Varnished without a Trace Read online

  “Yeah, don’t even start with me. You know I love that you came back to cleaning with us again, and I gladly stepped aside without a single hesitation. But I know you’re not actually here to clean, so I was trying to make it easier on you.”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t picking up what you were throwing down there.”

  “Guilt?” She smiled at me.

  “Some. I just don’t want you to feel like I’m using you, or be uncomfortable when you know I’m going to be asking questions that Chrissy might not want to answer.”

  She groaned and hit me again.

  This one actually hurt. “Ow.”

  “That’s for being an idiot. Now, let’s go clean before the family comes out and starts trying to help us with things. Sometimes the kids like to carry around my caddy. I had to get those Mr. Yuk stickers to make sure they weren’t messing with the chemicals because their parents don’t always watch them.”

  Ah yes, I remembered that from when I used to clean this house. The youngest had run off with a bottle of bleach and made my heart stop. I didn’t have kids and wasn’t sure I ever would. I, of course, would not be telling my mom that; it was my secret, and not one I wanted her weighing in on, loudly and vehemently.

  But even I knew you should watch kids around chemicals. When I was young, one lady down the street had mixed bleach and ammonia in her toilet and Uncle Sherman had to come out to air out the house because it was toxic. I’d learned my lesson that day and hadn’t unlearned it since.

  But those stickers made me think of Hoagie and Ronda, and I buckled down to get through some tough questions.

  Letty and I headed farther into the house, loaded down with our caddies and our supplies. I had no plan whatsoever about what I’d talk about, or how I’d even start a conversation regarding this woman’s dead mother and missing father, but I trusted my gut that something would come to me. If all else failed, I could fall back on the funeral excuse, though I was more and more reluctant to use it.

  The first person we saw upon entering the spacious, blue-and-white kitchen was Todd Jessup, Chrissy’s husband, standing over near a wine rack. He was just shy of six feet tall and had moved here from Montana years ago after meeting Chrissy during a rodeo or something.

  Hoagie had made all his kids work during a gap year after high school. He’d said it built character. Though I had heard that he wasn’t happy when Chrissy decided to actually leave the state; no one else had. But she’d snuck away one night on a bus, and no matter how much her dad had begged her, she’d stayed in Montana for six months, then come home married to Todd. And left Nathan hanging.

  According to the grapevine, it was a happy marriage and their kids were good ones. And she was a talker, which hopefully would make my mission an easier one. Hopefully, though life seldom worked that way for me.

  Looking farther into the kitchen, I spotted Chrissy.

  “Tallie!” Chrissy sat at the kitchen table with some supermarket rag from the magazine stand. She loved gossip and had tried to take the title of “Gossip Hub” from Mama Shirley a few times but had never quite succeeded. Mama Shirley probably wouldn’t give up that title even when she was dead.

  “Hey, Chrissy. Just thought I’d come by with my crew to see how you’re doing.” I didn’t use my dirge voice because she seemed happy enough. I didn’t want her to start crying, but I also didn’t want to answer her back as brightly as she had said my name.

  “Oh.” She closed the magazine. “Right.”

  That was an odd response, but I let it pass to see what more she would say.

  “Mom’s dead. Dad’s gone. I’m sure you know.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry about that. Ronda will be remembered fondly.” I wasn’t sure what to say about Hoagie, so I left it alone for the moment. Unfortunately, there was a distinct possibility that someone had taken him and left that body, hoping it would burn and no one would question it.

  I got back on topic before I trailed too far away from my mission. “If there’s anything I can do or if you need help, just say something. We’re family, after all.”

  She snorted, and I very firmly reminded myself that everyone grieved and processed death differently. Just because she wasn’t crying didn’t mean she hadn’t or that she wouldn’t in the future when it hit her what had really happened.

  “Your dad had everything set up at Graver’s, so you won’t have to worry about that.” I stayed standing while she sat at the table because she hadn’t invited me to take a seat yet. I didn’t want to assume she had any desire to talk to me at all, so standing at least gave the illusion that I could walk away and start cleaning at any moment. Not that I would, but the illusion could be everything in the right circumstances.

  “Well, that’s something at least that we won’t have to pay for, because no one but that coattail rider at the hardware store is getting a dime.”

  Now I did sit down, no matter what she wanted or didn’t want. As far as I knew, Hoagie didn’t have a ton of money, but he had valuable property and many contacts. That hardware store had paid for schooling, and vacations, and all the necessities for years. It had to be worth a pretty penny. And none of them were getting anything except the one person who wasn’t related to Hoagie?

  “Nothing for no one?” I asked, unable to resist trying to keep this conversation going.

  “Correct, no one and nothing. Only Nathan is getting anything, and that anything is full control of the entire store and all assets. Because no one ever wanted to work at the family store, Dad decided to make sure no one ever could unless we worked under Nathan the Magnificent.”

  Wow, animosity, thy name was Chrissy! She was seething to the point that Todd stopped polishing the wine bottles in his cabinet by the fridge and came over to pat his wife’s back. But why was she assuming that the store would go to Nathan right now, when Hoagie was still possibly alive?

  “Now, honey, we talked about this. No one else wanted to run the store anyway and it’s been a staple for years. Plus, we do fine without your father’s money. Don’t we?”

  The grudging nod was not very reassuring, nor was the rolling of the eyes outside of Todd’s vision, but I didn’t say anything. Did she regret not marrying Nathan now that he was the only one to inherit?

  I was sincerely hoping Todd would go back to polishing bottles in another room so I could drill Chrissy.

  And then he did, moving with his towel to the next room and what I assumed was another rack of wine bottles.

  I wasted no time scooting my chair closer. Chrissy liked to talk, and I was going to let her talk once I got the conversation rolling in the right direction. How to do that without coming off as awkward?

  “This must be so hard after also losing Ronda,” I said, reaching out to pat her hand.

  She yanked it back and put it under the table. “We didn’t lose her. She was killed with a can from my dad’s store. You found her, Tallie. Don’t try to be coy. Everyone knows you’re always trying to figure out things before the police do.”

  My cover was blown. Not that I’d really had one to begin with, because I wasn’t cleaning anything and most people did know that over the last couple of years I was the one who handed Burton the perpetrator. Not that he had ever really thanked me for my services to the community until recently.

  “I wasn’t trying to be coy. I really am sorry. She was good people.” I choked on that last part but would have said it about the devil’s best friend if I had to.

  “Yes, well, she at least I could count on to always be her nasty self. It’s Dad that has a lot to answer for. He often was nice to anyone who wasn’t living in his house. At home, he was a whole different kind of man.”

  Part of me shrank back at that. He might have been nasty sometimes, because everyone must have bad days. But he was just cranky, not actually a jerk. I didn’t want to hear my memories of Hoagie tarnished. I did have good memories, and they were keeping me looking for him and looking into the man who could have been related to him. How el
se could the corpse look so much like Hoagie? And I didn’t want him to be anything other than what he presented at the hardware store, with his sage advice, his big voice and his mile-wide smile.

  She sneered from her hand-carved wooden kitchen chair and slapped a hand on the oak table. “See, no one wants to hear about that. Everyone only knows the Hoagie from the store, but I knew a different one, and no one ever believed me. Do you know what it’s like to live with one outwardly horrible mother and a father who is only horrible once the front door is closed?” She sank back in her chair with her arms crossed and an expression of pure mutiny on her face.

  I flinched, even though I’d heard worse things before.

  Grieving people often chose one of two ways to express that grief. They either only talked about the good things, to make the deceased into an angel the earth had been blessed with, and we were so very lucky to have this inhumanly kind and wonderful person for any amount of time. Or they went the other way, and talked about how the person was so flawed that the world was better without them, and could we just put them in the ground now so it could be over? Of course there were people in between; rarely was anything so polarized all the time, but the ones who chose a side to sit on rarely moved off it.

  “I’ll listen.” There, I’d said it, and now I was going to have to deal with whatever came out of her mouth. Whatever her brain had chosen to focus on while she dealt with her father taking off and her mother dead.

  “He rarely let us go anywhere that wasn’t the hardware store. He had so many rules, they had to write them out and post them next to the refrigerator. Don’t be out past ten. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t talk to people who think you’re someone you’re not. Don’t give away our family connections. Don’t ride your bike past the town limits. Don’t ride in a car that doesn’t belong to an immediate family member. The list went on.”

  Interesting. I hadn’t realized that was how they’d been raised. “He seems almost paranoid.”

  “Ha! He was beyond paranoid, straight into superneurotic-to-the-nines paranoid. He about had a heart attack when I took off for Montana, but I’d never seen anything outside of our town. I wasn’t even allowed to go to the mall to buy clothes without my mother or him hovering over me like someone was going to snatch me away at any minute. I know there were kids who got kidnapped all those years ago that were all over the television, like Adam Walsh and Elizabeth Smart, but my mom and dad took the Amber alert thing to the extremes. They’d go crazy if we were one minute late home from a dance, and those were only at school. With four of us, they somehow kept track of every single one. I’m so thankful we didn’t have these phones that we do now when we were younger because I guarantee you, he would have had some kind of command center where he would know when we were going to the bathroom and whether or not we’d washed our hands.”

  I sat back, not sure how to take this all in. Obviously, it was not a horrible thing; there was nothing illegal or disgusting about wanting to make sure your kids were safe. Though of course I knew for a fact I would have gone bonkers if my parents had been that strict, but it wasn’t against the law. And she still lived in town, so there must have been something she liked here.

  “You came back from Montana with Todd, though. You could have stayed out there when you were already out.”

  She snorted and slapped her hand on the top of the magazine. Todd turned, but stayed where he was. I hoped he remained that way. “That’s because my parents refused to come to us, and Todd wanted to be near family because he doesn’t have any. If it had been only my choice, I would have lived on the other side of the world.”

  But that was over fifteen years ago, and Ronda had to have been a little lacking in those familial warm and fuzzies at least enough for Todd to even consider moving. I didn’t ask her the question that burned on my tongue—the one about why she hadn’t moved then because she could have moved any time after that—because we were getting off topic and I needed to get the story from her before Letty in all her efficiency was done cleaning the house.

  “So, do you have any idea who would have wanted Ronda dead and Hoagie gone?”

  “You want to know what I think? I think you should look at Nathan. Mom was fighting Dad tooth and nail about giving everything to Nathan but hadn’t made any progress as of yet. Maybe Nathan wanted to hasten things along a little bit. Maybe he decided Dad had lived past his shelf date, and Mom never would have given it up without being forced to by Dad. So he killed Mom and then went after Dad. I’d say he got the best of both worlds with Mom and Dad gone. Look at that for a bit and see if it doesn’t make sense.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Yikes. I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I knew Nathan a little and I didn’t see him as ever thinking Hoagie had outlived his usefulness, especially with how nervous he was about not being able to run the store without him. And I certainly couldn’t understand how he would think Hoagie should now go to the great drill press in the sky. However, I didn’t want to contradict her and make her angry. Then she’d stop talking to me.

  “Nathan? You think he might be the one?” And why would Hoagie have outright told his kids that they were getting nothing? And when had he done it? Timing could be everything.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised, that’s all I’m saying. Nathan has been insinuating himself into Dad’s good graces for years. We were even supposed to get married until I ran away to escape it. He’s always wanted to take over the store. And we’ll see about that. My oldest brother, Carl, is already talking to a lawyer because we should contest the will. There was an offer from a big corporation to buy out the hardware store that he brought to Dad and he refused. Well, now that he’s gone, I think we should sell and all get a part of what kept us here, chained in one spot.”

  Todd came back in on that last sentence and shot Chrissy a narrow-eyed glare. She harrumphed and crossed her arms tighter over her chest, then turned her face away from him.

  This was big talk when we didn’t know for certain that Hoagie was anything more than missing, not dead. But maybe every time she’d said “gone” she meant dead. If Burton hadn’t told her it was a twin corpse, maybe I shouldn’t either.

  Trouble in paradise here? Differing thoughts on what should happen and when it should happen? They seemed like a nice couple, but sometimes those were the ones you had to worry about the most.

  Fortunately, Letty peeked around the corner into the kitchen and gave me a nod. The cleaning was done and we could now leave. I hadn’t lifted a finger physically, but my brain was working overtime with the information I’d found out. Part of me wanted to share it with Burton and the other part wanted to make sure I had all the information I could get before saying anything.

  I did, however, feel it might be a good thing to check what story he was letting people believe before I went anywhere else.

  I said my goodbyes and offered to help in any way I could again, with or without the funeral home, and then followed Letty outside.

  We walked to our cars, hauling all of our things in silence. My brain was on overdrive and I didn’t know where to start. Did I want to go after Nathan? But he’d been checking us out at the register when the fire alarm went off. And he’d seemed genuinely surprised when he saw the Hoagie look-alike. He’d seemed horrified to see him in the gravel outside the door.

  And before that, he’d still been at the ball cage when Ronda had died. Or at least I thought so. Maybe? I couldn’t remember. I’d picked up Ronda’s purse and gone to give it to her, but I hadn’t known where all the players were because I hadn’t thought it was going to be important. I would have to ask around.

  But first Burton, if I could get him to take my call. As much as I got involved, I still tried not to lie, at least not a lot, or at least not lies that could be easily found out. And Hoagie being officially dead was one of those times where it would be much better to be on the up and up. Was he letting people think Hoagie was dead to help the investigation along? Or was Chrissy
assuming? Or had she killed him and her mom and was covering up her crimes?

  Just because the corpse at the hardware store wasn’t Hoagie didn’t mean he was definitely still alive and running around.

  I didn’t want to sit in the jail again, rattling my plastic water bottle against the bars because they wouldn’t give me a tin coffee cup. Burton would do it just for obstruction of justice if he got angry enough. He’d done it before without hesitation.

  After putting her things in her trunk, Letty turned to me. “So, what did you find out?”

  “I’m not really sure, to be honest. There’s so much rolling around in this poor brain of mine that I don’t know where to start. I have a ton of pieces, but I feel like they’re from seventeen different puzzles instead of just one.”

  She put a hand up to stop me. “You’ll get it right. I heard you grilling her, even if I didn’t hear everything she said. Maybe you need to write it down in your trusty notebook and talk it over with Max. That seems to be the way you do things. Right? Todd kept giving looks over his shoulder to monitor the conversation. I really felt like he would have stepped in if Chrissy would have said anything he didn’t want her to say.”

  “That’s weird, because I felt the same way, and I’ve been cleaning their house for a while yet never felt that before. They’d always seemed like very happy and healthy people together. But today, I got this vibe that all is not what it seems.”

  She shook her head. “Do you think it’s because of the murder?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I mean, I guess that’s a possibility, but I feel like if I look back, it might have always been there, just not as strong as it was today, because we often talked about kids, or things going on around town, not murder.”

  Leaning back against her trunk, she eyed me. “So, what are you going to do now? I don’t clean Nathan’s house because I’m pretty sure Jenna does that for them, so I’m not in a position to help you get to him.”