by Tim Myers
I found Lillian in the kitchen, and took in the delightful aroma of freshly baking brownies. “When will they be out of the oven?”
Lillian laughed. “Patience, Jennifer. They’ve got another five minutes of baking, and then I like to let them cool before I ice them.”
“Well, I’d like to lose twenty pounds, but that’s not happening either. I’ll give you five minutes to bake and five to cool, but that’s my best offer.”
Sara Lynn came out, and I noticed she held the note from Bailey clutched in her hand.
Before I could warn Lillian not to say anything, our aunt asked, “What’s that you’re holding so tightly?”
“It’s a note from Bailey,” Sara Lynn said simply.
“How sweet,” she said, the sarcasm dripping from her words. “So he’s already apologizing and trying to crawl back to you. I know how you feel about him, though I can’t imagine why, but if you do take the cur back, I hope you’re going to make it so miserable for him that he cries like a little girl.”
Sara Lynn handed Lillian the note, then after she explained its meaning, she said, “Somehow I don’t think this is a reconciliation attempt.”
Lillian looked surprised by the admission. “Everyone knows I’m not Bailey’s biggest fan, but it seems petty even for him, to rob you on his way out the door.” She tapped the note with a finger, then said, “If that’s what he did. Sara Lynn, when was the last time you saw that cash?”
She thought about it a few seconds, then said, “It’s been months. I don’t ordinarily keep tabs on my emergency fund. Every now and then I’ll check on it, though, just to make sure it’s there if I need it.”
Lillian said, “Then how do you know he took it tonight? This note’s not dated, is it?”
Sara Lynn took it back from her, studied it a few seconds, then said, “No, there’s nothing here that would tell me he robbed us tonight, but somehow I know in my heart he did. Why else would all the lights be on in our house?”
Lillian shrugged. “Sorry, I don’t have an answer for that. You’ll just have to ask him the next time you see him.”
The oven timer went off and Lillian said, “The brownies are ready.” She opened the oven door and poked a toothpick into the center of the rich brown concoction. After seeing that it came out clean, Lillian pulled the pan out and put it on a cooling rack. “I’d like to wait an hour, but I insist we at least wait five minutes.” She reset the timer, then put out plates of fine china, Waterford drinking goblets and linen napkins.
“You don’t have to bring out your best for us,” I said. “A paper plate and a plastic cup apiece would be fine.”
Lillian arched one eyebrow as she looked at me. “Jennifer, how can it be a party if we treat it like it’s so commonplace?”
Sara Lynn was still staring at the note when I looked over at her. There had to be some way to get my sister out of her funk. I thought furiously of all the things that had worked in the past, but none of them seemed appropriate tonight. Finally, I decided to let her have her silent introspection. After all, if Bailey really was gone, she had something worth mourning. While I wouldn’t have been able to live with the man for more than fifteen minutes without wanting to beat him to death with his television remote control, he and Sara Lynn had found a happy balance in their lives together, and I knew my sister would be devastated by her marriage’s demise no matter what the circumstances. I lifted my eyebrows as I looked at Lillian, hoping that she could make things better, but she just shrugged as the timer went off again. Putting on an air of false buoyancy, Lillian said, “It’s time to indulge.”
As she lifted crumbling fragments of brownie out of the pan, I was there with a knife, ready to slather on the frosting. The brownies were from a boxed mix and the icing was in a plastic container, but I didn’t care. They smelled delicious, and besides, who had the time to make them from scratch anymore?
After Lillian had filled our plates and I had topped the brownies with an ample layer of milk chocolate icing, we took our treats to the table and sat down.
Our hostess said, “I’d offer you ice cream, but all I have at the moment is peach, and I’m not sure how it would go with our main course. Would anyone like coffee?”
“Not me,” I said. “I want milk.”
“Sara Lynn?” Lillian asked.
“Whatever you’re having will be fine with me,” she said absently.
Lillian and I did our best to make it a party, but Sara Lynn was only half there, and soon after we ate, she excused herself and went off to the lavender bedroom.
As I helped Lillian clean up, I asked, “Is there anything we can do for her? I hate seeing Sara Lynn like this.”
Lillian said, “Goodness knows I’ve been through more than my fair share of divorces over the years. All I can say is they seem to get a little easier as you go along—not that that particular advice would do her much good right now. She’s going to have to work her way through it by herself. All we can do is support her in any way we can.”
As I rinsed the dishes Lillian washed in the sink, I said in a low voice, “Can you believe he robbed her on the way out?”
“So you don’t think it could have happened months ago?”
“Lillian, it’s a good story, but I’m not buying it.
Those lights were on for a reason. I’m betting that Bailey wanted her to know exactly what he was doing.”
Lillian frowned as she handed me a glass. I hated the thought of dropping one, knowing that I couldn’t afford to replace it without depleting the entire contents of my slim bank account.
“There’s something we haven’t considered,” she finally said. “Maybe he needed it tonight to escape.”
“Escape from what?” I asked. “A bad marriage? Five hundred bucks wouldn’t help him do that.”
“You’re forgetting something, Jennifer. If Sara Lynn is right and Bailey was having an affair with Eliza, is it possible he killed her and needed the money to run away?”
I nearly dropped the glass I was rinsing. “Honestly, can you see Bailey murdering anyone?”
Lillian shrugged. “Some people have a surprising way of fooling those closest to them. If you hadn’t heard it from Sara Lynn herself, could you ever have imagined Bailey would cheat on her, especially with Eliza Glade?”
I thought about it for nearly a minute before I spoke. “No, it’s still hard for me to believe, but I once heard Bradford say that given the right circumstances, anyone could commit murder.”
“I believe it,” Lillian said.
“You honestly think Bailey could have done it?” I couldn’t imagine my brother-in-law displaying anything that resembled that kind of passion or anger.
“I’m not just talking about him anymore,” Lillian said as her gaze drifted back toward the lavender bedroom.
I was just glad I didn’t have anything in my hands at the time or I would have surely dropped it. “You’re not suggesting Sara Lynn killed her, are you? I don’t believe it—not for a second.”
“Calm down, Jennifer, I don’t believe it either. But your brother is going to have to consider the possibility, whether she’s related to him or not. Sara Lynn is going to be under his microscope, and so is Bailey.”
“Then the two of us have to figure out who really killed Eliza,” I said resolutely.
“Surely your brother is capable of doing that himself,” Lillian protested.
“He is, but how long will Sara Lynn’s reputation last if Bradford doesn’t wrap this up quickly? Her business could die before the truth comes out, if there’s a suspicion that she’s a murderer. We can’t let that happen. We have to uncover the truth, and we have to do it quickly.”
“I’m in,” Lillian said as we finished the dishes. “But where do we start?”
“Let’s make a list of who had a reason to want Eliza dead,” I said, then hastily added, “besides my sister and her husband, that is.”
“We can skip them for now,” Lillian agreed, “but that doesn’t
mean we can just forget about them.”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” I said, unwilling to accept the possibility that Sara Lynn, or even Bailey, could be a murderer. That was, along with a thousand other reasons, why I would have made a terrible cop. I let my emotions influence my thought process too much. Honestly, though, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Lillian looked around, then said, “I wish I had our white board from the store. It’s so much easier when we can see our ideas printed out. Wait a second, I’ve got an idea.”
She left me for a minute, and I stayed right where
I was. With everything that had happened today, I hadn’t had time to dwell on my own problems. Thanks to my nutty landlord, I was going to have to find a new place to live. The fact that Hester was also evicting my neighbors Barrett and Jeffrey didn’t help, though the two of them had found their own ways to make my life less than idyllic. So where could I go? I knew Lillian would take me in, but we spent enough time together at the card shop. I doubted either one of us could take cohabitating as well. Bradford and his family would give me a place to sleep, but I’d fought most of my life to get out on my own, and I wasn’t going to surrender it so easily. I’d find a place again. After all, I had some time. How hard could it be?
Lillian came back in with a large mirror and eyeliner. “Have you completely lost your mind?” I asked.
“Hey, I’ve left many a message this way in the past. Most of my ex-husbands found it charming.”
“I just bet they did,” I said.
Lillian wrote suspect, motive, means, and opportunity on the mirror. Below those, she listed the names of the people my brother had talked to tonight. I knew there could be more suspects than that, but we had to somehow limit our list to less than the telephone book for all of Rebel Forge. She wrote the names Addie Mason, Luke Penwright, Polly Blackburn and Kaye Jansen down the left side of the mirror.
I nodded as she worked. “So we’re looking at everyone who admitted to seeing Eliza tonight.”
“Yes, but I’m missing someone,” Lillian said as she studied the list.
“Beth Anderson?” I asked, half in jest.
“Exactly,” Lillian said.
As she added the waitress’s name, I said, “I wasn’t serious. What possible reason would she have to kill Eliza?”
Lillian refused to strike the name. “Don’t be so naive, Jennifer. Eliza could make an enemy faster than Stephen King can give you nightmares. We shouldn’t cross her off our list until we can prove she’s innocent.”
“Then let’s see what we do know,” I said. “Let’s take Addie. Can you honestly see her killing Eliza? They’ve been partners for years.”
“What better reason could she have?” Lillian said. “That woman would drive a saint to murder. I wonder what happens to Eliza’s share of Heaven Scent now that she’s dead.”
I shrugged. “I’d think it would go to her estate.”
“Don’t be so hasty in that assumption,” Lillian said. “A lot of partners leave their stake in their companies to their co-owners so the business can keep on operating. We need to look into that.”
“And how do you propose we do that?” My aunt had an underground network of sources and information that would have astounded Bradford, but I didn’t see how she could find that out.
“We’re simply going to ask her,” Lillian said. “I think we should pay her a social call after work tomorrow to give her our sympathies in losing her business partner. You can make her a lovely card, and it will be the perfect excuse to deliver it.”
“You could make her one yourself,” I said.
Lillian frowned. “I doubt she’d appreciate my humor. This calls for a more conventional card than my offerings. One of yours would be perfect.” I’d encouraged Lillian to indulge her wicked sense of humor and start her own card corner in my shop. While her dark sentiments weren’t appropriate for everyone who came into the card shop, she certainly had developed a rather loyal fan base for her wit.
“You’re probably right,” I said. “But I can’t do it after work. I’m having dinner with Gail and her new boyfriend.” Gail was my best friend in the world. I couldn’t imagine my life without her in it.
“Just the three of you?” Lillian asked. “How cozy.”
I’d been avoiding telling my aunt about my dinner plans for tomorrow night, but it was time to get it over with. “Actually, Gail’s boyfriend, Reggie, is inviting an old college roommate to be my dinner companion. We’re going to his mother’s house in High Meadows.”
“That’s so very cosmopolitan of you. Very well, if we can’t do it after work, we’ll take a long lunch and close the card shop.”
I stared at my aunt, not able to believe that she was letting me off the hook that easily. “That’s it? No third degree? I expected at least a water torture to pry more details from me.”
“Please, Jennifer, your social schedule isn’t all that great a concern to me.”
“Since when?” I asked. She’d done everything in her power to fix me up with an eligible young man, and now suddenly she was backing off. What was going on here?
“Don’t flatter yourself, child. I’ve got more important things to think about.” She tapped the next name on our list. “Luke was there tonight, though I didn’t realize he was a member of the chamber. I wonder how he managed an invitation. Or did he just crash the party to see Eliza?”
“Bradford will find out,” I said, confident in my brother’s abilities to follow all of the orthodox clues. He came up a little short sometimes only when the killer used real imagination—something he assured me was rarer in reality than the mysteries I liked to read.
Lillian frowned, then asked, “Why would he kill her, though? I’ve been under the impression that for some unfathomable reason, the man was still in love with his ex-wife.”
“Don’t you think any of your exes are pining away for you?” I asked, only half joking. My aunt could cast a spell on a man that made him lose his senses completely.
“I’d be terribly disappointed if any of them have gotten over me,” she said with an utterly straight face.
“So he wouldn’t kill her,” I said. “Not while he still had hope.”
“But did he? Eliza was seeing Bailey. Perhaps Luke took that as a threat.”
I shook my head. “That might explain it if Bailey was the victim, but not Eliza.”
Lillian frowned. “We’ll come back to him later, then.”
She moved her pencil to the next names on the list. “Polly and Kaye both hated her, but did either one of them despise the woman enough to drive a letter opener into Eliza’s chest? That speaks of a certain level of passion I have difficulty seeing either one of them attain.”
I thought about what I knew of the women in question. Polly had visited the card shop twice since we’d opened, and though I’d tried to entice her to try her hand at crafting her own cards, she’d opted both times for a ready-made offering. While I enjoyed the profit margin of selling cards Lillian and I made, I was always proselytizing, trying to share just how much fun card making was with my clientele. She’d flatly refused, though, so I’d dropped the matter. As for Kaye, while she hadn’t been in my shop, she had visited Sara Lynn’s a time or two when I’d worked there. I’d found the woman abrupt and condescending, but I didn’t know if I could see her as a murderer.
“So what do we do next?” I asked, as Sara Lynn walked out in her pajamas and a robe.
At least the back of the mirror faced her, and not the front. I sprayed the glass with some cleaner Lillian had brought out to correct any mistakes we might make, and then wiped away the evidence of our notes I with a paper towel as Sara Lynn approached. She noticed me working on the mirror and said, “It’s a little late for housecleaning, isn’t it?”
“I just wanted to touch it up a little,” I said as I handed the glass cleaner back to Lillian. “There, I think that got it. Thanks, that smudge was bugging me.
Lillian
laughed, and though I could tell it was forced, I wasn’t sure Sara Lynn could. Working closely with my aunt over the past several months had taught me the nuances of her actions and tones of voice better than I’d ever learned around her in the past. “I’m hoping Jennifer finds something unsettling about the hall carpet. I’ve been meaning to run the vacuum for the past three days, but I just never manage to get around to it.”
She’d been teasing, but Sara Lynn was a demon of a cleaner. “Is your vacuum still in the closet over there?”
“Dear, I was just trying to be amusing. Failing at it, too, I might add.”
“I don’t mind,” Sara Lynn said as she retrieved the vacuum and had the hall runner clean in no time. “Now, that’s better, isn’t it?” she said as she surveyed the results.
“Absolutely,” Lillian said.
Sara Lynn said, “I just wanted to come out and wish you two a good night. Lillian, thank you for having us.”
“You can stay as long as you’d like,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“That reminds me. Jennifer, did you tell her the news?”
“What news is that?” I asked, hoping Sara Lynn wasn’t going to bring up my living arrangements. I didn’t want to fight that particular battle, especially not this late.
“Jennifer’s being evicted,” Sara Lynn said, and I saw Lillian’s face cloud up.
“What are you talking about?”
There was no escaping it now. I brought her up-to-date, and before I could stop her, she was reaching for her telephone. “Don’t, Lillian, I can handle this.”
“I got you hooked up with Hester Taylor, and I’m not about to let her throw you out on the street like this.”
There was no arguing with Lillian, so I kept my thoughts to myself as she punched in her friend’s telephone number. After a minute she hung up without saying a word. “I got her machine. Can you believe it? She’s already gone, spouting some nonsense about moving to the Florida Keys.”
