by Tim Myers
Savannah looked at her steadily and asked, “Do you think she fell asleep at the wheel in the middle of the day?”
The woman looked startled by the suggestion. “Is that how she died? I hadn’t heard.” She paused, then added, “I can’t imagine it. We drove to Richmond once for a quilt show, and she was the safest driver I ever rode with. Unless she changed dramatically, there’s no way she would have taken the chance.
That’s one of the reasons we drifted apart. Maggie wouldn’t ride with anyone else, she didn’t trust them at behind the wheel, and I got tired of always riding with her. It’s a shame,” she added. “I’ve missed her, and now I’ve lost my chance to be her friend again.”
Savannah reached over and patted the woman’s hand. “Tillie Matthews, I’m sure you were a fine friend to her. People drift in and out of our lives all the time. Now let me get you that pie.” As Savannah left to grab the promised dessert, Tillie told us, “I don’t believe those other rumors I’ve been hearing, either.”
“What have you heard?” Lillian asked.
Tillie looked down at her hands, then said, “I hate to speak ill of the dead.”
“What if you could help her? Would you do it?”
“Of course I would,” Tillie said.
“So tell us what you’ve heard,” I urged her gently.
Tillie looked around, then said softly, “I heard she’d had an affair.”
Lillian said, “We’ve heard that ourselves.”
“I don’t care if she and Frances were close. That’s how rumors like that get started.”
“Are you talking about Frances Coolridge?” I asked.
Tillie nodded. “She even put her in her will, the way I heard it.”
I’d heard they were friends, but this was not really any new information. “Maggie put Frances in her will? I wonder who inherited her stuff instead?”
“No, you misunderstood me,” Tillie said. “From what I heard, when Frances died, Maggie got everything she had. Honestly, I think that’s what started, the rumors.”
Savannah returned with Tillie’s pie. The older woman said, “You don’t have to give this to me on the house.”
“I’m a woman of my word,” Savannah said. “Enjoy it, girl.” Instead of sliding it in front of her, Savannah walked it back down to where Tillie had been sitting before. It was a clever way to get our privacy back.
As we finished our meals, Savannah came by again with two Styrofoam cups. “Here’s some coffee for the road. Sorry I couldn’t help with Maggie.”
“You did fine,” Lillian said as she slid a few dollars under her plate.
“You already paid for your food,” Savannah said as she tried to hand the bills back to Lillian.
“But not for the coffee,” my aunt said, refusing the money.
“Are you saying I can’t treat a couple of my best friends to a cup of coffee when I please?”
We were starting to attract attention again. “Put it in the college fund jar,” I prompted. There was a glass jar near the counter that used to hold pickles but now housed money for Charlie’s college tuition. I knew Savannah and Pete were doing okay at their restaurant, but their income wasn’t always enough, no matter how popular the spot was.
“That I can do,” Savannah said. “And we thank you for the contribution.”
Once we were outside, Lillian said, “I don’t believe that rumor for a second. Maggie and Frances together? I just don’t see it.”
“I know what you mean. Maggie was a big fan of men; there was never any doubt about that. I wonder if the other part is true, though.”
“It should be easy enough to find out. When we get to Maggie’s place, I’ll call Patrick back.”
I glanced at my watch. “There’s no way he’ll still be in the office, Lillian. We’ll just have to find out tomorrow.”
My aunt smiled as she unlocked her car. “We won’t have to wait. I’ve got his home number, and I’m willing to bet that if he handled Maggie’s business affairs, he’ll know if Tillie was right.”
As she drove, I asked, “How do you happen to have a lawyer’s home telephone number memorized?”
“Patrick’s much more than just a lawyer,” Lillian said cryptically.
“Don’t tell me you dated him, too.”
Lillian said, “And what would be wrong if I had? He’s not that much younger than I am, and some men find sophisticated older women a refreshing breeze from the banality of youth.”
When it came to my aunt, I didn’t doubt that for a second. “So you two used to go out.”
“I never said that,” Lillian said. “You just assumed it.”
I swear, sometimes she could drive me crazy. “So we’re back to our original question. How do you have his home number?”
Lillian waved a hand in the air. “The truth is so mundane, it barely needs to be repeated.” When I realized that was all the answer I was going get to get out of her, I gave up. My aunt liked to think of herself as mysterious, and I wasn’t about to try to dissuade her of that opinion. She more than made up for my intermittent frustrations with her, with an air that made her exciting to be around. We pulled into Maggie’s driveway, a neat cottage with a well-kept garden in front and a white picket of fence.
I stared at it with longing in my heart. “Why can’t I find a place like this to live?” Lillian asked, “Are you unhappy with your current accommodations?”
“No, I guess it’s fine, but there are a few things I’m not exactly thrilled about.”
As Lillian started retrieving folded boxes from the trunk, she said, “Honestly, get over what happened in the bathroom. People die every day.”
“You know, I’d forgotten to even put that on my list,” I said.
Lillian didn’t look like she believed me, but it was true. I didn’t associate Frances’s demise with my new apartment, even with the rumors of her haunting the place. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t spending enough time there to know if it was haunted or not. Oggie and Nash could have given a more informed opinion about it than I could have.
Lillian shrugged, then asked me, “So what’s on your bad list, if a suicide doesn’t even make the cut?”
I grabbed the rest of the boxes she’d brought and said, “I’m not crazy about my neighbors. No, that’s not true. I’m actually starting to like one of them.”
“I was afraid you’d start to feel that way,” Lillian said. “That Barrett is a handsome man, isn’t he?”
“If you like him, then you can have him,” I said. “I was talking about Jeffrey Wallace.”
Lillian put her boxes down and retrieved a key. That would certainly make it easier than our original plan to somehow break in so we could snoop around the place. “What in the world could the two of you have in common? He’s quite a bit older than you, you know.”
“There’s no age limit on friendship,” I said. “Besides, what were you saying before about a man wanting a little sophistication sometimes?”
Lillian’s eyebrows shot up. “Dear child, it’s one thing for a man to crave the wisdom and experience of an older woman, but the reverse is completely unacceptable. I suggest you find a man more your own age. I always thought Greg was a good match for you.”
“Why don’t you open the door and we can talk inside?” I swear, sometimes the only way I could get my aunt to change the subject was with a sledgehammer.
Lillian gave me one of her famous looks. Then she opened the door and we stepped inside. The boxes were forgotten on the porch for now.
It was time to snoop around and see if we could figure out what had really happened to Maggie Blake.
Chapter 13
The first thing that hit me when I stepped inside was the mixed scents of a dozen different candles and potpourris. It appeared that Maggie was an aroma freak, and she didn’t mind in the least mixing lavender with cinnamon or apple spice with sage. I started to open a window, but Lillian protested, “Jennifer, we’ll freeze to death.”
�
�It’s better than being asphyxiated,” I said, ignoring her complaints as I went around the place flinging open every window I could find.
“If you insist on doing that, then I’m turning the furnace on,” she said.
“That’s fine by me. I wonder if there’s a fan somewhere in here.”
She frowned at me and said, “Honestly, I think you’re overreacting.”
I grabbed a trash bag from the kitchen and started gathering up candles. “And I think your sense of smell must be on the blink. You know what this stuff does to my allergies.”
“I think it’s delightful,” she said as she sniffed the air.
“Then you can take all of this stuff home with you.” I finally got everything I could find that had any aroma to it at all and tied the bag tightly before putting it out on the porch. The air was definitely starting to clear, but I wasn’t in any hurry to close the place back up just yet.
“I’m still chilly,” Lillian complained.
“So grab one of Maggie’s sweaters,” I said.
“Who realized you could be so thoughtless?” Lillian snipped at me.
I wasn’t about to take that from her. “What can I say, it runs in the family.”
That was a risk. It would either snap her out of her little snit or she’d be impossible to work with the rest of the night. Either way, though, I wasn’t about to back off. After all, it wasn’t that cold inside. We weren’t even officially in autumn yet, and though we were near the mountains, Rebel Forge was still blessed with moderate temperatures most of the year.
Lillian paused a little longer than I would have liked, then chuckled. “Sometimes you are exactly like your grandfather.” It was the highest praise she could give anyone, and I knew it.
“Thank you kindly. So now that we’ve got the place aired out, what say we get started?” Lillian retrieved one of Maggie’s jackets from the front hall closet and put it on, then said, “I’m ready if you are. Jennifer, should we put the boxes together and pack as we search? That way we can eliminate some of the clutter and still manage to explore.”
“That sounds like a good plan,” I said as I collected the boxes from outside.
“I’ll fold them, and you tape the bottoms,” Lillian commanded.
Ordinarily I might have fought her out of sheer stubbornness, but I’d already pushed her hard enough for one night, and besides, I loved duct tape. After we had our containers ready, it was time to start in earnest. “What room should we tackle first?” I asked.
Lillian thought about it, then said, “Let’s leave the public spaces for last. Why don’t we start with her bedroom? That way we’ll get the hardest room out of the way first.”
“Do you really think it will be the hardest to search?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It’s the most intimate spot here. Jennifer, if we can disassociate this place from Maggie, it will make all of this a great deal easier on both of us. Think of it as a job and try not to remember her laughter, or the way she smiled.”
I really wished Lillian hadn’t said that. Up to that point, I had somehow managed to forget why we were really there. Now that was impossible, though. Maggie was everywhere. I took a few deep breaths, catching more than a hint of the banished candles and potpourris. That helped. If I dwelled on the smells, I might be able to forget about my lost friend.
The house was as neat inside as I expected it to be. Lillian had been joking when she’d claimed that the place was cluttered. Maggie had been nuts for organization, and like many other scrapbookers who had gone into card making, I knew she’d enjoyed using many of the same tools she’d used to create lasting memory books to personalize her own greeting cards. As Lillian and I walked to the back bedroom, I looked around for the scrapbooks Maggie must have made over the years. Sure enough, there were a stack of them on the shelves in the living room, but I did see an odd-looking empty space with no dust on it toward one end. “Come here,” I said to Lillian as I got a closer look.
My aunt glanced at me. “What am I looking at, Maggie’s scrapbooks? Jennifer, we’re here to look for clues.”
“Don’t you get it?” I asked. “I’m willing to bet she kept her most recent scrapbook here where there’s an empty space.”
Lillian frowned at the shelf. “For all we know, that’s where she kept her diary.”
“That might be a good read too, but I can’t imagine it being here. Look, there’s no dust on the shelf at all. That means the missing books haven’t been gone very long.” I picked up the last one in line. “This one is dated two years ago. There have to be at least two more missing, from the look of things. You and I both know she got involved in card making because of her scrapbooking, and I’m willing to bet that she didn’t just stop making her scrapbooks.”
“I honestly don’t know,” Lillian said. “Do you think it’s important?”
Suddenly I was sure of it. “Think about it. What kind of memories has she had lately that someone doesn’t want us to know about? I’m willing to bet whoever killed her stole those last few books. That probably means that whoever killed her was in her it life over the past couple of years and not before then.” Lillian sighed. “Jennifer, for all we know she gave up scrapbooking when she started making cards, no matter what your theory is. She was doing them long if before you opened your shop. Maybe she just got tired of it.”
“I know one way to find out,” I said as I picked up the telephone. “Who are you calling?”
I stopped dialing as I explained. “Where would Maggie get her supplies if she was still scrapbooking?” I finished dialing. Then before it could ring more than once, my sister picked up on the other end. it “Sara Lynn, hey, it’s Jennifer. I need to ask you something.”
She was short with me, even testier than usual. “Can it wait? I’m just putting dinner on the table.”
I glanced at my watch. “My, you’re eating awfully late, aren’t you?”
She huffed into the telephone. “If you must know, Bailey’s still out of town.”
“I thought he was supposed to come back this morning.” That was odd. My sister’s husband was normally as reliable as an engineer’s watch.
Sara Lynn snapped, “As did I, but I don’t control his schedule. I will call you back after I eat.”
She hung up before I could say another word, so I hit the redial button.
“Hello,” she said tensely. It sounded like something was definitely wrong in her paradise, and I wondered if I was interrupting more than her dinner.
“Sorry, it’s me again. Listen, I’m not home. Call me at this number when you get the chance.” I rattled off Maggie’s number, conveniently printed in script and taped to the phone in the slot meant for it. It was just one more example of the woman’s eye for detail, which I sorely lacked.
“Where are you?” Sara Lynn asked abruptly.
“I’m at Maggie Blake’s place,” I said, then hung up.
Lillian asked, “What in the world did you do that for?”
I grinned, held up my fingers and started to count. Before I could get my third finger in the air, the phone rang. “Hi, Sara Lynn.”
“Sorry?” a man’s voice asked.
“Oh, excuse me. Hello.” Who on earth was telephoning Maggie’s house?
“Is Lillian there?”
“One moment, please. May I tell her who’s calling?”
Instead of supplying the information, a reasonable request as far as I was concerned, he said, “Just put her on, please.”
I handed the phone to my aunt. Lillian asked, “Who is it?”
“He wouldn’t say, but whoever it is, he’s in a pretty foul mood.”
“We’ll just see about that.” She took the phone from me. “Hello? Patrick, why are you calling?” She held the phone away from her ear so I could hear, too. “I want to be sure you’re not overstepping your bounds there.”
“And whatever gave you the idea that I might?”
Lillian asked in a saccharine sweet voice that se
t my teeth on edge.
“Don’t do it, woman. I don’t know what you’re up to, but you wheedled that job out of me, and I expect you to perform, do you hear me?”
“Of course,” she said, dismissing his complaint, “While I’ve got you on the telephone, would you mind telling me if it’s true that Maggie Blake inherited everything that Frances Coolridge owned?”
The attorney exploded again. “I can’t tell you that. Don’t even ask me, do you hear?”
“They’re both dead, so don’t bore me with that attorney-client privilege nonsense. I was once married up to a lawyer, if you recall.”
“That didn’t make you one, any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car.” Lillian’s voice had a steel edge to it the next time ok she spoke. “Patrick, are you certain you want to poke this particular bear? The world might be fascinated to hear about your trip to Las Vegas three years ago.”
There was a sudden intake of breath on the other end. “You wouldn’t,” he said. “No, strike that. You’d tell for the fun of it, wouldn’t you?”
Lillian said, “I’m going to ask you this one last time. Did she or did she not inherit everything Frances owned?”
With obvious reluctance, the lawyer admitted, “There wasn’t much, but whatever Frances had went straight to Maggie. As I recall, there were a few books, some property in the middle of nowhere that no one in their right mind would want, and a box of personal things like paperweights and rocks, if you can believe that. I drew all of the wills up at the same time, so there were no real surprises.”
“And what was the nature of their relationship?” Lillian asked.
“Come on, do you really expect me to answer that?”
“I do,” Lillian said, and then she simply waited. I thought for sure he’d hang up on her, but after nearly a minute, Patrick said, “Maggie and Frances were friends, no more and no less. The way it was explained to me was that neither of them ever had children, had I no close relatives at all, and they wanted their things to be handled with respect in the end.”
“And there wasn’t anything more to their relationship than that?” Lillian asked.
