The Devil's Puzzle

by Clare O'Donohue

  “And you figure Eleanor wasn’t strong enough?”

  “You and she are about the same size. You’re only a few years younger than she would have been then. I’m about the same height and probably the same weight as the victim. Maybe a few years younger than he would have been. How many times could you hit me with something without my stopping you?”

  “If you were asleep, I could get in enough blows to kill you.”

  “I’ll sleep with one eye open from now on.”

  “But assuming the victim was asleep when he was killed,” I said, “then someone would have had to drag him out to the backyard, dig a hole, and dump him in.”

  “So asleep or awake, the killer would have to be pretty strong . . .”

  “And probably male.” It was hard to argue with his logic. “Unless the killer had help.”

  “Or a wheelbarrow,” Jesse admitted. “Then maybe she could have moved the body on her own. Or he could have. And if the victim were drunk, or drugged, his reflexes would be slower, making it easier to get a blow in.” He sighed. “With just a skeleton to work with, there’s no way of telling whether there were drugs in his system. So I guess we haven’t eliminated someone Eleanor’s size.”

  “Not yet. What’s the next step? We talk to Eleanor?”

  “Which she won’t like.”

  I sat up. “What if you came over for dinner? You, me, Oliver, and Eleanor. You could slip it into the conversation somehow.” I hesitated before adding, “But just so you know, she’s going to hint around about a wedding because she thinks you’re about to propose.”

  “She thinks what?”

  “She knows you and Oliver went to the jewelry store together and figured it was you buying the ring.”

  “Amateur sleuthing runs in the family.”

  “The point is, just go along with it because we don’t want her suspecting that it might be Oliver. Not until we’re sure why she’s against remarrying.”

  “Until you’re sure. I’m staying out of that. Even if you are helping with the murder investigation.”

  “I’m helping you talk to Eleanor in a way that will be open and relaxed, so she won’t think you’re accusing her of something.”

  “Oliver and I are lucky men to love such interesting women.”

  I grazed his lips with mine. “It’s amazing how often we agree these days, isn’t it?”

  I had just settled back into his arms when I heard a booming voice from above. “Hello, lovebirds.”

  I looked up at our mayor, smiling at us, his favorite green tea in one hand and a double-chocolate brownie in the other.

  “I like to balance my bad habits with good ones,” Larry said when he saw me looking at his food.

  “Smart man.” I smiled.

  With him was a young woman in her late teens or early twenties with an intense, almost angry look. She had long black hair—so dark that it could only be from a bottle—long black fingernails, and a large Celtic cross hanging from her neck. But she was wearing a soft pink lipstick that matched her outfit, a light T-shirt, and khaki pants. She looked as though she were trying to be Goth enough for her friends and country club enough for her parents, though neither look was a perfect fit.

  “This is Molly O’Brien. Summer intern down from Newton. She’s helping with the anniversary celebration. She’ll coordinate with the committee chairs,” the mayor nodded toward me, “on anything they may need.”

  Molly smiled vaguely at us but seemed bored.

  “And Molly,” he turned to her, “this is our chief of police, and this is Nell Fitzgerald. It was in her grandmother’s garden that we found our skeleton.”

  Now Molly was interested. “I saw the mayor’s blog,” she said, her voice more animated with each word. “It’s so cool. A dead body just buried in your backyard all these years. Any idea who he is?”

  “Not yet,” Jesse said.

  The mayor sat on the arm of the couch and leaned in. Larry Williams owned the local travel agency, sold insurance, and from January to April did the taxes of nearly half the town. He’d even set his sons up in a hardware store that served as one of his many unofficial campaign offices. And when Larry wasn’t working, he was helping. He had a jovial, laid-back way about him, but he was absolutely passionate about Archers Rest.

  “We have to talk about this skeleton situation, Chief,” he said.

  “We’re doing everything we can to identify the victim,” Jesse said.

  “Oh, I’m sure you are. It’s just I’m thinking of the big celebration this Fourth of July.”

  Jesse nodded. “And you don’t want this becoming bad publicity for the town. Which is why posting pictures on your blog is a bad idea . . .”

  The mayor waved him off. “On the contrary. I want this to be huge publicity for the town. A skeleton in a backyard in a small town like Archers Rest? If we can get you a few interviews with some of the New York papers, talking about how the town is full of secrets, maybe even ghosts . . .”

  “Ghosts!” I nearly spit out my coffee.

  “City folks love staying in haunted bed-and-breakfasts, visiting old houses where spirits still roam,” he said, with a confidence that suggested he’d done a study of it.

  “Mayor,” Jesse interrupted, “there aren’t any ghosts in this investigation.”

  “You don’t know that,” Molly jumped in. “The house with the skeleton has to be full of ghosts. I’d love to see it sometime. Poke around for spirits. It’s at least a hundred years old, isn’t it, Nell?”

  “A hundred and thirty,” I told her. “But no ghosts.”

  “But those New Yorkers don’t have to know that.” Larry looked around as if he were afraid of being overheard, which was likely considering how loudly he spoke. “We have a picturesque little town here, right on the banks of the beautiful Hudson River. We have the nicest people in the world, the best shops, great little coffee places like this one. What we don’t have is tourism.”

  “We don’t really have anything that sets us apart from all the other picturesque towns on the Hudson,” Jesse said. “Sleepy Hollow has the Washington Irving story, Hyde Park has Roosevelt’s home, and West Point has—”

  Larry practically jumped up. “That’s my point. We’re losing out to those flashier places. We need something unique, something that gets people interested in Archers Rest.”

  I didn’t want to burst his bubble, but I didn’t see it. “Why would a decades-old murder investigation get people interested in coming here for the anniversary celebration?”

  “We have to dress it up a bit. Make it more exciting. And that’s where Jesse comes in. We don’t have to run around solving this thing right away. We could maybe suggest that it might be a Revolutionary War hero. Or something else, I don’t know—maybe a pirate, or a duel gone bad. There are lots of scenarios.”

  “A pirate?” I looked over at Molly, who was listening intently. “Would pirates be interesting enough for you to come to a town like Archers Rest?”

  She glanced at the mayor, seemed to consider her words, and said, “I think murders are always interesting. Even—maybe especially—old ones.”

  “Exactly,” the mayor said. “This is an old town. That body could be hundreds of years old. No sense in solving it tomorrow and making it another mundane homicide when it could be the jumping-off point for a story that would get us on the map.”

  I could feel Jesse tensing up. “Mayor,” he said, “I’m interested in identifying this man, and if possible, solving his murder. That’s my job. I’m not interested in parading the body of a dead man around so some bored New Yorkers can have a bit of weekend fun.”

  Larry stood up and sighed. “Well, you’d better be, Jesse Dewalt, or this town will be looking for a chief of police who cares about the welfare of its living residents.”

  CHAPTER 15

  To his credit, Jesse didn’t seem too worried about the mayor’s threat.

  “He’s a little manic about this place,” Jesse reassured me on
ce we’d left Jitters and walked across the street to Someday Quilts. “Sometimes he forgets he’s the mayor and imagines he’s the king.”

  “When are you going to tell him that his pirate was wearing synthetic fabrics and had a poker chip in his pocket?”

  “Not today, that’s for sure.”

  “He’d be an idiot to lose you,” I said. “And if he doesn’t know that, then the rest of the town does.”

  Jesse looked at me for a long time before gently kissing me. “I’ll see you at this dinner party tomorrow,” he said. “And I have a favor to ask. I need to send Allie over to the shop, just for a couple of hours this afternoon. My mom is doing some errands.”

  “That’s not a favor. I love having Allie at the shop.”

  “She loves being there. She told me she wants to be a quilter when she grows up.”

  “She’s already a quilter. Eleanor has been teaching her. Allie will be at the Friday meetings before you know it.”

  He laughed. “I’d say that was harmless fun, but I have a feeling a lot of dangerous talk goes on at those meetings.”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  We kissed again and I watched as he walked toward the police station.

  Inside the shop a couple of women were wandering through the aisles of fabric. Eleanor was at the front counter ringing up a sale and Natalie was in back, working on the longarm machine, trying to finish a growing pile of quilts.

  The quilting world used to be divided into two camps: the hand quilters and the machine quilters. Now there’s a third category, those who quilt by checkbook—people who make quilt tops and send them out to be quilted by someone like Natalie or me. The advantage of sending out a quilt top is, of course, that it will actually get quilted. For the folks who do it all themselves, making the entire quilt is a way to stretch their skills and create something completely their own. For those who send them out, it seems like the perfect way to make more quilts in less time. Personally, I thought they were both right.

  I made ten phone calls to ten regular customers of the shop, explained about the quilt show, and got ten promises to make reproduction-style quilts to fit the theme of the show. As I picked out some fabrics for my devil’s puzzle quilt, I congratulated myself on how smoothly things were going. I even left a message for Glad telling her the theme, and how, not surprisingly, quilters from all over town were contributing their work to what I knew would be a great show. At least something was going right.

  “Nell Fitzgerald, I want to speak to you.”

  I was hoping I hadn’t spoken too soon. Just as I was feeling relaxed, Glad entered the shop. Even though she was dressed in a soft green skirt and matching jacket, as if she were stopping in on the way to tea, her whole demeanor was that of a woman ready to do battle.

  “Hi Glad. What can I do for you?”

  “It’s about this skeleton,” she started, “over at your grandmother’s.”

  “What about it?”

  “We cannot have that kind of scandal in our town with the anniversary celebration coming up. How would it look?”

  “I don’t think it’s a scandal, exactly.”

  I looked toward Eleanor, who was quietly moving toward her office. I was a little annoyed that she would leave me to deal with Glad alone, but I had to admire her ability to make a quick getaway. Barney, on the other hand, stayed by my side in a show of loyalty. Or maybe it was that he’d found a fabric cat one of the customers had made for him and he was having fun chewing on it. Glad looked down at him and scowled.

  “Isn’t it against some health code to have a dog in a shop?”

  “It’s a fabric shop, Glad. We don’t serve food here.”

  “Still, an animal wandering around . . .”

  “You wanted to talk to me about the skeleton.”

  “Yes,” she sniffed, as if she’d suddenly developed an allergy. Barney, now walking around her feet, didn’t appear to take offense. But then, he never did. As I watched him, I noticed a mark on Glad’s leg. It looked like several long, narrow cuts on the side of her calf.

  “What happened there?” I said, pointing to her leg.

  Glad reached down and patted her leg through her nylons. “One of my sister’s many cats,” she said. Then she stood up straight and stared into me. “Nell, this skeleton is exactly the kind of bad publicity that we don’t need. We are a safe, quiet town with good people. People with values. People with manners.” Her voice, which had been getting progressively louder, suddenly turned into a whisper. “If people hear about this after everything that’s happened this year, they’ll think the whole town is full of killers.”

  “The mayor . . .”

  “The mayor is shortsighted.”

  “So you know about his idea?”

  “There is very little that goes on in this town that I don’t know about.”

  I had no doubt about that. “Well, then you know there really isn’t anything I can do about it.”

  “You can tell Jesse Dewalt to identify this . . . person as quickly as possible.”

  “That’s what he’s trying to do,” I said.

  “It should be his only priority to put this matter to rest as quickly as possible. Solved or unsolved. In fact, it might be the best thing for everyone if he just buried the bones of that poor person and let that be the end of it.”

  “That poor person had a name, Glad, and Jesse plans to find it. And solve his murder. I know he’s putting every available officer on the case.”

  “Tell him that it must be dealt with quietly, and with respect for the reputation of this town.”

  “I’ll tell him what you said, but, for future reference, you don’t need to go through me to give Jesse a message. The police station is one street over to the left.”

  She blinked her eyes slowly. “I realize the reason Eleanor foisted this assignment on you is that she didn’t want to spend time with Ed Bryant . . .”

  “The theater owner?” I’d never heard my grandmother even mention his name, let alone suggest she disliked him.

  “Obviously.” Glad was losing whatever patience she had with me.

  “And since you are in charge of the quilt show, I’m hoping that you care about this town as much as I do, Nell. I’m hoping you want this celebration to be a success.”

  “I actually left you a message with an update on the show and . . .”

  “That’s fine. Thank you.” She smiled at me, though it was clear that she wasn’t happy. “You can tell me all about it at the organizers’ meeting tomorrow. You do remember we’re getting together promptly at four p.m. to discuss our progress, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t know . . .”

  “Well, you do now. You’ll be there?”

  “Absolutely,” I said—to no one, because Glad had walked out of the store, slamming the door behind her.

  I walked into Eleanor’s office, where she was ordering fabric, and Barney followed, bringing his fabric cat with him. I shook my finger at Eleanor. “Chicken.”

  She looked up. “That woman scares me.”

  “Nobody scares you.”

  “Glad does.” Eleanor looked through the door of her office, as if she were making sure Glad was gone. “When I met her, she was a child, and she was just as forceful then. Her father was the town banker. And I think the mayor for a time. She thought she owned the place then. She thinks she owns it now.”

  “She’ll have to fight it out with the current mayor. He’s gotten awfully possessive of it.”

  “Larry’s just a nice man who wants to make his mark,” Eleanor said.

  “He worked for his success. Glad thinks she got hers by divine right.”

  I looked back at the door that Glad had slammed just moments before. “How old would she have been in 1975?”

  “Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe seventeen or eighteen.”

  “Was she athletic as a teenager?”

  “I don’t remember. I d
on’t recall her being on any sports teams. She seemed more interested in shopping. When Grace and I would go into the bank to check on Grace’s investments, Gladys and her sister, Glee, would often be there, getting money from their dad.” Eleanor shook her head. “He was a soft touch. ‘Anything for my girls,’ he’d say. I don’t think he ever said no to them.”

  “Glad has a sister named Glee?”

  “Mrs. Shipman, Mary Shipman. The woman who lives in that big house near the highway. I don’t think you’ve ever met her.”

  I shook my head.

  “She keeps to herself these days,” Eleanor continued. “Funny you should ask about Glad being athletic. Mary was the athlete in that family. I remember she played softball and girls’ field hockey, I think. She was quite good, too. She even held a protest march, one woman strong, if I recall, about getting on the wrestling team. To prove she was up to it, she pinned one of the local boys to the ground. Not that he minded.” She laughed to herself. “It didn’t get her on the team, but you had to admire her spunk.”

  “Is that why everyone called her Glee?”

  “Everyone didn’t. Her mother called her Glee for some reason. Strange mother, if I recall. Very theatrical.”

  “She named her daughters Glad and Glee. Maybe she was just happy.”

  “Well, if she was,” Eleanor said, “she didn’t pass it on to her children.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Jesse’s daughter, Allie, dipped her hands into the pile of bolt ends and other fabric scraps we kept in a large box labeled DISCARD PILE. We said it was there for anyone to take needed fabrics, but the truth was, we didn’t have a discard pile. We just told Jesse that. He insisted on paying for any fabric Allie used from bolts on the sales floor, so Eleanor, Natalie, and I had started cutting small scraps of brightly colored fabric and putting them into a special “Allie pile,” so she would be free to play without Jesse feeling obligated to pay for anything.

  Allie loved going through that pile and getting her first taste of what addicted most quilters: the endless choice of fabrics. When she found a piece she liked, she would place it on Barney’s back, using him as a kind of display wall. She would stand back and stare at the fabric as he stood perfectly still, letting her decide if it was worth keeping. For Allie, a pretty piece of fabric was always worth keeping, so she would add piece after piece to Barney’s back. After a few minutes he ended up looking like a circus clown. Not that he minded. He followed Allie around as if she were his secret crush.