The Minstrel & The Campaign

by Lila K Bell

I tuned Frances out and sipped my smoothie. At least now I had a hint of which way the rumour winds were blowing, and the only thing working in John’s favour was that, as far as I knew, the Brookside Police Department didn’t convict on gossip alone.

  3

  As soon as I finished with the girls, I headed to the high school to pick up Sybil. Although I hadn’t had much of a chance to move forward on my promise to Gramps, I’d made plans to go see a movie tonight, and I didn’t mean to let her down.

  Besides, gossip had taken me as far as it was going to today and, knowing Sybil, she’d already pried a tidbit or two out of Sam. If I was careful, maybe I could get the information out of her without tipping my hand.

  She left the school once most of the other kids had reached their buses. As usual, her headphones were on and she hugged her books to her chest. Her head bobbed along to whatever song she was listening to, and there was such… contentment in the moment, a satisfaction so independent of what anyone else thought of her that I was loath to interrupt it. Especially when I noticed a young man lingering by the doors watching her.

  I waved to get her attention, and she nearly dropped her books as she started.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “We’d talked about that movie tonight, remember? Jason Eckhart. Pew pew.” I opened the passenger side door for her.

  “I’m swamped with homework,” she said. “Rain cheque?”

  She looked so remorseful that my feelings weren’t even bruised. “Sure thing. Want a lift home?”

  “Sure.”

  As she passed me, I nudged her shoulder and nodded to the doors. “Who’s the stud?”

  Sybil glanced over her shoulder and shrugged. “That’s Nigel.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Friend of yours?”

  “Not really. We have art class together. He’s cool enough.”

  She got in the car and closed the door, putting an end to that conversation.

  I respected her wish and went around to the driver’s side, sliding into the seat and starting Mercy’s engine. She purred like a contented tiger and rolled out of the parking lot toward the main drag.

  “How was school?” I asked, aiming for cool and calm. It would be an immediate giveaway if I started asking questions about how Sam was getting on with the case. Smarter to ease my way in. Start with the general and narrow in on specifics.

  “It was fine. Boring. Can’t wait for this semester to be over. Why is geography even a thing? If I want to know the capital of a country, I can just look it up.” She waved her phone at me as though to make her point.

  “What if your battery is dead?” I asked. “What if you’re on one of those millionaire shows and you’re asked the capital of Switzerland. Easy question — two thousand dollars in your hand. Wouldn’t you be humiliated if you didn’t know?”

  “I just wouldn’t let my battery die.”

  “What about if you’re at school?”

  “That wouldn’t stop me.”

  The youths of today. “That’s right, I forgot. It’s how you get all the latest local news. Anything juicy today? Another murder? Robbery at a convenience store?”

  I hoped my questions would spur her on to tell me what she’d learned about the case in another attempt to spark my curiosity, but all she said was, “Nope.”

  She was looking out the window, barely even registering what I was saying.

  “There has to be something about today you found interesting. Cat videos? Miss Popularity tripping and falling in the hallway? Local politicians not even being sneaky enough to get away with murder?”

  “Nope.”

  I snuck another glance her way, and this time I caught a hint of a smile before she pressed her lips together to hide it.

  The little witch was messing with me.

  “You know something.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to know.”

  I shifted in my seat. “I really don’t. But this does affect me in the sense that it’s my town, too. If our old mayor went and got himself arrested, then I think I should have all the information before I decide who to vote for on the next ballot.”

  Sybil laughed. “Yeah, right. Okay.”

  “All right, fine, call me Miss Curiosity. What have you heard?”

  “You know, a little of this, a little of that,” she said. “It’s a cold case, so Sam’s not being quite as tight-lipped about it as he was with the last one, but he still hasn’t said much. And he told me not to pass anything along, so, you know…”

  She passed a zipper over her lips, and I ground my teeth. As if Sam’s prohibition would stop her. Was she looking for a bribe? Well, she wasn’t going to get one. I’d bought her ice cream yesterday — that would have to be enough.

  “All right, then,” I said. “That’s very honourable of you. I guess you wouldn’t mind, then, if I also did the honourable thing and told Sam how much of a help you were to me on the Brooks case. How you were so dedicated, you skipped one of your midterms to help me gather evidence.”

  Her jaw dropped. “I never did! You wouldn’t.”

  I pressed my lips together in an apologetic grimace. “It just doesn’t seem right to keep that from him. Especially not when I’m supposed to be guiding you in a mature, proper direction.”

  “Fine,” she said, drawing out the word in an imitation whine, though I spotted the hint of a smile in the corners of her eyes. “Her name is Amelia Wright, okay? She worked at City Hall until she went missing, and no one had any idea what happened to her until they dug her up the other day.” She shuddered. “Can you imagine how horrible it was to find her? Jackhammering away and all of a sudden—whoops, there’s an arm.”

  I glanced at her, but she’d turned her attention out the window again.

  I didn’t blame her. Carrying around the memory of two dead bodies myself, the thought of stumbling on a third was enough to turn my stomach.

  How people chose to do this for a living was beyond me.

  “The police didn’t have any theories at the time about what happened to her?” I asked, focusing on the less morbid part of the story.

  “They just assumed she ran away,” Sybil said. “I’m sure some people thought something bad had happened, but since they never found her, what could they do?”

  “So why did they arrest John Kingslake?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sybil. “Sam hasn’t talked about that part.” Her eyes narrowed with a sly expression. “You’re getting involved, aren’t you?”

  “Curiosity is not a crime,” I said. I couldn’t straight out lie to her, so hopefully she interpreted my answer to mean that she was absolutely, one hundred per cent wrong.

  I pulled up to the house and got out of the car.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, surprised.

  “I thought I’d see if Sam was home. You know, say hi to an old friend. You got a problem with that?”

  “Not at all,” she said. Her smugness was palpable, and the worst part was, I couldn’t even call her out on it, because she was, in fact, absolutely, one hundred per cent correct.

  So much for keeping a low profile.

  We went inside and found Sam hunched over a sandwich at the dining table. He was reading something that looked awfully like a crime report, but on our entering the room, he tucked it under his placemat.

  “You’re home early,” he said to Sybil.

  “Got a ride.” She nodded to me and tossed her backpack on one of the empty chairs.

  “How’s the case?” I asked. Sybil was already on to me, so I didn’t see the point in sticking with subtlety. Clearly I needed to work on my subterfuge. I also knew, however, that she wouldn’t rat me out to her brother.

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  “I hear you arrested John Kingslake.”

  He narrowed his eyes and sat back in his chair. “You said you were staying away from this.”

  “I’m asking on behalf of my grandfather,” I said, skirting the implie
d question. “The two of them go way back.”

  “I’m sorry. It must be tough to learn your old friend is a murderer.”

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “Gramps doesn’t think he did it.”

  A hint of pink filled Sam’s cheeks and he leaned forward, clasping his hands on the table. “You can pass along my conviction that we have the right man, Fi. I’m sorry if it’s hard to take, and I can see why he wouldn’t want to believe it, but all the evidence points to John Kingslake. The victim, the murder weapon, all sorts of little details. It all fits.”

  “What about why? Do you have that?”

  Sam sighed and shook his head. “This isn’t a prime time drama, Fiona. Motivation is nice, but it’s not always all wrapped up with such a neat little bow. Unless he confesses, we might never know why he did it.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “So he hasn’t confessed yet?”

  The pink in Sam’s cheeks deepened into a full blush. “I’m not saying that. I’m not saying anything. This has nothing to do with you, so you can take my sympathies to your grandfather and let that be the end of it. This case is closed. Accept it and move on.”

  I appreciated where he was coming from.

  No one liked having their work questioned, especially by an amateur who would be the first to admit she didn’t know what she was doing.

  But I had no intention of moving on.

  Until John Kingslake opened his mouth and admitted he’d killed Amelia, I was on this.

  Whether Sam liked it or not.

  ***

  Although Sam hadn’t given me much, I felt I’d learned enough to go back to Gramps.

  Twenty-five years ago, I… well, I hadn’t been born yet, but no doubt Amelia Wright’s disappearance had caused a bit of a stir. People didn’t just go missing in Brookside. As a small town, the gossip mill was too busy to let anyone drive off into the night. Even if no definitive answers were known, the theories would have abounded. Someone would have mentioned it to one person, who would have shared different theories with two others, who would have changed it up and told four, and by the end of the week everyone would have had a different idea about where she might have gone and why.

  Some of those theories, the ones starting from the people who’d known her best, might have even had a grain of truth to them.

  If Gramps and Kingslake were as close as it sounded, they would have heard their share. I just hoped the identity of the dead woman wouldn’t be an added blow to Gramps. The woman had worked at City Hall, which meant she’d known John, which also suggested she might have known Gramps. I didn’t want to be the bearer of more bad news.

  But he’d asked me to look into this, which meant I had to be honest with him.

  I got home just before dinner. My parents were in the kitchen, Father sitting in the breakfast nook with his evening paper and Mother standing over the oven, the door propped open as she peered in on whatever gourmet dish she’d prepared this evening.

  Honestly, I don’t know where my mother found the time to cook. With all the committees she was on and all the events she attended, she was barely home, but in the time she was, she always seemed to have the latest popular dishes ready from the hottest new cookbooks, or have put together the blingiest Pinterest trend. She was a woman who hated being idle — and hated idleness in other people.

  No wonder we never got along.

  “Hello!” I exclaimed as I walked into the kitchen.

  Since Mother had stopped speaking to me, I found great pleasure in being as cheerful as possible. I enjoyed the way it made her eye twitch.

  “I hope you both had a good day today.”

  “Just fine, Fifi,” Father said without looking up.

  “Wonderful. What’s for dinner?”

  Mother sniffed and closed the oven door. Instead of looking at me, she opened the refrigerator door between us. I took that as my hint that, whatever she was making, I wouldn’t be allowed the privilege of leftovers.

  Instead, I grabbed a box of crackers and headed upstairs to the third floor.

  Five years ago, after Gramps had fallen and hurt his knee and hip, my parents had handed over the third floor to his use. The bedroom, bathroom, and living space were bright and spacious, and absolutely my grandfather. He’d been quite the cinephile in his day, and there were framed movie posters up on the walls next to cheerful candids of aging me, alongside a few photos of my cousins. A record player sat in the corner of his living room, next to his thirty-six-inch flatscreen TV. Aside from those few touches of passive entertainment, the rest of the room was filled with bookcases packed with thriller novels and classics, a few crumpled Agatha Christies, a well-worn Narnia series.

  Gramps was the reason for my love of reading. He was the one who’d got me into Nancy Drew when I was a kid… and then I’d jumped ahead a few age groups and sped through everything Stephen King had put on the shelf. We would spend hours together when my parents were out, him with his book, me with mine, and I was grateful every day for the passion he’d instilled in me.

  If he’d known that ten years later I’d start stealing the books he prized so much, maybe he would have thought better of his lessons and plopped me in front of a television to let my brain rot.

  Really, my thieving nature was all his fault.

  I found him sitting in his armchair. Some medical drama was on the TV, but he didn’t appear to be watching it. A book of crossword puzzles lay open on his lap, forgotten; Charlie at his feet, ignored.

  “Hey, Gramps,” I said, knocking on the door.

  He shook himself out of his reverie and smiled at me. “Hey there, chickadee. What’s going on?”

  Charlie’s tail beat against the carpet, his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth.

  I came in and settled into the other armchair, pulling the handle to pop out the footrest. “Not much. I just thought you might want to know the latest.”

  “Tell me,” he said, and turned off the TV to give me his complete attention.

  “It turns out the victim is Amelia Wright, the woman who went missing about twenty-five years ago?”

  Fear pricked my heart when Gramps paled, and I readied myself to jump out of the chair and get him a glass of water if it looked like he was about to fall over.

  Charlie got to his feet with a whimper and pawed at Gramps’s lap. Gramps rested his hand on the beagle’s head and stroked his ears, seeming to find comfort in the movement.

  “Amelia,” he said after a moment. “I hoped it wasn’t the case.”

  I lowered the footrest and spun the chair around to face him. “Who was she, Gramps?”

  “She —” He cleared his throat before continuing. “She worked in John’s office as his personal secretary.”

  I refrained from pointing out the outdated title. This was hardly the time to discuss gender politics.

  “I can’t believe they finally found her.”

  He passed a shaking hand over his face, and my worry increased. I’d anticipated the shock, but not quite the emotional reaction.

  “Did you know her well?” I asked.

  “Only a little,” he said. “It just — no, don’t worry, chickadee, I’m fine. I didn’t know anything about her except that she was John’s… I guess you would say girlfriend. They were in a relationship at the time she went missing. Quite a serious one, as I recall, though it wasn’t widely known.”

  I sat back in my chair.

  Amelia Wright and John Kingslake. I’d asked Sam earlier about a motivation, but it was possible I was staring right at it. Love was one of the oldest motivations in the book. Nothing stirred a person to murder quite like passion.

  “What do you remember about the time she went missing?”

  “Not much. It was a huge mystery, of course. Everyone talked about her. Her mother was devastated, and her father died shortly afterward. John tore the town apart looking for her, and he was never the same after that. I always thought it was grief that made the difference, but now… What
if it wasn’t?”

  Surprise left me momentarily speechless, and my attention wandered to the crossword puzzle on his lap. Synonym of Remorse. Five letters.

  Guilt?

  How apropos.

  “You think he might have done it?” I finally asked. “You were so sure earlier that he hadn’t. How does this change anything?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t. If he didn’t do it, then it means he had no idea he was working only a few feet from where she was buried.”

  I thought of the distance between the courtyard and the mayor’s office. The tell-tale heart would have been beating pretty loudly at that close distance. How would he have stayed sane?

  Gramps fell silent, and I reached over to take his hand. “Do you still want me to look into this? I don’t want to be the one to bring you more pain if it turns out he did do it.”

  Gramps hesitated, but eventually he shook his head. “Keep going, Fi. I need to know. If he didn’t do it, someone needs to find out. If he did… well, regardless of the outcome, the poor woman deserves justice.”

  4

  I felt for Gramps, I really did. To have your old friend hauled in for murder was bad enough, but to have doubts about his innocence?

  Would I want to know in that case? I would if I knew for sure he hadn’t done it, but if I ended up being the one to hammer that last nail in his coffin…

  I shuddered at the thought.

  Gramps would never hold it against me, but I would always have it on my conscience that the fruits of my labour had disappointed him.

  Wanting to work through some of the questions and concerns these new revelations evoked, I took a late night walk to the edge of downtown.

  I brushed Bessie’s hood as I passed through the Eagle’s Gate parking lot, then headed down the stairs toward the side door that led to the Treasure Trove.

  Tonight, the patrons of the Trove were in full swing. Over by the jukebox stood Ruby and Onyx, two of the sex workers that drummed up business at the bar. They called themselves the Jewels, a moniker that fit with the full nautical theme of the place. Ruby gave me a smile and a wave as I came in, which I cheerfully returned.