Murder, Mayhem and Bliss (Myrtle Grove Garden Club Mystery Book 1)

by Loulou Harrington

  Well, so much for Jesse’s Trojan horse theory. And her guilt. And any need for subtlety, which was always a plus in her case.

  “She did,” Jesse confirmed. “Although my mother would have brought that recipe to you, anyway.”

  Adele cast a sly grin in their direction. “Bet I wouldn’t have been getting that bread, though.”

  Jesse returned the smile. “Probably not. But I’m hoping we’ll find out something from you that will help us get to the bottom of not just Harry Kerr’s death, but Ginny’s, as well. The bread’s just a little thank you in advance.”

  “No need to beat around the bush, then.” Adele patted the afghan into place around her lap and snuggled deeper into the pillows at her back. A comfortably plump woman, grayed and lined by age, she seemed eager to talk. “I got lots to tell you.”

  “Why don’t we start with Ginny?” Jesse rested both elbows on the arms of her chair and leaned forward just enough to focus all of her attention on the woman across from her. “Do you think she killed herself, Adele?”

  For the first time since they had entered her apartment, the older woman seemed hesitant. “Well, I did at first. It didn’t seem right, but I accepted it.”

  She shifted her weight uncomfortably. “But the longer I thought about it, the more I thought…” She paused and shook her head in a slow-motion version of a dog shaking off water. Then she lifted her gaze, pain obvious in her eyes. “No. Hell, no, that girl didn’t kill herself. Somebody did that to her. And they got away with it. And the more I think about that, it just makes me sick.”

  Jesse could feel when anger replaced pain as Adele Culpepper’s primary emotion. That was when she realized that for Adele, the girl had been more than a neighbor. She had been a friend, a dear friend.

  “You were very fond of Ginny, weren’t you?” she asked quietly. “Is it true that you hadn’t seen her for several days just before she died? I think you had said that you didn’t see anybody visiting her. Could somebody have gone in there without your knowing?”

  “Well, I wasn’t exactly honest with the police.” Adele’s head ducked as her fingers plucked at the stitching on her lap robe. “Or that other lady who came around asking questions.”

  “Is that the lady who said she worked with Harry Kerr? Was she young? Hispanic, maybe?”

  “Yeah, that one.” She nodded and lifted her eyes to meet Jesse’s.

  “When did she talk to you?” Jesse remembered Maria saying she had attended Ginny’s funeral but didn’t remember her mentioning a visit to Ginny’s apartment building.

  “The day of the memorial service. She came by to make sure I had a ride, and to see if there was anything she could do to help. But I didn’t feel like I could be honest with anybody right then.”

  “Did she tell you her name? Was it Maria?”

  Adele shook her head. “I don’t know. She may have said, but I wasn’t paying much attention. I had too much else weighing on my mind. She was a pretty girl, though, and real sweet.”

  “Did anybody else come around to see Ginny, either before she died, or after? Besides Harry?”

  “Her old boyfriend. Bobby, I think his name was. He was coming around again a lot just before she died. And there were some people who came with Harry sometimes.”

  Jesse felt a jolt of surprise. Maybe Harry hadn’t worried about secrecy as much as she had thought he did. “What did they look like?”

  Adele shrugged. “Just people. Older than her, like Harry was. A man, and sometimes a woman. Nothing special about ‘em. The woman came around a couple of times by herself, but I never got a really good look at either of them.”

  Excitement set Jesse’s heart to racing and she cautioned herself to stay calm. “If I can get pictures of some people, would you look at them for me? Just to see if anyone looks familiar?” Her mind tumbled over ideas, like Bobby’s comment about the woman who had befriended Ginny shortly before her death, and the pictures Connie had from Bill and Cindilee’s wedding.

  “Sure. The police already showed me some this weekend,” Adele said, “but I didn’t recognize any of them, other than Harry. The pretty blond lady I think is his wife, but I never saw her around here.”

  “Well, it’s worth a shot, just in case.” Jesse took a deep breath and forced herself to focus on the moment. This woman was the only person who knew what had happened in the days just before, and just after, Ginny Spurber died. “So, Adele, I guess that means there were people who visited Ginny that you never told the police about. Did you also see Ginny just before she died?”

  Adele shifted uncomfortably again, a sign Jesse was starting to recognize as a signal there was a confession coming.

  “She knocked on my door that night. She seemed upset. But more like she was worried, not like she was going to kill herself. She had an envelope she asked me to hold for her. She said don’t tell anybody about it. Don’t give it to anybody. Just her. She said if anything happened to her, for me to burn it.”

  “Were those her exact words, ‘if anything happened to her’?” Again, excitement beat like a drum inside Jesse’s head and down into her chest.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did it seem like she was afraid of somebody? Had someone threatened her?” Her thoughts threatened to unravel like a tennis ball and she had to remind herself to breathe.

  “No. She was always kind of dramatic. She didn’t seem to be scared. It was more like she was maybe having a fight with somebody. She had little secrets she liked to keep, and she’d given me other things to hold for her from time to time.”

  “So, did you look in the envelope?”

  “Later, but not then. I hid it, like she asked. The next morning I knocked on her door to see if she wanted to have breakfast with me. We did that sometimes, but she didn’t answer the door.”

  “What day of the week was that?” Sophia asked, startling Jesse with a question she hadn’t thought of herself.

  “Thursday morning.”

  Jesse waited a beat to see if her mother had another question, then asked, “Do you know if Ginny went back to her apartment after she left you on Wednesday night?”

  Adele frowned, looking from Jesse to Sophia and back. “Gosh, I don’t know. I just figured she had.”

  “How long before you looked in the envelope?” Jesse continued.

  “It took a while. I was so stunned at first, I forgot all about it until after I was done talking to the police. Maybe a week? Maybe not quite that long.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “You better believe it, and I’m getting kind of tired of hanging onto it.” Adele reached down and opened a shallow drawer in the apron of the coffee table. “Like I said, I was hoping you’d come by.” She pulled out a letter-sized brown envelope and handed it across the table to Jesse. “Some of that stuff’s kind of X rated. Some of it, I couldn’t even tell what it was. Just looked like scribbles.”

  Her interest piqued by that last remark, Jesse reached into the envelope and pulled out everything she could find. Then she checked inside to make sure nothing small had been overlooked. The interior was empty, and in her lap was a smaller collection than she had expected. One or two 8 x 10 photos were head shots of Harry Kerr inside a room similar to Adele’s living room but with different furniture.

  Jesse looked up. “Did you look at these? Were they taken in Ginny’s apartment?”

  “Yes. That’s her apartment. I was in there lots of times,” Adele answered. She pulled her legs up under her and tucked the throw in around her.

  Sophia scooted her chair closer and peered over her daughter’s shoulder, seemingly content to keep some distance from what she was looking at. Jesse shuffled through the pictures. The first ones were taken in the living room, showing a girl who must be Ginny and a man who was definitely Harry, both fully clothed. In one they were kissing. In one, she was pulling his tie from under his collar.

  When the pictures moved to the bedroom, the focus was not as clear, except for one where
a shirtless Harry was standing closer to a second hidden camera, his features undeniable. In the background a girl, now nude, knelt on the bed, her arms reaching out.

  In the next shot, they were together, both nude, kissing. The man stood at the side of the bed. The girl still knelt. The man had a tattoo on his left arm, just below the shoulder. Then there was a close up of the tattoo, followed by a clear profile of Harry with the tattoo visible in the bottom corner of the shot.

  The next was a slightly wider angle. The girl’s face was turned toward the camera and clear enough to identify as Ginny Spurber. The man’s arms were around her, his face buried in her hair, his tattoo visible just beneath her chin.

  They were a clever and concise collection of photos. Jesse hadn’t known he had a tattoo, but his wife would. There was no denying who he was and what he was doing. There was no denying who he was doing it with.

  Jesse shuffled through the remainder of the pictures, blurred rejects from both the living room and the bedroom cameras. In most, the figures were nude, on the bed, in what would have been uncomfortably graphic poses had they been in focus.

  Almost at the bottom of the stack, she encountered a surprise—a small sheet of paper with what looked like notes on it. Jesse sorted through everything again, making sure she hadn’t overlooked any other stray pieces of paper.

  “That’s the only one there was,” Adele said, obviously watching everything Jesse was doing. “It’s the one I couldn’t figure out what it was. But I made sure it didn’t get lost, even if she’d put it in there by mistake.”

  Jesse slipped the pictures back into the envelope and held the notepad-sized piece of paper in both hands. On it was what appeared to be the word ‘bank.’ Underneath that were the words ‘Grand Cayman,’ and beneath that was a series of numbers and what seemed to be a date, with the year written first, in the European fashion.

  Her heart pounding, she held up the note. “Would you mind if I kept this?” Jesse asked.

  “Keep the whole thing. I’ve done what I had to do. Once I realized she didn’t kill herself, I knew I couldn’t burn it like she asked me to. I held onto it until he was dead, ‘cause I thought that’s what she would want. Now I trust you to do what’s right.”

  “Why did you decide she didn’t kill herself?” Maybe it wasn’t relevant, maybe it was, but Jesse needed to know for herself and for the selfish, self-centered little college girl who had died too soon.

  Adele leaned forward again, and her voice dropped to just above a whisper. “I had a key. When she didn’t answer the door again that afternoon, I let myself in. I didn’t touch anything, but I found her there. She was on the floor. Not on her bed, not on her couch. On the floor. Who kills themselves like that? And it looked like somebody had gone through her stuff. I don’t think the police could have told the difference, but she was a real neat girl. I never saw papers laying around all over the place like they were then. So I went to where she kept her key to my apartment, and I took it back. Then I left and I locked her door with the same key I used to let myself in.”

  “Do you think whoever searched her apartment found what they were looking for?”

  “I think you’ve got what they were looking for.” She tipped her head toward the envelope in Jesse’s lap. “And if I were you, I’d be real careful who I let know about that. I’m damned glad to be getting rid of it myself.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Back in the car Sophia started the engine. “We need to eat.”

  “Yep.” Jesse leaned over and slid the envelope of pictures under her seat. The slip of paper that might contain the number of Harry’s offshore account was tucked into a zippered pocket inside her purse.

  “We own a restaurant for goodness sakes,” Sophia said as she swung out of the parking spot next to the curb. “How did we leave without even having a piece of toast?”

  “Possibly because it’s a tea room and coffee bar, and we never bother with anything so mundane as toast.” Jesse pulled her phone from its handy front purse pocket. “We do French toast, scones, omelets, breakfast sandwiches, orange rolls…”

  Her voice trailed away as she looked at the black face of her unresponsive cell phone and remembered that she had turned it off to avoid being tracked down by a vengeful sheriff. She really had seen too many spy movies.

  “I do toast,” Sophia protested. “I love dry toast and poached eggs. And toast and jam. We have wonderful jams.”

  Jesse couldn’t help smiling at the enthusiasm in her mother’s voice. Probably the main reason they owned the Gilded Lily was to share their love of food with others, and to put Jesse’s vast collection of vintage china to good use.

  The tea room was more than a business to them. It was a passion—a passion they opened to the public from 6:30 in the morning to 2 o’clock in the afternoon, Tuesday through Sunday, fifty weeks out of the year. And they did have wonderful jams. They served honey from a neighborhood beekeeper, and their preserves were all locally sourced and homemade.

  “Are you going to use that thing or just stare it?” Sophia inquired. Without being asked, she had circled around behind the apartment building and pulled into the small parking lot.

  A single row of diagonal spaces were nosed-in to the back wall of the red brick apartment building. There was one way in and one way out, with barely enough room at the end to turn around. Luckily, it was Monday morning and some of the parking spots were empty.

  “I need to call Connie.” Jesse leaned toward the windshield and peered up as her mother pulled into an empty space facing the back entrance of the building. Counting down the windows, Jesse estimated that the double window in Adele’s living room was about half a room over from the back entry, which would give her a pretty good view of anyone coming and going from the building.

  “Has Connie got the pictures you want Adele to look at?” Sophia asked as she backed out of the space going the right direction to get out of the parking lot.

  Jesse turned on her phone and waited for it to find itself and reestablish all of its bells and whistles, most of which she didn’t use or even understand. “She was at Bill and Cindilee’s wedding. She has pictures that include Harry and Bliss and probably a lot of other friends and acquaintances of both couples. It’s a long shot, but there could be somebody in there that Adele recognizes from last spring.”

  “Okay with you if we hit a drive-thru on our way to Bea’s house?” Sophia asked. “I’m probably not in any danger of starving, but I figure, why risk it?”

  “My stomach’s threatening to drown out my brain,” Jesse said. “I vote for food.” She retrieved the notepaper with Adele’s address and texted the information to Connie. “How far is it to Bea’s?”

  “Maybe halfway back to Myrtle Grove. But I think Marjorie Dawson lives closer to Culverton. We’ll need to get her address from Bea.”

  “I think I may let you talk to your friend Bea alone. We just need to know anything specific that Marjorie said to her. The rest of it we’re going to have to pry out of Marjorie herself. I just have this feeling…” Her voice trailed off and she stared into the distance, lost in thought.

  “There are buildings approaching,” Sophia warned. “Possibly a town big enough to have fast food. Do you have a preference?”

  Jesse pulled a twenty out of her jacket pocket and handed it to her mother. “Just get me one of whatever you get, and some orange juice if they’ve got it. Connie should call me back when she gets that text, and I still need to talk to Vivian.”

  “So, what’s this feeling you have?” Sophia slowed the car as they entered the city limits of a town large enough to have a speed limit. “And what was that stuff about Maria? Oh, and was the information on that scrap of paper connected to Harry’s embezzling?”

  “From what Bobby said, Harry was siphoning money from the business and stashing it in an account in the Caymans, which, from what I understand, is a smaller, more conveniently located version of Switzerland. The thing is, Harry was no accountant.
That’s why he needed Bill in their original partnership. Harry was a talker, not a thinker. He would have needed help from someone else, who would have been juggling the books for him.”

  “What does that have to do with Maria?” Sophia’s attention suddenly veered. “Ah! Food!” Jesse’s phone rang as Sophia whipped into the drive-thru of a taco place. “Breakfast burritos for everyone,” her mother called.

  Seeing Connie’s face appear on her phone display, Jesse said, “Fine with me,” and hit the receive button.

  “So what does that text mean?” Connie asked in one ear while the garbled voice of the order taker went in the other, followed by the beginning of Sophia’s breakfast order.

  Jesse held the phone tighter to her head and stuck a finger in her other ear. “It’s the address of the woman who lived across the hall from Ginny Spurber. If you can’t remember what you heard in your sleep, ask Matt. What I need you to do… Wait, are you free? Can you run an errand for me?”

  “Yes, and yes. What do you need me to do?” Connie’s voice sounded excited.

  “Those pictures from Bill and Cindilee’s wedding, and any others you have of anyone who was remotely associated with Harry or Bill—I want you to show them to Adele Culpepper to see if she recognizes anyone.”

  “When?”

  Jesse heard Matt in the background. He didn’t sound thrilled, and she wished he had been out working or something. She was pretty sure he was in the middle of a construction project. Why was he even home?

  “Today,” Jesse said. “Adele is an older lady, very nice. I think she’s probably lonely and will enjoy the company. Anyway, she saw some people visiting Ginny in Harry’s company. She said they were about his age. So, I thought if you could run over there right now while it’s fresh in her mind, maybe it will jog something. It can’t hurt, and it’s a nice day for a drive.”

  “I thought you were going to leave us out of this today?” Matt demanded.

  “Ignore him,” Connie said. Both of their voices echoed just enough to indicate her phone was on the speaker setting.