Page 19 of Killer on the First Page
“Again...”
“Shouldn’t you be at the store, helping your husband?” said Bea, dropping that last word unnecessarily hard. As much as she loved having her idol as a guest in her attic, Bea had long thought Miranda’s place was not in the B&B, but with Edgar.
“He’s not my—” Miranda caught herself. “It’s...”Don’t say complicated. “... complex.”
“I see,” said Bea, but of course she didn’t.
Although best known as the karate-chopping church pastor she’d played for six years on network TV, Miranda Abbott was a classically trained actor who had trod the boards at the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis before being discovered by Hollywood. As such, she was well versed in the actor’s craft: movement, voice, dance, diction—and swordplay. She knew a thrust from a parry, and she countered Bea’s unstated suggestion with one of her own. “And what of you and Ned Buckley?”
Bea was instantly on the defensive. “What do you mean?”
“Come now. Ned practically lives here!” It was true. Happy Rock’sfinest was so often at Bea’s that the locals referred to it as HRPD Station Number Two. “Why can’t he move in here, save himself the drive back every night to that sad little basement he rents behind the flower shoppe?”
Bea, blushing to the bone, said, “Ned and I are friends. Old friends. We went to school together. He was Bob’s best friend.”
She’d managed to say “friend” three times in one breath.
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much!” said Miranda.
Andrew, however, was on Bea’s side. He said softly, “I don’t know. Sometimes moving in with someone can ruin everything. Too much of a good thing.” He looked away. Far away.
Three bruised souls. Three hearts in search of love.
“Hey, everybody. Where’s the funeral?”
It was Ned Buckley, in uniform as always. Was he ever out of uniform? Miranda wondered. He’d popped into Bea’s unannounced, as was his habit.
“Why so glum? Usually this place is full of chatter. Hey, is that peach cobbler I smell?”
Bea’s mood brightened with his arrival. It always did. “I made it ’specially for the do tonight.”
“I saw Edgar’s Jeep out front,” said Ned, pulling up a chair.
Andrew perked up. “I drove!”
“Good on you,” said Ned.
“Working on a big case?” Andrew asked, fascinated as always by Ned Buckley, the small-town cop of lore.
“Could say that. Some rope went missing from behind Owen’s garage.”
“How would anyone know?” asked Miranda. “Owen’s garage is a heaping pile of discarded parts. It’s practically on the tour route.The Teetering Mountain of Happy Rock.”
“That’s what I said when I went to investigate. I said, ‘Owen, howwould anyone ever know?’ and he said, ‘I know every spare part and every tool on my lot and where I threw them, and I’m telling you, Ned, some son-of-a-gun—though he used saltier language, naturally—has walked off with a coil of my best rope.’ Says he’s going to put an insurance claim in for it. Says he bought it second-hand on a handshake deal for twenty-six dollars, and I said, ‘Heck, the legal fees alone are gonna cost you more than that.’ But you know Owen: once he gets a notion into his head, you can’t shake him off it.”
Andrew was thoroughly charmed. “The Case of the Missing Rope,” he said. Small-town crime! You couldn’t beat it.
“Some grease went missing, too,” said Ned. “Which is to say, we may have a serial thief on our hands.”
“Oh! Or it could be an orangutan.” Bea had a way stopping conversations in their tracks.
“An... orangutan?” said Ned.
“I read a locked-room mystery where the culprit was an orangutan. With a razor.”
“Um, sure, Bea. Could be a primate on the prowl, I suppose. Though I would think poor inventory management would be the more likely solution.”
Miranda remembered a similar twist in aPastor Fran Investigatesepisode. One of Lachlan Todd’s screenplays, where the murder happenedinsidean orangutan cage and the killer was ahumandressed as an ape, who was in turn dressed up as a human. What was he doing lurking about Happy Rock anyway, our Luckless Lachlan?
