I gave Mr. Royal the photo Stone had given me. It was an amazing shot of him walking on the beach holding a surfboard. “If he wants to put out anything about his energy drink, there will be room on the table,” Mr. Royal said. He stared at the photo and spent a few minutes raving on about Stone’s surfing prowess.
“I wonder where Adele is,” I said, doing a three sixty around the bookstore. “It’s too quiet in here.” Dinah followed me as we headed toward the kids’ section. But when we walked into the area with cows jumping over the moon on the carpets and kid-size tables and chairs, there was no Adele.
“Her stuff is here,” Dinah said touching Adele’s tote bag sitting next to a notebook on the counter against the wall. Dinah’s elbow brushed the tote bag and it toppled off the counter and fell bottom up on the floor.
“We better pick this up before Adele comes in,” I said grabbing a runaway ball of yarn. I noticed a hook had fallen free. “Did you see where this came from?” I asked Dinah as I rummaged through the stuff on the floor. I finally found a swatch of yarn missing a hook and figured they belonged together. Before I slipped the hook back into a loop, I examined the cream-colored yarn. I held it up to show Dinah.
“Poor Adele,” I said. “These are supposed to be bullion stitches.” I handed them to Dinah and she shook her head in dismay.
“I see what she means about it being her Achilles’ heel. These are terrible.” We’d both seen photos of properly done bullion stitches and they were tight coils with a slightly crescent shape. Adele’s coils were anything but tight or neat and appeared to be coming undone. We put everything back in the bag and set it back where it was.
“What’s in the notebook?” Dinah asked.
“It is just sitting here,” I said as if that made snooping in it okay. As soon as I opened it, I almost dropped it.
“Look.” I pointed to the title “Adele Abrams, Very Private Detective” on the first page. Underneath it said “Case Book.” There was no way I was putting it down now. I flipped to the next page and saw “Case #1—The Murder of Kelly Donahue.” Beyond that she had a page titled “Suspects” and below that had headings for “Who Gained From Her Death,” “Alibis,” and “Adele’s Golden Triangle of Guilt.” A whole separate sheet was called “What to Wear to an Investigation.”
“Wow, she sure has a long list of suspects.” I did a double take as I got lower on the list. “Including you and me.”
“Geez, is she crazy?” Dinah said looking over my shoulder.
“She put an ‘LOL’ next to us,” I said going through the list. “She’s got Dan at the top with an asterisk. Nanci Silvers is right under him. Look at all the production people she listed. The only names I recognized were Fred and Zeke, the two prop guys I’d overheard and North Adams.” It seemed like she’d listed everyone on the cast and crew except Eric. “She ought to put herself on the list. She could be trying to kill everyone who knows how to do the bullion stitch, so she won’t look bad.” I was just joking about that and we both started to laugh. Neither of us heard Adele come in until it was too late.
“What are you doing?” she demanded pulling the binder from my hands. She stuffed it into her tote bag. As she did, she noticed that things weren’t quite as she’d left them. “CeeCee knows, doesn’t she?” She pulled out the little swatch of bullion stitches and she started to cry and pull out the stitches at the same time. Adele cried like everything else she did, loudly and with a lot of drama.
Dinah and I surrounded her and gave her a group hug. She seemed so heartbroken over her crochet disability as she called it, we both reassured her that we were sure she’d master the stitch in no time and once again promised not to mention it to CeeCee.
I was hoping the fuss would make her forget we’d been looking at her detective book. Of course it didn’t. “A lot you know. Eric was helping me with it. Maybe you don’t know, Pink, but homicide detectives make up a murder book for each of their cases. Us serious freelancers do, too.”