Murder, Money, and Moving On

by Stacey Alabaster

  “You need to make it look as professional as possible,” Agatha said. “But there is good money to be made from selling arts and crafts online! You should try it.”

  Yes, but Agatha had a knack for the internet and she always seemed to be successful at whatever she did.

  That was how Agatha and I had first met, actually. A while back, I’d started an online blog to try and gain new customers for the store. Agatha had her own craft blog and we started to email each other and she linked to my site. Because Agatha had such a huge online following, her one little link had garnered me a bunch of new readers.

  “So, how is your blog going anyway, George?”

  Eh, was it suddenly hot in here? “I, um, I have to admit I’ve sort of let it fall by the wayside.”

  Agatha looked disappointed in me. But not all that surprised. She shrugged. “Well, yes, I had noticed you hadn’t posted in a while. I wasn’t going to say anything.”

  “It’s just that I’ve been really busy lately. It’s been a crazy couple of months.”

  Agatha peered at me like she was not really buying my excuses. “I told you, you have to blog about what you really love. Then it will be easy.”

  I agreed with her. But having just seen the eighty bucks she’d made, I was starting to form a different plan. I just needed Agatha’s help. “Agatha, do you think you could show me how to do something?”

  Jasper looked up at the screen and nodded in approval. I was glad that he approved of the site. I didn’t have a professional headshot yet, but I had already uploaded all the photos I had of my handmade beaded jewelry from my cell phone.

  “How come you look so sad?” Agatha asked, bringing me a cup of tea. She’d already warned me that I would have to drink it quickly if we were going to catch Brenda and Les in the act, but I still thought she was entirely wrong about that.

  I had to admit what was really going on with me. I told Agatha all about Alice and the fact that Jasper was only on loan to me for a few days.

  “Oh, George, that’s terrible,” she said, bending down to pet Jasper and give him a cuddle. “Oh, I am so sorry to hear this. But isn’t there anything you can do? Surely you have some kind of claim on him?”

  I shook my head sadly. “Even if I did…I couldn’t do that to Jasper, if he’s happy now being back with Alice.”

  Agatha stood up and put her hands on her hips. “He seems happiest when he is with you, if you ask me. This isn’t right, George.”

  Well, there was still the option of dognapping and a life on the lam. As I hit “list items” on the remaining sets of beads, I started to wonder if maybe I could hit the road again. Not necessarily as a fugitive. Just…more as a free spirit. I made a decision to leave it up to fate. If the beads sold, I would have my answer.

  Maybe I didn’t need the shop after all.

  14

  Agatha was ecstatic for me once she heard my new plan. “So when will the new era of George start?” she asked as we drove back to the cliffs.

  As soon as possible. Once the loose ends had been tied up, there would be nothing stopping me. “There is only one thing left to do, Agatha, and that is to prove that Brenda killed Lleyton.”

  It was strange…almost like it had been under my nose this entire time. Working for me. I should have seen it. Brenda had always had a quick temper, and she was always quick to dole out her harsh brands of vigilante justice. I should have known that she would eventually snap and push a man to his death. Hey, her very own niece was in prison for murder. It must have run in the family.

  I just wasn’t sure how Les was involved yet. But that was what this stake-out was all about.

  I was glad we had the rental car so that Brenda wouldn’t recognize who it was tailing her and pulling up at the end of her driveway. I asked Agatha whether we should attempt to scale the cliff again. This time, I wanted to actually get inside the house, without Brenda seeing. We needed some kind of proof.

  My cell phone went off again for the seventh time that morning. And for the seventh time, I ignored it.

  Agatha raised an eyebrow. “Whoever that is, they keep calling you…”

  “Ha,” I said, trying to brush it off. “Yes, they can be pretty relentless.”

  Agatha laughed. “At least they still chase you. The men, I mean.”

  I let her believe that was what was going on for a little while. When actually, it was Alice’s number.

  Agatha suggested we stay in the car until we knew for sure that Brenda was actually home. Les’s car was still in the driveway, though. Had he stayed overnight? We watched as he opened the door and stepped through it, looking like he was taking the walk of shame. I watched with my jaw open as Brenda came to the door and waved him good-bye.

  Agatha turned to me. “Now do you believe me? George, I know this isn’t what you wanted to be true, but I think you have to accept it.” She was silent for a moment. “I don’t think that Brenda killed anyone. I think she only ‘admitted’ to that because she was covering up a crime she thinks is even worse.”

  I gritted my teeth and nodded. My phone rang again and this time, I answered. It was Alice of course.

  “Georgina!” she said, exasperated. There was an air of desperation in her voice. She sounded so mad she could murder me. “You told me that you would only be three days at the most, and it has been four! I need Jasper back. Immediately.”

  I tried to calm her down. “Things have taken a little longer to sort out than I thought they would.”

  “There are no excuses, George! Have my dog back by four today or I am going to call the police!”

  I agreed to her demands and ended the phone call. Agatha and I drove away and I intended—really I did—to leave by 2:00 so that I would have Jasper back at 4:00.

  But 4:00pm had come and gone. And I was still nowhere near Mornington.

  I heard the words: “You need to return that dog.” It was coming through a loudspeaker, which I thought was a little too much. I waited, with my arms crossed, for Ryan to exit the car. He was going to have to actually arrest me if he was going to take my dog off me.

  He put the amplifier down and spoke to me like a normal person as he crossed the sand. “This is hardly the call I wanted to get today, George.”

  “I’m surprised they sent you of all people.” The wind had picked up and it was blowing my hair. Jasper was safely in the house behind me with Agatha protecting him. And I knew that Agatha wouldn’t give me up.

  Ryan raised an eyebrow. “I insisted. I figured you would be embarrassed to have anyone else come up and have this conversation with you.”

  This was embarrassing enough.

  “Come on, George,” he said. “Please don’t make me actually arrest you here.”

  I considered it in silence as I stared out into the waves. Was I actually willing to be cuffed, to be charged, over this? When at the end of the day, it wouldn’t actually achieve anything except to probably make sure I would never see Jasper again?

  Ryan came right up to me and placed a hand on my shoulder. “I know it doesn’t seem fair, George…but this isn’t going to help anyone, is it?”

  We were on the beach, but we didn’t exactly have privacy. Above us were the cliffs, and Brenda wasn’t the only nosey person who lived there. We had caused a scene and onlookers were starting to gather. Ryan took my hand and quietly led me away before we made even more of a scene. “George, I can do it for you if it makes it easier. I can take Jasper back to Alice’s now by myself.”

  I thought about putting up a fight, but I just nodded quietly.

  I handed over the leash to him. “He’s inside,” I said, hanging my head. “Agatha will hand him over if I say it’s okay.”

  “I’m so sorry about all this,” I said to Agatha, later that evening as we walked along the beach at dusk. It was just the two of us. No dogs. No boyfriends. “You probably didn’t intend to house a fugitive when you invited me to stay here.”

  She laughed. “You don’t need to apologize
. This is just what friends to for each other.”

  At that moment, I caught Brenda’s beady eyes, glaring down at me from the cliff tops.

  “I thought I would come and say good-bye before I left.” I was standing at Brenda’s gate. I genuinely did want to say good-bye to her before I left for Pottsville. For all I knew, it could well be the last time I ever saw her.

  “You’re obsessed,” she said, shaking her head.

  I had intended to leave it alone. To drop the whole thing. But she had a way of winding me up and I just couldn’t help myself. “I saw you with Les this morning. I saw him leave your house. Brenda, I know what’s going on.”

  I have never seen on person’s face turn so red so quickly

  “Georgina, I never wanted you to find out about this…” Her voice was shaky.

  “Well, I did, okay? I just want to say good luck in your new life, Brenda. You’re going to need it.”

  It was time for me to go home. Even if there was no longer much there waiting for me.

  Agatha had offered to drive back with me, but I had declined. It was time to be a big girl and deal with my life.

  I arrived home to nothing but an empty, broken down shop and an almost empty house. Oh boy.

  I wasn’t really depressed, though. Not exactly. In fact, thinking over everything, a sort of amusement crept over me. What did I have left to lose? There was a sort of peace that came over me. Adam was away on his honeymoon with Fiona. Ryan was still up in Mornington. Brenda had moved to Sandy Point. And Jasper, well, I had to accept that he was never coming back.

  Well, that was the one thing that did really hit me. There wasn’t exactly peace there. Just grief.

  I sat down on the sofa and Casper jumped up and curled up in my lap, immediately going to sleep. She was tired from a stay at Tom’s, where he took her for long walks every day.

  “What do you think, Casper?” I said, musing out loud. “Do you feel like a sea change?”

  But there was no response.

  I thought we were just having a casual dinner together, as friends more than anything. Then Ryan looked across the table of the Italian restaurant and said the three words I never thought I would hear him say. “I need help.”

  “Whose help?”

  He swallowed down the last of his spaghetti and took a sip of beer. “Yours.”

  “Help with what?”

  “With the case.”

  I had to laugh at first. I thought he was joking. “All these times you should have come to me for help and you didn’t. Are you really finally admitting that I know more than you do sometimes?” I was teasing. But still serious.

  “I know,” he said, pulling something out of his bag and placing the folder on the table while the waitress cleared our empty plates. “But we’re not getting anywhere with this case and so this time, George, I am truly asking you. What have you discovered?”

  I still had a lot of questions about Brenda’s involvement. Had she really just been up on the roof that night to kiss Les? She wasn’t a teenager. But first, I had to make a bit of a bargain with Ryan, before I told him what I knew. I crossed my arms and smiled a little smugly. “You tell me what you know first. Then I’ll share mine.”

  I figured this was calling his bluff. He would never tell me what the cops had. If he told me any confidential information, he could lose his job.

  “We know that there were multiple people up on the roof that night. That is what is making this investigation so complicated. We just can’t figure it out.”

  My eyes widened. I couldn’t believe that Ryan was actually telling me this information. I called the waitress back and asked for the bill. We needed to go somewhere more private if we were really going to crack this case.

  “I’m just tired of all the red tape…” Ryan said, pacing in my living room. “I can’t get anything done in this town.”

  I wasn’t sure his frustrations were correctly directed. “You do realize that even if you were a cop in big city, you would still have to deal with red tape…”

  “Yes, but there would be more cases to work and I would have a lot more opportunities for promotion. I wouldn’t just be sitting around on my hands all day. Or yelling at kids to get off rooftops.”

  Hearing him talk about opportunities and his future made me remember an earlier discussion. We’d never come back to the conversation we had about our combined future. And we still hadn’t made any promises to each other.

  “So?” Ryan asked. “You said you had something to tell me.”

  I considered what information I could share with him. He had kept up his end of the bargain though, so I had to keep up mine.

  “Brenda,” I said. That was all I said. Ryan stood there waiting for me to elaborate, but I was silent.

  “Yes?” Ryan finally asked. “And what about her?”

  “She’s moved to Sandy Point.”

  Ryan’s face made several different expressions, like he wasn’t sure which one was the correct one. He finally settled on a frown. “Is that what you were doing in Sandy Point?”

  I nodded and looked at my hands. “Yes. I was spying on her.”

  “I see. So you weren’t just visiting a friend, like you told me.”

  “I’m sorry, Ryan.” He looked genuinely hurt. Maybe betrayed on both a personal and professional level. But he couldn’t have expected me to be honest with him back then, could he?

  “If you thought Brenda was hiding something, you should have told me.”

  “I wasn’t sure what I would find. That’s why I couldn’t come to you with what I knew…not until now.”

  “What did you know?”

  I took a deep breath. “Brenda was up on the roof that night.”

  Now that was new information that Ryan hadn’t had in his folders. The cops knew that multiple people had been up on the roof that night, according to witnesses. They just didn’t know exactly who.

  Ryan’s voice was low. When he spoke, I could tell he valued my opinion. So I’d have to be careful with my answer. “Do you think she did it?”

  “She took off out of town awfully fast. And she hasn’t been acting like herself.”

  Ryan nodded. “So she’s a strong suspect then.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Let me show you what I use in situations like these.”

  “Well, this is an interesting way of profiling suspects,” Ryan said, while he sat back on the sofa and shoved a handful of popcorn into his mouth.

  In front of him, like I was putting on a show, I threw my head back and laughed. “I told you, you should have been using me all this time.” He’d been referring to my dry erase board, which now had Brenda and Les’s faces sketched on it. Ryan stood up to come have a closer look.

  “You are a really good artist,” he said, running his hand lightly in front of the board but not quite touching the sketches. “This one looks exactly like Brenda…” He shook his head and stared into my eyes for a moment. “You know, George, you should be making money selling your own art—not selling supplies for other people to use.”

  I turned away. There was one thing I wasn’t quite ready to share with Ryan yet, and that was the existence of my online store. Or my plan for what would come next.

  But the sales had started to come in and there was excitement brewing in my belly. I couldn’t believe how quickly my online shop had taken off. In a very short amount of time, I had been able to make enough cash to pay half of the repair bill for the roof, and if things kept up, I would be able to quit my ‘day job’ altogether and live anywhere I liked in the world.

  Ryan leaned forward and asked more questions.

  “So what does Les have to do with this?”

  I explained to him Agatha’s ideas about the whole situation. “She thinks that Brenda and Les were just having an affair. That they went up onto the roof to have a smooch and that is why she’s embarrassed to admit that she was up there. You know Brenda. She’s a good Christian, married woman. But…” I shook my head. “T
hat doesn’t seem right to me. Or at least, it doesn’t seem like the whole story.”

  Ryan had his own take on the matter. “What if that is what they were doing? Having a kiss, or an affair, I mean. And Lleyton sprung them. Brenda might have been so embarrassed, she pushed him to his death.”

  I pointed the marker toward him and nodded. “Exactly,” I said. “Now that is more what I am thinking!”

  I started to scribble notes on the board while Ryan came up with new ideas. Lleyton had been up late that night because he’d heard the burst pipe and the water running. He must have been sussing out the area, and gotten suspicious when he saw Les and Brenda up on the roof. But springing them was his fatal mistake.

  I sat down, satisfied. “Now it really feels like we are getting somewhere,” I said. “Is this enough to arrest her yet?”

  “Not yet, but we’re getting there. I might be able to go up and pay her a visit in the morning.”

  It felt so good to be working like this with Ryan. But I realized something. My heart started to beat a little faster. “But then Brenda will know that I told you everything.” And I realized, that would be the end of mine and Brenda’s friendship, for good.

  Ryan had gone out on a noise complaint call, so I was left alone again for an hour or so. He texted me when he got there, telling me it had been those same kids who’d been playing on my roof. This time, they were drinking up there. I decided to take Casper for a quick walk around the neighborhood. When I got back, I noticed that I had a package waiting for me on the side of the porch that I hadn’t noticed before.

  I picked up the package and took it back into the house, checking the return address. It was from the hospital.

  My belongings. I had left them there the day I’d been discharged.

  As I ripped open the package, the coat I had been wearing the evening of my accident fell to the floor.

  “Oh, gosh,” I said, picking it up off the floor. I cringed when I saw the blood on the collar. “That is going to need to go to the dry cleaner’s in the morning.”