Irregardless of Murder (Miss Prentice Cozy Mysteries)

by E. E. Kennedy

  All in all, it was a good day, except for a weird encounter with Judith Dee in the hall after lunch. “I’m tougher than I look,” she told me when I expressed amazement at seeing her. “Takes more than that to get me down!” Gingerly, she touched the high turtleneck of her sweater, then took my hand. “They tell me the boy who attacked me is still in a coma. I don’t wish him any harm . . . ”

  I’ll just bet you don’t, I thought.

  “ . . . but if dear Vern hadn’t been there, well . . . ” She shook her head, a faraway look in her eye. “I just wish I knew where Derek got such a notion about me.”

  I didn’t enlighten her. I was finding it difficult to stand there and talk calmly.

  “They asked me where I got the gun,” she said. “It was my husband’s, Amelia. He got it in the army. I never used it before. Never needed to.” She looked at me with dancing gray eyes. “It was self-defense, pure and simple. That’s what I told them. Vern will tell you—ask him! Self defense, pure and simple.” She kept rubbing one hand with the other.

  Out, damn’d spot, I thought. “I’m sure it was, Judith. I’m sure it was.”

  I hurried off to call Dennis again. He was still unavailable. Where was that man?

  “I thought you’d never get here!” Vern said as I walked through my front door.

  “Fine, thanks, how are you?” I hung up my coat.” What’s the matter?”

  “Why don’t you get an answering machine? I must have taken a dozen messages.” He had a handful of paper scraps in one hand and a half-eaten sandwich in the other. “It’s onion and mayo. Want me to make you one?” he asked, noticing my gaze.

  “Yuk! No thank you.” I reached for the message slips. “O’Brien. WCB,” I read.

  “That’s will call back.” He took another bite of sandwich and some mayonnaise fell on his sweatshirt. “Oh rats!”

  I could sympathize. I reminded myself to take my suit to the cleaners.

  “Marie LeBow. CH?”

  Vern licked his fingers. “Call her. Alec called, too, asking about me, but I handled that one for you.”

  “Jack Garneau. Re: UDJ. DCH.”

  “Don’t call him ’cause I talked to him. He remembered me. He said he asked around and nobody ever heard of those letters.”

  I looked at the next slip. “SJ?”

  “Sally Jennings.”

  “Good. That’s one I can tear up.” I proceeded to do so.

  “I don’t know. She asked if you were going to Marguerite’s funeral.”

  “Why? She didn’t know Marguerite. At least, I don’t think so. Oh, wait. I think I know. She’s going to try to persuade Marie to sell her house, I’ll bet.”

  “Wow, that’s cold.”

  “No, that’s Sally. My father was no sooner buried than she was over here, pressuring my mother to sell this place. You saw her in action yourself the other night. She still hasn’t given up. Oops, someone’s at the door.”

  When I answered it, Vern took one look from behind me, burst out laughing, and quickly retired to the safety of the kitchen.

  It was Sally Jennings. “Hi. Me again. May I come in?” Without waiting for an answer, she proceeded inside. “Who was that?”

  “Just a houseguest. Pay him no attention.”

  I led her to the parlor. She sat on Mother’s loveseat and I took a Victorian rocker across from her. “Sally, I talked with Steve Trechere—”

  “I know. He was very taken with you, Amelia. Very taken. He still hasn’t given up his dream of turning this place into a bed and breakfast. You discussed the possibility, right?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Well, then, you can see what an incredible idea it is. If Steve Trechere and his friends keep investing, it could mean a turnaround for this town. He said you liked the idea. You did, didn’t you?” she wheedled. There was a desperate air about her I had never seen before.

  “Well, I—”

  I heard the telephone ring. “I’ll get it,” Vern called from the kitchen.

  Sally mistook my hesitation for agreement. “I know, I know. When he told me his plans for the place, well, I was just blown away too! Anyway—”

  Vern stuck his head in. “Amelia. Phone for you. It’s urgent.”

  “Excuse me, Sally.” Thank you, I mouthed to Vern as I passed.

  Ever the hero, he stepped into the parlor and proceeded to make small talk with Sally. “Hi, remember me? We met the other night in the yard. By the way, did you know that this place has termites? Big ones. Talk about a dump! It’s practically falling apart. And it’s haunted! Oh, yes! Many’s the night old Ebenezer Prentice walks . . . ”

  It was Dennis O’Brien returning my call. Briefly he apologized for his rude behavior the other day.

  “I can’t explain myself completely, just yet, Miss Prentice, but it was inexcusable, the way I behaved.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Dennis. I know you had good reason.” As succinctly as possible, I told him about Derek and the carjacking, and everything else that had transpired since. Last of all, I told him about the letters UDJ and my theory about them.

  “I think Marguerite’s journal may say something about it . . . no, it’s still at the post office. I have a slip for it here and I’m going to pick it up in a few minutes. I’ll bring it right over to the station.”

  I heard the front door closing.

  Vern sauntered into the kitchen and flashed me the high sign. He had gotten rid of Sally. What a guy!

  There was another knock. Vern spun on his heel and headed for the door.

  I returned my attention to the telephone. “Yes, I know. You’re absolutely right. I should have called much earlier. I’m so terribly sorry. Yes. I think it should tell you a lot. I’ll bring it in right away.” I hung up.

  “Miss Prentice?” said a voice behind me.

  I turned. “Mrs. Swanson.” What was she doing here? “Please, call me Amelia.”

  Vern stood behind her. He shrugged helplessly.

  “ ’N I’m Hester, remember?” She smirked and darted her eyes around the kitchen. “Um, Amelia,” she began. Her eye was caught by the row of salt shakers on the windowsill. “Hey, cute.” She picked up a pair and examined them. “ ’Specially this little maid and butler.”

  Behind her, Vern frowned and tapped his watch.

  “Hester,” I began, “I’m afraid that we have—”

  There was another knock on the front door.

  “Now what?” Vern whined under his breath.

  It was Judith Dee, bearing a huge box of chocolates. “I just had to drop by and thank my rescuer,” she said breathlessly, handing the gift to him.

  From the way his face lit up, I could tell that Vern didn’t share Lily’s negative opinion of candy as a gift. “You didn’t need to do this,” he said, pulling off the gift wrap and opening the box. “A sampler. Wow, thank you! Nobody ever gave me one of these before. Amelia?” He held out the box to me.

  “Not right now, thanks, Vern.”

  I had been standing transfixed through all this. What should I do? Would Judith actually have the audacity to try to harm him? In an Agatha Christie novel, I remembered, a murderer used a hypodermic needle to inject poison into soft chocolates. Judith would certainly have access to syringes.

  “Mrs. Dee? I hate to eat alone,” he said, holding out the box,. “Oh, and, er—Ms. Swanson?”

  “Hm?” Hester, who had wandered in from the kitchen, was leafing through a new magazine from the stack of mail on a side table. “No thanks.”

  “Well, maybe this little coated almond,” Judith said, reaching for her selection and popping it into her mouth. “I just wanted to thank you,” she said, picking up her purse and heading for the door.

  Why was she so anxious to leave? Did she want to be gone before anything happened?

  Vern followed her, holding the huge open box on one arm. “It was awful nice of you,” he said, his hand poised over a large coconut-filled confection.

  “Go ahead,
” said Judith. “Take one. Don’t mind me.”

  I had to do something. Think fast, Amelia!

  “Was that Sam out there on the porch?” I said. “Here, kitty, kitty!”

  Rushing past Vern toward the door, I elbowed his arm and knocked the candy box into the air. Chocolates, jellies, and sugared nuts flew through the air, rained on our heads, then rolled to inconvenient places all over the floor and the lower steps of the staircase.

  “Oops!” I said insincerely.

  The four of us, including a highly amused Hester, scrambled after the candies, piling them willy-nilly into the box. As I repeated polite apologies, I caught Vern shooting me an injured glare. Judith promised to replace the box with a brand-new one.

  By that time, I thought, he will have been warned.

  Judith left hastily, still dusting powdered sugar off her shoes.

  “Why did you do that?” Vern whispered angrily, crawling after a peanut cluster that had lodged itself under a piano leg in the parlor. “You practically slugged me!” He dropped the candy in the box. “Are you some kind of health food nut or something?”

  “Look, folks,” Hester said, her hand on the front door knob, “I gotta go. I’ll call you later.” Pulling the heavy door open, she scurried across the front porch and was gone.

  “What was all that about?” Vern stood in the open doorway, his hands full of dusty chocolates, as cold gusts swirled around him.

  “Never mind.” I pulled him inside and closed and locked the front door. “Just listen—”

  While Vern discarded the candy, I explained my theory about UDJ. By the time I’d finished and he’d washed his hands, I’d obtained his complete forgiveness.

  “Remember, I don’t have any concrete proof of this,” I cautioned, handing him a paper towel.

  “But you told Detective O’Brien, right?”

  “Yes, though I’m not sure he took me very seriously.”

  “Don’t worry. They’ll follow every lead they get. At least, that’s what they do on NCIS,” he added sheepishly. He glanced out a front window. “Oh, no! Another one!”

  I looked out. Sure enough, reenacting the scene in which Gaston realizes he loves Gigi, Steve Trechere was bounding up the porch steps. Almost jauntily, he knocked.

  “Miss Prentice,” he said as I opened the door, “I see you have disposed of the broken swing.”

  I looked out the door. Sure enough, it was gone.

  Vern tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, “I took care of it. Back porch.”

  I stepped back to make way for him. “Won’t you come in?”

  “Merci. I wanted to talk with you one more time about what we discussed the other night.” Strolling forward, he gazed up the staircase and gestured. “Can’t you see it? Wouldn’t it be marvelous? Guests occupying all those charming rooms upstairs. Perhaps a bride, descending here . . . ”

  For a second, we were all three caught up in Steve Trechere’s vision. I hated to break the spell.

  “But Mr. Trechere, it’s still not for sale.”

  “Ah!” He held up a finger. “That’s true! But perhaps, and you understand that I say perhaps—no pressure, of course—perhaps we could become business partners! You provide the facility, I provide the capital!”

  He’d done it again: come up with a fascinating idea and sprung it on me out of nowhere. Why, I wondered, did I find this trait so enchanting in Steve Trechere and so irritating in Gil Dickensen?

  “Well,” I said, “if you’ll just let me think it over . . . ”

  “Of course! Take your time! We can discuss it another time. I will check back with you later, eh?”

  “What do you know about that?” Vern said as we stood on the porch and watched Steve Trechere drive away.

  “I don’t know, Vern.” I looked at my watch. “Hey! It’s quarter to five! Better get to the post office, or we’ll have to wait another day to get the journal.”

  “Right. Let’s get going. The slip is right here on the table.” He walked into the entrance hall and stood looking at the table. “Uh, oh.”

  “What uh, oh? I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “I don’t like saying it. It was right here—that slip!” A panicky tone, not unlike that of last night, crept into Vern’s voice. “I swear! I saw it there when you came in the door!” He crawled around on his hands and knees. “Maybe it fell down under here . . . ” He found another chocolate, which he tossed aside with an annoyed grunt.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll just run over to the post office and I can show them my driver’s license. Hurry! They close in a half hour.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’re real busy,” the man at the post office window protested, gesturing at the long line behind us. “Like I told you, the package was already picked up. See? Signed for and everything.” He held out the slip, containing an illegible scrawl that in no way resembled my own. “There’s so many people come through here, I can’t remember everybody picking up a package.”

  There was nothing we could do but leave.

  “Which one of them was it?” Vern said as he started the car.

  “You’re thinking the same thing I am?”

  “Sure. That slip didn’t just walk away. One of them took it.”

  “It could have gotten blown away somewhere. There was a lot of activity in that hall.”

  “Okay, then—who picked up the package?”

  “Good point.”

  “And we both know who it was.”

  We spoke together, “UDJ!”

  I felt sick. This one simple thing to accomplish, and I had failed. “I better call the police station and let Dennis know.”

  I didn’t want to call Dennis. I wanted someone to hold me and tell me things were going to be all right. I wanted it to be Gil.

  He couldn’t have read my mind, yet Vern said, “How about we check in with Gil first?”

  “Sure,” I agreed casually.

  They were as busy at the newspaper as at the post office. Gil stepped into the newspaper’s minuscule reception area just long enough to inform us of that fact and to give me a chaste peck on the cheek.

  “Was that too randy?” he whispered in my ear.

  “It was borderline, but acceptable,” I whispered back.

  Vern’s eyes were enormous. “Wow! It’s like that, is it?”

  “Amelia, you tell him what it’s like, please. Run along now, kids.” Gil fairly pushed us out the door.

  “Call you later,” he said to me, closing his office door.

  Vern blocked my exit. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I pushed past him and descended the stairs. “There’s not that much to tell. We’re just going to, um, date for a while and see what happens.”

  Vern was beaming as he held the car door open for me. “Works for me!” He looked at the car clock. “Can you call O’Brien from home? I gotta run.”

  “You’re not going to stay another night?”

  “No thanks. I’ve got to go to class tomorrow, and I promised to make up the time I missed over the weekend by driving for Marcel tonight.”

  The atmosphere on the way home was considerably cheerier than before. I attributed it to Gil’s kiss.

  “Got just enough time to grab a burger and punch in,” Vern said to me at the curb. He patted my hand. “We’ll get to the bottom of this thing, Amelia, don’t worry. And just to be on the safe side, why don’t you throw those chocolates away for me.” He winked and sped off.

  I called Dennis O’Brien. The officer who answered told me he was gone again, so I left a message: “Someone else picked up the journal. Call me for details. Amelia.”

  It was a good thing Vern hadn’t stayed longer. I made a quick inventory. In addition to bed linens, the boy had used seven towels, three washcloths, five plates, eight spoons, a fork, three table knives, a coffee cup, two saucepans, numerous slices of bread and half a jar of mayonnaise. Most of these items or their remains were still sitting in the kitchen sink. I had no
idea where he found the onion.

  Not that I begrudged him. In fact, I enjoyed his company. But it had taken me this long to get used to living alone, and I rather liked it.

  The telephone rang. “Amelia,” said Sally Jennings, “I’m glad I caught you.”

  “Steve Trechere came by again after you did, Sally. I told him I’d think about his idea.”

  “Isn’t it fabulous?” she gushed. “But that’s not the only thing I wanted to talk about. It’s Gil.”

  “Gil who?”

  “Don’t be coy with me. I’ve known you since fifth grade. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that you and Gil have become an item.”

  “Apparently it doesn’t,” I said dryly.

  The sarcastic implication was lost on her. “He’s been looking at the Fields’ place on the lake.”

  “You’re handling that sale too? You’re some busy lady, Sally.”

  “You have to be in this market. Did you know closings have decreased by fifty percent in the last two years alone?”

  Whatever that meant, it sounded bad, so I said, “That’s a shame.”

  “Anyway, you can do me a favor.”

  This sounded interesting. The Super Sally I remembered from our high school days was so self-contained she didn’t need favors from anybody, least of all me.

  “What is it?”

  “Would you come take a look at the Fields’ house and see if you like it? Gil is still undecided about it.”

  “I heard he made a down payment.”

  “No such luck. He’s just considering it. But if he knew you liked it, well . . . ”

  I could feel my face getting hot. It was embarrassing to be so transparent in front of the entire town. My first impulse was to turn Sally down flat, coolly and with poise. My second, however, was quite the opposite. I had always wanted to see the inside of that place.

  “Sure. When?”

  “Why, right now!”

  I was surprised, but it was only six-thirty and it couldn’t hurt to check out what Gil considered a dream house. “I’ll be ready in five minutes,” I said.

  It occurred to me that Lily would enjoy coming along, but when I called her, I got the answering machine. “This is just to let you know that you’re about to miss a little trip with Sally Jennings and me to see the Fields place,” I told it. “Pick up if you’re there, Lily.”