Murder on Old Main Street (Kate Lawrence Mysteries)

by Judith Ivie

  I enjoyed the morning as I waited for Margo to join me, knowing that a hard frost or two would put an end to the blooms, for the most part. Many of the perennials in the borders had already been cut back and mulched for the winter, and although the chrysanthemums made a brave display, they weren’t nearly as hardy as most people thought. It wouldn’t be long before we were compelled to settle into the drabness of November, to be followed by the white winter. Each season had a charm of its own, to be sure, but autumn was my favorite. At least it had been until this whole business with Prudy had cast suspicion on friends, colleagues, and even my own daughter.

  Impatiently, I checked my watch again. The sooner we found those diaries, the better, so where in blazes was Margo?

  Right on cue, Margo slid the BMW in behind me at the curb and climbed out, yawning widely. She carried a cardboard tray with two super-sized Dunkin Donuts coffees in it. Though dressed casually, for her, in denim capris and a navy big shirt with a white tank top underneath, she was as immaculately groomed as always. I wondered yet again how she always managed to look pulled together. My own jeans pouched badly at the knees, and I had barely taken the time to swipe on lipstick and mascara.

  “Sorry I was late, Sugar, but I had to drop Rhett off at his pen behind the office and pick us up some caffeine, if I’m goin’ to be of any use at all today.”

  She yawned again, and I noticed the dark smudges beneath her eyes.

  “Hot date, huh?” I said too casually as I reached for a coffee, and she clammed up instantly. Margo would talk when Margo was good and ready. I got the message and veered into a new subject. “Where do we begin? I’ve been sitting here for several minutes, but Janet and Will don’t seem interested in joining us.”

  “Uh uh, no way,” Margo said, taking a pull on her coffee. “The quicker those folks can unload this property, the happier they’ll be. In the meantime, it’ll be just us. Where’s Emma?”

  “She’ll be along later. After the week she’s had, I told her she could sleep in.”

  Margo nodded. “Okay, then, let’s do this.” She handed me the tray and produced the set of large, old-fashioned keys we had seen earlier. “As soon as I figure out which one of these opens the front door, I’ll put it in a lockbox. I’ve got one in the car.”

  A lockbox is a device used by virtually all realtors to avoid having to keep track of hundreds of individual house keys for their listings. The key to each listing is placed in a small box affixed to the knob on the front door. All of the lockboxes can be opened with a single key, which the realtor carries.

  The gray house sat quietly behind its forest green shutters, patiently awaiting its fate as it had for so many years. I was humbled, as I always was in the presence of old trees and buildings, by the knowledge of how much they had witnessed and endured. This one had been built in 1925, so it had survived the Great Depression and World War II in addition to the calamitous world events that had occurred in my time, plus dozens more winters and hurricanes. Yet here it sat with its rocking-chair porch and windowed sunroom, dozing serenely in the late-season sunshine, oblivious to the fact that one of its occupants had been brutally murdered.

  Inside, we fumbled for a wall switch in the dim interior. I located one to the right of the door and switched on the elegant, crystal-faceted ceiling fixture that graced the modest foyer. Janet and Will had obviously done a lot of work on the first floor. Without needing to discuss it, we could see that the house would show very well—and quickly, too. Properties for sale in Wethersfield were few and far between in this market. Original hardwood floors and moldings led gracefully from a fireplaced sitting room to a formal dining room, eat-in kitchen, the sunroom, and a tiled bath. The rooms were smallish but well-proportioned, and light spilled in from the windows on all sides. I knew from the listing that the house boasted a full basement, something many others of its era did not have. I sincerely hoped it would not be necessary to search there for Harriett Wheeler’s diaries, however.

  Leaving our belongings in the kitchen, we finished our tour of the first level and climbed slowly up the wide stairs to what had been Prudy Crane’s living quarters. A heavy door at the top of the staircase separated the apartment from the lower part of the house, and once again, Margo negotiated the key chain successfully. The cleaning crew had removed the yellow crime scene tape, but I was apprehensive as she eased open the door. Almost fearfully, I peered over her shoulder.

  Instead of the rabbit warren of tiny rooms I had expected on the second story of this old structure, we stepped into a large, sunny studio apartment. Structurally, the space was very interesting since it had obviously been created by knocking down several interior walls. The result was one open room, flooded with light from the large windows on the back wall. The plainness of the room was alleviated by its buttercup yellow walls and a number of appealing nooks and niches in which hung some beautifully framed botanical prints. A large, decorative column rose from the floor in the center of the room, apparently replacing a weight-bearing wall of years past.

  A doorway to our right led into a tiny, but nicely equipped, galley kitchen and an equally well-appointed bathroom. The focal point of the main room was a small gas fireplace on the left wall. It boasted a hand-carved mantelpiece and was flanked by built-in bookcases that held hundreds of hardcover novels. Many were expensively bound in leather, and most of them seemed to be mysteries. Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh jostled for space with Joan Hess and Lisa Scottoline, Josephine Tey and P.D. James. Lillian Braun’s The Cat Who titles shared a shelf with Nancy Atherton’s Aunt Dimity series.

  A slipcovered club chair and ottoman sat before the fireplace along with a drop-leaf table, which held a shaded lamp and one tidy coaster. The absence of a television confirmed that reading was Prudy’s preferred recreational activity—that is, when she wasn’t out collecting payments from her blackmail victims. The rest of the room was devoted to a comfy-looking brass bedstead piled high with comforter and pillows, a night table, and an old-fashioned armoire.

  “Well, let’s get to it,” Margo sighed. “This is pretty much our only opportunity to find those danged diaries, and we can’t make a mess doin’ it. We have to show this place tomorrow, remember.”

  “Mmm,” I agreed, looking for a logical place to start. “What do you think these diaries might look like?”

  Margo thought about it. “When I was a kid, I kept a diary one year. My mama gave it to me for Christmas, you know, one of those little books with a leather strap and a lock that could be picked by anybody with a paper clip. It was months before I realized my little sister was readin’ it to her friends and gigglin’ on the phone every night.”

  I couldn’t help chuckling myself. “So you think they look something like that?”

  “Hell, no. Harriett wrote a bunch of G-rated romance novels back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, right?”

  I nodded.

  “So I’m thinking somethin’ girly with one of those satin ribbon thingies attached at the top to mark her place. Of course, I’m just speculatin’ here.”

  “Well, it’s as good a theory as any. Tell you what. I’ll tackle the kitchen and bathroom, and you start out here. We can share anything that looks interesting. If we don’t find them up here, we’ll go down to the first floor and look, but I’m hoping we’ll get lucky up here.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me.” I left her opening the door to the armoire and trudged into the kitchen to tackle the cupboards. A small window cheered the utilitarian space. Fortunately, Prudy seemed to eat most of her meals at the diner, limiting her use of the kitchen to making cups of tea and indulging a taste for macaroons. Except for these items, a canister of granulated sugar, a half-empty bottle of scotch, and half a dozen cans of soup, her cupboards were bare. The pickings were equally slim in her compact refrigerator, which held half a pint of spoiled half-and-half, two desiccated lemons, a few eggs, and some flat soda water, which I assumed had gone with the scotch.

  An hour later as I was replac
ing the drawer beneath the oven, which I had conscientiously removed to search behind, I was out of ideas. I had pulled the refrigerator out of its niche, disassembled and looked beneath the dishwasher, tapped all of the walls and cupboards in the kitchen and bath for hollow spots, and emptied every container of flood and cleanser, just in case a key had been concealed within one of them. I had filled a big trash bag from Prudy’s stash under the sink and dragged it into the living room to check on Margo’s progress. I found her flat on her back underneath the brass bed, poking the underside of the mattress.

  “Well, I’m out of places to look,” I announced. “Any luck in here?”

  “Not unless you want to start pulling off the crown molding,” Margo sighed. “Help me out from under this thing.”

  I grabbed her ankles and yanked, and she slid smoothly across the hardwood.

  “If I have a splinter in my backside, I’ll know who to blame,” she complained and clambered to her feet, dusting off the seat of her pants. “Huh, that Grace does a great job. There aren’t too many places where you can crawl around on the floor under the bed and come up clean.”

  “She’s one in a million,” I agreed. “So were you kidding about the crown molding?”

  “I think so.” Margo stood with her hands on her shapely hips as she surveyed the tops of the walls. Even tired and slightly grubby, she looked gorgeous. I wondered again about her relationship with John Harkness, but I knew better than to ask. “You’ve got to figure there were a bunch of volumes, and that molding just wouldn’t conceal a big enough hidey hole. Mrs. Wheeler kept a diary all of her life, Mavis said.”

  “Yes, but maybe Prudy only kept the juicy ones. I mean, how many scandals could a little New England town generate in Harriett Wheeler’s lifetime? For all we know, her own daughter’s situation might be the only scandal she wrote about, if she even wrote about that. There might have been only one volume worth stealing for Prudy’s purposes.”

  “Good point. Still, I’ve been over everything in this room with a fine-toothed comb, floors, walls, furniture. Nothing. So much as I hate to say it, I guess we’d better suck it up and head downstairs, Sugar.”

  Unenthusiastically, I agreed, and together we bumped the bag of trash down the stairs to the first floor. My stomach had been growling for some time, and the stale macaroon I had scarfed from Prudy’s larder hadn’t done much to ward off hunger. I was cheered to see Emma heading up the front walk with what I hoped was lunch in a large paper sack.

  Margo was apparently as hungry as I was. “Hey,” was all Emma had time to say before we relieved her of her burden and fell upon the bagel sandwiches within. While Margo and I munched, Emma ran lithely up the stairs to check out Prudy’s apartment. When she returned, we all trooped out to the back porch to sit in the sun for a few minutes while we filled Emma in on our progress, or lack of it.

  Refreshed, and with young muscles to help us, we returned to the search. Emma tackled the big kitchen downstairs while I investigated the sitting and dining rooms. Margo snooped thoroughly around the sunroom and bathroom. With the exception of the mailman, who startled us in mid-afternoon when he saw the lights on inside and rang the doorbell to see if the house had new occupants, we were undisturbed. By five o’clock, as the sunlight faded, we had exhausted every possibility we could think of and were ready to call it quits. Two more trash bags filled with construction debris and the remains of our lunch joined the first one on the rocking-chair porch, and we formed a discouraged little posse on the stairs.

  “So now what?” Emma asked the obvious. “The basement?”

  “At night, in the dark? I don’t think so,” I demurred, and Margo shuddered.

  “I don’t see any other choice,” Emma insisted.

  I put my head in my hands and tried to think. We knew Prudy was getting her information from a number of sources. She was an inveterate snoop, and her eyes and ears were always open for an opportunity to put the squeeze on another victim. When Janet and Will were clearing out Harriett Wheeler’s books, and she saw those boxes filled with personal papers, she would have found them irresistible. I had no doubt that she would have pounced on them. I just didn’t know whether Harriett’s diaries were in them. For all we knew, Harriett burned them or buried them long before she died in order to carry Mavis’s secret to her grave. But if she had done that, how had Prudy discovered the truth? I groaned in frustration, and Emma rubbed my back sympathetically.

  “Okay, that’s enough for one day,” Margo announced. “Shoo, shoo now!” She jumped to her feet and waved her hands at us. “Go get yourselves some dinner. Take the trash to the Law Barn dumpster on the way, and I’ll lock up here.”

  “You’re not coming with us?” I protested. “We need to figure out a game plan for tomorrow.”

  “Honey, I’ve held enough open houses in the past year to dance through this one backwards and in high heels just like Ginger Rogers, so don’t you fret. For your information, I’m seeing John tonight—yes, again,” she said as Emma’s mouth opened, “and you can both mind your own business.” Emma’s mouth clacked shut. “I’ll just make one more run through the house to make sure everything’s tidy, and then I’ll be on my way. Go on now.”

  Emma and I exchanged looks and got obediently to our feet. We knew when we were licked.

  Twenty minutes later, we perched on bar stools at On the Border and sipped cold Coronas while we racked our brains. Exploring the basement of that spooky Victorian, even with company, appealed to me not at all. I put the topic aside for the moment. “Millie Haines is an interesting character,” I said and recounted my conversation of the previous day in the lobby. “She’s a funny mix of middle-aged professional and Valley Girl, all real estate jargon one minute and girlish slang the next. I didn’t quite know what to make of her, but she seemed to think quite a lot of you,” I mused.

  “I know what you mean. She seems competent enough, but all that ‘Hey, there!’ and ‘Way cool!’ stuff seems odd coming from a woman of her age,” Emma agreed.

  “The thing is, she reminds me of someone. That sweet face and big brown eyes with the long lashes. Sort of reminds me of—“ I stopped short and looked at Emma.

  “Elsie the Cow!” we both finished my thought.

  “Oh my god, Emma, she’s the spitting image of Mavis Griswold. She could be Mavis Griswold twenty years ago. It’s the Jersey shag haircut that threw me off, and the heavy eye make-up. Otherwise, I would have seen it right away.” In my excitement, I took too big a swallow and choked. Emma thumped me between the shoulder blades, and the bartender looked our way with concern. When I could stop wiping my eyes, I mopped my nose with a napkin.

  “Easy, there, big girl,” Emma admonished. “Slow down, or you’ll have a stroke. Do you really think,” she looked cautiously over both shoulders and lowered her voice, “that Millie could be Mavis’s long-lost daughter?”

  “She’s the right age. She told me herself she’s forty-five, and Mavis’s and Henry’s daughter was born forty-five years ago. She’s from California, which is where Mavis went to have the baby and gave her up for adoption. And she looks so much like Mavis, it’s scary. How much more convincing do you need?” I was practically bouncing up and down with excitement.

  “More than that,” Emma said with conviction, “and anyway, it’s not a matter of convincing me. We just need to find out if it’s true, because if it is, that gives Millie Haines a motive for murdering Prudy Crane, and we could really use another suspect right about now.”

  Our burgers arrived, and we munched thoughtfully, washing down big bites with the Coronas. Emma wolfed down her fries and reached for mine, and I slapped her hand away automatically. “Not a chance. Listen, there’s got to be a fairly easy way to find out who Millie Haines really is.”

  “Maybe she’s really Millie Haines,” Emma pointed out reasonably enough. “Even if she is Mavis’s daughter, she was adopted, remember? She could have any name at all.”

  “True. We need some basic inform
ation in order to research her background, like previous addresses, places of employment, that sort of thing. There might be something in her office.” I kept my eyes on my burger as Emma thought that over.

  “Are you actually suggesting that we—“

  “Yes.”

  “Tonight? I thought you had plans with Armando.”

  “He won’t mind if I’m a little late, so why not do it? It’s Saturday, and presumably even mortgage brokers take Saturday night off. We’ll never have a better opportunity. Besides, we have to take the trash to the Law Barn dumpster anyway. We could just check things out, poke around a little, see what we can see.”

  “Welcome to the Kate Lawrence cliché festival,” Emma said and drained the last of her beer. She put her glass down with a thump and swiped a napkin over her mouth. “Check, please,” she said to the bartender.

  “I’m not through yet,” I protested.

  “You are if you want my help. I’ve been stuck in that loft all week, and I have a life too, you know. I have no intention of spending the whole night skulking around Millie Haines’s office. It’s probably locked anyway. So show me your money, Sherlock, and let’s hit the road.”

  As we had hoped, except for the shaded lamp that burned softly on Jenny’s desk, the Law Barn was dark when we let ourselves in the front door. We had traveled there separately and driven as close to the building as we could, tucking both cars into the overhanging branches next to the driveway. I had been there at night only occasionally, and frankly, I was glad of Emma’s company this time. The old building was full of cracks that caught the wind, not to mention Emma’s friends, the mice. The combined rustlings and creaks could be really creepy.

  Cautiously, we locked the door behind ourselves to prevent being surprised by any conscientious colleagues who decided to put in a few hours over the weekend, but at month’s end, that was extremely unlikely anyway. As we started through the empty lobby, I remembered that I hadn’t yet told Emma and Margo about the listening tube in the reading room. “Wait a minute! You have got to see this,” I told her and led the way through the coatroom.