Sinking Ships: An Abishag's First Mystery (The Abishag Mysteries Book 1)

by Michelle Knowlden

  It sure would reflect badly on my Abishag duty to protect the family if I turned him over to the police for murdering Hillary.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “What are you doing in here?” I hurriedly shut the study door. After reading to Thomas from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest for an hour, I’d looked for Vicky. Instead I found Kat in the study, shifting books on the shelves with one hand while holding a frosted glass of lemonade in the other.

  “What are you doing in here?” I repeated.

  “Did you know your husband has two safes in here and at least six hidey holes? Your man kept a lot of secrets.”

  “You found something?”

  She nodded. “You listen to my messages?”

  I shook my head. “Dog wouldn’t let me last night, and it’s been one thing after another this morning.” I looked at her suspiciously. “How’d you get in here?” I knew Kat had a set of illegal lock picks and broke into houses, shops and university buildings when bored.

  “Relax.” She raised her lemonade. “The maid let me in.”

  I didn’t bother pointing out that Mrs. Timmons was a housekeeper, not a maid. “I don’t want to leave Thomas alone, and I can’t find Vicky. Wait here while I check on him. And don’t touch anything.”

  “Can I see him?”

  If she’d asked out of morbid curiosity, I would have said no. I knew the Abishag rules about a husband’s privacy and dignity, and no one wanted to protect Thomas more than I. But Kat’s curiosity seemed kind.

  I checked the dining room before we climbed the stairs. Where had that dratted woman gone?

  Thomas’s glucose bag held less than an inch of fluid. My fingers lingered automatically on Thomas’s hand as I studied his breathing.

  “Is he okay?” Kat stood on the other side of the bed. As if he were a shrub losing its leaves, she lightly brushed the length of his arm.

  “For now,” I said. “Thomas, this is Kathmandu. She’s been working in your gardens. Kat, I gotta find the aide. Would you stay with Thomas for just a minute?”

  Her eyes widened. “I don’t know what do with a dying person.”

  Weird way to put it. Like anyone could stop the inevitable. “Tell him about the garden. And don’t take anything.”

  Halfway down the stairs, I heard a tinkling in one of bedrooms at the top of the stairs. I froze, then snuck back and carefully opened the door of a room I hadn’t been in. Unaware of me, Vicky Sellars sat on the bed, hunched over a sheaf of papers, the drawer of the nightstand wide open.

  “Vicky?”

  She gasped. and the papers scattered. “Miss! You startled me.”

  I stepped into the room and saw an open suitcase on the floor and a box on the bureau. The closet door hung open, as did most of the drawers in the room.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Mister Crowder’s daughter asked me to pack Hillary Lattimer’s things. The hospice service will return them to her family.”

  Odd that Tina hadn’t asked me to do it. As if she read my thoughts, Vicky picked up the pile of papers and dropped them in the box. “I expect Miss Crowder didn’t want to disturb you, and it’s really the hospice service’s responsibility to collect their employee’s things. I don’t mind. The patient really doesn’t need much attention.”

  “Mister Crowder’s glucose bag needs changing.” She flinched at my tone, which I admit was flinty.

  “Of course, Miss. I’ll attend to it immediately.”

  As she slipped past me, I surveyed the room. I hadn’t realized Hillary had stayed at the house. Didn’t Tina say Hillary lived in Torrance?

  Remembering Kat, I sprinted after Vicky, arriving just as she stalled in the doorway to stare wide-eyed at Kat. My housemate was speaking animatedly to Thomas about apricots.

  “This is Kat.” I eased around her to stand near my husband. “I asked her to stay with Thomas till I found you.”

  She blinked. “I am sorry. I didn’t think I’d be missed.” She pursed her lips, looking at the not-quite-empty glucose bag, and at the monitors unchanged in the half hour she’d been absent.

  Circling the bed, Kat made a face at me as she passed Vicky and disappeared into the hall.

  “No harm done.” Maybe I’d overreacted. “May I have Mrs. Timmons bring you anything?”

  She shook her head.

  “I need to speak to the gardener, and then I’ll need another nap. I’ll sit with Thomas while you have your dinner and have a late dinner myself. You’re off at…?”

  “Mister Kovic and I overlap between 9 and 9:30. I’m off-duty once I’ve briefed him.” Her tone was stiff.

  “Great.” I beamed my best smile. “We appreciate what you’re doing here, Vicky. Seeing to his medical needs is what we’ve entrusted your service to do, and the family is grateful.”

  She nodded warily.

  I paused at the door. “I’ll finish packing Hillary’s room. She may have been an employee of the service, but she was also a Crowder. I’ll make sure her things are by the door before you leave.”

  “But you’re not…” She stopped, and I wondered how she planned to finish that sentence. I wasn’t family? I wasn’t a real wife?

  My mother says class shows in how one responds to rudeness. I smiled gently. “I’m not as busy as you, and I don’t mind at all.”

  Kat must have heard part of the conversation as I found her in Hillary’s room, drapes wide open, eagerly going through the papers in the box.

  I shut the door. “What are you doing?”

  “Sorting.” She whipped through the papers. “You check the closet and drawers.”

  “We’re packing her stuff for her employers…”

  “Yeah, I heard. So they can give it back to her family. Did you know that your husband was her closest relative?”

  No one counted the estranged sister, but even death probably wouldn’t erase the fact that Hillary had blackmailed her husband. “So tell me what you found.”

  I went through her closet, which held only a uniform, a sweater and a pair of black pants, and emptied all the pockets onto the bed.

  “I didn’t get an answer from you about looking into the Crowder family doings.” I felt my lips tighten but ignored her pointed words by pretending an interest in a dry cleaner receipt. “I looked anyway. You wanna know what I found out?”

  “Found out about whom?” I tensed when her gaze flicked toward Thomas’s bedroom, but she said, “About Hillary and her brother-in-law.”

  All motives came back to the victim. “What did you find?”

  Kat’s streaked blond dreadlocks swung left to right as she skimmed the papers and tossed them back into the box. “A regular old spider she was. Spun webs, caught whatever passed her, sucked her victims dry. Kept her secrets close, but she wasn’t past paying back-alley detectives to take pictures, tail a prospect, mine accounts.”

  I heard indignation in Kat’s voice. How did her own connivances with shady characters and information-gathering differ from than Hillary’s? Kat would say her motives were curiosity and helping others. Hillary’s had been greed.

  “Some of those detectives talked to you.” It wasn’t a question. I’d heard the satisfaction when she said “back alley detectives.”

  “Yeah. She spread the work with several, but I knew one of the guys who did a job for her. I also know another guy who knows a guy who did a couple jobs for her.”

  She knew a guy who knew a guy. So I had to marry a pillar of the community like Thomas to step into a film-noir version of a gritty detective story.

  “And these guys said…”

  Her nose twitched and she leaned so close to the paper she’d been studying that her hair brushed its margins. She set it aside on the bedspread and flipped the next one into the box.

  “The guy I knew, Rinds, did research for Hillary in 1993 on Brad Jeppers, Hillary’s brother-in-law. You know, the one who had to close his business because of the video pirating? Case looks pretty solid against the empl
oyee who got prosecuted, but it’s kind of suspicious that Hillary’d been collecting money from him since before the trial.”

  “Havey-cavey,” I said, remembering the message she’d left me.

  She looked up from her papers and nodded. “Yep, totally suspicious. Rinds didn’t want to talk to me. Said the work was confidential. When I told him Hillary was dead, he opened up some.”

  Her lips thinned. “I said spider before, because in certain circles, Hillary was called the Brown Recluse— deadly, hides in shadows, drains even her family dry.” She glared at the small piles Hillary left behind as if she blamed them.

  I thought about what the police detective said, Marriage is not a business transaction. Being an Abishag wife was nothing like what Hillary did. I was not a spider bleeding the Crowders dry.

  “Rinds didn’t say specifically what he’d dug up about Jeppers and told Hillary. He did say, like my guy who knows the other detectives Hillary hired said, that she knew how to work her victims, how to make them grateful for keeping their secrets.”

  “We can’t go to the police without knowing what Brad Jeppers did.” I didn’t want the murderer to be a family member, even one by marriage. And I didn’t want to be the one to turn him in.

  Kat shrugged. “Okay, forget Hillary’s brother-in-law for now. The police still aren’t considering him a suspect anyway.” She flipped another sheet into the box. Her stack of papers shrunk to a half dozen while I finished folding and packing the clothes in the closet.

  “My guy knew the detective that Hillary hired to tail the executive from the investment firm.”

  “The one where she worked for a couple of years in the late 90s.”

  Kat’s nose twitched in distaste. I didn’t see why. Obviously Hillary had to do some legitimate work—according to her accounts, she didn’t make a living at blackmail.

  “Apparently some photos the detective took netted her the money she’d been collecting from the executive. After I told the gumshoe that Hillary was dead, he said he’d check his notes to see what he’d taken pictures of.”

  “I can guess…” My nose didn’t twitch, but disgust colored my words.

  Kat grinned. “Can you really? I’m shocked.”

  I grimaced. I didn’t want to gossip about Thomas’s people, even the people who’d employed his niece.

  She held up paper to hide another smile, then said, “About the shipwreck…”

  My heart skipped a beat. Without thinking, I said, “What he salvaged…” Then I ground to a halt.

  She looked at me alertly. “He? Thomas salvaged something?”

  I wondered how much of the computer files of Thomas’s 1950 ledger accounts I should share. I swallowed. “I interrupted. You go first.”

  She sighed, disappointed. “Whatever Thomas had been paying Hillary to keep quiet about had to be about the shipwreck. My guy found a box filled with newspaper articles of the shipwreck at Hillary’s house. A box marked as her dad’s things. Thomas only started paying her after her dad died.”

  She checked my face, but I think I remained expressionless. She continued, “Did you know that Thomas’s wife, Carol, was heading for a nervous breakdown before the shipwreck? Seriously. Her parents had money and kept it hushed up, probably kept the poor woman sedated, but a lady at the Portuguese Cove historical society said in the early days of Thomas and Carol’s marriage, they appeared everywhere—charitable events, social fetes, even hosted outdoor parties on the hill here. Till the baby was born.”

  Their only daughter—Tina. I thought about those pediatrician bills. Had they been a cover for Carol’s breakdown? “Didn’t they used to call post-partum depression nervous breakdowns in those days? Maybe Thomas was willing to pay Hillary hush money to keep it quiet.”

  Kat looked thoughtful. “Interesting, Sherlock. I’ll look into it. Anyway, after the shipwreck, the wife was fine again.” She shucked the rest of the papers into the box, and narrowed an eye at me. “Guess a shipwreck might shake someone out of mental illness. Seems a minor thing to me that Hillary could bleed Thomas for it. And that he’d continue paying her till his stroke.”

  “Thomas doted on his wife. Whatever it took, he’d protect her.” I rummaged in the drawers, ignoring her narrow gaze. “Anything more on the neighbor?”

  “In a minute.” She wouldn’t be distracted. “So what were you saying about shipwreck salvage? Did Thomas find a treasure trove?”

  I shook my head, shocked at how easily I’d lie for my husband. “I didn’t find anything like that. Thomas did start giving money to Hillary when her father, Thomas’s brother, died. Maybe he was just trying to help her out.”

  “For more than thirty years? Come on, Les. You said something about salvage. What do you know?”

  Hoping I wasn’t betraying Thomas, I decided to give her part of the story. “Thomas’s brother, Hillary’s dad, was here when the Isabelle foundered in the cove.”

  Kat gnawed a thumb. “So if something happened that night, her dad could have told Hillary about it on his deathbed.”

  “Or she found something in his things afterwards.”

  Kat brightened. “Like gold doubloons?”

  I laughed. “Really? A freighter carrying wheat just happens to have a cache of gold coins? And if she had doubloons, why would she need money from Thomas?”

  “You’re the one who said salvage.”

  I shrugged. “I saw the line in the ledger, but no details. The money they made off it wasn’t worth getting blackmailed over.”

  My words hung in the air. Hillary had found some reason to extract money from Thomas.

  “And the neighbor?” I asked firmly.

  “He’s only been making payments for the past four years, monthly, and not big ones. He’s even missed a few. Apparently he was a ‘person of interest’ suspected of being a rapist in Lomita, but Hillary said she’d been with him on the “night in question,” so he was never charged. ‘Course his wife dumped him, which presumably is why Hillary’s not collecting much. He pays child support.”

  I buried myself in a drawer. Too much information about people I didn’t know. I couldn’t see how this could be relevant. I could see how people would pay to hide information, but to kill because they were tired of paying?

  On the other hand, Kat obviously relished digging into secrets and didn’t seem at all surprised at the bad things people did. And yet she still liked people. Go figure.

  “Zeke figures Hillary’s killer to be between 5 foot 3 inches and 5 foot 6 inches.” She frowned as she messed around in the box.

  Holding a coat hanger, I stared at her. “How would he know that?”

  “From the picture you took of the crime scene, field notes, and how tall Hillary was, which he got from her driver’s license. Something to do with blood splatter.”

  I wasn’t going to ask her how Zeke had obtained her driver’s license or accessed the detective’s field notes. Knowing the killer’s height would definitely remove some of the suspects. Tina, for example, was nearly six foot. I wondered how we could get the other suspect’s measurements.

  “Are you listening?”

  I came up for air. “Found her cell phone.”

  Kat scooted to the floor next to me. “Hid it in her unmentionables drawer. Somehow appropriate, yes?”

  It still had juice. I scrolled to the last number called, and my heart sank.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “That’s Tina’s number.” I handed the cell to Kat and retreated to the bed, sitting in the crackling center of discarded receipts. “Thomas’s daughter was the last person Hillary called.”

  “Huh.” Kat looked nonplused for only a second. “Tina called a couple of hours before you found her dead.” She tapped the phone thoughtfully. “Doesn’t mean she killed her, you know. She could have been checking on her dad.”

  I felt a stirring of hope. Thomas would have been devastated if his daughter was arrested for murder. ‘Course, he wouldn’t have been happy with Sebastian as a suspe
ct either. Being brain dead had its blessings.

  “Maybe we should make a list of everyone she called her last day.”

  “And who called her,” Kat said. “Already on it.”

  While I emptied drawers into the suitcase, Kat finished mining Hillary’s cell phone—two outgoing calls and five incoming. I also completed the inventory of the papers and receipts I’d found. Nothing incriminating. No death threats, no cryptic notes on the nefarious doings of her blackmail victims. I took an undated note and two receipts from the day she died, and stashed the rest in the box.

  Using her own phone to check the phone numbers with no names, Kat took hasty notes, tapped the paper with her pen, and shot me a perplexed smile.

  “What did you find?” she asked.

  She needed another minute to mull, and that’s about all I could spare. I’d lost my afternoon nap, and I’d be spelling Vicky for her dinner break in a few minutes.

  “I found this phone number.” I passed it to her. “And two receipts—one’s a dry cleaning bill and the other’s from a Starbucks on Crenshaw.”

  She dismissed the phone number and the receipt with one glance. “The number is the drycleaner’s. It’s the other outgoing call.”

  I slumped. “So she didn’t call the killer.”

  “Maybe the killer called her.” Kat tapped the Starbucks’ receipt. “Maybe she met with him too.”

  “That’s reaching. I pick up coffee all the time without meeting killers.”

  “Everything’s suspicious on the day one gets killed.” Kat rolled her eyes. “Though we can probably leave the drycleaner out of it.”

  “The dry cleaning isn’t in the closet. Hey, maybe that’s a clue.”

  “Or not. She didn’t start work that day till 9PM. She had lots of time to do errands, drop off the dry cleaning at her house, and have coffee with her killer. What time was she there?”

  I consulted the receipt. “11:34 a.m.”

  She checked the list of incoming calls. “No name on this one, but when I called it, a brokerage firm answered.”

  “Maybe she’s investing her blackmail funds in stocks.”