Marry in Haste

by Susan Van Kirk

  Now Grace knew how the diary came to be in the upstairs bedroom. Jeff said they had enlarged the front bedroom, knocking down a wall to make it a one-room walk-up. It made sense that the diary was found in the north part of the room where Olivia’s room would have been.

  Too bad Olivia didn’t know in a few more months she would no longer have to endure this terrible punishment. That knowledge might have made it easier to get through her long winter and spring.

  Grace suddenly remembered Sam had written some thoughts about the town’s reactions to the judge’s death near the end of his book. The judge’s death was still a mystery to be sorted out. Sam’s book was sitting on her nightstand, and she picked it up and read the pages where she’d left her bookmark.

  Editorial from the Woodbury Sentinel, May 25, 1894: “In discussing the untimely death of Judge Charles Lockwood, two theories are prevalent in the community of Endurance. First, his wife poisoned him because of his dalliances outside the marital bond or his treatment of said wife. Speculation is rampant that she was often ill-used by her husband. Within the bonds of matrimony, the wife vows to be obedient. Scripture regards this as a solemn vow, and civil authority considers the role of the husband to be guardian and teacher of his wife, guiding her in the proper path. If this guidance is firm and occasionally harsh, it is still his proper role within wedlock. The second theory prevalent in the community is that of revenge. A released prisoner, upon whom the judge has passed sentence, returned and caused the judge’s untimely demise. This editor will take no stand on either theory, but he has observed when wives are left to their own devices and they stray from their appointed tasks, it is an ill wind that blows for the future of the marital bond.”

  Amazing, thought Grace. This Woodbury Sentinel editor isn’t much different from the current idiot. So much for not taking sides. How interesting he totally ignored the “dalliances outside the marital bond” theory.

  Grace glanced down the page and stopped on a diary entry from Rebecca Lynn Hampton, an Endurance resident writing on May 27, 1894. “The Garden Club was all aflutter with highly charged words concerning the death of our member’s husband, Judge Charles Lockwood. Mrs. Lockwood is in deep mourning and so did not attend as she observes the customary two years. However, much discussion ensued concerning the confounding and precipitate passing of her husband, the judge. He seemed to be of hardy and salubrious disposition. The cause of his demise is being debated in whispers through many quarters of the community.”

  The mystery deepens. I wonder if Olivia even knew how her husband died. Back then people often died of food poisoning after lingering for days. I imagine medicine was practiced in a rather primitive fashion, so his death could have been from some kind of illness that had been present all along and no one knew it.

  Grace closed Sam’s book. She was reaching the end with no answers to the mystery because Sam had no answer to explain. She put Olivia’s diary back in her nightstand, maintaining the thought that she didn’t really want it to end. She would save the last few entries for later.

  She stretched her arms and noticed how dark it was getting outside. She smelled the succulent fragrance of Lettie’s turkey wafting up from the kitchen, and her stomach recognized the familiar hunger for Lettie’s cooking. Oh, how wonderful it is to have my cook back, she thought. The clock next to her bed said 6:15. Geez, I have to get up and help Lettie with the last-minute stuff. She smoothed out her slacks, peeked in the mirror at her hair, and headed down to the kitchen. Eliot Ness woke up immediately and followed her, almost causing her to trip over him on the stairway landing. She reached down, picked him up, and stroked his luxurious fur. “Poor Eliot. Has Lettie been mistreating you with all these silly tricks she teaches you?” Carrying the cat with her down the rest of the staircase, she looked at the dark fireplace in the living room and thought they could use a warm, glowing fire. She would start that first.

  A couple of hours later, they’d finished Lettie’s turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, dressing, and green beans, and they were still talking in the dining room. Emily had brought a bottle of wine, and they sipped it while they discussed Conrad and Caitlin’s progress in adjusting to a one-parent home and going to school again.

  “So, what will your next act be?” Lettie asked, looking directly at Emily Folger.

  “Next act?”

  “Well, you know. Grace works at the newspaper, and I continue to feed her, give some love to TJ’s cat, and”—Lettie’s voice grew deeper and she closed her eyes—“bask in a fiery and passionate romance.” She put her napkin down on the table and added, “And Grace hasn’t considered the future implications of that yet.”

  Grace looked up at Lettie’s smug face. “I think you’re a little off the track with your question for Emily,” Grace said, and she raised one eyebrow, adding a silent “checkmate” in her head.

  “I am just giving some expert examples. So, Emily, what do you plan to do with your time now since you have—well, some control over your own life?”

  Emily looked at both Grace and Lettie and pursed her lips. “A good question. I haven’t really considered. I still see a therapist, and I need more self-confidence. But I’m better.”

  “I don’t think Emily is quite ready to—”

  “Nonsense,” Lettie said. “Of course she is. She’s young, nice looking—and I like your new haircut, Emily.”

  “If you’re hinting I might need to find another Del Novak somewhere,” Emily said, “I don’t think that’s on my agenda, at least not for a while. But now I feel I have a future.” She took a deep breath.

  Grace stood up. She thought she might smooth the bluntness of Lettie’s questions by redirecting the conversation. “I, for one, am out to get more wine. Anyone else?”

  “Sure,” said Emily.

  When Grace reached the kitchen, Eliot was in the far corner lapping water loudly from his bowl. He followed her back to the dining room, yearning for someone to drop an edible tidbit on the floor.

  “I know,” Grace said. “You’ve missed Lettie’s cooking too.” Trying not to trip on Eliot, Grace sat back down at the table.

  In that moment they heard a deafening pounding on the front door, and Eliot once again took off, this time to scramble under the dining-room table next to Lettie’s leg. Grace looked at Lettie and said, “What the heck?”

  “Beats me,” said Lettie. “Obviously, I need to give the cat some lessons in how to guard the house. He didn’t give a hint of arriving visitors. I know you said TJ might drop over for dessert and a glass of wine, but she wouldn’t beat on the front door. Besides, she always arrives through the kitchen, and I left the light on for her back there.”

  Grace uncrossed her legs in jerky movements, reacting to the unnerving noise from the front of the house. She moved through the hallway listening for more signs of noise. Her muscles tensed as she reached the front foyer. It was completely dark now outside, only a bit of light shining from the street lamp. She flipped the light switch for the porch lights and saw the familiar face of Darlene Folger through the small window in the upper panel of the door. Breathing a sigh of relief, Grace unlocked the door and pulled it open.

  A wool-shrouded apparition, Darlene Folger, stood in the light with a gun in her hand pointed directly at Grace.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  TJ Sweeney listened to U2 as she worked in her office. Several darts stuck soundly to her wall calendar, fodder for her thinking process. Her whiteboard, filled with numerous names, motives, and alibis, kept her sagging calendar company. This was all part of the detective’s mode of operation for processing a crime. In this case, Conrad Folger’s murder details stared at her. Then Myers, the desk sergeant, opened her door, coughed, and dropped some papers on her desk.

  “Crime lab info just came in on a fax, TJ,” he said, and then he disappeared, silently shutting her door.

  She examined the crime scene photos from the banker’s murder, and then she opened her desk drawer and took out a magnifying glas
s. No, I will not admit to Grace that I use this, she thought. I’ll never hear the end of it. Grace will never, never, know. Never. She studied the photos, turning them this way and that, and after she’d reviewed all fifteen of them, she stacked them once again at the corner of her desk and began to look at the itemized evidence list. Sometimes it helped to go over these several times so her subconscious would process the details her conscious mind missed. She checked items off the evidence list with a pencil, leaving the circled ones she wanted to think about and try to connect—dirt, glass, blood, sedatives and water, torn nightgown, the unfired Glock, pieces of thread or yarn, some torn pages from a book, tissues, broken eyeglasses, and some minor details that seemed insignificant. After fifteen minutes, she had settled on only a handful of details that might be relevant.

  Then she remembered the faxes. Turning them over and reading each one, she realized she knew the owner of the potting soil left at the scene and on Conrad Folger. She stared again at the list of items and sat back in her chair. Her heart raced, and she got that fluttery feeling of intuition in her belly. “Well, I’ll be damned. It was there all the time, and I didn’t see it.” She dropped her pencil on the list, pushed her chair back from the desk, and put her hands on her cheeks, her breath coming faster and her fingers pressing on her face. “Yes, Grace, I did hate that book, but at least I remember it—and Madame Defarge. It was Madame Defarge all along.” Suddenly, she rose from her chair, left her office, and found Myers.

  “Get Jake Williams in here, ASAP. Tell him it’s an emergency.”

  “Sure,” Myers said. “Uh. Why?”

  She grabbed his arm. “Never mind the why. Just get him here!”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The desk sergeant hurriedly punched numbers on his phone while TJ charged back to her office. She pulled her gun out of her drawer, grabbed an extra cartridge, and was out the door. “Tell him I’ll wait in my car out back,” she yelled to Myers. “Meanwhile, get on the computer and give me a couple of license plates from the DMV for Will and Darlene Folger. And call in whoever we’ve got as backup. We’ll be at Will Folger’s house.”

  “Yeah. Got it, and Jake’ll be here in ten.”

  “Good.”

  Williams was actually a minute early. “What’s up? I’ve got the license plate numbers from Myers.”

  TJ turned the heat up to counteract the car door opening. “It’s an interesting story, Jake. Ever read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities?”

  “Sounds familiar. High school?”

  “Yeah.” She began to turn the car around.

  “I think I read the Cliffs Notes. Why are you asking me this?”

  “ ’Cause I missed it, and I could kick myself. Remember Madame Defarge?”

  “No.”

  “Next time you need to read the whole book, Jake. She was the owner of a wine shop during the French Revolution, and she was bitter about the past and her poverty. She was a ruthless, unmerciful monster, like Conrad Folger’s murderer, and she was organized and calculating. During the beheading of aristocrats, her knitting recorded the destruction of their lives and families—class warfare against the wealthy.” She put the car in forward gear and coasted silently out of the parking lot behind the station.

  “Seriously? A literature lesson?”

  “I was taught by the best, Jakie.”

  Williams’s eyes narrowed and he gave her a blank look. “I don’t follow, TJ. What does this have to do with Conrad Folger?”

  “It was his sister-in-law, Darlene. Like Madame Defarge, she’s often called ‘a force of nature’ by Grace and Emily Folger. She did it. Madame Defarge sat and knitted the story of the beheading of aristocrats as she watched them die. We found yarn at the murder scene and Darlene was knitting that night. She must have caught some loose yarn on her clothes. We have to get to her house. Fastest way is down Primrose Street to Seventh Avenue. A few minutes and we’ll be there.”

  She continued to explain to Jake while she drove down Main Street and east toward Primrose. As they rolled past Sweetbriar Court, TJ glanced down at her house and saw Emily Folger’s car parked on the street. Then she pulled in her breath and felt her back stiffen. She saw another car—a black SUV parked directly in Grace’s driveway. She hit the brakes—almost sliding off the street—and her heart began to race as adrenaline surged through her veins.

  “She’s at Grace’s. Got those two license plates? Bring them and your gun and ammo. This could be ugly. I don’t know how far ahead of us Darlene is. Let’s hope we can talk some sense into her if it isn’t too late. Call Myers and send backup here. 1036 Sweetbriar Court. Tell them to come in lights off.”

  While Jake got on the radio, TJ reversed the car carefully, shut off her headlights, and crept quietly into Sweetbriar Court.

  “And I was so looking forward to a glass of wine and a piece of Lettie’s pie,” she whispered.

  Jake touched her shoulder. “You’ll still have them, but first it may take a little more work than we figured.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “Time to invite me in for dinner, Grace,” Darlene said in a quiet, restrained voice. She smiled. “Lead the way.”

  “Darlene. I don’t understand.”

  “Move, Grace,” Darlene said more emphatically, and she turned Grace around and pushed the gun barrel into her back. Grace walked back toward the dining room, and she heard the front door close behind her and footsteps follow her. How to call 9-1-1 and get TJ over here sooner, she thought, and she walked as slowly as possible. They reached the dining room and Emily saw them first. She stood up as if to come over to Darlene, her sister-in-law, but then she saw the looks on Grace’s and Darlene’s faces, so she stopped and sat down again. Lettie sat across from Emily, her back to the hallway, but when she saw the look on Emily’s face, she turned in her chair, almost knocking over the crutches she had leaned on the table edge.

  “Hi, Darlene,” said Lettie, attempting to be pleasant. Grace moved toward the side, and Lettie and Emily could see the gun in Darlene’s hand. “Darlene! What the heck?”

  “Shut up, Lettisha,” said Darlene, a snarl in her voice. “Your gossiping days are over tonight, you bantering bitch.”

  “Hmm. I like the alliteration,” Lettie said thoughtfully. Then she remembered the gun. “Now you see here—” Lettie started, but Darlene pushed the gun forward in a menacing way, and Lettie didn’t finish her sentence.

  “What are you doing, Darlene?” Emily said.

  “You can shut up, too, my soon-to-be-dead sister-in-law.” She pushed Grace forward, toward her chair. “Dear Grace, why couldn’t you just leave it alone? Now you force me to kill you and Emily, plus this busybody.”

  Lettie started to rise, grabbing her crutches as if to run away, but Darlene waved the gun at her and she sat back down. Grace looked at Darlene’s crazed eyes and wild hair, touched in spots by snowflakes. It must have been snowing sporadically, she thought, and then wondered why she was worried about the weather. How can I slow her down, maybe play for time so TJ will show up?

  Lettie said, “Why don’t you take off your coat, Darlene, and have some pie and coffee with us? We have more than enough, and you can do your killing on a full stomach.”

  Grace rolled her eyes at Emily, and Darlene prodded her to sit down at the head of the table, a safe spot when she had left it a few minutes ago.

  “Darlene! Why?” asked Emily, her voice pleading on the last notes.

  Darlene’s voice segued into sarcasm. “Oh, Emily, you sweet thing. Can’t you figure out why? No, you always were the naïve, little, small-town girl, so eager to please Conrad and so stupid about your own existence. In fact, so stupid you wrote down where you’d be tonight right next to your phone.”

  “Darlene, please, if you’d just—”

  “You should be happy I killed Conrad, Emily. And it was so easy. The alarm system was a piece of cake. Gloves on the outside, and a small lever to reset it on the inside. It meant only Conrad’s prints were left on the
inside security pad, since he wasn’t so drunk he left the house without an alarm on. Last thing he told me in a drunken slur was that he’d set it.”

  Grace thought, Maybe if we appeal to how smart her plan was we can keep her talking. She glanced over at Emily, catching her eye. Then she turned toward Darlene.

  “Darlene, you had me fooled. I figured it might have been Will.”

  “Will?” Darlene’s face changed again, this time into a look of disdain. “How could Will pull something like this off? It was always, ‘Yes, Conrad,’ and ‘No, Conrad.’ He thought if he waited he could get the bank.” She stopped and thought for a moment. “Actually, for a while we both thought that. But no, Emily, your little brat will get it all. Conrad made it very clear at our beloved nephew’s birthday party. And that was it, Emily, the point where I knew I would have to take the plans in my hands, step-by-step, and execute the details. Will was too wasted most of the time to keep a clear head.”

  Grace looked at Lettie from the corner of her eye, and she could see her sister-in-law look down at her crutches, sitting next to her chair and right in front of Darlene. Lettie’s back had been toward Darlene in the doorway, but now she swiveled in her chair so she could see the ghostly apparition.

  “Tell us this perfect plan,” Grace said, and she tried to keep her voice from wobbling. “I bet I can poke holes in it. What have you got to lose? You’re going to kill us anyway.”

  Darlene moved a little closer to the table, and Grace saw her hand wavered not a bit.

  She smiled and said, “Sure, Grace. After all, no one will miss a sniveling schoolteacher, a small-town nobody.” Her voice became more matter-of-fact, and her face visibly relaxed. “I waited, you know, for Will to fall asleep that night. As always—an alcoholic stupor. Ever since we came back here, Emily and Conrad have lorded over him, and Conrad made sure Will had every menial job he could find for him. How many nights did I watch him drink himself into oblivion because he knew how smart he was, but he was stuck under Conrad’s thumb—Conrad, a man who was so stupid he had to constantly ask Will about any issue that came up at the bank.”