Trick or Treachery

by Jessica Fletcher

  “I’m not being critical of you for coming to the party, Lauren,” I said. “But it does mean your husband was away from the party during the time Matilda Swift was murdered—and we know he was extremely angry at her, not only because your daughter visited her that day without telling you, but because Matilda was a stranger here, like Dr. Tremaine. She was someone others gossiped about.”

  Joan Lerner pointed at Wandowski. “I saw you downtown the other day bragging you were going to run Tremaine out of town.”

  Erica Marshall added, “And you’ve been walking around saying you hated these newcomers so much you wanted to move from this estate because of them.”

  “So what?” Wandowski growled. “Everybody who’s mad at somebody doesn’t go around killing them.”

  “Not usually,” I said, “but sometimes they do.”

  Before he could respond, I turned to Erica, who stood between Warren Wilson and Jeremy Scott. “I’m disappointed in you, Erica. You lied, too.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You told me you didn’t know Matilda Swift, had nothing to do with her, had never even had a conversation with her.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you baked cookies with her.”

  “I did not!”

  “Oh, Erica, I think you did. Little Julie Wandowski recognized you. Why would you lie about something as innocuous as that?”

  “Because of . . . him.” She directed her words at her father, Paul. “You told me to have nothing to do with her, and I didn’t want to go against you, but—”

  “But what?” I asked.

  “But I . . . I just found myself coming here to Rose Cottage. I can’t explain it. It was as though there were a magnetic field that pulled me here, a force. I was like a moth, and she was a candle. Oh, God, it sounds so stupid.”

  “Not to me,” Tremaine said.

  I didn’t let him go into one of his explanations about Matilda being some sort of supernatural being. I said to Erica, “Wasn’t it more a matter of not wanting anyone to know you’d struck up a friendship with Matilda, Erica? Because not only were you embarrassed about spending time with this strange woman who’d moved here, you didn’t want your father to know that you were looking for evidence concerning Tony Scott’s death.”

  “Is that true?” Paul asked his daughter.

  Her eyes flared with anger, and her voice mirrored it. “Yes, it’s true. Everyone knows the fire that killed Tony wasn’t an accident.”

  All eyes went to Paul Marshall.

  “How dare you?” he said. “You’ve been hinting for more than a year that I might have had something to do with Tony’s death. The man was like a brother to me, Erica.”

  Warren Wilson weighed in. “Your father is right, Erica. I’ve heard you question whether he was involved in some way with the fire. He’s your own father, for God’s sake. How could you?”

  Erica turned her ire on Warren. “It wouldn’t matter to you whether my father did kill Tony, would it, Warren? The only thing that’s ever mattered to you is my father’s money.”

  I thought for a moment that Warren might physically attack Erica, and was glad when Jeremy took a few steps in order to position himself between them. Tony Scott’s son said, “Now maybe we’re getting someplace.”

  “I know you each have your reasons for lying,” I said, “and even though I’m sure you can justify those lies, I can’t help but wonder whether the underlying reason is to distance yourselves from any possibility of guilt in Ms. Swift’s murder. If you were innocent, there was no reason to deny knowing her.”

  I confronted Jeremy Scott. “Jeremy,” I said, “your lies concern me more than Erica’s and Bob Wandowski’s.”

  “What lies?” he said.

  “About not knowing Ms. Swift. You were in the Rose Cottage on a number of occasions, including just about the time she was killed. Unless, of course, Ms. Swift smoked cigars. As far as I know, she didn’t.”

  Jeremy’s laugh was nervous. “What did you do, Mrs. Fletcher, find a cigar in the cottage and automatically assume it was mine? Lots of people smoke cigars.” He looked around at the others. “What a joke.”

  I smiled. “As a matter of fact, Jeremy, I did find a cigar, and yes, I did assume it was yours. But there’s a good deal more than that to indicate that you and Matilda Swift weren’t strangers. Blood relatives would be a better description of your relationship.”

  The gasp from the group was spontaneous and loud.

  “Blood relatives?” Paul Marshall boomed. “What the hell is she talking about, Jeremy?”

  “My question, Jeremy,” I said, “is when did you learn that Matilda Swift was your father’s sister, your aunt? Before or after you returned to Cabot Cove?”

  “She . . . this is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “She was your aunt, Jeremy?” Erica asked, her voice testifying to her disbelief.

  When he didn’t answer, I did.

  “Anthony Scott and Matilda Swift had been out of touch for a long time. They didn’t know where each other lived until Matilda read about Tony Scott’s efforts to develop BarrierCloth. That’s when Tony discovered that his sister lived in Salem, Massachusetts. He got in touch with her not long before he died.”

  “Why didn’t she just announce who she was when she got here?” Paul Marshall asked.

  “Because she didn’t come to Cabot Cove to be reunited with her brother’s family,” I said. “She came to Cabot Cove to discover who killed him.”

  I held up the letter Artie had shared with me, but I didn’t pass it to anyone. “This explains it quite nicely,” I said.

  “She rented Rose Cottage under false pretenses,” Paul Marshall said. “If I’d known—”

  “If you’d known who she was, Paul, you might not have spent all that money ‘renovating’ Rose Cottage, would you?”

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “You used the excuse of renovating Rose Cottage to search for the formula for BarrierCloth. Even though you’d been told by Tony—and told by Warren, too—that he’d never developed a working formula, you wanted proof. You never found it, did you?”

  “Excuse me,” Warren Wilson said. “This is all very interesting, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me. So that crazy lady was Tony Scott’s long-lost sister. So what? I have better things to do than stand around here and—”

  “It has everything to do with you, Warren,” I said. “I suggest you stay a little longer. Mr. Tremaine has promised us a visit from The Legend.”

  Wilson shook his head. “Has everybody gone nuts? The Legend of Cabot Cove? That’s just a crazy myth.” He looked at Lucas Tremaine, who now leaned against the brick wall, arms folded in defiance, a smirk on his face. “Is this one of your con games, Tremaine? You belong in jail.”

  “You lied, too, Warren,” I said.

  He fixed me in a hard stare. I ignored it and said, “At the party, you said you’d never been to Rose Cottage since Matilda moved in. Yet you claimed that the scratches on your hand came from Matilda Swift’s cat.”

  “That’s hardly important.”

  “But you weren’t telling the truth either time. I remembered that cat jumping down on Artie’s shoulder and thinking it must hurt to have its claws digging in. But Artie said the cat couldn’t hurt anyone. At first I thought he was talking about its disposition. But the fact is, the poor thing has been declawed, so it couldn’t have scratched your hand.”

  “You’re right, Jessica. It wasn’t the cat that scratched me. It was . . . I scratched it on a . . . on a wire in my apartment.”

  “No, Warren, I think you scratched it right here, at Rose Cottage. As beautiful as roses are, they have very sharp thorns.”

  “Why would he be handling the rose bushes?” Paul Marshall asked. “He’s no gardener.”

  “He was looking for something,” I said.

  “Looking for what?” Marshall asked.

  “He was hoping to find this,” I said, ag
ain holding up the letter Artie Sack had recovered for me from the barn. “Maybe if I read it, things will become clear.”

  “Go ahead, Jessica,” Seth said.

  I adjusted my half-glasses on my nose, cleared my throat and began reading:Dear Matilda:

  It’s unfortunate that we have found each other so late in our lives. I would have enjoyed knowing my sister years ago, when things in my life were happy and relatively carefree. But that is no longer the case, and I’m compelled to write to you in the hope that you will do the right thing by my son, Jeremy, should anything happen to me.

  I don’t say this as a doomsayer. But certain events have recently taken place that cause me to question whether my life might be in danger.

  Paul Marshall interrupted by laughing. “Poor, paranoid Tony,” he said, shaking his head. “He was accident-prone, as anyone who knew him can testify to. The last six months of his life, he really started going off the deep end, imagining someone was out to get him, run him over, drop something on his head.”

  “You know what they say,” Seth said in response. “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t following you.” To me he said, “Go on, Jessica. Continue reading.”

  As I’ve told you, I’ve been working for more than a year on a formula for a new lining for our outerwear that is warmer and lighter than our competitors’. I thought I’d been successful, but there was the problem of it not meeting federal flammability standards. I’ve been working day and night to solve this problem, and only last night came up with the answer. That should be considered good news.

  Ordinarily, I would have immediately shared this news with my partner, Paul Marshall, but I’ve grown not to trust him.

  I glanced at Marshall, whose expression said he’d heard quite enough and was about to leave. “Please stay, Paul,” I said. Confident he would, I continued.

  Paul has brought in a new VP named Warren Wilson. Warren and I have become friends, and from what he’s told me, my distrust of Paul is certainly justified, particularly where the formula for BarrierCloth is concerned. I decided that I needed some way of protecting myself and the formula, and have turned to Warren in this regard.

  “What the hell is he talking about?” Paul growled at Warren, who averted his boss’s eyes.

  “I think it will be explained shortly,” I said, picking up in the letter where I’d left off.

  Warren and I have entered into a business partnership. In return for one half ownership in my formula for BarrierCloth, he has given me $300,000, and has arranged to seek a patent and trademark through a venture capital company of his own in Vermont, Nutmeg Associates.

  Paul interrupted my reading again by shouting at Warren and shaking a finger for emphasis. “I’ll have you arrested, Wilson, for fraud and theft of company secrets.”

  Wilson, to my surprise, took steps toward Paul, rather than backing away under his verbal attack. “Tony was right,” Warren said, thrusting his chin at Paul. “You would have stolen the formula and cut him out. I was protecting Tony. I only wish I could have protected him from murder—his murder in that fire.”

  Jeremy sarcastically applauded Warren’s speech, causing the beefier Wilson to make a fist and shake it at Tony Scott’s son.

  “No sense becoming upset, Warren,” I said. “But I must admit I’m having trouble understanding your allegiance to Tony Scott.”

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

  “It seems from Tony’s letter to his sister that he threw you, his new partner, a nasty curve,” I said. I didn’t give him a chance to reply and started reading again.

  I suffered quite a bit of guilt, Matilda, selling the formula to someone other than my partner of many years. I sometimes wonder whether I’m too suspicious of those around me, too quick to question their motives. But I know I’m right in this case if I’m to benefit myself from my work, and see to it that those I love reap the rewards after I’m gone. That’s why I did what I had to do with Warren Wilson after taking the money from him.

  “What did he do to you, Warren?” Erica asked.

  “Nothing. He was obviously going mad. You can tell from this stupid letter that he was nuts.”

  “Paranoid perhaps,” I said, “but maybe he had cause to be. Let me finish the letter.”

  Because Warren was willing to sell out Paul Marshall, I became convinced he’d do the same to me. So, I provided Warren with a fake version of the formula, one I knew wouldn’t pass muster in any lab. Warren has submitted the unworkable formula to the patent and trademark office, which, as a huge bureaucratic agency, will probably take years to come to a decision.

  In the meantime, I intend to hide the working formula I perfected last night until I’ve had a chance to decide how best to protect it so that Jeremy will benefit one day. The cottage I live in on Paul’s estate is called Rose Cottage. It has a long brick wall covered with prize-winning roses. I love it here. It’s peaceful and quiet, things I treasure in life. If I should die, you’ll be able to find the new formula, the one that works, in that wall, behind the bricks. Artie the gardener will show you where. I trust him implicitly. Should anything happen to me, I beg you to come here, retrieve the true formula, and take all necessary steps to secure the proper trademark for it and arrange for Jeremy to reap whatever rewards there might be.

  But I ask one thing of you, Matilda. Do not let Jeremy know that you are his aunt, or that he stands to benefit from the formula, until the truth has come out.

  Thank you, Matilda. It gives me considerable comfort that I can ask this of someone whose blood I share, rather than entrusting it to strangers who can never be trusted.

  Your loving brother, Tony

  When I finished reading, I slowly lowered the letter and took in everyone’s faces. To say shock was written on most of them would be an understatement.

  “The formula for BarrierCloth,” I said. “The true formula. Must have been upsetting, Warren, when you found out you paid a lot of money for the wrong formula.”

  Paul Marshall grabbed Warren’s arm. “You told me Tony said he’d never perfected the formula.”

  I continued, still looking at Warren. “The formula you’d registered for trademark protection under Nutmeg Associates, your Vermont corporation, instead of Marshall-Scott, didn’t work, did it, Warren?”

  Paul roared. “Nutmeg Associates?”

  Warren turned to Paul. “Don’t listen to her, Paul. She’s as crazy as the Swift woman was. I was protecting you. Tony Scott was a bad guy. He sold out everybody.”

  “Hey, that’s my father you’re trashing,” Jeremy shouted.

  Marshall glared at his vice president. “Protecting me? By registering the formula in another corporation’s name?” He looked at me. “Go on, Jessica, I’ve suddenly developed a keen interest in what you’re saying.”

  But Warren spoke first. “I see what you’re getting at, Jessica. Of course. Paul here found out that his partner had sold him down the river. So he killed him and set that fire to cover it up.”

  “I knew it,” Erica said, beginning to cry.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “No, Warren, I think it was you who killed Tony Scott in anger over having given him all that money for a worthless formula. You figured you had the true formula, and told Paul that Tony hadn’t been able to perfect it. But then you discovered through the lab in Vermont—Excel Laboratories—that it would never pass a government flammability test. What happened then, Warren? Did you demand the money back from Tony? Did he balk? He certainly was more cunning than his reputation as a mild-mannered, accident-prone inventor would suggest. I wouldn’t blame you for being angry at him but—”

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” Warren said.

  “What about Ms. Swift?” Seth asked.

  “Yes, what about her?” Warren said, turning and pointing to Jeremy. “He’s the one who benefits from her death.”

  “Jeremy didn’t know Matilda was his aunt,” I said. “He had no idea that his father had wr
itten the letter to Matilda, or that Matilda, his aunt, had taken out a half-million-dollar life insurance policy before coming here, with Jeremy as the beneficiary.”

  “A half million?” Jeremy said, incredulous.

  “No,” I said, “Jeremy didn’t have a motive to kill Matilda because he wasn’t aware of his relationship to her.” I fixed my eyes on Warren. “You searched Rose Cottage on Halloween night, looking for the real formula, Warren. Matilda Swift caught you, and when she ran for help, you followed her outside, grabbed the shovel and killed her.”

  “You’re crazy. You can’t prove a thing.”

  “I disagree, Warren,” I said. “Everyone, it seems, has been operating out of greed and paranoia. This distinguished family and its business perhaps isn’t as distinguished as it appears on the surface. But greed and paranoia aren’t crimes. Murder is. You’re the only one, Warren, who truly had reason to kill Tony Scott and then Matilda Swift. And now that your business relationship with Tony Scott has been revealed, and your lies about never having had any contact with Matilda are factored in, I think Sheriff Metzger and his law enforcement colleagues won’t have much of a problem convincing a jury of your guilt.”

  Warren’s expression turned from defiance to panic, and he looked as though he might bolt. I peered into the darkness toward the rear of the cottage. “Sheriff,” I shouted, “I think it’s time for you and your deputies to join the party.”

  Mort, followed by Wendell and Harold, emerged from the shadows.

  “Got anything to say, Mr. Wilson?” Mort asked Warren.

  “Go to hell,” he said.

  “How could you?” Erica said. “You kept telling me you knew my father had arranged for Tony to be killed in the fire. And I believed you.” She turned to her father. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  Mort’s deputies moved to either side of Warren. “You’re under arrest,” Mort said as Harold and Wendell each took one of Warren’s arms.

  Then Mort looked at me. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Where’s the real formula you’ve been talking about?”