The Silver Anniversary Murder by Lee Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

her face. His forehead tightened as he pored over it. He jutted his lower lip out. “I don’t know,” he said.
    I gave him the full-length sketch and watched a slow smile appear. “You know her?”
    “She came in maybe a month ago. No one was at the counter so I waited on her myself. It’s the fingernails that made me remember. They were so bright and fresh and such a pretty pink. I said something about it and she kind of blushed.”
    I felt hope rise within me. “Did she have an account with you?”
    “I’m not sure she was ever in here before that day or after.”
    “Did she ask you to fill a prescription?” I asked, almost crossing my fingers.
    “No, nothing like that. She took a couple of items off the shelf and paid cash. That’s when I noticed her nails. And she was dressed like that, in a suit, very business-like.”
    “I don’t suppose she gave you her name.”
    “No reason to. It was a cash transaction. But that’s her. I’d bet on it.”
    That was as far as it went. She had simply been a woman off the street picking up a few necessities. Well, I thought, at least I had gone one small step beyond the police.
    I went back to my list, determined now to show both pictures to everybody. You never know what will trigger a memory.
    Elsie was picking up Eddie at school so I didn’t have a deadline. It’s amazing how many pharmacies were in this group of towns. It made me wonder how people picked only one for themselves. Mr. Greeves’s store delivers, and that had been our main criterion—that and the charge account.
    I grew weary and bleary-eyed, not to mention tired of hearing people say no. It occurred to me as I walked into what would surely be the last drugstore I would visit today that I should buy some Band-Aids for the bathroom upstairs that Eddie uses. I took a good-size box off the shelf and walked up to the counter, waiting behind an old woman with a cane. The cashier handed her two prescriptions in a paper bag, and the woman gave her name for them to charge the purchase.
    I put my box on the counter.
    “Anything else?” The cashier was a middle-aged woman who looked vaguely familiar. I thought she might live in Oakwood.
    “I wonder if you recognize this woman.” I laid the pictures on the counter and took out my wallet to pay.
    “She comes in a lot.”
    “She does?”
    “Yes. I haven’t seen her for a while, but I was away on vacation, so I might have missed her.”
    “Do you know her name?”
    “I don’t think she has an account with us. She pays in cash. I always have to make change from a fifty.”
    “Does she bring in prescriptions?”
    “I don’t know. Let me ask the pharmacist.” She went behind the high counter where the pharmacists worked and showed the pictures around.
    Before she came back, a woman’s voice behind me said, “I know her. You looking for her?”
    I turned to see the old woman with the cane. “I’m looking for people who know her.”
    “That’s Rosette Parker. She picks me up sometimes in the morning and takes me to the bus stop. It’s very nice of her but it’s so much trouble getting into that SUV of hers, sometimes I wish she’d just go by and let me walk.”
    I smiled with sympathy. “When was the last time you saw her?”
    “Quite some time ago. Weeks. But the weather’s been nice.”
    “Ma’am?”
    The woman behind the counter was back. The pharmacists didn’t recognize the pictures, she said. I thanked her and turned back to my new informant. “May I take you somewhere?” I offered.
    “Just home. If you don’t own a van or a pickup.” She laughed.
    I assured her I drove a small car and that she could get in and out of it easily. Outside she told me the cane was more for reassurance than physical necessity. She had had a hip replacement and was doing very well.
    We talked while I drove the short distance. “She told me her name and I told her mine, maybe the second or third time she picked me up. I’m Gladys French, by the