Murder, She Wrote--A Time for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “Frank,” I said in my scolding voice.

  “Didn’t want to miss our turn, Jess.”

  I looked up at the sign that reflected what little light remained of the day.

  “Candlewood Lane?”

  “Yup.”

  “That sounds familiar. . . .”

  “Yup.”

  “We sat in our car staring at a house on Candlewood Lane for something like an hour once, didn’t we?”

  “Yup,” he said, applying the brakes in more gingerly fashion this time.

  “That house,” I realized as he pulled up in front of the beautiful, stately white Victorian at 698.

  “Yup,” he said one last time. “It came up for sale, wouldn’t you know?”

  He and Grady bounded out of the car, leaving me in the front seat too weak-kneed from staring at the house to move. Frank had to practically lift me out, as a smiling woman with the blondest hair I’d ever seen approached from her car.

  “Mr. Fletcher, I’m Eve Simpson from Cabot Cove Realty. I work for Harry Pierce. We spoke earlier”—then after casting me a quick smile—“several times.”

  “You sell her yet?” Frank asked, eyeing 698 Candlewood Lane.

  “Not since lunchtime, no.” Eve Simpson checked her watch, the kind of person already starting her next appointment while she was finishing yours. “Would you like to see the house?”

  “That’s what we came for,” Frank said, while I remained tongue-tied, head over heels in love with the house already.

  “Your timing is perfect, Mr. Fletcher. The owners have already relocated and are quite motivated to sell.”

  “How far are they willing to come down? Because we can’t even come close to affording the asking price.”

  “Not even close? Not even in the ballpark?”

  “Depends on the ballpark, Ms. Simpson.”

  * * *

  * * *

  In the backyard there was a swing that Grady set himself to play on beneath the spray of an outdoor floodlight, while Frank and I stood on the screened porch. Eve Simpson was nowhere to be found, having left us on our own as she placed a call on her mobile phone. Not many had what people also called cell phones, and judging by the number of times Eve said, “What?” or “I can’t hear you,” I could see why. I imagined myself with one of the newfangled things—me, who couldn’t even manage the workings of a car.

  Then again, I could fly a plane.

  “We’ll never be able to afford it, Frank.”

  “Do you trust me, Jessica?”

  He lowered his voice dramatically—he had, after all, been a thespian before he’d turned his talents to set decorating and building. I’d been assigned painting duties at the Appleton Theater, and my work was so terrible that almost all of it had to be redone. I blamed my infatuation with Frank for distracting me, but I’m sure the theater company was glad to be rid of me for future productions.

  “I’ve got a plan,” he continued. “We can cash in a chunk of my military pension for the down payment.”

  “Frank—”

  “Shush now, my dear. Don’t you go arguing with me. You talked about this house for two days straight after we spotted it.”

  “It wasn’t for sale then. I was just dreaming.”

  He reached over and ran a hand through my hair, then held his hand against my cheek. “I love that look on your face when you’re dreaming.”

  “As in, asleep?”

  He cupped my other cheek with his free hand and drew me in closer. “Everyone dreams when they sleep. Only the special ones dream when they’re awake. I look at you drifting and wonder where you’ve gone off to.”

  “Sometimes I don’t know myself. My mind starts to wander, and off I go with it.”

  “To places that are yours and yours alone. Let me make this place yours, too.”

  “Are you sure, Frank?”

  “Never surer of anything in my life.”

  I glanced at Grady going higher and higher on the swing, climbing toward the heavens. “But can we afford it?”

  “Absolutely not. So we’ll find a way, just like we always do.”

  The clacking of heels announced the return of Eve Simpson.

  “So,” she said, mobile phone in hand, “what are we thinking?”

  * * *

  * * *

  We lingered in the front yard for a time after Eve Simpson left for her next appointment. Grady was in the car listening to his favorite radio station, though we didn’t expect so many songs to have come and gone while we stood there.

  “She’s a beauty, all right, ayuh?”

  The voice came from a man in a sweater buttoned all the way up to his neck. He was approaching along the street near where it met the edge of the lawn, which seemed to extend forever.

  “I delivered the boys who lived here, watched them grow up, and gave them their physicals for college. Three, one after the other.”

  He was a kindly-looking sort with salt-and-pepper hair and a belly protruding slightly over his belt. He hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his sweater, then raised one hand to take off his glasses.

  “I can tell you who lives in every house now and who lived there before them. They all got a story to tell, most happy but some not.” He cast his gaze on 698 Candlewood Lane. “This one’s all happy since the time it was built ninety years ago. I could give you the whole history, if you want.”

  “Frank Fletcher,” Frank said, extending his hand. “And this is my wife, Jessica.”

  “Seth Hazlitt,” the friendly man greeted us, taking Frank’s hand. “You folks have children?”

  I was about to offer an explanation when Frank said simply, “Yes.”

  “Well, no better place to grow up than Cabot Cove. You look up ‘quiet’ in the dictionary, there’s a picture of our town. Reason people move out from time to time, as a matter of fact, is nothing ever happens here. And as for crime, most folks I know don’t even bother to lock their doors. We did have a murder here once, but nobody can say exactly when that was. You folks would be real happy here.” He reached into his pocket and came out with a business card. “Put this somewhere you can always find it. Once you move in, you may require my services.”

  Frank checked the card. “Thank you, Doctor.”

  “That’s Seth to my friends. And if you live in Cabot Cove, odds are you’re my friend. All my patients are my friends—a fine thing until it comes to collecting the bills,” he said, smiling. “I’ll be leaving you folks to the house now. Don’t say ‘good-bye’ to her when you leave. Say ‘so long.’”

  Grady honked the horn, which was Dr. Seth Hazlitt’s cue to resume his evening constitutional and ours to head on home. In the car, I kept my gaze cocked backward through the darkness at 698 Candlewood Lane until Frank swung around the corner and the house vanished from sight. But I saw it every time I closed my eyes and could barely sleep that night, I was so excited over the prospect of our potentially buying it. I was concerned that, seeing how much I loved it, Frank would make the sale happen no matter what, and I resolved to insist that we exercise restraint and discipline going forward. Not that it would matter. Frank was as headstrong as I was when it came to his singular focus on a goal and pursuing that goal with relentless intensity until it had been achieved.

  That said, I awoke the next morning never having felt better about the future. Grady had settled into his life with us, I was about to be brought on full-time at Appleton High, and in the near future, we might be the proud owners of a beautiful home in tony Cabot Cove. I could barely wait for Frank to drop me at school so I could meet up with Walter Reavis to explain away my “failure” to show up for our meeting and, I hoped, pick up our discussion about my future.

  “Oh my, what’s this?” Frank said as he braked the car well before our normal drop-off point.

  I looked up f
rom the stack of papers I’d been sorting through on my lap and saw a pair of Appleton police cars to go with a quartet of Maine State Police vehicles and a dark wagon with no markings.

  “That’s the coroner’s wagon, Jess,” Frank told me.

  I bounded out of the car in the next moment, the stack of papers shed to the floor and my shoulder bag left behind. Thankfully, as was our custom, Frank had dropped Grady off at Appleton Elementary first, sparing us the need to explain to an eight-year-old what a coroner’s wagon was.

  I rushed up to the front of the school, where a number of my colleagues were milling about as students filed silently past them into the building. I’d never heard it so quiet at this time of the day, so quiet that the collective rumbling of the buses sounded more like a roar. I spotted Wilma Tisdale approaching me.

  “Oh, Jessica,” she said, hugging me lightly. “Did you hear?”

  “It’s Walter Reavis, isn’t it?” I said, gazing inside the building, my voice full of dread.

  Wilma nodded sadly. “He’s—”

  “Dead,” I completed for her, picturing Walter found dead of a heart attack at his desk that morning in the wake of that argument I’d overheard him having over the phone the previous afternoon.

  “Not just that,” Wilma Tisdale told me. “He might have been murdered.”

  Chapter Six

  The present

  We’re going to have to finish this later, Jessica,” Mort interrupted me over the phone.

  I looked around the living room portion of my suite, reacquainting myself with the time and stunned at how late it had gotten.

  “Sorry, Mort. I must’ve lost track of time. Again.”

  “It’s not that. I just got a text. A body’s been found. Looks like we’ve got a murder on our hands in the present, too.”

  “Who?”

  “You’re not going to believe this, Mrs. Fletcher: a woman who meets the description of the one who interviewed you yesterday morning.”

  * * *

  * * *

  He was right: I didn’t believe it.

  I was waiting outside Hill House when Mort picked me up in his department-issue SUV. He was on the police radio for the entire drive to the outskirts of Cabot Cove and one of the few remaining scenic overlooks in the region. I’m not sure where the term originated or why town managers throughout Maine thought it would be a good idea to carve out wide swaths of road that resembled the truck weigh stations that still dot much of the East Coast highway system.

  This particular scenic overlook didn’t overlook much of anything anymore, given the lack of pruning and upkeep on the undeveloped land beneath the overlook that would have once been described as “rustic” but now might more aptly be labeled “crumbling.” Two Cabot Cove cruisers, their lights flashing, were already on the scene, parked on either side of an older, and smaller, BMW.

  “Nice car for a high school student,” Mort said, frowning at me as if I were somehow to blame for not figuring out the ruse earlier.

  “The young lady was already inside Mara’s when I got there, and we left separately, so I never saw what she was driving. And let’s not jump to conclusions until we’re sure it’s her.”

  One look inside the car told me it was. The young woman I knew as Kristi Powell had clearly been shot. Of all the murder victims I’ve come upon in my time, those killed with guns have always taken the greatest toll on me. I can’t explain why exactly. I mean, murder is murder, the means not nearly as important as the act itself and finding justice for the victim. But there’s something about the sudden finality of a gunshot, the brutality of it, not to mention the blood and the mess. In my books, a great number of murders are random acts, as opposed to premeditated ones. The killers respond on impulse and do something they’ll have to spend the rest of their lives lying about and covering up. And beyond that, my experience, at least through research, has yielded the fact that the majority of gun murders are not acts of passion so much as acts of planning. Whoever this young woman really was, that was the kind of crime she’d fallen victim to tonight.

  The driver’s-side window was down, and the young woman’s head rested on the windowsill, a neat bullet hole carved just above her right temple. Her body was twisted at an odd angle, as if she were reaching for something she never got the chance to grab. Her left hand dangled outside the car, and her right had flopped into her lap. Gazing into the car, I noticed on the floor a pair of glasses that I recognized as the ones she’d been wearing when we’d met at Mara’s the day before.

  The young woman who’d impersonated Kristi Powell was wearing different clothes than the ones I recalled from fifteen hours earlier, now the previous day: she was now wearing black tights, shapely boots, and a waist-length tapered leather jacket that I was certain bore the label of some fancy designer.

  “Tell me what you’re seeing, Mrs. F.,” Mort said, using the pet name he’d given me in his early years as sheriff of Cabot Cove.

  Maybe murder made him nostalgic.

  “The killer was inside the car when he or she shot the victim,” I told him.

  Mort nodded, squeezing his hands into a pair of latex evidence gloves. “And you know this because . . .”

  “The same way someone with twenty-five years in the NYPD does.” I backed slightly away from the driver’s-side window. “Had the victim not known her killer, or the murderer approached from this angle, she would’ve been shot in the opposite temple and slumped toward the passenger side of the car instead of toward the driver’s window.”

  Mort nodded again. I couldn’t tell whether he was a step ahead of or even with me in his thinking. “What else?”

  “She’s not wearing her seat belt. That tells me she took it off because she was waiting for someone to show up.”

  “Positioning of the car could be a giveaway to that, too, Mrs. F.”

  “Of course. Someone who makes a random stop to place a call, think, or whatever else normally parks nose in. The fact that the victim backed in against the fence there indicates this was a prearranged meeting, not a random encounter. She arrived first and was waiting and watching when the killer arrived. If the order had been reversed, she would have pulled in next to the killer’s vehicle. No need to back in next to it.”

  “Good point,” Mort said, looking down at the asphalt as if it might yield something through the chilly darkness. “I’ll ask the forensic team from the Maine State Police to check for tire tracks.”

  “You may want to cordon the area off in the meantime.”

  He fingered his chin as if what I’d just suggested was some kind of epiphany. “You know, that’s a smart idea. Too bad a cop with twenty-five years’ experience in New York would never have thought of it.”

  I ignored his remark and circled round to the other side of the BMW, not bothering to suggest that Mort check the door for prints. “The killer shot her from the passenger seat. The victim saw the gun in time to turn away, maybe try to flee. That explains the odd angle of the entry wound.”

  “Couldn’t she just as easily have been shot from outside the car?”

  “I suppose. Only the window’s closed now, and it wouldn’t have been open then either because of the cold. And yanking a door open and shooting someone at the same time would be a difficult task for all but the most experienced gunmen. No, Mort,” I said, turning back toward him, “whoever killed this woman wanted to be sure. I think that the forensics team will find powder burns that prove the bullet was fired from no more than two feet away.”

  “Want to know what I see, Mrs. F.?”

  I had no idea why he’d taken to calling me that again. “Oh, did I leave something out, Sheriff?”

  “A second bullet.”

  “Second bullet?”

  Mort shone his flashlight toward the black upholstered ceiling on the driver’s side above the victim. “You see this slight crease her
e? Looks to me like this was the first shot fired, but the victim managed to deflect the shooter’s hand, sending the bullet askew.”

  “Maybe she thought she’d hurt the killer,” I postulated, “at least enough to try to make a run for it instead of continuing the struggle. And that tells me it was a struggle against a stronger opponent, a struggle she didn’t think she’d be able to win.”

  “A man, then.”

  “I was just about to say that.”

  “Sure, steal my thunder.” Mort stepped away from the BMW, squeezing his chin and shining his flashlight about at nothing in particular. “So, somewhere around twelve hours after interviewing you,” he continued, “a young woman who claimed to be a high school student winds up dead.”

  “Be nice if we could trace back where she’d been for those twelve hours. She must’ve gone somewhere to change, and if we check the trunk, I wouldn’t be surprised if we found an overnight bag of some kind.”

  “Meaning she may have checked into one of the gazillion motels within easy driving distance,” Mort agreed. “I’ll put my deputies on that as soon as we get some photos.”

  That made me think of the sketch I’d created of the young woman. As I looked at her face again, the likeness was incredible. Mort was shining his flashlight over the car again, first in the front seat and then in the back, until his beam stopped on the fashionable shoulder bag resting on the floor behind the driver’s seat. I could picture the victim lifting it from the passenger seat and stowing it there when her killer arrived. In my mind, I saw it all unfold as if I’d been standing right there. What I didn’t know was how much time had passed, or what the purpose of the meeting had been, before the fatal shot had been fired.

  “No wallet or ID,” Mort said, riffling gently through the contents of the bag with his evidence gloves.

  “Belated attempt to make it look like a robbery, you think?”

  “Could be. Or maybe some kind of tryst set up on one of those Internet sites gone wrong.”