nothing but rich paneling graced with a few scenic pictures. Perhaps these remotes were for the television in the sitting room. No, Jerry had showed her that remote.

“Okay,” she whispered. “I’ll play along,” and she depressed the TV button. To her surprise and amazement, a piece of paneling between the pictures depressed into the wall, then slid aside, revealing another large flatscreen TV as well as a full media center, a shelf with CDs, and another with a row of DVDs.

“Wow,” Phoebe said. She took up the Dish remote and was able to find some reruns of Firefly on the sci-fi channel. Tucked into a warm, silky bed, propped by plump pillows, with a huge television to entertain her, her life would only be more complete if—

She heard a knock on her door and slipped out of bed, threw on her robe and padded to the door in the sitting room. Emogene stood there, a silver tray in hand. On it was a steaming cup of hot chocolate topped by whipped cream and a beautiful curl of chocolate. Next to it was a thin slice of that fabulous chocolate torte from supper.

“Your aunt likes to have a cup of hot chocolate at bedtime. It helps her sleep. She thought I should offer the same to you.” Not waiting for Phoebe to say anything, Emogene walked right in, went to the bedroom and set down her tray on the night table next to her bed. “Ah, I see you figured out the media center. Good. Emily was concerned that Jerry hadn’t explained any of it to you. Now it sometimes gets a little chilly up here at night, and I don’t know if you’re the kind of person who likes a bit of fresh air. That’s an electric blanket on the bed under the comforter, though. The remote for it is in the drawer of the nightstand. If it gets a bit close in here, there’s also a remote for the fan overhead. Or you can open a window. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Um, no . . . but thanks so much. I feel really—”

“You aunt wanted you taken care of.” Then Emogene smiled. “Oh, and the torte probably won’t help you sleep at all, but you seemed to enjoy it, so I thought . . .”

Phoebe smiled. “Thanks. I’ll enjoy every bite.”

Emogene smiled again, this time with pride, and left.

Phoebe stood staring at the closed door after the woman had left. Taken care of. She realized with a note of astonishment that she had not felt taken care of in a very long time. Maybe ever. Then she turned off the sitting room lamps and returned to the silky sheets and Firefly and another taste of chocolate torte and the best hot chocolate maybe on the face of the Earth.

Chapter 4: Detective Magillicutty

The evening in her aunt’s comfortable home had relaxed Phoebe more than she even understood she needed to relax. The recent months had overloaded her with stress: the divorce, watching her ex-husband quickly oust her with no look back, then fill her roll with someone much more capable of the entertaining and favor-currying lifestyle he wanted. Wedding bells had already been announced. The realization that this woman had been in Phil’s life for some time had come slowly but hit like a hammer. Phoebe was from a family of law enforcers, a very different kind of people than politicians. For all her father might have been harsh, exacting, demanding, she also always felt his fierce loyalty, his total sincerity.

Her father, his father, her brother—all had taken up the roll of law enforcement—and Phoebe knew that lineage went back much further.

After a tasty slice of Emogene’s quiche at six the next morning, Phoebe had gone into the office even though it was Saturday to pack up her personal items from the desk she shared with members of two other shifts. Her stuff fit into a small box, another reminder that she owned very little, and contained little more than a few framed photographs, a list of the cases she had worked on, a kind of diary of her six years of service, some pens, and paper clips. She put the box in her locker.

She said good-bye to a few people she had worked with, but, really, there’d be no fanfare. She was, after all, only moving across the hall to the detective side of the department. In some respects, it was a small move, a few steps different from where she had served the last six years, a right turn instead of a left off the main hall and the elevator, but, in another sense, it was a profound change. Some on the patrol side were happy for her. Others, she was sure, resented her advancement.

When she saw, about noon, that the detective side had vacated, the personnel either on calls or out to get lunch, she wandered into the room and looked around. On the wall with the door, a wall she never saw from outside the room, a photograph stopped her. Her father’s stern face and hard jaw regarded her impassively. His piercing blue eyes, eyes hers matched in color but not in intensity, almost made her feel she had wandered into some place private, a realm he owned and dominated and she didn’t. Next to him other detectives of the past. None looked as . . . dangerous as her father. Phoebe whispered, “Don’t dump on me, Dad. I’m trying here.”

That afternoon, after lunch with a few of her friends from the patrol side, Phoebe went down to the indoor pistol range in the basement of the building. She practiced. Though her scores on the test had been average, incipid, she emptied her .357 over and over, producing paper targets with groups of hits in inch and half-inch circles. If she had shot this well on the test, she would have had a very high score. Her last of three targets on the test had been an inch-wide circle of hits, but the other two looked like some rank novice plinking tin cans with a .22, not a professional cop with the calm and skill worthy to carry a weapon. She promised herself that, when the challenges and pistol contests were announced in early summer, she would step up and see how she stood against others. She knew, in a way, she was channeling her dad again, proving to him, to that stern picture on the wall that she was worthy even though she wasn’t her brother, a military police sergeant. She’d never met Skip, but his life had overshadowed hers all her days.

Sunday, her aunt, Jerry, and Emogene vacated the house shortly after breakfast, saying they had someplace to go. Phoebe walked the gardens, spent time sitting on the dock, watching the loons out on the lake. She ate the lunch Emogene made for her and left in the refrigerator even though Phoebe said she could feed herself. She arranged her books on the shelves, glad to see her “old friends” on such lovely shelves, feeling they had stepped up in accommodations pretty much as she had. She brought up a few of the other boxes from the garage, clothes and photos, and began the process of putting things in the dresser and closet, but she made no attempt to work hard at that. Her photos of her mother and herself as a child joined the ones of Emily and Zephalon on the mantle in the sitting room, but she didn’t put any in the bedroom, not even on the bedside table. Truthfully it never occurred to her to keep her dead relatives, not even her mother, close.

Late in the afternoon, the three returned, and Emogene made a simple supper of steaks on the grill, baked potatoes, and salad. But, even though the food looked simple, Phoebe had never tasted such flavorful steaks—clearly they had been marinated in something to acquire that depth of flavor and perfect tenderness—nor had she enjoyed a baked potato as much with the toppings Emogene provided. The salad’s dressing was a delicious vinegrette, simple but the perfect complement to baby greens of the salad and the steaks.

After supper, as seemed to be a common occurrence in this household, they walked the path down to the boat house, listening to the frogs and the loons out on the lake, talking about flower plantings to come, about the vegetable garden partially planted, about perennials and trees and gardens designed specifically with birds or butterflies in mind.

“Aunt Emily,” Phoebe said, “we need to talk about rent.”

“No, we don’t, dear,” her aunt said with her girlish laugh. “I don’t need your money, and I have the room. Anyway, you’re going to need to save your money for your new apartment when you’re ready for it.”

“Yes, I have to save up first and last month’s rent, and I’ll need furniture and kitchen stuff . . . a bed even. That’s all true, but, what you’ve given me is too much.”

Another trill of laughter. “No, it’s not. Again, dear, those room are just sitting there gathering dust otherwise. It warms my heart to see them used. But, you know, there’s a little drafty room in the attic you might have if you really wanted.”

Phoebe was making no progress. “I love the rooms you’ve let me use. I’ve never enjoyed a space more. Really. But even if I accept that, the food isn’t free. My being here has to have upped your food bill.”

“Oh, hardly. You have to understand, Phoebe dear, that Emogene is thrilled you’re here. Mr. Brown and I don’t really eat all that much, and she makes enough for an army. Less food is going to waste with you here. You’re doing us a favor.”

Determined not to let Aunt Emily steamroll her, Phoebe knew she had come to the discussion of rent wholely unprepared. Truthfully, she had felt opening the discussion was obligatory on her part, a test kind of. But no. Emily was a brick wall whose generosity needed to be breached rather than someone eager to settle the issues of room and board. Phoebe would need to come at the subject with firmness and a well-thought-out plan of action with dollar amounts that made sense and could not be denied.

* * * * *

Phoebe didn’t know exactly when she had made the decision to go back to her maiden name, but when she arrived at the LEC Monday morning after a delicious breakfast that made the boxed donuts in the back of the room no temptation at all, she stuck out her hand to Detective Neil McKenna and introduced herself as Phoebe Magillicutty. It just kind of came out, almost as if she had forgotten that she’d been married, almost as if she were too nervous to remember her name and had settled on the default one, but that wasn’t it. Maybe she could feel her father’s eyes on the back of her head.

She had seen Detective McKenna around, of course, even said hello to him in the hall, but she had never actually met him. Detectives, as a rule, didn’t hang with the patrol officers. He was an average guy in a lot of ways, kind of tall but not noticeably so, kind of good looking, but not a real head-turner, well built but not body-builder, average dresser. But every time Phoebe had seen him while she worked “across the hall,” she had liked the look of the man, though she would never have been able to say just why.

When Phoebe introduced herself, he smiled and shook her hand, but then he looked confused and said, “Oh, I thought I was getting a Phoebe Stuart.”

“That’s me. Just got divorced. Papers came through last Friday. I’m going back to my maiden name, though. I haven’t changed it officially, but I plan to.”

“Magillicutty is your maiden name?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re going back to that on purpose?”

That set Phoebe back a step. “Um—”

“Sorry,” Detective McKenna said hurredly. “That sounded way more rude than I meant it in my head. It’s just that ‘Magillicutty’ is a name with history in this office, isn’t it? Well, maybe he was before your time here, but there was this Magillicutty who was this hard-nosed, bull-moose of a—”

“Ah, that would be my dad,” said Phoebe.

“No kidding,” McKenna said with a nervous, ironic laugh. “Oh, God. Well, it’s good to know I’m limber enough to be able to manage a complete foot-in-mouth maneuver without breaking a sweat. Again, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Phoebe said, liking the way he got so flustered. “Dad was like that, hard-nosed and bull-moosed. But then, you don’t get to pick your parents do you?”

“No, I guess not. You also don’t get to pick your superiors when you’re brand new to the department. Hell of an experience coming in under Zip Magillicutty. Um, you don’t mind that nickname, do you?”

She shook her head. She found him extremely cute when he was embarrassed.

“I wasn’t sure I was going to survive Zip, but I did. Learned a hell of a lot from him, too. Anyway, nice to meet you, Phoebe Magillicutty. Okay, then. So that’ll be yours,” he said, pointing to a gray-metal desk with a tired office chair behind it. “You’ll share with Andy Franklin. His is the left locked drawer. Yours will be the right. Here’s the key. We’ve always got a slug of things to investigate, but more on that at the briefing.”

* * * * *

Phoebe sighed. She had been on duty as a detective for only a morning, but already she began to realize that not much had changed in what she had been doing as a patrol officer. Sure she had moved up in pay grade, but, as lowest ranking and newest detective, she was investigating the most mundane of cases. She had gone out with a Detective Homer Stark to check into a break-in at a rental unit on the south side of town, talked to another homeowner about a break-in that looked like one of a series of break-ins perpetrated on homes on theMississippi and Sauk rivers that had boathouses. Then they meandered to the east side to take statements from witnesses regarding a dog attack. Patrol officers could have done that. She had done it many times herself.

“I thought we’d do different stuff,” she complained when they were back in the unmarked car after an hour-long discussion with a very angry woman whose ten-year-old son had been bitten by a dog. Of course, as Phoebe was beginning to suspect, having met the boy in question, a sullen, somewhat angry kid who sighed repeatedly at his mother’s rantings, then heard the stories of two neighbors who said the kid teased the dog every time he passed the owner’s house, and then met the dog, an ingraciating smallish golden retriever bitch, she was sure the boy had pretty much taunted the dog until it reacted. Phoebe asked to see the wound. Only reluctantly did the boy’s mother unwrap the bandaged arm. The “bite” looked more like a scratch, and to Phoebe it looked like a claw scratch or some kind of unrelated scrape, not teeth marks. Chances were better than good that the happy retriever had jumped up on the kid in play rather than grabbed his arm with her teeth. The boy’s mother wanted the dog put down. The family with the golden had three small children, and everyone there was in tears about the whole thing.

Homer Stark, a skinny, lank man with thinning hair and a hawk-like nose, chuckled. “You wanted maybe to investigate murders and deal with hostage situations?”

“That’d be cool.”

“Yeah, and homicide probably would get the one, the negotiation team the other. Sorry, Magillicutty, we get all the crap the street officers have already gone to but haven’t resolved. They go to a scene, take statements, try to figure out what’s going on. Then we come in, take statements and file reports. It’s a great system.”

“Sounds it. So what exactly do we do that’s useful?”

The look Homer gave her seemed understanding attempting to be hurt. “Filing reports is useful, Magillicutty. Hey, I’ve even solved a few cases all on my own.”

“You have?” Phoebe said, encouraged. “What?”

“This lady on Clearwater Road had called in a series of thefts. Officers had talked to her and passed the case onto us. I went out and talked to her, and suddenly, the thief waltzes right into her yard.”

“Really?” said Pheobe, excited. She could see the scene in her head. The thief, clothed in second-story black, returns to the scene of the crime to steal again but was confronted by the law lying in wait. A case of really bad timing on the thief’s part and a covert police op on Homer’s.

“Yeah,” said Homer with a chuckle. “The lady kept garden gnomes.”

The music to the scene in her head dimmed. “Wait a minute. What? Why would anyone steal garden gnomes?”

“We suspected neighborhood kids. She’d lost three fairly large statues already, and had maybe a dozen more in her yard.”

“Garden gnomes?” Not jewels, not wads of cash.

“Yes. Small bearded men with big red dunce hats. Garden gnomes. Anyway, we suspected kids, and she even had a couple in mind she thought we ought to check out.”

“And the kid came into her yard while you were hiding in the bushes?”

“We were standing right on her front porch when the thief waltzes right into her yard and nabs another gnome right from under her maple tree and took off with it.”

“Really? That brazen. Was it one of the kids she suspected?”

“Nope. It was a great dane from down the block.”

The swelling balloon, the build-up of the case in her head, popped. “Excuse me? What? It was a . . . dog?” The score that had played so suspencefully in her head turned into a kind of quack and a rendition of Nanna-nanna-boo-boo.

“Like I said, the lady had lost three of her gnome statues in the last week. She thought the neighborhood boys were lifting them. It was a neighbor’s dane. He trotted right into the yard as we were standing there, grabbed another gnome in his jaw and trotted away. I followed him, and, sure enough, four houses down, he trots around into the backyard and deposits the gnome on a turned up vegetable garden site that had been tilled for planting. Then he proceeds to dig this huge hole halfway to China and drops the gnome into it. The owners came out just then, asking what was going on. We got some shovels and unearthed that lady’s four gnomes, six boots—one pair and four unmatched ones—a frog hide-a-key, and a bra, size 46-D. Cleared up a troubling raft of petty thefts in that neighborhood all in one fell swoop.”

“A great dane.” Phoebe was non-plussed.

“Yup. The owners agreed to fence their back yard with invisible fencing to keep Boppo from continuing his neigborhood cleanup campaign.”

Phoebe sighed. Lowest rung as a detective might just be a step or two down from where she’d been before as a patrol officer. “So, what’s likely to happen to the family with the golden? Clearly that woman’s brat of a son teased the dog into jumping on him. I don’t think that was a tooth mark.”

Homer slid her a glance, grinning. “I got the boy aside when you were talking to the dog owner’s kids. Threatened him with juvvy hall. He said it wasn’t even a claw mark. He’d scraped himself on the neighbor’s fence as he climbed into the golden’s backyard. I threatened him with jail time for trespass if he bothered that dog again.”

“Oh. Really? Did you inform his pissed-off mother?”

“You know, I didn’t so much like talking with that woman. I told the kid to confess all to her, that I’d call his mom in an hour, and if he hadn’t told her what really happened, I’d arrest him for trespass.”

Phoebe was at least happy to see Homer wasn’t the dufus she had thought he was. Pedantic and methodical, but not an idiot.

At lunch, Homer wanted to go to Taco Bell. Phoebe might have been up for that a day or so ago, but her eyes had been opened to food by just at few days eating Emogene’s meals. There were far better things than fast food. In fact, she had a bag lunch from Emogene back in the office that she was eager to investigate. She and Homer had a few calls for the afternoon, but they headed back into the LEC after Homer had his sack from Taco Bell.

Phoebe went to the communal fridge but discovered the sack lunch she had set in there that morning with her name clearly written on it was gone. “Hey,” she said, “where’s my lunch?”

Neil McKenna was walking by and looked at her. “What’s the matter?”

“I set my lunch in here this morning. It’s gone.”

He scrunched up his face. “You left a lunch in there?”

“Yeah, isn’t that what refrigerators are for?”

He shrugged. “Kind of, I suppose. It’s not very secure though, is it?”

“Secure? I need a secure facility for my lunch in a police station?” Her register had gone up an octave.

“Did stuff you left in the fridge on the other side stay where you put it?”

“I never put anything into that fridge. It was filthy and people would eat anything over there.”

“Oh, and you expected it to be different on this side of the hall?”

She pressed her lips together, fuming. “I kind of hoped it was. The fridge was cleaner.”

“Get an insulated lunch bag. Target has them in all colors. Lock it in your desk drawer. You didn’t think that locked drawer was for files, did you?”

She turned and stomped to her desk and sat down. There in front of her was a note. She picked it up and read, “Hey, couldn’t resist the lunch. Best meatloaf sandwich I ever ate. Bring more tomorrow.”

She crumbled the note and tossed it into the trash. Angry, she got out her note pad from the morning interviews and started writing up what she had learned on the minor cases she had helped deal with that morning.

A few minutes later, Neil McKenna, cup of coffee in each hand, sat down in her perp chair. He set one foam cup on her desk and slid it toward her slowly with one finger. “Sorry,” he said.

“For what? Did you eat my lunch?”

He sighed, scrunched up his face. “I may have.”

She hit him hard with her eyes. “May have? May have?”

“Well, if your lunch was a truly epic meatloaf sandwich with homemade pickles on the side and a Tupperware of chocolate torte, then . . . yes, I did. Sorry. I’ll get you the containers back.”

“Sorry? It wasn’t yours. You knew that much from the get-go.”

“But it smelled so good, and I hadn’t gotten breakfast and it looked like I’d miss lunch . . .”

She glared.

“I’ll make it up to you.”

“Sure,” she said, thoughts forming. “Sure. You can make it up to me by giving me something to do with a little more teeth to it . . . and I don’t mean dog teeth either. I mean, I know I’ve just been here a nanosecond, but, geesh, if I wanted to be this bored, I’d have stayed a patrol officer.”

He smiled. “Didn’t get along with Stark?’

“Homer’s . . . fine. He just doesn’t seem . . .”

“Yeah, I know. And I’m sorry to inform you that you have at least a month under his tutelage. Regs. Thing is a detective can get over his head in a case a lot faster than you might think. Take the serial burglaries we’re investigating just now. Older women are being terrorized by a thief who comes into their homes in the evening and threatens them with a knife, saying he’ll kill them if they don’t give him what he wants.”

“Wow. I haven’t heard much about that yet. I mean, I heard last fall that a couple of old ladies had been robbed, but—”

“We’re keeping it on the down-low, trying to keep it out of the papers for now. The guy’s mean, roughs up the old ladies—and we’re talking women aged seventy to ninety—until they tell him where they keep their cash. And, it seems a lot of older women keep money in their homes. A significant amount of money, too. And a lot of older women live alone.”

Phoebe thought of her aunt and hoped she didn’t keep cash in her house, but, then, she ­didn’t live alone. She had Jerry to protect her. “How badly is he hurting the women? How much is the guy getting?”

“That’s the thing. He’s getting more brazen. He started out with a bit of shoving, but he’s graduated to hitting women. A couple have gone to the hospital.”

Phoebe shook her head in disgust. “That’s just wrong, but how much could he be getting?”

“He’s got a successful gig going with this MO. He’s gotten, on average, some nine grand from about half a dozen ladies. Low end is maybe fifteen hundred dollars. Older women don’t seem to put up much resistance either. He pushes them around a bit, hits them if they seem resistive, and all the fight is out of them. And it isn’t just cash he’s netted in these thefts. He takes silver, too. Flatware, platters, tea sets—stuff old women seem to have more than younger people. He doesn’t take electronics—no computers or laptops, which tend to be outdated, no cell phones, iphones, smartphones—nothing that might possibly have a way we can trace or has a GPS built in. He doesn’t even bother with credit cards.”

“Jewelry?”

McKenna nodded. “Some, and the guy knows the difference between costume paste and the real stuff, too. One lady said he was disgusted because all she had was costume jewelry, which pissed her off.”

“Pissed her off? I don’t get—”

“It seems her husband always gave her jewelry for Christmas their anniversary, and her birthday—like through their whole marriage of thirty-some years—and he always told her it was the real thing—diamonds, precious jewels, gold, silver. She thought she had her kids’ inheritance tucked away in her jewelry boxes. She had it appraised since. Worthless. The kids did some checking, and cheapskate dad was a frequent flyer at Savers and Good Will.”

“I bet that caused a bit of marital strife.”

“Not really. Well, the woman was upset of course, but that’s pretty much as far as it could go. The perp only preys on women who live alone. The woman was angry with a man who’d died fifteen years ago.”

“Oh, my.”

Neil chuckled. “Her children weren’t that happy with their old man either.”

“But the perp doesn’t kill the women? Doesn’t hurt them badly?”

Here McKenna seemed to equivocate. “He hasn’t yet. Sometimes these kinds of perps escalate their attacks though, and I’m worried about that. Something about this guy has me convinced it’s only a matter of time before some old lady is killed.”

That was a concern. Phoebe said, “Wait a minute. If you have live witnesses, have you gotten descriptions?”

Neil chuckled with a bitter edge. “Oh, sure, and they’re even consistent enough to make me sure it’s the same guy each time. Male, late twenties, Caucasian, brown hair, about five-eight, 150 pounds. Scar on left cheek.”

“Scar? He doesn’t wear a mask?”

“Nope. Brazen asshole. And we’re not talking a little scratch kind of scar. This one runs from outside his left eye all the way to his chin. It’s jagged and nasty looking.”

“So, if this guy has an identifying scar, why can’t you find him, arrest him?”

Neil sighed. “The guy’s not stupid. He wears surgical gloves. Not one fingerprint has been left at any of the women’s houses. No DNA whatsoever. We’ve recovered some of the jewelry from pawn shops, but no prints there either and no consistent description of the person who pawned the stuff. We’ve gotten everything from some kid to a big, bald, fat guy. But none of that adds up.”

“Why not?”

“We have a serious suspect in mind—that cheek scar really narrowed down the list—but we can’t make anything stick. He’s Mr. Alibi. At the exact time of the robbery—any many of the old women were very precise on the time he was in their homes—they guy we know with their exact description’s been in a bar buying rounds of drinks, and fifteen people saw him there. Been bowling with his league, and twenty people can swear to it, know his score even and best split. Hell, he was even in jail once for drunk driving, and the county deputy had to swear to it. Hated doing it, but had to. Every single time we think we’ve got this guy nailed, he’s skated on us.”

“That’s awful. You must have the wrong guy then.”

“Sure. But we’ve put him in line-ups and every womon has pointed him out with certainty. Just him. Even when we have a half dozen guys with scars of some kind.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Wish I was. What’s more, the guy’s real regular. Last fall, he made a hit a month. Starting in late September. But he stepped that up. Through much of the winter he made a hit every two weeks. In March he started making a hit every week, and since May, he’s gone to random, sometimes daily hits, sometimes twice or three times a week. It’s like he knows we’re no where near stopping him, damn it, and I can’t do anything about it.”

“I’d give my eye teeth to work on a case like that.”

“Really? I have this plan, you see. Dwuane Schultz—that’s my suspect—likes to hang out at the Red Carpet on Monday nights. They have pool, and he enjoys bilking college kids of their allowances on Mondays. I thought I’d hang out, keep him in my sights, see how the hell he’s managing to be in two places at the same time. If you want, you can come there with me tonight. Help me keep an eye on the guy.”

Her eyes grew large. “Undercover?”

Neil grinned. “I wouldn’t say undercover, Magillicutty, but it’d be best if we didn’t dress cop. I mean, Dwuane knows me. If I show up at the Carpet, he might think I was following him or something. Unless I’m with someone. So we can’t look like we’re on duty.”

She looked down at her blue suit. “I got jeans and sweatshirts.”

“Yeah, well, I thought I’d make up for lunch by taking you to D.B. Searles for dinner before we meandered to the Red Carpet. You might want to upgrade the jeans just a tad. Still up for it?”

Phoebe felt about six alarms go off in her head. The last thing she needed was to get involved with anyone for a while, not with the divorce so new, not after being married to Phil. She was a long way from being able to find herself, reorganize, reassess, have a prayer of knowing what she wanted. She had just started a new job and rank. Plus, getting involved with someone from work was forever and always a really bad idea. Getting involved with a superior was even worse, let alone that he was someone she kind of liked looking at, let alone . . . “As long as you accept that it’s payback for stealing my lunch and . . . business,” she found herself saying even as the string of roadblocks in her head went on and on down a long highway of concerns.

He held up his right hand. “Swear to God. Truth is I might need someone to corroborate that old Dwuane really was there at the bar. And I don’t want him running to his attorney and telling him I was harassing him. I’ve been trying to figure this case out for months now, and I’ve been . . . well, following Dwuane is maybe a bit strong, but he might not see it that way, and his attorney sure wouldn’t. That I was ‘on a date’ at the same place he was at, at a popular bar . . . well, that’s another story, isn’t it?”

“I can playact,” Phoebe said.

“Yeah, well, don’t. In my experience amateur playacting just leads to trouble. Just eat a good supper, drink a couple drinks, talk to me like we might be friends. You start acting, and we’ll probably be made. The real trick to undercover work is not to look like you’re undercover or have some other agenda. Got it?”

She bobbed her head. “Got it.”

“Okay. I’ll pick you up at—”

More alarms. If he drove, he controlled the evening, controlled when she could go home, maybe where they went. She scrunched up her face. “Pick me up?”

“Fine. Even better. Park in the Radisson garage. Come through to D.B. Searle’s bar. I’ll meet you there at . . . seven?”

Much better plan. Pheobe felt she had taken a step at sticking up for herself. She smiled. “Sure.”

Phoebe called her aunt’s house to tell them she would not be having supper with them but got no answer, just a cheery phone message about Emily returning her call when she wasn’t so busy, followed by her aunt’s giggles. Phoebe left aa message.

Detective Stark took her to two more calls that afternoon. They were investigating a store break in, which had sounded kind of exciting to Phoebe until she saw it was a nail and hair shop in a tiny strip mall near the highway that had had several bottles of “product” taken. Regardless of the fact that the stuff was worth a few hundred dollars, Phoebe suspected one of the hired stylists in the shop. The other call was another dog-bite case, one close to resolution. They had to stay on the scene while humane officers came and picked up a pair of dobermans that were barking incessantly and had nipped a little girl who stuck her finger through their fence. The dogs had not had their shots and would stay at the Humane Society for a week to make sure they weren’t rabid. Not likely. In the meantime, the owners assured them, they would put up a solid fence so “accidents” didn’t happen again.

“And why did we have to go on that call?” Phoebe asked Stark as they cleared and got back in the unmarked. “A patrol officer could have babysat that scene.”

“Insurance,” he said. “Owner’s Dick Murphy, big-ass lawyer in town. Likes to sue. Definitely likes to criticize the department.”

“Ah.”

Twice more Phoebe tried to call her aunt to make sure Emogene wasn’t planning she’d be there for dinner. She was determined to be a respectful guest if she could. No answer. After the last chipper message from Emily telling of returning calls, Phoebe left a second message.

At five she cleared and followed the line of cars out of town. She was at her aunt’s in twenty minutes. The house looked very quiet. Since her room was upstairs in the main house, and since she was going to use her car in another hour or so, she parked in the circle drive out front and keyed her way into the front door.

The house was empty and eerily quiet. She stood just inside the door and listened, hearing nothing, and, even though it was nearing dinner time, she smelled nothing as well. Odd. Phoebe slipped off her street shoes and padded in her nylons to the kitchen. All the lights were off and it was clean and neat. Maybe this was Emogene’s afternoon off? She was just about to turn and head up to her room to look through her clothes to see what she might have to wear for dinner with Neil when she spied the note tented on the island in the middle of the kitchen. Her name was on the front of it.

“Phoebe. We’re not here . . .” it started. Yeah, obviously, Aunty Em. “There’s lots of food in the fridge. I’d recommend heating up some soup from last night or have another meatloaf sandwich. Emogene will be home before eleven. Jerry and I will be home by midnight.”

“Eleven and midnight?” Phoebe said aloud. “That’s kinda late for a bunch of old folks.” She thought they maybe had gone to a concert in the Cities, but, if Emogene was going to be home earlier, clearly they had not gone to the same event.

Phoebe considered that and walked down the hall to the garage. The Buick and big Ford SUV were missing, but so was the rusty hulk. Only the Camry remained. She shrugged, figuring Jerry and Emily were in the SUV and Emogene had the Buick. Maybe one of the Stevenson boys had the old pickup. I was the perfect kind of workhorse truck for hauling wood or hay bales.

Then she concentrated on getting ready for her “date, but really not a date” thing. After she had showered, she went to her bedroom closet. When she opened the doors, everything looked slightly different. She had put away her clothes, but now they looked neater, like they had been ironed and rehung. All the clothes she had put on the closet shelving unit looked refolded and considerably neater than she had left them. For a moment, she felt just the teeniest bit violated, then sighed. “Your aunt wants you taken care of,” Emogene had said. This clearly was part of that. Not violation. Cared for. Without exploring too far, she knew all her clothes had been freshly laundered before being hung or shelved. Her four pairs of shoes were lined up under the shelving unit. They were clean and polished. They had never looked better since they were new.

“Damn,” she said aloud. “Have you got a team of brownies working for you, Aunt Emily? This had to take hours.” Then she half smiled. “I could so get used to this in a New York minute, but I sure better not.” Cops didn’t get rich. Ever. She knew this. Not in her lifetime would she earn enough to be able to afford a house like her aunt’s or a cook or a gardener or maid. She would be a hands-on, do-it-yourself kind of person her whole life. She had already come to this assessment and was okay with it.

Though as Phil Stuart’s wife she had had dozens of sparkly, glamorous dresses and sequinned evening wear, he’d kept them, all of them. Said he’d bought them, so they were his. She’d made no fuss about that. She still had a few dresses she could call her own, pieces she had purchased herself, a couple even slinky. She chose a simple black dress that she knew she looked good in. The rest, all the fancy dresses, evening wear, and costume jewelry had stayed with Phil, though she had no idea what he was planning to do with it all. She’d never miss them. Maybe her replacement was her size and could wear them. “Let her,” Phoebe husked. Sequins were the stuff of politics and high society, not law enforcement. When an occasion had come up, some political event where Phil wanted finery to be seen, he’d buy her a new dress, and she’d have to wear it. These were designer dresses, and Phoebe knew they cost hundreds of dollars, but they weren’t her style. The few times she had tried to wear something else, Phil had thrown a fit. His usual argument was that he had done research on the event, and this particular dress would ace anything there and yet complement the governor’s wife’s dress or complement some other dignitary’s flag or was someone’s favorite color. The pretentiousness of his plans spoke of careful research by his teams of assistants and political strategists. To quell his anger, she’d put on whatever gaudy thing he’d gotten for her. She was so glad she was away from this controlling man, his misguided ambitions . . . his madness. Maybe the divorce had cost him enough that Liza Winter was going to have to wear hand-me-downs instead of Phil buying her a new dress for each occasion. But even if he sold the dresses, she didn’t care. She was just glad she was away from him, away from the glitz of politics and all its pretentiousness. It wasn’t who she was.

Phoebe had a sweater that went well with her black dress, and she thought that might be enough of a wrap for that balmy May evening. Her black pumps, freshly shined, and taupe pantyhose should almost complete the outfit. Then she started to think about her hair and a bit of jewelry. She piled her hair up on her head, held with a couple jeweled pins she’d saved from her mother’s collection. This left her neck open, and she looked to the dresser, not at all surprised to see her small, modest jewelry box sitting there next to the bouquet of fresh flowers—lilacs—that filled her rooms with their lovely scent. She tried to remember if she had seen lilacs in the yard, but couldn’t recall seeing any, so turned back to the consideration of jewelry. She lifted the lid of the little carved wood box. Not much in there.

Phil had showered her with jewelry both before they were married and after, and he had insisted she wear a lot of it during the parties they went to or had at the house, saying she had to look like a senator’s wife even though he was only a junior state representative. And he always seemed to know exactly what was in her jewelry boxes, which, to her seemed a little creepy. But in the divorce proceedings he had tearfully and most sincerely insisted that all those necklaces and earings and bracelets and broaches had been his dear, departed grandmother’s—which, in all the time Phoebe had known him, he had referred to as the dragon witch of Stillwater and seemed to hate venomously. With crocodile tears, he had confided in the judge in a broken voice that he hoped the jewlry could stay in the family. She had almost believed him even though she knew it was a bold-faced lie. Not being at all enamored of the gaudy stuff he had given her—necklaces with multiple layers, bracelets that covered half her forearm, and rings the size of quarters—she hadn’t objected. She’d never wear any of it again had only hoped to add to her apartment fund with it by hocking it. If he wanted all that crap, he was welcomed to it. In fact, as she thought about it, she liked the idea that none of the financing of her new life would be coming from Phil in any measure. But it would take a while.

Phil had allowed her the bits of jewelry that came from her mother, and Phoebe had thought him generous, but in his next breath Phil claimed her father’s deer rifle belonged to him. It was a beautiful brushed-nickle Remington 700 with carved wood stocks, and a Kahles K16i 1-6×24 scope. Phoebe had produced photos of her dad with the gun. Phil’s lawyers argued it was a similiar piece. Phil won. Phoebe let go the loss. She didn’t deer hunt anyway. She’d let go a lot of things just to be away from Phil and hoping that, by being generous, she could keep the promised large settlement. She should have known better.

Phoebe fingered her way through what was left in the jewelry box—her mother’s small gold cross and simple pearl necklace, matching pendent pearl earings, and a few odds and ends. She put on the pearls.

A look at the clock told her she had just enough time to make it back into town to meet Neil. She added a flowery silk scarf around her shoulders for color and called it quits. With her little black shoulder purse in place, she left her rooms, skipped down the stairs and out to her Prius.

Chapter 5: Not a Date

Neil was waiting at the D.B. Searle’s bar when she arrived. She caught sight of him before he saw her, and he looked good. It wasn’t so much the tan slacks and slightly darker leather jacket over a green turtleneck that attracted her. That was a bit of an old fashioned look, though it was cute he thought it date attire. But when she saw him, he was gazing out the window with a far-away look as he slowly sipped an ale from a tall glass. It made him look vulnerable.

A couple came into the bar, the woman laughing loudly over something, and Neil turned, his eyes going first to the woman laughing. Then he caught sight of Phoebe and smiled. His eyes did an involuntary down and up. His smile widened. “Damn, Magillicutty,” he said, “you clean up pretty good.”

She would have liked to say the same thing to him, but didn’t, though the words were on the tip of her tongue. Instead she just smiled. This isn’t the time to get involved with anyone. Not until she had time to heal from Phil. “A time for each season . . .” she heard her mother’s voice sing in her head. Her mom had had an angel’s voice.

“We can go up,” he said, and they walked to the elevator in the back of the building. A waitress met them on the second floor, and they took seats at the front of the building, at a window overlooking Fifth Street. The House of Pizza, a landmark both for St. Cloud and for great pizza was directly across the street, and the Red Carpet just up from there. Neil sat so he could watch the front door of the Red Carpet and see up the street toward the Press bar. Phoebe knew he was checking who went in and came out of both bars. The Press also had a St. Germain entrance, but the Red Carpet didn’t.

“So, how do you like being across the hall?” Detective McKenna asked her when they were seated.

“Well, I turn right instead of left,” she said. “I’ll eventually get used to it.”

He laughed. “It’ll get more interesting. Besides this series of break-ins with the guy roughing up older women, I’ve got a few other interesting cases.”

“Like what. Dog bites annoying boy? Airedale wheels off grocery cart because of a taste for Sugar Pops? Poodle, impersonating a seat cushion, highjacks a semi? Please tell me there’s some stuff out there that doesn’t involve a very large, very ill, very old, very strange dog of some type.”

Neil chuckled. “I have a few cat stories.”

“Oh, goody.”

Just slightly more seriously, he said, “Don’t fault Stark for what’s handed to him. After all, this is St. Cloud, not Minneapolis or Chicago. We got all the same stuff as the big cities, just not so much of it. We get more domestic abuse than gang shootings. I’m not unhappy about that, but fewer people tend to die. Well, that’s not to say I approve of domestic abuse but . . .” He paused, flustered, and Phoebe inwardly smiled. He started again. “We have our share of meth houses, more than I would like, but the county gets more of those because people think they can hide out on some isolated farm to crank out their drugs. Now and again we get a series of garage break-ins. Got one going on the north side right now. Seven break-ins so far. We’ve pretty well figured the MO, just not the pattern yet. So many of the neighborhoods have alleys with garages facing away from the houses. It’s not a bad design in some ways, but it makes it hard to know when someone is breaking into those garages.”

“What are they taking? Lawnmowers?”

“Sometimes, but it’s way cuter than that. They break into the garage—and we think they’re testing garage door openers—but then we believe a crew closes themselves inside the garages, while the drop-off car leaves. The inside people break into whatever car is in the garage. With the garage door closed behind them, they have pretty good cover and can take their time, so they’re more thorough than the typical smash and grab. They’re taking CD players and gobs of CDs. They’ve gotten laptops, tools, cash—why people would leave money in their cars I just don’t know—sports gear . . . you name it. They’ve boosted a few cars, too, usually when people have left keys in them, figuring, I suppose that they were safe in their locked garages. Then the theives ransack the garages themselves, selecting lawn mowers, snowblowers, golf clubs, tons of sports gear, and tools. Some people have whole workshops in their garages with lots of power tools. Then we figure a second person or team with a truck or van comes by and loads everything up. The seven break-ins all seem to have very similiar MOs so far, and another four could be related.”

“Don’t garages have better door remotes now, not as easy to trick?”

“Oh, you’d think. Truth is too many people just program their doors with the default codes that come with the overheads. People are lazy and a lot are still technologically challenged, especially older folks, but they’re usually the ones with the better cars and more stuff of value in their garages. Not always, but . . . you know.”

“That’s probably true. At least the better car thing.”

“And, if a thief can get hold of a few remotes and start pressing buttons, they’re bound to get a door here and there to open, and as these thieves have racked up a few break-ins and steal the remotes from cars everywhere they go, their chances of opening a door increase. The break-ins seem to be getting more frequent.”

“Any leads?’

“I’ve got several sets of prints that don’t match up to any family members at places hit, but they don’t match up to anyone in the system either. And except for one partial set, which has shown up three times, none of the others have even been at any two sites.”

“That kind of makes it kids, doesn’t it?”

“That was my first thought. Smart kids, though. They’d have to be pretty smart, pretty savvy kids. But lately, I’ve been thinking that, while it might be true that kids are doing the work inside the garages, it might not be a kid-run operation. We’ve stepped up patrols, but so far nada. And, of course, they do their thing in the wee hours of the morning. Once they get a garage door open, the inside team slips into the garage and closes the door. We’ve got that on video. We’re talking seconds that they might be visible to the homeowner or neighbors. The drop-off team vehicle vanishes, only returning for the ‘transfer’ of goods, but that might not be for ten minutes to half an hour later. Sometimes longer.”

“So, we’re talking the few seconds necessary for a garage door to cycle up, then down.”

“Exactly. The drop-off vehicle hardly needs to stop.”

“Yeah, I can see the problem. After those seconds to drop off an inside team that can take pretty much all the time they want to gather what they’re going to take. Then what? They call the pick-up vehicle and, when it arrives, they transfer goods in a matter of minutes.”

Neil was nodding. “Patrols can’t go by often enough, and the video we have showed no clear faces and no plates. Lots of hoodies. A few woolen face masks this winter. The one video we got was when they hit the garages of an apartment building. They broke into four that night. Four drop-off teams. One big van with a trailer at the pick-up.”

“That really doesn’t sound like a bunch of high-schoolers.”

“Not really. And they skip around a bit. They hit the west end one week, Walden Woods the next, then north St. Cloud, a patio home division in Waite Park, Quarry Estates, Cooper Avenue, Clearwater Road . . . I can’t get a pattern. Last two hits were on the north side.”

“Have they hit the same neighborhood more than once?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, that can focus patrols some.”

He stared at her. “Hey, nice thinking, Magillicutty. We do tend to run the extra patols in areas that have been hit, but that’s wrong. It makes the neighbors feel safer, but it’s not catching the crooks. We need to try to anticipate where they’ll hit next.”

Phoebe mentally preened at her clever remark and his praise. “What about frequency? How often do they strike?”

“Weekly.”

“Same day?”

“No, but it seems to cycle. Like for two weeks, it’s a Wednesday. Then two Thursdays. Like that.”

“So, if the operation is run by an adult, he might be pulling extracurricular jobs on his days off. What kinds of jobs get migrating days off?”

Again McKenna looked at her. “You mean, like someone, the person in charge of this, has a ‘day’ job and his days off vary? First thing that comes to mind is hospital staff. Some service folks who have to work some weekends also would have varying week days off. Maybe department store staff. Maybe grocery stores. Wow. What made you think of that?”

Phoebe shrugged. “It just stands to reason, I guess.”

His gaze was penetrating. “No, it’s something else. What?”

Phoebe sighed. She felt her face warming and decided to voice her reason before she ended up beet red. “Dad used to tell me about cases—no names of course—but he used to tell me about cases where the perps showed the least modicum of intelligence. He used to say, ‘Most perps are desperate folks acting outside their—’”

“‘Skill set’!” McKenna interjected and burst out laughing. “Yeah, Zip used to say that at least once a week. And he was right, of course. People on drugs need a fix. There’s no school teaching them how to support their habits. They’re desperate. They do insane things to get that next fix. They’re being driven, not by cunning, but by their habit’s need. And they usually need a fix regularly. Kids want money for some new video game or boost a car just to joyride. These are not studied criminals. Most kid perps are opportunists, at least to start. Eighty percent of perps maybe fall into this category of seizing opportunity when it presents itself. But then we have the other twenty percent. Usually they’ve been through the system, done time. These folks know they can’t leave their fingerprints anywhere. If they do and we find it, we have them.”

“Yes, but that twenty percent also includes a small group of sociopaths who may not have been caught at anything yet. No prints, no record, and even ‘regular’ jobs, but no moral compass to keep them from ‘improving’ their lives on the side.”

“Yes,” said McKenna. He was studying her now. She looked out the window.

Their meals came. Neil had walleye, and Phoebe had ordered the pasta with white sauce and chicken. Phoebe thought it unusual that he hadn’t ordered a huge steak. On first dates—or whatever this was—guys usually ordered steak. “Not a meat eater?” She inquired as they ate.

“Oh, I like a good steak now and again. I always order it at Anton’s in Waite Park, but not everyone does steak the way I like it.”

Phoebe thought back. “I think D.B. Searles does okay. I’ve had steak here, and it’s been good.”

“I’ve never tried it.” He shrugged. “I don’t eat out a lot, but I tried the walleye here and I really like it—grilled, not beer-battered. Since I don’t eat out that much, I stick with what I like. Want some dessert?”

Phoebe knew nothing would stack up to Emogene’s cooking and that five-star chocolate torte she had made—oh, and Neil had eaten out of her lunch. “No. Thanks though, but I don’t eat a lot of desserts.”

He looked up quickly, as if checking to see why she had said that. And she knew why. She smiled knowingly, and he actually reddened a little and looked away.

“Coffee?” he asked, covering his embarrassment.

“Sure.”

When the waitress came for the plates, he ordered the coffee.

Phoebe had been watching him. All through the meal, while she could hardly say she had been neglected, she had caught him glancing up the street. He watched who passed the restaurant, watched who was going into the Red Carpet and who was walking on to the Press.

She finally said. “Has Dwuane Schultz shown up yet?”

He frowned. “Don’t mention him. Someone might hear.” Then he glanced again down at the street. “About half an hour ago.” He turned to her and smiled. “Enjoy your coffee. I don’t want to rush him.”

She agreed.

Conversation through their meal and over coffee had remained more businesslike than datelike, Phoebe was happy to say. As they sipped their coffee, Neil asked her if Homer Stark had told her the story of the great dane and the gnomes yet. Apparently, that incident, which had occurred nearly two years earlier, had been a highlight in Homer’s career. As dour as the man was most of the time, Phoebe wondered if it wasn’t the humor in the situation, the laughs Stark got when he told the story, that was the main attraction for him.

“Usually cases aren’t solved because the perp shows up to steal right in front of the investigating detective,” Neil said, chuckling.

“Nor are the perps usually great danes,” Phoebe added. “At least I’m hoping not.”

Neil laughed. “That’s true, but I’ve had it happen a couple of times that I’ve been in the exact right place at the exact right time to catch a perp in the act of committing a crime.”

“No kidding? Stake outs?”

“No. Serendipity.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Did it involve dogs or maybe the cats you mentioned?”

He seemed to be enjoying her humor. “Nope, but in both cases the perp was under twelve. Kids. One was a shoplifting case where Walgreens was experiencing increased losses from their candy aisle, and the other was CDs going missing from the Electric Fetus. The Walgreens thief was a girl about eleven. She was being bullied by an older girl to get candy for her because she wasn’t allowed to have it at home. When the eleven-year-old ran out of allowance, she lifted stuff so she wouldn’t get beat up. When I napped her—I was in Walgreens picking up a perscription—she broke down right in the store, crying and spilling the whole sordid story. It took weeks to staighten out that mess, and the county ended up taking the bully away from the home.”

“Oh, dear.”

He shrugged. “Let’s just say abuse breeds abuse.”

“Sounds nasty.”

“It was, but I was glad the little girl, the actual shoplifter, wasn’t punished. Walgreens was very understanding once we let them know what was actually going on. And we got the girl into counseling on how to deal with bullies. They’ve got classes on that sort of thing now.”

“I’ve heard. Sounds like a good outcome.”

McKenna nodded. “The other case was a twelve-year-old taking CDs at the Fetus. The shoplifter was a boy, and the little sucker denied stealing anything even when we pulled eight CDs from his backpack and the clerk identified one as new and put on the shelf only that morning.”

“And why were you in the Fetus?”

“My bong broke,” he said with a straight face, then grinned. “Actually, I collect LPs. They get them in from time to time. I like to go through their bins regularly. Blue grass is my favorite, but I have . . . a few records. I saw the kid glancing around a bit too much, so I watched him. When I saw him slip a CD into his backpack, I nabbed him. Dad was a doctor at the hospital. Big-time surgeon. He tried to say his boy was innocent, but the evidence was a little overwhelming. When the kid’s bedroom was searched he had over 400 CDs, and his dad knew he hadn’t bought them and that the kid didn’t have the allowance to buy them. The kid tried to tell us he had lots of friends who gave him CDs, but that was fiction, and everyone knew it. On further checking we discovered the boy had been selling CDs to his classmates for five bucks a pop and visiting Pawn America regularly, getting cash for his stolen booty that classmates ­didn’t want. He’d also hit several other stores for their CDs and, we think, was breaking into cars while people shopped at Coborns—they lived a couple of blocks from the north-side Coborns. Dad got the charges talked down to community service, but that kid’ll be doing road cleanup until he’s eighteen.”

“Sounds like a good outcome for both cases.”

“Not too bad. The trick, you see, is not to end an investigation too soon. I mean, a kid caught stealing candy. Seems pretty straight forward. Slam dunk.”

“Sounds a little like my dad being channeled just then.”

Neil thought about that. “Probably. Most of the best stuff I learned about investigation I learned from Zip Magillicutty.”

“What tipped you off that the candy shoplifting was something else?”

“The kid was scared and not because I’d caught her. She was scared before I caught her, but when I caught her, she was relieved. Relief isn’t typical. She was happy to give up the real reason she was shoplifting too, glad to have the bullying ended. Her parents were dumbfounded, but they said she’d been withdrawn lately, spending a lot of time in her room alone. They thought it was incipient teen-age behavior, but I didn’t think an eleven-year-old girl who hadn’t started . . . her period would be leaping into teen behavior.”

Phoebe smiled, both at his awkwardness in saying this and in his knowing it. “Big family?” she asked.

“No. She had a couple younger brothers is all.”

“Not her. You.”

“Oh. How did I know what eleven-year-old girls might be like? Yeah. I got a slew of sisters, both older and younger. Seven of them. Got three brothers too, but they’re younger. Last three kids were boys, but I got stuck in the middle of the pink aisle.”

“That’s a huge family. Eleven kids.”

He shrugged. “Catholic. St. Cloud used to be about ninety-eight percent Catholic. It’s not so much now, but there’s plenty of us who come from big families.”

“You go to Cathedral, then, for high school?”

“No, Apollo. We lived on the west end of town. Some of my older sisters went to Cathedral, though. I did a couple of years at St. John’s Prep.”

“Really. Go to St. John’s too?”

He sipped his coffee, looking again out the window up the street. “The point I was making,” he said, “is not to end the investigation too soon. Simple solutions might make for a conviction, but they might not be the answer. Your dad wasn’t wrong about that.”

Phoebe wondered at the ducked question, but she chose not to push it. “Was the simple answer right for the CD thief?”

“Well, kind of, but not exactly. The kid needed more attention from his dad. You know what doctors can be like? Wrapped up in their work of saving everyone else’s lives but the ones closest to them. Daddy saw that his son was ‘crying out for help.’ It’s what got the kid’s sentence down to community service, but the old man tried to pay more attention. The kid hasn’t had a swing back through the system as far as I know, so maybe he was right and maybe daddy changed. That was a couple of years ago. I’m hopeful.”

“So a lot of your cases really are minor.”

His eyebrows momentarily bunched. “I wouldn’t call them minor exactly. People’s lives were being seriously affected—”

Phoebe back tracked. “No, no. I can see that. I’m sorry. What I meant was that you’re not dealing with murder so much in your investigations.”

“Not too many, no. County sheriff gets more than we do. Stearns County is a big area. They handle anything not city, but they get involved in most of the small-town stuff when they can. St. Cloud PD usually handles its own murders. I’ve got a case working right now. Hit and run. Woman was killed right in front of the Paramount. No real witnesses, kind of late at night, but . . .”

He stood, and since his focus was out the window when he did, Phoebe knew something had happened. “What?” she said.

“He’s leaving. Where’s your car?”

“Radisson lot, like you told—”

“Come on,” he said. Even as he stood, he had reached for his billfold. He dropped four twenties onto the table, which was their bill plus a very generous tip, and all but ran for the back of the building, opting for the stairs. Typical guy, he gave no consideration to the fact that Phoebe was in heels, but she knew how to keep up with him. She slipped off the pumps and galloped down the stairs after him.

At the door to the covered alley that led either to the street or back toward the garage, he turned for the garage. Phoebe slipped her heels back on. He said, “Where?”

She knew he meant her car, and she kept directions brief. “Left, half a row, on the right. Blue Prius.”

He ran in that direction, glancing back at her to quip, “You drive a Prius?”

“So where’s your car?” she said, arching an eyebrow.

“I walked. I didn’t expect the guy to leave.”

They hopped into her car and made a rather fast, squeaky-wheel trip to the check out. Neil paired her parking ramp ticket, which she had left on the dash, with a ten-dollar bill.

“That’s too much,” she said, taking the ticket and money as she pulled to the gate.

“Hand it to her and go.”

She didn’t think that was going to work. Surely the attendent would just delay them while she made change, but when she handed the woman the money and ticket, she looked past Phoebe and opened the gate. Phoebe looked over at Neil in time to see him pocketing his badge. She turned left out of the ramp.

“He’s got to be long gone by now.”

“Might not be. He parked in the Mexican Village lot.”

They reached the corner just in time to see a lime-green Taurus take a left out of the lot behind the Mexican Village. The plates were custom and read, “studman.”

“That’s him. Follow him, but not too closely.”

At First Avenue, he turned left, then turned right down Sixth Street. Dwuane seemed in no hurry. He maintained the exact speed limit and followed Sixth past the hospital, took Fifteenth to Ninth and followed that to County One.

“Where the hell is he going?” growled Neil.

“Does he live out here?”

“No. He has an apartment out by Parkwood 18.”

“I don’t suppose you care that that’s in Waite Park jurisdiction.”

“Not really. Not if I can catch this son-of-a-bitch.”

Phoebe knew that cases could be lost if cops didn’t play by some very strict rules. Her silence seemed to pose Neil the right question.

He sighed. “Yeah, I’ll call in the Waite Park cops at the right moment.”

She nodded.

Duane turned on County 1 as if to go to Walmart, then continued on, turning south on Highway 15. Sure enough, he turned right on Third Street, followed that around to the Parkwood 18 theater, then pulled into the apartment lot across the street. Neil had Phoebe pull into the theater lot and park so they could watch. Schultz parked, got out and walked into the apartment building. He was a smallish man, thin. In worn jeans and blue hooded sweatshirt, he was mostly unremarkable. “Wow,” said Phoebe. “That scar is visible from here.”

“It is. No mistaking the guy.”

The man entered the apartment building.

“Damn,” said Neil. “Looks like he’s done for the night. He must have cleaned out a few college kids and made a strategic retreat before they considered taking him out back and beating the piss out of him to get their money back.”

They sat in the Prius another ten minutes. “Do you know what apartment is his?” Phoebe asked him.

“Three B,” he said.

“Is that in the front of the building or the back?”

“Front.” McKenna pointed. “It’s that one, just over the main entrance door.”

“The lights didn’t come on,” Phoebe said. She’d watched for that.

“No.” He sounded frustrated.

“So what do you think it means that he didn’t turn on his lights?”

Neil was getting aggitated. “I don’t . . . head back to the Red Carpet.”

“Okay,” Phoebe said, but she was wondering what he was thinking.

She pulled out of the theater lot and took Division Street back into town. They found a street space near the Press bar, just down from the Red Carpet. When they went in, they looked around. Suddenly, Neil, who was ahead of her, spun and pushed her toward the bar. “Shit,” he intoned.

“What?” she asked.

“He’s here. He came back here. I don’t believe it. I don’t get it. His car didn’t leave the apartment lot, but he’s back here, looking like he never left.”

Phoebe glanced around Neil, trying to be covert. Neil handed her a drink. She sipped, making a face because it was Diet Coke, and she hated diet. But the non-alcoholic aspect told her they were still working.

A number of guys were crowded around the pool tables, and she didn’t see the man with the scar. She looked for the blue hoody. Then a groan from one table, and the shooter stepped back, revealing Dwuane Schultz, the thin twenty-something blond guy with week-old beard not quite hiding a rather wicked scar that ran from just under his left eye down toward his chin, getting lost in the scruff on his face. The scar was definitely a show stopper, ragged and nearly a quarter of an inch wide in places, and white. It reminded her of Gregory Peck’s scar as Ahab in the older Moby Dick movie. The man’s jawline looked hard, unfriendly, and his blue eyes cold and calculating, like a snake’s eyes. He was laughing and joking with three college kids, but the humor never reached those cold eyes. He had taken over as shooter and ran the table in short order. Laughing, he collected money from some very unhappy college students.

This is the guy who’s terrorizing old ladies? she thought. Except for that scar, he’s not so scary. Not as scary as my dad on some days and Phil when he was pissed. But she could just bet the old women he confronted in their own homes were instantly terrified when they saw him. But something wasn’t right. “He had a blue hoody on before.”

Neil’s eyes hit her. “What?”

“Outside the apartment he had on a blue UMD hooded sweatshirt.” The man in front of them had on a blue UMD sweatshirt all right, but it wasn’t a hoody.

“You’re right. Damn.”

Dwuane ran the table in a follow-up game, and the three students unhappily handed over more money, looking more disgusted than after the first game. One threw up his hands and left the bar entirely, the other two refused to play any more games even when Dwuane, mockingly, tried to give them advantages. When no one would play with him, he put the cue stick down on the table and came over to the bar.

“Well, well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t Detective McKenna. Stalking me, are you?”

“Dwuane, old buddy. What the hell are you doing here?” Neil said, acting both surprised and expansive. He stuck out his hand.

Dwuane smiled, stared at the offered hand but didn’t shake it. “Well, I’m getting myself a little drink, Detective McKenna. Then I think I’ll just give my lawyer a little ringy-ding. Got him here on speed dial.”

“If you need to chat with Dick Murphy, Dwuane, you go right ahead. It’s no never mind to me. I’m here showing my lady friend a good time. Wanna meet her? Cindy Fischer, this is Dwuane Schultz. Dwuane, Cindy.”

He stuck out his hand, and Phoebe let him hold her fingers. He said, “You a cop, too, Cindy?”

She giggled like a little girl, channeling her aunt. “Me? Oh, my, no. I’m a secretary over at St. Cloud Medical. Dr. Silverstein’s office.”

Dwuane’s eyebrows bunched. “Silverstein. Isn’t he like a women’s doctor?’

“Like an ob-gyn? Oh, no, no, no. That’s Dr. Peter Overmeyer. Same office though. No, Roger Silverstein does a lot of vasectomies and sees men for impotence and prostate issues. His clientele is definitely guys.”

“So why doesn’t he have a male secretary?”

“What guy would like that?” Phoebe said and batted her lashes.

Dwuane didn’t ask any more questions, just eyed her with those cold blue eyes. He finally let go her fingers. He shifted his gaze back to Neil and turned up the deep freeze in his expression. “Don’t harrass me, McKenna. I’ll get Murphy on your ass, maybe make a formal complaint to Johnson . . . again.”

“Harrass you? Don’t be obsurd, Dwuane. We just had supper at D.B. Searles. Go ask. We thought we’d come in for a drink, but, hey, we can go down to the Press, if that’d make you more comfortable. Is that okay, Cindy? It is a little crowded in here anyway.”

“Sure, sweetie,” Phoebe said, trying her utmost to do the dumb blond to match her hair.

She set her glass on the bar and Neil did too. As he guided her to the door, a hand on her back, Dwuane called out. “I must say, though, McKenna. She might not have much of a brain, but she’s better looking than that dog you were with a few weeks ago.”

Phoebe felt Neil stiffen behind her, felt him hesitate. He’s going to turn around and swing at the asshole, she thought. She turned her ankle and squealed, grabbing at his arm, ostensibly for support, but she dug her nails in hard. He had half turned toward Dwuane, but stopped, looked hard at her, then put his arm back around her waist.

In a moment, they were out the door and walking up the street. He looked at the marks on his wrist. “That hurt,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I was a little afraid you were going to take a swing at the man.”

Neil looked away. “If I don’t get that bastard convicted of attacking old women pretty soon, I’m gonna have to kill him,” he said.

“You let him get your goat,” she said. “Don’t be that kind of idiot. But why did you react so strongly?”

He breathed out, then breathed out again. “Five weeks ago, my girlfriend of three years, my fiancée really, was struck and killed while crossing the street in front of her house. Hit and run.”

Phoebe turned to face him. “Oh, Neil, I’m so sorry. That’s awful. Was the driver found?”

“Nope. Nothing. No witnesses, no clues. Only Nancy was dead.”

Something, just a kind of thought thread, caught. Nancy wasn’t all that common a name really. “Was that Nancy Broderick?”

Neil met her eyes. “Yes. What? Do you remember that case from last month?”

“Well, not exactly. My husband . . . ex-husband had a secretary by that name.”

Neil’s eyesbrows went up. “Your ex is Phillip Stuart?”

“Yeah.”

“Small world, I guess. Nancy worked for him for almost a year. Then he up and fired her. No reason. Just handed her the box of her personal stuff when she came to work one morning. She was so upset. Never did find out why.”

“Phil was like that,” Phoebe said, embarrassed if only by association. “He was an asshole. What can I say? What did Nancy do for him? I mean, he usually has several assistants at the same time.”

Neil got quiet. “Some filing. Some research. I don’t know. She didn’t really talk about it. When Nan got fired, though, she was angry over it. She said she had seen stuff on him that, if it got out, might cause his political career harm. I was also angry because she was angry. But, when I pressed her for what she knew, she didn’t want to talk about it yet. Said she had to think through what she knew and what she wanted to do with it. Cool off first. She left to visit her mom out East. She came back a week later. I was at work, but I talked to her on her cell. She said she’d made up her mind about Representative Stuart. We had a date planned for that night, but she was killed that afternoon just hours after she got home.”

They walked in silence while they crossed St. Germain, having passed entirely by the Press bar. Phoebe was thinking. “You think it was Dwuane who killed your fiancée.”

He shrugged and shook his head, then said, “I don’t know. The timing was right. I had just had a small breakthrough in the case, a witness who got a better look at him than most. It was enough to pull him in for questioning. He wasn’t happy about that. Murphy had just gotten him out. I figure Nancy’s death was revenge or letting me know that he could and would do me harm if I persisted. And that bastard is going to get away with it most likely. It makes me sick.”

“You think he was the Paramount hit-and-run driver too?”

“It’s crossed my mind.”

“Any connection?”

He gave another shrug that seemed to indicate that he did indeed see a connection, if only a small one. “Carol Burg was an assistant county attorney. For one hearing, she represented the state in the case against him, the only time I actually got that far in convicting him. That was when he assaulted Jessica Parker, the older woman with good eyesight. She was rock solid in her identification of him in the line-up. Pointed him out with no hesitation or question even though we had other men with scars in the line-up. County attorney gave it a try, but Dwuane allibied his way out of that one, too. It had been a church night, and a whole choir said he had sung loudly and off-key from the second row. Carol Burg was killed two days later coming out of a concert at the Paramount.”

“A concert. You had witnesses, then.”

Neil met her eyes briefly. “Not really. A couple street lights were out, and Carol hadn’t come out with the crowd. She knew some of the theater crew and had stayed to chat. The street had mostly cleared by the time she left. All anyone really saw was a big dark vehicle. One stage hand saw a few numbers of the license, but it didn’t really pan out.”

“On going, then.”

“Stalled is more accurate.”

“Who’s Cindy Fischer?”

“Who?”

“Me. You introduced me as—”

He was grinning lopsidedly. “A friend from grade school. You played it pretty good, by the way. A little too blond, maybe, but not bad. I like it that you can think extemporaneously and with convincing detail. Good lies are always in the details. Is all that info about the doctors correct?”

She liked it that he could use the word “extemporaneously.” “Completely. I’ve sat in that office waiting room. Read his brocures.”

“Seeing Overmeyer?”

She smiled. “Like I was pregnant or something? Sorry. There are two others in that complex—Dr. Andrea Hills, homeopathic medicine, and Karly Limsome, a councelor.”

“And you were seeing . . . ?”

“None of your business. Just kidding. I don’t mind anyone knowing. I see Karly now and again just to make sure I’m on an even keel.”

“Issues with your old man?”

“Not that it’s really your business, Detective McKenna, but . . . yes. My mom got me started in counselling right after my dad died so I could work through stuff. Dad had been pretty angry and in pain at the end, and it was hard on both of us. I kept up with the counseling after she passed. I check in with her monthly.”

They continued along Fifth to the Mexican Village lot. The lime-green Taurus with the studman license plate was parked in the last row. For a long moment, Neil glared at it. “How the hell did he get here ahead of us?”

Phoebe didn’t know.

“We might as well call it a night, Magillicutty,” he said. “He’s made us, probably called Dick Murphy by now. If we so much as hang around waiting for him, we’ll be slapped with an injunction.”

They walked back down Fifth to her car. She climbed in. “Can I drop you off anywhere?”

“No. I really did walk. Anyway, I need to clear my head. See you at work tomorrow,” and he closed her door and gave it a couple taps before he skirted around behind the Prius and headed down Fifth toward First.

Phoebe drove back to her aunt’s. As the note had described, no one had arrived home as yet. Phoebe thought she might check out the DVDs in the library and crossed the foyer in her stocking feet, having slipped off her pumps yet again.

At first she didn’t see any movies in the library, a lot of books, however, and a cursory look showed her that her aunt had accummulated a fair number of first editions and many very old books as well. It was a nice collection. If she wasn’t in her aunt’s house just temporarily, she knew she’d want to spend time here, make new friends of the old editions.

Phoebe had always loved books, hence her own collection that, while certainly more modest than her aunt’s, included a few first editions, though not many valuable books. Which was probably good, she figured, as Phil would likely have kept them if he thought she had anything of value.

Phoebe thought she might rearrange her books that evening while she watched a movie. But she was having trouble locating the promised movie collection supposedly in the library. She decided she’d have to select from the modest few already in her room or surf what might be on HBO or Stars and turned to the door. When she did, she saw two things. A bit of light seemed to be coming from under the bottom shelf along one wall of the library, and right there, behind the door, she saw the ends of several shelves that had DVDs on them.

Phoebe pulled the library door away from the wall, discovering that most of the wall behind it was filled with DVDs, hundreds of them, everything from drama to kids’ movies to TV series, to British.

“Wow,” she said aloud. “Oh, hey, she has the Neverending Story.” She hadn’t seen this in years, but it had been a favorite when she was young. Still, she had enjoyed the Firefly series episodes she had found on the Sci-Fi channel and chose the movie Serenity for the movie to watch that evening. Then she also grabbed Mission to Mars, just for fun. Oldies but goodies, she thought.

Movies in hand, Phoebe swung the door back against the wall. She flipped off the lights and took a step into the foyer when she remembered the light she had seen at the bottom of one wall of books. She looked into the darkened room, but could no longer see any light. She figured it must have been a reflection off some shiny book jacket that had caught the room’s lights just right. She headed upstairs for a few hours of watching movies and arranging her books.

Chapter 6: Next Day

Phoebe, in brown slacks and darker brown blazer over a tailored pale-pink blouse, came down early the next morning to the frangrant odor of good coffee and bacon. Her aunt and Jerry already were digging into plates of bacon and eggs and homemade hashbrowns when she walked in. Emogene must have heard her on the stairs as she was just dishing up a plate for Phoebe and set it before her just as she sat down.

“Oh, wow. This looks wonderful. Thanks, Emogene.”

The cook served herself a plate and sat with them at the little dinette in the kitchen in front of the patio doors that looked out on the backyard. Morning sun already filled the yard and glinted off the lake.

“Did you manage to find some supper, dear?” her aunt asked.

“Oh, yeah. I ate with a colleague in town.”

“I’m so sorry we hadn’t discussed our schedule in the morning. I know we should have. That was very rude of us.”

“Oh, no, Aunt Emily. No, please. This is your house and your life. I surely don’t mind that you keep doing all the activities you enjoy. Was it a concert last night?”

Aunt Emily pursed her lipes and looked to Jerry. “Did we miss a concert?”

He set down his paper, looking thoughtful. “Well, I’m sure there was something going on in the Cities. Always is. And we always have conflicts.”

“Oh, I suppose that’s true, but to miss a concert for a dry civic fund raiser with plastic chicken.”

“I told you to have the stuffed pork chop,” he said. “My meal was lovely.”

“But pork can be so tough sometimes, and when it is, it’s awful.”

They went on through several more exchanges that included how spoiled they were by Emogene’s cooking. Phoebe was sorry she mentioned any of it.

“Is that the paper, Jerry?” she said.

He handed her part of the folded copy of the St. Cloud Daily Times. She opened it up to read the headlines. “Series of River Home Thefts Solved,” the paper had in big black letters at the top of the Local News section. She went on to read how a couple of brothers and their cousin had been caught red handed with several laptops and other electronics traced to three homes burglarized on the Mississippi River in the past week. The three had apparently been celebrating their latest theft of a home near Sportsman Island, which had included a substantial quantity of alcoholic beverages, when the authorities, on an anonymous tip, discovered them, drunk and passed out in an apartment in the Hester Park neighborhood in St. Cloud. Items from several thefts, including the recent one near Sportsman Island, were found in the apartment, rented by the cousin, where the three were apprehended. Caught red-handed, the three had confessed.

“That makes it easy,” Phoebe said.

“What does, dear?” said her aunt.

“Some anonymous tip and the PD has the solution to five cases of theft handed to them. That makes our life easy. It’s not usually that easy, though, I’ll just bet.”

Jerry shrugged. “It happens, though. Not every case has to be like pulling teeth.”

“I suppose not. I was kind of on a stake out last night. Neil McKenna, the senior detective—did you know him too?—is struggling with a case where older women are attacked in their homes and robbed of cash and jewelry and stuff. But he can’t seem to pin anything on the guy he seems sure is the attacker.”

“McKenna’s senior detective now?”

“Yeah.” Phoebe had seen Jerry’s smile. “Why?”

“He was a good kid. Young and inexperienced when I knew him. A little gung-ho too, but dedicated and smart. Zip saw it too. He liked him.”

“McKenna mentioned being under my dad. Didn’t seem to have enjoyed the experience from what he said.”

Jerry chuckled. “No? I can’t imagine why. Zip was a sweetheart. Such a sweet, fun guy.”

Phoebe smiled. “He questioned my sanity in going back to my maiden name.”

“Have you, dear?” her aunt said, sipping her coffee and looking at Phoebe over the rim of her cup.

“Yeah. I . . . ah . . . wanted to make a clean break from Phil.”

Jerry said, “It’s a good name. Don’t trade on it though.”

“How could I?” said Phoebe. “Most people remember Dad as some kind of bastard.”

She thought her aunt might disapprove of her language, but Emily said, “He was. He specialized in bastard, especially later in his life. More’s the pity. He wasn’t really.”

Jerry said, “But I bet McKenna thought he was.”

“He seemed to.”

“There’s a reason for that. Zip was always hardest on those young detectives who seemed to have the best instincts, the ones who looked past the quick solution.”

Phoebe knew then that Neil really had been channeling her father when he had talked of his cases. In a way, that felt good, like her father had been more than the mean, angry old man she thought he was.

“I bet he was hard on you, too,” said her aunt.

“Well, he . . .” and Phoebe paused. He had been very hard on her, always expecting the highest marks, the best scores, always pushing her to do better even when her efforts put her at the top of her class, especially after she had talked about going into law enforcement. Had he seen something in her? She sure wished he had said something, even just once. “Well, he was tough. I always thought he was harder on me than anyone, but now I’m not so sure.”

“He loved you, dear,” said her aunt with sympathetic eyes. “I know he probably never said so, but he did.”

Phoebe nodded and went back to the paper. Then she remembered the garage thefts Neil had talked about and told her aunt, Emogene, and Jerry about that to change the subject.

“Oh, I think you might be right about those week days off,” said Jerry with a smile. “It really does sound like someone with rotating days off is behind the ring.”

“I think McKenna might check it out.”

“I’ve heard about those attacks on older women,” said Jerry. “Nasty series of cases. Guy is terrorizing women in, what, their late seventies or so.”

“Oh, dear,” said Aunt Emily. “How utterly terrifying.”

“One was ninety,” said Phoebe. “And it is awful. Chances are that poor woman—maybe all of them—will be scared at night for the rest of their lives.”

Emogene said, “Really, Phoebe. You’re going to frighten your aunt.”

“Oh, Aunt Emily,” said Phoebe quickly. “I’m sure you have nothing to worry about. All those women lived alone. You don’t.”

“That’s a relief,” said her aunt. Phoebe looked up. Her aunt hadn’t sounded relieved, but she also hadn’t sounded like she wasn’t relieved either. Her words had had absolutely no emotional charge. That struck Phoebe as odd.

Phoebe’s glance up also allowed her to see her aunt give Jerry a little smile. He caught her glance with a touch of warning and a slight tip of his chin in Phoebe’s direction, but Phoebe could have sworn he gave a bit of smile back. Then he shook his paper and went back to his sports. Her aunt sipped her tea and looked benignly out into the backyard.

“Do they have suspects?” Jerry asked, off-handedly. “The guy who robbed the old ladies.”

Phoebe smiled inwardly at how easily the retired cop in Jerusalem Emmett Brown rose to the surface. “Actually Detective McKenna’s pretty sure he knows who the culprit is, but he can’t nail him, can’t figure out what’s going on. Several of the women identified the same suspect in line-ups but the guy always has an alibi.”

“Good alibis?”

“Seems so. He’s was buying rounds of drinks all night in a bar or had been bowling with a league, or singing badly at Wednesday-night church services. Each time dozens of people can ID him miles from the crime. Oh,” Phoebe said, seeing an article at the bottom of the front page that told how a seventy-five-year-old woman was robbed after an intruder came into her home in north St. Cloud. She didn’t read it outloud because she quickly saw that some of the details in the attack had changed. The old woman had been bludgeoned to death.

The phone in the foyer rang, and Aunt Emily jumped up to go answer it.

“I saw that article,” Jerry said, his voice low, nodding his chin toward Phoebe’s section of the paper. “Maybe they’ll catch him this time. Maybe his alibi won’t be as good. In any case, let’s not alarm your aunt.”

Phoebe sighed. “But this time someone died. It seems to be the same MO in some respects, but I doubt McKenna’s suspect will even be taken in for questioning. McKenna and I are his alibi last night. From about seven to close to ten at least. We were watching him, following him, all evening, though I still don’t know how he got out of the Parkwood Apartments lot without our seeing him and then beat us back to the Red Carpet. It’s weird. And McKenna thinks his suspect might have had something to do with his girlfriend’s hit-and-run death a few weeks back and maybe even some assistant district attorney’s death.”

“Actually,” Jerry said, snapping up the sports page in front of himself again as Emily came back into the room, “it sounds like McKenna’s getting a little obsessed. He better be careful. He can get wrapped up too tight that way and miss important details. That’s no way to solve either the break-ins or . . . or the other stuff.”

The phone rang again, and Aunt Emily rolled her eyes and dashed back to the foyer.

“Just bring the phone back with you, Em,” Jerry called after her. “Obsession won’t solve the case,” he said to Phoebe.

“Oh, I know,” said Phoebe. “He’s working pretty hard, following the clues. He’s just not getting any breaks in the case. I mean, several of the women have positively identified a specific guy—the same guy each time. But he always an has these iron-clad alibis. How’s that happening? It makes no sense.”

Jerry shrugged. “Yup, not all cases are solved easily or by accident.”

Her aunt came back and sat down. “I’m sorry for the interruptions. You were talking about that nice young detective, that Detective McKenna. I met him at . . . something. I liked him. I’m sure he’ll figure out his case.” Then she smiled over her tea cup. “How was your breakfast, dear?”

Truthfully, Phoebe had eaten mostly without thinking about it. But she paused and gave the perfect sunny-side-up eggs, the bacon that was just the right crispness without being dry, the seasoned hashbrown, and the whole-grain toast a proper appraisal. “Oh, thanks so much, Emogene. It was a delightful breakfast.” She sipped her coffee. “Sunny-side up is my favorite way to eat eggs. And I love extra crisy hashbowns. Oh, and the coffee is the most delicious I’ve ever had. It’s wonderful.”

Emogene smiled. “My pleasure, Phoebe. Are you likely to be home for supper tonight?”

“I expect so. I’ve been going around with another detective, but, truthfully, it’s boring. It’s no more exciting than what I was doing as a partrol officer. Last night, though, going undercover with Detective McKenna was a lot more interesting. I even got to play act.”

“Oh?” said her aunt.

“Yeah, Detective McKenna and I went into a bar to keep an eye on the guy he thinks is terrorizing the old women, but the guy made us. So McKenna introduced me as his girlfriend. We ­hadn’t planned any of that, but I made up a job and stuff right on the spot. It made me think of you, Aunt Emily.”

“Me? Whyever for?”

That set Phoebe back a step. “Well, because you were an actress.”

Emily laughed her little girl laugh, a high cascade of mirth. “I was never an actress, dear. I told you. I was a screamer. I never even had any lines. Not one word other than screaming. More’s the pity. I always wanted lines. That’s all I did though. Scream. I was more a stunt person, you might say, than anything else, an extra in most cases.”

“I suppose,” Phoebe said. “Still, it made me think of you.” She glanced at the clock. “Oops. Gotta go. Supper’s at . . .”

“Let’s make it six,” her aunt said. “Emogene and I are going out later. We have a club.”

“So do I,” said Jerry. “It’s the second Tuesday. Dinner at six will allow me to get to the Cities in time.”

“Oh,” said Phoebe. “Emogene, I really appreciate your making me lunch. If it’s okay, can you make me one that I don’t have to refrigerate?”

Jerry started to chuckle. “Got a grazer in the office?”

“Yes. He ate that meatloaf sandwich on me.”

While Emogene tutted, Jerry held up a finger for her to wait and left the kitchen. In a couple of minutes, he was back, two insulated lunch bags in hand. He gave one to Emogene, and she began transferring what she had put in a brown paper bag. “Here,” he said giving Phoebe the other one. “Put this in your locked drawer. Don’t open it yourself. The other one should keep your food cool in your locker—Oh, Emogene, put one of those cold packs in with her lunch.”

“Already thought of that, Mr. Brown,” Emogene said.

Jerry smiled, then turned back to Phoebe. “Hide the lunch inside a coat or something like that. Not even lockers are really safe. Locked drawers sure aren’t. Police stations always have grazers. It’s endemic.”

* * * * *

As Phoebe drove into town, she found herself pleased that her aunt was doing things. So many older people kind of shrivled up and did nothing but watch soaps or putter around their homes. Aunt Emily seemed much more vital than many eighty-year-olds. Emogene was more than her aunt’s cook. She was a companion. That also explained why she ate with them. What Jerry’s relationship was to her aunt was still unclear, though, if he and her aunt had a thing going, Phoebe was all for it. A relationship—a little elderly love—was even better than a companion.

She walked into the office to hear Neil excitedly telling Homer how great it was the string of river home burglaries had been cleared up with the capture of two brothers and their cousin. “So many of the break-ins were out in the county—along the Sauk River in St. Cloud and Cold Spring—that the Sheriff’s Department had claimed jurisdiction, not that they had had any better luck than we had in figuring out who did it. Three kids! The oldest was twenty-two and the other two were still under nineteen, and the three of them just fell into the county’s lap. Can you imagine? Escaped on the rivers in canoes.”

Phoebe said, “It was an anonymous tip?”

“Actually,” said McKenna, “a process server had to deliver a summons. Overdue parking tickets. The summons was for a Peter Treebain in 3B, but the outside of the envelope read 2B. Someone had made a clerical error. She went to the wrong apartment in North St. Cloud meant for low-income housing. A sleepy, mostly drunk guy answered. Sarah got a look inside while they straightened out that she didn’t have the Treebain apartment. She knew about the break-ins, of course, and the apartment seemed to have too many laptops, flat screens, and odd electronic gear. She remembered seeing a really large flatscreen TV listed as stuff taken from the last place in Sportsman’s Park, and darned if a huge flatscreen leaned up against the wall. In her mind, kids with a screen that big would have it mounted and hooked up in a nanosecond. She called in the tip. So it was more like this total coincidence that those guys were caught.”

The euphoria over McKenna being happy with the solution to one set of crimes got Phoebe through the mundane calls Homer Stark and she had to make. Now that she had had a taste of what some aspects of detective work could be like, she was doubly sure what Homer did, though probably important, just wasn’t what she wanted to spend her career doing. As far as she could tell, the one case with the great dane might have been his only actual solution, though his meticulous background work surely added to the good outcomes of cases solved by others. She wasn’t sure on that and certainly had no real proof, but she felt she had to be hopeful he did something useful because she might spend years doing the same thing before she got cases with more meat to them.

She had just sat down at her desk and began inputting data into her laptop in preparation for writing the day’s reports when Neil McKenna sat down in her perp chair. “Kept your lunch with you today, didn’t you?” he said with a grin.

“I learn quick,” she said, stiffling a smile.

“Yeah, well, I had dreams last night of that meatloaf sandwich.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m touched.”

“Wanna bring me another one tomorrow?”

“Nope. Anyway, the meatloaf’s gone. I had the last of it as a snack before I went to bed last night.”

“Oh, cruel woman. So, what did you have for lunch?”

“Let’s see. Thinly sliced chicken breast on homemade multigrain seeded bread—”

“Oh, God. What else?”

“Touch of brown mustard, mayo, pepperjack cheese, bib lettuce, bread-and-butter pickles. And a fruit salad dressed in cream cheese and lemon sauce.”

“God damn, Magillicutty. How do you do it?”

“I’m just that good.”

“Know what I had?”

“Someone else’s lunch from the fridge?”

“As if. Only some newbe would leave a decent lunch unattended in there. If I hadn’t gotten yours yesterday, Stan would have.”

Phoebe looked over at “Stan, the man.” Heavy, balding, he sat opposite Homer. As Phoebe watched, Stan made comment about one of the secretaries, who, at that moment, walked to the water cooler, bent down and took a few sips of water. Homer turned and stared. Stan, paying no attention to the shape and firmness of Georgia’s behind, reached over and snatched seven or eight of Homer’s fries—today seemed to be a MacDonald’s day.

By the time Georgia finished her drink and Homer turned his attention back to his lunch, Stan had consumed, chewed and swallowed the fries—what amounted to nearly a third of the ones in the little paper sleeve.

Homer didn’t seem to notice as he continued eating his lunch while making some sort of guy comment about Georgia that made Stan’s hefty shoulders bounce in laughter.

“That’s not Stan’s desk,” McKenna said. “Stark is . . . a little awkward socially, in case you hadn’t noticed. Stan’s hiding his grazing as camaraderie.”

“That’s kind of disgusting, you know,” Phoebe said.

“Yeah. Stan’s a pig.”

“And you?” She smiled.

“Me? Hmm. Well, I’m just occasionally weak willed.”

“Ah. I see.”

“No, you don’t. My weakness is that I’m trying to maintain my body. I go to the gym three days a week. I run. I try to eat healthy.”

“So you want my really good food and not Homer’s crappy fast food?”

“When I opened the fridge and smelled that meatloaf wafting fragrantly out at me, my carrots and celery just shriveled in their little plastic bag. I reached in for them, I really did, but my hand verred to your bag. I couldn’t help it. Then I saw Stan come in. He always checks out the fridge. I just couldn’t let him scarf your lunch. Not Stan. I grabbed the bag and went to my desk. I still was of the mind to protect it until you and Stark came in, but again, that sandwich called to me. Before I could stop myself, I’d opened your lunch and taken a taste. Just a taste, mind you. Besides Stan was munching down my carrot sticks by then.”

“Wow,” Phoebe said. “I almost feel I should thank you for eating my lunch. Almost. I’m not putting even so much as a half eaten Snickers bar in that fridge ever again. I have an insulated lunch tote, and I’m keeping it in my locked drawer.”

“Wise choice,” said Neil.

A little while later, Phoebe got up and crossed the office to the hall, headed for the ladies room just down a couple of doors. When she returned, she saw that Neil had come around to her desk and had her letter opener in the lock of the drawer. It popped open with considerable ease . . . or practice. He looked to the door, but she had stopped just at the edge of the glass, and he missed her. He unzipped the tote. All Phoebe heard was a soft poof, but a tiny blue cloud puffed up around him. Not sure what Jerry had put in the tote, Phoebe came back into the room. Neil was just digging out his handkerchief and wiping off a faceful of blue power.

“What the hell was that?” he shouted at her, pissed. He got up and headed out to go to the men’s room.

Everyone in the office, of course was laughing. “It serves you right,” Homer called after him.

When Neil came back, he went to his desk, not even making eye contact with Phoebe. She was happy to see the blue was gone from his face, and, though his shirt looked wet, none of it was stained that color either. A tiny speck of blue still clung to his earlobe, though.

A hulk sat down in her perp chair, and Phoebe looked up to see Stan. “You’re going to regret that,” he said conversationally. “You embarrassed Neil, and he doesn’t like that.”

“He ate my lunch yesterday.”

“Oh, poor baby. What you failed to see is that offices have a dynamic. You just messed with ours. I eat some of Homer’s lunch all the time. Thing is, he knows it. His wife makes him lunch every day. Did you know that? He hates the dry whole wheat she gives him. Hates peanut butter and jelly, tuna—well, she really can’t make a decent lunch. I should know, I eat those lunches. In payment for humanely disposing of them, I get a few fries and such. Call it my fee. He doesn’t get caught eating fast food often, but, when he does, he can truthfully tell Sylvia that someone ate his lunch. That’s important because Syliva can spot his lies a mile away.”

Phoebe frowned. “And Neil?”

“Neil ain’t a grazer. Not usually. He goes to the gym, works hard too. Runs, jogs, does 5k and 10k races all the time. Real health nut. But he likes good food, and your lunch was really good food.”

“How do you know?”

“He shared it with me. A corner anyway. Meatloaf. Really first rate. Today, however, he wasn’t going to eat your lunch.”

“Well, he couldn’t. I ate it an hour ago. I even told him I ate it.”

“Then you know for certain he wasn’t going to eat it. He was putting a note into your lunch container. Might have fallen.”

Phoebe looked down. Nothing lay on the floor. She scooted back to glance under the desk. Nothing. She opened the locked drawer. A slip of paper, splotched with blue lay in the bottom of the drawer. She slipped on a latex glove she always kept in her purse hoping for some evidence that she’d need the glove for. She maneuvered the note open. Though a couple of the words were partially covered, she read, “See, I have some self-control.”

Stan stood up. “He likes you, Magillicutty. But you just embarrassed him, and he won’t forget that easily. Too bad.”

“But why don’t you have your own lunches?” Phoebe asked.

“Me? I’m a bachelor. Can’t cook. Supper’s mostly take-out for me but I don’t get paid near enough for two meals a day out. Office coffee’s good enough for breakfast, and I scarf the best donuts both in this room and from the patrol side when I can. I wing it here in the office for lunch and have a round of lovely carry-out places I rotate for supper.” He shrugged. “It works.” And the big man lifted from her chair and wove his way back to his desk.

Works? thought Phoebe. You’re headed toward a heart attack, Stan the man.

The rest of the day was long and boring. Stark took her on three calls. After two hours spent with a parking attendent talking about a series of car break-ins, and another couple of hours tracking down two women wanted for questioning about some porch thefts in a retirement neighborhood, she was tired and very bored. She was nearly to the point of wanting to stay with the car when they arrived at their last stop of the day.

“What’s this one?” asked Phoebe, expecting another rendition of witness to some petty crime only to find out they had heard about the crime from some neighbor they’d already interviewed and hadn’t seen a thing directly themselves.

“We’ve got this guy going around breaking into old ladies’ houses. He scares the bejeebers out of them, steals cash and silver, pushes them around, then leaves.”

Phoebe’s ears pricked. “Wait a minute. McKenna’s been working on that.”

“Everyone works on it. We ended up with this interview.”

“Didn’t the thief just kill his last victim?”

“Last night. Yes . . . and no. Mrs. Elsa Plotman died, and there is evidence of some kind of a blow, but the coroner ruled it mostly a heart attack.”

“No, the paper said she’d been blugeoned.”

“She had a bruise on the side of her head that can’t be accounted for by falling and hitting her head, but the coroner said it couldn’t have killed her. The paper got it wrong, which is no huge surprise. ME said it was a heart attack what killed her.”

“Brought on by a really stressful situation maybe.”

“Oh, probably. So even though the perp didn’t blugeon her head in, he did hit her, and he’s still going to be charged with murder. But the DA is squiffy about it. Perp’s attorney will argue that Plotman could have died before the theft or died of natural causes after it. With no witnesses . . .”

“So who are we going to see?”

“Plotman’s daughter, a Mrs. Marjory Olson. She came out from Cleveland to make arrangement for her mom’s funeral and to assess what’s missing.”

The woman was a mess. She bawled through the whole interview, going through a whole box of Kleenex. Even Phoebe and Homer needed a tissue or two just watching her.

“Mom was eighty-four. No spring chicken.”

“Did she have any health issues?” Homer asked.

The woman rolled reddened eyes. “At eighty-four everyone has health issues. Sure. She had a bad heart, was diabetic. Her hips were going. Knees had been replaced years ago. She had arthritis bad enough to cripple up her hands and she walked stooped because of issues with her lower back. You name it. But her mind was good . . . better than mine on some days. I mean Tony and I have been talking about maybe getting her into an assisted-living facility this year, but, really, it wasn’t like we felt we had to hurry. She kept the house clean, made food for herself, stuck to her diet and all. She spends . . . spent three days a week at Whitney Senior Center to be with people. We had a home health aid check on her twice a week, and she got Meals-on-Wheels three days a week, just to make sure she had the nutrition she needed and, of course, to have people checking on her regularly.”

“What did you find missing?”

The woman sighed, and big tears dripped steadily down her cheeks. “You have to understand that she lost her dad on Black Monday.”

Homer intoned to Phoebe, “Start of the Depression,” as if she didn’t know. Phoebe hated it that he felt the need to translate for her. This wasn’t the first time.

“Having gone through the Depression,” Mrs. Olson said, “Mom didn’t trust banks in tough times, and the series of recessions we’ve had the last few years scared her. With a new one threatening, she pulled her savings and hid it in the house even though we all told her it was a very bad idea.”

“How much savings are we talking?” Homer asked.

The woman wiped her nose. “As close as my brother, Wendel, and I can figure, it was maybe thirty thousand dollars.”

Homer whistled. “She had to know that made her a target.”

“You couldn’t tell Mom stuff like that. She didn’t listen. She’d say, ‘How would anyone know? It’s not like I’m going to take out an ad in the paper.’”

“Do you know where she kept it?”

“Sure. Both Wendy and I did. Mom insisted on that. But the wall safe in her spare bedroom’s empty. The thief got all of it.”

And right there Phoebe saw the first lie. Something in the woman’s tone and her steady eye contact shifted.

“Can we see the wall safe?” Phoebe said. She rarely spoke up in the interviews they’d had. She usually let Homer conduct them, just sitting quietly and taking notes. Being the good junior detective.

She had interrupted Homer in the midst of opening his mouth to ask another question, and he looked at her. So did Marjory Olson. Startled, she hesitated, then got up. As she turned to lead the way to the spare beadroom, Homer gave Phoebe a look and mouthed, “What?”

Phoebe shook her head and followed the woman with Stark bringing up the rear. In the spare bedroom a picture had already been swung out of the way and a wall safe stood open. It was a particularly small safe, maybe the depth and width of a dollar bill and four inches tall.

“Yeah,” Phoebe said, examining the safe with gloved hands though she knew the forensic team had already gone over the house with a fine-toothed comb. “Looks like the thief made her open it. Probably at gun or knife point. I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Olson.”

Phoebe turned and started walking back to the living room, and Homer, not to seem out of the loop, also examined the safe door and combination lock.

Again seated in the living room, Phoebe, pad in hand and pen at the ready, said, “Do you have any idea what she usually kept in there? Twenties? Hundreds?”

The woman hesitated. “Oh, I really wouldn’t know. Hundreds I would assume.”

“And that was the only safe she had?”

“Yes, of course.”

Something in what the woman had said before had seemed like a lie, but she had taken them to a wall safe, one clearly empty. But when she said that the safe she had shone them was the only one, Phoebe saw a clearer lie. The woman was suddenly much more nervous, different from just being upset. Her eyes flickered, and color rose in her cheeks. At first she stared at Phoebe, then turned away, looking down in her lap. Her wringing hands had also stilled and were being held rigid. The woman had seemed to turn to stone.

“Anything else missing?” Homer asked, his tone routine, monotonous.

That brought the woman back to life. “The thief got her silver tea set, all her jewelry—she had some really nice pieces, some very old and valuable. I’ve been through the house, and that seems to be the extent of what’s missing. He didn’t take any electronics from what I can tell. She had several TVs and a cell phone, and a couple computers, and a laptop, but none of that seemed to have been touched. He left her credit cards too. Oh, but he also got her silver manorah.”

“She was Jewish?”

“Was. Her family was. Dad made her turn Catholic when they married, but when her mother passed, she got the family manorah. She called it a candelabra. Dad never knew the difference. Anyway, that came out of Germany just before the war. It was one of the few family treasures that did. Now some thief has it.”

They spoke with the woman for over an hour, getting some descriptions of the manorah and other things taken. In the car, Homer turned to her and said, “So what was that trip to the safe all about? Why’d you take over the interview right there?”

“She was lying.”

“No, she wasn’t. She said the safe had been robbed, and it was empty.”

Phoebe nodded. “Yes, she was telling the truth about almost everything, but when she talked about how much was stolen, she was lying.”

“Really. And how do you know that?” His tone had a little mocking to it, as if to say, “Ha. Rookie thinks she knows thing one.”

Phoebe shrugged. “Something changed in her. She went all stiff.”

“Yeah, well, she’s just suffered a huge loss and—”

“No, it was more than that. Yes, I believe her grief is real, and I believe she had nothing to do with her mom’s death, but I also think a bit of greed slipped in between her tears. She talked about thirty-thousand dollars.”

“Yeah, so?”

“That’s a very specific, very large figure. Her brother is going to hear that figure. Maybe it’ll surprise him. Maybe it won’t. If they agree, maybe the insurance will pay out on it.”

“Not on cash kept in a house usually. They’ll say banks are safer.”

“They weren’t in ’29, were they? I think we should talk with that brother. And I’d like to see what kind of life insurance the mom had.”

Homer started up the unmarked. “I don’t understand why you’re going on about this.”

“That was a really small safe. It was deep enough and wide enough to hold one stack of bills four inches high.”

He turned around to back out the driveway, but paused and looked at her. “Okay, so . . . ?”

“It was only four inches tall,” she repeated with a bit of emphasis. “How many bills do you think would fit in there even if Mrs. Plotman only had hundreds?”

Homer’s face paled. He put the car back in park. “Damn. I don’t know for sure, but maybe not thirty grand. Very clever, Magillicutty.”

They called the office before they left the driveway and managed to get the number for the brother. He corroborated that his mom probably had thirty grand in the house. Their mom spoke of it often to them in an effort to make sure they didn’t sell the home after her death with a small fortune still in it. However, he said there were three safes. The spare bedroom safe the sister showed them was one, but there was one in the woman’s bedroom as well, and one in the corner of the living room in the floor under the rug. That one, according to the brother, held the bulk of his mother’s hidden money.

With this information, they went back to the house. Mrs. Olson met them at the door, tissue in one hand, cell phone in the other.

“Calling your brother?” Phoebe asked. “He couldn’t answer. He was talking with us. Want maybe to change your story a little?”

The woman blanched, then pressed her eyes shut. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that. It was stupid.” She led them to the living room.

“So how much really was taken?” Stark asked.

“Five hundred dollars, basically all that was in that bedroom safe. Nobody expects more than one safe. The living room one had twenty-nine thousand. Her bedroom had another five hundred. After she put that money in place, she left it alone. She had some loose change and a few hundred in a jar in the pantry. That went untouched as well.”

“Did your mother have any life insurance?”

“Some. The mortgage has been paid off for years. Mom kept enough life insurance to make sure we could bury her. I think it was ten, twenty thousand tops. I’ll find the policy.”

She led them back into the spare bedroom where a small file cabinet took up space in the mostly unused closet. A little searching, and she brought out a policy. “Twenty thousand. It’s more than we’ll need, I’m sure. She wanted to be cremated.”

Back in the living room, the woman sat, her hands twisting a tissue in her lap. “Am I in trouble? Do you think I killed my mom?”

Homer quickly said, “It’s never a good idea to lie to the cops.”

Phoebe said, “We’ll have to do some checking, but we believe that your mom was attacked by someone—a stranger—and that money and other things were stolen. We’ll need you to make full disclosure of what you said, but grief makes people do some really stupid things. I mean, you had no assurance your brother would cooperate with you. Clearly the lie was spur of the moment. I doubt the DA will take the incident any further.”

“But you don’t know that,” said Homer pointedly.

“Not for sure,” Phoebe said quickly, “but I have a feeling all you’re going to have to be dealing with is burying your mom and grieving your loss. Besides we haven’t filed our reports yet.”

Homer nodded, then shrugged.

“I hope so,” said Mrs. Olson. “It was the stupidest thing I think I’ve ever done in my life. All I could see was that the person who attacked her, the . . . asshole who either killed her or scared her into a heart attack might get off if what he stole wasn’t large enough and they decided mom died mostly of natural causes. I didn’t know where the line was drawn between a misdemeanor and a felony. I was suddenly scared five hundred dollars wasn’t enough. But I was sure thirty thousand dollars was.”

“Five hundred dollars is the line between petty theft and a felony,” Homer said, “but the thief took silver and jewelry too. Did you have any idea what the value of any of that was?”

She shook her head. “Not really. My parents weren’t extravagant. I’m sure the menorah was worth something, but I have no idea what. You see my dilemma.”

Phoebe patted her hand. “Really, you shouldn’t worry about any of that now. Deal with your grief and make arrangements for your mom. All the rest of it isn’t important now.”

Marjory attempted a smile. “You both are so kind. I appreciate your concern and care.”

Homer said, “I’ll make arrangements for you to come to the office and make a statement. Don’t let that worry you either. It’s just a formality.”

Homer and Phoebe left. As this was their last interview of the day, they headed back to the office, but Phoebe caught Homer sidling glances at her.

“What?” she finally said.

“You impressed me with that woman,” he said. “You have good instincts and compassion. I figure you’ll lose the compassion after a while, which is probably for the best—”

“What? Why?”

“Easy answer is that it’s best to stay objective. Truthfully, though, compassion can make you promise stuff you can’t fulfill. Be careful about that. You can get wrapped up in people’s lives otherwise, and that makes you sloppy and, a lot of the time, wrong.”

“I’ll think about that. But after we called her out, I didn’t see even the hint of any more lies. She was just scared the perp would get off. She wasn’t bilking her brother or hoping to pull a fast one on the insurance company. Nothing like that. She just wanted justice.”

“Yeah, I got that. Truth is though, that the five hundred cash is likely to be discounted, and looking around the old lady’s house, I couldn’t see much of anything worth anything. I mean the perp might have skimmed the cream, but that place was skim milk to start with.”

“Yeah, I know, and the woman’s death might be ruled natural causes and a decent lawyer might get a suspect off involvement in that. And suddenly, the daughter’s fears are realized. The perp gets a slap on the wrist and skates . . . unless he’s nailed with all those attacks on old ladies.”

“Yeah, never going to happen. A guy like that isn’t going to keep one item around where it can cause him any harm. Whatever he took from that old lady’s been fenced already and the cash is spent or well hidden.”

“Should we follow up with a visit to Pawn America or one of the other shops?”

“In St. Cloud? Oh, I doubt it. This guy’s too careful. If he uses a pawn shop, which I greatly doubt, it’s one in the Cities, maybe a different one each time. Chances are, though, he has a regular fence with connections far from here—New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam.”

“That all makes sense,” said Phoebe, “but you can be sure if the guy is shipping stuff out of state, he holds it for a few jobs before he ships it out.”

“Well, if he does, he’s vulnerable,” said Homer.

Chapter 7: Retell

“And so she confessed to showing us only the one safe. One of three. It had only five hundred dollars. That’s what the thief got. Another one in her mother’s bedroom held another five hundred, but it was untouched. The really big bucks were in the living room floor safe. That’s where the bulk of the thirty grand was stashed, and it was still there.”

Jerry whistled.

Aunt Emily, Jerry, and Emogene sat at the dining room table in rapt attention listening to Phoebe’s story about the old woman who was attacked and killed and the interview with the daughter.

“That poor woman,” said Aunt Emily. “I mean women. The one who died must have been so scared, and her daughter was so worried the thief was going to get off, she found herself caught in a lie. What a horrible situation to be in.” She sniffed.

Jerry said, “Actually, $30,000 in one-hundred-dollar bills would fit in just over an inch.”

Phoebe said, “What? Really? How do you know that?”

He shrugged. “It’s come up before. Actually what’s come up is a million dollars in hundreds makes a stack about forty-three inches high. Therefore . . .”

“Oh, so I was wrong.”

“The woman didn’t know it because she had lied. If she had seen the thirty grand in that safe, she would have said so. She never had. Stark didn’t know it either.”

“An inch,” said Phoebe.

“Actually 1.29 inches,” said Emogene, setting down a pencil, “but who’s counting?”

She had made a computation at the edge of her crossword puzzle.

Jerry said, “I’m impressed, Phoebe. Your estimate of the depth of thirty-thousand dollars in hundreds might have been off, but your instincts weren’t. Your dad woulda been proud of that. He was a hard-nosed sonofabitch, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, but he had good instincts. Always had good instincts. I admired that in the man. Problem is, instincts aren’t enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was a detective in the department. I told you that.”

“Yes, and you knew my dad, right?”

“Oh, yeah. But that’s not what I’m getting at. I was an instincts . . . a gut kind of cop, too. Most of my career was in the Cities, though. Minneapolis. I could always tell who the perp was. Line up a bunch of suspects, and I’d know who the perp was. Didn’t much matter the crime. Shoplifting to murder to snatching the neighbor’s newpaper off his lawn. It was pretty much a slam-dunk for me. Knowing who had commited the crime, that is. A couple of questions . . . just looking at the suspects sometimes, and it was over . . . ’cept that it wasn’t. Used to be a cop’s gut was a trusted thing, something that meant something. The DA would trust I was right, that your dad was right, and the investigation would proceed with that in mind. We made a lot of convictions that way.” For a few moments, Jerry seemed to get lost in memories. The lines of his face softened, and he sipped his coffee. Then his face hardened again.

“But times change, don’t they?” he said with an edge to his voice. “Defense lawyers got . . . I’d hesitate to say smarter because that presupposes I thought them smart in the first place, but they got a whole lot more ruthless, that’s for sure. They ceased caring if the person they defended was guilty or not. No, that’s not it. They seemed to get the most satisfaction about getting people off, guilty or not. They laughed at my ‘gut.’ They said I was an old dinosaur to believe anyone gave a shit about what my gut told me. And jurors listened to them. My testimony, once rock solid, became suspect, then discounted, then . . . laughable. I stopped getting convictions, and perps walked. Too many walked. Dangerous ones too. Then they repeated their crimes. My gut, in the final analysis was harming people, killing people, in point of fact, rather than making the streets safer. I couldn’t take that. Not that. I got out of the Cities and came up here. And for a while it was better. I was trusted. Your dad trusted me. The DA trusted both of us. Having a good cop gut was again respected. But then the smartass lawyers moved outstate, and it was the same old same old. That’s when I retired. I’d already been through this sort of thing and knew how it was going to go. Your dad didn’t. He fought what was to me inevitable, and I swear it was that more than anything else that killed him. Sure he died of lung cancer, but cigarettes didn’t kill him. Not even Skip being gone made as much of a difference, but being laughed at did. In a lot of ways, he died because his life had been made pointless.”

And, in a flash, Phoebe had a new understanding of her father, one that she had never imagined could be true. The crochety, angry man who never had a kind word for her or seemed to care about her or her mother at all was really a man who cared but who had been dumped on by the system. She had always believed her father to be a good cop but a bad father. She saw now that a good cop who was ineffectual might have that dismal outlook bleed into his private life. She doubted he ever explained any of this to her mother, doubted he probably would have known how to explain it, but, seeing him through Jerry’s eyes, Phoebe knew he had felt it, and, she believed that Jerusalem Emmett Brown maybe was right—it had killed him. And if he was hardest on those he loved the most, had the most hope for, then maybe he really had loved her too.

But that left a new question.

“Should I ignore it when I just kind of know stuff? Am I setting myself up for trouble later?” she asked Jerry.

He rubbed the white stubble on his chin. Then he shook his head. “In what you did today, I think you played it really smart. You knew the daughter was lying, but you didn’t accuse her. I might have. Your dad might have slapped cuffs on her right then. No, you used that information, asked more questions, figured out where she was lying, then pushed more until you understood why. Detective Stark listened. He didn’t have to. That he listened is a good sign. He might start to look to you to see if you have any insights, but that’s where you best be real careful. Always have reasons, Phoebe. Always articulate those reasons carefully and always get to motivation not just guilt. You have to keep in mind that guilt and conviction aren’t at all the same thing. That’s where your dad and I went wrong, ’cause for a whole lot of years it was. It isn’t now. You remember that, you should be okay. I had a hard time with that part of things, and your dad couldn’t deal with that at all. With him it was gut and guilt or nothing, but that nothing set criminals onto the streets again and again. What Stark does, those mundane, boring calls and endless interviews and detailed reports . . . now that’s what it takes to make a case and get convictions today.”

“I do know that,” Phoebe said, “but it’s so . . . boring. And most of it’s worthless.”

“Oh, that’s true enough, but, if you look carefully, almost every conversation has some nugget, some little grain of gold. It might be a look while something is said or an odd way to say something. Or even something not said. You let it all be boring, and you’ll miss it, and, sometimes, if you let that moment slip away unremarked, it’s gone forever, and you end up working nine times as hard to get to the answer and the conviction from some totally different angle.”

This was good advice, and it made Phoebe reassess how she should look at the routine calls and interviews that filled her day. She had to be a prospector and consider every conversation a stream to be panned for gold. She liked that image. And she just bet that, though Jerry hadn’t said as much, if she didn’t let all the mundane work bore her, her gut might kick in more, string together bits of information that, by themselves, meant nothing, but put together like pieces of a puzzle might actually mean something really important.

“People lie a lot, don’t they?”

Jerry chuckled. “Constantly. But that’s not really the issue. It’s the reason for the lie that counts. Take the daughter of the woman who was killed. She could have lied to you because she wanted to keep the dough and not share it with her brother. Or she might have wanted to try to get the insurance company to pay it back, thus doubling her take. And don’t discount that people, even those faced with horrific circumstances, might just want to come out ahead, might even feel they’re owed that benefit. But the daughter wasn’t trying to take her brother or the insurance company. No. She was interested in justice for her mom. That might not be a good reason to lie, but it’s sure nobler than greed. You sussed that out, both the lie and the motive for the lie. That’s why you’re a good cop, and why your gut isn’t likely to get you into as much trouble as it got me.”

“It got you into trouble?”

Jerry hooted. “More’n once.” Then he got serious. “Criminals went loose. They committed more crimes, and some of those crimes were serious. Murder even. It pushed me out of a job once and forced me into early retirement in the end. You do better. Make it your job to do better. You’ve got a long career ahead of you, so you’ve got to find a way to let your gut help you but not get in your way. From what I heard today, I think you might have put the key in the lock.”

Aunt Emily had been sitting quietly the whole time Jerry and Phoebe had been discussing gut copping. Emogene had gotten up to clean up after supper. Phoebe hadn’t even noticed that the meal had ended and the table was clear. She sipped her coffee, not even remembering when the cup had been set in front of her.

“You know,” said Aunt Emily, “I think we have a meeting tomorrow night.”

“Do we?” said Emogene as she sat down again with them, a cup of coffee in hand.

“Yup, I think we do.”

“Another meeting?” said Phoebe, smiling. “What group is it this time?”

“That’d be the fifth,” said Jerry, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “Let’s see. I know we got something, but I just don’t rightly remember if it’s the Agatha Christie club, the Audubon Society, or the Arberatum. I think it’s the Arberatum.”

“Oh, that would be nice,” said Aunt Emily.

Jerry chuckled. “What would be nice?”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s the Arboretum. No. That’s next week. I was thinking the Audubon Society would be good tomorrow. Weather’s supposed to be nice. I bet we’d go on a bird walk and see what migrants are still hanging around. We walked the Wobegon Trail last year about this time didn’t we?”

“I believe we did,” said Jerry. “Anyway, you might consider eating in town, Phoebe, or, if you like, Emogene can fix something you can reheat.”

Phoebe said, “Oh, I can feed myself. Emogene, you don’t need to worry about me.”

“Suit yourself,” Emogene said. “But I was just going to suggest you pull one of my potpies out of the pantry freezer and have that. They’re homemade of course. There’s turkey and chicken, but I’d recommend the roast beef. That one turned out particularly well. Whenever I make a meal, I always make extras so people can have snacks or at least something good when they’re hungry.”

“Okay, thanks. That sounds perfect,” Phoebe said. Then she turned to her aunt. “Aunt Emily, we really do have to talk about rent.”

Her aunt laughed. “No we don’t, not if I don’t want to. Anyway, we already did. Twice I believe. And it’s quite out of the question. I know how hard the divorce was on you, dear. I know you got out of that marriage—and I must say I’m glad you did—but you came away with next to nothing. That wasn’t right. You should have had enough to start over.”

“Oh, I don’t care about that.”

“I know. I understand. I also know you want a place of your own, but not some crappy little apartment. I want to see you get a real home, a house somewhere in St. Cloud or nearby enough to make the ride to work okay. But you’ll never get a place, not even in this economy, unless you can save your money. I got this big old house with room to spare. Rooms going wanting, really. Wasted space otherwise. If each month you set aside what you might have to pay for a mortgage on a real place, stick it in the bank and let it collect the pittance they call interest nowadays, that’d be good enough for me. But I don’t need the money. Okay, dear? Shall we have an end to this discussion?”

Phoebe wanted to say that wasn’t okay, that she was an adult and should pay her own way even if it meant she might have to settle for a crappy apartment. But she didn’t. Instead, she said, “But the food. Come on. I know I’ve increased your food bill. You can’t snow me about that. Surely I can pay that difference at least.”

“Truthfully,” said Emogene, “I can’t see how you’re costing us one cent more. I always make way too much for every meal. We’re just not wasting as much now. Truthfully, you’re doing us a favor.”

Her aunt giggled. “Phoebe dear, you’ve had a hard time in many ways up to now. I know your life as a child was difficult with my dear brother the way he was. I saw that, you know, and your dear mother worried about you. Then Zeph died and Gertrude passed tragically. Then that Phil came along and any benefit you might have gained from your parents’ estate was sucked into his extravagance. You should have at least gotten some of that back, but I saw the little you came with. After four years of marriage, you’d think you’d had more than what fit in that little car of yours.”

Phoebe could feel emotion rising, but she fought it. “You were watching me?” There had to have been a reason her aunt showed up just in the nick of time to save her from homelessness.

Aunt Emily and Jerry made eye contact. Jerry said, “Yes. We were watching.”

Phoebe sucked in a deep breath.

“Well, of course we were,” said Aunt Emily. “You and I have no other relatives than each other.”

Jerry said, “As long as we could, we let you fight your battles, make your own decisions. You’re an adult. We’d never take that from you.”

“But we couldn’t let you be homeless, dear,” said Aunt Emily, a tear glistening on her cheek. “We stepped in when we believed it was time for you to have someone on your side, to have someone . . . give you a little help.”

Phoebe’s emotions had gone wild. She was angry, grateful, felt exposed and vulnerable, and defensive all at once. “When I moved out, Phil let me stay in an apartment in a building he owned. A furnished apartment. It seemed unaccountably generous at the time, and I went for it. I didn’t know until the final decree that he was charging me rent, and it was really high rent, too. I never saw a bill. It ate up everything I might have gained, completely gutted my cash settlement. I didn’t know, and his lawyers still made him out to be generous, even though he had already brought another woman into his house, and I believe he’d had her on the side for a long time. I suspect she even stayed in the apartment he put me in and charged me for.”

Aunt Emily sniffed, reached over and patted her hand. “Let it go, dear. You’re away from that horrid man. Your life is going to get better now. But, please, no more talk of rent and food money. The very idea. Why, it’d cost me more just trying to figure out your share. I’d have to get in my accountant. He’s expensive. So not worth it. I have the money, dear, and if you’re not just the best thing I could possibly spend it on, I don’t know what is. Save your money for a really nice place. Now that would make your old aunt happy.”

* * * * *

Later, as Phoebe was settling into her room with a cup of Emogene’s fabulous hot chocolate, she wondered about part of that conversation after supper. Her emotions had finally settled down, focusing on the preciousness of these three old people struggling to help her without it showing. It was sweet. Then another part of the conversation came into her head. The three oldsters had a meeting, but they didn’t know which club. Was that odd? She gave that some thought, then dismissed it in favor of the Owen Wilson movie Midnight in Paris that she had found in the library. She finished her hot chocolate. She had partially opened a window before climbing into bed so she could listen to the chorus of frogs, and the soft but cool May breeze made her bed seem all the cozier. Nature had never impacted her life much, but, surrounded by it in her aunt’s house, she found herself soothed by the night sounds and interested in what lived on and around the lake.

She gave some thought to closing the window before she went to sleep because it still got cool at night in early May, but she was so comfortable and slipping easily to sleep that she didn’t. She slid down among the pillows and let the comforter soothe her, cuddle her. She saw little more than the first scene of the film before she was asleep, but she had already gotten smart and set a sleep timer to turn off the television and DVD player after a couple of hours. By then she was beyond waking for the night. Or almost.

Phoebe’s eyes opened, and she wondered what had awakened her. She listened. Had some noise triggered her to lifting from comfortable sleep, she couldn’t hear it now. She sat up, the better to hear, and automatically checked the clock. Five. Though her windows had the drapes drawn, she saw light around them. Not dawn yet, not in the first week of May in Central Minnesota, but certainly headed in that direction. Then she heard something, talking coming from outside.

Phoebe slipped out of bed and padded to the window. The cool of early morning spilled over her feet, making her shiver. She went to the side of the window and eased the drapes aside with as little movement as possible, looking down into the gardens in the back. She saw nothing at first, then movement along the hedge. Jerry appeared, shovel in hand. He walked away from the house, toward where the vegetable gardens lay, and he wasn’t alone. Two boys, Phoebe thought they were a couple of the medium-sized Stevenson brothers. One pushed a big-wheeled garden cart filled with dirt from the look of it, and the other had a large sack in his arms, a gunny sack with a pull-string tie. It rattled as he walked with it. Maybe it’s full of flower pots. They followed Jerry, and soon disappeared down the path, screened by morning mists off the lake.

Phoebe sighed. She must have heard them below the window. Maybe they had put some soil on one of the beds near the house. That someone was nearby and speaking had to have been what had triggered her into wakefulness. Already, though, she was sagging again toward sleep. Her mind at ease, her body was telling her that she was not finished with the night’s rest, and her curled toes wanted to be returned to the warm comfort of blankets. She had the better part of an hour yet, and wanted every minute of it. She closed the window, crawled back into bed and closed her eyes.

* * * * *

In her dream, she saw them again, Jerry and the boys, but what they were doing altered. Jerry still carried a shovel, but the cart one boy pushed was not full of soil. A woman’s body slumped in it. The woman’s feet—shoeless, with one sock dripping off her toes—dangled over the front, bent at the knees. Her head lolled at the back, rocking with the uneven ground, and one pale-skinned arm draped out the back. The gunny sack the other brother carried sounded like a collection of metal objects. The burlap became clear plastic, and Phoebe could see the pieces of a silver tea set, the creamer without its lid, and below it, a menorah.

Phoebe woke with a start, finding herself sweating and breathing hard. Again she padded to the window and looked out. She saw no sign of Jerry and the boys, though the birds had awakened and sang in many voices on a sunny May morning. The mist has already burned off, and a clear blue sky and sunshine dominated the morning. The bucollic beauty of the gardens, the lake, and the farm on the other side eased her. She went to the bathroom for a shower and started her work morning routine.

Chapter 8: Dwuane, the Magician

“You look tired this morning,” said Aunt Emily. “Didn’t you sleep well, dear?”

Phoebe cradled her coffee in both palms, her elbows on the table. “Oh, I guess I slept well enough. I just woke up too early and had trouble getting back to sleep. When I did fall asleep, I had a bit of a nightmare.”

“Thinking about that poor woman who died?”

Phoebe actually hadn’t been thinking about that, though clearly the dream seemed related to it, but talking was tiring. She just said, “Mm-hmm,” and continued sipping her coffee. By the time Emogene set a plate of food in front of her—scrambled eggs with onions, mushrooms, and cheese, with a side of Canadian bacon and fruit—the coffee had begun to do its work, and she felt more awake.

“We don’t know if this latest attack on a senior citizen living alone was done by the same guy,” Phoebe said, “but I suspect it was. The problem is that Detective McKenna and I were watching him most of that evening. We’re his alibi. Isn’t that just a hoot? It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Every woman who’s been attacked and lived has identified him, but nothing sticks because he always has an air-tight alibi. Every time. Something weird is working here.”

Jerry shoveled a forkful of egg into his mouth. He took a sip of coffee. “Mmm, that’s fine coffee, Genie. I do so appreciate it.”

Emogene smiled. “That just makes my day, Mr. Brown. I thank you.”

“So, what meeting are you going to this evening,” Phoebe asked. “Last night no one was sure.”

Aunt Emily laughed. “It’s our choral group, of course. As soon as I looked at my calendar, I remembered. It’s over at the Unitarian meeting hall.”

Phoebe lifted her eyebrows. “You all sing?”

She was instantly treated to a rendition of the beginning of “Old Man River.” The harmony was fair but none of them came anywhere near reaching the lowest notes. They laughed just trying.

“Not a base,” said Jerry with a shake of his head. “I’m a fair tenor, but base . . . no way.”

“And I’m an alto,” Aunt Emily said. “Emogene has better range, but she’s also an alto.”

“Well, have fun,” said Phoebe. “I plan on trying out that tub in my room. It looks very soothing.”

“Oh, you’ll love it,” assured her aunt. “I have one just like it in my room, and I could just melt in there.”

* * * * *

On the way to work, Phoebe found herself thinking about the attacks on the older women, wondering why this case was giving everyone fits and apparently was giving her nightmares. They had to be missing something. When she got to work, she asked Stark for the files on the case, which he handed over as they had just interviewed someone in relation to it. Pictures of Dwuane Schultz clearly showed the scar she had seen in the Red Carpet. But something about that scar bothered her. It was a big scar, something that would be the focus of someone’s attention almost exclusively. It might be just the sort of thing to distract people from other details of Dwuane’s face or person that might otherwise point out differences in the testimonies of victims.

She read some of those testimonies. Every one mentioned the scar first. “He had a huge scar on his left cheek,” “I’ve never seen such a scar,” “I’d recognize that scar again if I saw it.”

When pushed, some of the women noted that he was thin, maybe in his late twenties, but those details were thin, uncertain, and they always seemed to come back to that scar like a drum beat, like it didn’t matter about the rest of him. Find the scar, and that was the attacker. Well, it sure hadn’t worked out that way.

As Phoebe was going through the files, a shadow crossed her desk. She looked up. Neil McKenna stood there. He looked serious, almost unfriendly. “You don’t have enough to do with your own cases?” he said, not adding the smile that might have made the question seem a jibe and not an accusation.

Phoebe felt herself tense and hurredly explained. “One of our interviews yesterday was with the daughter of Elsa Plotman, the older woman who was attacked, forced to empty a safe. Then she died. The daughter said some jewelry was missing and a family keepsake, a manorah that came over with some Jewish relative just before World War II. Any idea yet if the perp might be charged with murder since Plotman died?”

McKenna sat down in her perp chair. “The DA doesn’t think so. Coroner said it was a heart attack, and the lady had a history of a bad heart.”

“But it could have been brought on by the stress of the attack.”

“Sure. Probably was, but they’ll never prove it. Schultz has a very savvy lawyer, though I’m not sure how a dirtbag like him can foot the retainer he’s got to be paying Dick Murphy.”

Phoebe flashed to the house she and Stark had gone to when the doberman pinchers were taken away. She remembered the owner—had to be Murphy—demanded that the snarling dogs get the best of care. She doubted he recognized her, but Murphy was also one of her ex-husband’s lawyers. She refocused on what McKenna had said before he looked at her funny. “That’s easy. He fences what he steals, and he steals stuff fairly often, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah, every few days lately, it seems like. This series of attacks is driving me mad.”

She looked at him hard. His eyes were evasive. He was embarrassed beyond words. “Neil, can I apologize for the dye? I live with my aunt right now, and her ex-cop gardener gave me that bag. I thought he might have put compost in it or something. You know, a gardening kind of joke. But dye? I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have—”

“Forget it, Magillicutty. It was my own fault. I broke into you desk and opened up the bag. It was just a joke, though. I had this note that I was going to leave.”

“I got the note.”

“I’m just grateful it wasn’t the kind of permanent dye they put in bank bags. That would have been really annoying. Still my own damn fault, of course.”

His face began to relax. She smiled. “We’ve been half a step off since we met,” remembering his foot-in-mouth behavior that first meeting. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

He huffed a laugh. “Haven’t a clue.”

“It means, once we get a little more in sync, we’ll be good friends.” Which wasn’t exactly how the prediction went. It had more to do with permanent relationships, but she wasn’t about to say that.

“That’s something to hope for.” His eyes lifted to hers finally, and he smiled. She knew right then that this man could end up meaning something to her, that the prediction she hadn’t said might just be true. That kind of scared her. Maybe she was still too raw after the divorce. Whatever it was, she knew she couldn’t focus on that. Not yet. Not for some time, in fact.

Phoebe looked around the office. “Where’d Stark go. He didn’t start out on his calls already did he and leave me behind?”

“He did. But I told him to. I thought you and I might put our heads together on this old lady attacker. He gave me the report about how you sussed out that Plotman’s daughter was lying.”

“Really? Turns out four inches high would have accommodated thirty thousand dollars, but I didn’t know that, and she believed me. I hope she doesn’t get into awful trouble over lying. She was just scared the guy would get off. But, regarding looking at the case together . . . I’d like that. I mean, my aunt is eighty something. She doesn’t live alone but—”

“She has the ex-cop gardender who clearly doesn’t like me. But he goes home at five doesn’t he? What time does he get there in the morning or doesn’t he come every day?”

“Jerry lives on the place. And I have no idea how he feels about you. I didn’t tell him who had eaten my lunch. I think the dye was just the ex-cop part of him. And Aunt Emily also has a live-in cook. They’re all late seventies or into their eighties. The three of them go around to their various clubs together.”

Neil’s eyes opened wide. “They’re into clubbing? Bit swanky for old folks isn’t it?”

Phoebe grinned. “Not that kind of clubbing. Sewing club, birding club, exercise club. They’ve got a singing group tonight at the Unitarian.”

“I see. That’s still pretty jet-setty for seniors in this area. Most limit themselves to going to the casinos and church.”

Phoebe laughed. “They haven’t mentioned either of those yet, but I’ve been there only a few days. But my aunt really hasn’t spent her life in the Midwest. As far as I know she only moved back here when my dad got ill. I mean, she was born here, but she’s spent most of her adult life in Hollywood. My aunt used to be an actress.”

“No kidding?Anything I’d know?”

“I doubt it. This was decades ago, I think. She was a screamer.”

His brows bunched.

She grinned. “Yup, just like that. The studios would hire her to let loose with the loudest, most terrifying screams imaginable. Never had a line, she said, but she made a living screaming. She treated me to one, her fall-off-the-cliff scream. It sent the cows that were across the lake to running over the hill. The loon left. The ducks flew off, and the frogs—all of them—shut up for like half an hour.”

“I guess that’s impressive. And she made a living as a screamer?’

“Apparently,” said Phoebe.

“That’s cool. Weird, of course, but cool. And this was Ironsides Magillicutty’s sister?”

“Ironsides?”

Neil looked a little embarrassed. He shrugged. “He was a tough old bird, wasn’t he? I mean, none of the young cops coming in these last few years even met him, but if you ask any of them, they’ve all heard stories of Ironsides or Zip. Only his buddies called him Zip, though. The rest of us called him Ironsides behind his back. Or the old bastard. I can’t help any of that.”

“I’m not expecting you to. I just never knew that particular nickname. Bastard, I knew.”

“He had a few names. Most common to his face was Zip. Most common not to his face was ‘bastard.’”

Phoebe smiled. “So Jerry says.”

Neil got a funny expression on his face. “The ex-cop gardener? Jerry?”

“Yeah. Jeru—”

“—salem Emmett Brown. Mr. Brown is your aunt’s gardener? Seriously?”

“Yeah . . . oh, I guess you probably knew him too.”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, he retired soon after I came on, way before I made detective, but I knew him. That was one scary cop.”

Phoebe’s eyebrows bunched. “Scary? No, he’s a sweet old man.”

“Well, he was never the hard-nose your dad was, no. He always had a joke or pun to tell, and he was big-family friendly. But he was another instinct cop like your dad, only better. I stood with him this one time, watching a witness facing a suspect line-up. He and Zip were behind the one-way mirror with the witness—well, not really with. The witness’s lawyer and victim’s advocate had arrived. The victim was late. We stood towards the back of the room, keeping a low profile you might say. It was an assault case. Your dad and Mr. Brown asked me who the perp was. They had eight bruisers lined up, one looking eviler than the next. I mean we’re talking tattooed knuckles, cold-eyed, neckless hulks of men. Of course one was actually Stan. He’d been told to put on a glowering face, and one of the female dispatchers put goop in his hair and spiked it out, and the knuckle art was ballpoint pen not tattoo. I mean, I burst out laughing at the sight of him, but he did look kinda tough and mean.

“So Zip asks me to point out the attacker. Of the seven left, I thought number four looked mean but not, like Stan, trying to look mean. I chose him. Jerry Brown laughed. He guessed it was number seven, and Zip took six.”

“Who was right?”

“Well, I’d chosen an accountant who had come in to visit his neice, who was a dispatcher. Zip picked the brother of the attacker, and Jerry picked the attacker.”

“Okay, but—”

“No, they hadn’t been told anything of the case. Didn’t know if it was assault or rape or road rage with a shopping cart in the grocery store. We hadn’t even seen the victim yet. County had brought in the perp. That wasn’t the truly freaky part. Still before the victim showed up, so before we knew for sure who was right about our picks, Jerry goes on to say that we should lean on number six, Zip’s choice. He says that’s the brother of the attacker and the brother was sick and tired of being pulled in because his brother was an asshole. Jerry said, if we leaned on him just right, we might convince him that putting his brother away for a few years would give him some relief.”

“So what happened?”

“Victim comes in—a guy. He’d been mugged outside an east-side bar. But it was dark and he can’t choose who the perp is, though he was leaning towards Stan—we teased Stan about that for a month. He said it was too dark to be sure of who had attacked him. We had to cut everyone loose, but we did get a chance to talk to the brother, and, oh, yes, just like Jerry called it, the guy was the brother of the suspect and he was ready to spill, ready to get his mangy brother away from him. He gave us details that allowed County get a search warrant. The nasty brother—Jerry’s pick—had the vic’s wallet in his room. They got a conviction.”

“That’s what Jerry could do? Call things that tight?”

Neil shrugged. “Ask your aunt’s ex-cop gardener.”

* * * * *

They took the files into the wardroom and spread them out. They wanted to check fine points of the MO in each case and how many of the victims could identify Dwuane Schultz as the attacker. They checked into what was taken each time and the duration of the attacks and the time between attacks. Until the last one, all the women had lived, though a fair number had bruises on their arms and had been pushed around enough to be very sore. A couple of them spent an overnight in the hospital just to make sure they were okay. The attacks had been going on for almost six months at that point, and every few weeks—lately every few days—another file was added to the collection. So far the list was nineteen women, more than half accumulated in the least few weeks.

“Here the attacker slapped the old woman,” Neil said. “She was ninety. She said she gave him what he asked for after that, told him where the cash was and handed over her jewelry. Even fed him a balogna sandwich.”

Phoebe looked through other files. “Yup, here’s another slap, and here’s another. He sure likes to slap older women around. Must have had issues with his mom.”

“His mother would be younger. This might be a grandmother issue.”

Phoebe looked up. “So what do you know about Dwuane?”

“I thought everything, but clearly not.”

They had information in their files, but Phoebe took it one step further. She went on line and Googled Dwuane. “Yup, he has a website. Egotistical bastard. He’s careful, though. He never says he did anything, but he lists all the attacks, saying where he was when it occurred, what he was doing and how awful the police are being, all because he was injured and has a scar. Ah, it says here he did get an injunction against you to keep your distance.”

“Yeah. Got served with it yesterday,” growled McKenna. “Brilliant day, yesterday. I get blue dye in my face trying to be cute, get served with an order of protection for trying to do my job, an old lady dies in a series of thefts that I wanted solved last January, and, just to put the cherry on the cake, I am the bastard’s alibi. Yup, yesterday was priceless.”

“Wow. And I added to that. I’m sorry.”

For a moment, McKenna’s jaw worked. In a tight voice, he said, “That asshole is going to slip up sometime, and when he does, I’ll be damned if I’m not there waiting to take him down.”

“You will be if we can figure this all out.”

“I don’t get it, though,” Neil said. “He might get less notice if he masked himself or—”

“Sure, but that’s not the point,” Phoebe said quickly, looking up. “He doesn’t really harm his victims, not until the last one, that is, and I doubt he killed her on purpose, for very good reason. He wanted them to ID him, needed them to create for him that impossible situation where he was in two places at the same time. That’s also the point of his roughing them up, scaring them. Frightened people can give descriptions, but they tend to be scattered, incomplete. Lots of holes and guesses. Their testimony is immediately suspect. Several of the women talk about his smashing their glasses. What senior doesn’t have sight issues? He smashed glasses here,” she said, going through the pile of the folders in front of her, “and here, and here,” and she started making a stack. When she had piled all nineteen cases into two stacks, she scanned them quickly. “These seven are the oldest cases.” Then she stopped. “Then he stopped bothering to smash glasses. What happened with case number seven that changed things?”

Neil took the folder and looked through it. “Oh, yeah, this was Mrs. Parker. Her home was broken into about eight in the evening. She also identified Dwuane, just like the others, but she had a few more details than most of the women. Seems she only wore glasses for reading. Eighty-four and only needed reading glasses. Wow. He smashed her reading glasses, of course, but she could see just fine without them. Picked him out of the line up, gave details of eye color and hair color and all that. She had enough details and his alibi was just thin enough—I think that time he had friends over his apartment—that the DA thought we might have enough to charge him. He actually came before Judge Reneau, but Murphy got it set aside. Just not enough, he said. That was last March.”

“That’s what I thought,” Phoebe said. “He learned a new detail that night. He learned that even women with good eyesight had no way to make any of this stick. Not if his alibi was sufficient. And he learned he needed to be out in the public for the alibi to be good, to have upstanding citizens be his witnesses. Having his drug-taking, mostly drunk cronies vouche for him wasn’t enough. After that, he’s always in public places.”

Neil was nodding, getting excited. “He learned then that his continued freedom was all about the alibi, not who saw him do what to whom. In fact, it might even be better if his victims saw him.”

“Right. See, the rest of these are very public alibis with lots of witnesses. Good witnesses, people wholely above board and unimpeachable. Now he’s found in popular bars, at AA meetings, in bowling alleys, at pool tournaments, and even at choir and church services.”

“He’s fucking laughing at us.”

“Oh, for sure. And he’ll continue laughing until we can figure out how he’s doing this, how he’s managing to be in two places at once.”

“Yeah, but he can’t be, can he? Not really.”

Again Phoebe took to the Internet again, looking Schultz up on Facebook, running down a Google search. “I have something,” she finally said, and Neil left the files and came to stand at her back. “Look, this is clearly our Dwuane Schultz. He was born a twin. Dwuane had an identical twin brother.”

“But,” said Neil, pointing. “The brother died. Died in a boating accident at his grandmother’s lake home. When he was seven. I’ve done this search. I knew Dwuane had a twin. But the brother’s dead, and he has no other siblings. No cousins in the area. Nada. See, he cut his cheek on the propeller of the boat the boys had been playing in. They both fell out. The brother hit his head on a rock and Dwuane was scarred for life.”

“And, apparently, pissed off at a grandmother who was there at the time and didn’t maybe do enough to save the brother or help him.”

“The accident was at the grandmother lake home.”

She pointed to the St. Cloud Times article. “Yes, she was right on the scene. The boys were in a boat tied to the dock. She sat on a lawn chair on the dock. The boys started up the boat’s outboard motor, which jerked the boat enough that they fell into the lake. She saw them fall in. But the next thing it says is that she called 911, not that she jumped in after them. Dwuane, already mangled by the propeller prop, pulled his brother to shore but couldn’t revive him. Presumably the grandmother was off making an emergency call right then. And the brother died.”

Neil, leaning over her shoulder, read the article the St. Cloud Daily Times printed of the incident. The grandmother wasn’t charged because she stated she couldn’t swim, something corroborated by other family members. The woman was eighty and had a bad heart.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t change anything,” Neil finally said. “He doesn’t have that brother . . . or any brother anymore. I thought in the beginning two guys might be involved in the attacks. One attacks the old women, while the other brother plays it up publically so their alibi is established. But that twin brother’s dead.”

Phoebe was nodding and grinning at the same time. “Yeah, but you’re missing one thing.”

Looking a little disgusted, Neil said, “And what’s that?”

“The brother’s dead, but he was identical.”

Neil scowled. “No, I really did get that part,” he said, sounding annoyed.

She smiled. “But did you connect that any set of identicals tends to figure out quickly that they can pretend to be the other twin?”

His eyebrows bunched. “So?”

“So, Dwuane already knew that little fact. I just bet he and his brother . . . Dewey. Seriously? He and Dewey played switch in school, played it with relatives and friends. That we can check out.”

Neil shook his head. “But so what? What if he did? The brother’s d—”

Phoebe pushed ahead. “It gives him a set of skills, don’t you see? Gives him knowledge of what works or might work. And I just bet he used those skills often by the time he was seven.”

Neil, still frowning, dug in his heels. “That doesn’t make any sense. In school, they would’ve known he was a twin and figured if one had an excuse, the other was the guilty party.”

Phoebe turned and looked up at him, her own expression lacking annoyance, showing some excitement actually. “His teachers, sure. His immediate class, maybe. But did the other teachers? And maybe not all the kids knew. Maybe he could snow some of the kids not in his grade.”

Neil sighed, looking as if trying to follow Phoebe’s reasoning even if he thought it pointless. “But, really—”

“Have you talked with any of his teachers?”

“No. Frankly, I didn’t see the point.”

“Well, if you ask me, we should.”

For a moment he looked stubborn, like he was going to say no, but then he shook his head and said, “Okay, fine. We’ll talk to teachers this morning. It’s probably a waste of time, though.”

“It could be.”

“The thing is, I don’t know what value it might have even if you’re right and he played switch-a-roo. He can’t do that now with his brother dead.”

“No, of course not. Not with his brother. Not unless this is a way paranormal crime. But that scar of his is a conversation piece, a show stopper. People stare at it, then, being Midwestern and polite, turn away. I just bet that scar is so damn distracting that very few people see past it, but, being so absolutely characteristic of Dwuane and pointing to him each time, most people might not think any other trait would be so damning.”

Neil tapped at his chin. “Meaning Dwuane might not need an identical twin to be his doppleganger anymore, just someone about the same height and build, someone in the same clothes, the same facial hair, but also someone with a scar on his cheek just like his.” Neil paused, considering this. Then his face screwed up. “It’s a nice theory and one I hadn’t considered, but I still have no idea how he’s doing it. Let’s say he has a buddy with a fake scar . . . or even a real one. One establishes the alibi, while the other perpetrates the attacks. But he has this crappy green Ford Taurus he drives, with those individualized plates . . . ‘studman.’ We followed it the other day back to his apartment and never saw it leave. But it did. Then we went back to the Red Carpet, and he was there, his green Taurus somehow miraculously back in the lot behind Mexican Village. How’d he do that?”

Phoebe didn’t know. “This guy is an ace with sleight of hand. Magic tricks, if you will. But magicians who perform at children’s parties aren’t that good. They don’t have to be. Kids are wowwed when you pull a quarter from behind their ears. Especially wowwed when they get to keep the quarter. But adults can see the sleight of hand of a kids’ party magician pretty easily. Can almost see the sleight of hand in a professional magic performer, if they know what to watch for. Magic is the difference between what’s possible and what seems like it might be impossible. In a performer, we love it when we can’t see how to equate those two areas, even when we know for fact that there has to be a way to.”

“Okay, so?”

“So, the one thing we didn’t do that night was send someone to check if a crappy green Taurus with studman plates was still in Waite Park while we were staring at the one in the Mexican Village lot. It wouldn’t be hard for Dwuane to have a set of fake plates and a second Taurus painted to match. The vins would never match, but everything else would. And we believe the lie.”

“This is a whole lot of supposition, Magillicutty.”

Phoebe nodded. “We might have to start with pure supposition with this guy because the facts we’re handed are telling us what we think’s happening isn’t possible. But this guy isn’t magical. He’s not some kind of Merlin. Going there makes this series of crimes unsolvable.”

For a long moment, Neil considered this. Finally, he said, “And you think I’ve been subbornly camped out in the unsolvable place because I haven’t figured what makes the impossible possible?”

Phoebe screwed up her face. She knew Neil had been working on this case for months. She knew, too, that this series of crimes truly bothered him. He hadn’t been missing details, hadn’t been taking the attacks too casually. He was a good cop in most ways she could identify. But he seemed stuck. “I think when what we’re doing isn’t getting results, we need to change what we’re doing. You’re pressing the same key on the computer, hoping the damn thing will get over its snit and do you what you want . . . what it’s supposed to do when you hit that key. But the key isn’t working right now. I’m suggesting we push a few different keys.”

Neil looked away, and his gaze shifted to the door of the room. She knew her dad’s picture would also be in his line of sight. His jaw worked. After a long moment, he said, “Okay, Magillicutty. I’ll give you your head for a bit. Channel your dad or that gardener of your aunt’s. I want this asshole off the street and stop the attacks on old women, and, frankly, I don’t bloody care how that gets done. I’m concerned about this line of thought, all the same. Checking it out will take time, and Dwuane’ll have time to hurt someone else’s grandmother. Maybe kill again. What you’re thinking might not pan out, you know. I still think this is too long a list of supposition.”

* * * * *

It was supposition, a great deal of supposition. And that long string of possibilities could be derailed by one small bit of fact not fitting into the string—like a string of Christmas lights that failed to light if one bulb was burned out or just a little loose. One bulb, one guess in the string of fifty, and everything fell apart. Phoebe knew she was making up possibilities predicated on information they didn’t yet know could be fact. They had to know what was.

Dwuane Schultz had gone to school in the Kimball district. They headed down Highway 15 to that little town and checked in with the grade school principal. Mrs. Peterson looked up records and identified Dwuane’s second-grade teacher, a Mrs. Sten, who was still teaching second grade. They had to wait until lunchtime, but then were able to speak to Mrs. Sten, a sturdy woman nearing retirement.

“Yes, I remember Dwuane and Dewey Schultz,” she said.

Neil said, “What do you remember about them?”

“Oh, let’s see. It’s been a few years of course. Maybe average students. Didn’t stand out academically. Got mostly Cs if I remember correctly, and they were class clowns.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they were a handful. They didn’t like to stay in their seats, didn’t like to do lessons, struggled with reading but loved to do the voices that made reading fun. They liked to fool people.”

“How?”

“Well, they were identicals. Right? They’d come to school in either the exact same clothes and play switch a lot or come in very different clothing, then exchange clothes. I never knew which one was which. I used to stamp the back of one of their hands and identify him as either Dewey or Dwuane and hope the mark stayed on long enough that I could evaluate each boy separately, but it wasn’t foolproof.”

“Dewey died that year, didn’t he?” Phoebe asked.

“He died over summer between second and third grade.”

“But he was seven. Isn’t that a bit young for a second grader going into third,” Neil asked.

“It is. Their birthday was in September, I believe. And the boys were bright enough. If they had applied themselves, they would’ve done much better academically. They just had too much fun playing games with people.”

“Did you have any contact with Dwuane that next year after his brother died?”

“I saw him. I talked to his third-grade teacher, a Mr. Harris. He retired a couple years after he had Dwuane. He died about three years ago.”

“What do you remember of Dwuane in third grade and later on?”

Mrs. Sten sighed. “He wasn’t the same boy. I’ve seen it at times. Twins. Identicals especially. They have trouble identifying themselves completely separate from their sibling. That makes the death of one twin so devastating. In a sense, it’s like part of the surviving twin has died too. I lost track of Dwuane as he moved from the elementary school into the high school, but from second grade to sixth, he was quiet, withdrawn. I’d go so far as to say he was hollow, as if the twin who died pulled too much from him to have left him whole. And that awful scar. Everyone stared at him, of course, pointed. He was constantly reminded that his brother was dead.”

“Do you know who we could speak with about how he was in high school?”

“Not specifically, but I’m sure someone remembers him. Again, that scar.”

They drove over to the high school and spoke with the principal there, Dora Wilson. She looked up records. “Hmm. Looks like Dwuane was here through tenth grade.”

“What teacher can we speak to?”

Mrs. Wilson said, “He had Mr. Shad as homeroom and English teacher in seventh, but he’s gone now. Emma Mikals is here—she taught seventh through ninth math—but Bob Dillwood, Casse Hallaway, Steve Cranz, and Peter Olsen were other teachers he had in those years, but they’re gone.”

“Gone?”

“Mr. Dillwood retired, Casse Hallaway got married. I think she and her husband moved out of state. But Steve Cranz and Peter Olsen were on that bus.”

“Bus?” said Phoebe.

“Seven years ago. There was that terrible blizzard in March. Four buses of kids and teachers were going down to the hockey finals in the Cities. A semi jackknifed on Highway 55. The first bus slammed into it and was struck by a second semi.”

“Oh, yes,” said Neil. “It was the biggest tragedy in forty years. Yes, of course.”

They got to speak with three teachers, but only Emma Mikals, the math teacher, remembered Dwuane. “I don’t know what I can tell you exactly. He was . . . unremarkable. Pulled mostly Cs I think.”

“But you’re sure you remember him?” Phoebe asked.

“Oh, yes. That scar. That scar set him off. A number of students thought he was creepy, kind of . . . oh, I don’t know. One girl I remember said he seemed haunted. It seemed an odd thing to say so I remember that.”

“Who was the girl?” Neil asked.

Emma shook her head. “Oh, I don’t remember that. It was part of a conversation I overheard in the hall. Several girls were speaking, but they were behind me as I walked down to . . . maybe lunch one day. One of them said that. I don’t remember who. Don’t remember if I actually looked at them. It just seemed an odd thing to say of anyone.”

* * * * *

As Neil and Phoebe were leaving the high school, Phoebe asked, “Had you ever talked to Dwuane’s grandmother?”

“No. She died last year, before any of these attacks started.”

“How soon before?”

“Dwuane was seven when his brother died. The grandmother called 911. To my knowledge that is the one and only bit of information I have of the woman.”

Phoebe noticed he hadn’t answered her question. She moved on. “So how do you know she’s dead?”

“Dwuane said so once.”

“How did he say it?”

Neil shrugged. “Just said it. Like, ‘My grandmother’s passed.’ He might have said, ‘It rained yesterday and might snow today.’ I can’t remember any emotion.”

“But you’re sure he said ‘passed’ and not ‘died’ or ‘dead’?”

He squinted up his eyes. “No, not really. I just know he said something to that effect.”

* * * * *

Phoebe wasn’t at all happy with the miasma of information she was getting on this series of cases. She looked up the information on the drowning of Dewey Schultz. What she found out was that it had occurred at Clearwater Lake, a popular large lake south of St. Cloud. A Detective Burk of the Stearns County Sheriff’s office had conducted the interview with the grandmother. Over lunch Phoebe contacted the county and arranged to meet with Detective Burk.

“Joe,” Detective Burk said when they met in his office. He offered her his hand. “Please call me Joe, Detective Magillicutty.”

“Phoebe,” she said with a smile, taking his hand.

“Any relation to—?”

Best just get it over with. “Zip was my dad.”

He nodded. Phoebe saw an enigmatic kind of smile, and she knew he had known her dad and both respected him and didn’t much care for him. She didn’t ask.

He offered her a seat in the interview room at the sheriff’s office. “So, what can I help you with?”

“Do you remember a drowning case about seventeen years ago? A seven-year-old boy drowned out at Clearwater Lake. He was a twin, and the other twin had been hit by the propeller of a boat. His face was badly cut. The grandmother called 911.”

“The Schultz boy. Sure, I remember that. I also understand that Dwuane Schultz is your number one suspect in the old lady attacks.” Joe smiled, this time with a kind of professional rivalry, if she wasn’t mistaken. One department always took some secret glee when another was given the runaround.

“Well, not really. I mean, we’d love to look at Dwuane for the attacks, but he can’t ever be a decent suspect with his string of alibis.”

Joe chuckled. “I’ve been watching that case. If Dwuane is guilty of anything it’s making Neil McKenna look the fool.”

Phoebe didn’t want to get sidetracked. “Yes, well, but that’s not why I’m here.”

“So you didn’t come here today to get my insights into the case in hopes of solving it for your new boss?”

Phoebe’s eyes opened wide in surprise. “I’m new on the detective side, yes, so I get stuck with grunt work. You know how it is. I get to go over endless background stuff, make sure whoever wrote reports got everything straight.”

Detective Burk chuckled, a wheezy kind of sound that spoke of years of smoking.

“I wanted to ask you, Joe, as the interviewing detective in that investigation, what your impressions of the grandmother had been.”

“The grandmother? Dwuane’s grandmother?”

“Yes.”

He opened a folder he had pulled in preparation of her coming. “The drowning of the Schultz boy. The grandmother,” he said, running a finger down a page and stopping at one point. “The grandmother, Sadie Schultz, was tearful, very upset. She kept saying, ‘Marv’ll never forgive me.” I remember that. Marv was her son, the boys’ dad. She was very upset, as she should be, of course. The rest of her statement goes, ‘I insisted I could watch the boys. I hadn’t seen them in months. Now I’ll never see Dwuane again. I was just watching them. They were playing in the boat at the end of the dock, just playing, pretending to be big fishermen like their dad. I didn’t know one of the boys couldn’t swim. Their mother said they’d passed beginner’s swimming. I didn’t know it was just the one boy who’d passed. I’m not sure she knew that either. They used to switch places so much, and none of us could tell them apart. I sure couldn’t. They weren’t supposed to start the outboard. I’d told them not to, but they did, and it threw them both out of the boat.’

“About that time the parents arrived,” Joe said. “They’d been in the Cities, Mall of America, I think. They arrived, yelling and crying and threatening the old woman. They’d been to the hospital in St. Cloud, where the one boy was for surgery to close up his face. It had been flayed open like a gutted fish. A real mess. As I think about it now, it seems odd they’d come out to the grandmother’s lake home just then when they’d just lost a son and the other still had to be in surgery, but they did. I had to restrain the son, Marv, from attacking his mother. She was scared of him. The boy’s mother was just weeping, but the son was pissed and yelled that his mom was incompitant, neglectful, stupid, and, well, about a dozen other nasty things. He blamed her for the boy’s death, talked about filing charges of neglect and abuse. Talked about making sure she went to jail for murder.”

“Did anything come of that?” Phoebe asked.

The detective rolled his eyes. “People say things when they’re upset. Sometimes really awful stuff. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to follow through with anything. No charges were filed. The family . . . buried their one son, dealt with the pain and disfigurement of the other.”

“Your hesitancy,” Phoebe said. “You really don’t know what happened after that.”

The detective cut her a hard look. “I know I never had to deal with any of them again. What inference could you make from that?”

Phoebe said, “The point is that very little inference should be made except that the family stayed out of the legal system. That doesn’t mean they dealt with their issues, doesn’t mean they stayed together. Is the grandmother still alive?”

Joe didn’t look happy with her comment. “The dad died . . . maybe ten years ago. No, not quite that long. Six-eight years maybe. Natural causes as far as I know. I saw an obit in the Times and recalled the name. I have no info on the mom. The grandmother was old at the time, white-haired and frail. She’s dead for sure.”

* * * * *

More research showed that the family had not stayed together. The husband and wife had divorced within the year. The grandmother died in her sleep at a nursing home, but just recently, just four months earlier. Phoebe went out to Quiet Pines and spoke to several people there.

“She was nice enough,” said a nurse. “Pretty crippled up with arthritis. We had to feed her even. She spent most of her days in a wheelchair.”

“I thought she was the saddest woman ever,” a health aide said. “I often put her to bed, and she cried every night. I don’t know what it was, but something in her past troubled her.”

“Did she have visitors often?”

“Often. I don’t think she had one visitor in the ten years she was with us.”

“When she died . . .” Phoebe said.

The director said, “It was typical of the invalids here. She just passed in her sleep.”

That had been the official report, but, just as Phoebe was leaving, the aide said, “I believe she did die in her sleep, but one of her pillows was on the floor.”

Phoebe said, “Why would that be unusual?”

The aide shrugged. “She was too crippled to move. How’d it get on the floor?”

Chapter 9: Evening Alone

Phoebe drove home with thoughts of Dwuane Schultz swirling in her head. Solving this case and protecting older women, she was beginning to see, was becoming a serious concern for her. She could sure understand McKenna’s motivation, even if Jerry had thought he was becoming obsessed. Her lovely aunt had taken her in, taken care of her at a time when she had felt pretty raw and alone. Maybe she hadn’t recognized it as such, but she probably had looked pretty helpless, though she believed leaving Phil was one of the stronger things she had done in her life.

She probably wouldn’t stay in her aunt’s house too much longer, she told herself several times a day. Just until I earn enough money for the deposit on an apartment in town and had first and last month’s rent. And enough to buy the necessities of everyday living, she kept reminding herself, though she felt totally disheartened by the idea of going into WalMart and buying a set of cheap pans, plastic dishes, kitchen ware, towels, sheets . . . it was a long list. But that mantra kept her focused on her independence. It sucked she’d have to make do like a college kid while Phil and his mistress entertained high society in the big house in Ten Oaks Estates and planned a huge wedding. But it’d be years before she could afford All-Clad. She laughed at that idea. It’d be years more before she could use the cooking gear anywhere as well as Emogene. Owning a microwave was probably all Phoebe needed at her skill level. And her aunt’s idea for her of getting a nice little house was pie in the sky for her foreseeable future. As to furniture, she figured she was religated to Good Will or garage sales for quite some time. If she lived like a monk she might be able to save up for some Ikea stuff in a couple years. That was also disheartening.

But she needed to have control of her own life. Finding an apartment she could afford that wasn’t a disaster was part of her healing, something she had to do. On the other hand, as a result of her aunt’s stubborn generosity, right now she had no expenses. Still, she pledged to set aside each month what she estimated it would cost her to live on her own.

It was true Phoebe had no idea how well off her aunt was, but anyone who could hire a gardener and a cook and some kind of maid service was probably not doing too badly, especially after affording a house as large as hers on lakefront property with considerable acres attached to it. But that’s not the point, she told herself. Even if her aunt was filthy rich and could afford to pay for Phoebe’s expenses all her life, that wasn’t the point. An adult needed to take responsibility for her own self. And she intended to, even as she recognized she was channeling her dad.

Phoebe pulled into her parking space in the second garage, closed the overhead door and walked down the back hall into the kitchen. She almost hadn’t remembered that all three of her housemates had some choral group that evening. A note on the refrigerator, held in place by a magnet attached to a seashell reminded her she had her choice of potpies in the freezer. She checked the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, but saw nothing but a few cartons of ice cream. Oo, Butter Brickle. Good to know. Then she remembered it was the pantry freezer she should be looking into. She went into the pantry, a room just behind the kitchen, and found two big chest freezer, one of four she had seen. The larger garage had two chest freezers as well. She hoped she wouldn’t have to search all of them in order to suss out supper. Fortunately, the pantry freezer seemed to be the one Emogene had meant. To her amazement, she saw that the basket in the middle was full of small pies in neat stacks. A rough count allowed for more than a dozen of them, and six were the beef ones. Emogene’s build up of the beef pie made that her choice easy. Looking about the freezer made her realize her aunt might just have been right to tell her that Emogene kind of overcooked routinely. Individual portions of many dishes filled that big chest freezer. All kinds of things from lasagna to soups of many kinds to casseroles and fried chicken. The amount of cookies in Ziplock bags was quite astounding, almost shocking.

The woman has to be cooking twenty-four/seven, Phoebe thought. Maybe she’s still cooking as if for her large family. Clearly, though, what Phoebe ate wasn’t denting the woman’s culinary proclivities.

The note in the kitchen gave her instructions for heating up the meat pie, warning that the oven was necessary. Big black letters indicated that Emogene would be insensed to know her pie was desecrated by being microwaved. It would ruin the crust. Phoebe followed the instructions, set the oven temperature as Emogene instructed and the timer for an hour and went into the living room. Here she found a second note, this one from her aunt.

Phoebe, honey,

Mr. Brown, Emogene, and I decided to take a few days’ vacation. We like to do this once and a while and the weather has turned so lovely. I have a cabin up near Brainerd, and we like to weekend there now and again. We’ll bring you up when we have the place opened properly. We should be gone only a few days, maybe a week. I’m sure you can feed yourself and I shouldn’t worry, but you know I do. So will Emogine. Now I know you can care for yourself, but I really want you to have some choices in life so please use this credit card to get the food you want in town and do what you need to do while we’re gone. I insist on this, Phoebe dear. If you spend all your hard-earned money, you’ll never get that place of your own I know you so want. And don’t stint! Mr. Brown, Emogene, and I will be most unhappy if you don’t care for yourself well, eat well, have some nice meals out and have some fun. Emogene will fuss if we come back to find you as thin and pale as when you came to us. Eat good lunches, not fast food. You may not know it, but you’re blossoming under our care. Emogene has included a list of some of the meals she has in the freezer that you might like. And she wanted me to particularly encourage you to make a cup of hot chocolate each night. She left instructions for it. Do it.

All my love,

Your Aunt Emily

A credit card lay under the note. There was also a list of places that delivered food and groceries and restaurants that, apparently, her aunt and Emogene found acceptable. The list included Byerly’s, the Good Earth Co-op, D.B Searles, Anton’s, and Café Renaissance among several others. A third sheet had an impressively long list of heat-and-eat frozen meals Emogene had in the freezers, and this included the two in the basement. Two? That made six huge chest freezers Phoebe knew about. Why would any household require so many freezers? Apparantly, though she had not noticed this yet, the freezers were numbered. She ­hadn’t looked further than the obvious potpies and what was in the top layer of the pantry freezers earlier, but, clearly, she ought to be able to eat for months, let alone days, with what Emogene had put aside. Phoebe wondered if there was some kind of a support group for chronic overcookers she might recommend to Emogene.

Phoebe found herself chuckling at the three oldsters who seemed to have taken her on as a project. Clearly, even with all the clubs and functions they attended, they still had too much time on their hands. She knew she ought to feel like she was four with the three of them hovering over her the way they did, worrying about what she ate and how much money she might have, whether or not she had fun, but she just felt loved, a feeling she really wasn’t used to, but sincerely was beginning to enjoy. And she knew that, in the short time she had been living in the house with them, she had grown to care for each of them as well. It was then the first inkling of sorrow joined her mantra of getting that place of her own. Already she knew she’d miss these three when she moved out.

While the potpie was cooking, Phoebe went upstairs and changed out of her work suit into loose sweat pants and an oversized sweatshirt that hung almost to her knees and was butter soft with wear. She checked into the bath to see if she knew how to run the tub and its jets, and found, not to her surprise, a note from Jerry as to how best to enjoy the jacuzzi. She was just coming out of there and figuring she would find a good movie for the evening after the bath, when the oven dinged.

The potpie was delicious, as all of Emogene’s food was. The meat was tender and full of flavor, and the vegetables just cooked and not mushy, as if Emogene had cooked each separately to its perfect state of being. The thick gravy that tied the ingredients together had a hint of wine in its flavors as well as mushrooms. But the crust . . . flakey perfection and buttery. No grocery store frozen potpie could ever aspire to the perfection this one had. I’m gonna get so fat in this house, Phoebe told herself as she licked the plate of every molecule of potpie.

The jacuzzi—and it was both heated and had jets that modulated their force—was amazingly relaxing, and the movie—she had opted for an old tear-jerker The Color Purple—just the thing to finish releasing the tension of the day. I’m sure no muscle in my body has any strength left, she giggled.

Then she lay in bed, lazily twirling a few strands of hair, cruising through the HBO channels, looking for another movie, wondering why she was still awake and not sleeping, when she remembered the hot chocolate and how it seemed to ease her into readiness for sleep. Clearly she was already addicted to the concoction. She slid out of bed and padded in her stocking feet downstairs. The big house was silent and dark. Phoebe realized that her aunt usually left a light on down in the foyer, and she hadn’t. Still, she knew her way to the kitchen and followed the shadowy hallway. She had almost reached the kitchen when a light flashed momentarily on the hall wall, then vanished.

Phoebe immediately crouched against the wall, her entire body tense. She gave some thought to tiptoeing back upstair for her cell phone and maybe her service revolver. Instead, she remained still. She could hear no movement in the kitchen, which meant that, perhaps, the light had come from somewhere outside the house. When in the next seconds, the light failed to reappear, she slid her back up the wall and moved to the edge of the kitchen door. Carefully, she peeked into the kitchen. Though it was a large room with an island and a breakfast nook, by the light of the backyard security light, she could see no one lurking. She was just trying to decide how best to search the room if someone were hiding, when, as she watched, the edge of light caught the window. The light was coming from outside. No one lurked in the shadows of the kitchen. Phoebe breathed out her held breath.

She tiptoed to the kitchen window and peeked out the patio doors. The part of the backyard she could see lay in quiet shadows. The light from this vantage seemed to be coming from out on the lake, a slice of which she could see through trees. She relaxed. Someone was night fishing. The season opener was next weekend, but pan fishing—crappies and sunfish—had been open for some time. To her it seemed a little chilly yet for fishing out on a lake at night, and that particular night a bit chillier than normal, but she knew Minnesota had some avid fishermen. The part she ­didn’t get was who this might be. Only her aunt and the Stevensons had land on the lake. Whether Long Lake had public access, she didn’t know but she doubted it, not with her aunt owning so much of the land on this side of the lake. Of course, as she thought about it, the Stevenson family had a number of boys—twelve, was it?—and boys often were the most avid of fishermen. And braving a chilly evening out on the lake likely didn’t daunt a boy’s ardor for fishing.

Phoebe slid open the kitchen’s patio door and stepped out on the upper part of the large backyard deck, where the three-season screened porch gave them bug-free eating while almost being outdoors and being able to enjoy the sights and scents and sounds of the lake and shore. From there, she clearly heard a boat’s trolling motor and boys’ voices, talking and joking between them. In a moment, she also heard the sound of a reel spinning out in a cast, the little plop of the bobber into the water, then the line being rewound. Boys fishing. That was what it was, and the light was just their lantern through the trees caught by the kitchen windows. Again Phoebe sighed.

She went back inside, much relieved. It was a cop’s bane to be bathed in badness all day long. It affected how one thought about life and safety. After all the break-ins she had read about that day, it was easy to imagine the worst and respond to the simplest thing with suspicion and paranoia. But boys fishing was not something of concern. Responding to the charge of adrenaline in her system, Phoebe went back out, locked the screen porch doors, then the kitchen patio door when she came back in. Then she made a tour of the downstairs, checking the locks on all the doors she knew. She was just starting back up the main stairs when she remembered the reason she had come down in the first place. Hot chocolate. She went about the process of making a mug according to Emogene’s directions taped to the canister of Ghirardelli Double Chocolate powder. It wasn’t as good as when Emogene made it, probably minus some ingredient she chose not to share so that hers always tasted better, but Phoebe could feel it begin to relax her as she sipped it at the kitchen table.

When she was finished, she rinsed her cup and the small pan she had used to heat the milk, put both in the dishwasher, where she found yet another note. “Please don’t run the dishwasher unless full. Thanks. Emogene.”

They must have spent all day writing these damn notes, she chuckled to herself as she padded back up to her room. She got this image of the three of them running around with note pads and tape, trying to guess what she would need assistance with. Again, instead of feeling that they considered her incompetent, she got the impression that they just wanted life for her to be easier and wanted to make sure she had everything she needed. It made her smile and increased the warmth she felt for these three rather odd old people who had come into her life.

Halfway up the long, curved staircase, though, she paused. Or are they just so used to their routine that they don’t like it that I’m here and want to make sure I don’t mess up their system? This was a troubling idea, but it couldn’t find purchase in her brain. Not only was the preponderance of evidence leading her to believe she was loved and cared for rather than being kept at a distance, but the hot cocoa was doing its job. She was feeling that she could let go the concerns of the day and slip into her lovely bed and finally get some sleep.

Chapter 10: Every Teen Flick Horror Scenario

For three more days, Phoebe found herself on her own in the big house. She got up in the morning, made a bit of breakfast—toast and coffee usually, rather than Emogene’s wonderful breakfasts of eggs and bacon or quiche full of mushrooms and vegetables—washed her dishes by hand and set them in the drainer, and went off to work. Some days she continued going around with Stark to question witnesses and neighbors when issues arose in the city. Another attack on an older woman set Neil’s teeth on edge, and he pulled Phoebe from partnering with Stark, and they went over the new case. An older woman, Sarah Baker, newly installed in a luxury patio home on the north side, answered her door one evening, thinking it was the cable man come to install her television. The attacker took seven hundred dollars cash, an ornate silver tea set that was worth nearly twice that, some gold coins, a priceless two-caret diamond engagement ring from the forties, and a handful of other gold and silver jewelry. Sarah, like so many of the other women, was hit a few times to insure her cooperation. She had fallen from the force of one blow and suffered a broken wrist.

Neil and Phoebe interviewed her from her hospital bed.

“Can you describe the man who came into your home?” Neil asked.

“Yes,” the eighty-two-year-old woman said. “He had an ugly scar down the left . . . no, down the right side of his face. No, it was his left. My right, his left. It ran from his eye to his chin. It was a jagged, horrible, ugly thing.”

“Good,” said Neil. “What else?’

“Well, let me see,” she said. “It all happened so fast, and he had just come in when he hit me across the face. He wasn’t a tall man, young . . . er . . . twenties perhaps. I think his hair was blondish. Blue eyes. Cruel blue eyes. Icy. Almost emotionless except for the anger. It was the scar that drew my attention, though. Not too many people are likely to have a scar like that. You find a young man with that awful scar, and I’m sure you’ll have the right man.”

“Do you think you could pick him out of a line up?”

“Oh, I’m sure I could. I’m sure I’d recognize that horrible man if I saw him again.”

All in all, Neil and Phoebe left the hospital feeling dissatisfied, though convinced with her details of his eyes and hair that she could pick Dwuane out of a line up. Not that it mattered. They’d already checked. Dwuane had been in the reading room of the library, arguing politics with three St. Cloud State college women following a lecture. The librarians had sent them all away at 10:00, when they closed. Mrs. Baker had been assaulted at 9:00. Another perfect alibi for Dwuane the Magician.

“She didn’t see more than anyone else,” Phoebe said. “I mean, we know it was Dwuane, but what good does it do us? Mrs. Baker focused on the scar, just like all his victims do. We put her in front of a line-up of guys all with scars, and might not be able to single out Dwuane.”

“Nope,” said Neil.

“Or she could, but it’d get us no where.”

Neil let out a huge sigh. “Nope,” he said, pulling out his notepad. “I got the names of the girls he was talking with at the library. Every one identified Dwuane by his picture. One even had taken a selfie with him. She showed me. It was Dwuane.”

Phoebe chuckled without humor and shook her head. “Damn, this guy is good.”

“Oh, yeah. And until we figure out how he’s doing this, he’s gonna keep doing it, keep hurting women, keep getting rich.”

* * * * *

But the attacks on older women were not all that was going on in the city. Two days later, Chief Johnson came into the detective side of the office. “The city’s going to hell in a handbasket,” he groused. “We got this bozo beating up on old ladies and robbing them blind and our gargage theives struck again last night. In spades! Their take was in the thousands.”

Johnson was pissed. He strode back and forth in front of the combined patrol and detective side. “I’m catching flak from the mayor over both these cases. What’s the hold up getting results? I’ve authorized extra patrols. Surely we have the manpower out there we need. We’ve got to get arrests made and pronto. Until further notice, there will be no time off, no vacations.”

Someone said, “What about the fishing opener?”

Everyone knew Johnson joined the governor each spring for the highly publicized Governor’s Opener. Johnson waffled, shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Fine,” he growled. “Starting Monday, no more time off. Everyone works overtime until we get results. And, yes, I’m authorizing the overtime. Don’t waste it. I want at least one of those messy cases solved this month and some perp or gang of perps in lock-up. If I don’t see results on my desk soon, heads will roll.”

Johnson stalked back to his office and closed the door. The glass rattled. All the patrol officers looked just as worried as Phoebe felt.

“Oh, great,” said McKenna. “Now we’ve got him riding our asses. Like that’s going to help. I hate politics.”

By afternoon, even Stark was put to the task to find out information about either case. Patrol officers were assigned his list of lesser interviews. Stan and Homer were told to find out how Dwuane was tricking them and making everyone believe he was innocent because he couldn’t be in two places at once. They weren’t happy with this assignment. Phoebe was given the task to figure out if there was any connection between shifts with varying days off and the series of garage robberies.

She set to work, a little sorry she had to leave off work on the guy who hurt old ladies, but this wasn’t a time to complain. McKenna was a walking thunderstorm, sure his job could be on the line if something didn’t break in one of the cases soon.

Phoebe talked to the hospital trying to match up the dates of the garage thefts with days off patterns of people working there. She got some matches, probably too many but a few burbles, too. The printed schedules of several employees did match up with the dates of the garage thefts, but every now and then they didn’t.

“So it’s meaningless,” said Neil when she brought him her results.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s isn’t a perfect match up, clearly, but—”

He was already shaking his head. “It’s a bust, Magillicutty. It was a good idea, but it’s a bust.”

“It might not be.”

“How do you figure?”

“People swap shifts all the time. I spoke to a few people in the office and they said that the shifts are laid out, but if someone has, oh, a baby shower to go to or a dentist appointment, they could swap with someone else to get that day off. That information might not get back to the office because it didn’t necessarily involve any pay changes.”

He was glowering. “And it could just as easily be kids who work at McDonald’s and pull jobs on their joint days off.”

By the end of the day, Johnson had stormed through two more times, and McKenna was jumpy and withdrawn. Phoebe left work a couple of hours later than usual with a bunch of the schedules she was trying to piece together into something, some kind of pattern or clue.

As she crossed the street in front of the LEC to get to her car, she heard screeching tires and looked up from the papers in her hand. A black SUV swerved around a bicycle, blasting its horn at the cyclist, who cut between two parked cars and bounced up on the sidewalk before the rider fell over. The SUV, however, in swerving to avoid the bicyclist, was headed straight for Phoebe. But she was nearly across the street and only had to dash a step or two to get to the sidewalk between two parked cars and light pole. The SUV clipped a mail drop box near the corner before the driver gained full control of his big vehicle and got back into his own lane. In doing so, a city bus had to swerve violently to avoid the SUV and struck a parked car.

Phoebe ran down the street, expecting the SUV to have stopped, but, when she ran around the bus just off-loading its passengers onto the sidewalk, the SUV was nowhere in sight.

“Damn things,” said Phoebe. “I see no point to them at all.”

She called for an officer to come assist and started assessing if anyone on the bus had been injured. A couple bumps and bruises and one cut lip numbered the injuries, but it was an hour before she could turn over the mess to several officers and an ambulence squad who had arrived just in case.

At home, after a supper of another delicious beef potpie, she settled into her sitting room with the radio playing softly in the background, the schedules spread out on the coffee table. As it got dark, she realized she really needed more light to work. She had seen a few floor lamps in that attic over the larger garage and didn’t figure her aunt would mind if she borrowed one to throw a bit more light on her research.

She had gotten comfortable in sweat pants and an old t-shirt, so she slipped on her slippers and went in search of lighting.

The house still creeped her out when it was this dark and so quiet, throwing images of every horror film she had ever seen into her mind. One of the great rules of safety in a horror film was, don’t go up into the attic or down into the basement alone at night. And just to make the experience perfect, it had started raining during the evening, and the wind had come up. The security lights out front and in the back yard threw their own sets of fluxuating shadows on the walls of the foyer as she crossed to the other side of the house. A television news flash much earlier in the evening had indicated that severe thunderstorms, some of the first of the season, were working through the middle of the state. The big house creaked softly now and again as she headed to the back hall. Though her slippers were soft-soled, they seemed to make an inordinant amount of noise.

Shadows danced in the dining room and the kitchen and against the hall wall. Looking through the kitchen to the back yard, she could see the trees were tossing. Lightning lit up the sky. Thunder rumbled after a count of three. The next bolt she saw fork across the sky, and the thunder—louder and more of a boom—came after a count of only one.

Just to make herself feel more confidant on this stormy night, she checked out the front and the back of the house. Other than rain slicking everything in the front and making puddles in the driveway, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Out back, though the windows on that side of the house were spattered with rain and blurry, the yard looked no different than she remembered.

In the kitchen, she checked out back again. The door to the screen porch had come unhooked and was banging a bit. She went out and fastened the hook securely. It was chilly this evening, wet and uninviting, and Phoebe hurried back inside, making sure to lock the kitchen door. She headed down the back hall to the first garage.

A building like a garage that was mostly a big open space with only outside walls always felt the wind a bit more than a house that had internal walls to bolster the structural support. The inside of the large garage seemed to be filled with air, and the garage door thumped as the pressure waves of the winds moved through the house.

All four stalls were empty. How three old people had managed to use four vehicles, Phoebe didn’t know, and it did give her a bit of concern, but she figured the Stevenson boys, as Jerry’s helpers, had access to them at times. She’d ask Jerry when he got back if she should ever be concerned if vehicles went missing.

Then she climbed the stairs up to the apartment over the garage. It was dark of course, and she felt for the light switches. She could hear rain ticking steadily on the west windows and the security light out back threw watery shadows into this room as well. A huge maple stood just outside the front windows and the outside light illuminated its branches. The wind howled hollowly and seemed to stir the west curtains just a little. She fumbled for the light switch, eager to beat back the dark. When her fingers found it and she had turned on lights, the apartment lay undisturbed. The curtains were moving because the overhead fan had been left on, its blades slowly turning. It felt damp up here, and Phoebe wondered if the fan had been left on purposely to keep mold from taking hold. She left the fan on but resolved she’d mention it to Jerry just to make sure. When had she come to assume that Jerry managed issues in the house?

The stairway to the the attic was utterly black until she flipped on the lights, but then it lost its creepiness. No windows opened on the stairs, so no shifting shadows. She climbed, listening to the wind and rain and thunder. The attic had a few dormer windows, and lightning flashed through them when she opened the door at the top of the stais. Thunder shook the house. The stairs light didn’t reach into the attic space well, but she could see the light switch for the overhead fixtures on the wall just inside the door.

Thunder roared again, gaining energy as the storm cleared its throat. The television weatherman had said it might have damaging winds and dangerous lightning. A tornado watch had already come and gone, though the severe thunderstorm warning lasted until nine that evening, another hour or so.

Phoebe wondered how their lake fared in such a storm. It was sheltered by woods on their side of it and by those rolling hills on the other side, so it shouldn’t have enough wind to make anything like real waves, but she didn’t know how the dock would fare and was already concerned about the screen porch. If its door came loose again, she thought maybe the wind could whip it right off its hinges if it got the right angle and force.

Phoebe reached for the light switch just as a massive bolt of lightning struck very close to the house. She heard the snick right through the garage walls, then a loud boom shook the whole structure. She automatically crouched, but what froze her wasn’t fear of lightning. In two hurried steps she reached the light and flipped it on, standing in confused awe at what she saw, or, rather, what she didn’t see. The attic was empty. Where just days ago, it had been a cluttered pile of furniture and bookselves and dusty boxes, the space above the garage had been totally cleaned out. Well, it was kind of trashy and messy, with bits of things and empty boxes turned over near the windows that looked out over the driveway, but everything of any value was completely gone. All the tables and chairs and the couch and shelves and myriad boxes closed and stacked. All gone.

Phoebe felt her heart beating fast and quickly ran back downstairs into the garage apartment. Another massive lightning bolt snaked down and struck a tree in the back of the house, illuminating the apartment briefly like a summer’s day. She again heard the electrical snick, then a tremendous boom that thumped through her and seemed to shake the roots of the house. A moment later, she heard a crackling, like something coming apart, then a heavy thud as a tree came down hard in the backyard.

Eager to get back into the house and check the weather she was sure was going to break into most programing, Phoebe turned off the stairs lights and hurried through the apartment, making sure to turn off lights and close doors behind her. The back hall seemed almost a sheltered space, and she breathed a sigh as she locked the garage access door behind her. Though she had left a trail of lights on to follow back through the house, most of which she turned off as she progressed, she was eager to see if she should find a basement, if the storm had powered up enough to warrant safety measures. Instead of going back upstairs, she went into the living room and flipped on that television. As she suspected, a weather update was playing, and she saw the telltale bow pushing out of the storm front pretty much where she figured she was at in Sherburne County, but just as the weather girl was pointing at this bulge in the storm front and about to address that issue rather than what was happening in the Twin Cities, the television and every light in the house flickered, then went dark.

For a moment, Phoebe froze, listening to the storm. Waiting. “It’s just a power outage. With all the lightning and wind, something took down a power line,” she told herself reasonably. Still she listened and waited. Tornadoes were supposed to sound like a train coming. She also recalled that frequent lightning was characteristic of a storm that could produce tornadoes.

“Damn,” she said, knowing that prudence at the moment was telling her to find the basement and hunker down there for a while. She figured the basement door was somewhere in the back of the house along that back hall, but she had yet to know exactly where. She headed to that back hall again.

At the base of the back stairs, which she could see occasionally as lightning lit up the house, she saw a door and opened it. Stairs led down. Had to be the basement. Even though she knew the power was out, she automatically flipped on the switch. Nothing happened, of course, and all those teen flicks with screaming girls—I wonder who the lead screamer is in Hollywood now that aunty is retired—came to mind. Everyone knew she should keep out of the attic and the basement, and she had just gone into both, during a wicked storm, with a power outage. Surely she was pushing fate. She was also sure she was going to be the next screamer in the family.

With a hand on the banister, she inched down the stairs trying to listen to the storm as she did so. No roaring, no train. She hoped that meant no tornado was about to Dorothy the house away. At the bottom step, she sat, figuring she was safe as long as she was in the basement and needn’t press her luck and trip over something in the dark. Just as she sat and rested her head on her raised knees, the power came back on.

Now would be the time that vampires or ax murderers would be shockingly illuminated on their way to grab her, their fangs dripping or ax raised and ready to swing. What she saw, however, was a washer and dryer on one side of a tidy room with a large table for folding clothes. Two more large chest freezers hummed on from the far wall, and from an alcove on her right the furnace gave a soft whoosh as it strove to keep the chill from the big house. Several hampers stood along the wall in front of her and shelves with home-canned fruit and pickles stood in neat, shining ranks along that and another wall. Some of the jars even had little petticoats of gingam fabric under their lids for gift giving. Not a scary place at all. Actually kind of homey and comforting.

Phoebe listened. Lightning lit up the basement windows briefly, but the rolling thunder took its time grumbling afterwards. The worst of the storm seemed to have passed over the house. More thunder rumbled from even further off.

Phoebe got up and climbed the stairs, trying to recall if a lull in the storm meant the arrival of a tornado or just the quiet passage of all danger. Even the wind seemed to have died down some. By the time she reached the kitchen and could see out back with the security light, she knew for certain the worst of the storm was over. The rain, that had pounded down earlier, had settled into a slow earth-soaking kind of rain that felt like it might last the night. She went back to the living room to turn off the television, and the newscaster was saying that all warnings had expired for Sherburne County and would expire across the state within the hour. The bow in the storm had already reached Elk River from the look of things. The Cities might still have to worry, but not Phoebe.

She flipped off the TV and turned out the lights, heading for the stairs. She was up in her sitting room and looking down at the spread of files and reports about the garage theives when she realized that she had gone out to find a lamp when all this excitement had started. Then she remembered the empty attic.

She called the office, getting McKenna on the first ring. “Still there?” she asked.

“Well, Johnson okayed overtime, and I’ve got to solve something. You took stuff home. Any progress?”

“Not a lot. But something weird happened.”

He just waited.

“I needed a lamp . . . well, that’s not important. What is important is that I went up into the attic over the garage to get one because a few of them were stored up there, and everything was gone. I mean that room had been packed with furniture, shelves, and boxes just a few days ago. And it’s all cleared out. Also, that garage holds four vehicles and even counting my aunt, Jerry Brown, and the cook, I don’t know how they could have moved four vehicles.”

“You think it’s another robbery?”

“I’m thinking it might be.”

“I’ll be right there.”

“I’m outside the city. And this is Sherburne County.”

“Yeah, so?”

Phoebe gave him directions.

Having done that, having called in to the office and knowing that Neil was on his way out, Phoebe suddenly felt a release of adrenaline. She began to shake and got cold. She quickly put on heavier socks and her joggers and slipped on a heavier sweatshirt. Then, just because, she went to her bathroom and pulled her hair back into a quick pony and checked her make-up. She didn’t want to look like she had put on makeup just for him, but she didn’t want to be totally au natural either. A touch of gloss and a quick swipe with a bit of mascara seemed enough of a transition between her office look and “just bathed.”

Then she figured that Neil hadn’t eaten much that whole day and dashed down the stairs to pop another potpie in the oven. She put on the kettle for tea as well and set out plates and cups, then realized it looked way too planned and gathered them up again. She set them on the counter instead.

The trip out to the house from the office, even in rush-hour traffic seldom took her more than twenty minutes, but the timer dinged on the stove just before the doorbell rang. If he had left the office right when she had called, which he said he was going to do, he should have been at the house half an hour earlier.

She peeked out the side windows to the door, seeing a squad unit. She opened the door.

“There are trees down all over the place out here,” he said as he came in. “I had to stop and help some folks move a big elm tree so they could drive into down. Woman was pregnant.”

“You delivered a baby?” she said, her eyebrows going up.

“God, no. I moved a tree trunk. I’m not going to deliver a baby in a storm on a dark road. No way. Not with the hospital ten minutes away.”

“But . . .”

“She was on her way in. Early labor. They had two kids already so they weren’t even concerned. Just needed to get to the hospital soonish and needed a tree moved. I helped.”

“Oh.”

He took off his wet jacket and she hung it over a dining room chair back.

“Are you cooking?” he said, sniffing and actually looking hopeful.

“I put some water on for tea . . . and I popped a potpie in the oven. It’s ready if you want it.”

“Are you kidding? I’ve eating nothing since breakfast.”

He trailed her into the kitchen and opened the oven while she made tea.

“Oh, God, that smells fantastic. Just look at that crust. Where would I find potholders?”

She laughed at him. “Sit. I’ll get it out.”

She put the potpie on a plate and handed him a fork. He dug in right away, burning his mouth on the first bite but closing his eyes in ecstacy anyway. “Damn, that’s just about the best potpie I ever ate. Sure beats the hell out of Swanson and even Marie Callender pies. Your cook made this?”

“Emogene isn’t my cook. She’s my aunt’s cook. I’m just staying here temporarily until I can afford a decent apartment.”

“You’d leave a sweet place like this with a cook who should be sainted for some drafty efficiency in town and grocery store potpies?”

It did strike Phoebe as stupid, but it was her general plan. It was any young adult’s plan, wasn’t it?

Neil scraped every molecule of pie and crust out of the aluminum shell. Phoebe wondered if he’d try to lick it just to make sure, but he used enough restraint to set down his fork. She hadn’t earlier.

“I could see if there’s any dessert around,” she offered.

With eyes wide with longing, he said, “If it’s not any trouble.”

She checked the refrigerator. There on the top shelf was a generous piece—the last piece—of the chocolate torte. She divided it and fetched the Butter Brickle ice cream from the freezer.

Neil ate torte and ice cream and drank tea like that was the business at hand. Then he closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. “Oh, my. That was so good. Thanks. So now that we’ve taken care of the important stuff, want to show me the empty room and empty garage?”

She took Neil to the garage. He looked around. “Nope, no vehicles. Damn this is a huge space. Doesn’t look this big from outside.”

“The size of this whole house is deceptive.”

She showed him the apartment above the garage. “You have to be kidding. You stay here? Damn, girl, you really need to grow roots in this place.”

“No, I don’t live here. I live in the house. Not even Jerry lives here. He said this is for summer help.”

“When I was a kid, summer help got a cot in the barn or a bunk bed in a crowded back room, and the beds were recycles of garage sale furniture, and K-Mart blankets. This place is a palace. Look, it even has an efficiency kitchen with full-size fridge. If this is summer help quarters, sign me up.”

They proceeded to go up into the attic. “Okay, Magillicutty. Here’s the deal. I’ll move in up here. I’ll bring my camping gear. No one will know. And you bring me food.”

“Please be serious. I’m concerned what happened to all my aunt’s stuff.”

“Well, whatever was here sure isn’t anymore. Have you talked with your aunt yet?”

“They’re having a mini-vacation up north. I’d hate to bother them.”

They made their way back down and into the kitchen. Neil said, “So, you don’t live in that palace above the garage. Want to show me where you do live?”

Phoebe shrugged. “Okay.”

When they stood in the sitting room of Phoebe’s rooms, Neil didn’t say anything, just gawked with his jaw hanging. She was about to make excuses, say what her aunt had said about wasted space otherwise, but he held up a finger and walked into her bedroom, then visited the bathroom. “A jacuzi even! And look at that shower. I could live in that shower,” he exclaimed. He came back to the sitting room. “Oh, shit, Magillicutty, you really need to find better accommodations. I mean run from this. Hussle your little butt into town and put hard-earned cash down on some cardboard apartment building efficiency that reeks of cigarette smoke and farts, has silverfish in the bathrooms and mice in the cupboards. Who’d want this even for a minute?”

Phoebe sighed. “But it’s not mine.”

His jeering softened. “Yeah, I know, but until you can get a place of your own, please have the decency to enjoy this lap of luxury.”

She smiled. “Actually, I do. I sometimes feel a little embarrassed talking about it, but I really do enjoy it here.”

He picked up the phone and handed it to her. “Call your aunt. You have to tell her what’s going on. Oh, and you better tell her she’ll need a crew out here to clear away trees. There are maybe four large trees down near your driveway—not blocking it because of the angle of the wind—and sticks and branches down all over. Through the kitchen I saw a big willow out back that lost half its trunk. Besides, she might be worried about you if she heard about this system moving through.”

Phoebe got the numbers Aunt Emily left her and made the call, but it went to voice mail instantly. Chances were that either they had also lost power where they were or they were out of range. Phoebe left a message, keeping it factual and succinct.

When she was done, she found Neil sitting on her couch looking at the material on the coffee table. He tapped a list she had made. “I got some of these same names.” He looked up. “I think we might have us a suspect list for the garage thefts. We’ll check them out tomorrow.”

He stood. “So, you okay in this big house all alone?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“It’s just that when you called the office, you sounded a little shook. I could stay, if you’d like, sleep on any one of what? . . . a dozen couches?”

She smirked. “I’m fine here alone.”

He grinned. “I’ll be going, then. I got a few hours of analysis before I can call it a night. Thanks for feeding me. That potpie was truly epic. Now I think I can focus again.”