Boston Scream Murder

by Ginger Bolton

  “Fine,” Tom said. “But if he’s meeting you at your studio, even if he’s bringing his alleged wife, make certain someone else comes along.”

  “I’ll come,” I said.

  Jocelyn made a sad face. “I’d go, too, but I’ll be back at school.”

  “Don’t worry, Jocelyn,” Tom told her. “I’ll go. I’ll stand around and look dangerous.”

  Nina clapped her hands. “It will be like I hire my own security guard!”

  The last customers left, and the four of us went out to the patio. We brought the urns, cups, plates, and napkins inside and then tidied the shop quickly so we could hurry home and hand out candy to trick-or-treaters.

  I loaded the donuts I’d made for my party into the donut car. Less than thrilled about her cat carrier, Dep straightened all four of her legs and held them out to her sides. It was almost impossible to tuck her into the carrier, even though it had plenty of room if a kitty wasn’t striving to shape-shift into an unbendable pancake with claws. Finally, she was in the carrier and we were on our way home in the fun donut car.

  Carrying Dep, grumbling inside the carrier, up the steps, I grinned at the display on my porch. It was nicely Halloween-like without being too frightening for, I hoped, even the smallest kids. I unlocked the door, let Dep out of her carrier, and smiled as she bounced toward the kitchen.

  I took the offensive cat carrier outside so it wouldn’t be in our way during the party. Our donut car was always quirky, but now it looked almost like another Halloween decoration—an old-fashioned police car trying to disguise itself as a donut. I put the carrier into the trunk and carefully took my boxes of donuts to the kitchen.

  I spooned some of Dep’s favorite canned food into one of her bowls. Perhaps still in a snit about being unceremoniously carted home, she frolicked into the sunroom and sat on one of her warm, cushioned radiator covers next to a back window.

  I pulled one of my individual servings of homemade chili out of the freezer. While the microwave oven heated it, I ran upstairs and changed into a floor-length, slinky black velvet gown. Silver reflective spangles and sequins decorated the lower third of the skirt. The black lace sleeves ended in points on the backs of my hands. Remembering the small witches who’d marched in the parade and pounded on a kettle drum inside a cauldron, I resigned myself to doing without a cauldron or a drum. But I did have the world’s most perfect hat and wig combination. Like the dress, the hat was black velvet. Reflective silver spangles and sequins were sprinkled all over the floor-length black lace veil cascading from the point at the top of the hat. The attached hair was long, frizzy, and silver. I put the hat on and checked my reflection. The shoulder-length hair covered my short dark brown hair, including the curls that inevitably flopped onto my forehead.

  It was a fun costume, and even without a mask, I didn’t think I looked like myself. A mask or scary makeup would have added a nice touch, but I didn’t want to scare little kids.

  Downstairs again, I took the baskets of candy out of the china cabinet. I left them and the hat with its super-long veil and frizzy hair near the front door.

  Finally, I went into the back of the house to enjoy the chili. It was hot, both heat hot and spicy hot, just the way I liked it.

  I’d eaten about half of it when the doorbell rang. I ran to the living room, slapped the wig and hat combo on my head, brushed a puff of silvery fake hair away from one eye, and opened the door.

  A toddler in a costume that resembled Dep took one look at me, burst into tears, and held his arms up toward his dad. Laughing, his dad picked him up. “Hold out your pumpkin,” he told his son. The tearful child shook his head but held the orange plastic pumpkin where I could barely reach it. I slipped a chocolate bar into it. The child stopped crying and stared in awe at the candy in the bottom of the basket.

  Grinning, his father thanked me and carried him to the sidewalk. A seahorse, a mermaid, and a dolphin toiled up the porch stairs. I gave them all candy.

  I closed the door. My chili was becoming chilly chili, but it was still delicious.

  The bell rang. I opened the door. Without a word, a two-year-old in a tiger costume that wrinkled around her ankles and wrists and would probably still fit her when she was six marched into the house and started climbing toward the second floor. Laughing, her mother ran inside and scooped her up. “We’ve been house hunting,” the mother explained. “She likes touring houses.” I gave the girl a chocolate bar.

  Dep raced toward me, her eyes huge and her ears flat to her head. “Sorry about the big cat invading your space,” I told her. Instead of accepting the apology, she galloped past me and up the stairs.

  The small tiger’s mother asked me, “Have you seen the moon? It’s full tonight, a harvest moon, and so near the horizon it’s huge and orange.”

  I followed her out to the sidewalk and looked east. The moon was exactly as she’d described it. “Beautiful,” I said. “Thank you.”

  The girl pointed at it. “Pumpkin!”

  Her mother and I laughed, and I went back inside.

  Between spoonfuls of chili, I doled out candy to the grim reaper, Alice in Wonderland, an astronaut, and several unidentified creatures. One of them might have been a surgeon in bloodstained scrubs.

  I finished the chili and set out a platter of veggies and bowls of dips, chips, nuts, and pretzels for my party. Beer, white wine, soft drinks, and juices were in the fridge. I put two bottles of red wine on the counter, ready to be opened. I set out glasses and answered the door to a toothy animal that might have been an alligator and his baby sister in a charming bunny costume with a satin ruffle around her adorable, pink-cheeked face.

  A werewolf grasped the leash of a real dog wearing a Dracula cape. A tarantula and a princess arrived together, followed by a baseball player and a bat, the kind that darts through the sky devouring mosquitoes.

  Out on the street, a woman in a skeleton costume clip-clopped past on an actual horse, a black one with a horse skeleton painted in white on it.

  I arranged the Halloween donuts on platters and set them on the coffee table. Around eight, the stream of kids dwindled. I left the wig and hat near the door, locked it, and went upstairs.

  Dep was in the center of my bed with her legs tucked underneath her and her tail coiled around her. She gave me a reproachful look.

  “Sorry about all those kids coming and going, Dep. I know their behavior didn’t fit into our usually quiet evenings. But Halloween happens only once a year, and your friends will arrive in a half hour or so. But,” I cautioned her, “they might be dressed like big cats or other scary creatures.”

  She turned her head away.

  I went into the guest room. Hampered by the tight velvet skirt, I eased into the chair at my computer. I logged on and searched for the Arthur C. Arthurs Gallery in Madison.

  Chapter 29

  The Arthur C. Arthurs Gallery website showed a photo of the proprietor. He was the man who was no longer a mystery man.

  Arthur C. Arthurs had an impressive history of discovering artists who later became well known. Go, Nina!

  Brent would only need to verify that Arthur C. Arthurs had actually attended the meeting Tuesday and that it hadn’t ended before seven or eight that morning.

  In the back of my mind, I’d been wondering about Steve. Was there any significance to the graying hair on only one side of his head? When he had come into Deputy Donut that afternoon, he had asked how we liked his costume. I’d assumed he’d been talking about the orange shirt, but could the mismatched hair at his temples have been part of the costume? I couldn’t think of any fictional characters who went around in orange shirts and had only one white-smudged temple.

  Misty, Samantha, and I had joked about Samantha powdering her hair to make it white for her wedding, and Misty had pointed out that theatrical dye could wash out. Maybe Steve preferred to date older women but was afraid they wouldn’t want to date a younger man, and he had been making his temples lighter in order to look close
r to Cheryl’s age. Maybe the article he was writing wasn’t about cheese at all. Maybe he was writing about dating sites for seniors, or he was doing research for an article about dating older women. And maybe he had accidentally brushed the powder out of one side of his hair today.

  Perhaps the gray had been real, and he was now trying to look his own age, bit by bit. Eliminating the white and gray on only one side of his head hardly seemed subtle enough to be effective.

  And then there were the charge cards with different names.

  I supposed Steve could have been an undercover cop. That would explain his having valid charge cards with different names. However, I was fairly certain that a cop who was deeply undercover would not risk carrying identification that did not match his alias.

  An even wilder guess was that Steve was an FBI agent, and he’d been following Terri and Derek from state to state while Terri conned men—and perhaps grandmothers—into willing her everything.

  If the FBI was investigating crimes like that, wouldn’t they have either taken over or informed the Fallingbrook Police and the Wisconsin Division of Investigation that they were also on the case? However, they could have told the other law enforcement agencies, and I wouldn’t know about it. Brent didn’t tell me everything.

  Did Steve use two names because he was famous?

  On the internet, I could find no photos of the Steve Quail I’d met. I did find one tiny mention of a Steven Quail who could have been Cheryl’s date. He was fifty-five and licensed in Ohio as a private investigator. Cheryl’s Steve could have been about that age.

  That would explain a lot. He could have come to Fallingbrook to investigate something, possibly Terri and Derek, and he was using writing about cheese as a cover story.

  Having found a possible reason for Steve’s use of credit cards with different names, I decided to research Hank. He was still fairly well known as a pianist. I looked for connections between him and Rich’s late wife, Patty Royalson. I found an obituary for Mary Patricia (Patty) Brook Royalson. She’d been survived by her husband, Richmond P. Royalson III, her mother, and her half brother.

  The half brother’s name was Stanley Quentin Meadows.

  Staring at the name, I wheeled my chair back, placed my palms over my temples, and squeezed. Was S. Q. Meadows the name on the charge card that Steve had used that afternoon?

  I told myself that Steve Quail couldn’t be Patty’s half brother, but even as I tried to convince myself, I stared at Patty’s picture in the obituary and remembered the pictures I’d seen of her in Rich’s cottage. The man I knew as Steve Quail had hazel eyes. Patty’s had been blue. The shape of his squarish face was similar to her face in the photos. Although she had been a beauty, his face was attractive but less noticeable, as if the high cheekbones, patrician nose, and defined chin that contributed to her beauty had been airbrushed and smoothed from his face. Or he had schooled his face to show mostly neutral expressions. Patty had been vivacious and smiling.

  Rich Royalson had asked Steve if they’d met before.

  Steve had answered that they hadn’t.

  Could they have never met each other? If Steve was the Steven Quail who was a private investigator in Ohio he would have been thirty-five when Patty drowned. Perhaps he didn’t make it to the funeral. The obituary said that Patty had been Rich’s wife of thirty years when she died. That meant that if Steve was Patty’s half brother, he had been a child, only about five years old, when Rich and Patty got married. Maybe he was too young to be invited to the wedding, and maybe he didn’t spend time with Rich and Patty while he was growing up and after he was an adult.

  Perhaps Steve, or Stanley, had looked familiar to Rich because of his resemblance to Rich’s late wife.

  Patty’s maiden name was different from either of the surnames on Steve’s credit cards. Following twisting paths through obituaries, I discovered that Patty’s father, who had, as Hank had told me, been divorced from Patty’s mother, had remarried. He and his new wife had a son, Stanley Quentin Brook. Stanley and Patty’s father died when Stanley was only five. Two years later, Stanley’s mother married a man whose last name was Meadows, and that man adopted Stanley and changed the boy’s last name from Brook to Meadows. He had also moved the family to California, which could have explained why Rich might not have seen Stanley since Stanley was about seven, if ever.

  Was it a coincidence that Stanley showed up in Rich’s hometown shortly before Rich was murdered?

  I checked my photo of the guest list for Rich’s party. I already knew that Steve Quail wasn’t on it. Stanley Quentin Meadows wasn’t, either, which didn’t prove much, since Terri had written the list and hadn’t included people she didn’t want to feel welcome.

  It was more likely that Rich hadn’t invited his late wife’s half brother except by accident when he’d invited Cheryl and the man I’d thought of as Steve. If Rich had written to the man he might have known of as Stanley and invited him, Rich probably would have figured out on Monday afternoon why the man looked familiar.

  The doorbell startled me out of my theorizing. It was almost time for my party guests to arrive.

  I trotted downstairs, plopped my hat and wig on, and opened the door to three burly football players in Fallingbrook High football uniforms. The three teens carried bulging pillowcases and thanked me politely for the chocolate bars. Luckily, I had lots of them for any high school kids who were trick-or-treating now that their littler sisters and brothers had returned home to sort their loot and go, probably reluctantly and bouncing off walls, to bed.

  I closed the door, grabbed my phone, and called Brent.

  He answered right away. “Hi, Em, I’m going to clear away a few little things and come over.”

  “That’s not why I called. A man who has been coming to Deputy Donut and dating one of our regular knitters is Rich Royalson’s late wife’s younger half brother.” Dep must have recognized by my tone of voice that I was talking to a friend. She ran down from the second floor and rubbed hairs onto the skirt of my long velvet dress.

  “Whoa, Em. Run that by me again?”

  I told him about the dyed temples and the alias, Steve Quail, that Stanley Quentin Meadows apparently used as a private investigator and on dating sites. I also told Brent about the way the man had shoved his charge card into a pocket after having trouble typing in the PIN. I added, “I thought he had arrived at Rich’s birthday party with Cheryl, which gave him an alibi, but today she told me they came in separate cars, and that he’d been staying up at Little Lake Lodge, at least at the time of the party.”

  “Thanks, Em. We haven’t questioned him beyond a short interview right after the murder. Someone will go to Little Lake Lodge and have another talk with him if he hasn’t already checked out. I’m not going up there tonight, though. I have a party to attend.”

  I smiled at the warmth in his voice. “See you soon.”

  I strode into the kitchen as quickly as I could in the constricting velvet dress. Dep followed me. I slid a tray of mini-quiches into the oven and set the timer.

  The doorbell rang.

  Expecting more teenagers or some of my friends, I flung the door open without remembering to put my hat and its attached wig on first.

  And it was a friend. I hadn’t invited the Knitpickers to my party, but Cheryl, dressed like Maria from The Sound of Music, was certainly welcome.

  I wasn’t sure about the tall ghost beside her, though. I could barely catch a glimpse of his hazel eyes through the small eyeholes he’d cut in the sheet that served as his costume. A bulging pillowcase hung at his side. I could make out enough of the letters stamped on one corner of the sheet to know where the sheet had come from.

  Little Lake Lodge.

  The hand that wasn’t holding the pillowcase snaked out from underneath the sheet. The glove on the hand didn’t completely cover the cuff of the orange shirt.

  The tall ghost was Steve Quail, also known as Stanley Quentin Meadows.

  He grabbed Cheryl’s w
rist.

  Cheryl complained, “Ow!” Staring at me, she gave her head a slight shake. Fear showed in her usually beaming blue eyes.

  Brent would be here soon, I told myself.

  Not wanting Steve to notice that I’d glimpsed an unspoken warning from Cheryl, I said as cordially as possible, “Come in.” I turned around and gestured toward the rest of the living room. “Help yourselves to some of the goodies. I’ll bring out mini-quiches in a few minutes. They’re in the oven. The other guests will be here soon.” I was babbling. “What can I get you to drink?”

  Behind me, the front door closed, hard, as if someone had kicked it. I faced my guests again.

  In one smooth motion, the ghost dropped the pillowcase while pulling a substantial cast-iron skillet out of it.

  This skillet was a normal size, not a huge one, and it had a normal length handle.

  It was probably easier to wield than the one that had killed Rich. Turning Cheryl away from him with his left hand, the orange-sleeved ghost lifted that skillet above her head with his right hand. He was wearing a glove on that hand, also. “Sorry, Cheryl, but you should not have told Emily that we went to Rich’s party separately.” With a loud exhalation, he swung the skillet toward her temple.

  I screamed and tried to reach the skillet, but the ghost was tall and quick. I grabbed only a pinch of orange shirt sleeve. I couldn’t hold on to it, but I hoped I disrupted Steve’s possibly lethal aim.

  The skillet crashed into the back of Cheryl’s head. She slumped to the floor and didn’t move or make a sound.

  The ghost blocked the front door.

  My phone was on the kitchen counter. Although knowing I was heading toward a dead end since there was no way out of my walled-in garden except through the house, I turned around and scrambled in that long skirt toward the back of the house. I would grab my phone, somehow dodge past the ghost, run out the front to a neighbor’s, and call for help.