by Beck,Jessica
How could I have never heard this story before? George was right. Sometimes I thought everything of importance in April Springs happened around me, but there was an entirely different world outside of the donut shop’s front door that I wasn’t aware of. “What happened to her husband?”
“It turned out that Clarence made quite a few mistakes that night. Not only had he assaulted his wife, but he was also in possession of enough narcotics to put him away for quite a while. As soon as he woke up, which happened pretty quickly due to a bucket of icy water being dumped on his head, I read him his rights and carted him away. The man was just plain nasty to the bone, and I doubt anyone mourned him three months later when another prisoner took care of him once and for all.”
“George, you’re an honest-to-goodness hero,” I said in earnestness.
“That’s not the way I see it. I was just doing my job, Suzanne. Any cop would have done the same thing in my place.”
“Maybe so, but it still sounds like you got there just in the nick of time.”
“I’m sure your husband has stories that make mine look like a church picnic.”
I shrugged as I said, “The truth of the matter is that we don’t talk much about the bad experiences he had when he was with the state police, but I know you must be right. Sometimes when something triggers his memories, especially late at night, he gets a little quiet. I know not to ask him about it, and before long he manages to deal with it, but I still wish he’d talk to me about it.”
“He’ll tell you when he’s ready,” George said. “I wouldn’t push him.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said, surprised that the mayor was offering me advice about my marriage. He wasn’t wrong, though. I instinctively knew that Jake was the kind of man who had to come to terms with things in his own way, and if he was quiet and distant, that was just his way of dealing with something. Fortunately that didn’t happen too often, but when it did, I respected his mood. It killed me to see anything trouble him, but it wasn’t exactly realistic to expect the man to constantly be happy. As it was, he was fairly even tempered, something I appreciated greatly, especially after my time being married to Max, the original drama king.
“Good. Anyway, when Megan died, I found out that she’d left this place to me. I wanted to do the right thing and turn it over to her next of kin, but the only problem was that there wasn’t anybody left in her family. It was either take the cottage myself or let the county take possession, and I knew that Megan wouldn’t have wanted that, so I accepted it. She left enough in her savings account to cover the tax bills and utilities for ten years, and when Tom came back into town, I naturally thought of putting him up there.”
“You’re really just a big teddy bear under all that gruff, aren’t you?” I asked him with a smile.
“Maybe, but I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t spread it around. I’ve worked too hard to cultivate my reputation as a grumpy old man to just let it go.”
We’d finally arrived. I leaned over and kissed George’s cheek before I slid out of the passenger seat. “Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me. Are you ready to go inside? If it’s going to be too painful for you, given the fact that your friend just died, I’ll be okay searching the cottage by myself.”
“No, I’m doing this for him. I want to go in.”
“Then let’s do it.”
The cottage was on the small side, and I wondered if it would comfortably hold more than two people living there full time. If it was more than six hundred square feet, I’d be amazed. I’d been expecting the place to be run down, but to my surprise, the wooden exterior had a fresh coat of white paint, there were flowers planted in front, and the lawn was neatly trimmed. “Did you do all of this?” I asked him.
“No, it was all Tom.”
I looked at George to see if he was kidding, but he wasn’t. “Are you serious?”
“I wouldn’t take rent money from him, but he insisted on paying me anyway, so we bartered a little. If he kept up the yard and touched a few things up, he didn’t owe me a dime. The paint was all his idea.”
“I thought he had a lot of money,” I said, confused by the idea that the man had paid cash for a new truck and yet he couldn’t afford rent.
“Maybe so, but I didn’t find out about that until later,” George said.
“I still can’t see Tom doing all this,” I said. It didn’t jibe with everything I’d been hearing about him, but then I remembered that none of us were just one thing. I honestly believed that there was good and bad in all of us in varying degrees, hearts filled with immeasurable shades of gray, and not clear-cut black or white.
“I asked him about it, and Tom said that his time in jail made him appreciate things more. Fixing this place up made him happy, so I wasn’t about to stop him. No matter what he might have done in his life, the man deserved better than he got, Suzanne.”
“I agree. After all, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” I asked as I patted his arm once. “Let’s go inside. Is it this nice inside as well?”
“I’m afraid not. Unfortunately, Tom was better with outside work than the interior. I’d better warn you, it’s pretty cluttered in there. Megan was a bit of a hoarder.”
“I can handle it if you can,” I said as George selected a key on his ring and opened the front door for us.
At first glance, it looked as though someone had broken in and trashed the place, and I wondered who had beaten us there. The place was an unmitigated disaster inside.
The real question was had they taken anything of use to us, or were there still clues hiding in the chaos we were about to dive into?
Chapter 8
“It wasn’t always this bad, was it? Am I right in assuming that someone got here before we could and trashed the place?”
“Well, it wasn’t perfect before, but I know that it was a lot better than this,” George said as he looked around in disgust before he reached for his phone.
“Who are you calling?”
“Stephen Grant,” he said.
“Do you think he or his men did this?” I asked him incredulously. I’d known the police chief for years, and I couldn’t imagine the circumstances under which he would have allowed something like this to happen on his watch. George had a point, though. He needed to ask the question, no matter how uncomfortable it might make the police chief feel.
“That’s what I’m about to find out,” the mayor said, and then he held up a hand in my direction as his call was connected. “It’s George. Did your men trash my cottage searching it? Are you sure? What did it look like when you got here? No, never mind. I’ll handle it. I’ll call you later.” After the mayor hung up, he turned to me. “He swears he supervised the search himself, and they left the place the way they found it. It was cluttered but neat, which was how it looked three days ago when I came by to touch base with Tom. Somebody obviously tore it apart looking for something.”
“Money is the obvious answer, isn’t it?” I asked. “After all, Tom was flashing cash all around town. Maybe someone saw it, and they took the opportunity to make an easy score once they knew that he wasn’t going to be coming back.”
“Maybe,” George said as he put a table back upright that had been flung to one side.
“What else could it be?” I asked him.
“What if Tom was hiding something more important than money here?” George asked as he looked around. “The person who killed him could have come looking for it after he pushed him over the falls.”
“That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?” I asked him softly.
“At this point we can’t know that, and it doesn’t do us any good thinking that whatever happened here wasn’t related to Tom’s death.”
“You’re right,” I said. “How do you want to tackle this?”
He loo
ked around the mess, and then he said, “The truth of the matter is that I’ve been meaning to clean out the clutter ever since I inherited the place, and now is as good a time as any, if you’re game. Why don’t we move things out onto the porch as we sort through them? It’s going to be a bigger job than you signed up for, so if you want me to, I’ll give you a ride back to town, and I’ll let you know if I find anything.”
“Nonsense,” I said, literally rolling up my sleeves. “Let’s do this.”
“Are you sure?” he asked gently.
“Why wouldn’t I be? At the very least, I can help a friend lighten his load in life a little. As far as I’m concerned, that’s reason enough to help. Should I call Grace, too? She’s doing paperwork at home, but I’m certain that she’d come if we called her.”
“I’m not entirely sure there would be room enough for three of us in here,” George said as he looked around the tiny combination living room/kitchen/dining area.
“You’re probably right. Should we split up, or tackle this room together and save the bedroom for later?”
“Let’s work our way from the front door, if you’re sure you’re okay with it.”
“Stop asking me that, George,” I told him with a grin. “If you give me too many more chances to quit before we get started, I might end up taking you up on your offer.”
He laughed briefly, a sound I was happy to hear. “We wouldn’t want that, now, would we?”
“I’m just saying,” I replied as I offered a slight chuckle of my own. “Now let’s dive in and see what we can find.”
Finally, the front living space was clean.
“Are you planning on keeping any of this?” I asked him as I surveyed the mess we’d made of the cottage’s front porch. There was a pack rat’s collection displayed there, full of old newspapers and magazines, glass soda bottles, half-filled mason jars, fabric scraps, bins of old nails, and more flotsam and jetsam than any one person should ever have. “How could one person accumulate all of this? The place must have been tough to walk through even when it wasn’t strewn out all over the floor.”
“You’d be surprised. Megan had a system, and it didn’t feel all that cluttered when you walked into the place.”
“I find that hard to believe,” I said. “It must have driven Tom crazy.”
“If it did, he never complained about it,” George said. “Do you think anyone will want this useless junk?”
“I have no idea. We haven’t found anything significant yet, but at least we’ve put a dent in the front part of the house.” The thought of what the bedroom must look like was something I wasn’t even allowing myself to consider. If the main living space was any indication, it would take more time to clean it than I had available.
“At least the bedroom isn’t like this,” George said, as though he could read my mind.
“Are you telling me that Megan was neater in there?”
“No, but Tom got my permission to move all of the junk in there out front. Once we tackle this main living space, it should be downhill from there.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said, trying to hide my elation at the news. I’d kept my eyes open searching for clues as we’d cleaned, but it had become a bit overwhelming dealing with so much clutter. I considered myself somewhat of a minimalist, but Jake took it to the extreme. This place would have driven him mad. I couldn’t even imagine what it would look like if we ever managed to finish.
“Should I call someone to come pick up the first load?” George asked me. “We didn’t miss anything out here, did we?”
“My question is how could we possibly know? Who are you going to call?”
“Being mayor has certain privileges,” George said with a smile. “I can have the front porch clean in fifteen minutes.”
“Wow, that’s what I call power,” I said with a smile. “Aren’t you afraid of using your connections to get something personal done?”
“No, I think folks will let me slide on this one. What do you say?”
“Make the call. Let’s get it cleared out,” I said.
As George grabbed his cell phone, I took one last look at the things we’d pulled out of the house before it was all taken away.
I was glad that I did, because that was when something caught my eye, something that we’d both missed before.
I leaned down and picked it up. It was a pass to Candy Murphy’s gym. That, in and of itself, was no big deal, but when I flipped it over, I saw that it had a sticky note attached to the back.
“Tom,
I won’t do it, so stop asking me.
Candy.”
That was certainly cryptic enough. The only problem was that I didn’t know how old the note was, but I was going to make it a priority to ask Candy about it. Grace and I, along with Tom, had gone to high school with Candy long ago. She’d been known for wearing daring and quite revealing outfits then, and the trend had continued into adulthood. I doubted that the woman owned anything other than yoga pants, miniskirts, low-cut tops, and men’s work shirts worn as jackets, based on what I saw her wearing around town. The only thing in her defense was that she still had the figure to pull it off, even though it had been quite a few years since her graduation. Candy’s gym, once financed by an older and quite married man in town named Leonard Branch, had lost its sponsorship when he’d broken up with her, but she’d somehow managed to keep the business afloat despite the setback. Candy liked to present an image to the world of being cute and ditzy, but I’d long suspected that there was a sharp mind behind all of the makeup and curls. I remembered that Tom had had a crush on her in high school, and I couldn’t help wondering what her current connection to him might be.
I couldn’t wait to ask her.
Just not yet, though.
Chapter 9
I tucked the pass, along with its accompanying note, into my pocket and waited for George to finish his phone call. As he wrapped things up, I did another cursory look around our discards, but nothing else attracted my attention.
George finally finished, and as he put his phone away, he said, “They’ll be here within the hour. Did I see you rooting through the discard piles?”
“Yes. I found this,” I said as I showed him the gym pass.
“I didn’t think it was significant,” he admitted.
Without saying a word, I flipped it over and showed him the note on the back.
“Where did that come from?” he asked with a frown as he studied it.
“It was there all along. Don’t beat yourself up. It was easy to miss.”
“And yet you found it,” he said with a heavy sigh. “Suzanne, maybe I’ve lost my touch for this kind of thing.”
“Come on, George. It was one little thing.”
“Maybe, but then again, maybe not. What else did I pass over? I saw that badge and didn’t even think to flip it over. Suzanne, all I can say is that I’m sorry.”
The man was really getting morose, but as I thought about it, I couldn’t blame him. I would have probably felt the same way if I’d been the one who’d missed the potential clue. “Let’s go back inside and keep working,” I said as I touched his shoulder.
“Are you sure you still want me?” he asked glumly.
“There’s nobody else I’d rather have working beside me,” I told him, and though I wouldn’t have minded Jake or Grace there as well, George was a good investigator, and I knew one thing for sure: there was no way that anything else would get past him.
“I’ll start on the kitchen if you want the bedroom,” George suggested.
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “If you find anything, give me a yell.”
“This place is so small I could probably whisper and you’d still hear me,” he answered with the hint of a smile. It was good to see his dark mood lighten, an
d I felt better as I started for the tiny bedroom in the back of the house.
The first place I headed was the trashcan. I’d made good finds in them in the past, and I had hopes for this one. Though the bedroom had clearly been searched haphazardly as well, it somehow encouraged me. Whoever had been looking hadn’t found what they’d been searching for, or so I suspected. Why else the mess? Since the bedspread didn’t appear to have been laundered in quite some time, I decided to dump the can’s contents after glancing through it. It was mostly wrappers, wadded-up paper, and the like, so I doubted that I’d make things much worse. As I sorted through the contents, I put the trash back into the can, leaving me a clearer idea of what might be in there. The first thing of interest I found was a quarter section of a torn business card. AKE was all I could see, but soon enough, I had the other three pieces, and I could read it in full.
RAY BLAKE, Managing Editor, April Springs Sentinel.
So, Ray had been here, and judging by the state of his business card, Tom had clearly been unhappy about it.
Flipping each piece over in turn, I read a quickly scrawled note on the back in what was most likely Ray’s handwriting.
“We Need To Talk.”
Was everyone in town leaving Tom notes? This one was clearly different from the one he’d gotten from Candy. He’d left hers intact, but this one had been shredded by hand and thrown away. I was about to call to George when he came into the room with a smile. As he saw what I’d done to the bedspread, it faded quickly into a frown.