by E M Kaplan
“Is there an Amber Alert you can put out for old people?” Josie asked.
Jablonski shook his head. “Some states are using Silver Alerts, which is kind of the same thing. It uses reverse 911 calling to send out alerts to residents, but it’s mostly for dementia and Alzheimer’s patients who wander off, which we know Betty isn’t—not in this particular case, since we have Harris on video actually escorting her away from the nursing home. We put out a bulletin and alerted the media. The local news already aired the story once. We can update it with Sandra’s information now—and this new development.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder at Harris, who was being loaded onto a gurney.
Josie tipped backward and leaned against the wall, turning her head to avoid looking at him as the coroner and her assistant wheeled the body toward the front door.
“This is Marlena,” Jablonski said. “She’s the county coroner.” He pointed at Josie with his pen. “This lady is a neighbor. Found the front door open.”
“Is there a back door to this place?” Marlena asked, not bothering to give Josie anything more than a perfunctory tilt of her chin, which Josie could totally respect. The woman had a job to do. “There’s two sets of stairs out the front and it’s going to be a pain in my ass to get this wheeled down them.”
“There’s a kitchen door out the back, but you still have narrow stairs down to the driveway. Too narrow with a rail,” he said, stuffing his notepad into his shirt pocket. “The front is your best bet.”
She cursed like a drill sergeant with a stubbed toe, but then stopped as if suddenly remembering. “Oh, hey, prints came back off that vial of white powder. Two sets.”
Josie had a sudden flash of fear and thought, Oh gawd, I didn’t touch the vial of arsenic, did I? She distinctly recalled pulling away from the cylindrical glass jar before making any contact with it.
“Who were they?” Jablonski asked.
“This guy,” Marlena said, jabbing a thumb downward at Harris, who lay on the gurney in front of her. “And the others were probably the little old lady’s. We don’t have a clean comparison on hers yet."
Harris’s fingerprints on the poison that had killed Lynetta? Josie ran a knuckle across her forehead. So he’d been working for Sandra and had used visiting Betty Edwards as an excuse to get into Lynetta’s room? With Harris now dead, it looked like he was nothing but a pawn as well, probably unbeknownst to him.
“I guess he made a bad deal, getting involved in all this.” Jablonski said, taking over the coroner’s end of the gurney and wheeling it out the door for her.
“You’re a true gem,” she told him. “This old lady appreciates you.”
“If you’re an old lady, I’m Santa Claus,” he said. The gurney got caught on the door frame on the way out, but Jablonski and the assistant coroner managed to wiggle it through on to the covered porch.
“Do you have a guess at the C.O.D.? Did he fall down the stairs?” Josie asked, peering after them. C.O.D. meant cause of death. She’d learned that from watching crime shows on TV.
Harris had been placed in a body bag—thank goodness—but there was no telling what had happened. She knew if he fell down the stairs, however, it probably hadn’t been on his own.
Marlena scowled at her. She had bright green eyes and perfectly groomed dark eyebrows under her silvery sweep of white hair. She could have been an ad for living right…unless she was only in her thirties instead of her sixties. “Are you a reporter? I can’t make a statement until I’ve done a thorough examination.”
“No, I’m a…” There was no way Josie was going to bring up her stupid P.I. license to a pro like this woman. “Mystery writer,” she finished lamely.
Those elegant dark brows shot up this time. “No kidding? I love mysteries. Just spoke at a local writers’ seminar. Those ladies asked the best questions. I did a presentation on maggots.”
“I…that’s…great,” Josie said, feeling a tad queasy.
“I love bugs. They tell us so many things. Like flies. They’re so quick to the scene of a crime. They know you’re dead almost before you do.”
Josie swallowed a couple of times and suddenly stopped breathing through her nose. Some people had stronger stomachs than hers. She might be able to debone a fish in less than five minutes, but when it came to real live dead bodies, little black spots tended to swim in front of her eyes…Deep breaths. Don’t pass out.
Marlena was still talking, but not about bugs anymore, thank the good lord above. She said, “But anyway, totally off the record, your neighbor didn’t fall. Or if he did, the fall didn’t kill him. He was shot. Right in the back of the head. With a twenty-two, if I had to guess. It really scrambled his head up good.”
Chapter 39
“Should I take my dog and go to a hotel?” Josie asked Jablonski a little while later after he’d come back inside Harris’s house. “What if Sandra returns? She has a key to my house. I mean, it’s her house—I’m just staying there. If she killed her nephew, she won’t even hesitate to take me out. I mean, even I think I can be kind of annoying.” She realized she was rambling nervously, but she couldn’t help it. Seeing a dead body had sent a rush of adrenaline coursing through her system and it was coming out as the verbal runs.
“Will your dog protect you?”
“Would Bert wake up if Sandra came in wrapped in bacon and filet mignon? That’s a fifty-fifty chance. He’s more of a lover than a fighter.”
He scratched his gray, bristly cheek. “She’d be stupid to come back here tonight, but we’ll have a patrol car up and down this street all night looking for her. Anyway, the station is about three minutes away if you need us. I think you’ll be all right.”
Famous last words, she thought with an inward eye roll.
He walked her across the street to her rental house and did a manly stomp around the house under the semi-watchful eye of Bert, who at least sat up while the armed man in uniform searched the premises. Josie had always had a dubious relationship with law enforcement, thanks to a misspent youth, but she had to admit it was nice to have a cop buddy on her side this evening.
“You’re all set,” he told her. “I guess you aren’t going upstairs too much with that ankle of yours. You need anything from up there?”
Was he seriously offering to help her with her toiletries? Maybe her hair looked as unruly as it felt. “Uh, actually, I can’t find my hairbrush. I think it’s up in the second floor bathroom.” It probably couldn’t hurt to have him check one last time that no one was up there. Not that she didn’t need her brush, but it wasn’t high on her list of necessities even on a good day.
He gave her a critical once-over. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but your hair is kind of sticking out on the side. I just figured it was hat hair.”
“What!” She clamped a hand to the side of her head in mortification. She didn’t feel any gravity-defying travesties, but that didn’t mean her hair wasn’t doing crazy things.
Except he was grinning.
“That was so mean. I ought to smack you!”
“But that would be assaulting an officer,” he said.
“Why would you even say something like that?”
“I have sisters. I guess I couldn’t help myself. Plus, I wanted you to stop worrying for a second. It’s not every day you find a body.”
It happens more often than I’d like to admit.
She was both a little irritated and amused at his teasing. He was a likable kind of guy despite the uniform. In a couple decades he’d make an excellent Santa Claus with those twinkling blue eyes. She didn’t normally have Chris Kringle fantasies about strangers, but since he’d brought it up earlier when he was talking to the coroner…
He jogged up the stairs and came back within seconds with her brush and a rest of her toiletry bag. “You want this stuff in the kitchen by the sink?”
“That would be great,” she said, hobbling after him. “I really appreciate it. As long as there are no boogiemen or murderous landlad
ies upstairs, I don’t need anything else.”
“You deadbolt this door after me,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”
Whether it was their buddy-buddy rapport or his bright blue eyes, she suddenly found herself hinting at why she’d been over at Harris’s house in the first place. She could still see the emergency vehicles over at the crime scene, so she thought now might be a good time to mention it without sounding like a paranoid shut-in.
“Incidentally, I thought I saw Harris digging in his backyard the other day. He had a shovel. Seems kind of weird for this time of year, doesn’t it? Isn’t the ground frozen anyway?”
The parting smile that had been on Jablonski’s face froze in place. His blue eyes had gone wide and unblinking. Then he cursed and reached for the door. Instead of saying goodbye, he jabbed a finger at the deadbolt on his way out and said, “Lock this.”
“I’ll bet you five Milk-Bones they’re not going to find anything in the backyard after all. I’ll be mad at myself, but at least it will settle my craziness for once and all,” she said to Bert as they both peeked out the front window at the increased activity across the street. The flashing lights were still making Lincoln Street look like a disco. She couldn’t see much with the strobing, but she was still staring across the street as if it were the best show on cable.
The coroner’s van was still parked in the driveway, but Josie didn’t know if they were just wrapping up the scene or beginning to excavate a new one.
“Would Jablonski even tell me if they find something?” she wondered. They were kind of buddies now, but still, he probably had a limit to what he would tell her. It was his job to protect and serve, not to disseminate news or spread gossip—as much as she wanted to know everything right this very minute.
She checked her phone to see if she’d missed a text from him in the last thirty seconds. Yeah, fat chance. However, the email from Susan about Lynetta’s long-lost relatives still sat in her inbox unread, so Josie clicked on it. Even if she just skimmed it to confirm that Harris wasn’t a relative, she could at least clear one notification from the 37 of them on her phone screen.
Susan had written a few notes in list format, which was way more organized than Josie ever was in her messages, never mind inside her head, and had also attached a couple of photos.
Detroit relatives:
Gerald Bates (married to Lydia, maiden name unknown), two sons (Max and Charles)
English relatives:
Poppy Downes (b. 1912, d. 1984), unmarried, no children
Olivia Downes (b. 1918, d. 1999), married to Antony Beardsley, three children — Richard, Ronald, and Howard
The message continued, but her mind screeched to a halt over two of the names—Beardsley and Bates. Dan Beardsley and Marcy Bates?
Holy Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Is everyone in this town related to Lynetta?
Part 5: Warmed Over
I’ve always thought “you look like death warmed over” is a funny turn of phrase—and I mean funny-peculiar, not funny-ha-ha. The saying is supposed to imply that the person you're talking about looks like they’re barely alive, literally that they are dead, but warmed over just a little bit.
I always picture frozen leftovers being warmed up in the microwave. Lumps of frozen food making that slow and halting rotation, on the carousel of microwaves being defrosted into a marginally edible meal.
One ticket to ride…until your time is up.
—Josie Tucker, Will Blog for Food
Chapter 40
Beardsley…as in Dan Beardsley? But also, Bates, which was Marcy’s last name. Were they related and possibly involved in Lynetta’s death as well? Their names coming up in Susan’s research was just too big of a coincidence.
What in the actual heck is going on here? Am I going to wake up and discover a weird Wizard of Oz scenario with everyone playing double roles?
Were any of them telling the truth as to who they were and how they knew Lynetta?
Josie was going to have to go back to the nursing home in the morning to interview Marcy the Gorgon again—if she even worked on the weekends because tomorrow was Saturday already—or track down Dan Beardsley, who could be in a number of places depending on which of the various hats he was wearing at the moment—mayor, journalist, or historian.
While Josie was mulling over her options and doing an internet search on her phone for Dan Beardsley’s daytime work number at the mayor’s office, another coroner’s van pulled up to the house across the street, adding more chaos to the disco ball effect of lights spinning around the neighborhood in the dark.
“That’s not good,” Josie said, pulling a chair over to the window so she could keep an eye on things and ease the pressure off her ankle.
Over the next hour she tried to find a biography of Lake Park Villa’s mayor online while she watched temporary lights being set up in Harris’s backyard.
As the clock ticked into a second hour beyond that, she thought she might lose her mind from curiosity and had nearly lost the battle of staying put and out of the investigators’ way. She’d gone as far as collecting her boots and coat from the front hall tree when a knock sounded at the front door. The pounding wasn’t angry or urgent like a SWAT team, but she knew the heavy thuds had to be Jablonski’s broad fist. Nevertheless, she checked the peephole before she opened it. After all, Sandra was still out there somewhere.
“I’m gonna have to get a statement saying what you saw,” he said without a greeting, picking up their conversation directly where they’d left off hours ago. He shook his head with his mouth in a tight, grim line.
Josie covered her mouth, aghast. She’d feared the worst, but she’d hoped she was wrong. “I saw the lights. It’s really Harris’s wife? I mean, I wasn’t sure—and another neighbor said he heard them getting…amorous later that day. Loudly.”
“Yeah, but it looks like he had an impressive adult video collection over there. It was all over the coffee table. He might have cranked up the volume with no one there to stop him or maybe even to make it sound like she was still alive—and you were right about the ground. It’s too frozen to dig although it looks like he tried to start a hole. She’s under a tarp and some branches, some yard waste. The coroner’s office sent over their entire team this time. They pulled everyone in who was on call. All hands on deck for this one. Our town gets maybe one murder in a decade. Now, here’s two in one day.”
Josie didn’t want to bring up Lynetta. Her death made the count three. Or the fact that people seemed to die when Josie was around—not that it was her fault. She was there to try to prevent it…not very successfully.
“Can you tell if Harris’s wife was killed with a shovel?”
“I don’t want to spread rumors. It’s too soon to tell, but she definitely had some damage to her head and there was a shovel in the yard with some dark stuff on it that could have been mud or blood. I’m not going to make an official guess, so don’t go telling anyone.”
Josie shivered. Harris was dead, and now his wife’s body was found, too—and she’d probably witnessed him killing her. Or somewhat witnessed it.
She told Jablonski what little she’d seen over the top of the fence, now feeling absolutely no satisfaction that she’d been right. While it was nice to confirm that she wasn’t crazy and seeing things, the poor troubled woman had lost her life.
There’s no fist-pumping “I told you so” when someone has ended up dead.
“The long and the short of it is, even if Harris killed his wife—based strictly on what you saw him do—we still need to find the person who killed Harris. That’s our immediate problem. There’s a killer out there on the loose.” He looked uneasy. “Of course, don’t quote me on that. I don’t want to panic the town when we don’t know all the facts, so please don’t say anything until there’s an official statement.”
“No problem,” Josie assured him.
She was too busy worrying about her own hide to run around like Chicken Litt
le. She didn’t know if the sky was actually falling, but she wasn’t going to take any chances if Sandra might be lurking out there.
And if the murderer was really Sandra, did she have anything to do with the missing Betty Edwards?
Also, what about Lynetta, who had been the starting point to this whole mess?
Josie’s mind was spinning a bit after Jablonski finished taking her statement. It had been well after midnight by the time the loud-talking officer had clomped back over to Harris’s house. His noisy presence meant that the silence was almost deafening after he left. She’d let Bert out for his nightly pee while Jablonski had still been there, so as she bolted her door she thought about putting some heavy furniture in front of it in case Sandra decided to pay her a middle-of-the-night visit.
Maybe I’ll spread some cooking oil on the floor and booby-trap the place like that kid in Home Alone. Although with my luck I’ll slip and hurt my other ankle.
Jablonski had expressed wholehearted concern for the safety of Betty Edwards. Josie had to agree. If Harris had taken the old woman from Pleasant Valley and delivered her into Sandra’s hands before he was killed, the chances of Betty living out the rest of her days in her easy chair with her e-reader were slim to none, even if it was in a jail cell…
“This is a weird chain reaction, a bizarre sequence of events,” Josie muttered to herself and Bert, if he’d been paying attention. He snored. “It’s like dominoes. First Betty poisons Lynetta. Harris springs her from the nursing home and tries to leave her to die out in the cornfield where we found her sweater. Then he comes back here where he’s already offed his wife with the shovel and left her in the backyard…and where Sandra then shoots him. Or if Betty didn’t die out in the cornfield, where is she and who saved her from exposure? Did Sandra take her and go on the run…?”
