by Blythe Baker
“Is Julia in college?” I asked.
Richard shook his head. “She dropped out after one semester.”
“Does she have a job?”
He shook his head again.
“So, Robert paid for everything?” Mason asked, shooting me a pointed look. I knew he was remembering his own theory, as well. It suddenly had a lot more credence.
“I was not intimately familiar with what Mr. Baines chose to do with his money—he and I were close, but there are lines that must not be crossed between an employer and an employee—but it had always been my interpretation that he funded his daughter’s lifestyle,” Richard said.
We asked more questions, hoping to find out something specific about Robert’s will and his financial situation just before he died, but Richard was of little help. He maintained that he had no specific knowledge, and was therefore of no further use to us. We thanked him for his time, and moved to leave.
Just then, glass shattered somewhere in the kitchen, the sound echoing off the hard surfaces of the counters and appliances. I ducked, Holly screamed, and Mason threw his arms over my body, shielding me from the unknown threat. A rush of cool air filled the room followed by the steady sound of static, like a television with a broken antenna.
As the chaos subsided, I stood up and looked around. The candles on the counter had gone out in the wind gust, so the room was dark except for two flashlight beams glinting off the shattered remains of the wall of windows. A tree limb was protruding through the gnarled opening, looking like a giant’s hand, the dripping wet fingers reaching into the house to pull us all out into the storm.
“Is everyone okay?” Richard asked, his head peeking over the granite top of the island.
Everyone nodded and checked themselves over. Glass shards littered the floor like tiny jewels, and a steady mist of rain was drenching the room.
“That storm is wild,” Mason said in a kind of grudging respect.
Mason, Samuel, and Richard set to work finding tarps and tape to cover the window and Holly grabbed a broom and began sweeping up the glass shards. With everyone working together, it was almost easy to forget there was a dead body lying at the base of the stairs. To forget that someone within the mansion’s walls could be a murderer. However, no matter how much I wanted those things to be true, they weren’t. We were all still in danger, and someone was lying to us all.
Having nothing useful to do in the kitchen, I quietly slipped out the door and into the dark hallway. I instantly regretted not bringing along one of the flashlights, but I hadn’t wanted to draw attention to my departure. While having Mason and Holly with me to question suspects was a comfort, I knew the only person I could truly trust was myself. I wanted to question Julia alone.
How I would get her away from Daniel, I had no idea. The two of them had been glued at the hip since the party had started. Julia wasn’t particularly pretty, but she was young and wealthy, and those two attributes alone were enough to warrant attention from Daniel. And especially now that she was in line to potentially inherit her father’s fortune, Daniel would be unlikely to let her out of his sight, no doubt hoping that his support during this trying time would be enough for her to fall for him.
As I neared the end of the hallway, a voice, high-pitched and giddy, caught my attention.
“No, I can totally make it.”
I peeked my head around the corner and saw Julia’s stout frame pacing the length of the corridor, her cell phone pressed to her ear.
“Of course, I’m sad, but that doesn’t mean my life is over. He’d want me to have a good time,” she said, flipping her hair over her shoulder.
Julia laughed. “Exactly. Well, just give me a few days, and I’ll meet you all there.”
Was she already planning on joining her friends for their vacation while her father’s body was growing cold in the next room over? She’d spent most of the night in a stupor, acting as though she could barely function. But it turned out it was because she was too busy thinking about the soonest she could get out of town. Even after hearing that Julia and her father had a troubled relationship, I hadn’t been eager to accuse her of murder. Patricide was a serious accusation, after all. Now, though, I felt more confident in Mason’s theory. Standing in the dark hallway and looking in on the young, black-haired girl, I felt a sharp realization race down my spine: I was looking at a murderer.
Chapter 13
As Julia hung up the phone, I did my best to casually walk into the room, pretending I hadn’t been eavesdropping on her conversation. Still, even at my most natural, Julia whipped around at the sound of my footsteps and her eyes momentarily narrowed at me, no doubt wondering whether she’d been overheard.
I lifted my hand in a polite wave. “You really shouldn’t be out here alone,” I said.
“Neither should you,” she responded.
I smiled. “Touché.”
We were standing in a small, windowless corridor where two hallways intersected. So, the space was exceptionally dark, but even at the center of the first floor, I could hear the rain pounding down on the roof, a constant reminder that we were trapped inside.
After hanging up the phone, Julia had become noticeably more somber. Her shoulders sagged forward, making her look shorter than she already was, and her eyelids looked heavier, as if she could break out into tears at any moment. She was playing the part of the mourning daughter quite well, and had I not just overheard her making vacation plans with her friends, perhaps I would have fallen for it. As it was, I saw through the act.
She nodded at me and turned to leave, her feet dragging on the plush carpet that ran the length of both hallways.
“How are you doing?” I asked, stopping her, forcing her to turn back to me.
I caught a glimpse of annoyance in her eyes as she shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. “I’m not really sure. I mostly just feel numb. I don’t think the reality of it has set in just yet.”
That was an understatement. If Julia turned out to not be the murderer, I was going to offer her the number of a few mainland therapists because the girl was disturbed. No one should be planning a tropical vacation within two hours after seeing their father’s lifeless body. Especially when that lifeless body had been murdered and had their throat slit. If I was her, I would have been in an inconsolable heap.
“I’m sure,” I said. “The whole day has been overwhelming for everyone, so I can only imagine how you feel.”
Her mouth turned down in a frown and she nodded in agreement. “It’s unthinkable.”
I’d wanted to start a conversation, try and earn her trust, but we’d only exchanged a few sentences and we had already slipped into an awkward silence. I wasn’t sure how to casually question her. I wasn’t sure how to casually question anyone. Detectives went through a lot of training in order to interrogate suspects, whereas I was basing my technique off of old cop show re-runs. Unlike Samuel and Richard, I had a suspicion that Julia wasn’t going to be as open to answering direct questions, so I was going to have to pull the information out of her.
“I had a rocky relationship with my dad,” I said, lying through my teeth. My dad had been like the parents in after school specials. Always around, ever patient, and strangely obsessed with playing catch, though he had two daughters who couldn’t care less about baseball. “But still, I can’t imagine losing him in such a terrible way.”
Julia hesitated just long enough that I began to think my plan wasn’t going to work. She wasn’t going to talk to some woman she didn’t know about her relationship with her father. Especially if she had been the one to kill him. It would be wise for her to say nothing, continue acting as though she were in shock, and wait for the police to arrive. However, just as I was prepared to concede this opportunity and wait to question her “officially” with Mason and Holly with me, she spoke.
“It is really difficult,” she said, glancing down at the floor. “Especially because my dad and I used to be close. Before my parent’s d
ivorce, he was always there for me, and he seemed happy. Things changed, though. We just fell apart.”
I almost couldn’t believe it. She was confiding in me. I was so pleased that my plan had worked that I had to keep myself from smiling, realizing that an ill-timed smile would very likely make Julia think I was some sort of sadist. I pulled my mouth in tight and reached out to brush her arm.
“I’m so sorry. What happened?” I asked, leaving the question open-ended, hoping Julia wouldn’t think I was being nosy. One thing I’d learned from six months of dating Daniel was that open-ended questions garnered a much longer response. If he could answer with a brisk yes or no, he would.
Julia stepped back and found a patch of wall that was miraculously free of artwork to lean against. She crossed her arms over her chest, pulling herself inwards as if she were cold. “It was a lot of things. The divorce definitely weighed heavily on him. I don’t think he ever particularly loved my mom, but my dad was all about appearances,” she said, gesturing to the lavishly decorated room as proof. “He liked the idea of having a nuclear family. A pretty wife, a smart daughter, a big house. The divorce blew all of that away. And it certainly didn’t help that I chose to live with my mom.”
“It sounds like he had a lot of expectations for you all. That couldn’t have been easy to live up to,” I said.
Julia scrunched up her nose and shrugged. “I got used to disappointing my father at a very young ago.”
“Still,” I said, “every child wants to make their parents proud, no matter how screwed up the parent is.”
Julia laughed, but it wasn’t genuine. It was threaded with anger and a bit of cynicism. “You should have been there to see him when he found out I dropped out of college. You would have thought I’d killed someone.”
Her eyes widened at her poor choice of words, and she gave me an awkward smile. “Figuratively, obviously. You know what I mean.”
I said I did, though I was actually wondering whether she hadn’t just had a slip of conscience. I’d heard on a cop show once that a lot of killers want people to know what they’ve done. There are a surprising number of instances where someone has killed someone and then they admit their crime to a family member or friend or stranger. Even some notorious serial killers have been captured purely because they couldn’t keep their mouths shut.
Julia recovered quickly, though. She took a deep breath, and shook her head, her hair falling around her face in thin sheets. “You’re right, though. I did strive for his approval. For a time. Then, I realized that he was failing to meet my standards, as well.”
“How so?”
“You used to work for the same bank as my dad, right?” she asked.
“Yes. Well, I worked at a different branch.”
“So, is it safe to assume you know of his reputation?”
Even with my investigation on the line and the knowledge that I could very well be talking to a murderer, I felt awkward admitting that I knew about Robert’s illegal business dealings. Talking ill of the dead was frowned upon, so I could only imagine how inappropriate it was to talk ill of the dead in front of the dead person’s family. However, I managed a single wooden nod of my head.
“It’s okay,” Julia said, sensing my nervousness. “I knew what he was doing. It was hard not to. My dad wasn’t exactly discreet.”
“No,” I agreed. “Discreet, he was not.”
She chuckled. “Sometimes I wish he had been. I wish I could have respected him the way I wanted to, the way my friends respected their parents. I wanted to be proud of him, but it was hard. Especially after his partner’s death.”
The death of Robert Baines’ partner was a particularly large spot on his already spotty track record. The story went that Robert had invested his friend’s money in an illegal business venture, and when the business was raided by the police, his friend lost everything: his money, his job, his reputation. And ultimately, he lost his life. Some people preferred to believe Robert or one of the cronies he worked with had killed the man, but most agreed with the police report. His partner had committed suicide.
“I heard about that.”
“Most people did,” Julia said.
For a minute, I forgot that she was my prime suspect, and I just felt sorry for her. On more than one occasion, I’d been embarrassed by Robert, and my only connection to him was tenuous at best. Julia, however, was intimately connected to him. His indiscretions reflected on her. It was easy to understand how that could fracture a relationship.
“Mr. Belden was such a nice man, too. He always had caramel candies in his suit jacket for me when I came to their office as a kid.”
I nodded deafly, barely hearing what Julia was saying as I tried to think of my next probing question. However, as her words slowly sank into my brain, something stuck out.
Belden.
Mr. Belden.
Suddenly, I snapped to attention, my body rigid, the hair on my arms standing on end.
“Your father’s partner’s last name was Belden?”
Julia looked at me, confusion plain on her face, wondering why I was interrupting her heartfelt recollections to focus on the name of a dead man. “Yeah. Harold Belden.”
Harold Belden. I repeated it over and over in my head, trying to convince myself that it was a coincidence.
“B-E-L-D-E-N?” I asked.
Julia sighed. “Yes. Why?”
My chest felt inflated, as though my lungs were expanding balloons, and my foot was tapping out a nervous rhythm on the floor.
“Did he have a daughter?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“I think so, but she was a bit older than me. I think she was in high school when I was in elementary. I never met her.”
Suddenly, the balloons in my chest turned to boulders and dropped into my stomach. I felt sick.
“Why?” Julia insisted. “What’s going on? Why do you care about my father’s ex-partner?”
I didn’t want to give voice to the words, but I had to. It was too perfect to be a coincidence, and it was dangerous to keep the secret. Someone else needed to know the truth…just in case.
“The friend I brought with me tonight?” I said, easing myself into the truth.
“Yeah,” Julia said, encouraging me to continue.
“Her name is Holly Belden.”
Understanding started in her eyes, widening them so I could see the whites around her irises, and then spread to her mouth. It fell open, a single breath rushing out as though she’d been punched in the stomach. Her skin paled even more than before, becoming almost luminescent in the dark.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “There has to be another explanation.”
“There might be,” I admitted. “But it seems a bit too coincidental, doesn’t it? That a woman with the same last name as your father’s ex-partner and within the same age range as his daughter just happens to come to one of your father’s parties on the night that he is murdered? I don’t know how much validity there is to the rumors, but many people believe Mr. Belden killed himself because of your father. Can you imagine how much anger his daughter would harbor towards your family?”
Julia shook her head, her eyes welling with actual tears for the first time all night. “This can’t be happening. Do you think she hates me, too?”
Her breathing was becoming more and more shallow, and I could see panic creeping in.
I grabbed her shoulders. “We don’t know what is going on yet. Right now, this is just a theory.”
“A really strong theory,” she gasped.
“You’ve known the murderer was inside the house the whole time,” I said. “Why are you so upset now?”
She sucked in air, and then looked at me, her eyes glazed and unfocused. “My father could have been killed for a hundred different reasons that had nothing to do with me. But now I could be a target.”
Seeing Julia falling apart made me realize how incapable she would be of murdering someone and then playing it off. I almost felt
silly for suspecting her, for thinking she had been putting up an act. As much as I hated to compliment murderers, they needed to have a strong constitution, and Julia’s constitution was looking pretty flimsy.
Besides, Holly made perfect sense as a suspect. She was the one who forced me to come to the party, she didn’t have anyone who could verify her alibi for the timeframe in which Mr. Baines was killed, and she had been the one to find the body. Plus, while she had screamed and been shocked and horrified after finding Robert Baines’ body, her behavior the rest of the evening had been almost playful. As if she thought it was all a game. Not only that, but she’d been the one to direct me towards the first suspect, probably in an attempt to throw suspicion from herself. The pieces lined up, and I felt daft for not seeing it earlier. The journalist from out of town who had come to write a scathing article about the deceased on the night he turns up dead should have been my first suspect. She had just seemed so normal, aside from her blackmailing me, of course. But even that had made a modicum of sense. Holly had been desperate for the story, and without me, she wasn’t going to be able to get close to him. At the time, as angry as it had made me, I’d assumed she was doing it for her job, for her story. Now, though, I had to seriously consider whether I’d opened the door to Robert’s murderer. The only thing that didn’t make sense was that she’d chosen not to use a pseudonym. Even if her last name had come up in polite conversation, Robert Baines would have recognized it immediately, and I couldn’t assume he would have taken kindly to her crashing his party.
“What’s going on?”
I turned around to find Daniel standing in the hallway behind me, his eyes flicking from me to Julia, who was in the midst of a full-on meltdown.
“Julia?” he asked, his voice surprisingly tender. “What’s happening?”
He turned to me, eyes narrowed and accusatory. “What did you say to her, Piper?”
I rolled my eyes and stepped back to let him wrap Julia in his arms. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Obviously you did,” he said. “Look at her. She’s a mess.”