Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit by Amy Stewart

Author:Amy Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

21

“i hope you cured Cordelia Heath of holding tea parties at the jail,” Norma said the next morning.

I laughed in spite of myself. I never did like the idea of the jail being treated as a backdrop for speeches and luncheons.

“As a campaign event, it was most unusual,” I said. “My unionists were striking against a factory owned by one of the ladies’ husbands, and my murderess answered the questions put to her a little too honestly. I wish the sheriff hadn’t allowed it, but he has a hard time saying no to his wife.”

“But as a concert, it was smashing,” Fleurette said. “The inmates loved our singing.”

“We all did,” I said, but it was more out of habit than anything I could recall of the concert. “The strange thing is that Mr. Courter came to speak to me.”

“What does he want with you?” Norma asked.

“He wouldn’t come right out and say, but he was hinting at something. He knows I went to Morris Plains.”

“I knew someone would find out,” Norma said. “You’re hard to miss. What did Sheriff Heath say?”

“That’s just it. Mr. Courter only wanted me to know. He left without telling the sheriff.”

Norma was bent over our dining room table, where pasteboard, toothpicks, glue, string, and bits of wood were scattered across the drawings that she and Carolyn Borus had been working on. She appeared to be making a miniature house and refused to answer questions about it.

She put down a little pen-knife and said, “Then he’s threatening to expose you to the sheriff, but he hasn’t done it yet.”

“That’s what it seemed like, yes,” I said. “The trouble is, he made no demands of me. He didn’t say what he wanted me to do.”

“Well, surely he was warning you away from the asylum,” Norma said.

“But why? He might not like me meddling in the Kayser case, but why not go to the papers with it? It’s unlike him to be discreet.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want it made public that there’s trouble with the case,” Fleurette offered. “He might not want the papers looking into what happened to Anna Kayser.”

I looked back and forth at the two of them, puzzling it out. “He’s had nothing to do with her. This wasn’t even a criminal case.”

“Well, it’s plain as day that he wants you to leave her alone, and he might want quite a bit more from you,” Norma said. “He can tell Sheriff Heath anytime he wants. It puts him in charge, doesn’t it? Hand me that pot of glue.”

Fleurette and I were waiting for some sort of explanation about the miniature building project Norma had undertaken, but none was forthcoming. Norma never saw any reason to explain herself.

“I hope it’s to be a doll-house,” Fleurette said. “Mother never let me have one.”

“It could be a working model of the jail,” I offered.

Norma ignored us, pushed her spectacles up on her nose, and rolled her sleeves past the elbow. When it became apparent that we weren’t leaving without an explanation, she said, “You’ll remember our plan for a message station in Ridgewood.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.