A Night's Tail

by Sofie Kelly

  chapter 14

  My mind was racing and I knew there was no way I was going to be able to sleep for a while. I couldn’t think of anything I could do with respect to what I’d learned about Zach, or the fact that I still believed Melanie was hiding something, but I could do more digging into Lewis Wallace.

  I sat in the middle of my bed and read the last article from the third of Burtis’s magazines. It was a follow-up to the piece they had done on a group of freshman players four years earlier. I didn’t learn anything new from the few paragraphs about Lewis Wallace but there was a photo of twenty-two-year-old Wallace and his Canadian fiancée, Julie Kendall.

  Hercules had wandered in at one point and was sprawled out on my shoe.

  I remembered that Melanie had mentioned Lewis Wallace might have been married briefly during his CFL playing days. “Would Julie Kendall have any reason to want her ex-husband dead?” I asked the cat.

  His whiskers twitched. “Merow,” he said.

  Maybe.

  I stood up, stretched and headed for the bathroom to brush my teeth. Hercules followed me.

  “What is Melanie still hiding?” I asked him around a mouth of toothpaste. “Whatever it is has to be connected to her and Wallace’s college days. Do you think they could have been mixed up in that cheating business somehow?” It seemed like a weak reason to kill someone.

  I yawned and the cat did as well. “I don’t know,” I said with a sigh. “Maybe I’m wrong thinking Melanie did anything. Maybe it’s Zach. Maybe it was a Romulan.”

  * * *

  It was a busy Wednesday at the library and I didn’t really have any time to think about Melanie, Zach or rogue Romulans. Ethan and the guys were going to a concert at the high school that evening at the invitation of Ruby.

  “I didn’t know you liked band music,” I said to Ethan. I had a feeling the music wasn’t the reason they were going.

  “They have a jazz band,” Ethan said. “Your friend Ruby said I should definitely hear the drummer.”

  Derek smirked. “And Milo thinks your friend Ruby is cute.”

  That pretty much explained everything.

  One of Marcus’s former colleagues on the police force was in town and some of the guys were going out with him. Marcus was going to be the designated driver. He stopped in on his way out to The Brick.

  “I feel like I’ve barely seen you in the last week between this case and the one that’s on trial, plus all the extra hockey practices.” The high school girl’s hockey team had advanced to the state final. He wrapped his arms around me as we stood in the porch.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m so happy to have had all this time with Ethan and I’m going to miss him like crazy when he leaves, but I do miss seeing you.” I kissed him and over his shoulder Owen winked into view on the bench where Hercules usually sat.

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he said as he let me go and turned around. He started at the sight of Owen, sitting there with his head cocked to one side in seemingly innocent curiosity, looking at me.

  “I walked right by Owen and didn’t even see him.” He gave his head a shake. “I think I really should get my eyes checked.”

  “Maybe when this case is over,” I said. That seemed to be my answer to a lot of things.

  Owen continued to eye me even after Marcus was gone.

  “I’m going to tell him,” I said, a little more sharply than I’d intended.

  Owen gave what sounded like a snort of derision and disappeared again.

  The house seemed too quiet and I was at loose ends. I took some muffins out of the freezer. I brushed off my boots. I vacuumed cat hair off the stairs. Finally, I got out my laptop and sat on the sofa in the living room.

  Zach Redmond was everywhere on social media. He liked action movies, spicy Buffalo wings and rock climbing if the pictures he posted were any indication. And he was working.

  I could drive up to The Brick, I realized. I could talk to him. I could get some answers.

  The place was quiet when I got there. Zach looked up and smiled as I approached the bar. I ordered ginger ale and a plate of onion rings. The rings were almost as good as the fries.

  “So what are you doing here on a Wednesday night all by yourself?” he asked with that pretty-boy smile. “Not that I’m complaining.”

  “I wanted to ask you a question,” I said.

  “If you’re asking for my phone number or a piece of my heart you can have both,” he said, pressing one hand to his chest.

  His flirting was so obvious I laughed in spite of myself. Zach could be charming in a clueless-little-boy way.

  “You saw the altercation between Lewis Wallace and my friend,” I said. “The other night when I was here you said something about karma catching up with Wallace. What did you mean?”

  At first he didn’t say anything. I waited, knowing most people didn’t like the silence and would end up saying something to fill it.

  “Aww, what the hell. I guess there’s no point in keeping it a secret now. I’ve already told the cops. Wallace was about to be investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. I had copies of a lot of the paperwork from my grandfather’s business. I gave them pretty much everything, and that, along with a bunch of other stuff, was pretty much going to put Wallace out of business and behind bars in an orange jumpsuit.”

  “Redmond Signs was your grandfather’s business,” I said. “In Red Wing.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, Wallace and his buddies put it out of business.”

  “Why were you at the hotel the night he died?”

  He looked away. I was afraid he was going to walk away as well. I put a hand on his arm to keep him there and waited.

  “I went because I wanted to gloat that he was going to be brought down,” he finally said. “But I didn’t talk to him.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean? He wasn’t there?”

  Zach shook his head. “Oh, he was there. He was standing in one of the hallways arguing with someone. I couldn’t see who it was and I didn’t hear the other person talk.” He’d been looking down but now he met my gaze head-on. “I didn’t kill him if that’s what you think. I left then. I realized how stupid what I’d been going to do was. He was alive when I left and I have an alibi for after that.” He cleared his throat. “There’s this girl I’ve seen a few times. I was with her.” His eyes flicked away for a moment and then came back. “At church. She volunteers overnight a couple of times a month at the shelter they run.”

  Church. Zach had been at church. That alibi was just far-fetched enough to be true.

  * * *

  I spent a few minutes at lunchtime on the computer trying to track down Lewis Wallace’s ex-wife, Julie Kendall. I didn’t have much luck. I had no idea if she was still in the Montreal area or somewhere else in Canada. I wasn’t even sure what last name she was using. For all I knew she could have remarried. There had to be a better way of finding her.

  Mary walked by my door carrying a stapler. An idea began to spin in my mind. I shut off the computer and went downstairs.

  I found Mary at the front desk stapling a report for a slightly panicked teenage boy. “There,” she said. “Next time don’t leave things until the last minute.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Lowe,” the boy said. Then he jammed the paper in his backpack and headed for the door.

  Mary shook her head and turned to me. “I’m trying not to think about the fact that someday that child will be running the world.” She smiled. “What can I do for you?”

  “I have a proposition for Bridget.”

  “And you want me to put in a good word for you?”

  “I was actually hoping you’d get her on the phone so I wouldn’t have to go through her assistant.”

  I waited for Mary to ask what my proposition was, but she didn’t. Instead she reached for the phone. “Hi, ki
ddo,” she said when Bridget answered. “I’m with Kathleen and she has a proposal for you. I think you should listen to her.” She handed me the phone.

  “Hello, Bridget,” I said.

  “Hi, Kathleen,” she replied. “Mom says you want to talk to me about something?”

  I braced one hand against the counter. “I do. I know you must be digging into Lewis Wallace’s background. Did you know he had an ex-wife?”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said.

  I’d been counting on that. The Mayville Heights Chronicle may have been an award-winning newspaper but like most papers these days it had to do more with less. Without Burtis’s magazines I wouldn’t have known Julie Kendall’s name.

  “How would you like her name along with the name of the last city I can confirm she lived in?”

  “What’s in it for you?” Like her mother, Bridget was direct.

  “I know you have a source connected with the police department, so I know you’ll be able to get this information eventually. I’m giving you a way to get it now. In return, all I want is the woman’s contact information. You have sources I don’t. You can find her a lot faster than I can.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “We have a deal?” I asked.

  “We have a deal,” Bridget said.

  I gave her Julie Kendall’s name and my cell number.

  “I’ll be in touch,” she said.

  I ended the call and handed the phone back to Mary.

  “Does Marcus know about this?” she said. “Or is this don’t ask, don’t tell?”

  “If he asks, I’ll tell,” I said. I was really hoping he didn’t ask.

  * * *

  The text came at four thirty. Just a phone number. Since I was still at work I decided to wait until after supper to call it.

  I stopped at the St. James on my way home. Melanie had called. The chef had made a test batch of Eric’s maple cookies. She wanted me to try one before she called Patricia. It had been the kind of day that would benefit from having a cookie or two added to it, so I said yes.

  Eric’s maple leaf cookies had turned out perfectly—thin and crisp but not crumbly and with just a hint of maple sweetness.

  “These are delicious,” I said.

  “According to the chef, it’s the recipe,” Melanie said. “Please thank Eric again.”

  I nodded. “I will.” I picked up my bag and was about to leave, but something made me stop. Some instinct, maybe?

  “You helped him cheat,” I blurted.

  “I already told you,” she said, a tinge of annoyance in her voice. “I didn’t have anything to do with stealing those tests.” Her shoulders were rigid.

  “I believe you,” I said. “But you did help Wallace get his marks up, and it wasn’t by tutoring him.”

  Silence hung between us like smoke in the air. I didn’t need her confirmation. The look on her face was enough.

  She put both hands flat on the top of her desk as though bracing herself for whatever was coming. “What I told you before about not wanting to jeopardize my chances of moving up in this business by having that old scandal come up was true.”

  I nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “There was a lot more to it. I didn’t help Lew steal those tests. That’s the truth. And I didn’t know for a long time that he had.”

  “But you did help him cheat in some way, didn’t you?” I said.

  “Yes. I did his assignments. Not perfectly, mind you; no one would have believed that. I just did them well enough to get his class average up.” She slid her right hand over the desktop as though she was feeling for blemishes on the wooden surface.

  “And the university suspected.”

  She nodded. “Suspected but never proved. I needed the money, Kathleen. It sounds like an excuse because, well, it is. And it’s the biggest mistake I ever made. I should have gotten a job waiting tables or selling my blood. Anything would have been better. That one mistake has been following me around for twenty years.”

  I studied her across the desk. Nothing in her body language or her tone suggested she was being anything less than one hundred percent truthful. “Was it just chance that Wallace decided to approach the town about setting up his business? Or was it because you were here?”

  “He was looking at the state in general because there were some tax breaks for a new business like his, but I think he chose Mayville Heights because he’d discovered I worked here. He told me he saw a magazine article about me when he was flying home from somewhere. It was one of those inspiring up-from-nothing pieces that I probably shouldn’t have agreed to.” She rubbed her left temple as though she had a headache.

  “Wallace was blackmailing you.”

  Melanie shook her head. “No. Believe it or not, he considered us friends. As far as he was concerned, friends help one another out.”

  “Did you help him?”

  “At first I said no.”

  “So what changed?”

  She leaned back in her chair and her expression turned thoughtful. “In a way, I guess he did.”

  I narrowed my gaze at her. “You’ve lost me,” I said.

  “The second night he was here, I was working late and as usual Lew was up wandering around. He walked by the office, saw me and we started talking, really talking. Lew was trying to fix things in his life. He’d connected with his mother’s family. They were good people from the way he spoke about them and it seemed to inspire him to make some changes.” She smiled. “I think there was a lot of one step forward and two steps back. He’s always thought he was God’s gift to women and from what I could see he couldn’t seem to get it through his head that he wasn’t. But he said he was trying to fix his mistakes.”

  That explained his settling the lawsuits.

  “I told him I thought we should come clean and just take the consequences. He said he had more to lose than I did.”

  “He took those tests.”

  She nodded. “And paid someone else to take the blame. I’d always suspected he had. Lew said if he admitted he’d cheated it would destroy any chance of him having a second chance at football.”

  I frowned at her. “Wait a minute. A second chance at football?”

  “Lew told me that he had a part-time job lined up as an assistant high school football coach, starting in the fall. I don’t know if he would have been any good, but when he talked about it I could tell how much it meant to him. He swore that he was going to make the supplement business a success and use the money to do good things and become a successful coach and inspire young people. I told him that he would be stuck with the weight of that secret for the rest of his life.”

  “Sisyphus,” I said.

  Melanie made a face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t understand.”

  “Sisyphus was a king from Greek mythology. A pretty despicable guy. Zeus punished him for his treachery by forcing him to roll a huge boulder up a hill. Just before it reached the top it would roll down again. Sisyphus was left rolling that boulder up the hill for eternity.”

  Melanie nodded. “That’s what those lies we told felt like to me: a big boulder that could flatten us both.”

  It was impossible not to feel some sympathy for her.

  “I didn’t kill him, Kathleen,” she said. “I was upstairs in my old office drinking and writing my resignation letter when Lew died, and I can prove it.” Her voice got a little stronger. “I Skyped my best friend in California and we talked for half the night. You can call her or the police can. You can check my computer.”

  I nodded. This time I did believe her.

  chapter 15

  There was no sign of the guys when I got home. No sign of Owen or Hercules, either. I checked my watch. I had time to call Julie Kendall.

  I went upstairs and changed into my tai chi clothes. Then I
picked up the phone and dialed Julie Kendall’s number. A woman with just a hint of a French accent answered on the fourth ring.

  “My name is Kathleen Paulson,” I said.

  “Bridget Lowe said you’d probably be calling.” Julie had a warm, friendly voice. “You, uh, you found Lew.”

  I found myself nodding even though she couldn’t see me. “I did . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “We’ve been divorced for a long time but I never wanted anything like this to happen to him. Even in my angriest moments.”

  “Do you mind if I ask when the last time you spoke to him was?”

  “I hadn’t heard from Lew in probably five years and then about three weeks ago, out of the blue, he called me, wanted to meet. He said he was going to be in Montreal in a couple of days and it was important. I was just curious enough to agree. We met at a coffee shop and he handed me a check.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. “A check?” I said. “He owed you money?”

  “I would have told you no,” Julie said. “Lew said it was money he should have given me when we divorced, my half of what I thought was a pretty much useless piece of property in Indiana of all places. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Did he tell you why he was doing this now?”

  “He said he’d changed. Then he hit on our waitress.” She laughed. “He may have changed but not completely. We talked for a while. He told me he’d made contact just by chance with a cousin on his mother’s side of the family. I don’t know if you know but he was just nineteen when his mother died. Anyway, they ended up getting together and he met the rest of the family—his mother’s sisters and his cousins. She’d run off, it seemed, with his father and hadn’t been in contact with them. Meeting them all, being welcomed by them all, did something to him. Something good.”