Murder, Money, and Moving On

by Stacey Alabaster

  “Come on, George! Get in!”

  “This has got to be the place,” Agatha said, slowing the car. She peered at the mansion over the top of her glasses. “If you were going to win the lotto, this is the place you would buy.”

  “Woah,” I said as we pulled up at the bottom of the cliff. The house was on top, a large shining glass beach property that was perched up high, with an endless view of both the sky and the ocean. There was a red ‘sold’ banner across the “For Sale” sign and there was a moving van in the driveway. Bingo.

  “So, you think this is the place that your friend might have bought?” she asked.

  I nodded a little. “It certainly looks flashy enough. And that is what she is all about these days, apparently.” We turned off the car, quietly, and took the set of public stairs that led to the top of the cliff. Anyone from the public could reach a certain place, but at the boundaries of the house’s property, there was a gate and a security system.

  When I spotted a familiar little grey cat just on the other side of the gate, I knew we had Brenda’s new place.

  “Hello, Banana,” I said, kneeling to pet him. He arched his back and purred in recognition. “So how do you like your new place?”

  The security system didn’t seem to be working. Agatha raised an eyebrow when she opened the gate and we were allowed to walk right through. But a woman wearing a fur coat and dark sunglasses and carrying a small box shouted at us once we got a few feet closer to the door. And then she just dropped the box and looked shocked.

  “Georgina….”

  I took my own shades off and shot her a bright smile. “I thought you might be pleased to see a friendly face.”

  “Welcome to the neighborhood!” Agatha called out, slightly sarcastically, then tried to bury her laughter.

  Brenda scrunched up her nose. No sense of humor, that one. “How on earth did you find me?”

  “You hardly went into witness protection, Brenda,” I had to point out. “People saw you down here.” I was right up at the door now. I could see that the hallway and front room were still littered with packing boxes in various state of emptiness.

  She nudged one of the boxes with her toes. “Well, as you can see, it is still quite untidy in here. I’m not in any fit state to entertain guests, so you’ll have to excuse my rudeness, but I’ll have to ask you to leave and come back some other time.”

  “I’m only in town for a few days,” I said, pushing past her. I had no intention of leaving. “You left town awfully fast.” I stopped and stared at the breathtaking view of the ocean. Well, I kinda didn’t blame her for leaving town suddenly if this is what she had waiting for her. It took me a few moments to pull my eyes away from the beauty of it.

  Brenda was standing behind me, indignant. “I told you. I wanted a new start. Something completely different.”

  “Uh huh. I’ve never know you to like change before, Brenda.”

  “You are just jealous, Georgina. And envy is a sin.”

  She picked up another box and moved it to the kitchen counter. She started pulling silverware from it, placing them nervously in their new positions. Agatha glanced at me. I nodded. I had to say something.

  “Brenda, I know that you were up on the roof that night that Lleyton was killed.”

  Brenda dropped the steak knife she was holding and it went point first into the floor, only narrowly missing slicing off the tip of her toe. “I was not!” She stood and marched over to show us the front door. “How dare you come into my house uninvited and accuse me of such a thing!”

  “Brenda. Les told me. And I heard your ringtone that night. You were on the roof.”

  She went pale. She was caught.

  “Brenda, I know that you and Lleyton weren’t exactly the best of friends. And there was no love lost with him and Les either. Just tell me what you were doing on the roof that night.”

  “You think I killed him?”

  “If you didn’t, then why else were you up there that night?”

  I saw a peculiar look come over her face and her eyes dart back and forth like she was wondering what the best way to play this was. The wheels were turning inside her brain, like there were little hamsters inside there.

  “Maybe…maybe I did push him then?” she said. But she was murmuring it more to herself, and more like it was a question. She finally looked up and stared me square in the eyes. “Yes. That is what I was doing up there on that roof that night. I was after Lleyton. He had parked his car in my parking spot one too many times. He needed to be taught a lesson.”

  Agatha gave me a strange look. She leaned over and whispered, “She’s lying.”

  I had already figured that out. What I couldn’t figure out was why Brenda was confessing to a crime she didn’t commit. To a murder she didn’t commit!

  Brenda was nervously fiddling with the edge of a lace tablecloth she had just finished unpacking. It was white and with the glare of the sun coming in through the glass windows, I noticed something for the first time.

  I leaned forward a little bit. “Brenda, is that…lipstick that you’re wearing?”

  She threw the tablecloth down. “I want you two to get out of my house. If you want to call the cops on me, that’s fine. But you need to leave.”

  I didn’t need any more hassles from the cops. Agatha and I hurried out and walked down the long driveway, waving to Banana as we found the public access staircase that led us down to the bottom of the cliff.

  “Well, she’s guilty,” Agatha said, leaning back in her seat as she peered up at the glass house.

  I peered at her over the top of my shades. “I thought you said she was lying?”

  “She is. But she’s still guilty.”

  13

  “This is kind of exciting,” Agatha whispered nervously as she dug her elbows into the sand. “Is this always how you spend your time?” It was the following day, and we had found a little bunker in the cliffs below Brenda’s new house where we could spy on her. I was holding myself up on unsteady wrists, trying to put most of my weight on my left arm. It was only a warmish day, but a sweat had broken out on my brow.

  I looked down at the white sand that I was about to plant my face into. “Not always,” I said. “But a good chunk of the time.”

  I’d been trying to hide my feebleness from Agatha ever since I’d arrived in Sandy Point. That morning when I’d pulled the hairbrush through my hair and it had hit the bump and I’d let out a yelp of pain, Agatha had run into the guest room to ask if I was all right or if I being attacked.

  “Ugh. It’s all these curls. They are prone to knots.”

  She offered me the number of a hair salon in town.

  But now I was struggling to find a comfortable position in which to spy on Brenda from. My right arm couldn’t take any weight at all and I was trying to hide this from Agatha and still remain upright. If she knew that I had been in hospital recently for a head injury, she would probably call the whole thing off. She’d probably tell me to go back to Pottsville and get some rest. Which was the last thing I wanted to do.

  My arm was wobbling wildly beneath me. It was no use. I fell forward and got a mouthful of sand, while Agatha’s eyes were trained on the house.

  I coughed as the sand went in my mouth and spluttered as I picked myself up.

  Agatha looked over at me in concern. “Geez, are you okay there, George?”

  I struggled up and sat back so that I was leaning back on my ankles. But I let out an “ouch” as I accidentally leaned on my right arm while I was steadying myself. “It’s just my arm,” I said, rubbing it. “I fractured it a couple of weeks ago. Well. They thought it was a fracture at the time. Turned out to just be a sprain.”

  Agatha was concerned and insisted we get back to the house. I told her I was fine, but when she learned about my head injury as well, she was insistent that I at least get out of the sun.

  But I didn’t want to leave, so I suggested a compromise. We could climb up the public staircase a
nd keep watch from the top. I was worried we would be spotted there.

  “This is a much better view at least,” I had to admit, looking over the ocean while we waited for Brenda to make any sort of a move. The house was still; it looked like she was still asleep.

  Agatha nodded. “I feel a bit guilty. I don’t always appreciate living here until I see it through an outsider’s eyes.”

  I looked away from the view and back at the glass house, which was framed with stunning white wooden frames. “This house is beautiful. It almost seems wasted on Brenda. She’ll be painting all the wood shades of gray before you know it…”

  Agatha raised an eyebrow at me. She was teasing me, but there was a note of seriousness to her voice. “There’s no sense in being jealous, George. If you want to move to the beach, you can!”

  I sighed. “You make it sound so easy.”

  “And why isn’t it?”

  “Life doesn’t always turn out how you’d planned it.”

  She launched into a long motivational speech about how it was never too late, and that I still had plenty of years ahead to make my life whatever colors and shades I chose to. And in a previous life, I would have believed her. It was just that nothing felt easy right then. Jasper was gone. Adam and Fiona were married and away on their honeymoon. There was a hole in the roof of my shop where the rain got through. I felt like I wanted to run away from it all, but at the same time, I was trapped.

  “Shh,” I said, grabbing Agatha’s arm.

  There was a car pulling into the driveway. “Maybe that’s her husband,” Agatha said as I got down lower so that I couldn’t be seen.

  I shook my head. “Tom drives a station wagon.” And if he had upgraded with his lottery money, I doubted he would have purchased a secondhand Prius.

  “But that car does look familiar,” I said, squinting. I felt like it was a car I saw all the time, I just couldn’t quite place where.

  I gasped a little when I saw the rusty red head get out of the car. “Les,” I said, before putting my own hand over my mouth so that I wouldn’t make so much noise that I was heard.

  “Who is Les again?” Agatha asked, sounding a little excited.

  I made a ‘shh’ sound again to get her to keep her voice down. Now we had two people to hide from. “He owns the shop next door…”

  “I thought he was killed?” Agatha looked frightened for a second, like we might be watching a ghost.

  “The shop on the other side,” I said.

  “Oh.” She let out a little sigh of relief and we returned to watching Les take the long climb up the hill to where the gate was. He looked a little too old for the journey, to be honest. I wasn’t sure how Brenda was going to manage it every day.

  The security system was working that day. I wondered if mine and Agatha’s visit had anything to do with the sudden installation. We waited while he pressed the intercom buzzer and spoke into it. There was a pause afterwards while Les crossed his arms and craned his neck, almost like he wasn’t sure whether or not Brenda was actually going to let him in.

  After a few minutes of waiting, the gates were finally pulled back and Les was allowed up the path and through the front door.

  “What do we do now?” I asked Agatha. We couldn’t see anything and with the new security system. We couldn’t get closer. I didn’t know the code. And there was no way that Brenda was just going to let us in after she’d told us to get out or she would call the cops.

  Agatha raised her eyebrows and nodded toward the cliff top. I knew what she was saying. I gulped. We’d have to climb down. And then climb back up. “There’s no security system keeping us out that way. Unless you count the jagged rocks and the steep fall onto them below.”

  “We can always turn back,” Agatha said, looking over her shoulder at me. To get up the cliffs, we would have to take it steady. There was no official walkway, but you could see the path that people had taken before. There were several flat spots where we could pause and take a breath.

  I shook my head. I’d come too far. My arm wasn’t going to stop me from getting to the top and seeing what Les and Brenda were up to. I remembered that phone call I’d heard Les make the night I’d been snooping at his house. He’d told the person on the other end of the line that I didn’t know anything. That they didn’t need to worry.

  Now I was sure he had been talking to Brenda.

  Agatha went ahead of me, making sure the rocks were steady before I attempted the climb. My arm pained me when I reached out and pulled myself up onto the first ledge. It wasn’t going to work—I was going to have to rely on my left arm to hoist me. The first few steps were wobbly, but I just followed Agatha and took it one step at a time.

  “I can’t believe I made it!” I exclaimed, looking around when I got to the top. Adrenaline raced through my blood. Then I remembered the last time I got prematurely excited about scaling something this tall. What do they say about pride going before the fall? I took a deep breath and stepped away from the ledge.

  We crept toward the back window of Brenda’s house. There was an excellent view, straight into the living room, much like my own lake house, actually. I shook my head. “Brenda always said that my house was too ostentatious with all its glass walls…”

  “Well, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Agatha giggled.

  I wondered if Brenda had been jealous of my house the entire time. Now that I really looked at it, something occurred to me. “Wow, the layout is almost identical…”

  I was so busy looking at the building that I didn’t even see that Brenda and Les were making their way into the living room. Agatha quickly dragged me out of the way to the other side of the house. Only just out of view. We couldn’t hear their conversation. But they were looking awfully cozy.

  “What could they possibly be talking about?” I whispered. I hadn’t even known that Brenda and Les were friends, let alone close enough friends that he would drive two hours to visit her in her new home. “None of this is making any sense to me…” I said, then suddenly stopped. “Unless they are in on this murder together, and they are trying to get their alibis straight.”

  I could feel Agatha’s eyes burning into the side of my head. We walked away a little further, out of eye and earshot, getting closer to the edge of the cliffs again. “Ever hear of Occam’s razor?” Agatha asked as the sea-breeze made her sunhat flap.

  “Sure,” I said, squinting a little. “But refresh me on it again.”

  “The simplest answer is usually the correct one. There is no use in making up conspiracies when there’s a much more reasonable explanation for Les being here in Brenda’s house.”

  “I cannot think of any explanation that is simpler than murder,” I said.

  “But that’s because you are biased to think that everything is about murder,” Agatha said. I hated how she was always so wise and reasonable. I was almost certain she had to be a Virgo, but I would need to double-check that later.

  “So what is it about then?”

  Agatha looked over her shoulder toward the glass house. “Why does a man usually meet a woman in secret? And lie about it?”

  It genuinely took several moments for what Agatha was saying to even register with me—the idea was that outlandish. Brenda was the most conservative, moralistic person I had ever met in my life. I had to laugh.

  I shook my head at Agatha. “This is Brenda we’re talking about. There’s no way that she is having an affair.”

  Agatha remained silent, but then she pointed out something that made me stop and think. “Well then, why has she arrived in Sandy Point without her husband?”

  He looked so peaceful when he was asleep. No barking. No digging holes. No dragging me around the lake on his leash, coming dangerously close to pulling me into the water. Just a sweet dog.

  Of course, he wouldn’t sleep for long. Jasper was a light sleeper. If he heard something that so much resembled a can opening, or a bag of dog food being set down, or the sound of his lea
sh being picked up, his ears would perk up and he would be awake.

  My heart sunk. If only I didn’t have to take him back to Alice’s house in a day’s time.

  Sure. There was a voice inside my head saying that I should just not take Jasper back to Mornington, that I should put him into the back of the rental car when I was done at Sandy Point and drive on into the sunset. But then I’d be on the run for both dognapping and grand theft auto. Maybe not the best plan.

  Jasper opened one eye, looked at me for a moment, and went back to sleep.

  I could hear Agatha squealing from the living room. It sounded like a happy squeal, not “I’m in danger” squeal, but I couldn’t be quite sure, so I left Jasper to go and check on her. She was sitting in front of her computer screen, bouncing with excitement.

  “Another sale!” she said excitedly, before she started typing frantically. I walked up behind her and saw that she was writing a thank you message to someone named “Seeshelllover83” and promising that she would ship the item that afternoon. Without my reading glasses on, I had to squint to see the screen. What was causing so much excitement?

  It was a website where anyone could log in and list items for sale. Sort of generic in that way. But Agatha had her own username and her own personalized page, for a shop called “Agatha’s Shells,” and the background of the screen was covered with, of course, mostly seashells and starfish.

  Huh. Impressive. “I didn’t realize you sold your items online.”

  She held up the vase proudly. It was tall and blue and looked like stained glass, delicately decorated with dozens of tiny white shells. It was actually really stunning. I would have loved it for my own house. “Yep, this beauty has just made me a cool eighty bucks!”

  “Wow,” I said, admiring first the vase, and then the amount of cash, as I leaned over to check the seller’s info. On the screen there was a photo of Agatha, professionally taken by the looks of it. She was holding up a vase, similar to the one she had just sold, and she had red-framed glasses on, which made her look even more artistic.