PW02 - Bidding on Death (13 page)

We returned to the scene of the crime an
d she took me backwards and for
wards over the events several times. What I saw and what I did and when and how and why. Looking at her notebook, she said, “Now I understand that the on-scene investigator allowed you to remove some items from the crime scene?”

“Items? He allowed me to remove the dog!”

“Only the dog?”

“Well, along with his crate and his leash and his bag of food. I have dog food of course, but I have a big dog and the kibble bits are larger…”

“And that’s all you took?”
She referred back to her notes. “
The dog, the crate, the leash and the food?”

“That’s all,” I assured her.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” What was this about?

“Nothing heavy?”

“Heavy?” I was puzzled. “Depends on how you define heavy. I guess the dog food was about four pounds, it’s a five pound bag but it wasn’t full. The crate’s pretty light, but with Paco in it, that might be seven or eight pounds or so.”

“I’d like to see this crate,” she said.

So we headed to the back of the house, me relieved that my cleaning frenzy of yesterday had the kitchen looking better than it usually does.

We went to the door of the laundry room. Paco started yapping furiously from behind his baby gates. I pointed to the plastic traveling kennel on top of the dryer.

“That’s not it,” Agent Maguire murmured.

Then I got it. “The murder weapon!” I exclaimed. “You don’t have it, do you? And you don’t know what it was.”

Ma
guire looked momentarily chagrin
ed, but then nodded. “There was nothing at the scene that we could identify as the murder weapon.”

“Couldn’t the killer have just washed it and put it back?” I asked. I got myself a cup of coffee and held up the pot to the agent. This time she accepted the offer and we settled down at the kitchen table.

“It’s harder than people think to clean a weapon so a modern forensics lab won’t find traces,” she explained. “And nothing at the site fit the wound.”

“I should have known you folks didn’t have the weapon,” I mused. “If you had, word would be out by now.”

She frowned. “That doesn’t speak well of the sheriff’s department.”

“Agent Maguire,” I said impatiently, “this is a small, rural community. People mind one another’s business whether they ought to or not. Word gets around.”

“Perhaps,” she admitted. But she looked doubtful.

“What sort of thing are you looking for?” I asked.

“Something heavy, with a straight edge,” she told me.

I winced. “Like an axe, maybe?”

But she shook her head. “Stra
ight, not sharp. Heavy
enough to break bone, but not
sharp enough
to cut.”

“Hmm.” I considered the possibilities. Unfortunately, I could think of a lot of candidates. “Do you think the killer brought his own weapon?” I asked.

“I don’t know what to think,” she admitted.

We wrapped up the interview then. I noticed that her eyes were a bit red and wondered if she was tired. Before we left the kitchen, I gestured toward the laundry room. “Could I interest you in a dog?” I asked, because it never hurt to ask. “I seem to be stuck with him. The brother told me to take him to the animal shelter.”

But Agent Maguire shook her head. “I love dogs,” she said sadly, and then let out an enormous sneeze.

Oh. “Allergies, huh?”

She nodded, fishing a tissue out of her purse. “I can be around dogs or cats for a little while, but pretty soon it catches up to me.”

“Won’t Washington House be a problem for you, then?” I asked. “They have those two big mastiffs.”

“It seems okay so far,” Maguire admitted. “The dogs aren’t allowed upstairs or in the restaurant. If it becomes a problem, I’ll have to move to the Motel Six, but it’s twenty miles away.”

As I escorted her to the front door, I asked, “Have you checked the brother’s alibi?”

She looked at me curiously. “Why do you ask?”

I shrugged. “I gather he’s inheriting all Rose’s stuff, and from what I hear some of the things are valuable.”

“Enough to be a murder motive?”

“Anyone who would take or suggest taking their dead sister’s beloved pet to the animal shelter is capable of anything,” I said darkly.

She considered for a moment, finally saying without inflection, “Well, that’s certainly one point of view.”

After she left, I realized that she hadn’t answered the question.

And five minutes after that, Julia’s Expedition rolled into the back yard. Julia got out and came to the kitchen door, where I was drinking coffee and pondering the Paco question.

“I see you survived the interrogation,” she said, helping herself to the coffee.

You have to pass Julia’s place to get here; Julia had obviously been watching for the agent’s departure.
She settled down at the table, ready to dish. “So? What did you talk about?”

“We just went over the same things I already discussed with Luther. Finding the body and the auction, and what all I touched in the kitchen, like that.”

Julia frowned. “Nothing new?”

“Oh, wait,” I remembered. “There was something new. Did you realize they don’t know what the weapon was? It wasn’t there and they can’t figure out what it might have been.”

“Reeeeally?” Julia perked up. “Well, isn’t that interesting?” She fished around in her enormous purse and pulled out a stack of index cards.

Oh, no – I’d been here before. “Put those away,” I said crossly. “We’re not doing this again.”

“Doing what?” Julia asked innocently.

“We’re not playing Miss Marple,” I told her firmly. “It’s Agent Maguire’s job to find out who killed Rose. Not us. It has nothing to do with us.”

“I think it does,” Julia argued. “What if this agent can’t solve the murder? What happens to her? Nothing. She just goes back to Richmond and gets on with her life. But we’re here. We’re right here, with a murderer on the loose and no idea who or why or if it’s going to happen again.”

I shivered. So many people had talked about how exasperating Rose was that I’d been thinking she just got on someone’s last nerve and they snapped. But what if that wasn’t it? And even if it was, people are allowed to be annoying, it’s not a capital offense.

Queen Anne was a friendly community. Sure, it was changing and growing, but still, there was the small
town rural ambience.
We kept an eye on one another and noticed if we could help out. But what if Rose’s murder
was never solved? How would it a
ffect us, to go through our lives with the unspoken knowledge – somebody
here is a murderer?

Julia was right. We needed to know who. I hoped it was the brother.

“Now remember last time?” Julia said. “Get to know the victim and you’ll know why they were killed.”

“I’m not sure it’s the same,” I objected. “Obadiah Winslow was a stranger, we had to go find out things about him. But everyone here knows Rose. Knew, I mean. She’s local. What else is there to find out?”

“But did we know her, really?” Julia asked. “I’ve been here for thirty years and I didn’t know she’d been married.”

“You don’t think a fellow would divorce someone they’d been married to for several years and then wait three decades or so to murder them?” I asked skeptically.

“No, but it’s something we didn’t know. Maybe there are other things we don’t know,” Julia pointed out. She fanned out her blank index cards importantly. “I’m going to make a biography of Rose Jackson. Speak to the old timers. There’s bound to be something.”

We got our opportunity to quiz the old timers that very evening, which was the monthly meeting of the Queen Anne Historical Society. Now, Queen Anne doesn’t really have a lot of what you might consider ‘his
tory’. We had no famous Signers
and no battlefields. (I know! A county in Virginia with no battlefields?! But so it was.) The Historical Society was really more of a social club and an excuse to get together. We’d been talking off and on for years about opening a museum, but the catch, besides the expense, was – what would we put into a museum?

But it was a nice outing and get-together, and all the old timers seemed to belong. Tonight’s meeting was at Evelyn’s, so we’
d have
scuppernong wine as well as the usual cookies and coffee.

There were nine of us today. I think I was the youngest person in the room. The only two men were George Haines, Buddy’s dad, and Reverend Lou, who’d retired from the Methodist church here. Then me and Julia, and a bunch of other old biddies. They were the assembled collective memory of Queen Anne.

Like I say, it’s really more of a social thing. And of course, the main topic this evening was the murder of Rose Jackson. George, presiding, raced through the Robert’s Rules of Order part of the meeting with even more haste than usual so we could get to the heart of the meeting, which was the socializing and gossip.

Nobody could imagine why anyone would want to kill Rose, but most people seemed to have had at least one run-in with her. “Rev, did
n’t
she give you grief over the parking lot?” George asked.

“Aw, geez, that parking lot!” Rev remembered. “We had to make do with a gravel lot for years and years, but back in ’86 we got that bequest from Hester Madison and the congregation said the thing they wanted the most was a paved lot. Simple enough thing, but I thought the county never would approve it, what with all their guff about run-off and something called ‘non-point-source pollution
’
. It was Rose raising all the objections, I know because Win Webber, he was county administrator back then, told me.”

“You didn’t hold a grudge about that, did you, Rev?” George asked, eyes twinkling.

Rev wasn’t amused. “That’s an uncharitable thing to say,” he said shortly.

“Sorry,” George said, abashed. “Not a joking matter, I guess.” Then he gave a bark of laughter. “Sorry again,” he told us. “I just remembered, though. She tried to stop Gracci’s from building that new wing, you know, the same one where her viewing was. She said their house was ‘culturally significant’ or something.
I remember Joel’s dad Henry raving about it. She said the Home was an Arts And Crafts house and shouldn’t be tampered with. They did eventually get their permit, but it took a lot longer than they wanted it to. And then there she was, when it came down to it, right in the wing she tried to stop being built.”

Everyone had stories about Rose in the county administrative office, but Evelyn trumped them all. Evelyn retired fifteen years ago; she’d been a high school English teacher and she remembered Rose from high school. “Her senior year, she was secretary of both the senior class and the student council,” she recalled
, hunting along her
shelved forty years of yearbooks for the pertinent volume.

I remembered high school. “Secretary,” I mused. “That means she did all the work while the president glad-handed.”

“Here we go!” Evelyn pulled out the correct volume, and flipped through it for the class officers. Sure enough, there was Rose, looking prim and actually rather attractive, despite the teased hair that was almost required in those days. The class officers were photographed peeking around the pillars at the front of the old high school, self-consciously signaling that they too could be ‘cards’ like the fun kids. And there was
Gene
Abernathy as senior class president. So he’d known Rose for a good long time; maybe he would be a good source for Julia’s biography project.

I flipped so
me more pages and saw that Gene
had snagged Most Likely To Succeed, while Rose had to settle for Most Serious. (Honestly, Most Serious? What a judgment to have to live with!)

I looked back at the yearbook cover. Rose was just two years older than me. “Didn’t she retire kind of young?” I suggested. “The county didn’t force her out, did they?”

“Oh, no,” said Reverend Lou. “Rose always said she was going to do her thirty years and then get out. Said she was going to retire while she was still young enough to enjoy her leisure.”

“And did she?” I wondered.

“Well, she kept busy,” Evelyn said. “You know those bus trips that Parks and Recreation puts on; she’d go on those. To D.C. for sightseeing, to Williamsburg for touring and shopping, like that. I think she even took a Caribbean cruise once.”

I was surprised. “She traveled? Did she take Paco?”

“No,” Evelyn said, thinking back. “I think most of her traveling was before she got that dog.”

“The Williamsburg trip was after she had him,”
Linda
Delmar said. “You know Bethany, who does for me? She’d been going to Rose’s once a week, dusting and sweeping, like that. And she took Paco when Rose went to Williamsburg. Just the once, though – she said Never Again.”

Evelyn laughed. “Oh, I remember that now. But that was around the time Rose discovered auctions, I think, so she stayed close to home after that, that was her new craze.”