“But she didn’t kill Theo Carson,” she said, stubbornly, ignoring the little voice in her head that said he was right.
“I believe—and now that we have those two in custody we may be able to find out—that one of them met up with her when she was on that bender, and saw a chance to use her car.”
“Oh.” Jaymie thought it through. “I wonder if, instead of Dick or Prentiss, it was Iago. He’s the type who might be in a bar, right? I speculated that he was looking for a way to move his merchandise out of the house; maybe that was his intent, to use her car to finish up the last of the stuff in the attic.”
“Why not use his pa’s car?”
Jaymie thought for a moment, her tired mind going in circles before settling down. “Well, his father had the car, that we already know.”
“Might just have to put the thumbscrews to young Iago for the whole scoop. You know, we did a trace on the commenter who posted about Iago being seen climbing out of the Dumpe Manor window. Do you know who it was?”
Jaymie glanced over at him, waiting.
“Richard, aka Dick Schuster.”
Jaymie digested that information. “I’ll bet it was just a way to get the guy in trouble, and by extension, cause trouble for Prentiss. What a weird, sick relationship those two have.”
The chief nodded, sleepily. “Yup, that’s what we figure. Dick might have thought he could stop the whole merry-go-round he was on if Prentiss had other problems to take care of.”
“Why didn’t he just say no to Prentiss? If he had, Theo would still be alive.”
Chief Ledbetter slowly shook his head, his jowls wobbling. “Easy to say for you. We’ve been looking into those two gentlemen’s history. Dick Schuster has had a lifetime of troubles, and the rotten doctor took advantage. He knew how to place Schuster in a type of bondage every bit as strong as shackles.”
“Unfortunately, I think Theo brought some of this on himself,” Jaymie said, just then remembering to tell the chief about the stolen tablet, and what she had learned about it being a bribe for Theo to stay quiet. “I don’t think he knew who he was dealing with. He thought he could blackmail them and still do what he wanted, still sneak into the house and look for the Dumpe family manuscript.”
“You think that’s what Theo was after?”
She nodded. “I do; he was really ambitious, and desperate to match the success of his first book. Isolde believes that, too. Chief, if you knew some of this earlier, would it have helped put those two away?”
He shrugged, his big shoulders rolling. “Probably not. Couldn’t arrest them for murder before they did it, right? Might have gotten Iago on theft, but he’d be out on bail by now anyway.”
“I guess all you would have had on Prentiss would have been the suspected fraud with the will.” She sighed with some relief. “Nothing I knew would have helped you get them earlier.”
“That is not for you to think, young lady,” he admonished. “Could be true, but we might have gotten lucky if we’d known for sure that Prentiss’s alibi was a fake.”
“I just thought . . .” She trailed off and stared out into the darkness, longing to be already inside with her puppy and cat. But she still felt the need to explain herself. His opinion of her mattered. “I couldn’t turn Cynthia in, not when I promised not to. It didn’t seem right. But I told her to come to you.”
“I know. But we’d already spoken to Mrs. Turbridge. When I told her we knew she was not home that night, and that Dr. Dumpe said she was with him, she confirmed it. If I’d known what she’d told you earlier, it may have helped.”
“I’m sorry,” Jaymie said, feeling weepy all of a sudden. “I really am. I just . . . I knew in my gut Cynthia didn’t do it, but I was worried about her.”
“You try to help people too much. You have got to let them figure things out for themselves. Tell the truth and shame the devil, my mother always said.”
“She sounds like my grandmother.”
“If you had told us about her, we could have broken Prentiss’s alibi and brought him back in for questioning. I don’t think Mrs. Turbridge realized what it meant, that he needed an alibi. That fella had a way of controlling his patients. When she finally saw what was up with him, she couldn’t very well back out.” He paused and looked her over. “You, young lady, get out and go to bed, go to sleep. You look about done in.”
Tears flooded her eyes. “I’m overdone, for sure. I’m so lucky I ended up at Jakob’s house, but I was afraid I’d put him and his daughter in danger.”
“You did what you had to do. Might have saved your own life, ’cause there’s no saying you would have made it all the way to the police station without being run off the road. They were getting desperate. I’d rather you had a fighting chance than be rolled over, trapped in your van or worse.” He paused, then said, gruffly, “I feel like I put you in danger myself, you know, coming over here and giving you the impression I was asking for help. I was just trying to figure out what you knew, see if you had any information you didn’t even know you had, if you get my meaning.”
“None of this is your fault. I got smug, figuring I could look after myself because I’ve done it before. I’m sorry about that. How many times do I have to learn the same lesson? It won’t happen again.” She said good night and felt some comfort that the chief waited in the lane until she had let Hoppy out to piddle. But when she finally went into the house, she saw the message light was blinking on her phone. The call display didn’t tell her anything; it wasn’t a number she recognized. She hit the message button, and Isolde’s voice filled the kitchen.
“Jaymie, I don’t know what to do! I’m out at Dumpe Manor looking for . . . wait . . . I think I may have—”
The message broke off there, but there was a muffled screech. What the heck? With shaking hands Jaymie called the Queensville police and in two minutes Chief Ledbetter was in her back alley again. She grabbed her coat and ran out to him. “Chief,” she said, out of breath, leaning over his car window. “Isolde may be in trouble, or . . . I don’t know!” She explained what she had heard, and he agreed that time was of the essence. He radioed for backup, but they took off to the historic house and were there in two minutes.
“Chief, that message came just about the time I was on my way out there. She wouldn’t be in the house, not with the security system armed. I don’t think it was any coincidence that Dick Schuster was there right when I was.” She thought for a moment as they pulled up the lane. “I hope she’s okay,” she said, her voice choked. “But I think we need to look for her . . . maybe even out at the root cellar.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” he grumbled, heaving himself out of the driver’s seat and grabbing a huge flashlight.
Jaymie dashed up to the garage, first, and looked in, but Isolde was not there, so to the root cellar they must go.
It was cold . . . so cold! Snowflakes fluttered down in the bobbing beam of the flashlight as the police chief and Jaymie hustled across the frozen field, with the chief sweeping the beam of light across the dark field in an arc, in case Isolde was somewhere out in the open. That was why he hadn’t driven, he told Jaymie; he was afraid she was out in the open and didn’t want to risk running her over.
But when they got to the root cellar, Jaymie stared at the door. “I guess we should look in there.”
“I’ll go,” he said.
She gave him a look. “I don’t mean to be impertinent, Chief, but that door isn’t . . . that is . . .” How to say tactfully that there was no way he could get into the root cellar.
“The door isn’t big enough for me,” he said, bluntly. “Okay. So we wait for backup.”
“No, I’m sorry but I won’t leave her there alone another minute.” She took the flashlight and ducked into the door, playing the beam into the dank interior. There, cowering in a corner, was a moaning and shivering Isolde Rasmusse
n. “She’s here, and she’s okay!” Jaymie shouted.
Jaymie helped her out of the root cellar and they both held her up as they walked back to the car. As she shivered in the chief’s car waiting for the ambulance, Isolde confirmed much of what they had speculated, and more they didn’t know. She said Theo Carson had had an inkling something was going on with the house, but he didn’t know what.
She told them that he’d started out looking for the legendary Dumpe manuscript, but in one of his perusals of the house must have come across some of the stolen goods, Isolde thought, because once when they were there, he went up to the attic but wouldn’t let her follow. He told her there was nothing of interest there but she had a feeling he was lying.
And that was why she had followed him the night of the murder. Theo did indeed take her cell phone, Isolde said. Why he texted Jaymie was a mystery, but Jaymie had a feeling it was his intention to get her out there to try to figure out what she knew, and what else there was in the house.
“Isolde, you told me that Theo got a phone call that night and seemed rushed. Who do you think called him?”
She shook her head. “It had to be one of them, right?”
Jaymie thought and met the police chief’s eyes. “I wonder if Dick or Prentiss called him to lure him out there, and told him to get me out there, too. He would not have known what they intended. He’d know that I’d be more likely to respond to a text from Isolde than from him.”
With a heavy sigh, the chief nodded. “We have Isolde’s phone, but we’ve never found Carson’s,” he said. “We might never be able to prove that. Could be important, so we’ll do our damnedest. Would prove premeditation right there.”
As the ambulance arrived, Isolde told them what little else she knew. Because at that point she thought Theo had found something important and was trying to exclude her from the fame, she followed him out there. When she pulled up to the house, she saw exactly what she told the police she saw. She hadn’t lied to them about any of that. She couldn’t tell if there was one man or two at the scene. She was hit from behind and knocked out; that seemed to indicate, to Jaymie at least, that Iago Dumpe probably was there that night and, as she had speculated, had Cynthia Turbridge’s car, maybe parked down the road or behind the garage.
Isolde was bundled into the trunk of a car, likely Cynthia’s, because the blood on Cynthia’s sweater must have rubbed off the clothes of the actual murderer, Dick Schuster. Forensics would eventually reveal what had happened. Isolde had been out cold and did not know anything until she was dropped off in town, coincidentally (or on purpose, who would ever know?) near Jaymie’s home. With the information they now had it would be a shortcut to the truth for the police, and to the prosecution of the unholy trio of Dick Schuster, Prentiss Dumpe and his son, Iago.
Who would have thought that three of the suspects would be working together?
Earlier that day, after Jaymie talked to Isolde on the phone at the Wolverhampton Historical Museum, Isolde had called Prentiss Dumpe, whom she suspected of the murder, and asked him if he had the Dumpe manuscript Theo had been looking for. She was stupid enough to threaten him, implying she had really seen something that night, even though she hadn’t. He told her he had hidden the manuscript in the garage at the historic house. She could have it if she would just keep her mouth shut.
In retrospect it was obviously a ploy to control her movements, but she fell right in with his plan. Recklessly, she went there directly from work. When the papers weren’t where Prentiss said they were, she called Jaymie’s house, using the pay-as-you-go cell phone she had bought to replace her missing one. She was calling Jaymie to ask her to meet her and help search, on the principle that shared glory was better than no glory, when Prentiss and Dick confronted her.
Who knew what they had intended? Isolde heard enough that she thought they planned to kill her and make it look like a remorseful suicide, hoping to throw the police off the trail of the three henchmen, but when they found out she had just called Jaymie, they decided to bundle Isolde off into the root cellar and wait to see what happened. Jaymie did show up, but not in response to the phone call she must have just missed.
The rest, Jaymie knew. One thing for sure, if she had been home and gotten that call from Isolde, she would not have gone to the house, she would have called the police. Isolde was a more reckless version of herself, and she was a little ashamed at the danger she had put herself in at times. Daniel was, to some extent, right to warn her to be careful, and she’d tell him that next time she talked to him.
Isolde appeared to be recovering nicely, but the EMTs were going to take her to the hospital as a precaution. The chief hoped to be able to reconstruct some of the night’s activities using Prentiss’s and Dick’s seized cell phones. They could tell a lot from the timing and number of phone calls and text messages between them.
An hour later Jaymie was finally home again, as snow lightly dusted the holly bushes and grass, and whirled in dancing swirls in the soft glow of her back porch light. She went in, greeted by a blinky, sleepy Hoppy, and turned off the kitchen light. She heard Chief Ledbetter’s police car engine thrum with a throaty murmur as the car pulled away.
She collapsed in bed, both her critters curled up beside her in the dark, Hoppy’s twitching and snoring strangely comforting. Something in her universe had shifted and she wasn’t sure what it was, despite the chief telling her it was the crimes she had seen committed, the turmoil she had witnessed firsthand. Maybe she was just overwrought, and that was why she felt so odd, so muddled and emotional. She must have fallen deeply asleep, because she awoke with a start; it was morning and her phone was ringing.
“H’lo?” she muttered, cradling the handset against her cheek.
“Jaymie, are you all right? Are you okay? My God, what happened?”
“Valetta?” She looked over at the clock. “What time is it? I can’t see.”
Her friend was calmer when she next spoke. “If you’ve been sleeping, you must be okay. Do you want to call me when you’re awake? I’m at home. Or I could just come over.”
An hour later after a hot shower, she was finishing up her story to Valetta, who sat at her table, mug in hand. At the same time she fielded phone calls and explained her night to various people. Nan, her editor at the Howler, was one of the first and said she was sending a reporter over to talk to Jaymie. That was not what she wanted to do—talk about events with a reporter—but what could she say to the woman who had been so helpful to her budding career as a food writer?
“I can’t believe those two, Prentiss and Dick, were in it together,” Valetta said, shaking her head and then gulping down the last of her tea. “How did they come to be in cahoots?”
“As unpleasant as he seemed to be to me, the doctor had some folks under his spell. Prentiss Dumpe is a master manipulator, or he is if you’re as troubled and afraid as Dick Schuster. The guy started out as a patient, I guess, trying to get his marriage back on track, but after his wife dumped him—pardon the pun—he ended up under the doctor’s thumb, totally controlled and manipulated by Prentiss. There even may be some pharmacological manipulation in there somewhere,” she said, shooting a sideways glance at Valetta, who remained stone-faced. “You’re not going to say anything?”
Valetta shrugged. “I may or may not have called the licensing board on Dr. Prentiss Dumpe once or twice when I got worried about the meds he was ordering for his patients.”
“Okay, I won’t press. I know that’s private. Anyway, it’s all kind of a jumbled mess. I think it got that way because of three crooks and a bunch of snoops, like me and Theo. I’m sure the police know more than I do about some aspects, by now, but a few things are clear. Prentiss knew about his son’s side business, stealing everything he could get his hands on. It’s been going on for a while. He seemed to feel it was their right to make use of Dumpe Manor as a storage facility, but then when the society fi
nalized the real estate deal in October, that left them with too short a time to get all the stuff out, especially with all the folks going in and out at all hours.”
“All the stolen stuff. They were moving it to the root cellar, right?”
Jaymie nodded. “Until I discovered that hiding place, which left them with nowhere. That’s why they ended up with a bunch of stuff still in the attic, shoved back so far it wouldn’t have been found for a while if it hadn’t been for the alarm guy. I think Prentiss was hoping that the discovery of the will would put a halt to all this business about fixing up and opening the home in early December. That may even have been some of the motive behind planting the fake will.”
“Okay, back up, back up. So . . . why did you end up bonked on the head in the first place? And who did it?”
“It was all about the will. Schuster was supposed to be planting it, but got scared when he heard me, so he grabbed the first weapon he could find and hit me on the head. Isolde was coming to the house to check it out. Theo was out of town and she was hoping to search the house for whatever it was he was hiding from her. Luckily, she helped me. So the will had to be planted later—I figure that’s when Dick took the other mallet, the one he used to kill Theo—but he and Prentiss didn’t know that Imogene and Mrs. Bellwood had already thoroughly searched the kitchen cupboard. I’ll bet they took my tool kit, too, because it hasn’t turned up since.”
“This was a mess, wasn’t it?”
Jaymie nodded. Valetta didn’t know the half of it. “The chief now knows about Cynthia, and we’ve figured out they used her car while she was passed out, then parked it near Algonac to confuse her. It had to be a maze of cars that night, before you and I got there, because they also had Theo’s and Isolde’s! I still don’t know where Theo’s car is or was, but I suppose the police do. There were three of them, so I guess they worked it out. They had a plan, I suppose, but Isolde and I kept mucking it up. It’s lucky for Cynthia she didn’t wake up while all this was going on, or she’d probably be dead. I think they were hoping she’d think she was guilty and end up arrested and her car searched for forensic evidence.”
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