Angora Alibi

by Sally Goldenbaum

  • • •

  They gathered at Nell’s in the early evening and spread the computer papers out on the table, poring over them, connecting dots as best they could.

  And alongside the dates were all the stones they turned over.

  A young man who didn’t choose his dalliances wisely.

  An old man with a gift of smell.

  And everything in between, including an innocent shower gift.

  Ben had a meeting; then he and Sam would be over with pizza. And then they’d collect everything they had and put it in Jerry Thompson’s capable hands for his consideration. And hopefully it would lead to a quick conclusion to the awful beginning of their summer. How much of this Jerry already knew was not known. But one thing was clear. The police concentration right now was on peering into every single aspect and angle of Martin Seltzer’s life with a high-powered microscope, looking for a murderer at every turn.

  When the truth might be much easier to find. It was all about dates. All about motive.

  And if they were right, the motive was clear . . . and the timing tragic.

  “Do you think Martin realizes his real role in this?” Cass asked. “I wonder if he . . . if he’s figured any of this out himself.”

  “I don’t know,” Izzy said. She looked up from scouring Nell’s sink. “Lily said he’s been obsessed with finding the morphine thief. He’s been questioning people who might have had access . . .”

  “Questioning people . . . I wonder if that’s a good idea,” Birdie said. “We have had two murders. We don’t want a third. I think that was Horace’s mistake. He figured it out, but instead of going to the police, he tried to get an admission of guilt.”

  Nell dropped the highlighter. She looked at Birdie. “That frightens me, Birdie. I wonder . . . I wonder who he’s questioning.”

  “He could be making his own suppositions,” Birdie said. Her words were coming faster now, her tone urgent.

  “I don’t know.” Cass looked down at their list again. “He’s too smart to put himself in danger, isn’t he? I mean, like you said, two people have already been murdered.”

  “From what Lily said, danger is the furthest thing from his mind. What he cares about is clearing his name . . . for his daughter’s sake.”

  “Of course he would.” Izzy threw down the scouring pad and spun around. Her voice was louder than normal. “He’s a dad. He will do anything for his daughter, himself be damned.” She wrapped her arms around herself and her baby protectively. “I think he could be putting himself in danger—and he won’t care about the danger at all. I already feel that way, and my baby isn’t even born yet.” She picked up her cell phone and called Lily Virgilio.

  Nell tried to call Ben but got his answering machine, his phone off until the meeting ended. She left a brief message.

  Birdie was putting on her sweater.

  “Dr. Seltzer isn’t home,” Izzy said, putting her phone in her pocket. “Lily doesn’t know where he is, but he was very agitated when she saw him leave a short while ago. It had to end, he said. When she called after him, he said he was going to walk the beach, clear his head, and get some answers. He was through protecting people. Then he disappeared out the door. She was with a patient and couldn’t follow him.”

  Nell looked at her niece, knowing there was more. “What? What else did she say, Izzy?”

  “She said that her father owned a gun.”

  The words were still hanging in the air as Nell pulled out her keys and headed for the door.

  “If Martin has connected any of the dots at all, there’s only one person he would be going to see.”

  They dismissed the thought of calling the police and left a message for Sam and Ben instead. It would take too long to make a valid case to some night duty officer who might not be familiar with progress on the case. Ben would call the chief at home.

  Nell drove quickly, rounding the bends that led to the beach road. The sky had grown dark while they were poring over their papers, not noticing the time of day. Stars appeared, the moon a sliver of light, hanging low over the water.

  At one end of Paley’s Cove, a party was gathering force, a small bonfire lighting the sky and suntanned bodies dancing on the packed sand. The smell of hot dogs filled the air. They thought of old Horace. He’d be sitting on his porch, smelling the dogs, listening to the music. “Did he enjoy those nights?” Cass wondered out loud.

  If the music wasn’t too loud, they guessed he would have. Red, too.

  Nell drove on, past the line of parked cars, and pulled in at the farthest end.

  Across the road, Horace Stevenson’s house sat dark and empty. In front of them, the cliff was silhouetted against the night, the mansions at the top lit with warm lights and television sets, candles on white-clothed dinner tables.

  They piled out of the car and walked toward the bend in the path toward the private beach. The servants’ beach. The last place Justin Dorsey had taken a breath. A perfect private spot to meet, to not be seen.

  To be killed.

  The music from the beach silenced their footsteps, but as they neared the granite wall that shielded the Danvers property, they heard faint voices, muted and broken by the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks.

  Nell crept closer, her hands pressed against the rock, guiding her way.

  “We need to talk. . . .”

  It was Martin’s voice. Tired—but thick with anger.

  They crowded close to the boulder, Nell in the front, crouched down behind a bank of thick wild rosebushes and tangled sea grass. They could see shadows on the beach.

  Cass pressed close behind her, and Izzy and Birdie followed, stepping gingerly over the rocky path. They couldn’t see much—but they could hear.

  They had no plan. No weapons. Just the urgent need to get Martin Seltzer out of the shielded stretch of beach before he killed someone.

  The voices continued. “I’ve nothing to say to you. You’re a murderer. You’re going to prison for the rest of your life.”

  For a minute, Nell froze. She thought she heard a click, a gun being cocked?

  “No, Martin,” she called out, rushing around the side of the boulder, prepared to talk him out of an act he’d regret the rest of his life.

  Tamara Danvers and Martin Seltzer turned and stared at her.

  “What are you doing here?” Tamara’s feckless question was tossed away by a pounding wave.

  “Nell, it’s okay,” Martin said. He put out one hand, as if to shove her back into the night.

  But it wasn’t okay. It wasn’t Martin who held a gun.

  It was Tamara Danvers, and she had it aimed directly at Martin Seltzer’s heart. She moved as stealthily as a tiger, backing away from the cliff, her back toward the water, as if Martin might try to escape through the sea and she was preparing to stop him.

  Nell thought of the women standing behind her. The police were probably on their way. Talk. Talk, she told herself.

  She looked over at Tamara. A beam of moonlight lit her face. It was calm, controlled. Her hands were steady.

  “The baby wasn’t Franklin’s, it was Tyler Gibson’s, wasn’t it, Tamara? Poor Tyler, who has no idea he was almost a father.”

  Tamara allowed a curious smile, as if thinking back to her time with the bartender, somehow enjoying the memory. Her bare feet were planted in the sand, her shadow still. “Yes. The baby that wasn’t Franklin’s,” she murmured. “He wasn’t even in the country those nights. I was lonely. An ironic happenstance.” Her voice was almost singsong, but with a chilling edge. “I got pregnant. Franklin wanted a baby. It was karma.”

  “Until it wasn’t,” Martin said. “Two innocent people killed for no reason.”

  She nodded. “Yes. It was unfortunate that the miscarriage didn’t happen a bit sooner. But that wiped the plate clean, in a way. What if the baby looked like Tyler? It was better this way. I will get pregnant again and give him his heir. Rightfully his, this time.”

  She fel
l silent, as if planning in her mind what she would do next.

  Talk, Nell, she told herself again. “Dr. Seltzer was right about Justin’s bad habits. He listened at the door, he overheard your conversation.”

  “And he thought he could make a quick fast buck. And then another. I grew up with kids like that. I know what they are like.”

  “But Dr. Seltzer didn’t know about that, Tamara. He didn’t know Justin was blackmailing you. And then, later, he didn’t know you’d killed him. And he wouldn’t have betrayed your confidence about the pregnancy because he’s a good man. He takes that very seriously. How foolish your distrust of people is.”

  She glanced over at Martin. They were right about Martin’s code of ethics. He was like a confessor, Janie had said. A good listener. But once he examined the calendars and knew that Tamara had been in his office the day the morphine was stolen, he had begun to piece it all together.

  “People’s values change when they’re accused of murder,” Tamara said. She hadn’t taken her eyes off Martin, somehow considering Nell less threatening. “Having him go to prison would be awful for his daughter. I saw him watching her today, hating her worry. Knowing he’d caused it. He’d betray any confidence to protect his Lily.”

  Her voice was tinged with envy as she talked about a father’s love, something she probably had never had herself until Franklin—and his money—came into her life.

  “And when he did—when he told the police I was carrying Tyler’s baby and desperate for my husband not to find out—they’d look further and find out Justin knew about it . . . that he overheard our private conversation. It wouldn’t take long to move along the chain, just like you did, Nell.”

  “Tamara, this is foolish. Don’t make it worse.”

  Tamara’s laugh was unpleasant. “Don’t you worry about me, Nell. Franklin will know exactly what happened here.” She glared at Martin. “I told him how you came on to me in the clinic, Dr. Seltzer. How you’d lure me into your office, put your hands on me—”

  Martin winced at the awful accusation—one that explained Franklin Danvers’ unyielding certainty that Martin Seltzer was a murderer. Tamara had convinced him of that, smoothly, adeptly, probably the same way she’d convinced him to marry her.

  “So he bought me this little gun,” she said, glancing down. “He’ll not be surprised that you came here, looking for me, hoping to satisfy your infatuation. And he won’t be surprised if I was so frightened I used the gun he’d carefully taught me how to shoot. And then Nell . . . Nell came to save me and was caught in the cross fire. So unfortunate.”

  They could hear Martin’s harsh laugh. “It was all in vain, you foolish, arrogant woman,” he said. “That’s the saddest part of all. Both murders. No one would ever have known that the baby you were carrying wasn’t your husband’s. Tyler Gibson had no idea that a pregnancy had come out of your reckless behavior. No one would ever have connected him to it.”

  “Just you,” Tamara said.

  The women standing behind the granite wall could see Tamara’s silhouette in the moonlight, but Nell and Martin were hidden from their sight. Cass pushed back into the darkness and texted Ben. Hurry!, she wrote.

  Nell thought about Tamara’s Roxbury childhood, not so different from Justin’s, probably. Difficult. But she’d been good at escaping. Good at finding a husband with everything she had never had—

  But she wasn’t nearly as good at murder.

  Nell’s breath caught in her lungs, tight and painful. She wondered if the others could hear her heartbeat, loud and raucous to her own ears. And she wondered about Izzy.

  “Horace Stevenson’s death was a mystery to us for a while,” Nell said, filling in the silence. “What could he have known? An old man with bad vision. And then we realized that Horace’s vision was bad, but his other senses filled in for him.”

  “Horace. He was a nice man. I saw him the night I was looking for Justin’s gear. And he saw me. He was walking the beach and he waved at me, though he didn’t now who it was. He probably thought it was Franklin because they’d often see each other on the beach when they couldn’t sleep.

  “So after Justin was dead, I’d check on Horace every few days, take him soup, talk to him, just to be sure he didn’t know anything. And then last Friday he asked if I’d come by. He needed to talk to me, he said.

  “I didn’t know for sure why, so I planned ahead.”

  “You saw Dr. Seltzer that Friday—we checked the calendar. And you took the morphine from his desk. And for good measure, the scuba book you found in Franklin’s library.”

  “Always prepared.” She laughed. “I waited until I knew he’d have his whiskey there, then went over to talk. He figured out it wasn’t Franklin he saw after all, he told me. It was me he had seen that night going into the dive shed. He was positive of it. So he’d have to tell the authorities, but because we were friends, he wanted to tell me first so I wouldn’t be surprised. He truly was a decent fellow. I tried to tell him it couldn’t have been me, but he was sure, he said. I could tell from his voice that he was serious—and completely coherent. They might have believed him. It was a chance I couldn’t take. He never told me how he was sure, but the certainty was in his voice.”

  “It was because of your scent,” Nell said calmly.

  Tamara frowned. “My sense? What does that mean?”

  “No, not sense—that’s what we thought for a while, too. It was your scent—Chanel Number Five. Just like you gave to Izzy for her shower. We know one another’s scents—women especially—but not in an obvious way. Not in the way Harold did. He smelled you there. That’s how he was certain it was you. He even knew the name of it, though it sounded more like channel when he said it out loud. And when we let Red smell the perfume on a piece of paper, the dog went wild. That’s when we knew that same scent must have visited Horace the night he was murdered. And Red remembered it in horror.”

  Nell had run out of things to say, and she could see the agitation starting to pinch Tamara’s face. Her calm demeanor was disappearing, her grip on the gun tighter.

  Nell turned slightly, trying to catch a glimpse of movement, of the women behind the wall.

  And then the night lit up as headlights came toward them along the beach. The screech of brakes. And next a rush of blue uniforms, some wading in the water, emerged through the blackness.

  Tamara jerked her head, spun around, then raised the gun.

  But it wasn’t the lights shining in her eyes that stopped her.

  Nor the women.

  It was Franklin Danvers’ voice.

  He came through the thick wooden door just behind Martin, the same door Tamara had used to sneak out into the night to make sure Justin’s dive was a fatal one.

  The voice was fierce and commanding, the figure imposing and stolid. Franklin Danvers walked over to his wife and slapped the gun to the sand.

  He kicked it away and waited for a policeman to pick it up and wrap it in plastic. Then, without a word, he walked away from his wife and toward Chief Jerry Thompson, waiting at the side of the granite boulder.

  Martin Seltzer slid his back down the side of the stone wall, breathing heavily. Birdie moved quickly to his side, offering comforting words until a young police officer relieved her. He leaned over the older man, handing him a bottle of water and a supporting hand. They’d sent for an ambulance, he said. Just in case. And his daughter was on her way.

  Ben and Sam were next, racing across the wet sand. They’d called the police, then driven like madmen toward the beach.

  “Izzy?” Sam yelled out into the darkness. “Izzy, where are you?”

  Nell spun around.

  But Izzy was gone.

  “She’s up there.” A policeman hurrying off to read Tamara Danvers her rights, handcuffs dangling from his belt, pointed back toward the cars lined up at the edge of the beach. “Over there.”

  They reached her in seconds.

  “Anyone coming?” she said calmly, reaching for th
e car door. “I’m on my way to have a baby.”

  Then she handed Sam the car keys.

  Chapter 35

  Nothing could deter Laura Danvers from celebrating the new baby—and the fact that the baby herself would attend was a bonus that filled her with great pleasure.

  The chosen Saturday was cool and dry, the party set to begin just before sunset—a perfect time to celebrate this new baby, one that the entire town of Sea Harbor, or so it seemed—was welcoming into its arms with love and joy.

  Abigail Kathleen Perry had come into the world quickly, once she knew the world was ready for her. In a heartbeat, this tiny baby—with a head of Sam’s sandy locks, a sweet round face that seemed to smile as Sam rested her in her mother’s arms—changed forever the moment, the day, the summer, and many Sea Harbor lives.

  Izzy’s parents arrived on the first plane out of Kansas City, and Nell and her sister wept in tandem, sharing this lovely miracle Izzy had brought into the world.

  Sam allowed no talk of the past weeks in the birthing room—not when Abigail was present. Only positive, nurturing vibes were to touch his baby girl, he said, and then he held her close and carried her to the window to explain what a wonderful town she was living in, what a wonderful, brave, sometimes foolish mother she had, and how loved she would always be.

  • • •

  It was over a glass of wine on Sam and Izzy’s deck a week later that they finally revisited the scene, filling in the blanks, though there weren’t many of them. It took that long for the men in the knitters’ lives to face the danger their wives might have been in. Could have been in. And to allow the night on the beach to be talked about in their presence.

  But the joy of sweet Abigail assuaged all things, and the worries were allowed to fade.

  The police had uncovered that Tami Ashland was Tamara’s given name. She’d been a problem child growing up. No father, just like Justin. And no real sense of right and wrong. Right was what Tamara wanted for herself. Wrong were people in her life who prevented that. Even her surprise pregnancy—the one-week stand with a handsome, gullible Tyler Gibson while her husband was in Europe—didn’t concern her. Her husband wanted a baby, and she would give him one. But when an overly attentive Franklin began asking for every possible precaution and test, she worried some, and talked it over with Martin Seltzer, confiding in him her uncertainty over the baby’s father’s identity. He assured her everything was fine—the tests Martin had asked for were for other things, not paternity. No one would know.