Breaking the Mould

by Victoria Hamilton

  He looked down at her and frowned, not answering. He turned and began walking toward the Nezer house.

  Jaymie caught up with him. “So you’re not living in the house, then? I thought maybe you would be, since it’s so big. But you’re a lawyer?”

  He stopped again and turned. “What’s with all the questions? You and that gaggle of busybodies hated my father. I get that he was difficult sometimes. But you and Bill Waterman . . .” He paused, blinked and shook his head. “And now my father has been taken away from me.”

  She examined him closely: was it grief he was expressing, or was it all a fraud? There were no tears, but not everyone cried at such things. Softly, Jaymie said, “I’m sure the police will find out who did it, Ben.”

  “It won’t bring him back. I feel like the only person who misses him like I do is Bella. And even then . . .” He shook his head and turned away. “Bella and me; that’s it.”

  “She truly loved your father?”

  He turned swiftly to stare down at her again. “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t know your dad or Bella well, but . . . well, there’s quite an age difference. Not that that makes it . . .” She shook her head. There was no way to gracefully say Evan Nezer was an unlovable jerk. “I’m sorry you and your dad didn’t get along.”

  He shrugged and turned away.

  “My husband and I left the party,” Jaymie said hurriedly, before he could walk away again. “But I understand that Finn Fancombe busted in on you all and confronted your dad, but that after a brief conversation Finn backed off. What do you think your dad said to Finn? Was he going to help him get back into school? Rescind his plagiarism complaint?”

  “I don’t know. He likely said they could talk later, maybe after the party.”

  “Who do you think would have done this?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Dad could be hard to take sometimes, but . . . he meant well.”

  Meant well . . . that was the family line, it seemed, because Ben had perfectly echoed Bella, as if it had been rehearsed. Jaymie did not believe that; if there was anything Evan Nezer meant, well was not it.

  “Ben! Ben! We need to talk,” Jacklyn Marley said, bustling up to them. “Oh, Jaymie. It’s you.”

  “What’s up?” Jaymie replied, looking between the two.

  “Nothing. We can talk later,” Ben said to Jacklyn, and strode away quickly toward the Nezer home.

  Jacklyn, dressed in a long, heavy cardigan, turned and glowered at Jaymie, bare hands tucked under her arms. “Thanks a bunch for turning me in to the police,” she said, moving from foot to foot. Her feet were clad only in slippers.

  “They already knew about you hacking into his computer, Jacklyn. I confirmed that I saw you. I told you I wouldn’t lie, but I wasn’t the one who told them in the first place.”

  “Hmph.”

  “Did you discover anything? Is that what you want to talk to Ben about? I mean, he’s going to be the heir, isn’t he, or do you think Bella will inherit everything?”

  “Things are way more complicated than that,” Jacklyn said with a smirk, then whirled and walked away.

  “What do you mean by that?” Jaymie called.

  “Never mind,” she said, flapping one bare hand in the air. “It’ll all come out eventually.”

  What did Jacklyn know that Jaymie didn’t? She stood and contemplated; they had been talking about inheriting, and that was when the ghostwriter said things were a lot more complicated than the inheritance simply being between Bella and Ben. What could she mean by that? Was there someone else in the mix?

  With a deep sigh, discouraged and out of sorts, she walked back toward the Emporium.

  Valetta came out to the store porch to have her morning break. She waved Jaymie over. “Come have tea!”

  Jaymie hopped up the few steps and took the thermos top full of steaming tea into her hands. Brooding, she was silent until Val jostled her and asked what was on her mind. Jaymie poured it all out, her confusion over the many possible motives to kill Evan Nezer, and who was implicated.

  “You need to get organized, kiddo,” Val said. “Don’t you usually make a list of suspects at this point?”

  Jaymie glanced over at Val in alarm. “It’s kinda scary that I have a ‘method’ to investigate murder. What is going on in my life?”

  “What’s going on in this town?” Val said, casting a cynical gaze over the village. “Maybe until something happened we never knew about all the dark undercurrents in Queensville. Or maybe this is all random crap. However . . . setting aside that, I’m going to get you a notepad and pen, and we’re going to work this out.”

  “And you’re going to tell me if the police saw anything on the CCTV footage.”

  “Yeah. That’s a whole ’nother story. I’ll tell you in a moment.”

  Valetta made a fresh pot of tea and got them proper mugs. Thermos tea was okay in a pinch, but there was nothing like a fresh brew to fire the little gray cells of the brain, as Poirot was known to call them. Valetta handed Jaymie a pen and pad of paper, and together they sat in the Adirondack chairs on the store porch.

  “So what is it about the CCTV you were going to tell me?” Jaymie asked.

  “Someone was smart enough to smear the camera lens with peanut butter, even though it’s mounted at the top of the roofline. They did it in such a methodical way that they first did the lens of the camera that would have caught them getting up on the roof, and then did the one pointing toward the village green.”

  “That had to be the killer, then, or an accomplice.” She paused, then with a sigh said, “So that means the camera caught nothing.”

  “Not a thing. The peanut butter trick was done earlier, we think the night before.”

  Jaymie set her tea aside and hopped down the porch steps, out onto the street, neatly avoiding Edith, Lyle Stubbs’s girlfriend, who was likely returning from a shopping trip. She turned to look up to where she now knew the front-facing camera was. And Jacklyn’s windows overlooking the village green. Could the ghostwriter have clambered out her window and done the peanut butter trick? Interesting thought, but if they conjectured that the camera lens was smeared by whoever killed Evan, what was Jacklyn Marley’s motive other than pure spite? It could not have been in response to anything she found on the computer because Jaymie now knew that the murder setup had been planned before that night. She returned to the porch and picked up her tea.

  Valetta had watched her but didn’t comment. “Unfortunately we had no reason to monitor the footage since the arson, so we didn’t find out about the smudged lens until Detective Vestry came to have a look.”

  “We’ll figure it out the old-fashioned way.” Jaymie tapped the pen against her bottom lip. “One big question I have is if the arson of the cider booth was related to the murder or not.” She jotted down her question at the top of the page. “For now I’m going to ignore it, but I have a feeling it’s connected. So . . .” Jaymie looked both ways and hunkered down over the pad of paper. “In this case there are so many people who had a motive because Nezer was such a pill. It goes without saying that I know Bill did not kill Evan, but it almost looks like things were being done to make it appear that Bill is guilty.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, planting Nezer in the diorama with holly and a pudding mould.”

  “That would point more toward you, though, wouldn’t it?”

  “Maybe. Though Bill is the one who constructed and painted it, and helped me move it into place. So, let’s see . . .” Jaymie started jotting down names and motives and anything else she thought of.

  Her list started to take shape:

  One: Bella Nezer. The wife is always a suspect, and maybe she inherits. Not sure yet about that.

  Two: Ben Nezer. Again, family is always suspect. He had been estranged from his father until recently, and he, too, may inherit. His mother is certain he’ll get the house because it is the ancestral Nezer residence.
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br />   Three: Jacklyn Marley. They were feuding about money that she claims he owed her from book royalties, and may have found something out from his computer. But . . . Nezer dying would complicate things. Or would it? Maybe Jacklyn felt she could work with his inheritor(s) better than him.

  Valetta interrupted Jaymie there and pointed to Jacklyn’s name. “And . . .” she whispered, “I’ve heard that once Nezer was done with Jacklyn Marley’s services he got her fired from her teaching job at WC. So . . . revenge as a motive?”

  “Yes! I forgot about that. But I still don’t know why she was fired.” Jaymie added that information with a question mark after her annotation.

  “Something to find out, I guess.”

  “I know one person I can ask,” Jaymie said, and got out her cell phone. She wrote a text to Austin and pressed Send. She continued with the list. “And speaking of being fired . . .” She jotted down the next entry on her list.

  Four: Finn Fancombe. He was barred from getting his master’s at WC after Nezer successfully accused him of plagiarism . . . after he accused Nezer of plagiarism first! (What gives with that?)

  Five: Sarah Nezer. Her ex had somehow compelled her to accept virtually nothing in their divorce. Did he have something on her?

  “I’d forgotten about that until I just now jotted it down,” Jaymie mused, twiddling the pen between her fingers. She blew on her hands to warm them up. “I still can’t figure out why a woman would walk away from such a long marriage with nothing, not even, apparently, her own heirlooms. And she is still angry about how he treated her.” A thought occurred to her and she jotted it down.

  “What does that say?” Valetta asked, squinting over her shoulder.

  Jaymie had written a question: Does Ben inherit, and will that help Sarah? “Sarah Nezer thinks her son will inherit everything, like I said. That could be a valid motive for her to kill her ex-husband, even beyond any personal animosity. She could have done it for her son’s benefit, which might indirectly benefit her.” She wrote another note. “Plus, there seems to be an awful long history of animosity between Sarah and Evan. Anger buried can distill into something pretty potent.”

  “Sounds like one of those true-crime documentaries: Anger Buried! Anyhow, is that everyone?”

  “Well, no . . . I mean, there are others. Oh, yes! One important one, as a matter of fact.” She jotted down a name, then added his motive.

  Six: Pastor Vaughan Inkerman. He found out at the party that Nezer was the cruel reviewer who had panned his book.

  “Has any writer ever killed a reviewer?”

  “Don’t know. I’ve read some pretty cruel reviews online. It gets pretty personal at times. My writer friend, Melody Heath, told me it takes her a day to get over a rotten review. She tries not to read them, but sometimes a writer has to, to get promotional quotes.” Jaymie chewed on the end of the pen. “However, if we believe that the murder was planned before the party, then Inkerman is out of it, yes? Because he didn’t know about Nezer being the nasty reviewer until the party. I will say, from what Nezer said at the party it sounds like he knew something about the pastor, something unsavory in his past.”

  Valetta cocked her head to one side. “If Inkerman was a clever killer he would make it appear that he only discovered at the party that Nezer was the nasty reviewer, when really he knew ahead of time.”

  “That would take some acting. The pastor seems open and emotional.”

  “Seems,” Valetta emphasized. “But his anger would have festered, you know? Planning the crime gave him satisfaction, foreseeing his foe’s downfall.”

  “Ooh, that’s good. But his emotionality seems so genuine.”

  Valetta shrugged.

  “And we’d have to believe that a man who wrote a book about creating your best life using scripture as a guide to help folks is capable of murder.”

  “You never know what’s going on inside someone’s mind or life,” Val said.

  Jaymie eyed her. “You do have a darkness to your soul, don’t you?”

  Valetta waggled her salt-and-pepper eyebrows and straightened her glasses. “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man? The pharmacist knows!”

  “Where do you get your sayings?”

  “That was from an old uncle of mine. Something about a radio show back in the thirties.”

  “So who does know what evil lurks in the heart of man?”

  “The Shadow knows.”

  “Ah. Okay. Anyway, we have to figure out who, among all these folks I’ve listed, were capable of the murder.”

  “With or without an accomplice. There is no saying that the killing wasn’t done by a combination of people, like Sarah and Ben.”

  Sarah and Ben . . . like what the note warned, not to do it that night. The note he never got because Jaymie forgot about it. Jaymie’s phone buzzed and she looked at it. “It’s Mrs. Stubbs. I’d better take this.”

  “And I have to reopen the pharmacy. I have dosettes to fill that have to be delivered this afternoon.” Valetta gathered their mugs and reentered the store.

  Mrs. Stubbs, as usual, got cranky trying to understand Jaymie on the phone. The conversation was slow and a little repetitive, but after some awkwardness Jaymie got the message: Mrs. Stubbs had invited Pastor Inkerman to tea in her suite and wanted Jaymie to come as well. Two p.m. “I’ll be there!” she said, and they hung up.

  She checked her text messages. There were a slew from Nan, and it seemed the reporter had come through, big time. Jaymie read them all, then digested them. Evan Nezer had died by blunt force trauma to the head, a kind of crescent-shaped wound repeated, like the edge of the head of a hammer, or some other rounded tool. And he did not die in the diorama. Nan made a punning reference to Jaymie’s die-o-rama that she did not appreciate.

  There was evidence that he was transported there in a wheelbarrow or some other one-wheeled cart, then dragged into place. The earth was somewhat frozen, and they weren’t sure if the cart had one wheel, two, or even four. And it didn’t help anyway, of course, because every single homeowner in Queensville had a wheelbarrow or handcart.

  Somehow the reporter had wormed his or her way into seeing the official police reports. Bella claimed she was sleeping and didn’t hear anything. Evan was in his nightshirt, though; hadn’t she felt or heard him get up in the night? Whenever Jakob got up, Jaymie awoke. That was odd. And didn’t she miss him in the morning and wonder where he was?

  Erla’s official statement said much the same. Exhausted after the party, she had gone to bed and stayed there. There was no further information. The official police statement didn’t help Jaymie at all. Incidentally, in case she was wondering, Nan texted, Evan Nezer had no outstanding lawsuits going at the present time, so there was no one angry at him at that moment for a legal action.

  Becca was at the store today. It was Georgina’s day off, and she was on a holiday-related shopping trip with her brother. The sisters therefore had lunch together at the store, ordered in from the Queensville Inn, and then Jaymie stayed for a lesson from Becca about how to evaluate the condition of vintage china. Though she had already had lessons in how to recognize hand-painted versus transfer patterns, and other elements, her sister was an expert in quality, having been in the replacement china business for over twenty years. Jaymie learned a whole new vocabulary, including glaze pop and glaze skip, flaws caused by bubbles in the glaze popping during firing, or glaze that was missed in the painting process. She learned about crazing—the fine web of cracks in the glaze that could become discolored with time—and decoration wear, where silver or gold trim is worn away with time and use.

  “Finally, I always give my china dishes a good listen,” Becca said. She dug under the desk for a little saucer. “Have a look at this and tell me what’s wrong with it.”

  Jaymie looked it over. “I can’t find anything,” she said, handing it back. “I think you’re trying to trick me.”

  Becca smiled and adjusted her glasses. “Nope. Here. Listen.”
She brought out another identical saucer and pinged it with her fingernail. She then did the same to the first piece, but the sound was different. “Look, here—” She pulled over a lighted magnifying glass and positioned it. Jaymie finally saw what she couldn’t see before, a very fine hairline fracture, invisible except under magnification. “I knew it was there by listening.”

  “Wow. Cracks that you can’t see with the naked eye.” She sighed and stood, tugging down her tunic top. “I have to go. I have a tea party to attend with a vicar,” she said in a fake snooty accent. She rolled her eyes. “Actually with Mrs. Stubbs and Pastor Inkerman, author of Living Your Best Life Through Scripture.” She snickered. “Toodles, sis. Hey . . . do you want to come to girls’ night tomorrow night?”

  “Could I?” Her eyes lit up behind her glasses and her lips turned up in a smile. “Tell you what, can we do it at our Queensville house?”

  “Let me ask the other girls. Can you pull it together by tomorrow night?”

  “Are you kidding? No problem.”

  Becca was a neat freak, so the house would be super clean, and she was extremely organized, so planning snacks and drinks for five or so would be no big deal.

  “I think I’ll drop over at the house right now, before heading to the inn.” Jaymie walked out to her car. Before heading out she sent a group text to Heidi, Valetta and Bernie asking if they could do girls’ night at the Queensville house, since Becca would like to be included. She then drove to their Queensville home, parking in the parking lane behind. The police were long gone, of course. Jaymie pushed through the wrought iron gate and examined the line of holly bushes she had planted a couple of years before, and that had just started producing berries.

  She had carefully followed advice to plant a male holly bush for every few females so the females would produce berries. She had deliberately made it an ornamental choice: three female bushes, then a male, then three more, then a male, then three more females, for a total of eleven bushes along the fence line separating the Leighton home from the bed-and-breakfast next door.

  She approached the holly bush that had been savaged; it was the very first one, next to the fence. She squatted down in the frosty grass beside it. Pam had said the damage happened mid-afternoon. It would take a lot of guts to do that, when you could easily be seen. Jaymie examined the damage. The person hadn’t even had to enter the lawn, they had crouched down, reached into the yard through the wrought iron fence bars, and pulled or cut the holly branches. She squinted; yes, cut. The vandal had come prepared and had used scissors or shears, cutting a thick branch near the center so they would have lots of holly for their jolly holiday murder scene.