Now I had three people involved with what was probably a completely unfounded worry, and I had nothing to do but wait. Danny called to say he was still a couple of miles away from the hotel. He’d tried to reach Phil and gotten no answer. He’d keep trying.
Tommy called me ten minutes later.
“It’s okay now, Ditie,” he said. “Josh is taking care of Phil.”
“What do you mean taking care of Phil?”
“Just listen and don’t interrupt,” Tommy said.
I sat down on a stool at the island. I held the phone so Lurleen could hear Tommy, but I didn’t put him on speaker phone for fear the kids would come in. I listened to the whole story before I said a word.
Tommy and Josh got there before Danny. They’d called Phil’s room, and when he didn’t respond, they went upstairs to find him. They knocked on his door, saw it was partially open and went inside. Phil was in the bathroom holding a wash cloth to the back of his head.
“He nearly had a heart attack when he saw Josh in the mirror,” Tommy said. “He obviously didn’t recognize him. ‘How’d you get in here?’ he kept asking. ‘Who the hell are you? Take whatever you want.’ He must have thought Josh was his attacker. He settled down when he saw me, and I explained why we were there. I talked to him while Josh tended to his head.”
Josh got on the line at that point. “It’s a superficial wound, Ditie. I think someone whacked him from behind and it stunned him. A sharp object, like the edge of a book. We found one near where he fell.”
I heard Tommy say something to Josh and then he took the phone back. “I’m in the living room. It’s a lot easier to talk here while Josh finishes patching up Phil.”
“Thank you, Tommy. Tell Josh he’s a life saver.”
Mason came inside to say the hamburgers were ready, and the kids bounced into the kitchen behind him.
“Hang on, Tommy,” I said. I ushered the kids back outside to set the table on the deck. It would buy me five more minutes to talk to Tommy.
“Tommy, are you there? I’m putting you on speaker, so Mason can hear what’s going on.”
“Sure. It seems that Phil was entertaining Harper Hudson when she got an urgent call from someone. It was an intimate moment according to Phil, but she pulled herself together and ran out the door five minutes later. Phil noticed she’d left her belt and caught her at the elevator. When he got back, he went into the bedroom, and it was then someone threw a book at him.”
“Hit him with what?” Mason asked.
“A medical school yearbook, if you can believe that. Phil said he brought it for the folks who were coming to the reenactment. ”
“Has Phil called the police or the county sheriff?” Mason asked.
“He’s reluctant to do that,” Tommy said. “He’s concerned about how it might look—his spending time with Harper when her husband was just killed.”
“He’s right about that,” Mason said. “Did he see who attacked him?”
“He didn’t see anything. He fell forward and by the time he got up, the person was gone.”
“I’m coming over,” Mason said, “after I call Barden.”
“Barden?” Tommy asked.
“Investigator Barden with Gordon County. He’s been on the case since the cannon explosion. He needs to know about this.”
Mason handed me the phone.
“I’m coming too,” I said.
We hung up, and Mason looked at me. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking you to stay put.”
“No point at all.”
We both went out on the deck. Mason sat with the kids while I told Lurleen where we were headed.
“But I want to go too,” she said.
“Not this time. The kids.”
Lurleen sighed dramatically. “All right. I’ll feed the kids and take them for ice cream after dinner.”
I didn’t say much to the kids except that their uncle Tommy asked us to come over. Lucie looked as if she didn’t quite believe me, but she didn’t ask any questions.
Mason called Barden. He said he’d meet us there. Apparently, Atlanta police were already on the scene.
Traffic had calmed down by the time we left the house. We got to the Whitley a little before seven and found Tommy waiting for us in the lobby. “Danny, Josh, and Phil are upstairs.”
He took us to Phil’s suite. We knocked and an Atlanta police officer let us in. “We have a team in the bedroom, so we’ll talk out here. Dr. Brockton says he interrupted a burglary. Nothing was taken, including his valuable Civil War guns—he keeps those in a lockbox in the closet.”
Phil joined us in the living room. “The guys probably didn’t know what they were looking for, just a snatch and run through an open door.”
“Phil, are you saying this is not related to the murders?” I asked.
“I’m alive, aren’t I?” Phil said.
.“He could be right,” the officer said.
“Or he could be very wrong,” I said. “You have two deaths. Do you really think this assault is unrelated?”
Inspector Barden joined us at this point. He’d gotten the quick version of events from the officer in charge. “Throwing a book at someone isn’t a way to commit murder,” he said.
“You’re right,” I said, “but the simplest explanation is that all of this is part of the same story, not some random coincidence. That’s the way we’d approach it in medicine—look for one diagnosis that fits all the symptoms.”
“Sometimes the simplest story isn’t the right one, Ditie.” This was from Mason. “What does a relationship between Phil and Harper have to do with Carl’s death or Ryan’s death for that matter? The only people who might care about it are dead.”
“Maybe it’s a woman who cares, like Sally Cutter. I suspect she was the woman involved with both Phil and Carl during med school. I think she’s still interested in Phil. And there’s more.”
That got everyone’s attention.
“When I asked Sally if she knew about Carl’s book of payments, it was clear she did. She denied it, of course, but I wonder if she also knew about the missing pages.”
“What does that mean?” Mason asked.
“I’m not sure, but I intend to find out.”
“I better be at your side when you do,” Mason said.
“And I better not hear that you are interfering with my investigation,” Inspector Barden said.
Chapter Thirty
Mason and I got home a little before nine. The kids were tucked in bed but still awake.
Jason wanted to talk.
“I got two scoops of ice cream. Lurleen said promise not to tell, and I said I wouldn’t.”
It was hard not to laugh. Someday, Jason would be a lot better at keeping secrets.
“What flavor?” I asked.
“You know, Mommy, vanilla with sprinkles!”
“Silly me. How could I forget!”
I gave him a kiss and a hug and found Lucie curled up in bed with her book Harriet the Spy.
“I’m going to be a detective when I grow up,” she said, “like you and Uncle Mason.”
“I’m a doctor, Lucie, what do you mean?”
“I mean your real job. You want to find out who is trying to make Dr. Brockton look like the murderer, but you don’t think he is the murderer.”
“Good grief, Lucie, where are you hearing all this?”
“I’m not listening at doorknobs,” she said, and then she blushed. “Sometimes you talk kind of loud, Aunt Di, and sometimes Lurleen tells me what’s going on. She says a good spy should always know what’s going on.”
“Do you know what’s going on?” I asked.
“I know someone got hurt when a cannon exploded and some people think Dr. Brockton did it, but I don’t.”
“Why not, Lucie?” I
asked.
“Because he was your boyfriend once, and I don’t think you would ever have a boyfriend who hurt people.”
“I hope you’re right.” I looked at her. “Since you are very good at listening, but not at doorknobs, do you have an idea who might have made the cannon explode?”
“No, I don’t know that. But I’m keeping a list of people like Harriet did. Do you want to see?”
“You bet I do.”
Lucie pulled a spiral notebook from under her pillow and showed me what she had so far.
Page One: People at the party
Page Two: People I like
Page Three: People I don’t like
I read through the pages. On the top of page three was Harper Hudson. Lucie wrote what she’d already told me. “Phony. Doesn’t like kids or dogs. Doesn’t like Dr. Ryan. Likes men and doesn’t like women.”
“That is quite a description,” I said to her. “How do you know she doesn’t like her husband.”
“I didn’t mean to listen, Aunt Di, honestly, but they were in my bedroom and I was just about to go in there when I heard them. The man Dr. Hudson said, “This has got to stop! You are making a fool out of me, right here in front of my friends.” And the woman Dr. Hudson said, “It’s your own fault. You hate everyone I like—you hated Carl. I wonder if you killed him!”
“That’s quite an argument you heard, Lucie.”
Lucie nodded solemnly.
I looked over her lists. “You have Frank Peterson on your ‘do not like’ list. Why?”
“I watched him walk around your house, Aunt Di, and he said mean things. He said, ‘Those pictures are done by amateurs. What does Mabel Brown do with her money? She sure doesn’t spend it on art or nice furniture.’ I love your house and your furniture and your paintings.”
“Thanks, Lucie, I do too. You have Frank Peterson pegged about right. All he seems to care about is money. Who was he talking to when he said those things?”
“He was talking to Sally Cutter.”
I looked at her list. “You wrote her name with a question mark. What does that mean?”
“It means sometimes she was nice and sometimes she wasn’t. She agreed with Dr. Frank, but then later she agreed with Dr. Andy when he said it was a beautiful house and then she agreed with Dr. Brockton when he said he was having a hard time. She seemed to agree with everyone, so I didn’t know about her.”
“You are amazing, Lucie. May I keep this for tonight?”
Lucie nodded. I tucked her in bed and put Harriet the Spy on her nightstand.
She motioned me down close to her. “Do you mind if I keep calling you Aunt Di?” she asked.
“I don’t mind a bit,” I said.
“It’s just I don’t want Mommy to think I’ve forgotten her.”
“I understand, Lucie.” I stroked her face. “We never forget our mothers.”
I turned off the light and closed the door to her bedroom. For a moment I thought about my own mother, and for the first time I wondered if I’d judged her too harshly. Her life hadn’t been easy. Her mother had been a no-nonsense woman who lost her husband at an early age. How could my mother have been soft and survived?
Lucie was a miracle of insight—about the suspects, about mothers and daughters. I wondered what she would become when she grew up and the thought of watching my daughter grow up made me cry.
Lurleen found me in the hallway, rubbing my eyes.
“It’s all good,” I said, before she could say anything. “It’s just that Lucie is the most amazing little girl. Look what she did.”
Lurleen took the notebook and glanced through it. “Where did she get this idea?” she asked.
“She’s been reading Harriet the Spy,” I said.
‘Didn’t Harriet get in trouble with her notebook about her friends?” Lurleen asked.
“How do you know that?”
“I was the one who gave her the book.”
We took Lucie’s notebook out to Mason. He looked it over and then looked at me.
“You agree with this assessment?” Mason asked.
“Every word, and I didn’t coach her. These are all Lucie’s thoughts. Did you notice she was writing in a notebook all evening?”
“She kept it tucked away,” Mason said. “Occasionally, she’d pull it out and write something.”
We sat on the sofa together and read each page. Lucie had a fourth page—“What Happened at the Party.” She kept an account of every hour and listed who was where. On the list were a few names I’d never heard of. I skimmed over those.
There was one addition to the list I didn’t expect to find, one person at the party I thought had come and gone in a flash. Kathy. At 8:00 pm Lucie described someone she couldn’t name—“a thin woman with brown hair and eyes, wearing white shorts and a purple top.” That was a description of Kathy. Lucie saw her talking to Dr. Andy at the side of my house just inside the wooden gate that led to my backyard. It was the one place two people might have spoken in private. It couldn’t be seen from inside the house, and Lucie must have been crouched somewhere, perhaps behind the wooden break for the garbage cans, to hear and see what she did. I read the passage aloud, so both Mason and Lurleen could hear.
“Dr. Andy gave her a big brown envelope. The woman gave Dr. Andy some money. Then the woman left.”
Chapter Thirty-One
I looked up from Lucie’s notebook. Mason and Lurleen were as stunned as I was.
“I need a moment,” I said. “Kathy came to the party around six or six thirty I’d say. She left within ten minutes. Andy followed us out to the car. She came back around eleven, after everyone had left, and she was hysterical. Was she making that up?” I looked at both of them. “She fainted. Was that for my benefit?”
I didn’t wait for a reply. “At eight, according to Lucie, she made a secret visit to the house, this time to see Andy. That had to be an arranged visit obviously. He hands her an envelope, maybe an envelope with a picture in it, and she pays him some money.”
Mason suggested we talk in the kitchen over a cup of coffee. I checked to be sure the children’s bedroom doors were closed.
I made decaf and brought out some brownies, left in the freezer for emergencies like this, for times when we needed to think.
“Remember,” Lurleen said, “I was the one who told you Andy Morrison was the murderer and you scoffed at me, Ditie.”
“Yes, and if that meeting was about the murder, then that means Kathy is involved as well. I just can’t believe it.”
“Perhaps you could believe it if you took your personal emotion out of it,” Lurleen said.
Mason and I both stared at her.
“What?” she said. “You think I can’t be logical? I worked at Sandler’s Sodas as an accountant for years. You can’t get more logical than that. And you know the saying—follow the money.”
“The money poses a good question, Lurleen,” Mason said. “Why would Kathy give Andy Morrison money in exchange for an envelope?”
Lurleen said aloud what we were all thinking. “The obvious reason is that she was paying Andy to murder her husband, and he was providing the proof that he’d done so.” Lurleen pointed a long slender finger in my direction. “And then perhaps when she finally looked at the picture, she couldn’t bear what she’d done. Maybe that’s why she showed up on your doorstep late at night.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t wrap my head around that and there’s a flaw in the logic. She didn’t need to see a picture of Carl dead. She knew he was dead. Why would either one of them risk being seen with that photograph? It doesn’t make sense.”
The three of us were silent, drinking coffee and eating brownies.
“You’re right,” Mason said, “unless she was determined to make herself look like the victim and not the perpetrator by bringing the ph
oto to you. But even that doesn’t work well. Her best bet, if she were involved, would be to lie low and hope Carl’s death would be declared an accident.”
“So, if Andy wasn’t giving her that gruesome picture, what was he giving her?” I asked. “It was done in secret or was it? Maybe Lucie saw it that way. Maybe they just met up at the most convenient spot?”
Lucie trotted into the kitchen at that moment and saw the three of us poring over her notebook.
“Was I talking too loud, Lucie?” I asked.
“No, I couldn’t sleep and I wanted to get some water.”
I gave her some.
“Why are you looking at my notebook? Did I do something wrong?”
“No, Lucie,” Mason said. “We’re looking at it because you kept such good notes. Do you mind telling us about seeing Dr. Morrison and the thin woman with brown hair? Did they act like their meeting was a secret?”
Lucie thought about it. “Kind of. Dr. Andy stood at the back gate and looked at his watch. That made me look at my watch. That’s how I knew it was exactly eight o’clock. The thin woman opened the gate like she was trying to be quiet.” Lucie’s eyes suddenly grew large. “The thin woman was Kathy Thompson—that’s who she was. I didn’t recognize her then, but I do now. She looked around like she didn’t want anyone to see her. Dr. Andy pulled the envelope from his pocket and gave it to her. It was folded over and she unfolded it.”
“Did she look inside?”
“She did, Aunt Di. I forgot that part. She looked inside and said, ‘It’s all here.’ and Dr. Andy said, ‘Of course it is,’ and then she gave him some money.”
“Were you close enough to see how much money she gave him?” Mason asked.
“No, but I think it was a lot of money. He put it in his pocket and kissed her on the cheek. And then she left.”
“Thanks, Lucie,” I said. “You are going to be a great detective one day or maybe a reporter. Do you want a brownie before you go back to bed?”
“No thank you, Aunt Di.”
I took her hand, walked her back to her bedroom, and tucked her in bed. When I came back Lurleen and Mason were whispering to one another.
Into the Frying Pan Page 22