Carrie replaced Jo at the cash register, chatting genially with her customer about the embroidery project she planned, but it wasn’t long before the questions turned from floss to fatalities. Carrie handled it smoothly, but Jo could see it was bothering her too. Happily, the busyness eventually calmed, at least for the time being, and Ina Mae and Loralee emerged from their nook, each having picked up a few items for their scrapbooking and stamping projects.
“Terrible goings-on,” Ina Mae said.
Loralee nodded, her face a picture of sadness. “That poor child.”
“Sally Hardesty said she saw you going in to talk to the police. Did you tell them about Pete Tober?”
“Yes.” Jo sighed, thinking about her latest spar with Russ Morgan. “I could have spared myself the trouble. They’ve already talked with Pete, and he’s been cleared.”
“An alibi?” Ina Mae asked.
Jo nodded. “He was at the garage, working late. A coworker was with him.”
“Hmmm.” The older woman scowled, mulling this over.
“I don’t believe it,” Loralee declared, her eyes flashing.
Jo looked at her. “You don’t?”
“Not for a minute. He could have snuck out easily, while that other person was occupied. Or, maybe they’re in cahoots!”
What surprising things came out of Loralee, Jo thought. Behind that sweet grandmotherly face seemed to lurk the mind of a Mickey Spillane.
“You mean this coworker might have helped Pete kill Genna?”
“Don’t you think? Or, if not, maybe he’s lying about Pete having been there the whole time. If his crew likes him, they could be closing ranks to protect him.”
“That would be a very risky thing to do,” Ina Mae said. “However, I’ve seen this kind of blind loyalty, especially among young males.”
“I don’t know,” Jo said. “I mean, I agree his crew might very well be inclined to defend him, but I’m just not sure he needs defending. Lieutenant Morgan indicated Pete was extremely upset. He may have been overly controlling, but I had the impression he truly cared for Genna.”
“Maybe he did,” Ina Mae acknowledged. “But could what he was feeling be regret? Over what he had done in a moment of rage?” Ina Mae asked.
“Yes, absolutely!” Loralee firmly agreed.
Jo had to admit they had a point. Even if the police had crossed Pete off their list of suspects, she probably shouldn’t. Not yet.
Two customers walked in, putting an end to the discussion. “Did you want me to ring these up,” Jo asked, indicating the items Ina Mae and Loralee each held in their hands.
“Please,” Ina Mae said, setting hers down on the counter.
“Oh, I forgot the double-sided tape,” Loralee exclaimed, and rushed back to the shelves she and Ina Mae had been scouring. Jo totaled it all up and packed their items into bags.
“Thanks for coming by,” she said, handing them their purchases. “It’s been a difficult several hours. You’ve helped clear some of my thinking on this.”
“Terrible happenings,” Ina Mae said, repeating her earlier comment. Jo looked at her, detecting more feeling behind that comment than she would have expected.
“Did you know Genna?” Jo asked gently.
“Taught her, back when she was in the third grade,” Ina Mae said. “A sweet girl, but too concerned, even back then, with trying to please everyone.” Ina Mae shook her head sadly. “It never works.”
Things quieted down at the shop by dinnertime, and, with no workshops scheduled for the evening, Carrie went home for dinner with her family. Jo took the downtime to try to catch up on some bills, nibbling at a sandwich as she worked. She had just written a large check for an order of plastic bags, amazed once again at how much the simple act of packing up a customer’s purchase could cut into the store’s profits, when the front door’s bell jingled. Jo looked up to see Charlie march in.
Uh-oh, she thought, he got the word about Dan’s injunction. Jo slipped her check into the envelope and got up to face the agitated teen.
Charlie glared silently at Jo, then turned to pace the front of the store, hands in the pockets of his jacket. When that continued for a while, with still no sound coming from his tightly pressed lips, Jo said, “If you’re just here to pace, let me put a dust mop in your hands to drag back and forth while you’re at it.”
Charlie stopped. “He said I can’t go back there. Just like that! No listening to my side of it at all.”
Jo nodded.
“He thinks I’m a kid! A three-year-old who can’t take care of himself.”
“No, he knows you’re his fifteen-year-old son, whom he loves and worries about.”
Charlie glared and went back to pacing. After a turn or two, he stopped once more. “I was just starting to learn the soundboard. You can’t believe how incredibly cool that was. They would have let me be the assistant on it, if I’d had time to get into it.”
“Charlie, I think things at the playhouse have come to a stop. There won’t be any soundboard work, or scenery building, or rehearsals for now. Their lead, Genna, is dead.”
That stopped Charlie in his tracks. The look on his face changed to guilt as he realized his self-absorption—not abnormal for a teen, Jo was sure, but still guilt-producing. Charlie’s own problem suddenly looked minuscule compared to the graver issue.
“Yeah, that’s right,” he said, shamefacedly.
“If you can just hang in there until all this is cleared up, your Dad just might look differently at your going back to the playhouse.”
Charlie’s gloom lifted somewhat. “Do you think they’ll find that her falling off that cliff was just an accident?”
Jo frowned. “I don’t know, Charlie. The situation sounded suspicious.” She told him about the dog tied safely to a nearby tree. “You know I’ve wondered about Genna’s boyfriend, Pete, with his controlling ways and bad temper. Several people I’ve talked with are highly suspicious he may have caused Genna’s fall. But I already found out from Lieutenant Morgan that Pete has an alibi for the time involved.” Unlike me, Jo thought, but didn’t say. “It might not be ironclad, though.”
Charlie scowled. “So you’re thinking this Pete might have killed Genna out of jealousy? And Kyle too, because he was getting too close to Genna?”
Jo nodded.
“But Aunt Jo, Kyle was a major jerk, remember? Nobody’s going to get jealous over someone like him.”
“We don’t know exactly how Pete would have felt about him. Maybe he saw only the onstage side, the more attractive side of Kyle. Maybe his thinking was blurred.”
“Maybe,” Charlie said, but his voice dripped skepticism. “But since he has an alibi, why not look into the guy I told you about at the country club. The landscaping guy.”
“Hank Schroder?”
“Yeah. I know the kids who work under him, remember? We could go over there and pretend I’m interested in a job and you’re my aunt helping me get it.”
Jo had almost forgotten about Schroder, with what had happened lately. She agreed he was a strong “person of interest.” Charlie would be a perfect cover, a way to question Schroder. Would it be dragging Charlie back into dangerous waters, though? Perhaps not, as long as she made sure to always swim alongside him. She’d check with Carrie to see how she felt about it, but it just might be a great way to direct Charlie’s thoughts away from his angry resentment of his father. And they could hope, once this whole, miserable business was over, that Dan’s attitude about the playhouse would take a 180-degree turn. Or at least a 90-degree turn. Knowing Dan’s stubborn nature, Jo wondered if 45 would be too much to hope for.
Chapter 19
“I’m glad you’re with me, Charlie,” Jo said as they climbed out of her Toyota. The disturbing transmission noise had reappeared on the drive over, but that wasn’t what concerned her at the moment. They had detoured to Highpoint Road on their way to the country club to see if they could look over the scene of Genna’s death. Charlie, once more, hadn’t taken much persuasion.
“You don’t like heights?”
Jo looked over and saw he meant that as a joke, trying to lighten up a grim moment. She appreciated the effort and smiled. “No, I mostly don’t want the police—if they see me—to think I’ve returned to the scene of my crime. Criminals, I’ve read, tend to do that when they’re alone.”
“Do the police think it was a crime, then? Not an accident?”
“I don’t really know what they think at this point—they haven’t seen fit to send me hourly updates. But for that matter I don’t know what I think either. That’s why I want to check out the scene. I was afraid it might still be secured, but I don’t see that. Looks like we can walk right over.”
Jo approached an area that had been trampled and rutted. A large section of the guardrail had been broken off, temporarily patched, and blocked with safety cones.
“This must be where the rescue crew worked. I presume it’s also where she fell over.”
Together they gazed down the steep incline leading to the creek. Large, uniform rocks covered the earth, obviously placed there as a hedge against erosion. Jo imagined Genna tumbling down their smooth surface, helpless to check her fall, picking up speed until she crashed on the rocks at the bottom. Jo shuddered and turned away, looking instead up the walk leading here. In the distance, less than two blocks away, she saw the top floors of the Wildwood apartments, which she and Charlie had circled in the Toyota before coming to the cliff.
“I can understand why she would walk the dog here. There’s plenty of grass and trees, and the view is lovely. Even at night, seeing the lights across the way there must be beautiful.”
Jo looked at the street. “It’s not a heavily traveled road, but not isolated either, though late in the evening it might be fairly quiet. The dog was a small poodle I heard, not the kind to offer protection, to make Genna feel safe, I mean. But then, I’m thinking like a New Yorker. Here in Abbotsville safety might not have been as much of a concern.”
“How could she accidentally fall?” Charlie asked, still looking over the rail.
Jo turned back. There was a narrow, grassy strip just on the other side of the rail. “Perhaps she dropped something, maybe her keys, or saw something she tried to reach for? That could be the reason, I suppose, that she tied up the dog first.”
Charlie looked at her. He didn’t believe it any more than she did.
“On the other hand, the rail isn’t all that high. A person could be pushed over it fairly easily.” Jo tried to picture Pete struggling with Genna. It wouldn’t have been much of a struggle, slight as she was compared to his brawn. It didn’t feel right to Jo, though. She just couldn’t see Pete actually doing that.
Who else, though, had connections to both Genna and Kyle? Jo realized she had shifted beyond trying to prove herself innocent to wanting to prove Pete innocent as well. He had a step up on her, though, with his coworker alibi. But would it ultimately hold up? And was she trying to protect someone who was actually guilty and might go on to murder again?
“Let’s go,” she said to Charlie. “I’ve seen all I need to here.”
“You’ll probably find Mr. Schroder at the storage shed,” the woman at the country club desk informed them, “with his crew. They’ll be getting ready to smooth out those tracks someone made with their SUV the other night—kids, probably.” Her eyes narrowed as she looked over her half-glasses at Charlie. “It’s just extremely lucky the ground is dry, or they would have made an even worse mess.”
“I don’t even have my driver’s license yet,” Charlie complained as he and Jo walked across the grass. “Why do all teenagers, especially guys, get lumped together?”
“Now you know how I feel when I have to talk to Lieutenant Morgan.” Jo wiped away a bead of sweat forming on her temple. The late-afternoon sun beat down warmly. If anything was predictable about September weather in southern Maryland, it was that it was unpredictable.
“Don’t worry, Aunt Jo. You’ll be able to set him right before long.”
Ah, the optimism of youth, Jo thought. Since she wasn’t exactly ancient, having only recently crossed into the latter half of her thirties, Jo wondered where her own optimism had gone. Up in smoke with the explosion in New York? Or was it simply the nature of the beast to fade away over the years? Whichever it was, she rather missed the feeling, along with the comfort it provided.
“There’s Garth, over there.” Charlie pointed ahead to a group of teens loading rakes and shovels into the back of a pickup. “He’s the one in the red shirt.”
Jo saw a muscular teen with the sleeves of his shirt ripped off, presumably to better display his well-defined biceps. His dark hair had been trimmed short, and he sported a bit of chin hair just under his lower lip. He looked up as they approached, greeting Charlie with an unsmiling, but not unfriendly, “Hey!”
Jo spotted an older man who fit the description of Hank Schroder, looking every bit the aging but fit ex-Marine, and sounding like one too as he barked orders to his crew.
“Jason! Get the lead out and load these tampers. Brett, bring that roller over, like I told you!”
“Mr. Schroder?” Jo called out as she and Charlie drew closer.
“Yeah?” Schroder squinted in Jo’s direction, his leathery face wrinkling so much that she wondered if he could see out at all.
“They told me I could come talk to you about a part-time job for my nephew here. I’m Jo McAllister, and this is Charlie Brenner.”
Hank Schroder, hands on his hips, looked Charlie up and down as though he were some kind of mutant weed that had just sprouted on Schroder’s pristine golf course. “You want to work for me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“This is hard work. You look kinda puny to me. Ever do much landscaping?”
“I cut the grass at our house, front and back. And I helped my dad put in some rose bushes for my mom.”
Schroder spit, thankfully in the other direction but clearly making the point he was less than impressed. “I need guys who can lift fifty-pound bags of mulch. And work in the hot sun til the job’s done. Your mama ain’t gonna be bringing no lemonade and telling you to take it easy. Can you handle that?”