A Catered Fourth of July Read online

  Obviously, she had grossly underestimated the humidity. There’s a lesson to be learned here, Bernie told herself. Don’t believe the weather forecaster.

  Oh well. What was done was done, as her mother used to say. Anyway she was better at this kind of thing—criminal activity of the lite variety—than Libby was. It wasn’t something to brag about, but it was true. For one thing, she didn’t get as easily flustered as her sister did.

  “Tell them to shave your calluses,” Bernie told her sister as she got out of the van. “It’s ten dollars more, but it’s worth it.”

  “Shave my calluses?” Libby repeated. “How do they do that?”

  “With a razor.”

  “No one is getting near my feet with a razor.”

  Bernie shrugged. “Okay, but your heels are cracking.”

  Libby sniffed. “They’re fine, thank-you-very-much.”

  “Don’t you want soft feet?”

  “I really don’t care. My feet take me where I want to go and that’s good enough for me.”

  “You’re just a tad grumpy this morning.”

  “That’s because I’m about to do something I don’t want to do.”

  “You need chocolate,” Bernie observed. “You’re going into chocolate withdrawal.”

  “There is no such thing,” Libby said.

  “Yeah, there is and I think you’re the poster child for it.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Libby conceded as she pulled away and headed toward her putative rendezvous with Gail at the nail salon, leaving Bernie on the side of Maple Tree Lane.

  The Evanses lived in a middle-class homogeneous development. That was Homogeneous with a capital H. The buildings had gone up in the seventies and mostly consisted of two-story colonials, which appeared to have been designed by someone using a Xerox machine. The fact that almost all of the houses were painted white, with a few light blue and beige ones sprinkled about, didn’t help. Bernie had always thought the people who lived in the blue and beige houses had to be the rebels in the development. It was the kind of place where it would be easy to go out, get slightly tipsy, and wander into the wrong residence.

  Built by the same developer who had built several other developments in and around Longely, the area featured the same touches. They included but were not limited to tree names for the main streets, black and gold decorative street lamps, houses with entrances that faced the street, attached garages, and gold eagles perched on the eaves over the front doors.

  Although the landscaping had not been mandated, each house featured evergreen foundation plantings in front of the houses, as well as petunias and impatiens in the summer, mums in the fall, and tulips in the spring.

  In addition, ninety percent of the houses had American flags flying out front. The only difference between the residences was that some of the houses had children’s toys strewn on the front lawn and some didn’t. Rick and Gail’s house was one of those that didn’t, a fact Bernie was reminded of as she neared their residence.

  She noted another fact and her spirits plummeted. Despite what she’d said to Libby, the garage door to the Evans’s house was closed. Shut tight like a drum, although why a drum should be shut tight she didn’t know. Bottom line, that sucked. She couldn’t even look inside. The garage door was one of those cheapo models that didn’t have any windows.

  Bernie slowed her pace as she thought about what to do next. Of course, she could always leave, but that would mean admitting to Libby she was wrong and she wasn’t prepared to do that. Also, most important, was the fact that, given the circumstances, Marvin did need as much help as he could get. A fact she shouldn’t lose sight of.

  Bernie nibbled on one of her fingernails as she considered what to do next. She guessed it would have to be the picks she’d brought along. After all, she couldn’t climb in through the second-story. She wasn’t wearing the right shoes for that sort of endeavor. Flip-flops just didn’t cut it when it came to second-story work. Besides, the windows were probably sealed, anyway. That left the first floor. She thought about breaking a window in the back, but discarded the idea. She didn’t want to alert Gail or Rick to the fact that someone had been inside.

  Of course, she could make it seem like a robbery had been committed . . . but that was a lot of work. Too much work and it increased the danger of being caught. If listening to her father’s stories over the years had taught her anything, it was that the more complicated things were, the more clues were left behind, which meant the greater the chance of being apprehended.

  The only problem with using the picks, as she now remembered was that she wasn’t very good with them. She sighed. Oh well. She guessed she was going to have to give it a try anyway.

  On the bright side, the neighbors were at work and no one would see her.

  Bernie stuffed her water bottle in her bag and walked quickly to the back. She spent the next twenty minutes trying to open the door . . . and failing. Finally, she gave up. She was just about to leave when she looked at the wreath full of herbs that was tied on the door and laughed. She couldn’t believe it! All this time struggling, and there was a key tied to the wreath. She hadn’t seen it because the black nylon cord had blended in with the willow branches intertwined with the herbs, which of course was the whole idea.

  She carefully took the wreath off its hook, unfastened the key, and wound the tie around her finger so she wouldn’t lose it. She put the wreath back, inserted the key in the lock, and turned it. The door swung open. Elated, she did the happy dance, then got control of herself and went inside, carefully closing the door behind her.

  She found herself in the kitchen. She took a quick look around, noting the time on the clock. She figured that to be on the safe side she should be out of the house by twelve o’clock at the latest. Bearing that in mind, she continued on through the living room and dining room, pausing on the way to look at the mail and the bank statement that had been left out on the dining room table. Nothing in it raised any alarm bells. From what she could see, Rick and Gail Evans looked like the average carrying-too-much-credit-card-debt couple.

  She headed upstairs and did a quick run-through of the second floor. She found nothing noticeable so she returned to the first floor, went into the kitchen, and opened the door that led to the basement.

  She switched on the light and slowly walked down the ten steps into something that wasn’t quite as bad as the pictures of hoarders’ houses on TV . . . but it was pretty darn close. Furniture was piled on top of furniture without much space to walk through. How odd, Bernie thought. The upstairs was immaculate. The downstairs was an incredible mess. It was as if the house was schizoid.

  Looking around, it was obvious the basement was the repository of twenty years worth of stuff. At least. Probably more. In fact, there was so much stuff that it took her a minute to break what she was seeing into individual components.

  She identified a washer and dryer sitting on top of a chest of drawers, two old refrigerators and an upright freezer piled together, a pool table with a tear in the felt, a foosball table with one leg propped up on a load of books, four file cabinets, a kitchen table, shelving of various sizes, old aquariums, stacks of old newspapers, innumerable cartons filled with who-knew what, piles of empty laundry detergent and Clorox bottles, not to mention a scattering of tools, some with their price tags still attached.

  Bernie sighed. Looking through the mess would take weeks and all she had was half an hour, maybe three-quarters of an hour at most, if she pushed it.

  “Of course it would help if I knew what I was looking for,” she muttered as she skirted a dining room table. She took another step, jamming her little toe against an old generator that had been lurking under the table. She cursed as she hopped on one foot. Serves you right for wearing sandals, she could hear Libby say as she bent down and rubbed it.

  When the pain subsided, she opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet nearest her and began looking through the papers jammed into it. From what she could
see, they were a potpourri of bills, receipts, recipes, newspaper articles, and tax returns, some of which dated back thirty years or more.

  She looked closely at a few of the papers then stopped and closed the drawer, certain that nothing in there had anything to do with Jack Devlin’s death. She quickly looked through the second and third drawers, but they contained the same materials as the first one. She thought about looking in some of the other file cabinets and changed her mind. She was positive it would be more of the same. Turning, she scanned the basement again and shook her head. The chaos made her think about the state of A Little Taste of Heaven’s office. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the basement, but it wasn’t good.

  Truth was, she’d be lucky if she could lay her hands on the shop’s tax returns for the last year. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. She knew they were in a pile in the office; she just didn’t know which pile, and that was true of their expense sheets, as well. It was one of the reasons tax season was always such a nightmare. One of these days, she and Libby were going to have to go through their papers, keep what should be kept, and throw out what needed to be thrown out before their office ended up looking like this basement. Fortunately, their office was smaller, which kept the mess down.

  Bernie shook her head again as she contemplated the task in front of her. Herculean was a fairly accurate term, she decided as she cruised up and down the basement randomly opening cardboard cartons. Most contained clothes, some contained books and magazines, while others contained dishes, glasses, and sundry pots and pans. One thing was for sure. None of them contained anything that indicated Rick or Gail . . . or both . . . had anything to do with Jack Devlin’s death.

  If she ever wanted to hide something, this would be the place to do it, Bernie reflected.

  For a moment, she weighed the idea of giving up the search and getting out of the Evans’s house, but she remembered what Cheech had said about not being able to catch the wave if you weren’t in the ocean and she made the decision to keep going. She spotted a door across the basement and made her way to it. Opening it, she clicked the switch, and went inside.

  Chapter 10

  The room was eight feet by ten feet wide. It was cooler than the rest of the basement and smelled of oil and metal. The walls were painted a high gloss white and lined with shelves. A recliner and a small TV sat in the left corner of the room. A large metal table with two stools stood in the middle. A collection of coffee cups, take-out containers, and rags smelling vaguely of oil were strewn over the top.

  As Bernie looked around, she saw lots of guns, lots of gun paraphernalia, and realized she was in the room of a serious gun collector. This is it, she thought. Rick Evans is responsible for what happened at the reenactment. Then she took another look around and thought, maybe not. What she didn’t see was anything resembling the muskets that the reenactors had used. She stepped up and studied a pair of mother-of-pearl handled dueling pistols displayed in a red velvet-lined case. Next to that were a Walther PPK, a German Luger, a Lancaster Oval Bore, a Browning, a Beretta, and a Glock. All of them were in their cases. All of them were neatly labeled.

  She was especially taken with a tiny pearl-handled revolver that was simply labeled LADIES GUN. 1875. WYOMING. The trouble with owning something like that, she thought, is I’d never be able to find the damned thing among all the junk I carry in my bag. Of course, she’d certainly be able to find the AK-47 on the next shelf, or the Sterling submachine gun, the Colt carbine, or the Uzi, not to mention the Remington rifle, the Winchester, or something called the Needle gun. Again, all were neatly labeled.

  As Bernie studied the guns, it occurred to her that they must be worth quite a bit of money. She moved around the room, spotting boxes of ammo, rods for cleaning the rifles, bags of rags, bottles of oil, and a machine she thought Rick Evans used to refill his bullets. A couple targets were tucked in one corner. She didn’t see anything that looked like the muskets used in the reenactment. Of course, they could be hidden somewhere, but that seemed unlikely. Why hide something from yourself? Nevertheless, she took another look through the room just to make sure.

  She was still looking when she got a call from her Dad. The moment she picked up, she knew that she shouldn’t have.

  “Where are my picks?” Sean asked.

  “No hellos? No hi, how ya doing?” Bernie replied.

  “Don’t start with me, Bernie. What are you doing?”

  She told him.

  She heard a sharp intake of breath, then silence. That meant that her Dad was really mad.

  “Don’t you want to know what I found?”

  “No. I want you to stay out of my desk.”

  “Would it help if I told you I was looking for some Scotch tape?”

  Silence.

  “I’ll snap some pics and send them to you. You don’t have to look at them if you don’t want to.”

  More silence.

  “Come on, Dad,” she wheedled. “I need your opinion.”

  There was another moment of silence, then Sean said, “I’ll see,” and hung up.

  “Okay,” Bernie said to herself as she took out her cell and began snapping pics of the gun collection. Then she sent them off to her dad with a text. What do you think?

  Her dad didn’t reply. Not that she had expected him to. It would take him a little while to cool off.

  Bernie dawdled for a couple minutes, looking around a bit more. Something was bothering her, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. Then she had it. Rick Evans had never mentioned anything about guns. He’d never given the impression that he knew anything about them.

  But so what? Bernie thought as she eyed the items in the room. That really didn’t mean anything. There was no reason why he had to say anything. On the other hand, he had given the clear impression that he knew as much about muskets as Marvin did, which was to say that he didn’t know anything at all. Hence, Rick Evans was lying by omission.

  Maybe lying was an inaccurate word. Maybe the word she wanted was dissembling. Whatever term one applied, the truth was that he had the capability of loading up his musket with shot, swapping it out with one of those Marvin had gotten from the costume store, and handing it to Jack Devlin.

  After all, Rick Evans had come up with the idea for the reenactment. Maybe the whole thing was just a way to help him get to Devlin. Maybe Marvin was just collateral damage, a convenient scapegoat. Maybe Devlin wasn’t supposed to die. Despite what Brandon had said, maybe Rick had wanted to just hurt Devlin. Maybe he wanted to teach him a lesson he’d never forget, especially when he looked in the mirror every morning.

  Bernie thought about how Devlin’s face had looked and shuddered. Devlin would have been seriously maimed or blinded if he had survived. Was it possible to calibrate the misfiring of a musket so that whoever was holding it would be hurt, but not killed? Was that even possible? Bernie would have to ask her Dad and Brandon, but she was pretty sure she knew the answer already. It wasn’t.

  She took a deep breath and blew it out. She had no proof of anything. The entire case she was building in her mind was strictly circumstantial. It was even less than that, really. She was stretching the facts to fit her hypothesis. She could see no muskets in the basement and nothing to indicate that Rick even had any. Bernie wondered how many people involved in the reenactment had muskets in their houses. She wondered how many were gun collectors. How many were hunters?

  Good questions.

  Bernie’s cell rang. She looked down. It was her Dad. Not answering it wasn’t an option.

  “Are you out yet?” he asked when she picked up.

  “On my way.” Well, she was. Almost.

  “Hurry up. If you get caught, I’m not bailing you out of jail.” He hung up before she could ask him if he’d had a chance to look at the pics.

  Bernie took a final look around, put her cell phone back in her bag, and walked out of the room, taking care to close the door behind her. She threaded her way through the basement, went up the stairs, an
d through the house. At the back entrance, she let herself out, locked the door, carefully reattached the key to the wreath, and left the Evans house.

  The heat hit her full force. She stood for a moment, wiping the sweat off her neck and regretting the fact that she was going to have to walk to the nail salon. Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of another option.

  Bernie pulled the water bottle from her bag and took a sip as she walked to the front of the house. She put on her sunglasses to block the sun’s glare and looked around. It was still. Nothing was moving. No one was outside on the front lawns. No one was on the road.

  The only sounds she could hear were the droning of the air-conditioners and the buzz of a lawn mower off in the distance. Even the birds were quiet in the noonday sun, lulled into a torpor by the heat.

  She walked to the corner, made a right, and continued until she was on one of the smaller, secondary roads in the development. A quarter mile later, she made a sharp left. The last thing she wanted was Gail passing her on the way home from the salon in the event that she’d finished early. It wasn’t likely to happen, but Bernie decided it paid to be careful. She’d pushed her luck far enough for one day.

  If Gail saw Bernie, she’d stop and offer her a lift. Then she’d want to know what Bernie was doing in that part of town and why she was on foot. Frankly, Bernie couldn’t come up with a good answer. Call her crazy, but somehow a reply like, Oh, I’m just walking back to meet my sister after breaking into your house, probably wouldn’t be well received. Nor would, And by the way, is there anything you want to tell me about your husband’s gun collection?

  Bernie took another drink of water, found a tissue, and blotted the sweat off her face. She didn’t want her eyeliner and mascara getting into her eyes. The stuff was supposed to be waterproof, but she had her doubts. She’d gotten her cell phone back out to call Marvin and tell him what she’d found, when he called her. She punched the ANSWER button. “Hello.”