Murder Between the Covers Read online

  Keith and Mama left the room together. Kelly came into the dining room to sit beside me at the table. I pushed some of the cookie sprinkles her way and handed my knife and bowl of icing to her.

  Pepper sat down opposite us. “Why does everything with our family always turn into a circus? Do you want a glass of wine? It’s the holidays. We should have some wine or something.”

  “I want some eggnog,” Kelly said.

  “No wine for me,” I said. “I’m driving. I’ll have eggnog, too.”

  While Pepper got the drinks, I looked at the boxes, bags, and containers of cookies stacked on a table in the corner of the room. We had baked the thumbprint cookies first. Some had dollops of strawberry or peach jam, while others held chocolate kisses. Chocolate chip cookies with maraschino cherries and walnuts had been baked next. Mama then cooked fudge on top of the stove, while Kelly, Keith, and I rolled warm pecan balls in powdered sugar as soon as Pepper took them from the oven. The sugar cutouts were the last cookie of the evening.

  In retrospect, we should have done the cutouts first, because they took the longest, and by now, everyone was cranky or punchy. I’d have to remember to suggest the change in baking order next year.

  I saw Pepper slip a bottle of brandy back in the cupboard and knew she had spiked her eggnog. She set our glasses before us.

  “I have a situation,” I said.

  “We have a solution,” Kelly replied cheerfully.

  I smiled. She was going to be twelve next month, and I knew she liked when Pepper allowed her to sit in on our conversations. She was acting more and more grownup all the time.

  “Well, part of my situation is your fault,” I said to her.

  Her eyes flew open wide. “No! What did I do?”

  I laughed at her reaction. “I never gave that stupid toilet by the kitchen a second thought with all its noise and groaning. It’s just old pipes and water pressure, and the toilet runs when the water level in the tank dips down.”

  “Oh, that toilet is evil,” she said without hesitation.

  “That’s the problem. Ever since you and Keith pointed out that it was possessed by the devil himself, it scares the crap out of me.”

  She laughed and said, “I bet literally.”

  Pepper smiled and took a long drink of her eggnog. I suspected the ratio was more brandy to eggnog.

  “It gets worse,” I said. “Now that we’ve turned the furnace on, and I hear the noises it makes more often, I’m convinced it’s the devil’s demon spawn.”

  Kelly giggled.

  “I’m serious. My skin crawls all over my body when I have to go in the basement and that thing comes on. It’s horrible. There’s no way I should be this afraid of a basement.”

  Pepper spoke with a slight slur to her words, making me think she might have had a few nips before we ever showed up to bake the cookies. “It’s my fault,” she said.

  “Your fault? Why would it be your fault?” I asked.

  “When you were little, you were afraid of the dark, but I wasn’t, and I’d tell you I had a surprise for you in the basement, and when we’d get down there, I’d tell you a monster was going to get you, and I’d run up the stairs, turn off the light, and close the door, and you’d be down there screaming your head off until Mama came to get you.” She took a deep breath after telling her story in one continuous sentence.

  Kelly and I were both flabbergasted. “Mom, you were so mean,” she said. “You scarred Aunt Jo for life.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “I don’t remember that. Did you do it very often?”

  “Probably three or four times until Mama got a belt and beat my butt with it. You weren’t worth the belt to do it again.” She smiled.

  “I’ve been terrified of Mama’s basement my entire life,” I said. “No wonder I’m having so much trouble now.”

  “Is that your situation?” Kelly asked. “You’re afraid of your toilet and your furnace?”

  I smiled. “Sort of. I told Glenn I needed a murder room. I can’t set up shop in the dining room, or I’ll have more incidents like we had with Keith finding my pictures.”

  “Yeah, I’m still not happy ‘bout that,” Pepper said slowly.

  “When I came home from work today, Clay was leaving.”

  “I like Clay,” Kelly said. “He’s cute.”

  Yes, he is,” I said. “You can date him in six more years. He’ll only be thirty-six.”

  “Eww. He’ll be old then.”

  “She’s not dating old guys,” Pepper said, her eyes half closed.

  “Anyway, Clay was leaving. I went in the house, and Glenn said he had a surprise for me. He made me close my eyes, and he took me down in the basement.”

  “Oh no!” Kelly yelped. “A surprise in the basement. Were you scared?”

  “I wasn’t scared, but I was nervous. Can you guess what was down there?”

  Pepper said nonchalantly, “Your new murder room, of course.”

  Kelly yelped again. “No way!”

  “Yes, way,” I said with a laugh. “What am I supposed to do? He and Clay worked all afternoon unpacking my things, hanging my whiteboard, and making a nice murder space on the wall opposite his workbench. He said we could both putter down there together.”

  “I hate puttering,” Pepper mumbled.

  “Aunt Jo, that’s terrible. What are you going to do?”

  “I guess I’m going to have to put my big girl panties on and get over my fear of the noises and the basement, because if I want to work a murder room, there’s no other choice.”

  Pepper was almost no longer with us. I knew she rarely drank, but when she did, alcohol affected her quickly. She managed to say, “Clean out the garage and work out there,” before closing her eyes and drifting off to sleep with her head dropped forward onto her chest.

  I looked over at Kelly and raised my eyebrows. “You know, that’s not a half-bad idea. It would be cold in winter, but I could put a heater out there.”

  “See,” Kelly said. “I told you we’d have the answer.”

  I grinned. “You keep working on the cookies. I’ll go see what’s taking Mama so long, and I’ll run up and get Keith.”

  I opened the front door, expecting to see Mama sitting on the edge of the low porch, but she and her car were gone. It wasn’t the first time Mama had ducked out on us in the middle of a project.

  I went upstairs to Keith’s room and stuck my head through the open doorway. He was lying on his bed, playing a hand-held video game.

  “Your grandmama ditched us, and your mother fell asleep. It’s up to you, me, and Kelly to finish the job.”

  He jumped off the bed. “Look at this, Aunt Jo.” He grabbed a box from a corner of his room and set it on the floor to open it. “Mom gave me an A in physics. I recreated your crime scene.”

  He pulled out a ladder made from dowel rods and craft sticks, a human form made from clay, and a piece of cardboard with a picture of books on shelves glued onto it. He leaned the cardboard against the bed before leaning the ladder against the cardboard. He then pulled a pencil holder and sharpened sticks from the box and placed the sticks in the holder with the pointy ends up.

  “If the lady fell back and held onto the ladder, this would have happened.”

  He placed the dried clay form on the ladder and pushed them both backwards. Of course, the ladder fell on the form. He continued to show other positions and how she might have fallen from the ladder, but none of them was consistent with the way she actually fell – forward onto the spear.

  “So, in conclusion,” he said. “Unless she did this…” He swiveled her around in the air and aimed her at the spears. He had already made a hole in the clay form, and he pushed one of the spears into the hole. “There’s no way the spear stabbed her if she accidentally fell.”

  I was impressed. It was a crude but fairly accurate way of depicting what he told us in my dining room. Someone definitely killed Meredith with the spear, possibly after striking her in the face fi
rst, and then dropped the ladder on her to make it look like an accident.

  “Good work, Keith. I think you’re going to be a good private investigator one day.”

  He beamed with pride and began putting the items back in the box. I looked around his room while I waited. Other than being clean and neat, it was pretty typical for a boy’s room. He was in that awkward stage of still wanting to play with army men and his childhood toys, but he was also ready for more grownup activities. I noticed some of his art items on his desk – colored pencils, markers, drawing paper.

  “What are you working on here?” I asked.

  He came over to stand beside me. “Nothing. I was just coloring a map.”

  I picked up the map. It seemed old and dull, but Keith’s pencils had brightened it. I smiled when I saw the X that marked the spot.

  “This is cool. Did you make it for something you’re studying?”

  “No. I found it in one of the old books you got at the book sale.”

  A tingle ran up my spine. “You found a map in a book?”

  “Yeah. It was folded up inside a Treasure Island book. I think it’s old, and I figured some kid drew it when he was reading the book.”

  I looked at the map more carefully. It was pretty simple, but there was a farm, the X, and a river. I looked closer still and saw the faded words above the river were actually Sneider’s Creek.

  The tingle ran down my spine this time. What had Jackie said about the town’s history? Randolph Buxley had tried to take the Schneider farm away from Daniel Schneider, but when the creek rose and flooded the farm, he moved on.

  Could this be the same creek? The spelling was close enough. And could this be an actual map of where Randolph Buxley stashed the gold? Did Bubba know about the existence of the map? Is that why he was looking for a copy of Treasure Island?

  “Where’s the book?” I asked.

  “I already read Treasure Island, so I gave it to Jimmy. They don’t read old stories in school, only Goosebumps and stuff like that, so I gave it to him to read.”

  “Can you get it back?”

  “I suppose, but why would I want to do that? He’s already reading it.”

  I grasped him by the arm and walked him over to the bed. We both sat down on the edge.

  “Listen, Keith. This is important. Really important. I think there are people in town looking for the book and the map. The people might even be dangerous. I’m going to take the map and put it in a safe place. You can’t tell anyone about it. Do you understand? You’re the private investigator now. You found a piece of evidence, and you have to keep it to yourself. Don’t even tell your Mom or Dad unless they specifically ask you about it. I don’t want you to lie to them but don’t volunteer anything. Can you do that?”

  His eyes bugged a little. I wasn’t certain if it was because of fear or excitement. “Sure I can.”

  “I know it will be hard, but the fewer people who know about this, the safer we’ll be. I’m not even going to tell Glenn. Did you tell Jimmy about the map?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet. I was going to show him when he comes over tomorrow.”

  “Good. Keep it to yourself for now. We’ll figure out what to do with it later. I’ll buy a copy of Treasure Island and you can trade Jimmy for the one he has. I’d like to see it. Do you still have my card?” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a Two Sisters and a Journalist card. I wrote my cell phone number on the back. “Call me when you get the book back from Jimmy, or call if you need to tell me something. Got it?”

  He nodded his head.

  “Good. Come on. Let’s go finish the cookies.”

  Chapter Eight

  The amount of electronics in Parker’s security room rivaled anything I had ever seen on television.

  He pulled up a chair for me next to him and began clacking away on his keyboard while instructing me to watch the first monitor on the wall.

  “Here’s where the man and woman enter the bar.”

  I noted the date and time in my notebook before writing a few words describing the man. I could add more details later.

  “You don’t have to do all that writing,” he said. “Just say the word, and I’ll put a screenshot on a flash drive for you. He went back a few frames and tapped a key on his keyboard. The faces of both the man and woman were clear in the shot. “See, I put this frame on the drive, and it’s already timestamped for you.”

  I suppose there wasn’t anything remarkable about the security equipment, but I was fascinated and wished there was some reason for me to have equipment this cool at Glenn’s house.

  Parker began rewinding the tape. “My place wasn’t their only stop that day.”

  He instructed me to watch the second monitor. It was a different view from another camera outside the bar. It focused down the street toward the laundromat and Walt’s building. “Watch the corner at the end of the block.”

  It was a little hard to see at first, but the man and woman came around the corner and walked toward the bar. When they reached Walt’s building, they went inside.

  “That’s the bookstore, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  He had already put a few screen shots onto the flash drive and hit the key again to capture the frame indicating the time the couple went into the store. He then fast-forwarded the tape and did the same when they came out. From there, they walked directly to Parker’s and entered the bar.”

  “Too bad they parked around the corner,” I said. “Maybe we could have picked up the license plate if they had parked closer.”

  He reached over to a stack of papers on his desk, grabbed the top paper, and handed it to me. It was a copy of an order receipt. The name and signature on it was Tabitha Abbott. “I went back through receipts for that night. The broad paid with a credit card.”

  I only slightly bristled at his use of the term broad. He and Arnie were of the same ilk, and it wasn’t uncommon for either of them to use politically incorrect slang, although I had noticed Arnie had toned it down now that his niece Nancy was working with us in the office.

  “Awesome,” I said. “Tabitha isn’t a common name, so I should be able to track her down.”

  He reached over to the stack and handed another copy to me. This one was a close-up photo of a license plate on a white car.

  “You should be able to find her pretty easy with this,” he said.

  “When did you find this?”

  He cued up another day of taping and pointed to the second monitor again. It was the day of Meredith’s murder. We watched as the white convertible drove past Parker’s and pulled up in front of the laundromat. It was close enough for Parker to zoom in and see a clear image of the license plate. Even though he had just handed a printed copy of the plate to me, he hit the key on the keyboard to add the shot to the flash drive.

  He zoomed out, and we watched the woman enter the bookstore. He then fast forwarded to when she came out. Once again, I thought she appeared calm and collected. She didn’t rush to her car. If she heard or witnessed a murder, she didn’t have any reaction to it. On the other hand, if she committed the murder, maybe she was deliberately exhibiting a calm exterior as she left the store. Parker stopped the tape when the woman drove away.

  “Is that everything you need?” he asked.

  “Did you check to see if anyone went into the bookstore before this woman?”

  He nodded. “Sure did. She was the first customer of the day. I assume the employees go in through the back, because no one entered from the front until this woman showed up.”

  I appreciated how thorough he had been. “Do you mind if I watch some of the footage after she left?”

  He set the tape to play again, showed me which keys to push to adjust the speed for forward and rewind, and then sat back with his arms folded across his chest. I had a feeling it was his usual position when he watched the tapes for any length of time.

  I fast forwarded a few minutes and saw myself come into the left
side of the frame as I waited to cross the street with the box of books in my arms. The bobbing of my head looked absurd at the faster frame rate. I glanced at Parker and saw a big smile on his face.

  “It was a little hard to wave with my arms full,” I said defensively.

  He continued to smile. “I didn’t say a word.”

  I resumed watching at a faster than normal speed and saw Bubba go into the bookstore and come out. He walked toward Parker’s until he disappeared. I saw myself walk out onto the sidewalk, Officer Winnie showed up with the ambulance, and the black Escalade drove past. I paused the tape.

  “Can you get a close-up of the license plate on the black vehicle? I don’t know if we need it, but I want to show it to Arnie.”

  Parker worked his clickety-clack magic on the keyboard and zoomed in to get a clear shot of the plate.

  I began watching again and saw the vehicle go down the street and out of view. A minute later, it came back up the street. I hadn’t originally seen the car pass the bookstore a second time. The driver slowed as he approached Parker’s but was soon out of view of the camera.

  “Are we able to see another angle of the Escalade after it passed here?” I asked.

  His fingers flew across the keyboard again. It didn’t take long, and he pointed to the third monitor on the wall.

  The Escalade came into view and stopped just past Parker’s. The driver didn’t step out to put money in the meter. The mayor came out from his office across the street and glanced both ways before jogging across and hopping into the passenger side of the vehicle.

  “Wowzers,” I said under my breath. “I need this for sure. I need pictures of the mayor getting into that car.”

  He did some rewinding and captured a half dozen shots of the mayor’s interaction with the vehicle. The entire encounter lasted only a minute.

  “Now I have everything I need,” I said.

  Parker ejected the flash drive from his computer and handed it to me.

  “What’s up with the mayor and that car?” he asked.

  “I can’t say, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d keep it under your hat that I even asked for the pictures.” He nodded his head, and I knew I could trust him. Arnie had always considered Parker a valuable source and confidant. “Off the record,” I said. “What do you think of the mayor?”