Blessed Is the Busybody (26 page)

I rambled. “It’s Aggie Sloan-Wilcox, and I’m at Gelsey’s house. I think maybe I’ve figured out who Jennifer’s father was. And it’s relevant. I think it was Frank Carlisle, you know, the senator? I found an old photo of him having an argument with Gelsey, and I, just, well, I put two and two together. I wasn’t sure who he was at first, but I just saw this photo of him at the service center dedication plus a dedication in a book, and I realized the man standing in front of the salt dome was the same man. And . . . darn.”

I hung up. It sounded absurd. Roussos would smile when he played his messages. He’d think I’d really lost my mind. And maybe I had.

Suddenly I didn’t want to be in Gelsey’s house speculating about her life and the reasons someone might have wanted her dead. I was one room away from the place where she had fallen lifeless to the rug. I was an intruder, an interloper, and a fraud. I wasn’t a detective. I was just Aggie, Ray and Junie’s daughter, Sid and Vel’s sister, Ed’s partner, Deena and Teddy’s mother, Lucy’s friend. And I wanted to go home.

I wrapped the remainder of the cups quickly and carefully, setting them in one of the boxes. I was positioning the bowl on overlapping sheets of paper when I heard tapping on the front door.

“Ed.” I exhaled gratefully.

Ed’s meeting was over by now, and he had decided to come and check on me. He had probably asked one of the attendees to stay with the girls while he came to bring me home. My husband, the worrier.

I left the bowl on the table, but I carried the carton with the cups to the front of the house to answer the door. It wasn’t Ed. It was Harry.

I set the box on an end table and shouted to him while I fiddled with the lock. I had double-bolted the door after my trip outside to get the boxes, and now the top key was not cooperating.

“What are you doing here?” I said through the door. I jiggled the lock and tried to twist the key as I spoke. “Did you think I’d forget the punch set?”

“No, but I thought you might like some help with it. I’m on my way home.”

Harry is one of those people you can always count on. In Ed’s year at Tri-C, Harry has been the one to show him the ropes, to remind him of people who expect him to visit, to suggest agendas at meetings. Maybe this stop was a little over the top, even for him, but I was grateful for the company.

“You can take the whole thing if you want.” Twist, turn, screech. The key only went half as far as I needed it to. “If I can get the darned door open.”

“It’s the rain. Our door does the same thing. Take advice from the Horace Grey Locksmith Service. Push against the door with your shoulder.”

He was right. This time the key turned.

I was so glad to see him. I turned the knob and had the door open before I realized what he had said. Lightning split the sky at exactly that moment and Harry jumped, presenting me with his profile.

I had identified Frank Carlisle because two photos were similar. Now I remembered
another
profile, a much younger man caught in a compromising position at a window. A Brad Pitt look-alike.

“Hor-ace . . . !” I stepped back and gave the door a shove to close it again, but the way I said the name must have warned him. Harry put all his weight against the door just as it started to slip into place, and before I could compensate, the door was wide open and Harry was in the room.

It was too late to fake it, but I tried. “So . . . Sorry about that,” I stammered. “I’m really afraid of light-ning.”

“Really?” He slammed the door behind him.

“Yeah. Silly, huh? And not very . . . brave of me to leave you on the other side, was it?”

“Stupid to try.”

Ray’s survival training emerged. I told myself to be calm. I had to take control of the situation and fast, or I wasn’t going to survive this encounter.

“Hey, somebody’s not in a good mood,” I said, forcing a smile. “Did the spring social committee come after you again?”

“Can it, Aggie. You got too close to the truth. You just wouldn’t leave it alone.”

I stopped pretending. “It was the scrapbook, wasn’t it?”

“I thought I took care of
every
photo of that picnic until you showed me the scrapbook this morning. Of course, I didn’t even know about the movie until last year when you mentioned you’d seen one. I never noticed anybody with a movie camera that day. I didn’t know what you’d seen, but it still worried me. I went through your house a couple of times when you were gone, but I couldn’t find the movies. I couldn’t get to them until you so thoughtfully put them back in the closet a couple of months ago. And there was the picnic.”

So much for the Women’s Society checking for dust bunnies when I wasn’t around. Harry had been my phantom home inspector. I shivered and wished I’d been smarter. “I don’t have a shred of proof about anything. I can’t identify the man with Gelsey.”

“I’ll do it for you. Francis Xavier Carlucci. Better known these days as Frank Carlisle, thanks to a little name change when he was eighteen. His father was Carmine Carlucci, a major player back in Brooklyn.”

It’s never a good sign when the bad guy starts clearing things up. Obviously Harry thought I might as well die knowing the truth. So far he hadn’t pulled a gun. There was no reason to think that advantage would last.

I tried to picture the rest of the house. A door to the backyard in the kitchen, one outside to the garage. The kitchen was my best bet. I began to back in that direction. Harry edged around me, cutting off the quickest route without giving me a clear shot at the front door, so I backed toward the dining room.

“Ed’s on his way over here,” I said. “He didn’t want me to come.”

“His meeting’s not even halfway done. I was there.”

“What connection do you have to this?”

“Does it matter?”

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. Humor me.”

“You already figured out Carlisle was Jennifer’s father, right?”

I shrugged.

“He was Gelsey’s business partner in a little venture in Vegas. She got pregnant, he talked her into giving up the baby. Arranged the whole thing himself. Even talked her into marrying Falowell and getting out of town.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Because I worked for him. Only I was Horace Greystoke in those days. I’m listed as Horace in the church directory. You’ve never noticed?”

Tarzan, son of Lord Greystoke . . . Tarzan, who had rated his very own page in Gelsey’s book.

I had heard emotion in Harry’s voice, now I tried desperately to dissect it.

“This is all so much history,” I said. “Not worth protecting, Harry. You had a good life here. Friends, money from your family . . . Oh, maybe not, huh? The Wal-Mart stock and family farm?”

He smiled a little. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“I guess it’s not a coincidence you landed in Emerald Springs.”

“I was in trouble in Vegas. Frankie thought I ought to get out of town. And I liked the idea of babysitting Gelsey. She was some piece of work, wasn’t she?”

“You didn’t like her.” It wasn’t a question.

“She tried to blackmail me back in the old days. She caught me with one of her Gorgeous Guys on camera. I didn’t know he had any connection to her. She was going to tell Frankie I was gay, something I knew he didn’t want to hear. She threatened me, but I helped her see reason the old-fashioned way. I told her if she did it, she wouldn’t be so gorgeous anymore.”

I tried not to react. “I can see why you were angry at her.”

“So when I had to leave town I liked the idea of just sitting around, watching her for Frankie and knowing she understood why I was here. When Frankie or his friends need me, I go off and do other things, but this is as good a base as any.”

“I’m surprised Carlisle didn’t just have her killed.” I winced at my own words. Of course he
had
eventually.

“Frankie had a soft spot for Gelsey. He never really got over it. Not even when her husband died and she asked for help finding their daughter. He should have put a stop to things then, but he didn’t. That’s when I came into the picture.”

“So he sent you to make sure she stayed quiet?”

“Frankie told her the girl was safe and happy. He told her to leave it alone. By then it was more than his wife finding out. He was into politics. He’d always kept a low profile with his other activities. He watched his own father take the heat over and over again, so he protected himself. When it came time to run for office, there wasn’t much the muckrakers could dig up.”

“Except Jennifer.”

“But not unless Gelsey went public.”

I was almost in the dining room now. Harry didn’t seem concerned. I was afraid I knew why.

I kept talking, but my mind was whirling, trying to figure out what he was going to do and how. “I bet Gelsey hated having you in town.”

“She wasn’t happy about it.” Until this moment he hadn’t looked angry. Conflicted, maybe. Even sorry to be here but resigned. Now, though, I’d hit a nerve.

I tried to sound like his friend. “She did something to you, didn’t she? She tried to get back at you. Last month when we were talking about Ed, you told me she tried to get you fired, too.”

The Harry I had known had never seemed menacing. Now with a muscle jumping in his clenched jaw and his eyes narrowed, I was afraid I saw the inner hit man.

“Trying to get me fired was nothing. I was indispensable. For once, nobody listened to her. No, it was bigger than that. She threatened to out me,” he said, as if we were still friends and he wanted my sympathy. “Just like she had before. She said she’d already started some rumors and soon everybody in town would know, and the word would get up to Frankie.”

“You must have been furious. That wasn’t any of her business.”

“I got back at her. I told her the truth about her daughter.”

“You told her Jennifer hadn’t been adopted?”

“And worse. How sick she was, how screwed up.”

I wondered why he was telling me this. There was something here I didn’t understand.

“She must have been beside herself.” I felt the dining room table at my back. I moved around it and bumped a chair.

“She said she’d go public. That she’d tell the world, that she didn’t care about her reputation. She was going to ruin Frankie’s. That’s why he came to town. She refused to see him, so he had to surprise her at the picnic.”

“Senator Carlisle must have said something to her that day to calm her down.”

“He told her he’d have Jennifer killed if Gelsey told anybody the truth.”

Along the way I’d had a few moments of sympathy for Gelsey Falowell. Now I could almost feel her despair. She had made some terrible mistakes, but she probably hadn’t realized until the day of that picnic how deep a hole she had dug for herself and her baby girl.

I manufactured a nod. “I guess that shut her up.”

“Let’s just say it gave her a compelling reason to help me get rid of every trace of Frankie’s presence at that picnic. Of course, we thought we had done just that.”

“Until I came along and mentioned seeing the movie.”

“Uh huh. And, of course, that made us wonder what else we had missed. I guess the only way Gelsey could think of to stop you from cataloging everything and asking questions was to get your husband fired. If Ed wasn’t here, you weren’t here. Then she could take over the archives the way she had taken over everything else in the church and make sure there was nothing left to see.”

I couldn’t think about that. Just by trying to do a good deed for the church I had caused this problem for Ed. If I worried about that now, I might never have the opportunity to worry again.

I struggled to sound sympathetic. “I bet the senator was angry at you for telling Gelsey about Jennifer, though. I bet he didn’t realize how she drove you to it. He probably never saw the side of her you and I did.” False comradeship. I was ready to try anything.

“He got over it after a while, that and me being gay. I was too valuable to him. Valuable to everybody, that’s me. Then Jennifer came to town. All ready to tell Gelsey who she was. All ready to tell the world. And she wasn’t going to stop there. I knew I had to take care of things.”

“You thought Jennifer might find out who her father was, too. You were afraid Gelsey might tell her. But Sax Dubinsky killed Jennifer, Harry. Not you.”

“Dubinsky was only supposed to rough her up and scare her off. I told him that. Frankie didn’t want his own daughter dead. But something went wrong.”

I had a revelation. “You
knew
Gelsey was coming to our house that morning. It must have been on Ed’s appointment calendar. You were the one who made sure the body ended up our doorstep just before Gelsey arrived.”

“Dubinsky killed her by accident in his buddy’s SUV, then he called me. So I told him to take her somewhere and wait for the right moment to drop her on your porch. Gelsey would get the message, but she wouldn’t be the focus of the investigation, the way she would have been if we’d dropped the body at her house.”

“You knew everything that was going on in the church. You knew every event, every rumor, every appointment.”

“Brilliant, huh? I took the job to keep a closer eye on Gelsey. It was kind of a joke. I wanted to show her I was watching everything she did. I thought she would quit the church, but she didn’t. She was too stubborn. Then the job turned out to be a real treasure trove. Why do you think Frankie
knew
he couldn’t get rid of me, even after I screwed up? How do you think I figured out who Jennifer was and what she wanted?”

“You hadn’t been watching Jennifer, too?”

“I’d never seen her until she came to town. Frankie kept tabs on her through other people. But that first day she came to see Ed I could hear her shouting, even with his door closed. I figured out right away who she was and what we needed to do about her. And later I figured out how to show Gelsey what would happen if she said a word to anybody.”

“But the morning we found the body Gelsey didn’t know Jennifer was her daughter.”

“Not then. But I knew we’d never keep it a secret. Ed was going to tell her. It was a matter of time unless I killed Ed, and I really wanted to avoid that if I could.”