I sat back and waited for the words to settle. Was she going to cry? Scream? Yell? But she just sighed and put down her cup of earl grey. “I know, dear. I was the one who told him to tell you. In case you found out accidentally.”
“Mum! You knew about this and you are just fine with it?” I would have been speechless if I wasn’t so outraged. I hadn’t even realized but I had stood up and backed away from her toward the door of my own apartment.
She shrugged a little and smiled at me, though I could have sworn she looked a little sad. I mean, surely she had to be a bit sad, right? She was just putting on a brave face and all that. “It’s someone he’s known since he was at school. A very old flame…” Yep. I definitely heard it. She was trying to be light and breezy, but there it was—that little hint of bitterness mixed in with it.
I took a seat again and searched Mum’s face. “Mum. Are you really okay with this?”
“Of course, love,” she said, smiling sadly. “I told you, your dad and I have drifted apart.”
I scoffed a little, quietly. Yeah, well, if he could get back together with Nancy after all these years, then there was certainly hope for mum and dad reconciling after a few weeks’ break.
“I just can’t believe he’s back with his high school girlfriend,” I said, shaking my head.
Mum laughed at that and shook her head. She looked a little perplexed, and I couldn’t figure out the reason for her amusement. “No, actually, they knew each other before high school.” Right. I had just assumed. “Nancy was dad’s ‘first girlfriend’ when he was just a wee thing. Eleven years old.”
“But hang on,” I said, slowly turning to look at her. “That would have been over fifty years ago.”
“Fifty years exactly.”
19
Alyson
Mum was complaining even more loudly than Claire was when she had to walk somewhere and had her high heels on. “Tell me again, Alyson, why you are dragging me across town at this time of night.”
“Because I need your help, Mum.”
She shook her head in a mixture of bemusement and almost admiration. “Is this really what you two have been up to these past few months?”
I’d told her about all the adventures that Claire and I’ve had since she’d been gone. Until she’d seen it for herself though, I don’t think she really believed that I’d turned into something of an amateur sleuth.
“Yep, you go overseas and your favorite child goes rogue.”
She laughed a little, but she slipped on some mossy rock and I slowed down. I had to remember she was over sixty now, even though she was young at heart and looked young for her age as well.
But Mum’s breathing was coming fairly heavily. Maybe she was getting ill as well. “How much further?” she asked me. “Can’t you just phone Claire and see if she’s okay?”
“Princess can’t look after herself,” I said, even though that wasn’t necessarily true in all circumstances. She was tough in her own way. But at the moment, Claire was doped up on cold and flu medicine and Nancy was right next door. Ready to pounce. She must have written that letter to Claire, warning her away. Claire had gotten—quite literally—too close to the killer.
I couldn’t turn back now and leave Claire all alone in that apartment.
But I ran into problems as soon as I entered the lobby.
“No unknown guests,” Jeff said, nose in the air as I entered.
“But I am Claire’s friend!” I exclaimed. “I have seen you several times.”
His nose was still turned up. “I have no recollection of seeing you here before,” he said stubbornly.
“Jeff, please. Come on.” As if he didn’t recognize me.
He started watering a pot plant. You’ve got to be kidding me.
“Jeff, please. You gotta let me up. It’s an emergency.”
But he just shook his head and went back to spritzing the leaves of the plant. “I have been under strict instructions from Miss Elizabeth Richardson not to let any visitors disturb her while she is unwell.”
“But I am not just any visitor! Jeff, I am her best friend! She would let me up there even if she was on her deathbed!”
I could hear Mum sighing wearily beside me. It was time to call it as far as she was concerned.
“You go back to the motel, Mum. Let me take care of this one.”
As soon as Mum was gone, I turned to Jeff and glowered at him. “This is because I caught you going through the letter boxes, isn’t it?”
I thought he turned a little red, though it was difficult to tell with his olive skin. “I was not going through the letter boxes, thank you very much! And I won’t stand to be accused of such!”
I stepped right up to the desk. “Yes, you were. You were tampering with Claire’s mail.”
“I wasn’t tampering…” He was nervous, stammering now. “I was checking, okay?”
“Ha, checking what?” I asked, now that I was on the front foot.
“I knew Miss Elizabeth Richardson had received a threatening letter…and I believed it had come from someone in this building.” He looked distraught. “On my watch. I had to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.”
“So you suspected that and yet didn’t tell Claire? Or the police?”
His eyes darted around like I had him cornered. “Please do not say any of this to Miss Elizabeth Richardson… I was only trying to protect the reputation of the Turtle Dove.”
Ha. More like his own reputation.
“Fine.” I pulled out the second, typed letter that Claire had received. She hadn’t technically told me I could take the letters with me, but she had also been in no position to stop me. Or to realize what I was doing. So I had taken the initiative. Sometimes, I just had to.
“Tell me who put this letter in Claire’s mailbox, the one that threatened her. Or I will tell her that you kept this from her.”
He had his head bowed. “Nancy.”
“Mum,” I said, holding the phone in one hand as I tried to look for a way to climb up to the fifth floor. I knew that I could do it if I could just find the fire escape. I had to save Claire, even if Jeff wasn’t going to be any help.
She sounded like I had just woken her up. Well, she was 61, so it was already past her bedtime at 9pm.
“Why did you want to name me Alyson?” I asked as I found the place where the escape ended. It would be a little difficult to jump up onto it and get my footing. But I could do it.
“What?” she asked, sounding frustrated.
“I promise you can go straight back to sleep after this,” I said, using one hand to climb the escape wall, looking over my shoulder in case Jeff had decided to come out front and watch what I was up to. I’d promised him I was going home and then made him at least promise to ring me if Claire was actually dying, just to make him think that I was serious about leaving. But I wasn’t confident that he would ring me even if she was dying.
It was difficult, climbing the escape AND having a phone call conversation with my mother. Anyone would have struggled doing what I was doing, but I was doing my best. I didn’t know it would end in disaster. How could I?
“Why did you pick the name Alyson?” I asked, losing signal a little bit. It sounded like Mum had the phone too far away from her ear. “Matt told me that it was your choice to name me that.”
“No,” she said, sounding confused, as though she was recalling an old memory. Ha. I had known that Matt’s memories about that couldn’t be trusted. I should always, always trust my intuition. That was what Rhonda had said to me.
But my intuition had told me that a member of my family was involved. And this was just Nancy and Claire. Huh. I mean, I guessed I did sort of consider Claire family. At one stage, I had. Maybe this sounded a little harsh, but when she had moved away for ten years and I hadn’t heard a peep from her, I had sort of taken back the ‘honorary family’ card. But I was a forgiving person. She could always earn it back. And in recent months, I had definitely started to feel
more ‘sisterly’ toward her again.
Still. She wasn’t a blood relative.
I was struggling to hold onto the phone. “Then why did you name me Alyson?”
“It was your father’s choice. He had picked it out from a young age. Or at least that’s what he had told me. Don’t take any offense, love, but I never really liked the name. I got my way the first time! I got to name Maggie and I told your dad that we would use Alyson if we ever ended up having another girl. And you came along as a bit of a surprise. I had to hold up my end of the bargain.”
“What—what do you mean young age?”
“Oh, I don’t know… He told me some story about some girl he knew at school called Alyson who he had a crush on. About the same time he was seeing Nancy. She was jealous, apparently.”
I gulped. “But that would have been fifty years ago.”
I dropped the phone and watched in horror as it dropped to the ground and smashed. My horror wasn’t just over the fact that my phone was still under contract and it was going to cost me about a thousand dollars to replace. It was also over the horrific noise it made. I couldn’t believe that such as small machine could make such a loud bang.
I watched Jeff run out the front of the building. He probably thought the place was being bombed from above.
He looked up at me and shouted that he was calling the cops unless I came down right that second. But I was so close to the fifth floor. All I had to do was to keep climbing just a little bit more.
“I am not fooling around, you maniac!” Jeff screamed, jumping up and down and waving his arms around. Wow. I mean, I supposed I got it. Part of his job as doorman was to make sure no unwanted guests or riffraff got in. And I was certainly about to get in.
I turned around and kept climbing. Well, if he called the cops, that could only be a good thing, considering that Claire was trapped inside the building with a psychopath. Someone who could hold a grudge for fifty years. So maybe I hadn’t even been the original intended recipient. Maybe the original Alyson had been, if she had ever married my dad.
Little could Nancy have known that the actual Alyson Foulkes would not go down without a fight.
Claire’s level. Phew. Finally. I pulled myself over onto her balcony and caught my breath before banging on her window. Now I knew why she had been so drowsy before. Nancy had drugged her with medicine so that she could do who knew what to her.
“CLAIRE!” I screamed, banging on her window. Please wake up.
She was laying on the floor and sort of jumped awake with a gasp, staggering over to the window. “Where is Nancy?” I asked breathlessly, sort of shoving her aside as she opened the window. I looked around her apartment wildly.
“Nancy isn’t here!” Claire shook her head. “Why are you looking for her?”
“She’s always been in love with my dad…” I said, realizing only too late that I was in the wrong place. I had climbed all the way up and smashed my phone for nothing. It was my mum who was the intended victim all this time. “Oh my goodness, I knew I should have trusted my intuition! Rhonda was right!”
It was about my family. It always had been. “Claire, seriously, pull yourself together. We’ve got to go!”
“Fine.”
But then I got a message from Jeff, a call to the room. Apparently, he’d gotten over his anger at my fire escape climb.
“Alyson? Your brother called the reception desk. He wanted you to know that someone called “J” is missing again.”
20
Claire
Alyson had just barged into my room and told me that Nancy was trying to kill her mother. It was all a bit too much to take in in my dozy state. I double-checked the label of the medicine Nancy had given me. It seemed legit, but the pills inside could have been anything. I’d thought she’d been so sweet and helpful to offer me the medicine. But all this time, she had wanted me and Alyson out of the way.
Alyson was ranting and yelling and telling me we had to hurry up and leave.
It was always up to me to be the sensible one and to save the day. Alyson liked to think that she was always the hero, but it was usually her making a huge mess of things and then me coming to the actual rescue after she had caused unnecessary chaos.
“Oh my gosh,” she said, heading toward the door. “My mum sounded just as groggy as you do.” Shoot. Maybe her mum had been drugged as well. “We have to go. Now.”
“Fine.”
But then there was a call from the reception desk. Alyson picked it up in spite of the fact that we were in my apartment.
“Hello?”
She put the receiver down, but it missed the phone. “J is missing.”
“I’ll go with Matt,” I said, making the executive decision. “You go and find your mum.”
“I told you—lock on the bedroom door,” I said when I greeted Matt inside his house. By that point, I was starting to get most of my executive functioning back, even though my nose was still running.
“Woah,” he said. “You look…Umm. Rough. Sorry?”
“Long story. Nancy drugged me so that she could…” Then I stopped myself. One drama at a time. It wouldn’t do Matt any good to know that his mum’s life was in danger while J was missing.
“Do you think she’s at the skatepark again?”
Matt shook his head. “Police have already checked there.”
“Oh no.” I had a sudden thought, even though my head was groggy and it was a little like trying to decipher a dream into reality. “Tina.”
“What about Tina?”
“We need to go back to the Dolphin (F)Inn.”
That was what Tina’s letter had been about. The one that hadn’t quite made it into the time capsule. I tried to explain it to Matt as we raced over to the motel, wishing that I was clear-headed enough to drive my Porsche. “I can do it,” Matt said.
“But you’re not insured!” I cried out. He shot me a look and I knew we didn’t have a choice. I was really about to let Matt drive the Porsche. I held on and prayed while he wrecked the gear box trying to get my precious baby up the hill.
“Tina’s letter made a similar threat as the original one,” I told him, my eyes closed, my teeth gritted. “She must have been threatening to kidnap J.”
Matt parked the car while I ran up to the second floor. Just as I’d thought—Tina checking out had been a bluff. I knocked on the door while Matt raced up behind me and pushed me out of the way when a startled Tina opened the door, a crying J behind her.
“Far out, Tina,” I said, shaking my head. “You’ve gone way too far.”
“She is better off with me!” Tina cried out. “You guys are not equipped to deal with her.”
J was still crying.
Matt knelt down and comforted her. “J. You can live with me full time, okay, if that is what you want? And don’t worry. I will talk to Aunty Alyson and sort it out. She will have to listen to me.”
But we had another problem to deal with. I turned to Matt, took a deep breath, and told him everything.
“We need to break down the door,” Alyson said. We were back out in the hallway, but this time, in front of Alyson’s mum’s room.
Alyson’s dad was coming out of his room toward us. That meant that for sure his date was over, and our worst fears were probably happening right then. “Oh, hi, Claire. Long time no see,” he said obliviously as he stopped for a chat. Now was not the time nor the place, Mr. Foulkes!
“I was just coming to see your mother,” Mr. Foulkes said. “What’s going on, Alyson?”
“Dad, what did you say to Nancy?” Alyson asked, temporarily giving up on her attempt to break the door down.
He sighed. “Not that it is any of your business, but I told Nancy that even though it was lovely to catch up with her again, I still very much had feelings for my wife and I would like to reconcile with her.”
“Well, great, Dad. You just signed mum’s death certificate. Thanks very much. You should have kept dating Nancy! Can’t you see that
.”
His face turned red. “Alyson. I simply cannot win with you!”
He definitely had a point there.
But maybe Alyson did as well. If her dad had gone back to Nancy, she probably would have forgotten all about her plans to kill whoever it was who had wound up married to the man she loved. It was probably just a note written in anger as a twelve-year-old girl, but now that she had been dumped again, it was all new. Fresh. Bloody.
There were sirens coming from two floors below.
The cops.
Oh great. It was Sergeant Wells. He was pummeling his way up the stairs. Staring us down as though WE were the criminals. Well, to be fair, it was the second time that Alyson had attempted a break and enter that night alone. But still.
“What are you four doing here?” he asked, shining the flashlight right in my eyes. I squeezed them shut so that he couldn’t see the state of them. Really not worth explaining in that moment.
“This is no time to have a go at us innocent citizens,” Alyson said. She pointed to the door. “There is a potential murder going on in there.”
For once in his life, Sergeant Wells actually listened. And was useful. He made us step aside as he broke the door down and then I watched, impressed as he held up his weapon and forced Nancy to drop the brick she was holding over Alyson’s mum’s head.
Matt reached out and grabbed my hand. I squeezed it back quickly, then dropped it before Alyson saw. Uh-oh. My heart was pounding as Nancy was taken away. I supposed a room had just opened up at the Turtle Dove.
“And that is why you should always listen to me,” Alyson proclaimed triumphantly. She took a few deep breaths and looked proud of herself. “And so should I.”
She was right. She should always trust her intuition. Well. Within reason. A lot of the times, she was very, very wrong.
My head was starting to thump again. Alyson and her parents had a lot of catching up and comforting to do. I was only going to get in the way.
A Time for Murder Page 9