by Jennie Marts
“We need to know if it really is a gun inside of the coat.” Edna set her handbag on the table with a clunk and started digging through its contents. She held up a small plastic packet with a flourish. “Ta da! I always carry an extra rain bonnet in my purse.”
“A rain bonnet?” Piper asked. “What are you? Eighty?”
Edna ignored the sarcasm and fluffed at her silver curls. “Don’t want to mess up my perm if it rains. Make fun if you want, but I pay a lot for this style.” She unfolded the little packet and shook out the rain bonnet.
“What about your other hand?” Maggie asked. “You don’t want your fingerprints on any of this.”
Rummaging through her handbag once again, Edna came up with a plastic sandwich bag full of M&M’s. She dumped the chocolates on the table and stuck her hand inside, forming a second makeshift glove.
Piper reached out, grabbed a few of the candies, and popped them in her mouth. “What? Five-second rule,” she said to her aunt, who was giving her a disgusted look.
Edna opened the top of the bag. A faint metallic smell wafted up, and she wasn’t sure if it was from the dried blood on the jacket or the gun she was hoping it hid. With both of her hands now encased in plastic, she reached into the bag and gently peeled back the white sports coat. The fabric was stiff and unwieldy, so she gave it a quick tug.
“Geez, be careful,” Maggie cautioned. “If it is a gun, it could still be loaded.”
“Good thinking.” Edna grabbed a different part of the jacket and pulled it back. It moved easier and revealed the dull gray metal of a pistol. “There it is. Just like Johnny said.”
Cassie reached for her phone. “Okay, now we’re calling Mac.”
Sunny dug in her purse. “And Jake.”
Edna looked down at Piper. “You’re always on that silly phone of yours. Don’t you have someone you want to call?”
“Heck no. I don’t want to be on the phone and miss any of the action.” Piper scooped up a few more chocolates and shoveled them into her mouth.
Maggie grinned mischievously. “Who wants to inform Ms. Customer Service-Veronica that she’s going to be late for her date?”
Twenty minutes later, Officer McCarthy walked into the Pleasant Valley Bank and Trust, accompanied by a young, dark-haired officer.
Tall and clean-shaven, Mac wore his uniform well. His muscular arms filled out his uniform shirt, and his dark Aviator glasses gave him an air of authority with a dash of bad-ass. The younger officer was shorter but stocky and good looking. They could have posed for a Boys In Blue calendar.
The sulky bank teller perked up a little after having spent the last fifteen minutes intermittently glancing at the clock and sighing.
Mac pulled off his sunglasses as he approached the book club members. “All right, what’s going on now? What’s this important evidence you need to show me?”
The Page Turners stepped aside and revealed the table holding the bag with the bloody jacket and the gun.
Mac looked down at the bag. “I have a feeling this is the gun involved in the murder. How did you just happen on this critical piece of evidence?”
“We didn’t happen on anything,” Edna said. “We used our brains and deduced information. You remember John told us last night that the jewelry box he sent me would have all the answers I was looking for? Well, I dug out that box this morning and found a safe deposit box key taped under the lining. The key was to this box and here’s what we found.”
“And what’s all this?” Mac pointed at the baggie, rain bonnet, and the remaining chocolates. “Did you decide to have a snack while you were busy deducing?”
“Edna used those so she didn’t touch the evidence,” Piper explained. “You can have some of the M&M’s, though.”
“I’ll pass.”
Edna nodded at the table. “You should really wear gloves if you’re going to touch it, so you don’t contaminate the crime scene.”
Mac rolled his eyes. “Thanks. Have you ever thought about joining the police academy? We could use a few more senior citizens with your sharp eye on the force.” He pulled a set of plastic gloves from his pocket and pulled them on.
He picked up the weathered newspaper article. “What’s this?”
The women had read the article while they waited for the policeman to arrive.
Edna pointed at the title. “It’s a newspaper clipping from the Coopersville Gazette dated back in 1966. It’s a nice little story about how an anonymous person dropped an envelope with over fifty-thousand dollars into the night depository of the First State Bank of Coopersville. The envelope also had a note explaining the money was being returned from the robbery during the tornado of 1955. They claimed to have returned all the money plus interest for the ten years that it had been missing.”
Mac raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like quite an upstanding citizen.” He opened the bag and examined the coat and the gun.
“Careful, it might still be loaded.” Edna shrank back at the look Mac gave her. “Okay, sorry. You probably know what you’re doing.”
“This gun is definitely old, and it looks a little rusty. That’s amazing to think it’s been wrapped in a blood-soaked jacket and hidden in this box for sixty years.” Mac flipped open the chamber, revealing one missing round and five remaining bullets. “This thing is still loaded.”
“I told you so.” Edna gave him a smug smile.
Mac tilted the gun and dumped the bullets into his hand. He pointed to the younger officer. “Go out to the car and grab a couple of the larger evidence bags. Let’s get this stuff down to the lab and let them run some tests on it.”
He turned to Edna. “Now we just need to find your boyfriend. Any idea where he might be?”
Edna shrugged and did her best to look innocent. “He hasn’t been my boyfriend in sixty years. How should I know?”
Chapter Fifteen
An elderly man shuffled up the steps of the courthouse. He wore a faded brown fedora, a baggy gray suit, and bedroom slippers. His cane hit each step with a sound thud. Bent and stooped, he made his way down the hall to the County Clerk’s desk minutes before closing time.
The older woman at the counter wore a pair of thin reading glasses attached to a pearled chain around her neck. She looked up from her computer and peered at the man over the top of her glasses. Her expression was unamused. “Hello, Mr. Adams. I was wondering when I was going to see you again.”
John’s shoulders slumped. “I worked really hard on this disguise, Irma Jean. How’d you know it was me?”
“I may be old, but I’m not stupid,” she said in a clipped tone. “How’s Edna?”
“She’s fine. Wait, I mean, Edna who?”
“Mr. Adams, it’s a small town. I’ve heard an elderly man has been staying at Edna Allen’s house, and her name is on both of the forms you wanted to see. It’s not rocket science.”
John grumbled. “I hate small towns.”
“It’s also rumored that she may be harboring a dangerous fugitive.” Irma Jean looked him up and down. “You wouldn’t know anything about any fugitive, would you, Mr. Adams? Dangerous or otherwise?”
“Hmm. I haven’t heard anything about that. But just in case there’s any truth to it, I better take a look at those documents and get on home.”
Irma Jean took a folder from her drawer and slid it across the desk. She held it down with one pink-painted fingernail. “About these documents. With all the danger going around, they seemed to have accrued an extra filing fee. Due upon receipt. As in now.”
John shook his head. He leaned his cane against the counter and reached for his wallet. “You may look sweet as apple pie, Miss Irma Jean, but underneath all those pearls and cardigans, you are a feisty little minx.”
She took the two twenties John set on the counter and released the folder. “Why thank you, John. It’s nice that you noticed.”
John opened the folder, his eyes quickly scanning the information. He tipped his fedora at Irma Jean in thanks, grab
bed his cane, and shuffled back down the hallway.
An hour later he was tapping on Edna’s back kitchen window. Night had fallen, and he could see clearly into the lit house. He watched Edna enter the kitchen, his little dog running along at her feet. She opened the back door and he quickly stepped inside.
She looked out the door, then pushed it shut behind him. “Did anyone see you?”
“I don’t think so.” He reached down to greet Havoc, rubbing the dog’s ears and sending him into a frenzied spin. “Are you here alone?”
“Practically,” Sunny said, as she and the other Page Turners stepped into the kitchen. “Where have you been all day?”
“We’ve been worried sick about you,” Cassie said.
“Nice disguise,” Maggie said. “Really changed up your look. I never would have recognized you dressed as an old man.”
John took off the fedora and set it on the table. “I didn’t have a lot to work with.”
“How about some coffee? You still take it black?” Edna asked.
He nodded. “Yeah, but it’s after supper, so you better make it decaf.”
“That goes without saying.” She poured him a cup and set it on the table in front of him. Looking up at him, she grinned. “I’m old too. Decaf and only one cup after six o’clock. Otherwise, I’m up half the night, either wide awake or making extra trips to the potty. And I don’t need any more trips to the potty. At my age, nature calls more often than telemarketers.”
John chuckled. She still made him laugh.
Even though it had only been a day since he had last seen her, he was taken aback by how lovely she still was to him. His mind looked past the gray hair and wrinkled skin, and his heart saw only the beautiful young girl filled with spunk whose blue eyes sparkled with a mixture of joy and mischief. His heart might be old, but it picked up its beat when he looked at her.
He pulled out a chair and sat down. Lifting the cup to his lips, he took a sip of the coffee. “So, what did you ladies get up to today?”
In a rush of motion, amidst the sound of coffee cups and pulled-out chairs, the book club members were seated within moments and a container of cookies had appeared on the table.
“Edna dug out the old jewelry box that you gave her, and we found the key to the safe deposit box,” Sunny said.
John turned to Edna. “Is that right? You still had it after all these years?”
“Of course,” she said. “Except for my memories, that box and the peacock pin were all I had of you.”
Piper reached for a cookie. “We figured out the bank and found the gun and the bloody jacket. Which, by the way, was disgusting and almost made me barf.”
“I understand,” John said. “It actually did make me barf.”
Havoc jumped into Maggie’s lap, and she fed him a corner of her cookie. “We gave the evidence to the police. We called in Mac, the guy who was here the other night, and they’re running tests on it now. If Donna’s fingerprints are the only ones on the gun, especially on the trigger, that will go a long way toward proving you’re innocent.”
“What I don’t understand,” Sunny said, “is if you had the evidence to prove your innocence this whole time, why didn’t you ever turn it into the police?”
“I was going to,” John said. “Once. I felt bad that I used the robbery money, so I saved everything I could to make up what I’d used and what Donna and Weasel had spent. I figured paying back their portion was the least I could do. It always felt wrong to me to use that money, but I was desperate.”
Edna put her hand on top of John’s. “No one’s blaming you. You did what you had to do in order to survive.”
John turned his hand over and entwined his fingers with hers. The slightest touch from her still sent butterflies racing through his stomach. “I knew that to disappear, I needed a new identity. Needed to appear common and forgettable. John is one of the most common names there is, so I kept that and changed my last name to Adams.”
“John Adams? Like the president?” Edna asked.
He shrugged. “I never said I was creative. Anyway, after I left Colorado, I hitchhiked around the country for several months. I got to know some people, some good, some not so good. The kind of people who would let me do some work and never ask for a social security card or driver’s license. The kind who could get me a fake birth certificate, ID, passport, that sort of thing. As soon as I had legitimate papers, I took off for Europe and spent several years backpacking across the continent.”
He squeezed Edna’s hand. “You have to understand. I had nothing. No home, no family. I had a canvas backpack, a few sets of clothes and a broken heart. I was alone and defeated. I spent a lot of years feeling sorry for myself and searching for the soul I thought I had lost.”
“You were so young,” Maggie said. “Not much older than my son. You must have been scared.”
“After all I’d been through, there wasn’t much left to scare me. I tried to keep my nose clean and steer clear of trouble. I fell in with a group of American college students studying abroad. Drank a lot of wine, talked a lot of philosophy, and when they came back to the United States, I came back with them. Traveling was different then. Customs was easier. One of the guys I met was going up to Montana to work on a dude ranch, and I tagged along. Seemed like a good idea at the time, and it was work that I really took to. The ranch was run by a widow named Annie, and she didn’t care about IDs and filing for taxes—she cared about the land and getting the horses taken care of. She paid cash, and when the summer was over, my buddy went back to school and I stayed on. I saved my money, and when I had enough to pay the bank back, I came back to Colorado.”
Edna pulled her hand free. “If you came back, why didn’t you contact us? Let us know you were alive?”
John shook his head, the memory of that trip back to Colorado still fresh in his mind. The excitement of seeing Edna. The anticipation of welcome hugs and smiles. “I tried. That was my plan. It had been ten years since I’d disappeared. I thought enough time had gone by that the investigation would have died down, and no one would be looking for me. I researched where you lived and knew that you had moved to Colorado after Frank graduated and bought a house. You and Frank were the closest thing to family that I had ever had, and I’d missed you both so much. But I couldn’t do it.”
“Why not? We missed you too. We loved you.”
“I know. And I loved you. Both of you.” John’s voice choked with emotion. “That’s why I couldn’t do it. I came to your house. This house. It was summer, and you and Frank were outside. I could see you in the backyard, playing with a little girl. You looked so beautiful, Eddy. So happy. You and Franky had built a life together. A family. How could I waltz in, ten years later, and tear that apart? I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I loved you both too much. I took the rest of the money from the safe box, drove to Kansas, and dropped it in the bank’s night depository with a note. They’d rebuilt the bank after the tornado, but it was still in the same spot.”
“How come no one recognized you?” Piper asked.
“By that time, I was a man. I’d grown a beard, filled out. I wore western clothes and looked like a different person than the bad boy kid that had ran out of town a decade before. No one in Coopersville recognized me. I checked in on my dad and Aunt Janice. I spent a couple of days in town, saw the article in the paper and knew the money was back. I felt lighter. That money had been like a weight around my neck for years. I felt absolved of the guilt of at least one part of that night. I clipped the article and decided to head back to Montana.”
“Did you see Donna? What happened to her?” Sunny asked as she reached for another cookie.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t want to know. She was the reason I was in this mess. I really didn’t care what happened to her. Besides, I was keeping a low profile and didn’t want to talk to a lot of people or ask too many questions. I heard that her dad was still the chief of police, so I guess she was doing okay.”
&n
bsp; He stopped and looked at Edna. “I wanted to see you again, so I drove back through Colorado and stopped in Pleasant Valley one last time. I watched you take your daughter to the park. You had a picnic that day and lay on a blanket side by side and read books together. You were so beautiful.”
Edna looked away, her eyes tearing with emotion.
“That must have been the second time you signed in to the safe deposit box at the bank,” Piper said. “We saw the record.”
John nodded. “I wanted to keep the article about the money being returned to the bank, but I didn’t want to ever be found with it and have it connect me back to Kansas or the robbery. I stopped at the bank to put the newspaper clipping in the safe box, and I never went back to it again.” He turned to Edna. “I also changed your name on the box from Anderson to Allen, just in case you ever figured it out.”
“But if you returned the money, then why didn’t you turn in the gun and prove you were innocent?” Piper asked. “Then you wouldn’t have to run anymore.”
“Because if he turned in the gun, everyone would know that he was alive,” Maggie answered.
John nodded. “It was easier to let sleeping dogs lie than to open up all those old wounds. Everybody else had moved on. Who was I to ruin everyone’s lives with my own selfish needs? Eddy, you had a family, a little girl. I couldn’t destroy your happiness.”
Edna got up from the table and carried her coffee cup to the sink. The Page Turners silently watched her. The only sound in the room was the faint tinkle of the cup against the saucer as Edna’s hand trembled.
She set her cup in the sink and turned back to John, anger flashing in her eyes. “My happiness was destroyed the night I thought you drove off a bridge and drowned in the lake. Why did you get to decide if we could handle knowing you were alive? What gave you that right?”
“I did what I thought was right at the time,” John said, his voice rising in pitch. He looked directly into Edna’s eyes. “And before you get yourself too worked up, think about the fact that you made a few important decisions on your own too. I’m not the only one that’s been keeping a secret all these years.”
