To Helen Back: A River Road Mystery

by Susan McBride

  Felicity’s answer was a meekly uttered, “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me what the fight was about?”

  Helen saw the knobby hands nervously smooth her wrinkled housedress. “It was about his fence,” Felicity said, her voice soft but sure. “He built it six inches onto my property, which he knew bloody well.” She glanced up at the sheriff. “It was a sore spot, but certainly not worth killing him over. I’d already had Art Beaner come take a look, and he promised he’d take up the matter at the town meeting.”

  The meeting last Thursday, Helen thought, when the whole town hall had emptied and lit out for Milton’s house.

  Biddle finished jotting down notes on his legal pad, then tapped the pen against his jaw. “Did you have your shovel with you that morning, ma’am?”

  “I did, yes,” Felicity told him, leaning forward, hands on her knees. “But that’s only because I’d just planted new raspberry bushes. I left the shovel outside near the fence, and I didn’t remember to fetch it until much later, well after dark.” She turned to glance up at Helen. There was raw fear in her eyes. “After they’d already found Mr. Grone lying dead in his yard.”

  “She’s telling the truth, Sheriff,” Helen said, jumping in. “I saw Felicity pick up her shovel and move it. Why would she have left it out if she’d been the one to kill Grone with it? That would have been really stupid.”

  “Thanks for your input, Mrs. Evans.” Biddle gave her a look but didn’t write anything down. He turned his attention back to Felicity. “What happened to the shovel after you moved it, Miss Timmons?”

  Felicity’s shoulders sagged. “My heavens, Sheriff, I didn’t bother with the shovel again until this afternoon. I’d been so gobsmacked by the turn of events that I realized I hadn’t cleaned my gardening tools properly. So I gathered them up to wash. I did the trowels first. But the shovel”—she put her hands to her cheeks and shook her head—“it had simply disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” Biddle wrinkled his brow.

  “It was just gone,” Felicity said. “I couldn’t find it anywhere.”

  “And you didn’t see it again until I recovered it from the brush behind your house half an hour ago?”

  “I didn’t hide my shovel in the woods.” Felicity sounded on the verge of tears. “I didn’t know it was there, Sheriff, I swear.”

  “Enough,” Helen said, and stepped in front of Felicity, turning her back to the sheriff at his desk. “She’s told you all there is to tell,” she added, taking hold of Felicity’s hands and helping her up.

  Biddle jumped up on his boots and waved his pen at Helen. “Whoa there, Mrs. Evans, this isn’t up to you—”

  “Good day, Sheriff,” Helen interrupted, guiding Felicity toward the door.

  She ignored Frank Biddle’s sputtered cries of indignation, thinking he was in over his head. How in God’s name did he imagine he was going to track down Milton’s murderer if he spent all his time interviewing the likes of Felicity Timmons?

  Or had he already made up his mind that poor Felicity was the killer?

  Chapter 21

  BY DINNERTIME THAT Sunday night all of River Bend had heard the news that Milton Grone had been clubbed to death with a bloody shovel belonging to Felicity Timmons.

  The ninety-one-year-old mayor of River Bend—whose chronic gout mostly kept him homebound—even shuffled over to Main Street to pay Biddle a visit. He’d popped in both his hearing aids before asking the sheriff if he’d “collared the varmint whodunit.”

  Since the scene of the crime had been pretty well trampled by half the town last Thursday evening, Biddle didn’t have much to go on except Doc’s lab tests and the accusations of Milton’s widow.

  Since Shotsie had seen Milt before leaving for the town meeting at seven, and his lifeless body was found a few minutes before eight o’clock, Biddle estimated the time of death somewhere in between.

  That was the easy part.

  As Milton’s most vocal enemies had been present at town hall and could testify to each other’s whereabouts, the sheriff faced an almost impossible task. He was tempted to use the eenie-meenie-miney-mo method and randomly pick someone to arrest.

  “You’re a smart man, Frank,” Sarah told him when she dropped off fried chicken and biscuits. “You’ll figure it out.”

  So Frank forged ahead, drawing up a list of those who’d had the biggest beef with Milton. One by one he’d haul them in for questioning, starting bright and early the next morning.

  The first name that he wrote was Felicity Timmons. He put a checkmark beside it, since he’d already grilled her.

  The next two on his list were Ida Bell and Dorothy Feeny. They’d hardly kept their feelings for Grone a secret. Ida had even gone so far as to call Milton “a murderer” in the newspaper, saying he didn’t deserve to live if he let the water park drive countless critters out of their homes.

  Biddle paused for a moment, gnawing the inside of his cheek while he pondered who should follow. How about Art Beaner and the whole darned board of directors? All of them had been fighting with Grone ever since the man had moved into his father’s house. Frank recalled an instance when Beaner showed up at the station red-faced and out of breath. He’d gone to see Grone about association fees past due, and Milton greeted him with a badly aimed pop from his shotgun.

  Then there was Delilah Grone, Milton’s first wife. Biddle had heard the rumors about the woman going after Grone for unpaid alimony and child support. Maybe she figured it’d be easier to get her claws on Milton’s water park windfall if he were dead rather than alive.

  Last but not least, Biddle jotted down the name Shotsie Grone. She’d been acting her part of the grieving widow well enough, and he wasn’t sure anyone could put on a show like that without really feeling it inside. But Frank knew from his years in law enforcement that it was more often the spouse who did it than the butler.

  Besides, he mused, women were more than a little unpredictable, especially when that time of the month rolled around.

  Finished with his list, Biddle slipped it into a folder and set it aside. Then he snatched up his hat and stepped out of the office just as the chapel’s prized carillon began to chime “Sweet Adelaide.”

  He got in his car and drove the three blocks to Doc Melville’s. Within minutes he was parked at the curb in front of the A-frame painted red as a barn. He avoided the front door, going around to the side entrance that led into Doc’s office. He stood on the welcome mat beneath the old-fashioned shingle that neatly proclaimed, DR. AMOS MELVILLE, M.D., and doffed his hat. Then he turned the knob and went inside.

  “Hey, Doc, it’s me, Frank Biddle,” he called out as he walked into the empty waiting area. The front desk, usually manned by Fanny, was deserted.

  “Amos?” he said again, heading up the hallway past an empty exam room.

  Yellow light streamed from an open door toward the rear. Biddle knew it was where Amos kept his lab.

  He tucked his hat atop his head and hiked up his pants before knocking on the door frame. “Yo, Doc,” he said, seeing Amos hunched over a table. “Am I interrupting?”

  “Ah, hello, Sheriff.” Amos briefly glanced up from the item sprawled across the stainless steel surface. It was the shovel Frank had found behind Miss Timmons’s house. “I was just finishing up,” Doc said, and Frank nodded, hanging back in the doorway.

  “What’d you find?” he asked.

  “I typed the blood on the shovel, and it’s O-positive,” Doc told him. “That’s the same type as Milton Grone. I’ll have Ed Drake’s office run a DNA test, of course. I don’t have the means to do that here.” The doctor sighed and scratched his chin with a latex-gloved hand. “My gut tells me that’ll show a match to Grone as well.”

  Biddle got tired of standing and pulled up an empty stool. “Did you find anything else, something that would point to who hit him?”

>   In response, Amos turned the tool upside down so the back of the spade could seen. He stooped over it, his spectacled eyes hovering above a spot inches away, and poked at something with a metal stick that looked like a dental pick. “You see that?” he asked.

  Biddle leaned forward. “It looks like little flecks of rock and . . . I dunno, dirt and stuff.”

  Amos pointed the metal stick at Frank’s “flecks of rock,” explaining, “that’s bone from Milton’s shattered temporal lobe. Someone whacked him awfully hard. In a fit of rage, I’d wager.”

  Frank felt his stomach lurch and tasted the fried chicken he’d eaten not a half hour earlier. He swallowed before finding his voice again. “Do you figure Felicity Timmons had the strength to clobber Grone with enough force to kill him? She’s, what, seventy-five if she’s a day.”

  Amos met the sheriff’s gaze. “If you’re asking me if I believe Felicity could’ve murdered a man, the answer is no.”

  Biddle shifted on his feet. “That’s your personal opinion, Doc,” he said. “What’s your professional opinion?”

  “She didn’t do it, Frank,” Amos said, shaking his head. “You’re fishing in the wrong barrel.”

  “Her prints are on the handle.”

  The doctor harrumphed. “Why wouldn’t her prints be on the handle? It’s her shovel. She’s not denying it. Will you put her in jail for that?”

  Biddle slid off the stool and headed for the door. There, he paused. “You’re not making this any easier on me, Doc.”

  “Nothing about this situation is easy,” Amos said, and began to peel off his gloves. “Isn’t there a part of you that wants to just let this one go?”

  Even if there was—even if he wanted to—Biddle knew he couldn’t do that.

  He shook his head.

  “That’s what I thought,” Amos replied, and patted Frank’s shoulder before he flipped off the light and left the room.

  The sheriff stood in the dark for a while after, trying to think of when he’d last had to deal with a crime as serious as this. He’d come to River Bend from a city police force when the tiny town had advertised for a new sheriff. He’d run for the office unopposed and kept the gig for nearly fifteen years. Not once in all that time had there been a murder.

  Though there had been one other dead body.

  A corpse was found floating in the harbor two summers ago. But it wasn’t the victim of a crime. Heck, it wasn’t even human. The floater had been Homer Brown’s geriatric German shepherd. As best he could surmise, the dog had been chasing a muskrat, plunged into the muddy water, and was unable to get out.

  If only this case were as simple to put away.

  In the lab room’s dim light, Biddle glanced at the shovel and wondered what skeletons it would unearth if only it could talk.

  Chapter 22

  AT HALF PAST seven on Monday morning, Helen had fed the cat, dressed in a navy blue sweat suit, and double-knotted the laces on her size six Tretorns.

  She’d been too preoccupied lately to take her usual two-mile walk to the river and back, so she made it a point to do just that. Not only would it give her heart and lungs a good workout, but it would give her time to think besides.

  It was still early enough that the town was quiet, and Helen strolled past sleepy block after block, feeling as if she was alone in the world. Houses appeared to slumber still, their window shades pulled down. The sun peeked at her in sporadic bursts of light from beyond the surrounding bluffs. In the treetops overhead, birds began to arise, chirruping like cuckoo clocks.

  Her mind was not on their cheery songs, though. Instead, her attention drifted, as it always did these days, to the death of Milton Grone. She found it hard to dwell on anything else when that was all everyone in town seemed to talk about, trying guess who did it and wondering if the killer could be living right next door.

  It shook Helen up to realize that such a hideous crime had occurred so close to home. She knew the world was changing around her, that drugs were as commonplace in small towns as big cities, and guns were bought and sold and stolen like trading cards. But River Bend had always seemed far removed from the sort of everyday crime that plagued nearby Alton, just a twenty minute ride down the River Road, and St. Louis City, less than an hour away.

  Helen had always so secure in this place. Why, she and Joe hadn’t had locks installed on the house until sometime in the seventies, when the last of their four kids had gotten out of college and moved away. Half the time, Helen forgot to secure the doors, and, despite living alone, she had never felt the least afraid.

  Until the murder of Milton Grone.

  She glanced around her, to her right and left, quickening her pace.

  When she realized what she’d done, she laughed at herself, though the pitch of it sounded far too high. Even she wasn’t fooled by her poor attempt at bravado.

  She slowed her steps, telling herself Sheriff Biddle would find the killer soon enough.

  Only that, too, caused her worry.

  You murdered my husband!

  Shotsie’s words rang in her ears, and she frowned, angry at the woman for pointing a finger at Felicity. Milton’s widow certainly had some nerve! And Frank Biddle himself, why he was no better, hauling Felicity down to his office in his squad car because of the whims of a hysterical widow.

  Yes, Felicity’s shovel had been used as the murder weapon but that hardly meant the old girl did the deed. Why, anyone could have accessed the spade. Everyone knew that Felicity kept her gardening tools out back. On that Thursday night when Milton died, any one of a number of townsfolk could have crept into Felicity’s yard in the dark, picked up the shovel, smacked Milton upside the head then returned it to Felicity’s as if nothing had happened.

  Even I could have done it, Helen concluded as she approached the town hall, eyeing its quaint whitewashed brick and black trim. But I didn’t, and neither did Felicity, she concluded as she passed the building and moved on.

  Half a dozen other residents of River Bend had better reasons to want Milton dead than a disagreement over a split-rail fence. Ida and Dot had been publicly fighting Grone tooth and nail since the sale of that land on the riverfront. Art Beaner and the town board had disputes over unpaid community fees going back at least a decade.

  Still, Helen had a hard time convincing herself that any one of them had actually bludgeoned the bastard.

  With a sigh, she pressed on past the playground, approaching the chapel.

  When it came right down to it, she figured, the killer had done the town a favor. Even as she thought it, she realized how horrid it sounded. But from what Helen had seen, folks seemed as relieved at Milton’s death as they were shocked that such a crime had actually happened. In fact, she’d even heard someone murmuring to his breakfast companion at the diner the other morning that Milton’s death was a most convenient murder.

  Now the Grones’ neighbors could live in peace and Art Beaner’s board was rid of the thorn in its side. Even Ida and Dot had one less obstacle to battle in their war against the water park.

  The growl of an engine suddenly and loudly invaded the quiet of the morning, interrupting Helen’s thoughts.

  With a whoosh of gravel and dust, a van whipped past her, tearing up the road toward the river. She turned away until the rush of gritty air settled. Coughing the rest out of her lungs, she shook her head, having recognized the truck that delivered the morning’s Telegraph.

  Did he think he was Jeff Gordon careening around the track in a Nascar race? She fumed as she brushed herself off.

  “Mrs. Evans!”

  The voice startled her no less than the speeding van, and she spun about, hand to heart, to see Earnest Fister emerging from the chapel and hurrying toward her.

  Clad in black trousers and white button-down shirt, he moved down the chapel steps two by two and strode forward in an agile sprint. He cr
ossed the stone bridge in a blink and was quickly at her side.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “That paper boy’s going to run down someone one of these days.”

  “I’m fine,” she told him, and she was. She held her palms apart by several feet, much as a fisherman bragging of his latest catch. “He missed me by this much.”

  Fister’s brooding features didn’t relax one iota. His dark eyes looked to the road as he told her, “I’ve called the paper myself to complain about his driving, but they don’t seem particularly concerned.”

  Helen smiled. “They’re probably glad to have anyone at all willing to do the job this far out of Alton and with the sun barely up. Speaking of which”—she hooked a thumb toward the chapel—“what’s got you working at the crack of dawn on a Monday? Is the town so full of sinners you’ve resorted to putting in overtime?”

  Instead of amusement crossing the clergyman’s face, his mouth pulled taut. “I got up early and came here to be alone,” he murmured. “It’s difficult for me to think at home, what with Madeline moping about and glaring at me..”

  “I see.” Helen knew from her chat with Madeline Fister the day before that the girl blamed her father for all her recent troubles. She felt nearly as sorry for the pastor as for Maddy. “How is she?”

  “She’s all right,” Fister said, but without much conviction, so that Helen wondered if the opposite weren’t true.

  “She certainly has a lot to deal with for someone her age, doesn’t she?” She glanced at him sideways. “I have to wonder how on earth she became involved with a married man,” she went on, before she could catch herself.

  Fister’s dark eyes turned on Helen with an intensity that made her take a step away.

  She swallowed hard. “I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn, but Madeline told me about him herself,” she explained, wondering if he thought she’d heard something on the town grapevine. “Perhaps she said it just to shock me.”