by Tim Myers
“It’s mine,” he said sullenly.
I knocked again, but Jeffrey ignored me. So much for his urgency to leave the building. I could spend the rest of the morning waiting him out, but I was pretty sure that card had been shredded by now. I’d really blown it, confronting him without anyone there to back me up, and worse yet, I’d let him take what might have been the only real evidence I had against him. If it turned out that he’d killed Maggie and I couldn’t prove it because of my negligence, I’d never be able to forgive myself.
I walked out back to the Gremlin and noticed an odd car parked behind Barrett’s. It was a Trans Am I’d never seen before, but as soon as I saw the license plate, I knew who it belonged to. The personalized plate said pny urnd. How clever. I wondered what Penny had done to earn it, then tried to dismiss her from my thoughts. I had other, more important things on my mind.
Lillian had opened Custom Card Creations without me, a fact I was thankful for. To my surprise, she and Sara Lynn were sharing a cup of coffee at my worktable.
“Good morning,” I said as I put my purse behind the counter. “I’m glad you’re both here. I only wanted to have to tell this once.” Sara Lynn hugged me, and Lillian moved in on the other side.
“We’re just glad you’re okay,” Sara Lynn said.
Lillian added, “I hope they fry him for this.”
I enjoyed their embraces, then backed away. “I’m willing to bet he’s in pretty rough shape after I hit him.”
Lillian looked delighted. “Oh, I hope you broke a few of his ribs. I know how much that hurts; it can be sheer misery to breathe.”
Sara Lynn asked, “When did you break a rib?”
“Skydiving,” she explained. “I took a bad tumble. It was entirely my fault. But enough about me. Talk to us, Jennifer.”
I related the night’s events to them, trying to skim over the facts and leave the commentary out, but with those two, it was practically impossible. What should have been a five-minute story ended up taking half an hour, and by the time I’d declared the subject closed and off-limits forever, I was finished with it. If there was anything I could do about it, Wayne Davidson would never haunt my dreams again.
I looked at my sister and asked, “Don’t you have a store to run?”
“My staff can take care of things while I’m gone,” she said. “I’ve got good people working for me.”
I hugged Lillian’s shoulder. “I do too. Listen, I appreciate you being here, but I’d kind of like to let things get back to normal if I can, okay?”
“I understand,” she said. “We’ll talk later.”
After Sara Lynn was gone, Lillian said, “So that’s that. What do we do now?”
I told her what had happened with Jeffrey Wallace, not able to meet her gaze as I admitted how badly I’d fouled things up.
“Nonsense, all is not lost. Sara Lynn and I both saw that card, so it’s not a matter of your word against his. Jeffrey’s reaction is interesting, isn’t it? The real question is if the man’s in denial or if he truly believes what he told you.”
I said, “You saw that card. Was there an inch of room to allow them to reconcile?”
Lillian thought about it a few seconds, then said, “If it had come from anyone else, I would have to agree with you, but we both know that Maggie had a flair for the dramatic.”
“I know,” I said. “When I tried to tell Bradford what we found, I could tell her past behavior was on his mind.”
“So you shared everything with your brother?” Lillian asked. “Do I even need to ask you what he thought?”
“We don’t have enough evidence,” I said. “I didn’t even have the heart to tell him about Howard and Betty, not without more proof than we’ve got.”
“Jennifer, I think it’s time we went back to the marker board.”
I looked around the shop. “So have we completely given up on running this place as a business?”
Lillian shook her head. “If a customer comes in, we’ll help them, of course, but are you going to be able to put your heart and soul into this place with Maggie’s death weighing on the back of your mind?”
“Probably not,” I admitted. “Let’s try it again.”
“Good,” Lillian said, retrieving the board. “Now where were we?” She studied it a few moments, then said, “Do you know what, Jennifer? This is useless.” Before I could protest, Lillian wiped the board with a paper towel.
“Hey, I wasn’t done with that,” I said.
“Jennifer, we know so much more now than we did. It’s time for a fresh look at things.”
I nodded reluctantly, since it was too late for my protests to do any good. It was time to figure out who had murdered Maggie Blake, and why.
Chapter 16
“So where do we start?” I asked Lillian as she retrieved a marker.
“There’s the prime question,” she said as she wrote, “Who killed Maggie and why?”
“We had that on the board before,” I said.
“Patience,” she said. “We’re going to approach this differently.”
As she wrote names down the right side of the board, Lillian said, “Okay, we’ve got our main suspects as Betty, Howard, and Jeffrey Wallace. Who else should we list?”
“All of the names in the club,” I said, “including ours.”
I’d said it as a joke, but Lillian wrote down “Hilda,” “Lillian,” and “Jennifer.” “Who else?”
“I was kidding,” I said as I got up and wiped out our names.
“What about Hilda?” Lillian asked. “Should we erase her name too?”
I thought about it a second, then said, “Let’s leave her up there until we can figure out a reason to take her name off the list.”
“Is that it, then?” she asked.
“I can’t think of anyone else,” I said. “Now what do we do?”
Across from the names, she wrote in headings that spelled “MOM.” I said, “Do you honestly think her mother did it? If the poor woman’s still alive, she’s at least eighty.”
“Jennifer, you should read more mysteries like I do.” As she touched each letter, she said, “Motive, Opportunity, and Means.”
“Why isn’t ‘Means’ first? After all, they both start with M.”
“Are you trying to be difficult, or does it just come naturally to you?”
I shrugged. “I was just curious.” I looked at the board. “Let’s go ahead and do Means first. We don’t even know how Maggie was killed. How in the world could we know if any of them had the capability of doing it?”
“So we do that one later,” Lillian said. “Let’s tackle Opportunity.”
I pointed to Howard’s and Betty’s names. “They couldn’t have done it.”
Lillian frowned at the board. “Why not? They admit they were the last ones to see her alive. It makes perfect sense to me. You know what kind of mindset Betty’s had lately. The two of them have been on the brink of divorce for years because of her jealousy.”
“That’s exactly why I think they’re innocent. Can you honestly see the two of them working together to kill Maggie and make it look like an accident? I doubt they could agree to a grocery list, let alone such an elaborate cover-up.”
Lillian paused, then said, “You’ve got a point.” As she put question marks by their names, she added, “So do you think Jeffrey Wallace could have done it? There’s no love like a scorned love.”
I thought about my downstairs neighbor, and the different sides I’d seen in him in a short period of time. “He could have done it,” I said. “But I don’t know if he would.”
Lillian said, “Unless we learn otherwise, we have to assume he had the means to do it, and the opportunity.
He had the motive too, if she’d just dumped him and he was beginning to realize that she was earnest about it.”
“So we convict him now? Let’s at least wait until we finish the board.”
Lillian sighed. “What possible reason would Hilda have to m
urder her? They were dear friends, from what we’ve heard.”
“They weren’t best friends for all that long,” I said. “Before Hilda, Maggie was best friends with Frances.” I shuddered as I thought about the prospect of that window coming down on my neck. If she was a ghost inhabiting my apartment, Frances was trying to make a point, and I wanted to figure it out before she tried something even more dramatic to get my attention.
I took the marker from Lillian and wrote “Frances Coolridge” beside Maggie’s name. “What if their murders are tied together somehow?”
“Jennifer, are you still on that? I can’t imagine why a suicide would be a part of Maggie’s murder. If Maggie had died first, I could see there might be some remorse there, but it was the other way around. Frances’s death didn’t have anything to do with Maggie’s.”
Something clicked in my head, but I couldn’t say what. There was something we were missing, some connection that was slipping past. Then it hit me. “Wait a second. Frances’s death did impact Maggie.”
“Certainly it’s difficult to lose a close friend, especially to suicide,” Lillian said.
“Humor me, okay? Let’s say Frances was murdered. So what happened to all her stuff?”
Lillian spoke as if she were talking to a small child. “Maggie inherited it. It’s not all that odd, you know. After all, they were both widows with no children. Who else would they leave their possessions to?”
Then I remembered what had been bothering me. “What was it that Patrick said on the telephone last night?”
“Which time?” Lillian asked.
“When he told you about Frances’s will, he said he did them all at the same time.”
“So? What’s wrong with that? He had no reason to lie to me,” Lillian said. “And all the motivation in the ill world to be absolutely straight in his answers.”
I tapped the marker on the table. “He didn’t have any reason to volunteer any information either, but I think he let something slip without meaning to.”
“Go on. You’ve certainly got my attention.”
I twirled the marker in my hand a second, trying to recall Patrick’s exact words. “He said he’d done all of them the same way, but shouldn’t he have said ‘both of them’?”
“So he chose the wrong word,” Lillian said. “We do it all the time.”
I wasn’t buying that. “We’re not sticklers for language usage like he is. I could hear it every time you talked to him. Lillian, what if there were more women involved?”
“Now you think it’s murder for profit?” she asked incredulously. “You heard Patrick yourself. Frances didn’t have anything all that valuable to leave Maggie, and I doubt Maggie did either for the next in line, if there is such a person. How do you explain that?”
I couldn’t. “I didn’t say I knew everything, but it does change the way we look at things, don’t you think?”
“If we can get Patrick to admit there are other members of the Widows Club, and that’s a big if.”
I picked up the telephone and handed it to her. “So call him and find out.”
She shunned the phone. “I think I’d better handle this in person.”
“Great, let me grab my jacket,” I said.
Lillian shook her head. “Jennifer, I hate to exclude you, but he’s more likely to breach his professional oath with me if we’re alone. I doubt he’d want a witness to it.”
“I want to go,” I said firmly.
“I’m sure you do, but I’d better handle this on my own. In the meantime, why don’t you keep the shop open? I won’t be long, I promise you that.”
“How can you say that?” I asked as I walked her to the door. “He could be with a client; he could be in court; the man might not even be in his office.”
Lillian smiled. “His secretary will be able to find him, believe me, and once she passes my message on, he’ll see me, no matter what.”
“Come straight back here,” I said reluctantly as I watched her leave.
“I will,” she said, and then Lillian was gone. She had a point about getting Patrick to open up to her in private, but I didn’t like missing out on the conversation. There was nothing I could do about it but take her advice, but it was going to be one of the longest waits of my life.
I waited on a few customers, but even selling a nice set of alphabet stamps with a hefty price tag didn’t help my general disposition. Despite Lillian’s pledge, she was taking much longer than she’d promised, and I was going crazy pacing the aisles of my shop. Finally I put the back in fifteen sign on the door and locked it behind me. If nothing else, I needed more room to pace. My steps led me naturally to Greg’s pottery shop, and I nearly went inside when I noticed that he was with a customer. I might have gone inside and waited anyway, but she was a good five years younger than I was, and, if I was being honest with myself, quite a bit prettier. It was no time to talk to Greg about our failed relationship. He nodded as he saw me through the window, but I just waved and kept walking past.
Ten seconds later he was out on the sidewalk with me. “Jennifer, are you all right? I heard what happened last night, and I couldn’t believe it.”
Before I could avoid it, he wrapped his arms around me in a bear hug. I could swear I felt my spine crack under the pressure. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it.
“I’m fine,” I muttered. “If I could just breathe. You shouldn’t leave your customers alone in your shop.”
He released me from his embrace, but didn’t step back much at all. “She’ll be all right. I’m worried about you.”
“Believe me, Wayne’s the one feeling the pain this morning.” I gestured to Greg’s shop. “So you trust her that much?” I asked. “How well do you know her?”
“She’s signing up for lessons, so I doubt she’d try to steal from me on her first day,” he said.
“You don’t give private lessons,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I make exceptions sometimes.”
“Still, you shouldn’t just abandon her.” Greg had taught me to throw pots once, and I knew it was part of his technique to reenact scenes from Ghost with his more attractive female customers.
“I need to talk to you,” he said.
“We can do it some other time. Go on.”
He nodded reluctantly, but before he went back inside, he said, “We’ll finish this later, okay?”
“Okay,” I agreed, willing to say just about anything to get him to go. So what did he want to talk about? I had a friend who used to say, “The horse is dead; dismount.” Maybe it was time to do what Greg was obviously trying to do, to look forward and not back.
Lillian was waiting for me inside the card shop. “How’d you get past me?” I asked.
“Are you kidding me? When I saw you standing there wrapped up in Greg’s arms, I doubted an elephant would have gotten your attention.”
I blurted out, “He’s giving private lessons. To a woman. She’s young and she’s pretty and from the look of her clothes, I’m guessing she’s rich, too.”
“Jennifer, don’t read more into it than is there,” she said calmly.
“I’m not, but if he can move on, so can I. So what did Patrick say? Did you even find him?”
Lillian flashed a brief smile. “Oh, I found him all right, though it was obvious he was ducking me. Jennifer, I was wrong.”
“Does that mean I was right? I surely hope so. I could use an ego boost about now.”
“Very well, I’ll say it. You were right and I was wrong. It appears that greed might be the motive driving this after all.”
“Don’t leave me hanging,” I said. “What did he say?”
“After no small amount of persuasion,” Lillian said, “Patrick finally confessed that there were four women involved in an odd will structure.”
I felt the hair on my neck stand up. “What happens? Does the last one standing get everything?”
“Actually, it’s something like that,” Lillian said. “There�
��s a stipulation that each woman write down her preference of beneficiaries to be included in each will. If any of the people named are already dead, they’re dropped until one woman gets everything.”
“So who are these two women left?”
“That’s what Patrick was so fussy about. They’re both clients, and he was worried he was breaching their trust. He demanded full deniability, and I promised I wouldn’t tell a soul.”
“And yet you’re going to tell me,” I said. “Aren’t you?”
“Of course I am,” Lillian said. “But you have to give me your word that no one knows where we got our information, and that includes your brother and sister. You have to promise me, Jennifer, or we’re going to drop this right here and now.”
I hated keeping anything from Sara Lynn or Bradford, but there was no way I was going to miss out on Lillian’s information.
“I promise,” I said.
“That easily? You’re making no demands, asking for no stipulations or loopholes? I’m deadly serious about this.”
“I know you are. So am I,” I said. “They won’t hear it from me. So who are they?”
“If your theory is correct, either Hilda is the murderer, or Hester Taylor.”
“So let’s go pressure them both,” I said. I couldn’t see either woman as a murderer, but it was the only thing that made sense. If one of the dead women owned something that was valuable—perhaps without having realized it—then killing off the remaining members of the pact was the only way to have sole possession of it, whatever it was. I said, “You take Hester and I’ll talk to Hilda.”
Lillian said, “No, we’ll question them together.”
“We don’t have time to do this as a team,” I said. “One of their lives could be at stake right now.”
“And if we split up, it could be one of us. We’re doing this together, Jennifer, or I’ll call your brother with some feeble excuse to lock them both up until we can figure it out, if we ever manage to.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” She nodded. “You’d better believe it. I’ve lost too many people I love in this world, and I’m not about to lose any more, or risk my own neck if I don’t have to. Are you ready?”
