by Kathi Daley
“That’s the assumption I’ve been working from, and the physical evidence supports the idea that Hollander willingly went into the rehearsal room. As I’ve mentioned before, it also appears that Hollander was close to the trap-room door when he was hit over the head. We didn’t find blood anywhere except in the immediate vicinity of the trap-room.”
I took a sip of my wine. “Okay, so then let’s imagine that Scotty is the killer. Keep in mind that I’m not necessarily saying he is, and this is just a theory we’re exploring. If Scotty did kill Hollander, that likely means he had planned to meet the man in the rehearsal room for some reason. Either that, or Hollander went into the room for a reason having nothing to do with meeting anyone, and Scotty followed him once he noticed him arrive.”
“I suppose either could be true.” Colt took a sip of his beer. “Go on.”
“Okay, so for whatever reason, Scotty ends up in the rehearsal room with Hollander. Either the pipe wrench used to kill Hollander was already in the room, or Scotty found it earlier in the evening, realized it would be a good weapon, and stashed it somewhere. Anyway, I guess we have to assume that Scotty already had the pipe wrench in his hand when he snuck into the room behind Hollander and hit him over the head before Hollander even knew he was there.”
“So, in this scenario, the murder was premeditated. Scotty knew Hollander would be at the theater for rehearsal, so he’d found a weapon and then waited for an opportunity to use it.”
I frowned. “I guess. That seems a bit unlikely to me, but for now, let’s go with it.”
“Okay. So what happens next?”
“After Scotty hits Hollander, he opens the trap-room door and pushes him in. While the door is open, the turkey, who was free and wandering around the building by this point, jumps in, and after a bit of consideration, Scotty decides to leave him there. He closes the door and heads to the men’s room to wash up. As he’s coming out of the men’s room, he runs into the boy he identified as his alibi. Scotty realizes the boy will make a good alibi, so he waits for him, and they join the group together.”
“Seems like a workable theory,” Colt said. “Although if the murder was premeditated, perhaps Scotty found the bird wandering around earlier and then put him in the trap-room as a way of getting Hollander to go over to the opening in the floor. Scotty might have hit Hollander over the head while he was leaning down to see what was making all the commotion down in the sub-ground level room.”
“I guess that works as well,” I agreed.
“Do you have a motive for Scotty to kill Hollander?”
“No,” I admitted. “I have no idea why Scotty would kill Hollander. Lacy and I talked about it, and we both thought that the killer had to be someone already at the theater. By the end of the discussion, we’d just settled on Scotty.”
“Why did you decide the killer had to be someone already there?” Colt asked. “We’ve established that the front door was unlocked.”
“We realized that there were a lot of people around. It seemed to us that someone would have noticed a person in the building who didn’t belong there.”
“I agree that the killer was probably already in the theater,” Colt said. “Although it is a bit early to settle on that for sure, it does seem likely.”
“And you decided that it could only be one of four men based on height and strength. You cleared Justin, which leaves Karl, Scotty, and George. Lacy and I did consider the others.” I set my fork down. “Do you know who Karl was talking to when the murder occurred? Lacy and I realized he could be on the phone and be the killer if the person he was talking to was in on things.”
“He was talking to Buck Owens about some paint he needed to pick up early the following morning. I spoke to Buck, and he said he had no reason to believe that Karl was doing anything other than speaking to him during the phone call.”
“Then I guess Karl is innocent. Buck would have no reason to lie for him.”
“I agree, and I have removed Karl from the list.”
“Which just leaves Scotty and George. No one saw George, so he could easily be the killer, and if we accept the premise that Scotty killed Hollander and then headed to the men’s room to wash up, then he could have done it as well.”
Colt used his napkin to wipe his mouth and then sat back. “I agree that theoretically, either Scotty or George could have done it. I do have to wonder about Hollander. As we’ve discussed, it does appear that Hollander was either standing on the stage near the trap-room door or bending over the trap-room when he was hit. If he was bending over, then a shorter person could have hit him with a downward blow.”
I nodded slowly. “I suppose that is true, but it still doesn’t tell us who killed him.”
“No,” Colt agreed. “It doesn’t. To be honest, I’ve gone over this thing in my mind dozens of times. We know that the turkey ended up in the trap-room, but there is no way to know for sure if the bird was already in the room when Hollander arrived, or if the turkey got in after the killer opened the hatch to dispose of the body. Additionally, it appears that Hollander arrived in the room of his own accord. There wasn’t a sign of a struggle. It didn’t appear he was forced into the room, or that he was killed elsewhere and then dragged there. But if he went into the rehearsal room of his own free will, why did he go into the room? Had he arranged to meet someone there? Had he seen or heard something that he decided to check out? Was the killer waiting for him in the room, or did the killer simply notice him go into the room and follow him? Was the murder premeditated, or did the killer act on impulse? There are many questions without answers at this point.”
I laid my head on Colt’s shoulder. “Yeah. We aren’t going to figure this out tonight. What do you say we move onto the other?”
Colt smiled. “I like the way you think, Abby Sullivan.”
Chapter 7
Colt had to leave early the following morning to head back into town for work. I considered going back to sleep, but I was pretty sure Georgia had never come home last night, so I figured I should head over to the inn to see if Jeremy needed help with breakfast. When I arrived, I found Georgia in the kitchen.
“I’m surprised to see you here. I figured Jeremy would be handling breakfast,” I said as I poured myself a cup of coffee.
“Annabelle has a field trip today, and Jeremy is chaperoning, so they both left early. The guests who checked in yesterday will be served at the regular time, but the three sisters asked for an early meal since their car is coming at eight to pick them up for their trip to the family estate.”
“How exciting,” I said.
“Perhaps, but when I spoke to Sierra last night, she seemed less excited and more terrified.”
“Terrified?” I asked. “I wonder why she’d be terrified.”
“I think the past few days have been hard on all the sisters. They’re finding out about a part of their history they never knew existed. I guess none of the sisters even knew the name of the man who fathered them before they arrived in Holiday Bay.”
“So, what did they know?” I asked. “And what have they learned?”
“They’re going to be down for breakfast in a few minutes. I say we ask them.”
As it turned out, they didn’t know a lot about their father, and they still had no idea how their grandmother had even found out about them. The only sister currently having a relationship with her mother was Sage since Sierra’s mother was dead, and Shelby was estranged from hers. Sage had called her mother to ask her why she’d never explained about her father, and her response was that it was complicated and that she did what she thought the best thing would be for her daughter at the time. She also told her that the man who’d fathered her hadn’t been worthy of any sort of love or loyalty. She encouraged her to take the money and never look back. She also encouraged Sage to caution her sisters to do the same.
I glanced at Georgia, who shrugged. It seemed obvious that Sage had made up her mind about things. Of course, at least part of Sage’s
attitude was probably directly related to her mother’s attitude. I wondered how the middle sister might feel about things if she hadn’t spoken to the woman who bore her.
“The attorney we spoke to told us that the estate in Holiday Bay was built by our great-great-grandfather,” Shelby began speaking after Sage shared her intent to do what needed to be done to grab the money, and then get the heck out of Dodge. It appeared that she was a bit more curious and open-minded about the whole thing and really did want to know the details of where Henrietta came from before making a judgment of any sort relating to the actual intent of the very rich woman, who Sage’s mother had assured her was as evil as her worthless father. “He was not himself a wealthy man, but he married an heiress who had more money than she knew what to do with. After the couple married and moved to Holiday Bay, they had three sons. Two died, and one became our great-grandfather, Andrew. Andrew married a local girl and they had two daughters, our grandmother, Henrietta, and a great-aunt named Pauline. Pauline died as a young woman, so Henrietta inherited the estate and the family fortune. Apparently, she was impregnated with our father by a man she knew only as Tex. Tex was really just passing through, and by the time Henrietta, who I guess preferred to go by Henri, knew she was pregnant, Tex was long gone.”
“Wow, that must have been really hard,” I said.
“I’m sure it was,” Shelby agreed. “According to a letter Henri left for us, she assured us that she tried to raise her son, Denver, to be a responsible and honorable man. She didn’t want him to be a tomcat like his daddy, but apparently, there was no amount of raising that could overcome the wandering eye he’d inherited from his daddy, and three women, our mothers, were impregnated within nine months.”
“Did Henri know about you all along?” I asked.
“No,” Shelby answered. “I am the eldest and was born three months before Sage. I guess this man, Denver, actually had a relationship of sorts with my mother. According to the attorney, Denver died in an auto accident five years ago, and after his death, his mother, Henri, went through his things. She found letters from my mother to her son, letting him know she was pregnant. That made Henri wonder about the baby, so she hired a private investigator. Eventually, she found a large payout to my mother as well as another to Sage’s mother several months later. I really don’t have all the details since they weren’t provided to us, but in the end, she realized she had not one, but three granddaughters.”
“Wow. What a shock. What happened next?” I asked.
“Nothing, as far as we know,” Sierra said. “She never contacted us. I don’t know why. We would have been nineteen by the time our father died, so any agreement our father had made with our mothers would have been irrelevant. I would think our grandmother would have wanted to reach out, but she didn’t.”
“What she did do was come up with this elaborate plan for the three of us to meet and get to know each other after her death,” Sage said. “I mean, a really elaborate plan,” she emphasized. “It must have taken her months to put this all together, and to be honest, I don’t know why she bothered. If she wanted to give us the money, she should have just given it to us. Making us jump through all these hoops seems cruel, which actually fits, given the fact that my mother seems to think she was a cruel woman.”
“She wasn’t cruel,” Shelby countered. “She wanted us to know one another, so she used the money as a lure to get us to know one another.”
“Which you must agree is manipulative.” It seemed Sage wasn’t backing down.
“And I think she wanted us to know her too,” Sierra added.
“If the old lady wanted to know me, she could have picked up the phone and called. This whole thing feels like a game, but I suppose if the reward at the end of the game is millions of dollars, I’ll play,” Sage said.
Sage seemed really angry. She hadn’t been angry the last time I’d talked to her. Hurried, sure, but not angry. Of course, I supposed that was before she’d spoken to her mother, who’d obviously riled her up.
“Today, we’re going to the estate,” Sierra said, changing the subject to a degree. “I’m hoping once we arrive, we’ll get a few more pieces of the puzzle.” She looked at Georgia. “By the way, the attorney we’ve been working with told us to pack a bag and expect to spend the weekend, so I guess we won’t be back here at the inn until Sunday. I assume it will be late in the day.”
“Thanks for letting me know,” Georgia responded. “I guess at this point, I won’t plan for you to be at dinner tonight or tomorrow, but if things change and you require a meal, call to let me know.”
The sisters agreed.
Once the meal was eaten, they hurried upstairs to finish getting ready, and I helped Georgia with the cleanup.
“It is a rather odd story,” I said to Georgia. “I really do have to wonder why the grandmother didn’t reach out to her granddaughters while she was still alive. She obviously knew about them for at least the past four years.”
“The question that keeps going through my mind is whether or not there might be other sisters,” Georgia said. “I mean, this guy impregnates three women in a nine-month period and then suddenly decides to use birth control? And what about all the women he slept with before Shelby’s mother?”
“You make a good point, although it seems odd to me that Denver found three women to sleep with who didn’t take care of their own birth control. It sounded like Denver and Shelby’s mother had a relationship of sorts before she became pregnant, but the other two sound like flings.”
“True.” Georgia opened the dishwasher and began loading it. “I suppose there must be a reason why the grandmother felt that these three women were her only granddaughters. If she suspected there had been others, it seems as if she would have kept looking.”
“Perhaps Denver wised up after Shelby was born.” I offered. “It sounds like Sage was conceived right around the time of Shelby’s birth, and shortly after that, Sierra was conceived, and then the whole thing became very real to Denver. It sounds like Shelby’s mother was paid off by Denver after the birth of their daughter, and then Sage’s mother was too. Maybe it was the payoffs that got him to wise up and start using condoms.”
“Maybe. I guess that would explain why there were three babies in nine months, and then nothing, but it still doesn’t explain why there were no babies before.”
“Maybe Denver was in jail or in the military or in some sort of a situation where impregnating women wouldn’t have been an issue.”
Georgia raised a brow.
“It’s a theory,” I defended. “Not the only theory, but a theory. If Denver was arrested as a young man or if he’d been overseas with the military, that could explain why there were no babies early on.”
“I guess,” Georgia acknowledged. “Then he finally gets out and goes a little crazy, knocking up women left and right without giving a thought to birth control. And then he meets his daughter, and it all gets real, so he decides to be more responsible. He may even have gotten a vasectomy.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay,” Georgia said. “I suppose if it went down that way, his mother might have been able to narrow down the window of opportunity where grandchildren could have been conceived, but that still seems like a lot of ifs.”
“Yeah. I suppose that short of speaking to the woman, we’ll never really know how she found the three sisters or how she came to the conclusion that they were the only three.”
The guests who’d planned to dine on the regular schedule had begun to wander down for breakfast, so I left Georgia to her hostess duties and headed back to the cottage. The sky was dark and heavy today, and I wondered if we’d have rain. I didn’t think it was quite cold enough for snow, although if the moisture moved in during the cooler overnight hours, then perhaps we could get a dusting. It might be nice to get that first little bit to brighten the landscape. Not enough that snow shoveling would be required, but just enough to give the place some atmosphere.
Ma
ybe I’d take a long walk while I could. If the weather did turn bad, I might not have that option later. It was odd for me not to have plans for the day. I’d decided to take the holidays off from writing and wait to start my next book after the new year. While it would be nice to have the free time, I was used to being busy and juggling a lot of different projects, so having so much free time was going to take some getting used to.
After a bit of back and forth with myself, I decided to head into town. I did have books to drop off at the bookstore that carried signed copies of my work, and it had been quite a while since I’d dropped in on Velma. Velma owned the local diner and was always up on all the latest gossip, so perhaps I’d pop in for lunch. If nothing else, I’d been interested in getting an update as to how things were going with Royce. Royce Crawford was Velma’s long-lost love, who she’d run into a year and a half ago on Nantucket Island. After the two had been reunited, they’d continued to see each other from time to time, and as of the last time I’d spoken to Velma, Royce planned to move back to Holiday Bay and wanted to move in with her rather than getting his own place. Velma loved Royce and enjoyed spending time with him, but was nervous about a full-time arrangement and still undecided the last time we’d spoken. I guess today was as good a day as any to find out what had ended up happening.
Additionally, she’d most likely have the latest scoop on Hollander’s murder, and if there was anything else worth talking about going on, she’d have an update on that as well. I had to admit that it had taken me some time to get used to the active gossip hotline when I’d first moved to Holiday Bay. Now that I’d made my way into the inner circle, I found I was as interested as anyone to learn all the little secrets the group seemed more than willing to share on any given day. Of course, I’d been the subject of the hotline a time or two as well, and I have to say that having everyone talking about you was a lot less fun than participating on the other end of the gossip distribution chain.
