Murder Among Friends (The Kate Austen Mystery Series)

by Jonnie Jacobs

  I grabbed a towel, wrapped it around her hand, led her to a chair and eased her head down between her legs to keep her from fainting.

  “Stay like that,” I said. “You’ll feel better in a minute or so. In the interim, I’m going to take a look at your hand.”

  I wet a couple of clean paper towels, then unwrapped the cloth from around her hand and dabbed at the wound. There were two gashes, both long, but neither particularly jagged nor as deep as I’d feared. And there didn’t appear to be any splinters of glass lodged in her skin. I pressed a dry paper towel into her palm.

  “It’s not as bad as it looked at first,” I told her. “I don’t think you’re going to need stitches, but it will probably hurt for a while.”

  Libby clutched the towel in her fist.

  “Why don’t you try sitting up and see how it goes.” She raised her head. Most of the color had returned to her face, but her expression was still marked by distress.

  “How’s it feel?”

  Tiny rivulets of tears snaked down each cheek.

  “Does it hurt a lot?”

  She shook her head and hiccupped.

  I sat beside her and gave her a hug. “I’m sorry about what I said. It wasn’t you I was upset with. I guess I just had a bad day.”

  She wiped her tears with the back of her hand and hiccupped again. “Me too.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  A shrug. “Lots of little stuff, like I lost my French book and got a D on my history test.”

  I murmured something sympathetic.

  “And some of the kids at school started saying I was like, you know, a death star. Anybody gets too close to me dies. They’d give me these funny looks and move away whenever I got near.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”

  “And then at lunch I called my dad. He made a big deal the other day about how I’m his own flesh and blood and how I shouldn’t shut him out of my life... so I called him to tell him about Brandon.” Another hiccup and then she burst into tears. “Do you know what he did? I told him about the train and that Brandon was dead, and he... he put me on hold. Like I was some goddamn salesman or something.” She covered her face with her good hand and sobbed.

  No words of reassurance came to mind that didn’t ring totally false.

  “I hate him,” she said. “I really, truly hate him. He’s the one who never thinks about anybody but himself.”

  “I didn’t mean that, Libby, honestly. It was a nasty remark for me to make.” I brushed the hair out of her eyes and handed her a tissue.

  “You know what he said when he introduced me to Bambi the first time? He said, ‘she’s someone very special to me and I love her more than I ever believed possible.’ ”

  “That’s nice. See, he does care about you.”

  A fresh torrent of tears made their way down Libby’s face. “No, you don’t understand. He was talking about Bambi, not me. He’s never once told me he loves me. Not ever.”

  Chapter 29

  I’m always impressed by the curative powers of a good night’s sleep. Even a bad night’s sleep, which was all I got, seemed to do the trick. Libby’s spirits, also, were brighter by morning. Only Anna remained in a funk, and that was largely my fault. I’d made the mistake of reminding her that she was going over to Jodi’s later that day.

  “She never wants to do anything,” Anna whined, looking up from her dinosaur coloring book. “She doesn’t even talk, she just sits there looking like a dope.”

  “Claire told me Jodi’s excited about having you over.”

  Anna looked at me. “Really, Mom,” she said, sounding remarkably like Libby. She picked up one of her new fluorescent pink crayons and began outlining the strong body of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. “You know Claire was just saying that because she’s supposed to. That’s what mothers do.”

  “I know no such thing. Anyway, it will just be for a couple of hours and I’ve got some errands to run.”

  Anna exchanged pink for purple, and gave Tyrannosaurus Rex stripes. “Why can’t Libby stay with me?”

  “Because,” I explained, “Libby has plans of her own.” She was going to be spending the day with Sharon, first going over some legal issues, and then shopping. I was hoping Sharon would find time to fit in a hefty dose of supportive counseling as well.

  When the appointed hour arrived, Anna wasn’t any more enthusiastic than she had been earlier. I walked her to Claire’s door and whispered a warning in her ear before nudging her inside. I had to admit there was a part of me that understood her lack of enthusiasm for the arrangement. Jodi, who stood down the hall a good ten feet from the door, eyed Anna silently and solemnly without a flicker of interest. And although she went through all the proper motions, Claire’s welcome wasn’t a whole lot warmer.

  “What time do you want me to come pick her up?” I asked, when the girls had finally disappeared into a back room.

  “No hurry,” Claire said. “I thought I’d take them to McDonald’s for lunch if that’s all right with you.”

  “It’s fine.” At least Anna wouldn’t view the visit as a complete loss.

  Claire leaned against the door jam, stuck a hand in her sweater pocket, and scowled at the thick cover of clouds overhead. “This weather’s really something, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “It’s not usually this bad for this long.”

  She glanced in the direction of Mona’s house. “It seems funny, this woman wanting to meet with you. A student of Mona’s, out of the blue.”

  “I have to admit I’m curious.”

  “She didn’t say what it was about5”

  “Not really. She’s been out of town so Mona’s death is new to her. I think she just wanted someone to talk with about it. I’ll let you know when I pick up Anna.”

  “Yes, do. I’m curious too.”

  <><><>

  When I got to the cafe, a woman was standing by the entrance, gazing into the parking lot. She cocked her head expectantly as I approached.

  “Eve Fisher?” I asked.

  She smiled and offered a hand. “And you must be Kate. I really appreciate your meeting me like this.”

  Eve was not the mousy, timid soul of advanced years I had pictured. Although her hair was mostly gray, it was styled in a fashionable blow-dry feather cut, and her face, though etched with experience, was earnest and attentive. She wore fashionable wool slacks and a sweater, with a yellow and black scarf knotted around her neck. She looked more like she belonged on the pages of McCalls than in a news article on women with controlling husbands.

  “I felt so bad about dropping Ms. Sterling’s class without explaining,” Eve said. “Especially after... well, after she was so nice to me.” We moved inside, found a table by the window and ordered. “I tried to write her a note before we left town, but things were so rushed, and I thought I’d have a chance to explain once we got back. Unfinished business is so...,” she drew in a breath, “so untidy.”

  Our coffee and muffins arrived. Eve stirred a packet of Sweet and Low into her cup, took a sip, and began peeling the wrapper from her muffin. “I shouldn’t really be having the muffin. I gained five pounds on our cruise. Eat, eat, and eat. That’s about all I did, that and soak up the sun.”

  It sounded nice, especially the sun part. “Where’d you go?”

  “The Caribbean. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years, but Ike, my husband, always said that. . . well, he was never very enthusiastic. Then one day, out of the blue, he shows up with tickets.” She laughed, looked embarrassed and picked up her coffee cup. “Oh, I know why he did it. I’m not stupid. But it was sweet of him nonetheless.”

  She set the cup down. “That’s what Ms. Sterling couldn’t understand, and why I feel so bad I never got a chance to explain. Ike never liked my taking classes at the college, but when I started working on my degree, he got really upset. I think he felt threatened, like maybe I was going to pass him up in some way, decide I didn’t need him. Or maybe it was just cha
nge that scared him. In any case, he kept getting more and more agitated. He even went storming into school one day and yelled at poor Ms. Sterling. I was so embarrassed when I found out.”

  Eve’s cheeks grew pink, as though she were embarrassed now, at the memory. “I couldn’t believe he’d actually done something like that. Anyway, Ms. Sterling called me the next day, not angry at all, but worried and very supportive. She went out of her way to offer help, and I know what she must think . . . uh, must have thought when I never came back. That I let myself be bought off for a cruise.”

  “Didn’t you?” It was so close to what I’d thought myself that the words came on their own.

  It didn’t appear, however, that Eve took affront. “I suppose from Mona’s perspective I did, but that’s not the way I see it. You’ve got to understand that I’m fifty-eight years old. I’m not about to change the world or charge off in pursuit of some fancy new career. In the scheme of things, a college degree isn’t all that important to me. It was more like a hobby. I know Ike comes on like a raging bull sometimes, but he’s actually not such a bad guy, and on balance I’d rather have him happy than angry.”

  “But if it’s something you enjoy—”

  “There are other things I enjoy.” She paused and offered me a feeble smile. “I wasn’t such a hot student anyway, if you want to know the truth. Not that Ms. Sterling was ever anything but encouraging. For instance, I wrote this simply awful paper about a woman who’d lost a child. We read our papers aloud to the class, so I know how much better the others were, but Ms. Sterling acted like she was really interested. You don’t find many teachers like her.”

  I found myself intrigued by the same question I’d had when I’d read the assignment that day at Mona’s. “Was it based on your own personal experience?”

  A little laugh. “Goodness, no. My children are all healthy and happy, knock on wood. Of course they’re grown now. In fact, I was visiting my daughter in St. Louis when the idea for the piece came to me. We were supposed to take a news item and go beyond the facts, write a poem or sketch which dealt with the emotions underlying the event. There was a story in the Sunday paper about missing children that got my attention.

  “You hear so much these days about kidnappings and abductions. It’s front-page news for a day or a week, but then it’s over and the media’s on to the next case. I can’t help but wonder about the families, how they cope year after year with such a terrible loss. Can you imagine how awful it must be?”

  Indeed I could. These past few weeks the thought had never been far from my mind.

  “Anyway, this article was based on interviews with families of missing children. It was very moving. I used it as the basis for my assignment, but I turned in the original article as well as my own because I knew my piece didn’t begin to do justice to the subject.”

  I remembered the folded section of the St. Louis Post- Dispatch the cops had found that day at Mona’s. It must have been the one Eve gave her.

  “Most teachers wouldn’t have given it a second thought, but Ms. Sterling was genuinely interested. She wanted to know if I was acquainted with any of the families personally and how I’d come across the article in the first place. It’s because she was so helpful and encouraging that I feel just awful about dropping her class the way I did, without any explanation. Of course Ike says she probably just wanted to use the information to her own advantage, like maybe she’d interview the McNevitts herself and write her own article, for money.”

  I choked on the piece of muffin I’d just plopped into my mouth. “McNevitt?”

  “That’s the name of the family I focused my paper on. Ted and Laurie McNevitt. Their daughter Madelaine was kidnapped at six months. Her twin sister had a doctor’s appointment that day, otherwise she might have been the one abducted. Think how that must weigh on the poor child all her life.”

  I agreed it was pretty terrible, but what tugged at my mind most was the name. Laurie McNevitt, the woman who’d left several messages on Mona’s machine, who’d practically pleaded for a return call. About an interview? It didn’t make sense.

  The waitress came by offering refills on our coffee. We both declined. As we left, Eve said, “You were awfully sweet to agree to meet me. I know it’s silly, but this whole mess with Ike and Ms. Sterling made me feel terribly guilty. I feel so much better now that I’ve unburdened myself.”

  I assured Eve that I’d enjoyed talking with her, which was the truth. What I didn’t tell her, was that our conversation had left me feeling curiously more burdened. Maybe it was the timing of our meeting, coming as it had in the wake of my recent anxiety about kidnappers, or maybe it was the memory of despair in Laurie McNevitt’s voice. Whatever the reason, Eve’s tale clung to me like the shadow of an unpleasant dream. What if it was some kind of omen, a warning from the misty regions beyond? I didn’t believe in such things, but I was suddenly seized by a sensation of dread, a sort of free-floating chill that turned my bones to ice.

  I found a phone and called Claire to tell her I’d be a bit late. When no one answered, I left a message, then headed for the county library. I was hoping that with a trip to McDonald’s under her belt, Anna wouldn’t mind spending a little extra time at Jodi’s.

  The newspaper and periodical room was more crowded than it had been mid-week, so I had to wait for a microfiche machine. And then I had to find a librarian to show me once again how to use the dam thing. Some of us were simply not destined to live in a high-tech era.

  I knew the article had appeared on a Sunday, and I figured it had to have been sometime after the first of the year, since Eve wouldn’t have been in Mona’s class before that. But since I didn’t know the exact date, I had to run the spool fast forward from week to week, a process which left me cross-eyed and slightly nauseated. At last, though, I found it.

  I skimmed through the page until I found the name McNevitt. The writer talked first about the abduction. Jennifer McNevitt, then six months old, had woken up with a high fever. Her mother made a doctor’s appointment, leaving Jennifer’s twin sister, Madelaine, with a baby sitter. The sitter had taken the child to a nearby park where she apparently met her boyfriend. What sort of activity the two of them were engaged in wasn’t made clear, but when the sitter finally thought to check on the baby, she was gone. There were no witnesses, no leads. Although the sitter had been a suspect initially, she’d been cleared.

  The McNevitts had been young, without a lot of resources, but the community had rallied to help, putting up reward money, sending out flyers, fielding calls on possible leads. For the first couple of weeks, the papers had followed every development. The McNevitt name had appeared, in one form or another, almost daily. And then, as Eve had so aptly noted, the story had grown old and faded from attention.

  In the interview, Laurie McNevitt talked about the anguish she experienced, the waning hope, as lead after lead went nowhere, as the authorities cut back on their search and the press coverage dried up. For a while, she said, the pain was unbearable, burning inside her like a red-hot iron. It was still there, she explained, but more like an ember that would flare, suddenly and unexpectedly, into four-alarm panic. The hardest thing, she said, was not knowing.

  Tears gathered in my eyes as I looked at a picture of the family. Mother, father, Jennifer, and a baby boy who’d been born since the tragedy. A picture-perfect family, except for the black hole at the center of their lives. I flipped onto the next screen for the conclusion of the piece. There at the bottom of the page was a color close- up of Jennifer, the twin on whom the gods had chosen to smile.

  I felt my heart rise into my throat as recognition slammed through me.

  Jennifer was a carbon copy of Jodi.

  Chapter 30

  It doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it does, I told myself. Doesn’t everybody have a double somewhere in the world? Or maybe Claire and Laurie McNevitt are related, second cousins in a family where nearly all the girls are curly redheads.

 
I tried to convince myself the similarity was simply coincidence, but deep down I knew it wasn’t. The resemblance was too striking for the girls to be anything but twins. Jodi Jorgensen was Madelaine McNevitt, the six-month-old baby who’d disappeared five years ago from a St. Louis suburb. Claire had told me she’d grown up in southern Illinois, left five years ago and never returned. She claimed to be a widow, yet didn’t have a single picture of her late husband. Nor did she ever speak of his family. Jodi’s birth certificate listed her mother’s name as Wilhelmina, which is a long way from Claire. And it listed her birthplace as Boston, which Claire had told me was a short stay. I was willing to bet she’d gone there simply to pick up a birth certificate for the baby she was claiming as her daughter. Besides, Jodi didn’t look anything at all like Claire. Not in build, coloring, or features.

  My head felt light, disconnected, as though I were peering the wrong way through a pair of binoculars. My throat had closed up so tight I was having trouble breathing, and my skin felt several sizes too small. I tried rewinding the microfiche but my hands were shaking and I had trouble working the machine. It made a shrill screeching sound, which brought the librarian running.

  She scowled, then saw the expression on my face. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, pushing back my chair and causing yet another loud racket “Suddenly I don’t feel so well.”

  As I took off for the door, I struggled with a second harrowing thought. Had Mona seen what I’d seen, come to the same conclusion I had? She’d taken snapshots of Jodi and had tried getting in touch with Laurie McNevitt. She must have known.

  Had Claire somehow gotten wind of that fact? Was she a murderer on top of everything else?

  With a deepening sense of dread, I realized how neatly the pieces fit. Claire didn’t drink, so it would make sense that she’d grab whatever liquor bottle she could find without thought as to the contents. She worked at a nursing home, so she probably had access to morphine. And since she lived on the property, nobody would have thought twice about seeing her there that night.