The Purloined Letter Opener

by Leah R. Cutter

  “Exactly!” Lydia said. “God, he’s such a horrible human being.”

  “He really is,” Bernard said, suddenly warming to the topic. “Him and the other jocks used to torture me in the locker room.”

  That actually didn’t sound like Neil, but Lydia’s lie-detection radar didn’t have enough data for her to judge Bernard’s words.

  “I’m so sorry,” Lydia said, laying on the sincerity. “I wish there was something I could do to make up for it.”

  Bernard looked her up and down. “You could buy me a beer,” he suggested.

  “Done,” Lydia said. “Come on. Let’s go to The Cove. It’s only a block away.”

  Lydia wasn’t about to get into a car with Bernard. She did give him a wink and a suggestive smile to get him motivated.

  While she still didn’t have any evidence that Bernard had killed his father, she was going to do everything she needed in order to get it.

  27

  “And then, and then you know what that asshole of a father said to me?” Bernard asked. “He told me that he was cutting me off!”

  Lydia nodded sympathetically and took a sip of her lukewarm beer. It hadn’t been difficult to get Bernard drunk. Or to prompt him into telling stories about how awful his father had been to him.

  Fortunately, Bernard was a loud drunk. Talkative. And still so very angry.

  They still sat at the bar in The Cove, ninety minutes later. The TVs hanging from the ceiling silently showed MMA fighters performing their strangely graceful ballet of dominance. Erin, the tough, tattooed woman behind the bar, silently caught Lydia’s eye before she poured Bernard another beer, seeming to understand that she was the one in charge. It was all going on her tab, after all.

  Lydia had known momentary fear walking into The Cove. None of the cops had been there. Damn it! She’d texted Misty, who hopefully had understood her message. Lydia still couldn’t afford to look around a lot, though she thought maybe she’d seen Ellis walking in.

  For now, she was on her own.

  “That’s so unfair of Schooner! To cut you off that way,” Lydia said, maintaining an easy lie of sympathy. “I mean, he was your father. He owed you, right?”

  Bernard beamed at her. “Exactly!” He took another drink. “Ya know, you don’t seem as stuck up as I thought.”

  Lydia smiled and batted her eyes at him, despite how it turned her stomach to do so. She took a deep breath.

  Was that Ellis’s aftershave that she smelled?

  “But your ex…” Bernard’s voice trailed off.

  “I know, right?” Lydia said. It seemed that Bernard really hated Neil. Though Lydia didn’t actually despise her ex, she and Bernard had bonded over the stupidity of Neil.

  “He seemed like the perfect patsy,” Bernard admitted.

  Lydia kept her smile pasted onto her face. “Well, everyone knows how much he hated Principal Thomas.” Finally, they were getting somewhere!

  Hopefully, that was Ellis beside her. And he was smart enough to have turned on the recorder on his phone or some official police device.

  “So, it would make sense that he killed my father, right?” Bernard said with a huge grin.

  Lydia pretended to be shocked. “No. My ex? Would he do that?”

  “He might,” Bernard said smugly.

  “But he’s not smart enough to do something like that!” Lydia exclaimed. It never hurt playing up Neil’s stupidity with Bernard. She’d learned that quickly.

  Bernard winked at her. “I know. Right? Had to be someone with serious smarts to knock off the old man. Then frame the high school hero.”

  Lydia maintained her shocked expression, gasping. “No. Really? You didn’t, did you?”

  Bernard nodded proudly. “I did.”

  Erin behind the bar stiffened, but she maintained her place a few steps down. Maybe she was recording everything Bernard was saying as well.

  Still, Lydia needed more.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said, throwing in a pout for good measure. Could she actually get Bernard to confess? Excitement mingled with the fear clenching her belly. Goosebumps ran continuously down her spine and across her shoulders. The half a beer that she’d consumed tasted extremely flat and bitter.

  “Nobody else could have done it,” Bernard said with scorn dripping from his voice. “I’m the only one the old coot would have allowed into the house that late at night. He was wily, that one.”

  Lydia gasped again. “What happened? Did you plan to kill him? Was it all thought out?” She was so close.

  Bernard sighed. He’d become mercurial as a drunk, his moods changing with every sip. “No. I hadn’t meant to kill him. He just made me so frigging mad, though! When I knocked him over, and the pillow was right there, it was just so easy to put it over his face and hold him down until he stopped breathing. I’d dreamed of doing it so many times. It just felt natural, you know?”

  Lydia nodded sympathetically. “He was mean to you, wasn’t he?” she said. She felt the presence of someone crowding into her space, at her shoulder.

  She did smell that nice spicy aftershave, after all.

  “I had to do it,” Bernard said. “Asshole left me no choice. I needed the money to buy the bar, so those dipshits couldn’t just kick me out and fire me. I coulda made it work.”

  Lydia swallowed. A sense of weird calm washed over her, as if she suddenly had a glass wall between her and Bernard.

  She’d found the killer.

  “Why did you stab him with one of my letter openers?” Lydia said quietly. She couldn’t help but ask about that.

  “Cause I thought you were stuck up,” Bernard said. “Figured the cops would blame the killing on you. But then I thought of Neil. I knew it would be even better to blame it on him. That’s why I turned on the gas in your place. The cops could then blame him. Particularly if he suddenly showed up in town again. I hadn’t meant to hurt you,” Bernard said, throwing a sad-eyed look her way.

  “I’m sure you didn’t,” Lydia said smoothly. Finally, she glanced over her shoulder.

  Ellis Avery stood there. He had his phone in his hand. He’d recorded every word. He nodded to Lydia, who slid off her stool and took a step back.

  Her legs shook as if she’d just run one of those ridiculous 5K marathons they had around the lake. Her gut kept twisting, turning over repeatedly. She had both the shivers as well as the sweats, her palms clammy.

  “Bernard Thomson? I’m placing you under arrest,” Ellis said, his deep voice carrying across the quiet of the bar.

  Fortunately, Bernard stayed morose, and didn’t switch over to fighting mad again. He went peacefully with the detective. All the patrons in the bar stared at the procedure. Lydia already knew the gossip mill would have a lot to talk about the next few months.

  She turned to Erin, ready to settle up her tab. Erin handed back her credit card and said, “On the house. Thank you for getting that killer out of our town.”

  The rest of the bar suddenly stood up, applauding and cheering. Lydia didn’t blush, not really. But she did feel her cheeks grow warm, as well as her heart.

  This was why she’d pursued the killer so hard. Not for the cheering, but for her people, her town.

  This place she called home.

  28

  Lydia woke up the next morning feeling relaxed and refreshed, despite how late she’d been up the previous night talking with her friends and neighbors. She was finally feeling settled in again, in her own place. She sailed through prep that morning with Misty setting up the front of the restaurant.

  Misty came bustling into the kitchen shortly after they’d opened. Lydia already had eggs and pancakes cooking on the grill.

  “Got a question for you, boss,” Misty said, instead of placing the next order.

  “Go ahead,” Lydia said when Misty didn’t continue immediately. She lifted on edge of one of the pancakes, making sure it was perfectly cooked before she flipped it.

  “Seems one of the customers wants
a chat with you,” Misty finally replied. “Those ready?”

  “In a minute or so, yeah,” Lydia said. “Who is it?” Was there something wrong with one of the rooms? Had she suddenly been infested with cockroaches or something?

  “Neil,” Misty said. “Came in here and ordered breakfast.”

  That…hadn’t been what Lydia had been expecting. She glanced over at Misty, puzzled.

  The sour look on her co-worker’s face spoke volumes. “Could refuse him service. Just say the word.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll go talk with him,” Lydia said. She wouldn’t rush out there immediately—he was going to have to wait until she’d finished cooking the current order.

  She was too curious to wait in the kitchen much longer than that, though, and walked out of the kitchen soon after that.

  “Hey there,” she said as she approached the table.

  Neil was dressed in work clothes, so he was probably on his way back to Seattle and would spend the afternoon in the office—nice suit, white shirt, blue tie.

  “Seems you’ve cleared my name,” Neil said with a smile.

  Lydia waited patiently, just looking at him. Finally, she was rewarded with the words, “Thank you” actually coming out of Neil’s mouth.

  “You know I didn’t do it for you, right?” Lydia said.

  “No?” Neil said, looking confused.

  “No, I did it for me,” Lydia said. She couldn’t help but grin. “While I was pretty sure you couldn’t have killed anyone, I also knew that I was too smart to have lived, unknowingly, with a killer all those years.”

  Neil looked shocked for a moment before he burst out laughing. “You’re really too much, you know that?”

  Lydia nodded. Yes, she really was too much, at least for someone as shallow as Neil to handle.

  “Still friends?” Neil said, sticking his hand out for Lydia to shake.

  “Friends,” Lydia said, shaking his hand. She wasn’t sure what their relationship would look like in the future. However, it might be nice to at least talk on the phone with Neil sometimes. Particularly if she had a business question.

  “Now, get back to the kitchen and cook me breakfast,” Neil teased. “And don’t let Misty spit in it.”

  Lydia snorted and returned to the kitchen, in many ways the heart of her business, where she got to take care of all her guests.

  And one ex-husband.

  29

  Alice didn’t work on Wednesdays. However, she still came into the restaurant that morning, with her mom, dad, and her cousin Mitch, to have breakfast together. Lydia knew that it would be a second breakfast for Jen and her husband Stu. They’d surely eaten something when the sun came up and they went out to milk the cows and take care of the rest of the livestock.

  Lydia came out to say hello after making their meal, which included a special pancake for Alice that was actually three pancakes cooked together so it appeared to be a face with round ears, strawberries for eyes, and whipped cream for a large smile.

  “Hi, Lydia!” Alice said as she came to their table. “Did you hear? They caught Schooner Thomas’s killer! I’m no longer a person of interest.”

  “I did hear that,” Lydia said, smiling down at her helper. “But I knew that you couldn’t have done anything wrong like that.”

  Alice just grinned at her, while Jen nodded in her direction. “Thank you,” she said quietly.

  Mitch cleared his throat, drawing Lydia’s attention. He was tall and thin, with straw-blond hair and a long face. His skin was pale because he never saw actual daylight. He wore large glasses over pale green eyes that seemed to make them even larger.

  “So how did you determine who the killer was?” he asked in a professorial voice.

  Lydia recognized that Mitch had no personal interest in her, but merely the crime itself. “It had to be whoever was impersonating Neil,” she said simply.

  “I’d like to talk about your deductions later,” Mitch said, sounding feverish.

  Lydia knew he was on that holiest of quests—novel research. “Come by later this afternoon, after three, and I’ll tell you all about it.” She knew there wasn’t much to tell, but Mitch was going to be obsessed with her until she did.

  “But that’s when we’re having our picnic!” Alice complained. “You should come with us instead.”

  Lydia paused. She knew she couldn’t always be putting Alice off, it would hurt the other girl’s feelings. She glanced at Jen, seeing if she could help.

  “Mitch and Lydia need to talk,” Jen said slowly. “And that was in part why we wanted to have the picnic, right?”

  Alice’s eyes grew big. “Right!” she said. “You should stay here and talk with Lydia,” she declared solemnly turning to Mitch.

  “Thank you for understanding,” Mitch said. The smile he gave Alice transformed his face. He suddenly looked like a doting relative.

  Though he held absolutely no interest to Lydia, at least she finally saw what Alice and her parents saw in him.

  “This afternoon, then,” Lydia said. She squeezed Alice’s shoulder. “And I’ll see you tomorrow!”

  “Yes, I’ll come to work,” Alice said. “I like working with you,” she added.

  “Good, because I like working with you,” Lydia confirmed. She smiled at all the McGowens then headed back to the kitchen to finish off the morning.

  30

  It wasn’t until Lydia got to the Marigold room that she realized that Ellis Avery had checked out. The door was open and all his things were gone.

  He’d left without saying goodbye.

  Lydia tried not to be upset or disappointed. The detective didn’t owe her anything. Even if she did find the killer for him. She tried to tell herself that it was a good thing. He was gone now, and her life could get back to normal.

  She still found herself angrily yanking the sheets off the bed and throwing them with more force than necessary toward the open door, roughly shaking the pillows out of their cases. She was going to wash all the sheets twice, and maybe the blankets as well, just to make sure that she completely removed all trace of the detective’s aftershave.

  Lydia stomped around the bed, heading for the bathroom to grab the towels there, when her foot collided with a small box.

  Ow.

  Huh. Seemed that Ellis had gone ahead and gotten that half case of wine from Blue Pond winery.

  Then left it behind.

  She checked her phone, finding out that she still had the text from Sergeant Gonzales, telling her that the police were about to make the formal announcement of Schooner’s death. She texted him back, letting him know that Detective Avery had left something behind, should she drop it off at the police station for him to pick it up?

  It wasn’t until Lydia was mostly finished with cleaning all the rooms on the third floor before her phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number.

  Will stop by Friday night to pick up my wine

  Feeling foolish, Lydia still saved the number as Ellis Avery, Detective under her contacts.

  And found her heart lightening when she realized that she would get to see the detective one last time.

  Lydia refused to do anything different Friday morning. No, she was going to wear her normal hairpins and braid. A plain gray T-shirt and black shorts. Sandals. A smile. While Ed and Alan might have chided her for not at least applying a little lip gloss, Lydia would not change her appearance, or who she was, not for anyone. Least of all some man who might have dreamy eyes and nice hands and move so steadily and who lived so very far away.

  She still found herself nervous as she checked her guests in, waiting for Ellis to show up on her doorstep. He hadn’t specified a time when he might be there. Still, she found herself lingering in the restaurant, dusting the teapots on the wall, just so she wouldn’t miss him.

  When the last of Lydia’s guests had checked in for the evening, it was around six PM. She was about to go and make herself something to eat when the chime above the door rang one last
time.

  There he was. She could tell it was him, just from the shape of his broad shoulders and how he carried himself: not overly proud like Neil, but just confident. Competent.

  It was going to take a long time before she’d forget him.

  “Hi, Detective Avery,” Lydia said, putting down the pot she’d finished dusting for the third time.

  “Ellis, please,” he said, smiling softly at her. He appeared to be drinking in her appearance as well.

  After a few moments of silently staring at each other, Lydia finally made herself move. “I have your half-case of wine right here,” she said, walking away from him and behind the counter, pulling it out and setting it on the counter.

  “Thank you,” Ellis said. He put one hand on the box, as if balancing it there. “I debated just telling you to keep it. As a thank you for helping find the killer.”

  “And why didn’t you?” Lydia asked. She found herself drawn forward, around the edge of the counter. Maybe it was something in his eyes, how deep they always appeared.

  The veneer of the detective was nowhere to be seen.

  “There might have been a cousin or some other relation at the station in Yakima who let me know in no uncertain terms that you were not, in fact, getting back together with your ex. That you might, instead, be amenable to dating someone else,” Ellis said.

  “So I have Misty to thank for your return this evening?” Lydia said. Her heart fluttered and she felt lighter than she had all week.

  Ellis shrugged. “It’s a small town. Word gets around.”

  Lydia nodded then sighed, forcing herself to stay exactly where she was standing and not get any closer. “You living in Yakima makes it a lot more difficult, you know. Plus the whole detective thing.”

  “I know,” Ellis said. “Believe me, I’ve thought about those things as well. My own ex complained that I stopped being human sometimes and went all cop on her.”