Murder, She Wrote--A Time for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “Except for that butane the former chief of police, then a detective, detected.”

  “Only trace amounts, nothing to base an investigation on for someone not used to that particular MO—that’s detective speak for ‘modus operandi,’ or ‘method of operation.’”

  “I know what it means,” I told him. “What I don’t know is how you’re so familiar with this particular MO.”

  “I solved another murder under similar circumstances back in the day.”

  “When was that?”

  “My life BJ.”

  “What’s that?”

  “‘Before Jessica.’ In my life there’s ‘Before Jessica’ and ‘After Jessica’ and nothing else.”

  “Should I be flattered?”

  “You should pay your bills. Anyway, the body was burned beyond recognition. They identified Lisa Joy Reavis from a single fingerprint found on the rearview mirror.”

  “The mirror survived the fire?”

  “I think I’ll double my bill today for educational services provided. The back of a mirror, composed of either silver or aluminum, will oxidize in a fire but the glass itself, typically, won’t melt unless temperatures exceed three thousand degrees. That’s possible for the engine compartment, but not for the interior cabin. Surprised you never came across that in all that research you do for your books.”

  “Now that I think of it, Harry, I don’t think I’ve ever researched anything to do with cars or driving.”

  “Your loss, my girl. Anyway, that former chief didn’t know any more than you did until I informed him, too. I think I tempted him to see if he could get the case reopened.”

  Something struck me at that moment, courtesy of the conversation Mort and I had had with Madeline Demerest in Cape Elizabeth. “Lisa Joy’s mother has no idea her daughter’s dead. As next of kin, why was she never informed?”

  “Can’t say. Given what you told me about the state of this young woman’s estrangement from her family, it could well be she didn’t list any next of kin anywhere. So when she was killed, technically there was no one to inform.”

  “That makes a degree of sense, in a sad way.”

  “It makes perfect sense. Not to mention the lag in time between her print being lifted off that rearview mirror and run through the system.”

  “Wait. How was it that Lisa Joy Reavis was in the system?”

  “A shoplifting beef while she was a college student in Virginia. She paid a small fine for what she claimed was a misunderstanding. The charges were dropped, but her prints stayed in the system.”

  I realized Mort and I would now have to deliver this news to Lisa Joy’s mother, Maddie Demerest, and we’d have to do it in person.

  “You know what this means,” I said to Harry.

  “No. What does it mean?”

  “First, the father is murdered, then the older daughter in this staged car accident, and now the younger daughter.”

  “You’re forgetting the oldest kid, that high school principal’s son.”

  “No, I’m not, but he was killed while serving as a Marine in the Middle East.”

  “Come on, Jessica—where’s your conspiratorial side? I’d say we’re looking at a serial killer who targeted a single family. It’s your dime, but I think I should do a deeper dive, into cousins, pets, domestic help, maybe even neighbors. With you involved, who knows how deep this might go?”

  I cringed at his macabre sense of humor. “Harry, you’re the only person I know who’s adept at making light of murder.”

  “Working with you has given me a whole lot of experience in the subject, after all.” He hesitated, his voice tightening when he resumed. “You really think all three murders here might be connected?”

  “That was your theory, remember? For my part, I know Ginny Genaway, Walter Reavis’s younger daughter, was sniffing around Appleton for clues about his death the week before she was murdered. And she had plenty of questions about her older sister.”

  “So there must be something to all this—that’s what you’re saying.”

  “How much would you charge me for you to make a trip to Tuscaloosa?”

  “I could be on a plane in two hours,” Harry McGraw said, in answer to my question, “if I can expense out a ticket to the Southeastern Conference Championship on Saturday, Alabama home against Georgia.”

  “I don’t want to waste your time yet.”

  “But the game’s the day after tomorrow, Jessica. Come on, give a guy a break.”

  “Roll tide, Harry!” I said, quoting the Alabama football team’s favorite cheer.

  “Not unless I’m in the stands,” he groused.

  * * *

  * * *

  “What are you smiling about?” I asked Mort, after I slid the phone back into my bag.

  “The fact that this fourteen-year-old murder by butane is in someone else’s jurisdiction, Mrs. F.”

  “Why did Ginny Genaway have copies of the Cabot Cove Gazette lying around her apartment, Mort?”

  “You pull that question out of midair?”

  “Mrs. F. did. And why did Ginny come to Appleton to poke around in her father’s murder and her sister’s potential part in it?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “You are a trained investigator with twenty-five years on the NYPD.”

  “You’d think that would’ve prepared me for anything, wouldn’t you?” Mort said, only half joking.

  * * *

  * * *

  Mort dropped me at Mara’s, where Seth Hazlitt was at his usual table inside, picking at salad for his afternoon snack.

  “Finish your pie already, Seth?” I greeted him as I sat down, thirty minutes late at three thirty.

  “Nope, skipping it for today.”

  “Really?”

  “Skipping it for a while, truth be told, ayuh.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “I stepped on the scale at the office this morning. Thought it was broken when I kept sliding the weight balance to the right. Turned out, it was: ten pounds in the wrong direction if you know what I mean.”

  “Ouch.”

  “My diet changed immediately to foods certain to be more in my favor,” he said, pronouncing that last word “fava” in his typical Maine speak.

  “When are you going to teach me to talk like a local, Seth?”

  “When you’re reborn as one, Jess. There are some things that come by birth that can’t be taught. It just wouldn’t sound familiar,” he explained, pronouncing the last word in this sentence “familia.”

  “Maybe you should consider pitching a Babel for Maine speak—you know, like a foreign language.”

  “Speaking of which”—he frowned—“the way the rest of you talk sounds like a foreign language to those of us who know what words are supposed to sound like.”

  I realized something in that moment.

  “Uh-oh,” I heard Seth utter.

  “What?”

  “You’ve got that look, Jess.”

  “You say that to me a lot.”

  “Because you get that look a lot. The one that says, ‘I just figured out who the murderer is.’”

  I shook my head. “It’s probably nothing this time, almost surely nothing.”

  Seth wasn’t buying it. “Since when?”

  “No, the likelihood that both of Walter Reavis’s daughters were murdered has me playing pin the tail on the killer. I’m seeing shadows even in the dark.”

  “That supposed to be a metaphor? Because if it is, I’d seriously recommend you consider another line of work. Maybe take Principal Sweeney up on that offer to teach at the high school.” He stopped and regarded me more closely. “There’s that look again, Jessica.”

  “You picking me up tomorrow morning as scheduled?” I asked him, changing the subjec
t.

  “Bright and early. Ginny Genaway’s psychiatrist, the good Dr. Sam Sackler, is expecting us. He’s freed up an hour at eleven o’clock. Means there’ll be time for you to buy me lunch at Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria at the Chestnut Hill Mall afterward.”

  “What happened to your diet, Seth?”

  He shook his head slowly to exaggerate the gesture. “Guess your book sales have hit a bad patch if you want to get out of paying that much.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  I didn’t know exactly what I expected to get out of Ginny Genaway’s psychiatrist. Certainly, I wanted to get a notion of Ginny’s general mental state recently, and hoped for a clue as to what exactly she was after in Cabot Cove that had spurred her to impersonate a high school student for our interview. Maybe Dr. Sackler would have some tidbit to provide about her older sister, Lisa Joy, now a potential murder victim as well.

  My desire to see Dr. Sackler, though, was rooted in a single assumption: Since Ginny had clearly been acquainted with her killer, it was reasonable to believe that he or she had been mentioned somewhere in her sessions with the psychiatrist.

  Dr. Sackler’s office was located on the first floor of a tony brick Brookline brownstone on the corner of Beacon Street and St. Paul Street, the mailbox outside indicating his residence was on the second floor. That made me long for the renovations on my beloved home at 698 Candlewood Lane to be completed at last. I often did red-line edits of my manuscripts at the kitchen table, but I wrote in an upstairs study I’d lovingly furnished over the nearly twenty-five years I’d lived there. Originally, I was heartsick over losing so many of my cherished keepsakes to smoke and fire damage. But over the months, I’d come to embrace the challenge of starting from near scratch in making the study my retreat again. Many of those keepsakes—the ones I’d insisted on salvaging at great expense through a restoration company called TRDN, which specialized in such things—brought with them my sharpest memories of Frank, which grew even sharper when I was pounding away at my Apple keyboard.

  I miss the nostalgic clack of the typewriter keys on my old Royal, though not the bother of having to retype entire manuscripts. Then there was the terror that came with completing a manuscript that was truly my only copy and taking it to be photocopied at the local storefront copy store because of the possibility that the building would burn down, destroying my just-completed book forever. That copy store had long since closed, replaced on Main Street first by a fruit shop and currently by a trendy women’s clothier that had also bought the old drugstore next door. I used to have all the prescriptions that Seth Hazlitt wrote for me filled there, and I often whiled away at the soda fountain the minutes it took the pharmacist to finish the order, the soda fountain now living only in my memories as well.

  I know it sounds crazy, but whatever was left of Frank’s presence and aura hadn’t seemed to accompany me to Hill House. Writing at the antique desk in the living room section of my suite felt like work, as if my muse wasn’t there to make the pages and time speed by. More than anything, I wanted to return to 698 Candlewood Lane to get back to whatever remained of Frank. And having rekindled memories of that night Frank had taken Grady and me to meet Realtor Eve Simpson, and then of how he somehow managed to put the funds together to buy the house, left me more reflective and nostalgic than ever for the world stripped from me by smoke and flames.

  I rang the bell to Dr. Sam Sackler’s door. It rattled open, and a sprightly woman maybe half my age stood before me.

  “You must be Jessica Fletcher. I’ve been expecting you.”

  I quickly got over my momentary surprise that Dr. Sackler was a woman.

  “Thank you for seeing us, Dr. Sackler,” I said, shooting Seth a glance.

  I could tell by the way he looked at me that he hadn’t been aware it was “Samantha” Sackler either.

  “And you must be Dr. Hazlitt.” She smiled, extending her hand. “It’s always nice to meet a colleague.”

  “I’m hardly much when it comes to matters of the mind, ma’am.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. You’ve probably helped as many patients out of mental scrapes as you’ve treated scraped knees.”

  “Well, now that you put it that way . . .”

  “Seth,” I said, “once you’re done patting yourself on the back, let’s get started so we don’t take up any more of Dr. Sackler’s valuable time than necessary.”

  “I envy you your small-town practice, Doctor,” she continued gushing to Seth in genuine fashion, “the last bastion of old-school medicine before we ended up where we are now.”

  “Doctor,” Seth returned, “my motto is, if it was good enough when I first hung up my shingle, it’s good enough now.”

  They shared a smile while I rolled my eyes.

  “Should we talk in your office?” Seth asked Dr. Sackler.

  “I’d rather we talk here in the parlor that doubles as my waiting room. There’s something, well, that feels unseemly about having this kind of conversation in the same room where I see patients.”

  “And where you saw Ginny Genaway regularly,” I said. “How long had you been treating her?”

  “I checked her file this morning. I started treating her after she married Vic Genaway just over two years ago. She said it was his idea.”

  Seth and I sat down on the couch. Dr. Sackler took a chair and maneuvered it so it was centered between us. She crossed one leg and then tried the other side, searching for a comfort that plainly eluded her.

  “I’ve been practicing psychiatry for ten years, Mrs. Fletcher, and this is the first time I’ve lost a patient to violence this way.”

  “By which you mean murder.”

  She nodded. “How do you live with it every day?”

  “I don’t. I only write about it.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  I shook my head. “When I’m writing about murder, I can turn if off when I turn off my computer. Not so when I’m investigating one in real life, which fortunately doesn’t happen too often.”

  “Could’ve fooled me,” Seth said under his breath before feigning a cough.

  I shot him a disapproving glance. “We’re most interested in your final sessions with Ginny, Dr. Sackler, the ones that would’ve occurred closest to her untimely demise.”

  “I’d love to help you, but Ginny canceled her last five appointments and then stopped scheduling new ones.”

  “Going back how long?”

  “Right around six months. I was seeing her twice a week, you see. The last time I saw or spoke to her was her final appointment. When she first started seeing me, she was living with her husband around here. We were making great progress leading up to the move, and it’s difficult to replicate the same rapport with another psychiatrist. Even after she moved to New Hampshire in the wake of the divorce, she considered it worth the drive.”

  Seth patted me on the knee and leaned forward. “Is it unusual for patients to end their treatment so abruptly, Doctor?”

  “It is unusual but it still happens more than I would like.”

  “Dr. Sackler,” I said, “we’re trying to understand Ginny Genaway’s mental state in the days leading up to her murder. Since you hadn’t seen her for a while, we’ll have to speak more generally. In your sessions with her, based on what you’re comfortable sharing, did she ever indicate that she felt threatened in any way?”

  “All my patients feel threatened in some way, Mrs. Fletcher. That’s why they seek treatment.”

  “I was talking more in a physical way, if she feared for her life or anything like that.”

  Sackler thought for a few moments. “Ginny’s issues were primarily related to her relationships with two men: her father, Walter Reavis, and husband, Vic Genaway. Sometimes she would even confuse the two, as if she found them emotionally interchangeable.”

  “‘Emotionally interch
angeable,’” I repeated. “That’s an interesting term.”

  “You won’t find it in any textbook, but I wrote a paper on it that received several awards. The basic tenet is the old trope of a young man looking to marry his mother or a young woman looking to marry her father.”

  “Not literally, of course, Doctor,” Seth noted, needing to inject his two cents into the conversation.

  “Of course not, but Ginny’s case was rather unique,” Samantha Sackler said, addressing him now more than me. “She enjoyed a very close relationship with her father as a little girl before his murder. Losing him left a void that led to a host of psychological problems through the rest of her childhood, extending well into young adulthood, including her college years and after. Did you know she was working as a server at a bar owned by her future husband?”

  “Mr. Genaway mentioned that when we spoke to him, yes.”

  Sackler nodded. “You might say she developed an old-fashioned schoolgirl crush on him.”

  “Because he finally filled the void left by her father’s murder all those years before,” I surmised.

  Sackler nodded. “The feeling was mutual, and they started dating, with Vic truly wining and dining her, making her feel safe in a way that nobody had been able to since her father’s death. I’m not sure she ever truly loved him in the traditional sense, but she came to depend upon him, and oftentimes, that makes for an even more powerful attraction. I’m always clinically suspicious of relationships between superiors and subordinates because it suggests a level of dependence that was classic in this case, on Ginny’s part.”

  “And then came the fight in the country club, when she took a golf club to her husband’s head,” I said.

  Sackler looked toward Seth again. “Care to hazard a forensic diagnosis of what all that means, Doctor?”

  “I’d say, Doctor,” Seth replied, beaming, “that she replaced the dependence she had transferred from her father to her husband to someone else.”