Did You Declare the Corpse? (31 page)

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Authors: Patricia Sprinkle

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She muttered, “If we don’t get up, will it all go away?”
“Darn. I hoped I was the only one who had that dream.” I shoved back the covers, sat up, and fumbled for my slippers. “I guess it all happened, then.”
She yawned. “More happened than you know. I went downstairs to read after you went to sleep, and Brandi came back and spent an hour telling me how all this is a plot by Joyce and the laird’s wife to keep her from inheriting Jim’s money.”
“At least she didn’t get arrested. That’s something.”
“Yeah, but the bobby told her not to leave the village.”
“He told me not to leave the village.” I found my robe tangled in the spread and pulled it on. “Why should Brandi think Joyce and Kitty are plotting against her? Surely she doesn’t think they killed Jim just to pin it on her.”
“She didn’t mention a motive, just that those two want to frame her for Jim’s death.”
“Did she explain when and why Joyce and the laird’s wife got together to conspire? The only connection I know of between them is the play.” I stretched and felt my muscles complain a bit from all that walking up and down hills. Then I trudged over to the mirror and took stock of what I saw. Nothing I wanted inflicted on other people, so I got busy with cold cream and paint.
“She said they resent her because of Jim’s first wife.”
I looked at her through the mirror. “How would Joyce have known Jim’s first wife?”
“Brandi said Joyce and Jim’s daughter went to school together.” Laura sat up and swung her legs off the bed. “I’m not going back to sleep, so I might as well get up, too. Has Joyce ever mentioned to you that she knew Jim and his daughter?”
“No. But she did say she’d need to call Jim’s daughter—that Brandi wouldn’t be likely to do it. And she said her parents came from central Georgia.”
“That could have meant Albany.” Laura frowned as she threw off her robe and started putting on warm clothes. “This trip is beginning to feel like something out of
The Twilight Zone
.” She stood on her toes and stretched so high she nearly touched the ceiling. I watched her enviously and hoped that when I got to heaven, I’d be tall.
“So when did Brandi let you come to bed?” I asked.
“Oh, she came up around midnight. I stayed down trying to reach Ben.” She added, in an offhand tone, “I thought he’d be finishing work about then.”
Aha. If she’d sat up waiting to call after work, things might be looking up between them.
Or so I thought until she added, in a flat voice, “But he wasn’t there.”
“Didn’t they say where he was?”
“No. Said he’d left early on Friday and told them he’d be back on Monday morning. I tried his place a couple of times after that, but he still hadn’t come in by ten.”
I did the math and figured she hadn’t gotten much sleep. “If you keep up these hours, you are going to need a vacation to recover from your vacation. Try him now. He ought to be asleep.”
Half dressed, she reached for her cell phone and pressed one number. She must have called Ben pretty often to have his apartment on international speed dial. I tried not to pay attention, but couldn’t help hearing when she threw down the phone and said, “Dang it, he’s still not there. Or sleeping too sound to hear the phone.”
“Maybe he’s on a fast plane to Scotland.”
“Yeah, right. Since I don’t think he’s ever been out of the state of Georgia, a passport is not likely to have been high on his agenda these past few years.”
I was still trying to think what to say when we heard the breakfast gong.
I was surprised to find Roddy again sitting at the table in the bay window with Dorothy. They were the only people in the dining room. As we came in, Dorothy was saying, “I can’t go. I have a painting I want to finish.”
“Don’t be a gloomy Gussie. You don’t want to spend your life painting pictures. Come for a wee ride,” he wheedled.
“I can’t,” she repeated. “Besides painting, I promised Alex I’d frame pictures. His assistant is home with a new baby, and he has fallen quite far behind.”
Roddy stood with a petulant scowl. “Well, I’m off for a wonderful ride on my motorbike. Your loss.” He stalked out.
Dorothy turned to us with anxious eyes. “Do you think I should have gone with him?”
“Honey,” I told her, “what I think you should do is decide what
you
want to do. Then do exactly that. Don’t let other folks always tell you what you ought to be doing.”
She gave me a stricken look through those golden eyes. “But maybe he’s right. Maybe I am a—whatever he said.”
Laura leaned forward to whisper, in case Eileen should come through from the kitchen, “Or maybe you’re more mature than Roddy and know what you like.” She reached for a piece of cold toast from the rack and put it back. “I know what I like. Warm toast.” She got up and went through the door to the kitchen.
“Take a lesson from Laura,” I told Dorothy. “Asserting yourself takes practice, and she’s been practicing for twenty-six years.”
Dorothy looked silently from me to the door, which was swinging gently behind Laura. Then we both ate our eggs in silence. I wondered what she was thinking.
“Start by doing exactly what you want to today,” I finally suggested, just as Laura came through with two pieces of what looked like hot toast.
“I guess.” Dorothy got up and left with a dubious expression.
“If you’re giving up Ben and Dorothy’s not keen on Roddy,” I said sadly, “it looks like there’ll be no romantic ending to this trip.”
Laura shrugged. “You can always fix up Marcia with Watty. So what’s next?”
“I don’t know. I thought I’d look in on Sherry to be sure she’s all right, then mosey down the village. I still haven’t done much research on the MacLarens. You want to come?”
“No, I’m going to follow your advice and do what I most want to: go back to bed.”
 
I planned a fishing expedition, but I didn’t exactly know what I was fishing for so I didn’t know what to use for bait. I said a little prayer as I tapped at Sherry’s door: “Don’t let me do anything dumb.”
I was surprised when Joyce opened the door. “Come on in.” She wore that tight, bright smile she put on for difficult times. “Sherry’s having breakfast in bed and I’m keeping her company.” She herself was pale. Probably from worry and exhaustion.
Sherry lay in the exact center of the double bed with a tray on her legs, looking like the Queen of the Hill. Still, poor thing, she didn’t look her best in that room. The pale lilac walls and dark purple spread made her skin look yellower, her hair dull and lifeless. Most of her breakfast still covered her plate, but she was sipping a cup of tea with a decent look on her face until she saw me. Then her usual scowl descended.
I perched on a chair upholstered in purple flowers and said, “I wanted to check on you and see if there’s anything I could do.”
“Like what?” She sounded like she suspected I was volunteering to arrange her hair for the firing squad.
“I don’t know, maybe run an errand into the village?”
“You could run to Aberdeen and get Kenny out of jail.” She said it with no emotion whatsoever. I wondered if the doctor still had her sedated. When she turned her black eyes on me, though, the pupils were so close to the color of her irises, I couldn’t tell.
“Sorry. Don’t think my running shoes would last that far. But maybe we could put our heads together and come up with another suspect. You got any ideas, Joyce?”
“Me?” She sounded like I had suggested she’d committed one of the murders.
“I understand you went to school with Jim’s daughter, and Jim seems to have known Mrs. MacGorrie and her brother back in Albany. Did you know them, too?”
“No, and Wendy, Jim’s daughter, was in my kindergarten class.” She gave me a strained smile. “That wasn’t exactly yesterday.”
Strike one. I turned back to Sherry. “You mentioned that first night in Atlanta that your restaurant has bought liquor from Jim’s old company for years. Did you all know him back in his Albany days?”
“Not personally,” she admitted.
“And you don’t either one know anything from his past that might have gotten him killed?”
They both shook their heads, then Sherry added, “Unless his first wife got mad that Jim sold her daddy’s business after he died and Jim became CEO.”
I doubted that was the motive. I hadn’t noticed any short female Southerners skulking around the hills, unless you counted me. But I could ask the sergeant if there were other Georgians in town besides our group.
The discouraging fact was, Norwood was still, far and away, the best suspect for Jim’s murder, and I doubted that anybody could ever prove it. And who killed Norwood? Unless the police could prove Kenny did, it was probable that none of the rest of us would be allowed to go home for a while, because who else could have gotten hold of Kenny’s
sgian dubh
?
“Still, I heard that Jim’s wife took him for a pretty penny when he left her,” Sherry added snidely, tracing the bedspread pattern with one finger.
“Have you kept up with Jim’s daughter all these years?” I asked Joyce.
“I told you, Wendy and I went to kindergarten together. That’s not usually an age for making lasting friendships.”
“My husband and I met around then,” I informed her. “And I asked because I wondered if that was why Jim hired you to put together this tour.”
She drew her eyebrows together in bewilderment. “What makes you think he did?”
“Laura and I were talking to Watty last night, and he said you guaranteed twenty-five places on the tour. We wondered who paid for the people who didn’t come.”
“People who didn’t come,” she said shortly. “That bad spring storm over here in March scared a lot of folks away, but they had already passed the date to get a refund.”
“Oh.” Strike two. That let a considerable amount of hot air out of my balloon, but I still hoped it might rise. “But did Jim suggest the trip? Was that why you planned it in the first place, to end up in Auchnagar? Or was it your play?”
“Neither.” She stood and brushed lint off her tailored navy skirt. “My
company
put this tour together because they thought people would enjoy exploring their Scottish roots.”
“But nobody has, except me,” I pointed out.
“Sherry saw Eilean Donan, Laura visited MacDonald sites, Dorothy went to Tain”—she ticked them off on her fingers, her face flushed and her eyes glittering—“and you still have two more days to explore yours here in Auchnagar.”
If you quit pestering me like this.
She didn’t say it, but it hung in the air.
At the risk of pestering her a little more . . .
“But if Sherry and Kenny got discounts for persuading Laura to come, Laura may get a discount for bringing me along, and Marcia got a two-for-one deal because her aunt owns this bed-and-breakfast, it sounds like the only people who paid full fare were me, Jim, and Brandi. How can you take a tour with only three full fares?”
She gave me her professional smile, having regained her poise. “You’ll have to write to the e-mail address in your materials to ask that question. Somebody at the parent company may be willing to explain their finances to you. They don’t explain them to me.” Her voice sounded a little bitter. “I’m just the hired hand. And if you will excuse me, the hired hand has some things to do. I have to talk with Brandi about sending Jim’s body home once the police release it, I have to talk to the police about Kenny for Sherry here, and I have to go down to the theater and pick up props that are no longer required.”
She departed, leaving Sherry and me to understand that we might be able to slack off on this lovely Saturday, but some people had enormous amounts of work to do.
I knew Sherry expected me to leave, too, but I had another question for her. “Something has been bothering me. If Kenny didn’t kill Mr. Hardin, how could anybody have gotten his
sgian dubh
? Didn’t you all lock your door?”
“Kenny lost his key,” she admitted. “Right after we got here. He swore he left it in the lock when we went down to the bar Thursday evening, but it wasn’t here when we got back.”
“Maybe Eileen saw it in the lock and took it back downstairs for safety.”
Sherry shrugged. “Maybe, but I think Kenny probably dropped it somewhere. He’s incredibly irresponsible about things like keys. I left the door open when I went out yesterday morning, because he’d said he’d be coming and going.” Her mouth twisted at what that had meant, and for perhaps the first time in two weeks I actually felt compassion for her. Being married to Kenny couldn’t be easy.
But before I could feel too sorry for her, Sherry snarled, “He must have come up as soon as I left, put on his kilt, packed a few clothes and his bagpipes, and split. I don’t know why he didn’t take his
sgian dubh,
he was so proud of it. It was a real bargain on eBay.”
The venom in her voice rocked me so, I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. I was half out the door when she screeched for the world to hear, “The rat took all our traveler’s checks, too. And do you know his bus stopped in the next village and I saw it, but I never saw him on it?”

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