A Denial of Death

by Gin Jones

  It was all just speculation, though. Helen needed something concrete to bring to the police if she wanted them to pay any attention to her.

  Charlene rolled her suitcase with the tote bag and laptop out of the middle of the room and into the tiny hallway before settling in the wingback chair across from the sofa. "So. What information do you think would help Ralph?"

  There was something odd about the stack of luggage, but Helen couldn't put her finger on it. She stuck to her prepared questions. "I was wondering about the medical bracelet the police found on Angie. I thought hers was old and didn't have a GPS tracker, but the one they found was new."

  "She got it a few days before she disappeared."

  "That explains a lot." If Angie'd gotten the new system while Ralph was out of town, then he hadn't been lying when he'd said she only had the old version. He just hadn't known about the new one.

  Things were starting to look better for Ralph. If Tate could confirm Helen's assumptions about Charlene's unauthorized use of her sister's secret bank account, it might make her a credible enough suspect to establish reasonable doubt. Tate was going to need more details about that account, though, and Charlene had disappeared once already. Helen needed to get as much information as she could before Charlene realized she was under suspicion and disappeared again.

  "You know," Helen said, trying to sound casual, "the dates and addresses for the bank withdrawals after Angie left the casino could be really helpful in Ralph's defense. Do you have a print-out of them showing when and where they were made? It might be possible to show that Ralph couldn't possibly have made them, so the police will keep looking for the real culprit."

  "I can email the information to you later," Charlene said. "My printer isn't working. I've never been very good at trouble-shooting anything to do with computers."

  And yet, she carried a laptop with her everywhere, judging by the various scratches and dents in the case, and by the way it had been stacked on top of her luggage, so it was right where she wouldn't forget it when she left the house.

  Helen glanced at the clunky old computer in the hallway. It was surprising that Charlene hadn't upgraded to something shiny and probably made by Apple. Even new, that laptop had always been too generic and too ugly for her tastes, and now it was too old, more than ready to be traded in on something new and pretty. It was more the sort of computer Angie would own: budget-priced, functional, and completely detached from any awareness of fashion trends.

  As soon as she made the connection, Helen was convinced that it was, in fact, not Charlene's. It was Angie's missing laptop.

  Charlene must have kept it, despite its lack of brand name, so she could impersonate Angie while accessing the secret bank account. Even Charlene wasn't so brand-name-obsessed as to discard her ticket to her sister's money just because that ticket was old and ugly. She'd needed Angie's laptop so the bank's security software would recognize the computer's cookies. Then, all she'd needed was the password, which Charlene had admitted knowing when she'd first mentioned the ATM withdrawals. If she'd used another computer, one her sister had never used, the bank's security system would have asked her to answer some additional questions to confirm her identity, and Angie probably hadn't shared the answers with her. If Charlene had been raiding the account, the police forensics team could use the laptop to prove the withdrawals had been made by Charlene after Angie's death.

  The police would probably find Angie's suitcase here too, since it hadn't been under the gazebo. Barry might be able to identify it as the one he'd tossed into Charlene's yard four weeks ago. Surely that would be enough for Tate to get the police to dismiss the charges against Ralph.

  Everything pointed to Charlene having killed her sister, but Helen still couldn't understand why. Seventy-five thousand dollars was a lot of money, but was it enough of a motive to kill a beloved sister?

  Helen's face must have given away her suspicion, because Charlene said, "It's not what you think. I didn't do anything wrong. Well, I moved Angie's body, which is probably illegal technically, but I didn't kill her."

  "If it was an accident, you've got to tell the police what happened so Ralph won't be blamed. And he deserves to know what happened to his wife."

  "I can't. Not now." Charlene stood and wandered over to stare fondly at the art glass sculpture in the open box on the coffee table between her and Helen. The sculpture was almost two feet long, made of intense colors that were muted in the dimly lit living room. Charlene picked it up and tossed the box aside, so she could set the sculpture upright in the center of the coffee table. "It's lovely, isn't it?"

  Not if it was the reason why Charlene was letting Ralph be punished for something he hadn't done. With Ralph convicted of Angie's murder, Charlene would be her sister's sole heir. Dumping the body beneath the gazebo was seeming more and more like it had been an intentional move to frame Ralph. If he was convicted of Angie's murder, then Charlene would end up with a lot more than the secret bank account. She'd also get the million-dollar life insurance policy. That money would pay for quite a lot of designer clothes and art glass.

  Maybe she was wrong and Charlene had an innocent explanation for everything, but for now Helen thought she had enough for Tate to at least establish some reasonable doubt in Ralph's defense. It was time to turn everything she knew over to Tate and let him do his job.

  Helen rose to her feet, trying to be casual about it, and preparing her joints for a quick departure. Charlene might not have killed her sister if it was true that the death had been due to the pre-existing heart condition, but she didn't seem the least bit remorseful about the lies that were likely to end Ralph's life as a free man. What more would she do to claim her undeserved inheritance?

  Charlene was still standing between Helen and the front door, admiring her sculpture, and there was no question who would win if they were in a race to the door. Helen needed a bit more of a head start.

  Feigning an interest in the sculpture, Helen said, "You should open the curtains and let some light in so we can see it properly."

  Charlene shook her head, like a petulant child. "I don't want anyone to know I have them. A burglar might notice. Or someone might figure out how I got them, just like you did."

  "They'll figure it out eventually anyway," Helen said. "It would be better for you if you told the police yourself. You can pay back the money, and I bet they'll only give you a small slap on the wrist for moving the body."

  "But I didn't do anything wrong," Charlene insisted.

  Helen didn't bother to remind Charlene she'd framed an innocent man for Angie's death. "You stole from your sister."

  "I told you—it's not stealing. She would have wanted me to have it." Charlene stroked the smooth contours of the art glass sculpture. "Besides, it's only fair. She always got everything she wanted, and the only thing I ever got that I cared about was my career. It was the only thing I had that she didn't. Then she had to go and start writing her silly books, instead of just reading them in secret, and all of a sudden she had a career too. I had to listen to her for hours and hours, telling me all about her characters and their problems. Then when she found a publisher I had to listen to her complain about the business of publishing and how hard it was to be an author. She'd never cared about how hard I worked in my career. I deserve the money for all the time I spent listening to her and encouraging her. Ralph certainly didn't have anything to do with her writing career, so why should he get the money?"

  "Because Angie wanted him to have it."

  "You don't understand." Charlene let go of the glass sculpture and took a step closer to Helen. "Why can't you ever just leave things alone? I read about what you did to the person who killed your nurse."

  "What I did?" Helen said, gripping her cane tightly, in case she needed it to defend herself again. "I almost got killed."

  "You wouldn't have been in any danger if you hadn't been pestering people about what had happened," Charlene said, hemming Helen in between the sofa and coffee
table by blocking the opening closest to the door. "Like you've done to me. Everyone would have been so much better off if you hadn't gotten involved and Angie's body had never been found."

  "Ralph wouldn't have been better off."

  "Oh, he'd have gotten over it," Charlene said. "Eventually, he'd have accepted that Angie left him, and he'd have moved on."

  "But Angie didn't leave him," Helen said, backing toward the far end of the coffee table, since there was no chance of her jumping over it to escape. "You killed her."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  "I would never hurt my sister," Charlene said with what appeared to be true outrage, pausing in her pursuit of Helen around the coffee table. "She was dead when I found her at the bottom of my front steps, hugging her stupid laptop. The autopsy will prove she died of natural causes. That will clear Ralph too, unless they charge him for hiding her body. She had a heart defect, you know. The kind that leads to sudden death. It was her own fault, really. She called at lunchtime and asked for a ride, but I was called in to work on my day off and couldn't get home until late. She shouted at me, like she thought that would convince me to jeopardize my career by leaving the store just so she could take a spur-of-the-moment trip."

  So that was who Angie had been arguing with the day she disappeared. Francesca had assumed it was Ralph, but it was actually Charlene, the only other person Angie ever bothered to be nice to.

  Helen continued to move around the coffee table, keeping some distance between herself and Charlene. "I still don't understand how it was Angie's fault she died."

  "She should have waited until I was home so I could have met her at the bottom of the driveway." Charlene sighed with what appeared to be genuine sorrow, even as she kept stalking Helen. "I don't suppose it would have made any difference. There wasn't anything I could have done to help her once her heart went into an arrhythmia, at least not without a defibrillator right here on the spot."

  Helen continued circling around the coffee table, staying just out of Charlene's reach, and imagined Detective Peterson's reaction to learning what happened to Angie. He'd be thrilled to finally charge someone with interfering with a criminal investigation but disappointed that the someone wasn't going to be Helen.

  First, though, Helen had to convince Detective Peterson of the facts. Charlene had admitted to the lesser crime, but how could anyone be sure she wasn't lying about the more serious crime of murder? "If it was a natural death, then why cover it up?"

  "I was in shock," Charlene said, standing still while she pled her case. "My sister was dead, and there was nothing I could do about it. Ralph was going to inherit everything, and I wasn't going to have anything after all I'd done for Angie. Worse, everyone was going to find out about the secret bank account and how Angie had gotten the money, and they were all going to be laughing at me."

  "So you covered up her death, in order to keep the money." Helen kept inching her way around the coffee table until Charlene was the one blocked in by it now. "And not just that original seventy-five thousand dollars. As long as no one knew Angie was dead, the royalties would keep rolling into the account, and you'd continue to have access to it."

  "It wasn't just about the money," Charlene said. "I also wanted to keep Angie's secret. Angie never wanted Ralph to know where she'd gotten the money, and he might have figured it out if he found the bank account. I was prepared to keep the secret for the rest of Ralph's life."

  "Why was it such a big deal, anyway?" She forced herself not to look toward the hallway and her means of escape. Could she get out before Charlene caught up to her? Helen tried to remember if the door had a security chain, and if so, whether it had been engaged. "Was the secret really worth covering up your sister's death? Angie wasn't committing a crime or anything."

  "Angie was afraid Ralph wouldn't approve of the subject matter," Charlene said. "He has some pretty traditional ideas about domestic life, so the idea of his wife having any kind of job, let alone writing erotica, would have been difficult for him to accept. He didn't even know she read steamy romance before she started writing it. Angie told me once that he was the only person in the world who believed she was a good person, and she didn't want to risk him thinking otherwise. But she was making so much money, she couldn't quit. Her income kept the insurance agency afloat during some bad years, and it wasn't entirely solvent yet."

  "The secret will come out now." Helen prepared to make her move toward the door. "Even if I don't report it. The bank will freeze the account when it realizes Angie is dead, and they'll be looking for the correct owner of the account."

  "Not necessarily," Charlene said. "It's not a local bank, so they'll probably never hear about it. Angie signed up for electronic statements, and I'm the only one who has the password now. As long as I don't tell the bank, they'll never know. Not before I withdraw all the money, anyway."

  "I hope you'll reconsider telling the police what happened, but there's obviously nothing else I can say to convince you, so I might as well go on home. The cab driver is probably getting restless. I told him I was only going to be here for a couple minutes."

  As soon as Helen took her first unsteady step toward the hallway, Charlene reversed direction around the coffee table and closed in on Helen. Helen automatically turned in the opposite direction, even as she berated herself for giving in to the instinct, and Charlene turned too. Being chased around a table wasn't as much fun in real life as it looked in cartoons, and the game wasn't going to last long, overmatched as she was by Charlene.

  When Helen reached the end of the table closest to the hallway, she continued on toward the front door, but Charlene managed to get in front of Helen, forcing her to retreat until she bumped up against the coffee table.

  "You can't leave yet," Charlene said. "Not until I'm sure you understand, so you won't go telling anyone about things that aren't any of their business."

  Did Charlene really think Helen would remain silent? More likely, Charlene was assuming no one would believe Helen. Charlene might have been right about that a few months ago, when Helen had been new to town, but things had changed. Helen still went unnoticed by car salesmen and the police, but Tate would listen to her, and the police would listen to him. Visibility by proxy was better than being completely overlooked.

  Better to let Charlene believe Helen was invisible and powerless, though. "I'm certainly willing to listen. If this is going to take a while, I need to sit down again." She raised her cane a few inches, drawing attention to her infirmity. She nodded at the two wingback chairs near the front window, where she might be able to pull back the curtain and get Barry's attention. "They look more comfortable than the sofa." Maybe Charlene had a neighbor like Francesca who kept an eye on everything. Even as she thought it, Helen realized that wouldn't work. Unlike the Deckers' neatly maintained and open front yard, Charlene's bungalow was all but invisible from the street, with the first floor completely obscured by overgrown hedges.

  Charlene kept an eye on Helen, but led the way over to the two chairs. Helen lagged behind, pretending to be more tired than she was, and looking for something that would give her an advantage over Charlene's greater speed.

  Close to Helen's elbow was the largest of the new glass sculptures. That was the answer, Helen thought. If anything would stop Charlene in her tracks, it was a threat to the glass sculpture.

  Helen reached out to it, mimicking Charlene's earlier action in stroking its contours, as if it were more important than what had happened to Angie "This really is a lovely piece. You must be very pleased with it."

  "I am," Charlene said, confusion evident on her face. "No one else around here seems to understand how amazing the sculptures are."

  "Martha Waddell understands." Helen gripped the sculpture, raising it a fraction of an inch to test how much it weighed. It was definitely heavy, but she could lift it with one hand, so she didn't need to abandon her cane. "I saw a lovely piece in her office the last time I was there."

  "That's mine," Charl
ene said proudly. "I'm going to buy it back from her now."

  Helen nodded sympathetically while she adjusted her grip to a lower part of the sculpture. "As a fellow art lover, I'm sure she'll let you."

  Charlene shrugged. "One way or another, it will be mine again."

  Charlene really was losing her grip on reality, Helen thought. Even if she hadn't killed her sister, it had to have taken a certain amount of cold-bloodedness to drag the body across a lawn in the middle of the night to a hole waiting to be filled with concrete. That sort of thing had to change a person. And it wasn't like she could have just tossed the corpse and run, acting on a spur-of-the-moment bad decision. Charlene had to have been in Ralph's yard for hours, finding a shovel among the abandoned tools, digging out a space within the foundation hole that was big enough for the body, then covering it up with dirt and smoothing everything out again so the disturbance wouldn’t be noticed in the morning.

  Helen grabbed the sculpture and hugged it to her chest. "I'm leaving now. If you try to stop me, I'm going to drop the sculpture and shatter it to pieces."

  Charlene gasped and jumped to her feet. "No. You wouldn't. It's a piece of art."

  "I can, and I will." Helen backed away from Charlene, toward the hallway and the front door.

  Charlene followed slowly, keeping her distance, but not letting the sculpture out of her sight.

  Helen passed the stack of luggage with Angie's laptop perched on top. Cursing the cane that prevented her from snagging the computer, she shuffled backwards a few more steps to the door and fumbled behind her for the knob. It turned and the door moved freely, relieving her of the fear that a chain or deadbolt might slow her down.

  All she had to do now was get to where Barry could see her. It wouldn't be easy, between the cane, her limp, and the weight of the glass sculpture. She could probably do it, but she'd have to leave the laptop behind and risk Angie destroying the evidence before the police could get here. Helen would be safe, and Tate might eventually get Ralph out of jail, but it could take months or even years to free him without the evidence of the laptop.