We finished our drinks and she led me to the dining room. The table was elegant with a starched white linen tablecloth and matching napkins, silverware that was actually silver, bone china with a blue forget-me-not pattern, and delicate crystal glasses. She brought us cold cucumber soup. She followed that with baked salmon, spinach risotto, and butternut squash roasted with pecans. The salad was baby greens tossed in raspberry vinaigrette. The two of us drank a significant amount of a bottle of Vinho Verde. And as if all that hadn’t been enough, she served perfect crème brûlée and gave us each a small snifter containing two fingers of brandy. She offered coffee, but I passed. “It would keep me awake.”
She threw me an impish grin. “Good, then you could call me every hour.” She patted the back of her head. “See? I told you. It was nothing.” She swirled her brandy and stared down into it. Finally, she looked up at me. “Did you tell anyone about my fall last night?”
“No. Did you?”
“Certainly not! But, Emily, if I tell you something, will you promise not to tell anyone else?”
I shifted uneasily on my dining chair. “I’m not sure I can promise that.”
“Well, would you at least consider not telling?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“As I might have hinted before I was fully awake in the wee hours this morning, if we call the cops, both of us could be in serious danger.”
“Yes, but aren’t you in danger whether you call the cops or not? Someone broke into your house, chased you into your backyard, and attacked you.”
“He or she didn’t chase me. He or she found me out there.” Either way was bad news. “I can use some advice, and I don’t know who else to turn to. You seem trustworthy and honest.”
“And I have friends in the police force.”
“I suppose if you need advice about my problem, you could pose a question as if it’s theoretical.”
“They might fall for that.” I quirked one eyebrow up to show I was joking.
She laughed. “Yes, I guess they probably wouldn’t.” She was silent for a while, and then she took a rather large sip of brandy. “Okay, here’s the thing. Someone did hit me last night. I truly do not know who it was, or if it was a man or a woman. Do you believe me?”
“Yes.” The night before, I’d doubted a lot of what she told me, mainly because she wasn’t a good liar. This time, she seemed to be telling the truth.
“I was outside, and it was dark. He or she came from behind, grabbed my arms, put his or her hand over my mouth, and whispered that if I told anyone what I knew, I’d be the next old woman to be found dead.” She shuddered. “Then he or she hit me with something hard, and you were right. I probably was unconscious, but not for long. When I woke up, I was lying on the ground, someone was saying something in your yard, and Tiger was butting my chin with the top of her head and meowing.”
“Lois, that could have been the person who . . . killed Georgia. And her son, five years ago. You have to tell the police what you know. Otherwise, the murderer might keep killing people. He or she obviously came looking for you, and knows where you live.”
Lois closed her eyes, rubbed away tears, and then spoke so quietly that I had to strain to hear her. “It’s possible that I might know who killed Matthias.” Before I could respond, she asked in a rush, “But how can I turn in my own . . . I mean . . . someone I know?”
Chapter 8
Everything in Lois’s house went quiet except for the ticking of the grandfather clock out in the living room. I was squeezing the delicate stem of my brandy snifter so tightly that I was afraid I might snap it. “What do you mean?” I finally asked. “Do you know who killed Matthias Treetor?” Alec and Brent had worked hard to solve that case and hadn’t succeeded. And now, five years later, was my new neighbor going to tell me who the murderer was?
If only Alec could be here . . .
I knew I should call Brent, but I sat still and quiet, waiting for Lois to speak again and knowing that the slightest move toward calling the police could make her go silent.
“No,” she said firmly, as if my expression was revealing my thoughts. “I don’t know who killed Matthias, or anyone else.”
I tried to look empathetic. “But you said something about not turning in your . . . I mean someone you knew.”
“What I remember would be called circumstantial. Very circumstantial. You see, I often paint from photographs. And that one evening, just around sunset, I was snapping pictures of a pretty scene, and a car came racing out of the valley. I was focusing on the scenery and didn’t look at the car or think anything about it being there, even later that night when Georgia told me that Matthias was missing. But I remembered that car a week or so later, after Matthias’s body was found.” She took a long, tremulous breath. “He’d been buried near where I’d seen that car, in that river valley.”
That river valley. I should have recognized the Fallingbrook River and that particular valley, several miles south-west of town, in her painting. “Was the painting that was hanging in your living room last night based on one of the pictures you took that evening?”
She bowed her head. “Yes.”
“Did you see the driver of the car?”
“No, I didn’t even look at the car. It just got in the way of the scene I wanted to capture. In my photo, the sunset was reflecting off the windshield.” She lifted her head, but the corners of her mouth continued to droop. “I couldn’t see the driver. But a few days later, I was talking to someone, and that person’s car might have been the one I saw the night that Matthias went missing.”
I tried to still the wild clamor of my heart. This could be a real break in the case. “Whose car was it?”
Those blue eyes flashed with stubborn determination. “No one who could ever kill another human being. I’d stake my own life on it.” That was hardly reassuring, considering that her life seemed to be in danger.
I tried a smile. “Any chance that you’re too trusting?”
“Who wants to live in a world where no one can be trusted?”
“Not ‘no one.’ Most people can be trusted. But there is or was at least one killer around Fallingbrook. For our own safety, for the safety of our friends and relatives, for the safety of all of Fallingbrook, if any of us knows anything that could help put this killer behind bars, we should give the information to the police.”
She gazed at me steadily. “I couldn’t agree more. But what if the thing we think we know, like what they call a ‘false memory,’ would put an innocent person in prison, and the real killer gets away with murder, and then he—or she—is free to harm others?”
I spoke softly. “Like the person who attacked you last night.” Why had Lois added that “she” as a seeming afterthought? To throw me off and hide the fact that the car she thought she recognized belonged to a man? Or because she actually believed the car belonged to a woman?
She leaned forward, tilting her snifter. “Could be.” Her brandy trembled, catching the light and projecting it on the ceiling. Muscles bunching, Dep stared up at the rippling reflections as if she were calculating how to leap up and catch them.
I tried another tack. “Did you get more than one photo of that car?”
“I can’t remember. I don’t think so.”
“Don’t you think you should show it to the police?”
“I can’t.”
“They won’t throw you in jail for waiting five years.”
She waved the notion away. “That’s not it. I doubt that I still have the photo.”
I didn’t want to admit that I’d spied through her sheers the night before and had seen her expression when she’d spotted something about one of those albums, and I definitely was not going to admit that I’d snooped through her photo albums before dinner and had found pages that were obviously missing photos. I prompted, “What happened to it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve moved twice in the past five years. I got rid of things both times.”
In
teresting. “You have photo albums in the living room. Should we go check?”
“Okay.” The idea did not appear to thrill her. “Bring your glass.” In the living room, she gestured for me to sit on the couch. We set our snifters on colorful quilted coasters on her end tables. “Georgia made the mug rugs,” Lois told me. “Aren’t they sweet?”
“They’re adorable. When she was at Deputy Donut with the Knitpickers, Georgia often knit tiny garments for dolls. They were awesome. I’m not surprised that she also made teensy quilts.”
“She was a perfectionist.” Lois bit her lip and turned away. Was she hoping I’d forget about looking through her photo albums?
I got up and removed the photo album I’d peeked into, handed it to her, and sat down beside her. “If nothing else, old photos are fun.” She was probably thinking I was terribly nosey. She didn’t know the half of it.
She opened the book to the first page. “These will be boring. They’re mostly scenes I was thinking of painting.”
“They’re pretty,” I said. “Did you copy many of them?”
“Several.” She turned the pages slowly, as if hoping that I’d lose interest and go home.
Sounding altogether too chirpy, I praised the photos.
Finally, she came to the pages near the middle where it was obvious that someone had torn out photos in a major hurry, leaving shreds of paper stuck to the pages. There were three blank pages, one more than I’d discovered in my quick examination. “Oh!” Lois managed to sound surprised.
I leaned closer. “Last night, your albums were scattered on the floor. Did the intruder steal some photos?”
“Someone did.”
“Wasn’t me.”
She gave me a halfhearted smile. “I know. You wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
“I told you that you’re too trusting. But you’re right. I didn’t steal anything. I was panicking, running through your house in search of whoever had called for help.”
She paged quickly through the book, and then slapped her hands down on the two facing blank pages. “He or she ripped out every single photo that I took of the valley that day, including the one of the car.” Her voice shook.
I closed my eyes, leaned back, and allowed myself a few seconds of intensely missing Alec. Even though the physical evidence was missing, he’d have known what to do.
He would tell me to call Brent. As soon as possible. I could do it, I supposed, without Lois’s consent, but she might stop talking to me. Maybe while I wheedled more information from her, I would think of a way of convincing her that we should call the police.
I opened my eyes and asked, “Could the car have been in other photos that were on these three pages, maybe in the distance? Like either near where Matthias’s body was later found, or somewhere else, not anywhere near it?” Dep jumped onto my lap and settled in, purring.
“I don’t remember noticing the car in other photos. And now it’s too late to get a magnifying glass and have a good look at them.”
Dep’s fur was warm and comforting under my hand. “Were you using a digital camera?”
“Yes. I went to those machines that print them. I like to keep pictures in albums, from habit, I guess.”
“Did you also keep the digital files?” Dep revved up her purring.
“My computer crashed a couple of years later, with the files on it.”
“But you must have put them on a portable drive at one time, so you could print the images at those machines.”
She picked up her snifter and stared down into the amber liquid. “I might have them on a thumb drive, in one of the many boxes I haven’t yet unpacked.”
“You could give those unpacked boxes to the police and tell them to look for a thumb drive containing photos. They could be important evidence.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“I wrapped things like thumb drives in lingerie to protect them.”
I burst out laughing. “To protect the thumb drives or the lingerie?”
She made a fake frown. “The thumb drives, of course. And all those fragile trinkets that I seem to accumulate.”
“Maybe it’s time to unpack your undies?”
She sat up straighter and pretended to be very stern. Her eyes were twinkling, though. “It’s not like I’m doing without. A few years ago, I met a . . . potentially interesting . . . man who invited me to dinner. Before our date, I bought an entire wardrobe of frilly and lacy lingerie, just in case. It was a nice dinner, but ‘in case’ never happened.” She gave a rueful shrug. “So, I hold on to the undies and never wear them, in case ‘in case’ ever does happen. Not that I think it will.”
“Could the potentially interesting man be last night’s attacker?”
“Not likely. He lives down in Madison. He’s a professor. Emeritus. Art History. He bought one of my paintings. He’s very calm. A real gentleman. Would never hurt a flea.”
She was definitely too trusting. “Did he buy a scene of the river valley where Matthias was buried?”
“No. I painted that scene only once. He bought a waterfall. Not the one that Fallingbrook’s named after, one closer to Madison.”
“Does he still have the painting?”
“I have no idea. I never talked to him again after that nice dinner. We hit it off okay, but a week or two later, I heard he was going out with a younger woman, like someone in her early sixties.” Again, that mischievous twinkle. “He was approaching eighty.”
I stroked Dep. “Can you describe the car you saw the day that Matthias went missing?”
“It was black. Kind of sporty, with one of those spoiler things on the back. There were probably other cars around Fallingbrook that looked like that one, and I might not be remembering it right. Or if it’s the car I think I remember, maybe someone besides the owner was driving it. After all, I was driving a borrowed car that day.”
“What?”
“Georgia.” She bowed her head and pinched her lips shut for a second. “Georgia and I. We often traded. She had a small sedan, still has it. Had it. How are you supposed to talk about someone who isn’t here anymore, but should be?” She sniffled. “My van was newish then, and I often lent it to her because she sometimes has . . . had . . . big boxes of supplies to pick up. She didn’t really need a van, but lending it to her justified owning the sort of vehicle I’d always wanted so I could haul big paintings around.” Her tears were about to overflow.
“But that could mean . . .” I couldn’t go on. I wished I hadn’t opened my mouth.
Not that Lois wouldn’t have figured it out, anyway. She wiped her eyes. “Yes. If the person who was driving that car was Matthias’s murderer, he saw her car that evening and assumed that the gray-haired woman was Georgia. We both had gray hair then, not white, yet. Besides, the sun would have been in the driver’s eyes, so he—I’m just saying ‘he’ because it’s simpler than saying ‘he or she’ every time—probably didn’t get a good look at me.” She sighed. “And then he waited five whole years before he went and killed the wrong one of us.” She gulped at her brandy. “That burns.”
I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the brandy or about someone murdering Georgia because of something he or she thought Lois knew. I said softly, “After he killed Georgia, he might have figured out who was driving her car that evening, and that’s why he came after you last night. You’re not safe, Lois.”
“Maybe I am, now that he stole the pictures. Maybe he had a good look at the photo of the car and realized that I couldn’t possibly have seen the driver.”
“Not at that angle, but what if he thinks you saw him after he passed you?”
“But I didn’t. Maybe he looked in his rearview mirror and could tell I was still snapping pictures of the valley.”
“Maybe he’ll think you snapped a photo of his license plate?”
“Well, if he thinks that, he now knows I didn’t keep it, because it wasn’t in my photo album.” She closed the book so
forcefully that a puff of air brushed my face. “I decided that the driver of the car can’t be anyone who knows me, or he would have stopped to talk to me, then and there.” She shook her head as if to clear fuzz from her brain. “I was probably mistaken about whose car it was.”
“You should tell the police everything you’ve told me.”
She shook her head vehemently. “Too dangerous.”
“Think of it from the viewpoint of the person who threatened you. He can’t come back here. If he does, he risks being identified.”
“And I risk being dead.”
“I know Brent Fyne, the lead detective on Georgia’s case, the man who arrived at Georgia’s in the unmarked police car. He worked on Matthias’s case, too. He’s fair and honest. You can trust him.”
She set down her empty snifter and folded her arms. “He didn’t find Matthias’s killer.”
And if he had, if Alec had, Georgia might still be alive.
“Maybe the leads you give him will prevent other deaths.” Like Lois’s, but I didn’t say it. I was sure she was thinking it, anyway.
“As I told you, the sunset was sparkling off the windshield, and I couldn’t see the driver. Weeds hid the license plate. On top of everything else, the car was making a cloud of dust. No one could identify it, at least not positively, from the picture.”
“Maybe the driver had a totally innocent reason for being there, like he’d been fishing. So, if the police can figure out who he was, they can question him about what he might have seen in the valley that evening.” Lois was going to have to talk to the police. And I was going to have to stop avoiding Brent, at least for a while. “If you can find the picture, the police could get the state forensics lab to enhance it. They might prove that your friend was not driving the car. Let me call Brent, Lois.”
She exhaled and then slumped down as if the air in her lungs had been the only thing holding her up. “Okay.”
I could barely hear her.
Chapter 9
Brent picked up right away. “Hi, Em. I was about to call you.” He paused, then added quickly, “About Georgia Treetor.”
Survival of the Fritters Page 6
