Murder, She Wrote--A Time for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “I might already have that somewhere on file. We update the list at the beginning of every school year for security reasons, don’t we?”

  “Since I don’t drive, I guess I wouldn’t know.”

  I smiled back at her and started to walk off.

  “Mrs. Fletcher?” Alma called to me.

  I stopped and turned back around. “Yes?”

  She was holding a key dangling from a wooden key chain that looked like a hall pass. “You forgot the key to Mr. Reavis’s office.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Amos Tupper stripped the crime scene tape down and inserted into the lock the key Alma Potts had provided.

  “Did I tell you this was my first murder investigation?” he asked me before turning the key in the lock.

  “You did, yes. A few days back.”

  He swallowed hard. “You believe in ghosts, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  “I’ve never really given it much thought, Amos.”

  “Because a few times when I looked up or turned around inside this office, I could swear I glimpsed Mr. Reavis sitting behind his desk, looking at me and wondering what I was doing here.”

  “Next time, maybe he’ll remain there long enough to tell us who killed him.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The office was shadowy, somber, drenched in semidarkness. Amos flipped on the lights, and immediately the room was bathed in overly bright light shining down from old-fashioned fluorescents that had somehow survived from one building renovation to the next. I looked down at the carpet and imagined Walter’s body still lying in the place where I had identified it earlier in the week, and I got a chill up my spine thinking of what Amos Tupper had said about catching glimpses of the principal’s ghost.

  “Now, tell me about this hunch of yours, Mrs. Fletcher,” he said.

  “This office is currently in the exact condition it was in when Walter Reavis’s body was discovered. Is that right?”

  “Yes, definitely.”

  “Nobody moved a thing or altered it in any way?”

  “Most certainly not. The state police—those officers who don’t think much of me—secured it as soon as our own patrolman confirmed Mr. Reavis was dead.”

  “And he remembered not to touch anything?”

  “According to his report in capital letters.”

  “What about this phone, Amos?” I said, moving around to the back of Walter Reavis’s desk, careful not to move the chair lest I disturb the ghost Amos claimed to have spotted.

  “The phone?”

  “None of your officers or the state policemen would have placed a call from it, correct?”

  “We’re professionals, Mrs. Fletcher,” he said as if offended. “Why is the phone so important, anyway?”

  “Because of that heated conversation I overheard when I was standing at the door. It’s possible, fifty-fifty, that Mr. Reavis placed that call.”

  “Okay,” he said, joining me behind the desk.

  “In which case,” I continued, pointing toward a button marked REDIAL, “the last number dialed might well have been to the person he was arguing with.”

  “Only one way to find out who that might be, I suppose.”

  We looked at each other as if to determine how to proceed.

  “Would you like to do the honors, ma’am?”

  I reached down and pressed the SPEAKER key, followed by REDIAL. Amos Tupper and I listened to the numbers being dialed out from the phone’s memory, followed by a line ringing. It was answered after the fourth ring, and we were greeted briefly with dead air before an answering machine came on.

  “Hi, you’ve reached the Dirkson residence. Please leave your name, number, and—”

  Amos Tupper reached down and hit the SPEAKER button to end the call. “Looks like we need to have a talk with Appleton High’s acting principal, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The present

  Our food arrived at our booth in Frank Pepe’s in the Chestnut Hill Mall, and I took that as my cue to stop.

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to stop there,” Seth pleaded.

  “I don’t want our pizza to get cold.”

  His eyes widened as he regarded it, looking like a kid on Christmas morning. “What’d you think of the psychiatrist?” he asked me as he reached for the nearest piece, only to pull his fingers back when it proved to be still too hot.

  “She confirmed what’s become clearer and clearer through the week, Seth: Ginny Genaway was a deeply unstable young woman.”

  “You think?”

  “You’re the doctor. What do you think?”

  “I try to hold off making judgments on those I’ve never examined or, at least, been acquainted with. But I would tend to agree with your assessment.”

  “It’s unlike you to couch your words like that, Seth.”

  “I’m trying to sound like a psychiatrist.”

  “You mean, like Sam Sackler.”

  “I looked into her a bit before we made the drive, Jess. She’s considered one of the best in Boston.”

  “That makes her a fine doctor to emulate.”

  The pizza had cooled enough for Seth to peel off a slice angled to his side of the table, careful to keep it from shedding its considerable toppings.

  “I’m thinking about making an appointment to see her myself,” Seth said, going to work on his slice with a knife and fork. “Maybe she can help me stop getting involved in your investigations. I’m going to ask for the Jessica Fletcher discount, which she must have, given the number of people you’ve driven crazy over the years, ayuh. You drove poor Amos Tupper all the way to Kentucky.”

  “Did I mention that I spoke with him the other day?”

  “No. How is the old coot?”

  “He’s just a few years older than you, Seth.”

  “Right, but he’s a coot while I’m a curmudgeon, according to the good folks of Cabot Cove.”

  I finally lifted a slice of plain cheese from my half of the pizza. “Anyway, he sounds fine. Maybe a little bored out there, but fine.”

  “Think he misses Cabot Cove?”

  “I know he misses being sheriff.”

  Seth lifted a second slice from the tray. “I’m still having trouble picturing him as a detective.”

  “So did the town of Appleton twenty-five years ago, but he proved them all wrong.”

  Seth blew on his slice of pizza to cool it down a bit more. “Let me ask you a question, Jess: Would he have ultimately solved the case without you?”

  “I guess we’ll never know, will we?” I said noncommittally.

  “Then let me ask you another question: Where to next?”

  “Manchester, Doctor,” I said, imitating the way both he and Sackler had exaggerated the syllables. “To give Ginny Genaway’s apartment another look.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The building manager was on-site again and he didn’t even question my desire to take another look inside Ginny’s apartment downtown at 875 Elm Street when we got there just before four o’clock, perhaps confusing me with a real police officer, given that I’d accompanied one there during my first visit.

  “Rent’s paid up for the next six months,” he explained, “so I’m not in any rush to clean the place out. Take your time,” he added, opening the door for Seth and me while giving no indication he intended to join us inside.

  “So, what are we looking for?” Seth asked me after I’d closed the door behind us.

  “I really have no idea. Something I didn’t see when I was here with Mort.”

  “If you didn’t see it the first time, how do you know what you’re looking for now?”

  “I’ll know when I find it,” I proclaimed halfheartedly.

  But Seth was right. When you
don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s very hard to find it. I thought back to our conversation with Dr. Sackler, and focused on the timeline she’d more or less confirmed. Something had changed drastically in Ginny Genaway’s life around six months ago, when she’d started breaking appointments with Sackler and developed a fascination with the Cabot Cove Gazette and, likely, Cabot Cove itself. Everything pointed to the likelihood that this had something to do with her late sister, her late father, or both. Everything I’d been able to uncover about her, starting with that interview she’d conducted with me under a false guise, suggested she was on the trail of something that Dr. Sackler might have revealed to us with a line she’d spoken almost as an afterthought.

  I can tell you one thing: Ginny didn’t believe the police ever caught her father’s real killer.

  If Ginny’s suspicions were correct, that would mean my first murder investigation had sent the wrong person to jail, that I’d convinced myself, Amos Tupper, and an entire town that an innocent person was the guilty party. And that meant I now had another reason to get to the bottom of what Ginny had been after, which had likely led to her death.

  What if Walter Reavis’s killer had been released from prison, though? After twenty-five years, given the charge was murder in the second degree, it was more than possible the killer had gotten out, perhaps to pick up killing again. Since I was the one who’d caught the killer, you’d think I would have kept better tabs on things, but the truth was I’d resolved to do my best to put the entire experience behind me and never revisit it.

  Having again found nothing of value to the case in any drawers or storage boxes, I had begun to wonder whether our search was truly futile when I glimpsed Seth tossing a piece of gum in the kitchen trash.

  “Don’t do that!” I yelled at him.

  “What?”

  “Throw your gum away!”

  He looked at me dumbfounded. “What, you want me to swallow it?”

  “No, I meant don’t toss it in the trash.”

  “Where am I supposed to toss it?”

  Instead of bickering with Seth further, I moved to the kitchen trash container, located under the sink, but found only his piece of gum inside, clinging to the liner about halfway down.

  “You know, Jess, if book sales are down, I could spot you a few bucks so you don’t have to go picking through other people’s trash.”

  He followed me from the kitchen into the second bedroom, which Ginny Genaway had converted into a makeshift office. In there a smaller wastebasket was practically overflowing. I was able to discard the magazines quickly, then began straightening out a whole bunch of crumpled pages to view their contents.

  If you really want to know somebody, check out their trash. . . . I forgot where I’d heard or read that pearl of wisdom, but it certainly was coming into play.

  “Anything I can do to help?” Seth asked.

  “I wish there were, Seth,” I told him, moving to another crumpled sheet of paper. “But I can’t tell you what to look for if I don’t know myself.”

  “What about that?” he said, pointing to the wooden floor where a jagged piece of paper had been ripped but not crumpled.

  My efforts might have toppled it from the wastebasket. But it could have been there all along. I could picture Ginny tearing a piece of paper in two, three, or four and then discarding the fragments, only to have them flutter to the floor unnoticed.

  “What is it?” Seth asked, moving in over my shoulder.

  “Here, take a look,” I said, holding the jagged piece of paper up for him to see.

  We regarded the large capitalized letters together:

  AMED PRIN

  Based on the nature of the tears, it was clear that something had been ripped off from the beginning and another fragment had been torn from the end.

  “Make any sense to you, Seth?” I wondered since it didn’t to me.

  “Not a thing. Well, except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  His eyes widened, his smile playing with me. “You mean this old coot may finally have something on the brilliant Jessica Fletcher?”

  “I thought it was ‘old curmudgeon,’ and why don’t you tell me what you see?”

  “Look closer, Jess.”

  “I already did.”

  “Try again.”

  I obliged him, and was struck instantly by what I’d missed before. “It must be the Web version of the paper,” I realized. “I only read the print edition.”

  “Either way,” Seth said, “it’s the Cabot Cove Gazette for sure. I’d recognize that font anywhere.”

  We fished through the trash, and our sorting process became more deliberate. Soon we found a similarly torn and also crumpled smaller fragment of what looked to be another part of the same headline, judging by the type size and face:

  F THE Y

  “No sense I can see here,” Seth noted.

  “Looks like we’re missing one word that ends in F and another that begins with Y.”

  “As I said, no sense there.”

  I laid the two fragments side by side to see what they added up to:

  AMED PRIN F THE Y

  “Ring any bells, Seth?”

  “You’re the Scrabble champion.”

  “But you’ve been watching Wheel of Fortune for as long as I’ve known you.”

  “What, you want me to buy a vowel or something?”

  I stared at the two fragments together until my vision began to blur and the letters were implanted in my brain to the point where I’d likely see them in my sleep.

  AMED PRIN F THE Y

  * * *

  * * *

  The newspaper’s editor and owner, Evelyn Phillips, wasn’t in when we called the office, so I left a message with my cell phone number for her to call me back immediately. If I’d been in town, it would’ve been a simple matter of heading over to the paper’s offices on Main Street to check the Gazette’s files myself so as not to waste any more time. I was able to log on to the website on my phone right there in Ginny Genaway’s apartment. But a search for AMED PRIN F THE Y yielded nothing the first time I searched and then something like five thousand hits when I tried various letters in front of AMED.

  Meaning we were still at square one here.

  That left me with no choice but to wait for Evelyn Phillips to call back, which meant I’d have to accommodate her questions about the state of the investigation into Ginny Genaway’s murder.

  “Well, at least we found something that made it worth the trip,” Seth said, climbing into his old Volvo.

  I was holding the fragments in my lap, unable to lift my gaze from them as if the rest of the newspaper headline was about to magically appear.

  “I’ll bet you a piece of pie at Mara’s that the date on that issue goes back six months,” Seth said, “just before Ginny Genaway started picking up hard copies of the Gazette.”

  “I thought you were on a diet.”

  “I am, but I’ll make an exception if you’re buying, ayuh.”

  “How about a side bet about when Evelyn Phillips will get back to us?”

  “Ready to get on home, then?” Seth asked me, firing up the Volvo’s engine.

  After all these years, it still purred like a kitten. “You mind if we make another stop on the way?” I asked him.

  “Where?”

  “Cape Elizabeth. We need to tell Maddie Demerest that her older daughter is dead, Seth.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The museum was closed for the day by the time we got to Cape Elizabeth under cover of darkness that found the now-automated lighthouse’s massive revolving light brightening the sky far over the waters of the Atlantic, steering ships away from the rocky shoreline as it had done for centuries. Rapping on the main door brought no result, so we tried around the side
of the building where the entrance to the museum and residence portion of the facility lay. The door there wasn’t just unlocked; it was open, having fallen prey to the stiff wind blowing off the ocean.

  “Maybe we should call the police, Jess.”

  I was already through the door at that point, racing up the stairs to the apartment Maddie Demerest kept as a fringe benefit of conducting lighthouse tours and running the museum. I could see the door at the top of those stairs was open, too.

  “Maddie?” I called. “It’s Jessica Fletcher, Maddie.”

  Feeling my heart pounding against my rib cage, I raced through the doorway and froze. Because Maddie Demerest lay on the floor.

  * * *

  * * *

  My first thought, as my heart continued to pound, was that she’d joined both her daughters and husband as a victim of foul play. Then I heard her moan softly just as Seth joined me inside the doorway, his hands sinking to his knees as he fought to get his breath back. When he spotted Maddie on the floor, he sprang into action. He checked her pulse and her breathing, and checked her pupils with a small penlight it had been his habit to carry for as long as I’d known him. She moaned again when he held one eyelid open and then the other.

  She was slumped on the floor between the galley kitchen and the living space, where a television was playing softly. She had fallen on a patch of the floor that was still wet from a spill and banged her head, judging by the lump Seth detected.

  Just then, Maddie Demerest’s eyes fluttered open. “Am I dead?” she asked Seth.

  “No.”

  “Then who are you?”

  “This is Dr. Seth Hazlitt, Maddie, a friend of mine,” I said, drawing the woman’s gaze my way and opting to address her as I would someone I knew far better.