Murder, She Edited

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Later that afternoon, I drove to Swan’s Crossing to wait for Sure Thing Security to show up and rip out their camera. I was also expecting Honoria Steinberg, the owner of Monticello Maids. That business had been our second stop of the morning. Ms. Steinberg had been much more cooperative, and a hundred times more pleasant to deal with, than Martin Meyerson. When she asked for a couple of hours to go through her records, I suggested that she bring them out to the farm. She’d been happy to oblige.

  Meyerson’s man needed only a few minutes to remove the company’s equipment. Grinning, he presented me with the broken pieces of a disintegrating cassette. “Piece of junk,” he said. “Hasn’t worked in years.”

  He’d just left when a low-slung sports car pulled into the driveway and a woman I’d never seen before got out. She could have been any age from forty into her late fifties, given her artfully streaked hair and skillfully applied makeup. Her outfit, although casual, probably cost more than I spend on refurbishing my entire wardrobe in the course of a year.

  “Ms. Lincoln? Michelle Lincoln?”

  “Yes?”

  She held out a hand. “I’m Laura Roth.”

  “What can I do for you, Ms. Roth?”

  “My parents rented that apartment.” She gestured toward the garage. “Charles and Nina Roth.”

  “Ah,” I said, belatedly making the connection. “Won’t you come in?”

  She followed me up the steps to the landing and into the kitchen, looking around with a great deal of curiosity and a hint of distaste. When I sat down at the table, she followed suit.

  “I’m afraid I can’t offer you refreshments. There haven’t been any provisions in the house since your parents lived here.”

  “They lived above the garage,” she corrected me.

  “Of course.”

  “And they were suspected of killing Rosanna Swarthout.”

  “They were questioned, certainly, but—”

  “They were subjected to interrogation, their names were in the newspapers, and they were never cleared of suspicion. It haunted them for the rest of their lives. As their only child, I was also forced to bear the weight of an unjust accusation.”

  She didn’t seem to have suffered too badly, but I bit back that observation. It was unfair of me to make assumptions. A polished exterior doesn’t always reflect the inner person.

  “It was a long time ago,” I said, careful to keep my tone neutral and my voice gentle. “Before you were born.” Seeing her up close, I readjusted my estimate of her age and put her in her mid-fifties.

  “Do you think that makes a difference? How would you feel if your parents were forced to live their entire lives with the fear that they might, at any moment, be arrested for a crime they didn’t commit?”

  “It must have been terrible,” I agreed, “but surely, after the police announced that the murder was committed during a burglary, they were off the hook.”

  “Every few years, the sheriff’s department would review the case. Every time, they’d come and question my parents again. It never ended!”

  Since she looked as if she was about to cry, or maybe scream in frustration, I kept to myself the thought that the Roths might have been a tad paranoid. Alternatively, they might have had reason to worry . . . if they had killed Rosanna.

  “I’m sorry they had to endure such persecution,” I said, “but I’m not sure I understand why you’re here today.”

  “I would have thought that would be obvious. You inherited the place and everything in it, including Tessa Swarthout’s diaries. Have you found them yet?”

  “I’m still looking, but how did you—”

  “You have to find them. Find them and publish them.”

  “That’s what Tessa wanted, and that’s my intention, but how did—”

  “That’s the only way the lies will be exposed. The only way my parents’ names will be cleared.”

  I struggled to follow her reasoning. The diaries, whoever had written them, dated from before the murder. I couldn’t understand why Laura thought there would be anything in them to exonerate her parents.

  She leaned closer, her eyes a little wild. “You have to help me. The truth was edited out of the original investigation of the case.”

  “A cover-up?” That seemed unlikely. “Why would anyone do such a thing?” I held up a hand to stop her from answering. “Wait. First tell me how you found out about the diaries.” Their existence wasn’t common knowledge.

  Before she could answer, we were interrupted by the toot of a car horn. A van with the logo for Monticello Maids emblazoned on its side pulled into the driveway.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Leaving Laura Roth sitting at the kitchen table, I went out to greet Ms. Steinberg and offer to help her carry the stack of printouts she’d scooped up from the passenger side of her vehicle. I steered her across the lawn to the front porch.

  “Thank you for coming,” I said. “Would you mind waiting in the living room while I finish up with something?”

  I was trying to be considerate, assuming that Laura wouldn’t appreciate a third party overhearing the questions I had for her, but by the time I returned to the kitchen, it was empty. The sound of a car starting drew me to the window just in time to see Laura back around the van and out into the road. A moment later, she’d driven out of sight.

  I bit back a curse. I had no idea how to contact her. My only chance to press for answers had just disappeared in a cloud of dust.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Honoria Steinberg had brought all the paperwork Monticello Maids had on Tessa’s house. Her firm kept meticulous records. Unfortunately, they only went back ten years.

  “It’s my understanding that the previous company went out of business.” She craned her neck to see into the next room.

  “Would you like a tour?” I asked.

  “I’d love one. I have to admit I’ve been curious about this place. The housekeepers who’ve cleaned here have come back to the office with some pretty strange tales.” At my lifted eyebrows, she shook her head. “Oh, nothing sinister!”

  “No ghosts?”

  Missing the dryness of my voice, she forced a chuckle. “Hardly! They were just taken aback by the way the place looks. It certainly is . . . retro.”

  As I showed her around, I gave her a sanitized version of Tessa’s abandonment of her family home. Twenty minutes later we were back downstairs again, settled at the kitchen table with her records spread out on top of it.

  “Can you recall anything at all about the company that looked after the house before Monticello Maids took over?” I asked.

  She remembered only that they’d gone by the name Clean-Rite.

  With Darlene’s help, I could try to track down their former employees, but I didn’t hold out much hope that we’d find them. Clean-Rite might not even have been the first firm to care for Tessa’s farmhouse, and I didn’t suppose that housecleaning services in the 1950s kept much in the way of records anyway. Anything considered women’s work back then didn’t get much respect. Even in the seventies, when I’d been a young wife, I’d often felt like a second-class citizen. Although my income was on a par with what James made, I couldn’t get a credit card in my own name. If I’d wanted to buy a house, I’d have had to find a man to cosign before I could get a mortgage. As the saying goes, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

  “Why are you so interested in these records?” Ms. Steinberg asked.

  Jerked back to the present day, it took me a moment to focus. When I did, I realized that I’d have done better to look at them in her office. I needed to talk to the women who actually did the cleaning, not their boss.

  “Two or more diaries were supposed to have been left behind in this house,” I said bluntly, “but I haven’t been able to locate them.”

  She bristled with indignation. “I can assure you that none of my employees removed anything from the premises.�
��

  “I didn’t think they had, but I was hoping one of the housekeepers might remember having seen them.”

  “My ladies come in to keep things clean and tidy. They don’t snoop and they leave everything exactly where they found it.” Still sounding huffy, she added, “A diary is a book. They’d see it as another object they have to dust, nothing more.”

  “Of course.” I tried to make my voice soothing, but some of my impatience bled through. “The thing is, if I can’t find and edit those diaries, I won’t inherit the house.”

  She frowned. “Then who will?” Clearly, she hoped whoever owned it would continue to employ Monticello Maids.

  I tried to see the place through her eyes. This was a pretty cushy job—just give the furniture a lick and a polish and vacuum every two weeks and occasionally wash the windows. Since no one lived here, there was never any mess to clean up.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The entire situation is a little screwy.”

  “So you mentioned when you were showing me around.”

  I waited a beat. There didn’t seem much point in keeping quiet about the details.

  “I told you that Tessa Swarthout’s stepmother died and Tessa and her sister left right after, abandoning all their possessions. Actually, the stepmother was murdered, probably by a burglar.”

  Ms. Steinberg’s eyes went wide. “Well no wonder they didn’t want to go on living here. I certainly wouldn’t want to sleep in a house where there’d been a murder.”

  “It may be that the missing diaries contain information relating to the crime.”

  Laura Roth certainly thought they might be relevant. Even Detective Brightwell had entertained that possibility.

  Mulling over what I’d told her, Ms. Steinberg leaned back in her chair. “All right. I’ll ask my employees if they remember seeing books of any kind here, but I’d prefer not to tell them why you want to know. One of my best workers is highly suggestable. If she heard about the murdered stepmother, she’d convince herself that she had seen that poor woman’s ghost.”

  “Thank you. Assuming I do inherit, I doubt I’ll keep the property any longer than necessary before I put it on the market, but I’ll be happy to renew your contract for as long as I am the owner.”

  Something in her satisfied smile made me think she shared Luke’s opinion that I wouldn’t find it easy to unload my white elephant. I wondered, briefly, where on earth that term had come from. Then I returned my attention to the printouts in front of me.

  I skimmed the pages, uncertain what it was I was looking for. Whatever it was, I didn’t find it. Time sheets meticulously recorded every visit to the Swarthout farm. An itemized expense list detailed the cost of cleaning supplies as well as the hourly wages of the cleaners.

  My sigh sounded loud in the quiet kitchen. I looked up to find Ms. Steinberg watching me with a considering expression on her face.

  “What?”

  “In an old place like this one, there are probably all kinds of good hiding places for something the size of a small book.”

  “I don’t know how big the diaries are. If they’re more like journals, I could be looking for something as large as a ledger.”

  She dismissed that concern with a careless wave of one hand. “Have you checked in the rafters in the attic? That’s where my brother used to hide his copies of Playboy.”

  “I’ll keep your suggestion in mind.” I’d read somewhere that searchers often fail to look above their heads, so she might be right, but at the same time I realized that my next sweep of the premises would probably be the last. I may be an optimist, but I’m also a realist. At some point, I’d have to accept that I was wasting my time looking for something that just wasn’t there.

  With startling abruptness, Ms. Steinberg sat up straighter. I am not exaggerating when I say that she looked like she’d just had the proverbial lightbulb turn on inside her head. “What about the inventory?” she asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The inventory. A list of all the items in the house when the stepmother died and how much they were worth.” Her hands flew in time with her words as she grew more and more excited. “The authorities usually make an inventory of the deceased’s possessions when there’s a question about a will or an inquest into a person’s death. Did you ask if there is one?”

  I hadn’t thought to, but I’d certainly remedy that oversight at my first opportunity.

  She waved off my expressions of gratitude.

  “I don’t know that it will be much help, even if it exists. It would only enumerate what the stepmother owned, not the possessions belonging to the two sisters.”

  “Then I’d better hope it was Rosanna who kept the diaries.”

  Our business concluded, Ms. Steinberg wished me good luck finding them and promised to let me know if any of her ladies remembered seeing any books while they were cleaning.

  I’ll need luck, I thought when she’d gone. It was a pity that Leland Featherstone hadn’t yet been old enough to practice law back when Rosanna was murdered. He’d probably still been a teenager at the time, but perhaps he could tell me who had originally handled the Swarthout estate for Tessa and Estelle, and if anyone had ordered an inventory to be taken.

  Featherstone’s name came first in the list of partners, so it was possible he was the firm’s founder. Since I’d gotten the impression that he’d been Tessa’s lawyer for a long time, I wondered if he’d taken over the client list of an older firm, one that was in business in the late 1950s.

  The list of questions I wanted to ask Leland Featherstone, Esquire, just kept getting longer and longer.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Another phone call to Featherstone, De Vane, Doherty, Sanchez, and Schiller yielded familiar results. Mr. Featherstone was in a conference and would have to get back to me. The earliest opening to meet with him in person was the following Wednesday, a full week away. I made the appointment and asked to be notified if he had any cancellations and could see me sooner.

  After I disconnected, I wandered into the downstairs bedroom Tessa had used. Ms. Steinberg wasn’t the first to voice the possibility that the diaries had been hidden. Luke had suggested pulling up floorboards to check beneath them. I’d been resisting doing something so drastic, but I’d reached the point where I couldn’t afford to discount any theory.

  I felt a little foolish circling the bed and pressing down hard with each step I took, but my effort to find a board that creaked or wobbled wasn’t any more absurd than all the wall tapping I’d done with Luke and Ellen. Only later, at home, had I’d realized that in a farmhouse as old and uninsulated as this one, all the spaces inside the walls were hollow.

  There wasn’t much open flooring in Tessa’s room. I considered moving the bed and bureau out into the hall, but they were both big, heavy pieces of furniture. I compromised by getting down on my hands and knees and running my fingers over as much as I could reach of the wooden surface beneath them. The floor felt gritty, but all the boards were tightly aligned. There wasn’t enough room to insert so much as a fingernail between them.

  I fared no better in the back room, the one Estelle had used during the season. Upstairs, I started in Rosanna’s bedroom. I tapped and tugged and once again crawled under a bed to check the flooring. Nothing irregular leapt out at me.

  Next came the corner room that contained the rest of Estelle’s possessions. By the time I crossed the hall to her door, I was hot and tired and feeling more than a little pessimistic. Still, having come this far, I was determined to finish what I’d begun.

  My expectations were not high. In the end, I almost missed the telltale creak. I stopped and shifted my weight, tentatively pushing down on the same spot a second time. Was I just imagining that one board had moved a little? I knelt and applied pressure with both hands. This time the floorboard wobbled and creaked.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” I muttered under my breath. “Just because you found a wonky section of flooring
doesn’t mean there’s anything hidden beneath it.”

  The spot in question was located right in front of the nightstand next to the bed. It would have been a convenient place for Estelle to hide something she didn’t want others to see. The floorboard and those next to it were among the shorter sections of wood, too, only seven or eight inches in length. It was impossible not to see the potential.

  Encouraged, I pried at the seam with my fingers. That the board resisted wasn’t too surprising. Whether it concealed a secret hiding place or not, it hadn’t been lifted for decades.

  Wishing I’d brought a crowbar, I kept clawing at it, breaking two fingernails before the plank abruptly came free and sent me rocking back onto my heels. Setting the length of wood aside, I bent down and peered into the hollow space between the upstairs floor and the downstairs ceiling. It was a couple of inches deep, just the right size to hide a book, but it appeared to be empty.

  Disappointment swamped me. If I’d been the weepy sort, I’d probably have burst into tears. Instead, I took a couple of deep breaths and then pried up the floorboards on either side of the opening.

  More empty space taunted me. To be absolutely certain nothing was hidden under the floor, I’d have to stick my hand inside the hole and feel around in all directions. I might find a stash of diaries. I might also encounter something else, like a spider or mice droppings. Another snake seemed unlikely, but I dearly wished I’d thought to bring a pair of heavy work gloves with me from home.

  “Stop shilly-shallying,” I muttered under my breath.

  Closing my eyes, I thrust my right hand into the opening and began to fish around. Moving my fingers forward and backward over the rough surface and then to the left and right of the opening, I encountered nothing worse than dirt and dust bunnies. I retracted my hand and fished in my pocket for a tissue to wipe my fingers.

  Glaring at the hole, I flattened myself on the floor, took the flashlight I’d brought in from the car in my right hand, and inserted my arm as far as it would go. With my face thrust into the opening, I aimed the beam into the deepest recesses.