To Helen Back: A River Road Mystery

by Susan McBride

  He shuffled papers until he found the list he’d made with suspects to interview. It had two names freshly added: Earnest Fister and his daughter Madeline.

  He put aside the pen and rubbed his eyes.

  Instead of his list getting smaller, the number of suspects only seemed to have grown. The deeper he poked into Milton Grone’s murder, the more motives he dug up. Although almost all of those under suspicion appeared to have an alibi for the time of the crime, Biddle didn’t believe everything was so clear-cut. Folks didn’t always remember things straight. The brain was a tricky organ. Sometimes it got mixed up.

  River Bend was a community of two hundred people. To call it small was an understatement. It was only a mile from one end of town to the other, which would have made it pretty simple for someone to show up at the town meeting on Thursday, duck out, then return fifteen minutes later with no one the wiser.

  He thumbed through his notes from the interviews thus far, trying to pick out any discrepancies. Though he stared and stared, he could find no blatant holes, nothing that reached out and grabbed him.

  Ida Bell and Dot Feeny were at town hall, something board chairman Art Beaner verified, which afforded him an alibi of his own. Felicity Timmons had been there, too, right beside Helen Evans. Earnest Fister had conveniently been on Mrs. Evans’s other side.

  Madeline Fister claimed to have been home all evening, watching TV in the house she shared with her father, just a block from the Grones’. She said she fell asleep on the couch and was awakened by the toll of the chapel bell, which would have rung at eight o’clock, when the town meeting ended. She did admit to hearing some loud pops, like the fireworks on July Fourth, sometime before then. But they could’ve come from the television, she’d told him, as she’d had a cop show on when she dropped off.

  What if those pops weren’t from the TV—well, at least one of them? Frank wondered. Maybe the noise from the show had disguised Milt’s shotgun going off. That would have fit in the timeline he’d drawn up for the murder. Not that it would help Maddy. Her alibi was hardly airtight.

  Frank drew a question mark beside the girl’s name.

  The sheriff had interviewed Fister’s daughter after the preacher dragged the girl in by the arm and ordered her to talk. She’d tried to act tough, but Frank saw that she was afraid. And she had good reason. Fister had informed him about Grone’s affair with the girl and how Grone had gotten her pregnant before he dumped her. Could she have struck Milton with the shovel after he broke her heart?

  Or had the pastor done the deed himself, so angry at the older man for taking advantage of his daughter that he’d forgotten all about the commandment that said, “Thou shall not kill”?

  Sorry, preacher.

  Frank drew a question mark beside the minister’s name as well.

  The weight of the case hung around him like an albatross. He frowned and closed the case file, shoving it into his top drawer. Then he rose from his chair and stretched his back, eliciting an unsettling series of pops.

  He plunked on his hat and closed up shop, heading home to Sarah and dinner of tuna casserole; though the questions about Milton’s murder wouldn’t leave his head. They flooded his every thought, turning them as thick and muddy as the Mississippi River.

  Chapter 28

  HELEN HAD INTENDED to cancel her Monday night bridge party because of the murder and all. But when she’d called around, her plan had met with such resistance that she decided the show would go on.

  “Why on earth would we miss bridge?” Clara Foley had gasped. “To honor the memory of Milton Grone? Please!”

  The sentiment had been echoed, more or less, by all the girls.

  So Helen pushed her wicker to the walls and set up three card tables with folding chairs on the porch. By seven o’clock the rise and fall of laughter and voices filled the air like summer cicadas.

  Helen sat between Fanny Melville and Bebe Horn, attorney Stanley’s wife. Her partner, Clara Foley, glanced at the hand she’d been dealt and then up at Helen. Her plump face broke out in a grin. “We’re hot today,” she declared, “hotter than a witch’s—”

  “Clara”—Helen sent her a look of warning—“no table talk.”

  Fanny Melville peered through her bifocals at the score pad near Helen’s right elbow. “Well, I hope you can open,” she said to Bebe. “The way we’re playing, I don’t think even one of Doc’s vitamin shots could revive our score.”

  “Yeah, that’s the spirit,” Bebe said, and shook her head. She gave her hand a final once-over before she announced, “I bid one no trump.”

  “What an optimist you are!” Clara chuckled. “The only way you’ll pull this off is if Fanny has some cards up her sleeve.”

  “Oh, hush up, would you, and let’s get on with the game,” Helen said, wishing she’d partnered with Lola Mueller or Bertha Beaner, anyone who didn’t talk so much. She was in no mood for chatter. No mood for bridge, to be honest.

  She had too much on her mind, though the aftermath of Milton’s murder didn’t seem to be troubling the others in her bridge club. She sighed impatiently then prodded at Clara, “Go on and bid, dear. We haven’t got forever.”

  “Okay, okay.” Clara checked her hand. “Guess I’ll double that no trump of yours, Bebe,” she declared, looking smug.

  “Fanny,” Helen said, trying to nudge the game along. If the pace didn’t pick up, it was certainly going to be a long evening. “Hurry up.”

  Fanny rearranged several cards fanned out in her hands and shook her head. She looked up at Bebe and shrugged. “Sorry, hon, but it looks like I’m gonna have to pass.”

  Helen smiled. Perhaps this game wouldn’t drag on forever after all. “Two hearts,” she said to Fanny’s moan and Bebe’s frown.

  “Good goin’, partner,” Clara cheered, and slapped the tabletop.

  “If I didn’t know better,” Fanny muttered, “I’d say the deck was stacked.”

  As Bebe had dealt this round, she glanced over at Fanny, looking apologetic. Then she stared at her cards for a full minute before murmuring, “Oh, my. I’ll have to pass as well.”

  “C’mon, Bebe,” Clara teased, “where’s your killer instinct? I mean, you are married to a shark. Some of it should’ve rubbed off after all these years.”

  Helen sighed.

  But Bebe seemed not to take offense. “Like I haven’t heard every lawyer joke there is,” she said with a laugh. “Speaking of Stanley”—Bebe leaned over the table—“guess who showed up at his office this morning?” Before anyone could say a word in response, she announced, “Mrs. Grone!”

  Though it was no surprise to Helen, Clara and Fanny seemed to eat it up.

  “Shotsie?” Fanny inquired.

  “No, no,” Bebe replied, and toyed with her cards. “Not the current wife, the first one, Delilah. She wanted to know about Milton’s will.”

  “Well, butter my biscuits,” Clara quipped, her eyes wide. “I didn’t think she’d show her face in this town again after what happened at the church during Milton’s funeral.”

  “Do tell,” Fanny said, egging her on. “Is she getting anything? The way they fought before their divorce, I can’t believe he’d leave her a penny.”

  Bebe shifted in her seat, looking around her before she said in a whisper, “I’m not supposed to gossip about Stanley’s clients.”

  Clara snorted. “It’s not like you haven’t done it before.”

  Even Fanny clicked tongue against teeth. “You know it won’t go past us.”

  Helen had to press her mouth shut or she’d have snapped at Fanny about talking out of turn about Madeline Fister. Now wasn’t that time. She’d deal with Fanny later.

  “All right, all right, since you insist,” Bebe said, giving in, her voice barely audible as she confessed, “Delilah isn’t mentioned in the will at all and neither are her kids.”


  Clara shrugged. “That doesn’t surprise me in the least. Milton Grone never cared about anyone but himself.”

  Fanny lifted her eyebrows. “If that’s true, then Delilah had no motive to kill him, did she?”

  “Was she a suspect?” Bebe asked.

  “Who isn’t?” Clara remarked.

  “Girls, please,” Helen chastised. “Let’s get back to the cards.”

  But no one seemed to listen.

  “If the sheriff suspected Delilah, it was probably because she was the only one of Milton’s enemies who wasn’t at the town meeting on Thursday,” Clara said with a jiggle of jowls. “You were there, weren’t you, Bebe?”

  “Yes, but we snuck in late.” Bebe’s head bobbed. “Stan had to meet with a client in Grafton and I went along, so we missed the first minute or two.”

  Helen hadn’t recalled seeing them at all; but the hall had been unusually full so it was impossible to remember all the faces.

  “Were you in the back?” she asked. “Somewhere near Shotsie Grone?”

  Bebe pressed a finger to her chin. “I do remember looking around when the ruckus started, and there she was. But I hadn’t noticed her before.”

  “She made a point to be seen,” Clara drawled. “Talk about stealing the show! I’m surprised Art Beaner didn’t have a stroke, losing control the way he did. And then Ida nearly took a swing at Shotsie before she stormed out like General MacArthur.”

  “Ahem.” Helen cleared her throat. “Girls, do you imagine we could get back to the game? Or is it going to be called on account of gossip?”

  Clara didn’t look pleased but did pick up her hand.

  Fanny and Bebe exchanged glances, then the latter meekly asked, “Does anyone know whose turn it was?”

  Within an hour they’d played out the cards, and Helen and Clara had emerged victorious again.

  Helen slipped away to the kitchen as the other two tables finished their games. She retrieved a pitcher of tea from the refrigerator and was pouring it when Fanny walked in.

  “What’s going on with you, Helen? You’re being a real party pooper tonight,” Doc’s wife remarked as she plucked a glass of tea from the tray. “And don’t tell me it has to do with Grone’s death. You didn’t like the man any better than the rest of us.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Helen murmured, and finished filling all the glasses.

  “So why are you so gloomy? I’ve never known you to pooh-pooh us enjoying a good chat during bridge before.”

  Helen set aside the pitcher and turned to face her friend. “Since you asked,” she said, and crossed her arms, staring straight into the familiar bespectacled face. “I’m a little bit angry with you.”

  “With me?” Fanny stood, agape. “Whatever for?”

  “You flapped your gums about Madeline Fister.”

  “I did what?”

  “You promised to keep what happened in Doc’s office a secret but you must’ve gone and shot your mouth off—”

  “I did no such thing!” Fanny interrupted, turning red from her lace collar to her hairline. “If someone blabbed, it wasn’t me.”

  “Well, it certainly wasn’t Earnest Fister or Amos,” Helen said, standing her ground. “And I know I didn’t do it, which only leaves you.”

  Fanny sniffed, clearly offended. “You’re wrong, I tell you. It wasn’t me.”

  “Then how in the world did Shotsie Grone find out that Maddy was pregnant?”

  “Shotsie Grone knew? Why would she even care— Oh, my.” Fanny stared, such a shocked look on her face that Helen realized she hadn’t known about Madeline’s affair with Milton. “Are you saying it was Milton who . . . that Maddy’s baby was . . . that they were . . . ?”

  “Eeeek!”

  A scream reverberated through the house, and Fanny’s question was lost.

  “My God, it’s a bunny!” a second yell followed, “and it’s hanging from the cat’s mouth!”

  Oh, Amber, Helen thought. She sidestepped Fanny and pulled on a pair of oven mitts with the efficiency of a surgeon. Then she marched out to the porch, finding her guests teetering atop the furniture and squealing like little girls.

  “Do something, Helen!” Clara Foley demanded from her perch atop the wicker settee.

  Helen spotted Amber beneath a card table, sitting proudly on his haunches. A very small rabbit dangled from his jaws. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn the old tom was grinning at the fuss.

  “You do know how to make an entrance,” she said, and squatted down, her mitted hands outstretched.

  The cat leapt away, eluding her grasp. He dashed under the chairs that held her guests, eliciting another round of shrieks.

  Helen pursued the killer feline, finally cornering him in the bathroom and prying the would-be prey from his mouth.

  “No cause for alarm,” she told the girls as she walked past them, the bunny cradled in her mitts. “It’s not dead, merely stunned,” she explained to their chorus of groans.

  Helen headed out the screen door and deposited the trembling creature in the bushes across the road. She waited until it had wiggled deep into the shrubs. Then she whispered, “You’re one lucky rabbit, a lot luckier than Milton Grone.”

  Chapter 29

  “SHERIFF BIDDLE!”

  His window rolled down, Frank heard the voice and slowed his black-and-white to a stop alongside the stretch of blooming flowers better known as Serenity Garden.

  It was half past seven on Tuesday morning. Frank had figured that if he drove down early to the truck stop to talk to Velma Simms, he’d be back at his office well before noon. And he could get himself a breakfast of sausage and eggs while he was there, without Sarah to henpeck him about his cholesterol.

  “Good morning, Sheriff.”

  “ ’Morning, ma’am,” he said, tipping his hat as Helen Evans approached the window. “You up and walking this early?” he asked, noting her blue sweatsuit and sneakers.

  “Best time to do it.” She tipped up her nose and inhaled. “The air smells freshest right after dawn.”

  “Really?” Frank took in a big gulp of the stuff himself, scrunching up his face as he caught a whiff of fish and muck from off the river. He coughed to clear the taste from his mouth, a part of him understanding then why Ida Bell was so militant about the environment hereabouts.

  “You going somewhere?” she inquired.

  “I am,” he said, and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, eager to be off but hardly anxious to confide his destination. He knew Helen well enough to realize she’d probably invite herself along, and he didn’t need a nosy grandmother—as nice as she was— playing his sidekick when he questioned Velma Simms. “I’m, uh, just heading over to the office,” he told her, and smiled.

  “You are not,” she insisted, frowning at him like a disapproving schoolmarm. “You’re driving in the opposite direction. Why, you’re nearly to the highway already.”

  “All right, you got me.” He pushed up his cap and scratched his head. He’d bet she’d been the kind of mother who, from two floors up, could hear the cookie jar lid being removed ever so gently; the kind who, years later, could recall who’d sent her thank-you notes after every Christmas; who could read a lie on someone’s face. “As a matter of fact,” he said, giving in, “I’m on my way to a truck stop south of Alton. I need to talk to a waitress who worked the shift last Thursday night with Delilah Grone.”

  “So you spoke to Delilah?”

  “Not yet, but I did get her note,” he said. “I already talked to her manager, and I want to get my timeline straight before she comes in.”

  “Delilah told me she arrived in River Bend just before eight and found her ex-husband dead,” Helen prattled on, seeming to know as much as he did if not more. “If she was telling the truth and didn’t leave work until seven, then took the time to change out
of her uniform, she couldn’t have been in town long before the group of us from town hall saw him lying on the ground.”

  Frank was tempted to say, Oh, yeah? You know so much, maybe you should run for sheriff next term, but he bit the inside of his cheek. “So you and the first Mrs. Grone have gotten cozy?” he tried instead.

  Helen looked at him strangely. “Hardly that. I did chat with her on Saturday morning after the funeral and then I bumped into her yesterday. I encouraged her to see you—”

  “Yes, that’s what her note said, and I appreciate it, ma’am.” Biddle cleared his throat. “Now if you’ll excuse me,” he said, glancing at his wristwatch.

  “Oh, yes, you were leaving for the truck stop.”

  “I need to talk with—”

  “The waitress who shares Delilah’s shifts,” Helen finished for him, a secretive smile on her lips, one that made Biddle nervous.

  Surely she hadn’t already had a “chat” with Velma Simms? If Helen Evans was that good at sniffing out information, he thought, she really should run for sheriff. “You haven’t met up with Ms. Simms, have you, Mrs. Evans?” he dared to ask.

  “No, I haven’t,” she said, “but I should.” She drew away from the window and walked around the hood, ending up on the passenger’s side of the squad car. The handle clicked and she had the door open so quickly that Frank could only stare dumbly as she slid in beside him and buckled up.

  What the heck was she doing?

  “I’m on official business, Mrs. Evans,” he croaked.

  “Don’t worry, Sheriff, I have no intention of interfering,” she assured him, laying her hands demurely in her lap. “But I could use a cup of coffee, and I’ll bet the truck stop makes it good and strong.”

  Biddle wanted to order her out of the car. He wanted to be angry with her for butting in, but he couldn’t. Instead, he smiled. “Do you read Agatha Christie, ma’am?”

  “I do,” she said, “now and again.”