I packed up the work in progress and slipped the box on the floor under a crafts table where Maddie wouldn’t find it. I looked forward to reading in bed, finishing my book club’s selection, The House of Mirth. I’d have to brace myself for what I knew was a devastating ending. When it was my turn to choose a book in a couple of months I planned to offer several more upbeat titles. I had to admit, though, I was tempted to try decorating a room box with the costumes of the times portrayed in the book, perhaps a turn-of-the-century ladies’ shop. It had been a while since I’d made a feathery hat or a parasol. I pictured a hat and accessories shop, with a row of pancake-shaped chapeaux in different pastels and piles of necklaces (thin, broken chains from my jewelry box) on the counter.
On the way to my bedroom, at the back of the house, I hit the button to close the atrium skylight. In one of those comic moments, my finger hitting the button coincided with a knock on the door. The tapping was barely audible over the sound of the motor that sent the skylight sliding over the fixed roof toward the front of the house.
Probably Skip, thoughtfully keeping his tap light at this hour. I remembered he said he’d be able to stop by later, though we hadn’t confirmed it.
I left the skylight about one-quarter closed and walked to the door. I used the peephole just to be safe.
Staring back at me was Cheryl Mellace. I felt like my house was a waiting room for the police department. Was there an unmarked LPPD car out in front again? I shouldn’t complain-my own private suspects were saving me a lot of legwork.
“What a nice surprise,” I said, letting Cheryl in.
Like Barry, Cheryl had chosen to visit in casual clothes, befitting the weather. Her outfit, a matching shorts and tank top set in a yellow and black geometric pattern was much classier than his, however. Her eye patch was gone and any residual bruising was covered by her makeup.
Cheryl glanced up at my partly closed skylight cover. “We have one just like that in our sunroom,” she said. “It’s a godsend, especially in this god-awful weather, isn’t it?”
I was too tired to play this game of chitchat, but I was, after all, raised to be polite to guests. “Can I offer you a glass of ice tea?”
Cheryl put her designer-logo straw purse (I’d always thought the designers should pay the customers for advertising) on one of the atrium chairs and fanned herself with her short, slender fingers. “I’d love some.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said, the same phrase I’d used with Barry last night.
A slight headache came on at that moment, as I tried to shake the feeling that I was caught in a loop, where every night I’d have a murder suspect in my atrium and would have to make them ice tea.
The more company I had in a given week, the more prepared I was and the more well stocked, except for my ginger cookies. I was back in a flash with tea and a plate that included the last four cookies. I hoped this meeting with Cheryl would result in some progress toward solving David Bridges’s murder and getting me back to baking treats for my family and guests.
Cheryl had wandered to the edge of my crafts room, where a small table held newly purchased miniatures, not yet integrated into my crafts room supplies. I’d started to glue a stack of books together for placement in a cozy reading scene I was doing for a childhood friend in the Bronx.
“This is amazing,” Cheryl said. “I don’t know how you work with these little things, and it all looks so neat and finished. I was in charge of decorations at the hotel last weekend and I had an awful time.”
“It showed” was on the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t want to aggravate her.
I let Cheryl praise the minty tea and explain how she didn’t eat sweets this late. Still very trim and muscular, she looked like she didn’t eat them early in the day, either.
“I’m assuming you have something on your mind, Cheryl?” I folded my arms across my chest. I used this body language rarely in my classroom, but when I did, words came tumbling out of the student in front of me. And it was words that I needed now from Cheryl. Fortunately for me, tonight she looked more like Cheryl Carroll, my C-average ALHS student than Mrs. Walter Mellace, important society wife and charity fund-raiser.
We took seats across from each other in the atrium, ready for business.
“I know you’re working with the police on David’s case, and I think you have an idea that I was involved in his murder.” Cheryl waved a finger at me and spoke in measured tones, as she might to her children.
I seemed to be locked in a power struggle, trying to be Cheryl’s old teacher while she was trying to be my mother.
“What makes you think that?”
“I didn’t do it,” she declared.
“You flatter me by thinking you have to answer to me, or that I have any official status with the police.”
She took a sip from her glass, leaving a large red lipstick mark on its rim, then looked at me sideways. “Come on, Gerry, everyone in town knows your, quote, status, unquote, with the Lincoln Point police.”
One point for Cheryl, for reaching the “Gerry” stage. In his time with me, Barry hadn’t gotten past “Mrs. Porter.”
“While you’re here, Cheryl, I do have a couple of questions for you.”
“I’m sure you do, and I’ll just tell you straight out that, yes, David and I had started seeing each other again. It wasn’t the biggest secret in the world, though we hadn’t exactly gone public with it yet.”
I decided to ask the most important question. “Cheryl, why did you put the room box in the woods near the crime scene and then call the police?”
Cheryl blinked several times and took another drink. I could tell I’d surprised her and I got the feeling she wished the drink were stronger than ice tea. She hung her head. I tried to remember if she’d been a member of the drama club.
“I’m ashamed of myself. I put it there because I didn’t want the police looking at me. I knew I’d made a bit of a spectacle of myself Friday night. I’d had a little too much in the hospitality suite, you know?”
I recalled that another Mellace, her husband, excused his behavior in accosting me, by invoking the same reason.
“How did you know where to put it?”
“I have a friend in the dispatcher’s office. He told me where David’s… David was found. That clearing was a special place for us, you know.” Cheryl’s eyes seemed to drift up and off to the right. An onlooker might have thought she was stargazing through my open roof.
“The clearing is not as private as you think.”
She dropped her gaze and seemed to freeze in time and space. “What? What do you mean?”
“Everyone knows, Cheryl.” I couldn’t believe I was the first to alert Cheryl that everyone past freshman year knew that the clearing in Joshua Speed Woods had been the teenagers’ haven for decades. I remembered the time a group of parents decided to drive to the parking lot where I’d been earlier today and camp out, hoping to head their children off at the edge of the woods.
“I have to go,” Cheryl said. Looking at her expression-eyes glazed over, lips tightened into a thin line-I wondered if I should let her drive.
I opened the door, hoping to see the LPPD escort that Barry had received.
The street was clear except for Cheryl’s own low-riding sports car, its top down. I watched wide-eyed as she climbed over the driver’s side door to enter. It was as if she’d gone back thirty years and was trying out for the cheerleading squad. I couldn’t imagine what had put her over the edge, literally and figuratively.
I mentally took out my grade book from the days of yore. As of this interview, my verdict for Barry Cannon was “not guilty,” for Walter Mellace, “guilty,” and Cheryl Mellace, “deadlocked.” It crossed my mind that Walter was suffering from not having knocked on my door for a late-night drink.