“So you wouldn’t believe him,” she answered promptly, and knew it was true.
“Yoder hasn’t told us anything.”
“He wouldn’t. Zach depends on Virgil for his family’s livelihood. You should see what he puts up with from that man. Maybe it’s his pacifist upbringing. But just in case he ever did, Virgil tried to make sure you wouldn’t trust him. It worked with me, didn’t it?”
“There he is.” Fred pulled over to the side of the road at a wide place. Sure enough, Zach’s pickup was parked just ahead of them. When they stopped, Zach jumped out and ran over to them.
“You got her!” he said, leaning through the passenger window to shake Fred’s hand. And then, to Joan, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Zach, thank you so much for sending help. And for coming yourself.”
“I had to. When I saw that awl in my toolbox, I knew Virgil put it there, and I thought I could guess why. Then I saw him taking you out to the quarry, and I could guess why he was doing that, too. I wanted to stay, but …”
“I know.” She patted his hand, resting on the window opening. “You did all you could.”
“You did exactly the right thing, waiting for us here,” Fred told him. “He’s under arrest.”
“And you can help now,” Joan said. “Will you?”
“Well, sure.” He looked puzzled.
“Tell us what happened when you were building Henry’s house,” she said. Fred’s eyebrows rose, but he kept quiet, and she went on. “On the drive out to the quarry Virgil let it slip about his concrete business, so I know that part.” Zach nodded. “But you know the rest. And you know why it matters.”
“Yeah.” Zach scuffed his toe in the dust before meeting her eyes. “For a long time I convinced myself that it didn’t. Virgil’s always in a hurry, always taking shortcuts, always going for the cheapest way to throw up a building. He’s not the only one, by a long shot. But he goes over the line. It was bound to catch up with him someday.”
“Uh-huh.” Like Ucello and his data fudging. “What did he do?”
“You know his concrete is below standard. And he never uses enough rebar. But he usually gets away with it. Nobody inspects that below-ground stuff. By the time the inspectors come around, he’s buried it. Later on, if the wall cracks, he blames it on settling, and on his subcontractor, Sands Building Supplies. Only there isn’t any subcontractor. It’s just Virgil, with another name. Sands, Shoals, it’s the same thing. He keeps different books and all, of course.”
Kind of risky to choose a name like that, Joan thought. But maybe not. I didn’t think of Shoals when Esther mentioned Sands.
“So we know why there was a crack in Henry’s foundation,” she said. “But that doesn’t explain the beam that fell on him. I’m sure Virgil would say you measured wrong.”
“I told him it wouldn’t work. It wasn’t big enough in the first place, and it was only bearing half an inch. But he wouldn’t pay for a bigger beam, and he wouldn’t wait for a longer one.”
“He wasn’t worried about the inspectors?”
“They never size the beams—they’re often not even sized on the blueprint. Bigger beams cost so much more, it’s really tempting to a guy like Virgil to undersize them. But an undersized beam can crack. And if it arrives short, like that one, you know you’re in trouble. I tried to tell him, but I couldn’t make him do anything about it.”
“What could he have done?”
“He could have sent for a longer one, but that takes time, and time is money. Or we could have changed the framing, so it would bear on more cripples—” He looked at the blank expressions on their faces. “Each end of a beam that size ought to rest on two or three two-by-fours, or cripples, so it would bear on at least three inches. More is better. But that one ended up barely hanging over part of one cripple. Almost anything could knock it loose when you install it that shallow, any little change in the foundation, or maybe that tree that hit the house. But old Virgil was in a hurry. He left it. Then he even wanted me to hurry and skimp on nailing the floor joists above it.” Zach shook his head. “That would have made it that much more dangerous.”
“Did you agree?”
“No. That’s where I drew the line. He pulled me off the job, sent me across town. I don’t know what happened after that.”
“I’m surprised a man like David used him,” Joan said.
“Virgil never cut corners on the judge’s house. Might have overcharged him, but he didn’t skimp.”
“So Putnam didn’t know,” Fred said. He’d been following well, Joan thought. And jumping to the connection, or seeming lack of one.
“He knew some of it after the tornado,” she said. “He took a backhoe over to Henry’s and dug out the foundation, right where the big crack was. Virgil must have blamed that on Sands. I heard them talking about it at a Ruddigore rehearsal, only I thought they were talking about Zach and the picture frames. He’d blamed Zach when they weren’t right, and it sounded as if David was agreeing with him. David told him that someone else’s sloppy work could wreck his good name. I thought he was awfully heavy-handed, and that he shouldn’t have stood up for Zach to his face and then bad-mouthed him behind his back. I was disappointed in David. He’d seemed like such an honorable man. I should have known he wouldn’t change all of a sudden.”
“When did they have that conversation?”
“The night David fell asleep on the supports, the night before he was killed. Oh!”
“Uh-huh,” Fred said.
Now the pieces were falling into place, and they made sense. Joan blurted it all out.
“Bad enough that David found the leak. Virgil talked him out of that. But he had to shut him up before he measured the beam. He would have, you know, once he was suspicious, and Virgil couldn’t have blamed that on any subcontractor. For starters, with David on the hospital board, Virgil would have lost any chance at the new nursing home contract. He buffaloed Zach—sorry, Zach—but there was no way he could buffalo David. David no longer trusted him, I know. After he was dead, Ellen told me he’d had cold feet about their new addition. Besides, he loved that old man. You should have seen him when he was calling the ambulance for Henry from my house. He stomped around hollering, ‘It shouldn’t have happened!’ If he’d suspected the truth—that Virgil risked Henry’s life to make an extra dollar—Virgil ought to have been more afraid of David than of anyone David might have told. Maybe he was, and he panicked.” She finally ran down.
“Maybe.” Fred leaned over to Zach. “You wouldn’t happen to have your toolbox with you, would you?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Mind showing it to me?”
Joan waited in the police car while he and Zach went over to Zach’s truck. Exhausted, she leaned back against the seat and quit fighting the weight of her eyelids.
The siren wailing brought her back to full consciousness, and she sat up straight in time to see the ambulance barreling past them on the way to the quarry. Not far behind it her old Honda, screeching to a halt. And Andrew, his hair wild, jumping out and dashing across the road. She got out on shaky legs to meet his warm hug. Her ankle twinged only a little. It was going to be all right, she was sure.
“Andrew!”
“Mom! The police called me. They said you were safe, but I had to come see for myself. Why are you still out here?”
“We’ve been asking Zach some questions about Virgil Shoals.”
“He was right, then? Shoals was kidnapping you?”
“I guess so. Except that he didn’t want ransom. He wanted me dead.”
“You should have told us last night what you were thinking, instead of saving it for Fred.” He ran his fingers through his hair—again, she was sure. It was the voice of sweet reason. He was right, of course, except that it wouldn’t have helped.
“Last night I had it all wrong. I thought Zach killed David, but it was really Virgil. Good thing I didn’t tell you last night. If I had, you wouldn’t have belie
ved Zach this morning, and I’d still be out there.”
“So Lundquist saved you?”
“Not exactly. But I was awfully glad to see him.”
33
And I am right,
And you are right,
And all is right as right can be!
—CHORUS, The Mikado
Home had never looked so good as it did that day. For that matter, the house hadn’t looked so good for a long time. It was past noon when Joan, Andrew, and Fred arrived for a celebratory lunch. Walt was already halfway through the undercoat on the new porch.
“Sorry I didn’t get over to your office to show you the paint chips,” he said. “I figured I could prime it first and catch you later. And I wondered, while I’m painting the porch, you want me to put a fresh coat on the front door?”
“Why not?” Joan said, feeling reckless. “I think red, don’t you?”
“Sure thing. I’ll bring those chips this afternoon.” Walt didn’t bat an eye, not even at the red mud she was wearing.
Andrew and Fred took over the kitchen while Joan went up to shower and change. Mighty nice to have men you can trust, she thought while she let the water pound her and then wrapped her ankle in the wide Ace bandage she still had from after the tornado. But she didn’t expect to find pink roses on the kitchen table when she came down. Someone had arranged them in her best crystal vase and set the table with her wedding china.
“Where did these come from?” She bent and inhaled their sweetness.
Andrew looked up from whatever he was concocting today. “One of the neighbors saw the police car and came over. She asked if there was trouble, and if she could do anything.”
“I told her yes,” Fred said. “Then I traded her gossip for roses. You’re going to be a hero, you know that.” He pulled out a chair, seated her, and poured her a cup of steaming coffee that smelled almost as good as the roses.
Andrew took a tossed salad out of the refrigerator. Then he carried a platter piled high with buttered toast, crisp bacon, and scrambled eggs with little peppers to the table.
“Fred’s been telling me all about it,” he said.
Oh, it’s Fred now. Well, why not?
“You didn’t say you disarmed him and broke his leg.”
“I didn’t even tell Fred that.” Joan dug in, suddenly ravenous. “Andrew, this is wonderful.” He beamed.
“Didn’t need to,” Fred said. “Virgil gave me a real earful. He seems to think you’re a dangerous woman.”
“And a smart one,” Andrew said. “Even if you did think I’d be dumb enough to dive into a quarry. You ought to know me better than that, Mom.”
“I do, I do.” It was true. “Years of worrying about you and Rebecca took over. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right. How did you figure all that out about Virgil?”
“I almost didn’t. But Esther Ooley had just told me about the case Virgil settled out of court and how he didn’t do his own concrete work. Then, while he was driving me out to the quarry—he told me you were drowning out there, Andrew, and I believed him!—he talked to me about quarries to keep me calm. He said he had to get the gravel for his concrete business from a different quarry. I didn’t put those two things together until we didn’t find anyone there and he wouldn’t take me back to the hospital. Then he sent Zach away and picked up a big rock. I finally caught on, and I ran. While I was sitting there after I knew I was safe, I started remembering all kinds of things. Like that conversation he had with David. It was kind of like the honor system, Andrew. David was giving Virgil a chance to clear his name. Like the dukes under the witch’s curse, he died because he was too good. And Virgil almost got away with it.”
“I believed him, too,” Fred said, and patted her hand again. “Funny, how you believe what you expect to hear. Like old Mrs. Snarr. She wanted us to arrest Shoals after her roof blew off in the storm. I couldn’t do that, of course. But I didn’t blame him for a minute. I told her it was tornado damage, even though none of our spotters said the twister touched down where she lives. Mrs. Snarr always blows things out of proportion. This time she just might be right.” He took a bite of eggs and saluted the cook.
“I don’t get it,” Andrew said. “The guy got stabbed with a dagger, right? But a little while ago you said something about an awl in Zach’s toolbox. What does that have to do with it?”
Fred quickly explained that there had been two weapons, and that the autopsy had made it clear that Putnam had been dead of a wound made by something like an awl before he was stabbed again with the dagger, after he was already dead. “Only question was why. At first I thought there were two attackers, but your mom’s idea made more sense, except for one little problem.”
“What’s that?”
“She suggested that the second stabbing was to hide the first one, so we’d let the killer—Shoals, as it turns out—take off with the awl that really did the job. Trouble was, I couldn’t see how there’d be time for one person to do both without being spotted.”
“I still can’t,” Joan said.
“Wait till you hear this. While you were upstairs just now I checked one bit of the story Shoals gave us before we suspected him. He said he sat over on stage right and knew when to open the curtain by the sound of the music. He left out the fact that he relayed a signal from Biggy, the stage manager, to your conductor, so she’d know when to start. So Shoals controlled that time we’ve been so worried about. It was easy for him to pick up the awl from Putnam’s toolbox and the dagger from the prop box. He killed Putnam and planted the dagger in his back between when he got the signal and when he passed it on.”
“And no one saw him?” Andrew asked.
“No one was looking. Once Biggy gave the signal, he was watching the stairs and the chorus, not the stage. He couldn’t see Putnam from there even if he’d been looking. When I asked just now, both Biggy and the conductor confirmed that the music started late that night.”
“That’s right!” Joan remembered now. “After you and I talked I just made it into the pit, and then we waited forever, it seemed.”
“Both the stage manager and the conductor figured it was the other one. No one thought of Shoals, and no one mentioned it to us. If Shoals had just taken that awl home with him instead of palming it off on Yoder, he’d have been home free.”
“Never mess with Mom,” Andrew said, grinning.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Fred said, with a slow smile that reached his eyes and melted Joan. He reached for her hand. “I have every intention of messing with your mom for a long, long time.”
About the Author
Sara Hoskinson Frommer lives in Bloomington, Indiana with her husband, Gabe, a retired professor of psychology at Indiana University. They have two adult sons, Charles and Joe.
Her seventh Joan Spencer mystery, Her Brother’s Keeper, will be published in Spring 2013 by Perseverance Press http://www.danielpublishing.com/perseverance.
Special thanks to
Ross Allen, Charles Brown, Bybee Stone Company, Joe Courtney, Mary Fenner, Mary Harrison, Joe Hensley, Sue Kroupa, Helen May, Dr. Anthony Pizzo, Barbara Burnett Smith, Bob Weir, Mary Ann Whitley, and the Bloomington Writers Group; and to Stuart Krichevsky, my agent; George Witte, my editor; and above all, W. S. Gilbert.
Other books by Sara Hoskinson Frommer
Murder in C Major
Buried in Quilts
Murder & Sullivan
The Vanishing Violinist
Witness in Bishop Hill
Death Climbs a Tree
Reviews
For Murder in C Major
'Ironing for a corpse wasn't Joan Spencer's idea of fun.' With an opening sentence like that, you surely have to read on. You won't be sorry. Murder in C Major is a virtuoso debut by a new writer.--Washington Post Book World
A chatty, easygoing and conventional first novel....Why C major? Because Schubert's Ninth Symphony, with its great oboe solo in the second movement, is integral to the story.-
-New York Times Book Review
Murder in C Major is a thoroughly nice mystery with an amiable pair of detectives. It is recommended for those who enjoy a comfortable read on a long winter's night.--Wilson Library Bulletin
For Buried in Quilts
Frommer's second mystery (after Murder in C Major) offers an entertaining family-centered murder investigation while examining the importance of quilts as a means of understanding women's history.--Publishers Weekly
Frommer creates a persuasive Midwest ambience in this quiet book . . . about small-town life, big-time emotions, and the practical poetry of quilts.--Gail Pool, Murder in Print: The Best of New Writers, Wilson Library Bulletin
If you like quilts, music, and low-key mystery, this one will please. --Elorise Holstad, The Verdict Is Murder, Deadly Pleasures
For Murder & Sullivan
Truly suspenseful and chilling finale –Publishers Weekly
A neatly plotted cozy filled with deft touches: Joan's affectionate relationship with her college-age son; what to do in Indiana during a tornado; the surreal dream of knowing, even in sleep, that you have to pee. Joan's relationship with local police officer Fred Lundquist is traced in the tentative dance of older lovers, as the debris of their past (she's a widow; he's divorced) swirls about them. A bit of melodrama at the denouement doesn't mask the basic intelligence and warm charm of this series.--GraceAnne A. DeCandido, Booklist
Murder & Sullivan invites you to kick your shoes off, hunker down on a plush cushion, and lose yourself in a rollicking, old-fashioned, down-home Hoosier-style murder. . . . Frommer excels at creating a small-town ambiance and connecting the story line of the operetta to events aswirl on both sides of the stage curtain.--Edward S. Gilbreth, Mysteries, Chicago Sun-Times
Murder & Sullivan Page 22