“They did have a motive. Marie wasn’t exactly a pauper, and from what I understand, your father believed he was going to inherit half her estate.”
With a grunt, Adam said, “Well, if you talked to Dad, he’d say he was entitled to her entire estate because he was her only son. And while I don’t get along with him, I can’t believe he’d kill his mother over money.”
“Not even if he thought he might lose his half?”
Adam shook his head. “No way. I have issues with my parents, but cold-blooded killers for money? Never.”
“How did your brother feel about your grandmother’s threat to change her will?”
With a snort Adam said, “I think his girlfriend was more upset than him. Sure, he wasn’t opposed to the idea of inheriting a quarter of Grandma’s estate. But he would never kill her for it. My brother has never been into money. If he was, he wouldn’t have taken a crappy associate professor job after all those years of college. He’s the good one.”
“So the girlfriend was upset?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant he really was not upset over Grandma’s threat.”
“Was she?”
“Sondra?” Adam shrugged. “I suppose a little. But I can’t really blame her. If she’s marrying my brother, her chance for any fortune will probably have to come by way of an inheritance.”
Twenty-Four
Adam didn’t knock. He used his key and entered the front door of his grandmother’s house. As he stepped into the entry, he heard voices from down the hall. His father was in the living room talking on his cellphone; it sounded like a serious conversation involving his work. The other voices came from the kitchen.
Shoving his keys into his pocket, Adam shut the door behind him and made his way to the living room. He found his father pacing the room as he talked on his phone. Adam stood at the doorway for a moment, watching his father, who was unaware of Adam’s presence.
After a few moments, Warren noticed his son. He stared at Adam a moment and then said into the phone, “He’s here now. Let me see what I can do. I’ll get back with you.” Warren ended his call and set his cellphone on the coffee table.
“Dad, I need to talk to you and Mom. Also Jason and Sondra. Are they all here?”
“In the kitchen, but I need to talk to you first.” Dressed in gray slacks and a blue golf shirt, Warren approached his son.
Adam glanced down the hallway and then back to his father. “What about?”
“Do you have any idea what’s in your grandmother’s new will?”
Adam shrugged. “Not a clue. According to Melony, Grandma instructed her to wait until the day after her funeral for the will to be read.”
“This is ridiculous. I’m a little surprised your grandmother made that stipulation. I don’t recall her going for such theatrics. I suppose this means we have to wait until the reading of the will before we do anything with the estate—assuming, of course, your grandmother didn’t do anything foolish like leave her money to some charity or that Danielle Boatman.”
“Why would you think Grandma would leave her estate to Danielle? I have a feeling Danielle would be pretty annoyed at Grandma if she did something like that, and Grandma knew how Danielle felt.”
“What in the world are you talking about? Boatman is obviously an opportunist. She managed to inherit Marlow House from an aunt who isn’t even a blood relative, and she ended up with the gold that was found in Mother’s house. Gold that should have gone into Mother’s estate.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad. But I really need to speak to you and Mom. Please, can we go into the kitchen?”
“Fine,” Warren snapped as he grabbed his cellphone from the coffee table and shoved it into his pocket. He followed Adam into the kitchen.
“Sorry, Adam, you just missed breakfast,” Chloe said as she stood by the sink, filling the dishwasher, while Sondra wiped down the stove, and Jason put a new plastic liner into the trashcan.
“I need to talk to you all,” Adam announced. All eyes turned to him.
Jason sat down at the table. “Are you going to lecture us again about how rude we were to leave Marlow House when we did?”
“No. I came to tell you all the preliminary autopsy is done. Grandma was murdered.”
“You can’t be serious!” Warren blurted.
“I’m certainly not going to joke about something like this. I came over here to let you know you need to go down to the police station. They want to interview all of us.”
“Murdered? Grandma murdered? I can’t believe that. How?” Jason asked.
“Suffocation,” Adam said. “They believe she was smothered with her pillow. The chief just picked it up from me.”
“Picked up what from you?” Warren asked.
“Grandma’s pillow, the one she took with her. It was with her things that I picked up,” Adam explained.
“I don’t understand; why would they want the pillow?” Chloe asked.
“They believe it was the murder weapon. There was a feather found in her nasal passage,” Adam explained. “Seaside Village doesn’t have feather pillows, but the pillow Grandma brought with her from home does.”
“That doesn’t mean she was smothered,” Chloe snapped. “You hear about people getting strange things up their noses all the time. It doesn’t mean someone tried to kill them. She could have easily breathed in a loose feather from her pillow while she was sleeping. It doesn’t prove anything.”
“According to the chief, when a person is smothered with a pillow, it can leave a DNA pattern behind on the pillowcase. I guess where the eyes, nose, and mouth are,” Adam explained.
“You can’t be serious?” Sondra gasped.
Adam glanced at the kitchen clock. “You’ve got less than twenty minutes to get down to the station, or the chief is going to send someone over here to get you.”
“I don’t understand. I barely knew your grandmother, and I wasn’t even at the care home when she died. Why do they need to talk to me?” Sondra whined.
Adam shrugged. “I don’t know. But they want to talk to all of us.”
Chloe picked up the hand towel off the counter and wiped off her hands. She then tossed it on the counter and glared at Adam. “This is all your fault!”
“My fault? That someone murdered Grandma?” Adam asked.
“Don’t be obtuse! You requested that ridiculous autopsy for heavens knows why. Nobody killed Marie. Just because she has a feather up her nose doesn’t mean anyone killed her. The idea is ludicrous.”
“That’s not all they have, Mother,” Adam insisted.
“This is probably going to complicate things,” Warren murmured. “Until they know more, we probably can’t touch her estate.”
“Seriously, Dad, you just found out your mother was murdered and you’re worried about getting your hands on your inheritance?” Adam asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Your mother’s right, she wasn’t murdered. No one would want to kill your grandmother. You really did screw things up, boy,” Warren grumbled.
“Dad,” Jason said, “it’s obvious the police think one of us might have killed Grandma, since they want us to go down there.”
Chloe walked over to the far counter and picked up her purse. She turned to Jason. “Don’t be stupid. They obviously want to find out if we know who might have had a problem with your grandmother at the nursing home. While I don’t believe for a minute she was murdered, if the police seriously think she was smothered during the night, they obviously believe the killer was someone from the nursing home.”
“You really think so?” Sondra asked with a sigh of relief.
Chloe turned her attention to Sondra and said dryly, “Unless of course you snuck over there when you were supposed to be jogging, so you and Jason would have a little extra honeymoon money.”
“Did you find your pillow?” Sunny asked Chief MacDonald when he returned to the nursing home later Friday morning. She sat at the mai
n nurses’ station, doing bookwork.
“We found a pillow, not sure it’s the same one,” the chief told her.
“Do you seriously believe Mrs. Nichols was murdered? There has to be some kind of mistake,” Sunny said.
“It looks like it. I was wondering where I could find Herman Garcia.”
“Herman?” Sunny frowned.
“I understand he’s a nurse here?”
“Yes. He’s been with us for about six months. You don’t think he had anything to do with Mrs. Nichols’s death, do you? He doesn’t even work in the rehab area. I doubt they even met. She didn’t get out and socialize much, pretty much stayed in the rehab section.”
The chief glanced at the notepad in his hand. “I understand he helped move her body when the funeral home picked her up.”
“Oh, yes, he did. I forgot about that.”
“I just have a few questions for him,” he explained.
“Would you like to use my office?” Sunny offered.
“I’d appreciate that.” He closed his small notepad and slipped it into his shirt pocket.
“Let me see where he is.” Sunny picked up the desk phone.
“Thanks.”
When Sunny got off the phone a few minutes later, she said, “He’ll be about ten minutes. He’s just finishing with a patient. I told him to come to my office when he’s done.”
“Thank you, Sunny.”
“Would you like some coffee or something while you wait?” she offered.
“No. I’m fine, thanks.” He glanced at his watch.
“Umm…I’ve been meaning to ask you, have you heard from Carol Ann?”
“Carol Ann? No.” MacDonald shook his head. “That bridge has been burned.”
Sunny grimaced and then smiled guiltily. “I wrote her a letter a while back. I know she was wrong, but I just feel it was that brother of hers. He always had such control over her. He practically raised her.”
MacDonald shrugged. “She was your friend. You need to do what you think is right.”
“It didn’t really matter. She never wrote me back. I don’t take it personally. I feel she’s probably just embarrassed about what she did.”
Chief MacDonald and Herman Garcia reached Sunny’s office at the same time. Sunny had given the chief a key, so he opened the door and let them both in.
“I understand you were the one who helped the funeral home when they picked up Marie Nichols’s body,” the chief said after he shut the door and sat down behind Sunny’s desk. Herman sat in a chair facing him.
Herman nodded. “Yes.”
“From what I understand, you told them about Mrs. Nichols taking a fall the day before she died.”
Herman shrugged. “One of them asked me if there was anything I knew about the patient that wasn’t on her chart. Something that might have caused her death.”
“And you told them it might have been a fall?”
“No. I said I knew she’d taken a fall in the dining room the day before, but it wasn’t anything that would have killed her. Maybe bruised her up a little bit. It’s not like she hit her head or anything. She fell on her walker; it slammed into her chest.”
“You saw this happen?”
“No. I wasn’t even there when it happened. Candy told me. And I figured since it wasn’t in her chart, it must not have been a big deal.”
“Candy?”
“One of the other nurses.”
“Yes, I did tell Herman that.” Candy cringed. She had been called to Sunny’s office to talk with the police chief after he was finished interviewing Herman.
“So you saw Marie Nichols fall in the dining room?”
She shook her head. “I was wrong. I mean, someone did fall in the dining room, but it wasn’t Marie Nichols, it was Betty Nichols, one of the full-time patients. She got bruised up pretty bad when she tripped and fell, knocking over her walker. When Herman told me Mrs. Nichols had died during the night, I thought he meant Betty Nichols. I told him what had happened to her the day before.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t until I saw Betty Nichols when making my rounds—and about jumped out of my skin—did I realize it hadn’t been the same Nichols who had died.”
“Yes, we have a patient named Betty Nichols, why?” Sunny asked the chief when he stopped by the nurses’ station to return her office keys and ask about the patient who had fallen in the dining room.
“Do you know if she fell the day before Marie was killed?” he asked.
With a frown, Sunny considered the question a moment. Finally, she said, “Why yes. It happened in the dining room. Betty has a bad habit of pushing her walker away from her chair, so that when she stands up, it’s not where it needs to be. From what I understand, she stumbled and ended up knocking the walker over and falling on it. She got a nasty bruise on her chest. Why did you ask? Does this have something to do with Marie Nichols?”
“Marie had some bruising on her chest. The funeral home initially ignored the bruising, believing it was from the earlier fall.”
Sunny frowned. “Bruising? She was bruised?”
“Yes. Probably when her killer was holding her down.”
“Oh…my…” Sunny stammered.
Twenty-Five
“Hello, Chloe, it’s been a long time,” Brian Henderson greeted Adam’s mother when he entered the interrogation room. She sat alone at the table. Before leaving for the police station, Chloe had changed into navy capris and a white blouse, her black hair pulled up into a bun atop her head.
“Hello, Brian,” she said lazily as she leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs, folding her arms across her chest. “I suspect you’re the oldest one at the Frederickport Police Department—in years and tenure—but I see you never made it to chief?”
Brian forced a smile and sat down across from her at the table. “Good to see you too.”
With a bored sigh she asked, “Why am I being questioned in here? And was it really necessary to separate us? It’s not like any of us was responsible for my mother-in-law’s death. I certainly don’t believe that cockamamie story about her being murdered. She was ninety-one, for heaven’s sake.”
“Elderly people do get murdered,” he reminded her.
Chloe shrugged. “So what do you need to know?”
“When was the last time you saw your mother-in-law?”
Chloe shifted in her chair. “Monday night. We stopped in to visit her after dinner. Left about nine.”
“And you didn’t see her again?”
“I haven’t been back to Seaside Village since I left that night, so, no.”
“Where did you go after you left?”
“We went home.” Chloe shifted in her chair again. “Back to Marie’s house. That’s where we’ve been staying since we got in town.”
“Did you go anywhere else that night?” he asked.
She shrugged. “No. Went to bed. Heard about Marie the next morning when Adam called from the care home.”
“Who can verify your alibi?”
Uncrossing her legs, Chloe scooted up in the chair and pulled herself closer to the table, leaning toward Brian. “You seriously asking me if I have an alibi? You think I murdered my mother-in-law?”
“I’m just trying to understand where everyone was at the time Marie was killed.”
Chloe shrugged and leaned back in the chair, stretching her legs under the table. “All of us were at the house—Warren, Jason, and Sondra, Jason’s fiancée. Ask them, they’ll tell you.”
“I understand there was an argument between Marie and your husband that night.”
“When didn’t Marie and Warren argue? Lord, if he didn’t kill her before, I don’t know why he would now.”
“Maybe because Marie threatened to change her will?”
Chloe stared at Brian for a moment before saying, “Marie was just angry because Warren didn’t believe she was capable of living by herself—and she wasn’t. He only wanted what was best for his mother. He certainly would never hurt her.”
“I understand you tried to get the funeral home to have your mother cremated. Why did you want to go against her wishes?” Brian asked Warren Nichols when it was his turn in the interrogation room.
“It just seemed silly to spend the money on a coffin.” Warren paused a moment and frowned at Brian. “Wait a minute, you certainly don’t think I killed my mother and wanted to destroy the evidence? It wasn’t even my idea to change her burial plans.”
“Whose was it?”
Warren shrugged. “Sondra, Jason’s girlfriend. She just said it was better for the environment.”
“And you were concerned with the environment?”
Warren shifted in his chair and uncrossed and recrossed his legs. “Not really. But I did think it would probably be cheaper.”
“So that last night, when you all left Seaside Village and returned to Marie’s, none of you went out again until morning?”
Warren shook his head. “No.”
“Did your mother ever say she had a problem with anyone at Seaside Village?”
“Fact was, Mother had a problem with everyone there. She thought the lady that runs that place was too cheerful. I mean seriously, too cheerful? She was constantly complaining about the fact there wasn’t a lock on her door. Said anyone could just walk in on her. And she was convinced half of the residents who lived there were crazy.”
“Knowing that, knowing how much Marie hated that place, you wanted her to stay there?”
Warren glared at Brian. “Are you saying this is in some way my fault? My mother checked in to that place. I didn’t pick it out. And she was there for rehab. I had nothing to do with it. If it really was murder—which I don’t believe—if one of the patients did this to her, it was not my fault.”
“I’m just trying to understand why you wanted her to move there full time, knowing how much she hated it.”
The Ghost and Little Marie Page 16
