A Tale of Two Biddies (16 page)

Scroll.

There they were again, Peebles and Didi, their smiles a little bigger, minus the red camp shirts.

Scroll.

And there they were again, minus just about everything else.

I’m hardly a prude but my cheeks were hot. “Well, then . . .”

“Oh, come on.” A poke from Peebles. “We’re all adults here. Don’t be so shy. And take a good look. A really good look.”

I swallowed hard and forced myself to do as I was told.

That’s when I saw the date and time stamp on that last picture.

And that proved it.

Dan Peebles was up to a whole lot of something on Wednesday night. But it had nothing to do with poisoning Richie Monroe.

You have my promise.

• • •

By the time I crossed back over to the park the concert was over, but the party was just getting started.

Groups of revelers streamed toward the bars across the park and the boardwalk in the other direction. Other people sat and got comfortable, waiting for the fireworks show to begin. They laughed and sang and called out greetings. As for me, I was too busy with my own thoughts to care about any of it.

Peebles was out. So were Rosalee and Mike.

Gordon Hunter was in.

Who did that leave?

“You bet your life I want that other bottle of scotch! Just like it says in our contract.”

I was near the stage, and the voice thundered out from behind it, unmistakable to anyone who’d been at the concert for the last couple hours.

Dino.

I froze, my mind racing.

Dino and Richie.

Theirs was a relationship that went back decades, and if what Tiffany had told us about the song that made Boyz ’n Funk famous and Richie’s and Dino’s dueling claims about who wrote it, animosity was the name of this game.

I slipped behind a small mountain of amplifiers that Paul, Scotty, Nick, and Jesse were just beginning to wrangle, stepped over a spaghetti tangle of wiring, and got to the space between the back of the stage and the motor home that had been parked parallel to it to allow the band a fifteen-foot by ten-foot green room of sorts. I arrived just in time to see Dino down half a tumbler of amber liquid and hear Gordon promise he’d have the other bottle of scotch for him in a jiffy.

When Gordon hightailed it out of there, Dino caught sight of me and stepped back, his chin high, his arms raised, his face flush with the excitement of being back in the spotlight. Or maybe it was the scotch. “Huh? So?”

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say, so it’s a good thing Tiffany zipped past me to snap a few dozen photos of Dino.

“Huh? So?” This time Dino asked Tiffany.

“Fabulous!” She chittered like a fledgling, darting left and right to get more pictures. “I’ll have these up on the fan page in just a bit,” she told Dino. “Along with a little video clip. Only a few seconds,” she added with a gulp when it looked as if he might object. “Just a couple lines from
‘Come Down the Road
,
’ that second song in the set after intermission. Just enough to make people crazy to hear more.”

“Well . . .” He pretended to think about it, then gave in with a smile that apparently carried a higher wattage over where Tiffany stood than where I was; she melted. I pretty much stayed my ol’ regular self, unmelted and just as curious as ever.

“‘Come Down the Road
.
’
Did you write that one, Dino?” I asked.

His shoulders inched back. “You bet I did, and I’ll tell you what, it’s going to be big. Mark my word. Bigger than big. As soon as people have a chance to hear it, they’re going to be all over us for more.”

The way I remembered “Come Down the Road”
 . . .
well, truth be told, I didn’t remember it. Each one of Guillotine’s songs blended into the next, until my overall impression of the concert was one of noisy discord.

This was not the time to mention my opinion to Dino, so instead I said, “Writing songs. That’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.”

He spit out a laugh. “Not everyone’s got the talent, honey. So if you’re thinking of giving it a try—”

“Oh, not me.” There was a table nearby strewn with the remains of a sandwich platter. I brushed aside a scattering of potato chip crumbs and perched myself on the edge of it. “Actually, I was talking about Richie.”

“I didn’t say anything!” Tiffany blurted out, even though just the fact that she felt she had to blurt—and the bright red color that rose in her cheeks—pretty much proved she did.

Dino crossed his arms over the white shirt with the ballooning sleeves. “If you know the story,” he told me, “then you know that scumbag . . .” His spite was tempered by a hiccup. “That Richie Monroe—”

Okay, whatever I expected, it wasn’t that Dino would get all choked up.

He coughed behind his hand and acted like it was no big deal. “It was a long time ago,” he mumbled. “Back then, me and Richie were friends.”

“And these days, Richie rigged the guillotine to cut off your head.”

“Did he?” Dino belted out a laugh. “That son-of-a-bitch! Leave it to Richie to do something that crazy.”

“You’re not mad?” I asked him.

“I would have been if he cut my head off.”

I didn’t bother to point out the flaw in his argument, but then, I didn’t have much of a chance. Dino came and sat down on the table next to me.

“We were friends,” he said, and this time I knew it was the scotch talking because his words were slurred. “A long . . . long time ago, me and Richie were friends. We were roomies. Sure I was mad when it all went down. But . . .” He burped and pounded his chest. “I didn’t want the guy to die.”

Which is different than saying
I’m not the one who poisoned his drinks
.

“When Richie showed up at my place the other day, you told me you didn’t know him,” I reminded Dino.

He reached for the bottle of Johnny Walker. There wasn’t much left in it, but then, Dino’s glassy red eyes and his slurred speech were pretty much proof that the glass he was drinking out of on stage wasn’t filled with water. No matter, he emptied the bottle into his glass and slugged it down. “So I didn’t want to bring up ancient history. What difference does it make?”

“I think it made a lot of difference to Richie.”

I can’t say if Dino believed this or not. He pulled out his phone, and a couple seconds later, shoved it under my nose. The screen showed a website called Richie’s Telling the Truth.

“You see this?” he asked. “It’s brand-new. Showed up on the web earlier this week.”

I hadn’t seen it, and I gave it a quick once-over. The website was neither well-written nor artistic, but it did convey a message.
Years ago,
Richie said in a rambling, misspelled message,
I wus cheated, but I won’t be cheated again. The world needs to no the truth.

I glanced at Dino. “What is the truth?”

“Tell her, Dino.” Tiffany advanced on us even before Dino could open his mouth. “Tell her how you wrote ‘Ali,’ and how Richie tried to say it was his. Tell her how all these years, you’ve had to live under the dark cloud of Richie Monroe’s lies. People have thought less of the Boyz,” she said, clearly for my benefit. “Because of the lies. But tell them, Dino . . .” Tiffany scrambled over to stand in front of her hero. “Tell her how you wrote the song that made Boyz ’n Funk famous.”

Dino still had the phone in his hands, and he stared down at the picture of Richie that looked back up at him. Richie, looking grungy and disheveled, and in spite of his fifty years, still young around the eyes.

Dino clicked off the website. “What difference does it make?” he asked no one in particular.

Which is different than saying
of course Richie lied and I’m the one who wrote that song.

I knew it, and so did Tiffany.

“He besmirched the band’s name,” she said, her voice tight. “Tell her, Dino. What difference does it make if the jerk is dead? Tell her the truth!”

With a grunt, Dino got up and lurched to the other side of the little enclosure. He scrubbed a finger under his nose. “I dunno,” he mumbled. “Maybe . . . maybe there was a little bit of truth in what Richie said.”

I bounded to my feet.

A far less dramatic response than Tiffany’s, which consisted of her jaw opening and shutting but no sound coming out.

I found my voice first. “Dino, are you saying—”

He whirled around and slashed a hand in the air. “I’m not saying anything!”

But I had news for Dino; he already had. Okay, so it might have been the scotch talking, but even silence can speak volumes.

“I can’t believe it.” Tiffany’s arms hung at her sides. Her shoulders drooped. “All these years I thought Richie Monroe was the bad guy. And now you’re saying . . .” Tears splashed down her cheeks and she swallowed hard. “You’re telling me . . .”

Her head snapped up and her face, already pale, turned ashen. “Oh my God!” She hyperventilated. “Oh my God! If it’s true . . . if Richie really did write that song . . . if all this time I thought he did what he did to hurt the band . . . Oh my God! What have I done?”

And before I could ask what, indeed, Tiffany raced out of the enclosure.

Which is different than saying
I did it, I killed Richie Monroe,
but I had to admit, it looked mighty fishy.

W
hatever remorse Dino may or may not have felt over his broken friendship with Richie, Richie’s death, and maybe Richie’s murder, didn’t stop him and the other Boyz from dragging down to breakfast late, turning green at the sight of the banana-Nutella crepes, and demanding so many pots of coffee, I caught myself wondering how much it would cost to put Juan Valdez on the payroll.

By the time they went back up to their rooms to sleep off the combined effects of those couple bottles of scotch and the celebrity that came from being the center of attention in the park the night before, and I cleaned up and made sure everyone’s bills were slipped under their doors, I didn’t have much time to get downtown. There was a parade scheduled at noon, and after that the big Dickens trivia contest. I’d promised Marianne Littlejohn I’d be there early to look over the questions she’d prepared.

The important word there is
parade
and I guess I hadn’t been paying much attention to the chamber of commerce bulletins that arrived in my email, because I had no idea the word
extravaganza
also applied. The closer I got to downtown, the more congested the streets were. Roadblocks, high school marching bands, Marie Antoinette (complete with huge powdered wig) in the horse-drawn cart that would take her to the guillotine, and costumed peasants running behind to throw insults at her . . . Everywhere I tried to drive or turn or get by was a dead end, and I ended up looping around downtown and heading off to the far side of the island in the hopes of finding less congestion and easier access to the park from the other direction.

No such luck.

And in the long run, that turned out to be a good thing.

See, my circuitous route took me right past Crown Hill Cemetery, and there, a flash of flamingo color caught my eye.

I wheeled into the cemetery, and a minute later I was out of the SUV and walking toward where Tiffany Hollister stood with her head bowed and a bouquet of flowers in her hand.

It wasn’t until I was right up next to her that she realized I was even there, and it wasn’t until I was there that I saw that she was staring at a bit of newly disturbed earth between a mausoleum and a tall obelisk with an urn at the top of it.

“Buried in an unmarked grave.” Tiffany’s words escaped her on the end of the sigh that sounded as if it had been ripped from her soul. “Such a sad ending to so noble a life.”

I would have been excused for saying, “Huh?” Instead I settled for, “Who?”

When Tiffany turned my way, I saw that her cheeks were streaked with tears. Her eyes were a color three times as deep as her pink shirt, and her melancholy was even bigger than her shoulder pads. “Richie, of course.” Her words were soaked with tears. “This is where they buried Richie yesterday.”

I couldn’t believe I’d been so busy that I’d actually missed the funeral.

“Not to worry.” Tiffany must have known what I was thinking because she patted my arm. “That was the way he wanted it. No funeral. No mourners. No big to-do. The man from the funeral home told me. Richie . . .” Her voice wobbled and the hand she touched to her cheek trembled. “Richie left instructions for them years ago about his cremation and what he wanted done with the ashes. He told them he wanted to be as anonymous in death”—she fished a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose—“as anonymous in death as he was in life.”

I can be forgiven for being caught flat-footed by all this. After all, this was the woman who was numero uno when it came to the I Hate Richie club. And when I saw her the night before after the concert, I remembered she’d mumbled something about Richie before she fled the park.

“Did you kill him?” I asked her.

Tiffany’s tears, the trickling kind before, erupted into the Niagara Falls variety. “Of course I didn’t kill him,” she wailed. “Why would I kill anyone as heroic and wonderful and talented as Richie Monroe?”

I looked at her hard. I’d once seen a dog trainer pull the same stunt on a particularly ill-behaved Jack Russell, but alas, the strategy worked no better on Tiffany than it had on the dog. When all else fails, I’m a believer in logic. Or at least in honesty.

“Tiffany,” I reminded her, “you hated Richie Monroe.”

I don’t think I’d ever actually seen anybody wring their hands. “No! No! I never hated Richie. I hated the man I thought Richie was.”

In its own weird way, this was starting to make sense.

I backed up a step, the better to give myself a little space to think. “So what you’re telling me is that you hated Richie—”

“Because I thought he tried to lay claim to Dino’s song. And he took Dino to court. And he did his best to besmirch—”

This I knew, so I waved aside the rest of her explanation and got down to the meat of the matter. “And now?”

“Now?” She sniffled. “You heard Dino last night. You came right out and asked him point-blank if Richie really wrote ‘Ali, Ali,’
and Dino . . .” The waterworks started up again. “He didn’t deny it. Don’t you see? Dino . . .” She hiccupped and added a little hyperventilation just for dramatic effect. “I think Dino’s been lying all these years. Richie really did write ‘Ali, Ali
.
’
And I . . .” Forearm to forehead. “I’ve spent my life standing up for Dino and telling anyone who would listen that Richie was the bad guy. And all this time . . .” She hung her head.

“Poor, poor Richie,” she said, talking now to the patch of barren ground. “Your name was dragged through the mud and you were cheated out of the fame and fortune that should have rightly been yours. I’ll never forget you, Richie.” She laid her bouquet of daisies and carnations on the small mound of freshly dug earth. “I’ll tell the world your story, Richie. I swear.”

I waited for the
as God is my witness
part, and when it didn’t come, I figured it was safe to talk again. “Tiffany, yesterday Dino showed me Richie’s website, the one Richie started up to tell the world his side of the story. You said when you saw it, you did something to retaliate.”

“Yes, but I didn’t kill him.” She shook her head. Then nodded. Then did a weird sort of combination of both that left me feeling as if we’d been transported from South Bass and set down along the San Andreas Fault. “If that’s what you were thinking, don’t. What I did . . .” She pulled out another tissue and dabbed it to her eyes. “I’m ashamed to admit it. Ashamed to think I was taken in by the likes of Dino. All these years . . .” The tears came tumbling down. “All these years I’ve been president of the fan club, and this is what I get in return. My heart broken.” She pounded her chest. “My faith in mankind crushed.”

“So you . . ?”

“I . . .” She heaved a sigh. “I started up a website, too. It was all about how Richie’s was a pack of lies. I talked about how Dino wrote ‘Ali’ and that Richie was nothing more than a poser. But don’t worry!” She said this with all the conviction of a woman who thought I really might. “I’ve already started to make amends. I stayed up all night last night taking down the old page and starting a new one. You know, as a tribute to Richie.”

“That’s nice.” It was, in its own twisted way. “But it still doesn’t explain what happened to Richie. Do you think Dino could have—”

“Killed him?” Tiffany’s voice ricocheted off the mausoleum and echoed through the cemetery. “Richie was a walking dead man all these years. Ever since his song was stolen and he lost faith in his talent and his friends. Don’t you see? Dino ripped out Richie’s heart. He robbed Richie of his ability to trust. I just don’t think Dino killed Richie; I know he did. All those years ago.”

I was hoping for something a little more definitive but knew it was not forthcoming, so I left Tiffany to her mourning and her new obsession and continued on to the park, my mind playing over the possibility of Dino as killer. Dino and Gordon. At least I was narrowing down the field. The trick, of course, was to figure out which was which, and which had (so far at least) been clever enough to pull the wool over all our eyes.

By the time I was close to downtown and actually found a place to park, the parade had started. I wound my way through knots of gawkers, TV cameras from the stations on the mainland, and the tables that had been set up for a craft fair, zipped by Levi’s (eyes straight ahead and refusing to glance around), and came up almost all the way to the Defarge Knitting Shop when I realized Mason Burke was standing outside.

Again.

Since he had his nose pressed to the glass in the front door, he didn’t notice me right away, but I noticed that he wasn’t carrying the big, flat package we’d seen him with the night before.

“So, how did Margaret and Alice like the poster?” I asked him.

“They’re closed.” As if to prove it to me, he gave the doorknob a tug. “I haven’t had a chance to give the ladies the picture yet. I decided it would be more fun to present it to them in person than just to leave it here for them. You know, so I could see the excitement on their faces.”

It explained why he left with picture in hand the night before. “And maybe when you give your gift to Margaret and Alice,” I suggested, “your wife could be with you since the thank-you gift is really from her.”

“Wife? Yes, of course.” Burke laughed a little too loudly and hurried down the shop steps. His chin on his chest, he disappeared into the crowd.

“Chin on his chest.” I watched him go and mumbled to myself, my brain nibbling at the image, reminding me I’d seen it some time before last night when we’d watched Burke sneak into town with the poster under his arm.

Funny thing, though; it’s hard to hold on to thoughts when you’re surrounded by a few thousand people pushing for a peek at the parade, and soon, I wasn’t as worried about Burke’s chin or his chest as I was about making it over to the park across the street in one piece.

I was waiting semi-patiently for a high school marching band to . . . er . . . march past, when another flash of pink (it must surely be the color of the day) caught my eye.

This time it was Margaret Defarge, resplendent that day in pants and a matching top in a shade that reminded me of blushing roses. She’d just walked out of the candy shop near the antique carousel and I thought about going over to say hello, but hesitated when I saw her dart to the side of the building, behind the lines of folks jockeying for position at the parade and away from the windows of the shop. She had a blue bag in her hand about the size of a evening purse, and she glanced around to be sure no one was watching, then reached inside, grabbed something, and popped it in her mouth.

When I turned around and darted across the street, I was laughing. No doubt Alice was somewhere nearby and Margaret didn’t want her sister to know she was indulging in candy. Or maybe she just didn’t want to share?

Another smile brightened my expression. Leave it to the Defarge twins to make a gentle competition even out of eating candy!

• • •

By the time the parade was over (and just for the record, it was a mighty long parade), most of the congestion and the noise died down. Let’s face it, there are only so many people who are interested in a Charles Dickens look-alike and trivia contest. While most of the island’s visitors headed off to water sports or bars, the diehard few gathered in the seats that had been set up in front of the gazebo.

Gregory Ashburn tipped his tall top hat to me when I passed.

If the smile above that unruly goatee of his meant anything, Timothy Drake looked confident.

Tyler and Max, the kids with the paper beards and pipe cleaner spectacles, were anything but nervous. In fact, they’d attracted something of a following in the way of a half dozen girls who giggled and hung on their every word, and they took full advantage, regaling the girls with stories about “that Dickens guy” that sounded way more like fiction than fact to me.

Charles Dickens would have been proud.

Our female contestant—as it turned out her name was Eva DeNato—sat in the shade under a nearby tree, a notebook open on her lap.

Mason Burke . . .

I glanced around the park.

The contest was set to start in less than thirty minutes, and Mason Burke was nowhere to be seen.

“Why the worried look?” Marianne Littlejohn zipped by carrying an armful of books and a manila file folder stuffed with typewritten pages that she handed to me, the questions for the contest. “You look like you’ve lost someone.”

I gave the area another quick scan. “Just one of the contestants, Mason Burke. I saw him a little while ago over near the knitting shop, and come to think of it, he wasn’t dressed in his Dickens costume. That explains it, of course,” I added, feeling relieved though I didn’t know why. “He had to go back to the cottage to get dressed.”

“Well, kick-off time is in exactly . . .” Marianne checked her watch. “Oh my, I’ve got to hurry and make sure everything’s set up. Look over the questions. I’ve included a lot of the ones you emailed me.” She grinned. “This is going to be so much fun!”

And actually, I believed her.

That is, until Levi showed up.

Yes, yes, I know . . . the arrival of the island Adonis should have cheered me, not chilled me. And it would have. Honest. If only I didn’t suddenly feel as jumpy as a high school student at her first mixer.

“Hey.” Levi, it should be pointed out, did a pretty good job of acting like a high school kid, too. One of those cool boys who is oh so not flustered by the rapidly beating heart of every girl around him.