Varnished without a Trace Read online

  Alice chuckled from her seat next to me. “I told them they should put up the chicken-wire cage tonight, even if it is Christmas Eve, but they didn’t listen to me. Pastor Jacobson is getting more agile, though. Last week it hit him in the eye and he had to give his sermon Wednesday night with a big old shiner.” She chuckled again. “You missed the B-3, dear.”

  She put one of her disks on my card, and low and behold, I had bingo! I shot out of my seat like there was a firecracker under me.

  Alice clapped and Ronda gave Grams a run for her money with the death glare she sent my way. Especially because it was the last game and she hadn’t won a single game all night long.

  “Lousy interlopers. Shouldn’t even be allowed to play. Lucky greenhorn.” Each derogatory phrase and some others that contained those words my mother would kill me for saying was punctuated by her sweeping her arm across the table and scooping everything into her tote bag.

  Uncle Hoagie ran over to help her when she was done and she shoved him out of the way. His face fell. Sliding a hand over his brow, he slicked back his sparse hair and raised his bushy eyebrows. The mole above his eye got a vigorous rub and then he walked in the opposite direction. Poor guy.

  “Stomping” was a light word for the way Ronda pushed and shoved her way out of the hall and through the back door. It all happened so fast, I hadn’t even gotten around to moving from my place at the table yet.

  I glanced toward Alice and she shrugged her shoulders. Moving my gaze to where Ronda had sat, I saw that in her fury and haste, she’d left her purse on the chair next to her.

  “Did you see Hoagie?” I asked Alice, really not wanting to do the right thing here and go after Ronda with her purse. Giving it to Uncle Hoagie to give to his irate wife would be far better than chasing after her.

  “Nope. You’d better go get your prize, though, before someone else tries to steal it. And I’d watch my back on your way to your house if I were you. I know it’s a short walk, but it could be a treacherous one, if you know what I mean.” She chuckled and kept packing up her own things. It wasn’t the same laugh as before, that jovial, fun one. This one had a slight tinge to it that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

  “Okay, then. Well, I’d better get this out to . . .” But Alice was already gone with her bag of luck that hadn’t gotten her much tonight.

  Max approached, looking like someone I could get to do this errand for me.

  “Hey, Tallie, great win tonight. Now you can take me out to dinner.” He smiled at me and I smiled back.

  “Can you go give this to Ronda?” I held up her purse. “She went out the back.”

  His face pulled into an adorable frown that had me frowning too. “I promised I’d help break down the tables. Maybe you can catch her. I heard the parking lot is a madhouse.”

  Well, darn it. I was going to have to face the evil queen of bingo anyway.

  Better to make it quick and be done. Maybe I would find Uncle Hoagie first. That would work.

  With that in mind, I headed out the back door, the way I’d seen Ronda go. Everyone else was heading out the bay doors out front, so of course she’d had to be the odd one.

  I couldn’t remember what kind of car she drove, but I’d probably find her by her yelling at people to get out of her way so she could get home and practice her throw for next time.

  Preparing to step out into the brisk winter air, I wished I had grabbed my coat and possibly my prize. I could have left Ronda’s purse with the pastor or even with Uncle Sherman, but my roots were showing and I just couldn’t leave it with someone else.

  The door latch turned in my hand easily enough, but the door stuck on something. I shoved it hard to get it to open, leaning into it with my considerable weight. It finally moved, only to have a very dead Ronda flop around the edge with a dent in her head and a very blank expression on her lifeless face.

  “Tallie, you left without your winnings,” my grandmother said from behind me as I stood there with my mouth hanging open and registering very little. “I got them for you. That’s very bad form when the men and women who were generous enough to put this on would like to go home to their families on Christmas Eve. We need to talk about your manners, young lady.” She paused to take a breath. It caught in her throat. “Oh my heavens, is that Ronda?”

  “Bingo.”

  Chapter Two

  Grams screamed at a frequency I was sure would set off the dogs living next door. They must have been inside for the night, because I didn’t hear a single howl to accompany my grandmother’s continued caterwauling. The woman had a set of lungs on her, because she hadn’t stopped to take a breath yet. I was almost curious to see how long she could go.

  But first I had to deal with finding yet another dead body. It was becoming like a habit, and one that Police Chief Burton was not going to be happy about. Again.

  I checked for a pulse just as my grandmother finally ran out of breath. Turning to her, I checked to make sure she hadn’t just fainted.

  “Can you please go see if Burton is still here?” I asked as calmly as I possibly could with my hand on the dead woman’s throat.

  “But . . . but . . . Ronda.” She pointed at the dead woman on the ground as if I hadn’t already seen her.

  No pulse meant that she was completely dead, not just almost dead or nearly dead but actually dead, and on Christmas Eve.

  I didn’t touch anything else. Grams turned back into the fire hall and Max stepped out around her.

  “Oh, babe,” he said as he crouched down beside me.

  “Yeah. Grams is getting Burton. Don’t touch anything. I don’t want to get in trouble for messing up the scene, because this is most definitely a murder. Look at the dent in her head. You don’t get that from opening the door wrong.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do.” Burton, dressed in jeans and a plaid vest with a Christmas tree handkerchief in the pocket walked around Max and crouched down next to me too. We formed a circle around the poor dead woman.

  “I don’t know when this happened or how.” I stood up, because my knees were starting to hurt. “All I wanted to do was give her the purse she forgot, but then I found her like this.”

  Burton put a hand on my shoulder. “Always something, isn’t it, Tallie?”

  Recently, Burton and I had started having coffee every once in a while when we happened to be at Gina’s coffee shop at the same time. Slowly but surely, we’d built on the small start we’d made months ago when I’d almost died at the hands of a crazy woman bent on turning our little town into some kind of criminal circus. Everything wasn’t always awesome of course, and he still found me irritating sometimes, or gave me tickets just because he could. But for the most part we’d come to an understanding. He seemed to believe, finally, that I wasn’t trying to take his job when I figured out who was murdering people and why in our little town.

  But I’d do anything to stay out of his way. No matter that I’d started listening to some podcasts he’d recommended about past crimes around the world and we’d had some lively discussions over lattes and sticky buns.

  This was the first murder since we’d gotten on better footing and I wasn’t sure how he was going to react to me finding yet another body. I prepared myself for anything.

  “I’m thinking someone hit her in the head with the varnish can to your left.” He pulled a pen from his pocket and lifted up the handle on a can marked with a Mr. Yuk sticker and Hogart’s Hardware on the side. “We have to find Hoagie.”

  “We?” I said before I could stop myself.

  “Maybe this time you’ll just use the tip line like normal concerned citizens, but I have a feeling that’s not actually going to happen. So if you find out something, let me know, but don’t go actively looking for a criminal again. It gives me heart palpitations no matter how much I ultimately have to appreciate the information at the end.”

  Well, that was quite an endorsement. “I, uh, don’t know what to say.”

  �
�That’s a first. Let’s see if it lasts.” His grunt wasn’t as irritated as it usually was as he looked over Ronda Hogart’s dead body. “Call Suzy if you can and tell her to get the guys down here. I guess we’re working on Christmas Eve after all.”

  * * *

  There wasn’t much for me to do once the rest of our small police force came and the EMTs showed up from down the street. Max and I headed back to our apartment above my parents’ funeral home on the other side of the firehouse. Christmas lights sparkled across the street in Gina’s coffee shop display window. She’d made an elaborate show of trains and lights and tiny Christmas trees. A whole village sat at the base of a mountain made of fake whipped cream, and delicate china cups filled with fake hot chocolate skied down the slope. She’d taken the ski slopes five miles up the road and had lovingly recreated them along the width of her store.

  Smart lady. I loved her creativity and her passion for what she did. And I hoped she’d soon be my sister-in-law, if my brother ever got his head together and did the right thing.

  After months of telling her that they should get married and hiding behind the excuse that it would look better for his reputation, he’d suddenly stopped asking and had become secretive about a month ago. I didn’t know what he had up his sleeve, but I hoped it was a ring and a spectacular display, the kind my best friend deserved.

  For now, though, I had my newly renovated top penthouse suite above the dead to enjoy.

  Those television shows about home renovations were entirely misleading. Sure, sometimes they broke out a wall and found a hornet’s nest, or gobs of mold. But we only got to see their remodeling done in segments, in a montage that only showed the progress, not the swearing and the tempers.

  But as with everything I did, our renovation of the third floor of my parents’ funeral home had been far more complicated, to say the least. For instance, take the horror of finding the floor in the section that had previously been my bedroom had been held up for however many years with broken paint sticks and bubble wrap under a spot I’d always avoided because it felt soft. Or the half a stop sign shoved under a floorboard to make it float where a vent used to be. And let’s not forget the chimney someone had collapsed years ago when they’d put on a new roof. Instead of removing it when they had the chance, they’d made all the bricks fall into the chimney itself for the top five feet, leaving birds’ nests in there and some sort of tiny skeleton I didn’t want to put a name to.

  Max and I had shoveled out any number of things, stripped what felt like miles of floor, scraped off wallpaper until our arms hurt and moved mountains of antique furniture. And before it was done we would probably end up hiring a contractor to finish things up, as I had wanted from the beginning. In the meantime, Max was flexing his renovator muscles.

  The object had been to make it into a real, livable space instead of the cramped one room I’d been making do with for almost the last two years. And it wasn’t turning out half bad. Or at least I didn’t think it would be bad once it was finally done.

  Dealing with my family up close and personal after all those years of separating myself from them during my marriage had not been easy, but Max made it better and far more tolerable. And now that he actually lived here instead of hours away in Washington, DC, I was incredibly happy.

  Despite ripping up carpet and moving trunks of clothes from over a hundred years ago, we’d had fun and hadn’t killed each other. Yet.

  Because the work wasn’t yet finished, I didn’t even have a tree up or a single Christmas light. We weren’t without cheer and my electric bill would at least be lower. Those were the pluses. The minuses were that even with it being the day before Christmas, I didn’t quite feel like it should even be December at this point.

  Max and I had been busy ever since he’d moved in. Between renovations and trying to get his tax business up and running, we had been on the go nonstop. He’d rented a back office from Hoagie on the second floor of the hardware store, but the clients weren’t exactly pouring in, much to my disappointment, and with the renovations, he’d decided to take a break over the holidays to get our penthouse done. Although it probably had given us too much time to yell at each other over paint colors and whether or not to varnish the floors or install carpet.

  I won with the carpet and looked forward to how plush it would be under my feet as I stepped out of my flats and into the living room.

  Max smiled as he opened the door to our third-floor almost paradise and I stood in the doorway, not sure if I could believe what before my wandering eyes should appear but a fully decorated living room.

  “What? When? How?” Calling myself baffled would have been an understatement. I was completely overwhelmed by the beauty that was currently on display in my new living room. Small ceramic Christmas trees all aglow that I hadn’t seen in years, twinkling lights garlanding every window, a huge tree with my dog Peanut and my cat Mr. Fleefers nestled in their respective beds and bows around their necks. Well, they weren’t in their actual respective beds because Mr. Fleefers was sprawled in the Saint Bernard’s bed and poor Peanut had cramped herself and overflowed from the small rectangle that should have held the small, black-and-gray cat.

  I turned to Max with a smile that almost hurt because it was so wide.

  “All the decorations your mother was willing to spare, tonight before we went to bingo while you were getting one of your absolutely necessary whoopie pie concoctions and with a lot of help from your brothers Jeremy and Dylan.” He looked monumentally pleased with himself and I couldn’t blame him.

  Running to hug him seemed the only right thing to do. So I did.

  We stayed that way for just a moment before I heard a siren from the firehouse next door.

  “So I guess Uncle Sherman will be working tonight, along with Burton, two different cases on what’s supposed to be one of the best nights of the year.” I rested my head on Max’s broad chest. “Do you think they at least found Hoagie?”

  “I don’t know.” He kissed the top of my head. “Let’s put it away for tonight at least. Can we? I have a present for you, and I’m sure when Burton has something he needs you to know, he’ll let you know.”

  I snorted, but let it go after that. I had a present for Max too and sincerely hoped he liked it.

  After Max lit the candles around the faux fireplace we’d picked up for a song at a discount store, we sat on our recently purchased couch.

  I hid his present behind my back, but he had mine on his lap. It was a big box and I felt like my little wrapped package was probably not going to stack up against whatever he had in store for me.

  “I’m going first,” I said, because if my gift for him was a disappointment, at least I’d get to enjoy my own for just a moment before he frowned. He handed it over and I was like a toddler, ripping paper with abandon to find that he had bought me one of those roaming vacuum cleaners.

  I burst out laughing. “You know how much I don’t trust these things.”

  “And I also know that our living space has almost quadrupled and I thought it might be nice not to have to worry about dog hair all the time.”

  “Okay, points for that, I guess.” I took it out and tried to think of it in good terms instead of worrying that I’d trip over it all the time and feel like it was watching me.

  And now it was my turn. I was no longer afraid to hand him his gift, so I presented it with a flourish. His face lit up like a giddy child’s and I started worrying again.

  He grabbed the package and opened it carefully, sliding his finger under each piece of tape, gently lifting each corner of the paper until I wanted to rip it out of his hands and demolish the thing. I bit my tongue instead.

  And then it was done. “A Pennsylvania Dutch cookbook?”

  Or maybe that was just what sounded like a question mark at the end of his sentence. He had a big old smile on his face and hugged me. “I’m thinking this is a request for more home-cooked meals in our big, newly outfitted kitchen?”

&n
bsp; “Well . . .”

  He laughed and laughed. “I guess I should have known when you gave me carte blanche in the restaurant store.”

  I thought about the other things I’d watched him ogle in that store and the mental list I’d made and then used to buy a lot of his gifts. What else was a girl to do for a guy who seemed to have one of everything? Or at least that was what I’d thought when he and all his worldly possessions had pulled up in the moving truck three months ago.

  We’d started renovating the house days later and were frequent visitors to Hoagie’s hardware store down the street.

  And just like that, my mood dampened. “Poor Hoagie and his family. To lose your mother on the night before Christmas, no matter how mean she could be. It’s like that song with the grandmother getting run over by a reindeer, but worse. My cousins must be devastated.”

  Max hugged me. “Well, at least you waited until after the presents before diving right back in.” And then he laughed. “Bring on the discussion.”

  I sat cross-legged on the couch and pulled a pillow onto my lap. “Someone smacked Aunt Ronda in the head with a can of varnish hard enough to kill her. A can of varnish from their hardware store.” Conveniently, there was a plate of my mom’s snickerdoodles set out on the end table with a note for Santa. I reached for them and grabbed a few. I’d replace them later after my thinking time.

  Max angled himself to play with my hair and face me. “Right. So you think it was a moment of anger? Something she said? Or did? I can’t imagine it was premeditated. Although where did the varnish can come from?”

  I sat for a moment, not wanting to say what I was actually thinking.

  “Do you think Hoagie was the one who killed her?” Max must either have read my mind, or my thoughts were more obvious than I wanted them to be.

  I shook my head after a moment. “I just can’t imagine that. Uncle Hoagie has been a fixture in my life since I was born. I’ve watched him put up with all kinds of things from Ronda, and as far as I know, he has never hurt her. Why tonight?” I went on before Max could answer. “No, I think maybe someone was just waiting to get her alone for all of her meannesses. Or maybe to pay her back for all her bingo bitchery?”