Read Online Looking for Yesterday by Marcia Muller - Free Book Online

someone—downstairs.”
    “Or someone?”
    “Well, Caro’s step was light, quick. A couple of times I heard a heavier tread.”
    “Could it have been mine?”
    She squinted at me. “No, you’re too slender. The footsteps I heard must have been a man’s.”
    “What time was this?”
    “In the evening. Before ten; I go to bed at ten.”
    “Can you narrow down the time frame?”
    She frowned. “My granddaughter had called. She always calls at eight to check up on me. We didn’t talk for long; nothing notable had happened to either of us. So maybe I heard the footsteps at a quarter past eight.”
    “Is there anything else you can tell me about Caro’s last days?”
    She thought, shook her head. “Nothing. She came and went so quietly—and now she’ll never come home again.”
    1:10 p.m.
    Since it was midday on a Friday, it seemed a poor time to canvass Caro’s neighbors, but I decided to give it a try anyhow. I had a quick sandwich at a nearby deli and then went up and down both sides of her block, talking with those who were home. None of them had known of her death, and all expressed sorrow. Caro had not been close to them, but they knew her story and sympathized with her.
    “She brought me some homemade apple butter just last October,” a chubby, balding fellow said.
    “She babysat for my kids once in a while,” a young mother told me. “I wasn’t afraid to leave them with her; I knew she was innocent. And they loved her.”
    “Why would anybody want to kill her?” an older man who was mowing his minuscule patch of front lawn asked. “She’d had more than her share of sorrow and still was as kind a woman as you’d ever hope to meet.”
    “Old lady Cleary kept the house dark on trick-or-treat night, but the kids knew to take the path to Caro’s door. She always gave Hershey’s Kisses.”
    “She shopped for my groceries once, when I was too sick to go to the store.”
    “She always brought Mrs. Cleary’s garbage cans in, as well as her own.”
    Saint Caro? Or Caro the atoner? Or something in between?
    3:36 p.m.
    In spite of the sandwich I’d had, I was hungry, so I stopped at home for a bite to eat. There was a note on the kitchen table from Hy: “Gone to LA on company business. Call you later.”
    Routine business? Dangerous? How the hell was I supposed to know? I thought again of his proposed merger with my agency; if the business entities were joined, I would insist on knowing the details of his activities, as he would the details of mine.
    I went to the fridge. Alex joined me and stood on his hind legs, peering inside. The bottomless-pit cat. I settled on ham and cheese on crackers; he joined me. I was spoiling him, but I’d always spoiled my cats. Jessie appeared, and I spoiled her too.
    While we ate I considered my next move and decided I might as well check with what neighbors of mine I knew would be home, to ask if any of them had seen Caro arrive here last night. The police would already have done this, but I thought maybe they’d missed someone or someone would have remembered something they’d forgotten or hadn’t wanted to reveal to officialdom.
    4:04 p.m.
    Mrs. Irene Hall, next door to the right, gaunt, stooped, and all angles: “We went to bed early, honey. And our bedroom’s at the back of the house like yours. We didn’t hear a thing till the police came. Lord, as we grow older we just sleep sounder. Getting prepared, I guess.”
    At the Curley house to the other side of mine, daughter Michelle popped out. “Damn,” she said, “I missed all the commotion. I was sleeping over at that place I’m rehabbing on Webster.”
    Chelle was a budding entrepreneur, having already refurbished a decaying cottage nearby and turned it for a profit.
    I said, “Is that wise, sleeping alone in a half-derelict building?”
    She rolled her eyes. “Shar, d’you think I was alone ?”
    Chelle was growing up, just like Jamie. I’d have to remember that.
    “Were your folks home? Or