Not a Chance in Helen (12 page)

Chapter Eighteen

T
HE OFFICE OF
Save the River was just off Catfish Lane in nearby Grafton.

Helen guided her old Chevrolet into a spot on the graveled shoulder of the road, the river so near she could smell it.

She rounded a mud-splattered Ford with a
SAVE THE RIVER
bumper sticker, pausing on the sidewalk to take in the sight of Baskin’s headquarters.

The place was little more than a shack—a wooden structure on cement blocks that kept it above water in the spring when the Mississippi ran over its banks.

She caught a glimpse of a rusted swing set in the dirt yard and figured it had once been someone’s home, probably left behind after one too many floods. Baskin had likely gotten it for a song.

Well, it didn’t pay to spend money on fancy digs when you were a charitable institution, right? In fact, Helen almost admired Baskin and his group for setting up space at such a low-rent site.

Almost.

After what she’d seen of Mr. Baskin yesterday, she didn’t know if he’d be able to afford the lease another year, no matter how cheap.

Helen knew that Marvin Duncan had left money to Save the River. She’d heard it was an annual stipend or some such thing. If Eleanora had been as fed up with Baskin’s tactics as the rest of River Bend was, maybe she’d tried to stop the flow of money. Was that why Baskin had stopped by to visit her the other day? Might the threat of losing such a reliable donation have driven him to murder?

Helen paused on the wooden steps. She held onto the decrepit railing and hesitated, recalling the rage she’d seen in Baskin’s eyes as he’d spat at Clara Foley and ranted about giving them a taste of something toxic.

She swallowed as her mouth felt suddenly bone dry.

Is that what he’d done to Eleanora? Had he made her taste something so toxic she’d ended up dead?

Helen gripped the rail so tightly that she felt a prick.

“Ouch,” she said and withdrew her hand. She held it away from her eyes and squinted at her palm, but everything looked too blurry.

She muttered under her breath and pulled her purse from the crook of her elbow, digging in it with her good hand to find her glasses, which she fast propped on her nose.

As she’d suspected, there it was.

The darned splinter was stuck right in the meatiest place at the base of her thumb. It was nice sized, too, plenty big enough to make its presence felt.

Maybe it was a warning, she thought. If she knew what was good for her, she’d turn around and leave. Instead, she ascended to the porch and, without so much as a knock on the door, turned the knob to find it unlocked.

She pushed her way inside.

“Hello?” she called. “Hello, can someone help me?”

The room was lit by old-fashioned fluorescent lights, and one of the bulbs flickered as if about to go out. Oversized maps of the region covered the knotty pine-planked walls. Each map had red-tipped pins stabbed into various places. A blackboard marked with dates and places hung above a nearby table. Picketing assignments? Or targets for more smoke bombs? Helen wondered. She noticed that River Bend’s harbor had been written there and then crossed off. A utility plant in a town upriver seemed to be their next target. She wondered if she shouldn’t warn the place.

“Have you been here long?” A thin girl in patched blue jeans emerged from the hallway. She tucked long yellow hair behind her ears. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in. I was using the john.”

The young woman didn’t look a day over twenty, that age when cellulite and wrinkles seemed as distant as settlements on Mars. Her hazel eyes were wide and devoid of the dark liner and mascara that Helen saw on so many females these days, even tweens not old enough to drive. The T-shirt she wore had
SAV
E THE RIVER
stamped on it. She smiled shyly at Helen’s once-over, revealing slightly crooked teeth.

“My name’s Lara. Can I do something for you?” she asked. She came nearer till Helen could see her bare feet. “Would you like to sign our petition demanding tighter regulations on dumping in the river? We’re taking it to the governor ourselves, once we’ve got at least ten thousand names,” she said, her eyes bright and skin flushed. “Or if you’d like, you can just make a donation. We take checks and all major credit cards, though cash is definitely okay, too.”

If the girl hadn’t been so incredibly earnest, Helen feared she might have laughed. But she swallowed back the tickle in her throat and, holding her injured hand palm up in the other, asked, “You wouldn’t have a tweezers around here, would you? It appears that I caught a splinter outside on that railing of yours.”

Lara blushed. “I keep telling Floyd we’ve got to move our office somewhere else, but he won’t hear of it. Keeps telling me it’s just where we answer our phones, not where we do our real work.”

“Maybe Mr. Baskin is right.”

“Sure he is,” the girl said, her eyes lighting up. “Floyd’s real smart about everything. He’s got a bunch of college degrees,” she added, gesturing at framed documents hanging crookedly above a desk. “He majored in chemical engineering, so he understands about sulfates and oxides and all the stuff people dump in the river.” She smiled. “No one can pull anything over on Floyd.”

The expression on her face was unmistakable. She’s in love with Baskin, Helen thought, very nearly forgetting about the splinter. But not quite.

“A tweezers?” she reminded.

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Lara mumbled, heading over to the desk and rummaging about in the drawers until she drew out a box of straight pins with colored heads. “Think this’d work?” she asked. “Sorry, it’s the best I can do.”

“Have you got some matches, too?”

The girl set aside the pins and managed to scrounge up a book of matches someone had swiped from a restaurant up the road.

Helen turned on the desk lamp, plucked a pin from the box, then struck a match and held it to the pin until the metal was singed black. Grimacing, she gingerly prodded until she worked the splinter out. Perhaps not the most sanitary of methods, but it did the trick.

“Oh, man, you’re braver than I am,” Lara went on. “I mean, I can’t get blood drawn without practically passing out.”

Helen looked at her and smiled. “By the time you’re a grandmother, you won’t have time to be squeamish. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to wash up.”

“Oh, sure, it’s right back there.” The girl pointed toward the hallway she’d emerged from a few minutes before.

Helen excused herself and went to wash her hands in the tiny lavatory. When she returned, the girl was sitting at the desk with a laptop opened before her.

“I don’t mean to pry,” Helen said, even though that was exactly what she meant to do, “but may I ask how long you’ve worked with Mr. Baskin? You do seem to be rather fond of him.”

The hazel eyes locked on hers. “You’re not here to make a donation, are you, Missus—“

“Evans,” she said, “Helen Evans.”

“Are you, Mrs. Evans?”

She pushed her purse up into the bend of her arm. “No, dear, I’m not. I’m trying to find out a few things about your friend Mr. Baskin.”

“Like what?” Suspicion tightened the girl’s voice.

“Well, he was pretty riled up yesterday when he led that protest at the harbor. Does he always get so angry?”

“What you call anger, I call passion,” the girl defended. “What’s so bad about that? Floyd would do anything for the cause, even if it means going to jail, which he has several times,” she proudly added. “And if there was anything I could do to help him, well, all he’d have to do is ask.” Her cheeks flushed, and she glanced at her lap.

Helen knew she wasn’t going to get anything helpful from the young woman. There was no way Lara would utter a cross word about Baskin.

With a sigh, she turned to go, though she hesitated before she left, telling the girl, “Thank you for your help.”

Then she closed the door on Lara’s frowning face and left.

Chapter Nineteen

“
S
O ASK AWAY,
Sheriff,” Jemima Winthrop demanded, staring at Frank Biddle with a defensive look on her face. “You have questions for me about Eleanora Duncan. That is why you phoned and insisted I come down here, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am, and it shouldn’t take long,” he promised, hating how she had him feeling rattled. He flipped to a clean sheet of paper and held his pencil at the ready. “Where were you this past Monday morning?”

“Monday morning?” she repeated.

Frank watched her and waited.

Jemima touched her fingers to the single strand of pearls at her throat. “For God’s sake, that was two whole days ago. I don’t remember everywhere I went.”

“Why don’t you take a stab?” he said.

“I was p-probably at the library,” she stammered and shifted in the chair until she suddenly came still. “Wait a minute, isn’t that when someone tried to run down Eleanora? Are you trying to pin that on me?” She laughed, but the sound was brittle. “Look here, Sheriff,” she said and leaned forward. “If I had attempted to flatten that old biddy like a squirrel on the road, I wouldn’t have missed her. You’d still be scraping her off the pavement.”

Whoa!

Frank realized his mouth was hanging open and promptly shut it, scribbling down nothing in particular but hoping to convince Jemima Winthrop otherwise. When he again felt composed, he ceased writing and glanced up to ask, “So, you don’t have an alibi?”

She shrugged. “I
was
probably at the library, though Lord knows, I don’t keep a journal of my whereabouts hour upon hour.”

“Fair enough,” the sheriff said and nodded. “What made you go see Eleanora that afternoon?”

Jemima sighed and fidgeted with her pocketbook. “Call me naïve, but I thought that nearly being run over may have softened up the old battle-axe so that she’d reconsider giving me back the land her husband stole from my family. It’s the least she could do, after all.”

“Stole?” Frank found her choice of words peculiar. “From what I heard, Marvin Duncan bought your father’s assets on the auction block. There’s nothing improper about that.”

“That might be
how
it went, Sheriff, but that’s not the whole of it,” she insisted, and her cheeks flushed a most vivid pink. “As far as I’m concerned, Marvin and Eleanora were thieves, first driving my father’s company into debt so they could rip it out from under him, and then snatching away land that had been in my family for generations, not to mention treasures he and Mother had accumulated all their lives. They only managed to keep the house because Daddy had put it in trust to me. But that was little consolation to either of them. It’s no wonder my father died so soon after. They took virtually everything he had.
Everything
.” Her hand gripped the armrests so fiercely that her knuckles turned white. “If you still want to call that proper, then you’ve a sick way of looking at it.”

Her eyes did their best to pierce right through him, and Frank stuck a finger between his throat and collar, feeling suddenly as if the thermostat had been turned up to one hundred degrees.

The local gossips certainly had it right that Jemima had worked herself into a real lather over the Duncan family. Though Frank couldn’t imagine a well-brought-up lady like Jemima shooting Eleanora or slitting her throat or clobbering her over the head—all rather messy forms of murder—he wasn’t so sure about poison.

Poison was so much more ladylike.

Somehow, he could picture her at Eleanora’s place, pacing about the kitchen as Zelma shuffled off to inform her mistress that she had an uninvited guest. In the meantime, Jemima had plenty of time to open up the fridge and withdraw the pâté. She could have brought Splat in her pocket—the bottle was tiny—and added a splash to the goose liver. Zelma’s plodding footsteps would have given her ample warning to put everything back in its place.

“Sheriff, are you paying attention?” Jemima said shrilly. “Have you even heard a word I’ve said?”

Frank blinked away his thoughts. He cleared his throat and fixed his eyes on Jemima, who continued glaring at him and fingering her pearls. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I was distracted there for a minute. Please, continue.”

The woman scowled, deepening the already hard lines etched into her skin. “I just wanted to know if you were through with me. I’ve a hundred other things to do this afternoon besides sit here while you amuse yourself.”

Frank arched his eyebrows. Amuse himself? Did it look like he was playing a game of solitaire?

“Well, if you have nothing else to ask.” She rose from the chair with a sniff, brushing at the pleats in her pants and slipping her purse over her shoulder. “Good day, Sheriff,” she told him, and, chin up, she started off.

“Uh, ma’am, if you don’t mind,” Frank called to her back.

She hesitated halfway to the door. “What is it?”

“Just a few more questions, please,” he said as kindly as he could.

She stomped back to the chair and settled down, only to begin a noisy tapping on the floor with the toe of her shoe.

The sheriff put aside his pencil and rested his forearms on his desk. “It sounds to me like you had a big enough beef with old Mrs. Duncan to want her dead. But maybe you didn’t do it, at least not alone.”

The thin line of her lips tightened until the skin around her mouth turned white. But she didn’t say anything.

He scratched his forehead. “You mind telling me exactly why you were with Stanley Duncan last evening after dark? Mrs. Evans spotted the two of you together at the playground.”

“Helen Evans is a certified busybody!” she snapped, her face reddening. “I told her once today already that whom I choose to meet and where I choose to meet them is nobody’s business but my own.”

Frank had to disagree. “When it comes to murder, ma’am, everything’s my business.”

Instead of explaining why she’d met with Stanley, Jemima crossed her arms and pursed her lips, saying nothing.

For one lingering moment, Frank found himself wishing all women could be like his wife. Sarah couldn’t keep a secret to save her life. Unfortunately, it appeared that Jemima Winthrop could. He figured it’d be easier to pull an answer out of Stanley.

So he cleared his throat and moved on.

“One last thing, ma’am,” he told her, ignoring her impatient snort, “I spoke with the salesgirl over at the corner market, and she tells me you bought several bottles of ant killer this week alone.”

“Is that a crime?” Jemima asked.

“You do realize that Splat was used to kill old Mrs. Duncan?”

“Of course I do,” she assured him. “The news is all over town. But that has nothing to do with me.”

“The stuff is used so sparingly that two bottles seems like an awful lot of poison,” Frank remarked, not about to let her squirm out of this one. “Do you have some kind of ant infestation?”

“So are you going to arrest me for buying too much Splat?” she said dryly. “I don’t think there’s a law against it, is there, Sheriff? Besides, we’ve had a terrible infestation at the library, so I keep a bottle there as well as at the house. You see, it’s all perfectly innocent.”

“Uh-huh,” Frank murmured.

“You think I’m lying?” Her voice rose, and her face screwed up tighter. “Let me tell you something, Sheriff Biddle. If I’d wanted to kill Eleanora, I wouldn’t have waited until Monday! I would have done it long ago, before I watched my father drink himself to death and my mother lose her mind!”

With that, Jemima jumped out of the chair and stormed out of the office.

Frank watched her go and shook his head.

“
I
F YOU THINK
I’m going to confess to killing Eleanora, you’re full of beans, Biddle,” Stanley Duncan crabbed. “Pull any funny business, and I’ll have my family’s attorneys here quick as you can piss.”

The sheriff was familiar with the Duncan family’s attorneys. They were from a big firm in St. Louis and had more names on their letterhead than anybody could rightly remember.

Before Frank could get a word out, Stanley ranted on.

“I’d like to see you try and slap handcuffs on me,” he growled. “I’ll sue you if you do. Hell, I’ll sue the whole town! Ever heard of false arrest or wrongful imprisonment or defamation of character? Take your pick!”

Honest to God, Frank was ready to strangle somebody with his bare hands.

He hunkered over his desk. The twinge of a headache that had started with Jemima Winthrop now blossomed into full-blown throbbing.

“Would you like to sit down?” he asked, not for the first time.

Stanley paced like a caged beast. Circling the room, stopping on occasion to poke a finger wildly in the air, he would holler, then resume his stalking.

“I’ll say it again, I had nothing to do with murdering my sister-in-law, although I won’t lie and tell you I’m torn up about her death,” Stanley told him. “She made my life miserable, she did. She took what was rightfully mine and kept it from me all these years.”

Frank squinted at the man, pegging him to be about middle to late sixties. Erma at the diner had mentioned the younger of the Duncan brothers had left home at twenty, only returning on occasion for brief visits. “Stan had ants in his pants,” was how Erma had put it. “He wanted to travel and see the world. But he didn’t want to work. He wanted the good life, like his brother, only that’s harder to do when your pockets are empty.”

Stanley finally ceased pacing and marched up to Frank’s desk, bending his tall body over it. “You can’t have a shred of evidence that connects me to what happened to Eleanora. Not a shred.”

The sheriff sighed. “Look, I’m not arresting you, Mr. Duncan, I just want to ask a few questions.”
If you’d ever shut up
, he left unsaid.

Stanley straightened up. He ran a hand over a full head of gray hair that caused Frank a pang of envy. “A few questions, you say?”

Biddle nodded. “It won’t take long,” he said, and it was an easy promise to make, what with the way his head banged.

“I guess I can spare a minute.”

“Much appreciated.”

Reluctantly, Stanley settled into a wooden chair and set his elbows on his knees. He rubbed his hands together, either because he was cold or he couldn’t keep them still.

Frank picked up his pencil and flipped to a clean page on his pad. “Have you been in town long, Mr. Duncan?”

“Oh, not more than a week, I guess. I’m staying in Grafton at a B&B.” A faint smile tugged at his lips. “I might have to stick around longer than I figured, what with me being the only Duncan still standing.” He nodded to himself. “I’m counting on moving into the house on Harbor as soon as the will is read.”

The sheriff cocked his head. “You seem awfully sure of that.”

Stanley shrugged. “I can’t imagine anything happening otherwise. Who else is there? Eleanora would have had to be off her rocker to leave the place to that antique who calls herself a housekeeper.”

“What about Jean?” Frank asked.

“Are you kidding me, Biddle? Eleanora leave anything to Jean?” Stanley laughed. “I was going to say over Eleanora’s dead body, but that’s the case now, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “I guarantee you, Jean is getting nothing.”

The sheriff had another question itching to be asked. “So you were in River Bend on Monday morning?”

Stanley patted his knees. “I guess I was at that.”

“Do you have a car?”

“When I need one, I’ve got one to borrow” was all he said.

Frank made a note then tapped the pencil against his chin. “When you’re not in town, where do you live?”

“Live?” Stanley grinned. “Why, the world is my oyster, Biddle.”

“How do you survive?”

“I do this and that. I once sold real estate, but that wasn’t my cup of tea. Even did some bookkeeping that didn’t last. It’s insane how bookkeepers get blamed for every damned cent that goes missing.” Stanley glanced around the room. “I did a little telemarketing, you know, pushing gold bullions, and I tried my hand at selling cars. But nothing stuck.” He flashed Frank a toothy grin. “Guess I’m just not cut out for that nine-to-five stuff.”

“Why didn’t you stick around and work for Duncan Industries?”

The man’s faced clouded, his eyebrows knitting together. “Eleanora always had a big influence on Marvin. She could’ve talked my brother into jumping off the Eads Bridge if she’d had a mind to. She never wanted me to stick around. Besides”—he sighed and wiggled a hand in the air—“I could never get myself worked up over grain and silos and subsidies. I played right into her hands, though, didn’t I, by staying away?”

For the moment, Frank forgot about his headache. “You really didn’t like your sister-in-law, did you, Mr. Duncan?”

“Are you serious? The old girl was a pain in the—” He stopped midsentence, eyeing Biddle with suspicion. “You’re trying to get me to say something I’m going to regret, aren’t you?” He got up abruptly and brushed off his pants. “Well, you can forget it, Biddle. It won’t happen, not with me. Besides, you’re barking up the wrong tree.” He approached Frank’s desk and leaned over, looking him squarely in the face. “Jean’s the one who killed her. And even if Eleanora lost her head and wrote Jean into her will, I know for a fact that a murderer can’t inherit from her victim. So it looks like I’ve got a clear shot of finally getting all that’s mine.”

He turned and started for the door.

The sheriff scrambled to his feet. “Mr. Duncan?”

Stanley turned around. “Yes?”

“Do you mind telling me what’s going on between you and Miss Winthrop?”

“Me and Jemmy?” Stanley lifted his shoulders then dropped them. “I hardly know the woman, Sheriff,” he said. Then he left, closing the door with a clatter.

Frank got up from his desk and walked to the window. He watched Stanley cross the street toward the diner.

So he hardly knew “Jemmy,” did he?

Right.

Frank sighed. Could Mrs. Evans be onto something? Were Stanley Duncan and Jemima Winthrop in cahoots?

The mere thought made the hammering in his head even worse.