Their conversation deteriorated into an argument about some event from least ten years in the past.
Jane sipped her coffee and wondered if the cops had thought to ask the volunteers what they had seen. Perhaps she could get an upper hand on the investigation. She’d just need to find someone who had seen Pat Bromfield more immediately before he had died.
Though she wandered from cafeteria to chapel to volunteer lounge, chatting with everyone she could, Jane found no one who had seen Pat shortly before she had found his body. Or at least no one willing to admit it.
She gave up on that quest—for the time being—and settled into a threadbare recliner with her Bible hoping to find a little solace in the Good Word. It wouldn’t have the solution to the crime in it, but it was better than dwelling on her failures as she tried to come up with her next move.
She was humming along to the forty-second Psalm when Jake joined her. “I’ve just been with the police. They interviewed me. I don’t know why they took so long seeing as how I’m married to the girl who found the body.” He frowned dramatically. “I like to be a bit more important than that.”
Jane closed her Bible. “How did it go? Did you learn anything?”
“It went very well, and yes I did. By inference at least. The questions they asked me were interesting. Did I have access to the house Pat lived in? No more access than any other volunteer. But as I had been assigned to construction all week, you might even say I had less access than most.”
“Seems like a weird way to start the interview.” It seemed to Jane, at least, that that kind of information was easily obtainable by the work schedule.
“It did catch me by surprise. That’s for sure. Next they asked if I had a medical background, which I don’t. I’ve never been more glad to not be a doctor.”
“That’s also kind of weird question.” Jane was hoping she’d be able to build a picture from the clues Jake was dropping, but the first two didn’t match at all.
“I agree. They also asked a bunch of normal questions, but the question that led me to my genius moment, the inference of inferences, was if I knew how Pat’s heart medicine had ended up in the men’s dorm.”
“That’s kind of a big reveal.” Jane laughed, the result of nerves and surprise. “If I were you I would have led with that just now.”
“No way, that’s the kind of thing you build up to.”
Jane frowned. “But why you?”
“Ah, well, that’s the next big deal. It turns out Bromfield is—was—on the board of directors of Escape International.”
Jane sucked in a breath. “So he’s technically your boss?”
“Kind of. Escape has a big board. Bromfield has lived in Mexico longer than I’ve been on staff, so I’ve never met him and didn’t even recognize his name. That said, of course the board does have the power to fire me from my position as a development officer, but they wouldn’t because I rock. It’s a coincidence, but not a big one considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Considering Escape is Southern California based, Pat has had a long history of work in Evangelical non-profits in California, and that the world of mission work is a little on the small side. But it was enough of a coincidence for them to question me closely about the heart medicine of a man who died mysteriously in Mexico while I happened to be in town.”
“This seems, on the surface, to be the stuff of nightmares.”
“Nah. They were reasonable men. They seemed to understand that I have about twenty bosses and that this one who I had never met and didn’t know had very little power over me personally. They also seemed to recognize that I wouldn’t have known he was on heart medicine, and wouldn’t have had a way to sneak it out of his bathroom.”
“And now we know how he died.”
“Now we can infer that he died by failing to take his heart medicine. And we can infer that someone snuck it away from him.”
“If he had known it was missing he would have just gotten more,” Jane mused. “So the killer must have substituted his pills for some that looked the same.”
“Another good inference.” Jake stood up. “I think we can’t make any more of it than that though.”
“But what about the pills being in your dorm?”
“It’s been several days and they didn’t find them the first day, so I think someone recently put them as far away from themselves as they could.”
“Another good inference.”
“True, but it only supports what the other facts seem to indicate. Someone with access and knowledge wanted Bromfield dead, was willing to wait for it, and wanted it to be untraceable.”
“If they wanted it to be untraceable, why didn’t they flush his pills? Or even better, why didn’t they just put them back after he died? Then no one would know.”
Jake sat quietly for a moment. “Maybe the autopsy revealed he hadn’t been taking them.”
“Okay. I can go with that. Perhaps something in the autopsy revealed he hadn’t taken his pills. We don’t know what the pills were, or how they worked, so we can only guess that was possible. The killer had replaced the fakes with the real ones, flushing the fakes and flushing the correct number of pills that Bromfield was supposed to have taken. But they get word that the police know the truth and they have to get rid of the right pills.”
“Why?” Jake leaned close, forehead to forehead with Jane.
“Because . . . access to the pills is limited enough to shed light on the killer, and she—probably his wife—had to make her attempt at a cover up disappear. And she ditched them in the volunteer dorm to throw suspicion on someone else—anyone else at all, really. Your connection with Bromfield, thin as it is, is an unfortunate coincidence that was actually very useful to us.”
“Not bad. I could be convinced of that if I was on a jury and you had some physical proof.”
“Which is one of the many things we don’t and won’t have.”
“Find out what permanent staff or residents have been near the men’s dorm lately. That’s a start.”
“You’re a genius, and I love you.” Jane gave him a big long kiss to thank him for the first real break she had had since coming to Mexico, and also because she was missing him at night.
8
A chill wind blew across the field as she walked to the chapel. November in Northern Baja wasn’t an equatorial paradise. They had finally received permission to hold Claude Marshall’s funeral. But it would be doubly sad since the families and full-time staff would essentially be mourning both men.
Jake nabbed Jane before she entered the chapel. “Everyone will be in there.”
Jane nodded, not feeling like the obvious deserved a huge kind of response.
“Everyone. The whole staff, all of the families. Even the police seem to be inside, watching so that no one could slip out, I guess. The whole orphanage will be abandoned.”
Jane froze. Her face lit up. A shiver of excitement ran down her spine. “Of course.” They slipped to the side of the chapel with no windows.
“We can watch from here. When the last of the slowpokes enter the chapel, this whole place is at our disposal.”
They didn’t have an attendance list to check off, but after twenty minutes, no one else walked up to the chapel door, and the police were still largely absent from the courtyard.
“While they could probably see us, they also probably aren’t looking,” Jane said.
Jake just nodded. “House four first, yes?”
“Definitely.” They headed to the Bromfield house, sneaking the long way around the buildings, just in case. It was unlocked, and they let themselves right in. “Good thing the cops asked us about our access to the house before we did this. Make sure you are careful with your fingerprints.” Jane wasn’t nearly as cavalier about Jake’s connection to the dead man as he was, and the idea of him sneaking around while under suspicion hit her like a rock, just as they walked in.
But she pushed the fear aside, and we
nt straight to the master bedroom.
The whole house was painted concrete, with linoleum floors, easy to keep cool, inexpensive to build. Woven throw rugs gave it a homey air. The furniture in the bedroom had the cast-off look one would expect of a place run entirely on American donations. A huge dresser of solid wood from the 1970s paired with a bed that had no headboard.
She pulled open the drawers of the dresser. The top held ladies’ clothes, the next men’s. She skipped the mother’s drawers and dug through Pat’s clothes. One pair of khakis, three pairs of jeans, at least five pairs of cargo shorts. But all of them with empty pockets. An assortment of polo shirts, worn thin with age.
The last of the five drawers didn’t have any clothes in it. Just one of those jumbles of string that the woman had told her were “cultural.” Jane picked it up and ran her fingers through it. The strings were all the same unbleached color, and most of them had a series of knots, though Jane couldn’t figure out the pattern. Though she would have loved to take serious time to study it, she put it back and moved to the closet.
One church dress, one pair of sandals. Nothing else. If Pat had had a nice suit and dress shoes, they were probably waiting for him at the funeral home. If and when the morgue released him, they would dress him in his nicest clothes.
Jake poked his head in the door. “Anything in here?”
“Not yet.” Jane knelt by the bed and looked under it, but it was empty. Not even extra blankets or dust bunnies.
She joined Jake in the living room. “You find anything?” Their voices were whispers, their words spare, and their motions jerky and slow, desperate to not be noticed though there was only one window, and it faced the empty courtyard.
“Just this.” He pointed to a chart on the wall. Ten Spanish names down one side. A series of words across the top: limpiar ropa, lava platos—regular chores, also in Spanish. Boxes with stars, some with check marks. “What do you think that means?” She pointed to whole row of black squares next to Annabella’s name.
“Discipline, I guess.”
Jane traced the line of squares with her fingers. “Check the kids’ rooms?”
Jake nodded.
Jane went to the girls’ room. Two bunk beds and one single bed on a simple frame. Two medium dressers. This room wasn’t as empty feeling as the parents’ though. The beds had cheerful blankets. One top bunk had a bright, clean baby doll, carefully swaddled. Two of them had matching teddy bears. The single bed had a book, open on the pillow. A laundry basket against the wall spilled over with small dolls, stuffed animals, and plastic toys.
Jane opened one of the dresser drawers. The girls’ clothes were folded and stacked nicely, except for the drawer full of tights and underpants, but as Jane well knew, it was almost impossible to keep that drawer tidy.
The closet was the same. A smattering of church clothes and shoes. Not enough for five American little girls, but plenty if each of these girls only wore one dress a week. And five school uniforms carefully hung. It seemed a pity each girl only had one uniform, but perhaps they had two and were wearing the other set. Still, nothing fishy. Nothing that screamed “my daddy beats me.” Everything looked fine.
“The boys’ room is perfectly normal,” Jake said, when she met him in the living room again.
“As is the girls’. Not even weirdly over-normal. Just actually normal.” The chore chart with the black squares made Jane sad. A tiny window into a life of weird rules and borderline abuse, but no evidence. Nothing you could use to call attention to it, to say “this isn’t okay.”
Jake shrugged, clearly as disappointed as Jane felt.
They checked the bathroom, with careful attention to the medicine cabinet. But all they found was enough toilet paper for a family of twelve, two toothbrush holders packed full, and toothpaste. Whatever the heart medicine situation had been, it was clearly in an evidence baggy with the police. There was no sign of it in the bathroom or bedroom.
Next they upended the living room, but put it back together again with care. Nothing tucked under cushions or furniture. Nothing hiding in the cupboards in the kitchen. “My mind keeps going back to that cultural craft project,” Jane said, as they shut the door to house four.
“The string thing you were telling me about?”
“It’s the only thing that stands out, don’t you think?”
“Sure, but how do you get someone to tell you what it means?”
“Good question.” She mulled over ideas. “After the funeral we need to hang out in the teen house.”
Jake raised an eyebrow.
“Trust me.”
Two sets of parents were entrusted with raising the teenagers—one for the girls, and one for the boys. When the girls and boys hit fourteen they moved into the teen houses, a dorm-style living arrangement, and stayed there until high school was over. It sounded miserable, to Jane, but then, there had to be a way to make room for new children in each family if you wanted to run a family-style orphanage.
It wasn’t until the next day that Jane and Jake were able to hang out with the teenagers, and at that it was getting late. Their two-week mission trip was more than half over. The police hadn’t told them they couldn’t leave the country, but that might change when their flights actually came up. They were allowed back in the dorms, but otherwise required to limit their movements to a few buildings. While the teen homes weren’t on the acceptable list of places for volunteers to hang out, Jane and Jake needed to risk it.
This time, instead of sneaking around behind buildings when no one was looking, they decided to go for confidence as a cover and walked boldly across the courtyard together, from the cafeteria to the teen houses, which stood next to each other.
No one stopped them.
They split up again, Jane to the girls and Jake to the boys.
It was the siesta hour on a Saturday and five of the twelve girls who currently lived in the dorm were lounging in a family room.
Jane joined them.
One girl, with deep dimples in her round face, smiled at Jane.
“How are you guys holding up?” Jane sat on the overstuffed couch next to the dimpled girl.
“Not so well.” Her English was very smooth. “Pat was my house daddy.” Her eyes were big, and her lashes long. A good enough reason, in Jane’s mind, to keep the boys in their own dorm.
“I’m so sorry. He seems like he was a really good daddy.” Jane lied through her teeth, but for a good cause.
The girl nodded. “The only daddy I ever had.”
Another girl, sitting across the room, snorted.
“Shut up, Esperanza.” Dimples frowned.
“No quiero.” Esperanza leaned forward. “Pat was terrible.” Her English was heavily accented, but not at all hesitant. Very beautiful and smooth, in fact.
As much as Jane wanted to hear how awful and abusive Pat had been—mostly from a sense of justice, as his death had made the issue moot—she needed to be able to steer the conversation to those string things, and getting the girls in a fight wouldn’t help.
“Did you live with them, too?” Jane asked.
“No way. You couldn’t have paid me to live there.”
The girl with dimples sighed. “He wasn’t always like that, though. Not when I lived there.”
“What changed?” Jane had to follow up, even though it was still out of the way of her goal. Though he couldn’t be held accountable for the possible abuse, it surely had something to do with his death.
“Este libro.” Esperanza threw a book on the floor. “It has ruined everything.” She looked like she wanted to spit on the book.
“It’s not a good book,” Dimples acknowledged.
“May I?” Jane picked it up. The book was a comb-bound with a thin card stock cover like a church ladies cook book. It was in Spanish, but the title was simple enough to translate—God’s Way for Girls and Boys.
“Is this where the headstand thing come from?” Jane asked.
Dimples shuddered. “
I don’t like it. It’s not okay. But when I was six they still spanked us, so what is worse? Trends come and go.”
“My father never spanked us,” Esperanza said. “And he destroys every copy of this book he can find.”
“Who’s your father?” Jane leaned forward, excited by the unexpected revelations. Maybe this man was a vigilante who had killed the abusive father.
“Jorge Estevez.” She looked at the floor. “He moved away last year.”
“Ahh.” Jane sat back. So not this week’s murderer . . . probably. “Where did he go?”
“My parents moved to the new orphanage we are opening in Oaxaca. I’m going to work there when I graduate.” She looked up, a hopeful light in her hazel eyes.
Jane smiled at her. “They don’t approve of this new discipline method?”
“No. They were born in . . . in . . . the twentieth siglo. They are not . . . mmm . . . ancianos.” She shrugged, her English failing.
“Modern parents.”
“Sí. Exactly. Perfect parents.”
“My parents were perfect, too,” Dimples said.
“Perfectly horrible.”
The other girls had been ignoring the argument until this, but one of them looked up from a book and threw a pillow at Esperanza. “Nadie es perfecto.” Nobody is perfect.
“What do you guys usually do on the weekend?” Jane had to turn the conversation before it exploded.
“This,” the girl who threw the pillow said. “Sometimes you Americanos come hang out with us, sometimes not. What do you do?”
“I like to knit.” It was a lie, but it was in a good cause.
Pillow-thrower frowned. “What is knit?”
“With yarn? String?” Jane made the motions with her hands . . . sort of. She purposefully made it look as much like what the house mother had been doing with the strings as she could.
“Como las madres?” Pillow-thrower directed her question to Esperanza, who appeared to be the oldest of the girls.
“Like tying them?” Esperanza asked.
Killer Calling: A Plain Jane Mystery (A Cozy Christian Collection) (The Plain Jane Mysteries Book 7) Page 6