Dirty Tricks: A Kate Lawrence Mystery by Judith Ivie Page B

so later, Strutter returned from her stroll, all smiles .“ Get yourself outside now,” she
said, shooing me out of the desk chair. “It’s one of the ten best days of the
year weather-wise, and this year’s line-up of scarecrows is first rate. Emma
and Jimmy loaned out the Law Suit to Blades Salon this year, and he looks just
fine. Don’t miss the one by Olivia’s nursery school. Just look for the brooms
that don’t have witches on them,” she grinned. “Go along with you now.”
    I was happy to allow myself to be
chased out of the office and let myself out of the Law Barn’s big front door.
For years I’d been accustomed to having my daughter Emma share the building
with us. As an accomplished real estate paralegal, she ran the small shop of
her lawyer boss, Jimmy Seidel. Our professional relationship had been good for
us all, but it was the personal give-and-take on a daily basis I so sorely
missed. Since she and Jimmy had relocated to Glastonbury, we’d hardly seen each
other. My summer walks for exercise and my winter walks to feed the local water
fowl and songbirds were now solitary. I missed my girl, although at nearly
thirty years of age, she hardly qualified as that any longer.
    The sunshine cheered me
immediately, as did the warm breeze and the sight of happy strollers nibbling
bag lunches from The Cove Deli and Village Pizza, licking ice cream cones from
Main Street Creamery, my destination, and enjoying the outdoor patio at Lucky
Lou’s. I took my time walking down Old Main Street toward Wethersfield Cove,
the better to enjoy the annual display known as Scarecrows Along Main Street. It was sponsored by the Old Wethersfield Shopkeepers Association
and had become a beloved event for tourists and residents. Individuals and
community groups alike participated, hoping to win prizes from the judges and
having a lot of fun putting their exhibits together. I welcomed back perennial
favorites such as The Roof Fiddler, who was perched on a house top; Fright
Attendant and Passengers, guaranteed to elicit chuckles from white-knuckle
flyers; a family of stick-mounted Booligans along a
picket fence; and of course, our old friend Law Suit, a braying ass dressed
entirely in a suit fashioned out of legal documents. The dozens of
broom-wielding ghosts playing on a lawn were called Baby Broomers and had to be the display Strutter had been talking
about.
    As I strolled along, events of the
past few years crowded my memory, many of them having to do with informal
investigations into which I’d been drawn along with my loyal partners. Some had
involved unexplained deaths, including one not-so-recent
demise , all of which had come to light during various real estate
transactions in which Mack Realty represented buyers or sellers. There’s
something about the transfer of property and the circumstances under which it
changes hands that seems to provoke—or sometimes unearth—family dramas.
Fortunately, all had been resolved fairly satisfactorily, and we’d made many
more friends than we’d lost as a result of our investigations.
    This train of thought led me back
to May’s story of bats in the night, as bizarre a tale as I’d ever heard. I
walked into the Creamery and waved absentmindedly at one of the volunteer
docents from the Keeney Memorial Cultural Center. I could never remember her
name, but fortunately she was preoccupied with her cherry vanilla double-dip,
so conversation wasn’t required. As I stood in the considerable line of
customers waiting for service, I replayed May’s story of last night’s events
from memory, hoping for an “Aha!” moment that would solve the mystery of the
bats in her house. One bat might have been lured by the warm air seeping out of
the slightly open window, but a dozen? No way.
    There was no doubt in my mind that
the incident had been deliberately engineered to frighten May, but why? As she
herself had said, she hadn’t become sufficiently acquainted with any of her