Detour

by Lorena McCourtney

  “Do you?”

  “No, of course not. I mean, Genevieve and I weren’t good enough friends that we’d take pictures of each other. And it would be kind of creepy, wouldn’t it, me taking photos of Genevieve’s ill husband?”

  “I wonder if the private investigator talked to anyone else in the neighborhood?”

  “I know he talked to someone who gave him my name and told him if anyone in the neighborhood would know anything about Genevieve, it would be me.” She sounded proud of the local referral. “Will you contact him?”

  “If he’s a scam artist, I wouldn’t want to let him know where Genevieve is. But, like you, I wouldn’t want her to miss out if there is a real inheritance.”

  “Hold on a minute and I’ll find his card.”

  I don’t know what I expected a private investigator’s name to be, but Megalthorpe wasn’t it. Roger Megalthorpe. Well, probably just more of the TV influence making me expect something a little more dashing and detective-ish sounding. She gave me a phone number off the card.

  “So will you contact him?” she asked again.

  “I’ll have to think about it. It’s hard to know what to do. But I do appreciate your talking to me. I wonder if there was insurance when Genevieve’s husband died.”

  “I have no idea. And, of course, I wouldn’t know, the way she scooted out of here after he passed away.” She paused, annoyance with Genevieve surfacing again. I expected her to ask where Genevieve was now, and I tried to detour the question.

  “Genevieve apparently has unhappy memories of her husband’s last days there on Jefferson Street. She didn’t seem to want to do any reminiscing with Magnolia and me about when she lived there.”

  “I can understand that. I was thinking I might drop her a card if I had her address, but sometimes it’s better just to leave the past in the past, isn’t it? Maybe that’s how she felt when she didn’t tell anyone goodbye.”

  We chatted a few minutes more about how Madison Street had changed and what Magnolia and Geoff were doing. I inquired about her pot-bellied pigs, and she said she’d lost that skirmish with city authorities; the pigs now had a country home.

  “But I have a miniature goat now. Her name is Gretchen and she lives in the kitchen most of the time. I really need her. There have been a couple of break-ins in the area, and I’m teaching her to wake me if she hears any strange noises.”

  She sounded gleeful, and I suspected the city officials may have met their match in Franny and her guard goat. “Right,” I said, and we ended the conversation with our mutual assurances that we’d like to meet in person sometime.

  After the conversation ended, I sat there wondering what to do with these unexpected bits of new information. About Kathy, of course, not the guard goat. Did I want to contact Roger Megalthorpe? He’d surely want an address for Kathy, how he could get in touch with her, and who knows what else. How much information was I willing to give him?

  Although I also had to wonder, how much information could I extract from him?

  I’d talk to Mac before deciding anything, of course. That’s another of the nice benefits of marriage. There’s always someone to talk things over with. And there’s no one I’d rather talk with about anything than Mac.

  Chapter 14

  IVY

  When Mac and BoBandy came in from their walk, I told him what Franny Lisbon had said about the private investigator back in Missouri. Over lunch we discussed both the scam possibilities and these new facts about Genevieve/Kathy. That she and the first husband hadn’t been married long. That she’d earlier received an apparently considerable amount of insurance when her mother died. That she may have had a mysterious motel liaison with some unknown person back in Missouri. That she’d scooted off with nary a goodbye to anyone after her husband died.

  We decided the first step would be to investigate the investigator and find out if he really was a legitimate PI. If he wasn’t, then we could be fairly certain this was some scheme he’d cooked up. Using the cell phone, we looked up private investigators back in Missouri and there he was: Megalthorpe Investigative Services, with the same phone number Franny had given me.

  Okay, we’d call Roger Megalthorpe. But, at least at first, it would be more to get information from him than to tell him anything. The first thing we needed to know was why he was trying to locate Widow Genevieve.

  I tried an immediate call, but it went to voice mail and I didn’t want to leave a message. So we drove on into Eureka, and after an afternoon shuffling between the library and the newspaper, which had been publishing since the mid-1800s, Mac had both facts and legends for his article. There had actually been several long-ago stagecoach robberies in the area, and the old tale about buried pirate treasure was retold in a couple of history columns. Plus we found more information about the old hermit and his goats, including various goat sightings over the years. Mac figured he had enough information for a lighthearted article for the magazine, and I had the side benefit of an old-time recipe for applesauce cake that I found in the column next to a blurry picture of what might be a ghost goat. Or it might just be a piece of an old hermit’s long underwear hanging on a branch.

  We’d been back at the motorhome for only a few minutes, and Mac was still in the bedroom, when Sheila came over. I wasn’t surprised. She must have seen us at the dinosaur park when she was at Duke’s trailer. She handed me a carton of frozen applesauce she’d made from her own homegrown apples and managed to make fidgety small talk about the weather until she apparently decided she could get down to the real business of this visit.

  “I saw you were there when that deputy hauled Brian off. Is he under arrest?”

  “No. He voluntarily accompanied the deputy to the station to answer some questions. I think they were investigating a tip that had come in.”

  “An anonymous tip?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it from a man or a woman?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  Sheila jumped to her own conclusions. “Someone told them about Brian and Renée!” She sounded elated. “I wonder who?”

  “I’m afraid Kathy thinks it was us.” I’d been tempted to come right out and ask if Sheila herself had called in the tip, but she’d already made a preemptive claim to innocence with her question about who might have done it. I tackled a different subject that made me curious. “I had the impression earlier, when you said you thought Duke needed a better cell phone for emergencies, that you thought he might be in some danger.”

  “That’s right. I’m afraid Duke might need to call nine-one-one sometime and that old phone would be about as helpful as a pet rock. I guess it’s no secret there’s no love lost between Brian and me.” She wrinkled her nose as if just the name gave off an offensive odor. “I don’t trust him. And I happen to know something that gives me a big reason not to trust him.”

  “Something concerning Duke?”

  “Oh, yes. Duke didn’t have any money to actually hire Brian to run the dinosaur park, so he added a—oh, what do you call it? A codicil, that’s it—he added a codicil to his will that if anything happened to him while Brian was still managing the dinosaur park that they could buy it from the estate at half whatever the county has the property appraised at. I’m pretty sure Brian suggested it. Duke’s nephews will then share whatever is in the estate.”

  “Brian can buy the entire property or just the dinosaur park?”

  “I don’t know. I never actually saw the codicil,” she admitted.

  “But you think this puts Duke in danger?”

  “Accidents happen.” She emphasized accidents with that little jiggle of fingers indicating quotation marks around the word. “Renée’s death certainly proves Brian is capable of murder.”

  “There is that old qualification, ‘Innocent until proven guilty,’” I pointed out.

  She dismissed that detail with a shrug. “What I can’t understand is why the sheriff’s off
ice hasn’t figured out yet that he is guilty. And I don’t think he’d hesitate to kill again if he thought he could gain something from it.”

  “It seems unlikely he’d let the park go so badly downhill if he really wanted to own it.”

  “Seems that way,” she agreed grudgingly. “But I still think he wants it.”

  “Why?”

  “I think he and Renée had some big scheme in mind. Maybe she pulled a fast one on him, something underhanded and sneaky, and got that option on buying Kate’s Kabins for herself. And it made him so mad he killed her.”

  “What about Kathy?”

  “Oh, I don’t think Kathy’s capable of murder. Although, if dear old Brian told her to put a little poison in Duke’s chocolate chip cookies, she’d probably reach for the carton of arsenic. Anything to keep Brian happy,” she added with a disdainful snort.

  “I meant, do you think Kathy is in danger from Brian?” Although Sheila’s snarky comments made me think that if Kathy was doing alphabetical in her kitchen reorganizing, maybe arsenic would be right up there in first place on the shelf.

  Sheila considered the possibility of danger to Kathy for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t think so, not now that Renée is dead.”

  “In other words, you think Kathy might earlier have been in danger because she stood in the way of Brian being with Renée, but now she’s safe.”

  “At least as safe as anyone can be, married to a shyster like Brian.”

  “What makes you think he’s a shyster?”

  “When they first came here, I think they were looking for a good place to hide out. I think he’d been involved in some business thing that went up in flames, and people who lost money were after him.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Just kind of reading between the lines on what Kathy has said. I have a good intuition about such things, and I am going to get Duke a better cell phone.”

  She was gone before I realized I hadn’t asked her about Renée’s ex-husband.

  ***

  Given the time difference between California and Missouri, we decided to wait until morning to try calling PI Megalthorpe again. We were curious about whether the deputy had brought Brian home, or if the interview had led to his actual arrest, but, short of peeking in windows or knocking on their door and inquiring, we didn’t know how to find out. Mac spent the evening working on the new article about the buried treasure. The photos I’d snapped of him in the hole turned out great, and Mac planned to use one of them for the magazine article. I used Sheila’s applesauce in my newfound recipe for applesauce cake.

  Mac isn’t tied to standard cereal or bacon and eggs for breakfast, so in the morning we had applesauce cake, dense and moist and delicious, and scrambled eggs for breakfast, then sat on the sofa together to call Roger Megalthorpe. This time, after going through a pleasant receptionist, he came on the phone with a brisk, “Megalthorpe.” He didn’t sound like a chubby man with a comb-over hairdo, and I remembered Franny had mentioned his “marvelous” voice. He sounded quite detective-ish, confident but on guard, a guy who might have a gun in a concealed holster under his jacket and maybe another strapped to his ankle.

  I gave my name, identified myself as a former resident of Madison Street, and put the phone on speakerphone so Mac could also hear. “I understand you’re trying to locate Genevieve Higman.”

  “Yes, I’ve made some inquiries about her. Thank you for calling, Mrs. MacPherson. You have information about Mrs. Higman’s current whereabouts?”

  “Possibly.”

  After a brief pause, perhaps waiting to see if I’d offer details, he added, “I’m authorized to offer remuneration for the information.”

  Mac and I looked at each other in surprise, and then Mac’s cell phone rang. He hesitated about answering, and I knew he was reluctant to leave this conversation, but after looking at the name of the caller he took the phone into the bedroom and slid the accordion door shut.

  I wasn’t interested in remuneration, but I was, as always, curious. “How much remuneration?”

  “That depends on the quality of the information,” Megalthorpe replied smoothly.

  “I understand this concerns an inheritance?”

  “Inheritance? No.” He sounded surprised. “What makes you think there’s an inheritance?”

  I didn’t explain about Franny Lisbon’s powers of observation, which may have been running on low voltage the day she talked to Megalthorpe. “Why are you looking for her, then, if it’s not an inheritance?”

  Another hesitation, as if he were calculating how much to tell me. “It’s a rather odd situation.”

  “I presume that’s why you’re investigating it.”

  “Yes. Well. My client is from out of state. He had an uncle he hadn’t seen or heard of for a number of years. His family has dwindled because of several recent deaths, and he decided to try to connect with this uncle. He traced the uncle as far as a care facility here in Missouri where he was basically bedridden with heart trouble and an increasing dementia along with a loss of memory. But a very nice old guy, the staff says. Not at all combative or unpleasant.”

  “And this involves Genevieve Higman how?”

  “The uncle has disappeared. He never had any visitors, the staff says, until a brother showed up and started visiting him regularly. Then the brother one day became quite agitated about what he considered ill treatment of his brother, raised a big fuss and threatened to sue, and finally said he was taking his brother home to care for him himself. He physically picked up the man and carried him out to his car and drove off. Didn’t bother with the man’s clothing or anything else.”

  “I can’t say I blame this man for taking his brother away, if the brother was being mistreated or neglected. In fact, his concern and quick action are rather admirable. But, again, how does this involve Genevieve Higman?”

  “I’m getting there. An aide there at the nursing home thought the brother’s actions were rather, well, exaggerated for a rather minor offense. They’d merely neglected to bring the man the glass of milk he asked for at lunch, which apparently made him quite agitated. Anyway, the aide jotted down the license plate number of the brother’s car. They had the man’s old file in their archives, and I traced the vehicle license number back through the Department of Motor Vehicle’s records. The car was registered to Genevieve Higman.”

  “How . . . odd.”

  “Yes.” He let me contemplate that for a moment, then added, “The care facility made a cursory investigation to find out where their patient had been taken but didn’t turn up anything and let it drop.”

  “That seems a bit careless. Maybe unethical. Or even criminal.”

  “I suspect it was a case of ‘let sleeping dogs lie.’ They didn’t want to chase the brother down just to find themselves tangled in a lawsuit about careless or incompetent care of a patient. I’ll have to say, this isn’t exactly a higher-class establishment. There’s a rating system for such institutions, and this one ranks near the bottom of the scale. They have various bad marks for lax patient care and financial irregularities on their record. So apparently they decided to just sweep this one under the rug.”

  “They didn’t know anything about the brother who made off with their patient, then?”

  “No. No one asked for identification when he was just visiting, of course, and the man’s file didn’t have any information about a brother. One older employee said the visitor was always very solicitous about his brother. Read to him and brought him socks and a bathrobe, sometimes cookies or other goodies. She wasn’t able to give a description other than fairly heavy and probably dark haired, but she thought his name may have been Art. But my client says his uncle didn’t have a brother named Art or Arthur or anything near that.”

  “And this man who disappeared from the nursing home, his name is—?”

  “John Anderson. A rather generic name, which has made it harder to find ou
t much about him. I need to talk to Genevieve Higman and find out why her car was used to remove Mr. Anderson from the nursing home, and who was using the car. And if she knows where Mr. Anderson was taken or is now.”

  John Anderson. An odd thought occurred to me. “Did John Anderson have a sister?”

  “No. There were a couple of brothers, but they died before he did.”

  “Was Mr. Anderson married?”

  “He was, but his wife was also dead before he entered the nursing home.”

  “Do you have her name?”

  “Let me see. It’s probably in here somewhere . . .”

  Silence then, except for Mr. Megalthorpe muttering and mumbling to himself, plus a noticeable burp. “Sorry. I’ve been having some stomach problems.” Another delay and then he said, “Yes, here it is. Evelyn was his wife’s name. After several falls while living alone he apparently realized he could no longer care for himself and arranged for his own admission into the care facility. By then he already had heart problems, but the loss of memory and drift into dementia came after he was in residence there.”

  Evelyn . . . Evie? Franny Lisbon had heard Genevieve Higman’s husband calling for “Evie.” And a vehicle registered to her had removed John Anderson from the nursing home.

  Which meant what?

  “By the way, you mentioned that Mrs. Higman had remarried—”

  “No,” I said sharply. Tricky, Mr. Chubby Detective. He’d tried to use a sly gimmick to mislead me into giving him information I hadn’t offered. “I don’t believe I mentioned anything about Mrs. Higman’s current marital status.”

  He asked the question bluntly, then. “Is she remarried?”

  I still wasn’t certain how much information I wanted to give him, and I used that handy-dandy line law officers often find useful when they don’t want to tell you something. “I’m not at liberty to discuss that at this time.”

  Big, non-detective-ish sounding sigh. “Very well, then. But if she is remarried, it might be interesting to check her new husband’s fingerprints.”