A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery)

by Lauren Carr

Hank slipped the backpack off her shoulders and propped it against the wall. She then took off the coat and draped it over the backpack. “From your message, I gathered you needed a lawyer. Being railroaded by a boob for murdering Gail Reynolds. That’s serious stuff, and a lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client.” She held out her arms. “So here I am.”

  He took her into his arms. When her body made contact with his, he felt a wave of warmth flow through him that he had not felt for a long time. He tightened his arms around her and brushed his cheek against her ball cap. “I’m glad you came. It’s good to see you again.”

  She smiled up at him. “It’s good to hear you say that.”

  Joshua offered her the chair that Tori had vacated moments before. “There’s a lot we have to go over if you are going to be defending me.”

  She sat down. “Civilian life hasn’t changed you one bit. Still work now; play later.”

  He handed her a yellow notepad. “Valerie used to say that she hoped that you could loosen me up a little.”

  “I miss Val.” She reached for the pen he offered her. “How are the kids?”

  “Good.” When he realized that their fingers were touching, he released the pen with the quickness of an electric shock.

  “And you? How are you doing?”

  “Everyone thinks I’m a lady killer—figurative and literal.” He swallowed the frustration that he felt creeping into his tone. “How do you think I’m doing?”

  “Anyone who knows you knows that you would never do that.” She lowered her eyes to the notepad. “Tell me about Gail. What was she doing here?”

  Joshua tried to be brief while still giving as many details as possible of the series of murders that had occurred since Gail arrived in town, until her death, which revealed her obsession with him.

  “Well,” Hank mused, “that explains why she kept showing up every time we were assigned to a major case. I suspected that she had the hots for you. This proves it.” She tapped the pen against the notepad. “Do you think Gail’s murder is connected to that cheerleader you went to school with?”

  “A murder made to look like a suicide. The killer gets away with it. Then, twenty years later, a journalist decides to write a book—”

  “And a second cheerleader is killed.”

  He interrupted her. “Grace Henderson’s murder has nothing to do with this.”

  “A cheerleader is murdered then and a cheerleader is murdered now. You can’t ignore that.”

  “I have one or two suspects for the Henderson murder. All I need is to break an alibi, which will probably happen as soon as a romance is broken up.”

  “What do you have on the Wheeler murder?”

  “Nothing. There is no physical evidence whatsoever.”

  She laughed. “Stop kidding me. What about the murder weapon?”

  He shook his head. “I wish we had it. Every ten years the county cleans house. They throw out everything they don’t need, including the physical evidence on closed cases. Since her case was closed as a suicide, her evidence box was disposed of—including the gun used to kill her.”

  “Don’t you have anything?”

  He held up a folder. “The case file and that’s it. Tad is still hunting—”

  “Who is Tad?” She snatched the case file out of his hand. It contained nothing but a simple form, typed up on a typewriter, a narrative by the former sheriff, copies of internal memos and a couple letters.

  “My cousin,” Joshua answered her. “He knows everyone and everything. He’s also the county medical examiner. He thinks that he might be able to find the former medical examiner’s file with the pictures of the crime scene. I’m hoping that that old pack rat kept more detailed records that would be of help. That’s one advantage to pack rats. They don’t clean house.” He checked his watch and put on his sports coat.

  She looked up from where she was studying the narrative of Tricia Wheeler’s death. “Where are you going?”

  “I have an appointment. I guess since we are working together again, you’re coming with me.” He was surprised to hear himself say, “Then we can go have dinner.”

  “Who is the appointment with?” Hank noted that she was not dressed for any legal hearings.

  He picked up the scent of the outdoors in her hair when he reached behind her to pick up her backpack. “Tricia’s best friend.”

  Tricia’s best friend, Cindy Patterson, was now Cindy Rodgers. Shortly after high school, she quit her job as a grocery store clerk to marry an older boy she had met at a Catholic youth retreat. The Rodgers family owned a plant nursery outside the park on Tomlinson Run Road. The greenhouse rested along a creek at the end of a steep dirt road behind their home, which was in a constant state of renovation.

  Cindy fell close to a foot shorter than Joshua. Weighing just over a hundred pounds, she was the one on top of the pyramid when she was cheerleader. He recalled that no party was complete without the jocks picking her up and tossing her around. She had put on a few pounds, but she didn’t seem to notice or care.

  Despite the oncoming winter season, Cindy was dressed in a short-sleeved T-shirt and dirt-encrusted blue jeans to sort a shipment of bulbs in the conservatory.

  “Come on back.” She waved to her visitors.

  In an attempt to get air to his body in the building’s humidity, Joshua discarded his sports coat while he walked the length of the building to where Cindy sat on a stool at a workbench. Hank took off her jacket and shook out the front of her shirt.

  Cindy teased him, “Are you here to RSVP for the reunion in person?”

  “I’m here for some information.” He loosened his tie.

  “Aren’t all you lawyers after that?” Seemingly unaware that his companion was also in the profession, Cindy winked at Hank.

  “It’s about Tricia,” he said with a somber tone.

  Her cheery mood disappeared. “Does this also have to do with Gail?”

  Hank asked, “Did you know that she was writing about Tricia?”

  Cindy wiped her hands on a rag. “Gail interviewed me for her book before she announced it on that TV show.”

  “When did she interview you exactly?” Joshua wanted to know.

  “About three weeks before she died, right after she found out about the dress.”

  “I saw the dress.” He told Hank, “Trish had picked up her homecoming gown from out of layaway just one hour before she was killed. Why would a girl pay off a gown for a dance that she didn’t intend to be alive to go to?”

  “That proves it wasn’t suicide,” she concluded.

  He asked Cindy, “Did you take her to the mall to get it that day?”

  “Of course. She didn’t have a car. We left right from school the same day she—” Her eyes said what day it had been.

  He paused to allow for her to regain her composure before he asked his next question. “Was she planning to wear the dress to the homecoming?”

  Cindy said that she was, and then added that Tricia was going to the dance with Randy Fine.

  “But she dumped him,” Joshua argued. “We all saw it. Why would she go with him after the way he treated her?”

  “I know what you are thinking,” Cindy stated. “That she had her heart set on going with Randy, and he cheated on her, and so she killed herself. But that wasn’t the way it was.” She went on to explain, “After she dumped Randy in front of everyone, he begged her to give him another chance. Well, Trish had had it. She had no intention of going steady with him anymore. But she had that dress on layaway. She had to buy the dress or lose all the money she’d already paid for it. So she figured she’d keep the date with him and, if he dropped her for Margo before the dance, then she’d go alone. But if he kept the date, she’d have a date for the dance and then dump him afterwards anyway.” She
asserted at the end of her explanation, “Trish knew that she was too good for him. She had no reason to kill herself.”

  He remembered how he found out about her suicide. “You were the one who told Beth and me that Trish shot herself.”

  Her gaze dropped to her dirty hands, which she had folded in her lap. “Because that was what her mother told me. Mrs. Wheeler called the night it happened and told me. I believed it because that was what I was told. Then, after the shock wore off, I realized that it couldn’t be true.”

  “It isn’t. Someone had to have killed her.” Joshua requested, “Tell me about the fight with Phyllis Barlow.”

  Cindy’s mouth opened, but no words came from it. She gazed at him with big eyes. “I forgot all about that!”

  “I was told that they argued a lot.”

  Cindy answered while giving thought to a memory long forgotten. “Yes, they did fight a lot, but I can’t believe Phyllis would kill Trish.” She giggled when she recalled, “It was stupid. Not worth killing over.”

  “What did they argue about?” Hank repeated Joshua’s question.

  Cindy said, “She was mad at Trish about Doug.”

  “Her brother?” Joshua asked.

  “Yeah, the brain,” Cindy explained to his companion. “Everyone called him the brain because he was a genius. I mean he really was certified as a genius.”

  Joshua wanted to know, “Why was Phyllis mad about him?”

  “Tricia blew him off for Randy.” She laughed in spite of the serious matter. “My, Josh! When you went to school, you kept your mind focused on scholastics and sports, and nothing else.”

  Hank explained, “Josh never did get into dramas.”

  “And now he is paying for it.” Cindy said to her before turning back to Joshua. “If you knew all the soap operas going on, you wouldn’t be here now.” The levity putting her more at ease, she returned to sorting the bulbs. “Doug was in love with Trish. That’s why he went nuts.”

  “I heard that he had a crush on her,” Joshua said. “Was Phyllis upset just because Trish rejected her brother?” He considered the motive for her anger.

  Hank wondered out loud, “Or did she lead Doug on?”

  “Trish never led Doug on. That’s what Phyllis says, but that isn’t what happened. Trish was polite, but she never let him think there was any possibility of a relationship beyond friendship.” Cindy held up her finger when she recalled another fact long forgotten. “Of course, there was that matter of the necklace.”

  “What necklace?” Joshua and Hank asked in unison.

  “Doug gave her a necklace. It was two gold interlocking hearts with a real diamond where they met. He had to have paid a lot of money for it. Well, she accepted it. I told her that was a mistake and so did her mother. I remember we were both there in her kitchen telling her that she never should have taken it, and she was telling us that he insisted and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Well, we knew how bad he had it for her and told her that it was leading him on. She ended up giving it back to him.”

  “Was that when Phyllis got mad?” he asked.

  “No, that trouble started with the junior prom.” Cindy told them with displeasure, “Randy asked Trish to go with him two weeks before the dance.”

  “You don’t think too highly of Randy, do you?” Hank noted Cindy’s tone when she said his name.

  “Never did,” she confessed before she apologized to Joshua. “I know he’s your friend, but personally I think Randy was, and is, a jerk. That crap he pulled on Trish proved I was right.” She grinned. “He’s coming to the reunion. Are you coming?”

  Joshua hoped to duck the subject, but now that Randy Fine was going, it was an opportunity to question a key witness, or suspect. He couldn’t ignore the fact that Tricia’s boyfriend—or ex-boyfriend—was an important piece of this puzzle.

  While he planned his interrogation, Cindy pitched her case. “You can’t not come now that you are living here. All of the old gang will be there.”

  “Except Gail, Beth, and Trish.” He cocked his head at her and changed the tone of his reminder. “Randy is coming all the way from Columbus?”

  She nodded her head. “When he called me to RSVP he went on and on about how he was meeting his wife, the vice president of some public relations firm, at the country club for a cocktail party. I never understood how you two became friends.”

  “Randy could be a bit much but he had his good points.”

  “So you’ll come?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  She made a note of his RSVP on a notepad next to her stacks of bulbs.

  He returned to the subject at hand. “What happened at the prom that got Phyllis mad at Trish?”

  “Trish had told Doug that she would go to the junior prom with him.” Cindy smiled at Doug Barlow’s eagerness. “He had asked her back in November.”

  Hank was confused. “If he had asked her to the prom in November, six months before the formal, then how did she end up going with a boy who asked her two weeks before? Did she break her date with him to go with Randy?”

  Cindy crossed one leg over the other and rested her elbows on her knees to explain the episode. “When Doug asked her she said yes. Even if he was a nerd, she would have gone with him, and she was strong enough that she could have handled the ribbing. But, when he asked her, he didn’t know if he could go.”

  “Didn’t know if he could go?” Joshua couldn’t imagine not being allowed to go to your junior prom.

  Not quite understanding either, Cindy shrugged. “He said that he needed his mother’s permission to go. I guess their parents were domineering that way. Anyway, Trish kept asking him if he could go, and he kept saying he didn’t know. Meanwhile, time kept passing. So then, Randy asked her to go with him, and she said yes. She did feel bad about it.”

  “And that started the trouble with Phyllis.” He knew that would be enough to start a feud with Doug’s sister.

  “Trish meant to tell Doug as soon as she got home from school, but Phyllis told him first and he went ballistic. I didn’t see it, but Trish’s mom did. He was devastated.”

  Joshua pointed out, “But Tricia was killed six months later. I was told that Phyllis was yelling at Trish in the school parking lot on the day that she was killed. It couldn’t have been the prom still.”

  Cindy gave the prosecutor a shrug and made a mocking face of helplessness. “Trish was running to the car because she had to be home by five o’clock and it was almost three. We had to get to the mall, get the dress out of layaway, and get her home. Meanwhile, Phyllis was chasing after us going on and on about how Trish couldn’t get away with treating people like dirt . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Come to think of it, I can’t even say for certain it was Doug she was talking about. I told Trish to hurry up. She jumped in the car, and we took off. I asked what that was about, and she just said that Phyllis was having another one of her fits. That was all she ever said about it.”

  She watched him digest that information. Then, she added, “I can’t believe Phyllis would kill anyone.”

  Joshua announced, “She shot her husband in the leg a few weeks ago and now he’s dead.”

  Cindy’s composure dropped a shade. “He probably deserved it.” She slid off the stool and stretched her legs by bending over to touch her toes while she said, “Now there is a marriage I never understood. It never looked to me as though she even liked him. Then, suddenly, she just up and dropped out of school in the eleventh grade, and ran off and married him. She wasn’t pregnant, so it wasn’t like she had to get married. They had to live with her folks. She went to work out at the gas station because he never could hold a job. Go figure.” She dismissed any further analysis about the Rollins marriage with a shrug.

  They finished the interview with pleasantries. After kissing Cindy on t
he cheek, Joshua followed Hank back through the greenhouse while putting their coats back on in preparation for stepping into the chilly weather and going to dinner.

  “What do you think? Do you think Phyllis killed her?” Hank asked while watching the waiter fill their glasses of wine.

  Joshua had taken her to the Ponderosa Golf Club, a restaurant overlooking a golf course, for dinner. He started off the meal, which had romantic overtones, with a bottle of Shiraz. Over the wine, Hank watched a flock of black swans through the picture window. When he looked at her, his thoughts turned to another woman from long ago, a friend whom he wanted to know better. He failed to hear her question about Phyllis.

  She seemed to read his thoughts when she suddenly said, “We all have regrets.”

  Joshua blinked out of his stare. “Regrets?” He sipped the red wine.

  “Regrets over questions not asked, lost opportunities, or relationships not pursued.”

  “What relationship are you talking about?”

  “Were you in love with Tricia Wheeler?”

  They broke their conversation to allow the waiter to serve their appetizer of Oysters Rockefeller. After he was out of earshot, Joshua told her, “Tricia was the girl I was afraid to ask out.”

  Hank dove into the oysters. “What scared you about her?”

  “She was beautiful, smart, sweet—”

  “And naïve,” she added. “Otherwise, how did she end up with the likes of Randy Fine?”

  “She thought everyone was as sweet as she was.”

  “Then she wasn’t perfect,” she concluded. “How about this other girl? Grace. You said her boyfriend is the perp in that murder.”

  “Except that he has an alibi.” He added, “His other girlfriend.”

  “What real evidence do you have against him?”

  “We have a witness who is very anxious to testify that he gave him the gun that was used to kill her. Billy made the mistake of striking a deal in exchange for testifying against him. Now Walt Manners can’t wait to get into court to get even.”