Death of a Toy Soldier

by Barbara Early

  He looked down. “I’m doing my best, Liz. But Sy’s rumored spoon collection from various state fairs is a siren’s song to certain relatives. They want her out of the house.”

  “Did many of your family members have keys to Sy’s place?”

  “You mean are they planning on sneaking in there and cleaning it out? There’s been talk. But only talk.”

  “Any of them desperate enough to hire someone to do it for them? The attempted break-in the morning of the funeral. They didn’t break in. Rumor is they had a key.”

  “So you think one of the family hired a gang of punk kids to break into the place?”

  “It certainly sounds like somebody did. Who else would want to get in there that badly? Not Kimmie. She was already living in the house.”

  “I don’t know if I like where this is going.”

  “Hey, you promised me insight into the Wallace family secrets. That’s one of two things I’d like to know.”

  He set his jaw, then nodded in agreement. “A promise is a promise. I’ll see what I can find out. What is the other thing you want?”

  “The recipe for your secret sauce.”

  ###

  My conversation with Jack was the kind I was likely to replay in my head multiple times, which I did while I checked the locks, switched off all extraneous lights, and made sure the coffee maker was off. I was still reviewing our talk when I climbed the stairs to the apartment, avoiding the creaky one. I didn’t need to worry about disturbing Dad. His reassuring snores were vibrating the timbers. That’s probably why we don’t have ghosts, I thought as I secured the locks on our apartment door. We’d never hear them over the din.

  I poured milk into a small bowl of Frosted Flakes and carried it to my bedroom, wincing at the recollection of my conversation with Jack. At the time, I was being playful. But the more I rehearsed it in my head, the more it sounded like blatant flirtation. I groaned, and Othello jumped up to comfort me—or was he aiming for the leftover milk in my bowl? Only a few drops remained, so I let him have it while I stroked his fur.

  What if involving Jack was a mistake? Still, his suggestion to think of this as a game of Clue had merit. I found a pad of Post-it notes on my nightstand and scrounged up a pen from the drawer. I then made up a “card,” Clue-style, for each suspect. Except I dispensed with the corny pictures. If I could eliminate all the suspects except for one, then I’d know who did it. Right?

  To be thorough, or so I told myself, I first made a card for my father. I couldn’t breathe while I was writing his name on the top. Dad had an appointment with the victim and access to the site and the murder weapon. I was about to draw a line through his name, but Dad’s inability to fully recall the event made it impossible to cross him off as a suspect, if I was doing this exercise objectively. Was I deluding myself? Surely a lot of killers out there have friends and family who would swear on a stack of Bibles that their loved one was incapable of murder. But what motive might Dad have had to kill Sullivan O’Grady? Was it over the toys? Or were the toys just an excuse for the two of them to meet? What if the meeting escalated into anger? Or violence? What if Dad grabbed the nearest weapon in self-defense?

  This idea didn’t sit well with me. I couldn’t imagine my father thrusting a lawn dart through anyone’s chest. It also went against everything I’d learned about Sullivan O’Grady. He was a health care aide, apparently because he liked to help people. The biggest scratches on his character were that sometimes he came off as a bit overzealous and didn’t always get his priorities right concerning his family. I had no idea how either of these flaws could put him in conflict with my father.

  The next card I made was for Mrs. O’Grady. She and her husband were going through marital issues, bitter enough to warrant a separation. Had she been so resentful at her husband’s neglect that she followed him? And got angry at what? Him carrying a box of toys into a toyshop? Or maybe she had more of a cold-blooded plan to benefit from his death. No crossing her off the list.

  I then made a card for Kimmie Kaminski. She was a ghost hunter. Sullivan O’Grady was a skeptic and in a position where he might have forewarned Sy DuPont and his family of her intentions. Had she prevented him so that she could carry out her plans and inherit the house? Yes, apparently Sy’s second autopsy showed no signs of foul play, but he was an old man. By marrying him, Kimmie gained a place of residence and a claim on the supposedly haunted house, and she just had to wait until he kicked off. If Sully stood in the way of her plans . . .

  A thought tickled at my subconscious just as Othello curled up next to me and his whiskers tickled my leg. Would a sincere ghost hunter kill someone? Or would she be afraid that person would come back to haunt her? I tapped my pen on the Post-it. Or would she want that person to come back? A psycho ghost hunter who killed people to haunt her house? Sounds like a made-for-TV movie you’d watch at three AM during a bout of insomnia. But I wrote “Psycho??” under her name for future reference.

  Then I made a card for Kimmie’s associates: Chuck, Zach, and Spook. Since they were part of her paranormal investigative team, they would have been in the house, presumably before Sy’s death. They might have seen Sully as a stumbling block. Had one—or more than one—of them followed him, saw him enter the toyshop, worried that he was spilling the beans to a former chief of police, and then capitalized on an opportunity to kill him?

  This created an even more bizarre image. Instead of a made-for-TV movie, Kimmie and her henchmen almost seemed like a group of villains from Batman (the Adam West version—the best version, in my opinion). I couldn’t see Kimmie standing back in high heels and a catsuit, hands on her hips, saying, “Get ’em boys,” while her gang of thugs went at Sullivan O’Grady, causing sound effects to pop on a screen in bright comic bubbles. Well, apparently I could see it. But it made me laugh. Not that I could completely rule them out.

  I ripped off that sheet and set it aside. Who were the other suspects in this game of Clue?

  On the next page, I simply wrote, “Kids.” They’d tried to break into—or rather, let themselves into—Sy’s house on the day of the funeral. Miles’s connection with this group also forced me to make a card for him. I didn’t like the coincidence that his former gang might have been involved, but coincidences like this abounded in a village our size. One couldn’t count on six degrees of separation in East Aurora. I forced myself, again trying to be objective, to imagine a scenario where Miles and/or his former gang could have been guilty of murder.

  The gang I could see. Gangs of nameless, faceless people were handy to blame for just about anything. Perhaps they had somehow come under the impression that the toys Sully had been carrying were worth something and followed him. But Sully hadn’t been carrying the toys at the time. They were already in the shop.

  But Miles knew about them. We’d e-mailed him pictures. Had he let them know, or perhaps let slip, that the toys were at the shop? Had they targeted the shop to steal them? Given their value, at least of the ones that we knew about, was it worth the risk? Then again, Miles was the one with the Internet contacts. He’s the one who told us he couldn’t find the value of Fred and Ginger. Maybe that was a lie. Maybe the thing was worth oodles, and he was cashing in. The thought made my stomach churn. It seemed out of character, both for Miles and for my father, who was normally a good judge of character.

  But where did this group get the key, if they even had one? They’d need a connection to someone else who had access to the house, and that thought made me breathe a little easier.

  The Wallace/DuPont family? What if they spotted Sullivan O’Grady with the toys? They might have jumped to the conclusion that he was absconding with their inheritance. So had one of them killed Sully, taken the toys, then contracted with this gang to break into Sy’s house while everyone was at the funeral? Perhaps to remove something else of value before the other family members could get their claws into it?

  And where did Jack Wallace figure into this? Was he trying to be helpful?
Or was he trying to discover what I had learned? That thought sent chills through me. Had I been sitting, face-to-face and knee-to-knee, with a cold-blooded killer trying to thwart our investigation?

  My major suspects accounted for, I made a few more cards, taking into account some of our neighbors who had come to game night.

  I made one for Peggy Trent, just because she had some connection to the toys via her work at the museum. I wasn’t sure she even knew Sully, and I doubted she had keys to Sy’s house or contact with a gang of thugs. Maybe writing her name on a card was just fun.

  I also made one for Chief Young. What if Sully had discovered something unsavory about the current chief? It wouldn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to think that he’d come to my father, a much loved and revered former chief, for advice, using the toys simply as a diversion. He had no clear connection to the gang, but he was the one who caught them, thus conveniently diverting attention further from himself.

  I even made a card for Lori Briggs. Her family didn’t care much for O’Grady, firing him when he was caring for their relative. Maybe there was more to this story. As the mayor’s wife, she had connections to a lot of people.

  The last name I wrote down before I fell asleep was Glenda’s. I just wrote “Glenda,” because I wasn’t sure I’d heard her last name. What did we know about her? She was getting on to be Sy’s age. Perhaps they had some connection that we didn’t know about.

  As I started to doze off, with the lights on and surrounded by one purring cat and a host of Post-its, my brain tried to solve the puzzle. Only Clue swirled together and mixed with Monopoly and Batman, transforming East Aurora into a hotbed of crime and greed, where nameless, faceless thugs roamed free, and archcriminals sauntered around town in catsuits, building houses and hotels, every one of which was haunted by the ghost of Millard Fillmore.

  Chapter 19

  When I stumbled down the hall the next morning, Dad greeted me with the smell of coffee and a cheerful hello. I grunted a response, and he turned down the way-too-joyous Christmas music blasting from his portable radio before he bent down and peeled a Post-it note from Othello’s nether parts. He placed it on the table with the others that apparently the cat had dragged in.

  “Glenda?” He rolled his eyes.

  I pushed my disheveled hair from my face and stumbled toward the coffee pot. “Well, you never know. Perhaps she stabbed him with a knitting needle and then figured the weapon would give her away, so she removed it and used the lawn dart.”

  “And her motive?”

  “He’d been telling too many yarns?”

  “Try again.”

  “Crewel fate. He caused that accident that left her in stitches.”

  He sucked air through his teeth.

  I took a long draft of the coffee. “And he’d stolen her purls.”

  “Drink faster.” He pulled out a chair for me, then settled back down with his paper.

  The coffee was strong for my taste, but I added sugar and it did the job. Mom always said that Dad’s coffee could peel wallpaper. But when Parker and I had put it to the test on the wall in his bedroom—and verified her theory—she hadn’t been pleased at all.

  Of course, Dad had poured gallons of it down Mom’s throat through the years. I can’t honestly say it sobered her up any. I suspect coffee just makes for a more alert and agitated drunk. Maybe that’s not always a good thing.

  As the caffeine kicked in and my eyelids opened, I noticed that the note bearing Dad’s name was already on the table. I snatched up the incriminating paper.

  Dad grabbed my wrist. “It’s okay, you know.”

  I crumpled up the note and tossed it on the floor for the cat. Othello jumped for it, then batted it with his paws, weaving it around the table legs like a hockey puck until he got it clear and chased it down the hall.

  “Maybe I should be a suspect in this case,” Dad said.

  “You’d never kill anyone. And you’d never lie to me.”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you,” he repeated and cradled his mug in two hands. “Come to think of it, I never told you that I didn’t kill him, just that I don’t remember doing it.”

  I leaned my elbows on the table and rested my chin on my hand. “Dad, how can you tell if someone is lying?”

  “You mean interrogation techniques?” He rubbed his bristly eyebrows. “There are a few tricks, but nothing foolproof.”

  “Such as?”

  “When people are telling lies, sometimes they won’t look you in the eye. Or they’ll focus off to the left or above your head. But some people do that when they’re trying to remember something.”

  “So they don’t look you in the eye.”

  “It’s not definitive. Maybe they’re shy. Or ashamed of something else. Or attracted, even. I interrogated one guy for three hours. Didn’t look me in the eye once. Kept looking at my shirt. When I got home, I realized I had a huge jelly stain down the front. Of course, the real bold ones, the pathological liars, will stare you straight in the eye and let anything fly.”

  “How else, then?” I tried to recall if Jack had looked me in the eyes at all.

  Dad got up to refill his coffee. “Sometimes when people add too much detail, it’s a giveaway. If they’re making it up on the fly, you can sometimes catch them because they forget what story they told. So you keep asking the same questions over again, in slightly different ways, to see if the story changes. Can be a long process.”

  “So that’s why you were always late for dinner.” I sipped my coffee thinking that this conversation had occurred a decade or two later than it should have. Dad might have been easier to live with if I’d known a little more about what he did all day. I was also beginning to understand his attraction to the job. It was more puzzle solving than cops and robbers. And like Dad, I was awfully fond of puzzles.

  Dad wasn’t done sharing. “If someone insists on telling a story the same way each time, using the same words, you know they rehearsed it. Or if they’re too helpful.”

  “Like volunteering too much? Offering to help?”

  Dad turned the page of his newspaper and peered over the top of his reading glasses. “Might be trying to cover up something. Then again, they might have thrived on gold stars in elementary school and never outgrew the compulsion.”

  “Jack Wallace offered to help us poke around in this case.”

  “He did, did he? Now you’re wondering why. Does he really want to be helpful? Or is he hiding some deep, dark secret?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think maybe I’ll make us some eggs. You’re going to need the protein. You’ve got a lot of thinking to do.”

  ###

  Since I had closed the shop late after the game tournament, Dad and Cathy both insisted I needed some time off. I climbed into my car and started driving and thinking. It was one of those crisp, sunny days that put a crust on the snow, and I found myself squinting against the glare as I left downtown and headed toward the house where Sullivan O’Grady had once lived with his wife and kids.

  I parked on the street a few houses down from theirs and waited. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for. A yellow bus came by and picked up all the neighboring kids. I remembered that the O’Grady kids were homeschooled. That had to be a lot of work.

  Only today, they did leave the house. A smaller bus stopped right in front, and four older kids, all wearing stiff, new private school plaid, left the house. They looked intimidated as they trotted carefully between the snowbanks piled on each side of the sidewalk, as if they were running some frozen gauntlet. Their mother followed them outside and had to peel the youngest away from her bathrobe to deposit the child on the bus. Said child was sending up a wail that would drive banshees away.

  The door closed and the bus departed, leaving Mrs. O’Grady staring after them.

  I got out of my car and rushed up to her, cheerfully asking, “Getting the kids off to school?”

  She wiped away a tear with a knuckle.
“First day. Sully was all for homeschooling, but I wasn’t sure I could keep up with it. Their grandfather offered to pay for private school.” She squinted at me. “You were here with the police, right?”

  Only this time without my father, I didn’t have the guts, or perhaps stupidity, to feign a police connection. “My father is the former chief of police, but I’ve never been on the force.” I looked her straight in the eye, hoping that she’d conclude she’d made some kind of assumption the first time. Did that make me a pathological liar?

  She seemed overwhelmed and confused. “I have to get back inside.”

  God forgive me, I followed her in without an invitation.

  In the days since Sully’s death, she’d managed a little housework. Clean casserole dishes lined the counters, probably once containing food brought by friends and family. An infant I didn’t see last time was in a swing and the older one in a playpen. Or rather, halfway over the top of the playpen. She rushed to put him back in, which he thought was great fun. He giggled and jumped and slapped his hands against the top railing.

  “Sorry, I don’t recall your name,” she said.

  “Elizabeth McCall.”

  “Betsy?” She smiled. “Like the old paper dolls?”

  I winced. “My dad was a fan. Only I don’t go by the name Betsy. I’m impressed, though. Usually it’s the older folks who try to call me that.”

  She collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table and gestured to an empty seat. “My grandmother gave me her old paper dolls to play with when I was a kid. She’d never cut them out. It was great fun then. I guess they’d probably be worth something now. Wasted.”

  “No, not wasted.” I sat across from her, taking care not to lean against the sticky chair back. “Play is worth something. Happy kids are worth something.”

  “I suppose.” Then she paused. Apparently this is where I was supposed to fill in the reason I came.

  “Hey, I’m sorry if you had the wrong impression of who we were when Dad and I visited last time. Truth is, I manage the toyshop . . .”