Shelley Freydont - Celebration Bay 03 - Independence Slay

by Shelley Freydont

  “He was always a sweet boy,” Ida said.

  “He was hell on wheels from the time he got his first tricycle,” Edna said. “But so interesting. Lord, always getting into trouble.” She frowned. “Not real trouble, just pranks, and so curious about everything. I could have used a hundred students like him.”

  “A hundred students like Chaz and you’d been sent off for the cure, Edna.”

  Edna made a face at her sister, ran her finger over her plate, and licked the last of the cake icing off it.

  That earned her a frown from Ida. “If you want more cake, Edna, you just need to ask.”

  “I don’t want more. I wanted to lick icing off my finger. The privilege of retirement. So was he home?”

  “Yes, but…” Liv wondered how much she should divulge about the status of the local editor.

  “But what?”

  “When I got there, he didn’t look very good. Actually he looked awful.” Liv paused. He’d probably kill her if she blabbed about his slovenly state to the sisters. Or about the way he and Bill had been acting. And what part her butting in might have played in it. But she needed some advice.

  “Well, the house was dark and locked. So I let myself in. The kitchen was a mess.”

  “Just like a man,” Ida said.

  “But worse. He hadn’t shaved or bathed in I don’t know how long. It was like he just didn’t care.”

  Edna nodded. “Took the outcome of that murder trial hard. I was afraid of that.”

  “You knew about the case?”

  “Sure we did. We’ve been following it on the Internet. And when we heard the outcome on the news last week, we thought he might be upset.”

  “Probably feels like it’s his fault,” Ida agreed.

  “His fault?” Liv said. “From what I read, the evidence he turned up during his investigation was pivotal in bringing it to trial at all.”

  Edna put her plate down. “But it wasn’t enough to convict the man.”

  “And you think he feels responsible?” Liv was having a hard time reconciling the lethargic, laid-back Chaz with this paragon of morality and responsibility.

  “Of course he must be taking it hard,” Ida said. “His father was so proud of him. We all were.”

  Liv let that sink in before she said, “He was very successful, from what I understand.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “So successful that he gave it up to run his father’s local newspaper?” Liv asked.

  “Now, Liv,” Edna said. “His family needed him. He’s also loyal, no matter what some people might think. He came back to his roots.”

  Ida sighed. “Now, if he’d just settle down with a nice—”

  “What do you know about Henry Gallantine?” Liv asked before Ida could finish her sentence.

  “Another one who left and came back.”

  “Leo isn’t the only one with a crazy mother,” Edna added. “Henry’s mother, Maddie, erred on the opposite side. Smothered that boy with her doting and ambition.”

  “Poor Henry,” Ida said. “She took him to New York to audition for a part in a movie they were making. He was a handsome boy and very photogenic. Next thing everyone knows, she’d packed up the baby and Henry and took them both to live in Hollywood.”

  “Left her husband behind. No one heard from her again,” Edna said.

  “Just what we read in the papers. We saw a couple of movies Henry was in. He was a good little actor. Then he had a television series for a while.”

  “What about the sister? Did she become an actor, too?”

  “Not that we ever heard of,” Edna said. “I know she came back to visit a few times, but then she just sort of dropped out of sight until she came to keep house for the current Henry. But that was a long time ago.”

  “So why did Henry leave Hollywood to return home?” Liv asked.

  “Sad, really,” Ida said.

  “The same thing that happens to most child stars happened to Henry,” Edna said.

  “He grew up and couldn’t get parts?” Liv guessed.

  The sisters nodded together.

  “Stuck it out for a while, picking up small parts in bad movies. Finally I guess he just gave up and came back to live like a hermit in that old mansion, just like his father before him,” Edna said. “But I remember the day he came back to town, driving a big old Lincoln, he looked like a young Robert Redford. The whole town lined the streets, waving and applauding. But he just drove straight through town to that big old house without even looking out the window to see.”

  “I imagine he was embarrassed,” Ida said.

  Edna nodded. “Sad. At first he tried to get involved in things, but the spirit was just gone out of him. That’s when his sister moved in with him to keep house, but talk about your hell on wheels. That boy of hers was incorrigible and spoiled to boot. Henry couldn’t stand him.”

  “Well, he was a horrible child,” Ida agreed. “And you know I love children. But this boy stole and lied and made mischief every chance he got. Henry finally had to send them packing.”

  “Grew up to be a horrible adult from what we hear,” Edna said.

  Ida tsked. “A pity. And after all Henry had done for them. Henry was like that. Always kind to the kids, gave to various charitable causes, tried to start up a theater group for a while, but couldn’t keep enough people interested.”

  “And,” Edna said, “turned out just like his father. Henry’s father never got over his wife and son leaving. And seems like the same thing’s happened to this Henry.”

  “He never married?”

  The sisters both shook their heads and sighed.

  “Such a shame, such a dashing young man. Ida, is there more tea in that pot?”

  Ida poured Edna another cup. “Liv?”

  “No, thanks.” Henry certainly didn’t sound like a man who would commit murder. Unless, as Bill had suggested, he’d gone round the bend. “Just out of curiosity, what happened to Henry’s mother and father?”

  “Maddie did lose her mind—so sad—ended up in an asylum in Los Angeles,” Ida said.

  “And Henry.” Edna stopped to shake her head. “The housekeeper found him dead one night out by the hedge. They declared it a heart attack, but some people think he threw himself off the roof out of loneliness.”

  “Which he brought on himself,” Ida said with a hint of exasperation, which she seldom showed. “He had good neighbors, and before Maddie and the children left, he had good friends. He could have turned to them, but he chose to lock himself up and pine away.”

  Unlike either of the sisters when they’d lost their fiancés to war. They had gotten on with their lives, become teachers, taught a whole generation of Celebration Bay men and women. Productive, nurturing, and well loved.

  And what about Chaz? Was that what he was doing? Cutting himself off from the world? She wasn’t really worried. She’d managed to badger him into helping Leo today. Whether he would continue to do so was another story.

  Hopefully Bill would catch the killer before it was put to the test.

  Ida leaned over and patted Liv’s knee. “You don’t worry about a thing. Just stick to your lesson plan like we showed you, and we’re sure you and Chaz will get to the bottom of this in no time.”

  My lesson plan, Liv thought as she and Whiskey walked up the drive to her house. How had it come to this, that a person whose forte was organizing parties and corporate events somehow kept getting involved in murder investigations?

  It wasn’t just because she was nosy. “I’m not nosy, am I?”

  “Arf,” Whiskey said, and took off for his nightly inspection of the shrubbery.

  “I take that as a no.”

  When Whiskey reappeared, Liv went inside, but not to bed.

  Her laptop was calling. She kicked off her shoes and sat do
wn at her desk.

  After a few minutes, Whiskey gave up standing in the doorway to her bedroom waiting for her to come to bed, yawned, padded over to the desk, and flopped down across her bare feet.

  “Have I told you lately you’re the best dog in the whole world?”

  Whiskey made one of those long whining yawns. Shook his muzzle and promptly fell asleep.

  Liv clicked on the template she’d made for her last adventure into things that she shouldn’t look into. She’d saved it in a folder labeled LPFM. Lesson Plan for Murder.

  She sat staring at the empty columns. She hadn’t expected to have to use it after the incident of the Harvest by the Bay Festival, when the sisters had first suggested she approach her questioning as they would a lesson plan.

  But she must have had some intuition that she might need it again, since she’d saved it as a template. And here she was again, though Liv was appalled at having to admit that she might consider investigating on her own.

  Well, she rationalized, she was just living up to expectations. And besides, even though she insisted she wasn’t a control freak and always delegated duties, in truth, deep down inside, she was a control freak. Was it her fault that she wanted to be the best, do the best, hire the best, have the best outcomes?

  Which brought her back to the first excuse—reason—for her meddling: looking into things. She had a festival at stake. She began to type.

  “Jacob Rundle murdered on the roof as he participated in the reenactment. Gardener. Case of mistaken identity?” Question mark.

  The Motive column she left blank. Though in the Comments column she entered: “Why would someone want to kill a gardener?” And another big question mark. For mistakenly mowing over the daylilies? For overwatering the cactus, for hitting a water main when digging out the— She didn’t write any of that down. It sounded too ridiculous.

  She stopped. Thought.

  Leo had said he and Henry had found some treasure, but not the “real” treasure. What if the gardener had been digging and accidentally uncovered the “treasure.” Would he have turned it over to Henry, or would he have opened it first? If it were gold would he just have taken it with no one the wiser? But if it were a document, as Ted suggested, and if he’d found something incriminating about Henry’s ancestor, would he generously hand it over and promise to never tell, or destroy it, nobly keeping his employer from disgrace?

  Nah, not the Jacob Rundle she’d seen in action. If it were gold, Rundle would have kept it. And if it were a document, he would have offered to give it back—for a price.

  She entered two words in the Motive column to the right of Rundle’s name. “Theft, Blackmail??” Put two question marks beside it. Already she was picking holes in that theory. If she were going to blackmail someone, she wouldn’t have dressed up as a patriot to meet her victim on the roof in the middle of a pageant with an audience of close to a thousand people sitting below.

  She would have just gone into the house, taken Henry aside, and asked for a reward or blackmailed him with what she’d found.

  And why on earth would Henry agree to meet him on the roof, when Hildy and Leo had said he didn’t like Rundle in the house. Maybe because the roof wasn’t the house?

  Only, instead of getting money from Henry, Henry killed him?

  And that would certainly take care of the question of how the killer had escaped. He’d just gone back inside. Did Hildy know? That would make her an accomplice, even if it were after the fact.

  And how had he eluded the police? Ted, Liv, and A.K. had gotten there within a few minutes… unless Rundle was dead before the first signal was given. It was possible that Henry had been on the roof to give the signal and had given it.

  Then Leo interrupted him, and he had to do something drastic. Like jump over the parapet and climb back into the house. But the dust hadn’t been disturbed on the floor; Chaz had said he would have to have flown.

  But there was the folding-stair entrance. Maybe he hadn’t just disappeared, but made a big show of it, and while Leo covered his head in fear—which Liv had seen him do—Henry just climbed back down the stairs.

  But why hadn’t Leo recognized him?

  Or had he and just not made the connection yet? He’d been dressed like the ghost… because he was playing the ghost, like he did every year. He’d probably planned to get away before the body was discovered.

  She leaned back and looked at her screen. So far the only motive she had was connected to the treasure or the purported treasure. But she had a lot of unanswered questions. Like why do it now with so many people around and when he was supposed to be at his sister’s, where his alibi could be checked?

  It didn’t make sense.

  And if Henry didn’t kill Rundle, someone else had…

  Henry Gallantine should have been portraying the ghost on the roof that night. But as far as they knew, he hadn’t given the signal but left Jacob Rundle to do it. And he’d never made it to his sister’s. His car was missing and so was he.

  Maybe he was dead, too.

  She added this to her lesson plan and looked over her columns. So far she had three people—Henry, Jacob, Leo. Two motives—gold, document. Questions—nearly twenty. Answers—goose egg. She yawned. She was getting too tired to think straight. But her mind was turning too fast to go to sleep.

  She went to IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, and typed in “Henry Gallantine.” Spent a few minutes reading about his movies, looking at photos and video clips. There were a couple of him at award functions several years back.

  He’d been a cute kid and not a bad actor if the short clips she watched were any indication. He was still a good-looking man, not terribly tall, maybe five ten, but fit.

  Formal, charming, and distinguished looking. Was he in good enough shape to leap to a parapet and jump to the ledge beneath, climb through the window or jump through the opening to the folding stairs, and make his escape before the police arrived?

  Was he hidden inside the massive old house, and then, once the coast was clear, would walk out to wherever his car was parked and drive away… to where? Had he already escaped?

  Liv searched the Internet for a stream of his old movies. Most weren’t available, but there was a version of Treasure Island.

  Perfect. A period piece about a treasure. A fitting end to the weekend.

  She stretched, dislodging her sleeping dog. Disgruntled, he got to his feet and padded off to his own bed. Liv curled up on the couch and started the movie.

  It only took a few minutes for Liv to be hooked. Henry Gallantine was one likable kid on screen. An enticing teen-idol type. And his Jim Hawkins was a perfect foil to Long John Silver.

  And she wasn’t at all surprised when Henry, being chased around the ship, climbed nimbly up the mast only to swing across the bow on the rigging to land on the other side of the deck.

  • • •

  When Liv woke up the next morning, the first thing she thought of was that she wouldn’t have to wear red, white, or blue to work. The second thing she thought was, Has Bill caught the murderer yet? And the third, Did Henry Gallantine do his own stunts?

  She hurried through her morning routine, anxious to get to the office and hear the latest, but when it came time to leash Whiskey, he refused to budge.

  “What?”

  He padded into the living room and put his feet up on the desk chair. And Liv saw what he was waiting for. His stars-and-stripes bandanna lay where she’d taken it off him the night before.

  “You are such a fashion hog.” She tied it on him and they started off to work. She was halfway there when she began to feel that post-event letdown funk. It always happened, like walking to a cliff edge—or a parapet—and falling over, the image of Chaz disappearing over the side of the wall still vivid in her mind. Her stomach did a sympathetic flip.

  In Manhattan she just tried
to keep going, maybe had a morning of exhaustion followed by some retail therapy and it was off to the next project.

  Now she was about to have several weeks where she wasn’t really needed. Which was a good thing.

  She could work on her recap of the year, find the things that hadn’t run as smoothly as they should have, bookmark things that were working fine, come up with plans for improvement. Start on her projections for next year. Look for new holidays and events to add to the roster.

  She could get back to running consistently. She really needed the exercise—fit body, fit mind.

  Maybe even take a few days totally off. Feet up, book open, air-conditioner turned up to near freezing; television on mute while she drank iced tea in her pajamas.

  She could take up crocheting, or quilting. There were so many things to do in Celebration Bay if she only had the time.

  But she wouldn’t have time. Especially if people kept getting murdered. Hopefully the murders they’d experienced were just an aberration and not a trend.

  She picked up pastries and coffee, but both places were busy with customers and Dolly and BeBe didn’t have time to talk. Which was just as well. They’d only want to talk about the murder, and Liv really just wanted it to be over.

  She climbed the steps to Town Hall. Whiskey sat at the closed door of the Events Office while Liv dropped the leash, anticipating his mad scramble to Ted and their daily songfest. She opened the door. Whiskey jumped in. There was no Ted.

  Whiskey went to the desk. Sniffed around Ted’s chair. Looked back at Liv.

  “Beats me,” she told him. “Maybe he’s taking a late morning.” That would be a first. But they had been running at full throttle for seven months. They both could use some downtime.

  Liv put the bakery bag and cups on Ted’s desk and went back to shut the door. But before she reached it, Whiskey shot out into the hallway.