“Of what?”
“That she can’t just pretend that it was as simple as she wanted it to be. All of us made mistakes back then. Even her.”
#
It was full dark out when Angie got back into the car. The stars were shining all across the cloudless night, the constellations twinkled at her, and the Milky Way ran in a dim stripe across the sky.
She should go home, even though she was nervous about seeing Aunt Margery. They’d both survive the encounter, no doubt. Angie would have to go home for clean clothes sooner or later. Technically, she could have bought new clothes and just lived out of her car for a while, but the thought made her wince.
The deeper she got into the story of these five old friends, the more she dreaded what she might dig up about Aunt Margery and the murder. She could just forget it all, stop her sleuthing and move out, close up the shop, move back to Manhattan and go back to work for her old bosses (who would probably snap her up before someone else could).
Or she could stop being ridiculous.
She drove back into town and went to the house. Aunt Margery’s car was in the drive. Angie parked in her normal spot. She hesitated at the back door and then made herself put the key in.
The house was empty. Angie shoulders dropped with relief. Whatever Aunt Margery’s role in the murder, Angie would just look the other way.
It would be fine. The police would sort it all out.
That was a plan, right?
If only Aunt Margery would tell her the truth. She had the power to clear up all of the confusion, but simply refused to do it. It was maddening.
Angie took a shower and got ready for bed. A long time after she had turned off the lights, she heard someone come in through the back door: Aunt Margery’s soft footsteps across the floor to her bedroom, where she opened the door and closed it behind her.
#
Angie had a troubled night’s sleep. Was Aunt Margery the killer? No, she couldn’t believe it. It hadn’t been her hand that had held the gun. It must have been Quinn. She had just been standing where the blood had…
She tried to visualize where everyone had been standing in Snuock’s study. Snuock’s body lay in front of the desk. The gun lay beside him. It might not have fallen there. It might have been picked up and wiped for fingerprints first, then tossed to the carpet.
There had been blood spatters on the ivory colored carpet, that much she could remember—but not what pattern were they in. No matter how much she went over it in her mind, all she could visualize was a big splotch of blood that had covered most of the carpet under Snuock’s body, and some splatters around the edge. What direction? What about other patches of blood, say, on the walls or something? If Aunt Margery’s dress had been covered with blood that meant that at least some of the blood had to have gone flying.
Wait, she thought, the pictures. She’d taken pictures for this very reason. She got out of bed and picked her phone up off her dresser. Quickly she opened the photos and scrolled to the ones from that night. What a shoddy job; she definitely had to work on her crime photo skills. It was obvious she hadn’t been as calm under pressure as she had imagined herself. But here was one photo of the edge of the desk and the wall to the right of it, a strange angle as if she’d taken it accidentally, and spatters of blood feathered up the wall in the direction of the door. A struggle, thought Angie, there was definitely a struggle.
Had Quinn’s clothes been covered with blood, too? If they had been, he could have dumped them somewhere out at sea…
At sea.
Quinn’s boat, the Woolgatherer, had been away from the dock on the night of the third. She had seen that it was missing, but hadn’t put any particular value on that, because she, like everyone else, had first assumed that Snuock had been killed on the fourth.
Could Quinn have docked the Woolgatherer in Polpis Harbor somewhere near Snuock’s house? The house did overlook the harbor, and there was a narrow beach that ran behind the house. But was there a place to dock? She couldn’t remember. Snuock had walked her along the top of the bluff once. You could drag a kayak or a canoe onto the sand, but not a fishing boat as big as Quinn’s.
Maybe he’d taken the boat and docked it elsewhere, then walked up to the main house, so no one would know that he’d been there.
No.
Whoever had come to Snuock’s house had come by car—otherwise, why open the gate?
He’d taken the boat to somewhere else on the island then driven a car over to the manor. Or he hadn’t driven, Aunt Margery had.
Then why had he moved the boat at all? Why not leave it where it was, rather than breaking his routine?
Hold on. It couldn’t have been Aunt Margery who had driven him. She had been sitting on the beach that night. Angie had seen her sitting next to the small bonfire. Or was she mixing up the two nights?
She tried to relax and let the memories come to her.
No: the first night, on the third, Angie had been wearing a jacket. She had looked out over the beach and zipped it up. The second time she had been wrapped up in the beach blanket. The night of the third, the night that the Woolgatherer had been missing from its slip, Aunt Margery had been sitting next to a small bonfire.
Which meant that she couldn’t have gone with Quinn.
What if he’d come back, though? He’d taken the boat to another dock, got out, driven a car to Snuock’s house, shot him, then come to get Aunt Margery to help him.
Angie tossed back and forth.
But the body had been left on the floor. What would she have helped with? Cleaning up evidence? Wiping off fingerprints and placing the gun in such a way to make it look like a suicide. And she would put herself at risk why? Because she still loved Raymond Quinn.
What time had Angie woken up that night to realize that Aunt Margery wasn’t in the house?
One o’clock, she remembered. She rolled over and looked at her clock: it was after that, now.
What time had Snuock been killed? She didn’t know.
She couldn’t be sure about the beach behind Snuock’s house; she couldn’t be sure of the time that Snuock had been killed; she couldn’t be absolutely sure of the spray of blood that had hit Aunt Margery’s dress—one picture wasn’t proof enough.
She needed to go back to the house and find out. Probably the study was taped off or locked up. In that case she could ask Valerie, maybe she remembered. Or could be talked into opening the door a crack, so they could peek.
#
In the morning, Aunt Margery’s door was closed. Angie could feel her presence in the house. And her purse and shoes were in their normal spots: shoes by the back door, purse hanging from one of the kitchen chairs. Angie started her normal routine then stopped in front of the coffee pot: to make the coffee or not make the coffee? Make the coffee and pretend everything is normal. Or, don’t make the coffee and add insult to injury for which she would never be able to forgive herself.
They were two adult women, both single. It was the little things that mattered, that kept the peace and their lives running smoothly.
She would make the coffee.
It wasn’t exactly an admission that everything was normal between them, but they were family and that bond trumped anything that threatened to undermine it. She opened the coffee bag and inhaled its rich, nutty roast.
#
She opened the bookstore. Soon, Jo arrived with the day’s pastries and the current gossip:
“Everyone wants to know if you’re going to close the bookstore.”
“What?” Angie put a stack of books on the table in the back and gaped at her friend. “Someone spreading rumors?”
“It’s not hard for people to see something is going on between you and your great-aunt. She hasn’t been in to the bookstore to help during the afternoons. I opened the shop for you one morning. And you’ve been closing early and closing for lunch.”
“You made me do that. And I’ve done it once!” Angie was incredulous.
&
nbsp; “Therefore,” Jo said, ignoring Angie’s interruption, “the bookstore must be closing.”
Angie blew a frustrated raspberry into the air. “I hate gossip.”
“You still have to live with it.”
“Are there any theories about why any of this is happening?”
Jo tapped one finger on her chin. “I see where you’re going with this. No. I haven’t heard any theories other than Snuock’s raise in rent. I think the consensus is that it was intended to drive Quinn out of business and the rest of us that go under are just collateral damage. So you’re the rest of us.”
Angie shook her head. “At least there aren’t worse rumors going around.”
“Yeah, it could absolutely get worse. Any messages you want to pass on? Sometimes it’s better to accept that gossip is going to happen and try to put some spin on it.”
“You could say…” Angie’s mind raced. “You could say that I’m trying to give Aunt Margery a break after the fourth, and that I’m thinking about hiring an assistant so that she can have more time off to enjoy her retirement.”
“Ooh,” Jo said. “I like that.”
“Just don’t say that she’s sick or anything. She’d hate that.”
“Okay. But that won’t last forever.”
“It will. If I hire an assistant.”
“You can’t just hire an assistant in order to help with gossip, Angie. It’s bad business.”
Angie rolled her eyes. For all that Jo thought herself a ruthless business manager, she was the less savvy of the two of them. “I’ve been thinking about it anyway.”
“Why? Aunt Margery does a great job here.”
“She does. But we have nobody to help cover us for emergencies, and books are heavy.”
“But won’t that be…an extra expense?”
Angie’s shoulders dropped. “Yes.”
“Can you really afford it? Now?”
“I can’t keep Aunt Margery here forever,” she said. “She needs to be able to live her life, not get stuck facilitating mine. She helped me get the bookstore established. Which is more than I could have ever asked of her. But I can’t expect that to last forever. At least I can start planning now to hire summer help, college students to work over the summer during the busiest hours.”
“Okay,” Jo said. “That almost sounds like you’ve thought about this.”
“Not all the way through. But good enough for gossip, right?”
“Right. So, off the books, how are things going with her?”
“I don’t know. We still haven’t talked. At least I went home last night. And made her coffee this morning.”
Jo shook her head. “And? What else are you going to do about it?”
“I’m…if she doesn’t get here by one, I’m going to close up the bookstore again and drive out to Snuock’s house.”
“Why?”
“There are some things I need to check.”
“What?”
Sometimes Jo was just as nosy as Angie. She thought about shaking her head and refusing to tell her—but that would have been hypocritical. She told Jo briefly about the thoughts that circled in her head all night and kept her up.
Jo gave her a strange look. “What if…?”
“What if I’m wrong?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’m wrong,” Angie said.
“I don’t know if you’re right but you’re not wrong,” Jo said. “Someone killed Snuock. And Aunt Margery is acting fishy as hell. If it wasn’t her and Quinn, and it wasn’t her without Quinn, then why did she have blood all over her clothes? Did she pull over to the side of the road to drag a dying deer out of the way? What?”
Angie’s mouth opened. Something had just occurred to her. “Could you swing by my house on your delivery rounds?”
“Sure. Why?”
“I want you to look inside Aunt Margery’s car and tell me if there’s any blood on the seats, or anything covering them to hide a stain.”
#
The hours crept by slowly. Jo called a little while later to report that the inside of Aunt Margery’s car was clean, repeat: clean. Not even dust on the front dash. For all that Aunt Margery couldn’t be bothered to do, she was a real hound for keeping things tidy. She did most of the cleanup at the house, too. And there were no signs that she had had stains removed—no light spots on the upholstery.
Angie wished that she was more of a Poirot, able to work everything out in her head all at once, instead of with painful, step-by-step slowness. She wanted to be able to have a sudden insight that would unlock all the answers for her. Instead it felt like she was struggling with a stack of corporate analyses, looking at different venture capital possibilities, knowing that they were all risky, but that one of them stuck out as being different than the others, either for better or worse.
And she was going to have to sniff out which that was.
Information. She needed more information.
The problem was too complex for her intuition to figure it out in a snap. All it could do was tell her when something smelled funny. And this smelled funny.
If Aunt Margery had been covered in blood, she would have left traces inside the car, unless she had driven back home naked, used a different car, or picked up a change of clothes.
Angie could think of ways for her to have done all three. She could have jumped through a lot of mental hoops and come up with answers for anything. She was creative enough.
But why?
A lot of her suppositions served her central premise, which was that Quinn had killed Snuock and her great-aunt had helped him somehow, planned or otherwise, and they were both now trying to cover that up.
If she let that go, what did she have left?
Was she really back to Walter having killed his father?
What about the bloody clothes? Coming up with excuses for her great-aunt to have been burning bloody clothes out on the beach when simply shoving them in the garbage can would have done (had the blood been on them for any innocent reason) was a laborious effort.
Her great-aunt was involved. But not the way that Angie thought.
How, though?
How?
Chapter 14
Questions & Answers
At one p.m., Aunt Margery hadn’t shown up. Angie closed the shop, drove to a hamburger-and-ice-cream shop where she had a patty melt and a cherry Coke, then drove out to Snuock Manor.
Her assumptions had been stripped down to nothing but a couple of pieces of burnt clothing and a lot of checkboxes for what could not have happened. She had questions to ask, but she didn’t even really expect to find answers, at least not ones that would satisfy her.
The gate was closed.
Angie stopped, rolled down her window, and pressed the intercom button. If nobody answered, she would just turn around and go home.
“Yes?”
She was staying. “Valerie? I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.”
“You and every reporter from here to Boston.”
Angie bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I’ll just…”
“Never mind, Angie. I’m on edge. I didn’t mean to snap at you. Of course you can come in. I could use someone to talk to about some things, as a matter of fact. I feel like I’m starting to go crazy in here.”
“You’re not all by yourself, are you?”
“Well, there are the people who come in and take care of the grounds, who don’t talk to me, and the housekeeping staff, who I have mostly told that they’re not needed for the time being because I…because most of this stuff…because…it would be easier to talk to you if you would just come up the drive, Angie.”
The gate opened and Angie drove through. It closed behind her, either to cover up the fact that someone had come through or to make sure that she couldn’t escape before Valerie was done with her. She parked in her usual spot behind the main house, then got out and looked around. Valerie was walking toward her from along the bluff, and waved at Angie to come with
her.
The two of them walked in silence to the edge of the bluff and looked over.
“Tell me I’m not crazy,” Valerie said.
“You’re not crazy.”
“Thank you. You’re seeing what I’m seeing, right?”
The two of them looked down at the harbor, the boats sailing around in it, and the long set of wood stairs leading down from where they were to the beach at the bottom.
“No dock,” Angie said.
“Right. No dock. I’m not stupid. I’ve heard the rumors, that Walter didn’t kill his father—for a kid who has been spending years trying to make peace between those parents, I can’t believe that it was him for a second—but that it was Raymond Quinn who did it. Now, I’m not that familiar with Raymond Quinn, but I know that he doesn’t have a car—he has a boat and a bicycle. And if he rode a bicycle out here and had to have Alexander open the gate for him, I’ll eat my hat, which I will have to go out and purchase because I don’t have one.”
“And he didn’t take his boat out here.”
“Where would he dock it? It’s not like he swam out here, climbed up the hill, and walked dripping into the house. I would have known if that’s what had happened.”
The two of them watched the waves coming in for a while.
Valerie took a deep breath then turned toward Angie like she was expecting a fight. “I’ve heard other rumors, too. That Raymond Quinn wasn’t the only one out here. That your great-aunt, the one who works with you at the bookstore, helped him.”
Angie squeaked, “Where did you hear that from?”
“All I can say is I went into town the other day and people talk. I can understand if that’s why you’re out here, to put the kibosh on that. I don’t know what you think you’re going to find that will help you do that, but I can understand.”
“I’m glad,” Angie said. “Because that’s exactly what I’m doing. I have a question…and a favor to ask.”
“Ask away. The answer might be no.”
“What was the actual time of death? Do you know?”
Crime and Nourishment_A Cozy Mystery Novel Page 17
