By The Howling Read online

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Todd said, now all willingness to help. “Anything to help in finding Susan. I’m sure Joyce has a key to the house. I’ll just—”

  “No need for that. I have a key myself—that the Wellses gave me. But I want to do all of this properly. I have a form here for you to sign, if you will, giving permission.”

  While Todd leaned over the coffee-table to sign the paper, Charlotte asked him several questions about whether he knew of anything that would help explain Susan’s absence, and, since he couldn’t, if he’d have Joyce contact her if she could be any more helpful—which he said he would.

  “I’ll talk to Joyce later myself, when she feels up to it,” Charlotte said, “and if we haven’t found Susan in the meantime. It could be that she just went off on a whim for a couple of days, but that doesn’t seem likely as she had arranged a meeting at the arts center not long before she went missing.”

  “Will that be all?” Todd replied, obviously keen for her to leave. “I had planned on cleaning out the gutters this afternoon. Now, it looks like rain, so I’ll have to do it another time.” He said it as if it was Charlotte’s fault that it had clouded up and started to sprinkle intermittently since she had appeared on his porch.

  “No, there’s one other thing you could help me with. There was a woman in the crowd out in front of Brenda’s house yesterday. Standing apart from the others and across the street, closer to the entrance to the village than the others were standing. She looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t identify her. Do you remember seeing her and know who she is?”

  “That could have been Mrs. Smith. Edith Smith,” Todd answered after giving it a bit of thought. “She’s reclusive—and a bit eccentric, I’ve heard.”

  “Edith . . . Smith. Rather an innocuous name. And is she a long-term resident? Despite supposedly being mayor here, I’m only recently becoming aware of how long some have lived here—and,” Charlotte dug in with a sharp look at Todd, “how intertwined some of their lives are.”

  Todd reddened up, but he didn’t venture a retort. “She’s only been here five or six years. A widow, I understand. She lives at the Clagett farm just outside the village. The Clagetts were here for generations and all died out, I think. I’m not aware that she has any connection to them. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m not sure. My mind is just telling me that it might be important. As I said, she seems quite familiar to me, and my brain is connecting her with something that tells me could connect with the events here of the last couple of days.”

  “Why don’t you just go out and talk to her then?” Todd asked.

  “I just might do that,” Charlotte said as she worked her way out of the overstuffed chair and got to her feet. “I might do some checking first, though,” she said without revealing that whenever she could avoid it, she didn’t go asking questions without already knowing what the answers were. “With what little I’ve got to run on now,” she continued, “I’m not sure what I’d even ask her. But for now, I will take a look in the Wells’ house. If I find anything I think you should know about, I’ll let you know. And I also have to feed Sam—something I’d like to discuss with Susan when she finally pops up. Luckily, Brenda and I stopped at a pet store in Easton yesterday and I bought some dog food. Otherwise, thanks to Susan, Sam would be one hungry and neglected puppy now.”

  Todd was thoroughly cowed as Charlotte sailed through the foyer and out onto the front porch and scanned the houses up and down the street for the reward of seeing curtains ruffle at the windows.

  Ah, the comfort of small town living, she thought as she steamed up the street between raindrops to feed Sam and then get into the Wells’ house. She was itching to see what was inside. As she walked and felt a dozen eyes follow her, though, she was slightly discontent that her cover had been blown. The locals had known she worked in the government before coming here—and she’d mentioned to Rachel that it was in a police investigative capacity—but now they knew the depth and extent of her involvement, and she felt she never again would be able to pass as simply a local, disinterested retiree.

  Sam taken care of, with several more minutes taken in walking him and giving some attention enjoyed by dog and human alike, Charlotte descended on the Wells’ house like a clipper in full sail. She felt guilty that she wasn’t going to the house as quickly as possible, but she felt a responsibility to Sam too—and she knew he was a completely innocent bystander to whatever was going on.

  Her fears—and, frankly her assumption—were fulfilled, although not as drastically as she thought they might be, when she got into the house. There was no aura about it of an intended departure. There was no evidence of Susan in the flesh, however, which was both a relief and a deepening of the mystery surrounding her absence. Charlotte did a cursory, but expert inventory of the signs and timeline of Susan’s last presence here. Papers from the last two days, including the morning Susan was to meet Charlotte and the other art judges at the arts center, were on the front stoop—something that Charlotte hadn’t noticed on that day, but then she remembered that her own local newspaper hadn’t been delivered until the afternoon—something that deliverymen certainly wouldn’t be permitted to do in Annapolis, but that seemed to be tolerated here in the hinterlands. The dishes in the drain board were more evidently from a dinner than a breakfast. The living areas of the first floor were in somewhat of a comfortable disarray, which indicated that Susan hadn’t left on any intentional journey of any length. TV programs for the evening before last were circled on the TV guide on the coffee-table in front of the television, giving the impression that Susan had planned to be watching television that night.

  Upstairs was even more revealing, and it was here that the mystery deepened and Charlotte began to link up some threads—which always was the beginning of the end in her investigations. There was no evidence that Susan’s closet was stripped of clothes and an apparently full, matched set of women’s luggage was lurking at the back of the walk-in closet. Lingerie and blouses were strewn around enough to indicate both that Susan wasn’t particularly tidy and that she hadn’t planned on being gone for any great length of time. And, most telling, the bed was made and a nightgown and robe were laid out on the bed, indicating, as the evidence downstairs did, that Susan had last been here the evening previous to the day her absence was noted.

  Charlotte’s thoughts went back to that night. She remembered waking to the howling of a dog—most likely Sam. She tried to remember the direction that had come from, and she thought perhaps it was from the direction of Brenda’s house, the lot where the murdered woman was found being just beyond that. Charlotte didn’t want to read too much into that, though, as she recognized that her mind might just be trying to rationalize events. What was more telling, though, was finding Sam on her doorstep, his leash attached and his paws muddy, on the following morning. If she’d been sharp, she would have collected some of the mud from the crevices in his paws. That might have linked him—and, therefore Susan—to the death scene by Brenda’s house. But Charlotte herself had washed away that possible evidence when she had bathed Sam later that day.

  As she was thinking these thoughts, Charlotte walked into the second bedroom upstairs—and stumbled onto something that she hadn’t, in her remotest conjecturing considered but that now became one more interlocking piece of the puzzle, a flash of light in the darkness.

  The room was strewn with items one did not associate with bedrooms. She would only have been curious at the eclectic nature of the furnishings and probably would have written it off to the bedroom being used more as a storeroom than a guest bedroom—if her eyes hadn’t gone immediately to the Japanese porcelain tea set that sat in the middle of one of the twin beds—her Japanese porcelain tea set, the one that was missing from the buffet under her dining room window.

  The first thought that entered Charlotte’s mind was, I’ve got to get Grady Tarbell to the antique shop in Easton to confirm that the stamp album I found there is his.


  What she did next, was to scoop an item up from the other twin bed and march back up River Street to the Vales’ B&B.

  This time it was Joyce who answered the door, and as soon as she saw what Charlotte was carrying, she broke down into tears. Todd appeared and took Joyce by the shoulders and guided her back into the house. He turned his head to Charlotte and wearily said, “You’d better come in, I suppose.”

  “So, this is your set of silver? You confirm that?” Charlotte asked, when Joyce had stopped blubbering and was sunk into the commodious overstuffed chair Charlotte had occupied on her previous visit. Charlotte was perched on the edge of a hard Windsor side chair, trying not to make it bear all of her weight.

  “Yes, it’s ours,” Joyce answered in a small voice.

  “And you realize that I found it in the Wells’ house, along with other property that was probably stolen from houses in the village—including something of mine that I know was taken?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you give this silver to Susan?”

  “No.”

  “And so we understand what the implications of that are, don’t we?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Does this have anything to do with your secretiveness on Susan being your daughter? And is this why there was the estrangement between you two that I have sensed?” Actually Todd had told Charlotte about the estrangement, but Charlotte was too polite to tattle on him. Todd seemed to realize that and gave Charlotte an appreciative, if startled, look.

  “Susan was . . . difficult . . . from childhood. And she was frequently in trouble. I had hoped when she came back here . . . but . . .”

  Joyce just let her voice trail off, and, as she rose to leave, Charlotte tried to give her what little hope she could. “This doesn’t reflect well on Susan, of course, but it does give us some added hope that she is alive. That is something you can hang on to; I know this is trying for you.”

  Todd looked up. “Oh, how does this give us hope?”

  “It gives us some rationale we didn’t have before on why Susan would leave virtually in the middle of the night on her own volition—and thus that she might not be in quite the harm’s way we supposed.” And then, when neither of the Vales said anything, while they were digesting and gaining strength from this hope, Charlotte continued. “Did Susan talk to either of you that night—the evening before she was found to have gone missing? Did she mention anything about seeing an unfamiliar woman in a car on River Street that day?”

  “No, we didn’t talk to her,” Todd said. Joyce shook her head in agreement. Todd went on, “But what would that have to do with anything?”

  “I saw such a woman that day.”

  “And you think that maybe she was there watching for Susan—that something Susan had done had brought the woman to town and caused Susan to flee?” Todd asked.

  “It’s possible. We have so little to go on that every possibility has to be examined.”

  “And do you know who this woman is? Do you think that she could lead us to Susan.”

  “No, I don’t know who she is. But, yes, there might be a link.” But then Charlotte shut up. There indeed was a possibility that there might be a link, but to say anything further about it to the Vales would surely dash any hope that Charlotte had given to them. There was a good chance that, given time to think, the Vales would make the connection themselves. But Charlotte didn’t want to tell them that there might be a connection between Susan and the woman found dead on the wooded lot across River Street from their B&B.

  Exiting the B&B and turning to walk back to her house, Charlotte’s eyes first went to the police car parked in front of the arts center and then to the figures of Jane Cranford and Deputy David Burch that were standing on the walk beside the cruiser. As she approached, David hailed her, but it was Jane who informed her in a tense, breathy voice, “They’ve been taken, Charlotte. Sometime last night, someone entered the arts center by one of the back doors and took several of the paintings on loan from the Barnes.”

  “Last night?” Charlotte asked. “Forced entry?” She addressed this last to David, who opened his mouth to respond, but Jane was still gushing forth in her excitement.

  “No. The door looks like it may have been jimmied, Deputy Burch said, but the markings don’t match. He thinks it was someone who had a key but who wanted to make it appear like a burglary. And the funniest thing—whoever it was knew where to find the casings for the paintings and knew exactly which ones went with the paintings they took. Do you know what that—?”

  “Well, for one thing,” Charlotte interjected, as both Jane and David gave her their rapt attention, “I think it means that Susan Purcell is still alive.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Yes, that’s mine,” Grady said when the stamp album from the Goldsborough Street antique store in Easton was shown to him. Gathered around him, in addition to the distressed store owner, who was twittering and flittering around like a wounded bird caught in a trap—which, in fact, he probably was—were Deputy Burch, Charlotte, and Brenda, the latter of whom had begged to tag along so that she and Charlotte could lunch and boutique crawl in Easton again.

  Leaving Grady and Brenda to smooth over the situation with the store proprietor, Charlotte and David Burch moved on to King’s Antiques, which Charlotte had seen now displayed an “open” sign in the window.

  “After this, I need to talk to you—alone,” David said. “That’s why I asked Ms. Boynton to stay with Grady.”

  They entered the store to be met halfway in by a rotund, red-faced little man, all smiles and welcome—at least until he saw the badge David flashed at him. Then it was like seeing water going down a drain as his face closed down into a wash of wariness. Both David and Charlotte had seen this happen hundreds of times before, and there was no doubt in the minds of either that they were face to face with a fence in stolen goods.

  “Yes, yes, I sold that stamp album to Mitch,” Stan King acknowledged. “It’s more in line with his stock then mine. Of course I had no idea it was stolen.”

  “Yes, I’d be happy to help identify who I bought it from. She’s a recognized local art broker. Yes, yes, that’s her,” he said as Charlotte showed him the photograph Joyce had given her. “Cynthia Black. No, no, of course I didn’t know she really was someone named Susan Purcell. She had a card, yes. But, no, I don’t think I kept it.”

  “Oh those?” he asked nervously as, after she had noticed the wooden art cases propped up beside the back edge of the counter, King was asked where they had come from—and when. “Yes, I did receive those on consignment from Cynthia—from this Purcell woman.”

  “Recently?”

  “When? Why, just this morning.”

  While David and Stan King watched, with David carefully stationing himself where he could move quickly if King made a run for it either out of the front of the shop or into the back rooms, Charlotte opened a case that was familiar to her—one that she had handled before.

  “Do you recognize a genuine Vormeer when you see one, Mr. King?” she asked as she carefully slid the precious landscape oil from the safety of its case. “I’m sure you do—and I don’t doubt you know that this one belongs to the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia.”

  There was little that King could say, and they stood there in a glum little triangle while David Burch called in the town police and they waited for them to arrive.

  After King was in custody, David took Charlotte off to the side.

  “I’m not surprised the Purcell woman has been unloading stolen goods here. The Easton police have seen the car you described as the one the dead woman was in when you saw her on the street in Hopewell. It’s been spotted twice, but they haven’t managed to stop it yet. Both times they said a young woman was driving.”

  “I’d bet it was Susan Purcell,” Charlotte said.

  “I wouldn’t take that bet. But if she’s here—and it appears she is, at least as late as this morning—we’ll nab her eventually. If she�
�s driving around in the car, she must not know that we have identified it. But there is something we’ve identified.”

  “What?”

  “The victim. Her name was Pamela Smith, and she’s a fraud investigator for the GML Insurance Company. Worked out of New York. They are big on art and life insurance.”

  Bells rang in Charlotte’s brain, but she didn’t quite know why—except for the obvious, which David went straight to.

  “So, it isn’t looking too good for Susan Purcell, is it?”

  “No, a lot of things are coming together,” Charlotte answered. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t seem fully satisfied. But that didn’t matter. Charlotte hadn’t gotten to where she had in the FBI for not being thorough. This case seemed to be coming together, but there were still some i’s to dot and t’s to cross.

  “And we’re talking murder here,” David said. “The medical examiner said she was dead before she went into the water. Blunt object trauma he said. Our teams did a thorough search of the area, so whatever was used to kill her was probably brought in by the killer and taken out again.”

  “Here are the keys to the Wells house, where Susan was living,” Charlotte said. “I guess that’s an investigation scene now, and you’d better get a team over there to do a closer search for evidence than I was able to do this morning.”

  “Will do.”

  “Oh, and David . . . ask them to be careful of the Japanese porcelain tea set on the guest bed, would you? That’s mine.”

  * * * *

  “I felt I needed to talk to you, but I didn’t know how to begin. That’s why I wanted to come with you to Easton today.”

  Charlotte and Brenda had started off sitting in the front window alcove of the tea shop on South Washington Street in the shadow of the looming Tidewater Inn across the street, but they had moved back into the interior when it became obvious that those walking down the bricked sidewalk recognized Brenda. The movie tabloids had already located her, at least generally, on the Eastern Shore, so the local residents were on the lookout for the famous actress.