1 Aunt Bessie Assumes (15 page)

“So what did you want to talk with me
about?” Bessie asked.

“A couple of things,” he told her.
 
“Firstly, when you found Daniel Pierce’s
body, did you happen to see a mobile phone anywhere around?
 
Maybe lying on the sand or sitting on a
rock nearby?”

Bessie shook her head.
 
“It wasn’t exactly the brightest of
mornings,” she reminded the man, “but I didn’t see anything like that.
 
If there was one around, it would have been
ruined in the wind and the rain, surely?”

“Possibly,” Rockwell shrugged.

“Wouldn’t he have kept his phone in his
pocket?” Bessie asked.

“It’s not his phone I’m interested in,”
Rockwell answered.
 

Bessie shuddered as she remembered the
gruesome appearance that Samantha’s face had taken on when lit only by the
flickering bluish light of a mobile phone.
 

“Who was calling Samantha?” she
demanded.
 
“I keep remembering that
ringing phone and wondering who was calling her.”

“Donny Pierce,” Hugh answered.
 
“He was trying to reach both Samantha
and Vikky to tell them that it was time to head back to the cottage.”

Bessie nodded.
 
“I guess that makes sense,” she said
slowly.

“Here’s what doesn’t necessarily make
sense,” Rockwell told her.
 
“And I’m
telling you this in total confidence.
 
The phone that was with Samantha’s body wasn’t hers.
 
No one seems to know where Samantha’s
phone is now.”

“But if it wasn’t her phone, how could Donny
call her?”
Bessie asked, feeling confused.
 
Then her eyes grew wide.
 
“It was Vikky’s phone?”

Rockwell nodded.
 
“The phone found with the body was
Vikky’s.
 
But Vikky claims that she
gave it to Daniel on Sunday afternoon.
 
His battery was running low and he needed to run to the store for
something.
 
Vikky lent him her phone
and she claims she never got it back from him.
 
Presumably it was still in his coat pocket
when he went out for his walk on the beach later, but it wasn’t found on or
near the body.”

Bessie shook her head.
 
“I’m confused,” she admitted.

“I think we all are,” Hugh told her.
 
“But it does tie the murders together.”

Rockwell frowned.
 
“Anyway, you didn’t see anything on the
beach when you found Daniel.
 
I’m
assuming you only saw the one phone when you found Samantha?”

Bessie closed her eyes and tried to
remember exactly what she had seen.
 
“It was so dark.
 
The only
light came from the phone.”
 
She
shook her head.
 
“I only saw the one
phone,” she said finally.

“As expected,” Rockwell told her.
 

“Was there anything else?” Bessie asked,
hoping the answer would be no.

“I’ve been over your statement several
times, comparing it with the one that Donny Pierce gave us,” the Inspector
replied.

“I should hope that they agree,” Bessie
said sharply.

“For the most part,” the man
answered.
 
“He gave us far less
detail about your conversation and, when pressed, claims he doesn’t remember
exactly what you two talked about.”
 

Bessie opened her mouth to argue, but
Rockwell held up a hand.
 
“I’m happy
to believe your account of the conversation,” he told Bessie.
 
“At any rate, you both agree that he
mentioned that his brother had a drug problem and that he felt the murder had
something to do with a drug deal gone bad.
 
That’s the line of inquiry that Inspector Kelly is pursuing.”

Bessie nodded.
 
“I suppose that was the most important
part of the conversation I had with the man,” she said.

“The question becomes, therefore, what did
a drug deal gone bad have to do with Samantha Blake?” Rockwell asked.

“I didn’t even remember her last name,”
Bessie said sadly.
 
“Did Donny have
any suggestions about it?”

“If he did, he didn’t share them with me,”
Rockwell answered.
 
“Inspector Kelly
is looking into how well Samantha and Daniel knew each other.
 
He’s thinking that she might have been
his connection to a supplier or something.”
 
The man shook his head.
 
“I can see why Donny Pierce is such a
fan of the theory.
 
Anything that
shifts suspicion from his family has to appeal, but I can’t see why Inspector
Kelly is so convinced.”

“Kelly sees drugs under every rock on the
island,” Hugh told them all.
 
“I
heard a rumour that one of his kids got caught with something and now he’s
decided that the island is overrun with drugs.
 
He takes every opportunity to pursue every
possible lead in any investigation that could possibly have any connections to
drugs.”

Rockwell held up a hand.
 
“I shouldn’t have made that last
remark.
 
It was unprofessional and
out of character,” he told them all.
 
“We shouldn’t speculate about Inspector Kelly or his investigation.
 
Let’s focus on our own investigation
instead of worrying about anything else.”

Doona grinned.
 
“Don’t worry, boss, none of us is going
to repeat anything said here.
 
We
don’t gossip when we shouldn’t.”

The man grinned back at her.
 
“I certainly hope that Aunt Bessie
gossips now and again.
 
I’m counting
on her to fill me in on what’s really going on around here.
 
I’m just hoping she won’t be talking
about me when she’s talking about the murders.”

Bessie was quick to reassure the man.
 
She had no intention of doing or saying
anything that might get him into trouble.
 

“So, what we really need is inside
information about the Pierce family,” Rockwell said eventually.
 
“Any idea how we can get it?”

“I know exactly how to get it,” Bessie
answered.
 
She told him about Bahey
and her years with the Pierce family.
 
“We’re having lunch together tomorrow,” she told him.
 
“I’m sure I’ll know a lot more after
that.”

“I don’t think anyone has interviewed the
woman,” Rockwell said with a frown.
 
“Perhaps we should have, but she wasn’t in Laxey when the first murder
took place.
 
Someone should have
talked to her for background information, though.”

“I took her statement this afternoon,
after Samantha’s body was discovered,” Hugh told his boss.
 
“She was at the house all day, mostly
sitting with Mrs. Pierce.
 
The
security folks were able to alibi both Bahey and Mrs. Pierce for the day.
 
There’s no way they had anything to do
with Samantha’s death.”

“What about Mr. Pierce?” Doona demanded.

“He left the house around the same time as
his son and the two women,” Hugh answered.
 
“He told Bahey he needed some fresh air.
 
He took the keys to one of the family’s cars
with him.
 
In his statement
originally, he claimed that he was home all day, but when challenged, he
admitted to going out for a short time.
 
He claims he went for a drive along the coast road and back.
 
Unfortunately, there are no witnesses.”

“And now we’re teetering on the brink of
talking too much about things that should be confidential,” Inspector Rockwell
broke in.
 
“I’m sorry to say that
this isn’t really a two-way street,” he told Bessie.
 
“I’m hoping you will gather information
for me, but I can’t offer you much, if anything, in return.”

“I’m not interested in hearing the latest skeet
on the murders,” Bessie replied.
 
“I
just want to see the murderer behind bars.”

“Don’t we all?” Doona said emphatically.

“While we’re talking about alibis,” Bessie
said slowly.
 
“Does anyone at Thie
yn Traie have one for the first murder?”

Inspector Rockwell shook his head.
 
“Tomorrow’s paper will cover the fact
that the coroner’s office is having a hard time determining even an approximate
time of death,” he told them all.
 
“With the wild weather and the tides coming in and out, all they can
offer is a fairly broad window from around nine Sunday evening, which is when
the Pierce family agrees that Danny left the house, until three or four the
next morning.
  
He was dead at
least three to four hours before you found the body.
 
No one at Thie yn Traie is able to
provide a watertight alibi for that entire stretch.”

“No pun intended,”
Doona
suggested.

Rockwell smiled.
 
“Indeed, no pun intended.”

The dinner party broke up soon after that,
with everyone agreeing to meet again the following evening to discuss whatever
Bessie could learn from Bahey.
 
Inspector Rockwell walked Doona to her car.
 
Hugh was kind enough to help Bessie with
the dirty dishes, gobbling up the rest of the cake as his compensation once
they’d finished.

“I’ll just say good night, then,” Bessie
told the man as she finished tidying up from his second pudding.

“I hope you’ll sleep well,” Hugh told her,
giving her another hug.
 
“Try to
think about happy things.”

Bessie nodded and headed for the
stairs.
 
She was surprised at how
kind and understanding young Hugh was turning out to be.
 
Perhaps Doona was right to think so
highly of him.
 

In bed, she tossed and turned for a while,
struggling to find a comfortable position while she listened to Hugh as he got
ready for bed.
 
When the last light
was finally switched off downstairs, she had nearly given up and climbed back
out of bed.
 
Now, unwilling to
disturb her guest, Bessie burrowed down under the covers and tried to force
herself to sleep.
 
Tomorrow was
going to be a busy day and she needed to be well rested if she was going to
find out anything useful for the investigation.
 

For once her sleep was restless and
disturbed, and more than once Bessie considered getting up and reading instead
of lying in bed feeling wide-awake.
 
Her new books were all in the sitting room, where Hugh was snoring
loudly on the couch.
 
She wondered,
briefly, how likely he was to actually wake up if she walked down to get
one.
 
She had plenty of other books
in the office next door to her bedroom, of course, but nothing appealed to her
overtired and overwrought brain.
 
She felt like she had been pummelling her pillow all night as she
flipped it around and around, trying to make it comfortable enough to tempt her
into sleep.
 
Finally, the clock rolled
around to six and she felt like she could get out of bed.

Chapter
Eight

Thursday morning was clear and noticeably
warmer.
 
Bessie smiled, in spite of
her tiredness, as she looked out her bedroom window.
 
For the first time in ages, she might
actually enjoy her morning walk.
 
After a quick shower, she dressed and headed down for some
breakfast.
 
Hugh was still snoring
loudly and she wondered just how much noise pollution the young policeman was
causing.

After tea and toast she headed out for a
short walk before Hugh was even awake.
 
This time she walked towards the police crime scene tape, stopping just
short of it.
 
She frowned as she
studied the scene in the dimly lit dawn.
 
With the fluctuating tides of the last several days it was impossible to
tell exactly where Daniel Pierce’s body had been.
 
Any evidence that had been missed was,
no doubt, long gone as well.
 
Bessie
breathed in deeply, pulling fresh salty air into her lungs.
 
In spite of everything that had happened
this week, she still loved the island.

With Hugh up and fed and off to work,
Bessie tidied her cottage and then spent the rest of the morning working on her
research paper.
 
She hadn’t done anywhere
near as much as she would have liked over the last few days.
 
Bahey was picking her up at half-eleven,
so at eleven she shut her computer off and stretched.

“I’m getting old,” she sighed to herself
as her an entire range of muscles complained when she got to her feet.
 
In her bedroom she changed into black trousers
and a lightweight lilac-coloured sweater.
 
Her hair needed a quick brushing after that and she even took the time
to add a touch of colour to her cheeks and lips.
 

“Not so old that you still don’t look
good,” she grinned at herself in the mirror.
 
She gathered up her handbag and checked
that her mobile was charged.
 
Until
the murderer was safely behind bars, she didn’t want to take any chances.

On the dot of eleven-thirty a fancy black
car pulled up outside Bessie’s cottage.
 
As Bessie opened her door, Bahey rolled her window down and shouted to
her.

“Hello, Aunt Bessie, hop in.”

Bessie locked up her cottage.
 
When she turned around, the car’s driver
had climbed out and he was now holding the car door open for her.
 
She flushed as she slid past him into
the car.
 
Such fancy treatment
wasn’t what she was used to.
 
There
had been a time, many years ago, when taxi drivers sometimes afforded the same
courtesy, but the practice seemed to have died out.
 
Some days Bessie felt as if her taxi
driver thought he was doing her a favour by simply slowing down when she was
ready to get out.

The luxury car slid smoothly along the
road as Bahey fussed over her.
 
“Fancy
you finding two dead bodies,” she prattled.
 
“I mean, finding Danny must have been
awful, but then to go and find Miss Samantha as well?
  
I can’t imagine what that must
have been like.”

When she paused for a breath, Bessie just
murmured a vague reply.
 
She was
happy for Bahey to keep talking, no matter what the subject.
 
Something interesting might just come of
it.

“Not that I was a huge fan of Miss
Samantha,” Bahey continued.
 
“But
she was much better than that Vikky person, anyway.
 
Honestly, those boys were raised well,
but neither one of them has any sense at all when it comes to women.
 
Daniel chased after everything in a
skirt.
 
I was amazed when he
actually got married to one of his ‘girls,’ and Donny, well, don’t even get me
started on Donny.”

Bessie grinned to herself.
 
This was going to be an interesting
afternoon.

Bahey took a deep breath and then launched
herself into a long and rambling story about how she had come to work for the
Pierce family in the first place.
 
The story filled the rest of the drive to Foxdale.
 
While it was somewhat interesting,
Bessie wasn’t especially interested in hearing it.
 
Over lunch she would have to make sure
to get Bahey talking about the murders again.
 
It was probably best to have that
conversation somewhere that the Pierces’ driver couldn’t overhear, anyway.

Joney Kelly’s husband had passed away many
years earlier and her son had moved off-island.
 
That was the explanation that Bahey gave
for the rundown state of the house where she and Bessie were dropped off.

“She just doesn’t have the energy to keep
the place up like she should,” Bahey tutted.
 
“And she doesn’t have the money to get a
man around to take care of things either.
 
That husband of hers left her just enough to make ends meet, but not a
cent more.”
 
Bahey sighed.
 
“And that son of hers doesn’t visit
often enough to see what she needs.”

“Maybe you should get her to move to
Douglas with you,” Bessie suggested tentatively.

“Ha, that’ll never happen.”
 
The woman who had opened the door to
Bahey’s
knock
glared out at Bessie.
 
“Move to Douglas?
 
Why on earth would I want to do that?”

Bessie smiled at Joney, hoping to disguise
her surprise at the other woman’s appearance.
 
Joney had been “the pretty one” in family,
but the years had not been kind to her.
 
She now looked substantially older than her younger sister and, Bessie
flattered herself, even older than Bessie herself.
 
Of course there were only about seven
years between them, but Bessie fancied that she looked much better than the
thin and pale woman who stood in the doorway.

“Will you be moving into Douglas some time
soon, then?” Joney demanded of Bessie.

Bessie laughed.
 
“Of course not, I’m staying in my home
until the last, and I guess you are, too.”

Joney nodded emphatically.
 
“They’re going to have to carry me out
of here,” she told her.
 
“This was
home from the time I was twenty-five and I don’t intend to be moving out of it
now I’m a bit older.”

“A lot older,” Bahey snorted.
 
“And I’m happy for you to stay here.
 
I just wish your William would help you
out a bit with the expenses.
 
The
house needs a good coat of paint, inside and out; the garden is overgrown
and….”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Joney interrupted her
sister.
 
“If you’re done complaining
about my home, maybe you want to come in and have lunch?
 
If you can stand the idea of spending
time in my falling-down wreck, that is.”

Bahey laughed.
 
“I’ll try to stand it for today,” she
said in a teasing tone, “but next time lunch is at my place.”

Joney made a face behind her sister’s back
as she stepped aside to let the other women into the house.
 
“At your fancy condo-minimum, huh, where
everything is all slick and shiny and new?
 
I guess I could just about have lunch there one day.”

Bessie smiled at the pair and their
good-natured bickering.
 
She felt a
small sadness as she thought about her own sister, whom she had last seen when
she was only a teenager.
 
Katherine
had stayed in America when Bessie and her parents returned to the island.
 
She had chosen to marry the man she
loved and remain with him.
 
She and
Bessie exchanged frequent letters over the years until Katherine’s death, but
spending time with Bahey and Joney reminded Bessie of what she’d missed by not
having her sister around.

She shook her head to clear the thought
from her mind.
 
Everyone had to make
his or her own choices in life.
 
Katherine had made hers and, by all accounts, she had lived happily with
her husband, eventually raising ten children with him.
 
Bessie had taken a different path, and
while she sometimes indulged in a bit of “what if” with herself, she never
regretted any of her decisions.

 
“What must you think of us?” Bahey now
said to Bessie.
 
“We don’t always
argue, just usually.”

Bessie just grinned and then stepped into
the house.
 
Bahey was right; it did
need a coat of paint.
 
The formal sitting
room that the entryway opened into also needed dusting and a good run through
with a vacuum cleaner.
 
Bessie
wrinkled her nose as she inhaled a good portion of dust with her first
breath.
 
The house smelled musty and
damp and Bessie wondered how often Joney’s son did visit.
 
Surely, if he had been there recently,
he must have noticed that his mother was no longer keeping the
house
as she should.

“Please pardon the dust,” Joney
announced.
 
“I don’t use this room
often, so I don’t clean it as much as I should.”
 
She looked around the room, her face
surprised as if she, too, were seeing it for the first time.
 
“Well, my goodness, it has managed to
get itself into a state, hasn’t it?” she sighed.
 
“I guess I should have taken the time to
clean it yesterday.”

“It might have been nice,” Bahey told
her.
 
“I assume you managed to clean
the kitchen, at least?”

Joney laughed.
 
“The kitchen is as spotless as ever,”
she answered.
 
The remark worried
Bessie.
 
Just how spotless did the
woman usually keep her kitchen, she wondered.

She needn’t have worried, however.
 
While the kitchen wasn’t exactly
spotless, it was clean and tidy.
 
Joney ushered the other two women into the spacious kitchen that took up
the entire back of the house.
  

“We remodelled everything about ten years
ago, just before my husband passed on,” Joney told Bessie.
 
“This was a small kitchen and a small
dining room, so we knocked them together and put the new kitchen in.
 
Then we tacked on the little conservatory.”

Bessie followed her through an open
sliding door into the glass-walled room that jutted out into the garden.
 
It was small, but it was cosy, clean and
comfortably furnished with overstuffed couches.

“Have a seat,” Joney offered.
 
“I’ve a lasagne in the oven; it won’t be
long now.”

Bessie sat down tentatively on one of the
couches and then smiled and slid back into the seat.
  
It was at least twice as
comfortable as it looked.

It wasn’t long.
 
Bessie was loath to give up her seat in
the sunny conservatory only a few moments after she had sat down.
 
The delicious smells that filtered in
from the kitchen, however, had her quickly changing her mind.

“I hope everyone likes red wine,” Joney
said, as she poured some into glasses that were already in place around the
small kitchen table.

“Sounds good to me,” Bessie answered.
 
Bahey looked at the bottle’s label and
frowned, but she didn’t complain.
 
Joney caught the look and grinned at her sister.

“Sorry sis, I’m sure you’re used to much
nicer stuff at the Pierces’, but this is what I can afford.”

Bahey took a sip and smiled at her
sister.
 
“Actually, it isn’t bad,”
she admitted.
 
“It’s not a brand
I’ve heard of, but it tastes okay.”

Joney laughed.
 
“I just buy whatever’s on offer at
ShopFast,” she told them.
 
“This was
last week’s special purchase.
 
If
you bought two bottles, you got a third one free.
 
I figured if it was horrible I could
just cook with it.”

The conversation over lunch wandered
through the threesome’s shared past and then into each woman’s individual life
story.
 
Bessie heard all about
Joney’s long teaching career and her wonderful son who was something important
in London.
 
She was more interested
in hearing about Bahey’s life with the Pierce family, but those stories
revealed nothing she thought was relevant to the murders.
 
After sharing a few stories from her own
past, Bessie decided that it was time to shift the conversation back to what
she really wanted to discuss.

“I’m sure Mr. and Mrs. Pierce must be ever
so pleased that you’re there for them in their time of need,” she said to Bahey
as Joney passed around profiteroles and chocolate sauce.