Murder by Mushroom (10 page)

“And that’s when you knew she had a problem.”

Samantha nodded. “I told her it was a bad idea, we might get caught. But she didn’t care and she said if I didn’t want any that just left more for her. That was about a month ago. She drinks every day now, and sneaks out almost every night. And sometimes she gets so trashed she’s…getting into other stuff.”

“Drugs?”

“No.” Samantha gulped. “Sex. She gets so wiped out she tells me the next day that she can’t remember who she was with. That’s happened more than once.”

Tears spilled down her cheeks. Margaret reached into the backseat for a box of tissue and handed her one.

“Have you tried talking to her?”

Samantha nodded. “I even looked up some stuff on alcoholism so I could tell her what could happen to her. That was scary. I went to the library downtown in case my mom and dad checked the Internet history at home and somebody from church came in. I was afraid I might get caught looking up Web sites about alcoholism, but I don’t think they saw me.”

“What does Liz say when you try to talk to her?”

“She doesn’t want to hear it. She tells me she’s just having some fun, and there’s nothing wrong with it. She says I’ve turned into a goody-goody.”

Margaret heard the pain in Samantha’s voice and watched her blot at a fresh batch of tears.

“It’s my fault, Mrs. Palmer. I’m the one who wanted to take the first drink with the cherry vodka. Liz really didn’t want to, and I talked her into it. She doesn’t go to church, and I do. I know better. And look what I’ve done!”

The tears fell freely now, and Margaret slid across the seat to put her arms around the sobbing girl. She ached for this poor child who was learning a painful lesson in integrity—one some people never managed to understand.

When the sobs subsided, Margaret handed her a fresh tissue.

“Are you a Christian, Samantha?” Blotting at her eyes, the girl nodded. “Then the first thing you need to do is ask God to forgive you for anything you’ve done wrong. And then start praying for Liz. I will, too.”

“Okay.” A huge sniff, and reddened eyes turned Margaret’s way. “But what else can I do?”

“Well, I think you need to continue to be honest with Liz and tell her why you’re worried about her. And maybe you could invite her to church.”

“She’ll never come. I can’t even get my mom to come to church with me.”

Margaret wanted to ask a few questions about that, too, but bit her tongue. Now was not the time.

“Then we’ll pray about that, too. I’m sure God will show you what to do.”

Jackie turned from Main Street onto U.S. 60, heading toward the grocery store for cat food. The first traffic light turned red as she approached, and her car glided to a halt. She glanced through the passenger window.

Wasn’t that Margaret’s Buick in the Wendy’s parking lot? Yes, it sure was. Margaret herself sat in the car, along with someone else. Who?

The light changed, and Jackie inched forward. A blonde sat in the passenger seat. It looked like…Was it Sharon Carlson? Jackie nearly wrenched her neck staring as she drove slowly past. As she came parallel to the window, Margaret leaned back and the other woman leaned forward, giving Jackie a clear view of her face. No, it wasn’t Sharon. That was Samantha Carlson in Margaret’s car.

What in the world was Margaret talking so intently about with the daughter of one of Jackie’s murder suspects?

Another pair of eyes, peering through the window of a bigger car, glimpsed the blonde in the passenger seat of the tan Buick.

This development was most disturbing. Something had to be done about it.

Quickly.

L
inus leaped onto the dinette table, directly in the center of Jackie’s notebook.

“Get out of the way, you goof.” She picked up the cat and stroked his soft fur a couple of times before returning him to the floor.

Not to be deterred, Linus sauntered around to the other side of the table and leaped again. He sat primly at the far end of the table, his tail curled around his body and his amber eyes fixed on Jackie.

“As long as you stay over there, you’re okay.”

Jackie picked up her pen and punched play on the recorder. She was thrilled with the quality of the recording from lunch. Esther’s voice sounded as clear as if Jackie had held the microphone right under her nose.

“Well, she wasn’t a nice old lady by any standard I ever heard. I can think of several reasons someone might want to get rid of her.”

“Esther.”
That was Margaret.

“It’s true. Everybody here knows that. I’m just stating a fact.”

Jackie pushed Stop and scribbled in her notebook below a heading in neat block letters that read ESTHER HODGES. She pressed Play again, listened all the way to the end, and double-checked her notes to make sure she had all her thoughts written down. Then she turned off the recorder and looked at the page.

“I don’t know, Linus. I mean, she’s certainly still angry over the letter that got her son fired. But the guy’s okay now. He has a good job and a nice wife with straight teeth. Mrs. Farmer wasn’t a threat to him anymore.”

She tapped the pen against her lips.

“So that means her motive is revenge, plain and simple. But she just doesn’t seem like the vengeful sort. Especially when she’s looking forward to having a grandchild someday soon. Why would she jeopardize that?”

Immobile, Linus watched the tapping pen with rapt fascination.

Jackie flipped the page and stared at the notes beneath the heading SHARON CARLSON. Sharon had a motive—trying to protect her husband’s chance for a promotion at the paper factory. There was no doubt she disliked Mrs. Farmer, but enough to kill her?

“If only we could get a look in her kitchen and see if she has a set of knives matching the paring knife the police found.”

Jackie flipped to another page, this one labeled CLUES. She had spent the afternoon surfing the Internet to research poisonous mushrooms. Her computer, a clunky thing about a million years old with a dial-up modem, was more frustrating than helpful. She hated it. The old thing ran so slowly it almost wasn’t worth using, and the connection dropped frequently without warning. But she suffered through several hours of surfing to make sure she had her facts straight before she wrote anything on her list of clues.

She read the short list to Linus.

“Poisonous mushrooms in the woods behind Mrs. Farmer’s house.
That’s the only possible explanation for the plate and knife the police found back there. But the mushroom site on the Internet said that’s nothing unusual—they grow just about everywhere this time of year.”

“Mushrooms planted in leftovers.
Well, yeah. But since that kind of poisonous mushroom usually only makes you sick, the killer would have to know that Mrs. Farmer had heart problems.” She shrugged. “That’s just about everybody at church, and probably everybody who knew her outside of church, too.

“Knife.
The one I saw was small, like a paring knife. We don’t know for sure if that’s what the killer used, but it’s likely. Unfortunately you can get a paring knife anywhere, even the dollar store. So unless they can find fingerprints, it probably won’t help much. I don’t think they’ll find anything on the knife, because of these.”

She drummed the tip of the pen on the next item on her list.

“Rubber gloves.
Not the yellow kitchen glove variety, but the thin, translucent doctor’s-office kind. Those could be the break we need, if the police can get fingerprints off the insides. Of course, you can probably buy rubber gloves in a drugstore, but I’m guessing a killer wouldn’t want to have a box of gloves with only two missing laying around his house for the police to find. It would be a lot safer to pick up a couple from someone else’s box. So we need to know who has access to rubber examination gloves. Doctors, of course, along with anyone who works for them. And who do we know who works for doctors?”

Linus remained silent, his eyes following the pen in Jackie’s hand.

“I’ll tell you who. Sharon Carlson.” Jackie flipped the page in her notebook. “See, I wrote right here after talking to Samantha on the phone the other night that Sharon would be at work
as long as she wasn’t out doing deliveries.
A medical transcriber delivers the documents she types to the doctor’s offices. So that means Sharon has access to the rubber gloves there.”

Jackie pictured her own doctor’s office. On the counter in each examination room, next to containers of cotton swabs and alcohol rubs, sat an open box of examination gloves. It would be so easy to take a few and stash them in a purse or shove them in a pocket. No one would ever know.

Then she remembered. She had seen a box of examination gloves recently, and not in a doctor’s office. Where? She closed her eyes and scrunched her nose, trying to picture the open box of gloves. It had been in a wire rack hanging on the wall at…

“The nursing home!”

Linus started at Jackie’s shout.

“There were rubber gloves on the wall right inside the door in both the rooms we visited at the nursing home yesterday, Linus. Anybody can walk into a nursing home on the pretext of visiting someone there.”

Her mind hovered around a thought, but she refused to go there. Instead she got up abruptly from the table and went into the kitchen. Snatching the telephone from the wall, she paused a moment before dialing. Then her fingers flew over the numbers.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Margaret. It’s Jackie.”

“I was just talking about you. Sylvia called to tell me what a good time she had at lunch today, and how glad she was that you were able to join us.”

“Yeah, I had a good time, too. Thanks for inviting me.” She clutched the receiver. “Uh, Margaret, I happened to drive past you and Samantha Carlson this afternoon at Wendy’s.”

A pause. “Oh, that was nothing. She needed a ride home from school, and we decided to stop for a Coke.”

“You seemed to be talking pretty intently. And since I just talked to Sharon earlier in the day, I couldn’t help but wonder what you guys were talking about.”

A longer pause. “I really can’t say, Jackie.”

“Why not? It might be important.”

“I can tell you it didn’t have anything to do with Alice or Sharon. Trust me, it’s something completely unrelated and private.”

Jackie heard the resolve in Margaret’s voice. She wouldn’t budge. Getting anything out of her tonight seemed unlikely.

“Well, okay. If you say so. You might be interested to know that Esther is no longer my number-one suspect.”

“She’s not?” Margaret sounded relieved.

“No. Sharon is.”

A pause. “You know, Jackie, you really should be careful.”

Goose bumps rose across the back of Jackie’s neck. “Why do you say that?”

“Earl said something the other day that has me worried. If someone in our church really did kill Alice, they won’t be too happy when they hear you’re running around asking all these questions. It could be dangerous.”

Of course Margaret wouldn’t threaten her; she was too nice for that sort of thing. And how sweet that she and Pastor Palmer actually worried about Jackie’s safety.

“Don’t worry about me, Margaret. I’ll be careful. I promise.”

“Well…okay. Will I see you tomorrow?”

“Sure. Maybe I could come over in the morning and we could pick a few more people to visit.”

“I’ll have coffee ready at nine.”

“Sounds good. Bye, Margaret.”

Jackie replaced the receiver and rubbed her neck. Why did Margaret sound so evasive about her conversation with Samantha? What secret could a teenager possibly have that would make her confide in the pastor’s wife?

Well, teenagers kept lots of secrets. And of course Margaret would have to keep whatever she said in confidence. But maybe Samantha had seen something that connected her mother with the murder. Whatever the secret, Jackie was sure it was important, and Margaret hiding the information was getting in the way of her investigation.

Mrs. Murphy’s words at church on Sunday morning came back to her. Mrs. Farmer had been the single dissenting vote against Pastor Palmer, and had even talked about getting up a petition against him. Margaret might have heard about that.

And she had access to rubber gloves at the nursing home.

“No,” she said, her voice harsh in the empty kitchen. “I don’t believe it.”

But enough doubt niggled her mind that she walked back to the table with a slow step. If she wanted to be thorough in this investigation, she needed to identify
all
the suspects, even the ones she didn’t believe for a minute were guilty. She would have to make a new page with the name MARGARET PALMER at the top.

“Hey, where’s my pen?”

From beneath the table, Linus looked up with innocent, round eyes. When Jackie confiscated his new toy, he gave her a wounded look and slunk toward the bedroom.

The evening’s first lightning bugs hovered a foot above the freshly mowed grass when Dennis turned from Walnut Avenue into his driveway. No light shone in the windows of the main house. He glanced at his watch. Eight forty-two. Twelve minutes past Mr. Montgomery’s bedtime. Dennis missed the old guy standing at the front window, watching as he parked his cruiser beside the house. The presence of a police car in his driveway gave Mr. Montgomery a sense of security, especially since all his family lived up in Ohio. And he gave Dennis a discount on his rent because of it.

Dennis let himself into the garage apartment and flipped on the light. The three small rooms were plenty for him. Five long steps took him across the combination living room/kitchen and into the bedroom, where he unhooked his belt and laid it on the chair beside his bed. He unsnapped the holster strap, readying his pistol for a quick retrieval, grinning as always at the useless habit. Nothing ever happened in sleepy little Versailles.

Except something had happened. Someone had murdered an old woman.

His thoughts turned to the afternoon’s discovery as he rummaged in the refrigerator for something to eat. The knife and gloves were the first real clues they’d found, though Conner wasn’t confident they’d lead to the identity of the killer. They couldn’t very well search every kitchen in town, looking for a telltale set of knives with one missing. And fingerprints only identified a perpetrator if they already had a record. If not, they were almost as useless as putting a saddle on a cat. You weren’t going anywhere anyway, so why bother?

A dried-out slice of leftover pizza went into the garbage can, and that pretty much cleared out the fridge. He pulled a couple of pieces of bread from the plastic wrapper and inspected them. Was that a spot of mold? Nah, couldn’t be. This loaf was only a week old. Or was it two?

Now Jackie showing up had been an interesting development. As he spread peanut butter on the bread, he smiled at the memory of her excitement when she caught sight of the knife. She was really into this investigation.

NBT—Nothing But Trouble, Conner said. Was she, really? Some women could weasel information out of another woman that it would take a guy years to find out. His mother was like that. How many times had he seen her stop to talk to a perfect stranger in a grocery-store aisle, and know the woman’s life story by the time they said goodbye?

The problem was Jackie didn’t really seem the sort women talked to. She was so…pushy. Not like Mom at all. In fact, Jackie might be one of those police groupies Mom had warned him about. And they really did exist. The minute Dennis put on the uniform, they seemed to come out of nowhere, smiling and batting their eyelashes and letting him know they wouldn’t mind if he stopped by after work.

Nah, Jackie didn’t seem that type, either. Though she had batted her eyelashes once or twice this afternoon. She was cute when she did it, too. But mostly he figured what she wanted was information.

He dropped onto the couch, bit into his sandwich. Lousy luck she showed up on the scene today in time to see their evidence recovery. And it was patently obvious she had ignored Conner’s demand that she stay out of the case, too. At least she’d seemed willing to tell him what she discovered. Like those rumors and the victim’s letter-writing habit. A shame Conner had interrupted before she’d told him anything of substance.

Maybe he ought to find out if she knew anything helpful. He chewed thoughtfully.

He should probably let it go. Conner was right when he said civilians had no place in a murder investigation. Especially one who was as closely involved as Jackie. Not a murder suspect, but without a doubt she was on the inside of this mess, even if she didn’t mean to be.

On the other hand, Jackie had glanced away this afternoon when he asked for specifics about those letters. A trained investigator watched for evasive behavior like that. It didn’t necessarily mean Jackie was a criminal, but it did mean she was hiding something.

He wanted to know what that something was. If it turned out to be important, Conner would praise him for sniffing it out.

He tossed the last of the sandwich into his mouth and dug the white pages out of the pile of books on the kitchen counter. There he found a listing for
Hoffner, J
with no address. He smiled. At least she possessed enough sense to keep her first name and address out of the phone book. Single women should never make it easy for a man to find them.

Channel surfing made Jackie tired. Horizontal on the couch, her head propped on the arm and Linus curled into the curve of her tummy, she struggled to keep her eyes open as she searched for something on television to hold her interest. A medical drama she liked came on at nine, and hopefully it wouldn’t be a rerun. If she could just manage to stay awake for another ten minutes—