Seven Threadly Sins (25 page)

Actually, someone
had
locked it. I’d seen Loretta do it. But then she’d gone back. I asked, “Did you see Loretta nearby?”

She shook her head.

“Kent?”

“No.”

“Anyone?”
Me? Or Macey, who had told Ashley she’d seen Paula leave the conservatory.

“I wasn’t seeing much. I wasn’t looking, either. I was just . . .” Clutching at her sides, she bent forward. “Walking around. I must have been in shock.” Slowly she straightened and focused on the group near the carriage house again. “Why is the fire department here? There’s no fire.”

I took a deep breath. Where to begin?

I took another deep breath.

Smoke.

“Actually, there is a fire,” I said in, I thought, a remarkably calm voice. “It smells like someone’s burning paper.”

Something clanked behind the carriage house.

Yelling, “Fire!” I sprinted toward the trash cans in the narrow space between the carriage house and the chain-link fence separating it from the park around the conservatory.

In damp rubbish inside one of the trash cans, flames flared up.

Behind a neighboring house, pale knees between high boots and black short shorts flashed between trees.

Loretta must have been behind the carriage house the entire time, and now she was running away, toward her apartment building.

L
oretta was escaping. She’d tried to kill me once that evening, and I wasn’t about to try to capture her by myself. I also didn’t dare scream for help. She would hear me, and the group talking to each other around Clay probably would not.

I could go back to the carriage house and enlist Ben, Haylee, and the other firefighters to charge after her, but Haylee’s mothers and Dora Battersby would probably think they should join the chase.

The best thing I could think of was to follow Loretta. I would stay back, out of her hearing. Out of her sight, too, unless she turned around. I would watch where she went, and then tell the police.

Wishing I still had the emergency dispatcher on the line, I pulled my phone out of my pocket.

A twig snapped behind me.

I whipped around.

Kent put his finger to his lips with one hand and beckoned to me with the other.

I didn’t want to go close to him, but I had my phone, and the far side of the carriage house was crawling with
my friends. I took a hesitant step toward Kent, then peeked over my shoulder. Loretta was almost to the street where her apartment building was.

Kent closed the gap between us. “Don’t go after her. Go back to your friends. I’ll follow her. She won’t get far. I’ve been trying to find evidence that she was the person who harmed Antonio, and although I hadn’t found anything conclusive, I suspected that she might at some point decide she needed to make a quick getaway. After she left her apartment this evening, I blocked her car in with mine in the parking lot behind our building.”

“Kent, where are you!” Mona was practically yodeling.

“Go back and keep Mona from following me,” Kent demanded.

But I just stood there, stubbornly mute and unsure whether to trust him or not.

“Please?” he added.

Waylaying Mona would at least give me the excuse I needed to put distance between myself and Kent. I plunged through underbrush. Maybe Kent and Loretta would escape together, but if so, I would happily let Chief Smallwood and the state police carry out the investigation, with no interference from me.

Mona charged toward me. “Where’s Kent?”

“Not back there.” The lie was justified. Whatever Loretta was up to, and whether or not Kent had anything to do with it, I couldn’t let Mona put herself in danger. “Let’s go back to the others. He’ll show up there again.”

“He’d better. We have a rehearsal planned.”

Tonight, after everything? “I think the police will want to close off the carriage house again. It’s a crime scene.”

“So where can we put on our
Seven Threadly Sins
play?”

Nowhere.
“Maybe we can rent the conservatory.”

“Good idea. That carriage house is probably too small.” She peered behind her. “What were you doing back there?”

“Phone call.” I dialed 911.

“What?”

I merely held up one hand for silence, and told the
dispatcher, a woman, this time, that I’d just seen the woman who had attacked Clay and me, and where I thought she was heading. Staying on the line as requested, I shepherded Mona toward the carriage house.

At the rear of it, Haylee and Ben were next to the trash can where the one small flame seemed to have been extinguished. Haylee asked me, “Where have you been?”

“Looking for Kent,” Mona answered. “Have you seen him?”

Haylee looked at me. I gave my head a slight shake. Haylee asked me, “Where were you, Willow?”

“Watching Loretta run away.” I gestured to the phone at my ear. “I’ve told emergency where the police can find her.”

Haylee said accusingly, “You chased after a murderer?”

“No. I only watched her. I’m pretty sure she’s on her way back to her apartment.”

Haylee pointed down into the trash can. “There’s a wet DVD case in there, and what looks like a letter that must have been in the envelope with the DVD. The back of the envelope was torn off, but I know where that part of the envelope is. Loretta printed the fake confession and suicide note on it and left it on the seat of Clay’s truck. She tried to burn the DVD in a trash can that had water standing in it from who knows when. The water drowned the fire before it did much more than singe the envelope. With luck, the heat didn’t damage whatever might be on the DVD.”

I pointed at trampled weeds behind the carriage house. “Loretta must have been back here the entire time Clay and I were trying to get out of the carriage house, and while the rest of you were arriving.”

Mona twisted her hands together. “She could have killed us all! I’d better find Kent.” She hurried toward the front of the carriage house.

“Ben and I will stay here with this evidence until the police come,” Haylee told me. “Meanwhile, Clay’s worried about you. Go show him that you’re okay.”

I didn’t need urging.

I dashed around to the side of the carriage house, sat down beside him, and held his hand. His grip was tight.

Paula was still on the bench, her head down and her hands clasped between her knees.

A siren wailed, closer and closer, and then stopped. Shepherding Mona ahead of her, Vicki ran toward us. “Sorry it took me so long to get here. There was a pileup on the interstate when your first call came in, Willow, and when I was almost here, you called 911 again. State troopers were already on their way to talk to you. They went to Loretta’s apartment building, instead, and I came here. Are you folks okay?”

The 911 dispatcher let me go, and I stood to greet Vicki. “Clay isn’t, but the rest of us are. Loretta tried to kill him and me.”

Vicki backed up and listened to her radio. After a minute, she returned to us and held both thumbs up in the air. “Loretta’s already in the back of a state police cruiser. Her colleague, Kent, led us to her.”

Mona crowed, “Kent’s a hero! Where is he?”

Vicki pointed toward the street. “Probably outside his apartment building, giving a statement to a state police trooper.”

“Mmmmm.” Mona started toward the street.

Vicki called to her, “Don’t interrupt them.”

I couldn’t tell if Mona heard her or not. She kept going.

Vicki turned to the rest of us. “Loretta damaged a few cars in her attempt to get away, but we’ll likely be charging her with more than that.”

I looked at Clay. “Two counts of attempted murder, perhaps?”

“That, too, plus I just asked the staties if they’d gotten matches for the fingerprints that were on Antonio’s vial of medicine, the package of Jordan almonds, the brown shoes you wore in the fashion show, and the briefcase that was found in your cubicle. Antonio’s prints were on his medicine. But there were also partials on that, the almonds, your shoes, and the briefcase the nuts were in. The lab used
the latest computer technology and confirmed that Loretta handled all of those things.”

“Did you already fingerprint her?” I supposed I should feel good that they hadn’t fingerprinted Dora and me after Antonio’s death.

“Yes, along with the rest of the TADAM staff.”

I said, “My fingerprints would have been on all of those things, too, except I didn’t touch the briefcase I saw in the cubicle Sunday morning and again Monday evening.” I frowned, concentrating. “Actually, Loretta handled all of the briefcases.” I don’t know why I was saying things that might make Loretta appear to be innocent of harming Antonio. If nothing else, she had tried to kill Clay and me.

Vicki waved her notebook as if trying to dispel a noxious odor, which wasn’t a bad idea considering that everything around us still smelled like a posse of skunks. “We have an envelope that he’d hidden in his apartment with instructions to open it in case anything happened to him. A DVD inside the envelope showed Loretta talking about ways of attracting students and keeping them. Her methods seemed underhanded, and didn’t have a lot to do with teaching. We think Antonio may have been attempting to blackmail Loretta and get her to pay him to turn over the DVD. He’d also put letters in that envelope. I don’t think we’ll need a handwriting expert for this—who else would even want to print like that? But I’m sure we’ll get one, anyway. In one letter, she told him that she didn’t believe the DVD existed. In another, she said if it did, she would find it.”

I pointed back toward the carriage house. “Antonio hid another DVD—probably a copy of the one you found—in an envelope in the carriage house, too, and Clay found it. You’ll have to get the exact wording from Clay, but he told me the outside of it said something like if anything happened to Antonio, someone should watch the DVD. Loretta saw Clay pick up the envelope and try to hide it in his shirt. She . . .” I gulped. “She tried to take it from him and pushed him off the loft. He says she did it on purpose. I wonder how many copies of that DVD Antonio squirreled away.”

Vicki frowned and shook her head. “We’ll keep searching.”

“When did they find the envelope he’d hidden in his apartment?”

“Yesterday. Wednesday.”

“What took them so long? Antonio died Saturday night.”

Vicki heaved a huge sigh. “It wasn’t until Tuesday evening that they knew for certain that Antonio had ingested an almond and reacted to it. Theorizing that someone had given him the almond and had hidden his medicine, we obtained a search warrant Wednesday morning.”

“So why didn’t they arrest Loretta then?”

“Not enough evidence. The partial fingerprints had to be double-checked by an expert, first. And at that point, we were mostly focusing on the widow.” Vicki looked with consternation at Clay. “I’ll get Clay’s statement later. Meanwhile, they should be able to free up at least one ambulance from the pileup on the interstate.” She stepped back and again spoke into her shoulder radio, then reported, “They’ll be here soon. What happened to the envelope that Clay found?”

“Loretta took it with her when she went out and backed Clay’s truck right up to the carriage house door.” I waved toward the rear of the carriage house. “She lit a fire back there, and you’ll find a damp DVD case, and maybe a DVD with the same file on it. And maybe copies of Loretta’s threatening letters. The bottom of the trash can was filled with water, and the fire burned out after scorching the envelope. Haylee and Ben are guarding it, so come see what Loretta left on the seat of Clay’s truck.”

Vicki warned, “You’re not to touch that truck.”

She came with me, and we both looked in through the driver’s window. I read the statement, printed with Loretta’s swirls and flourishes, aloud, “‘I’m so sorry about putting a candy-covered almond into Antonio’s pocket along with his mints and hiding his allergy medication that I decided to end it all. Clay wouldn’t let me, so I pushed him off the
loft in the carriage house. Then I backed his truck up to the door and left it running. Now I’m going to crawl into the building through a hole and block the hole from inside.’” It was signed W. “That’s not my printing,” I told Vicki.

She stared at the note for a long time. “That sounds like the theory about Antonio’s death that you proposed to Detective Neffting.”

“Yes, and it still seems reasonable to me.”

“Did you tell Loretta or anyone else about that theory?”

“Not Loretta. Dora Battersby figured it out on her own, and I told Haylee and Edna about it.”

“So any of them might have told Loretta.”

“I doubt it. None of them is particularly fond of Loretta.”

“Or told someone who told her?”

“I doubt it.”

“Mona seems friendly with Kent.”

“We don’t tell Mona anything she doesn’t need to know.”

Vicki looked back at the group surrounding Clay. “We’re going to have to borrow his truck, you know, and search it for evidence, but I guess he won’t be driving for a while, anyway.”

“I’ll take him wherever he needs to go, and if I can’t, someone else will.”

“So you’ve decided to agree with me about him? He’s a keeper?”

I smiled. “I knew that all along. Besides, it turned out that he didn’t like Loretta, after all.”

“I could tell that. Why couldn’t you?”

“You’re better at putting clues together.”

Vicki pretended to write that in her notebook, then put her notebook back in her pocket and called Macey to come talk to her.

With obvious reluctance, Macey left Ashley’s side and joined Vicki and me beside Clay’s truck.

Vicki asked me, “Willow, you said that Macey told you that she’d slapped Antonio in her cubicle the night of the dress rehearsal. Is that what Macey told you?”

I nodded.

Vicki gave Macey a stern look. “Yet when Detective Neffting asked you about it, you said you’d slapped Kent. Are you sure about that?”

Flushing, Macey stammered, “No. It was . . . Antonio. But after he died, I got scared and—”

Vicki finished for her, “Nearly got yourself into a lot of trouble. Honesty really is the best policy.” She stared at Macey’s bowed head for a second, then led us back to the group around Clay, where she got everyone’s attention and asked, “Who removed the yellow tape that the state trooper strung all around this carriage house?”

I answered, “Loretta told Clay and me that the police had taken it down because they’d gotten all the evidence they needed about Paula attacking herself.”

“And you believed Loretta that the police had taken down the tape?”

My attempt at a smile was lopsided. “I shouldn’t have.”

“I believed her, too,” Clay said from the ground. “Though nearly everything else she said was a lie.”

Vicki growled, “So you two went in there, with Loretta, the obvious liar?”

I nodded.

She asked, “Did anyone else go in, then or since?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

“So you three contaminated last night’s crime scene.”

I confessed, “We moved some concrete blocks and a pitchfork around. I also broke two windows and repurposed that super-sticky stabilizer that had been on the lawn mower handle. I used the stabilizer to block most of the area where the exhaust was coming into the carriage house.”

Vicki’s stern look was obviously fake. “Under the circumstances, I suppose I understand your motives and won’t charge you for tampering with evidence.”

“Thanks.”

She reminded me, “Last night, you took pictures inside the carriage house, right? That you were going to print for me?”