Dead Man Stalking (Barbara Marr Murder Mystery Series Book 5)

by Karen Cantwell

  “Nothing?” Vikki’s voice asked over the speaker.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Dead ends. All dead ends.”

  “This was everything?” Willy asked. “Nothing else in this backpack, you sure?”

  “Just Dead Man Stalking,” I said. “And the envelope it came in, but I’ve looked through that a thousand times.”

  “What’s Dead Man Stalking?” asked Vikki.

  I gave a queer look to the phone. “Your dad’s manuscript. Remember, you said I could read it?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the title of his book.”

  “Yes it is.” I snatched up the manuscript and manila envelope from the couch. I showed the manuscript to Willy while I read from it. “Dead Man Stalking. A Novel by Cecil Cleveland.” I handed the envelope to Red. He peeked inside it.

  “That wasn’t the title originally,” she said. “It was something else... something strange.”

  “Sam Storm’s Sacrificial Silence,” said Isbel.

  “Ugh,” groaned Vikki. “That was it. Terrible title.”

  “It was my idea,” huffed Isbel. “Cee Cee loved that title.”

  “So he changed the title,” I said. “I guess authors do that a lot?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Although most I know are pretty attached to their titles once they decide on one.”

  Isbel kept shaking her head. “No, no,” she said. “He loved Sam Storm’s Sacrificial Silence. He would not change it.”

  I began thinking out loud. “But he did. The question is, is it significant?”

  “I told you he was typing the night he left,” Isbel said. “Maybe he changed it then?”

  “Possibly the new title has something to do with the missing ticket,” I speculated. “Nothing can be crazier than the theater idea.” I stared at the title on the cover page, trying to figure out how it would be a clue.

  “Maybe it’s an anagram,” suggested Carney. “Willy, you’re good at anagrams. Work on it.”

  Isbel crowded in to see the page and we all started mouthing different ways of seeing the words Dead Man Stalking.

  “Talk Mad Gin Dead,” Willy said.

  “No,” Isbel said. “You miss the s in Stalking. That no work.” She stared at the words harder, her lips moving silently.

  “Did you notice the address on this envelope?” Red asked.

  “What about it?” I asked.

  “It’s made out to Lola Barnes at The Barnes Agency, but the street address is the same as the street address of the Rustic Woods Library, 112 White Birch Way. I’m sure of it. I drive by there every day.”

  I’d looked inside the envelope many times, but had never paid attention to the address on the outside. I opened up my laptop and did a search for the Rustic Woods Library. “Yep,” I said, “that’s the address all right.” On a whim, I clicked on the card catalog and searched on the title Dead Man Stalking. My eyes nearly popped out of my head when the search produced a result. “Look at this,” I said, my voice cracking in the excitement. “Dead Man Stalking by George Winner, copyright 1971. There’s only one copy, and it’s not checked out.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  George Winner. That had to be a clue. We disconnected Vikki and tore off to the Rustic Woods Library in four different vehicles. On my way, I realized the danger of five different people approaching that book at possibly five different times.

  What if he’d hidden the ticket in the book and suppose one of them got there and snatched it before the others, then lied the same way Cecil had?

  It was dangerous territory, to be sure. Money did strange things to the nicest of people. I’d seen large, loving families who’d spent every summer vacation together be torn apart over wills and trusts. Imagine what could happen when six hundred million dollars was involved and you didn’t share blood and a gene pool.

  I parked and made it to the automatic doors at exactly the same time as Red. Isbel was panting on our heels, and the ZZ Crop Lawn Care van was just scooting into the handicapped spot. I didn’t have a share of the winnings, so I wanted to be the first to the book, knowing I’d be honest. “Let me go first, Red,” I said, hoping he’d understand.

  He did. He nodded and let me step in first. I had a sheet of paper with the catalog number written on it and was looking down to remind myself when I bumped right into someone.

  When I looked up to apologize, the blond woman looked familiar. I thought I knew her, but couldn’t place her. She didn’t seem to recognize me though and didn’t even stop to accept my apology.

  Red tugged at my arm. “This way.”

  We found the right shelf, but had to find the right book. Isbel took one row and Red and I took another. Our fingers and eyes scanned to find a number match.

  “Here it is,” Red said in his outdoor voice which isn’t exactly a library voice. “Dead Man Stalking.”

  I put a finger to my lips to shush him and grabbed the book out of his hands.

  At the same time, Willy was wheeling Carney toward us at the end of the shelf. “We ain’t got much time” he said. “A lady up front told us it’s five minutes to closing.”

  “Is it there?” Carney asked. “Is it there?”

  Did these people not know to whisper in libraries? I shushed him too while flipping through the book. When I didn’t find anything, I took it by the spine and shook it hoping something might fall out. Nothing did.

  “Is there any writing in the pages?” Isbel asked. “Look for the writing.”

  I flipped and flipped through the pages. “No writing,” I said. My frustration grew as I stopped flipping. “Page twenty-five is missing.” I sighed. “That’s it. A missing page. No ticket.”

  “May I?” Willy asked, indicating the book.

  I handed it to him. “Have at it.”

  A spectacled man appeared at the end of the shelves. “Please select your books and move to check out.” He spoke softly through gritted teeth. “And keep quiet while you do so.”

  I cringed. No one likes getting yelled at by a librarian. I slithered out, ashamed. Red and Isbel followed. Carney and Willy did not.

  The late day sun beat down on us mercilessly. A few more minutes in that heat and we’d all be poached. Poached and super cranky. I’d already passed regular cranky. And after super cranky I’d hit ultra-ultra cranky, and then no one would want to be around me.

  “Another dead end,” I said, throwing my hands in the air. “And I have things to do. I need to go feed my cats before they eat each other, and I have an appointment to meet a guy about my air conditioning.”

  Willy and Carney arrived with Carney holding the book, Dead Man Stalking. “We checked out the book,” Willy said. “Figure ain’t no harm in taking a better look. Maybe there’s a clue in the story.”

  “You’re all on your own for a while,” I told him. “Maybe you should be on your own forever. I don’t think I’m very good at this. Vikki will probably fire me soon. And maybe we should all consider the possibility that Cecil never had the winning lottery ticket. Or the other possibility that he did, but we’re never going to find it.”

  “That’s crazy talk,” Willy said. “I ain’t givin’ up. You givin’ up, Carney?”

  Carney shook his head.

  “You givin’ up Isbel? You Red?”

  “I am not,” Isbel said. “Until someone else proves they have that lottery ticket, I will believe Cecil had it. I feel it in my bones. And my bones, they are always right.”

  “Okay,” I said. Truthfully, I was glad they weren’t giving up. Even though this chase was feeling very Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World-ish, I was having fun. Most moms don’t have the chance to say that they were chasing down a six–hundred-million-dollar winning lottery ticket accompanied by a hissing Slovakian, a silver haired, blue-eyed giant named Wee W
illy, a cigar-smoking almost-leprechaun, and a grumpy guy in a wheelchair named Carney Smutz.

  “Fine,” I said. “But let’s take a break. Let’s all meet at my house at eight. The air conditioning guy should be gone by then.”

  Before going home, I wanted stop by Vikki’s to let Puddles out for a piddle. I also wanted to get the manuscript. If I was lucky, Vikki might have arrived home from New York, and I could let her know that the library was a bust.

  I was searching my pockets for the key when a voice startled me from behind.

  “How ya doin’?”

  Moyle.

  “Where have you been?” I asked, feeling the key in my right back pocket.

  “Places.”

  “The year twenty-five twenty-five?”

  “A guy has to check in at home sometimes,” he said. “Actually, I did a little investigating on my own.”

  “Oh?” Locating the key in my back pocket was proving easier than getting it out.

  “I know a cop. He patrols around the shelter at nights. Nice guy.”

  “That’s good.” The key was halfway out. Sweat was dripping from my nose. I just wanted inside.

  “He talked to his detective friend, the one who wrote up Cecil’s ‘accident’.” He made finger quotes in the air. “Turns out there were witnesses, and one of ‘em claims she saw a blond lady trip him on purpose.”

  “Vikki never said anything about that.”

  With the key out, I slipped it into the lock.

  “No one else claimed to see this blond woman, so it didn’t go into the report. My cop buddy says he’s a lazy detective.”

  I went to turn the knob, but Moyle stopped me. “Vikki has blond hair.”

  “That’s crazy.” I pushed his hand away. “She hired us to find the tickets.”

  He followed me in, and I closed the door behind us. “Vikki?” I called out. “Are you home?”

  “In here!” she said.

  “Be careful,” he whispered. “She might be a killer.”

  I sighed and followed her voice. Moyle breathed down my neck he trailed so closely.

  “Vikki,” I said, “you’re not going to believe—”

  Uh-oh, I didn’t see that one coming.

  It was the woman I’d bumped into in the library. The one I recognized from somewhere. And now, seeing her in Vikki’s house, I remembered where. Vikki had shown me her picture hanging on the dining room wall.

  “Found the book, did you?” asked the woman as she stood, holding a gun pointed at Vikki Cleveland’s temple.

  “Barb,” said Vikki, her voice trembling. “This is my stepmother, Delilah. She wasn’t out of town after all.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Vikki had said that she and her stepmother Delilah had remained friendly. This didn’t seem very friendly. Instinctively I put my arms in the air and noticed Moyle had done the same.

  “Imagine running into you twice in one day,” I quipped. Sometimes things just spill out of my mouth before I’ve had time to really think about whether or not they might get me killed.

  She waved her gun. “Over here,” she said. “On the couch with the little brat. Cell phones on the table first.”

  Not one to argue with a gun-wielding woman, I placed my cell phone on the coffee table and sat.

  Moyle shrugged. “No cell phone here. They cause cancer. And brain damage. And—”

  Delilah snapped at him. “Just sit.”

  He obeyed, but not very gracefully and pushed me into Vikki.

  “Ouch,” I said, as we all readjusted ourselves so we weren’t piled on top of one another. “Little brat?” I asked Vikki.

  “She’s been calling me that since she got here.”

  “I thought you two liked each other.”

  “So did I.”

  “Hellooo,” Delilah sing-songed. “I’m right here. No need to talk about me like I’m not.”

  “Who’s this lady?” Moyle asked.

  Delilah pointed the gun in his direction. “Did you not hear what I just said? You ask me the questions.”

  “Dee,” Vikki said, “what’s going on? This isn’t like you. I refuse to believe it.”

  “Well go ahead and...believe it,” said Delilah, her voice cracking and her hand starting to shake.

  “I don’t think so,” Vikki said with an amazingly calm voice considering the circumstances. “We’re friends. You were a good stepmother and you’re a good person. I know it. Put the gun down, I’m sure—”

  “I am,” Delilah said, her cheeks beginning to pucker and her eyes starting to water. “I am a good person, right?”

  Vikki was a good negotiator. I needed to keep her around me for future kidnappings. I wondered if she gave lessons. Delilah’s hand kept shaking, but it slowly dropped. Soon one of us would be able to grab that gun and subdue our captor.

  Or not.

  Delilah’s arm stiffened, and she aimed her gun at Vikki again. Then she pointed it at me, then Moyle. “But I did something bad. Horribly bad. And I can’t turn back now. I’d die in jail.”

  So Cecil was killed. By his ex-wife.

  “You threw Cecil in front of the bus?” I asked. Just to clarify. I mean, she didn’t confess exactly. Always good to get things out in the open and eliminate doubt. And if I’ve learned anything about bad guys from the movies, it’s that they love to talk about their crimes when they’ve got a gun in their hand.

  “He waited. He hid and he waited,” she said.

  “Waited for what?” I asked.

  Vikki’s expression registered understanding. “Until the divorce was final,” she said softly.

  “He waited,” Delilah repeated, tears beginning to stream down her face.

  “I thought they were already divorced,” I said.

  Vikki shook her head. “They separated years ago, but he’d never signed the papers.”

  “It took me a court order to get him to sign those papers.”

  “He signed them last month, right?” Vikki asked.

  Delilah nodded, wiping her eyes.

  “But if he signed them last month...”

  “The divorce isn’t final when you sign the papers,” Vikki said. “A judge has to sign the final decree. Papers can take a while to make it to a judge’s desk. I researched it for my last novel.”

  “He called me, and said he’d just talked to the county clerk—the judge had signed the papers that day. He was being unusually gracious and invited me for a glass of wine. As a goodwill gesture, he said. I thought he was finally growing up a little. Willing to put the past behind him.”

  The bar tab. Of course. They met for wine and beer the day he died. So it was sort of a clue. If only we’d figured that one out sooner we might not have had a gun pointed at us right now.

  “He told you he’d won the lottery?”

  “Told me? He gloated the entire time. Laughing and cackling about how smart he was, and how he was on his way to meet with a lawyer and arrange to have the winnings split five ways.”

  Ah, so Cecil was going to follow through and do right by his gambling partners.

  “The more he laughed,” she went on, “the more he reminded me of my boss. And the more I wanted that money for myself and wanted him dead. Six hundred million. I could stop working at that infernal job and... and... buy five islands...”

  “Ten,” I said. “I calculated. You could probably buy ten. Or twenty small islands.”

  “I just snapped,” she said, snapping her fingers. “But I didn’t let him know how upset I was. Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “I told him how lucky he was and how happy I was for him. I lied and told him that I’d found a man that I loved, a self-made millionaire, and we were moving to Paris. Then, as a peace offering, I wal
ked with him to the bus stop. The whole way there, I watched that envelope in his hands and tried to figure out how to get it and kill him at the same time. Then the bus came along. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. Stuck my foot in front of his, pinched the envelope with one hand, gave him a slight push with the other. There was so much commotion that all I had to do was scream like everyone else, then fade into the background before the police arrived.”

  Moyle’s mystery blonde.

  “Envelope?” I asked. “What envelope?”

  She pulled a white envelope out of her back pants pocket. “This envelope.” She shook it in the air. “This stupid, stupid, empty envelope!”

  “Why did you want an empty envelope?” Moyle asked.

  “I didn’t want an empty envelope, you dope,” she said. “I wanted the lottery ticket that he had been bragging to me was in the envelope.”

  “Maybe you could un-snap,” I suggested, “and realize that we’re just innocent bystanders. We’re not even stakeholders in that ticket. Just let us go. You know, nice and easy like.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not an idiot. There’s no turning back now. I have to take this all of the way.” She pulled something else out of her back pocket. When she unfolded it I could see that it was a page from a paperback book. The missing page from George Winner’s Dead Man Stalking, if I had to take an educated guess. She held it up for us to see that there was a key taped to the paper.

  “What does this key unlock?”

  “How in the world did you know to go to the library and look for that book?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Remember Rosetta’s cell phone?”

  “Rosetta is in on this? I knew there was something fishy about how she was acting.”

  “No,” Delilah sniped. “It’s not Rosetta’s. I left it here when I snuck in while she was home alone cleaning. Handy device I found on the internet. Looks like a phone, acts like a bug. The battery lasted just long enough for me to hear you goons figure out the library connection.”