“You still haven’t told me what you two are doing here,” he reminded us, crossing his arms over his chest.
“The buyers are doing a final walkthrough Friday morning,” Aunt Tressa told him. “Since I had no idea what condition this room would be in after … you know … I wanted to be sure I didn’t have to get a cleaning crew in here.”
Josh smirked. “Yeah, right.”
I edged closer to Josh and looked deep into his eyes. Aren’t the eyes the mirrors of the soul? He met my gaze with nary a blink. I couldn’t help wondering if it was the act of an honest man, or of a man simply playing a part—a modern, twisted version of his childhood role as coroner in TheWizard of Oz.
He looked away first.
“Josh,” I said, taking a desperate plunge, “do you know Lillian Bilodeau?”
He snapped his head back toward me. “You mean the crazy cat lady?”
“She’s not crazy. She’s an elderly woman who got in over her head trying to care for too many strays. Is that the only reason you know her?”
“Yeah, plus my mom knows her from being in the club with all those old ladies who knit stuff for charity.”
“Your mother was in the Hazleton Knitting Club?”
“A long time ago she was. She wasn’t much of a knitter, though, so she quit. What does Lillian Bilodeau have to do with anything?”
It was a calculated risk, but I spilled out the story again, ending with Lillian’s strange, late-night phone call to me. He listened quietly, then brushed past Aunt Tressa and me and went into the room where Lou had been murdered. I followed him. He stood there, silently, staring at the desk we’d just searched.
“It was so bizarre,” Josh said, a tremor lacing his tone. “I came in here that day to tell Lou that whether he and Blake liked it or not, I was going to have the Hudson towed away on Monday. It was my car, and they had no right lumping it in the appraisal with the other estate assets. Anyway, it was weird because the door was closed. That didn’t make sense. I knocked once and didn’t hear anything, so I opened it. Lou was … sprawled face down on the floor. That big dagger was sticking out the back of his neck. His shirt … God, it was soaked in blood.” Josh covered his face with his hands. “It was surreal, you know? I can’t stop having nightmares about it.”
He’d deftly avoided the subject of Lillian. Had that been intentional?
Josh went on. “And his laptop—I’d never seen anything like it. It was practically chopped in half. The hard drive was totally destroyed. Whoever killed Lou must’ve stabbed the laptop, too.”
That was news. Something the police had obviously withheld from the public.
“Josh, did you see Lillian before you came in here and found Lou?”
He thought about it for a minute, or at least appeared to. Then he shrugged. “I don’t remember seeing her, no. The snow was coming down hard by then, and people were starting to leave.”
That much was true. The crowd had thinned out fairly quickly once the roads started to get bad.
“By the way, Apple, what were you doing on those back stairs?” Josh asked abruptly.
My aunt and I exchanged glances. Though she knew precisely where the staircase came out, she kept silent. “I wanted to see where they led,” I told him honestly. “Because it occurred to me that those hidden stairs made the perfect escape route for the killer.”
“Then come on, I’ll show you.”
I looked at Aunt Tressa, and we both fell in line behind Josh.
“Be careful,” he warned as we picked our way down the narrow staircase. Josh’s leather boots echoed noisily, and we sounded like a herd of hippos clumping down the stairs. At the bottom was another door. Josh opened it and the three of us stepped inside an old-fashioned pantry. The room was about eight feet square, with yellow painted shelves that lined the walls from top to bottom.
“Wouldn’t you love to have this kind of storage space?” Aunt Tressa quipped. “My kitchen cabinets are overflowing.”
“No one builds anything the way they used to,” Josh said sourly.
Following him through a doorless entryway directly opposite the staircase, we found ourselves standing in a huge kitchen. Tall, glass-front cabinets lined two of the walls. The counters and flooring were hopelessly outdated, but with this much space to work with, the possibilities for renovation were endless. I felt a twinge of envy for the two lucky doctors who were buying the house.
“Edgar could’ve modernized the kitchen,” Josh said, “but he didn’t see the point in wasting money like that.” He shook his head and chuckled. “The fridge wasn’t even self-defrosting. Sometimes the freezer looked like the polar icecap.”
Josh’s tone had sounded wistful. Once again, I saw how much he seemed to miss Edgar. Or was living in this intriguing old manse the only thing he missed?
“You two better go,” he said suddenly.
“I second that motion,” Aunt Tressa said. She looked at Josh, a slight glint in her eye. “Need any help getting those boxes into your car?”
After a momentary hesitation, he shook his head. “No. They’d be too heavy for you two anyway.”
We left him standing in the kitchen and hurried out to my car. The sky was a yellowy gray, and the temperature had dropped considerably. I shivered as I slid into my car and started the engine.
Aunt Tressa looked unusually pensive as she snapped her seat belt into place. “Apple, do you think it was a good idea to tell Josh about Lillian? What if it was him Lillian saw that day?”
Actually, the same thing had occurred to me. If Josh had something to do with Lou’s murder, I was taking a risk revealing that we knew Lillian was missing. And that we’d been trying to find her.
“I know, Aunt Tress, but it was time to go proactive. I can’t help thinking Lillian’s time is running out.”
If it hasn’t already.
And something else was sticking in my brain—something that someone had said. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to pluck it out long enough to expose it to the light. I couldn’t even remember who’d said it.
With a silent prayer that it would come to me, I rummaged through the compartment that held my CDs. I was about to pop in the Spice Girls when I remembered one of my favorite Christmas CDs. I found it and pushed it into the player. The lush, powerful sounds of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra began roaring out of my speakers. One of my favorite songs—“A Star to Follow”—came on.
If only there was a star I could follow that would lead me to Lillian.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
From the journal of Frederic Dwardene, Tuesday, December 19, 1950:
Until now my progress has felt plodding, but I now feel a sense of renewed hope. The biting cold and snow have worked in my favor, for nearly every day Lillian allows me to drive her home. Since the bank closes at three, there is always ample time for me to make the fifteen-minute drive to Manchester to greet her at the bus stop. Some days she looks unwell, and I fear for her health. Even worse, I am afraid she is pining for her soldier …
I was delivering Aunt Tressa to her realty office to retrieve her Caddy when we spotted Wilby camped out on her steps. The moment he saw us, he leaped down the stairs and sprinted toward the passenger side of my car, his grin the width of the Merrimack River.
“Miss Tressa! Look what I did!” His ears and nose a matching shade of rose, he wiggled his new cell phone in front of her window. “I already took seven pictures!”
Aunt Tressa smiled at me. “He doesn’t have cell service yet, but I showed him how to use the camera feature on the phone. I swear, he was more excited than a kid with a Christmas puppy. Let me see, Wilby!” she trilled, swinging her legs out of the car.
I hopped out, too, and went over to where Wilby and Aunt Tress were viewing the pictures. The air felt raw and biting. I turned away and coughed several times, then peered over my aunt’s shoulder at Wilby’s new toy.
He giggled as he pointed at the first image. “My mom got kinda mad when I took this o
ne at breakfast this morning. She told me to never take her picture again before she has her face on!”
Peeking at the tiny snapshot on the phone, I could totally understand where she was coming from. Wilby had captured his mom with her hair uncombed and her eyes half closed, glaring at him over the rim of her coffee mug. I laughed. “You’re quite the photographer, Wilby.”
He beamed. “Keep going. There’s more.”
“Oh, App, look at this one.” Aunt Tressa held up the phone so that I could get a better view. Wilby had taken a picture inside Hazleton’s Food Mart. The three deli clerks—sporting jolly Santa hats and boasting silly smiles—had posed for him. The remaining images were nondescript scenes Wilby had taken in downtown Hazleton.
It was the last one that caught my eye.
The image was crooked, but the building was instantly recognizable—my office building. In front of the building, a woman stood on the sidewalk. She appeared to be staring through one of the office windows. With her back to Wilby’s camera, I could discern only one thing about her—she wore a long fur coat.
“Could I see that one?”
Aunt Tressa handed me the phone. I rotated the tiny image every which way, then located the zoom feature. On the first floor of Quinto and Ingle, in the second window from the right, a faint shadow was visible. It could have been a trick of the light, or even my imagination. But I didn’t think so.
Unless I was completely imagining it, the woman in the fur coat was watching someone.
And the only two people in the office this afternoon would have been Sam and Vicki.
Two hours later I was back in my apartment, warming my hands around a mug of steaming cocoa. Aunt Tressa and I hadn’t managed to squeeze much holiday shopping into our dwindling afternoon, but we’d stocked up on wrapping paper and ribbon, so the trip to the mall wasn’t a total loss. My stomach felt queasy and my head ached, so I was glad to be home alone on my comfy, sagging sofa.
I’d retrieved the old valentine from my kitchen drawer, and was analyzing it for about the twentieth time when Cinnie and Elliot joined me on the sofa. Elliot tickled my neck from behind with his whiskers while Cinnie sprawled in my lap.
Aunt Tressa, meanwhile, was busy in her own apartment, cooking up a culinary storm for her Wednesday evening dinner with Darby. The man had clearly cast a spell on her, a fact I would simply have to tolerate.
For now.
But since I was going to have to endure at least one meal with him, I’d already decided I would use the time as an opportunity to pry into his psyche. His ten-dollar deal with Lillian was sticking in me like a three-pronged thorn. No one offered to do that much work for so paltry a fee unless he wanted something. But whatever it was Darby wanted from Lillian, I couldn’t fathom. For the most part, Lillian subsisted on Social Security. Her lifestyle was what I would euphemistically refer to as modest. Surely Darby didn’t think she had money hidden away somewhere?
No, something else was going on. I only wished I had a clue as to what it was.
With an exasperated sigh, I snatched the old journal off my end table. I wasn’t surprised to realize that the handwriting on the valentine matched the flowery entries in the journal.
Frederic Dwardene had been obsessed with a woman he barely knew, a woman whose delicate beauty and quiet tenderness had sent him over the moon.
Lillian.
I wondered how Lillian had felt about him back then. Had he managed to persuade her to fall in love with him? Was that why she hadn’t returned any of Anton’s letters?
I opened the journal and turned to an entry written five days before Christmas.
Wednesday, December 20, 1950
The painting continues to progress nicely, though I am struggling with blending the hues for Lillian’s golden hair. Without a photograph of her, I must paint from memory, but that is easy, since her face is always foremost in my mind. I am sure, now, that I will have the painting completed by February 14th, at which time I will present it to Lillian and ask her to marry me.
I flipped ahead a few days.
Friday, December 22, 1950
I was wise to befriend Lillian’s mother, for I’ve been invited to have Christmas Eve dinner at their home. Lillian’s only aunt, a woman who lives in Pennsylvania, arrived three days ago to spend the holidays in Hazleton. I can hardly contain my joy at being invited! Already I am feeling like a family member, which I will be, very soon …
Lillian’s only aunt.
If that was true, then Daniel was right. Lillian had had only the one aunt—her Aunt Alice. Not that it mattered, but I couldn’t help wondering why Bernice thought Lillian’s aunt had died in the fifties.
Oddly, there was no entry for Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day, however, Frederic’s words were bittersweet.
Monday, December 25, 1950
It is Christmas, and I am alone. Lillian was very quiet on Christmas Eve, though she seemed delighted to be with her Aunt Alice. I must say Alice was a charming woman, bubbly and full of fun. No one mentioned the soldier all evening, which I took as a positive sign. Lillian’s mother—clearly my ally— showered me with food and eggnog. We ate and drank in the tiny parlor as the snow fell outside. Tinsel sparkled among the red and blue lights on the small Christmas tree. I waited till just the right moment to present the prettily wrapped topaz necklace to Lillian. Lillian’s mother and aunt gasped with delight as Lillian removed it from its velvet box. Aunt Alice immediately fastened it around Lillian’s neck, as Lillian smiled at me and murmured a quiet thank you. I confess I’d hoped for a stronger response, but I know that Lillian is shy and reticent, so I forgave her that …
I forgave her that.
The words sent a shiver through me. Frederic was beginning to sound creepy. I read ahead, through several more entries.
Saturday, December 30, 1950
I have not seen or heard from Lillian since Christmas Eve. I know she took days off from the factory to spend time with her aunt, but surely the woman must have returned to Pennsylvania by now. I will spend all of New Year’s Eve working on the painting. The second half of the century will soon dawn. I must be ready …
Thursday, January 4, 1951
Lillian came into the bank today with her savings deposit, looking more somber than ever. Oh, if only I knew what troubled her so! Is it because of the soldier, who has clearly lost interest in her? Risking the wagging tongues of the tellers, I asked her to come into my office. She sat down, and I expressed my concern for her health. She insisted she was perfectly fine, if a bit weary from the dreadful weather we’ve been having.
Saturday, January 6, 1951
Today I returned to Whalie’s Jewelers, for I cannot bear to see Lillian looking so blue! Thinking that a small gift might cheer her, I purchased a lovely china cat, white with green eyes (like her own cat!). It is imported from England and truly quite special. I will drive her home from work on Monday and present it to her then …
A china cat.
From Frederic’s description, it sounded like the one Lillian purchased at the estate sale. Could it be the same one? I read on, wanting desperately to know if Frederic ever gave the cat to his beloved Lillian.
Monday, January 8, 1951 Today I gave Lillian the gift box with the china cat nestled inside. We were sitting in my Hudson, in front of her home, when I presented it to her. The sky was dark and scattered with a million stars. In the meager glow from the porch lamp, I saw Lillian’s look of surprise as she untied the bow and removed the cat from the box. I wished desperately for her to lean over and kiss my cheek! Instead, her eyes filled with tears as she thanked me in a hoarse voice …
Poor Lillian. Frederic had really been putting the pressure on.
What didn’t make sense were his statements about the soldier losing interest in Lillian. If the soldier in question was Anton—the one who died in Korea—it didn’t jibe with the genuine pleas of love Anton had expressed in his letters. Hadn’t he begged Lillian to write to him?
I co
uld think of only one possibility.
Lillian had never received the letters.
Only a dozen or so pages remained in the journal. Turning to the next page, my thoughts kept tripping to the valentine, which was resting on my end table. Something in the poem had stuck in my memory. What was it?
I’d no sooner reached my hand over to grab it off the table when a thunderous crash from Aunt Tressa’s apartment made me leap out of my socks. In a matter of seconds I was out of my apartment and pounding frantically on her door. I heard her mutter a long string of expletives as she stomped across her living room and yanked open the door.
“My Lord, I thought a meteor fell through your roof! What happened?”
“Come see for yourself.”
At the entrance to her kitchen, I came to an abrupt halt.
What on Planet Earth … ?
Spread all over the floor, like an overflowing pond, was a cream-colored, chicken-flecked disaster area. In a prior incarnation, the mess had obviously been the filling of a chicken pot pie.
“I can’t believe I did this,” Aunt Tressa sputtered. “I was carrying the pot from the stove to the counter when Pazzo jumped right in front of me. I stopped short and my foot slipped, and—”
“Oh, my gosh! You didn’t get hurt, did you?”
“No, of course not.” She swiped at a glob of gravy that had splashed onto her arm. “I didn’t even fall. I just dropped the pot. I was afraid Pazzo might have gotten splattered with hot gravy, but he’s fine. He bolted like a rocket when the pot hit the floor. Poor thing didn’t know what was happening.”
Sure enough, Pazzo was peeking into the kitchen from around the corner, his big green eyes flicking nervously over the scene.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Aunt Tressa said with a sigh. “He was only coming in for a snack. It was his timing that was lousy.”
“I’ll help you clean it,” I said, coughing into my arm.
“Your eyelids are sagging and you look pale. Go home and go to bed. This will take me five minutes to clean up.”
“Give me a break, Aunt Tress. A haz-mat team couldn’t clean this up in five minutes.”
Some Enchanted Murder Page 19
