ILL-TIMED ENTANGLEMENTS (The Kate Huntington mystery series #2) (12 page)

Then he made himself sit back. “Consider that a preview of… future possibilities,” he ad-libbed. He tried to grin but it came out lopsided.

Skip knew if he kept looking at her he would kiss her again, so he turned on the bench and looked straight ahead. Sitting side by side, their arms were just barely touching. He couldn’t resist leaning ever so slightly toward her until his arm was more firmly touching her shoulder. To his amazement, she leaned back.

Kate knew she was sending the wrong message, especially since he’d just kissed her. But she couldn’t help it. She needed the contact comfort right now, she told herself, after her scary encounter with Joe. Actually she really wanted this man to hold her again, but she knew that was dangerous.

Instead she indulged in leaning against Skip’s solid arm a bit longer. For a moment, she contemplated how being held by a man was different from a hug from a female friend. Women were warm and soft, but men were warm and
solid
.

Stop that!
she admonished herself. Out loud she said, as much to herself as to him, “It really is too soon, Skip.”

“I know.” He leaned a bit more firmly against her shoulder for a second and then moved away. “But I can still be your friend, can’t I?”

“Of course,” she said, standing up before she was tempted to lean against him again. She took three steps away, then pivoted back around to face him as he was pushing himself to a stand. “And I value that friendship, Skip,” she said, then turned and headed toward Betty’s building.

T
hey had checked in on Betty and were about to head out again when Detective Lindstrom rang the doorbell. He did not look happy.

As Betty invited the detective to sit down, Skip made a point of turning his back on the living room area. He sat down on one of the stools at the breakfast bar and pretended to be absorbed in reading the newspaper he found laying there.

“Mrs. Franklin,” Lindstrom began. “I’ve talked to several members of the writers’ group and a couple have mentioned something that I found interesting. It seems you’re not above using a cliché in your own mysteries. There’s a scene in your latest book where someone hits somebody else with a poker, is there not?”

Betty looked puzzled. “I write historical romances, not murder mysteries, Detective,” she said. Then her face cleared. “Oh, you mean the flashback that the heroine has to her childhood. When she saw her father murder her mother and then he tells everyone the woman slipped and hit her head on the hearth stones. That’s there to explain why she’s so mistrustful of men.”

“Yes, that must be the scene that was mentioned to me. It seems Mrs. McIntosh had commented to a couple members of the group about the similarity between that scene and Mrs. Blackwell’s death.”

He was watching Betty intently, but she once again just looked confused.

Kate had a bad feeling about where this was going. “I suppose that bashing people with a poker in the heat of an argument has become a cliché in novels, Detective,” she inserted in a mild voice, “because it
is
often a weapon that is close at hand, if one has a fireplace that is.”

Betty, however, had not caught the drift of the detective’s thoughts. “I don’t know why Doris even had that set of fireplace tools. Our fireplaces all have those modern ventless gas fires,” she said, making it apparent that she had noticed the tools amongst the clutter of the woman’s apartment. “If she hadn’t been such a horrible housekeeper, I would’ve said she had them there for show,” Betty rambled on, oblivious to the hole she was digging under her own feet.

Kate gritted her teeth, but telling Betty to stop talking would just make the hole that much more obvious.

The elderly woman shrugged. “Maybe they had sentimental value.”

Detective Lindstrom allowed a moment of silence to pass.

Damn,
Kate thought. The man had planted an idea in her head, and like a tongue that can’t leave a sore tooth alone, her analytical mind kept poking at it. What would be the psychological motivation for an author to act out a crime from his or her own work?

She forced her attention back to the discussion. Lindstrom had changed tacks. “The medical examiner’s preliminary report says Mrs. McIntosh died between nine p.m. and four a.m. Where were you during that time, Mrs. Franklin?”

“Sound asleep in my bed, of course, young man.”

The detective turned to Kate. “You stayed here last night, Mrs. Huntington?”

“On the sofa bed in the den,” Kate confirmed with a nod.

“And did you sleep soundly through the night?”

“Actually no, I was rather restless. Just dozed off and on most of the night.”

“Did you get up at any time?”

“Yes, once.” Kate looked toward the door and hoped he wouldn’t ask if she had heard anything strange. “I was kind of spooked about the pot incident. I got up and checked the door to make sure it was locked.”

“And was it?” Lindstrom asked.

“Yes.”

The detective had picked up on her distraction, the hesitations and lack of eye contact. “Anything else bothering you about last night, Mrs. Huntington?”

“No, I just kept hearing the night critters chirping and rustling outside my window.” Kate made a concerted effort to give him a natural smile and look him in the eye. “And you know how it is when you’re not sleeping in your own bed. Sometimes it’s hard to get comfortable.” She knew her claim that she had slept lightly did not give Betty an airtight alibi.

“I do know how that is,” the detective said, briefly smiling back at her. Then he turned to Betty. “Do you have a key to Mrs. McIntosh’s apartment?”

“Why, yes, we each had a key to the other’s place,” Betty replied.

Lindstrom nodded. Again there had been no signs of forced entry. Either the killer had a key or was an expert at picking locks.

“Did you know, Mrs. Franklin, that your friend Frieda was also gossiping with others about the similarities between your subplot and Doris Blackwell’s idea, which she apparently had also described to Mrs. McIntosh?”

Betty was silent, digesting that piece of information. She wasn’t totally surprised. Frieda was a good friend in other ways, but she couldn’t resist gossiping, even about her friends. Betty caught herself still using the present tense in her thoughts. Tears pooled in her eyes.

The detective had been watching her closely. “One person reported that Mrs. McIntosh implied fairly blatantly that she thought you might have killed Doris Blackwell.”

Betty looked at him and blinked. Tears broke loose and trickled down her wrinkled cheeks, but her voice was steady when she answered him. “I find that hard to believe, Detective Lindstrom. Frieda was an incorrigible gossip but she never would have said anything like that.”

Kate jumped in. “The person who told you that wouldn’t happen to be Carla Baxter by any chance?”

Lindstrom gave her a surprised look. “How did you know that?”

“Frieda told me yesterday afternoon that they had been talking and
Baxter
said point blank that she thought Betty was guilty.”

“Are you saying that Ms. Baxter is lying?” Lindstrom asked.

“Maybe. Or she’s just not remembering the exchange accurately,” Kate said. “It’s hard sometimes, when people think back on a conversation, to remember who said what.”

“And you’re an expert on memory now, Mrs. Huntington?” Lindstrom said, annoyance creeping into his voice.

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Kate replied, a touch of anger in her own. “As I mentioned before, I’m a psychotherapist and I work in trauma recovery. One cannot do that work without gleaning a fair amount of knowledge about what to believe, and what not to believe, in people’s memories… Especially in the conveniently distorted recollections of child abusers, or boyfriends who have committed date rape, or husbands who have beaten the crap out of their wives.”

Skip was silently cheering Kate on from his stool at the breakfast bar.

“If you would bring back Mrs. Franklin’s computer, I could find the references for you. Quite a few studies have been done on the fallibility of human memory.” Kate gave Lindstrom a defiant look.

The detective didn’t answer her. He turned back to Betty. “Mrs. Franklin, did your friend’s gossiping, which was strengthening the case against you for murder… Did that anger you enough to want to kill her?”

Betty winced but before she could answer, Kate said, “Betty didn’t even know Frieda was gossiping about those things until you told her, just now.”

Lindstrom clamped down on his temper. He was developing a growing respect for this woman, but damn she could be annoying.

“Mrs. Huntington,” he said with exaggerated patience, “we don’t
know
if that was the first time Mrs. Franklin heard about Mrs. McIntosh’s gossiping. Some well-meaning mutual acquaintance could have told her.”

“She’s hardly left this apartment since this whole mess began, and when she has gone out, at least one of us has been with her,” Kate said.

Betty pursed her lips. She was getting annoyed that they were talking about her as if she weren’t in the room.

“She could have gone out when you weren’t here, or someone could have dropped by, and there is always the telephone,” Lindstrom was saying. “Now would you
please
be quiet while I finish my interview.”

The detective looked at Betty Franklin’s face. How far did he dare push the old woman? There was fire in her eyes but her skin had a slight grayish tinge to it. He decided he had to take the risk. “Mrs. Franklin, did your friend’s gossiping make you angry enough that you put a knife in her heart while she lay helpless in her bed?”

Up until that moment, Betty hadn’t been told exactly how Frieda had died. Now the mental image the detective’s words created in her mind made her rear back in her seat, her hand flying to her own chest. “Of course not,” she managed to gasp out.

Lindstrom had expected a denial. He was much more interested in her body language than her words. He paused for a moment, giving his suspect an opportunity to elaborate.

Finally he pushed himself to a stand. “I’m going to have to ask that you not leave the jurisdiction, Mrs. Franklin.”

“I have no intentions of doing so, young man.”

As the detective walked past his stool, Skip spoke quietly, so the women wouldn’t hear him. “Detective, can I talk to you, outside?”

As he followed Lindstrom out the door, he called over his shoulder, “Be right back, Kate.”

Out in the hall, Skip opened the newspaper he had tucked under his arm and pointed to the front page.

“Is this your case, sir?”

Lindstrom nodded grimly.

“I might have a possible suspect for you, but I’d prefer you not say anything about what I tell you in front of the others. It would embarrass Mrs. Huntington.” Skip told the detective about Kate’s encounter with the maintenance man.

Then he folded the headline–‘Rapist Terrorizes Lancaster Women’–back inside the paper before re-entering the apartment.

•   •   •

At five o’clock, after several unanswered doorbells and two more interviews that gleaned nothing of value, Skip and Kate decided to call it a day.

They arrived at Betty’s door and rang the bell. After a moment, Kate knocked on the door and called out, “Betty, it’s me, Kate.” She thought she heard faint noises inside but couldn’t be sure.

Another moment passed and Kate reached into her pocket. “Betty gave me her spare key on Friday, for this very reason. She said she doesn’t always hear the bell, if she’s napping.” She inserted the key in the lock.

“I thought she promised to stay vigilant,” Skip said. “Napping doesn’t sound vigilant to…”

His words did not quite cover the sound of footsteps running through the apartment. Kate shoved the door open. It caught on the chain. Through the narrow opening Kate could see a shoe, with a foot in it, laying on the kitchen floor.

“Betty!” she screamed. Skip nudged her aside and put his shoulder to the door. The chain gave way as the bracket pulled loose from the wood.

Kate rushed to Betty’s side as Skip took off through the apartment. Kate kept her eyes up scanning the room for signs that the intruder might still be there, while she crouched down and felt Betty’s neck for a pulse. She collapsed onto her butt in relief when she found one.

She was punching 911 into the kitchen wall phone with one hand, while turning off the whistling kettle on the stove with the other, when Skip startled her as he came in the front door, that was still standing open. She jumped and shook her head in confusion.

He nodded grimly toward Betty still crumpled on the floor. “She’s alive,” Kate said. Then into the phone she told the emergency dispatcher to send an ambulance, and the police.

After she’d hung up and had started digging around in her purse for her cell phone, Skip said, “He came in through her bedroom window. I went out that way to see if I could catch the guy. Ran around the side of the building, but no sign of him.”

Skip crouched down next to Betty’s still form and gently ran his fingers over her scalp. “Don’t feel any bumps or cuts. Ah, what have we here?” He leaned over something laying on the floor nearby and sniffed it.

“Whew!” He sat back on his heels. “Smells like chloroform to me.”

Kate, having found her phone, was scrolling down her contacts. She found Lindstrom’s number, then muttered, “This time I
am
putting him on speed dial.” She got his voicemail and left a message.

Betty moaned and stirred. Kate moved quickly around the breakfast bar to help her.

“Don’t disturb the rag,” Skip was saying, just as Kate’s foot kicked against something that rolled away from her with a soft tinkling sound. As Kate helped Betty to sit up, then struggle to her feet, a fragment of white paper fluttered from the elderly woman’s hand onto the floor.

Kate carefully backed Betty out of the kitchen area and steered her over to the settee. “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” Betty answered, rubbing her forehead with a slightly trembling hand.

“The paramedics should be here soon to check you over.”