Deadly Greetings (Book 2 in the Cardmaking Mysteries) (27 page)

“
He was busy,” I said, not
wanting to discuss his liaison with Penny. “I need to talk to
you.”

Instead of inviting me inside as I’d
expected, Jeffrey stood in the opening, one hand on the door.

I looked at him and said, “Do you really
want to do this out here?”

He glanced at his watch. “I really don’t
have time for a long discussion, Jennifer; I’m late as it is.”

“
Fine,” I said, “we’ll do it
in the foyer, then. Why didn’t you tell me Maggie broke up with
you?”

He looked as if someone had hit him with a
bat instead of Wayne. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he
stammered.

“
Come on, Jeffrey, don’t lie
to me.”

“
I don’t care enough about
what you think to lie,” he said. “Besides, it’s none of your
business.”

“
You’re wrong there,” I
said. “Maggie made it my business before she died.”

“
What did she tell you?” he
asked, suddenly very defensive. “Certainly we had our share of
tiffs from time to time, but we were two adults in an adult
relationship. Things were good between us.”

“
Then why did she make this
for you?” I pulled out the card we’d found at Maggie’s the night
before and stuck it in his face.

He read the front, then opened it and stared
at the words she’d written inside. “How do you explain that?”

Jeffrey’s face was almost white. “I don’t
have to, not to you or anyone else.” He took a step inside and
slammed his door shut. “Hey, I want that card back,” I protested.
It was the only real evidence I had that there had been trouble
between them.

“
It’s mine,” he said
sullenly.

I knocked again, but Jeffrey ignored me. So
much for his urgency to leave the building. I could spend the rest
of the morning waiting him out, but I was pretty sure that card had
been shredded by now. I’d really blown it, confronting him without
anyone there to back me up, and worse yet, I’d let him take what
might have been the only real evidence I had against him. If it
turned out that he’d killed Maggie and I couldn’t prove it because
of my negligence, I’d never be able to forgive myself.

I walked out back to the
Gremlin and noticed an odd car parked behind Barrett’s. It was a
Trans Am I’d never seen before, but as soon as I saw the license
plate, I knew who it belonged to. The personalized plate
said
pny urnd.
How clever.
I
wondered what Penny had done to earn it, then tried to
dismiss her from my thoughts. I had other, more important things on
my mind.

Lillian had opened Custom Card Creations
without me, a fact I was thankful for. To my surprise, she and Sara
Lynn were sharing a cup of coffee at my worktable.

“
Good morning,” I said as I
put my purse behind the counter. “I’m glad you’re both here. I only
wanted to have to tell this once.” Sara Lynn hugged me, and Lillian
moved in on the other side.

“
We’re just glad you’re
okay,” Sara Lynn said.

Lillian added, “I hope they fry him for
this.”

I enjoyed their embraces, then backed away.
“I’m willing to bet he’s in pretty rough shape after I hit
him.”

Lillian looked delighted. “Oh, I hope you
broke a few of his ribs. I know how much that hurts; it can be
sheer misery to breathe.”

Sara Lynn asked, “When did you break a
rib?”

“
Skydiving,” she explained.
“I took a bad tumble. It was entirely my fault. But enough about
me. Talk to us, Jennifer.”

I related the night’s events to them, trying
to skim over the facts and leave the commentary out, but with those
two, it was practically impossible. What should have been a
five-minute story ended up taking half an hour, and by the time I’d
declared the subject closed and off-limits forever, I was finished
with it. If there was anything I could do about it, Wayne Davidson
would never haunt my dreams again.

I looked at my sister and asked, “Don’t you
have a store to run?”

“
My staff can take care of
things while I’m gone,” she said. “I’ve got good people working for
me.”

I hugged Lillian’s shoulder. “I do too.
Listen, I appreciate you being here, but I’d kind of like to let
things get back to normal if I can, okay?”

“
I understand,” she said.
“We’ll talk later.”

After Sara Lynn was gone, Lillian said, “So
that’s that. What do we do now?”

I told her what had happened with Jeffrey
Wallace, not able to meet her gaze as I admitted how badly I’d
fouled things up.

“
Nonsense, all is not lost.
Sara Lynn and I both saw that card, so it’s not a matter of your
word against his. Jeffrey’s reaction is interesting, isn’t it? The
real question is if the man’s in denial or if he truly believes
what he told you.”

I said, “You saw that card. Was there an
inch of room to allow them to reconcile?”

Lillian thought about it a few seconds, then
said, “If it had come from anyone else, I would have to agree with
you, but we both know that Maggie had a flair for the
dramatic.”

“
I know,” I said. “When I
tried to tell Bradford what we found, I could tell her past
behavior was on his mind.”

“
So you shared everything
with your brother?” Lillian asked. “Do I even need to ask you what
he thought?”

“
We don’t have enough
evidence,” I said. “I didn’t even have the heart to tell him about
Howard and Betty, not without more proof than we’ve
got.”

“
Jennifer, I think it’s time
we went back to the marker board.”

I looked around the shop. “So have we
completely given up on running this place as a business?”

Lillian shook her head. “If a customer comes
in, we’ll help them, of course, but are you going to be able to put
your heart and soul into this place with Maggie’s death weighing on
the back of your mind?”

“
Probably not,” I admitted.
“Let’s try it again.”

“
Good,” Lillian said,
retrieving the board. “Now where were we?” She studied it a few
moments, then said, “Do you know what, Jennifer? This is useless.”
Before I could protest, Lillian wiped the board with a paper
towel.

“
Hey, I wasn’t done with
that,” I said.

“
Jennifer, we know so much
more now than we did. It’s time for a fresh look at
things.”

I nodded reluctantly, since it was too late
for my protests to do any good. It was time to figure out who had
murdered Maggie Blake, and why.

Chapter 16

“
So where do we start?” I
asked Lillian as she retrieved a marker.

“
There’s the prime
question,” she said as she wrote, “Who killed Maggie and
why?”

“
We had that on the board
before,” I said.

“
Patience,” she said. “We’re
going to approach this differently.”

As she wrote names down the right side of
the board, Lillian said, “Okay, we’ve got our main suspects as
Betty, Howard, and Jeffrey Wallace. Who else should we list?”

“
All of the names in the
club,” I said, “including ours.”

I’d said it as a joke, but Lillian wrote
down “Hilda,” “Lillian,” and “Jennifer.” “Who else?”

“
I was kidding,” I said as I
got up and wiped out our names.

“
What about Hilda?” Lillian
asked. “Should we erase her name too?”

I thought about it a second, then said,
“Let’s leave her up there until we can figure out a reason to take
her name off the list.”

“
Is that it, then?” she
asked.

“
I can’t think of anyone
else,” I said. “Now what do we do?”

Across from the names, she wrote in headings
that spelled “MOM.” I said, “Do you honestly think her mother did
it? If the poor woman’s still alive, she’s at least eighty.”

“
Jennifer, you should read
more mysteries like I do.” As she touched each letter, she said,
“Motive, Opportunity, and Means.”

“
Why isn’t ‘Means’ first?
After all, they both start with M.”

“
Are you trying to be
difficult, or does it just come naturally to you?”

I shrugged. “I was just curious.” I looked
at the board. “Let’s go ahead and do Means first. We don’t even
know how Maggie was killed. How in the world could we know if any
of them had the capability of doing it?”

“
So we do that one later,”
Lillian said. “Let’s tackle Opportunity.”

I pointed to Howard’s and Betty’s names.
“They couldn’t have done it.”

Lillian frowned at the board. “Why not? They
admit they were the last ones to see her alive. It makes perfect
sense to me. You know what kind of mindset Betty’s had lately. The
two of them have been on the brink of divorce for years because of
her jealousy.”

“
That’s exactly why I think
they’re innocent. Can you honestly see the two of them working
together to kill Maggie and make it look like an accident? I doubt
they could agree to a grocery list, let alone such an elaborate
cover-up.”

Lillian paused, then said, “You’ve got a
point.” As she put question marks by their names, she added, “So do
you think Jeffrey Wallace could have done it? There’s no love like
a scorned love.”

I thought about my downstairs neighbor, and
the different sides I’d seen in him in a short period of time. “He
could have done it,” I said. “But I don’t know if he would.”

Lillian said, “Unless we learn otherwise, we
have to assume he had the means to do it, and the opportunity.

He had the motive too, if she’d just dumped
him and he was beginning to realize that she was earnest about
it.”

“
So we convict him now?
Let’s at least wait until we finish the board.”

Lillian sighed. “What possible reason would
Hilda have to murder her? They were dear friends, from what we’ve
heard.”

“
They weren’t best friends
for all that long,” I said. “Before Hilda, Maggie was best friends
with Frances.” I shuddered as I thought about the prospect of that
window coming down on my neck. If she was a ghost inhabiting my
apartment, Frances was trying to make a point, and I wanted to
figure it out before she tried something even more dramatic to get
my attention.

I took the marker from Lillian and wrote
“Frances Coolridge” beside Maggie’s name. “What if their murders
are tied together somehow?”

“
Jennifer, are you still on
that? I can’t imagine why a suicide would be a part of Maggie’s
murder. If Maggie had died first, I could see there might be some
remorse there, but it was the other way around. Frances’s death
didn’t have anything to do with Maggie’s.”

Something clicked in my head, but I couldn’t
say what. There was something we were missing, some connection that
was slipping past. Then it hit me. “Wait a second. Frances’s death
did impact Maggie.”

“
Certainly it’s difficult to
lose a close friend, especially to suicide,” Lillian
said.

“
Humor me, okay? Let’s say
Frances was murdered. So what happened to all her
stuff?”

Lillian spoke as if she were talking to a
small child. “Maggie inherited it. It’s not all that odd, you know.
After all, they were both widows with no children. Who else would
they leave their possessions to?”

Then I remembered what had been bothering
me. “What was it that Patrick said on the telephone last
night?”

“
Which time?” Lillian
asked.

“
When he told you about
Frances’s will, he said he did them all at the same
time.”

“
So? What’s wrong with that?
He had no reason to lie to me,” Lillian said. “And all the
motivation in the ill world to be absolutely straight in his
answers.”

I tapped the marker on the table. “He didn’t
have any reason to volunteer any information either, but I think he
let something slip without meaning to.”

“
Go on. You’ve certainly got
my attention.”

I twirled the marker in my hand a second,
trying to recall Patrick’s exact words. “He said he’d done all of
them the same way, but shouldn’t he have said ‘both of them’?”

“
So he chose the wrong
word,” Lillian said. “We do it all the time.”

I wasn’t buying that. “We’re not sticklers
for language usage like he is. I could hear it every time you
talked to him. Lillian, what if there were more women
involved?”

“
Now you think it’s murder
for profit?” she asked incredulously. “You heard Patrick yourself.
Frances didn’t have anything all that valuable to leave Maggie, and
I doubt Maggie did either for the next in line, if there is such a
person. How do you explain that?”

I couldn’t. “I didn’t say I knew everything,
but it does change the way we look at things, don’t you think?”

“
If we can get Patrick to
admit there are other members of the Widows Club, and that’s a big
if.”

I picked up the telephone and handed it to
her. “So call him and find out.”

She shunned the phone. “I think I’d better
handle this in person.”

“
Great, let me grab my
jacket,” I said.

Lillian shook her head. “Jennifer, I hate to
exclude you, but he’s more likely to breach his professional oath
with me if we’re alone. I doubt he’d want a witness to it.”

“
I want to go,” I said
firmly.

“
I’m sure you do, but I’d
better handle this on my own. In the meantime, why don’t you keep
the shop open? I won’t be long, I promise you that.”