by Cathy Ace
I cleared my throat.
“Hello everyone. I know you all know me as Bud’s ‘other half,’ but I have to begin by telling you all that I’ve been here this weekend under false pretences.” The folks I’d expected to shoot puzzled looks did so. Good.
“Yes, my name’s Cait, Cait Morgan, and I am indeed a professor at the University of Vancouver, but I’m not a marketing professor, I’m a criminal psychologist. I specialize in profiling victims. And, as those of you who were at the party last evening will know, Ellen invited Bud, who’s a retired police officer, to come to Kelowna to look into her sister’s death. To be fair to Ellen,” I nodded in her direction, “she didn’t know that Bud’s ‘accompanying other’ for this weekend visit would be me—well, she knew it would be me, Cait, but she didn’t know then what I do for a living. She was just lucky, I guess, that she actually got two investigators for the price of one.” I forced a smile.
I’d expected a buzz around the room, and that’s pretty much what I got. Good.
“I realize that Bud and I have only spent a very small amount of time with each of you, but we’ve managed to learn a lot in a short time. Now, with the events of this afternoon and this evening, it’s clear that something’s amiss here, so it’s time for me to speak up. With Bud’s support, of course, and with the indulgence of the RCMP, who, you might have noticed, have a presence in the room.”
It was clear from the response that several people hadn’t noticed the cops hovering at the door. To be fair, there had been rather a lot going on. There was a lot of shuffling on seats. Also good.
“Now, of course, we’re all devastated by the tragic deaths of Rob MacMillan and Dave . . . um, his friend and colleague, Dave, this afternoon.” As the room muttered, Sheri blew her nose, and Colin looked toward me with red eyes, his face a mask of despair, with a hint of relief. Interesting.
“I also know that you might think that the reason for the accident was that the driver had been drinking. When Bud, Ellen, and I left the lunch today, I saw a puddle of brake fluid on the side of the road where the Wisers’ car had been parked. I mentioned this to the police”—I raised an eyebrow in Bud’s direction, and he nodded at me—“and they have confirmed that the brake fluid line on the car had been tampered with.”
Gasps. Open mouths. The Wisers grabbed each others’ hands even tighter.
“Oh my God!” cried Sheri.
“Mom, he was drunk anyway,” added Colin blackly.
I held up my hands for quiet. I got it. “Obviously the police need to find out who might have done this, and why. I believe I can help them. First of all, we have to wonder if Rob and Dave were the intended victims of this, and I cannot discount the facts that Rob and Dave are friends who sometimes work together in the oil business in Calgary, and that some sort of reason for them to be killed might have followed them here to Kelowna from Alberta. However, I think you’ll all agree, most people would have expected that the Wisers would be driving that car, heading down the steep curves and bends of Lakeshore Road this afternoon.”
Accepting expressions and head nodding all around. Good.
“The question is, who would want to kill Marlene and Gordy Wiser? And why?”
This time a round of head shaking, rather than nodding.
“Who are the Wisers?” I asked, rhetorically. “Gordy’s been a farmer in this area for decades. He and Marlene have raised six children, all adopted, and have secured a future for themselves by the efforts they have made to tame the land and grow fine crops. They are fun-loving, happily married people, who, I think everyone would agree, have their little quirks, as we all do,”—a few smiles, and even the Wisers nodding—“but they are well respected, well known in the community.” More nodding. “One of their little quirks is that they like to know what’s going on around them. So keeping an eye on things is second nature. Interested neighbors can be very useful.” I was trying to err on the side of politeness, but realized I’d have to cross the line at some point. “Though some might see it as nosiness. And nosiness can be dangerous, because a nosey person might see things that others would rather they didn’t see. And they might do things that others might wish they hadn’t done. The Wisers even went so far as to keep collecting Annette’s mail after her death as a way to continue to ‘keep an eye on her.’” I let this thought sink in.
“So what might the Wisers have seen or done that might have caused them to become the target of a killer?” I paused. I didn’t expect any suggestions. “This is what brought me to a possible link with Annette’s death. You all know the circumstances: Ellen found her sister dead, with a note and an empty wine bottle beside her. It’s always been accepted as a suicide, and, when I thought in detail about the reactions to Ellen’s little outburst last night, it became very clear to me that the idea that someone might have killed Annette was completely alien to most people in the room. That was a most telling discovery. But that’s exactly what Bud and I were asked to come here to consider: was Annette Newman murdered? Which brings me to the answer to that question: yes, she was.”
The silence that followed was broken by Grant.
“At lunch, Ellen said that Bud had looked into Annette’s death and had convinced her it was a suicide after all. I’m confused.”
“I’m afraid that after Ellen had that epiphany this morning, Bud and I discovered more facts that led us to believe it was murder after all.”
“You didn’t tell Ellen? You didn’t tell anyone?” Grant seemed to be speaking on behalf of my entire audience.
“Okay, I understand your confusion, because I, too, was confused for a long time. Right up until this evening, actually: but here it is. I know Annette Newman was killed, and I know a good deal more. I know who tampered with the Wisers’ brakes, and why—and who made sure that Serendipity Soul suffered an almost fatal allergic reaction tonight.”
“Okay—out with it! You’re saying someone did that to my angel? Someone poisoned her? Tired to kill her?” Sammy was on his feet, ready again to fight for his child. Maybe even ready to kill for her. He couldn’t have been less laid back. All the passion he’d put into his stage presence was still there.
“Serendipity is quite safe now, don’t panic,” I replied, “and I can hear the sirens coming. It won’t be long until she’s at the hospital.”
“I’m fine, really I’m fine,” said Serendipity weakly. “Sammy, sit down. Dad!”
It was clear that both Sammy and Suzie were taken aback at the use of this term by their daughter, and it had the desired effect. And the sirens had their effect on me. I had to get a move on.
“If Annette was killed, then maybe the attempt on the Wisers’ lives had something to do with that. After all, they were close to Annette. They saw her frequently, they each dropped into the other’s homes. She brought them little treats, they knew of her hobbies, her interests, her passions, and they had a bird’s eye view of all the comings and goings at Anen House, all day, every day. If they knew that much about her life, what might they know about her death? Now, Gordy and Marlene did mention to me that Annette had become distant in the last few weeks of her life, but, somehow they forgot to mention that they’d witnessed her new will. Why would they forget to mention that?” I peered over at them. “It was quite important, really, wasn’t it? Especially since the new will was one of the things that quite a few people in this room used as an example of how Annette must have been getting ready to kill herself.”
“It’s an odd thing, that: the will that left her part of the winery to you, Raj.” Now it was Raj’s turn to wriggle with discomfort beneath my withering glance. “To you and your ‘firstborn child,’ that is, which is very odd, isn’t it, eh? Got any kids, Raj? I mean, you’re about forty, you’ve only been here a few years. Plenty of time for you to have had a kid as old as what, twenty, twenty-two even, back in Yorkshire. Anything to say? You are, as I’ve already told you, the prime suspect here, given what Annette willed to you. Did the Wisers know something about you th
at you didn’t want them to share? Did you convince them to sign a fake will, thereby gaining access to what you’ve told me more than once is a unique collection of grape varietals? Did Serendipity begin to suspect? Maybe she wasn’t the first girl who needed to be disposed of. Maybe . . .”
Both Raj and Sammy leapt to their feet. Serendipity jumped up between them.
“Dad, stop. You stop too, Cait. This isn’t fair to Raj.” She turned toward the man she clearly loved and said, “No more messing about. This is it, right? Cards on the table?” Raj nodded, and sat. He held his head in his hands, shaking his head.
“Look everyone, Raj and I love each other. We’ve been together a while, and, whatever you might think, Cait Morgan, I know he didn’t kill Annette. He really quite liked Annette. In fact, they’d been together for a little while, back when he was still working here, right?” Sammy looked shocked, Suzie rolled her eyes, and Raj just kept shaking his head. “Raj hasn’t got any children. But we might have, in the future.”
“Are you two . . . ?” Sammy sounded amazed.
Both Raj and Serendipity nodded. “Yes, Mom, Dad, I’m sorry you’re finding out this way but we are, and we always will be, a couple. We’ve decided. I think we’re old enough to know our own minds, and I don’t think I really need your permission to do anything I want, right?”
Sammy shook his head, dazed.
“Raj,” I said, cutting across the personal dramas of the Souls, “would I be right in saying that, when you and Annette hooked up at a wine event the first time, you weren’t as ‘careful’ as you might have been?” Raj nodded.
“I told you, Ser,” he said, looking at the smiling face of Serendipity, “we was drunk. It were just one of them things.”
“Raj. I know. It’s not an issue.” She was still calm. She reached out and took his hand.
“But, you see Raj,” I continued, “Annette got pregnant. She was pregnant when she died. In fact, it was because she was pregnant with your child that she was killed.”
I watched. I saw. I carried on.
“Annette’s odd behavior was because she was pregnant: even Bonnie said she was ‘dashing here and there like a bird in spring.’ A nesting bird. She lost a tasting event to you, Raj! There’s a lot of research that suggests that taste and smell change during pregnancy. She missed meetings, canceled tastings. She was likely suffering from morning sickness, and knew she couldn’t hide her changing abilities when it came to her job. She was, literally, clearing out her house and beginning to prepare for a baby in her life. She started to buy larger clothes at thrift stores, and she dumped her garbage herself, probably because it contained items she didn’t want anyone, even garbage collectors, to see—maybe pregnancy test kits, even the debris from cleaning up unexpected attacks of vomiting. She didn’t want anyone to know. She didn’t even tell you, Raj, did she?”
Raj was shaking his head sadly. “Is that why she changed her will, then?” he asked plaintively. “’Cos she were having my child? It would have been my ‘firstborn.’”
I nodded.
“Oh, dear, dear,” said Marlene, quietly. “Terrible.”
“Yes, terrible,” I agreed, “because Annette’s killer committed a double homicide: Annette and her baby.” I let it sink in.
I looked around the people in the room. “And yet none of you knew. None of you guessed? Not you, Ellen, her loving sister, who saw her every day? Not you, Gordy and Marlene, who said she was acting oddly, and yet agreed to sign a new will? Not you, Raj, who continued to see her constantly in and around the locale and the business? Not any of you? Lizzie—you told me Annette was suffering from a bad back, an altered mood, and a changed sense of smell—how could you come up with ‘root chakra’ and not ‘pregnant?’ Amazing. No one saw what was right under their noses. All the clues were there, and not one of you put them together to work out that she was having a baby. That’s largely because you were all, to a greater or lesser extent, fixated on your own obsessions.”
People shifted uncomfortably.
“Of course, there was the complication I had to work through about Annette selling her entire collection of snuff boxes, but that related to her obsession, and not to the fact that she was pregnant. Grant, you told me that you tried to help Annette, but you let her down?” Grant nodded.
“I did, and maybe even more than I thought, if what you’re saying is true,” he said, grimly.
“Oh, it’s true alright. It’s also true, isn’t it, that Annette, one of your ‘best customers’ according to an inscription you wrote in a book on silverware for her, came to you and begged you to sell her snuff box collection—in a hurry. Right?”
He nodded. “We’d worked together building her snuff box collection over many years. That’s how I came to get to know Kelowna, driving up here with boxes I’d found for her, when I still had my silver and antiques business in Vancouver. She came to me, a couple of months before she died, and asked if I could go back to my old contacts and sell her whole collection. Fast. I told her she could have got a lot more if only she would wait for the right sales to come up, but she said she needed money, and she needed it quickly. I should have pressed her. I should have made her tell me why she needed it. Though,” and here he looked puzzled, “I still don’t really get it. I mean, okay, she might have been about to have a child, but the winery’s doing well. She can’t have been short of money.”
“She needed the cash to be able to buy her collectors’ ‘grail.’ She told Colin about it, right?” Colin nodded. “Otherwise, like the obsessive collector she was, she kept the whole thing to herself. I’m going to suggest that you sold her collection of silver snuff boxes for around forty thousand dollars, would that be right?”
Grant looked surprised. He nodded. “How’d you know that?” he asked.
Bud’s face was telling me he wanted to ask the same question.
“I just spoke to a very nice, if sleepy, man in Newfoundland, by the name of ‘Sanderson.’ His family name used to be ‘Sandy’ back when they were in Scotland: such a well-respected name, in certain parts, that it was an honor to be known as a ‘son’ of the house, hence ‘Sanderson.’ He confirmed that he sold Annette a signed James Sandy snuff box, made from the wood of the bed in which Robbie Burns died, with a letter in Sandy’s own handwriting giving it an impeccable provenance. She paid fifteen thousand dollars—which he assures me was a very fair price—and Annette had deposited another twenty-five grand in her bank account. That’s forty.”
There was a sharp intake of breath from Ellen, to my right. Ah!
I turned toward Ellen. “Yes, you didn’t know that the plain wooden box that arrived at Anen House by courier, two days after Annette’s death, was worth that much, did you Ellen? Otherwise you might not have tossed it into the apple store with all her other mail. All that stuff you hang onto, Ellen. All the years you’ve been filling storage bins, surrounding yourself with the evidence of your inability to let go? It speaks volumes about you. You’re a very unusual hoarder: you’re neat; you’re highly organized; and, unlike many who see the ‘value’ in everything, which is why they can’t get rid of it, you’re a hoarder who sees ‘value’ in nothing. Not in a small, perfectly formed little box. Not in your sister. In fact, the only thing you do see ‘value’ in, the only thing you see as ‘important’ is you. You, Ellen Newman. You are the center of your world. You are the only one with desires that matter. It is only your obsession that counts. You are the person in this room with by far the strongest, most driving obsession. Your obsession is Raj Pinder, isn’t it? It has been since he arrived in Kelowna, four years ago. Which was when you went to Lizzie Jackson and asked for her help to ‘make room’ in your life for ‘someone special.’ It was because of your obsession with Raj that you’ve killed four, probably five people, including your own sister, and have tried to kill again tonight.”
There was complete silence. Even the approaching sirens had stopped wailing.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” explode
d Ellen, jumping to her feet. She drew herself up to her full height and looked down at me. “You’re talking rubbish. It was me who said Annette had been murdered. Why would I say that if I’d murdered her, when everyone said it was a suicide. Why wouldn’t I just shut up and get away with it?”
Everyone looked at me, Ellen’s question reflected on their faces.
“That is such a good question, Ellen, and, you know, that had even me confused for quite some time. If you’d managed to stage the perfect murder, because everyone thought it was a suicide, why would you be rattling the cage, asking Bud to come and look into your sister’s possible murder?”
“And the answer is?” asked Lizzie, on behalf of the room.
“The answer is because of Raj. Again, back to Ellen’s obsession. Let me explain.”
“Please do,” said Sheri, “because I want my boy to be off to the hospital—but only when you’ve explained, right, Colin? I have to understand why my Rob is dead, and I don’t.”
I nodded at Sheri, then at Bud. He understood, and began to move toward the doors.
“This is what happened, and how it happened, and why it happened,” I said, suddenly feeling very weary. I took a sip of water. Then one of champagne. Much better.
“Ellen and Annette Newman lost their parents, tragically, in a road traffic accident. Ellen stepped up and made sure she and her sister were okay. She, and then her sister, built up a successful and, thanks to Annette’s fabulous nose, world-renowned winery. About four years ago Raj Pinder comes to town. He’s younger than Ellen, good-looking, and a bit out of the ordinary for a woman like her, whose major brush with the outside world—her years at the University of Vancouver—I’m guessing made her feel a bit left out of things. It’s not an unusual story: Ellen Newman fell for Raj Pinder. What is unusual is the psychological profile of the woman doing the falling.”
I looked down at Ellen, who had plopped back onto her seat. She looked up at me, nostrils flaring, face all pink. She was seething.