Murder, She Wrote--A Time for Murder
Page 23
* * *
* * *
The woman at the bar while I’d been talking to Jim Dirkson! She didn’t have the same spiky hairdo in the picture, but it was definitely Kristen, daughter of the late Alma Potts.
“Did I just hear you right, Mrs. Fletcher?”
“If you have to ask me that, you know you did.”
“I’m going to put out an all-points bulletin on her,” Mort informed me, sounding as determined as he did surprised by this revelation. “I’m going to call in the state police to help us track her down.”
I heard a knock on my door and tried to ignore it until it fell again, louder and more incessant this time.
“There’s someone at my door, Mort.”
“Genaway’s thugs, maybe? I’m staying on the line.”
I took the phone, and thus Mort, with me as I walked across the room, threw back the lock, and drew open the door.
“We caught this one snooping around the floor, Mrs. Fletcher,” Joe told me, Nails behind him holding a figure by the arm. “We figured we’d best let you know.”
Joe stepped aside, clearing my line of vision to the figure Nails held by one hand in a grasp that looked like it could have cracked walnuts. I dropped the phone, Mort’s voice resounding up from the floor.
“Jessica, is everything all right? . . . Jessica?”
I didn’t know what to tell him, because standing before me was Kristen Potts.
* * *
* * *
Mort sped over to Hill House with two of his deputies in tow after making me promise not to say a word to Alma Potts’s daughter until he arrived, which took all of nine minutes. His men took her into custody, handcuffs and all, while Mort engaged in a staring contest with Joe and Nails.
“What’s the charge, Officer?” a smirking Kristen Potts asked him.
“Let’s start with suspicion of murder and go from there.”
The smirk vanished. “‘Murder’?”
Mort nodded. “And it’s ‘sheriff,’ not ‘officer,’ by the way.”
Down at the sheriff’s station, the deputies escorted Kristen into the sole interview room and remained with her, while I pleaded my case to Mort to let me participate in the interview slash interrogation.
“Can you hold your tongue, just this once?” he relented finally.
“You know I can.”
“No, I don’t, because you’ve never been able to before in all the years we’ve known each other. Maybe you should consider sitting this one out.”
“Got any duct tape in your office, Sheriff?”
“What for?”
“So I can cover up my mouth.”
* * *
* * *
In the end, I decided to rely on force of will instead. Mort and I sat on one side of the table, the still-handcuffed Kristen Potts on the other, her face utterly blank.
“I didn’t kill Wilma Tisdale, Sheriff,” she said without being prompted, before Mort had even said a word.
“I notice you weren’t on the invite list, Ms. Potts. Care to explain what led you to crash the party?”
“I wanted to give that woman a piece of my mind, that’s all.”
“Long trip for something you could’ve done over the phone. At last check, you were living in Pennsylvania.”
“I’ve been moving around a lot the last few years.”
“So your file says.”
“Walter Reavis was principal at Appleton High,” I chimed in, “where your mother worked. Did you ever meet him?”
Kris nodded a single time. “When I was a little girl and they both worked at the middle school. I was in the mall with a friend and her mother. I spotted them together at a restaurant. I was too young to realize what I was looking at, but I didn’t stay young forever,” she said, confirming her mother’s motive for killing Walter Reavis twenty-five years ago.
“That make you mad?” Mort asked Alma’s daughter.
“I was in denial.”
“But you don’t deny crashing Wilma Tisdale’s party last night.”
“Why bother?” she asked, fixing her gaze on me. “I practically bumped into the great Jessica Fletcher there.”
“Thank you,” I couldn’t help but say, drawing a caustic stare from Mort.
“A real hero, aren’t you? Made your bones getting my mother arrested for murder.”
“She confessed, Kris,” I said, sensing Mort’s ire. “You should keep that in mind.”
“That doesn’t mean Wilma Tisdale had to steal the pension she’d worked her whole life accumulating from my brother and me, does it?”
“From what I hear, the money instead ended up going in one lump sum to the family of the man your mother murdered,” Mort informed her. “How’d that make you feel, Kris? Upset enough maybe to kill Walter Reavis’s two daughters: Lisa Joy fourteen years ago and Ginny last week after she somehow caught on to your involvement?”
I have to say that Mort was really impressing me here. I guess you can take the cop out of the NYPD, but you can’t take the NYPD out of the cop.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I wonder if the FBI might take an interest in you, too, Kris. As a matter of fact, I wonder if you’ll be able to account for your whereabouts on the night Lisa Joy was killed in Alabama.”
“I’ve never been to Alabama in my life, Sheriff.”
“Then you’ve got nothing to fear from the FBI. Of course, if you come clean to me you’ll find us local authorities a lot more willing to work with you than the feds. Believe me, I know of what I speak. And if you didn’t intend to do Wilma Tisdale any harm, what were you doing at her party last night?”
“I already told you I was going to confront her.”
“Get yourself a little satisfaction, then,” Mort said, nodding.
“I guess.”
“Why not get yourself a lot by sticking a knife in her back instead? Why else would you have fled the scene after the lights came back on?”
“Because I was already gone before they went off. I changed my mind after I spotted Mrs. Fletcher at the bar. Figured she might tell Wilma I was there.”
“Except I’d never met you and had no idea what you looked like,” I said, not able to help myself. Mort did not seem to mind my interruption this time. “So how was I supposed to tell anyone you were there?”
“I panicked, got cold feet. And Wilma Tisdale deserved worse than a knife in the back.”
“I don’t know how much worse it gets than that,” Mort interjected. “Maybe you’ll find out, Kris. We don’t have the death penalty in Maine, but they still do in Alabama.”
“Look, Sheriff,” she said, her voice and her facade of bravado both cracking, “I’ve made my share of mistakes and done more than my share of stupid things, but I’ve never killed anyone.” She shook her head, her expression laced with self-loathing. “You want to know the worst of it? My mother going to the ceremony honoring Walter Reavis as Principal of the Year. I think that was the moment that broke her, just a few months before she finally did the town a service by cracking his head open.”
I didn’t hear Mort’s next question. I was too fixated on what Kristen Potts had just said about Walter Reavis being named Principal of the Year and on resuming the Scrabble game I’d played on my computer the night before.
AMED PRIN F THE Y.
In that moment, I knew the rest of that newspaper headline from the Cabot Cove Gazette.
And I also knew who’d killed Ginny Genaway and Wilma Tisdale.
Chapter Twenty-five
Sheriff, could I see you outside for a moment?”
Mort caught the look in my eyes and followed me out of the interview room, signaling a patrolman to watch over Kristen Potts.
“I know who the killer is,” I told him, still feeling numb.
“Not at all.”
Evelyn Phillips finally called back at that moment, her call probably the only one I would have even considered taking. “About time, Evelyn,” I said after putting my phone on speaker so Mort could listen, too.
“Just make sure I get an exclusive on all these murders once you bring the killer to justice. Anyway, I got your messages. What you don’t know is that there’s a very good reason why Dr. Hazlitt couldn’t find that headline in the Gazette. I’ve also taken over the local Appleton paper.”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Nobody is, because it hasn’t been announced yet. Don’t want to go creating a stir about consolidation and shrinking paper size and all. But the truth is, consolidating operations is the only thing that allowed the Appleton Post to stay in business. We piggyback the printing on the same press and run numerous articles of local interest in both papers. That’s why you and Dr. Hazlitt recognized the typeface as the Gazette’s, because it’s the Post’s typeface now, too. And the headline you’re looking for reads in total—”
“‘Cabot Cove Resident Named Principal of the Year,’” I completed for her.
“It got bumped from the Gazette for space reasons, when we were having all those zoning board issues,” Evelyn told me. “The headline also included the principal’s name.”
“Jen Sweeney,” I said, filling in that blank, too.
* * *
* * *
Mort couldn’t believe it when I told him. “Are you saying Jen Sweeney killed Ginny Genaway and Wilma Tisdale?”
“Yes and no, Sheriff.”
“It can’t be both, Mrs. F.”
“In this case, it can. You see, Jen Sweeney is really Lisa Joy Reavis.”
“Well,” Mort said, after letting that sink in, “I guess we can’t arrest her for that murder, too, then.”
“But we can arrest her for killing whoever she coaxed into taking her car that night, but not before she filled the tire with butane to cause the blowout that forced the driver to lose control and crash into a tree.”
Mort couldn’t stop shaking his head. “Unbelievable. Why should I be surprised, though? It’s always unbelievable with you.”
“It should’ve come to me a lot sooner, but I kept missing it.”
“Missing what?”
“After all those years Lisa Joy Reavis spent in Alabama, she couldn’t help but bring some of the dialect back.”
“You call that a clue?”
“I do when a woman who’s supposedly spent her entire life in the North uses the phrase ‘you all’ as much as Jen Sweeney does. And when I ran into her and Seth at Mara’s not long after Ginny’s murder, she said something didn’t ‘amount to a hill of beans these days,’ another phrase that’s predominantly spoken south of the Mason-Dixon Line.”
“Pretty thin for evidence.”
“Which is why it didn’t register with me . . . until now, until everything else fell into place.”
“Like what?”
“Like that article running in the Appleton Post, accompanied in all probability by Jen Sweeney’s picture.”
“Which, you’re suggesting, Ginny recognized.”
“Enough to arouse her suspicions, anyway. Lisa Joy must’ve gone to great lengths to change her appearance, become another person entirely, when she came back to Maine to take the principal’s job in Cabot Cove. But Ginny must’ve seen something she recognized in the picture, enough to make her suspect Jen Sweeney was the older sister she thought was gone for good.”
“Hold on,” Mort said, not quite grasping it all. “You’re telling me Lisa Joy Reavis came back to Maine after all these years and took a job maybe twenty miles away from where she grew up.”
“No, Jen Sweeney took that job because in her mind Lisa Joy Reavis really was dead and buried. You’ve heard the same stories I have about her growing up. What I’m saying is consistent with all that. She was so convinced she’d successfully become another person, she must not have even seen coming back to Maine as a risk. Or maybe she enjoyed that risk, since we now have strong reason to believe she’s killed at least three people?”
“‘At least’?” Mort repeated, incredulous at the notion.
“There are a lot of years unaccounted for between the time Lisa Joy supposedly died and Jen Sweeney took over as principal of Cabot Cove High.”
“Just don’t go calling her a serial killer. I know you’ve always wanted to catch one of those, but let’s not turn Lisa Joy Reavis, Jen Sweeney, or whatever you want to call her into that. I’m having enough trouble buying into the possibility that she’d dare move back so close to home, never mind so close to the one person who would almost surely recognize her for who she really was: her sister.”
“I don’t think that even registered with her, and she might have had no idea that Ginny was still living in the general area. Or if she did, it was part of the challenge, the fun. To stick it in all our faces, become the high school principal in a town a stone’s throw from where her family had been destroyed.”
“So, that article runs, making Ginny wonder if Jen Sweeney just might be her long-lost-and-thought-to-be-dead sister.”
“And if we dig deeper, we’ll probably find that Ginny was spending time in Cabot Cove, watching Jen Sweeney whenever she could. From a distance for sure, but maybe even up close. Check the school security cameras, and I’ll bet you’ll find Ginny somewhere on the recordings.”
“But what clinched it for her? What led her to visit Wilma Tisdale and then interview you in the guise of a high school student?”
“I don’t know, Mort, not yet. Something we haven’t figured out, a piece of the puzzle that’s still missing.”
He nodded to himself. “So, Ginny finally confronts her. They meet at that rest stop—”
“Scenic overlook . . .”
“—and Lisa Joy shoots her own sister in the car. But that doesn’t explain why she killed Wilma Tisdale, Jessica.”
“I think it does, Mort, because I think Wilma was the one person who knew the truth. Maybe she figured it out on her own, or maybe Jen Sweeney had paid her a visit upon her return. Wilma was her tutor during high school and middle school as well, likely the one adult in her life she felt close to.”
“Something Ginny would have remembered.”
“She showed up at Wilma’s house to confront her about what she already believed she’d figured out. I think Wilma intended to come clean at her retirement party. That’s why she invited me at the last minute. But Ginny’s death must have scared her out of doing it. And by the time she spotted Lisa Joy, aka Jen Sweeney, at the party and changed her mind, it was too late.”
“But what was it that confirmed it all for Ginny, Mrs. F.? What did she see or hear that convinced her beyond all doubt that Jen Sweeney was her long-lost-and-thought-to-be-dead sister?”
“There’s only one person who can tell us that, Mort.”
* * *
* * *
But Jen Sweeney was nowhere to be found. Mort looped in the MSP on our suspicions, and within minutes every law enforcement officer in New England was looking out for a person matching Jen Sweeney’s description. Mort and pretty much all his deputies showed up at the high school, where they were met by a janitor who unlocked the main entrance for them and handed Mort the school master key, given that it was Sunday.
“Stay here,” Mort ordered.
I wasn’t sure if he was speaking to me or to the janitor, so I followed him through the door. The search warrant Mort had managed to obtain on a Sunday after three hours of trying to reach an appropriate judge allowed us to search the Cabot Cove High principal’s office, but we found nothing indicating Jen Sweeney was anyone other than who she claimed to be. Not a shred of evidence providing any ind
ication of her past life as Lisa Joy Reavis.
“You ever write about this kind of thing in your books?” he asked me, stripping off his evidence gloves.
“What?”
“Someone effectively becoming another person.”
“If you read my books, you’d know, Mort.”
“Can you just answer the question? In this day and age, I thought it would be impossible.”
“But Lisa Joy Reavis must’ve become Jen Sweeney around fourteen years ago, when she set up someone else to die in that car accident.” I shook my head. “Three murders, then. How many does it take to brand someone a serial killer?”
Mort grimaced, no doubt recalling that he’d expressly told me not to call her that. “The resident expert on murder doesn’t know?”
I shrugged. “Because I’ve never written about one.”
“Not even once?”
I shook my head. “They scare me.”
“I didn’t think anything scared Jessica Fletcher.”
“Clowns scare me, too. Clowns and serial killers.”
“Well,” Mort said, enjoying the moment, “as I live and breathe. Maybe I’ll share that information with Evelyn Phillips.”
“Are you blackmailing me?”
“Not yet.”
“Good,” I told Mort, “because I trust your search warrant includes Jen Sweeney’s home as well.”
He checked it, as if to make sure. “Wait a minute. I recognize this address. There was a break-in not too long ago. One of my deputies handled it, but nothing turned out to be missing.”
We headed to Jen Sweeney’s house straight from the school, as the late-afternoon sky darkened ahead of dusk with an approaching nor’easter the weathermen had been warning about for days. The wind had started to howl, and the first big fat raindrops began to dapple Mort’s windshield, a portent of what was to come.
The rain had picked up slightly by the time three Cabot Cove and two Maine State Police vehicles ground to a halt in front of Jen Sweeney’s simple slab of a ranch house located near the old Cabot Cove quarry in one of the least desirable residential areas in town. That had the positive effect of making the homes out this way modestly priced. The area qualified as a slum in Cabot Cove even though Jen Sweeney’s simple home featured well-manicured, modest grounds and what looked like a fresh coat of paint and a new roof.