Stuck on Murder (9 page)

Nate moved to stand in the open door. “You can shower now,” he said. “I don’t think Ed will be back for a while.”

“Thanks,” Brenna said. “I really don’t want my name in the paper.”

Nate looked at her questioningly and she realized she’d said too much. Before he could ask for an explanation, she said, “What do you think he meant when he asked if we knew what he’d done to get here?”

He studied her for a moment as if trying to decide whether to allow her to change the subject. Finally, he said, “I think he meant covering all of the lousy stories that he’s had to write all these years, from school board meetings to charity yard sales. He’s finally got hard news and he’s not going to give it up easily.”

“Oh,” Brenna said. She supposed that could be true.

“Why? What do you think he meant?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

She wasn’t going to admit that she thought he was saying he had done something to create this story. Not yet anyway.

Chapter 9

It wasn’t long after Nate and Hank had left and Brenna had showered that the phone started ringing. Judging by the messages on her voice mail, the gossip had begun at the early bird breakfast at Stan’s Diner with the waitress Marybeth DeFalco, who was married to one of the police officers who’d been at the scene. With every order of coffee, she served up a side of the latest dish, today’s being the mayor found dead in a trunk. By eight o’clock in the morning, the entire town knew that Cynthia Ripley was now a widow.

Brenna didn’t answer her phone and stopped checking her messages. She supposed some people were calling to see if she was all right, but she imagined most of them were looking for information. Well, she didn’t have any and she didn’t need to relive the whole horrible experience for the vicarious thrills of others. So there.

Once it was more dry than wet, she pulled her curly, reddish brown hair back in its usual band and put on a moss green sweater, which made her hazel eyes appear more green than brown. She wore tan khakis, and in deference to the mud, she donned her hiking boots instead of her usual sneakers. She locked up her cabin and followed the path to the communal lot.

Although it was her day off, she just couldn’t sit on her porch staring out at the lake beyond, thinking about last night. She needed to be in motion. She needed to be someplace where she felt comforted and safe. So she climbed into her Jeep and went to work at Vintage Papers.

As soon as she opened the door, Tenley charged at her from across the room and folded her into a hug that would have suffocated her if it had lasted a second longer.

“Brenna, are you okay? Are you all right? I’ve been calling and calling. Why aren’t you answering your phone? I was just about to drive out to your place. Why didn’t you call me last night?”

“Tenley, breathe,” Brenna ordered, grabbing her friend by the elbows and pulling her off.

Tenley sucked in a long breath, in through her nose and out through her mouth.

“Okay, I’m better,” she said. “Now start talking.”

So much for hiding, Brenna thought ruefully. It was all right, however, because it was Tenley. She knew it was concern and not gossip that motivated her.

Tenley flipped the Closed sign on the shop door and locked it. Then the two of them hunkered down in the break room in the back of the shop with a pot of coffee and a box of doughnuts. Brenna could have sworn she wasn’t hungry but she managed to eat two jellies and a cruller while she told her tale.

When she got to the part about discovering Mayor Ripley in the trunk, Tenley covered her mouth with her hand and turned an unflattering shade of green.

“Did you throw up?” she asked from behind her hand. “I would have thrown up.”

“I came close,” Brenna admitted. Then she told her how the investigators were there until the wee hours of the morning and that Nate had lent her Hank to get her through the night. She did not mention breakfast with Nate or how he’d tossed Ed Johnson out that morning. She figured Tenley already had enough to process as it was.

“I just can’t believe it,” Tenley said. “Who would want to kill Mayor Ripley?”

“You mean other than Nate?” Brenna asked.

Tenley gasped. “You don’t think . . . ?”

“That Nate did it?” she asked. “No, absolutely not.”

“But you’re worried about him,” Tenley guessed.

“Nate’s like me,” Brenna said. “He’s not from around here and he keeps to himself. It would be easy for people to read bad things into that.”

“I wish I could argue with you, but you’re right. The people of Morse Point have long memories,” she said. “And even though Jim Ripley was, well, an idiot, he was still one of our own and the locals won’t forget that.”

Brenna nodded. This was exactly what she needed, someone who understood the situation.

“So if it’s not Nate, and we’re agreed it’s not, then who?” Tenley asked.

“Cynthia?” Brenna suggested. “Isn’t it usually family that they consider first in a murder?”

“They do, but I don’t see it.” Tenley shook her head. “Cynthia made Jim what he is . . . er . . . was. It was her foot in his behind that got him into politics to begin with, and I can’t see her stuffing her investment into a trunk. Being the mayor’s wife gave her the cachet she always dreamt of, and I don’t see her letting it go, not willingly at any rate.”

The sound of someone banging on the front door interrupted their talk. They glanced at one another, and Tenley stood up and poked her head out the back room door.

“It’s the Porter sisters,” she said. “And they look like they mean business.”

“You don’t think they’d actually break down the door, do you?” Brenna asked.

“Let’s see, this is the biggest thing that’s happened in Morse Point since Louise Holbrook backed over her cheating husband fifty years ago, and I hear Marybeth down at the diner scooped them on this one. That must be sticking in their craw like a lobster claw. So, um, yeah, I could see them tossing a brick to get in.”

“Well, don’t just stand there, open the door,” Brenna said. “I’m pretty sure your insurance policy doesn’t cover gossips on a rampage.”

Tenley hurried across the room, and Brenna braced herself. She had an ulterior motive for talking to the Porter twins. She wanted to know what the scuttlebutt was in town, and they were just the ladies to tell her. It was going to be the gossip equivalent of you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.

Tenley unlocked the door and the two women yanked it open and marched in. Brenna had repositioned herself at the large worktable in the back of the shop. She had a basket of paper cutouts in front of her that she pretended to be sorting.

“Good morning, Ella and Marie,” she said. “How are you today?”

“Spill it,” Marie said. She was bouncing up and down on the balls of her white tennies, looking ready to bust out one of her karate-for-seniors high kicks if Brenna didn’t give her what she wanted.

“Whatever do you mean?” Brenna asked, playing dumb.

Ella gnashed her teeth, and Tenley shot Brenna a worried look. Brenna wondered briefly if she and Tenley could take them. She had a feeling the Porter sisters could rumble, and she’d lay odds they fought dirty.

“You know why we’re here,” Ella said. “So start talking. What do you know?”

“You first,” Brenna said.

“What?” Marie gasped, taken aback. “You were the one who fished him out of the lake, you go first.”

“I want to know what the buzz is about town,” Brenna said. “I want to know what people are thinking and saying.”

The sisters exchanged a long look. They wore matching running suits, Marie in yellow and Ella in green. Their gray hair sprang about their heads in recently tightened sausage curls and they both favored a shiny, bubblegum pink shade of lipstick.

As if reaching an unspoken agreement, they turned back to Brenna, pulled out chairs, and sat down. Tenley went to fetch the remaining coffee and doughnuts while Ella and Marie decided who should go first.

“You go ahead and start,” Ella said. “It’s your turn.”

“You just want to tell the ending,” Marie said. “You go first. I want to be the one to finish it.”

“You got to finish it last time,” Ella protested.

“No, I didn’t,” Marie argued.

“Yes, you did. You told Jorge Garcia at the flower shop the entire story before I could even say a word.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Quiet!” Brenna shouted over them. “Now someone start talking or I am taking my information and leaving.”

The twins studied one another again. It was a silent argument with a lot of raised and lowered eyebrows and put-out humphs. Finally, Marie nodded.

“Oh, all right, fine,” she snapped. “Save the best part for yourself.”

Ella gave her a close-lipped smile.

“Okay, it all started with Marybeth DeFalco,” Marie said.

“We already know that,” Tenley said. “She’s married to Officer Stuart DeFalco and he . . .”

The twins gave her identical baleful glares and she stammered to a halt.

“As I was saying,” Marie began again, “it started with Marybeth, and let me just say, if she wasn’t married to Stuart, she wouldn’t know anything about anything. That girl thinks that she’s in the know, but really she has no appreciation of the history of Morse Point residents, so how could she possibly know anything about anything? Am I right?”

“Quite right,” Ella agreed.

“Anyway, Marybeth told everyone who came into Stan’s this morning that you found Mayor Ripley bound and gagged and stuffed into a trunk that was sunk at the bottom of the lake.”

Tenley and Brenna exchanged a look.

“Don’t forget,” Ella prodded Marie. Marie looked bewildered until Ella pointed at her neck.

“Oh, and he had his throat slashed,” she said in an overly dramatic dinner theater stage whisper.

“No, he didn’t,” Brenna said.

The twins blinked at her.

“And he wasn’t bound and gagged either,” she said.

“He wasn’t?” Ella asked. “Are you quite sure?”

“Quite,” Brenna said.

“Well, that’s disappointing,” Marie said.

Tenley gave her a chastising glance and said, “The ru mors have obviously gotten way out of hand.”

“The trunk wasn’t at the bottom of the lake either,” Brenna said. “How could I have possibly found it there?”

The sisters gave her perplexed looks.

“So, it just floated to shore?” Marie asked.

“Sort of,” Brenna said. “I saw it in the water and pulled it in. It wasn’t out far at all.”

“That’s what we get for believing Ruby Wolcott’s mother,” Marie said. “Everyone knows she’s getting dotty.”

“How did Mrs. Wolcott hear about all this?” Tenley asked.

“Well, from her daughter, Ruby, of course,” Ella said. “Ruby heard it from Marybeth at the diner.”

“And when Mrs. Wolcott, who lives on our street, took that yippy little dog of hers, Hercules, for his morning trot, she stopped by our house and told us. We should have come here first. Everyone knows those hair-perming chemicals Ruby uses at the salon have made her dumber than a bag full of hammers.”

“Yes, but she does a nice job with a blue rinse,” Ella said.

“Except for that one time when she forgot Linda was under the dryer,” Marie said. “Poor thing walked around looking like a blue snowcone for a month.”

Brenna felt her right eye begin to twitch. “Ladies, if we could get back to the subject? How are the locals reacting to the news?”

She wanted to know if the townspeople suspected Nate, but she didn’t want to say as much.

The sisters exchanged a shrewd look.

“We could tell you that,” Marie said.

“Yes, we could,” Ella agreed.

“But . . .” Brenna knew there was a but involved here.

“But first tell us exactly what happened,” Ella said. “And no glossing over the details either. We need to have an accurate accounting of events before we can give any more information.”

Their pink-tinted lips clamped tight in identical mutinous lines, and Brenna knew she’d get nothing more until she showed hers, as it were.

She took a deep breath and told them about seeing the trunk and pulling it out of the water and finding the mayor inside. Both ladies gasped appreciatively. She then told them about talking to Chief Barker and watching the body bag get wheeled away on the stretcher.

Like her recitation to Tenley, she did not tell them about sharing breakfast with Nate or Ed Johnson’s appearance. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to keep this information to herself. Certainly, there was nothing wrong with eating breakfast with her landlord or borrowing his dog or having him chase away nosey reporters, but it was as if there had been a subtle shift in her relationship with Nate, and until she knew what it was, she didn’t want to talk about it, especially to the two biggest gossips in town.