The Heirloom Murders - Kathleen Ernst [49]
“Not now!” Sabatola blazed. He turned his back on the woman and strode back toward the fellowship hall.
Roelke leaned against the brick wall, affecting complete disinterest as he pulled a lighter from his pocket. He didn’t smoke, which put him in a distinct minority among cops, but this pretense let him linger unobtrusively in all sorts of places. Sabatola, head down and fists once again clenched, didn’t even glance his way.
The skinny woman stood for a few moments, staring after him. Then she got into an old-model Dodge Dart, and drove away.
Roelke was still mulling that exchange over when the door opened again. Another woman stepped outside and immediately began scrabbling through her purse. She extracted her own pack of cigarettes, but further search failed, evidently, to produce matches or a lighter.
“Can I offer you a light?” Roelke asked. He normally didn’t encourage anyone to smoke, but this wasn’t the time for a talk about lung cancer.
“Thanks.” She joined him, put a cigarette to her lips, and inhaled fiercely. She was about his own age, with a narrow face framed by reddish curls.
“It’s a difficult time,” Roelke said.
“Yeah.” She took another drag. “Are you a friend of the family’s?”
Roelke introduced himself. “I was on duty the day Mrs. Sabatola died.”
“Oh, God.” The woman hunched her shoulders, as if defending herself from the vision of what he’d found on the trail.
“Were you and Mrs. Sabatola friends, Miss … ?”
“Sorry. I’m Mona Lundy. Bonnie and I were friends all the way through high school together, and we both worked at a dress shop in Elkhorn.”
Roelke felt something quiver inside. Finally, finally. “How long did you work together?”
Mona considered. “A year or so, I guess. She quit after the wedding.”
“Did she say why?”
“No. She just came in one day and gave notice.” Mona stared at a dandelion straggling through a crack in the sidewalk.
“Perhaps with a big house to take care of … and the gardens …” Roelke made a You know gesture.
Mona shook her head. “Bonnie loved her job. She had a knack for finding just the right style or color for customers. And she told me that she wanted to keep working after she got married. ‘Simon wants me to quit,’ she said, ‘but I can’t imagine not contributing anything to the family finances.’”
Lie number one, Roelke thought. Simon Sabatola had said Bonnie had wanted to quit her job. “Did you keep in touch after Bonnie left the dress shop?”
“I never saw her again.” Mona took one last drag, dropped the cigarette onto the pavement, and ground it out beneath the toe of one shoe. “We talked once or twice on the phone. After awhile, though, the maid or whoever it was always said Bonnie wasn’t home. She never returned any of my calls.”
“Do you happen to know if Bonnie kept in touch with any other high school friends?”
“No, she pretty much disappeared.” A new tear began dragging another black streak down Mona’s cheek. “And then … this. Now I wish I’d tried harder to stay in touch.”
Roelke expressed his regret, and traded one of his business cards for Mona’s contact information. “Sure, I’ll call if I hear anything else,” she told him. “But I doubt if I will. All of us—Bonnie’s old high school friends—lost touch with her years ago.”
Chloe spent the day after Bonnie’s funeral cataloging artifacts in one of the old trailers that, for the time being, housed part of the historic site’s collection. She’d recently completed a proposal for a new collections storage facility, and the site director was working on raising funds.
For now, simply organizing collections was an ongoing task. Some of Old World’s objects had been donated directly to the site; some had been transferred from the state’s collection back in 1976, when the historic site opened. Interpreters were permitted to actually use only