by Mary Bowers
Then I stood up straight and stared at the wall. Detective Bruno had serious doubts. That’s why he was here instead of in Santorini wrapping up Kip’s arrest. Yup. He was looking for confirmation from the great beyond, or whatever it was he thought I represented. He’d even asked if it was a good idea to make an arrest.
The thing popped out at me again, the penny that had dropped but refused to fall all the way down into the tin cup. Willa and Kip. I could still see it in my mind: the moment Trixie had come out into Santorini Drive and distracted us, Willa and Kip, just before he went into his gruesome reenactment of the murder.
Willa and Kip had both turned to look at Trixie, but I had continued to stare at them. Their profiles had lined up perfectly. Willa was closer to me than Kip, so even the perspective was perfect; she was shorter than him, and the space between them brought their profiles into perfect alignment. The square jaws. The strong facial bones. The angle of the noses. Even the hairlines. They matched.
They were related.
Willa was not the only illegitimate Strawbridge.
And now I knew why there had been a murder. It hadn’t been about money at all.
Chapter 30
It took a moment for all the ramifications to settle in. Actually, it took the whole drive back to Santorini, with Detective Bruno driving his unmarked car ahead of us and Michael in the driver’s seat of my SUV; I didn’t even feel like I could drive. When we were alone together in the car, I told him that Willa and Kip were related, probably brother and sister.
“So he’s guilty after all,” Michael said. “And Willa, too. He must have got her to help him. But why? Something to do with Frazier, I bet; everybody seems to believe that Harriet caused his death somehow. But why didn’t they flee? They must have thought they could get away with it. Yes, that’s it. After all, without knowing their secret, who would suspect them? The bloody Strawbridges and their money. And their arrogance.”
I wished he would stop talking. There were still things I hadn’t figured out yet. But I was too demoralized to say anything. Willa, the woman Ed loved. The woman I had befriended, had spent the last three nights with, the woman who still had my cat!
Bastet. Why had she wanted to stay with Willa? Here was another loose end popping out, just when I’d managed to tie up a few.
“And you were spending the nights in her house!” Michael said. That thought silenced him for a while, and I began weaving up stray ends again.
By the time we got to Santorini, I thought I knew the whole story. It only took having a good hard look at the characters of all the people involved to understand what had happened. And why.
The whole neighborhood was out in the drive, and Kip was just being perp-walked out of his house, head held high, his magnificent auburn hair moving wildly in the seabreeze.
“Look, there’s Ed,” Michael said, parking in his driveway and pointing down the street. “He’s coming this way.”
“Coming” was an understatement. He was running.
“They’re going to arrest Willa!” he cried as soon as he got close to us. “We have to stop them.”
“Ed,” I said tenderly, “we may not be able to. But she can afford a really good attorney, and she’ll have a chance to prove her innocence.”
“You DO believe she’s innocent?”
“I – I don’t know what to think.”
After a pause, he muttered, “Neither do I.”
We stood there, Michael, Ed and I, a confused trio, and were quickly joined by Trixie and Dan.
Nobody knew what to say, and before anybody could even catch their breath, Bruno was coming at us.
“Okay, where is she?” He was looking at me.
“You mean Willa? Isn’t she in her house?”
“You gave her a head’s up, didn’t you? You called her, or texted her, and told her to go on the run.”
“Taylor, give him your cell phone,” Michael said, taking his own out of his pocket. We handed them to Bruno and he went through the motions of checking our call and text logs, but the fact that we had handed them over without even being asked for them settled him down a bit. When he was done, he handed them back.
“No,” he said more quietly. “She’s not in her house.”
“But I just saw her,” Trixie said.
“When?” Bruno said, zeroing in on her.
“Oh, an hour ago? Maybe a little longer?”
“I saw her this morning too, but earlier,” said Dan. “You know, just in passing. I was on my way out to the beach for a run and she was just walking in the front gate. She’d been out picking wildflowers by the roadside. She had a bunch of yellow dune daisies in her hand.”
“When?” the detective asked.
“Just after dawn.” He looked at me. “She said you weren’t up yet.” He turned back to Detective Bruno. “Are you arresting her? Really? What about Linda Small, are you arresting her too?”
“No.”
“Why not?” Dan persisted. “She’s Kip Stanley’s girlfriend. She’s the one with a motive, isn’t she?” he asked, looking around at us.
“She’s definitely the one with a motive,” Sherman Frey said, joining us, trailed by Carr. “She was Frazier Strawbridge’s mistress. She thought Harriet put him in his grave. Which she probably did. When my nephew notified me that Harriet had arrived here, I was afraid that Linda wouldn’t be able to stop herself, and I was right. She had to have revenge!”
“That might have been part of it, too,” I said, wondering out loud and still a bit wooly. “Kip and Frazier were friends. They shared the same interests and were members of some of the same clubs. They were cousins.”
“What clubs?” Sherman snapped. “What is this nonsense about cousins?”
“It’s not nonsense. Kip is a Strawbridge. I’m sure of it. He’s another one of Winston Strawbridge’s illegitimate children, like Willa. Didn’t you wonder how he knew so much about the Foundation’s business, and about Carr’s nervous breakdown? He knew you and Carr were related before he asked; that’s why he asked – he wanted Carr to admit it to the rest of us. He was a Strawbridge himself, so he kept himself informed about the Foundation. He and Frazier shared the same interests. They met and became friends; they must have figured out that they were related.”
“How did you find that out?” Bruno said, moving in.
“Didn’t you? Didn’t you check out where Kip came from?”
“We tried. He was born in Italy, or so he says. His birth record is mysteriously missing. He claims to have been an orphan, says he doesn’t know who his birth parents were, but he’s got a trust fund in a Swiss bank and they’re guarding information on it like bulldogs. It doesn’t surprise me he comes from money. Somebody’s been taking good care of him.”
By that time, I got a faint glimpse of the Strawbridge profile again, as the squad car carrying Kip away went slowly by us. He didn’t look like a defeated man. His chin was up and his shoulders were square. He looked . . . proud.
* * * * *
After the car had passed through the gate, Linda came toward us like a sleepwalker.
“Have you arrested Kip Stanley?” she asked Bruno, stunned.
Bruno turned on her and asked point-blank if I was right about Kip being a Strawbridge.
“How did you know that?” She caught herself immediately and decided there was no point in keeping secrets any longer. “Yes. He had the same father as Willa. It was such a deep secret that Kip almost never found out about it himself. His mother was a society girl, and when she got pregnant, Winston Strawbridge wouldn’t marry her. Her family sent her to Italy for the birth and hushed it up. Kip was never told who his father was, and he barely knew his mother. He was raised by nannies. The Stanleys and the Strawbridges hated each other after that, and Kip was kept away from the Strawbridges completely. He was never told what the feud was all about.”
“Then how did Frazier and Kip ever manage to meet?” Trixie asked.
“They met years after al
l their parents had died. It was purely an accident. Kip and Frazier had the same interests. They were exactly alike. Kip wrote an article that interested Frazier, they corresponded, and finally they met in person. And then they began to notice things. How much they looked alike. How much their voices were alike; even I couldn’t tell them apart on the phone. The mystery of Kip’s father. They began to suspect that they were related and finally got a DNA test and confirmed it. Then Frazier told Kip about Willa.
“After Frieda died and there were some murders here in Santorini, Frazier asked Kip to buy a house here and watch over her. He didn’t know what else to do, but they both wanted to protect her. Is that what happened? Kip killed Harriet to protect Willa from her? My God, it would be just like him. He’s a latter-day cavalier, and this was his big chance to rescue the damsel in distress.”
She dissolved into tears after that, and Trixie, who I was beginning to realize had a heart of gold, went to her and managed to get her up to the little table and chairs on her front porch. Looking after them, Carr, Sherman and Dan put their heads together and began to talk quietly and intently.
Bruno was a different man now from the one who had waited for me on the porch at Cadbury House with a glass of iced tea in his hand that morning. He was on the job and he didn’t care who knew it. He was done trying to charm information out of me.
“Stay outside here for a while, but don’t go anywhere,” he told Ed. “We’re going to have to search your house.”
Without acknowledging Michael or me, he walked away from us.
* * * * *
The police began searching the area for Willa, starting with Ed’s house. Her car was still in her garage, and she’d been seen around the neighborhood that morning, so she had to be nearby. A couple of uniforms were sent to the beach and a couple more went out to Route A1A, I suppose because of Dan’s information about her coming in the front gate with wildflowers earlier.
Ed, Michael and I left the others, went down to the walkover and sat on the steps, exhausted.
My heart didn’t feel golden. I didn’t go with Trixie and Linda, though Trixie was shooting looks at me. I was done. Something began to press down on me and I felt haunted, depressed. Being told that Kip was the killer hadn’t brought any relief. And wherever Willa was, she wouldn’t be able to evade the police for long. She wasn’t a worldly woman. She had no skills when it came to being a fugitive.
And I didn’t believe, really, that she would run away. Had she really intended to take off with Kip? More likely he’d thought of making the reservations himself, just in case, and hadn’t told her about them. It still surprised me that the police hadn’t found her inside her own house. She was always in her house. She lived her whole life trapped inside the walls of that house. She’d been a prisoner in that house. She’d been . . . .
It hit me and Ed at the same time, and Michael wasn’t very much slower in figuring it out. We all turned our heads and looked up at Frieda’s house at the same time. It was still locked up and taped off as a crime scene; there was no activity there at all. Bruno knew darn well that Willa had a reputation for being afraid to even set foot in Frieda’s house. But he had no way of knowing that she’d decided her aunt was with her at all times now and it wouldn’t make any difference where she went – even into that house. Oh, they’d probably search there eventually, but we weren’t going to wait. It would be better if she was found by friends.
Cautiously, with many a look over our shoulders, we went around the side of Frieda’s house, pulled down the yellow police tape, tapped the universal Santorini security code into the keypad next to the mudroom door, and slipped in.
The house was quiet and dead. An unoccupied house stops breathing, somehow. You know nobody is there.
Ed cautiously called, “Willa?” into the vacuum of the great room, and his voice seemed to stick in his throat.
Michael cleared his throat and called her name more loudly, but we all knew she wouldn’t answer. We would have to find her.
After carefully searching the main floor, we ignored the elevator and slowly climbed the stairs. To the master bedroom. Where Harried had been murdered. Where Frieda Strawbridge had died.
We found her there, lying on the bed, over to the right side as if she’d left room for somebody beside her. She looked peaceful. More peaceful than I’d ever seen her. There was blood, but she’d pulled the covers over herself, and not much of it had seeped through yet.
Ed went and touched her neck, then let his hand drop and stood beside her. Michael and I went to either side of him and we were quiet for a time.
When I’d had my good-bye, I let myself drift and finally looked away to the night stand. The vase. The red vase she’d bought at Girlfriend’s. She’d filled it with yellow wildflowers, just as her mother had, all those years ago. And beneath it . . . .
I pointed silently and Ed stirred and looked.
She’d left a note.
* * * * *
The police never made public the contents of Willa’s suicide letter. But Ed – ever the documentarian – lifted his cell phone, zombielike, and took a shot of each page. For the sake of completeness, as he always says. So we knew what was in it. She confessed to killing Harriet, and explained why she’d done it.
She went into the details of Kip’s swashbuckling act, the night of the murder, trying to protect her with a clumsy cover-up. That part didn’t even interest me, to tell you the truth. But that last page told us all we wanted to know.
Willa’s voice read that part to me in my head as I had stood beside her quiet body, and it finally broke me down. It was so like her. Here’s that part. For the sake of completeness:
I am not a strong woman, or a brave woman, or a particularly clever woman. I know that. If I were, I might have been able to think of a better way to deal with Harriet. But I am who I am, and I accepted that long ago.
For myself, I would have just given her the money. I don’t need it. But I couldn’t let her ruin my friends. She would have sued them all and taken everything she could get from them. So I did the only thing I could do – I ended it, without argument or discussion or drama. I ended it, and I’m glad I did, even though I know I must pay.
I will lie beside my aunt and give myself over. I see her lying there now, and she reaches for me. She never did in life, but she’s proud of me now. I know that what I did was a sin. But Aunt Frieda knows that I had no choice, and that for once in my life, I did something brave.
Forgive me, Ed,
Willa Strawbridge Garden
Chapter 31
I had Detective Bruno’s number, but I was too blank at that moment to dial it. I just called 911 and handed the phone to Michael.
We’d only been in the house for 16 minutes. Between the security company’s entry log and the time my phone said I called 911, I know for a fact that it was only 14 minutes.
But it was days. Weeks. A lifetime.
The police came in and threw us out, of course, demanding to know if we’d touched anything and giving us dire looks. Bruno acted as if he were very disappointed in me, as if we were buds and I’d let him down, and I didn’t care.
But as long as I had his attention, I asked, “Is it all right if I go into her house now? I want to get my cat.”
“We searched the house. We didn’t see a cat.”
“You wouldn’t. They’re very good at hiding. You were looking for a grown woman, not a cat, so you didn’t look in the places a cat would be. Didn’t you see the water bowl and the litter box?”
He gave me a look. Not a nice look.
“My cat is there and she’s not evidence. I want her. I’m going in to get her.”
He made a sweeping motion with his whole arm and sent an officer to accompany me, leaving Ed and Michael standing in the driveway outside. She was on an open shelf in the clothes closet, behind a stack of Willa’s tee shirts. Once I had Bastet in the carrier, I was hustled out. They wouldn’t even let me take the litter box. Or clean it.
Evidence, I guess.
We went down to Ed’s house and went inside and I set the carrier down in the foyer and let Bastet out. Santorini Drive had been empty of neighbors. When word had gone around that we had found Willa – dead – everybody had stopped gossiping and complaining about the police and gone inside.
We went into Ed’s living room and he stared at me, hollow-eyed. He just said, “Why now?”
“You mean, why kill herself now?”
He nodded. “If she was going to do it, why didn’t she do it right after she killed Harriet? Did she think she was going to get away with it?”
“I don’t think so,” I said with half my usual voice. “I don’t think she even wanted to get away with it. But she waited because she wanted to make sure we were paid for the Mystery Dinner. She had never made a donation to Orphans through the website and she probably didn’t know how. She always just wrote checks, and that’s what she did this time: she wrote a check to Orphans of the Storm, and she wanted to make sure I deposited it while she was still alive. She even went with me to the bank to make sure I took care of it. Remember what she said about her Aunt Frieda’s checking account being frozen after she died? She was afraid if she died and I hadn’t deposited that check, it wouldn’t be any good.”
“And then you decided to spend another night with her,” Michael said. “So she went on living a little longer.”
“Oh, don’t!” I said.
We stopped talking then. We just couldn’t play detective after what had happened. I suppose we would have never talked about it again but the neighbors wouldn’t let it go. They demanded answers, and not just the ones they were getting from the police.
And so we got together two weeks later, after the newspaper articles had mostly dried up and the TV news had switched gears to whatever scandal-du-jour came next.
We gathered at Ed’s house – all of us. Me and Michael, Ed, Trixie, Dan, Linda, Carr and Sherman, even Gretel.
Kip had been cleared of the murder but was being held for obstruction of justice. Things got really fiery over the question of whether Harriet could have been saved if he’d called 911 as soon as Willa confessed to him, but the autopsy had shown that Harriet must have been dead within just a few minutes of being stabbed. The knife went directly into her heart. It would have been quick.
