by Judith Ivie
There was a short silence. “I’m not sure what anybody can do,” she said finally, “but I need somebody else to know what’s been happening before it’s too late. Meet me at the diner when you can tomorrow, will you?”
“Well, sure, but what do you mean, ‘before it’s too late’?” I asked, not really wanting to know.
“Before someone else is murdered,” she said flatly and broke the connection.
Three
Abby Stoddard came from a long line of Stoddards, most of whom lay at rest in the Reverend Dr. Henry Griswold’s churchyard diagonally across the street from the Village Diner. You couldn’t travel the length of Wethersfield without running across a road, building or other memorial to one or another of her ancestors.
For as long as anyone could remember, Abby had kept company with Frank Wainwright, the previous owner of the diner and about 10 years her senior, but the two had never married. “Just not the marrying kind, neither one of us,” Abby explained without apology, but they were as much a couple as the longest-married pair in town. For the most part their devotion was unquestioned, but until Frank’s death a few years previously, they had endured the scorn of a few self-righteous prigs, particularly when Abby took Frank into her home to care for him during his final illness, “and them not even married in the sight of God!” But even the most vocal critics fell silent when at last the cancer claimed poor Frank, and he left the diner to Abby in his will—lock, stock and trash barrels.
I thought about how difficult those next few years must have been for Abby as I walked down the street to the diner the next afternoon. Running a restaurant, even one as well established as this one, was a tricky business. Keeping ahead of expenses was a challenge for an experienced owner, let alone someone with no experience whatsoever. Still, Abby had dug in and somehow managed to keep the place afloat, keeping a roof over her head and that of her aged mother in the bargain.
The crime scene tape in front of the antiques shop and Blades had been removed, and the scarecrows and their props had been hauled off by the police for forensic examination. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view—our little murder hadn’t deterred the tourists who flocked to see this year’s crop of scarecrows. If anything, the crowds were bigger and earlier than most years, the locals assured me. Although most of the sightseers parked down at the cove and walked up the hill, we had noticed the increase in traffic at our end of the street, too. Usually, parking was at a premium only on weekends, but now it was becoming difficult for our clients to find a place to park during the week.
I had deliberately waited until mid-afternoon when there would be a lull between the lunch and dinner rushes. As if she were expecting me, Abby sat at the counter with a cup of coffee as I pushed through the swinging door from the sidewalk. Trim and petite, Abby might have passed for forty were it not for the graying hair that she had decided to ignore and the worry lines that had etched themselves into her otherwise youthful forehead. The place was empty except for Mort Delahanty, the seedy-looking, middle-aged fellow who swept under the tables, emptied the trash, cleaned the restrooms, and performed other menial chores around the diner. As far as anyone knew, Mort didn’t speak. He certainly never had to me. He scowled wordlessly at me now and went back to refilling salt shakers.
I was surprised to see a cigarette smoldering between Abby’s fingers and raised my eyebrows. “I know,” she said. “You’d think watching Frank die of lung cancer would have been enough to put me off the things, but …” her voice trailed off, and she shrugged. “Frank needed to smoke. I hated it. So we accommodated each other. He didn’t smoke around me, and I never complained when he stepped outside for a cigarette. The hard thing now is knowing that if I’d been a little less accommodating, Frank might still be alive.”
“So you punish yourself by smoking?”
Abby looked at me a moment but didn’t reply. “Thanks for coming by, Kate. Let’s go back to my office.” She stubbed out the cigarette in her saucer and led the way through the kitchen to the cramped quarters that served as her office. A wooden desk overflowed with order forms, invoices, timesheets, and a huge, old-fashioned ledger. A computer workstation lurked in the corner, covered with dust. It looked as if it had never been turned on. Cartons of office supplies, samples, and unfiled correspondence were shoved against the wall. Abby scraped a pile of newspapers and catalogs off the wooden guest chair in front of her desk and motioned me into it. Instead of sitting herself, she folded her arms across her chest and started to pace back and forth behind the desk.
“I hope you didn’t just have lunch, because what I have to tell you is pretty gruesome. Do you remember when you found Prudy, her mouth was covered with duct tape?”
I nodded, dreading what I might hear next. With good reason, it turned out.
“Everyone knows by now that Prudy was poisoned.”
“I didn’t. What kind of poison?”
“The medical examiner says chlordane. It’s a very deadly chemical commonly found in industrial strength cleaners. You know, the kind of cleaner you’d use in a restaurant.” She stopped pacing and looked at me. “And that’s not all.”
I tried mightily to keep my expression neutral. “Okay. What else?”
Abby’s mouth twisted in disgust. “When they took the tape off her face, they discovered that Prudy’s tongue had been cut out. Hacked right off with a kitchen knife. Sorry!” she added, as my stomach roiled in protest, and I felt suddenly faint. I lowered my head into one hand and held up the other to ward off further horrific revelations, momentarily unable to speak. Abby walked over and patted me on the back briefly, but there was no stemming the flow of words. She plowed on, determined to get it all out.
“That wasn’t what killed her, of course. It was the poison. As a matter of fact, her tongue was cut out after she was dead. Otherwise, her mouth would have been filled with blood when they took the tape off.”
That did it. I fell forward and stuck my head all the way down between my knees as the room spun around me. Taking serious note of my plight at last, Abby crouched next to me, rubbing my back and making soothing noises. “I know, it’s a shock. You’ll feel better in a minute. Do you want some water?”
I nodded. I didn’t want any water, but getting some would get her out of the room for a couple of minutes and give me a chance to regroup. She opened the door and went out, and I breathed shallowly through my mouth so I wouldn’t hyperventilate. By the time Abby returned with a glass of ice water, I had recovered sufficiently to sit upright again. I accepted the water gratefully.
“Sorry, Abby. I’ve always been a little squeamish. You should have seen me in the emergency room when Joey accidentally stabbed himself in the leg with a pair of my sewing scissors about twenty years ago. I’m better now.”
Abby got to her feet. “The thing is, Kate, it was my knife. It came right out of the diner’s kitchen, and it had my fingerprints all over it.” She sagged suddenly into her desk chair and put her forehead into her hands. “I’m the number one suspect. They think I did it. They haven’t actually arrested me, but that could happen any time now.”
As shocked as I had been by Abby’s words, I was even more shocked at the idea of her being anyone’s murderer. Abby Stoddard had nursed Frank through his final illness. She had taken her aged mother into her home. And it was Abby who had given Prudy Crane a job when nobody else in town would. Outrage helped me find my tongue.
“That’s ridiculous. I don’t know you all that well, but even I know you’re incapable of killing anyone. For God’s sake, Deenie told me that you use Have-A-Heart mousetraps in your pantry. Who in the world would try to pin this on you?”
Abby lifted her head and stared into space over my shoulder. “The police, that’s who. It was my knife, Kate. It had my prints on it.”
“That’s circumstantial. Of course it had your prints on it. You probably used it every day. I take it you have no alibi for the time of death? When was that, anyway?”
“As far as the medical examiner could determine, the chlordane killed her sometime around midnight Sunday. The tongue was cut off later. Then the body was propped up outside Blades sometime in the wee hours, judging by how much blood pooled in the lower part of it.”
My head swam again, and I struggled to stay focused. “What about an alibi?”
“I was doing paperwork right here until about ten o’clock. Prudy had left at six. I assume she went back to her apartment in the old Wheeler house. I was just glad she was gone. When I locked up, I drove around for a while to clear my head, then went home and got into bed. Mom was already asleep, so I didn’t wake her up just to say goodnight. I was exhausted and fell asleep almost immediately. No witnesses,” she joked feebly.
“Even so, that’s all perfectly normal stuff for you. You always do the bookkeeping on Sunday night. Even I know that, because once when Margo and I were working late on a Sunday, we tried to get a sandwich, but even though the lights were on, the door was locked. You must have been here in the back room. A passer-by told us it was your custom to catch up on paperwork on Sunday nights.”
“Huh! Everybody knows everything in a small town.”
“I still don’t see how the police have enough to arrest you. After all, you were the one that kept Prudy employed, even though she was a lousy waitress. There must be something else the police know that we don’t.”
“I know what it is.” Abby leaned back in her chair and met my eyes. “Prudy was blackmailing me, and the police found out about it. They looked into my books, and there were discrepancies …” Her voice trailed off.
Well, that would explain why you kept her on the payroll, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut and waited.
Pure hatred blazed from Abby’s eyes. “Prudence Crane was a vicious, scheming, horror of a woman, but the plain fact is, without her on my side, I would have lost the diner, and I need this business.”
“Because of your mother?” I prompted.
Abby nodded. “When Frank was alive, he helped out a lot. When he became so ill, I took on Prudy because I needed the help, but the only person that harpy ever helped was herself.” She laughed without humor. “One day, I had to leave her in charge for the dinner rush. Frank had been rushed to the hospital again, and he needed me with him. It was very late when I got back to the diner. It had been closed for hours.” She paused as if weighing the wisdom of confiding in me further. Then she made her decision.
“Prudy greeted me at the door that night. She had the register tapes and the order slips from the previous week spread out on the counter. They didn’t match. It hadn’t taken her long to figure out that a lot of the cash business had never gone through the register.” Abruptly, she stood and resumed her restless pacing, or maybe she simply didn’t want to look at me as she continued.
“My expenses were through the roof. There was the medicine and all of the other things Mom needed. Extra help in the house while I was with Frank so much. And of course, he wasn’t able to help financially any longer. So I started pocketing most of the cash from the orders I took myself, not reporting it to the government. I believe they call it income tax fraud,” she said. Her expression was bleak. “I didn’t know what else to do. I thought it would just be for a few weeks, a couple of months, maybe. And then it went on and on, and I forgot to throw out the order slips for the cash I’d skimmed, and, well …” She turned to face me.
“There’s no way to excuse it. I just did it, that’s all, and Prudy found out about it and announced that she would keep my little secret if I’d keep hers. I asked her what she meant, but she just smiled to herself and didn’t say anything.” Abby dropped back into her chair and rubbed her temples.
I felt myself staring in disbelief and consciously rearranged my features into what I hoped was a compassionate expression. Poor Abby. What a spot to be in, held over a barrel by a blackmailer. “Did you ever find out what Prudy meant, what her secret was?”
“Oh, yes,” Abby assured me. “For a few days after that, I was too rattled to pay much attention to what was going on around me. Mostly, I just tried to keep out of Prudy’s way. But I guess my brain was working in spite of myself, and it started keeping track of her activities pretty closely. It took a while, but I finally noticed that we had several regular customers every weeknight who always sat at Prudy’s station. That in itself was hard to explain, her being such a bad waitress and all. But what really caught my attention was that most of them only ordered coffee.”
“What’s so strange about that? Maybe they knew that was about all she could handle and played it safe.”
“It wasn’t the coffee. It was the fact that they almost never drank it, and then there was the way they paid for it—with big bills, always with big bills. One night, I saw Prudy slide a fifty-dollar bill into the pocket of that ratty old sweater she always wore around here. It never made it into the cash register. Being experienced at that sort of thing myself by that time, I got her alone and confronted her. She just grinned at me with those bad teeth of hers. ‘We all have our little secrets now, don’t we, Miz Stoddard?’ she said.
“After that, she didn’t bother to hide it from me. She and I were the only ones behind the counter most nights, and two or three nights a week, her victims paid her off in cash. They just put the cash under their checks and walked out. A lot of our regulars leave cash on the counter, so I never thought anything of it until I saw her pocket that fifty.”
“Understandable,” I said, although my head was reeling. I thought carefully before asking my next question. “Who was she blackmailing besides you, Abby, and why?”
“I don’t know why, but I know who, or at least I know who some of her victims were. The thing is, I don’t want to tell the police unless I absolutely have to. You know how small towns are. You just gave me an example. Everybody knows everybody else’s business and gossips like crazy about it. My telling the police that Prudy was blackmailing these folks would be just the same as accusing each and every one of them of murder.” She dropped her hands from her temples and leaned forward. “For myself, it doesn’t matter so much. Half the people in this town probably wonder why it took me so long to do that woman in and figure I’ll plead temporary insanity or something. But the others … even if they’re never charged with murder, the fact that they had secrets dark enough that they submitted to blackmail will ruin them.”
I nodded in agreement, knowing what she said was true. These fifth- and sixth-generation New Englanders wouldn’t do business with anyone who had submitted to blackmail. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and all that. “Why are you telling me all this, Abby? What do you want me to do?”
Then Abby did something I never would have expected. She reached over the desk and covered my hand with her own. “I didn’t kill Prudy, Kate, but someone did. The other people she was blackmailing are the most likely candidates I can think of, but right now, I’m the only one the police know about. I’m their only suspect. To clear myself without implicating anyone else, I’ve got to find out which of her blackmail victims really did it. I heard you investigated something like this before, so you’d know what to do.” Her eyes sought mine. “Can you help me out?”
A long minute passed while all the reasons why I shouldn’t become involved in this mess whirled through my head. None of them seemed terribly compelling compared to the tacit plea in Abby’s eyes.
“Yes,” I said. “Who were Prudy’s other victims, Abby?”
Still, she hesitated.
“I promise you that I’ll reveal nothing that I don’t absolutely have to.”
“Not even to me,” she insisted. “I honestly don’t want to know my customers’ secrets.”
I knew what she meant. Already, I dreaded the burden of knowing what I was about to learn about my neighbors. Generally speaking, I’m happier operating on a need-to-know basis when it comes to the details of other people’s lives. “Not even to you,” I assured her.
Abby reached int
o her apron pocked and watched my face closely as she handed me a folded scrap of white paper. She’s the one in big trouble here, I thought, but she looks as if she’s feeling sorry for me. And then I understood why.
On the paper were written three names: Ephraim Marsh, Mavis Griswold, and Emma Lawrence.
Four
I was rehashing the surprising developments of the afternoon with Margo. I had promised Abby I would discuss it with no one else, but I needed Margo’s advice. For all of her libidinous, southern belle affectations, Margo Farnsworth was one of the most levelheaded people I knew. Besides, she had been through a murder investigation with me once before, when one of the partners at the law firm for which we both worked turned up dead.
We were sitting at each end of the sofa in my family room, Rhett Butler lolling luxuriously between us, his head in Margo’s lap. As long as he remained motionless, which he seemed happy to do, Jasmine and Simon accepted his presence warily from where they were curled up, rump to rump, in front of the fireplace; but if he lifted his head, I knew they would evanesce in the way that cats can. A piece of driftwood Armando had picked up during one of our walks on the beach at Harkness Memorial Park last summer added snap and color to the blaze, a welcome distraction from the darkness that came on fast. In another few weeks Daylight Saving Time would end, and the dark season would be upon us in earnest.
Margo took a long, unladylike pull from the bottle of beer she held. I sipped more cautiously at an excellent Pinot Grigio. “No matter how hard I try, I cannot cast Abigail Stoddard as anyone’s cold-blooded murderer, not even Prudy’s,” I said wearily. “I can believe she would lash out against someone who was threatening her life or her mother’s, or even her dog’s, if it came to that. But not premeditated murder, uh-uh.”
