Murder at Moonshiner Days

by Michelle Goff

“It’s no problem.”

  “Well, I don’t want to put you out. I sure do appreciate you doing this, looking into Jennifer’s murder. Blake’s so quiet. She keeps her feelings to herself, but it don’t take no genius and, believe me, I ain’t one, to see that she misses her mom.”

  Maggie thought back to Jay Harris, the young man whose disappearance she had solved the previous year. Jay had been around the same age as Blake when he watched his dad die. By all accounts, he had acted out following the loss. She wondered if Blake had suffered a similar experience. “How is she?”

  “She’s good.”

  Wanting to clarify her question, Maggie asked, “I mean, has she had any problems or gotten into trouble?”

  Jeff looked up from the bill he had been writing and said, “Blake? In trouble? That girl ain’t been a bit of trouble since she was born.”

  “Did Jennifer feel the same way about her?”

  Jeff regarded Maggie behind narrowed eyes. “What are you getting at?”

  “Jennifer’s friends described her relationship with Blake as strained.”

  “I guess that’s one way of describing it.” He tossed his pen onto the desk, picked up the rag, and vigorously rubbed it against his hand. “When Blake was little, she played the role of Jennifer’s perfect little doll. She never complained when Jennifer put those big pink bows in her hair or dressed her in those frilly pink dresses. Everything that girl wore was pink and her room looked like Barbie decorated it. I ain’t exaggerating. Everything was pink. Even the doorknobs were pink. By the time Blake got about twelve, she had had enough with all that pink. She started taking out the bows, then she started wearing shorts under her dresses and changing clothes at school, then she out and out refused to wear the clothes Jennifer had picked out for her. Jennifer blamed me. Course, she blamed me. She blamed me if it rained. And I defended Blake. Once a child gets so old, they should be able to pick out their own clothes. At least that’s the way I see it. Jennifer thought different and she and Blake kept going round and round. And it wasn’t just the clothes. Blake wanted to play ball. Jennifer wanted her to be a cheerleader. You’ve met Blake. Can you imagine her cheering?”

  “Goodness no.” Realizing how that might sound, Maggie added, “She seems too soft-spoken and reserved.”

  “She don’t even raise her voice to holler across the way and tell me supper’s ready. She ain’t going to yell ‘Go! Fight! Win!’”

  “It doesn’t seem likely.”

  “No, it don’t. I guess you could say it got ugly between them. So ugly that I sued for custody. Blake was thirteen or fourteen by then. Jennifer lost her mind. She accused me of filing for custody so I wouldn’t have to pay child support. That wasn’t the reason. I was just trying to do the right thing for Blake. After we got a talking to by the family court judge, me and Jennifer finally come to an agreement. I dropped my case and Jennifer agreed to let Blake play soccer and basketball and pick out her own clothes. As long as Jennifer approved them. Well, that didn’t always work out, but Blake made the best of the situation. And playing ball helped Blake come out of her shell a bit. And I’ll give Jennifer the due. She went to every game and cheered like Blake was playing in the Olympics or the Final Four. She was so happy when the soccer team won district that she hugged me. She hadn’t touched me since the day I left her. And that day she slapped me.” Jeff chuckled. “I won’t deny that Jennifer loved and supported Blake, but she never got her.”

  “Got her?”

  “You know, understood her. She never got why Blake spent so much time hanging out here in the garage or reading or playing video games. She was always encouraging her to make friends with the popular kids. I guess that’s because Jennifer ran with the popular crowd herself. I didn’t know her in high school. I met her when she was in college. She brought her car to a garage I worked at and that was all she wrote for me. But Jennifer was a cheerleader in school. I’ve seen all the pictures. I think it embarrassed her that her daughter was more like the kids she had always made fun of.”

  Maggie hadn’t been popular in school, but she hadn’t considered herself unpopular, either. Unlike so many others, she didn’t regard high school as the greatest time of her life. But she hadn’t hated it, either. She felt ambivalent about her experience, but remembered all too well that many of her classmates had not escaped unscathed. They had been bullied and teased by the bigger, the stronger, and the more popular. “Maybe Jennifer was afraid other kids were making fun of Blake. Maybe she wanted to spare her that pain.”

  “Maybe. Probably. I guess we’ll never know now.”

  Maggie allowed a few seconds of uncomfortable silence to pass before asking Jeff, “If you don’t mind me asking, why did you and Jennifer get divorced?”

  “Because of money. If I brought money home through the front door with a spoon, she’d take it out the back door with a shovel.” When Maggie giggled, Jeff said, “I’m serious. I knew I married a girl with expensive tastes, but I also married a girl with smarts. I was so proud to be with a girl like Jennifer. She was pretty and studying to be a teacher. We married after she finished college and rented an apartment in town. We were happy for a while, but by Blake’s first birthday party, I knew I was in over my head. Jennifer hired some people from an outfit over in West Virginia to dress as cartoon characters and she hired a lady to make a cake that, I promise you, was two feet tall. She wouldn’t tell me how much she spent on the party, and that told me everything I needed to know. And you want to hear something funny?”

  “Always,” Maggie answered.

  Unsmiling, Jeff said, “Blake slept through all of the party.”

  “Well, she was only one year old. She wouldn’t have appreciated it anyway.”

  “That’s my point.” Jeff laid down the rag and hunched over his desk. “I stayed with Jennifer four more years. I stayed until the arguing got so bad that it was affecting Blake. It killed me to leave my little girl, but I’d get so mad at Jennifer that I could hit her. Sometimes, I could feel myself shaking her or putting my hands around her neck.”

  Maggie didn’t think Jeff realized the implications of what he had said. She didn’t press him, though. She simply made a notation in her notepad and asked, “Did your relationship improve after the divorce?”

  “Eh,” Jeff wiggled his hand up and down in the universal sign of sort of. “She hated me for leaving her. Hated me. It would have been different if she had given me the boot, but she couldn’t stand that I had been the one to leave. She wouldn’t talk to me or see me. I had to pick up Blake and drop her off at Jennifer’s mom’s. If I needed to know something about Blake, she would have her mom call me. That only got worse when I remarried.”

  “When was this?”

  “When Blake was seven. Jennifer didn’t appreciate Blake’s close relationship with my wife, neither. At Blake’s eighth birthday party, Blake ran to me and my wife when we walked in the door and gave us the biggest hugs. You heard the expression, if looks could kill? Well, if that was the case, me and my wife would have dropped dead on the spot. Shew, you should have seen the way Jennifer was looking at us. I’ll give Jennifer the due, though. As far as I know, she never badmouthed me or my wife to Blake. And we never said a word against her or Mel. Well, at least not around Blake. Course, I didn’t have nothing against Mel. He was a good man and he got along better with Jennifer than I did.”

  A sly grin appeared on Jeff’s face. “Let me tell you this one. I guess Blake was nine or ten when Jennifer called me out of the blue one day and told me to pick up Blake at her house. I remember my wife joking that Jennifer might be setting a trap for me. She told me not to turn my back to Jennifer or so much as accept a drink of water. Well, when I got to the house, there was a man there. Jennifer said, ‘This is Mel. He’s my fiancé.’ Heck, I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend.”

  “What a surprise for you.”

  “It was a good surprise. He treated Blake real good and she thought the world of him. Losing him really hur
t her and then to lose her mom on top of that. And she was real close to Jennifer’s mom, too. By eighteen, she had already buried her mom, her nana, and her stepdad. I know we ain’t supposed to question, but that’s a lot to put on a kid.”

  “Yes, it is. I’m glad to hear she’s doing as well as can be expected.” Clearing her throat, Maggie asked, “Jeff, what do you know about Jennifer’s credit card debt?”

  Jeff squinted. “How do you know about that?”

  “I’ve spoken to Mel’s sister, Didi.”

  “Shew, I felt bad for that lady, for the way Jennifer treated her. But I advised Blake to sell that property to her for market value. I told her she would need that money one day, but she wouldn’t listen. She said the property belonged in Mel’s family.”

  “Wasn’t there other money in Jennifer’s estate?”

  “Are you kidding me? When it came to money, Jennifer didn’t think about tomorrow. She had a closet full of nothing but purses. My wife told her where she could find some, well, I don’t know the word for them, but they’re not real.”

  “Knockoffs?”

  “I guess that’s what they’re called. Jennifer wouldn’t have that. She wanted the real thing even if it costed a thousand dollars.” Jeff smirked. “Anybody told you how much Mel paid for her engagement ring?” When Maggie shook her head, he said, “More than fifteen thousand dollars.”

  Maggie tried to speak, but choked on her words.

  “And that was eight years ago, imagine how much it would cost today?”

  “If I had a ring that expensive,” Maggie mused, “I’d live in fear somebody would cut it off my finger.”

  “Somebody did pull it off her finger. It wasn’t found on her body.”

  “Blake mentioned that jewelry was missing from the house, but she didn’t say anything about a fifteen-thousand-dollar engagement ring.”

  “She wouldn’t have. I know Blake didn’t care, but I wish they had left the ring. That would have provided a nice nest egg for her.”

  “What about the house, Jeff? Couldn’t Blake have gotten some money out of it?”

  “Oh, she did, after she paid off the mortgage. It wasn’t much, though, cause Jennifer skipped payments like some people skip lunch.”

  To herself, Maggie thought, who skips lunch? “Was she in debt to the wrong person? Did she have a gambling problem –”

  “No, she had a money problem. She spent two weeks at the beach every summer, went to New York every October, went skiing every winter, insisted on getting Blake a new car when she turned sixteen. I went in to halfers with her –”

  “You mean you paid cash for the car?”

  “No. I paid half the down payment and every other payment. The car was in Jennifer’s name and we found out after she died that she missed a few payments on that, too. Just like she did her mortgage. We got zero percent financing for the car and I’ve settled up with the financer, but it makes me so mad when I think about it that I’d choke Jennifer if she wasn’t already dead.”

  Once again, Maggie wondered if Jeff understood the significance of his words.

  “But anyway, she never paid cash for nothing. Everything went on those credit cards. She used one card to pay for a second one and that one to pay for a third one. You get my drift?”

  “Yeah, I just don’t understand how somebody can get into such dire financial straits. I understand if you lose your job or have an accident or suffer a medical catastrophe, but it sounds like she lived beyond her means.”

  “That’s one way of saying it. Jennifer wasn’t pulling in millions, but she was doing okay for around here. Course to hear her tell it, she was getting by on pennies. Truth be told, though, she probably would have gotten into money trouble even if Mel had lived, but him dying didn’t help matters. She would have been fine, though, if she had cut back on the vacations and the purses and, well, on everything.”

  “Who do you think killed her?”

  “I think it was that housekeeper. What’s her name?”

  “Delphene.”

  “Delphene,” Jeff repeated. “Blake won’t have it, but all the evidence is there.”

  Knowing that Blake had said she hadn’t told anyone, not even her dad, that Jennifer had laid off Delphene, Maggie asked, “What motive would she have had?”

  “The same problem I had with Jennifer. Money. At Jennifer’s funeral, Delphene told my wife that Jennifer hadn’t paid her in months. I don’t care how much you like somebody, money can cause hard feelings and lead to trouble. Heck, it caused my divorce.”

  Chapter Eight

  Maggie rushed through the Sentinel’s back door. Due to scheduling conflicts, Tyler had been unable to secure an interview with the Jasper City Police Department to discuss the status of the investigation into Jennifer’s murder. Although the situation had inconvenienced him, it had worked in Maggie’s favor. She had delayed speaking to the police until she had a chance to talk to Jennifer’s family, friends and, in the case of Didi and Jeff, former family. Just that morning, Tyler had announced that a representative from the police department would be coming by the office in the afternoon. Unfortunately for Maggie, she was facing a full day of interviews and deadlines. She completed one interview and two stories before lunch, proofed Joe’s editorial and three news stories during lunch, and squeezed in an interview with the county’s newly-crowned spelling bee champ before hurrying back to the office for a seat at the table with the police officer. She didn’t unload the camera or stop by her desk before bursting into the conference room where she found Tyler interviewing her ex-fiancé, Jasper police detective Seth Heyward.

  As she gasped for breath, she demanded of Seth, “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s always nice to see you, too, Maggie,” Seth said, his crooked smile betraying his somber tone. “It sounds like you need to sit down and take some deep breaths.”

  Dumping her purse, notepad, and camera onto the desk, she collapsed into a chair just as Tyler asked, “Maggie, why didn’t you tell me you would be joining us? I would have waited on you.”

  “No need to wait on me,” she snapped while opening her notepad. “I still don’t understand why you’re here, Seth. You weren’t the investigating detective.”

  “That’s right, but the investigating detective has been too busy to talk to Tyler and now he’s on his honeymoon. Instead of asking him to participate in a phone interview while sipping piña coladas on a beach, the chief suggested I step in. I’ve been briefed on the case and I’ve reviewed the case files. I think I’m prepared to answer Tyler’s questions.”

  “I see.” With her breathing returning to a normal pace, she commanded to Tyler, “Well, go ahead. Pick up where you left off.”

  Tyler flinched. “Uh, okay. Um, Detective Heyward, you were explaining why Delphene Fugate is still a person of interest.”

  “Well, there are the obvious reasons. Her fingerprints were found on the murder weapon –”

  “Were anybody else’s fingerprints on the meat thermometer?” Maggie asked.

  “No. Not even Jennifer’s. Also,” Seth continued, “no one can collaborate Delphene’s alibi.”

  “What was her alibi?” Maggie asked.

  “She says she was home sleeping,” Seth said with a raise of his eyebrows. “As Jennifer’s housekeeper, Delphene also had access to the house. There was no forced entry, so we know Jennifer either let in her killer or the killer entered via a key.”

  “Or an unlocked door?” Maggie suggested.

  “That’s a possibility. But those closest to Jennifer said she always locked her doors, even when she was home. As for Delphene, there’s also the fact that she found the body.”

  “Why is that considered evidence?” Maggie asked.

  “I guess it’s not evidence, per se, but people who murder loved ones, and by all indications Delphene cared for Jennifer, often are the ones who report finding the victims. They can’t handle the fact that their loved ones are alone.”

  “Do you
have statistics that prove this theory?”

  “No, I don’t, Maggie, but maybe the FBI does. But when you consider all these factors,” Seth stressed the last word, “it explains why we continue to view Delphene as a person of interest.”

  “But not a suspect?” Tyler asked.

  Seth hesitated before answering, “No.”

  “Are there other persons of interest?” Maggie asked. “What about Moonshiner Days vendors or carnival workers?”

  “Obviously, we looked into that. We couldn’t ignore the hundreds of vendors who were setting up booths or the dozens of people working the carnival the day Jennifer was killed. We ran background checks on every vendor and carnival worker. A few had records and some were for burglary, but no one had a record for assault or other violent crimes. We interviewed every vendor and worker, though, and nothing suspicious came up during our conversations. We also spoke to the man who ran the carnival, and he assured us that no one was away from their post for longer than it takes to use the Porta Potty.”

  “But it wouldn’t have taken long. Jennifer lived two streets from the carnival,” Maggie said.

  “True, but it would have taken a few minutes to walk to the house, a few minutes to commit the homicide, a few minutes to go through the house looking for things to steal, a few minutes to steal said items, a few more minutes to walk back to the carnival, a few minutes –”

  “You’ve made your point,” Maggie said.

  Seemingly ignoring her, Seth continued, “And while I’ve seen photos of bloodier crime scenes, the killer’s clothes and person would most likely have been bloody. The carnival opened that night. It was crowded. I think somebody would have noticed if the person operating their ride was covered in blood.”

  “You’re assuming the killer owned only one shirt and didn’t have access to soap and water,” Maggie said.

  Seth’s green eyes twinkled. “Changing clothes and cleaning up would have taken even more time. Besides, you’re assuming that the assailant stabbed Jennifer to death, burglarized a house, and calmly sauntered back into their life as operator of, we’ll say the Tilt-a-Whirl, without raising any suspicion. And don’t forget that the killer left that house with three game consoles, two televisions, a laptop, a tablet, several items of jewelry, many video games, and, from what we’ve been told, a closet full of purses. That’s another reason we’ve named Delphene Fugate as a person of interest. The killer would have needed time –”