Murder Wears a Mask Read online

  He was surprised when she gave her order; he wouldn’t have expected such a slender woman to be able to do justice to a menu item that described itself as the “Hungry Man’s Breakfast.” He was confident that he could dispatch pancakes, ham, home fries, and coffee without any problem but he didn’t know where she’d put it all.

  “Lucas didn’t do it,” she said as soon as the waitress had taken their order and left.

  Troy sighed. “There’s no other suspect,”

  “No one has bothered to try to find one,” she retorted. “What are you going to do about that?”

  7

  A Private Investigation

  By the time they’d finished eating breakfast and she’d paid for the meal—she insisted, laughing, because she said she’d taken him hostage and it was the least she could do—Troy realized that all of his stereotypical ideas about librarians were wrong. Kelly Armello wasn’t dowdy or prim; she had a rich laugh and a vibrant smile. She could eat as much as a trucker and the waitress refilled her coffee cup three times.

  She was also stubborn, persistent, and didn’t intend to take no for an answer. “There’s nothing I can do about it,” he protested when they left the restaurant. “The investigation is over.”

  “What investigation? There wasn’t one. They want an easy case and so they arrested Lucas. Can you honestly see a girl like that being involved with Lucas? He’s just a kid.”

  “That doesn’t mean he doesn’t notice girls.”

  “Of course, he notices them,” Kelly said impatiently. “But he doesn’t actually engage with them romantically.”

  “What about the Princess Leia mask?”

  “Do you know how many kids dressed as Star Wars characters for Halloween?” she rebutted. “Star Wars costumes are the second most popular choice for Halloween. Harry Potter is first.”

  That sounded like the kind of thing a librarian would know.

  “You have to admit; it didn’t look good for Lucas when he showed up with that mask.”

  “He should have left it in the police car,” she said.

  He didn’t bother to tell her that at that stage of the investigation, concealing the fact that Lucas had been wearing a Darth Vader mask would only have made the boy look even guiltier.

  “That’s not how to prove his innocence.”

  “Then you tell me how to prove it, Officer Kennedy, because that boy is not a killer, and I intend to do whatever I can to prove his innocence. And I’m counting on you to help me.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “Because I don’t think you want to see an innocent kid blamed for a murder he didn’t do.”

  “No, I don’t,” he said angrily. “But I can’t start up an investigation that’s been closed!”

  Their raised voices were attracting attention from passers-by heading into the restaurant.

  “Look, I have things to do,” Troy said.

  “Nothing you have to do is as important as finding the person who killed that girl,” Kelly said. “Go home, do what you have to do. I’ll meet you at the library at six o’clock.”

  “The library?”

  “It’ll be closed. We’ll be able to go over what we know and try to figure out what we need to do.”

  “We don’t need a library to do that. I owe you dinner.”

  She grinned; she had a cute dimple in the corner of her cheek that curved when she smiled. “That’s right, you do. Where do you want to meet? Settler Springs doesn’t have a lot of restaurants.”

  “I was thinking of my place.” He wasn’t sure why he was inviting her to his home. But he didn’t retract the invitation.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Are you a good cook?” she asked. There was a no-nonsense, straightforward expression in her eyes that told him that an invitation to his house had better mean dinner and nothing more.

  “No, but I’m great at picking up take-out. Chinese, pizza, you name your preference, and I’ll have it on the table. And I’ll even use real plates.”

  She studied him for a few moments as if she were making up her mind. Troy stood up under her scrutiny. He wasn’t planning to attack her. He just didn’t like eating out all that much and he placed a lot of faith in Arlo’s assessment of character. If Arlo didn’t like her, well, that would tell him all he needed to know.

  “Okay,” she said. “Where do you live?”

  “I’ll pick you up,” he said.

  “Not yet,” she told him with a smile that eased the refusal. “I’ll come over. It’ll be okay. I’m a librarian. Your neighbors will assume I’m teaching you how to read.”

  “My neighbors,” Troy said drily, “will be happy to see someone besides my dog, Arlo, coming into the house. They don’t approve of my lack of a social life.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “On Jefferson, 512 Jefferson.”

  She nodded. “You must be the only person on Jefferson who’s under thirty years old.”

  “I’m thirty-two,” he said.

  “Close enough. I’ll be there at six. I’m always on time, so if I knock on the door and you’re not there, I’ll take it as a sign that you changed your mind.”

  “I’m never late and the food will be on the table. Pizza or Chinese?”

  “General Tso’s, fried rice, shrimp egg roll, wonton soup.”

  The doorbell rang promptly at six, setting off Arlo’s barking response. Troy glanced around the rooms for a quick inspection. He’d cleaned, dusted, and vacuumed so that every room she would see was neat. She wasn’t going to see his bedroom, so it didn’t matter that his clothes were heaped on the bureau and his shoes were piled in the corner.

  The leaves outside hadn’t been raked, but the bathroom inside was pristine. The car hadn’t gotten washed, but the furniture smelled of lemon polish. Plates, silverware and glasses were on the table, waiting for pepperoni pizza and General Tso’s chicken and wine to be served.

  “Hi,” he greeted.

  “Hi,” she said. “I brought dessert,” she handed him a bakery box.

  Arlo went to greet her. She responded by kneeling down and rubbing his fur. “Hey, baby,” she said. “You must be Arlo.”

  Arlo bumped his nose against her knee.

  “It’s a sign of affection,” Troy said. “He has a strange way of showing that he likes you.”

  “Learned behavior?” she asked, giving Troy a quizzical glance.

  She made him laugh. She wasn’t flirtatious at all, he realized. She just said what she thought. He liked it. He wasn’t exactly sure what to do, but even the novelty had its appeal because it was obvious from the get-go that Kelly Armello wasn’t the kind of woman who would pretend to be something she wasn’t. Kelly didn’t have an image to project; she was exactly what she seemed to be. He realized that most of the women he’d known in the past started out with an image that was a composite of what they wanted to appear to be and what they thought he wanted a woman to be. The real woman underneath took time to find and by that time, sometimes it hadn’t really been worth the emotional excavation that was involved. That wasn’t Kelly. He didn’t know much about her, but he knew she was real.

  She was wearing blue jeans and a green sweater and boots. It sounded more mundane in words than it looked on her. She was curvier than her slenderness had indicated and her hair, loose now, made a vivid red cloud of curls around her heart-shaped face.

  He was glad that he’d shaved before she arrived. He doubted that he looked as good in jeans and a flannel shirt as she looked in her attire, but maybe shaving helped.

  Kelly didn’t hide the fact that as she went with him into the kitchen, she was noticing the look of the rooms.

  “Does it pass inspection?” he asked when they were both seated at the table.

  “You’re a better housekeeper than I am,” she admitted.

  “Company is a great inspiration for a dust cloth,” he said.

  “So, you’re not a neat freak,” she said. “That’s good. I figure that if dust was good
enough for God to use to make a man, who am I to sweep it up and throw it away?”

  “Are you planning to build a roommate out of your dust?”

  She grinned. “No, but I have enough of it to do that if I wanted to.”

  “So,” he said when their plates were occupied by the foods they’d chosen and their wineglasses were filled, “where do you want to start?”

  “Start with what you know.” She took a small notebook and a pen out of her purse, waiting, fork in one hand, pen in the other, for him to proceed.

  “I know what you know,” he said.

  “Okay, then what do the police know?”

  “What the police ‘know’ is an overstatement. They know that Lucas Krymanski found a body in Daffodil Alley on Halloween night at some point after six-thirty. They know who the murdered girl is.”

  “Well?” she asked when he stopped talking.

  “You asked what they know. That’s what’s known. From that point, they decided that Lucas killed her.”

  “You don’t agree.”

  “You already know that I don’t agree. But no one asked. The state police arrested Lucas for the murder.”

  “Do they think he got her pregnant?”

  “They haven’t made that point yet.”

  “Yet?”

  “I don’t know if they’re going to pursue it.”

  “Wouldn’t the assumption be that her boyfriend got her pregnant and killed her because of it?”

  “That’s an assumption. They don’t know her boyfriend.”

  “They aren’t investigating?”

  “I told you, the case is closed and awaiting trial as far as the police are concerned.”

  “Then it’s up to us,” she said, putting down her pen. She raised her wine glass. “To justice.”

  He raised his own glass but didn’t clink it against hers. “Justice might be too ambitious,” he said darkly. “Let’s just toast to proving that Lucas didn’t kill her.”

  Kelly nodded. Their glasses touched. “Is this where we spit on our hands and make a pact never to trust anyone but ourselves and to reveal nothing until we’ve uncovered the truth?” she asked.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever shared a meal with a woman who made an offer like that,” he said. “Is this a date?

  She smiled. “Not yet,” she said.

  “Is it me or baggage from someone else?”

  Kelly shook her head. “I’m single. My boyfriend and I have been apart for six months. We’re ‘still friends’,” she said, grimacing at the term. “What about you?”

  “Single. My fiancée and I broke up when I went to Afghanistan for the second time. I guess we’re still friends, although since she married one of my friends, I wouldn’t swear to it.” Troy shrugged. “It was another life in another time.”

  “You don’t want her back?”

  “I don’t want her back.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Angela. Why?”

  “All stories have characters,” she said whimsically. “And all characters have names.”

  “Okay, I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means that, even though this isn’t a date, I don’t think we need to invite Angela to the table.”

  8

  Library Sleuthing

  He was good looking. Very good looking. Dark hair, dark eyes, tall, lean. No annoying mannerisms. A sense of humor. He wore the Settler Springs male uniform of jeans and a flannel shirt with ease.

  She liked his dog. Arlo was well-behaved and affectionate. That was a good sign. You could tell a lot about a person from their pets; Kelly was convinced of that. She was still mourning the loss of her cat Jade, who had died the winter before. Jade had been the family cat for eighteen years, a tenure that had given her rank in the household, where she was petted and adored and treated like the royalty she had believed herself to be. What would Jade have thought of Arlo, Kelly wondered. And what would she have thought of Officer Kennedy?

  She hadn’t intended to pursue Officer Kennedy romantically when she saw him on the Trail. Noticing that a man was nice-looking was a function of eyesight. Appreciating his sense of humor was not an invitation. She could not deny that she had been aware of him in a manner which invited contemplation on the subject. But her intentions had been entirely focused upon Lucas and they still were. Finding out that Troy believed he was innocent as well galvanized her; together, they could prove that Lucas was not a killer.

  Not that she needed to be galvanized. Troy’s cautious approach was completely opposite her own response to a situation. Some of it was, she supposed, the result of his military background. Don’t rush in until every possible danger had been assessed. Some of it, she suspected, might be a tendency toward cynicism. Maybe that was Angela’s fault, Kelly thought. Losing a fiancée to a friend had to sting.

  Some of it might be due to his being the newest officer on the force; he had been there long enough to sense that the family ties in Settler Springs were, in some ways, more powerful than the laws that the police department was sworn to uphold. It was interesting that when he referred to the police, he said ‘they’, not ‘we’ as if he felt distance from his fellow officers. Was it the newness of the employment or was it distrust?

  And did it matter, she asked herself as she finished the monthly statistical report? He wasn’t going to hide from the truth, and he believed that Lucas was innocent.

  “Good morning,” she said to Carmela, who arrived, as always, five minutes late with the usual story about traffic at the stop light. There was never traffic in Settler Springs, but five minutes wasn’t a hardship as long as the doors opened promptly at ten o’clock in the morning.

  Carmela, who had enjoyed the notoriety of being in a town with a murder case, missed the excitement of the news vans parking in front of the library. “Do you think they’ve found out anything new?” she asked as she picked up books to re-shelve.

  “I haven’t heard anything,” she said.

  “Officer Kennedy didn’t have any news?”

  “Officer Kennedy?”

  “I heard you two had breakfast yesterday morning at The Café.”

  She should have known. “We were both running on the Trail,” Kelly explained. “We got breakfast. If he knows anything about the case, he didn’t tell me.” That wasn’t a lie. He didn’t know anything because the case wasn’t being investigated the way it should be. But she knew she needed to protect Troy from gossip. He was the new guy on the force, and he wasn’t part of the code of silence.

  Disappointed, Carmela left the circulation desk to put books away. But her speculation soured Kelly’s mood. No one seemed to care whether an injustice was being committed and no one thought about what being locked up could do to a fourteen-year-old boy who wasn’t a street kid. She needed to go somewhere and do something beyond Carmela’s pervasive aura of peevishness.

  “Who’s on the homebound delivery list?” she asked when Carmela returned to the circulation desk.

  The library had gotten a grant to deliver books to homebound patrons. It was Carmela’s job to deliver the books and while she enjoyed doing it when the homebound patrons were people from her church or were known to her, she didn’t like everyone.

  “Mrs. Hammond, and I don’t know why she’s on the list. She should move to the high-rise where she wouldn’t have to climb the stairs. The only reason she doesn’t is because if she lived in the high-rise, she wouldn’t be able to look out her window and see everything that’s going on in Daffodil Alley and—”

  “Do you want me to deliver her books?” Kelly interrupted. Daffodil Alley! Maybe Mrs. Hammond had seen something.

  “She’ll talk your ear off,” Carmela warned, happy to surrender the task but feeling obligated to alert Kelly to the perils that went with it. “You won’t get out of there in less than forty-five minutes.”

  Kelly was already on her feet and had her coat on. “That’s okay. I’ll stop at the bank first and make the deposit, then I
’ll deliver Mrs. Hammond’s books.”

  She put the satchel with the books in her car, went to the bank, and then drove to Lincoln Avenue and parked her car in front of the building where Mrs. Hammond lived on the second floor above the jewelry shop. She rang the doorbell and waited, knowing that it would take the older lady a little while to come down the stairs.

  When she opened the door, Mrs. Hammond was beaming happily. “Oh, Kelly, it’s so good to see you,” she said. “You go first, dear, you’ll be much faster than me.”

  Mrs. Hammond had a tray on the coffee table in front of her living room sofa. “Let me take your coat, dear,” she said. “Is it getting cold out?”

  “It’s not too bad, but it’s November, and we know what that means.”

  “I have tea to warm you up. Now you sit down and show me what you’ve brought me.”

  Mrs. Hammond was a fan of many genres and when choosing her books, Kelly made sure that she brought a variety. Mrs. Hammond nodded with pleasure as Kelly showed her the books.”

  “Oh, that’s a lovely assortment,” she said. “I’ve put the books to be returned by the stairs for you to take when you leave. But I hope you can stay for a bit?”

  “I’m happy to do that,” Kelly said, accepting the cup of tea.

  Kelly and Mrs. Hammond chatted about the books they were reading. Mrs. Hammond’s memory of literature extended back for decades. She remembered when The Catcher in the Rye was considered a disreputable book, and she could chuckle over the scandal that accompanied the publication of Peyton Place.

  “People make such a fuss over what they think is obscene,” Mrs. Hammond said. “But no one is forcing them to read it.”

  “No. Well, I suppose people are easily bothered by things they regard as bad behavior. I imagine that you see quite a few things up here, from your vantage point, that go on below.”

  “I do indeed,” Mrs. Hammond agreed. “Couples are much more open these days. I believe they call it PDAs?”

  Kelly grinned. “You see a lot of public displays of affection?” she asked, amused that the old lady was familiar with the jargon.