They issued tickets for murder now, instead of arrests, trials, and prison terms?

That couldn't be right.

He must be talking about my car. Maybe it was in the snowplow's way, and Uncle Allen had kindly brought my parking ticket instead of leaving it on the windshield to sop up snow, swell to double its size, and shed its wording.

He plunked a small square of pink construction paper onto my counter. It did not look like a parking ticket. Lines had been drawn near the edges, showing where to bring down the paper cutter's blade.

Roast Beef Dinner, it said in big letters.

Uncle Allen said, "It's for a good cause. Tomorrow night. Your friends are going."

To collect evidence, no doubt . . . Maybe Edna would bring her notebook of clues. "Sure," I said. "I'll go." I paid him for the ticket and challenged, "Trooper Smallwood said that state police investigators would come today to look at the paint someone tracked around my cottage. No one showed up."

"I told them not to bother. That paint can't have a bearing on the case."

"Yes, it could! What if it does?"

My pleading was in vain. With a dismissive wave, he was out the door.

I read the ticket's fine print.

The roast beef dinner was to be hosted by the ATV club.

A good cause, Uncle Allen had said.

Uh-oh. The ATV club might consider bulldozing Blueberry Cottage a good cause. I was tempted to chase after Uncle Allen and demand my money back, but there was no telling how much I might learn about Mike and his enemies at a dinner put on by his friends.

Uncle Allen's never-ending siren wailed off into the distance. I stood looking out the front door at snow melting. Suddenly, the solution to the stumpwork problem came to me. I wouldn't have to embroider over the wires. I could have my machine stitch the design first, and I could thread the wires through the stitches afterward. Usually, I liked to make the machine do as much as possible, but this more manual method might end up being faster.

That little success gave me the courage to phone the state police again and beg them to come see the paint. The dispatcher said that several troopers were in the area, some of them helping sort out weather-related collisions, but she'd send one as soon as possible.

While I waited, I again loaded my embroidery software into my computer. On its screen, I superimposed the photo of the man disappearing into the woods. I traced cornstalks in the foreground and a few of the trees in the background, then sent messages to the software to fill those areas with textured stitches. The final step for the software was to make the embroidery machine outline the tree and cornstalk designs with satin stitches. I adjusted the satin stitches until they were wide enough for me to thread thin wire through them. This was going to work . . .

Sally-Forth and Tally-Ho, however, did not have patience for creating embroidery methods. I took them to the backyard. The snow had gone from sticky to slushy. The dogs bolted uphill from the back door toward the street. Afraid that the gate might be open, I ran around the corner after them. The gate was closed, and someone was rattling it.

17.

IT WASN'T THE MURDERER RETURNING to the scene of the crime. State Trooper Gartener was on the other side of my gate. "Your store's locked," he said.

That wasn't surprising, since it was closed for the night. I let him into the yard and put the dogs back into the apartment. They weren't keen on ending their evening so quickly, but after having been in a rescue facility for most of their lives, they never tried to rush past me when I shut doors in their endearing faces.

Gartener accompanied me down the hill to Blueberry Cottage. We could have used a sled. I took him around to the porch where the paint was, but of course the paint was now knee-deep under snow. "I guess we shouldn't shovel this snow," I said.

"Certainly not."

"Come inside, then." In the cottage's kitchen, I showed him where we'd found the button and the tracks leading from the door to the sink. I opened the riverside door and showed him the paint that must have come off a boot when someone kicked the door. I explained Clay's theory about the uncured paint.

Nodding, he wrote in his notebook, then examined the floor. "I'm afraid I'll have to send someone to remove part of your flooring," he said, sounding apologetic, as if he could empathize, after all.

"That's fine. I wasn't planning to keep that linoleum anyway."

He spoke into his radio. "As soon as you can free up some of those techies from the Krawbach place, send them to the Vanderling cottage. Tell them they're going to have to pry up some floorboards from the kitchen and the porch."

How gratifying. I might be losing some porch, but with it would go the ugly aqua paint. When Gartener ended his call, I said, "I guess you'll need my door, too."

He could actually grin. "Only the lower fourth of it."

"You might as well take it all, then."

"The guys will cover the holes with plywood. Come help me figure out how much of your porch floor they'll need to take."

He led me to the great room and out the door we'd come in. I trailed after him, feeling like an obedient stray. I was tall, but he was taller. I tried walking as straight as he did, but it felt really stiff. Good thing he didn't have eyes in the back of his head. At least I hoped he didn't.

At the porch, he had me point out where the blob of paint was.

"Does the paint go all the way to the edge of the porch?" he asked.

"It's closer to the wall of the building."

With a bare index finger, he made a tiny indentation in the slush at the edge of the porch. "The rate that stuff's melting, it'll be gone before the techies get here."

Such abundant loquacity encouraged me to question him, for all the good it would do. "What was the other evidence you said you found?"

He stared at the river.

So much for conversing.

"Evidence?" he repeated after the silence threatened to collapse in on itself.

"Against me?" I could answer a question with a question, too.

"Besides . . . ?"

Great. Now he was putting me into the position of summarizing the clues implicating me. I grumbled, "The victim was found in my locked yard. My coat had a small blood smear. My canoe paddle was supposedly the murder weapon."

"And you threatened to kill the victim."

I waved my hand in a gesture of dismissal. "That's just one of those things people say without meaning it. I didn't. Mean it, I mean." Gartener tended to bring out the worst in my conversational abilities.

He pondered the ice floating down the river for what seemed like another hour or two.

I remained resolutely mute. I'd read about policemen. They created long silences to tempt the unwary into filling the empty air with confessions. But I had nothing to confess, so I simply watched the river and waited for him to speak. He'd have to, eventually. Or maybe he'd simply leave, and I could phone Trooper Smallwood and engage in a real conversation.

Finally, I broke down and filled the silence, as he probably knew I would. "You have to tell me what the rest of the evidence is. I should be allowed to defend myself."

"You may get your chance. We expect to wrap this case up in a couple of days."

"I didn't think they could match fingerprints on that button that fast." I could be sarcastic, too.

"That button may have nothing to do with the case."

"If the fingerprints were mine, it wouldn't, since it was found on my property. But I never touched that button, and the fingerprints will be someone else's. Find the person who's missing that button, and you'll have a real suspect. Even," I asserted with no care for self-preservation, "if that person is a police officer."

The guy had a real poker face. "Who's this person who told you all about the drying rate of oil-based paint?"

"Clay Fraser of Fraser Construction."

That annoying state trooper got out his notebook and wrote in it. A reminder to re-interrogate Clay, probably. Great.

I told Gartener about the aqua paint I'd seen on Rhonda Dunkle's thumb. He wrote that down.

I added, "I've seen her in a black pickup truck that could be the one Uncle Allen and I saw after Mike's attack."

"Describe the truck you and Detective DeGlazier saw. Black, you said?"

"It was the middle of the night, so I couldn't be sure. Streetlights were on. It was definitely dark, but could have been dark blue or brown or . . ."

"Red?"

"Not bright red like Clay Fraser's truck." And like my face suddenly became. "And it didn't have writing on the door. His does."

He had about a million other questions about the truck. Obviously, I had not been paying sufficient attention to subtle variations in truck styling.

"What about the truck's cab?" he asked. "Standard two-door, or extended?"

"I don't know, but nothing about it seemed unusual, other than it was going more slowly than most people might drive at that time of the morning. Maybe Unc . . . Detective DeGlazier could give a better description." I asked again, as reasonably as possible, "So now that you've seen and heard the additional evidence I've found, how about telling me what supposed new evidence you have against me? Does what I just showed you refute it?"

Gartener really seemed to have a fondness for staring at slabs of ice on a river. Finally, he said, "The button and the paint on your porch and on your friend's hand-"

I shot out a quick denial. "She's not my friend."

He went on as if I hadn't spoken. "-could have a bearing on the case, but none of it refutes our latest evidence against you."

"What was it?" Wind blew hair into my mouth. Frustrated, I wiped it away.

After another maddening spell of river watching, he said, "We found something else extremely interesting."

"What?"

"One of those little aluminum dog tags that vets hand out when dogs get rabies shots."

It was my turn to dole out the silent treatment. I was afraid to guess what he was talking about, or what it might have to do with me. My mind churned through possibilities.

"Strangely enough, when I contacted the vet who issued it, she said the tag belonged to one of your dogs," he added.

"I didn't know that one of the dogs lost a tag." The dogs had definitely had their ID tags when Clay brought them to me.

His voice hard, Gartener shot out, "What was your dog doing in Mike's backyard?"

Playing there when Haylee and I were snooping inside Mike's house. Good thing it was too dark for Trooper Gartener to see my flaming face. "Nothing," I managed. "Mike must have taken the tag when he opened my gate." I warmed to my lies. "Now we know for certain that he's the one who let the dogs escape. Maybe it was worse than that. Maybe he was trying to steal my dogs, and all he managed to grab was a rabies tag." Was I babbling?

"Though the ground was frozen in Krawbach's backyard, dog claws managed to penetrate it. Odd, isn't it? It looked like a couple of dogs had been fighting around Mike's clothes pole."

It wasn't hard to sound shocked. "He did steal them, then, and they got away." Had I told the police what time the dogs had gone missing? Had Clay told them when and where he picked them up? If so, Gartener would know I was lying. Barely breathing, I threw in the hard, cold truth. "I did not kill Mike Krawbach. We have to find out who did." I crossed my arms.

"You stay out of it," he ordered. "Leave the investigating to law enforcement."

I didn't say anything, but my thoughts seemed loud enough that even he might have heard them. Not if law enforcement is trying to convict the wrong person. Like me . . .

"Don't worry," he said. "We're checking everything."

"Good. Then you'll find the murderer." More likely, they'd take the easiest route, arrest me, and go home happy. I wasn't bitter, or anything. I asked, "Are we done here?"

"You are. I'll wait for the techs."

I didn't want to give him the key to Blueberry Cottage. I told him I'd lock it later tonight after the techs were done, then tramped up the hill.

The first thing I did when I went inside was examine the dogs' collars. Sure enough, Sally didn't have her rabies tag. I should have checked more carefully around Mike's clothes pole before we fled his yard Wednesday night. Had we left any other evidence of our presence at Mike's?

The second thing I did was fill a mug with cider, heat it in the microwave, and carry it and a plate of cookies back down the hill.

Maybe Trooper Gartener's long johns weren't bulletproof, but they must have been waterproof. Or his uniform trousers were. He had brushed some of the slush off my porch stairs and was sitting, his chin in his hands and his elbows on the knees, on a wet step. He leaped up when I came around the corner of Blueberry Cottage. I had probably startled him.

I thrust the cider and cookies at him. "I thought you might get cold and hungry."

He took them from me and set them on the step. "The team should be here soon."

Why had I bothered? He would probably have the forensics lab test the cider and cookies for every toxin known to man before he tried them.

I went back to the apartment, locked the door, called Haylee, and told her the police had found Sally's rabies tag and signs of the dogs' wrestling match at Mike's, and that I hoped Gartener believed my story that Mike had stolen the dogs and they got away.

"Maybe he did."

I pictured the unbending state trooper. "I doubt it. Anyway, last I knew, investigators are at Mike's place."

"I guess we'd better not go back there." She sounded disappointed, then perked up. "Until after the police are done, some time when there's no snow."

"And no mud," I added.

"The police may miss something. Like where Mike hid his key."