The Christmas Fair Killer

by Amy Patricia Meade

  Tish raised her eyebrows.

  ‘That’s right. Then, after she’d sowed enough seeds of division here and decided it was time to move on, she charmed poor Bailey Cassels into pitching her name to his parents, who are agents.’

  ‘Wait. I saw both Jenny and Bailey after Thursday night’s show. She completely shot down his attempts to make a move on her.’

  ‘That was for the sake of appearances, I’m sure of it. No,’ Lucinda dismissed with a wave of her hand, ‘I overheard them talking on Thursday morning outside the campground showers. Jenny was thanking Bailey for getting his parents to sign her to their agency because they’d gotten her an audition with a repertory theater in Maryland over the Christmas break.’

  ‘So Jenny was looking to leave the group,’ Tish uttered as her mind processed all the possible ramifications of such a decision.

  ‘That or she was positioning herself to approach Rolly for more money, more influence, and maybe even a partnership.’

  Did Rolly know Bailey had conspired to help Jenny leave the group? Was that why he arranged for Bailey’s understudy – because he had plans to fire the young actor? ‘Did you tell anyone what you’d overheard?’

  ‘Just your sheriff when he was here yesterday. Between dress rehearsals and our first show that night, I didn’t have time to warn Rolly. I’d planned to say something to him yesterday morning, but then Jenny was discovered dead.’

  If Lucinda LeComte hadn’t notified Rolly of Jenny’s possible departure, who, if anyone, had? Did Rolly have other reasons to replace Bailey Cassels? Or had he actually told Tish the truth about wanting help with the lighting? Perhaps this didn’t involve Rolly at all. ‘Is it possible anyone else might have overheard that conversation?’

  Lucinda pulled a face. ‘Bailey and Jenny weren’t what I’d call discreet, but they weren’t exactly loud either. And I didn’t see anyone else around as I snuck back to camp.’

  Tish silently sipped her tea, her mind awhirl with questions.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking.’ Lucinda’s eyes narrowed. ‘But if you suspect Rolly, you’re wrong. That’s not just coming from a loyal member of the group – that’s coming from someone who knows his flaws all too well. Rolly has never been the most attentive boyfriend, and he would have made a terrible father to our child, but he’s not a murderer.’

  Tish felt her jaw drop once again. ‘Father?’

  ‘Yes, the daughter I told you about. I put her up for adoption mostly because I thought raising a child would hamper my artistic aspirations, but also because Rolly didn’t want to be tied down to a family. It was a long time ago. Long before Rolly and Edie ever became an item,’ she reassured Tish. ‘Everyone’s fully aware of the relationship, but not the product of our little tryst, as I took a sabbatical in Florida during the last few months of the pregnancy. So if you wouldn’t mind not letting it get around to the rest of the group.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Tish promised, before sighing and taking a long sip of tea.

  Lucinda echoed the sigh and took a bite of sandwich. ‘You see what I mean now, though, don’t you? About Jenny? She was poison. Had she stuck around, Justin might have lost his mind, the Fentons’ marriage might have broken up, the entire group might have imploded. As much as I’m sorry Jenny went the way she did, she needed to go. She desperately needed to go.’

  NINE

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ Clemson Reade requested from his spot at the counter of Cookin’ the Books Café, where he had met with the caterer for a post-breakfast-delivery debriefing. ‘Are you telling me you think Jenny might have been Rolly and Lucinda’s child?’

  ‘No,’ Tish answered as she poured them both coffee from a glass carafe. The café was unusually quiet for a Saturday morning – a result, no doubt, of the townsfolk conserving both their energy and their money for the afternoon and evening festivities. ‘Well, maybe … Jenny had dark hair and eyes like Rolly, fair skin and a lithe figure like Lucinda, and she definitely inherited the acting bug from someone. I might also point out that Justin said Jenny had hailed from somewhere south of Savannah. Lucinda had her baby in Florida, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility.’

  ‘I’ll look into births and adoptions related to Lucinda LeComte in Florida at the time, but I highly doubt we’ll find anything. I mean, seriously? Jenny grows up, runs away to Savannah, and just happens to meet Justin Dange, who just happens to invite her to join him in working for her birth parents’ theater company? That’s an awfully big coincidence.’ Reade was skeptical.

  ‘It is, and yet awfully big coincidences occur all the time.’

  As if summoned by Tish’s words, Jules barreled through the front door of the café. He was dressed in a heavy green parka zipped to his bronzed chin and a matching green velvet elf’s cap. Beneath his left arm, he held Biscuit, dressed in a coordinating red velvet Santa suit. ‘Tish, Sheriff Reade. Just the two people I wanted to see.’

  Mary Jo glared at Jules over the bridge of her reading glasses as she rang up the café’s only customers and bid them a good day. ‘It’s lovely to see you too, Jules,’ she quipped.

  ‘Sorry, Mary Jo,’ Jules apologized breathlessly before returning his attention to the couple at the counter. ‘You won’t believe this, but I saw the dead girl last night.’

  ‘Jules, how many times have MJ and I told you not to watch The Sixth Sense by yourself? You know it gives you nightmares,’ Tish admonished.

  ‘I didn’t watch The Sixth Sense. I’m telling you, I saw that actress who was just murdered – Jenny Inkpen. She was down at the Piggly Wiggly last night.’

  Tish, Sheriff Reade, and Mary Jo exchanged puzzled glances.

  ‘What were you drinking last night?’ Mary Jo snickered.

  ‘Nothing. I was stone-cold sober.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Tish joined her friend. ‘Back in college, you once spotted Elvis in Leggett’s Department Store after drinking half a bottle of Riunite Lambrusco.’

  ‘Elvis?’ Octogenarian and neighborhood eccentric Enid Kemper shouted as she hobbled through the front door of Tish’s café. ‘Never cared for Elvis. But I saw Liberace at The National back in fifty-nine. Now that was entertainment.’

  ‘Here for your morning tea, Miss Kemper?’ Mary Jo asked.

  Enid nodded.

  ‘Where’s Langhorne?’ Tish enquired, concerned by the green conure’s absence from his owner’s shoulder.

  ‘Too cold for him today. Can’t dress a bird in a sweater or a hat or whatever folks put their pets in nowadays.’ She slid a judgmental eye in Julian and Biscuit’s direction.

  ‘It is a cold one. Are you and Langhorne set for the weather?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Langhorne and I always manage to do just fine,’ Enid reassured her, but Tish had her doubts.

  Wrapping a couple of miniature quiches in a wax paper bag, Tish slid the parcel across the counter toward Enid. ‘There’s plenty of vegetables in those. Just to make sure Langhorne keeps up his strength.’

  ‘Oh, Langhorne doesn’t need anything so fancy—’

  ‘On the house. You’ll be doing me a favor. As you can see, there’s no one here to eat them.’ It was a blatant lie. Tish could easily have sold the quiches at the fair.

  ‘Well, seeing as you need my help and all …’ Enid shoved the bag into her tapestry tote and picked up her steaming to-go cup of tea. As she made her way toward the door, she spied Sheriff Reade. ‘You’re not here to close the place down, are you?’

  Reade stood up from the stool before addressing the woman. ‘No, Miss Kemper.’

  ‘Good. Only place in town where I can get a halfway decent cup of tea,’ she declared before shuffling off into the cold.

  ‘OK,’ Tish prompted Jules once Enid was at a safe distance from the café, ‘tell us about this Jenny sighting.’

  ‘I left the fair last night and realized on the way home that I needed milk for my morning cereal and some treats for Biscuit, so I stopped at the Piggly Wiggly just a few blocks away from the pa
rk. The place was packed with other fairgoers picking up odds and ends, so I left Biscuit in the car rather than risk him being trampled. Well, I was in the beer and wine aisle—’

  ‘Knew it!’ Mary Jo joked.

  Jules wrinkled his nose and bared his teeth in mock anger. ‘Since it had been an ex-haust-ing day, I was looking at a nice Malbec to enjoy with a hot bath. While I was reading the wine label, I suddenly felt someone jostle my shoulder. I looked up and it was her! It was Jenny.’

  ‘You mean it was someone who looked like Jenny,’ Reade corrected.

  ‘No. I’m telling you, it was her. She had no makeup on, her hair had been cut really short, almost like a buzz cut, and she was dressed in a hoodie, jeans, and a down vest, but it was definitely her. She had the same doe eyes and delicate features, and she even moved the same way. I watched as she walked away. It was definitely Jenny.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Tish reasoned. ‘Jules, Jenny is dead.’

  ‘On a slab, in the morgue,’ Reade added.

  ‘Are you positive you weren’t drinking?’ Mary Jo reiterated.

  ‘For the last time, I wasn’t drinking. You can bet I did when I got home, though. And I do understand how preposterous the whole thing sounds, Sheriff. I’m a journalist, for heaven’s sake. But I’m telling you the truth. I saw Jenny Inkpen alive last night.’

  ‘If I’m ever resurrected from the dead, I hope I have somewhere better to go than the local Piggly Wiggly.’ Mary Jo sighed.

  Jules nodded. ‘I know. And buying boxed macaroni and cheese and Pop-Tarts of all things.’

  ‘Kid’s food,’ Tish lamented.

  The group fell silent for several seconds at the stark realization that Jenny Inkpen wasn’t very much older than a child.

  ‘I’m going to bake more bread for the fair.’ Mary Jo excused herself and retreated to the kitchen.

  ‘I believe you saw what you say you saw, Julian,’ Sheriff Reade addressed in a quiet voice. ‘But it couldn’t have been Jenny Inkpen. There has to be some logical explanation for it.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Jules agreed. ‘Are y’all sure the woman in the morgue is Jenny and not someone made-up to look like her?’

  ‘Positive,’ Tish asserted. ‘I found the body. She and I had come face to face at the booth the night before her death. It was definitely Jenny lying dead in that trailer. I’ll never forget her face.’

  ‘And I won’t forget the face of the girl in the Piggly Wiggly. I saw Jenny the night before she died too – I served her coffee. And I’m telling you, if it wasn’t Jenny I saw last night, then it was someone doing a mighty fine impersonation.’

  Reade drank some of his coffee before interjecting, ‘OK, Julian. I’ll investigate this doppelgänger at the Piggly Wiggly. However, I need you to promise you won’t breathe a word of it to anyone who isn’t in this room. That especially includes your news broadcasts. The last thing I need is the entire town thinking I lost a corpse.’

  ‘Oh, believe me, honey, I’m not about to go on the air with any of this. People already think I’m crazy for getting wiped out by a snowplow outside the Edgar Allen Poe Museum last winter. Telling them I saw a dead girl buying Kraft Dinner would get me banned from the newsroom and a six-year stint in the sanitorium.’

  ‘Good. I’ll send an officer around the Piggly Wiggly to see if anyone knows the young woman you described or has noticed her shopping there before. For all we know, she could even be a relative of Jenny’s.’

  ‘Didn’t you already notify her relatives?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Um, off the record?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘We have no idea of the victim’s identity.’

  ‘You have no idea …’ Jules’s hazel eyes flared, and he wagged a warning finger. ‘I come in here saying how I saw Jenny Inkpen at a convenience store last night and y’all tell me I’m wrong because Jenny Inkpen is dead, on a slab, in the morgue. Then, in between asking me if I’ve been drinking, y’all treat me like I’m your crazy old Aunt Velma who crochets toilet-paper cozies, smells like mothballs, and talks to squirrels. Now you’re saying the dead girl might not even be Jenny Inkpen, after all. Are y’all gaslighting me or what?’

  Tish quieted her friend. ‘What Sheriff Reade meant to say is there is no Jenny Inkpen. She doesn’t exist – at least not this incarnation of her.’

  Jules narrowed his eyes. ‘Then who’s in the morgue?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Reade confessed. ‘The ID in the dead woman’s trailer was forged and we’ve yet to get a lead on who she was or where she came from.’

  ‘What do you think? Was she FBI, CIA, M6?’

  ‘That’s MI6,’ Tish corrected. ‘The M6 is a motorway in England.’

  ‘Oops! Hey, you don’t think Jenny was KGB, do you, Sheriff? The Russians are everywhere these days, you know.’

  ‘No.’ Reade’s facial expression swayed between disbelief and amusement. ‘I think she was simply using an assumed name.’

  ‘Hmm, guess we should have seen that coming. Inkpen? What kind of name is that? Oh!’ Jules exclaimed. ‘Maybe Inkpen is an anagram of her real name. Let’s see … Pinken? Penink? No, that’s just as bad as Inkpen. Knipe? No, that’s missing an “N.”’

  ‘Jules,’ Tish interjected. ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘Oh, I know! Inkpen is a substitute for her real name, which is similar to that of a manufacturer of ink pens. Let me think, who manufactures pens? Parker … Cross … Faber-Castell? No, they’re just pencils, aren’t they? Papermate … no, that doesn’t work. Bic … could be short for Bickford. Yes, Jenny Bickford.’

  ‘I’ll, um, be certain to look into those possibilities,’ Reade stated. ‘In the meantime, if you could help out by broadcasting Jenny’s photo, asking her family members to call my office, I’d greatly appreciate it.’

  ‘Consider it done.’ Jules smiled. ‘On that note, I’d better stop by the newsroom and add that to tonight’s schedule. Tish, are you heading to the fair right now?’

  ‘No, I thought I’d warm up a bit first,’ she replied between sips of coffee.

  ‘Good move. I have an electric heater I keep by my desk. I’ll bring it by the booth later. I’ll see you in, say, an hour or so?’

  ‘Sounds great. I just hope it doesn’t snow,’ she added to get Jules’s proverbial goat.

  ‘It won’t. There’s absolutely no snow in the forecast. It’s meteorologically impossible.’ And with Biscuit tucked beneath his arm and more than a bit of smugness, Jules made his exit.

  ‘Thanks for your patience,’ Tish said to Reade after Jules left. ‘I know Jules’s outside-the-box, stream-of-consciousness ramblings can seem odd to those who aren’t well acquainted with him, but those strange ideas of his can be quite helpful. You know, he actually suspected Callie Collingsworth was named after a soap star two minutes after meeting her.’

  Reade laughed. ‘Sounds like maybe I should ask him to join the team.’

  ‘Only if you don’t mind him interviewing your deputies on live TV and hanging a disco ball over his desk.’

  ‘The disco ball is fine. The interviewing? Not so much. But, seriously, I don’t mind his odd suggestions. A change of perspective can help you view things in a different light. And, quite frankly, the idea that the name Inkpen was derived from the victim’s real name isn’t too far out there. As I said to you yesterday, liars pepper their stories with elements of the truth. That said, I won’t hold my breath for a Mr and Mrs Rollerball to step into my office, asking to identify their daughter.’

  ‘How about the Montblancs?’ Tish grinned.

  ‘They’re sketchy, too.’

  ‘Sketchy?’ she groaned.

  ‘Hey, Tish,’ Mary Jo called from the kitchen. ‘You want to check this gingerbread you made? I don’t want to overbake it.’

  Tish excused herself and joined Mary Jo in the kitchen. She returned with a half sheet pan of deeply aromatic molasses-colored cake.

 
Reade smiled and shook his head. ‘My God, I haven’t had real gingerbread – the cake, not the cookie – since my grandmother was alive.’

  ‘Really? Every year I debate whether I’m going to make it, but then as Christmas gets closer, I start to crave it. Not just the taste, but the smell.’ She placed the hot tray on a wooden trivet.

  ‘The smell is incredible. Is it a family recipe?’

  ‘No, my mother and grandmother weren’t big into cooking or baking. They put healthy meals on the table and had their specialties, but they weren’t as obsessed as I am. When I was in junior high, my folks separated and my mother went back to work, so I pitched in getting dinner ready on weeknights. Then, when I was sixteen, she fell ill with a degenerative muscular disease. She could barely lift her arm to brush the hair on her head, so I took over all the cooking, as well as the cleaning, and the laundry. My grandmother would come by the house to nurse my mom until it all became more than she could handle.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Reade stared down into his coffee cup.

  ‘Don’t be. I taught myself to cook because of it. I discovered my passion.’

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, where was your father during all of this?’

  ‘Oh, he and my mother reconciled after her diagnosis and he moved back into the house, but he did shift work at the local factory, so he was rarely home.’

  ‘Still, it must have been comforting to have him nearby during that difficult time.’

  ‘It was. Until I discovered he was having an affair with my mother’s nurse.’ Tish bit her lip and refilled their coffee cups.

  ‘I’m sorry your mother had to endure that in addition to her illness.’

  ‘My mother never found out. I never told her.’

  ‘I’m sorry you had to endure that.’

  ‘Don’t be. Had I told her, it would have broken her completely. That would have been worse.’

  ‘Families.’ Reade exhaled noisily.

  ‘Families.’ Tish raised her mug high in salute. ‘And what about yours? You’ve spoken of your grandmother twice since I’ve met you, but you’ve never mentioned your parents.’