by Mark McNease
“Unless you’ve got a million dollars hidden in your closet,” Tess said.
“A million dollars?” said Gerri, startled.
“I’m just guessing. Maybe it was half that. Maybe fifty thousand, people kill for pennies these days.”
“Or maybe there is no money and the whole thing is gossip,” said Maggie.
Tess looked slightly hurt. “I don’t gossip.”
“I know that, Tess. I’m just saying we need to take a deep breath and let the police handle this. If there’s money to be found, they’ll find it—or whoever took it.”
Tess stepped away from them. “I’ll get out of your way,” she said. “I know you’re super busy. I hope those cats are okay.”
The cats, Maggie thought. She’d completely forgotten about Alice’s cats. She felt a sudden sadness, knowing animal control would have taken them by now. She wondered if they knew Checks needed a pill. That’s why Alice had been so upset and wandered into Maggie’s house looking for the animal. She made a mental note to find out where they’d been taken and at least make a phone call.
“Listen,” Maggie said, “it was so nice to see you. You’ll be at the opening?”
“Jack and I would not miss it,” Tess said. Maggie had never said more than a few words to Jack Stanley; he seemed like the type who did not appreciate the human currency of small talk.
Tess walked up to Maggie and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. The move surprised Maggie. Uninvited kisses and hugs were high on her list of dislikes.
They waved at each other as Tess left the store, setting the bell jingling again.
Maggie saw a UPS truck double parking outside.
“The delivery’s here,” she said.
“I have an idea for us tonight,” Gerri said.
“I could use a movie,” Maggie said, absently wiping her cheek where Tess had kissed her. “Something funny or ridiculous.”
“Oh, this is much better,” Gerri said. “We’re going treasure hunting.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Alice’s house. Hoarded money.”
Maggie had entertained the thought all day but it now seemed even riskier. What if there was any truth to Tess’s talk about hidden money? What if the killer didn’t find it and came back? What if the police were aware of the same rumors ... would they consider the sisters’ actions a little harmless breaking-and-entering, or an admission of guilt?
“It’s a bad idea,” Maggie said. “We should forget about it.”
Gerri shrugged. It was her way of telling Maggie the subject was not closed.
Maggie hurried to the door and opened it as the UPS driver wheeled in a hand truck piled with boxes. She would deal with her sister later. Right now she had a grand opening to prepare for.
CHAPTER Eight
GERRI MADE DINNER THAT EVENING. It was the first time in five years Maggie had enjoyed her sister’s cooking. Gerri had just married husband number three then. Maggie and David had hoped it would work out this time for Gerri, but neither had a good impression of John. For starters, he was evasive about what he did for a living. Gerri eventually told them he was an “idea man” and had started several businesses he had to abandon for one reason or another, supplementing his income with money from Gerri’s savings.
Through it all—three marriages, two miscarriages, no children, and a life that might make lesser women bitter—Gerri Lerner remained optimistic, assertive, and an excellent cook.
“I’ll never use any name but Lerner again,” Gerri said as they carried their empty plates to the sink. “No more married names, no more men, except for an occasional hired hand, if you know what I mean.”
Maggie raised her eyebrow. “Seriously?”
“Oh, yes. There’s an app for that.” Gerri laughed.
They’d eaten stuffed sole with spinach and feta cheese Maggie thought rivaled anything from a good Greek restaurant. Garlic mashed potatoes and a beet salad rounded out the meal, with pieces of baklava they’d picked up at Anastos Bakery on the way home.
Maggie quickly rinsed the plates and was putting them into the dishwasher when she glanced up, looking through the kitchen window at Alice’s dark, empty house.
Seeing her, Gerri said, “Well?”
Maggie hesitated. “Well, what?”
“How do we get inside Alice’s house? Is there a cellar door? Lambertville seems like the kind of place where the houses have cellars.”
“Basements. Nobody calls them cellars, unless you’re really in the country somewhere and there’s a tornado to outrun. I don’t know if she has a basement entrance, and it doesn’t matter. We’re not breaking into her house.”
“I don’t think taking a look around is the same thing as burgling. We’re not going there to steal anything.”
Maggie filled the dishwasher compartment with soap, closed the door and started it running. “We’re not going there at all.”
“Don’t you want to clear your name?”
Turning around and staring at her sister, Maggie said, “Clear my name? Seriously? There’s nothing to clear, Gerri. I haven’t been accused of anything.”
“But you’re a suspect and you know it. You’re the one who found the body. Correction … you’re the one they found with the body. They have to view you as possibly involved.”
Maggie leaned back against the sink, thinking about it. “Hypothetically speaking, what is it we would be looking for in Alice’s house?”
“Hypothetically? I’d say we could look for places Alice and her husband would hide a half million dollars. Or fifty thousand. What did that woman say? ‘People kill for pennies these days.’”
“The whole thing is based on rumor and whispers, some of them malicious.”
“Rumor often has a seed of truth at its core.”
“That’s true. I remember what they said about you in high school.”
Gerri ignored her—it was a joke Maggie had told before, based on Gerri’s teenage reputation for misadventure.
“Second question,” Maggie said, stepping away from the sink. She’d begun to feel trapped against it, as if Gerri were pushing her in, pressuring her to do something she knew was irregular and probably illegal. Still, she thought, a quick look through Alice’s house might reveal something important, something the police overlooked. She knew they would be reexamining her story, asking her the same questions they’d already asked her ten times. Maybe there was something to find in the house—if not money, then possibly something else that pointed toward the killer. After all …
“There wasn’t any blood,” Maggie said suddenly.
“Excuse me?” Gerri had moved away, toward the kitchen table, giving Maggie room to pace and think.
“She was bludgeoned to death with the claw end of a hammer.” She shivered as she remembered the sight. “There should have been more blood.”
“So what? Does that mean anything?”
“It means she wasn’t killed there.”
Gerri looked at her as if the idea was crazy. “Why would anyone kill her somewhere else and bring the body back?”
“Exactly.”
“But we were here all day, Maggie. We would have seen something.”
“We weren’t here all day. I was at the factory in the morning, and you didn’t get here till eleven.”
“You’re right, I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Of course I’m right. And that means she was dead on the kitchen floor all day.”
“That’s gruesome. And sad, lying there dead for hours on the floor.”
Maggie thought about those poor cats trapped inside with their deceased owner. The implications of what she’d suggested were clear. “How could it be a burglary gone wrong if she wasn’t killed there?”
“I still think the answer is in that house.” Then, as if having an epiphany, Gerri said, “What if the body itself was a message?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why put her body there if she’d b
een killed somewhere else? Why not bury her in the woods, or dump her in the river?”
Maggie grimaced at the image.
“Not to be unkind,” Gerri quickly added, “but that’s what serial killers do.”
“Serial killers?” Maggie said, aghast. “So now we’ve gone from a burglar caught in the act to a serial killer.”
“Just hear me out, there’s a logic to this. What if the killer wanted her found that way for a reason?”
“Of course he did,” said Maggie. “He wanted her found in her own home so she wouldn’t be found in his. And he wanted it to look like a burglary.”
“Or a crime of passion.”
Maggie had never considered Alice to be a passionate woman, except when it came to her cats.
“We’re getting way off track here, Gerri. The more we fantasize, the farther we’ll get from the truth. Stick to what we know: Alice was killed, somewhere, by someone. Her body was brought back to the house.”
“Wouldn’t one of the neighbors have seen that? How would he get her inside?”
“The hedge,” Maggie said. “It provides cover, once he got into the driveway. He’d only have to risk being seen for a few seconds.”
Ignoring her, Gerri said, “What if there’s a tunnel? Two hundred years ago these old houses had tunnels so they could move around in winter. I’ve read that.”
“You’re not listening to me. And I seriously doubt the houses in Lambertville have tunnels.”
Maggie turned to the window and stared out into the darkness. She felt a chill on her arms. “This is crazy,” she said. “We’ve talked ourselves into something ridiculous, a lot of made up nonsense. This is how innocent people get accused. I don’t like it.”
Gerri waited a moment. “So are we going?”
“Of course we are,” Maggie replied.
“How do we get in?”
“That’s the easy part. Alice kept a hidden key outside, like most people who own a house. And like most people, she told a few trusted neighbors.”
“You being one of them.”
“Yes. She liked me for some reason. Maybe because I never called her Crazy Alice behind her back. Now get into some jeans and put your sneakers on. Oh, and did you bring winter gloves?”
“Leather, high end. One of John’s guilt purchases when he was screwing the receptionist.”
“Bring them. We’ll be ducking under crime scene tape and making sure we don’t leave fingerprints.”
“Oh, this is exciting!” Gerri headed out of the kitchen to change.
“It’s also criminal,” Maggie shouted. She hurried to the kitchen closet where she kept cleaning supplies, Latex gloves, and a flashlight. She wanted them in and out of the house as quickly as possible.
CHAPTER Nine
“WAIT, PLEASE,” MAGGIE SAID. SHE knew Gerri was impatient. Her sister had always been the type to run ahead, to risk a fall, to leap blindly into another marriage destined to fail.
They’d entered through the back door, the same way Maggie had gone into the house the night before. This time the door was locked, as Maggie assumed it would be now that the house was a crime scene.
She remembered Alice had shown her the spare key in the window well along the side of the house. Maggie and David were not pet people. They’d never even kept live plants. Maggie hadn’t been sure why Alice would trust her with the information, except that they lived next to each other.
“I don’t have anyone else,” Alice had said. They’d been standing on Maggie’s front porch after Alice showed her the hidden key. Maggie barely knew her next door neighbor then and had not invited her in.
“I don’t know much about taking care of cats,” Maggie had said, assuming that’s why Alice wanted her to know where the key was.
“Oh, I wouldn’t ask you to do that. I never go anywhere, anyway! I just … you never know. People fall, they sprain their ankle, that kind of thing. We all need someone who can get into our home in case of an emergency.”
Maggie knew she was right. Her son Wynn had a key to the house in Lambertville, just in case. She hadn’t known if Alice expected her to reciprocate, which she would not do.
“What about one of the other neighbors?”
Alice had looked down at her shoes, embarrassed by the question.
“They don’t …” she’d said, struggling for words. “They think I’m eccentric.”
The neighbors were correct, Alice was eccentric. But not in a harmful way, and now, as Maggie and Gerri crept across the kitchen, she felt a pang of regret at not having been kinder to Alice, not having accepted her invitations for morning coffee.
She wondered if she should have told the police about Alice showing up in her living room the morning of her death. All she’d said to Sergeant Hoyt was that she knew the cat was missing and she’d gone over to tell Alice he was back. She made a mental note to tell Hoyt about the encounter.
“Oh my God,” Gerri said, gasping and stopping in her tracks. Alice’s blood had not been cleaned up. There wasn’t much, since a corpse doesn’t bleed, but her bloodied hair had created a crimson halo on the white tile. Maggie stared at it a moment, her earlier conviction confirmed: there was no spatter, no brutal spraying of Alice’s life force against the cabinets and walls, because she wasn’t killed here.
“Come on,” Gerri said. She’d gotten over her shock and had started moving through the kitchen. She looked back and saw Maggie staring at the floor. “What’s wrong?”
“I was right,” Maggie said. “She was killed somewhere else …”
Gerri stopped suddenly at a familiar sound. Both women heard it: the front door opening. It creaked as it swung into the front entryway.
“Somebody’s here!” Maggie looked around frantically. Could they get back out without being heard?
“This way,” Gerri said. She was pointing at a door next to the stove that led to a basement.
Maggie hurried over and, as quietly as they could, they crept onto the stairs and into the darkness. Maggie gently pulled the door closed behind her, turning the knob in silence as she shut them in.
Sergeant Bryan Hoyt wanted to be alone in the house. This was only his second murder in six years as a sergeant. Homicides were rare in Lambertville but not unheard of: human nature assured that at some point someone was going to kill somebody. It might be a domestic dispute, of which Hoyt had seen his share, or it might be a bar brawl or even a hit and run. Knowing the time would come, he’d kept himself educated in the skills required of an effective investigator.
His previous killing had been a thwarted store robbery, ending with the shopkeeper blowing a large hole in a robber’s chest with a shotgun she kept under the cash register. Alice Drapier’s death, however, had the makings of something deeply sinister. He’d known when he first saw Alice’s body in the kitchen that she had not been killed there. The crime scene techs knew it, too, as would anyone making more than a cursory inspection of the room. There was no blood spatter. There was no sign of a struggle. It was as if Alice had been carried in through the back door and placed on the floor for someone else to find, along with the hammer that had punctured her skull.
He’d heard the rumors about the Drapiers keeping cash in the house and he’d dismissed them as gossip. While theft was a possible motive, the murder had none of the markings he would expect from a burglary gone wrong. At the same time, there was no sense in killing Alice somewhere else and bringing her back just to go through the house looking for money. Or was there? Was it possible the killer had forced information he’d wanted from Alice somewhere else and brought her body back to the house? And was she killed for something she had, or for something she knew?
He stood in the living room, glancing around in the darkness. He did not believe in any sixth sense, but he had often come to insights by standing still and listening. It was not spirits that spoke to him, but his own thoughts taking shape.
A moment later he walked to a table lamp and turned it on.
Alice kept a clean and orderly home. There was a couch, old but presentable, facing a large screen television sitting on a TV stand. He’d sat on that couch the night before interviewing the women from next door. There was a matching recliner perpendicular to it, where Hoyt imagined Alice’s husband had sat watching sports games or the nightly news year after year. There were photographs and knick-knacks along the ledge of a faux fireplace. And there was cat hair on everything.
The poor cats, he thought. Animal control had come in that morning and taken six cats away. They’d been told there were seven, but one of them must have found its way out of the house, possibly frightened off by the sight and smell of its dead owner on the kitchen floor.
He glanced at a staircase to the second floor and intended to head up later to see what was there. More bedrooms? A mattress stuffed with twenty-dollar bills?
He started to walk into the kitchen for a closer look at where Alice had died, when the cat cried.
“I can’t see,” Gerri said. They had stopped halfway down the basement stairs while they waited and listened.
“What if it’s him?” Maggie whispered.
“Who?”
“The killer.”
“That’s ridiculous. Murderers don’t really return to the scene of the crime.”
“Unless they didn’t find what they were looking for the first time,” said Maggie. “What if he was in the house when I came over last night and it scared him off before he was finished?”
The possibility unnerved Gerri. They had no weapons.
“Get ready to run,” Gerri said quietly. She carefully stepped back up the stairs, pulling Maggie with her by the hand.
And then they heard it.
“Oh, crap,” Maggie said. She knew the sound well. It’s what had started this all. The damn cat was still in the house.