Wedding Cake Killer (11 page)

Chapter 16

S
he had been to too many funerals in
her life, Phyllis thought two days later as she sat in the cemetery, trying not to shiver as a chilly wind blew across the rolling green hills around them.

She wondered, if she tried, could she count them all up, going as far back over the years as she remembered? Or were there too many for that?

It hadn’t been long, only a few weeks, since she’d attended another graveside service in this very cemetery. The person who’d been murdered on her own front porch had been laid to rest that day, which had also been cold and windy. Phyllis looked across the cemetery, but although she could pin down the area, she couldn’t see the actual grave.

Not that it really mattered. Life had moved on without the person who was resting there, just as it would one day move on without her. Funerals, graveside services, memorials . . . it was often said that these things actually were for the living, not the dead, and that was true.

They were meant to remind everyone who attended them that someday the end would come for them, too.

Phyllis closed her eyes and tried to banish those grim thoughts. The minister was droning on, the wind was cold, and even the day was gloomy, with thick clouds clogging the sky and the potential for snow in the forecast for that night. Suitable weather for what had brought them here. Phyllis was ready for it to be over.

Eve sat beside her, with Carolyn on Eve’s other side. As Eve began sobbing quietly, Phyllis and Carolyn took hold of her hands and squeezed to give her strength. They all wore gloves and hats and sober dark suits. Sam stood to the side with the other pallbearers, the wind ruffling his thick salt-and-pepper hair and plucking at his tie.

Mike and Sarah sat in the second row of folding chairs under the canopy that had been set up over the grave and the casket. They had left Bobby with a sitter this afternoon. Mike wasn’t in uniform, thank goodness. He was off duty today. In fact, no one from the sheriff’s department was here officially, although a Weatherford police car had led the procession from the funeral home to the cemetery. The officer hadn’t stayed for the service, though.

Juliette Yorke was here, too, also in the second row, next to Sarah. And Dolly Williamson and a number of other retired teachers and administrators had shown up for the funeral and also come out here to the cemetery. There were more mourners than Eve had expected. She was well liked, even loved, in the educational community. In fact, many of the same people who had been at the bridal shower on Christmas Eve and the wedding on New Year’s Eve had come today to bid farewell to Roy, even though they hadn’t known him well. They knew Eve, and that was enough, Phyllis had thought as she looked at all the solemn, familiar faces.

She had spotted Loretta Harbor and Velma Nickson and remembered the spat the two women had had at the bridal shower. That seemed so far in the past now, and so unimportant, too. Phyllis hoped their feud wouldn’t lead them to say or do anything to disrupt the service. It didn’t seem likely, since they were sitting as far away from each other as possible.

There were other familiar faces besides the retired teachers. Jan and Pete Delaney were there, looking solemn. They had to be upset about the fact that a murder had been committed in their bed-and-breakfast, and Jan had been the one who had found Roy’s body, Phyllis recalled. That must have been a terrible thing for her. She wouldn’t have blamed them if they had stayed away, but like everyone else, they were here for Eve.

Finally, the minister seemed to be wrapping up his remarks. When he said, “Let us pray,” Phyllis bowed her head not only in reverence but also in relief.

After the prayer, Sam and the other pallbearers, all of them retired teachers Phyllis had recruited, took off the carnations that had been pinned to their lapels by the funeral director and placed them on the casket with the other flowers. Then they moved along the front row of chairs to shake hands with Eve and offer their condolences. The rest of the mourners followed suit. Jan Delaney bent down to hug Eve, as did several of the other women.

Now that the service was over, most of the people headed for their cars, obviously eager to get out of the cold wind, and who could blame them, Phyllis thought. Others remained behind briefly to talk to old friends. The Delaneys were among them, and when Jan caught Phyllis’s eye, she knew that the woman wanted to talk to her.

“I’ll be right back,” she told Eve, who only sighed and nodded. Phyllis stood up and walked back among the other grave markers to join the Delaneys.

“We’re so sorry about all this,” Jan began. “And I really hate to bother you with it, but we need to know what to do about the things that are still at the house. You know, the things that belong to Eve and . . . well, that belonged to her and Roy.”

Phyllis nodded and said, “That’s all right. I understand. I assume the police have already conducted all their searches and the room isn’t taped off as a crime scene anymore?”

“That’s right,” Jan said, which confirmed Phyllis’s guess that Roy’s body had been found in the room he’d shared with Eve at the bed-and-breakfast. Until now she hadn’t known that for certain.

“Did the investigators take some of their belongings?”

Jan started to answer, but before she could, Pete said, “The officers told you not to talk about that or anything else about the case, Jan, remember?”

“Oh, yes, of course. I’m sorry, Mrs. Newsom.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean to pry,” Phyllis said quickly.

Which wasn’t exactly the truth. She
had
meant to pry. She was a prying, meddling, self-righteous old snoop. More than likely that was what some people thought of her, anyway. She didn’t care. All that mattered to her was finding out the truth, clearing Eve’s name, and bringing Roy’s killer to justice.

“I guess I can’t talk about anything the investigators did,” Jan went on, “but I can tell you that quite a few things are still at the house. I’d be glad to box them up so that someone can get them and take them back to your place. Eve’s going to be staying there, isn’t she?”

Phyllis nodded and said, “Yes.” She started to add,
for the time being
, but then she realized that sounded like she expected Eve to be going somewhere else—prison, maybe—and she wasn’t going to entertain that notion even for a second.

She went on, “Sam and I can come out and pick them up in a few days, whenever you’re ready. Will that be all right?”

“That’ll be fine,” Jan said with a smile. “Thank you for being so understanding about this.”

“Well, you don’t need the room just sitting there empty when you can rent it again.”

Pete said, “Yeah, we’ll be lucky if we’re able to do that. I don’t know if anybody will ever want to stay in a room where a murder took place, but I worked hard getting the bloodstain out of the rug . . . Blast it, now I’m saying things I shouldn’t.”

“It’s all right,” Phyllis told him. “I know how hard it is not to talk about something when it’s all you can think about.”

“Yeah, you’ve been mixed up in cases like this before, haven’t you? I remember reading about you in the newspaper.”

Phyllis shrugged and didn’t say anything.

Jan clasped her hands and said, “I’ll give you a call.”

“That’ll be fine,” Phyllis said. She waved good-bye as the Delaneys headed for their car.

Turning, Phyllis went back to the canopy. Eve was on her feet now, standing with Carolyn and Sam, talking with Dolly Williamson. The former superintendent was still a formidable figure despite her age. Phyllis didn’t know exactly how old Dolly was, but she had to be in her eighties.

Dolly hugged Eve and said in her booming voice, “Anything you need, you just let me know, you hear?”

“Of course, Dolly,” Eve said.

Dolly hugged the other three of them in turn before going to her car. Carolyn shook her head as she watched her go.

“I miss the days when if you had a problem, you could tell Dolly about it and she would make it go away.”

“I’m not sure if it was ever really like that, or if she just made it seem that way,” Phyllis said.

“Either way, life seemed a lot simpler then. I thought once you retired, everything was supposed to be simpler. That’s what I planned on.”

“Well, you know the old sayin’,” Sam said. “Life is what happens when you’re makin’ other plans.”

Phyllis glanced at the flower-bedecked casket sitting on the mechanism that the funeral directors would use to lower it into the grave vault once everyone was gone. It was vivid evidence of the futility of making too many plans.

She linked her arm with Eve’s and said, “Let’s go home.”

“That’s a good idea,” Carolyn said. “People have brought so much food, we’re going to be doing nothing but eating for a week just to keep up with it.”

Eve shook her head. “I don’t think I can eat.”

“Now, don’t start that,” Carolyn said as the four of them walked toward Phyllis’s Lincoln. “The past few days you haven’t eaten enough to keep a bird alive, and it’s time you got your appetite back.”

“Life goes on, you mean?” Eve said. “I appreciate the sentiment, dear, but—”

“But, nothing,” Carolyn said, her voice even blunter than usual. “Nobody’s saying that you have to stop mourning Roy. You’ll do that when the time is right, and not before. But you do have to keep living, and part of that is eating. You know good and well that’s what Roy would want you to do. He always had a healthy appetite, didn’t he?”

“Oh, yes. He loved to eat.” Eve smiled. “He would have loved all the potato salad and the casseroles and the pies . . .”

“You see what I mean? He would expect you to eat and enjoy all that good food.”

“You know, I think you’re right,” Eve said. “Thank you, Carolyn. Maybe I can eat a little when we get back to the house.”

That reaction was encouraging, Phyllis thought. Sometimes, what a person needed more than anything else was some straight talk. And nobody could be counted on for straighter talk than Carolyn Wilbarger.

Almost everyone had left now. The hearse and the funeral director’s car were still here, of course, and in the distance there was a pickup that probably belonged to the man who would use a tractor to cover the grave later on, but Phyllis didn’t want to think about that.

There was also one car parked not too far from her Lincoln, but Phyllis didn’t recognize it or the woman who was sitting in it. When the woman saw them coming, she got out of the car.

She wore a long dark brown coat, the tails of which swayed a little in the wind. Even though the coat mostly concealed her shape, Phyllis could tell that she was tall and slender. Sunglasses covered her eyes despite the overcast sky. She had blond hair that fell in wings around her face.

For a second Phyllis thought that this was one of the teachers she didn’t know, one of Eve’s coworkers from her last years at the high school. But then Phyllis realized she had never seen this woman before. Clearly, though, the woman wanted to speak to them.

“Mrs. Porter?” she said as she stepped away from her car.

Eve and the others all stopped. “Yes?” Eve said. “Do I know you, dear?”

The woman took her sunglasses off, revealing blue eyes. She smiled, which relieved the rather stern lines of her face. “No, we’ve never met,” she said.

“Did . . . did you know my late husband?”

“I’m afraid I never met Roy Porter, either, although I wouldn’t have known him under that name. But I’ve been looking for him for quite a while.”

Eve shook her head in confusion and said, “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why were you looking for Roy, and what do you mean about his name?”

Phyllis was confused, too, and a bad feeling had cropped up suddenly inside of her. She had a hunch that Eve wasn’t going to like whatever this woman was about to say.

“My name is Tess Coburn, Mrs. Porter, and I’m a private investigator. I’ve been looking for your husband because he was a con artist and a thief.”

Chapter 17

I
n
the shocked silence that followed Tess Coburn’s statement, Sam was the first one to react. He moved quickly, putting himself between his three friends and the stranger and saying, “I think you’d better get on outta here now, miss.”

Carolyn spoke up next, bristling with fury as she said to Tess Coburn, “How dare you—”

The woman ignored both of them and went on, “I’m sorry to have to break it to you like this, but you have a right to know the truth.”

Sam crowded closer to her. “Look, lady, I’m tryin’ to be a gentleman because that’s the way I was raised, but I’m tellin’ you, you better leave.”

She gave him a cold stare and said, “Back off, Mr. Fletcher. I don’t bully easily.”

“Everyone settle down,” Phyllis said as she took hold of Sam’s arm and got a firm grip on it. She glared at Tess and went on, “Have you no sense of decency, Ms. Coburn? We just buried my friend’s husband.”

Tess stuck her hands in the pockets of her coat and said, “Actually, I do have a sense of decency, Mrs. Newsom. That’s why I don’t want your friend there to waste one more minute mourning the death of that man when he doesn’t deserve it.”

“Stop it!” Eve cried in a ragged voice. “Please, stop saying things like that!”

“I don’t blame you for not believing me. He was good, very good, at what he did. But just let me show you one thing.”

Tess took her hand out of her pocket, and for one crazy second, Phyllis thought she was going to pull a gun. Instead, it was a photograph Tess took from her pocket. A police mug shot, in fact, and when she held it up where they could see it, another shock jolted Phyllis as she recognized Roy. He was considerably younger in the photo, but there was no doubt that it was him. Eve exclaimed in pained recognition.

“His name then was Jack DeWalt,” Tess said. “At least that’s what he was calling himself. This photo was taken twelve years ago in Sarasota, Florida, when he was arrested for fraud. He had married a woman named Doris Tilley and cleaned out her bank accounts. She realized what he’d done in time to alert the police, and they arrested him at the airport just as he was about to fly out of town. Unfortunately, he was released on bail and promptly disappeared. He changed his identity, and Mrs. Tilley never got her money back. The police were never able to find out where DeWalt stashed it.”

Phyllis and the others listened to this recital in stunned disbelief. Tess wasn’t finished, though. She took a notebook from her pocket and opened it.

“The next place he cropped up was Louisville, Kentucky, using the name Harry Evans. He got married there, too, to a woman named Patrice Wilson. She owned a very successful horse farm. Evans talked her into giving him power of attorney; then he sold the place out from under her, pocketed the proceeds of the sale, and vanished, leaving her up to her neck in litigation and broke, to boot.”

“Wait just a minute,” Carolyn broke in. “How do we know this man Evans was the same person?”

Tess took a newspaper clipping from the notebook and held it out. The clipping was from a society section, and the photo in it showed Roy dressed in a tuxedo at some fancy affair. Standing next to him was an attractive older woman in a stunning gown. Both of them held drinks as they smiled at the camera. Phyllis leaned forward to read the caption under the photo, which identified the couple as Harry and Patrice Evans of Oakdale Farms.

“I don’t know if it was his next stop after Louisville or not, but the next place I was able to identify him was Tulsa,” Tess started to go on, but Eve cried out and stopped her.

“No more,” Eve moaned. “Please, no more.”

“I hope you’re proud of yourself,” Carolyn snapped at Tess. “You’ve destroyed this poor woman.”

“Not at all,” Tess said briskly as she closed her notebook. “I’ve saved her from spending the rest of her life mourning that man. And I’ve probably helped her defense as well. Now her lawyer can point out that she had a good reason to kill him, once she found out that he’d been lying to her and planned to steal all her money and abandon her. She ought to be able to plea-bargain the charge down to manslaughter without much trouble.”

Eve burst out in a miserable wail.

“She didn’t kill him,” Phyllis said, “and I don’t care what Roy did in the past; he never hurt her. You’re terrible for doing this, Ms. Coburn, just terrible.”

Tess shrugged. “Think whatever you want. I can’t stop you. But I still think Mrs. Porter has a right to know the truth.”

“A right, maybe, but not an obligation.”

Even as Phyllis spoke, she wasn’t sure she was correct about that. Of course, Eve could have gone the rest of her life without knowing what appeared to be the dreadful truth about the man she had married. She might have been happier that way. But that happiness would have been based on a lie.

And Phyllis had already realized something else. All along they had been asking themselves why anyone would have had a reason to want Roy Porter dead.

If what Tess Coburn had told them was true, then she might have just given them that reason.

“Carolyn, take Eve to the car,” Phyllis went on. “I need to talk to Ms. Coburn.”

“I want to give her a piece of my mind, too—,” Carolyn began.

“Please,” Phyllis said, and a steely edge had come into her voice despite its polite tone.

“All right,” Carolyn said. “Come on, Eve.” She tightened her arm around Eve’s shoulders and led her toward Phyllis’s Lincoln as Eve continued to sob. Sam stayed behind with Phyllis and Tess Coburn.

“Look, I’m sorry—,” Tess said.

“I don’t think you really are,” Phyllis said. “But I’ll grant that you probably believed you were doing the right thing.” She took a deep breath. “I’d like to talk to you some more about Roy’s past.”

Tess nodded. “We can do that. It would be a good thing if you could help Mrs. Porter to understand that this wasn’t her fault. Whatever his real name was, that man had been taking advantage of women like her for years and years. He was very talented at it.”

“Is that the only reason you came here today? To tell Eve about him?”

A thin smile appeared on Tess’s face. “Not completely. I’ve been on his trail for a while. I guess I just wanted to see for myself that he was really dead, that it wasn’t another of his tricks to get away. Now I know. He won’t be swindling any other women.”

“No,” Phyllis said. “He won’t.” She paused. “Since you obviously know who we all are, I assume you’ve been stalking us for a while.”

Tess frowned and said, “Hey, hold on there. I haven’t stalked anybody. I just got to Weatherford yesterday. It didn’t take me long to find out what’s been going on, though. All of you turn up in the online newspaper archives. You’re sort of like Texas’s version of Miss Marple, aren’t you, Mrs. Newsom?”

“Not at all,” Phyllis said. “Your investigation must have told you where we live.”

“Sure,” Tess said with a nod.

“Can you come by there in an hour or so? I’d really like to talk to you some more about this.”

Tess hesitated as she glanced at the car where Eve and Carolyn sat in the backseat. Eve was resting her head on Carolyn’s shoulder, and her back was shaking a little as she continued to cry.

“Look, maybe I got carried away a little—,” Tess began.

“Maybe?” Sam said. “You reckon?”

“I’m sorry, okay? It might be better if I just left you folks alone from here on out. The guy’s dead, which means that my part of the case is over.”

Phyllis shook her head. “I’m sure Eve will go up to her room when we get home. We’ll be discreet and try not to let her know that you’re even there. But I’d really like to hear whatever you know about Roy.”

“I wouldn’t mind hearin’ about that myself,” Sam put in with a shrug.

“So you’re a detective, too?” Tess said.

Sam shook his head. “Not me. Phyllis is the one who always figures out everything.”

“Well, I don’t mind talking to both of you, I suppose. If you’re sure it won’t upset Mrs. Porter even more.”

“It’s a little late to be worrying about that,” Phyllis said. “But please come by anyway.”

“All right,” Tess said. “If it’s that important to you, I’ll be there in an hour or so.”

“Thank you.”

Tess put her sunglasses back on and got into her car. As she drove away, Sam said, “That gal’s got a lot of nerve, showin’ up at the cemetery this way and sayin’ all those rotten things to Eve.”

“You saw the pictures she had,” Phyllis said. “From the looks of them, she wasn’t lying about Roy.”

“Maybe not, but her timing still stinks. She was at the funeral home, wasn’t she?”

Phyllis nodded. “Yes, I remember seeing her there. I just thought she was one of the women who taught at the high school the last year or two that Eve was there. I don’t know most of them.”

“Me, neither. But I figure I know why you want to talk to her . . . You’re thinkin’ that if Roy really was a con man like she claimed, that’s a good reason for somebody from his past wantin’ him dead.”

“You know what Juliette said about trying to establish reasonable doubt.”

“Yeah, and Roy havin’ a bunch of enemies is one way to get it.” Sam nodded. “I guess it’s a good idea findin’ out all we can . . . but that doesn’t mean we have to like that Coburn woman.”

“No,” Phyllis said, “it doesn’t mean that at all.”