Phantoms Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mystery #13

by Connie Shelton

He gave me a blank look, but Gabrielle bustled over to the counter. She sent her pretty smile my way. After a minute of rummaging through some loose scraps of paper near the register, she came up with one.

  “There you go,” she said, handing me a pale green sheet of notepaper. “Don’t suppose we’ll be needing it anymore.”

  I thanked her and told Archie to let us know if he needed any help. I couldn’t fathom what that might entail, other than moving all that heavy furniture up from the cellar and I instantly began to regret the offer. I scooted out of there before he could think of it.

  Down the block I unfolded the page Gabrielle had handed me. There were about a dozen names on it with phone numbers beside them, each in different handwriting, the kind of list people pass around at a meeting to take attendance. Some only gave first names, but Louisa could probably fill me in.

  When I reached the house I discovered she’d arrived before me and was in the process of uncorking a wine bottle.

  “I’d no idea how exhausting this is, asking questions of people,” she said. She’d shed the tweeds in favor of a soft track suit and fuzzy slippers. “Is this what you do all the time at home?”

  “And then some,” I said with a laugh. All the accounting duties for our small business, the occasional investigation that I personally get wrapped up in, plus keeping up my piloting skills so I can help Drake with his business as well. The thought of Drake made me realize this might be the right time of day to catch him before he started work. I asked if it would be all right to use the phone upstairs.

  Unfortunately, I’d forgotten about the additional two hour time difference so I woke him at an ungodly hour in Alaska. He must have been in the middle of a vivid dream that involved me and something lacy because he didn’t seem to mind talking—a lot. I closed my bedroom door and somehow twenty minutes went by pretty quickly. When we said a breathless goodbye, I realized that my face was a bit flushed. I ducked into the bathroom and splashed some cold water on it before I rejoined Louisa in the kitchen.

  “So—” I said with a too-bright smile as I sat across the table from her. “Did you learn anything from your interviews?”

  She gave me a knowing glance and pushed a full wine glass toward me. “Nothing of substance.” Her smile drooped a little. “Like I said at lunch, a lot of the people hardly remember what happened. I guess Dolly wasn’t nearly as important as she wanted to think.”

  She made this last comment with just enough hint of humor that I knew she hadn’t taken Dolly all that seriously either.

  “Well, someone spent a lot of time coming up with those pranks at the shop,” I said. “There had to be a reason for that. Someone wanted to harm her and that takes a fair amount of pent-up anger.”

  She nodded thoughtfully and reached for a bowl of little crunchy snacks that she’d come up with from somewhere.

  “Oh, hey,” I said, “I’ve got another list of names we can check.”

  Her face did a couple of little moves that let me know doing more interviews wasn’t going to be tops on her list. I pulled the note page from my pocket.

  “I’ll do the actual interviews—that’s no problem,” I said. “But I could use your help with names and background info. They’re the members of Dolly’s knitting group.”

  I handed her the sheet.

  Her forehead wrinkled a little. “I’ve never seen a lot of these women at the meetings. Well, guess I can’t really call them meetings—we just got together and worked on our projects. Dolly would offer help if someone was having trouble with a pattern or something.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “Most. Some have only given first names but I think I can piece it together.” She picked up a pen and began to fill in the blanks.

  “Tell me a little about each one,” I said when she handed the sheet back to me. I made notes as she glanced at the names again.

  “Well, I introduced you to Hazel Blaine at the tourism office,” she said. “We work together there, discovered we both love needlework, and she introduced me to Dolly and the shop.”

  “Does Hazel still, or did she still, go to the group?”

  “She cut back, said she couldn’t spare so many evenings away from home. Has a young child.”

  “But she didn’t quit in anger with Dolly or anything like that?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Hazel is so polite. She might not say anything, even if that were the real reason.”

  “See if you can find out.” It was a stretch—a huge stretch—I knew. Someone polite enough to make up an excuse for not attending would almost certainly not be vindictive enough to go back and torment the hostess. I put a small X beside Hazel’s name.

  Three other names were of women Louisa knew fairly well and none of them seemed likely candidates either. Again, the tiny X’s. If I couldn’t come up with absolutely any other clues I might contact them but they weren’t on my A list.

  By seven o’clock we were getting very hungry and a little tipsy so I suggested that we just pop out to the nearest pub and get something quick to eat. While Louisa changed her shoes I reviewed the list and found that I had four people to definitely contact—the ones Louisa didn’t know at all—and four others with ‘maybe’ beside their names, women she only knew slightly. The calls could certainly wait until tomorrow.

  We placed orders at the bar and walked into the larger of the two rooms, looking for an empty table. There, at the first table on the right, sat Archie Jones and Gabrielle. She was feeding him something and smiling widely. Archie spotted me, quickly swallowed and scooted his chair a few inches farther away from hers.

  “Hello there,” I said.

  Gabrielle looked up at me. “Oh, hello.” She giggled and I noticed that a tall beer glass at her place was nearly empty. “You should try the sweet potato chips. Yummy, aren’t they, Archie?”

  “We were just getting a bite to eat after working on the stock all day,” he said, clearing his throat.

  “How is it going?” Louisa asked.

  “Pretty well. We’ve sold a lot of the inventory and bagged up quite a lot of trash. I’ve got a mover coming Thursday for our personal things, the furniture and such. It’s just very difficult.” He draped his napkin over his nearly-empty plate.

  Maybe they were merely having some dinner and Gabrielle had a little too much beer.

  “Well, I need to be off,” he said. He turned to Gabrielle. “You’ve got your car?”

  She nodded a little stiffly and I wondered whether she should be driving, but he didn’t seem concerned about it.

  “I’ll come in again tomorrow then?” she asked.

  He gave a quick nod to each of us and made his way out the door. Gabrielle watched him go as she stuffed a few more of the potatoes into her mouth. Louisa, meantime, had spotted a table for us and we took it, just as our plates came out of the kitchen.

  “That was odd, didn’t you think?” I murmured to Louisa. “Archie and Gabrielle were pretty cozy there.”

  “Surely it’s nothing. He just bought her dinner after a day’s work.” She unwrapped her silverware from the napkin and started poking at her fish with the fork.

  “Probably so.” They seemed to work in the shop like a father-daughter team. I decided to let it drop. Suddenly I was starving.

  * * *

  The next morning I started out fresh and early to go through the list of Dolly’s friends, in one final attempt to figure out what had happened to her. At this point Louisa seemed to be the only one who felt terribly concerned about it, and if I couldn’t find some answers pretty quickly I was going to have to talk her into accepting the coroner’s report.

  Before she left for the office, Louisa had looked up the addresses of my targets and had marked them on my little map, which was by this time becoming rather covered in scratchings and notes.

  I’d laid the groundwork for my visiting each of the women by phoning to say that Archie had wanted each member of Dolly’s group to have some of the wools left in the sh
op. The women all seemed flattered by the gift, and no one questioned too deeply as to why an unfamiliar American would personally be delivering them. Now I just had to get Archie to give me the leftover yarns. Sheesh—the things I get myself into.

  Forty-five minutes later I left his shop with four separate bags containing a hodge-podge of yarn, but Gabrielle had assured me that each contained enough for the recipient to make a nice scarf. That seemed a good enough parting gift from Dolly to get me into each house.

  Mary Ellis greeted me at the door with such a bright smile that I couldn’t turn down her offer of cinnamon cake and tea, despite the fact that she was barely over four feet tall, at least ninety-eight years old, and could hardly make it across the room, even using her walker. There was no way this woman had sneaked around Dolly’s shop, setting up the pranks against her, much less entered the upstairs apartment to administer an overdose. I knew this within the first two minutes I spent with her but I stayed for cake anyway. What can I say—it smelled delicious.

  One thing about the elderly—they usually love to talk and Mary was no exception. I had the whole scoop on the knitting group: who was happy in her marriage, who was not, how many had unruly grandchildren, and which ones were not really very good knitters but just came for the company. But it was all in a lighthearted vein.

  “I heard that Dolly could be pretty disagreeable at times, that people around town didn’t like her much. That surprised me. She always seemed so nice.”

  “Well, I can tell you—” she began. “That wasn’t always the case.” She started in on the mayor’s dog story.

  “What about those in the knitting group?” I asked, trying for information I didn’t already have. “Is that why some of the ladies stopped coming?”

  “I only know of one who truly could not abide Dolly Jones in any form.” She reached for the tea cozy and refilled my cup. “Elizabeth Scott. Pretty girl. You might say that she has dated a few men. I say that’s her business and I didn’t much care. She was always very kind to me. But Dolly, she just had it in for that poor girl. Spread ugly rumors about her. It got so that Elizabeth lost some of her clients—she’s an exercise instructor. All because of Dolly’s gossip.”

  Chapter 19

  The fitness center was near the post office. I’d passed it several times but never really taken much notice. Although Elizabeth’s name was on my list, I’d not been able to reach her by phone so just dropping in seemed like the best way to handle it. I left the yarn in my tote bag. Somehow I didn’t think she would believe Dolly was sending a gift.

  A receptionist pointed out Elizabeth Scott who was working out with weights in the far corner of the large room, and told me it would be fine to go over there. I stepped gingerly between the unfamiliar machines and scary-looking heavy weights and made my way to the thirty-something blond in aqua-blue spandex who seemed to be bench-pressing about a thousand pounds of round disks.

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Yes. Do I know you?” She was barely breathing hard as she lowered the barbells to the rack and sat up.

  “I’m looking into the death of Dolly Jones, on behalf of her friends and her husband.”

  “She had friends?” She dusted some powdery stuff off her hands. “Sorry. What can I do for you?”

  “Dolly was the target of a series of pranks at her shop, right before she died. It really affected her, mentally, and may have had something to do with her death.”

  Elizabeth stretched her arms into some odd contortions designed to loosen up her shoulders. “I don’t know anything about any pranks. Dolly was mental to begin with. I met her because I got started on a knitting project and I found myself in a little over my head. The price of taking private lessons was a bit much, so I joined the group for awhile to get some advice on working the pattern. I finished the sweater—didn’t much care for how it looked on me, after all that work. Dropped knitting and the group.”

  “Did you get along all right with Dolly?”

  “At first. The woman ran hot and cold. Friendly one minute, would turn on you the next. She spread some ugly gossip about me, I confronted her once.”

  “Recently?”

  “Two or three months ago, I’d say.” Her blue eyes narrowed. “Look, I won’t deny that I could not abide the woman after what she did. But I’ve got better things to do than chase around creating little episodes to scare her. If Dolly was running scared it was probably because she had a guilty conscience about how she treated people.”

  She marched over to a stair-climber machine and stepped up on it. She pressed a couple of buttons and the machine started moving. “Sorry, I’ve got to finish my warm-up. I have a class in twenty minutes.”

  Well, Elizabeth Scott didn’t seem like a sneaky poisoner who would slip someone extra pills or mess around with cups of tea or shuffling coins in a cash register. I got the sense that if she were in the mood she could simply break your neck. I left the gym pretty quickly.

  Watching Elizabeth in her skinny-spandex, lifting those weights, put me in mind of the exercise I should be doing. I popped into a pastry shop and squelched the mood with a cupcake and take-out cup of tea. At a tiny table outside I sat down to finish my cupcake and consult my map.

  Louisa had marked the address of Joanna Sands for me, so I brushed the cake crumbs off my jeans and headed that direction. Her home was on a street so similar to Louisa’s—a row of stone houses with colored doors which opened directly onto the sidewalk—that I wondered if people ever got mixed up and went to the wrong house. Joanna opened the door within seconds after I pressed the bell. She could have been Dolly’s sister—same height and build, nearly the same age, even the same haircut. She wore a pleated skirt and twin set in pastel blue.

  “Mrs. Sands? I’m Charlie Parker. I phoned this morning.”

  “Ah, yes.” Her gaze traveled from my head to my sneakers and back. “So Dolly wanted me to have a gift.”

  I held out the bag of yarn that I hoped would gain me an invitation inside.

  She peered into the sack, wadded the whole thing with her hands and threw it to the sidewalk. “She would! She would choose this color for me. I absolutely cannot wear orange!”

  “I . . . I’m sorry. I’m afraid I randomly chose them.”

  She took a step back and drew herself up straight. “Sorry. Not to take it out on you, but Dolly . . . she simply—” Her face crumpled and her voice cracked.

  “Joanna? Are you all right?” Maybe the gift was too vivid a reminder of her friend’s death.

  I reached into my tote and brought out the other two bags of yarn. “You may certainly have your choice.”

  “It’s not that.” She waved them away. “I don’t want a gift from Dolly. I should have told you that on the phone this morning. I guess curiosity got the better of me.” Her eyes grew hard. “She treated me so . . . so badly. All for the one favor, years of feeling like her slave.”

  “What—what happened?” I glanced up and down the street, a little uncomfortable with the intimacy of the conversation, right here on the street, but there was no one else around.

  Joanna noticed. “You might as well come inside. It’s a rather long story.”

  I followed her into a parlor that was remarkably like Louisa’s. She waved vaguely in the direction of the sofa and I took a seat. She remained standing and paced as she talked.

  “I got into a bind once. My daughter needed an operation, one not fully covered by the National Health Service. I desperately needed the money and had no other resources. Dolly was a friend. I confided my situation.”

  She looked directly at me. “You didn’t ever want to confide anything to Dolly, as I later learned. At any rate, as soon as she knew about my situation, she became so very caring and concerned, so I accepted a loan from her. It was in the days when Archie made tons of money in his position at the sugar factory, so I knew they could spare it.”

  “What happened?”

  “I paid back the money. My Christmas bonus was a nic
e one that year, so I gave her most of it right away. The rest came a little at a time over the next months, but I did pay it back.”

  She seemed sincere enough, her earlier anger almost completely receding.

  “But then Dolly began calling in the favor in so many ways. First, it was simple things. ‘Joanna, since you’re coming by would you mind picking up my dry cleaning on the way over?’; ‘Joanna, be a dear and get me a sandwich for lunch.’ Of course she never felt the need to reimburse me for all these little things. But I felt beholden so I didn’t say anything.

  “Then the favors grew bigger and bigger. ‘Volunteer to help me on a committee.’ Except that she would inevitably become too busy and I would take on all the work. One year I practically ran the town Christmas pageant all by myself! I’m not a young woman, as you’ve noticed.”

  I started to assure her that she looked as vital as anyone, but she went on.

  “It was that way with the jumble sale, the choral program, the church bake sale . . . I literally could go on and on. By then I’d paid back all the money, but Dolly became a force to be reckoned with. Any time I told her I couldn’t take on any more, she would almost literally leap down my throat as she reminded me how she’d saved my daughter’s life.” She’d begun to twist her fingers practically in knots. “I was at the end of my rope, Ms Parker.”

  “Did you do anything about it?” Was I about to actually get a confession here?

  Her face grew hard again. “For starters, I gave up the knitting group. Then I quit going to her shop altogether. When I stopped answering my telephone she began showing up at the door. If I didn’t answer the door, she would peek in at the windows, her face pressed to the glass to see inside. It was driving me insane.”

  “Did you report to the police that she was stalking you?”

  Once more, she crumpled. “No. I didn’t have the heart. Ignoring her seemed ungrateful enough, but to take it to the authorities. No, I simply couldn’t. I could just imagine how she probably treated poor Archie, and him such a nice man.”