Invisible Prey Page 11

  “It’s missing?” Lucas asked, sitting up, listening now.

  “We couldn’t find it,” Coombs said. “It used to be in a built-in bookshelf with glass doors. The police wouldn’t let us look everywhere, and she could have moved it, but it’s been in that bookcase since she bought the house. Everything else seems to be there, but the music box is gone.”

  “Do you have a description?” Lucas asked. “Was it insured?”

  “Wait a minute, I’m not done,” Coombs said, holding up an index finger. Lucas noticed that all her fingers, including her thumbs, had rings, and some had two or three. “There was another woman, also rich, and old, in Chippewa Falls. That’s in Wisconsin.”

  “I know,” Lucas said. “I’ve been there.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “To drink beer, I bet.”

  “No. It was for a police function,” Lucas lied. He’d gone on a brewery tour.

  She was suspicious, but continued: “Sometimes Grandma and Connie Bucher would go over to this other lady’s house for quilt group. They weren’t in the same quilt groups, but the two groups intersected. Anyway, this other woman—her name was Donaldson—was shot to death in her kitchen. She was an antique collector. Grandma said the killers were never caught. This was four years ago.”

  Lucas stared at her for a moment, then asked, “Is your grandma’s house open? Have the St. Paul police finished with it?”

  “No. We’re not allowed in yet. They took us through to see if there was anything unusual, or disturbed, other than the blood spot on the carpet. But see, the deal always was, when Grandma died, her son and daughter would divide up everything equally, but since I was the only granddaughter, I got the music box. It was like, a woman-thing. I looked for it when the police took us through, and it was missing.”

  LUCAS DID a drum tap with his pencil. “How’d you get down here?”

  She blinked a couple of times, and then said, “I may look edgy to you, Mr. Davenport, but I do own a car.”

  “All right.” Lucas picked up the phone, said to Carol, “Get me the number of the guy who’s investigating the death of a woman named Coombs, which is spelled…”

  He looked at Coombs and she nodded and said, “C-O-O-M-B-S.”

  “…In St. Paul. I’ll be on my cell.” He dropped the phone on the hook, took his new Italian leather shoulder rig out of a desk drawer, put it on, took his jacket off the file cabinet, slipped into it. “You can meet me at your grandma’s house or you can ride with me. If you ride with me, you can give me some more detail.”

  “I’ll ride with you,” she said. “That’ll also save gasoline.”

  As they headed out of the office, Carol called after them, “Hey, wait. I’ve got Jerry Wilson on his cell phone.”

  Lucas went back and took the phone. “I’d like to take a look at the Coombs place, if you’re done with it. I’ve got her granddaughter over here, she thinks maybe something else is going on…uh-huh. Just a minute.” He looked at Coombs. “Have you got a key?”

  She nodded.

  Back to the phone: “She’s got a key. Yeah, yeah, I’ll call you.”

  He hung up and said, “We’re in.”

  COOMBS HAD PARKED on the street. She got a bag and a bottle of Summer Sunrise Herbal Tea from her salt-rotted Chevy Cavalier and carried it over to the Porsche. The Porsche, she said, as she buckled in, was a “nice little car,” and asked if he’d ever driven a Corolla, “which is sorta like this. My girlfriend has one.”

  “That’s great,” Lucas said, as they eased into traffic.

  She nodded. “It’s nice when people drive small cars. It’s ecologically sensitive.” Lucas accelerated hard enough to snap her neck, but she didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she looked around, fiddling with her bottle of tea. “Where’re the cup holders?”

  “They left them off,” Lucas said, not moving his jaw.

  Halfway to Grandma’s house, she said, “I drove a stick shift in Nepal.”

  “Nepal?”

  “Yeah. A Kia. Have you ever driven a Kia?”

  Being a detective, Lucas began to suspect that Gabriella Coombs, guileless as her cornflower eyes might have been, was fucking with him.

  THE STREETS WERE quiet, the lawns were green and neat, the houses were older but well kept. Lucas might have been in a thousand houses like Marilyn Coombs’s, as a uniformed cop, trying to keep the peace, or to find a window peeper, or to take a break-in report, or figure out who stole the lawn mower. They left the car on the street at the bottom of the front lawn, and climbed up to the porch.

  “Not a bad place,” Lucas said. “I could see living my life around here.”

  “She got very lucky,” Coombs said. The comment struck Lucas as odd, but as Coombs was pushing through the front door, he let it go.

  THEY STARTED WITH a fast tour, something Lucas did mostly to make sure there was nobody else around. Marilyn Coombs’s house was tidy without being psychotic about it, smelled of cooked potatoes and cauliflower and eggplant and pine-scent spray, and old wood and insulation. There were creaking wooden floors with imitation oriental carpets, and vinyl in the kitchen; brown walls; doilies; three now-dried-out oatmeal cookies sitting on a plate on the kitchen table.

  An old electric organ was covered with gilt-framed photographs of people staring at the camera, wearing clothes from the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. The earliest were small, and black-and-white. Then a decade or so later, color arrived, and now was fading. The organ looked as though it probably hadn’t been played since 1956, and sat under a framed painting of St. Christopher carrying the Christ Child across the river.

  There was a blood spot, about the size of a saucer, on the floor next to the bottom of the stairway.

  “They took the ball,” Coombs said, pointing to the bottom post on the stairway. The post had a hole in it, where a mounting pin would fit. “They supposedly found hair and blood on it.”

  “Huh.”

  He looked up the stairs, and could see it. Had seen it, once or twice, an older woman either killing or hurting herself in a fall down the stairs. The stairs were wooden, with a runner. The runner had become worn at the edges of the treads, and Coombs might have been hurrying down to the phone and had caught her foot on a worn spot…

  “Could have been a fall,” Lucas said.

  “Except for the missing music box,” Coombs said. “And her relationships with the other mysteriously murdered women.”

  “Let’s look for the box.”

  THEY LOOKED and didn’t find it. The box, Coombs said, was a distinctive black-lacquered rectangle about the size of a ream of paper, and about three reams thick. On top of the box, a mother-of-pearl inlaid decoration showed a peasant girl, a peasant boy, and some sheep. “Like the boy was making a choice between them,” Coombs said, still with the guileless voice.

  When you opened the box, she said, four painted wooden figures, a boy, a girl, and two sheep, popped up, and then shuttled around in a circle, one after the other, as music played from beneath them.

  “Is the boy following the girl, or the sheep?” Lucas asked.

  “The girl,” Coombs said, showing the faintest of smiles.

  “I think we’re okay, then,” Lucas said.

  Although they didn’t find the box, they did find what Coombs said, and Lucas conceded might possibly be, a faint rectangle in the light dust on the surface of the bookshelf where the box should have been.

  “Right there,” Coombs said. “We need a light…” She dragged a floor lamp over, pulled off the shade, replugged it, turned it on. “See?”

  The light raked the shelf, which had perhaps a week’s accumulation of dust. There may have been a rectangle. “Maybe,” Lucas said.

  “For sure,” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Only two possibilities,” Coombs said. “Grandma was killed for the music box, or the cops stole it. Pick one.”

  THE HOUSE DIDN’T have anything else that looked to Lucas like expensive anti
ques or pottery, although it did have a jumble of cracked and reglued Hummel figurines; and it had quilts. Coombs had decorated all the rooms except the living room with a variety of quilts—crib quilts and single-bed crazy quilts, carefully attached to racks made of one-by-two pine, the racks hung from nails in the real-plaster walls.

  “No quilts are missing?” Lucas asked.

  “Not that I know of. My mom might. She’s started quilting a bit. Grandma was a fanatic.”

  “It doesn’t seem like there’d be much more space for them,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah…I wish one of the Armstrongs were left. I’d like to go to India for a while.”

  “The Armstrongs?”

  “Grandma…this was ten years ago…Grandma bought a bunch of quilts at an estate sale and they became famous,” Coombs said. “Biggest find of her life. She sold them for enough to buy this house. I mean, I don’t know exactly how much, but with what she got for her old house, and the quilts, she bought this one.”

  They were at the top of the stairs, about to come down, and Coombs said, “Look over here.”

  She stepped down the hall to a built-in cabinet with dark oak doors and trim, and pulled a door open. The shelves were packed with transparent plastic cases the size of shoe boxes, and the cases were stuffed with pieces of fabric, with quilting gear, with spools of thread, with needles and pins and scissors and tapes and stuff that Lucas didn’t recognize, but that he thought might be some kind of pattern-drawing gear.

  The thread was sorted by hue, except for the stuff in two sewing containers. Containers, because only one of them was the traditional woven-wicker sewing basket; the other was a semitransparent blue tackle box. All the plastic boxes had been labeled with a black Sharpie, in a neat school script: “Threads, red.” “Threads, blue.”

  “A lot of stuff,” Lucas said. He put a finger in the wicker sewing basket, pulled it out an inch. More spools, and the spools looked old to him. Collector spools? Which tripped off a thought. “Do you think these Armstrongs, would they have been classified as antiques?”

  “No, not really,” Coombs said. “They were made in what, the 1930s? I don’t think that’s old enough to be an antique, but I really don’t know. I don’t know that much about the whole deal, except that Grandma got a lot of money from them, because of the curse thing.”

  “The curse thing.”

  “Yes. The quilts had curses sewn into them. They became…what?” She had to think about it for a second, then said, “I suppose they became feminist icons.”

  LIKE THIS, SHE SAID:

  Grandma Coombs had once lived in a tiny house on Snelling Avenue. Her husband had died in the ’70s, and she was living on half of a postal pension, the income from a modest IRA, and Social Security. She haunted estate sales, flea markets, and garage sales all over the Upper Midwest, buying cheap, reselling to antique stores in the Cities.

  “She probably didn’t make ten thousand dollars a year, after expenses, but she enjoyed it, and it helped,” Coombs said. Then she found the Armstrong quilts at an estate sale in northern Wisconsin. The quilts were brilliantly colored and well made. Two were crazy quilts, two were stars, one was a log-cabin, and the other was unique, now called “Canada Geese.”

  None of that made them famous. They were famous, Coombs said, because the woman who made them, Sharon Armstrong, had been married to a drunken sex freak named Frank Armstrong who beat her, raped her, and abused the two children, one boy and one girl, all in the small and oblivious town of Carton, Wisconsin.

  Frank Armstrong was eventually shot by his son, Bill, who then shot himself. Frank didn’t die from the gunshot, although Bill did. The shootings brought out all the abuse stories, which were horrific, and after a trial, Frank was locked up in a state psychiatric hospital and died there twenty years later.

  Sharon Armstrong and her daughter moved to Superior, where first the mother and then the daughter got jobs as cooks on the big interlake ore ships. Sharon died shortly after World War II. The daughter, Annabelle, lived, unmarried and childless, until 1995. When she died, her possessions were sold off to pay her credit-card debts.

  “There were six quilts. I was in Germany when Grandma found them, and I only saw them a couple of times, because I was moving around a lot, but they were beautiful. The thing is, when Grandma bought them, she also bought a scrapbook that had clippings about Frank Armstrong, and Sharon Armstrong, and what happened to them.

  “When Grandma got home, she put the quilts away for a while. She was going to build racks, to stretch them, and then sell them at an art fair. She used to do that with old quilts and Red Wing pottery.

  “When she got them out, she was stretching one, and she noticed that the stitching looked funny. When she looked really close, she saw that the stitches were letters, and when you figured them out, they were curses.”

  “Curses,” Lucas said.

  “Curses against Frank. They were harsh: they said stuff like ‘Goddamn the man who sleeps beneath this quilt, may the devils pull out his bowels and burn them in front of his eyes; may they pour boiling lead in his ears for all eternity’…They went on, and on, and on, for like…hours. But they were also, kind of, poetic, in an ugly way.”

  “Hmmm.” Lucas said. “Grandma sold them for what?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. Mom might. But enough that she could sell her old house and buy this one.”

  “All this quilt stuff ties to Connie Bucher.”

  “Yeah. There are thousands of quilt groups all over the country. They’re like rings, and a lot of the women belong to two rings. Or even three. So there are all these connections. You can be a quilter on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and you need to go to Los Angeles for something, so you call a friend, and the friend calls a friend, and the next thing you know, somebody’s calling you from Los Angeles, ready to help out. The connections are really amazing.”

  “They wouldn’t be mostly Democrats, would they?” Lucas asked.

  “Well…I suppose. Why?”

  “Nothing. But: your grandma was connected to Bucher. And there was another woman killed. Do you have a name?”

  “Better than that. I have a newspaper story.”

  LUCAS DIDN’T WANT to sit anywhere in the room where the elderly Coombs had died, in case it became necessary to tear it apart. He took Gabriella Coombs and the clipping into the kitchen, turned on the light.

  “Ah, God,” Coombs stepped back, clutched at his arm.

  “What?” Then he saw the cockroaches scuttling for cover. A half dozen of them had been perched on a cookie sheet on the stove. He could still see faint grease rings from a dozen or so cookies, and the grease had brought out the bugs.

  “I’ve gotta get my mom and clean this place up,” Gabriella said. “Once you get the bugs established, they’re impossible to get rid of. We should call an exterminator. How long does it take the crime-scene people to finish?”

  “Depends on the house and what they’re looking for,” Lucas said. “I think they’re pretty much done here, but they’ll probably wait until there’s a ruling on the death.”

  “You think I could wash the dishes?” she asked.

  “You could call and ask. Tell them about the bugs.”

  THEY SAT AT the kitchen table, and Lucas took the newspaper clip. It was printed on standard typing paper, taken from a website. The clip was the top half of the front page in the Chippewa Falls Post, the text running under a large headline, Chippewa Heiress Murdered.

  A noted Chippewa Falls art collector and heir to the Thune brewing fortune was found shot to death in her home Wednesday morning by relatives, a Chippewa Falls police spokesman said Wednesday afternoon.

  The body of Claire Donaldson, 72, was discovered in the kitchen of her West Hill mansion by her sister, Margaret Donaldson Booth, and Mrs. Booth’s husband, Landford Booth, of Eau Claire.

  Mrs. Donaldson’s secretary, Amity Anderson, who lives in an apartment in Mrs. Donaldson’s home, was in Chicago on business for

/>   Mrs. Donaldson, police said. When she was unable to reach Mrs. Donaldson by telephone on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, Anderson called the Booths, who went to Donaldson’s home and found her body.

  Police said they have several leads in the case.

  “Claire Donaldson was brilliant and kind, and that this should happen to her is a tragedy for all of Chippewa Falls,” said the Rev. Carl Hoffer, pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Chippewa Falls, and a longtime friend of Mrs. Donaldson…

  Lucas read through the clip, which was long on history and short on crime detail; no matter, he could get the details from the Chippewa cops. But, he thought, if you changed the name and the murder weapon, the news story of Claire Donaldson’s death could just as easily have been the story of Constance Bucher’s murder.

  “WHEN WE get back to the office, I’ll want a complete statement,” he told Coombs. “I’ll get a guy to take it from you. We’ll need a detailed description of that music box. This could get complicated.”

  “God. I wasn’t sure you were going to believe me,” Coombs said. “About Grandma being murdered.”

  “She probably wasn’t—but there’s a chance that she was,” Lucas said. “The idea that somebody hit her with that ball…That would take some thought, some knowledge of the house.”

  “And a serious psychosis,” Coombs said.

  “And that. But it’s possible.”

  “On the TV shows, the cops never believe the edgy counterculture person the first time she tells them something,” Coombs said. “Two or three people usually have to get killed first.”