I may have growled. It had been quite a day.
When I stood to close the glove box, some stuff inside it fell out, so I had to grab those and shove them back in. It was a bunch of the usual detritus: insurance folder, tissues, window scraper, vehicle registration …
Vehicle registration?
I glanced out the window guiltily to see if Mr. Butler was coming and then looked back down at the piece of paper.
Itwasa vehicle registration. And it was in the name ofGreg Butler, owner. Not U-MOVE-IT.
Not a leasing agreement at all.
Why did Susan’s godfather own a U-MOVE-IT van? Or, probably more accurately, why was he pretending that his personal van was a commercial vehicle? Did that even make sense?
Every minute of this week had brought more questions than answers, and I was so sick of it I almost went marching into the shop to confront him with the registration form.
But then I thought … why?
What really was the crime here? He was an odd old guy who liked to pretend he drove U-MOVE-IT vans. So what? Or maybe he’d bought a used one from the company and hadn’t had time to paint over the logo yet.
I sighed. The events of the day had left me on edge, as anybody would be who’d battled a killer zucchini plant. I shoved the papers, including the registration, back in the glove box, retrieved the roll of trash bags, and headed into the shop.
Just as I rounded the front of the van, though, I had a thought. About moving vans and missing murder weapons. There were lots of nooks and crannies in the back of a box-filled, moving van. And I doubted Susan would have searched her own godfather’s vehicle. She’d verified his alibi that he’d been at the Orlando hospital, although they’d never figured out the origin of the fake phone call that had sent him racing over there. So, his van hadn’t even been at her house at the time of the murder.
But if Ish held on to the gun and then just happened to hide it in the van when Butler got back…
I didn’t want to ask about it, though, and open up a whole can of worms. I wasn’t a detective. Susan had probably thought about all of this.
Maybe I could ask Jack to sniff the van? A recently fired gun might have a strong enough scent that he could pick it up. But no. As Jack always said, he didn’t have any special sense of smell. He was a tiger, not a wolf.
I stopped walking. But maybe I knew somebody who wasalmosta wolf …
I texted Lizzie.
I know this is going to sound very odd, and please keep it between us, but would you be willing to go with me to Susan’s this afternoon and smell the woods around her house? And, maybe, a van, too?
She texted back almost immediately.
This town is so weird. I love it. Let’s do it.
34
Tess
I closed the shop for the rest of the day and put aClosed For Repairssign on the door. On the way home to shower off plant detritus, I explained my missing-murder-weapon theory to Jack and filled him in about Lizzie and her almost-werewolf powers (she’d given me permission to tell him).
He gave me a thoughtful look and said, “Hmm.”
“Hmm?”
“I almost hate to admit it, but it makes sense to me.”
“Then why do you hate to admit it?”
He sighed and turned into my lane. “Because it means we have to spend part of our afternoon prowling around Susan’s woods and snooping in her godfather’s van, instead of hanging out at home, cooking an excellent dinner, and leaving our phones out in the truck, so nobody can reach us.”
But when we met Lizzie two hours later when Susan was tied up at work dealing with Henrietta, we wound up spending an hour accomplishing nothing at all.
First off, Mr. Butler was out, so we couldn’t snoop in or around his van. Second, we walked all over the woods, but Lizzie didn’t smell anything that gave off the aroma of “fired gun.”
