Beads of Doubt

by Barbara Burnett Smith

  Well, maybe it was, but I decided that was beside the point. “It doesn’t matter. I talked with Stephen today, and he confirmed it.”

  Houston’s mouth was a thin line, and he looked pale under his tennis-court tan.

  “You were awfully nervous Thursday night. Jumpy.” Houston started to say something, but I interrupted him. “Some of the people you owe money to were here, weren’t they? They were starting to put pressure on you.”

  He put his hands up. He had regained his composure and with it the tone of voice that had convinced his clients to entrust all their money to him. “All right, all right. I had a couple of bad nights, and a few people loaned me some money. They knew I was good for it.”

  “Did they?”

  “Of course. I always pay them back . . .”

  I raised my eyebrows. “This has happened before?”

  He said nothing.

  “Houston, what was the deal Sandy offered you? How much?”

  He sighed, and somehow the air escaping him seemed to deflate him. He turned away from me. “Okay, okay. He offered me fifty thousand if I took it over. When Andrew got involved, I didn’t like it—something didn’t seem kosher—but I had so much going on with Rebecca, his clients were doing really well . . .”

  “Like the Yancys? And the Linders?”

  He swung around. “What about them?”

  “They lost a lot of money on Andrew and Sandy’s little yacht venture.”

  “What?” he croaked.

  “Sandy Corcoran was running a scam. He never sold the investors the boats—I think he just used their money to fix them up. I’m guessing he goosed their returns by funneling some of the new investors’ money into existing accounts.” I remembered the discrepancy in the Yancys’ account. “And when that ran out, Andrew started playing with the numbers on the statements. Moving money around, making balances look bigger than they were.”

  Houston sank into a chair. “No . . .”

  “Houston, I have an important question to ask you.”

  He looked up at me, suddenly haggard. He seemed to have aged ten years in the last five minutes.

  “Do you know who killed Andrew?” I said.

  His face turned gray with horror. “No . . . I have no idea.”

  “I didn’t think so. I just had to ask.” I walked toward him and sat down on the chair opposite him. “Look. I know things haven’t always been great between us, but I want to help you.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  I sighed. “How much do you owe?”

  He looked away. “About $170,000.”

  “Gambling debts?”

  He nodded. “If I can sell Rebecca’s Cinder Sage, it should cover most of it. But I’ll still be short about eighty thousand.”

  He must have been desperate if he was planning to sell the horse that never lost. Too bad he played cards instead of sticking to the track. “If you call off the vote on the house, I’ll help you pay the loans—even do what I can to get your business back on track. I don’t know how much damage Andrew did, and whether we can recoup your clients’ money, but we’ll do what we can to fix it.”

  He looked up. “You’d do that for me?”

  “But there’s a catch.”

  His eyes turned wary. “I figured there had to be.”

  I held his gaze. “You have to go into a program for gambling addiction.” He stared at me for a moment, then started to get up. I grabbed his arm. “Houston, you have a problem. You need to deal with it. For your sake—and for Rebecca’s.”

  He drooped into the chair again. “With the illness . . . it’s just been so hard lately.”

  I thought of Rebecca’s shining eyes, and of Tess, alone in her hospital bed. “I know. Get some help, Houston. For her sake. Get this behind you so that you can focus on your wife. She’s getting better, but she still needs you.”

  He was silent for a long moment, looking at the floor. Then his eyes cut to me. “I’ll think about it.”

  He walked to the door and disappeared into the crowded conservatory. When the door shut behind him, I sat there for a long time, staring at the empty spot on the sofa table where the candlesticks had stood, until the door opened and Nate came in.

  “What happened?”

  I reached for my wineglass and stood up. “I think I may have just averted a family crisis,” I said.

  “You talked Houston out of it?”

  I took his arm. “We’ll see. I’m hoping it’ll work out, but I’m not counting my chickens just yet.”

  As we exited into the conservatory, Mother caught up with me. “I saw Houston coming out of the living room a few minutes ago. Is everything okay?”

  There was no need to tell her that her nephew was planning to kick her out of the Manse so he could sell it, and that her own son was planning to join him. Or that he had a gambling problem, for that matter. “We just had a little talk about the Manse. And Rebecca. Everything’s fine.”

  She nodded approvingly. “And no more trouble with the police. Miranda will be very happy to hear that.”

  The band wound up “Blue Skies,” and I moved closer to Nate, thinking that despite the magical atmosphere and the handsome man at my side, the sky felt more gray than blue. A moment later, Judy picked up a microphone from the podium in front of the fireplace and invited everyone to be seated.

  “Are you at table three?” I asked Mother.

  “No. For some reason, I’m at table two,” she said.

  I gave her a quick hug, inhaling the scent of her Youth Dew perfume. “I’ll see you after dinner, then.”

  Nate had arranged to sit next to me, and as he pushed my chair in for me and settled himself at my left side, Beth took the seat to my right. “Did Granger find anything out?” I whispered to her as the waiter set a plate of Caesar salad in front of me.

  “Nothing yet.” She patted her beaded purse, a new acquisition from the tents outside. “I’ve got my cell phone set to vibrate, just in case.” She gave Nate a meaningful glance. “You seem to be having an interesting evening.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said, thinking of Houston.

  Her eyebrows arched up. “I’m all ears.”

  “I’ll tell you later,” I hissed as a young, fashionably dressed couple found their seats at our table and introduced themselves. “But I do have some good news.”

  “What?”

  “Rebecca seems to be in remission.”

  Beth’s eyes grew round. “You’re kidding me! That’s wonderful!”

  “I know. Fingers crossed that it stays that way.”

  “Toes, too,” Beth said.

  The food was delicious—crusty bread and a luscious chicken Cordon Bleu followed the salad—and Nate’s presence beside me made my whole body hum. Despite the lively conversation and the good food, though, my mind kept straying to Andrew’s murder. Something kept niggling at me, something someone had said, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Finally, the waiters did the rounds with plates of chocolate torte and pots of coffee, and Judy stood up at the podium again.

  After thanking everybody who had helped make the Tea a success and reading the names of loved ones lost to ovarian cancer in the past year—a list to which I was afraid at least one woman I loved would soon be added—an assistant brought the box of raffle tickets to her. She plunged her hand in and pulled out a slip of paper.

  “And the winner of the tourmaline necklace is . . . Beth Fairfield!”

  I squealed as Beth stood up, mouth open in surprise.

  “Woo-hoo, Beth!” I shouted over the applause. She beamed, and Nate and I clapped as hard as we could as she went up to receive the necklace. After what she’d been through with Mo-Ron, she deserved every bit of happiness that came her way. It was only when she walked back to the table, her face flushed above the glittering necklace, that I remembered the candlestick under her bed, and a wave of uneasiness swept through me. I hadn’t gotten to the bottom of things yet.

  I
came down for breakfast late the next morning, my head aching from an overdose of sweet white wine. After the banquet, Nate and I had gone up to the balcony and finished a second bottle of Muscovito together under a blanket of stars. Just before midnight, he swept away in his Lincoln Navigator, promising to be back the next day. It was probably a good thing, too; with all the excitement of the last week, I was short on sleep.

  The caterers had cleaned everything up the night before, and for the first time in three days, the kitchen was quiet, the countertops clear. Beth looked up from a plate of scrambled egg whites when I walked in. “Guess what?” she said, eyes bright.

  “What? And where’s the tea?”

  “What do you mean, where’s the tea? Isn’t this your kitchen?”

  “Not for the last few days it hasn’t been.”

  Beth gestured toward the counter with a fork. “I just made a pot.”

  “Did you use the hot-water dispenser?”

  “No, I did it the old-fashioned way.” She grinned. “Like civilized folks. Anyway, you were right about Mr. Cat’s Eyes. Dwayne ran a check on him. Turns out he’s a con man—usually operates under the name Anderson Crawford.”

  I poured myself a cup of tea, added a spoonful of sugar, and used the first warm sip to wash down a Tylenol. “Have they talked to him yet?”

  “They went out there last night, once they figured out who he was. They got a search warrant and found Andrew’s computer in his house.”

  “So that’s who powered down the computer while Lauren was hooked up to it.”

  Beth nodded. “When Dwayne found it, he thought Sandy might have killed Andrew—but it turns out he was in L.A. the night Andrew died.”

  I sat down across from her. “So we were right. It was a Ponzi scheme.”

  Beth nodded. “Seems he’s pulled this kind of thing before: he buys businesses in trouble, finds a respectable partner to hawk them to clients, and then uses the funds coming in to upgrade them and resell them. Then Sandy, or Alexander, or whatever he goes by, disappears, leaving his innocent partner to tell his clients that the investment tanked. In the meantime, Sandy sells up and walks away with the cash.”

  “Nice,” I said. “It’s a good thing we caught him. Maybe if they sell High Jinx, Bruce and everyone else will get their money back.”

  Beth scooped up a forkful of eggs and took a sip of tea. “That’s the hope, anyway. And did I mention he works with a partner?”

  “A partner? Other than Andrew?”

  Beth looked up at me. “A young woman. Her name is Leila Ketchum.”

  My stomach lurched. “Lauren.”

  Beth nodded. “They’ve done it once or twice before. She takes a job as an assistant of some sort and then sees if she can find a way to hook Sandy up with one of the decision makers.”

  “But she’s been helping us!” Somehow, even though on some level I knew it was true, my mind couldn’t wrap itself around this new information. Maybe it was because I hadn’t had my morning tea yet.

  “She’s been following our progress and probably reporting back to her boss. Trying to keep the blame on Andrew, so she and Sandy could slip away.”

  I thought about Lauren—her excitement when I told her she could stay at the Manse, her eagerness to help us find out more about Andrew’s investment scheme . . . “Are you sure? After all, she did get us into Andrew’s computer. And Houston’s office.”

  “For all we know, before she did it she sent an e-mail to Sandy to let him know what was up. Which might be why the computer was gone when we got there. And remember how nervous she was? She was afraid of getting caught, all right. Caught by us.”

  “I can’t believe it,” I said. Although in truth, I could. The BMW, the nice house in Hyde Park . . . still, I was disappointed. I had trusted her. “Have the cops found her?”

  “We sent her to Galveston, remember? She should still be there; at least I hope she’s still there. Unless Sandy got a chance to warn her.” Beth’s eyes widened. “Kitzi, you gave her your credit card. Shouldn’t you call the company and cancel it?”

  I grimaced. “If I did, it might tip her off. Shoot.” I took a swig of tea. “Does Granger think one of them might have killed Andrew?” I asked.

  “As I mentioned, they thought it might have been Sandy, but he was in L.A.”

  “But Lauren wasn’t.”

  Beth shook her head. “Nope. She was here at the Manse the whole time.”

  “And if Andrew was starting to make trouble,” I said, “Lauren could have decided to take care of the problem herself. She’s young, she’s in shape . . .”

  “Dwayne will call us as soon as he knows anything. In the meantime, if she gets in touch, we find out where she’s staying and pretend nothing new has happened. Although I don’t know why she bothered to do the ‘research’ when she already knew it all.”

  “If she didn’t, she’d blow her cover,” Beth said. “Like you said, though, we can’t let her know that we know.”

  Beth was right. If we knew where Lauren was, the police could find her in Galveston. But if we called her and tried to get her to come back, she might get nervous and call Sandy, and when Sandy didn’t answer, she might do a disappearing act. I shivered to think that I might have harbored a murderer under my roof. “Got it.”

  “So that’s my news,” Beth said. “What happened with Stephen last night?”

  “It’s not nearly as exciting as what you found out, but at least I made some progress,” I said, and told her about my phone call to my brother and my conversation with Houston.

  “Wow,” she said. “So they were planning to sell the Manse? And now he’s considering backing down on the corporate takeover?”

  “I told him I’d cover his debts and help get his business on track if he backed down and went into a program. I’m hoping he bites.” If he didn’t, I didn’t want to think about what it would do to Rebecca when she found everything out.

  “I had no idea he was addicted to gambling,” Beth said. “Does Rebecca know about it?”

  “No, she doesn’t. He’s been protecting her. And please don’t tell anyone else, either—I don’t want Mother to worry.”

  Beth sucked at her lip. “Do you think Houston might have killed Andrew?”

  I shook my head gingerly; the Tylenol hadn’t kicked in yet. “I asked him, in a roundabout way, and I believe his answer.”

  “Well, then, at least we’re pretty sure your cousin isn’t a murderer.”

  The thing that had been niggling at the back of my mind twitched again, but at that moment, the door opened and Mother walked in.

  I shooed all thoughts of Houston and Lauren and Sandy Corcoran from my head and put on a smile. “Hello, Mother.”

  “Good morning, Kitzi darling. Did you sleep all right?”

  “Fine, thanks. How about you?” Actually, she looked remarkably refreshed. I had walked down to the gatehouse with her right after the dinner ended to make sure she got to bed early; the weekend had been exhausting for her. I was happy to see that there was no sign of fatigue this morning, and I was glad we had managed to keep most of the upsetting news—the takeover of the Manse, the details of Andrew’s murder, and Houston’s gambling problem—from reaching her ears.

  “The cleanup seems to be going quite well, and everyone I talked to seems to think the Tea was a big success.”

  “That’s what Judy said. She told me they raised even more than they’d expected to.” I smiled at Beth. “And Ms. Fairfield here walked away with the grand prize.”

  Beth smiled and stood up. “Speaking of prizes, Ron and Shannan are coming back into town. I promised I’d pick them up at the airport.”

  “Weren’t they supposed to be gone a week?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I don’t know what happened, but I suspect I’ll hear all about it from Shannan this afternoon.” She looked at me. “I’ll call you if I hear anything.”

  Beth stowed her plate in the dishwasher and headed for the door.

  �
��What did she mean by that?” asked Mother.

  “Oh, she was talking about the bead sales,” I said, and changed the subject. “How is it coming out there?”

  “It was fine a few minutes ago, but I’d better make sure none of the trucks end up in the begonia beds again.” A moment later, she followed Beth out the door, and I sat in the relative peace of the kitchen—disturbed only by the occasional growl of a diesel engine outside. I sipped my tea and toasted myself a bagel, trying to make sense of things.

  Lauren had betrayed us, and might even have killed Andrew with the candlestick from the conservatory. The candlestick whose twin I had found under Beth’s bed.

  I sighed. The whole thing felt like a scenario from Clue. Next thing I knew, someone would turn up shot by a revolver in the library. It was too bad we didn’t have Colonel Mustard pottering around the Manse; I could just pin the murder on him.

  I was about to take the first bite of bagel when the thing that had been niggling at the back of my brain for the last twenty-four hours broke free.

  Thirty minutes later, I pulled up outside the Yancys’ house. A dark blue minivan I didn’t remember seeing during my previous visit was parked in the driveway, and as I passed it on my way up the front walk, I noticed it had handicap plates.

  Mrs. Yancy opened the door almost immediately, surprise in her gray eyes. Her hand flew up to her crepey neck.

  “Miss Camden . . . Kitzi. What a surprise.”

  “May I come in, Mrs. Yancy?”

  “Of course. I have a visitor. I hope you don’t mind.”

  As I stepped into the living room, the dark eyes of Keith Linder rose to meet mine. He wasn’t the company I was expecting—I was thinking it might be one of Mrs. Yancy’s golf partners—and I wondered why neither of them had mentioned they were in contact with one another.

  “Hello, Keith,” I said.

  He nodded.

  I turned to Mrs. Yancy. “I didn’t know you two were friends.”

  Mrs. Yancy’s eyes flicked nervously to the young man in the wheelchair. “Ever since the accident, we’ve been very close. Keith comes to visit a couple of times a week.” That was strange, I thought. Last time I was here, she referred to him only as “the other boy” in the accident. She turned to me. “Won’t you sit down? Can I get you something to drink?”