“Yes, but I was just saying that we’ve already got old Pastor MacMillan’s—”
“I know, I know.” Tundy shot a harried glance at Susan. “We all heard you, C.J. Now take that big ladle and stir the lemonade. Gotta keep it fresh!”
“But the old pastor—”
“He don’t need any more lemonade,” Tundy said in a voice that brooked no resistance.
“Oh! OK.” Apparently mollified, he crossed to his directed position, took the ladle, opened the top of the cooler, and began to stir the lemonade.
“What we need,” Clara said, “is the new pastor to come and get his lemonade.” She lifted a hand and called, “Yoo-hoo!”
He waved again but continued his conversation.
Susan had been right; they had to be collecting prints. But why?
Susan smiled. “About this break-in?”
“Who told you about that?” Tundy demanded.
Clara and Rose looked guilty.
“I believe there was a police report filed?” Susan said smoothly.
“Uh. Not yet.” Tundy sniffed. “I didn’t want to place one, you know, but the director of the center said we had to. Damn fool idea, too. Nothing was taken.”
“Nothing?”
“Nope,” Rose said. “Though I think they were after my dentures.”
“Why on earth would anyone want your dentures?” Clara demanded.
“They’re good dentures! Doc Rosenblum made ’em herself, and she promised they’re as good or better than the ones you can order off the late-night TV.”
“Doc Rosenblum knows her way around dentures,” C.J. added from where he stood by the cooler, unexpectedly lucid. “She did mine, too.” He used his tongue to pop his dentures out, then popped them right back in. “Never had more comfortable ones in my life.”
Mark wondered if he’d ever get that sight out of his mind.
Susan said, “I could see where dentures might be valuable, but these people … whoever they are … they had to be after something more valuable. Otherwise they would have just broken into Doc Rosenblum’s office and gotten more than one pair.”
Clara, Rose, and Tundy stared at her.
After a moment, Clara siad, “I’ll be damned. I never thought of that.”
“Me neither,” Rose said. “Humph.”
Tundy cocked a brow at Susan. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe they were after something else.”
Rose piped up, “I think they wanted the dentures and our dossiers.”
“Me too,” Clara agreed.
“Dossiers?” Mark asked. “What dossiers?”
Tundy made a noise like a strangled cat. “You two! Don’t be blurtin’ out our secrets!”
Clara blinked. “We didn’t. We didn’t tell Miss Susan a thing about our dossiers. How we had them on every person in town, or how we had pictures of them all, and how we were ferreting out their private information by going through their trash and getting their pri—”
“Clara!” Tundy bellowed.
Clara looked sheepish. “Sorry.”
“Oh, the dossiers,” Susan said in a breezy tone. “I’ve already heard about them.”
“A few people know,” Tundy admitted sourly. “You and Mr. Treymayne here. Oh, and Deloris Fishbine. I don’t know how, though I have my suspicions.” Tundy eyed Clara narrowly, who stared into the sky as if beholding a forgiving angel. After a disgruntled minute, Tundy added, “Miz Pat knows, and the mayor’s girlfriend, that Robin Wright woman, knows. C.J. blurted everything out when she got all huffy because we didn’t want to give her one of our lemonades.”
Susan suspected that even more people knew what was going on with the Murder Mystery Club but wisely didn’t say that aloud. “I wonder how Pat figured it out.”
“I didn’t tell her,” Tundy said.
“Neither did I!” Clara said stoutly.
“I didn’t mention anything to anyone, either,” Rose added.
They all looked at C.J., who was humming a tuneless song as he stirred the lemonade, his hips swishing as he danced a bit.
“Damn it all, this club has got to get some decorum!” Tundy stated. “We can’t be gabbing our top secrets all over town!”
Susan nodded sympathetically. “It’s tough keeping a secret.” She pointed to the box of files at Rose’s feet. “I take it those are the dossiers.”
Rose nodded. “Every last one.”
“Do you think whoever was searching your room might have been looking for them?”
“Why would they look there? We don’t keep them in my room. We keep them— Ooof!” Rose glared at Tundy. “You smacked my back.”
“Sorry. Saw a fly.” Tundy turned to Susan. “Whoever searched Rose’s room turned it inside out just like they did mine.”
Susan said, “It sounds like they were thorough.”
“Cut a hole in my mattress big enough to put your head in,” Rose affirmed.
“Next time they might go for C.J.’s or Clara’s room….” Susan said thoughtfully.
Mark had to hide a grin when Tundy’s eyes widened. He cleared his throat. “Tundy, would you let Susan and me see those dossiers of yours and do a little sleuthing of our own? Maybe we could find out why someone wants those files so badly.”
Rose shook her head. “Hell no, we won’t let you have the records! Why, you’d print up a story about some nonsense, and then someone would want someone dead—”
“Whoa!” Mark interrupted. “What on earth are you talking about?”
Clara pointed a beringed finger in his direction. “Don’t tell us how this scenario works. We’ve seen the shows. We know what’s going to happen: how the second a journalist gets involved, someone starts gettin’ killed.”
“It happened on Columbo,” Tundy said, “and Murder, She Wrote; Rockford Files; Barnaby Jones—all of ’em!”
“Even on that Magnum, P.I.,” Rose added.
“Wooee, he’s a hottie!” Clara fanned herself.
“So don’t even ask for our dossiers,” Tundy concluded. “We don’t know if we can trust you, and even if we could, we don’t want to be the cause of no murders.”
Mark frowned. “Tundy Spillers, you know me and you know you can trust me.”
“I know you a little,” she said grudgingly.
“You know me a lot. You were my sister’s maid for two years!”
“True.”
“And then you lived with me and my mother when you came to take care of her when she was sick.”
“Which was the hardest job I ever had.” Tundy looked at Clara. “After taking care of cranky old Mrs. Treymayne, you three are a piece of pie.”
“I know,” Clara said. “She used to visit us at the home and it drove us all crazy. Her daughter Roxie is nice, though.”
Rose agreed. “But her momma, whew. She was a piece of work. We used to hide in the broom closet if we saw her coming.”
“I liked the broom closet,” C.J. added from the lemonade cooler, a wistful tone in his voice.
“We all did,” Rose agreed.
“That was a good closet,” Clara added. “Smelled like lemon wax.”
“Besides,” Tundy said, eyeing Mark, “you haven’t always been a good judge of character. Look at that woman you married.”
Beside him, he could feel Susan stiffen. “I’m a much better judge of character now.”
Tundy turned to Clara and said in an undertone, “Arlene had a pretty face, but whew, she was hard as nails. She had the biggest fake boobs I ever saw, and she a little bitty thing, too. It’s a wonder she didn’t tip over and fall face-first when she walked, ’cause she sure had huge—”
“Tundy, I think that’s enough.” Mark tried not to look Susan’s way. He could just imagine the disgust on her face. “My past marriage is just that—in the past.”
“Besides,” Susan chimed in, “we really want to hear more about those dossiers. May we just take a quick look at them to see what you have that someone might be looking for?”
&n
bsp; Clara sniffed. “We can solve our own mysteries, thank you very much! Why, that’s what a Murder Mystery Club does, is solve mysteries.”
“That’s right,” Rose said, looking down her beak of a nose at Mark. “What sort of investigators would we be if we handed our secret information over to someone the first time he asked?”
“Especially,” Tundy added in a dark voice, “to people like you.”
Clara blinked. “People like Miss Susan?” She leaned toward Tundy. “Are we against redheads? ’Cause if we are—” She glanced up at Tundy’s own red hair and then over to Rose’s red wig and gulped. “We’re in a heap of hurt.”
“No!” Tundy said, looking offended. “I mean the media. They work for the newspaper, remember?”
“Oh.” Clara looked at Susan and Mark with a wistful expression. “I sort of like havin’ my picture in the paper.”
“And we love having it there,” Susan said without missing a beat. “In fact, if you’re interested, I’d love to put you all on the front page selling your lemonade.”
“The front page?” Rose patted her crooked wig while C.J. said, “Hot damn! I like bein’ in the paper!”
“I don’t know about that,” Tundy said. “This here’s our undercover operation and I don’t think we should—” She caught Susan’s gaze and clamped her mouth closed.
“Undercover?” Susan asked gently. “The lemonade stand? What information were you collecting here?”
“No! I didn’t say ‘undercover.’ I meant to say ah, under, ah, under butter operation.”
Clara blinked behind her huge glasses. “Tundy Spillers, that doesn’t even make sense.”
Rose shook her head. “Nope. Not a bit.”
C.J. scratched his head. “Under butter? We don’t have any butter here.”
Tundy grimaced. “C.J., just forget it. I was trying to find a way to explain our situation to the newspaper folks.”
C.J.’s face cleared. “Ah! Just tell them we’re selling lemonade to get people’s fingerprints for their dossiers—”
“C.J.!” Clara, Rose, and Tundy snapped almost in one voice.
He jumped. “What?”
Mark and Susan exchanged glances. For one delicious moment, all was forgotten between them except the story. Mark welcomed the return to their old ways with enthusiasm. Susan’s theory had been correct; the club was collecting fingerprints and more on the entire town.
“Damn it, guess the cat’s out of the bag now,” Tundy grumped.
Susan nodded. “Yup. Might as well tell us everything. We’re going to find out one way or another.”
“You’re relentless,” Tundy said with grudging admiration.
“I try,” Susan agreed.
“Can I tell her?” Clara asked in a chipper voice.
Tundy sighed. “Go ahead. We’ve been worn down. I … Oh, look! The new preacher’s leaving. We can’t let that happen. C’mon, Rose, put on a glove and grab a glass. We gotta get his prints!” Tundy and Rose hurried off.
Clara looked around as if expecting to see men in trench coats peeking from nearby trees. Satisfied none were there, she turned back to Susan. “Promise you won’t print this in the paper? At least not until we’re finished with our investigation. We don’t want to spook any potential murder suspects as may be lurking about town.”
“I promise.”
“Good! It’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys, so we thought we’d just investigate everyone.”
“I see,” Susan said, nodding.
“That way when a crime is committed, we’ll already have all of the preliminary work done.” Clara reached under the table and pulled out the plastic file box Rose had been carrying, then flipped it open to expose an array of pink and blue folders.
“Pink and blue?”
“Pink for women, blue for men.”
“Of course,” Mark muttered.
Clara grabbed the first folder and flipped it open. “This one’s on—” She squinted at the page. “Ethan Markham.”
“That’s my neighbor.” Susan looked surprised.
Clara smirked. “We know.” She placed the open folder on the lemonade table. “Here we have a basic info sheet, including name, address, work, family info, education—anything we can find out.” She flipped a page. “And then here we have a photo and—”
“Wait.” Susan looked closer. A picture of Ethan had been stapled to a piece of paper. “He’s bending over his bike. You can’t see his face.”
Clara chuckled. “Me and Rose took that picture. Thought we had one with his face, too, but when we got home we couldn’t find it, so we used this one instead.” She picked up the paper and held it a few inches from her face, squinting through her glasses. “That’s OK, though. We’ll recognize him from this angle.”
She handed it to Susan, who looked at it and handed it to Mark. He frowned. “No one would know this was Ethan.”
“I would.” Susan plucked the paper from his hands and placed it back in the folder. “What else do you have here?”
“Birth and marriage records. We got copies just by sending in requests online.”
“You didn’t!”
“Not for everyone, of course. Depends on what state they’re from. And then we got phone numbers, addresses, and names of kids and kin and such. Finally, we’ve got financial records, like bank and pay deposit stubs.”
“How did you get those?”
“Went through their trash, of course.”
“That was fun,” C.J. said. “I like going through people’s trash.”
“And,” Clara continued, pointing to a card stapled inside each folder, “now we’ve got fingerprints. Of course, we had a bit of a problem knowing if we had left or right ones, so we just stuck them in wherever.”
Susan looked at the fingerprint card. Ethan’s name was printed in shaky block letters across the top. Below it, a set of fingerprints had been pain-stakingly pressed onto the card. “According to this card, he has two thumbs on the right side.”
“Does he?” Clara peered at the card. “Hot damn!”
Mark cleared his throat. “Pardon me, Miss Clara, but what good are those fingerprints? I mean … do you know how to match them?”
Clara brightened. “Sure do! We bought a crime scene kit off the Internet and it came with a DVD that shows everything! We know how to take prints, how to put them on the cards, and how to match them. Although—” She looked over her shoulder, then bent forward to whisper, “The next time we solve a murder, when we need these prints read, we’ve decided we’ll turn ’em over to the FBI and let them do it for us.”
“I bet they’ll be happy to know that.”
“Yup! And they can sort out that right/left thing.” Clara chuckled. “It’s amazing what technology can do these days. Why, the other day on CSI, their scientist man figured out what color and type of lipstick a woman was wearing just by adding an eyedropper of something to a vial.”
Susan patted the older woman’s hand. “Clara, I don’t think all of those tests and stuff they show you on CSI are real.”
Clara sniffed. “Of course they’re real! Why, if they lied about something like that, they’d get sued by someone.”
Susan could tell from the way Clara’s face had turned fire truck red that the older woman didn’t agree. She merely said, “Boy, that Gil Grissom is sexy, isn’t he?”
Clara’s face cleared like the sun appearing from behind the cloud. “He sure is! I’d do him in a heartbeat.” Her smile dimmed a moment. “It’s sad he left the show, though.”
“I think he’ll be back.”
“I hope so.” Clara tapped the dossier in front of her. “If I was a crook, I’d be afraid these days, they’ve gotten so good at figuring things out. Not like the old times, when crooks like Dillinger used to be able to pull off capers and get away with it.”
Mark frowned. “Wasn’t Dillinger shot and killed in front of a movie theater by the cops?”
“That’s what he wanted people
to think.”
“Really?”
“Of course! He’s in a criminal protection plan somewhere. At one time, I thought he might be living in the assisted-living center. There was a J. D. Illinger who was being transferred in, and I just knew—” She shook her head sadly. “But it wasn’t.”
Susan couldn’t help asking, “What gave it away?”
“The breasts. She was Jane Denise Illinger.” Clara shrugged. “One of those odd coincidences. Unless—do you think they might have given him surgery?”
“No,” Mark said baldly.
Clara looked disappointed. “Probably not.”
Susan looked at the box of files. “Clara, could you let me borrow your files just for a few nights?”
“Tundy wouldn’t like it. Since someone started breaking in on us, she sleeps with those things under her be—” Clara clapped a hand over her mouth, but Tundy was still across the square.
“Could I take just a few? I used to work as the county dispatcher, and I may know a few things you could add to these folders to make them more complete. I did all of the paperwork for the sheriff’s office for years.”
Clara frowned. “You’d add good stuff?”
“Oh, yeah. Lots of good stuff.”
“Hmm. I don’t suppose it would hurt if you just took a few. But you can’t tell Tundy. I like her and she’s a fine van driver, but good gosh, she’s bossy. Sometimes Rose and I sit out in the garden just to get a breather from her now and then.”
“No problem!” In just a few moments, Susan had appropriated a good dozen of the folders, and she and Mark said good-bye to Clara and headed to the newspaper building.
“What are you going to do with those?” Mark asked.
“Someone wants them badly enough to break into the assisted-living center to find them, so I’m going to go through each and see what’s really going on.”
“And then?”
“And then we’ll see if we need to write another shake-the-hornets’-nest story.”
Mark groaned. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
She smiled, and though she wanted to slip her arm through his, she didn’t. For her own peace of mind, she’d tried to establish some distance between her and Mark since their talk and so far, she’d succeeded. What she hadn’t been able to do was erase the sense of loss that dogged her like a rainy day. It was funny how he’d become such a big part of her life in only a short few months, and yet he had. Far more than she wanted him to know.