Ill-Gotten Panes (A Stained-Glass Mystery) by Jennifer McAndrews Page A

and the view the day before was that this time Anton Himmel’s fancy car was parked beside a trailer inside the fence . . .
    And the gates were open.
    Even as I steered the Jeep through the open gates, the little voice in the back of my head declared me unreasonable and bordering on insane, while the little voice emanating from the GPS on my cell phone told me repeatedly to turn left. I ignored both and pulled the SUV parallel to the sports car, guilt and triumph warring within me at the sight of the clouds of dirt and dust the SUV kicked into the air around the Jaguar.
    I shifted the vehicle into park and took hold of the ignition key. Doubt took hold of me. I was in the grips of a crazy idea, wondering what talking to Himmel would accomplish, wondering if I should back up the Jeep and return to the road.
    I was reaching for the gear shift when Himmel stepped through the door of the trailer, eyes on me. Or eyes on the dust now settling over his Jag. Either way, he didn’t look pleased.
    Taking a breath for courage, I cut the ignition at last.
    Feet clad in classic workman’s boots, and knees stretching threadbare jeans, Himmel jogged down the few steps, came straight for the SUV, and pulled open my door before I’d even exhaled my courage.
    “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked in a voice that indicated he was something other than pleased.
    Shifting in my seat to face him, I said, “You know it wasn’t me who told the police you were arguing with Andy Edgers, right? So why the animosity?”
    “Why the visit?”
    “Why the rushing out the door?”
    “To keep you from getting out of the car.”
    “Then why did you open my door?”
    Seeming as though the question caught him short, he straightened, but tipped his head slightly to the side. “Habit.”
    “You mean, as in opening a door for a lady kind of habit?” In my mind, the idea of Himmel as a gentleman contradicted the idea of Himmel as a jerk the way opposite poles of magnets repelled each other. Two such different ideas simply could not occupy the same space. “What brings you to my construction site, Miss Kelly?”
    A zillion lame excuses occurred to me in one jumble. In the end, I went with the truth. “I was wondering if you would tell me why you were arguing with Andy the other day. What was that all about?”
    He huffed and released the door. Turning away from the Jeep, he said, “I went all through this with the police.”
    Moving slowly, so as not to spook him, I lowered both feet to the ground and eased myself out of the SUV. “What did you tell them?”
    He pushed a hand through his hair, and I mentally kicked myself for admiring the sureness of his motion, the way the blond strands brushed his collar, the definitive set of his jaw. “I explained to them about the project,” he said.
    I edged closer to him, conscious all the while of his potential to turn on me and order me off the property. And conscious, fleetingly, of the knowledge that the police had questioned Himmel in relation to Edgers’s murder. Like Grandy, he was a person of interest. Unlike Grandy, I had no past experience with him to tell me whether he was innocent or guilty. “What about the project? What’s that got to do with . . .”
    He glanced over his shoulder at me. “This project.” He waved an arm, the motion intended to encompass the construction site. “The rebuilt, revitalized waterfront.”
    “Umm . . .” To call the location
rebuilt
was some serious cart before the horse business. The grounds were crisscrossed with excavators and bulldozers, all idle, while gaps remained in the walls of the massive brickwork factory. Window frames lacked glass panes, and what was once the employee parking area was now a field of flowering weeds broken by patches of asphalt. In the deep recesses of my memory, snapshots from Grandma Keene’s photo albums created my impression of the venerable brickworks where Grandy had spent his days. Neatly trimmed hedges had