At the first opportunity, I went over to Ben Lillydale and crouched beside his desk. His big blue eyes met mine, and I said, “I’m really sorry, Ben. The last thing I wanted to do was upset your parents and ruin your party.”
He looked away and pushed his chair back from his desk. “They’re always mad. It’s not your fault.”
Before I could think of a response, he found an excuse to head across the room and left me sitting on my heels by his desk, trying not to cry.
The four of us arrived at my mother’s house at three p.m. As anticipated, the children were so excited it was all I could do to disguise my own emotional state from them. It just didn’t seem fair to them to have me upset over that insane, nasty exchange I’d had with the Lillydales.
I immediately checked the tray on my machine for more faxes from Simon. To my pleasant surprise, I had received a fax from a prospective customer. A woman requested an idea for a bon voyage card for some friends going to Yellowstone.
I had a half hour till Simon would arrive, and there was no telling when I’d have another opportunity to work-no doubt the kids would find me soon. I drew a family hunched together in their car, the man and children looking scared out of their wits as an enormous bear on the roof of the car is scraping at the windows. The mother, however, looks calm as she snaps her fingers and says, “Oh, shoot! I just remembered I forgot to have our mail held.”
I had just finished inking the cartoon when the power went out. A few seconds later the power returned. But my mother called, “Molly? Can you come upstairs please?” Judging from her quaking voice, all was not well.
A moment later, I discovered the cause of my mother’s distress. While I’d been working on my drawing, Karen and Nathan had gotten their summer vacation off in typical sibling style: Nathan had spit his gum into Karen’s hair. She retaliated. I now had two sobbing kids, with gum wads firmly enmeshed in their hair, screaming and threatening each other.
We separated the children, and my mother unceremoniously snipped the gum out of Nathan’s hair while I used the ice-cube method on Karen. I’d heard that peanut butter works well, but neither Karen nor I were especially anxious to give that one a whirl. We opted to keep the children as far apart as possible and sent Nathan into the backyard while Karen went upstairs to take a shower.
Afterward, it occurred to me that Simon was forty minutes late. I called his house, but got no answer. Since the man almost never left his house, that must mean he was en route. Sure enough, the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it, Mom,” I called. I swung the door open without looking through the window first. To my surprise, it was Lauren, looking tense. Her nose was still red and chafed, but her eyes looked a little brighter, as if she were starting to recover from her cold.
I greeted her and looked past her shoulder. “I’m expecting my next-door neighbor, Simon Smith. He was supposed to be here over half an hour ago.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Lauren said somberly, maintaining her post in front of Mom’s doorway. “What do you mean?”
“I got a call from Tommy. He checked your house and realized you weren’t home. He asked me to come see you and make sure you were all right.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Simon Smith had an accident. He was on a ladder and fell onto the high-voltage wires. He’s dead.”
Chapter 14
We lost the Duck a l’Orange
Lauren’s stunning announcement gave me a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. Simon Smith was dead. I had just spoken to him a couple of hours ago.
Why was he up on some ladder when he was supposed to be here? Had someone murdered him to stop him from giving me incriminating evidence?
“Are the police calling it an accident?”
Lauren nodded. “Tommy said that, by all appearances, Simon simply lost his balance.”
“Simon Smith? “ my mother asked from behind me.
She’d been in the kitchen, but she had obviously overheard our conversation and had wandered in to learn more. “Molly, wasn’t he that evil little man who’d been spying on you?”
“He wasn’t evil, Mom,” I immediately fired back. “He just had a few loose screws.”
“Maybe so, but he kept pawing me after Joey Newton fired that Beebe gun at me.” Mom furrowed her brow. “He claimed he was just trying to help me brush the dirt off my clothes.”
“Well, he’s dead now, so let’s give him a break.”
Lauren gestured toward her house and said, “I guess ‘I’d better—”
“Thanks for telling me, Lauren. Would you like to come in for a while?”
I knew Lauren felt the slight tension between my mother and me. “No, I need to get back to Rachel. She’s so excited about school being out she’s bouncing off the walls. You know how that goes.”
Needing to get away for a moment, I said, “I’ll walk you out,” and led the way outside. Part of me knew I couldn’t blame my mother for her callousness over Simon’s death. After all, I had never said anything nice about him to her. With good reason.
But now that I knew I’d never speak to him again, my thoughts returned to his telling me so forlornly, “I got nothing left. Just my reputation.” I battled feelings of guilt, remorse, and fear. Accidental falls could easily be faked. If someone had killed Simon to prevent him from’ presenting me with evidence, where could that leave me , except as the next intended victim?
I stood on the sidewalk with Lauren, the late-afternoon sun beating down on us. She put her hand on my arm and said, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. This is just such a shock.” I winced and added, “No pun intended.” I stared in the direction of my cul-de-sac. “I have to talk to Tommy. Simon said he was going to give me some information about Helen Raleigh’s killer. That’s why he was coming over to Mom’s to meet with me.”
“So he died minutes before he was going to give you some evidence?”
I nodded.
Lauren searched my face for a moment. Her pretty features bore deep worry lines. “Molly, please stay out of this. Lock yourself and your family in your parents’ house and don’t come out until the killer’s behind bars.”
“I can’t do that. I have information that will help the investigation. Simon could have climbed up to his roof to retrieve evidence he’d hidden there that could identify the killer.”
“I guess you do need to talk to Tommy.” Lauren pursed her slightly chapped lips and ran her fingers through her hair. “Why don’t you send Karen and Nathan over to my house? Rachel would love it.”
“Okay. Thanks. But whatever you do, don’t let them near any chewing gum.”
Lauren did a double take at that, but then merely took me at my word. I dashed back inside, told Mom what I was up to, gathered up the children, ushered them over to Lauren’s, and headed off.
Minutes later, I surveyed the “crime scene.” The police had cordoned off Simon Smith’s house with the yellow and black-lettered plastic tape that I was altogether too familiar with by now. The tape ran from the front corner of Simon’s privacy fence on our side, around a maple tree on Simon’s front lawn, to his petunia-adorned lamppost, his mailbox, some other less-recognizable type of tree on the far side of the lawn, to the front corner of the fence on the Abbotts’ property line.
Since Simon had apparently been fiddling with the fascia at the side of his house, the “accident” scene itself would be within Simon’s privacy fence. I wished I could see for myself what was. going on over there. Though if Simon had been in the process of retrieving some evidence, odds were the killer had taken it from him. And even if Simon had died while clutching some major clue—such as a piece of paper that read; “The name of the murderer is..:” Sergeant Tommy probably would notice it without my assistance. But still....
I walked slowly up to the foot of Simon’s walkway, where the baby-faced officer was standing guard. He remembered my first name and greeted me. I’d forgotten his name, but called him “Officer�
�� and asked if he could send Sergeant Newton over to my house as soon as possible.
Though it felt a bit voyeuristic, the first thing I did when I unlocked my front door was rush upstairs to my bedroom to look out the window at Simon’s side yard. The angle was such that I could see Simon’s lawn by the base of the house. There was nothing: no chalk lines, dead body, fallen ladder” Simon must have been on the opposite side of the house when this happened. Somehow that was slightly reassuring. My property wasn’t such a murder magnet after all. A death had occurred next door, yet alongside someone else’s property line.
The doorbell rang and I trotted down the stairs. It was Tommy, who immediately held up his hands as if to placate me. “Know what you’re about to say, and you’re wrong. This was an accident, Molly, not murder.”
I clicked my tongue as I opened the screen door for him. “You’ve already made your mind up? That’s not very good police technique, is it? Aren’t you supposed to keep an open mind?”
He gave a big sigh-as he entered. “Oh, I s’pose.” He shuffled over to the tan velour recliner that the children and I refer to as “the big chair” and plopped down. He looked tired, the front of his red hair damp with sweat. I crossed the room to the couch and took a seat myself.
He slowly met my eyes, as if out of obligation. “Okay, Moll. You tell me. How come you think Simon Smith was murdered?”
I gathered up Simon’s poem and the faxes he’d sent me, and explained about how I’d located the poem in a small opening in the floor in Karen’s room.
Tommy read everything twice, then said, “Let’s go take a look at this hiding place of yours.”
I led him upstairs to Karen’s room. Tommy whipped out a flashlight from his belt and shined the beam into the opening. “Guess I’d better get someone out here to enlarge this hole, just in case there’s somethin’ else hidden here.”
“No!” I shouted.
Tommy looked at me as if surprised by my outburst. “Sorry, but I’m putting my foot down while there’s still a floor to put it on. If you want to send someone out here with a periscope, that’s fine. But you’re not going to tear up my house. You’ve already bulldozed my yard. It looks like a dump out there.” This was my property, so I felt completely free to exaggerate.
“Fine. We’ll examine the house as unobtrusively as possible. With the understanding no one’s allowed to cut or drill any new holes without your knowledge.”
“Without my prior knowledge and consent.”
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever.” Tommy gave me a dismissive wave and led the way back downstairs.
As I trudged after him, I promised myself that nobody was coming into my home to look for evidence without my being present. “How do you think Simon wound up accidentally electrocuting himself?”
“He was boarding up the fascia where the cameras used to be. He apparently leaned out too far and the ladder tipped over. He grabbed on to the power lines that run past his house.”
“And this happened on the side facing the Abbotts, right?”
Tommy gave a small nod. “Apparently the ladder slid. He grabbed the wires for balance.”
“No way. It’s too enormous of a coincidence that he died right before he could give me something he claimed could identify Mr. Helen Raleigh’s killer.” In fact, Simon had merely told me he’d give me “real evidence.” Close enough. “Besides, he was an electronics whiz. He should have known he’d be better off falling from a ladder than grabbing a power line.”
“Molly, we get an accident like this every few years. I guarantee you, it’s the natural human reaction. You feel yourself falling, you grab hold of whatever you can. Even a high-voltage wire.”
“Maybe so, but someone could have pushed the ladder into the lines. The only people who might have been able to see over Simon’s fence to tell what really happened are the Abbotts. Have you talked to them yet?”
“We will as soon as they get home.”
Aha! They weren’t home! Those two popped up at all sorts of odd times to overhear snippets of my private conversations regarding Mr. Helen’s death. Then they managed to be gone when their neighbor died alongside their house. A little too convenient, in my opinion.
Tommy intercepted my thoughts and said, “Don’t go jumpin’ to conclusions.”
“ You’re the one who’s leapt to the conclusion that it was an accident.”
Tommy held up his palms. “All right, all right. It’s possible he was pushed, Molly. We’re lookin’ at the evidence. And if he was pushed, we’ll catch the guilty party.
But, Molly, you’ve got to accept the fact that it’s also possible it was just an accident.”
“No. It couldn’t have been an accident.”
“Why not?”
My voice was thick with barely suppressed emotion as
I replied, “Because he wouldn’t have been up there in the first place if it weren’t for my having insisted he remove the cameras.”
“That doesn’t make this your fault.”
I averted my eyes and stared out the window at Simon’s house. “Oh, no? Then why do I feel so guilty?”
After Tommy left, I sat on my porch chair on the deck, sipping an iced tea; trying to put my thoughts in order. I was so frustrated, I had to force myself to stay seated instead of pacing. Why hadn’t I insisted on hearing whatever Simon Smith had to say? Because, I answered myself, what rational person would believe that a real-life witness would actually die right before revealing the killer? That was the stuff of TV cop shows. And, in retrospect, there was no guarantee that Simon wasn’t merely blowing smoke. It would have been completely in keeping with his character to have manufactured evidence, simply to appease me and get his embarrassing poem back.
For that matter, Simon could have been Mr. Helen’s murderer: He could have been careless on that ladder because he felt so guilty, If so, Mr. Helen’s murder might never be officially solved.
My brow was furrowed as I mentally ran through the bizarre, tangled threads of clues. Who was the tall man in the fedora digging up my yard? Why were Sheila and Roger so angry at me? Out of the mire of unanswered questions came an idea for a cartoon. Pencils were always strewn around my house, and I spotted one on the other side of the glass patio table. I snatched it and began to draw on the nearest paper available—my napkin.
A couple dining out watches in surprise as a duck flies out of the kitchen, through the restaurant, and toward an open window. A snooty-looking waiter says, “The Duck a la Orange has apparently escaped. However, we offer an exquisite array of condiments for your dining pleasure.”
Afterward, I stared at my drawing, trying to decide what the cartoon said about my current state of mind. Perhaps I felt a bit like the flabbergasted woman in the restaurant-wondering what the heck was going on while my seemingly sane world goes topsy-turvy. Or maybe I felt like the duck, desperate to escape impending doom.
A flurry of motion in the bushes that lined my backyard caught the corner of my eye. I looked up, then gasped and barely stifled. a scream as someone suddenly burst through the woods and into my back lawn.
A man smiled and waved Wildly. “Molly! Hello! Betsy and I were just on a little stroll, when we happened to spot you.”
Bob Fender. That reminded me: I’d forgotten to tell Tommy Newton about him as a possible suspect.
Betsy appeared a step behind. While they tromped their way toward me, I scanned my immediate surroundings to see how I’d rate as far as conspicuous vegetable consumption went. I pocketed my pencil and napkin to spare myself a lecture about the wanton destruction perpetrated by the lumber industry. Were tea leaves harvested so that the roots were left intact? Probably. My tea-logged slice of lemon would also pass their inspection. Just so long as they weren’t currently lobbying for ice-cube rights. Mine were melting rapidly in the heat.
I forced a small smile, but didn’t rise from my position on the patio chair as the Fenders neared. “Bob. Betsy. This is a surprise. What brings you out to my little n
eck of the woods?”
“Oh, we often take little strolls after Bob gets done with work.” Betsy fluffed her curly, dull brown hair. They were wearing identical khaki shorts and shirts, with heavy hiking boots. They looked as though they were on a safari.
“Uh-huh,” I murmured, then recoiled. I was starting to sound a bit like Sergeant Tommy.
“There were quite a few police vehicles out here when we first walked by,” Bob said. The bristles of his unkempt mustache moved with the wind of his breath. “Is everything all right with you?”
Ignoring his question, I asked, “How long ago was this?”
Bob grabbed hold of the frame of his glasses and repositioned them, looking at Betsy inquisitively. “Maybe half an hour ago, wouldn’t you say, dear?”
“That’s about right. Neither of us wears a watch.”
“Why not? Does Timex exploit vegetables?”
A hurt look flashed across Betsy’s features.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s been a frazzling couple of hours. My next-door neighbor just had a fatal accident, an hour or so ago. You weren’t in the neighborhood at that time, were you?”
“No,” Bob said. “Why? What happened? Which neighbor?”
I gestured at Simon Smith’s property with a jerk of my head. Keeping an eye on Bob, I said carefully, “My neighbor fell into the power lines and was electrocuted.”
“Oh, dear,” Betsy said, clutching her hands to her chest. “The poor man.”
Gotcha! “How did you know it was a man?”
She and Bob exchanged nervous glances. “It...I just...assumed. You said your neighbor fell onto the power lines. What would a woman be doing on a tall ladder?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Taking down her Christmas lights, perhaps. Painting trim. Cleaning the gutters. I’ve climbed ladders for those reasons. Haven’t you?” In point of fact, my only motive for climbing onto our roof during the last few years had been to fetch objects the kids had thrown up there. But no sense muddling the gist of conversation.
Death of a Gardener (Book 3 Molly Masters Mysteries) Page 17
