Doubled Up (Imogene Museum Mystery #2) Read Free Page A

can live that long without heads, too, because they breathe through spiracles. They really only need their heads for eating and drinking.”
    Sheriff Marge and I stared at him.
    Dale shrugged. “My kid’s doing a report on insects for school. Hey.” He snapped his fingers. “If I can catch one of those, he could pin it in his display case.”
    “ There’ll be plenty more,” Sheriff Marge said. “You ready?”
    She kicked the crate and quickly retreated. An extended family of creepy monster bugs fled over the crate ’s sides. Dale held up the tarp edge to keep the scrabbling creatures contained. He reached in with a gloved hand and grabbed a big one. Then he let the tarp drop, and we watched the rest of the roaches escape through the puddles. Dale dropped his catch in an evidence bag and sealed it.
    I shuddered. “I need gloves before I’m touching anything else in that crate.”
    Dale handed me a pair of gloves. I slid them on and bent over the crate, gingerly picking at the packing material. It became musty and damp the deeper I plunged. “Phew. Water must have leaked in somehow.”
    “ Which would have made the roaches happy,” Dale said near my shoulder. He was squatting, watching closely as I pulled out a gob of reeking cockroach nest.
    “ I think maybe I should be wearing a mask,” I said, and my hand bumped something hard. I felt around the foot-long object and lifted it, brushing off the loose raffia strands. A dark carved wood statue of a woman with a grotesquely disproportionate face and figure.
    “ Whoa,” Dale said. “Thank God none of the women I know look like that.”
    I rolled my eyes.
    “What is it?” Sheriff Marge asked.
    “ I’d guess aboriginal folk art. I can’t even tell you what continent, but probably Pacific Island, Australia or Africa. If I knew what kind of wood, that might narrow down the location. It’s really heavy.”
    “ Because it got wet?” Sheriff Marge held out her gloved hands.
    “ I don’t know.” I handed the statue to her and bent to rummage through the crate again. I found seven more statues — another woman, three men, a water buffalo/cow, a goat and a creature that appeared to be a cross between a boar and an anteater — all with body parts skewed or somehow not quite right.
    “ Fourteen crates of those, huh,” Dale said. “How much do you think they’re worth?”
    “ Not much, except to a collector,” I answered, “or for historical reasons. But if they’re valuable historically, they should have stayed in their country of origin, which I am quite sure is not England.”
    “ So it’s fishy.” Sheriff Marge said.
    “ Yeah. I think the shipment was fishy to start with, and became fishier when someone stole most of it,” I answered.
    Sheriff Marge set her fists on her hips. “Dale, we’re impounding the truck and all its contents until we can sort this out.”
    “ What about my statues?” I asked.
    “ What?”
    “ Mole, Ratty, Toad—”
    Sheriff Marge scowled. “More animals?”
    “ Much cuter animals. You’ll see.”
    “ You can probably have them. But I want to talk to the driver first.”
    “ Who is getting very fidgety,” Rupert said, strolling into view and puffing on a Swisher Sweet cherry cigar. “Ford’s keeping him company.” His eyes widened. “What is that?”
    Wrinkling my nose, I held up a statue.
    “Hideous.”
    “ And the reason the truck was broken into,” Sheriff Marge said. “Know anything about it?”
    Rupert hunched toward the statue and squinted but did not offer to take it from me. “No. This kind of stuff has never appealed to me. A form of folk art, I suppose. Not North American or European, that’s for sure. Or Asian, for that matter.” He shuddered. “I wouldn’t want that thing looking at me from a shelf.”
    “ Maybe they’re death statues,” Dale said.
    He returned a sheepish grin as we stared at him again. “Discovery Channel.”
    “ Well, like you said, nobody wants to look at these