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by Nadine Doolittle

  She opened the door and breathed deeply of the September air that held a hint of decay. Canada geese honked high overhead, flying south in familiar chevron formation.

  The geese were flying south!

  It was like being zapped with electricity. That meant winter was coming and the book wasn’t finished, and no book meant no income potential! She was like the grasshopper (or was it a cricket?) that played all summer and starved in the winter. Avery closed the patio door, put her dishes in the sink and marched to her office. There was nothing like fear to motivate the muse.

  Her office was too pleasant, she thought, looking around. Maybe she should have a windowless cell. She’d found an extra-wide armchair for the corner near the bookcase and had filled it with inviting pillows. It was covered in durable flowered chintz. A reading lamp was behind it and a small table on the left hand side. The idea was she would use the chair for deep study and research.

  Her desk on the other hand was all business. A big, glossy dark wood behemoth that she’d found at a yard sale. It had two banks of drawers and one narrow one for holding pens and paper that locked with a key. The key had been lost years ago. The owner said Avery was welcome to break into it if she wanted. Whatever she found in there was hers. Avery was curious but not so curious that she was willing to break the clasp.

  Her leather chair was upholstered in soft forgiving padding. It swivelled and adjusted to whatever height she desired. She’d arranged the furniture so she faced the window and the door. The window really was a pleasure to look at, though it was as old as Moses and probably would have to be replaced if she didn’t want to go bankrupt heating the room. Practicality wrestled with her love for historic colonial glass window panes.

  While she waited for the computer to warm up, her thoughts drifted to Karen’s parents and their ambitions for their daughter. Did Karen share those ambitions or was she like most teenagers of that era and rebelled against the Establishment? A pregnant teenager didn’t have a lot of choice back then if her parents wouldn’t support her.

  The details of the case were too numerous to keep track of. Avery typed them into the computer.

  Point One: Frank Zwick said he thought Karen was on the Pill.

  What did that suggest? Karen and Duncan were lovers and she didn’t get pregnant because she was taking birth control. She stopped taking it when Duncan broke up with her.

  Or Duncan couldn’t have kids. Frank hinted the Penelope was barren, but what if Duncan was the problem? Any number of events could render a teenage boy sterile, especially an athlete. Duncan had played football.

  Point Two: Duncan was jealous of Frank’s relationship with Karen. Why didn’t he get back together with her when she dropped Frank? He didn’t know about the pregnancy at that stage.

  Point Three: Could Ida Greb have killed Jenny Blake? She hated her enough to do it and she could have owned a puka shell necklace.

  Point Four: Could Jesse have killed Jenny Blake? He was clever enough to outwit the police and get away with it.

  Point Five: Who attacked Karen Haggerty? Was it Frank? Two separate attackers for two different reasons. One is a copycat. Logically, Duncan was Jenny’s killer. He had the necklace in his possession at the time of her death and a motive. And Frank, always the runner-up, copycatted Duncan’s method on his ex-wife, maybe to incriminate his old buddy. He was still bitter over the treatment of his parents who sounded like great people. Being back in St. Ives brought back all the bitter memories. He was only pretending to be over it.

  They all were pretending.

  Avery realized not one of them was saying what they really felt about Jenny and at least one of them was flat out lying.

  She flipped through the notes she had taken at the last meeting. In the absence of material evidence, the solution would have to come from the personalities of the people involved. Which of this group was a murderer?

  Duncan Carmichael

  Frank Zwick

  Jesse Sutcliffe

  Karen Haggerty

  Ida Greb

  The doorbell squawked in the hall. Avery’s head lifted. It couldn’t be four o’clock already! The little clock on her computer screen confirmed that three and a half hours had flown by in wasteful ruminations and the only words written were to do with the murder mystery. Not one word had been added to her novel. Writer’s block would be interesting and dramatic if her situation wasn’t so desperate.

  She tried to not to think about it. The more she thought about it, the more blocked she became.

  Much like this case. The more she tried to figure it out, the further away the solution drifted.

  She stared at the names again, going over each one of their stories, poking into crevices—and then the solution came to her.

  If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck....

  ✽✽✽

  HER TINY Victorian living room wasn’t made to hold so many people. Hector stood at the bow-front window, his legs astride like he was on the deck of a ship. Dennis and Helen claimed the sofa with Josephine tucking in beside them. It was a beautiful sofa, one of her few pieces of good furniture, upholstered in dark green velvet patterned in muted shades of green leaves and set on graceful wooden legs. Pearl and Solomon, Avery noticed, had chosen opposite corners of the room. Solomon sat in the rocking chair, while Pearl took the ottoman. Elliot stood at the hearth, examining Avery’s collection of silver-framed photographs.

  She closed the paned-glass doors that separated the tiny living room from the equally tiny dining room and brought the meeting to order.

  Hector began by relaying the threat Duncan Carmichael had made and that his alibi had been cemented by Karen Haggerty. “She’ll testify he never left the room. As a side note—I don’t know if it’s relevant—his wife is leaving him.”

  Solomon and Pearl both spoke at once and somehow managed to deliver a coherent summary of their interview with Veronica Brice-Wakefield. Avery agreed with Pearl that it was unlikely Karen was behind the break up of the Carmichael marriage. “The fractures were there before they married,” she said and repeated the story Frank had told about the couple’s infertility problems. “Some marriages survive childlessness. Some don’t.”

  Elliot ceased poking at the fire to ask a question. “The slogan painted on the wall was ‘Die bitch’? Those were the exact words?”

  “My mother doesn’t make mistakes,” Solomon replied. “Those were the words Penelope found on the wall outside her hotel window. I can check with the Regency for confirmation if you like.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said vaguely. “Who told us about the vandalism done to Jenny’s locker? Was that Missy Hilroy or Ida Greb?”

  “Neither.” Avery consulted the minutes. “It was Karen Haggerty. Hey, what do you think of this—Ida Greb could have been responsible for defacing Jenny’s locker!”

  “But it was not Ida Greb who defaced the wall outside of Penelope Beresford’s hotel.” Elliot resumed his absorption with the fire.

  “No, that could’ve been Karen,” Avery admitted. “Or vandals. Isn’t what happened with Penelope beside the point? She wasn’t on the scene at the time Jenny was murdered.” She drew herself up and sucked in a breath to control her excitement. “Everyone, I’ve solved the mystery. I know who killed Jenny Blake.”

  “Impossible,” Josephine objected. “I’m nowhere near to figuring it out and I’ve been talking to the church ladies for hours. They all knew Jesse Sutcliffe to a certain extent. He kept to himself and made very little conversation. He was always respectful and pleased to accept their charity. Not many are, you know. Some get downright nasty when the Auxiliary shows up. They have a nickname for them: the Battleaxe Brigade,” Josie added in a disapproving undertone. “Jesse wasn’t much of a talker. The ladies were unaware he knew the murder victim.”

  “Someone knew,” Dennis said ominously. “Someone is trying to gaslight him. We were on suicide watch all day yesterday and again today. His nerves are shot.”
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br />   Avery pounced. “And yet you still believe he didn’t do it?”

  Everyone blinked in her direction except for Elliot who was examining a photo Avery had taken of her favourite goat.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not any more. We have to face facts. Jesse Sutcliffe killed Jenny. The answer has been staring us in the face, but we were so eager for a mystery that we refused to see it. His nerves are shot because he knows he’s been found out. Whoever sent the necklace and the note is pushing for a confession. There isn’t enough evidence to make an arrest. A confession is the only way.”

  “What makes you so sure he did it, Avery?” Helen asked. “You know as much as we do and that’s not the conclusion I came to. I think Duncan Carmichael killed her and after what Hector just told us, I’m convinced of it. You forget Jesse didn’t have the murder weapon—Duncan did.”

  Solomon raised his hand. “There could’ve been more than one necklace. Jesse could’ve had one of his own that he used.”

  “I came to this conclusion,” Avery explained, “after itemizing what we knew, reading the minutes of the past meetings and making a list of suspects. Through a process of elimination, I was left with Jesse. I don’t like it—I don’t want it to be him, but if I take emotion out of the equation, he’s the only one most likely to have done it. If it walks like a duck....”

  “What was your process of elimination?” Elliot asked.

  “I examined motive and concluded that the one we had for Duncan was weak. He wanted to get back with Karen. Jenny wasn’t an obstacle to that. Again, emotion came into play. I wanted him to be guilty because he’s not a nice man. He’s probably a terrible man, but he’s not Jenny’s killer. And now that Karen has confirmed that he never left the bedroom, Duncan is ruled out.”

  Avery flipped through her notes.

  “Karen was at the party at the time of the murder. Missy’s friend Casey was on the front porch. She didn’t see Karen leave at anytime. We now know that she was in the hall outside her bedroom door. Ida Greb was a possibility and so is Frank Zwick. Frank didn’t have a motive for killing Jenny, but I think he’s behind the attack on Karen. He’s still bitter over the way his parents were treated after Imogene was born. He didn’t want to kill her, which is why he sent the note. He just wanted to frighten her. What better way than to strangle his ex-wife in the same spot Jenny was killed? Ida Greb had the best motive of all. She hated Jenny, and as I said, she was probably behind the locker vandalism. But she didn’t have access to the murder weapon, and from the photo of her in the Explorers’ Club, I can’t see her owning a puka shell necklace. Not her style. Which brings me to Jesse Sutcliffe.”

  She looked around the room.

  “I think we have to face it. The obvious suspect is obvious because he’s the only one with a strong motive, an opportunity and is the boy most likely to own a puka shell necklace. He was a young man with a temper. In our eagerness to clear his name, we forgot that Jenny had bruises on her that she said came from Jesse. He could’ve had a mental break of some kind. A doctor would have a better idea about that sort of thing. I believe he doesn’t remember because his denial was so real that even Hector and Dennis were persuaded.”

  “You’re saying he’s not conscious of having committed the murder,” said Hector.

  “Precisely.”

  “Fascinating, Mrs Holmes,” Elliot said. “It’s interesting to see how your mind works. You focussed on the most likely individual and you rightly followed what we had learned of the case to fit that individual. That’s how the police worked the case originally. They couldn’t make an arrest because Mr Sutcliffe’s parents swore he was with him from nine-thirty to ten-fifty—the time at which he discovered the body and called police. But as we know from Jesse himself, that was a lie. He could have seen Jenny leave the party, followed her and killed her.”

  “Then you agree with Avery,” Helen said. “You think Jesse is the murderer?”

  Elliot Marks lifted his eyes and scanned the group. He appeared puzzled by the question.

  “No. Jesse Sutcliffe did not kill Jenny Blake.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  THERE WAS an appreciable range of responses from groans to mild approval. The murder club was divided on how the evidence, which depended on the memories of witnesses in their early sixties, stacked up.

  “Would you care to share with the rest of us why you think Jesse is innocent?” Avery demanded.

  “The bicycle. A bicycle pushed through tall grass following a shortcut suggests a boy who expects to meet up with his friend and continue on their way. He doesn’t leave his bike on the sidewalk because he’ll have to go back to get it once he’s caught up with her. But for the sake of argument, let’s say all of the above is true. He catches up to Jenny, they quarrel and he kills her. He arranges her body on the stone table, and then leaves the scene to call police and forgets the bike?”

  Elliot folded his arms across his chest. “Jesse was a mathematical thinker. We can rule out stupidity for his actions. There’s only one conclusion. He left it because in his haste to call for help, he wasn’t concocting an alibi.”

  “Fine,” Avery said, throwing up her hands. “I forgot about the bike—to be honest, I didn’t think it was that significant. I still don’t.”

  “It isn’t if taken alone, but when a number of other small observations are brought into play, like Romeo and Juliet, the bicycle is important. It skews the picture presented of that night.”

  “What does Romeo and Juliet have to do with anything?” Hector had sat down in the window seat, finally giving in to the fact that they were going to be there awhile.

  Elliot Marks’s shoulders lifted and his mouth moved in a series of twitches that presaged the laying out of his deductions.

  “From the first, I felt this was a woman’s crime and the clue was in the murder weapon. Passionate fury in a man is very different in a woman. A male youth driven to the point of murder would’ve strangled Jenny Blake by hand. The method used to kill was not released by the police to the public. No one knew how she was killed or what had killed her until Miss Hansen heard Detective Denton’s description of the wound on the victim’s neck and made an astute guess.”

  He paused as though gathering his thoughts. No one spoke. Avery was conscious of Solomon reaching in his bag for a pen and notepad.

  “Nevertheless, a theory is only a theory and a guess is only a guess. We had the luxury of asking questions and testing various hypotheses. Duncan Carmichael fit the profile of a killer but he inadvertently cleared himself when he told us that Jenny threw the puka shell necklace at him—a gift he’d given her—after discovering him in bed with Karen Haggerty. Had he been the killer, he would’ve known the necklace was the murder weapon. Mr Carmichael has been a politician for too long not to see the outcome of every action four or five steps ahead. If he’d been guilty, he would’ve claimed to have no knowledge of any such necklace. He did not—ergo, he is innocent.”

  “That works if Jenny’s puka shell necklace was the murder weapon,” Dennis interjected. “Pearl’s hunch was only a hunch.”

  Elliot nodded. “Exactly, which brought us to the next test—confirmation of the murder weapon. The only person who could confirm the necklace was used to strangle Jenny is the murderer and the only other person in the room when the necklace was thrown was Karen Haggerty.”

  “But she was at the party at the time of the murder!”

  “Mrs Haggerty was at the party but as it happens at parties, people are seen and then not seen. She could’ve gone to the bathroom, or to the basement to get more drinks, or stepped outside for a breath of air. At the moment, she claims she was in the hallway outside her bedroom door. There were a myriad of places she could have claimed to be at the time she was strangling the life out of Jenny Blake.”

  Josephine shot forward. “I was worried something like this would happen if we started digging into peoples’ lives! Pearl and Solomon told us what Veronica thinks of Kar
en, and I agree she’s always been a social climber, but that does not make her a killer. She had nothing to gain. Jenny and Duncan had broken up. She had the guy. Why kill Jenny?”

  “I’ll explain,” Elliot replied in his maddeningly deliberate way. “First we begin with the how. How did Karen Haggerty escape the house without anyone noticing? We know, as reported by Missy Hilroy, that her young friend was staked out the front porch. Jesse reported feeling a presence on the porch when he arrived. That was Casey. It’s the small details that give his story veracity. The girl saw Jesse Sutcliffe arrive but—and this is important—she did not see Jenny leave. I thought it odd that a sobbing teenager leaving the party wasn’t noticed by Casey. We know she would’ve gossiped about it with her friend, Missy. I concluded that Jenny didn’t leave by the front door. The Haggerty house has a side door entrance that leads to the driveway. After hanging up the phone, Jenny left by the side door and reached the sidewalk, unnoticed by Missy’s friend on the porch. That was at approximately ten-thirty. At ten-fifty, Jesse arrived looking for her.”

  Pearl was hunched forward, her arms locked around her knees. “Romeo and Juliet, He was too late to save her.”

  “Precisely,” Elliot said with a smile of appreciation. “Missy Hilroy’s reference offered a fresh perspective on the events of that night.”

  “If Jenny wasn’t seen leaving the house how did Karen know where to find her?”

  “Karen came downstairs as Duncan described and overheard her on the phone with Jesse. We know from Missy that Jenny was crying and referred to Jesse by name. Jesse said she told him she had made a mistake. We can assume Karen heard the whole thing and then she followed Jenny out the side door.”