Vampires, Bones and Treacle Scones (A Liss MacCrimmon Mystery)

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

  Her muttered words reminded Liss of the altercation she’d observed between Hilary and her brother. Combined with what she’d seen of the way Cracker Snipes treated his sister and his wife, Liss was willing to bet that Hilary had been made to feel worthless from her earliest girlhood, first by her father and brothers and later, sad to say, by Ned. She’d been taught to expect to be taken advantage of by men . . . to the point where she’d simply accepted shabby behavior. Acts of rebellion, in Hilary’s experience, weren’t worth the effort.

  “Hilary, Margaret believes in your innocence. So does your son. And I’m willing to be convinced. Will you let us help you?”

  “How? What can you do?”

  “Just talk to me, okay? For starters, I’d like to know why you helped Ned out in the first place. You certainly didn’t owe him anything.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Has he paid child support all these years?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Liss waited.

  “He gave me money when he could.” Hilary sounded defensive.

  “I thought he denied he was Teddy’s father.”

  “He did. At first. But he sent me checks.”

  “Regularly?”

  She shrugged, reminding Liss of Boxer. “On and off. And when he moved in above the market, sometimes I’d go up there.”

  “You slept with him? After what he—”

  “I loved him!” For the first time, Hilary came to life.

  “You think I’m a tramp, but I’m not. There was never anybody else. Just Ned.”

  Stunned by this revelation, Liss needed a minute to regroup. She realized that she believed Hilary. “Did . . . did Ned—?”

  “He was thinking about making things right. I know he was. Even before he went to jail. And while he was in prison he had a job and arranged for all the money he earned to come to me and Boxer. It wasn’t much, but it helped.”

  “Did you visit Ned while he was locked up?”

  Hilary shook her head. “He didn’t want visitors. But he phoned me every few months.”

  And that, Liss thought, was why the police had zeroed in on Hilary so quickly. That she’d had Liss’s jacket hadn’t had all that much bearing on the investigation. By the time Gordon found out that detail, he must already have identified Boxer’s mother as the woman on the bank’s surveillance video.

  “Did you ever go out to the Chadwick mansion?” she asked Hilary.

  “Once.”

  “Touch anything?”

  Hilary heaved a sigh. “I guess I must have left fingerprints, huh? I’m never going to get out of here, am I?” One tear rolled slowly down her cheek, followed by another.

  “Hey, no crying!”

  To her surprise, Hilary managed a watery grin and quoted Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own. “ ‘There’s no crying in baseball.’ ”

  “Good movie,” Liss said.

  “One of my favorites. Teddy likes it, too.”

  “Do you two spend a lot of time watching movies together?”

  “A monthly cable bill is a lot cheaper than going out.”

  “So you were saving up to buy a better TV and the two hundred dollars you took out of Ned’s bank deposit put you over the top.”

  Hilary nodded, confirming Liss’s theory. “Teddy was so thrilled when we hooked that sucker up and turned it on.”

  And Teddy, Liss realized, had been so determined to take the TV with them because he knew how much it meant to his mother. Whatever else she might think of the two of them, they were devoted to each other.

  “Do you have any idea who might have killed Ned?” Liss asked.

  “I wish I did.”

  “Did he talk to you? Did he mention anything that was worrying him?” She got negative shakes of the head in answer to each question. “Do you know where he was getting the money he deposited in his bank account in Fallstown?”

  “No. He never told me.” Her hands clenched and released, clenched and released, until Hilary realized Liss was staring at them and forced herself to hold still.

  “Do you think Ned might have been blackmailing someone?”

  One last clench made Hilary’s knuckles stand out white against skin that was already unnaturally pale. “I . . . I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it. Ned said to keep mum about his being in town, so I did. I didn’t think anybody knew he was out of jail except me and Teddy.”

  “And his probation officer,” Liss murmured. “What about his move to the Chadwick mansion? Did he tell you why he was living there?”

  “I didn’t even know that was where he’d gone until Teddy told me. It made sense, though. He used to go out to that old house all the time when we were kids.”

  “Treasure hunting?”

  “Yeah. Blackie’s gold. He used to talk about that all the time.”

  Gold? Liss let that pass without comment. She supposed that, if the hidden loot existed at all, it could as easily be gold as cash or jewels or rare stamps.

  “Ned came by the trailer any time he needed me to do something for him,” Hilary volunteered.

  “How?” At her blank look, Liss clarified. “Did he have a car?”

  “He borrowed mine sometimes.”

  “But he didn’t keep your car out at the mansion. It would have been seen. Think, Hilary. Did he ever drive out to your place in another vehicle?”

  She nodded.

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. I didn’t look, I just heard the engine when he left. I didn’t think—”

  Agitation had her twisting her hands together again. Liss touched her fingers to Hilary’s to still them. The corrections officer, all but forgotten till then, cleared his throat.

  Liss hastily withdrew her hand. “It’s okay. Just knowing that he had a car, other than yours, could help.” Especially if he borrowed it from the person he was blackmailing. “What did he want when he visited you at your trailer?”

  Hilary blushed.

  “Besides that.”

  “Mostly he wanted me to buy groceries for him. Or cook him a meal. And one time he made me promise to go to the bank down to Fallstown for him that same night. He was real particular that I go after dark.” She sighed. “I don’t know why I shorted him the cash. It was stupid, and I felt bad afterward. That’s why I went out to the old Chadwick place to look for him. I figured I’d better tell him I’d kept some of the money for myself, before he found out on his own. Better that way, right? So I banged on the front door and called his name and after a long, long while, he came and let me in. We talked in the front room. I never saw any of the rest of the house.”

  “That was enough. That’s where he was killed.” Liss thought for a moment. “The, uh, weapon that killed him came from the dining room. Did you ever go into that room?”

  “No. I told you. I was just in the one at the front of the house. I confessed to Ned about the money. He said some nasty things to me and then he yelled at me to get out, so I did. That was the last time I saw him. A couple of days later, he was dead.”

  A chill passed over Liss as a new thought struck her. “Did, uh, Teddy ever overhear Ned yelling at you?”

  “I don’t think so, but—Hey, wait a minute! You can’t imagine that my son would kill his father. That didn’t happen. No way!”

  “Calm down.”

  But it was too late. Hilary was on her feet and the corrections officer was fast approaching the table.

  “I want to go back to my cell,” Hilary told him.

  “I don’t suspect Boxer of anything beyond a few pranks,” Liss called after her.

  She didn’t think Hilary believed her.

  Chapter Thirteen

  That evening, Liss sat down at the desk in her attic office/library with a lined yellow tablet and started making lists. Now that she’d talked to Hilary, she was almost certain she could eliminate her as a suspect. She supposed the worm could turn, but in this case it seemed unlikely. Hilary was too accustomed to le
tting the men in her life walk all over her, everyone from her brothers to the customers at the grocery store. Added to that, she wasn’t very bright. Liss didn’t think she was smart enough to think of insisting she’d only gone into one room at the mansion, not if the truth was that she’d taken the two-pronged fork from the dining room into the parlor and stabbed Ned with it. She’d have been more likely to claim that she’d never visited the Chadwick mansion at all.

  The first name Liss wrote down was Jason Graye’s.

  He wanted to buy the house. What if Ned had caught him trying to sabotage the furnace or the kitchen appliances in a sleazy attempt to lower the town’s asking price? Would Ned then have been able to blackmail Graye into making three payments of $6000 each? And if he’d tried for more, could that have caused Graye to lose his temper and kill him?

  “Oh, I wish,” she murmured.

  Unfortunately, she couldn’t imagine Jason Graye coming at Ned with a two-tined fork. Come to think of it, she didn’t see him agreeing to a payoff, either. She doubted Graye could be blackmailed, not once he realized that Ned was as much an intruder in the Chadwick mansion as he was. Graye would know he had a powerful threat to hold over Ned’s head, one that packed more punch than what Ned had on him. One anonymous phone call and Ned would have been back in jail, serving the remainder of his original sentence. Given that Ned was a convicted felon, counter-charges that Graye was guilty of breaking and entering would have been easy for the authorities to dismiss. Graye would have fallen back on the old “your word against mine” defense and have pointed out that Ned was the one with a criminal record. Put the prominent local citizen up against the ex-con and Graye would have been believed . . . even though everyone in town knew what a crook he was.

  Liss doodled on the page with her felt tip pen, trying to think who else might have had a reason to kill her cousin. What had the town clerk said about another potential buyer for the Chadwick mansion? Someone named Greeley had phoned. That was it.

  The moment she wrote Greeley on the page, Liss remembered why the name had sounded familiar to her. Surely that was the last name of Gloria’s Aunt Flo, the house guest no one in town had ever seen. Was she still staying with Gloria? Liss had no idea. In the months since Halloween, the only time she’d spoken to Gloria had been at MSBA meetings and their conversation had been the superficial kind that dealt with the weather, how tasty the muffins Patsy had brought were, and the ever-increasing price of home heating oil.

  Liss crossed out Greeley and wrote Florence Greeley, after which she scribbled, Gloria’s great-aunt, plastic surgery after accident, and doesn’t leave house?

  Then she wrote, Gloria Weir, newcomer to town, and background unknown.

  If Ned had enjoyed a secret life with Hilary, maybe he’d been keeping other secrets. Was Gloria Weir one of them? Or some other woman? Liss wondered if she could find out whether or not Ned had authorized anyone to visit him while he was in prison. She was sure prison officials kept track of such things, and inmates’ phone calls, too.

  That train of thought led to another. Could Ned have been blackmailing someone he’d met while he was locked up? Was it too far-fetched to think that another convicted felon might eventually have gotten tired of paying Ned and killed him?

  Another name tickled the back of her memory. Lowell Danby. She wrote it down and stared at it, unable for a moment to recall when or where she’d heard it before. Then it came to her. Sherri had told her about a warrant for the arrest of a man by that name. Danby had been released from prison and placed on probation with Chase Forster but, instead of reporting to Chase, he’d disappeared. Sherri had even wondered, briefly, if those were Danby’s bones they’d found in the basement of the Chadwick mansion.

  She reached for the phone and called her friend at home. “This Lowell Danby character,” she said when Sherri answered. “Is there any chance Ned could have met him in prison?”

  “Depends on where Danby was held. Chances are they were both in the state prison in Warren for a while, but there are several facilities there. Where a prisoner is locked up depends on how much time is left in his sentence and how much of a security risk he’s considered to be. Why?”

  Liss explained her thinking. “You said this Danby character took off. Maybe Ned knew where he went.”

  “How? Ned got out of jail months after Danby did. Danby was long gone by then.”

  Liss drew a circle around Danby’s name, reluctant to rule him out as a suspect. After all, he and Ned had both been assigned to Chase Forster. The connection implied that both were planning to live within Chase’s jurisdiction. “Any idea what Danby looks like?”

  “There’s a physical description on the warrant, but no photo and I’d have to dig the paperwork out of the file at the office to know what it says.”

  “What? No wanted poster up on the wall?”

  Sherri chuckled. “No one is actively looking for Lowell Danby. He could be anywhere by now. What’s most likely to happen is that he’ll be charged on this warrant after he’s arrested for something else.”

  “That’s depressing.”

  “Your justice system at work,” Sherri quipped.

  “People are still talking,” Dan reported, shedding his coat as he entered their large, cozy, L-shaped kitchen through the back door. He’d been out early this Saturday morning and over to Patsy’s for a newspaper and a listen. “Some profess to be astonished that the boy is really Edward Boyd, Jr. The rest claim to remember that Ned and Hilary were an item a dozen years ago and insist they knew who he was all along.”

  Less than a week had passed since Margaret had dropped her bombshell on Liss. Once Boxer had moved in with her, she’d made no secret of the reason. Human nature being what it was, the story of their newfound relationship had spread through Moosetookalook like wildfire.

  Liss stopped folding laundry to glare at her husband. She’d taken one load out of the dryer and put another in, then brought the clothes out into the sun-filled room with its east-facing windows in an attempt to brighten her mood. “The boy, as you call him, is still Boxer Snipes, and I’m sick and tired of hearing him judged by what name he goes by. He’s himself, whatever people call him.” Liss knew she sounded waspish, but she couldn’t help herself. “People should mind their own damned business,” she added in an angry mutter.

  “Crocuses are up,” Dan said. “They’re early this year.”

  “And don’t try to change the subject!” She slammed the last neatly folded T-shirt into the basket.

  “You want me to carry that upstairs for you?” Dan asked in a mild voice.

  “Sorry. I’m just out of sorts. And frustrated!”

  “Why?” He stood with one hip braced against the sink, the newspaper in his hand forgotten.

  “Because I can’t think of anything I can do to help. You know Margaret asked me to investigate.” She’d been honest with him about that, even knowing he wouldn’t like the idea.

  He nodded. “I can understand why both of you want to prove Boxer’s mother didn’t kill Ned. For better or worse, we’re all one family now.”

  “The thing is,” Liss said, “I can’t even decide what I think about Hilary’s innocence or guilt. I keep waffling back and forth between believing her and thinking that the police have a pretty good case against her.” She outlined her conclusions about the evidence pointing to Hilary Snipes. “That makes sense, you see. And it isn’t as if we have any other viable suspects.”

  “You’re overlooking the whole blackmail thing,” Dan reminded her.

  “No, I’m not. I made a list. It didn’t help.”

  “Still, it seems to me that if the extortion angle is brought up at Hilary’s trial, it will create that ‘shadow of doubt’ lawyers are always yammering about.”

  “Only if the jury believes it. What if they decide that the money came from finding Blackie O’Hare’s loot or from selling antiques stolen from the Chadwick mansion?”

  “Has anything turned up in pawn shops o
r at an auction? Any single item known to have come from that house?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of things!” She gave the laundry basket a kick to emphasize her irritation, sending it sliding halfway across the room. It struck the food and water dishes set out for the cats, both fortunately almost empty, but the sound woke Glenora, who had been napping on top of the refrigerator.

  “That’s one thing you may be able to check on,” Dan said. “Who handled the estate? Maybe there’s an inventory of the contents.”

  Liss thumped herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand. “I thought of that. Ages ago. Why didn’t I pursue it?”

  “A few other things on your mind, maybe?” He didn’t add that it wasn’t her job, but she could tell that the reminder was on the tip of his tongue.

  “I’ll ask around,” she said quickly. “Maybe someone at the town office knows who handled Blackie O’Hare’s inheritance from his wife. It’ll probably be some snooty law firm from Boston.” Liss stood to retrieve her laundry basket, stooping to pick it up just as Glenora, having quietly descended from her former perch, was about to leap into it. “Back off, cat.”

  Dan eased away from the sink and took the basket away from her.

  She let him have it. Who was she to object to gallantry?

  “Or you could talk to Jason Graye.”

  Side by side, they headed for the stairs. Glenora trailed along behind them.

  “Why?” Liss asked as she climbed to the second floor.

  “Simple. If he wants to buy the place, you can bet he’s already done his research.”

  “You’re assuming Graye didn’t kill Ned.”

  “It shouldn’t be too hard to find out if he has an alibi for the time of Ned’s murder. And once you eliminate him as a suspect, even if you don’t have another, you’ll still be ahead of the game.”

  “I have to admit that’s a good idea.” Liss was a little embarrassed not to have thought of it herself. She took the laundry basket back once they entered their bedroom, but her mind was still on murder while she put clothing away in drawers, automatically getting everything in the right place. “And you’re right. It shouldn’t be difficult. There were lots of people around on Halloween. Surely someone can vouch for Jason Graye’s whereabouts before he turned up at the haunted house and helped us keep the murder under wraps until the next day.”