Murder, Malice and Mischief

by Quinn, Lucy

  As I rushed back into the office, I heard Justin’s voice call out. “Y’know, I should head back out to the Pump’n’Go over in Rolo. That motor oil finally—” When he saw me, he stopped talking. “Oh. I thought you were Danny.”

  “Yeah. Look. I’m sorry, okay?” I stopped with my body halfway through the door. “I didn’t intend to be so mean.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “No, not whatever.” I furrowed my brows and inched a little farther into the room. “I really shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Fine.” Justin flipped through a couple more pieces of paper, not meeting my eyes. I did notice he was sucking in his gut a little. My words had obviously hit some nerve.

  Danny came up behind me, standing beside me in the door. “I meant to tell you, Justin, Roy called about that back-ordered box of motor oil he didn’t get.”

  Something clicked in my head. Rolo. Pump’n’Go.

  “Wait, do you deliver to that convenience store in Rolo?” I asked, turning to Danny.

  He nodded. “They call it The Store,” he said with a grin. “It was the first convenience store in the town, so it only had one name.”

  “Were you in Rolo on Tuesday?” I looked at Justin, but he was still busying himself with paperwork.

  “Yeah. Tuesdays and Fridays,” Danny finished for him. “Why?”

  “I wasn’t there for the murder, if that’s what you’re asking,” Justin sneered, still not looking up. I was about to ask another question, but he kept going. “I went to school with Claire, y’know. If I had seen someone kill her, I would have come forward.”

  His tone said, I’m not that big a jerk. And I deserved the defensiveness. But the words he’d chosen made me pause.

  “You didn’t see someone kill her, but…did you see her that day?”

  “Yeah. We pulled up to the corner of the highway. Y’know, you have to turn left to go along the highway, but if you turn right, there’s The Store.”

  I nodded, leaning forward in eagerness.

  “When I looked over, I saw some black car speeding away. Claire was trying to follow it, yelling something. We had the right-of-way, but the car cut in front of us. They looked pretty pissed.”

  Emotion flooded through me. Henry. He’d seen Henry’s car. On the road back to Saint Agnes. And Claire had been alive.

  Chapter 24

  I called the sheriff’s office on my way back from Murphy’s, and reported to the night clerk that someone should talk with Justin Brent about Henry’s alibi. I was doing what Malcolm had told me and staying away from it.

  In lieu of going home, where I wouldn’t have reception—and where I wouldn’t have a landline until Monday—I went to my office at Saint Agnes Community Church. They hadn’t fired me yet, and there was work to do, for both my jobs.

  I spent an hour typing up notes from the comment cards and tweaking recipes. I settled on four flavors of macarons for the next morning, and printed out the individual recipes.

  Then I turned my attention to my other job. It was time to switch out the sermons. When I opened the box, it struck me that Norman’s sermons were organized by date. Considering how long he’d held his position, it was a little like having a living history of the town. I was on 1995, which was still early in his tenure, but it wouldn’t be long before I reached the first year of the school co-op—the timeframe during which those pictures I’d seen at Mrs. Barnett’s had been taken.

  I flipped through the folders, moving forward in time, and pulled the files from July, August, September, and October of 1998. Shoving them into my messenger bag, I moved the sticky note that reminded me where I was to July of ‘98, and then left the office and locked up.

  Norman had been more of an academic-minded teacher from the pulpit, but he’d always done a sort of week-in-review at the opening, tying something that had happened in the world into the topic of his sermon. It was easy to imagine the old pastor sitting at his kitchen table with Nadine in the mornings, the newspaper spread open in front of him, over a copy of The Cost of Discipleship.

  He must have been an interesting man.

  It was dark when I got home, and there was a strange truck in Malcolm’s driveway. I tried not to stare, as I gathered my things and walked into my house. A quick dinner of chicken breast and French green beans distracted me, but I checked on the truck again when I sat down to read the sermons. It was still there.

  I purposefully lowered the lights in my living room, which faced Malcolm’s house, and kept the curtains mostly closed. There was just enough space for me to peek out and keep an eye on what was happening next door.

  Reading through Norman’s sermons, starting from July 5th, 1998, which had been a Sunday. He made a big deal out of the veteran’s parade—a tradition I’d heard about from the coffee ladies.

  Norman’s Fifth-of-July sermon acknowledged Frances Barnett and her sister Phyllis, who were the chairs of the parade planning committee. That seemed a strange thing to mention, since none of the Barnetts were members at Saint Agnes Community. The parade had to be a bigger deal than I’d originally thought.

  Subsequent weeks in July revealed nothing interesting, and the first sermon in August was uneventful. Norman prayed for the people killed in an earthquake in New Guinea. He congratulated the Montana Little League teams for their performance.

  But August 9th had some hand-written notes in the margin. Pray for the family of August Krantz, who is missing after a bombing at the embassy where he was stationed in Nairobi. His parents, Audric and Clara Krantz, are members of this church and pray for him to be found, quickly and safely.

  I pulled out my phone and googled pregnancy calculator. I clicked on date I conceived, entered August 7th and hit calculate my due date. After a little waiting on my slow internet, the page loaded.

  April 30th.

  That confirmed my suspicions. Auggie couldn’t have been Austin’s father. I didn’t know a single doctor who would let a woman stall delivery for more than thirty days after her due date.

  Was Henry really Austin’s father? There had to be a way to find out.

  I brought up the search engine again and searched for Henry’s name. The first hits were on Wikipedia and IMDB, which I perused. According to whoever wrote his bio, he was discovered at his gym—which fit what Scarlet had told me—but didn’t give any dates, except for the first film, which was released in 1999. He had minor parts in several films and a couple of long stints on TV shows before he struck the proverbial gold with Bronson. He hadn’t exaggerated; he’d been married four times.

  It bothered me to look at the photos of him, happy and alive. It still hadn’t really set in that I would never see him again. I hadn’t known him for long enough to feel real, deep grief, but I did grieve for him. He’d had so much to atone for, and he’d tried so hard to escape it.

  If he had lived, would he have tried harder to make it up to Claire? Had he tried to make it up to her, in the intervening years?

  Would he have tried to meet Austin? Be a father?

  I wanted to believe that he would have, that people could change. It was the bedrock of my faith…redemption. But I didn’t know enough about him to make any pronouncements.

  I looked up again, glancing out the window and closing my laptop screen. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that there was light coming from the front of Malcolm’s house, likely from his living room. It faced the street, not my house, so I couldn’t tell for sure. Through the side window that did face my house, I could see the glow of light in a hallway, but all the activity appeared to be in the front of the house.

  I went back to Norman’s sermons, and the opening prayer was all about Auggie Krantz. Most of the sermon was about Auggie, too, in some way. Norman would be doing the funeral, according to his sermon, though it would be held at the Catholic Church. A real ecumenical outpouring for the fallen hero. His parents were going to Delaware to meet the body, and there would be a burial at Arlington National Cemetery. The funeral in Saint
Agnes was to be on Saturday, and the Krantzs would return for the event.

  Oddly, no mention of Nikki at all.

  The following week’s sermon included another prayer for Auggie, as did the final week in August, but the town seemed to be recovering from the tragedy. I knew enough about the aftermath of death to know the family hadn’t recovered as fast.

  September began with another prayer for the Krantz family. Then there was nothing about the tragedy until the first week of October, where there was another large-scale prayer for the parents of Auggie Krantz and their daughter-in-law, Nikki, who was newly pregnant. A grand, eloquent prayer about the baby being Auggie’s salvation. The one thing he’d always wanted. A family.

  There was another reference to Auggie’s baby in the sermon—which was about Abraham bringing Isaac to the mountaintop, a father offering his son as a sacrifice. Norman was unusually eloquent about the son being the father’s redemption, about him being preserved as a promise. It was downright Hopkins-esque. I was proud.

  But it was also a little strange. I’d read many of Norman’s sermons at this point, and he was rarely this loquacious.

  I read and re-read his prayers from August, the quick mention of the tragedy in September, and then the sermon in October. It was a clear shift, and it felt like he was riding a wave rather than creating one. Typically, a big tragedy like a fallen soldier was big news when it happened, and then it would be replaced in the community consciousness by something else. But something else was sustaining the wave.

  Perhaps Nadine was awake. She had, by her own estimation, sat in the front pew every Sunday for forty years, listening to her husband deliver sermons. If anyone was likely to remember the shift in tone, and what had brought it about, it would have been Nadine.

  I checked my watch as I grabbed the keys to the Tank. It was just coming on eight o’clock. I didn’t have a big window if I wanted to catch her before she closed down the house for the night.

  The church directory was programmed into my phone, and I looked up Nadine’s address while I buckled into the Tank. I set my phone into the cradle, so I could see the screen, and called up the directions.

  As I drove by Malcolm’s, I noticed that the truck was gone, and I slowed my car for a moment in front of the driveway. I still felt like I should tell Malcolm in person about what I’d learned from Justin Brent. Part of me was afraid he’d accuse me of something or get me into even bigger trouble with Peter. A bigger part of me wanted to make sure justice was done, but I felt like I was in over my head.

  A car came around the corner, and I glanced at the driver. It was Jenna Van Andel, driving a car I didn’t recognize, so I waved at her with a smile. Her eyes rounded, but she caught herself and waved back.

  I continued on my way to Nadine’s house, pausing just a touch at the corner. Jenna made a U-turn in the little dead-end past my house, then pulled into Malcolm’s long drive. If only I could be a fly on the wall for that conversation. I still wanted to know why she had given Derek that bag, and why a knife, which I was still convinced was the murder weapon, had been right on top of the contents. I couldn’t ask her, though, not straight out.

  Nadine’s house was on the road to Rolo, which I found to be particularly ironic, given that this was where all the trouble had started. At the last corner before the canyon, I took a right turn off the winding road and the cell service cut out, so I had to navigate on my own from there. The screen still contained the turn-by-turn directions, but I had to scroll through them myself. In the pitch black, on a road with no lights, this was no easy task.

  By the time I made it to the last turn, I was considering pulling over and setting up camp until sunrise. But there it was, a little sign above the mailbox that read Nadine Winters. I turned in.

  Nadine didn’t answer her door at first, and I was worried that I’d come too late—until I heard a faint voice calling to me from the back of the house. The door was open and I stuck my head inside.

  “Hello?” I called out.

  “I can see you, Vangie. Come on in. I’m in the kitchen.”

  I made my way through the small, spare house. The last set of doors opened up into a long, narrow kitchen. Nadine stood at the sink, hands wet up to her elbows, humming.

  “Sorry I couldn’t come to the door,” she said, between bars of a familiar hymn. “Don’t you just love this song?”

  I was puzzled for a second, but there was a little radio on the windowsill in front of her and a cord reached from the radio to her ear. Perhaps she’d forgotten that she had the headphones in.

  “I didn’t mean to bother you…” I said, hoping she would take out the headphones. I was having flashes of various accidental radio-in-water scenarios.

  “It’s no bother.” She swayed back and forth, placing the big, white dish she’d just rinsed in the full wooden dish rack. “What can I do for you?”

  “I was just going through Norman’s sermons.” I walked around the little island and came to stand beside her. Through the front window, I could see the edge of the moon glinting off the hood of the Tank. There were neither yard lights nor porch lights on, so the entire front of the house was dark.

  “How far have you gotten?”

  “I just finished October of 1998.”

  Nadine’s hands stilled for a second, both in the water. She had been digging for something. Glancing up at me, she said, “I suppose you’re here about the second funeral.”

  “The second funeral?” I leaned against the counter, trying to fake my way through my surprise. “Yes. The second funeral. That’s why I’m here.”

  Nadine pulled her hands out of the water, along with a plunger, and the sink began to drain. She dried her hands and took the earphones out, placing them on top of the little silver radio.

  Something caught my eye out of the window—a light moving outside in all that darkness. It was one light only. Not quite slow enough to be someone walking. Was there a headlight out on her neighbor’s car?

  Nadine walked to the breakfast nook on the far side of the house, flipping the button on the electric teapot as she passed it. She gestured for me to follow, but I couldn’t stop watching that one lone light. It moved past the driveway, then I couldn’t see it anymore. Either it had gone behind something or gone out.

  “Come and sit with me, pastor.”

  I finally followed, checking the outside road one last time. Nothing.

  Sliding onto the bench opposite Nadine, I was aware of the tiny buzzing sound that the kettle made. It seemed to be the only sound in the entire house.

  “Pastor Findlay asked me the same question, when he was reading Norman’s sermons, you know. He’d never heard of anyone doing such a thing. There were several people in the town who didn’t approve of it, including the pastor where the Barnetts attended.”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing, either.” I folded my hands on the table, hoping to hide just how interested I was in this little piece of gossip. The gurgling of the water increased just enough that it made my heart beat a little faster. The rising pitch lent a strange, sinister air to the conversation.

  “I told Norman he shouldn’t do it. But Nikki insisted. Audric and Clara Krantz reluctantly gave their permission.”

  The tenor of the water crescendoed and I sat forward just a touch.

  “You mean, he’d already been buried in Washington, D.C., and they had a second service here?”

  “Oh, no.” Nadine shook her head and tight gray curls bobbed against her scalp. “He did the memorial service when the Krantzs came back from Washington, and then Nikki asked for a second funeral in October.”

  I cocked my head to one side. That was a very strange request. “Was it at her house?”

  “No, they had a veteran’s parade with a color guard, and it ended at our church. They did the burial at Nikki’s house, though. She got a permit, of course, although I don’t think any of his remains are actually buried there, because they would all have been interred at Arlington like
his parents wanted, after he passed. I think the city gave her a special easement.”

  “Was this for Veteran’s Day?”

  “No. I think it happened on Halloween weekend. It was after Nikki got back from overseas. She wasn’t there for the first funeral, of course, since she was still in Europe, or wherever she’d been staying while Auggie was in Kenya.” The water bubbled furiously and Nadine rose to walk to the counter. She raised her eyebrows. “Would you like some tea, Vangie?”

  “Yes, please,” I said, vaguely. “Peppermint if you have it.”

  She made me a cup and brought it over, setting her own cup in front of her on the table.

  I sipped at my tea, feeling a slight burn on my tongue, but I needed some time to think. My curiosity was piqued by the notion of the two funerals, and I wanted to know the whole story.

  “I had come across the prayers about Auggie in Norman’s sermons,” I said, setting the cup down. “I intended to ask you about his renewed fervor over Auggie’s death in October, but this seems to explain it. Was it because Nikki was arranging the second funeral?”

  “Well, that and the baby.” Nadine picked the teabag out of her mug and placed it on a china plate that sat in front of the clear salt and pepper shakers near the edge of the table. “Everyone was so thrilled when they found out about Austin, they wanted to do as much for Nikki as they could.”

  “I got that sense, too.”

  “It was a shame she went back East, though.” Nadine said the words like an afterthought, but they perked a memory.

  “Where back East did she go?” I asked, trying to remember all the dates on those pictures from Frances Barnett’s house.

  “Her aunt lived somewhere in the Midwest, I think.”

  That clinched it for me. She had gone to Minnesota, where Claire had clearly been sent to have her baby, and then she returned with a little one in tow who wasn’t her real son.

  Frances had probably considered it a good trade, given her attitude toward Claire.

  My stomach turned sour. My heart broke for Austin. I knew what it was like to grow up without one of your parents. Austin had never known the man he’d always believed to be his father, and now he’d lost his biological mother and father in a matter of days.