by Wendy Tyson
Megan could hear commotion on King’s end of the line. “Clover’s kicking me out of the room,” King said. “Give me a minute.” Megan heard him shuffling around, and then in a quieter voice, he said, “What I don’t understand is how she got the body to your place. Even if she took Penny there to throw suspicion your way knowing that Penny had been researching you, how would she have physically moved her sister?”
“An accomplice.”
“Who would that be?”
“The man who is missing. The man who could easily carry Penny. The man Claire was looking for at Gertie’s house.” Megan took a breath, forced herself to slow down. “The man who was seen at the von Tressler estate.” Megan filled King in on her trip to the city. “Claire and Duke Masterman. Both single.”
“I don’t know—”
“And when I told Evan I’d met Claire in Winsome, he didn’t react at all. If she had only gone for the memorial, you’d think he would have questioned our relationship. But he knows Claire came here often.”
“To see Duke.”
“And plan.”
King was quiet for a moment. “How would she have met Duke?”
That bothered Megan, too. There were a few things that still bothered her. Like where Olive fit in. “Maybe Claire reached out to him. She knew he had access to David and Melanie’s property. Perhaps she promised him a chunk of change if he cooperated.” Or a house. A very big house. He acts like he owns the place, the landscaper had said. “Porter said he’s a gambler. He may have needed cash.”
King sighed loudly into the phone. “This all sounds right in theory, Megan, but I need to do more research.”
“Can you get a warrant for the house in Chestnut Hill? I bet you’ll find Claire—or at least evidence she’s been living there.”
“I don’t have enough for a warrant, Megan. You know that.” King yawned. “I have meetings in the morning, but I’ll be around in the afternoon. Call me then.”
Megan slipped her phone on the charger and brushed her teeth. She lay in bed beside Sadie thinking about her evening with Denver. She missed him, and she’d broken all of his rules once she returned home.
Staying with him would have been nice. Having him here? Even better.
Megan turned onto her side. She replayed her conversations with Dom, Evan, Gertie, Olive, and Melanie over and over again. What was she missing? Her theory about Claire felt right, but she was sure there was some critical piece to this puzzle.
Sadie began snoring softly and Megan stroked her head. “Sleep, old friend,” she whispered. Someone should get some rest. She knew sleep would not come easily for her.
Twenty-Five
Serenity Manor seemed to be all the brochure promised it would. Ten rolling acres in bucolic Bucks County. A beautiful dining area, topnotch food, a gym, hair salon, five-lane pool, art studio, and even a cat room for those who missed their pets. One-floor apartments equipped with a kitchen alcove and separate bedroom. Bright, modern—and blandly institutional.
“Not bad, right?” Jenny Clark said.
Jenny had the enthusiasm and perspective of a twenty-year-old raised in the comfortable suburbs, and Megan wanted to take her at her word. But she knew marketing and reality weren’t always the same. The residents looked happy. Were they happy?
“Ask a few yourself. We’re going to grab coffee in the cafeteria. See how they interact.”
“Is it true you can’t have crockpots?”
“Or curling irons, or space heaters, or toaster ovens, or a number of other small appliances,” Jenny said. “It is strict that way. And no dogs.”
Bibi without dogs. The thought saddened Megan.
Megan followed her hostess to a table in the middle of the dining area. Jenny left and returned with two coffees and a basket of brownie bites. “I always eat their brownies. They’re the best. And the residents can have all they want.”
Oh, lord, Megan thought. Bibi with access to unlimited sweets.
“Why did you want to talk to me, Megan?”
Megan swirled her coffee around with a metal spoon. “As I’m sure you’ve guessed, I didn’t come here for the grand tour—although I appreciated it. I understand you worked the memorial at the von Tressler estate.”
Jenny put her coffee down without drinking. “Did I do something wrong?” A petite girl with large dark eyes and a mop of brown curls, she looked nervous.
“No, no. I just have a few questions about what went on. You see, a woman is missing. I dropped her off at the memorial, but she never showed up. I was wondering if you saw her. Her name is Claire von Tressler.”
Megan slid a photo she’d gotten off the internet across the table. Jenny stared at it for a few seconds before sliding it back.
“Sorry, I’ve never seen her before.”
“You’re sure?”
Jenny glanced at the photo again. “You have to understand, the caterer was very stern with all of us. No fraternizing, and it was crowded at times. I didn’t really talk to anyone. Is it possible she was there? I guess, but I think I would have noticed.”
“How about this man?” Megan handed her a photo of Dom, the one from LinkedIn.
“Yes, him I saw. He was talking to Melanie and Veronica at one point. I don’t think he stayed long.”
“But you didn’t see Claire? She wasn’t with them—you’re certain?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I appreciate your help.” Megan pulled the photos together and put them back in her bag.
“I did overhear Melanie talking about her, if that means anything.”
Megan was in the middle of closing her purse. She paused. “Do you remember what she was saying?”
“Not really. She was talking with a guy in what I think was the study. Lots of bookshelves, no books. I thought maybe that’s what you wanted to talk about.” Her skin flushed red. “I was looking for a spot to take a call, and I kind of opened the door on them. Melanie was pretty angry.”
“Were they doing something they shouldn’t have been doing?”
Jenny’s eyes grew wide. “Oh, goodness, no. I guess I just interrupted their discussion, and she was annoyed. I heard Claire’s name mentioned as I was opening the door.”
“Do you remember what the man looked like?”
“I can do better. I know who he is. My uncle has used him for work now and again. Duke Masterman. He lives on Canal Street down the road from your café.” Jenny’s gaze strayed to the table beside them. “Uncle Roger says he was doing work for Melanie, so that makes sense.” She peered at Megan. “Right?”
Megan agreed. She thanked Jenny again and left, managing to get to her car without running. She had been wrong all along. She needed to talk with King.
But first, she dialed Ryan’s number as fast as she could. She had a hunch, and he could give it credence. He picked up immediately.
“What’s up, Megan?”
“Last Thursday morning, were you working on my house?”
“Are you okay? You don’t sound so good. You’re breathing hard.”
“I’m fine, I just need to know. It’s important.”
“Hold on, let me check.” Ryan was back on the line in two minutes. “June 30, right? No, I wasn’t here. I had some other work to do.”
“Do you remember where you were?”
“I came back here in the afternoon. In the morning…let’s see. I stopped by the Myers first thing in the morning to fix their garage door. Mr. Myers is my mom’s friend and he was having a fit because their door was stuck open. Afraid of burglars. Quick fix for me. After that…hold on, checking…I stopped at the von Tressler’s property to work on the basement. You know that Duke had left parts of the job unfinished, and water was coming in through a hole in the wall when it rained.”
“Did you fix the hole?”
&nbs
p; “I did.”
“Was your presence really needed?”
“The hole needed to be fixed, if that’s what you’re asking. The carpet was wet down there, and I could see where water had leaked in. Personally, Melanie let it go too long, but with David’s passing, I guess she had other things on her mind.”
“This is important, Ryan, so take your time. Was Melanie there when you were?”
“I don’t need to take my time. The answer is no. I had to deal with her mother, Veronica. A real sweetheart.”
Megan thanked her contractor and hung up. Her next call was to King. He didn’t answer—meetings all morning, she recalled—so she left an urgent message. It took him seconds to call her back.
“I’m tied up, Megan. Can it wait?”
“No.”
“Executive summary then.”
Megan forced her breathing to slow down. “I was wrong. It’s not Claire you want. It’s Melanie.”
“Melanie? I thought she was the next target. Competition for the estate and all.”
“Right, that’s what I thought. But today I spoke with someone who saw Duke at the memorial gathering.”
“So?”
“Duke was supposed to be missing. Why was he at the memorial?”
“To repay what he owed.”
“Melanie claims he never did that. She claims he hasn’t been seen in weeks.”
“Who saw him? Someone reliable?”
“Jenny Clark, Roger’s niece. She was working the memorial. She knows Duke, says she walked in on Melanie and Duke talking in a room together.”
“Megan, hold on—”
“There’s more. You asked me what Ryan was doing the morning Penny was killed. Ryan was at the von Tressler estate—at Melanie’s request.” She paused. “And Melanie wasn’t there.”
Dead air. “Bobby? Don’t you see, it adds up. Claire wasn’t coming to Winsome to be with Duke, she was coming to be with David. They continued their affair. Meanwhile, Melanie was getting it on with Duke. She and Duke decided to kill Claire after David died. Kill the competition. I bet Penny overheard them planning ways to get rid of her, and they killed her to silence her. She had information about me in her possession, so it was easy enough to place her body on my property.”
King said, “And then Claire ran.”
“She knew her life was in danger. Maybe she saw something at the memorial. She’s been lurking around, though. Checked up on Duke by posing as a cop.”
“I had my officers drive by Duke’s house. Empty. As you said, the neighbors haven’t seen him in weeks. Still think he’s staying at the Chestnut Hill property?”
Megan thought about the sequence of events. “That would be my guess.”
“We’ll work with the Philadelphia police department to get a drive by, check it out. In the meantime, just go home. Please? If what you say is right, and if Melanie suspects you’re on to her, you could be a target.”
Megan had thought the same thing. “She probably hired Clay to check up on me. See what I know.”
“Likely.” He said something to someone in the room with him. “Megan, I have to go. I’ll call you later. Again, go home. Stay there. Please.”
Twenty-Six
Megan arrived back at the farm at lunchtime. She was surprised to see Bibi’s car in the driveway along with another—one she didn’t recognize. One of her Bridge friends, perhaps, Megan thought. Or a woman from their church. She could see Clay and Porter milling around in the back fields, and she heard hammering at the Marshall house. She was glad to be home.
Inside, the house was oddly quiet. The dogs were up at the barn with Clay, Megan figured—normal for a nice day. The kitchen smelled of cinnamon and coffee, and the dishes in the sink said Bibi was entertaining. The murmur of voices drifted from the parlor.
“Megan, is that you?” Bibi called.
“It is. I’ll be there in a moment.”
“Bring me some hot tea, please. Black tea would be nice.”
“Okay,” Megan replied.
Hot tea? There were two cups in the sink and two dessert plates, which meant Bibi had already had coffee and cake. She never had more than one cup of caffeine in the afternoon, and her typical tea was chamomile. Black tea was caffeinated.
You’re overthinking this, Megan told herself. She boiled water and put the water and teabag in a Winsome mug. Pausing by the kitchen door, Megan held her breath so she could hear what was going on in the parlor. The murmuring had stopped. Something was wrong. One, Bibi could always be heard chattering when she had guests. Two, Bibi usually bustled in to meet Megan when she got home, guest or no guest. Three, the tea.
Four, the car outside was a Mercedes. Who did they know who drove a Mercedes? No one.
Megan figured the tea was some kind of Bibi signal. “Cream?” she yelled to her grandmother.
“Definitely!” was her perky response.
That cemented it. Bibi didn’t believe in milk products in her tea, and she knew Megan knew that. Definitely a signal. Quickly, Megan banged some drawers to make it sound like she was getting a spoon for the tea. She shoved a paring knife up the sleeve of her blouse. She texted King that something was amiss, and she was about to text Clay to come down to the house with Gunther when she felt a presence behind her.
“Hello, Dom,” she said, her back to the door.
“How did you know?” he asked pleasantly. “Were you expecting me to call on your grandmother?”
Megan turned to face him, keeping the arm with the knife behind her back. She saw the same serious young man she’d met at Starbucks, only this time he was holding a gun and pointing it at her.
“Where’s my grandmother?”
“Put the tea and your phone down and I’ll show you.” He smiled. “She’s fine. A little tied up right now, you might say.”
Megan placed the tea on the counter and yelled, “Bibi!”
“I’m fine, Megan,” came her grandmother’s voice from the other room.
“You don’t trust me, the golden boy of von Tressler Investments? I’m disappointed. And after I spent so much time sharing my boo-hoo story with you.” Dom walked closer. “So how did you know it was me? Tell me, please. I like a game as much as my grandfather did. I thought we were pretty careful.”
“You were,” Megan said. “Until I saw the Mercedes, I thought Melanie was working with Duke Masterman. But as I was making the tea—which my grandmother would never ask for after having coffee, by the way, especially with cream—I realized I was missing an even bigger picture. Claire was still bedding David, right?”
Dom nodded.
“And Melanie was sleeping with the help—Duke, that is, right?”
Another nod.
“For Melanie and Duke, the immediate problem wasn’t Claire, it was David. That’s where you came in.”
The amused look on Dom’s face dimmed slightly. “Go on.”
“David was a problem all around. He stood between Melanie and her boy toy. He stood between you and ownership of the company. With that prenup in place, he stood between Melanie and freedom. And he wouldn’t ditch that girlfriend of his, Claire. You and Melanie decided to kill David, which was oh-so-easy given his preexisting heart issues. A little of the right poison, and no one would ever know a thing.”
“A good story so far.” Dom waved the gun. “Go on.”
The kitchen was warm, and Megan was sweating. She blinked away sweat that had dripped into her eyes.
“I said go on.”
“The problem was, once David was gone, you had a distraught Claire to contend with. And even worse, Claire’s big sister Penelope, a woman who valued family loyalty above all else. Penny overheard you and Melanie plotting at the memorial, and she confronted you. The next day, you and Melanie took care of that issue—with a little help from a certain contractor. Pu
tting Penny’s body on my property was a no brainer. She’d been asking about me all around town, so you could throw the police off the trail by having them chase shadows.”
Dom began to clap using his gun as the other hand. “Impressive.”
“I’m not sure how you and Melanie got together. Maybe an affair of your own—keeping it in the family and all. Maybe you had a little tête-à-tête during a family dinner and realized how much you both hated the von Tresslers.”
“Maybe we both just hated David.”
“Maybe. Only now you had two people to get rid of. One, Claire. With her dead, Melanie would be set to inherit everything. I’m sure the two of you made some type of deal keeping you on as CEO and eventually transferring more ownership to you. A real win-win. Two,” Megan met his gaze. The knife felt heavy against her arm, and she fought to keep it steady as she let it fall into her sweaty hand. “Two, Duke. He’d served his purpose, and now he was a liability.”
“This is all wonderful, and quite astute of you to figure it all out so eloquently, but you have no proof. David’s been cremated, and his official cause of death states natural causes. And Duke? He’s a womanizer who frequently disappears. No one will miss him.”
“You’re forgetting something.”
A shadow crossed Dom’s features. “What’s that?”
“Me.” Megan hurled the knife across the room. It grazed Dom’s cheek and clipped a chunk off his ear. In the moment he took to recover, he dropped the gun. Megan sprang across the room, flinging herself onto Dom. He was a small man, but strong. She used her elbows to dig into his neck while her fingernails clawed at his eyes. Bibi was shouting from the other room. Megan could hear sirens in the distance and dogs barking outside.
Dom struggled to sit up. Megan used whatever leverage she could to throw herself against him.
He gasped. She dug her elbows in harder, feeling soft flesh give way under her body. Blood soaked the floor by his head. His hands were pulling at her, but she felt an adrenaline rush like never before. He was in her home, and her grandmother was tied up in the other room. She pressed harder. His struggling stopped.
