Mad as Helen (10 page)

Chapter 19

D
USK
SETTLED
,
DARKENING
the room so that Frank had to get up from his chair and switch on the lights. He finished some paperwork and intended to head out. He wanted to get back to Grace Simpson’s office before he called it a day and went home for dinner.

He was nearly to the door when the phone rang. “Sheriff Biddle,” he said into the receiver, hearing his contact from the county crime lab on the other end. “What’ve you got for me?” Frank asked, and the answer was plenty.

Max Simpson’s fingerprints were on the bat, all right, just as he’d suspected. There were several smudged ones buried beneath those of Grace and Nancy, along with a partial thumb. They matched up with a set on file with the St. Louis Police County Department, as Max’s store was located in West County. Show Me Sporting Goods sold several dozen different models of firearms, from small-caliber pistols to hunting rifles. Max’s prints had been logged with his permit to sell.

“Lucky for us,” Biddle said, adding a “thanks” before hanging up.

He sat down at his desk, pulled out his pad, and scribbled down a few thoughts while they were fresh on his mind.

He’d forgotten to ask Max when exactly he’d last seen Grace. Or maybe it would be a better idea to ask Mattie Oldbridge. The old girl seemed to keep pretty good tabs on her neighbors, particularly since she’d been burgled the week before.

The sheriff mulled over his impression of Grace’s not-quite ex-husband. Tall and good-looking, younger than Grace by a decade, and cocksure to a fault, he was hardly the picture of a grieving spouse. But then, Frank had heard they’d been estranged for quite a while, so there probably wasn’t much for him to grieve about.

Frank pondered what Max had to gain by Grace’s death.

For one thing, he spared himself the trouble of going through a divorce. Those could be costly and painful.

Would Max inherit Grace’s house and her practice? Though Frank hadn’t seen Grace’s financial records, he had to wonder if she owned either free and clear. In this economy, he highly doubted it. Would a man like Max risk committing murder for Grace’s money as well as her debt?

And what about the missing manuscript?

Frank wasn’t sure he bought Max’s ignorant act. How could he not have gotten wind of the infamous book when, in just one stop at the diner, he’d heard about Nancy Sweet being under suspicion for murder?

So many questions and so few answers, the sheriff thought and tugged on his hat. Then he ventured outside to the dusty black-and-white parked at the curb.

Gray-haired Agnes March was in the process of locking up her antiques shop adjacent to his office. She nodded and uttered a brisk, “Good evening, Sheriff.”

He tipped his hat. “How do, Agnes.”

“Have you nabbed the killer?” she asked and took a step toward him. She cocked her head and waited, studying him through her owlish glasses.

“Well, ma’am, I can’t say that I have.”

“Bully for that,” she said and gave a little clap.

Bully?
Frank wondered if she’d gone as cuckoo as those old clocks on the wall of her shop that he could hear going off every hour on the hour.

She smiled at his bemusement. “I think it’s what they call the curiosity factor, Sheriff. Instead of scaring people away from town, they’ve been coming through like ants to a picnic. News of the murder’s all over the Internet. I’ve sold twice as much today as I normally do this time of year. I heard a couple say they drove up from Springfield just to soak in the atmosphere.”

“Huh,” the sheriff murmured, hardly knowing how to respond.

Agnes marched up to him and patted his shoulder. “As you were then, Sheriff,” she said, and off she went, heading up the road, the streetlamps seeming to glow brighter in her wake, though Frank knew it wasn’t magic, just the falling dark.

He scratched at his jaw, hardly knowing what to make of the exchange. Had Agnes just insulted him? Or was it a compliment?

He recalled Max Simpson labeling folks in River Bend as bumpkins, and he knew that wasn’t true at all. What they were, Frank decided, was quirky. Quirky with a capital
Q.

He made sure he had the keys to Grace’s office in his pocket before he got into his car. He drove the block and a half to the place and parked out front.

Once inside, he flooded the place with light. Then he pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

He went to Nancy’s former office first and hunted in her desk for the box of staples. When he shook it open, he found the set of keys inside, exactly as she’d promised.

He entered Grace’s cranberry-walled sanctum and sat behind her desk. Through trial and error, he found the key that unlocked the drawers. He didn’t find the flash drive Nancy had mentioned, but he did locate Grace’s old-fashioned appointment book.

He thumbed through the pages, stopping when he found yesterday’s date.

Several familiar names had been penciled into morning slots, but they had angry lines drawn through them. Frank figured they’d cancelled, and he could hardly blame them.

“Beauty Shop” was penciled in at six-thirty and, at eight o’clock, “Dinner with Harold.”

Frank flipped to pages for the days before, but nothing jumped out at him. Had he expected to find the killer’s name written down in bold print?

He took his time going through the rest of her desk, turning up nothing of interest. Then he checked out the room again, pulling up couch cushions and feeling behind the rows of books on the shelves.

“Nothing,” he said to himself.

He took the appointment book with him into Nancy Sweet’s former office. He could go through the pages more thoroughly later.

Using the keys from the box of staples, he began unlocking file cabinet drawers.

The first drawer he inspected contained nothing but files about the office equipment and procedures, the bills for letterhead and envelopes, certificates for hours of credit at this seminar or that, a personnel folder with Nancy Sweet’s job application, rolls of stamps, a zippered bank bag filled with petty cash, and copies of Grace’s curriculum vitae.

The sheriff moved on to the two drawers below that one, finding they contained blue billing envelopes and insurance information, checks received and not yet deposited, checks returned from the bank, and letters sending clients with overdue balances to collection.

Frank marveled at the paper trail Grace’s computer phobia had left behind, and he was suddenly grateful for it.

A folder stuck near the back with “SUIT” written on its label caught Biddle’s eye, and he removed it from the pack. He flipped the file open and read a memo that had been paper-clipped to a stack of other pages, instructing Nancy to turn over copies of everything inside to her lawyer.

“Suit” as in malpractice lawsuit? Frank wondered. Did that happen to psychotherapists even though they weren’t medical doctors? Frank squeezed into Nancy’s desk chair and gave the folder a serious look-see. From what he could make out, the “suit” had to do with Grace billing a deceased client’s estate. Scribbled notes mentioned the dead woman’s children having been against Grace seeing their mother in the first place. So they’d filed a complaint against Ms. Simpson.

Unfortunately, Biddle didn’t find that a motive for Grace’s murder.

He put the folder back, then pulled the top drawer from the adjacent cabinet toward him.

Ah, here they were: her client files from A to Z. Well, from A to H, anyhow. He quickly found I through P in the middle drawer and Q through Z in the bottom one.

There had to be two hundred files, he figured, each one belonging to a separate client with a different name, different trouble, and, possibly, a motive.

Biddle sighed heavily, knowing he couldn’t go through the things without a court order. If he needed anything evidentiary from Grace’s client files, he’d have to get a subpoena. No prosecutor wanted a cop who had plucked fruit from the poisonous tree. Truth be told, Frank didn’t really need to see the contents. He only wanted to confirm the names of a few of the townsfolk alleged to have seen Grace.

So if he happened to take a peek—off-the-record, of course—what could it hurt?

Instinctively, he looked around him even though he’d come into the office alone and was, as far as he knew, alone still.

Then he thumbed through the neatly typed labels on each file, seeing many familiar names, and learning more than he needed to know. Apparently Grace had seen not only the sheriff’s wife but Bertha Beaner, wife of the chairman of the town board, as well. In fact, Frank saw so many names he recognized that it felt like he, Helen Evans, and the town’s newly appointed minister were the only ones who
hadn’t
sat on Grace’s couch to spill their guts.

Feeling sick to his stomach, Frank gathered up the keys and the appointment book. He switched off the lights and got out of there, stripping off the latex gloves as soon as he got into his car. He drove the block and a half to Grace’s house as fast as his beat-up car would carry him. If he couldn’t find a copy of the book manuscript, then he was heading home.

He planned to have a few words with Sarah. If she had something to talk about from now on, he wanted her to talk to
him
.

Frank loved his wife, but he realized she was prone to gabbing too much and too often. And suddenly he found himself fearing that because of the blabbermouth he’d married, he himself might appear, however thinly disguised, in the pages of Grace’s yet-to-be-published book.

Chapter 20

H
ELEN
COULDN
’
T
STAND
it another minute. She had to do something. If the sheriff wasn’t going to search for any suspects other than Nancy, then Helen was going to find some answers on her own.

Before she left the house, she fed Nancy dinner and settled her in front of the television. They didn’t get cable here—it had to do with the way River Bend sat in a valley between the bluffs—but everyone had satellites. Helen had held out as long as she could, using rabbit ears on her old set and enduring grainy Cardinals games for years, until she’d finally caved, getting a dish on her roof and more channels than she knew what to do with.

But at least Nancy had found a show she liked well enough to stay put. The flicker of light cast ever-changing shadows on the girl’s face. Even still, her features looked too pale, and her eyes stared at the screen, rarely blinking.

Helen shook her head. She couldn’t blame Nancy for acting like a zombie. Until Grace’s real killer was caught, how could anyone expect the girl to move on?

Of Helen’s nine grandchildren, Nancy had always been the quietest and the quickest to blush. Helen thought of all the summers the girl had spent in River Bend with her and Joe. Ever softhearted, she’d brought orphaned cats to their doorstep—which is how they’d ended up with Amber—or butterflies with battered wings. Wounded frogs had found their way from creek bottoms into glass aquariums that had remained on the porch until the smell had gotten too much to bear. “A snake had it in its mouth, Grandma,” Nancy would explain, tears in her eyes. “So I threw rocks until it let it go. It’s missing a leg now, but if I just take care of it for a couple of days, it’ll be hopping again in no time.”

Helen smiled at the memory. Nancy was too kind, if anything. How Sheriff Biddle could believe the young woman could murder someone, even a cold woman like Grace Simpson, troubled her and frightened her at the same time.

Purposefully, she retrieved her windbreaker from the closet, pocketed a slim flashlight, and located the key to Grace’s that Nancy still had in her possession—and which Biddle had apparently ignored. She had the screen door open when she heard Nancy’s voice.

“Are you leaving?”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Helen said, crossing fingers behind her back, “I’m just going out for a breath of fresh air. I’ll be back before you know it.”

Then she hurried out the door, down the porch steps, and into the night.

She walked briskly, pumping her arms as she went, hoping she could find something—anything—that Biddle had missed. Because as long as the sheriff held fast to his ill-conceived notion that Nancy had killed Grace, the real murderer went scot-free. That thought, Helen mused with a shiver, was hardly comforting in the least.

Lights warmed the windows of the houses she passed. Ahead, on Main Street, the streetlamps glowed cheerily above shops now darkened behind plate glass.

The diner had not yet closed, and Helen could see a dozen heads inside. She spotted Darcy, the young woman she’d seen at Doc’s office, scurrying about in checkerboard pink. A coffeepot in one hand, she kept busy refilling cups.

Helen thought of something a woman she’d met at a bridge tournament in St. Louis had said to her upon learning she lived in River Bend. “My dear,” she’d intoned, staring down her nose through glasses tinted pink and speckled with rhinestones, “what do you do to amuse yourself? I’ve heard tell the whole town shuts down after dusk.”

Why, we country folk just settle into our rocking chairs, sip some white lightning, and listen to ourselves breathe till we’re either too potted to care or fall asleep,
Helen had felt like telling her if only to see the powdered-white skin flush. Instead, she’d ever so politely answered, “We do the same things as other people, I’d imagine. Watch the ball games on TV, play cards, or read a book.”

“You read books?” the woman had said, her eyes wide.

“We even have a library,” Helen had assured her.

“Is that so?” the woman had remarked, leaving Helen to wonder if in some folks’ narrow minds, River Bend was akin to Siberia.

By the time Helen reached Grace Simpson’s street, she was winded. She slowed her steps and slid her hand into the pocket of her windbreaker, feeling for her flashlight. As she passed Mattie Oldbridge’s place, she looked up, recalling Mattie’s statement to the sheriff that she’d seen no one come or go from Grace’s after seven-thirty last evening, not until Nancy had shown up in the morning. Just as she figured, all the shades were drawn. Newly bought porch lights blazed, illuminating her rose bushes, as well as half the yard. No doubt she had one of her prime-time shows turned on loudly enough to drown out all else.

Helen felt reassured that Mattie hadn’t been aware in the least of any visitors to Grace’s the evening of the murder. The burglary had shaken Mattie so that she kept herself insulated once darkness fell. If she’d heard any unusual noise, she would have certainly called the sheriff and awakened him, even if it had been after midnight.

Helen went over what she knew to be true, the first fact being that Grace didn’t make it to her eight o’clock meeting in St. Louis. Mattie had seen her depart, which meant that Grace had turned around and come back to her house unobserved. That surely implied that the murderer was already inside. Grace must have been killed shortly after entering, or else, as efficacious as she was, she would have called her publisher to tell him she’d be late. Clearly, she’d had no opportunity to do that.

Helen walked away from Mattie’s brightly lit yard, crossing the width of a driveway until she stood before the shadowed lawn that belonged to Grace. She noticed that crime scene tape still crisscrossed the front door, so she flipped on the flashlight and slipped around the house, following the driveway toward the door in back.

And there was Grace’s Ford tucked into her car port, too obscured by shrubbery for Mattie Oldbridge to see from next door. Helen shined her flashlight on the car. All the seats looked empty. The sheriff had mentioned finding Grace’s purse inside.

She figured he’d checked the trunk as well, looking for the hard copy of Grace’s manuscript. Helen found it quite odd that those pages had yet to turn up.

She approached the side entrance, settling her flashlight’s beam on the knob. The brass looked dirty, covered with the graphite Sheriff Biddle used to dust for prints. Helen removed a key from her pocket, stabbed it into the lock, and turned it with a click. She was reaching for a tissue that she could use to turn the knob itself when a pair of headlights fastened on her. She jerked her head around as a car bumped into the driveway. Its brakes squealed as it pulled up right behind Grace’s Ford.

Helen squinted against the brightness. She froze like a frightened deer caught on a back road. She had no time to hide, no chance to scurry off into the shadows.

The headlights cut off.

Helen’s eyes struggled with blackness once more.

“Mrs. Evans? Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” she heard a familiar voice grumble. “What the devil are you doing here? Don’t tell me you’re breaking and entering.”

“Of course I’m not!” Helen weakly protested. She held her flashlight behind her back, but she could hardly hide the key sticking out of the lock. “Well, I’m not breaking, anyway,” she scrabbled to explain, “and I haven’t entered yet, have I?”

“It’s a good thing,” Biddle growled, “or I’d have to arrest you.”

He stepped around her and snatched the key from the lock, pocketing it. His hangdog’s face glowered. “Ma’am, this is a crime scene. You’re not supposed to come sticking your nose around here, especially at night. I’m conducting this investigation, you got that? I don’t need your interference.”

“Interference?” Helen sputtered. A jolt of fury rocked her. She was ready to let him have it again about just what she thought of his so-called investigation, but she stopped short and swallowed the angry words. “I just want to help,” she said instead, her worry for Nancy overshadowing all else. “I thought maybe fresh eyes could find something that was overlooked.”

The sheriff pursed his lips, staring at her for a long moment, and Helen was sure he was going to send her home or, even worse, drive her there himself.

But he sighed, his shoulders sagging. “I’ve already been through the house several times, and the county folks have taken all the photographs and fingerprints they’re gonna take. So I guess it can’t hurt if you come on in and turn on your spidey-sense.” He crooked a finger at her. “Just don’t touch anything.”

“I won’t,” she promised eagerly.

The sheriff shrugged. “Besides, I’d like to find that manuscript of Ms. Simpson’s. If you can turn it up, I might even deputize you.”

Helen knew he was kidding, but she didn’t care. At that moment, she could have kissed him.

“Okay,” she said simply, afraid to say more for fear he’d change his mind.

He pulled a wad of something from his pocket and Helen realized they were gloves. With some fumbling, he snapped them on. Then he used a key from a ring to let them inside.

Helen followed him as he turned on the lights, asking something that kept nagging at her brain. “If the manuscript is still missing, don’t you think whoever killed her took it with him?”

“It’s a good bet, ma’am, yes.”

“Then it couldn’t have been Nancy,” Helen remarked. “It wasn’t in Grace’s office, right? And you didn’t find it in Nancy’s apartment.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“So you must have doubts,” she pressed.

The sheriff looked at her and pursed his lips. But he didn’t refute her statement, which Helen felt was an improvement. Maybe he was beginning to realize that solving Grace Simpson’s murder wasn’t going to be as simple as pinning it on Nancy.

“Let’s split up, all right?” he suggested. “I’ll head upstairs. You look around down here. But remember—”

“Don’t touch,” she finished. “Got it.”

He left her, and Helen decided she’d start in the kitchen. She did a simple walking inspection first, pacing the checkerboard floor and eyeing the pristine white counters. She moved into the breakfast room and rounded the drop-leaf table, a bowel of plastic fruit settled precisely in its center.

As she entered the living room, she inhaled a scent that wasn’t unfamiliar. But she couldn’t quite put a finger on it. Was it perfume? No, that wasn’t quite it. She thought it might be a room deodorizer, though the vague odor made her somehow uncomfortable.

She spied the secretary that Nancy had said Grace always kept locked. Its desk had been pulled down, just as Nancy had insisted it was when she’d stumbled upon Grace’s body. Had Grace left it open? Had something important been removed?

Helen went over and peered into its depths. There were papers jammed into the cubbies. She figured the sheriff had already poked through them, There was nothing else that caught her eye.

She heard noises overhead and glanced up, knowing it was Biddle’s footsteps, his weight causing the floorboards to groan.

Helen was walking through the dining room when Biddle clomped down the stairs and remarked with a sigh, “It’s not here.” He scratched his jaw, looking baffled. “It’s like that manuscript vanished into thin air.”

“The killer took it,” Helen said, plain and simple.

Biddle didn’t respond.

“Nancy wanted that book published,” she told him. “She was practically the ghostwriter. No, someone else took it, someone who didn’t want that manuscript to make it into print.”

“I know where you stand, Mrs. Evans,” the sheriff replied.

“If nothing else was stolen, then someone was in this house last night for one reason and one alone: to kill Grace and to ensure that her publisher never printed the book.”

“Let’s go, ma’am,” the sheriff said and held open the door. “You want a ride home?”

“I’ll walk,” Helen told him for the second time that day, ticked off that he didn’t seem to be listening.

“Fine,” he replied.

And Helen stood alone on the stoop as Sheriff Biddle closed the door.