Killer Dress: A Small Town Cozy Mystery (Shot & Framed Book 1)

by Nancy McGovern

  Dante, nervous and yet eager to know what was happening, tapped Darwin on the shoulder. “Er, is anything the matter, Deputy?”

  “Just wanted to talk to you about a victim.” Darwin turned to him, completely ignoring Dani. “Her name is Jessica Thorne.”

  “Yes, we were just discussing her,” Dante nodded eagerly. “Jessica auditioned for one of our plays and she suddenly freaked out halfway through it. She ran out, still dressed in the costume, and we never saw her again.”

  “What time was this?”

  “About 7:30pm,” Dante said.

  Darwin nodded. That fit in with the timeline. So Jessica had freaked out and run over to Leo’s. She reached Leo’s house about 8pm. After that… things were a little hazy.

  Dante was about to say something more when a junior ran up to him and whispered something in his ear. “Oh, handle it yourself, you little ninny,” Dante said with a hiss. “Can’t you see I’m mixed up with important business?”

  The abashed young boy looked very hurt, but he nodded and backed away.

  Dante turned back to Darwin, “I’m very sure it was 7:30pm,” he said. “She was our last audition for the day and I was looking at my watch wondering when I would get to go home.”

  Dani was staring at Darwin. “It’s full of holes,” she said. “The whole thing.”

  “Is that a pun I hear?” Darwin smiled at her.

  “Darwin, if Jessica ran out at 7.30pm, was at Leo’s house by 8pm, and then messaged Caro at about 8.45pm, what on earth took him so long to kill her?”

  Darwin shrugged. “I wish I knew.”

  “Jim Newell got a call at about 3am, didn’t he? Saying that someone had heard a gunshot?”

  Darwin bit his lip. “Dani. There’s an application form available down at the station if you want to join the force. Until then, even if we’re friends, I cannot discuss this case with you. I hope you understand.”

  She sighed. “But you doubt it, too. I can feel it. You don’t believe for a second that Leo was the killer.”

  “He said he was,” Darwin said. “That’s hard to argue against. Why leave a suicide note?”

  “This is really exciting, isn’t it?” Dante wedged his face in between them. “Murders and suicide notes in our little town! I always thought Innocence was the most boring place in-”

  Darwin turned and glared at him, and Dante raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture.

  “Dani, I, er, just wanted to hand you my card,” Dante gave her a gold embossed card, with his name and number on it. “In case you need any further help, or even if you just want to chat.”

  “Thanks.” Automatically, Dani handed him one of hers, and saw Darwin shake his head and smirk.

  “Come on,” Darwin said. “I’ll give you a ride home. It’s the best way to ensure you don’t get into more trouble.”

  They walked down the steps with Dante waving them goodbye, his face still frozen in an eager smile.

  “That guy gives me the creeps,” Darwin said, as he held the passenger door open for Dani.

  “He seemed nice enough to me,” Dani said.

  “Exactly. He was nice enough to you but did you see the dismissive way he treated his juniors? It’s a clear sign he lacks character.”

  “Lacks character?” Dani laughed. “Sometimes, Darwin, you manage to sound like my great aunt, Edna.”

  “She was clearly a good judge of character, too.” Darwin said with a smile. “I think we would have gotten along fine together.”

  *****

  Chapter 17

  The Riddle of Jessica

  Back home, Sharon and Martin were nowhere to be found. Even with the wedding cancelled or, at least, postponed, Caroline was still off of work, and she opened the door in her sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt. Dani sighed when she saw the bags under her eyes.

  “This week keeps on throwing punches at you, doesn’t it?” Dani asked.

  “Nobody told me I’d signed up for a boxing match,” Caroline said. She gave Darwin a weak smile and asked him if he’d like to come in.

  “No, thanks,” Darwin said. “I’ll give you some time alone. Looks like you both could use the rest. Call me if you need anything.”

  Dani waved goodbye, and shut the door. Turning to Caroline, she enveloped her in a hug. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I mean, Leo and I had a complicated relationship. I can honestly say I didn’t care much for him anymore. But I remember the boy he used to be. Life is a harsh teacher.”

  “The harshest.” Dani sank down on a couch, and pulled Caroline down with her.

  “You’re alright, though, aren’t you?” Caroline asked. “Why were you even at Leo’s house so early in the morning?”

  “Oh, I’d just gone-” Dani was about to tell her an easy lie, when she decided that the truth would probably be better. “The truth is, I overheard your conversation with Martin this morning, Caro. About what Leo did to you.”

  Caro drew in a sharp breath. “You heard us?”

  “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have been listening. It was an accident.” Dani said. “But Caro, how could you not tell us? If I’d known, I would have-”

  “You would have what? Killed him?” Caro gave her a look.

  Dani sighed and pushed her head back into the fluffy sofa. “I wanted to. When I heard he hurt you, I really wanted to. At the least, I wanted to hurt him back.” Raising herself suddenly, she asked, “Caro, does Sharon know about this?”

  “No!” Caro said. “At least you would only hurt Leo. Sharon actually was capable of killing him. You know how she is when her protective instincts are unleashed.”

  “He hurt you, and all you could think of was protecting him? Caro, what are you, a saint or a martyr?”

  “Neither,” Caro said. “It’s hard to explain, so I won’t even try. I’ve been through so much with Leo that I could never want to hurt him. I know it sounds like I’m defending him, but I’m really not. I cut off contact with him after the incident, didn’t I? I put myself first. I just couldn’t carry around hate with me.”

  “All I know is that I would have been furious,” Dani said. “I-”

  Caroline got up abruptly, clearly she had had enough of this conversation. “Dani- I was planning to visit Jessica’s mother today. Offer my condolences. Would you like to come along?”

  Dani really wanted to just stay on the couch forever, preferably with a can of coke and some chips, and the TV on. She knew Caro needed her, though.

  “Sure,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

  Half an hour later, they were ringing the doorbell of a shabby house on Cypress Street. Jess had still been living with her mother in her childhood home. Dani had passed by it every day on her way to school, and she as she looked at it now, she thought that homes aged along with the humans in them. The neat, whitewashed house of her childhood, with its well mowed lawn and clipped hedges, had transformed slowly into a hunchbacked thing with weeds and patches of brown soil peeking out like bald spots on the lawn. The paint on the walls was chipped now too, and it made her think of an old, well worn coat that was being used past its expiry.

  The door opened, and there was Jessica’s mother, hunched over herself, with grief, not age. Her skin sagged, and her hair lay limp around her. A black shawl was wrapped around her body, and her eyes were dull with sorrow.

  “Mrs. Thorne.” Caroline gave her a hesitant hug. “Mrs. Thorne, I just wanted to offer my condolences to you. I’m so very sorry about what happened to Jess.”

  “Come in,” Mrs. Thorne waved her inside. She didn’t say a word about Jessica. Not yet.

  When they’d sat down on the plush sofas in the living room, Mrs. Thorne stared at them as though they were strangers. In halting words, Caroline talked about how much Jessica had meant to her, and offered her support to Mrs. Thorne.

  Mrs. Thorne only stared at her as though she had never seen her before.

  “..if there’s anything I can do.” Caroline ended, her words hang
ing in the air.

  “You can find out who killed Jessica,” Mrs. Thorne said. “You can help me get justice for my daughter!”

  “Mrs. Thorne…” Caroline looked at Dani, “Mrs. Thorne, Leo confessed. He committed suicide sometime last night and he left behind a note-”

  “I heard all about it,” Mrs. Thorne said. “I don’t believe a word! First they tried to accuse you, then they try to pin it on poor Leo!”

  “You believed I was innocent, too?” Caroline’s lips tilted upwards just a little bit. “Thank you.”

  “Of course, you were innocent. You, Jess and Leo, you could hurt each other, you could be mean, you could fight. But kill? No. Never. If anyone loved Jess as much as I did, it was you two. You were the brother and sister she never had. You raised each other, all three of you. Why-” Mrs. Thorne took out a handkerchief and blew into it. “It doesn’t matter, though, does it? I can’t believe she’s really gone.”

  “Mrs. Thorne?” Dani piped up.

  “Yes?” Mrs. Thorne turned to look at her.

  “Was there, is there, anyone you know that might have wanted to hurt Jessica?”

  “I can’t think of a single person,” Mrs Thorne said. “Of course, I didn’t know everything about her life. She never really bought her friends around to the house. She preferred to roam around on her own.”

  “So, did she have a friend who gave her the iphone she carried around?” Dani asked. “Maybe… a boyfriend? Did she ever talk about anyone?”

  Mrs. Thorne shook her head. “No. I think she bought the iphone with her own money.”

  Dani sighed.

  “Look.” Mrs. Thorne got up. “Could you do me a favor, Caroline?”

  “Anything,” Caroline said.

  “I haven’t entered her room since that day. The police have already poked around, and they said I’m free to…to clear it out now if I want. But I can’t...” Mrs. Thorne’s lip trembled. “I can’t bear to.”

  “I’ll do it,” Caroline said immediately. “Don’t worry. You won’t even need to look inside.”

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Thorne sniffed. “I really appreciate it. You can keep whatever you like, and throw away everything else. Donate it. I-I don’t want any of it.”

  They spent the rest of the day boxing up everything that Jessica had left behind. Her laptop had already been confiscated by the police, as had a few diaries. Her cupboard overflowed with clothes, and her bookshelves with tattered paperbacks. The rest of the room had an assortment of the odd clutter that piles up around every life.

  “Boy, Jess wrote a lot of diaries,” Dani said, as she finished packing her third cardboard box full of books. “There’s one every year since she was ten.”

  Caroline nodded. “She loved to write, Jess did. She even let me read all of those.” She grabbed a pink one with “Jess Thorne, 13” printed on it, and flipped it open. A heavy sigh escaped Caroline. “Poor Jess. I feel so rotten, Dani. About everything. If she were here, if I could see her for just one minute more, I’d apologize for everything. She was obnoxious, but if I’d told her what Leo did to me, I think she would have liked Martin a lot more, and understood why I didn’t want to marry Leo anymore. As it stands, I didn’t want to break their friendship. So I ended up breaking mine.”

  Dani didn’t know what to say.

  “Funny thing is, these aren’t even all her diaries, you know,” Caro sniffed. “Her mother used to sometimes sneak in and read her diaries when she was younger- to check up on her, and make sure she wasn’t getting into trouble.”

  “Jess knew that?”

  “She figured it out,” Caro nodded. “After Mrs. Thorne referenced something that Jess had never told her about.”

  Dani smiled. “I’d have given up writing diaries if that had happened to me.”

  “Jess just figured out a better hiding place,” Caro said. “She used to unscrew the air vent and stick them inside it. Silly, but effective.”

  Dani grew pale, staring at Caro. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah. She was proud of it. She told me she’d make a good spy one day.”

  “Caro!” Dani wanted to shake her sister. “She had a secret hiding place for her secret diaries? Why didn’t you ever tell anyone?”

  “What?” Caro looked confused, then shocked. “Well, first of all, I only just remembered. Second of all, it’s a teenage girl’s diaries. It’s not like she had nuclear codes hidden there.”

  “Caro, sometimes you’re downright daft!” Dani sprang up, ran to a nearby drawer, and got out a screwdriver. Then, climbing up on a chair, she began to unscrew the vent cover.

  “You’re going to find nothing but spiders up there,” Caro said. “Come down.”

  Dani ignored her. She peered inside the vent, and only dust and darkness greeted her. Still, she felt a great hope. There had to be something. Jessica had to have left something behind!

  “I thought maybe you girls would-” Mrs. Thorne appeared at the door, and gave a startled gasp. “Oh!”

  Dani turned to look at her, with her arm still inside the air vent, buried up to the elbow. “Mrs. Thorne.”

  “What is this?” Mrs Thorne had suspicion and doubt written all over her face.

  “Jessica’s way of helping us out,” Dani said, bringing her arm out.

  Clutched in it was a small notebook, dog eared and dusty, but filled with writing.

  They spent the next hour bent over the notebook, all three of them. It was useless, though. The squiggles were just line after line of numbers, with the occasional initial in front of them.

  “None of this makes sense to me.” Mrs. Thorne said.

  “It will help the police, though,” Caro said. “I’m sure it will! Dani, you’re brilliant!”

  “I’d say you’re the brilliant one,” Dani smiled. “Searching the vent wouldn’t have occurred to me unless you mentioned it.”

  “Will you take it down to the station?” Mrs. Thorne asked. “I can come with you, if you like or-”

  “I’ll take it,” Caro said. “Dani, you need to go home and make sure Dad has had his medications, alright? I’ll call you both as soon as I’ve spoken to the sheriff. This might be a really big break in the case!”

  Despite her usual pessimism, Dani found herself believing in what Caro said. It was very likely that this clue could help the police unravel who had murdered Jessica after all.

  The bad news, however, was that if Leo hadn’t been the one to do it, the killer was still at large. And the police might focus their attention on Caroline again.

  *****

  Chapter 18

  A Phone Call

  Back home, Dani felt a vague dissatisfaction linger over her. It had been an hour since she’d heard from Caro. She supposed the sheriff must have had a lot of questions about the diary they’d found.

  For that matter, she had a lot of questions herself.

  Nothing made sense to her.

  Sitting down at her computer, she took out her camera, and listlessly scrolled through the photos.

  There was the missing polaroid from Caro’s room, torn in half and found under Jessica’s body.

  There was the photo of the blood splatter she had taken just yesterday, indicating that Jessica had been shot while she was already on the ground.

  There was a photo of Leo’s body, with the suicide note in front of him and a half empty bottle of whiskey next to it.

  Then, there was the photo of her mother that Jessica had seen. What about it had caused Jessica to react so violently?

  How did the diary with its cryptic squiggles, fit into all this?

  Dani gave a frustrated sigh, and looked at all the photos, over and over, trying to find a single detail that might make help her make sense of the whole.

  All of this started and ended with Jessica, that much was obvious. In her mind, Dani tried to picture Jessica, tried to picture her life. Who was she?

  She was a woman who wanted money, DJ had said. She had been looking for a rich boyfrien
d.

  She was a good daughter, Mrs. Thorne had said.

  She was a determined matchmaker, Leo had said.

  A good friend and, yet, an obstinate one, Caro had said.

  Could the simplest solution be the truth? Perhaps Jess had been blackmailing Leo about something and, in a fit of rage, he killed her instead of giving in to the blackmail. Afterwards, he was consumed with sorrow and killed himself, leaving behind a confession.

  It would hold up in court, this theory. After all, there was a suicide note, written in Leo’s own distinctive handwriting. The gun he’d used to take his life was the same gun that had been used on Jess. Mona had witnessed the fact that Jess had met him that night and Leo had even admitted it himself.

  In a court of law, the case would be considered solved. Leo had definitely killed her. The diary didn’t matter much, it was only proof that Jess had something to hold over his head, something he was willing to kill for.

  But there were a lot of holes in this theory.

  First and foremost, if Leo were guilty enough to take his own life, why hadn’t he at least shown a hint of guilt when he was interrogated earlier that day?

  Second, if Leo had killed Jess in a fit of rage, why not do it when she was still in his house, and then hide the body? Why go to all the trouble of letting her leave, then following her, then killing her but leaving Caroline alive? What was the point of it?

  But, if he hadn’t killed her, why leave that suicide note behind?

  Dani scrolled up to the picture again, reading the words over and over.

  Everything I told you was a Lie!

  Love made me do this!

  Anyway I can’t bear it any more. I must confess!

  I killed Jess, and it was all for Caro!

  Nothing matters but you, Caro!

  Everything I’ve done was for you. Please forgive me. I don’t want to live anymore!

  Leo

  There was something off about the note. It wasn’t very normal, was it? Jumping up, Dani headed out of the house.

  “No lunch?” Her father stopped her before she could leave. “Sharon is coming over soon. I thought I’d cook us some pasta.”