The Double Wedding Ring

by Clare O'Donohue

  He smiled. “Sort of like a thief I once knew. He said each time he stole it was because he only needed a little more money. I asked him how much was a ‘little more’ and he said, ‘just the money I don’t already have.’”

  I laughed. “Same thing, only with fabric.”

  Bob looked around the shop, seemed overwhelmed at first, then gravitated toward a group of pincushions that Natalie made. He held a small pear-shaped one toward me. “This is pretty, but it doesn’t seem like it’s enough.”

  “Can I make some suggestions?”

  “You can insist. I’m putty in your hands.”

  For the next ten minutes we wandered the shop, choosing small items, like charm squares, scissors, hand lotion, and a box of threads. I added a quilt pin from our collection as my gift to his sister. “If you bring these to Cindy’s Flowers and Gifts, she’ll put them in a gift basket for you,” I said. “It’s right near the police station. Have you gone by there yet?”

  “Not yet,” he said. But he seemed distracted. The Bob Marshall Jesse described bore no resemblance to the soft-spoken man in front of me. “This was really nice of you, Nell. I forget sometimes how nice people can be.” His voice cracked slightly.

  I’d done nothing out of the ordinary, but somehow it had touched him. “Anytime.” I watched him walk out of the shop, another puzzle that seemed just beyond my ability to solve.

  “What’s wrong with you? I’m always finding you in a dream world these days.” Maggie was standing less than a foot away from me, holding a large quilted tote bag that she dropped on the counter. “Are you sitting down?” she asked me.

  I looked down at my feet in an instinctive check. “Nope, standing right in front of you. Do you need to get your eyes checked?”

  She waved me away. “I was making a point. You should be sitting down because this will knock you off your feet. I spent half the night on the Internet checking on the lead I got from Bernie, and I found something. I saw you cozying up to Bob Marshall. . . .”

  “He was here buying a gift for his sister.”

  “Well, your new friend was released from prison six weeks ago after doing twenty-seven months on assault charges.”

  “But he was a cop. . . .”

  “Was is right,” Maggie said. “He was a corrupt cop.”

  “And he was Roger Leighton’s partner,” I added hopefully. If it were true, then we would have a murderer who didn’t have anything to do with Jesse’s payouts to Roger, and the whole thing would be over by the time the sun went down.

  Maggie looked surprised. “Not unless you know something I don’t.”

  “He wasn’t Jesse’s partner at any time, was he?”

  “No. But he was involved in a case where Roger was the arresting officer. A drug dealer—a man named Alex Walker.” Walker, the name Greg had circled in his notebook. He was obviously chasing the same leads we were, doing his own shadow investigation behind Jesse’s back.

  “What about Jesse?” I asked. “Did he have a role in any of it?”

  “The arrest happened just two months after Jesse came home to Archers Rest.”

  “What do we know about the case against Alex Walker?”

  “It was thrown out of court. It seems that nearly half a million dollars that was alleged to have been found at Walker’s home went missing.”

  “Bob Marshall stole it?”

  “Not that anyone could prove. The money was never found.”

  “So maybe Roger was his partner, and maybe after Bob got out of prison he came looking for Roger to get his share of the money. . . .” I was getting excited. Maybe we really would solve the case by sundown.

  I thought about the money in Roger’s bank account, the fact that he was still living in the house he’d shared with Anna, and that for three years after the money was stolen Roger had worked for the police force. If he had access to a large amount of cash, he wasn’t living like it.

  “You think it might be hidden somewhere in Archers Rest?” I suggested.

  “If it is, then it’s got something to do with Jesse.”

  “Nell!” My mother walked in on Maggie and me. “Please tell me I didn’t just hear what I think I heard?”

  “Depends what you think you heard.”

  “That Jesse’s friend was a corrupt police officer who was murdered and Jesse might be involved?”

  “I’m just thinking out loud,” I told her.

  “I don’t know what happened to this town since I was a child, but it’s not a healthy place for you to live. Maybe it’s for the best that your grandmother is moving away from here, and maybe it would be a good idea for you to do the same.”

  “That’s an overreaction, Mom. And a complete misunderstanding of the situation.”

  Maggie stepped toward my mom. “Patty, don’t worry yourself. What’s happening now, well, it’s a bit of excitement, but really everything’s fine. And Nell is really very good at figuring things out. She’s brought quite a bit of intrigue to our quilt group.”

  “With all due respect, Mrs. Sweeney,” my mom said, “Nell should be focusing on her career plans, not murder investigations or boyfriends or quilt groups.”

  “Speaking of which,” I told Maggie, “I can’t make quilt group tonight.”

  “We’ll muddle through.”

  “What exactly are you doing tonight, Nell?” my mother asked. “More traipsing around after killers?”

  “No, actually, I’m not. We’ll talk later about my patterns and getting them on the Web and in other shops. I’d really like your input, but right now I have to go.”

  “Where?”

  “I have to pick up Allie from school.” Before my mother could say another word, I lifted my hand to stop her. “This is my life, Mom. Mine. And right now I have to go.”

  Maggie handed me the tote bag. It was heavier than I expected. “Take this with you,” she said. “There are some interesting patterns in there.” From the look she gave me, I sensed she didn’t mean for quilt tops.

  CHAPTER 30

  I fed Allie a snack. We played dolls, and talked a lot about the upcoming wedding. Her duties as a flower girl were a big deal to her, so we went over them carefully until she felt satisfied she could handle the job. When she was bored with me, she went to watch her favorite cartoons and I was left alone in the kitchen with a hot cup of tea and the tote bag that Maggie had given me.

  There was a folder in the bag stuffed with various papers, and a thick binder that had to weigh a couple of pounds. I opened the notebook first. Maggie had been busy. There were dozens of printouts on the crime that had ended Bob Marshall’s career along with a photo of him from a Daily News article as he was entering the courtroom for his trial. In the photo his attorney was a tall, well-dressed man identified as C. G. Kruger. The general consensus in all the articles was that Marshall had been caught skimming drug money off vice arrests, though the word alleged was used in every other sentence. The corruption had likely gone back years and involved more than just one bad cop. But Marshall wasn’t talking and the silence had cost him. Because he’d been unwilling to cooperate, the district attorney threw every charge he could at Marshall: multiple counts of robbery, tampering with evidence, corruption, and filing false police reports. In the end only one charge stuck: assault with a deadly weapon.

  I sat for a minute and looked at the photo until it jumped out at me. C. G. Kruger. That must have been the name on the business card Greg found on Roger’s body. The card that Jesse wouldn’t put into evidence.

  I continued reading the story, going over it for details that might lead to another clue. A rookie named Kevin Findlay had testified that, along with a large amount of drugs and a stash of weapons, five hundred thousand dollars in cash had been found at the scene and bagged for evidence. Marshall had been the one to bring the money to the evidence locker, and somewhere between
the drug dealer’s home and the police station, the cash had gone missing.

  Marshall contended the money never existed. Another officer on the scene backed him up, but Findlay wouldn’t change his story. Marshall and Findlay had apparently exchanged words, they fought, and Marshall broke Findlay’s jaw with the butt of his gun. It put him in prison for more than two years and ruined his career in law enforcement.

  “This is the tip of the iceberg,” the prosecutor was quoted as saying in one article. “And the frustrating thing is that guys like Bob Marshall know how to play the system. We’re not going to see someone show up with a fancy car, or suddenly take an expensive vacation. These guys are just going to add the money in small amounts, a little bit here and there, and they’ll wait out the statute of limitations before early retirements and the good life will begin.”

  The other officer on the scene hadn’t been identified, but if the man was Roger, it would explain Marshall’s appearance in Archers Rest. Roger might have been hiding the money all these years and Marshall was looking for it.

  As I reread the prosecutor’s statement, I felt slightly sick. “These guys are going to add money in small amounts.” Like bank deposits in odd sums of less than five hundred dollars over a period of three years.

  Could Jesse have been holding the money for Roger and paying it out little by little? No, he couldn’t have. Jesse was a good man. He didn’t have to ask me to believe it; I did believe it. But what if someone else found out about the deposits Jesse had been making, assumed it was the missing cash, and brought Roger up here to get it? That I could believe.

  There was a scratch at the window. It sounded like a branch. I knew it was a branch, and when I got up to check it I could see that the wind had picked up, and, in fact, it was a branch from the overgrown oak scratching against the window. The window that was right next to the back door where someone had entered Jesse’s house on the night Roger was killed. Maybe someone looking for the money they thought was hidden here.

  I walked into the living room to check on Allie, who was half watching the television and half playing with a loom I’d gotten her—one of those simple weaving looms that allows kids to make squares of about six inches. Since I’d gotten it for Allie, she’d been making potholders for everyone she knew. She was making two blue and white ones as her wedding gift, and she was taking the project quite seriously. I stood watching her, but she was engrossed in her task and barely paid attention.

  If the money was hidden in the house I didn’t know where to start looking. Or even if I should start. Surely going through his things was a huge invasion of Jesse’s privacy. And, of course, I reminded myself that the money wasn’t hidden here because Jesse would never be involved in anything that terrible.

  But someone had been in this house the night Roger was killed, so it made sense he was looking for something. If I could figure out what, maybe I could help.

  The other issue was that searching wasn’t really necessary. In the year Jesse and I had been dating, I’d opened nearly every closet and drawer in his house. I’d cooked meals, helped him organize toys and clothes, and even sorted through his receipts at tax time. I never saw large sums of cash sitting around, or anything that might contain large sums of cash, like a locked file cabinet or the key to a safe-deposit box.

  Jesse certainly didn’t live as if he had more money than his salary. Neither one of us were into fancy restaurants or weekends away. Most of our dates had consisted of dinner in town, or cooking at his place so the three of us could be together.

  “Instant family.” My mom’s words popped into my head.

  “Not now,” I answered them silently. I debated asking Allie whether Roger had been in the house recently. His picture was on the bookcase, so it would be easy to ask if she remembered the man, but that seemed like a betrayal both to Jesse and to his little girl. I walked back to the kitchen.

  “So what if it wasn’t money the killer broke in to find? What if it was something else?” I asked myself.

  Maybe a key, a piece of paper, the number of Roger’s bank account. But the day of the murder, Jesse had been unconcerned about my theory that someone had been in the house. If he knew something was here that tied Roger to the murder, wouldn’t he have immediately looked for it?

  Questions. That’s all I had, questions on top of questions, and no one to answer them since Jesse wouldn’t talk to me about it. I sat back down at the table and took a gulp of my tea. It had gone cold.

  There was one box I hadn’t opened. A large plastic bin, actually, that Jesse had said was full of old stuff he was saving for Allie. When we’d been organizing her room over the summer I found it in the back of her closet. Jesse told me not to bother with that. It was filled with “keepers,” he said. But a box of old keepsakes might be a good place to hide something.

  I stood in the kitchen for ten minutes debating before I finally went upstairs. The box was where it had been before, on the floor in Allie’s closet, underneath a pile of neatly folded clothes she’d recently outgrown. I moved the box to the center of the floor and opened it. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was filled with “keepers” as Jesse had said—baby clothes, photo albums, toys from her baby days. I lifted out the top photo album and looked at the first pages. Jesse in college. He was so very young and very handsome. Lizzie was on his arm; pretty, happy, young. The album told the story of their life together, ending with pages of casual wedding photos, the kind taken by friends and family. The next album was the formal wedding photos. I found that I couldn’t look at more than a few of those without feeling jealous and sad, and then petty. My punishment for being so nosy. The last of the albums were Allie’s baby pictures. At the end of the last book were a few pictures of Lizzie, looking frail and thin, sitting in the hospital bed holding her daughter for what was likely the last time.

  As I put the albums back I saw a stack of letters and cards. There was an envelope with Jesse’s name written across it, and without wanting to but not being able to resist, I opened the card it contained. “Happy sixth anniversary,” it read. “Whether we have six years or sixty, the happiest moments of my life are the ones I spend with you.” It was dated six months before her death.

  I could see Jesse’s handwriting on the envelopes of other cards, some pink for Valentine’s Day and others that just said “I love you” on the front. But I didn’t read them. I put everything back where it belonged—the albums in the box, the box in the closet, and the clothes on the box—and went back downstairs to the kitchen.

  I looked at the thick binder that Maggie had given to me. I didn’t know how much more evidence I could take in, but it gave me something to focus on so I opened it. Instead of items about the case, it was photos stuffed into clear plastic three-ring folders. Unlike the photos upstairs, these didn’t leave me feeling like an intruder. There were snaps of Eleanor from when she was a girl all the way through just a few weeks ago at the town’s Christmas Eve party. Another plastic folder held pictures of Oliver from his days at school, to his early art shows, to the same Christmas Eve party. A Post-it note on the stack said that Maggie had tracked down Oliver’s relatives in England for the early photos, and gotten the later ones from photo albums Oliver had in his house.

  “Not stolen,” she wrote with a smiley face. “Borrowed.”

  A slide show of photos for the wedding. I’d insisted on it in September when a January wedding seemed so far away and easy to organize. I liked the idea of showing the very different lives of these amazing two people; how they had met, fallen in love, and found themselves wanting to commit to be together.

  My mother had found it odd that two people of an advanced age would want to marry when there were so few years left to share, but all I saw were happy people in love. Besides, what were the guarantees for any of us? Lizzie was proof of that.

  I shook off my melancholy. Jesse would be home soon and I promised myself th
at I’d avoid any talk of the murder, or Lizzie, or the past—his or mine. Instead, we’d just be together and enjoy spending time as a couple. A couple and Allie, which, instant family or not, sounded like a perfect evening to me. I looked up at the clock. It was almost six and completely dark outside. Jesse and Anna couldn’t still be at the cemetery, could they?

  I went to Jesse’s desktop computer and started scanning the photos into a file. The folder was thick; I knocked pens, a zip drive, and a “World’s Best Dad” pencil holder off the desk trying to make room. It was a long slow process. Allie helped me by placing the photos in the scanner and keeping track of what had been done. She offered suggestions on the best ones for the slide show and how we could decorate poster boards and display some of the photos in Eleanor’s hallway so the guests would see them as they arrived. After each photo was scanned, she took a moment to study it before carefully placing it back in the plastic folder. As excited as Allie was by all things wedding, she was equally fascinated by these images of her beloved almost-great-grandparents as young people.

  When we were almost done, I had to take a break and feed us both dinner. A simple task like creating the photo presentation had made me feel useful and clearheaded. And hungry.

  “Someday I’ll be as old as Eleanor,” I told her as we ate. “And you’ll be as old as me.”

  “Unless you die like Mommy did,” she said. “Then you don’t get old.”

  I tried to hide it as I gasped. Allie had spoken of her mother before, of course, but never about her being dead. It was mainly about how Jesse had told her that Lizzie’s favorite color was lilac, and her favorite day of the week was Sunday. Allie had been barely three when Lizzie died. She had no memories of her, so understandably Jesse tried to give her all that he could. About her death he had told her only that “Mommy got sick and went to heaven.” I’d never heard him use the word die.

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” I said, struggling for what words to use. “I’m planning on getting old and cranky, like Eleanor.”