Varnished without a Trace Page 7

  “I . . . I . . . I can’t find Hoagie. He’s not anywhere and I can’t find him, and I have to find him and I can’t find him.” He shook his head, as if trying to clear an image from it. Closing his eyes, he slapped a hand to his forehead. I was very much afraid that he was about to throw up. While I was capable of many things, helping someone who was puking was certainly not one of them.

  Catching one of the EMTs by the arm as he walked by, I prepared to hand Nathan over to him. And then I realized it was Ray, the one who always liked to make fun of me.

  “No dead body this time, Tallie. I’m both impressed and a little disappointed.”

  I made a cutting motion at my throat, but he either didn’t see it or willfully chose to ignore it. Either way, he kept on talking.

  “Burton will be pleased, though.”

  Max cut in. “Ray, not now. Why don’t you see if Nathan needs any help? He looks like he might be nauseous.”

  That stopped the EMT in his tracks as he looked around and finally saw Nathan between Max and me.

  Nathan shook his head. “I’m fine, Tallie. Really, Ray, I’m fine. I’m going to walk home until Sherman or Burton needs me.”

  His footsteps dragged, and Max and I shared a look, then took up posts on either side of him.

  “Let us at least make sure you get there, Nathan,” I said. Nathan shook his head again, and Max took over while I kept up as best I could.

  “Everything is going to be fine. Sherman is going to be able to get the fires out and then they’ll be able to get the store back up and running in no time. They’ll figure out what happened and make it right.”

  Nathan shrugged his shoulders this time, but still trudged along with us. I looked around as we made our way down the sidewalk and around the corner to Nathan’s apartment above the pizza shop. Nathan looked up the metal stairs rising to his third-floor apartment. Then he dropped his head and his shoulders.

  “Do you need us to go up with you?” I asked. “I know you must have a ton of stuff going through your head right now, and we’re more than happy to get you settled before we go. Do you know how to get in touch with Hoagie to let him know the store is okay?” I won’t lie that I slipped that in there to see if he knew where the other man was. He’d said he needed to find Hoagie as if he’d been in the store. Had he, or was Nathan so conditioned to defer to him that he automatically thought of him even though no one had seen him since Christmas Eve?

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll be fine. I have to go make a list of all the things I need to do. I haven’t seen Hoagie since anyone else has, Tallie. I wish I had, though. I need authorization to do everything. I can’t make these decisions myself. Though I guess I’d better at least call Bertie over at the cleaners to see who I should talk to about getting us dried out.” He took out his phone and started making notes. “It’s okay, guys. I’ll be better thinking about going forward instead of worrying about what just happened. I do appreciate you walking me home, but I’ve got it from here.”

  He began the long climb on the outside stairs with the switchback to his apartment. Nathan and I had gone to high school together, and I remembered him from back in the day, but we’d never really been friends. Now I wished I knew who he was friends with besides Hoagie so I could call someone over for him. But I didn’t know him well enough to ask, and he probably wasn’t going to tell me. I did send a quick text to Jenna, though, to let her know what had happened. Per the calendar in my phone, she was at a job but should almost be done.

  Max and I were still standing at the bottom of the stairs when Nathan rounded the corner to walk up the next flight. He staggered back on the landing and slapped a hand on his mouth.

  “Are you okay, Nathan?” That was Max this time, because I’d started walking toward whatever Nathan was pointing at from the second story. I knew I shouldn’t. I knew it, but I couldn’t seem to help myself.

  Because sure enough, there was a dead body on the gravel up against the hardware store.

  Unfortunately, my first thought was that at least I hadn’t been the one to find it this time.

  My second thought was that Burton wouldn’t have to look for Hoagie anymore, but would be just as heartbroken as everyone in town that he was dead.

  I ran the last few steps.

  “I’m going to check to see if he has a pulse.” I was almost positive the answer was going to be no, but I did it anyway. Bending down, my suspicions were confirmed.

  My heart clenched. Hoagie was dead on the ground in front of me. My uncle, who had been part of my growing-up years. He’d given me a job to get out of the funeral home when I was a teenager and my dad was trying to teach me the ropes with dead people. I knew I had only run just down the street, but the hardware store had been far enough away not to have to deal with funerals during my sophomore summer, when I had simply wanted to enjoy myself and whoever I had been trying to get to notice me that year.

  And Nathan had been there to teach me the ropes, along with Hoagie. That gave me pause; then I glanced up, and Nathan was no longer green but sheet white. Oh, I was going to have to send Max up the stairs to bring the poor man down. He was still standing against the railing on the landing with his hand over his mouth. His whole world had just fallen apart in the last half hour; I couldn’t blame him. I hoped Jenna got here soon.

  “Can you go get Nathan? I think he’ll need to be here,” I said to Max, who stood slightly to my left and behind me.

  “He’s really dead, then?”

  Max sounded as sad as I felt. “Yeah; who knows why, though. I don’t see any damage, but it could have been smoke inhalation. Maybe he was trying to get out the back way and collapsed once he made it through the door.” I looked around, still crouching. The back door was to my left and a window was right beyond that. I remembered that the door led into a storeroom, or at least it had all those years ago when I’d worked there. It was possible Hoagie had moved things around, but I highly doubted it. He had always been a creature of habit.

  That, however, would be a question that my not-always-friendly chief of police would undoubtedly answer. “I guess we’re going to have to call Burton.”

  “I’ll do it so you don’t have to.” Max pulled his phone from his pocket.

  I looked around the area to see if there was anything that could have hurt Hoagie. I was careful not to touch anything, but for some reason the whole scene looked off. Had Hoagie died in the fire or while we were in the store? But this entrance was on the opposite side of the building from where the fire had erupted in the building next door.

  The blinds had flickered upstairs when we were in line, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you if it had been Hoagie. It could have been someone who was checking to make sure he, or she, could drag the body down the stairs before setting the place next door ablaze to cause a distraction. And there had been the yell and someone shoved up against the blinds. Or had someone fallen against them without being pushed? How did this all connect to Ronda being dead? Why this couple? And why now?

  I was fully aware I might be making something out of nothing, but I also knew that Sherman had been chasing a firebug over the last few weeks and was getting pressure from the town to get things settled and the person caught.

  So, could the firebug have moved from residences to stores? Who was it? What had they done? Or was this truly an accident? Maybe the wiring in Hoagie’s store was not up to code and something had blown. Like the shoemaker’s kids who had no shoes, had Hoagie spent so much time helping everyone else with their projects that he’d let things go at the hardware store?

  I was having a hard time believing that. I set Hoagie’s hand back on his lap and he fell over to the right. Instinctively, I reached out to grab his shoulder to keep him from hitting his head even though it was ridiculous. I encountered something and realized there was a screwdriver stuck in his back. You didn’t get that by running out of a door. And on closer inspection, the corpse resembled Hoagie, but the nose was wrong, the mole above
his eye was missing, and the chin was slightly off. Being as careful as possible, I opened one eye and found a blue iris instead of the deep brown of Hoagie’s eyes.

  I grabbed Max’s arm. “Tell Suzy in dispatch that we have a murder and it’s not Hoagie, but someone who looks a lot like him.”

  Chapter Nine

  Max tried to hand the phone to me once he’d made contact with Suzy. I didn’t want it because I was trying to figure out who this was. I actively shoved the thing away in my hardened concentration.

  “No, no, no. I’m not talking to anyone at the moment. Handle it and get someone over here now.” I could hear Suzy squawking on the line through Max’s high-end phone, but whatever she said was lost in my continued denial of the phone.

  Max finally put it back up to his ear. “She won’t talk. She thought it was Hoagie, but now she’s saying it’s not. I believe her, though the resemblance is uncanny. Nathan is the one who found him, but Tallie checked for a pulse, and it’s not there.”

  There was more squawking. I felt bad for a half second for leaving Max to Suzy by himself, and then I shut it down. Every other time, from Darla, my former employer, to Waldo, my ex-husband, to the woman I’d found rolled in a carpet, each death had been a body I had found, people I had then stood up for and done the dirty work to find the killer before they could do it again or get away altogether. But each time I’d known them, even Ronda, who I was willing to ask the tough questions for. Not that I’d had much of a chance to ask any questions with Hoagie missing and Sherman asking for my help. This person I did not know from Adam, or Hoagie, almost, as the case seemed to be.

  And then I shook my head at myself when Burton came steaming around the corner of the hardware store and made a beeline for me. Max was on the phone, so Burton didn’t even stop to tap him on the shoulder. He just came right to me, shaking his head.

  “Did you hear or see anything?” he asked as he too crouched down to feel for a pulse. He shook his head again when he didn’t find one and then looked up at the sky and closed his eyes. “This is bad.”

  “Worse than the others? Or just bad?”

  “Both. What happened? Was he alive when you found him?”

  I didn’t know if Burton was hoping it was a heart attack or smoke inhalation, as I had thought previously, until I remembered that the hardware store hadn’t been on fire but the store next to it. I hated to burst his bubble, but there was no help for it. “He’s been screwdrivered.” I said it solemnly, because it seemed to deserve a moment of silence. If I’d have had to say that about Hoagie, I felt like it would have been worse. To be killed with your own most useful tool in the business would be the height of irony. Like if someone came after me with a vacuum cleaner or tried to embalm my father while he was still alive.

  But this was not Hoagie, and I had to keep telling myself that because the resemblance was astounding.

  Burton stuck his hands on his hips with his one hand firmly gripping his gun and shook his head for a third time. He was going to injure his brain if he didn’t stop that. “What is this town coming to? There is too much going on for how small and quaint we’re supposed to be.”

  “It’s still the real world, though, and these things happen in smaller towns than ours. There was a murder in a town of less than three hundred not even two years ago.”

  “Listening to those podcasts of yours again?”

  I’d been hooked recently on listening to and watching those podcasts and television shows that dive into the evilest women, or evilest people, or small-town murder mysteries. I couldn’t help myself and had taken to talking shop with Burton when I’d find him in the Bean There, Done That.

  I shrugged and then bit my lip and nodded.

  “Well, I hope you’re ready for this one, because I have no idea who this guy is, but at first glance I would have definitely thought it was Hoagie.” Burton scratched his head. “I just don’t know what to think. Is someone going after the Hogarts? Do I need to warn their kids? It can’t be a coincidence that it was Ronda and now it’s a Hoagie look-alike. Was whoever did this trying to cover it up and hoping that the fire would catch and burn this one beyond recognition?”

  I felt Burton was more talking to himself than actually asking my opinion, so I held my tongue. I didn’t have any theories or anything solid to add anyway, but this way I’d get points for not trying to insert my opinions where they might not be wanted in the first place.

  Then I looked around at the way the pseudo-Hoagie slumped on his side, with his silvered and sparse hair flopped over his forehead. He’d been beaned with something too; he had a dent in his head and his eyes were vacant.

  He was dressed just like Hoagie and had a familiar look on his face. That smile that seemed to be there no matter what was going on. But how could he have been smiling when he got hit in the head with something hard enough to not only hurt him but also kill him? Wouldn’t he have at least been grimacing? I touched the laugh lines on either side of his mouth and snatched my hand back quickly.

  “Um, Burton?”

  “What, Tallie? I’m trying to think what to do from here. I have a missing person, two dead people, one of them a look-alike for the guy I want to find and can’t and fires being set all over the place. What could you possibly need?”

  I clamped my lips shut, then took in a breath through my nose. Now was not the time to smart off to him. No matter how much I wanted to.

  “I just wanted to point out that this guy is very cold, like not newly dead cold, not even cold over a period of a few hours. He has a cast to his eyes and his jaw has been wired shut. In my not-so-expert opinion, I think you’re going to find that he’s been embalmed and has been dead for long enough to have that done.”

  Who knew Burton could gasp like that without fainting? And who knew that my job as a funeral assistant might one day put me in this position?

  * * *

  We stood around for ten minutes while my father was called to check out the corpse. I urged Max to hand over the cake he’d made for Burton’s birthday to pass the time. It was a little sodden and maybe not as good as it would have been fresh, but it did get a nod from Burton and a small smile.

  I had not wanted to have my father called, but didn’t think calling Jeremy instead would have been any better. And my dad was an old hand at this. He would be the best one to check out for any other signs that this person was dead and had been dead long enough to have gone through the whole funeral preparation process.

  Burton and I didn’t talk much during those ten minutes. Max went up to get Nathan and ask him to come down just in case he needed to be questioned. But we all kind of stood around looking at one another with quick glances but not saying anything.

  I actually breathed a sigh of relief when my father walked up at a brisk pace and drew to a halt in front of Burton. “What’s the situation? Usually I’m called in much later than this. If you need me to talk to Tallie about staying out of your business, I think we all know that’s fruitless.”

  Ah, good old Dad did not come to the rescue. It didn’t matter, though. He would find out soon enough what this was all about. Then he’d start hemming and hawing and making excuses instead of actually apologizing, because that’s what he did. Fortunately, it didn’t bother me, because I knew what I had and hadn’t done and was perfectly comfortable watching him stutter over himself as soon as he figured out he’d been a jerk.

  So I leaned back against the wall, just waiting.

  Burton shook his head and sighed too. “Bud, I need you to tell me if this corpse has been embalmed.”

  “What?” Dad crouched down in front of the pseudo-Hoagie. “It’s Hoagie; I have his contract. And he was just seen two days ago, so I don’t think anyone had time to prepare him for the casket.”

  “Look closer, Dad; it’s not Hoagie. He’s missing that mole up by his eye, and the face is just a little off.”

  Bud Graver’s eyes flicked to mine for a brief moment and I saw the flash of guilt. It was e
nough.

  “To tell you definitively, I’d have to take him back to the home.” He lifted an eyelid and touched his jaw. “Even if he hasn’t actually been embalmed, though, he has been dead for at least a few days. Long enough to fill in a few spots on his face and plump up his cheeks, as well as keep his jaw shut.”

  “Good work there, Tallie.” Burton said the words as if they might burn his tongue.

  Then again, he was smiling at me, so maybe I was just so conditioned to expecting him to be against me that I was having trouble realizing he might actually be with me. Max’s words about trusting Burton popped into my head before I could open my mouth. And instead of saying anything that could have come across as snarky, I simply nodded at him.

  “Tallie?” Dad looked me over.

  “I felt the wires in the jaw and told Burton he should call you before he did anything else because this wasn’t Hoagie. Whoever it was has been dead for a few days. Nothing much.” I shrugged and went to walk away.

  “Let’s leave that for the moment.” Dad turned to Burton. “Do you want me to have the body brought to the home and then I can tell you for certain what’s been done?”

  “I have no flipping idea, Bud. No flipping idea what to do at this point at all.” Burton shook his head. “Can you tell me one thing? Was he hit in the head before or after he died?”

  I could answer that one. “After; no blood at all. Whatever hit him cut his skin, but no blood whatsoever. Whoever did this must have gotten the body from a funeral home, then hit him on the head and put him out here for someone to find.”

  Now everyone was looking at me. I shrugged. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. But how did they find someone who looked this much like Hoagie? Or did they think it was Hoagie? If they did, why at all?”

  “Lots of questions and not a lot of answers.” Burton paced away and then came back with a frown on his face. “I think we’re going to have to take him to the home, Bud. This is all kinds of strange, and I’d like to have as many facts with me as possible before I do anything else. Will you have to do further damage to get the answers?”