All Hallows Evil

by Valerie Wolzien

  “There doesn’t seem to be a connection between Mr. Armstrong and anyone in town—except for his wife,” Brett answered. “I have some people working on his background. They were busy all day. I should have an answer or two on my desk in the morning.”

  “Which you will share with me?” Susan asked.

  “Fine. But …”

  “I won’t do anything wrong. I’m just listening to what people say. I’ll certainly bring anything I learn to your attention.”

  “Immediately.”

  “Immediately,” she assured him.

  “There’s still one thing I’m very worried about,” Brett said, heading toward her house.

  “What?”

  “What happened tonight that it was so important to keep you away from?”

  “Good question.” They drove a few miles, the silence broken only by smothered yawns. “Although,” Susan began slowly, “when you think about it, my house is the only logical answer.”

  “Your house?”

  “That’s where I would have been if I hadn’t gotten locked in. I would have gone right home after speaking with Charles Grace—if I had spoken to Charles Grace and if I hadn’t been trapped in the library. Am I making any sense, or has the lack of sleep finally gotten to me?”

  “It’s gotten to both of us, but I get your point.” Brett drove the car up into her driveway. “Why don’t you get some sleep. I’ll be at my desk most of tomorrow morning if you want to hear what we’ve learned about Jason Armstrong—if there is anything to be learned about Jason Armstrong.”

  “I will,” she agreed, getting out of the car. She closed the car door quietly (the bedroom she shared with Jed was at the front of the house) and, unlocking the door, slipped silently into her house.

  She need not have bothered. Jed was sitting on the couch in the living room, his body turned so he could see into the hall. He stood up as soon as he saw her.

  “Jed!” Susan was startled—and then worried. “What are you doing up? Has something happened?” She remembered what she and Brett had just been talking about.

  “No.” He smiled. “I was too worried about you to go to sleep. How did the meeting with Charles Grace go?”

  “It was interesting, I guess. Do you think we could talk about it in the morning? I’m glad you waited up, but I’m completely exhausted.”

  “Of course. I just wasn’t thinking. You go on, and I’ll close up down here.”

  Susan was mounting the stairs before he stopped speaking. Her house was toasty warm but stuffy. Someone had been smoking. She’d have to remember to open windows in the morning. Her bedroom, however, smelled of fresh sheets, and she dropped her clothing on the floor as she walked toward the adjoining bathroom. The view in the mirror over the sink woke her up long enough to consider whether or not a shampoo could wait for another day. It could. She had barely enough strength to brush her teeth before she returned to the bedroom and fell across the bed, instantly asleep.

  Sometime in the night, she was vaguely conscious of being gently tucked under a down quilt. And later, probably toward morning, she heard voices outside her bedroom door and the unmistakable smell of fresh coffee and burning sausage. But she was too tired to be hungry, and she rolled over and slept.

  It was past noon when she finally became fully conscious, and the air in her room smelled more like pizza than sausage. Susan stretched and groaned. She was groggy from too much sleep and too little food. Pizza sounded good. She got up and headed for the bathroom.

  Twenty minutes later, she was eating cold pepperoni pizza and drinking warmed-over coffee. Both were delicious. She leaned back in her chair and wondered where her cleaning woman was—the place was a mess. And where was everyone else? Empty pizza boxes gave testimony to the presence of other lunchers earlier in the day, but the house appeared empty.

  The Henshaws left messages for other family members on a magnetic pad stuck to the refrigerator door. The height changed as the children grew, but the idea remained the same, and each was supposed to write down his or her whereabouts. She glanced over and found a few messages. She pulled them off and read as she munched.

  Sue—

  Brett Fortesque called at nine a.m. and said he would call back later.—Jed

  Sue—

  Mrs. what’s her name (who cleans) called. She has the flu and will not be here today.—Jed

  Sue—

  Chad needed a ride to the soccer field. Back soon.—Jed

  Sue—

  I am going to drive Rebecca to the police station. Will be back soon. I love you.—Jed

  Sue—

  The network people are meeting with Brett at the police station. I will give Hilda a ride over there and return to do something about lunch.—Jed

  Mom—

  Mrs. Ellsworth called and said for you to call her as soon as you wake up.—Chrissy

  Mom—

  Over at Cindy’s. Home for dinner.—Chrissy

  Susan—

  Chrissy called. Needs info about some college tour next week. Call her at Cindy’s when you wake up.—Jed

  S—

  Rebecca and her entourage have gone to New York City for some sort of press conference. I have gone to pick up Chad at field. Chrissy called, and she is spending the night with Cindy. I’ll be home soon.—Jed

  Susan neatly piled up the papers she had read and smiled. It would do her husband good to play housewife for a while, she thought, realizing it must be Saturday.

  The notes had raised some interesting questions—what press conference? What college tour? What did Brett want to talk with her about? She grabbed another slice of pizza in one hand and the phone with the other.

  It took a few minutes to get through to Brett, and Susan was pouring another cup of coffee when she heard his voice. “Brett, it’s Susan Henshaw. I just woke up and got the message that you called.”

  “I’m glad you got some sleep. It sounds like you’re going to need it.”

  “Why? What’s happened? I woke up, and the house was empty and …”

  “So no one has told you what’s going on?”

  “There were a few cryptic messages from Jed—but nothing about the murders. Does this have something to do with the reason Rebecca’s gone to New York for a press conference?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Do you have time to explain?”

  “Sure. I don’t suppose you subscribe to some of our country’s scandal sheets—or have time to peruse them in the checkout line at the grocery store—but this morning all of them ran the same story. (I take this as proof that it’s not only the great minds that think alike.) The headlines were different, but the general idea is that Jason is not the first man Rebecca murdered.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You do have more details than that,” Susan suggested.

  “As much as these rags ever give. I think it was the National Smut that said that Rebecca got her first job from a news director somewhere in the Midwest—who fell in love with her and subsequently died.”

  “How?”

  “Heart attack—the story suggested that the exertion of keeping up with a younger woman was too much for him.”

  “Pretty tacky. Any evidence?”

  “None that they gave. A different, even less distinguished paper has a front-page headline claiming that Rebecca loved the anchorman at the second station that employed her, they had an affair, he died, and she got his job.”

  “An interesting death benefit. How did he die?”

  “Food poisoning.”

  “What?”

  “Botulism from improperly canned beans. That station’s annual promotion campaign was the presence of their on-air personalities in the judging at the county fair.”

  “And no one else died?”

  “No. The weatherman got pretty sick, though.”

  “Anything else?” Susan was almost afraid to hear the answer.

  “One more. Rebecca was hired by a very we
ll liked producer—the creator of this morning show that she’s on. He was said to have taken a personal interest in her career.”

  “And he’s dead, too.”

  “Yup.”

  “Are you going to tell me how it happened, or was it something he ate again?”

  “Good guess.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No. Evidently this producer was big on doing the in thing. And the in thing in the beginning of the eighties was food. Exotic food: vegetables in strange colors, game birds, new varieties of old standbys.”

  “I remember. What got to this man?”

  “Wild mushrooms. There was to be a spread in the food section of the New York Times extolling the virtues of wild mushrooms and the famous people who love to gather and eat them.”

  “Gather the mushrooms or gather together with other famous people to eat them?”

  “Both. Happily for the rest of the distinguished group (a cranky restaurant critic and his lawyer wife, a fashion designer and his live-in lover/model, a playwright, and one or two others I can’t remember), the producer tasted his mushroom pie while he was preparing it and before it got to the table. Apparently he made a serious mistake in his gathering and died.”

  “Was Rebecca there?”

  “No, she was new on the show and didn’t go out much in the evening. But she had been with him when he was gathering earlier in the day.”

  “And she picked the poison mushroom?”

  “There is absolutely no evidence that she did. But that’s not what the paper implied.”

  “Did any of these accusations ever make it to the police in the places where they happened? Did anyone ever take any of this seriously?”

  “I checked all that out this morning. This is all nothing but innuendo and scandal. Rebecca may have killed Jason, but there is no reason in the world to believe that she caused any of these other deaths. The heart attack was the logical way for a stressed-out, overweight man in his late fifties to die. She wasn’t even at the food booth in the county fair; the women from the station judged the handwork contests. And from the description of the producer that I got from the men who investigated his death, he would do anything to stand out and be in the forefront. ‘The man would have eaten toad shit if he thought it was chic’ is the way it was put in the report of his death. It was never considered to be a suspicious death—just a stupid one. And Rebecca was never considered a murderer.”

  “Of course, now …”

  “Now is a problem. If our homeless man changes his confession, she’s a suspect. And, I think, the best one we have. No one else in town knew either Jason or Mitch Waterfield.”

  “Did you get the background report on Jason this morning?”

  “Yes, and it’s just what we expected—in fact, nothing that we didn’t know. The man has had a very dull life—until becoming an overnight star at the network.”

  “Did he really? So how did he get the job?”

  “Evidently Rebecca saw him while she was traveling around on some sort of publicity jaunt, and she pointed out his work to her producer, and he hired him—practically a story out of A Star Is Born.”

  “Too good to be true?”

  “Apparently not. These things do happen in real life.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Hey, I thought it was the cops who were supposed to be cynics.”

  Susan laughed and then turned around, hearing the door open behind her. “I have to go. Jed just came in.” She turned and smiled at him. “Hi!”

  “Hi.” He kissed the top of her head as she hung up the phone. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine. How are you?”

  “As fine as I can be right now. Susan, what would you say if I said that I think we could have a murderer living in our house?”

  TWELVE

  It’s frequently said that couples married as long as Susan and Jed were (nineteen years) stop listening to each other. But Jed had his wife’s complete attention.

  “Who? Rebecca?” Susan guessed.

  “No, Hilda,” he surprised her by answering.

  “Did she kill Jason and Mitch Waterfield? Why would she do something like that? Jed, what do you know?”

  “I know she would be perfectly happy to kill anyone who got between her and what she wanted,” he answered, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “You wouldn’t believe the way she’s been acting since last night.”

  “But you don’t really know that she killed someone.” Susan was disappointed.

  “No, but I wouldn’t put it past her.”

  “So what has been going on?” she asked, sighing.

  “A lot. To begin with, the public relations department got copies of three scandal sheets that are running front-page stories on Rebecca.”

  “I know about that. Brett told me. He says that there is no question that they’re fiction.”

  “Then you can imagine their reaction.”

  “What exactly happened?”

  “It was right after you and Kathleen left. Brett got a call first—I don’t know what that was about—and he took off a few minutes later. Then two calls came in for Hilda. I had answered the phone, and the voice on the other end of the line was frantic. Turned out to be Hilda’s secretary. He …”

  “He?”

  “Men can be secretaries, you know.” (Susan had the grace to blush at her chauvinism.) “He was calling about these so-called news stories. The early reports on these newspapers had come out, and the entire public affairs department was frantic. Phone calls and faxes must have filled every satellite between here and New York.”

  “We don’t have a fax machine.”

  “They installed two in the study yesterday morning.”

  Susan decided she would think about holes in walls and things like that later. “So that was the evening? Calls and faxes?”

  “As the evening went on, the mood became hysterical. Hilda screamed into the phone, sent faxes that were just short of obscene, and thundered that she was going to kill everyone involved in these stories. Rebecca’s mood progressed from very sad to very mad. I went in and out of the living room delivering coffee and helping take messages and things like that.” (Now they’d turned her husband into a gofer.) “Around eleven o’clock last night, everyone had agreed that the best thing to do was to hold a press conference today. Rebecca was exhausted and went to bed, leaving Hilda to set up everything.”

  “Which she did,” Susan finished for him while he rummaged in the refrigerator.

  “Yes. You know,” he added, “someone needs to go to the grocery store. We’re completely out of juice.”

  “Maybe you could pick up a few copies of those scandal sheets at the same time.” She grinned.

  “Maybe we could?” Jed emphasized. “Chad is spending the afternoon hanging out at Bobby’s house, and Chrissy isn’t going to be home until late, and we could use some time to catch up. Don’t you think so?”

  “Why not? I’d like to do some normal things, in fact.”

  “Great.” He looked around the room. “Unless you think I should stay here and clean up?”

  “I’ll tell you a little secret about housework—you don’t have to worry—it’s always there waiting for you.” The phone rang, and she reached for it.

  “Don’t. The answering machine will pick it up.” Her husband stopped her. “Chad and Chrissy are fine. It probably isn’t even for us.”

  Susan looked at the ringing machine and hesitated. “You’re sure?”

  “We could have left fifteen minutes ago, and we wouldn’t even know it was ringing.”

  She took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s get out of here.” She put on a heavy loden coat and opened the door to the garage. Her husband followed.

  “My car or yours?”

  “Mine. Groceries fit into my trunk better. Besides, you don’t want your car to smell like food, do you?”

  He laughed and opened the door to the driver’s seat for her.

  “Did any
thing else happen last night?” Susan asked, backing the car into the street.

  “I think I told you everything. Certainly nothing happened here that was as exciting as being locked in the library.”

  “That’s what I’m wondering about. Brett has the idea that I was locked in the library to keep me away from something—presumably something that happened at home.”

  “I told you everything, I think.”

  “Did anyone leave the house? Rebecca or Hilda?”

  “Both of them—not together, though. Rebecca went out for a walk late in the evening—right before she went to bed. She was gone for quite a while. I wondered if she had gone back to her house, in fact.”

  “She drove?”

  “She didn’t say she did, but she could have. Her car was parked in the street. I didn’t watch to make sure she was on foot, and I don’t think anyone else did.”

  “And Hilda?”

  “Hilda went out late, too. She took off for a pack of cigarettes.”

  “She did drive.”

  “I assume so.”

  “How long was she gone?”

  “Probably fifteen minutes or so. I didn’t pay that much attention, to be honest.”

  “So either of them could have driven over to the library and back.”

  “Sure.” He looked intently at his wife. “You think Hilda or Rebecca locked you in the office?”

  “I have no idea. But I’d like to know if it’s a possibility. And it sounds like it is.”

  “But how would they have gotten out of the building? They wouldn’t have had a key or anything.”

  “True, but they might not have needed one. I’ve been thinking about it,” she added, swerving around a large pile of leaves that had been raked into the street. “Someone could have locked the door to the office by reaching inside and turning the latch and then just left the building with everyone else. Marion Marshall locked up. If she had found Charles Grace’s office locked, she would have assumed that he had done it and just gone on to lock up the building.”

  “You didn’t hear anyone lock the door?”

  “No, but I think I fell asleep almost at once. I’ve been pretty tired these days. In fact”—she sneezed—“I have a horrible feeling that I’m catching something. My throat is awfully sore.”