Ten

 

Stupefied, Jaymie sat, eyes wide, thinking of all the implications of that statement. “So those novels he wrote in the eighties were yours?”

“You bet,” she said with relish. “Root of the Bitterfruit Tree and I Make This Solemn Vow. My work. My blood, sweat and tears poured out onto the page.”

“How did he get away with publishing them under his own name? You should have fought him! You should have—”

“Should have, could have, would have,” she said, and hammered the tabletop, making the spoons dance. “If I’d been sane and not grieving. If I’d been independent and not needing Evan. If I’d not been nursing a little boy whose baby sister died in my womb.” The last words were a groan of pain. She covered her face in both hands, her shoulders shaking, tears leaking from under her palms.

“Oh, oh! Sarah! I’m so sorry!” Jaymie jumped up and circled the table and impulsively hugged the woman to her, holding her as she shook.

The woman took a long shuddering breath and shrugged out of her grip. Taking another deep breath, like a fish gulping air, swallowing and choking back sobs, she steadied herself against the edge of the table and finally cleared her throat. “You’d think thirty years would have taken the edge off the pain, and usually it has, but learning Evan was dead . . . I guess it revived it.”

She took another deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment. Jaymie silently sipped her tea.

“I got pregnant very soon after Ben was born,” she said, calmer, her voice reflective and soft with emotion. “The doctors tell you that’s unlikely; I’m here to say it happens. The pregnancy did not go well, but I didn’t know for a while. It was . . . it was the worst time of my life.”

Jaymie held her breath, tears welling, feeling the woman’s pain, hearing it throb in her voice.

“Everyone thinks I should be over it. That was thirty years ago, they say. Get over it already, they say. And most of the time . . .” Her voice broke. She blinked back tears, licked her lips and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear all this.”

“No, Sarah, I’m sorry. I was . . . I was judgmental and unkind, saying you should have done this or that, and that’s not like me. I hope you believe that.”

“I do believe that. You look like a kind young woman.” She wiped her cheeks with a paper napkin and squeezed it in her hand. “I had already completed Root of the Bitterfruit Tree before Ben was born. But I wrote I Make This Solemn Vow after he was born. In a way it was about me and him, about a mother’s vow to raise him to be a better man than his father. I finished it, kind of, but it never received a thorough edit. I was . . . I was in such pain, emotionally, and Evan was caught up with his work. I didn’t think he even noticed my writing.” She snorted and shook her head. “He noticed exactly what he wanted to notice. While I was convalescing, in no shape to do anything, he found the manuscripts and took them to a publisher.”

“How did he justify stealing them?”

“He told me we needed the money. My care had cost a lot. He said there was no way I was capable of approaching publishers, much less being with it enough to promote a book.” She sighed and rolled her shoulders, squeezing her eyes shut and opening them. “He wasn’t wrong about that.”

Jaymie thought about her friend, Melody, who wrote romance novels, and gave everything she had to the process. It left her drained and weary, but she then held it in her hands to love and weep over. It was a deeply emotional process for her. To have all of that stolen away would be a crushing blow. Sarah might shrug off the pain, but it had to have hurt, and on top of the loss of her second child . . . it must have been a devastating blow. “None of that justified him stealing your work.”

“I know. But it was a long time before I came out of my fog and saw how he’d taken advantage of me. Years before I was functioning again, years when poor Ben relied completely on Evan and Erla. I couldn’t afford to alienate Evan. And I had . . . setbacks. Months . . . years in a prescription fog.” She sighed. “Life goes on.”

Of all the people who may have killed Evan Nezer, it seemed to Jaymie that Sarah’s motives were deepest rooted, a bitterness that may have soured into hatred over the years. “I think you’re being far too kind about Evan,” Jaymie said. She stood. There was more she wanted to know, but this had been a harrowing day for Sarah Nezer. And for herself; finding a murder victim would never be easy. “I should go. Have you ever thought of telling the world that those books are yours?”

She shook her head. “The past is the past. It’s taken me thirty years, but I’m at peace with it all.”

At peace. Was she truly? “You must still write. I’ve never known a writer to just quit. Do you write fiction, still?”

“Not for publication anymore, just for myself. I’ve been broken so long that I want to heal and write and . . . be.” She smiled, tears welling in her eyes. “You don’t know how much pleasure there is in just being.”

Jaymie hesitated. As much as she didn’t want to torment the poor woman, the conversation felt unfinished. “I’m still curious, Sarah,” she said, patting the tabletop. “What were you doing in the bushes by the front door of the Nezer house last night? Were you waiting to hand that note to Ben? Is that the only reason you were there?”

“What did he say when you gave him the note?” Sarah asked, searching Jaymie’s face.

Jaymie felt her cheeks burn. “I . . . actually, with everything that went on, I never got a chance to give him the note. To be completely truthful, I forgot. It’s still in my clutch purse.”

Sarah’s eyes widened. “You didn’t give it to him. Oh.”

“Does it matter? What’s in it?”

Sarah shook her head. “Oh, dear.” She swallowed hard and looked up to Jaymie. “Could you do me a big favor? Could you return that note to me?”

“What’s in it?”

“Nothing important, trust me. But . . . I’d rather have it back.”

Jaymie watched her; she was upset about the note. She couldn’t promise to return it to her. If it was evidence, if it had anything to do with the murder . . . it probably didn’t have, but how could she be sure?

“Will you?” Sarah asked again. “Bring it back to me?”

“Why, Sarah? What does it say?”

She was silent.

Every question she had asked sounded, in her mind, like an accusation. What had Evan had over her that she took such a rotten settlement in their divorce? Where had she been before she returned to the village a year ago? What was in the note, and why did Sarah need it back? As accustomed as she was becoming to asking the hard questions, and as important as this seemed, she did have limits and she’d reached hers. Her nerves felt frayed and she felt anxious exhaustion welling up within her.

The woman didn’t have anything else to say. She seemed troubled, but didn’t appear guilty or worried, not as if she had killed someone, anyway, and she didn’t continue to press for the return of the note. She hadn’t been panicked, just concerned. Jaymie said goodbye and headed out, needed some solitude and time to reflect on what she would do with the note. Her phone dinged, and she answered as she walked. It was Nan Goodenough. In response to her editor’s questions about the murder, Jaymie said, “I can give you some info, Nan, but not everything. It is a murder investigation.”

“Don’t be stubborn, Jaymie. At least give me a statement for the website. I’m recording.”

Jaymie thought for a moment. “I was coming to set up my diorama; it’s a scene from A Christmas Carol, the one where Scrooge is looking in a window with the Spirit of Christmas Present and watching the Cratchits with their Christmas pudding. I opened the diorama and found the body of Mr. Evan Nezer. The police are investigating.”

There was silence. Then Nan’s raspy voice and irritated tone: “Jaymie, come on. You must have seen the body. How did he die? Was his head bashed in? Or his throat cut? I heard there was a lot of blood; was there? What did you see? How do you feel?”

Annoyed, Jaymie stopped and took a deep breath. Sometimes Nan was too much, too pushy, too . . . news-editorish. “This is off the record, Nan; yes, I know more and saw more, but I can’t tell you anything but what I just said. It could compromise the investigation.”

There was silence from the other end for a long moment. Nan was tapping at her computer keyboard and scratching something down on paper. Conversations with her were often punctuated with silences, while the editor did several other things at once. The phone was muffled for a moment, and she heard voices in the background, probably Nan answering questions, or asking them of subordinates. Jaymie walked again, scuffing her shoes through leaves matted in clumps along the side of the road. She was in sight of the Emporium and could see police cars and people gathering.

Finally Nan came back as if there had been no pause and said, “Jaymie, I hate to say it, but at some point you’re going to have to choose between being a newspaper writer and a police stooge.”

“That’s a little harsh, Nan.”

“Maybe, but I mean it. What have they done for you lately? I know your cozy relationship with Ledbetter is gone now that he’s retired, so what are you worrying about?”

Her stomach twisted. She hated confrontation, but Bernie, her police officer friend, recently told her to grow a pair and stop worrying so much about what people thought of her. She squared her shoulders. “Nan, as much as I believe in freedom for the press, and how precious it is, I will not be bullied into giving you more information than I feel is right. It’s my decision to make, not yours. I only get this close to investigations because people in the police department trust me. If it comes down to choosing between you getting a scoop and the police catching the bad guy, then I’m going with the police every time. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

There was again silence on the other end of the line, and then Nan breathed out and chuckled, a rueful sound. “Okay. I guess I know where I stand.”

Jaymie felt a moment’s remorse, but steeled herself. She knew in her gut this was right and resisted the urge to apologize. In a relentless campaign to out-scoop other papers and news media outlets Nan could be manipulative. Guilting Jaymie into revealing more than she should was not beyond her. “This has nothing to do with you, Nan. This has to do with me living with myself, and being a good citizen in this town. This has to do with justice and catching the bad guys. Or gals. I’ve been too close to too many killers and I won’t let one slip past the police because he or she found out what the police knew from my big mouth.” She paused, then added, “That sounded . . . pretentious. I’ll climb down off my soapbox now. I want you to understand where I’m coming from.”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Nan said, and this time it sounded like she truly did and was irritated that she understood Jaymie’s position more than she’d admit. “But keep me in the loop. Let me know what you can when you can.”

“I will.”

They hung up and Jaymie continued up the road to the Emporium then stood, uncertain and undecided, hanging back. It was rare that at this stage, hours after finding the body, that she knew so many reasons why so many people would want to kill the deceased, but events of recent days and the party last night had shown her much.

Pastor Inkerman loathed Nezer and had a violent altercation with him hours before the man’s death. Nezer had ensured that Finn Fancombe lost his academic career. Jacklyn Marley was owed money and had been hacking his computer hours before his death; who knew what had happened between them after Jaymie left? Evan had deprived his ex-wife, Sarah Nezer, of her literary children—her novels—and perhaps the affection of their son, who seemed to be toadying to his father in the few days before the man’s death. And that led her to consider Benjamin Nezer; had he been hiding his true feelings about his father, deciding to make up with him to make sure he didn’t lose out on a family inheritance?

There were two more people of course, but Jaymie didn’t consider either of them viable suspects. The police would have to consider both Brock Nibley, who had a run-in with Nezer the night before, his business reputation sullied, and Bill Waterman, who had been uncharacteristically aggressive toward Nezer. Jaymie knew the handyman would never commit murder, but the police had video evidence that Bill had threatened Nezer. They couldn’t ignore it.

As always, questions teemed in her mind. She circled the Emporium and mounted the outside steps, getting to the top and facing the scarred wood door, painted brown some years past but faded and battered by sun and wind. She knocked. Jacklyn Marley answered. She looked relaxed and happy, not at all as if she worried she was a suspect.

“Hey, Jacklyn, can I come in?”

“Sure. Entrez-vous, mon ami.”

Jaymie followed her into a small living room lined with bookcases that were filled with books, interrupted only by a smallish flat-screen TV. Three doors to other rooms were all closed at the moment. There was a shabby sofa in the middle and a coffee table piled high with books. A laptop was open, and several notebooks filled with a nearly illegible scrawl were haphazardly spread across what was left of the tabletop, floor and a hassock. As her eyes became accustomed to the mess, Jaymie noticed a pair of white cats sitting on a ruby velvet pillow in a deep window. Both had turned to gaze at her, unblinking, one blue-eyed, one green-eyed.

“That’s Alexandra and Rasputin,” Jacklyn said, after noticing the direction of Jaymie’s gaze. “Sister and brother. Raspy is the green-eyed love, and Lex is the blue-eyed doll. She’s deaf, but Raspy hears for both of them. It’s weird . . . I’ll call and they will both instantly come to me, even though the vet swears Lex is stone deaf.”

“They’re beautiful. My daughter has a tiger-striped sweetie and I have a Yorkie-Poo, a rescue. I did have a tabby, Denver, but when I got married and moved I rehomed him with Valetta. He now lives like a king.” Jaymie found a spot on the edge of the hassock as Jacklyn plunked down in front of the laptop. “What are you working on?”

“A couple of grant proposals. I need to make some dough, and soon.”

A grant did not sound like a quick way to make money. The heritage society had applied for several, and it took months, sometimes years, to even get a rejection. But it was an opening. “Which brings me to what you were doing last night on Evan Nezer’s computer. Did you find out anything? Does . . . did Evan owe you money?”

Jacklyn gazed at her steadily. “Are you going to tell the police about what I was doing?”

“I don’t know.”

The woman shrugged and went back to work.

She wasn’t inclined to answer, and Jaymie couldn’t promise she’d keep quiet about Jacklyn’s illicit activities. “Did you find anything in all the stuff you copied from his computer?”

“I . . . haven’t had a chance to look at it all yet.”

The pause was telling. “What was Evan like to work with?” Jaymie asked, keeping in mind his theft of work from a woman he was married to. It had, for her, put his accusations against Finn Fancombe in a new light. If he would steal writing from his wife, why would he not steal from a student?

“He was smart,” Jacklyn said. “He had his own worldview, and while he was arguing it, it was difficult to counter him. He believed that unfettered production and consumerism were the solution to every first world problem . . . unemployment, poverty, hunger . . . even inequities in education.”

“How so?”

“It’s complicated. Simply put, I guess it comes down to producing and selling more goods to create income that helps everyone eventually.” She shrugged. “I’ve tried to explain it before but it sounds dumb the way I put it.”

“I don’t know a lot about the economy,” Jaymie admitted. “But I do know that in my grandmother’s time you used something until it fell apart, then you fixed it and went on using it, or someone else fixed it and went on using it. But industry has been producing more goods cheaply, and building in obsolescence.”

“What can I say? He made a compelling argument. He believed a lot of things that on second thought had me shaking my head. But he sure made them sound good at the time.”

“Like . . . ?”

“Like . . . well, he thought shame was a good thing. That women should be ashamed of being pregnant out of wedlock, for example.”

“That’s awful!” Jaymie said, taken aback.

“I’m not defending the guy’s philosophy, I’m telling you what he thought.”

“Interesting. How about him? Was he ashamed of carrying on behind his wife’s back and then splitting up with her to marry the woman he was carrying on with?”

Jacklyn smiled. “He justified it by saying that Sarah was crazy, and he had a right to find some joy when he was married to a lunatic. I think he felt that shame was for other, lesser beings.”

That explained a lot. Nezer was someone who was content with twisting the rules when it suited him. “So Nezer talked about his affair and marriage to Bella while you worked on the book?”

“Sure. He seemed completely at ease with his behavior and could justify everything. But then, he always was at ease with his behavior. Even when he was cheating people,” she said, her mouth twisted in bitterness.

“Did you get along with him?” Jaymie asked, eyeing her with interest.

“Sure,” she said, her gaze sliding over to her cats. She got up and crossed the room, dropping a kiss on both of their heads. “We got along fine.”

Avoidance; that was interesting. Of course she didn’t get along with him. No one did, from her limited knowledge. So why was she lying? Of course, folks were usually careful not to speak ill of the dearly dispatched. “Except he didn’t pay you what he owed. Why didn’t you get paid up front? Isn’t that how ghostwriting usually works?”

Jacklyn straightened and turned to look at Jaymie. “He did give me a small fee up front, but then convinced me I’d make more if I agreed to work for a cut of the royalties. It’s an unusual deal for a ghostwriter, but he made it sound good. I should have known better.” She squinted at Jaymie and pursed her lips. “What is this all about? Do you think I killed him?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you’re asking a lot of questions. Are you done quizzing me now? I’d like to get back to this,” she said, waving her hand at the computer.

That had devolved rather quickly before she got to the part when she asked Jacklyn where she was after the party the night before. Jaymie looked around the apartment. “I’ll let you go, then,” she said, but didn’t move. That, she had found in the past, worked ninety percent of the time; talk about leaving, then change the subject. “Will you decorate for Christmas?”

“No. I only need to look out my window to see décor, right?” Jacklyn drifted over to her front windows that looked out over the village green. “It’s such a pretty town,” she said wistfully.

“Did you take the job serving at the Nezer party just to hack into Evan’s computer?”

“Pretty much,” she said, sitting down on the sofa.

“What time did you come home?”

“Okay, enough of the third degree,” she said, slamming her laptop shut and crossing her arms. She sat back and glared at Jaymie. “Just say it! Say you suspect me. Say it!”

“Jacklyn, I was wondering if you saw anything,” Jaymie said, waving at her window. “You have this perfect view of the village green. His body was found in a display I set up. I’m taking it a little personally.”

She calmed immediately and uncrossed her arms, relaxing. “It was probably somewhere convenient to dump the body.”

Well, no . . . whoever had dumped him there had set up the scene for maximum effect, but she couldn’t say that. “Did you see anything at all?”

“Not a thing. I was beat. I came home, fed the cats and went to bed.”

“What time?”

“I didn’t look at the clock.”

“Who do you think killed him?”

Jacklyn smiled. “His wife. Who else?”

“Which one, ex or current?”

“That is the question, isn’t it? Fury or gain; which is the motive this time? I have to get back to work, Jaymie.” She opened her computer back up.

“I have to say, Jacklyn . . . I did hear that Evan got you fired from your teaching job at the college. That, combined with him refusing to pay you . . . people have been killed for less.” Jaymie was astounded at herself, having the nerve to say that.

Jacklyn stared, her expression stony. “You can let yourself out.”