“I see,” Bruce said.
“Don’t you want to know how Clara Randall died?” Libby asked.
“I presume from old age,” Bruce said in a dry tone of voice.
“Not exactly. She had an accident or someone hit her on the head,” Bernie told him.
Bruce shifted his position. “That’s a big difference. Which is it?”
“We don’t know yet, but in the meantime we need to talk to Ellen and you,” Bernie said.
Bruce’s frown got deeper. “And why would that be?”
“Because the dead man in the motel was Manny, more formally known as Raymond Manford Roget, and he was living in Clara Randall’s house.”
Bruce shrugged. “And?”
“The name doesn’t ring a bell?” Bernie asked.
“Should it?” Bruce shot back.
“Considering he worked for your wife, I would think it would.” She pulled the Arf T-shirt she’d taken from the attic out of her bag and waved it in Bruce’s face.
“I wouldn’t know,” Bruce said. “I don’t have much to do with my wife’s business. That’s her thing, not mine. Anyway, he could have gotten that shirt in a store.”
“They’re not available retail.” Bernie tucked a wisp of hair back in her ponytail. “Anyway, I find it hard to believe you don’t know what’s going on, considering your wife’s business operates out of your basement,” Bernie said.
Bruce glared at her. “Did operate out of the basement, and for your information, I’m at work when Ellen and Lisa are baking. In addition, Lisa takes care of all of the deliveries. So, if you have any questions, I suggest you talk to her.”
“We will,” Libby said. “But right now we’re talking to you. So you didn’t know this Manny?”
Bruce snorted. “I just said that.”
“Because hanging on Clara Randall’s wall is a picture of him and you together at a picnic in Highland Park.”
Bruce shook his head. “Sorry, it doesn’t ring a bell.”
Bernie lifted an eyebrow. “Seriously?”
Bruce spread his hands apart. “Hey, that was a long time ago.”
“So you do remember,” Libby said.
“I remember going to picnics there when I was a kid. That’s what we used to do on Sunday afternoons. There were always lots of kids hanging around. So maybe Manny was one of them. So what? And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go.”
“Fine, but we’d still like to speak to Ellen,” Bernie told him.
“You can’t. She’s out,” Bruce told them.
“Out?”
Bruce crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s what I just said. She’s out doing an errand.”
“She’s not answering her cell.”
“That’s because she left it in the house.”
“Oh,” Bernie said. Ordinarily Ellen never went anywhere without it, but then these weren’t ordinary times. “Okay, then. Just tell her my sister and I were here.”
“I don’t think I’m going to do that,” Bruce said.
Bernie could see the vein in Bruce’s neck start to pulse. “And why is that?”
“Because of the kind of friend you turned out to be,” Bruce said, pointing to Bernie.
“You’re wrong. She’s a good friend to Ellen,” Libby told him.
“I don’t think so. Your sister is the one who put the ransom note idea in my wife’s thick skull. If she hadn’t done that, none of this would have happened. Your sister ruined our lives.”
“My sister was kidding when she said that to your wife,” Libby told Bruce. “She never expected her to follow up on it.”
“That’s not what my wife says,” Bruce retorted.
Bernie jumped into the conversation. “Well, Ellen is wrong,” she said.
“So now my wife is a liar on top of everything else?”
“I didn’t say that,” Bernie cried.
Bruce didn’t reply. He just slammed the door in her face.
“That man’s a jerk,” Libby said as she walked down the porch steps. “How can anyone be married to someone like that?”
Bernie came down the steps after her. “I don’t know, but they’ve been married for a long time, so there’s got to be something there.”
“How about inertia?” Libby got the keys for the van out of her backpack and she and her sister got into the van. The cat sat in Bernie’s lap.
“Bruce is big enough, you know.”
Libby put the keys in the van’s ignition. Mathilda coughed twice and started up. “Big enough for what, Bernie?”
“To have killed Manny.”
The cat meowed and Bernie automatically began petting her.
“But why would he, Bernie?” Libby asked as she drove onto Sycamore Street. “What motive would he have?”
“I have no idea, but he knew where Ellen was going to be. In fact, he’s the only one who did.”
“That we know of. Maybe Ellen told someone else about her plans.”
“That’s possible,” Bernie conceded. She thought for a minute. “She might have told Lisa. They talk a lot.”
“Well, they are in business together.”
“And then Lisa could have told someone else. . . .”
“Also possible.” Libby slowed down to let a car pass.
The cat began to purr.
“We have to talk to Lisa, but before we do that, we have to figure out what we’re going to do with Cindy.”
Libby briefly took her eyes off the road to look at her sister. “Cindy? Who is Cindy?” she demanded.
“She’s the cat, of course.”
“Why Cindy?”
“Because she reminds me of Cinderella.”
Libby scrunched up her nose. “Because?”
Bernie shrugged. “I don’t know. She just does. Do you have another suggestion?”
Libby thought for a moment. “No. Not really.”
Bernie scratched the cat behind her ears. “Then Cinderella it is. Home, James.”
“Dad will be so pleased,” Libby noted.
“Can you think of another place?”
Libby considered the possibilities. None presented themselves. “Not really.” Marvin had an allergy to cats and Brandon rented a “no-pets-allowed” flat.
“It’s just until we find her a new home,” Bernie assured her sister. “After all, we did promise Ethan.”
On the way to the flat, they stopped at a pet store and picked up a litter box, a small bag of litter, and some canned and dry food.
“You know,” Libby said at the register, “maybe Bruce is covering for Ellen.”
Bernie snorted at the idea. “That I doubt,” she said. “If anything, he probably set her up.”
Chapter 21
Sean looked at Cindy and Cindy looked at Sean.
“Why is she here?” he asked.
Libby explained.
Sean leaned forward. “Clara Randall is dead?”
Bernie nodded. “She either fell or was hit over the head. Given the circumstances, Libby and I are going with getting hit over the head.”
Sean sighed. “It must have been quite a blow. I thought she was too mean to die.”
“Evidently not,” Bernie said as the cat jumped into Sean’s lap, curled up, and closed her eyes.
“Make yourself at home, why don’t you?” Sean said to Cindy.
Cindy opened her eyes for a minute and closed them again.
“She likes you, Dad,” Bernie said.
Sean looked decidedly unthrilled.
“Dad, she’s just here till we find her a new home,” Libby said hastily. “She’ll help with the mouse problem.”
“We don’t have a mouse problem,” Sean said, giving Cindy a tentative pat on the back. “I guess we can all manage for a while, the key concept here being a while.” Then he changed the subject. “Was there a weapon?” he asked, getting back to Clara Randall’s death.
“Not that Bernie or I saw,” Libby replied. “I figure someone pushed her, she hit her
head on the bedpost, and it was bye-bye, Clara, off to the promised land.”
“She could have just gotten dizzy and fallen,” Sean said.
“She could have,” Bernie agreed, “but the door was open.”
“Did the lock give any evidence of being jimmied?” Sean asked.
Bernie and Libby exchanged glances. They hadn’t looked. Libby closed her eyes and thought back.
“I don’t think so,” she said when she opened them. “At least there was nothing there that caught my attention.”
“Meaning either Clara Randall left the door open, which is unlikely, or whoever did this had a key.” Sean gave the cat another pat.
“They could have gotten the key from Manny,” Bernie suggested. “I’m sure he had one since he was staying there.”
Sean steepled his fingers together. “Could it have been a robbery?”
Bernie replied. “I guess it could have been, but it sure didn’t look that way to me. If it was, whoever did it knew exactly where what they wanted was. There was nothing out of place down- or upstairs.”
“And you said Manny was living there?” Sean asked.
“His stuff was there,” Bernie said. She got up, took out the Arf T-shirt, and showed it to her dad. “He had this in his room, plus a book of order forms and receipts with Arf printed at the top.”
Sean scratched his chin. “Did you find anything else?”
“Not really. A couple of chess books, some clothing. It didn’t look as if Manny had much in the way of possessions. We did find his laptop, but we didn’t find his wallet or his phone. I figure someone took them.”
“That’s a good guess,” Sean said. “The question is whether they took those items because there was something that pointed to the killer’s identity or did they take them to sell or for their own use?” He was about to add something else when his cell rang. The cat startled. As Sean leaned over and picked it up off the table next to him, Cindy jumped off his lap, onto the floor, then onto the arm of the sofa.
Bernie and Libby watched while their dad nodded his head and said, “Yeah, you don’t say,” and “Interesting.”
“Well?” Libby said after Sean had hung up. “What’s going on? What’s so interesting?”
“That was Clyde,” Sean said. “He thought we’d want to know. According to the ME, it seems as if our friend Manny Roget had spent some time in a cold room, a very cold room, before he ended up on the bed in the motel. At least that’s what a preliminary autopsy indicates.”
“So what’s the timeline?” Bernie asked.
“The ME is saying probably within the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours,” Sean said.
“That’s a fairly wide time frame,” Bernie noted as Cindy yawned, jumped off the sofa and back on Sean’s lap, where she circled around three times and lay back down.
“She really does like you,” Libby observed.
Sean frowned. “Well, I hope she’s not going to get too comfortable, because she’s not going to be here that long.” Nevertheless he began petting her.
Bernie tried not to smile. Instead she bent over and started massaging her ankle. Even though the swelling was going down, it still felt better when she had it propped up. “So,” she hypothesized, “first Manny gets killed, and then whoever does that takes his keys and goes to Clara Randall’s house to find something. He lets himself in, closing the door behind him, and goes up the stairs. Clara is just coming out of the bathroom and she sees him and screams, and this person goes in, and either accidentally or on purpose pushes her and she hits her head on the bedpost and dies.”
“That’s certainly a plausible scenario,” Sean commented. “Clara as collateral damage. I wonder what he was looking for.”
“If what I’m saying is true,” Bernie said.
“There is that,” Sean agreed.
He gazed out the window. It was still pouring. The streets were empty, except for a few people running for cover. The streetlights were coming on and they reflected on the pavement. A gust of wind whipped the branches of the ash tree in front of the shop. Hopefully, the storm would blow through in another hour or so.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to go out,” Sean asked Cindy.
She didn’t bother replying.
“Just like a woman,” he said, and petted her some more. Cindy began to purr. It was a deep purr that filled the house. “You know what I would do,” Sean said after another minute had gone by. “I would talk to Ellen and see who else she told her plan to.”
“That’s what we were planning to do, Dad,” Libby said. “But first we have to find her.”
“Ask her husband,” Sean suggested.
“We did,” Bernie said. “He says she’s out doing an errand.”
“What kind of errand?”
Bernie shook her head. “He won’t tell me or he doesn’t know, and even if he did know he won’t tell me. I’m not on his good side at the moment. He blames me for what happened.”
“They don’t have a good marriage, do they?” Sean commented.
Bernie snorted. “That’s putting it mildly,” she said.
“Bruce Hadley.” Sean said the name slowly. “I heard something about him recently. I just can’t remember what it was.”
“Maybe Clyde would know,” Libby suggested.
“Maybe,” Sean said, and reached for the phone to call him at home. This time the cat didn’t move. “He doesn’t,” he informed his daughters after he’d spoken to him.
“Maybe Brandon does,” Bernie suggested, ringing him up. The call went to voice mail but he called her back five minutes later.
Bernie could hear voices intermingled with the sound of the TV and the clinking of glasses in the background. “Busy night?” she asked.
“Busier than I would expect considering that it’s a weekday,” Brandon answered. “So what’s up, Tiger Lily?”
Bernie gave him the condensed version.
“Bruce Hadley, hunh?” Brandon said. “Yeah, he’s in some deep doo-doo.” And he told Bernie what he knew.
“So what did he say?” Libby asked Bernie after Brandon had hung up.
Bernie sneezed. She hoped the zinc worked and nipped the cold in the bud. “Evidently Bruce’s business is in trouble,” she replied. “He’s behind on his state and federal taxes as well as being three months behind on the taxes for his apartment building. The county is about to sell it to the Land Trust.”
“No wonder he hasn’t been paying any attention to Ellen,” Libby observed. “I’d say he’s been a little preoccupied.”
Bernie shifted her position. “I wonder if Ellen knows. Somehow, I’m guessing not.”
“How could she not?” Libby demanded.
“Maybe because Bruce hasn’t told her,” Bernie replied.
“More to the point, how does Brandon know?” Sean asked, interrupting.
“The way he always knows everything,” Bernie replied. “He overheard it. Bruce’s partner was in RJ’s for a drink last week. Brandon heard him talking to one of his friends.”
Sean continued to pet Cindy. “It’s interesting information ; in fact it might help rule him out.”
“How so?” Libby asked. “I’d think the opposite.”
Sean paused for a moment to organize his thoughts, then started talking. “According to Brandon, Bruce needs money, agreed?”
Libby and Bernie nodded. “Agreed,” they chorused.
“So in that case it would behoove him to take out a big insurance policy on Ellen and kill her and collect the money—theoretically speaking.”
“He could have. We don’t know that he hasn’t,” Bernie pointed out.
“That’s true,” Sean said, “we don’t. But Ellen isn’t dead, Manny Roget is, and Ellen is being framed for the murder. She’s on the verge of expanding her business, so having her arrested is not going to be in Bruce’s interest. In fact, just the opposite is true. If Ellen goes to jail the family loses a second income stream, not to mention the attendant legal fees.
”
“I can see why Bruce is so pissed,” Bernie allowed.
The cat got up, stretched, turned around, lay back down on Sean’s lap, and began butting her head against his hand. Sean absentmindedly rubbed the tips of her ears as he continued speaking. “It seems to me we have two questions here. The first is, who benefits from Manny Roget’s death? And the second is, was Ellen selected as the fall guy or was this happenstance?
“Did someone just happen to see your friend leaving the motel and think, oh there’s a good place to park a body? I would say the probability of that happening is fairly low. All things being equal, we might want to start with Manny. Why did he come back? More importantly, why did Ellen pretend she didn’t know who he was?”
Sean shook his finger at Bernie and Libby. “If you ask me, that’s the crux of the matter. Answer that and you’ll have the answers to everything.”
Then, before Sean could say anything else, the downstairs door opened and shut and footsteps came thundering up the stairs. Cindy jumped off Sean’s lap, scampered into Bernie’s bedroom, and hid under the bed.
“Who’s that?” Sean demanded as Matt and Ryan Hadley came bursting through the door.
They were both soaked to the skin.
“We found something,” Matt cried, shaking the water out of his hair like a puppy dog.
“Yeah,” Ryan added. “You gotta see this.”
“This had better be good,” Bernie said, pointing to the clock on the wall. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“We do now,” Ryan chirped.
Chapter 22
“You’re not helping your cause,” Sean growled.
“But . . .” Ryan began.
Sean glared at him and Ryan stopped talking and looked down at the floor.
“Do you not believe in knocking?” Sean asked him. “Calling would be even better. Do you just barge into people’s houses whenever you feel like it? You should be glad I didn’t shoot you!”
“Sorry.” Matt looked sheepish.
“Me too,” Ryan said.
Matt wiped drops of rain off his face with his forearm. “It’s just that this is important.”
“It really is,” Ryan said, backing his brother up. “It couldn’t wait.”
“At least pull your shorts up,” Sean instructed. “They’re down around your knees.”
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