The Magic of Murder (21 page)

I stopped and looked up at Rebecca.

“Keep reading,” she said. “What herbs do we need?”

I turned to the next page, turned back. “I don’t know.”

She leaned from her chair. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“What I said.” I wiped sweat from my forehead. “Did you turn the heat up?”

“Forget the heat, what’s the mixture for the amulet?”

I pointed to the book. “It’s not here!”

Rebecca’s eyes went wide. I could almost see smoke waft from her nose. It was as if she’d been engrossed in a mystery and someone tore the last page from her book—which, when I think about it, is what happened.

“Gimme that!”

She grabbed Sarah’s book from my hands and dropped it on the coffee table. With manic motions, she turned page after page. Then, as if she’d spent every bit of her energy, she slumped back in her chair.

“Now what do we do?” she said.

“Damn,” I muttered and looked to Elvira. “Any ideas?”

The cat looked back, her eyes hooded, as if she searched
for one. Then she opened her eyes and her mouth.

As crazy as it sounds, I believe Rebecca and I both expected Elvira would verbalize an answer in clear, grammatically correct English. She didn’t get the chance. Just then my cell phone played the chorus of
The Cats in the Cradle
.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Arresting Developments

            
 
W
hen I flipped up the lid of my phone, Roger said, “Turns out you were right—”

The
honk-honk
of horns crowded out the rest of his sentence.

As if it were me who couldn’t be heard above the racket, I shouted, “Talk louder!”

“Damn!” he said.

I heard a quick
wroo-wroo
of a police siren. Obviously,
Roger was in his car. Just as obviously, he was caught in traffic.

“Get the hell outta my way!” he hollered. “Can’t you see this is official business?”

“What’s going on?”

“Don’t have to shout at me. I hear you,” he said.

“Okay, okay.” In a quieter voice, I repeated, “What’s going on?”

“Kevin
was
holding something back,” Roger told me.
“A big something. Blew this case wide open when he finally
started to sing.”

I felt such instant relief, my leg stopped hurting. “How’d you get it out of him?” I asked.

“What?” Rebecca said.

I repeated Roger’s words.

“How’d they do it?” she asked.

“
Shh
.” I flapped my wrist to stop her from talking. “He’s about to tell me.” Into the phone, I said, “You’re going to tell me, right?”

“Yeah, I’ll tell you.” Though Roger clearly felt
pressure to get somewhere, he had less tension in his voice than there had been since a bottle bomb smashed the window of my house. “Agent Parker also thought Reinhart knew more, though it wasn’t the murders Parker wanted to know about. That federal lummox was only after a pretty ribbon to tie around his drug case. Soon as he offered your ex witness protection, Parker got what he needed to round up the big kahunas in Buffalo.”

“Who’d Kevin give up?”

Rebecca poked me. “What? What?”

“
Shh!
” I pushed the button to put his voice on the phone’s small speaker. “Happy now? Okay, Roger, go on. We’re listening.”

“It’s Jimmy’s son-in-law, Sean Ryan, who’s behind everything going on in Niagara Falls.”

My jaw dropped. Sean’s face hadn’t been on one of the patches of my quilt. Could I have been wrong about how all the patches fit together? My eyes shot around my living room, as if to search for what I’d missed.

“Sean?” I said.

“According to your ex it’s him.”

This can’t be right,
I thought
.
“Can we believe Kevin?”

“I’m about to find out.”

Rebecca nearly jumped out of her seat. “C’mon, c’mon,
what did Kevin say?”

Roger explained Sean Ryan had been chasing a story for the
Buffalo News
about the drug ring operating on the south end, and he got chummy with some guys who brought the drugs in from downstate. Sean allegedly convinced those guys there was big money to be had peddling the powder to high rollers at the Niagara Falls casino. Kevin saw Ryan pass the stuff out one night, and sold him on the idea of selling the coke to clients of Ira Smith’s insurance agency. When Smith found out what Kevin was up to, he wanted in, too.

“I’m told Smith bawled like a baby when he opened his door and saw Deputy Chief Reynolds and a couple of squad cars outside his house,” Roger said. “The DEA decided he’s small potatoes. Since they don’t need Smith to make their main case, they’re gonna let us prosecute him locally. That made Reynolds happy.”

What Roger said made sense. It tied in nicely to what Ira had hinted to Rebecca and what he’d told us. As for Sean Ryan, I remembered the way he hadn’t let Jennifer out of his sight when I visited Marge Osborn. Then there was the way he held tight to her arm when he saw Roger with me at the book signing. So Jennifer probably knew what Sean was up to. Still, I had a nagging sensation a piece was missing. What was it? Stuck in the back of my
mind was something I’d seen when I dropped by the Osborn
house after the funeral. Or could it have been something that wasn’t there? I knew whatever it was would tell me
what questions I hadn’t thought to ask. What I’d missed was
right there, just beyond my grasp. Figuratively, I stretched out my hand until I almost had it—

“Wait a minute,” Rebecca said. “Where does Detective Osborn come into this? Did he belong to the gang?”

Her question knocked my hand from what I almost had in my grasp. As if it were a butterfly, the recollection fluttered away.

“Uh-uh,” Roger said. “Jimmy learned about the operation. Stupid kid, how’d Sean think he could keep it a secret from his wife? Jennifer got suspicious one night when she was at the casino and saw him skulking in a corner with Reinhart. She phoned Jimmy. Jimmy went to Smith’s office looking for Kevin. Figured he’d implicate Sean. Smith told Reinhart about the visit, then Reinhart blabbed to Sean. Family.” Roger sighed. “I guess that’s why Jimmy didn’t tell me what he found out.” He sounded relieved his partner, his friend, hadn’t been dirty.

Kevin’s version of what happened didn’t convince me. I couldn’t let go of the new Corvette in the Osborns’ driveway. Where had Jimmy gotten the money to buy it? Marge said they’d scrimped for every penny— Damn, what was it I couldn’t remember?

“So the Ryan kid killed Detective Osborn?” Rebecca asked.

“That’s what Reinhart thinks.”

“But, did Kevin
see
him do it?” I said.

“No.”

“Did Sean
tell
Kevin he did it?”

“Hey, what’s with you?” Roger said. “I thought you’d be glad, knowing it’s over.”

I looked at Rebecca with doubt in my eyes. We both passed a doubtful expression to Elvira. On the floor at our feet, the cat craned her neck and looked through the French doors to where I’d imagined seeing Sarah in the snow. Instead of my ancestor out there now, I imagined the butterfly I mentally chased. The winged bug floated closer.

“It’s not over, Roger,” I said. “Even if Sean killed Jimmy to keep from being arrested, why did he kill Amy Woodward?”

“Who knows what goes through the guy’s mind?” The lightness was gone from Roger’s voice. He sounded distracted. “Maybe she bought drugs from him and couldn’t pay. Maybe she threatened to tell Woody.”

“Amy Woodward was a cokehead? Oh, come on.” I never would have written her character that way. I glanced at the wall across from me. On it, hung above my computer desk, was a framed page from my first published story.

In my mind, I saw Roger shrug. “Maybe the two murders aren’t connected. Have you considered that?”

“They are. They have to be,” Rebecca insisted. “If they’re not, why’s someone trying to kill Emlyn?”

I smiled at her. Good girl, she had spoken my thought.

“And your theory still leaves your boss on the hook for his wife’s murder,” I added.

My smile faded. If I were wrong, and the Osborn and the Woodward murders weren’t committed by the same person— “If the two aren’t connected, it means someone is still after me, Roger. Why? What did I do to make someone want to—?”

“Maybe it’s that creepy Fred Silbert. Maybe he broke your window so you’d call him and he could get close to you, give you comfort.”

“Comfort from a firebomb?” I shouted into the phone. “If it was Freddy and he just wanted my attention, why’d he try to kill me by burning down Main Street Books?”

For a long moment all we heard were honks of car horns and engines revving. At last Roger said, “Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. Well, you and Rebecca stay tucked in at your house. I’ll be by later and we’ll figure it out. Meantime, I’m just getting to the
Buffalo News
with an arrest warrant made out in Sean Ryan’s name. I called Marge Osborn an hour ago and she told me he said he was coming here. Don’t wanna give him a chance to slip away.”

***

I grumbled. “Stay tucked in until he gets back? Not gonna happen.”

“Just what I was thinking,” Rebecca said. “You seem to have an idea about what’s really going on. What do we do?”

Again my mind flashed to the old crone I’d envisioned in the snow in my backyard. “We go where Sarah pointed,” I said.

Rebecca’s brow creased.

“She told us what we need to know.”

My friend stared, as if I’d winked at her with the third eye Roger sometimes saw in the center of my forehead. “What did Sarah tell us? The herbs we need for an amulet of truth aren’t written in her book.”

“We don’t need to know them. Think about what Sarah said.”

Rebecca’s lips moved when she silently repeated my words.

“Betrayal,” I said.

Elvira rubbed against my leg. When she lifted her head,
I think I saw pride in her eyes.

“I don’t get it,” Rebecca said. “From what we’ve heard,
this has been about illegal drugs.”

“Yes and no.”

She gave me another look of incomprehension.

“Sure, cocaine is at the bottom of it,” I said, “and that might explain why Jimmy Osborn was killed. But it doesn’t tell us why Amy Woodward died, or why someone’s come after me. Roger’s content with the idea Amy’s murder isn’t
connected, that happening when it did is just a coincidence.”

“It might be.”

“It might,” I agreed. “But if it isn’t—” I thought for a minute then said firmly, “No, it’s not.”

Rebecca gave a short laugh. “Chasing after your spinning mind exhausts me.”

“No, no, listen,” I said. “Presume for a second Sarah wasn’t being metaphorical when she wrote about betrayal. What if the murders were really about—?”

I stopped in mid-sentence, recalling the way Marge glared at Sean when I brought the casserole the day of Jimmy’s funeral. The message she wanted to send me finally got delivered. But there was one other thing. I closed my eyes and sighed. The butterfly I’d been trying to grasp at last flitted close enough to snatch. What I saw on its wings was such a small thing. The killer hadn’t thought it would be a give-away, but it was. Now the final patch for the crazy quilt fell into place. As if I finally saw the true meaning beneath one of my story-lines, the complete scenario spread out before me in all its lovely complexity—lovely, being a relative term for the ruptured protagonist I envisioned. My hands folded across my stomach, I closed my eyes and smiled. What I pictured explained everything: the drugs, the Corvette, Jimmy’s death, Amy’s, the bottles thrown through windows—

There was one tiny detail that refused to fit into the pattern.

As if out of breath from running to catch up with me, Rebecca panted, “Yes, betrayal. Sean Ryan betrayed his father-in-law. Kevin Reinhart betrayed you and Sean Ryan and the guys from the barn.”

“No. Sarah wrote of a deeper, more hurtful betrayal.” 

“I really can’t follow you.” Rebecca bit the corner of her lip.

That one tiny detail nagged at me, as if it were a flaw in one of my stories. I turned to the French doors, hoping I’d see Sarah Goode outside and she’d provide the final answer. I saw only a white blanket spread across my yard. I sat up straight. At this point the missing detail didn’t matter, I decided. Everything else fit so perfectly.

I knew what I had to do.

“Is there any undyed linen in your shoulder bag?” I asked Rebecca.

She rapidly blinked, trying, I supposed, to conjure up a path through the maze into which I’d led her.

“And some dry herbs.”

“What herbs? Sarah didn’t tell us—”

“Doesn’t matter. We can grab a couple from my spice closet. And silk thread. Red. I have a spool in my sewing kit.”

“I don’t get it,” Rebecca said. “Without the right ingredients and a ceremony to purify them, the amulet you’re gonna make won’t do anything.”

“Oh, but it will,” I said.

The creases in her forehead grew so deep I thought her eyeballs might roll into the crevices.

“While those gypsy women were teaching you to read tarot cards,” I said, “my father taught me to play with a poker deck. ‘Daughter,’ he’d say to me while he systematically won back my allowance, ‘it doesn’t matter what cards you’re holding if you know how to bluff.’”

Rebecca laughed out loud.

“What?”

“I think the student has become the teacher,” she said.

“We’ll soon find out.” I rose from the sofa and grabbed my crutches and coat. “I’ll put the amulet together in the car.”

She didn’t move.

“Come on!” I said.

“Uh, have you forgotten something?”

With my hand on the doorknob, I counted my supplies. “Linen, dried oregano, dried thyme, dried rosemary, silk thread—nope, I’ve got it all.”

Again she laughed. “What about car keys? Roger confiscated both yours and mine after our little romp through town. Remember?”

“Is that all?” I said.