All Murders Final!

by Sherry Harris

  I gave up on that and went back to my garage sale site. I’d promised Pellner I’d message Frieda Chida. He might have already tracked her down, but I was curious as to what she might know. Wording the note was a bit awkward. How did you tell someone, “The police want to talk with you,” without telling them why? But my worries were for naught. She’d already messaged me. It read: Thanks for siccing the police on me.

  Yeesh. Thank you, Ellington police, I thought.

  Then the message said: They wouldn’t tell me it was you, but I know it has to be. Who else would have known?

  Oops, not the EPD’s fault. Well, anyone who had read the post last night would know we were both interested in Margaret’s vintage tablecloth. I should have deleted it last night, per the rules of the site, which stated that as soon as an item was sold, the post had to be deleted. That way the site wasn’t clogged with old posts. Actually Margaret, as the seller, should have deleted it. But last night I’d been so mad, I’d slammed the cover of my laptop closed without following my own rules.

  Now how to respond to Frieda’s remark? I could deny it. The police had told me not to say anything. I could fess up or just point out that others had seen the post too. Or I could not answer at all. But my curiosity got the better of me. I wondered how much she knew.

  So I sent a quick note. Really?

  That seemed noncommittal enough. I didn’t know how long I’d have to wait, but I’d barely hit SEND when I heard back.

  No, she wrote. I’m making the whole thing up. Sarcasm almost dripped off her reply. They asked me all sorts of questions about how I knew Margaret and how well. I told them I’d cleaned for the woman for years, until last spring, when she fired me. Besides, it’s not like you can live in Ellington and not know about Margaret and her family. It’s annoying. You’d think they were royalty, the way people fawn over them.

  Whoa. Frieda worked for Margaret and was fired? I wondered what the police thought about that.

  I made sure the police knew how mad you were last night, when Margaret sold me the tablecloth.

  Gee, thanks. I wrote back: She shouldn’t have said I could have it and then changed her mind.

  You have too many damn rules. It should go to the highest bidder.

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to rehash our argument.

  Another message popped up. I wanted the damn tablecloth. I just remodeled my kitchen, and it’s the perfect finishing touch. I wonder how long I’ll have to wait to get it now.

  The twelfth of never. Apparently, the police hadn’t told her the tablecloth was the murder weapon, or so it seemed to me. I have no idea.

  My grandma had one like that in her kitchen when I was little. She went to heaven’s pearly gates way too young. My mom got rid of everything. Said it was junk. So I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

  If she’d told me all of this last night, I’d have lost more gracefully. And I wished she’d arranged for an early morning pickup. Then she would be the one who found Margaret, and I’d be here, doing something other than seeing Margaret’s cold, dead body over and over in my mind.

  I waited to see if she’d type more. When she didn’t, I clicked on her profile picture. She had bleached blond hair, with dark roots and purple ends. Wrinkles framed her eyes, as did her thick black eyeliner. I clicked through her photos. She lived in a modest ranch, if anyone could call any home modest in this high-priced area, where the cheapest homes were almost four hundred thousand dollars. There were pictures of her with some twentysomethings, but none with a man. She didn’t have anything marked on her relationship status. Most of her posts had to do with games she played and pictures of puppies. Nothing else to learn about her there.

  Every time my phone chimed, I cringed. But no further pictures came in. I berated myself for not remembering the user name of whoever had sent the picture. It wouldn’t be much to go on, but it might help. I closed my eyes more than once and tried to do some deep breathing, but nothing would pop the user name back into my consciousness.

  As the afternoon wore on, I checked the local online news several times, but the story of Margaret’s death hadn’t broken yet. I was amazed that the police had somehow managed to keep it quiet for this long. I worried about Margaret’s family, about how shocking the news of her death would be. I was so antsy, I couldn’t stand myself. Staying busy seemed to be my best option.

  Chapter 4

  I grabbed my coat and a couple of sturdy tote bags. I’d go hit the last thirty minutes of the rummage sale at the Congregational church. Walking across the town common to the church, I wondered if anything good would be left. Sometimes going late meant losing out on the best stuff. Other times I’d managed to negotiate rock-bottom prices on great items as sellers packed up their things.

  Across the common I spotted a woman and a well-dressed man loading bags of stuff into the trunk of a car. Hennessy Hamilton. I wouldn’t have known it was her from this distance, but the doors on her car had large bright pink Hs painted on them to promote her consignment shop, Hennessy’s Heaven. I knew that underneath the large H, her slogan, “Where all your shopping dreams come true,” was painted on the car. You’d have to be dead to miss it. I winced as I thought of Margaret.

  There were still a lot of cars parked around the common and people going in and out of the church. Drat. That didn’t bode well for my bargain hunting. I trotted down the steps to the church basement and hung my coat on a hook in the hallway outside the fellowship hall, where the sale was being held. I kept the totes with me. At this kind of sale, where everything was paid for at the end, it was easier to set my finds in the totes than try to juggle an armful of things or depend on people having plastic bags available to put stuff in. At bigger events, like outdoor flea markets or sales at convention centers, I took a collapsible wire cart with wheels.

  As I entered the fellowship hall and looked at the people milling about, I wondered if the news of Margaret’s death was out. At the first table I had my answer. A woman was crying and blowing her nose. “They should have canceled the sale. It’s not right being here when poor Margaret is dead,” she said to a woman standing next to her.

  “She wasn’t even a member of our church,” the woman replied.

  “But she was a member of our community. A godsend for this town.” She choked back a sob. “What will we do now?”

  The woman next to her rolled her eyes and moved away.

  I spotted a blue and white porcelain lamp a couple of tables down and strolled over to it. “How much?” I asked the woman behind the table. She’d started packing away a few of her things.

  “It’s broken,” she said, looking around. “Have to be honest at a church sale.”

  I turned the lamp over but didn’t see any cracks or chips in the porcelain.

  “No,” the woman said. “It doesn’t turn on anymore.”

  Ah, so it just needed new wiring, an easy fix. Any hardware store carried socket kits, and I probably had one at home. I was pretty sure the base was from the forties, and once I fixed it, the lamp would be worth at least thirty dollars. A sticker on it said TEN DOLLARS. “Since it’s broken, would you take three?” Was this lying in a church? Would a bolt of lightning strike me dead? Was it wrong to be here after finding Margaret this morning? Since nothing happened, I decided I was okay.

  “I guess so, but why would you want it if it’s broken?” She shook her head, clearly thinking I was an odd duck. She marked the price down on the sticker. “Terrible news about Margaret More, isn’t it?”

  I nodded my agreement, not trusting myself to say anything, and placed the lamp in one of my totes.

  I bartered with a man over a set of salt and pepper shakers—vintage Mr. and Mrs. Claus. I’d found them at the bottom of a box full of old dish towels—not old in a good, antique way, but old as in worn and stained. It paid to dig through boxes. I’d turned up a lot of treasures over the years by doing just that. The man wanted twelve dollars for the shakers but agreed to five. I moved around
the sale listening to people’s reactions to Margaret’s death. I bought a blue cobalt glass vase thick with dust. An unframed watercolor of a cabin in the snow was my last purchase. I’d fix it all up and sell it at the February Blues garage sale on base.

  As I paid for my purchases and thought about the conversations I’d overheard, I realized about 85 percent of the people felt terrible about Margaret dying, another 10 percent seemed ambivalent, and the last 5 percent appeared almost happy. I wondered about those people.

  * * *

  My apartment had a slanted ceiling, so it was high on one side and sloped to a four-foot wall on the other. A small door in the wall allowed access to a good-size place to store things. My phone rang as I started to stash my purchases away in the storage space. CJ.

  “I heard you had a rough day,” CJ said. His low voice rumbled over the line like a lightning bolt into my heart. We might be divorced, but when he spoke to me with such a caring tone, it was easy to forget everything that had happened between us.

  “I’ve had better, but compared to Margaret’s day, I’m fine. Is there an official cause of death?” I sat down on one of the two chairs at my small kitchen table and started tracing the pattern of the flowers on the vintage tablecloth with my finger. It wasn’t that different than the one stuffed in Margaret’s mouth, the one I had wanted so much last night. Sometimes I was an idiot.

  CJ sighed. “You know I couldn’t tell you if there was. You have to wait and find out like every other resident of Ellington.”

  “A girl can hope,” I answered.

  “Did you remember anything else about the photo that was sent to you?”

  My heart dropped a little. This was an official call, not a personal one. A small town police chief doing his job. “I don’t remember anything else. Where are you?”

  “At a conference for chiefs of small police departments.” He paused. “In Monterey.”

  Monterey? I’d grown up in Pacific Grove, a small town next to Monterey. When I was eighteen, my mother had warned me to stay away from the military men at the Defense Language Institute, just up the hill from our house. So, of course, I’d headed right up there. I’d bowled CJ over, literally, as I hustled out of a building I wasn’t supposed to be in. The security guys had been hot on my heels as I exited, right into CJ’s arms. He’d even lied to the MAs—the masters-at-arms, or navy police—saying that I was waiting for him and that he was late. The memory made me smile.

  “I had dinner with your folks last night.”

  My folks? That wiped the smile off my face. I loved my parents, but since the fall they’d increased their pressure on me to move home. I’d spent Christmas with them, and much of the holiday had been them probing into why I was staying in Ellington. I loved it here, although the warm weather and the stunning coastal scenery of Pacific Grove tempted me.

  But I didn’t want to go back as a failure. If anything, Monterey was more expensive than this area, and there was little possibility of finding a place I could afford on my own. I’d checked the classifieds there after CJ and I first split. It had helped to make my decision to live here easier. Plus, my parents hated garage sales, because they thought if you didn’t want something, you should give it away. Which was fine and dandy if you had lots of money, but many people needed the money, and I liked to help them make it.

  “Are you there?” CJ asked.

  “Yes. I’m just . . . surprised.” Surprised didn’t begin to describe my feelings. My mother had been dead set against us getting married so young. My father hadn’t been happy about the idea either, but at least he hadn’t vocalized those feelings and instead had bent over backward to welcome CJ to the family. Even after CJ and I were married for nineteen years, my mother had continued to be a bit reserved with him. At least she’d managed not to say “I told you so” to me over Christmas. I wondered if she’d said it to CJ. I was flummoxed that she’d invited him over for dinner, now that we were divorced. Maybe she was trying to get him to tell me to move back to California.

  “How did it go?” I asked, not sure I actually wanted to know the answer.

  “No blood was shed, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I wasn’t too worried about bloodshed with my pacifist parents.” “Aging hippies” was a better way to describe them. Me marrying a military man went pretty much against everything I’d been raised to believe. But over time, as CJ won them over, they’d mellowed a bit. “But they are opinionated, to say the least, and the fact that you hurt their only daughter . . .”

  “They asked where we stood.”

  “What did you tell them?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know this, either.

  “That they’d have to ask you.”

  Ask me? The last couple of times I’d reached out to him, he’d been all business. It sure felt like he’d reached a decision all on his own, even if I hadn’t. Not that I’d blame him if he was tired of waiting around for me to figure my life out. I heard a woman in the background call to CJ.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said.

  “When will you be back?” But CJ had already hung up.

  Thinking of CJ with another woman upset me more than I wanted to admit. I crawled back through the small door to the storage space to finish putting my purchases away. A box in back of the things I’d accumulated for the February Blues sale caught my attention. I dragged it out from under the eaves and realized this unopened box was one from when CJ and I split up. So much for not thinking about CJ. I pulled off the packing tape and found a box full of CJ’s sports stuff. A baseball bat, a basketball, and an old pair of cleats, apparently nothing he valued or things he thought were lost. I took out the baseball bat, hefting it in my hand. I went to my bedroom and stuck it under my bed as I thought about the photo of me standing by Margaret’s car. The photo must have freaked me out a little more than I cared to admit.

  * * *

  I fixed another fluffernutter for dinner, realizing a diet of fluffernutters would get old quickly, but I still didn’t have my car back. At six, I flipped on the news, and the story of Margaret’s death was covered even by the Boston stations. Her family had a compound on Nantucket, but they’d called Ellington home for many generations. Philanthropy and industry seemed to be the main words used to describe the family. After getting my fill of Margaret’s family history, I flipped on the Celtics game. During the commercials I approved posts for the garage sale site. If I’d known how much time the site would take up, I wasn’t sure I would have started it. The admin of the Concord site had warned me and hadn’t been overstating the amount of work.

  At halftime there was a knock on my door. I hoped it was Stella Wild, my friend and landlady, who lived in the apartment below me, so I could vent about finding Margaret. I yanked open the door. Seth Anderson stood there.

  Chapter 5

  In his black cashmere overcoat, gloves in hand, he looked every bit Massachusetts’s Most Eligible Bachelor, which he’d been named by a magazine two years running. I hadn’t seen him in person in several months. I’d seen pictures in the newspaper—lots of pictures. Him at this gala or that charity event, always with some dazzling-looking model type on his arm, but never the same one twice in a row. He was a darling of the society pages, and every one of those pictures sparked a jealous twinge in me, as much as I’d like to deny they did. Here I was, dressed in sweats, a Celtics T-shirt, and pink, fuzzy slippers. At least I still had a bit of makeup on.

  “I know I’m breaking the ‘You don’t want to see me’ rule, but I thought finding Margaret dead and a trip to the police station allowed for relaxing the rule.”

  Seth was the district attorney for our county and thus would know when any major crimes occurred. He smelled heavenly—fresh air and soap. I’d forgotten how deliciously tempting he was, even with his dark hair mussed, like he’d run his hands through it a hundred times recently. I was happier to see him than I wanted to admit to myself. We’d met in a bar last winter, and I was still embarrassed that I’d sl
ept with him that first night. I hadn’t seen him again until last April, and after that we’d dated on and off until last October.

  “I take it by your silence that you want me to go.”

  “Yes,” I said as I shook my head no. Damn. My subconscious was totally betraying me. I sighed. “Come in.” I managed not to say, “Please, please, please come in and hold me and take me and never, ever let me go.” Instead, I demurely stepped back so he could enter. But I wondered if the amused grin on his face meant he read every thought as it flicked through my mind.

  He slipped out of his coat and laid it on the arm of the couch.

  “Would you like a glass of Cabernet?” I asked. I definitely needed one.

  “Sure. That would be great.” He took off his red silk tie and loosened the top couple of buttons of his pristine blue shirt. His dark gray suit must have been custom made, because it fit him so perfectly.

  Seth settled on my couch like he belonged there. I fled to the kitchen. Well, it was more of a shuffle in my fuzzy slippers. I gave myself a good talking to as I opened the bottle of wine and poured two glasses. Do not get too close. Be friendly. Polite. Maintain a proper decorum, as much as one can when wearing sweats, a T-shirt, and pink fuzzy slippers. I took a deep breath, gave my shoulder-length hair a toss, and shuffled back into the living room.

  Trying to look composed in fuzzy slippers wasn’t all that easy. As I handed Seth his wine, I stepped on the back of one slipper, lost my balance, and tossed the wine all over Seth’s shirt.

  “Oh, no. I’m so sorry.” Heat flamed my face. “Give me your shirt and I’ll rinse it out.”