Mahjonged (An Alex Harris Mystery)

by Elaine Macko

  “No wonder they both kept winning,” Theresa shook her head and I could tell she and Meme were already plotting their revenge for the next time we played.

  “Anything else?” I looked at both of them.

  Meme took another sip of wine. “Remember what Mary-Beth told us on Saturday about the conversation she overheard?”

  I shook my head. “Which conversation?” I had heard so many things the last few days, I just couldn’t remember everything.

  “Something about your one true love and then she met her husband?” Theresa added.

  I took a sip of water and tried to focus on the conversation. “Right. That she met her one true love and then she met Pieter.”

  “Maybe the picture you found is the one true love,” Theresa said.

  Meme nodded. “Probably is or why keep it all these years?”

  “I think you may be right. She was married to Pieter for quite a while, twenty or so years, so why have the other picture all this time unless she forgot about it,” I said.

  “You never forget.” Meme shook her head.

  The waitress arrived with our plates. The linguine came with chunks of fresh fish that looked and smelled wonderful. Meme and Theresa both had the catch of the day with garlic mashed potatoes and sautéed vegetables. We ate in silence for a few minutes. There didn’t seem to be much else to add on the subject of the picture. I mean, so what? Penelope had been in love with someone before she met Pieter, but then she married him for whatever reason. End of story.

  Obviously not because Meme picked up the conversation again.

  “Maybe he came back. Maybe he’s been mad at Penelope all these years for dumping him and he came back and killed her.”

  I put my fork down and looked at my grandmother. “And just happened to know she’d be playing mahjong at my house?”

  “He could have followed her,” Theresa suggested.

  “All the way from Holland?” I looked at the bewildered faces on my two octogenarian dinner partners and explained. “Okay. From what Mary-Beth heard it sounded like Penelope dated this guy and then Pieter showed up. So doesn’t that mean the guy was probably someone she knew in Holland?”

  “Did he look Dutch in the picture?” Theresa asked.

  “You mean was he wearing wooden shoes and standing by a dike with his finger in one of the holes as a windmill gently turned behind him in a field of tulips?”

  Meme cackled.

  Theresa glared at Meme. “You know what I meant. Did he look like a foreigner?”

  “He looked normal. Like a guy. Any guy,” I said hoping to put an end to this. I felt more tired than I thought what with staying up to all hours and having a murder happen in my own house.

  Meme took a bite of her mashed potatoes. “Well, you know what this means?”

  “No. No, I don’t know what this means,” I said wondering if I had totally missed out on a potential clue.

  “It means we still have nothing. You’re going to have to start all over again.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  My grandmother, as luck would have it, was right of course. I had nothing. I had two stepchildren who had absolutely nothing at all to do with the murder. I had a former lover, who for all I knew was dead himself, and couldn’t possibly have anything at all to do with this.

  I sat there at my desk very early trying to focus on work, the actual stuff that paid my bills. After I dropped my grandmother and Theresa off the night before, stealth-like, with the car lights out, I went back to my parents’ house all depressed. I was never going to solve this thing and that meant I couldn’t go back to my own house. I needed to clear this all up before John got home because once he showed up, he’d put the kibosh on my involvement. Not that that ever stopped me before, but I didn’t need him here to cramp my style. What kind of talk was this? We were newly married and here I was thinking I didn’t want him around. Of course I wanted him around. Just not for a few more days.

  And then my face brightened. I did have something. Two somethings. I had Bert. And I had Connie. And I still had a whole lot of other people to talk to. I grabbed my purse and hurried through the office running out the door and locking it before anybody showed up. I also grabbed a phone book, and now parked a few blocks from my office, sat looking up addresses. I needed to get one of those new phones with all the apps so I didn’t need to lug around a phone book, but until then, this would have to do.

  Luckily for me, the people who lived in Indian Cove still acted like it was the nineteen sixties and we lived in a Leave It to Beaver episode so I had no trouble finding the suspects’ names, addresses, and phone numbers. I kept an unlisted number but I think I was the only person in town who did. I jotted down all the addresses I needed and stuck the piece of paper in my purse. While I sat there, I rewarded myself with four M&Ms, savoring two of them when a WHACK on my car window scared the hell out of me.

  “Alex, what are you doing in there?” my sister asked and then, seeing two candies in my hand, grabbed hold of the door handle and yanked it open. “You are out of control. If you have to pull over to pop a few M&Ms then you have a real problem. I’m telling Mom. No. I’m telling John!” She turned and headed back to her car, the car I never heard pull up and park right behind me. Maybe I was out of control.

  I jumped out of the car. “Sam. Stop. I didn’t pull over to get a fix. I needed to write down addresses from the phone book for Mia and Jean and Liz.” I reached into the car and pulled the list from my purse. “See? And besides, if I did want to pull over and take a little candy break it’s no business of yours.” I turned and got back in my car, locking the door this time. I started the car up and slowly pulled away from the curb giving my bewildered sister a little wave.

  It was still pretty early but I knew the health club opened at six and Connie’s first class started in half an hour.

  Ten minutes later, I swallowed my pride and walked into the Indian Cove Health Club. Connie stood by the entrance talking with someone and I waited for them to finish before I approached her.

  “I really don’t want to talk to you, Alex,” Connie said turning away from me.

  “Wait. Connie, I wanted to apologize. I acted like a jerk yesterday. I guess all the stress from Friday night is just getting to me.”

  “Well, it would, wouldn’t it? I mean having someone killed in your home and all.” Connie folded her arms across her chest, still a bit defiant.

  “Yeah. I didn’t mean to take it out on you. I’m just trying to find out what happened.”

  “Well, you’re barking up the wrong tree if you think Bert had anything to do with it.”

  “He did break into my….” I let the words trail off. I didn’t want to get into it with her again. “That’s not why I’m here. I wanted to talk with you about Liz.”

  “Liz?”

  I had to approach this from a different angle. If Connie thought I now planned to accuse Liz, she would walk away from me for good. “I never got a chance to talk with her. You know, about the job search.”

  “Right. She wanted to set up an appointment with your agency. I can call her if you’d like.”

  “No, it’s okay. I can contact her but before I do, I just wondered if you knew anything about what happened with Liz and Mia? Did you know Liz had been a nurse?”

  Connie shook her head. “No, I didn’t know much about her at all, to tell you the truth. It all just kind of happened, I mean my bringing her to your house.”

  “So you’re not good friends with her?”

  “No. She comes to the club, usually in the afternoon, and not very often. She came in here a couple of weeks ago and we started talking and she said she really needed to find a job. So I asked her what kind of work, and she said office related, and you had just been in the night before and asked me about the mahjong night. So, I asked Liz if she’d like to come and play and I could introduce the two of you.”

  Damn. My hopes of getting the dirt on Liz before I went over to her place were
squashed, but it did give me a new angle on the subject, one that had been in the back of my mind but I hadn’t really brought to the forefront yet. The four suspects—five if you count Bert, and I did—and the victim, showed up at my house through pure happenstance. No one knew anyone else. All the invites were spur of the moment, just trying to fill in the gaps to get enough players for a nice evening.

  But that’s not how it turned out. One person died and five people became suspects. They all came to my house and in the space of a few hours something happened which created the perfect storm inside to equal the one that raged outside, and I needed to find out what that something was.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The good thing about living in Indian Cove is nothing is really ever too far from another. Within fifteen minutes of leaving the health club I pulled up next to a small duplex. Liz Throckmorton lived on the left-hand side of the unit and I walked up a neat pathway and knocked on her front door.

  I brought brochures and a few applications for the agency with me and if she happened to be home, I had my excuse ready. But still I felt nervous. It was one thing to have an impromptu party at my house with a group of women I didn’t know, but it was another thing to go knocking on the door of one of these women and interrogate her. True, I’d done it before with other murders I’d worked on, but in those situations, more often than not, the person being interrogated wasn’t a nice person to begin with. But everyone who came to my party seemed nice. Seemed. That was the operative word and I needed to remind myself one of these nice people was a killer.

  Luck was on my side, and Liz answered the door wearing a skirt and buttoned-down sweater. Recognition came to her face and she smiled.

  “Alex. It’s nice to see you again. Please, come in. Can I get you anything?”

  “A tea would be nice if you have it?”

  The duplex was small, but quite comfortable inside. It obviously had been modernized and the main room had a kitchen at the far end toward the back, a small dining area and then the living room fronting the street. I took a seat at the dining table while Liz busied herself in the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t have more of a chance to talk on Friday night,” Liz said, while she pulled cups from a rack on one wall.

  “Yes. Things didn’t turn out quite the way I planned. I know you wanted to talk to me about a job and I brought over some brochures and things from my agency.”

  Liz brought two cups into the dining area and placed one in front of me. “Do you take milk or sugar?”

  “No, nothing. This is fine.” I picked up the cup and took a tentative sip using this as an excuse to take a look at Liz. My first impression the night of the killing seemed spot on. Everything about her screamed average. I then turned my attention to the room. “This is very nice,” I said taking it in.

  Liz looked around. “It’s not bad. It’s small, but there’s just me. I’m divorced, by the way. I have a daughter but she’s grown and married and followed her husband to Minnesota for his job. There’s a bedroom in the back and a small room I use as an office.”

  “You have some nice photos. Did you take them yourself?” I asked looking at several framed black and white photos hanging on the walls of the living room.

  “I did. I really got into photography at one time. A long time ago.” She laughed. “I did some traveling right after school and took these pictures.” Liz took a sip of tea and then put her cup down.

  “Alex, I guess I owe you an explanation. I mean about what happened with Mia.”

  “Mia talked with me on Friday. She said you didn’t lose your job, so I did wonder why you wanted me to find you some admin work.”

  Liz turned and looked out the window, pushing her blond hair over her ears. “It’s times like these I wish I still smoked.” She turned back to me. “Alex, I didn’t kill Mia’s father.”

  “I know. So why aren’t you still working as a nurse?”

  Liz let out a sigh. “After high school I tried a lot of things. I walked dogs for a while. I’m not much of an animal person, so who knows why I did that. Two dogs got away from me and were never found so that ended that.” Liz fingered the edge of a placemat, pulling on a loose thread. “Then I started up my own plant service, going from office to office taking care of plants. Most of them died. Next I got a dream job tasting ice cream. You don’t want to know how much weight I gained, and then, well, we don’t even want to go there,” Liz said with a wave of her hand. She leaned on the table and looked at me. “The point is I never fit in until I became a nurse. It was always something I wanted to do and once I settled down and got my degree, I knew I found my life’s work.”

  “Then why aren’t you still doing it?” I asked again.

  “After Mr. Christenssen died, the hospital board cleared me. But you can never get away from something like that. There’s always going to be whispering. My marriage ended at the same time. We were having problems to begin with and the lawsuit and all the tension just finished us off. So, I moved up to New Hampshire where my brother lives and got a job with a small hospital there. I liked it fine, but something happened. To me, I mean. I just lost the desire. My heart wasn’t in it.

  “I was on a break when Mia’s father died,” Liz continued. “I went outside to have a smoke. And then someone called the code and the nurse on duty checked the chart and saw the DNR. It was a mix up.” Liz took a deep breath. “It doesn’t really matter. It was my fault pure and simple. If I hadn’t been on break smoking a damned cigarette I would have checked the chart myself and found the mistake right away. I left a young, inexperienced nurse alone and a man died. The truth is he was going to die very soon anyway, probably within a day or two, but still. I quit my job and I quit smoking. And now I’m back in Connecticut and I need a job.”

  “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry. I know it was horrible but it was an accident. Have you talked to someone? It seems like you need to forgive yourself.”

  Liz reached over and touched my arm. “Thank you, Alex. And yes, I am talking with someone. I just started. So, do you think you can help me find something?”

  “Well, I’m sure I could,” I said with confidence. The bad economy seemed to be helping my business. More and more companies turned to bringing on temp employees rather than assuming the burden of hiring permanent staff only to have to lay them off if things didn’t pick up. “But if you don’t want to get back into hands-on nursing, would you be open to teaching?”

  “Hmmm. I do have the credentials.”

  “Let me make some calls and I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, fill out these.” I handed Liz the packet. “I do have a couple of other questions if you have a few minutes.”

  “Sure. What do you want to know?”

  “Did you know Penelope before you met her on Friday?”

  “No. The only person I knew was Connie. And Mia.”

  “Penelope wore red and so did you and so did Mia. She was so upset. Do you think she wanted to kill you and in the dark killed Penelope by mistake?”

  “Oh, God, does she hate me that much? Of course she does.” Liz put her hand to her mouth. “Do the police think Penelope was killed by mistake?”

  “I don’t know. Have they talked with you yet?”

  “Yes, first when they got to your house and then they came back here on Sunday afternoon. They wanted to know everything about Penelope, but I told them I never met her until the night of the party.”

  “And how about the night of the party? I know you played a few hands with her. Did she say anything that might have led to her death?”

  “Of course not. We were playing a game, for God sakes. She laughed a lot and told us stories about living in Europe. It all sounded so wonderful. Made me long for the days right out of college.”

  “Did she say anything specific,” I asked, grasping at straws.

  “Like what? What could she have said that would anger anyone enough to kill her? It was just girl talk. I told everyone about my online
dating experiences and she told us about her dating experiences in Europe and how she met her husband. Innocent banter, that’s all.”

  I got up and thanked Liz for her time, telling her I would make some calls and get back with her on the job front. She walked me to the door.

  “And Alex, just in case you’re wondering but don’t have the nerve to say it, it could have been me, trying to kill Mia and killing Penelope by mistake. After all, some people could say her accusations ruined my life.”

  I just nodded and walked down the path to my car. Of course I wanted to know if she had tried to plunge a knife into Mia and got Penelope by mistake. But one thing I was sure of, if she had, she wasn’t about to admit it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Next on my list was Jean Malansky. Jean lived closer to the beach and I turned right at the stop sign at the end of Liz’s street and headed toward the Sound.

  Being near the ocean always rejuvenates me. I’m not big on going into the water, but I love being near it. All the hints of the previous days’ storms were gone and the sun shone brightly. Leaves started to turn, at least what leaves were still left on the trees, and in a week or so it would be magnificent with the maples a deep red and orange and the russet of the oaks.

  Jean lived on a street of small cottages. They looked rather old and the street had once been full of summer rentals but over the last ten years, they were bought up and renovated. The little yard in front of Jean’s house looked neatly kept with what seemed like new landscaping, but the house shingles screamed out for some paint.

  “I heard you drive up,” Jean called from the small porch. “It’s so quiet around here during the day I hear every little sound.”

  Jean had on a pair of navy blue sweat pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt under some kind of smock splattered with paint in various colors. Her hair hung limply and I thought she could use a good cut. I kept mine short for just that reason; limp and lifeless, but with it cut short, it gave it some life. Jean struck me as someone who in the sixties probably hung out in bohemian cafés listening to some musician playing guitar and singing Joan Baez songs.