Phantoms Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mystery #13 (16 page)

One thing about the elderly—they
usually love to talk and Mary was no exception. I had the whole scoop on the
knitting group: who was happy in her marriage, who was not, how many had unruly
grandchildren, and which ones were not really very good knitters but just came
for the company. But it was all in a lighthearted vein.

“I heard that Dolly could be
pretty disagreeable at times, that people around town didn’t like her much.
That surprised me. She always seemed so nice.”

“Well, I can tell you—” she
began. “That wasn’t always the case.” She started in on the mayor’s dog story.

“What about those in the knitting
group?” I asked, trying for information I didn’t already have. “Is that why
some of the ladies stopped coming?”

“I only know of one who truly
could not abide Dolly Jones in any form.” She reached for the tea cozy and
refilled my cup. “Elizabeth Scott. Pretty girl. You might say that she has
dated
a few men. I say that’s her business and I didn’t much care. She was always
very kind to me. But Dolly, she just had it in for that poor girl. Spread ugly
rumors about her. It got so that Elizabeth lost some of her clients—she’s an
exercise instructor. All because of Dolly’s gossip.”

Chapter
19

The fitness center was near the
post office. I’d passed it several times but never really taken much notice.
Although Elizabeth’s name was on my list, I’d not been able to reach her by
phone so just dropping in seemed like the best way to handle it. I left the
yarn in my tote bag. Somehow I didn’t think she would believe Dolly was sending
a gift.

A receptionist pointed out
Elizabeth Scott who was working out with weights in the far corner of the large
room, and told me it would be fine to go over there. I stepped gingerly between
the unfamiliar machines and scary-looking heavy weights and made my way to the
thirty-something blond in aqua-blue spandex who seemed to be bench-pressing
about a thousand pounds of round disks.

“Elizabeth?”

“Yes. Do I know you?” She was
barely breathing hard as she lowered the barbells to the rack and sat up.

“I’m looking into the death of
Dolly Jones, on behalf of her friends and her husband.”

“She had friends?” She dusted
some powdery stuff off her hands. “Sorry. What can I do for you?”

“Dolly was the target of a series
of pranks at her shop, right before she died. It really affected her, mentally,
and may have had something to do with her death.”

Elizabeth stretched her arms into
some odd contortions designed to loosen up her shoulders. “I don’t know
anything about any pranks. Dolly was mental to begin with. I met her because I
got started on a knitting project and I found myself in a little over my head.
The price of taking private lessons was a bit much, so I joined the group for
awhile to get some advice on working the pattern. I finished the sweater—didn’t
much care for how it looked on me, after all that work. Dropped knitting and
the group.”

“Did you get along all right with
Dolly?”

“At first. The woman ran hot and
cold. Friendly one minute, would turn on you the next. She spread some ugly
gossip about me, I confronted her once.”

“Recently?”

“Two or three months ago, I’d
say.” Her blue eyes narrowed. “Look, I won’t deny that I could not abide the
woman after what she did. But I’ve got better things to do than chase around
creating little episodes to scare her. If Dolly was running scared it was
probably because she had a guilty conscience about how she treated people.”

She marched over to a
stair-climber machine and stepped up on it. She pressed a couple of buttons and
the machine started moving. “Sorry, I’ve got to finish my warm-up. I have a
class in twenty minutes.”

Well, Elizabeth Scott didn’t seem
like a sneaky poisoner who would slip someone extra pills or mess around with
cups of tea or shuffling coins in a cash register. I got the sense that if she
were in the mood she could simply break your neck. I left the gym pretty
quickly.

Watching Elizabeth in her
skinny-spandex, lifting those weights, put me in mind of the exercise I should
be doing. I popped into a pastry shop and squelched the mood with a cupcake and
take-out cup of tea. At a tiny table outside I sat down to finish my cupcake
and consult my map.

Louisa had marked the address of
Joanna Sands for me, so I brushed the cake crumbs off my jeans and headed that
direction. Her home was on a street so similar to Louisa’s—a row of stone
houses with colored doors which opened directly onto the sidewalk—that I
wondered if people ever got mixed up and went to the wrong house. Joanna opened
the door within seconds after I pressed the bell. She could have been Dolly’s
sister—same height and build, nearly the same age, even the same haircut. She
wore a pleated skirt and twin set in pastel blue.

“Mrs. Sands? I’m Charlie Parker.
I phoned this morning.”

“Ah, yes.” Her gaze traveled from
my head to my sneakers and back. “So Dolly wanted me to have a gift.”

I held out the bag of yarn that I
hoped would gain me an invitation inside.

She peered into the sack, wadded
the whole thing with her hands and threw it to the sidewalk. “She would! She
would
choose this color for me. I absolutely cannot wear orange!”

“I . . . I’m sorry. I’m afraid I
randomly chose them.”

She took a step back and drew
herself up straight. “Sorry. Not to take it out on you, but Dolly . . . she
simply—” Her face crumpled and her voice cracked.

“Joanna? Are you all right?”
Maybe the gift was too vivid a reminder of her friend’s death.

I reached into my tote and
brought out the other two bags of yarn. “You may certainly have your choice.”

“It’s not that.” She waved them
away. “I don’t want a gift from Dolly. I should have told you that on the phone
this morning. I guess curiosity got the better of me.” Her eyes grew hard. “She
treated me so . . . so badly. All for the one favor, years of feeling like her
slave.”

“What—what happened?” I glanced
up and down the street, a little uncomfortable with the intimacy of the
conversation, right here on the street, but there was no one else around.

Joanna noticed. “You might as
well come inside. It’s a rather long story.”

I followed her into a parlor that
was remarkably like Louisa’s. She waved vaguely in the direction of the sofa
and I took a seat. She remained standing and paced as she talked.

“I got into a bind once. My
daughter needed an operation, one not fully covered by the National Health
Service. I desperately needed the money and had no other resources. Dolly was a
friend. I confided my situation.”

She looked directly at me. “You
didn’t ever want to confide anything to Dolly, as I later learned. At any rate,
as soon as she knew about my situation, she became so very caring and concerned,
so I accepted a loan from her. It was in the days when Archie made tons of
money in his position at the sugar factory, so I knew they could spare it.”

“What happened?”

“I paid back the money. My
Christmas bonus was a nice one that year, so I gave her most of it right away.
The rest came a little at a time over the next months, but I did pay it back.”

She seemed sincere enough, her
earlier anger almost completely receding.

“But then Dolly began calling in
the favor in so many ways. First, it was simple things. ‘Joanna, since you’re
coming by would you mind picking up my dry cleaning on the way over?’; ‘Joanna,
be a dear and get me a sandwich for lunch.’ Of course she never felt the need
to reimburse me for all these little things. But I felt beholden so I didn’t
say anything.

“Then the favors grew bigger and
bigger. ‘Volunteer to help me on a committee.’ Except that she would inevitably
become too busy and I would take on all the work. One year I practically ran
the town Christmas pageant all by myself! I’m not a young woman, as you’ve
noticed.”

I started to assure her that she
looked as vital as anyone, but she went on.

“It was that way with the jumble
sale, the choral program, the church bake sale . . . I literally could go on
and on. By then I’d paid back all the money, but Dolly became a force to be
reckoned with. Any time I told her I couldn’t take on any more, she would
almost literally leap down my throat as she reminded me how she’d saved my
daughter’s life.” She’d begun to twist her fingers practically in knots. “I was
at the end of my rope, Ms Parker.”

“Did you do anything about it?”
Was I about to actually get a confession here?

Her face grew hard again. “For
starters, I gave up the knitting group. Then I quit going to her shop
altogether. When I stopped answering my telephone she began showing up at the
door. If I didn’t answer the door, she would peek in at the windows, her face
pressed to the glass to see inside. It was driving me insane.”

“Did you report to the police
that she was stalking you?”

Once more, she crumpled. “No. I
didn’t have the heart. Ignoring her seemed ungrateful enough, but to take it to
the authorities. No, I simply couldn’t. I could just imagine how she probably
treated poor Archie, and him such a nice man.”

She’d paused near the fireplace
and I stood.

“I’m sorry to hear how it ended,”
I said. “So hard to lose a friendship like that.”

She apparently thought I was
referring to Dolly’s death. “Oh, the friendship was long gone before this past
week. You can’t classify a tormentor as a friend. Keep the yarn—I wouldn’t want
the reminder.”

With that, we had subtly moved
toward the door and I found myself outside. The story ran through my mind as I
walked the two blocks to Louisa’s house. Here was certainly someone with a real
reason to be rid of Dolly. Maybe the pressure had simply become too much for
Joanna to handle and she’d broken, dishing out little helpings of
passive-aggressive paybacks. It wasn’t much of a stretch for me to imagine her
donning a pair of work boots and grinning as she made muddy tracks across
Dolly’s clean floors.

This just might be my best
suspect—but drugging Dolly? Giving her enough to kill her? I couldn’t be sure
about that, not yet anyway.

After cake at Mary Ellis’s house
and that completely indulgent cupcake I’d bought for myself, I needed protein.
I made a hefty roast beef sandwich in Louisa’s kitchen and pondered what to do
next. I wanted to call Drake and just hear his voice, but midday here was
completely the wrong time to call Alaska. He’d said the job was going well and
that he might be home within two weeks. I hated the fact that he and I and
Freckles were so spread out in different places. I wanted our little family
back together again. Soon.

I set my plate in the sink and
tried to decide on a course of action. I wasn’t going to get back to
Albuquerque any sooner by sitting here doing nothing. I at least owed my aunt
the effort of following these few leads. If nothing turned up by the end of the
week, I would have to call it quits.

The fourth woman whom I’d planned
to take a yarn gift to had told me that she worked in a nearby town all day,
but I was welcome to leave the gift at her home. Since my true purpose was to
question her, I needed to wait until she got home in the evening. So, with a
few hours to spare I decided to drop by the yarn shop again. I’d thought of a
few questions I could ask Archie, in my attempt to piece everything together.

A blur of pale blue passed me as
I reached the front door to The Knit and Purl.

“Joanna?” She must have dashed
right over here after I left her house.

“Oh, Charlie. Hello. I was
just—well, it seemed only right to pay a condolence visit to Archie.”

I nodded mutely.

“Well, many things to
accomplish,” she said, hurrying away.

Okay. After what she’d told me
earlier, I would have thought Dolly’s home and shop would be her last choice of
places to visit. And if she’d come to pay a social call, it kind of shot my
theory about her being the one to slip Dolly the overdose of pills. I grabbed
for the knob, only to have the door swing rapidly inward.

“Arch, dear, don’t forget, if you
need anything just pop over,” a woman was saying. I’d never seen her in the
shop before, a lady in her fifties with beautiful skin and chin-length blond
hair, recently styled. She wore a tailored dress and coat that looked as if she
were on her way out to Ascot or someplace equally high-class.

“Oh! Sorry, I didn’t see you
there,” she said to me, her tone as modulated as the queen’s.

I stepped back to let her pass,
and she went into the dress shop immediately next door.

A glass bottle hit the floor and
the scent of geranium filled the air as I entered the shop.

“Bloody hell,” Gabrielle cursed.
“I’ll sweep it up.”

Archie stood near the register,
leaning a hip on the counter, the telephone receiver in hand, a slightly dreamy
look on his face.

Was it just my imagination or
were there far too many women calling on Archie Jones these days?

Chapter
20

Archie put the phone down and
gave me a quizzical look. I noticed that his shirt had some kind of food stain
on the front and his cardigan sweater hung a little off-kilter, as if he’d not
looked in the mirror when dressing this morning. The lack of a woman’s
influence was beginning to show. Maybe that’s why they had all begun showing
up, to mother him.

“Do you have a spare minute?” I
asked.

The half-smile vanished. I gave
myself a kick—of course, he had all the minutes in the world, now that his life
had been turned upside down. No job, no wife, no reason to put on clean clothes
in the morning.

“I’m sorry, Archie. I—”

“It’s fine, Charlie. I’ve got the
time.” He ushered me toward the stock room.

I pulled out my notepad. “I’m
trying to piece together a few details about those incidents that frightened
Dolly so badly. I would appreciate anything you can remember about each of
them.”

He stood very still.

“Louisa studies the paranormal,
you know.” Technically, the truth. I pushed on with my questions. “For
instance, the time that the tea in her cup went from cold to scalding hot. It
happened here, in the back room of the shop, correct?”

He nodded.

“Was there anyone else present in
the shop at the time?”

“You’ll have to ask Gabrielle. I
believe she was working that morning.”

He was right, of course. I’d come
in a few minutes after it happened and but I’d only seen Gabrielle and Dolly at
work. He called the younger woman into the room and I asked the question.

She stared at the ceiling for a
full minute or two, trying to remember. “I can’t be positive,” she said, “but
that was the day you came in for Louisa’s blue heather, wasn’t it? I’m fairly
certain that the customer right before you was Mrs. Ellis. The order was a
yellow cashmere. I tend to remember people sort of more by what they buy than
by their names.”

I pictured the ninety-something
with the walker and I couldn’t envision any possibility that she’d tippy-toed
into the back room and messed with the teacups without anyone seeing her do it.

“There might have been someone
with her,” Gabrielle said. “Mrs. Ellis often gets a ride with a friend from the
knitting group. But I don’t remember which lady it was. Only Mrs. Ellis bought
anything that day.”

I made notes. I could go back to
Mary Ellis and see if she could tell me who had brought her shopping that day.
If I could remember for sure which day it was . . . and if she happened to
remember . . . This was already getting complicated.

“What about the other time, when
the hot tea turned cold, upstairs in the apartment, and Dolly swore it happened
in an instant? Do either of you remember being there, seeing it happen?”

Gabrielle gave a completely blank
look. Archie seemed to think he was home at the time but he couldn’t call up
any details. I had come along later, once again, but I sure didn’t remember
anyone else being around.

“Okay. What about any of the
other incidents? I’m trying to figure out who might have been near enough that
they could have set the scene to scare Dolly. The muddy footprints? The yarns
all being rearranged? The candles all being lit?”

They both shook their heads
slowly and I realized I wasn’t coming away with any usable information.

The door bells chimed and
Gabrielle hurried back into the shop. I heard female voices.

“Not to rush you, but I have some
calls to make,” Archie said. “Arrangements for the movers and all that.”

Despite his grief he sure seemed
to be conducting business efficiently. I couldn’t come up with any other viable
questions so I left when he started up the stairs.

In the shop, two women were
browsing the remaining skeins of yarn. Of the hundreds that had originally
stocked the shop, only a few dozen were left. The woman in black turned away
from the yarn and faced the bottles of essential oils. I saw that it was
Elizabeth Scott.

“What are you doing here?” I
blurted out.

She spun around and stared at me.

“Sorry.” Belatedly, I realized
how rude my tone had been. “I’m just surprised.”

She stared around the shop. “I
guess I needed to see for myself. She’s really gone.”

With that, she spun on her heel
and sent the small bells crashing into the glass as she whipped open the door.
She headed in the direction of the fitness center without a backward glance at
the yarn shop.

I looked around. The other
customer’s eyes were wide. Gabrielle stared at the swaying strands of bells
with an enigmatic look on her face. We must have all been thinking how weird
Elizabeth’s comment was.

A shape passed the front window
and the door opened to admit the expensively-dressed woman who had just left a
few minutes earlier.

“Mrs. Devon.” Gabrielle said
somewhat stiffly. “Back already?”

She had shed the coat but her
tailored dress was still impeccable and every hair of her blond coif stood
perfectly in place. She carried a small white paper sack.

“Just brought a little something
for Arch. I’ll just pop up to deliver it,” she said with a tilt of her head toward
the upstairs apartment.

“He’s rather busy—” But
Gabrielle’s words were cut short as the visitor disappeared through the
stockroom doorway.

I sent a puzzled look toward
Gabrielle but she was too busy staring daggers toward the back of Mrs. Devon to
notice. Well, there’s more than one way to get information. I walked outside,
stepped over to the dress shop next door and went inside.

Two employees were present. A
young one was in the process of hanging dresses on a rack. The other—a classy
dresser of about thirty-five—was going through some papers at the register. I
approached her.

“Excuse me, is Mrs. Devon here?”

“I’m Diana Devon.”

I was momentarily baffled. “A
blond woman—”

“Oh yes, my sister-in-law,
Catherine. She’ll be back in a moment. Would you care to wait or shall I leave
a message?”

I noticed a small stack of
business cards on the counter and picked up one that said, Diana Devon,
Proprietress.

I put on my best I’m-new-in-town
face. “Is she the same Catherine Devon whose husband owns the Big D ranch in
Arizona?”

She laughed politely, as only the
English can at a completely stupid question. “No, I’m afraid not. Catherine is
a widow. Her husband was one of the owners of the sugar factory here in Bury.”

I pretended to be a little
embarrassed at the mix up. “Sorry. I thought I’d heard . . . Well, no matter.
You have some lovely things in the shop.”

She offered to show me the new
autumn line but I begged off, saying I was in a hurry today. I’d glimpsed a
price tag hanging at the neck of a summer dress, and even at a half-off
reduction it was way beyond me.

The sugar mill. So it was quite
likely that the Devons had been acquainted with Archie Jones for a long time.
Some instinctual thing told me that Archie had
known
Catherine a bit
better since her husband’s passing. I wondered whether she’d had anything to do
with the knit shop occupying its current location. And I wondered if Dolly had
any clue. Somehow, I thought there would have been war on the block if she did.

I pondered all this as I
meandered along the streets, finding my way back to that ice cream shop and
ordering their monster sundae, the Knickerbocker Glory. I ate the whole
thing—the fruit, the ice cream, all the sauces and all the whipped cream—even
the wafer. No sense trying to cover up the fact. I knew the minute I finished
it that I’d spoiled my dinner in a big way and hoped Louisa hadn’t planned
anything special, because I would have to disappoint her.

I deliberately waited until I’d
finished my ice cream before giving serious consideration to the whole Archie
Jones/Catherine Devon question. On the one hand I could see how such a thing
might happen—someone had a little too much to drink at the office Christmas
party one year or something like that . . . On the other hand, Classy Catherine
and Archie? I pictured Catherine in the outfit I’d seen her wearing this
morning, then Archie in his stained shirt and lopsided cardigan—the image just
did not make sense.

I couldn’t see her sticking with
an affair like that, especially once Archie had lost his prestigious job. With
his days pretty well controlled by Dolly the logistics would become very
difficult.

Anyway, Charlie, I told myself,
you have to have a few more facts before jumping to a conclusion like this one.
I waddled out of the ice cream shop, knowing I better walk off some of that
dessert. Found myself again in the Abbey Gardens, where the hard rain a couple
of days ago had taken a toll on the flowers. They were starting to show a
little autumn fading.

I sat on a bench and reviewed my
notes but no new insights leaped out at me. Before I could come to any
conclusions, I needed to piece together a sequence of events and see whose face
showed up as the puzzle pieces began to fit into place. I put my notes away
then circled the gardens twice before heading to Louisa’s, where I promptly
stretched out on the sofa.

By the time Louisa came home from
work, I’d roused myself from my somnolent coma. She offered to make sandwiches
for both of us for a light supper, but I couldn’t manage even that little.

While she ate hers, I posed the
idea I’d had earlier. “Help me make a list of each incident at Dolly’s shop and
let’s see if we can put the clues together.”

“The first one I remember was
when Dolly burned her hand with the hot tea,” I said, starting off the list.

“Yes, but she said she’d just
finished straightening all the yarns which had been disorganized when she
arrived that morning.”

“Right.” I jotted down the two
events. “We can’t possibly know who messed up the yarn display since that
happened during the night. We have to assume that the perpetrator was alone. So
let’s start with the hot tea. When we walked in, I seem to remember a couple of
other women being there.”

I’d not actually met anyone in
town at that point, so I was no help with names.

Louisa closed her eyes in a
squint. “This helps me to see my visions,” she whispered.

I gave her a minute, feeling a
sense of anticipation.

“I believe they were Mindy Hart
and Elizabeth Scott,” she said. “They weren’t together. That’s the impression
I’m getting. Mindy was browsing the yarns and Elizabeth stood near the
candles.”

“Did either woman seem like she
might have been . . . I don’t know . . . admiring her own handiwork or plotting
something?” Maybe this Mindy person had somehow messed up the yarns and came
back to see if she’d left Dolly flustered. “Were either of them near enough to
the stockroom door that they might have sneaked in and microwaved the tea to
make it boiling hot?”

“Your American-ness is showing.
Dolly didn’t even keep a microwave in the shop. She always used the kettle and
brewed a cup or a whole pot fresh.”

Hmm. I had noticed the kettle on
other visits, but that particular time I hadn’t thought to check to see if it
had recently been used. By the time we got there Dolly was already holding ice
to her burned hand and bemoaning the fact that she’d broken a good cup.

“Elizabeth Scott always admired
Dolly’s Spode. She might have done something spiteful, just to watch Dolly
cringe, although I doubt she would have deliberately wanted a cup to get
broken.”

Elizabeth had told me she’d
confronted Dolly two or three months ago—no mention of having been in the shop
recently. The omission moved her up a notch on my list of suspects.

“What about the first time the
muddy footprints appeared?”

“That was before the hot tea
incident, too. Remember, Dolly said she’d come downstairs in the morning and
the floor was dirty?”

“Ah, yes. I suspected that Archie
had come in late and either didn’t realize his feet were muddy or didn’t ’fess
up to it.”

Again, she closed her eyes.
“Archie normally wears leather shoes with smooth soles. I’m picturing him on
that day and I would swear that’s what he had on.”

“But if the prints were made the
night before . . .”

“Quite right.”

“I wish there were a way to get
into his closet and see if he owns some boots with treads.” Even if we could,
though, it was doubtful we’d find anything of use. Archie was in the process of
packing up to move. And surely by now he’d cleaned the boots anyway.

“I don’t think we’ll be able to
pin down either of those incidents with the muddy footprints, Charlie. Both
times the prints appeared at night and had been cleaned up before anyone else
saw them. Dolly was like that, wouldn’t want a customer walking in to see
anything out of place.”

“What about the other time with
the tea, the time Dolly swore she’d made a fresh hot cup and then it went ice
cold? I had walked up to the apartment and I felt the side of the cup. That tea
wasn’t just lukewarm, it was downright cold.”

“And it was only you and Dolly
there?” she asked.

“Archie came out of the bedroom.
Her scream awakened him from a nap. Otherwise, no one was around.”

“But I doubt Dolly locked the
apartment door during the day. She would have buzzed in and out several times a
day, likely, so anyone in the shop who went into the back room could have
climbed the stairs and gone in there.”

She was right, of course. At
least she wasn’t suggesting that a ghost had turned the tea cold. The only
reasonable thing I could think of was that someone had poured out the hot tea
and replaced the cup with an identical cup of cold tea. And the
only
real purpose I could see in that was to make Dolly believe she was going crazy.
And if she truly began to doubt herself, maybe she really did swallow all those
pills on purpose.