Wild Goose Chase by Terri Thayer Page B

Vangie added. “Wild Grannies Corporation.”
    I laughed. I could always count on her to lighten my load.
    “We’ll figure it out,” she said. “In the meantime, let me balance the receipts from the booth.”
    “That’ll take hours,” I protested.
    “No, it would take you hours.” She tugged on my chair. “Come on, take off. I can straighten this out in no time.”
    I got up from my desk, grateful to go home and get into bed.
    “Want to hear the worst part?” I said, as she began expertly sorting the credit card slips.
    “Worse than Claire dying?” she said, without looking up. Her forehead was creased with concentration on the task.
    “The homicide detective, Sergeant Sanchez, thinks I did it.”
    She looked up. Her expression was concerned. “Thinks you killed Claire Armstrong? Is he crazy?”
    “I mean, it’s ridiculous. She had an accident with her rotary cutter. But he’s not convinced and thinks I had something to do with it.”
    “I bet she was murdered.”
    “Vangie, how can you say that? She was a quilter, for crying out loud.”
    Vangie put more slips into a pile, sorting by a method I could only imagine.
    “What? she said. “Quilters can’t kill each other? Come on, all that slicing and dicing—what’s that about? I bet Claire had a lot of enemies.”
    “I don’t think so.” I remembered the toasts in the bar. Except maybe Eve. And Lark.
    “What’s more important is what the cops think.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Vangie looked up. She pointed her chin at me, eyes narrowed.
    “You need to be proactive. You can’t just lay down and let the cops walk all over you. Go out there and find someone else who might have done it.”
    “Vangie, you’re not serious.”
    “Dude,” Vangie continued. “You’ve never been in trouble; you don’t know how the system works. Once the police know your name, everything changes.”

I loved my neighborhood, and after the day I’d had, the familiar streets lined with mature olive trees, cracked sidewalks, and yellow roses were like a balm on my frazzled nerves. The houses were a brew of Spanish and craftsman architecture with the odd Cape mixed in. Most of the houses were small; the large Victorians on the Alameda had long ago been turned into law offices and real estate firms. I’d only moved back to the old neighborhood two years earlier when my company stock split and left me with a windfall that made a sizable down payment. Even with that money, my house was tiny and on the wrong side of Park Avenue. And the monthly nut was large enough to make my mortgage-free parents gag.
    I parked in the driveway and went in through the back door.
    My bungalow was a work in progress, what Ina would call a UFO, Unfinished Object, but I loved the graceful proportions of the built-ins, the warmth of the wood floors and the arched doorways. When I’d first moved in, all I had to do was enter my back door and I felt renewed and safe. That sense of security had been spoiled by my mother’s death.
    It was only lately that the sheltering feeling in my house had returned. And it was because of Buster. For weeks after my mother’s death, I’d found it impossible to sleep through the night. I’d wake up about three in the morning, too keyed up to read, too unfocused to watch television. I tried to knit, but ended up with a twisted mess of yarn in my lap that looked like a psychotic kitten had been playing with it.
    One night, after Buster had left a particularly disarming message, I pushed play again to hear his joke at the end. Alone in the dark, I found the sound of his words comforting.
    All of his messages had been stored on the voicemail system, filed neatly under Buster’s return number. I’d played another and discovered if I rewound clear to the beginning, the messages would replay one after another. In the pre-dawn emptiness of my small house, Buster’s deep timbre filled the space up.
    He was shy in the first few messages, growing bolder as he