Chime and Punishment

by Julianne Holmes

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Please. Happy to. I know right where it is and won’t need to use it for a while.”

  Jason stood and looked at me. “Okay, thanks,” he said. I stepped aside and followed Jason back into the vestibule area. His head turned slightly toward the wainscoting, but he caught me watching him and turned away.

  “Any luck?” Ben asked when we stepped back outside.

  “Nope. Once we can get back inside and clean up, I’m sure the lock will show up,” I said. “I’m going to loan Jason my bike lock for his trip.”

  “Great. That will give Jason and me a chance to talk about what he was doing in a restricted area. First, let me get this place closed up again,” Jeff said. “Ruth, you need a better lock on this door. You can pick it with a credit card. I hate to leave it wide open. Let me call Officer Wilson and have him come down and keep an eye on things.” Jeff ran his hand over his closely cropped head, from front to back. He jaw was set in a straight line.

  “Can we go back to the Cog & Sprocket? Pat is probably frantic,” I said.

  “Pat?” Ben said.

  “When I couldn’t find you, I called Flo. Pat and Nancy were there. Pat was coming into town to help me.”

  “You were that worried?” Ben said. “That’s sweet.” He put his arm around my shoulder, and Jeff rolled his eyes.

  “Tell you what. This place is lit up like a Christmas tree, plus Nadia’s cameras are rolling. It should be all right for a few minutes. Why don’t we all head over to the Cog?” Jeff said.

  “Nadia’s cameras?” Jason asked.

  “The locks may be low-tech, but the security is pretty high tech,” Jeff said. “State-of-the-art cameras all over the building. Lots of video, from lots of different angles.”

  “So, you have video of the back portico?” Ben said.

  “No, unfortunately those cameras aren’t in place. Otherwise we’d know who killed Kim.”

  “Ruth, do you have the keys for this door?” asked Jeff. “Ben, Jason, you can head on over. We’ll catch up.”

  “Did Ben show you the bottle?” I whispered. “Do you think that could be what killed Kim?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe. But we have no proof of anything,” Jeff said. “Even if that bottle is what killed her, Ben found it. No proof of whom it belonged to.”

  “No proof yet, but we’re close. I can feel it.”

  chapter 26

  When we opened the door to the Cog & Sprocket we were met with a full house. Flo and Nancy hadn’t let Pat come in alone. Moira was there as well. Nadia was standing behind the customer counter, her phone in hand. Caroline and Zane were also there, along with Janet. Jimmy Murphy was sitting in the customer area, his phone to his ear. Beckett was standing off to the side, looking at the grandfather clock. When we first walked in there was dead silence, and then a cacophony of voices.

  “Where have you been?”

  “You had us worried sick.”

  “Ben, do you not listen to voice mails anymore?”

  “Jason, what happened to your clothes?”

  “Chief, are you all right? You look a little—”

  “What is everyone doing here?” I asked. The answer was silence, but then Pat spoke up.

  “Nancy was going to meet Jimmy and Beckett anyway, so she came with me. When you weren’t here, and Harriet hadn’t seen you . . .”

  “We called Caroline and Zane,” Nancy said.

  “I’m so sorry they worried you,” I said to Caroline.

  “I’m not. If something ever happened to you—”

  I went over and gave Caroline a hug. “Nothing is going to happen to me. What’s this?”

  “Cookies. From Nancy.”

  “I bake when I’m stressed,” Nancy said. “Sue me. Try one, Ruthie. Tell me what you think.”

  I took a bite out of the pink cookie. A sweet and tart sandwich cookie. “Yum. What is it?” I chewed while I tried to make sense of the threads of an idea that were trying to form in my brain. For some reason they wouldn’t all catch. Maybe a cookie would help.

  “Grapefruit cookie. I’m glad you could take it for a test drive. Most of the folks here can’t.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Grapefruit is a no-no if you are taking certain medicines. Makes them less effective. So Pat and Flo won’t try the cookies.”

  “Better safe than sorry,” Pat said.

  “I do hate this, since I love grapefruit,” Flo said. “Maybe if I get my cholesterol under control.”

  “Good luck with that,” Nancy said. “Some folks are predestined.”

  “And others enjoy bacon, cheese, and wine too much,” Flo said. “Still, I can try.” She picked up her water bottle and went to take a swig.

  “Wait, that one’s mine,” Caroline said. “See the C in the B of Been? I marked my bottle so I could recognize it. Here’s your bottle,” Caroline said, handing Flo the other bottle on the table. “In the meantime, have one of these sugar cookies.”

  Pink grapefruit cookies. Water bottles. Unexpected interactions. Or perhaps, some interactions could be expected? Even encouraged? I wondered if—

  “Jeff, can I talk to you for a minute?” I said.

  “Ruth, I wonder if I could get that bike lock now? I want to get home and finish packing,” Jason said.

  “Sure. Ben, could you get the bike lock? It’s in the staircase going down to the basement, hanging up. To the left of the doorway, second spot down,” I said. I looked at Jeff and tapped my temple a couple of times. I hoped he read “I have an idea” rather than “Someone is nuts.” He gave me a nod.

  “Ruth, do you always know where everything is?” Jimmy said.

  “Old habit. Know where things are and make sure you put it away when you’re done. Precision. It is a clockmaker’s trait. Jason has a similar trait, don’t you? Pharmacy. Homeopathy. You need to get it precisely right,” I said. I wandered over to make sure I was standing near Jason.

  I thought about water bottles. Drops in blue bottles. Tolerance buildups. Unexpected side effects.

  “What do you mean?” Jason asked.

  “Your medicines. Compounding of some meds for folks who can’t take pills, and your warning that folks need to shake up the meds, otherwise they won’t get the right levels. Homeopathy, and the idea of building up a tolerance over time.”

  “It is important to follow directions,” Jason said, picking up a cookie. “You’re right. These are delicious.”

  “Would there be enough grapefruit in them to be a problem for folks?” I asked. “I hate that Flo can’t try them. They really are good.”

  “Hard to say. Better to avoid foods that may have interactions with drugs,” he said through a bite of cookie.

  “I used to be a housemaster with my ex-husband,” I said, nibbling the corner of my cookie. “I spent a lot of time with students. I remember one student, Lydia, who struggled with depression. She finally found meds that worked, but she couldn’t eat specific foods. Surprising foods, like certain cheeses, and soybeans. Pickles. She was a kombucha fan, till she realized it was on the list.”

  “Kombucha?” Pat asked.

  “It is a fermented drink,” Moira said. “Supposed to have health benefits. I drink it every day.”

  “So did Kim. I tried it a couple of times, but couldn’t get it down,” Beckett said.

  “You need to try different types. I like the ginger lemon flavor,” Moira said.

  “Are you talking about that mold drink?” Nancy said. “Disgusting.”

  “It isn’t mold, Mum. You haven’t even—” I watched as Jason’s face relaxed. The conversation had moved on. Then he saw me looking at him.

  “Kim was taking stress drops, wasn’t she?” I asked, raising my voice a bit so that Jeff could hear me. “She suggested I try them at one
point.”

  “Course, she was the reason you needed them,” Nancy said. Flo laughed aloud.

  “She swore by them,” Beckett said, artfully ignoring Nancy. He was good at ignoring Nancy, which drove her crazy. “She started taking them three, four months ago. Isn’t that right, Jason? It didn’t take long for them to make her feel a lot better. Even I noticed a difference.”

  “Me too,” Jimmy said. “I called her Queen Drip. Not to her face, mind you. She had alarms set on her phone. When they went off, no matter what we were doing, she’d stop and take a drop or two. Some of them straight up. Others she’d add to a glass of water.”

  “Must have been hard to keep them all straight,” I said. “How many blue bottles did she have?”

  “Three or four,” Jimmy said. “She wrote on each bottle and used nail polish to paint the caps different colors.”

  “Blue was stress, red was for headaches. Green was for sleep. White was for general health,” Beckett said.

  “Good thing that nail polish comes in so many colors these days,” Flo said. “Back in my day she would have had shades of red and pink. A lot harder to keep track of on the fly. I used to get distracted in the middle of a pedicure, and then I’d go back and pick up another pink, not realizing it was wrong. I remember one time—”

  “You gave them all to her—right, Jason?” I said. “It must have been a lot for both of you to keep track of. You needed to make sure they all worked together. And not against each other.”

  “That’s my job,” he said, shrugging. Jason looked up at the clocks on the wall.

  I noticed Jeff stood in front of the door. He lifted the blue bottle we’d found over in the Town Hall out of his front pocket, holding it by his side. If folks noticed, they didn’t say anything. I looked over at Jason, who stared at the bottle, transfixed.

  “What do you put in them? The drops?” I asked.

  Jason started, and then looked back at me. “Some of them were off the shelf. Others were tonics I’d concocted over time. Chief Paisley knows all this. I gave him samples. They were mostly herbs. Nothing dangerous.”

  “Did she like to have all of her medicines in liquid form? Sounds like she did, from what folks have been saying.”

  “She didn’t like pills,” Jason whispered. A bead of sweat rolled down his face and he took a half step toward the door. “I really need to get going.”

  “Just one more question. You know how much I hate unanswered questions,” I said. “I’ve been wondering, what would have happened if someone knew Kim was taking something that helped her with stress? Say, a depression medication like that student I knew did.”

  “Depression and stress aren’t the same thing,” Jason said.

  “Of course they’re not. But if someone doesn’t feel well, would they really care what helped? If she wasn’t paying attention to the side effects, that could be a problem, especially if she was using other drops that may have an interaction. An interaction, like, say, high blood pressure. That was what my student had to worry about. Certain foods could trigger an episode, since the medicine made her vulnerable. Maybe some of her other drops added to the problem.”

  “I was always careful to warn her about side effects,” Jason said. “I can show you the printouts.”

  “Of course you were,” I said. “But what if someone wanted to do her harm? Is there something they could give her that would be a fatal blow? Cause a reaction of some sort? Or a heart attack? Maybe her allergy meds caused an interaction?”

  Jason was silent for a moment. No one else was talking in the room now. They were all listening to us.

  “It wouldn’t be an efficient way of killing someone. It would take a lot of patience. It might never work,” Jason said.

  “It might take a long time,” I said. “And you’re right. It might never work. But suppose someone wanted to rush it, for whatever reason. Then what would they do?”

  Jason didn’t answer. I looked over at Nadia, who had her phone out. The red recording light was visible.

  “What would they do, Jason? They would probably give the person a huge shot of something that would cause a heart attack. I’d imagine if you went to all that work, you’d want to be there when it happened, don’t you think?”

  “Why would this person do this terrible, difficult thing?” he asked, swallowing.

  “Well, maybe this person hated Kim not for what she’s doing in Orchard, but for what she did in another life.” I looked over at Nancy. “Nancy’s been trying to find next of kin and has been uncovering a pretty checkered past. She left a lot of carnage in her wake.”

  “Why did they hire her here, then?” Jason said. “If she was so terrible.”

  “She came with good references,” Jimmy said.

  “Folks were afraid of her,” Nancy said. “I think they were willing to give her a good reference to get her out of their lives. One guy I talked to today over in Binghamton, he sounded relieved. He’d moved there after his divorce, a divorce he got so he could marry Kim.”

  “I thought her husband was dead?” Beckett said.

  “She didn’t marry this one. He wasn’t much use to her after his divorce. His wife got half of everything, and he had high child support payments. After she left, he made a few phone calls, dug up some of Kim’s past. He told me stories about the games she’d been playing that wrecked families. One woman even killed herself. Course, there wasn’t any proof, and Kim moved on when it got too hot to stay put. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but she was a truly terrible person.”

  “Binghamton. Your family is from upstate New York. Is that right?” I said to Jason. I hadn’t taken my eyes off him. The story threads were becoming a rope, and I imagined them snaking toward Jason. “Didn’t you say that your sister died in a car crash? After being depressed when her husband left her for another woman?”

  “You think Jason . . .” Flo said. She sat on one of the settees. Caroline ran over to grab her hand, and Nancy sat on the couch arm and put her arm around Flo.

  “I’m afraid I do,” I said.

  “You can’t prove anything,” he said, his face a mask. “Thanks for the cookie. I have to be going now.” He picked up a water bottle, then he dropped it back on the counter.

  “All of the bottles look alike, don’t they?” I said. “So easy to get them confused. Looking back, I never saw Kim without hers the past few weeks.”

  “Neither did I,” Beckett said. “She had a couple of them. Left them everywhere.”

  “You found her water bottle at the scene, didn’t you, Chief?”

  Jeff nodded. “It was full of water.”

  “Of course it was. I’ll bet if you checked the DNA on the part you drink from, though, you’ll find it was actually Jason’s bottle. I remember him leaving with a bottle on Saturday. That was probably Kim’s.”

  “You think that he switched bottles with Kim?” Moira said.

  “I think he met her in back, on the portico. Maybe he gave her a special set of drops, told her they would help with stress. She added them to her water, as directed by Jason.”

  “So you think she died from some chemical reaction?” Jimmy said.

  “You can’t prove anything,” Jason said, his eyes still fixed on the water bottle.

  “I’m not trying to prove anything. I’m only telling a story. Suppose you went back and found her dead. You grabbed your water bottle. Then you rolled the bell stand over and knocked it on top of her.”

  “Why drop the bell if it wasn’t to kill her?” Flo asked. “Seems like a horrible thing to do. Never mind heavy lifting.”

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about that,” I said. “Kim had a lot of enemies here in Orchard, that’s for sure. Sounds like she left a wake of misery behind her. If she was killed over time, that takes visceral hate. Also planning, and knowledge. Think about the weight of that hate,
and how it would corrode someone’s soul over time. Maybe that’s what the clock bell was about. A final act that gave her killer satisfaction? What do you think, Jason? Maybe murder wasn’t enough?”

  Jason looked at me and started a slow clap. “Nice story, Ruth. Let me offer an alternate solution. Maybe her killer had nothing to lose? He had some health issues that gave him limited time left to right a few wrongs? Maybe a relatively painless heart attack wasn’t as satisfying as he expected it would be? Maybe he wanted her to suffer, even after she was dead, by taking away the one thing she used every day in a million different ways: that coldly beautiful face of hers? She cast a powerful spell on men. The bell took that away. I didn’t want her to seem in peaceful slumber at an open casket funeral. No, she was going to have a closed casket. Just like my poor sister who—”

  “That’s enough,” Jeff said, stopping Jason cold. “Let’s continue this conversation down at the station, Jason.”

  chapter 27

  “Once Jason filled in the gaps, the picture became a lot clearer,” Jeff told me when he came by Tuesday night to let me know we could move back into the Town Hall. He and his team had spent the day in the Town Hall, reexamining evidence in light of Jason’s confession. Jeff had agreed to sit down for dinner with Ben and me and help us get rid of the rest of the leftovers. Moira and her mother were over in Marytown, buying new baking supplies for the Sleeping Latte.

  “That bottle I found?” Ben asked. “What was in it?” He scooped out another serving of corn salad and dug in.

  “Adrenaline. Herb based, but effective. He’d set her up with a series of drugs that left her vulnerable to a heart attack. The elixir he offered her that afternoon delivered on that promise. His words. Anyway, she died instantly.”

  “The bell was a mistake? If they’d found her dead, they might have assumed it was a heart attack,” Ben said.

  “The ME never thought it was just a heart attack,” Jeff said. “But figuring out the how, and then proving the who—that was tough.”