Book Clubbed (A Booktown Mystery)

by Lorna Barrett

  Angelica looked out the window onto the darkened street. “Right about now, that sounds like heaven. Of course, this is a terrible time for me, what with Betsy dying and the Chamber in chaos.” She was quiet for a while. “I do wish I could say yes and jump on a plane tomorrow, but I can’t. Are you terribly disappointed?”

  Tricia shook her head. “It was just a pipe dream.”

  Angelica stirred her soup, which didn’t need stirring at all. “I’m sorry, but I’m terribly touched that you would even think of me as your travel mate.”

  “Maybe we could do something next winter.”

  “Yes, why don’t we?”

  The sisters looked at each other and smiled, but Angelica’s eyes also glistened with unshed tears. It was time to change the subject.

  “I tried to track down Bob today. I wanted to ask him about Betsy—what kind of employee she was, what he thought of her—but apparently he’s still nowhere to be found,” Tricia said, and popped one of the oyster crackers in her mouth.

  “That’s odd,” Angelica said and sampled the egg salad, found it lacking, grabbed one of the shakers, and added a little pepper to it.

  “I thought so, too.” Tricia dipped her spoon into the soup, but blew on it several times before trying it. Just right. “Did you have a chance to talk to Grant about the Chamber files?”

  “Damn. I completely forgot.” She glanced at the clock. “Too late today.”

  “I’m sure he’d take the call, even if he is just tucking into his own dinner.”

  Angelica sighed. “I really don’t want to get into it all with him. It would take hours and hours and, anyway, you were the one to actually come up with the blackmail angle. I think the news should come from you.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Then we can agree to disagree.” Angelica took a bite of her salad, chewed, and swallowed.

  “All right. I’ll give him a call. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Fine with me.” Angelica changed the subject and opened a packet of crackers. “I’m looking forward to finding someone else to work with on Chamber business. Betsy was such an odd duck. She never let on what she was thinking or who she was as a person. And now she’s dead and won’t be missed. Isn’t that just the saddest thing—to have lived half a century on the planet and no one to grieve for you?”

  “Joelle was pretty upset about her death,” Tricia said.

  “Okay, then only one person to grieve for you.”

  “It certainly is sad,” Tricia agreed. “I wonder how she lived when she wasn’t at work for the Chamber. Did she have a nice house or did she live in an apartment? Did she secretly collect plates with clowns on them—”

  “I think I could believe that,” Angelica said, taking another bite of egg salad.

  “—or did she grow orchids and cross-country ski? We’ll never know.”

  Angelica’s eyes suddenly widened. Tricia knew that mischievous look. “What are you thinking?”

  “We could visit Betsy’s house.”

  “A drive-by? What are we going to see when it’s pitch-black out?”

  “We could go in and take a peek,” Angelica said with a devious lilt to her voice.

  “That’s breaking and entering. Not that that has stopped us before,” Tricia admitted.

  Angelica got up, retrieved her purse from under the counter, and took something from it, waving it in the air. “I have her keys.”

  “Where did you get them?” Tricia asked, aghast.

  “The day she died, Betsy left them on my sales counter. I never had the chance to return them to her.”

  “And you never gave them to Chief Baker.”

  “Until just now, I’d almost forgotten I had them.”

  Tricia felt a smile tug at her lips. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s finish eating and go!”

  * * *

  After taking Sarge for a short walk, the sisters jumped into Angelica’s car and headed into Milford. No full moon illuminated the inky black sky as Angelica drove slowly down Vintage Road, while Tricia rode shotgun, looking for number 77.

  “Most of these houses don’t have visible house numbers,” she commented. “Say they need to call 911 to report a fire or order an ambulance—how do they expect the good guys to find them?”

  “Clairvoyance?” Angelica suggested. They’d reached the end of the street, so Angelica drove partway up one of the driveways, backed out, and started up the road once more, driving at a crawl.

  “Stop!” Tricia said. “It’s got to be this one.”

  “You think?”

  “Number 79 is on the right and 75 is on the left. Process of elimination says this is the right one.”

  Angelica pressed the accelerator and drove on. “If we’re going in, I don’t want the neighbors to see my car and take down my license number.”

  “Where will you park?”

  “That little strip mall on Nashua Street.”

  “Good idea. I’m glad I wore layers. It’s at least a three-block walk and it’s freezing out.”

  Angelica parked the car under one of the strip mall’s tall lampposts. She groped under the driver’s seat and came up with a big flashlight. “Will you take charge of this?”

  “Sure thing,” Tricia said, taking it from her.

  They pulled on their gloves, got out of the car, locked it, and started off on foot.

  After they’d gone a block, Angelica spoke. “Remind me again why we decided to move to such a cold place?”

  “I wanted to open a bookstore. You arrived on my doorstep and never left. And you got here when the weather was perfect, and had no clue how nasty winter could be.”

  “I guess you’re right. And I guess I love it too much to leave just because it’s cold and miserable for five or six months of the year.”

  “Good.”

  Angelica stopped abruptly. “What did you say?”

  Tricia stopped, too. “I said ‘good.’ Stay here with me forever.”

  Angelica smiled, her eyes filling with tears. When she spoke again, her voice cracked. “Okay, I will.”

  Tricia patted her back and then gave her a nudge, and they started off once more.

  “I hope the wind has blown the snow off Betsy’s driveway,” Tricia said. “Otherwise we’ll leave footprints.”

  “Good point,” Angelica agreed. “Maybe we should have brought a shovel.”

  They walked the next block in silence. Would it look equally suspicious to Betsy’s neighbors to see two strangers walking down their dead-end street on a cold winter’s night?

  “Have you got those keys handy?” Tricia whispered.

  “Right in my pocket.”

  They turned up number 77’s driveway. Betsy’s house looked dark and forbidding with all its drapes drawn. The shaggy bushes that flanked the front steps helped reinforce an aura of neglect, but then most houses looked rather that way at night with no illumination to highlight their best attributes. Tricia and Angelica had already agreed to try the back door first in hopes of staying out of the neighbors’ sight, and headed straight there.

  Angelica fumbled with the keys while Tricia held the flashlight beam fixed on the door’s lock. But something wasn’t right. She moved the light to take in the doorframe. “Ange, I think this door has been kicked in—just like at your apartment.”

  “You mean someone’s already been here and robbed Betsy? That’s disgusting.”

  “Maybe we should just call the police,” Tricia suggested.

  “And tell them what? That we were about to enter a dead woman’s house to snoop around and found that another crime had been committed before we even got here?”

  “It doesn’t sound good, but it’s the right thing to do.”

  “We can do the right thing after we take a look.” And with that, Angelica pushed open the ba
ck door and stepped inside. She fumbled for a switch, found it, and a light near the ceiling flashed on in what Tricia assumed would be the kitchen. “Oh, my God,” Angelica murmured.

  “What is it?” Tricia asked, trying to see beyond her sister, but Angelica’s bulky parka made an effective barrier. “Move,” she ordered.

  “I can’t. Wait a minute.”

  Angelica seemed to shuffle a foot or so forward, giving Tricia just enough room to enter. It was then Tricia’s turn to mutter, “Oh, my God. Betsy was—”

  “A hoarder,” Angelica said in disgust. The entire kitchen was filled with mounds of big black trash bags, stacks of cartons, heaps of newspapers, dirty dishes with caked-on dried food, clothes, and heaven only knew what else.

  “Well,” Angelica said, sounding overwhelmed, “I never expected this.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone does. Is there a trail you can follow?” Tricia asked and wrinkled her nose. The place didn’t smell all that good, either.

  Angelica shuffled forward, shoving stuff aside as she went. “I’m going to try to get into the next room. Are you game to follow?”

  The truth was, no! But Tricia answered yes, anyway. She stepped farther into the kitchen and then shut the door as best she could and followed Angelica.

  It took a good couple of minutes to navigate through the four-foot-high piles of garbage and junk before they made it into what must have been a living room, although if there was furniture, it was buried under more trash, clothes, unopened Priority Mail boxes, sagging cartons, and bulging plastic storage containers. Angelica hit a light switch and the dusty light fixture in the middle of the ceiling flashed on.

  “Good grief,” Tricia cried in awe as she took in the decorations lined up on the wall. “I was only kidding when I said Betsy collected clown plates.” There must have been twenty or more of them hanging about a foot above the trash heaps, each of them encrusted with greasy dust and cobwebs. “If someone broke in to rob Betsy, how would the police know if anything was missing?”

  “That’s a good question.” Angelica shuffled forward again, then halted and let out a strangled squeak.

  “What’s wrong?” Tricia asked, concerned.

  “Eew. There’s a dead mouse on this pile of crap,” Angelica wailed.

  “Better it’s dead than alive,” Tricia said.

  “How could Betsy live like this? I always thought she had a screw loose, but I never anticipated this,” Angelica said in exasperation.

  “It beats me how someone so organized at work could be so disorganized at home,” Tricia said. She thought of something she’d heard some months before. “Last fall, after Joelle and Stan Berry broke up, Frannie told me that Joelle used to come here to stay with Betsy so as not to sully her reputation. But I can’t imagine anyone in her right mind wanting to stay in this hovel.”

  “Unless Joelle is a hoarder, too. Then she probably wouldn’t blink an eye at a mess like this.”

  “Maybe.”

  Angelica gazed around the room. “What should we be looking for—and more important—are we ever likely to find what we’re looking for?”

  “You got me.” Tricia thought about her sister’s question. “Keep an eye out for bank statements, insurance forms, and stock certificates—you know, financial papers.”

  “A lot of that stuff is now delivered via e-mail. Do you see any sign of a computer?”

  Tricia looked around the room. “Maybe we should try to find her bedroom. She might have stored all her important stuff in one place.”

  “I think the trail veers to the left,” Angelica said and started shuffling forward again.

  Tricia kept her eye out for anything that looked important—but it all appeared to be trash littered with mouse droppings and spiderwebs, and around the floors and on every picture or knickknack hanging on the walls was a thick layer of greasy dust. And worse, she suspected under all the rubbish was likely to be black mold. After all, packed in tightly as it was, the junk curtailed the circulation of air. Tricia shuddered at the thought, and couldn’t wait to get home to throw her clothes—jacket and all—into the washer, and then jump in the shower with water as hot as she could stand.

  Angelica had stopped moving and stood before the opening to a hall, grimacing. “Oooh, it’s the bathroom, and it’s even nastier than a gas station restroom.”

  It took a few moments for Tricia to reach the open door to the bathroom. The hall before her was stacked with cartons and draped with yet more piles of clothes. She looked into the bathroom and felt distinctly queasy. The toilet had no seat, and the bowl was caked with . . . she didn’t want to speculate. The tub was piled so high with clothes and towels that there was no way Betsy could bathe in it. “No wonder Betsy spent so much time in the Cookery’s washroom. Her own was unusable.”

  Angelica made no comment and continued picking her way through the accumulated trash once again. She opened a door. “It’s a bedroom . . . I think. This could have been a child’s room. It’s painted lilac—favorite little-girl color.”

  “Joelle mentioned Betsy had a daughter who died. Can you get in?” Tricia asked.

  Angelica shook her head. “I don’t think so. I can’t see a bed, or any toys or books, just more piles of crap.”

  Tricia caught up with her and looked inside. Other than the color of the wall, there was no indication the room had ever belonged to a child. It was filled with more of what they’d found in the rest of the house. “Do you think Betsy was trying to replace her dead child and the husband who left her with piles and piles of rubbish as some weird way of filling the voids in her life?”

  “It doesn’t make sense to me, but after the death of a child, heaven only knows how deep her grief ran.” Angelica craned her neck. “There’s another door across the way.” She sidled past more boxes and stood before an open doorway. “This might be it.” She reached inside the room, found and flipped a switch. Yet another dusty bulb illuminated the littered space.

  Angelica waited for Tricia to catch up before she entered the room. At least this space wasn’t quite as cluttered. A small area had been cleared and Tricia saw a dirty Berber carpet covered with coffee and food stains. A computer desk piled high with papers, dirty coffee cups, and a thick layer of dust was crammed into a corner next to a double bed. Half the bed was piled with clothes, leaving only a narrow sleeping area with grimy sheets and blankets.

  Tricia swallowed hard, disgusted. What a difference from her lovely, uncluttered home—where she fervently wished she was at that moment. “How could anyone live like this?”

  “It’s a disease,” Angelica said with sadness. “Poor Betsy couldn’t relate well to people, so she must have spent her free time collecting stuff that comforted her. I’ll bet she valued all this rubbish over the people who remained in her life.”

  “And maybe her hoarding was responsible for her failed marriage,” Tricia said. “Joelle mentioned how she and her husband fought over their assets. Maybe she couldn’t find them in all this junk to satisfy a judgment.”

  Angelica picked through the stack of papers on the computer desk. “Looks like mostly old bills. I’ll bet she paid them electronically.”

  “That would save on stamps,” Tricia agreed.

  “And maybe she paid them as they came in so they wouldn’t get lost.” Angelica hit the computer’s power button and they waited for it to boot up. Unfortunately, the first screen up demanded a password. “What do you think Betsy would use?” she asked.

  “I have no idea. Maybe her maiden name?” Tricia suggested. “What if it’s her mother’s maiden name? That’s what the banks always seem to want as a security check.”

  “Do you have to be such a pill?” Angelica accused. She turned back for the keyboard. “Lowercase? Initial caps? All caps? We’ve only got three tries before we’re locked out.”

  “We’re as good as locked out now,�
� Tricia pointed out.

  Angelica sat on the grubby office chair, stared at the dust-covered, grimy keyboard for a long moment, and then removed her gloves.

  “You’ll leave fingerprints,” Tricia warned.

  “I can’t type with them on. And I can always dust the keyboard off when I’m done. It certainly needs it.” She rested her fingers on the home-row keys, but paused. “What’s Betsy’s unmarried sister’s last name?”

  “Morrison.”

  “I’ll try initial caps.” Angelica tapped the keys and got a warning message to try again. She tried all lowercase letters and got the same warning. “One last time,” she said, hit the caps lock key, and tried again. Sure enough, the sign-on screen morphed into the desktop display, which was as littered with files as the room was cluttered with junk. “Oh, boy. Where do we start?”

  Tricia noticed an open container of recordable CDs peeking out from under a soiled towel. “Copy all the files onto these CDs and we can peruse them at our leisure.”

  “Who has time for leisure?” Angelica asked, but she accepted an empty disk from Tricia and proceeded to copy all the desktop files. After that, she dug deeper into the documents file and copied everything there before starting on a third disk.

  The task took a good twenty minutes, and as each minute passed Tricia’s anxiety level rose. “That’s got to be enough,” she said. “We’ve got to get out of here before someone finds us here.”

  Angelica popped the final CD from the read/write drawer and added it to the others in her pocket. Then she pulled out a pocket container of hand sanitizer and squirted some into her palms, working it in before she pulled her gloves on again. She grabbed a towel from the pile overhead, squirted sanitizer on it, and wiped down the keyboard.

  Tricia began to make her way through the house, aiming for the kitchen with Angelica following, switching off lights as she went.

  A loud bang reverberated through the house and Tricia stopped dead.

  “What was that?” Angelica whispered.

  “There’s someone else in the house!” Tricia practically squealed.

  “Hide!” Angelica said.