Leighann Dobbs - Mystic Notch 02 - A Spirited Tail (24 page)

I crouched in front of him, rubbing his ears. “I’d love to keep you, but I’m not set up for a dog.” 

“Meow!” Pandora huffed from her cat bed and we all laughed.

“Well, at least he doesn’t seem depressed anymore,” Hattie said.

“Yeah, he’s a good dog. He’ll make a great pet for someone.” I raised my eyes at the four seniors.

Bing held up his hand. “Not me, I travel too much.”

“We’re cat people.” Cordelia looked at Hattie and she nodded in agreement.

“I’ve got a dog and she’s very jealous,” Josiah said.

I wasn’t surprised none of them wanted to take on a large Golden. I had a couple of good candidates in mind, anyway.

“So what’s going on with the investigation? Do you have the inside scoop?” Hattie looked at me over the rim of her Styrofoam cup.

“I heard the murder weapon was found,” Bing said.

“Yeah, I guess Gus is analyzing it for clues or whatever she does. I haven’t heard anything.”

“Hmm. Very unsettling.” Josiah rose from the couch and tossed his cup in the trash. “Well, I gotta get on with the day.”

The others murmured similar farewells and they all shuffled toward the door. Jimmy came rushing in, just as Bing pulled the door open. He nodded to the four seniors as he squeezed past them in the doorway.

“Willa, I have some news!” he said, then looked back at the foursome who had paused in the door to see what he had to say.

“Oh, err… we’ll see you tomorrow, Willa.” Bing ushered the others out reluctantly.

“Did you find anything on the murder weapon?” I asked as soon as the door closed.

Jimmy’s eyes sparkled with excitement. “Yes, that
was
Bruce’s blood on the end. There was also some hair which was not Bruce’s and a partial fingerprint.”

“Whose fingerprint?”

Jimmy’s face fell. “That’s the problem. AFIS didn’t come up with a match, so it’s someone who has never been in the system. We don’t know who it is.”

“And you think the hair was from the killer?”

“Well, it could be.”

I chewed my bottom lip. “But if the fingerprint isn’t in the system and all we have is some hair, how can we find out who the killer is?”

Jimmy shuffled his feet, darting a nervous glance out the window. He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “Yesterday, after I saw the hair, I did something to help the case that I probably shouldn’t have done.”

My eyes widened. “What?”

“You can’t tell Augusta. She won’t like it.”

I made a zip-your-lip motion. “I promise.”

“I figured your theory about Gladys was a good one, so I went out to pay her a visit. The hairs on the club were gray. Gladys has gray hair.” He shrugged. “So, I simply got a sample of hair to match it.”

“That doesn’t sound like anything bad.”

“Well, it’s not really. Except it was without her permission.”

“You stole her hair? How did you do that without her knowing?”

Jimmy smiled proudly. “I took a look around her place and happened to find some on her hairbrush. Saw that on TV once.”

I noticed Jimmy was standing taller, his shoulders no longer slumped. Apparently, he had gained some confidence and I felt a rush of pride that I had helped him a little with that. “But will that stand up in court?”

“No, but I just did it to prove or disprove it was her. I figure if we can prove the hair is hers we can have probable cause to get her fingerprint and match it to the one on the murder weapon, and then we can arrest her.”

“Well, that was very clever!”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said proudly. “She wasn’t very friendly, either, which makes me believe that your theory about her is correct.”

“Oh? She wasn’t unfriendly to me, but she did kind of brush me off.”

“She seemed really put out when I was there. She said she didn’t like visitors and now she’d had three in two days.”

“Three?”

“You, me and Les Price.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Les Price? I guess he must have gone right after I talked to him about Gladys. Probably trying to get a scoop for his book. Well, I suppose I can’t really blame him. And that means one thing—Les thought my theory about Gladys could be right, too.”

A customer came in and Jimmy looked at them nervously. 

“I gotta go.” He leaned closer to me and whispered. “Don’t tell anyone until I have something official.”

Then he winked and disappeared out the door.

I spent the next several hours waiting on customers, my brain whirling with the news. Was it really Gladys? Now that I knew she wasn’t Charles’ lover, my initial theory about them couldn’t be right, but what if she had another motive? Why did Charles leave her money? Was she supposed to do something for him after he died? 

Of course, Gladys wasn’t the only one with gray hair … Claire had gray hair and I already knew she was deceitful. She might have even lied to me about the rivalry being just for show and about what time she left Charles’ that night. I remembered seeing a ticket stub at Bruce’s place. Would that prove Claire had lied or would it prove she had told the truth? 

And what about the talcum powder Charles said they found on Lily—could that have come from Claire? Maybe it wasn’t talcum powder at all. Claire was known to hang around with Felicity and Felicity fancied herself to be some sort of witch. What if Claire was, too, and had sprinkled some sort of powdery potion on Lily?

None of it really seemed to add up. I was missing something important. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to picture Bruce’s house with his table of clues. I remembered the one odd thing—the cuttlebone.  What did birds have to do with Lily and Charles’ murders? 

The shop was in a lull so I scooted over to my computer and Googled ‘cuttlebone’.  Jimmy was right. It was the internal structure of a Cuttlefish. The picture of them was not appealing and I would probably think twice before jumping into the ocean now that I knew they could be swimming around in the water. The bone was loaded with calcium and used for supplementing the diets of birds, chinchillas, hermit crabs and snails. It could also be ground up and used in toothpaste, (yech) and as a polishing powder, and in antacids, (double yech) or as an absorbent to help dry liquids. Interesting, but how did any of that tie into Lily or Charles’ murder?

I had to admit, I was in quite a quandary. Claire’s clues could be misdirection. She knew Charles needed the crystal to talk to Lily’s ghost. Maybe she didn’t want Lily’s ghost to speak and took the crystal, then killed Charles later on because he was getting close to figuring out who the killer was.

Of course, the same could apply to Gladys. She’d have access to the whole house and no one would question her skulking around and taking the crystal. Or maybe she was blackmailing him about Bruce. She would have had to know and he was going between them. Maybe Charles stopped paying so she killed him. But if that were true, why would he leave her money? One thing was for sure. It had nothing to do with Gladys’ son—Charles was not the father.

My thoughts were interrupted by my phone blaring out the theme from the
Pink Panther
and I pulled it out of my hobo bag. It was Jimmy.

“Great news,” his deep voice boomed over the phone.

“What?”

“The hair was a match.”

“You mean Gladys is the killer?”

“Well, it looks that way. We’re on our way to pick her up now and get her fingerprinted to see if we can match the partial on the murder weapon.”

“Wow, that’s great. Good work.” My heart warmed for him. I hoped he’d get the credit for breaking the case.

“Thanks. Couldn’t have done it without you. Gotta run.”

Jimmy disconnected and I stood there, phone in hand, daydreaming. It was hard to believe after all this that the three cases were about to be solved.

“Gladys was not my killer!” Startled, I dropped the phone on the counter and whirled around to see Charles’ ghost at my elbow.

“Well, it looks like she killed Bruce.”

“No, it can’t be.”

“There’s physical evidence.”

Charles wrinkled his face at me. “She’s no killer. We were as close as peas in a pod.  She was a dear friend as well as my housekeeper.”

“I hate to tell you, but we found her hair on the murder weapon.”

“Pishaw. I don’t believe it. And, furthermore, she could not have killed me.”

“Why not?

“She was in New York City that day.

“What? Claire said she was at your house.”

“Oh, Claire—she has a bad memory. You can’t go by what she says. Besides,
why
would Gladys kill me?”

That was a good question. “Why did you leave her money?”

Charles eyes darted around the shop. “You have to trust me on this. There was a reason … a reason that is bigger than any of this. But it’s got nothing to do with my murder.”

I sighed. He seemed like he was telling the truth, but there was one thing that was bugging me. Elspeth had said Charles’ suicide note was written in fountain pen but Charles never used fountain pens. Wouldn’t Gladys have known that? And if she did, would she have made that mistake? I decided to test Charles out and see if he really did hate fountain pens.

“I heard Gladys bought you a special fountain pen that you used to write the suicide note.” 

Charles wrinkled his face up. “What?  Where did you hear that? It’s not true. I hated fountain pens and Gladys knew it. In fact, she hated them, too—ink flying everywhere and splotching up the paper. Oh, I know some people loved using them. Like that writer, Sal Price—always fiddling with his inks and papers and whatnot. I mean, really, why use one of those when you could use a nice, neat, roller pen?”

So, Elspeth had been right. Charles didn’t write that note, and if Gladys did, she probably wouldn’t have used a fountain pen. I felt a prickle of doubt starting to grow in my chest.

“How can you be so sure it wasn’t Gladys? You said you didn’t remember.”

“I vaguely remember that day. Gladys left in the morning to meet her sister in New York. Back then, the train still stopped at Downtown Station and we all took it.”

“So, what happened that day?” 

“I only remember we were going to try to contact Lily to see if she could name her killer, but my crystal was missing. I couldn’t contact Gladys. There were no easy calling contraptions back then like you have now.” He pointed to my cell phone sitting on the counter where I’d dropped it. “And then I don’t remember what happened after that.”

My stomach sank as I listened to Charles. If he was right, Jimmy was about to make a big mistake that could hurt his career … and I was partly responsible. Not only that, but my gut instinct told me that Charles was right. 

Gladys wasn’t the killer.

But if it wasn’t Gladys, then who was it? Claire could have been lying about catching the train. Or there could have been another person there lurking about, waiting for everyone to leave so he could do Charles in.

The problem was I had no idea how to make sense out of all the clues I had whirling around in my head and the clock was ticking.  I had to do something soon.

“Right, Willa?” Charles was saying.

“What?”

“You’re going to find the killer so I can move along my path, right?”

“Oh sure, I just don’t know how—”

“Meow!” Pandora let out a screech from the other side of the room as she snaked her paw under the couch and batted at some unseen object. The object skidded across the floor. It spun at my feet, then slowly came to a stop. A silver pen. 

I stared at the pen. A light bulb blinked in my head and suddenly all the pieces of the puzzle started to snap in place.

“I know who the killer is and how I can prove it!”

As I headed for the door, my phone broke out in song. I glanced at it as I ran by the counter. It was Jimmy, but I didn’t have time to answer it nor did I want to tell him what I was up to, just in case I was wrong. I didn’t want to get him into any more trouble than I’d already gotten him into. I’d call him back once I was sure I could back up my theory with evidence. I raced past him, leaving the persistent phone on the counter.

As I turned to lock the door, I saw Pandora and Ranger looking at me curiously. Charles was standing there, smiling. 

“Go get ‘em!” I heard him yell as I locked the door and raced to my car.

Chapter Twenty-Four

I was glad the entire police force of Mystic Notch was at the station processing Gladys, because I surely would have been pulled over for speeding if any of them had seen me race out of town.

I was going on gut instinct now, trying to prove my theory and, of course, I could still be wrong. Gladys
could
have done it and Charles might just be too loyal to see. Or maybe it was Claire … or even Bruce. 

But one thing still bugged me. The argument between Bruce and Les Price in the Mystic Cafe the night before Bruce died just didn’t ring true. No reasonable person would get that upset over what Les was writing. Sure, most of the people put that down to Bruce having dementia, but just looking through his house, I could tell Bruce was as sharp as a tack—especially with the way he’d organized and arranged the clues on his dining room table.

What if Les Price knew about Bruce and Charles and was going to write about that in his book? Bruce had hidden the affair all these years and maybe he wanted it to remain a secret. But if that was the case, why didn’t Les tell me about Bruce and Charles when I told him about my theory on Gladys? Instead, he’d played along. Maybe he didn’t want to let on about the affair so it could be a shocking surprise in his book. But would he go so far as to try to incriminate an innocent person? 

I sped past Van Dorn’s, glancing over at the stream gaging station. The murder weapon had been found there … on a clue I’d gotten from Les Price. Then, it hit me like a medicine ball to the gut as I stared at the sign SGS 17 06-82.  That wasn’t an identification number at the end—it was a date. The station was built in 1982—almost
thirty
years after Charles had died. 

I remembered a conversation with Pepper about Ruth Walters complaining about the traffic on that road. Pepper had said ‘she’s been complaining since they put that in thirty years ago’. I could have kicked myself for not picking up on it at the time. Either Les Price had been lying, or he’d been lied
to
. He’d said his father had seen Gladys coming out of the gaging station, but that was impossible—it hadn’t been built yet.