Chapter
Thirteen
“ We don’t have time,” Liss
insisted as she followed her aunt back into the hallway. “We’re
pressing our luck as it is.”
“Piffle. Yvonne’s the star of the
conference. Her fans will keep her busy for a while yet, and Bill
Stotz sticks to her like glue. They’re probably down in the
lounge.”
Liss gritted her teeth, marshaled a new
argument, and stifled it when she saw that the elevator was about
to stop at their floor. Margaret gave a guilty start when the doors
opened to reveal Yvonne and Bill. Liss forced herself to remain
calm. There was no reason for Yvonne to think they’d been in her
suite, but she stepped back, giving the couple a wide
berth.
Recognizing her, and no doubt
remembering the scene in the bookstore, Bill frowned as he guided
Yvonne out of the elevator with a hand on her elbow. The actress
ignored Liss completely—or so Liss thought until she boarded the
elevator and looked back the way she’d come.
Yvonne Quinlan had turned her head to
glare, her eyes filled with loathing. She looked as if she wished
she could make herself into the vampire she’d portrayed for so many
years and take a large and fatal bite out of Liss’s
neck.
The elevator doors closed. Margaret
mimed wiping sweat from her brow. “She looked seriously annoyed.
You don’t suppose she’ll guess we searched her suite, do
you?”
“She’s still pissed off about what I
said to her at Angie’s Books. I think you may be right, that she’s
convinced herself she really did write all those novels. If that’s
the case, then I must have offended her very deeply.”
The elevator stopped on the second
floor.
“Oh, no,” Liss objected. “We’re
not—”
Margaret stepped off and headed down
the corridor.
“Margaret, this is
insane.”
“He’ll stay with Yvonne for a while
yet.” She sounded confident. “Maybe even all night. When will we
have a better opportunity to search his things?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,”
Liss said, but she followed her aunt into Bill Stotz’s hotel
room.
They hadn’t even begun to search when
the door opened behind them and a man walked in. It wasn’t Bill
Stotz. It was worse. It was Dan.
Dan couldn’t believe his eyes. Or
rather, he could. He just didn’t want to.
“Out,” he ordered, his voice a low,
threatening growl, “or I’ll call the cops on you
myself.”
Margaret’s cheeks turned a bright,
embarrassed pink. Liss just looked exasperated.
“No, you won’t,” she said. “You don’t
want the bad publicity.”
For a moment Dan saw red, but he
quickly harnessed his temper. He was more frustrated than angry.
And, as usual, Liss had scared the daylights out of him with her
impulsive behavior. She was going to turn him gray before his time
with her antics, and she’d never learn patience. He resigned
himself to a lifetime filled with edge-of-the-seat moments like
this one. His future wife simply wasn’t the type who could sit back
and let other people handle things, not even when those other
people were duly authorized officers of the law.
“I have to admit that you two don’t
look like typical housebreakers,” he admitted.
They were both dressed to the nines, or
what passed for the nines in rural Maine. Dan couldn’t remember
when he’d last seen either of them in high heels or wearing so much
makeup. Heck, he rarely saw anyone in Moosetookalook sporting
anything but the most casual clothing. Most folks looked on a nice
pair of slacks and a dress shirt or frilly blouse as putting on the
dog. He didn’t count the outfits Margaret had always worn when she
was working at Moosetookalook Scottish Emporium. She’d just been
modeling the merchandise, wearing a lot of long tartan skirts to
showcase items she had for sale.
He caught a whiff of flowery
perfume—something else Liss rarely wore—as she stepped past him
into the hall. He was surprised she didn’t realize—since she read
so many crime novels—that she’d leave some of that fragrance
behind, proof that an intruder had been in Stotz’s hotel room
during his absence.
Margaret dawdled, checking the drawer
in the bedside table before she finally obeyed Dan’s order to
leave.
“I don’t know why I put up with this
nonsense,” Dan muttered as he shepherded both women down the
corridor in the direction of the stairs he’d used to reach the
second floor. The elevators had been too slow for him, crowded with
conference-goers on their way back to their rooms after the
banquet. When he’d come out of the stairwell a few minutes earlier,
he’d been just in time to see Margaret insert her passkey into the
lock of a guest room door.
“You love me,” Liss said in reply to
his rhetorical question. “People in love put up with a lot from
each other.”
“You needn’t sound so smug about
it.”
She stopped, turned, and threw her arms
around him, hugging him tight. “I’m sorry, Dan. I know I promised
to stay out of trouble, but—”
“It was all my fault,” Margaret cut in.
“I was determined to conduct a search, and Liss thought it would be
safer if she came with me.”
“So that both of you could get
yourselves killed instead of just one?” Dan asked.
“So you do think
we’re onto something?”
Margaret sounded so elated that Dan
hastily revised his analysis of the situation. Maybe it
was Liss’s aunt who’d been the instigator.
This time.
“Did you find something?” he
asked.
“Gum wrapper,” Liss said succinctly,
digging it out of a tiny bag on a long thin chain. She’d slung it
crossways to free her hands, an odd look with the slinky red dress
and high heels. “Spearmint,” she added, holding it up.
“Okay. So what? You already knew that
Stotz is a gum chewer.”
“I picked this up in Yvonne’s
room.”
“So Bill shared a stick with her. Big
deal.”
“I think he shared a lot more than a
stick of gum. I found this in her bedroom.”
“The fact that they may or may not be
having an affair doesn’t make either of them a murderer.” Even for
someone with Liss’s imagination, that seemed a leap.
“You’re forgetting that another of
these same gum wrappers was found at Lover’s Leap.”
“And you’re forgetting that it could
have been lying there for days. Jane and Nola and whoever was with
them, if there even was anyone else with them, are hardly the only
people who’ve ever been up there.”
Dan could remember a few steamy
evenings at the site himself, back when he’d been fifteen or so and
leery of bringing a girl home. His mother had still been alive
then. She’d had a strict rule about no girls in his
bedroom.
“Time is getting short,” Margaret said
when they reached the foot of the stairs. “They’re all leaving
tomorrow. The conference attendees and the
guest of honor.”
“And I’m sure the police can track them
down if they need to. It’s time to go home, ladies, and leave
sorting this out to the people who know what they’re
doing.”
“Gordon still thinks it’s a case of
murder/suicide, that Nola killed Jane and then took her own life
out of guilt and remorse,” Liss reminded him. “What if thinking
that way keeps him from looking at the other
possibilities?”
“Tandy’s good at his job,” Dan said,
albeit grudgingly. He had to give credit where credit was due.
“Trust him to do it right. Now, not another word about it. Either
of you. Go home, Margaret, and stay out of trouble. And you—” He
was pretty sure that another kind of heat shone in his eyes when he
glared at his fiancée. “What you need is a
distraction.”
Dan could tell she was receptive to
that idea. He also knew there was a smart comeback on the tip of
her tongue. Before she could utter a single word, her cell phone
rang.
“I thought you had that thing turned
off. Let it go to voice mail.” Dan entertained a brief fantasy that
involved sweeping Liss up into his arms, carrying her to his truck,
and taking her away to someplace where they wouldn’t even have to
think about murder, let alone try to do anything about it. It
occurred to him that they could catch a flight to Las Vegas tonight
and be married by this time tomorrow.
“I did turn it off earlier.” Unaware of
his flight of fancy, Liss fished the small cell phone out of her
tiny purse, giving him a brief glimpse of the rest of the
contents—her house key, a lipstick, and a couple of tissues. “I
turned it back on thinking I might need to call for help in a hurry
if—”
She broke off when she looked at the
caller ID. Dan shifted until he was close enough to see the readout
over her shoulder. The incoming call was from the Carrabassett
County Sheriff’s Office.
“You don’t have to
answer.”
“Yes, I do. It might be
important.”
Since cell phone reception was better
outdoors, Liss shoved open the door that led to the floodlit
parking lot behind the hotel, the one used by employees. Margaret
had gone on ahead of them and was already backing out of her space.
She and Liss exchanged waves and Margaret drove off. Only then did
Liss answer her phone.
She paced while she listened to whoever
was on the other end of the line and occasionally replied with a
monosyllabic mumble. Mostly the conversation consisted of long
silences on her part. The look on her face worried Dan. It combined
disbelief with incredible sorrow. She’d gone pale, too. Whatever
she was hearing, she was having a hard time accepting
it.
At last she disconnected. “That was Stu
Burroughs,” she said. “He’s in jail. He says he killed
Nola.”
Liss had never been to the Carrabassett
County Sheriff’s Office and Jail in Fallstown before, even though
Sherri had once been a dispatcher there and Pete still worked for
the county as a deputy sheriff. It was a long, low brick building
with bars on the windows and a well-lit parking lot. Inside, a tiny
lobby funneled visitors straight to a glassed-in area. On the other
side was the dispatch center.
“I’m here because Stuart Burroughs
phoned me,” Liss informed the uniformed female who came to the
window. She was a motherly-looking person, a bit on the plump side,
but her expression was better suited to a junkyard
dog.
“So, you were his one phone call, huh?
Sit yourself down, then. Someone will be out to talk to you in a
minute.”
They settled into hard plastic chairs,
the kind designed to discourage long stays. Five minutes passed,
then ten. It was going on fifteen before Liss heard a loud click,
the sound of a door being remotely unlocked, and Gordon Tandy
stepped out of the secure area into the jail lobby.
Liss shot to her feet. “Did you talk to
Stu? What did he say? Did he really push Nola off Lover’s
Leap?”
Gordon ignored her question and spoke
to Dan. “I thought you were going to keep her out of
this.”
Dan’s shrug spoke volumes. “I could
hardly stop Stu from calling her.”
To Liss’s annoyance, they locked gazes
for another full minute, as if they were silently exchanging ideas
about how to control her actions. Finally, Gordon answered her
question. “Stu Burroughs did not kill anyone, but only because he
crashed his car into a tree instead of hitting another vehicle or a
pedestrian. He was arrested for drunk driving. The bail
commissioner isn’t going to let him out until tomorrow, so you may
as well go back home.”
“But Stu said—”
“Yeah, I know what he said.” Gordon ran
his hand over his short-cropped hair and stared at the ceiling. “I
interviewed him. What he meant was that he
feels responsible for Nola’s suicide. It seems they had a big fight
yesterday at the hotel. He thinks she killed herself over some of
the nasty things he said to her, and he’s upset because he didn’t
really mean them. He was just trying to pay her back for abandoning
him all those years ago.”
“He’s probably been carrying a torch
for her since she left.” Liss found that possibility both
wonderfully romantic and heartbreakingly sad.
“Get a grip, Liss. Next you’ll be
saying that they quarreled because he asked her to marry him and
she turned him down.” Dan looked faintly disgusted by the
idea.
“If that were the case, it would have
been Stu who took the header off the cliff,” Gordon
said.
Liss glared at them both. “Whatever his
reasons, Stu was terribly upset by Nola’s death. He was drinking
heavily all last night and into this morning.” And after she’d left
him all but passed out in his kitchen, he’d apparently slept off
his first drunk and started on a second.
“You’re partly right,” Gordon
grudgingly admitted. “He had a lot of unresolved feelings. It
ticked Stu off that Nola accepted her ex-husband’s offer to take
her back to the hotel on Thursday night instead of going with
him.”
Gordon’s stance was rigid, his face a
mask, but Liss couldn’t help but wonder if he was seeing parallels
between Stu’s disappointment in love and his own rejection when
Liss decided to marry Dan. Of course, the situations were nothing
alike, but she felt her cheeks grow warm all the same.
The three of them nearly filled the
claustrophobically small lobby, but Gordon had not suggested they
move into a meeting or interrogation room to continue their
discussion. That meant he didn’t intend to spend very long talking
to them. Liss told herself she was relieved, but she still had
questions.
“What happened when Stu and Nola met on
Friday at the hotel?” she asked. “I know they quarreled and Nola
was upset, but what did they say to each other?”
For a moment, she didn’t think Gordon
would answer her. She imagined he had to wage a brief but violent
struggle with himself—not that she could see any evidence of such a
thing in his stony countenance—before he relented.
“Stu taunted Nola with her lack of
success. According to him, she had big plans and none of them
materialized.”
“He was wrong about that. Sort
of.”
“So I hear.” Gordon sent a speculative
look her way. “Been talking to Sherri, have you?”
Liss ignored the question. “After
Nola’s death, when Stu got good and drunk and maudlin, he must have
decided that his taunts had driven her to kill herself. He didn’t
give her enough credit. She was stronger than that. And more
successful, too.”
“And maybe she was already distraught
about something else,” Gordon suggested.
“Guilt-ridden, according to your
hypothesis, because she’d killed Jane Nedlinger? I don’t think
so.”
“Let’s just agree that Nola Ventress
didn’t kill herself because of Stu Burroughs. I’ve already informed
him of that.” Gordon’s stiff formality eased for a moment when he
added, “He wasn’t as grateful as you’d think he’d be for that
information. Then again, he’s still pretty soused.”
“Can we talk to him?” Liss
asked.
“No.”
“But I’m the one he called. If he’d
used his one phone call for a lawyer, you’d let the lawyer in to
see him.”
“You’re not a lawyer. However, if you
want to be the one to pick him up tomorrow, I’ll have dispatch call
you just before he’s released. His car’s totaled, so he’s going to
need a ride.”
Liss felt a headache coming on. She was
already supposed to be in two places at the same time in the
morning—the dealers’ room and Lenny Peet’s funeral. Splitting
herself three ways just wasn’t possible. “I’ll find someone to come
for him. Will you tell him that?”
“I’ll see that he’s informed.” Gordon
turned away, heading for the heavy, reinforced door that led back
to the dispatch center.
“Will you also inform him of something else while you’re at it?” Liss
called after him. “Tell him I don’t think Nola killed herself at
all.”
A spin on his heel and two quick
strides brought them toe-to-toe and face-to-face. Liss took an
involuntary step backward, bumping into one of the plastic chairs
that were the only furnishings in the minuscule lobby. Gordon’s
face was no longer impassive. Temper sparked in his eyes and his
mouth was set in a hard, thin line ... until he opened it to yell
at her.
“Damn it, Liss! I’m not going to go
putting ideas into his head. The next thing you know, Stu will be
trying to play detective. Bad enough that you are.”
“I’m not—”
He silenced her with a look that
promised retribution if she interrupted him again. “I’ll be at The
Spruces tomorrow. And, yes, I am pursuing other possibilities. I
know damned well Sherri’s just passing on ideas you’ve come up
with. If something pans out, I’ll be grateful. But if I even
suspect that you’re meddling in police business again, you’ll be
sitting in a jail cell, just like your pal Stu, waiting for someone
to bail you out!” This time, when he turned away, he signaled for
the dispatcher to unlatch the door the moment he reached it. It
closed behind him with a solid thunk.
“There’s no point in denying it, you
know,” Dan said as they walked back to his truck. “You can claim
you only went along with Margaret to keep her out of trouble, but I
know better and so do you.”
“Is it so wrong that she doesn’t want
to see her friend blamed for something she didn’t do? I can’t help
but sympathize with that.” And nobody wanted a murderer to go
free.
“I’m not going to argue with you about
it,” Dan said.
“Fine with me.” She was too exhausted
and discouraged to have much fight left in her.
They accomplished the drive back to
Moosetookalook in contemplative silence. Dan parked in his own
driveway and walked Liss back to her house, but when she would have
said good night to him and gone inside alone, he slung an arm
around her shoulders and went in with her.
“You’re not going to be able to sleep,”
he predicted. “You’re going to stay up, going over your lists,
hoping you’ll think of something the police haven’t. Why don’t you
let me take a look at them with you? Maybe you can use me as a
sounding board. Who knows? We might even come up with a solid
lead.”
“To tell Gordon? Do you really think
he’d listen? He’ll be too busy throwing me in the slammer. That’ll
really make his day.”
Dan ignored her mini-rant and the
long-suffering sigh that followed. He simply hung around until she
did what he wanted. They settled down on the sofa, one cat on his
lap and the other behind Liss’s head, and Liss handed over her
lists. He started with the page that listed all the people Jane
Nedlinger had talked to and/or threatened at the opening
reception.
“Bill Stotz,” Dan read aloud. “Yvonne
Quinlan. Me. Who’s Eleanor Ogilvie?”
“She’s the woman Jane talked to after
she finished interrogating you,” Liss reminded him. “Remember? You
pointed her out to me the next day.” At least, she thought it had
been the next day. Events were beginning to run together in her
mind. She shook off her lethargy and explained how Eleanor, the
editor who was now an agent, was connected to both Nola and
Yvonne.
“Okay,” he said. “Then you’ve listed
Nola. You left yourself off the list. Anyone else?”
“No one else that I know of talked to
Jane Nedlinger that night. And that makes sense. The names on my
list all fit into one of two stories Jane was writing. You and I
represent one exposé. Bill, Yvonne, Eleanor, and Nola were
connected to the other.”
“But there were
others,” Dan mused. “Didn’t Tandy tell you that he found some of
Jane’s notes in Nola’s room?”
Liss nodded. “I’ve been assuming she
deliberately left the ones about me behind, and she’d have
destroyed anything relating to her, so if there were notes left for
Gordon to find, they must have been about other people at the
conference. There could be someone here we haven’t even thought of
who wanted Jane Nedlinger out of the way.”
“Tandy has their names. He’ll have
checked them out.”
“Yes. Good. That’s good.” She fought a
yawn.
Frowning, Dan skimmed over the local
names on her list—members of the Moosetookalook Small Business
Association who’d attended the emergency meeting at Liss’s house.
“We can’t discount anyone who knew Nola from before. Who knows what
enemies she made when she lived in Moosetookalook? But with Jane’s
murder in the mix, I think we can narrow things down a
bit.”
“Wonderful choices there—your father,
my aunt, Stu, and Doug.”
“Too bad Lorelei Preston wasn’t at the
meeting. She strikes me as the jealous type. She wasn’t happy to
hear that her husband had spent time with his
ex-wife.”
“She didn’t even know Nola was in town
until we told her,” Liss reminded him, “and that was after Nola was
already dead. Besides, she’d have had no reason to kill
Jane.”
“I agree, but I’m trying to keep an
open mind. Do you suppose there’s any way we can include Dolores
Mayfield among the suspects? She knew Nola before, and she wanted
very badly to talk to her on the day Nola died.”
“About the class reunion,” Liss
recalled.
“So she said. What if Dolores wanted to
see Nola for some other reason?”
“You think she had murder on her mind?
Why?” Liss was just groggy enough from lack of sleep to give
serious consideration to the suggestion. Hadn’t Margaret mentioned
something about Moose Mayfield having had a bad case of puppy love
for Nola Ventress?
Dan shrugged. “Who knows? But Dolores
had a link to Jane, too. She talked to her at the library on
Thursday.”
“Dolores doesn’t kill people,” Liss
muttered. “She just talks them to death. Besides, knowing Dolores,
she’d be the last person to want to get rid of Jane. She was
probably hoping she’d be quoted in The Nedlinger
Report. It would make more sense to suggest Davy Kline as a
suspect.”
“Davy Kline?” Dan needed a moment to
place the name. “You mean the kid who found Jane’s
body?”
“If Gordon can suspect me just because
I found Nola, then I can put Davy Kline on my list.”
“He’s what, twenty? He probably still
has trouble telling the difference between the blood and gore in
video games and real death.”
“And you’re so
much older.” But thinking about Davy, picturing him, sobered her.
“He came to the conference with his invalid mother. Someone said
she has a heart condition. Anyway, he sticks close to her, taking
her wherever she wants to go, pushing her in a
wheelchair.”
“Altruistic?”
“He did climb down the goat track to
try to help Jane. If he’s accustomed to taking care of his mother,
he probably has some training in first aid.”
“My father said he recognized Jane. Do
you know how?”
“He’d seen her at the
reception.”
“Seen her? Or talked to
her?”
The realization that Dan was not only
taking her seriously but also making suggestions—getting
involved—gave Liss a second wind. Her brain
began to function at full capacity again. “I don’t know, but I
think I should find out.” She took back her lined tablet, turned to
a fresh page, and scribbled a note to herself. There was one day
left of the First Annual Maine-ly Cozy Con. Chances were good that
Davy and his mother would pay another visit to the dealers’ room.
If not, she could waylay him at the tea, the last event of the
day.
Flipping back to the list of people who
might have wished to harm Nola, Liss made a few revisions. When she
was done, she’d circled five names. Four were people who’d also had
reason to dislike Jane.
“Bill and Yvonne, because of the
ghostwriting thing,” Dan said, studying the list. “Not
Eleanor?”
“I don’t think so. But add her if you
like.”
“Stu and Doug,” he read. “But they
didn’t exactly hate Nola. It was more like she was the one who got
away. The lost love.”
“There’s always the ‘if I can’t have
her, nobody can’ motive,” Liss reminded him. “Plus love and hate
sometimes get all mixed up. And both Stu and Doug have
tempers.”
“Okay. Leave them on the list. Who’s
Phoebe Lewis?” He pointed at the last name Liss had
circled.
“She was Nola’s second in command. I
overheard them quarreling over conference business. My take is that
Nola may have been charming to most people, but she treated Phoebe
like dirt and Phoebe resented it. She did all the grunt work while
Nola took all the credit.”
“That’s a pretty poor reason to push
someone off a cliff.”
“Is there any good reason?” Liss rubbed her forehead. Her headache was
back, more fierce than it had been earlier. “The best scenario I
can come up with involves Yvonne and Bill acting together, because
the same argument I have against Nola killing Jane applies to
Yvonne acting alone, as well. Jane was a big woman. Yvonne isn’t as
tiny as Nola was, but she’s so slender she looks as if a good
breeze could blow her away.”
“I wonder,” Dan said, “who was working
the check-in desk Thursday night? Whoever it was might have seen
Jane leave the hotel, and maybe who she was with,
too.”
Asking someone who’d know seemed so
obvious Liss could have kicked herself for not thinking of it
before. She supposed that Gordon had already thought to do so, but
it wouldn’t hurt for Dan—the boss’s son—to make his own inquiries.
She wrote herself a note about that, too. Then she turned to the
page where she’d sketched out a time line.
“One big problem with figuring this
out,” she said, “is that just about anyone could have killed Jane.
As for Nola, anyone who was at the hotel that afternoon could have
slipped away and followed her along the cliff path, just as I
did.”
“I don’t like to think about that. The
murderer could still have been in the vicinity when you found
Nola’s body.”
“Then I’d have met him—or her, or
them—on the path. Unless he, she, or they took the trail that comes
out on Spruce Avenue and walked up the drive to get back to the
hotel.”
“Or into town,” Dan added, playing
devil’s advocate.
“In any case, I didn’t see anyone. Nola
was probably already dead by the time I started looking for her.
Yvonne or Bill weren’t at the auction, but Doug was there and Stu—”
She broke off, shaken by a memory.
“Stu what?”
“Stu came in late. He was out of
breath. You don’t suppose. . . ?”
“No, I don’t. First of all, Stu is
often late. That he was on time for the MSBA meeting on Friday was
the exception to the rule. Second, if he’d killed her, he’d have
confessed to it when he was arrested, instead of just rambling on
about suicide. Who else did you see at the auction before you went
to look for Nola?”
“Margaret. She was the one who asked me
to find Nola. And—oh, you’ll like this—Dolores and
Moose.”
He cracked the ghost of a
smile.
“But I keep coming back to Yvonne and
Bill, who weren’t there. And when you add in the gum
wrappers—”
“Which are pretty darned common. You
can’t build a case based on litter. Besides, if they were acting
together, don’t you think one of them would have been smart enough
to make sure they didn’t leave any evidence behind?”
Liss mulled over what he’d said, but
she had a clear picture in her mind of the two of them ganging up
on Jane and pushing her over. “She was a big woman,” Liss mused.
“It would have taken considerable strength to shove her hard enough
so she’d fall and break her neck.”
Dan hid a yawn behind his hand.
“Pushing someone off a cliff seems like a pretty dumb way to commit
murder. People can survive falls like that.”
“That’s what Gordon said, too. I
suppose they hoped it would look like an accident. And it did, at
first.”
“Me, I think I would have broken her
neck before she went over the side, just to
make sure she died.”
Liss stared at him, suddenly reminded
of a scrap of conversation in the dealers’ room, a careless comment
that hadn’t made any real impression on her at the time. “Oh my
God,” she whispered. “She wouldn’t have needed help, after
all.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“Yvonne Quinlan. She was a stuntwoman
before she was an actress. She all but came right out and told me
that she knows exactly how to break someone’s neck.”