We Wish You a Merry Murder

by Valerie Wolzien

  “I do, you know,” Susan replied gently. “But I’m not going to let Kelly take the fall for a murder she didn’t commit. I know the solution to this crime and, in a while, everyone is going to know it.”

  Kathleen got up quickly and stood behind her friend as Barbara moved forward menacingly. “Susan’s right, you know,” Kathleen added.

  Barbara gave them both a nasty look before spinning around and almost flying out the door.

  “She’ll leave …” Kathleen started.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Susan disagreed. “She’ll want to stay to the end. This has gone on long enough. We all need to know the truth now.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Kathleen was surprised when her back door opened, and Kelly Knowlson hurried into the room.

  “Good timing,” Susan commented.

  “Susan told me not to ring,” Kelly said, apologizing to Kathleen for her lack of manners. “Oh, Susan,” she continued, without waiting for an answer, “is it really going to be over tonight?”

  “I think so. I hope so. Do you mind staying in the kitchen until—”

  “I don’t mind doing anything, just as long as I find out who killed Evan.” She sat down in a chair and stared at the espresso maker for a minute before saying, “I don’t know why, but I feel that once the murderer is exposed, everything will be over and I’ll be able to sleep again.” She looked up at Susan. “The worst part has been not understanding. Surely this wasn’t supposed to happen. Evan couldn’t have wanted this!”

  “No, of course not,” Susan agreed.

  Kathleen looked at them both and then at the desserts she had accumulated on the table. “Are we ready to start?”

  “Yes. Just be sure that only you or I enter the kitchen. We don’t want the wrong person to know that Kelly is here.”

  “I assume you mean Rebecca. Don’t worry. I’ll keep everyone in the living room. Can you handle that espresso machine? Or Jerry …”

  “I can do it. Don’t worry. Just get out there and start passing around cookies. Ho. Ho. Ho. Merry Christmas.”

  Kathleen smiled at her friend. “Maybe it will be a better Christmas than any of us are expecting,” she said, leaving with a plate of pastries in one hand and a tray piled with pignoli macaroons in the other.

  Susan issued some last-minute instructions to Kelly, then followed Kathleen to the dining room.

  “Everyone seems to be here. They’re gathered in the living room listening to Dr. Barr babble on and on about how terrible the meal they just ate is for their health. Keep that espresso machine away from my mother; she looks as if she might pick it up and throw it at him. We don’t want another murder.”

  “Definitely not. On the other hand, at least your mother isn’t pining away for him.”

  “True. How do you want to handle this? Are you going to let everyone eat dessert and then reveal all or—”

  “Reveal all?” Susan quoted. “You make this sound like some sort of game. I do know who the murderer is. I was just going to tell you what I wanted you to do. Kelly arrived a little early or I would have told you sooner.” She hurriedly gave Kathleen a few directions, ending as Dolores entered the room.

  “I was going to—”

  “You’re not to do anything. We have one more load of stuff to bring out, and then you can call everyone to come and have dessert,” Susan said, knowing that Dolores would listen to her orders rather than those given by her own daughter. “Besides, that meal was so stupendous that if we let you do any more work, Jerry and Jed will think we’ve become ungrateful beasts. You must give me the recipe for that scampi. It was heaven,” she added, hoping to soft-soap her orders.

  And it worked! “Whatever you say. But, if you want my recipes, you’re going to have to come and watch me cook. I just guess at amounts. That’s the way my grandmother taught me.”

  “Fine,” Susan agreed, as Kathleen reappeared with the last load of goodies. “Why don’t you tell everyone we’re ready?”

  But they had heard. The teenagers appeared first, ignoring the coffee and filling their plates with cookies and cake. The twins, both tall and thin, had gigantic appetites, and Seth and Chad weren’t far behind. Chrissy was more careful of her figure. Her mother grabbed a word with her before she left the room.

  “Why don’t you take Chad with you and Seth when you go for that walk?” she suggested. “I know it’s not what you want to do, but it is Christmas Eve,” she added before her daughter had time to protest.

  “Okay,” the girl said, surprising her by agreeing. “We’ll leave as soon as possible, if you don’t mind.”

  “Great.” Susan was anxious that her kids be out of the way before they started talking about the murder. Although she wanted the twins to hang around.

  “We already asked Thomas and Travis if they wanted to come with us, but they refused,” Chrissy continued, as if reading her mother’s mind.

  “Fine.” Susan walked around the table, picking out a selection of desserts that she certainly didn’t want, and followed the other guests into the living room.

  “So, you’re going to solve the puzzle of Evan’s disappearance?” Barbara St. John asked sarcastically.

  “I think we can wait to talk about this until the kids leave, Barb.” Her husband amazed everyone by correcting her in public for the first time.

  “We were just on our way out the door.” Her son popped out of his chair. “Coming, Chrissy?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Chad?”

  “I just got all this food!” the boy cried, looking greedily at his full plate.

  “You can fill your parka pockets,” his mother suggested, anxious that her children should leave.

  “And we’ll save you a nice big plateful,” Dolores added. “My, how that boy does like to eat.” She appeared to think this was the greatest compliment she could pay anyone.

  “I don’t understand,” Dr. Barr was heard to say. He had moved while everyone else was getting dessert and now had the best seat in the room. “I thought we were here to socialize. Now everyone is talking about murder. I thought that man was just missing anyway.” He looked around the room, obviously disgruntled.

  “Oh, Bobby. I’m so sorry. We could leave, of course. I’m sure we’re not needed here.”

  “I’m sure you are, Claire. In fact, you hold an important clue to who the murderer is. Please don’t talk about leaving. I need everyone who was at Evan’s party,” Susan said. “I’m sorry … and I know this isn’t a pleasant way to spend Christmas Eve, but I think we’ll all have a better Christmas if we know which one of us killed Evan Knowlson.”

  “I didn’t know that we all knew that Evan was dead,” came the sulky response from Thomas—or Travis.

  “I …” Jed began.

  “I think everyone except for possibly Claire and Jed, and maybe Jerry …”

  “No, Susan. Kathleen told me about it,” Jerry Gordon explained.

  “Look, we’re not going to get anywhere if Susan keeps being interrupted,” Elizabeth Stevenson said. “And I, for one, would like to get home tonight. Could you just go on with your story, Susan? I suppose it can’t take very long since Evan’s only been dead—and in case any of you are wondering, Kelly told me about finding him—for a week.”

  “If everyone will just sit down and eat their dessert, I’ll explain. But we have to go back more than a week.” As Susan spoke, Kathleen got up and left the room. “We have to go back to when Kelly and Evan broke up.”

  “What?” Rebecca was the only person to speak, although everyone else’s looks indicated their surprise. Everyone in the room, Susan noted. Everyone.

  “Let me tell you what I know,” Susan began. “Some of the story is just conjecture, but a lot of it is pieced together from what’s happened and what everyone has said—or didn’t say.

  “I don’t know why Evan left Kelly and married Rebecca. I suppose he really could have fallen out of love with Kelly and fallen in love with Rebecca. Or maybe he never was in love
with Kelly; maybe he just enjoyed the fact that Kelly so obviously worshiped him and would be his slave. Anyway, whatever happened when Evan left and married Rebecca, it’s important to realize that Kelly never really left him. She was still in love with him, she would still subjugate her own needs to his, she would still do anything he asked her to do. Anything.”

  “Even murder him?” Rebecca asked sarcastically.

  “No, but she helped cover up for the person who did kill him.”

  “Susan, give me a break,” Barbara interjected. “Evan told Kelly to cover up for the person who murdered him? Why would he want to protect his own murderer?”

  “It doesn’t make much sense, hon,” Susan’s husband agreed.

  “If you’ll all just let me go on with my story? Fine. Well, Evan and Kelly got divorced and Evan married Rebecca and, in some ways, set out to duplicate his old life-style. He built a house in a different design, but for the same purpose: to impress and entertain business acquaintances. He gave the same parties and lived the same life as much as he was able. The twins were a slight problem, but one that could be dealt with by getting rid of them for the summer and finding them jobs.”

  “He hated us. Wanted us to get out of the house. But we got kicked out of every boarding school on the East Coast, so he had to let us live with him,” one of the twins spoke up.

  “True,” the other agreed. “We bought him the punching bag for Christmas because we knew he’d have loved to punch us out—not that he could have.”

  Susan smiled weakly. “Anyway, there were two things different about his life now—the first is that he had a former wife living almost in his backyard who was ready, willing, and able to do his bidding.”

  “And the second?” Rebecca asked sarcastically.

  “That you were involved in his business—as a partner, as you so often remind us—and as a wife who couldn’t be forced to testify against him if he were doing anything illegal.”

  “That condo deal over the old Baxter property!” Jeffrey St. John exclaimed. “I heard that Evan was involved in that. Isn’t that where you and the twins lived when you first came to town, Rebecca? Was Evan making some sort of deal that involved the property that long ago?”

  Rebecca opened her mouth and then shut it again.

  “There’s no reason for you to say anything,” Susan said. “Remember, you’re protected. Anyway, when I realized the legal ramifications of being married to a man you’re in business with, I realized for the first time just how clever Evan was, just how good he was at taking care of himself by surrounding himself with people who would do things for him. Both you and Kelly have been pretty busy in the past few weeks, haven’t you?”

  “If they’ve been so busy helping Evan, how come he’s dead?” Barbara asked, rolling her eyes to show how preposterous this whole story was to her. “What sort of help have they been?”

  “We’ll get to that later. First we have to consider a few other things about Evan’s life right before the murder.”

  “Such as?” Barbara continued her goading.

  “Insurance. Life insurance, to be more precise. Kathleen found out something very interesting. Part of Evan’s divorce settlement was a two-million-dollar policy, payable to Kelly.”

  “Well, that gives her a motive—”

  “Barbara, would you just shut up and let Susan finish a sentence?” her husband insisted.

  “I—”

  “Shut up!” he roared. And it worked.

  “As I was saying, Evan had this huge life insurance policy and, like Barbara”—Susan smiled at her, feeling embarrassed at the other woman’s public humiliation, no matter how justified—“I thought it gave Kelly a motive. Or, to be more precise, a motive for Rebecca to want to keep Evan alive. You see, Evan couldn’t buy another policy at his age, so her only financial security would have to be found elsewhere. Kathleen’s research turned up the facts that both houses were mortgaged and Evan’s business had been acquiring debts rather than profits for the last year or so. It was beginning to look more and more like Kelly had the only motive for killing Evan—or, more to the point, that Rebecca had every reason in the world to want him to stay alive. Because as his second wife and business partner, she was going to be saddled with massive debt after his death.

  “Then I discovered the answer to something that had been bothering me all along. Why did the body disappear? The twins admitted to moving it. They claimed they were trying to protect their mother. But why keep it around? Why not dispose of it in the ocean or someplace? Why did Rebecca continue to insist that Evan was on a business trip? If Rebecca really believed that Kelly had killed him—”

  “I did, and I do!”

  “Then why did you keep the body hidden? It made absolutely no sense to me for a long time. Until I remembered something else—that you had been to New York City two days in a row after the murder, probably at Evan’s office.

  Once I connected this unexpected flurry of business activity—unexpected because Evan told me the night he was killed that he and Rebecca were taking a break from work for a full week—the answer occurred to me. You wanted the body hidden so you could do some quick financial maneuvering before Evan was discovered missing—before all his assets, such as they were—were frozen while his will was probated.

  “I assume you have everything like that taken care of now?”

  “It’s as right as can be.” Rebecca shrugged. “All the capital has been removed from ongoing projects. It’s enough to cover my personal expenses for a while. And I didn’t do anything illegal; all I needed was a few extra days. But now”—this time the shrug seemed to indicate despair—“now I sure wish I knew where the body was.”

  “You’ve really only proved that Rebecca had better reasons to want Evan alive than dead,” Barbara insisted, glaring at her husband.

  “True. But eliminating Rebecca and her kids as murder suspects helped me think this mystery through.”

  “You mean you think Kelly did it?” Elizabeth cried, horrified. “Susan, I thought you were trying to help Kelly!”

  “I am. One of the biggest problems I was having doing that is that Kelly’s lies were hiding the truth that might help her.”

  On cue, the kitchen door opened and Kelly, followed by Kathleen, entered the room.

  “You’re right, Susan,” Kelly admitted, sitting down in the armchair that Jed had hastily vacated for her. “But I wasn’t lying for myself. I was doing it for Evan.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “You were doing just what he told you to do, weren’t you?” Susan said gently. “You see,” she explained to the rest of the room, “Kelly told me that very thing more than once, but I wasn’t listening.

  “The first time she said something was right after we found Evan. I, of course, ran to the phone to call for help, but the line had been cut. I was surprised and more than a little distressed, and then Kelly made a strange comment. She said, ‘We’re not supposed to call anyone.’ At the time, I assumed that she was merely referring to the phone line, but later I realized it was fitting in too well with other things she was saying.”

  “Such as?” Elizabeth asked, thinking she was defending Kelly.

  “That she knew what to do, that her actions that night were part of a plan—Evan’s plan. Kelly almost told me that much on the way home from the hospital emergency room that night. When I suggested she visit her mother out of town for the holidays, she told me she was ‘needed’ here in Hancock. By whom? By Evan. And after the murder, she told me that what was happening ‘wasn’t making any sense,’ implying that a different outcome had been planned—that, in fact, there had been a plan. In my kitchen the other day, Kelly said that Evan made all the plans in her life. And that she hadn’t been told what to do since the night he died.”

  “You’re right, Susan. But it doesn’t make any sense. It was Evan’s plan, but something must have gone wrong. Surely Evan wasn’t planning his own murder!” Kelly cried out and then, covering her face with her
hands, began to cry in earnest.

  Susan took a sip of her now-cold espresso and sat back to wait until Kelly could speak.

  “Susan’s right,” Kelly began, sniffing. “Being in Hancock with all my friends and neighbors giving parties and going on with their lives was painful for me, very painful. I had, in fact, been planning on going away this year, just like I did last Christmas. But on the day before Thanksgiving—I remember I was busy in the kitchen making Evan’s favorite cranberry sauce with Grand Marnier in it—Evan knocked on the back door and asked to come in. Well, of course, I let him”—she shot Rebecca a defiant glance—“and we had some Stilton and some crackers and a little Moët that I always keep in the refrigerator in case—”

  “Oh, get on with it!” Barbara could control herself no longer. She glared at her husband, who didn’t speak.

  “He asked me to do him a favor. He had a plan, and he said it was very important, and that he couldn’t possibly carry it off without my help. I was essential, he said. Absolutely essential.” She smiled at the memory.

  “And the plan?” Susan prodded. “What was this plan?”

  “Well, he told me that he and Rebecca were going to give a Christmas party. Of course, he assured me that he wouldn’t even think of giving a party so much like the ones we gave each year, except for the fact that giving this party was necessary for his plan to be carried out.

  “Anyway, there were some things he wanted me to do that day—before, during, and after the party. Although, actually, he wasn’t that specific about what he wanted done after the party.”

  Susan remembered the bedroom set up for two and wondered if Kelly had been making a few plans of her own, despite what she claimed.

  “But the first thing he wanted me to do was supposed to happen the day before the party. Evan wanted me to call Kathleen and convince her that I believed someone was trying to kill me. Does that make sense?” She looked around the room.