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

by Loulou Harrington

  “That’s all?” Jesse couldn’t help worrying. Something didn’t seem right. She had moved back home to spend time with her grandfather in his last years, and she knew sick when she saw it. “Because you really don’t seem to feel well today.”

  Cindilee shrugged again, just one shoulder, and it seemed to barely move. “This is my life. I have good days and bad days. More bad than good lately.”

  “So, if I can’t take you to the doctor, is there anything I can do?” Jesse asked, realizing this had nothing to do with why she had come, but nothing she was seeing made any sense. She needed to know how this woman could have been walking up and down stairs just a few months ago, and be so helpless now?

  “Actually, yes.” A smile lit the drawn and pale face of the other woman. “If you could bring me a glass of water from that pitcher there.” She pointed to a tray in the middle of the coffee table where a water pitcher, a glass, and a small bottle of pills sat side by side. “And that bottle of pills, if you would.”

  Jesse quickly handed her the pills, then poured a glass of water and gave it to her. Meanwhile, Cindilee dumped a generous portion of the pills into her palm, which she then emptied into her mouth and followed them with a long drink of water before handing the half-empty glass back to Jesse. The pill bottle was then added to others on a table behind Cindilee’s shoulder.

  “Thank you,” she breathed the words out with a sigh.

  Teetering between sympathy and confusion, Jesse decided this was no time for politeness. She came here to get answers, and that wasn’t going to happen without questions.

  “If I’m trampling on a sensitive subject,” she began as gently as possible, “please just say so. But, your difficulty walking…is that from an injury?”

  “Oh my, you do believe in getting to the heart of a matter, don’t you?” Cindilee’s smile was crooked this time, and definitely sad. “I don’t normally talk about this, but I fell during my second pregnancy. Lost the baby. Injured my hip. Never got pregnant again, and my hip’s never really healed. Poor Bill blamed himself.”

  Jesse’s mind reeled, pulling her heart along with it. “Oh, how awful!” A large part of her wanted to turn and tiptoe quietly away, leaving this poor woman to the wrenching tragedy of her life. A much smaller, more cynical part whispered that this could all be a lie designed to elicit the crushing sympathy that it had. Confused and torn, Jesse didn’t know which part of herself to listen to, and it only reinforced the knowledge that she really did suck at being a detective. One sob story and she was ready to toss in the towel and go home, except…why would Bill Marshall blame himself?

  “Why did Bill blame himself?” Jesse asked as soon as the question formed in her mind.

  Could it an accident for which he was responsible? Or was he just feeling the blame that Cindilee projected on him, much like the guilt Jesse’s own suspicions were arousing.

  “We were hiking in New Mexico,” Cindilee began again, a dreamy singsong quality making her sound disconnected from the memory. “The terrain was too rough, but Bill’s such an outdoorsman, and I thought I should go with him. It was a silly, romantic notion, but I was young and in love.” She sighed, too small a sigh to be overly dramatic and just enough to sound sincere. “More than silly as it turned out. We’ve both paid the price ever since.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Jesse’s response was genuine even as her mind wildly calculated the possibilities. Even if the story wasn’t true, it could still be a lie Cindilee Marshall had been living for years. And if it wasn’t a lie, if this woman turned out to be innocent of all wrongdoing, Jesse was going to have a lot of moral reevaluation to do. Deciding to ignore her cold-hearted skepticism for another few minutes, she asked, “There’s nothing you can do about it? Surgery won’t help?”

  Cindilee shook her head. Her slight smile was the perfect balance of resignation and melancholy. “Unfortunately, my problem at the moment is a little more serious than my hip. Last summer I was diagnosed with stage-four ovarian cancer. They removed what they could, but by the time I was recovered enough to begin treatment, it was spreading again.”

  Jesse was stunned into silence, wondering what to do next. Should she, for the moment, simply believe what she was hearing, even if such a tale of woe seemed a little too convenient? Erring on the side of sincerity, she went with her heart. “Good heavens, is there anything they can do?”

  “I seem to fall into the ‘nonresponsive’ category on the treatments, and it’s progressed to where it’s inoperable. So…” Cindilee spread her hands in a helpless gesture. “I’ve been quietly putting my house in order and preparing to die.”

  The words, the tone, the mannerisms, everything rang true, and Jesse felt a weight settle over her heart. This, of everything, she believed. And this answered the question of how the invalid before her had been seen upright and walking into the second-floor apartment of Ginny Spurber on more than one occasion just last spring. Cindilee had been diagnosed and begun treatment during the summer. She had given up hope only recently.

  And that, combined with the words “putting my house in order,” set off alarm bells in Jesse’s head. “I don’t suppose,” she asked quietly, throwing hesitation to the wind, “that a part of putting your house in order might possibly include killing Harry Kerr, could it?”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Cindilee laughed, a genuine, deep-throated laugh that sounded hearty while it lasted. “Do you honestly think I could do that?” she asked when the laughter faded. She waved her hands over herself stretched out on the chaise, looking weak enough to faint if she stood up.

  “Well, no, not really, but I had to ask,” Jesse conceded. “You did seem a lot stronger when I saw you on Saturday. And I’m betting you have some pretty serious drugs at your disposal. In which case you could have drugged Harry first, then shoved him into the pool and let him drown.”

  “Well, I admire your imagination.” A sleepy-eyed smile stole over Cindilee’s face, making it look as if the laughter had worn her out. “But why in the world would I have wanted to do that, even if I could have? It’s true I wasn’t terribly fond of him, but I just didn’t care enough one way or the other to kill him.”

  Jesse pondered briefly, very briefly, whether she should mention the embezzlement yet. She decided not to, then opened her mouth and out it came. “Except for all that money the three of you were hiding between you.”

  “My goodness, you have been a busy girl. But that was between Bill and Harry. I had nothing to do with that.” She shrugged dismissively even as she looked Jesse dead in the eye.

  “Then why were you visiting Ginny with the two of them?” Jesse asked. The conversation was beginning to feel a little like a poker game complete with bluffs, counterbluffs, and ‘I’ll see your bet and raise you.’

  “Damage control.” Two bright red spots appeared on Cindilee’s otherwise white cheeks. “It was bad enough for Harry to have taken her to the Caymans with him, but to take her into the bank was idiocy. I was along to help figure out if she understood what she had seen.”

  Judging from the scrap of paper with the account information on it, Jesse was fairly certain Ginny understood exactly what she had seen, but she might have been clever enough to hide it. “And had she?”

  “They didn’t think she had, but I looked into her eyes, and she was a lot smarter than Harry wanted to believe. She was trouble.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Nothing.” The softness was gone from Cindilee’s voice. “Harry broke up with her and seemed to think that was going to take care of everything. And Bill went back to living in his own private fairytale. The one where Harry takes the money and runs, leaving Bliss free for Bill to swoop in and marry.”

  “Excuse me?” Even Jesse felt offended for Cindilee, and for Bliss, as far as that was concerned. “And what’s supposed to happen to you?”

  “Me?” Cindilee plucked at the quilt, looking genuinely uncomfortable for the first time. “I was supposed to take
Bill’s part of the money, divorce him and leave town. But I had no intention of doing that. There’s no way Bill could divorce me without looking like a complete heel, and Bliss would never marry him if he divorced a poor, helpless thing like me. And if he tried to force me, I could expose him as an embezzler and destroy what was left of his life.” She tossed her head, her gaze defiant. “Either way, he was still married to me, and Bliss was free to start her life over again while he stood by helplessly watching, gutless bastard that he is.”

  “You’ve got a lot of pent-up anger there, lady,” Jesse said, not at all sure that she didn’t like and possibly admire Cindilee on some level in spite of everything. The woman had a fire in her belly if nothing else.

  Cindilee met her gaze. “What can I say? Life has not been easy. Bill seemed like such a nice guy when I met him. Then he turned out to be someone who didn’t have the balls to fight for what he wanted and ended up blaming me because he wasn’t happy with what his life had become.”

  “So, how unhappy was he? Could he have finally worked up the courage to go after Harry himself? You got any theories on exactly how Ginny and Harry ended up dead?”

  “Why would you be asking me that?”

  The red dots on Cindilee’s cheeks had subsided, and a small smile danced at the corners of her mouth. Even when the conversation was not particularly flattering, she seemed almost to be enjoying herself.

  “Because I’ve been noticing that while Bill seems to be the one with the head for business, you would appear to be the real alpha dog. I can’t see Bill doing much that you’re not at least aware of.”

  Cindilee tilted her head, her eyes crossing ever so slightly as she studied Jesse. “So, does that mean you think Bill killed Harry? And Ginny? Or you really don’t know, and you’re just fishing.”

  “Well, as long as we’re playing couch detectives,” Jesse said, “he could have done both of them. Ginny had become a threat to everything Bill had spent years working toward, and by the time Harry died, Bill would have been aware of how sick you are. Maybe he needed more money than Harry was willing to share.”

  “That’s not a bad theory, but there are a few flaws. I don’t think Bill ever took Ginny very seriously, and as for my illness, he’s still under the impression that my surgery last summer was successful.”

  “You have got to be kidding.” The words were out before Jesse could stop them. “I mean, I just met you,” she added, hoping to soften her bluntness, “and I can tell you’re not well. How could someone who lives with you be so blind?”

  “He’s a man,” Cindilee said as if that explained it all. “He sees what he wants to see. Like you said, he’s good with math and computers, but not so much with people.”

  He sounded more like someone who just didn’t care, but that was an opinion Jesse was keeping to herself. Instead, she said, “Well, still playing at detective, I think nearly a million dollars is a lot of money, and a lot of motive.”

  “But Bill didn’t care about the money,” the other woman said again, then lifted a divided plastic pill container from the table behind the chaise. “Excuse me a minute. Time for more medicine. Could you hand me that water again?”

  Flipping open a section, she emptied the pills into her cupped palm, tipped back her head and downed the handful followed by a long drink of the water Jesse handed her. Then Cindilee replaced the nearly empty glass on the table along with the medicine container.

  Jesse had no idea what kind of pills were just taken, but it was enough to make her apprehensive, considering the other handful that had been swallowed earlier. “That was a lot of pills.”

  Cindilee laughed. “Silly as it seems, I’m still taking all of my vitamins, too. There’s one more round in a little while, then I’m done for a few hours. So, like I was saying, money is not a big motivator for Bill.”

  “All right, I’ll concede that. Maybe he just got impatient and wanted Harry out of the way now.”

  “Or maybe somebody else entirely is the culprit,” Cindilee countered.

  With a shrug, Jesse confessed, “I’m running out of people with motives.”

  “Well, there’s always the chance that Bliss actually did it.”

  “Bliss didn’t even know most of what Harry was doing,” Jesse said with a slow shake of her head. “Which gives us a lot of people with more motive than she has. And you, by the way, are one of them.”

  “So, maybe I did it.”

  “Are you confessing?” Jesse’s breath caught in her throat, and she willed herself to stay calm, even as her cynical voice now argued that such a thing would be all but impossible for the woman in front of her.

  “Would you believe me?” Cindilee’s smile was coy, with a touch of simper.

  “In a heartbeat, if I could figure out how you could have done it.”

  “Oh, that part wasn’t hard. With Ginny, she was self-medicating and drinking too much. Stupid kid with everything to live for, and she didn’t have enough sense to appreciate it. There’s some cognac in that cabinet behind you,” Cindilee said with a tip of her chin. “Think you could pour me a drop?”

  Her head spinning from the lightning turn of the conversation, but not wanting to break the flow, Jesse went to the small cabinet without argument and hurriedly poured a couple of fingers into a snifter. She noticed her hands were shaking and took several deep breaths to steady herself before she carried the drink to the chaise.

  “Ah, thank you.” Cindilee cradled the cognac in her palm and tossed half of it back in one long gulp. “I’m not supposed to be mixing this with my medication, but what’s it gonna do? Kill me?” With a wobbly smile, she drained the rest of it and leaned forward to set the snifter on the corner of the coffee table.

  “Now, where was I? Oh, yes, Ginny. I’d gone back a couple of times to check on her. She was such a sad mess without Harry. I felt sorry for her, but it was easy to see that she was unraveling. That night, she told me all about her scheme to get him back. She even showed me the folder of blackmail pictures, complete with the thumb drive they were stored on.”

  Cindilee paused again and pointed to the snifter, then looked pleadingly to Jesse. “Do you think you could pour me one more small drink? I promise not to get sloppy drunk. Maybe just a little tipsy.”

  Jesse’s instinct was to refuse, but really, when a dying woman appeared to be confessing to murder, what was the harm? And who cared anyway? Certainly not the strange, dangerous woman sitting a few yards from her.

  Again, Cindilee downed the drink like someone trekking across a desert. Her satisfied smile slipped off to one side of her face. “So, anyway,” she began again, “it was all Harry’s fault. What did he think was going to happen after he let her in on everything that was going on? She was in love with him, and love makes you do crazy things. I couldn’t let her ruin everything. She was already mixing pills with Tequila Sunrises, so I just added more pills and mixed her another drink. She started having trouble breathing almost as soon as she passed out. It wasn’t much longer before she was gone.”

  “Did you take the pictures?” Jesse asked. She didn’t see any reason to act shocked or horrified or any of the other emotions she was really feeling. Coldblooded murder was an ugly thing, but this is what she had come here looking for. If only it didn’t feel quite so much like having a dead rat dropped in her lap.

  “Of course.” Cindilee’s frown seemed almost offended. “And the thumb drive. I looked around for anything else incriminating, but that seemed to be all there was.”

  “So what about Harry? Was that Bill, or you, or someone else?”

  “You still don’t think that was me, do you?” Looking pleased with herself, Cindilee relaxed against the pillows tucked around her and finished the cognac in a series of sips interspersed with sighs. When she was done, she dangled the empty glass in front of her and gifted Jesse with a sloppy, flirtatious smile over the top of it. “Bill’s too spineless to make a move on a woman he’s been in love with since high school. He might h
ave wished Harry was dead, but that was all he had the guts to do.”

  “So, I guess now he’s got an open field with Bliss. Or soon will.”

  The other woman’s laugh was loud and harsh. “Not hardly. What he’s got now is Harry’s money moved over into his own account, and a plane ticket to a country with no extradition treaty.”

  Jesse tried to say something simple like “what,” but the air wheezed out of her chest as if she were an accordion. She had been trying to get a rise out of the younger woman, but the response she got was way more than she had been expecting.

  Again, Cindilee laughed. “That one caught you by surprise, didn’t it? Yeah, as soon as Bill heard about Harry’s death, he came rushing to Bliss’s side. But that was the second thing he did. The first thing Bill did was to transfer all the money that was in Harry’s Cayman account into his own.”

  “He’s gone?” Jesse asked. Her voice still didn’t sound too strong, but at least she could form words again. “Where? When?”

  “As soon as he found out about that auditor Vivian was bringing in, he bought a ticket out of the country. Argentina? Morocco? I don’t know where. Maybe it’s wherever Harry was planning to go. I just know that the plane should be long gone by now.”

  “And you made sure he got away. You planned to confess all along, but not until you knew he was safe.” It sounded like the worst kind of “B” movie plot, but somehow Jesse knew it was true.

  Cindilee was almost limp against her pillows. Her shrug was nothing more than a jerk of her shoulders and her smile was a sad twist of her lips. “What can I say? I guess there’s a little bit of Ginny in all of us. You do crazy things for love.”

  “How can I believe anything you tell me about Harry? You would confess to anything to keep Bill safe.”

  “Bill’s gone. I don’t know where he is, and if the police find him, they won’t be able to bring him back. But I do know that he sent a letter to Bliss. She should be getting it tomorrow or the next day. He told her about the money. And he told her that I killed Harry. And he told her to give the note to the sheriff.” Cindilee’s eyelids were at half-mast, and her words were beginning to slur. “He’s gone, but he moved half the money back into the dealership’s corporate account, and he made sure Bliss was cleared of Harry’s murder. How’s that for love?”