Breaking the Mould

by Victoria Hamilton

  Nan texted a rude joke after that, based on the name Belcher Institute, with a laughing emoji.

  But there was more. Speculation was rife that bribery was only a part of her downfall. She had skirted criminal charges when she had funneled many of those generous donations to her own home renovations, calling her house a “university support building.” She had been forced to repay every cent. If she hadn’t, she would have been charged. She was fortunate enough to know someone on the Wolverhampton College board of governors, which was how she had gotten this job. She might be on her way out once more, though, given her recent behavior. Echoes of her past, it seemed to many. But did it give her a motive to kill Evan Nezer, even if he was blackmailing her somehow? Jaymie didn’t see it.

  In rapid fire there were more texts from Nan with the reporter’s findings:

  Jacklyn Marley had been fired from the university for “inappropriate conduct with a male student,” but the informant could offer the reporter nothing more, since the identity of the complainant was withheld. Jaymie frowned. Given what she now knew about Jacklyn marrying Ben, it seemed unlikely she would have any kind of relationship with a student, and the fact that there was no gossip about it, no whisper campaign, made her suspicious. Everyone said Nezer was behind it, but how? And why? It didn’t make sense.

  Nan’s reporter also claimed that as part of Finn Fancombe’s appeal of his removal from the master’s program at WC, he charged that Nezer’s claims were absurd, since he had no proof that Finn had plagiarized his thesis advisor’s critiques, and that the college was backing Nezer only because they were afraid he’d sue them if they didn’t.

  That had to be easier, then, now that Nezer was dead. Jaymie sat back and reflected on what she had seen and heard the afternoon before. Fancombe had issued veiled threats, based on some information he seemed to feel he had, and he had shifted from blaming Nezer for everything to blaming the college president for some part of it. Did that mean Nezer had been spurred on to charge Finn with plagiarism by the college president? With everything she knew now it appeared to be, as Finn suspected, a deliberate campaign to shut him up and shut him out of the college.

  At the same time the reporter had snooped into Pastor Inkerman’s past, and what he found was interesting, though not definitive. The pastor had, at his last posting, become entangled with the wife of a parishioner. Perhaps that was the “affair” to which Nezer had alluded. If so, it was hardly damning, since the woman had apparently been a willing partner in the affair, and other than a divorce on her part, there were few repercussions. Maybe that’s what the pastor had been referring to when he said he was bad at romance, unless the lady was aggressive; perhaps the parishioner had pursued him. Was it cynical of her to think it wasn’t such a big deal? Maybe for a pastor it would be, though. It was probably enough to get him removed from his position.

  Jaymie needed to speak with Bella Nezer. Surely the victim’s wife would have some insight into his death. She wished it was clearer who inherited Nezer’s money and property. The reporter had been able to discover very little about Bella Nezer and her past, except for the tidbit that she had signed a restrictive prenup upon marrying Evan. That in itself might be a valid motive for murder if she inherited more from a dead husband than she would have gotten from a divorced husband. Pure speculation on her part, though.

  And she had work to do, work other than investigating a murder. It was going to be a long day. Gracey Klausner was delayed, so Jaymie worked at the Emporium for an hour longer than she had intended before heading over to Cynthia Turbridge’s store. She and Johnny were going to pick up some purchases from an estate sale, things the woman would convert, or “upcycle,” for her store. Dickens Days was expected to be a sales boon for local artisans.

  Before leaving, Johnny took Jaymie aside, out the back door of the cottage that had been converted into Cynthia’s store, the Cottage Shoppe. He shuffled and looked down at the ground, frozen into tufts of browning grass and mud.

  “I talked to Amos. He’s scared. He did see who set fire to Mr. Bill’s cider booth.”

  “Yes?”

  “But he made me promise . . .” He shifted and sighed, his shoulders slumping.

  Jaymie watched his eyes. They flicked back and forth, and he wouldn’t meet hers. “Tell me, Johnny.”

  “He’s afraid if I tell you what he saw, you’ll tell the police and they’ll talk to him and he’ll get in trouble for not telling them himself.”

  This was a dilemma. Her curiosity burned and she longed to say that if he told her she’d keep it to herself, but what if it was vital information? How could she justify not telling the police? However . . . it didn’t do anyone any good locked in Amos’s mind. At least if she knew, it might help her figure out if it had to do with Evan Nezer’s murder.

  “So what are you saying, Johnny?”

  “He made me promise. I can only tell you if you promise not to tell the police the information came from him.”

  “So I can tell the police, I just can’t tell them it was Amos who saw it?”

  He nodded.

  Okay, that was a twist; however, if she did tell the police, it was quite possible they’d figure out who told her anyway. She didn’t want to get Johnny’s friend into trouble, but maybe that was a risk she’d have to take. It was also possible that if she knew who did it, she could use the information to identify him or her from the closed-circuit footage.

  “I can live with that,” she said.

  He sighed and nodded. “Okay. So . . . this is who did it.” He leaned in to her and whispered a name.

  • • •

  Three hours later Cynthia and Johnny came back and Jaymie headed out, walking over to the village green. There was no longer any police presence around the tarp-covered diorama. There was no reason on earth why she shouldn’t be able to take it down. Right now it was a silent scream, with the yellow crime scene tape flapping in the breeze that scudded a candy bar wrapper along the pavement. It announced, A murder happened here! The scene was indescribably lonely.

  She walked over and pulled back the tarp covering the open front wall of the diorama. Eventually the police would figure out the truth, but she was on a deadline. She cared deeply about her town and the history of it, and it bothered her immensely that whoever had killed Nezer used her diorama to plant the body. It was a slap in the face of what the historic committee was trying to do, to make something positive happen for their little town.

  Knowing who set fire to the cider booth didn’t help as much as she thought it would. She didn’t believe the arsonist and the killer were one and the same, though the crimes might be connected. She needed to think about it a lot more.

  The joyous traditional scene painted on the diorama backdrop mocked her. Happy Mrs. Cratchit, with her hands in the air waving them in excitement, now seemed to be horrified by the dead body under her dining table. Jaymie had felt like there was a message in the scene for whomever cared to read it. Evan Nezer had been planted there, with the pudding mould over his head and a stake of holly planted through his heart to make a point.

  But what if that was wrong? What if it had been done to make it seem like the killer was someone with a personal grudge against Nezer? She sighed. And maybe she was overthinking the whole thing. Now, if Nezer had been the killer instead of the killee, the scene would have at least made sense, given his hatred of Dickens Days, but he hadn’t killed himself.

  She had to stop thinking of the scene as a message and consider the mechanics of it. The murderer—or his or her accomplice—would have had to plan ahead and know what the diorama was. That wasn’t necessarily a difficult thing, given that though she had tried to keep it a secret, coyly refusing to discuss it in the historical society meeting, anyone seeing Bill build it in his workshop would have known. Also, she had set up the diorama in public. It didn’t give the killer much time to plan, however . . . maybe the planning hadn’t been so much in advance, but a hasty use of what she had so providently
provided them. Perhaps it was a handy place for the body of a man who hated Christmas, and more particularly hated Charles Dickens and everything he wrote about and stood for. The rest—holly, wooden stake, pudding mould—was last-minute window dressing, like a bizarre and macabre mockery of a festive Christmas display window.

  She dropped the tarp back down over the scene. It was Wednesday; she needed this solved before Friday if they were going to be able to hold the first night of Dickens Days and the lighting of the tree without a dark cloud hanging over the festival.

  And Christmas was coming. She loved Christmas; this would be the first for her new family. She would not let the gloomy ghost of Evan Nezer, Queensville’s resident Scrooge, cast a pall over the whole season. The only thing she could do for him now was to find his killer and turn him or her in to the police.

  Humming a Christmas tune to brighten her spirits, she decided to follow up on something she had thought of a few days ago. She was still in desperate need of a couple of Christmas gifts, one for her mother-in-law and one for Val. She always got Val something handmade. The previous year she had commissioned Mabel Bloombury, a prolific knitter, to knit a cardigan for Val with a stylized image of her cottage on it. But this year had been hectic and she had not thought far enough ahead to do something like that.

  So she would combine asking a crafter about gifts with a little snooping. She circled the line of pines and headed for the back door of the Nezer house. Approaching the home, she heard the sound of two women bickering.

  “You knew! You must have known.” There followed a string of expletives too foul to follow, delivered in a cultured English accent. Bella Nezer was on a rampage. Something dropped and something else crashed.

  “I swear I didn’t know a thing, Bella. Honest!”

  “But you must have hidden it. Am I supposed to believe that suddenly Finn, of all the people in the world, comes up with a handwritten will? Dated five days ago?” Bella’s tone was a shriek at this point. “I can’t believe you’d conspire against me like that, you—”

  “I did not conspire!”

  A hidden will? And Finn Fancombe involved? Intriguing. It sounded like an old-time murder mystery, The Clue in the Hidden Will. However . . . it wasn’t like her to eavesdrop. Jaymie tapped on the door, but the fight went on, the combatants unable to hear her, it seemed.

  “You most certainly did! You’re a conniving witch and planned this all along. You got your son recognized, and made Evan write that damned codicil. Then you killed him!” Bella shrieked.

  “I did not kill him! I’d never . . . I couldn’t kill a lamb. Evan always planned to recognize Finn! We talked about it long before you came along and pushed your way in,” Erla said, her equable tone taking on a hint of steel. “I didn’t want to tell my son until I knew Evan was serious. I never pressured him. Evan decided the night of the party, after he found out what you were doing behind his back.”

  Jaymie’s interest was piqued: What was Bella doing behind Evan’s back? Was there a hidden crack in the Nezer marriage, like the hairline fracture in the fine china saucer?

  “Me? I was doing nothing! Don’t you dare point your finger at me!” Bella said, her voice louder, her cultured accent slipping into a growl.

  “It was Evan’s decision, not mine!” Erla insisted.

  Jaymie was confused. Why would Finn be in Evan Nezer’s will, especially given their fractious relationship and the professor’s hand in getting the younger man banished from the master’s program he had invested so much time and money in? And what did “recognizing” him mean?

  Bella and Erla were doing some back and forth “did so,” “did not,” when the answer hit Jaymie. References in the historical romances she read about “recognizing” someone almost always meant that someone was an illegitimate son. Her stomach twisted; Finn Fancombe was Evan Nezer’s biological son? It had to be what they meant. That was why no mention had been made of Finn’s father, no photo, no tale of abandonment or death.

  But there were pictures and tales of Erla, Sarah and the two boys vacationing together, camping and heading to Disney World. Did Sarah know of Finn’s parentage? How would she feel if she did, knowing that Ben was not Evan’s only child? So if she understood correctly, Nezer had apparently recognized Finn as his son in a handwritten codicil to his will written days before he died.

  “You had better be ready to provide DNA,” Bella shrieked, all of her playacting “lady of the manor” air gone. “And for a court challenge! I don’t believe a word you’ve said. Evan would never have kept this from me! He promised; everything would be mine!”

  That was a startling statement from a newly bereaved widow, and it piqued Jaymie’s interest, given the restrictive prenup she had apparently signed. Was the Nezer marriage in such deep trouble that Bella was afraid she’d be divorced and left with virtually nothing?

  Bella must have stormed off, a door slamming and echoing even through the closed window by the back door. Jaymie tried the door and it opened. She walked into the kitchen to find Erla Fancombe sitting at the worktable, her head in her hands, sobbing.

  “Are you okay?” Jaymie asked softly.

  The woman bolted up, her chair tumbling back, turned over by her precipitous movement. “What are you doing here?”

  Jaymie, watching her closely as she swiped at her wet eyes with the back of her hand, said, “I actually was coming to see your quilts.” She bent over and picked up the chair, noticing a shattered mug on the floor nearby, likely the result of Bella’s temper tantrum. “Remember we spoke of your quilting?”

  “I . . . yes, I remember.” Erla, on automatic, it appeared, got a dust pan and broom and cleaned up the mug bits, tossing them into the trash under the sink, the remains clanking and tinkling into the bag.

  “You said I could come back and see them.” Jaymie wasn’t sure that had been said, but mendacity was merited in this case. “I knocked repeatedly but . . . you were busy and didn’t hear.”

  The woman wasn’t listening, and the quilt excuse didn’t appear to be necessary other than to explain Jaymie’s arrival. A few things occurred to Jaymie in that moment, and one was to wonder which son was actually older, Ben or Finn. Did that matter? They weren’t in nineteenth-century England, after all; laws of primogeniture didn’t hold in America. And even in merry olde England an illegitimate son could not take advantage of the old English law of primogeniture. But the birth order might be revealing in another way, like . . . when did Erla’s affair with Evan get started?

  Erla sank back down in her chair. Jaymie sat down across from her. “I have to confess,” she said. “I overheard your argument with Bella.”

  The woman gazed at her, eyes wide. “We’ve never gotten along, but now . . .” She shook her head.

  “What was the Nezer marriage like, Erla?”

  Her gaze shifted away. “I don’t talk about my employers behind their backs.”

  “I guess I’ll think the worst then. It’s human nature.” Jaymie watched her for a moment and said, “What are you going to do, now that Mr. Nezer is dead?”

  She sighed and closed her eyes. “I have to leave. But where? I’ve worked for the Nezer family for . . . thirty-three years. My whole youth given to that . . . that awful man.” She broke down into weeping again, tears streaming down her cheeks under the hands she had over her eyes.

  “I so sorry, Erla,” Jaymie said softly. A torrent of emotion had broken down the reserved woman’s walls. Maybe it wasn’t fair to use the woman’s vulnerability, but murder wasn’t fair either. It left deep wounds that would never heal, poisoning everything and everyone with fear and doubt. A solution at least gave peace of mind. She was the housekeeper, and who knew more about her employers than the one who made the bed, did the laundry, cooked and cleaned and cared for them all?

  Jaymie made a pot of tea. More confidences had been spilled over tea and sympathy than even wine and commiseration. Setting a steaming mug in front of Erla, she said, “I overheard, as I said. S
o . . . is it true? Is Finn really Evan’s biological son?”

  She nodded.

  “You had an affair with Evan?”

  “More a moment of weakness than anything.”

  “He was married to Sarah at the time.”

  “I had just started working for them. I was young, stupid. When did I get so old?” She tugged at a lock of gray hair, stared at it, then pushed it back off her cheek. “It feels like forever ago. Those two—Sarah and Evan—had just got married and were not getting along. They were fighting all the time and he came to my room one night to apologize for quarreling in front of me.” She smiled weakly. “He could be charming when he wanted to be. I would have regretted it, but then there was Finn. I can’t regret it when I got a son out of it, the best thing to ever happen to me, my only child.”

  “So Finn never knew?”

  She shook her head.

  “What did you tell him about his father?”

  “More or less the truth, that it was a one-night thing, that I’m glad it happened because I got him.”

  “Didn’t he ever want to get in touch with his dad?”

  She flushed up to her graying roots. She looked down at her tea and took in a long breath. “I said . . . I lied. I said he didn’t give me his real name, that I didn’t know how to find him. I regret that. He’s angry with me now that he knows the truth. I don’t blame him.”

  But was he angry with his father, too? Jaymie wondered. “The codicil to the will means that Evan was preparing to openly recognize Finn as his son?” The woman nodded again. “But why did he do what he did to him—accusing him of plagiarism—when he knew it was his son he was destroying?”