Death in the Stacks

by Jenn McKinlay

  The woman slowly lowered the small curved clippers she’d been holding and took off her gardening gloves. Her expression was pensive rather than grief-stricken, and Lindsey was beginning to wonder if there was a person alive who was grieving for Olive Boyle.

  “Deadheading the last of the blooms?” Robbie asked, and he reached out to cup a large, dried-up blossom in his hand.

  “Yes. We’ve had our first frost,” Ms. Davidson said. “It was time.” She glanced back at Lindsey. “What did you want to talk to me about Olive for?”

  Lindsey introduced herself and Robbie and gave her the same speech about a proposed memorial that Lindsey had given the board and Kyle. Ms. Davidson nodded. A small smile turned up one corner of her mouth, although it did not light up her eyes.

  “Olive would like that,” she said. “If it’s my approval you’re looking for, you have it.”

  “Thank you,” Lindsey said. “Is there anything else you think she might have preferred, Ms. Davidson? I am having a hard time getting a sense of Olive.”

  “Please call me Margaret.” She glanced up at the sky. “It’s getting dark. I should call it a day.”

  She left the wheelbarrow where it was and walked around the side of the house and back to the front. She didn’t invite them inside but stood on the driveway near Robbie’s car.

  Robbie and Lindsey exchanged a desperate glance. This was all they were going to get out of Olive’s sister? Really?

  “Do you think she’d want the name Olive Davidson Boyle or just Olive Boyle?” Robbie asked. “We want to get it just right.”

  Margaret stared at both of them. Her gaze was thoughtful, as if she was trying to make up her mind about something.

  “Olive wasn’t really a Davidson,” she said. “We found out just last year when our mother died. Among her papers was Olive’s original birth certificate with no father listed. My father, Henry Davidson, adopted her. We never learned who her real father was. We were so shocked. We had no idea we were really half sisters.”

  “That can’t have been easy,” Robbie said.

  “No,” Margaret agreed. From the pained expression on her face, it was clear that was an understatement. “Matters that were already strained between us became unbearable.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lindsey said. She couldn’t imagine finding out such a thing about her brother, Jack, but then again she couldn’t imagine things being strained between them. He was her first best friend, and he always would be.

  “Olive was furious with our mother for never telling her the truth. She was angry with me because I’d been away, living first in Alaska and then in several other states over the years. I have a bit of the gypsy in my soul. Anyway, Olive felt that she had been the one who took care of our parents in their declining years, and as the oldest, she felt she should have been told the truth.”

  “Can’t really fault her there,” Robbie said.

  “No, I didn’t,” Margaret said. “My parents should have been honest with her. Still, she was so bitter. She tried to contest the will and have the estate go solely to her instead of the fifty-fifty split my parents had decided upon. Unfortunately, what she didn’t understand was that the will had an in terrorem clause that stated if either of us contested the will, we would forfeit our inheritance in its entirety. Olive ended up losing everything. The estate is still in probate. I’d been holding off, trying to give her time to reconsider or to figure out how to change my parents’ directives, but I didn’t know how much longer I could stall. I don’t suppose it matters much now.”

  “Oh wow.” Robbie gave a low whistle.

  A single tear slipped down Margaret’s cheek. “I felt terrible. I tried to tell her that we’d ignore what the will said and still split it, but she was so angry. She rejected me completely. I had so hoped we would grow old here together, but no. It clearly wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Did anyone else inherit?” Lindsey asked. “Was there anyone else that Olive might have been angry with?”

  Margaret stared off into the distance and then shook her head. “No, just me. I already told your police chief all of this. She even asked me if I had an alibi.”

  Robbie raised his eyebrows as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing, ever the actor, and then he asked, “Oh dear, did you have one?”

  “Yes, I was at the local gardening club that night.” She waved her pruning shears at them. “That’s where they instructed us to deadhead our flowers after the first frost but before winter sets in.”

  “Ah.” Robbie nodded. “Sound advice, that. Of course you don’t want to prune back the bushes themselves or they’ll be vulnerable to the freezing temperature of winter.”

  “Exactly,” Margaret said. Her voice wavered, and her nose was turning red. Lindsey had the feeling a crying jag was pending. She suspected Margaret was the sort who would want to be alone for that.

  “Thank you for your time, Margaret,” Lindsey said. “We won’t keep you.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Margaret said. She sounded grateful for the understanding. “I’m sorry. I think I’m still in shock from Olive’s death. I was so sure that in time we’d make it right . . . but now, we’ll never have that time and it will never be right.”

  She looked positively broken. Lindsey resisted the urge to give her a hug, thinking it might be awkward, but when another tear slipped down Margaret’s cheek, Lindsey stepped close and gave her a bracing squeeze. Margaret huffed out a breath of surprise but then hugged her back.

  After a few moments, Lindsey pulled away. Margaret wiped her cheeks with the palms of her hands and said, “Thank you, and thank you for the memorial to my sister. I think it’s a lovely idea.”

  As they drove away, Lindsey watched Margaret in her side mirror. As she made her way into the house, her shoulders were slumped as if the weight of her grief sat all on her shoulders. It had to be a heavy load to bear to lose a sibling while estranged. Lindsey didn’t think Margaret was feigning her grief.

  “What do you think of Ms. Davidson?” Robbie asked after several minutes of contemplative silence.

  They were driving the road that ran along the shore back to Briar Creek. It was now fully dark, and Lindsey hunkered into her wool coat. Even though the car was toasty warm, she felt a chill shiver through her from the inside out.

  “I don’t know. She seemed sincere, but who knows. If she killed her sister, she’s going to do everything she can to hide it, isn’t she? Hey, I didn’t know you knew so much about gardening,” she said.

  “I’m British. It’s in our DNA like tea and biscuits.”

  “And Shakespeare.”

  “Big Ben.”

  “Paddington Bear.”

  “The changing of the guard.”

  “Tolkein.”

  “Have you noticed all of your British references are literary?”

  “Librarian.”

  “Quite.”

  The traffic was light and Robbie turned onto the road that would take them through the center of town.

  “How about that bomb she dropped?” he asked. “Finding out your dad wasn’t really your dad when your mum passes? That can’t have been pleasant.”

  “No, especially since it sounds as if Olive was the one who was here taking care of them while Margaret was off seeing the world. It sounds like she had some resentment.”

  “But why try to take the entire estate away from her sister?” Robbie asked. “That seems punitive.”

  “If what Kyle said was true and Olive did have a narcissistic personality disorder, then it makes sense. If I remember right from my college psych classes, narcissists are pretty big on revenge, whether the slight they feel is imagined or real.”

  “Scary,” Robbie said. “But she only managed to hurt herself.”

  “Which might have fueled her desire for revenge even more,” Lindsey said. “We need to ta
lk to her friends again. They have to know something.”

  “Kim seems rather fond of me,” he said. “I can try to work my magic on her and get some answers.”

  “Be careful,” Lindsey said. “I don’t trust any of them.”

  “Don’t worry about me, pet,” he said. “I’ve got this.”

  They were stopped at a light, and Lindsey gave him an uneasy look. She didn’t want him to be overconfident, not with those women. Instead of nagging him, however, she tried to focus on the upside. The more people they found that Olive had clashed with, the more suspects in her murder there would be, making Paula a less likely suspect.

  “Where do you want me to drop you off?” Robbie asked.

  Lindsey glanced at her phone. Sully had sent her a text asking her to meet him for dinner. She realized she was starving and Robbie probably was, too.

  “How about grabbing dinner at the Blue Anchor?” she asked.

  “Best plan I’ve heard all day,” he agreed and drove straight there.

  The Anchor was the only restaurant and bar in all of Briar Creek, so even on a slow night it was packed to the rafters with residents of their small town eating dinner, watching a televised ball game or enjoying an end-of-the-day beverage with friends.

  When Lindsey pulled the door open and strode in, the smell of the night’s special, baked stuffed cod with boiled potatoes, coleslaw and fresh-baked bread, hit her right in the nostrils. Sully was seated at the bar with an empty seat beside him, and Lindsey made for it.

  Sully caught sight of her and stood. He opened his arms, and she walked right into them. As always, it felt like coming home. She leaned back to look up at him, and he grinned down at her.

  “How goes the investigation?” he asked.

  “Slow,” she said. “Any word on whether Paula has surfaced?”

  Sully shook his head. “No.”

  “It looks bad for her to have bolted, doesn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t look good,” he said.

  Lindsey turned around to tell Robbie the news, but he wasn’t there. She scanned the room, looking for his familiar reddish blond hair. Finally, she spotted him all the way over in the corner booth, sitting with Amy, LeAnn and Kim.

  “What is he doing?” Sully asked.

  “Interrogating the suspects?” Lindsey answered, but her words curled up at the end as if she was asking a question.

  “Ah, he might want to be careful with Kim MacInnes,” Sully said.

  Lindsey turned to look at him with eyebrows raised. “Why is that?”

  Sully put a hand on the back of his neck and looked sheepish. “She has a reputation as being a bit of a cougar.”

  “Really?” she asked. “And how do you know that?”

  “Because a few summers ago, she set her sights on your boyfriend, and in an effort to win him, she—” Ian joined their conversation from behind the bar, but Sully interrupted him.

  “No, don’t—”

  Ian threw a bar rag at Sully’s face, cutting him off, and he continued, “And she hid aboard his water taxi, buck naked, and when he set out to pick up a fare, she popped out of the bench where he stores his life vests.”

  Lindsey turned a wide-eyed gaze on Sully. “No, she didn’t.”

  Sully ran a hand through his thick curls and pitched the bar rag back at Ian with a glare. “We swore we would never speak of this.”

  “Did we? Maybe you did. I’m quite sure I would never make any such vow,” Ian said. He ducked down behind the bar and then sprang up, batting his eyelashes, and in a girlish voice he yelled, “Surprise!”

  Lindsey belly laughed. She couldn’t help it. It was so ridiculous. Sully turned a vivid shade of red and scowled at his friend. “Next time we’re out on the sound, someone is going to be swimming for shore.”

  Ian guffawed. “Aw, don’t be mad. I’ll go naked like your stowaway.”

  “Gah,” Sully gagged. “Now I’m off my food for the night.”

  He looked at Lindsey, who grinned and then hugged him tight.

  “Don’t you worry,” she said. “I won’t allow any more naked girls to jump out at you—unless it’s me.”

  “Check, please!” Sully shouted at Ian, who laughed at them.

  Then Ian’s eyebrows rose and he leaned to the right and said, “Not to alarm anyone, but I think our friend Robbie might have gotten himself into a compromising position.”

  Lindsey spun around and glanced back at the booth. Sure enough, Kim had looped her arm about Robbie, and even as Lindsey watched, she was sliding into his lap a bit like a boa constrictor slithered around its prey before strangling it.

  “Uh-oh,” Sully muttered. He jerked his head in the direction of the door. “Incoming.”

  “Huh? What?” Lindsey asked. She turned, following the direction he indicated, and saw the familiar navy blue wool coat with the badge fastened to it. Emma!

  20

  If she saw Robbie with Kim on his lap . . . Oh, no, no, no. This was bad—so bad. Lindsey whipped around and faced Ian.

  “Start a fire!” she yelled.

  “What? In my restaurant? Are you crazy?”

  “Well, do something! Cause a distraction. This is a matter of life or death!”

  Ian blinked at her. Then without hesitation, he vaulted up onto the bar and began to do a Riverdance routine. Well, his version of it at any rate. Sully looked from him to Lindsey and said, “I don’t know which one of you is crazier.”

  Then he began to clap a rhythm, and Lindsey joined in, pausing only to wave frantically at Emma. Emma looked at them like they were all insane—not completely wrong—and then, as if some sixth sense called to her, she turned her head and stared right at Robbie, who was trapped under the full force of Kim in his lap.

  She turned on her heel and marched over to the booth, looking like she was getting ready to kick some cougar booty. As they watched, Ian stumbled to a halt, mindless of the bills some of the bar patrons had tossed at him, and Lindsey and Sully stopped clapping.

  “Do you think she’ll shoot him?” Ian asked. “’Cause that would likely be bad for business.”

  Lindsey bit her knuckle while Sully took a step forward as if there was anything he could do to prevent the slaughter that was about to happen.

  To their surprise, Emma strolled right past Kim and Robbie to the party of five seated next to them. She then opened her wallet and handed a man at the table some cash. He nodded at her, looking delighted. Then she hefted the pitcher of beer sitting in the center of their table and turned back to Robbie and Kim. Without hesitation or warning, she tipped the entire contents of the almost-full pitcher right over Robbie’s head.

  With a yelp, Kim jumped off Robbie’s lap, avoiding the worst of the splash. She grabbed a fistful of napkins and dabbed at her tight sweater and skinny jeans, flapping her hands uselessly at her sides when the napkins stuck to her clothes.

  Emma leaned close, and in a voice that carried to every corner of the restaurant, she said, “If you wanted my boyfriend so badly, all you had to do is ask. Seriously, he’s free to a good home!”

  “What? No!” Robbie cried. He jumped to his feet. “Emma, love, it’s not how it looks.”

  “You had a woman draped across you like a beauty queen sash,” Emma snapped. “How is it not how it looks?”

  Robbie shook his head, and droplets of beer flew everywhere. People all around them cried out, but he was oblivious as he smiled down at Emma with a grin that Lindsey knew from personal experience was full of mischievous delight.

  “I knew it!” he crowed.

  Emma glared at him.

  “You care about me,” he said. “Admit it. You, Emma Plewicki, are sweet on me, Robbie Vine.”

  “Oh my God, shut up,” Emma said. “I am merely trying to keep you from contaminating a possible person of interest in an ongoing murder
investigation.”

  “Ha! That’s a load of malarkey,” Robbie said. “And I should know because I’m full of it. You like me.”

  Emma pressed her hand to her forehead as if she was warding off a headache. She turned on her heel and stomped toward Lindsey and Sully.

  “Come on, admit it,” he cajoled as he followed, heedless of the trail of beer he left in his wake. “You like me. You really like me. I bet you even love me.”

  He was dancing around her, and she was ignoring him, signaling to Ian that she needed a drink. Ian shook his head.

  “No can do. You’re on duty,” he said.

  “Son of a—” Emma began, but then she spun on Robbie who was still chanting and snapped, “All right, I love you—oh—”

  That was as far as she got before Robbie kissed her. It was likely meant to be a quick one, but Emma’s arms looped around his neck and held him in place while she kissed him back. A collective “Aw” sounded in the restaurant, and Lindsey leaned into Sully, who wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close.

  Lindsey glanced past Robbie and Emma and saw the one table who didn’t feel any warm fuzzies about this clinch. LeAnn and Amy were gone, and Kim was alone, shrugging on her coat, looking the picture of misery. With a distraught expression, she raced for the front door.

  As happy as Lindsey was for Robbie and Emma, she couldn’t help but feel for Kim. This was a public kick in the teeth, and having suffered her own in the past, she knew exactly how it felt.

  Lindsey stepped away from Sully with an apologetic smile and said, “I’ll be right back.”

  She pushed through the restaurant doors right behind Kim, calling, “Hey, wait! Kim, are you okay?”

  Kim pressed her key fob, and her car unlocked with a double beep. She glanced at Lindsey over her shoulder and frowned.

  “What do you want?”

  “I just wanted to make sure you’re all right,” she said.

  “What do you care?”

  “I . . . well . . . I just . . .” Lindsey stammered. She hadn’t really thought about it. She just felt sorry for the other woman.