Death Knell (Juniper Grove Cozy Mystery Book 8)

by Karin Kaufman

  “You’re telling us we shouldn’t let each other in,” Tyra said glumly.

  “At least we know who to watch out for,” Mariette said, examining her now-chipped nails.

  Alison stood. “My suitcase is already packed, so I’m off.” She started for her bedroom but halted and turned back. “I’m sorry about this, Sophie. You know what? I’m glad you’re moving. You can start fresh, and after a while, you’ll forget about this atrocious weekend. We’ll get together again in June, all right? How does that sound?”

  “Sure,” Sophie said. “Sounds good. Goodnight, Alison.”

  Sophie’s frail optimism wasn’t persuasive. I thought then that their book club would never meet again, and that was probably for the best.

  I walked with Gilroy to the front door, where he was waiting with Turner for Mariette and Tyra. He told me to take precautions, and I told him I’d see him tomorrow. I glanced back toward the kitchen, looking for Royce and Julia, and saw Underhill talking earnestly to the redheaded, emerald-eyed Sophie. Hovering like a bee again, and a little too closely this time. More tellingly, he was completely ignoring the other women.

  Royce, with his arm around Julia’s shoulder, led her into the living room. I sidled up to her, calling her attention to Underhill. “I thought he was still seeing Natalie,” I whispered. “Do you know something I don’t?”

  “He’s still seeing her as far as I know,” Julia said. She watched Underhill a moment and then clucked her tongue in disapproval. “That man will never settle down if he doesn’t stop being distracted by a pretty face. In this case, a pretty face that could belong to a killer—and a married killer. She’s Mrs. Crawford, and her husband will be home soon. He’s behaving shamefully. I thought he was better than that.”

  To be a lesser man than Julia thought you were was stern criticism.

  But we had more pressing things to think about. Like two murders. And I couldn’t stop thinking about Ackley’s phone. My instincts were telling me that retrieving it was vital to solving his murder, if not Lauren’s too.

  Tyra headed upstairs while Mariette, flat-footing it in her bare feet around the kitchen, held one high-heeled shoe and looked for the missing one. She had to be reminded that it had been bagged and was now evidence in the pastor’s murder. Alison returned quickly from her bedroom and wheeled her small suitcase into the living room, head down, charging forward, almost daring anyone to get in her way. Gilroy held the door open for her, and without acknowledging his gentlemanly act, she fled the cottage. I had no doubt the woman would sleep well, free from anxiety or bad dreams, unlike the rest of us.

  “Are we ready to go?” Royce asked me.

  The poor man look tired. And hungry. We never did have Sophie’s dry chicken.

  “Just one second,” I said. I walked up to Sophie and asked to speak to her alone for a minute. Underhill wasn’t happy with me, I could tell, but his pretty-face gazing could wait. I took Sophie aside.

  “I need to ask you four quick questions before I go.”

  “I’ll answer as best I can,” she said, a trace of apprehension in her tone.

  “Did you know that a lot of people disliked Lauren?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tyra said Lauren had a dark soul.”

  Sophie cringed a little at the words. “I’d say Lauren was calculating. She chose her friendships based on what someone could do for her.”

  “But you told me everyone but Alison was in tears when they found her dead.”

  “It was a terrible thing to see, Rachel. It was shocking. I wasn’t very close to Lauren, but no one should die like that.”

  “Okay, second question. Do you or any of your friends know about the computer program St. John’s uses to control the bells?”

  “I knew the bells were computer operated, but that’s the limit of my knowledge, and I don’t think the others know more than I do. Alison knows about the bells, but I don’t think she understands the program. Pastor Ackley did, though. He was computer savvy. He probably could have written the program himself. If he hadn’t become a pastor, he might have gone into computers. The man was amazing.”

  “I never would have guessed.” I glanced over my shoulder at Royce and Julia, mouthed, “Just a sec,” and then looked back to Sophie. “My third question is kind of nosy.”

  “Don’t apologize. I asked you to come here tonight.”

  “Do you know how St. John’s is able to afford your property? Most churches don’t have that kind of disposable income.”

  “The church has been saving for years. They’ll have more than enough for a down payment on the mortgage. I didn’t know it, but Pastor Ackley told me they’d had their eyes on my land for a long time.”

  “For a parking lot?”

  “That’s just for the flood-prone part of my land. St. John’s is going to expand the church itself and build a small house to use as a retreat for missionaries on leave. A lot of them rent their homes or apartments and have to sublet while they’re in the mission field. They have no place to come back to when they come home for a summer off.”

  “Oh.” I was taken aback, and pleased, by this new information. “That’s nice. I didn’t know that.”

  “Most people focus on the parking lot. Lauren sure did. Frankly, I gave up telling people about the retreat house or explaining why the sale is good for both me and the church.”

  I nodded in agreement. “Besides, it’s no one else’s business.”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  “One last thing,” I said. “Do you have Pastor Ackley’s cell phone number?”

  CHAPTER 13

  I drove Royce home first, promising him we would talk in the morning. A meeting of the Juniper Grove Mystery Gang—our little group of puzzle solvers, so christened by Holly—was in order.

  I was about to drop Julia off in front of her house when she suggested we go over the evening’s events while they were still crystal clear in our minds. From time to time she suffered from bouts of insomnia, especially when we were trying to solve a case, and tonight she was hours away from unwinding.

  We were famished, so I made us sandwiches using egg salad I’d whipped up the day before. We devoured them—rapidly—in the kitchen and then headed into the living room. Julia settled into the couch nearest the fireplace and began to jot notes on a yellow legal pad, and I sat on the other couch, working on my laptop. My first order of business was to learn more about the MacAllan bell-ringing system.

  Ten minutes into my research, I confirmed what Pastor Ackley had said: almost anyone who worked on computers could have hacked such a controller. Indeed, “hacking” would hardly be the term for it. One of the women could have breached the program on Ackley’s office computer, but it also could have been breached from a home computer—or possibly even a cell phone that had the same app.

  I shut my laptop and set it on the next cushion over. “I think one of the Cottage Women got into the bell-ringing program.”

  “On the pastor’s office computer?” Julia asked, laying down her pad and pen.

  “I’m not sure about that. Sophie said Ackley was computer savvy, but by his own admission his password was too simple. Probably to make things easier on his staff. Doing it from a laptop would require remote access and another level of sophistication, but the upside to that is it could have been done privately and at night, so no one would have noticed repeated attempts at a password or seen the computer seemingly working on its own.”

  “Remote access?”

  I tapped my laptop. “I use my computer or even my phone to connect directly to another computer. Someone else’s computer, mouse, and keyboard becomes mine.”

  “That’s devious.”

  “Not necessarily. Say a friend lives in another state and you want to help him navigate a computer problem. You install remote-access software on his computer, and there you are. You control his computer and fix the problem for him.”

  As I spoke, I realized I might have stumbled upon
the hacker’s method. “I think one of the women installed the remote software, guessed the password, and accessed the computer from home. Something like that. Maybe she didn’t even need a password. I don’t know enough to know exactly how it was done, but from what I’ve learned, even I could manage it after a few hours’ trial and error.”

  “So which of the women had the knowledge?” Julia asked.

  “For now, I’m assuming they all did. We know Mariette is a real estate agent and Sophie works in the library—you have to use computers at both jobs. But what do Tyra and Alison do for a living?”

  I opened my laptop again, navigated to a search engine, and typed in “Alison Francis” and “Juniper Grove,” hoping Alison lived or worked in town.

  “It’s frightening what you can learn about people online,” Julia said.

  It was a common refrain of hers, and of course she was right, but in this case, I was glad that Alison had an online presence and had left quite an online footprint, voluntarily or not. “She’s a freelance cybersecurity consultant,” I said with a chuckle. “She’s all over the web. There are even reviews of her work, which out of kindness I won’t read.”

  “She could hack a computer in the twinkling of an eye.”

  “Hold on.” I typed in Tyra’s name, finding it rather quickly on a local website. “Tyra’s on the staff at Brownlee Dental on Blossom Road. I can’t tell for sure, but it looks like she works at the front desk, not as a hygienist or dental assistant.”

  “Computers again,” Julia said. “Either one of them. All four of them.”

  “And all four of them could have walked into the church office. Holly and I did. If Pastor Ackley hadn’t been there, I could have installed remote software in thirty seconds. I wonder if Ackley discovered remote software. He would know how to find it, and then he’d try to work out who installed it.”

  Julia rested her head on the couch back and propped her feet on my coffee table. “Why did you ask Sophie for the pastor’s cell phone number?”

  “You heard that?” I asked.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my hearing.”

  “If Ackley used it all the time, he kept it well charged.”

  “So far, so good.”

  “If it’s still charged and I dial his number, I can hear his phone ring.”

  “I’m sure Gilroy thought of that when he was looking for it.”

  “In the graveyard and on the cottage grounds, yes. But Tyra, Mariette, and Alison drove away from the cottage in the afternoon. Tyra and Alison went shopping downtown. I don’t know yet where Mariette went, but I’m going to find out.” I scooted to the edge of the couch. “What if one of them killed Ackley, took his phone, and disposed of it as she drove away? I know it’s a long shot, but I could drive along the usual routes and stop every few hundred feet to dial this number. From Sophie’s place it’s only a mile to downtown, and the killer would’ve thrown it into a field or wooded area, not in someone’s front yard, so the search area wouldn’t be as big as you’d think.”

  Julia wrinkled her nose.

  “Like I said, it’s a long shot. A hundred to one.”

  “Probably. But then again, long odds can pay off.”

  Julia had that look in her eye. “What are you thinking?”

  She whipped her feet off the coffee table and sat to attention. “Let’s go now.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s perfect, Rachel. No one’s out driving or walking. No cars, no noise, and no watchful eyes. We’ll be able to drive slowly, stop, and listen for rings. We can’t do that on a Monday morning.”

  “That’s true.” She had me half convinced. “You’re not tired?”

  “Do I look tired?” She rose as swiftly from the couch as any sixty-something woman could after ten o’clock on a Sunday night. “I know you’re not tired, so no more dillydallying.”

  Royce had encouraged the nascent sleuth in her, and between her insomnia and her desire to surprise him with a discovery, my tenacious neighbor stood a fair chance of finding Pastor Ackley’s phone.

  Minutes later we were back in my Forester and out on Finch Hill Road, heading for Sophie’s cottage. I’d brought a flashlight and, optimistically, a plastic sandwich bag with me to use as an evidence bag. Two hundred feet from Sophie’s drive, I swung the car into a U-turn and stopped.

  I turned off my headlights and lowered my window, surprised by the heavy scent of lilacs on the breeze. “I didn’t know there were lilacs on this part of the property. Or is that the graveyard? They must be everywhere. What a heavenly smell. When I think of May, I think of lilacs.”

  “I didn’t notice them either,” Julia said. “I must have been distracted by all the bodies. Are we really going to talk about flowers?”

  There wasn’t another car in sight, and the only lights were dim, golden glows from the windows of Sophie’s cottage and houses across the street. Even the half moon was obscured by clouds.

  “You were right,” I said. “It’s so quiet, we might be able to hear the phone.”

  Julia rolled down her window.

  “Finding it in the dark will be another matter,” I added. I popped open my glove compartment, removed the flashlight, and then dialed Pastor Ackley’s phone number.

  We listened but heard nothing. I wasn’t surprised. We were too close to Sophie’s cottage. I drove ahead two hundred feet, dialed again, and stuck my head partway out my window, listening. All I heard was my car engine rumbling. As I continued to let the phone ring, I got out and walked away from the Forester. Still nothing. It struck me that Ackley might have put his phone on vibrate, and if he had, all attempts to find it by dialing would prove fruitless.

  Back in my car, I pulled ahead another two hundred feet. Once more I got out and dialed, straining to hear anything other than my Forester and a distant chorus of crickets. I went back to the car, reached inside the window, and turned off the ignition. This time Julia got out too. She patrolled her side of the road, back and forth, stopping now and then, walking again.

  “Not here,” I said. Beginning to feel a little foolish, I drove ahead another two hundred feet and repeated the exercise. This time I thought I heard a faint ring.

  I threw my hand in the air. “Julia, listen!”

  She froze.

  “I don’t hear anything,” she said after a moment.

  “In that wooded area behind the field,” I said, drawing her attention to a grove of junipers. I trotted back to the car, retrieved my flashlight, and trudged toward the trees.

  “Are you trying to show me your superior hearing?”

  I waved for her to follow me.

  “Are there weeds?” she asked.

  I halted and wheeled back. “Julia.”

  “I’m just asking,” she said, squinting at the ground.

  I handed her my flashlight and she shone it downward.

  “Dandelions and bindweed,” I said. “You keep the flashlight.” I continued through the field, Julia trailing behind me and pointing the light in the direction of the trees.

  “This is too far from the street,” she said. “She must have gotten out of the car to throw it.”

  “That would be smart.”

  “Now I hear it.”

  As we headed into the grove, the ringing stopped. I dialed the number again, and as we continued, the rings became more distinct.

  “This is it,” I said, growing more excited with each step. “It makes sense. This is the only wooded or scrubby area we’ve seen since the driveway.”

  Twenty feet farther into the junipers, it sounded as though we were nearly on top of the phone. Julia let the flashlight beam play over the needle-covered ground.

  “I saw something!” I said. “There. Back there.”

  “This is so exciting,” Julia breathed, scanning left.

  I knelt, pivoting on my heels toward the ringing. “Got it!”

  “Don’t touch it,” she warned, shining the light over my shoulder at the phone.

 
“That’s what I brought the sandwich bag for.” I hung up my phone and pulled the bag from my pocket. Turning it inside out, I used it to take hold of the pastor’s phone. Then I stood, examined the face of it in the flashlight beam, and pressed the bottom of the screen through the plastic. “It’s Ackley’s, all right,” I said. “And it’s not locked.”

  “This is unbelievable, Rachel. We found a needle in a haystack.”

  I grinned. “More like a phone in needles.” I turned the plastic right side out, pulling it over the phone and securing it inside the bag.

  Julia turned and aimed the flashlight ahead, through the black pines and toward the car.

  “I hear a car,” I said.

  “The street’s ahead, Rachel.”

  “No, I mean idling. Someone stopped.” We crept forward, staying within the dark shelter of the grove.

  At the muffled thud of car door, we froze.

  Julia grabbed my arm. “Someone got out,” she said.

  I put a finger to my lips.

  She let go of me and swung the flashlight in an arc in front of her. I seized it and flicked it off.

  I listened, my senses sharp, the sound of my own breathing in my ears.

  “She came back to find the phone,” I whispered.

  “Who?” Julia whispered back.

  I shook my head, hooked my arm in Julia’s, and continued to creep forward, suddenly aware of how the crunch of pine needles signaled our every step. I paused and peered into the semi-darkness. “There’s two of us and one of her,” I said under my breath. “We should wait for her.”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  Neither did I. And by now, I thought, whoever it was should have made her way to the junipers. “Maybe she saw our light.”

  The instant the words left my mouth, a car door slammed and an engine started.

  Leaving Julia behind, I raced ahead, desperate to catch sight of the car. But by the time I made it to the street, it had vanished. I ran to my left and then swung to my right, hoping to see even the silhouette of a car dissolving into the night. It was her, I thought. It was the killer, and we almost had her. “I don’t believe it!”