April Fool Dead

by Carolyn Hart

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.” Max ran one finger over the bright red letters of the Garve title. “I feel like we handed Diane Littlefield over to Billy tied up like a lamb for slaughter.” He drank the coffee, put down the mug, frowned at it.

  Annie knew he wasn’t frowning at the wonderful coffee. Frame-Up. Maybe so, maybe no. “Maybe with good reason,” Annie said quietly. “No matter where we look, there’s Diane. She drives a red Jeep. She’s Meredith Muir’s best friend. She was at Meredith’s house Wednesday night. At the assembly, Diane and Meredith had an intense conversation. But who knows?” Annie shrugged. “Maybe Diane has an alibi for last night when Meredith died.”

  “For her sake, I hope so.” Max reached for the coffeepot. “If not, she’s in deep trouble.”

  The front door to Death on Demand banged open. Rachel’s high voice called out, “Hi, Ingrid. Is Annie here? In back?” She clattered down the central aisle, her backpack dangling from one hand. “Oh, Annie, I’m so glad you’re here.” Rachel tossed her backpack onto the table, flung herself into Annie’s arms. “Have you heard about Meredith? Oh, Annie, it’s awful. I tried to talk to Ben, but he left right after they told us about Meredith. He just walked right out of school, but I don’t think he’ll get in trouble. Dr. Allensworth’s pretty nice, really. And the police came and talked to Diane. They say she was white as a sheet when she came out of the office and she ran to her car and left. Annie, it’s so awful.” Rachel burrowed her head against Annie’s shoulder.

  Annie held her tight. “I know. I know.”

  Rachel slowly pulled away, swiped at her face. “Everybody says they’re going to arrest Diane. They say the police told her not to leave the island and they called her dad in Honolulu and as soon as he gets back they’re going to talk to her. She’s supposed to have a lawyer with her.” Rachel’s eyes were huge. “You know what that means! And they say Diane was over at Meredith’s Wednesday night. You know, nobody’s ever home at their houses. I guess it was like when I was at Aunt Marguerite’s after Mom died, nobody caring where you were or what you did. Some of the kids thought it was cool. I mean, Meredith and Diane could do whatever they wanted, stay up all night or look at anything on the Net or drink a lot. Meredith and Diane used to do that, stay up all night in the cabana at Meredith’s. It’s the separate house right by the pool. Everybody thought Meredith was so lucky, doing whatever she wanted to do, she and Diane both. But it isn’t cool. It’s like being out in a blizzard and you can’t see anything because the snow’s swirling around you and you ache inside because you’re so cold. And now Diane’s in big trouble.” Rachel took a deep breath. “I told everybody you could help.” She stared at Annie with huge, hopeful eyes.

  “Help? Me? Rachel, I don’t know anything that will help Diane.” Everything she and Max knew, Billy knew, too.

  Rachel reached out a thin, wavering hand. “Please, Annie. You will help, won’t you? Diane didn’t hurt Meredith. She wouldn’t do that. Not ever. And all this stuff about Diane shooting Mrs. Nevis—why, that’s just crazy. It would be”—Rachel’s narrow face tightened, the cheekbones jutting out—“like Mom, wouldn’t it? Lots of…blood?”

  “Oh, Rachel.” Annie stepped forward. She held Rachel tight once again, stroked the dark curls pressed against her shoulder.

  Rachel lifted her head, her stricken face determined. “But that’s true, isn’t it? Wouldn’t there have been lots of blood when Mrs. Nevis died?”

  “Yes.” Annie left it at that.

  Rachel stepped away, gripped the back of a wooden chair. “Then”—she gave a decided nod—“Diane didn’t do it. One day last fall, somebody ran over a dog in the parking lot. Diane screamed and screamed and somebody told me she’s like that about seeing blood. She can’t stand it.”

  Annie almost spoke, then didn’t. There would have been blood when Bob Tower died. Was it the fact the dog was hit by a car that upset Diane?

  “Anyway, I promised the girls that you’d talk to Diane tonight.” Rachel’s eyes fell. She didn’t meet Annie’s gaze.

  “The girls?” But Annie knew what was coming.

  “Some of the seniors.” Rachel’s muttered answer was hard to hear. Head down, Rachel swung away and reached into her backpack. She pulled out her cell phone. “I’m sorry, Annie. I shouldn’t have said you’d do it. I’m supposed to call Diane and tell her what time. I’ll just say you can’t.”

  Annie spoke fast. “Ask her to come at seven, Rachel.”

  Rachel jerked to face Annie, her thin face alight with joy. “Oh, Annie, I know you can help her.”

  A chuck-will’s-widow skimmed low near the edge of the lagoon, its repetitive cry a harbinger of dusk. A flock of pine warblers swarmed near a stand of loblolly pines. In the shadows of the crape myrtle, a dimly seen raccoon observed the terrace and, of course, the wooden enclosure where the snap-lidded garbage pails were kept.

  Max clapped his hands. “Go on, fella. Snack bar’s closed.”

  The raccoon didn’t move.

  Max grinned. “Have to admire a man who stands his ground.”

  “Wait a minute.” Annie drawled the words as a challenge. “Aren’t you being just a tad sexist?”

  “Who, me?” Max’s face exuded angelic innocence. “How could you even think it? So, okay, maybe this is a mama raccoon. Whichever, I’ll lay odds the minute we leave the terrace he/she is alley-oop up and over the stockade fence.”

  Smiling, Annie relaxed against the cushions of the swing. This was fun. This was how life should be after dinner (somewhat early because of their expected guest) on a lovely spring evening with the moon edging up behind the pines and the male frogs creating a vigorous chorus of barks, shrieks and grunts in their romantic efforts to attract lady frogs. “A guy will do what a guy has to do,” Max had been known to remark in a sympathetic tone.

  They both heard the slam of the car door, shattering the peace of the night, silencing for an instant the song of the frogs. Where the raccoon had stood there was now only the shadow of the bush.

  Annie sat bolt upright.

  Max reached out, took her hand. “It will be okay.”

  “Oh, Max, will it?” Annie twisted to look toward the French doors. “I shouldn’t have agreed to see her—” She broke off as one of the French doors opened.

  “Out this way, Diane.” Rachel held the door.

  As they stepped onto the illuminated patio, the girls looked summery in T-shirts and shorts and sandals. Diane’s bronze hair was pulled behind a red calico bandanna. Rachel’s flyaway dark curls stirred in the breeze. She moved fast, then stopped and looked back, waggled an encouraging hand. “Come on, Diane, it’s okay.”

  Annie wished everyone would stop saying it was okay. Nothing at this moment was okay. Kay Nevis and Meredith Muir were violently dead and the tall, slender girl walking so reluctantly across the flag-stones might soon be sitting in a jail cell charged with those murders.

  When Diane was only a few feet away, she stopped and stared helplessly at Annie. “You came to the store Wednesday. About…” Her voice trailed away. She pressed the back of her hand against trembling lips.

  Annie patted the cushion beside her. “Come sit with me, Diane.”

  Max stood up so suddenly, his chair scraped on the stone. “I’ll bet you girls would all like to have a Brown Cow. Come on, Rachel, you can help me fix them.”

  Diane edged toward the swing, tentatively perched at the far end.

  “Max and Rachel love to pretend we have an old-fashioned soda fountain. They…” But there was no answering spark in Diane’s strained blue eyes.

  The girl hunched her shoulders, wrapped her arms tightly together. She shivered. “I’m so scared.” Her voice was a whisper of sound. “Oh, God, I’m so scared.” She turned toward Annie. Terror burned in her eyes as wild as a fire roaring through mountain timber. Tears slipped out of those hot eyes, ran unchecked down ashen cheeks. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do any of it. The police asked me about Mrs. Nevis and Meredith
and they looked at me like…I hated the way they looked at me. They called my dad and told him they wanted to talk to me and I’m supposed to have a lawyer. Dad’s flying home but he doesn’t get into Savannah until real late and he’s mad. He called and told me he didn’t know what I’d been up to but I damn sure better be able to get it all taken care of because he had a big deal and he had to get back to Honolulu. And Mother’s in London.” Her arms fell away from her body and her hands lay open and helpless on her slim tanned legs. “I have to talk to the police tomorrow and they’ll ask me those questions. I told them the answers and all they did was look at me, that terrible look. Rachel said you’d help me, but what can you do?” Her tone was hopeless.

  Annie gently touched her arm. “I don’t know, Diane. Maybe together we can figure something out. You were over at Meredith’s Wednesday night, the night Mrs. Nevis was shot.”

  Diane nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  The oh-so-Southern courtesy touched Annie, made her want desperately to help this frightened child. “Did you know that Mrs. Nevis lived across the inlet?”

  “Oh, sure.” Diane tucked a strand of hair beneath the bandanna. “Mrs. Nevis was nice. She’s one of the teachers I liked. She was…fair, you know? And she made the dullest things kind of fun. There was this general named Stilwell and she told us all about him and how he was treated…” Her voice faded away. “I used to always wave at her when I went to Meredith’s.” There was a tone of remembrance.

  “Used to wave at her?” Annie repeated. “Did you stop waving at her?”

  Diane sighed, slumped back against the cushion. “I hadn’t been over for a while, but I had to talk to Meredith Wednesday night. I had to. I didn’t know what else to do. Those flyers talked about my…about a red Jeep.” She stared at Annie, her eyes hot with fear. “But nobody else knew. Only Meredith.” She lifted a shaking hand, pressed it against her temple.

  “Only Meredith knew”—it was as if the truth hovered in the air around them—“that you accidentally hit Bob Tower?”

  The girl reached out, clutched Annie’s arm. “Oh, God, I didn’t mean to hit him. It was so awful”—horror bubbled in her voice—“and my folks were gone. I drove to Meredith’s. She was just leaving for school. And she went and…looked. She came back and said it was too late, we couldn’t do anything for him. We left my car at her house and went to school. The next week we took my car and drove to Savannah and found a place that would fix the bumper. I told them I hit a deer. We got the car back when it was done and nobody ever knew—so how did it get in those flyers?”

  The flyers. Everything came back to the flyers. “What did Meredith say?”

  Diane sat up straight, clenched her hands. “She said I must have told somebody. But I never did. Never, never, never. Why would I? I’ve tried to forget but I can’t. I dream about the way he went through the air like it was slow motion. I wake up and I want to run, but there’s no place to go.” She buried her face in her hands. Her words were muffled. “Oh, God, I can never get away.”

  Annie gently touched a trembling arm. “Diane, you can make it better.”

  Slowly that ravaged face lifted. “I have to tell them, don’t I?” Her voice was dull. “They’ll put me in jail”—she shuddered—“and jails are so awful. We went to see one on a civics trip….”

  “I wouldn’t think about that now.” Annie wished she could insist that wouldn’t happen. But no one could make that promise. “Tell your parents. Will you do that?”

  Diane pulled off her bandanna, used it to wipe her face. “The police will think I killed Mrs. Nevis and Meredith to keep it quiet about Mr. Tower. That’s not true! I swear I didn’t do it. I swear!”

  Annie had a cold sense the girl was absolutely right. That was exactly what the police would believe. To keep it quiet…Annie lifted a hand. “Wait a minute, Diane. You say that no one besides Meredith knew about the accident. Is that right?”

  Diane twisted the bandanna in her hands, turning it tighter and tighter. “That’s right. Nobody knew. Just Meredith.”

  But the deeply incriminating suggestion of the red Jeep was included in the flyers. Meredith knew, but Meredith’s murder proved she was not behind the flyers.

  Annie studied the nervous, distraught girl, her hands tight on the bandanna. “Do you think Mrs. Nevis knew about your Jeep?”

  Diane looked at Annie with dull, hopeless eyes. “She saw me at Meredith’s lots of times in my Jeep. But she couldn’t have known about Mr. Tower. Not unless Meredith told her. And that would be crazy. Anyway, Wednesday night Meredith kept saying the red Jeep in the flyers had to be just a fluke or maybe somebody’d known about my car all along and maybe this was some kind of queer game somebody was playing and I should just keep my mouth shut. But the next day, she was real upset…”

  Annie leaned toward Diane, listened to her faltering, puzzled voice.

  “…at the assembly and she told me that Mrs. Nevis being killed had changed everything and she didn’t know what to do but she was going to see what she could find out and she asked me not to tell anybody. I asked her what she meant, but she just shook her head. She looked kind of sick. Then she ran away from me and I never saw her again.” Diane began to cry, great gulping sobs. “We used to have so much fun together. She was my best friend. Then everything changed.”

  Max opened the kitchen door. He held a tray with four tall ice cream soda glasses.

  Annie shook her head.

  He turned away and the door closed.

  Diane shook out the bandanna, scrubbed her tear-streaked face. “We used to spend the night in the cabana down by the pool. It was so neat. We’d play music and we could play as loud as we wanted to. There’s a little kitchen and we’d make fudge. I used to spend the night there a lot because her folks are mostly gone, like mine. Starting a couple of months ago, she didn’t invite me over anymore, and when I’d call, she didn’t answer. I knew she was there and I thought maybe she and Ben…But Ben was real sad because she stopped going out with him, and pretty soon, nobody saw her much except on the weekends. She’d still hang out with everybody at Spooky’s…”

  Annie recognized the pizza parlor that, according to Rachel, was the place to be from Friday afternoon to Sunday night.

  “…on the weekends but she didn’t have anybody over on school nights. She treated Ben like he was some kind of little kid. And Ben”—Diane’s pale face softened—“he’s the neatest guy. Everybody would like to go out with Ben, but he never saw anyone but Meredith. She just blew him off.”

  “Do you think she was depressed?” Annie knew that avoiding contact with friends was a classic symptom of depression.

  Diane’s lips twisted. “Oh, no. She seemed happy as anything. She just didn’t have anything to do with us anymore. Now”—Diane rubbed her temple—“she’s dead. It doesn’t make any sense. Why would anybody kill Meredith?”

  There seemed to be one easy answer. “Maybe she was up late and looked across the inlet and saw the person who shot Mrs. Nevis. What time did you leave Wednesday night?”

  “About eleven.” Diane took a quick breath. “I went straight home and I stayed there until I went to school Thursday morning.”

  “Where was Meredith when you left?” A shadow moved not far away. Annie glanced toward the crape myrtle. She and Diane had sat so still, spoken so quietly, the raccoon had returned to reconnoiter.

  “Oh, in the cabana. Meredith always had her friends there. She was out on the deck and she watched me drive away.” She pressed the back of her hand against trembling lips. “Just like always.”

  Annie recalled the cabana. It took only a quick glance to look across the inlet at Kay Nevis’s house.

  “And last night?” Annie kept her tone casual, but she watched Diane’s pale, drawn face with careful attention.

  “I called her and called her.” Diane hunched forward, knotting her fingers together. “I was so mad I could have—” She broke off with a startled gasp. “But that was all. I was just
mad. I didn’t go over there. I just kept calling. I had to do something about those flyers. If my folks ever saw one…But I didn’t know what to do. That’s what was so awful. I didn’t know what to do.” Her hands sagged loose in her lap. She stared at Annie with despair in her eyes. “Now I don’t know what to do about”—she shuddered—“Mrs. Nevis and Meredith. It’s like when you know something awful’s going to happen and you can’t do anything to make it stop.”

  Seventeen

  ANNIE WRINKLED HER NOSE. “Hmm, that coffee smells wonderful.”

  Max tilted the pot, poured.

  Annie raised her mug, savoring the aroma and treasuring the rich, fresh taste. But when she put the mug down, her face drooped. “I feel terrible.”

  “I know.” Max sighed and leaned back in his chair. He glanced toward the clock. “What time do you suppose Diane will be interviewed by the police?”

  Annie lifted her shoulders, let them fall. “Sometime this morning.” She looked through the terrace windows at the sparkling morning—the sky Wedgwood-blue, the azaleas such a vivid pink they dazzled her eyes, the lagoon emerald-green. “Max, they’ll arrest her. I know they will. It all fits together—the flyers in Kay Nevis’s house, the red Jeep, Diane at Meredith’s house, Diane and Meredith having that terribly intense talk during the assembly.”

  Max drummed his fingers on the kitchen table. “Diane has a motorboat. I saw it. If Pete ever finds out that Kay’s murderer came in a motorboat…”

  Running steps clattered down the stairway. Rachel burst into the breakfast room. “Hey, I’m going over to Christy’s. Everybody’s coming. We’re going to see if we can figure out a way to help Diane.” She trotted toward the garage door. “I’m taking my bike—” The door slammed behind her.

  Annie half rose. “She hasn’t had any breakfast.”

  Max grinned. “I imagine Christy’s house runs to sweet rolls and Pepsi.”

  Annie dropped into her chair. “Well, it will keep her out of harm’s way.”