String of Lies

by Mary Ellen Hughes

  “Oh, Jo, I almost forgot! You know that lovely candleholder you have? I admired it once when I was there, if you remember.”

  “The stemmed, glass bowl that holds a scented pillar candle?”

  “That’s the one. Would you put it aside for me, dear? It will make a lovely housewarming gift for Dulcie and Ken with a rose-colored candle in it, don’t you think?”

  What Jo thought was that Dulcie and Ken should be showering Loralee with gifts for the sacrifice she was making for them, not the other way around, but she said, “Of course, Loralee. I’ll find a nice gift box for you too.”

  Loralee fluttered on with more thanks before finally ending the call. Jo went to find the candleholder, thinking, as she lifted it off its shelf, that it really was a lovely piece. Shaped like an oversized brandy snifter, it was designed to hold a six inch pillar candle inside, and could be easily trimmed with matching flowers or ivy at its base. She wiped a bit of dust from its foot, found a rose-colored candle that smelled like strawberries, and set the whole thing on her desk. She heard the coffee pot come to its final sputters and glanced out her front window. Randy looked to be finishing up on the walk, so she went to bring him in.

  Jo leaned her head out the door and called, “Coffee’s ready.”

  Randy, who had been scraping up the final crumbs of snow from the pavement, looked over. “Okay. Thanks. I’ll be right there.”

  Jo went back to pour out two mugs and set them on the workshop table where she and Randy had their lunch a few days ago. She heard Randy stamping off his boots, then cautiously open the door.

  “Don’t worry about bringing in the snow,” Jo said. “My customers will be tracking it in all day. Come on back.”

  Randy did so, Loralee’s glass candleholder catching his eye as he passed by.

  “That’s just like the one at Parker’s house.”

  “It is?” Jo handed him his mug. “You’ve been there?”

  “Yeah.” Randy blew at his coffee and took a tentative sip. He pulled out a chair and sat down, opening up his jacket and pulling off his knit cap. “Some time last summer. Parker hired me to work on his yard. I remember that candle thing because I nearly knocked the darn thing off a little table near the back door. I could hardly see when I came in from bright sunlight to use the bathroom.”

  Randy took a hearty drink of his coffee. “That’s good. First cup of the day.”

  Jo smiled and nodded. “For me too.” She pulled out a chair and joined Randy at the table. “So you did some landscaping for Holt? Were there others there too? Workers from Pheasant Run?” Jo realized she’d never checked on Heather Bannister’s story of Parker Holt dipping into the Pheasant Run resources.

  “Not when I was there. But I could see there had been work done there recently – new bushes and stuff with their tags still on. I was hired to spread mulch from a big pile. I remember thinking it was funny that whoever did the planting hadn’t finished the rest of it.”

  Jo made a mental note to verify who did do the planting, and where they got the plants from.

  “So you worked there just that once?”

  Randy shifted in his chair. “Well, that might have been the last time I was there. Parker threw a few odd jobs to me, off and on. We knew each other from high school.”

  “Oh, right, I guess he would have been about your age. Were you in the same class?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What was he like then?”

  Randy shrugged. “I only knew him from shop class.” He grinned, remembering. “He wasn’t much good at it. Funny in a way, seeing as how he turned into a big developer. Guess he was a lot better at getting other people to do the work, while he just added up the numbers.”

  Jo took a drink from her mug. “Some people have accused him of dishonesty. Did you see that in him then?”

  “As I said, I only saw him in shop. Hard to cheat there. You either build the thing or you don’t. You’re not going to get someone else to do your work for you with the teacher right in front of you, watching.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  The front door dinged, and Jo looked over to see her first customer of the day, a woman Jo remembered who had bought Jo’s pre-packaged key ring kit. Was it just a week ago? It seemed, after all that happened, more like months.

  “Excuse me, Randy,” she said, and got up to greet her customer.

  The woman smiled. “That kit I bought here turned out so well, I came for another one, plus one for my daughter.”

  “Great, I’m glad it worked out.” Jo led her over to where the kits were stacked.

  As the woman sifted through the various choices of colors and styles she said, “Wasn’t that a shame what happened to Alexis Wigsley the other night?”

  “Yes,” Jo said, by then weary of hearing the same comment repeated often the day before. She heard Randy pushing his chair back and remembered she hadn’t paid him yet for his snow shoveling. She excused herself from her customer, and went to her cash register. Randy seemed to have forgotten his payment as well, as he continued on to the front door.

  “Randy!” Jo called, and held his money out to him.

  “Oh, yeah. Thanks.” He took the cash and stuffed it into his pocket.

  “Thank you,” Jo said. “By the way, Randy, did you happen to notice when Alexis Wigsley left the ball Saturday night?”

  “The police asked me that too.” Randy pulled on his knit cap. “I can’t say for sure. I think it was toward the end, but people were leaving in bunches because of the snow and I was kept hopping.”

  “So I guess you didn’t see if her car was acting funny or not?”

  Randy shook his head.

  Jo’s customer brought two key ring kits over to the counter, and Randy took off. As Jo rang up the purchase, she reminded the woman of the on-going beading workshops, “in case you want to learn a few more beading techniques.” As she said it, Jo’s thoughts went to her group of regulars, and how she looked forward to meeting with them again. She wanted their help to make sense of all the bits and pieces of information she’d picked up over the last few days.

  “I’d really like to do that,” the woman said. “But with so many things popping up lately in my life, I’ll be lucky if I manage to get to this new kit anytime soon. Can’t hold onto too many strings at once, can we?” The woman laughed. “You just end up with a tangled mess!”

  Jo nodded. How very true.

  CHAPTER 22

  Javonne was the first of the workshop group to arrive, and Jo handed her the black dress on a wire hanger, covered with a plastic cleaner’s bag, along with the coat she had borrowed for the ball.

  “Thanks so much, Javonne. It was a great outfit for my undercover work.”

  “You had the dress cleaned?” Javonne protested. “Why did you go and do that? I’ll never be that size again, so all it’s doing is going back into my closet.”

  “I don’t think I was that size either, to tell the truth. I doubt I took a full breath the entire night.”

  “Then good thing you didn’t have to chase down any criminals, wasn’t it? Javonne grinned. “I’ll just take this right out to the car and get it out of the way.”

  As Javonne left the shop, Ina Mae and Loralee entered, and Jo retrieved the glass candleholder from the stockroom where she’d packed it carefully with tissue paper in its gift box.

  “Here you are, Loralee,” she said. “I added a rose-colored candle to it.”

  “Thank you, dear!” Loralee said, taking it. “This will look lovely on Dulcie’s coffee table.”

  “In your living room,” Ina Mae added with a sniff.

  “No, it will be her living room then. I’ve had it long enough.” Loralee said it with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I went to talk with Angie Palmer yesterday. She’s drawing up the papers.”

  Jo struggled with what to say and settled on, “Pheasant Run will be lucky to get you.”

  Javonne breezed back into the store, accompanied by
Vernon, and they all gathered around the workshop table where Jo had already set out the boxes of beads.

  “I thought we could work on a multi-strand bracelet,” Jo said. “It’s a bit more complicated, so don’t expect to finish it tonight. But the result, I think, will be a lovely piece and worth the extra work.” Jo explained how beads of various sizes would be strung on five separate wires, all attached in a row to the end slide clasp. “If you make each string hold a different pattern of beads, you’ll get a nice effect. Then we’ll string a sixth wire, and wrap it loosely around the other five.” She held up the sample bracelet she had put together and got a pleased reaction from the group.

  The ladies and Vernon got to work, needing much less direction by then, their major problems being the choice of color and style of the beads.

  “So, when you weren’t busy sleuthing, Jo, did you enjoy the Founders Ball?” Javonne asked. Jo noticed that she watched Vernon closely as he chose his beads, having likely figured out if she followed his lead she couldn’t go wrong.

  “I think she enjoyed her dance with our lieutenant, didn’t you Jo?” Loralee asked with a teasing smile.

  “Russ Morgan asked you to dance?” Javonne asked. “I knew that dress was the right one for you.”

  “I think he just wanted to make sure I wasn’t harassing the mayor’s niece.” Jo said it lightly, but felt her cheeks warm just the same. She bent down to retrieve a runaway bead as well as cover her reaction. What she had said to the group was what she’d been telling herself, but it didn’t keep her from wishing another social event was in the works that would bring the two of them together once again.

  “As it turned out,” Jo said, straightening and dropping the bead in its proper box, “Mallory was the one harassing me. Where was Russ Morgan then, I ask you?”

  “Mallory Holt gave you trouble?” Ina Mae asked. “That must have been after we left you. What happened?” Ina Mae wrapped a piece of wire around her wrist to judge for length.

  Jo told about facing Mallory’s fury over Jo’s visit to Sebastian Zarnik’s studio, and the follow-up threat to Jo’s craft shop.

  “How very unfair,” Loralee said, “to hurt someone in a business way over a personal disagreement!”

  “It’s been done before,” Ina Mae said. “However, this might be more than just personal. She could be fearful because of what she and this Zarnik fellow cooked up regarding her husband’s electrocution, and wants to scare Jo off.”

  “It sounds like a very real threat to me, Jo.” Vernon said this. He had been working rapidly and had one wire of his bracelet nearly strung. “It sounded like she was giving you notice.”

  “I know,” Jo agreed. “I’ve had a couple sleepless nights over that, believe me. My only hope is that she was bluffing or simply voicing what she’d like to do. I don’t know that the building’s actually been bought.”

  “You’re still unable to reach Max McGee?” Ina Mae asked.

  “Unfortunately, yes. Alexis had tracked him down to the Bahamas, but not precisely where in the Bahamas. She was going to work on it.”

  Jo’s words hung in silence as each of them, she was sure, considered the fact of Alexis’s untimely death. Word had spread by now that her car had been tampered with. The question remained as to by whom. Javonne broke the silence first.

  “Did the same person who killed Parker Holt also kill Alexis?”

  “I think we have to assume so,” Ina Mae said.

  “Somebody who was at the ball?” Loralee asked. Her partially beaded wire lay limply in her hands as she looked from one to the other and got four nods.

  “The police, of course, have zeroed in on Xavier,” Jo said. She told them about her conversation with Xavier at the hospital and his lack of alibi once more, for a critical time.

  “Why does that man do this to himself?” Javonne cried. “It’s as if he wants to be sure he’ll be the chief suspect.”

  “I’m sure he wasn’t aware that a crime was being committed,” Ina Mae said, “when he chose to be alone and unaccounted for. If he had been the person who cut Alexis’s brake lines I’d think he might have arranged some sort of fake alibi.”

  “How much time would it take to cut through the lines?” Javonne asked.

  The women looked to the sole man in their midst for the answer. Vernon cleared his throat.

  “Probably not all that long. The perpetrator wouldn’t have wanted to cut all the way through, since the brake fluid would then have emptied out altogether, and Alexis would have known her brakes weren’t working long before she got to that hill on Greenview. So a small cut in the line that produced a leak would be what was wanted. A slow leak that might increase as she used her brakes so that finally the brakes would give out altogether.”

  “Would they need a special tool?” Jo asked.

  Vernon shrugged. “Just a basic cutting tool you’d find in most tool boxes. Dike pliers would do it, or even a penknife A lot of men carry tools around in the trunk of their car.”

  “Xavier told me he did his own car repairs. He probably kept such tools handy in case of a breakdown.”

  Vernon nodded solemnly. Jo knew what he was thinking: another nail in Xavier’s coffin.

  “We have to figure out,” Jo said, “who else wanted Alexis dead.”

  “She wasn’t well-liked,” Loralee said. “But I can’t imagine who would actually murder her.”

  “Perhaps,” Ina Mae said, “Alexis had come too close to Parker Holt’s murderer through her snooping.”

  “But why wouldn’t she have gone to the police if that was the case?” Javonne asked. She had gotten behind in her attempts to duplicate Vernon’s bracelet and was starting to look a bit frazzled.

  “Maybe she didn’t know she was coming close,” Ina Mae argued. “Maybe her murderer needed to stop her before she realized what she knew. Jo, who did you see her talking with at the ball?”

  Jo thought back. “She was with Mallory, of course. She followed Mallory out of the kitchen after Xavier was fired.”

  “So Alexis could have let something drop to Mallory,” Ina Mae said. “I can’t picture Mallory working under the hood of a car, but I could certainly see that artist fellow doing it for her.”

  “Yes, I could too,” Jo agreed. She remembered Zarnik’s mention of having to fix things himself around the studio, and his handy-looking toolbox. “I also saw Alexis talking to Heather Bannister. Heather’s husband avoided joining them, but I saw him in a huddle with Heather afterwards.”

  “Hmmm. It would be interesting to know what they discussed, wouldn’t it?” Ina Mae slipped a large black bead onto her second wire. “And he’s an electrical engineer, I understand.”

  “Yes,” Loralee agreed. “So he’d certainly know all about how to kill someone with electricity, as Parker was killed.”

  “I think I’ve missed something about Heather Bannister,” Vernon said. “She’s the former manager at Pheasant Run, right?”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Jo said. “We didn’t catch you up on everything.” Jo filled Vernon in on her visit to Heather’s home and how Heather explained her firing from her management job.

  “So she claims Holt was threatening her with a lie about an affair?” Vernon asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Is Heather Bannister an attractive-looking blond?”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “About twenty five, maybe five-five, hair down to about here?” Vernon held his hand at just below his chin.

  “Yes.”

  Vernon cleared his throat. “Then I’m afraid she may have been the one telling the lie.”

  “What do you know?” The question burst out of all four women at once.

  “Well,” Vernon carefully crimped a bead near the end of his wire, “as you know, I had a standing rule not to repeat things I heard or saw at my shop. However, you all have convinced me of the need to break that rule.” He drew a breath. “I do remember Parker Holt coming into my shop about a year ago to buy a co
uple of steaks. A woman was with him who I assumed at the time was his wife, particularly as she was clinging closely to him as he chose the meat. Something was said, I remember, about people being out of town, picking up some wine, and fixing a nice dinner for the two of them. Because I’ve since learned that Mrs. Holt is a brunette, I’m thinking this might have been Heather Bannister.”

  “So it sounds like she was having an affair with Parker,” Javonne said. “And he threatened to tell her husband about it if she blew the whistle on him about dipping into Pheasant Run’s money.”

  “Or,” Jo offered, “maybe it was the other way around. Maybe she was aware of what Holt was doing but looked the other way until he decided to end the affair. Then she threatened him with what she knew.”

  “So how would that lead to his murder?” Javonne asked.

  “Well,” Ina Mae spoke up, “perhaps he had built up her hopes for the future with grand promises, which, when they were broken, infuriated her. Or, perhaps her husband found out and was just as furious. He might not have been able to stand the thought of Parker Holt getting away with what he did, may have needed revenge, and murdered him.”

  Loralee shook her head in distress. “Poor Kevin Bannister. Did all his hard work and study lead to this?”

  “It’s still just speculation, Loralee,” Jo said. “We’ll need to find out what Kevin was doing shortly before Parker Holt’s death.”

  “Time is running out,” Ina Mae pointed out. “Xavier Ramirez is in imminent danger, I’d say, of being charged.”

  “And if Xavier goes to jail,” Loralee said, her face wrinkled with worry, “it will be a terrible sentence passed on Carrie and Dan as well.”

  Jo nodded grimly. She had feared that from the very beginning. Dan’s business would never recover from its association to murder.

  The group grew silent, the only sound that reached Jo’s ears being that of beads slipping over wire, and pliers pressing crimps.

  “Well, I’m sure, Jo, you’ll figure something out,” Loralee said, quickly turning positive. You always do.”