by K. J. Emrick
“Especially not Jozelle’s only son. Why, that’s just unthinkable.”
“Horrible.”
“Monstrous, even.”
Darcy couldn’t have put it better herself. “Let’s start,” she said, “with the books you bought on gardening. You don’t read books. You said so yourself. I did think it was odd that you would bother to buy a book on gardening when you specifically told me you don’t have time to read anything. It also made it strange that you would want to join our book club. You don’t have any love of reading, obviously. Which means you wanted the gardening book for something else. Like finding out what plants are poisonous when consumed.”
Now both of the sisters shifted around in their seats. “You have no proof of that, dear.”
“Actually, I do. I asked Izzy just before coming here which books you bought. They weren’t just books on gardening. They were books on what plants were toxic. Pretty advanced stuff for women who said they might not even have time to start a garden.”
“That’s just…” Jozelle faltered, searching for the word. “What is that called, Althea?”
“Conjecture,” her sister said. “That’s all. Just conjecture.”
“Yes! That’s what I meant. Like on those crime shows on TV.”
“Exactly. Well said, Jozelle.”
“Thank you, Althea.”
Darcy decided that their banter wasn’t all that cute, after all. “Well, you might look at it as conjecture, I suppose. I believe it’s just one more piece of the puzzle. It leads us to the next piece.”
“Hmm,” Jozelle murmured.
“What piece is that?” Althea asked.
Terry just sat there, watching everything with his mouth open.
“The fact that you bought a book to learn about poisons,” Darcy said, “leads us to the cause of Steve’s death. I asked Jon to have the coroner add a toxicity screen to Steve’s autopsy. Once we find what I know we will find in Steve’s system, that will lead us to the next piece.”
“Which is?”
That question came from Terry, surprising the whole table.
“Which is,” Darcy said, “exhuming Merlon Nelson’s body. I’m betting no one thought to look for poison in the system of an old man who had been convalescing at home for that long. Well. We’re going to look now. I think you know what we’ll find.”
This had been what Steve’s ghost was trying to tell her, about his grandfather dying. By lying down on what was essentially Merlon’s deathbed, and reposing like a corpse himself, he was trying to say that he and Merlon had died the same way. His grandfather’s death was his death, essentially, because they had both been poisoned.
Terry’s dark eyes were wide and round. He kept glancing down at his teacup and pushing it away inch by inch with one finger.
“So, Mister Lucas,” Darcy said to him, “I have a theory. All of these pieces add up to only one thing, but right now it’s still just a theory. I’d like you to confirm it for me.”
“Uh, well,” the man stuttered, and wiped his mouth against the back of his hand. “Um. I mean, well. Attorney-client privilege pretty much prohibits me from, um, you know. I can only say so much.”
“Wasn’t Merlon your client?”
“Yes he was, Mrs. Sweet, but the privilege extends past death.”
“Even if,” Darcy asked him, “you’re about to hand over everything to his killers?”
He took in a slow breath as the full impact of that question sank in. “Good point. Ask your question.”
Across from them, Althea reached out and took Jozelle’s hand. “Oh, sister…”
“Shh, now,” Jozelle said to her.
Darcy had already gotten further than Jon would have in his official capacity as police chief. Not that he wasn’t a master at interviewing suspects, like when he got Nash Fullerton to confess, but she had no doubt that Terry Lucas would have stonewalled Misty Hollow’s police chief with a bunch of legal terms. Now that she had her advantage, it was time for her to get right to the heart of the matter. “In the will, didn’t Merlon leave everything to his grandson, Steve Nelson?”
Terry nodded. “Yes, he did. He was very old fashioned, and not in the good way. More like, the man rules the household and the women folk are there to do chores and stay out of the man’s way. He believed in a patriarchal system, I suppose is the polite way of saying it.”
“Right.” Darcy remembered what Millie had said about Merlon, and what she herself had heard from Jozelle and Althea about their father’s ways. “The man rules the roost.”
“That’s another way of putting it, yes.”
“Okay, so if he truly felt the men ran the home, he would have wanted his inheritance to go to the only male member of the family who was left.”
“Precisely,” Terry agreed.
“And Merlon only had daughters. No sons. The only male member of the family who was left, was Steve.”
“Exactly. So in the will, everything goes to Steve.”
Darcy thought as much. “Except there’s just one problem. Steve is dead.” She paused for a moment taking in the people sitting around the table. “So now everything goes to…”
“These two,” Terry said.
“His daughters.”
“That’s right.” He looked down at his teacup again. This time, he moved his chair away. “That was actually the delay in reading the will. Once Merlon died I told Jozelle and Althea the gist of what was going to happen with their inheritance. How it was all going to go to Steve once he was released from prison. They immediately insisted that he was going to get out on parole, soon, and they wanted me to wait… until he was here…”
His eyes got wide again, and his jaw fell open. If there had been any doubt in his mind before, there certainly wasn’t any this time.
“And after Steve got here,” Darcy continued, “they took him in like the long-lost son that he was. They told him to come straight here to the house and not speak to anyone else. He was already telling people about his inheritance. He knew that money would come to him. That’s how Jess O’Conner found out. That’s why she’s here in town now, for the money. All that time in prison and he arrived here with only the clothes on his back. It didn’t matter how rich he was going to be, in that moment he had nothing. So, you bought him new ones, didn’t you Jozelle?”
It had actually taken Darcy a long time to put that one together but that was why Steve’s ghost had been wearing such baggy clothes. His mother had new clothes ready for him as a welcoming gift, but she got the sizes wrong.
Jozelle sniffed back a tear. “Of course we got him new clothes. He was my son. It was the least we could do.”
“Only,” Althea said, “they were so baggy. He’d lost so much weight in prison.”
“Still, it was an act of kindness for my son,” Jozelle insisted.
“Of course it was,” Althea agreed, patting her sister’s hand.
Darcy leaned forward. “Then you killed him. In his new clothes. Was that an act of kindness?”
“No,” Jozelle gasped, and now the tears fell for real. “He was going to take all of our money. It was me and Althea who took care of our father. “All this time, it was us.”
“We bathed him,” Althea said.
“And we fed him.”
“And we stayed by his side night and day.”
“That was us,” Jozelle insisted. “We deserved that money.”
“Yes, we did,” Althea said.
“Yes, we did,” Jozelle echoed.
That was all very heartbreaking, Darcy had to admit, but it didn’t change what happened next. “So, you took Steve in. You gave him new clothes. You smiled at him and told him how happy you were to have him home. Then you killed him with a drink of tea.”
Miserably, Jozelle bit her lower lip, and nodded.
“Sister!” Althea said in surprise. “Hush now!”
“Oh, what’s the use, Althea?” Jozelle sniffed and wiped at more tears. “We knew she would find out soo
ner or later. As soon as we saw Darcy Sweet at our door we knew it. Why else would we try to be in her book club?”
“That’s true,” Althea said, giving in as well. “What other reason would we have for being in a bookstore? I mean, with all the television programming out there in the world, who reads books anymore?”
Darcy tried not to glare at them, but they sure were making it hard. It was bad enough they were murderers, they didn’t have to criticize books, too. There was no replacement for a good book. If these two had actually taken the time to read a book, then maybe they would have discovered that murder will out, as Shakespeare said. Or as Sherlock Holmes put it, when you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever you have left, however improbable, is the truth. Or even Miss Marple’s line about how the depravity of human nature is unbelievable.
Or, that there was always one more thing.
Actually, that last one was from Detective Columbo, played with such flair on television by Peter Falk, and not a quote from a book.
It still fit.
“Jozelle, you killed your own son,” Darcy pressed, “and your father, and you did it for money. Althea, you’re just as guilty. I don’t agree with what you did, but I understand that the temptation of money can make all of us do evil things. What I still don’t understand, is how in the world did the two of you move him from this house and all the way to Applegate Road? You’re…”
“Old?” Jozelle laughed. “Heh. I suppose we are.”
“My dear,” Althea said, “we deserved that money. After taking care of our father for all that time the money should have come to us.”
“He was our father,” Jozelle said. “Even if he was…”
“A chauvinist?” Darcy interrupted, finding that word much more suitable to any of the niceties that Terry Lucas had come up with earlier.
The sisters pursed their lips and levelled identical stares at Darcy through the lenses of their glasses. “I suppose,” Jozelle said, “that’s one way of putting it.”
“But he was still our father,” Althea said.
“Even if he wanted to give our money to my son,” Jozelle said.
“We would have been dependent on that boy for life.”
“Can you imagine? A mother going to her son to beg for money.”
“It wasn’t right,” Althea said.
“Certainly not,” Jozelle huffed. “Plus there was that tramp, Jess O’Conner to worry about. Steve would have invited her right back in.”
“Given her all his money.”
“Our money, Althea.”
“You’re so right, Jozelle.”
“Thank you, sister.”
“Our point,” Althea complained, “is that we shouldn’t be forced to rely on someone like Steve Nelson to take care of us.”
Jozelle nodded. “We should be able to take care of ourselves.”
“We’re grown women.”
“Very grown.”
“Darcy thinks we’re old,” Althea said.
“Well,” Jozelle said, “we are old, I suppose.”
In a way, these two reminded Darcy of her Great Aunt Millie. Saucy. Vibrant. Sure of themselves and not afraid to say so. In other circumstances, Darcy thought the three of them might have been friends. If they weren’t murderers.
Or haters of books.
There was a long, uncomfortable silence, during which Terry cleared his throat twice. When he started putting all his paperwork away, the sisters leaned toward him, as if the money in those pages was still pulling them in. Money that now, they would never see.
As the folder closed around the documents, Jozelle actually gasped. Althea let out a long, slow sigh.
“It’s over, Jozelle,” she said to her sister.
“I know, Althea. We poisoned my son."
“Darcy wants to know how we got him downstairs.”
Jozelle shrugged. “It wasn’t hard. He drank the tea.”
“He was drugged.”
“His body went so limp.”
“Then it was just a matter of rolling him to the stairs.”
“And pushing him over.”
“And letting him fall all the way down.”
“Certainly. Gravity did the work, not us.”
Darcy was shocked at the callous way they said it. They had not only ended a life, but it was Jozelle’s own son who they killed. Now she understood the report of bruising all over Steve’s body. He hadn’t been beaten up, and then dumped on the side of the road. He’d been thrown down the stairs of his mother’s house. That’s what made all those marks on him.
“Then,” Jozelle said, her voice slower, and sadder, “we lifted Steve up into our trunk. That was hard.”
“But,” Althea said, “we did it. After all, we’ve been lifting and bathing our father all this time.”
“We’re stronger than we look,” Jozelle said.
“For two old birds,” Althea said.
“Yes.” Jozelle wiped at her tears again. “We’re old, and we’ve done something terrible.”
“We brought him to the cemetery on Applegate Road,” Althea said, patting her sister’s hand. “We did what we could for him.”
“He deserved to be treated with respect,” Jozelle sniffed. “He deserved that much.”
“Yes,” Althea agreed, “he did.”
“He had such a hard life.”
“Yes. Such a hard life. Just like you said, Jozelle. That boy of yours has had nothing.”
“But bad luck.”
“Exactly. His life has been so hard.”
“And now…”
“…it’s over.”
A chill went up Darcy’s spine. The two sisters truly believed they had done the right thing in murdering Steve. For themselves, and for Steve too. The same with the death of their father Merlon. Nothing she said or did would ever change that for them. Their minds were made up. They would go to prison believing they were right.
How long would the two of them survive behind bars? She had no way of knowing, but Steve had been in prison for much less time than Darcy would have liked. So, who knew? Maybe the courts would go easy on Jozelle and Althea. With a minimum sentence, and parole, they could live long enough to see the outside world again.
For now, the mystery was solved.
She looked over at Terry. His face seemed to be stuck in a permanent expression of shock. Apparently, he didn’t deal with a lot of things like this in that big, clean office of his up in Meadowood.
“Terry,” she said to him, calling him by his first name this time. “Why don’t you and I show ourselves out?”
She picked up her teacup as she got up from her chair. This was the evidence they needed to prove that Steve’s murderers had been right under their noses the whole time.
“But…” Terry didn’t finish that sentence, but his eyes very purposely rolled over to the sisters. He didn’t want to leave them here alone. Not after they had confessed to murder.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “I asked Jon to give me a half hour and then have a patrol car park out on the street. His officers will be waiting for us to leave so they can come and arrest these two.”
Not that she was worried about them running away. Even if they decided to pull a Thelma and Louise and speed off into the sunset in their Volkswagen, Darcy had every confidence that the guys at the police department could keep up with them. They might be stronger than they look, like they had said, but she suspected they were just exactly as slow as they appeared to be.
Not a word was said as she and Terry made their way outside. Sure enough, a black and white patrol car was parked at the curb. The driver flashed his lights at her twice, and she gave a thumb’s up sign in response. Almost immediately two uniformed officers stepped out of the car, and walked past them, up the stairs to the house. It was going to be another long night at the Misty Hollow police station.
As they got closer Darcy reached over and yanked the handkerchief out of Terry’s vest pocket. The same one he had used to w
ipe up the spilled tea from the table.
“You’ll find what you need in this,” she said to one of the officers, holding out the handkerchief. “In this teacup, too.”
The officer looked a little surprised, but he took both items with a smile and a little shake of his head. Everyone knew to listen to the chief’s wife when she said things like this, no matter how crazy she might sound. The handkerchief went into a plastic evidence bag. The teacup got set down carefully on the front steps for now. Darcy had no idea what the protocol was for taking a full cup of tea into evidence.
In the driveway, Terry took a deep, deep breath and then slowly let it out. “This has got to be the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me as an attorney. Like, ever.” He shook his head dramatically. “Want to know the really crazy part to all of this?”
Darcy stuffed her hands into her pockets and shrugged. “Sure. If there’s a crazier part than what we’ve already seen today, I’d love to hear it.”
“Yeah. See, the thing is that I’ve read Merlon’s last will and testament. All of it. There’s three safety deposit boxes listed in there, sure enough, and the contents of all three together equal up to five hundred and seven dollars, and sixty-two cents.”
“What?” Darcy wasn’t sure that she’d heard that correctly. “Just five hundred and seven dollars?”
“And sixty-two cents,” he reminded her. “Yeah. Now, if you tell anyone I said this I’m going to deny it because I think I’ve bent the rules on attorney-client privilege enough for one day, but that’s all there is. Oh, there’s some junk stocks in there from companies that either went belly up or aren’t worth a single dime. A pickup truck that Merlon hasn’t owned in eight years. There’s this house and the little plot of land, too, both of which are money pits. Other than that, there’s exactly five hundred and seven dollars, and sixty-two cents. No more, no less. That’s what the sisters were fighting about.”
Darcy couldn’t believe it. All of this, for next to nothing.
Terry looked up at the deep blue sky above them and shaded his eyes against the light of the late afternoon sun. In the distance, from the center of town, pumped the patriotic sounds of America’s national anthem. It was a beautiful day.