Free Home Repair is Homicide 13 - Crawlspace by Sarah Graves Page A

Shape-shifters might kidnap you, or ghouls. But—”
    She smiled back in spite of herself. “You haven’t changed much, have you? Are you still interested in strange music, too, the way you used to be?”
    “I am. I might even try writing about it,” he added, clearly gratifiedthat she remembered. “And I have a bigger project in mind to do, too.” He hesitated. “But there are some things I have to clear up with Carolyn first.” At this, he looked miserable again.
    “What is it, Chip? No,” she added, “don’t bother denying it. I know you, remember? And I know that look on your face.”
    She’d last seen it when she’d tried asking about his family, years earlier in New York. He’d given her a brief, useless answer whose unspoken message was
Don’t ask me again
.
    So she hadn’t. “Spill it,” she said now.
    Whereupon he broke down and revealed to her how much work he’d done on Carolyn Rathbone’s books, and how little credit he had received.
    “People want to think she does it all,” he said simply, “so we let them. It’s just good business.”
    They passed the massive granite-block post office on Water Street, and across from it the Moose Island general store. “Even those strange e-mails I got,” Chip said. “I replied in her name, not mine. I’m supposed to be invisible.”
    “And you resented that?” She pulled over in front of the bar Roger Dodd ran, on the first floor of a two-story brick building a few doors down from the store.
    With its side window overlooking the length of Water Street, the Artful Dodger had a view of nearly the whole downtown.
    “No,” Chip said. “That’s what I signed on for, I knew what I was doing, so how could I have resented it later?”
    He sighed. “But she’s not an easy person, Carolyn. And right after we arrived …”
    His hands made those washing motions again; the guilty look returned to his face. “She’d stolen an idea of mine. I found out last night. We argued about it.”
    “I see. And did anyone hear you?” The sleet had stopped, but the gray sky over the water was still wintery and the air damply penetrating.
    “The bartender heard. I guess it must’ve been Roger Dodd,” Chip replied.
    She parked the car and they got out. “And there was another guy at the bar, too,” Chip added, sounding as if he was only now re calling this. He zipped his thin cotton jacket, which was in no way adequate for the day’s nasty weather. “Just some local, I think. I remember he had kind of a limp. But he had his own troubles, it looked like.”
    He paused. Then: “I thought about it,” he blurted. “About hurting her. Just for a minute, she’d made me so angry, it felt like being rid of her would make things better.”
    He gazed unhappily at the asphalt parking lot adjacent to the fish pier. “But I’d never really have done anything to her.”
    Just then Bob Arnold drove by in the squad car, flipping one hand up in a curt wave as he passed. If he’d learned anything about where Sam was, he’d have stopped to say so.
    “He was right, wasn’t he?” Chip said, meaning Bob. “It was stupid of me to let Carolyn come here. And now Sam might be in trouble because of it, too.”
    But Jake was still mulling Chip’s previous remark, that he’d thought about harming the missing woman. That admission, plus his being the last person known to have seen her …
    “Do yourself a favor, Chip. Don’t volunteer more information to anyone but me, okay?”
    Because nothing good could come of it. She didn’t think Chip had done anything dreadful.
    But he could still get his name on a warrant by talking too freely; she sensed in him once more a kind of youthful naïveté, a too-honest softness about him that could make him easy pickings for a tough prosecutor.
    Although of course she didn’t really know what Chip Hahn might’ve turned into in the years since he and Sam had played catch and tossed footballs around. Reminding herself that she