“I’m not finished,” said Angie.
“Oh, well, pardon me. Continue then.” Dory took another sip of coffee.
“Phyllis came into the bookstore,” Angie said.
“She did?” Dory said.
“Didn’t you know that?”
“No! My usual source of inside information had cut herself off from the bookstore, and Ruth didn’t happen to notice. And by then Josephine was putting up her defenses, too, because she knew she couldn’t tell me anything without your Aunt Margery finding out about it, and she’s always been far less loyal to me, her mother, than to you.”
Angie shook her head. She had known something that the cabal hadn’t. That had to be a first.
“Phyllis introduced me to The Little Grey Lady of the Sea,” Angie said.
“Ah. That’s how you found out about all of us and our lovely history.” Dory paused. “But how did you find out who wrote it?”
“That’s a secret that I’m going to keep.” Angie didn’t want to reveal Sheldon as her source; she thought it best to stay in his good graces.
“It doesn’t matter. I can guess.” A slight irritation coated Dory’s voice.
“The Little Grey Lady of the Sea led me to Miss Mark’s literary club, and the literary club led me to the photograph of all of you together. And then there was the photograph at Ruth’s of you and Quinn, and you were in a long sundress, a windbreaker, and a scarf.”
Dory just stared at her, blankly, with no emotion, no fear.
“I have a question to ask you,” Angie couldn’t stop now. “What did Alexander Snuock steal from you? What of yours did he take credit for? I’ve been going over that conversation. We were talking about how it was worse that my ex took credit for the work I did for our company than that he was cheating on me. And you seemed to imply that Alexander had done the same to you.”
Dory shook her head.
“May I guess?”
“Later. After you’ve finished.”
“Okay.” Angie gathered her forces. “ So before I came here tonight, I went to Snuock’s to talk to Valerie one more time. She told me that the police confirmed that Snuock had been killed on the third, not the fourth, at nine-thirty at night. So I had to go back over everything and sort it out all over again with Valerie staring at me suspiciously. She said that there were rumors about the murderer being Quinn, and Aunt Margery helping him.”
“And you could let Ray take the fall, but not your great-aunt.”
“Honestly? Yes.”
“It would break her heart.”
Angie made a face. “Even after this affair with Phyllis?”
“I didn’t say it would be the first time he’s broken her heart.”
“Anyway, that was the point at which Valerie took the scarf out of her pocket and showed it to me. It looked familiar. I realized that it would match the dress if the dress hadn’t been blackened and scrunched up, half-melted. She accused me of trying to protect Aunt Margery. I left without telling her one way or the other. I’m sure she’s gone to the police by now.”
“You never know. What made you come here?”
Angie could practically hear what Dory was thinking: What made you suspect me?
“You didn’t have an alibi,” Angie said. “I knew that Jo was with her, uh, gentleman that night. You looked me right in the eyes and told me you were with her.”
“She said she didn’t want you to know.”
“Well, she changed her mind. And the way that you and Snuock confronted each other in my bookstore when he raised the rents, that should have told me something a lot earlier—that the grudge that you had against him wasn’t just about defending your kids, it was something personal. Then the photo with you and Quinn, and knowing that he was cheating on you with my great-aunt. When I found out about the real time of death, it was down to you or Aunt Margery: someone who knew him well enough to get him to let them in. And someone with a grudge.”
“And you weren’t going to let it be your great-aunt.”
“No. I wasn’t. So I had to ask myself again: what did Alexander Snuock take from you? And I realized that the split between your group of friends was in high school, when you were supposed to be engaged to Raymond Quinn. But you never married him. I thought it was Aunt Margery’s fault…but I also knew that Snuock was supposed to never be able to leave anything of Quinn’s alone. If Quinn had something, Snuock had to have better.”
Angie leaned forward and whispered her revelation, “I think he stole you.”
“We all make mistakes,” Dory said.
“When I remembered the dress in the photo matching the burnt one, I started putting another scenario together: you invited yourself up to his house ‘for old times,’ dug that dress out of the closet, and wore it. But I have to know. Why that dress?”
Angie knew that once Dory answered that question there was no turning back, the hypothetical would turn into reality, so she waited patiently for the answer.
Dory took the time such an answer deserved, and then finally said, “Snuock gave it to me. A gift. It was a simple dress, but pretty and whimsical. I kept it all these years as a reminder of how moments of weakness can change the entire trajectory of our lives.”
“How so?” asked Angie.
“I was engaged to Quinn and Snuock was able to steal me away. He made me feel beautiful and sought-after. He pried me with gifts like that dress. And eventually I gave in. I betrayed Quinn and turned to Alexander. He turned into an old miser, but there used to be something else to him. And as short-lived as our affair was, it was passionate. Quinn blamed Snuock, of course, not me, and our circle of five was broken. The trajectory of lives was changed that year. Quinn turned to your Aunt Margery for comfort but that didn’t last. My passion for Alexander faded and I met Hank, the true love of my life. I got lucky. I had two beautiful children and shared my life with a wonderful man. Aunt Margery, Quinn and Alexander – their wounds were deeper, their scars harder to hide.”
With that admission Angie felt like she had been given a secret key and let into the circle, but it didn’t make her happy. There was a cost to this knowledge. Angie had known Dory most of her life, she was her best friend’s mom, for a moment she wished she wasn’t one of the nosy Proutys. Still, she was going to see this through. “You left the scarf on the floor of the guest room, and then the two of you went into the study for some reason… you argued. Maybe you said some things you didn’t mean. One of you picked up the gun. You fought…the gun went off. Blood everywhere, all over your clothes.
“You called my Aunt Margery. She was covering for you that night in case anyone asked where you were. You wanted to make sure Quinn didn’t hear about you seeing Snuock, because Quinn still gets angry about anything between you and Snuock—they aren’t so different those two. But now you were calling her to help with a situation that had gone horribly wrong.
“Aunt Margery showed up at Snuocks with a change of clothes and a plastic bag. You were shaken up. Maybe one of you wiped the gun and the doorknob for print. You both fled, each in your own car. Neither of you noticed the scarf you’d dropped.
“Aunt Margery waited until she was sure I was asleep, then went out to the beach to light a bonfire as a signal for Quinn to come out and talk to her. He didn’t. She was so upset that she’d forgotten about the clothes and didn’t burn them that night.
“She had to wait for another night, one where I shouldn’t notice she was out. But I noticed, and saw her and Quinn together. She’d started burning the clothes, but Quinn stormed off the beach toward me, and she panicked and left. I went back later, stirred up the ashes, and found them before she could come back out and recover them, or make sure they’d been swept out to sea. Since then everyone’s been trying to steer me away from the situation. If I thought that Aunt Margery was involved, then maybe, just maybe, I would leave it alone.”
“But you didn’t,” Dory said.
“I couldn’t. I knew just enough to know that if I didn
’t do something, my great-aunt was going to go to prison.”
“And what do you want to do about it now?”
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? The police know that Alexander Snuock didn’t kill himself, and that he didn’t have an accident all alone in his house, cleaning his gun. They’re going to find out that Walter wasn’t the murderer; he was out in public at the time of his father’s death, and eventually that will come out. They’ll find out that Quinn and Phyllis were together. They’ll find out Aunt Margery’s DNA wasn’t on that scarf then they’ll find out who the scarf belonged to. You can’t shift the blame to a new target forever. Someone has to be blamed for the death, and the only logical people are all people you care about. Who do you want it to be? Mickey?”
“He wouldn’t fit in the dress. But you haven’t answered the question. What do you want to have happen?”
“I want…I want you to go to the police and confess. Tell them that it was an accident.”
“Was it an accident?” Dory asked.
The whole house seemed to go still. Angie could hear the wood floors in the hallway creak.
“Yes,” Angie said firmly. “You’re not the kind of person who kills someone just because they’ve made a mistake. And what Alexander Snuock did was a mistake. He said to himself, ‘That Raymond Quinn and Phyllis Snuock, they’ve pushed me too far. And now they’ll have to pay.’ He thought that taking their money away was a fair punishment. It’s the only hold he had over them. He was up there, all alone in his house, and he thought, ‘You know what will make me feel better? Hurting someone else, and manipulating them so they have to dance to my will.’ And that was a mistake. That was how he ended up so alone…and so easy to convince to let you in. He let you in because he thought you might get back together with him, finally, now that Hank was dead for a year.”
Dory shivered and rubbed the sides of her arms. “Hank. I miss him so badly.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“No, I agree…that must have been what he was thinking. When Hank first passed, he tried…” She sniffed. “Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”
She put down her coffee cup and walked down the hallway.
A moment later, Angie heard the front door open, then close. A car engine started then drove away.
She sat shaking on the couch with her hands clenched into fists. All of this because of love…because of mistakes that people made over their stupid money and pride. How disappointed Snuock must have been when he realized that Dory didn’t want him. She only wanted him not to raise the rent on her children. He’d lost his temper.
It must have been terrifying.
To kill a miser, all you had to do was prove to him once and for all that nobody wanted him, only his money.
Angie closed her eyes and cried. Like a child she tried to hold in the sound and conceal her tears. After a moment someone sat on the couch next to her, the rattan creaked. Angie leaned into her Aunt Margery and they held each other. The heartbreak was almost over.
#
Dory drove back to town slowly, five miles under the speed limit. It was a beautiful day, the kind with a scattering of puffy white clouds across a sky so blue that it seems to take all your cares away.
She was distracted and she didn’t want to get in an accident.
The road slowly and regretfully led her car toward the police station. The classical music station played Spanish guitar songs that all sounded like the story of a love that was not meant to be.
It was for the best that it was over; it was for the best that she was going to confess. She had tried to convince herself that Alexander’s death hadn’t meant anything, or at least that he had deserved it, if anyone did.
But the situation had threatened her best friend—the friend who had taken her fiancé away from her, but Dory could’t blame her, they were young, and then she’d gone and fooled herself into thinking she could have an affair with Snuock without any consequences. Then Margery lost Quinn to his own arrogance. And after the affair with Snuock Dory didn’t stand a chance of getting Quinn back. Forty years of friendship had eased the quagmire and bitterness of that whole situation.
Quinn. Snuock. They had shaped her youth. But neither man had been Hank Jerritt; neither of them could make up for his loss. She still felt that a hundred times more than she ever would the insult of losing Quinn to her best friend, or the slow drifting apart that she had had with Alexander.
Goodbye, Hank.
Tears welled up in her eyes and she pulled over.
A few minutes later, she was at the police station, sitting across the desk from Detective Bailey.
He stated their names, the date and the time, and said, “You are being recorded. Do you wish to have a lawyer present?”
“No, I’m fine.”
She smiled. If Josephine had heard her, she would have railed against her mother and told her never to speak to a police officer without a lawyer present.
“Please tell me what happened, starting on the morning of July third.”
She took a deep breath. “I found out that the rents on the properties Alexander Snuock owned were going to be raised significantly, far above the ability of my children, Josephine and Michael Jerritt, to afford as owners of the Nantucket Bakery, about seven hundred dollars a month.”
“How did you find out?”
“My daughter, Josephine, told me.”
“What did you do when you found out?”
“I drove into town with the intention of discussing the matter with other tenants to find out what the raises in rent would be for them. I wanted to know whether the rents were being raised consistently—or just for my children. Alexander Snuock has had a grudge against me ever since we stopped dating, forty years ago.”
Detective Bailey paused for a moment, as if to let that sink in.
“And did you discover whether the raises in rent had been applied fairly?”
“I wouldn’t say they were fair…”
The conversation went on for almost two and a half hours. By the end she was hoarse and had described going up to Alexander’s mansion in order to confront him.
“And then I parked behind the house,” she said, “where my car wouldn’t be seen from either the drive or the old carriage house, where I knew Valerie, the housekeeper, would be.”
“Could she have heard you arrive?”
“That’s possible, although I doubt it. That old carriage house is well built, with solid walls. I’d been there previously and…I’d noted that it was very quiet and isolated.”
“All right, you pulled up behind the house, and then what?”
“I went inside.”
“Was the door unlocked?”
“Alexander let me in.”
Blushing furiously, she told Detective Bailey about her encounter with Alexander, and how he had asked her if her dressing up and seducing him had meant that she was over Hank Jerritt’s death.
“And that’s when it all fell apart,” she said. “I…I hadn’t intended for anything to happen. I just got carried away.”
“I understand, ma’am,” Detective Bailey said, in the same professional voice that he’d used throughout the rest of the interview. “What happened then?”
“We fought. He accused me of trying to use him. I accused him of being nothing more than a heartless miser. He seemed to take it as a personal challenge. He said that the twins would be hearing from him soon. He planned to increase their rent even further. I’m not sure whether he really intended to or not. He might have just said that to make me angry. I followed him from the guest room to the study. By then it was very dark out, and the fireworks were going off outside. I could barely hear them, but I could see the flashes of light from inside the house.”
She closed her eyes. The window of the study had faced toward the harbor. The sound of the explosions seemed to echo faintly from every direction—the sky flickered. The lights in the room were dim. Alexander
turned on his desk lamp and sat behind the desk, looking up at her with a vicious expression.
“You’ve never loved me,” he had snarled.
She said, because it was that kind of fight, “That’s right. I only used you to get back at Quinn for cheating on me with Margery.”
He sneered. “That arrogant, two-bit pirate. He couldn’t even write a decent sonnet.”
Dory had almost burst into laughter then. If she had, maybe things would have gone differently. But she had been too angry.
“If you do this to my children, I’ll…”
“What? What will you do?”
She was at the other side of the desk then, leaning forward with her fists on the wood. She had worked so hard, for so many years, to keep her family together, to find happiness with Hank. Now she had money, no husband, and her children had been out of the house for years.
She understood how it made the loneliness echo.
She hadn’t answered. She knew that Alexander was a lonely man. She knew it now in a way she hadn’t understood for the previous thirty-odd years. She wanted to make everything better again—not to become a possession of his—not to be tied to him or obligated to him—but he’d spent so long not knowing anything but money and power and how to manipulate people.
“Alexander,” she started to say.
His face had turned bright red, the color of a stroke or a heart attack. He pushed back away from the desk and stumbled, ending up against the countertop under the windows. His hand closed on something.
He raised it toward her. An antique silver-chased pistol, carved silver flowers and vines over the barrel and winding down into the hilt.
Crime and Nourishment_A Cozy Mystery Novel Page 19