“So Anika cheated on Charlie to get back at him for having an affair with Brigit?”
“Or the other way around. It could be that she cheated first and Charlie had an affair to get back at her.”
Julia gave me her sour-lemon expression. “But with Wayne Gundersen?”
“In matters of revenge, any fool will do.”
“You don’t have proof.”
“No, but I hope to get it. And if I’m right, Wayne isn’t the only suspect in Brigit’s murder. Anika had a motive to kill her.”
Julia began to clear our cups from the table, and I slipped back into my coat. I had an early dinner date with Gilroy and didn’t want to be late.
“The last time I saw Charlie and Anika together,” she said, “they looked so in love. Like they were starting fresh.”
“Looks can be deceiving.” And so can hotel reservations, I thought. “Julia, remember Wayne supposedly planned to take Brigit away for a long Valentine’s weekend in Colorado Springs? That was all smoke and mirrors. He was really planning to take Anika—and Charlie knew it.”
“He’d willingly let her go?”
“If that meant he could spend the weekend with Brigit, why not? Though why he’d give Charlie the name of his and Anika’s getaway hotel is beyond me. Unless he thought it was funny in a sick kind of way. He knew he’d be with Brigit while Wayne was with his wife at their special hotel.”
“All this cheating! It’s too much.”
“It’s a spider’s web, Julia.” With a jolt, it occurred to me that I’d overlooked a glaring complication. How, if Anika was Wayne’s lover, was she planning to go to the Springs with him? She and Charlie were going to the dance together, weren’t they? Anika couldn’t be in two places at once.
“Well, have a lovely dinner with the chief,” Julia said, heading into her living room. “How long has it been since you two had a quiet dinner in a restaurant?”
“A few weeks.”
“Oh, dear. The life of a policeman.”
I paused at her front door. “Do you know if Anika planned to be at the Valentine’s Day dance? I’m talking about before Brigit died.”
“She didn’t say, but I would think so. She knew Charlie was putting in a lot of work making the decorations. I assumed they were going together.”
“Then how could she have traveled with Wayne to the Springs?”
Julia threw back her head. “Of course! She couldn’t go with Wayne and Charlie.”
I was tempted to bang my head on Julia’s door out of sheer frustration. Trying to solve this case was like trying to find my way out of a hedge maze. I would optimistically turn a corner only to run straight into another part of the hedge. “Every time I think I’ve figured something out, I hit an obvious obstacle. Something I should have seen a long time ago. Unless Charlie and Wayne are into wife swapping, Anika was going to the dance with Charlie and Brigit was going to the Springs with Wayne this Friday. And if they were into wife swapping”—I flung my hands in the air—“why would either of them murder Brigit?”
“Could there be another murderer? One we haven’t considered?”
“No,” I said with unjustified conviction. “It’s one of the three.”
“So you’ve let Royce off the hook.”
“Don’t gloat, Julia, it’s not becoming.”
She hurried me out her door and onto her porch. “Go. You’ll be late and have to wait another month to have dinner with Chief Gilroy.”
I trotted down her steps and up my own, gave myself the once-over in the mirror, and headed out my back door to the garage. My jeans and sweater would do just fine. Like every other restaurant in town, Wyatt’s was a casual place, and neither Gilroy nor I were into dressing up.
Driving down Finch Hill Road, I encountered another obstacle in my search to find Brigit’s murderer. If the cheating between the two couples was consensual, a disgusting wife-swapping affair, why did Brigit plaster Main Street with flyers? Wasn’t that breaking the rules? If people found out about the couples’ affairs, Wayne’s real estate business would take a dive.
Charlie’s line of work insulated him from public opinion. The lawn-care company he owned didn’t bear his name, and I couldn’t imagine the Board of Trustees severing business ties with him. Juniper Lawn Care had probably signed a years-long contract with the town. Besides, Charlie didn’t service properties himself, he sent others to do the work.
I pulled into a parking space across the street from Wyatt’s, checked my watch, and headed across the street, my thoughts still tumbling like rocks rolling this way and that down a hill. What if wife swapping wasn’t part of the deal? What if Wayne didn’t know about Brigit and Charlie? And what if Charlie had wanted to break off his affair with Brigit? And Brigit, ever dramatic, ever vengeful, had threatened to tell Wayne about the affair?
Worse, what if Brigit had threatened to tell Anika? I’d been a fool not to consider it.
As I pulled open Wyatt’s front door, Charlie leapt to the top of my suspect list.
Gilroy was waiting for me just inside the door. We spotted a small corner table in the already-busy restaurant and decided to snag it before anyone else could. “From now on, early dinner means before five,” I said, following him as he weaved his way around the tables.
Wyatt’s wasn’t the sort of place where you made fashionably late dinner reservations. It was almost unthinkable to order a meal after six or six thirty, and I liked it like that. As Gilroy held my chair for me, my mind traveled back to an eight o’clock working dinner date in Boston my last year there. The managing editor had asked several senior editors to join him at Constantino’s, a trendy Italian restaurant, to discuss the upcoming book calendar. Madness, I thought. Stuffing yourself until nine o’clock at night. I wasn’t even sure I’d eat a cream puff that late.
Gilroy seemed in a talkative mood, so after we ordered, I asked him how his chat with Anika had gone. He turned the question back on me.
“She says she went to your house yesterday to tell you that Brigit was afraid of Wayne.”
“I’m glad she mentioned that. I forgot to tell you. It’s weird she’d show up on my doorstep, and after I’d just talked to her at Town Hall.”
“What was your impression of her?”
Lowering my voice, I said, “I think more than anything, she was covering for herself, though I’m not sure why. Two days before the murder, Brigit tells Anika that Wayne is becoming violent, and Anika brushes it off? Not likely.”
“A funny thing to do with a friend.”
“James, I’m not sure Brigit had any friends. She and Wayne ate dinner several times a month with Charlie and Anika, and as intimate as that sounds, I think their dates were nothing more than habit. Maybe the Gundersens liked eating out but couldn’t stand to be alone with each other. I’ve seen no evidence of genuine warmth between the two couples, present or past. Charlie and Anika were unmoved by Brigit’s death. Downright cold. I talked to Charlie soon after he found out about it, and the biggest reaction I got from him is when I told him that Julia and I had just talked to Anika in her office. That got a rise out of him. Brigit’s murder didn’t.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“He was worried about what she’d told me. They’re both lying. The question is, are they lying about cheating or about murder?” I quickly filled him in on my latest suspicions, unfettered by hard facts though they were, regarding Charlie, but it was clear his mind was elsewhere.
Seeing the waiter approach with our food—steak and potatoes au gratin for Gilroy, Wyatt’s amazing chicken scallopini and broccoli spears for me—we sat in silence until he left, promising to return with our missing bread rolls. Gilroy and I made our cursory comments about how good it all looked, and as I dug into my chicken, I realized that he had two cases on his mind, one involving murder and the other involving criminal bookkeeping at Town Hall. “Did you talk to Anika about the Town Hall books?”
He grimaced. “I asked her about the unus
ual charges on the books, starting with the plumbing charge Mrs. Gundersen brought to my attention.”
“How did she react? Did you make her sweat the sweat of the guilty?”
“I made her laugh.”
My fork froze midway to my mouth.
“She explained the charge, Rachel. I won’t go into the details, but there was nothing wrong with it. She called in one of the trustees to corroborate her explanation and said she’d have the mayor contact me to confirm.”
“But Brigit—”
“And there was nothing wrong with any other charge I could see. Mrs. Mays showed me the books and told me they were open at any time if I wanted to check. I don’t know what game Mrs. Gundersen was playing, but it was a game, and she had me fooled. If I had to guess, she was trying to cause trouble for Mrs. Mays. Without me saying a word, she guessed it was Mrs. Gundersen who told me there was trouble with the bookkeeping.”
I laid down my fork. “Wayne might have told her that Brigit made the accusation.”
“Making his temper tantrum at the station yesterday even more of a sham. Eat your chicken. I have to leave soon.”
“You see what I mean? None of them are friends. Not even Charlie and Brigit. You’d think the man would have a speck of affection for the woman he was having an affair with, but no.”
“Rachel, you don’t know what Mr. Mays really felt. He didn’t do anything to hurt her, right? He didn’t set her up like she did Mrs. Mays with this bookkeeping thing. In Fort Collins I had to tell a man his wife was killed in a boating accident on Horsetooth Reservoir, and when I did, he acted as if I’d told him she’d be late for lunch. If I hadn’t known better, I would have called him cold.”
If I hadn’t known better. I nodded. Of course he knew better. Gilroy’s own wife had been murdered during a carjacking in Denver, before he had moved to Fort Collins and become a police officer. Knowing him as I did now, I was sure he’d taken news of her death stoically, even calmly. And the officer who informed him of the tragedy would have thought him cold—when he was anything but.
“I sense disagreement,” Gilroy said, leaning forward, his elbows on the table. “Tell me why you think they dislike one another. I want to hear your thoughts.”
“In a nutshell? I wonder why Charlie and Anika are doing everything they can to make it look like Wayne killed Brigit.”
CHAPTER 14
After we left Wyatt’s, Gilroy walked back to the station and I headed home. I saw Julia’s living-room lights on as I drove past her house, and though I knew she was wide awake and wanted to hear about my dinner date with Gilroy, I had other plans: a fire in my fireplace, my comfy couch, and my trusty yellow legal pad.
Writing down names, clues, dates, and other details always helped me see the big picture, but with Brigit’s death, it was more crucial than ever that I jot down what I had learned. As far as I could tell, there were multiple motives for her murder, not one of them more striking than the other, and that made for a knotty case.
I made a cup of decaf, got a fire going, and settled into my couch, tucking my legs beneath me. Charlie, Wayne, and Anika were my only focus. The way Gilroy had talked about Royce, he wasn’t considered a suspect, thank goodness. Julia was fond of Gilroy, but she perhaps was a little bit in love with Royce, and if Gilroy ever zeroed in on Royce, she would be hard-pressed to split her loyalty between the two.
Wayne’s motive for killing Brigit was the most straightforward. He was cheating on her and wanted out of their marriage. If word of his cheating became widespread, his real estate business would suffer. And Brigit had humiliated him with her flyers on the day she was killed. So he snapped and struck her.
Charlie’s motive was less clear. He was having an affair with Brigit, that much I knew. Maybe she had threatened to tell Wayne, as revenge for his infidelities, or maybe she had threatened to tell Anika, to force Charlie to choose between her and his wife. Either way, Brigit would have ruined Charlie’s marriage, though his business might have survived.
And Anika? My guess was she knew Brigit and Charlie were having an affair, just like she knew Brigit wanted to cause trouble for her at Town Hall with phony charges of embezzlement. The women were not friends. Far from it. So why did they try very hard to appear to be friends? Why the dinners at Wyatt’s several times a month?
Maybe they once had been real friends. It seemed the couples’ affairs were recent, so maybe once upon a time they had all liked each other. What had changed? At what point had they told themselves it was okay to have an affair with a friend’s husband or wife? I shook my head and set my legal pad on the cushion. For once, jotting things down wasn’t helping.
I went to the kitchen and searched the refrigerator for a leftover cream puff before I remembered I’d eaten them all. A morning stop at Holly’s Sweets was in order, though tomorrow was Valentine’s Day and she was bound to be busy. Shutting the refrigerator door, I suddenly recalled Gilroy saying he was off sugar. Maybe that vow had exacerbated his grumpiness at the station. I chuckled at the thought. I was the one who should have sworn off sugar, but in no universe, this or any other, was that about to happen.
I checked my watch, surprised to find it was only seven thirty. It felt much later. I’d just decided to make an early night of it when my phone rang. Julia, unable to contain herself over something, said she was on her way over. Sixty seconds later she was at my door.
“First, how was your dinner?” she asked, zipping through my living room on her way to the kitchen. “Can you fix us a pot of coffee? Decaf?”
“My dinner was fine.” I pulled two cups from the cupboard and started the coffee. “James is back to his old self.”
Julia plopped herself down at my table. “Who was he before?”
“Mr. Grumpy. Turns out he was worried that he’d put Brigit in danger by asking her to keep an eye on iffy finances at Town Hall. It was all a scam, created by Brigit herself.”
“Oh?”
Despite this being news to Julia, she was only vaguely interested in what I was saying. Joining her at the table, I asked her to spill the beans on what she was itching to say, pronto.
“Now, I don’t know if this means what I think it does,” she said, nearly quivering in her excitement, “but I overheard Anika on the phone.”
“How?”
“I was at Town Hall.”
“When was this?”
“I drove back to Town Hall to see how the decorations were going—after you went to dinner. I felt bad leaving like that. Well, no one was there, but when I was leaving, I noticed a light coming from the Records Section, so I walked down the hall.”
“Doesn’t Anika stop work at five o’clock?”
“She doesn’t have Brigit’s help anymore, does she? She needs to catch up on her work. Now stop interrupting. I don’t know who she was talking to, but it was a deadly serious conversation. She was almost whispering.”
“She didn’t see you?”
“I walk softly. So Anika said, ‘He’s setting you up. He’s fattening you for the kill.’”
“Seriously? Who talks like that?”
“Will you let me finish? Then she said, ‘I know you’re innocent, but the police don’t, and you know who’s to blame for that.’”
Now I was excited. “And then?”
Julia leaned back in her chair. “And then she turned and saw me.”
“What did she do?”
“She stared at me as though I’d been eavesdropping on her.”
“Which you had.”
“That’s not the point. She put her phone in her purse and sat down, calm as can be, like she’d just ordered a pizza. I tried to get her to crack, but she wouldn’t.”
I laughed. “Poor Anika.”
“What do you think it means? Do you think she was talking about Brigit’s murder?”
“I don’t know what else it could be. You have no idea who she was talking to?”
“Either Charlie or Wayne, don’t you think?”
&
nbsp; “Probably. Was Anika already on the phone when you heard her?”
“Yes. She was at her desk with her back to the door. I was about to knock on the doorjamb when I heard her.”
“So she doesn’t know how long you were standing there?”
“I don’t suppose so. Why?”
A sinking realization hit me. “She might have said the name of the person she was talking to, or said something that identified him, and she doesn’t know for sure if you heard that.”
“Okay. And?”
“But if she’s smart and up to no good, she’ll assume that you did hear. And she’ll tell that person you overhead her.”
“Oh, I see.”
I rose to get our coffee, and as I poured our cups, I devised arguments to convince my fiercely independent neighbor that it wasn’t safe for her to be alone right now.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, taking her cup from my hand. “Am I in danger?”
In matters of safety, honesty was vital. “I think you should assume you are. We need to phone Gilroy and tell him what you heard. And I think you should stay here tonight.”
Julia agreed, reluctantly, and said she needed to run home and grab a few things for the night. As soon as we stepped onto my porch, I seized her by the arm and tugged her back. “There’s an SUV in front of your house,” I hissed. There was never a car parked in front of Julia’s house. She kept her deceased husband’s old Ford in her backyard garage and almost never drove it herself, and Holly never parked there. She and Peter lived just across the street.
Frozen like statues on the porch, we watched as the SUV’s door opened and out stepped Anika Mays.
“Hey, guys,” she said, waving jovially.
I let go of Julia’s arm.
“Did I scare you?” she asked, hooting with laughter. “I’m such an idiot! I know it’s late and I should have called.”
“I’m going to thump her,” Julia said under her breath.
Anika trudged up the sidewalk, opened my garden gate, and made her way up the front walk, stopping at my porch steps. “I wanted to talk to you, Julia, but then I saw you on Rachel’s porch.” She hesitated, waiting for my invitation.
Juniper Grove Cozy Mystery Box Set 2 Page 34