Cancelled by Murder (17 page)

“You were trying to be a good friend to both. So you went to Daisy's shop . . .” I showed my palm, inviting more.

I got an enthusiastic nod from Molly and an eagerness to explain. “It was raining really hard, and the wind was out of control, as you must remember. But I didn't want to put it off. I left my girls to close up shop and ran across the street. Daisy wasn't out front or inside, and there were no customers, of course, so I checked out back. She was practically being blown away by the wind, she was so tiny. She was trying to move that heavy metal furniture she has out there and pull in the outside plants. I started to help her.”

“What time was that?”

She shrugged. “I know I hadn't had lunch yet, but, you know, I don't have a regular lunchtime. I think I went over a little before eleven, and I didn't stay more than about twenty minutes.”

I'd seen Daisy taking in the displays from the front of the shop around noon, after Molly left. If I hadn't been so self-conscious about being an interrogator, I would have dug out my notepad and taken notes. I tried to keep the time sequence straight in my head. Molly leaves; I drive by; the killer arrives and leaves; Tony finds Daisy's body—all between about eleven thirty and one thirty.

Molly was breathing heavily, a worry to me. She'd stopped talking and stared into the space over my shoulder, which happened to be the direction of Daisy's shop. She'd become more and more agitated, probably from finally sharing the details of what had to have been one of the worst moments of her life, and one she'd had to keep to herself.

“Let me get you some water,” I said, already on the way to the small refrigerator. I pulled out a bottle of water and opened it. When I touched her hand, intending to call her attention to the water, I released another flood of emotion.

“Then I brought up Liv and the card issue, trying to be all casual, and Daisy went ballistic. She yanked a chair from me, so hard that I fell over, and she didn't even seem to care that I was hurt.” Molly shook her head. “I'd never seen her that way. I knew I'd better get out of there before something worse happened.” She gasped, realizing again that something much worse had happened.

I closed my eyes, as if to focus on the timeline taking shape in my head. Another data point came to me. “Did you report back to Liv after your fight with Daisy?”

“Oh, you bet. I gave her a call immediately. She wasn't happy, and”—Molly squinted, and jerked her neck forward, scrutinizing me—“wait a minute, Cassie, you're not thinking that Liv went over there and—”

I held up my hand, stopping her before she lost her breath again. “I'm trying to put things in order, Molly. It's important to have a clear picture.”

I didn't elaborate about another piece of the picture that had fallen into place. I thought back to Liv's appearance as my last customer before Ben and I closed up on the morning
of the storm. It had been before noon and, now I knew, after Molly called her and gave her the bad news about Daisy's aggressive behavior.

Even Ben had noticed the foul mood Liv was in at the time. I hoped Molly couldn't see the image taking shape in my mind, of Liv finishing her post office errand and storming over to confront Daisy.

One of Molly's employees came to the doorway, but left immediately. I guessed it was clear that a private meeting was going on. Molly and I sat in silence for a minute or so. I hated to bring her back to my reason for being there, but I knew I had to. “Is that it?” I asked, trying to keep my tone neutral.

“You don't believe me. And now you think Liv killed Daisy.”

I'd failed again. “That's not it,” I assured her. “I'm just asking if there's anything more that you remember. Is there some reason why you didn't talk to the chief immediately, once you knew she was dead? If nothing else, your story would have helped pinpoint a time when Daisy was alive.”

Molly strained to recapture her powers of reason. “I would have called her, but I was hurting, in more ways than one, kinda shocked at Daisy's reaction. Then Tony stepped up right away with his information and I felt I had nothing to add.”

I was stuck. I knew it would do no good to emphasize, again, that any tidbit could have been helpful.

Molly's eyes teared up. “I haven't been able to get the whole thing out of my mind. I console myself with the idea that Tony saw her not long after I left, so she couldn't have suffered very long. Someone just rushed in there and . . .”

I didn't like the image, either. We lapsed back into our inert state, staring past each other, the buzz of beauticians and clients in the next room incongruously cheerful.

“Are you going to tell the chief?” Molly asked in a hoarse whisper.

“It would be better if you told her yourself.”

“Do you think she'll hit me with an obstruction of justice charge?”

“I don't know, Molly. But I know it's the right thing for you to do.”

She nodded. “You're right.” A loud sigh followed.

“Can we talk about one more thing?” I asked.

She screwed up her face, curious but wary. “I guess so.”

“I saw that there was a gathering in here last night.”

“So?”

“Anything I should know about?”

Wrong question. Molly bristled. “It's not my place to say, really.”

“Because Reggie Harris was in charge?”

Molly leaned on the table and hoisted herself up. “I think I should get back to work,” she said, limping away.

*   *   *

Though I smiled at everyone who caught my eye on my way out, I felt drained of energy. I couldn't help thinking that the result of my alleged helping with an investigation might be that I'd end up with no friends. Which was exactly my status when I first came back to town a year ago. Everyone I'd known in high school was on a path that didn't include me. I'd worked hard to be accepted and now I was headed back to square one. I passed a row of black sinks and I
considered signing up for a complete redo of my untamed locks—its main appeal was that I'd be able to hide for a while under one of the sleek plastic drying hoods.

As I walked to my car, my purse rang. The old-fashioned ring tone signaled a text from Quinn. I leaned against the bank building and read it.

Home for Skype later?

Yes!!!
I wrote, disregarding my old English teacher's firm direction never to use more than one exclamation point. “These are extraordinary times,” I would have told her now.

M
olly Boyd was out of my hands. She'd apparently taken a blood oath, like everyone else at the meeting in her salon. I hoped I'd at least convinced her to report to Sunni. If so, then I'd made one small contribution to the Daisy Harmon case file.

I still had items on my list to complete. Sunni had asked me to talk to the quilters and that was what I'd do. But not before I downed a good cup of coffee. I crossed Main Street and entered Mahican's coffee shop. I used my sweater to stake a claim to a chair at the back, away from a baseball game on TV, then placed my usual order at the counter.

On the way back to the place I'd saved, I saw that a woman had taken a seat at my table, opposite my sweater. No problem. Customers often doubled up when the café was busy.

The closer I got, the clearer it became that I knew the
woman and her cascading blond hair. I arrived at the table and greeted Terry Thornton, who'd settled in with a coffee and a brownie.

“Hey, Cassie. I was sitting over there”—Terry pointed to a long communal table along the street side of the shop—“and I saw you come in, so I figured I'd join you. Is that okay?”

“Of course,” I said, thrilled that at least one person in North Ashcot appeared eager to talk to me. So what if Terry wasn't high on my list of suspects? She was a quilter and, therefore, on my assignment sheet. And she'd handed herself to me. That, and there was an excellent cappuccino in front of me. Maybe my luck was changing.

Terry reached down to a shopping bag on the floor and pulled out a white, semicircular headband, a narrow crown of sorts. “What do you think?” she asked. “I just picked it up. The trend these days seems to be minimalist.”

“Minimalist?” I echoed, giving myself time to adjust to the issue on Terry's mind: her own wedding, not Daisy's murder. Without preamble, we were into wedding talk. I realized it might take a while to transition to homicide. I took in the sequins, tiny crystals, and pieces of shiny ribbon wrapped around the band. “Lovely,” I said.

“So simple, right? No more wreaths or spikes sticking out of your hair or long, complicated veils. Most brides don't wear veils at all now. Course, styles change, which is why I'm not settling on a dress yet.”

To my chagrin, I was on my second cappuccino, this time accompanied by a few small biscotti, and we were still discussing bridal issues. The cake (in fact, she was considering cupcakes, arranged like a multitiered cake), the attendants
(there was some unfortunate tension, since one of her best girlfriends was on the chubby side and balked at wearing a sleeveless dress even though it was a summer wedding), the caterer (tastings with three companies were scheduled, with her mom and sister as advisers), and the rehearsal dinner (it was hard to choose between a casual, youth-oriented, fun place, and a fancy restaurant in one of Boston's finest hotels).

“Don't you have almost a year to get all this together?” I asked.

Terry's eyes widened, as if I'd said her crown was ugly or that she ought to elope. “Ten months and two weeks. It's closer than you think,” she said. “We already have the church and the hall, naturally. It's going to be in Boston, where we both come from, down by the waterfront, and you wouldn't believe how everything gets booked even two years in advance.”

I assured her I believed it, and sipped through one more wedding topic—shoes. Terry showed me transparent strips she'd bought to put on the soles of her wedding shoes. She wiggled the strips to show me how flexible they were. “They're for walking on the lawn, which we'll have to do, you know, for pictures. I've heard horror stories of brides slipping on the grass.”

I tried to be suitably horrified, but I'd reached my limit and had to make an attempt to derail the wedding talk. I excused myself to get a refill, with an extra shot, and when I got back to the table, I was ready.

“I ran into Molly Boyd earlier today,” I said. “We were talking about how we miss Daisy Harmon, how much help she was at our quilting meetings.”

“Absolutely. Daisy was a cool old gal.”

I cleared my throat, and kept silent, approaching cool old galhood myself.

Terry nibbled on her brownie, then shook her head, eyes toward the ceiling, as if recalling a scene from the past. “That is, unless she'd had a fight with her husband right before.”

I leaned in toward Terry and assumed a do-tell position. “I haven't heard about that,” I said, and decided immediately afterward that I was officially a bad person, capitalizing on Terry's immaturity and gossipy tendencies to get information. I hoped the result would be useful enough to justify my questionable means.

Terry waved her hand. “Well, you're sort of new to the group, you know, so you may not have heard as much. But she was always complaining about Cliff and his lack of ambition.”

“I thought he had a pretty secure job.”

Terry failed my private test—she didn't seem to get the pun. “Yes, but, as I'm sure you know, he tried out for the police force and didn't make it.”

“That's nothing to be ashamed of.” There I was, defending Cliff again. I had to be careful not to dissuade my companion from sharing further tidbits. “It was his eyesight, I think.”

“I didn't mean that he's a loser or anything. It's just that there's not much opportunity for advancement in a private security firm. Justin, my fiancé, is in marketing, for example, and he's going for his master's in business administration. Really, you can go almost anywhere from there if you apply
yourself.” She paused for a sip of coffee. “Which he does. He's going for a promotion as soon as we're settled.”

“What about you, Terry? What are your career goals?”

“Me? Oh, I'm happy in the school office, right now. There's always something new to learn, like new policies and procedures in the district. Maybe after all this is over”—she pointed to the bag at her feet, and I assumed she meant wedding prep—“I'll go back and finish my degree. It all depends.” Terry had a slightly pained expression on her face, as if it hurt to think too far ahead.

Before we took a complete detour to a conversation about careers, I inserted a little gossip as a distraction. “I heard that Cliff wasn't happy with Daisy's activism,” I said, cringing inwardly.

Terry rose to the bait. “Oh, no kidding? I heard Daisy say once—I think it was to Eileen at a quilting meeting—that Cliff was trying to get her to pull back on being so outspoken. ‘It's not good for business,' he'd told her over and over.”

Now I was absorbing not only hearsay, but tales with at least three degrees of separation from the source. “Really?” was my only contribution. I knew that was all it would take for Terry to continue.

“Daisy's point was that if it wasn't for her, always pushing to grow the business and work to make the conditions in town favorable to small merchants, their shop would have folded long ago. That's what she said to Eileen; she didn't talk about it with me directly.”

I could see why Daisy might not have used Terry as a confidante. But I had to admit that for a young woman, Terry
seemed to have her pulse on the community. Her vantage point was the office in the town's only school, K through six, where she interacted with the teachers, parents, and staff. Ripe for information. And she knew how to spin a good tale.

I'd thought about asking Eileen if she'd had any direct information about the tension between Cliff and Daisy, but Eileen was not the type to gossip. I gulped. Unlike me. When had I become the Queen of Scuttlebutt? Was it still gossiping if you'd been charged with uncovering chatter that might help the police in a homicide investigation? I could only hope.

Before I could intervene, Terry switched back to talk of her impending nuptials. I let her go on for about ten minutes, listening to reviews of the various bridal magazines Terry subscribed to, the catering catalogues she'd picked up this afternoon, and the choices of designer wedding apparel. When she took a break for a sip of coffee, I looked at my watch.

“I can't believe it's this late,” I said, barely noting the actual time. “I'd better get going.”

“Oh, me, too. I'm supposed to be going over all the samples of favors I've collected. Big decisions coming up.”

I wished her good luck with the high-stakes verdicts and left Mahican's, wondering how I could manage to be left off Terry's guest list.

*   *   *

When I finally did check my watch, I saw that it was only four forty. A little more than thirty minutes since I'd met Terry. I could have sworn I'd spent a couple of hours with
her. I sat in my car behind the bank and thought about Andrea, whom I hadn't spoken to since quilting night. Main Street was still busy with shoppers. Should I wander into the hardware store where she worked part-time, on the off chance I'd meet her? I tried to think of some use I might have for nails or a soldering gun and came up empty. An unplanned meeting had worked with Terry, but it was unlikely to happen a second time.

I pulled out my phone and checked my contacts, where all the quilters were listed. My finger was in midair over Andrea Harris's number when my phone rang. I said hello to Cliff.

“I'm really worried about Jules,” he said. “I've been calling him ever since I heard I could take Daisy to Miami and he hasn't answered.”

I felt compelled to remind Cliff again that it was Saturday. “Maybe he has a date,” I suggested.

“Yeah, but he's never off the clock this long, you know. I'm outside his house now. I was thinking, what if he's sick or he fell or something?”

I realized I didn't know much about Jules's personal life, whether he had a family, lived alone, who his close friends were.

Cliff clearly knew where he lived at least. “I knocked and rang the bell and looked in all the windows I could. Then I checked the garage. His car isn't there, so he must be holed up in his office, not wanting to be disturbed. I'm going to check.”

Thus thwarting Jules's plans to hole up. Didn't Cliff hear me the first six times? “It's the weekend, Cliff.” I knew I sounded like a scolding parent. “Hard as it will be, you
might have to wait until Monday. Don't you have access to other funds?”

“Not as much as I'll need for the trip and all the logistics. The shop's account is in Daisy's name only. I have the paperwork I need to access it, but I can't do that until the banks open on Monday.”

“I wish I could help you, Cliff, but I'm not in a position—”

“No, no, Cassie. I'm not asking for that. I'm going to Jules's office. I'll call you from there.”

The “there” Cliff referred to was two doorways from where I sat in my car. The lot covered the whole block from First Street to Second Street, encompassing the back properties of the bank, Molly's salon, and the hardware store above which Jules had his office. If I were a good friend, I'd offer to check the accountant's office myself. I took a deep breath and allowed my better self to come forward. “I'm in the neighborhood already. I can run up and check.”

“Would you? Thanks, Cassie. I owe you.”

“One question first, Cliff. Did you tell Chief Smargon about my car's break-in?”

“Uh, yes, I did. I'd never be able to live with myself if anything happened to you just because you were helping me out. Never. The chief said she was glad to know.”

“I'm sure she was.”

“I'm sorry. I knew you wouldn't do it yourself, and, like I said, it would kill me if I'd put you in danger. Whatever nutcase killed Daisy, I don't want him after you.”

I should have been more grateful than annoyed, but it was neck and neck. Cliff had set himself up as protector, perhaps for Jules, too. I believed him when he said he was concerned for Jules's welfare as well as for accessing the
money he needed. There was nothing like a murder in town to set a security guard to high alert.

I clicked off with Cliff, regretting that I hadn't found a way to ask him about the rumored tension between him and his late wife. As I climbed out of my car, parked directly behind the bank, I glanced at the salon windows next to it, into Molly's back room, and couldn't help thinking of the secret (to me) meeting held there last evening, one that Jules had attended.

There were few cars left here this evening, since stores were closing. The parking lot, devoid of people, was unpaved, a mixture of gravel, dirt, and puddles, with a few large rocks in the mix, plus debris that still hadn't been cleared from Monday's storm. Just like the lot across the street, behind Daisy's shop. The yard where Daisy met her death.

The shortest route to Jules's office was across the lot and into the back entrance to the hardware store, and up the stairs. Though it was still daylight, the lone walk through the rubble was unappealing and instead I took the long way around, over to First Street, then down Main; past the front of the bank, all closed up now; past the salon, still bustling inside; and into the front of the hardware store. I welcomed the coolness of the air-conditioning. It would be a couple of hours before the temperature dropped enough to be comfortable outside.

I opened the door to the building just as Pete, the manager, exited the side door of his store, pushing a broom, corralling sawdust, a few nails, and tiny pieces of wood. We nearly bumped into each other in the small lobby. A short, middle-aged man, but very muscular, Pete would have come out on top in any such collision.

“Hi, Cassie. Good to see you. But another minute and you wouldn't have gotten in. I came to lock that door.” He tucked the broom handle under his arm and showed me a ring of keys as an offer of proof. “If you're headed upstairs, you won't find anyone. Dr. Hotte came down with her last client of the day a few minutes ago.”

Did Pete think I needed a therapy session with Dr. Hotte? I ran my fingers through my hair, as if it weren't too late to make a more put-together impression. “I thought Jules might be up there,” I said. “I've been trying to reach him all day.” Close enough to the truth.