Tj Jensen Cozy Mystery Boxed Set 2: Books 6-10

by Kathi Daley

  “Okay, say that Harriet had some sort of proof that Edmonton had been murdered and was planning to expose this truth. Say the killer somehow discovered Harriet’s plan and decided to stop her. Why blow up an entire building?” Jenna asked. “The one question we keep coming back to is if Harriet was the intended victim, why not just shoot her or stab her or poison her?”

  That, I decided was a good question. An individual, any individual, as the intended victim didn’t really make sense when the fact was that an entire structure was demolished.

  Kyle’s phone buzzed. It was Roy, so he put the phone on speaker. “Jenna and Tj are here with me,” Kyle informed the deputy.

  “Good morning, everyone,” Roy responded.

  “Any news on either the missing persons report or the arrest record?” Kyle asked.

  Roy shared what he knew about the missing person, which basically mirrored what Jenna had just told us.

  “And the woman who was arrested?”

  “Her name is Julie Matheson. She was arrested just two weeks after Robert Edmonton turned up missing. It appears to me that her police record has been tampered with.”

  “Tampered with?” I asked.

  “Based on my knowledge of what should be included in an arrest report, there is information missing. Quite a bit of it actually. Based on what does appear in the report, it seems that Ms. Matheson was arrested for drug trafficking after a very large amount of cocaine was found in her apartment. I went back through the court transcripts and found multiple statements where Ms. Matheson claimed that the cocaine did not belong to her, and had been planted, as part of a setup. The DA wasn’t buying her story since she had several previous arrests for drug possession in smaller amounts. He argued for a maximum sentence, and she spent fifteen years in prison.”

  “Do you have a photo of the woman?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I’ll forward it to your phone.”

  I pulled up the photo. “Black hair, brown eyes, long thin scar over her right eye.” I looked at Kyle. “Does that ring a bell?”

  “The woman Harriet had lunch with on the day she died.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay, so Harriet had lunch with Julie Matheson on the day she and the entire town hall was blown to smithereens. Are we thinking this woman is the one who gave Harriet the bomb?” Jenna asked.

  “Actually,” I answered, “our current theory is that the bomb was not in Harriet’s purse as we first thought, but in the drawer where she kept her purse.”

  Jenna raised a brow. “So Harriet wasn’t the intended victim?”

  “We can’t know for certain at this point, but given the precision of the explosion, we are thinking the bomb must have been placed in a stationary location. Putting it in Harriet’s purse would be too random,” I informed her.

  “So the intended victim was the building. Why?” Jenna asked.

  “We don’t know yet,” I admitted.

  “The series of events really is confusing,” Roy agreed. “The precision with which the building was blown up really does point the theory that the intended victim was the building itself. And the fact that the explosion was so precise, also leads to the idea that the person who set the bomb was very skilled at what they did. I think we have to assume that the bomb was set at some point in time before the date of the explosion; otherwise, someone would have seen the bomber poking around in the building. If that were the case, the emergency meeting would not have been called when the bomb was planted, so I think we have to assume the bomber did not anticipate any human casualties.”

  “So why six p.m. on Halloween?” Jenna asked. “Why not midnight?”

  “I don’t know,” Roy answered. “At this point, there is a lot I don’t know.”

  “Like why Harriet had lunch with this ex-con, and if that lunch and the presence of Julie Matheson’s arrest record in Harriet’s file are in any way related to the explosion at the town hall,” I added.

  I sat back and tried to understand why Harriet would seek out Julie Matheson. I assumed she had been the one doing the seeking. Julie had been out of prison for close to three years, so it made no sense that she would come looking for Harriet at this point. I would suspect that Harriet planned to do a blog on Julie and her arrest, but as far as I knew, Harriet hadn’t spoken to any of her blog subjects ahead of time, so that theory really didn’t make sense. Perhaps Julie had information Harriet needed about someone she had planned to write about. It didn’t seem that a missing bank president and a convicted drug dealer would be linked, but both reports were found in the same file on Harriet’s computer, so in my mind, there had to be a connection.

  “Who filled out the missing persons report?” Kyle asked Roy.

  “Deputy DuPont.”

  “Why DuPont? I thought he worked out of the office in Indulgence.”

  “I’d have to check to know for certain, but he would have been relatively new to the force eighteen years ago, so he may have started in the Serenity office, or he may have just been in the North Shore office to fill in if someone was on vacation, or out on medical leave.”

  “And who was the person responsible for arresting Julie Matheson?” Kyle asked.

  “Deputy DuPont,” Roy answered.

  “His name does seem to keep coming up,” I said.

  “It does at that,” Roy agreed.

  “I think we need to talk to this woman,” Kyle said. “Do you have an address?”

  “I do. I’ll call her and see if she is willing to speak to us voluntarily. If not, I can go through legal channels. Once I get ahold of her, I’ll call you back.”

  After the Roy hung up, Jenna and I decided to go into town to order flowers for Thanksgiving, as well as linens that matched since we were going to need to utilize at least four large tables. We decided on tablecloths the color of dark sand and napkins in a chocolate brown. Rita had a good selection of flowers on order for holiday arrangements, so we ordered a fall bouquet for each table and arranged to pick them up on Wednesday. Once we had linens and flowers ordered, we headed to the holiday shop for other items to use as decorations for the house. Initially, I wasn’t going to fuss with all that, but Jenna’s enthusiasm was rubbing off on me. By the time we returned to Kyle’s from shopping, I was the most excited I’d been about hosting the holiday than I’d been so far.

  “Roy called shortly after you left,” Kyle said to Jenna and me after we walked in from the driveway.

  “Did he have news about Julie Matheson?” I asked.

  “Not about Julie Matheson, but I guess the crime scene guys were at the blast site this morning with high tech equipment they hoped would uncover clues they may have missed the first time around.”

  “And did they find something?”

  Kyle nodded. “A body.”

  I frowned. I glanced at Jenna. She was frowning as well. “A body?” I asked.

  “Buried in the concrete,” Kyle specified. “A tiny part of it was exposed by the blast, so they dug the rest of it up. It appears as if it has been there since the foundation was poured.”

  “You’re kidding?” I gasped.

  Kyle shook his head. “I’m afraid not. The skeleton is being processed, but quite coincidentally, they think it might be Robert Edmonton.”

  “We find a file relating to Edmonton’s disappearance eighteen years ago, and then a few hours later, his body is found? What are the odds?” Jenna asked.

  “Astronomically unlikely,” I answered. “Still, I suppose that finding Edmonton’s body fits with everything else we’ve uncovered.”

  “So Robert Edmonton did meet with foul play,” Jenna shook her head slightly as she set the bag she carried on the kitchen counter. “My dad never did believe that he stole money from his own bank and then took off after suffering some sort of midlife crisis.”

  “Were there any clues as to how Edmonto
n ended up in the concrete?” I asked.

  “The crime scene guys are still looking into things, but Roy did some checking, and the concrete that served as the foundation for the new town hall was poured two days after Edmonton was last seen.”

  “So someone knew the foundation was going to be poured and took advantage of it,” Jenna said.

  “We think there was more going on than that,” Kyle answered. “It turns out that the concrete for the town hall wasn’t due to be poured until the following week, but Mayor Wallaby arranged for the concrete to be poured early. The cost for this early pour was an additional twenty percent, which says to me that Wallaby was in on whatever occurred that led to the president of the local bank being killed and buried in the foundation of the town hall.”

  I am pretty sure my mouth was hanging open at this point, although I have no idea why I was so surprised. On more than one occasion, Wallaby had demonstrated that he was very willing to operate outside the confines of the law.

  “So Wallaby was in on the whole thing,” Jenna voiced the thought I’d been having.

  “It looks like Wallaby was involved in some manner,” Kyle confirmed. “As of the last time I spoke to Roy, he had not been able to get ahold of Julie Matheson, but he had been able to get ahold of her defense attorney. He told Roy that he had never believed Julie was guilty of the charges against her, and it was his conviction that she had been set up as she maintained all along. He told Roy that Julie had seen a man carrying what looked to be a dead body on the night Edmonton was last seen. It was dark, and she’d been unable to say with certainty who the man was, but she was fairly certain the man carrying the body was Deputy DuPont. She told Mayor Wallaby as much since she was afraid to go to anyone in law enforcement based on what she’d seen, and the next thing she knew, she was being arrested.”

  “Why would DuPont kill Edmonton?” Jenna asked.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But if DuPont did kill Edmonton, that would be huge news, even now, Harriet must have somehow found out what happened and planned to reveal the cover-up in her blog. She must have needed to confirm some details, so she asked Julie to lunch.” I paused to work through the logistics of the whole thing. “It really does make sense if you stop to think about it. If DuPont killed Edmonton for some reason and then enlisted Wallaby’s help in covering it up, Harriet might even have known the truth all this time. She was famous for listening in on Wallaby’s conversations, and even snooping through his files.”

  “If she knew all along, why wait so long to tell what she knew?” Kyle asked.

  “She just recently took on the role as gatekeeper for the truth,” Jenna pointed out. “Prior to Judge Harper dying and Harriet creating Sinful Secrets, she appeared to be the keeper of as many secrets as anyone, but she kept them to herself for the most part. Once she came to the conclusion that secrets were bad, she began to reveal confidences she had previously kept close to her chest.”

  “So how does Harriet deciding to rat out Deputy DuPont after all this time relate to the town hall being blown up?” I asked. “Are we thinking DuPont blew it up? Because that actually makes no sense. If he wanted Harriet dead, it seems that he would have killed her in a manner that wouldn’t have risked exposing the body he’d buried all those years ago.”

  No one spoke for a moment, and then Kyle jumped in. “Roy told me that Julie told her attorney that when she went to Wallaby with her assertion that there was a body buried in the foundation of the town hall, he pointed out that the only way to prove or disprove that assertion was to tear up the foundation, which he was unwilling to do. It makes sense that Julie might have blown up the building, or had the building blown up, in order to expose the body that she knew had been buried there eighteen years ago.”

  “Yeah,” I said, with doubt evident in my voice. “That could have been what happened, but I don’t think so. If Julie was going to blow up the building to prove that she had seen what she’d sworn she had, why wait so long? She has been out of prison for a while now.”

  “And if Julie was behind this whole thing, why trash Harriet’s home office?” Jenna added. “Harriet had lunch with Julie on the day of the explosion. If she had been planning to blow up the town hall, it seems as if Harriet had been willing to work with her.”

  “There is something that still isn’t fitting quite right,” Kyle admitted.

  “We don’t know exactly when Harriet’s home office was trashed,” I added. “It could have been a day or more after the explosion. Maybe after Harriet died, Julie went looking for the proof Harriet said she had, or maybe someone else, such as DuPont, wanted to suppress what Harriet knew.”

  “Hold on,” Jenna said. “Are we saying that either Julie or Harriet planted the bomb? Because that makes no sense. Not if they were working together in an effort to expose the fact that a body actually was buried in the foundation of the town hall, which I think is where this discussion is going. First of all, Harriet would never agree to blow up the town hall. It was like her second home. And even if Julie did convince her it was the only way, why would she agree to the emergency meeting? At the very least, you would think she would make up a reason for the meeting to be delayed until the following day. She could even have used the holiday as an excuse for the delay.”

  “Actually,” Kyle said, “if, as we suspect, the meeting was called by Lloyd to inform the group of the lawsuit from James Kingston, it seems like Harriet would have scheduled the meeting for the next day anyway. It wasn’t like the potential of a lawsuit was so important as to disturb everyone’s Halloween.”

  “Had Harriet ever called a same day meeting before?” I asked.

  “Once,” Kyle answered. “But she sent out emails in the morning about a meeting to be held that evening. The emails were worded to give the recipient the option of attending or not. The text on Halloween had more urgency to it, and a lawsuit that hadn’t yet been filed would not, in my mind, constitute the sort of urgency indicated by the text. When I first saw the letter from Kingston, I was sure that the lawsuit was the reason the meeting was called, but at this point, I’m less certain.”

  “So if not the lawsuit, what?” I asked.

  Kyle slowly shook his head. “I don’t know. No one alive seems to know. I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll ever know.”

  “So, what now?” I asked.

  “I know we can’t figure out how the body in the foundation is related to the town hall being blown up, but it seems it has to be linked in some way,” Jenna pointed out. “It would just be too bizarre if it wasn’t. I will agree that there doesn’t seem to be a logical sequence of events that explains everything, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one we just haven’t stumbled across yet.”

  “I do feel like there are still pieces of information that need to be discovered if we are ever going to stitch the entire picture together,” I agreed.

  “It would help if we could definitively determine if the emergency meeting was intended to get the town council there for the purpose of blowing up the council along with the town hall, or if the explosion and the meeting were oddly unrelated,” Kyle pointed out.

  Chapter 25

  Tuesday, November 21

  Jenna and I decided to do all our Thanksgiving shopping on Tuesday in order to beat the Wednesday crowd. Of course, the store seemed almost as crowded today as it had last time when we’d shopped on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but we vowed to keep our wits in spite of the chaos and power through until we’d picked up every single item on the list.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Jenna.

  “I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

  “You just look a little… I don’t know… something.”

  “I’m fine,” Jenna assured me. “I guess I didn’t sleep all that well, and I have a bit of a headache. I’m thinking I should up my pie count by a few,” Jenna said, heading toward the apples. “Several peopl
e have been added to the guest list since I did my original count.”

  “Do we have enough pumpkin?” I asked.

  Jenna nodded. “I think we are set for pumpkin. I remember someone liking cherry, so I might make one of those as well as an extra apple.”

  “Exactly how many pies are you making?”

  “A bunch,” Jenna answered. “With so many guests, I’m sure you’ll have a need for leftovers, and to be honest, now that I’ve sold the restaurant, I really miss cooking for a crowd.”

  Jenna paused when we reached the dairy aisle. She took her phone out of her pocket and looked at the display. “It’s Dennis. He is at the ice rink with Kari and Gracie. He wanted to let me know that Rosalie came by and picked up Ashley and Kristi. I guess she is taking them to Reno to get fabric for the jackets they are going to make this week.”

  “That’s nice of her. Ashley is really excited about the jacket she has planned to match the purse Rosalie helped the girls to make a couple weekends ago.”

  Jenna began loading whipping cream in the cart. “I’m impressed. You actually managed to say that without sounding annoyed or jealous.”

  I shrugged. “I think I’m over the queen bee thing we talked about. When I told Rosalie that Kyle and I were engaged, she was happy for me, but I could see that she was upset that the girls and I would be moving out. I guess in the back of my mind, I’d always assumed that she wouldn’t want us living at the resort once she moved in, which made me feel pushed out, but I can see that I was wrong. She has worked hard to make it work for all of us, and I am determined to do so as well.”

  “Good for you. Should we get ice cream for the fruit pies?”

  I picked up a dozen eggs. “Sure. I guess so. We’ll grab that last so that it doesn’t melt.” I looked toward the bakery aisle. “I was going to pick up some extra rolls for sandwiches and leftovers, but it looks like Armageddon over there.”

  “Rosalie is baking rolls. I suppose you can just ask her to make extra,” Jenna suggested.