by Jana DeLeon
Gail’s parents were an older couple and I could immediately tell where Gail got her nice gene. They were clearly overwrought but couldn’t stop thanking everyone for their kindness. Marie for letting them stay with her. Ida Belle, Gertie, and me for giving Marie a much-needed break and sitting with Nolan. The entire town for bringing food and for the many phone calls and emails from residents sending their thoughts and prayers.
Nolan showed up about twenty minutes after I did. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days and that was probably true, more or less. Dozing for ten or even thirty minutes didn’t give your body the rest it needed. I’d played the sleepless game enough times to know that eventually it caught up with you.
He approached Gail’s parents and immediately apologized that they couldn’t stay in their prior home.
“I don’t want you to feel that you’re not welcome,” Nolan said. “It’s still your home as well. But I’ve had to move to the guest room because of the police—” His voice cracked and he coughed and looked down for a bit.
Gail’s mother put her hand on Nolan’s shoulder. “We understand. It’s probably for the best anyway. I’m not sure…”
Her voice trailed off but we all knew what she was thinking—that being in the same house where her daughter had been murdered might not be the most comfortable place to be. Assuming that there was any comfortable place to be given the circumstances.
Ida Belle cleared her throat and looked down at Nolan. “Did the police, uh, finish?”
Nolan nodded. “I haven’t been there yet, but I spoke with Carter earlier. He said I’m free to return home. I have some paperwork and a few other things I need to handle, but I think I’ll pack some more clothes and stay at the hotel again. The soonest someone can get out to fix the upstairs window will be tomorrow, and I need to hire someone to clear the room, uh…anyway, the hotel wasn’t too bad and at least it’s secure.”
We all shifted uncomfortably at the thought of someone hauling the bed that Gail had died on out of the room, and that wasn’t the end of the things that would need to be addressed. Murder wasn’t a tidy business.
“Do you need any help today?” Ida Belle asked.
“No, thank you,” Nolan answered. “I don’t have that much to do, really. I guess I mostly just need some time to think.”
“And to rest,” Gertie said. “If you can manage it.”
He nodded. “I’m certainly going to try.”
Gail’s father stepped forward and I could tell he’d spent a good amount of time crying. “Would you like us to help with the, er, arrangements?”
Nolan gave them a sad smile. “You know Gail. Everything was prearranged and paid for. She always said that if something happened she didn’t want us dealing with such things.”
My eyes misted up a bit and I moved away from the discussion and went to stand at the back window, looking out over Marie’s well-manicured backyard. Bones, the old hound dog I’d inherited with the house and rehomed with Marie, was lying in the backyard, stretched out in the sun and enjoying the afternoon. He was completely oblivious to all the sadness and turmoil around him.
If only everyone could view life from the perspective of an aging hound dog.
* * *
Just after midnight, I peered over a hedge and checked out the house. The front porch light was on but that was it. Looked like no one was home. Perfect. I could retrieve the camera, and hopefully, Sinful’s latest nightmare would be over by tomorrow morning. I’d driven through downtown and spotted Carter’s truck at the sheriff’s department, then went back home and pulled on a black hoodie before setting out. I took a circuitous route to the house, making sure that Carter wasn’t lurking somewhere on foot, as he sometimes did, but all appeared to be clear. All I needed was ten uninterrupted minutes. Then I’d have the camera secured and would be back in my kitchen watching the footage that hopefully would nail a murderer.
I slipped down the side of the house and pushed up the window I’d left unlocked the night before when I’d placed the camera in an air vent in Nolan’s living room. I lifted myself over the window ledge and rolled silently onto the carpeted floor, pausing for a moment to listen. The house was completely silent, and I moved quickly to the couch and climbed on the back directly below the air vent. I pulled a screwdriver out of my pocket and removed the vent from the wall. I flipped the vent over, expecting to see the camera on the back of a vent slat, where I’d attached it, but it was gone.
“Looking for something?” Nolan’s voice sounded behind me and I turned around, still balanced on the back of the couch. He stood in the hallway that led to the guest room, a pistol with suppressor leveled at me. The camera dangling in his other hand.
“I set up my own little televised network days ago,” he continued. “I was afraid if I couldn’t get out of Sinful soon enough, something like this might be in the cards.”
“I see you’ve had a miraculous recovery,” I said, and pointed to his legs.
“I think we both know that’s not the case. You know, I wondered which of you it was. Carter couldn’t do it without a court order, and he needed a good reason and time to get one. Marie was out because, well, she would never have made the leap you did. But the three of you…you’ve managed to be in the middle of everything that happens in Sinful. I knew you wouldn’t be able to keep your nose out of this. I just didn’t expect you to hit on the answer so soon.”
“I’m so sorry I interrupted your murder-and-insurance-grab timeline.”
“No interruption. Merely a small delay that caused another shift in plans, like the one created by that idiot Derrick. If he hadn’t catfished that Latour woman and brought attention to all of this, Gail might have had another six months or a year of life.”
“You’re despicable.”
He smiled. “I’m clever. Derrick did it all wrong and got caught. Greed is the problem with the short game. If Derrick hadn’t asked for such a large amount, she probably wouldn’t have reported him. None of my victims came trotting forward until Beulah started braying like an injured donkey.”
“So you figured you’d make Gail another victim of the catfish, except this time, you’d escalate it.”
“It did seem to be the easiest solution for a speedy exit. By tomorrow, I’ll have a death certificate in hand and the insurance company is already prepared to expedite my check.”
“I’m sure your partner Francesca is only too happy to see to it that it happens. What’s her cut—twenty percent? Half? Or maybe she’s your partner in more than just crime.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re even more clever than I realized. Perhaps I’m not the only person in Sinful who isn’t what they seem. It’s almost a shame to kill you. You would have made a great criminal.”
“And how do you propose to explain shooting me?” I asked.
“I don’t propose to explain it at all. I’ll simply return here tomorrow morning with Gail’s parents and gasp at the shocking discovery of a dead woman in my living room. Ballistics will match the weapon used to kill Gail and everyone will think you were in on it with him or snooping about again and this time, you came up short.”
I felt my heart drop. He was right. Suspicion wouldn’t fall on Nolan. Everyone thought he was tucked away in a hotel, not to mention the fact that no one else knew he could walk. That was exactly what I’d been hoping to capture with the camera. It would have blown Nolan’s entire alibi out of the water.
“I told the others,” I said, trying to come up with a way to delay the inevitable. Time produced options.
He cocked his head to the side and studied me. “You’re a convincing liar, but nonetheless a liar, I think. And even if you told them your suspicions, they have no proof. By the time those two busybodies convince anyone to check their story, I’ll be long gone.”
He lifted the gun and I looked down and saw the red line move up my chest. I knew it stopped on my forehead. “Goodbye, Sandy-Sue Morrow. You were too smart for your own good.”
I dived off the couch as a shot rang out. I hit the ground and rolled, expecting the shock to hit me at any moment. Instead, I instinctively popped back up, gun drawn, and looked over to see Nolan lying on the floor, a single bullet through his forehead.
I whirled around and spotted Carter standing at the window I’d used to climb in.
He shook his head. “I keep having to kill people when I’m around you.”
Crap. Nolan was dead and I was breaking and entering. There was no good way to arrange that story.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Get out of here before someone reports that shot,” he said.
“But what about Nolan?”
“I heard everything. I’ll handle it, but I can’t do that if you’re in the middle of it, so go.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I headed to the window and bailed out. When I landed on the ground, I threw my arms around Carter, momentarily startling him.
“Thank you for…everything,” I said, then dashed off through the hedges.
Chapter 18
I’d barely made it home when my cell phone started ringing. It was Ida Belle.
“Shots fired at Nolan’s house,” Ida Belle said. “Peaches heard it this time and called the police, then Marie, because she was afraid she was still staying there.”
“Yeah. I kinda have inside knowledge on that.”
“I knew you were up to something! What the hell have you done? Do we need to raise bail money? Get Harrison in gear to find you a safe house?”
“Nothing that dire. Carter’s covering for me. Again. It’s no wonder he doesn’t want me as a girlfriend. I present enough trouble as a resident.”
“Well, don’t just stand there lamenting. Get your butt over to Gertie’s house and fill us in.”
She disconnected the phone call and I smiled. They were going to be pissed that I’d left them out, but it wasn’t a mission that required two, so why run the risk?
Until the end. If not for backup, you’d be dead.
I shook my head, refusing to dwell on the facts. They were too inconvenient.
I grabbed my Jeep keys and headed for Gertie’s house. They were going to have a stroke when I told them who the real villain was.
When I walked through the doorway to Gertie’s house, they were ready for me. Ida Belle stood in the middle of the room, hands on her hips and a disapproving look on her face. Gertie was sitting, so the hands-on-hips thing wasn’t a good option. Instead, she wagged her finger at me, looking totally disappointed.
I held my hands up in the air. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. But I wasn’t sure and if I was right, I didn’t want you implicated in what I was doing. The worst Carter could do to me is have the CIA move me to a farm in Idaho, but the two of you would be left here to deal with Celia hounding him to arrest you.”
Ida Belle looked over at Gertie. “Should we forgive her?”
“Hell yeah,” Gertie said. “Now get those lips to flapping. Start with who’s dead. We heard the paramedics carried out a body bag.”
“Nolan is dead,” I said.
“What?”
“Oh no!”
Their expressions reflected shock and horror.
“Before you start feeling bad,” I said, “Nolan killed Gail.”
For the first time since I’d met them, Ida Belle and Gertie were absolutely speechless. If they’d been required to utter even one word at that moment, I don’t think they would have been capable. They both stared at me, eyes wide, jaws dropped, waiting for the punch line. When it finally dawned on them that none was forthcoming, they looked at each other, probably ensuring they’d heard me correctly, then Ida Belle sank onto the coffee table and they both looked back at me.
I sat on the couch and started telling them what I knew and what had happened. When I got to the part about Nolan standing, Ida Belle jumped up from the coffee table and both of them shouted an impressive number of expletives. It took several seconds for them to calm down, but finally Ida Belle sat on the coffee table again and gestured for me to continue. When I told them about Carter saving me from being the one in that body bag, they both sobered.
“That was a close call,” Ida Belle said.
“Too close,” Gertie said. “You shouldn’t have taken such a risk.”
“Probably not,” I said, “but what could I have done? I only had suspicion. No proof. And on the surface, it was a wild idea. Who would have believed it?”
“How did you put all of it together?” Ida Belle asked.
I frowned. “I don’t know exactly, and there’s parts that I still don’t have answers for, but I’m sure Carter will get it all sorted out. I think the biggest part of it centered around people not being who others thought they were. That’s been the biggest issue in my life lately, and something about all of this—the catfish, Gail’s murder, and whatever Brandon is up to—kept pushing me back to that point.”
“That someone wasn’t what or who they were pretending to be,” Gertie said. “I can see how you’d be sensitive to that, especially in your current state, but how do you fix on Nolan? It still seems such a leap.”
“Not really,” I said. “Think about it. Who was on site when Gail was murdered? Nolan. Who had easy access to the house and knew her schedule? Nolan. Most importantly, who benefited from her death? Again, the answer is Nolan.”
Gertie nodded. “The spouse is always the first suspect.”
“Exactly,” I said, “but no one suspected Nolan because everyone thought he was disabled.”
“And if you take away the disability,” Ida Belle said, “it changes everything.”
I nodded. “So I removed that from the equation and then thought about the remaining facts of the case. Who repeated the private messages between Gail and the catfish? Who did Florence Thompson overhear saying Gail was having an affair? Who said the lights went out and there was a scream? Who said someone shoved him down and ran out the front door? The answer was always Nolan.”
“So the affair was all Nolan’s invention,” Gertie said.
“I think so,” I said. “Remember when we looked at Gail’s Facebook account? She hadn’t posted on her wall in months. It would be easy for Nolan to claim he saw something and for Carter to assume it was deleted. It would be equally easy for him to create messages between the catfish and Gail the night she was murdered, supporting his claim about the earlier correspondence, and I bet he did.”
“And the insurance?” Ida Belle asked. “I suppose Gail never took out a policy.”
“No. That was all Francesca,” I said. “Remember Marie said Gail had claimed the policy was too expensive to purchase. I did some checking and she was right. A luxury car would have cost less. Then there was the part where Nolan said they had a joint bank account, but claimed he didn’t know about the policy. Surely he would have noticed an amount that large leaving the account.”
Ida Belle shook her head. “So Francesca processed the policy and paid for it. And I bet when Carter checks, he’ll find that Gail’s signature was forged.”
“I’m sure of it,” I said.
“I still can’t wrap my mind around it,” Gertie said. “You’re saying Nolan and that woman intended to kill Gail from the beginning? That the disability was his cover to prevent him from being accused of murder?”
“I think Nolan is a con man,” I said, “and the long con is his trade. When Carter figures out who he really is, I’ll bet Gail isn’t the only victim. And while the disability turned out to be a great alibi for the murder, I think it was originally intended to explain the large amount of insurance purchased. That’s something the police look into at great length, especially when people haven’t been married for very long.”
“But if you want to ensure your disabled partner is taken care of in case of your demise,” Ida Belle said, “people don’t think as much of it.”
I nodded. “Especially when the insurance agent is claiming the benefiting spouse wasn’t ev
en aware of the policy.” I frowned. “In fact, if you think about it, I bet they were hoping no one ever found out about the insurance. Remember when Ida Belle took the phone call from the insurance agency? It was a man. Then Francesca showed up and claimed her assistant jumped the gun and made the call. She seemed a little aggravated.”
“They hoped the police wouldn’t find out about the policy,” Ida Belle said, “but just in case, Nolan set himself up in the beginning so that he wouldn’t draw suspicion.”
“They had a plan to back up a plan and an answer for everything,” I said.
“But how could Nolan know Gail would fall for him in the first place?” Gertie asked.
“He didn’t know,” I said. “My guess is he went to that charity event looking for a mark, and he found Gail. A lonely, middle-aged woman who knew how to cope with the disabled and according to you guys, had a penchant for trying to rescue men.”
Ida Belle shook her head. “She was practically flashing in neon.”
“So how do you think Nolan actually did it?” Gertie asked. “I mean, he had so little time…”
“But did he?” I asked. “Again, no one else heard the shot because he used a suppressor. Nolan is the one who gave us the original timeline, and we know he lied. I think when he heard gossip about the catfish, he knew the gig was about to be up and he needed to form an emergency exit plan. So he tested the trellis and jimmied the window, figuring if things went further than gossip, he had a quick way out.”
“Gail spent the night in New Orleans two nights before the murder,” Ida Belle said. “Based on the damage to the ivy, he must have tested the trellis then.”
I nodded. “Then Beulah reported the catfish to Carter, so Nolan put his emergency plan into action. Gail went up to bed. He waited for her to fall asleep, then he walked upstairs and shot her. Then he went outside to cut the power and passed off the murder weapon to Francesca, who was probably waiting nearby. Then he went back inside, flipped himself over in the wheelchair, and pressed the paramedic alarm.”