Murder Makes it Mine

by Christina Strong

  Janet sensed it. “What is it? What were you about to say?”

  Samantha experienced a pang of guilt at saying what she knew would hurt the girl, but Janet had asked to be kept appraised of their plans, and this was certainly a major development in their investigation of her Cousin Olivia’s death.

  Samantha’s voice showed her sympathy as she said, “And I am even sorrier to tell you the suspicions that arose from our impromptu meeting, but Colonel McLain thinks there is a very good possibility that your cousin really might have been murdered to keep her from exposing a bogus Benny Stoddard.”

  When Janet didn’t speak, Samantha told her the rest of it.

  “Furthermore, he thinks that Jasmine’s accident may have been an attempt on her life, as well. She and Olivia were the only ones left of us here in Riverhaven who knew Ben Junior well enough to identify him, you know.”

  “Oh.” Janet went quiet, and Samantha didn’t speak while she let the girl come to grips with the dreadful news.

  After a moment, Samantha spoke again, “We determined that we have to find pictures of Benny Stoddard to compare with the young man at the Talleys’s. Colonel McLain says that there are many things about a face that age wouldn’t change, and that by comparing, we can at least discover whether or not this is really the Stoddards’s son and heir.”

  “Oh, dear. I should never have voiced my far-fetched thought.”

  “Don’t regret it, dear. You wouldn’t want someone to get away with such a dreadful thing if it is indeed an imposter.”

  “Yes. That’s true. And you think that comparing Benny to old pictures of him might answer the question?”

  “We certainly hope so.”

  Janet cleared her throat, and Samantha was sorry she had reopened the wound of the young woman’s grief. Her voice sounded forced. “So, how can I help?”

  “I’m going to the hospital today and while I’m there, I’m to ask Jasmine if she has any pictures of her and Benny. If she does have, I’ll whip right over to her place and dig them out.”

  “She just might have some. I know they were close.”

  “There’s something else. Just a few minutes ago in the shower, I thought of Olivia’s pictures. You know, she was always taking snapshots of her Sunday school class when they went on outings or did anything special, and I hoped you would know where those pictures are.”

  Janet took a deep breath and said. “Oh-oh. Here comes a client. I’ll have to get back to you, Samantha. I’m the only one here.”

  “Call me back as soon as you can! Goodbye.”

  “Yes. Yes, I will.” Janet hung up.

  “Oh, blast, Rags. Why is it that something always happens to interrupt important conversations.”

  “Errf.” His eyes brightened, and his lips lifted in a doggy grin. “Yap.”

  “Right. Nothing ever happens to rescue you when you’re being bored to tears, only when something is interesting. There must be an evil principle at work here.”

  “Yap, yap, yap.” Rags ran in small circles that got closer and closer to the hall door.

  “All right, all right. I’ll get dressed. I know you want your breakfast.” She walked to the closet, and Rags sat down with a satisfied sigh. Samantha whispered, “Tyrant,” into the sweater she was pulling on over her head.

  ***

  The phone rang when she had half finished her breakfast.

  “Hello?”

  “Samantha? I’ve gotten the afternoon off. We can go look at Olivia’s photo albums if you’d like.”

  “Oh. Wonderful. I’d planned to go out to Jasmine’s if she says she has any pictures of Benny at home, but I can do that tomorrow morning.”

  “Are you still going to the hospital, then?”

  “Yes. I’d hate to disappoint her. This is her last day in traction, and I’d like to make it pass as quickly as I can.”

  “Okay. Why don’t I pick you up at the hospital, then? It’s a bit of a drive to where I’ve stored Olivia’s things, so it’s silly to take two cars.”

  “Fine.” Samantha glanced out the window. The day had turned gray and sullen clouds were drifting in over the river. “Better bring a raincoat. It looks as if the weather’s turning ugly.”

  “Will do. I’m finally getting used to all these sudden changes in the weather here in Virginia.”

  “Just wait till summer. Then the changes are even quicker.”

  “I’ll see you in the hospital parking lot at . . . one, shall we say?”

  “You’re condemning me to a lunch there?”

  “I have a few things to take care of before we go. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not. I’m just eager.”

  “Yes. I can understand that.” She hung up.

  For once, Samantha wasn’t annoyed. “Poor child.” She looked down at her dog. “This must be very difficult for her, Rags.”

  Rags cocked his head, but didn’t say a thing.

  “Oh, Rags. You’re such a good little dog. You can even understand Janet’s grief.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  At the hospital, Jasmine fished in her purse as soon as Samantha had bent down and reached it up for her from inside the bedside cabinet. Keys jangled and papers rustled. Finally Jasmine handed her employer and friend her door key.

  “I keep meaning to pin those keys to the lining of my purse so’s they stay put, but I do keep on forgetting. What do you want pictures of Benny Stoddard for, Samantha Masters?” Jasmine frowned, suspecting something.

  “Janet Wilson—the young lady I brought to see you—has expressed a shocking theory, Jasmine, and I want to prove or disprove it before I tell you what it is.”

  “And it has to do with Benny.”

  Samantha couldn’t deny it.

  “With pictures of Benny.”

  “Yes.”

  Jasmine lay and looked at Samantha a long minute. Then she said very carefully, feeling her way, “Yes. I suppose that would explain things, all right. Benny, if he really was home, would have come to see me by now.” She sighed. “So I can guess what’s happening. You want to compare the pictures of my Benny with this boy who won’t come to see me, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Jasmine. We do.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Mrs. Fulton, the Colonel and I.”

  “Not the Wilson child? How come?”

  “No, Janet put forth the question, but she was at work when Laurie and Colonel McLain and I got together. After discussing it, we decided we had to go looking for pictures we knew were Benny.”

  “She’s poor Miss Charles’s cousin, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. Though it seems they were more like sisters. If I remember right, Olivia said that Janet had lived with them from the time she was about twelve because her—Janet’s—parents were killed in a fire. Anyway she’s most eager to . . .” Samantha left their attempting to solve Olivia’s murder hanging. There was no benefit in upsetting Jasmine while she was trapped in a hospital bed.

  Jasmine wasn’t having any. “She wants to know who killed Olivia Charles, is that right?”

  “Of course. We all do.”

  “That’s surely a fact. That was a dreadful thing, somebody stabbing that lovely Miss Olivia that way.”

  She shook her head and ordered Samantha, “Well, you have my door key, so you’d better go be about it. Go to the house to the right of mine—to Ms. Smithers—and take her with you into my house.

  “She’s always home, and she’s a regular old nosy. She never misses a thing, that woman, so she’ll come over to be checking on you if you don’t go get her first. I know you’re honest, but my neighbors don’t.” Jasmine smiled a crooked little smile. “Besides, it’ll just look better. That way nobody’ll take you for a burglar.”

  “Jasmine!” Samantha laughed with the woman in the bed. Then she said, “I’ll go first thing in the morning. This afternoon I’m going with Janet Wilson to look at Olivia’s photo albums. She knows where Olivia’s things are store
d, of course.”

  Jasmine looked out the window at the gray skies. “I hope you brought your raincoat.”

  “You know I keep one in the car. But thanks for reminding me. Janet’s driving from here, so I’d be soaked if I forgot to take it with me from the looks of the weather.”

  “Yeah. Good old Norfolk weather. No wonder most of us carry an umbrella in our cars.” She sighed. “And now I have my very own built-in weather predictor.” She tapped her cast.

  “That’s so, unfortunately. My left arm still aches when the weather takes a turn for the worst, and I broke that when I was a teenager.”

  “Well,” Jasmine said in a dry voice, “I do thank you much for that cheery bit of comfort.”

  Samantha chuckled, gave Jasmine a hug and pecked her on the cheek. “I love you, you silly thing.” She hugged her again. “I’ve got to go. Janet will be in the parking lot at one, and I want to get something to eat first.”

  “Be careful.”

  After Samantha had gone, Jasmine wondered what in the world had prompted her to say ‘be careful’ instead of ‘goodbye.’ She looked out the window again. Rain was coming. That must be it. Everybody needed to be more careful driving in the rain.

  ***

  While she took the elevator down to the cafeteria level, Samantha mulled over the fact that Janet seemed to think the Talleys were behind the bogus—if he was bogus—Benny, too. Grabbing a grilled cheese sandwich and a coffee she gulped them down. Not only did she want to hurry out of the large, echoing room with its capacity crowd of people in varying stages of grief or worry, but she also wanted to have time to phone Laura Fulton.

  She wanted to tell Laurie where she was going. Not that she knew, come to think of it, but she wanted to tell her that they were about to get hold of Olivia’s photos of Benny Stoddard.

  “Yes,” she told her best friend. “Janet is picking me up here at the hospital and taking me to wherever Olivia’s things are stored. She says there are several albums of pictures among Olivia’s belongings. Which certainly makes sense. You remember how Olivia always took pictures of everything we did in Garden Club or Bridge. I’m assuming she did the same for all the Sunday school projects and outings. Don’t you think?”

  “Yes. That’s probably true. But where will you be? I went to your house to borrow your Bundt cake pan, and Rags is howling.”

  “Howling? How odd. Must be this storm coming in. Tell him it’s all right and to be quiet. I’ll call you the minute I get home, okay?”

  “Samantha . . .”

  “Gotta go.” Samantha hung up before Laura could tell her she had no intention of going out in the rain again just to tell Rags to be quiet. Hmmmm. Maybe the hanging-up habit was contagious—and just maybe it had its uses.

  She was a little worried about Rags. He never howled. Heaven knew he growled, barked, yapped or yipped, but he never howled. She hoped Janet would get her back home in time for her to take Rags to the vet to be checked out.

  In the parking lot, Samantha could see no sign of Janet’s little red sports car. So she was startled when Brenda Talley’s black Lexus slid up beside her while she was retrieving her raincoat from her own car and Janet called, “Here I am.”

  “Oh. I was looking for your little red car.” Samantha slipped into the passenger seat and threw back the hood of her raincoat.

  Janet grinned at her. “I noticed how uncomfortable you were in it when I took you for our Mexican lunch so I borrowed Brenda’s car. It’s bigger.”

  Yes, thank heavens. But if you manhandle it the way you do your own car, Brenda will kill you. “How very nice of Brenda. I know this car is her pride and joy.” She hoped that last statement would cause Janet to drive the Lexus more considerately than she did her own vehicle.

  It didn’t.

  Samantha settled into the luxurious leather seat and set her mind to keeping the younger woman from learning that it was her driving, not the size of her car that made her uncomfortable.

  “Yes, it was nice of Brenda to lend me her car, wasn’t it? She leant me her raincoat, as well.” Janet gestured toward the back seat.

  Samantha glanced at the coat there and saw that it was, indeed, Brenda Talley’s distinctive red raincoat. “So today you’ll be Little Red Riding Hood.” She chuckled. “We all tease Brenda that that’s who she looks like in that coat.”

  “It is sort of one of a kind, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes.” Samantha told her. “Brenda sent away to some out of state shop so that she could avoid looking like one of the,” she formed little quotation marks in the air toward Janet with the first two fingers of each hand, “‘usual flock of khaki-clad pouter pigeons’ that she calls the rest of us.”

  Janet laughed, but the sound had a brittle sharpness to it. Samantha could easily understand that because of the rain. What had been a gentle mist when she’d gotten into the car had become a driving downpour. Being responsible for somebody else’s expensive car had to be causing Janet anxiety. Samantha saw that her knuckles were white as she clutched the steering wheel.

  Windshield wipers flailing, they passed the Norfolk Yacht and Country Club and headed toward Naval Station Norfolk. How annoying. Samantha felt a moment’s irritation. They were quite close to home here. She could very well have left her car in her own driveway instead of at the Hospital downtown.

  Hampton Boulevard was so puddled and shining wet that the rain pelting its surface made it impossible to tell where the lines marking the lanes were. She wished Janet would slow down.

  In no time they’d passed the Destroyer Piers and Naval Station Norfolk and were whizzing down I-64, throwing plumes of rain water to either side like the bow wave from under a ship’s prow. A driver blew his horn angrily as the Lexus inundated his Honda.

  They whizzed past Forest Lawn, where Samantha’s Grandmother and Grandfather Swann were buried. The cemetery’s well-kept monuments and wide green lawns were all but invisible behind the sheets of rain blowing across Granby Street. Samantha was thankful Janet slowed a bit as she swept into the curve that took the highway on over Willoughby Spit.

  Janet had slowed, however, to take the first exit. She shot onto the ramp like a bullet. With no more than a slight hesitation, she zipped through the stop sign at the end of it and sent the big car racing down the road away from what had once been Ocean View Amusement Park.

  Samantha couldn’t help herself. She said, “Its fortunate there was no traffic coming then.”

  “I’d checked. I can’t see any reason to stop if there’s nobody coming, can you?”

  “Well,” Samantha said dryly, “there is the law.”

  Janet laughed. “Nobody sane is out in this storm. And no policeman would want to stand out there in the rain just to give me a ticket for a boulevard stop.”

  “A boulevard stop?” Samantha had never heard the expression.

  “That’s Californian for a rolling stop. Everybody runs stop signs out there.”

  Samantha thought that that was a rather extreme statement. She’d certainly not run any stop signs when Andrew had been stationed at San Diego and she’d lived in California three years. Neither, as well as she could remember, had anybody else there—always excepting the irresponsible few.

  She glanced at Janet. The girl’s profile was calm, if a little tense. Was that what was bothering her? Was she sitting here finding Janet Wilson one of those irresponsible few?

  At that instant, the car jolted as it hit a pothole hidden in a puddle. Janet seemed unaffected by it. Samantha, in her place, would have cringed to have done that to a friend’s car.

  They’d reached an area where the old beach houses were spaced further apart. Many had been bought by people who had turned them into lovely year-round homes, Samantha remembered rather than saw. The rain was still obscuring everything, falling in heavy sheets that washed across them in undulating patterns like vertical waves, giving only a glimpse now and then of the scene outside.

  Suddenly, Janet slowed, peered across
Samantha and slewed into a driveway. Ahead loomed a large, square, four story house set seven or eight feet above the sand on pilings. Broad wooden steps led up to the porch that surrounded the house. Gracious in its heyday, it still maintained a forlorn air of dignity in neglect.

  Lights glowed from the first floor windows in an obvious attempt to combat the gloom of the day. There were two cars parked near the stairway, and a third just around the side of the house. Janet pulled in between the two in front, nosing the Lexus to the foot of the stairs.

  “Here we are. Olivia’s apartment’s upstairs. The two downstairs ones were already rented when she started buying the place. She let the tenants stay.” Janet reached into the back seat for Brenda Talley’s raincoat and struggled into it. Pulling the hood well forward to shield her face from the rain, she opened the car door and rushed for the steps, slamming the car door behind her.

  Samantha closed the passenger door carefully and hurried after the slender girl in the red coat. She was full of questions.

  Janet sensed it and smiled. Her voice was low as she slipped a key into the door’s lock. “Olivia was buying this place. She thought she—we—could live in part of it and rent the rest out. Or, if she could get the zoning, she really wanted to turn part of it into a youth center. You know how she always worried about keeping kids off the street.”

  “Yes.” Samantha smiled too, pleased at the way Janet kept her voice down in consideration of the people occupying the ground floor apartments. “Olivia was not only wonderful with children, she had an honest desire to make the world a better place for them. She had a real burden for them.”

  “That’s a Christian phrase, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I think it is. I can’t imagine why I used it instead of just saying she was concerned for children. I suppose I just wanted to express the fact that her concern went deeper than most people’s. I’ve rarely used that phrase.”

  Janet laughed as she swung the door open for them. “Well, I certainly heard it enough.” Her voice was a husky whisper. “You probably picked it up by some sort of mental osmosis. My father was a preacher. Did you know that?”