Death Comes to a Retreat (Book 4 Molly Masters Mysteries)

by Leslie O'Kane

  “How is Tommy? Never mind. You can’t answer with him sitting right there.”

  “He’s fine. Want to talk to him yourself?”

  “No!”

  She spoke so loud I know Tommy heard, but I hung up and said, “She’s busy right now.”

  We were soon at Katherine’s house, a new townhouse just east of town. She escorted us into the living room portion of what real estate agents call a “great room.” It was really only so-so. The upholstery complemented her teal carpeting. I’d pictured her as living in a small house on the Hill, furnished solely with antiques, but I’d been completely off. Not a single piece of furniture appeared to have been made more than five years ago.

  Katherine had a full glass of iced tea on the wrought-iron-and-smoked-glass coffee table in front of her. She offered us some, but we both declined. Though I was thirsty, I’d decided to set a blanket policy of not ingesting anything that came from a suspect’s kitchen.

  “Am I to gather,” Katherine began in a breathy affectation, “that the two of you are here because you are presupposing I had something to do with Molly’s recent mishaps?”

  Tommy immediately asked, “Can you tell me ‘bout your whereabouts at two-thirty this afternoon?”

  “I was grocery shopping at King Soopers. Was that when Molly had her latest—as you put it to me over the phone—‘incident’?”

  Tommy evaded the question and asked, “What route did you take home?”

  With a tone that clearly portrayed she thought we were ignoramuses, she gave us her exact course, which did indeed cut through Julie’s canines’ neighborhood.

  “That’s a rather circuitous route,” I said, then shuddered—I was starting to sound like Katherine. I’d meant to say, Whatcha go that way for?

  She took a long drink of tea, peering over the rim at me. “Perhaps, but there are fewer traffic lights. Does my choice of roads comprise the entire content of your interrogation, or is there something else that’s puzzling you?”

  “We know about your drug history,” I said.

  She returned her glass to its coaster. Only the slightest stiffness in her manner hinted that my question had caught her unaware. “I’m sure I have no idea to what you are referring.”

  “You served three months in a halfway house in Boston while using the name Katherine Bennington,” Tommy stated. “Did you tell the Boulder police about your record?”

  “Yes, though I had been led to believe that a press release to that effect was not imminent. Where, pray tell, did you hear this?”

  “Like I said, Molly here asked me to lend my expertise. Ran my own background checks on everybody in Molly’s workshop.”

  Katherine gave her short auburn hair a shake before leaning back in her chair. “This is, you realize, thoroughly irrelevant to Allison’s death. If you must know, I was arrested a number of years ago for possession of heroin with intent to sell. My colleagues at the university are fully aware of that regrettable transgression, as are the police. Those professionals, apparently unlike yourselves, realize a lot of people do foolish things in their youth. They felt I deserved a second chance, and I daresay I have more than exceeded their expectations.”

  “You told Allison about this, too?” I asked.

  “I don’t recall whom I told or did not tell. Rest assured, however, that Boulder is a small town in terms of how quickly news of a personal nature spreads.” She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes at me. “Don’t you have anything in your past of which you are now ashamed?”

  “Sure. I have things in my present I’m ashamed of.”

  On the surface, her story sounded reasonable. Yet, why would her first response to me have been to deny her drug history if she didn’t care who knew about it? Also, why hadn’t Julie—her ex-sister-in-law—mentioned this to me? When I’d told her I suspected Katherine of locking me in the sauna last night, Julie had said only nice things about her.

  “I didn’t realize you and Julie were once sisters-in-law,” I lied.

  She pursed her lips. “That marriage was, in many ways, a much greater mistake than the error that led to my arrest. In fact, Julie furnished me with my drug supplier.”

  I gave Tommy, sitting beside me on the couch, a quick glance. He seemed content to listen to Katherine and me. “We’re talking about Julie Murphy, right?”

  She chuckled without humor. “You sound surprised. Is it because Julie’s such a fitness freak that you can’t picture her having once had such an unhealthy habit?”

  I shrugged.

  “Rest assured, Molly, Julie is not as squeaky clean as she now appears. When I met her, she was not only a user, but turning tricks in Boston Common.”

  This caught me so off guard, my surprise must have been obvious. Katherine smiled at my reaction. She snatched up her iced tea and swirled the cubes before taking a sip. “She’s come a long way. I could make a joke about her breeding bitches, but I’ll refrain.”

  There was that bitches word again. I felt sure Katherine was lying. “According to Lois, you’re the one with the shady past, not Julie.”

  Katherine studied my face for a moment, then slowly smiled. “Only because I am so much better at respecting Julie’s right to privacy than she is mine. She was the black sheep of her family—not bright enough to hold down much of a job, but attractive enough for that not to matter. She worked for a dating service after high school, and one thing led to another. My former husband and I took her in and helped her get a fresh start. However, right at that time, I started having serious health problems and was in a lot of pain. Shortly thereafter, at the age of twenty-six, I learned that I had breast cancer. I had a radical mastectomy. My husband was repulsed and left me, but Julie stayed on. There I was, in physical and emotional anguish. And there she was, with ready access to feel-good drugs.”

  Beside me, Tommy made a quick scribble in his notebook but remained silent. This seemed too elaborate a story for Katherine to concoct. Yet I’d seen her wearing nothing but a towel last night and had not noticed anything unusual about her breasts. Not that I’d been looking.

  “At the time of my arrest, I had purchased such a large quantity of heroin that the police drew the incorrect conclusion that I had intended to sell it. In truth, my intention was to overdose.” She set her glass down and leaned forward to stare right into Tommy’s eyes. “I made some terrible mistakes. I served my sentence and have paid my debt to society.”

  “How did Julie manage to get where she is now?” I asked. Katherine raised an eyebrow at me, and I explained, “How did she wind up here in a wealthy Boulder neighborhood, working as a Zumba instructor?”

  “After my arrest, I agreed to keep her name out of my legal battles, but only if she would enroll herself in a detox clinic. I never saw her again, until we happened to bump into each other in Boulder, entirely by accident. We both vowed to start our relationship anew and never to speak of our sordid past. That, as you might have surmised, is a pledge that I have managed to keep until just now.”

  Tommy and I exchanged glances. I shrugged. He rose, and I followed suit. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Lindstrom,” Tommy muttered.

  “You’re welcome.” She opened the door for us. “Next time you wish to engage someone in an interrogation, Officer Newton, you might consider, as a matter of simple courtesy, identifying it as such first. Have a nice afternoon.”

  Much as it killed me to let her have the last word, I was unable to think of a snappy comeback. For one thing, it had been a very trying twenty-four hours, and for another thing, Katherine was right. We left quickly and got into Tommy’s car without a word.

  “What did you think?” I asked Tommy. “Do you believe her?”

  He ran his fingers through his red hair. “Julie Murphy hasn’t got as much as an unpaid parking ticket. That’s more than unusual for a former hooker with a drug problem. S’pose it’s possible, though.”

  What I’d been struck by was how haughty and unlikable Katherine was. “Have you noticed
that all of these women are at least slightly off-kilter?”

  “Figured that’s what comes from hanging with you.”

  I gritted my teeth but, with effort, let the remark pass. “Do you happen to have Nancy Thornton’s number? She’s a therapist, after all. She might be willing to give us her professional opinion of these women’s personalities. Either way,” I added sarcastically, “heaven knows I’m depressed enough to visit a psychologist.”

  I scooped up the cell phone, and Tommy grudgingly looked up Nancy’s office number for me. I told her only that I had some questions about our fellow retreat members.

  There was a long pause. Finally Nancy answered, “I have very strict boundaries. I never accept friends as patients. I never discuss my patients with friends, nor vice versa.”

  I wasn’t sure how my questions would fit in with her ground rules. “Okay. Can we just talk about Allison, as one friend of hers to another?”

  After a pause, she replied, “That would be fine. Actually, I’m home this afternoon, so this would be a good time.”

  “Great.” I glanced over at Tommy. “Just one thing, though. Would you mind if my friend Tommy Newton accompanied me?”

  There was a long pause. “Yes, I would. I said I was willing to discuss Allison as one friend to another…not in front of a police officer.”

  “You’re right. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  She gave me her address on Fourth Street, which was right against the Foothills. Houses there tended to be small and old and rarely came on the market. When I hung up, Tommy grumbled. “What am I s’posed to do? Wait in the car?”

  “I could probably catch a bus home.”

  “With your track record, it’d prob’ly run you over.”

  “So you’ll wait for me? Thanks. I won’t be long.”

  He parked on the street and I walked down her short gravel driveway. Her house was a ranch-style bungalow made of flagstone, with old nine-pane windows and a one-car garage. I rang the doorbell. She was wearing a black muumuu and sandals. My eyes were drawn to her glorious white hair. If I could go “gray” like that, I’d be thrilled. Judging from my mother’s salt-and-pepper hair, I was unlikely to be as lucky. Furthermore, since I compulsively plucked out my white hairs, I expected to go gracefully bald.

  Nancy swept me inside with a gracious welcome. Her house smelled of spices and dried flowers. We took seats in her sunroom in the back. I was just about to speak, when the sound of clawed footfalls on linoleum frightened me into silence. I turned and stared at the doorway as an enormous Great Dane loped into the room.

  “Oh, great!” I cried. “A Dane!” and flattened myself against the back of my chair.

  “That’s Faldo,” Nancy said. “Don’t worry. He’s perfectly harmless.” Faldo stuck his huge snout in my face and sniffed. “Maybe so, but I can see he’s not toothless.” I pushed myself all the harder into my seat.

  Nancy snapped her fingers as she got up, and Faldo instantly stopped hogging what little remained of my personal oxygen supply and looked at her. “I can see you’re afraid of him. Come, Faldo.” She opened the back door, and Faldo trotted outside.

  Through the window, I watched as a squirrel caught sight of the dog and tore across the lawn. Though no fan of squirrels myself, it was all I could do not to yell, Run, squirrel! Run for your life!

  “What’s on your mind. Molly?”

  I flinched as Faldo barked just outside the open window beside me—a deep woof that rattled the walls. Whether or not Tommy Newton is close enough to hear me scream was currently on my mind but would be a bad answer. “Did you know that Allison was a battered wife?”

  Nancy blinked a couple of times, then said. “I suspected as much, yes, but she always denied it.”

  “You didn’t feel any ethical or moral obligation to pursue it further?”

  “More than once I gave her the name of an excellent therapist. Beyond that, I feared my interference might do more harm than good.”

  “Do you think she killed her ex-husband?”

  She lifted her hair off the back of her neck with both hands, then said. “I am not comfortable answering that question.”

  I could only take that as a yes. “Allison hid her troubles from me the whole time I knew her. When I saw her for the first time in years on Friday, she acted down and out.”

  Nancy frowned. “She’d been that way ever since the divorce and even more so after her ex’s death. I’m sure she felt responsible, especially since the crime is still unsolved. At the very least, she would have been left wondering whether or not somebody killed him to avenge his treatment of her.”

  Something about Nancy’s voice was so soothing that, even with this subject matter, I felt myself almost nodding off. My trance was broken when Faldo growled. I glanced outside and watched Faldo circle the cottonwood. He’d probably treed some poor woodland creature, such as a grizzly bear. “So, you think that’s all that was bothering her? Nothing else?”

  “No. There was definitely something else, some recent trouble, very much on her mind. I have no idea what that ‘something’ might have been. Yet that, in my opinion, is why she died.”

  “You were telling me the other day about how Lois’s son moved out. You don’t think he could have had anything to do with Richard Kenyon’s death, do you?”

  She shook her head. “One of my patients lives next door to him. I run into Max quite often.”

  “You make house calls?”

  “No, I run into Max because he’s a waiter at Turley’s, where I often have lunch.” Her tone of voice implied I should have made that connection on my own.

  “Tell me something, Nancy, did you like Allison?”

  She tilted her head as she considered the question, then answered slowly, “I suppose the answer is no. She had a well of suppressed anger and resentment Though she masked it, it made her a difficult person to be around for any length of time.”

  Interesting, then, that she’d agreed to talk to me about Allison “as one friend to another,” I thought. “What about the other women in the retreat? Do you like them?”

  She grinned and answered, “Some more than others. I’m not very close to any of them, to be honest.”

  Again, I was momentarily distracted by the sight of Faldo batting something between his paws, but I forced myself not to stare. “Purely hypothetically, if someone my age were to be sexually involved with a friend’s teenage son, why might the boy’s mother be inclined to collect tokens which once belonged to that friend?”

  Nancy chuckled, then shook her head. “Nice try, Molly, but that simply isn’t hypothetical enough for me to answer.”

  “All right, then, how about this one?” Thinking about Katherine and her criminal record, I asked, “Could revenge over someone’s having divulged a secret be a motive for murder, even if that secret was all but common knowledge?”

  Nancy thought for a moment, looking puzzled by my intentionally vague question. “That would not be what I, or what a rational person, would consider a reasonable motive. That’s not to say, however, that the killer would not consider it sufficient motivation. I once heard of a man who shot his wife for complaining one too many times about his not putting the toilet seat down.”

  “Yes, but the difference is, the guy with the toilet seat acted in a moment of passion. Allison’s murder was not only planned, but I was framed for it. You know the people on the retreat. I don’t. You must have an opinion on which one of them did it.”

  “An opinion? Yes, I most definitely do. But I won’t share it with you, Molly, because I could be wrong. I will tell you, though, that if I were investigating this murder, I’d start by looking at the opportunity. Who had the opportunity to set up the scenario in which Allison was killed?”

  As the organizer of the retreat, the answer was Celia Wentworth. Nancy was all but telling me she thought Celia did it. I could have pursued that idea further, but Faldo had trotted up to my window. I shot to my feet, wanting to leave before he committ
ed my scent to memory and associated me with a chew toy.

  “Thanks, Nancy. I’d better run, Your dog isn’t likely to jump over the fence… or the house, is he?”

  “No,” she said with a laugh, “And he really wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “I’m sure the flies are grateful.”

  I raced to the car, where Tommy was dutifully waiting. We left Nancy’s house and headed east across town. Tommy asked me what I’d learned.

  That Boulder’s gone to the dogs. “Nancy hinted that she thought Celia did it. I also learned the name of the restaurant, where Max Tucker, Lois’s son, works. That’s kind of on our way.”

  To my surprise, Tommy said he was game and that he could use a drink anyway.

  We soon reached the restaurant, which, had been a Boulder staple for years. I inhaled deeply as we entered the paneled lobby; the spicy scent from the house iced tea was unchanged after all these years. The young hostess assured us that Max Tucker was working and agreed to seat us in his section.

  At this late afternoon hour, we passed only one table of customers, and we convinced her to let us sit in a deserted corner of the restaurant. She offered us menus, but we assured her we were just here for drinks. After a minute or so, Max sped around the corner toward us, but his pace slowed the moment he saw me. He quickly shifted his gaze to Tommy. “What can I get for you?”

  “I’ll just have a beer.”

  Max rattled off about a dozen names, including a couple of local breweries. “Just give me whatever’s on tap,” Tommy said.

  Again, Max gave Tommy four choices. Tommy sighed. “Changed my mind. Just give me an iced tea.”

  “Want the house tea, or we also have—”

  Tommy raised his hands to cut him off. “Yes. The house tea.” Max turned his eyes to me.

  “I’m fine.” Before he could leave, I said, “I saw you recently. My name is Molly Masters.”

  “Yeah. I remember seeing you at Allison’s funeral.”

  “You’re Lois Tucker’s son, right?”

  “You know my mom?”

  “I’m Sergeant Newton, a police officer from upstate New York,” Tommy interrupted. “I’m unofficially looking into the death on the request of Ms. Masters here. Got a minute to answer a couple questions?”