Three May Keep a Secret (An Endurance Mystery)

by Susan Van Kirk

  Brenda was a loving aunt to her nieces and nephew and memorials may be taken to the First National Bank of Endurance to be placed in trust for their education. Please note that bequests should be made out to “The Norris Children’s Educational Fund.”

  A private family graveside service will be held on Wednesday, June 22, with the Rev. Cynthia Andrews officiating. Internment will take place at the Shady Meadows Cemetery.

  Online condolences may be sent to www.homestretchfuneralhome.com.

  That makes it real, she thought. Sitting down at Brenda’s—her—desk, Grace mulled over the press conference. What really surprised her were Bill Tully’s comments. Rumor had it that he had quite a temper, but she hadn’t heard or seen it before. He appeared almost paranoid about people’s opinions of his part in Brenda’s death. As he said, he couldn’t help it if Brenda did something stupid after she left his place.

  Swiveling around in her chair, she cupped her elbow with one hand and tapped her lips with her other hand. She surveyed her office in a slow, panoramic turn, and wondered where Brenda might have hidden that book Shannon wanted so badly. Folders of papers and pictures would be too obvious. She had moved most of Brenda’s personal belongings, like her photographs and yearbooks, to boxes for her brother to pick up.

  If she were going to hide something small and flat, where would she hide it? Turning back to her desk, she opened the desk drawers and felt around for false bottoms or a small booklet taped underneath the drawers. Nothing. Two containers of silk flowers occupied the bookshelves. She picked each of them up and looked inside and under them. She had already taken down the diplomas and there was nothing behind them.

  She focused her eyes on the bookshelves again, raising her eyebrows and lingering on the titles. Brenda loved Poe. Maybe she hid that little black book inside or behind the Poe anthology. Walking over to the bookshelves, Brenda pulled out the Poe book and thumbed through the pages. Nothing. She checked the binding and the endpapers glued onto the book’s covers. Grace remembered a conversation with Brenda in which Grace had mentioned with amazement that a 1700s poet hid 900 pages of his poetry inside the endpapers of books in his library. When his personal library was sold in Nebraska in the twentieth century, the astonished buyer found the poems hidden in the bindings of his books. She returned to the Poe book. Well, nothing in here. Nothing loose and no places to slip in a small notebook.

  Placing the book back on the shelf, Grace examined the other titles. The Great Gatsby, The Last of the Mohicans, A Room of One’s Own, and Moby Dick. Then she spied Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. That was an acerbic volume if she ever saw one. It was also perfect for Brenda’s sarcastic sense of what was humorous. She pulled it off the shelf and fanned the pages. Nothing. Then she inspected the binding in the front and the back. Inside the back cover was a small slit, so small that it might be overlooked unless someone were scrutinizing every inch with care. She slipped her baby finger under the edge of the backing page and could feel something inside, but the opening was too small and she didn’t want to rip the paper. Walking over to the desk, she opened her purse, pulled out her cosmetic bag, and felt around for tweezers. Then she used her tweezers to pull out the object: a small, black-covered notebook. Turning it over, she recognized Brenda’s handwriting on the front cover. She had written “Brenda’s Retirement Fund.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  * * *

  Grace plopped down on the wooden bench at the edge of Endurance Park. She panted, coughed, and attempted to catch her breath. “Why . . . did I let you . . . talk me into this . . . TJ?”

  TJ stopped jogging and sat down with a nonchalant air as she looked around the park and shrugged her shoulders. “I thought you invited me for a run because you said I needed to get some stress relief. You didn’t tell me you hadn’t run for a long time.”

  Grace could feel her pulse slow down. “And what about the fact . . . that you’re still a youngster . . . and I’m . . . not?”

  “You’re the youngest fifty-six-year-old I know, and yes, I have seventeen years on you. But I don’t think you need to trade yourself in for a new model yet.”

  “Two miles is enough . . . for a good start,” Grace said as her breath returned. She opened the lid on her water bottle and drank deeply. “At least it’s early so it isn’t so hot and humid yet.” She looked down at her sweat-drenched shorts and shirt. “You’re right. I need to get back to this.” She took another drink. “Feel any less stressed?”

  TJ stretched her arms and replied, “Ah, this was a nice warm-up, Grace, and yes, I’m feeling better.”

  “And how is ‘Mr. Construction Guy with the Chiseled Abs?’ ”

  TJ smiled luxuriously. “ ‘Mr. Construction Guy’ is just fine . . . and so are his abs.”

  Grace laughed and then broke into a fit of coughing. Once it stopped, she said, “I only ask because I have your best interests in mind. I can’t help but see his battered brown truck when it’s parked in your driveway. You know—neighborhood watch. The NRA sticker on the back is a dead giveaway that you’re incompatible.”

  “Haven’t had a great deal of time for my boy toy with this murder investigation. The chief got the report today that it definitely was arson that killed Brenda. Gasoline—multiple pours—no igniter. Whoever it was knew what he was doing.”

  “I suppose Mike Sturgis doesn’t have much experience with burning down buildings.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I don’t think he has.”

  “What about Brenda’s ‘little black book’? Any luck?”

  “Oh, crap! That was like throwing a stick of dynamite in the center of town. You wouldn’t believe all the names and numbers with dollar signs in that book. We had to go back to square one. Some are reputable guys in town and others—well, reputable or not, I’d guess the male population of Endurance is sweating this out. Course they don’t know we’ve found the book, but they will once we start questioning them today. Chief has called in reinforcements because we need more feet on the ground. I wonder if Brenda could be nominated for some book of world records for the most people who want to kill her.”

  “You must have some way to eliminate them.”

  “We do. And that’s why I use you as a sounding board, Grace. You help me sort things through.” She patted Grace on the shoulder. “And you don’t divulge my secrets.”

  “Is that why we’re sitting on a bench in the park at six-thirty in the morning?”

  “Ah, you guessed my strategy.”

  Grace was silent for a moment. “How about alibis? If they have a strong alibi, won’t that eliminate them?”

  “It would. And that’s exactly where we’ll start.” TJ took a few swallows of water and looked off across the highway. “One of the key questions is, ‘Where’s the money?’ Generally, we follow the money. We’ve checked her bank accounts and nada.”

  “What about online accounts—you know—maybe a stock portfolio?”

  “That’s a possibility. I doubt that she has it stashed away in an offshore account in the Cayman Islands. I don’t see her among corporate CEOs and millionaires who try to evade taxes.” She pursed her lips and focused on the squirrels chasing each other around a small copse of trees. “I suppose we’ve missed something.”

  “I know people don’t generally hide money under their mattresses these days, but could she have had it in her house? It would be long gone now.”

  “Possibility. On the other hand, where else might you stash cash that you don’t want anyone to know about?”

  Grace thought for a moment. “Lockbox at the bank? What about a friend who would put it in his or her account? I guess you’d have to trust them, wouldn’t you?”

  “Lockbox is a thought. I have that on my to-do list. The only possibility for a friend might be Shannon Shiveley. I don’t trust that sniveling, little liar, but wasn’t she close to Brenda?”

  “She’s the one who told me about the black book, so she’s an obvious choice. I can’t thi
nk of anyone else at the newspaper or at Tully’s—she seems to have called the sports bar her home away from home.”

  “I’ll check into both of those. Good thinking, Grace. Someday I may have to deputize you.”

  “To change the subject, I know you had Mike Sturgis in. It’s all over town. He strikes me as too stupid to fit your description of ‘knew what he was doing.’ ”

  “Had him in for several hours and grilled him on a timeline the night of the fire. Fortunately for us, he was as naive as about eighty percent of the population—he talked, no lawyer. Unfortunately for me, I forgot to button a button on that cream-colored silk blouse and I saw him checking out my breasts throughout the interview.”

  “At least he has good taste.”

  “We do agree on something.”

  “Maybe no lawyer means he doesn’t have anything to hide,” Grace said as she took another drink from her water bottle. “Oops. Double negative.”

  “We got a search warrant based on witnesses to his threats. Actually, I guess you could be on that list, Grace, since you heard him at Tully’s that night. His warehouse has plenty of gasoline—says he uses it all the time in his business and doesn’t know if any is missing.”

  “Does it strike you that anyone at the bar that night could have seen Brenda drunk and taken advantage? You might want to consider the other people who were in the bar. Maybe one of them is someone she tried to blackmail.” She yawned and then added, “Not me, of course.”

  TJ stood and began to do hamstring stretches. “Sturgis doesn’t remember how many beers he drank or even who he talked to, not even Brenda. You were there. What was your take on his condition?”

  “By the time I saw him he was wildly drunk and talked like a big shot. He threatened Brenda and might have assaulted her if Tully hadn’t called for the police really fast. I thought he was scary, TJ.”

  “He said he’d never hurt her, but I believe he’s lying about something. I think his exact words were, ‘This is just great. Now that bitch is getting even with me from hell, since I’m sure that’s where she is.’ ”

  Grace gave TJ a point-blank look. “Do you believe him—about the ‘not hurting her’ part?”

  “Not sure. He definitely has a motive, but Jake and I both felt he lied about something—body language does it every time.”

  “By motive you mean—”

  “Brenda. Tabloid stories. He says she made a serious impact on his business, not in a good way. If you remember, she accused him of taking shortcuts, overbilling, using poor-quality materials. He claims she took clients away from him and he has kids who will leave for college in the near future. Bingo: motive.”

  “Sure seems like you have quite a few motives. Is Sturgis at the top of the list?”

  “He’s hired an attorney to sue—for false arrest, only we didn’t arrest him. All the time I questioned him he was quoting the Constitution, saying it puts reporters away for lying. Do you think he read the same document we studied back in high school?”

  “Not sure he has a clue. You have to remember that Dave Cassandas taught him history and civics, and his classes probably consisted mostly of talk about the game plan for Friday night’s basketball game.”

  “All right, you’ve got a point. I’ll concede. So I tried to get Sturgis to reconstruct a timeline from that night. He was home the next morning but his truck was gone from Tully’s parking lot by two a.m. He blacks out when he’s had too much to drink, so he doesn’t remember how his truck got from Tully’s to his office or how he got home.”

  “An hour before Brenda died,” Grace said. She paused thoughtfully and added, “Would he have had time to go to the warehouse, grab gasoline, and hightail it to Brenda’s to have the fire up and going before three a.m.?”

  “Plenty of time.”

  “How did he act when you questioned him?”

  “I wish I could have knocked him off his chair. He was all sprawled out, cocky, and slammed his fist on the table at least twice. It’s good that it was a simple crime because I can’t see him planning anything elaborate.”

  Grace cleared her throat and sat up straighter. “You always talk about records. Does he have a record?”

  “Nothing a little anger management training couldn’t fix. He admits himself that he gets angry, drinks too much, and ‘says crap.’ His wife has threatened him with divorce if he comes home drunk once more. Three months ago he took care of some barn construction at Andrew Lawrence’s farm. Lawrence claimed the workmanship was shoddy—shades of Brenda, exposé writer—and, when he wouldn’t pay, Sturgis got out of control and Andy called the police. Mike has, unfortunately, a very thick folder.”

  “Is he able to explain the bruise on Brenda’s forehead?”

  “No. Not a word. I can see various possibilities, but the one I explained to him was that he hated her and decided to give her a scare. He goes to her house and pours gasoline on the foundation. He’s still drunk so that might excuse his lack of logic, but it doesn’t excuse his stupidity. Figuring she isn’t stupid and will smell smoke and get out, he lights the house. Of course, her car wasn’t there, so he might have thought she was gone. But that still doesn’t explain the bruise. He might have done that before he fired the house but he doesn’t remember.

  “We have a second scenario, too,” TJ said.

  “A second scenario?”

  “Besides the line of people who have been blackmailed—and you have yet to find the money—we also have victims of her newspaper stories. Maybe Tully was right—we’d have a line around the block of possible murderers of opportunity. And then we have yet another possibility.”

  “Good grief! What else?”

  “Sturgis claims Brenda was shacked up with a married man. Didn’t get the name, of course. But he said he’d heard it from more than one person. I believe he ended that part of the conversation with, ‘Enough people with motives to kill her but not enough cops to round them all up.’ I have to admit he may be right on that one.”

  “Are you sure this wasn’t smoke and mirrors to get himself off the hook?”

  “It might be, but we will start on interviews with the blackmail-ees—I refuse to call them victims if they were dumb enough to get mixed up with Brenda—starting tomorrow morning.”

  “We?”

  “Chief has sent for some help from the department in Woodbury.”

  “So, you have Mike Sturgis with means, opportunity, and motive. Standing behind him are, oh, twenty or thirty people with motives also. Sounds to me like you’ll need an army on the ground.”

  TJ glanced at her phone. “Time to go, Grace. I’ve got to get to work. I swear I’ll get this guy.”

  “Do we have time for a leisurely walk back to town?” she pleaded.

  TJ smiled. “Not on your life,” and she was up and jogging in place.

  Grace sighed, gave a half-hearted shrug, and stowed away her water bottle. “Guess that was too much to ask. You go on. I think I’ll take a more leisurely pace and call it a nature walk.”

  “And I’m going to catch a killer.”

  Grace watched TJ head down the path out toward the highway. Once across that barrier, the sidewalks would take her to town. I have to get back to this running, Grace thought. It makes me feel better and gives me a chance to talk to TJ. She has so much on her hands right now. In some ways she isn’t any different than she was in high school—well, maybe a little less stubborn, but still she loved to explore possibilities and was curious about everything.

  She laughed out loud when she thought of TJ, the contentious teenager. She had moved the future detective into her Honors English class during her freshman year at Endurance High School. TJ had dropped her head on her desk and refused to do anything. Grace smiled at the memory of her indignant demands. Too much work, too many white kids, no one that looks like me. You placed me in this class against my will and I’m not gonna do it.

  Not to be outmaneuvered, Grace had shown up at TJ’s rundown, ramshackle house. She re
membered that visit vividly. Ms. Sweeney hesitantly let her in the door after Grace explained who she was and her mission. Inside, every doily, photograph, pillow, and knickknack was in place and squeaky clean. Grace sat down as if she visited the house of an African American lady every day, and Ms. Sweeney brought out fresh lemonade and cookies as if she entertained white ladies in her home every day. Ms. Kimball assured her that TJ should be in her Honors class. Laughing, Grace remembered TJ’s remark: “So whadda ya want with a skinny-ass black girl in your white-bread class?”

  Her mother had scolded her with “that look” and called her “Teresa Johanna.” After that TJ was quiet.

  Grace remembered she stayed calm and composed and told Ms. Sweeney that TJ could write her ticket to college if she took the Honors class and other hard classes. She was extremely bright.

  “And who’s gonna pay for that ticket?” asked Mama Sweeney in her quiet, polite voice.

  “She’ll get a scholarship,” Grace had said.

  “We ain’t takin’ no charity,” Ms. Sweeney had sniffed and mumbled.

  “This wouldn’t be charity. Colleges give scholarships because they recognize academic promise. This could be her chance.”

  “We’ve been promised to before,” her mama said. Grace could see the hurt in her eyes but also the ramrod-straight back as she sat on the edge of her chair.

  “This time is different. She’ll have to work hard and it will pay off. I promise. Just let her try it for a year and see what happens,” Grace had said.

  Mama Sweeney said “yes” and Grace had TJ trapped in her net. After that, TJ’s world changed. She read books she’d never heard of before—Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Native Son— and books about worlds she’d never imagined: Jane Eyre and Things Fall Apart. Grace steered her toward books about strong women who struggled and overcame adversity, especially when the world was younger and belonged to men. She got a full ride to the state university, took a law enforcement class because nothing else fit in her schedule, and found her niche.