Red Rum: A Rosie Casket Mystery by R.M. Wild (top 100 novels of all time .TXT) 📕

went over to the couch and kneeled beside Mettle.

He was still breathing hard. I kissed him on the cheek. His stubble was scratchy on my lips, but I preferred the roughness to a cheek as smooth as plastic.

Mettle’s breathing softened, he stirred, and then he looked at me, confused.

“You’re up early,” he said.

“And you’re up late,” I said. “No workout this morning?”

“It’s a recovery day.”

“Are you doing anything else today?”

“I’m still suspended, remember?”

“Do you want to go for a ride? We’ll take my car.”

We visited all the antique shops within a ten-mile radius of Dark Haven, but by midafternoon, we still had no leads.

“I don’t know, Casket,” Mettle said. “This is like a scavenger hunt with no boundaries. That antique chair could have come from any place in the country. Heck, for all we know, it could have been bought brand new.”

“I know, I know, but there’s one more place to try,” I said. We returned to Beacon Street, drove past the inn and the lighthouse, and about two miles from my property, turned into the last shop on my list.

There, an old saltbox sat behind a junkyard of rusting rubbish, unmowed weeds growing up through all the corroded gaps. There was an old bilge pump, the skeleton of an old fishing boat, even a broken totem pole. I had been avoiding wasting my time on this place—because there were so many rumors about its owner, an old, irascible man by the name of Terry Luther—but now, having exhausted all the other shops, wanted to give it one last shot.

Apparently, Terry Luther had become a hermit, a real-life Boo Radley who hadn’t been seen in town since I was in high school. Even back in junior high, the kids had traded rumors about him. He was the ghost of Dark Haven—always talked about, but rarely seen. Apparently, he had once had a mummy for sale in his shop. He had once survived a hanging. He had once—

“What a crap hole,” Mettle said.

I parked at the end of the driveway, unwilling to risk my tires on whatever shrapnel was hiding in the gravel. “We’re going to have to get out and walk.”

We climbed out. Mettle took the lead. “Watch your step. This place is a minefield.”

We headed for the front door. An old sign over the roof read Mainely Antiques. The name was nothing unique, of course. A Maine state flag hanging from the porch was as thin as gauze, as threadbare as a spider’s web.

We climbed the porch and knocked on the door.

It was silent. Then, “Comin,” someone said from inside, the Down East accent even thicker than Eldritch’s.

After a few creaks, Terry Luther stood behind the screen. He was at least ninety. Like a park ranger, he was wearing khaki shorts, a khaki shirt, and a khaki pith helmet. He wore bottle-thick glasses, even thicker than mine, and his bushy gray sideburns encroached on his nose. He looked at Mettle and then at me. The overhang on the porch was long enough, the surrounding woods thick enough, that it blotted out the sun and he was mostly in shadow.

“What do you two want?” Luther growled.

I held up my phone as if I were showing him my badge. “We’re trying to finish decorating our house and we were wondering if you’d ever seen a chair like this.”

Luther lowered his glasses and squinted through the screen. The picture on my phone was of the chair I had taken in Kendall’s bedroom. Luther must have recognized it, for his face drained and went pale, even in the dark behind the screen. His large Adam’s apple dipped and tried to hide beneath his collar.

“That specimen came in a set of four,” he said, his voice trembling enough to make his sideburns flutter.

I looked at Mettle. Mettle looked at me.

“You’ve seen this chair before?”

“Ayuh. I remember them hooves. Can’t forget ‘em. I used to have the whole set for sale. It’s gone now, though.”

My heart sped up. “Can you remember who bought it?”

He shook his head. “Maybe. What’s it to yuh?”

I swiped through my phone and showed him the picture of Kendall I had taken at the reunion. “Was it this man?”

Luther barely glanced at it. “That was the man who picked it up, but not the man who bought it.”

“You barely looked at it. How can you be sure?” Mettle said.

“I’m sure,” Luther barked.

“I’m a cop,” Mettle said. “Troop J, state police. We’re looking for a missing person and we think this antique set might be involved. If you can give us any more information—”

Too eager, I cut Mettle off. “Was the sale recent?”

“Ayuh. About a year ago,” Luther said.

I clenched my fists to hide my excitement. If it was only a year ago, then Chrissy might still be alive.

“What else can you tell us?”

“The buyer came in here, looked around for a few minutes, and saw the hooved feet and said he had to have it straight away. He didn’t even bother to haggle with the price. I knew right then that he wasn’t no leaf peeper. And the shape of his face was way more familiar than I cared for.”

“Who was he?”

“Lemme finish, will yuh?” Luther said.

“Sorry.”

“The point is, I wouldn’t sell it to him. Somebody else had already claimed it. A local gal. Phyllis Martin. She lives down the street.”

“Phyllis Martin claimed the chairs?”

“Ayuh. You know her?”

“I used to,” I said.

“How’s she doin?”

“She’s—”

“Here and there,” Mettle said. “Like the wind.”

Luther raised an eyebrow.

“Why would Phyllis want the chairs?” I said.

“She wanted them for the inn, so I promised I would hold them for her. Me and the owner of that inn go way back, you see.”

My heart skipped. He knew my mother?

“We go farther back than you two can imagine. So when this fancy feller wanted ‘em, I told him that no matter how much money he had, my chairs ain’t for sale. But the man insisted. Boy, did he insist. He took out his checkbook and said