by Jessica Beck
“Well, I always wondered about his sister, Lisa,” Gabby said.
I’d met the woman a few times socially, but I hadn’t realized that she’d been the murder victim’s sister. “Do you think she might have had something to do with his death?”
“I wouldn’t have said so at the time, but now that I know that Ben’s death was no accident, it makes a kind of sense.”
“In what way?”
Gabby looked at me as though I were some kind of fool, which wasn’t all that odd an expression for me to get from her. “If Ben and I had gotten married, Lisa wouldn’t have inherited a single dime.”
“Was there a lot to inherit in his estate?” I asked. Had Benjamin Port been wealthy when he died? If so, money could be a strong motive for murder, and following the trail to see who inherited from his death might be a path that led directly to the killer.
Gabby waved a hand in the air. “I heard rumors that the family was quite well off, but I could never get confirmation from a reliable source after he passed away.”
So that added one more suspect to the list: the sister. “Is there anyone else you can think of who might have had a reason to want harm to come to Benjamin?”
Gabby looked around her deserted shop before she answered. Lowering her voice despite the absence of anyone present who might be able to eavesdrop, she said softly, “You should tell Jake to take a look at Judge Hurley.”
She had to be kidding. I’d known the judge for years, and there was no way I could see him as a killer. “Why would the judge want to see Benjamin dead?”
“I wish I could tell you, but I honestly don’t know. Ben wouldn’t say a word about it to me. All I can say is that there was bad blood between the two men until the day Ben died. Jake needs to investigate him if he’s digging into this.”
“But you can’t think of any reason yourself.”
“Suzanne, I never claimed to be an investigator; your husband is supposed to be one, though. You’ve certainly bragged around town enough about his prowess at detection. He’s going to have to figure it out for himself.”
“Sorry, I was just hoping for a little something more that I could pass on to him,” I said.
“Don’t you think I’ve given you enough?” she asked. “What do you want me to do, make the arrest myself?”
“No, you’ve been more than helpful,” I said quickly. Gabby was getting snippy, so it was time to end the interview. I knew that if I kept pushing her now, she wouldn’t be of any use to me down the line, and I couldn’t burn that bridge just yet. “I know that it’s been painful for you to talk about this, but we all greatly appreciate it.”
“It’s nothing that I ever wanted to share with anyone else, but I owed it to Ben. Tell your husband something for me, would you?”
Was I about to get something else juicy about the murder victim, one last tidbit that might help find his killer? “Of course.”
Gabby looked as though she were about to cry when she spoke again. “Tell him that I’m sorry.”
“Excuse me?”
“Suzanne, I shouldn’t have stonewalled him when he was here earlier. The sheriff had every right to ask me about Ben, and I was a fool not to share everything that I knew with him. Sometimes my stubbornness seems to get in the way of doing the right thing. I should have treated your husband better when we spoke earlier.”
“Gabby, it had to have been a shock learning that what you thought was an accident was in actuality murder.”
“Maybe, but I’m still sorry for my behavior. Would you tell him that for me?”
I wasn’t entirely sure that he would believe me, but I at least owed the attempt to her. “I’ll tell him as soon as I see him.”
“Thank you,” Gabby said, and then she surprised me again by grabbing my hands in hers. “Suzanne, I know that Jake is in charge of things in April Springs now, but you need to help him in any way that you can. Ben deserves the best that the entire town has.”
“I’m doing what I can, but I’m mostly just staying out on the edges of the investigation,” I admitted.
“In whatever way you can contribute, I’d greatly appreciate it,” she said.
As I left her shop, I marveled at the twists and turns our conversation had taken. I wished that I’d had the foresight to tape it, if nothing else so I could replay Gabby’s apology to be sure that I hadn’t heard it wrong, but as things stood, it was a fact only in my memory. I thought about going to get Grace and sharing what I’d learned with her, but updating her was going to have to wait.
Jake needed to hear this new information, and he needed to hear it immediately.
I wasn’t going to give it to him over the phone, either.
Mostly because I wanted to see his reaction when I conveyed Gabby’s apology to him.
Chapter 7
“She said what?” Jake asked incredulously after I relayed Gabby’s apology. I’d saved that part for last, touching upon the suspects she’d mentioned first. Jake hadn’t even raised an eyebrow when I listed the people Gabby had mentioned, not even the judge. He’d just made a few notes in his book without revealing much emotion at all. “Suzanne, I’m having a tough time believing that Gabby has ever been remorseful about anything in her life.”
“Trust me, I just about choked on my own tongue myself when she said it,” I said, “but she sounded sincere. You caught her off-guard when you first told her about what happened to Benjamin. She felt bad about rebuffing you the way that she did.”
“Well, no harm done in the long run, since she clearly felt comfortable opening up with you. We’ve got some new leads now, so that’s never a bad thing. I’m expecting Phillip any second, and I have a feeling that he’s going to want to hear what you uncovered, too.”
“Despite my mother’s desire that he stop investigating murder altogether?”
Jake shrugged. “He’s already got his toe in the water. Besides, I’m not asking him to do anything that he’s not comfortable doing.”
“Do you really need him, though?” I asked my husband. Was he having a crisis of confidence or something? That was more impossible for me to believe than Gabby’s earlier apology, though I’d heard it with my own two ears.
“Phillip might not have been sheriff back then, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have valuable insights into the folks Gabby mentioned to you.”
“Maybe so, but let’s at least try to leave him out of it, okay? For me?”
Jake looked at me for a full ten seconds before he spoke again. “Is it really that important to you?”
“Not to me personally, but it matters to Momma, so that means that it matters to me.”
“Okay. I get it. I can’t make any promises, but I’ll try.”
“That’s all I’m asking,” I said.
“You might get some arguments from Phillip about dropping him, but that’s going to be on your head.” Jake studied what he’d written for a moment before speaking again. “So far, we’ve got a spurned love, greedy sister, and a judge whose motive is yet to be determined. Does that about sum up what we know at this point?”
“Don’t forget Gabby herself,” I added.
That caught Jake by surprise. “Do you actually suspect her of murder?”
“If you’re asking me if I think she did it, I’d have to say no, but that doesn’t mean that her name doesn’t belong on our list until we can prove that it’s fact and not just wishful thinking.”
“To be honest with you, I added it in my head, but I wasn’t certain how you’d react if I said it aloud.”
“It’s a possibility, so her name belongs with the others,” I said. “We can’t let anything else influence our actions.”
“Good. I’ve got to say, you’ve come a long way, Suzanne. I’m impressed.”
“Thank you, kind sir.” I enjoyed getting praise for my abilities as much as anyone else did, whether it was coming from my husband or a total stranger.
Stephen Grant popped his head into Jake’s office. �
��Boss, did you need me for anything?”
“Not yet, but after I talk to the sheriff, come find me,” Jake said.
“Will do, but I thought you were the sheriff now.” It wasn’t said with any malice or rancor, even though Jake had replaced him in the office.
“For the time being. No, I’m talking about Sheriff Martin.”
“It’s getting to be that you can’t turn around in here without bumping into a sheriff one place or another,” I said with a smile.
He turned to me and grinned for a second. “What can I say? We’re just lucky that way, I guess.”
After he was gone, I asked Jake, “How’s Stephen handling his demotion?”
“Nobody’s calling it that, Suzanne.”
I frowned for a moment before I spoke. “That’s funny; he was sheriff, and now he’s not. How else could you describe it?”
It was Jake’s turn to frown. “Stephen Grant is a fine officer. He may need a hand right now, but as soon as he’s ready, I’m going to turn things back over to him.”
“And whose job is it going to be to determine that he’s ready?” I asked.
My husband took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then said, “Suzanne, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were trying to pick a fight with me.”
I looked at him as I hastily shook my head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I’m just worried about him.”
“Well, there’s no need to be. He’s fine.”
“If you say so, then that’s good enough for me,” I said, and then I kissed my husband’s cheek. “I really wasn’t trying to be mean.”
“I know that. It’s not in your nature.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” I replied with a grin.
Jake was about to answer when the former sheriff hesitated at what had once been his door, knocked, and then waited to be asked in.
“Come on in, Phillip. Did you have any luck?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, and then he said hello to me before he settled into one of the visitors’ chairs. Phillip took out a notebook much like the one Jake used, flipped through the pages until he got to the appropriate entry, and then began to explain just what he’d uncovered so far. As he spoke, Phillip reached into his briefcase and pulled out a handful of copies. “That was smart making copies of all of the letters, not just the confession.”
“You would have done it yourself if I hadn’t suggested it,” Jake replied, though I wasn’t entirely sure that would have been the case.
Spreading them out on the now-empty desktop, Phillip asked, “What did you do with the other things that were in the time capsule?”
Jake pointed to one corner. “I put them all over there. Thank goodness we have a mayor who used to be a cop. The Historical Society wanted to put it all back in and rebury it so the clock tower could be replaced as soon as possible, but George refused.”
“George is a good man,” Phillip said. After he had the letters spread out on the wide oak top, he started consolidating them into small piles. “These five letters were from people who signed them at the time they were buried, so I didn’t bother checking on any of them. The other five are a little more interesting. Two of the folks who wrote letters have since died, so I figured that we didn’t have anything to worry about them, at least not immediately. I focused on the last three that were still alive. If we end up eliminating the living suspects, we can investigate the others later.” As Phillip spoke, he pulled the letters in question to the front and added the others to the main stack.
“So, did any of the final three living letter writers know Benjamin personally?” I asked.
“Hang on. I’m getting to that.”
I wished my stepfather would speed up his presentation, but it was clear that he was enjoying his role as investigator too much.
“Sorry,” I said contritely.
“Don’t apologize, Suzanne,” Jake said. “I was wondering the same thing. Go on, Phillip.”
“Understood. Of the three folks remaining, I found references in each of the letters that strongly suggested two of the identities without having to question either person. That left me with one letter, which was the confession we found, and one person still on my list.”
“So, who wrote the last letter, the one we’re all interested in?” I asked.
Phillip shook his head. “The real question at that point was who had the last slot, not who wrote the confession.”
“Aren’t they one and the same person?” Jake asked.
“No. There’s absolutely no chance of that.”
“You seem pretty confident about that,” Jake said.
“Okay, I’ll bite. Who was invited to include the last letter in the capsule?” I asked him.
“That’s where things start to get muddy. It turns out that it was Emma, your assistant at the donut shop,” he said gravely.
“What? Emma? She was five years old when they buried that capsule. I doubt that she could have even written her own name.”
“That’s the beauty of it. She didn’t write anything, but she did create a drawing in crayon that they were supposed to include. There was a lottery at every level of the local school system with every child’s name entered, and they drew Emma’s.” Phillip stopped and turned to look at my husband. “Jake, we didn’t miss anything, did we? I searched the contents of that capsule thoroughly, but I didn’t see anything like the artwork Emma described to me over the phone twenty minutes ago when I asked her about her entry.”
“I can’t imagine that we overlooked anything like a small child’s drawing, but let’s look again to be certain,” he said.
Phillip gathered up his copies of the letters again, and we spread the contents of the time capsule out on his desk once more.
There was nothing that even vaguely resembled a child’s drawing in the pile.
It appeared that we were back at square one.
“So, where does that leave us?” Phillip asked us.
“Clearly someone substituted their confession for Emma’s drawing at the last minute,” Jake said. “They must have buried it with everything else, figuring no one would actually notice the switch. After all, why would they, unless they were looking specifically for Emma’s artwork? To the casual bystander, it would look like it was ten letters from ten submissions. We need to find out who had access to that time capsule before they buried it. More importantly, did any of our suspects so far have any way of adding anything to the stack before it was buried?”
“Jake, how can he possibly know the answer to that? We haven’t told Phillip what Gabby shared with me yet,” I reminded him.
“That’s right,” Jake said before my stepfather stopped him. “We need to talk.”
“Hold on. I agreed to help out behind the scenes, but if you tell me those names, I’m going to be involved in your current investigation, whether I want to be or not.”
“You can walk away right now if that’s what you really want to do,” Jake said. “Nobody’s forcing you to do anything that you don’t want to do.”
Phillip was clearly wrestling with his desire to be a part of this and my mother’s need for him to stay out of it. I started to say something, but then I knew enough to keep my mouth shut. My stepfather needed to come to his own conclusions without any advice from me. After all, he was the one who would have to live with the consequences of his actions. After a few moments, he reluctantly nodded. “Go ahead and tell me. As long as I stay behind the scenes, I should be okay. I’ll give you any advice I can about whoever you’ve been able to come up with, but I won’t go out into the field anymore.”
“Will you at least help us with our research?” Jake asked. “I’m not talking about interviews. I’d like to have someone dig into the town’s archives to see what they can uncover. It might be helpful to look through old newspapers, too. What do you say to that? Are you up for it?”
“That’s right up my alley these days,” he said, clearly excited about the prospe
ct of digging into our town’s past. The mere thought of it nearly put me to sleep, so he was more than welcome to that line of investigation as far as I was concerned. “I’d be happy to help.”
“Good. Here’s what we know so far. Gabby was able to give us three suspects, and Suzanne suggested that we include her in our list as well. After all, if she was dating Benjamin Port when he was murdered, then she might have motive of her own that she didn’t share with us.”
“It makes sense,” Phillip said as he nodded his acknowledgment in my direction. When I’d first started sleuthing, he hadn’t been all that impressed with my instincts or my abilities, but over time, he’d learned that I could contribute to an investigation as well. “Who else made your list?”
“So far we have: Lisa Port Smith, the victim’s sister; Hilda Fremont, from the Boxcar Grill; and Judge Hurley,” Jake explained.
Phillip whistled softly. “That’s quite an eclectic selection of suspects,” he said. “I’m dying to hear their motives.”
Jake nodded at me, and I spoke. “Lisa inherited Benjamin’s estate, supposedly Hilda was a scorned lover, and we still haven’t determined the judge’s motives yet. Gabby’s would most likely be jealousy, but again, we need to dig deeper into her real relationship with him as well.”
“It’s not exactly clear cut, and the fact that this murder happened fifteen years ago isn’t helping our cause any. When I think about the advances in forensics alone, it makes me shudder. We don’t even have a cause of death,” Phillip said wearily.
“I’m still guessing that it was poison, though I seriously doubt that it was from the canned chicken,” Jake said. “The symptoms still seem to fit, unless Doc Nance is completely incompetent.”
“He might have realized too late that it wasn’t an accident, but I’m willing to vouch for his ability. You can take the fact that it was poison as rock solid,” the former sheriff said.