Cry for the Strangers Page 0,64

he’d disappeared, then went back into the gallery.

As he continued staining the display case he’d been working on, he thought over the conversation with Connor and decided that maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe he was paranoid and the town wasn’t really out to get him. But then Miriam Shelling’s words came back to him, ringing in his ears.

“They’re going to get you! Just like they got Pete.… They’ll get you too!”

14

The folder on the deaths of Pete and Miriam Shelling lay open on the desk in front of him, but Harney Whalen wasn’t reading. By now he knew the contents of the folder—could repeat them verbatim, if necessary. Still, none of it made sense. Despite Miriam’s insistence to the contrary, Whalen was still sure Pete’s death had been an accident. But Miriam Shelling’s was something else.

Somebody strangled her.

The words crawled up from the depths of Whalen’s mind, tormenting his sense of order. Suicide fit for Miriam Shelling; murder didn’t. Even so, those three words kept coming to him. Somebody strangled her. But Whalen could find no reasonable motive for someone to want to kill Miriam Shelling. So he went back once more, as he had periodically over the last several days, to considering unreasonable motives. And, as always, the name Glen Palmer popped into his head.

He glanced at the clock, then at his watch, annoyed that Chip Connor had not yet come in this morning. He was about to phone him when Chip suddenly appeared in the doorway.

“You keep banking hours?” Harney growled.

“Sorry,” Chip said quickly. Something was eating at Whalen this morning. “Talking to Palmer took longer than I expected.”

Whalen’s brows rose skeptically. “I thought you were going to take care of that yesterday.”

“I tried,” Chip explained. “But the gallery was closed, and when I drove out to the Palmers’ nobody was home.” Chip excused himself for the small lie: after all, there was a good possibility the Palmers hadn’t been home the previous afternoon. Whalen seemed satisfied. He looked at Chip expectantly.

“You want to tell me what you found out?”

“Not much of anything. His wife wanted to go to the funeral, so they went. That’s all there was to it.”

Whalen stared at Chip. “How long did you talk to him?”

“An hour, maybe a little longer,” Chip said uncomfortably.

“And all you found out was that his wife wanted to go to the funeral, so they went?” Whalen’s voice dripped sarcasm and Chip winced.

“I found out some other things, too, but they don’t have anything to do with the funeral.” He decided to try to shift the conversation a little. “Frankly, Harn, I don’t see what’s so important about that funeral. Why are you so concerned about who was there?”

“Because I don’t think Miriam Shelling committed suicide,” Whalen said flatly. Chip gaped at him, and Whalen grinned, pleased that he had disturbed his deputy’s normal calm.

“I don’t understand—” Chip began, then fell silent as Whalen made an impatient gesture.

“There’s nothing to understand,” the chief snapped. “It’s nothing but a hunch. But over the years I’ve learned to pay attention to my hunches, and right now my hunch tells me that there’s more to Miriam Shelling’s death than a simple suicide.”

“And you think Glen Palmer had something to do with it?”

Whalen leaned back in his chair and swiveled it around to gaze out the window as he talked. “When you live in a town all your life you get so you know the people. You know what they’ll do and what they won’t do. As far as I know, nobody in town would kill Miriam Shelling. So it has to be a stranger. Palmer’s a stranger.”

Chip felt baffled: it didn’t make sense—none of it made sense. As if he had heard Chip’s unspoken thought, Whalen began explaining:

“He was the last person to talk to her. She was saying strange things. Probably acting crazy, like she was when she came in here the day before, and she scared him. Hell, maybe she even attacked him. How the hell do I know? But it happened on his property, and he was the last person to talk to her, and I can’t see that anybody else in town would do something like that.”

“But that certainly doesn’t mean Glen Palmer did it,” Chip protested. “It doesn’t even mean that anybody did it!” Now he spoke his earlier thought out loud. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, and if you’ll notice, I haven’t charged him with anything, have I? I didn’t say it makes sense, Chip. Hell,