The Deadly Art of Love and Murder

by Linda Crowder

“Can’t take you to dinner, because there isn’t anywhere to go.” He gestured toward the empty dining room.

  “Let’s go snowshoeing. It’s perfect weather for it.”

  “I don’t have shoes.”

  “You can borrow Bent’s.”

  “It’s a date.”

  Chapter 10

  Dan stopped in after breakfast to let me know the prosecutor didn’t think there was enough evidence to go before the judge. “He told me to wait for the lab report.”

  “What good will that do?” I asked. I was doing dishes and, not that I’m not always happy to see Dan, but he also gave me a good excuse to toss Mel the dishtowel and go sit in the dining room.

  “I sent his prints to the lab. We’ll see if they can place him at the house.”

  “When did you get his... oh, when you arrested him. But you already know he was there.”

  “I have one man’s word for it. Nobody else in town seems to have seen Alex. Heck, for all I know Dickerson shot her when she wouldn’t sell to him.”

  “Oh honestly. You don’t get far as a developer if you shoot everybody who won’t sell.”

  “I also only have his word for it that he’s a developer.”

  “You said people hadn’t kept his cards. You didn’t say he didn’t have them. Nobody prints cards on the off chance they’ll need them to establish an alibi.”

  “They do in Agatha Christie novels.”

  I stared at him. A slow grin started to spread across his face. “Dan Simmons. Have you been reading Agatha Christie?”

  He pulled out a battered copy of Murder on the Orient Express. “I inherited my uncle’s book collection. Thought I’d take it for a spin.”

  “I bet you liked that one. Did you guess the killer?”

  “Did you?”

  “Not the first time.”

  “It’s cheating to guess the killer on the second time through.”

  “That’s not what I meant. It’s just that she’s so subtle when she drops hints, sometimes I go back and read it again once I know who the killer is just to see if I can pick up on it. It’s a lot easier when you already know who the killer is.”

  “I would think.”

  “Don’t make that face at me. It’ll be easy for you too, now that you know who killed Mrs. Nash, to go back and find proof.”

  “You think so?” He crossed his arms and leaned on the table. “What do you think I should be looking for? Let me see what you’ve got, mystery girl.”

  “Fingerprints on the gun. He couldn’t wipe them off if he was staging a suicide because that’d be a dead giveaway that she couldn’t have shot herself.”

  “Dead women wipe no prints. Got it. What next?”

  I stared out the window, thinking. “If he shot her, you’d think he’d have blood on his clothes. It’s a wonder nobody noticed.”

  “It was cold the last day of the season. He’d have probably worn a coat.”

  “But he had to have changed at some point. You can’t wear a coat through the security line at the airport and you’d think they’d have stopped him if he had blood on his clothes.”

  “Good point, Sherlock. I’ll have to give that some thought. If he brought along a change of clothes, it would be premeditation.” His face fell. “But if you bring clothes, why would you take a chance on the victim providing the murder weapon?”

  “How’d he get a gun on the plane? I really think it had to be a crime of opportunity. You see the gun, you act. He might have had an overnight bag for the flight and it came in handy.”

  “In which case, the clothes are in the water between here and Juneau.”

  “I would think so. What about motive?”

  “Money.”

  “Yes, but that makes it all the more likely it was a spontaneous thing. Alex brought this developer up to sell him the property, then he finds out it isn’t his to sell.”

  “Unless he kills her.”

  “That obviously didn’t make it his again. Maybe he got away with renting a house he didn’t own, but even he would know it would come up in a sale. If he killed her over it, it was because he was angry and in shock.”

  “I see what you mean. I need to find out if the Tilamu heirs knew the house wasn’t theirs and why they suddenly wanted to sell after all these years.”

  “You might try talking to Aggie.”

  “Aggie?”

  “Agatha Kirby. She’s the oldest of the three.”

  “Remind me. She’s the sister who came up with Alex?”

  “No, that was Anne. Anne Buchanan. All my dealings have been with Anne and Alex. I called Aggie once, out of desperation when I couldn’t get them to authorize some repairs. She told me she washed her hands of that house and didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”

  “Sounds like she knew about the ownership.”

  “Or just that there’s a rift in the family. When I asked Dad about it, he told me Aggie was pretty close to her parents but once her mother died, as far as he knew, Doc never heard from her again. Said it broke his heart because it was Aggie he and his wife went to visit before she died.”

  “Do you have her number? Or are you planning to conveniently call her before you give it to me like you did the developer?”

  I blushed. “Sorry. I got caught up in the moment.” I went into the kitchen and pulled my keys from a hook by the back door. Returning, I put them on the table in front of him. I grabbed an order pad from behind the counter and neatly wrote a series of numbers. “I’m going to make it up to you by letting you go to my office and get the numbers out of my files. Here’s the alarm code. Just re-arm and lock up when you leave. You can drop the keys back anytime.”

  He picked up the code but didn’t look at it. “That’s assuming you won’t call her first from here.”

  “Dan, I’ve called Aggie one time in my whole life and that was from my office. I don’t have her number on my cell phone.” I pretended to be hurt, because that was exactly what I might have done, had I had her number on my phone.

  He laughed. “Come on. We’ll call her from your office. She might pick up the phone quicker when she sees it’s you than if she sees the police are calling.”

  “Well, if you really need me...” I didn’t bother to finish. I ran back to the kitchen, where Mel was just finishing putting the dishes away, and tossed my apron in the hamper. “Gotta go help Dan.”

  “I thought you had a date with Frank today.”

  “Not until later.”

  She shook her head. “For starting out life as a wallflower, you’re certainly making up for lost time.”

  “This is business, Melly.” I hugged her, careful not to bump the bump. “We’re trying to nail down Alex’s motive.”

  “And Dan needs your help to do this?” she said, but I was already out of the kitchen.

  “THAT WAS NO HELP,” I said, slumping back in my chair after hanging up the phone. Aggie’s daughter had answered the phone, telling us her mother was on a cruise and wasn’t due back for three more days. “Who cruises in October?”

  “I don’t want this to come as a surprise to you, Cara, but there are other places people cruise to besides Alaska.”

  I glared at him. “Nobody I know.”

  “The Caribbean, Hawaii.” I threw a pencil at him. “Asia, Australia...”

  “What are you, a travel agent?”

  “Haven’t you ever wanted to go on a cruise? Watching all these people all these years getting back on their ship and sailing away. Haven’t you ever wished you could sail with them?”

  “Truthfully? No. You know what they say about cruisers. The newly wed and the nearly dead.”

  “Oh come on, you’ve met enough people from cruise ships to know that’s not true.”

  “So where would you go if you could sail away?”

  “Tahiti.”

  “Just like that. No thought, just Tahiti.”

  “What’s wrong with Tahiti? Tropical breezes, warm ocean, island music.”


  “Island music?”

  “You know what I mean. Ukuleles, drums. Stop looking at me like that. I think it sounds nice.”

  “Okay.”

  “You might like taking a cruise. People waiting on you, buying souvenirs instead of selling them.”

  “Dan, I don’t sell souvenirs. Is that what you think of the work I carry?”

  “It was just an expression.”

  “Buying souvenirs is not an expression.”

  “You know what I meant. You wait on people all day, every day but Thursday, hoping they’ll buy your fine works of art. Wouldn’t it be nice to turn that around and have somebody wait on you?”

  I gave it some consideration. Cruisers always seemed happy coming off the ship, except a few bad apples but you would get that anywhere. Some people seem determined to go through life with a frown on their face. “I suppose I could try it. Someday. So what do we do now?”

  “I’m going to call the boat rental and see if they found anything unusual in the boat Alex rented last month.”

  “Like a bag of bloody clothes?”

  “Like anything they made a note of in the files, or anything for the lost and found. Then I’m going to start looking into this developer.”

  “Dickerson.”

  “Confirm his travel dates, make sure he’s on the up and up.”

  “What about Anne?”

  “If she’s close to Alex, I don’t want to tip my hand by calling her. I’m taking a big enough chance calling Agatha.”

  “I know, but she was with him the day before the funeral. My Dad thinks she must have taken the ferry out, and I guess that’s true since Alex was alone the next day, but I do wonder what she was doing here. She lives in Montana so obviously the trip was planned. Why?”

  “Good question. I’ll take a look at her too.”

  I STOOD WATCHING AS Frank stumbled into Bent’s snowshoes. “Need help?”

  “I’ve got it,” he said, trying to get his boot to catch, as you would if you were stepping into skis.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” I said, holding out my foot so he could see how my snowshoes were attached. “You strap them on.”

  He bent back over his boot and was able to wrap the strap around the heel this time. He held up one foot, shook it and seemed satisfied enough when the snowshoe didn’t fall off to strap on the other. He made quick work of that, now that he’d seen how it was done, and before long, we were trudging up the near side of the bay on a path that would take us past the cannery.

  “You’re pretty good at this, especially for a first time, Frank.”

  “I used to do some cross country skiing,” he shrugged. “It’s not too different.”

  “It’s way different. But you’re doing well anyway.”

  “What were you and Dan doing at the gallery this morning?”

  I glanced at him, but he was looking straight ahead. “You shouldn’t be worrying about what I might be doing with him anymore than he should ask what I’m doing when we’re together.”

  “He asked you what we did last night?”

  “No.”

  We went along without talking and I surrendered myself to the beauty of the day. Snowshoeing when I had to in order to get from point A to point B is an entirely different thing than doing it for pleasure. I breathed in the crisp air and was thankful for my sunglasses, which blunted the glare from the sun bouncing off the untouched snow. The cannery was closed this time of year and I noticed the fishing boats were either gone, looking for crab in the northwest, or hoisted from the water to dangle on boat lifts through the winter.

  “How’s your murder investigation going?” he asked as the path entered the woods past the cannery.

  “Up and down. Dan’s trying to tie down details while he waits for the state lab report. He’s hoping that will give him proof Alex was in the house. Maybe we’ll get lucky enough he left his fingerprints on the gun.”

  “He shot the old lady with her own gun?”

  “That’s what it looks like. If Dan has the ballistics report, he hasn’t shared it.”

  “So your theory is he got so mad at her, he picked up her gun and shot her? Why’d she have the gun out anyway?”

  “Maybe he threatened her.”

  “Your developer, what’s his name?”

  “Mr. Dickerson and he’s not my developer.”

  “This Dickerson guy told you Alex brought him all the way out here with the idea of selling him the place so obviously, Alex assumed his family owned the house.”

  “Dan’s trying to confirm that, but Aggie’s off on a cruise, of all things.”

  “Dickerson said there was an argument between Alex and Mrs. Nash about which one of them owned the house, so he skipped out and went to find someone else who’d sell their house to him.”

  “That’s what he told Dan, but he’s checking up on Dickerson too, in case he’s the one who killed Mrs. Nash.”

  “Huh. He hears her tell Alex the house is hers and she’ll never sell so he slips back after Alex leaves, somehow gets her gun and shoots her, hoping to snap up the house from her heirs?”

  “Does sound silly when you put it like that.”

  “He did call you awfully quick after you’d found the body, though. How’d he know she was dead?”

  I stopped walking. “I can’t remember if he knew or not. He said he was interested in the house, described it, and asked if the owners might be willing to part with it. I told him he’d have to talk to Mr. Clarke.”

  “Still seems fishy to me.”

  “It does, kinda. Anyway, Dan must think so too because like I said, he’s checking up on Dickerson.”

  “So, what’s your guess why Doc gave the house to that woman? You think it was payment for killing his wife like Alex said?”

  “No.” I started shoeing again and Frank fell in beside me. “Doc would never do that.”

  “Then he was having an affair with her.”

  “He wouldn’t do that either, and as Mel pointed out, they never got married and they had ample opportunity. That couldn’t have been it.”

  “When did he sign over the house to her?”

  “A few years after his wife died.”

  “So what happened in his life around that time? What changed between Doc and his kids?”

  “I was just a kid then, Frank. I don’t know. I’ve never heard of anything.” My phone started ringing so I sank down onto a fallen tree and answered it.

  “Cara King? It’s Agatha Kirby.”

  “Mrs. Kirby? My goodness, I thought you were on a cruise.”

  “We had a lovely ten days. We’re in Miami for the next couple of days, then we’re heading home. My daughter called me because she said your call sounded important.”

  “I appreciate you calling me back. I don’t know if you ever met Mrs. Nash, the woman who’s been renting the Tilamu house for so many years?” There was silence on the line. “Mrs. Kirby?”

  “Yes, I heard you. I never met the woman.”

  There was something in the way she said, ‘the woman’ that made me wonder. “Well, she died recently and ... I’m not sure how to say this, but I checked the land records and it seems she owned the house.”

  There was another silence. “Is that what you called to tell me?”

  “Well, no. I called because, well, Alex was here.”

  “My brother? In Coho Bay? When was this?”

  “He was here a few days ago,” I said, deciding not to mention that we knew he’d been here when Mrs. Nash was killed.

  “How very strange. I haven’t spoken with Alex in years. What was he doing in Alaska?”

  “He came to take a look at the house.”

  “Why on earth would he do that?”

  “It seems, ma’am, he was under the impression that he––well, that the three of you––owned the house.”

  I waited. I had counted to five by the time she answered. “I imagine he did think so.”

  “But you knew otherwise?�
��

  “When no one contacted me about probate when my father died, I assumed he’d left the house to Anne and Alex. I told you when you called me about it, didn’t I, that I washed my hands of the place.”

  “I assumed you just weren’t interested in it. It isn’t as though there was very much money from the rent, especially split three ways.”

  “No, Miss King, I simply didn’t care. This will probably come as a shock to you since everyone thought my father was a saint, but I hadn’t spoken to him in years when he died. After my mother’s death, I just couldn’t bear to look at him.”

  “Your mother had cancer.”

  “Yes, she did. And she would have survived that cancer if he’d let her stay with me in D.C. instead of dragging her back to that god-forsaken hell-hole. I’m sorry. I’m sure you wouldn’t understand.”

  “I understand that many people leave town when they need medical treatment.”

  “Exactly. But my father thought he could treat Mom as well as any cancer hospital and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Hurt his feelings, Miss King! My father as good as murdered my mother when he took her back there.”

  “That must be why Alex told us his mother was murdered.”

  I hadn’t realized I’d said that aloud until she answered. “Alex never took his head out of a bottle long enough to care how our mother died, and Anne wasn’t much better. Oh, she doesn’t drink, but she makes excuses enough to keep Alex from ever having to stand up and be a man.”

  “I thought Anne lived in Montana.”

  “She did, until her husband died. He left her well enough off, that is, until Alex got hold of her. She moved to Washington to take care of him and I told her she was making the biggest mistake of her life. That’s when she stopped talking to me. Frankly, Miss King, it pains me to say this but my life has been more peaceful without either of them in it.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Do you have brothers and sisters?”

  “I have one sister.”

  “Well, I hope you have better luck with yours.”

  “So, as far as you knew, your siblings owned the Tilamu house?”

  “Until you told me otherwise. Who does own it?”

  “Mrs. Nash.”

  “Really.” There was a sharp intake of breath. “She and her husband bought it from my dad after all.”