A Second Helping of Murder

by Christine Wenger

  “I’ve heard of Dr. Huff, but I haven’t met him. I haven’t found it necessary to go to a doctor,” Ty said.

  “Me either. Thank goodness.”

  “Did Dr. Huff replace Dr. Francis?” Ty flashed his badge to the young receptionist with the moussed crown of hair on her head.

  “In a way. Dr. Francis passed away several years ago. Then Dr. Morgan took over. Then Dr. Fineburg. Then Dr. Huff took over that practice.”

  “Is Dr. Huff available?” Ty asked, looking around at the very empty waiting room.

  “No, he’s not. Sorry. Right now he’s golfing at Twin Trees. Today’s his day off.”

  Ty leaned on the counter and turned on the charm. “Well, darlin’, you seem like you run this place by your little self. I’d like to look at one of Dr. Francis’s old files. The name is Claire Jacobson.”

  “I can’t do that, Deputy Brisco. Our files are confidential. You know that. I’d need a court order.”

  “It’s impossible to find a judge now.” He checked his watch. “It’s almost four o’clock on a Friday. I couldn’t get a judge until probably Monday.” He sighed, and I knew that Ty wanted to follow this clue—and fast.

  But I wanted to follow it up even faster.

  I read the receptionist’s name tag. Shannon Shannon?

  I cleared my throat just to get her attention away from Ty. “Miss Shannon, Claire Jacobson is deceased. Surely, she won’t object.”

  She ignored me and smiled at Ty. “I’ll have to ask Dr. Huff, but I can assure you that he won’t release anything without a court order.”

  “Then why ask him?” Honestly, I hated rules when they got in my way to get something done quickly. “Are all your records digitized?”

  “Huh?” said the diligent Miss Shannon.

  “Are they all on the computer?”

  “Not the old ones. They’re still on paper. In files. In filing cabinets.” She still hadn’t taken her eyes off Ty.

  Ty leaned over and grinned, flashing two perfect rows of whiter-than-white teeth. “Where are the old ones, darlin’?”

  “Um . . . ,” she said. “I don’t know if I should tell you that.” But she immediately looked at the door to her left. On the door was a sign that read RESTROOMS ARE DOWNSTAIRS.

  I decided that I had to go to the restroom.

  Nudging Ty, I said, “Officer Brisco, please excuse me. I’ll be right back. I have to hit the ladies’ room, if Miss Shannon doesn’t mind.”

  She waved me away as her phone rang. I could hear that it was a personal call—something about a trip to New York City to visit a vampire club to drink umbrella drinks with a twist of animal blood.

  Eew!

  I hustled down the stairs and headed right for the rows of file cabinets that were lined up against the wall like gray metal soldiers.

  They were locked.

  I found 1989, the year that Claire Jacobson would have visited Dr. Francis. And found her exact drawer. It was marked I–K.

  I yanked on the drawer. Nothing happened. I tried to pop up the lock. No luck. I yanked again.

  I was about to give up when I saw a key in another lock. With any luck, the same key would fit this file cabinet.

  I tried the key, and the lock popped up. A thrill of excitement ran up my spine, and I felt ready to begin a career as a safecracker should I fail to fill the cottages this summer.

  I pulled the file drawer open, walked my fingers through the names, and found Claire’s file.

  Stuffing it into the waistband of my jeans, I zipped up my jacket.

  Sliding back the drawer, I pushed the lock in and put the key back in the other file cabinet.

  Time to get the hell out of here.

  I hurried up the stairs and was breathless when I got to the top.

  Ty took one look at me, and his eyes grew as wide as platters. He took me by the arm, gave Miss Shannon times two a “Good-bye, darlin’,” and we were off.

  “Tell me you didn’t steal her file.”

  “That would be illegal.”

  “That’s never stopped you before. And why are you walking funny?”

  “No reason.”

  We climbed into his hulk of an SUV, or at least he did. I tried to climb up without losing my five-to-fifteen-years-at-a-women’s-prison-worth of stolen property.

  Finally I plopped down on the beige leather seat, the manila folder digging into my back.

  “Hand it over, Trixie.”

  “Just drive, will you? This is the getaway SUV.”

  “So you did steal the folder! Dammit, Trixie. It could have waited until Monday, when I could get the court order.”

  “Look, Deputy, I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  “Well, like you said, I’m driving the getaway SUV. Plus, I’m harboring a criminal. I’m in this deep.” He shook his head, but when he looked at me, there was a twinkle in his eye.

  Ty Brisco might be a by-the-book cop, but he was willing to skip a few pages.

  “Bedford Hills is women only. You’ll have to find another prison of your own,” I informed him.

  “How do you know about Bedford Hills?” he asked.

  “My ex-husband’s niece, who was a math teacher in one of the western New York high schools, decided she was in love with one of her students. Unfortunately, she didn’t know math good enough to calculate that he was underage. She was sentenced to Bedford Hills, and she kept writing my ex because she seemed to think that a Philadelphia traffic cop could help her get out of Bedford Hills in New York.”

  He laughed. “Let’s go to your place and take a look at the folder that I don’t know you have. Do you want to stop somewhere for takeout?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go to the Crossroads. They have excellent burgers. They aren’t as good as mine, but they’re okay. Besides, I’d like to chat with Laura Tingsley about the two murders. She always has something to say.”

  Ty nodded. “Good idea, but she might not talk if I’m there.”

  “Then you wait in the getaway SUV and hide from the cops. I won’t be long.” I pulled the file out of my clothes and handed it to him. “This will be good reading while I’m gone.”

  “Thanks. Take your time.”

  From the outside, the Crossroads looked like Daniel Boone’s log cabin on steroids. The inside was knotty pine. It was divided in half by a planter with silk vegetation. One half was the restaurant area, and the other half contained a bar with red vinyl and silver barstools and booths around the perimeter.

  I knew that Laura Tingsley, the former Laura VanPlank, bought the Crossroads from a very outdoorsy couple for a low price several years ago, but the informal, rustic appearance of the place really didn’t suit her. However, it did suit the locals and the Sandy Harbor visitors.

  I didn’t plan on staying very long with the wannabe Jackie Kennedy Onassis. She always managed to slip several campaign-type sound bites for her husband, Mayor Rick Tingsley, into any conversation.

  Laura was sitting at a table with an older woman, who looked just like Nancy Reagan. Jackie O. and Nancy Reagan were eating Cobb salads and drinking red wine.

  “Hi, Laura. How are you?” I smiled at both ladies. “Nice rainy day, isn’t it?”

  “Hello, Trixie. I’d like you to meet my mother, Mrs. Carla VanPlank.”

  Mrs. VanPlank held out a limp hand so loaded with diamonds, no wonder she couldn’t hold it up.

  I took it and pumped away.

  Local gossip (my maintenance man Clyde) said that Laura’s parents were wildly wealthy, and now I believed it. Gossip also had it that they were the ones who were bankrolling Rick Tingsley’s runs for office.

  “Nice to meet you. How long are you visiting, Mrs. VanPlank?”

  It would have been nice if she told me to call her by her first name.

  “Oh, I don�
��t know. Our plans are flexible. It’s just so nice to visit my daughter and Mayor Tingsley.”

  Was it me, or wasn’t it creepy that she referred to her son-in-law so formally?

  “With the recent discovery of Claire Jacobson’s body and the even more recent murder of Mr. Burrows, it must be a public relations and tourism nightmare for Mayor Tingsley,” I said.

  Laura sniffed. “He can handle it.”

  “Of course he can handle it. He can handle anything,” Mrs. VanPlank snapped. “After all, he’s senator material. And after he’s senator for a term, he’ll be elected president.”

  I’d heard the same declaration from Laura several times before, but now her mother was throwing his hat into the ring, too.

  “Of the United States,” Mom added.

  I snapped my fingers as if this question just occurred to me. “Laura, you knew Claire, didn’t you?”

  “Barely. She was not part of Sandy Harbor proper. She was just a summer visitor.”

  “Just like me,” I said. Sandy Harbor proper? What on earth?

  “Not like you anymore. You’ve graduated to being a regular Sandy Harbor resident since you’re a property owner here now,” Laura said, as if she were quoting from a rule book.

  “Graduated, huh?” I’d call it being in debt up to my hair roots.

  Laura turned to her mother. “Trixie owns the Silver Bullet Diner and Sandy Harbor Cottages. She bought it all from Stella, her aunt.”

  Carla VanPlank patted her white coiffure, even though not a hair had escaped its varnish. “In the past, Mr. VanPlank and I attended several of your aunt and uncle’s Dance Fests when we were living here.”

  She didn’t seem like a Dance Fest kind of person, and it seemed as if she called her husband “Mr.” all the time.

  I shifted on my feet, which I’d just realized were killing me. Apparently, I wasn’t going to be asked to sit.

  I decided to press on to see if they might have any information that could help me in my investigation. After all, they might remember important things after all these years. Laura had been there, and her parents had lived in Sandy Harbor at the time, too.

  “Speaking of graduation,” I began, “I read in the Sandy Harbor Lure where the mayor—obviously, he wasn’t the mayor then—said that he was the one who invited Claire to the bonfire the night of their graduation party. I guess that you and the mayor weren’t dating then. Right, Laura?”

  “Of course we were dating!” She turned her eyes to the bare rafters as if her next sentence were written up there. “We were a couple all through high school. The mayor was just trying to be nice when he invited her.” Laura crossed her arms over her chest, daring me to contradict her. “He probably felt sorry for her. He’s sensitive like that.”

  Sensitive is the last adjective I’d attribute to Rick Tingsley.

  “Really?” I feigned surprise. “My mistake. The way the paper read, I must have misunderstood. I thought that the mayor was with Claire—like a date.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. The mayor was always enchanted with my Laura.” Mrs. VanPlank set down her fork, quite ladylike. However, judging by the sour expression on her face, she’d rather throw the fork at me, prongs first. “The mayor was just trying to be nice to Miss Jacobson, just like my daughter said.”

  I leaned over the table and whispered, “Do either of you have a guess as to who killed her?”

  “For heaven’s sake.” Mrs. VanPlank sniffed. “This isn’t very pleasant lunch conversation.”

  “Are you getting takeout, Trixie?” Laura asked. “Or are you lunching alone?”

  Yikes. I can take a hint. This conversation was over. I’d pushed too hard.

  “Takeout. I came here for your delicious burgers.”

  “Give your order to Charlie, the bartender. He’ll help you,” Laura said, picking up her fork.

  That was an absolute dismissal. She didn’t have to hit me over the head with a serving platter. I got the message.

  “Ladies, I’d like to invite you both to the Silver Bullet Diner for lunch or dinner, on me. Please do come.”

  I heard myself babbling, and couldn’t believe I was inviting the First Ladies to dine with me. But maybe I could get more information out of them on my home turf.

  “Thank you, but our schedule is quite full,” Laura said, fingering her pink pearls.

  “I’d like to go, Laura,” said Mrs. VanPlank, surprising me. “I’d enjoy seeing Trixie’s diner and cottages. I’d like to take a tour.”

  “Then it’s a date,” I said. “How about tomorrow for lunch?”

  “I presume that’ll be okay. I do have to check my appointment book to be sure.” Laura shifted on her seat to cross her legs. “If I don’t call you to cancel, we’ll see you at noon.”

  Mrs. VanPlank nodded.

  I waved good-bye and decided to skip the takeout from here after all. I’d phone Juanita and order some bacon cheeseburgers on homemade sourdough bread and some curly fries with balsamic vinegar. It would be ready by the time we got there.

  When I walked to where Ty had parked his black monolith, I found him completely absorbed in reading Claire’s file. Walking around to the passenger side, I climbed in.

  “What did you find out from Claire’s file, the one that you know nothing about and have never seen?” I asked.

  “Claire was pregnant. Two months along when she saw Dr. Francis.”

  Pausing for a while, I let that sink in. She had to be truly in love, head-over-flip-flops, white-lace-and-promises in love with whoever her boyfriend was.

  And Claire was always happy, even more so just before she went missing. Her eyes always twinkled and the smile on her face was even bigger. I’d studied her every movement back then, her hand gestures, the way she walked, talked, and laughed. I would have known if something was wrong with her.

  “Who went with her to the appointment?” I asked.

  “No one.”

  “Twenty-five years ago, did a seventeen-year-old have to have a parent or guardian with her to see a doctor?” I wondered.

  “I don’t think so, and Dr. Francis didn’t seem to care. He even made a note in the folder that he thought she was younger than twenty-one. That was the age she gave him.”

  “Really?” That surprised me. “Who did she name as father?”

  Ty stared a hole through the folder. “She didn’t. She said that the father was unknown.”

  “She knew who the father was. Claire wasn’t the type to sleep around.”

  “Being that you were ten years old, how did you know?”

  “Let’s call it preteen intuition. Admittedly, she was my heroine, so my opinion was very tainted, but I just had a feeling that Claire was in love—and she seemed like the type to fall hard for one person,” I insisted. “What else did you find out from the folder that you don’t have in your possession?”

  “When her family came to Sandy Harbor for that summer in June—it was June first, if I remember correctly from the reports—she saw Doc Francis on August third and was already four months pregnant. She died three days later, the night of the bonfire.”

  “I’d assumed that the father was a townie or summer vacationer, but if she came here already two months pregnant, that isn’t likely.”

  “True.”

  “But somehow the murderer found out. Maybe it was the father of the baby. Maybe it was ‘B.’” My heart started pumping. Maybe this was the right track.

  “Who?” Ty asked, then snapped his fingers. “Oh yeah, the initial she carved behind the medicine cabinet.”

  “Maybe he didn’t like the fact that he was going to be a father at age seventeen.”

  I was on a roll, playing off Ty.

  “Trixie, you’re assuming that the father of Claire’s baby was a high schooler. What if he was my age at the time? What if he was
older?”

  “Claire wouldn’t go for someone as ancient as you when there were hot high school boys around.”

  “Thanks a lot.” He ran his fingers through his thick dark hair. “By the way, where’s our food?”

  “I decided to skip ordering from here. I didn’t want to hang around and wait. I’m calling Juanita now. I figure that it’ll be ready just as soon as we get back. Cheeseburger and fries okay with you?”

  “Perfect.”

  He started the car as I called Juanita with our order.

  “Oh, could we stop at Brown’s? I want to see if ACB is back. You can wait in the car. I just wanted to tell her about the three buses of mystery people that she missed and make sure she’s all right.”

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Take your time.”

  Antoinette Chloe Brown was indeed back from wherever she was. Her delivery van was parked on the side, windows down.

  “Go around back, Ty. ACB will probably be in the kitchen with Sal’s brother, Tony.”

  Since Antoinette Chloe’s husband was doing hard time in Auburn Correctional Facility, she’d found a friend—or maybe a lover—in Sal’s brother, Tony. They could often be seen riding around on Tony’s motorcycle, or rather the flamboyant ACB would be in the sidecar.

  I knocked on the screen door of the kitchen. “Antoinette Chloe? It’s Trixie.”

  “Trixie? Welcome. Come in. Can I fix you something?”

  “No. I’m all set. I just wanted to tell you that I fed three buses of mystery lovers at the Silver Bullet. They were booked at your place, but you weren’t open.”

  “Trixie, I forgot all about them. Tony and I were motoring along the wine trail in the Finger Lakes.”

  The colorful muumuus that ACB used to wear were replaced by black leather, lots and lots of it. Chains hung from every part of her, like tinsel on a Christmas tree. She wore goth makeup and her platinum hair with black roots was parted in the middle and gathered into a ponytail, which jutted out from the back of a black leather visor.

  When ACB dresses, she goes all out.

  “So everything’s okay, Antoinette Chloe?” Never just call her Antoinette or you’d hear about it.

  “I’ve been having a ball with Tony on his Harley. I love riding in the sidecar next to him and roaring down the highway of life. But then he dropped me off here and said that he might be back, but maybe not. He had to find himself. I didn’t think he was missing.” Tears pooled in her black-painted eyes, and she changed the subject. “Did you hear that they found the body of Claire Jacobson?”