by Jana DeLeon
I filled him in on what we knew and he was silent for a couple seconds.
“That’s not good,” he said finally. “If she saw who did this…”
“I know,” I said. “Carter will have someone watching her round the clock. Probably himself more often than not. Especially since he’s not allowed on the case.”
“Yes. The Heberts have heard about the unfortunate choice of detective as well. We’ve all assumed you’ll be taking the lead since Carter can’t do so without risking his job. The Heberts would like you to know that they and their resources are at your disposal.”
“I really appreciate it. And I have a feeling those resources will be requested at some point. We’re just starting to put everything together now to figure out where to start.”
“Call any time, day or night, and we will accommodate whatever you need.”
I disconnected and told Ida Belle and Gertie what Mannie had said.
Gertie cocked her head to one side. “Do you ever wonder if you called and said you needed someone killed, that they might accommodate that as well?”
“I’m sort of afraid to go there,” I said.
“For Fortune they would,” Ida Belle said. “In a New York minute. They trust her. She would never ask for such a thing unless the world was a better place if the person on the receiving end was gone.”
“You realize that’s not a short list,” Gertie said.
“Definitely not,” I said. “But they also know I would never ask for something like that. I’ll defend myself or others in a second, but as a civilian now, I prefer to work within the confines of the legal system.”
Gertie stared.
“Okay, maybe loosely, but sort of within,” I said. “Besides, if I thought the only option was eliminating someone, I’d do that myself.”
“Always the best course of action,” Ida Belle said. “Unless you need an alibi.”
“So where do we start?” Gertie asked.
I grabbed my laptop to take some notes. “I think we need to start with the murder victim and make the assumption that Emmaline was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“That makes sense, given that St. Ives was stabbed and Emmaline wasn’t,” Ida Belle said. “But then, wouldn’t that mean that Emmaline didn’t actually see the killer? If she had, wouldn’t he have stabbed her as well?”
“If she’d gotten a good look at him, probably,” I said. “But my guess is he ran up behind her while fleeing and clocked her in order to get away.”
I stared out the window and frowned.
“What’s wrong?” Gertie asked.
“I was just thinking, what if Emmaline saw him and he clocked her, but before he could stab her like he did St. Ives, he heard Celia coming.”
“And he didn’t have time to finish the job,” Ida Belle said. “Those are two very different possibilities with two distinct outcomes for Emmaline now.”
I blew out a breath. “I know. But Carter will make sure she’s guarded in case it’s the worse of the two options.”
“Hopefully, Emmaline will wake up soon,” Gertie said. “Then she can tell us what she knows. Once it’s on record that she didn’t see the guy, there’s no point in coming after her again.”
I pulled up a blank document. “Okay, tell me what you know about St. Ives.”
“Not much,” Ida Belle said. “He was only here for a month the spring before you showed up in Sinful. He did a short-term rental, claiming he wanted to try out the area before buying.”
“If complaining about everything day and night was his idea of trying,” Gertie said, “then he tried really, really hard.”
Ida Belle nodded. “He didn’t make friends. Didn’t participate in local events. He did attend service every Sunday but didn’t show up for any church events. He shopped up the highway, claiming he didn’t want to pay markup at the General Store, so even Walter didn’t get a lowdown on him.”
“And he didn’t have a single person he had a drink with? Coffee? Sat on the front porch and complained to?”
They both shook their heads.
“Not that I’m aware of,” Gertie said.
“So what happened when he left?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Ida Belle said. “He was simply gone one day. He’d rented the house furnished, so it’s not like a moving van had to pull up and load. We assumed he just threw his personal items into his car, which was always parked inside the garage, and left. No one even knew he was gone until the For Sale sign went up in the front yard of the house he rented.”
“Well, the silence was kind of a tip-off,” Gertie said.
“True,” Ida Belle agreed.
“Who was the Realtor?” I asked. “Maybe we can get some insight from them.”
“Cara Holiday,” Gertie said.
I groaned. Cara Holiday was one of those people that you crossed the road to avoid when you saw her coming. She was too perky. Too happy. Too nosy. Too loud. Too talkative. Fortunately for me, she’d also had a thing for Carter for years, which meant she never tried to snare me into one of her useless exchanges. It also meant she wasn’t likely to tell me anything. As soon as Carter had zeroed in on me, Cara had as well, except her feelings were the opposite of Carter’s. When word got out about my CIA past, she’d stopped glaring and started pretending I wasn’t there. Since it worked for me, I’d never bothered to call her on it.
“I think it would be better if one of you talks to her,” I said.
“Maybe but maybe not,” Ida Belle said. “She’s kind of afraid of you. If she had an inkling you thought she knew something that would help catch Emmaline’s attacker and she was intentionally withholding it, she’d probably give up her dress size to get rid of you.”
“That was a long and convoluted sentence,” I said. “But it makes sense. Okay, so we have Cara on the list for questioning. Who else? Where was the house? Would the neighbors talk?”
They looked at each other.
“What?” I asked. “Did he live next to blind people?”
“No,” Ida Belle said. “On one side is Maisey Jackson.”
The name sounded familiar and finally I locked in on the reason. “The woman who boats naked?”
Ida Belle grimaced. “That’s the one.”
“Good God, I don’t want to question naked people,” I said. “I’ve seen more naked people since I moved to Sinful than I had in the rest of my life before, and I’m including myself in that count.”
Gertie nodded. “People do seem to have a problem maintaining a proper wardrobe in these parts.”
“The ‘parts’ are the problem,” Ida Belle said. “And for the record, you’re one of those people.”
“Everyone needs a hobby,” Gertie said.
“What about the house on the other side?” I asked.
They both frowned.
“Emmaline lives on the other side,” Ida Belle said.
“Crap,” I said.
Emmaline’s house was on an outside street of the neighborhood, which meant nothing was behind it but woods and marsh. There were houses across the street, but the likelihood of overhearing something from across the street was slim to none. Next door and behind were usually the two best options for getting some local dirt.
“You know who else we have to talk to, right?” Ida Belle asked.
“Who?” I asked.
“Celia,” Ida Belle said. “If you’re right on that couldn’t-finish-the-job theory, she might have seen the killer as well.”
“Great,” I said. “An obnoxious Realtor, a naked person, an idiot lecherous cop, an unconscious person, and Celia. This investigation is getting off to an awesome start.”
“The upside is, if someone murders Celia tonight, we’ll know she saw him,” Gertie said.
“How is that an upside?” Ida Belle asked.
“No more Celia?” Gertie suggested.
I sighed. “I don’t like the woman, but I don’t want her to die.”
“Walter sai
d she was a no-show at the hospital,” Ida Belle said. “Leave it to Celia to knock herself out, then wake up and insist she didn’t need medical care.”
“She caught on fire and didn’t want medical care,” Gertie pointed out. “All in the same night, too. That has to be some kind of record. Even I haven’t managed that many brushes with death in a matter of hours.”
“Give it time,” Ida Belle said.
I slumped in my chair. “Jesus H. Christ, we’re going to have to go over to Celia’s house tonight, aren’t we?”
Gertie shook her head. “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Chapter Five
A very disgruntled Dorothy opened the door to Celia’s house. I couldn’t really blame her. It was late, it had been a long day, and she was taking care of Celia. That was enough to sour anyone’s mood and since Dorothy’s standard personality was sourpuss to begin with, things were only going down from there.
“Do you have any idea what time it is?” she asked.
“Of course we know what time it is,” Gertie said. “Everyone over the age of three has a cell phone and they’re lit up bright at night, then there’s watches, dashboards on cars, and oh, those things called clocks that hang on walls.”
“Do you really think we’d be here if it wasn’t important?” I asked. “Here? Of all places.”
Dorothy frowned but stepped back and waved us in.
“Celia’s in bed,” Dorothy said.
“Is she asleep?” I asked.
“I wish,” Dorothy said. “She’s complaining about her head and her hips and her knees but refusing even an aspirin. If she doesn’t take one soon, I’m going to pick up that ridiculously heavy lamp on her nightstand and finish her off.”
She gave me a pointed look. “I don’t suppose that’s part of the services you provide these days.”
“I’m retired from the killer-for-hire sort of thing,” I said. “It has to be my idea now.”
“Just thought I’d ask,” she said, and waved us down the hall. “Maybe seeing you three will tire her out and she’ll go to sleep. I’ve already been through half a bottle of whiskey and I’m not sure the second half is going to be enough.”
“Celia’s throwing back whiskey?” Gertie asked.
“No,” Dorothy said. “I am.”
“Dorothy, is that you?”
We could hear Celia yelling before we made it halfway down the hall.
“Are you bringing me a snack?” Celia yelled. “I told you I’m starving. And don’t you try to sneak an aspirin in there. I’ll know. Oh—”
She broke off as we stepped into the bedroom and she stared for a moment, confused. Then her eyes widened.
“There was a man!” she said. “He was dead, wasn’t he?”
“I’m afraid so,” I said.
Celia gave Dorothy a dirty look. “I told you there was a dead man in there when you were trying to haul me off to the hospital, but you didn’t believe me. None of you believed me.”
“You’d just hit a wall,” Dorothy said. “You were ranting like a crazy woman, and why in the world would anyone think there was a dead man in the funhouse? The funhouse, I tell you. There’s something very wrong about that.”
Gertie nodded. “Would have been better if he’d been in the House of Horrors. I was thinking about that earlier and—”
“We’re not staging a movie,” Ida Belle said. “It happened the way it happened.”
I looked at Celia, who was still giving Dorothy a dirty look. “Do you remember what you saw in the funhouse?” I asked.
“It comes and goes,” she said, and felt her head at the hairline. “Like when you wake up one morning and there’s pieces of a dream floating around. I touched him, but he was dead. I know how to take a pulse.”
She sounded defensive and still a little confused. But then, the fact that she hadn’t yelled for Dorothy to call the police and have us arrested was the first indication that Celia wasn’t back to her usual snuff.
“I’m sure you do,” I said, reassuringly. “What happened after you checked his pulse?”
“I ran to get help, but I tripped over something on the way,” she said. “I hurt my knees but I just jumped up and kept going. Then I hit that wall. I don’t know how I could have done that.”
“It was made of glass,” I said.
Celia nodded. “Who was he? That man? Do you know?”
“Rupert St. Ives,” I said. “Do you know him?”
She scowled. “Good Lord, unless you were hard of hearing you knew Rupert St. Ives. The most disagreeable man ever placed on earth. I’m not surprised someone killed him.”
“Preach,” Gertie said, and Dorothy gave her a disapproving look.
I studied Celia for a minute, then glanced over at Dorothy, who shook her head. So Dorothy hadn’t told her about Emmaline. I supposed that made sense given the situation. Celia’s thinking was flawed when she was operating at a hundred percent. Dorothy probably saw no point in feeding her information she might not even remember tomorrow morning and that might cause more distress and delay Celia sleeping by even more time. Unfortunately, I needed answers to questions so that half bottle of whiskey wasn’t going to last.
“When you tripped, did you notice what you tripped over?” I asked.
Celia frowned. “No. I guess I didn’t think…”
Her eyes widened. “I think…maybe…was it another body?”
“Yes,” I said. “It was Emmaline.”
Celia gasped. “Emmaline!” She gave Dorothy a dirty look. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because when I called the doctor, he said to keep you quiet and minimize stress,” Dorothy said.
“Please don’t tell me that Emmaline…” Celia’s voice trailed off again.
“She’s alive,” I said. “But unconscious. She’s at the hospital now and Carter and Walter are with her.”
Relief washed over her face. “That’s good. Really good. Emmaline and I might not see eye to eye on some things but she’s a good woman. A righteous woman. We don’t have enough of them in Sinful.”
“Not by your definition,” Gertie grumbled, and Ida Belle elbowed her.
“But what happened to her?” Celia asked. “What happened to that awful St. Ives?”
“We don’t know,” I said. “We were hoping maybe you would remember something that might help.”
“What in the world could I know?” she asked.
“Did you see anyone else in the funhouse?” I prodded. “Someone who went in ahead of you maybe?”
She scrunched her brow in obvious concentration but finally shook her head. “I don’t recall seeing anyone. One of the God’s Wives dared me to go through that mess. Of course, it’s silly and completely beneath a woman of my station, but then they all did it so I wasn’t about to have my own group determine I was a coward.”
“How long after your group went through did you go?” I asked.
“Probably thirty minutes or so,” she said. “I waited for them at the end and they were all raving so much that I knew I was going to have to do it. We took a restroom break first, then went back to the attraction.”
I tried not to show it, but I was disappointed. An entire marching band could have gone through the funhouse in the twenty minutes Celia wasn’t there. And while there were plenty of people milling around, how many of them would have made note of people going into an attraction when the fairgrounds were packed?
“You’re sure you didn’t see anything out of the ordinary?” I asked.
“Good heavens, it’s a carnival,” Celia said. “The whole place is out of the ordinary. Some of it ought to be against the law. But no, nothing that indicated someone was going to be murdered.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said. “We’ll get out of your hair.”
“That’s it?” Dorothy said. “You barge in at an ungodly hour and that’s all you have for us?”
“It couldn’t wait until tomorrow,” I said.
“Why the heck not?�
�� Dorothy asked.
“Because if Celia had seen the perpetrator, he might have crawled through that window later tonight and made use of that ridiculously heavy lamp.”
For probably the first time in their lives, neither Celia nor Dorothy had anything to say.
It was just after 11:00 p.m. when I heard a knock on my front door. I had been enjoying a marathon of Forensic Files and a stack of cookies, so I was sitting in the living room. I grabbed my phone and checked the security cameras and was surprised to see Carter standing there. I jumped up and hurried to the door, flinging it open.
“Why didn’t you let yourself in?” I asked. “How is Emmaline? Why aren’t you at the hospital?”
“Can I come in?” he asked.
“Jesus, get inside. What are you waiting for?” I moved over so he could shuffle past me. He made it as far as the couch and flopped down. I perched on the coffee table in front of him, waiting for answers.
“Mom is still unconscious,” he said. “They ran a bunch of tests and the doctor said there’s some swelling on her brain. He thinks it should go away in a day or two and when enough has gone, she’ll wake up.”
“That’s it? Hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical school and who knows how many millions for the equipment they used to test her, and all he had to give you is ‘he thinks?’”
“Yeah, I wasn’t thrilled either, but the neurologist they called in said the same thing. They’ll retest tomorrow to make sure the swelling is going down. If it isn’t, then they’ll reassess.”
“Well, that’s crap.”
He gave me a tired smile. “It’s nice to hear that my sentiments are supported.”
“So why are you here? I mean…it’s fine for you to be here, but I figured you’d be at the hospital all night.”
“I got some backup.”
“Backup you trust?” I asked.
“Mannie showed up.”
“Oh. Well, then that’s fine.”
“Is it? The guy appears silently behind me, apparently having managed to skirt the nurses and the idiot the state police left up front, expresses his and the Heberts’ sentiments about Mom like he’s an English professor, then offers his services as a bodyguard. I’m not sure I get the guy.”