A Quilt in Time (A Harriet Turman/Loose Threads Mystery) (31 page)

“Joshua thinks Howard Pratt killed his mother.”

“He could just be paranoid, or lying.”

She sat down at the table opposite him.

“So, given all we know, who do
you
think killed Seth?”

Aiden leaned back, closed his eyes and ran both hands through his hair. After a moment, he blew his breath out.

“If you had asked me that question a year ago, I’d have said it must have been a stranger, because what upstanding citizen of Foggy Point could kill their own flesh and blood. After my uncle killed my mother, and my sister did…what my sister did, I was questioning whether I could trust myself around my loved ones.”

Harriet started to protest, but he raised his hand to silence her.

“I’ve spent hours of my recent therapy talking to my counselor about the subject, and I accept that my uncle and my sister are responsible for their own actions. I even believe our bloodline isn’t cursed—at least, most of the time.”

He gave her the crooked smile that melted her heart every time she saw it. She reached across the table and took his hand.

“To answer your question, I don’t know. Howard is an obnoxious self-promoter, and it seems like he’s got half of Foggy Point in his pocket. On the other hand, he always talked about Seth like he was the anointed one. I assumed he was grooming him to take over the empire. It doesn’t make sense that he would send him off to school so he could become his resident pharmacist and then turn around and kill him. Besides, shooting someone doesn’t seem like Howard’s style.”

Harriet gave him a wry smile.

“And what, pray tell,
is
Howard’s style?”

Aiden smiled back.

“Oh, I don’t know. If we believe he killed his former wife—poison. Or maybe in a car accident, if we believe
those
rumors. He just seems way too sneaky to do something as straightforward as shooting someone himself.”

“If not Howard, then who else?”

“Clearly, the psychopath brother has to be a candidate, but you know, it’s still possible it’s someone we don’t know.”

“I suppose, but if you believe all the true crime shows, you’re more likely to be killed by one of your loved ones.”

Scooter came over and put his front paws on Aiden’s leg. He scooped the dog up with one hand and deposited him absently onto his lap.

“By all accounts, there wasn’t much love to be had in that family.”

“I just had a thought,” Harriet said. “With the three wives we know about and the mix of half- and step-siblings, I wonder if there’s an additional wife or kids we don’t know about. There may be people who have either been driven away or escaped.

“I need to go check on Sarah again anyway. Maybe, if she’s stronger, I can see if she knows. If Seth has always been the favored son, maybe there’s a resentful sibling out there.”

“I wouldn’t hold your breath on that one.”

“Have you got a better idea?”

He pressed his lips together.

“Hmmm, nothing really comes to mind, other than maybe letting the police handle this one.”

“And let Howard railroad Sarah?”

“You don’t even know he’s doing that. I mean, I’m sure the folks at the senior center are wonderful people, but
they’re
not the police, either. It might all be in their collective imagination.”

“You’re right. I need to talk to Detective Morse.”

Aiden closed his eyes as if struggling for strength.

“You are impossible.”

Harriet grinned. “Yeah, but that’s why you like me.”

Harriet went directly to the big room in the back of Tico’s Tacos. Aunt Beth had called to say she’d rounded up as many of the Loose Threads as she could, and that Jorge was fixing a special dinner for the group.

“Is that garlic bread I smell?” she asked her aunt.

Beth was already seated at the big table.

“Jorge had a craving for Italian food tonight, so he made us spaghetti and meatballs.”

“You ladies are my trial,” Jorge said as he came into the room with an antipasto platter arranged with slices of hard salami, cheese, and marinated artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes and olives. “Depending on your reaction, I’m thinking I might have an international cuisine night once a month.”

“I vote yes,” Lauren said as she arrived. “We need a little more variety in this town.” She turned to Harriet. “Do you have time to stitch on my quilt for the shelter? I finished the top this afternoon. Hopefully, they’re not expecting fine art. This one’s fairly simple.”

“Simple and done is what they need,” Aunt Beth told her. “I’m sure anything you made is going to look nice enough.”

Lauren smiled at her.

“I guess.”

“Do I smell—” DeAnn started.

“Garlic bread,” Harriet finished for her. “Jorge’s experimenting on us.”

DeAnn sat down opposite Harriet and her aunt.

“Sounds good to me, I’m starving. I worked on my quilt for the shelter while the boys were at school and Kissa was at her play group. I think she looks forward to seeing Wendy there.”

“It’s wonderful that she’s adjusted so well since you adopted her,” Beth said.

Mavis and Connie came in, followed a few minutes later by Carla and then Robin. When the last two were seated at the table and Jorge had placed pitchers of iced tea and water on the table, Beth picked her flip chart up and set it in front of her place.

“Let’s get started before Jorge starts delivering food.”

Harriet stood up beside her aunt.

“It’ll be easier if I just make notes on the chart of what I’ve learned this afternoon.” She flipped pages until she came to a blank. She wrote
Howard
,
Joshua
and then a question mark across the top. Then, she wrote what Aiden told her Hannah had said about Joshua under his name and what Joshua had said about his stepdad under Howard’s. Under the question mark, she wrote “possible other wives and children.”

Lauren pointed to the last column.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“When I was talking to Aiden today it occurred to me that, with the three wives and tangled collection of children and stepchildren Howard has had, it’s possible there are more.”

Lauren thought about that for a moment.

“I suppose that’s possible, but given the ages of the children we know about, and the fact that he was married to all their mothers when they were born, it would be hard for him to have squeezed anyone else in. I’ll dig around on the Internet and see what I can find.”

Robin tilted her chair back.

“So, Joshua thinks Howard did it, and Hannah thinks it was Joshua. I wonder who Sarah suspects.”

Mavis took a sip of her tea.

“Another way to look at it is who was abusing whom. Howard abused Joshua, may have killed his second wife, and, at the very least, has Sarah’s mother cowed, but he’s probably abusing her as well. Seth was abusing Sarah. I wonder if Howard was also beating Sarah.”

“I’ll ask Aiden to pay attention to Hannah and see if he thinks she’s being abused. From what Georgia at the shelter told us, domestic violence tends to spread in a family.”

Lauren pulled out her smartphone and keyed the notepad app.

“I think I’ll do a little digging and see what happened to Seth’s mother. No one has mentioned her. It would be interesting to see if she’s dead or alive.”

Carla twirled a strand of hair around her finger.

“If Seth’s mother is dead under suspicious circumstances, would that move Howard to the top of the list?”

“Diós mio,” Connie said. “If she’s dead, too, it could make Howard a serial killer.”

“Let’s stick with what we know for sure,” Robin cautioned.

Harriet rested her elbow on the table and her chin on her fist.

“We’re missing something here, something big. We’ve got all sorts of clues indicating that Howard is a bad guy. If we believe Joshua—and I have to say what Lauren and I saw makes me inclined to believe him—Howard is cutting the drugs prescribed for the residents of the senior center then selling the excess on the Internet. Joshua says he’s defrauding Medicare and Medicaid, also.

“Janice was investigating him for the murder of his second wife, and we’ve heard it suggested that Seth’s mother was his first wife and she, too, died under mysterious circumstances. What we haven’t heard is any real reason Howard would want Seth dead.”

Lauren tapped the fingers of her right hand on the table.

“You know, to a lesser degree, the same could be said about Joshua. We’ve heard he’s a psychopath and that he is, at the very least, on probation for some unspecified crime. He says he hates Howard and believes the man killed his mom—but again, no Seth tie-in.”

“Hannah did say Joshua resented Seth for being the favored son.” Harriet reminded her.

Lauren gave her a sarcastic look.

“Really? So he kills his brother because he got better toys when they were growing up?”

Aunt Beth smiled. “She’s right, honey. That’s not much of a motive for murder.”

Harriet sat down as Jorge entered, setting baskets of garlic bread at each end of the table. She picked up a piece of the bread and used it to point at the flip chart.

“We need to find information—different information. We’ve established that Howard is probably a criminal, so we don’t need more corroborating evidence of that. Same with Joshua. We need a motive for one of them or, failing that, someone else to commit murder.” She bit into her bread.

“What about Janice?” DeAnn asked. “Could she be more than she seems?”

Lauren laughed. “Anyone could be. Janice could be lying about her memory loss. She could have been lying about her investigation of Howard. We could pick a name out of a hat.”

Harriet accepted a glass of water from Jorge’s waitress and took a sip.

“Maybe we’re going about this wrong. Maybe what we need is more information about Seth. Why would anyone want him dead?”

“What are you thinking, honey?” Aunt Beth asked.

“We need to talk to Sarah again and maybe Joshua and Hannah. Maybe one of them would have an idea why he’d be a target. We’ve established he was abusive to Sarah, and that gives her a motive, but we need to find out who else might have wanted him dead.”