The Double Cross (14 page)

“Where were you?” I asked.

“I went to the library to check my e-mail. I have a shipment due at the shop early next week. I was also going to try to find a little background on this property.”

“Why would Rita be with you for that?” I asked.

“She wouldn’t be. But I did ask her to meet me later, so I could show her some Web sites to attract quilters to her shop. I guess she didn’t care enough about it to join me.”

“I’m not sure that was the reason.” I reminded them about what I’d witnessed in the window of the third floor and filled them in on my conversation with George in the kitchen.

“All the more motive for her to kill him,” Eleanor said. “They were fighting and one thing led to another.”

“There were several hours in between,” I pointed out.

“Maybe that picnic with Bernie was the last straw.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I think that may be what Jesse believes.”

“What’s he doing up here anyway?” Susanne asked.

“I’m not sure. I guess he was worried and he came to see if everything was okay.”

“Good thing he did,” Eleanor said. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving Bernie’s fate up to a stranger.”

“I’m not too comfortable leaving any of our fates up to that man,” Susanne said. “If Rita is a killer, then we are all sleeping under her roof, and if the killing has something to do with George and Bernie, isn’t Bernie at risk as long as she’s still in this house?”

It wasn’t a comforting thought. “What about this place?” I asked. “Did the library have any information?

“Oh, heavens! I nearly forgot about that in all the excitement.” Eleanor leaned forward. “It’s better than just information on the inn. Much better. I didn’t find anything really on the Internet, but I got into a friendly conversation with the librarian. She gave me some very good information.”

“What information?” The buildup was killing me.

“Well,” Eleanor continued, “you remember how Rita and George told us she had inherited the place from her father?” Susanne and I nodded. “Not a bit of truth to it. This place was owned by a local man until about two years ago, when he passed on. He was said to have been quite an eccentric. The rumor is that he amassed quite a fortune and hid it somewhere in the house. He had one heir, a nephew, who tore up the place looking for the money and finally, in frustration, sold it.”

“To Rita and George,” I said.

“Yes.” Eleanor smiled. “And they paid cash for it. The house was torn apart, and the nephew was desperate to sell, but the Olnhausens paid his asking price without any negotiations. Then they opened an account in town. Deposited nearly a hundred thousand dollars. Haven’t touched it as far as the librarian knows.”

“Is she sure?”

“She’s married to the president of the bank,” Eleanor said, “so she would know.”

“We couldn’t get better inside information in Archers Rest.” Susanne smiled.

I looked up at my grandmother. “But it means they aren’t short of money after all. If they weren’t interested in conning Bernie out of her money so they could fix up the place, why did they want us here?”

CHAPTER 19

“If the librarian knows, so does McIntyre,” Jesse said the next morning. He had barely finished dressing, but I couldn’t wait and had barged into his room. “That’s why he didn’t see money as a motive.”

“And that makes Bernie look even more guilty.”

“Not necessarily. Rita could have been jealous of a renewed relationship between her husband and his first love.” Jesse put on his watch and looked at me. An amused look, clearly at my expense, spread across his face. “I would love to have seen Eleanor questioning the librarian and looking for clues.”

“She was just asking around.” I wasn’t sure the idea of my grandmother helping to find George’s killer was as funny as Jesse found it.

“You’ve turned the entire quilt group into an amateur detective agency, haven’t you?”

“Not the entire group.” I was thinking about how Maggie was out of state, and we had left Bernie out of our most recent discussion.

“Right, Natalie, Maggie, and Carrie are clear on this one.”

“Carrie is looking into financials, and Natalie is checking to see if she can find anything about them online,” I said before I could stop myself.

He nodded. “You don’t have access to the Internet in the inn, I guess.” His smile widened. “How does Carrie get financial information? You’ve got to have a social security number for that.”

“Rita asked to open an account with a fabric supplier, using Eleanor as a reference. Eleanor’s known the owner for years and she’s a great customer, so I’m sure he would have been happy to extend any credit Rita or George wanted. Natalie told him Eleanor wanted to read the application and cosign it to smooth the process. She asked him to fax her a copy to give to Eleanor.”

“Which he did, because people will do anything for your grandmother.”

“I also told her to promise him one of Eleanor’s rhubarb pies.”

“Nice touch.” He sat on the bed. “And the form had their social security numbers on it.” He shook his head and started laughing.

“I amuse you now, since it’s not your jurisdiction.”

“I guess. It’s nice to be in on the caper for a change.”

“Happy to include you.”

“You’re kind of cute when you’re masterminding an end run around a police investigation. I’m surprised I never noticed it before.”

“So am I. Do you think George engineered this whole quilt retreat to get reintroduced to Bernie?” I asked.

“Okay, boss, I guess we’re back to the case.” He was having a little too much fun at my expense. “I have a question. Was Rita surprised to see her?”

I tried to remember. “I guess. It’s hard to tell with Rita. I haven’t spent much time with her. She’s always in town or shopping or something. It seemed to me that George did most of the work.”

“Okay, then that’s another contributing factor. George had some
Green Acres
fantasy of a backwoods home. He bought this place and put all his energy into turning it into a quaint inn. But Rita, who is every bit a city girl, saw herself as stuck here. Then add their argument and the fact that maybe George was shopping around for a better fit to his dream, and you have a pretty strong motive.”

“Except, how did he know Bernie would be here? I didn’t even know Bernie would come until she put her suitcase in the car. Being friends with Susanne was certainly no guarantee that she would come with us.”

Jesse shrugged. “No idea. He had roped two of Susanne’s friends into helping. Maybe he just hoped Bernie would be the third.”

I nodded, but that seemed like too much for George to hope. He tracks down a woman he hasn’t seen in over forty years, a woman he may have dumped for his wife, because he wants to leave his wife for her? I guess crazier things have happened. But after all that, rather than contact his lost love directly he sets up an elaborate ruse to get her friends to visit his country inn, hoping that she will just happen to be among them? That was a little too rose-colored glasses, even for a guy with no quilting experience who thought he could run an inn designed especially for quilters.

But for the moment the explanation seemed to satisfy Jesse. As he tied his gym shoes, I got momentarily distracted by the length of his legs and the muscle in his arms and hint of neck that appeared between his shirt collar and his hair.

“This is how it all starts,” I silently reminded myself. “A moment of distraction becomes a romance, then a broken heart, and then what? Maybe in George’s case it turned into a murder.”

Much as I was glad that Jesse and I were unofficially in this investigation together, I didn’t feel ready to share the nagging feeling eating away at me. Especially when I might find myself getting lost in the way he smiled at me or, worse, being more a source of enjoyment than an equal partner in our hunt for George’s killer.

I promised myself I’d share my suspicion with Jesse. But only when I’d gotten to the truth myself.

CHAPTER 20

“Yes, I talked to him,” Bernie said as she poured herself some coffee.

“When?”

She sighed. “The day before we came. He tracked me down at the pharmacy and left a message, and I called him back on his cell.”

“So it wasn’t Eleanor who talked you into coming?”

“No. Though she was right. I had been carrying around a lot of old baggage and I needed to figure out if I could let it go. I needed to come here and I’m glad I did, or I was until yesterday.”

“And that whole ‘Bernie Keegan, small world’ thing that George did when we arrived . . .”

“It was because he didn’t want anyone to know we had talked.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Nell, I know you’re trying to help, but some things are private.”

“This isn’t one of those things, Bernie. A man is dead. And as far as I can tell, you were the last one to see him before the killer. What you and George said to each other is important, and I’m not the only one who’s going to think so.”

She seemed about to cry but held it together. I led her to the kitchen table, and we sat awhile before she spoke.

“It was strange. When I heard his message, I almost dropped the phone. I didn’t think I would ever want to talk to him again, but I couldn’t help myself. I suppose curiosity got the better of me.”

“Just curiosity?”

“Maybe a little nostalgia. I got out a box I keep in the attic, filled with photos of me and George and Rita when we were all kids together. And other things. Movie stubs, a postcard he’d sent me when his family took a vacation in Florida. Dumb stuff. I hadn’t looked at it in years, but for some reason, I never threw it out. It’s just stuff you keep when something or someone is important to you, you know?”

I nodded. “It made you miss him.”

“It made me wonder what happened. We had so many wonderful times. The three of us used to go to the drive-in every Wednesday. We’d sneak Rita in because she never had money for a ticket.” Bernie laughed at the memory. “Then we’d go for pizza or get a bottle of wine out of my parents’ house and drink it in the yard. I thought we’d always be together. Me and George. And Rita too. The three of us were so close, and then it was just him and Rita. He never even told me. I had to find out . . .” She took a deep breath. “He never told me why.”

“So you asked him that in the call?”

“No. I chickened out. He seemed nervous. I felt stupid for even calling. So I just let him talk. He told me about the inn and about the quilt shop. He told me that he thought about me often. He asked if I ever thought about him.”

“What did you say?”

“I reminded him that when we were kids, he told me he wanted to die in my arms. He was romantic like that,” she sniffed. “So I said, ‘George, you’ll die in Rita’s arms. That’s your choice.’ And he said he didn’t think that would happen.”

“So the marriage was in trouble?”

“He didn’t say so in those words. He just asked me to come up. Begged me, really. He sounded so sad, so defeated. And once I got here and saw the place, I thought I knew why. I thought he was at a place in his life where he was wondering if he should have made different choices. Not that I would have gone along with him, I swear to it Nell. I’m not that kind of person.”

“I know.” I put my hand on hers. She looked so tired. The take-no-prisoners Bernie I knew in Archers Rest seemed to be gone, and I missed her terribly.

“I just wanted to know why he’d chosen Rita over me. Maybe a part of me wanted to hear him say he’d made a mistake. Dumb as that sounds, I really thought that was why he wanted me here. That is, until you thought maybe he had lured me up here to take the money he thought I’d inherited from Johnny.”

“Did you tell Chief McIntyre about the calls?”

“No,” she stuttered. “I told him I came up with my friends and talked to George for the first time when he greeted us the other day. I didn’t think it was any of his business. And I figured it would only hurt Rita, and, believe it or not, I really didn’t want to do that.”

I took a deep breath. I wanted to shout but instead I tried to be as quiet and calm as possible. I knew that Bernie was fragile and I didn’t want to make things worse, but, considering how she had handled the matter, I wasn’t sure they could possibly be worse.

“McIntyre will check phone records. He’ll find out the two of you were talking and that you lied about it. And if you lied about that, he’ll start to wonder what else you lied about.”

Bernie put her head in her hands and cried for several minutes. “I didn’t kill George,” she said over and over.

“I know.” I hesitated, but it had to be asked. “What
did
you do with George?”

CHAPTER 21

After a frustrating attempt to get answers from Bernie, who refused to admit that anything was going on with George—she said I “misunderstood” the scene in the kitchen, and was “mistaken” about George drugging me—I headed out, thinking it might be possible to search the crime scene for myself.

But something else caught my eye. Helen, Alice, and Alysse were huddled together outside the classroom.

“Rita called us this morning and told us about George,” one of the twins said. “She said we should come anyway.”

“We want to do what’s right,” the other twin added.

“I’m sure Rita will be glad you’re here,” I said

“Ladies.” We turned around to see Pete coming from the direction of his house. “Rita called me about coming to class.”

Helen leaned toward him. “I certainly don’t want to criticize, but I’m not comfortable continuing under the circumstances.”

He nodded. “She’s grieving. She doesn’t want to be alone. Why don’t we stick close for today? Helen, remember how you brought a tuna casserole over to me after Siobhan left? It meant the world to me that you did that. I bet if you made one for Rita, she would be very grateful.”