Juniper Grove Cozy Mystery Box Set 1, page 14
part #1 of Juniper Grove Cozy Mystery Series
“She was stupid enough to email me. She’s so sure of herself.”
“Then you can stop her. It won’t be easy, but if you tell the truth, you’ll be free of Jillian Newsome.”
“I’ll lose my house!” Belinda cried. “My husband cheated on me five years ago. We divorced, and I ended up with this house. If he finds out I cheated on him first, I’ll lose everything.”
“He didn’t believe the rumors about you and George?”
“Never.”
“Then he won’t believe them now, when Newsome produces whatever she has on you.”
“She has more photos from the benefit party.”
“The one in the paper wasn’t bad.”
“That was the least compromising one. The photographer snapped it when George was being a drunken jerk. Trust me, Rachel, if my husband sees the other photos—and Newsome will publish them or mail them to him—he’ll believe the rumors.”
“That party was more than seven years ago. Why would your husband do—”
“He resents giving up the house. End of story.”
I made my way to the front door, wondering how Jillian Newsome, that menace of a woman, could live in my beautiful little town for all these years and yet still want to bully its residents. Or worse than bully. Anyone who would keep photographs for seven years on the off chance she could blackmail someone with them was not a well woman. But was she capable of murder?
Belinda followed, and we stood together in the foyer as I searched for a way to make a graceful exit. She looked so miserable at that moment that I wished I had something encouraging to say to her, even knowing what she’d done to Julia and Gilroy.
I paused, my hand on the door knob. “Is there anything else you can tell me that might help?”
Belinda shrugged. “I told Newsome I heard Officer Hammond and Tom Ventura arguing at the festival.”
“Did you make that up?”
“No, it’s the truth. I also told her I saw Mayor McDermott and Ventura arguing—and that’s the truth.”
“You say you heard Hammond and Ventura arguing. Did you catch what they were they saying?”
“Some of it. Hammond told Ventura he was an idiot and he was going to end up ruining everything by going freelance.”
“Freelance?” That word again. What did Hammond mean?
“That’s what he said. Then Ventura said something like, ‘How was I supposed to know? You’re the cop.’ Then he said Gilroy was too stupid to notice anyway. That’s about it.”
“No idea of what they were talking about?”
“No, sorry.”
“All right, thank you.”
Belinda pushed on the door, preventing me from opening it. “One more thing. I’m afraid I said something about you.” She watched me expectantly, judging whether she should go on, I thought, or waiting for me to deliver her from her discomfort by telling her that whatever she’d told Newsome was just peachy. “Newsome said you were looking into George Foster’s murder so you could sell more books, and I told her you were on the verge of solving the case.”
“Tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m so, so sorry.” Her hands shaking, she reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a white box with green lettering on the front. “They make it look like a cigarette pack,” she said. “Isn’t that insane?”
“What is it?”
“Nicotine gum.”
“You smoke?”
“I used to. Now I’m hooked on the gum.” She popped the square in her mouth.
“I’ve seen that pack before.” I took it from her hands and covered the lower portion of it with my palm so that only half the lettering showed. “Only I thought it was an embroidered handkerchief.”
CHAPTER 19
For the first time in days, I felt a real sense of fear. For a minute, sitting in my car outside Belinda’s house, I was almost paralyzed with it. I was knee-deep in trouble now. It was bad enough that George Foster had been killed in my backyard, but now the killer thought I was onto him. Or her.
I was now sure Tom Ventura had dropped a cigarette in my yard to make Gilroy look incompetent, but had he murdered Foster and Aiden Dillard? Something told me he wasn’t capable. Ventura was on the periphery, trying to hurry the process of getting rid of Gilroy so he could be mayor, but talking with Hammond at Wyatt’s Bistro, he sounded like a man who feared things were spiraling out of control.
As soon as I got home, I checked the outdoor lights at the front and back of my house and made sure the deadbolts and chain locks were serviceable. Living in Juniper Grove, I’d become sloppy with my security, hardly using the deadbolts and leaving the chains dangling all the time. Not that a cheap chain would stop a killer.
If Newsome had killed Foster or Aiden, she’d try to silence me. If she hadn’t killed them, she’d spread word to Hammond, Ventura, and the whole rotten crew that I was about to name the killer, and one of them would come after me. No way was I going to call Gilroy to let him know I was a target. He’d tell me it was my own fault.
“Time to get deadly serious,” I said out loud as I riffled through the refrigerator for something to eat. “Treat this like the plot of a mystery novel.” Ignoring part of a leftover cream puff in one of Holly’s pink boxes, I grabbed a hunk of cheese, sandwich bread, and cold cuts and dropped them onto a large plate. Feeling virtuous, I jogged up the stairs to my writing room.
My computer desk faced a giant corkboard I used to plot my mysteries—a place to jot down ideas, display drawings and photos of my imagined characters and locations, come up with connections between events to flesh out my plots. I hated pulling down all my work, but I set to it, leaving nothing behind but a few dozen thumbtacks. Then I began to rebuild the corkboard with an altogether different mystery in mind.
Twenty minutes later I had the basics before me. The victims, the suspects, the motives, the opportunities. And the blackmail. I stuck Gilroy’s name up there for good measure. He was connected to all the suspects in some way, except maybe Belinda, and he was the reason Hammond, Ventura, and Newsome were cooperating with one another.
I threw together a sandwich, sat at my desk, and stared at the corkboard. The clues to George Foster’s death lay in the past, in the events surrounding his and Mitch Dillard’s bank theft. Dillard had died within hours of the theft on the rapids of the Blue River, but Foster may as well have died the same day. It was only a matter of time before fate and his killer caught up with him.
It still puzzled me that George had dug a hole in my backyard the night he was killed. Surely it wasn’t to retrieve an old piece of paper that read, “Chief Gilroy is a liar.” A liar about what? I tried to imagine the sequence of events: George crept into my yard, the killer was waiting for him, and . . . No, it couldn’t have happened that way. George and his killer arrived together—it had to be—and one or both of them dug that hole.
Evening was still a few hours away, so I called Julia over with the promise of homemade pancakes after church next Sunday. My thoughts were going in aimless circles and I needed her sensible and fresh pair of eyes.
“This is a war room,” she said when she saw my corkboard. “In all the months you’ve lived here, I’ve never seen where you write.” She glanced at what remained of my sandwich, clucking her tongue. “That’s a meal?”
“And it was delicious.” I took her by the shoulders and positioned her in front of the corkboard. “Tell me what you see.”
“A lot of pieces of paper.”
“Obviously. What else?”
“Why is Belinda Almond’s name up there? Is she a suspect?”
“Everyone’s a suspect,” I said, sidestepping the real issue.
“Well . . .” Julia tilted her head to the left. Then the right. “All of these people knew George seven years ago.”
“And except for Mayor McDermott, they all held the same position back then as they do today. Officer Hammond was Officer Hammond, Chief Gilroy was Chief Gilroy, Tom Ventura was the town attorney, Jillian Newsome was the editor in chief of the Post.”
Julia searched my eyes. “What was Belinda Almond?”
“Just Belinda. A sad woman.”
“Yes?”
“Unlike you, Julia.” I shoved my hands in my pockets and stared at the board. “Is it possible that one of these people was supposed to give you some of George’s money?”
“Let’s see.” She pointed at the board. “Not Chief Gilroy.”
“Of course.”
“Why do you dislike him?”
“I don’t. Really. Seriously, I don’t.”
Julia let out a gentle, between-friends laugh. “You like him.”
“What? Stop it.”
“Don’t deny it. I’m old enough to know the signs. You can’t talk about him without becoming irritated.”
“Since when is irritation a sign of affection?”
“Since Adam and Eve.”
“Let’s get back to this corkboard,” I said, trying to pull both our heads out of the clouds. There was no point in thinking about James Gilroy, chief of police. Ice blue eyes, dark hair. I wasn’t in his ballpark. “Anyway, I’m sure he has a girlfriend.”
“I’ve seen him with a date.”
“See?”
Her hands flew to her hips. “He’s not supposed to date?”
Well, I don’t date, I wanted to say. Time to shift the subject back to murder. “Think, Julia. Which one of our suspects might George have trusted with some of the stolen money?”
She exhaled loudly and refocused on the corkboard. “He and Tom Ventura didn’t get along.” She pointed at Gilroy’s and Hammond’s names. “And he didn’t like the police.”
“What about Newsome?”
“Like everyone else in Juniper Grove, he didn’t like her or trust her.”
“McDermott?”
“He didn’t dislike him, but he didn’t really know him.” She stepped closer to the board. “What about Belinda?” Julia spun around, her hand to her throat. “What if the money wasn’t even for me? What if he left it for Belinda?”
“Remember, it was news of the court hearing that brought both George and Aiden back to town, and there was nothing in the hearing about Belinda. She wasn’t in court and she wasn’t in the papers.”
Julia relaxed and dropped her hand. “I had an awful thought that . . .”
“Belinda has plenty of money. She does now and she did then.”
“Then who?”
“George must have been friendly with one of these people. Maybe you didn’t know how he felt.”
“That’s more than possible.” Julia wandered over to my desk chair and sat. “You were always leaving messes behind you, George.”
I planted myself in front of the corkboard and stared at it as though it held the answers, and in a way, it did. The answers were there in front of me, I just couldn’t see clearly enough to untangle the clues from the insignificant details. “I forgot the cigarette I found in my backyard,” I said, writing “cigarette” on a sticky note and placing it under Ventura’s name. “Officer Underhill said the chief was looking at it as if it meant something to him. I think I know why now.”
“Nothing ever came of it.”
“Gilroy isn’t saying anything, but I think Tom Ventura dropped it. Ventura is trying to quit smoking and probably has cigarettes around the house. He left a cigarette at the crime scene to make Gilroy look bad. That’s what Hammond meant by ‘freelancing.’ Ventura wanted to speed things up and broke with the plan.”
“He was always a foolish man.”
“I hate to say this, but there are two people who could have taken the money, or some of it, from George.”
Julia glowered at the corkboard.
“Who could have found George on the day he and Mitch Dillard stole that money and never told a soul?” I asked.
A moment later, Julia realized what I was saying. “Chief Gilroy isn’t dirty, Rachel. Hammond, maybe, but not Gilroy.”
“Think about it. They found Dillard’s body but never found George, alive or dead. George had the money.”
Julia was shaking her head. “Hammond, maybe.”
“George came back to find out why you never got your part of the money, to stop running and face the music, whatever. They couldn’t allow that.”
“Hammond couldn’t allow that.”
Julia was right. The man I knew, however briefly I’d known him, as Chief James Gilroy would never steal hundreds of thousands of dollars and bash a man’s head in with a shovel. Or put a knitting needle in his neck. But Officer Chase Hammond was a different man altogether. “Remember this morning, when I was eavesdropping on Ventura and Hammond? I told you they were arguing, but Ventura said he’d deliberately arranged to meet Hammond in a public place. He was afraid of him.”
Julia’s eyes grew large. “Officer Hammond is the killer.”
“We have zero proof.” Again I studied the board. “Court hearing,” I said, counting off on my fingers, “Aiden’s notes, the newspaper articles, hole dug, George killed, buried box found, cigarette found, Aiden killed.” I let out a little roar of frustration. “I’m not getting anywhere. I need to clear the cobwebs.” I twisted back to Julia. “Want one-quarter of an old cream puff?”
“I wouldn’t say no. Even if you did phrase it so I would.”
Downstairs in the kitchen, I took the Holly’s Sweets box from my fridge and tried to remove the leftover cream puff without damaging it—quite the operation, considering that the cream filling had oozed and glued itself to the box. I ended up using a spatula to free it.
“You weren’t joking,” Julia said.
“Nothing wrong with it, though. Holly says that if they’re refrigerated, they’re safe for three days.”
“I hope she has a wonderful time tonight. She works too hard.”
“It’s not work if you love it, and she loves that bakery. It’s a shame Jacob Ventura vandalized it, even if she is getting a free employee for the next three months.”
“He never said why he broke in.” Julia took her plate, examined her damaged slice of cream puff, and decided she would chance taking a bite.
“Tom Ventura doesn’t like Holly. He made that very clear the first day I met him. I think Jacob picked up on that and was trying to please his grandfather.”
“Mmm.”
“I want another look at the hole in my yard. Coming?”
I strode into the backyard with Julia in tow, half expecting to find another cigarette or some other evidence that my privacy had been invaded again.
“When are you going to fill that in?” Julia asked.
“I’m thinking of planting a tree.” I did a half circle around the hole, hoping to catch something I’d missed before.
“Do you think a woman could dig a hole in this hard clay?”
“I’ve dug back here.” I pointed to my left, at a climbing rose rising up latticework along the fence. “I planted that right after I moved in. I added amendments to the soil so the roots could breathe.”
Julia’s eyes were drawn to the cedar gate on the west side of my yard. “I see a woman’s hand waving,” she said.
“Hello!” Holly called out.
Cupping my hands around my mouth, I shouted, “Come in!”
“I rang the doorbell, but no one answered,” Holly said, shutting the gate. “Then I thought I heard you back here.”
“We need another pair of eyes,” I said, glad for her company. While I sometimes read too much into things or complicated them, Holly was the opposite, seeing simplicity in apparent chaos.
“What are we looking at?” she asked.
“The hole,” I said, pointing.
“Okay.”
“We had a leftover cream puff,” Julia said as the three of us stared. “Rachel had to pry it from the box.”
Goodness knows what my other neighbors would have thought, had they seen us congregating around a hole in the ground. At that moment I was especially grateful for my fence.
“A hole is a hole,” Julia said. “The police have never figured out why George would dig it just to stick a box in it.”
And then it hit me. “The bakery box, of course!” Why hadn’t I seen it before? Standing there, looking at the clay soil, thinking of the rain we’d had and the snow to come, it was embarrassingly obvious. “Gilroy figured it out. So did Hammond, I’m sure, and I’ll bet even Officer Underhill had a lightbulb go off eventually.”
“About the hole?” Holly asked.
“About the piece of paper and box. Julia, are you positive that was George’s handwriting on the paper?”
“One hundred percent.”
“The night we found George, you told Hammond he could search your house again, that the police had searched it several times before.”
“I was exaggerating. They searched it twice.”
“And you said George liked to scribble letters to the editor. By hand?”
“Always. It gave him more satisfaction.”
“What if that strip of paper in the box Underhill found was torn from one of George’s letters?” I asked.
Julia considered. “It did look like one of his letters. But I can’t understand why he’d tear off part of it and bury it back here.”
“He didn’t.”
“I’m sure that was his writing.”
“It was his handwriting, but someone found a letter he’d written and tore off the bottom strip, leaving a single incriminating line and George’s signature.”
“By ‘someone’ you mean a cop,” Holly said. “A cop buried that box in your yard.”
“At Wyatt’s, Hammond said Ventura had stolen from him. I think Hammond took the letter, thinking he might use it later, and at some point he showed it to Ventura. Then Ventura, trying to hurry Gilroy’s ouster, tore the strip from the bottom of the letter and left it in the box.”
“They planned this years ago?” Julia said.
“No, days ago.” I threw my head back, frustrated by my failure to spot such a glaring clue. “I should have seen it! Even the box from Holly’s Sweets started to fall apart when the cream filling touched it. Cardboard doesn’t last, and I distinctly remember Underhill saying he found the paper in a cardboard box. After seven years, there would be little left of a cardboard box or the paper in it.”
“Then you can stop her. It won’t be easy, but if you tell the truth, you’ll be free of Jillian Newsome.”
“I’ll lose my house!” Belinda cried. “My husband cheated on me five years ago. We divorced, and I ended up with this house. If he finds out I cheated on him first, I’ll lose everything.”
“He didn’t believe the rumors about you and George?”
“Never.”
“Then he won’t believe them now, when Newsome produces whatever she has on you.”
“She has more photos from the benefit party.”
“The one in the paper wasn’t bad.”
“That was the least compromising one. The photographer snapped it when George was being a drunken jerk. Trust me, Rachel, if my husband sees the other photos—and Newsome will publish them or mail them to him—he’ll believe the rumors.”
“That party was more than seven years ago. Why would your husband do—”
“He resents giving up the house. End of story.”
I made my way to the front door, wondering how Jillian Newsome, that menace of a woman, could live in my beautiful little town for all these years and yet still want to bully its residents. Or worse than bully. Anyone who would keep photographs for seven years on the off chance she could blackmail someone with them was not a well woman. But was she capable of murder?
Belinda followed, and we stood together in the foyer as I searched for a way to make a graceful exit. She looked so miserable at that moment that I wished I had something encouraging to say to her, even knowing what she’d done to Julia and Gilroy.
I paused, my hand on the door knob. “Is there anything else you can tell me that might help?”
Belinda shrugged. “I told Newsome I heard Officer Hammond and Tom Ventura arguing at the festival.”
“Did you make that up?”
“No, it’s the truth. I also told her I saw Mayor McDermott and Ventura arguing—and that’s the truth.”
“You say you heard Hammond and Ventura arguing. Did you catch what they were they saying?”
“Some of it. Hammond told Ventura he was an idiot and he was going to end up ruining everything by going freelance.”
“Freelance?” That word again. What did Hammond mean?
“That’s what he said. Then Ventura said something like, ‘How was I supposed to know? You’re the cop.’ Then he said Gilroy was too stupid to notice anyway. That’s about it.”
“No idea of what they were talking about?”
“No, sorry.”
“All right, thank you.”
Belinda pushed on the door, preventing me from opening it. “One more thing. I’m afraid I said something about you.” She watched me expectantly, judging whether she should go on, I thought, or waiting for me to deliver her from her discomfort by telling her that whatever she’d told Newsome was just peachy. “Newsome said you were looking into George Foster’s murder so you could sell more books, and I told her you were on the verge of solving the case.”
“Tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m so, so sorry.” Her hands shaking, she reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a white box with green lettering on the front. “They make it look like a cigarette pack,” she said. “Isn’t that insane?”
“What is it?”
“Nicotine gum.”
“You smoke?”
“I used to. Now I’m hooked on the gum.” She popped the square in her mouth.
“I’ve seen that pack before.” I took it from her hands and covered the lower portion of it with my palm so that only half the lettering showed. “Only I thought it was an embroidered handkerchief.”
CHAPTER 19
For the first time in days, I felt a real sense of fear. For a minute, sitting in my car outside Belinda’s house, I was almost paralyzed with it. I was knee-deep in trouble now. It was bad enough that George Foster had been killed in my backyard, but now the killer thought I was onto him. Or her.
I was now sure Tom Ventura had dropped a cigarette in my yard to make Gilroy look incompetent, but had he murdered Foster and Aiden Dillard? Something told me he wasn’t capable. Ventura was on the periphery, trying to hurry the process of getting rid of Gilroy so he could be mayor, but talking with Hammond at Wyatt’s Bistro, he sounded like a man who feared things were spiraling out of control.
As soon as I got home, I checked the outdoor lights at the front and back of my house and made sure the deadbolts and chain locks were serviceable. Living in Juniper Grove, I’d become sloppy with my security, hardly using the deadbolts and leaving the chains dangling all the time. Not that a cheap chain would stop a killer.
If Newsome had killed Foster or Aiden, she’d try to silence me. If she hadn’t killed them, she’d spread word to Hammond, Ventura, and the whole rotten crew that I was about to name the killer, and one of them would come after me. No way was I going to call Gilroy to let him know I was a target. He’d tell me it was my own fault.
“Time to get deadly serious,” I said out loud as I riffled through the refrigerator for something to eat. “Treat this like the plot of a mystery novel.” Ignoring part of a leftover cream puff in one of Holly’s pink boxes, I grabbed a hunk of cheese, sandwich bread, and cold cuts and dropped them onto a large plate. Feeling virtuous, I jogged up the stairs to my writing room.
My computer desk faced a giant corkboard I used to plot my mysteries—a place to jot down ideas, display drawings and photos of my imagined characters and locations, come up with connections between events to flesh out my plots. I hated pulling down all my work, but I set to it, leaving nothing behind but a few dozen thumbtacks. Then I began to rebuild the corkboard with an altogether different mystery in mind.
Twenty minutes later I had the basics before me. The victims, the suspects, the motives, the opportunities. And the blackmail. I stuck Gilroy’s name up there for good measure. He was connected to all the suspects in some way, except maybe Belinda, and he was the reason Hammond, Ventura, and Newsome were cooperating with one another.
I threw together a sandwich, sat at my desk, and stared at the corkboard. The clues to George Foster’s death lay in the past, in the events surrounding his and Mitch Dillard’s bank theft. Dillard had died within hours of the theft on the rapids of the Blue River, but Foster may as well have died the same day. It was only a matter of time before fate and his killer caught up with him.
It still puzzled me that George had dug a hole in my backyard the night he was killed. Surely it wasn’t to retrieve an old piece of paper that read, “Chief Gilroy is a liar.” A liar about what? I tried to imagine the sequence of events: George crept into my yard, the killer was waiting for him, and . . . No, it couldn’t have happened that way. George and his killer arrived together—it had to be—and one or both of them dug that hole.
Evening was still a few hours away, so I called Julia over with the promise of homemade pancakes after church next Sunday. My thoughts were going in aimless circles and I needed her sensible and fresh pair of eyes.
“This is a war room,” she said when she saw my corkboard. “In all the months you’ve lived here, I’ve never seen where you write.” She glanced at what remained of my sandwich, clucking her tongue. “That’s a meal?”
“And it was delicious.” I took her by the shoulders and positioned her in front of the corkboard. “Tell me what you see.”
“A lot of pieces of paper.”
“Obviously. What else?”
“Why is Belinda Almond’s name up there? Is she a suspect?”
“Everyone’s a suspect,” I said, sidestepping the real issue.
“Well . . .” Julia tilted her head to the left. Then the right. “All of these people knew George seven years ago.”
“And except for Mayor McDermott, they all held the same position back then as they do today. Officer Hammond was Officer Hammond, Chief Gilroy was Chief Gilroy, Tom Ventura was the town attorney, Jillian Newsome was the editor in chief of the Post.”
Julia searched my eyes. “What was Belinda Almond?”
“Just Belinda. A sad woman.”
“Yes?”
“Unlike you, Julia.” I shoved my hands in my pockets and stared at the board. “Is it possible that one of these people was supposed to give you some of George’s money?”
“Let’s see.” She pointed at the board. “Not Chief Gilroy.”
“Of course.”
“Why do you dislike him?”
“I don’t. Really. Seriously, I don’t.”
Julia let out a gentle, between-friends laugh. “You like him.”
“What? Stop it.”
“Don’t deny it. I’m old enough to know the signs. You can’t talk about him without becoming irritated.”
“Since when is irritation a sign of affection?”
“Since Adam and Eve.”
“Let’s get back to this corkboard,” I said, trying to pull both our heads out of the clouds. There was no point in thinking about James Gilroy, chief of police. Ice blue eyes, dark hair. I wasn’t in his ballpark. “Anyway, I’m sure he has a girlfriend.”
“I’ve seen him with a date.”
“See?”
Her hands flew to her hips. “He’s not supposed to date?”
Well, I don’t date, I wanted to say. Time to shift the subject back to murder. “Think, Julia. Which one of our suspects might George have trusted with some of the stolen money?”
She exhaled loudly and refocused on the corkboard. “He and Tom Ventura didn’t get along.” She pointed at Gilroy’s and Hammond’s names. “And he didn’t like the police.”
“What about Newsome?”
“Like everyone else in Juniper Grove, he didn’t like her or trust her.”
“McDermott?”
“He didn’t dislike him, but he didn’t really know him.” She stepped closer to the board. “What about Belinda?” Julia spun around, her hand to her throat. “What if the money wasn’t even for me? What if he left it for Belinda?”
“Remember, it was news of the court hearing that brought both George and Aiden back to town, and there was nothing in the hearing about Belinda. She wasn’t in court and she wasn’t in the papers.”
Julia relaxed and dropped her hand. “I had an awful thought that . . .”
“Belinda has plenty of money. She does now and she did then.”
“Then who?”
“George must have been friendly with one of these people. Maybe you didn’t know how he felt.”
“That’s more than possible.” Julia wandered over to my desk chair and sat. “You were always leaving messes behind you, George.”
I planted myself in front of the corkboard and stared at it as though it held the answers, and in a way, it did. The answers were there in front of me, I just couldn’t see clearly enough to untangle the clues from the insignificant details. “I forgot the cigarette I found in my backyard,” I said, writing “cigarette” on a sticky note and placing it under Ventura’s name. “Officer Underhill said the chief was looking at it as if it meant something to him. I think I know why now.”
“Nothing ever came of it.”
“Gilroy isn’t saying anything, but I think Tom Ventura dropped it. Ventura is trying to quit smoking and probably has cigarettes around the house. He left a cigarette at the crime scene to make Gilroy look bad. That’s what Hammond meant by ‘freelancing.’ Ventura wanted to speed things up and broke with the plan.”
“He was always a foolish man.”
“I hate to say this, but there are two people who could have taken the money, or some of it, from George.”
Julia glowered at the corkboard.
“Who could have found George on the day he and Mitch Dillard stole that money and never told a soul?” I asked.
A moment later, Julia realized what I was saying. “Chief Gilroy isn’t dirty, Rachel. Hammond, maybe, but not Gilroy.”
“Think about it. They found Dillard’s body but never found George, alive or dead. George had the money.”
Julia was shaking her head. “Hammond, maybe.”
“George came back to find out why you never got your part of the money, to stop running and face the music, whatever. They couldn’t allow that.”
“Hammond couldn’t allow that.”
Julia was right. The man I knew, however briefly I’d known him, as Chief James Gilroy would never steal hundreds of thousands of dollars and bash a man’s head in with a shovel. Or put a knitting needle in his neck. But Officer Chase Hammond was a different man altogether. “Remember this morning, when I was eavesdropping on Ventura and Hammond? I told you they were arguing, but Ventura said he’d deliberately arranged to meet Hammond in a public place. He was afraid of him.”
Julia’s eyes grew large. “Officer Hammond is the killer.”
“We have zero proof.” Again I studied the board. “Court hearing,” I said, counting off on my fingers, “Aiden’s notes, the newspaper articles, hole dug, George killed, buried box found, cigarette found, Aiden killed.” I let out a little roar of frustration. “I’m not getting anywhere. I need to clear the cobwebs.” I twisted back to Julia. “Want one-quarter of an old cream puff?”
“I wouldn’t say no. Even if you did phrase it so I would.”
Downstairs in the kitchen, I took the Holly’s Sweets box from my fridge and tried to remove the leftover cream puff without damaging it—quite the operation, considering that the cream filling had oozed and glued itself to the box. I ended up using a spatula to free it.
“You weren’t joking,” Julia said.
“Nothing wrong with it, though. Holly says that if they’re refrigerated, they’re safe for three days.”
“I hope she has a wonderful time tonight. She works too hard.”
“It’s not work if you love it, and she loves that bakery. It’s a shame Jacob Ventura vandalized it, even if she is getting a free employee for the next three months.”
“He never said why he broke in.” Julia took her plate, examined her damaged slice of cream puff, and decided she would chance taking a bite.
“Tom Ventura doesn’t like Holly. He made that very clear the first day I met him. I think Jacob picked up on that and was trying to please his grandfather.”
“Mmm.”
“I want another look at the hole in my yard. Coming?”
I strode into the backyard with Julia in tow, half expecting to find another cigarette or some other evidence that my privacy had been invaded again.
“When are you going to fill that in?” Julia asked.
“I’m thinking of planting a tree.” I did a half circle around the hole, hoping to catch something I’d missed before.
“Do you think a woman could dig a hole in this hard clay?”
“I’ve dug back here.” I pointed to my left, at a climbing rose rising up latticework along the fence. “I planted that right after I moved in. I added amendments to the soil so the roots could breathe.”
Julia’s eyes were drawn to the cedar gate on the west side of my yard. “I see a woman’s hand waving,” she said.
“Hello!” Holly called out.
Cupping my hands around my mouth, I shouted, “Come in!”
“I rang the doorbell, but no one answered,” Holly said, shutting the gate. “Then I thought I heard you back here.”
“We need another pair of eyes,” I said, glad for her company. While I sometimes read too much into things or complicated them, Holly was the opposite, seeing simplicity in apparent chaos.
“What are we looking at?” she asked.
“The hole,” I said, pointing.
“Okay.”
“We had a leftover cream puff,” Julia said as the three of us stared. “Rachel had to pry it from the box.”
Goodness knows what my other neighbors would have thought, had they seen us congregating around a hole in the ground. At that moment I was especially grateful for my fence.
“A hole is a hole,” Julia said. “The police have never figured out why George would dig it just to stick a box in it.”
And then it hit me. “The bakery box, of course!” Why hadn’t I seen it before? Standing there, looking at the clay soil, thinking of the rain we’d had and the snow to come, it was embarrassingly obvious. “Gilroy figured it out. So did Hammond, I’m sure, and I’ll bet even Officer Underhill had a lightbulb go off eventually.”
“About the hole?” Holly asked.
“About the piece of paper and box. Julia, are you positive that was George’s handwriting on the paper?”
“One hundred percent.”
“The night we found George, you told Hammond he could search your house again, that the police had searched it several times before.”
“I was exaggerating. They searched it twice.”
“And you said George liked to scribble letters to the editor. By hand?”
“Always. It gave him more satisfaction.”
“What if that strip of paper in the box Underhill found was torn from one of George’s letters?” I asked.
Julia considered. “It did look like one of his letters. But I can’t understand why he’d tear off part of it and bury it back here.”
“He didn’t.”
“I’m sure that was his writing.”
“It was his handwriting, but someone found a letter he’d written and tore off the bottom strip, leaving a single incriminating line and George’s signature.”
“By ‘someone’ you mean a cop,” Holly said. “A cop buried that box in your yard.”
“At Wyatt’s, Hammond said Ventura had stolen from him. I think Hammond took the letter, thinking he might use it later, and at some point he showed it to Ventura. Then Ventura, trying to hurry Gilroy’s ouster, tore the strip from the bottom of the letter and left it in the box.”
“They planned this years ago?” Julia said.
“No, days ago.” I threw my head back, frustrated by my failure to spot such a glaring clue. “I should have seen it! Even the box from Holly’s Sweets started to fall apart when the cream filling touched it. Cardboard doesn’t last, and I distinctly remember Underhill saying he found the paper in a cardboard box. After seven years, there would be little left of a cardboard box or the paper in it.”
