Gone Crazy (11 page)

I was giddy as a teenager with her first car, and as proud. I rolled down Main, past the churches and the Emergicare, Shiflet Hardware, Joe Brady’s Hunt & Fish, the liquor store, Blue Quartz Pottery, Shiflet Realty, on down past the library and WCZY. Then the road veered more or less east, became Piedmont Road, and we paraded past the veterinarian, the mini-plaza, out to the Elk Creek Apartments and back. Even Boris was preening as we went up and down the town’s side streets. Seventh through First, then Littlepage Road‌—‌aptly enough, leading up to the Littlepage estate‌—‌and Spottswood Lane. When I was done, I ran out to the animal shelter on Turner Gap Road to show off the cruiser to Aunt Marge and Roger.

The adoption fair was going well. Even though not many animals were being adopted, Aunt Marge confided, people had come just to see the facility, and to check out the bouncy-play inflatables outside under a big tent. “We’ve gotten lovely donations,” said Aunt Marge, “and at least a dozen applications for volunteers. Oh, and there’s a shelter up by DC that is going to take some of the animals, since they’ve gotten more requests for dogs than they can handle.”

“Poor cats,” said Roger. He had a trio of kittens cuddled asleep in his arms, and seemed perfectly content. I wondered how long before Aunt Marge’s pampered Natasha got more roommates. “But at least the guinea pig got a home.”

They exclaimed over the new cruiser, but I left pretty quickly. Boris was still feral enough to not like the idea he’d have competition, and I’d been too close to those other cats for his comfort. It really wasn’t much wonder I didn’t feel a need for a man in my life. I already had someone to feed, clean up after, and constantly reassure of my affections.

I drove up to the Littlepage house on the chance Cousin Jack would be there. He was standing on the front walk directing a lot of people in LP Inc. uniforms. From the look of it, he was moving furniture around. When he saw me, he strolled over. “Cousin Lil.”

“Jack,” I said, and hugged him briefly. “Thanks for the new cruiser. You must’ve lit some fires to get it so fast.”

He grinned smugly. “I pay my debts. Speak of. Mother’s back in France, and I think some of the smaller antiques are gone.”

“You want to file a report?”

Jack grimaced. “God no. Let karma get her. I’m glad you stopped by, actually. You know Grenville?”

It was hard to live in Crazy and not know Grenville. About a hundred years or so ago, a Littlepage got this brilliant idea to recreate an English manor complete with fancy gardens on some land just south of town, squeezed in between Bear Mountain and some low hilly spurs coming off Mineral Mountain’s north end. It came to nothing, and the land was eventually sold off. The road to the old site was just a weedy track now, mostly used by deer hunters. It wasn’t much of anything to anyone that I knew of.

Then my brain kicked a few facts into place. Whoever owned Grenville owned a direct route between Crazy and Quarry. My Eller relatives would love that. They’d been thwarted by geology at their first prospective development site in Quarry. If they got Grenville, they would have some serious options, and their big project would be back on track.

I scooped Boris out of the way of two guys hauling a huge old china cabinet. “You buying it?”

“As a matter of fact, I am trying to,” said Jack. We moved off the walkway, Boris squirming to get down and snoop. “But I can’t seem to locate the owner.”

That was news to me. “I thought the county owns it.”

“They did, it was seized for taxes, but they sold it about twenty years ago, and whenever I call the number they gave me, I get an out-of-service message.” He gave me what he probably thought was an endearing, hopeful, puppy-dog look.

I eyed him the way Boris looked at leftover kibble. “Are you buying police favors?”

“No, no, no, but… Well… You know everyone around here.” He fumbled a piece of paper out of his wallet. “I did a Google search but I came up empty. The name’s not even in the phone book. My lawyer had to find it and I’d really like to speak to the woman myself. Vera Collier.”

It was obvious my cousin didn’t read the local
Gazetteer.
And pretty damn obvious I looked like I’d swallowed a fish. “Lil? Are you sick?”

“No,” I croaked, and put Boris down so I could get my head lower than my heart. Boris stretched up to give me a wet, slimy cat-smooch on my forehead, then ambled off to dig in the fresh mulch. I took some deep breaths, then straightened. “How much is Grenville worth?”

“It’s five hundred acres, about half of which can’t be developed, and it’s all trees…”

“Jack!”

My cousin jumped. “Well, I was offering twenty-five hundred an acre, but it’s really only worth maybe…‌say eighteen hundred.” He blushed. “I wanted to get in before your uncle, your Eller uncle, did.”

That was one and a quarter million dollars of motive.

My head was spinning. I smiled weakly at my poor cousin. “Vera Collier’s dead.”

“Damn. Who’s her lawyer?”

“Didn’t have one. Or a will.”

Now Jack looked sick. “She died intestate? In this day and age?”

“Actually,” I said, “she was murdered. Probably by at least one if not eight or nine of her kids.”

Jack’s eyebrows locked into Surprised Mode, and stayed there. “What?”

“Did either of you, I mean you or my Eller uncle, talk to her about it?”

“I hadn’t. Not in person. I had my attorney send her a letter of inquiry, though.” His mouth went tight and prissy. “You’ll have to ask Robert Eller yourself about what he did.”

Boris covered his mess with more mulch, and galloped over to distance himself from the scene of the crime. I reached down and rubbed his ears. “Your attorney didn’t get a reply?”

“Not yet.” Jack frowned, then smiled. “Well, at least this means Eller can’t get the land either.”

There are times when, much as I like my cousin, I still want to clobber him.

***^***

I rolled up to the security gates that barred my way up Eller Lane. Those were a fairly new feature in the Eller quest for exclusivity. You’d think the big high-school-sized house would be enough.

After the gate guard went through an elaborate process of confirming I was me, I was informed I could drive up to the house. Mr. Eller, he intoned gravely, was at home. That wasn’t surprising, now that I knew about Grenville. He’d want to be on the scene, ready to dash in with buckets of cash to prevent a Littlepage coup.

He met me on the veranda. Uncle Littlepage hadn’t liked my existence. Uncle Eller plain didn’t like
me
. I returned the favor. “Sheriff,” he said icily.

Ellers breed true, and you could see he was one from a hundred yards away. Tall, thin, long-faced, dark-haired, haughty as all get-out. If he’d had an English accent, he could’ve played a lord on any BBC drama. Instead, he sneered down his nose at me and my cat. “What do you want?”

“I’ve got some questions about Grenville,” I said. It was nice to see him flinch.

“I don’t see why,” he said. Stalling, of course. Thinking he’d outwit me. Which was possible, but I wasn’t going to let him know it.

“It’s a possible murder motive. Vera Collier’s been killed, and she owned Grenville.”

He turned funny colors. “I do not
murder
to get what I want, Sheriff! I was prepared to make a fair offer for that property!”

I had to ask. “How fair?”

“Two thousand an acre, which is more than it is worth.”

I noticed it wasn’t as much as Jack Littlepage was offering. “And did you formally inquire about buying?”

I wasn’t surprised when Boris’s tail switched precisely twice when Uncle Eller replied, “No, not yet, I was still in the planning stages.”

For which read: “working my proffers to the county to make sure I get my way.”

“Did you have any reason to think she’d refuse?”

“I doubt it. She was not a wealthy woman, from what I understood.”

Memory jingled some bells. “Did you try to buy it from her about, oh, twenty years ago? Right when the county sold it?”

This time, the color wasn’t funny. It was crimson. Jackpot. “How do you know that?”

I smiled meaninglessly. “It’s my job. So, no luck buying then, and no need. But with that little problem at Quarry…” I shrugged, let the silence fill up. Boris was sniffing around my uncle’s ankles, and my uncle was struggling not to kick him. Finally, my uncle gave in, and stepped away. He demanded, “Do you have any other insulting questions?”

I had dozens, but only a few related to the case. “To whom did you speak about the possibility of buying Grenville?”

“My local real estate agent, of course.” That would be Margaret Shiflet, our only realtor, whose family had long favored Ellers. “My son. One of my attorneys.”

One? How many did he have?

“I am sure there were a few others. Why do you ask?”

“Would any of them have spoken to the Collier family?”

He uttered a short bark of a laugh. Boris’s ears went back.

“So that’s not likely then,” I concluded, jotting notes. “Mr. Eller.”

“What?” he snapped.

I smiled sunnily. “Have a nice day.”

He sputtered. I didn’t laugh, not out loud, but Boris wasn’t as discreet. He pranced to the car with his tail jauntily pointed skyward, and paused only long enough to ostentatiously spray a rosebush.

11.

I
have a gigantic white board in my office. Well, two, really. One is a calendar to keep track of my occasional court dates, the other is for working out cases. Both tend to be empty. After I was done scribbling, the case-board had less white space than before, though that wasn’t saying much. I was writing very large under the heading of “Known”, and it came down to “Vera Collier is dead”. Not a big leap forward in the investigation. Still, I kept writing until I’d run out of facts.

It didn’t take long.

I swore and hurled the dry erase marker across the room. Kim ducked. Boris pounced. I heard a clatter as he swatted the marker into the crack between the wall and the filing cabinet.

Kim tossed me a chocolate bar from the stash in her desk. “Happy pill,” she said.

We were both addicted to a dark chocolate with pistachios and cherries. Sounded awful till you tried it. I nibbled off a corner with a sigh. “Thanks. Dammit.”

Kim viewed the board with her head twisted to one side, showing off her tan lines. “So many suspects, so little evidence.”

I bit off a bigger chunk of candy. “Don’t remind me,” I said, and perched on my desk. A review of the evidence wouldn’t take long, so I ran through it again. We had the autopsy report and cause of death, and we had Ken alleging his mother had stocks, and much more reliable knowledge of Vera’s ownership of Grenville based both on my relatives’ testimony and the county tax records. I also had a copy of the Littlepage letter of inquiry. God bless Jack and his anal-retentive attorney. But what I didn’t have was anything to link a Collier to a felony, aside from Beau’s attempt to smash me into an outcrop of metamorphic rock, and Ken wishing they could burn his mother’s house. That’s the worst about arson, especially when the structure burned down to ash and cinders. Not a lot of evidence left behind. Add to that the fact every Collier had cans of gas or kerosene in their garages, some empty, some not, and for very legitimate reasons, and I had even more nothing than I started with. The state police had done their own search of the homes belonging to Vera Collier’s brood and found no evidence of anything remotely related to homicide, arson, theft of deeds or stocks. They had even gone through every single book in Jeff Collier’s cabin, the silverware drawers in Davis’s café, you name it. Zip.

“Somebody’s gotta have that Grenville deed,” I said at last. “And they aren’t keeping it at home.”

“Safe deposit box?”

I shook my head, and retrieved the marker for Boris. “None of them have one. Not as far as we know. Or the state boys know. Nothing unusual in the financials, either, not so far.” Breeden had shared those, a professional courtesy that had probably been inspired by Aunt Marge calling his mother.

I sipped my lemonade. It was icy, teeth-aching cold. A nice break from the wicked heat outside. “Vera didn’t have insurance. No fire, life, house, nothing. She had Medicare for medical, that was it.”

“What about Vera’s financials?”

I pointed at the board. “She didn’t use banks, remember? If she even had stocks, which I’m starting to doubt, the dividend checks probably got cashed like everything else.”

Kim frowned. “Don’t you have to have a bank account to get checks cashed?”

“Nope. Just a cash-checking place,” I pointed out. “And there’s one in Gilfoyle. I think all they ask for is a photo ID. C’mon, baby,” I cooed to Boris, who was gnawing the pen and growling happily to himself. “Time to go bug the nice check-cashing people.”

***^***

The check-cashing place in Gilfoyle was also a convenience store, and had more security cameras than the bank. It was owned by a woman who looked remarkably like Vera, and turned out to be her youngest sister: Emmaline Craig. Never married. Unlike Vera, she’d grown pudgy with age. “Why the hell wasn’t I told you’re Vera’s kin?” I demanded.

“I doubt her own kids know it,” said Emmaline, sucking a long drag on a cheap cigarette. We were standing just outside the store, huddling in a puddle of shade under a scathing sun. It wasn’t where I wanted to be, not with Memorial Day fireworks that night right after the town picnic. I wanted to be home catching some sleep so I’d be fresh for the slew of drunks I’d be hauling in.

“I don’t follow.”

Emmaline’s laugh was husky with years of smoking. Her smile showed she lacked a few teeth. “I’m twenty years younger than the old bat.”

She didn’t look it. Aunt Marge would’ve been proud of me for not mentioning that.

“She married against Mama’s wishes. Daddy wouldn’t even give her away. Marrying a Collier,” sniffed Emmaline disdainfully, then coughed up phlegm. Boris backed away, fur fluffing. I stifled a laugh. She really did sound like a cat gearing up for the attack. Or a bad hairball.

I fanned myself with my hat. “Your family disapproved?”