Murder Had a Little Lamb (29 page)

When it opened, I expected to find myself face-to-face with the person who had answered. Instead, I was looking at empty space.

But not for long. It only took me a fraction of a second to realize that making eye contact required looking down.

That was because the man who’d answered the door was in a wheelchair.

It was only then that I noticed that next to the concrete steps was a wooden ramp that connected this particular apartment with the walkway.

“Mr. Faber?” I asked.

“You got ’im,” he replied with a friendly smile. The
fact that he had the rounded cheeks and big blue eyes of a toddler made his greeting seem even warmer. “What can I do for you?”

I was pretty sure I detected a trace of a southern accent.

“My name is Jessica Popper,” I said. “I’m looking for information about someone you once knew.”

His smile flagged considerably. “Are you a cop—or a private detective? I guess what I’m really asking is, is a friend of mine in trouble?”

From what I’ve heard, I thought, I doubt that you’d characterize Nathaniel Stibbins as a friend.

“To be perfectly honest,” I told him, “from what I know of the man’s past, I don’t think he’s someone you were particularly fond of.”

“Okay, now I’m intrigued.” Willard rolled his wheelchair backward, then gestured for me to enter his apartment. “Come inside and I’ll make you a cup of tea. That’s what my mama taught me to do.”

As I stepped inside, I commented, “From your accent, I would have thought your mama taught you to offer guests a mint julep.”

He laughed. “You got me there. So much for my plan to substitute a New York accent for the one I got growing up in Georgia.”

Willard Faber’s openness was already making me feel relieved. If he had anything to tell me about Nathaniel, I was nearly certain he wouldn’t hesitate to share it with me.

Now that I was inside his apartment, I saw that the décor was shabby but comfortable. I supposed the living room furnishings weren’t that different from what
any middle-aged man living alone would opt for: a large couch covered in what looked like fake brown leather, a coffee table littered with glasses and cups and newspapers, and a huge flat-screen TV.

“Have a seat,” he offered. Glancing down, he said, “I hope you don’t think I’m rude for sitting before you do.”

I smiled as I lowered myself onto the couch. “You don’t really have to make me a cup of tea, Mr. Faber. I wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble.”

“First, please call me Willard,” he insisted. “Second, it’s no trouble at all, thanks to the handicap-accessible kitchen I had installed when I first moved in here seven years ago. And third, I was about to make myself some tea anyway. Having some company just makes it that much more pleasant.”

While he was in the kitchen, I did whatever snooping I could do from a sitting position. A single bedroom jutted off to one side of the living room, and through the open door I could see that the double bed was unmade and the blinds were still drawn. Once again, I wondered if I should feel sorry for this man who obviously lived by himself—or if Willard Faber was just one more single guy with the freedom to keep things exactly the way he liked them.

He certainly seemed like the picture of confidence as he rolled back in, this time bearing a tray with two cups of tea balanced on it. He handed me one and then grabbed the second for himself before finding a place for the tray on the coffee table.

“Nothing like a caffeine fix,” he said as he lifted his steaming hot mug to his lips. “This is something I do
every day at the same time. Since the accident, I’ve found that having a little routine in my life helps me get through the days.”

“What happened?” I asked gently. “The accident, I mean?”

I found myself hoping desperately that Nathaniel hadn’t had anything to do with it.

Gesturing at his wheelchair, he said, “I’m afraid this was the result of my own hubris. A skiing accident.” With a wan smile, he added, “As an intermediate-level skier, I should have known better than to think I could handle the north slope of the mountain. Even the friends I was skiing with that day tried to convince me that the trail was too difficult for me. But I’m one of those people who never stopped trying to prove I was as good as everyone else. This time, things didn’t go quite the way I’d planned.”

“It sounds as if that’s not the only time in your life that that’s happened,” I said gently.

He looked at me quizzically, remaining silent for a few seconds before asking, “Who are you?”

I waited until he had set his mug down on the table before answering. The last thing I wanted was for him to spill hot tea and burn himself.

In an even voice, I replied, “I’m trying to find out whatever I can about Nathaniel Stibbins.”

Instantly the expression on his face changed. For a moment, I was afraid he might order me to leave.

Instead, in a controlled voice, he said, “May I ask why?”

I took a deep breath before telling him, “A week and a half ago, Nathaniel was murdered.”

“Ah.” This time, the look on his face didn’t give any indication of what he was thinking—or feeling. “If you’re expecting me to gasp and say something like ‘How terrible!’ or even ‘I’m sorry,’ I’m afraid that’s not going to happen.”

“I know about what happened when the two of you were at Schottsburg Academy,” I said.

He suddenly looked deflated. “Goodness, if I’d known the conversation was going to go this way, I really would have offered to make us both mint juleps. Or something else with alcohol in it. A
lot
of alcohol.”

“I’m sure it’s still painful, even after all these years.”

“Painful? Yes, I suppose that would be the right word.”

For the first time since I’d arrived, I heard bitterness in his voice. “Getting that scholarship to Schottsburg Academy was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “It was my ticket out of a childhood that otherwise was guaranteed to go nowhere.”

Willard shook his head slowly. “I’m not someone who likes to cast blame on others. But that incident with Nathaniel—well, there was nothing else I could do but blame him. After all, if it hadn’t been for him, my whole life would have turned out differently.”

“How did it turn out?” I asked. “After you left Schottsburg, I mean.”

“I got shipped back to Georgia before I’d had a chance to catch my breath,” he replied, still sounding angry. “This time, they didn’t pay my train fare, either. I went back to my original high school, which was as crummy as the town I grew up in. The people who actually
managed to get jobs worked in the mill a few miles away. The others sat on the front porch all day, feeling sorry for themselves. Do I need to mention that some of them found whatever solace they could in those famous mint juleps—or some variation on the same theme?

“At any rate, simply graduating from high school, even one of such poor quality, was a major event around there. The fact that I was both fairly smart and extremely motivated made me practically a star. My teachers were always telling me I was the best student they’d ever seen come through there. That didn’t mean much at first. It wasn’t until one of them—my English teacher, Mr. Marlin—encouraged me to apply to Schottsburg and I was offered a full scholarship that I realized they were right.

“And then it all ended—like that.” He snapped his fingers. “One Saturday morning, I was lying in bed in my dorm room, trying to decide whether I’d spend the morning studying math or working on a history term paper, when there was this loud knock on the door. A really angry knock. I knew immediately that something was wrong, even before I opened it and found the headmaster himself standing there, looking like he was about to explode.

“What followed was like something out of the Spanish Inquisition,” he went on. His eyes had taken on a faraway look, as if he was actually reliving the events he was recalling. “I was hauled into the headmaster’s office, where an entire committee was waiting for me. I barely had a chance to say a word. It was more like they told me what had happened—that the
night before I’d stolen the school’s van, meanwhile wearing some stupid cap I’d taken from Nathaniel so I could try to pin it on him.”

“It sounds as if you didn’t have much of a chance to defend yourself,” I interjected.

“Hah!” he barked. “No one would even listen to my alibi—which three other students were more than willing to vouch for. The four of us had spent all of Friday night playing Scrabble. The board was still set up in the first-floor community room, since it had gotten too late for us to finish our last game.”

“Guilty without being tried,” I said, thinking aloud. And then I asked, “Couldn’t you have applied to some other prep school?”

“An incident like that has a way of following you around forever,” he answered. “It’s like a tattoo, something you can never get rid of. I hadn’t managed to prove my innocence while I was still at Schottsburg, so there was no way I was going to be able to convince anybody else. Especially the board of admissions at some other fancy private school.”

“So what did you do?” I asked softly.

“Tried to make a go of it at my old high school,” he replied with a shrug. “That lasted a few months. Even though I’d only been at a real school for a short time, I was already painfully aware of the differences.

“Eventually I dropped out. I moved around the country a bit, living here and there and working at whatever jobs I could find. I did manage to earn my GED along the way. Then, when I was nineteen, I joined the army, thinking a stint as a disciplined
military man might help me get my life together. Boy, was that ever a miscalculation.

“Since then,” Willard continued, “I’ve pretty much just drifted from place to place, getting jobs that I thought might be interesting but always turned out not to be. I took some college courses, too. Turned out I did pretty well at them, too. But somehow I never figured out what I wanted to do with my life.

“And then,” he said with a little shrug, “I ended up here.”

His silence told me he was done with his story. And I had to admit that it hadn’t added up to much. That is, aside from the fact that he saw what had happened at Schottsburg as his one chance for a better life being ripped out from under him.

Which could be a very strong motive for murder, I thought.

Except for the fact that he was in a wheelchair. I could see for myself how difficult his situation would have made it for him to sneak across the lawn at the estate on which my wedding was taking place, get into the kitchen, and stab Nathaniel with a large knife.

But there was one other loose end I hoped to tie up.

“Willard,” I said hesitantly, “there’s someone else I wanted to ask you about.” I took a deep breath before adding, “Claude Molter—or you might know him as Carl Dougherty. He’s a music teacher at the Worth School, the same school where Nathaniel taught.”

All the blood drained from his face. “What do you know about that?”

“Nothing, aside from having found your posting on
the
Classmates.com
website, asking if anyone knew how to get in touch with him.”

His eyebrows shot up to his hairline. “My, you have been sniffing around, haven’t you?”

“It’s kind of a long story,” I said. “But I’m basically trying to find the answers to some very confusing questions.”

“I only met the man once,” Willard said, sounding defensive. “It was at a restaurant. Well, a bar, actually.”

“Where?” I asked.

“New York City.” He paused. “The Village.”

From the way he was answering, I suspected that the establishment in question was in New York’s West Village—meaning it was most likely a gay bar.

“Yet you tried to track him down afterward,” I observed.

“That’s right. As I said, we only had the one conversation. We happened to be sitting next to each other at the bar. We didn’t exactly—click, if you know what I mean.”

I did.

“Anyway,” Willard went on, sounding resigned to telling the whole story, “he mentioned in the course of the requisite small talk that he was from a stifling small town in Ohio. He said the only thing the least bit memorable about it was that it was the birthplace of Rutherford B. Hayes. He went on to say he was now a teacher at a fancy private school somewhere in the New York area. A music teacher. He said the thing that had gotten him out of Ohio was his passion for music.

“Since we were still in the meeting and greeting phase, I made a polite comment about how it must be interesting, teaching at a private school. He said not really, since it was located in what he called a cultural wasteland. He complained that he’d only met one other person he’d connected with, an art teacher. As he talked about the friend he’d made out in the hinterlands, he referred to him as Nathaniel. I jumped on it, since there aren’t that many people named Nathaniel these days. Sure enough, it turned out that the man he was talking about was Nathaniel Stibbins.

“I was so shocked that Nathaniel’s name had resurfaced after all these years that I didn’t know what to make of it. It wasn’t until I went home and started to brood that I realized that finding the man at the bar could be a way of finding out about Nathaniel. So I decided to track him down. The problem was, he’d never told me his name. The name of the private school where he taught, either. The only thing I did know, in fact, was where he’d gone to high school.”

Shrugging, he said, “So I decided to use the Internet to try to find him. Since I knew about his connection to Rutherford B. Hayes’s hometown, I went onto
Classmates.com
and posted a query, asking if anyone could tell me how I could find him.”

“But at that point, couldn’t you have just Googled Nathaniel Stibbins’s name and found him directly?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure his name would have come up and led you straight to the Worth School’s website.”

“But I wasn’t simply looking for Nathaniel,” Willard explained. “There was no way I was going to approach him directly. Believe me, after what happened
at Schottsburg, I had no interest in talking to him. But I figured that if I could initiate a relationship—a
friendship
—with the music teacher I’d met at the bar, I’d be able to use him as a source of information. You know, find out how Nathaniel’s life had turned out.