The Eleventh Hour

by Anina Collins

  Chapter Fifteen

  I raced home to get my car so I could drive out to Alex’s and tell him what I’d found. Since he hadn’t answered any of my texts all day, I figured I wouldn’t bother trying to get him that way again. This kind of news demanded an in-person telling anyway. I couldn’t wait to see his face when I told him that former mayor Jefferson Girard and Geneva Woodward had a history!

  Pulling up to his house, I found it looking much like it did the last time I was there. Even though it was still daylight out and his car was parked in the driveway, the place looked abandoned like no one was around. With each step toward the door, I grew more excited, though. Alex would see I had done my homework and found the clues to show that our murderer was Girard.

  I’d all but solved this case for us, and I couldn’t wait to hear what he had to say when I told him.

  I knocked and waited, bouncing on my toes with excitement, but nobody answered. Had he gone out on foot? I knocked again, harder this time, and after a few seconds heard footsteps coming toward the door.

  It opened just enough to let me see him standing there looking much like he always did, but in his eyes there was something odd in the way he stared out at me. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but he looked strange.

  “Hey, I’ve been texting you all day. I have news. Can I come in?”

  He hesitated for a few moments, but then he nodded and opened the door. Walking past him, I entered his living room and waited for him to offer me a drink and a seat. But he did neither. He simply closed the door and turned to face me.

  “What’s going on, Poppy?” he asked in a somber voice.

  “I found something out about our case that I wanted to share with you. I figured we could go to Derek with it after and then maybe a celebratory bite to eat. You know, because it’s my first case and I blew it wide open.”

  “Yeah?”

  His almost complete lack of interest in what I had to tell him baffled me. Alex had never been overly enthusiastic in all the time I’d spent with him, but I’d at least expected him to want to hear what I had to say, especially since I’d just alluded to solving the case.

  “Alex, what’s wrong? Did something happen?”

  I wasn’t sure what could have happened to make him so disinterested in solving Geneva Woodward’s murder since not twenty-four hours earlier he’d intentionally gone to Diamanti’s just for the case. Was that it? Had I done something at dinner that had upset him?

  “I just…I’m just not really up to dealing with the case today,” he said in that same somber voice that matched the unhappiness written all over his face.

  Suddenly I felt unwelcome in his home once again. Uncomfortable and feeling foolish that I’d let myself believe we’d become close friends, I stammered out, “I’m…I mean I’m…I didn’t mean to intrude. I just thought you might want to know what I found.”

  We stood there awkwardly staring at one another for so long I felt like running out and speeding away, but then he quietly offered me a seat and sat down in a chair across from me. We hadn’t been like this around one another since that first night he found me in his backyard, and I couldn’t understand what had happened to change things.

  Then an idea popped into my head. Had last night been a date and I hadn’t acted interested, so now he didn’t feel right about working with me on the case?

  I hated thinking like that. If I hurt or offended him, I wasn’t sure if I should bring it up or just leave it alone.

  Or maybe I was completely off the mark and something else was the problem, something that had nothing to do with me or our time at Diamanti’s last night.

  “What did you want to tell me, Poppy?”

  As clear as day, I heard his voice catch when he said my name. Had I done something? I didn’t know, and the stern look in his eyes told me he probably wouldn’t tell me if I had anyway.

  “I found out that Jefferson Girard and Geneva had a history. Jeannette McMurphy, the woman who worked for him, told me Geneva practically badgered him at least once a week when he was the mayor.” Waving the paper with the article about the missing woman and the love triangle, I said, “And then there’s this about her in Vermont.”

  Alex held his hand up to stop me. “Wait. What are you talking about? What history?”

  “Geneva constantly harangued Girard while he was in office. Even his secretary thought it seemed personal.”

  “I imagine small town mayors get that kind of thing all the time, Poppy,” he said, practically dismissing what I’d said. “What are you talking about something with Geneva in Vermont?”

  “Up in Vermont. They both lived there in the same town. They were involved.”

  “Involved? Like what?” he asked, perking up for the first time since he opened the door and saw me standing there.

  “Like romantically! She was married and having an affair, and the person she was having an affair with was none other than the former mayor himself. Can you believe it?”

  His eyes opened wide, and it looked like the Alex I’d been spending all that time with had returned. Holding out his hand, he said, “Interesting. Let me see.”

  I handed him the printouts of the articles I’d found and knew he’d see that this case had totally been turned on its head. He looked down at the paper and read the details of Jefferson Girard before he came to Sunset Ridge. His response wasn’t exactly as thrilled as I had hoped for, but this was Alex, after all. He wasn’t the type of man who ever jumped up and screamed for joy.

  Because he seemed to not be entirely convinced, I showed him the pictures of the much younger versions of the mayor and Geneva, laying them out on the coffee table in front of him. “You can see they’re both the same people. He went under a different name, but her name was the same back there.”

  Alex studied the pictures, first leaning forward to look at them and then lifting each one to eye level to examine it even closer. What was he looking for?

  When he didn’t say anything, I said, “Are you thinking they were photoshopped? Why would anyone do that?”

  He remained silent for a few more moments and then lowered the paper from in front of his face to show me his look of skepticism I’d seen before. Was he serious? How could he be skeptical now that I’d shown him all this new information?

  “I don’t know. Why would anyone do anything?”

  I leaned away from him, unsure of what he was referring to. Who asked questions like that? “I have no idea how to answer that, Alex. All I know is that both Girard and Geneva lived in the same town up in Vermont and were involved in a love triangle. They knew each other, and the way I’m seeing it, pretty intimately.”

  He pointed at the article on the table about the missing woman. “Did you read all the way to the end of that?”

  I thought I had, but what did it matter? I knew what journalists stuck at the end of a piece. Nothing useful since readers often didn’t make it that far. So what was he talking about?

  “Yes. Why?”

  Handing it to me, he said, “Read it again. I think you missed something.”

  I didn’t like what I saw as smugness on his face, and taking the piece of paper from his hold, I quickly moved my gaze to the bottom of the page. What exactly did he think I’d missed?

  Update: We are saddened to report that the victim, Geneva Woodward, was found dead on June 22.

  Letting the paper drop into my lap, I looked up at him and saw that same smugness that now made me want to dig my heels in even more. I didn’t care what that newspaper said. I knew what I knew.

  “So you’re okay with believing that someone would alter a picture but not with the idea that the wrong information could be printed in a newspaper article?”

  My question didn’t faze him in the least. He continued to stare at me like I was the biggest fool he’d ever met. But I had no intentions of just crumbling under his withering glare I knew was meant to chastise me for being sloppy, or whatever he thought I was.

  “Poppy, it
says the missing woman was found dead. How can that be our victim, who up to just a few days ago was alive and well and living in Sunset Ridge?”

  Frustrated, I felt all the enthusiasm for sharing my findings with Alex drain out of my body. Yes, he was right. The article did say that the missing woman had been found dead. Then an idea came to me.

  “Fine. She was found dead. If that’s the truth, then why wasn’t the prime suspect in her disappearance then made the prime suspect in her murder? I found nothing in the database that followed up on this. Don’t you think I would have?”

  Alex didn’t have an answer to that, but it didn’t change the fact that he thought I was wrong. With a shrug, he said, “I’m not sure. Maybe you didn’t search the right way for that information to come up on the database?”

  Was he serious? Did he actually say I didn’t know how to search for information, the one key part of my job for The Bottom Line?

  Incensed at his casual insult, I pointed my finger at him and let him have it. “I’m sure you didn’t just say that I don’t know how to do my job. I’ve been researching for years, and I think I know how to use a damn database. You just don’t want to admit I’m right on this because you don’t think Jefferson Girard is the right suspect. Well, in this case, you’re wrong, Mr. Fantastic Detective.”

  My outburst stunned him, but he quickly regrouped. Folding his arms across his chest, he said in an all-too-calm voice, “What about the fact that we have a letter pointing to Candy Skerrit as a suspect and that her assistant said she wanted to wring Geneva’s neck? We haven’t even found out who wrote that letter yet.”

  Was he actually saying some note anyone could have written to implicate one of the rudest women in town was worth as much of our attention as the evidence I had right in my hands?

  “I want to tell you a story about when I was on the force that I think you need to hear.”

  Something told me I didn’t need to hear whatever it was he wanted to tell me, but I sat back in my seat and figured I’d give him a chance to enlighten me.

  “Poppy, a lot of times it seems like a detective is onto the clue that will break a tough case, but the problem is that often it’s just a lead to nowhere. That’s what I think this is. When I was on the force, I was involved in a case that kept giving the lead detective dead ends. His wife was murdered, so he was rightly hell bent on finding the killer and bringing him to justice. But all the leads turned out to be nothing.”

  I wanted to stop him before he went any further, but before I could say anything, he took a breath and continued.

  “Every time one of those leads turned up, he was sure it would be the one that would blow the case wide open. He’d go running around after it on what would end up as wild goose chases over and over, even though his fellow detectives kept telling him to slow down and take a step back. He couldn’t, though. He was too close to the case, so he couldn’t see the truth of things. There were better officers who could have taken the case, but he wouldn’t let them. He couldn’t distance himself.”

  “And you think I’m too close to this case?” I asked sharply, not even trying to temper my anger at him.

  “I think so. If you weren’t, you’d see that the woman you think was Geneva couldn’t be her. I’m not even sure the younger man in the picture you showed me was the former mayor.”

  I jumped to my feet as furious indignation coursed through my body. Unable to control my emotions, I barked, “You know what I think? I think that story of yours is more appropriate to your situation with your wife’s death and has nothing to do with me. If you don’t want to believe in me on this, then fine. I don’t need your help with this case or anything else!”

  His expression morphed from stunned at my explosion of anger to hurt at my mention of his wife. I didn’t care, though. Whatever he was dealing with, he was putting his issues onto our murder case and muddling it because he couldn’t separate his past from the present. That wasn’t my fault, and I wouldn’t stand there to be lectured to when it was him who needed to take his own advice.

  Storming away, I flung his front door open and stomped down the front stairs, not even caring that I’d left all the information on his coffee table. I could get more copies of all of it, so it didn’t matter.

  By the time I sat down behind the wheel, the adrenaline rush that had pumped through my veins had subsided, and I sat there deflated and wishing none of it had happened. I watched as his front door slowly closed and felt like I’d lost a friend, but even more, I felt like I’d hurt someone intentionally who hadn’t deserved it.

  All afternoon, I worked to forget how awful I felt about what I said to Alex while I spied on Jefferson Girard’s comings and goings. I watched him putter around his backyard planting flowers, walk to the grocery store for cold cuts and bread, and then back to his house for more landscaping. I honestly wondered if I may have been wrong about him as I saw him spend his time like a stereotypical retiree.

  I had to push that out of my mind, though. Even murderers could love to plant flowers and eat sandwiches.

  By dinnertime, I hadn’t seen him do anything I could use to prove my assertion that he was Geneva’s murderer, so I decided to take another tactic. I took a slow walk to her neighborhood three blocks away and looked for any of the people who lived around her to talk to. Four houses away from Geneva’s house I found a woman named Sarah and asked her if she’d seen anyone she recognized around Geneva’s the night of the murder, but she didn’t remember seeing anyone and fell asleep before eleven that night.

  Across the street from the murder scene, the owner of a house that faced Geneva’s, Jacob Minton, told me he was up for much of the night and saw lights on throughout the house, but he didn’t think he’d seen anyone Sunday night either.

  I left him watering his lawn and tried to keep faith in my gut feeling about Jefferson Girard being the one who killed Geneva, even though I couldn’t find anyone to say they’d seen anyone lurking around the neighborhood that night. That I had no real idea what his motive was had occurred to me too.

  Actually, motive was the least of my concerns. The combination of their past in Vermont and their history while he was in office surely would equal some reason why he’d want to kill her. Maybe she was planning to tell the truth about their relationship up north and he didn’t want his wife to find out. Or maybe she wanted him back after all those years they’d lived so close to one another in town and he had to kill her to stop her from ruining his life that way.

  Whatever it was, I believed Jefferson Girard was the killer.

  Around six o’clock, I came upon Gertrude Jenkins sitting on her porch enjoying the unseasonably warm evening weather. An elderly woman with teased blond hair and a thin face, she had been one of the secretaries at Sunset Ridge High School when I was a student there. I hoped she’d remember me and be willing to talk about what she may have seen that fateful night since she lived directly behind Geneva.

  Waving to her from the street, I yelled, “Hi, Mrs. Jenkins! How are you tonight?”

  She strained to look at me, taking a few moments to recognize who I was, and finally answered, “Oh, is that you, Poppy? My eyesight isn’t what it used to be. Come on up on the porch.”

  I joined her on the porch swing and after we talked a little about the old days at Sunset Ridge High, I asked her if she’d seen anything out of the ordinary the night of Geneva’s murder.

  Placing her hand on mine, she gave me a gentle smile. “I’m the wrong person to ask, but my granddaughter Alicia might know something. I’m in bed early by seven each night, although I love to watch my shows. She keeps later hours than I do. By the time that woman was murdered, I was sound asleep.”

  “Is Alicia here? I’d like to ask her some questions.”

  “She’ll be home in a few hours, but let me call her to see when she can talk to you.”

  Gertrude Jenkins took out her cell phone from her apron and dialed her granddaughter. “Alicia, Poppy McGuire is here with me a
nd wants to know if you saw anything out of the ordinary the night Geneva Woodward died.”

  I heard Alicia say she had, and Gertrude said to me, “She saw a man go to the back door of Geneva’s. Oh yes, now I remember. She told me about him a few weeks ago, but as I said, I’m always asleep early.”

  “Can she meet with me after work?”

  Alicia heard my question and answered her. “Yes, she says she can meet you at Madison Diner right after seven tonight. Oh, hang on. She wants to talk to you herself.”

  I took the phone from Gertrude and said, “Alicia, I can be there tonight. Thanks so much for being willing to talk to me.”

  “Poppy, don’t tell my grandmother what I’m about to say, but that man who was coming to visit Geneva, I think I know who he is. I can’t talk right now because there are people around, but I’ll meet you right after seven at the diner, okay?”

  “Okay. I’ll see you then.”

  Handing the phone back to her grandmother, I thanked her and left to head back to my place for a little bit before it was time to meet Alicia. At a few minutes before seven, I walked down to the Madison Diner and found a booth in the back to wait nervously to hear what she had to say.

  My mind raced thinking of who could be the mystery man Alicia had seen. Whoever it was, he could be the key to solving the case. If I was correct, he was none other than Jefferson Girard, the former mayor and murderer of Geneva Woodward, his former lover.

  Two glasses of sweet tea later, I looked up at the clock on the far wall of the diner and saw it was already after eight. I hurried over to her grandmother’s house just in case Alicia had to stop there after work and had gotten held up. I knocked on the front door for five minutes, but got no answer.

  Something was wrong.

  I walked around the outside of the house as I called the police station to ask Derek for his help, but Dominick answered. Knowing he’d probably read me the riot act, I lied and told him how she was supposed to meet me over an hour earlier and that I was concerned she might have gotten hurt. I hoped what I was feeling was misplaced disappointment over not hearing who Geneva’s mystery man was, but my gut told me something bad had happened.