Sink Trap (25 page)
Authors: Christy Evans
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Large Type Books, #Mystery Fiction, #Murder, #Crime, #Investigation, #Murder - Investigation, #Oregon, #Plumbers
I tried to absorb what the sheriff had said as Carruthers led me down a short hallway, past several closed doors, and around a corner.
Ahead of us, a security door with a heavy lock and a crash bar blocked the end of the corridor.
Carruthers pulled a business card from his shirt pocket and handed it to me. “If it’s a slow news day, the city paper will send someone out from the metro desk. They’ll be hanging around the front. If you’d rather avoid them when you come back, just give me a call and I’ll let you in this door.”
“Thank you, Deputy. I just may take you up on that.”
He swiped a key card through the slot next to the door, and we waited as the device clicked a couple times and then a green light appeared on the panel.
He pushed on the crash bar and held the door open for me.
“Call when you’re ready to come back in, miss.”
The “miss” was a nice touch. I’d been getting the occasional “ma’am” over the last year or so, and had begun to
worry that I needed to rethink my mother’s advice about wrinkle cream. But maybe not.
worry that I needed to rethink my mother’s advice about wrinkle cream. But maybe not.
I hurried out into the late afternoon sun, relieved to be away from the oppressive atmosphere of the sheriff’s station. Even though I hadn’t been there as a suspect, I had still felt the walls closing in on me the entire time I was inside.
I skirted the parking lot, keeping an eye on the front door. Having successfully ducked the reporters, I didn’t want to run into them before I reached my car.
By the time I got home, my phone had rung several times. I ignored it, concentrating on my driving, trying not to think about what I had learned.
In spite of the sheriff’s careful words and his caution about DNA testing, I knew that was Martha Tepper’s blood on the towel. A lot of it.
He hadn’t said anything about the shell casings. No matter what they showed on TV, though, I was pretty sure the examination of those would take more than the couple of hours he’d had since we’d found them. But just the fact that they were there was a bad sign.
In my bedroom I dug in my jewelry box and pulled out the brooch I’d retrieved from Sue’s office last week. It hadn’t changed in the days since I had put it there, yet it felt different somehow—heavier.
I was the one who had changed. I knew more about the brooch and about its owner’s fate than I wanted to.
The spent casings, the blood, the bag hidden in the wall—they were all things I would never forget.
Added together, they forced a conclusion I tried to avoid. Martha Tepper had been badly hurt, and the person who had hidden the bag was the last person to see her.
Alive.
I checked my cell phone before I got back in the car. Two calls from Sue, one from Paula, and three from my mother. As I scanned the call list, the phone rang again.
Make that four calls from Mom.
I considered letting it go to voice mail again, but I
knew I would have to talk to her eventually. Might as well get it over with.
knew I would have to talk to her eventually. Might as well get it over with.
“Georgiana? What have you gotten yourself into now?”
“Why, I’m fine, Mother. Thank you for asking. I was a bit upset, but I think I’ll be okay.”
“Don’t be that way, Georgiana.” My mother never appreciated my sarcasm. “Your boss would have told me if there was anything wrong with you. He just said you had to suspend work on the Tepper house because the police were there.”
“They were.”
“Georgiana!” I held the phone away from my ear, but I could still hear her exasperated voice. “You still haven’t answered my question!”
“There isn’t much to say, Mom. We found something we thought the sheriff might want to see, so we called him. He said he needed to investigate and told us to stop work for a couple days.”
“But that’s going to throw our renovation schedule off. How long will we have to wait?”
“I really don’t know, Mother. That’s the sheriff’s call, not mine. I don’t have anything to do with any of this.”
“But you were right there. Barry said you were the one who found—what exactly did you find?”
“I can’t talk about it, Mother.” The sheriff hadn’t actually said that, but it made a good excuse not to discuss with her what we’d found.
“Even with me, Georgiana? I’m your mother.”
“No, Mom. I really can’t tell you anything right now. As soon as I can, I’m sure you’ll be one of the first to know.”
She harrumphed into the phone, but she stopped arguing. “Very well, if that’s how you’re going to be.”
“It’s how I have to be for now, Mother. I have to go.”
“You’ll call me when you know something, won’t you, Georgiana? Please?” There was a note of concern in her voice, and I relented.
“Yes, Mom, I will. I promise.”
I finally got her off the phone and hurried out to the car. As I turned the key in the ignition, I realized I didn’t know where to park once I returned to the sheriff’s office.
I took Deputy Carruthers’s card from my purse and gave him a call. He answered on the first ring.
“Come around the back,” he said. “There’s a lot marked for employees. You can park there, close to the back door.”
“Great,” I said. “I’m leaving my house right now, so I’ll be there in a few minutes. I’ll call you as soon as I get to the parking lot.”
I found the lot he’d described, and phoned Carruthers again. A couple minutes later, he met me at the door.
“The sheriff’s talking to someone right now,” he said apologetically. “But you can wait, or you can just give me what you brought, if you want.”
I considered the options. I wanted to find out if the sheriff had heard anything else, but I didn’t want to have to sit around the office, waiting for him.
“Do you know anything more?” I asked Carruthers.
“No.” He shook his head. “The lab is working and we’re conducting an investigation. Beyond that, there isn’t any information we’re releasing.”
I realized I was getting the brush-off.
Well, wasn’t that what I wanted, to be relieved of any responsibility?
Still, I was curious about what was going on. I was involved, whether I had wanted to be or not, and I couldn’t just walk away.
“I suppose I could give you the brooch,” I said. I reached into my pocket, drawing it out. I looked at it, weighed it in my hand. It was just a piece of jewelry.
I held it out to Carruthers. He took a plastic bag from his pocket and pulled the top open so I could put the brooch inside.
“I found it in a drain pipe,” I told him. “I cleaned it up. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known . . .” My voice trailed off. I didn’t quite know what else to say.
Carruthers sealed the bag and wrote on it. “I’ll see that this gets to the sheriff,” he said. “Don’t worry about cleaning it up. You had no way of knowing.”
I turned to go.
A door opened in the hall ahead and Janis Breckweth emerged, followed by Sheriff Mitchell. She glanced my way, then did a double take as she recognized me. “You were there,” she said. “You helped me get my things from Martha’s house.”
The sheriff tried to guide her toward the front door. “I can have a deputy take you home, Miss Breckweth. If you’ll just wait a minute—”
“I can take her.” The words were out of my mouth before I thought about what I was saying.
The sheriff looked at me, his eyebrows raised in question.
“I was just leaving,” I said quickly. “I can drop Miss Breckweth off on my way home.”
“You sure? I can have a deputy . . .”
“Sure.” I motioned toward the back door. “Deputy Carruthers has that item you asked for, Sheriff. If there isn’t anything else right now, I’d be glad to give Miss Breckweth a ride. Second Chances, right?” I turned to Janis. “I hear you’re the new cook over there.”
She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Needed a job, didn’t I, and they gave me one. Place to stay, too. Maybe not as nice as Martha’s house, but it’ll do.”
She held her chin up as though daring anyone to think less of her for living in the homeless shelter. There was a toughness to her that I hadn’t seen the first time we’d met.
She wasn’t a nut case; of that much I was suddenly certain.
Janis didn’t speak until we were in the car and well away from the sheriff’s office.
“He thinks I hurt Martha,” she said without preamble. Her voice trembled with indignation. “As though I would hurt her! I was more like a sister to her than an employee, was what she always said.
“And now that nasty sheriff thinks I had something to do with her going away.”
I shifted gears and made a tight left turn onto Main Street. Although there was little traffic, Main was about the slowest way back to Second Chances, and I wanted the opportunity to talk to Janis. Next to Paula Ciccone, she probably knew Martha the best.
“Well, you had a right to be upset, didn’t you? I mean, she was going to sell out and move to Arizona. You’d be out of a job if she left, and have no place to live once she was gone.
“That would sure make me angry.”
“I admit, I didn’t like it much when she first started talking about it. She even offered to take me with her, but I hate the desert. I wasn’t going to that godforsaken place for anybody, even Martha.”
“So you were angry?” I risked a quick glance over at my passenger to gauge her reaction.
“At first, like I said. But it didn’t matter anymore, since she wasn’t going to go.”
Janis dropped that bombshell as though it was an established fact, even though no one else in town seemed to be aware of it.
I concentrated on not running off the road as I reassessed my whole not-a-nut-case opinion.
“But how can you say that?” I asked. I hoped my voice didn’t betray me; I was white-knuckling the wheel, trying not to consider the possibility that I was currently driving around with a lunatic in my car.
“She told me,” Janis said calmly. “How could she, after she found out what those people were doing with her money?”
The surrealism level climbed another notch, and I swallowed hard. “What people?” I asked, fearful of the answer.
“You were there,” she said. “The ones that were in the house with you.”
“There were a lot of people in the house that day.” Silently,
I repeated, “Not the real estate people, not the real estate people . . .”
I repeated, “Not the real estate people, not the real estate people . . .”
“That woman, the one that threw me out of the house,” Janis said. “Her and her husband. You know, the whiny ones.”
I nearly choked with relief. I didn’t think my mother was capable of hurting anyone, but I still had my doubts about Gregory.
Even so, it was nice to get confirmation. You could call my mother a lot of things, many of them uncomplimentary, but you could never call her whiny.
“You mean the Gladstones?” I asked.
“Yes,” Janis said. “Those lawyers. Martha said they were doing things with her money and she couldn’t leave until she got them straightened out.”
I was nearing the Second Chances building, and I slowed to turn into the parking lot.
“She was going to fire them if they didn’t straighten up.”
“Are you sure that’s what she said?” Janis Breckweth might be a suspect, but she could still be telling the truth. And if Martha Tepper had a problem with money, I knew who could confirm it for me.
If he would.
“That’s what she said. And it’s what she wrote down.”
“Wrote down?” This time my voice did squeak. I couldn’t help it.
I lurched the Beetle into a parking space and killed the engine. I pretended it was deliberate.
“Wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t so, would I?” Janis challenged, turning to face me.
“Of course not.” To tell the truth, I had no freakin’ idea whether she’d say it or not, but I wasn’t about to argue with her.
“Right.” She crossed her arms over her scrawny chest. “She started writing it all down, keeping track of stuff. She was going to take care of it before she left.”
“Wh-where did she write it down?”
“In that diary of hers. She started doing that a few weeks back, and she was always scribbling in it.”
“She had a diary?”
“Just said that, didn’t I? Are you even listening to me, girl? You’re like that sheriff, only hear what you want.”
“I, uh, I’m sorry,” I stammered. Clearly, my interrogation technique could use some fine-tuning. “I was surprised, is all.
“So she was writing down all this stuff in a diary?”
Janis eyed me suspiciously for a few long seconds, then accepted my explanation.
“Yep. She always said she could write a book about the people in this town, and that’s what I thought she was doing. But no, she was writing stuff about her lawyers and how she thought they were cheating her.”
“Uh, Janis, why didn’t she go to the police if she thought they were stealing?”
“All the bad things she was saying about them, she didn’t really know if it was them for sure. She said she had to give them a chance to explain, and to fix things.”
I nodded. That sounded like Martha Tepper, always trying to see the good side of people.
“Makes sense. But where is the diary now?”
“Someplace safe,” she hedged. “Bet those lawyers would like to know. But it’s someplace nobody is going to get it.”
“What about the sheriff?” I asked. “Don’t you think he ought to know about it?”
“What for?” Her mouth twisted, and for a second I thought she was going to spit, right there in my car.
“He just wants to make me out to be some crazy old lady who got mad at Martha and hurt her.”
“But you didn’t,” I coaxed.
“Course not. Why would I? Martha said she would take care of me before she moved for good, that she’d see I was set up somewhere else. Even said she’d help me get moved.”
Janis leaned over and looked deep into my eyes.
“That’s why I knew she was coming back,” she said with conviction. “She didn’t do any of those things, and she promised. Martha always kept her promises. Always. So I knew she’d be back.”
“That’s why I knew she was coming back,” she said with conviction. “She didn’t do any of those things, and she promised. Martha always kept her promises. Always. So I knew she’d be back.”
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