Laura Bishop Cozy Mystery Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Grace Topping

  “I put the pole in the car. Perhaps the police can get fingerprints from it.” I joked about the fingerprints, but it wasn’t all that funny. “If someone planned to trip someone on the steps, and we don’t know for sure that it was intended for me, they would have been too smart to leave fingerprints on it.”

  Mrs. Webster closed the lid of her medical supply box with a loud snap. “Everything that’s been happening there this week seems fishy. A young woman is murdered, someone attacks Josh, and you are nearly killed on the stairs by someone who mistakenly leaves a pole there. Sounds strange to me. I need to have a word with Tyrone about keeping an eye on you there.”

  “Do you think the person who murdered Beth could be the same person who attacked Josh the next day?” Nita asked.

  I pursed my lips and thought about it. At this point, none of our theories was getting us close to identifying Beth’s killer. Could it just be wishful thinking on my part that Chris wasn’t guilty? Things weren’t looking good for him.

  After we’d all calmed down, we spent an enjoyable hour hearing about Mrs. Webster’s stay at the B&B.

  “Those two young men took excellent care of me. So much so I hardly gave a thought to someone possibly breaking into my house for those necklaces. What a relief Detective Spangler and his police surveillance team caught them red-handed coming out with both necklaces. They won’t be victimizing anyone else soon.”

  “It was a brilliant plan, Mrs. Webster. Even Detective Spangler said you did good,” I said.

  “He was kind enough to call and tell me that. You’d do well to get to know him better, Laura. He’s an awfully nice man.”

  “I’ve been telling Laura the same thing for some time,” Nita said.

  That surprised me. Where had that come from—and from both Nita and Mrs. Webster? Had the two of them been talking about Detective Spangler and me with matchmaking in mind?

  “Forget it. After my disastrous marriage to Derrick, I’m fine on my own. Anyway, enough about the detective and me. What have you learned from Neil about the aides?”

  “Neil said they picked them up. For once, it was easy getting information from him. I think he’s quite pleased they’ve been able to break up that gang. The aides made the mistake of thinking you were an easy target, Mrs. Webster.”

  “A lot they knew. It isn’t wise to discount an older woman like me.”

  Nita and I laughed. If only finding out who killed Beth would go as smoothly. With only one day of the competition left, time was running out.

  Chapter 35

  Stage a media room by adding comfortable sofas and chairs pointed to a TV screen. It will be much more comfortable than theater seating and more functional.

  When I arrived home, I found Aunt Kit sitting at the kitchen table, pouring over the notebook I’d left for her to decipher. Inky sat in her lap quite contented and barely looked up at me. He was in for a big surprise when Aunt Kit found her own place and moved out.

  “Hi, Aunt Kit.” I limped in, being very gentle with my injured ankle.

  “What did you do to yourself?” Leave it to Aunt Kit to think whatever had happened to me had been something I’d done to myself.

  I decided not to alarm her by telling her what’d actually happened. She worried enough about me as it was. “I twisted my ankle, hitting a step the wrong way.” Close to the truth.

  “Here, put your foot up on a chair. I’ll get you some ice.” She put ice cubes in a plastic bag and placed it on my ankle.

  “Thank you. That feels good.”

  She shook her head. “You do worry me.”

  “No need to. It should feel better in the morning.” I pointed to the notebook in her hands. “Were you able to make any headway with Beth’s journal?”

  “It’s been slow, but I’ve made progress. It really is rudimentary shorthand—the type someone possibly learned from a book and not from taking a class. But I was able to decipher enough to get the gist of what Beth recorded.”

  “Which was?” I held my breath.

  “It looks like she was trying to gather enough evidence to expose Simon Tate as a sexual predator. From what I could gather, her sister had returned home, deeply disturbed by what happened while she worked for the production company. Beth believed Kristin’s experiences, and some other traumas in her life, caused her to take her own life. She wanted to investigate Simon herself to see if there was enough to prove her sister’s accusations against him. To ultimately bring him to justice.”

  “After being around Simon, that doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know how these men can continue to get away with that type of behavior?”

  “You have to give her a lot of credit. She was working to prevent other women from being victimized by him. She gathered details from some of the women who worked there before her. Apparently, she made arrangements to meet with a reporter, Leo somebody. She wanted to work with someone to do an expose’ the TV network couldn’t ignore. So many organizations turn a blind eye to this type of behavior. Probably because the men who run them are equally guilty of the same thing and don’t want a light shining on them. They cover up for each other.”

  Poor Beth. Her desire to find justice for her sister could have led to her death.

  “Then, of course, many of the victims don’t want to come forward for fear of being labeled a troublemaker and losing future work.” Another reason I was so thankful to have my own business.

  “So, what do you plan to do with this information?” Aunt Kit asked.

  “I’m out of my league with something like this. I’ll turn over whatever we have to Detective Spangler and see what he can make of it.” In novels, the protagonist would have taken on Beth’s vendetta, but I wasn’t about to do that. There was a limit to my abilities. Detective Spangler needed to know about it since it could throw light onto someone else being responsible for Beth’s murder—namely, Simon.

  Aunt Kit pushed sheets of papers across the table to me. “You better take these—my transcription of what I could decipher.”

  I called Detective Spangler and made arrangements to meet him early in the morning at Hibbard’s Bakery. It was becoming a frequent meeting place for us.

  Chapter 36

  Create a welcoming entryway by adding seating and cubbies to remove and store boots, coats, and sporting equipment.

  Competition Day Seven

  Early the next morning, I pushed open the door to Hibbard’s, ready to meet with Detective Spangler. The smell of baked goods tantalized me, but I decided not to give in to temptation. This wasn’t a social meeting. I would be facing the detective’s ire for holding onto Beth’s notebook, and I didn’t want to do it with a mouth full of croissant.

  I scanned the bakery dining area, searching for him. I finally spotted him in a back booth waiting for me. Like most police officers, he sat facing the door, always wanting to be aware of what was going on around him. Taking a seat in the booth across from him, we greeted each other, and I thanked him for the coffee he placed in front of me.

  A puzzled look crossed his face as I placed the pole I was using as a cane on the floor. “What happened to you? Why are you limping?”

  I pointed to the pole. “I tripped on this going down the stairs at the warehouse last evening.”

  “What?” His brow furrowed in concern.

  “It was lying across one of the steps. If I hadn’t had a firm hold on the handrail, I would have gone flying.”

  “Seems strange someone would have left something like that lying there.”

  “Yes, strange. But there had been so much construction and activity going on there, someone could have just dropped it.” I wasn’t quite sure about that, but if I came out with a theory about it, he would probably accuse me of being fanciful.

  I took my time adding cream to my coffee and taking a sip, knowing he would blow up as soon as I gave him the noteboo
k.

  “Before we get into why you wanted to meet me this morning, I wanted to let you know, as promised, I followed up on the man you said had been approaching Beth at the hotel. Knowing what floor he’d stayed on helped us narrow down the search. We discovered he’d checked out two days before Beth was murdered.”

  “But he could have still been in the area.”

  He looked at me as though trying to find patience. “To assure you that we do our job, we followed up on his whereabouts. After he checked out, he traveled to his home in Toledo, Ohio, and hasn’t left there since then.”

  I pursed my lips together in a frown. I’d been hoping the creepy man at the hotel would point the police to someone other than Chris. “Disappointing, but I appreciate you following up on that.” One less suspect.

  Time to get down to my reason for meeting with him.

  “I’m sorry to drag you out here so early in the morning, but you need to see this.” I pulled Beth’s notebook from my bag and handed it to him.

  He opened the notebook and leafed through the pages, frowning in puzzlement. “What is it?”

  “It’s a notebook that belonged to Beth Crawford—written in a simple form of Gregg shorthand.”

  “Where did you find it? It wasn’t among her things in her hotel room.”

  “Will Parker found it. He’d taken Beth up to Thompson’s stables to go riding on the Saturday before her death. Days later, he discovered it near a bale of hay she’d been sitting on. He figured it had fallen from her bag.”

  “Why did he take it to you?” His voice became steely. “More importantly, why am I just now seeing this?”

  I was afraid he was going to ask me that. “Will didn’t know what to make of it. When he saw Chris’s name in it, he brought it to me. When we looked through it, we saw that most of it was in some kind of code—all those symbols. Aunt Kit identified it as rudimentary Gregg shorthand and spent time deciphering it.” I pushed Aunt Kit’s notes across the table to him. “Here is what she could transcribe from it.”

  He took the papers and looked them over, his eyebrows moving up and down as he read. After turning over the last page, he looked up. “I don’t see anything in there about her accosting Simon Tate with her accusations.”

  “Nothing in Aunt Kit’s notes points to that. I think Beth was still making her plans. Just before her murder, she arranged to meet with a reporter. She said in her notebook she planned to discuss doing an expose’. The reporter said she never showed.”

  “And how do you know about this reporter?” I could see his ire starting to build.

  “Through Nita. He’s one of her cousins.”

  He smacked his hand on his forehead. “Another one of Nita’s cousins. What would this town be without the wide network of her family?”

  I couldn’t answer that. All of the members of Nita’s expansive family had always been good to me.

  “So if she was going to meet up with the reporter, it’s unlikely at this point she would have shown her hand to Simon Tate.”

  I thought about it for a minute. “Probably not. If Beth did, she didn’t record it in her notebook—at least as far as Aunt Kit could see.”

  He studied the notebook again as though trying to decipher its contents. “Why would Beth write it in code?”

  “Aunt Kit and I thought it might be something Beth and her sister or a friend had devised when they were teens—their secret code—and she continued to use it. That would keep anyone from reading about her plans. Not many people these days can read shorthand. From what I heard, she was very secretive.”

  He tapped his finger on the notebook. “It worries me that we have a questionable evidence chain of custody for this. And no proof it belonged to her. It might have been different if we’d found it among her things. I’ll have to confer with my supervisor or the district attorney.”

  “Can’t you check it for fingerprints or DNA—something to prove it had been Beth’s?” My hope the notebook might lead to Chris’s release started to fade. It provided the only thing linking Simon to Beth’s murder.

  “Are you going to the warehouse today?” He finished the last of his coffee.

  “As soon as I leave here. It’s the last day of the competition.”

  “Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone about this notebook. Who else knows about it, and who handled it?”

  “As far as I know, Will and Aunt Kit are the only people besides me who touched it. I talked to Nita about it.”

  He groaned, knowing of Nita’s inability to keep anything to herself.

  I jumped to allay his concern. “Nita wouldn’t mention this to anyone—well, maybe Guido. But no one else.” It made me wonder who else could be aware of it.

  Chapter 37

  Key your decor to the community and your target area. A mountain lodge-look in a beach community might not draw much interest with buyers looking for a beach house.

  With it being the last day of the competition, chaos reigned on the set. The competitors busily brought in items to add to their living rooms and removed things they changed their minds about. With so much riding on the outcome, a lot of second-guessing was going on.

  Luke and Robin bounced in with a cameraman, trying to heighten the excitement about the judging that would be done that evening. A reception including Fischer College board members and local dignitaries would follow afterward.

  Now that I knew Robin and Luke somewhat better, I saw what an effort it was for them to perform for the camera, especially now for Robin, who didn’t know whether the reason for her being blackmailed would soon be exposed. There was more than a little acting going on. It confirmed my desire not to become the next home staging star, although I wouldn’t mind if the judges selected the living room Tyrone and I had designed as the winner. If we won, could we pull out in favor of the second-place competitors so I didn’t have to go on to the finals?

  Tyrone pushed some furniture aside to try a different rug in the center of the room. We quickly removed it, preferring the one we’d initially selected. Time to stop second-guessing ourselves.

  Staging a home didn’t ordinarily take so much time. But with the constant interruptions for interviews, murder and police questioning, and having to forage for the furnishings rather than draw from our own inventory, the staging had taken an inordinate amount of time. Looking at our completed living room, I was well pleased with our efforts. I didn’t know how our room would compare with the rooms designed by the others, but I felt we’d staged a space we could be proud of.

  The cream color on the walls and sofa provided a neutral canvas for the pop of red provided by the red wall unit, the red pattern in the Royal Steward tartan pillows and blanket, and the Pendleton rug with a Native American design. The crossed skis above the rustic fireplace encased in faux river rock completed the mountain or ski lodge feel we were going for. It turned out to be a living room that would make homebuyers want to curl up in and relax. All it needed was a roaring fire in the fireplace to complete the look. Tyrone had placed some battery-powered candles in the fireplace to add some ambiance. They flickered like the real things.

  Often, how a place smells can set the mood. For the mountain lodge setting, I placed a balsam fir pillow on the sofa. It exuded a woodsy fragrance. One whiff of it made me feel as though I were in a pine forest—perfect for our mountain lodge living room.

  Using my phone, I snapped photos from every direction. The images wouldn’t look as good as the ones Nita could take, but they would be excellent additions to our promotional material. Beneath them, we could add, ‘As seen on CLTV.’ My excitement about the advertising we could run was starting to build.

  “Laura, could you and Tyrone come and join the others?” I looked up to see Olivia standing in the doorway. “The local paper is here to conduct interviews.”

  I grabbed my pole walking stick to give me balance. My ankle
felt better, but I wanted to treat it gently, so it didn’t get worse.

  “What happened to you?” Olivia asked as I limped toward the doorway.

  “It’s a slight sprain. I twisted it going down the steps last evening.” I was thankful it had happened on the last day of the competition and not on the first day.

  “Do you need some help?” Was she concerned about my injured ankle or wondering if I planned to hold the production company liable for my injury?

  “No, I’ll be fine.” I held out my walking stick. “This is giving me balance.”

  “That makes for a convenient walking stick. Where did you find it?”

  “It was on the stairs. That’s what tripped me up.”

  Her eyes widened. “You should talk to Josh Sheridan about that. Pure negligence by his maintenance crew.”

  We joined the others in the common area. Leo, along with a photographer from the Louiston Mirror, directed people to gather for group photos. Josh hovered in the background. All the publicity surrounding the competition benefitted his business. I wondered how soon he would start giving tours of the film set.

  Getting as close to Leo as I could without anyone overhearing us, I whispered. “Don’t say anything to anybody about your call from Beth.”

  His eyes widened. “What’s going on?”

  “I can’t say now, but I might have a story for you later.”

  He winked at me. “Gotcha.”

  For the next two hours, Leo interviewed the competitors and assistants, taking photos of us individually and in groups. Simon bounced from person to person, putting an arm around this one and then that one. More than likely, he would end up in most of the photos.

  The day had become unseasonably warm, and with all of us crowded together, I soon found myself becoming fatigued. I was relieved when we broke for lunch and got to relax. As a special celebration for the last day of filming, Olivia had arranged for us to have a catered lunch instead of the usual box lunches. As wonderful as the food smelled, my stomach was in knots from nerves. I could barely eat a thing, wondering what Detective Spangler was going to decide about the notebook.