by Tim Myers
“Did you have an autopsy done?” I knew I was pushing him, but I didn’t care. I’d lost a friend, and it had been murder, from the way things were starting to look.
“That’s not my decision to make. You’ll have to talk to the county coroner about that.”
I wasn’t about to let him derail me. “Bradford Shane, you know he’ll never discuss that with me. That’s why I’m asking you.”
He was interrupted when the front door opened. I was in no mood to be disturbed at the moment unless a customer had an American Express Platinum Card clutched in her hand and was ready to put a serious dent in it. Not only was it not a customer, but it was my least favorite person in all of Rebel Forge: Deputy Wayne Davidson, a man who gave me the complete and utter creeps.
Bradford didn’t look happy about his presence there, either. “What do you want?” he asked abruptly.
“I saw your car parked out front. I need to talk to you about something.”
Bradford said, “Wait outside. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Wayne looked right through me, without a nod, a wave or any acknowledgment that I counted for anything. “It’ll just take a second.”
“I said go,” my brother snapped, and Wayne left quickly.
“Why is he still working for you?” I asked Bradford. “He’s a complete and utter jerk. I can’t believe you are keeping him around.”
“Jennifer, I can’t fire the man just because you don’t like him. Hold on a second,” he said as he saw I was about ready to explode. “You don’t have anything to worry about. I told him to steer clear of you.”
So at least Bradford was willing to acknowledge that Wayne wasn’t a model employee. I still didn’t like him coming into my shop. “Yeah, I can see how much he listens to you. You practically had to throw him out.”
It appeared that my brother wanted to say something, but then changed his mind. “It won’t happen again; you can believe it.”
As Bradford headed for the door, I grabbed his shoulder. “Wait a second. We’re not through here.”
“Jennifer, I have real work to do.”
I waved the card under his nose. “So you’re going to completely ignore the message Maggie sent me?”
He nodded. “You might not like it, but I don’t have much choice. It was a bad joke, and even worse timing. I’m sorry she’s gone, Jen, but there’s nothing I can do about it. It really was an accident.” He left before I could say another word. I hated when he did that. It was Bradford’s way of fighting without raising his voice.
I was still fuming about my brother’s reaction when Lillian walked in two hours later. As promised, she had two bags from The Lunch Box with her, but for the second time in two days, I was in no mood to eat.
When I refused the bag, she said, “My dear, I’m sorry I’m so late. I hope you can forgive me.”
“Lillian, I’m not angry with you. I got a card in the mail today you should see.”
As she read the note from Maggie, I discreetly pulled her note from the night before off the board, hoping she hadn’t noticed it. I didn’t really want to tease her anymore.
After she read it, Lillian handed it back to me and said, “Jennifer, you’ve got to call Bradford and show this to him.”
“I already did. He wasn’t all that impressed with it. In fact, he assumed it was just another one of Maggie’s joke cards gone bad.”
Lillian pursed her lips. “That’s absolutely ridiculous.
Couldn’t he see that the tone is deadly serious? It’s perfectly clear that this is no joke.”
“We know that, but he doesn’t. The question is, what do we do about it?”
Lillian smiled grimly. “I think it’s time to get out our whiteboard and make some notes about what we know and what we suspect. We can work while we eat.”
It felt good having my aunt on my side. My brother was a pragmatist by nature, but sometimes it absolutely drove me crazy. He might need more proof that Maggie had been murdered, but that card was enough to convince Lillian and me that something very real had happened to her.
Chapter 5
“Should we close the shop while we eat and work this out?” Lillian asked.
“I’d rather we didn’t,” I said as I retrieved the marker board and set it up near our window workstation. The table where we made cards with our customers often served as our lunch table as well. In a shop as limited in space as Custom Card Creations, we were big on multitasking. “We’re not really in the position to turn people away.”
As Lillian cleared the table for our lunch, she said, “Now, Jennifer, the business is building, and you know it.”
“I know,” I said as I put placemats down. “I just wish it would build a little faster.”
She looked at me critically, then said, “You need some food, young lady. I picked up your favorite burger.”
I took the offered bag and saw that Lillian had added an order of onion rings. If it could be fried, Pete could do it with an artistry that brought in customers from halfway around the state. “You’re spoiling me,” I said. “These are going straight to my hips.”
“Pooh, you deserve to splurge a little every now and then. If you’re feeling guilty, you can always walk them off later.”
“How far do you think I would have to go, Canada?”
As Lillian retrieved two Cokes from the refrigerator in back, she said, “Jennifer, if you don’t want to eat them, set them aside.”
“Like there’s a chance of that ever happening,” I said as I bit into one. Hot and fresh on the plate at The Lunch Box, Pete’s onion rings were a clear ten. Half an hour sitting in the bag, and they’d dropped to a nine, still better than anything else I could find in our part of Virginia. I had a twinge of guilt just before I took the first bite, but after that, it was pure pleasure. I nearly forgot about my hamburger, but as soon as the onion rings were gone, I suddenly remembered it. The Lunch Box couldn’t touch the ambience of Hurley’s, but their hamburgers were in a dead heat, at least in my opinion.
I looked over at Lillian, who was smiling broadly at me. Before she could add her own little commentary on my eating habits, I said, “It’s okay if you think it, but I don’t want to hear a word, okay?”
She smiled and shrugged all at once, but I had to give her credit: she didn’t say a word. We’d planned to work on Maggie’s murder as we ate, but Lillian and I were both so hungry that we barely managed some small talk until both bags were empty.
“That was outstanding,” I said as I cleared away the debris. “Thank you.”
“It was my pleasure. That lunch was excellent. And a fine breakfast as well,” she said.
I looked askance at her. “Lillian, are you trying to tell me you just woke up? Who is this mysterious stranger, anyway?”
Lillian hiked her eyebrows. “Now how ladylike would I be sharing that information? Suffice it to say that I’ve found another admirer.”
“In a long line of them,” I added.
She stared at me a moment, then asked, “Jennifer, is that a hint of jealousy in your voice? Don’t worry, my dear; your time will come.”
Discussing my love life—or more accurately the lack of it—with my aunt was about the last item on my list of things I wanted to do. I took a note from her style and waved the statement away with my hand. “Now let’s see what we can come up with about what really happened to Maggie Blake.”
I picked up a black marker and wrote her name across the top. “I’m not even sure where we should start. What questions do we need to ask?”
“Who killed her?’ is a good place to begin,” Lillian said.
I raised an eyebrow toward her as I replied, “That’s kind of the point of the whole exercise, isn’t it? We need to be serious if we’re going to do this.”
Lillian looked suitably chastened. “Very well. The first question has to be, who wanted her dead?”
“That’s a fair question,” I said as I wrote it on the board, then added, “Who were her
friends? Did she have any enemies?”
“Jennifer, Maggie said she didn’t have enemies in her card to you, remember?”
I kept that question on the board. “Lillian, everybody has people who don’t like them.”
She couldn’t hide her smile as she asked, “So who wants to kill you?”
I really wished my aunt would take the whole thing more seriously. “Come on, you know what I mean. Who knows what someone else might take as an affront? I’m willing to bet both of us have people who wouldn’t mind seeing us go.”
Lillian nodded reluctantly. “I suppose you’re right. Go ahead and put it down, but I’d be shocked if we found anyone that fit that description for Maggie Blake.”
I thought about Maggie’s death, and that led to another line of questioning. As quickly as I could, I wrote, “Where exactly was she when her car went off the road? Where was she going? Where had she been?”
Lillian must have been reading over my shoulder. As soon as I finished, she said, “How about who saw her last?”
“That’s good,” I said, “but we’re missing something, a really important question.”
“What might that be?”
Instead of answering her, I wrote it down: “Who had the most to gain from her death?”
Lillian nodded. “That is the most important question, isn’t it? Motive is critical here.”
“So how do we determine that?” I asked.
“Probably by answering all of the other questions first,” Lillian said.
As she finished, the front door chimed. To my delight, it wasn’t my brother, my sister or anyone else there to hound me. It appeared that we had an actual customer visiting us at Custom Card Creations. “I’m here to spend some serious money,” the woman in her early forties announced as she waved a credit card in the air. “Can one of you two help me?”
“Absolutely,” I said as I turned to my aunt. “Lillian, why don’t you put the marker board in back and we’ll work on it more later.”
“What about Maggie?” my aunt asked as she reluctantly picked up the board.
“First and foremost, we have to make a living,” I said.
Our customer said, “If this is a bad time, I can always go somewhere else.”
“Not at all,” I said as I hurried to her. “Now what can I help you with?”
“I love greeting cards, and I’ve got over a thousand dollars to spend today.” There was an inescapable grin on her face as she said it, and for a moment she looked more like she was nine years old.
“That sounds like you’re exactly where you need to be, then,” I said. “Do you mind if I ask if you won the lottery?”
The woman’s smile was infectious. “Oh, no, it’s much better than that. I just discovered that my husband spent that much on a new set of golf clubs after promising me he wouldn’t buy anything else this year. But he just had to have them, and the bill came in this morning. Can you imagine that? Somehow he forgot that I’m the one who writes the checks. Now he’s going to pay, though.”
I didn’t want to take advantage of this woman, but I couldn’t afford to turn down a sale that large, either. I knew I should keep my mouth shut, let her have her spree, and celebrate the sale, but I couldn’t do it. “I’m thrilled to help you, but all sales are final here, and I’m afraid you’ll regret doing this later. Are you absolutely certain you want to do this?”
She laughed heartily. “My dear, thank you for your thoughtfulness, but this is exactly what I want to do. Don’t worry; we can afford it, trust me. Last week I bought a hundred dollars’ worth of material for curtains and you’d have thought I’d shot my husband when I told him. All the while, his new clubs were in the garage, hidden safely away. We can afford it, and I’ve always wanted to make my own cards. So can you help me or not?”
I grabbed a nearby buggy, one customers rarely used but something I found helpful when I restocked the shelves. “Oh yes, I can easily help you spend a thousand dollars here.”
The woman nodded. “Now don’t hold back. If we happen to go over by a few hundred dollars, well, that will be just dandy. You can explain to me what I’m buying as we go along. Don’t be afraid to use your imagination; just help me put together a perfect kit.”
She was the kind of customer most shopkeepers only dreamed about, and I planned to enjoy every second of her spree.
Her purchases ultimately took two buggies. I set her up with card stocks, papers, expensive die cutters, embellishments, accessories, envelopes, specialty scissors, rubber stamps, cutouts, stickers, stencils, pressed flowers and more. I’d also included a good selection of books, and the store’s phone number. “Call me if you have any trouble, and I’ll walk you through whatever you’re doing,” I said as I handed her one of my business cards. I’d made them myself, shunning the printers and creating each one individually. I couldn’t give out a lot of them, but so far their creation had more than kept up with the demand. She took the card, then asked, “Now, is there anything else we’re missing?”
“I can’t imagine what it might be,” I said in complete and utter honesty.
“Neither can I. This looks perfect.” She glanced at the clock over the register. “Is that right? Is it really that late?”
I checked and saw that we’d been shopping together over two hours. Time truly did fly with fun. “I’m sorry I’ve kept you so long.”
“No, that’s fine—this has been absolutely joyous— but I’ve got to get home so I can set things up before Lee gets there. I can’t wait to see the expression on his face.”
“Sybil, don’t give him a heart attack.” We’d gone to first names early on, and not just because of how much money she was spending. Sybil was my kind of gal, a free spirit who embraced life.
“Jennifer, he’s as stout as a horse. Besides, he could use a good shock to his system.”
She signed the credit card charge slip with a flourish, then said, “I feel like I should tip you; you’ve been so helpful.”
“Nonsense,” I said as I slid the deposit in the drawer. “It’s been great fun.”
“It has, hasn’t it? I may come back for more later.”
“I’ll be here.” If she created and sent cards to everyone in the state of Virginia, then she might need more supplies, but I couldn’t imagine her running out until then. “Come by and tell me how you’re doing.”
“I will,” she said. “Now how am I going to ever get this all to my car?”
“I’ll help. Lillian, could you watch the front? I’m going to help Sybil with her bags.”
My aunt looked up from the worktable where she’d been brainstorming on new card ideas for her own section of the store. I’d given her an area to display and sell her acerbic cards, and she’d reveled in the opportunity. Her cards were full of zingers, put-downs, sarcasms and innuendos, perfect for the cynical souls who walked among us. “I’d be delighted,” she said. “Hurry back, though. It’s nearly closing time.”
“Do you have another big date tonight?” I asked. Where did the woman get her energy? I knew I couldn’t keep up with her if I was aided by a quart of coffee and a dozen PowerBars.
“No, I’m staying in tonight,” she admitted as she stifled a yawn.
“Don’t worry. We won’t be long,” I said as I grabbed several of the heavier bags.
Sybil took the rest, then held the door for me. It was drizzling slightly outside, but I’d double-bagged her purchases, so they would be safe from the weather. By the time we got to her car, my arms were ready to fall off. She opened the trunk and I gratefully put the bags inside. That’s when I had the chance to look more closely at her transportation. It was a shiny black Mercedes, a big one at that, and all doubts about Sybil being able to afford my bill vanished. “That’s a lovely car you’ve got,” I said.
“I’d rather drive something a little more austere, but Lee has to have his symbols.” She turned to me and said, “Jennifer, I’ve had the best afternoon in I don’t know how long. Thank you.”
“You’re most welcome,” I said. “Now don’t be a stranger.”
“Oh, I won’t,” she said. “I can’t wait to get home and get started.”
I watched her drive away, and wondered what the scene at her house would be tonight when her husband came home. Sybil could handle it; I had no doubt about that.
I was still smiling about the thought as I walked back to the shop, and I was nearly at my front door when I heard a familiar voice calling to me.
“Jennifer, wait up. I need to talk to you.”
It was Greg Langston, my ex-fiancé times two. I thought about ignoring the summons, then I remembered that card he’d sent me so long ago and I stopped.
“Hi, Greg, how are you?”
From his expression, it was pretty obvious he wasn’t expecting a cordial greeting, and I really couldn’t blame him. I hadn’t been at my nicest with Greg lately, something I really needed to remedy. Truly, all he’d done was express concern over my welfare, and no matter how aggravating I found it when people tried to protect me, I knew he acted like he did because he still cared.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Listen, there’s something I’d like to ask you.”
“Fire away, but you’ll have to make it quick. It’s closing time, and Lillian’s in a hurry to get home.”
Greg wasn’t classically handsome, but I never could resist him. He had a boyish charm that melted my heart, and a pair of deep brown eyes that lit up everywhere else. “Well, what I’ve been meaning to do, what I wanted to ask—blast it all, this shouldn’t be this hard. Jennifer, would you like to have dinner with me tomorrow night?”
He’d asked me out on a dozen times since we’d broken our engagement the last time, and I’d never failed to turn him down. Before I could overanalyze the ramifications of my answer like I always did, I said, “That sounds like fun. Where did you have in mind?”