Dying to Remember

by Karin Kaufman

  “Sheila Abbottson. I’m Mr. Landry’s realtor.” She held up her own key ring. “And I have a key too.”

  “Realtor? But Ray wasn’t selling his house.”

  “No, not that Mr. Landry.” Sheila, along with her giant tote, sat on the couch. “His son, Owen Landry. He hired me to sell his father’s house. Of course, I had to drop by and see what needs to be done before it goes on the market.”

  “When will that be?”

  “As soon as possible.” Sheila glanced about the living room, pursing her red lips in satisfaction. “It’s not in bad shape at all. That’s always a relief in these situations. You never quite know what you’re going to encounter with an elderly person’s house or how much you’re going to have to spend before you can list a home. Then again, I haven’t seen the rest of the house. It might well be one of these situations.”

  She was about forty-five, I thought, with shoulder-length reddish brown hair and large but deep-set hazel eyes. As she spoke, her eyes widened and eyebrows arched, giving her a look of frozen astonishment.

  “Owen moved awfully fast,” I said. “Ray’s been dead less than twenty-four hours.” I cringed inwardly as soon as the words left my mouth. Owen and his realtor were none of my business. But honestly, Sheila was already irritating me. An elderly person’s house. Say his name, Sheila. These situations. What situations? Like murder? The woman was a vulture, circling and then swooping in, relieved she wouldn’t have to waste money on sprucing up Ray’s house. Ray’s house.

  “There’s more to this than you know, Kate. How long have you been Ray’s neighbor?”

  I pulled out the desk chair and sat. Emily remained standing, legs planted, arms folded over her chest. She didn’t like Sheila either.

  “More than twenty years,” I said. What’s with Owen? I wondered. He couldn’t have waited twenty-four hours before contacting this woman? What kind of son had he been to Ray? “Ray was a good man. He was well liked, and he loved his house and his land.”

  “He loved them a little too much, I think. He should have sold this place while he was still in his seventies.”

  “Why? He was perfectly capable.”

  Sheila clucked and displayed her concern with a condescending tilt of her head. “He had dementia, you know.”

  “Ray Landry?” I couldn’t help but laugh. “He was as sharp as they come.”

  “Of and on, yes. But that’s how it is with dementia. In the early stages it comes and goes. With Ray, it was getting worse.”

  “That’s not true. Who told you that?”

  “Owen was worried about him.”

  “So Owen told you that?”

  “He pleaded with Ray to sell this house a year ago and move to a facility where he could have care when he needed it. As I said, there’s more to this than you know.”

  “Is that why you wrote Ray? You wanted him to list his house?”

  The already-arched eyebrows rose higher. “He spoke to you about that?”

  Not wanting Sheila to know I’d been looking through Ray’s mail, though she would probably find out soon enough, I ignored the question and stood to leave. There was nothing more to be discovered in Ray’s house, not with a realtor prowling around. “Can I ask you a favor? Ray stored his foraging finds in Ball jars in the kitchen. If Owen doesn’t want them, I’d like to have them. I know some people in the neighborhood who would like the jars as keepsakes, and I don’t think Ray would want his foraging to go to waste.”

  “What’s a foraging find? You’re not talking about bugs, are you?”

  “Plants, nuts, berries.”

  “Oh, that foraging. Lawn food is not my idea of delicious.” Sheila left her tote behind and strode for the kitchen, smoothing invisible wrinkles in her black skirt as she walked.

  “There are about thirty jars,” I said, trailing behind her.

  On first sight of the jars, Sheila stopped abruptly. “Good gravy! I’ve never seen these before.”

  “You’ve never been in the kitchen before?” I circled around her and stood near the table.

  “No, just in—” Sheila clamped her mouth shut.

  “Just in?”

  “Listen, I can almost guarantee Owen doesn’t want any of the jars, but I’ll check with him and let you know. Or one of us will. You can pick them up then. But please, take all of them with you at the same time. Otherwise, what gets left behind will have to go in the trash. Now I’ll have to hire someone to take care of all this.”

  “Ray loved to forage,” I said. “He said it kept him active and healthy, and I believe it did.”

  “I so hope these things are the last surprise I find.” Still gazing in horror at the jars—I mean, for crying out loud, they were jars—Sheila shook her head, no doubt wondering if her dreams of a speedy sale were in jeopardy. “Owen didn’t mention anything like this. He said everything was shipshape.”

  Emily jumped in. “It is. It’s spotless.” Her arms still wrapped across her chest, she joined us in the kitchen. “Is Owen flying in, I would hope?”

  “Yes. He’s arriving the day after tomorrow.” Sheila made a snappy, soldier-like pivot in my direction and again fussily smoothed her skirt. “That means I’ve got to get to work. There’s so much to do. People to hire, things to clean, paperwork to handle. Will you excuse me?”

  Knowing very well that Will you excuse me? meant Get out now, I tugged at the hem of my jacket to make sure the folded pamphlet in my back pocket was hidden, and then headed for the door, pulling Emily with me.

  “Just a second,” Sheila said. “You didn’t tell me what you two were doing in here.”

  “We wanted to make sure the police had locked things up,” Emily said.

  “I’m certain they did. They know what they’re doing.” She walked up to me and stuck out a manicured hand. “May I have your key?”

  I had no right to tell her to leave, but that’s what I wanted to do. Get out of Ray’s house. He wouldn’t like you in here. Instead, I gave her what I hoped she’d take as a semi-genuine smile and said, “I’ll be happy to give it to Ray’s son. I want to say hello to him anyway, and I can ask him about the jars at the same time so he doesn’t have to call.”

  Sheila studied me for a moment, probably wondering if she could bully me into giving her the key. Bur her version of bullying consisting of silently glaring, and that had no effect on me. “Well, that’s it for now, then,” she said at last. “Nice to meet you. I’ll be sure to tell Owen we met. First thing.”

  Now that sounded like a threat. Never mind. Ray had talked about his son, and Owen had always sounded like a fine and decent man. If anything, he’d be pleased we were watching his father’s house.

  “Nice to meet you too,” I said. Emily remained silent, which was just as well.

  We left the same way we came—out the back door and into the woods—and as we headed back to my house, I pondered what I’d seen in Ray’s living room. On first glance, everything had looked orderly, just the way Ray liked it, but on further examination, too many things had been the tiniest bit awry. Just a speck off—like three misplayed notes in a five-minute song. But if you knew that song inside and out, you could hear those wrong notes, even if others didn’t.

  “I don’t think we gained much,” Emily said as we stood outside my back door.

  “Oh yes we did.” I opened the door slowly, letting it creak and grate as a warning to Minette.

  “Laurence can fix that squeak when he comes back.”

  “Don’t bother him. I can fix my own squeaky door. I’d better learn.” Remembering the small pamphlet I’d smuggled from the house in my back pocket, I took it out, sat, and tossed it down on the kitchen table. “Someone searched Ray’s house, and they tried very hard to make it look like they hadn’t.”

  “Huh?” Emily sat across from me. “Do you mean the police?”

  “Nope. They wouldn’t have been so careful. They wouldn’t have tried to hide a search, and besides, why would they have searched the living ro
om? They think Ray died of a heart attack in the kitchen.”

  Emily gave me a barely perceptible shake of her head. “I think I hate what I’m thinking.”

  “I think we’re thinking the same thing.”

  “The person who killed Alana Williams killed Ray. And then he—or she—searched Ray’s house.”

  “And I believe I know what they were looking for,” I said.

  CHAPTER 8

  I showed Emily Ray’s memoirs, specifically chapter 14, and reminded her of the missing ribbon cassette in Ray’s typewriter. “When the killer couldn’t find his manuscript, he took the cartridge, thinking he might be able to reconstruct what was typed. But Ray had moved on from the Alana Williamson murder,” I said. “His last chapter was on Donna’s death. He ended his story there.”

  “So whoever stole it could pull the ribbon out and read the memoirs?”

  “Maybe. Unless the typewriter went over the ribbon more than once.” I lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know, and the killer probably doesn’t either, but he must have thought it worth a try. I remember reading a book about a spy who did that. The thing is, that cartridge was gone. If Ray had taken it out, he would’ve put a new one in. The person who took it also searched Ray’s house and wanted to keep people from reading his memoirs.”

  “Who else knew Ray was writing his memoirs?”

  “I’ll bet Welch and Rancourt did.”

  “Agreed. He talked to them one day before his death, and we don’t like coincidences.”

  “So who did they talk to? And did Ray mention his memoirs to anyone else? How many people knew he was writing them?”

  “What did he write about Alana that has her killer worried?” Emily asked. “The description of her body?”

  “I need to finish that chapter. And one more thing—my laptop.” I was up like a shot, bounding for the corner desk in my living room. I felt charged with energy, a peculiar sensation after months of grief and lethargy.

  Unlike Ray’s living-room desk, mine was a monument to moderate disorder. I wiped a stack of bills off my laptop, hit the On button, and took the computer to my couch while I waited for it to boot.

  “First, I want to know if Marie St. Peter is still working for the Smithwell Police,” I said. “She and Rancourt were the first law enforcement officers on the scene.”

  “What about looking up old issues of the paper?”

  “We may as well. Though if I remember right, Ray offered more information on the crime than the paper ever did.”

  I navigated to the Smithwell Police Department’s website and clicked on its Staff Directory link. “And there she is,” I said, swiveling the laptop to give Emily a better look. St. Peter was about forty, I estimated. Her light brown hair was fixed so neatly behind her head that not one stray wisp grazed her temples. She wore a broad, dimpled smile and oval, wire-rimmed glasses that made her round face look rounder. “She’s gone up in the world. According to Ray, she was a lowly officer six years ago. Now she’s a sergeant.”

  While Emily read St. Peter’s brief bio, I glanced furtively about my living room for Minette. Either she was hiding or she’d left the house. I hoped the latter.

  “And here’s Rancourt,” Emily said, angling the laptop my way. “Sixty, would you say? Maybe older. He’s pretty gray. And kind of grizzled looking.”

  I had to agree with the grizzled part. Rancourt had the kind of face that declared he’d been through a lot, worked long hours, and seen too much of the bad side of life.

  Emily whipped the laptop back her way. “OK if I use your credit card to access articles at the library? It’s five dollars.”

  “Go for it.” I gave Emily my credit card then went to my kitchen to make yet another cup of almond tea and give that pamphlet I’d found a look. At the hutch, thinking I might find a sleeping Minette, I stood on tiptoe and peeked inside the teacups on the uppermost of the two shelves. She wasn’t there. But there was no need for concern, I told myself. She had taken care of herself long before she’d met me, and even before she’d met Ray.

  As the kettle heated, I sat at the table and turned to the first page of the pamphlet—an author’s bio. According to the bio, Irene Carrick was a local woman and a member of the Smithwell Garden Society. It was a strange topic for a gardening club publication, I thought. Fairy Lore and Horticulture in Smithwell. I wasn’t even sure what that meant. How were the two connected? Had the society shelled out money for the publication?

  The next page contained a short dedication to Foley’s Nursery, which didn’t surprise me. I’d purchased my rhododendron there. For a town of six thousand, Smithwell was blessed to have such a nursery. It had as large a selection of plants as any nursery or garden center in Bangor or even Portland, and it drew people from as far east as Dover-Foxcroft and as far west as Farmington.

  Noticing a fold in one of the pages, I turned there. Ray had written the words “Paphiopedilum Maudiae” in the margin, and under those words, “Expensive. $32. But worth it.” Ray, a man whose motto was “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” never spent thirty-two dollars on anything but groceries, and even then he expected three bags’ worth at that price. So what on earth was worth three bags of groceries?

  Fifteen minutes later, downing the last of my tea, Emily still toiling away in the living room, I was beginning to think that either Irene Carrick believed in fairies—which made me wonder what her fellow club members thought about her foray into fantasy land at the club’s expense—or, as the title suggested, she knew a thing or two about fairy folklore and found the subject fascinating. The horticulture part of the title became clear in the pamphlet’s last three pages, which listed places fairies were known to frequent, like pine forests and cottage gardens, and plants fairies were known to like.

  It was in this latter section that Ray had scribbled more notes. Next to “Asters” and “Salvias,” he had written “No,” alongside “Dandelions” was the word “Sometimes,” and just above a list of orchids, he had jotted “Always,” underlining it twice. I ran my finger down the list. There it was, five orchids down: Paphiopedilum Maudiae. So the mysterious and expensive plant was a fairy favorite.

  Had Minette asked him to buy it? Is that why Ray had written “worth it” in the margin? But I was getting too far afield of my purpose. “Anything interesting in the articles?” I called out.

  “Oh yeah.” A moment later Emily popped her head into the kitchen. “And I now have a list of suspects.” She sat with me at the table and waved a piece of notepaper. “Rancourt and St. Peter, for starters.”

  “Stands to reason,” I said, nodding my assent.

  “Town Manager Conner Welch, since he was talking to Rancourt in the supermarket.”

  “Yup.”

  “Get this. Nick Foley, owner of Foley’s Nursery.”

  “Why Nick?”

  “He was questioned by the police because he was the last person to see Alana outside the school. She was at his nursery the morning of the day she died. He said she was buying a fern for her apartment.”

  “That’s peculiar.”

  “I’ll say. Then there’s a local writer named Irene Carrick.”

  My mouth dropped open. “Good heavens. She wrote the pamphlet I took from Ray’s house.”

  “That’s not all. They also questioned—are you ready?—Sheila Abbottson, our chirpy neighborhood realtor.”

  My mouth hung open like an airplane hangar ready for a Boeing 707. “What did she have to do with it?”

  “First, she’s Welch’s sister.”

  “Somehow I’m not surprised.”

  “Sheila was seen arguing with Alana the night before she died, and reading between the lines, it was a very personal argument. Not only that, but it got so nasty the police were called.”

  “Called where?”

  Emily bent forward in her seat, eager to pass along the next nugget of information. “To the Pumpkin Festival in Scarborough Park. Yipes! Can you believe it? What a place to have
a fight. There must have been a dozen or more witnesses.”

  “What was the argument about?”

  “The paper didn’t say. The article writers danced around a lot of subjects. I think they wanted to avoid being sued since the police hadn’t named a suspect or even a person of interest. And you know what that means. Everyone the police questioned had an alibi.”

  “Either that or the police couldn’t link them even marginally to the murder,” I said.

  “I’ll ask around and find out about that argument. It’ll be a snap. The same vendors are setting up this year’s Pumpkin Festival right now, and Laurence helped some of them with some . . . issues. I’ll drop his name.”

  I cleared the table of croissants and teacups. “While you’re doing that, I’m going to pay Irene Carrick a visit, using that”—I tipped my head at the folklore pamphlet—“as a pretext. I’m hoping the Smithwell Garden Society will give me her phone number.”

  “What are you going to ask her?”

  I gently set the cups in the sink. An excellent question, Emily. “I don’t have the foggiest idea,” I said, turning around. “I’ll wing it, depending on what she says. I’m hoping she’s the talkative sort.”

  Emily scooped up Ray’s memoirs. “I’m going to finish reading this before I go. Mind if I stay here?”

  “Of course not.” My thoughts took a sudden turn as I envisioned the thief-slash-killer still hunting for Ray’s manuscript. And hunt he or she would, knowing that Ray would have given his story to a friend to read. It was simple deduction. “Emily, take the memoirs with you when you go, and keep them with you. That’s the only copy. We can’t lose it.”

  It dawned on Emily—I could see it on her face—that I was now worried about the killer breaking into my house or hers. “When we start asking questions around town, it’ll become obvious that one of us has the memoirs,” she said.

  “We should find a place to hide it. Like a safety deposit box. Or we can make copies.”