The Gingerbread Bump-Off (11 page)

“She’s doing fine,” Winthrop said. “She’s married now, lives in Grapevine. Got a couple of kids of her own.” He smiled. “I get to play grandpa every now and then.”

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

“Sure is.” The smile went away and he grew solemn again. “But that’s not why I stopped by here tonight. It’s about Georgia Hallerbee.”

“Oh, dear.” Phyllis felt the floor seeming to sink under her feet. “You don’t have bad news, do you? She’s not . . .”

Winthrop shook his head. “No, no, she’s still in a coma, as far as I know. That’s terrible enough.”

“Yes, of course. My goodness, where are my manners?” Phyllis gestured toward the living room. “Let’s go and sit down. Would you like something to drink?”

She didn’t offer the cookies this time. Carl Winthrop looked too upset for that.

“No, thanks,” he said as he followed her into the living room. He took a seat in one of the armchairs while she perched on the edge of the sofa. He sat forward and clasped his hands together between his knees. “I was just thinking about her and wondering . . . did you get a chance to talk to her at all that night?”

“You mean the night she was attacked?”

Winthrop nodded. “Yeah. All the stories in the newspaper have been pretty vague. Was she still conscious when you found her? Did she say anything?”

Phyllis suddenly felt nervous. She didn’t know Carl Winthrop well at all, and he certainly looked big and strong enough to have lifted one of those gingerbread men high enough to hit Georgia with it. Sam, Carolyn, and Eve were all upstairs right now, as far as she knew, and she found herself wishing that weren’t the case.

Winthrop was staring at her, waiting for an answer. She said, “I really don’t think the police would want me to be talking about that, Mr. Winthrop. The detective in charge of the case made it clear—”

“I don’t want to get you in trouble,” Winthrop broke in. “I just . . . I just hoped that maybe Georgia was able to tell you why she was so upset. I thought that might help the cops catch whoever did this awful thing.”

“Georgia was upset?” Phyllis repeated. This was the first she had heard about that.

Winthrop nodded. “Yeah. The tour committee got together late that afternoon to go over the route and the plan for that evening, and I could tell then that something was bothering her. I thought it was something about the tour, but she insisted everything was fine. I didn’t really believe her, though. And then she made some comment about stopping by here to see you before the tour started—”

“She told you she was coming to see me?”

“Yeah, but she wouldn’t say why. She just said she needed to talk something over with you. She thought maybe you could help her because you had more experience in that area than anybody else she knew.”

“Something about school, maybe?”

Winthrop shook his head. “No, not school. Detective work. She said she was curious about something, and she thought you could figure it out because you’d solved all those murders.”

Phyllis sat back, a little stunned. Her brain considered the implications of what Carl Winthrop had just told her, and one of them stood out just as bright and obvious as any of those decorations out on her lawn.

Someone had followed Georgia here and attacked her specifically to keep her from revealing something to Phyllis.

In other words, if not for her reputation as a detective, it was possible Georgia might not have been attacked, might not be lying in the hospital right now, desperately clinging to life.

Chapter 10

“ M
rs. Newsom? Mrs. Newsom, are you all right? You look . . . you look like you got sick all of a sudden.”

Phyllis gradually became aware that Winthrop was still talking to her. She made out his words over the sudden pounding of her pulse inside her head. He went on. “I didn’t mean to upset you—”

She lifted a hand to stop him. “No, it’s fine. I’m all right. I’m just surprised that Georgia would say such a thing.”

Winthrop smiled. “You shouldn’t be. You’re something of a celebrity around here.”

Phyllis let that go by. She didn’t bother explaining that that sort of celebrity—or notoriety was more like it, she sometimes thought—was something she hadn’t sought and didn’t want.

“Georgia didn’t give you any details about what was bothering her?”

Winthrop settled back a little in the chair and shook his head. “Nope. Like I said, at first she even denied that anything was wrong. I wish she had just confided in me. I might not have been able to help her, but that way she wouldn’t have been here later on. Wouldn’t have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

That wasn’t the case at all, Phyllis thought. There was nothing accidental about the attack on Georgia. Picking up the gingerbread man and striking her with it might have been a spur-of-the-moment thing, but the assailant had followed her here to shut her up, one way or another. Phyllis was sure of that.

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t be of any help at all,” she said. “Georgia was unconscious when I opened the door. She didn’t say anything to me.”

She hoped she wasn’t doing the wrong thing by revealing that to Carl Winthrop. It hadn’t escaped her mind that he could have an ulterior motive for angling to find out what Georgia might have told her. If
he
was the assailant, he might be trying to make sure his attack had served its purpose and prevented Georgia from telling anyone what was bothering her. Phyllis had no reason to believe that about Winthrop, and in truth, her hunch was that he
wasn’t
the attacker, but it couldn’t be ruled out.

And she was all alone with him down here, she reminded herself.

He shook his head. “I’m sorry to hear that. I was hoping there was
something
we could tell the cops, something that would help flush out the son of a—” He clasped his hands on his knees and heaved a sigh. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to get upset. I’m just so worried about Georgia, and so mad that somebody would do such a terrible thing.”

“I understand the feeling completely, Mr. Winthrop.”

“Please, call me Carl.”

“You must know Georgia fairly well, since you worked on the Jingle Bell Tour with her.”

Winthrop smiled again. “Yeah, we’re on several of the same committees and boards. And she helped out with my campaign when I ran for city council a couple of years ago.”

That was another reason Carl Winthrop’s name was familiar, Phyllis realized. She had seen it on election campaign signs, plastered all over the city. She hadn’t even thought about that until he’d reminded her of it just now. Winthrop had lost that election by a considerable margin, she recalled.

“Georgia was very civic-minded, all right,” she said.

“Is,” Winthrop said. “She
is
very civic-minded.”

Phyllis realized she had just committed the same mistake that had annoyed her when Detective Latimer did it, by referring to Georgia in the past tense. But Latimer had done it the night of the attack, as if it were a foregone conclusion that Georgia was going to die. Now, after several days had passed without her coming out of her coma, the possibility that she might recover was getting more and more remote.

But it couldn’t be ruled out, Phyllis thought. Miracles happened every day.

“Of course she is,” Phyllis said. “I’m sorry.”

Winthrop waved a hand. “It’s easy to get discouraged. I’m not going to give up as long as there’s any hope, though.”

“Certainly not.”

The visitor pushed himself to his feet. “Well, I appreciate the time you’ve given me, Mrs. Newsom. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“It’s no bother at all,” Phyllis assured him.

They went to the front door. Winthrop took a card from his pocket and held it out to her.

“If you hear anything about Georgia, I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call.”

“Of course,” Phyllis said as she took the card. “And if you could do the same . . . ?”

He nodded. “Sure. Well, good night, now.”

“You may have trouble getting back out into the street with all that traffic,” she warned him as he stepped out onto the porch.

“Tell me about it,” he said with a smile. “But maybe somebody will take pity on me and let me out. I mean, nobody’s in a hurry. They’re all going slow to look at those lights.” He glanced around and nodded. “This would have made a great stop on the tour, all right. Maybe next year.”

“Maybe,” Phyllis said.

She waited at the door and watched until Carl Winthrop succeeded in backing out into the street and joining the slow procession of cars in front of the house. She glanced down at the card he had given her.

Carl Winthrop—Financial Consultant—Annuities—IRA Accounts.
The card also had an address, office and cell phone numbers, and an e-mail address on it. It wasn’t really a surprise that Winthrop and Georgia had been friends, since they not only volunteered on a lot of the same projects but also were in roughly the same line of work, although Georgia specialized in accounting and tax consulting. It was all a sea of numbers where Phyllis was concerned. Math had never been her strong suit.

She knew people, though—teaching history for so many years had been as much an education for her as it was for her students—and she suddenly found herself wondering if there was anything between Georgia and Winthrop other than being friends and colleagues. It was true that Georgia was fourteen or fifteen years older than he was—that is, if Phyllis’s estimate of Winthrop’s age was accurate—but she looked considerably younger than she really was and was still in good shape. Winthrop might not have known how old she was and might not have cared if he did. Age was mostly a state of mind anyway, Phyllis had always believed.

She tried to recall if he had been wearing a wedding ring. She didn’t think so. Of course, that wasn’t conclusive evidence that he was single. Plenty of married men didn’t wear rings, although most men from her generation did. Sam still wore his ring, even though he had been a widower for several years.

Phyllis closed the door and started back toward the living room. As she did so, Sam came down the stairs. “Did I hear the doorbell a little while ago?” he asked.

“Yes, one of Georgia’s friends from the tour committee stopped by,” Phyllis said.

Sam frowned. “Not that Fisk lady again, I hope.”

“No, not her,” Phyllis replied with a shake of her head. “I don’t expect to see her visiting again anytime soon. This was a man named Carl Winthrop.”

“What did he want?”

Phyllis hesitated. Ever since Sam had moved in, he had been an excellent sounding board for her theories, and she was upset enough about the one stuck in her head now that she thought it might be a good idea to talk about it.

“Are you busy right now?” she asked instead of answering his question.

He shook his head. “Nope. I was just upstairs watchin’
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
. That Yukon Cornelius always cracks me up, even though I’ve seen it thirty or forty times.”

“Come out to the kitchen with me.”

The two of them went down the hall to the kitchen. Phyllis didn’t want the distraction of all those headlights going past on the street.

She poured cups of herbal tea for both of them. She knew Sam didn’t care that much for it, but he never complained. When they were seated on opposite sides of the table, Phyllis said quietly, “Mr. Winthrop wanted to know if Georgia was still conscious when I found her. He asked if she said anything to me.”

Sam’s bushy eyebrows lowered, making his forehead crease in a frown. “That’s sort of suspicious, isn’t it?”

“That was my first thought, too, but he explained that earlier that afternoon, Georgia mentioned she was coming by here to talk to me before the tour started. Something was bothering her, according to Mr. Winthrop, and she wanted to ask me about it because she knew that I had some experience as a detective.”

Sam’s frown deepened. “That makes it sound like whoever attacked her did it to keep her from talkin’ to you.”

“That’s exactly what I thought.”

“I guess I’ve learned a little about figurin’ things out from bein’ around you.”

Phyllis sipped her tea. “What in the world could Georgia have been worried about? Why would she want to talk to me about it?”

“Maybe she was afraid that somebody she knew was up to no good,” Sam suggested. “Maybe whoever it was, was mixed up in some sort of crime.”

“In that case, wouldn’t she have just gone to the police and reported it?”

Sam turned sideways in his chair so he could stretch out his long legs and cross them at the ankle. He shrugged and said, “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it was a friend of hers, or a relative, and she didn’t want to get ’em in trouble. She might’ve thought that you could tell her a way to get ’em to stop whatever it was they were doin’. Or maybe she wasn’t even sure that anything was wrong and just wanted to see what you thought about it. There’s no tellin’.”

“Everything you say makes sense,” Phyllis mused. “Those things are certainly possible. But if she’d let on to the person that she suspected them, then he—or she—could have followed her and attacked her before she could say anything to me about it.”

“Which brings up another question,” Sam said. “How’d this mystery person know that Miz Hallerbee intended to talk to you about whatever it is they were doin’?”

“She told Carl Winthrop that those were her intentions, straight out.”

“Which brings us right back to this Winthrop fella.”

“But we don’t know who else she might have told, or who else could have overheard her talking to him,” Phyllis pointed out. “All these things are starting to go around and around in my head.”

“Well, there’s one surefire way to stop that from happenin’,” Sam said from the other side of the table.

“How? Tell myself to just not think about it?”

“Nope,” he said. “Find out the truth.”