Crime and Nourishment_A Cozy Mystery Novel

by Miranda Sweet

  “Nine-thirty on the night of the third,” Valerie said without hesitation.

  Angie’s mouth dropped open. “What?”

  “I didn’t stutter. That’s what the police told me.”

  “I know, I just can’t…I’d assumed it was later.”

  “Why?”

  Angie shook her head. If Snuock had been killed earlier where would her Aunt have been at the time?

  She would have been…

  She would have been with Dory, having supper. That’s what she’d said.

  Except that Dory had said, twice at least, that she and Jo had been having supper together. She’d been covering for Jo’s night out with the guy with the mohawk, though. Was Aunt Margery lying because Dory had told her about covering for Jo? If so, all this should take was…

  She was forgetting the blood all over the clothes again.

  She wanted to forget.

  The reservation at Sheldon’s had been at nine-thirty, so there was Walter’s alibi: Angie and anyone who was at the restaurant that night. She felt like breaking into a dance, except…

  Why hadn’t he been released?

  “What is it?” Valerie asked. “I can see your mind running a mile a minute.”

  “Walter hasn’t been released, has he?”

  “Nope. Word is he won’t say a word about where he was that night.”

  “He was with me—at least he was at nine-thirty. We had a reservation at Sheldon’s for that time.”

  Valerie frowned at her. “So you’re telling me that he’s covering up for someone?”

  “But who?”

  “The only person I could think of would be his mother.”

  “Where was she?”

  “She won’t say,” said Angie.

  “That’s suspicious.”

  “It is. But then she’s pretty eccentric.” Angie blinked. “Quinn.”

  “What’s that?”

  She waved her hands restlessly. “You can’t say anything, but I think she might be sleeping with Raymond Quinn.”

  Valerie clucked her tongue. “Wouldn’t that be something. I just assumed that Alexander was off his rocker for threatening to cut off her allowance. But that would do it, all right. As soon as she did anything that threatened his control—and we all know just the mention of Raymond Quinn got under skin—well, forget it, no more cushy life for her. And then, more because she’d been told not to than anything else, she’d have to do it. She’d try not to. But she’d have to do it. That woman is an odd duck, I tell you.”

  “Yes, I’ve met her twice and that came through loud and clear. Is there a dock near her house?”

  “Her house is right along the water on Smith’s Point,” Valerie replied. “All she’d have to do is drive out to the docks at the end of Massachusetts Avenue and pick him up.”

  “And there wouldn’t necessarily be any records of him docking there.”

  “Nope. There’s nobody there after dark. As long as he didn’t moor there for too long, or he had an agreement with somebody. Or paid cash.”

  Angie reveled in the back and forth between her and Valerie. It made her think of Holmes and Watson. She felt like they were getting somewhere…until another thought occurred to her:

  What if Quinn wasn’t involved at all? What if he had an alibi, one he wasn’t willing to admit to, in case it got Phyllis cut off from her means of support? And what if Walter was trying to protect his mother, too?

  The two of them were back to looking at the water. It was a beautiful July day, the perfect kind of day for standing around and looking down at waves rolling across a beach.

  “One more thing,” Angie said. “Can I see the study?”

  “It’s locked.”

  “I thought so. I want to look at the bloodstain and analyze any kind of spatter. I didn’t do such a great job capturing those details with my camera.” She hung her head a little ashamedly when she recalled how Valerie had called 911, and she instead had gone straight for her phone’s camera.

  “There was spatter,” Valerie said drily. “I keep having nightmares about trying to clean that room. That wallpaper needs to come out.”

  “Can I see the room? Like peek through the doorway?”

  “No. The door’s locked and sealed. I handed over the key. And even if I happened to keep a copy somewhere, they’d know if I opened the door.”

  “There isn’t a video camera in the room or anything?”

  “In the study? I wish. Then the police could have just rewound the tapes and found out who’d done it.”

  “Could you describe it for me, then?”

  “I could. But you’d have to tell me why I should, first. Because it sounds like you have a reason that I can’t even guess at, and I’d need to know that reason before I’d be willing to help you any further than I already have.”

  Tell her or don’t? Lie? How could she both tell the truth and protect her Aunt Margery?

  “Never mind,” Angie said. As expected, what she’d found out hadn’t given her any of the answers she actually needed. She turned back from the bluff toward her car. Time to go.

  “Wait,” Valerie said. “You’re not the only one with questions, you know.”

  Angie turned back. “I’m sorry, of course not. Go ahead.”

  Valerie reached into her pocket and pulled out a scarf. “Have you ever seen this before? It’s Phyllis’s, isn’t it?”

  Angie could feel the blood drain from her face. Her mouth went slack with shock.

  The scarf matched the dress; the one that Aunt Margery had been burning.

  “You recognize it, don’t you?” Valerie said. “Admit it. Whose is this?”

  It was the scarf that they had picked up from a guest room and used to open the door of the study. Angie had completely forgotten about it.

  “This is what I used to open the study door,” Valerie said. “I shoved it in my pocket. And forgot about it until today when I found it getting dressed. But if it belongs to Phyllis, and she was with Quinn that night…that doesn’t make sense. She hasn’t been here for years. She and Alexander wouldn’t have anything to do with each other face to face. And it wasn’t here before Alexander kicked me out of the main house on the third. It had to have shown up after that.”

  Angie couldn’t speak. Her throat had seized up.

  “Was this your great-aunt’s?” Valerie demanded.

  Lie…or tell the truth?

  “No,” Angie said. “That’s not Aunt Margery’s.”

  “You’re lying. I can see it on your face. I can hear it in your voice.”

  “It’s not hers,” Angie insisted.

  “It’s one of that crowd. Ruth’s then. She’s always wearing that hippy clothing.”

  At just after nine o’clock that night, Angie had been dragging Ruth’s heavy bag of trash out to the bin for her. It had been during the frantic rush to close up the bookstore so she could go out with Walter that first night at Sheldon’s.

  It hadn’t been Ruth.

  A picture flashed in front of her eyes, and she swayed. Valerie grabbed her by the arm. “Don’t faint. Please don’t faint. Let’s go back in the house and get some water. You haven’t been sleeping, have you?”

  Angie let Valerie lead her back inside the main house; Valerie opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water. Angie sat on one of the kitchen stools around the central island and put her head in her hands. She felt dizzy.

  She couldn’t say anything until she had decided what to do.

  What did she want to have happen?

  She didn’t want anyone to get hurt. Someone was going to get hurt. Conversations flitted through her memory, a line here, a line there. Like a refrain Aunt Margery words marched through her head: “Think about what you would like to have happen before it’s too late.”

  “I have to go,” Angie said finally. She hadn’t touched the water.

  “You have to tell me what’s going on,” Valerie said. She was using the kind of voice that Dory used o
n Jo all the time: the “mom” voice.

  “No,” Angie said. “I’m sorry, Valerie. I don’t.”

  Valerie rolled her eyes. “You’re trying to protect your great-aunt. It’s obvious. Just say so.”

  #

  As Angie drove back from Snuock Manor, she kept digging her fingernails into the steering wheel and biting the inside of her cheeks.

  What she had was circumstantial evidence, at best. But it might be damning: Valerie would probably take the scarf to the police. And the police would run forensics tests on the scarf. All it would take would be one hair, one flake of skin and then everything would be known.

  She swung back into town and drove past Aunt Margery’s house; the car wasn’t in the driveway. And, when she checked, the bookstore wasn’t open.

  Quinn’s boat, the Woolgatherer, wasn’t there, either.

  Angie turned to drive out of town, toward Dory’s house. The conspirators were gathering to discuss their strategy as the sharks closed in…

  A number of cars were parked in front of Dory Jerritt’s house, the one that would eventually just slide into the ocean and disappear. Not the only thing around here on shaky foundations, Angie told herself. She pulled along side the other cars and turned off the engine.

  What do you want to have happen?

  She didn’t know. She wanted…she wanted to be one of the conspirators, one of the trusted few on the inside of a terrible secret. And she wanted to be on the side of truth and justice. She wanted to be able to steer the course of fate away from the shoals of too much justice…just enough justice, and no more. Maybe some mercy.

  Her thoughts raced as she walked up the path to the front door, climbed up the three front steps, and knocked.

  Raymond Quinn answered. “Go away,” he said, and tried to close the door in her face.

  But she’d already wedged her foot in the door.

  “You have to let me in. Valerie is bound to go to the police.”

  “She’s already been.”

  “She’s going to go again. And this time she’s going to take the scarf with her.”

  “What scarf?”

  “The paisley one.”

  Quinn let out a pair of choice curse words, then opened the door, standing aside for her to pass.

  The second of the conspirators, Ruth, met her in the hallway. “Angie, you know that you’re only going to make things worse. Go home.”

  Without a word, Angie turned toward the photographs on the wall and touched the one from the yearbook photo.

  Ruth grimaced. “You don’t listen, do you?” But she, too, stepped aside.

  Angie followed the hall into the living room, with its wood paneling and unexpectedly delicate furniture. Dory and her Aunt Margery were sitting together on the divan, the little coffee tray on the table in front of them. They were both holding coffee cups.

  “Agnes,” her great-aunt said. “You shouldn’t be here. You’re not welcome.”

  “I am,” Angie said. “I am welcome here. You’re my family, and you’re just bluffing to protect me. You’re raising a lot of bluster to try to scare me off, that’s all. But here I am.”

  Aunt Margery looked at a loss. “Such melodrama.”

  Angie didn’t have entire novels memorized the way her great-aunt did, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a line or two up her sleeve. “‘It is the custom on the stage in all good, murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alteration as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon.’”

  “Oliver Twist,” Aunt Margery said. Her lips, pressed together, as if she were about to burst out with a cry ordering Angie from the room, or in tears, or some other gambit.

  Dory put a hand on Aunt Margery’s arm. “She won’t hurt me,” she said, “She’s family.”

  Aunt Margery turned her face to the side, then put her coffee cup on the table and walked away. Tears streaked down her face.

  Dory looked perfectly reasonable, perfectly calm.

  She patted the cushions beside her. “Sit. Tell me all about it.”

  Angie sat next to her; the seat was warm from Aunt Margery sitting on it.

  “I thought it was Aunt Margery and Raymond Quinn for the longest time,” she said. She glanced back over her shoulder. No one else was in the room, but it still felt as though their hushed breaths were hanging over her shoulder.

  Dory said, “There aren’t many secrets between the four of us. They’ll hear what you have to say, but they won’t intrude.”

  That last phrase was tinged with a little bit of or else.

  “I saw the two of them on the beach, and—”

  Dory raised a hand. “That’s no place to start, Angie. That’s not the beginning—that’s the middle. Start at the beginning.”

  “This goes back so far that I don’t know where to begin,” Angie said.

  “A good rule of thumb is to start where you came in. Where it started for you.”

  “It started for me…with the news that Snuock was going to raise the rent.”

  She told Dory about it as though Dory had never heard of any of this beforehand, not a single word, as though she hadn’t been there—the raise in rent, the way that Snuock had stopped by Pastries & Page-Turners, the tense scene between Dory and Snuock when she had come to the back door while he was still there. Then delivering the books to Snuock and practically begging him to take it easy on the twins.

  Then she talked about Aunt Margery telling her that she was going out to supper with Dory on the evening of the third—and the fact that later Dory’s story had changed to be an evening spent with her daughter, Jo. But the story hadn’t been true: Jo had spent the evening with the guy with the mohawk. Angie’s assumption that Dory had been lying for Jo’s sake had stuck with her a long time; there hadn’t seemed any reason to question it.

  Then she described meeting Walter. “He made the reservation for Sheldon’s at nine-thirty,” she said. “The order of the things I found out is what made it so hard to piece together. Because it was the evening of the fourth, when he was out searching for his mother, that he didn’t have an alibi. And by the time that I found out that Snuock had died on the third, I hadn’t really been thinking of Walter as a suspect anyway. But now I have that sorted out. He must think that his mother did it; he must think that his silence is a way to protect her, even if it costs him.”

  “Go on,” Dory said.

  “Oh—I saw Ruth as we were closing the bookstore. I took out her trash. When I went home, Aunt Margery was there and spoke to me about my date with Walter. But at one in the morning I woke suddenly. She was gone then, and I started to worry. I walked out to the children’s beach to check for her. Sometimes she just goes out onto the beach, as you may know, to wait for her pirate, the one who’s off with the mermaids. I didn’t realize that the pirate was Raymond Quinn until later.”

  Dory shook her head. When Angie raised an eyebrow, Dory replied, “No, go on. If something needs to be said, I’ll say it later.”

  For the day of the fourth, Angie skipped a lot of the details, mentioning only a few things, like seeing Dory all over the place. The things that had misled her: the emergency Phyllis had called Walter about. Then she told her about delivering the last book and finding Snuock’s body.

  The scarf.

  Dory’s eyes narrowed. Angie paused to see if she would say anything…she didn’t.

  She recounted being questioned first by the police, then later by Detective Bailey, then again by Aunt Margery. Then there was the rumor that Walter wasn’t Alexander Snuock’s son, and the threat that Phyllis’s allowance was going to be cut off. Dory and Aunt Margery feeding her stories about the feud between Quinn and Snuock going all the way back to kindergarten, instead of in high school. Then she’d found the picture on Ruth’s wall connecting Dory and Quinn.

  A rueful smile crossed Dory’s lips, and she glanced toward the hallway.

  Angie went over Walter’s arrest, how re
signed he’d been to his fate. Her throat suddenly tightened and she went hoarse. But she continued…Quinn’s anger had misled her, how easy it was for him to say that Snuock deserved to die that night at Sheldon’s when everyone had gathered to talk about Snuock’s death, and whether that would be the end of the rent increases.

  “Later, it almost seemed like he was calling attention to himself on purpose,” Angie said. “As if he were trying to misdirect attention from another suspect. It wasn’t a big risk for him since he knew that he had Phyllis as an alibi if he needed it; she had been with him. And he could probably find someone who had seen either him or his boat on Smith Point. When it came down to it there was no way he could have landed at Snuock’s house. There’s no dock nearby, and the gate had been opened, so whoever had killed him had to have come by car.”

  Dory nodded.

  “And then Aunt Margery said something that stuck with me. ‘Think about what you would like to have happen, before it’s too late.’ It’s been playing over and over in my head.”

  “What do you want to have happen?” Dory asked.

  “I’ll get to that later.”

  “That’s fair.”

  Angie described how she’d seen Aunt Margery a second time on the beach, this time arguing with Quinn. She had found out then that he had been sleeping with Phyllis. Technically, neither of them had been cheating on anybody, yet it seemed everyone had gotten hurt.

  Then there were the burnt clothes.

  “That’s when I knew that Aunt Margery had to be involved. It almost seemed common knowledge that Raymond Quinn had really murdered Alexander Snuock, and the clothes were proof that Aunt Margery was an accessory to the crime. I flipped.”

  “And confronted your great-aunt at the bookstore the next day.” Dory’s eyes were penetrating. She seemed to be waiting, on edge, for a cue.

  Angie continued, “Yes, and she made it clear I didn’t know what I thought I knew, but she also made it clear that I knew something, and it scared here. She wasn’t going to help me put the pieces together, and hasn’t talked to me until just now.”

  Angied glanced anxiously toward the hallway.

  “She panicked,” Dory said, taking a sip of her coffee. “When she had a moment to think about it, she decided that it was best to keep her distance. The more she discouraged you from sticking your nose into things, the better, that was her reasoning. For your sake and for…everyone else’s. But you’re tricky, Angie. You were always the quiet one who paid attention—Mickey off in his own little world, Jo charging into things in order to right all the wrongs, and you with your big eyes, watching and giggling. The staying Proutys have always been the observant ones. Some would say, the nosy ones, and now it’s gotten you here. Exactly where Margery feared it would.”