Murder, Mayhem and Bliss

by Loulou Harrington

  “How so?” Vivian asked, seemingly oblivious to the bipolar-like mood swings that seemed so apparent to Jesse.

  “From meltdown basketcase to take-charge business woman. From ‘oh, woe is me’ to ‘I’m so excited’,” Jesse explained.

  “That’s grief, hon. Bliss is just a little more conflicted than most people would be. She’s genuinely sad, and she’s just as genuinely relieved. Her marriage was a mistake, and now that mistake is gone.”

  “Is she going to level off any time soon, do you suppose?” Jesse continued to frown in the direction of the library.

  “Over time the sadness will come less often and the happiness will come more.”

  Not reassured, Jesse asked, “Do you think we can ask her to downplay the happiness for awhile? Just until the sheriff’s through investigating her for murder?”

  “Oh, I hadn’t thought about that.” Vivian rested delicate fingertips on the slender band of diamonds encircling her throat. “I was too busy trying not to worry about her going into partnership with someone who acts alarmingly like her lover.”

  Jesse sank down onto the sofa next to Vivian and buried her head in her hands. “Oh, good grief,” she muttered, her words muffled in the hollow of her palms.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Vivian patted Jesse on her back and started laughing softly. “For some strange reason,” she said through her laughter, “I had thought this was going to be simple.”

  The ringing of Jesse’s phone stopped her from having to think of something positive to say. “Yes,” she answered, hoping her eagerness didn’t show.

  “OMG, Jesse, I heard something!” SueAnn cried. Her voice dropped to a loud whisper. “Everybody is talking about this. Hey!” Her sudden shout faded into the distance.

  “Chill. I’ll give it back to you in a minute,” Lindsey said, and Jesse could only assume the comment was meant for SueAnn. “Hey, are you watching TV?”

  “Uh, are you talking to me now? If so, no,” Jesse answered. They kept a small TV in the kitchen area of the tea room, and she figured they must have seen something on it.

  “Well, the news hounds have found us. I just saw a reporter all the way from Tulsa accost Sheriff Joe on the way to his truck a minute ago.”

  “Hey, I have news of my own,” SueAnn’s muffled words sounded in the background. “And I need to tell her before I forget what they said.”

  “I’ll give you the phone in a minute,” Lindsey said again. “And I saw a TV news truck hauling ass by the front windows a few minutes ago.”

  Jesse’s filter system felt whiplashed, but she scored the first statement for SueAnn and the second for herself. “Were they two different news crews?” she asked, not liking the idea of an invading hoard of reporters adding to the growing confusion.

  “Yep. And it’s front page on the Sunday paper, just in case you haven’t seen that either.”

  Jesse struggled not to groan out loud. “I hadn’t.”

  “Give me the phone!” SueAnn insisted, followed by the sound of a scuffle, then a loud huff. “Finally! Jesse, are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, I’m going to have to talk fast, ‘cause she’s still eyeing the phone. I heard these two ladies, a little older than Lindsey maybe. One was Mazie Dickens—she’s in here a lot—and she apparently went to high school with Bill Marshall and Harry and Bliss, but a few years before them. And her friend apparently is from the same town as Cindilee Marshall, whose maiden name was Parker.”

  SueAnn paused to suck in a deep breath, and Jesse used the opportunity to put her phone on speaker and motion to Vivian to stay quiet. Then, SueAnn launched back into the story she had been working up to. “So, anyway, what they ended up remembering was that when Bill and Cindilee got married, it was about two years after Harry and Bliss, and it was kind of a scandal at the time. They had only dated a couple of months, and Mazie remembered that nobody thought Bill was very serious about Cindilee, ‘cause he’d always seemed to have a thing for Bliss that he’d never really gotten over.”

  Another pause for a deep breath, while Jesse and Vivian exchanged glances. It may just be gossip, and old gossip at that, but still it was information that promised to be tantalizing… such as, what scandal?

  “Then, all of a sudden, Bill and Cindilee were getting married, with practically no engagement to speak of. So, of course, all the gossip said pregnant. Then a couple of months after they got married, she got sick and dropped out of sight for while. So, the gossip was that she’d miscarried. Then, over the next few years, she would periodically have flu-like symptoms, then drop out of sight, then reappear subdued, then gradually act more normal, then start the whole thing over again.”

  After one last quick breath, SueAnn finished with, “Then, over time, she seemed more and more sick, more and more of the time, and everybody stopped waiting for Bill to divorce her and realized that he was never going to leave his invalid wife. Except, according to the lady from Cindilee’s home town, nobody ever knew exactly what was wrong with her.”

  “Wow,” Jesse said, impressed with the amount of information SueAnn had gleaned. “Did you get a good tip? Because you must have spent a lot of time hovering around that table.”

  SueAnn’s happy giggle rippled through the phone connection. “I did, several of them, in fact. Because the tables I actually hovered over were the tables surrounding the ladies who were talking. I think I might really have a talent for this sort of thing.”

  She sounded terribly pleased with herself, and Jesse couldn’t blame her. It might not be anything that mattered, but it was a good chunk of information they hadn’t had before.

  Jesse’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a scuffle, several grunts, and one cry of outrage before Lindsey’s breathless voice said, “I think we may have created a monster here. Oh, no, you don’t. Stand back, brat. You’ve had your say. Jesse? You still there?”

  Lost in thoughts of how much her coworkers sounded like squabbling siblings, and that it was a good thing, wasn’t it, since she had set out to foster a family-like atmosphere at the tea room and had obviously succeeded, Jesse nodded an absent-minded response to Lindsey’s question. The sharp prod of Vivian’s stylishly slender elbow jerked Jesse from her woolgathering.

  “Yes,” she said a little too loudly.

  “Will you be back here this afternoon?” Lindsey asked. “Say, a little after closing?”

  “I’m planning to. Does three o’clockish sound good?”

  “Customers should all be gone by then,” Lindsey agreed. “I’ve got to tell you, I’m kind of stunned by how big this thing is turning out to be, and the brunch crowd hasn’t even hit yet.”

  “Are you all right? Are you guys handling it okay?” Jesse felt suddenly guilty for being away so much the last two days, even though she didn’t normally work on weekends, anyway.

  “Well, you know, we don’t have that many tables. It’s not like we can get completely overrun,” Lindsey said. “It’s not the work that’s overwhelming, it’s the level of enthusiasm these people are displaying. Boy, bring a murder to a small town, and people just go nuts.”

  “Murder?” Vivian asked, alarmed. “Are they calling it murder now?”

  “Whoa, here comes the lunch crowd. See you this afternoon.”

  “OMG,” came SueAnn’s excited voice in the background. “It’s a news truck!” Then the connection went dead.

  “Oh, dear heavens.” Vivian lifted a fluttery hand to her forehead. “This is all going out of control.”

  Jesse blew out a heavy sigh. “Murder has a tendency to do that.”

  “If they’ve ruled it a murder, it won’t be enough just to prove Bliss innocent,” Vivian said, turning a serious gaze to Jesse. “You do realize that, don’t you? We’re going to have to figure out who really did it. Because without that, the suspicion and scandal are going to hang over her for the rest of her life.”

  The fatigue that had plagued Jesse since arising that morning, sett
led over her once again, like a heavy fog clouding her mind and dragging at her tired limbs. “We need more practice at this murder solving. Right now the hill we’re climbing just seems to keep getting higher.”

  “I have one thought,” Vivian offered. “Just brain storming on other suspects, Bill Marshall has real possibilities.”

  Without lifting her drooping head, Jesse tilted it sideways to look at her elegant, ageless friend. “Other than the obvious business grudge and his possibly coveting another man’s wife, do you have anything else in mind?”

  “Well, he has a wife who’s been in poor health for years, without anyone knowing exactly what’s wrong with her. What if he’s been poisoning her slowly for all those years? What if he used that knowledge to get Harold out of the way, by giving him a larger dose of the same poison?”

  “That’s pure speculation,” Jesse pointed out.

  “So is the evidence against Bliss. That’s how these things are done. You start with speculation, and then you gather evidence to prove or disprove what you imagine might have happened. And in the case of Bill Marshall,” Vivian continued, “I’ve always thought very highly of him, and I’ve never liked that wife of his one bit.”

  “Really?” Jesse was surprised. She herself had rather liked Cindilee Marshall, although she had noticed that her own tolerance of other people was more liberal than Vivian’s was. Vivian was also the more astute judge of character.

  “She seemed to like you,” Vivian conceded with a shrug. “She and I have never been particularly congenial. It was well understood that Bill only married her because she was pregnant. And when she miscarried almost immediately, I began to wonder if she’d ever been pregnant in the first place, or if it had just been a lie to entrap Bill.”

  “That sounds like the conversation SueAnn overhead. Was that the scandal they were referring to?”

  “Probably. Then every time Bill seemed restive, the unconfirmed symptoms of morning sickness reappeared, followed a few months later by the hints of miscarriage, and the long-suffering, tragic saga of Cindilee Marshall began to form.” Vivian gave a trademark huff of disdain. “I always thought the woman was a class “A” bitch, myself. And as much as I like Bill personally, desperate men do desperate things.”

  “I’m confused. Was she faking it, or was he poisoning her?” If it were anyone other than Vivian, Jesse would chalk the whole story up to the wild imaginings of a small-town gossip. However, Vivian’s more cynical musings were usually too accurate to be discounted.

  “In the beginning, I’m almost positive she was faking it. Desperate woman also do desperate things, and she was wildly in love with a man who had no real interest in marrying anyone at the time. But Bill’s not a stupid man. How many years would he have been fooled by her act? Eventually, it’s possible that he devised a plan to rid himself of both the people standing in his way.”

  “Wow, that almost makes sense. It’s a shame there’s not a bigger difference between murder solving and character assassination.”

  Vivian lifted a dismissive shoulder. “The police do it all the time. I never notice them apologizing.”

  “Point taken. I hate to put everything on Bill Marshall, though. Anyone else come to mind as a likely suspect?”

  “Maria Ortiz seems very nice, but she was aware of the Ginny Spurber situation and seemed rather upset by Harold’s continuing callous actions. Perhaps she decided to blackmail him and the whole thing got out of hand.”

  “Cynicism and suspicion really come in handy, don’t they?” Jesse asked, wondering if this was how law enforcement became jaded.

  “Very. And with a little work, considering how much material Harold gave us to work with, I’m sure we can come up with a pretty substantial list of people with some sort of motive for getting rid of him.”

  “Okay then, I guess that means we need to start speculating.” Jesse shivered at the thought. “I just need to get over this feeling that we’re starting a witch hunt.”

  “Cheer up.” Vivian gave her a bracing pat on the back. “It’s not like anybody’s going to listen to us anyway.”

  With that, Jesse dropped her head back into her hands and groaned. Almost immediately, a sharp gasp from Vivian snapped her head back up again.

  “What!?”

  Vivian pointed toward the front windows, where a county sheriff’s department car was showcased rolling to a halt immediately behind a dark Lincoln that had arrived while they weren’t watching.

  Jesse stopped herself just before she groaned again. A sick feeling of dread slowly sank to the pit of her stomach. She looked to Vivian, who was clutching her midriff with one hand and the hollow of her throat with the other. Her face blanched of color, Vivian looked years older instantly.

  When Deputy Murphy emerged from her car alone and paused to watch a monarch fluttering by, Jesse and Vivian both exhaled the breaths they had been holding, then exchanged relieved smiles.

  “Not yet,” Jesse said, voicing both their thoughts as she watched the pinched lines of her companion’s face soften and the perfect complexion return.

  Vivian closed her eyes and gave her head a shake, then exhaled another sigh. “I hadn’t realized how worried I was about all of this,” she answered with a rueful smile. “So much for all of my bluster.”

  “Maybe you should go ahead and get in touch with a criminal attorney. Just in case.” Jesse hated to make the suggestion, but it was either that or give into her need to hug the older woman like a child, which wouldn’t have been a very popular move either.

  “I already have,” Vivian said. “He’s standing by for a phone call.”

  Someone else might not have heard the vulnerability in Vivian’s voice, but Jesse did, and it stirred every protective urge in her body. “We’ll figure out who did this, Vivian,” Jesse promised. “We’ll find them. We’ll prove it. And then we’ll put this behind us.”

  Tears sparkled in Vivian’s eyes as she took the hand Jesse reached out to her. “Michael did me a huge favor by bringing you into my life, dear. You have become my rock, Jesselyn. And now…” Vivian released Jesse’s hand and rose to her feet. “Before I become too maudlin, I think I’ll do what I can to divert the good deputy, while Bliss wraps up her meeting.”

  “Oh, please,” Jesse said, rising as well, “let me help.” While the two of them crossed the sunroom on the way to the foyer, she gave into her curiosity. “Why do you suppose she’s here?”

  “I believe Bliss is supposed to look at suit jackets again.”

  “Ah! The note.” Jesse nodded, remembering that Bliss still needed to face the music about the note she found and walked away with. “Does this mean they’re going back to Bliss’s house?”

  “Yes, it does. Do I detect a glimmer of conniving in your eyes?”

  Jesse smiled. “Quite possibly you do. Is it too obvious?”

  “Only to me, dear. And it lightens my heart to think that you might have learned it from me.”

  “That’s very possible,” Jesse agreed. “I do remember myself as a more simple and innocent person when we first met.”

  “You were eight.”

  “Well,” Jesse answered as they linked arms and continued toward the front door, “that would explain it.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The meeting in the study broke up while Jesse and Vivian kept Deputy Murphy diverted on the terrace outside the kitchen. Chatting over coffee, they had reached a first name basis with the young, mahogany-haired deputy only moments before she interrupted their conversation to exclaim, “Wow, you weren’t kidding about her being in a meeting, were you?”

  Startled, Jesse looked up to see the dark blue Lincoln driven by Bliss’s attorney, Marcus, glide slowly past the terrace before rounding a curve in the driveway and disappearing from view behind a colonnade of mature oaks. Her gaze moved to Vivian, who sat transfixed in something approaching horror.

  “Was that Marcus Rutherford?” Marla asked. “He’s the dealership’s attorney, isn’t he?”


  “I believe so,” Vivian answered. Her composure, at least outwardly, had returned. Jesse herself wondered at the fact that the sheriff’s office already knew who the dealership’s attorney was. What did that mean?

  “Wow,” Marla said again.

  “Would you like some more coffee?” Vivian asked, only to be ignored as the black Cadillac sedan belonging to Bill Marshall was followed by the red Mustang with Maria Ortiz at the wheel to form a sedate parade that crunched its way past the curious deputy. One by one they followed the Lincoln down the limestone drive past the terrace, around the curve and behind the oaks that blocked their exit from view.

  With the cars out of sight, and only a distant grinding of tires on gravel to mark their progress, Marla Murphy turned her attention back to Vivian and Jesse. “Am I wrong, or was that Bill Marshall and Harry Kerr’s assistant—what’s her name? Uh, Maria, right? Maria Ortiz. Was that her?”

  “Uh,” Vivian said, staring toward the second curve in the driveway at the base of the long, sloping lawn. This would bring the cars back into view just before they reached the gated front entrance.

  “Yes,” Jesse answered. How could they have forgotten that the driveway passed by the terrace? Of all the places they could have chosen to keep the curious deputy out of the way, why did they choose the terrace?

  Right on cue the parade of cars emerged from the protective overhang of the old oaks and followed the white gravel strip across the wide, green lawn to the arched iron gateway with the giant “W” centered in the scroll work. An electronic eye parted the twin gates, swinging them wide for the little parade to exit, then quietly closed again. Like the breaking of an hypnotic trance, everyone relaxed and ended the silent stare that had held them all.

  “Well, here you are.” Bliss emerged from the kitchen onto the terrace with a bounce in her step. “That went really.… Oh, hi there, Deputy Murphy, I didn’t realize you were here.”

  Setting down the coffee that had grown cold, Marla rose. “I’ve just been here a few minutes. Sheriff Tyler was hoping you would be able to identify that suit jacket for us today.”