by Edie Claire
Lucille’s body had only just been removed from the house when her son Bobby, the garden store manager, blew through the front door and stomped into the middle of the living room. Bobby was around fifty, had an enormous potbelly, talked in a very loud voice, smelled like cigarette smoke, and was still wearing the same muddy boots he’d gotten in trouble for wearing into the house that morning.
He looked around the room, red-faced and wild-eyed, until his gaze landed on Bridget. The fretful personal assistant was standing by the Christmas tree at the time, and when she saw him she made a pathetic mewling noise and tried to slip behind the branches.
“You did this!” he shouted at her, pointing a finger. “What happened? What did you do to my mother? She was perfectly fine this morning!”
The longtime Floribundas who were in the living room looked at Bobby with the same “dear me, what a bother” look they had been giving him since he was a ten-year-old making flatulent sounds with his armpit. Those who didn’t know him gaped with open astonishment. Leigh, who considered herself to fall somewhere in the middle, wasn’t surprised that Lucille’s not-so-bright troublemaker of a son was upset and yelling. But his fixation on the trembling personal assistant was bizarre.
For a moment everyone in the room remained perfectly still except Allison, who pulled out her notebook and started scribbling again. Then the three police officers who had been conducting interviews in the dining room, kitchen, and master bedroom reappeared.
Bobby did not seem surprised to see them. “I want her arrested!” he demanded, still pointing at Bridget, who slunk even further behind the tree. She had already toppled a wise man; now she knocked off two Styrofoam ornaments and snagged icicles in her hair. “For negligence! I don’t know what she did wrong, but I’m damned well going to find out! You stupid, incompetent—”
Bobby’s tirade was interrupted by the local police chief, who stepped forward with a raised palm and quietly suggested that Bobby follow him into the kitchen to discuss the situation. Bobby, surprisingly, obliged without complaint. The two men left the room, and a moment later Melvin was dismissed from the kitchen and came to join the rest of the restless in the living room. The officers interviewing Frances and Lydie in the dining room and upstairs went back to their tasks, and hushed chatter broke out once again among the Floribundas.
Leigh’s peripheral vision caught sight of her daughter moving stealthily around the outskirts of each gossiping group. It was obvious to her that the girl was eavesdropping, but Leigh realized that Allison was right — no one paid much attention to a small, dark-haired child with glasses. Nor did anyone seem to notice that the deceased woman’s beleaguered personal assistant was still quivering behind the Christmas tree.
“Bridget,” Leigh assured, “I really think you can come out from there. Nobody’s going to hurt you in a house full of police officers.”
Bridget didn’t move. “Why is Bobby being so mean?” she sniffled. “He knows how sick his mama was. Why would he blame me?”
Leigh wasn’t sure how to respond. It seemed crass, so soon after the death of his mother, to give her honest opinion on either the character or the intellect of Bobby Busby. But not doing so made it impossible to answer that question.
“You’re perfectly safe, here,” Leigh repeated. “Come on out, please.”
Slowly, in a series of jerky, uncertain motions, Bridget made her way back around to the front of the tree. Three more ornaments fell, but this time Leigh was able to move the sheep and the other two wise men to safety. Shiny icicles stuck to Bridget’s frizzy hair and trailed behind her head like cobwebs.
Leigh pulled them off and returned them to the tree. “Don’t take it personally. Bobby’s upset.”
“I know, but—” Bridget looked genuinely confused. “But he seemed to like me well enough when he hired me. And I haven’t made any horrible mistakes. Really! I haven’t!”
“I believe you,” Leigh said, looking into the woman’s miserable pale eyes and meaning it. If Bridget had done something to hasten Lucille’s inevitable demise, Leigh didn’t think she was aware of it. Her level of defensiveness, however, was interesting. “Why would anyone think you’d made a mistake?”
Bridget shot a suspicious look at Leigh, and her body tensed. “No reason,” she said sharply. “I’m going to go sit down somewhere.” She moved out of range of any further questioning, then leaned awkwardly against the arm of a chair, pretending to be part of another conversation.
Leigh got the message. She had not forgotten the comment Bridget had muttered upon realizing that Lucille was deceased: “this cannot be happening again.” Did Bridget even realize she had said it?
Leigh couldn’t help but wonder how Bobby and Lucille had come to select her. Perhaps they had a difficult time finding someone willing to take Lucille’s steady stream of verbal abuse. Or maybe they were penny-pinchers who hadn’t tried that hard to find someone competent in the first place. Either way, Leigh suspected the personal assistant’s past record of achievement in the field was less than stellar.
She looked over to see that Allison was now alone with Virginia near the bottom of the stairs. Virginia was carrying on an animated monologue, and Allison was taking notes.
No, no, no…
“So, what are you two up to?” Leigh interjected shamelessly.
Virginia ignored her. “—the healthiest of all of us, wouldn’t you know it. Anna Marie’s so lazy she sends Eugene out for the mail and he can’t hardly breathe with the emphysema, but she’s fit as a fiddle. And their house! Good Lord ’a mercy their house is like a pigsty. She hires a woman to do for her, you know, always has, never mind that they can barely afford it. Now I do remember she had some thyroid troubles a few years back, but—”
“Virginia,” Leigh interrupted again, “have you been interviewed yet?” She knew the answer already. Only Lydie, Frances, Bridget, and Melvin had been interviewed so far. Why the police were delaying Leigh’s own torture when she had technically been first on the scene, she didn’t know. But she was anxious to get it over with. When it came to being grilled by cops over her involvement with the nonliving, practice did not make perfect. It only pushed a person one notch closer to needing psych meds.
“No, I haven’t,” Virginia answered, sounding miffed. “And they had better reserve a good amount of time for me, because I have quite a bit I’d like to tell them!”
“Oh?” Allison encouraged in her most innocent voice.
Leigh shot her daughter a look of disapproval.
The cause was lost. Virginia was entirely too delighted to have an attentive audience. “Well, don’t get me wrong, you know I think the Flying Maples are behind all this. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something fishy about Little Bobby storming in here and popping his cork like that. I always did say it was just a tad bit suspicious how grand that family lived after Big Bob passed. Lucille got the insurance, you know. Family didn’t have two dimes before that — Big Bob spent it all on his booze and his motorcycles. He had diabetes and heart disease both, but when he passed don’t you know it wound up being an ‘accident.’”
Virginia leaned in closer and lowered her voice. “That’s what pays the most, you see. The ‘Accidental Death and Dismemberment.’ Can’t get squat in regular life insurance for a man with a bad heart, but you can buy the accidental kind, because they figure if you can’t breathe, you can’t get in too much trouble. But they didn’t know Big Bob, I guess, because he was always banging himself up on that bike, and sure enough he spun out on a wet road and bought the farm and made his wife a millionaire!”
Leigh caught both herself and Allison casting an involuntary glance toward the dining room. Lucille? A millionaire?
“Oh, you wouldn’t know it to look at them now,” Virginia continued, seeming to understand the unspoken question. “By the time Lucille settled Big Bob’s debts and bought that nice house of hers, there wasn’t a whole lot left for fripperies. Little Bobby flunked out of college and she spent another bundl
e setting him up in a business that failed. But she got some money. Oh, believe you me, she did.”
Leigh believed her. She couldn’t remember ever thinking of Lucille as rich, but she’d never thought of her as poor, either. In Leigh’s memory Lucille had simply been a cranky widow friend of Frances’s who was best avoided. And when Leigh was a kid and “Little Bobby” had appeared at Floribunda events, he was best avoided too.
“Lucille had one of those policies on herself,” Virginia said, lowering her voice further. “She told me she did. Said if she was going to croak anyway, she might as well line her kid’s pockets while she was doing it. I told her it wouldn’t work — you know those policies don’t pay out if you do yourself in. They’ll pay if someone else whacks you, since it’s still a ‘non-natural’ death, but they sure as hell won’t pay your beneficiary if he’s the one who did it! I told Lucille that, but she just sniffed and told me not to worry. So, I bet you two shakes of a lamb’s tail that Little Bobby’s going to try and cash in somehow. No matter how Lucille really died, he’s going to try and make it look like an accident. An accident he had nothing to do with!”
Leigh breathed in sharply. For all her paranoid ravings, Virginia raised a valid point. Why else would Bobby storm in the house and essentially accuse Bridget of criminal neglect?
Leigh felt her cheeks flame with annoyance. She knew she should give Bobby’s outrageous behavior a pass, given the circumstances, but still… what kind of opportunistic weasel starts planning his pay-out strategy within an hour of his mother’s death? And at an innocent woman’s expense?
“How long is this going to take?” Harry asked, breaking into their conversation.
His wife scowled up at him. “Let the police do their jobs, Harry. What’s the matter, don’t you have a bottle in the car?”
He shook his head, and Leigh noticed that the ordinarily suave Casanova seemed nervous. Beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead, his face was flushed, and he fidgeted with his hands. “No,” he said with a sulk. “And the cognac’s all gone.”
Virginia drew back in horror. “The cognac! You weren’t… You mean that bottle you’ve been carrying around was the Flying Maples’ cognac?”
Harry dropped his head and nodded, guilty as a little boy.
“Oh, my God!” Virginia screamed.
All three police officers popped out of their rooms again.
“Help! You’ve got to help him!” Virginia continued to scream. “He’s been poisoned!”
“No, I haven’t!” Harry insisted, still looking distinctly guilty. “I’m fine! Really, I am!” He turned to his wife and put his hands on her arms. “Calm down, honey. Look at me! I’m fine!”
The officers exchanged looks among themselves, which Leigh interpreted as variations on “Can we go back to traffic duty, please?” Finally, the upstairs policeman who had been speaking with Lydie started down the stairs and motioned for Lydie to follow him.
Virginia was fussing over Harry, feeling of his forehead. “Are you feverish? Do you have a headache? How’s your urine stream?”
“Oh, good Lord, Virginia, will you hush?” Harry said peevishly.
The three officers formed a huddle and began talking quietly among themselves. Leigh stepped to Lydie’s side. “How did it go?”
“I didn’t have much to say, I suppose,” Lydie answered with a shrug. “But I’m worried about your mother. Is she still in the dining room?”
Leigh nodded soberly. They couldn’t see Frances; the officers had left the screen in place for the interview process. “How was she doing before?”
Lydie blew out a breath. “Her pressure was okay. But she’s very upset. She can’t stop thinking that she’s done something wrong. That she’s responsible for Lucille’s death in some way.”
“But—” Leigh protested.
“Don’t tell me,” Lydie interrupted, holding up a hand. “It’s nonsense, of course, but you know how stubborn your mother can be. She has this ridiculous idea that somehow she deserves all this misfortune by tempting fate.”
Another sick feeling rose in Leigh’s middle. She did not want to think about, much less hear spoken out loud, those last two words. “Why is that?”
Lydie started to speak, then shook her head. “I told you,” she whispered, too low for the still nearby — and obviously listening — Allison to overhear. “It has to do with… the incident. But I can’t get into that now. We just need to keep reinforcing that none of this has anything to do with her.”
“Will do,” Leigh promised.
The police officers broke their huddle, then turned to face the crowd in a grim-looking line. The chief cleared his throat. “I’m afraid that we’re going to have to ask for everyone’s cooperation here. Now, most likely, nothing’s wrong and Mrs. Busby died of natural causes. But we’ve got enough, uh… suggestion of… irregularities, say, that we think it’s best to have a medical team come in and check everyone out before any of you leave the premises.”
A smattering of groans was punctuated by several ear-piercing screams.
“You mean we’re all going to die?” Virginia screeched.
The chief threw her a long-suffering look. “No,” he said firmly. “Of course not. All we want is for EMS to take a look at anyone who’s having symptoms of stomach upset, or who has passed out, or who feels funny in any way. You’ve all been through a traumatic emotional experience, and that can cause a lot of symptoms on its own. We just want to make sure that’s all we’ve got going on here. All right?”
Delores stepped out of the crowd toward the officers and offered a beatific smile. “Will a stomach pump be necessary, do you think, Lieutenant?” she asked sweetly.
Somewhere in the back of the room, Jennie Ruth moaned.
“Um…” the chief said uncertainly. “We’ll leave that to EMS. They should be here soon. In the meantime, please just relax, and we’ll try to keep these interviews moving.”
The chief returned to Bobby in the kitchen, and the officer who was interviewing Frances slipped back around the screen and into the dining room.
Leigh’s heart began to pound. She didn’t know what to make of the chief’s announcement. She supposed that Lucille’s death happening so soon after the bizarre prank call might make the authorities choose to err on the safe side. But she had to wonder if there was something else going on. Was it something that Bobby had said? Surely they wouldn’t take seriously all of Virginia’s ravings about the Flying Maples!
“Excuse me, Ms. Leigh Harmon?” asked the officer who had just interviewed Lydie.
“Yes?” Leigh answered.
“You’re the person who first noticed that Mrs. Busby was deceased?”
She nodded.
“Could you come upstairs and answer a few questions for me, please?”
She started up the steps with legs that felt like lead.
Chapter 12
Leigh made her way through the play-by-play fairly well, she thought. She laid out for the officer everything she could remember happening between the last time she’d seen Lucille alive and the moment she’d found her deceased in the dining room. Leigh’s short-term memory, which had taken a hit during the twins’ early days and which she was convinced had been deteriorating at double speed ever since her fortieth birthday, served her surprisingly well, and she was able to answer all of the officer’s questions. The not so aimless chit-chat that followed was slightly trickier.
“Are you feeling all right yourself, Ms. Harmon?” the policeman asked. Officer #2 was an unassuming man in his mid thirties, and Leigh was quick to notice the contrast between this “regular” local officer and the county detectives who worked with her friend Maura. This guy not only acted friendly, he appeared to actually be friendly, which was to say he did not automatically assume that everyone he met was capable of murder.
He also didn’t seem to recognize her name. That was always nice.
“I’m feeling fine,” Leigh answered.
“Did you
have any of the punch or the food in the kitchen?” he asked.
“I had a little of the punch. But I didn’t eat anything.”
“When was the last time you drank any of the punch?”
Leigh didn’t like that question. She felt defensive of her mother and her Aunt Lydie both, but she tried to keep the pique out of her voice. “Earlier this afternoon. I’d say it’s been at least four hours now. Why?”
The policeman smiled and shrugged. “We’re supposed to ask everybody that. Now, did you see anything else today that seemed suspicious to you in any way? Anything else you want to tell us about?”
Leigh couldn’t help but smile. What an adorable rookie he was. No self-respecting detective would ever assume those two questions had the same answer. “No,” she said simply, answering the second one.
Not that she meant to be unhelpful, of course. But her duty as a mother came first. Allison had already been drawn into this unfortunate spectacle way more than was healthy, and so had Lenna. What purpose would be served by Leigh’s bringing up any of her own half-baked thoughts and observations? No purpose at all, except further delay.
“Well, thank you, then,” the officer said politely, writing something in his notebook. “That’ll be all. Could you send up Harry Delvecchio, please?”
“I’d be delighted to,” Leigh agreed. Then she took herself gratefully out of the bedroom and down the stairs.
She was greeted by a sea of anxious faces. “They’d like to talk to you next, Harry,” she explained, trying to keep her voice light.
Evidently, she failed. Harry’s face went pale and he sank down on the back of the sofa. “Oh, Lord,” he moaned. “They know!”
“Know what?” Virginia hissed, coming close and making a shushing gesture. Not everyone in the room was paying attention, but they could have heard him if they chose to.
Harry looked up at his wife with sad, bloodshot eyes. He looked like a hound dog that had gotten caught raiding the garbage can. “I didn’t mean anything by it,” he mumbled. “It was just a bit of fun.”
