For Letter or Worse

by Vivian Conroy

  He stared at the floor. “I’ve always looked after Sally. She’s my little sister. And that louse, sucking her dry, then the museum firing her… It was all too much. I wanted to help her, set her up in the Drake company. But Lena took it badly. She was suddenly convinced Sally was going to prevent her from getting her furnishings line. I hadn’t even promised her a line, she had raised it once, and I had said we could see. Never meaning to do anything with it, really.”

  He rubbed his forehead. “It was hard enough convincing Una that Sally could be an asset to the company. I didn’t need Lena giving me a hard time as well.”

  “You said then you started to notice things.”

  “Yes. Her ways to get attention from me. Acting scared, then getting angry. Mood swings. It got worse and worse.”

  “Instead of contacting Jonas, you should have asked for a psychiatrist to look her over.”

  “She would never have agreed to see one. She told me she wasn’t crazy. That was it. I need not hire anyone for her. In the meantime, I did think it was odd, with the deliveries and her response to them. So, I hired Nord to ensure everything went smoothly at the party.” He scoffed. “Talk about making a huge mistake.”

  “Jonas didn’t know that…” Delta fell silent.

  Drake sank in a chair and buried his face in his hands. “My little sister,” he said. “She’ll never be back.”

  Delta didn’t know what to say or do. Maybe Drake blamed Jonas for what had happened, because deep down inside he blamed himself? That he had not been able to prevent Sally’s murder?

  Spud went to the man and leaned his head on his knee. Drake looked up and patted the dog. A smile flickered across his features.

  “You seem to love dogs,” Delta said. “Your wife’s poodles are a bit spoiled, but they seem friendly and playful. How did you find Zara to take care of them?”

  “Through an agency.” Drake scratched Spud behind the ears.

  “You interviewed her before you hired her?”

  “I emailed her, and she came here.”

  “To the villa? Or did you meet her before?”

  Drake looked at her. “What are all these questions?”

  Delta cleared her throat. It was now or never. She might not get another chance to speak to him one on one. “You were seen at the Lodge Hotel with Zara, before she came to work for you. You put an arm around her. You seemed quite close.”

  She had expected him to jump to his feet and shout at her to leave his house, but he just sat there, his shoulders slumped. Then he said with a hoarse voice, “I should have known it would get out. How can I ever explain this to Lena? Especially now that she has already left in a frenzy.”

  Spud whined and licked his hand. Drake patted the rough head.

  Delta waited patiently for him to continue. Finally, she seemed to be close to a big revelation. She could only hope it would make Jonas happy.

  “Can I ask you to keep this to yourself?” Drake asked.

  Delta pursed her lips. “If it’s relevant to the investigation…”

  “I can assure you it’s not.” Drake sighed. “Do you know anything about my past marriages? I mean, before I was with Lena?”

  Delta felt uncomfortable. “I know you’ve been married twice before. And you have kids from your first marriage.”

  “Yes. Kids I never saw, as they were angry with me for having left their mother. Then this summer here in Tundish, a girl wants to meet me about a job for dog walker and tells me out of the blue that she is my daughter. That she wants to get to know me but without me advertising her as my daughter. You see, she hadn’t heard nice things about me from her mother and wanted to see for herself what kind of man I was, without attaching herself to my name. She was skeptical, so, I knew I had to give her the chance to see me and get to know me without that pressure on the relationship. I hired her to watch Lena’s dogs. Zara is not that handy with dogs but…”

  “You covered her mistakes and defended her to your wife, because she is your daughter.” Delta exhaled. Of course. The age difference now made total sense. “People are whispering it’s an affair.” She didn’t want to say Lena herself thought this.

  Drake turned red and made an impatient hand gesture. “People claim so much. Let them talk. I’m having a chance to get to know my daughter, at last, and I’m not letting anyone spoil that for me.”

  “But why not tell Lena? Let her in on the ruse? You could still have kept it a secret from everyone else.”

  “No, Lena wouldn’t have kept her mouth shut. She would have given it away in no time. Also, to drive us apart. I know she wouldn’t be able to take me getting close to anyone, not even my own child.” His expression was grim. “She’s possessive like that.”

  He sighed, and Spud licked his hand again. “I should never have married her. But I was under the spell of her beauty and her charming ways and… I wish I could turn back time and do it all differently.”

  Drake looked at Delta with a desperate expression. “You see, Lena will never tolerate me having a bond with Zara. Even if she knew the girl was my daughter and no threat to her… Because everyone is a threat to her, in her obsessed mind.”

  “Your sister Sally as well?”

  Drake watched her with a frown. “You wonder if Lena would have hurt Sally? I asked myself that same question. I don’t know. I really don’t know.” He patted Spud with a forlorn look in his eyes. “I try to tell myself she would never have gone that far. Simply because I can’t stand the thought of her having…”

  He swallowed hard. “And Una says they were together at the time of the murder. Una and Lena. So, neither of them could have…”

  Delta blinked. “Did Una say that to you? In private? Or did she actually make a statement to that point to Sheriff West?”

  “Yes, both of them did.”

  “But Lena and Una are not exactly friends, are they? Isn’t it odd they are each other’s alibis?” On the other hand, would they lie in an official statement to the police?

  “You mean, they could be lying, and they weren’t together at all?” Drake studied her. “And which one of them do you cast as the killer? And why would the other one lie for someone they don’t like?”

  Yes, that’s the trouble. Delta shrugged. “I don’t know, but you can always promise something the other one wants. Una wanted to stay your right-hand woman. With Sally out of the way, she could. Maybe Lena said that if Una declared they were together, she could stay in charge, and Lena would not push for any sort of role in the company. Maybe she even said she’d give up her line of furnishings. Something like that.” Delta took a deep breath. “Sally may have been a threat to both of them.”

  “Sally was harmless.” Drake jumped out of his chair. “I only wanted to help her get back on her feet. Have a life again after the misery in LA.”

  “Did she tell you she had been wrongly accused by a colleague?”

  “Of course. She told me everything. I felt so sorry for her. I only wanted to help her.” Drake’s voice broke. He stood with his head down.

  Spud sat on his rear, watching him.

  Delta wanted to ask if Drake had also known about the jade statue, missing from the museum’s depot, but the door opened, and Jonas walked in. His expression was tense, and he stopped a few paces away from Drake. “I got it. The moment where the gift, the box with the perfume bottle is placed on the table.”

  “It’s actually on there?” Delta shot to her feet. “Does West know?”

  “If he looked, he found it. If not…” Jonas made a hand gesture. “But it’s not good news, Mr. Drake.”

  Drake looked at Jonas with wide eyes. “Is it…Lena herself?” he asked in a whisper.

  Jonas shook his head. “No. For a moment I thought so because of the color of her dress. But it was someone else.”

  Someone who looked like her, superficia
lly. Delta knew the name before Jonas said it. Realized how devastating this would be for Drake.

  “It was Sally.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “No, that can’t be. You’re lying. Sally would never do anything to hurt Lena. To hurt me through her. She knew I loved Lena. She…” Drake clenched his hands into fists. “You’re mistaken.”

  “Those images don’t lie. I can show them to you if you want to see for yourself.”

  “No.” Drake stepped back. “I don’t want to see it. I can’t bear to see her alive and well and… She’s dead, Nord. Don’t you have any feeling?” He turned away abruptly.

  Delta said to Jonas, “Will you let West know about this?”

  Jonas shrugged. “I have no choice. The person who placed the sinister gift on the table died that same afternoon. There might be a connection.”

  Drake swung round to him. “What are you saying now? That Lena killed her? Because she suspected her of being behind the threats and… You’re destroying my entire life. My family.”

  Jonas shook his head, but Drake pushed on. “I should never have hired you. You bungled the case. You didn’t do what you were supposed to. My sister died, and now you go digging and throwing up smoke just to cover your own incompetence.”

  Jonas wanted to say something, but Drake gave him no chance. “Leave my house. Now.”

  Jonas stepped back and called for Spud, who came to him at once. He looked back at the host, as if he wasn’t sure he was doing the right thing, then left the room. Delta followed in a rush. In the hallway, she whispered, “Is the footage secure? I mean, what if he goes up and destroys it to protect his sister’s good name? He seems to have loved her so much.”

  “I made a few screenshots with my phone. Besides, West has a copy of the footage. That’s okay. I only wish I had told him in a different manner. I realized that it would be hard on him when I recognized her, but…”

  Jonas shook his head as he walked with her out of the house into the bright sunshine. “I can’t understand why Sally would want to threaten Lena.”

  “Maybe she hoped she would leave the villa and Sally could have Drake to herself? He had left his first two wives, so maybe Sally believed that he didn’t love Lena much, or the marriage was under strain anyway. Or she used the perfume bottle in particular to show Lena that if she made products, those would be used to harm her. To keep her from making the furnishings for Drake Design. It seems Sally wanted into the company.”

  Jonas nodded.

  Delta continued, “I have more. I confronted Drake with the fact that he was seen at the Lodge with Zara before she came to work for him and Lena as their dog walker. That he seemed close to her, even putting an arm around her. He admitted to me that she is his daughter, from his first marriage. You mustn’t tell anyone, as Lena doesn’t even know.”

  “Why not?” Jonas asked, looking surprised and confused.

  Delta explained what Drake had told her. “He apparently wanted to give his relationship with his estranged daughter another chance, on her terms. Without anyone knowing what they really were to each other.”

  “Yes, I can understand that, but he gave her access to his house and his life. Judging by what you and others told me, Zara hasn’t been a good influence. She’s coming between him and his wife, and she’s not taking care of the dogs like she should. She’s behaving as if she’s sixteen. A brat, testing the limits.”

  “Her father’s limits,” Delta supplied. “She must be carrying a grudge over the way he left her mother for the babysitter. Maybe she wants to make life hard for him by aggravating his new wife, while he has to defend her, and hurts his marriage without being able to explain why. It’s working, because Lena fled the house last night.”

  “Yes, which leaves us with the open question of who caused the power outage. Was it Zara trying to unnerve her stepmother? Or Lena herself, to maintain the illusion she’s under threat?”

  “Illusion, if we assume the other threats were her own doing, but we now know Sally put the gift with the perfume bottle on the gift table. And let’s not forget nephew Randall, who lives with them. He could have sabotaged the control panel before he left the villa to drive into town. His conspicuous car ensures everyone can vouch for him being there when the power outage happened. But he might have engineered it in advance. Have you talked to him?”

  “In passing. He was at the Lodge. I asked him how he was doing after the murder, and he said he was fine. He acted a bit jumpy, but I suppose people don’t like to discuss murder.”

  “I see. He was close to Lena at the party.” Delta frowned hard. They had reached the Jeep and got in. Jonas leaned his hands on the wheel.

  “I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Sally threatening Lena…” He looked at her. “It now seems the perfume bottle and the murder weren’t two different things after all. They might have been intimately connected.”

  “You mean, Lena suspected Sally was behind the gift and confronted her about it, away from the party? Having brought a knife to maybe scare her into forgetting about ever doing something like that again?”

  “For instance. They fought, and Lena killed her. By accident, maybe.” Jonas started the engine. “Lena is high-strung enough to lash out in anger.”

  “And cold enough to cover it up by pretending she may be next on the killer’s list?” Delta thought it over. “If we want to accuse Lena, we need to break her alibi first. That would mean targeting Una Edel, who claims Lena and she were together during the time frame for the murder.”

  “Now there is someone who is cold and calculating,” Jonas said. “If she agreed with Lena to cover for her, I doubt we could shake her.”

  “But what would be in it for her?” Delta mused. “Must be something pretty big and important.”

  She leaned back in the car seat. “I’m going to ask Clara Ritter how the design for Wanted is coming along. With a little luck, I can ask her what she knows about Una Edel.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jonas dropped Delta near the offices of LyCla Design and waved at her as she stood on the sidewalk. The tense events at the Drake villa had made her forget about her complex feelings for him. They had easily fallen back into the atmosphere of companionship she enjoyed so much. Maybe being friends was actually better than hoping for more?

  She looked up at the front of the building, which held a shoe store below. Racks with discounted boots were outside, and Delta cast a covetous eye on a pair of knee-high black boots. And the mustard ankle boots beside them were not bad either.

  But before she got lost extending her wardrobe, she had work to do. She entered through the door beside the shoe shop, marked with the LyCla logo on the glass pane, and went up the steep stairs. At the top, she looked into a corridor with three doors on her left-hand side. She decided to knock at the first. It was opened quickly by a smiling woman in a blue pantsuit. Her blond hair was pulled back with a band, and curls dangled onto her shoulders. Delta had a fleeting association with a country singer. “Good morning. I’m looking for Lydia or Clara?”

  “I’m Lydia.” The woman shook her hand. “Do come in. Would you like some coffee or tea?”

  “Tea would be nice.” Delta took a chair opposite a modern desk with a white top and metal legs. Models of rooms with tiny furniture sat everywhere, and in the corner, a golf bag rested against the wall. The dust settled onto it suggested it wasn’t used much.

  Lydia had gone to the corner where a water heater sat on a high counter against the wall and poured water into a mug. She brought it to Delta with a box full of tea bags. “Choose anything you like. I hate the herbal varieties, but Clara insists on us having them—claims they are relaxing.”

  Delta chose plain Ceylon and inhaled the scent as she moved the bag around in her mug.

  Lydia said, “I can guess what you’re here for. The design isn’t
quite finished yet. Clara is very busy.”

  Delta was surprised, and apparently it showed as Lydia began to laugh. “Clara told me about her visit to your store and the assignment you gave her. She pointed out both Hazel and you to me when we walked down the street the other day. I guess she feels a sort of natural connection to you both. We’re also friends who started a business together.”

  “Oh, really, how nice.” Delta accepted an oatmeal cookie from the tin Lydia presented before her. The thin layer of chocolate on the bottom immediately stuck to her fingers.

  Lydia leaned back in her chair. “It’s not always easy for women to run a business. Men don’t see you as equals. Maybe in your specialty, where you deal with female customers more, it’s different. But we compete directly with men all the time and…”

  “Yes, it must have been a blow to you when Drake of Drake Design bought a villa here and started to get customers. He’s such a big name.” Delta blew on her tea. “I heard you were eager for a partnership. If you can’t beat them, better join them, right?”

  “Yes, we looked at the possibilities.” Lydia moved a pen around on the desk. “But it didn’t work out. Drake is too traditional for us. We like to be a bit more daring.”

  “Oh, I see.” Delta took a bite from the cookie. “Yes, of course if you don’t agree with the work… I’m so sorry you’re facing such backlash just for being successful female entrepreneurs. I mean, Marc LeDuc wrote about Clara like…she was flirting with Drake to get into his company. It’s a shame things are viewed in such a light. He must have been lurking behind a bush to get that photo.” Delta shook her head. “Sad, really, when you think of it.”

  “Well, he also has to make a living somehow. It’s old news.” Lydia looked her over as if she wondered why Delta had brought it up. Then suddenly she leaned forward on her desk and said in a vicious tone, “And he didn’t have to take that shot himself. Someone gave it to him.”