The Fred Vickery Mystery Series: Books 1-3 (Fred Vickery Mysteries)

by Sherry Lewis

  Fred followed, clinging to the hope that he’d be able to stop her if she did anything foolish.

  At the back of the storeroom, a stairway rose to the second floor. Showing no signs of hesitation, Kate took the stairs two at a time.

  Out of necessity, Fred took the stairs more slowly, reaching the top just as Kate disappeared into a room at the front of the building. Before Fred could follow, shouts erupted. Shrill voices grated the air. A man’s voice punctuated the cacophony with a string of obscenities.

  Panting from the exertion, Fred finally stepped through the door into pandemonium.

  Kate stood just inside, her arms folded tightly across her chest, a gleam of triumph and some other emotion—something unsettling—in her eyes. Brandon scrambled with his underwear while Winona lay on a sofa, a blanket draped casually over her.

  “You’ll never change, will you?” Kate said bitterly. Without mercy, she watched Brandon’s frantic attempts to dress.

  Fred wanted to turn away out of decency, to give the man a chance to cover himself but he wanted to keep an eye on Kate more. He had no idea what she might do.

  She took a menacing step toward Brandon. “You couldn’t even wait for Joan’s memory to fade before you went panting after somebody else, could you? You can’t even pretend to be sorry she’s dead.”

  Brandon finally managed to get into his briefs and came out from behind the sofa. He walked toward Kate, his hands out, imploring. “You don’t understand . . .”

  She slapped Brandon full across the face. “Don’t tell me I don’t understand! I understand everything. I know exactly what you are, and I’m only sorry Joan didn’t figure you out before it was too late.” She turned to Winona who hadn’t moved from her provocative pose on the sofa. “I just had to see for myself what kind of woman you are. Apparently, you’re just like your mother.”

  Winona smiled wickedly. “Unlike yours, my mother never spent her nights alone. Neither do I.”

  Or her mornings either, from the look of things. Fred looked away, uncomfortable with her state of undress beneath the skimpy cover, hoping she wouldn’t move and dislodge it.

  “What did you promise him to get him in bed with you?” Kate demanded.

  Winona brushed back her flaming red hair in a lazy movement. “I didn’t have to promise him anything. I’m not in the habit of buying my men.” She moved as if to sit up, let the blanket edge lower and caught it in the nick of time. At Fred’s flush, she laughed throatily. “Isn’t he sweet? You ought to take up with this one, Kate. He’s such an innocent old thing.”

  Fred’s face burned with embarrassment. He felt Kate look at him before she shifted her gaze to Brandon again.

  “It’s not what you think—” Brandon began.

  “Really? I walked in and found the two of you naked. If you weren’t screwing her, what is going on here?” She waved a hand in front of her face. “Don’t bother to answer. I’ve heard it all from you before.” Without another word, she left the room.

  Relieved to have the scene over with relatively little damage, Fred nodded clumsily at Brandon and went after Kate. He had more questions for Brandon, but they’d have to keep. This didn’t seem like a good time.

  When he reached the top of the stairs, he saw Kate sitting near the bottom. She leaned back against one wall, hugging her knees to her chest. She watched him walk down to meet her and for a moment he wondered if she were on the verge of tears.

  “Well,” he said with a little laugh, “that was a shock.”

  “I knew what I’d find the minute I saw his car outside.”

  “Then why did you barge in there like that?”

  Kate shrugged. “Maybe I had to see it for myself.”

  Knowing would have been enough for Fred. Seeing went a bit too far. She rocked herself gently and stared at her knees. He’d never seen her so quiet before.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on here?”

  Kate laughed without humor. “Besides the obvious? Sorry. That just brought back too many memories. I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  Fred tried to believe her, but the look on her face and the trembling of her hands convinced him that whatever memories she’d run into had been rough ones. “Listen Kate, let’s get one more thing straight before we go any further. I’m willing to help you, I told you that, but I’m not going to do it unless you tell me everything. Like what happened between you and Joan and Brandon. And I don’t want to hear that it was a long time ago or that doesn’t matter.”

  He honestly thought she’d refuse. He expected her to rise to the bait and stand up fighting, or tell him to forget it.

  But she only shrugged. “I might as well tell you, I guess. It can’t hurt any more. I was married once—briefly. It didn’t work out and we split up after only three years, but I still loved him even though I knew the marriage would never work. He married me for my money. He admitted it. The day the divorce was final I came home to find him with Joan. Oh, she never slept with him while we were married—I’ll give her that much credit, but he didn’t even let our marriage die before he went after her.”

  She tilted her head and looked up at Fred with a distorted smile. “Brandon married Joan less than a month after he divorced me.”

  seventeen

  “I never had any idea how she felt,” Kate said to Fred an hour later. After the scene with Brandon and Winona, Kate had needed to pull herself together. In desperation, Fred had led her to the lake. Now they walked the north path, away from Fred’s place, away from the spot where he’d found Joan’s body.

  “We both met him one summer at Bar Harbor and I fell head over heels in love. He wanted me because I was the oldest and, of course, he thought I would get the money.” Kate shrugged almost sheepishly and kicked at a chunk of ice on the trail.

  Fred waited for her to go on but when she didn’t speak for a while, he said, “So you both fell in love with him.”

  Kate nodded but kept her eyes on the path. “He was handsome and exciting. He said all the right things, did all the right things. Much later, of course, I recognized what I should have noticed from the beginning, but at first, all I saw was his charm. I felt so lucky to have him.”

  “What about Joan?”

  “I didn’t care. No, that’s not right. I would have cared if I’d realized. But I only saw that he loved me and I loved him. I would have done anything for him”

  “Did your parents see through him?”

  Kate laughed scornfully. “If my father thought about me at all, he would have been glad to have me off his hands. My mother was dead. Joan was all I had until Brandon came along.”

  He touched the back of her elbow, wishing he had the courage to offer her comfort. “Maybe you were wrong about your father. We don’t always know what another person feels . . .”

  “I know what he felt.”

  “That’s probably what my kids think,” Fred said and smiled, trying to lighten the moment.

  Kate didn’t smile back. “You’re lucky, Fred. I’ve watched you with Maggie, and I’ve seen how much you love her and how much she loves you. I wish I knew what that was like. I don’t feel anything but disgust when I think of my father.”

  “That’s a shame,” he said. “Why is that?”

  She shook her head, but just shoved her hands into her pockets and stepped ahead of him on the path.

  Fred increased his pace to catch her. “I’ve never understood how you and Joan could go ten years without seeing each other. Just thinking about my kids drifting apart like that tears me apart.”

  “Your kids won’t.”

  He hoped she was right. But this wasn’t about his family, so he shook off his concerns and asked, “So you and Brandon married. How did the two of them end up together?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Guess.”

  “They had an affair?”

  “You got it. But hey! At least he’s consistent.”

  “And that was it between you and Joan. Didn’t you
miss her?”

  “No. Not at first, anyway. I was too angry. Later I wondered if I’d been wrong to cut her off so completely, but I couldn’t have done anything to prevent what happened and couldn’t let myself feel bad about it forever. I’ve learned not to worry about things I can’t change.”

  “But you could have changed that.”

  “Not while she was with Brandon. He didn’t want Joan to have anything to do with me, and she seemed happy enough to go along with him. He convinced her I was jealous and that I’d try to ruin their marriage, but he just didn’t want me to tell her the truth or for her to listen and believe me. He didn’t need me to do that though, did he? He proved himself in the end.” She swung away from him and took a few steps off the path into a grove of aspens, some of which were still clinging to their gold leaves.

  She walked through a pile of leaves and snow, and Fred shivered. Even wearing his boots, his toes felt like ice. He should get her indoors soon or she would freeze. She looked forlorn standing in the middle of the snow, her arms at her side, her head drooping. He wished he could think of something to say that would help her.

  It couldn’t be good for her to be so self-contained, to lock everything up so tightly inside herself. By some odd circumstance he’d been thrown in the middle of this crisis in her life and probably because he was responsible for urging her to stay, he felt responsible for helping her get through it.

  “I should be angry with him, shouldn’t I?” she said over her shoulder a few minutes later. “I can’t feel anything for Joan but pity. And Brandon disgusts me. No matter how hard I try, I can’t make myself feel truly sorry that he hurt her.”

  Fred went to her. “Well, she hurt you. It’s hard to feel sympathy for somebody who’s offended you.”

  “Harder for some than for others, I suppose.”

  “Probably. So I guess that explains why you never came to see her—why you never called her in ten years—because she married Brandon?”

  “Partly.” She twitched her lips in a hint of a smile. “Mostly, I guess. I tried to tell her what he wanted from her, but she wouldn’t believe me. She kept saying that I was jealous because she had him and I didn’t. I don’t know, maybe I was jealous at first. But I knew what he wanted and I hated him for using her to get it.” She knocked the snow from a low-hanging branch with one vicious movement. “I wish I’d never inherited that filthy money.”

  That surprised him. He’d assumed she cared a great deal about her wealth.

  “It’s all we ever got of my father. Oh, I took it. He owed it to me. In fact, he owed me more than that, but the money was what I got and I don’t intend to share it with anyone—especially Winona Fox.” She took a deep breath and looked away. “I didn’t find out about her until I was seven. She must have been eleven or twelve at the time.”

  Her expression changed and pain skipped across her face. Tears gathered in her eyes and spilled onto her cheeks. Fred suspected she’d needed to release the sorrow and anger for a long time.

  “Nobody ever bothered to tell me about his other family—about, you know, Winona. You know how I found out I had another sister? Somebody brought a pony to the house one day. I thought it was for me. I can’t tell you how excited I was. And happy. He’d never done anything like that for me before. He actually came home that night—which was pretty rare in itself. I ran to him and threw my arms around him and thanked him. I kissed his cheek over and over. He pushed me away and yelled at my mother for letting me mess up his suit and then he left. Afterward, my mother told me the pony was for Winona. That’s how I found out.”

  Her shoulders slumped, but Fred didn’t go to her. He held back, telling himself that she needed to let everything out. If he put his arm around her and offered her comfort, she would pull away and lock everything inside again. Later, when she’d let it all out, he could try to comfort her.

  “My mother knew. She knew about Deirdre and Winona. And she stayed married to him. She said she stayed because she loved him. Can you believe that?”

  “Maybe she did,” Fred said. “People react to hurt and disappointment in different ways. If Winona was older than you, maybe your father’s relationship with her mother came first.” That might explain why Winona had such a sense of entitlement.

  Kate sniffed and dug a tissue from her pocket. “I hated seeing what he did to my mother. I used to think he hurt her, until I realized that she condoned the affair—that she’d married him knowing about it. He’d been sleeping with Deirdre for years before he married my mother. Winona was born before he married my mother, but Deirdre didn’t come from the right type of people, so he had to marry my mother—for appearances. My mother said they were the same type, Deirdre and Russell, and they’d never get over each other, but she didn’t care. For money, she accepted it. For a big house, she let him leave us every weekend to go to them. For jewelry and clothes, she let him spend the holidays with them. I can count on one hand the number of Christmases we had together.

  “When my father died, he left everything to us—Joan and me. We were his legitimate daughters, so we got it all. Winona couldn’t stand it. She’s tried everything to get a share of the money. She believes one-third of it should be hers. I hate the money, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let her have any of it!”

  “That gives her a convincing motive for wanting Joan out of the way,” Fred suggested. “But could she have overpowered Joan? Is she strong enough to carry Joan down to the lake?”

  “Maybe she had an accomplice,” Kate said. “Maybe she and Brandon were in this together.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” She shook her head, unconvinced. “I talked with my attorneys yesterday about Joan’s will. I wanted to know how much Brandon gets—whether it would be worth it to him to kill her. They told me that everything from my father’s trust goes to Madison.”

  That was a surprise. “The money doesn’t go to Brandon?”

  “Nope. The only thing he gets is the property they owned together, and there’s not a lot of that. Not enough to kill for.”

  But that changed everything, Fred thought. “Who can say what’s enough to kill for? I read in the paper once about a lady who killed a friend over a game of Scrabble. But maybe you’re right. Maybe it wasn’t the money.”

  “So we’ve ruled out Brandon and Winona as suspects?” Kate looked disappointed.

  “Maybe,” Fred said, “but let’s not cross them off the list yet.”

  “Fine, but we should probably shift our focus to someone else. What about Summer?”

  Fred shrugged. “If she believed Joan stole her paintings and was somehow destroying her career, she could have done it. She doesn’t have an alibi for the time of the murder. We only have her story about hearing noises outside of her house that night.”

  Kate stuffed the tissue into her pocket. “There’s also no proof Joan actually stole any of her paintings.”

  “I don’t believe Joan did,” Fred admitted. “But Winona? Maybe. She could have been skimming money off the top from the sales she made. She’s the one with the contacts around the country. So she’s the one most likely to be the art thief.”

  Kate’s eyes blazed as she returned to the trail. “It keeps coming back to her, doesn’t it? If she stole art from Summer, she probably stole from other artists, and she was probably setting Joan up for the fall—at least, as long as Joan had an interest in the Frame-Up. But that’s where that theory falls apart. According to Winona, Joan wasn’t involved in the Frame-Up anymore.”

  “Have you seen any legal paperwork giving Winona the store? So far, we only have her word for it that Joan signed over the store. For all we know, Joan still owned half the store. Maybe she figured out what Winona was doing and Winona decided to get rid of her.”

  “If Winona’s lying, then Madison will inherit Joan’s share of the store, too.”

  Fred nodded and ran through the scenario they’d laid out once more. “We’re missing something,” he said. “Winona would be taking a terri
ble risk to lie about Joan’s interest in the store. It would be too easy for you to prove that she’s lying. Maybe we should talk to Logan Ramsey again and find out what we can about Shadow Mountain.” He cast a sidelong glance at Kate and changed the subject. “What will you do now? About Madison, I mean?”

  “What is there to do?”

  “Plenty. You can’t just leave her up there with Brandon and never see her.”

  Clearly exasperated, Kate turned to face him. “What do you want me to do? Knock on Brandon’s door and tell him I want visitation? Oh! I know! Maybe I should come to Cutler twice a year. I could stay with Brandon for the holidays!”

  Fred was just as frustrated as she was. “I expect you to do whatever you can to see that she has a better life than you had.”

  “She’ll have a wonderful life,” Kate snapped. “She’ll have all Joan’s money eventually. What more does she need?”

  “She deserves more than a bank full of money,” Fred argued. “She deserves to be loved.”

  “Well, I’m not the person to give it to her. I don’t know the first thing about children except that they’re demanding and selfish. They want everything they see and they’re never satisfied.”

  Fred bit back the words that rose to his lips, aware that they were born of anger and were probably better left unsaid. “Selfish and demanding? Unlike some adults I could name, I suppose. You complain about your father, but it sounds to me like you’re just like him.”

  Kate’s mouth fell open and her cheeks burned with anger. “That’s a horrible thing to say!”

  “Maybe so, but it’s true.”

  “Why do you care how I feel about Madison?”

  What could he say? That he cared because he didn’t like to see Kate so cold and unfeeling and because he thought Madison could bring her out of it? Or that she had only to look at her own painful childhood to find the answers? Better to say nothing at all.