Murder, She Wrote--A Time for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “Now there’s something I’ve never heard before.”

  “It happened twenty-five years ago when I was a substitute teacher in Appleton.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s not even a half hour from here, Mort.”

  “Oh, that Appleton. You’re saying there was a murder at the school?”

  I nodded. And then, in that moment, I figured something else out—an anomaly I should have noted before but had somehow missed.

  “You’ve got that look, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “What look is that, Sheriff Metzger?”

  “The one that says there’s something you’re not ready to tell me yet.”

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  “With you, it’s never nothing.”

  “We’ll figure all that out . . . when I’m ready to tell you, Mort.”

  * * *

  * * *

  I met Seth for dinner back at Mara’s.

  “I think I’ll have the meat loaf,” I said, closing the menu.

  “You always get the meat loaf.”

  “No, I always get the special, which just so happens most of the time to be meat loaf.”

  He closed his menu, too. “Club sandwich for me.”

  “Turkey, of course.”

  “You really are a sleuth, aren’t you?”

  “You always order the same thing, too.”

  “We’re nothing if not predictable, Jess.” Seth set his menu down before him and regarded me with a serious stare. “Could you tell me about Wilma Tisdale?” he asked, referring to the woman who’d invited me to her retirement party, scheduled for the coming Saturday.

  “Not much to tell”—I shrugged—“or at least not much that I remember. She taught math, and we ate lunch together a lot because she started out as a substitute, too.”

  “You weren’t close?”

  “Not particularly. I left all my friends behind when Frank and I moved from Appleton to Cabot Cove.”

  “With good reason, I suppose,” Seth said, sipping his water.

  “Well, there was a death involved.”

  “A murder, more specifically, right?”

  I nodded, sipping the tea the server had already set down before me.

  “There’s always a murder with you, Jessica, but this is one I don’t recall you ever going into much detail about.”

  “There’s a reason for that, Seth.”

  “Which is . . . ?”

  “There’s not a lot to say.”

  “There’s always a lot to say when it comes to murder.”

  “Not this time. I’ve never thought about this before, but it’s almost like talking about my experiences with real-life murders became a lot easier once I started writing about fictional ones.”

  Seth nodded. “The experience in Appleton is unique because it happened before you were published.”

  “Mysteries, anyway.”

  “You’d published something else?”

  “I was a journalism major at Harrison College, you know.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Yes, I’ve published things other than mysteries. Not much, but some.”

  We ordered our meals, Seth looking primed to change the subject once our server, Clara, left the table. “I’ve never heard of anyone impersonating a high school student before.”

  I sipped some more of my tea. “Nothing aroused my suspicions during the interview, nothing at all. She must’ve been very comfortable in the guise.”

  “If you were writing about this in one of your books, what would you say she wanted?”

  “Well,” I said, thinking with my words, “I’d home in on what her primary focus was, based on her line of questioning.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “And in this case, that would be Appleton.”

  “The murder?”

  I nodded. “When I think back to our conversation, it seems she must’ve already known the answer to her own question and was after details.”

  “For a murder that happened before she was born, in all probability. Why, pray tell?”

  I shrugged again. “If I had to guess, I’d say that something new has been added to the equation, something I’m not aware of yet.”

  “I can drive you to Appleton tomorrow afternoon, ayuh, if you want.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Is that a no?”

  I shook my head. “It’s a ‘let me think about it.’ I’m not so sure there’d be anything to gain from that after so many years. There’d be only a handful of teachers left at most who were there back then, and I’ll probably see all of them on Saturday night at the retirement party.”

  “You’re going, then.”

  “I haven’t RSVP’d yet.”

  “But you’re going for sure now. Because it’s business.”

  “You mean murder, Seth.”

  “Same thing in your case.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Mort had dropped me and my Pashley bike at Mara’s, but I insisted on riding it home, against Seth’s protestations.

  “Don’t blame me if the next time you look at me is from a hospital bed in the ER.”

  “I promise.”

  “Because I can’t treat bad judgment. They don’t make a pill for that, and I don’t want to see anyone scraped off the sidewalk.”

  “Your bedside manner could use some work, Seth.”

  “Really?” he said, his gaze turning playful. “Because I don’t care one bit about anything you say.”

  I biked to the Cabot Cove library, instead of straight back to Hill House. Doris Ann, our wonderful librarian, greeted me with her customary enthusiasm and pointed me in the right direction for the old Cabot Cove High School yearbooks.

  My thinking was that, given her knowledge of our town, the young woman who had impersonated Kristi Powell might be a former resident who had attended the high school. Even though I’d be looking at pictures that had been taken anywhere between five and ten years, if not more, since the impostor graduated, I recalled enough of the young woman’s features to be confident I’d be able to spot her amid posed headshots of the members of several senior classes. I started four years back, figuring she’d likely at least have finished college, and stacked ten yearbooks before me, since I didn’t think she was older than twenty-eight or so.

  Two hours later, blurry-eyed and with my fingers lined with paper cuts, I finally abandoned the effort. The general resemblance among people that age, at least in their yearbook photos, had never struck me before to this degree. By the time I finished, the faces were running into one another, and I feared I’d see rows and rows of them all night in my sleep. There were as few as five and as many as twenty female faces that could have been that of the young woman who’d interviewed me earlier in the day in the guise of Kristi Powell. I dutifully recorded their names and any other pertinent information that was listed, intending to cross-check the information against other Cabot Cove rolls to see what might have become of them. With Doris Ann’s help, I could probably complete much of that process right there in the library, but it was too late to bother her with such things, and there was always tomorrow.

  “Anything I can do for you, Jessica?” Doris Ann asked me, suddenly over my shoulder.

  “Is it closing time already?”

  “Twenty minutes ago”—she nodded—“but I’ve got some more inventorying and cataloging to finish up, so you’re welcome to stay.”

  “Thank you. And as for your offer . . .” As my voice trailed off I handed her the list I’d made. “If you can provide any notion of what’s become of these girls, all Cabot Cove High graduates, I’d be even more grateful to you than normal.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Anyth
ing that stands out,” I told Doris Ann. “Anomalies. Oh,” I added as an afterthought, “if any of them went on to become writers or at least tried.”

  Doris Ann looked at the list, then back at me. “Does this have something to do with a case you’re working on?”

  “You know, I’m not sure.” Something else occurred to me. “You don’t keep Appleton High School yearbooks anywhere about?”

  “No, but I think they’re online.”

  * * *

  * * *

  They were indeed. And I went back through seven years of the older ones with nary a result. I was pushing too hard through the fatigue that had caught me in its clutches. As a result, I stopped jotting down the names of potential candidates because one face bled into another until all of them and none of them could have grown up to be the young woman who interviewed me. I resolved to take a fresh look at the same faces in the morning, either at the library again or on my own computer in my suite at Hill House.

  After managing the bike ride back there with the brisk fall air doing its utmost to revive me, I turned on my computer with exactly that intention in mind until another thought struck me. For a book I’d written a few years back called The Dead Man Sang, I’d done considerable research into facial-recognition software. I’d even downloaded a rather professional program to better acquaint myself with the process to make proper use of it.

  I probably should have given into exhaustion, but I figured I’d just spend a few minutes utilizing the software to get the rudimentary details of the young woman’s features down. Two hours later, I was still at it behind the computer and had managed to compile a sketch that looked reasonably like the young woman I’d spent an hour with at Mara’s earlier in the day—the day before now. One more hour tapping away at the keyboard to hone the more intimate details of her face and get her glasses right left me with a more-than-passable likeness I was actually excited about, enough so that I just might take Seth Hazlitt up on his offer to make a field trip to Appleton that afternoon to show the computerized sketch around.

  I didn’t have a color printer. But the sheriff’s department and the library both did, and I was so excited, I decided to e-mail the sketch to Mort immediately. Then I decided to call his cell instead.

  “Do you know what time it is?” he greeted me groggily.

  “Obviously not. I’m sorry, Mort. I must’ve gotten carried away.”

  “Who died?”

  “Nobody yet,” I said, and filled him in on what I’d been doing all night.

  “You should go to sleep,” he said curtly once I’d finished.

  “That the best you can do?”

  “It’s the best I can do at one o’clock in the morning, Jessica.”

  “Deepest apologies for disrupting your beauty sleep, Mort. How can I make it up to you?”

  “Really? How about something you avoided telling me in the office today?”

  “Just name it.”

  I heard Mort yawn on the other end of the line. “That first murder case you got swept into, the one the impostor was so interested in, the one in Appleton twenty-five years ago.”

  “What about it?”

  “I’d like to hear more.”

  Chapter Five

  Twenty-five years ago . . .

  Over my dead body.

  “What was that, Jess?” Frank asked me.

  He startled me so much, I almost fell out of my chair. I’d been hunched over a stack of papers and hadn’t finished correcting a single one, unable to chase out of my head that phone call I’d overheard from outside Walter Reavis’s office that afternoon. I’d scampered out of the school office without keeping the appointment we’d made to discuss his bringing me on full-time as Bill Gower’s replacement. I’d been excited by that prospect all day, only to dash away so Walter wouldn’t think I’d been eavesdropping on his conversation.

  “Just thinking out loud,” I managed, clearing my throat and having no idea what it was Frank thought I’d said.

  Walter Reavis had a private life like everybody else, and I guess I must’ve caught him in an argument with his wife, maybe over one of their children, one of whom, his elder daughter, currently attended Appleton High—a junior, I thought. Or maybe the call had been with one of his children. He had another daughter, in elementary school, and a son who’d just entered the military.

  “Well,” Frank said, grinning, “if you can tear yourself away from your homework, I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  I noticed Grady already had his jacket on and was raring to go, and I recalled that hint Frank had given just after we’d finished breakfast. “Now? It’s been a long day. Could this wait until tomorrow?”

  Frank eased me out of my chair and up onto my feet. “No, my dear, it can’t. That’s why they call it a surprise. Come on—let’s do this while we’ve still got light to burn.”

  I smiled, glad he’d lifted me up physically the way he’d done so often emotionally through this disappointment or that. Frank had been a war hero in the Air Force, hardly a stranger to adversity, and a man who knew how to put on a brave face for his men no matter what the situation was. It’s one thing to spend a good part of your life in the military, quite another to see actual combat, and Frank had seen more than his share.

  We’d met building sets for a play at the Appleton Theater a number of years back. Two single adults who might have appeared lonely to others, if not for the fact that we’d managed to build full lives for ourselves that were instantly enriched when we got together. A head of prematurely gray hair and a penchant for cardigan sweaters made Frank look older than he was. He had the bluest eyes of anyone I’d ever known, the kind of eyes real writers refer to as piercing. But they were warm and reassuring, a perfect complement to the smile he flashed early and often. I got the feeling his experience in the war had left him grateful for the things in life most of us take for granted, which made him the perfect foil for me since I was prone to fixating on the smallest things and lamenting laboriously on what wasn’t right in my life.

  I’d left college with so many dreams, and years later, when I’d first met Frank, I was at a stage where it seemed none of them was going to come true. I’d tried for many of those years to land a job with a major daily newspaper like the Boston Globe, but I couldn’t land one even with the local Appleton paper or the New Hampshire daily based in the town where I settled briefly after graduating from college. That’s why I’d been so looking forward to my meeting with Walter Reavis. Becoming a full-time teacher had never been my dream, but teaching was something I enjoyed, and that would afford me time to continue my passion for writing.

  As Frank held my coat for me to stuff my arms into, I flashed back to the reaction of my students—well, still Bill Gower’s students—to that story of mine I’d assigned them to read. If that wasn’t confirmation enough I was lucky to be on the verge of landing a full-time teaching job, nothing was. Fate was funny that way, I mused again, given that my meeting with the high school principal had been scheduled for just a few hours after I’d been pronounced by a bunch of fifteen-year-olds a failure as a writer.

  Of course, the girl named Missy had thought she was reading a mystery. Given that was my favorite genre to read, I guess my own preferred tastes had found their way into a story I fantasized about being published in The New Yorker.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Frank as he snatched his car keys from the hook by the door. “I should be fixing dinner.”

  “There’ll be time for that later. I want to see the look on your face.”

  “When?”

  He winked at Grady, who winked back. “When we get there.”

  * * *

  * * *

  “Cabot Cove?” I said when, twenty minutes later, we cruised past the town limits along a road that rimmed the shoreline. “What kind of surprise have you got for me in Cabot Cove?”

 
Frank checked his watch, even though it would’ve been easier to check the dashboard clock. A habit that had become ingrained in him during the war, and this was the very watch he’d worn through its entire duration. Truth be told, I’m not sure I ever saw him take it off.

  “You know when I talk, I slow down, and if I slow down, we’ll miss our appointment. I don’t want to be late.”

  “Frank?”

  “What?”

  “You’re talking.”

  He glanced at the speedometer and saw he was slowing down well below the speed limit.

  “Why don’t you ever drive us, Aunt Jess?” Grady asked from the backseat.

  “Because I don’t have a license.”

  The boy rolled his eyes. “All grown-ups drive, Aunt Jess.”

  “You know,” Frank chimed in, “you could let me teach you. You let me teach you how to fly an airplane.”

  “Yes, but that was different.”

  “How?”

  “We had the sky all to ourselves.”

  “If you can get your pilot’s license, my dear, you can get your driver’s license.”

  “I have my bike, and you to drive me.”

  “I’m not always going to be around, Jess.”

  “Frank?”

  “What?”

  “You’re slowing down again.”

  * * *

  * * *

  We wound our way through the outskirts of nearby Cabot Cove and through the rustic town center lined with shops that had been in business for generations. What a wonderful place to live this must be, something Frank and I had often ruminated about, even though the houses were well out of our price range. But now that I was on the verge of being hired full-time at Appleton High . . .

  Perchance to dream, as Shakespeare wrote.

  Even though he wasn’t talking, Frank cruised the streets slowly, checking the signs carefully as if either lost or looking for one street in particular. The last of the light was burning from the sky when he jammed the brakes hard enough to jostle both Grady and me.