April Fool Dead

by Carolyn Hart

  “Yes.” Max’s tone was grim. “That’s important.”

  Annie shivered, though the coffee was good and strong and hot. “I’m scared, Max. I don’t think Diane killed either Kay Nevis or Meredith. Can you see Diane breaking into Laurel’s house and trashing her bedroom? Max, if it comes to it, we’ll have to talk to Laurel, explain how important it is to tell Pete about sighting that motorboat the night Kay was shot.”

  “Telling Pete about the motorboat might just be enough to clinch Diane’s arrest. And he won’t be impressed at our linking Laurel’s late-night excursions with the vandalism at her house.” Max frowned. “Damn, what do you suppose will happen when Laurel comes back to the island?”

  Annie sipped the robust coffee, wondered if it would be piggy to eat a second poppy-seed muffin. “If Diane’s arrested, nothing will happen. The murderer won’t worry about Laurel at that point.”

  Max moved restively. “I don’t see how we can be sure of that.”

  Annie didn’t answer. They couldn’t be certain of anything. “What a mess.” Annie shoved her hand through her hair. “I thought Diane would be able to help us. But obviously she hadn’t seen much of Meredith recently. If we knew why Meredith stopped hanging out with her, maybe that would help.” Annie paused, her face crinkling with thought. “Mrs. Thompson”—Annie pictured the teacher’s dark, intelligent, thoughtful face—“said Kay Nevis was angry that some student’s parents weren’t paying enough attention. What if that student was Meredith?”

  Max quirked an eyebrow. “Could be. But wouldn’t that apply equally to Diane? Her dad in Honolulu, her mother in London, Diane left pretty much to do what she wanted to do.”

  Annie ran her finger around the rim of the mug. A circle. Everything seemed to come to a circle when what she wanted was a nice straight line leading to the stealthy figure that nosed a motorboat into a lagoon Wednesday night and shot a defenseless woman. Had Kay Nevis been worried about Meredith or Diane? “Right. It could be either one of them, so that doesn’t get us anywhere. Maybe we should concentrate on Mrs. Riley’s idea about the lunch table.” Abruptly, Annie sat very still. “One of the teachers at the lunch table was Jack Quinn. I told you about him. He’s the track coach, a tall, lanky guy with a bony face. Damn sure of himself. Anyway, he and Meredith had an argument in the parking lot Thursday afternoon. Yesterday morning I tracked him down, but he clammed up, told me to ask Meredith. What do you suppose that was all about?”

  “An argument?” Max’s face brightened. “Hey, that could be important.”

  “Meredith can’t tell us now.” Her tone was quiet. “So he damn well better.” She popped up and hurried to the counter. She flipped open the phone book, ran her finger down the column. When she found the listing, she punched in the numbers. As the line rang, she switched on the speakerphone.

  The phone was answered on the third ring.

  “H’lo.” The voice was young and could have been either a little girl or boy.

  “Is your daddy there?” Annie’s hand tightened on the receiver.

  “S’minute. Daddy? Hey, Daddy…”

  In a moment, the track coach answered. “Hello.” His voice was good-humored, held the reflection of laughter.

  “Mr. Quinn. This is Annie Darling. I spoke to you yesterday morning at school.” A flock of pelicans swept past the terrace windows, heading for the harbor to feast upon menhaden and mullet. Annie loved the ungainly birds with their huge bills and snowy heads and silvery-brown bodies. One of her favorite pleasures was walking out on the pier to watch the birds glide toward the wavetops.

  The flock was out of sight before Quinn said gruffly, “Oh.” And nothing more. His voice now held no warmth, was wary and distant.

  Maybe that was why she went straight to the point. “Why did you quarrel with Meredith Muir in the parking lot Thursday afternoon?”

  Max pushed back his chair, joined Annie beside the speakerphone.

  “Why do you ask?” Quinn’s question was sharp.

  Annie glanced at Max.

  He understood. His nod was swift.

  Annie traced a D on the counter next to the phone. “Because Diane Littlefield may be arrested for Meredith’s murder and for Kay Nevis’s murder and I don’t think she’s guilty.”

  “Oh, shit.” Squeals rose in the background, were suddenly muffled. “Just a minute.” Steps sounded, a door slammed. There was the distant burr of a leaf machine. “What’s the deal about Diane?”

  Annie told him all of it, starting with the red Jeep in the flyers.

  Quinn spoke slowly. “I saw Meredith run away from Diane at the assembly. Anybody could see Meredith was upset.” He stopped.

  “You followed Meredith out to the parking lot.” The more Annie thought about Quinn’s pursuit of Meredith, the odder it seemed. “Why?”

  “Because Kay Nevis was murdered.” He blew out a spurt of air that rasped over the speakerphone. “Oh hell, I didn’t think Meredith could be involved, but I thought I had to talk to her. Now…” A chair scraped on concrete. “…well, now it’s pretty clear poor little Meredith didn’t have anything to do with Kay’s murder. Meredith must have seen something the night Kay was killed and she didn’t have sense enough to tell anyone. Anyway, nothing I say can hurt Meredith now. It was Monday afternoon. I’d gone down to the parking lot to get some stuff out of my car before sports. I had on running shoes and I cut across the field. I was walking behind a line of willow trees along the near boundary of the lot. The point is, I wasn’t making any noise. Nobody could hear me coming. When I ducked around one of the willows, I saw Meredith on the driver’s side of Kay Nevis’s car. She was bent over and her hand made a quick, slashing movement. She looked around, but she didn’t see me. Then she took off running, back toward the area where the seniors park. By the time I got to Kay’s car, Meredith was gone. I looked at the door. There was a jagged X scraped on the side.”

  Cars were parked on both sides of the road leading up to the Nevis house. Some of the overflow had encroached on the lane leading to the Muir house.

  As Max cautiously eased his red Ferrari into a depression near a stand of firs, Annie shaded her eyes and looked toward the Muir house. “There are some cars there.” Cars meant people and heartbreak, parents in pain. “Oh, Max.”

  He reached out, squeezed her hand.

  Annie didn’t want to look at the rambling house or at the cabana where Meredith and Diane had played music as loud as they wanted or at the pier where Meredith had walked out to meet death. “Max, if only Meredith had talked to me Thursday.”

  Annie felt that Meredith walked with them up the dusty, rutted road. When she and Max stood beside Kay Nevis’s tan Camry, Annie had a sudden vision of a beautiful blond girl, head ducked, keys gripped in her hand, lifting her arm, scouring a rough X on the unblemished paint.

  Annie pointed at the six-inch-long gashes in the pale paint. “Ugly. If Meredith did that, she must have been very angry with Kay Nevis. You know, when I saw this the morning Henny found Kay, I thought maybe the murderer had done it. But now we know Meredith scraped the car. Why on earth…”

  Max rocked back on his heels, hands in his pockets. “Nobody has mentioned a quarrel between Kay Nevis and Meredith.”

  Annie scarcely heard him. She was shaken by the anger implicit in the vandalism. If Chief Garrett had known about the jagged scratch on the Nevis car, wouldn’t he immediately have wondered if Meredith had reason to murder the teacher?

  “A quarrel between Kay and Meredith…” Annie glanced at the Nevis house, filled now with friends and mourning family. She looked across the inlet at the Muir house. Soon there would be cars overflowing there, too, as friends came to call, bringing food and flowers, offering love when love was needed most. “I don’t get it. We all thought Meredith was killed because she saw something—”

  Annie broke off as she stared across the inlet at the cabana and the pool and the long rambling yellow house. Her gaze returned to the cabana with its inviting deck, a b
rightly striped folded umbrella over a table, a half-dozen webbed chairs. The cabana was Meredith’s little kingdom, far from the house. There was a dusty path that led from the pier to the deck of the cabana. This view could clearly be seen from the deck of the Nevis house or through the windows that faced the inlet. Suddenly everything clicked into place for Annie—Kay Nevis’s distress in the days leading up to her death, the information in the flyers that was clearly linked to the school, Meredith’s anguish after Kay’s murder.

  “Oh, Max! Maybe it wasn’t what Meredith saw.” Annie pointed across the bright green water, barely stirred by a sluggish breeze. “Maybe it was what Kay Nevis saw!”

  Annie walked behind the pines that screened the tennis courts at the country club. She heard the thwock of balls, smelled the sweet scent of water splashing onto an empty clay court. The clerk behind the desk in the tennis center said Ben Bradford was raking Court 16.

  Annie reached the entrance to the court. A young man in tennis whites pulled a rake across the far court. His back was to Annie. His head was bowed, his shoulders slumped. There were pain and sorrow in every step.

  Annie steeled herself, walked quickly across the court, the soft clay deadening her footsteps. She stopped a few feet away. “Ben.”

  He jerked around. His eyes were red-rimmed, his features hard, his skin splotchy. He stared at her and there was a flicker of recognition. “You’re Rachel’s sister.”

  “Yes. I wanted to talk to you….” She didn’t want to do this. She wished she were far from the beautiful tennis court with its pinkish clay and the huge green pines that rustled ever so slightly in the breeze and this terrible grief. “Ben, I’m so sorry about Meredith.”

  His face twisted in a spasm of pain. He gripped the rake, leaned his head against his hands.

  She had nothing to offer except “Ben, you can help catch the person who killed Meredith.”

  Slowly he looked up. His eyes glittered. “How?” His voice was deep and harsh. “What can I do?”

  Annie hated to ask this question, but everything hinged on Ben’s answer. “Ben, please tell me why Meredith stopped seeing you.”

  His mouth trembled.

  Annie wondered if he could bear to answer.

  “Why”—he cleared his throat, stared at her with anguished eyes—“does it matter?”

  Annie took a deep breath, forced out the words. “Was she seeing someone else?”

  His eyes fell. His words were ragged, uneven, could scarcely be heard. “She told me I was just a kid and she didn’t have time for kids anymore. I know there was some guy. I thought maybe a friend of her parents. Some goddamn old man.”

  …didn’t have time for kids anymore.

  Ben was probably eighteen. Anybody over twenty-five would seem old to him. And Thursday afternoon, Meredith slammed her car door and her Mustang jolted out of the parking lot, leaving a grim-faced Jack Quinn staring after her.

  Annie pushed the Volvo horn, held it.

  Max poked his head out of the back entrance of Confidential Commissions and waved. He held up an index finger, ducked back inside. In a moment, he returned, slamming the door and hurrying down the steps. He carried a folder in his hand.

  As soon as Max had settled in the passenger seat, the Volvo zoomed up the alley. “Did you get anything on Quinn and Wilson?”

  Max tapped the folder. “Some stuff. I got to work as soon as you called. Didn’t Ben have any idea who the man might be?”

  “Not really. He thought it might be some friend of the family. I didn’t suggest anything about Quinn or Wilson—”

  “I hope not.” Max gave her a worried look. “We don’t have anything definite to link anybody to Meredith, Annie. We can’t go around accusing either Quinn or Wilson of having an affair with Meredith.”

  Annie paused fleetingly at the stop sign—her driving habits seemed to be deteriorating, but dammit, she was in a hurry and there wasn’t anybody coming—and accelerated onto Sand Dollar Road. “Well, I can sure tell Pete exactly what Ben told me. Pete will have to check it out.” Annie slowed to let a heavily pregnant doe lumber across the road. “Max, I don’t know what’s going on at the police station. I’ve called and called. Finally I got Mavis and she said if I didn’t have an emergency I should call back Monday. I told her I had important information about the murders and she said she’d take my name and somebody would get back to me.” The Volvo picked up speed. Wind rushed through the open sunroof. “Get back to me!” Annie’s voice rose. “I mean, what the heck is going on? There was so much noise and hubbub behind Mavis, I could barely hear her. It sounded like a cross between an Elks convention and the midway at a carnival.”

  Annie sped through the residential checkpoint with a wave for the guard. Almost there. Only a few more blocks to the police station. Annie marshaled facts in her mind. All she had to do was present them, make everything clear to Pete…. She turned onto Main Street, slowed, and pointed toward the one-story cinder-block police station, its cream paint gleaming in the mid-morning sun. “Max, look!”

  There wasn’t an empty parking spot anywhere on the block and cars were parked three deep in the dusty lot north of the station, including pickups, vans and sedans, all black. Television vans were double-parked in front of the station.

  Annie turned right and made an immediate left into a narrow lane. “We can park by the Littlefield shop. You can bet it’s closed today.” They slammed out of the car and Annie hurried to match Max’s long stride. “Do you suppose they’ve arrested Diane?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on.” Max walked faster. “It looks like the television stations from Savannah and Charleston are here.”

  By the time they reached the police station, a phalanx of cameramen waited on either side of the shallow front steps. The door opened. Cameras swung that way. Lights flashed. Reporters pressed forward.

  Annie gripped Max’s arm. “Look. It’s the circuit solicitor. Something big’s happened.” Wherever there were news cameras, Circuit Solicitor Brice Willard Posey was sure to be found.

  Posey paused at the top of the steps, his florid face exuding overweening pride. “Ladies and gentlemen of the press…” Was there a flicker of unhappiness that a mass of listeners wasn’t arrayed before him? Bearing up to the disappointment, Posey clapped his hand on the shoulder of Chief Garrett, whose face was drawn with fatigue. “I am proud to announce that the great state of South Carolina has arrested smugglers attempting to transship more than a hundred kilos of cocaine from this fair island to the mainland. Thanks to the excellent work of our local police”—Posey moved his shoulder in front of Garrett, blocking him from the view of the cameras—“and the magnificent assistance of our federal Drug Enforcement Agency, I am announcing the arrest of”—he glanced at an index card in his hand—“Terry and Eva Crawford. DEA agents infiltrated the island last night and, working with local authorities, staged a surprise raid at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Crawford, arresting not only the Crawfords but more than a half dozen of their associates who had arrived on the island to pick up portions of the shipment. This shipment is estimated to be worth a minimum of three point six million dollars. My office will make a news release available”—Posey, resplendent in a navy suit just a little too tight in the chest, a blue Oxford cloth shirt and a rep tie, lifted his well-tailored arm to check his watch—“at two o’clock this afternoon.”

  Max leaned close to Annie, whispered, “Requiring the reporters to hotfoot it to his office on the mainland where, of course, he will be happy to pose for further photos.”

  “So that’s why Pete’s been so hard to get in touch with this week. Max, do you suppose that Laurel…” Annie shook her head. “No. How could she possibly have known anything about the Crawfords?”

  “I don’t know.” Max’s tone was bemused. “But, Annie, I checked the map when I was trying to figure out why Laurel was near the inlet where Kay Nevis lived.” His dark blue eyes were wide. “The Crawford house is on the next point.”

&nb
sp; “I’ll be damned.” Annie brushed back a tangle of hair. She tugged at Max’s arm. “We’d better get out of the way.”

  The reporters, shouting questions, swarmed after Posey as he strode toward a waiting car. In a moment he was gone, and the reporters headed back into the police station, following Chief Garrett.

  “Come on, Max.” Annie jerked her head toward the pier a half block away. “There’s no point in getting involved in that mess. I’ll use my cell phone.”

  Annie tried three times, then, her face determined, she punched in 911. “Mavis? This is Annie Darling. Listen, I have to talk to the chief.” Annie frowned. “Left? My God, how could he have left?”

  Max was pointing up the street at the police car rolling out of the parking lot.

  “Look, I know you’ve got a lot going on. We saw the news conference. You’d think Posey captured them all single-handedly”—Annie nodded in agreement—“that’s for sure. Nobody’s had any sleep? Everybody’s calling in congratulations?” Annie smiled. “And the mayor said he’ll put out a proclamation for Chief Garrett Day. Oh hey, that’s great, Mavis.” Annie hesitated. “Was it a big undercover operation?” Annie looked at Max. “Oh, information received. A video of the stuff being landed! That’s amazing.”

  Max bent closer and Annie tilted the phone so he could hear.

  Mavis’s voice was high and breathless. “The most exciting day I’ve ever had! The video was here Friday morning. And that was after everybody’d been up all night watching Frank’s house for Jud Hamilton. You know what happened there! Frank shot the gun out of Jud’s hand before anybody could get to them. Frank just did a marvelous job. Everybody’s so proud of him. But that had all happened and then Friday morning there was this video and Pete got busy and called the DEA and the circuit solicitor and the sheriff’s office and everybody coordinated and last night the Crawfords were having a party and there were a bunch of people who’d come over from the mainland and they caught them putting the kilos of cocaine in their cars and it’s the biggest drug bust ever and—”