Dying to Get Even

by Judy Fitzwater

  "It might help if we had some idea what we were looking for," Teague complained.

  "I told you. Any kind of scandal to do with Edgar Walker thirty or so years back. Why don’t you have this stuff scanned, anyway?"

  Her nose itched, but she didn’t dare scratch it. Her hands were the powdery gray of smeared newsprint.

  "Doesn’t seem to be much call for research into the kinds of stories we write. People throw our news out with the next day’s garbage."

  How appropriate.

  They’d made it through all of two year’s worth of tasteless antics by various Atlantans and a few tales more appropriate to the X-Files than to a newspaper. But nothing about one Edgar Walker.

  "You’ve got to remember this guy didn’t become newsworthy until his business took off a few years ago. Money, sex, weird stuff—that’s what sells, but the public has to know who we’re writing about, unless the weird stuff is weird enough."

  Jennifer sat back and brushed the hair out of her eyes. "Well, then, maybe we’re looking for the wrong flag. Mrs. Walker’s family was prominent, right? Their name would have been known."

  "She was an Albright?"

  Jennifer nodded.

  "You don’t hear much about them anymore, not since the old man died. But I know the name, even at my age. Made and lost two fortunes. The last one he held on to, though."

  "Okay, then. Look for his name."

  She sniffed loudly—if it wasn’t mold, it had to be dust—and dug into another stack. Close to the bottom she caught the name in a headline. She pulled out the copy, leaned back against the stacks, and scanned the front page. Inch-high letters announced that Emma’s father was backing some big Hollywood film while romancing the leading lady on the side.

  "Is this true?" Jennifer asked, offering it to Teague.

  He took it and glanced over the newsprint. "Nah. The picture’s spliced. We do it better these days."

  She dropped the newspaper back where it belonged and sighed. Her back ached and her knees weren’t doing so great either. Why had she thought she could find the truth here?

  "Okay, I think I’ve got something." Teague pulled out another issue. On the cover was a full-length picture of a much younger Edgar Walker. Not bad. Maybe Jennifer had been a little hasty in dismissing him. Maybe Emma did have some taste in men after all—at least in their looks.

  Next to Edgar’s photo was another full-length picture of a striking woman wearing an evening gown and looking back over her shoulder, her long, light-colored hair flowing, her smile elegant. Inset in an oval between the two of them was a young, attractive Emma Walker.

  Somehow Jennifer had never actually considered the idea that Emma might have ever looked any way other than she did now. It was a startling idea.

  Her gaze wandered to the headline which read: ALBRIGHT SON-IN-LAW STEPS OUT."

  "That one might be true," Teague told her.

  "How do you know that?"

  "They didn’t doctor the photos. If you’ve got a story, why make one up?"

  Why make one up at all? she wondered, but she kept it to herself. No reason to alienate Teague at this point. She might need him again. "Think I could have a copy of this?"

  "It comes with a price."

  She’d known when she’d called him that Teague McAfee gave nothing away. The question was simply how much it was going to cost her.

  "And that is...?"

  "I want an exclusive. Your exclusive."

  Terrific. Every writer needed publicity, but she really would prefer that it be in the legitimate press. And what would Sam say if he saw her face across the front page of the Atlanta Eye?

  "Okay."

  "Okay? Just like that? I don’t have to cajole or beg? Just okay?"

  "Just okay. But not until after the trial."

  He started to protest.

  "Take it or leave it."

  She had a firm grip on the copy, and she’d wrestle him for it if she had to.

  Teague studied her face. "Okay, Marsh, but I expect enough material to fill a whole page."

  She’d give him material all right. The question was whether or not he’d want to print it.

  Jennifer swept into the lobby of the Macon Telegraph like a woman on a mission and ran smack into Sam, who was on his way out. She caught her breath and demanded, "Where are you going?"

  "And good afternoon to you, too." He winked at her, clearly amused. "I was coming to find you. What are you doing here?"

  She offered him the copy of the thirty-year-old story from the Atlanta Eye. "You gotta see this."

  He took it from her. "What are you doing with this trash?" he asked as he unrolled it.

  So much for his good mood. One innocent mention of the tabloid press was enough to turn this seeker of truth into a major grump.

  "It’s a story about Edgar Walker," she offered, hoping to soothe his irritation. He was, after all, a sweetheart—most of the time.

  "The Eye is the worst example of tabloid journalism you can find anywhere. You can’t believe a word they print. I wouldn’t wipe my shoes with it. I wouldn’t subject my bird—"

  "You don’t have a bird." She nudged Sam. The receptionist was watching them intently.

  Sam offered the woman a boyish grin—fake, but real enough looking. "If anyone comes looking for me, tell them I got a lead in the Walker case." Then he grabbed Jennifer by the elbow and shuffled her outside.

  It had gotten too hot and was threatening rain, one of those quick afternoon showers that washed the heat out of the air and then cleared, leaving frizzy hair in its path.

  They walked several blocks up the street and ducked into a coffee shop/book store. It was dark, the only natural light coming from the storefront windows, which were obscured with posters announcing poetry readings and promoting herbal remedies. They took a table in the far rear surrounded by shelves of books on three sides.

  "Now what the heck—"

  "Thirty years ago Edgar Walker had an affair," Jennifer began.

  "Says who? The Atlanta Eye?"

  She shook her head. "Emma mentioned it to me. Lisa wasn’t his first. Besides, the pictures aren’t spliced, which means, most likely, that the story is true. Teague said—"

  Sam glared at her. "What the heck were you doing with McAfee?"

  No reason to let him get off on his dislike of McAfee. She suspected Sam harbored the tiniest bit of jealousy where Teague was concerned, and she had no time to deal with that right now.

  "What’d you promise him to get this?"

  Her face went beet red. "Would you just keep with the program? The fact is Edgar Walker had an affair."

  Sam could have pushed it, but he didn’t. "So what if Walker was sleeping around? Old dog, old trick. Who cared—other than Emma?"

  "No, you don’t understand. It happened while Emma’s dad was alive. It was a big scandal. If you’ll just take a minute to look at this…" She pulled the paper from his hand and laid it flat on the small table. "See? And they couldn’t divorce. She told me so."

  "Why not?" Sam asked. "How many times did he have to stray before Emma figured it out? She doesn’t strike me as a slow study."

  "No, don’t you see? It was that pride thing—her pride. Emma had taken up with this guy against her father’s wishes—at least initially. She insisted on marrying him. It was that `I made my bed, now I’ve got to lie in it’ routine."

  "So? That happened to lots of women. What is it that I’m not following here?"

  "It’s not that Edgar had an affair, and it’s not that Emma stood by him. Look at who he had the affair with."

  She thumped her hand loudly at the caption under the picture.

  Sam pulled it closer. "Thelma Ornsby?"

  "Right. Ornsby as in Walter, as in the Walkers’ attorney, as in I bet he didn’t much care for Edgar."

  Sam shook his head. "I don’t know. That was a long time ago."

  "It was his little sister, for Heaven’s sake. And Edgar wasn’t just messing with
his sister, he was doing it on the front page of the Atlanta Eye. Do you think a brother ever gets over that, especially a proud son of the South?"

  "Point taken. Okay, so what are you trying to tell me? Ornsby killed Edgar defending his sister’s honor—thirty years late?"

  Telling him? Did she have a point to all this? "Yes. Maybe. No. I don’t know, but I think the last place I’d entrust my dollar was with some guy I’d—"

  "What can I get you?" the waitress asked.

  "A mocha cappuccino," Jennifer said immediately. She’d smelled it when they walked in.

  "Black coffee," Sam added.

  "And would you like that with—"

  "No. Just hot, just black, just coffee."

  Just go.

  "Listen to me." Jennifer was sitting on her knees on the wooden chair, every nerve of her body alive.

  "Settle," Sam ordered. "I’m hearing you. But I don’t know what it means, and I don’t want to have to pick you up off the floor."

  And she didn’t either. She sat down properly on the chair. Maxie would know. She thought she’d had this big revelation to share with Sam, but what was the use of finding a big, bright puzzle piece if she didn’t have all the edge pieces fitted together?

  "Why were you looking for me?" she asked.

  "I got word back on those fingerprints off the glasses we took from Brewster’s apartment."

  At last, something tangible. "Yes, and...?"

  "And nothing. No matches in the police data base."

  Jennifer sighed and sat back.

  "What? You thought Natalie Brewster was a felon? I told you I was pretty sure we wouldn’t get anything from the prints."

  "And the hair?"

  "You were right. It was dyed. Actually it was coated with one of those temporary rinses. Originally it had been a medium brown with reddish highlights."

  The waitress plunked down their coffees. "What else can I get you? We have some unbelievable French pastries made fresh this morning."

  The coffees were rent for the table. They hadn’t come in to eat. Sam shooed her away.

  Jennifer took a sip of her drink. It had been topped with whipped cream, and it was heavenly. Thick, rich, caloric. "Did you ever get the information about the bank records?" She swirled the thick cream on top with her finger.

  "Yeah. Guess I forgot to tell you."

  Forgot to tell her? She reminded herself to be nice. And made a mental note that some things she should do herself. She waited, but he sat sipping his coffee.

  "What did you forget to tell me?"

  "Oh, you mean the records. Everything’s fine as best I could tell. No withdrawals on the franchise accounts, at least. No missing funds."

  Jennifer sat back and let out a deep breath. Natalie Brewster wasn’t a felon and she wasn’t a thief. Yet she’d gone to great lengths to adopt a dead woman’s identity. Why?

  "This puts us back to square one," she said.

  "Only with Brewster. I think you moved us forward a square with this Ornsby revelation."

  Sam was trying to make her feel better. She could tell from the way he looked at her from under his eyelashes, like a little boy telling a fib. He could be sweet like that. But his words couldn’t change the facts. What she’d found out about Ornsby moved them sideways, not forwards. And the more they seemed to uncover, the less certain she was about what really happened to Edgar Walker.

  Chapter 27

  Bigsby had turned out to be a bigger player in this mystery than Maxie had suspected. Rufus Donaldson had had an affair with Bigsby’s sister thirty-two years ago. And not a private affair, either. It had hit all of the papers. Still, he had remained the family lawyer because…

  Because, because, because—think, Jennifer!

  …because Emily Donaldson had insisted upon it.

  That had to be why. Emma must have told Edgar she wanted Walter Ornsby to handle their affairs. She had most of the money. She had the power to keep him. And Edgar had a lot to atone for. But, even if she were right, Jennifer couldn’t think of a single reason why Ornsby would stay.

  An even bigger question was the true identity of Natalia Brewski, the woman who had passed herself off as having a plan to sell Chocolate Heaven fudge in kiosks in every mall in America. She looked the part, she seemed to know what she was doing, and yet she wasn’t who she said she was. No, she was...

  "Okay, Maxie, give it up!" Jennifer demanded, wanting to shake her monitor until the words magically appeared. She had typed in everything Maxie could possibly need to know about the woman calling herself Natalie Brewster and the latest on Edgar’s escapades. The least Maxie could do was come up with some answers. Too bad she didn’t have a solve button on her computer like the old total key on calculators.

  She shook her head. She needed a fresh perspective, a new eye. She’d take some of her writing to the critique group that night. Maybe one of the gals would see the logic in the mess.

  April’s hormones must have been raging. That was the only way Jennifer could explain the array of finger foods that took up most of Monique’s Queen Anne dining room table. She wasn’t particularly hungry herself, which was probably fortunate since April was devouring everything within reach. Apparently she was not only eating for two but for all future generations of little Aprils.

  April chomped down on another chicken wing, wiped her hands on a napkin and demanded the page Jennifer had just finished reading. Normally, they didn’t pass around printed pages, preferring to get the impact of the spoken word. But something she had read must have bothered April. Jennifer tossed the paper across the table.

  April pursed her lips as she tapped her greasy index finger lightly against the page. "You know how much I like Maxie Malone…and your style, as always, is really good, but..." she began, licking the fingers of her other hand.

  Jennifer leaned forward, almost catching her hair in the pecan squares before tucking it behind her ears. April was using the b word: but. The word was never good. It automatically negated anything positive that came before it. Kind words and then the ax. It was sort of like offering someone a pillow before chopping off her head.

  "The plot is...not exactly..." April scrunched her eyes together and then opened them wide. "Did you try some of this dip?" She pushed the bowl toward Jennifer.

  "I think what April is trying to say..." Leigh Ann started as she reached past Jennifer and dunked a corn chip into the sour cream-black olive mixture. She brought the chip close to her lips and then, looking Jennifer full in the face, stopped. "I don’t write mystery, so what do I know?"

  Coward.

  At least Leigh Ann was looking better than she had the last time she saw her. Now that she and Teri had quit their jobs at the restaurant and Suzy had replaced them as her undercover source, they had returned almost to their normal selves. They seemed able to stay awake during a critique meeting, which, at the moment, was not necessarily desirable.

  Jennifer looked across the table at Teri, who was having none of the goodies and who, in lieu of her perpetual exercising, had pulled her legs into a lotus position in one of the dining chairs. Teri seemed lost in thought, studying her in a kind of sad, pitying way.

  This was like getting terminal news from a doctor. Kind of an "I’m sorry to inform you your book has flat-lined."

  Teri clenched her jaw and then spoke. "You’re too good a friend to let this go."

  Words of death. Jennifer didn’t need friends that good.

  "What these two yellow-bellies are afraid to tell you," Teri went on, "is that your plot stinks. Where did you come up with such an idiotic idea in the first place? You’ve got some woman masquerading as a kind of kiosk expert and running some kind of scam, but she doesn’t make off with the dough. And then there’s some dude’s sister getting used and abused thirty years ago, not to mention strange nephews, and another somebody’s cousin twice removed, or whatever the heck it was—"

  "Teri." All Monique had to do was say her name. It stopped her cold. Teri slumpe
d back in her chair like a scolded dog. She had crossed the bounds of good critique etiquette, and she knew it.

  "Jennifer," Monique said kindly, shoving a bowl of peanuts in her direction as if they would somehow soften the blow she was about to throw.

  She hated Monique’s condescending kindness more than anything else—anything except Monique’s supercilious teacher mode.

  "While our books are unabashed fiction, we must all strive for a certain semblance of real life."

  Sure. Monique set her fiction on a planet with two suns and had a hero who was a silicon-based thingoid who communicated by clicking his tongue. She was supposed to take advice about reality from her?

  "It’s obvious that in an attempt to make your work more real," Monique continued, "you’ve taken an element or two from Mrs. Walker’s current situation to weave into Maxie’s case. Where I think you’ve fallen down is in your selection of subplots. We don’t understand how they fit, how they’re all going to come together toward a coherent solution. Our role as authors is to bring order to the chaos of possible events in any particular situation. While interesting, your plot currently shows more chaos than order. Do you understand what I’m getting at?"

  Monique was sounding a little too much like some of the rejection letters Jennifer had stacked in her closet. She’d much prefer for Monique to spit it out like Teri had. To just tell her that the book was a waste of good trees.

  "In the past," Monique added, smiling down her nose, and ladling out a cup of punch which she handed to Jennifer, "while your plots tended toward the fanciful, there was always a basis—however farfetched—that the reader could relate to, find some kind of pattern—"

  Jennifer shook her head. "You’re all missing the point. Real life is complicated. Didn’t you get it when Maxie—"

  "Uh-uh," Teri interrupted. "Flew right over this head."

  Leigh Ann nodded and sucked down an olive.