by Iris Kincaid
“Is that even possible?” Ruby wondered.
“It’s totally against the rules. But this guy says that he had an unpleasant speeding encounter with a cop and then wrote this angry letter complaining about the cop, trying to get him into trouble. And then he was sorry about it immediately afterward. So, he wanted to get the letter back. It had already reached my sorting station, and Sam and I went back and forth about it. Back and forth. Back and forth. It’s something that could’ve gotten us fired. But it was also something that was so easy to take care of.
“I slipped the envelope to Sam, and he returned it to the guy. No problem. Thing is—while I was deciding whether to do it, I was curious about what was in the letter, so I kinda steamed it open and was going to take a quick look—but then my supervisor was on top of me, and I quickly had to toss it aside and get it back to Sam.
“So, I never really saw what was in it. Later, Sam told me that the guy, Preston, was sort of happy to see his letter back, but he was also really uneasy to see that it had been opened. Sam said that he actually might’ve been mad at him for looking at the letter when neither of us actually did.
“Anyway, that’s it. It’s probably nothing. But you were asking about people who might have been mad at Sam, and he’s one of them. I would love it if you never mentioned this to my supervisor. You won’t, will you?”
“As long as Mr. Green didn’t kill Sam Singleton, I think you’re in the clear. We’ll check it out. Thanks for letting us know,” Finn said.
After Alex Wilson left, Finn asked Ruby, “You mind one more visit today?”
“Can we stop and get Star? She’s probably wondering where I am.”
With cat and police dog in tow, Finn and Ruby stopped in on Preston Green. Like most people who greet the police at the door, he was a bit unnerved. But after he found out that they were there about Sam Singleton, he graciously let them in and agreed to sit down for a few questions.
They relayed the account that Alex Wilson had given them of the letter retrieval, omitting the fact that Alex had steamed the letter open. That might send Mr. Green marching straight to the postal supervisor and getting Alex fired.
“Are those the correct facts of the story, as you remember them?” Finn asked.
“Yeah, that’s about the size of it. Sometimes, my temper gets the best of me,” Preston Green admitted. “The traffic cop just rubbed me the wrong way, and I was having a bad day, so I just tried to get him into trouble, which was lousy of me. So, I had to get the letter back.”
“Very nice impulse. But . . . we also heard something about the letter appearing to have been opened. And maybe you were upset with Sam about that.”
Preston squirmed. “Well, I was embarrassed about what I wrote. And I appreciated Sam bringing the letter back for me, but he shouldn’t have nosed around and read it. Although he denied it. But . . . how else could the letter have been opened? It was sealed up pretty good. So, yeah, I think Sam took a look at what was inside.”
The thought of Sam violating his privacy caused a dark cloud to cross Preston’s face. But even if he held Sam responsible for checking out his letter about the cop, that’s not even remotely a good motive for murder. Is it?
“Did Sam have anything to eat when he was in this house?” Finn inquired.
“Sure. The man liked his pastries. He was really fond of scones. I’ve got some right here.” Preston opened up a nearby bag and extracted a tempting-looking scone.
“Can I interest you in one?”
“Since this murder was caused by poison, we’re really not at liberty to accept food. Although, and I hope you don’t mind, our police dog is professionally trained to sniff out the poison that we’re looking for, so yeah, I’ll take that scone just because we need to check out foodstuffs.”
Finn took the offered scone and held it up to the dog’s nose. The police dog inhaled deeply, and then in a split second, it wolfed the scone down.
Finn shook his head incredulously. “Worst poison-sniffing dog ever.”
Outside, Ruby set Star down to stretch her legs as she and Finn debated whether there was anything suspicious here.
“Either he wanted to get the cop fired or he didn’t. I’m not buying the change of heart,” Finn said.
“You think he was lying. So, what was in his note that he needed to get back so badly?”
“Unfortunately, that note is long gone, either in the shredder or in the fireplace. No way he would’ve kept it around.”
“Hey! Star! Where are you going?”
Star was headed straight for Preston Green’s back yard, and Ruby ran after to get her. Preston must’ve been something of a gardener. There was a lot of loose soil in the back, perhaps in preparation for a big planting. Star started digging vigorously in the loose soil.
“Stop that, Star. This isn’t our home. He’s not going to want you to do that.”
“Don’t stop. I’m down there, and no one knows it. Let it dig me up so that my family will finally know what happened to me.”
Both Ruby and Star stared at the ghost, startled.
“How did you get down there?” Ruby asked.
“Preston. It was Preston’s doing. But don’t let him see you or he’ll bury you right next to me.”
Ruby scooped up her cat and hurried back to the front of the house. “Hey, what’s your name?”
“Ezekiel Beatty. I used to live next door. Preston was a terrible neighbor.”
Ruby hustled Finn and the dog into the police car and hoped that Preston hadn’t seen Star digging. She explained what had happened with the ghost.
“How long would it take to get a search warrant and permission to dig?”
“Too long.”
*****
It was about two o’clock in the morning when Ruby returned to Preston Green’s backyard accompanied by fellow witches, super-strong Gemma Keating and Gillian Swann, gifted with x-ray vision. Gillian could see through walls, and thankfully, also through five feet of soil. She spotted the location of the skeleton immediately. Gemma immediately went to work with a nearby shovel, and moving at hyper-speed, had reached the body in two minutes flat. Ezekiel Beatty’s ghost watched the three remarkable young women with enormous gratitude.
After the body was exposed, then it was time to bring in the police. Preston Green was roused from a sound sleep to spend the remainder of the night in the jail’s holding cell. He was told that they knew the exact identity of the body in his yard and that he was in big, big trouble. Best to cooperate.
It’s always good to achieve justice and closure, even for a complete stranger. But the arrest of Preston Green for the murder of Ezekiel Beatty didn’t seem to bring them any closer to solving Sam Singleton’s murder. Or did it? Ruby was allowed to listen in on Preston’s interrogation the following day behind a two-way mirror.
“Preston, I’ve got a question for you. And as your attorney here will tell you, we’ve got all the evidence we need, and you’re going to be put away for a very long time,” Finn began. “But if you cooperate with us, that’s something that the judge will keep in mind during sentencing. So . . . what was actually in that letter that Sam Singleton got back for you from the post office? It was a confession about Ezekiel’s murder, wasn’t it?”
“You don’t have to answer that,” Preston’s lawyer cautioned him.
“It’s over. They have Ezekiel’s body. They know. What’s the point of lying about this? Sure, I got a case of the guilts. And I wrote a confession and mailed it. And then I thought, what on earth have I done? A written confession was going to put me away in prison for the rest of my life. So yeah, I needed to get it back.”
“And you believed that Sam opened the letter and read about your murder confession. And believing that, Sam posed quite a threat to you, didn’t he?”
“Uh . . . sure, I was worried that he knew. That he would turn me in. That he would blackmail me. I kept trying to talk to him, pull it out of him, figure out if he knew anything. But he ne
ver owned up to it. But I saw what I saw. That letter was opened.”
“Did you kill Sam Singleton to make sure your secret never got out?” Finn grilled him.
“Don’t answer that,” Preston’s lawyer advised. “I think we’re done here.”
From the other room, Ruby could only wonder and hope. Wouldn’t it be a huge relief if Sam’s murderer had finally been found? Only time would tell.
In the meantime, she had a date.
*****
So far, Griffin Wynter was scoring big points by surprising Ruby at every turn. When he had asked her at the end of dinner night at the Wynter condo whether she liked boating, she had shrugged and said, “What’s not to like?”
Of course, he would be into boating. That’s what rich people do. They get on their huge mega-yachts with big staffs and crews and throw big parties. And they drink champagne and toast their fabulousness. Yeah, she had caught a few episodes of Lifestyles of The Rich and Famous.
So, Ruby had to laugh out loud when Griffin showed her to their boat for the afternoon, a sixteen-foot flat-bottom canoe. Equally unimpressive was the picnic lunch he had provided, a collection of odds and ends pulled from the grocery store deli, with one-dollar fruity drinks to wash it all down.
Griffin was savvy enough to know that Ruby’s affections were not for sale. He knew that he himself had little regard for the status symbols of life and saw that she had even less. As much as he would have loved to treat her to some spectacular luxury items and experiences, he knew that this was not the time. Those things just got in the way and distracted from learning about each other.
There was one high-ticket item on board, a $10,000 tracker and emergency beam. He valued their lives too much not to spring for the very best in that particular area.
Despite having spent the last several years in Oyster Cove, Ruby seldom got onto the water, and even this lowbrow transport was a real treat. They rowed parallel to the shore, not so far that they would ever get pulled out to sea, but isolated enough that they felt cast adrift in their own little world.
“My brother, Jesse, is coming in from San Jose next week. You’ll join us, won’t you?” Griffin asked.
“You talked to your brother! Tell me how that went.”
“Yeah, it was awkward because it was so long overdue. But I did it. I picked up the phone, and I could feel how tense he was on the other end, just waiting for an argument or criticism. But I told him that I had read the article that Brooke pointed out about his startup, and I let him know that I thought he was doing a fantastic job.”
“That’s so nice. Did you to talk about finding your father’s will?”
“I did. But I also wanted to make clear that it didn’t mean that he was going to be cut off from the business. Because that’s in my hands right now, and it’s really not what I want. I asked him if he’d be interested in getting together and drawing up a five-year plan for the company.
“He was so excited at the prospect. He said he’d get started putting some ideas together but that we should also have a twenty-year plan. And a fifty-year plan. Clearly, my father and I sold him short. The CEO role suits him a lot better than it suits me. We’ll see what happens. But enough of the Wynters. I want to hear about the Townsends. You never told me much about your job.”
“As a matter of fact, I have a fantastic job. I’m an assistant to a brilliant organ transplant surgeon. And I get to watch him save people’s lives, over and over again. And I give him whatever support and assistance he needs to make sure his office runs smoothly. And I make sure that the transplant patients have what they need. A lot of them have become good friends, and it’s such a joy to see them get their health and their lives back. That’s what I do.”
“A transplant surgeon. Man, that’s a very rare skill. We could have used someone like him desperately in the town where I lived in India.
“Hmm. Tell me about India. How did you wind up there?”
“It was a college program that was only intended to last the semester. I was just out there helping to dig wells, work on the clean water supply, help out at the medical clinic, tutor kids in English, just do whatever was needed. It was just such a different world from the one I had just left. And it felt so much more important, what I was doing. At school, I was just sitting in a classroom and going to parties. When the time came to go back, I just . . . didn’t. I decided to stay. I thought that my help was needed and was more important than anything that I could accomplish back home. So, I dropped out of school.”
“Which school?”
“Harvard,” he admitted sheepishly.
“Go ahead. I’m loving this. You dropped out of Harvard and stayed in India. And your father must have loved that.”
“Oh, yes, he loved it so much that he immediately wrote me out of his will and then sent me a copy just to make sure that I knew I had been exiled from the Wynter fortune. He could never have known that at the time, it was a huge weight being lifted off my shoulders. I was free to stay and try to do something that meant something.”
“Seven years?”
“Seven years. I’d be there still if he hadn’t gotten cancer. So, I came back to help run things. He was ecstatic. And I was willing to do anything that made him feel better, including something as unappealing as running the Wynter Empire.
“There was one great part of it, though. He let me completely take over the Wynter Trust, our charity organization. I got to make all the decisions about what charities and organizations we were going to support. That’s the most satisfying thing that I do, even today. I actually was able to divert quite a large chunk over to the organization I volunteered with in India. I essentially quadrupled their budget. They wrote back to me and said, We enjoyed having you here. But when you stay away and send money, we enjoy you even more.”
He chuckled. “Money’s pretty hard to come by unless you’re born into it, as you’ve already driven home. What I do now feels a bit distant, but I’ve gotten used to being useful in a very different way. I connected with charities in Africa, South America, and the Middle East. A lot of good work is being done by a lot of good people, and I’m happy to give them the resources that they need. That’s one of the reasons I guess I’m reconciled to running the business. It’s the profits from the business that provide the money for the trust, and I am willing to commit myself to the business for that reason alone.”
He was quite a bit more interesting than Ruby could have predicted. She felt her preconceptions falling away.
“You taught them English. What did they teach you?”
He responded with a long, impressive string of Hindi dialogue.
“Nice. What does it mean?”
“Something that would make us both blush.”
It was the most memorable date of Ruby Townsend’s life, the kind of experience that befits a true leading lady.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The following day, Ruby’s head was so filled with daydreams and exciting possibilities that she bumped smack into Mercedes Singleton, Sam’s widow. Mercedes was carrying a large bag from a specialty import store, filled to the brim with pricy items, several cans of caviar, and the top of a champagne bottle was clearly visible.
“Mrs. Singleton. What are we celebrating?”
Mercedes looked like a deer caught in the headlights. One really isn’t supposed to be throwing a party on the heels of one’s husband being murdered. Then she squared her shoulders defiantly.
“The insurance check just came through. It’s $4 million. That’s more money than I ever dreamed of having. It’s a really big deal. So, it seemed like it was worthy of a little celebration. I mean, life is short. You never know when your number is going to be up. Sam sure didn’t. His life ended with absolutely no warning. You’re still looking into the murder, I assume. He was cheating on me, wasn’t he?”
Ruby hesitated. “Yeah. Yeah, he was.”
Mercedes nodded. It was just a confirmation of what she already knew. “The good news is th
at there’s still time for me to find someone who will really love me. And isn’t that worth celebrating?”
No, she was hardly a grieving widow. But Sam had not been a dutiful husband, and it was hard to come to any conclusions about whether her suspicions of infidelity had driven her to murder.
Further down the street was another remarkable sight, a gathering of witches—Fiona Skretting, Zelda Beale, and Raquel Grimm, all huddled together on a street corner. They noticed Ruby immediately and grinned ominously in her direction.
“This does not bode well,” Lilith warned, startling Ruby, who was still unused to the sudden appearances. “I have never seen them all together. Perhaps this is not the first gathering. Perhaps it is the continuation of a partnership that began with the purpose of consolidating their strengths and efforts to achieve my demise.”
“Or . . . maybe they’re just friends.”
“They are the strongest of their kind remaining. They have no need of friendship. I didn’t. No, they came together for some purpose. And it is all starting to make sense. I knew that no single one had the ability to challenge me, to best me. But united—that is certainly a likely scenario of how they were able to ambush me.”
But what Lilith had said was disturbing. No need of friends. That couldn’t have been further from Ruby’s experience. Her friendships were the most meaningful and gratifying things in her life.
“Lilith, can I ask a question? Did you enjoy your life?”
“What a foolish question.”
“I’m just remembering that you and I are coming from very different perspectives, and I can’t just assume that you feel the same way about things that I do. That you feel about your life the same way I feel about my mine. Did you? Did you enjoy it? What did you like best?”
