The Pickled Piper Read online

  “That’d be great. Nice meeting you, Will.”

  Piper backed away, holding her drink, then remembered the shady bench that was supposed to be nearby. She found it and sat, taking a sip from her lemonade and thinking what a nice guy Will Burchett seemed to be, volunteering his time for a good cause as he was. She hoped he really would come by her shop.

  • • •

  Shortly before eight the next morning, Piper was sipping the last of her coffee in the apartment over her shop, when she heard familiar beeps out back. She ran to her bedroom window and threw it open.

  “Morning, Uncle Frank!”

  “Good morning, peanut.” Uncle Frank had called Piper “peanut” as long as she could remember, and though she’d eventually grown taller than her aunt and stood within an inch or two of her burly uncle, she was happy to still be called that—but only by Uncle Frank. He leaned out of the cab of his freshly washed tan Ford pickup.

  “Can I take any more heavy stuff out to the fair for you?”

  “Sure! I’ll be right down.” Piper dashed down to the shop to unlock her back door, then ran about gathering up jars of the pickled vegetables she’d decided to take—definitely more pickled watermelon—and packing them carefully into divided cardboard boxes. Uncle Frank walked in, pulling off a green John Deere cap and smoothing down the few remaining strands of his gray hair.

  “I have to swing by the garage to pick up a tractor part,” he said, “but I’ll get these to you by the time the fair opens up.”

  “That’ll be fine. Oh, I got a call from Mom and Dad last night. They arrived in Bulgaria. Said to give you and Aunt Judy their love.”

  “Bulgaria. Well, well.” Uncle Frank gave a low chuckle. “That brother of mine does get around, doesn’t he?”

  Piper smiled. Although her father and his brother had grown up together and even resembled each other physically, they couldn’t have chosen any more widely divergent paths in life. Uncle Frank considered a drive to Albany a major excursion, whereas Piper’s father had been twice around the world with his archeological pursuits.

  “We both like to dig in the dirt,” Uncle Frank often joked. “Only difference is the things I come up with are a bit fresher and they’re edible. But the things he digs up he can write about. I don’t know anybody’d want to read about my beets or carrots.”

  “Maybe not, but I can’t pickle an old candlestick, can I?” Piper would respond.

  Uncle Frank’s organic farm provided most of the fruits and vegetables that Piper preserved with her pickling spices. And Aunt Judy grew in her garden several of the herbs that Piper dried and either used or packaged for sale. They were the perfect team, as far as Piper was concerned, and she was daily grateful that her Uncle Frank had chosen farming rather than anything he could write about.

  “Just these two boxes should do it,” she said. Uncle Frank reached for the larger of the two and headed out. Piper followed close behind with the second, unsurprised—once she stepped out—to see Jack occupying the passenger seat of her uncle’s truck. Jack yipped an excited greeting, and as soon as Piper deposited her load in the back of the cab she reached over to rub his ears and receive a few juicy licks.

  Uncle Frank climbed into the driver’s seat. “Thanks a bunch,” Piper said, giving her uncle a kiss on his leathery cheek. He started his engine and pulled off, a well-tanned arm waving out the window as the truck disappeared around the corner.

  As she watched him go, Piper thought of all the summers she’d spent with Aunt Judy and Uncle Frank. Though Piper knew her parents loved her dearly, she had realized long ago—and gamely accepted—that they loved archeology even more. Each summer, therefore, they flew off to far-flung corners of the world to pursue their passion, parts that were usually less than congenial for children, and therefore Piper was sent to Cloverdale. Not that—once Piper fully understood what they were up to—she ever really wanted to go along with them. Her parents had their passion and Piper had hers. It had just taken her longer to discover it.

  Was it simply coincidental, she wondered, that Scott, another important person in her life, had discovered he was happiest when he was hundreds of miles away from her? Such thoughts were best pondered on another day, Piper decided, so she shook herself to get moving and on her way.

  Minutes later, Piper was locking up when she remembered that Tina Carson had asked her to drop off more of her pear chutney at the coffee shop. Apparently it was a big hit with her customers. Piper ran back into the shop for the jars, thinking she could stop on her way. But when she pulled up in front of Tina’s shop, a “Closed” sign hung inside the door, and the shop’s interior was dark.

  Bummer. Especially since the lettering on the door proclaimed the opening hour to be eight A.M., and it was twenty minutes past that. Piper got out of the car and peered into the shop, hoping to see signs of life. She rapped but spotted no movement in the darkened interior. Tina, she decided, must have seen her business, like A La Carte’s, drop off and felt it wasn’t worth opening during fair days. Piper would have to get the chutney to her some other time.

  As she continued down Beech Street she noticed much lighter traffic than usual. Most of the bigger draws at the fair, such as the midway rides, didn’t open until ten, which probably explained it. If the majority of Cloverdale residents had shifted their activities from town to fairgrounds, they apparently had also decided to sleep in a little that day.

  When Piper pulled into the vendors’ parking area, there was only a scattering of other cars. She had come early to do a bit of tidying and rearranging at her booth, since spreading a protective tarp over her wares the night before was about all she could manage. Piper had also sold out of pickles from her pickle barrel, proving Amy’s optimism to be spot-on, so she’d brought a fresh batch of dills to restock it. She lifted up the hatch on her white Chevy to unload them.

  “Morning, Miss Lamb.”

  Piper looked over to see Ben Schaeffer walking toward her, dressed in khakis and a plaid shirt rather than his auxiliary officer uniform. Piper’s first thought was that Ben Schaeffer, who was only three years younger, had just addressed her as if she were his former kindergarten teacher.

  “Call me Piper, please,” she said. “You’re here early, Ben. Are you on duty?”

  He shook his head. “Not officially. But I thought I’d check around. You know, make sure nobody’s dumping trash where they shouldn’t. Things like that.”

  “That’s conscientious of you.” Piper reached for one of the large plastic bags of dill pickles.

  “Help you with that?”

  Piper smiled, resisting the elderly-woman-aided-by-Boy-Scout feeling that Ben seemed to automatically stir. “Thank you,” she said, and handed one of the bags to Ben, then grabbed the second, larger one herself. They took off toward the vendor booths.

  “The fair seems to have slowed things down in town,” she said, conversationally. “Have you closed your place? Amy said you have an insurance office.”

  “Amy mentioned that?” Ben’s eyes lit up and a spot of red appeared on each cheek.

  “Well, yes. When I asked her, specifically.” No use getting the man’s hopes up.

  “Oh.” Ben cleared his throat. “Well, I’ll be heading in to the office later on to do some paperwork. But I don’t expect new clients to pop in during fair days.”

  “No, people’s minds are definitely on more fun things right now. Not to imply, well, you know. Insurance, obviously, is serious. Not something you think of when you’re in the mood to get away from it all.”

  Piper was afraid she may have dug herself into a hole, but all Ben said was, “Right.”

  Piper mentally ran over what insurance she already owned, expecting a sales pitch to soon follow, but as they drew closer to the stage where the talent show would take place she was distracted by the condition of the area. Papers were strewn about the stage, chairs wer
e disarranged, and a pot of artificial flowers lay tipped over, its papery roots half out of the container.

  “Look at that!” Ben cried, disgusted. “Did they have to leave things in such a mess after rehearsals?”

  “I thought Aunt Judy said rehearsals were held at the high school,” Piper said. Then she saw something up ahead that drove thoughts of rehearsals out of her head. “Something’s wrong,” she said, quickening her pace.

  “You’re darned right something’s wrong. When people can’t take the trouble to pick up after themselves—”

  “No, I mean something’s wrong at my booth.” Piper had seen what looked like the lid of her pickle barrel standing upright, though from the distance she couldn’t be sure. She took off at a run, struggling to hold on to the bag of pickles that bounced and slipped in her arms. She was sure she’d firmly clamped down her barrel lid the night before. After seeing the disarray around the stage, her fear was that vandals had been at work. What would she find at her booth?

  She approached her booth from the rear but was able to see her pickle barrel, which stood to the side of the shelves of jars and spices. Her green tarp was still in place over those items, but the barrel lid was definitely up. Piper stopped, suddenly afraid to see what might have happened to her precious container. Trash dumped into it? Worse?

  Ben caught up with her and paused, following her gaze. He continued a few steps more. Piper watched his face as he made his way to the front of the barrel. His mouth worked soundlessly, then she heard, “Good God.”

  “What?” Piper lurched forward to see for herself.

  Two legs, partly covered in tasseled socks and barely edged with a tartan kilt, hung over the rim of her pickle barrel—the same kilt and socks she remembered seeing the day before on Alan Rosemont. The legs were attached to a torso about Rosemont’s size that was pitched forward into the barrel, deep into Piper’s pickling brine. A bagpipe lay on the ground nearby, deflated and looking as dead as the body in the barrel.

  Ben Schaeffer fumbled for his cell phone, clearing his voice several times as he pressed its buttons. “Sheriff? Schaeffer, here. I’m at the fair. We have, uh, a situation, here. I think it may be a homicide.”

  Piper blanked out on the rest of Ben’s report as her mind struggled with the awful scene in front of her. Her thoughts swirled until, at Ben’s final words, her attention suddenly snapped back.

  “Yes, sir. And, Sheriff, if you don’t mind me saying? You might want to send someone to check on the whereabouts of Nate Purdy.”

  4

  Piper watched the bustling activities of the sheriff’s department from behind the crime scene tape, where she’d been politely but firmly moved after a brief questioning. A large area around her booth had been cordoned off, although the rest of the fair, after some discussion with frazzled fair officials, was allowed to carry on. From her position, all Piper could see were crime scene technicians moving about and department vehicles with flashing red lights.

  Not that she really wanted to see Alan Rosemont’s body—for it had been identified as his—any closer than she already had. But much of her shop’s merchandise remained in the midst of that barely fathomable scene, and though she couldn’t move any of her jars or pickling spices out of harm’s way, remaining within watching distance made her feel she was somehow keeping them safe. Which, at the same time, made her feel horrible. A man was dead and she was worrying about her pickles? The only rationalization she could come up with was that she knew her pickles much better than the man.

  “So, someone did Pinky in?” A voice behind her made her turn.

  “Pinky?”

  “Yeah, you know, Rosemont.” The speaker was a denim-clad, grizzled man whose earthy aroma signaled he’d wandered over from the livestock barn. “We all called him Pinky. Not to his face, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he would have punched you out if you did. The man had a temper.”

  “No, I mean why Pinky.”

  “Oh.” The man scratched at his day’s growth of beard. “Well, first it was Rosey, from his name, you know? But then that library business turned it into Pinky.”

  “Sorry to sound so out of it—I’m fairly new around here—but what library business?” Piper asked.

  Her companion seemed more than happy to fill her in. “A few months ago, the library needed a new paint job, and the town council had to approve it. Councilman Rosemont, there, didn’t want to put a lot of money into things like that. From what I heard he was looking into installing new, fancy streetlights on the block where his antique shop is. So he cut the cost of redoing the library by buying a paint called Azalea Bloom, some color that they were practically giving away. Once it was on, we could see why. It made the library look like a great big bottle of Pepto-Bismol.” The man chuckled for a moment, then added, “Lyella Pfiefle was fit to be tied.”

  “Lyella—?”

  “The head librarian.”

  “Oh.”

  “So Rosey became Pinky.”

  “Ah.” Piper couldn’t help a lip twitch or two, first from picturing the library, then from imagining that in-your-face, belligerent man being called Pinky and how he would have reacted if he’d ever learned of it. A movement near her booth caught her eye, sobering her. They’d started setting up privacy shields around the crime scene.

  Her informative companion moved on, to be replaced by clumps of other curious spectators. The sun, having had to fight its way through an overcast sky, had yet to burn off the early morning chill, and Piper rubbed at her arms and thought about scaring up a cup of coffee. As she glanced around, she spotted a woman charging her way: Charlotte Hosch, owner of Charlotte’s Chocolates and Confections, whose booth was next to Piper’s. The confectioner’s flying hair and steely expression gave Piper an uh-oh feeling, and she braced herself.

  “No one can get anywhere near my booth,” Charlotte shouted once she got within whites-of-her-eyes distance.

  Unsure what Charlotte expected her to do about that, Piper said, “I’m sorry, Charlotte.”

  “You’re sorry? What happened at your booth is ruining my business! How could you let that man drown in your pickle barrel?”

  “I didn’t let anything happen, Charlotte.”

  “Don’t you lock your things up like the rest of us do? You can’t just leave traps of that sort for people to fall into.”

  Piper took a deep breath. Charlotte could probably guess that pickle barrels didn’t come with locks—combination, padlock, or otherwise. And Piper didn’t feel the need to explain, as she had to Sheriff Carlyle, that she’d firmly clamped her barrel lid closed before leaving the night before. Besides which, Piper was pretty sure Alan Rosemont didn’t die because he’d decided to go diving in her pickle brine. Before being shuffled away from the crime scene, she’d overheard comments about head trauma, which told her he most certainly had been dead before he ended up where he did. If whoever killed Rosemont hadn’t deposited him in her barrel, his body would likely have been found lying somewhere nearby, and this entire area would still have been blocked off.

  But Charlotte Hosch was a fellow businesswoman whose shop was within walking distance of Piper’s Picklings. It was best to stay at least on speaking terms with someone she’d likely have to deal with for years to come.

  “I don’t think it will be much longer, Charlotte. You don’t sell much candy before lunchtime, anyway, do you?”

  Charlotte huffed but pursed her lips. Piper pressed on. “You know, once the crew there finishes up, they’re going to be famished. I’d get your fudge ready and extra bags of those fruit and nut mixes you have lined up if I were you.”

  Piper could see Charlotte’s mind clicking as she calculated what she had on hand and what she could expect to unload. For a woman surrounded daily by highly fattening foods, Charlotte kept herself amazingly slim, and Piper expected a lot of that came
from the energy she used getting upset with everything and anything around her. She’d heard comments from others, though, about the number of calories Charlotte probably burned up counting her money. Either way, the confectioner’s anger seemed to be deflected away from Piper for the moment, though she had a parting volley.

  “Nothing like this ever happened around here before you showed up with your pickling shop.”

  And a nice day to you, too, Charlotte!

  As Charlotte tramped off, a voice from behind said, “Awful woman, isn’t she?”

  Piper turned to see Tina Carson, proprietor of the coffee shop. “Not the easiest to get along with,” Piper agreed.

  She looked more closely at Tina. When she’d first met the woman several weeks ago, Piper had judged her to be in her late forties, with a pretty face and wavy brown hair offsetting the twenty or so extra pounds on her frame. Tina usually wore a cheery smile, but that morning dark shadows under her eyes gave her a somber look.

  “Are you okay?” Piper asked.

  Tina shrugged. “Just a headache. I’ll be better once the aspirin kicks in.”

  “I hope so. Was that why you were closed this morning? I stopped by with those jars of chutney you asked for.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry I missed you! I probably could have opened up, even with this dumb headache, but business has been sluggish because of the fair and I figured I’d take the day off. But then I heard sirens heading out here. Nobody on the street seemed to know what was going on, so I came to find out for myself.”

  Piper gestured grimly toward the crime scene, still bustling with technicians. “Alan Rosemont was killed here last night.”

  “Oh my gosh!” Tina’s hand flew to her mouth. “The poor man. I’m really sorry to hear that, even though he’s the one who caused me all that hassle about regulations and inspections when I was trying to set up my shop.”

  “He caused a lot of people a lot of problems,” put in a large man who’d just walked up. He took a bite from the cone of cotton candy he held. “But someone got even with him, and not just by doing him in but by how they left him.”