Lavinia shrugged. “I just think you might have blinders on here. Maybe you should consider some other suspects.”

“I don’t have any other suspects.”

“Because you haven’t been looking. It’s never good to focus on one thing. Besides, my feeling is there may be more to this than meets the eye.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Maybe there are other forces at work.”

“Other forces?” I scrunched up my face at her. Now she was starting to sound like Elspeth.

“Oh bother,” Lavinia waved her hand in the air, making a swirly trail of misty goo that hung suspended for a few seconds before falling to the ground and evaporating. “What other clues do you have?”

“Well, Ophelia did say she saw a long, dark car speeding away from town that morning.” My leg was starting to throb, so I turned back toward the front of the store where I kept a tube of Iced Fire. Lavinia floated along beside me, Pandora at her heels.

“See? Now, that’s a clue you should be looking into.” Lavinia suggested. “And what about the bronzes?”

“You know about those?”

“I overheard you talking about them yesterday. I had forgotten all about them until you mentioned them. They’re downstairs, just like you said.”

“How many are there?”

“Four. At first we had them on display upstairs, but then people’s tastes changed and Western stuff wasn’t as popular. We moved them downstairs decades ago,” Lavinia said. “Do you think I stumbled across someone trying to steal them and they did me in?”

“Maybe.” I plopped onto the sofa, then pulled up the leg of my jeans and rubbed some Iced Fire on my leg. Pandora came over to investigate, sniffed at my leg, yowled and ran to the back of the store.

Lavinia laughed. “That is a rather potent smell.”

“Yeah, but it works wonders.”

Two misty figures materialized before us—Franklin Pierce and Robert Frost—and they were both holding their noses.

“Iced fire? Will the world end in fire or ice?  I know not, but either way I hope it doesn’t smell like that,” Frost said, pointing down at the tube.

Pierce and Lavinia burst out laughing at the poetry reference. I didn’t think it was so funny. Did I really smell that bad?

“I heard you talking about bronzes, and I do say some are quite valuable.” Franklin Pierce looked at us importantly. “In fact, I could boast that there were a few bronze busts made of me in my day.”

“That’s right,” Lavinia said. “We have one in the library.”

“I’ve had one or two made of me as well,” Frost said, not to be outdone. “In fact, mine was so valuable it was stolen from its spot at Wichita State University some years back.”

Pierce narrowed his ghostly eyes at Frost. “I heard that was a drunken prank.”