Free Murder in the Hearse Degree by Tim Cockey

“Mrs. Pierce, do you have a picture of Sophie?”
    “I certainly do. I have one on my refrigerator. Hold on.”
    While she was off fetching the snapshot, I asked Pete what he thought. He shrugged.
    “Naïve girl. No friends. Likes kids. Loved the water. Read books. Rode a bike. Enjoyed old movies. Hadn’t ever gotten over leaving Hungary. Missed her daddy.”
    “Damn. You’re good at this.”
    Pete took hold of my earlobe and tugged on it. “Use it.”
    Kathy Pierce came back and handed Pete a photograph. He looked it over then handed it to me.
    “It was taken at Christmas,” Kathy Pierce said.
    Chances are that the Douglas fir in the photograph festooned with decorations and colored lights would have tipped me off, but I knew the woman was only trying to be helpful. The photograph showed a young woman standing in front of the Christmas tree. The twins were on either side of her. Little Patricia was wincing an overlarge smile and on the other side of the nanny, darling Patrick was sticking out his tongue at the camera and bugging his eyes. The twins were dressed in matching red and green outfits. Like elves from hell.
    For her part, Sophie seemed oblivious to the overposing going on around her. She stood erect, her hands down at her sides, wearing a dark blue dress that fell just below the knees. Her brown hair was an explosion of unkempt waves falling well past her shoulders. Sophie had a slender hooked nose, like her mother, and a small pointed chin. Her eyebrows were thick and quite dark, as were her eyes. Unlike her mother, however, the girl looked to be short. Maybe five four. She was slightly built, though not exactly waiflike. The look on her face was extremely earnest. Her smile was tiny, almost imperceptible.
    “She’s cute,” I said. “She looks like a real nice kid.”
    Kathy Pierce took the picture back. “Yes, she . . . well, she was.”
    Pete handed her his card, along with his rap about giving him a call if she thought of anything that we might want to hear. We thanked her for her time and returned to Pete’s car.
    “Where next, Sherlock?” Pete asked me.
    I opened up the Annapolis map on my lap. I ran my fingers along the paper.
    “Go up here and take a right,” I said. “Then a left. Then check back with me.”
    In about ten minutes we pulled up in front of a three-story brown clapboard house that sat back from the sidewalk on a nick of land that needed some watering and maybe just the slightest bit of thought. The windows had pale blue shutters with the design of a simple sailboat jig sawed into them. A pair of last-gasp bushes sat on either side of the front door, looking like lost tumbleweeds a long long way from home. Planted in the middle of the yard was a wooden duck, painted yellow and red. Its wings windmilled backward in the breeze, like it was trying to get the hell away from this place. The door knocker was a crab.
    The woman who answered the crab had a head of hair not dissimilar to the dying bushes, only smaller, of course, and in her case sprayed orange. The parts that had missed the spray were a dull pewter. She was wearing a blouse of such electric fuchsia that it hurt my eyes to look at it, and a pair of lime-green slacks, the hips of which filled half the doorway. The woman was close to sixty. She looked like George Washington. I was awestruck.
    She sang out, “Can I help you?”
    “You’re Mrs. Gibbons?” I asked.
    “Stella Gibbons.”
    “I’m Hitchcock Sewell. I phoned this morning?”
    “You most certainly did.”
    “Mrs. Gibbons, we’d like to talk to you about a boarder you had here a while back,” Pete said.
    “Yes, I know. Sophie Potts.” The woman pursed her lips and took a hard look at Pete. “Are you her daddy?” She let out the sort of cackling laugh that would split ice. “I’m teasing with you, hon.” She gave Pete a conspiratorial look. “Unless you are ?”
    “Unless I’m what?” Pete asked.
    “Her daddy.”
    “We’d like to ask