Jack looked at the bag. He looked at Nans. He had the expression of a man annoyed at being one step behind someone’s grandmother.
Ruth already had her iPad out. Forty-five seconds of focused tapping. She turned the screen toward Jack.
“He had this in the bakery. Porcelain cat, blue and white, mid-century, welcoming pose. Bronze base, ornate mount.” She scrolled. “If the base is original and the mounting hardware dates to the right period, pieces like this can be worth a fortune. Auction records show comparable pieces going anywhere from eight thousand to considerably more.” She looked up. “Quite a profit on a yard sale item.”
Ida looked at the fish ashtray and the grinning swimsuit salt shakers. “So they left all of that and only took the cat.”
“Whoever hit him knew exactly what they were after,” Nans said.
Jack wrote something in his notebook. He did not thank Nans. He also didn’t tell her she was wrong, which everyone present understood to be the same thing.
He looked at the four of them — Nans, calm as a Sunday morning; Ruth, already back on her iPad; Helen, studying the spilled bag with quiet interest; Ida, who was eyeing the alley exit like she was calculating something.
“Ladies,” he said. “Promise me you won’t get in the middle of my investigation.”
A pause just long enough to be meaningful.
“Of course, Jack,” Nans said.
Helen smiled pleasantly. Ruth didn’t look up.
“We should probably go inside and get some snacks,” Ida said. “It’s going to be a busy afternoon.”
CHAPTER THREE
Nans’s dining room table was command central. The whiteboard had been wheeled out from the spare bedroom when Lexy arrived. She’d brought pastries and arranged them on the table and the coffee was just percolating.
Ida was already eating.
Nans uncapped the marker. “All right. What do we know?”
What they knew, laid out in Nans’s clean block letters, was this:
Everett bought the cat at the Mercer yard sale — two dollars, possibly less. Ruth had confirmed that comparable pieces, right base, right hardware, right period, could fetch anywhere from eight to twenty thousand at auction. Everett wound up dead in the alley behind The Cup and Cake not three hours later. The cat was gone. His bag, with everything else in it, was not.
“So whoever took it knew what it was worth,” Lexy said. “They didn’t grab the cocktail shaker or the fish ashtray. Just the cat.”
“Which means our pool of suspects walked right through your front door this morning,” Nans said.
Ruth looked up from her iPad. “Not necessarily.”
Everyone looked at her.
“The neighborhood app. Someone posted photos of all the sales, including the sale. Lamps, furniture, boxes of kitchen things.” She turned the screen around. “Third photo. Right there on the folding table. A porcelain cat on a bronze base.”
A beat.
“So anyone could have seen it,” Lexy said.
“Anyone with the app,” Ruth said.
“How would they know Everett had it though?” Ida asked.
Nans almost smiled. “How does anyone know anything in Brooke Ridge Falls?”
“Gossip,” everyone said, more or less simultaneously.
“What about Beatrice?” Lexy said. “She was right there in the Cup and Cake. She looked at that cat and told him it wasn’t worth very much.”