Toni L.P. Kelner - Laura Fleming 08 - Wed and Buried

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  I kept my face straight, but I couldn’t help thinking that if that was a little something, I wondered what a big something would be.

  “Was anybody else named in the will?” I asked.

  “Irene was going to get some, but not much because I figured she’d keep on working for Dorcas as long as she could walk—that woman pure worships Dorcas. Some small amounts for the woman who cooks for us, and the man who does our yard work, and our lawyer, and financial advisors. There were a handful of things I wanted given out to my cousins, the ones that are left, anyway. Nothing big, just some family heirlooms.” I started to get interested, but he added, “It’s all been appraised, and none of it is worth more than a thousand dollars or so. They’re all in good shape, financially speaking—one of them probably has nearly as much as I do.”

  “Are your cousins your only other family living?” I asked.

  He nodded. “The rest of the will is charity bequests.” He counted them off on his fingers. “Something for the church, and the library, and the historical revival committee, and Burt’s alma mater.”

  I was impressed. Not just by the amount of money Big Bill had to divide up, though that was pretty impressive, but that he’d thought to leave things to the people who worked for him, and to some of the most worthy charities in Byerly. Even though he gloried in having enemies, he was making sure he had plenty of friends to remember him.

  Hearing the list also got me to thinking that Richard and I needed to make our own wills, to make sure Alice was taken care of in case anything happened to us.

  “It doesn’t sound as if your will adds anybody to the list of suspects,” I said. “How did the new will change things?”

  “Everything goes to my wife,” he said, “unless she predeceases me. Then it all changes back to the original plan.”

  So much for the money. We still had sex and revenge as motives, or some combination thereof. Though I really didn’t want to think about Big Bill’s sex life—especially not where Aunt Maggie was concerned—I had to ask. “I know you’ve been seeing Aunt Maggie for a while now, but I was wondering if—I mean, is there anyone else—maybe somebody who thought you were interested, even when you weren’t…”

  Big Bill looked blank, and I didn’t blame him.

  Fortunately, Aunt Maggie saw through my ineptitude. “She wants to know if you’ve been stepping out on me.”

  “Lord, no.” Then he grinned. “Not that there haven’t been plenty of women willing—some young ones, too. The older a man gets, the less competition there is.”

  “Of course, the size of your bankbook doesn’t make a bit of difference,” Aunt Maggie said.

  “Of course it does,” Big Bill said, “but it didn’t matter why they wanted me. My heart belongs to this lady here.”

  I expected her to snort again, but Aunt Maggie permitted herself a tiny smile. It must be nice to know that she’d beaten out so many others, including younger women. I was just glad I didn’t have to pursue that subject any further.

  “That leaves revenge,” Richard said, echoing my reasoning.

  But try as he might, Big Bill couldn’t think of anybody who was mad enough at him to want him dead. Finally, he asked, “Don’t you think I’ve been racking my brains over this? I don’t know who would want to kill me. Why do you think I’ve been going through fifteen years’ worth of threatening letters? For my health?”

  That reminded me that Big Bill’s health wasn’t currently all that good. Somebody had poisoned him less than twenty-four hours before, and he wasn’t a young man. Even though he was doing fine, he still needed to rest. Aunt Maggie looked tired, too. So I told them both that Richard and I appreciated their trust, and that we would get started snooping.

  Chapter 9

  Our first step was to look very solemn when we left Big Bill’s hospital room, and when Burt anxiously asked how his father was, I said, “He’s still very weak. They think the doctor is going to let him go home, but he’ll need nurses on duty constantly.”

  “He’ll get whatever he needs,” Burt said stoutly.

  I felt guilty about deceiving the man about his own father, but knew it wasn’t half the amount of guilt I’d feel if I let something slip and it turned out that Burt really was trying to kill Big Bill.

  If Burt was the one, it sure didn’t show on his face, because I was watching him carefully. In the meantime, I knew Richard was scoping out the other folks in the waiting room, hoping to catch a hint of what they were thinking. As soon as we were alone in the elevator, I said, “How did they react? Did anybody give anything away?”

  He shook his head. “If the killer was there, he or she has an excellent poker face. No flash of triumph at Big Bill’s incapacitation, no disappointment that he’s still alive, nothing.”

  “Oh well, it was a long shot. You’d think we’d know by now that killers don’t look like killers.”

  “‘One may smile, and smile, and be a villain,’” Richard agreed. “Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5.”

  Next we headed for the Walters mansion. Big Bill had given us permission to go through that file of threatening letters, and I was itching to get at them. It was petty of me, but Big Bill had been a source of speculation my whole life, and I couldn’t wait to see just what kind of wheeling and dealing he did in that fancy office.

  Miz Duffield opened the front door but only gave token resistance when we told her we had permission to use Big Bill’s office. The poor thing looked miserable—her dress hadn’t been ironed, and at least three hairs had escaped the bun on her head. She seemed so relieved when I told her Big Bill was doing better that I was feeling sorry for her until we got into Big Bill’s office.

  That’s when Richard said, “What about Ms. Duffield?”

  “What about her?”

  “Could she be trying to kill Big Bill?”

  “Are you serious? She’s worked for the Walterses for as long as I can remember. If she’s not devoted to them, she’s been putting on an awfully good act.”

  “According to what Big Bill said, it’s Dorcas she’s really devoted to. Big Bill is just part of the package.”

  “True. What motive could she have?”

  He thought about it. “What if Dorcas had been worried about Big Bill marrying Aunt Maggie even before it happened? She could have told Ms. Duffield that she might have to move out of the mansion, and Ms. Duffield would have known how much that would upset her. Why not get Big Bill out of the way so that Dorcas could live happily ever after? With Ms. Duffield in attendance, of course.”

  “Then when Big Bill did marry Aunt Maggie, she went after both of them, thinking that Burt and Dorcas would get to keep the house. Or just for revenge for Big Bill snubbing Dorcas. He was just as mean to her at the party as he’s been to Burt, not to mention how rude he’s been to Miz Duffield.”

  “Right,” he said. “I don’t know about the other attempts, but Ms. Duffield certainly had opportunity to poison the champagne.”

  “The problem is that she knew that Alice and I were in the laundry room. Why would she have risked me catching her with the rubbing alcohol?”

  “What risk? If you’d seen her, she could have come up with any number of excuses for having rubbing alcohol handy. She does work here, after all. And that would explain why she was in such a rush to rinse out Aunt Maggie’s champagne goblet. I bet she’d have gotten Big Bill’s washed before anybody realized he was sick if you hadn’t been so quick on the uptake.”

  “That’s not bad. We’ll put her on the list.” Looking at the stack of letters on Big Bill’s desk, I added, “Of course, it could be a long list.” We divided the stack into two piles, and we each took one and settled down on the couch.

  Even though I’d been relishing the idea of rooting through Big Bill’s business, it wasn’t long before I felt kind of sick to my stomach. Big Bill hadn’t been kidding when he bragged about how many enemies he had—if anything, he’d been underestimating! The worst part was that a lot of the people who’d wri
tten letters seemed to have legitimate grievances.

  “Look at these, Richard. People laid off after working at the mill for ten years or more. Unfair hiring practices. Race discrimination. Sexual discrimination. Sexual harassment. It’s like a primer for how to be a robber baron.”

  “These are allegations, Laura. We don’t know that they’re true. As the Bard said, ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’ The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene 3.”

  “And as my granddaddy said, ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.’” I waved a handful of letters at Richard. “There’s an awful lot of smoke here.”

  “Granted. So what if they’re all true?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if they’re true, should we go back to Boston and let Big Bill get what’s coming to him?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Even if he…” Richard picked up a letter and quoted from it. “Even if he ‘allows his delivery trucks to run past sleeping people’s houses in the middle of the night, ruining their sleep’?” He picked up another letter. “Or ‘sold inferior socks that caused blisters on the big toe and ankle’?”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Okay, some of these are clearly cranks. I know Big Bill didn’t let space aliens use his warehouse for a staging area for world domination. But some of these other letters… Brown lung really happens, and so do industrial accidents.”

  “They do, and maybe Big Bill has things to answer for. But Aunt Maggie married him, and I’ve always known her to be an excellent judge of character. Maybe most of these letters aren’t true and Big Bill never was as big a scoundrel as people said he was, or maybe he’s changed and isn’t as big a scoundrel as he used to be. I don’t know, but I do know that we promised Big Bill and Aunt Maggie that we’d help.”

  “You’re right. As usual. Remind me to let you handle all the morality lessons with Alice.”

  “Laura, reading these letters wouldn’t bother you if you weren’t a moral person. I just think I’ve got a bit more objectivity about the Walterses than you do—I didn’t grow up under their shadow.”

  “They do cast a big one. Kind of like Harvard and Cambridge.”

  “Now you’ve lost me,” he said.

  “We both know Cambridge wouldn’t be nearly as interesting a city without Harvard, and Harvard wouldn’t be the same kind of place if it weren’t in Cambridge. Harvard provides jobs and students with money to spend and intellectual cachet. Cambridge provides a funky, eclectic city for students to fall in love with. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “But the city has been fussing about Harvard for years: they don’t pay enough taxes; they use up all the good land; the students cause problems. Ad infinitum.”

  “Ad nauseum,” Richard said.

  “Spoken like a true Harvard man. The real reason Cambridge fusses about Harvard is the fact that they’ve got so much money and clout, making them the biggest target. Maybe that’s why so many of us in Byerly fuss about the Walterses. If it weren’t for the mill and the bank, Byerly might have dried up and blown away like so many of the other tiny farm towns, and if Byerly weren’t such a nice place to live, the Walterses wouldn’t have anybody to work in the mills or live in their apartment buildings. But the Walterses have money and clout, and the rest of us resent them.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say Big Bill was an angel,” Richard said.

  “No arguments here, but we don’t want him to be dancing with the angels, either, at least not for a good long while. So let’s get back to work.”

  The letters weren’t sorted—apparently Big Bill had just stuffed new ones into his file as they arrived. So we started by alphabetizing them by the name of the sender. That left a big stack of anonymous letters, but since we didn’t know how we could trace those people anyway, we figured we might as well start with the people we could identify.

  Once the letters were alphabetized, we counted how many had come from the same person. Our reasoning was that if somebody wasn’t mad enough to send Big Bill more than one letter, he or she wasn’t likely to be mad enough to kill him. So we eliminated folks who hadn’t sent at least two letters.

  Next we eliminated the people who hadn’t sent a letter since the first of the year. Some of those people from further back had sounded mad enough to chew nails, but it didn’t seem reasonable that somebody would have nursed a grudge without taking action sooner.

  Then we edited for severity of grievance. Yes, there were many letters from the woman who said that the change she got from the bank was filthy, and the last one had arrived only a few weeks before, but I just didn’t think she’d go after Big Bill. If she thought pocket change was nasty, surely she’d find murder unsanitary.

  After reading for a while, I got thirsty. Big Bill would just have rung the buzzer for Miz Duffield to carry him something, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Instead, I left Richard to keep on working while I went foraging. The house was uncomfortably quiet. Even Aunt Maggie’s dog, Bobbin, was gone—Thaddeous had taken her home the night before, figuring Aunt Maggie would have enough to handle with Big Bill. I tentatively called out, “Hello?” but when I didn’t get an answer, made my way to the kitchen.

  Nobody was in there, so I found glasses and opened cans of Coke for Richard and me. There was a pitcher of iced tea in the refrigerator, and while I knew logically that it must have been tested to make sure it wasn’t poisoned, I just didn’t have a taste for it right then. I was looking for a recycling bin for the empty cans, when I had that funny feeling of being watched, and turned around to see Miz Duffield staring at me. She’d changed her clothes and forced her hair back into a bun, but her disposition hadn’t improved.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She continued to glare.

  “I didn’t know where you were, so I helped myself. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Why should I mind? I’m just the hired help.”

  If that was going to be her attitude, the last thing I wanted to do was chat with her, but I had reasons to try. For one, she could be a useful ally in that house. For another, I felt bad about the way she’d been treated by Vasti and Big Bill. And most important, she was a suspect, too. So I plastered on my most ingratiating smile.

  She came the rest of the way into the room, eyeing me warily, and I wondered if she was checking out my pants to see if there was room for me to hide the good silver in my pockets.

  I said, “I never got a chance to tell you how nice everything looked for the party last night.”

  “Mrs. Bumgarner was in charge, not me.” The disdain with which she said Vasti’s name would have made her my chief suspect if Vasti had been poisoned.

  “Vasti can be a bit hard to take,” I allowed, which was true enough. “Especially with all the commotion you’ve already had to deal with, what with Aunt Maggie moving in.”

  “And that dog!”

  “Oh, Bobbin. I guess the Walterses don’t have any house pets.”

  “Certainly not.”

  I tried again. “Now you’re going to have an invalid to contend with, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Big Bill is supposed to come home from the hospital tomorrow, but he’ll need constant care. Private duty nurses, special equipment, the whole bit.”

  “Nurses? I don’t see why we need to bring in more strangers. I’m perfectly able to tend to Mr. Big Bill, just as I’ve been doing for years.”

  “I’m sure you are,” I said quickly, “but it wouldn’t be fair, would it? You’ve got so much to take care of already. I don’t know how you keep a place this big so immaculate—I can’t keep our little place half this clean.”

  “All it requires is organization and routine,” she said with a sniff. But she did add, “Of course, we use a service for the heaviest cleaning tasks.”

  “Naturally,” I said, as if I had a staff of cleaning folks myself, “but you still have to supervise them to make sure the job is done properly.”

&n
bsp; She nodded in acknowledgment.

  Figuring that this was as friendly as she was likely to get, I decided to see if I could get anything useful out of her. “I was wondering, do you have a few minutes? I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  “What kind of questions?” she said suspiciously.

  “Big Bill and Aunt Maggie have asked Richard and me to help find out who wants to harm him. You may have heard that we’ve done this kind of thing before.”

  “There has been some talk of your unusual inquisitiveness.”

  That almost sounded insulting, but I let it pass. Maybe she always talked that way. “It occurred to me that you’re in an excellent position to know about anything odd going on here at the mansion.” She looked doubtful, so I added some butter. “You’ve got such a personal relationship with the family, and I know Dorcas thinks the world of you.”

  Her bosom swelled with pride. “Yes, Mrs. Walters—I mean Mrs. Burt Walters, of course.”

  “Of course.” I suspected that Aunt Maggie would never be “Mrs. Walters” to Miz Duffield, but since I was having problems with that myself, I couldn’t very well hold that against her.

  Miz Duffield went on. “Mrs. Walters does rely on me. A woman in her position has so many obligations.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, nodding as if I had some idea of what obligations she was talking about.

  “She’s been working with Mr. Montgomery on the Halloween Carnival for months and has already started arrangements for this year’s Jingle Bell Ball. Then there’s her work with the Junior League membership committee.” She cut her eyes at me. “Your cousin has been proposed for membership, but I’m not sure that she’d be a good match.”

  I thought that was mighty snotty for a woman who had less chance of gaining entrance into that archetypal ladies’ club than Richard did, but I didn’t want to destroy our tenuous rapport. So I settled for, “Vasti isn’t always the easiest person to get along with, but everybody knows how hard she’ll work on whatever project she’s involved with, and she’s had some amazing successes.”