by Leslie Nagel
“You went to see Sarah that night. It’s just ten blocks, a few minutes’ walk. As you approached the house, you saw Sarah let Oliver in the side door. It had been years, but you recognized him.”
Rachel stopped moving. “I circled the block and found a truck parked around the corner. The hood was still warm; it had to be his. The toolbox was under the passenger seat. I took one of his tools, the sharpest one I could find. I only wanted to scare her.”
“No,” Charley said firmly. “The moment you saw Oliver, you decided to kill her. You’d seen Sarah around Oakwood, out walking perhaps. You knew she was here, but you didn’t know why. I’ll bet you were petrified. Your assistant Jenny told Frankie you’d been distracted and crabby ‘for a while,’ not just that day, the day you saw Sarah’s death on the news. That suggests a few days at the least. Then, when you saw that letter in ‘Ask Jackie’ and guessed from the odd language that Sarah had written it, you figured your time was running out. Jackie practically ordered ‘A Tortured Soul’ to call the police. But you were wrong about why Sarah wrote it.” Charley dropped her bombshell. “Sarah came back because she knew Pippo is a girl.”
Rachel gasped in shock. “She—what? What are you talking about?”
“Judith’s been passing Phillipa Sharpe off as a boy, calling him Phillip,” Charley elaborated. “No one else knew except Mary, but she’s in a nursing home and has no idea what Judith’s been up to. I don’t know why your mother never mentioned it to you.”
“She knows we haven’t been speaking.” Rachel’s voice cracked. “We…don’t talk about Judith.”
“When Sarah came home for a visit two years ago, she stumbled on her mother’s secret. When she couldn’t convince Judith to reveal the truth about Pippo’s gender, Sarah wrote to ‘Ask Jackie’ because she didn’t have anyone else to turn to. You’ve been obsessing about Sarah for fifteen years, so of course you immediately leaped to the wrong conclusion. You thought she’d figured out that her baby didn’t die, that that’s what she was writing about, and why she’d returned home after so many years away.”
“What else could it have been?” Rachel whispered. The news about Pippo seemed to have drained all the fight out of her. She swayed, grasping a chair back with her free hand. “I had no idea. Why would Judith do such a crazy thing?”
Charley ignored the question. “You lied about not knowing Sarah had a boyfriend. You told me how close you two were, so of course she confided in you; she certainly couldn’t confide a secret boyfriend to her strict mother. That was the first thing that seemed off to me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. You and Judith were like sisters, you helped her raise Sarah, yet you and Judith both claimed you didn’t know Sarah was pregnant? You said the estrangement didn’t begin until the twins were born, so it makes no sense you wouldn’t have known what was going on.”
“I knew. Sarah showed me Oliver’s picture once, made me promise not to tell Judith.”
“You’d guessed back then that Oliver was the father, so when you saw him that night, you were convinced it was all coming out.” Charley took a deep breath. “You decided to kill Sarah and frame him for her murder.”
Rachel stared at the knife in her hand. “Yes,” she said, her voice oddly calm. “I killed her. I had to kill her.” She sank into the chair, the knife clattering onto the tabletop, as the tension level in the basement dropped about two hundred percent. “I was all alone, my husband overseas. Then I lost him, and I had no one. No one but my baby, my Danny. Judith has a husband, her twins. And Sarah was young. She could always get married, have another child. But I’ll never marry again. I’ll never love anyone the way I loved Mike.”
Charley leaned forward, picked up the knife, and took a healthy step back from the table. Out of Rachel’s line of sight, she lifted a finger in a “hold on” gesture. “Why did you give Pippo the carved monkey?”
Rachel pressed fingertips to her eyes. “I meant to leave that chisel, so the police would believe Oliver had killed her. But I was so nervous. I was gripping it so tightly, and when she fell, somehow I was still holding on to it. I knelt down, thinking I could…stick it back in.” She looked pale and sick, and Charley couldn’t blame her. “The carving was lying next to her. Instead of leaving the weapon, I picked up the carving and put it in my pocket.” Rachel sounded bewildered. “It was as if everything was happening to someone else.”
“And Sarah’s laptop?” Charley prompted. “Did you touch it?”
Rachel nodded. “When I turned to leave, I saw the laptop was on. That letter was staring me in the face. I deleted it and emptied the recycle bin. I heard someone moving around in the kitchen. I crept up the stairs. I should’ve run, but I just had to see. The door was open a couple of inches, and I saw a light come on. The refrigerator light, I suppose.” Her mouth twisted. “I peered around the door and found myself face-to-face with one of the twins. He stared at me with those brown eyes, so like Judith’s. I probably should have killed him, but I simply couldn’t harm a child. I hid the chisel behind my back and handed him the monkey, told him to be a good boy and go back to bed. Then I slipped out the side door and walked home. I hid the chisel in my office.”
“Deleting that letter wasn’t enough, though. You broke into the Oakwood Register office.”
“I couldn’t risk someone making the connection between Sarah’s murder and that damned letter,” Rachel muttered. “How could I know you’d already done it?”
“You waited to see if any of the Sharpes knew about Oliver’s visit, if they would tell the police about him. When that didn’t happen, you called in that anonymous tip.” Charley tilted her head. “I couldn’t figure out why anyone who wasn’t already a suspect would bother framing Oliver. Why not just lay low and wait for Paxton or Brandon to be arrested? But you had a reason, an excellent one. You wanted to make certain both of Danny’s real parents were out of the picture.”
“Yes,” Rachel said bitterly. “That was the whole point, wasn’t it?”
“Judith was already wrestling with guilt over lying to Paxton about Pippo’s gender,” Charley went on. “Then Oliver’s arrest dredged up all the old memories, the guilt she’d suppressed for what she’d done to her own daughter years before. After I confronted her, I suppose she called you, maybe said she wanted to make a clean breast of everything. You couldn’t allow that, so you begged her to talk to you first. You rushed over on foot, waited for her under the hawthorn tree on the boulevard, and stabbed her.”
“I hadn’t spoken to her in four years, but somehow, I wasn’t surprised when she called. She was frantic, babbling on about Paxton, her children, and how she couldn’t take the lying anymore. I just assumed she was talking about Danny.” Rachel sighed heavily. “The minute you walked into my house, I knew I was in trouble. How did you figure out it was me?”
“From the moment Judith admitted Sarah’s baby had lived, I kept wondering where it was,” Charley replied. “When she spun that cock-and-bull story about Catholic Social Services, Judith couldn’t even look me in the eye. So, okay, she hadn’t handed over her granddaughter to the nuns—but the baby had to be somewhere. I thought at first that Portia Delgado’s daughter might be her. Portia’s in love with Paxton; she’s sacrificed her career to follow him from one deployment to the next. But her little girl can’t be more than eleven or twelve.”
“Judith knew about Pax and Portia,” Rachel said faintly. “It was a long time ago, before they were married. I doubt he fathered that woman’s child, since he and Judith needed fertility treatments to conceive the twins.”
Charley absorbed this without comment and returned to her narrative. “All that wondering about dates got me reconsidering the sequence of events. Cecilia told Frankie that Sarah never came back to school after the holiday break. That would be January. But you said she ran away during the spring of her senior year. I put it down to a turn of phrase; perhaps you meant sp
ring semester. But it was a deliberate attempt by you to reinforce that gap in the timeline. You distracted me further by stressing the brief interval between Paxton and Judith’s marriage and Sarah’s disappearance, and by hinting heavily that Paxton was abusive. You wanted me to think that was the reason she’d run away.”
“It was obvious you already suspected Paxton.” Rachel shrugged. “Pointing the finger at him was a no-brainer.”
“I wanted him to be guilty,” Charley admitted, “and that biased thinking kept me on the wrong track for days. But it was Pippo who finally put me onto the truth. She insisted that a tree troll had given her the monkey. She knows both Paxton and Brandon; it didn’t seem likely she’d invent such a story about someone she knew. That meant whoever she’d seen in that kitchen wasn’t someone she’d seen before. When I got to that point, I wondered: Why a tree troll? Who knows how a child’s mind works, but still, why not a fairy godmother, or some creature a bit more likely to be handing out gifts in the middle of the night? So I wondered. When I saw the picture, I knew I’d seen a hooded cloak like it before. You’ve got at least one hanging with the dress-up clothes at The Crayon Club.”
Rachel dropped her head in her hands. “Like I said, trouble from the minute you walked in.”
“I’ve been worried about Pippo,” Charley continued, “and whether she might have personal identity issues in the future. I think she’ll be okay, but it made me realize how very easy it is to label a child as a boy or girl, to dress them a certain way, to cut their hair or let it grow. Everyone who’s ever met the Sharpes has contributed to Judith’s deception. Why wouldn’t we believe her? She’s their mother, for God’s sake.”
Charley shook her head, still wrestling with the incomprehensible deception. “It took me long enough, but it finally occurred to me that if Judith lied about a child’s gender once, she could’ve done it before. Could Sarah’s baby have been a boy? What a great way, a devilishly simple way, to further camouflage that first, massive lie. You and your cousin weren’t yet estranged, but you stayed away during Sarah’s pregnancy. Judith told me Sarah didn’t want you to know about her troubles, which played right into your plan. The two of you used your grief over Mike’s death as an excuse for you not to visit the farm. You couldn’t show up without a baby, could you? Someday, though, Sarah was sure to meet her little cousin Danny, and she might wonder. So I asked myself, if that lost baby was a boy, who was he? Where was he?
“I saw him a few days ago in the park.” Rachel’s head jerked up, and Charley smiled, remembering. “Danny’s not built like you—short and stocky with dark hair—or fair-haired and muscular like your late husband. He looks like Sarah, and like Oliver—tall and slender with light brown hair. You still make him wear those tinted glasses, even though the lenses don’t magnify anything. I bet he has heterochromia, too. It can be inherited through a mother who has it, as Sarah did. He’s artistic, with clever hands, like both of his parents. And,” she added, “he has his father’s gentle smile.”
Marc stepped out from the shadows under the stairs and pointed to the video camera he’d been manning. “This conversation is streaming live to Assistant Montgomery County Prosecutor Trent Logan, and to Investigating Sergeant George Drummond of the Sheriff’s Department. Two Oakwood safety officers are upstairs, waiting to take you into custody.”
“Danny.” Rachel gazed at Charley with pleading eyes. “He’s all alone.”
“We’ll keep Danny safe,” Charley promised. She linked fingers with Marc, grateful beyond measure to have him beside her. “In this neighborhood, we’re a family. We take care of our own.”
Epilogue
Charley locked the front door, scooped up two canvas carryalls stuffed with hard candy, and headed down the porch steps. Pansy season had come and gone, and the terra-cotta pots now overflowed with purple and gold petunias and trailing ivy. Lawrence had cleaned out the spent tulips and daffodils, replanting the front beds with impatiens and geraniums in a joyous mix of colors. The smell of freshly cut grass sweetened the air. She glanced skyward and sighed with satisfaction. Breezy, mild, and not a cloud in sight. Last year’s parade had been a total washout, but this year the weather promised to be perfect.
That Day in May was an Oakwood tradition. Held the third Saturday in May for no other reason than to bring the community together for a good time, the all-day celebration featured a five-kilometer run, a pancake breakfast fundraiser for the local Rotary Club, and a parade through town ending in a picnic and children’s carnival at Shafor Park.
This year’s event would have an added attraction: a second venue at the Shops of Park Avenue. Since they’d had to postpone the grand reopening of Old Hat until Dale Penwater recovered enough to complete renovations, Vanessa and Heddy had come up with the brilliant idea of tying their event into this existing, citywide party. As Vanessa had predicted, the other merchants on Park Avenue had jumped at the chance to get in on the action.
Charley paused to admire the Mystery Machine’s updated paint job. The original two-word name had been amended. Now OLD HAT NEW BEGINNINGS marched boldly across the side above the orange daisies and swirls of blue. She smiled at the saucy giraffe still peeking from within the O. Both doors sported temporary placards reading GRAND REOPENING TODAY!
Marc had overseen the permanent changes, hounding his friend who’d done the original work into completing the job in time for today’s parade. Ever since he’d turned in his shield, she reflected, her reserved, intensely driven police detective had seemed almost a different person: relaxed, lighthearted, taking pleasure in simple tasks, particularly any task that gave her pleasure.
She’d been sleeping like a baby.
Marc had thrown himself into helping her prepare for today, even assisting her and her staff with the heavy lifting associated with merchandising her newly renovated shop. He’d picked out her costume as well, an emerald green sheath of delicate Indian Muga silk with soft, flowing sleeves and a sweetheart neckline decorated with leaves and flowers embroidered in silver thread. She’d made the wide matching headband herself, reclaiming a length of dove gray silk from a vintage gown too damaged to be sold, and embroidering it in green.
Marc had surprised her this morning with a carved jade pendant on an antique silver chain. A “grand reopening present,” he’d called it. Charley worried about how he could afford such a costly gift, now that he wasn’t working. Still, she had to admit, it was the perfect accessory for the perfect dress. He knew her so well.
Charley glanced next door to where Marc sat cross-legged on the grass with the twins. He’d dressed for today, too, wearing a canary yellow shirt with a high collar, black high-waisted trousers with emerald green suspenders, and matching green garters around both biceps. He’d drawn the line at the bowler hat with a green and yellow band. She’d stashed it in the van, knowing she could change his mind if she wanted to, but knowing also that she wouldn’t try. Everything about today, including her man, was already perfect.
As she started across the lawn, she paused. What was Marc doing? Origami? She realized she’d never seen him interact with young children before. The twins gazed at him with rapt expressions as he produced a frog, and then they laughed happily when he made it hop off his knee with the flick of a finger. He seemed to be quite a hit.
She walked over to where Paxton leaned against a moving van, watching Marc play with his children.
“Your friend has a way with kids. I can’t tear Hank and Pippo away long enough to get in the van.” He shook his head. “I guess it’s ‘Pippa’ now.”
“I guess it is,” Charley said kindly.
“I took them clothes-shopping, let them each pick out whatever they wanted.” Paxton gestured at his children with a helpless expression. Pippa wore a new Spider-Man T-shirt; Hank’s shirt featured a sword-wielding Wonder Woman.
Charley grinned. “I’d say your kids are going to be just fine. Goo
d luck to the three of you.”
“Thank you.” Paxton hesitated. “Charley, I wanted to apologize. Please,” he said, holding up a hand as she tried to stop him. “I owe you so much, and I should have spoken before now. It’s been so difficult without my Judith.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve been a lousy neighbor, and my personal issues are no excuse for the way I’ve behaved. It took losing my wife to make me realize there are more important things than a career. I’m going to stay stateside from now on, get to know my amazing children. We’ve already started family counseling, and we have a great support network out at the base. It’s a lot like Oakwood. I’ll miss it here, but, well, we can’t stay.”
“I understand,” she said. “What about Brandon? He struck me as needing a little TLC, too.”
“You’re not wrong, and that’s at least partially on me.” Paxton sighed. “He’s pled the assault charge down to a misdemeanor with five hundred hours of community service, which I’ve arranged for him to complete at the base hospital. He’s talking about taking the GED and joining up, actually. We’ll see.”
“When you talk to him, please tell him I wish him luck.”
Paxton nodded. “You two chipmunks ready?” he called.
“Last one in the van’s a rotten egg!” Hank announced. The twins scampered across the lawn and swarmed up into the cab, leaving Paxton in a cloud of dust. They both giggled as he moaned in despair, clutching his chest and staggering toward the driver’s door. With a last nod for Charley and Marc, Paxton climbed behind the wheel.
“Seatbelts, Avengers!” he proclaimed. All three buckled in, and Charley and Marc watched the little family drive off.
Family drama, Charley thought. It could be messy and sad, especially when people weren’t honest with one another. Or it could be wonderful, the most wonderful part of living.
“I suppose poor Mr. Schmidt will have to find new renters. I wonder who we’ll get next?” She sighed. “With my luck it’ll be somebody whose kid has a drum set. Or a motorcycle. Or both.”