The Devil's Puzzle (38 page)

“This is the most crowded I’ve ever seen this place,” he said.

“It may clear out soon,” Jesse said.

“Let it wait,” I told him. “It’s waited more than thirty years. Let everyone have this.”

Jesse nodded. “I’m putting two guys outside,” he said. “Just in case.” For an hour we milled around, talking and laughing and exchanging theories about the quilts. All the while I could see Jesse staring, and I felt a tension that had started in my jaw creep down my shoulders and into my stomach and legs, until every muscle in my body was tight.

Finally the last of the tourists left to return to the carnival and wait for the fireworks. But we wouldn’t have to wait for our fireworks. As the last stranger walked out, Jesse closed the door.

“What’s going on?” Maggie asked.

“Nell figured out who killed Winston,” Jesse told her. “You guys can all leave, but you can stay if you want to. You’re going to hear about it sooner or later.”

“I’m staying,” Molly said. “I have a right to know who killed my great-uncle.”

Ed nodded. “Yes, I agree. I think you might as well just tell us.”

I looked around at the faces in the room, all people I knew, all people who loved Archers Rest. And one who hated Winston enough to kill him.

“So who was it?” the mayor asked.

I turned to him, saddened that I was actually saying what I was about to say. “You.”

“Me?” The mayor laughed. “That’s ridiculous. Why would I kill the man?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I know Glad had a confrontation with Winston. He told her she’d get over it. Ed thought it was a romance, but I don’t think it was. Glad was too in love with you to cheat on you. I think it had something to do with her father. I think her father was the one taking advantage of Grace.”

“You’re wrong,” Glad bellowed. “This is not acceptable, saying awful things about my father when he isn’t alive to defend himself.”

Mary walked out from the booth. “Glad, we don’t need to protect him. Dad was embezzling from Grace’s trust. He had access to it, and lord knows my sister and I liked to spend his money. Winston found out about it and threatened to have him arrested. We all spent weeks waiting for the police to knock on our door, but it never happened. Winston just disappeared. I thought after that confrontation at the bank that Ed had killed him.”

“Well, I didn’t,” Ed said. “And I cannot imagine why the mayor would. He was only a teenager, and Winston was a grown man.”

“I know,” I said. “But he was a strong kid, a high school football player, and he worked in the garden. That’s what came to me this afternoon when Glad was talking about the red flowers around the base of the statue. In a photo of the rose garden taken before Winston died, the flowers were orange, yellow, and pink. And after he died, they were red, yellow, and pink.”

“So what?” Glad asked.

“It’s a small change,” I admitted. “And considering that Grace was dying and my grandmother is no gardener, it was one no one would have noticed. Except the man who tended those roses every week.” I looked at the mayor. “If someone had disturbed the garden, and it wasn’t you, you would have said something. But you didn’t, and you have said that you bugged Eleanor with details about the garden every time you were there.” I looked back at Eleanor. “He never mentioned it to you?”

She shook her head. “Not that I remember.”

“We think you dug up the orange roses to bury Winston, and they must have died in the process, so you planted red ones instead,” Jesse said. “You had time. Eleanor and Grace were gone a month.”

“So I changed the roses,” the mayor said. “What does that prove?”

“It just bothered me,” I said. “And other things bothered me. There was all the vandalism. Jesse and I figured out the killer was trying to keep the police busy with one crime after another. But there were so many and they seemed so random. Except, I started to realize, maybe there was a connection. Your office is on the same floor as the historical society, so you could have stolen the coins and key chain Jesse found in the garden after Winston’s body was discovered. You planted them there to confuse us as to the identity. You were at Jitters picking up doughnuts when I sent Carrie the text about Glad naming Winston. She leaves the phone by the cash register, so you could have seen the message. You dumped garbage in her office to keep her from helping with the search. You didn’t know Natalie was also looking into it,” I said. “You could get red paint from your son’s store; you walk into the newspaper office probably every day, so you could have gone through the old papers and found something to put in the brick; and thanks to your newly rekindled friendship with Glad, you would know that the library doesn’t have a security system. Plus, you would have to know the same shortcut the police do that cuts the distance between city hall and Jitters in half. You could easily have called in that bomb threat and been back in time to appear to have been in the men’s room.”

“It’s that imagination of yours, Nell,” the mayor said. “It’s working overtime again. What you’re saying could apply to nearly everyone in this room who knew Winston Roemer.”

“That’s true,” I continued. “In fact, yesterday Carrie said that the killer had pointed a finger at nearly everyone in town. There was an ad for Ed’s theater in that newspaper clipping that was thrown through the police window. Glad’s photo had the word
killer
written across it. There was a threat to blow up city hall, just as Mary had done years before. And the suitcase was found on Eleanor’s property,” I said.

The mayor shuffled his feet and looked down at the floor.

“At first I thought the killer was trying to set someone up,” I said, “but you weren’t setting anyone up—you were setting
everyone
up. You didn’t want to do any permanent damage, so you did small things to public buildings, things that could easily be fixed. And you didn’t want anyone to get in trouble for the murder or the vandalism, so you pointed a finger at anyone who could have been involved. But that was a mistake. Nothing pointed to you. You were the only one who didn’t get accused of a crime.”

Jesse walked toward him. “You hit Winston with something, buried him in the roses, and took the suitcase because you wanted it to look like he’d gone to Peru. You had to know he was going. It was hardly a secret. And you probably knew he wouldn’t be missed.”

“Why?” Glad came forward. “Why would you do that?”

The mayor took a deep breath. “To protect you,” he said. He buried his face in his hands and started to cry. “I was a stupid kid who was in love with a girl. When Glad told me what Winston intended to do, I confronted him. I didn’t want Glad’s life ruined. I didn’t want to see her unhappy. I thought I could explain it to him, but he was such an arrogant man. He didn’t care about anyone else.”

“That money my father stole,” Mary said. “It was maybe thirty thousand dollars. A lot of money, but there was more than a million in the trust. Winston acted like he’d taken every penny Grace had. I’m not saying what Dad did was right, but he was going to pay it back.”

“He just needed time,” Glad said.

“That’s why your father wrote those things about John Archer,” I said, “about judging a man by his whole life instead of just his mistakes. He was talking about himself.”

I could see Glad blush.
The History of Archers Rest
had represented her father’s admission of guilt. Any hint of imperfection was difficult for her, so she had no copies of the book, but it was comforting for Mary, which was why she had a shelf full.

“Winston wouldn’t listen to Glad’s father or to me,” the mayor continued. “I got mad. Lost control of my senses. I took a shovel and hit him. And kept hitting him.” He threw his hands up in the air. “You know the rest.”

“Is that why you broke up with Glad?” I asked.

“I felt too guilty. Every time I looked at her, I saw what I’d done. I couldn’t take it anymore.” The mayor looked to Jesse. “I’ve done a lot of good in this town. I’ve dedicated my life to doing good.”

“I know, but it doesn’t make up for killing a man, Larry.” Jesse took his arm and they left the theater, with two of Jesse’s officers walking behind them.

We stood quietly absorbing the news. Everyone, including Glad, seemed unable to speak. Mary walked over to Ed and took his hand.

“I thought you couldn’t leave your house,” I said.

She smiled. “I’ve been getting help. From Ed and your grandmother.”

“Small things,” I said. “Eleanor had said something to Ed about doing something small every day. She was talking about you taking steps outside your house. And when she said Glad was next . . .”

“She meant Glad was the next person to know that Mary was trying to get over her fears,” Ed said.

Mary glanced over at her sister, still shaking her head in disbelief. “Glad knew something was going on and she was pretty upset with Eleanor and Ed for trying to encourage me.”

“Glad didn’t think it was a good idea,” Ed said. “That’s what the arguments were about. She’d helped me a little with the theater, and she thought it had bought her the right to tell me what to do. She thinks she runs the town.”

“My sister wanted to protect me,” Mary said, patting Ed’s hand.

“She thought it would be too much for me if I tried again. After I had my little nervous breakdown years ago and threatened to blow up city hall, I used to stay home all day. I was afraid of crowds, and then just being around people scared me. I started to walk through the town late at night when it was quiet. I think that’s why people thought I was a witch.”

“You were the one watching me,” I said.

She nodded. “I was curious where you were going, what you might find out, but I wasn’t ready for you, for anyone, to see me.”

“And you had some kind of altar in the projection booth.”

She laughed. “An altar! It was supposed to be the beginning of a romantic picnic—candles and a velvet tablecloth. But Ed got a call from Glad and it kind of ruined his mood.”

I blushed. I had decided it was an altar without ever considering a simpler explanation. “Where did you hide?” I asked. “I looked everywhere.”

“Not everywhere, Nell. I came out into the hallway and stood in the dark by the door. When you went into the room, I locked you in to give myself a moment to think. I saw through the crack you had turned your back on the door, so I opened it and ran down into the theater.”

“And the night you ran in front of my car at the cemetery?”

“I’d borrowed Glad’s car, without telling her,” she admitted. “I parked it by the cemetery and I was trying to get to it. I thought I could just drive around. But I was so scared being out on my own. That’s when I realized I needed more than Ed helping me. I needed a group, like you have with your quilt group. So I called Eleanor. She enlisted Oliver to help, and she confided in me about her past. I think she wanted me to realize that we all have our fears. Hers was that you would be disappointed in her.”

“Not possible.”

“I told her that,” she said. “I’m very grateful to your grandmother. Without her I’d still be trapped in my house, known as the creepy witch who stalked the town at night.”

“I go through town late at night, too,” I said. “So I guess that will be my reputation.”

“No,” Mary said, “you have your reputation, as an inquisitive citizen . . .”

“A nosy snoop,” I said.

“And you should be proud of it. You help people. You solve problems.”

“So do you, I gather.” I nodded toward Ed. “You’re Ed’s new partner in the theater.”

“See how good you are at figuring things out?”

I looked at the antique quilts that surrounded us, with each stitch a clue to the maker’s true personality. “I guess we can’t hide who we are. Not forever, anyway.”

CHAPTER 62

I
sat on a rock near the water’s edge and watched the explosions of color in the sky. I wasn’t alone. The whole town was out watching the mayor’s fireworks display, and it was, as he had promised, the best we’d ever seen.

“Can I join you?”

I looked up at Molly. “Grab a rock.”

She sat next to me. “I thought it would be satisfying, you know, to find Winston’s killer. Instead it just made me sad.”

“I know. I kind of wish that Oliver and I had never come up with the idea of digging up the garden. But the mayor did kill Winston, and he did hit you on the head.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t a hard hit. He could have killed me, but he didn’t. He just wanted my grandmother’s letters in case Winston said anything about the embezzlement. I guess he figured once you and Jesse had a motive, you would somehow trace it back to him.”

“Too bad he didn’t realize I’d already seen them.”

“What I don’t understand is why he kept the suitcase all these years. Do you think he just felt guilty?”

“I don’t think he kept it. It probably was buried out in the yard somewhere close to Winston’s body. Once we found the remains, he must have come back to check that he’d left nothing that would point toward him, and he cut himself on something, leaving those droplets of blood. And when it was clear Jesse wouldn’t drag the investigation out for publicity, the mayor probably figured we’d go back and keep digging. If we did, we’d find the suitcase. I heard someone in the yard one night, but I didn’t pay enough attention. I’m sure it was the mayor. Maybe he thought he’d get rid of the suitcase, then decided to use it to implicate Eleanor instead.”

She nodded. “Still, you have to feel sorry for the man. He’s lived his life trying to make up for it.”

I pointed to Jesse, who was standing at the edge of Main Street with several detectives. Next to him, watching the beautiful display, was the mayor.

“Jesse agrees with you. He let him out of jail for an hour. He wanted him to be able to see his hard work pay off.”

“And it did pay off. You guys had quite a crowd today.”