“We either wait until Mom gets back with the camera, or we need to find a camera the memory card will fit in,” Claire said.
“A real camera,” Maggie said. “One with different lenses like everyone used to use before cell phones.”
“Sean has one of those,” Melissa said. “It’s at the office.”
“Let’s go get it!” Claire said.
Melissa and Claire left to get the camera and soon after, Delia came in, carrying a garbage bag.
“Did you get it?” Hannah asked her. “Is that it?”
Delia took off her coat and sat the bag on the table.
“It wasn’t easy,” Delia said. “I was waiting in the vestibule when she got there, and I tried to take it from her there, but she held onto it. Fortunately, she had Olivia with her. The little precious ran up the aisle in the sanctuary and Ava dropped the bag to chase her. I snagged it, took it downstairs, and hid it in the cloakroom behind some folding tables.
“When she came down to the basement, she asked me what I did with it, and I told her I put it on the pile with the others in the fellowship hall. She spent the next hour frantically going through each bag, pretending to be sorting. She made a huge mess, but no one wanted to offend her. I thought she’d never leave. I had to wait until she was gone to retrieve it from the cloakroom. I was a nervous wreck the whole time.”
Hannah untied the bag, pulled the clothes out by the hands full and flung them on the floor.
“Hannah, those are expensive clothes,” Delia said, as she picked them up.
“Clothes of the enemy,” Hannah said.
When she reached the bottom of the bag, she looked perplexed.
“It’s not here.”
“What’s not there?” Bonnie asked.
“The camera and the phone,” Hannah said. “I saw her wrap them up in a scarf and put them in here.”
She shook the empty bag.
“She must have ditched them somewhere on her way to the church,” Maggie said.
“Probably threw them in the river as she crossed the bridge north of here,” Bonnie said.
“I’m so sorry,” Delia said.
“Nothing’s your fault,” Hannah said.
“If she ditched them, then why was she so frantic to find the bag?” Delia asked.
“Because these clothes were in it,” Maggie said. “She never intended to donate them. They’re expensive.”
“No, you should have seen her,” Delia said. “She was frightened, panicked.”
“And no one saw you put the bag in the cloakroom?” Hannah asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Someone must have gotten to it before you left,” Hannah said.
“I can’t imagine who,” Delia said.
“Oh well,” Maggie said. “All the evidence is gone.”
Claire and Melissa came in with the camera.
“Someone broke into the office,” Melissa said.
“What?” Scott said as he jumped up.
“Sean’s there now,” Claire said. “He got a call the alarm had gone off. Skip’s with him.”
“They didn’t steal the computers or petty cash,” Melissa said. “It looked like they went through all the drawers and tried to pry open the safe.”
“Looking for something,” Sam said and met Hannah’s eye.
“I’ll run up there,” Scott said, and Ed made to follow.
“Stop right there,” Claire said to Ed. “You’re on trick-or-treat duty this evening.”
“I’ll call you later,” Scott said and left.
“Does anybody want to go trick-or-treating?” Hannah asked.
All the children responded with shouting and screaming. It was deafening.
“It’s after six o’clock,” Delia said. “I had no idea it was that late.”
They sent the children off with Sam and Ed, and Delia heated up the chicken and dumplings she had made earlier in the day.
“My favorite!” Hannah said.
While Delia and Bonnie tended to dinner, Hannah removed Sean’s memory card from his camera and inserted the stolen one. There was a delay while new batteries were procured for the camera. Once it was working, they scrolled through the photos. The most recent ones were of Ava, arriving at the bar or leaving.
“That’s a kick in the pants,” Melissa said, and Claire hugged her.
Scrolling back further, they came upon pictures of Ava posing, seemingly deliberately, for the camera.
“Hannah, look at the brick walls,” Maggie said.
“I know,” Hannah said. “That’s the private investigator’s apartment.”
It was evident Ava was enjoying posing for the photographer. Some of the photographs were intimate and revealing.
“Ugh, I can’t look at anymore,” Melissa said, and left the room, with Claire following.
There was one the photographer had taken as a selfie, while Ava slept naked next to him. There was also one taken in the bar downstairs from his apartment.
They scrolled to the end, where there were more surreptitious photos of her, again taken outside the Rose and Thorn. The date of the earliest one was almost nine months previously, and the last one was the night of the accident.
“They all get obsessed with her,” Hannah said.
“So he was surveilling her, fell in love, somehow contrived to meet her, and they had an affair,” Maggie said.
“No. Ava found out the PI was spying on her,” Hannah said. “She seduced him to control the situation.”
“And now that he’s dead, she thinks she’s in the clear,” Delia said.
“She robbed a dead man’s body,” Bonnie said. “What kind of monster does that?”
Hannah held her tongue. Ava was far more monstrous than the rest of them knew.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” she said to Maggie.
“We’re going back to Pennsylvania,” Maggie said.
“Now?” Bonnie asked.
“We have to,” Hannah said. “But we’ll eat first.”
They showed the bartender the photo of Ava that they had printed and brought with them.
“That’s her,” he said. “That’s his sister, Angela.”
Maggie and Hannah looked at each other.
“You’re sure?” Hannah said.
“Her I would not forget,” he said. “Gorgeous.”
“How long had his sister been coming in here with him?”
“I’ve known this guy for five years, maybe,” he said. “He’s been bringing her in here for the past six months. I guess maybe they weren’t close before then.”
After interviewing the bar owner’s son, they drove to the address the “sister” had given the police, the drugstore in a strip mall. Outside in Maggie’s Jeep, Hannah and Maggie sat talking.
“Recap,” Maggie said. “I need to think this through.”
“Ava was at the scene of the accident,” Hannah said. “She took his keys, wallet, camera, and phone.”
“She took his car, brought it here, and stole anything out of his apartment that could implicate her,” Maggie said. “Then what?”
“She called the Rose Hill police station from Besington so it would show up on the station caller ID; she said she was his sister, saw it in the paper, what could she do to help? They weren’t close, but she knows some things. She tells them where his apartment is, and that his landlord owns the bar downstairs. That way if anybody does look into it everything checks out, and they find all his other case files but not hers.”
“When did she call?”
“Wednesday night,” Hannah said, after referring to the file.
“She would have to have called from a burner phone or a payphone,” Maggie said.
Hannah pointed to one outside the drugstore. They both got out of the Jeep, and as they walked toward the pay phone, Hannah dialed the number from the police file. The pay phone rang until Hannah picked up the receiver.
“She called from here, and she gave them this
number,” Hannah said, pointing to the number engraved on the pay phone's metal housing.
“So she might have gone in there,” Maggie said, referring to the drugstore. “She used their address.”
“There’s no address posted on the building, though,” Hannah said. “So where did she get it?”
“It would be on their receipts. She must have bought something.”
“We’ll show them the photo,” Hannah said.
The first three employees they showed the picture to did not recognize Ava. The last one did.
“Oh yeah, she was like, movie star good-looking,” the man behind the photo counter said. “I followed her around just to get a better look at her. She asked me if I thought she was stealing, but she was just kidding.”
“What did she buy?”
“I remember it well,” he said. “She needed lighter fluid for her grill, but that summer stuff was all gone a long time ago, I told her. She said she just needed something to light the coals with so I told her rubbing alcohol would work. She bought a big bottle of that and one of those stick lighters, you know, butane.”
When Hannah wrote down his name, and the time of Ava’s visit, he got worried.
“Did she like, go missing or something?”
“No, she’s just fine,” Hannah said. “We just needed to verify her story. Nothing to worry about.”
“I’m glad. She was so nice,” he said. “She’s the hottest woman I ever met in real life. Tell her I said hi.”
Hannah and Maggie got back in the Jeep and sat there for a few moments, looking straight ahead, lost in their thoughts.
“What did she need the lighter fluid for?” Maggie asked.
“To burn up the files and the hard drive from his PC or laptop,” Hannah said. “We could look in every trash can from this county to ours, but I’m not going to.”
“She’s there when the guy dies, right? Or just after,” Maggie says.
Hannah hesitated but found she just couldn’t break Patrick’s confidence. Not yet.
“She realizes she knows him,” Hannah said.
“She panics,” Maggie says.
“No, not her. She’s cool as a cucumber,” Hannah said. “She takes his wallet with his IDs, his phone, and his camera.”
“And his keys,” Maggie says. “She finds his car by clicking the lock button on the key fob.”
“So she takes the car, hides it somewhere, and brought it back here Wednesday night.”
“Where could she hide it?”
“Melissa ran into her outside the garage apartment behind the B&B,” Hannah said.
“So she hid his car in the B&B garage,” Maggie said, “until she could deal with it.”
Hannah reminded Maggie about the boat with Ava’s coat in it found at the bottom of the dam.
“So that’s how she was getting back and forth to Rose Hill,” Maggie said.
“I thought she was in the white SUV,” Hannah said. “But the security camera at the fire station showed only about a minute between the white SUV coming and going, and that’s not long enough to do all that. She took the boat. I don’t know what happened to her on the way back, but the boat with her coat in it ended up on the other side of the dam.”
“Then what did she do?”
“On Wednesday she brought his car back to Besington,” Hannah said.
“She could hide her own car in the B&B garage while she drove his car up here.”
“What was her excuse to be gone long enough to do everything she did here and somehow get back to Rose Hill?”
“We’ll have to ask someone close to her,” Hannah said. “There’s something else. Something I haven’t told you.”
“Don’t hold back now,” Maggie said. “I’m already in this up to my elbows.”
Hannah told Maggie what the coroner had told Malcolm. She demonstrated strangling Maggie, putting both thumbs across her windpipe.
“So you think Ava killed the guy?” Maggie asked.
Hannah nodded, but she didn’t elaborate.
“But why kill him?” Maggie said. “If he were that crazy about her he wouldn’t want to hurt her.”
“Except maybe she wasn’t crazy about him,” Hannah said. “She was handling him the best way she knew how, to keep him under her control, but he was an inconvenience, a threat. He may have been pressuring her to leave Will, to stop seeing Patrick. Maybe he threatened blackmail. She wouldn’t leave Will, certainly not for some PI with an apartment over a bar in Besington. If she left Will for anybody, it would be Patrick.”
“She was just covering her tracks.”
“Eliminating a complication.”
“What are you going to do?” Maggie asked.
“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “Let’s tie up all the loose ends here and then regroup. I want to go to the bus station and show some people her photo.”
Of course, they remembered her. She was so beautiful. Her purse had been stolen, so she didn’t have any ID. Such a lovely lady. So anxious to get home to Rose Hill. She paid with cash. The name she gave was also fake. Yes, it was on Wednesday.
“That’s how she got home,” Maggie said.
“After she dumped his car here,” Hannah said.
They sat in the parking lot of the bus station, their thoughts on all that must have happened on Wednesday night. The moon was high in the sky now, and Maggie said they should think about heading home.
They didn’t speak again until they crossed the state line.
“You think we should tell Scott,” Hannah said.
“Of course not,” Maggie said. “But what are we going to do?”
“What have we got?” Hannah said. “We’ve got one guy says he sold her rubbing alcohol and a lighter in the drugstore, which is connected to the phone and address the fake sister gave. We’ve got the bartender landlord who thought she was the guy’s sister. The bus station staff could ID her. We’ve got the photos of her in his apartment, which we illegally removed from the stolen camera, which has now disappeared, so that’s tricky. We know those paintings are all of her, but could you convince a jury of that beyond a reasonable doubt?”
“Why didn’t she take the paintings?”
“Too big, too many, doing so would attract too much attention,” Maggie said. “Or she was so confident no one would investigate that there’d be no one who would connect her to them. I don’t know, Hannah. It’s still all circumstantial.”
“Okay,” Hannah said. “I wasn’t going to break his confidence, but here it is: Patrick has video from the Thorn security camera that showed Ava was at the scene of the accident.”
“I thought he said it was turned off.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Great,” Maggie said. “That will show Ava stealing the man’s stuff.”
“Except it also showed her killing him.”
“What?”
“She strangled him and then stole his stuff.”
“How do you know this?”
“Patrick told me this morning.”
“What’s he going to do?”
“He won’t say. Sam, Sean, and Patrick are all up to something, but he wouldn’t tell me what.”
“What do we do?”
“Well, I’m of a mind to turn all this over to Sam, and trust him,” Hannah said. “He said he would help us.”
“Lord, when Scott finds out, we’re all in big trouble.”
“Mostly you, though,” Hannah said. “I’m going to tell him it was all your idea.”
Back in Rose Hill, at Delia’s house, the kids were zoned out in front of a movie in the living room. Pixie and Olivia were asleep on the couch between Ed and Sam. Tommy was seated on the floor with Sammy and the other kids. Hannah waved at her husband as she passed through, and he winked at her.
In the kitchen, Claire was painting Delia’s nails, and Melissa was putting a load of towels in the washer. Claire’s little Boston Terrier, Mackie Pea, was curled up sleeping with Delia’s black cat, Dinah, in
a basket of clean, folded laundry sitting next to the washer and dryer. The kitchen smelled like coffee and cinnamon rolls; it was warm and cozy.
“Are Ava and Will going to pick up their kids?” Hannah asked Delia.
“Nope,” Melissa said.
“They’re staying the night with Ed and Claire,” Delia said.
“That should be a circus,” Maggie said.
“What’s two more?” Claire said. “We’ll just throw them in there with the rest; it will toughen them up.”
“You look like you don’t have good news,” Delia said.
Hannah and Maggie quietly got them caught up on what they had found out in Besington. They did not mention what Patrick saw on the video.
“This has gotten out of hand,” Delia said. “We need to tell Scott and let the police handle it.”
“I’m going to hand it all over to Sam,” Hannah said. “We all trust him, right?”
Everyone nodded.
“What’s going to happen to her kids?” Claire asked.
“If she goes to jail,” Delia said, “Will has custody of Olivia, but I don’t think he’s adopted the other three. Bonnie would have thrown a fit if he had.”
“Charlotte’s old enough to take care of herself,” Maggie said, “but she would always have a home with one of us.”
“Not me, thank you very much,” Claire said.
“We don’t know for sure that Charlotte killed Professor Richmond,” Delia said.
“I know what I know,” Claire said. “There’s no doubt in my mind. Why do you think they whisked her out of the country when they did?”
“Boy trouble is what they told Bonnie,” Delia said.
“Do you think Will would continue to pay for her school?” Hannah asked.
“Or Timmy’s?” Claire said.
“Hard to tell,” Maggie said. “You couldn’t blame him if he didn’t.”
“Do you think there’s any chance Charlotte is Theo’s daughter?” Hannah asked.
“Every chance,” Delia said.
“You’ve thought this before?” Hannah asked.
Delia nodded.
“I can’t prove Ava had an affair with Theo, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”
Pumpkin Ridge (Rose Hill Mystery Series Book 10) Page 17