I waited. Nothing. I peeked inside. No one was there. All I could see in the darkened theater was a poster for Friday the 13th, the movie playing that day. I took a step inside.
From behind me I heard a man call out. “Anything I can do for you, Nell?”
I jumped. When I turned I saw Ed walking up the street, a large to-go coffee in each hand.
“The door opened as I was walking by,” I told him.
He laughed. “Spooky, isn’t it? Unless I lock the door, it does that when the air-conditioning comes on.”
I felt a little foolish. I stepped back onto the street. “No one’s in there?”
He laughed. “It’s just me today. And I went out for a little coffee.” He held up one of the cups.
“It looks like you went out for a lot of coffee.”
“One for now. One for later.” He paused. “I microwave it. Saves me walking up and down the street.” He walked past me and stepped inside the theater. “The movie starts at eight if you want to come back.” Then he put one of the cups on the other and with his free hand pulled the door shut behind him.
Dru Love, the librarian, was deep in a Stephen King novel when I arrived. I was more shaken up by my conversation with Ed than I was by the door opening for no reason. He’d lied to me about what caused it, I knew that much. It was a heavy metal door with a pulldown bar that often took two hands just to open it. Even unlocked, a mere blast of air-conditioning would not have been enough to cause the door to swing open. But unless I could prove it had something to do with the skeleton, Eleanor, or the quilt show, I reminded myself, I had to let it go.
“Dru,” I said once I got her attention. “Have you seen Glad?”
She nodded toward the library conference room. “Private meeting with someone.”
“Who?”
“I didn’t see anyone come in. Must have come in the back way.”
“Do you know what it’s about?”
“All I know is that it’s private. Glad said that no one could disturb them under any circumstances. And you know how Glad is about getting her way.” She pulled her sweater tightly around herself and I could see she was still wearing the anniversary button.
“Molly gave you that,” I said.
“She didn’t want it. Not too fond of this town, I think.”
“But you two seemed to be getting along pretty well the other day. What were you talking about?”
“You, actually. She wanted to know all about you.”
“And what did you say?”
“That if anyone could figure out about that skeleton, and about everything else that’s been going on in town, it would be you and Jesse.”
“Thanks, Dru. And if I were stumped on a literary reference, I’d know just who to ask.”
She blushed. Anyone working closely with Glad probably would go a long time between compliments.
“I wish I knew who Glad was meeting with,” I said.
Dru looked around. “When they built that conference room where the employee lunch area used to be, they only put a thin wall between it and the office. Money saver, that’s what Glad said. If someone were sitting in the library office, right next to the conference room, they probably could hear every word that was being said.”
I smiled. “Enjoy your book, Dru.”
I walked to the office, closing the door behind me, and leaned against the wall it shared with the conference room. It was, as Dru had promised, paper thin. I could hear two very distinct voices: one was Glad and the other was a deep male voice. It took a minute of listening, but I was sure it was the mayor’s voice.
“I don’t know how much more I can do,” the mayor was saying.
“You don’t have any choice,” Glad said. “There is too much at stake here. My reputation. Your reputation. We can’t let that ridiculous woman ruin everything.”
The mayor answered her, but it was muffled, as if he were moving. I took a few steps backward and banged into the desk.
I froze, but I knew I’d been overheard. I could hear the door to the conference room open, and within seconds Glad and Larry were standing in the office, staring at me.
“What in heaven’s name?” Glad said.
“I was waiting to talk to you,” I said. “I had a question about the quilt show.”
“What about it?”
“Is there,” I stammered, “a limit on the number of quilts I can have in the show? I’m getting quite a lot of interest.”
“Isn’t that more or less up to you, as the chairperson of the quilt show?” the mayor asked.
I smiled nervously and moved toward the door. “Well, that answers that.”
“That’s why you were sitting in the office?” Glad clearly wasn’t buying it.
“Not entirely,” I admitted. “I also wanted to ask you about Molly. How do you know her? And don’t say you met at the meeting, because that’s obviously not true. Neither of you liked each other, before you’d even been introduced.”
“If you must know, Nell, and obviously you must, Molly came to me and asked for a job with the historical society, and I turned her down,” Glad said. “Too inexperienced. The next thing I heard she was interning for the mayor.”
“You had a problem with that?”
“No. But I did have a problem with the fact that she was snooping around in the office of the historical society, much as you’re doing now at the library.”
“I was waiting for you.”
“And she said she was lost. But you were both snooping. I don’t know why Jesse finds that an attractive quality, Nell, but he may tire of it. I would watch all your interfering, or you’ll lose him to someone better suited to a man in his official position.”
CHAPTER 25
“Tonight, my house?” Jesse called my cell as I was leaving the library, my thigh bruised from the desk and my ego from Glad’s scolding. “I got the note you left. I think I may have a surprise for you.”
“You’ve ID’d the skeleton as Winston?” British, no?
“Not exactly. Come to the station around four.”
“Any hints?”
“You’re going to laugh.”
Four o’clock was a long way away, so I headed back to the shop. Natalie was there, but she was busy with customers, so I couldn’t fill her in on what I’d been up to. As much as I tried, I could not figure out what Jesse had in his office that would make me laugh, so I decided not to focus on it. Instead, I started work on my devil’s puzzle quilt.
Like so many quilt blocks, it looks complicated—intersecting rows form secondary patterns and it’s hard to see where one block starts and another ends. But it’s actually quite a simple quilt. I used just three fabrics: a bubblegum pink, a dark brown, and an olive green. An odd color combination for today’s quilter but quite in keeping with the period I was representing. I reminded myself that having an odd-looking quilt was not my biggest problem and set to work cutting the rectangles and triangles that would make up the quilt.
By midafternoon I’d sewn my blocks—brown rectangles with a pink triangle sewn to each long side and pink rectangles with a green triangle sewn to either long side. Using the felt design wall we had in the shop’s classroom, I positioned my blocks, alternating colors, and stepped back to admire my work. I still had to sew the blocks together, add borders, and quilt it, but for a day’s work it wasn’t bad.
It was almost three o’clock and I’d forgotten to eat, so I was about to run across the street to Jitters for a sandwich when I saw Oliver pacing outside.
“What are you doing?” I opened the door to the shop and invited him in. Well, forced him in would be more accurate, as he seemed unusually reluctant to cross the threshold.
“Just came to see Eleanor.”
“You’re not going to . . .” I whispered. “I don’t think you should right now.”
“No. I thought about what you said, about it not being the right time. It’s just . . . I have to talk to her about something else.”
H
e looked past my shoulder to Eleanor’s office and saw what I saw—Barney’s paw. And where Barney was, Eleanor was. He took a deep breath and stepped toward the office before I could stop him. If he proposed now, it would likely be a disaster.
I started to follow him, hoping that somehow I could delay his mission, but before I could reach the office, Oliver closed the door.
At four o’clock Eleanor’s door was still closed. I couldn’t hear anything coming from inside, which probably was a good sign. As much as I wanted to stay and make sure everything was okay, I had to get to the police station. I hurried over there and saw Jesse standing outside the door to his office.
“So what will make me laugh?” I asked.
“Nell Fitzgerald, meet Molly O’Brien.”
“We’ve already met,” I pointed out.
“Not officially.” Jesse smiled broadly. “Molly is . . .”
I remembered Elizabeth’s Christmas card, and the mention of a grandchild in college in Boston. The mayor said Molly was going to college in Newton. I hadn’t put it together before, but Newton is a town just outside the city and home of Boston College. Suddenly it all made sense—why someone like Molly would practically insist on an internship at city hall, even after Glad turned her down. “You’re Grace’s—”
“Great-granddaughter,” she finished my sentence. “I’m here about my great-uncle Winston.”
“Is she providing DNA?” I asked Jesse.
“No. Winston’s sister, Elizabeth, gave a swab to a facility in California. We’re waiting on the results.”
“But it has to be Winston,” Molly said, with a touch too much enthusiasm in her voice. “We assumed he was dead,” she told me. “He just disappeared and my grandmother said that if he were alive, he would have gotten in touch at some point. He and Elizabeth were very close, but even if they weren’t, there was an inheritance he would have claimed.”
“Will you excuse me for a moment?” I grabbed Jesse and pulled him several feet away. “Why would this make me laugh?”
He smiled. “You’ll see.” He moved me back toward Molly. “It’s okay to tell Nell what you told me.”
“I’m studying criminology in Boston, so when I saw the mayor’s blog about the skeleton, I figured I should come down and see if I could help with the investigation.”
“You thought you would what?” I asked.
“You know, help, in whatever way I can. As long as I don’t get in the way.”
“Archers Rest has a very capable police force,” I told her. “Jesse was a detective in New York.”
She looked embarrassed. “I’m sure everyone’s great. It’s just that I have a great mind for puzzles and I’m good at reading people. I’m only a freshman, but I’ve taken two criminology classes and got an A in both of them.”
“So you thought you would just come up and see if you could solve Winston’s murder?”
She nodded.
“So why didn’t you just say all of this the other day, instead of pretending to be an intern helping with the anniversary celebration?”
“I’m not pretending. I took the internship.” She sat up straight, trying to look more imposing. “I didn’t know anything about this town, so I wanted to find out what I could and see if any of the suspects were still around. If I said who I was, people might not be willing to talk to me.”
“So why say anything now?”
“You said you were going to talk to the mayor about the file. I knew he’d tell you he hadn’t asked for it, and you’d probably bring it to the chief.”
“What was in that file, aside from a copy of my grandmother’s deed?”
“Just old papers about the history of the house. I thought I might find something that explained how your grandmother got the house, but there really wasn’t anything that helped.”
“You took them from the historical society,” I said.
She blushed. “Glad caught me. But I made up an excuse about being lost, and I think she bought it.”
I turned to Jesse. “And this was supposed to make me laugh?”
“It made me laugh.”
CHAPTER 26
Jesse and I had settled back in his office. He was behind his desk, I was leaning against the window, and Molly was in a chair facing us. The police department in Archers Rest didn’t have an interrogation room. Usually there was no need for one. But today I felt like it would have been nice to have a long metal table and a two-way mirror, just like they do in the movies. Obviously Molly wasn’t a suspect in her great-uncle’s murder—she’d been born almost twenty years after his death—it was just that she was . . . I don’t know. I just didn’t like her, and that was reason enough for me to want to sit in while she and Jesse talked.
“What do you know about Winston Roemer?” I asked.
Molly smiled at me but directed her answer to Jesse. “From what I understand he was very smart, well respected. He was close to his sister and mother.”
“Didn’t anyone in your family wonder where he’d been all these years?” Jesse asked.
“No. He spent years in South America in the 1950s and 60s, going to some places that were unstable. It was understood in our family that he must have been killed on one of those trips.”
“Did he have any financial issues?”
“No. He was quite well-off, actually. He had an inheritance from his father, as well as money he’d made on his own. And of course, he was set to inherit an even larger estate from his own mother when she passed away.”
“What about romantic issues?”
She shrugged. “As far as I know, he didn’t have a wife, or kids, or anything like that. I can’t say whether he might have been involved with someone.”
“Your grandmother never mentioned a woman to you? Or a man, for that matter?”
“No.” She smiled. “But she was his sister. Do you talk about your love life with your sister?”
Jesse smiled back. “I don’t have a sister, but I take your point. I couldn’t find any legal problems, and if he had no financial or romantic ones, then it’s unlikely he just took off to start a new life.”
“Very. As I said, he was close to his sister and his mother.”
“When’s the last time anyone had contact with him?”
“My grandmother says that they spoke last in the summer of 1975, shortly before Grace died. Winston had visited Grace and was concerned,” Molly said.
“Concerned in what way?”
“I’m not sure. But he was quite worked up about something. That’s the impression I got. He felt she was being taken advantage of.”
I stood up. “Who did he think was taking advantage of her?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think he told Elizabeth. She was his younger sister and she was three thousand miles away in California. I think he wanted to protect her. Until he was sure.”
“Sure about what?” I asked.
“If it was true. Grace was a trusting person, and apparently Winston believed that someone was abusing that trust,” Molly said. “I don’t know all the details. It wasn’t really talked about much because it was so long ago, and Grace was dead, and we assumed that Winston had died on one of his trips. But I always thought that it was possible that Winston knew something, and that’s why he disappeared.” She sat back. “And, well, it looks like that’s turned out to be the case.”
“So you’re suggesting someone killed Winston to stop him from exposing a mistreatment of Grace?” I said my words carefully, as calmly as I could. “Is that why you stole a copy of my grandmother’s deed?”
“I just wanted to see when she took over the place.” Molly was getting defensive. “It was my family’s property.”
“Until they sold it,” I pointed out.
Jesse looked back at me and quietly shook his head. “Let me ask, Nell.”
I leaned back against the window and crossed my arms. I finally knew why I didn’t like her. She was here to accuse Eleanor of manipulating Grace and possibly killing
Winston, a charge that was not only untrue, it was outrageous.
Even from my vantage point I could see Jesse smile at Molly, but it was a cop smile, not a friendly one. “Assuming this is your great-uncle, did anyone in your family have medical records or dental records on him? It might help us make a preliminary ID as we wait for the DNA results.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Not after all these years. But I do know he broke his leg when he was in his twenties. He was on a ship somewhere, going on one of his trips. Apparently he limped slightly.”
“That fits with the description we have of our skeleton,” Jesse told her. “According to our forensic pathologist, there was a broken leg that had not been properly set, which might fit with his being somewhere with poor medical care.”
“There you go,” she said. “It is him.”
“Maybe,” Jesse cautioned. “Do you have any letters or diaries, anything that might give me some indication of his whereabouts the summer he disappeared?”
“I asked my grandmother to send me copies of anything she has from Winston in those years. She kept everything in a box in her study. It was all she had left of him.” Molly glanced toward me, then back at Jesse. “I know this was a long time ago, and maybe it’s easy to forget that there are victims here, but my grandmother lost her mother and her brother in the same summer. All these years later, it’s still painful for her. If we can find out what happened to Winston, I know it will mean a great deal to her.”
“We’ll do our best,” Jesse told her.
“You don’t believe that,” I said to Jesse as he walked me outside the police station. Ushered me, really—practically escorted me from the building.
“It’s as good a theory as any.” He put his hand up to my mouth.
“And before you yell at me that I’m accusing Eleanor of murder, I want you to understand that I’m not. I am open to the theory that someone was taking advantage of Grace, but that could have been a lot of people, okay?”
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