She took a deep breath and tried to formulate a plan to find Jack Landings. She was sure that Sunny would hold a grudge if she brought her back to the groomer the next day to see if he was there.
She was contemplating possible plans of actions when she saw something that she thought might be the answer to her problem. She stood up to make sure that she saw correctly. A man was walking two Irish setters along the shoreline. Remembering that Daniel mentioned those dogs as the reason that Jack had not been at his doggie salon, Lydia jogged over toward them.
“What beautiful dogs,” Lydia said by way of a greeting.
“They sure are,” the man agreed. “They’re going to be models in a tourism commercial for Ocean Point. I’m in charge of them for the next few days.”
“Are you by any chance the man who owns the grooming place in town?” asked Lydia. “My dog, Sunny, just went there. She doesn’t like baths very much, but her fur looks great now.”
“I am the owner,” he said. “And that’s why the mayor though I qualified to care for these dog models. I’m glad that you were satisfied with your dog’s coat. The people who work for me are great. Though I’m usually there myself.”
Lydia thought quickly to come up with a reason to bring up the doctor that wouldn’t seem suspicious.
“I needed to take Sunny to get groomed because of all the smoke in the air from that explosion the other day.”
Jack nodded sadly as the setters began sniffing Lydia, and she stroked their fur.
“The smoke was a problem, and the reason for it is upsetting,” Jack said. “I was at work that day. I was trying to squeeze all my usual appointments in so I would be free to work with these dogs. There was a terrier, Rascal, there as soon as I arrived to open shop that morning and I was grooming dogs all day. I heard people mention a fire, but I didn’t learn someone died until much later.”
“I didn’t know at the time either. But now I know it was a doctor in town.”
“The world lost a great doctor that day,” Jack said. “He was helping me with my allergies. I don’t know if anyone else will be able to make sure that I won’t sneeze when I’m around canines.”
“I can see how that’s important for your line of work.”
“It’s vital. And Dr. Statler was so good. He let me visit him at his home whenever I had a problem. Which was often.”
“So you saw where the fire took place?” Lydia asked. “You had been there before?”
“It looked like the building needed some renovations. I thought the landlady could have done more to fix the place up,” Jack admitted. “And it was strange to have photos on the wall when he covered the face of a woman in most of them with post-it notes. But he made it feel professional when I was there. Which was a lot.”
Lydia was about to ask him about the last time he had been to the doctor’s condo, but then the Irish setters noticed a seagull on the beach and pulled on their leashes to chase after it. Jack followed, and Lydia stood by the water, contemplating their conversation.
Then, she heard Aunt Edie cry out, and Sunny barked. Lydia raced back toward them, feeling terrible that she had left them alone.
However, Aunt Edie was blushing when she returned to their beach chairs. Sunny was sitting next to Aunt Edie but was staring off away from the ocean.
“I hope I didn’t startle you,” Aunt Edie said. “I must have been having a bad dream. I woke up and was afraid I was being watched. I think I scared Sunny because then she started barking.”
Lydia felt a mix of emotions. She was relieved that her aunt and dog were safe and that the cry seemed to be a false alarm. However, as she looked in the direction that Sunny was, she thought it was possible that someone could have hidden behind the dune grass. Maybe Aunt Edie’s sense of being watched was real, after all.
14
So Many Suspects
Aunt Edie and Mona seemed in good spirits as they sat on the porch that night with Lydia and Sunny. They were all enjoying the warm summer evening and some lemonade. However, as much as Lydia enjoyed the company, she didn’t feel as happy as her companions.
She kept thinking about the doctor’s murder and felt at a loss. She knew that the killer had to have a reason for destroying the condo as well as killing the doctor. However, she now felt like she had an abundance of suspects.
She considered them one by one. First, there was the wife, Stella Statler. She and the doctor were going through a divorce, and she would end up with a lot more money if her husband died before the legal proceedings were finished. It didn’t seem like she had an alibi and she had acted very suspiciously in the taffy shop. Maybe she had chosen fireworks because she wanted to destroy any relevant documents related to the divorce. Maybe she might also have collected more insurance from her husband’s death if it were deemed an explosive accident.
Then again, if insurance were a motive, it was possible that Cora was the killer. She told Lydia and the neighbors, Neil and Maggie, that she was having trouble getting the insurance company to pay out. However, she might have been lying to the tenants so they wouldn’t be as demanding. Or, perhaps she had expected a big payout after an explosion in her building and never expected the difficulty in receiving the money. Maybe she had been disappointed romantically with the doctor (because she certainly seemed to have a crush on him) and chose him as the one to kill with the fireworks as she found a way to get funds to improve her building.
There were also the patients to consider. Claudia and Jack both seemed to have alibis, but they might have fabricated them. They had both been to the doctor’s home recently and could have come up with a plan to use the fireworks then.
She considered the possibilities of each scenario and wondered if she was missing something else. Who could have committed this crime? Why did the doctor have to die?
“Lydia?” Aunt Edie said.
“Huh?” Lydia responded.
“I asked if anything was on your mind.”
“Actually, she asked you three times,” Mona said quietly. “And you didn’t respond at all. Which makes it look like there is definitely something on your mind.”
“I’m sorry,” Lydia said. “I guess I was just thinking about Dr. Statler.”
“I think about him too,” Aunt Edie admitted. “I try not to dwell on these thoughts because it’s so sad that we lost him the way we did, and his death reminds me of losing Edgar too. But it’s all right to be sad about this.”
“Were you thinking about how he was killed?” asked Mona. “Did you figure out who the murderer is?”
Aunt Edie looked confused. “What do you mean by that?”
“She’s just teasing me,” Lydia said. “I have no idea who killed Dr. Statler. I wish I did.”
“I guess solving the case still wouldn’t mean that I’d be able to move back home right away,” Mona said. “And even if the fireworks are canceled, we can still enjoy the 4th of July.”
“I do hope there are fireworks,” Aunt Edie said. “But it will be all right if there aren’t any. I’m glad that those I love are safe right now.”
Lydia didn’t want to mention how she was still secretly trying to solve the murder or how she thought she was being followed. Instead, she said, “I’m glad that we’re safe right now too. I was really upset when I thought that Sunny might have been in the fire. I don’t want to think about what it would have been like if I lost her.”
Sunny heard her name and moved closer to Lydia. She started petting the pup who finally seemed to have forgiven them for the bath.
Then, a thought occurred to Lydia. It was incomplete, but she felt like she was closer to solving the case. She tried to figure out the rest of the puzzle to see if this was the answer she had been waiting for.
“Now, what is it?” Aunt Edie asked. “You have that look again.”
“It’s nothing,” Lydia lied quickly. “I was just thinking about taffy.”
15
Chasing a Hunch
Lydia listened carefu
lly. She was laying on her bed, but she was far from falling asleep. Sunny was snoring on one of her pillows, but Lydia was just listening to see if everyone else in the house had finally gone to bed.
When she thought that Mona and her Aunt Edie were finally settled in their rooms, she got up out of her bed. Sunny opened her eyes as she moved. Lydia tried to speak soothingly and convince the dog to go back to sleep, but for once, Sunny didn’t want to nap. She must have sensed that Lydia was up to something and followed her as she tiptoed to the front door.
“You have to stay here,” Lydia said. “I need to do something on my own.”
Sunny let out a small noise of discontent.
“I have to go now. If it’s late at night, there’s a better chance that there won’t be someone following me. Whoever it is will think I’m asleep. And I can’t ask anyone else to risk the trouble I could get into,” Lydia said. She was trying to convince herself just as much as the dog that the scary thing she was about to do was necessary. “But I need to do this. It could unveil the killer.”
Sunny started whining, but Lydia shushed the dog and then kissed her on the head. Then, she snuck out of the house. She made her way to Cora’s Coral Condos and continued on to the marked off crime scene.
She took out the flashlight that she brought specifically for this purpose and shone it inside through a hole in the wall. She hoped that she would be able to find some evidence to point to who she thought the killer was. She knew that Leo and Detective Grey had been going over the crime scene thoroughly, but they hadn’t known what to look for. They might have thought that it was trash or a piece of rubble.
She scanned her flashlight around the room, trying not to think about how a killer might be lurking nearby. Equally scary, she didn’t want to think about what Leo would say if he caught her so close to the crime scene.
“At least I’m not crossing the line of tape,” Lydia muttered to herself.
She kept scanning the room, and then her light fell on something that she thought might be significant. There was a portion of a tea box that had not been completely destroyed on the floor. She adjusted her angle to get a better look but then heard nearby footsteps.
Lydia shut off her flashlight and tried to quiet her breathing.
“Who’s there?” a male voice asked.
This was not a person that Lydia wanted to encounter. She tried to remain calm as she heard Neil move even closer.
“I saw a light,” he said. “Who is there?”
He started shining his own light toward her, and she decided it was better to reveal herself with an excuse than to be discovered.
“It’s Lydia,” she said right before his light was shone on her. “I just wanted to see what progress the police were making, so I could determine when Mona could move back home.”
It was hard to see with the light shining in her face, but she heard Neil sigh.
“Oh, Lydia. I wish I could believe that. Mona doesn’t talk about much with her neighbors. But the one story she did like to tell was how her new boss solved the murder of her old one. You make a habit of getting involved with police cases, don’t you?”
“I wouldn’t call it a habit,” she responded. “And I’m not involved with this one. I just wanted an update on their progress.”
“And what did you discover?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell in this light,” she said. “So, I think I’ll be heading home now. I don’t want my detective brother to catch me out here.”
Neil walked closer to her and then looked through the hole in the wall that she had been peering through. Lydia was about to move away when he grabbed her arm.
“You figured it out, didn’t you?”
“Figured what out?” Lydia asked, playing dumb.
Neil stared at her and sounded very ominous when he said, “You did. And I’ll have to do something about that.”
Lydia didn’t waste another moment. She put her flashlight to use. She shined the light right into his eyes. This disoriented him, and he lost his grip on her arm.
She hit him with her flashlight for good measure to knock him off balance and then began running for it.
Unfortunately, she didn’t get far before he caught up with her. He grabbed her and hit her against the coral building. Some reddish blood soon added to the wall’s color.
16
Big Trouble
Lydia felt woozy. Her head hurt after she had been thrown against the wall. She could barely remember being half-dragged and half-forced into the condo that had once belonged to the doctor.
She tried to get her bearings and began speaking to Neil. “You killed Dr. Statler.”
“Yes. And I’m going to kill you too,” he said. “Right after I finish this.”
Lydia felt in too much of a cloud to be scared by this. However, part of her did realize that she needed to get her brain into gear if she were going to survive. She tried to focus on the facts.
“Do you know how I realized it was you?” she asked.
Neil stopped what he was doing by the remnants of the desk to look at her. “How?”
“Your dog,” Lydia replied. “You needed to make sure that he wasn’t at home at the time of the explosion. Jack Landings said that a terrier was at his door right when he opened. That was your dog, Rascal. You wanted him out of the way of your murderous plot. When I first came to the condo, everyone was holding their prized possessions when they came outside, but you didn’t need to. You had already made sure that your dog was safe. I bet you put the other items you didn’t want to be destroyed somewhere else.”
“That could have been a coincidence,” Neil said.
“I might have believed you if you didn’t just attack me,” said Lydia. “And I bet you wanted me to consider Jack Landings a suspect. It’s a shame that he ended up telling me something that would lead me to knowing it was you, isn’t it?”
“No matter now. Originally, I wanted this all to look like an accident, but you and the police had to undermine my beautiful setup. Now I’ll just need to frame someone for your death in a second explosion. Luckily, I’m prepared.”
He held up a plastic baggie with several pink hairs inside it.
“Cora,” Lydia said. “You took her hair.”
“I picked them up when I went to her office that day that you were there,” Neil said proudly. “I thought I might need a scapegoat. And with the way she is fighting to get large insurance payouts, it will look like she has a motive.”
“But your motive was darker,” Lydia said. “You didn’t kill Dr. Statler for money. You killed him because of what he borrowed from you.”
“I wondered how much you figured out,” Neil said. “But you are right. I lent him a box of tea when he asked for it without thinking. But, of course, that was what I used to kill my wife. When I realized that he knew about my wife’s food allergy, I knew that he would make the connection about what I did. I had to silence him before he could talk to the police. And fireworks seemed like the perfect way to cover it up. I could destroy the tea and any notes he might have made on the matter. If he took out my wife’s medical file, then that would be incinerated too.”
“I can’t believe I felt sorry for you before,” Lydia said.
“If it helps, I feel a little sorry for you,” Neil said. “I’m told death by explosion is painful. And I’ve just set up a second device to go off. I never meant for you to be my third kill. Maybe this is becoming a habit of mine.”
He laughed as he headed to the door. Lydia tried to follow him, but he slammed it in her face. She wondered if there was anyone in this part of the building who might hear her scream.
She waited for the next explosion to begin but then she heard a whacking sound outside the door. The next moment, the door was swung open. Aunt Edie was there in her nightgown holding a frying pan. Neil was lying on the floor.
“I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed a frying pan,” Aunt Edie said.
Lydia was so happy she started cr
ying. “You can borrow anything you ever want!”
Epilogue
“Let me do that,” Daniel offered.
“I am capable of putting a blanket down,” Lydia said, but she allowed him to do it anyway.
They were at the beach ready to watch the fireworks as part of the 4th of July celebration. Lydia was happy that she was well enough to see them after having to spend a day in the hospital for observation. She was also very grateful to her aunt for saving her life so she could be there for the event.
Fireworks and Felonies Page 7
