A Tale of Two Biddies (League of Literary Ladies)

by Logan, Kylie

  Then there was Mason Burke, of course, looking as dapper as he had when I’d last seen him at the cottage where he was staying over near Gordon Hunter’s. His costume was perfection. His style . . . er . . . he didn’t have the panache of either Ashburn or Drake, but hey, ask the woman who’d had to listen to them squabble these last few days. Panache isn’t everything.

  As I suspected, there were a few other contestants, too. One was a woman, and I had to give her big points for pulling off the transformation. From the hair she had rolled into a tight bun and tucked under her top hat to a suit that fit her to perfection and even a silver-tipped cane, she more than passed for a Victorian gentleman.

  As for the last two contestants . . . even now, I cringe thinking about them. At the same time I have to smile. Tyler and Max were college students who freely admitted to the crowd that they were there for one reason and one reason alone: extra credit in their college English class. They wore beards printed and cut from paper, and glasses (which, as far as I could remember, Dickens didn’t wear) twisted out of pipe cleaners. As for the denim shorts and T-shirts that featured a man sitting next to his severed head and the words, Mostly, It was the Worst of Times . . . hey, their outfits might not be authentic, but I had to give them big points for trying.

  With our first look at the contestants over, Gordon called the high school band up for the second half of the show, and I turned to head back to where I had left Kate and Chandra. Alice Defarge was right behind me.

  “Enjoying the concert?” I asked her.

  By this time the sun had long since set and Alice’s eyes twinkled like the dome of stars above our heads. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it? I was just telling Margaret . . .” Though I never caught a glimpse of her, Alice obviously knew exactly where her sister was standing in the sea of people because she looked across the park and waved. “I was just telling her that we need to do this sort of thing more often. An old-fashioned band concert. What fun!”

  The band regrouped under the gazebo and Gordon walked by. “Good evening, ladies.” His expression was stony. “Nice to see you again, Bea,” he said before he dashed off.

  “Again?” Alice watched him go. “You two best friends?”

  I knew she was kidding so I laughed. “Hardly. But we stopped to say hello to Gordon earlier this evening on our way back from Richie’s.” I knew I didn’t need to explain. Something told me the Defarge sisters shared everything—well, maybe not critiques of their knitting skills or love lives—and I knew Margaret would have already told Alice all about how we’d offered to clean up the house. “He wasn’t very friendly.”

  “Gordon, you mean? Well, of course you do.” Alice shook her shoulders. “You couldn’t be talking about Richie, could you? Then again, Richie and Gordon . . . well, I guess it’s only natural I’d think of the two of them together. I mean, after what Margaret and I . . . after what we saw the other night.”

  Whatever she was talking about, it couldn’t have had anything to do with Richie’s murder. Could it? I knew it was impossible. If Alice knew anything that would help with the official investigation, she surely would have told Hank. Still, there was something about the way she said those words—what we saw the other night—that sent a tingle of anticipation through me.

  Apparently, Alice knew it. She raised her eyebrows and nodded. “We were out for a spin in our golf cart. Sunday night. Late. You know, just to get a little fresh air and because we knew it was going to be a busy and crowded week. How Margaret and I do love the peace and quiet of the island at night! No matter.” She clutched her hands at her waist. “We just happened to go by Gordon’s and there he was with Richie. They were unloading a van in front of Gordon’s place.”

  “Sunday night? That was the day Richie damaged Gordon’s boat, right?”

  “Exactly what I thought.” Alice put a hand on my arm. “It was dark, and we couldn’t see clearly, at least not without stopping the golf cart and gawking. And you know me and Margaret, when it comes to our snooping, we’re way more professional than that. So we couldn’t tell exactly, but it looked as if they were unloading boxes and carrying them into Gordon’s cottage.”

  “Gordon must have had to get his things off the boat, right? I mean, after it was damaged. They would have needed to clean it out and—”

  “Oh yes, I suspect that’s exactly what it was.” Alice stepped back into the crowd. “Gordon was so angry at Richie for what Richie did to the boat, I bet he made poor Richie move all those boxes and never paid him a dime!”

  • • •

  We didn’t hang around for the rest of the band concert. It had been a long day, and I had a lot to think about. I dropped off Kate and Chandra, but the moment I pulled into the driveway of the B and B and saw Tiffany and her gang of Boyz ’n Funk worshipers across the street listening to the not-so-melodic strains of Guillotine coming out of the garage where I’d let the band set up to rehearse, I knew thinking would not be on my agenda, at least not until eleven o’clock (the official turn-off-all-loud-music-and-TV time at Bea & Bees) rolled around.

  I parked the SUV and tucked my keys in my pocket. If I was looking for peace and quiet, I wouldn’t find it in my own home for at least another hour. Until then . . .

  I ambled down the driveway and turned right, away from the house and from the direction of all the activity downtown. A nice, quiet walk and some time to clear my head was exactly what I needed, to a part of the island where there were no concerts, no rock bands, and far fewer weekend partiers.

  A minute in, and my heartbeat ratcheted back and my breathing slowed.

  Two minutes, and the tightness that I hadn’t realized had been building in my shoulders eased.

  Three, and I was far enough from the house for the sounds of croaking frogs and chirping crickets to replace the racket of pounding bass and Dino’s wailing.

  Life might not be perfect, but for these few minutes, it was as good as it could get, and I smiled to myself, enjoying every single moment while I let my mind work over everything I’d learned that day about Richie, Richie’s friends, and Richie’s many, many enemies.

  I was somewhere between considering Mike’s motives and remembering how good the salted caramel ice cream tasted when I heard sounds behind me and spun around.

  The shuffle of feet.

  The snap of a twig.

  Someone following me.

  Except . . . I peered into the darkness . . . there wasn’t a soul on the empty road behind me.

  And I was being way too jumpy for my own good.

  I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and turned around to continue on my way. There was a cross street coming up on my right, and I could head that way, then loop around and behind the B and B and Chandra’s house, then on to another road where I could hang another right and then another, and be back home. It would take only another ten minutes or so to complete the circuit, and if I could get my blood pressure to settle down after that split second of thinking I wasn’t alone, that was ten minutes I could use to think about the investigation.

  Good advice, but still, I picked up the pace a bit and soon found myself in front of a cottage where row upon row of twinkly solar lights outlined the roofline and the windows and the deck out back. Bathed in the gentle glow, I forced myself to slow down and enjoy the feel of the lake breeze against my skin. I’d lived in New York City for years, right? And I’d walked all over the city at all hours, I reminded myself. If I could do it there, I certainly could do it here on South Bass, the Eden of Lake Erie. I could. I would. I—

  A hand came down on my arm and I didn’t so much scream as I let out a screech that could probably be heard by dogs ten miles away. Everything I’d learned in the self-defense classes I’d taken back in New York kicked in and I spun, pushed against the person behind me as hard as I could, and yelled, “Back off!”

  Self-defense maneuvers.

  A good thing.

  Except they left a skinny woman I’d never seen before staggering
back, her mouth open in astonishment and her eyes wide with terror.

  Those eyes . . . although I’d already stepped up to get close when I shoved her, I moved even closer for a better look. Her eyes were small and dark. They were also crossed.

  “Hey!” I remembered my conversation with Margaret on regatta day at the same time I grabbed the stranger’s arm before she could collapse in the street. “You’re Richie’s girlfriend!”

  The winking lights flashed against a face that was pinched and too angular to ever be considered pretty. Her nose was long and thin.

  “I . . . I . . .” I bet there wasn’t much color in the woman’s face to begin with, but the white LED lights only made the pallor worse. She reminded me of those pale fish that live way down deep in the ocean. “Sorry.” She blinked and hugged her arms around herself. “I didn’t wanna scare you.”

  “Well, you did. And I didn’t mean to scare you, either, it’s just that—”

  “I shoulda said something.” It was plenty warm out, but she chafed her hands up and down her arms. “I just didn’t know what to say and I knew I shouldn’t bother you, but I knew I had to, like, talk to you or somethin’. I was waitin’ for you back at your house and then you showed up, but then you walked away and, well . . . I shoulda said somethin’.”

  “It’s okay.” It wasn’t. Not completely. My heart still jackhammered against my ribs and my brain jumped to those horrible months back in New York when a stalker made my life a living hell. “What can I do for you?”

  Instinctively, I knew her shrug didn’t mean she didn’t know what she wanted. It meant she wasn’t sure how to explain.

  I guess the fact that I’d come across as a paranoid—and dangerous—New Yorker didn’t help.

  I offered a smile. “It’s been such a busy week already, I just wanted to get some air. You want to walk with me?”

  She nodded and fell into step beside me.

  “We haven’t met,” I said.

  “But you called me Richie’s girlfriend.”

  “But I don’t know your name.”

  “Rosalee.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Rosalee. I hear you work at the hotel.”

  I think she nodded. Since we were already past the house with the soft lighting, it was a little hard to tell.

  “Have you worked there long?”

  “Last summer,” she said. “And the summer before.”

  “And is that when you met Richie?”

  Another nod, and don’t think I failed to notice that her chin quivered.

  “It’s hard.” I didn’t need to tell her, but she did need to know that I understood a little of what she was going through. “You must miss him.”

  “We wasn’t serious or nothing. I mean, every year after the summer, I went back to Sandusky where I’m from and then me and Richie, we’d hardly ever even talked to each other or anything. But then when I came back up here the next summer . . .”

  I let her gather her thoughts while we walked along in silence past rows of well-tended summer cottages.

  “We’d hang out. You know?” Rosalee finally said. “Not like all the time or anything. I mean, it’s not like we were living together. Richie was just . . .” I gave her a sidelong look just in time to see her raise her scrawny shoulders. “Sometimes it was hard to talk to him.”

  “Still, you kept up a relationship all this time.”

  Rosalee shook her head. “He’d get real quiet sometimes. And sometimes he’d complain, you know, about how life didn’t treat him so fair. But most of the time, Richie, he was okay. I mean, like when we stopped at a bar, he paid for my beers.”

  “Do you have a theory about why someone killed him?” I asked.

  Rosalee stopped walking and shoved her hands into the pockets of her black shorts. “Richie sometimes pissed people off. I guess you probably know that. But he wasn’t a bad guy. He never wanted to hurt anybody, it was just that sometimes, well . . . sometimes Richie had some real bad luck.”

  So did Mike Lawrence and Dan Peebles and Gordon Hunter. All because of Richie. This wasn’t the time to mention it. “Who do you think killed him?” I asked her.

  “I dunno.” Rosalee turned away as if that would keep me from seeing her brush her hands across her cheeks. “But who killed him, that’s what I come to talk to you about. That’s why I was waiting for you and why I followed you. The girls over at the hotel, they talk, you know. And they was saying that you and your friends, they told me you solved a murder a couple months ago, and I thought if you could do it then, maybe you could do it again and, you know, figure out what happened to Richie.”

  “That’s what the police are for.”

  “The police, they don’t care. I mean, not really. Richie was just Richie and everybody thought he was a loser. But he wasn’t. He was just . . .” Thinking, she pressed her lips together. “Richie was kind of depressed sometimes. He used to say he could have been somebody but that didn’t work out because some guy, he stole what should have been Richie’s. I never told him, but I always thought that sounded a little crazy.”

  “Maybe not.” I wasn’t prepared to tell Rosalee everything I’d learned from Tiffany about the court case that had once pitted Richie against Dino, not until I had a chance to fact check. “Is there anything else you can tell me that might help?”

  She hung her head.

  “How about explaining that fight you and Richie had outside the hotel the other day.”

  Rosalee’s head shot up. “Who says?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She propped her fists on her hips. “Hell, yes, it matters ’cause it ain’t true, and anyone who says it is, that person is lying. So what, you listened to that lie and now you think I was mad at Richie? That I had something to do with killing him?”

  “Did you?”

  Instead of answering, Rosalee kicked a stone and sent it skittering to the side of the road. “I came to talk to you to ask for your help,” she said. “But you’re just like all the rest of them. You figure people like Richie and me, we’re not worth helping, that we don’t matter.”

  Before I could tell her she was wrong, Rosalee stalked back the way we came and disappeared into the darkness.

  “So much for that line of the investigation,” I grumbled to myself.

  But don’t think I was about to give up. Either Rosalee was lying about the fight she had with Richie, or Margaret was mistaken about what she and Alice saw. Guess which I was betting on?

  I added Rosalee to the list of people I’d need to pay more attention to and hung a right to walk down the street that would take me behind the B and B.

  “You didn’t have a fight, huh?” I asked myself, thinking about what Rosalee had told me. “That was a whole lot of anger for somebody who claims she and Richie were tight when he died.”

  That will teach me to talk to myself.

  If I would have shut up, maybe I would have heard the noise behind me sooner.

  Footsteps against the pavement.

  I stopped and blew out a breath of exasperation. “Rosalee,” I called out without bothering to turn around, “if you’re not going to be level with me, don’t even bother following me.”

  “How about if I’m not Rosalee?”

  A man’s voice brought me spinning around. If my heart wasn’t pounding hard enough to deafen me, I would have realized who it was right away.

  “Levi!” I pressed a hand to my chest and relief washed over me. At least until I took a second to assess the situation. “Why are you following me?”

  In the waxy light of the crescent moon, his hair gleamed like silver. “I came over to the B and B to see you just as you were walking away from the place. And then I saw that woman follow you. I thought—”

  “That I can’t protect myself from skinny hotel maids?”

  I didn’t say it to make him smile, and when he did, I realized my teeth were clenched. “I’m sure you can protect yourself.”

  “But you followed me anywa
y.”

  Rather than explain, he started walking, and since I wouldn’t be happy until he explained himself, I did, too.

  “You’ve been poking your nose into Richie’s murder,” Levi said, as casual as can be.

  “Not exactly poking. More like—”

  “Poking.”

  Honestly, I thought about cutting him off at the knees right then and there, turning on my heels and heading back the way I’d come, but I knew I was closer to home in this direction than I would be if I headed back. “This sounds like a conversation we’ve already had,” I reminded him.

  “You apparently weren’t listening last time.”

  I drew in a lungful of air big enough to supply all the wind I needed to level him, but Levi never gave me a chance.

  “What you’re doing is dangerous,” he said.

  “I’m being careful.”

  “Not careful enough to realize Rosalee was following you.”

  “Or that you were following both of us.”

  My sarcasm was lost on him. We made the right turn at the street that would take us alongside Chandra’s house. “It’s not smart,” he said, and added quickly, “which isn’t to say you’re not smart.”

  “Just that I’m not acting smart.”

  “You said it, not me.”

  We walked a little more, and rather than debate what I figured wasn’t worth debating anyway, I decided to catch him off guard. “Why aren’t you at the bar?” I asked him.

  We were nearing Chandra’s and the colored Christmas lights that criss-crossed over her patio threw a rainbow against Levi’s face. “If I tell you we weren’t busy you’re just going to tell me I’m wrong.”

  “Then tell me the truth instead.”

  “The truth . . .” We made the last of our right-hand turns and we were back on my street now. There was no music coming from the garage, and since apparently the Boyz had called it a day, no fan club panting with every note, and for this I was grateful. “The truth is that the bar is open again, but Mike had things under control. The rest of the truth is that I’d hate to see something happen to you,” Levi said.