Clause & Effect

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

  Of course he had. He’d been about to run for office. He’d been worried that he’d be blamed for Grace’s actions.

  “I wonder sometimes if I could have done more to help her.” Regret underscored Welby’s words and his shoulders drooped. “Perhaps if I’d referred her to a psychiatrist, or convinced her to enroll in the local community college, things might have turned out differently. She was a difficult youngster, though, likely to do just the opposite of what anyone in authority suggested.” On a long, drawn-out sigh, he repeated, “Just the opposite.”

  “You tried to help,” I said.

  He seemed to appreciate my attempt to console him, but had no further information to offer about Grace’s associates or her activities, other than those relating to the pageant, in the days before her death.

  After I left the mayor’s office, I had much to consider. If Grace had acted inappropriately with Tony Welby, a man who had only wanted what was best for her, then she hadn’t been a very good judge of character. It followed that she might have been mistaken about the way someone else in her life would react to her behavior. When provoked, that person had struck back, and Grace Yarrow had ended up dead.

  Chapter 27

  That afternoon, I made a phone call to Florida and talked to Bud Graham. My pretext of writing an article about the bicentennial worked wonders with him. He was happy to reminisce about the good old days when he’d been in charge of the historical society. He sounded as if he missed Lenape Hollow, making me wonder why he didn’t come back, at least during the summer months when the weather was warm. I wasn’t sure how old he was, but the tremulous quality of his voice confirmed he was getting on in years, and the occasional pause for a phlegmy cough suggested he had health issues, as well.

  “Why are you asking me about this again?” he asked after recounting the same story Judy had told me about the scrim getting caught on a stage light.

  “We’re celebrating the 225th anniversary of the founding of Lenape Hollow.” Hadn’t I already told him that? I wondered if his memory was going.

  “I got that, but you keep asking about the pageant in particular. Why?”

  “Because we’re doing it again. Well, a version of it, anyway.”

  There was nothing wrong with his memory! My explanation set off a rant about the stupidity of repeating something that had been a waste of time and money the first time around.

  “Badly conceived, badly written, and badly produced,” he declared as he wound down.

  “The new version is much better,” I assured him, “despite the time constraints and the furor when the wall collapsed.”

  Dead silence reigned on the other end of the phone line.

  I cleared my throat. “I guess you haven’t heard about that.”

  “Guess I haven’t. You want to fill me in?”

  As succinctly as I could, I gave him the details.

  Given his strong feelings about Grace’s work, I expected some reaction. He didn’t say a word until I prompted him by asking if he had any theories about what might have happened.

  “You asking me who killed her?”

  “Do you know?”

  He gave a strangled laugh that started him coughing again. When he caught his breath, he was short with me. “You don’t need to know that for this article you’re writing.”

  “No, but you can’t blame me for being curious. Grace was killed at the historical society, Mr. Graham. Odds are good that the person who murdered her was someone you knew from your work there.”

  This concept seemed to stump him, but not for long. “I’d lay odds on Elise if she wasn’t so tiny. Maybe she had help.”

  My heart began to beat a little faster. Was he onto something? “Who would have helped her back then?”

  This time his answer came without hesitation. “That Baxter fellow had the same reason as Elise to be ticked off at Grace. The way I remember it, Grace dumped him to take up with Elise’s husband.”

  Clutching the phone a little tighter, I asked, “Did you ever hear either of them threaten her?”

  “Can’t say as I did.” He chuckled. “Nope. The only one doing any threatening was Judy Kenner. Heard her light into Baxter one day when I was trying to concentrate on some paperwork and they were in the vestibule.”

  “I’m confused,” I admitted. “Why was Judy upset.”

  “Because Baxter dumped her to take up with Grace, of course. What? You think people with an interest in history are stuffy? Peyton Place had nothing on Lenape Hollow back in the day.”

  Flummoxed is the word that best describes my reaction to this statement. By the time I figured out what else I wanted to ask him, Bud Graham had hung up on me.

  Chapter 28

  I’d already made plans to have supper at Darlene’s house that evening. Frank had a meeting to go to, and she needed a guinea pig for a new recipe she was trying, a delicious Middle Eastern dish with a name I couldn’t pronounce. The whole house was redolent with enticing, exotic aromas.

  During the meal, I brought her up-to-date on the results of my amateur sleuthing. The only thing I left out was Bud’s claim of an affair between her sister and Gilbert Baxter. We were clearing away the dishes and I was working up to broaching that subject when the front doorbell rang.

  “It’s open,” Darlene shouted. “Come on in.”

  I sent her an amused look. “You’d better hope it isn’t our friendly local ax murderer.”

  It was worse. Ronnie North stormed through the living and dining rooms and into the kitchen, eyes shooting sparks, breathing fire . . . well, you get the idea. All that heat was directed at me.

  “There you are! Honest to God, Mikki, you are such a pain in the butt.”

  “What did I do?”

  “You told Bud Graham you’re writing an article about the bicentennial. You made it sound as if I authorized it.”

  “Oh, well—”

  Darlene interrupted before I could plead guilty. “Settle down, Ronnie. This has nothing to do with you.”

  We both turned to look at her. I hadn’t come right out and told Bud that Ronnie had suggested I talk to him, but in the process of explaining who I was and what I was doing, I had allowed him to leap to that conclusion.

  “Mikki’s starting a blog,” Darlene announced.

  As much as I wanted to deny it, I thought better of contradicting her and kept my mouth shut. If Darlene’s lie got Ronnie off my case, who was I to object?

  “It’s going to be called ‘Lincoln’s Language Log’ and it’s mostly about writing,” Darlene elaborated. “You know—Mikki’s pet grammar peeves? But she’s also planning to blog about local events and life in Lenape Hollow. Right, Mikki?”

  “Uh, right. Although I haven’t settled on the name for the blog yet.”

  Faced with Darlene’s earnest enthusiasm and unaware that my friend had been lobbying me unsuccessfully for months to do something on social media to promote my editing business, Ronnie backed off. She didn’t apologize, of course. Admitting she was wrong went against her nature.

  “You might have been clearer about that when you talked to Bud.” Her lips pursed into a thin, disapproving line.

  I leaned back in my chair and attempted to appear nonchalant. “I take it he phoned you?”

  “He did. He wanted to know if the police have made any progress in finding Grace Yarrow’s killer.” She paused, her frown deepening. “I must say, he didn’t seem too distraught when I told him the investigation appeared to be stalled.”

  “They haven’t discovered anything at all about what happened to her?” Darlene asked.

  “Not that I can see, and I asked the mayor himself to monitor their progress for me.” Smug satisfaction laced her voice. “It helps to know the right people. Tony Welby has enough influence to get answers the general public can’t.”

  Having impressed us with her importance in the pecking order of the village, Ronnie cut her losses and declared she had a pressing commitment elsewhere. I waited until I h
eard the front door close behind her before I spoke.

  “I am not starting a blog.”

  “You’ll have to now. She’ll be on the lookout for it.”

  “Let her look,” I muttered.

  Darlene ignored me. “If you don’t want to call it Lincoln’s Language Log, we can go with the other title we discussed.”

  “The Write Right Wright Writes?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “We’ve been over this before, Darlene. I don’t want to blog under any name. Aside from the amount of time it would eat up, I don’t have anything to say. Blogging is useless if you don’t have followers, and the only way to get them is to post something new and interesting every single day.”

  “You have lots of pet peeves when it comes to writing.”

  “Not enough to for three-hundred-sixty-five blogs a year.”

  “That’s okay. As I told Ronnie, you’re also going to post pieces about life in Lenape Hollow. Just think of all the wonderful topics you can explore.”

  I sighed and went back to clearing the table, the task we’d left unfinished when Ronnie barged in on us. “Such as?”

  “Nostalgia is a gold mine. Stories from our high school days. Bits of trivia. You can start with charm bracelets. After we were reminiscing about pajama parties the other day, I was hunting for something else in my jewelry box and came across mine. It has three horse charms.” She grinned. “I was mad about horses in those days.”

  “Did your bracelet come with a charm that showed the number sixteen with a high-heeled shoe on either side of it?”

  “It did.” Her grin broadened. “Learning how to walk on stilts was a rite of passage back then.”

  “Except that our mothers wouldn’t let us wear anything but those little ones—what do they call them?”

  “Kitten heels.”

  We both laughed at the memory.

  “We wanted so badly to be grown up and sophisticated,” I said. “Now I sometimes wish we could regain the innocence of youth.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “No, I suppose I don’t. Do you think Ronnie’s right about the police being stymied?”

  “Well, if her good friend the mayor said so . . .” There was more than a hint of sarcasm in Darlene’s voice.

  “I wonder if what I’ve learned so far can help them? I’m sure the people I spoke with told me more than they revealed to Detective Hazlett, but I’m not sure any of it means anything.”

  “You should talk to him,” Darlene said. “Let him sort the wheat from the chaff. Just be prepared to listen to the standard lecture afterward. He’ll remind you you’re not Nancy Drew and then warn you not to meddle in police business.”

  I shook my head, remembering what the mayor had said. “Not Nancy Drew. At our age, the amateur sleuth of choice has to be Miss Marple.”

  Chapter 29

  We were both wrong.

  The next day, after I’d shared the results of my snooping with the good detective, he informed me that Mrs. Pollifax couldn’t have done better. I stared at him, stunned. Not a fictional amateur detective, but a fictional spy?

  “Was that a compliment?”

  His eyes warmed by a fraction of a degree at hearing the suspicion in my voice. “It was, but don’t let it go to your head. I’ll be honest with you, Ms. Lincoln. We’re getting nowhere on this case. Any insight you have to offer is more than welcome.”

  “I thought I’d have to defend myself. Say something like, ‘I can’t help it if people talk to me,’ or ‘I just hear things’ before you suggested that I might want to remove my hearing aids.”

  “Good one. I had no idea I was so clever.”

  “Did the autopsy reveal anything helpful?”

  He hesitated and then, with a “oh, what the hell” shrug, told me that Grace had been killed by a blow to the head.

  “That doesn’t help you much, does it? Anyone could have done it.”

  “Good summary.”

  I hesitated, remembering my far-fetched, briefly held theory about my young cousin. It was no more likely to be true now than it had been the night of tryouts, not when we shared a physical feature as obvious as the Greenleigh nose, but that didn’t rule out a variation on the theme.

  “Did the autopsy reveal whether or not Grace had ever had a child?”

  His gaze sharpened. “Why do you ask?”

  “Humor me.”

  “It’s apparently possible to determine that when dealing with a fresh body, although not with a hundred percent accuracy. Given the condition of the remains, no such determination could be made.”

  He waited for me to explain why I wanted to know.

  “You’re the one who asked me if Grace had children. Remember? No one has suggested that she did, and even if there was a child, he or she would hardly be a suspect in her murder. He’d have been what? Two or three years old at the most?”

  “She was twenty-four when she died. Given what we’ve learned of her life, she could have had a child at fifteen or even younger. But you’re right. Even a nine- or ten-year-old, presumably given up for adoption and unaware of his real mother’s identity, isn’t a likely suspect. An adoptive parent would also be a long shot.”

  So much for that idea.

  He looked down at the notes he’d made while we talked. I’m not good at reading upside down, but even I could see that he’d listed five names at the bottom of the page: Gilbert Baxter, Elise Sanders, Ronnie North, Bud Graham, and Judy Brohaugh.

  “You should add those boys on the stage crew,” I said. “The ones Judy told me about. I looked up their names on the program.” I rattled them off and he dutifully wrote them down.

  When he looked up, there was a faint smile on his craggy face. “If you were thinking of interviewing these men for your imaginary article, Ms. Lincoln, I can save you the trouble.” He tapped the middle name with the eraser end of his pencil. “This gentleman, now a respectable businessman in our little community, came in of his own volition as soon we released the victim’s identity. He thought we’d want to know what he remembered about her.”

  “And?”

  The twinkle in his eyes was a good match for his smile. “He offered a detailed account of an encounter between himself and Grace Yarrow that took place in a supply closet at the historical society. It was apparently the most memorable sexual experience of his young life.”

  “Let me guess—he didn’t notice anything beyond her . . . physical attributes.”

  “Young men are somewhat single-minded at that age. Seventeen, in case you’re wondering. She was older, experienced, and she warned him that if he ever bragged about what they’d done, he’d regret it. She threatened him with a very jealous ex-boyfriend.”

  I sucked in a breath. “Gilbert Baxter?”

  “Let’s not jump to any conclusions. And, Ms. Lincoln? Although I want to hear about anything further you might happen to learn, it would be best if you stopped asking pointed questions. The person we’re looking for cracked open Grace Yarrow’s skull. I’d hate to have the same thing happen to you.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I promised. “In particular, I’ll stay away from Baxter.”

  It wasn’t so much being bashed over the head that worried me. It was that the killer had so successfully hidden his victim’s body that it took a freak accident twenty-five years later to reveal his crime.

  Stupid murderers make mistakes and get caught.

  Smart ones? Maybe not.

  Chapter 30

  I went home resolved to get some editing done, but wouldn’t you know it? Everything I read seemed custom designed to send my thoughts straight back to Grace Yarrow’s murder. I turned to Valentine Veilleux’s coffee-table book, hoping that working on the text to go with cute photographs of kittens and puppies would distract me. It didn’t. The first jpeg file I called up showed a droopy-eared mutt staring with abject longing at a white poodle walking away from him.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

&nb
sp; I shut down the file. Then I closed my laptop. Calpurnia, who was curled up on the windowsill in a sunbeam, opened one eye, gave me a hard stare, and closed it again.

  “Obviously, my subconscious is not about to let things be,” I muttered.

  She had no reaction to that statement.

  I’d come home from the police station fully resolved to meddle no more. Anything else I learned about the case would be purely by accident, or so I told myself. Only a few hours later I already knew it wasn’t true. I’d thought of several angles I could pursue without coming into direct contact with my prime suspect.

  There was no doubt in my mind that Gilbert Baxter had the best motive for killing Grace—jealousy. I could imagine him rationalizing with the old “if I can’t have you, no one will” excuse. But there were loose ends, things I might yet discover that tied—you should forgive the pun—into the larger mystery. Those bits and pieces might also exonerate other people, Judy Brohaugh in particular. If Bud Graham was right and she’d been seeing Baxter before he took up with Grace, she had a pretty good motive for wanting the other woman out of the way. For Darlene’s sake, if not for her sister’s, I wanted to eliminate Judy as a suspect in the murder of Grace Yarrow.

  I glanced at my watch. Diego had scheduled a rehearsal for five o’clock. It was the first one to be held outdoors at the site where the pageant was to be performed. Darlene had told me that she and Ronnie planned to be there. As members of the board, they assumed they had a standing invitation to kibitz. I smiled to myself. Diego Goldberg might appreciate having someone there to distract those two from taking too keen an interest in the way he staged the production. Wasn’t it lucky that they were also the two people most likely to confirm or deny Bud’s salacious memories of the good old days?

  Up until now I’d avoided telling Darlene what he’d said about her sister, but it wasn’t as if she didn’t already know that Judy was capable of indulging in an illicit affair. Once I shared that story, I hoped she’d be able to offer some insight into how serious the relationship might have been, and into how Judy was likely to have reacted when it ended.