“Let’s see, this is the biggest thing that’s happened in Morse Point since Louise Holbrook backed over her cheating husband fifty years ago, and I hear Marybeth down at the diner scooped them on this one. That must be sticking in their craw like a lobster claw. So, um, yeah, I could see them tossing a brick to get in.”
“Well, don’t just stand there, open the door,” Brenna said. “I’m pretty sure your insurance policy doesn’t cover gossips on a rampage.”
Tenley hurried across the room, and Brenna braced herself. She had an ulterior motive for talking to the Porter twins. She wanted to know what the scuttlebutt was in town, and they were just the ladies to tell her. It was going to be the gossip equivalent of you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.
Tenley unlocked the door and the two women yanked it open and marched in. Brenna had repositioned herself at the large worktable in the back of the shop. She had a basket of paper cutouts in front of her that she pretended to be sorting.
“Good morning, Ella and Marie,” she said. “How are you today?”
“Spill it,” Marie said. She was bouncing up and down on the balls of her white tennies, looking ready to bust out one of her karate-for-seniors high kicks if Brenna didn’t give her what she wanted.
“Whatever do you mean?” Brenna asked, playing dumb.
Ella gnashed her teeth, and Tenley shot Brenna a worried look. Brenna wondered briefly if she and Tenley could take them. She had a feeling the Porter sisters could rumble, and she’d lay odds they fought dirty.
“You know why we’re here,” Ella said. “So start talking. What do you know?”
“You first,” Brenna said.
“What?” Marie gasped, taken aback. “You were the one who fished him out of the lake, you go first.”
“I want to know what the buzz is about town,” Brenna said. “I want to know what people are thinking and saying.”
The sisters exchanged a long look. They wore matching running suits, Marie in yellow and Ella in green. Their gray hair sprang about their heads in recently tightened sausage curls and they both favored a shiny, bubblegum pink shade of lipstick.
As if reaching an unspoken agreement, they turned back to Brenna, pulled out chairs, and sat down. Tenley went to fetch the remaining coffee and doughnuts while Ella and Marie decided who should go first.
“You go ahead and start,” Ella said. “It’s your turn.”
“You just want to tell the ending,” Marie said. “You go first. I want to be the one to finish it.”
“You got to finish it last time,” Ella protested.
“No, I didn’t,” Marie argued.
“Yes, you did. You told Jorge Garcia at the flower shop the entire story before I could even say a word.”
“Did not.”
“Did too.”
“Quiet!” Brenna shouted over them. “Now someone start talking or I am taking my information and leaving.”
The twins studied one another again. It was a silent argument with a lot of raised and lowered eyebrows and put-out humphs. Finally, Marie nodded.
“Oh, all right, fine,” she snapped. “Save the best part for yourself.”
Ella gave her a close-lipped smile.
“Okay, it all started with Marybeth DeFalco,” Marie said.
“We already know that,” Tenley said. “She’s married to Officer Stuart DeFalco and he …”
The twins gave her identical baleful glares and she stammered to a halt.
“As I was saying,” Marie began again, “it started with Marybeth, and let me just say, if she wasn’t married to Stuart, she wouldn’t know anything about anything. That girl thinks that she’s in the know, but really she has no appreciation of the history of Morse Point residents, so how could she possibly know anything about anything? Am I right?”
“Quite right,” Ella agreed.
“Anyway, Marybeth told everyone who came into Stan’s this morning that you found Mayor Ripley bound and gagged and stuffed into a trunk that was sunk at the bottom of the lake.”
Tenley and Brenna exchanged a look.
“Don’t forget,” Ella prodded Marie. Marie looked bewildered until Ella pointed at her neck.
“Oh, and he had his throat slashed,” she said in an overly dramatic dinner theater stage whisper.
“No, he didn’t,” Brenna said.
The twins blinked at her.
“And he wasn’t bound and gagged either,” she said.
“He wasn’t?” Ella asked. “Are you quite sure?”
“Quite,” Brenna said.
“Well, that’s disappointing,” Marie said.
Tenley gave her a chastising glance and said, “The ru mors have obviously gotten way out of hand.”
“The trunk wasn’t at the bottom of the lake either,” Brenna said. “How could I have possibly found it there?”
The sisters gave her perplexed looks.
“So, it just floated to shore?” Marie asked.
“Sort of,” Brenna said. “I saw it in the water and pulled it in. It wasn’t out far at all.”
“That’s what we get for believing Ruby Wolcott’s mother,” Marie said. “Everyone knows she’s getting dotty.”
“How did Mrs. Wolcott hear about all this?” Tenley asked.
“Well, from her daughter, Ruby, of course,” Ella said. “Ruby heard it from Marybeth at the diner.”
“And when Mrs. Wolcott, who lives on our street, took that yippy little dog of hers, Hercules, for his morning trot, she stopped by our house and told us. We should have come here first. Everyone knows those hair-perming chemicals Ruby uses at the salon have made her dumber than a bag full of hammers.”
“Yes, but she does a nice job with a blue rinse,” Ella said.
“Except for that one time when she forgot Linda was under the dryer,” Marie said. “Poor thing walked around looking like a blue snowcone for a month.”
Brenna felt her right eye begin to twitch. “Ladies, if we could get back to the subject? How are the locals reacting to the news?”
She wanted to know if the townspeople suspected Nate, but she didn’t want to say as much.
The sisters exchanged a shrewd look.
“We could tell you that,” Marie said.
“Yes, we could,” Ella agreed.
“But …” Brenna knew there was a but involved here.
“But first tell us exactly what happened,” Ella said. “And no glossing over the details either. We need to have an accurate accounting of events before we can give any more information.”
Their pink-tinted lips clamped tight in identical mutinous lines, and Brenna knew she’d get nothing more until she showed hers, as it were.
She took a deep breath and told them about seeing the trunk and pulling it out of the water and finding the mayor inside. Both ladies gasped appreciatively. She then told them about talking to Chief Barker and watching the body bag get wheeled away on the stretcher.
Like her recitation to Tenley, she did not tell them about sharing breakfast with Nate or Ed Johnson’s appearance. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to keep this information to herself. Certainly, there was nothing wrong with eating breakfast with her landlord or borrowing his dog or having him chase away nosey reporters, but it was as if there had been a subtle shift in her relationship with Nate, and until she knew what it was, she didn’t want to talk about it, especially to the two biggest gossips in town.
“So, tell me,” she said. “What are people saying about the mayor’s death?”
Ella and Marie exchanged a triumphant look as if she were a big fat fish on their hook and they were about to reel her in.
“They think—” Marie began, but Ella cut her off.
“Back off, Sister. It’s my turn.”
Marie sniffed and sat back in her chair with a pout.
“They think,” Ella paused, “that your landlord, Nate Williams, did him in.”
“But that’s ridiculous!” Brenna argued. “Why would he stuff the mayo
r in a trunk and put him in his own lake?”
“Everyone knows they were arguing about the property,” Marie said. “And he did say he would sell that land over the mayor’s dead body.”
“That’s true,” Ella said. “Pete Farcas heard them arguing on the town hall steps.”
Brenna exchanged a look with Tenley. They had both heard Nate say it, too. Still, she didn’t believe, not for an instant, that he’d actually hurt the mayor.
“No. Nate was having too much fun taking on the mayor,” Brenna said. “He was enjoying fighting for a cause too much to end it prematurely. He didn’t kill the mayor. I know it.”
The Porter twins looked at her with matching calculating gazes. “What proof do you have?”
“Excuse me?” Tenley spoke up on Brenna’s behalf.
“She sounds awfully sure that Nate Williams couldn’t have done it,” Ella said. “Is she his alibi?”
The two ladies twittered, and Brenna felt her face grow hot with embarrassment. Honestly, she felt as if she were in junior high.
“Well?” Marie asked.
“He’s just my landlord,” Brenna said. “But I know he’s innocent.”
“Well, that’s not what Cynthia said to Chief Barker,” Marie said, looking smug with this bit of news.
“What?” Brenna and Tenley said together.
“Cynthia told Phyllis two days ago that she told Chief Barker that Nate Williams repeatedly threatened her husband and that Mayor Ripley had been about to get a restraining order against him.”
“She didn’t!” Tenley gasped.
“She did!” Ella said.
“How do you know this?” Brenna asked, wondering if it was the same source who’d said Mayor Ripley had been bound and gagged with his throat slashed.
“Because Phyllis’s maid, Karen Quincey, told Sarah Buttercomb at the bakery, who told us when we went for sticky buns yesterday. That’s why everyone thinks he did it.”
Brenna felt sick to her stomach. She’d only been joking with Nate about the townspeople running them out of town because they weren’t locals and were causing a ruckus with their signs, but now she wasn’t so sure. If enough people thought he’d killed Mayor Ripley, they’d have to take him in for questioning and then what would people think?
She stood up, banging her hip against the table in her haste. She had to let him know. She had to tell him that he was suspect number one.
“Where are you going?” Marie asked. She had a knowing glint in her eye that made Brenna squirm.
“Home. I forgot something,” she said.
Tenley nodded that she understood, and Brenna snatched her purse from the back counter and raced out the door, leaving the string of bells on the door handle jangling in her wake.
Chapter 10
Before cutting, make a color copy of the image as a backup. Always respect copyright.
Brenna stepped out onto the sidewalk and felt the unnatural quiet that blanketed the center of town like an unexpected snowfall. People were gathered around the town green in clusters, speaking in hushed tones. It was as if the mayor’s murder had left an indelible mark upon the small community, taking away its sense of safety and security and leaving it vulnerable and exposed like an open wound.
She hurried by three ladies, one of whom was Ruby Wolcott, distinguishable because of her platinum beehive, who owned Totally Polished, the salon on the corner, and who had helped spread the misinformation about the mayor. All three ladies turned to stare at her as she pressed her key fob and unlocked her Jeep with a bing.
She heard Ruby say to her friends, “I’m going to get me one of those.”
“Yeah,” agreed her friend. “And some Mace. I heard you can take down a bull elephant with one blast to the face.”
As a former urbanite, Brenna thought she should probably correct this erroneous information, but there was no time. She needed to get back to the lake and see what, if anything, was happening with Nate.
“Well, then surely it could take down a murderer like Nate Williams,” the third woman said.
Brenna stopped short as if she’s smacked into a glass wall. It was one thing to ignore their misinformation in regards to personal safety devices; it was another to disregard their opinion of her landlord, no, make that her friend.
She spun away from the Jeep and marched toward them. They looked startled to see her coming. She’d gotten last summer’s pedicures from Ruby, but hadn’t been in much this past winter as manicures were a bit of a waste of time and money, given her propensity for varnish-dried cuticles and paper cuts.
“Nate Williams is no more a murderer than I am,” she said, irate.
The three women goggled at her, and she realized that she might appear to be just the teeniest bit deranged.
Ruby stepped forward and looked her up and down. She patted the side of her enormous up-do with her long purple nails and said, “How do you know he’s not the murderer?”
“I just do,” she said. It occurred to her that she would make a lousy defense attorney.
“And we’re supposed to take your word for it, because …” Ruby’s voice trailed off.
“Yeah, why should we believe you?” The woman to Ruby’s right, who was wearing leopard skin pants and sported black spiky hair, asked.
“Because I know him,” Brenna said. It sounded lame even to her.
“How well do you know him?” Spiky Hair asked. There was no mistaking the innuendo in her voice.
The women chortled and Brenna felt her face grow warm.
“Not that well,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Too bad. He’s a fine-looking man,” Ruby said.
“I was behind him once in the market,” the third woman, a chubby brunette plainer than Ruby and Spiky Hair, said. “And I looked in his cart. It was full of those weird cheeses with the funny names and imported beer.”
“You know, if he were a little friendlier, I’d have made a play for him myself,” Spiky Hair said.
“He’s not very friendly,” Ruby said. “I ran into him at Stan’s once, and I couldn’t get a smile out of him, and I was wearing that cute little periwinkle top I have that always gets smiles.”
“Well, he is from New York City,” the brunette whispered, as if he came from the other side of the planet.
Brenna hung her head. She did not want to be here gossiping about Nate. She just couldn’t stand that people thought he was a murderer because he wasn’t local and liked to keep to himself. And she definitely didn’t want to know that the other women in town had the hots for him.
She had to get out of here. She forced her lips to go up in the corners in a facsimile of a smile. “Oh, and by the way, they say pepper spray is much better to use than Mace, which is actually tear gas and not as effective.”
She spun on her heel and left the women staring after her as she clambered into the Jeep. Well, what could she say? Twelve hours ago, she’d found a dead body and now she was running on virtually no sleep and too many doughnuts. She was not at her best.
The drive out to the lake was short. Upon arrival, she saw Chief Barker’s cruiser parked in the lot. She felt her heart thump in her chest. Would he arrest Nate? Could he?
She slammed the car door, forgetting to lock it, and hurried to Nate’s house. She dashed up the steps and pounded on the door.
Hank went into a frenzy of greeting, and when Nate opened the door, the dog launched himself at Brenna before Nate could grab his collar. Luckily, she’d had the foresight to brace her knees and caught his paws on her hip without getting knocked down.
She rubbed Hank’s ears and glanced over his head to look at Nate’s wrists to see if he’d been handcuffed, but they were unshackled. She felt her shoulders drop down from around her ears with relief.
Chief Barker sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee. He waved at Brenna. He looked as tired as she felt, with purple circles under his eyes and several hours of beard stubble sprouting all over his chin.
“Morning, Bre
nna,” he said.
“Good morning, Chief,” she answered as she came into the house with Hank dancing around her feet.
“I was just about to come and find you,” he said. “I have some more questions.”
“You’re welcome to talk here,” Nate offered. “I could take Hank for a W-A-L-K.”
Chief Barker looked at him with one eyebrow raised.
“Sorry, I have to spell it; otherwise he goes mental,” Nate explained.
“Yeah, I had a shepherd like that,” the chief said. “Honestly, I could use some fresh air. It’s a nice morning; how about you and I go for a W-A-L-K, Brenna?”
“Oh, okay,” she said. She glanced at Nate and he nodded, which she took as encouragement.
She followed the chief as he led the way out the door toward the lake, but in the opposite direction from where the yellow crime scene tape still marked off the area.
They walked side by side with nothing but the sound of a giddy flock of red-winged black birds chirping and the breeze rustling the new leaves on the trees for accompaniment.
Finally, Chief Barker broke their mutual silence. “I know you’re probably tired of thinking about last night.”
“It’s like a B movie horror clip, The Creature from Morse Point Lake, stuck in a loop in my head,” she said, and he smiled.
“I expect it’ll be like that until your brain gets tired of it,” he said.
They reached a narrow part of the path and were forced to walk single file until they got around the bend and the path opened up again.
The chief waited until she was beside him before he continued. “You’ve told me about finding the trunk,” he said, “and I appreciate your information. What I need to know now is do you remember seeing anyone around the lake over the past few weeks? Did anyone make an unusual appearance?”
Brenna thought about it. “Other than you, you mean?”
A small smile tipped up the corner of his bushy silver mustache. “Yeah, other than me.”
“And I can assume we mean other than the mayor?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
Brenna mulled over the past few days. The previous twelve hours had been an adrenaline-infused haze, and while there were some parts of it she couldn’t forget, there were other lapses in time that she couldn’t remember. Unfortunately, anything from the past few weeks fell into the category she didn’t remember.
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