Overkilt

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

  “I don’t see why. Surely not everyone at Pilgrim Farm loved their leader.”

  “But that’s just it, isn’t it? Any of the New Age Pilgrims would have been able to tell the difference between Hadley and Jasper, no matter how much alike they looked. They’d never have mistaken one for the other.”

  * * *

  Vi and Liss waited to compare notes until that evening, when Liss’s parents and her aunt were invited to a strategy session in the Ruskins’ living room. No one had arrested Margaret yet, but the lawyer she’d hired had warned her that she should be prepared for that eventuality. This news put everyone in a somber frame of mind. Even the Scotties, curled up beside Margaret’s chair, seemed subdued. Lumpkin and Glenora, each of whom had claimed a lap, ignored the two dogs.

  “It has to have been someone from the New Age Pilgrims,” Liss insisted from her perch on the sofa. “The people who had to put up with Hadley Spinner on a daily basis would have had the most reason to hate him.”

  “Spinner?” Dan sat beside her, close enough to be even more comfort to her than the purring cat on her lap. “Or his cousin? Because if they lived in such close quarters for years, surely they’d know the difference.”

  “Not necessarily.” Vi, too restless to sit, circled the room as she spoke, now and then pausing to rearrange a knickknack or check a surface for dust. “The killer stabbed him in the back. Maybe he never got a good look at his face.”

  “He or she,” Liss said, trying to ignore what her mother was doing. “Dolores saw at least one of the Pilgrim women at the demonstration. That seems strange to me. Given Hadley Spinner’s chauvinist attitude, I would have expected him to forbid them to be there.”

  “Doesn’t make sense,” her father muttered. “Some things are okay for the women to do and some things aren’t? Either you trust your wife or you don’t.”

  “Said like a man who’s been married a long, long time,” Margaret teased him.

  He grinned at his sister across the space between their chairs and then sent an affectionate smile winging toward his wife. “True enough.”

  Vi, her attention focused on Liss, didn’t notice her husband’s look. “I don’t think I’ve yet caught sight of any of the women in this sect myself. Long skirts, right?” At Liss’s nod, she asked, “How did you tell me they wear their hair?”

  “Braids. Or twisted up in a bun. They don’t seem to cut it short. But Dolores said this one was wearing a sunbonnet.”

  Margaret’s eyebrows shot up at that.

  “Shades of the pioneers,” she said with a chuckle. “Or maybe Little House on the Prairie.”

  Vi came up behind her husband’s chair and braced her elbows on its high back. “A hat like that would do a good job of hiding someone’s face.”

  “What are you getting at, hon?” Mac twisted around so he could meet her eyes.

  Instead of answering, she backed up and began to fish in the pocket of her jeans. “I think I—yes, here it is, right where I put it on Saturday.” She produced an ordinary-looking bobby pin, holding it on the palm of her hand so that it caught the light from a nearby lamp. “These come in different colors. The woman who used this one was a blonde.”

  “Now I’m the one who’s not sure what you’re getting at,” Dan said.

  “I stepped on this just before I found the body.” Vi gave a theatrical shudder, remembering that grisly discovery. “When I heard it crunch under my foot, I bent down to see what it was. I’d just picked it up when I noticed what I thought was someone who’d passed out on the merry-go-round. When I went to take a closer look, I stuck the bobby pin in my pocket without thinking, and when I realized he was dead . . . well, you can imagine. This little souvenir went right out of my mind. I didn’t remember I had it until just now when Liss was talking about the lavender lady Dolores saw. Not many women pin their hair up these days, and this was awfully close to the scene of the crime.”

  “There was at least one blond Pilgrim,” Liss said. “One of the younger women. I noticed her because she smiled when Sherri told Spinner he couldn’t speak for everyone in the group. She intended to question each of them separately.” Dan’s attack on Spinner had put the kibosh on that plan.

  “Well, then,” said Liss’s mother, “we need to find out more about her.”

  “Vi. Liss. It’s kind of you to be concerned,” Margaret said, “but please let the police handle this. They may be suspicious of me right now, but—”

  “They’re more than suspicious, Margaret. They’re just itching to throw you in jail.”

  Vi’s blunt words produced a flurry of protest, but when the furor died down a little, Liss was forced to accept that her mother was right. “It won’t hurt to do a little investigating on our own. At the very least, I’d like to put names to the faces out at Pilgrim Farm. And there’s another idea I’d like to follow through on, and that’s to talk to one of the women who does housekeeping here in town.”

  “I have some of that information already.” Vi produced a folded piece of paper from another pocket. “Francine was very helpful. Unofficially, of course.”

  Dan and Mac exchanged a look that made Liss laugh. “Don’t discount gossip,” she scolded them. “Sometimes it’s the best source of information there is.”

  “If you really think that bobby pin is evidence, you should turn it over to the police,” Dan said.

  “He’s right,” Liss said. “Give it to Gordon and tell him where you found it.” At Vi’s disgruntled look she added, “It couldn’t hurt.”

  “Nor will it do any good. These jeans were in the load of laundry I did on Monday. If there were fingerprints on the bobby pin, they’ll have been washed away.”

  “Give it to him anyway. Now, let’s have a look at that list.”

  It contained sixteen names. The first fourteen were grouped in couples.

  “That last one is a child,” Vi said, “Kimmy Miller, and this Chloe Spinner is Jasper’s widow. The names marked with an asterisk are women who clean houses for local people.”

  “All tidily married couples,” Liss murmured. “Hadley Spinner’s wife is named Miranda.” She had an asterisk by her name.

  Dan leaned closer to get a better look at the list. “Both Chloe and Miranda would have been called Mistress Spinner out at the farm. Must have been confusing.”

  “Yes.” She ran her finger down the rest of the names. “I wonder which one is our smiling blonde.”

  Margaret took possession of the page and scanned it. “I know a little about a few of these people. Susan spoke of Diana, George, and Connie.”

  Connie Gerard’s name was marked with an asterisk. Diana Collins’s was not. Such mundane names, Liss thought. She’d have expected the Pilgrims to change them to something Biblical—Esther and Esau and Rachel, perhaps. Or, remembering what Dolores had said, maybe Moonbeam, Sunshine, and Cloud.

  “How long ago was it that Susan died, Margaret? I don’t think you’ve said.”

  “Twelve years. Twelve years almost to the day.”

  “That’s not going to look good to the police.” Vi’s voice was sharply critical.

  “What are you talking about?” Liss asked.

  “Didn’t you look at that folder you brought home from the library?”

  Belatedly, Liss realized that as soon as her mother had handed over Francine’s list, she’d shifted her attention to the contents of Dolores’s file. “I haven’t had time.”

  “There are several clippings. One is Susan Spinner’s obituary. Susan Spinner,” she repeated. “Susan was Jasper’s first wife. Wasn’t she, Margaret?”

  “Yes, she was, but—”

  “It was twelve years ago,” Liss interrupted. She’d already been through that issue with her aunt. “If Margaret had wanted revenge on Jasper, she’d have done away with him long before this.”

  “I’m not the one you need to convince.” Vi glanced at the bobby pin she still held and then shifted her gaze to Margaret’s pale gray locks. “It isn’t just blo
ndes who use light-colored bobby pins,” she remarked. “Lucky for you that you wear your hair short.”

  Chapter Eleven

  After Liss’s parents and aunt left, Liss turned her attention to the items in the New Age Pilgrims file. She already knew that, unlike most churches, even small, off-the-wall sects, the New Age Pilgrims did not have a social media presence as a group. Only Hadley Spinner had online accounts, the ones he’d used to spread the word about the boycott and the demonstration. Neither he nor the Pilgrims had a Web page. Now she found something even more peculiar. It appeared that their worship services were private affairs. Outsiders were not welcome to join them.

  “They won’t get many new recruits that way,” she muttered.

  She was talking to herself. The cats had disappeared and Dan had fallen asleep in his recliner, an open book still gripped in one hand. She glanced at the clock on the cable box, astonished to see how late it was, but she wanted to finish going through Dolores’s clippings before she called it a night, in particular the ones that covered Susan Spinner’s death twelve years earlier.

  Neither the news stories nor Susan’s obituary provided more than the sketchiest of details. She’d “died suddenly” and was survived by her husband. No parents, siblings, or children were listed. No mention was made of her membership in any organizations, not even her church. Funeral services had been private. The photographs accompanying the first report of a body found in a farm pond showed police milling around the water. None of the Pilgrims were visible. Liss wondered if they’d had any particular reason to hide their faces or if it was just that they were camera shy. There was no picture of Susan with her obituary either.

  Last of all, Liss came to the pamphlet. She picked it up gingerly, prepared for it to be venomous, and she was not far wrong. After admonishing the reader to follow the straight and narrow path or risk spending eternity paying for the sins of the flesh, the author provided a list of Bible verses. Liss didn’t take the time to look them up. She could guess which ones they were and had little tolerance for threats of fire and brimstone, especially when taken out of context and quoted by people who appeared to despise anyone who wasn’t just like them.

  After tucking Francine’s list inside so she’d be able to find it again, Liss closed the folder and set it on the coffee table. “Sufficient to the day,” she murmured. Wasn’t that a Bible verse, too?

  Yawning, she woke Dan and headed to bed. Tomorrow was time enough to decide what to do next.

  * * *

  In the morning, Liss made three phone calls. The first was to the town office. Once she was armed with additional information supplied by Francine, she phoned Audrey Greenwood. According to Francine, Audrey used the services of the New Age Pilgrims to clean both her house and Moosetookalook Small Animal Clinic. Liss was in luck. Two of the lavender ladies were scheduled to work for Audrey that very day. The third phone call was to Mac MacCrimmon, to ask him to mind the store while she paid a neighborly visit to Lumpkin and Glenora’s doctor.

  The clinic was only a short distance from the town square. Liss walked, enjoying the crisp morning air and noticing, as she rarely took time to, the change in the season. She could smell fragrant smoke, since several families preferred to use their fireplaces or woodstoves when they could. Both stove wood and wood pellets were plentiful and relatively inexpensive in Maine; oil, gas, and electricity? Not so much.

  That it would soon be Thanksgiving amazed her. Hadn’t it just been Halloween?

  In recent years, she and Dan had celebrated with the Ruskins. This year, with her parents living in Moosetookalook, she supposed her mother would expect them to come to dinner at the house on Ledge Lake. Margaret, too, assuming she wasn’t in jail.

  She walked faster. At the clinic, the barking of a half-dozen dogs made conversation difficult, but Audrey was perfectly willing to answer Liss’s questions. She’d always been blunt-spoken. Before she prescribed expensive treatments or performed surgeries, she made certain that pet owners knew what the odds of success would be.

  “I have no complaints about the job they do cleaning,” she told Liss as she swapped out food and water bowls in the cages. “I think the clothes they wear to do it are a little strange, but each to her own.”

  A rangy, athletic-looking forty-something, Audrey was a couple of inches taller than Liss’s five-foot-nine and had a long, narrow face that matched her build. She wore her blunt-cut blond hair tucked behind her ears and had never felt the need to wear makeup. As for clothing, Liss had rarely seen her in anything fancier than jeans and a sweatshirt.

  “Do the Pilgrim women always work in pairs?” she asked.

  “Ordinarily, they do, but today only one lavender lady showed up. She’s tackling the house first. You can go on in if you want. I have to finish up here and then I have vaccinations scheduled.”

  Liss rehearsed her pitch on the short walk between the clinic and the pretty little cape with dormers where Audrey lived. She intended to lie and say she was interested in having her house cleaned once a week, that it had gotten to be too much for her to handle, what with working full-time and all. She smiled to herself at that thought. Lately her father had put in more hours at the Emporium than she had.

  Liss changed her mind about what approach to take when she recognized the young woman pushing Audrey’s vacuum cleaner around the living room. It was the blonde with the braids, the one who’d smiled when she’d heard Sherri contradict Hadley Spinner. The one she suspected, on the evidence of that bobby pin, of being in the town square on the day Jasper Spinner was murdered.

  “Excuse me,” Liss called, raising her voice to be heard above the racket.

  The woman gave a start, turned wide, frightened blue eyes Liss’s way, and hastily hit the power button. She didn’t seem to know what to do next. Shoulders slumped, she folded her hands in front of her and lowered her gaze to a carpet that still sported clumps of dog and cat fur and the remains of a potato chip.

  “Do you recognize me?” Liss asked. “I was at Pilgrim Farm the other day with my husband and the chief of police.”

  The woman nodded but did not speak.

  Start slowly, Liss warned herself. Don’t spook her. “Will you talk with me for a few minutes?”

  She sent a furtive glance Liss’s way but managed to avoid meeting her eyes. The silence continued.

  “You can’t be afraid of me.” But when Liss moved closer, the other woman retreated a few steps. “Seriously?”

  She advanced again. This time the Pilgrim kept backing up until she bumped into Audrey’s end table. Finding herself trapped, she at last lifted her head to give Liss her first good look at the other woman’s face. No, she wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t on the verge of flight. But she was definitely wary.

  “Let’s sit down, shall we?” People were supposed to seem less threatening when they were seated. Liss suited action to words by settling into one of Audrey’s Danish modern chairs. It smelled strongly of dog.

  After a moment, the blonde perched on the far side of the matching couch. As if the movement was habitual, she placed both hands in her lap, loosely folded together, but this time she did not duck her head. Her gaze remained fixed on Liss’s face.

  “I’m Liss Ruskin.” When this didn’t elicit any response, she added, “And you are?”

  “Anna.”

  “Anna what?”

  “Anna Knapp.”

  Liss grinned at her. “I half expected you to say it was Spinner.”

  “We are all his spiritual children.”

  Liss blinked at her in surprise. “Uh, okay. So, is it all right if you talk to me a little? I’m curious about the New Age Pilgrims.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  Liss heard an undercurrent of suspicion in the simple question and warned herself to proceed with caution. Instead of asking Anna how long she had been a member, she tried a different tack. “Are your worship services open to the public?” She already knew the answer, but she was curious to
hear what Anna would say.

  “We pray in private.”

  “But you hold some kind of religious ceremonies, right?”

  Anna shook her head. “We pray in private.”

  “Are you saying that there is no organized ritual at Pilgrim Farm? I thought Hadley Spinner was a preacher.”

  “We gather together to hear his words of wisdom.”

  Oh, brother! Liss thought. The more Anna talked, the more she sounded like someone who’d been brainwashed. Or did she mean hypnotized? Could mass hypnosis be more than just a plot device in a B movie? For once, Liss thought carefully before she spoke.

  “There were Bible verses on some of the signs at the protest. Do you have organized Bible study?”

  Anna’s frown was three parts confusion and one part irritation. “I do not know what you mean.”

  “Do you have a Bible? Do you read it for yourself?”

  “Mr. Spinner has charge of the Bible.”

  “Just one copy?”

  “It is kept on a purpose-built table, open to the page he chooses, so that we may read the day’s text whenever it pleases us.”

  Both fascinated and repelled by this glimpse into Spinner’s domination over his followers, Liss pondered what to ask next. Things were even stranger out at Pilgrim Farm than she’d imagined. After a moment, she went with the question she’d put off asking earlier. “How long have you lived at Pilgrim Farm?”

  “Three glorious years.” Anna’s smile was beatific.

  “How did you even hear about the group? I mean, it isn’t as if they advertise for converts, and if they don’t allow strangers to visit, and don’t hold regular worship services, let alone any that are open to the public, then I’m surprised they haven’t gone the way of the Shakers long before this.”

  A faraway look came into Anna’s eyes. “I was guided to this place. Mr. Skinner found me when I was lost.”

  “Do you think you could be a little more specific?” Liss couldn’t quite keep the sarcasm out of her voice.