by Morgana Best
And so we found ourselves back in town for the second time that day. The first medical centre was at the end of a narrow alleyway. I was glad my car wasn’t any bigger or surely I would have scratched the sides. The parking was meagre. I locked the car, and then looked at Jezza-Belle over the roof. “What’s our cover story? Why are we looking for him?”
“How about you tell them you’re the local funeral director, and a card has arrived addressed to him?”
I nodded my appreciation. “Thanks—you’re good at this.”
The abrupt receptionist was no help at all. She simply said she had never heard of him. She suggested I try the other doctor in town.
I drove a few streets further on and parked outside the tiny, unassuming green building. “This is our last lead,” I told Jezza-Belle.
We walked inside, and the receptionist looked up at us expectantly. “How can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m Laurel Bay from the local funeral home,” I told her. “This is my mother, Thelma. We’re both most anxious to track down a Dr Sharpe. A card arrived at the funeral home for him, but we’ve never heard of him.”
“I haven’t heard of him either,” she said. “Why don’t you try up at the big medical centre just up on the highway?”
“We tried there first,” I said, “and she sent us here. I did google him first, and found out that he had a practice in town five years ago.”
She tapped her pen on her desk. “I only moved to town last year,” she told us, “but if you could wait until the doctor is free, I’ll ask him. He’s been here for years, so he should know.”
I thanked her, and we sat on some hard blue vinyl chairs. The only other person in the waiting room was a stressed mother who was trying to entertain a young child.
It seemed like an age before someone emerged from the doctor’s room. The receptionist left her desk and hurried into the room. She emerged only a minute later and showed the mother with the child into the room, before coming over to me.
“You’re in luck,” she said. “Dr Sharpe is very elderly, but only retired about five years ago. He lives in that big house right next to the Tourist Information Centre.”
“He still lives there?” I asked her.
She nodded. “Yes, at least that’s what the doctor told me.”
“Thanks so much for your help,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
“What’s the plan?” Jezza-Belle asked me when we were safely out of earshot.
I shrugged. “He only lives around the corner, so we can visit him, only he might be defensive if we ask about Phil. Do you think we should buy a card and write in it, and then pretend it was delivered to the funeral home?”
“We can’t fake a postmark on an envelope.”
I thought about that for a moment. “I know. I’ll say I found it in the foyer the other day. If he doesn’t believe us, what’s he going to do? Then we have to somehow bring the conversation around to Phil Palmer.” Once I said it, it sounded difficult to say the least.
Jezza-Belle appeared to be thinking the same thing. “I don’t like our chances, but it’s all we’ve got to go on.”
We decided to walk to the doctor’s house, and stopped on the way to buy a card. I wrote in it, Thanks for your help, Dr Sharpe.
Jezza-Belle looked at the card and snickered. “You have a better idea?” I asked her.
She had to admit that she didn’t. “I hope he’s home,” Jezza-Belle said when we were on our way.
“If he’s not there now, we’ll try again tomorrow,” I said. We had reached his house, and my stomach churned. The adrenaline rush made my heart race. The house was pretty, sitting at the end of a concrete pathway winding between native bottlebrush trees. It was painted a pleasant shade of pale blue, which contrasted nicely with the white shutters and white door.
I clutched my stomach and knocked on the door. There was no answer, so after an interval I tried again, louder this time. I heard footsteps, and shot Jezza-Belle a look.
The door was opened by a wizened old man. He looked like one of the characters from Lord of the Rings, although he was too thin to be a dwarf, and too frail to be an elf.
He looked at us with rheumy eyes. “Who are you?” he asked us with no preamble.
“I’m Laurel Bay from the Witch Wood Funeral Home, and this is my mother, Thelma.”
He cupped his hand around his ear. “Eh?”
I repeated myself, more loudly. “I’m Laurel Bay from the Witch Wood Funeral Home, and this is my mother, Thelma.”
He took a step backwards. “There’s no need to yell. I’m not buying anything. Good day.” With that, he made to shut the door.
“Wait!” I said loudly. “We’re here because someone left a card for you at the funeral home.” I thrust the card at him through the now small gap between the door and the wall.
He read the card and then looked at me. “Who’s it from?”
I held up both hands. “I don’t know. We found it in the foyer.”
“You found it, you say?” he asked me. “Where did you find it?”
“In the foyer,” I said loudly. “The foyer at the funeral home.”
The man put his hands over his ears. “Please stop yelling. What was that you said again?”
I was beginning to see why this man had signed off on Phil Spencer’s wife’s death. I was judging how to speak in a voice that he could hear but not be too loud, when he spoke again. “Please come in. Would you like a cup of tea?”
I hurried inside before he could change his mind. Jezza-Belle was hard on my heels. All the curtains were drawn, and I was at once hit with the unpleasant smell of mothballs. The living room, although large, was dark and depressing, and a yellow glow pervaded the room.
“I’ll see if I can find some biscuits that aren’t stale.” With those encouraging words, he left the room.
I heard him muttering in the kitchen. He appeared to be speaking to a teaspoon. He presently returned with two cups of tea. His hands were shaking, so much so that the saucers were full of tea and some was dripping onto the floor. He handed me a cup, and I took it before it sloshed all over me. “Thank you.”
“I’m not used to guests. A lifetime of work as a doctor has made me turn off people. Now I only like animals, specifically, ferrets.”
“Ferrets?” I asked him.
“What was that you said?”
“Ferrets,” I said more loudly.
This time he did not berate me, but pointed to what I had thought was a long narrow cushion at the side of my chair. “That’s Hepatitis, and Liver Disease is around here somewhere.”
I jumped away from the ferret, as Jezza-Belle spoke up for the first time. “You named your ferrets after medical conditions?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t have a medical condition. I didn’t need to retire, you see, but I picked an arbitrary age at which to retire. I chose to retire a few years ago at ninety. I could still be a doctor now. There’s nothing wrong with me, it’s just that I chose a certain age to retire and I stuck to it.”
An idea formed in my mind. “I was speaking to one of your old patients the other day. He spoke well of you.”
“What was that you said? Speak up, girly.”
“Phil Palmer,” I yelled. “He said you were very good. You were his wife’s doctor when she died.”
This time, he heard me. “Yes, very sad. Phil Palmer grew up in this town, and then he went to Newcastle for some years before he came back here. I was his doctor from the time he was a child.” He went on and on, telling me all the patients he had treated from childhood. I finally managed to get a word in when he paused to pat one of his ferrets.
“Wasn’t Mrs Palmer too young to die?”
He nodded. “Everyone is really too young to die, when you think about it. She was a nice woman.”
“What did she die of?” I said loudly and slowly. “Can’t you remember?”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “My memory is as sharp as a tack. I remem
ber that day as if it was yesterday. She died in her sleep.”
“Do young people die in their sleep?” I asked him.
The doctor stopped stroking one of the ferrets and looked up at me. “She did.”
“Phil said there was never a post-mortem.”
He nodded. “Yes, she died of natural causes. Phil told me that he was too upset about his wife’s death and didn’t want an autopsy. He told me that she died in her sleep.”
“And you believed him?” I said, incredulous.
“Tim? Who’s Tim? I thought you were talking about Phil Palmer. Who is this Tim that I believe?”
I nodded to Jezza-Belle, and we both stood up. “Thank you for your time, Dr Sharpe,” I said. “Sorry to have bothered you.”
“I don’t like people,” he muttered. “Had to go to all the trouble of making you tea and you didn’t even drink it.”
I muttered my apologies and we hurried out the door as fast as we could.
“He’s as mad as a hatter,” Jezza-Belle said before we had even reached the footpath.
“Shush, he’ll hear you,” I warned her.
Jezza-Belle snorted rudely. “He’s as deaf as a post. His records would never have been computerised, and he’s probably lost them all by now. Oh well, at least we found out Phil Spencer’s wife never had an autopsy and why the police weren’t alerted. The doctor signed off on the death certificate as natural causes.”
“Yes, and I know that the police are only called to a death if the doctor thinks the circumstances are suspicious,” I told her. “That’s why Mrs Palmer’s death was never investigated. Put that together with Phil Palmer asking you to change her hospital records to sleep apnoea, and we can only draw one conclusion. Phil Palmer murdered his wife.”
“That doesn’t mean he murdered me,” Jezza-Belle pointed out.
I nodded. “True. I’ll bet you anything that he had his wife cremated, so there’s absolutely no evidence at all. I don’t suppose you kept any records anywhere, such as backup copies or anything detailing the hacker work you did?”
Jezza-Belle shook her head. “No, I made sure I covered my tracks.”
“That means we’ll never prove that he murdered his wife,” I said, “but the thing that puzzles me is—why did he want you to change the hospital records now?” I turned off the main road in the direction of the funeral home.
“Hello!” Jezza-Belle said. “I think we have established that he got away with his wife’s murder, and that we can’t do anything about it. Shouldn’t we be focusing on my murder now? We still need to investigate Daisy Fairchild and Donnie Fairchild.”
I pulled the car off the road, quite a feat as someone was tailgating me. “I wrote the Fairchilds’ address in my notes. I’ll open it in Maps, and you can navigate to their address.” I handed my phone to Jezza-Belle.
“What do you want me to do with your phone?” an angry voice snapped. “And Laurel, why am I wearing a hat?”
Chapter 9
I gasped. Luckily, I was on the side of the road. If I had been driving, I would have run off the road. I turned to the person sitting next to me. “Mum?”
She glared at me. “Who else would it be, Laurel? Sometimes I wonder about your sanity. Why are we parked on the side of the road? You know, Laurel, you always were trouble. Have I ever told you that you took three days to be born? Yes, you took three days to be born and you’ve been nothing but trouble ever since.”
I stared at Mum. Had Jezza-Belle gone for good? I looked around, but I couldn’t see her ghost.
Mum was on a roll. “I went to the bathroom, and a lady asked me whether I’d had a boy or a girl. I had to tell her that I hadn’t had it yet. Can you imagine how that made me feel? I had never been so embarrassed in my whole entire life. You were trouble then, and you’re trouble now.”
A string of foul language emanated from her mouth, and that gave me hope. “Jezza-Belle?”
She nodded. “That was a horrible feeling! Your Mum forced me into the background.”
I shuddered. “Get a grip, Jezza-Belle. Try not to let it happen again. And if it does, see if you can give me some warning,” I said as an afterthought.
“I’ll do my best, but that came out of nowhere,” she said in a shaky voice. “It was horrible.”
“It was pretty horrible for me, too,” I admitted. “I don’t know how, but try to keep Mum out of the way until we find out who murdered you.”
“Getting used to having me around, are you?” Jezza-Belle asked with a smile.
I pulled a face. “If it’s a choice between you and my mother, you win hands down. Okay then, direct me to the Fairchilds’ house.”
The Fairchilds’ house was on the north edge of town, on a steep slope with a hill behind it. It was massive, but looked dated from the front. It seemed that various owners had added to it over the years. The approach was up a steep winding road, with signs warning to watch out for koalas on the way.
A small red BMW was parked next to the house. The entry itself was unimpressive. A small concrete path flanked by cheap garden solar lighting led to an unattractive A-frame addition of a dark and gloomy porch.
I rang the bell, and heard it echo throughout the house. “I sure hope Donnie isn’t home,” Jezza-Belle whispered to me.
“Don’t worry about that—just make sure my mother doesn’t pop out when we’re in the middle of speaking to Daisy,” I said.
A woman opened the door. From the amount of heavy gold jewellery hanging around her neck, I guessed she wasn’t the cleaning lady. “Daisy Fairchild?” I asked her.
“Yes?” she said warily.
“This is rather a delicate matter,” I said. “I’m Laurel Bay. I own Witch Woods Funeral Home, and I recently conducted the funeral for Jezza-Belle. This is my mother, Thelma. ”
Daisy looked around nervously. I pressed on. “Jezza-Belle was a friend of mine, and a few days before she died, she told me she was worried for your safety.”
Daisy was clearly taken aback. “The police haven’t mentioned anything to me.”
I nodded. “Jezza-Belle must have sensed that something was going to happen to her. She said if anything happened to her, she wanted me to tell you she was worried for your safety, but she asked me not to inform the police because it was a delicate matter.” I wondered if Daisy would believe such a preposterous lie, but it seemed that she did.
“Come in,” she said. “If my husband comes home, pretend you’re collecting for a charity or something like that.”
I thanked her, and we followed her into the house. The house inside was bright and airy, filled with lots of natural light. One wall was of huge picture windows overlooking the ground in front of the house as well as the highway heading north out of town. There was a bushland reserve on the other side of the highway, so the outlook was quite pleasant, if you didn’t mind the constant stream of trucks and cars. Heavy lace curtains hung from the windows, but they had been pulled back. An old-fashioned china cabinet filled with every manner of china ornament stood next to the massive fireplace. The wall behind it was covered with photos, I assumed of relatives.
The furniture itself was gloomy, beige sofas and an overly heavy wooden coffee table sitting on beige carpet. Beige-grey heavy curtains hung on the windows on the opposite side of the wall, and the living room opened onto the kitchen which was white with stainless steel appliances. The whole impression was one of misery.
Daisy indicated we should sit on one of the sofas, and she headed for the kitchen. “Tea, coffee, cold drink?”
“You have any good Scottish whisky?” Jezza-Belle asked.
Daisy fetched a bottle of whisky from the bar, while I forced a loud laugh. “Mum’s joking. She’s never had any alcohol in her life.” I shot Jezza-Belle a pointed look. “We’d both like coffee, please.”
Daisy left the whisky bottle on the table and went to pour the coffee, leaving me wondering what would happen if Mum suddenly forced her way back into her body when Jezza-Belle was ha
lfway through drinking whisky.
Daisy set a coffee mug in front of me and offered me a caramel Tim Tam. She did the same for Jezza-Belle. Daisy then took a seat and came straight to the point. “I suppose Jezza-Belle told you all about my husband, Donnie, having an affair.”
I nodded. “Yes, she did. I told my mother everything that Jezza-Belle told me, so she knows as much as I do.” I wiggled my eyebrows at Jezza-Belle, to give her the hint to interrupt or to take over the conversation at any point. She nodded slightly in response.
“One thing I didn’t understand from Jezza-Belle is the fact that you haven’t divorced your husband. Wouldn’t it be easier to divorce him?”
Daisy gripped her coffee mug. “I do want to divorce him, but I’m treading carefully because I’m afraid of him.”
“Has he ever been violent to you?” I asked with concern.
She shook her head. “He’s never been physically violent, but he’s been very verbally abusive. I’m afraid of him.”
“I know this isn’t a very nice question,” I said, “but do you think he could have possibly murdered Jezza-Belle?”
Daisy turned her coffee mug around several times before answering. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Like I said, he’s never actually hit me, but he does throw furniture. He threw a television through that glass wall right there.” She pointed to the centre glass wall on the side with the view. “He punches holes in walls for trivial reasons. You never know what will set him off. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he murdered Jezza-Belle.”
“You wouldn’t?” Jezza-Belle said.
Daisy stirred some sugar into her coffee. “Yes, I did wonder whether he did. The thing is, he flies into a rage at the drop of a hat. You never know what’s going to set him off, but I don’t think he would plan anything bad. He goes into a rage for no reason usually, but the police said it was a stolen car. I can imagine if he had been speaking to Jezza-Belle he could have gone into a rage and murdered her, but I don’t think he’s the type to plan to steal a car and then go and hit her with it. Am I making sense?”
