Authors: Traci Andrighetti,Elizabeth Ashby
"Oh my word," Loretta said. "Can you imagine selling children to make a profit?"
The power of her words hit me with such force that I sunk to my knees on the floor. Now I knew why Margaret had hidden her Bible.
Something illegal had happened with those babies listed on the inside flap, and I had the sickening feeling that it had to do with black-market adoption.
* * *
Amy produced the torch lighter that she carried in her satchel in case of emergency, and she lit both of her homemade candles with a flourish.
The scent of pine was immediately so overpowering that it smelled like I was standing in the forest behind my salon rather than in the library. "Wow, those candles have quite an aroma. Are you sure we can't just turn on the lights?"
"They're pungent because I used a steam distillation technique to extract the oil from the pine needles," she said as she opened the drawer of a metal cabinet and began thumbing through the microfiche. "And I already told you. Library employees are not allowed in the building after hours under any circumstances, and Ben goes over the electric bill with a fine-tooth comb. He'll get suspicious if he sees an increase in our kilowatt-hour usage."
I buried my nose in my scarf. "Won't he know that someone was here anyway when he comes in tomorrow morning and the whole place smells like a Christmas tree lot?"
"
Nein
." She slammed the drawer shut. "The cleaning crew gets here before he does, and they use Pine-Sol on the floors. Hence the pine-scented candles."
"Good thinking," I said. "I guess." I sat down at a microfiche reader, but I didn't dare turn it on until I got the green light from Amy. She didn't like people who wasted electricity anymore than her boss did. And judging from the way she'd brandished that torch lighter, I figured I'd do well to sit tight and wait for her instructions.
Amy took a seat at the machine next to me. "Since Margaret moved to Danger Cove in the mid-eighties, I thought we'd start with 1985 and work forward a few years. If nothing turns up, we'll go backward."
"Sounds like a plan. I'll take Gulfport. You take Jackson."
She handed me a stack of microfiche labeled
Sun Herald
and then loaded her reader with the
Clarion-Ledger
.
We switched on our machines and fell silent as we began the work of sifting through the daily newspapers for anything having to do with illegal adoption. Amy flew through the film at the speed of light, whereas I floundered along at the speed of darkness.
After what seemed like an eternity, I finished my first microfiche and returned it to its envelope. "Talk about dry reading. Studying accounting was more stimulating than this."
"Hey, you haven't mentioned accounting lately," Amy said as she inserted a new microfiche into her reader. "How's that going?"
With everything that had been going on, I'd forgotten all about the class. "I'm glad you brought that up. I need to go online and drop the course before the final exam."
"Why would you do that?" she asked, scrolling through a newspaper. "Isn't the final coming up?"
"It's at the end of the month." I inserted a microfiche into the reader.
Her eyes shot to their corners. "That's tomorrow, you know."
"What?" I leaned over and tugged my daily planner from my purse. I rifled through the unused pages until I got to September and saw that it was indeed the 29th. "So much for organization," I said, shoving my planner back into my bag. "What am I going to do now? It's too late to drop."
She shrugged. "Take the exam."
"But what would be the point?" I exclaimed, not without a note of hysteria. "I made a 50 on the last quiz, which means I have, like, a 58 average."
"Then you could still pass," she said with the calm of a candlemaker. "All you need is a 60."
I crossed my arms. "Maybe if I had your brain."
She gave a combined head wave and eye roll. "It's accounting. Nobody does well on those exams, which is why they're always graded on a curve."
"I'm sure clients of accountants everywhere would be thrilled to hear that."
"Just pull an all-nighter tonight," she said, reaching for another microfiche, "and you'll be fine."
I wasn't anywhere near as confident about that, but she had a point. I had nothing to lose by taking the exam and everything to gain. "Okay, but it's already eight thirty," I said with a nervous glance at the clock. "We'd better get a move on."
Amy pushed up her glasses and leaned closer to her screen. "
Ach mein Gott
!"
I touched her back. "Are you okay?"
She pulled away as though I'd just lit the torch lighter in her face. "Of course. Why do you ask?"
My arm fell to my side. "You made a gagging noise, so I thought you were choking."
"I said 'Oh my God' in German because I think I found something."
"That explains it." I slid my chair closer to hers and looked at the screen. "What did you find?"
"Listen to this. It's from February 15, 1986." She cleared her throat. "'The woman whose newborn was falsely declared deceased and then placed for illegal adoption last year has decided to press charges against Presley-Smith Memorial Hospital after the disappearance of the hospital staff members allegedly involved in the scandal. Doctor Jonas Thorpe and Nurse Leona Hawthorne, who were charged with kidnapping and abduction in the case, are presumed to have fled Jackson to avoid prosecution.'"
I looked at her open mouthed. "The nurse's name was Leona," I whispered. "That's the same name Clyde said in Margaret's house."
Amy's lips formed a grim line. "Do you think there's a connection?"
"I don't know," I said, resting my elbows on my lap. "I guess Leona could have been someone Margaret knew, like a friend or a relative."
"Well, who did the Bible belong to?"
I pressed my temples and tried to focus. "I thought that it was Margaret's. But now that you mention it, I don't remember seeing her name inside, so maybe it belonged to Leona. What else does the article say?"
She turned to the screen. "'Jackson native Hazel Kirkpatrick—'"
I gasped. "Stop right there," I said, leaping to my feet. "I remember that name. There was a 'Baby Kirkpatrick' listed in the Bible."
"So there is a connection," she said.
"It sure looks that way, doesn't it?" I began pacing back and forth in front of the stacks. "Does the article name any other victims?"
She shook her head. "It says that even though Ms. Kirkpatrick got her baby back, she felt that she had a 'personal and moral obligation' to file suit in case other women and their infants were victimized by the hospital staff."
I thought of the thirty babies named in that Bible. "So, no one knew of any other victims in 1986."
"Apparently not." She turned off both of the readers. "Let's go google this case to see what else we can find out."
I followed Amy to the public computers located next to the microfiche readers. She pressed the spacebar to wake the computer from sleep mode and entered both the doctor's and the nurse's names. "Here's an article that explains how Dr. Thorpe and Nurse Hawthorne tricked Ms. Kirkpatrick."
I looked over her shoulder.
She pointed to a line of text. "It says here that they took the baby while she was under anesthesia for an emergency C-section. Then when she woke up they told her it was stillborn."
I rose to my feet and rested a hand on my nauseated stomach. "What awful, horrible people."
"You can say that again." She clicked Images at the top of the screen. "Let's see what these monsters look like."
I leaned forward to scrutinize their photographs and then promptly leaned back. I didn't recognize the doctor, but I knew the nurse.
She was a fifty-something Margaret Appleby.
With my head propped on my hands, I watched from the break room table as my third double espresso of the morning dribbled from the machine. The steady stream of liquid had a soothing, hypnotic effect, and my eyelids lowered to a close.
"Well?" Gia's voice punched through the silence like a fist pump.
My eyelids jerked open. Then I jumped.
She stood before me in a black T-shirt, with a giant, gold Medusa on the front, and a pair of black tights. To complete the look, she'd accessorized with a snake-coil bracelet and done her hair in tight ringlet curls that looked a lot like the snakes on Medusa's head. "Did you finish the exam?"
"Not in what I'd call spectacular style," I replied as I tried to rub the scary sight from my eyes. "But I submitted my answers, yes."
"At least it's over." She pulled a newspaper from under her arm and threw it on the table.
"Yeah." I yanked down my Pink sweatshirt as I rose from the table to get my caffeine. "Because now I can get back to focusing on the fun stuff, i.e., the murders, Lucy's incarceration, and the impending failure of my business."
Gia grabbed a bag of bagels and a jar of Nutella from the cabinet and flopped down at the table. "You're in a mood."
"Actually, I feel just like the image on your shirt looks."
She arched a gold-glittered brow. "If you felt like Donatella Versace,
cug
, you'd feel frighteningly fabulous."
I didn't bother to correct her about the identity of the image, because the designer did bear a resemblance to Medusa. "You got the 'frighteningly' part right, because I am afraid." I poured a liberal dose of sugar into my cup. "As soon as I tell Detective Ohlsen about Margaret's double identity, he's going to arrest me for sure."
"So rude," she exclaimed, using her finger to extract a glob of the chocolate-hazelnut spread from the jar. "I mean, he should be thanking you for helping him solve his case."
I slid into my seat. "You know he's not going to see it that way."
"Then don't tell him about Margaret. He keeps telling you that it's his job to do the investigating, so let him do it. What's the worst that could happen?"
"I'll tell you." I leaned forward to make sure she paid attention to me and not the Nutella—which even I had to admit was delightfully distracting. "Someone else could turn up blue, like you or me, for instance."
"Not likely." She calmly licked the chocolaty goo from her fingernail, revealing the Versace Greek key logo. "We don't have anything to do with this adoption vendetta. And besides, how many other people in Danger Cove could possibly be connected to crimes that went down in Mississippi thirty-something years ago?"
I chewed my thumbnail. "What if it's not about the adoptions?"
She gave me a get-real glare. "The woman stole thirty babies from their mothers. It had something to do with her death."
My gut told me that Gia was right, but it was also telling me that there was more to this crime than we suspected—and that I'd had too much espresso. "I'm not sure it's that simple."
"What do you mean?" She spooned chocolate-hazelnut spread onto her bagel.
"Don't forget that Uncle Vinnie died in this building too."
She shook her snakes. "Vinnie couldn't have had anything to do with the illegal adoptions. He lived in Jersey then."
"Well, I think there's a connection between him and Margaret. I just don't know what it is yet."
"Oh, I know what it is." She bit into her bagel with gusto. "A looove connection."
I gave her a stop-it stare and shot the rest of my espresso.
Gia opened the newspaper and then closed it. She had that
I did not just see what I thought I saw
look on her face.
I put my coffee cup on the table for fear that I might launch it. "What is it now?"
"Duncan strikes again."
I reached for the paper and opened it to the front page. The headline "Homicide by Barbicide!" covered the top, and below it the faces of Margaret and Seth were juxtaposed over a photo of the salon. Thankfully, they were not only alive in the image, but they were also in black and white. I pushed the paper away. "At least he didn't use the picture of Sadie again."
"Aren't you going to read it?" she asked with wide, heavily eye-lined eyes.
I stood up and took my coffee cup to the sink. "I have something I need to do right now."
She dropped the bagel onto her plate. "Don't tell me you're going to turn yourself in?"
"Not yet. I want one last shot at tying Bertha to this case."
"About that," she said, resting her forearms on the table. "While you were taking your exam, I called Presley-Smith Memorial, and they have no record of her."
I sunk back into my chair. "Are you sure? Maybe it's HR policy to tell that to callers who don't have a signed release."
"Hey, this is me we're talking about," Gia said with a gesture to her chest that caused the rhinestone eyes on her snake-coil bracelet to flash. "I sent a signed release—signed on behalf of Bertha by me. And the man I spoke to said that Bertha had never worked at that hospital."
I crossed my arms. "Maybe she's using an assumed name, like Margaret was."
"If that were the case, those two wouldn't have peacefully coexisted here in Danger Cove until now."
Gia had a point. If Bulldog had an old bone to pick with Margaret, it would have come out long before now. "You don't suppose that Bertha was one of the mothers whose babies were stolen, do you?"
She gave me a blank look not unlike that of the Medusa on her shirt. "Uh, she would have been something like fifty back then."
"Right. So that's out." I drummed my fingers on the table. "The only other thing I can think of is that she was a relative of one of the women whose babies were stolen."
"That's a long shot."
"Nevertheless, I'm going to talk to Santiago." I stood up and pulled the car keys from my purse. "I have to find out why the police released Bertha and arrested Lucy instead."
"What about the plumber?" She glanced at the clock. "He said he'd be here by nine, which is in fifteen minutes."
"You'll be here to let him in." I opened the door and then turned to face her. "Just call me if it's going to cost more than three hundred dollars, because I might want to get a second bid."
"All right. But be careful, will ya?" She put her hand on Medusa's face. "All of a sudden, I'm getting that bad feeling about today."
"You're such a drama queen," I said and then closed the door behind me. I didn't want to let on, but the truth was that I was getting a bad feeling too.
* * *
"Mr. Beltrán will see you now," a smoky female voice announced.
I looked up from my complimentary plate of salmon-dill-cream-cheese finger sandwiches to see a statuesque, red-saronged brunette with a Coveside Retirement Resort name tag that said
Minka
.
Before we could make eye contact, she turned runway-style and glided down a sparkling marble-floored hallway with gilded paneling.
I shoved a sandwich into my mouth and hurried after her. Judging from what I'd seen of the so-called "resort," the joke was on those of us who didn't live here, not on the elderly. The place was a cross between a luxury condo complex and a spa with a splash of tropical island hotel. It made my old Victorian house look like a rundown, well, brothel.
Minka opened a door and ushered me inside.
What I saw stopped me cold in my tracks, and I stress "cold."
Santiago was lying half-naked and face down—getting a full body massage.
I'd imagined that he'd be wearing linen, as in a Guayabera shirt, but not as in a bedsheet. I looked at the red-muumuued masseuse, whose name tag read
Helga
but could easily have read
Hulk
, and pointed behind me toward the door. "Maybe I should wait outside."
Santiago propped himself onto his forearms. With his thick, white hair and matching mustache, he looked more like Cesar Romero than Ricardo Montalbán. "
Señorita
Conti," he began with a mild accent, "to what do I owe the pleasure?"
I didn't know what made me more uneasy—his fur-pelted back or his emphasis on the word
pleasure.
"Mr. Beltrán, I—"
"Santiago,
por favor
." He flashed a celebrity smile.
His white dentures contrasted so sharply with his coffee-colored skin that I flinched. "I was hoping to talk to you about the investigation into the deaths of Margaret Appleby and Seth Windom."
If he was surprised by the request, he didn't show it. But maybe that was because Hulk was leaning on him with the bulk of her weight and digging her elbows into his muscles.
"Specifically," I continued, sitting on the edge of a plush leather recliner situated in a cluster of palm trees, "I'd like to ask you about your relationships with Margaret and Bertha Braun."
"
Un momentico, mi corazón
." He pressed a button at the head of the massage table. "Minka, bring the
señorita
un batido de mango y melón
,
por favor
."
"Oon bahteedoe?" I asked.
He motioned toward a frozen drink garnished with a strawberry on a tray beside him. "A smoothie."
I sunk deeper into the chair and searched for the lever to the footrest. While I was here, I was going to make myself as comfortable as possible.
"You were saying,
cariño
?"
"Huh?" I looked up. "Oh, yeah. How did you know Margaret?"
"
Mi Margarita
." He gave a deep sigh. "I met her a few years ago. She was the apple of my eye until I met
Berta
," he said, omitting the
h.
"You know, Bertha came to my salon the day that Margaret was murdered."
"
Sí
," he confirmed, laying down and closing his eyes. "I saw her on the street outside, showing her makeup to two women."
Probably Eve and Loretta
, I thought.
"Her eyes looked so mysterious, I could not resist her."
"Mysterious" is one word for it. "Monstrous" is another.
"I picked her up and took her straight to my bed."
"Wait," I said, both to stop him from adding any lurid details and to gather my thoughts. "You picked her up from The Clip and Sip? But I thought that she was going home to get ready for your dinner reservation."
"As we say in Cuba, '
El sexo es libre y el ron es barato
,' which means, 'Sex is free, and rum is cheap.' There is no need to spend money at an expensive restaurant when you have a beautiful woman on which to dine, no?"
I was so surprised that Bertha had an alibi that I didn't remember to be grossed out by his comment. But I did remember not to answer his rhetorical question.
Hulk cleared her throat. "It's time to turn over, Santiago."
He rolled over while she manipulated the linen. As he settled onto his back, he ogled her chichis. "
¡Ay
,
qué melones!
"
This time even I understood that the melons he was talking about weren't in a smoothie.
Hulk giggled and began stroking Santiago's legs with long, sweeping movements.
I shifted uncomfortably in my comfortable chair. "What about the night of the fundraiser for the lighthouse when Dr. Windom was killed? I saw Bertha talking to him at the Smugglers' Tavern, but I didn't see you."
"I wasn't feeling well," he replied with his eyes closed. "In fact, I began to have some pains in my chest. So I called her at the tavern to ask her advice, and she came here to drive me to the hospital."
"What time was that?"
"Six o'clock."
I leaned forward. "But that was around the time I saw her talking to Dr. Windom on the deck."
"
Sí, mi amor
. I am afraid that I interrupted their conversation."
"Okay, but what time did she drive you to the hospital?"
"At six thirty. And, according to the police, Dr. Windom died between seven thirty and nine thirty that night. At that time, Berta and I were in the emergency room." He turned to look at me and winked. "Getting frisky. So you see…" His voice trailed off as he opened his arms wide.
Minka floated into the room, handed me the
batido
, and left without a sound.
I hoped that there was some "ron" in the smoothie, because I needed a drink. I took a sip and marveled at the fact that Bertha had alibis for both of the murders. Now I knew why the police had released her, but I still had a few more questions I needed to ask. "Do you know whether Bertha ever lived in another state?"
"She told me that she has lived in this area her entire life."