Deadly Greetings (Book 2 in the Cardmaking Mysteries) (29 page)

“
Ladies,” she said softly,
not meeting our glances. Behind her, she’d mounted a bulletin board
for notes, announcements and general information, which covered a
lot, given the scope of her business. “I’m sorry, but a lease is a
lease. I can’t let you break it and move out.”

“
We’re not here about that,”
Lillian said, and Hester looked relieved. “We’re here about your
little Widows Club. That’s what you meant at the memorial, isn’t
it?”

Hester looked shocked. “How did you know
about that? It was supposed to be a secret.”

I took a deep breath, then said, “How long
did you think you’d be able to get away with killing them for their
money?”

“
What? Have you lost your
mind?”

Lillian was looking at me with the exact
same expression, but I decided to bull on through. “Don’t try to
deny it. I saw you stalking us outside Maggie’s house last
night.”

“
I can explain,” Hester
said, nearly hyperventilating. “I wanted to come in—I swear it—but
you know how nervous I get around people.”

I said, “So you’re denying you had anything
to do with the murders?”

Hester screeched, “Murders! Why do you keep
saying that? Maggie’s death was an accident, and Frances killed
herself. Everybody knows that.”

Lillian said, “Hester, you can stop lying.
We know the truth.”

“
You don’t know anything,”
she screamed. I’d never heard her speak above a whisper before, but
she was certainly coming out of her shell. It was amazing what a
little accusation of double homicide could do.

Lillian was still talking to her when my
gaze drifted back to the board behind the counter. Something had
caught my eye earlier, but I hadn’t been able to isolate it from
the clutter. I walked back to get a better look, then felt my heart
chill as I pulled a handmade card from the collage of facts and
information announcing that someone was moving.

“
Where did you get this?” I
asked as I studied the distinct edging that had been Maggie’s
latest personal pattern. “Did she send you a card, too?”

“
Of course she did. It just
came in the mail today, but what has that got to do with
anything?”

“
You know exactly what I’m
talking about,” I said as I opened the card. Instead of finding
Maggie’s handwriting, though, I saw that someone else had made the
card using those specialty scissors. Inside was an announcement
that someone I knew was leaving town, and they hadn’t uttered the
slightest word to me about it.

I grabbed my aunt’s arm. “Lillian, we’ve
made a mistake.”

“
What? That’s impossible.
The facts are all there.”

I showed her the card without saying a word
and waited while she read the inside. “And we just tried to warn
her,” she said.

Lillian turned to Hester and said, “I’m so
sorry, but you’re going to have lock up your shop and leave.”

“
Lillian, I swear I think
you’ve lost your mind. First you accuse me of killing my friends,
and now you’re telling me to close my business. What’s gotten into
you?”

“
There’s no time right now;
I’ll explain it to you later. Listen to me carefully. No matter
what you do, don’t answer the door, even if it’s someone you think
of as a friend.” She took Hester’s hands in her own and said, “Now
this part is extremely important. There’s one person you must not
let inside, even if she acts like she’s dying. Do as I say, or
Hilda will kill you, just as surely as she killed Frances and
Maggie.”

It took some convincing, but after a few
more minutes, Hester agreed and dead bolted the place up as soon as
we left. I’d tried to get her to come with us, but she wouldn’t
hear of it. It appeared that she wanted to believe Lillian, but I
had the feeling she was locking us out as well as anyone else who
might want to hurt her. I wasn’t sure why Hilda was moving—running
was more like it—but I knew if we didn’t get to her in time, there
might be another “accident” so she could have it all before she
vanished.

“
Call him now,” Lillian said
as she handed me her cell phone. I dialed Bradford’s number, and
got through to him immediately. “Bradford, we need your
help.”

There was a ton of interference on the
phone, and the rain was pounding down on the roof of the ragtop so
hard I could barely hear my own voice.

“
Jen, is that you? I can’t
hear you, you’re breaking up.” There was a pause; then we were
disconnected.

“
You didn’t tell him what we
were doing,” Lillian said.

“
He couldn’t hear me,” I
said. “This rain is miserable. I’ll call him again when we get
there.”

We were on the outskirts of town when
Lillian’s eyes lit up as she said, “Look behind us.”

Coming out of the rain and the gloom, I
could see Hilda speeding toward us in her white truck. As she hit
our back bumper, I felt the Mustang start to skid off the road. She
was trying to kill us!

“
Hang on,” Lillian shouted
as she fought the wheel. We were near a hillside with a pretty
steep drop-off, and I doubted we’d survive the fall if Hilda
managed to force us off the road.

“
What are we going to do?” I
asked, trying not to scream as I looked back at Hilda’s furious
expression.

“
We’re going to survive,”
Lillian said curtly. “Now stop yapping and let me
focus.”

Lillian took another hit, this one spinning
us sideways, jamming us for one moment against a telephone pole and
caving in part of the side before she managed to regain
control.

“
She’s not going to stop
until we’re dead,” I said loudly.

“
Quiet,” Lillian
snapped.

She needed to concentrate on her driving,
but time seemed to come to a standstill as I saw Hilda prepare to
ram us again. I could barely recognize her. Her face was twisted
into a mask of fury, and it looked like the only thing she wanted
in the world was to see us die.

Hilda slammed into us again, and after a
harsh jolt that slammed my head forward, I could feel the back of
the car start to skid toward the trees. I didn’t know how Lillian
managed it, but she corrected at the last second and somehow
straightened us out of the fishtail.

Hilda was growing more furious by the
second, and I could see her face redden as she shouted at us. No
doubt she was frustrated that we refused to die.

She was nearly to us again and I braced
myself for what might be the final impact when Lillian did
something with the gas, the brake and the steering wheel all at the
same time. The Mustang responded to her touch and we were suddenly
turned facing the other direction and out of danger, at least for a
moment or two. Hilda’s reaction time wasn’t nearly what Lillian’s
was, and her vehicle kept going straight, though the road curved
abruptly. The truck hit a tree, started to tip, then was upright
again as another massive trunk caved in the passenger side
entirely. I hoped and prayed that Hilda was still alive, but not
out of any humanitarian spirit. If she died, the secret of why
she’d behaved as she had might die with her, and I didn’t think I
could stand not knowing for the rest of my life.

Lillian looked at me and asked, “Are you all
right?”

“
I’m a little shaky, but I’m
alive, thanks to you.

Where did you learn to drive like that?”

Lillian offered a partial shrug as she
unfastened her seat belt. “Did you forget that my husband Hank
raced stock cars when he was younger? He made sure I knew every
trick he did before he’d let me out on the road. I’ll have to thank
him for that. Maybe I’ll send him a card.”

“
Was Hank your third husband
or your fourth?” I asked as I got out of my side.

“
He was my second husband,
and you know it.”

I was about to say something smart when I
saw the side and the back of Lillian’s car. “Oh no. It’s pretty
bad, isn’t it?”

Lillian shrugged. “Jennifer, it’s only a
car. I was getting tired of it anyway. Call your brother again, and
then we’ll go check on Hilda.”

There hadn’t been any movement from the
truck, but I still kept a wary eye on it as I hit the redial number
on the cell phone.

Bradford answered. “Jen, did you just hang
up on me? This weather’s driving me nuts.”

“
There’s been an accident.
We’re on route twenty-seven, just out of town. Call an
ambulance.”

I could hear my brother’s breath explode.
“Jennifer, are you all right?”

“
I’m fine. Just hurry,” I
said.

“
I’ll be right
there.”

After we hung up, I saw Lillian walking
toward the truck. I called out to her, “Wait a second; Bradford’s
going to be right here.”

“
Jennifer, she might need
our help.”

“
She tried to kill us,” I
said, shouting through the pouring rain.

“
That doesn’t matter right
now,” Lillian said, and I followed her to the truck. I was braced
for another attack, but when I got to the vehicle, I could see that
I needn’t have worried. Hilda was pinned neatly against the
steering wheel, and there was a steady pulse of blood coming from
her forehead. I knew head wounds could be bloody, and Hilda’s was
shaping up to be a real beauty.

I leaned forward, still staying out of her
reach. “Hilda, are you all right?”

She seemed to-come out of it. “Jennifer? Is
that you? What happened?”

Lillian stood beside me. “You tried to kill
us,” she said flatly.

“
I know that,” Hilda
snapped. “How did I miss?”

“
You can curse my second
husband,” Lillian said. “He taught me evasive driving.”

“
Wish he’d have taught me,”
Hilda said. “You two would be out of my hair now.”

I took a deep breath, then said, “You don’t
have any remorse for trying to kill us and succeeding with Maggie
and Frances?”

Hilda said, “I’m sorry I didn’t get away
with it, but that’s not what you want to hear, is it? So you
figured Frances out, too. I was afraid the two of you were too
clever for me. Can you get me out of here? My chest is killing
me.”

“
The paramedics will be
right here,” I said, not wanting to help free such a dangerous
woman, despite the current evidence to the contrary. “So why did
you kill them?”

“
Why do you think? It was
all about the money. Frances was part of a rich family, and I
wanted my share of it. I’ve been sick of living on a widow’s
pension. She’d told us all that she might as well have been
orphaned, but I didn’t believe her. I thought for sure I’d be her
first choice, but then she named Maggie instead of me in her will.
I couldn’t believe it! After Frances was taken care of, I cemented
my friendship with Maggie. I waited until she had time to change
her will to reflect our new relationship; then I decided I had to
take care of her. That part of it worked, anyway. The daft woman
even sent me a card from beyond the grave like she did the rest of
you. I knew I had to kill her. It was the only way I was going to
get my hands on Frances’s money.”

“
Maggie didn’t get any money
from her estate,” Lillian said simply.

“
That’s what she tried to
tell me when I confronted her. She was lying, though, and I knew
it.”

“
So you decided to kill her
too,” I said as the rain finally started to ease up. I couldn’t
hear the sirens yet, but I knew I didn’t have much time if I was
going to get the truth out of her face-to-face, and suddenly it was
very important that I did.

“
I couldn’t trust her, so
she had to go next,” Hilda said calmly. The steady cadence of her
voice sent chills through me that had nothing to do with the icy
rain. “I waited in the back of her van, and I was ready to deal
with her when I noticed she was driving to Howard and Betty’s
house. If news of our arrangement got out, I knew I’d be a prime
suspect, so why not muddy things up a bit? They must have had some
row inside, because Maggie was shaking when she got back to the
van. She drove about a mile up the road, then pulled over so she
could calm down. It was easy taking care of her; she wasn’t
expecting me.”

I wanted to throw up, but the sirens were
coming in the background, and I knew we didn’t have much , time.
“So you made it look like an accident.”

“
I thought I did a pretty
good job too,” she said. “How did I slip up?”

“
My brother told me he found
Maggie with her seat belt unbuckled, and a friend of hers told us
that she was an overly cautious driver, so I knew there was no way
it was an accident like you’d staged it.”

“
But what led you to
me?”

“
A greeting card,” I said as
the first ambulance pulled up. “You used Maggie’s scissors to cut
the edges of the card you just sent to Hester.”

“
They were rightfully mine,”
she said, showing emotion for the first time since we’d been
talking, “She left them to me.”

As the EMTs worked on getting her out of the
truck, Lillian and I walked back to the road and waited for
Bradford.

After what seemed like forever, I was
finally back in my apartment. I could have gone out and faced the
world if I had to, but for the moment, I just wanted to lock the
door and keep everyone and everything out on the other side. I
called Gail and brought her up-to-date, then turned down her offer
to get together. I knew we’d talk about it later—we discussed
everything happening in our lives—but for the moment, I just needed
to be alone. The peanut butter sandwich I ate as the cats dined on
their own victuals was finer than any other meal, since I didn’t
have to leave to get it. By the next morning, I was feeling
somewhat human again, ready to see what the day held.