Dying to Read (2 page)

“They must have used a stand-in for the body. Amelia’s never had that kind of figure. At least not since I’ve known her.” Doris patted her own chest. “Oh my. I’m cattier than Octavia today, aren’t I?”

A walk-in closet had been built into a corner so that it extended out into the room. Cate opened the door. Amelia’s taste ranged from furs and glitter to designer jeans and cashmere sweaters. And if an army ever needed to march on high heels, there were enough here to outfit them. Amelia apparently liked scarves too, because designs from geometric to flowery, wool to silk, handkerchief-sized squares to toe length, draped a dozen hangers. A scent of some perfume that Cate suspected was too pricey for her to recognize hung in the air.

Doris circled the bed and studied the labels on the prescription bottles.

“What are they for?” Cate asked, curious in spite of a feeling this was getting a bit too nosy.

“Blood pressure. Heart. Cholesterol. Insomnia. I think she takes a sleeping pill almost every night. There’s no point even trying to talk to her before she has her morning caffeine to unfuzz her head.” She opened the drawer of the nightstand. “Of course it’s no wonder she can’t sleep. I wouldn’t be able to either, if I were her.”

“Why is that?”

Doris had already moved on to the bathroom and didn’t answer. Cate followed and peered into the room with her. Double sinks, fancy gold faucets, garden-style tub with Jacuzzi jets, separate shower large enough to shower the Whodunit ladies en masse.

What neither bedroom, closet, nor bathroom contained was Amelia herself.

Back in the hallway, they cautiously opened other doors. Two were guest rooms, a bit musty smelling. The third held a four-drawer, wooden file cabinet, an old electric typewriter, and an expensive copy machine. At the end of the hall another narrower stairway led upward.

Cate and Doris exchanged glances, and then, in a conspiratorial tone, Doris said, “Why not? I’ve always wondered what’s up there.”

Cate paused midway up the stairs. “We probably should have checked the garage first to see if her car is here.”

“Amelia hates to drive. She uses a taxi a lot of the time. So the Mercedes might be here, and she could still have gone somewhere.”

“But surely she wouldn’t leave knowing the Whodunit ladies would be here at noon. Unless she forgot, I suppose.”

“Or got a better invitation from Radford.” Doris gave the name an inflection that was not complimentary. “She’d dump us in a minute for Radford.”

“Radford?”

“The current man in Amelia’s life.”

Cate had to admit she was surprised Amelia had a “current man,” but then she chided herself for being ageist.

The third floor hadn’t benefited from the remodeling and updating that had taken place on the floors below. Faded wallpaper in an old-fashioned cabbage-rose pattern covered the walls of small rooms stuffed with furniture and racks of old clothes. The last room held a jumble of golf clubs, fishing rods, a stuffed owl, and an accordion. Octavia raised a cloud of dust when she jumped up beside the owl.

“A memento room for old husbands,” Doris observed. “Amelia had four of them, and the last one played the accordion, as I recall.”

“You’ve all been friends for a long time?”

“Define friends.”

“You’ve all been in the Whodunit Club together for a long time?”

“That’s how we met. It used to be a larger group, but some people find Amelia’s personality a bit . . . overpowering.” Doris’s smile unexpectedly changed her bony face. “And the rest of us have our peculiarities too.”

The third-floor hallway ended in a door to the outside. Cate was surprised to see that it stood partway open. “Maybe she leaves this open for the cat to go in and out?”

“Not Octavia. That cat may have been a stray at one time, but she thinks she’s queen of the universe now. She’s also deaf, so Amelia keeps her inside.”

Cate felt an unexpected flicker of kindliness toward Amelia. She hadn’t heard much good about the woman so far, but anyone who’d take in a deaf stray must have some redeeming qualities.

Cate stepped onto a small square of weathered boards outside the open door, Doris right behind her. The steep stairway below them looked dangerously flimsy, the old boards dark and cracked. And at the bottom . . .

Cate’s breath snagged in her throat. Uncle Joe had assured her this assignment was strictly routine. No murder, mayhem, or mystery, not like what those detectives on TV always encountered. No dead bodies.

Wrong.

 2 

“Oh no,” Doris breathed. “Amelia.”

Cate grabbed the rough handrail, rammed a splinter in her palm, but ignored it as she dashed down the stairs. Even with the handicap of high heels, Doris was only a few steps behind. At the concrete landing at the bottom, they both knelt by the crumpled figure. Cate awkwardly fumbled with the wrist for a pulse. Doris touched the woman’s throat.

“I don’t feel anything,” Doris whispered.

Amelia’s eyes were neither open nor closed. Slitted, as if she looked into some eternity beyond this world. Blood matted the dark mass of her hair and oozed onto the concrete. Her skin felt cold beneath Cate’s hand.

Still on her knees, Cate dug the phone out of her purse and punched in 911 with fingers that felt peculiarly numb. A brisk lady took the information and said help would arrive within a few minutes. After Cate put the phone away, she and Doris just looked at Amelia. Cate felt as if she should
do
something, but she had no idea what.

“She likes black,” Doris said. “Liked,” she added with a catch in her voice. “She said it made a woman look sophisticated.”

Amelia was in black now, but she didn’t look sophisticated. The slacks were ordinary, a bit snug, and a swirl of Octavia’s white hair decorated the front of the sweatshirt. Amelia was a large woman, her body matronly, her personality apparently formidable, but she also seemed so vulnerable, so exposed and defenseless lying there. One fuzzy pink slipper lay near her foot, the other upside down in the grass. The little-old-lady slippers seemed at odds with all those spike heels in her closet.

Which meant . . . what? That, at the time of her fall, the arrival of the book club was not imminent, so she hadn’t yet dressed for the lunch? Uneasily, Cate looked up the stairs again. A dangerous stairway, obviously. But falls weren’t always accidental, and the Whodunit ladies, including Doris here, were so hostile toward Amelia.

No. Ridiculous. The women obviously had their squabbles and hard feelings, but surely that wasn’t enough to motivate a fatal shove. None of them could have done it anyway. They were all clustered on the front porch when Cate arrived, all puzzled about Amelia’s absence.

But one or two or more of them could have come earlier, done the deed and departed, then returned at the lunch hour to play innocent. And they each had a key . . .

Get off it
.
This was just an accidental fall, not a conspiracy of little old ladies.

But what about the missing Willow Bishop, who had apparently disappeared in haste?

Doris’s gaze followed Cate’s up the stairs. “I can’t imagine what Amelia was doing out here. I didn’t think she ever used these old stairs.” After a moment, she added, “I guess I’d better go tell the others.”

Cate wanted to jump up and follow Doris, but leaving Amelia lying there alone didn’t seem right. “I’ll wait here.”

Cate, stiffening in her uncomfortable kneeling posture on the concrete, scooted over to the bottom step. Someone had made a rock garden beneath the stairway at one time, but now it was a neglected jumble of weeds and rocks and a broken metal statue of an antlered deer. Maybe the rickety stairs and weeds were the reason Amelia kept those dining room drapes closed.

Cate didn’t want to stare at the body, but she couldn’t not look, either. The almost-black hair had to be a dye job. It did not go well with Amelia’s aged skin. Overly taut skin. One too many face-lifts? Trying so hard to hang on to a long-lost youth . . .

Then Cate felt guilty for such unkind thoughts. She jumped back to speculation about time of death.

No makeup, which further suggested the fall may have happened several hours ago, before time to get ready for the lunch group. She remembered hearing somewhere that rigor mortis set in at some predictable number of hours after death, but she had no idea how many hours that was. Hey, she could ask Uncle Joe. He’d know. Or he had all those reference books in his office—

She dumped the thought. Rigor mortis had nothing to do with anything beyond this awful moment in her life. No need to learn anything about it. Her toe, much less any larger part of her anatomy, did not belong in the PI business.

Cate was digging at the sliver in her palm when the Whodunit ladies swarmed out the back door and surrounded Amelia’s crumpled figure. One woman knelt and touched Amelia’s throat with an authoritative gesture.

“Krystal works with a volunteer group at the hospital,” pink-clad Fiona said, the information apparently aimed at Cate since everyone else undoubtedly knew it.

The elegantly white-haired Krystal, with fashionable wedge shoes, shook her head and confirmed what already seemed inescapable fact. “Dead.” She looked up the stairs. “And no wonder, if she fell all that way and hit her head on this concrete.”

“How horrible,” Fiona said. “How truly, terribly, incredibly horrible. Dying out here all alone.” She lifted her glasses and swabbed her right eye with a tissue. “I feel so awful. Saying what I did about her being . . .”

Fiona didn’t repeat the word, but Cate remembered. Cheap. And someone else had called Amelia rude.

“And I didn’t really mean it when I suggested we disband the club and cut her out.” Texie swallowed hard and added virtuously, “We’d never have done it, of course. She had a wonderful lunch waiting in the refrigerator for us.”

Krystal stood up. “She really held our group together all this time.”

“Deep down, she was a wonderful person.” Fiona hesitated, as if trying to think of examples of that, but apparently came up blank and instead murmured, “One we all cared deeply about.”

More murmurs echoed that thought. Death had apparently upgraded Amelia’s character considerably.

Cate looked at the stairs again. Octavia stood at the edge of the landing now, tail twitching. Amelia might have stumbled over the cat. Yes, that was probably it. A tragic stumble.

Octavia cautiously descended the stairs, as if she suspected they might be booby-trapped. At the concrete landing, she eyed the group of women warily, then headed straight for Amelia’s body. Cate could almost see the cat’s confusion as she prodded the hand with her nose and got no reaction. She circled the body twice, then curled up in the bent crook of Amelia’s arm.

“What will happen to the cat now?” Cate asked.

“There’s a niece,” Doris said. “Maybe she’ll take it.”

“Shouldn’t somebody call the niece?” Cate asked. When no one offered to do so, she added, “Does anyone know the niece?”

“Her name’s Cheryl Calhoun,” Fiona said. “She and Amelia never seemed very close. Although Amelia thought Cheryl’s husband was a financial genius.”

Exchanged glances in the group seemed to give that statement some special meaning that Cate couldn’t interpret.

“They live over in Springfield,” Doris added. “Cheryl has an interior decorating business, but I don’t remember the name. The number might be in Amelia’s little red book, on the stand there by the phone.”

“Then maybe—” Cate didn’t get to finish the suggestion about calling the niece before a siren screamed to a stop on the far side of the house.

“I’ll go tell them Amelia is out here,” Doris said.

She disappeared through the open back door. Everyone else, by some unspoken agreement, backed away from the body. Another siren screamed up, then went silent at the same time as two white-clad EMTs ran out the back door. Octavia skittered to hide among the rocks under the stairs. Cate expected the EMTs to load Amelia up and instantly take her away, or maybe try to revive her with shock equipment. But, after a quick check, the men in white also stepped back. A moment later two police officers burst through the door.

“Don’t anyone leave,” one of them barked. “We’ll need to talk to all of you.”

The Whodunit ladies gravitated into a silent huddle. Cate stood off to one side.

The officers also checked the body briefly. They asked if anyone knew her identity, and Doris volunteered the information. Amelia Robinson, age seventy-four. Widowed, no children. The only relative known to those present was the niece in Springfield. While the older officer was writing down the information, the other officer got on his cell phone.

“Was anyone here when this happened?” the stocky older officer asked.

Doris explained about the Whodunit Book Club and the lunch, and then how she and Cate had discovered the body. “Could she have had a heart attack?” Doris asked. “She had heart trouble and high blood pressure.”

“That will be for the medical examiner to determine. Officer Detrick is on the phone with the ME’s office now.”

“But isn’t the medical examiner the one who looks at a body when there’s a crime?” Fiona’s voice rose in alarm.

“The medical examiner is called in any situation such as this. Someone from that office will be here shortly.”

Any situation such as this.
Did they have a lot of elderly ladies tumbling down stairs?

The EMTs left, but the younger officer repeated the earlier instructions to the women that they were not to leave. Cate doubted anyone planned to leave. They were obviously horrified by what had happened here but also morbidly mesmerized by it.

One officer went back to the police car and returned with both digital and video cameras to photograph the body and stairs from all angles. Both officers climbed the stairs and took more photos. Octavia dashed out from under the stairs and disappeared around the corner of the house. The officers closed the upstairs door. They came back to the body and made sketches and took measurements.

“There’s someone else you might want to talk to,” Doris suggested. “An employee who also lived here, Willow Bishop. But her room is empty. She seems to have moved out.”

“Quite suddenly,” Fiona added.

Mention of Willow immediately brought questions from the officers about the departed employee. Cate expected answers from the club women, but, except for Doris’s comment that Willow drove a red Toyota and Fiona’s statement that she looked a lot like Cate, no one seemed to know anything.

“Anyone know the year of her vehicle?” an officer asked. “Or the license number?”

Cate hesitated. Along with Willow’s physical description, Uncle Joe had given her information he’d obtained from DMV records about Willow’s car. Confidential client data. Yet she surely couldn’t withhold from the officers what might be important information. She told them the car was a 2009 Toyota Corolla and gave the older officer the scrap of paper on which she’d scribbled the license number.

“You have this information because . . . ?”

“I’m working with a private detective agency.” Cate handed the officer the ID card Uncle Joe had made for her. She heard a whispery hum of excitement among the ladies at the announcement about her employment. “A client has a family message for her. That’s why I’m here. Because I’m looking for her.”

The officer inspected the card. “I know Joe Belmont, but . . . ?” He looked at her again.

“I’m his new assistant.”

Cate halfway expected some expression of doubt, but the officer merely nodded and handed the card back. “Good man.”

The officer wrote something more in his little notebook, but if he thought Willow’s hasty departure had any connection to Amelia’s fall, he wasn’t saying so. But now there were more questions about Willow. The only information anyone had to add was Texie’s statement that Willow was a real fanatic about trees.

“Amelia said a couple of times that Willow asked for a day off so she could go join some protest about logging. She was a, you know, one of those tree-hugger people.”

After that, they were each interviewed individually. Someone from the medical examiner’s office was just arriving as they were finally allowed to leave.

“All this questioning for an accidental fall?” Cate whispered to Doris as they all trooped around the house. They’d been told not to enter the house again.

“You’re suggesting . . . ?”

“Nothing!” Cate said hastily. She lined up mental support for that statement. Amelia wasn’t young. Heart attack. Stroke. All those pills in the bedroom. Maybe a momentary attack of dizziness there at the top of the stairs. A stumble over the cat. Lots of innocent explanations for the fall.