Murder in Tranquility Park

by J. D. Griffo

“I do consider my nose to be the highlight of my face,” Lori remarked.

  “And then there are the lines around your necks,” Alberta said.

  Grabbing her throat, Sharon exclaimed, “I do not have lines around my neck!”

  “Yes you do,” Lori corrected.

  “I do not!”

  “Stop being so vain!” Lori shouted. “We both do and there’s not a thing we can do about it. It’s just something else we inherited from our mother.”

  “A lot of women have neck wrinkles,” Alberta added. “But both of yours are those crepe paper wrinkles that continue down to your, um, cleavage.”

  “I’m flattered you noticed,” Lori said with a wink.

  “But what put it all together for me was the photo we found from the old issue of The Herald,” Alberta said. “The one with Sharon, Father Sal, and an unidentified young woman behind them. That was you, Lori.”

  “It is?” Jinx shrieked. “How’d you figure that out, Gram? I saw that photo and it doesn’t look anything like Lori.”

  “Sure it does,” Alberta corrected. “She’s much younger, but she still has the small forehead and low hairline and the same blemish on her right cheek. I thought it was part of the photo at first since it was quite old, but when I saw you at the park when we found Kichiro’s body, I noticed it again because you kept turning away and couldn’t look at the body. That and the fact that Sharon is wearing almost the same outfit you wore in that photograph. I knew it was familiar, but I thought it was just the style. Is it the same by any chance?”

  Stunned, Sharon looked at Lori, who just smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Yes, it is actually,” Sharon said. “And I worked damn hard to fit into it.”

  Swinging her legs over the desk, Lori plopped her feet on the floor and with an exaggerated sigh stood up. “Alberta, I am sincerely impressed that you noticed all those little details and added them up to come up with the fact that Sharon and I are sisters,” Lori said. “I don’t think anyone else has a clue that we’re related. Not even that idiot, Father Sal, and he and I were the only ones who knew Sharon wasn’t going to Europe to study, but to give birth.”

  “You mean give Nola up for adoption,” Jinx corrected.

  “Which was my only choice!” Sharon exclaimed.

  Outraged, Jinx took a step toward Sharon, but before she could turn that step into any further action, Lori raised her gun and aimed it directly at Jinx’s face. Alberta grabbed her granddaughter by the arm and pulled her back so she was standing behind her.

  “Looks like Grandma understands the desire to protect the ones she loves,” Lori remarked.

  “I think we’re very much alike when it comes to protecting our family,” Alberta said.

  Relaxing a bit, Lori let the gun hang at her side, her eyes, however, never looked away from Alberta and Jinx. “Sharon always found herself in trouble, ever since she was a kid,” Lori divulged. “And ever since we were kids, I was the one bailing her out.”

  “I never asked for your help!” Sharon screamed.

  “Because you knew you didn’t have to!” Lori screamed even louder. “You knew that every time you screwed up I was going to come to your rescue to clean up your mess.”

  “Like when she found herself pregnant with one man’s baby when she was engaged to someone else,” Alberta stated.

  “Exactly!” Lori confirmed. “If David ever found out you were pregnant, he would’ve called off the engagement right then and there. He was going to give you everything, set you up to live the life you had always dreamed about. His only condition was that he didn’t want children.”

  “I thought he would change his mind if he knew I was pregnant,” Sharon said.

  “So you slept with another man just so you could get pregnant?” Jinx asked.

  “I didn’t know the real reason David didn’t want to have a child,” Sharon said.

  “Which was?” Alberta asked.

  “He carried a gene that almost certainly would’ve caused any child of his to go blind by the age of five, and he refused to take that risk,” Lori explained. “I was a candy striper at the time and saw David in the hospital. I did a little investigating, talked to a chatty nurse, and found out the truth. I also found out that David had a vasectomy so once Sharon told me the delightful news that she was pregnant I knew that it wasn’t David’s child and I knew that David would dump her and she’d be left alone to raise a child as a single mother. That’s when I convinced her to talk to Father Sal. I knew he had helped a few other girls who had found themselves in . . . the family way . . . so I knew he’d be able to help Sharon. And he did.”

  “I didn’t want to go along with it at first,” Sharon said. “I really thought David would want to raise my child as his own.”

  “That’s because you were an idiot!” Lori shouted. “And you still are! No matter how old you are you still act as if you’re this ignorant teenager. No wonder you work in a high school.”

  “I have a very important position here!” Sharon cried defiantly.

  “That you were willing to risk by having an affair with a man half your age!” Lori screamed.

  “So that’s why you killed Kichiro?” Alberta asked rhetorically. “To save your sister’s reputation.”

  “He left me no choice,” Lori revealed. “He was going to ruin Sharon’s life. He was going to finish what Jonas had started.”

  “Per nascondersi a vista,” Alberta muttered to herself. “All this time the truth was right in front of our noses.”

  “You killed Jonas, too?” Jinx asked. “But why?”

  “Because Jonas was the other man from Sharon’s past,” Alberta answered. “But he also wanted to be the man in Sharon’s present and future.”

  “I told you not to move back to this stupid town, Sharon, but no, you wouldn’t listen to me,” Lori ranted. “Because none of the advice I ever gave you was any good!”

  “David wanted to move back,” Sharon protested. “And when I was offered this job how could I say no?”

  “In a million different ways!” Lori screamed. “But no, you had to move to the one town where your ex-lover just happened to live. It was like you were deliberately looking for trouble. And guess what? You found it!”

  “So Jonas wanted to rekindle your romance with you, Sharon?” Jinx asked.

  “Yes,” she admitted. “I told him that I was happily married, and for a while he believed it.”

  “Until he caught you fooling around with Kichiro,” Alberta added. “And then he blackmailed you.”

  “Which is when I moved back to town,” Lori said. “It was obvious that someone had to put a stop to all this nonsense before Jonas blabbed the truth and then Sharon’s life would really spin out of control. It was bad enough that she was having an affair with a cop who was barely out of high school himself.”

  “I loved Kichiro!”

  “No you didn’t!” Lori replied. “You just liked having sex with a much younger man because your husband hasn’t touched you in years.”

  “I thought you said you had a good marriage?” Alberta asked.

  “Alberta, don’t be so naïve,” Lori said. “You should recognize a sham marriage, you had your own.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t look so shocked, research—forensic and otherwise—is my job,” Lori reminded her. “I’ve done my research on you and if you haven’t noticed, our friend Vinny likes to talk.”

  Embarrassed, Alberta kept her focus on Lori, refusing to look over at Jinx, who she knew was doing her best to remain silent. Alberta knew the kind of marriage she had and to herself never embellished, romanticized, or lied. But hearing the truth spoken out loud by a virtual stranger was a completely different story and left her feeling vulnerable and ashamed. She hated the feeling and hated that her negative, self-destructive emotions were linked to her dead husband, who had brought her so many years of agita while he was alive.

  “At least I stood by my husband,” Alberta finally said, knowing tha
t such a decision could not be considered a major accomplishment. “And didn’t wind up being the reason that two men were killed.”

  “Why don’t you fill in the few remaining blanks left, Sharon?” Jinx asked. “Just so we can all be on the same page.”

  “I made the mistake of telling Lori that I saw Jonas watching me and Kichiro using the tree house to . . . to . . .”

  “Have sex,” Lori finished. “We’re all adults here, isn’t that right, Berta?”

  Alberta winced at hearing Lori pronounce the word “adult” the same affected way Sharon did and flashed back to when they were all badmouthing and making fun of Sharon at her kitchen table when Lori was their dinner guest. Alberta knew that she would be furious if she overheard people mocking Helen, so she knew how angry Lori must be.

  “Jonas told me that he had waited long enough for me and that if I didn’t meet him in the tree house, he was going to tell David all about my affair,” Sharon explained.

  “So I dressed up like Sharon, used Kichiro’s retractable ladder, which is really one helluva clever invention, got into the tree house, and waited for Jonas to take the bait, which of course he did,” Lori added.

  “So poor Jonas climbed up the ladder thinking he was finally going to have the rendezvous with Sharon that he had been dreaming about for decades,” Alberta said.

  “And instead he found a cheap imitation,” Jinx finished.

  Lori flicked her gun in Alberta’s direction. “You might want to teach your granddaughter some manners.”

  Ignoring the taunt, Alberta wanted to focus on getting all the details of the story while Lori and Sharon were willing to do their very fine impersonation of the Chatterbox Sisters. “What did Jonas do when he found out he’d been set up?”

  “He did what men always do. He turned into a coward and wanted to run away,” Lori said. “He acted indignant and pathetic and vowed to make me pay for playing him for the fool. He was already a fool wasting his life pining after my sister!”

  “Then how did you convince him to stay?” Alberta asked.

  “By playing to his strength or in this case his weakness,” Lori replied. “He was already a little drunk, guess he had to work up his courage with a few nips from the bottle, so I offered to share my bottle of white wine with him. Pitiful excuse for a man that he was, Jonas jumped at the chance.”

  “That’s when you gave him the wine laced with the pesticide,” Alberta said.

  “The idiot didn’t even notice any difference,” Lori moaned. “And the pesticide does have quite a strong odor, but after a lifetime of heavy drinking your senses dull so he didn’t suspect a thing. He just kept drinking and blabbering on about how Sharon was the only woman he ever loved and he was the only man who could ever make her happy. Such a stupid romantic I almost took a drink of wine so I didn’t have to listen to him any longer.”

  “Then you pushed him out of the tree house to make it look like an accident,” Jinx said.

  “You didn’t have to do that, Lori,” Sharon whined. “Jonas would never have gone to David or the police. He was too much in love with me.”

  Lori lunged at her sister with such speed and ferocity that Sharon stumbled into the wall trying to get out of the way. “You were always such a bleeding heart! Thinking the best of people! Haven’t I always told you that, down deep, people are no good?”

  Thinking that this was a chance to turn the table of power, Jinx stepped forward and reached her arms out to try and grab Lori’s wrist and wrestle the gun away from her. But Lori’s peripheral vision was on red alert and she noticed the movement. At the last second, she whirled her arm back and the gun whacked Jinx on her temple.

  “Jinx!” Alberta cried.

  Jinx lay on the floor for a few seconds while a thin stream of blood ran down the side of her face.

  “Jinx? Mi nipotina?” Alberta whispered. “Wake up, lovey.”

  It took a few seconds for Jinx to respond to Alberta’s command, but finally she did and it was clear that she was stunned and would be bruised, but she wasn’t fatally harmed.

  “Thank God,” Alberta gushed, hugging Jinx close to her body.

  “Seriously, Lori?” Sharon shouted. “Is violence always the answer with you? I thought you would’ve learned your lesson after getting expelled from here.”

  “Shut up!” Lori yelled, her black eyes widening like the centers of two bull’s-eyes.

  Ignoring her sister, Sharon continued to reminisce about Lori’s stormy past. “You always thought you’d get away with everything, no matter how vicious you were. The nuns proved too smart an enemy and they tossed you out of here after that incident in the lab with the frog and that boy.”

  Turning on Sharon, Lori shouted viciously in her face, “I told you to shut up!”

  “What you did to that boy . . . it was horrible!” Sharon screamed. “You deserved to be sent away!”

  “You shouldn’t talk like that to Loretta,” Alberta chastised.

  “Gram, her name is Lori, not Loretta.”

  “Lori’s her nickname, a shortened version, isn’t that right, Loretta?” Alberta asked.

  The long thin line that was Lori’s lips soon curved into a malicious smile. “You really are quite smart for an old lady, I must say. My elders have never given me much reason to demand my respect, but you’re different.”

  “So are you,” Alberta said, trying to keep her own smile on her face. “That’s why you were forced to leave St. Winifred’s.”

  Suddenly Lori’s smile vanished and her jaw clenched and the rest of her face began to be gripped with fear. “You know about that?”

  “I told you that these two know everything!” Sharon barked. “Nola said they were trying to become amateur detectives. I thought she was just bragging and exaggerating like she usually does, but she was right, they stick their noses in every place where they don’t belong, like your past.”

  “Really?” Lori asked, trying desperately to control her mounting fear. “What else do you know of my past?”

  “In Sloan’s research he found an article that a young girl named Loretta was expelled from St. Winifred’s for some lab experiment that went wrong,” Alberta started. “And they made her go to another high school. You were the girl they sent to St. Joe’s.”

  Jinx’s face looked more frightened than Lori’s. “Oh no!”

  “What’s wrong Jinx?” Alberta asked.

  “St. Joe’s isn’t a high school, Gram, it’s a mental institution.”

  “It is not a mental institution!” Lori cried. “It’s . . . a . . . therapeutic . . . facility!”

  Alberta and Jinx both stepped back by the sheer force of Lori’s outburst and grabbed each other’s hands. “How do you know that, lovey?” Alberta asked.

  “Father Sal told us that he counseled kids who were sent there, putting his own life at risk because some of them were violent and beyond reach.”

  Giggling and tilting her head from side to side, Lori confirmed Jinx’s explanation, “Well, yeah, some of us were.”

  “Looks like some of you still are,” Jinx replied.

  Slumping in her chair behind her desk, Sharon looked deflated. “I tried to warn you. I told you both to leave.”

  “And now it’s too late,” Lori stated. “The only thing left to teach the two of you is what I learned at St. Joe’s.”

  Alberta and Jinx looked at each other, one face whiter than the other. Alberta found the strength to speak first. “And what lesson would that be?”

  “That once you’ve killed two people, what’s two more?”

  CHAPTER 23

  Bambina vestita come una donna.

  “You don’t have to do this, Lori,” Alberta said. “We can help you.”

  A huge gale of laughter erupted from Lori’s body. “You think I need help?” Lori asked. “I’m the one with the gun, Alberta, and you and your granddaughter are the ones with about fifteen minutes left to live. I think the HELP sign needs to be hung around your necks and not m
ine.”

  “Lori, we can get you the help you need, trust me,” Alberta said, meaning every word she said. “What you did to Jonas and Kichiro, it wasn’t your fault.”

  “So this is all my fault?” Sharon said, responding to Alberta’s comment as if she were talking about ruining a recipe by using too much garlic instead of double homicide.

  “Shut up, Sharon!” Lori snapped, giving voice to what Alberta was thinking. “This isn’t about you, not every single thing in the world is about you! This is about me and what I’ve done. And sorry, Alberta, but premeditated murder is pretty hard to reconcile even for a nice old lady like you so save your postmortem sympathy spiel because I don’t believe a word of what you’re trying to sell.”

  Before Alberta could continue to try and appease Lori and speak to whatever portion of sanity and logic still resided within her brain, Jinx piped up. “One thing I don’t understand is why you didn’t just fake the toxicology report? You’re the medical examiner, all you had to do was say that there were no drugs found in Jonas’s system and he died from the accident. End of story.”

  “Because of the two of you, that’s why!” Lori yelled. “My original plan was to falsify the report, but ever since you, your grandmother, and the rest of the old ladies in your family decided you wanted to be amateur sleuths, Vinny knows he’s got to cover all his bases so he had two toxicology reports done, one by me and one by an outside service. I had no choice but to tell the truth because of your meddling.”

  Looking up toward heaven, Alberta said, “Thank you, Bocce.”

  “It is good to know that we’re helping improve the police department,” Jinx added.

  “At the expense of your own life,” Lori replied.

  Sharon pounded her fist on her desk as if she was trying to corral an unruly classroom. “You didn’t have to kill Jonas! I was handling him just fine.”

  “Like you were handling your cop boyfriend?” Lori asked. “Or your daughter.”

  Alberta still couldn’t believe that Sharon knew Nola was her daughter all this time and allowed her to suffer in jail and with the possibility of spending her life behind bars for murders she didn’t commit.