Evidence in the Echinacea (Lovely Lethal Gardens Book 5)

by Dale Mayer

  He reached into his back pocket, pulled out several pieces of paper, and unfolded them. “She went missing a good thirty-odd years ago,” he said. “Her body was never found, and there were absolutely no suspects.”

  Doreen snatched the pieces of paper from his hand and studied them. “She worked at a clinic on Bernard.” She nodded slowly. “Wow, interesting.” She sat at the kitchen table, opened her laptop, and brought up the address of the clinic. It wasn’t there any longer and was now a pretty rough area of town.

  “Because we never found a body,” he said, “we don’t know for sure that she’s even dead, but we assume so.”

  “So no family or friends had any contact afterward? She just disappeared off the face of the earth?”

  “Essentially, yes. She finished her shift at five o’clock that day. She walked home, but nobody saw anything, and she didn’t arrive home.”

  “Wow,” she said. “I wonder what went wrong.” She stared off in the distance, her mind trying to fit the pieces together, but they weren’t fitting. She looked at Mack and asked, “What about Penny’s father?”

  “It’s on the other sheet. Also a strange one. Shot dead in the head on a street. A back alley actually. Again nobody knows anything.”

  “And we don’t know about the nurse, if she was shot either?”

  “No, since no body was found.” He pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down beside her. “Are you thinking it’s the same person?”

  She nodded. “I am. I just don’t know the motive behind it. Well, I know the motive behind one. I’m not sure about the motive behind the other.”

  “Okay, that’s getting interesting,” he said. “You seem to have a handle on cold cases nobody else does, so how the devil do you link these two?”

  “Because Randy Foster was at that halfway house down on Bernard,” she said. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he and the nurse worked together, or if she wasn’t involved in some way.”

  “You’re saying she might have killed Penny’s father?” he asked in confusion. “That doesn’t mean it’s the same person then, because, if she committed suicide, we would have found her body.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean.” She shook her head and looked toward the garage. “Some stuff I still have to go through in my head, but I haven’t had a chance yet. I’ve been a little busy.”

  He thrummed his fingers on the kitchen table and said, “You’re not making sense. You know that, right?”

  “I am,” she said, “and it will make sense, but …” She tilted her head at him and said, “Look. Can you give me an hour? Just an hour to sit down, map out some of the stuff in my head, and I’ll present my ideas to you. But I don’t want you hovering over my shoulder while I do it.”

  He just stared at her.

  “I know. I know. You’re the official. I’m nobody. We don’t do this on assumptions. We need evidence.”

  He bolted to his feet, gave a curt nod, and said, “One hour.” And he went back to the living room to start moving furniture.

  She grabbed the little black book she hadn’t had a chance to look at thoroughly and started reading it with a notepad beside her, jotting down notes. She was formulating a pretty strong case, but she didn’t understand why the book had been left behind, although it had been jammed in the back of the drawer, so maybe it had been lost for decades. And she had the larger journal George had kept as well. That one showed an unraveling state of mind. She flipped to the last page where he’d written that cryptic message, wrote it down again, and sat back, looking at the pieces. On her laptop, she brought up the picture of where the nurse had worked and wondered what could possibly be the connection. If Penny’s father had died immediately from a gunshot wound, then nobody would have needed the nurse’s help.

  And then … Doreen knew what it was all about. She sat back and said, “It hasn’t been an hour, but do you want to come in?”

  He was at her side, glaring at her, his anger vivid.

  While he’d been busy moving furniture from the basement to the living room, he’d obviously been getting angrier and angrier.

  “I don’t have all the answers,” she said. “All I have is a working theory. Which means it’s an assumption, not evidence,” she underlined heavily with her tone. His frown deepened. She rolled her eyes at him. “Open mind, please.”

  He nodded, sat with a thud, and said, “Go for it.”

  “Penny’s father was very abusive. He beat up the family after his wife died, took out his temper on the kids. His son ended up dead. Father did jail time. We know all that, right?”

  Mack nodded.

  “Penny moved on, married George, probably told George, or maybe he already knew about her terrible history and was likely very protective. Then her father gets out of jail and moves to a halfway house in Kelowna because that’s close to where Penny lives.”

  Mack settled back, crossed his arms, and said in a low voice, “Go on.”

  “I couldn’t figure out why the nurse was involved,” Doreen said, “but, if you think about it, Penny’s father was dangerous. He’s only been in jail ten years plus whatever he earned for bad behavior. When he’s released, it’s not like he’s infirm now. It’s not like he’s elderly. Chances are he’s one badass angry male. And he comes to Kelowna to see Penny, who wants nothing to do with him. But what if they could knock him out? They could then kill him.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Mack said. “Who is they, and how will they knock him out?”

  “With the nurse’s help,” she said.

  “No reason for the nurse to help.”

  “I don’t know how that fits in yet,” Doreen admitted. “But the theory is, they needed the nurse’s help for some reason. Father was in a halfway house, and somehow they got him alone out in the alleyway, and they shot him.”

  “That’s a really big jump right there.”

  “Let me continue,” she said. “Whether this is Penny and George, just George, somebody else in their circle of friends, I don’t know. Father is gone. Brother is gone. Penny is married. Soon afterward poor Johnny disappears, and maybe George starts a journal to deal with his feelings. I know that’s not a very manly thing to do in some circles, but, … over the years, maybe there is an unraveling sense of guilt that George has done something terrible, and it’s because of him that Johnny went missing.”

  Mack looked at her, looked at the journal she held, and snatched it from her hand. He flipped through a few pages and said, “Wow.”

  She nodded. “You can see as you read from the beginning to the end how there’s definitely a sense of guilt. George never writes down what he did that was wrong, but … it’s clear how he felt. He was afraid his actions may have been behind Johnny’s disappearance. As if through some karmic rebalancing. Or as if fate had stepped in and said, You know you killed so-and-so, so we killed so-and-so in revenge.”

  Mack frowned. “So you think George had something to do with Penny’s father’s death. Then Johnny gets killed, and George blames himself, and what happens at the end?”

  She said, “Honestly, I think George commits suicide because it just got to the point where he was unraveling, and, whether Penny was having an affair or not, as some have speculated, I can’t say because I don’t know about that. There had to have been some sort of trigger, and it could have just been the passage of time, the accumulation of all that guilt of George’s. It could have been mental illness run amok, but George ended up killing himself.”

  “So then Penny had nothing to do with any of this, and your suspicions were completely wrong?” he asked for clarity. “Because, although suicide is frowned upon in many sectors of society, it’s not against the law in Canada. It was decriminalized in ’72. And, of course, Penny wouldn’t be charged.”

  “No, I no longer think Penny had anything to do with George’s death.”

  Mack settled back with a sigh. “If George did have something to do with her father’s death, we can’t prosecute a dead man anyway
, so that would mean any murder case would never be closed.”

  “Well, we’re back to that theory versus evidence problem again,” she said. “I need evidence to make my theory stand.”

  “I still don’t understand how the nurse comes into play.”

  “I don’t either,” she admitted. “But she has to. Somehow she has to.”

  “In what way though?”

  “Because that ID card,” she said, “was buried right there on George’s property. On Penny’s property. That is the one piece of evidence we can’t argue with. It connects George and, therefore Penny, to the nurse.”

  Chapter 31

  Saturday Morning …

  Mack just stared at her, as if his mind was trying to wrap around it. “We have to actually prove this. You know that,” he said with an attempt at a lighter tone.

  “We could talk to Penny.”

  “She might not even know what George did, if your theory is correct.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s quite possible she doesn’t know anything about it. I was worried maybe she had killed George, but, at this point, I think George committed suicide. So maybe let sleeping dogs lie.”

  He shook his head. “I hear you, but, if we can clear up either of these cold cases, there are families who want to know what happened to their loved ones.”

  “I know,” she said softly. “And Penny, of course, is the only family member left as far as Randy is concerned.”

  “You don’t know anything about the nurse’s family.”

  “Oh, I didn’t even think of that,” she said. She frowned, looking down at the data sheet. “I do need to understand the nurse thing.” She tapped it in confusion. “I keep trying to fit that piece back in.”

  “Evidence is like that. Some of it fits, and some of it doesn’t. Usually we’re lucky if we can get eighty percent of it to make any sense.”

  “Just keep lifting rocks,” she said, “and see what nastiness crawls out.”

  He chuckled at that. “What time is Scott coming?”

  “Noon to early afternoon,” she said. “I’d like to get the rest of this reorganized and try to match up whatever pieces we can.”

  “Which I think is a good idea. But you won’t let this Penny thing go, will you?”

  “We should talk to Penny,” she said. “I’m just not sure how to make that happen nicely.”

  “Nicely?”

  She slid a look at him. “I’m pretty sure she was my intruder last night.”

  He stared at her. “Not if she jumped over a fence, she wasn’t.”

  She frowned at that and nodded. “No, that’s a good point.” A very good point. She sat back and remembered her surprise as the intruder jumped the fence. She sat up straight suddenly. “There were two of them,” she cried out. “Because, when I came around the corner of my fence, somebody much bigger jumped over that neighbor’s fence. And I didn’t realize it at first, but you’re right. It was someone else. The hoodie was also darker.”

  “So now you’ve got Penny and an accomplice?”

  And then she knew who that was too. She nodded, then groaned. “I don’t know why, and I don’t know how, but it’s Penny and Steve.”

  He raised both hands in frustration. “Okay, now I really don’t understand.”

  “We need Penny to explain it,” she said slowly.

  “It’s hardly like you can go up to her and say, ‘Hey, so, did George commit suicide, and did he kill your father, and were you the one who broke into my garage last night?’”

  “Right.”

  “And why would Penny even care about getting into your garage?”

  She lifted both books and said, “You’ve seen this one, but you haven’t seen this one.”

  He looked at her and asked, “Where was that?”

  “When I pulled out one of the workbench drawers, it fell to the ground. I pocketed it and didn’t get a chance to really look at it until this morning.”

  He started at the beginning of the little black book and said, “This is from a long time ago.”

  “I know, and I haven’t had a chance to really figure it all out.”

  He sat back and flipped through the pages, reading every entry. When he got to one, he lifted his gaze and said, “He did kill her father.”

  “Well, it doesn’t specifically say so, but it does say, Problem solved.”

  He nodded and kept reading.

  “You’re right though. All the puzzle pieces don’t make a whole lot of sense.”

  “But it does, since it mentions a Nancy here,” he said slowly. “George talks about meeting with her.” Mack looked up at Doreen. “This definitely connects George to Nancy.”

  “But why? Was she a victim of Penny’s father’s? Was she a victim of George’s?”

  Mack flipped through it all and said, “This is almost a confession.”

  “I think George wrote it just afterward, just after he had killed someone, and then hung onto it all these years, and it’s the part that bothered him. And maybe he lost the book, and that terrified him, thinking somebody would find it. Because, in the other book, he does talk about needing to find something.” She held up the journal. “We just don’t know what. The older one was jammed in the back of the workbench drawer. Why he kept the nurse’s ID, I don’t know. Maybe as a reminder of what he’d done? But then, as to why he burned it, well, that’s yet another mystery.”

  “Have you checked through all of George’s drawers?”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t had time.”

  He stood up and said, “No time like the present.”

  He removed the chair at the kitchen door and stepped outside. She went first to the drawers where she had found the two books and said, “This is where both of them were.” She pulled them out, and pieces of paper, yellowed and old, were in there. At the bottom was one folded up. “It’s the death certificate for Penny’s father.” She laid it down so Mack could see it.

  “Cause of death, a single gunshot to the head,” Mack read. “It’s not out of line that George and Penny would have this. Randy was Penny’s father.”

  And then she picked up another piece of paper, glanced at it, and handed it over. This was a faded purchase record of a weapon.

  Mack whistled. “This is a handwritten note—and no names are on it—saying a purchase was made for a revolver,” he said. “Even the number on it is hard to read. It’s been fading out for so many years.”

  She nodded and picked up another piece of paper. “I can’t really see what this is either.”

  “No, but it’s got Nancy’s name on it,” Mack said, frowning. He placed it on top of the other paperwork and said, “Why would he have left all this in this drawer?”

  “Maybe because he wanted to be caught, to be punished. Maybe he wanted to confess,” she said. “He was very religious. This had to eat away at him.”

  “But then why wouldn’t Penny have cleaned it out?”

  “I don’t think she knew any of this stuff was here. She said this wasn’t her world. She never went into the garage, never had anything to do with George’s tools.”

  “So what’s this Steve guy got to do with that?”

  “They’re old friends. And, for all I know, he knew.”

  “So, what then? They both came back last night looking for it?”

  “If he happened to stop by her place and realized the garage was empty, he might very well have told her about the books and the papers. Then they came here after them.”

  Mack looked at her and sighed. “Some of this makes a crazy kind of sense, but none of it’s conclusive.”

  “I know,” she said, “and that’s why we need Penny.”

  Just then her phone rang.

  “Doreen,” Penny said, “I hope you got everything home okay. A couple documents I need apparently were stored in one of those drawers I wasn’t aware of. Do you mind if I come and check the drawers for it?”

  “Oh, my goodness, of course not, Penny. Come
on by,” Doreen said, staring at Mack. “I’m working in the garage myself. We got it all set up again, but I’ve been moving furniture out of the basement, so I haven’t had a chance to go through any of the drawers yet.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll come now then,” Penny said fretfully. “I wouldn’t want that stuff to get into the wrong hands. People would get the wrong idea.”

  And she hung up, leaving Doreen to stare at Mack. “She’s coming here for this stuff right now.”

  Chapter 32

  Saturday Late Morning …

  Doreen looked at Mack as she put away her phone. “What do we do?

  “That’s very curious timing on Penny’s part,” he said, studying the papers.

  Doreen nodded. “She also sounded almost desperate.”

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

  She straightened up, collecting the paperwork. “Here. You take it.”

  He accepted the stack. “What will you do?”

  She winced. “I want to record the conversation.”

  “Which you’re not allowed to do unless you tell somebody you’re recording,” he said.

  “If you use it as evidence maybe,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t record. It’s not illegal if I don’t do anything with the recording.”

  “True. … Besides, if the kitchen door is open, and I’m in the kitchen, I should be able to hear,” he said. “Then I’ll be a witness.”

  She nodded. “You know what? That might not be a bad idea. You want to go move your truck then?”

  He eyed her for a split second, then hopped into his truck, and parked it out of sight. He was barely back inside when Penny barreled around the side of the house, coming from the creek.

  When she saw the garage full of furniture, she cried out, “Oh, my goodness.”

  “Like I said, Nan has been filling the basement for a long time,” Doreen said, placing her phone on the workbench, the video on. “How are you? You sounded quite upset on the phone.”

  Penny nodded. “I’m looking for a book. It was George’s. He used to jot his thoughts down sometimes,” she said. “I didn’t want people to find it and think he’d gone off his rocker.”