Nell and Birdie laughed, fragments of Richie’s yarn shop monologue echoing in the car. Esther Gibson’s assessment—that Richie was more interested in being rich and the concept of “opportunity”—began to take on new overtones.
“We were listening for Kayla’s name in the conversation, but if he talked about her, we didn’t hear it. Not until they were about to leave. He went to pay the tab—flashing big fifty-dollar bills around, by the way—and noticed us. Or noticed Cass, anyway.”
“And?” Birdie turned her head toward the backseat.
“And he turned on the charm, albeit the charm was a bit slurred. He even hugged her, much to her chagrin. She introduced us, Charlie, too.”
“Did Charlie say anything?”
“No, but Richie looked at him hard, like he recognized him, and he said something like, ‘Hey, you know my friend Kayla, doncha? Great gal, our Kayla,’ and some more gibberish. Charlie didn’t say a single word, just stared at him, and finally Richie’s buddies pulled him away.”
“So he is a friend of Kayla’s,” Nell mused. “Or at least claimed to be.”
“Well, there’s something there.”
“Between Richie and Kayla?” Nell asked.
“Yeah.”
“Something romantic?”
“Cass says absolutely not, that there’s no way that could be true. But you know Cass. She’s attached to that family in some Cass-like way, and she doesn’t like the reporter guy. So in her head, at least, they can’t be anything more than acquaintances.”
“And Charlie?” Nell asked. “What does he say?”
Danny shrugged. “He’s kind of in a strange position. And Charlie isn’t pushy, though I could tell he didn’t like the guy any better than Cass did. In fact, I think he was worried about it.”
“We talked about it a little yesterday, connected some dots. He told me about a car he spotted at Kayla’s,” Nell said.
“He mentioned that, too. He went by to see Kayla again yesterday; it was before we went out last night. He had some excuse or another—I think he took something over to the kids, but we could tell he was worried about her. Her reaction to the will was strange and he wanted to help. She seemed relieved to see him, he said, but then it looked like she was about to cry again so he kept the conversation light.”
“I called her, too,” Birdie said. “I wanted to set up a meeting with her to explain all the details of the will provisions, but she became so sad, and then she asked for some time.”
“Time?” Nell asked.
Birdie shrugged. “The poor girl is worried about something. Whether it has to do with Dolores’s murder or something else is yet another mystery. And it sounds like Charlie didn’t get very far either.”
“No. The kids were around and he could tell she was getting emotional. So he tried to change the subject, but picked a bad one. He brought up the reporter. Casually, he said.”
“And—” Nell asked.
“It worked to stop the flood of emotions. She switched from sad to mad, claiming she had more important things to do and maybe he should leave. And that was that. He felt like he’d been slapped, he said.”
The sight of a wild turkey ambling across the road slowed down both the conversation and the car. The turkey stopped at the edge of a thicket, stared back at them, then started back the other way.
Nell made a wide circle around it, wondering if turkeys were smarter than people gave them credit for. This one seemed to be enjoying some game he was playing with her. She tapped the horn for good measure, not wanting to end the poor bird’s life, and drove on down the road.
“We’re close now,” she said, rounding another curve in the road where the land spread out, a deeper woods visible in the distance and one house close to the road, the other tucked back closer to the woods.
Nell turned into the drive that wound up to Dolores Cardozo’s land and brought the car to a stop near the mailbox, just as she had done before. She pointed out the old quarry to Danny first, hidden behind the woods, then Dolores’s house.
Danny looked over at the tree with the gnarled branches. The one where Kayla had parked her bike that night. Then he looked back to the house, bathed in sunshine today. “It’s so normal,” he said. “Murder is unspectacular.” He looked over the flat and plain yard, then toward the woods just steps away, and beyond the house to the curving, bending road. Lots of places to disappear.
“So fill me in,” Danny said as Nell turned off the engine. He unsnapped his seat belt and leaned forward, his arms on the back of Birdie’s seat. “What happens now? I guess we put those muffins to their magical use?”
Birdie reached up and patted his hand. “Patience, Danny. We brought them, and now he will come.”
Nell laughed as Birdie’s sentence ended right on cue.
First they heard the slam of a door. Then Joe Duncan appeared on his small porch, his shotgun tucked beneath one arm, his binoculars hanging from a cord around his neck. He lumbered down the steps and across his small yard, headed their way.
The image of a flying cormorant was barely visible on his baggy sweatshirt, the seabird’s long hooked bill hidden beneath smudges of dirt and something that looked vaguely like spaghetti sauce. He drew closer, his body hunched over, his small eyes squinting as Nell opened the door and climbed out of the car.
“Oh, it’s you folks again,” he said.
Birdie walked around from the other side with Danny beside her, carrying the muffins.
Birdie introduced Danny to Joe, wiping away his wary look with the fact that Danny was a famous mystery writer. And he also loved birds.
Nell held back a smile. She’d never heard Danny mention birds, but as Birdie no doubt suspected, the fact carried some weight. It wiped the wariness from Dunc’s eyes and the gun nozzle slipped into a downward tilt. They all hoped the bird topic would be dropped before Danny’s knowledge of feathered vertebrates was put to a test.
“Dunc, call me Dunc,” the grizzled man said. “Are you here to give me news of my land?” He tilted the bill of his baseball cap toward Dolores’s house.
Their confused looks nudged Joe to continue.
“The land.” He swept his free hand in a wide semicircle. “It’s ours. Just haven’t gotten the word yet.” He glanced back at his own house.
“Your land?” Danny asked.
He nodded, a few long gray hairs coming loose from his baseball hat and sticking out straight.
Just then the front door of the Duncans’ house slammed again and they looked over to see a round-faced woman with blue-white hair standing on the steps, grasping the railing tightly. She wore an apron over her dress, and her hair frizzed wildly about her face.
“Yoo-hoo,” she called, one hand waving in the air. Then she began descending the steps in slow motion.
“That’s my Marlene. She’ll want to meet you folks. Can you come across the road with me? Marlene doesn’t like to leave our place.”
They looked over at Marlene. She wasn’t carrying a gun, which pleased them greatly.
“Of course,” Nell said, and they followed him across the road and up a short walk toward the steps.
“This is Marlene,” Dunc said proudly.
Marlene stood smiling on the walkway.
“My name is Marlene Duncan,” the woman said, as if Joe hadn’t spoken. She leaned forward, two pudgy hands reaching out to shake theirs, making a sandwich out of them. She moved from one to the other, scanning each face slowly and carefully, not letting go of each hand until she was satisfied. Finally, she stepped back and the smile returned. “Joseph told me about you visiting out here.”
“Yes, and now we’ve come back,” Nell said.
“Your husband was kind to give us some time when we were out here last week,” Birdie said, looking from Marlene to the muffin container in Danny’s hands. “So we brought some muffins as a thank-you to both of you. It’s been a difficult time for you and perhaps something sweet will help. They were made this morning and
are quite delicious.”
Marlene and Dunc looked at Birdie with surprise, and then were effusive with thanks.
Birdie glanced at Danny, along with a lift of one white brow. Magic muffins.
“While we’re here, if it’s not disturbing your day too much, I wonder if we could ask a question or two—”
Joe Duncan’s thin brows pulled together but Marlene shushed him as she breathed in the smells of cinnamon and butter and blueberries. “Of course you can,” she said brightly, a lopsided smile creasing her face.
“Is it about the Cardozo murder?” Dunc asked.
Marlene’s smile disappeared. She looked up, the muffins briefly forgotten. Her high voice came out in a staccato rush. “I don’t want to talk about that. Stop it, Joseph. Right now. Stop it.” Her hands slapped together as she stared over at the house, as if the murderer might still be in it, lurking behind the curtained windows, watching her. “Blood everywhere,” she said with a frown.
Marlene looked shaken and her husband stepped closer to her side, one arm moving around her shoulders. He scowled, upset. “It’s been hard on her, all the commotion. All the noise.”
“Of course it has,” Nell said. She looked at Marlene. “The police are working very hard, Marlene. They will solve this soon. It must be difficult for you, living so close, and having a neighbor die like that.” She rested one hand on her arm and could feel the tension ease away. “Were you and Dolores Cardozo friends?”
Marlene’s smile returned, slightly crooked now, and aimed directly at Nell—two women chatting over tea. Her head moved in small shivers, up and down. “Oh, Dolores. Yes. Yes. She loved to walk, you know. Everywhere. I’d sit in my rocking chair and wave to her as she walked by. Every day. Rain or shine. She was so healthy, not pudgy like me.” She blushed slightly. “When she’d come back from her walk, she’d wave back to me. One hot day I made some lemonade and I waited for her to come by. When I saw her, I invited her up to the porch and she came.”
The words were said with a childlike joy, as if the popular girl had agreed to sit with her at lunch. “We sat together while she drank a glass. She said it was the best lemonade she had ever tasted. And I told her I loved the slipcover on her sofa. It was the same color as mine.”
“I’m sure she was a good neighbor,” Birdie said.
She frowned, as if processing Birdie’s comment. “I was a good neighbor to her. She knew that. I wasn’t a bother, not like some of them. She would be upset with the people coming to look at the land. Peering in her windows. Trucks trampling her grass. They frighten me. The noise, you see.” She covered her ears tightly and grimaced at the imagined intrusion. “Dolly was always quiet. She never made noise.”
“So what kind of questions do you have?” Dunc asked, his arm still resting on Marlene’s shoulders.
“I’m just wondering about the people who might have bothered Marlene, coming around here,” Birdie said. “I know that the food pantry workers brought food out, but they wouldn’t have been a bother, would they?”
Dunc was nodding his head as Birdie spoke. “Oh, sure. They came often. No bother there, although Marlene thought the car sometimes made a rumble.”
“Did you ever meet the woman who brought the food?” Nell asked. “A young, dark-haired woman. Very nice.”
“I saw her when she’d drive up in her old car. We’d be sitting right here on our porch, Marlene and me. We never talked to her, though. She was here to see Dolly, not us. We know to mind our own business. We stayed on our porch.”
Marlene’s blue-white hair nodded with his words. “The black-haired woman,” she said.
“She was a skinny thing,” Dunc added. “Had all those rings in her ear.”
“It must have hurt,” Marlene said, rubbing her own ear.
Birdie and Nell exchanged a look. Dunc may have politely allowed Dolores Cardozo and her visitors their privacy, but seeing someone’s ear from his porch would have been a feat for Superman. Not to mention the color of Dolores’s slipcovers. Dunc’s binoculars must have worked overtime, doing his walking for him.
“It was nice of her to come all the way out here alone. Dolores must have appreciated her,” Nell said.
“Don’t rightly know. Like I said, we didn’t talk much. But the gal would stay in there for a while sometimes. Talking, we supposed. Or we wondered if maybe she cleaned the house for her, but she never took rags or buckets or anything in. Just the white bags with the food. Big blue letters saying it was from the Bountiful Bowl Cafe.”
“She didn’t always come alone,” Marlene said, her tone scolding. She looked up at her husband as if he’d made a terrible error in not telling all the details. “You should have told them about the fellow, Joseph. There was that fellow.”
Joe Duncan nodded patiently and smiled at Marlene as if he were extremely grateful for her help. He looked at the others. “My Marlene’s right, she doesn’t miss anything. I nearly forgot, but she remembered. There was the fellow who came a few times. Hair as red as that mum back there in Marlene’s pretty pot. I nearly forgot about him.”
“I called him Carrot Top,” Marlene said. “And when I looked through the bins at him, his hair looked like a burning bush.”
“I suppose he helped carry the food in for Kayla. Like a gentleman,” Danny said.
“Nah, never, lazy galoot. But I don’t think she wanted his help anyway. She waved her hand that first time, like motioning for him not to come in. He didn’t like that—you could tell—but he stayed back. The first time anyway.”
Again Marlene was miffed at the lack of details coming from her husband. “Here’s what he did the next time. He’d wait for her to disappear around the back of the house. She always walked around to the back. There’s a kitchen door back there. And then he’d sneak out of that car like he had good sense. Moving in the shadows, all the way up to that tree near the corner of the house.” She pointed over to a giant pine tree, its branches brushing against the roof. “He stood there, crouched over, spying on her through the window. His face all surprised the first time. Then he went from window to window, even looked into the bedroom. He was sneaky, that one.”
“He scared Marlene,” Dunc said. “She didn’t like him poking around her friend’s house the way he did. Strangers aren’t welcome here.”
Marlene settled her body into Dunc’s side, wrapping one arm around his waist. She smiled up at him. “But no more, right, Joseph?”
“Right, darlin’,” he said.
“No more?” Nell asked.
“No more noise. No more bother. Like I said, the land is ours,” Dunc said.
Marlene’s smile grew until it filled her whole round face. “Ours. Dolly promised me that day we had lemonade together. I told her about the noise. How it made me nervous. How it was hard to think. She told me not to worry. This land is our land, she said. And she’d keep the noise away.”
Dunc nodded. “Yep. She knew Marlene was special. She told me we didn’t need to worry about the noise. We’d keep it away. None of those big boxy stores. No sirree, not on our land. No one loves the quiet like we do. Dolly loved it, too.” He scratched the side of his head, looking over at the house. “Sure sorry Dolly had to leave us, though. We’ll miss her.”
He looked down at his wife and smiled. “There’ll be no more noise, Marlene. Dolly promised.”
Chapter 26
Izzy was frowning as Birdie finished relating the saga of Marlene and Joe Duncan to the others. “Are you saying you think Dunc might have killed Dolores to get the land?” she asked.
It was what they had discussed with Danny all the way back into town the day before, then continued it over a glass of iced tea and turkey sandwiches on Birdie’s patio. Marlene was challenged in some way—and her husband was obviously her loving protector. That they all agreed on. Yes, he could have murdered Dolores to ensure the integrity—as Joe and Marlene saw it, anyway—of the land.
“I left a message for Elliott after we talked,” Birdie said, pull
ing a bottle of wine and several soft drinks out of a carrying bag. “It’s such a strange story and I wondered if Dolores ever mentioned the land in connection with the Duncans. Maybe originally she had promised them the land when she died. But it’s clear from the will that the land is now in Sister Fiona Halloran’s hands. And we know from Cass that she and Dolores discussed uses for the land. So it doesn’t sound like she planned to give it to Dunc and Marlene, at least not recently.”
“Perhaps Fiona’s religious order will build a retreat house out there and Marlene will still have her quiet,” Nell said.
“But there’d be cars. The lady doesn’t seem to like them.” Cass had heard the story twice now, a longer, detailed version from Danny the night before. “Danny says that fear of loud noises is real. It’s called phonophobia or something. In serious cases it can cause panic and anxiety—all sorts of things.”
“Maybe that’s why she never leaves the house,” Nell said.
“I know Danny isn’t a policeman, but he probably studies more murders than most people. He’s always on the lookout for the perfect suspect. He said Joe Duncan would probably be in that camp.”
“He could be a suspect,” Nell said. She peeled the foil off the meat loaf pan and set it on the warming plate. “But to kill for quiet?”
“No, to kill to protect his wife,” Cass said. She moved closer to Nell and leaned in to smell the flavors rising on the steam. Wine and sweet caramelized onions. Bacon and savory tomato sauce. She whispered her undying love for Nell, then stepped away from the food to think more clearly. “Danny said the guy looked like he would do anything for her. He said the lady never leaves their yard. Her husband is her whole world.”
“And people have certainly killed for less.” Izzy carried a basket of biscuits over to the coffee table. Of the four of them, Izzy was most aware of what little motivation sometimes led to murder. She had seen it firsthand as a lawyer when she had defended some of those very people. And she still saw it sometimes in unwelcome dreams.
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