Drizzled with Death (A Sugar Grove Mystery)

by Crockett, Jessie

  “Zip. That’s what I got from all my digging around.” Myra exhaled forcefully then coughed. She must have been calling me during a smoke break. I imagined her leaning her stretch pants covered backside against the peeling clapboards of the old wooden police station, flicking ash close enough to worry the fire department.

  “No one knows anything. How can that be?” I was astonished. Myra never failed to turn up the dirt on anything she set her mind to finding. She was like a human truffle pig when it came to delicious nuggets of knowledge. The only way I could imagine her not finding what she was looking for was because it didn’t exist. Or maybe the only people who knew about it had a very compelling reason to keep quiet. But why would anyone want to keep quiet about his or her business? I yakked about mine to everyone in my path. I paid for advertising and conducted free talks anywhere that would have me just to get the word out about Greener Pastures.

  “What I’m wondering is if your guy at the state was wrong. Maybe he remembered the name incorrectly. Or maybe he is just messing with you.”

  “He wrote the name down when the call came in and read it back to me so I don’t think he got it wrong. And what possible reason would he have to make something like that up? He volunteered the information.”

  “Maybe Alanza lied to him when she called. You never knew what that woman was up to or why, but you knew it was to stir up trouble for someone.”

  “What could she gain from lying about an unregistered fertilizer business?” It didn’t seem worth her bother.

  “I’m going to mention this to Lowell.”

  “But I thought you hadn’t discovered anything.”

  “Dani, if someone doesn’t want anyone to know they are making or selling fertilizer, what might that mean?” Myra’s voice had taken on a worried note I never associate with her. She is bossy, pushy, brash, and nosy but never worried. My stomach got squishy and my legs felt like the bones had turned into licorice whips as I understood what she was implying.

  “Explosives.”

  “Exactly.”

  • • •

  I drove to Tansey’s hoping to hear how things had gone with the police questioning her and Knowlton about the rat poison in her shed. She was sitting on her porch, her feet in her usual gardening boots, a cat in her lap. Her greeting felt more forced than usual and I can’t say I blamed her.

  “How’s Knowlton?” I asked. With Tansey there is no need to bother with the usual niceties. She’s content to get to the point and respects others who do the same. Tansey and small talk mix about as freely as church deacons and biker gangs.

  “Tired and upset, no thanks to you and the guy trying to replace him in your affections.” For such a practical woman, she had a blind spot the size of the Atlantic when it came to her son and me.

  “Did you want us getting killed by a giant angry bird?”

  “How you manage to fit so much bull pucky into such a small package, I will never know.” Tansey stroked the cat harder and harder until the poor thing’s eyes bugged out of its head and it squirmed to the ground in a well-timed act of self-preservation.

  “You run into a couple of them as night approaches and then let me know how scary they are. Besides, I didn’t find the rat poison and I didn’t call the police about it either.”

  “So you didn’t turn your back coldly on your one true love?”

  “I didn’t say anything approaching that. I said I didn’t rat you guys out to the police for having some old chemicals in your shed. For all I knew, they weren’t even yours.”

  “They were ours, all right. When the studies came out about how dangerous that stuff was, I stopped using it around the farm. But you know how it is; you plan to get to the hazardous waste day at the dump but something always comes up and you don’t get there. So it has sat, along with all sorts of other junk in the shed, until I finally get around to it. It’s been kicking around so long I didn’t really remember it was there until Lowell came to ask us about it.”

  “But Knowlton must have seen it since he spends so much time in that building.”

  “Knowlton only has eyes for his mother, animals he might want to stuff, and you Greene girls. Nothing else matters to him. He still doesn’t even notice when his teeth need brushing.” She said that like it was something that would have escaped my attention. Knowlton’s lack of personal grooming was among the chief reasons he was more popular with dead animals than live people.

  “Are the police just questioning him or did they arrest him?”

  “They asked him questions for about an hour last night and then turned him loose. The poor thing was so upset he didn’t even go out looking for roadkill.” He must have been rattled. Gale force winds, nor’easters, and hailstones the size of biscuits never kept Knowlton from roaming around at night. Which was another reason he hadn’t snagged a girlfriend. Women in New Hampshire like their men to stick around at night if for no other reason than to take the chill off the sheets. Nights are too cold here to spend them all alone. I know from too much experience.

  “Did they question you, too?”

  “Of course they did. There were enough questions here to have fueled a television game show. They even got around to asking some fool thing about fertilizers.”

  “Best Bett All in One?” I asked, thinking Myra had made good on her decision to tell Lowell what she knew.

  “That’s the one. Lowell wanted to know if I had ever heard of anyone producing or even buying a product with that name. I told him the same thing I said to Lewis Bett when he asked me about the trust; I was only connected to the Betts by marriage and their business was not really mine.” Tansey crossed one grubby jean-clad leg over the other and stared off into space like she was remembering something.

  “Lewis Bett asked you about a trust?” You know that buzzy feeling you get when you are starting to pick up a thread on an idea? I was buzzing like a bunch of wasps had started construction on a paper nest inside my head.

  “He did indeed. Several years ago, when he was getting on and feeling his mortality, he asked me if I would serve as a trustee for his estate. He said he liked the way I took care of my own land and he felt I would do a good job helping to protect his.”

  “But you refused?”

  “I did. The whole thing sounded a lot more complicated than I really wanted to be involved in. Something about a living will and assets and making sure things all stayed like they were even if the people he left the place to wanted to make changes. I told him he ought to talk to someone related by blood, not by marriage, but really it just seemed like about as much fun as pulling burrs off a poodle.”

  “So who did he ask?”

  “First I suggested Myra but he said she had a big mouth so I suggested Felicia. I didn’t really want to talk about it again in case he had trouble finding someone so I never asked if she said yes. You’d have to ask her.”

  Which was exactly what I decided to do.

  • • •

  I caught up with Felicia just outside the post office. Her arms were full of parcels and I caught one on its way to the pavement. As I helped her load them into the car, I noticed they all were marked with the return address Grow Right Garden Supply Company. What was she doing with something like that at this time of year? The ground had frozen up enough that there was no way she was planting perennials or bulbs outside, and it was a bit early for most people to have placed their seed orders. Besides, there would have been enough seeds in the boxes to plant a good-sized Midwestern commercial farm. Roland and Felicia were enthusiastic gardeners, but they only had just so much room around their place and it was mostly planted with low-maintenance trees, shrubs, and flowering groundcovers. Rather than question her about that, though, I decided my priorities lay elsewhere so I took advantage of her gratitude and started in asking about Lewis Bett’s trust fund.

  “He did ask me. It’s been a while, though.”

  “Did you say yes?”

  “I thought about it long and hard. Lew
is was a distant relative and a nice old man. But in the end, I turned him down.”

  “Why?”

  “We had just bought the bed-and-breakfast, and as Roland put it, if we weren’t close enough family to leave the place to, then why were we close enough to be responsible for it? In the end, I agreed with Roland that it was more responsibility than I wanted to take on.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  “I suggested Connie. She is related in some sort of shirttail way to the Bett family and she used to do a great job with our books so I knew she had more experience with that sort of thing than I did. I suggested she might be an ideal candidate for the job.” Felicia slammed her lid down on her trunk.

  “Do you know if she accepted?”

  “She did. When Alanza first got to town, Connie introduced me as another member of the family, and when I asked how they had met, Alanza told me Connie was a trustee of the trust fund.”

  “Do you think Lewis Bett is rolling over in his grave after what Alanza did to his property?”

  “I wondered about that. When all the trouble with Alanza started, I went to Connie and asked her about what the trust covered and if she could stop Alanza.”

  “And?”

  “She said if I had wanted to be the one to deal with the trust, I should have said yes when Lewis asked me. She told me her hands were tied and she wasn’t about to discuss the terms of something so private with me.”

  “I noticed some coolness between the two of you at the pancake breakfast.”

  “I told her after Alanza announced her plans to put in the storage facility that I regretted suggesting her to Lewis, and if that was the way she was going to handle things, I would get someone else to do our books.” That couldn’t have been good news for Connie. Roland’s position as the president of the Chamber of Commerce might cause others to reconsider keeping Connie on as their bookkeeper if he fired her. Roland and Felicia were well liked and well respected. I felt like every time I got one question answered, it brought another three or four to mind. Finding out more about trusts seemed like the next step. Fortunately, I knew just who to ask.

  • • •

  Whenever Loden wasn’t taking long rambles through the sugar bush or visiting the local library, he could be found in his train room. With a house as large as ours, with as many different people in charge of remodeling over the years, there were always unfortunate outcroppings of bad taste. Loden’s train room took up what the rest of the family considered to be a home unimprovement. Verdant Greene, arguably the looniest of us all, had stuck a leaking little wart of a thing onto the back of the house in 1923. He built the pyramid-shaped structure as a tribute to the discovery of King Tut’s tomb and had covered the entire thing with galvanized tin. It overheated in summer and encouraged frostbite in winter, as he hadn’t wanted anything as utilitarian as windows or a heat source to mar the effect of his creation.

  Loden claimed the space as his own almost as soon as he could walk, and rare was the day he was not found in it for at least an hour or two. Personally, I think that might go a long way in explaining why he’s still not married either. I knocked, and upon hearing permission to enter, I tugged open the door and began wriggling through the opening. What met me on the other side of the birth canal of a hallway was not the golden splendor of Tut’s hoard but a wonderment of another sort.

  Loden is a model train enthusiast whose dedication to his hobby borders on obsession. What most of the family does with Christmas, he does with trains. He’s handcrafted most of the buildings and the land formations, too. No one can make tiny trees look as realistic as Loden can, and his miniature stone walls are so convincing, I always expect a rock adder to slide out from one of the cracks and hiss at me. In a rare moment of self-revelation, Loden once confided that the hardest part of law school for him was being too busy to work on his models. But for my purposes that day, his law school experience was exactly what I needed. Unfortunately Loden also has a fine set of principles so getting the information from him was going to take a bit of blackmail.

  “I thought you weren’t talking to me.”

  “You didn’t think you should tell me about Mom and Lowell?”

  “No, I didn’t. You reacted exactly like everyone expected. Which is why no one wanted to tell you.”

  “Tell me what any of you have gained by keeping this from me.”

  “I guess that’s a good question. Looking at it that way, I don’t suppose there was anything improved by that.”

  “Well, that’s something, at least. It’s more than anyone else will admit. I’m the bad guy because I loved my father and don’t enjoy my family keeping secrets from me.”

  “How can I make it up to you?”

  “You can’t.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “You’re a lawyer; you understand how little fair matters anytime there is a disagreement.”

  “So what can I do to get back on your good side?”

  “As a lawyer, what would you suggest?”

  “Compensation for pain and suffering.”

  “So I should ask for something I want in order to forgive you?”

  “That’s right. Ask for something much more valuable than you expect to receive and bargain down from there.” He flicked an imaginary speck of something off a miniature picnic table.

  “Ask Piper to marry you.”

  “What?” His finger bore down on the table and snapped it in two.

  “Since the family is running around airing out hidden depths of emotion, I thought it was time to mention you have been in love with Piper since the first time I brought her home after school and she liked what you did with this place.” I waved my hand around the pyramid.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “You said aim high and work down from there. How about a tempestuous weekend fling?”

  “Dani.”

  “Then I want you to ask her out on one date.”

  “Why now?”

  “I don’t like her latest boyfriend. I’m worried she’s going to start thinking about settling down. If she is going to settle, I would rather it was for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Not that she would be. Settling, I mean. You are a great catch. I just hate seeing you shrivel up like a slug hit with table salt whenever you spot her zipping around town in another guy’s car.”

  “Are you saying you want your friend to settle for a disintegrated slug?”

  “You know I’m not. I think she keeps picking losers because in her heart of hearts she doesn’t want things to work out with them since she is secretly waiting for you to pursue her. You’ve got to be the only man in town under seventy not trying to get her to give them a private tour of what’s beneath her waitress uniform.” Loden blushed so deeply it was like a beautiful sunset was taking place right across his face.

  “I can’t.”

  “Okay, then you’ll have to tell me what you know about trusts instead,” I said, watching him put the finishing touches on a covered bridge.

  “You mean like a legal thing?” He gently put down the paintbrush he was holding and gave me his full attention.

  “Yes. What are they exactly and why would someone have one?”

  “The reasons for creating a trust are about as varied as the people who create them. There are a number of different types. One of the most important details is whether the trust is revocable or irrevocable.”

  “I assume one is permanent and the other is subject to change?”

  “That’s right. Once a trust is irrevocable, it is no longer possible to get the entrusted property out of it. Why are you asking?”

  “Lewis Bett left his property in trust.”

  “I know. He consulted me on it.” Loden didn’t have an active legal practice, but he was a member of the New Hampshire Bar and he happily took pro bono cases that interested him from time to time.

  “What did he say?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that. I s
houldn’t even have told you he consulted me about a trust.”

  “Then I’m not forgiving you. Your choice.”

  “You drive a hard bargain.”

  “You know how I like to get my Christmas shopping done early, and I want to know whether or not to keep you on my list. Besides, Lewis is dead and so is Alanza. You don’t have a client in this situation at all, and my business is flapping all over the riverbank gasping for a bit of air.”

  “Since you put it that way, I guess a bit of information won’t do any harm. Lewis Bett came to me several years ago to ask about setting up a trust for his property. He wanted to leave it to a family member, but he didn’t want them to be able to run through all the money in a hurry. He wanted them to be able to leave the bulk of the wealth to the next generation.”

  “He was a well-known cheapskate.”

  “He preferred to be called thrifty. He said he had seen too many people go through their money buying any bit of glitz that caught their eyes.”

  “Didn’t he have a very expensive wife at one point? A much younger wife?”

  “He did. Alanza’s mother was her sister.”

  “So Alanza wasn’t really even a Bett?”

  “Not by blood. But he wasn’t particularly keen on any of the blood relatives he knew around here. He said they weren’t willing to help out with the property so he didn’t feel obliged to leave any of it to them.”

  “So Alanza was the one he thought of.”

  “Yes. But he wanted the trust set up in case the spendthrift nature of her aunt was a genetic thing. So that’s what we set up, a spendthrift trust.”

  “So it wasn’t a land trust?”

  “Not at all. I tried to convince him a land trust would be the best thing for everyone since he valued community use of his property, but he wouldn’t hear of it. For him, tying up the money was his main priority.”

  “So how did it work?”

  “He appointed a trustee and all access to funds associated with the trust went through her.”

  “So Alanza couldn’t get her hands directly on any of Lewis’s money?”

  “No. We set up a small stipend for Alanza per month in addition to the use of the house. Everything else had to be approved and authorized by Connie.”