It's Murder, My Son (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (30 page)

“Hey, Mac?” David called from the hallway before entering the kitchen. “There you are. The state police are here and the cottage is open. Are you coming to check it out?”

*   *   *   *

Betsy Weaver’s home had one bedroom, a bathroom the size of a walk-in closet, a kitchenette, and a great room with a dining area. The great room served as her office. She had a small patio area that, judging by the lack of furniture, she didn’t take advantage of. The smell of musty carpets, dirty laundry, and rotting garbage assaulted Mac’s and David’s nostrils when they stepped through the door to search for the cause of her death.

Notepads like the type Mac had seen her writing in filled every flat surface available: kitchen counter and table, end tables, coffee tables, crammed in among the books on her bookshelves, sofa, and floor. Not a page was left unmarked.

“Steve realizes the sheriff killed his missing wife. He tricks him into leading him to the body by making him think he had already found it,” David read a paragraph from a notebook on top of the stack on the kitchen table. Bills in unopened envelopes rested next to the notepads.

“Travis says Betsy was a frustrated writer.” Mac went to the sofa. An empty prescription pill bottle rested on the floor under the coffee table. Not wanting to touch it for fear of disturbing evidence, he pointed at it with his hand encased in evidence gloves that David had given him. “Pill bottle, but it doesn’t have a pharmacy label on it.”

“Maybe she was self-medicating.” David snapped a picture of the bottle on the floor, as well as the empty wine bottle next to a water glass with residue of red wine crusted at the bottom. He recognized the label on the bottle as being a cheap wine available at the local store. “Pills and booze.” He shook his head. “What a way to go.”

“What was here?” Mac had noticed rust-marked indentations in the carpet in the corner of the room. The marks formed a rectangle next to a minute computer desk that held a laptop computer and printer.

“File cabinet.” The answer came from the open front door. Travis leaned casually in the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest.

“Where is it now?” Mac asked.

“Don’t know,” Travis answered. “It was locked. Betsy lost the key a long time ago and couldn’t get into it. When Sophia and I came back from California a few weeks ago, the cabinet was gone. She must have gotten rid of it.”

When David demanded to know what had been in it, Travis shrugged while replying, “Manuscripts. Contracts. Whatever it is people keep in locked file cabinets.”

The author looked around the cluttered room. “If you won’t be needing me, Sophia and I have appointments with our hair stylists. Can you be sure to get that body out of here before you leave? We’re hosting a party tomorrow.”

Stunned by the order, Mac glanced at David, who paused long enough for Travis to read the glare in his eyes before responding. “Betsy Weaver will be moved after, and only after, the medical examiner has completed her on-scene examination. I’m sure if Betsy was aware of how inconvenient her dying next to your pool was going to be to you, she would have chosen someplace else to expire.”

Travis uttered a noise that sounded like a “humph” before sauntering back to his house.

David muttered, “Did fame make him that self-centered or has he always been like that?”

“You tell me.” Mac went into the bedroom. House cleaning-wise, he found it to be the same as the rest of the cottage. The closet overflowed with two piles of laundry. One pile smelled clean, the other didn’t.

Water glasses with varying amounts of water littered the nightstand too small to hold everything on it. It also contained an alarm clock, lamp, and cordless phone crammed to the side closest to the bed.

Why does she have everything crammed to one side?
Mac knelt to study the set up.
What was on the far side of the stand?

When he opened the door on the front of the nightstand, an avalanche of notebooks spilled out. Like the others, notes filled the pages, front and back. The nightstand also had a drawer that contained one notepad that appeared to have been started recently and a pill case, which Mac recognized to be birth control pills.

“Travis told me that Betsy didn’t date,” he called out into the living room.

“As long as I’ve known her, I’ve never seen Betsy with anyone.” David came into the bedroom where Mac held up the pill case.

“How long have you known her?”

“Since she moved back here with Travis after he hit the big time,” David answered. “She’s been living here in the guest cottage for years.” He paused before adding, “Come to think of it, she probably spent more time here than Travis.”

“Anyone stay here with her?”

David shrugged his shoulders. “Someone could have. I know she stayed here by herself that whole summer Travis and Sophia got married and honeymooned in Europe. We should ask Archie. Betsy was a big fan of Robin and used to visit her.”

“Robin did mention her in her journal. No boyfriend? Are you sure?”

“None that I know of.” David suggested that some doctors would put women on oral contraceptives for medical reasons other than birth control. For example, to control their menstrual cycle.

Mac was half-listening. Something sharp had punctured his knee. He rose up to find that he had put a hole in his pants. Blood seeped from a small wound. Imbedded in the carpet where he had been kneeling, he found the cause of his injury: a shard of glass.

“With all those glasses on the nightstand, she must have knocked one off,” David suggested.

Mac studied the clear piece of glass. The water glasses were thick and rounded. This four-inch-long piece was thin, flat, and clear. One edge was a clean and straight cut.

He held the broken glass up on the vacant portion of the nightstand. “What do you think?” he asked. “Picture frame?”

David glanced around the room. The trash contained no broken glass. “Where’s the picture now?”

“Maybe the boyfriend knows.”

One of the town’s police officers stuck his head in through the doorway. “The ME is done. Want to talk to her before they haul away the body?”

*   *   *   *

The body bag rested open on top of the gurney. It took two troopers and two Spencer officers to lift Betsy’s body to put on it. Along with the medical examiner, David and Mac examined the body before they zipped the bag shut to take her to the morgue.

Betsy stared up at them with cloudy gray eyes.

“Any idea how long she’s been dead?” David asked the medical examiner, an attractive middle-aged woman with her long blond hair pulled up and clipped to the back of her head.

“The blood had settled in her back, but she was found face down. The body has definitely been moved.” The medical examiner explained, “Plus, her body temperature doesn’t jive with the outside temperature and the condition of her body. In my opinion, she’s been put on ice.”

Chapter Sixteen

“This is the smartest dog I’ve ever seen in my life—and I’ve seen a lot of dogs in my life.”

A lot of dogs, Bernie O’Reilly had seen.

While Mac was at the Turner home getting the low-down on the body next to their pool, Archie found Priscilla Hardwick’s sister, Bernie. The dog trainer and breeder had sold Helga the poodle to the late couple. After some negotiation with animal control, Archie got permission to turn Helga over to Bernie, who lost no time racing to the Spencer Manor to collect the dog.

Big boned and taller than her sister, Bernie wore khaki shorts, work boots, and a dusty safari hat on her head. Her long salt-and-pepper hair flowed down her back.

Upon her arrival, Bernie took the poodle into a hug and kissed her snout. By the time the two left, the passive dog felt comfortable enough with Bernie to return her affection with a lick on the cheek.

Sitting on the porch steps between Helga and Gnarly, the dog trainer recounted how her sister had stolen the poodle from her.

“Prissy got it in her head that she and Gordon wanted a show dog.” Bernie appeared to be talking to the canines as well as Archie. “So I sold them the pick of the litter from one of my dogs, a grand champion. Helga was worth well over a thousand dollars. When the check bounced, Prissy promised to make good on it. After waiting a good year, I filed a suit against them for payment. I’m in business. I can’t be giving away grand champions. The day after they got the papers, the computer network at my kennel got hit by a virus and everything was wiped out, including thirty-two thousand dollars from one of my bank accounts.”

Archie asked, “Do you think Prissy did it?”

“I know Prissy did it. I couldn’t prove it, but I know she did.” After Gnarly knocked her hat from her head for the third time, Bernie set it on the step. “She was a hacker and identity thief. She spent all her time on the Internet stealing everything she could get out there. Anyone who pissed her off, even by looking at her cross-eyed, she’d send them a virus, and then go in and rob them blind.” 

“You don’t seem that broken up about her death.”

Bernie hugged the poodle again. “Dogs never mess with you. You always know where you stand with animals. I’d trust a wild lion before I’d trust a man.”

“Since you know so much about dogs, can you answer a question about this one?” Archie pointed at Gnarly, who had his tongue in the trainer’s ear.

“What kind of question?” She giggled like a schoolgirl flirting with a new beau.

Archie told Bernie about Gnarly’s thievery, his nabbing the thief posing as a job applicant, and his dishonorable discharge from the army. Doubtful about the information’s validity, Bernie took the German shepherd out into the yard to perform a battery of tests: giving him commands, timing his reactions, and other experiments. She was still testing Gnarly when Mac’s Viper rolled between the stone pillars.

“What’s going on?” He sat next to Archie on the porch steps.

“Gnarly is being tested.”

“Betcha a hundred bucks he cheats.”

Archie let out a laugh before noticing the hole and blood in the knee of his pants. He told her about the broken glass and birth control pills in Betsy’s bedroom. Like David, she shook her head at the suggestion that Travis’s frumpy secretary had a boyfriend. “I never saw her out with anyone. She never mentioned a man in her life. She never mixed with anyone here in Spencer. I always saw her alone in the corner watching everyone. Robin once said that Betsy reminded her of a writer she knew a long time ago who lived through the characters she created. Robin thought she lived in this fictional world that she had created because it made her feel safe. Writers have complete control of what they put on the page, and no one ever really gets hurt.” She concluded, “Robin worried about Betsy because that writer she knew ended up killing herself.”

“That’s what Travis says happened.” Mac recalled the notebooks that filled the cottage. “He said that she wanted to be a writer.”

“The world is full of writers who’ve never been published. Some writers never even try to get published.” She explained, “Some people get their entertainment watching television all day long. Others listen to music. Others write, if only for themselves.”

“But someone put Betsy next to that swimming pool after she was dead,” he said. “Certainly not some made-up character from her notebooks. David said Betsy used to visit Robin.”

“She felt sorry for Betsy. I had some problems with her,” Archie confessed.

“What kind of problems?”

“She always had some excuse to come over here to bounce book ideas off Robin or ask her advice,” she said. “I got the impression that she wanted my job, and I didn’t like that at all.”