Table of Contents
Excerpt
Praise for Sylvia Nickels
Disguise for Death
Copyright
Dedications
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
A word about the author…
Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
Marc, her next-door neighbor, handsome and affable friend, and now her attorney, came out to the reception area and ushered her into his office.
“Read this, Royce, before we get into the will.” He handed her a sealed envelope and his monogrammed silver letter opener.
She glanced from the envelope to Marc’s inscrutable face. He’d remained beside her chair, seemed to be waiting for her to open the letter. “Right now?”
She looked back at the envelope in her hand. Felt its smooth vellum surface. Her name on the front, in Eddy’s handwriting. And underlined. A farewell letter from Eddy. Could she bear to read it?
Marc patted her shoulder and took the chair next to her. “Yes, these legal routines are hard, Royce. I’m here to help.”
She straightened her back. When she turned the letter over and thumbed the sealed flap, she felt a faint wrinkle in the heavy paper.
Frowning, she looked over at Marc. “Eddy sealed the envelope after he wrote the letter?”
“Yes. Even I haven’t read it, Royce.”
She nodded. With effort, she overcame her emotional resistance and slowly slid the bright edge of the letter opener under the flap. She unfolded the sheet of paper covered with Eddy’s careful script, as familiar as her own handwriting. She felt a sharp contraction in her chest, then her heart settled into a slow, painful beat.
“My darling Royce,
If you’re reading this letter, it means I haven’t had the guts to tell you this myself.”
Praise for Sylvia Nickels
“I finished DISGUISE FOR DEATH and really enjoyed it. It grabbed me in the first chapter and never let go!! I couldn’t put it down. Great writing, good plot, and interesting characters.”
~Brenda Cobb, Reader
~*~
“REQUIEM FOR A PARTY GIRL gives readers an engaging ride. The suspense is immediate, the heroine worthy, and the complications absorbing…The ending holds surprises but is not contrived. It is a well-written book that should be on the list of every hungry mystery reader.”
~Delilah F. O’Haynes,
Creative Writing Professor, Concord University, WV
~*~
“Sylvia Nickels makes people and places come alive. Her humor is sharp, and her details are grand.”
~Joe Tennis, Columnist, Author
Disguise for Death
by
Sylvia Nickels
Royce Thorne Series, Book One
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Disguise for Death
COPYRIGHT © 2017 by Sylvia Maner Nickels
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Contact Information: [email protected]
Cover Art by Kim Mendoza
The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
PO Box 708
Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708
Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com
Publishing History
First Mainstream Mystery Edition, 2017
Print ISBN 978-1-5092-1812-7
Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-1813-4
Royce Thorne Series, Book One
Published in the United States of America
Dedications
I thank my dear friend and talented writer,
Mary Ann Artrip,
for her tireless editing and advice
during the writing
of this first in Royce Thorne’s adventures.
~*~
My thanks also to members of my writing group,
Lost State Writers Guild,
for their acceptance of me as a “real writer.”
Chapter One
Eddy Thorne’s wife and his only sister sat three feet apart on the cushioned front pew. Decades-old hostility filled the space between them as tangibly as a cold fog. Behind them, police officers crowded the funeral home, come to pay their respects to a fallen comrade.
Eleanor Thorne Frost, her very real grief cloaked by her usual haughty demeanor, had flown up from Georgia for her younger brother’s funeral.
Twenty-five years ago, she’d made no secret of her furious opposition when Eddy married Royce Henderson. But the iron will of his adored sister was not enough to stop Eddy from going through with their simple city hall ceremony. That will did win Eleanor’s own marriage goal, to land a wealthy husband and ascend to the position of urban society matron. She chose to eradicate all memory of the poverty into which she, her brother, and Royce were born in the slums of Atlanta.
Still numb from the news herself, Royce had called to tell Eleanor of Eddy’s death. “And, of course, you can stay in the guest room in our home.”
“Absolutely not.” Eleanor’s answer was short and harsh. Instead, Eleanor booked a room at the Fall Creek Inn. Her distaste for the shopworn hotel was not strong enough to overcome her long-held wrath toward Royce for marrying her brother.
During Eleanor’s two-day stay in Fall Creek, they exchanged perhaps a dozen words and those only when absolutely necessary.
During the week following Eddy’s funeral, Royce went through the motions of living, but her heart was not in it. Would it ever be? When memories of their years together threatened to surface, her mind fled from the pain to numbness. Was this what life as a widow was going to be like? Her thoughts caught on the word—widow—as again the unthinkable was brought home to her. Eddy was dead.
Only days ago, she’d heard the heartfelt eulogies of his fellow officers and the Fall Creek Police Department chaplain.
Eddy had stopped a car driven by a young man for a minor traffic violation. For no known reason, the driver, who was still in his car, had accelerated and rammed into Eddy as Eddy stepped to the ground. Eddy had been thrown like a rag doll against and over his cruiser, chest crushed and neck broken. He’d died instantly.
Royce had to force herself to keep the appointment with their attorney on Friday. As with the funeral, the legal formalities associated with death must be endured. So she steeled her emotions for the painful hour and drove to his office.
She’d had no occasion to visit the Sage and Sage Law Offices in all the years since the attorneys moved to Fall Creek. Marc handled the noncriminal side of the practice and shared the office with his defense attorney wife, Amanda. Eddy had told Royce of testifying in trials in which Am
anda was the plaintiff’s attorney. Though they had been on opposite sides, Eddy admired her tenacity and determination to represent her client to the best of her ability.
Royce entered the luxurious, for Fall Creek, law offices on the ground floor of a renovated downtown building. She barely noticed the highly polished mahogany side table between comfortable, upholstered chairs. Due to her love of flowers, the beautiful fall arrangement of spider mums and red and yellow maple leaves in an antique bronze vase did briefly catch her attention.
When Royce gave the receptionist her name, the young woman expressed her condolences and told her that Mr. Sage would see her immediately.
Marc, her next-door neighbor, handsome and affable friend, and now her attorney, came out to the reception area and ushered her into his office.
“Read this, Royce, before we get into the will.” He handed her a sealed envelope and his monogrammed silver letter opener.
She glanced from the envelope to Marc’s inscrutable face. He’d remained beside her chair, seemed to be waiting for her to open the letter. “Right now?”
She looked back at the envelope in her hand. Felt its smooth vellum surface. Her name on the front, in Eddy’s handwriting. And underlined. A farewell letter from Eddy. One he’d written in anticipation that this day might come. Whatever message it contained would not bring him back. It could never give them a second chance to do all the things they’d planned. To grow old together. Would only intensify her loss. Could she bear to read it? Marc patted her shoulder and took the chair next to her.
“Yes, these legal routines are hard, Royce. I’m here to help.”
She straightened her back. When she turned the letter over and thumbed the sealed flap, she felt a faint wrinkle in the heavy paper.
Frowning, she looked over at Marc. “Eddy sealed the envelope after he wrote the letter?”
“Yes. Even I haven’t read it, Royce.”
She nodded. With effort, she overcame her emotional resistance and slowly slid the bright edge of the letter opener under the flap. She unfolded the sheet of paper covered with Eddy’s careful script, as familiar as her own handwriting. She felt a sharp contraction in her chest, then her heart settled into a slow, painful beat.
“My darling Royce,
If you’re reading this letter, it means I haven’t had the guts to tell you this myself.”
Her vision blurred and tears gathered. “Tell me what?” She turned to Marc again, and he handed her a large white handkerchief. In one corner was embroidered an ornate S. She studied the dark blue monogram and knew she was seizing at any distraction to avoid reading Eddy’s letter.
“He said the letter was a separate provision from the will. I wasn’t sure it was wise, but he insisted.” She detected a puzzled note in Marc’s voice.
She wiped her eyes with the fine linen handkerchief, wadded it into a ball, and returned her gaze to the letter from her dead husband.
“You’ve been the love of my life ever since, back in Atlanta, I pulled you over in that beater of a car and glimpsed you through the cracked windshield. I can’t explain the things I’ve done, and there is no excuse. The only thing I can say is that some women affected me like a fever, and I couldn’t, or didn’t, resist.”
“No!” Royce crumpled the pages, rejecting what her unwilling mind recalled, her discovery of Eddy’s betrayal over twenty years earlier. Yet she never told Eddy. So why had he left this letter to dredge up that bitter day? The day only her body’s physical weakness had prevented her from grinding Lily Woodstone’s exquisite face to a pulp.
Marc’s lawyer countenance remained impassive, but his hazel eyes reflected compassion. “He warned me you would be shaken. I’m so sorry, Royce.”
“I can’t read this. Can we get on with the will?”
“As I said, Eddy wanted you to read the letter first.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. Could she do this? Smoothing out the crumpled pages, she tried to scan them quickly.
“…resist. I’d never met anyone like Lily. You saw the bruises. We both did. I only wanted to comfort and help her. And it happened. You were both pregnant then, but we lost our baby. I never had the nerve to ask Lily if I was Palm’s father. I only knew for sure after she had gone. She left a note telling me and asking me to watch over him. Marc will tell you about a bank account. Your name is on it. But I’m asking you to give the money to Palm as, I suppose, long-delayed child support. You were so trusting you never questioned any papers I asked you to sign. The money came from job bonuses and my sister. She insisted she owed me because after our parents died, I sent her to the private high school where she earned a college scholarship. And the years since had been financially good to her.”
Royce was sure Eleanor had indeed wanted to share her wealth with Eddy. Had he told his sister what he planned to do with the money? She was equally sure he had not. Royce did not doubt that Eleanor’s grief at her brother’s death was deep and bitter. And made more so by her belief that the wife she despised would inherit the money she had given him. Now Eddy had taken the easy way out by asking Royce to give the money to Palmer Woodstone—his and Lily’s child.
Shaken! The word hardly described her feelings. She barely felt able to hold a coherent thought. Not just when she found Lily’s shoes under their bed. She couldn’t think about that now. Must hold it together until this will business was finished and she could get out of Marc’s office.
“Tell Palm I know money can never make up for my failure to acknowledge him as my son.”
He finished the letter in a sort of soul-cleansing: “What I’m asking is a terrible burden for you, and I beg your forgiveness.”
The final sentence swam before her eyes. “My sweet Royce, I do love you. Eddy.”
The rest of the session with Marc was a blur. He read the will in his professional, impassive voice and handed her a copy. On each page were Eddy’s scribbled initials. On the last page, following Eddy’s scrawl and Marc Sage’s neat signature, was the name of a witness and a notary stamp. At the bottom were two sets of initials separated by a slash, Marc’s and those of the legal secretary who typed the will, she assumed. Finally, Marc showed her the bank book, put everything in a folder.
“Royce?” He waited for her to meet his eyes. “Call if you need me.” He handed her the folder. “We’ll go over it all again if you want to.”
“Thank you, Marc.”
“I’ll arrange for the death certificate and go with you to the bank.”
“That won’t be necessary, Marc, since only my name is on the account,” she reminded him.
He nodded and said nothing else.
****
Her brain was stalled on autopilot as she left his office. Phrases from Eddy’s letter gunked up her thoughts like cobwebs…you were so trusting… acknowledge him as my son…She paused on the stamped brick entry to the building, letting the early September sunlight meet the ice inside her body. Her hand groped one of the granite pillars as she went over in her mind what she had just seen.
Recalling the dates in the bank book, she realized that Eddy had deposited money into the secret account for more than twenty years. Ever since Lily went away, leaving husband, son, and friends. At least one hundred thousand dollars, two-thirds of the total, had to have been from his sister. At that moment, Royce vowed that Eleanor would never know about Palm and all those years Eddy had saved the money for him.
But the will. He’d had it drawn up barely a year ago. She’d accepted his explanation when he told her about it. I want to make it easier for you, if anything happens to me.
“You mean you wanted me to do your dirty work,” she muttered, “didn’t you, Eddy?”
He’d had Marc draw up a will with Royce as sole beneficiary. Then wrote the hateful letter asking Royce to give money in a secret bank account to the boy Lily claimed was his son. His son. Her knees started to buckle, and she barely made it to a wooden bench in front of a lady’s boutique in the building next door. She dro
pped down, hands clenching the folder. Lily, seducer of husbands and out of their lives for all these years. Eddy’s death, for God’s sake, bringing her back.
Royce leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Why did Hal have to bring her to Fall Creek? After living in the commune where he found her, Lily surely tired of small-town life and Hal’s single-minded attention to his greenhouses instead of to her. So she looked next door for another man to ensnare or “infect,” as Eddy called it. But when Lily realized he’d never leave Royce and his marriage for her, it must have shocked her. So she left town and in retaliation lied to Eddy about Palm’s paternity, knowing he would watch out for Palm. How could the woman sleep with the husband of her only friend? When Royce discovered their treachery and asked Lily, the woman gave no answer to the question.
Now after Eddy’s death, to learn of Lily’s lie and its threat to shatter all that Royce held dear, the life she’d built. The life and marriage she had refused to allow Eddy’s self-proclaimed “fever” to destroy. It was not going to happen, not then, not now. Not ever.
The money. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Why should she hand it over to Palm Woodstone? And Eleanor Frost certainly didn’t need it back. Paying for Eddy’s funeral would take most of his insurance. Since their mortgage had been paid in full, if she was careful, she might squeak by on the Police Department widow’s pension until she found a job. If a job in Fall Creek could be found. But if the house needed a major repair, or she got sick, what then? After what Eddy had done to her, she deserved the money, all of it. Nobody knew about the letter, and she’d make sure nobody ever did. No one.
Royce took a deep breath and glanced up into the window of the boutique, filled with sheer, varicolored, full-skirted dresses. Dresses with fluted hems and flowing sleeves. A young girl arranged a tasseled sash over the shoulder of a magenta tunic. The kind of clothing Lily used to wear. Royce jumped to her feet and almost ran to her car.
When she reached home, she threw the folder of papers on her desk. In her bedroom, she changed into jeans, an ancient cotton shirt, and her gardening sneakers and went outside again. The mulch for the tulip and iris beds still lay on the deck next to the house. Better get it spread.
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