Copycat Killing: A Magical Cats Mystery (28 page)

The waitress came back and topped up our cups again. I added another packet of sugar to mine. “Burtis, I know Idris was…an entrepreneur. I know Tom worked for him and then suddenly he didn’t. What I don’t know is—”

“—whether Idris did have him whacked over the head and buried out behind the Henderson place,” he finished.

“Did he?”

He shook his head. “No. You see Idris had a reputation. It wasn’t what he did, it was what people thought he did that kept ’em in line, if you get my drift.”

I did. I poured a little cream into my coffee and stirred it. “I hear there used to be a fairly regular poker game happening out in those woods back then,” I said.

“There may have been.”

“I hear Tom Karlsson was a cheat.”

Burtis picked up his mug and drained it. “I don’t care for cheaters myself,” he said, putting his cup on the counter and sliding off the stool. “But I’ve heard that story. I
also heard Tom broke a couple of fingers and had to give up playing cards.” He shrugged. “Those things happen sometimes.”

He pulled his keys out of his pocket. “One more thing. Back then, there was a road of sorts, rough but passable, that cut through those woods up there behind the Henderson place. If someone wanted to get back there they didn’t necessarily have to go past the house.” He tipped his hat to me and smiled. “You have a nice day, Kathleen. Come back and have breakfast again, sometime.”

He headed toward the cash register and I picked up my coffee. So if I believed Burtis, neither Idris Blackthorne nor the poker players had anything to do with Tom Karlsson’s death. And there had been a way to get Tom or his body up onto that ridge without anyone in the main house seeing anything.

Was Burtis telling the truth?

Was there any reason for him not to?

I slipped off my stool and walked over to the cash register. “Mr. Chapman took care of it,” the waitress said with a smile.

I walked back to the counter and left a generous tip. Then I went out to the truck. Assuming Burtis hadn’t been stringing me a line, I was back at square one.

So now what?

There was no sign of either cat when I got home. I headed upstairs to make the bed. Hercules came out of the closet as I was pulling up the spread.

“What do you do in there?” I asked. He looked at me blankly.

I dropped into the chair by the window and pulled the carton with Rebecca’s mother’s things closer. With all
the turmoil of the previous few days I hadn’t done any more planning for the library centennial celebration. I hadn’t even asked Maggie for her ideas on what to do with Ellen’s drawings.

Hercules jumped into my lap, ducking his head under my arm so he could look too. I reached into the box, pulled out one of the journals and opened it. Hercules shifted so he could see the pages. Maybe he was reading too for all I knew.

Now that I understood what The Ladies Knitting Circle had actually been doing, Ellen’s oblique comments about the women made more sense. After reading a few pages I put the diary back and looked for the journal that spanned the time period when Tom Karlsson had probably been killed. It would have been easier if Hercules hadn’t decided to help. He kept moving around on my lap, trying to poke his black-and-white head inside the box.

“Just sit still for a second,” I said in frustration. “And I’ll get it.”

He made a huffy noise, but he pulled his head back and I was able to find the book I wanted. It started about six months before Pearl and little Roma had ended up at Wisteria Hill. A couple of times Ellen even wrote about seeing Pearl with Roma, and I wondered if she was the one who’d told Pearl about The Ladies Knitting Circle. And she mentioned Sam several times. It was clear she’d liked him and that she hadn’t thought much of Sam’s father. The day Tom disappeared there were several pages carefully cut out of the diary. The entries picked up more than a week later. Hercules put a paw on the seam.

“I see it, too,” I said. I looked down at the little tuxedo cat.
“Do you think it was just a coincidence that Tom’s body was buried at Wisteria Hill—that it had nothing to do with what Anna and her friends were up to?”

He covered his face with a paw.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me neither.”

I
put the journal away, curled my feet up under me, and settled Hercules a little more comfortably on my legs. I thought about the few memories of her father that Roma had shared, like that game of hide and seek with Tom tossing a blanket over her head and telling her to be quiet and then “pretending” to look for her.

Owen wandered back in, stretched out on the floor in front of my chair and started washing his tail. He was acting just a little spacey, which meant he’d been into his stash of catnip chicken parts. He seemed to have gotten over our near accident the night before. I was pretty sure he was most annoyed about having my old sweatshirt tossed on top of him.

My shirt thrown over Owen to hide him.

A blanket thrown over Roma. Part of a game or an attempt to hide her?

Maybe Tom hadn’t been playing a game with Roma.
Maybe he’d been going to take Roma away from Pearl. Maybe that’s what had caused Pearl to pick that particular day to run. Was I wrong about Roma’s mother?

“Could Pearl have killed Tom to protect Roma?” I asked Hercules. What else had Roma said about Tom? “He sat me on his lap and let me drive,” she’d said. “I can close my eyes and see the car. It had turquoise and white bucket seats.”

Could those memories be from the same night? The night Tom disappeared?

I stroked the top of Hercules’s head. There was a connection I couldn’t quite make. I glanced at the box of Ellen’s things beside me on the table and suddenly tab A dropped into slot B.

“I have to put you down for a second,” I said to Hercules. I set him on the floor and hurried downstairs to the living room where I’d left my briefcase. I took it back up to the bedroom with me, sat down on the rug with the cats and pulled out the old yearbook and the envelope of photographs.

I started with the pictures. Hercules put both paws on my leg and poked his head in to check out each photo. Owen was content to watch and crane his neck for a better look from time to time.

It took a while, but I eventually found what I was looking for, not in the photos but in the yearbook under the heading T
RAVELIN’
M
AN
.

“That’s piece number one,” I told Hercules. “Cross your paws that I can get piece number two.”

He held out his paw and looked at it.

I pulled the phone down and thought for a moment. “She should be home,” I said to the boys. I dialed Mary’s number and crossed my own fingers that she was home
and would have the answer. I was hoping the fact that she was a bit of a pack rat would work in my favor.

It did.

I hung up, set the telephone on the floor, and leaned back against the side of the bed. Hercules climbed up onto my legs and put his paws on my chest.

“I think I know what happened to Tom,” I said. “It’s a bit of a stretch—okay a lot of a stretch—but I think I know who killed him.

“And why.”

T
he phone rang and I almost jumped out of my skin. It was Pearl.

“I need a favor from you, Kathleen, if you have time,” she said.

“What do you need?” I asked.

“I want to go out to Wisteria Hill before we go talk to Detective Gordon. Roma’s going to drive out there with me, but Neil has an appointment. Is there any chance you could join us?” She hesitated for a moment. “I think it would help Roma to have a friend.”

“Of course,” I said. There were things I needed to ask Pearl, and Wisteria Hill seemed like a good place to have that conversation. It was where everything had started and ended in many ways. We agreed to meet at the old estate in half an hour.

“Wish me luck,” I said to Owen and Hercules.

I tucked the truck in next to a muddy, nondescript SUV out at Wisteria Hill and Roma pulled in right beside me. I thought she looked tired. The past few days
had been pretty horrible for her and I was impressed by how well she’d handled everything.

Pearl got out of the passenger side of the car. “Hello, Kathleen,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.

Her attention was already being drawn to the carriage house and the field behind it. “I’m just going to look around a little,” Pearl said. “It’s been a long time since I was out here.”

I nodded and walked over to Roma.

“Thanks for coming out here,” she said. “She wouldn’t exactly take no for an answer.” She stood with her arms tightly wrapped around her body and for a moment I wondered if I should just keep what I suspected to myself. “I think she just wanted to see where…he was, all these years.”

I put a hand on her arm. “Why don’t you go check on Lucy and the others? I’ll walk around a bit with your mom. I don’t mind.”

She exhaled slowly. “I uh, thank you. I think I will.”

“Take your time,” I said.

Pearl was standing by the side steps to the old house. I walked over to her.

“It makes me sad,” she said without turning around. “This house used to be full of life and now it’s just…lonely.” We stood there in silence for a minute. “Show me where he was,” she said.

I hesitated.

“Please, Kathleen,” she said, softly.

I nodded. “All right.”

We made our way along the edge of the field. I could see that Dr. Abbott and her team had measured out a grid that covered most of the back end of the grassy area.

“There?” Pearl asked.

“Yes,” I said, pointing at the slope. “I was standing at the edge of the trees. The earth gave way. It was just so wet.” I remembered the feeling of the ground falling out from under me. I sucked in a breath and closed my eyes for a moment.

When I looked at Pearl again her eyes were fixed on some distant spot across the grass. I glanced back over my shoulder for any sign of Roma. Sam Ingstrom and a man I recognized from Everett Henderson’s office were getting out of a town truck that had pulled up by the old house.

“Why don’t we go find Roma?” I said to Pearl.

She had a look in her eyes that I couldn’t decipher and all the color seemed to have drained out of her face.

“What is it?” I asked.

“All these years he was out here and I didn’t know. I walked around in those woods and Tom was …un-derneath my feet.”

My heart started to pound. “Let’s go sit down,” I said. I led Pearl over to the steps at the side of the old house. We both sat down. She folded her hands in her lap and I covered them with my own. “It’s not your fault,” I said.

She’d been staring past me, focused on nothing really, maybe the past, but she looked at me then. “He didn’t deserve that.” She gestured toward the embankment. “He wasn’t a bad person.”

“He wasn’t a good person,” a voice said. Sam’s voice. He was standing just a few feet away. He shook his head emphatically. “He was a lousy husband and a lousy father, Pearl. Don’t make Tom out to be some kind of saint just because he’s dead.”

Pearl got to her feet and I did as well.

Sam came and stood in front of us, ignoring me, focusing only on Pearl. “Whatever happened to him has nothing to do with you. You did the right thing for you and for Roma. If Tom had been a good man, you wouldn’t have had to sneak away with the supper dishes on the table and just the clothes on your back. You wouldn’t have had to depend on Anna’s kindness.”

“We know what Anna and the other women were doing,” I said quietly.

Something flashed quickly across Sam’s face. “Okay,” he said. “That doesn’t change anything.”

Pearl kept her eyes fixed on Sam, one hand clenched into a tight fist at her side. “You told me it would be all right Sam, but you lied, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t,” Sam said. His focus was completely on Pearl. “It was all right. You’ve had a good life.”

“That night, he threatened to take Roma, trying to scare me,” Pearl said. “He twisted her arm, she was crying and I…I told him I’d do whatever he wanted.” Her voice gained strength. “I made his favorite meal—liver and onions—when it was ready he said it tasted like an old boot, and he went out looking for beer because Idris wouldn’t sell any to him anymore.”

Roma had come up behind Sam and she stood there, arms wrapped tightly around her body again, one hand pressed against her mouth.

“I grabbed Roma and I ran,” Pearl continued. “I knew Anna would help us so that’s where I went. You were there. You said it was over, Sam. But it isn’t.”

She seemed to be aware of only Sam, towering over her, his mouth pulled into a thin, tight line.

He swallowed and gave her a smile of sorts. “It’s been
over for a long time, Pearl.” He reached toward her and then abruptly pulled his hand back.

“Turquoise bucket seats,” Roma said then, to no one in particular.

We all looked at her. She was shaking. I pulled off my sweater and put it around her shoulders. She looked at me. “The car had turquoise bucket seats. I was in the driver’s seat turning the steering wheel, driving the car. I remember. Then my dad came and he sat me on his lap and I was still driving the car. He smelled like cinnamon gum.”

Her hands were clenched into tight, knotted fists. She took a couple of steps closer to Sam. “It was you. You let me sit on your lap and drive. It wasn’t Tom. It was you.”

S
am acted like Roma hadn’t even spoken. All of his attention was concentrated on Pearl.

“Just leave this all be, and trust me,” he said. “You didn’t kill Tom. You couldn’t.” His body language didn’t give anything away but I could hear an edge of desperation in his voice.

“You helped Anna, didn’t you, Sam?” I asked.

His gaze flicked in my direction.

“I don’t know why,” I went on. “Maybe your father hurt your mother. Maybe you stumbled onto what Anna and the other women were doing and it made you feel good to help. Really it doesn’t matter why you were helping. You were doing it.”