Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 02 - Rekindling Motives (14 page)

“So, when Aunt Madge and I looked at them, she spotted Mary Doris in a picture and suggested Mary Doris might like to see it.”
I rubbed my nose, sure it was getting longer. “Like half the town, Mary Doris was her teacher.”

He eyed me for two or three seconds.
“Uh uh, Jolie. You and your sore tailbone wouldn’t lug those old albums over there ASAP. You wanted her to tell you what she knew.”

“It so happens,” I closed the folder I was looking at, “that I’m nicer than you think I am.
Unless,” I sat the folder in the tray for refiling, “I’m talking to you of course.” I gave him my sweetest smile and hitched my purse back on my shoulder.

I had planned to look at a couple
of other recent sales, but he would probably just stand there and talk to me. Winters trailed me as I walked out. In the hallway, I stopped. “Look George, I’m tired of you coming up to me about the attic.”

“Don’t you mean about the skeleton?”
He grinned.

“Whatever.
It’s Sgt. Morehouse you should be talking to, not me.” It suddenly occurred to me that he must not know that Mary Doris’ death had been a murder, and I realized there had been no news stories about that.
What is Sgt. Morehouse up to?

“You know something,” he said, an
d I figured I must have shown the realization on my face.

“I know a lot of stuff.
See you later George.” He didn’t follow me out. I had just beeped open my car door when I realized he was putting a lot of time into the late Richard Tillotson’s demise. He had someone in the Register of Deed’s Office watching for me and he’d talked to enough people at the nursing home to know that I’d taken photo albums over there. I gave a mental shrug.
What do I care?

A
LOT, IT TURNED OUT, when I read the next day’s paper. Winters was giving Ocean Alley readers an update of the “decades old murder,” as he put it. He had done more digging and learned that Gracie’s grandmother and mother had a long-standing “cold relationship” with Mary Doris, though no one seemed to know why. Though he did not say so, this fact seemed to be what had gotten his interest. At least that’s how I read between the lines of his article. He had talked to Gracie, who had told him she’d never met Mary Doris, and then her mother who had told him she’d “forgotten more than she remembered” about the “tragic nature” of her uncle’s disappearance. I didn’t know George well, but I would bet Scoobie’s lottery winnings that it was that comment that had fueled George’s interest.

My mobile phone
rang as I pulled into the small parking area at the B&B, but I didn’t recognize the number so I didn’t pick up. Remembering that Scoobie might have called from any phone, I listened to the message as I poured a glass of water.

“Jolie, its Annie Milner.
We never did get to Java Jolt for that coffee, and I wanted to get a few friends together to talk about my options.”

Now I’m her friend?

“I thought it might be fun to meet in the building I’m going to use as my campaign headquarters.”

Sounded as if she figured out her best option on her own
.

“Are you free Saturday afternoon about
two o’clock? We’ll meet at 227 C Street. Call me.” She rattled off her number.

I sat on Aunt Madge’s sofa holding my glass of water out of Jazz’s reach as I thought about the invitation to Annie’s campaign meeting.
I didn’t especially like her, but I didn’t dislike her and I thought she’d be a much better prosecuting attorney than the current one. Who I had liked was her Aunt Mary Doris.
You barely knew her
, I told myself.

“Wait a minute.” I said, aloud.

“What minute?” asked Aunt Madge as she came into the great room through the swinging door that leads to the guests’ breakfast room. She was carrying a small sack of groceries and opened the fridge to put some cream and butter in it.

“Annie called me to see if I would meet with her and some others to talk about her campaign, or whether she should run, or something.”
I began. Then I decided to be honest. Aunt Madge would find out anyway. “The building we’d meet in is one that I guess she will inherit from Mary Doris, 227 C Street.”

Aunt Madge looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

“The building that used to be Peter Fisher and Richard Tillotson’s bakery.”

Aunt Madge filled her electric tea kettle.
“Why does the building make a difference to you?”

I shrugged.
“I guess it doesn’t. She just seems to be,” I paused.

“To be moving kind of fast after her aunt’s death.” Aunt Madge finished for me.
“Which of course you would not do.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

I LEFT ANNIE A VOICE MAIL saying I would meet her the next day. It was late afternoon and I still had two of the small ledgers crammed into my handbag. I decided to pay Lance Wilson an unannounced visit, and told Aunt Madge I was going down to the library to look for Scoobie. As I got to the front door I saw the two chipmunks sitting on the landing that was two steps up from the hallway. Each had a sunflower seed. I stopped to stare at them, then proceeded more slowly toward the door.
Maybe they want me to open it and let them out.
As I got closer they jumped down the two steps and ran under the washstand.

Great, they’ve learned to climb steps
.

If Lance was surprised to see me on his porch he didn’t show it.
“I wondered if you could look at these ledgers for me,” I said, and held them up for him to see more closely. He opened the door and motioned that I should precede him down the hall. I sat them on his small table and he picked one up and flipped through the pages without saying anything. Slowly he sat down and kept reading, still not saying anything. I and my donut sat down.

After several minutes he raised his eyes to look at me.
“I’d say they bought a lot of yeast, even for a bakery.”

“Aunt Madge said most people kne
w they brewed and sold some kind of alcohol.”

He nodded.
“Mary Doris talked to me about that quite a bit the last couple of years. I guess,” he stared down at the open page and then looked back at me, “she knew she wasn’t going to be around forever, and she wanted to talk to someone about Richard.” I stayed quiet, which was a struggle.

He continued, “She really believed that Peter killed Richard but, as far as I could tell, it was just a strong belief, she hadn’t seen them quarrel, though she said that Peter thought Richard was cooking the books; I think that was her expression.”

“She sort of implied that to me the other night.” His eyebrow shot up, and I told him that I had gone to talk to her and had come back the next day with a photo album, but she had already died.

Hearing this, his mood seemed to visibly lift.
“Well now, that’s nice to know. She was looking forward to something when she died.”

I let him think about this for a few moments, and then broached what I really wanted to know.
“Is there anything in those ledgers that makes you think one of the two men was shorting the other?”

He shook his head.
“Can’t tell. You see all these erasure marks and it makes you wonder.” He flipped through a few pages. “Maybe someone, for our purposes let’s say Richard, took some money out of the till. You can see that the handwriting is different sometimes, one person wrote the original numbers and a couple of lines below it looks like some numbers were erased and others written in.”

He slid the ledger to me and I looked again.
The handwriting had not looked that different, all the numbers were written with the kind of old-fashioned penmanship that looked very neat to me, as if each letter were formed with care. The sevens had a line across the stem of the number. Looking more closely, I could see that there were differences in the writing styles, but they were not great. I slid it back to him. “It almost looks as if the second person was trying to write like the first person,” I said.

He shrugged, “Could be.
If you don’t mind me asking, why is this important?”

Before I could answer, there was a loud knock on the door and Lance stood up.
“I haven’t had two people stop by to visit me at the same time in years.”

As soon as he opened the door I knew I was in trouble.
I heard Sgt. Morehouse politely asked if he could come in for a few minutes. I quickly stuffed the ledgers in my purse. Deep into my purse. When he walked into the small living room I knew Morehouse would have hollered at me if he wasn’t in Lance’s house. “You! What are you doing here Jolie?”

“Ms. Gentil is the new ch
air of the committee for the food pantry,” Lance said, having glanced at the table and noted that I had picked up the ledgers. “Did you hear about our good fortune?” he asked, gesturing that Morehouse should sit in one of the leather chairs.

I watched Morehouse deflate as he sat down.
“Good fortune?”

“Yes.
My good friend Mary Doris Milner left the pantry a substantial sum of money. A good bit of it will help us modernize the facility and add some refrigerators.” Lance smiled as he said this.

Morehouse thought about this for a second.
“That’s terrific.” He paused. “I’m here to talk about Mary Doris, in fact.” He glanced at me.

“Would you like me to leave?” I asked, trying to be courteous and hoping he’d let me stay.

“All right with you if Jolie stays?” Morehouse asked Lance.

“Fine by me,” he said, appearing to be puzzled by Morehouse’s visit.

“I have some…uncomfortable news.
It’ll be in the paper tomorrow.” Morehouse drew out the small notebook I’d seen him use when he interviewed people. “I know you were good friends. Partially I didn’t want you to be surprised by it, and in part I hope you can help me.”

“Help you?” Lance asked.

Morehouse took a breath. “I’m afraid Mary Doris did not die of natural causes. She was poisoned with methyl alcohol.”

Morehouse and I both jumped to Lance’s
chair as he leaned forward, almost falling out of the chair. Morehouse kept a hand on Lance’s elbow. Which was good, because jumping had not helped my tailbone and I don’t think I would have been much help to anybody.

“Steady there,” I said.
“I’ll get you some water.” I walked down the short hallway into the kitchen and grabbed a coffee mug from the small dish drainer and filled it with water.

When I got back to the living room Lance was sitting back in the recliner, his eyes closed.
My own met Morehouse’s, and for once he did not look angry at me. He took the mug. “Ready for a small sip?”

Lance waved him away.
“It was just the shock. I’m okay.” He opened his eyes. “Are you going to find the bastard who did this?”

Morehouse sat back down, placing the mug on the floor and picking up his notebook from where it had dropped at his feet.
“I’m going to do that, yes. That’s what I meant about you helping.”

Lance sat up straighter.
When he spoke, his voice was clear and strong. “What do you want to know?”

Morehouse went over the events of the day before her death, including my visit, and the suddenness with which her stomach flu seemed to arise.
“That’s why we did the toxicology tests at the police lab. The nurse who was on that night insisted that Mary Doris had been healthy as can be. She actually,” here a small smile appeared and vanished, “thought Jolie here might have given Mary Doris something that didn’t sit well with her.”

Lance glanced at me.
“Jolie didn’t know about the money for the Food Pantry. None of us did.”

Great, give Morehouse a motive for me.

“I can’t think of anything to arrest Jolie for other than being a pain in the ass.” He did smile at Lance then.

“Hey,” I said, and then took Morehouse’s look in my direction to be a command to shut up.

Lance shook his head slowly. “I can’t think of a soul who didn’t like her.”

“I can’t either,” Morehouse said.
“It just seems like too much of a coincidence that Richard’s skeleton is found and then Mary Doris is murdered.”

Lance opened his mouth to speak, shut it,
and then spoke. “She did have a secret.”

I sat up straighter in my hardback chair.
“A secret?”

Morehouse didn’t even look at me, he kept looking straight into Lance’s eyes.
“What kind of a secret?”

Lance looked from me to his big screen TV and back at Morehouse.
“After Richard disappeared, Mary Doris left Ocean Alley. She said, I heard this later of course, that she couldn’t stand to look at the ocean when Richard wasn’t with her.”

This registered with me.
I thought Aunt Madge had told me the same thing.

“The thing is,” Lance’s eyes filled with tears, “she only told me this a few years ago, and she asked me not to repeat it.”

“I don’t think anything can hurt her now,” Morehouse said, quietly.

“She left because she was carrying Richard’s baby.
They planned to elope the weekend after his sister Audrey and Peter Fisher got married.” He cleared his throat. “They didn’t want to take away from that wedding.”

Mary Doris’ firm assertion that Richard would never have left her made more sense now.
“What happened to the baby?” I asked, and was surprised to hear that I was almost whispering.

Lance wiped a tear from the corner of one eye.
“She said she gave it up for adoption; she never even said if it was a boy or girl. I don’t know why I’m even telling you this, but it’s likely the only thing you wouldn’t find out any other way.” He pulled a tissue from his pocket and blew his nose. “I can’t imagine it matters.”

Morehouse made a note.
“Yeah, hard to imagine it would.” He looked at Lance. “How old would that person be now?”

“More than 70,” Lance said, “possibly not even alive.”

Morehouse nodded. “A lot more adoptions were private back then. Likely the records are gone, even if we knew where to look.”

Lance nodded.
“She never did say where she went. I think that was deliberate. She always liked Chicago though. Took a couple of trips to the art museum there.”

Morehouse stood.
“If you think of anything else…”

“Do you have to write that in a report or something?” Lance asked.

Morehouse hesitated. “I’ll mention it to the captain, so two of us know. I won’t write it down unless it’s important later.”

Lance saw him to the door, and I remained rooted to my donut.
When he came back into the room we just looked at each other. “Thank you for not telling about the ledgers.”

Lance nodded, unsmiling.
“I figured you wouldn’t have picked them up if you wanted him to see them.” He sat down in the chair opposite me at the table and put his head in his hands. “Murdered. It’s impossible.”

“Would you like me to stay or go?” I asked, quietly.

“Nothing you can do here,” he said. When I stood, he looked up, “Could I borrow that album that has some pictures of Mary Doris?”

“I’ll drop it by this evening.”
I let myself out.