by Kate Bell
“I’d appreciate it. With you retiring and Mills transferring out, we’re a little shorthanded,” Sam said.
“No problem,” Alec said, looking him in the eye.
I wanted to stick my tongue out at Sam. The big jerk. If he’d treated Alec a little nicer when he worked for him, he may not have retired as early as he had. Alec still hadn’t gone into any detail about what the issue was with Sam, but it was obvious to me Sam didn’t like him much.
We stayed until the coroner arrived and he had been briefed. The snow was really starting to come down by that time, making everyone’s job even harder.
“Let’s go. There isn’t anything else we can do here,” Alec said and took my hand.
My feet were soaked and feeling pretty frozen and I was more than ready to head home. All I wanted was to soak my feet in some warm water and build a fire in the fireplace.
“What do you think about it?” I asked him as we headed to the car.
“I don’t know. Like I said, I didn’t see any obvious signs of trauma. We may not know how she died for a while,” he said, as we got into the car.
When Alec started the car, I turned the heat on full blast and groaned. “That feels so good.”
“Now we’re going to have to wait to make snow cream another time,” he said.
“I tell you what. I’ll just set a bucket out to catch the snow when we get home. That will make the most perfect snow cream you’ve ever tasted,” I said.
“You just don’t know how to live,” he said, pulling onto the highway.
I sighed. “I just cannot get it out of my mind. Who would have done that to Iris? She was so sweet. All the kids loved her.”
“That’s a shame, for sure,” he said. “Was she married?”
I nodded. “Yes, but I can’t remember if she had any children. When Jennifer was in her class, she was still young and had just gotten married. Her husband is a teacher, too, if I remember right. Over at the high school.”
“First stop tomorrow is to pay her husband a visit,” he said.
“Who’s going to tell her husband she’s dead?” I asked him.
“Sam will probably have George or Yancey go talk to him. They’ll ask him a few questions, but probably not much, unless he’s in the talking mood.”
“How sad. I bet you’ve had to tell a lot of people that their loved one was murdered,” I said, turning toward him.
“Oh yeah. Lots of times. It’s not a part of the job I’m fond of. Fortunately, I’m no longer an officer, so that’s out of my hands. I don’t wish it on anyone though,” he said.
I agreed with him on that. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, either.
--3--
“Jennifer, there’s something I need to tell you,” I said gently. She was sitting on the sofa, watching an old episode of I Love Lucy, with one eye on the television and one on her phone.
“What?” she said without looking up.
I sat next to her and picked up the remote and turned the television off. She looked up from her phone, questioningly.
I sighed. “I have some bad news.”
“What?” she asked, anxiety creeping into her voice.
“When Alec and I went into the woods, we stumbled onto a body,” I said, trying to figure out how to make this easier. But the truth was, there wasn’t going to be anything easy about this.
“Who?” she asked.
“Mrs. Rose,” I said.
She gasped. “Mom, I just saw her at Walmart a week and a half ago. There’s no way!”
“I’m sorry, honey,” I said.
She stared at me wide-eyed. “I just can’t believe it. She asked me how college was. She said she was proud of me. She encouraged me and said I could do anything I wanted to do if I set my mind to it.”
“She was a really good teacher,” I said. “A really good person.”
She started crying and all I could do was hold her.
***
It was nice being able to ride over with Alec to interrogate a suspect without either begging him to take me along, or having to hide the fact I was there so that his boss didn’t jump all over him. Of course, the fact that I owned the car Alec was driving helped. It’s not like he could tell me to stay home when he needed my car to get to the suspect.
“So, I’ve been thinking,” I said, looking out the window as we drove along Allen Road. When Alec didn’t answer, I continued. “I think now that you’re no longer bound by the police department’s rules and regulations, we should take a more aggressive stance on interrogating suspects. You know, really drill into them with the questions.”
Alec chuckled. “I’m going to make you stay home.”
“No, it’s my car. Remember?”
“First off, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Therefore we will be nice and sweet to people. In the beginning, at least. Second of all, Mr. Rose is not a suspect. He is a grieving husband. We are not interrogating. We are merely interviewing and gathering information.”
I snorted. “The husband always did it. It’s classic.”
“Interviewing is a much sweeter word, don’t you think?” he asked, ignoring my comment. “Besides, what if it was you that was being interviewed? Wouldn’t you want someone to be nice? Especially if you didn’t do it and you’re grieving the loss of a loved one?”
“I know you’re right,” I said. “I just want to play good cop bad cop one of these days. Will you let me do that?”
He chuckled again. “Yes. One day, when I’m relatively certain who the bad guy is, I’ll let you play the bad cop.”
“That’s all I ask,” I said.
I really had no desire to be unkind to someone that was grieving the loss of a loved one. I knew about grieving all too well. My husband had been killed by a drunk driver and my children’s and my life had been changed forever. I did rather enjoy giving Alec a hard time about interrogating, though. I’d seen more than my share of old detective shows and I liked the idea of being the bad cop.
We pulled up to a modest looking home in a family neighborhood on the South side of town. Iris Rose lived in the Sandy Creek development, established in the early eighties. The homes were still kept up nicely and were smaller in size. It was the sort of area I would expect a schoolteacher to live.
Alec knocked on the door and I could hear movement on the inside. I glanced at Alec. There were more sounds of movement from inside, but no one came to the door after several minutes. Alec rang the doorbell and we heard more movement, then the door opened. A middle-aged man stood at the door, his hair uncombed, and dark circles under his eyes. His eyes were rimmed in pink and he looked like he had been through the mill. He seemed vaguely familiar, but I didn’t think I had ever met Mr. Rose before.
“Mr. Rose?” Alec asked.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding his head, looking from Alec to me.
“Mr. Rose, I’m D-, Alec Blanchard,” Alec said, stumbling over the fact that he was no longer a detective. I noticed a slight tenseness on his face when he said his name and I wondered if it bothered him more than he let on. He had been a detective for so many years, it had become his identity. “And this is Allie McSwain. We wanted to express our condolences on the loss of your wife, Iris. We’re also working with the Sandy Harbor police department and we’d like to have a word with you.”
Mr. Rose looked from me to Alec again. “What do you mean? Working with the police department?”
“We were asked to interview you,” Alec said, still not looking entirely comfortable with his new role as a non-detective.
“Alec is a retired detective with the police department and he’s now a private investigator,” I supplied when Mr. rose still looked at Alec blankly. “We’re working with the police department.”
It seemed like Mr. Rose was ready to tell us to hit the road and I didn’t want there to be any hostility between us before Alec got to interview him. It was only a small stretch of the truth that Alec was a private investigator. He would be on
e just as soon as he took the test to be licensed.
“Okay. Fine,” Mr. Rose said, nodding his head. He stepped back and we followed him into the living room. The house was decorated simply and it felt warm and cozy in spite of the sparse décor.
“Have a seat,” Mr. Rose said, motioning toward a sofa.
Alec and I sat, and Mr. Rose sat across from us on the love seat.
“Mr. Rose, I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said quickly. “My daughter was in your wife’s class the first year she was a teacher, and she loved Iris.”
A wave of grief crossed his face, but he quickly recovered. “Thank you.” He said thickly. “She loved the kids. She lived for them. I guess you never expect something like this. There’s nothing that can prepare you for it.”
“That’s the truth,” I said.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Rose,” Alec said. “Can you tell me when was the last time you saw your wife?”
“It was two days ago. Sunday afternoon. She went to the school to work on grading papers.”
“She graded papers on a Sunday?” Alec asked, notebook and pen suddenly in hand.
“A teacher puts in a lot more than forty hours a week. She was there all the time,” he explained. “The schools expect a lot. Lots of rules and laws about everything.”
“What time of the day did she leave?” Alec asked.
“About noon. We went to church first, came home, and she was out the door again. She said she’d be home by four or five, but she never came back,” he said, his voice cracking on the last part.
“What did you do then?” Alec asked.
“I called her cell phone, but there was no answer. Around six I started calling family members, friends, anyone I could think of. No one had seen her. Around seven I drove by the school, but it was locked up. Then I called the police, but I was told she had to be missing for twenty-four hours before they would look into it. By the time the twenty-four hours were up, the police were coming to me,” he said, staring at the floor.
I glanced at Alec. I didn’t think he knew that we were the ones that had discovered her body. I wasn’t sure if it would make a difference to him or not, but I thought we shouldn’t mention it.
“Is there anyone you can think of that would want to hurt your wife?” Alec asked.
He shook his head. “No. No one. She was an elementary school teacher. She hung around people that were just like her. Other teachers.”
“Mr. Rose, did you and your wife have any children?” I asked.
“No. Iris really didn’t want any. Her childhood wasn’t the greatest and she didn’t want to repeat it with kids of her own. Don’t get me wrong, she loved kids, but she didn’t want any,” he said, still looking down at his feet. “I was fine with it. I wanted what she wanted.”
I wasn’t sure I could identify with someone that didn’t want children, but I figured it was better to know you didn’t want them up front, rather than figure it out after the fact.
“Did she have other family in town?” I asked. Other than Jennifer having had Iris as a teacher, I knew virtually nothing else about her.
He snorted. “Oh yeah. Her mother’s a piece of work. I have never met another person that had such a need to control another person in my life.”
Alec and I glanced at each other.
“How so?” Alec asked, scribbling in his notebook
“She tried to control everything. When Iris wanted to go to college, her mother wanted her to study to become a doctor. Iris always wanted to teach. Her mother wouldn’t support her financially when she refused to go to med school. She wouldn’t even help her fill out the financial aid papers. Then when Iris became a teacher, her mother was always trying to control that. Telling her how to decorate her classroom, telling her how to teach her students, telling her what to teach them. It never ended. There was this constant bickering between the two of them,” he said. His face turned red as he spoke and the tension between the two of them was clear.
“And how about your marriage? Did your mother-in-law take a hands off approach to that?” I asked, knowing that would be impossible if the woman were as controlling as he said she was.
He laughed, but there was no joy behind it. “She tried everything she could to keep us from getting married. She threatened to disown her. She told her she wouldn’t come to the wedding. Then she tried to control us at every turn when Iris went with her heart and married me anyway. She was always telling her how to behave in our marriage. She was obsessed with having grandchildren, so she was always looking up all these natural remedies for infertility. She made Iris a tea that she said was for her eczema, but it made Iris sick for three days. Later she admitted it was a fertility tea and refused to tell her what was in it. Iris refused to drink any more of it, and Hilda went into a rage, demanding she drink it so she would get pregnant,” he said. “The crazy part was she wasn’t infertile, she just didn’t want kids. But Hilda wouldn’t listen.”
“Hilda is her mother? Did she have these rages often?” I asked.
He nodded. “Oh yeah. Whenever she didn’t get her way.”
“What’s her last name and how can we get a hold of her?” Alec asked.
“Her last name’s Bixby and she lives in the apartment over my garage.”
--4--
“Wait, your mother-in-law, who is controlling and seems to have made you and your wife very unhappy, is living in an apartment above your garage?” I asked. It didn’t make sense. I had gotten along fine with my mother-in-law, but there was no way I wanted her living that close to me.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense. I told my wife it was a bad idea, and believe me, it was. Iris insisted. Hilda could guilt her into anything. She would just pop in here whenever she wanted. No knocking. Just pop in and stick her nose into whatever my wife and I were doing.”
My mind spun with the thought. I could imagine how normal marital disagreements could be turned into family brawls with a family that was on the edge. And if what Richard Rose was saying was true, this was a family on the edge.
“You know what I think?” Mr. Rose asked. “I think Hilda was jealous of Iris. She had a really bad childhood and when her husband dumped her, I think it was the epitome of failure to her. She would have loved for her daughter’s marriage to have failed, too.”
The muscle along Mr. Rose’s jawline twitched. I looked at Alec, unsure of what to say next.
“Do you think Iris’s mother killed her?” Alec asked flatly.
He nodded his head. “I do. She went down to the school on Sunday when I told her Iris was there working. She had to stick her nose into whatever Iris was working on. Hilda came back, but Iris didn’t.”
“I think we should go and have a talk with her,” Alec said. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Rose. We’ll be in touch.”
Mr. Rose led us to the front door and we said our goodbyes.
“Wow,” I said when he had closed the door. “I know they must have had their problems, but I can’t imagine a mother killing her child.”
Alec looked at me. “Do you never watch the news? Parents kill their own children all the time.”
I breathed out hard. “I know, I know. But I can’t imagine it. I just can’t.”
We walked around the side of the house and to the detached garage. There was a dark blue Toyota parked beneath a landing that led to the apartment. I wondered how old Iris’s mother was because the steps were a little steep. I figured at least mid to late sixties based on hold old I thought Iris was, but maybe she was in good shape physically and didn’t have an issue with the stairs.
“Up we go,” Alec said and we began climbing. I was glad I was a runner. These things would wear you out if you had to climb them every day.
Alec barely had time to rap out three knocks before the door swung open. Hilda Bixby stood at the door, her gray hair in a bun on the top of her hair, and her eyes red and swollen.
“Good morning, Mrs. Bixby,” Alec said, “I�
�m Alec Blanchard and this is Allie McSwain. We’re working with the Sandy Harbor police department and we’d like to have a few minutes of your time.”
She looked from Alec to me and back to Alec without saying a word.
“Mrs. Bixby, we just wanted to express how sorry we were to hear about your daughter, Iris. She was my daughter’s second grade teacher, the first year she taught,” I said, giving her a sympathetic look. I could use some sugar when I needed to.
Mrs. Bixby took a deep breath. “Come in,” she said and led us into the apartment. The apartment was small, but Mrs. Bixby had made good use of the space, with slightly undersized furnishings. There were floral prints everywhere, but she had somehow managed to keep them from feeling overwhelming. Mrs. Bixby had a flair for decorating.
“Please, sit. Would you like some tea or coffee?” she asked stiffly.
“No, thank you,” Alec said before I could answer. We sat down on a loveseat across from her. “Mrs. Bixby, we’d like to ask you a few questions. Do you know of anyone that would want to harm your daughter?”
“I certainly do,” Mrs. Bixby said confidently.
“And who would that be?” Alec asked.
“My son-in-law, Richard Rose,” she said with a gleam in her eye.
“And why would you suspect him?” Alec asked, notebook and pen in hand.
“Because he wanted to get rid of her. She had infertility problems. It broke Iris’s heart. She wanted children so badly. It was easier for him to get rid of her and find a new wife that could have children.”
I forced myself not to look in Alec’s direction. This was the opposite of what Richard Rose had told us.
Alec scribbled in his notebook, then looked up at her. “Not being able to have children isn’t usually a reason to kill someone. Was there anything else going on?”
She nodded. “Richard also had an affair.”
Mr. Rose had forgotten to tell us this little tidbit of information.
“Are you certain?” Alec said, scribbling in his book.