There Must be a Happy Medium

by Morgana Best

  I laughed at that. “That’s like telling someone that they’re clever for being tall. It’s just a gift, something I was born with.”

  Alum came over and took me by my shoulders. “Don’t sell yourself short, Prudence. You’re a remarkable woman.”

  I thought he was about to kiss me, when we heard a car door slam outside. I silently cursed the timing as I followed Alum to the door.

  There was a truck outside, and two men jumped out of it. “They’re probably the builders,” I said in a low tone to Alum.

  Alum walked up to them and introduced himself. “I’m Detective Alum Mullein, and this is Prudence Wallflower, who is consulting with the police on the case.”

  I recognized the men by sight, having seen them around town, and they both nodded to me.

  Alum continued. “I suppose you heard what happened to Mrs. Cornford?”

  They both said that they had. The older one spoke first. “I’m Tom Jones, and this is my apprentice, Jarrod Martin. We were doing the renovation work for Mrs. Cornford. We’ve just come back to get our tools. The other police officers said we could because they’re in the shed out the back.”

  “Sure, go ahead,” Alum said.

  When the men left, I whispered to Alum, “Why didn’t you give them the third degree?”

  “I’m not on this case,” Alum said. “I’m sure Larry wouldn’t be happy if he heard I’d questioned anyone. Anyway, you got some good information, as far as I could tell from only hearing one side of the conversation.”

  “I did indeed,” I said as we walked back to my car. “Boris McIntosh and Sally Symons frequently had cups of tea with Mrs. Cornford, as did the builder and his apprentice, the two men we have just met. Mrs. Cornford can’t remember having cups of tea with anyone else on a regular basis.”

  Alum scratched his head. “That doesn’t mean her murderer wasn’t a one off visitor, though,” he said thoughtfully. “But at least you have some good information to pass on to Larry.”

  I had left my phone in the car, and I saw the text as soon as I opened the car door. It was from Larry, asking me if I could meet him at Mrs. Cornford’s lawyer’s office right away. He had given me the address.

  “Would you like to come, too?” I asked Alum.

  “I’d love to, but I’m feeling a bit unwell, tired more than anything.”

  I tried not to let my disappointment show. I loved the time I was spending with him. “Will you be able to drive yourself home?” I asked him, concerned at his pallid expression.

  “Yes, thanks. I just need to lie down for a while. Would you like to come over to my house for dinner tonight?”

  I realized my mouth was hanging open, and shut it. Alum’s house! “I’ve never been to your house,” I said.

  Alum smiled weakly. “I’ve been to your house so many times and you haven’t even seen mine. It isn’t fair, when you think about it.”

  I bit my lip. Was he only inviting me for dinner out of a sense of fairness? Did he see me only as a good friend and not as a romantic interest? I was beginning to think that was the case.

  Chapter 11

  I arrived at the lawyer’s office after leaving Alum at his car. It wasn’t far from the police station. I found a parking place readily, and Larry was waiting for me on the pavement. “Before we go in, I have something to tell you,” I told him.

  He paused with his hand on the brass door knob. “What is it?”

  “I just went to Mrs. Cornford’s house. I was able to communicate with her.”

  Larry swung around to face me fully. “Did she say who murdered her?”

  I moved aside to let a man in a suit enter the building, and shook my head. “No, but I asked her who she’d normally allow in her house, that is, who’d regularly have a cup of tea with her, and she named Boris McIntosh, Sally Symons, and the builders, Tom Jones and Jarrod Martin. She’s renovating her house.”

  “That explains her bank records.”

  It was my turn to be surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “We got a warrant for her bank records. Mrs. Cornford barely had any money, and she had a lot of credit card debt. I’d say that the funding source for her home renovations was a credit card, a now pretty much maxed out credit card.”

  I frowned. “She had that house for years. I wonder why she suddenly decided to renovate it?”

  Larry sighed. “Late night television, I expect. You know, all those ads for supposed great deals on credit cards? Seems like she got one and spent up big in a short space of time.”

  I was at a loss for words.

  “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you here?” Without waiting for me to respond, he pressed on. “The lawyer has agreed to speak to the police about the content of Mrs. Cornford’s will. I wanted you along to see if you had any insights.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said, “though I’m only good at communicating with the dead. I suppose you want to know who the heirs are, for motive, and that sort of thing.”

  “Exactly,” Larry said as he pushed the door open.

  The reception room was vast, with several people bustling around and looking busy. The technology seemed to be the very latest, and the staff were well groomed and trendy. Larry and I were asked to sit at white plastic chairs around a white plastic round table until the lawyer could be with us. I thought the choice of furniture rather strange, so cheap and nasty in an otherwise expensive environment.

  When we were finally ushered into the lawyer’s office, I took an instant dislike to him. He was wearing a superior air and a stuffy suit. His condescension and his poor choice of aftershave hung heavily on the air. “I don’t have much time for you, Detective,” were his opening words. I wondered if I had somehow become invisible.

  Larry pointedly introduced me, and then asked the lawyer to tell us the terms of Mrs. Cornford’s will.

  He opened a folder, and held it in front of his face so we would be unable to see the contents. I thought that rather strange, given that he was about to tell us the contents, anyway. “It’s all very straightforward,” he said in an officious manner, and then paused.

  I shot a glance at Larry, and was surprised to see that his face was composed. I expected he dealt with self important people all the time.

  However, I was soon preoccupied with the presence in the room that had just come through strongly. “He always was a difficult son,” she said. “I have five other sons, but he was the one who was always mean to the other children. He was a bully. I don’t know where I went wrong.” Of course, as usual I didn’t hear the actual words as such, but I had the strong impressions of the words. “He’s developed into a rather unpleasant person,” the spirit added.

  “I’m beginning to get that impression,” I said aloud.

  The lawyer, who had introduced himself as Frederick Markle, stared at me before uttering a sharp, “Excuse me?”

  “Just thinking aloud,” I said, embarrassed. I avoided looking at Larry.

  “If I may continue?” the lawyer said through tight lips. “Mrs. Cornford had scant funds to her name. There was her car, a 1964 Mark 1, two door Cortina, her house, and her furniture. It’s listed in the will as her house and land and all the contents.” He tapped the file, but again we weren’t able to see what was inside it.

  “Is that all?” Larry asked.

  “It depends what you mean by ‘all,’” the lawyer said snarkily. “If you mean are they all her assets, then I should answer yes. But if you ask that is all that I have to tell you, then the answer is no.”

  At this point, the mother’s spirit vanished, and I wished I could follow her.

  “Please go on. Please tell us what other information you have for us,” Larry said calmly.

  The lawyer held the folder higher so that it now was completely covering his face, and peered at the contents, or so I assumed given the proximity of his combover to the folder. “She had twenty five thousand dollars worth of credit card debt on one credit card, ten thousand dollars
of credit card debt on a different credit card, and fifteen thousand dollars of credit card debt on another credit card.”

  I did the mental math. That was fifty thousand dollars worth of credit card debt.

  “We only found letters of demand for one of the credit cards,” Larry said in surprise. “We did find several unpaid bills for gas and electricity in her house.”

  “I suggest your men look a little harder,” the lawyer said dismissively.

  I turned to Larry. “The house wouldn’t be worth much.”

  “That’s right,” the lawyer said with a superior air. “By the time the sole heir, Boris McIntosh, pays off the credit card debt, there’s not going to be much left.”

  Larry nodded. “Whatever the motive was, it doesn’t seem that Mrs. Cornford was murdered for her money.”

  The lawyer stood up and gestured to the door. “Will that be all?”

  “For now,” Larry said.

  I followed him out the door and onto the street. “Let’s sit in my car and talk,” Larry said.

  I agreed, but I would have preferred to sit in a coffee shop and eat lots of cake. Larry came straight to the point. “Did you get any vibes?”

  I cringed at the word ‘vibes.’ I wondered whether to give him my I’m-not-psychic speech again, but decided against it. “Only the lawyer’s mother came through and said she didn’t have a very high opinion of him, that’s all. No other spirits came through.”

  Larry appeared to be thinking it over. He tapped his chin and stared out the window. It seemed an age before he spoke again. “I think I should pay a visit to the builders now. I’d like you to come too, to see what you pick up.”

  I sighed. It looked as if I would have to give him the speech, after all. “Larry, I’m a clairvoyant medium. I connect with spirits who have passed. Died,” I added for emphasis. “I’m not psychic. I don’t get vibes and don’t pick up things, as you put it, apart from psychometry, and those results are always capricious for me. Unless a spirit tells me something, then I don’t know more than anyone else.”

  “I’ve seen that medium on TV,” Larry said. “I can’t think of his name. He’s young. Anyway, when he touches objects, he often knows stuff connected with the person who owned them.”

  I nodded. “Yes, that’s what I just mentioned. It’s called psychometry.”

  “Can you do that?”

  I ran my hands through my hair. “I can, but it’s hit and miss. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all for me, and sometimes it works very strongly.”

  “It’s worth a shot,” Larry said. “I want you to touch something of the builder’s and see if you can get any murdering vibes from it.”

  Vibes—that word again. Oh well. On the bright side, I figured Larry was closer to understanding my abilities.

  Like most builders in small country towns, Tom Jones had no public office. Larry called Tom and said we’d met him at his current job.

  It turned out that Tom Jones’ current job was replacing the boards on someone’s front porch. We drove a few blocks and pulled up outside a house known as a Victorian miner’s cottage, a common type of cottage in old gold mining towns. This one was charming, and given its appearance, I guessed it had been newly renovated. It was painted in soft grays and whites, and wasn’t leaning at an angle as were many of the others in town.

  Tom was pulling up the old boards, while his apprentice, Jarrod Martin, was stacking them, and not too well at that, as several boards were strewn across the pathway.

  Tom looked up. “Don’t stand on any of the boards,” he yelled, just as I did so, and let out a scream. A thick nail had impaled itself just under the ball of my foot.

  I leaned down and instinctively seized the board attached to the nail and pulled the nail out of my foot, an act which made my stomach turn. I thought I would faint. It was an awful type of pain, more like a horrible ache. Larry stood there with his mouth open. For a homicide detective, he looked rather queasy. “Ouch! How did you manage to pull it out?” he asked, his voice trembling.

  “It couldn’t stay in,” I said. I was always good in an emergency; it was afterward that I fell apart. And that afterward was now. I trembled, and sat on the grass, clutching my foot. “It went right through the sole of my sandal,” I said.

  Tom was loudly berating his apprentice. “I told you not to stack the boards there!” he yelled at the red-faced Jarrod, who apologized profusely.

  “I’ll have to take her to the doctor for a tetanus shot,” Larry said, his face still pale and somewhat green. “Then I’ll come back.”

  Larry took me to the local doctor, whose office was only a block away. I had never been there before, and didn’t want to be there now. “I’m scared of injections,” I said.

  “Call me when you’re done, and I’ll collect you,” Larry said, before beating a hasty retreat.

  I gave my details to the receptionist, telling her I had just impaled a nail into my foot. “Fill in this form, then take a seat and wait until you’re called,” she snapped. “And you have to pay today. There’s no bulk billing. Is that understood?”

  I said I understood, hobbled to a seat to complete the form, and then hobbled over to the desk to hand it back. I had no sooner taken my seat again than she called across the room to me. “Age?” she screeched rudely.

  That got my back up. Likely the pain wasn’t helping. “What does it matter?” I asked. “I’m only here for a tetanus shot.” I sure wasn’t going to call out my age to a room of onlookers, and I didn’t want to hobble back across the room to fill it in.

  The receptionist turned beet red. “We need your age, because when people turn a certain age, they get certain ailments. The doctor uses age as a method of diagnosing.”

  That didn’t sound too good to me. “I’m not a regular here,” I said. “This is a one off visit to get a tetanus shot.”

  The receptionist stood up and leaned over the countertop. “I’m sorry, madam, but you have to tell me your age.” Her tone was strident.

  “No.”

  “Excuse me?” she yelled. “We need it for our records.”

  “Then call the age police,” I said, “because I’m not going to tell you.”

  The receptionist simply sat back down and didn’t say another word. I noticed that other people in the waiting room were trying not to laugh. The woman sitting directly opposite me smiled. “She’s always mean,” she whispered across the room.

  To my relief, the doctor was much nicer. She gave me a tetanus shot which did not hurt while being injected, but hurt considerably afterward. Still, I wasn’t afraid of pain—I was afraid of injections. My foot was now throbbing. I took two Advil as advised by the doctor, and then limped outside to wait for Larry in the parking area. I didn’t want to cross swords with the receptionist again.

  “How are you?” Larry asked when I climbed in the car. “Will you be able to drive yourself home? Should I take you to your car now, or take you straight home?”

  “To my car, please,” I said “It’s my left foot. I should be fine.”

  Larry thrust a screwdriver at me. “Here, hold this, and see what vibes you get.”

  I took the screwdriver, but drew a blank. I said as much to Larry, and he handed me another screwdriver. “This one’s from Jarrod’s toolbox,” he said.

  I held it for a moment, turning it over in my hands. “I don’t get anything from this one, either.”

  Larry was visibly disappointed. “Does that mean that they’re not murderers?”

  “No,” I said. “It simply means I can’t get anything from their screwdrivers. Perhaps I could get something from a more personal item. How did you get these?”

  Larry turned red. “Best not to ask,” he said.

  Chapter 12

  When Alum opened his door to me that night, I thought for a moment he was going to pull me into a hug. He didn’t. However, I took consolation in the fact that his face lighted up when he saw me.

  “Is your foot all right?”

&
nbsp; “Not too bad,” I said. “I can walk on it normally now. It just throbs from time to time. It’s just the thought of it, I suppose.” I winced as I said it.

  “That was awfully brave of you. Larry told me how you pulled it out of your foot.”

  I shuddered and clutched my stomach. “Ooh, please don’t talk about it. It makes me squeamish.” I handed him the containers I had brought with me, in which was the dessert I had promised to make, as well as containers of frozen meals to reheat. I was sure he wasn’t eating properly.

  “Gosh, that’s a lot of dessert,” Alum said with a twinkle in his eye.

  “They’re meals I’ve frozen for you,” I said. “Reheat, and they’re done. You don’t look like you’re taking care of yourself.” Gosh, that’s something my mother would say, I silently reprimanded myself.

  Alum thanked me and nodded by way of response.

  As I followed Alum into his living room, I took in the surroundings. The house was clinical, impersonal, not at all like the house I imagined he would have. It was contemporary, whereas I had imagined him in a house with more of a shabby chic, or perhaps even Hamptons, style.

  Everything was white, large white square tiles on the floor, white walls. Alum caught me looking, and said, “It has heated flooring.”

  “That’s good in winter,” I said automatically. The place looked as though he had not quite moved in. There were no personal touches, barely any furniture, and certainly no pops of color. It didn’t even have a bachelor look about it. I couldn’t imagine that he had his police officer friends over for a beer and poker night. Nothing was out of place.

  There was the faintest smell of tea tree oil, as if he had hastily scrubbed the place before I came. Not that it would have needed much cleaning, I reasoned, because nothing was out of place. It was all entirely minimalist.

  I knew I was staring, so wanted to say something complimentary. “Your place is...” and then my voice trailed away. I couldn’t think of anything polite to say, so concluded my sentence with the word, “contemporary.”