Health, Wealth, and Murder: A Plain Jane Mystery (The Plain Jane Mysteries Book 4)

by Traci Tyne Hilton

  She brushed it away. “Be serious.”

  “I am. Did you pay any attention to the flyers when you joined up? From the wall of info at the church? If Green Valley Bible Church does anything right at all, it’s in the printed word. They’ve got a flyer for everything.”

  “I read it.”

  “Then you read the part where it said the missional communities exist as family groups that are intentionally built around neighborhoods for the purpose of building local communities of faith.”

  “Of course I read that.”

  “But it doesn’t apply to you?”

  Jane shrugged.

  “Jane…”

  “I hated leaving Columbia River Community Church after I broke up with Isaac, but you understand that I couldn’t keep going to his church.”

  “Right. Because it’s real awkward, what with him living in Montreal.”

  “His parents go there. It was awkward.”

  “And you couldn’t go back to the church you grew up at, why?” He tried the trick with his hand and her knee again.

  She brushed his hand away, again, but this time he caught her hand and lifted it to his lips for a lingering kiss.

  “Because it wasn’t the same anymore. Not without Mom and Dad.”

  “And you couldn’t go to my church because you will probably dump me, too, and that would get you right back in that awkward spot you were in at Christmas with CRCC.”

  Jane sighed. “When you put it like that, it makes me sound so…”

  “Pragmatic. Which is fine. You settled on Green Valley because it is awesome. I agree. I like it too. Good church, good people. Good program.”

  “Good focus on evangelism and outreach. So I love the missional communities. It’s awesome experience that will make us way more effective on the foreign mission field one day.”

  “Agreed.”

  A happy thrill shivered up Jane’s spine. He agreed about missions. She really, really loved that about him. “So, obviously the thing to do was join a missional community, and I did, and I love it.”

  “Well, goody gumdrops. But you only love it so long as it is willing to bend its rules to suit you.”

  “Oh, go away.”

  Jake pulled her in for a kiss, but she turned her head. He dropped her hand and stood up. “I think Sean has a point. I don’t mean to be a jerk, but the guy is solid, and he had a point.”

  “So you think we should just run out now and get married?”

  Jake’s eyes sparkled. “Yes, obviously. But barring that, you should accept my proposal and we should get married as soon as reasonably possible.”

  She pushed him away. “Nope. It’s way too soon.”

  Jake shrugged. “I want you to be my wife, and I have wanted it since the day after my parents died and I woke up to find you in my kitchen. I’ll ask you again, and again, and again. But until then…”

  “Until then, all is well.”

  “Until then, I think I should back off a little with the whole missional community thing. I should hook up with the one in my hood and get intentional about outreach.”

  “Don’t be like that, Jake. Be on my side.” Even as she said it, she knew she sounded whiny and entitled. She rubbed her eyes. “I’m tired, sorry.”

  Jake kissed the top of her head. “It’s okay. I forgive you for wanting me to hang out with you all of the time.”

  She held her hand out to him. “Gemma’s out attending a birth. Will you stay here so I won’t be scared?”

  Jake shook his head. “That’s another point Sean was right on. Let’s not keep giving people a reason to think the worst.” He kissed the top of her head one more time, and then let himself out.

  Jane grabbed a throw blanket off the floor and wrapped herself in it. She closed her eyes and began to pray. God was going to have to show her why this was so important to everyone else if he really wanted it to be important to her, too.

  Seven

  Jane was at the Malachi house bright and early the next morning. She had slept longer, and better, than most nights, and felt more than a bit embarrassed about walking out on her missional community group. Of course Jake and Sean were right, but it stank. It also stank that she needed to call Sean and apologize. But there it was. She needed to show him that she wasn’t a spoiled brat and did care about the success of the Green Valley missional communities.

  Francine let her in at the back door and quickly pulled her into a utility room at the back of the house. “Today you’d better focus on cleaning, and making a good impression,” she whispered. “Once Christiana is completely sure of you, then you can start snooping. And in my opinion, you can’t start soon enough.” Francine’s hair was pulled back into a bun, but brown wisps were falling out in the back. She had dark circles under her eyes, and, unlike the day they had met, she was in blue jeans and a rumpled button-down rather than a tailored suit.

  “That’s not a problem at all.” Jane set her cleaning caddy on the small counter by the utility sink. “I can start now. Give me two and a half hours, I’d say.”

  “Fine, fine.” Francine’s eyes darted from Jane to the door behind her.

  “Is there something you want to tell me?” Jane kept her voice low.

  “The police called this morning and want me to come in for questioning.” Francine chewed her lip.

  “Have you contacted a lawyer yet?”

  The color drained from Francine’s face. “Do you think I need to this early?”

  “Yes, definitely. Don’t go without a lawyer.” Jane knew that much at least, from her classes. Though she wasn’t sure if telling Francine this was considered giving legal advice or not. She’d have to check.

  “Don’t you think that will just make me look guilty?”

  “Don’t let your mind play games like that. You can’t go in there vulnerable. Not when the case at hand is murder.”

  Francine nodded. “Okay. I’ll call. I…I don’t know who to call.”

  Jane nodded. She ought to have some kind of referral system for her clients, but, of course, hadn’t developed one yet.

  “Why don’t you ask Christiana?”

  Something outside had captured Francine’s attention. She nodded again, and then pushed past her and went outside.

  Jane followed her out, but hung back by the door.

  Francine crossed the yard and entered the detached garage. The window was dirty, but it lit up a second after Francine went in.

  Jane followed, but didn’t go in, and tried to keep her head away from the window. She listened, but it was quiet.

  The door creaked open. Jane ducked around the corner of the wall and hoped Francine wouldn’t notice her.

  Francine shut the door, a fluffy white cat cradled in her arms. “Christiana would kill me if she knew I had let you out,” she murmured as she rubbed the cat’s head.

  Jane sighed, disappointed. It looked like she’d have to start the job cleaning, like Francine said, and hope that clues would make themselves apparent.

  The house was a great deal messier than she had expected, considering she had figured Christiana Malachi lived there alone.

  Jane hadn’t wondered about the dishes piled in the kitchen sink. Surely the Malachi Ministries task force and other random staff had been in and out of the house for days.

  She washed them up, paying close attention to the knives, but there was a knife for each spot in the block.

  But the bedrooms and hall bath upstairs told a different story. The rug in the bathroom was damp, as was the shower curtain. Jane squeegeed the bath. Not that you needed secret clues to find out who was staying here. Francine ought to have provided her with that information already.

  Once the bathroom was clean, she knocked on the first bedroom door. There was no answer, so she let herself in.

  The room reeked of sweat socks and stale food, which was no surprise since there were plenty of both littering the floor.

  The smell, mess, and piles of laundry implied a male of the tee
nage variety was occupying the room. Jane dug through the desk drawer to see if she could ID the occupant. She shuffled through the pile of scratch paper and stubby pencils until she found a crumpled-up receipt.

  She smoothed it out and laid it under the desk light. Two weeks old. From Safeway. Muscle Milk, three-meat pizza, and Red Bull. That looked like food an adolescent boy would eat. She scrounged in the drawer again and came up with a scrap of paper that had half a phone number on it—not a local area code. She put her finds back and shut the drawer.

  She whipped open a garbage sack and started in on the garbage, mostly food wrappers. Once she had excavated the floor, she set her little silver Roomba to work and opened his closet. The owner of the room didn’t have much hanging, just one black church suit and two white shirts. But he did have a coat hanger with three ties on it. The bright orange tie Jane was sure she recognized from the online video. So, if she could isolate the guy with the orange tie, she would be able to ID the first roommate at the Malachi house. She made the bed and moved to the next room.

  The second room had a deeper layer of trash, and cleaning the garbage off of the desk would be a perfect excuse to dig around. Something crunched under her foot as she stepped into the room. She cringed. Snooping would have to wait until the potato-chip sacks, hamburger wrappers, paper coffee cups, and all of the greasy napkins went in the garbage.

  She let the Roomba range freely in this room too, so that no matter who happened in, they would find her actively cleaning.

  The mess on the desk was promising. She lifted a composition book that sat on top of paperbacks and notebooks. The pages were dated, but hard to decipher. Sermon notes? Journal? Both? The handwriting was definitely masculine, but the dirty laundry lying all over the room made that clear enough. A page dated February 22 was especially difficult to read, but that made her want to try harder. Some of the words had been etched deeply into the page, while others were scribbled out so effectively the page had ripped under the force of the pen.

  Jane wrote “2/22” in the notebook she kept in her apron pocket. Something happened of note on that day, and the words “guardian,” “Toledo,” and “broken” were important.

  Jane put the book down and grabbed one of the paperbacks. It was inscribed by the author—J. D. Ypres—“to Wilt with love.”

  So was this Wilt’s room? She flipped open the rest of the books, one after the other, until she found two of them marked “Wilt Peterson” on the interior cover. Obviously, she noted that in her notebook.

  Either Wilt had given these books to the room’s occupant or he was the room’s occupant. She shuffled through the clothes hanging in the closet, but they were unremarkable, except that the jeans were hung, and looked expensive. Also, they had a thirty-inch inseam, but were cuffed, and the cuff was worn at the fold, as though it dragged when he walked, so the person staying in this room was either young or fairly short.

  She was pushing it, snooping this much with Francine’s directions to just clean still ringing in her ears, so she moved off to Christiana’s room, determined to clean it and nothing more.

  Jane was tucked into the master bath, scrubbing the grout lines around the bath tiles, when Christiana came into the bedroom, talking.

  Jane scrubbed slower, and more gently. Eavesdropping was the first chance she’d have to hear something useful. She paused and tucked her white earbuds into her ears. Yes, it was to look like she was listening to music instead of her employer. Yes, that was technically a lie. But…no. She decided not to try and justify it.

  “I expect it to run no differently than it did when he was with us.” Christiana’s voice was pinched. No one replied, and she continued, “Now, if we don’t have it, how do we expect to see visions?” Christiana paused, but no one responded, so she must have been on the phone. “Listen, if this is how God chooses to work, who am I to judge? I expect to hold the revival as scheduled.” She swallowed a sob. “I will run it, of course. But if I want to share God’s visions, I need to have the tools to do it, don’t I?” There was a lengthier pause, then Christiana laughed, in a sad kind of way. “This has nothing to do with faith. Don’t try that with me. I have faith that God will work like he always does.” Pause. “Where’s your faith, then? If God intends to speak to me through his usual means, then he plans to make it perfectly safe for you to acquire it for me, despite the police ‘crawling all over the place,’ as you put it.”

  Jane was disappointed. She wanted new information, not more of the same. She already knew that Josiah’s visions were induced by drugs. She put her back into scrubbing the wall. She might as well work hard and get the job done, since she was here anyway.

  Christiana continued her one-sided argument. “What I want to know is what happened to all of our inventory. We don’t cross the country unprepared. If one of you kids has taken it all, you will be dead to me. Do you understand?”

  A year’s worth of missing LSD?

  Now that was something more like. Jane grinned as she made the grimy black grout as white as she could. Anyone would say drugs and murder went hand in hand.

  Christiana took her conversation out of the room, so Jane finished as quickly as she could, hoping to find another good spot to clean and listen. But after the bathroom was cleaned and the bed was made, she found Christiana quietly reading her Bible in the living room. Jane paused. “Is there anything special you’d like me to do before I go?” She kept her voice low and her eyes averted, the image of a humble but respectful housekeeper.

  Christiana looked up. “Hmmm? Oh, no, I don’t think so. Just whatever Francine said to do.” She had a dreamy, faraway look in her eyes, and stared out the window instead of looking at Jane.

  “Okay. Thank you.” Jane went to the mudroom. She rinsed out her rags and her mop.

  The door behind her opened, and someone stomped in. She turned and smiled at a young man with messy brown hair who was wearing work gear.

  He nodded at her and then sat down on the bench to take off his mud-caked boots. “Is Christiana inside?” he asked in a voice that had a hint of Boston to it.

  “Yeah, in the living room.” Jane wrung out her rag again.

  “Thanks.” He shoved his boots under the bench and went sock footed to Christiana.

  “Did you get it?” Christiana asked, her voice tired, and not at all dreamy as it had been before.

  “It’s not gonna happen, Mamma,” the young man responded.

  Christiana exhaled loudly. “Well then, what ideas do you have?”

  “Pray about it?” The man laughed.

  “Might as well.” Christiana’s voice was resigned. Jane didn’t want to listen in to a conversation that was completely devoid of interesting or specific details, so she packed up her cleaning caddy and left.

  Ei ght

  Later that night she camped out in her bedroom with her criminology text and pored over the assigned chapters. The criminal mind wasn’t much of a mystery. All have sinned and fallen short. And out of the heart of man come evil thoughts. And thoughts lead to actions. Since she was part of the “all” who had sinned, and who had evil thoughts, well, she didn’t love the implication that she was equally capable of murder, but in general, the idea that sinners in a broken world were out to get each other was neither shocking nor particularly intimidating.

  She just had to narrow down what kind of evil mind was behind this particular murder.

  Every time a lecturer in her criminal justice class mentioned religious fanaticism as a sign of mental imbalance, Jane bristled. But, if that were true and not just liberal bias, a Josiah Malachi event was likely to be rife with just that kind of crazy. His killer could easily be a maniac who was exhibiting religious fanaticism. If so, should she be looking inside or outside? Would it have been someone who came to the event and saw the opportunity, or someone within?

  Jake wanted her to dismiss the idea of an outsider, but if he had a fanatic follower who was familiar, from televised events and the Internet, with his regular
script, that person could have easily planned a murder.

  Her phone chirped—Francine was texting.

  “TMRO 9 AM. B HERE.”

  Jane wrinkled her nose. Needlessly vague texts irritated her. “At the Malachi house? To clean?”

  “YES! IMPORTANT MTNG.”

  Jane considered asking what kind of meeting, but it occurred to her that someone might be monitoring Francine’s phone. For about fifty bucks Jane could set her up with an untraceable phone no one else knew about. It would be a deductible work expense—and invaluable for getting real info from Francine.

  “CU then.” Jane sent her last message. She’d have to hope there was some kind of mess near enough to the meeting that she could conveniently hear what was happening. Maybe Francine would take care of that little detail for her.

  Jane was too excited to sleep well. She tossed and turned and kicked her down comforter off. Could she convince Francine to take a new phone? Would she be able to hear what was going on in the meeting? Would she know the useful information from the worthless? Was she just wasting the Malachis’ money while the police did the real work?

  Would the Malachis actually pay her?

  Despite the sleep fail, she was up by five, like usual, and had plenty of time to make her requests known to God before she was needed at the Malachi house.

  As to the necessary mess, an act of God had taken care of that.

  Christiana was established in the dining room with half a dozen people around the table, Francine included.

  Jane was in the kitchen, one small butler’s pantry away, deep cleaning because of an infestation of sugar ants. They were everywhere, like the lice in Egypt, and Jane couldn’t be happier. Scrubbing every inch of the kitchen could last as long as she wanted it to.

  The voices from the dining room were clear enough that Jane didn’t even need to crouch at the door to eavesdrop.

  “I agree with Christiana,” a young man with a clear, deep voice said. “We’ve already got the schedule planned for our whole stay here.”