A Deadly Snow Fall by Cynthia Gallant-Simpson Page A

Rosita cleaned for Edward Granger
and his wife in Truro for a couple of summers. Might be worth
trying to find her, sure. I’ll look into that when I get to the
station tomorrow. I’ll ask around.”
    “Absolutely splendid, James. Why, you ought
to go into police work!”
     
     

Chapter Twelve
     
    The bedside clock said three-sixteen when I
suddenly burst into wakefulness from a deep sleep . Rosita!
Of course, Rosita, how could I be so dumb? She had cleaned the
Granger’s house? So that’s how he came to paint her. The rare
portrait Granger painted of a beautiful girl with creamy café au
lait skin, raven hair and eyes like blueberries, if blueberries
were black. He’d called the lovely painting Rosita in the Morning
Light.
    Leaping out of bed as if it had been in
flames, I headed to the computer. Pushing aside piles of notes for
my cookery book, I waited impatiently for the boot up. Facts
collided in my semi-groggy head. Rosita could surely have
introduced her boyfriend, or perhaps he was already her fiancé, to
the Grangers. Logical. So, what does that prove? Thoughts tumbled
like bits of shattered glass from a broken kaleidoscope. I was
grasping at straws but somehow I knew that I was on the right
trail.
    Then, there on the screen was the painting of
a lovely young woman just as I’d seen it at the show in Boston.
Rosita in the Morning Light. So that was Rosita Gonsalves. Cleaning
lady turned portrait subject. Granger, it said, had only painted
two portraits during his long career and the other one had been
lost in a gallery fire on Newbury Street in Boston in the
seventies. Crawling back into bed, a plan began to gestate and I
spent the rest of the night sleeping fitfully between dreams in
which I raced through the tangled back streets of London pursuing a
killer in a lilac wig and swam in the Thames holding hands with a
plastic bag.
    Time to beard a certain lion in his den. Or
hers, as it were. I had walked by the Fairies in the Garden shop
many times and never been tempted to enter the front door. Daphne
had mentioned that Emily Sunshine knew everything worth and
probably not worth knowing in the village. As the official village
fortune teller, Emily, as Daphne had kidded, “Knows where all the
bodies are buried.” Therefore, I hoped that she might know more
about what might have motivated someone to kill old Edwin Snow. Not
that I had ever believed in what the woman did for a living but
sometimes one must suspend one’s own reality in the cause of
justice. I noticed that my thoughts were beginning to sound like
Dashiell Hammett.
    Daphne had said, “Emily Sunshine is a bit of
a weirdo but really sweet. I have to admit that she sure surprised
me more than once with things she knows. Once, she stopped me in
the street to tell me that I really ought to get a doctor to look
at the mole on the sole of my foot. I didn’t even know I had a mole
on the sole of my foot. The next time I went to Doc Emory for a
checkup I pointed it out to him and he sent me right off to Hyannis
to have it checked. Well, I no longer have a mole on the sole of my
foot because it was removed due to it being very suspicious. You’ve
got to admit the woman is not to be discounted as a total nut. I
myself am very grateful to her. Gave her a painting to thank her.
She’s your oracle.”
     
    Stepping into the thick smog of the shop
where the miasma created by the combat of dozens or more flowery
and spicy scents vying for dominance created a sinus-blasting blend
of Biblical proportions, I gasped in search of a clean breath.
Finding none, my decision to get out quickly was reinforced
tenfold.
    Emily Sunshine was busy waiting on a customer
so I wandered through the crowded shop where angels, fairies, worry
beads, incense, scented candles, scented cards, and even dangling
earrings that were guaranteed to waft their scent as one walked,
filled every shelf and crevice. The air in the place could have
brought an army to its knees. How did the