(1T) Real murders
Page 1
Praise for
Real Murders
“Real Murders is the first adventure for Harris’s perceptive protagonist and I eagerly look forward to the second…Harris’s story alternately charms and chills, a difficult combination she manages with aplomb and brilliance.”
—Carolyn Hart, award-winning author of Set Sail for Murder
“An ingenious plot and sufficient flow of blood keep the pages flying in Harris’s novel…Harris draws the guilty and the innocent into an engrossing tale while inventing a heroine as capable and potentially complex as P.D. James’s Cordelia Gray.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Clever pacing along with ample red herrings and judiciously placed clues keep Harris’s story moving briskly. Let’s hope for another fast-paced mystery featuring Aurora and her friends.”
—School Library Journal
Praise for Charlaine Harris’s
Southern Vampire novels featuring
Sookie Stackhouse
“The goofy charm of Harris’s world, with its humor and occasional terror, is what makes Dead Until Dark so delightful.”
—The Denver Post
“Harris brings off this blend of mystery and vampires better than most.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A fun, fast, funny, and wonderfully intriguing blend of vampire and mystery that’s hard to put down and should not be missed.”
—Susan Sizemore, New York Times bestselling author of Primal Heat and the Laws of the Blood series
Praise for Charlaine Harris’s
Harper Connelly Mysteries
“Too much fun.”
—Wilmington (NC) Star-News
“Harris debuts a series that just might surpass all her others in popularity…Will have readers dying for more.”
—Booklist
“Fast pacing, excellent character development, and a strong story line…This fabulous opening gambit affirms that every series Charlaine Harris creates is utterly fantastic.”
—Midwest Book Review
Praise for Charlaine Harris’s
Lily Bard Mysteries
“Lily Bard [is] the equal of Kay Scarpetta, Kinsey Millhone, and V. I. Warshawski.”
—Library Journal
“First-rate mystery.”
—Midwest Book Review
“Lily Bard gives as good as she gets. The reading is fast and the action’s faster, proving that women really are the better half.”
—Mostly Murder
“One of the best-drawn and most compelling characters in contemporary mystery fiction—complex, smart, street-wise, tough.”
—Booklist
Praise for
A Secret Rage
“Compelling…Powerful.”
—The Boston Globe
“Not many novels, and no mysteries, have shaken me as brutally as A Secret Rage.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Absorbing tension…Effective crime fiction.”
—Booklist
“A thriller built on a vital issue…Riveting.”
—Publishers Weekly
Praise for
Sweet and Deadly
“A first-rate mystery with special character…As convincing as it is surprising in the final revelation.”
—The Washington Post
“Harris writes neatly and with assurance, and she avoids the goo that makes equivalent books so sticky.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Packs a perennial punch. It offers a rarity in popular fiction: an unromanticized portrait of a Southern Girl.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
Ace Books by Charlaine Harris
The Sookie Stackhouse Novels
DEAD UNTIL DARK
LIVING DEAD IN DALLAS
CLUB DEAD
DEAD TO THE WORLD
DEAD AS A DOORNAIL
DEFINITELY DEAD
ALL TOGETHER DEAD
MANY BLOODY RETURNS
edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner
Berkley Prime Crime Books by
Charlaine Harris
The Harper Connelly Mysteries
GRAVE SIGHT
GRAVE SURPRISE
AN ICE COLD GRAVE
The Lily Bard Mysteries
SHAKESPEARE’S LANDLORD
SHAKESPEARE’S CHAMPION
SHAKESPEARE’S TROLLOP
SHAKESPEARE’S COUNSELOR
The Aurora Teagarden Mysteries
REAL MURDERS
SWEET AND DEADLY
A SECRET RAGE
Real Murders
An Aurora Teagarden Mystery
Charlaine Harris
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
REAL MURDERS
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 1990 by Charlaine Harris Schulz.
Cover art by Lisa Desimini.
Cover design by Judith Lagerman.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 1-4295-7156-X
BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
To Mother and Father
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter One
“Tonight I want to tell you about that most fascinating of murder mysteries, the Wallace case,”
I told my mirror Enthusiastically.
I tried Sincere after that; then Earnest.
My brush caught in a tangle. “Shoot!” I said, and tried again.
“I think the Wallace case can easily fill our whole program tonight,” I said Firmly.
We had twelve regular members, which worked out well with twelve programs a year. Not all cases could fill up a two-hour program, of course. Then the member responsible for presenting the Murder of the Month, as we jokingly called it, would have a guest speaker—someone from the police department in the city, or a psychologist who treated criminals, or the director of the local rape crisis center. Once or twice, we’d watched a movie.
But I’d come up lucky in the draw. There was more than enough material on the Wallace case, yet not so much that I’d be compelled to hurry over it. We’d allocated two meetings for Jack the Ripper. Jane Engle had taken one for the victims and the circumstances surrounding the crimes and Arthur Smith had taken another on the police investigation and the suspects. You can’t skimp Jack.
“The elements of the Wallace case are these,” I continued. “A man who called himself Qualtrough, a chess tournament, an apparently inoffensive woman named Julia Wallace, and of course the accused, her husband, William Herbert Wallace himself.” I gathered all my hair into a brown switch and debated whether to put it in a roll on the back of my head, braid it, or just fasten a band around it to keep it off my face. The braid. It made me feel artsy and intellectual. As I divided my hair into clumps, my eyes fell on the framed studio portrait of my mother she’d given me on my last birthday with an offhand, “You said you wanted one.” My mother, who looks a lot like Lauren Bacall, is at least five-foot six, elegant to her fingertips, and has built her own small real estate empire. I am four-foot eleven, wear big round tortoise-rimmed glasses, and have fulfilled my childhood dream by becoming a librarian. And she named me Aurora, though to a woman herself baptized Aida, Aurora may not have seemed so outrageous.
Amazingly, I love my mother.
I sighed, as I often do when I think of her, and finished braiding my hair with practiced speed. I checked my reflection in the big mirror; brown hair, brown glasses, brown eyes, pink cheeks (artificial), and good skin (real). Since it was, after all, Friday night, I’d shucked my work clothes, a plain blouse and skirt, and opted for a snug white knit top and black slacks. Deciding I wasn’t festive enough for William Herbert Wallace, I tied a yellow ribbon around the top of my braid and pulled on a yellow sweater.
A look at the clock told me it was finally time to go. I slapped on some lipstick, grabbed my purse, and bounded down the stairs. I glanced around the big den/dining/kitchen area that took up the back half of the ground floor of the townhouse. It was neat; I hate to come home to a messy place. I tracked down my notebook and located my keys, muttering facts about the Wallace case all the while. I had thought about xeroxing the indistinct old pictures of Julia Wallace’s body and passing them out to show the murder scene, but I decided that would perhaps be ghoulish and certainly disrespectful to Mrs. Wallace.
A club like Real Murders seemed odd enough to people who didn’t share our enthusiasms, without adding the charge of ghoulishness. We kept a low profile.
I flipped on the outside light as I shut the door. It was already dark this early in spring; we hadn’t switched to daylight savings time yet. In the excellent light over the back door, my patio with its high privacy fence looked swept and clean, the rose trees in their big tubs just coming into bud.
“Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to crime I go,” I hummed tunelessly, shutting the gate behind me. Each of the four townhouses “owns” two parking spaces: there are extra ones on the other side of the lot for company. My neighbor two doors down, Bankston Waites, was getting into his car, too.
“I’ll see you there,” he called. “I’ve got to pick up Melanie first.”
“Okay, Bankston. Wallace tonight!”
“I know. We’ve been looking forward to it.”
I started up my car, courteously letting Bankston leave the lot first on his way to pick up his lady fair. It did cross my mind to feel sorry for myself that Melanie Clark had a date and I always arrived at Real Murders by myself, but I didn’t want to get all gloomy. I would see my friends and have as good a Friday night as I usually had. Maybe better.
As I backed up I noticed that the townhouse next to mine had bright windows and an unfamiliar car was parked in one of its assigned spaces. So that was what Mother’s message taped to my back door had meant.
She’d been urging me to get an answering machine, since the townhouse tenants (her tenants) might need to leave me (the resident manager) messages while I was at work at the library. Actually, I believe my mother just wanted to know she could talk to me while I wasn’t even home.
I’d had the townhouse next door cleaned after the last tenants left. It had been in perfect condition to show, I reassured myself. I’d go meet the new neighbor tomorrow, since it was my Saturday off.
I drove up Parson Road far enough to pass the library where I worked, then turned left to get to the area of small shops and filling stations where the VFW Hall was. I was mentally rehearsing all the way.
But I might as well have left my notes at home.
Chapter Two
Real Murders met in the VFW Hall and paid the Veterans a small fee for the privilege. The fee went into a fund for the annual VFW Christmas party, so everyone was pleased with our arrangement. Of course the building was much larger than a little group like Real Murders needed, but we did like the privacy.
A VFW officer would meet a club member at the building thirty minutes before the meeting and unlock it. That club member was responsible for restoring the room to the way we’d found it and returning the key after the meeting. This year the “opening” member was Mamie Wright, since she was vice president. She would arrange the chairs in a semicircle in front of the podium and set up the refreshments table. We rotated bringing the refreshments.
I got there early that evening. I get almost everywhere early.
There were already two cars in the parking lot, which was tucked behind the small building and had a landscaped screening of crepe myrtles, still grotesquely bare in the early spring. The arc lamps in the lot had come on automatically at dusk. I parked my Chevette under the glow of the lamp nearest the back door. Murder buffs are all too aware of the dangers of this world.
As I stepped into the hall, the heavy metal door clanged shut behind me. There were only five rooms in the building; the single door in the middle of the wall to my left opened into the big main room, where we held our meetings. The four doors to my right led into a small conference room, then the men’s, the ladies’, and, at the end of the corridor, a small kitchen. All the doors were shut, as usual, since propping them open required more tenacity than any of us were able to summon. The VFW Hall had been constructed to withstand enemy attack, we had decided, and those heavy doors kept the little building very quiet. Even now, when I knew from the cars outside that there were at least two people here, I heard nothing.
The effect of all those shut doors in that blank corridor was also unnerving. It was like a little beige tunnel, interrupted only by the pay phone mounted on the wall. I recalled once telling Bankston Waites that if that phone rang, I’d expect Rod Serling to be on the other end, telling me I had now entered the “Twilight Zone.” I half smiled at the idea and turned to grasp the knob of the door to the big meeting room.
The phone rang.
I swung around and took two hesitant steps toward it, my heart banging against my chest. Still nothing moved in the silent building.
The phone rang again. My hand closed around it reluctantly.
“Hello?” I said softly, and then cleared my throat and tried again. “Hello,” I said firmly.
“May I speak to Julia Wallace, please?” The voice was a whisper.
My scalp crawled. “What?” I said shakily.
“Julia…” whispered the calle
r.
The other phone was hung up.
I was still standing holding the receiver when the door to the women’s room opened and Sally Allison came out.
I shrieked.
“God almighty, Roe, I don’t look that bad, do I?” Sally said in amazement.
“No, no, it’s the phone call…” I was very close to crying, and I was embarrassed about that. Sally was a reporter for the Lawrenceton paper, and she was a good reporter, a tough and intelligent woman in her late forties. Sally was the veteran of a runaway teenage marriage that had ended when the resulting baby was born. I’d gone to high school with that baby, named Perry, and now I worked with him at the library. I loathed Perry; but I liked Sally a lot, even if sometimes her relentless questioning made me squirm. Sally was one of the reasons I was so well prepared for my Wallace lecture.
Now she elicited all the facts about the phone call from me in a series of concise questions that led to a sensible conclusion; the call was a prank perpetrated by a club member, or maybe the child of a club member, since it seemed almost juvenile when Sally put it in her framework.
I felt somehow cheated, but also relieved.
Sally retrieved a tray and a couple of boxes of cookies from the small conference room. She’d deposited them there, she explained, when she entered and suddenly felt the urgency of the two cups of coffee she’d had after supper.
“I didn’t even think I could make it across the hall into the big room,” she said with a roll of her tan eyes.
“How’s life at the newspaper?” I asked, just to keep Sally talking while I got over my shock.
I couldn’t dismiss the phone call as lightly and logically as Sally. As I trailed after her into the big meeting room, half listening to her account of a fight she’d had with the new publisher, I could still taste the metallic surge of adrenaline in my mouth. My arms had goosepimples, and I pulled my sweater tightly around me.
As she arranged the cookies on her tray, Sally began telling me about the election that would be held to select someone to fill out the term of our unexpectedly deceased mayor. “He keeled over right in his office, according to his secretary,” she said casually as she realigned a row of Oreos. “And after having been mayor only a month! He’d just gotten a new desk.” She shook her head, regretting the loss of the mayor or the waste of the desk, I wasn’t sure which.