Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [40]
The front room was so bare that Lee’s first impression was that no one lived there at all. Then personal little details began to emerge: the green pottery vase of dried flowers in the window, the child’s wooden chair in the corner next to the fireplace. The room was clearly originally intended as the main living room of the house, but as Trooper Anderson led them through to the kitchen, it was clear that most of the living had gone on there. In contrast to the rather bleak spareness of the living room, the kitchen was a happy, untidy jumble. Bunches of dried herbs hung suspended from each of the three windows. Stained and spattered cookbooks lined one shelf of a battered built-in bookcase, and the shelves over the heavy, old-fashioned gas stove sagged with the weight of mismatched, obviously handmade ceramic plates and mugs.
A brightly colored hooked rug covered most of the floor, which was made of the same wide white-pine floorboards as the rest of the house. A wooden table painted turquoise blue snuggled up against the far corner of the room. The walls were painted a cheerful bumblebee yellow, with a mural of wildflowers on the north wall. The sun streaming in through white lace curtains fell on the riotous blossoms, turning it into a lifelike three-dimensional trompe l’oeil. An old potbellied stove against the far wall served as the heat source for the room, Lee suspected—a wooden crate full of firewood was nestled in the corner, next to the kitchen table. The two chairs on either side of it looked as though they had been recently and hastily vacated, and the sight made Lee’s heart give a sad little skip until he realized that the room’s most recent occupant was no doubt Officer Anderson.
“The crime-scene techs spent quite a lot of time in here,” the trooper said. “Removed a few glasses and some silverware for fingerprinting.” He looked around the room and shook his head. “Such a pity—someone was real happy here.”
Butts stared at him. “How can you tell?”
Anderson waved a hand at a stack of unpainted ceramic mugs on the windowsill. “It’s not hard to see—look here, see? She was in the middle of this project—and look here, too,” he continued, indicating an open cookbook on the counter. Lee recognized it: The Moosewood Cookbook, an early pioneer of the natural food movement. The pages were stained and splattered—obviously the recipe was one she had loved, and made again and again.
“Okay,” Butts muttered, “so she was happy here. Fat lot of good it did her.”
The young trooper looked shocked at the detective’s apparent callousness, but Lee knew Butts better—his disgust was an expression of his deep anger at the injustice of murder.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Anderson said, with a disapproving glance at Butts. “Call me if there’s anything you need.”
“Thanks,” Lee replied, and the young officer retreated quietly back to his post on the front porch. They heard the swing and slam of the screen door and the scraping of a chair across the floorboards, then silence.
Lee turned to Butts. “You know,” he said softly, “not everyone knows you as well as I do. I think our friend has the wrong impression—”
“Yeah, whatever,” Butts grunted, stomping over to the corner and sticking his face into a blue crockery bin. He immediately pulled it back and sneezed. “It’s damn flour,” he said with disgust, wiping the white powder from his nose.
“What did you think it was—cocaine?”
Butts ignored him and continued to poke around the kitchen, opening cupboards, lifting the lids off saucepans, rifling through drawers filled with silverware and kitchen utensils. Lee sat on one of the chairs and watched Butts for a while, then let his gaze fall idly upon the mural of wildflowers. It really was wonderfully painted—with the sun on it