A House by the Side of the Road

by Jan Gleiter

  It had taken several hours to locate a dog trained to detect the nitrogen given off by dead bodies, and another hour had been spent waiting for that dog and his handler to arrive. The police had used the time to grid the woods, marking off squares of territory to be searched one at a time.

  “Harold Mathieson, the man whose bloodhound we’ll use, says it’s more efficient to limit the search,” Barbara Stanley explained. “But once the dog starts, Mathieson says it won’t take but an hour or two. I guessed the wooded area at not much more than an acre. That is, I don’t think he would have carried her much farther than that.”

  Meg hadn’t wanted to watch the search going on now in the woods. Neither had Christine, who’d gone home to put ice on her shoulder and let Harding have his choice of what the refrigerator contained.

  Mike folded his arms on his chest. “You know, if you’d told me what you were up to, I could have helped. As it was, we each had to snoop alone.”

  “You were snooping?”

  “I had to. You wouldn’t tell me anything! You’d been asking about Aunt Hannah’s silverware, and then I followed you to the library and saw you check out every volume in the place that would have information about silver.”

  “You followed me?” Meg stared at him.

  “Oh, get huffy!” he said. “Wouldn’t you have? So I thought, gee, I wonder what’s on her mind? I talked to my sister, asked her about the stuff she got. She’d been a little surprised by the silver boxes and figurines and biscuit jars and what all. They’re nice, she says, but nothing really special. Nothing that’ll put her kids through college. So I started thinking. I was still just in the floundering-around stage, though.”

  “What were you floundering through?”

  He looked at her and continued, his voice slow and serious. “Aunt Hannah kept a copy of her will at home. Who, besides me, could have seen it, realized the opportunities it provided by the way it was written? Who, besides me, had easy access to her attic?”

  He paused, and Meg nodded encouragingly. “Go on.”

  He reached over and pushed her dark hair away from her face. “I wanted to think it was Jack, but I didn’t have much but that to go on. How did you figure it out?”

  “Like you said, anybody who’d seen her will was suspect. But that’s not an infinite number of people. And whoever it was … well, it was someone who’d been watching me, watching the house, knew when I was home and when I wasn’t, even though one time—the time he got the tape—he was wrong. That limited it more.”

  She had told Mike, as they had sat waiting for Mr. Mathieson’s bloodhound, about the tape. She’d told him about the indications that someone had been searching her house, about the stains behind the cabinet and on the floor, about visiting Wakefield Antiques, about her conversations with Jane. As she’d talked, he had leaned forward, his eyes revealing that the bits and pieces of the story were taking on, for him, the cohesion they had so gradually acquired for her.

  Mathieson, as it turned out, was right about how long it would take his dog. Forty-five minutes after the huge animal began, he found what he was looking for: four feet underground, her grave neatly packed and covered with the twigs and old leaves that nature would have deposited across such a spot. The various officials who needed to deal with the scene came and went, and what remained of Angie Morrison was carried away.

  Mike’s eyes followed the ambulance as it turned out onto the road. “How did you get to Jack? I would have thought he’d be the last person you’d suspect. You liked him. Unbelievable as that was to me, you did.”

  “Yeah,” said Meg. “I did.” She crossed her legs and looked at him. “You have some lovely narcissus in your garden,” she said. “It’s called Tahiti. We looked at it the other day—gold and orange and yellow, a double blossom, pretty. Even so, it’s not expensive.”

  “The flowers at the far end, that you said I should put on Aunt Hannah’s grave?”

  Meg nodded.

  “You said they were called By George. I looked them up on the chart she made, and that is, indeed, what they are.”

  “No,” replied Meg. “That’s what they’re supposed to be, not what they are. By George is new, so new it isn’t in most catalogs. She had to get it from a nursery, but she didn’t drive. So she sent Jack. I knew she sent Jack; Teddy told me. She gave him, oh, two hundred dollars for maybe thirty-five bulbs. But when he got there, he discovered that Tahiti costs less than a third as much.”

  “So he bought the other bulbs? Why?”

  Meg sighed. “He hates to waste money,” she said. “He had to come back with something, but one narcissus bulb looks a lot like another. Why not spend, oh, maybe sixty dollars and keep the difference? Your aunt wasn’t going to live to see the flowers. She’d never know. That’s what it came down to. The person who planted those flowers knew she’d never see them bloom.”

  Twenty-three

  “Over here!” said Meg. “Leave your stuff and get over here.”

  The Astros gathered around her in silence, their faces glum.

  “How much did we lose by?” asked Meg.

  “One run,” said Suzanne.

  “Uh-huh. Do you know what that means? To play one of the best teams in the league and lose by one run? While we’re missing Jane and another seventh grader? It means you all are getting good, that’s what it means. You played heads-up ball. Your defense was terrific. We’ve just got to do more at the plate. We can’t afford to go up there looking for a walk.”

  “The ump was calling them so low,” said Bobby.

  Meg looked at the boy. “Ah,” she said. “He was indeed. Could you have hit that last called strike? If you’d swung, could you have hit it?”

  “Probably,” said Bobby. “But it was a ball.”

  “You know,” said Meg, “I don’t care, and neither should you. That’s the umpire’s job, not yours. If you think you can whack the pitch, do it. That’s all a strike is—a pitch you can take a good swing at. Leave the details up to somebody who doesn’t have to concentrate on hitting it. If you’re looking for the pitch you can hit, you’ll swing at everything any ump is going to call a strike. The only time you don’t swing is when you get junk.”

  “Or if the count is three and oh and I haven’t touched my hat,” said Christine.

  “Right,” said Meg. “Now the ice-cream-truck man is getting tired of waiting for you, so get on over there and ruin your appetites for dinner. Be here Wednesday at five.”

  Mike got up from the bleachers and helped Meg and Christine stuff equipment into duffel bags.

  “What did you find out?” asked Meg. “When did you get here?”

  “Two minutes ago,” he said. “It was Angie all right. Skull fracture. It was, uh, not self-inflicted.”

  Christine crammed a batting helmet into an overstuffed duffel bag. “Did they find the tape?”

  “No,” said Mike. “The tape seems to have been disposed of. The search warrant for Wakefield Antiques, however, turned up the silverware.”

  “Which is going to be difficult to prove was your aunt’s,” said Meg. “It may be rare, but it’s hardly the only set ever made.”

  “Would have been difficult to prove,” corrected Mike. “Except that Ginny Eppler decided she didn’t like being part of a murder case. That wasn’t what she’d bargained for, and it didn’t take much, I gather, to get a statement from her. She got involved with Jack when she contracted with him to renovate the really quality stuff he tore out of old houses—things she used mainly for display, like mantels. I guess he just decided to take the logical next step. The DA doesn’t think there’s much to pin Aunt Hannah’s murder on Jack with, but Angie’s…”

  “Is there evidence he did that?” asked Meg.

  “Not one conclusive piece, but lots of incriminating indications. He was with her shortly before she died. His right thumb left a nearly perfect print on the buckle of her belt.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily prove he killed her,” said Christ
ine.

  “No. But it’s one piece. And the police will find the clerk who sold him black and white tiles in the middle of April.” He smiled ruefully. “The tiles that I thought made the floor look nicer. They’ll find his hair in her car. The gun he brought to the creek was reported missing by a Mr. Richard Delaney. Seems Jack’s been doing some work for him. Put all that together with the thefts Ginny’s statement corroborates … It was enough to get him to confess to Angie’s murder.”

  Meg sat down hard on the bleachers. “He confessed?”

  “He’s in the process,” said Mike. He slapped a base against the backstop, raising clouds of dust, and dropped it onto the pile of equipment. “Not much support for first-degree, but the DA was willing to make that charge, and I guess, with the felony theft charges also on the line, Jack opted for the deal.”

  “His lawyer went for that?” asked Meg.

  “It’s not a bad deal,” said Mike. “He was right to take it.” He sat down next to Meg and looked steadily at her. “Second-degree,” he said. “The up side being no chance of swaying a jury with his boyish grin.”

  “Not much of an up side,” said Christine bitterly. “It’s your aunt’s murder I want him charged with. And that was premeditated.”

  Meg shook her head. “No, you don’t,” she said. “This keeps Jane off the stand with her stories about the forgotten silver casket and the spoon. That would have been hard on her.”

  “Why did he do it?” said Christine. “Why did he ever start stealing from her? He was so helpful!”

  “He probably liked her,” said Meg. “Other than being a thief who was willing to murder people when it seemed necessary, he’s a pretty nice guy. Whatever his first favor was, it was probably just because he liked her. But doing it gave him a chance to realize how much stuff she had, how wealthy she was. So he did more and more for her. The whole thing probably escalated slowly.”

  “Or maybe,” said Mike, “he’s not so complex. Maybe he’s just evil, and every favor he did for her was motivated by a hope to inherit big time. Then, when he saw her will, he realized she had other plans. So he changed his.”

  Meg started to object then fell silent. She wanted to believe that something she had seen in Jack had really been there, but did it matter? However bad he was, it was more than bad enough.

  “So he’s confessed to killing Angie,” said Christine, sitting also and looking out at the field. “I wish I were a fly on the wall.”

  “You don’t need to be,” said Mike. “Barbara Stanley’s off tomorrow. She’s coming over to Meg’s at eleven o’clock.”

  * * *

  Barbara Stanley looked different, wearing apricot-colored wide-legged shorts and a cropped beige shirt. She sat in an easy chair in Meg’s living room, slim legs crossed. Christine and Dan were close together at one end of the couch, with Meg at the other end and Mike in a chair next to her.

  “I thought,” said Meg, “that confessions were, like, secret.”

  “No,” said the detective. “The police aren’t under the same constraints as attorneys. See, criminals don’t pay us, so we have little motivation to help them get away with what they do or to protect their precious reputations.”

  “Was that a dig?” asked Mike.

  She smiled. “Take it however you like.”

  Meg was glad she wasn’t alone. She wanted to know what had happened, but wouldn’t have liked hearing about it alone.

  “Jack and Angie had been involved,” said the detective, “involved enough for her to be ticked off when Ginny came to visit. Seems she planted a tape recorder to find out if Ginny was a threat and got more information than she’d bargained for, but it gave her something to hold over Jack, and she tried to use it when Jack told her he wanted out. She told him she had proof of what he and Ginny were involved in, and they quarreled, and he killed her. Accidentally.”

  “Was it? Was it accidental, really?” asked Christine.

  “Depends on what you mean,” said the detective. “Surely one doesn’t slam a liquor bottle into someone’s head accidentally. But it may be true that he didn’t actually mean to kill her when he did it.”

  “And he couldn’t have planned it,” said Meg. “If he’d planned it, he would have planned it better.”

  Barbara Stanley nodded. She rubbed her hands along the arms of her chair, inhaled slowly, and let out her breath. “He says she threw a glass at him and he lost his temper. He was holding a liquor bottle. He swung it…”

  “He cleaned up,” said Meg, “or tried to, and buried her and drove her car away—very fast so it would look like she was driving it—and left it, unlocked and with the keys in it, in a bad section of Philadelphia.”

  The detective nodded. “Who’s telling this story?”

  “Sorry,” said Meg. “I’ve just thought about it so much, I can’t help it.”

  “Well, go on. There isn’t a lot more to tell.”

  “He had to find whatever proof Angie was talking about, but he hadn’t succeeded by the time I got here. After going through the boxes she’d left and searching the contents and undersides of every drawer—including everything I sent to the Salvation Army—and who knows what else, he finally did find it. And when he listened to it, he knew I’d heard it too. And that made me potentially dangerous.”

  “That you’re guessing on,” said Barbara Stanley. “But it’s what I’d guess, also. We know from Ginny that he talked to her and she described you. He has to have figured it was just a matter of time before you went after her, and if you succeeded in tying him to Ginny … Well, he couldn’t risk the scrutiny.”

  “So why not kill her?” asked Meg. “Forgive me for whining, but why kill me? Why not her? She was the only one who could prove anything.”

  “He’s not confessing to any ill intent toward you. Maybe he wouldn’t have used the gun he brought.”

  “Right,” said Meg. “We would have just strolled down the creek and when I got hungry, he’d have said, ‘Whoops, I must have picked up the wrong knapsack, the one with the gun. Silly me.’ Uh-huh. But why didn’t he kill Ginny?”

  “Again, I’m guessing,” said Barbara Stanley, “but she would have been next.”

  * * *

  Mike leaned forward in one of the chairs on Meg’s porch and put his forearms on his knees. He did not look at her.

  “How did you know it wasn’t me?” he asked.

  The dog was lying next to her chair, and Meg pushed off a shoe to stroke her back with one foot. “I wondered, but it didn’t fit. Some things did, enough things to be worrisome. You spent a lot of money on your office—”

  “Which I borrowed from Aunt Hannah and am still paying back to her estate, meaning my sister and cousins at this point.”

  “You knew how your aunt’s will was written. John Eppler wouldn’t speak to you—”

  “Because he’s a hardheaded curmudgeon who thinks Saint Paul’s should sink a huge amount of money into an addition it doesn’t need instead of doing something worthwhile with its resources. Even in Harrison, we need day care and a food pantry and counseling services, and God knows we could use a van to transport people who want to visit their incarcerated sons and sisters and—”

  “I know,” interrupted Meg. “He’s equally eloquent on the subject, though taking the opposite view. You, I hear, are a hotheaded liberal do-gooder who shouldn’t even be a Lutheran—you should be a Unitarian—who can’t understand that an addition to the church is absolutely necessary and got Mr. Eppler’s best friend to side with you in the Board of Stewards’ voting so that he had a big fight with her and said things he didn’t have time to apologize for before she died. That’s what he’s most upset about, Mike. He feels terrible about it.”

  “He should,” said Mike, shifting his weight in the chair. “She was upset with him, really upset. She almost left the IBM stock to the county Historical Society. But we talked about it, and there were just too many good years to wipe out with one angry conversation.”

&nbs
p; Meg leaned toward him and put a hand on his knee. “Tell him that, Mike,” she said earnestly. “Really. You have to. Or is your German side keeping your back just as rigid as his? Fight with him during the board meetings, if you want to. But let him forgive himself for fighting with your aunt. He’s got enough to face, with his daughter in trouble.”

  Mike smiled at her, his face relaxing. “My training does not permit me to give in without getting something in return. I’ll do what you want, if you admit your best clue was that, unlike what I hear about Harding, I possess a reliable moral center.”

  Meg sat back and laughed. “Harding’s moral center is shaping up just fine. Or at least he sure does hold a ‘stay’ when he’s supposed to, bless his heart … and his bulk. The worst thing against you was your willingness to sacrifice the training of young minds and bodies, the noble ethics of coaching youth baseball, to your obsession with victory.”

  Mike looked at her disbelievingly. “Are you referring to our bet? You’re the one who suggested the bet! I’m not obsessed with victory, though I may have become a bit obsessed with the idea of beating you.”

  Meg made a dismissive gesture. “No, I’m not referring to our bet. I’m referring to Brian Warren. Or, rather, Brian Warren’s mother. She told me all about your true character … how you kept Brian on the bench because you just had to win, win, win. That’s a pretty lousy trait in a coach, at least in the kind of coaching we do, and until I watched you with your kids, I wasn’t sure.”

  “You still might not be, except you’ve had the pleasure of dealing with Brian yourself. His mother’s oblivious. She either doesn’t see that her son won’t follow basic rules, or she thinks benching a kid for breaking them shows a character flaw in the coach. He nearly drove me crazy, that kid. I couldn’t figure out what his problem was.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Meg. “You should have spoken with his mother. I did, and I learned all about it. He has ‘oppositional defiant disorder.’ Those of us in the know sometimes call it ODD. He has to be handled delicately.”

  Mike’s eyebrows rose. “Oppositional defiant disorder? You mean he’s a brat.”