Aunt Bessie Goes (An Isle of Man Cozy Mystery Book 7) (21 page)

She had Dave
drop her off on a little side street near a few small boutiques.
 
It had been several months since she’d
been
clothes
shopping and she was surprised to find
some changes in one of the stores she’d been shopping at for many years.

“Ah, Bessie,
how nice to see you,” the fifty-something shop assistant greeted Bessie with a
smile.

“Hi, Jane,”
Bessie replied.
 
“I need a dress for
tomorrow night.”

Jane
frowned.
  
“I’m not sure,” she
said slowly, glancing around the small shop.
 
She took another step towards Bessie and
lowered her voice.
 
“We’re under new
management now,” she whispered.
 
“And we’re, well, stocking some rather different lines than we used to.”

She took
Bessie towards the back of the store.
 
“There might be something here,” she suggested as she began to flip
through a rack.
 
“This is the rack
of things we’re clearing out,” she explained to Bessie.
 

Bessie took a
closer look at the dresses hanging on the nearest rack.
 
“I’m sorry,” she said to Jane.
 
“Is this a dress or a shirt?”
 
Bessie held up the tiny little dress
that was barely more than a scrap of fabric.

Jane shook her
head.
 
“That’s the whole thing,” she
said sadly.
 
“And they’re flying out
of here.
 
Every girl in Ramsey
between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five seems to be buying at least one,
and we have a few customers that are buying them in multiple
colours
.”

Bessie made a
short circuit around the shop, checking out cropped tops and mini-skirts,
sparkly mini-dresses and longer gowns that had dangerously low-cut tops.
 
“I guess you’re right,” she said after a
moment.
 
“There isn’t going to be
much here for me now.”

Jane held up
two dresses from the sale rack.
 
“These are the last two things we have that I think might suit you,” she
told Bessie.
 
“But I don’t know that
either of them is appropriate for your event tomorrow.”

Both dresses
were perfectly fine, but neither felt right for the art auction, so Bessie
moved on to the next shop, feeling rather let down by what had been one of her
favourite
stores.
 
Luckily the other two shops had yet to follow suit and Bessie ended up
with three good possibilities between the two stores.
 
After trying them all on twice, she
finally selected a
favourite
before moving on to
ShopFast
.

The trip around the grocery store was, as always, frequently
interrupted by friends and
neighbours
who wanted to
hear the latest skeet
.
 
No
one seemed overly surprised at hearing that the body had been identified as
Mark Carr.
 
Maggie
Shimmin
, whom Bessie ran into near the tills, summed up the
general reaction that Bessie had been getting.

“Well, we all
knew he was going to come to a bad end, didn’t we?” Maggie said.
 
“If ever there was a child who was
trouble from birth, that Mark Carr was one.
 
I know he treated me badly, and I wasn’t
the only one.
 
I always thought Adam
would have turned out okay if he’d not been friends with Mark.”

“Any thoughts
on who might have killed Mark?” Bessie asked.

“Someone must
have followed him from across after he got out of prison,” Maggie said with a
shrug.
 
“I’m sure he made more than
a few enemies in there.
 
No doubt
whoever did it is now back across, sleeping in his own bed and feeling pretty
sure he got away with it.”

“So you don’t
think Mark’s death is connected with the body that was found at the King
house?” Bessie felt she had to ask.

“Haven’t they
figured out if it was really Adam or not yet?” Maggie said, shaking her
head.
 
“I guess Mark’s death could
be connected to that somehow, but I don’t know how.
 
It would make more sense if it wasn’t
Adam that was found.”

“Why?”

“Well, say
Mark and Adam were up to something and somehow they ended up killing some poor
bloke.
 
Mark would have helped Adam
hide him in the wall and then Adam could have run away while Mark went
across.
 
That makes perfect sense to
me anyway.”

It made some
sense to Bessie as well, but she knew it hadn’t been Adam who built the
wall.
 
Sarah had seen her father
doing it himself after Adam’s disappearance.
 

“The police
are working on identifying the body from the wall,” Bessie said to Maggie.
 
“I’m sure they’ll make some sort of
announcement when they do.”

“Yes, well,
that isn’t going to get my shopping done for me, is it?” Maggie said.
 
“I’m off.”

Maggie headed
down the cereal aisle while Bessie headed for the tills, her mind playing with
the notion that Mark and Adam had killed someone unknown.
 
She could just about imagine Nancy and
Frederick King helping their son hide the body.
 
But where had Adam gone, if that was the
case?
 

Bessie was so
distracted that she had to count the money for her shopping twice before she arrived
at the right amount.
 
She shook her
head at her lack of concentration and then headed out to the taxi rank.
 
Dave was waiting for her as arranged and
he whisked her home.
 
It wasn’t
until later that Bessie
realised
she’d barely spoken
to the man on the drive home, her brain being still
focussed
on other things.

The rest of
Thursday passed quietly.
 
Bessie
ignored her phone, letting the answering machine deal with the inevitable
callers.
 
She only answered once,
when Doona rang to double-check the arrangements for Friday night.
 
Otherwise, she read and did a bit of
light cleaning.
 
Friday morning was
dry and sunny and Bessie walked past
Thie
yn
Traie
and continued for a long
while down the beach.

Letting her
mind drift, she found herself thinking about Matthew Saunders, the man she’d loved
and lost so many years earlier.
 
What
would he have thought of my sticking my nose into murder investigations, she
wondered.
 
He’d probably have been
right here with me, poking around and trying to figure out what was
happening.
 
Matthew had always been
trying to figure out how things worked or what made people behave in certain
ways.
 
He’d been smart and he’d had
a very bright future in front of him.
 
Bessie forced her brain onto other things as she felt tears welling up
in her eyes.
 
You might have found
that you were totally ill suited and been divorced after three months, she told
herself sternly.
 
Anyway, you
wouldn’t be mixed up in murder investigations
here,
you’d be living in Ohio or somewhere else in the US.

By the time
she’s argued herself out of her unexpected melancholy, she was home again.
 
She kept both breakfast and lunch light,
reasoning that there would be plenty of food at the evening event.
 
Mary always had expert caterers and they
always prepared far too much.

Doona was
collecting Bessie at six.
 
The event
was scheduled to start at seven, but Mary had invited Bessie and Doona to
arrive early for a quick chat before she got too busy to enjoy their
company.
 
Bessie took a second
shower and then climbed into her new dress.
 
She had always kept herself slender, and
the simple sheath style in black suited her perfectly.
 
A touch of makeup was all she bothered
with.
 
She didn’t like to wear it
and she could see little point in changing the habits of a lifetime now.

Back
downstairs,
she slid on a pair of low heels, frowning as she
did so.
 
She’d much rather wear
comfortable shoes, but no one seemed to make shoes that were both dressy and
comfortable at the same time.
 
Transferring all of her essentials from her large handbag into a smaller
evening clutch took a moment, and then she simply had to wait for her friend.

Doona was
right on
time
, as usual.

“Bessie, I
love that dress,” Doona told her when Bessie had let her in.

“You look
gorgeous,” Bessie told her friend.
 
Doona had obviously put a great deal of time and effort into her hair
and makeup.
 
She was wearing a dress
in a dark magenta that made
Doona’s
eyes seem an even
brighter green.
 
The dress was well
styled to flatter
Doona’s
generous curves.

“Yes, well,
the event is going to be full of rich men, right?
 
I thought it might be worth making an
effort.”

Bessie smiled
as she followed her friend out the door.
 
Doona alternated between swearing off men for good and hunting eagerly
for a new boyfriend.
 
Apparently,
tonight was a night for hunting.

“Are you
feeling very sad about Mark’s death?” Doona asked Bessie as she drove.

“Yes and no,”
Bessie answered from the passenger seat.
 
“I’m sad at what happened to him.
 
No matter what he did, he didn’t deserve to be murdered.
 
But I’m not surprised and I’m not sure
the world will be worse off without him.”
 

Bessie sighed
deeply.
 
“That sounds very cold,”
she said after a moment.
 
“I don’t
mean it to be.
 
From everything I’ve
heard, Mark Carr wasn’t a very nice person.
 
I will mourn for the little boy who sat
at my kitchen table and ate biscuits, but not for the man he became.”

“Was he a good
kid or could you already tell that he was going to be trouble?” Doona asked.

“He wasn’t the
best child,” Bessie said after a moment’s thought.
 
“He could be impulsive and short-tempered,
and Joan was hopeless at disciplining him.
 
He started to really test her when the baby died and she was too
grief-stricken to deal with it properly.”

“What about
Adam?”

Bessie thought
for a bit.
 
“He had two older
brothers and an older sister,” she said eventually.
 
“He rather got lost in the crowd, as I
remember.
 
I recall him chasing
after his brothers on the beach, but he never could quite keep up.
 
He was several years younger, of
course.
 
I remember him as an
opportunist.
 
While Mark might take
the time to plan a way to trick me into giving him extra biscuits, Adam would
just wait until my back was turned and grab them.”

“So Mark was
smarter?”

“Mark was
certainly more clever,” Bessie said.
 
“Adam was lazier; he was always looking for the easy way out or a quick
fix for things.
 
Mark was prepared
to take his time and work for what he wanted.”

“But he didn’t
want to work at his father’s business.”

“Oh, good
heavens, no,” Bessie said.
 
“That
was not only hard work, but it didn’t pay terribly well.
 
Both
Mark
and
Adam had much bigger dreams than that.”

“And they were
both willing to break the law to achieve them?”

“Mark wasn’t
overly concerned with the law,” Bessie told her friend.
 
“I remember him being arrested multiple
times for stealing cars.
 
He never
did much more than go driving too fast around the island, and he always got
caught, so I’m not sure why he kept doing it, except it was a bit of adventure,
I guess.”

“I think I’m
glad I never met either of them,” Doona said.
 

They’d reached
Douglas now and Doona slowed for the entrance to the vast Quayle estate.
 
The guard at the gatehouse checked a
list and then opened the gate.
 
Doona drove slowly down the long driveway and both women sighed when
they spotted the enormous mansion as it came into view.

“It looks like
a museum or something, not like a family home,” Doona said as she pulled up
towards the mansion’s front door.

“The only room
I like in the whole place is the library,” Bessie told her.

“That’s hardly
surprising,” Doona said with a laugh.
 

A man waved
for them to stop and Doona applied the brakes.

“One of the
valets will take the car from here,” he said to Doona.
 

She glanced at
Bessie and shrugged.
 
“Poor kid, he
was probably expecting to be parking fancy sports cars and luxury sedans.”

Bessie smiled
at the young man who climbed behind the wheel of
Doona’s
sensible saloon car.
 
He drove off
as the women approached the front door.
 
It flew open before they arrived, and Mary rushed down the steps to
greet them.