“If I hadn’t been so caught up in protecting Roger’s reputation, I would have seen it,” Jesse agreed.
I took his hand. “That was the point. That was the reason for the shooting in the street. It was misdirection. Who is the first person you look at when a person is killed? Their spouse. Especially when they’re in the middle of a divorce.”
The officers and Anna’s friends nodded in agreement.
“So Anna had to misdirect. She shot up Main Street so that we’d be looking for a professional. Someone like a fellow cop. Someone like Bob Marshall. She had Ken here give her the means to set up a flash, a way to send Jesse looking down the street instead of looking up.”
Ken cleared his throat. “For the record, I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I thought she was just getting into magic. It was only after I talked to you last night at the wake that I realized why she had been so interested.”
I nodded. I could see by the anger in his eyes, he had been fooled, too. “She also needed to misdirect me,” I said, looking at Jesse as I spoke. “So she whispered in my ear about Lizzie. She kept me off balance so that instead of thinking about who killed Roger, all I could think about was how much you loved Lizzie. How you loved her more than me.”
“That isn’t true, Nell,” Jesse said softly.
I squeezed his hand.
Anna rolled her eyes. “That’s charming. It still doesn’t prove I killed Roger.”
“But this does.” I put her purse on the table, and dumped its contents. A wallet, lipstick, tissues . . . a pack of cigarettes, and two sets of house keys.
“Those are from my house,” Jesse said as he picked up one of the sets of keys. “But you gave me back the set I lent you.”
“She did,” I said. “These are Roger’s keys. The ones he’d had ever since staying with you after Lizzie died. She took them from him after she killed him. She needed to get into your house.”
“I didn’t go into the house that night.” Anna started to say something else but stopped herself.
“Because my car pulled up,” I pointed out. “You were nervous. You had just shot your husband. He was already dead, wasn’t he?”
Anna didn’t answer. She just stared at me.
“You saw me get out of the car. Maybe you thought I saw you. You certainly knew I saw the cigarette smoke.”
“That’s what you’ve got on me? Cigarettes and magic tricks? I mean, it’s literally smoke and mirrors.” She laughed.
“I have one more thing,” I said. I looked at Ken. “You know that Anna would dump you in a heartbeat for someone with more money, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“Where did Anna get the money for her design company?”
He looked at her. “From the money Roger stole. About fifty or sixty thousand dollars. Up in smoke as far as I can tell, and then she came after me. I gave her what I could, but I have problems of my own. So she went back to Roger. That’s what it’s like with her. Roger said he’d give her more money, but she’d have to stay with him. Anna doesn’t like being told what to do.”
“You jerk,” she yelled at Ken, then calmed herself. “I told Roger being married to a cop is nothing but heartbreak.”
I smiled. That’s why he said it to Carrie. He wasn’t warning me of anything, just reliving his own pain.
“So where’s the money?” Jesse asked her.
“Don’t ask me,” she spat. “Roger gave me money in drips. Making sure I’d always need him. He even blamed me for stealing it, can you believe it? Said his love for me had made him weak.” She rolled her eyes. “I was sick of it. Sick of him. I tried to find the money, but he found out. Roger was still a good detective, and he was always watching me. Then suddenly, he told me that he couldn’t do it anymore; he was going to get the money and give it to me. All of it.”
“So why kill him?” Jesse asked.
“I knew Roger better than anyone, and there was something about the way he said it that made me sure he was lying. So I followed him. I figured he was going to grab the money and head off to Mexico or somewhere. But I found him right in front of Jesse’s house. And I found out what he was really going to do. He told me he was going to turn himself in to some old buddy of his in vice, John Toomey. Roger said he’d put the money in a safe place, and he was going to tell the police everything. Try to right the wrong, he said. He told me I might be charged as an accessory after the fact. He said he was sorry about that, but maybe it was better for both of us to get this burden off our chests.” She took a long breath. “I wasn’t going to prison because of Roger.”
Jesse blinked back a few tears, then borrowed a pair of handcuffs from one of the officers. “Yes, Anna, you are,” he said.
CHAPTER 52
The bachelor and bachelorette parties were postponed until after the honeymoon so Oliver could rest. Instead, on Thursday night I worked on the double wedding ring quilt for Jesse. I was alone in the shop, and at peace.
I hadn’t formally decided to keep it open, and to run it as my own, but I knew that I would. Someday Quilts was my home and my sanctuary. There would be time enough, I told myself, to figure out how I could do it.
I put the last stitch in the quilt just after midnight, left a note for Natalie to quilt it ASAP, and then I locked up. This time I was careful to remember my keys. There would be no more grandma there to rescue me. Eleanor and Oliver were leaving for the new house a week after their honeymoon. They had gotten a scare, and it reminded all of us that life is too short to waste.
I drove to Jesse’s house, where he had made dinner. A little over a week had passed since I’d done the same thing. This time the streetlamp was working and there were no unfamiliar cars parked out front.
We still didn’t know why Roger had come to Jesse’s that night, or where the missing money was—by some estimates more than four hundred thousand of the original sum was unaccounted for—but there were some mysteries that were not mine to solve.
Instead I enjoyed dinner with Jesse and Allie, then went to his computer to work on the slide show of photos for the wedding.
“How do I get these from your desktop to my laptop?” I asked. “It’s too big a file to e-mail.”
“Use the zip drive you left here when you brought the photos over,” he said.
“I didn’t leave a zip drive.”
Jesse grabbed a blue zip drive from the desk. “This isn’t mine,” he said.
“It isn’t mine, either.”
He went white. “You don’t think?”
“It must be. Where else could it have came from?”
“He was here,” Jesse said. “And he wasn’t looking for something. He was leaving me something, just in case. It’s been here the whole time. But why wouldn’t he leave it somewhere I’d notice it? It could have been here for months. . . .”
“It was right on the keyboard, but I knocked it over,” I admitted. “I guess Roger didn’t account for my being clumsy.”
We opened the zip drive, and just as we suspected it contained one file. “For Jesse.” When I tried to open it, I was stopped. “It’s asking for a password.”
“I don’t know what it could be.”
We sat and thought, when the words Roger had said to Jesse on the night before his wedding came back to me. “Your secret code,” I said.
“Vigiles keep vigil.”
I typed it in, my fingers clumsy and nervous. When I clicked “enter,” the file opened. On it was a letter.
Jesse. I made a mistake. A bad one. I don’t know a more honest cop than you, or a truer friend. I’m going to the police with some information. I talked to a lawyer about all of this and he says I’m probably going to prison for a long time. But in case I don’t make it, in case something happens, I want to explain two things.
The money I gave you for Lizzie’s hospital bills really was from
some stocks I sold. On my honor, if that means anything to you. Check my safe-deposit box for the papers that prove it. I’ve left the money you’ve paid me back in a trust for Allie. It’s honest money and it shouldn’t be mixed up with the rest of my mess.
The other thing is that I’ve learned true love brings out the best in people, not the worst. You had that kind of love once and I hope you will again. It was my mistake not to see this earlier. I don’t know if you’ll ever speak to me again, but I want you to know that I’ve missed you. Roger.
Beneath it was the information for a safe-deposit box and the number of a bank account in the Cayman Islands. As Jesse read the words, tears rolled down his face. Just when he thought he’d lost his friend, he’d found him again.
“ I wish—” Jesse started one of those sentences that doesn’t need to be finished.
“You found his killer,” I told him. “Vigiles keep vigil.”
“You found his killer,” Jesse said.
“We’re a great team.”
“Jesse kissed my forehead. “Yes, we are, Nell Fitzgerald, in every way.”
CHAPTER 53
“Do you, Eleanor, take Oliver to be your lawfully wedded husband as long as you both shall live?” the minister asked.
“I do.”
“And do you, Oliver, take Eleanor to be your lawfully wedded wife for as long as you both shall live?”
“I do,” he said. “And I intend to be here for a long while.”
We all laughed.
“Then I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss your bride.”
As Eleanor and Oliver kissed, I looked over at Jesse and felt, for the first time in a long time, sure that I was on the right path with my life. In my career, in the town I chose as my home, and in the man I loved.
At the reception, Greg and Kennette danced, and while he was terrible at it, she didn’t seem to care. Dru and Charlie held hands even when it made drinking coffee a little complicated, and my parents snuggled in a corner. Even Barney and Patch stuck together, working on ways to get scraps from the table to the floor and their waiting mouths. But the bride and groom took center stage, laughing and talking, and looking every bit like young lovers about to embark on a wonderful adventure.
There was a lot of talk about the case, of course. Jesse had turned over the zip drive to the New York City police, who found the remaining four hundred thousand. In Roger’s safe-deposit box was his will, the papers that proved he had sold stocks when Lizzie was ill, and a digital tape recorder. Shortly after the theft, Roger had taped a conversation he and Marshall had had about the money. It was the second “insurance” policy Anna had mentioned to me that day in the shop. The recording gave police everything they needed to charge Marshall. He was barely out of prison, and he’d be going back for a long time. That fact helped me breathe a little easier.
I wandered into the kitchen and saw Patch and Barney playing together with a ball of tinfoil, batting it back and forth. When Barney would trap it between his paws, Patch would jump to retrieve it and be momentarily trapped there, too. But she didn’t mind. She rubbed her body against Barney’s fur, and he rubbed his snout against hers. I called Barney’s name, but he didn’t hear me. Patch did, though. She looked up at me, then swatted Barney. The poor, almost-deaf dog looked over, surprised but happy to see me.
“She’s going to be his ears,” Eleanor said, sneaking up behind me.
“They do seem inseparable. Which begs the question, are you taking them with you to South Carolina?”
“It would be a lot to ask of old Barney, to adjust to all those new smells and sights. He might be happier here, with you and the town he knows. I don’t think he’ll miss me too much with you around.”
As if he knew what she was saying, Barney got up and buried his face in Eleanor’s dress.
“I think he’s decided he’d rather move than be without you for half the year.”
She kissed his head. “Me too, dear one.”
Patch followed Barney to Eleanor’s leg, and rubbed against it. It looked like all three of my roommates were heading south for the winter.
After the cake, Eleanor and Oliver got ready to leave for their train trip to Montreal. Susanne, Bernie, Maggie, Natalie, Carrie, and I grabbed the bride and took her upstairs to the sewing room, for the last quilt group meeting that would include all of us—at least until summer.
“We didn’t have a chance to give this to you before, because of all the excitement,” Maggie said. “So here.”
We piled quilt after quilt on her lap. Each of us had chosen a special one from the quilts in our own personal stash, and Eleanor oohed and aahed at each. When she got to my blue and white bow tie, she laughed. “I was going to steal this from you, Nell. And now I don’t have to.”
Though Eleanor was now nearly covered in quilts, we had one more. On top of the pile, we placed the group quilt we had made.
Eleanor looked at it with amazement, then tears rolled down her face. “I can’t pretend I didn’t know you were doing something,” she said. “I almost peeked a few times under that muslin Natalie had on the frame but . . .” The tears overwhelmed her. “I just had no idea it would be anything as beautiful as this.”
Finally I gave her my gazebo quilt. “The first pattern of the new company,” she said. “I feel I’ve inspired an empire.”
“A one-woman empire,” Natalie noted.
“Funny you should say that.” I turned to Susanne. “Susanne, you design your own quilts, don’t you?”
“You know I do, Nell.”
“Ever thought of making patterns?”
Susanne looked at me, puzzled. “I thought you were going to do that?”
“I don’t want to be a one-woman empire.”
She looked stunned, then hugged me. “I’d be thrilled. And I was thinking, if I help out at the shop a few days a week, maybe I could get in a few lessons from Natalie on how to use that longarm machine.”
Natalie laughed. “You’ll have to let me be in charge, Mom.”
“I’ll help, too,” said Maggie. “I’m there nearly every day anyway. Might as well be of some use.”
“Carrie and I have a lot of businesses experience,” Bernie said, “so we can show you whatever you need. Anytime.”
“And Greg told me Kennette’s thinking of staying in Archers Rest, now that they’ve become our latest town romance,” Natalie said. “I wonder if she’d like her old job back?”
We talked about what Someday was and what it was turning into. “Just like quilting,” Eleanor said. “It builds on tradition, but it keeps up with the times.”
We were all about to break into tears when Oliver found us and told Eleanor it was time to go.
I walked them down to the car. My parents had volunteered to drive them to the station just a couple of minutes away. I hugged Oliver tightly.
“See you next week,” I said, a tear rolling down my face.
He wiped it away. “We’ll have a few days here before the move to South Carolina, so we’ll have plenty of time for that. Let us know if you solve any murders while we’re gone.”
I smiled. “I’ll keep you posted.” Then it was Eleanor’s turn. “You’re a married lady again,” I said.
“It’s funny that it doesn’t seem strange,” she said. “Seems the most natural thing in the world. But I suppose when something’s right . . .”
“I know what you mean.” This time I couldn’t stop the tears, and neither could she.
“I love you, Nell.”
“I love you, too, Grandma.”
“Don’t mess up the shop while I’m gone.”
I laughed. “No promises.”
As they drove away, I thought about the day I came to Archers Rest, tired, sad, and feeling very much alone. And now I had a house full of friends, a business to run, a man I loved�
��and one more quilt to give away.
I went back into the living room and watched the festivities. People were laughing, dancing, helping themselves to a second slice of cake, and sharing a wonderful day. Carrie was doing her best to pile used plates and bring them to the kitchen, but I stopped her.
“I can do that. It’s your day off,” I said.
“Nonsense. It’s what friends do.” She looked around and whispered. “Did you hear that Glad Warren’s husband went to New York on business Thursday and hasn’t been seen or heard from since? I was thinking we could look into it for her, kind of informally. Since it’s not really a police investigation at this point, I don’t think Jesse would mind.”
I laughed. Knowing Glad, her husband had probably just taken a few days to himself for peace and quiet, but on the other hand . . . “Maybe we can get the group together tomorrow to talk over what we know,” I said. Eleanor always said it was good to have a hobby. And now that quilting was becoming my profession, I guessed amateur sleuth could move up to become my favorite pastime.
After a while, I snuck into Eleanor’s bedroom, where I’d kept the double wedding ring quilt hidden, rolled it up tightly and held it behind my back. I went back downstairs into the reception looking for its new owner.
“Where’ve you been?” Jesse found me as I was looking for him.
“Looking around, saying good-bye to Eleanor.”
“Five days,” he said. “It’s only five days.”
“And then almost five months,” I pointed out. “Eleanor’s been my only family in town since I moved here.”
“We should change that.”
I kissed him. “Wait right here.”
I left a perplexed Jesse and went searching again. This time for Allie. I found her dancing with my mom and dad.
“Come with me,” I said to the little girl.
The Double Wedding Ring Page 23