Dying to Be Murdererd

by Judy Fitzwater

  “Welcome home, Mary,” Jennifer said from across the room. She stared at the less-than-cultured turn of Mary’s mouth and wondered how she could have ever thought her attractive. “Glad you could make it. We were about to think you weren’t going to show.”

  She stood between Sam and Eileen McEvoy. Lieutenant Nicholls was on the other side of Eileen.

  Mary squinted in their direction. “Eileen? Is that you?”

  The first officer tugged Mary toward the door, slightly loosening his grip. Suddenly she ducked and lunged straight at Eileen, hatred so powerful it was almost palpable. “She murdered me!” she shrieked.

  Nicholls dove for Eileen, pushing her up against the wall, his body covering hers. Two officers were immediately on top of Mary, but she’d come within a yard of them. They pulled her away.

  “Arrest her,” Mary demanded, full of outrage. “She snuck into this very room and slashed me to death. My blood was everywhere. You must have seen it. All that blood. All my blood.” She continued to seethe, her gaze darting about the room, her eyes wild.

  Then looking up at the officer, almost twice her size, who was holding her arm, she calmed. She seemed to relax and allowed him to direct her toward the door.

  Suddenly she smiled. “Oh, goodness me. I had no idea I’d have guests. I’ll ring for Arthur to bring us all up some tea. You do like tea, don’t you, young man?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Nicholls said. “Just take her downstairs, don’t talk to her, and don’t question her.”

  She glanced back at the four of them standing there.

  “Really, young man, wouldn’t you care for a bite to eat? I hardly feel right having all these guests in my home and not offering at least some form of refreshment. Perhaps you’d prefer coffee or...”

  Her voice trailed off as they made their way down the grand staircase.

  Eileen stood stoic, not uttering a word. But she was shaken down to her bones, Jennifer could tell. It was her eyes, once again, that betrayed.

  “Aren’t you going to read Mary her rights?” Jennifer asked.

  “I told them not to question her. She obviously had her whole defense mapped out after one glance around that room. Sharp old broad. The fact that her competency was questioned before will play right into her defense. Bet you she’ll claim to have been on vacation and have no idea what all the fuss is about.”

  Eileen studied Jennifer. “Don’t let her fool you, you of all people.”

  Jennifer nodded, her heart still pounding. Only she wasn’t so sure Nicholls and Eileen were right. Mary might well have slipped right over the edge and plunged into madness.

  In any case, the woman wasn’t likely to ever see the inside of a jail cell, not if she could make Jennifer, who knew what she was capable of, doubt her sanity. All she needed was one member of a jury. She might even be able to convince the district attorney that she was totally nuts.

  They would try her on attempted murder. If Eileen McEvoy had been in that bed, and no one had been there to stop her, Mary would have killed her. She had destroyed her husband’s will, stolen her husband’s fortune, or more accurately, her husband’s family’s fortune, and she had tried to frame her sister-in-law for a murder that had never actually happened.

  “So you don’t think the D.A. will pursue the possibility that Mary murdered Clarisse?” Sam asked.

  “I doubt it,” Nicholls said. “We have enough on her to keep her busy for a good long time. If she lives to see the sunshine, I doubt she’ll be a threat to anyone by the time they turn her out.”

  “She’ll be a threat until she draws her last breath,” Eileen assured him.

  Jennifer was inclined to agree, sane or not.

  “Besides,” Nicholls added, “even if we exhume the first Mrs. Ashton’s body, assuming we could talk Mrs. McEvoy here into giving us permission, what good would it do? So we find arsenic or some other poison in Clarisse Ashton’s body, like Jennifer suggested, we couldn’t link Mary to her death, not after all these years, not without a confession. And if the old broad was smart enough to use something that dissipates over time, we wouldn’t even have that much.”

  “I won’t let you dig her up,” Eileen told him. “You’ll have to have it court ordered if at all. Clarisse deserves her peace.”

  The four of them made their way out of the room and down the stairs of that majestic old house. “I’ll need at least one more statement from each of you,” Nicholls told Jennifer and Eileen. “And one from you,” he added to Sam, “as to what you witnessed tonight.”

  Outside, two police cars had been brought around, lights flashing.

  “The colors are quite delightful twirling around like that,” Mrs. Ashton was saying, as they came down the front steps. Her hands were cuffed behind her back.

  When she looked up, she caught Jennifer’s eye. “Oh, my dear child, so nice to see you. You are staying with us, aren’t you, now that I’m back? I’m so sorry you couldn’t join us on holiday. We’ve missed you, Juliet. We’ve all missed you.” The officer opened the back door of the car and then gently nudged her into the car, placing his hand over her forehead to protect it. The door shut and she stared up at Jennifer, smiling enigmatically.

  Chapter 39

  “I’m impressed,” Nicholls told Jennifer, as the police car with Mary in it drove away. “You stuck with this one.”

  “I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t...” Jennifer confessed. Watching the car go, she wondered exactly what was going on in that woman’s mind.

  “What’s that?” Nicholls asked.

  “Mary Ashton made a mistake,” Sam said. “She should never have made Jennifer promise.”

  “Promise what?” Eileen asked.

  “That she wouldn’t let her murderer get away with it.”

  Sam was right. If she hadn’t, Jennifer would have walked away and left it all to the police. And Eileen McEvoy would be facing a charge of first-degree murder.

  “But how did you know?” Nicholls asked. “What tipped you to how she did it?”

  She couldn’t actually tell him. She didn’t really understand it herself, so how could he? It was the thing that made her plots come together when she was writing, that subconscious working of her mind that sometimes woke her from a deep sleep. How could she explain that magic moment when all the elements that played through her mind somehow finally made sense?

  At least she could try.

  “When I first met her,” Jennifer began, “Mary seemed resigned to dying. But even as she was telling me this, she was playing me. As I learned more about her after her ‘death,’ it hardly seemed logical that this manipulating woman would sit back and allow herself to be murdered.”

  “People are murdered all the time and how strong their personalities are doesn’t save them,” Nicholls told her.

  “Oh, I realize that, but it was what first got me wondering, especially after I met Mrs. McEvoy. She seemed to have too much of a sense of fair play to resort to bloodshed.”

  “Sure, but what I was asking—,” Nicholls began.

  “Was how I figured out where she got all that blood to drown her bed and still walk away from it alive. It was the frozen salads I made for Dee Dee and the fact that I’d missed my appointment to give blood. And the timing, every six weeks. And Arthur’s being a med tech in the Air Force, of course.”

  “Does she always talk like this?” Nicholls asked.

  “You mean sort of in a stream-of-conscious mishmash?” Sam asked.

  Nicholls nodded.

  “Only when she’s trying to describe her thought processes. Some wonders are best left unexplained.”

  “Okay then, you two,” Jennifer grumped. “Plain English it is. I had my hand in the freezer and Leigh Ann was talking on the phone about missing my appointment to give blood. Then I moved the frozen peas to get to the coleslaw—”

  “I didn’t think you could freeze coleslaw,” Eileen said.

  “That’s just it. You can freeze almost anything. That’s w
hat went through my mind, and I suddenly thought what if. What if Mary had frozen her blood? What if Arthur, the former med tech, had taken a pint from her arm just like they do at the Red Cross every six weeks or so, maybe even more often than that, over the eight months since the competency hearing? What if she’d thawed that blood, and what if the night of her ‘murder,’ she’d poured all of it over her bed? What if she wasn’t dead at all?

  “That’s when I called Lieutenant Nicholls and asked him to have a forensic chemist examine a sample of the blood under a microscope to see if he could find evidence that it had been frozen.”

  “And did he?” Eileen asked Nicholls.

  “Some of the cells showed alterations consistent with freezing. It at least raised the possibility.”

  “It took finding the passageways and the rug with the empty blood bags wrapped inside to get him to agree to bait Mary,” Jennifer explained.

  “I would never have gone along with Jennifer’s screwy plan—” Nicholls began.

  “Screwy?” Jennifer demanded.

  “Aw c’mon. You can’t tell me this plan wasn’t something right out of a mystery novel.”

  “It wasn’t,” Jennifer insisted. “If it had been, Eileen would have been in that bed instead of a dummy—”

  “I hardly think so,” Eileen interjected.

  “And we would have barely saved her at the last minute,” Jennifer finished with a grin.

  “But why did they leave the rug behind?” Sam asked.

  “They hadn’t planned to, I’m sure, but they didn’t count on my phoning the police from my room. Mary had specifically told me not to bring anything electronic to the house. The squad cars arrived before Mary and Arthur could get the rug out undetected, so they left it behind. They figured any odor would be attributed to the blood in Mary’s room. The threat of having an architect come in made it imperative that Mary get the rug out before someone tore into the wall and discovered it. She couldn’t keep herself from paying Eileen one last, fatal visit while she was at it. After all, she felt it was Eileen’s harassment and the threat of losing the house and her fortune that forced her to liquidate the estate and to leave. She knew if she stayed, Eileen would have found a way to take it all away.”

  “I had trouble believing she’d come back,” Nicholls admitted. “She’d gotten away with the money.”

  “You don’t know Mary,” Eileen said. “You don’t know how important winning is to that woman. She wanted me to suffer.”

  “And she couldn’t afford to be found out,” Jennifer added. “Besides, as far as she was concerned, her trip back was perfectly safe. She was convinced everyone thought she was dead, and she had no reason to believe anyone was aware of the passages.”

  “How do you think she found them?” Sam asked.

  “She must have been determined to discover how Juliet was slipping in and out of the house. The tunnel’s existence only confirmed her fears that Juliet was sleeping with Malcolm.”

  “Until you told me, I had no idea that Juliet had had an abortion,” Eileen confessed.

  “Of course you didn’t. Mary helped her hide it, but Melba and Luther suspected she was pregnant, as did Mary. She probably suffered from morning sickness. But neither of them told Shelby, and when Juliet killed herself—”

  “They carried the guilt,” Sam finished.

  Jennifer nodded.

  “And how do you think Juliet found the passageways?” Sam asked.

  “If you lock someone in a room enough times, and there’s a way out, they’ll find it,” Jennifer assured him.

  “Is this relevant?” Nicholls asked.

  “Probably not to you.”

  “But how did you get the word to Mary?” Eileen asked. “How did you get her to come back?”

  “With a newspaper article that Sam wrote,” Jennifer explained. “We had copies delivered to Arthur’s home and to his grandfather’s house. I knew Luther read the newspapers every day. He told me. And I knew he would tell Arthur about what had happened with you, just in case he didn’t read it for himself. We gave Mary the Monday deadline with the architect so she’d have to strike this weekend. And, of course, she did.”

  Eileen sighed. “And now we have Shelby’s will, too.”

  “Right,” Jennifer agreed.

  “Where was it found?” Sam asked.

  “Tucked in a hollow piece of molding,” Nicholls told him. “Once we figured out the kind of trip mechanism used for the passage entrances, it wasn’t all that hard to find. I’m sure he planned to let someone know where it was before he died.”

  “Mary never let any of us alone with him,” Eileen assured him. “But it’s over now, and everything has been set right.”

  Almost everything.

  Chapter 40

  “...and you should leave out that whole subplot about the asteroid,” Jennifer heard April telling Leigh Ann. “When writing about cataclysmic events, the romance has to take a backseat, so I suggest you either...”

  “Just listen to her,” Teri whispered loudly. She was leaning against the wall in Monique’s kitchen, her eyes narrow, her arms crossed. “Now that she’s going to be published, she thinks she knows everything. She doesn’t write anything remotely similar to what Leigh Ann and I do, yet she told me to change the title of Deep Frozen Love and to move my story to New York City. My heroine trains sled dogs in the wilds of Alaska, for heaven’s sake! She hasn’t seen a human for six months when she finds Ramon almost dead on the ice and takes him in and....Well, you’ve read it. And then she said ‘Of course she falls in love with him. Anything without long ears and a tail would look pretty good to her after nothing but snow.’

  “I even heard her telling Monique to write a romance,” Teri went on, “because, according to April, they’re easier to sell. Hah! Can you imagine what kind of romance Monique would write? Some kind of slimy alien—argh! It makes me ill just thinking about it.”

  Jennifer nodded. The dark god of publishing had struck again and created one more monster. “She’ll get over it.” At least she hoped she would.

  “I don’t know...” Teri batted a balloon out of the way. They were tied everywhere: to the chairs, the drawer pulls on the cabinets, even the light fixture. “If she gets a contract for more of these Billy and Barney books, and it looks like she will, we may get to know an April we never knew existed.”

  Monique drew a long knife from a drawer and handed it to April. “Time to cut your cake.”

  It was huge, four layers of rich chocolate frosted with cream cheese icing, sitting in the middle of the table next to a vase full of pink roses. It was one of Dee Dee’s most popular sellers. Way to Go, April! was written in swirled red and pink icing.

  Teri scowled and Jennifer punched her arm. “Be good. If we’re lucky, this will happen to all of us one day and you’ll get your turn to be Mr. Hyde.”

  April put down the knife, her eyes glistening. “I want to thank all of you. I never could have done it without you.” She could as easily have been accepting an academy award. “Jennifer’s suggestion to make Billy older and change Barney from a bat to a flying squirrel made all the difference. Monique’s constant encouragement, Leigh Ann’s line editing, and Teri’s help with the plot...This book is every bit as much your success as it is mine.”

  Jennifer glanced at Teri who promptly lowered her eyes.

  “I love every one of you.” Her voice cracked. “I’m the second, but I can’t wait for the rest of you to get published!”

  Jennifer knew that she meant it. It was hard to handle, the tears of joy that they all shared and that tiny ache she knew was in each of their hearts, wanting so much to be the next. She knew that April felt that ache as well.

  “Group hug!” Leigh Ann called out, spreading her arms wide. They all crowded together, even Monique.

  “Enough,” Monique directed, pulling back and wiping tears from her eyes. “We’ve got cake to eat.”

  April cut five pieces, each large enough to supply an
entire day’s ration of calories for an adult female, and Leigh Ann scooped gobs of vanilla ice cream on top.

  “So what happens to Arthur?” Teri leaned close.

  “Probably very little.” Jennifer handed April the plate with the first piece cut, then offered one to Teri before taking one for herself. “As far as he knew, he was simply helping Mary disappear with her own money. He probably didn’t believe what he was doing should have been illegal.”

  “Do you think he would have stood by and let Mrs. McEvoy go to prison for murder?” Teri asked. She dipped her finger in some icing and tasted it. “Man, this is good.”

  “Of course it is,” Jennifer assured her. “It’s Dee Dee’s own recipe. I hope he wouldn’t, but who knows. Mary paid him really well, a heck of a lot more than that $10,000 he added to his account here. The police found an offshore account with a quarter of a million dollars in it and there may be more in other accounts.”

  “Whoa! I know a whole lot of people who’d do a lot more than he did for that amount of money. Did he plant the knife in Eileen’s garden?”

  “I suspect Mary did it before she left town, at least that’s what Arthur’s saying. She seems so out of it, she can’t even be questioned.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “But if Mary did do it, Arthur had to realize it was her. He knew about the notes that Mary had written and wanted me to pass off as threats. When he came to my apartment and fixed me lunch—”

  “Get out of here! You didn’t tell me that.”

  “He was there to make sure I’d played my part, given the police the notes, and then he told me my work was finished. But something he said that day stuck in the back of my mind. I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was.”