No Scone Unturned

by Dobbs, Leighann

  Nans peeled the paper off the cupcake and then sliced it into quarters, popping one whole quarter into her mouth. “But Olive went over to get Connie’s mail. Won’t she be expecting Connie to come and collect it?”

  “Probably the best thing is to be able to prove to Jack somehow that Connie isn’t where she is supposed to be,” Ruth said. “What about that club, Lexy? Didn’t they say that they kept track of where Olive was?”

  “Yeah. They seemed like stalkers, though we haven’t seen them there anytime we’ve been there, so they must not be very dedicated ones,” Lexy said.

  “They can’t be there twenty-four hours a day. If only they were, they might’ve seen the murder,” Nans joked.

  “Hey, maybe one of them saw my drone,” Ida said.

  “Maybe I can find something of interest on the fan page.” Ruth pulled out her iPad and started typing, squinting down at the page, using her fingers to pinch the posts so that they would be larger and easier to read. Ruth’s face scrunched up. “Well, this can’t be right.”

  “What’s that?” Nans craned her neck to look at the iPad.

  Ruth turned it around so they could all see. It was an article about Murder-Con with a picture of a blond woman who looked similar to Olive, though the scarf partially obscuring her face and the giant sunglasses made it impossible to tell if it was Olive or Connie.

  “Isn’t Murder-Con the conference that’s going on right now that Olive said Connie was at?” Lexy asked.

  “Yes, it is.” Nans scraped some frosting off another section of the cupcake with her fork. “If Olive is here in town and Connie is dead, then who is this?”

  “Beats me. I thought maybe neither one of them was at the conference, but this picture was taken yesterday, and it says the fan club ladies are going to step up their efforts to figure out who it really is.” Ruth squinted down at the iPad. “Seems like it’s sort of a mission of theirs to figure out if the sightings are really Olive or Connie. Apparently they know Connie stands in for her.”

  “Well then, maybe they’ll be able to figure out who it is and come up with some clues for us,” Nans said.

  Ruth turned the iPad around, showing a full-face picture of a blonde who had a similar hairstyle to Olive’s and looked to be the same size. “That’s Connie.”

  “She doesn’t look that much like Olive,” Ida said.

  “The sister looks more like her. Maybe she should have had her stand in,” Lexy said.

  “Maybe she does! Maybe that’s who is at Murder-Con,” Ruth suggested.

  “Susan could be pretending to be Connie to hide the fact from Olive that Connie is dead!” Nans said. “Maybe she even took the red Cadillac. We should check if Olive let Connie take that when she was filling in as her.”

  “You mean Susan could have been pretending to be Connie who was pretending to be Olive?” Ida shook her head. “This is getting complicated.”

  “I’ll say.” Helen stood in the doorway, the bank statement dangling from her hand.

  “What is it?” Nans asked.

  Helen put the statement on the table. “According to this statement, Connie didn’t have any big deposits.”

  “What?” Lexy leaned over to read the statement. It looked like a regular bank statement from someone who didn’t have a ton of money. Similar to her own. “This doesn’t look like she’s been getting money from Rupert and Susan. I mean, she was getting tens of thousands. Wouldn’t she have deposited some of it?”

  “Maybe she didn’t want a record of it. But where has she been putting it?” Ida asked.

  “Well, maybe she’s just been stashing it away under her mattress or something,” Nans said. “You know, maybe she doesn’t want to make it obvious that she’s getting a large sum of money. Going to save it for later or dole it out a little bit at a time.”

  “But Rupert was getting bank checks. Wouldn’t she have to cash those within a certain number of days?” Lexy asked.

  “I think so. Probably ninety days.” Ruth said. “Maybe she was using the cashier’s checks to buy something. Jewelry, household items. Laundering the money, so to speak. Then she could return the items or sell them on eBay. Are there any eBay statements in your pile of mail, Ida?”

  “I don’t think so.” Ida thumbed through the pile of mail like a deck of cards, and a single piece of paper fluttered up from the pile, landing upside down on the table.

  “What’s that?” Nans asked.

  “I don’t know. Doesn’t look like mail. Maybe the grocery list.” Ida flipped it over, and the room fell silent as they all stared at it.

  It was a note on white-lined paper, handwritten with a black felt-tip pen.

  Keep your mouth shut or you’ll be next.

  “Does that mean what I think it means?” Helen asked.

  “Yep. Looks like a threat to me,” Ruth said.

  “But what was it doing in Connie’s mail?” Lexy asked.

  Nans shook her head. “No, that wasn’t in Connie’s mail. That was on the credenza with Olive’s notebook. That note wasn’t for Connie. It was for Olive.”

  Everyone’s head swiveled toward Nans. “You mean Rupert wrote Olive a threatening note?”

  Nan spread her hands. “It’s the only explanation. Olive lives in the house and is in a position to be able to find evidence of the murder. Maybe she’s been asking questions and Rupert is trying this one thing to keep her quiet.”

  “He’s probably just trying to get her to keep her mouth shut long enough for him to execute his plan to kill her,” Ruth said.

  “Well, if that’s true, we don’t have much time. We need to tell Jack,” Ida said.

  “Tell Jack what?” Nans asked. “Connie’s bank statement showed no deposits, so we have no evidence to show that she was blackmailing them. We have no body. No murder weapon. Heck, we don’t even have a motive. And without any of those, what can Jack possibly do?”

  “She’s right. We don’t have any evidence to give Jack right now, but we do have something.” Ida held her phone out with the GPS app open. “I think I figured out how to get this thing to be even more precise, and if that’s the case, I should be able to locate the drone.”

  “And on the drone is all the evidence we need,” Ruth said.

  “In that case, we have but one choice,” Nans said. “Tonight under the cover of darkness, we must go to the Pendletons’ and retrieve the drone.”

  24

  Lexy wouldn’t lie to Jack, so it was a good thing he was working the night shift that night and, technically, she didn’t have to lie because he didn’t even know she was going out. His rule of not talking on the phone and only texting when he was on the job was working in her favor. Otherwise he might’ve called and asked what she was doing. The fact that he was working was good for another reason too. If they got arrested he’d be able to keep them out of jail. Hopefully.

  Lexy dressed in all black. Black jeans. Black T-shirt. She was contemplating her black hoodie, but it was too hot out. When she arrived at the retirement center, Nans, Ruth, Ida, and Helen were waiting for her at the door, also dressed in black, except instead of jeans and T-shirts, they wore identical black polyester pantsuits accessorized with gigantic black patent-leather purses. Ruth was holding her wetsuit.

  “You’re not going to need that, are you?” Lexy pointed to the wetsuit. She didn’t relish the idea of recovering a body that had been underwater for over a week.

  “I figured if we can’t find the drone, maybe we could dig up the body.”

  Lexy glanced up at Nans, who shrugged. Better to just put the wetsuit in and argue about it later.

  They got in the car, and Lexy headed toward the Pendletons’.

  “Okay now, we need to make this a stealth operation,” Nans said. “Ida, you need to keep your phone shielded so that the light can’t be seen from the house. We don’t know if Rupert will be home.”

  “Check,” Ida said.

  “And we all need to be quiet. No talking. We’ll use the owl sig
naling system,” Nans continued.

  Lexy slid her eyes over to Nans. “Owl signaling system?”

  Nans frowned at her. “Don’t you listen to anything I tell you? That’s the stealth system we use for communication. One hoot to indicate things are going fine, two hoots to indicate you found something, and three hoots to indicate get the heck out.”

  “Oh, right.” Lexy vaguely remembered Nans explaining the system to her before. She hadn’t paid much attention, not expecting to ever be going on a covert operation at eleven p.m. with her grandmother and her three senior-citizen friends.

  “Cut the lights! Cut the lights!” Nans whispered sharply as Lexy turned onto the Pendletons’ street.

  “What? I won’t be able to see if I turn off the lights,” Lexy said.

  “You can coast,” Ruth said. “If you leave the lights on, Rupert might see us coming.”

  Lexy pulled over to the side and turned off the lights then inched the car slowly forward. She didn’t want to park right in front of the Pendleton house, so she pulled up three houses down.

  The street was quiet, and most of the houses’ windows were dark. Several of them had outdoor lights on. Cars sat cold in the driveways. A few parked on the street in front of the houses. It appeared that the entire neighborhood was asleep. They sat in the car, waiting for a few minutes. Nothing moved in the neighborhood, and the air was silent except the occasional peep of a frog or chirp of a cricket.

  “Okay, I think the coast is clear.” Nans popped her door open slowly and quietly. “Ready?”

  The four old ladies slipped out of the car as silent as ninjas. They shuffled down the street, keeping to the shadows of the hedges and shrubs that dotted the yards. They slipped into the Pendletons’ yard virtually undetected.

  “Hoot,” Ruth said.

  “Hoot,” Nans answered.

  Ida pulled out her phone, shielding the screen with her hand.

  “Ping!”

  “Ida, turn that down!” Nans whispered.

  Ida pressed a button on the side of the phone then continued looking at the shielded display in her hand. “This way,” she whispered, nodding toward the back corner of the Pendletons’ yard where the half-built gazebo stood.

  They walked slowly across the yard, sticking to the shadows. Lexy’s nerves were on edge, expecting the dogs to come racing and barking and the lights to blare on at any minute. Her phone vibrated in her pocket, and she took it out, shielding it with her palm as Ida had done with her phone. It was a text from Jack. She didn’t dare not answer it lest he suspect she was up to something.

  Olive Pendleton’s car found at Lakeside Garage. Getting a new fan belt.

  Hmmm… That was odd. Apparently their theory of Rupert taking the car to some desolate place to fake a disappearance or Susan taking it to the conference had been off. She was only getting a new fan belt. Lexy refrained from telling Nans and the others. The less talking they did the better. It could wait.

  They slowly followed Ida as she veered first to the east and then to the west, heading toward the gazebo in a serpentine pattern.

  “It’s over there.” Ida pointed toward the gazebo.

  “In the gazebo?” Helen whispered.

  “I suppose there’s lots of places for the dogs to hide it,” Lexy said, remembering how Sprinkles loved to hide things under other objects or dig holes in the ground.

  “I saw them digging under that wood pile when we were here before. Maybe it’s there,” Ida said.

  They moved up even with the gazebo, and now Lexy could see how slipshod the building of it was. Had Rupert only started the project so he could have the excuse of having cement around? Her eyes had adjusted fully to the dark, and she scanned the area for the blue tarp, remembering how Jack had said Rupert could have wrapped the body in it and weighed the whole package down. The blue tarp was nowhere to be seen.

  Ida waved her phone back and forth as if it were a dowsing rod.

  “It says it’s over there, but…” She nodded toward the side of the gazebo, where Lexy could see they’d set up a little area for cooking out.

  “Looks like they’re moving their outdoor kitchen up here,” Lexy whispered.

  “Seems odd to me,” Nans said. “Construction isn’t even finished. And look at this weird foundation.” Nans pointed to the foundation, where forms had been set up that looked a lot deeper than they needed to be.

  “Maybe he needed a deep footing because it’s muddy here,” Helen said.

  “I don’t think this GPS tracker is working,” Ida whispered. “It seems to think the drone is in—”

  A light snapped on, illuminating them and freezing them in their tracks, and then they heard Rupert’s voice. “I’m getting a little sick of you old biddies nosing around here.”

  “Hoot hoot hoot,” Ruth yelled.

  “Yeah, it’s a little too late for that, Ruth.” Ida hid her hand with the phone behind her back and puckered her face into a look of confusion. “Snooping? Why, I thought this was my bedroom? Isn’t this the way to my room?” Ida looked from Nans to Ruth to Helen innocently.

  “We’re very sorry, Mr. Pendleton,” Nans said. “My friend here wandered out of the retirement facility. She sleepwalks and gets confused easily. We had to follow her over here.”

  Rupert’s brows mashed together. “You don’t think I’m going to buy that, do you?”

  “Why? You know she’s not all there.”

  “Why are you people really here?”

  Nans' eyes flicked from Rupert to the pile of lumber. She sidled toward it. “Okay, let’s cut the malarkey. I think you know why we’re here.”

  “No, honestly. I have no idea. What is it that you want? An autograph? A signed book? Pictures to put in one of those tabloid papers?”

  Ruth scoffed. “Still playing, I see? We’ll have you know that we know what you’re up to. Where’s Susan? I thought she’d be right behind you.”

  Rupert looked confused. “Susan? She’s in Europe.”

  Helen laughed. “Yeah, sure she is. We know she’s here. Her car is in your garage.”

  “Yeah, she left it there when she went to Europe with Olive. They took it to the airport and left it in long-term parking. Then when Olive came back by herself, she drove it back. Susan is staying on.”

  “I think you can stop pretending now,” Lexy said. “We know what you’re up to. We know what you’ve used the cement for, and we know what’s in your pond.”

  “You ladies are all senile. You’re bat-shoot crazy like that fan club. I want you off my property. Now.” Rupert waved the flashlight toward the front of the house. Lexy and Nans exchanged a confused look. Was he going to let them get away?

  Ida was over by the freezer with her cell phone out in plain sight now. It appeared as if she was homing in on the location of the drone.

  “Not a chance, buddy. We know what you’ve done, and the proof is right in here.” Ida tapped the top of the chest freezer.

  “What are you talking about? Oh no, don’t open that!” Rupert looked worried. Scared, even. “Olive is doing an experiment for her new book, and if you open the freezer, it’ll ruin—”

  But Ida didn’t follow directions so well. She whipped the top of the freezer open triumphantly. Lexy expected her to produce the drone, but instead her face crumpled, and she said, “Uh oh.”

  “What?” Lexy ran to her, her heart seizing when she looked inside the freezer. Nestled in the blue tarp was Ida’s drone. Next to that, the baseball bat. But those two things weren’t what caught her attention. The thing that caught her attention was what the tarp was partially wrapped around. A body. Susan’s body.

  Rupert hadn't murdered Connie—he'd murdered Susan.

  * * *

  “You wrecked the experiment!” Rupert cried.

  “Experiment? Is that what you call this?” Nans said.

  “My drone! It’s frozen!” Ida had pulled the controller out of her purse and was pushing the levers back and forth. The drone inside the
freezer didn’t budge. “I’m not reaching in and getting it. You get it, Lexy.”

  Nans whirled on Rupert. “You won’t get away with this. We have evidence now.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?” Rupert glanced back at the house nervously. “You’ve screwed up Olive’s experiment, and I’m going to be in trouble for it. You ladies have ruined everything!”

  He lunged toward Nans, who deftly sidestepped.

  Ruth picked up a piece of lumber that was lying on the ground and swung at Rupert. She missed, clocked the side of the freezer, and fell down, sliding in the mud.

  Rupert made another attempt at Nans, which she averted, and then he turned his attention on Lexy. She had the drone in her hand and her back up against the freezer. He came at her, his hands reaching toward her throat. And then he stopped short. Looking down into the freezer, his eyes grew wide in horror just as the drone came to life in Lexy’s hands.

  “Let go!” Ida cried as she worked the controls.

  Lexy loosened her grip on the drone, and it flew up into the air then plummeted, smashing into Rupert’s head. He fell to the ground and lay there, knocked out cold.

  “We’ve got him!” Nans cried.

  “Hoot! Hoot!” Helen said.

  “And I’ve got the evidence.” Lexy held up the USB card she’d taken from the drone.

  “But I don’t understand what actually happened now,” Nans said as they all stood around, looking at Rupert’s inert body. “Susan was the victim, not Connie. But why?”

  “That does screw up our theory for the motive, now, doesn’t it?” Helen said.

  “Unfortunately, a lot of our evidence doesn’t make much sense now.”

  “Why would Rupert want Susan dead?”

  “Oh well, that’s not a problem anymore. We’ve got the killer. We’ve got the evidence. We can hand it over to the police. Lexy, why don’t you call Jack and—”

  Click!

  “Not so fast, ladies. Throw down your phones and step to the back of the gazebo.”

  25