Death Knell

by Karin Kaufman

  “Alison’s been up in the bell tower more than once,” Sophie said. “The mechanics fascinate her. I think Tyra went up there just to please her parents.”

  “Why would that please her parents?” I asked.

  “They’ve been church members for three decades, since before she was born, but they’ve never been able to get her to attend services.”

  Gilroy shifted on his feet. “Are you saying she’s never gone to a service?”

  “Never,” Sophie replied. “Not even at Christmas.”

  “What did she think of Pastor Ackley?” Gilroy asked.

  “I don’t think she liked him, but she didn’t hate him. It wasn’t personal with her. She thinks pastors in general are nosy, and she’s right. It’s their job to involve themselves in church members’ lives. I don’t know why it bothered her. She didn’t attend, so what was the difference? But maybe she heard things through her parents and didn’t care for the church grapevine.”

  As I pondered Sophie’s words, I recalled my conversation with Tyra and Alison about the church’s bell-ringing system. Alison had appeared most knowledgeable, but Tyra had known more than I would have expected from someone who, by Sophie’s account, had been dragged unwillingly to the bell tower.

  “Wait a second,” I said, thrusting out a hand. “Tyra knew where the controller was.”

  “Sure she did,” Sophie said. “She was up in the bell tower.”

  “In the bell tower,” I said. “She told Turner she’s never set foot in the church office. So how does she know the controller is there? If it were me, I’d assume it was in a utility room.”

  “Alison told her?” Sophie suggested.

  “But Tyra knew it’s a black box,” I said. “On Sunday she said, ‘It’s a black box, literally.’ I remember her exact words. She said it was about the size of a shoe box, talking as if she’d seen it herself, not heard about it secondhand. She’s been in that office—and specifically to see the controller.”

  “This is crazy,” Sophie said, rubbing her eyes. “My friends? My friends?”

  “Sophie, you knew it had to be one of them,” Underhill said tenderly. “And they’re not your friends. Trust me, I’ve heard those ladies talk to you and each other. They’re not friends with anyone.”

  “Mrs. Crawford, do you know of any trouble in Miss West’s life or in her parents’ lives that would leave her vulnerable to blackmail?” Gilroy asked.

  Sophie looked as though she’d been slapped across the face. “No. No, I don’t.” She turned to Underhill. “No,” she said again, more insistently.

  “We have reason to believe Lauren was blackmailing people who had a connection to St. John’s,” Underhill said. “Did she ever threaten you in any way?”

  “No. Never.” Her hand flew to her collarbone and she looked back at Gilroy. “She worked in the church office.”

  Gilroy nodded. “There’s not a much better place a blackmailer could work.”

  I was zeroing in on Tyra as the murderer, but we still lacked a clear motive. Had Lauren been blackmailing her? Had Tyra refused to be blackmailed? Or had she succumbed at first but finally reached her limit? I needed to talk to Holly, pronto. “I think I can help. I’ll be right back,” I said, hurrying from the station.

  The final pieces of the puzzle were dropping into place. Lauren’s murder had nothing to do with Penelope Falls or the sale of the cottage or the book club. She was killed to stop her blackmail scheme. Even more than that, she was killed to shut her up. So she could never spread what she had heard.

  I raced down the sidewalk and entered the bakery to find Holly knee-deep in customers. When she caught sight of me, she tipped her head toward the back of the shop. I threaded my way through the crowd, circled around the counter, and waited for her by a stainless prep table.

  A minute later she joined me, dropping into a stool as she wiped her hands on a towel. “Oh, my feet. Peter gave me your message, but we’re not usually this busy once we get past the morning rush.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, but this is important.”

  She grinned. “Detective work isn’t an interruption. I like it almost as much as baking.”

  “I know you hate gossip,” I began, “but in this case, it may help solve Lauren’s murder. Have you heard any gossip about Alison Francis, Tyra West, or their families?”

  “Peter mentioned the word ‘vicious.’”

  “I think it must be vicious gossip. Otherwise, two people wouldn’t be dead.”

  “I haven’t heard anything about Alison, but I have about Tyra.” She chewed on the inside of her lower lip. “This is awful. How detailed do you need me to be?”

  “As detailed as you can be. Lauren was uncovering secrets about people and blackmailing them. She even listened in to a counseling session with Pastor Ackley last Wednesday.”

  “Wednesday. Is that why he was killed?”

  “I think that’s why Lauren was killed. Ackley was killed because he found out who hacked the bell system.”

  “Rachel, if this has nothing to do with Lauren’s death—”

  “Then it stays a secret. I won’t talk to anyone but Gilroy.”

  Holly tossed the towel to the table. She had no problem passing along snippets of overheard conversations she was certain could help solve a murder, but she was about to wade into murkier waters. “Thursday morning is when I first heard one of my customers say to another that Mason West, Tyra’s father, was in counseling with Ackley,” she said, a mixture of caution and distaste in her voice. “I almost told her to get out. Church counseling! That’s no one else’s business. What royal gall.”

  “Do you know what the counseling was for?”

  “Friday afternoon I heard a different customer talk about the counseling. This one was more specific, but not completely.” Holly grimaced. “It had to do with a gambling addiction. It sounded very expensive and very serious.”

  “Friday afternoon,” I repeated. “The book club ladies got together Friday night. It sounds to me like Lauren was leaking more and more information, putting the pressure on Tyra.”

  “And then Lauren joined Tyra for the group’s usual weekend book club?”

  “Tyra must have said no to the blackmail at first. Maybe Lauren hoped to have some cash in her pocket by the time she went home.”

  “And Tyra wanted to protect her father.”

  “I think she was more interested in protecting herself. You know what I realized today? All the people who shouldn’t have talked, did talk, and the people who should have talked, didn’t. Eventually, someone was going to kill Lauren Hughes.”

  Holly picked up the towel and began to wring it in her hands. “Tyra was the one who insisted Lauren’s death wasn’t an accident. Why?”

  “She had to. She knew a closer examination of Lauren’s body would uncover the neck wound, and she knew the fireplace poker would be found. Being the first to say it was murder made her look more innocent. And her insistence that it had to do with Penelope Falls was classic misdirection.”

  Holly stood with a weary sigh and crossed her arms, hugging herself. “Caleb is already heartbroken about Lauren’s death. How am I going to tell him his favorite substitute teacher was a blackmailer? The woman who encouraged his interest in the stars? You know it will be in the paper by morning. My son’s teacher, Rachel. He’s only in middle school. How could I have trusted her? Am I that foolish?”

  “You are not foolish, Holly. The pastor trusted her too. So much that he allowed her to work in the church office. He never dreamed she was blackmailing people, and he knew her much better than you did. Same with Sophie. When Gilroy told her Lauren was blackmailing people, she was genuinely shocked. Lauren must have been one heck of a sociopathic actress. I can’t say she had a dark soul, but she had a troubled soul. Sometimes the worst people put up the smoothest fronts. And sometimes the nastiest people have never killed anyone. Like Alison French.”

  Holly smiled.

  “Unless I see a r
ed flag, I’d rather trust than not,” I said adamantly. “Trust is not a weakness, Holly.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Gilroy arrested Tyra that afternoon, soon after I told him about her father and his counseling at the church. Being a murderer by nature but not by skilled practice, Tyra had crumbled under the pressure and confessed to killing both Lauren and the pastor the moment the handcuffs hit her wrists. Case closed.

  But the killings left behind a stunned town and a grieving church. Holly and Peter told Caleb about Lauren’s blackmailing ways before he had a chance to hear from his friends or read about it in the paper, and she said he took it surprisingly well. The benefits of being thirteen, we supposed. You moved on easily.

  Tyra told Gilroy she’d had enough of Lauren’s threats. She didn’t have money to pay her, and regardless, she didn’t trust Lauren to keep quiet even if she did pay her. Tyra used the word “snapped,” in fact, which Gilroy said indicated the tenor of her future courtroom defense. I don’t know what happened, Your Honor. I just snapped. Trouble was, she also told Gilroy that she had taken the fireplace poker to her bedroom hours before killing Lauren, in preparation for the murder. That was planning, not snapping.

  The bells were also planned, of course. Tyra told Gilroy she liked the “irony” of bells tolling for Lauren the church worker, tolling at the church where a pastor’s big mouth and nosy invitation to counseling threatened to ruin her and her mother’s life. The bells were fitting, and so easy to hack. Alison had blabbed about them, their fascinating mechanics, and the computer program that controlled them so often that Tyra knew she could get them to ring on command if she could plant remote software on Ackley’s computer. So she took a flash drive loaded with the software to Ackley’s office. As she had suspected, the pastor’s computer password was a piece of cake: StJohns.

  Tyra had mistimed the murder, and the bells rang several minutes after Lauren’s death, but she claimed that didn’t bother her much. All in all, everything went much better than she had hoped.

  To hear it from Tyra, she had never wanted to kill the pastor. But having shoved a poker into Lauren’s neck, she couldn’t stop there, could she? What was done, was done. It was prison for her if the pastor talked, and it was humiliation for her and her parents if Lauren talked.

  Though Pastor Ackley had it coming, she told Gilroy. He should never have agreed to counseling her father—to sticking his nose in her father’s business. He owned some of the blame for his own death.

  When they met in the graveyard, Tyra said, Ackley told her he had proof that she had hacked the bells. A longtime church volunteer happened to mention seeing a woman who fit Tyra’s description in St. John’s a day before the murder. The woman couldn’t be certain, but this stranger appeared to be coming out of the pastor’s office.

  Normally, seeing someone walk out of an office door wasn’t memorable, certainly not worth mentioning, but in Tyra’s case it was notable because the only other time she had been anywhere in St. John’s was that day, years ago, when she’d visited the bell tower with her parents. The office worker remembered wondering who the young woman with the long brown hair was and why she was looking over her shoulder and scurrying out of the church.

  As Ackley told Tyra, he realized he knew who that young woman was. He remembered her from years ago, in the bell tower. And her father, worried she would find out about his addiction, had talked about her in his counseling session. He’d shown Ackley a wallet photo and said he could never get this daughter to attend St. John’s, though she sometimes visited Wild Rose Cottage behind the church. She would be there that very weekend, he’d said, for a book club meeting.

  The nosy pastor had texted Sophie—texts Tyra had discovered on Sophie’s phone while she slept—and Tyra knew she had to act. She erased the text messages on Sophie’s phone in the kitchen, watched for Ackley, and went out to meet him in the graveyard. Later, she threw his phone in the woods on her way downtown.

  After Gilroy made his arrest, I drove home, ate, and went to bed early. The next morning I drove to the Loveland Walmart and bought a new coffeemaker. It didn’t grind its own beans or steam milk or make espresso, but it was a quality machine, and along with the freshly ground beans I bought, it would make some tasty coffee.

  I picked up Julia before heading to the station. She had demanded to come along, especially after I told her who Sophie really was and how I’d taken Underhill for granted all these months. She felt badly too, after, in her words, “giving him looks that could kill” over Sophie. And though we both knew better, we had assumed he would play around with a married woman. Not our Underhill.

  “Don’t let him know I told you,” I said. “I got kind of emotional when I apologized, and he’s already dropped the subject. You know what men are like.”

  “Royce is the same,” Julia said, shaking her head. “If either one of us says, ‘I’m sorry,’ it’s the end of our discussion. He doesn’t see the need for anything more.”

  “Maybe he’s right. There’s something to be said about saying sorry and leaving it behind you.”

  Julia grunted. “I suppose.”

  “If Underhill can stop for an early lunch, we should take him to Wyatt’s,” I said.

  “What a good idea. We can ask him about Natalie.”

  “We can ask him about himself. That’s the point.”

  “Asking about Natalie is asking about him.”

  “At least we know they’re not breaking up.”

  “And I can speak to Sophie Crawford when I visit the library. I was prepared to ignore her if she didn’t remind Underhill that she was married.” Julia plumped her curls with her fingers. “It’s not easy to ignore someone who runs the library, Rachel. I wasn’t sure what I’d do.”

  I found a vacant parking place in front of the station, inched to the curb, and shut off the engine. “Thank goodness I don’t have to carry that coffeemaker a block.”

  Julia looked to the back seat, giving me a scolding shake of her head. “It’s enormous. Is it for warehouse workers? I don’t think it will fit on that table in the lobby.”

  “It’s not that big, Julia. That’s just a lot of Styrofoam packing. Anyway, you know how much coffee those three drink in a day. They need a hefty machine.”

  I opened the back door, slid my hands under the box, and pushed the door shut with my foot.

  “Do you need help?” Julia called from the curb.

  “Nope. Got it.”

  Julia hurried ahead to the station door and peeked inside. “Chief Gilroy and Underhill are at the desk,” she said as I neared.

  She held the door open and I entered triumphantly, bearing the coffeemaker before me and dying to see their expressions. Underhill would be thrilled, I thought. Gilroy would be mildly surprised but nevertheless pleased.

  “Surprise!” I said, raising the box a couple inches.

  Their mouths dropped open.

  “Are you surprised?” I said.

  “Rachel, I . . .” Gilroy’s eyes shot to where the old coffeemaker used to sit. In its place was a brand-new one. Not my model, but good enough. Maybe even better than mine.

  “What a surprise,” Underhill said without a trace of surprise in his voice. “You didn’t need to do that.”

  Gilroy took the box from my hands and set the huge, awkward thing on the desk. “I bought the coffeemaker this morning,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize,” I said. “I should have asked. I can easily return this thing.” I thumped the box with the back of my hand. Shoot.

  “No, let me buy it,” he said. “I need a new one. You’ve seen how old mine is.”

  “Twenty years or more,” I said. “But you don’t have to.”

  “I want to.”

  “Really, you don’t have to.”

  Julia stepped forward. “Rachel, let the man buy it if he wants. Where’s that fresh coffee you bought?”

  I looked down at my hands, perhaps expecting the bags to materialize there.
“I left them in the car.”

  “Fresh coffee?” Underhill said. “Now that we can use.”

  “I honestly don’t see a problem with our old coffee,” Gilroy said.

  “And that scares me, Chief,” Underhill said, working his way around the desk. “Give me your keys, Rachel. Where did you park?”

  I handed him my key ring. “Just a few cars to the right. Thanks.”

  When I looked back, Gilroy was smiling that smile of his—the one that made me weak in the knees. “It’s your station,” I said. “I should have asked.”

  “It would’ve spoiled the surprise.” He pointed at the box on the desk. “That’s just what I need. I mean it.”

  Underhill returned with the coffee bags, and if his grin was anything to go by, he approved of my selection. “Chief, you gotta try good coffee brewed in a new coffee machine,” he said. “You will change your tune and never look back.”

  “So go ahead and make a pot,” Gilroy said.

  “Not now,” Julia said. She took the bags from Underhill and set them on the desk. “We’re here to take Officer Underhill to Wyatt’s.”

  Underhill frowned and checked his watch.

  “Brunch,” I said. “I’d like to hear more about your computer expertise.”

  “Is that all right, Chief Gilroy?” Julia asked.

  “Uh, sure. Yeah, okay.”

  “Oh, Chief,” Julia said, laying a hand on his arm, “we can take you for a late lunch.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Foster, but I’m good.”

  I bit back a grin, and as Julia launched a still-befuddled Underhill out the door, I turned back to Gilroy and mouthed, “I’ll explain later.”

  Out on the sidewalk, Julia crooked her arm in Underhill’s and led him the whole dozen steps to my car. “Derek, tell me how things are going in your life. How’s Natalie? How are you and Natalie?”

  Subtle, Julia.

  “We’re fine, Mrs. Foster.”

  “Call me Julia. We’re all friends, after all. We’ve known each other a long time.”

  Very subtle.