Dying for Murder

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about.” Jayne reached my stair and stopped.

  I made a giant leap of faith and said, “Three file folders. One with your name on it that maybe you are looking for.” I wished to God I had read that third file folder but I wasn’t going to let this chance go by.

  “And why would I want my own file folder?” she asked.

  “For the same reason anyone would. To read what people say about you. To assuage your ego. To still some fears. Or, in your case, to hide evidence in a murder investigation.”

  “Jesus, Cordi. Lighten up. What evidence could I possibly want to hide?” But her voice was wary.

  When I didn’t say anything she laughed. “You’re just winging it, aren’t you? Hoping I’ll say something to incriminate myself. All I’ll say is that Stacey and I agreed to disagree on just about everything but sea turtles. We were not friends but that is a lousy reason for killing someone.” She passed me then on the stairs and I turned to watch her go. Without turning around she waved her hand and said, “Don’t quit your day job, Cordi.”

  I was angry that I had boxed myself in. I shook the pain out of my leg and took the stairs two at a time, even though it still hurt. I pushed thoughts of Jayne out of my head and entered Stacey’s cottage. There was an impressively huge picture window at the front of the house overlooking the canopy of trees. The main room was open concept with a long mahogany bar and a lovely maple island. Everything was burnt orange or pale yellow, from the sofas to the chairs to the burnt sienna walls, making it quite dark even with the picture window. I walked over to a bookcase lined not with books but with pictures. I scanned them for a while, looking for anything recognizable. I picked up one of a boy and a younger girl and peered at the faces. David was unmistakable — a little replica of his older self. The girl’s face looked familiar but try as I might I couldn’t see much of the young woman in the older Stacey. There were family photos too, but they were all from her distant past — nothing from Stacey’s later life, as if she had just obliterated it. I wondered why and began to think about what Jayne had said: that something had happened to Stacey when she was young. What had happened to her that would wipe out her history from what must have been her late teens on?

  There wasn’t much upstairs other than the somewhat surprising find that she slept on a thin cot. The downstairs two bedrooms were sparsely furnished but both had double beds. The office was another story. It was in a large room that overlooked the snaking stairs outside. It was a riotous jumble of papers, computers, printers, photocopiers, file cabinets, two oversized desks, and an upholstered swivel chair that screamed out luxury. It was a daunting display of an academic at work, knowing no interruptions would occur. Of course, someone might just have ransacked the place. My heart plummeted at the thought, but then I started poking about and there was order to the mess. For whatever reason, Jayne and Melanie had been circumspect in their searches. I flipped through the filing cabinets — mostly personnel files and research projects. I set aside a file of newspaper clippings that, at a quick glance, related to a murder in Austin, Texas, hoping that what she had clipped randomly from newspapers might give me a clue. Next I rifled through some folders lying loose on her desk. Two were related to some of her research but the third was a correspondence file, which I set aside. And that’s when I spied the yellow envelope, surely the one that I had seen David give to Stacey the day I arrived. Stacey’s name was handwritten on the envelope and I carefully extracted the single sheet of paper from inside. It was a letter to Stacey from her doctor, saying he had tried to get in touch with her by phone with no luck and so was sending it via her brother. It was a gentle letter confirming a horrific blow. All the tests that had been done had excluded other causes. Stacey had had Lou Gehrig’s disease.

  chapter seventeen

  I was sitting at the desk digesting this information when I heard someone starting up the outside stairs. I craned my neck to see who it was as Martha’s curly mop of a head came into view. After several false starts she finally found me.

  “Wheelchair heaven this is not,” she said. “Do you realize I have not been to a single dwelling on this island that has fewer than seventy-five stairs?”

  “Our cabins,” I said, thinking what a nice warm feeling it is when someone else independently does the same thing as you; in this case counting stairs.

  “Our cabins what?” she asked.

  “Our cabins only have two stairs.”

  She rolled her eyes at me and asked what progress I was making.

  “You remember when Darcy overheard Stacey and David arguing over a baseball player?”

  Martha nodded.

  “Well, it wasn’t a baseball player. Well, actually it was, but it was also a baseball player’s disease. Stacey had Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

  Martha looked blank.

  “It’s a neurodegenerative disease — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — that the baseball player Lou Gehrig had.”

  “Cripes. The one where you lose everything but your mind?”

  “Yeah, that one.”

  “Her limp?”

  “Would have been a symptom.”

  “How long did she have?”

  “Her doctor said maybe two years at most, but miracles do happen. Look at Stephen Hawking.”

  “So her murderer could have just waited a few years and saved themself the trouble.”

  “You could look at it that way,” I said as something on the edge of my mind pulsed dimly and was gone.

  “So anyone who knew about the disease is unlikely to be the murderer.”

  “Unless they murdered for money.”

  “Was she wealthy?” asked Martha.

  “I don’t know. Doesn’t look like it.” I glanced around the room and saw nothing of luxury, of expense, of overactive spending habits, except for the desk chair. This was the cottage of a woman who wasn’t showing much of herself in her belongings other than what their absence said. Except for the photographs, of course.

  Martha hung around for a while longer before she confessed to having a date with Duncan. When she told me she had a ride I handed her the files I had set aside and gave her Stacey’s laptop to take back to the station. Since the cottage was already monumentally compromised I figured it would do no harm. After she left I booted up one of the two desktop computers Stacey had. After half an hour I was exhausted. There were so many files on so many different subjects with so many different names I was getting eye strain. It seemed to contain her entire life and I wondered what was on her laptop.

  I was booting up her second computer when I heard a footfall upstairs, soft but unmistakable. I looked out the window at the snaking stairs wondering how I could have missed someone entering the cottage. There must be another entrance. I soft-shoed myself to the door and listened. There was no sound at all, not even a ticking clock. And then there it was again, a soft tread on the stair. I looked around wildly for some kind of weapon and blessed Stacey for being a romantic when I spied a five-pronged candelabra. I grabbed it with my right hand and raised it over my head as I stood behind the door. I listened to the footsteps padding slowly down the stairs and hitting the bare linoleum. Definitely a man, I thought as I gripped the candelabra more tightly. The footsteps turned away from me but some minutes later headed my way again. I stilled myself and as he came into view I tensed, ready to wallop him with my weapon. I was on a hair-trigger and just as I realized it was David my arm had started its downward trajectory onto his circlet of white hair. He yelped as he saw it coming and I managed to swing the candelabra clear of his head, but not before all the candles had tumbled down on top of him.

  He had hit the floor in the classic arm over head pose of someone fending off a candelabra. I felt foolish until I realized that just because I knew him did not exclude him from my list of stalker suspects, so I kept a grip on the candelabra.

  He looked up at me in astonishment. “What the hell was that all about?”

&
nbsp; “I thought you were an intruder.”

  “Mother of God. You are the intruder. This is my sister’s cottage. That candelabra should be in my hands. What are you doing here?”

  I figured that if I told him I was looking for clues he’d freak out so I said, “I’m here to secure Stacey’s office as a crime scene.”

  “As if anyone is going to be rifling through her things,” he said dismissively.

  “You’re wrong there.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Several people have already rifled through her things.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Whatever for? There is nothing of value here.”

  I shrugged. “You sure of that?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I assume you are Stacey’s next of kin?” I said.

  He nodded and then it dawned on him what I was getting at and he frowned. “Are you trying to imply that because I inherit from Stacey I am the murderer?”

  Bingo! “All I am saying is that if Stacey was worth a lot of money you would definitely have a motive.”

  I couldn’t read the look on his face — it was the face of a man just succeeding in hiding some powerful emotion.

  “Are you named in her will?”

  “She was my kid sister. I would never kill my sister.” He spat it out in anger and I kept my silence. “She left what she had to me. I was all she had.”

  He turned to go but I called him back. “I found a medical letter in her belongings telling her she had Lou Gehrig’s.”

  David stared at me and a little nerve twitched above his right eye. “What gives you the right to look through my sister’s things?”

  “Well, technically speaking, you did, among others.”

  “You take yourself too seriously, Cordi. You’re not the police, you know.”

  “Don’t you want to find out who killed your sister?”

  “Of course I do.” He rubbed his forehead with his hand and turned to look me in the eye. “Look, they gave her two years to live — two years of slowly losing everything. The cruelty of it is that the mind is left intact to witness the awful deterioration of the body.”

  “Couldn’t have been easy for her.”

  David laughed. “My but you have a way with words. Of course it wasn’t easy, the tentative diagnosis came last month but they had to do tests to be sure. That letter you read was just confirming the worst. From the moment she knew, she hid it, maybe even from herself, but I wouldn’t know because she wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “You weren’t close.” I stated it as a fact not a question.

  “We were once —” he started, then stopped abruptly.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He looked at me through narrowed eyes again and said, “You ask too many personal questions, Cordi. Most people don’t like that.” Said that way it sent a shiver down my spine.

  “When I first met you, you called the biologists here dedicated,” I said. He glanced up as if wondering where I was going. “You also said they weren’t harmless. Care to elaborate?”

  He laughed an empty laugh. “If you’re looking for demons, most of them are guilty of one thing. They just couldn’t accept how big she was. She was a decided anomaly among biologists the world over. They never let her fit in.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to fit in?”

  “Really, Cordi. Can you name one person who doesn’t want to fit in and be part of things?” The question lingered between us for a while. “She wasn’t always fat you know.”

  I waited.

  “When she was eighteen she just started eating and eating and she couldn’t seem to stop.”

  “What happened to her?” I held my breath.

  We were still standing over the upended candelabra when he suddenly walked toward the desk and began searching for something, my question discarded like a used match.

  In my most authoritative voice I said, “This is a crime scene. You can’t do that.”

  “Where’s her laptop?” he asked, ignoring my demand.

  “It’s been impounded,” I said.

  “Impounded where?” He rubbed his eyes with his hand. He was getting impatient and I didn’t know why. “For god’s sake there’s nowhere on this island to impound anything. May I remind you once again that you are not the police?”

  “I sent her computer back to the station so that nobody could surf through it.”

  “What’s wrong with leaving it here?”

  I hesitated. Had he forgotten? “Because several people have been here before you, looking for I know not what. I just thought it wise to secure her laptop.”

  “Who’s been here?” he asked.

  I ignored him and said, “What do you want with her laptop?”

  “I have to make funeral arrangements. She kept that sort of stuff on her laptop.”

  “You mean her will.”

  “Well, actually you don’t usually put your funeral requests in your will, but a copy of it would be there too.” He stiffened, as if he’d said too much, and then he bent over and picked up the candelabra. “After all these years the fool kept this,” he said under his breath and traced a hand along a dent in one of the arms. Then he caught himself and turned to look at me. “She had a hard life.” With that he walked out the door.

  I hung around a little while longer but I was keen on getting back and looking at Jayne’s file folder and Stacey’s laptop. Something told me that they would give me more pieces to the puzzle.

  The sun was still high in the sky when I sealed Stacey’s door with masking tape — kind of useless — and headed down the stairs. I decided to bushwhack through the live oak and palmetto to the beach. It was tough slogging, the palmetto kept grabbing at my clothes and the bugs were really bad. I smelled the sea before I saw it, that pungent aroma of seaweed and salt, sun and wet sand. I hadn’t taken more than a step toward the dunes when someone yelled, “Stop! Don’t move!” The voice was loud and insistent. I stopped.

  The voice came from somewhere behind me and to my right. “Do not move a muscle,” it said.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked in alarm.

  “There is a rattlesnake two feet from your right foot. Don’t look! I’m going to approach it from behind and use some tongs to capture it. Stay put.”

  I watched as Melanie slowly came into my line of vision as she skirted me and came in behind the rattler. She was carrying a long metal rod with tongs on one end and a handle to control them on the other. She moved very slowly into position and I was dying of an itchy nose. The rattler was coiled in a lovely cone with the tip of its tail poking up next to its unblinking eyes. Surely I was far enough away to just make a dive for it but Melanie was in charge. I watched as she grasped the snake behind its neck as it lashed out. I itched my nose and backed away. She disappeared behind a dune and when she didn’t return after two minutes I started toward it. She had all her gear spread out and I realized with dismay that I had interrupted her research.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She looked up at me. She was wearing mosquito netting and I couldn’t really see her face. “It’s okay, I guess. Just frustrating. I’ve just spent three hours watching this particular snake — I don’t have the money for transmitters and the snakes are not easy to find.”

  I said sorry again. I had just blithely broken both of Stacey’s cardinal rules. Melanie stood up and took off her mosquito hat. I must have looked dumbfounded because she took a step backwards and said, “What’s wrong?”

  I wasn’t quite sure how to put it. A thousand thoughts were chasing through my mind as I put two and two together and actually got four.

  “I just saw a picture of Stacey when she was a young girl.”

  Melanie breathed in.

  “She looks exactly like you.”

  Melanie didn’t say anything. She just stared at me.

  I took a chance. “When did you know?” I asked.

  “Know what?” said Melanie. She had regained some of her co
mposure, but she was on the defensive — like a boxer just barely holding her ground, waiting.

  “That you have to be Stacey’s daughter.”

  Melanie coughed and flicked the blue hair out of eyes that looked hunted, haunted, and trapped. “What business is that of yours?” she said defiantly.

  I didn’t say anything and the silence grew. Finally I said, “You know you can’t hide it. I already know your secret. So when did you find out?”

  I watched as her eyes found a way out of their trap and she made her decision. “About two months ago, shortly after I applied for the research position.”

  “And Stacey hired you.”

  She hesitated, still grappling with some inner demons. “That’s right,” she finally said. “The Island Association wanted someone to do some research on rattlesnakes and copperheads. It was pretty fierce competition so I was really excited when I got it. I was so proud of myself. I actually thought I got the position with no pull.” She looked at me then, a forced smile on her face and her eyes blank.

  “But Stacey saw your application photograph …” I gently prodded.

  “Yeah. She saw my photograph and realized I was her daughter.” Melanie sighed and stood up. “I was on the island a month before she told me.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “That she got pregnant when she was eighteen years old and gave me up for adoption. The usual story, isn’t it? Get loved. Get laid. Get rid of baby.” The bitterness in her voice was palpable.

  “I take it you didn’t exactly get along.”

  “Not at first. I mean, would you? She just abandoned me.” She said it as if by rote, or perhaps she was simply disassociating herself from the trauma in some way.

  “Maybe she had her reasons.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they all say.” She pitched her voice mockingly high and angry and said, “I was too young and I couldn’t take care of you. I had no choice. You’re better off with someone else. Did she ever stop to think that the someone else might be worse?” Challenging words that she had obviously spoken before. Melanie stared at me, daring me to speak, waiting for an answer I could not give.