Murder, She Wrote--A Date with Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  If only she’d gotten a better look at the dark sedan, good enough even to remember its license plate. Seth’s phone went to voice mail, so I pressed the end button and redialed. I noticed the pickup’s bumper and part of its fender were badly scuffed.

  “I’m sorry about the damage to your truck,” I said.

  We looked toward my ruined bike, surrounded by the spilled contents of my handbag, and then back at each other.

  “Looks like your bike suffered the worst of it.” The woman shrugged.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  I could barely hear Seth’s voice through the phone’s speaker and realized I hadn’t taken my helmet off yet. It had probably saved my life by cushioning the impact, and featured a trio of indents that looked like golf balls had struck it.

  “Seth,” I said finally, realizing my hand holding the phone was shaking.

  “Jessica? Where are you? What’s this number?”

  “I’ve been in a minor accident. Nothing serious, but—”

  “Stay there! Don’t move! I’m on my way! I’ll be right there— Wait, where are you?”

  * * *

  • • •

  “Okay, Jessica. Follow the light.”

  A small flashlight, about the size of a pen, slid left and right across my field of vision. Seth had driven me to his office, insisting he check me out after I again refused transport to the hospital. We’d waited until one of Mort’s deputies arrived, so he could hear from both me and the kind woman in the red pickup truck who’d lent me her cell phone, after sending me flying from my bike through no fault of her own.

  “And again,” Seth said, holding the light about a foot from my face, now moving it up and down. I crossed my eyes and smiled, wobbling to and fro. “If you’re not going to take this seriously, I can take you to a different doctor.”

  “Maybe I should see a real doctor, Seth, if this is as serious as you seem to think,” I said with a smirk. “Just don’t tell Mort that.”

  “Tell Mort what?” Cabot Cove’s sheriff asked as he strolled into the examination room.

  “I called him,” Seth explained, pocketing his penlight. “Let him know you weren’t going to make your meeting.”

  “That’s why I came straight over,” Mort said, an edge of concern in his voice. “Because my office never phoned you.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “And then this dark sedan followed you,” Mort said. We were still inside Seth’s exam room, and the shock of Mort’s telling me it hadn’t been his receptionist who’d called me hadn’t worn off.

  “More than followed,” I told him. “It rode my tail, forced me into the intersection.”

  “You could have been killed,” Mort noted.

  “Maybe that was the idea.”

  “I may be just an old country doctor, ayuh,” Seth started, “but I want to see if I’ve got all this straight. Yesterday, a man closely associated with Hal Wirth gets murdered, and today Jessica, who believes foul play may have been involved in Hal’s death, nearly gets run down.”

  Mort shot me a glare. “You involved Seth in this?”

  “I asked him to check out his blood work and toxicology report in advance of the autopsy results, that’s all.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing,” Seth and I said together.

  “But there’s something else.” I picked up from there, finally getting to what had struck me the night before, after finishing Hal’s memoir. “Hal Wirth was writing a book, a memoir.”

  “Surefire bestseller, certain to threaten your status as Cabot Cove’s preeminent author?”

  “We’ll never get to find out, since it was left unfinished—literally in the middle of the line.”

  “Didn’t I read somewhere you do that so you have a running start when you pick up the process the next day?”

  “Something like that, but I don’t think Hal learned it from me. This was something else.”

  “Like what?”

  I was finally getting to the point, testing my realization to see if it bothered Mort, and Seth, as much as it did me. “Hal used a dating service for a while when he was away from home down in Granite Heights.”

  “Go on,” Mort urged.

  “He only went on a single date he expressed deep regret for, profound guilt, even though nothing occurred other than dinner with a woman named Nan. That’s where his memoir ends: in the middle of a sentence without any mention whatsoever of whatever led to his financial ruin.”

  Mort and Seth looked at each other.

  “Hal uses this online dating service, LOVEISYOURS, one time and one time only,” I elaborated. “Then he forgets all about his memoir and finds himself in financial ruin what must’ve been a short time later.”

  “When would this have been?” Mort asked. “What’s the time frame?”

  “I’m not sure. I need to check the actual document on Hal’s computer to find when he left off writing. That will tell us the general time frame of the date as well.”

  “What about the time frame of these financial issues that surfaced yesterday?”

  “Well, the estate’s lawyer, Lawrence Pyke, mentioned that the lines of credit that were almost immediately drained were opened between three and four weeks ago.”

  “And if that’s the same time frame as this date Hal went on . . .”

  “Then maybe the two things are somehow related,” I said, completing the thought for him.

  “You know how crazy that sounds, Jessica?” Seth asked, before Mort had a chance to speak.

  “Be gentle with me. I had a fall, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Nope, haven’t forgotten. But that doesn’t mean you left your mind in your busted-up bicycle helmet.”

  “He’s right, Jessica,” Mort interjected. “This does sound pretty outlandish, even for you.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence.”

  “So you always say.”

  “And I’m betting his not going back to the memoir and the financial calamity that led Hal to open those credit lines happened at almost the same time.”

  “After this date with someone named Nan.”

  I nodded, affirming Mort’s statement.

  “Then what do you say we go have a look at Hal’s computer?”

  * * *

  • • •

  It turned out Hal did all his writing on the laptop I’d noticed on the desk in his basement office. I led Mort down there, putting on as brave a face as I could, because, truth be told, my head was starting to throb. I didn’t want to say anything, lest Seth have me spirited away to the hospital, in Mort’s handcuffs if necessary. I attributed the pounding headache more to the shock of the accident and my lack of sleep than anything else, especially since Seth had cleared me of any concussion. Still, I wasn’t myself and didn’t want anyone to notice.

  We brought Hal’s MacBook Pro upstairs. It wasn’t password protected, and the file icons appeared across the screen, just a double click away from opening, as soon as I turned it on. Sitting at the kitchen table with Mort and Babs looming over my shoulder, I found an icon marked “Memoir.” I didn’t have the password to log on to Hal’s e-mail, nor did I want to under the circumstances. So I opened his Safari browser and logged on to my own e-mail account. Then I clicked on COMPOSE and attached the Word icon marked “Memoir” to an e-mail I never intended to send.

  “What are you doing?” Mort asked me.

  “You’ll see.”

  What all three of us saw, once the attachment loaded, was a box containing it on the right-hand side of the page that featured the file name, the size, when it was created, and when it was last opened.

  Almost four weeks ago—twenty-six days, to be exact.

  Which, according to Lawrence Pyke, jibed almost perfectly with Hal’s opening of lines of credit amounting to over ten
million dollars, his and Babs’s entire net worth.

  “There’s your timeline,” I said to Mort. “And if we look further into—”

  I cut myself off there, just in time to avoid mention of Hal’s use of the dating service LOVEISYOURS in front of Babs. She didn’t need to hear about that for the first time in the midst of planning his funeral services. It could be that Hal had shared the news with her already, confessed it after they’d reconciled their differences, but I couldn’t be sure. And I could tell from Mort’s expression that he was drawing the same conclusion I was.

  “Sorry to have disturbed you, Mrs. Wirth,” he said, backing away from the table. “We’ll get out of your hair now.”

  “You’re not disturbing me at all, Sheriff. My daughter’s out running some errands, so I’m grateful for the company. And, for God’s sake, when are you going to start calling me Babs?”

  “How about now . . . Babs?”

  * * *

  • • •

  We sat in Mort’s squad car for a time, leaving Babs’s house for her driveway.

  “You want to tell me what that mind of yours can conjure of a possible link between that date Hal went on and the financial crisis that followed?” Mort asked, looking at me across the front seat.

  Not to mention Eugene Labine’s murder and a dark sedan trying to run me over, I almost added. “I think we need to find out more about this woman Hal went on a date with.”

  “You said her name was Nan.”

  “It’s what she called herself, but according to Hal’s memoir, her real name was Naomi.”

  “How many Naomis could there be in the dating site’s database?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  Mort pulled a phone that looked as big as a small television from his pocket. “Let me check something,” he said, working the keyboard with surprising dexterity, which reminded me how much I missed my old flip phone. So much that I almost wished my so-called smartphone had been ruined in the accident, which would mean I’d get the chance to go back to my flip.

  “It’s based in Boston,” Mort reported, turning the screen toward me so I could see the LOVEISYOURS logo displayed on their Web site. “Chestnut Hill, actually. There’s a break.”

  “You’re thinking we should take a drive down there and have a chat with them, find out more about this Naomi.”

  “I’m thinking that I should take a drive down. But if you’re game, I could use the company.”

  “I’m game.”

  “Tomorrow morning, then.”

  “So long as you pick me up,” I told Mort. “In its current condition, my bike doesn’t have room for two.”

  Chapter Twelve

  But first there was dinner with Babs, Alyssa, and her boyfriend, whose name, I seemed to recall, was either Chad or Zach. Maybe the fall off my bike had done more damage than I had initially thought. The pounding in my head got worse as the day wore on, no relief found from the aspirin, which was all I allowed myself to use. And I knew the feeling in my mind as well.

  Overdrive.

  It happened when I was in the all-consuming midst of penning the first draft of a book and also when I found myself embroiled in one of the investigations that kept finding me, rather than me finding them. But this was different, because the victim had been a friend—or at least an acquaintance, since I knew Babs far better than I knew Hal.

  I kept circling back to the same thoughts.

  Eugene Labine had been murdered.

  And maybe Hal had been murdered, too, his thriving business rendered insolvent virtually overnight.

  Then there was this online dating service, LOVEISYOURS, to which Mort and I would be paying a visit tomorrow.

  When I do appearances and interviews, I get asked a lot whether I outline my books. The answer is yes and no. I have all the pieces, but am never exactly sure how they’re going to fit together when I start. I like to surprise myself, like to imitate a real detective piling clue atop clue, in search of a suspect. But real life defies that kind of symmetry. Real life doesn’t come with order; it brings chaos, and the unfortunate fact is that in real life criminals get away with it. Schemes work because real heroes aren’t living in a writer’s mind where whatever they need is always a paragraph away. So I had to face the fact that I might never find how everything surrounding Hal Wirth’s death was connected, but I resolved to do all I could to fit together the pieces of the puzzle.

  Because of Babs. Because she needed me. Because her future quality of life and her daughter’s ability to finish college where she’d started it depended on what I might be able to uncover and string together.

  I tried to take a nap before heading back over to Babs’s house for dinner, but my mind wouldn’t let me, wouldn’t shut off. Every time I closed my eyes, financial balance sheets, manuscript pages, Hal lying on the kitchen floor, Eugene Labine shot dead in his Hill House hotel room, the bright airy logo of LOVEISYOURS displayed across Mort’s giant phone screen, flitted through my mind. Exactly as things did when I was working out the connections in my books, where the clues led. It was so much easier when I was writing, because I could make them up.

  I only wished I could do that here. Identify Labine’s killer and how he might’ve been connected to whatever financial plight had befallen Hal. Because Labine was the key. He must have known something his killer couldn’t risk being revealed. Something he’d uncovered in the course of preparing this lawsuit he was threatening to file, something he’d come to Cabot Cove to confront Hal with, but had arrived too late. Someone watching him, following him the whole way.

  And now someone was after me, too.

  What else could explain the dark sedan riding the rear of my bike, forcing me into traffic in the hope of causing exactly what had almost come to pass?

  The connections were unavoidable. Labine was dead because of something he’d uncovered, and I was a threat because somebody must have thought I knew it, too. But who?

  And what exactly?

  * * *

  • • •

  My so-called smartphone was dinged up a bit but still fully functional. Not wanting to ride my older, spare bicycle to Babs’s or bother anyone for a lift, I brought up the Uber app and requested a ride. Our tiny, tony hamlet had several residents who made extra cash as Uber drivers, especially in the summer, when business was brisk, although I had to think this would be the first time someone who was nearly killed while riding her bike had called them for a ride.

  I remembered I’d be meeting Alyssa’s boyfriend and I resolved to be on my best behavior. I would not peer into any closets in search of skeletons or hit the young man with particularly probative questions, as was my instinct, more in this case out of my affection for Alyssa than anything arising from suspicion.

  She greeted me at the door, doing her best to look happy, and hugged me tight.

  “Jessica, I heard what happened. I was so worried. Are you all right? You look okay.”

  “I’m fine,” I reassured, holding her by the elbows. “Just a touch of a headache. Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t cure.”

  “Are you sure? Were you checked for a concussion?”

  “I’m a writer, Alyssa. My brain is always banging around in my head. Get used to it.”

  She smiled again, less forced this time, and turned toward the living room, where a young man rose from the couch through a cloud of tumbling hair. It was dark and carried past his shoulders, his features soft and flat, deep-set eyes shadowed by the locks of hair that dropped over his forehead to his brow.

  “And this is Chad,” Alyssa said, introducing us. “Chad, this is Jessica Fletcher, my—” She stopped and looked at me. “How do I describe you exactly?”

  “How about mentor?”

  “Or the aunt I never had. Aunt Jessica,” Alyssa tried out. “Has a nice ring to it.”

  “How a
bout old widow?”

  “You’re not an old widow.”

  “I’m not your aunt either.”

  “Are you two always like this?” Chad asked, grinning as he extended his hand. He was wearing those jeans I never understood how young people, men especially, could squeeze into, made of denim so rough it looked starched. He was thin and lanky, with his soft face nearly swallowed by all that hair. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Fletcher. I’ve been reading your books. Didn’t think I’d like them, but I do.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Alyssa cleared her throat. “I told Chad I mentioned him to you.”

  “You mean the fact that he’s a genius with computers,” I said, leaving out any mention of Alyssa’s noting Chad’s expertise with coding and hacking. “Maybe you can teach me how to work my smartphone, which makes me feel exceedingly dumb.”

  “No problem, Mrs. Fletcher. I can also load any apps you might like.”

  “Is there one for an autodriving bicycle?”

  Chad’s eyes flashed brightly. “Not yet, but . . .”

  “Chad’s going to be staying for Dad’s funeral.”

  “In one of the guest rooms,” Babs pronounced, emerging from the kitchen with an apron tied round her waist. “Isn’t that right, Chad?”

  He grinned at her, not at all embarrassed. “I’m already unpacked, Babs.”

  “My houseguests call me Babs. My daughter’s boyfriends call me Mrs. Wirth.”

  “Understood . . . Mrs. Wirth,” he said, flashing that grin again.

  It was nice to see a degree of normalcy, however strained, returning to the Wirth household. Hal’s funeral was the day after tomorrow and I was sure it was going to be difficult. But I was immediately glad I’d fought back my headache and come over for dinner. Being around Alyssa had inevitably perked me up when she was a little girl, and that remained true now that she was in college. The kindness, unbridled optimism, and generally good natures displayed by the young could be both restorative and enriching, and I understood deeply how much it must have meant to Babs to have Alyssa there. It’s easy to overlook the fullness the company of young people brings into our lives. And, besides my nephew Grady, Alyssa was the closest thing I had to a child myself.