Chapter Twenty-Eight
Two hours later, the coffee cups had been emptied and refilled and emptied again. Hazel had brought out two kinds of cakes (classic chocolate and raspberry creme) and three plates of assorted homemade cookies. Most of the cookies and half of both cakes were now gone. I’d described how the trail behind the Baileys’ house led to my father’s cabin and then shared what Lacy had told me about finding no evidence in the muddy ground that led from the back to the front of the house.
“Well, that settles it. We know who it wasn’t.” Delanie set her coffee cup onto its saucer. It made a delicate clatter. “No one in the book club could have been responsible, which is a relief, really. I hate looking at my friends and wondering if one of them is secretly a monster.”
“Secretly?” Beau muttered. “Those harpies don’t keep anything about their natures secret.”
But that wasn’t quite true, was it? Marigold hid her technological prowess. Annabelle hid her temper. And who knew what else might lurk under the polished veneers of the ladies I hadn’t questioned.
I was glad I didn’t need to find out. Mama Eddy would have never forgiven me if I’d angered any one of those pillars of Cypress society by prying too hard.
Tori leaned over toward me. “You know who did it,” she whispered.
I tried to keep my expression neutral as I shrugged.
“I knew it!” she exclaimed.
“Knew what?” Charlie asked.
“I knew that our girl Tru has been holding back on us.”
Everyone turned and stared at me.
“Not holding back,” I said, holding up my hands. “Just not spouting off wild hunches without having proof to back them up.”
Jace smiled at me in a way that made my heart melt a bit. “And how do we get this elusive proof?”
“Y’all remember Gail?” I asked.
Delanie groaned at the mention of Ideal Life’s producer. “She won’t return my phone calls.”
“So rude,” Tori said with a twinkle in her eye.
“She’ll return my phone call,” I said. “She’s desperate to keep her show on the air. And will do anything to get a big story.”
“Anything?” Delanie said. “As in—?” She gasped. “She wasn’t with the rest of the film crew that came with Joyce Fellows that night.”
“She wasn’t,” I agreed.
I was about to say more when my cell phone chimed. I checked the screen. Dr. Lewis was finally calling.
“I need to take this,” I said as I hurried into the kitchen.
Jace followed me.
“There must be a stomach bug going through the elementary school,” Dr. Lewis said after apologizing for calling so late. “I’ve been busy all day with kids with upset tummies. I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath, much less make any calls. But I do have your blood results right here, and I knew you wanted to hear back as soon as possible.” Paper rustled. “Are you sure you didn’t take caffeine pills that morning?” she asked.
“No. I had a few cups of coffee, that’s all. Why? What do the results say?”
“The lab results are clear, Tru. You overdosed on caffeine. And this isn’t the kind of overdose a few cups of coffee would cause. I’m talking about megadoses of caffeine.”
“I only had four cups of coffee that morning.” And I’d spilled most of one of them all over the desk.
“It had to come from somewhere,” Dr. Lewis said. “Did anyone give you a drink? Or something to eat that morning? Perhaps someone slipped you something, trying to poison you.”
“No” came my automatic answer. “I brewed the coffee that I drank that morning.”
But then I remembered that wasn’t exactly right.
Flossie had brought me a coffee.
I looked at Jace.
He looked concerned.
“We should go talk with Flossie,” I said.
“Tonight?”
“Tonight.”
Flossie’s house sat on the shore of Lake Marion. It had been owned for generations by her husband’s family. After Truman had inherited it, he’d installed a ramp around the side of the porch for Flossie’s wheelchair. He’d also made several modifications to the house’s interior that allowed Flossie to live independently. A woman from town came in twice a week to help with cleaning, laundry, and any projects Flossie might need handled. A lawn service kept the lawn neatly mowed and the flower garden, which had been Truman’s pride and joy, in pristine condition.
Moonlight seemed to make the pearly white moonflowers glow as Jace pulled up to the house.
“You can’t seriously believe she’d do anything to hurt you.” Tori had leaned forward from the Jeep’s back bench and stuck her head in the space between the two front seats.
“Of course I don’t,” I said.
“People do all sorts of unbelievable acts when they find themselves in a difficult situation. She might have killed Rebecca in a fit of anger and then realized that her best friends would figure out the truth without any trouble,” Jace said. “That’s why she didn’t come tonight.”
“This is Flossie we’re talking about,” Tori argued.
After Jace and I had said our hasty goodbyes at Hazel’s house and left, Tori had jumped into Jace’s back seat and demanded to be told what was going on.
“Flossie might have a temper,” Tori continued, “and she might threaten anyone who dares disturb her writing time, and she lives a secretive life that she fiercely protects.”
“You’re only making my point,” Jace said. “And don’t forget that this is the same woman who chased the plumber down the street with a broadsword.”
“That was completely justified,” Tori said. “I’ve worked with Marvin, and he’s totally unreliable.”
“She chased him with a broadsword,” Jace reiterated.
“He was five hours late and had interrupted her when she was writing a crucial scene,” I said.
Jace turned off his Jeep’s motor and turned to me. “If she’s so innocent, why did we just run out of my parents’ house moments after hearing from Dr. Lewis that you were poisoned, which may I remind you, I’ve been saying all along?”
I held up my finger and smiled. “Because she is holding on to a piece of vital evidence.”
“Why would she do that?” Tori cried from the back seat.
“Because she doesn’t think it is vital, and she’s embarrassed about it,” I said.
“Oh!” Tori’s eyes grew wide. She jumped out of the Jeep with the prowess of an Olympic pole vaulter. “This is going to be good!”
“We’re not here to embarrass her,” I cautioned as I climbed out of the Jeep.
“I still don’t have a good feeling about this,” Jace said. “Didn’t you say that Flossie brought you a coffee to drink that morning you were poisoned, and that no one else had given you anything?”
“Well, I did.” The poisoning scenario still didn’t sit right with me. But I didn’t say anything, since Jace now had Dr. Lewis to back up his theory that someone was out to stop me from solving Rebecca’s murder. “Let’s just go talk with Flossie and see what she says.”
“Yes, let’s,” Tori said, tugging on my arm and sounding far too eager.
“I sincerely hope she’s not in the middle of writing a crucial scene,” Jace muttered.
I chuckled as we approached our friend’s front door.
The wooden door was stained red. “It’s a bloodred,” Flossie had once told me while contemplating painting it a friendlier color.
A soft breeze blew in from the dark, winter-silent lake that reminded me of a gaping hole beyond her house.
“I don’t have a weapon,” Jace whispered just before I knocked.
I gave his arm a nudge. “This is Flossie we’re talking about. She’s a pussycat.”
One of Jace’s eyebrows rose. “A sword-wielding, boomerang-throwing, meteor-hammer-swinging pussycat?”
The bloodred door swung open. Flossie, dressed in a somber black dress, was on the other side of the door. She wasn’t smiling.
“Flossie,” I said softly.
“Girl, it’s time you come clean with us,” Tori blurted before I had a chance to say anything else.
Flossie looked at me, and then at Tori, and finally at Jace before bursting into loud ugly tears.
“Now, now,” I said, and handed her a tissue from one of the many gaudy tissue boxes scattered around the large wood-paneled living room. Truman’s cousin Gracie liked to crochet tissue box covers and give them as gifts to her relatives, which was lovely in theory. The problem was that Gracie was color-blind, so the colors of her creations often clashed in a way that strained the eye. And Flossie was one of Gracie’s few remaining living relatives (if only by marriage), which meant Flossie received a crocheted tissue box cover every year for Christmas and Easter and Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day and even the Fourth of July.
Flossie didn’t have the heart not to use them. That was why there were nearly twenty color-clashing crocheted-covered tissue boxes . . . in the living room alone.
“I knew”—sniff—“as soon as I saw it at Hazel’s”—sniff—“you’d”—sniff—“find me out.” She blew her nose loudly in the tissue I’d handed her. “And . . . and then that nasty Gail woman with the Ideal Life show started poking around in my business. She’s desperate for a huge story, you know?”
“I’ve heard,” I said.
“Wait?” Tori said. “Are you confessing?”
Jace stood a bit taller. I didn’t blame him for getting that excited look in his eyes, like a predator getting ready to pounce. After all, his mother’s freedom was on the line, and he saw Flossie’s confession as the solution to his troubles.
Flossie sighed. She spun her wheelchair toward a doorway that I knew led into her office, a room she rarely used for writing and never allowed anyone to enter. “Follow me.” She sounded defeated, flattened. “It’d be easier if I just showed you.”
“Flossie, you don’t have to worry,” I told her. “We’re your friends. You can trust us with your secrets.”
“I’m also an officer of the law,” Jace reminded us as he stepped into Flossie’s inner sanctum. “I cannot help cover up a crime, especially not a crime my mother is being accused of committing.”
Flossie looked over her shoulder. “A crime?” She seemed to think about that for a moment and then sighed again. “I suppose it was a crime.”
“Do you want him to leave?” I asked her.
He looked at me as if I’d just offered to help Flossie push him off a cliff.
Again, Flossie took a moment of thoughtful consideration before answering. “No, I don’t suppose I do.”
I nodded.
Flossie’s office was lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves absolutely packed with books. Even above the doorframe and above the windows looking out onto the lake, someone had covered every bit of the walls with bookshelves. If I had to guess, this was Truman’s handiwork.
Also, tucked in here and there, I spotted several writing awards, plaques, statues, and framed certificates. All naming various well-known authors.
In the middle of the room was a large wooden desk, its top neatly organized. A bin holding bills sat on the left side of the desk. A second bin with what looked like outgoing mail sat on the right side. There was no desk chair since Flossie wouldn’t need one. There were also no other chairs in the room, suggesting that she never invited anyone, perhaps not even her husband when he was still alive, into this room.
“Tell us what you want to tell us already, the suspense is killing me,” Tori complained.
I pointed to the library book that had been placed at the center of the desk. It was one of the new mass market paperback books that Delanie had donated to the secret bookroom. To be more precise, it was one of the uncorrected proofs that Delanie had donated.
“You didn’t want anyone to see that,” I said. “You took it from Hazel’s kitchen.”
“Obviously she was trying to protect the secret bookroom.” Tori jumped between Flossie and Jace. “You can’t arrest her for that!”
“No one is getting arrested,” I said.
“Yet,” Jace muttered. He still looked unhappy. And I still didn’t blame him. His focus was (as it should have been) on protecting his mother.
I turned to Flossie. “You didn’t take the book because it belonged in the library,” I said, guessing at the truth. “You took it because you wrote it, and you didn’t want Rebecca to see it.”
Flossie sniffled.
“That doesn’t make sense. Rebecca was dead,” Tori said, shaking her head. “She couldn’t see anything. And even if she could, her deadness would make it so she wouldn’t care.”
My gaze remained on Flossie, who was fidgeting with her hands. “When you went into the kitchen, you didn’t know Rebecca was dead, isn’t that right, Flossie?” I remembered how my friend was just as surprised as I was when I found Rebecca on the other side of Hazel’s kitchen island.
Flossie nodded. “I saw the book and made a grab for it before anyone else came into the room. I guess I ripped out a few pages when I’d rolled over them in my haste to get it off the floor. I rammed my wheelchair into the counter as I reached for it, which had to be that second crash you’d heard. The book had been sitting there, splayed open, the pages crumpled and swimming in the spilled tuna casserole. And all I could think was that Rebecca might walk in and see it and somehow know it was mine. Foolish, I know, but all night she’d been seesawing between ignoring me and outright telling me that I wasn’t Arete Society worthy. It was maddening.” She looked over at Jace. “Not murderous maddening, mind you,” she told him. “It wasn’t as if she’d interrupted me when I was writing the all-important ending of a book. But maddening because it made me think that she somehow knew about the kinds of books I wrote and that was the reason she thought I couldn’t be part of the book club.”
“That’s why you were so upset after we talked with Emma, isn’t it?” Oh, why hadn’t I seen it sooner? “Emma said that no one had objected to Rebecca tossing out your membership application. And then she had badmouthed one of the books the book club had read, and she apologized, worried that you had written it.”
Flossie was shaking her head sadly from side to side.
“The reason you couldn’t get into the Arete Society wasn’t because of the types of books you’ve written,” I said. “They just don’t want to accidentally insult you by talking about one of your books in front of you.”
“I hadn’t realized that was the reason until Emma said it,” Flossie said tearfully. “I should have seen it. Others have made the same comments, even you, Tru. But I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand that my writing was creating a wedge between me and my friends. I hate that.”
“Wait. Hold up.” Tori lunged across the desk and scooped up the library book Flossie had taken from the crime scene. The muscular man on the cover was standing on the side of a craggy mountain wearing a red-and-green tartan . . . and nothing else. Tori shook the book. “You wrote this?”
Flossie nodded.
“This is what you write?” Tori asked, shaking the book some more.
“I can’t control what the publisher puts on the cover,” she said. “My editor tells me that whenever they use that particular model, sales go through the roof. It’s a good story, though.”
“A good story?” Tori sounded incredulous.
“It is!” Flossie insisted, sounding more like her old self again.
“It’s not merely good. It’s smoking,” Tori nearly shouted. “Charlie and I have been reading a copy to each other at night.” She waggled her perfectly arched eyebrows in a suggestive way. “Plus, Charlie can’t keep them in stock in his store. Everyone is reading this book.”
“Oh . . .” Flossie blushed. “Thank you.”
I recognized the author’s name on the cover. She was one of our patrons’ most requested historical romance novelists. I took the book from Tori and flipped it over to look at the back cover. The photo, which I recognized from previous books by that author, was of a young, stylish woman wearing a slinky red dress and making a pouting face as she leaned against a brick wall.
“No,” I said. This couldn’t be right. “I know her. I saw her talk about her books at a book signing in Charlotte last year.”
“Yeah.” Flossie rolled over to the office door and closed it. She lowered her voice. “What I’m going to say right now cannot leave this room.”
“I can’t make that promise,” Jace said rather stubbornly.
“Then leave,” Tori snapped. “I want to hear her dish.”
“I do too,” I agreed.
“It’s not anything illegal nor does it involve Rebecca’s murder,” Flossie said, and made a cross over her heart. “I swear.”
Jace took several deep breaths before saying, “Flossie, I consider you a friend. That’s what makes this even harder. My mother . . .” He shook his head. “She could go to jail. If you had information that would have helped the police look for suspects other than my mother, you would have saved my family a world of heartache by handing it over. It’s hard enough for my mom to accept that someone was murdered in her house. It’s even worse that she’s being blamed for the death.”
Flossie nodded. “I understand. And I know I shouldn’t have taken the book. And after Tru discovered Rebecca’s body, I really should have returned it, but by then my fingerprints were all over it and it’s a book from the secret bookroom, and . . . none of that matters because this is your mother we’re talking about.” She drew a deep breath. “I am sorry, Jace. But please, don’t make what I’m going to tell you right now public unless you feel you have no other choice.”
“I can do that,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said, and gave his hand a squeeze.
“Very well,” Flossie said. “Here’s my secret. I’m a ghost.”