Murder, She Edited

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

  “But you are the one who walked around the Swarthout property at Mr. Featherstone’s request, are you not? You took note of the pond and other features?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I did that.”

  He couldn’t quite control a moue of distaste at the memory. Tromping through underbrush and weeds had clearly been an unpleasant experience for him. I wondered if he’d neglected to change into more suitable clothing beforehand. Such an expedition would have been ruinous to a nice suit and a pair of highly polished, undoubtedly expensive shoes.

  Despite his protests, I hustled him down the hall, through the kitchen, and into the dinette. “Sit,” I ordered. “At least take the time to dry off. And if you’d like something to drink, it’s no trouble at all to fix you something. I was about to take a coffee break myself.”

  He sat. I busied myself filling two mugs. By the time I brought them to the table, he’d opened his briefcase and removed the “packet” he’d spoken of. I’d been expecting legal documents of some sort, perhaps even a copy of Tessa’s will. Instead he presented me with a thick stack of letters tied together with a faded green ribbon.

  I didn’t need to remove it to read the return address on the top one. A single glance was sufficient to recognize the loops and flourishes of my mother’s handwriting.

  “Where did Mr. Featherstone find these?”

  “They were with Ms. Swarthout’s papers.”

  A cursory examination of the postmarks revealed that the earliest letter was written shortly after Rosanna’s murder. The most recent dated from the year of my mother’s death. All were addressed to Tessa and all had been sent to her by her BFF. I opened the oldest first and started reading, too intrigued to be concerned about being rude to a guest.

  “I should go,” Mr. Coleman murmured.

  I barely noticed when he left and didn’t realize until much later that he hadn’t taken so much as a sip of his coffee. That first letter, with its oblique reference to a “recent tragedy,” riveted my attention despite the fact that it gave no specific details. The next few were completely unhelpful when it came to learning more about the crime, but I found them fascinating all the same.

  What my mother wrote to Tessa reflected Mom’s optimistic outlook on life. She was obviously trying to cheer up her oldest friend. She did so, in large part, by relating a string of silly stories about me. She recounted several of my youthful escapades, some of which I’d completely forgotten and a few of which I wished I could forget. One or two, in retrospect, made me nostalgic, but most just embarrassed me.

  To my frustration, nowhere after that first letter did Mom come close to touching upon the reason Tessa no longer lived on the farm. She never mentioned Rosanna by name and in the course of dozens of letters made only one vague reference to Estelle.

  After I’d read them all, I studied the addresses on the envelopes. Tessa had moved around a lot before she settled into that apartment complex in Connecticut. I didn’t suppose that fact was particularly significant, although it did interest me to see that her earliest abode after leaving Swan’s Crossing was in Los Angeles, California. Clearly, she’d wanted to get as far away from her old home as possible.

  I got up, dumped Mr. Coleman’s untouched coffee down the sink, and poured myself a fresh cup. On the way back to the dinette, I collected a lined tablet and a pen from my kitchen junk drawer. While I sipped at my drink, I made a list of the places Tessa had lived. I stared at it when it was complete, wondering what on earth I thought I was going to do with it. It was highly unlikely that anyone who’d known Tessa was still living near any of her old addresses. Besides, the mysterious diaries weren’t in California or Connecticut or anywhere in between. If they still existed at all, they were in that farmhouse in Swan’s Crossing.

  Tearing off the top page of the tablet, I crumpled it up and tossed it onto the floor for Calpurnia to play with. That was all it was good for. I scooped up the letters, putting them back in order. When they’d once again been collected into a neat stack, I tapped the bottoms and sides on the tabletop to even up the edges and retied the green ribbon.

  This was worse than one of those jigsaw puzzles that came with no illustration on the outside of the box. How was I supposed to figure anything out with so few clues?

  I wandered into the dining room. Or rather, what had been used, occasionally, as a dining room when my parents owned the house. Then and now it was furnished as a family room. My television set held pride of place against one wall, and I’d recently set up the purpose-built jigsaw puzzle table I acquired from a local craftsman shortly before I moved to New York from Maine. It’s a cleverly designed piece of furniture with legs raising the surface to a comfortable height, a tilt-top feature to make all of the puzzle easier to reach, two drawers on each side for sorting pieces, and a cover specifically intended to keep cats and small children from wreaking havoc on the work in progress.

  The current puzzle was titled “Lighthouses of the World” and it, unlike the mysteries surrounding the Swarthout farm, offered me plenty of hints on how to proceed. I removed the cover, sat down, and resumed my search for pieces that contained parts of place names. I already had the border together. Continuing on, I’d look for distinguishing features on each piece. I like to be challenged . . . but not to the point of frustration.

  Successfully putting together parts of a dozen little pictures of lighthouses provided an excellent antidote to my inability to find answers to any real-life puzzles. I kept at it until Calpurnia appeared in the doorway and demanded, in loud and strident tones, that I feed her. I was surprised by how late it was, but I felt considerably more relaxed than I had been after reading those letters.

  “Yes,” I said to the cat, “it is time for supper. And after we eat, we’re going to continue to ignore problems we can’t solve and spend the entire evening watching a movie, preferably something with no redeeming social importance or literary value whatsoever. How about Tremors? You’ll like that one.”

  Mentally reviewing the collection of DVDs James and I had acquired over the years, I decided that one of Mel Brooks’s comedies might be even more appropriate. Or perhaps Erik the Viking.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I was all set to leave for the farm the next morning when Luke turned up on my doorstep.

  “Speak of the devil,” I greeted him.

  My cousin sent me a questioning look. “I can go away again if you like.”

  “On the contrary, since fate seems to have sent you my way, I intend to make use of you. Unless you have other plans for the morning, that is.”

  “Free as a bird,” he assured me. “It’s Saturday, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  I hadn’t. Retired people and those who work at home have the same problem—no regular schedule to help them keep track of the date. A lot of folks my age have daily pill keepers to remind them if it’s Monday or Friday. I swallow a multivitamin every morning with my toast and coffee, but I’m fortunate in that I don’t have to take statins to lower my cholesterol or medicine for high blood pressure. Unless I’ve turned on the news or have been reading the local rag on my iPad, I don’t necessarily register what day of the week it is.

  Over a second cup of coffee I hadn’t planned on drinking, I filled Luke in on the details of my unexpected inheritance. He made short work of the contents of his mug and listened to the rest of my account while doling out affection to my cat. Calpurnia can be extremely persistent when she wants to be stroked.

  I often refer to Luke as my young cousin, in much the way Mr. Featherstone called Mr. Coleman his young assistant. Now that he’s passed his thirtieth birthday, I really have to stop doing that. Tall and slender, with light brown hair and blue eyes, he’d be rated as handsome if it weren’t for the one hereditary appendage we share. The “Greenleigh nose” is . . . distinctive. On me, its size is notable but not unduly so. In Luke’s case, it’s too big for his face and tends to be remarked upon. For all that, we are among the luckier ones in the family. Seen in
profile, the nose gives some of our relatives a distinctly ratlike appearance.

  It could be worse. Literally dozens of my distant relatives on my mother’s side of the family are afflicted with abnormally large, square front teeth. Most of those teeth are crooked, since they’re way too big for the average mouth and singularly resistant to realignment. Wearing braces fails to have a lasting effect.

  “So,” Luke summarized when I came to the end of my tale, “you only get to keep the place if you find and edit these diaries?”

  I nodded over the rim of my coffee mug and took a last swallow to polish off the contents.

  “Have you considered not looking for them? From the way you’ve described the property it sounds like a real white elephant.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  Or was it? I hadn’t been thinking in terms of what would happen after I met Tessa’s conditions, but once the deed was transferred to me, I’d be responsible for upkeep and taxes and deciding what, ultimately, to do with the house and land.

  “I’ll sell it, of course,” I said aloud.

  “That might be easier said than done. I wouldn’t presume to tell you what to do—”

  “Better not!” I gave him a little kick under the table to reinforce the warning.

  “But it could be a very big mistake, financially, to saddle yourself with an old house and undeveloped land.”

  “Speaking as my accountant?” Luke works part-time as a tax preparer.

  “Speaking as your friend. You know as well as I do that the promised improvements in the economic prospects of this area didn’t materialize. Our part of Sullivan County isn’t considered prime real estate. It might be years before you can unload your inheritance. In the meantime, it’ll be nothing but a money pit.”

  “Maybe I can rent it out.”

  “How’s the wiring?” Luke asked. Calpurnia was now in his lap, purring loudly.

  Following his line of thought, I stared at him in dismay. “Pre–nineteen fifties.”

  “So it’s not just old, it’s probably too dangerous for continuous use. I’ll bet the outlets don’t even have an extra hole for a three-pronged plug.”

  My hands hurt from clenching them so tightly around my empty coffee mug. Tessa’s family farm was a relic out of another century. Fixing it up to the point where someone could actually live there would not be cheap. At the very least, all the wiring and plumbing would have to be brought up to code.

  I have the best of reasons for knowing how expensive such upgrades are. Paying to have similar work done on my house was the reason I’d had to start a second career during what was supposed to be my retirement.

  But not look for the diaries? Ignore the mysteries Tessa had left behind? Impossible!

  I caught myself worrying my lower lip, stopped, and frowned instead. “You’re right, of course, but I feel a sense of obligation to Tessa. She and my mother were such close friends that Mom used to say Tessa was the sister she never had. How can I ignore the dying wish of someone who, for all intents and purposes, was my honorary aunt?”

  Luke sent me a rueful smile. “I get it. It’s a family thing.”

  “Pretty much,” I agreed.

  He stood, dislodging Calpurnia from his lap, and carried his mug to the sink to rinse it out. “In that case,” he said, “we’d better get going. Do you want to drive or shall I?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  An hour later, Luke and I stood in the middle of the kitchen of Tessa’s farmhouse. We’d spent the drive going over a list of places I’d already searched and trying to decide where to begin looking this time around. We were still debating the issue.

  “You said you skipped the cabinets,” Luke said, eyeing them. “Maybe I should start there.”

  “Be my guest, but I doubt you’ll discover anything but dust and mouse droppings. If the cleaning crew Tessa hired did their job, you won’t even find that much.”

  “Did they also clear away the foodstuffs the Swarthouts left behind?”

  “I suppose they must have. Someone emptied the refrigerator and turned it off. And before you ask, I think it’s highly unlikely that the diaries were wrapped in plastic and stored in the freezer compartment.”

  “Toilet tank?” he suggested.

  I laughed. “Obviously, despite the difference in our ages, we were both brought up on a similar diet of low-budget TV detective shows.”

  “True,” he agreed. “This whole setup could have come straight out of an episode of Murder, She Wrote.”

  “Are you comparing me to Jessica Fletcher? I’m not sure if I should be flattered or insulted.”

  “Why insulted?” He sound genuinely curious.

  “Because there’s a theory out there about why there were so many murders in Cabot Cove and other places Mrs. Fletcher visited. Some think she was a serial killer who covered her tracks by manufacturing evidence to convict other people of her crimes.”

  He laughed.

  “And don’t even get me started on how many things that series got wrong about Maine!”

  “Easy there.” Still chuckling, Luke put one hand on my shoulder. “Let’s stick to the business at hand. One murder is quite enough for this scenario, and you can model yourself after whatever great detective you choose.”

  “I’d prefer to be myself, thank you very much.”

  “Done.” Luke started going through the cabinets. As I’d predicted, they were as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard.

  “I’m not sure Rosanna Swarthout’s death had any connection to the diaries,” I said after a moment. “Other than that they were left behind because Tessa and her sister refused to return to the scene of the crime.”

  “But that’s peculiar in itself, isn’t it? Why not ask someone else to retrieve them? They were obviously important to her. Why else would she leave such detailed instructions about them in her will . . . unless she was senile by the time she wrote it and forgot what she’d done with them.”

  “Bite your tongue!”

  “Do you think Tessa is the one who wrote the diaries?” he asked.

  “I’ve been wondering about that myself.” I opened the oven door and peered inside, then moved on to the cabinet next to the sink. “There were three women in the house. Any or all of them could have been in the habit of writing down their thoughts and recording their daily activities.”

  The prospect of dozens of diary books, all needing to be transcribed and published, was almost enough to have me turning around, getting back into the car, and driving straight to Monticello to tell Mr. Featherstone I wanted no part of Tessa’s strange bequest.

  “We need to be methodical about this,” Luke said, closing the last of the overhead cabinet doors. “Diaries are where you record your most personal thoughts, right?”

  “They can be, especially for young women. If you don’t want someone else to read what you’ve written, you don’t leave it out in the open. I’m not sure the person who wrote the diaries actually hid them, but she’d certainly have kept them in a place where no one else would be likely to stumble upon them by accident.”

  “So, she’d probably have tucked them away out of sight, but it would still have been in a location that was easy for her to access. Maybe we need to start tapping on walls and listening for hollow sounds, rather than looking in cabinets and drawers.”

  “Shades of Nancy Drew,” I murmured.

  “And the Hardy Boys,” he said with a grin. He gestured for me to precede him into the middle room. “Do you want to start in here or take the living room?”

  “You can have the pleasure of checking for a safe hidden behind one of those ugly portraits, but don’t overlook that drawer in the table under the radio.”

  “How big a book are we looking for?”

  “There’s more than one diary,” I reminded him, “and I don’t know what size they are.” I described the fat little page-a-day diaries I’d had as a teen. “Some people prefer to write in a journal, and that could be the size of
a small ledger, or we might be looking for a composition book.”

  I’d seen one of the latter, from 1910, in the Lenape Hollow Historical Society’s museum. The green paper cover had been torn and faded but the writing inside had still been bright and easy to read.

  “Got it,” Luke said. “Anything big enough to scribble in.”

  He left me in the middle room and went directly to the portrait of George Swarthout. I watched him through the archway as he gently edged it aside . . . and found nothing more exciting than wallpaper printed with vines and cabbage roses.

  In addition to chairs and end tables, the Singer sewing machine tucked into the corner, and the sideboard, the room I was searching also contained a large drop-leaf dinner table collapsed to its smallest size and shoved out of the way against an interior wall. Its presence confirmed my earlier assumption that the Swarthouts had used this space as a dining room when they had boarders to feed. During the off-season, with only the three of them living in the house, they’d undoubtedly taken their meals in the kitchen and treated this space as a second living room.

  The sideboard had been designed to store china, linens, and silverware. It took up an inordinate amount of space against the wall the middle room shared with the kitchen. In the drawers and cabinet on the right-hand side, I found almost exactly what I expected, including a complete set of hand-painted china. The storage space on the left side of the sideboard was devoid of diaries, too, but it did yield the most interesting find of the day.

  The Swarthout family Bible was a heavy old thing, ornately bound. I stood up with it cradled in my arms and placed it on top of the sideboard before I opened it. It didn’t take me long to find the pages where the Swarthouts had recorded marriages, births, and deaths. Different hands had inscribed the details. The earliest entry was from the 1860s; the latest was dated 1951.

  At my fingertips, I now had a treasure trove of information about the Swarthout family, including records of George Swarthout’s two marriages and the births of his daughters. Struck by an anomaly, I went back to take another look at the dates of his marriages. I hadn’t misread the information. George Swarthout and Nellie Perry were wed a scant five months before the birth of their first child, Tessa May Swarthout.