Marriage, Monsters-in-Law, and Murder

by Sara Rosett

  Brian blew out a sigh. “Yes, well, Graham isn’t extremely altruistic.”

  Summer rolled her eyes. “Graham has never done pro bono work—ever. I’m not surprised he couldn’t find time to do a will for Aunt Gloria.”

  Redding said, “Apparently, he came to regret it. Besides the house your aunt lived in, she owned another piece of property, a small beach house in Sarasota. She received it as an inheritance from her deceased husband’s brother two years ago. She left both properties jointly to you and Murphy. Mr. Philmore sent me a copy of the will.”

  “What?” Brian said.

  Redding took out his phone, tapped on it until a document appeared, then handed it over to Brian. “Your aunt appointed Murphy as the executor. Did he mention your aunt’s will to you? That you were a beneficiary?”

  Brian had been scrolling through the document. He looked up, his face puzzled. “No. Nothing. He never said anything about it.”

  “I thought so.” Redding flipped to another page in his notebook. “Mr. Philmore said that Murphy told him he would personally inform you of the terms of the will. I gathered from Mr. Philmore that it’s not usually done that way, but since Murphy was a friend and work colleague, Mr. Philmore agreed. Murphy’s phone has been entered into evidence. His e-mail was on his phone and even though I’ve only had a quick look through it, I’ve already found that Murphy contacted a Realtor in Sarasota last week. Their exchange of e-mails indicates that Murphy floated the idea of putting the property on the market and asked for a ballpark valuation. The Realtor sent comps from one to three point five million dollars.”

  There was a stunned silence in the room for a moment.

  Brian cleared his throat. “What? Are you sure? What kind of property is it?”

  “I’ll read you the Realtor’s summary to Murphy,” Redding said. “A two-bedroom bungalow, constructed in 1952. Needs a lot of work—roof, exterior paint, new windows, etc. Located on a busy section of prime beachfront, and surrounded on three sides by high-rise condos, which makes it a prime location. I personally know of at least two investors who would be very interested purchasing it.” Redding gestured to his phone that Brian still held. “There are photos of it on there. I pulled up the address on a mapping app.”

  Brian tapped the phone, and Summer and I both craned our necks to get a look at the photos.

  “It’s cute. Tiny, but cute,” Summer said.

  I was close enough to Brian to get a glimpse of a tan Craftsman-style bungalow with white trim dwarfed on either side by two high-rise condos.

  “So he agreed to sell it?” Summer asked, lifting the real estate papers that Brian had handed off to her when he took Redding’s phone to read the will. “This is an offer to purchase the property. How could he do that? Didn’t the will have to go through probate? He couldn’t even put it on the market.”

  “He couldn’t,” Brian said, his voice stunned. “Not legitimately.”

  “Oh,” Summer said, her shoulders dropping. “But Graham has never been one to color inside the lines.”

  Redding said, “The e-mails indicate that the Realtor floated the possibility of the property going on the market to a few potential buyers. One of them made an offer, despite it not being officially on the market.” Redding pointed to the paperwork Summer held.

  “But that still doesn’t explain why he’d try to kill me,” Brian said. “He could have bought me out. I would have sold it to him.”

  “No you wouldn’t,” Summer said as she took the phone from him. “Look at this photo when you zoom out. It’s literally right on the beach. See that? Salt grass and sea oats and sea grape. Dunes right up almost to the front door. With all the work you’ve done to preserve beach ecosystems, I know that once you saw this, there would be no way you’d sell this slice of beach. And Graham would know that too,” Summer said, her voice sad.

  “Ah, I see,” Redding said. “That fits. He knew you wouldn’t sell, so he set in motion his plan to make your death look like an accident. If you die before the wedding, then he is the sole beneficiary.”

  The room suddenly felt colder, and I snuggled into Mitch’s side. The thought of Graham carefully planning the timing of his cousin’s death . . . no wonder he’d looked so removed and almost analytical up in the tower. He’d planned to kill Brian from the beginning, and I was only a bump in the road, something in the way of his goal.

  Summer touched the papers. “And he went off and left this in a bin to be shredded?”

  Redding nodded. “Very careless. He slipped up there, but it’s difficult to plan the perfect murder. Normally, the hotel employees would have collected the paper and shredded it. No one would have known about the property deal if the bin hadn’t been unlocked.”

  “And it looked like it was locked,” I said. “It was only when Nathan told me where he got the paper that I realized it wasn’t fastened.”

  Redding’s phone rang, and Summer handed it back to him.

  “Excuse me. I have to take this,” Redding said. “Mrs. Avery, if you wouldn’t mind explaining Murphy’s plan involving the pranks.”

  “Sure,” I said as Redding moved off to talk on the phone.

  “Pranks?” Summer looked toward me. “What is he talking about?”

  “The paintball and the poison ivy. Graham must have been behind them. Anyone could have brought those things to the island hidden in their luggage, but Graham specifically invited Julia, someone who had a history with Brian. Graham knew that the first incidents would be blamed on Julia. Once those had taken place, he only had to loosen the lug nuts in the golf cart wheel. Brian should have been driving. Ned taking the golf cart was a coincidence. If he had been, Brian would have taken the turn that Ned did, and his death would have been written off as a horrible, tragic accident, one of a series of revengeful pranks gone wrong.”

  Summer leaned forward. “So you’re saying that Graham set up Julia? She wasn’t involved at all?”

  “I don’t think so. You and I both noticed how smitten she was with Graham. She wasn’t acting like she felt any attraction to you, Brian. All her attention was focused on Graham. And she also seemed to be . . . I don’t know . . . embarrassed when she arrived and saw you both. I had the distinct impression that she wasn’t comfortable. At the time—after Summer explained the relationship history—I thought it was because she didn’t like seeing you two together, but now I think it was because she didn’t know this weekend was your wedding.”

  “What? Why would you think that?” Summer asked, clearly not sold on the idea of Julia not being the villain.

  “Because I talked to her sister at the hospital. She said Julia had other plans. She was supposed to visit her sister this weekend, but that she’d switched everything around at the last minute, but that didn’t go with the careful planning that would have had to have gone into the pranks and the golf cart ‘accident.’ Each of those things would have to be arranged and calculated out beforehand, especially the golf cart accident. The stretch of cart path that the wreck happened on was coordinated so that the wheel would come off, pitching the cart over, and throwing Brian onto the asphalt. Everything Julia would need to know—the use of the golf carts, the cart paths, the plan to picnic at the ruin, even the tidbit about the resort providing a special ‘bride and groom’ golf cart—was there on the resort’s website. But she would need time to figure it out and plan each step of the pranks and the golf cart wreck so that it would be accepted as an accident. That’s a lot to do at the last minute.”

  Redding had stepped to a corner of the room to take his call. He ended the call and returned to the group, catching the last few words. “Speaking of Julia Banning, I was interviewing her when your calls came in, Mrs. Avery.”

  “So she’s out of the coma?” I asked.

  “Yes. Her prognosis is good, but the first thing she told her sister was that she didn’t want Graham in the room. He’d pushed her down the stairs.”

  Summer shook her head, a look of amazement on her f
ace. “So it’s true. Graham really did use her. He set her up to be the scapegoat. Do you think she suspected Graham was behind the incidents? Why else would he push her down the stairs?”

  “Yes,” Redding said. “You said she appeared to be very involved with Murphy, and she told me herself that she thought she was in love with him, but she noticed something that bothered her. Julia said she went into his room through the connecting door after he returned from his run. She startled him, and he dropped the fanny pack. It clinked when it hit the floor, and she caught a glimpse of something silver-colored inside. She stated that she asked him what it was. He told her it was a metal water bottle. She said she didn’t think anything about it until the next day when they were leaving to go for a walk on the beach. Graham suggested they stop at the resort’s shop to pick up some bottled waters. Julia said that when she suggested filling up his water bottle, he looked like he didn’t know what she was talking about. She said it felt odd to her. Apparently, it wasn’t the first thing he’d said to her that didn’t seem quite right, so later she slipped into his room and took a look in the fanny pack. She found a socket wrench and lug nuts.”

  “We saw him that morning on his jog,” I said. “He stopped to talk to us, Mitch and me.” I explained about our detour to show the ruin to the kids. “I did think it was a little weird that he had brought a fanny pack on a jog. You know, it would be bumping against your hip the whole way.”

  Brian said, “Just the fact that Graham was jogging is weird. He doesn’t like physical activity at all. I was always trying to get him to play golf or racquetball or tennis, but he never wanted to.”

  I looked toward Redding. “If he brought the fanny pack with him on his run, and he was at the ruin, was he retrieving the socket wrench and lug nuts?”

  “Yes, I believe so. He probably decided he didn’t want to have those things on his person immediately after the accident—that would be instantly incriminating—so he hid them to be retrieved later.”

  “And it wouldn’t be easy to hide a socket wrench in your clothes anyway,” Mitch added.

  “Unless he was wearing something like cargo pants or shorts, but I think he was wearing a pair of khaki shorts with a T-shirt.”

  “That’s right,” Summer confirmed. “Patricia was a little put out with him that he hadn’t dressed appropriately for the garden party theme.”

  “So his jog was just cover for him when he returned for the socket wrench and lug nuts that he had hidden,” I said.

  Redding looked unhappy. “Yes, we searched the ruin, but the area is so large that we must have overlooked it.”

  Mitch said, “They could have been anywhere—buried or hidden in a tree or shrub or even in the ruin itself. I noticed several loose flagstones as well as crumbling masonry. Any small gap could have been a hiding place.”

  “So what did Julia do when she found the socket wrench and lug nuts?” I asked. “Did she confront him?”

  “No. She called the front desk and asked for my contact information. Unfortunately, it appears that Murphy overheard enough of the conversation that he became worried.”

  “And so he pushed her down the stairs,” Brian said, his face a mixture of horror and disgust.

  “Yes,” Redding said. “It did happen only a few minutes after her call to the front desk. She said she made an excuse about running down to the gift shop alone—said she needed more batteries—but he must have followed her.”

  “And the main elevators were slow,” I remembered. “So she must have headed for the back servants’ stairs like I did, thinking it would help her get downstairs quicker.”

  “But it only made it easier for Murphy to attack her,” Redding said.

  I shivered, thinking of those moments on the stairs when Graham had tried to get me to leave and when he’d wanted to move Julia. I was so glad Rebekah had arrived as quickly as she did. With both of us there, he couldn’t do anything but watch as Julia got medical care and was taken away to the hospital.

  Brian, his face pale, said, “I still can’t believe it. Graham did all that and then tried again at the rehearsal dinner.”

  “Unluckiest murderer I’ve ever seen,” Redding said.

  “But determined,” I added. “I wonder how he knew about the lily of the valley—about it being poisonous?”

  Redding shrugged. “Don’t know. There’s nothing about it on his phone, so he didn’t search for information on it there. Maybe it was just general knowledge he picked up somewhere along the way. I do know that we can nail him on that. The other things—the paintball and plastic bag with the poison ivy, even the tire lug nuts are iffy. None of those things have any prints on them, which is suspicious in and of itself. But the lily of the valley, we’ve got him on that. I’ve searched his room. The coffeepot that the resort provides in each room was broken. He’d dumped the pieces in the trash, but there is definite residue on the broken glass and in the trash. My crime scene tech says his fingerprints are all over the coffeepot. Preliminary tests on the fragments show traces of the toxin administered to you.” Redding looked toward Summer. “It seems he chopped up the plant and boiled it, concentrating the liquid before adding it to the champagne. We also found a small bottle of shampoo that the resort provides in his jacket pocket. The bottle had been emptied of shampoo, but there was a residue in the bottom. It’s been sent to the lab for testing.”

  Redding flipped his notebook closed. “I think that about covers everything. Did you have any questions?” he asked, looking toward Brian and Summer.

  Brian just shook his head, and Summer said, “I’m so stunned, I don’t know what to think. I mean, I knew Graham liked to skate close to the edge, but . . . murder? Of his own cousin? And trying to hurt Julia and Ellie, too? I’m just . . . astonished.”

  Redding slipped his pen into his jacket pocket and stood. “One to three point five million dollars is a lot of motive. I’ve seen people kill for less. A lot less.”

  “I have a question,” I said, figuring that if I didn’t ask now, I probably wouldn’t get another opportunity. “One thing that bothered me was that golf cart we saw leaving the ruin right before Ned’s wreck. Did it have anything to do with all this?” I asked, waving my hand at the real estate papers.

  “No. I was able to run that down this morning. Completely unrelated to this case. The cart was used by a couple returning from the golf course. They decided to take a detour on the way back to the resort to see the ruin. They have no connection to anyone in the wedding party.”

  “I see,” I said. “Thanks, I don’t like to have leftover bits and pieces that don’t fit into the pattern, so to say.”

  “In this case, they weren’t even part of the pattern. Just a stray complication.” Redding put his hands in his pockets and relaxed a bit. “All right. I’ll need formal statements from you all, but that can wait until later.” He checked his watch. “I believe you have a wedding on the schedule.”

  Summer looked to Brian. “I know I was very adamant this morning about the wedding having to be today, but after all that’s happened with Graham, well, if you want to put it off until later, I understand.”

  “Do you want to put it off? Having second thoughts about marrying into the Murphy family?” Brian asked.

  “No,” Summer said quietly, her gaze fixed on his face. “No second thoughts. I’m marrying you. Whether that’s today or next year, doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Then today it is.”

  Tips for an Organized Wedding

  The day after a wedding can be almost as busy as the big day itself. Don’t forget to arrange for rental items to be returned as well as transportation to the airport for out-of-town guests as needed. Designate someone to collect all gifts at the reception and either transport them to the new couple’s home or arrange for them to be shipped, if the wedding is not in the bride and groom’s home city.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The soft strains of the string quartet flowed through the air, and I straightened Na
than’s tie then gave him and Livvy a quick hug. “All ready?” I asked. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the ushers escorting guests to their seats.

  Nathan nodded. Now that the actual moment had arrived, he didn’t look a bit mutinous, as I’d been afraid he might. He looked a little scared. “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “You’ll do great. Just walk slowly down the aisle and wait until Uncle Brian motions for you to come over to him. Easy-peasy.”

  He nodded, his gaze fixed on the end of the aisle where Brian and the minister stood under the flower arch. Behind them the endless horizon of beach and water stretched out as far as you could see. The sea breeze buffeted the flowers and ribbons decorating the end of each aisle and pulled at the women’s dresses and ruffled the men’s hair.

  Livvy tugged on my hand. “Mom, some of the kids said I’m too old to be a flower girl.” She looked over my shoulder at a row of cousins giggling in the back row of white chairs.

  Why were kids so mean? I squatted down so that I could be on level with her. “Did you ever think that they might be just a teensy bit jealous?”

  Livvy wrinkled her nose. “They would say that because they’re jealous? Why would they do that?”

  “Sometimes people don’t like their situation, where they are in life, and they do and say mean things.”

  “Like Graham,” Nathan popped into our conversation. News of Graham’s actions and his arrest had spread quickly through the resort. I’d have rather sheltered the kids from it, but there wasn’t a way to keep the news from them.

  “Yes, unfortunately Graham is a grown-up example of that. But let’s not talk about Graham right now. Let’s focus on the wedding. Your cousins might wish they were in the wedding. After all, you get to dress up and be in the pictures. It’s an honor to be picked,” I said. Livvy looked thoughtful. “Just remember, you’re doing it for Aunt Summer. She wants you here.”

  “Ellie, are you ready?” Mitch asked as he reached out a hand to lift me up. “It’s time.”