“How upset?”
“If you’re asking whether she seemed despondent, like someone about to take her own life, the answer is ‘no.’ But . . .” I glanced over at Finn and Alice, both wrapped up in misery and guilt. More than anything, I didn’t want them to bear the burden of believing their fight with Emily pushed her to suicide.
“But what?” Cal prompted.
I looked up at him, at the unforgiving geometry of his face and the clear light of certainty in his eyes.
I’m not a perfect person. In fact, I’ve done a lot of stupid things, and even a few mean ones, in my time. But I don’t lie. I knew what lies did to people. When my mama found out about my daddy’s other family up in Tulsa, it killed her. Her body lived on for years, but her soul was as dead as could be. Lies hurt.
This time, the truth might hurt, too. But I had to tell it.
“Right before she left, she said it would be okay. That she thought she knew what she had to do to make everything better.”
Cal nodded. “I sure hope she didn’t think suicide was gonna fix things. Because that”—he pointed at Finn and Alice, holding each other for comfort—“that sure doesn’t look like ‘okay’ to me.”
chapter 16
Finn followed me, Bree, and Alice home. He brewed a pot of herbal tea while I dug out a package of the high-end chocolate chip cookies that had been hidden in the cabinet above the fridge so they stood a chance of surviving until we had company.
When we’d gathered in the living room, we all just stared at the plate of cookies. Even the promise of extra-large chunks of chocolate and macadamia nuts held little appeal.
“Does she have family?” Bree asked.
Finn nodded. “Her folks are in Duluth. Cal said the police will call them tonight, but I’ll call them in the morning. I can help them make arrangements, but I bet they’ll want to . . .”
His voice grew tight, then trailed off. I knew what he was thinking—that her family would want to take her home to bury her—but it didn’t seem right to say the words out loud. We’d all just seen Emily, spoken with her, argued with her. To talk about that person we knew as just a body to be buried felt too sudden, too final.
“Duluth?” Bree said. “Poor kid. She was pretty far from home.”
Finn shrugged. “Most academics don’t get a choice. You graduate and you go wherever you get a job.”
I remembered what Emily had said about the two-body problem, and the difficulty of married academics finding jobs in the same state, let alone the same city.
“Emily always knew she might end up someplace far from Minnesota,” Finn said, “call some new place ‘home.’ ”
Still, I thought of her sparsely furnished house, her dogless life, and my heart broke. Some people, when they move to a new town, they make a new home there. Emily had not. She had been in Dalliance for years, but was clearly still a stranger.
“We should do something here, too,” Alice said. “We—”
She broke off, her whole body wracked with sobs. Bree pulled her close, enveloping her in a fierce hug. “It’s okay, baby. We’ll say good-bye to her.”
I glanced at Finn. His eyes swam with tears as he watched mother and daughter grieve. But then he shook himself, physically casting off the raw emotion of the moment.
Cal and Finn thought of each other as oil and water, but they were really two sides of the same coin. Emily had pointed out that Finn shared Cal’s deep sense of integrity, but where Cal followed the rules, Finn made his own. And both men shied away from sorrow, Cal falling back on action and Finn falling back on intellect.
I didn’t know the man Finn Harper had become, but I knew the boy he’d been. And that boy would treat his loss as a puzzle to be solved, while the hurt he felt simmered beneath the surface, eating at his soul.
“Tally, how did Emily seem when she left the store last night?” Finn asked.
I weighed my options, considered shrugging off the question, and decided on full disclosure. I repeated the story I’d told Cal, about Emily’s last words to me.
But Finn didn’t interpret them the same way Cal did. “I got the sense that a lightbulb had gone off for her when we were arguing, but I was too angry then to listen. Maybe she had an idea about who killed Bryan.”
“Oh, man. If she did, maybe that’s why she called. To tell me what she’d figured out. I can’t believe I didn’t have my phone when she called,” Alice said, pushing herself out of her mother’s arms. The child was bound and determined to make this her fault.
“Sweetie, it wouldn’t have mattered,” Bree said. “She was already in a bad way when she called. She didn’t make any sense at all.”
“Was she drunk?” Alice asked.
“I doubt it,” Finn said. “Because of her medical condition, she didn’t drink. Even if she were upset, there wouldn’t have been alcohol in the house. My guess is she took too much insulin. That would have sent her blood sugar plummeting and left her dopey, confused, and weak.”
“She seemed so on top of her illness, though,” I said. “How could she take too much insulin unless it was on purpose?”
Finn shrugged. “It happened once when we were dating. She uses”—he cringed—“used both long- and short-acting insulin. The long-acting stuff she took morning and evening, like clockwork. The short-acting insulin was for regulating her sugar after eating an unusually big meal. It packs a punch. One morning, she was tired and she accidentally picked up the vial of short-acting insulin. She bottomed out fast and had to drink some juice right away.”
“I told her to get some OJ or some fruit,” Bree said. “I remembered that from Steel Magnolias, when Julia Roberts got all wonky in the beauty parlor. But from what she said, she was in bed. She said she was too tired to go to the kitchen.”
“What else did she say?” Finn asked. “I mean, if she was having a crisis with her insulin, why would she call Alice instead of 911?”
Bree shook her head and her cheeks turned almost as red as her hair. “I don’t really know. Like I said, she wasn’t making any sense.”
“Come on, Mom. Just tell us what she said. Maybe it will make sense to one of us.”
“Well, she asked for Alice, and I told her Alice had left for the evening. Then she said she had to lay down and that her bed was really soft. I said Alice had to sleep, too, but she said she needed to talk to Alice, it was important, Alice was brilliant. Then she said something like, ‘What she said. Keys. Tim.’ ”
“Huh?” I asked.
“Like I said, it didn’t make any sense. And she was whispering. It was hard to understand her, but I’m almost one hundred percent certain that’s what she said. I asked her who Tim was and what keys he had, but she just said, ‘No! Keys. Tim. Money.’ ” Bree swallowed hard. “And then she asked for candy. That’s when your aunt Tally figured out what was going on.” Bree grabbed Alice’s hand and held it tight. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know she was sick.”
I held my breath, terrified Alice would snap at her mother and break Bree’s heart. But, instead, she squeezed her mom’s hand and offered her a wobbly smile.
Finn finally gave in to the lure of the cookies. He took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. “So Alice is brilliant. Keys, Tim, and money. What could it mean?”
“I have her keys,” Alice said, “but I don’t know anyone named Tim. Except for Timmy Jenkins, that kid who lived next door to us when we lived in San Antonio. But no one named Tim at school.”
Finn sighed. “It might not mean anything at all,” he said. “Since my mom had her stroke, she’s had some bad episodes where she starts talking about all sorts of gibberish. The doctor told me that when the brain is starving, random synapses fire. Mom’s brain gets starved for oxygen, but I bet if Emily’s brain was starved for sugar it would do the same thing. We may be looking for meaning where none exists.”
Bree looked like something was eating her up inside, but every time she opened her mouth like she was ready to talk, she’d glance at her d
aughter and stop.
“Alice, honey,” I said gently, “you’ve had quite a day. Why don’t you try to get some rest?”
The mere suggestion of sleep triggered a yawn, which Alice fought to smother. “No way. I know how this works. You send me off to bed, and then you talk about what’s really going on. But I think I deserve to be a part of this conversation, don’t you? She was my teacher, my friend.”
Bree and I exchanged a look, but we both knew Alice was right. She’d earned her seat at the grown-up table the hard way.
“What’s bugging you, Bree?” I asked.
“It may be nothing, but I would swear I heard a voice in the background when she called. It was muffled, and I couldn’t make out any words.” She shook her head in frustration. “I don’t know, maybe it was the television. Or maybe it was the power of suggestion. I had just learned she had a fu—um, a boyfriend and so maybe I imagined she had late-night company. But I don’t think so.”
Bree looked around at each of us in turn, her expression earnest.
“I think someone else was in Emily’s house tonight. I think she was whispering because she didn’t want someone to hear her on the phone.”
I nodded. “Normally, I’d say you were nuttier than a scoop of praline pecan, but I think you may be right.”
Finn leaned forward, his cookie forgotten. “All right, Nancy Drew. Lay it on me,” he said.
I told them what I’d found in the kitchen, the gold take-out box of tiramisu and the fork.
“She loved tiramisu, right?” A look of pain flashed across Finn’s face as he nodded. “That was the one thing she couldn’t resist, even though she wasn’t supposed to eat dessert. If she were going to kill herself, do you think she would have passed up one last opportunity to indulge?”
Out loud, it sounded weak. But after the conversation Emily and I had about denying ourselves pleasure and putting off happiness, I found it hard to imagine that she would have passed up the opportunity for a little indulgence.
Finn picked up the thread of my argument. “Leaving aside the armchair psychology, where did the dessert come from? Em and I had dinner together last night. We went to Café Siam . . . no tiramisu on the menu there. And then we went directly to the A-la-mode, and she left there way too late to hit a restaurant for dessert. If she’d gotten the tiramisu earlier during the day or on Thursday, why would it have been on the counter instead of in the fridge?”
From the expression on her face, Alice had her thinking hat on.
“There’s no way she killed herself,” she said. “Mom, you said she was slurring her words and talking about lying down, right?” Bree nodded. “Well, if Dr. Clowper’s blood sugar was so low that she couldn’t even talk right and she was calling from the bedroom, how did she get the phone back to the kitchen?”
Finn nodded. “For that matter, how did she manage to . . .” His voice trailed off and he threw a nervous look at Alice.
“It’s okay, Mr. Harper. I know what you’re getting at. How did she manage to tie the knots and strangle herself when she was basically incoherent?”
We all sat mulling that over for a minute. Finally, Finn broke the silence.
“Shit. She was murdered, wasn’t she?”
Bree and I nodded tentatively, but Alice showed more commitment. “I can picture exactly what happened. Someone, someone she knew, was in her house. That person managed to get her to take too much insulin, or the wrong kind of insulin. Then, when she was too weak to fight back, that person strangled her, making it look like suicide.”
It sent chills down my spine to have our sweet Alice describe the particulars of murder with such clinical precision, but she painted a compelling picture.
Alice leaned forward earnestly. “Whatever she’d figured out about Bryan’s death,” she said, “it got her killed.”
“And whatever she’d figured out,” Bree said to her child, her voice tight with emotion, “she thought you had the answer.”
“But I don’t have any idea what she was talking about,” Alice said.
“Shit,” Finn said again. “It doesn’t matter what you know or don’t know, Alice. Emily said you held the key, and her murderer was probably standing right there when she said it.”
chapter 17
By morning, news of Emily Clowper’s death had spread clear across Lantana County. The official cause of death might take weeks, but the preliminary statement by the coroner’s office was that Emily had died from self-inflicted asphyxiation.
Somehow the staff at the News-Letter had taken that informal conclusion and cobbled together a brief story for the Saturday morning edition, throwing in a few seemingly offhanded references to Emily’s connection to the recent murder of Bryan Campbell. The innuendo led to the obvious conclusion that guilt drove Emily to despair. It seemed impossible to imagine that her suicide and Bryan’s murder weren’t somehow connected, especially when linking them created such a neat TVMOVIE story line.
And that sort of storybook closure made for better PR—for the Dalliance PD, the Chamber of Commerce, and Dickerson University—than the notion of a killer on the loose.
Bree spent the whole day mulling over the fact that Emily had probably been murdered over some kernel of information her daughter possessed. She got more and more torqued up as the day progressed, until finally she exploded.
“No way in hell are you spending one minute more than you have to on that campus.”
We were sitting at the kitchen table, wolfing down plates of leftover meat loaf and mashed potatoes while Kyle watched the A-la-mode during the dinner-hour lull. Alice carefully mounded a dab of potato on top of a tiny square of meat loaf and levered the perfect mouthful onto her fork.
“No problem. Once the May term starts on Wednesday, I’ll only have to be on campus for the three hours of class in the morning and maybe for another hour or so afterwards, for helping students and meeting with Reggie. I can do my grading at home.”
“Nuh-uh,” Bree said. “I mean it. You’re not going to campus. You just tell that Reggie person you’ve changed your mind and you can’t help him with that class.”
“Mama—”
“Don’t ‘Mama’ me, Alice Marie Anders. Unless you turned eighteen when I wasn’t looking, you still gotta do as I say, and I say you’re not stepping foot on the Dickerson campus until they catch this murderer.”
“Why not?”
Bree rolled her eyes. “I musta dropped you on your pointy head one too many times. Two people are dead already, and you’re smack in the middle of the trouble. It’s not safe for you to be on campus.”
Alice tipped her head in that calculating way she had, all cold logic to Bree’s fiery emotion. “Dr. Clowper wasn’t on campus when she was murdered. If someone wants me dead, they’ll find me.”
Her words found their mark, and all the color drained from Bree’s face. She couldn’t shelter her child from danger; no place was safe. Her breath hitched audibly, and I thought she might start to hyperventilate.
“At least if I’m on campus,” Alice continued, “there will be lots of people around. I’ll probably be safer there than, say, the alley behind Remember the A-la-mode.”
Bree rolled her lips between her teeth and squinted hard at her troublesome child. I swallowed a groan, because I knew that look. Alice came by her smarts honestly, and she got them from her mother. When Bree gave up the footloose and fancy-free persona and got down to business, she was a formidable opponent for her genius child.
“I don’t like it,” Bree muttered.
Alice reached out to pat her mother’s hand. “I know you don’t like it, Mama, but I can’t back out on my obligation. I’ll be okay.”
“Yes, you will. Because I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
“Mama—”
“Save your breath, little girl. I know you want to TA this class. So I’ll just go with you.”
“Mom!” Alice shrieked, all horrified teenager. Her fork clattered to her plate.
> “It’s not open for discussion.”
“You can’t just follow me to class.”
“Watch me.”
“No, really, you can’t. The school has a policy against people sitting in on classes unless they’re registered. They don’t want people getting an education they haven’t paid for.”
Mother and daughter faced off across the remains of our family meal, each sizing up the other, looking for tells, any indication that the other was bluffing. They could have given lessons on brinksmanship to Cold War-era diplomats.
“Fine,” Bree conceded. “I’ll register for the class. American literature, right?”
Alice snorted.
“What? I may talk like I got a banjo up my ass, but I can read, you know,” Bree drawled.
“You can’t just register for a class like that.” Alice snapped her fingers. “Dickerson is a selective school.”
Check.
Bree’s eyes lit with triumph. “But they have that community outreach program for folks who aren’t getting a degree. Vonda Hudson took a class on art history before she took that trip to Italy, and she’s a lovely woman but she’s dumb as a box of hair.”
“But Vonda has a high school diploma,” Alice countered. And you don’t. Alice didn’t say the words, but they echoed in the silence anyway.
Checkmate.
The stricken pain in Bree’s eyes was so raw I had to look away. A flicker of uncertainty, maybe a little shame, flashed across Alice’s face before she stuck out her jaw in resolve.
Bree made out how she was a party girl and pretended to be a screwup in school, but she actually got really good grades in high school. A pregnancy scare forced her to drop out and get married. In the end, she lost that baby along with her dreams of getting out of Dalliance, going someplace where she could shed her hell-raising reputation and make something of herself. She talked a good game, but her lack of an education shamed her.
I watched as she got a grip on her emotions and straightened her spine. She reached out for the bowl of mashed potatoes and spooned up another serving onto her plate.
Scoop to Kill Page 12
