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

by Loulou Harrington

  “It’s pretty disgusting, if you want to know the truth. But to hell with Bill. If you killed Harry, tell me how, because I’m still having trouble believing it.”

  “God, I never knew it would be so hard to confess to murder,” Cindilee complained, so limp now that she was talking to the ceiling.

  “Well, pardon me, but you can’t even sit up, much less stand, and I’m just not quite able to picture it.”

  “So, you won’t have any trouble believing that Harry didn’t see me as any kind of a threat,” Cindilee said, struggling to lift her head.

  “I can believe that.”

  “Which means he didn’t worry about sitting down with his back to me at a table poolside. And he was more surprised than scared when I injected a syringe full of morphine into the side of his neck. And by the time he started getting pissed about that, I tossed one of Ginny’s blackmail pictures at him.” She snorted in what sounded like it might be a laugh. “That kept him distracted for a few more minutes. And he was already starting to get groggy by the time I pulled my little pistol out of my pocket and told him to jump in the pool and swim to the middle. He refused, but by then he was wobbly enough I could shove him in with one hand. It wasn’t long before he passed out face down, and after that, it was all over.”

  “That sounds very convincing.” In spite of her misgivings, Jesse was impressed. It seemed efficient, well thought out, and possibly even doable.

  “Well, I brought the gun as a backup, just in case,” Cindilee conceded. “But it went a lot smoother than I had expected. Harry could be such an ass, and he and I never did get along well. I figured he’d put up more of a fight.”

  “In your own way, Cindilee Marshall, you are an amazing woman.” A little amazing and a lot creepy, but Jesse needed to keep the confession flowing. This was going to be hard for anyone to believe. As the reality sank in, a ripple of cold chills chased down Jesse’s back.

  “I won’t say ‘thank you’ because I realize that’s probably not a compliment. I am rather sorry that you and I didn’t meet in another lifetime. Maybe the one before I met Bill and became the horrible, murderous woman I have become.”

  “That sounds harsh, but unfortunately true.” Jesse felt almost relaxed now that the hard part seemed to be over, maybe because she still had a little trouble believing it all. “So, what do we do now?”

  “I think you should go find the sheriff and save me the trouble of repeating all of this. And I think I’m just going to lay here and go to sleep.”

  “Are you sure you don’t have a passport and a plane ticket tucked under that quilt?”

  Cindilee pursed her lips in a sloppy moue of displeasure. “You are so suspicious.”

  “I have been told that. So,” Jesse persisted, “are you going to pop up from there and go running off to some land far away?”

  “Why don’t you stand up and take a look at this array of pill bottles behind me.”

  Curious, Jesse did as suggested, and as she moved closer, noticed that Cindilee was chalky white and glistening with a sheen of sweat. “You don’t look so good,” she said, suddenly nervous and not sure why.

  “That’s because there aren’t nearly as many pills in those bottles as there should be. I took a fistful just before you rang the doorbell, and then another fistful, and then…” Her eyelids fluttered and her hand flapped vaguely. “Well, you were here for those.”

  “I thought those were for cancer. And vitamins.”

  “Those are over there.” She pointed to the opposite side of the room, toward the front door. “These…” A finger twitched toward the back side of the chaise. “Are for sleeping and pain and anx…anxiety.”

  “Oh, my God! You’re OD’ing!” Jesse whirled and started to run toward the door, then stopped, turned back and ran to her purse on the coffee table. “Mom!” she was shouting before she had even gotten her phone out of the pocket. “Mom! Are you there?”

  She put the phone to her ear and was relieved to the point of dizziness when her mother answered. “Mom, I’m going to hang up now. Call 911 for an ambulance. Call the sheriff and get him out here, and then get in here and help me. She’s dying!”

  “That’s the point, you know,” Cindilee said faintly.

  “What?” Jesse demanded irritably as she hung up so her mother could call for help.

  “Dying. That’s the point,” Cindilee repeated. “Confess. Then die. Don’t ruin it.”

  “What do you mean, don’t ruin it?” Jesse pulled back the quilt and grabbed Cindilee’s lifeless arms, tugging her up. Instead of sitting up, she slid farther down the chaise, going flatter than she was before.

  “Quit wallowing me,” Cindilee complained.

  “Quit whining. I’m getting you up, and you’re going to walk.”

  The boneless woman clung to the chaise, making a weak but stubborn attempt to dig in her heels. “Too late.”

  “You’re not dying on me! Do you understand? You are not!”

  “Am, too.” Cindilee opened one eye, and it rolled wildly around to the side.

  “Stand up, damn you!” Jesse shouted. In response, Cindilee giggled, turned her head to the side and puked on the floor.

  Jesse jumped back out of the way and pumped a jubilant fist in the air. “Yes!”

  “Whoa!” a male voice said from very close behind her.

  She turned, too relieved to be surprised by the quick arrival of Joe Tyler.

  “I was going to help you get her up and walking,” he said. Stopping shoulder to shoulder with Jesse, he pointed to Cindilee, arched over the side of the chaise and still violently heaving. “But she’s going to finish that first.”

  “I have never been so glad to see anybody in my whole life,” Jesse confessed, fighting the urge to give him a big, grateful hug.

  He stared down at her, grinning. “Well, that won’t last long.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “Mom,” Jesse said as the taillights of the ambulance disappeared around the bend in the Marshalls’ driveway, “would you call Vivian for me and tell her it’s okay to convene that meeting of the Myrtle Grove Garden Club now. You and I will be heading that way in a few minutes, and I think everyone else is already there except for Lindsey and SueAnn.”

  With a nod, Sophia retreated to her Cutlass to retrieve her phone.

  Joe Tyler tore his gaze from the driveway to watch Sophia until she was almost to her car. “Myrtle Grove Garden Club?” His left eyebrow arched dramatically.

  “It’s a group we recently formed. We’re thinking of landscaping a plot on the town square,” Jesse said, refusing to look him in the eye but unable to ignore his presence next to her. Now she would just have to warn the rest of the group about their new landscaping project before he had a chance to talk to any of them.

  Then she remembered her shock at the sheriff’s sudden arrival in Cindilee’s living room. “How did you get here so fast?” She forgot her resolve not to look directly at him. “The words were barely out of my mouth before you appeared. And do you not own a pair of sunglasses that aren’t tinted black?”

  “Why do my sunglasses bother you so much?” he asked, ignoring her first question.

  “Because I’m a person who looks into the eyes of the person I’m talking to. And thank you, by the way,” she said, veering back to her original subject. “All I know about dealing with an OD is what I’ve seen in the movies.”

  He adjusted his hat, checked on what Sophia was doing, and glanced down the driveway a second time. “Once Mrs. Marshall started throwing up, she wasn’t going to die. Unless she got choked on all those pills she was tossing up. And you were on the right track, trying to get her up and moving. If you could have done that, you would probably have kept her alive anyway until the ambulance got here.”

  Jesse looked past her mother’s car to where his pickup was parked well behind it, tucked under the shadow of the trees. He had arrived at Adele Culpepper’s shortly after she and her mother had left. And Matt had confessed t
o telling his buddy Joe about Adele’s identification of the Marshalls before he had told Jesse herself.

  She tilted her head to the side and stared up at an angle, into the shadows cast by his hat and the blank expression created by the sunglasses. “You were already here when I asked Mom to call you, weren’t you? Let me guess—you were on your way into the house, and my mother stopped you and had you join her in the car so you could listen to what was being said through the phone. So, how much of that could you hear?”

  “The confessions came through pretty clear. You sort of rambled a little, but…”

  “Oh, no!” Jesse’s hand reached out to clutch his forearm as she remembered that Bill Marshall was on his way out of the country and beyond extradition. “What about…”

  “Bill?” Joe Tyler asked. An indulgent grin tugged at the corners of his mouth.

  At least it looked indulgent to Jesse, indulgent and smug. “Yes,” she snapped, wanting to tell him to quit grinning and do something. But she’d seen that grin before. It was the one he used when he thought he’d done something smart and was waiting for her to do something stupid. “Did you catch him before his flight left?”

  “No, she stalled you too long for that. But I guess they forgot that nothing leaving Tulsa goes very far before it has to connect with something else. He was picked up in Houston while he was waiting for his international flight. We’ll have to sort out jurisdiction, since we’re dealing with embezzled funds that were moved offshore. And we’ll have to get him back here and question him before we can pin down the accomplice-to-murder charge.”

  “Good luck with that,” Jesse said grudgingly. “Part of me believes Cindilee, and part of me doesn’t trust a word that comes out of her mouth. It’s not that I don’t think she would, it’s that I’m not convinced she could. And him…I think he’s just worthless, whatever he’s guilty of.”

  One corner of Joe’s mouth drew up in another grin even as he shook his head. “Yeah, ole Bill’s gonna have a lot of people scratching their heads over that one for a while.” Then the fleeting smile was gone. “And, just so you know, we started looking into the Marshalls’ personal and business finances yesterday. By this morning, we had enough for search warrants. There’ve been people at his used car dealership since noon. And I wasn’t chasing you when I came here. I was here to execute a search warrant for their house, which I still intend to do just as soon you head on over to your garden party.”

  “Garden Club,” Jesse said, then conceded. “Okay, so you had it all under control with no help from me. But I did get a confession and unearthed some facts in Ginny Spurber’s death that had been lost in the shuffle.”

  “Withheld,” he corrected emphatically. “Facts that had been withheld. And you… just what the hell did you think you were doing, confronting a possible murderer by yourself? And leaving your mother alone out here with no protection?”

  Jesse started to explain about the tire tool, but sanity forced her to agree with him, even if she would never say it aloud. “Having a conversation with a dying friend,” she said instead, feeling as phony as she sounded. “Or acquaintance, anyway.”

  “Dying?” He frowned down at her and shifted his body subtly closer. “What do you mean dying?”

  “Cindilee says she has terminal cancer. And she had started taking whatever those pills were before I got here today, apparently. Then she took more while we were talking, but I didn’t realize what she was doing. When I caught on, she said she was intending to confess and then die, and she wanted me to stop interfering.”

  “She said that? Actually said those exact words?”

  He seemed excited, almost eager, and no longer upset with her, which made Jesse more nervous than his yelling did.

  “Well, maybe not those exact words,” she answered hesitantly. “I was kind of distracted at the time, but it was pretty close to that.” Warming to her subject, Jesse continued, “When I tried to get Cindileee up and walking, she said I was ruining it. She insisted that I leave her alone because she had it all planned. She was supposed to take the pills, confess, and then die. She even had me get her a glass of cognac before I realized what kind of pills she was taking, or how many she had already had.”

  Joe readjusted his hat, pushing it back, then pulling it forward again, clearly agitated. “Which makes it a deathbed confession,” he said, his mumble indicating he was talking mostly to himself, “and admissible in court.”

  “You mean she doesn’t have to say it again in front of more people when she’s not drugged out of her skull?” Jesse asked, wanting something more definite before she got too excited. “What she said there, in front of just me and a phone, was enough?”

  Still distracted, Joe nodded, his attention focused somewhere around the treetops. “You heard her, I heard her, and your mother heard her. And Cindilee Marshall didn’t expect to live. That’s as good as written and signed. It’ll stand up.”

  “So, it’s over.” Jesse’s knees felt weak suddenly. This whole thing had been a nightmare. It wasn’t exciting. It wasn’t rewarding to get the bad guy. It was just sad. The whole damned thing was sad.

  A nineteen-year-old girl was dead for no real reason. A successful businessman had turned out to be a truly awful husband and all-around bad person and had died for it. And a respected pillar of the community and his invalid, church-going wife were revealed as a thieving, murderous couple who served their own needs at the expense of everyone else, including each other.

  If the murder of Harry Kerr had sent out shock waves over a quarter of the state, then the truth behind his death and the people responsible would rock their own small community and its neighbors to their foundations.

  “Yeah, it’s over.” Joe’s hand cupped her shoulder and turned Jesse to face him. “Are you okay? What is it?”

  “How do you do this every day?” She stared into his eyes and saw only her own reflection in those damned sunglasses. She looked lost. “How do you face the awful things people do to other people?”

  “People do awful things to other people all the time. People like you…” He tapped the end of her nose with the tip of his finger, making sure he did it gently. “…just have to live with it. People like me get to arrest them for it. I like that.”

  “I’m glad it’s over. I’m never getting involved in anything like this again. Not unless something happened to threaten someone like my mom.” Jesse stopped herself before she could continue mumbling any of the other exceptions running through her head.

  “Good,” he said, not giving her any chance to keep talking. “Hold that thought. Because the next time, we’re not even discussing handcuffs. I’m just putting you in a straightjacket, sticking you in the seat next to me, and not letting you out of my sight until it’s over.”

  She ducked her head and started grinning. “I’ll be sure to remember that if I start feeling crazy again.” The engine on the Cutlass rumbled to life, and Jesse looked up to see that Sophia had put the top down on the convertible and had her scarf and sunglasses on. She smiled and waved when she saw Jesse looking.

  “Uh, oh. Looks like Mom’s getting restless. Now that I’m thoroughly depressed, am I free to go?”

  “I know where to find you, if I need you.”

  He fell into step beside her. When they reached the car, he opened Jesse’s door for her and tipped his hat to Sophia. “You ladies drive careful. I don’t aim to lay eyes on you again till at least tomorrow.”

  By the time Sophia had turned the car around, Joe Tyler was retracing his steps back toward the house. Jesse watched him over her shoulder until the car rounded the bend in the driveway and he disappeared from sight.

  “Was Vivian upset when you talked to her?” Jesse was suddenly eager to see her friends. They were a relief valve and a soft, warm robe on a cold evening. They soothed her and cheered her. And they were so much better than being alone when the realities of life weighed too heavily on her soul.

  “Not upset, just curious. She sounded
very, very curious. And she would never admit this, but she really sounded to me like she needed a hug,” Sophia answered.

  “Then this is a good time, I guess, because I know exactly how she feels.”

  ∙∙∙•••●●●•••∙∙∙

  When they pulled up in front of Vivian’s house, the drive was lined with vehicles. Jesse recognized Lindsey’s battered green SUV, great for grocery runs and deliveries. Behind that was SueAnn’s cheerful yellow Jeep. Farther down the drive was Matt and Connie’s dignified sedan. Bliss’s car was probably in the detached garage next to Vivian’s sporty Mercedes.

  Sophia parked in the gap between Matt and Lindsey. While she removed her scarf, carefully folded it and tucked it into her purse, Jesse took off the baseball cap she had pulled on and tossed it into the back seat. Then she ran her fingers through her shoulder-length hair and shook it out.

  Checking herself in the visor mirror, Sophia patted her hair, fluffing it up and out. “Well, I’m gorgeous. How about you?”

  “As long as I don’t look in a mirror, I’m just fine.” Jesse got out and walked around the car, giving her hair one more finger comb and head shake as she went.

  They had reached the bottom step on the porch when Connie came out of the house and hurried to intercept them. “Jesse.” Her hands shook and her fingers were icy as she caught Jesse’s hands in hers. “Is it true? Was it really Cindilee?”

  “Who said that?”

  Sophia cleared her throat in a nonverbal confession.

  “Vivian told me,” Connie answered. “Why would Cindilee, of all people, do something like that? And how could she?”

  “Well, she says that she did, and we’ll just have to respect that. The sheriff has accepted her confession.” Jesse gave the cold hands a squeeze. She knew how Connie felt, or at least in part. None of it sounded very reasonable, but then most murders didn’t.