by Harper Lin
Lucien had been poisoned.
This hadn’t been a slow process, either. Most toxins take hours to have any effect. Some take days. Whatever had killed Lucien had acted fast and must have been administered within the last hour or so—or to put it plainly, sometime during the weekly meeting of the Cheerville Active Readers’ Society. Someone in this house was a murderer.
A little chill ran down my spine, not of fear—I can take care of myself—but of excitement. I know it sounds cruel, but this was the most exciting thing that had happened to me since my retirement. A murder right in front of me, and me personally acquainted with the murderer!
But who was it?
Lucien Rogers was a good man, a good-natured soul. The British would call him a good egg. He deserved better than to be quickly cooling on a linoleum floor. The house with those linoleum floors wasn’t his only home; the entire neighborhood was his home. But while Lucien was a charming fellow, he was actually a prime candidate to become a murder victim.
He was a pillar of the community in the truest sense of the term, always willing to lend a hand (or a chainsaw) to anyone in need. He was easy to find and was even easier on the eyes. That was the only reason I could immediately come up with that someone would want to hurt Lucien. He certainly rubbed a few husbands the wrong way because he was the standard against which they were all measured. If they were above sixty, that is. The older women of Cheerville changed their posture when he came around, standing up straighter. Their voices rose, higher and sweeter. A bit of lust twinkled in their eyes. I can admit that I’ve felt it myself. And through it all, Lucien just gave the ladies that winning smile, helped shovel snow from their driveways or change tires on their cars, and as far as I knew, never let his popularity go to his head. Just as he had said earlier in the meeting, “marriage is forever.” In fact, those were his last words.
Helpful. Handsome. Humble. A dangerous combination bound to attract envy and spite.
Charles’s voice snapped me out of my thoughts. He was on the phone with 9-1-1, informing them of the death, identifying himself to the woman on the phone, who apparently knew him, and giving the details. After he hung up, he gently led Gretchen back into the living room.
I followed, wiping a tear from my eye. That tear reassured me. I had seen a lot of death in my time, and had caused a fair amount of it, too, but I had never become any more hardened than what the job absolutely demanded.
Once out in the living room, I hardened again. One of these five senior citizens was a murderer, and I was the woman who could discover the culprit.
Gretchen? The odds suggested that it was her. Most of the time when a married person gets bumped off, it’s the spouse. The motive was usually one of three things: money, abuse, or an affair. Lucien didn’t have much money and shared it all with Gretchen anyway, plus he wasn’t the abusing kind. People have surprised me before in that department, but that was well beyond the realm of possibility. An affair? Lucien didn’t seem the sort of person to cheat. From what I’d heard, he had refused many offers. In fact, he had refused someone in this very room.
Pauline had been entranced with Lucien even more than was usual among the gray-haired belles of Cheerville. Perhaps that was because her husband had left her many years ago for a younger woman. That’s why she took the plotline of Endless Beach so personally. At seventy-two, more than a little overweight, and relying on a walker, she hadn’t exactly been Lucien’s most fetching offer, but when she had opened up her heart to him a few months back, the guy let her down easy. So easy, in fact, that she stayed in the reading group and everyone got along.
At least on the surface. Could Pauline be angry and hurt enough to kill her autumn love? Or could Gretchen suspect the two had been having an affair and decided to bump Lucien off? Or maybe I had it all wrong and there really was an affair? I didn’t know enough to say. Once again, the grinding politeness of Cheerville meant that I didn’t know much about that whole mess.
Then there was Evon, also seventy-two and a childhood friend of Pauline. She hadn’t come into the kitchen when we heard Lucien fall. She was a hypochondriac, so that reaction was understandable, but perhaps she avoided confronting the body because she feared her reaction would betray her guilt. But why would she want to kill Lucien? As revenge for breaking her friend Pauline’s heart? Or maybe she had a thing for him, too.
She was the person in the group I knew the least, since most of my conversation with her involved enduring long monologues about her imaginary physical complaints. Calling her a hypochondriac was an insult to the mental stability of your average hypochondriac. And that made me wonder if she could kill someone even if she wanted to. On the other hand, when you fear death so much, you tend to think about it all the time, and that can twist one’s mind.
What about Charles? The sixty-eight-year-old mortician still worked every day, partly to keep his mind off his own grief. His wife, Laura, had died of a horribly aggressive thyroid cancer the year before. I had never met her but heard she had been quite the party gal. Could there have been some history between her and Lucien? If there was ever a man more devoted to his wife than Charles, I haven’t met him. He still talks about her as though she was still alive. He would go to his own grave with his heart completely hers. But what if he discovered something that changed his perspective?
Also, it was no secret that Charles’s business was suffering. It was not something he liked to talk about, but he didn’t need to. The town did the talking for him. A new funeral home had opened up in a nearby town and had taken much of his business. It was a chain and could offer lower rates. I hadn’t realized that funeral-home businesses could be franchises. “Do you want fries with your coffin?”
Funeral directors are known to be a bit morbid, and there are stories of them boosting business through rather nasty means. A struggling funeral director in Georgia found himself in a fix when his cremation oven broke and he didn’t have the money to repair it. Apparently, cremation ovens cost a pretty penny, and he was already badly in debt. The bodies kept coming in. Instead of taking a loan to fix the oven, he decided to dump thirty bodies in a swampy marsh on his land and give grieving families concrete dust instead of the remains of their loved ones. It’s heinous, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. But was Charles capable of not just heartless deception, but cold-blooded murder? Would he poison a close friend just to sell a coffin?
If that was the case, why Lucien? There were many Cheerville families much better off than the Rogerses. If you were going to knock someone off, wouldn’t you want to take out someone who will spring for a king’s casket as opposed to the bargain box that Gretchen was sure to buy?
Least likely was Pearl, who at ninety-six was by far the oldest and feeblest in the group. I couldn’t think of a motive, but that didn’t mean a motive didn’t exist. She had a sick sense of humor, and she was the only one whose eyes weren’t wet. Perhaps she had seen so many friends die that she had come to accept death as a regular occurrence. Or perhaps she didn’t mind that Lucien had keeled over. I’d have to check that out.
I’d have to check them all out.
I looked at Gretchen, who had her face buried in her hands, shoulders shaking as Charles tried and failed to comfort her. Pearl sat in her armchair looking grim, her snappy and off-color sense of humor silent for once. I looked at Evon, the hypochondriac who constantly checked WebMD to see what she might have come down with this time, now staring at the kitchen doorway as if the Angel of Death himself stood there leering back at her. And I looked at Pauline, who sat there with a stunned, lost look.
Which one?
Chapter 3
I drove through the tree-lined streets of Cheerville, passing well-manicured lawns and whitewashed Colonial-style houses while trying to sort out my thoughts. I had kept quiet when the EMTs had taken Lucien’s body away. The county coroner would notice the telltale signs of poisoning and prompt an investigation. The police would do their best to find the culprit, and perhaps
they would succeed, but I couldn’t be sure of that.
I had a better chance to do that myself. First off, people wouldn’t be on their guard when I talked with them. I also wouldn’t be buried under a big caseload like every single homicide detective I’d ever met, and I’d met a lot.
A part of me felt guilty. I’d had too much training and had lived too long not to know myself inside and out. I knew I wanted to investigate this case because my life as a grandmother in Cheerville had begun to grind me down. This was the most exciting thing to happen to me since getting shot at in Cairo, and that had been almost five years ago. So I had to ask myself—was I interfering in police business only because I wanted some thrill in my life?
No, I was right to keep my mouth shut. The murderer would be someone in the readers’ group, and I had an excuse to see all of them anytime I wanted and pump them for information without their realizing my true motive. That, combined with my professional background made me the most qualified person to investigate the murder.
But how much time did I have before the police started knocking on doors and putting everyone on guard? That depended on the coroner’s caseload. He had to see the body, make a preliminary diagnosis that the death was suspicious, perform an autopsy, send some blood and tissue samples to the lab, and get the results back.
Of course, the police might get involved right after the coroner did the autopsy. The coroner’s initial suspicions would be raised, but the lab results would be the clincher. The cops wouldn’t want to wait for the lab results, which might take a week or more, so they might start on the coroner’s recommendation right after the autopsy. It was a Sunday, though, so the whole process probably wouldn’t start until tomorrow. So I had what—two days? Three at the very most.
I had to act fast. The problem was, I had to let everyone cool down for a bit. The whole readers’ group was stunned and would need some time to sort themselves out.
Gretchen would be talking with various officials. Charles had stayed with her, being accustomed to death and handling the bereaved loved ones of the recently dead. The others had headed home to deal with their shock and sorrow however they needed to. I would have to put off starting my questioning until tonight at the absolute earliest.
So I did what I always did when I was on a mission and had to endure some mandatory downtime—I put the situation on the back burner of my mind and focused on something else. It was an old trick that had served me well. The subconscious made connections while the conscious did other things. Even science supported my practice. Numerous studies had found that “sleeping on it” actually improved creativity and problem solving.
I headed over to my son’s house.
Frederick, his wife, Alicia, and their thirteen-year-old son, Martin, lived in a pleasant New England–style home with a leafy yard at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. In fact, most people in Cheerville lived like this. The town was embarrassingly prosperous and homogeneous. I’d rather live in Cairo or Medellín any day.
But my only son and my only grandson lived here, and after my husband James died, I couldn’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be.
I pulled into the driveway, narrowly avoiding my grandson’s bike dumped half on the lawn and half on the pavement, and cut the engine.
As I hauled the bike onto the grass, my back gave me a nasty twinge. I went to the front door and rang the bell. Frederick had given me keys and told me to come over anytime, but I didn’t like barging in. I valued my privacy, and I wasn’t about to intrude on someone else’s, not even someone’s whose diapers I had once changed.
After a moment, I heard Frederick’s heavy footsteps. What forty years ago had been the pitter-patter of little feet had now become the thud thud thud of a grown man rapidly entering middle age. There was the click of a lock and the slide of a bolt. Frederick had put that bolt in himself, to “protect his family,” he said. I smiled. Why did people invest in bolts when the average American front door was so flimsy a single good kick would knock it in?
Not that that sort of thing happened in Cheerville. Briefly, I wondered when the last murder had occurred in this upper-middle-class bubble of white picket fences and gourmet cheese shops.
“Mom! Nice to see you. Come on in.”
My son greeted me with unaffected joy. I smiled, flush with gratitude. Considering all the times my dear departed husband and I had left him for weeks at a time with relatives while we were on assignment during his childhood, he had every right to feel sullen and distant, and yet he had never shown us an ounce of disapproval. He had never known what all that “government work” really was, and yet he had accepted it and loved us both. It had been a no-brainer to move here after James passed away.
“Make yourself at home. I’m just preparing some dinner. We’re having microwave pizza. Want some?”
“Um, no thanks. Did Alicia get called away again?”
My daughter-in-law was a particle physicist, doing something I didn’t understand with the CERN reactor beneath the border of France and Switzerland. Some big research project kept her flying over there at a moment’s notice. It was my greatest fear that they’d move to Europe for the sake of her job.
“Yeah. She’s headed down to JFK now,” my son said.
A loud beep came from the kitchen.
“Looks like your haute cuisine masterpiece is ready to wow the culinary world,” I said, following him down the front hall. “When is the Food Channel signing you up for a show?”
“Two words—frozen meatballs,” Frederick shot back with a smile.
And old joke. Bad cooking ran in the family. Once when Frederick was eleven, I’d served spaghetti and meatballs, with the meatballs coming frozen from the supermarket. I thought I’d heated them up enough, until my son bit into one and chipped a tooth on the frozen core. Luckily, it was a baby tooth that he lost the next year anyway. He still remembered, though. He also remembered it hadn’t been my worst attempt at cooking.
Passing into the living room, I saw my grandson, Martin, slumped on the couch, his feet propped on the coffee table as he played Call of Duty on the Xbox. The thirteen-year-old was slaughtering a host of enemy targets with the ruthless efficiency of a KGB or Mossad operative. I knew. Oh, I knew.
“Hi, Martin!” I said cheerily as I sat down beside him.
The only response was a tank exploding. The graphics were beautiful, but tanks didn’t sound like that when they exploded. My grandson stared at the screen through bangs that desperately needed trimming. His unruly blond hair seemed to go in all directions at once. I used to love to tousle that hair. Now, I didn’t dare.
“Martin, say hello to your grandmother!” Frederick called from the kitchen.
“Hello,” he mumbled.
“Say hello to your grandmother!” Frederick called again.
“I DID!”
More enemy targets got taken out in a spray of gore.
“How was school?” I asked.
“Good.”
“What did you study this week?”
“Things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Stuff.”
“I was always pretty good at Things class. I had a bit of trouble with the Stuff section, though.”
Martin gave me a look like I was the most boring old fart in the world then went back to staring at the screen.
I winced. When he had been a toddler, I had been “Nan Nan!” When he had been an adorable little boy flying into me with the force of a meteor, I had been “Grandma!!!” Now I was “Martin, say hello to your grandmother.”
“Dinner’s ready,” Frederick called from the kitchen.
Martin paused the game in mid-massacre and thumped off to the kitchen, leaving me alone on the couch. Letting out a sigh, I looked at the screen. Martin was using an M16, although I knew from all the times I had watched this game that he had a bunch of weapons and an unlimited supply of ammo. I’d have loved to tell him how I’d used all of those weapons in combat and that you had t
o conserve your ammunition, since nobody could carry an unlimited supply. A few stories about my missions would certainly get his attention. All that was classified, however. I could tell him, but then I’d have to kill him.
With another sigh, I extricated myself from the sofa and headed into the kitchen. Frederick and Martin sat hunched over the small breakfast table, shoveling cheap microwave pizza into their mouths. The dining room was never used when Alicia went away because Frederick was too lazy to set it, and Martin wasn’t exactly the kind of kid who did chores.
I sat down in the spare seat and watched them for a moment.
“How’s the real estate business going?” I asked my son.
“Still pretty flat thanks to the downturn,” he said, taking another bite of radioactive pepperoni. “Got some good leads, though.”
Ever the optimist. I could gauge the ups and downs of Frederick’s business by how often I was called to babysit. Most prospective buyers scheduled house visits after work and school hours, and with Alicia away so much, that left me taking care of Martin. Not that he really needed taking care of, but when he was playing video games, he was as much of a zombie as the ones he killed in some of his games. The house could fall down around him while he was defeating the level boss, and he’d never know it.
I used to love babysitting. Now, I mostly sat in a corner reading while things blew up on television.
“How was your reading group?” Fredrick asked.
I had been dreading that question.
“Well, not so good. Lucien died. It was quite sudden.”
Frederick’s jaw dropped. Even Martin looked up from his plate.
“What happened?”
I shrugged, feeling the sadness wash over me. Funny how it hadn’t really hit until I told someone who didn’t know Lucien.
“He collapsed. It looked like a heart attack.”
Looked like.
The tears started to come, not so much for Lucien, but for James. My late husband had been just as handsome, just as helpful, and way more intelligent. Even better, he had been mine.
