Murder, Money, and Moving On

by Stacey Alabaster

  I put my hands in all the pockets to make sure they were empty in preparation for the trip to the dry cleaner’s and felt something small and fluffy in there. “What is this?” I pulled it out and stared at it.

  A small, blue, toy cat.

  I laughed a little and turned it over in confusion. This must have been sent back to me in error. Or had someone maybe given it to me as a present while I was in the hospital? I had no recollection of it at all.

  Then something flashed into my head. The rooftop…the ladder…the gutters.

  Had I found the toy on the roof that night?

  I put the toy cat in the bottom drawer.

  15

  One Month Later

  I shook my head. “None of them are right,” I said, looking at all of the sweet creatures in front of me. “Although they all deserve good homes of course.”

  Ryan sighed. He’d brought me to the shelter in the hopes that I would be able to pick a new dog. And I was being rather uncooperative.

  “He’s not coming back,” Ryan said gently.

  But that didn’t mean that I could just replace him. “I want to go home. I have Casper there, waiting to be fed.”

  Ryan opened the can of dog food.

  “I thought you might have finally gotten notification about her whereabouts, that’s all.”

  I was asking him about Brenda, again.

  He placed the food on the ground for Casper. “I promised you that when I did, I would tell you.”

  I swallowed. Yes, but what had we said about promises? It was better not to make them when they couldn’t be kept. As much as Ryan was claiming transparency and telling me that he was on my side, was he really going to tell me when Brenda was found by the cops?

  It seemed like she was determined not to be found at all.

  Her house on Sandy Point was sitting empty and the “For Sale” sign had been erected again. I had Agatha down there as a secret pair of eyes for me. She was keeping watch on the house and promised me that she would tell me as soon as there was any sign of Brenda. But there had been no sightings in over a month.

  “What was that?” I asked, hearing a scratching at the door. And then…a bark. A very familiar bark. I ran to the front door and as soon as I opened it, a bundle of black and white fur leapt up at me. “Jasper!”

  He was hot and panting and as soon as I put the water bowl down for him, he lapped it up. I looked up at Ryan. “Don’t you understand, Ryan? This is what I have been waiting for this entire time. I KNEW he would run away and come back to me.”

  Ryan put on his Mr. Sensible voice. “Just because he has run away doesn’t mean that you can keep him.”

  I paid no attention to that. It was getting late in the evening, so I led Jasper back to his bed in my room. He was yapping at the bottom draw for some reason. He looked up at me with expectation. Open it, open it, he seemed to be demanding me.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, laughing a little bit as I tried to get him away from the drawer.

  “What is in there that he is so interested in?” Ryan asked curiously.

  I shook my head. “Nothing that I can think of,” I said.

  It was a struggle to get him away from the drawer and back into the corner to his bed. Ryan was the one who finally got him to rest and lay down. While Ryan was making sure Jasper stayed put, I took a quick peek into the drawer. I only had the usual in there. Socks, pantyhose…oh. And that small blue cat. I frowned for a second before Ryan turned around and I quickly shut the drawer again.

  I sat down on my bed and kept quiet. The poor pup had had such a long journey. Ryan came and sat next to me, putting his hand on top of mine.

  We both watched Jasper sleeping for a while. I knew it was only temporary. But I just wanted to enjoy that night. Eventually, Ryan said, “At some stage, we are going to have to wake him up and take him home, you know.” We were both waiting for the other one to make the move to do it.

  But neither of us had the heart to take Jasper back home that night.

  It was a dreary day. Cloud and fog obscured the view from the shop to the street, but I was pretty sure I could see a ghost walking toward me.

  Casper jumped up onto her little legs and started yapping at the door. Now that Jasper was back with Alice, I had started to drag poor little Casper around town with me. But Casper was more the quiet, stay-at-home curled up on the sofa kind of dog. She was more jumpy than protective, and she would bark at so much as a leaf falling outside the window.

  But this time, it wasn’t a leaf. But was the figure real? I couldn’t quite make up my mind. But the barking coming from near my ankles was giving me a clue.

  Well, if Casper had seen it as well, perhaps the sad-looking figure stumbling toward us was actually flesh and blood

  “Well, well, well,” I murmured, looking through the window. “Look what the cat has dragged in.” For a moment, I picked up the phone, thinking that I ought to call the police. Or at least shoot Ryan a text. I had promised to tell Ryan the moment I saw anything, just like he had promised me that he would.

  But I put the phone back down. For just a few moments, at least, this needed to be between her and I.

  I’d already had one creature reappear with his tail between his legs. Now I was seeing a second.

  Her fur coat was dripping. I wasn’t sure how long she had been walking in the fog and rain. The small bag that hung from her arm told me she had probably walked at least as far as from the bus stop, and that was on the other side of town.

  Brenda made a move to step inside.

  “I usually make Jasper stand outside and shake himself off.”

  But I stood aside and let her through. There was already a hole through the roof, so what difference did a little bit more water make?

  Brenda walked to the back and stared up at the hole without saying anything else first. “You should at least empty the bucket,” she said, looking down. The tarp only worked so well. When the rain was heavy, it didn’t hold.

  Of course… Brenda had been back less than sixty seconds, after being on the run for a month, without a word to anyone, and she still had the confidence to stand there and tell me what I was doing wrong.

  She stuck her nose up in the air and looked haughty. “I suppose you never came up with the money to make the repairs then? Looks like this hole is just getting worse and worse.”

  She looked awfully pleased about this for some reason. But she wasn’t quite right.

  I was glad I could have at least one small moment of satisfaction. I smiled at her and made sure I said the words slowly so that she could fully take them in.

  “Actually, it’s being taken care of tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve managed to come up with the money. The full amount. On my own.”

  I saw Brenda’s face drop. “Oh… I… But…” She had to stop and catch her thoughts. “But I was going to give you the money, Georgina. Are you really telling me you don’t need it?”

  I was shocked that was what she had come back for. To offer me the money. Well. It was a case of too little too late by that point.

  “How did you come up with the money?” she asked, sounding suspicious. As though maybe I had won the lotto as well.

  “Turns out there are people out there who like my colorful beads,” I said. “And they are willing to pay good money for them.”

  Brenda suddenly seemed a little unsteady on her feet.

  “Here,” I said, hurrying her over to a chair.

  I fetched her a glass of water and she gulped it down. I laughed a little nervously. “I thought you were going to pass out on me there, Brenda. You had me worried for a moment.”

  She stared off into the distance like she was staring into an abyss. She was still sopping wet. Now her fur coat only made her look tragic, not glamorous.

  “What happened, Brenda?”

  She shook her head. “Oh, it’s all been a complete disaster, George.”

  It was the first time I had heard her call me that. She’d alw
ays stuck to the formal, full version of my name until then. She seemed overwhelmed, not knowing where to start.

  “I know that you abandoned the house in Sandy Point,” I said, trying to encourage her. “But that is all I know.”

  “I didn’t abandon it,” she said, some of the sharpness returning to her eyes. “I put it back on the market.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  She told me the whole sorry story. “It all seemed like so much money at first. Like it would never run out. But I just kept spending and spending, and…”

  So now there was no money left. Well, perhaps a little—enough to cover the repairs to the shop and maybe a little extra after that. She’d thought I was going to welcome her offer with open arms.

  I shook my head. There was the saying, “easy come, easy go.” I just couldn’t believe that Brenda had been that reckless. She was always the careful, ‘put money away for a rainy day’ type.

  And after all that, when almost everything was lost, this was where she had returned to. This was her home. The shop. I couldn’t just turn her away, could I? Not when she was in need. But if she stayed, then Ryan would have to bring her in for questioning.

  I had to try and solve this myself. She was in too much of a sorry state to just hand straight over to the cops.

  Would she have really come back to Pottsville if she was the one who had killed Lleyton?

  “You know, we all thought there might be another reason you were on the run…”

  We heard the bell above the door rattle at the same time and Brenda gasped as a tall, rusty-haired man barged through the door. “Excuse me,” I started to say. “We are closed…” But it was Les. And he wasn’t there to buy a ball of yarn.

  “I thought I saw you,” Les said, the door banging shut behind him. He was bellowing, and he barely even seemed to notice I was there. If he did, he certainly didn’t care. “Brenda, I can’t believe you just skipped town like that after all that has happened between us.”

  I didn’t want to be caught there in the middle of their lovers’ tiff. Well, that wasn’t totally true. I did kind of want to see how this all played out. However, I cleared my throat and told them I should give them some space.

  “No,” Les said, shaking his head. “You need to hear this.”

  “Er…I do?” I really doubted that was the case.

  Les stared at me. The whites around his eyes had turned as red as his hair.

  I had to break the tension. “I think I know what’s going on between you and Brenda… The nature of your relationship, I mean.”

  Les shook his head. “I was going to give Brenda a loan.”

  I blinked a few times. That was not exactly what I had expected him to say.

  “A loan for what?” I asked, looking first at Les and then at Brenda. But I couldn’t help needing to clear something up first. “Hang on… So the two of you are not having an affair?”

  Brenda looked like she was about to combust. She stood up and opened her mouth to defend herself.

  “Sit back down, Brenda,” I said. “You’re going to give yourself a heart attack.”

  Les rolled his eyes. “We were going to go into business together. Take over this shop.”

  I was starting to feel a little combustible myself. “What is he talking about, Brenda?”

  Brenda was busy twiddling her thumbs. “Oh, it was something like that,” she finally mumbled dismissively. “I can’t remember the details exactly. Nothing was ever in stone.”

  Now it was Les’s turn to combust. “It was! At least it was until you won your lottery and bailed on me.” He turned to me. “Well, I may as well tell you the whole truth if Brenda is too chicken to. She wanted to buy your shop, so she came to me, knowing that I had the cash. But she didn’t think you would sell. So, we concocted a plan to make it a more…appealing proposition.”

  I felt my stomach sink. “You mean...by making my pipes burst and putting a hole in the roof! That’s what you two were doing on the roof that night. And that’s what you were worried I would figure out while I was up on the roof—that the hole was manmade!”

  Les looked at the floor, ashamed.

  All I could do was shake my head. “I can’t believe you did that to me, Brenda.”

  Les looked just as outraged. “You? What about what she did to me? Backing out of the deal as soon as she won the lotto? After I’d already taken out a mortgage and committed a crime to help her out!”

  Brenda threw her hands in the air. “I was just doing what I thought I was supposed to do, okay? I wanted to let my hair down and have a bit of fun for once in my life. I made a mistake. Must I be punished for it forever?”

  I had a feeling that if the shoe was on the other foot then, yes, Brenda would believe that person needed to be punished forever.

  “Well, the tears might work on this one,” he said, pointing to me. “But I still intend to take you to court over breach of contract, Brenda.”

  He left, slamming the door behind him.

  “So what am I going to do now?” Brenda asked, still tearful. Les was, unfortunately, right. The tears were working on me. “I have no money, no job, and Tom is furious at me for leaving.”

  She really had gotten herself into a pretty little mess. But I could see a way ahead for her. She still had options. There were ways to make it all right again.

  I couldn’t believe what I was about to say. “You can have your job back, Brenda.”

  “Oh, George!” she said, wiping away her tears as she jumped up to hug me. “I will be the best employee you’ve ever had from now on, I promise.”

  But I was starting to think, even if she worked in the shop again, I would no longer be her boss.

  16

  The red heels were click-clacking up the driveway.

  My old real estate agent Carrie gave me a wry smile and waved a little as she banged the ‘For Sale’ sign into the front lawn while I watched through the glass.

  There was a very cold gust of wind that came in with her through the door and we both shivered. She looked around the place and shook her head. “I guess nothing has changed here.”

  With all the tiles, the place had always been relatively easy to keep clean with the two dogs. The fact that the tiles were white had always posed a bit of a problem, but everything had been mopped and scrubbed in preparation for the photos that Carrie was taking that day.

  “I was hoping I’d gotten rid of this place permanently when I sold it to you,” she said with a sigh as she took out her camera. At least she was being honest about it.

  It wasn’t that the place wasn’t stunning—it was, with its direct access to the lake, and the beautiful, huge windows. It was just that most people didn’t want to live in a house where someone had been murdered. It never mattered too much to me. Especially seeing as I got such a good price on the place. But Carrie was right. She’d probably have trouble moving it again. Not everyone was as openminded as I was.

  “What is this?” Carrie asked curiously as she moved into my bedroom to take the last lot of photos.

  I had already started to clear out some of my drawers and closets, so the little, blue toy cat was sitting out on one of the chairs. I hadn’t been quite sure where to put it. Packing it seemed wrong. But just tossing it back into one of the drawers or closets hadn’t seemed right either.

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure, to be honest. It looks like a child’s toy, doesn’t it?”

  Carrie shrugged. “Or a dog’s toy.”

  Okay, so I hadn’t technically asked Adam if I could borrow his truck. But what was he going to do? Send the police after me? There hadn’t been enough time to get a rental car. I’d had no choice.

  “Please don’t break down on me,” I said, hearing the rattling of the motor as I got higher and higher up the mountain. I remembered how distressed Jasper had been every time we’d driven this way. It wasn’t car rides he didn’t like.

  It was going back to Alice’s house he didn’t like.
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br />   The engine kept rattling. It wouldn’t be the first time that Adam’s truck had done that to me at the worst possible moment. It might serve me right, might be some sort of karma.

  I pulled over for a moment to re-read the email again on my laptop. The one that had been sent to me from the Border Collie breeder. I read it carefully this time. $1000 a pup was the going price. There was a lot of money to be made in breeding purebreds.

  Just as I was about to start the truck up again, I saw that my cell phone was ringing. It was Adam. Darn it. I thought about not picking up.

  “Adam? How are you? How was the honeymoon? I still haven’t seen you to ask about it.”

  “Tell me you didn’t, George.” He re-thought this. “Actually, tell me you did…otherwise, I will have to report this to the police.”

  “You don’t understand, Adam. This is an emergency.”

  “I’m sure. It always is. George, you really need a car of your own!”

  He was fuming. I knew that hanging up on him would only make it worse, but I really had to go. I couldn’t leave my best friend alone with a killer.

  “George, I am being serious. I need that truck to get to work! If you don’t return it within thirty minutes, then I will call the cops. I’m not bluffing, George!”

  I knew that he was, though. “I’m sorry, Adam, I have to go.” I ended the call. I turned off my phone and quickly got back on the road.

  I was going to have to play this very carefully. Or Alice was never going to let me into the house.

  I spotted an eye-roll from the window as I walked down the driveway, but she did actually walk over to the door and open it. We still had the screen door in between us.

  “What are you doing here, George?” she asked warily. I glanced down at the locked door and wondered—what was I going to do if she wouldn’t let me in?

  “I was just driving by, on my way to Sandy Point,” I lied, smiling. “No big deal. I just wanted to say hello to Jasper.” If she caught on that I was too desperate, she wouldn’t let me inside. “And I could really use the bathroom too, if you don’t mind.” I made a face and did a little jiggle to show that I really needed to go, right there and then.