Twenty

 

“What’s wrong?” Jaymie cried.

Austin whirled around and used his cell phone to light the back of the diorama, where a figure could be seen lying in a fetal position.

“Oh no!” Jaymie cried, and knelt down by the figure. It was Amos. Had he found a convenient corner to curl up and sleep? Not likely, given the frigid temperature. “Shine that over here,” she said. Austin switched to a flashlight app and shone the light down. “Amos, Amos!” Jaymie said gently, one hand on his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

The man moved and groaned, then whimpered and curled up tighter. Jaymie grabbed the cell phone and pointed the light at his head. “There’s blood!” she said. She handed Austin back the phone. “Call 911.”

“Don’t even think about it!” Those shrieked words were followed by a whack, the sound a dull thud, and Austin fell to his knees with a groan, his cell phone dropping from his hand and skidding across the damp grass.

Jaymie froze and looked up, her heart thumping like a bass drum. Erla had the brown fluted bowl from her kitchen in her hand, and Austin had a crescent-shaped cut on his forehead. He was not unconscious but he was hurt, whimpering and holding his forehead, his fingers bloody.

“Erla, we were just . . . we’re . . .” Her mind finally caught up to speed. “Oh, you did this to Amos! And . . . and . . . you killed Evan.”

The housekeeper looked distracted and upset and afraid all at once. But she still held that heavy bowl . . . but it wasn’t a bowl, Jaymie realized. It was an antique pudding mould. She should have recognized it in the kitchen, on the shelf above the pickle crock, but though she had seen photos of the older crockery moulds in person she had only seen metal pudding moulds up to that point.

“Why did you have to interfere? Why did he?” Erla said, pointing down. Not to Austin, Jaymie realized, but to poor Amos, who was groaning, and now semiconscious.

“How did he interfere?”

“Tried to extort money out of me,” she said. “He said he saw stuff he shouldn’t have.”

As impossible as it seemed, mild-mannered, quilt-making, loving mother and housekeeper Erla Fancombe was . . . a killer? It felt surreal, impossible, absurd. Her stomach churning, Jaymie realized that she had made the deadly mistake of identifying with Erla so much that even though she was officially considering her, emotionally she had discounted her as a suspect. So though Erla was on the list, Jaymie kept pushing her off, finding any reason to ignore her. “Did you . . . did you really kill Evan Nezer?”

The cell phone light flicked off. The diorama was dark, with just the faint glow of streetlights from outside the three walls dimly illuminating the interior. Erla hummed a weird, tension-filled drone of agitation, swinging the bowl back and forth. Her eyes were huge, like mirror saucers. Glossy tears welled in them. “Why did you have to come along right now? I’m going to have to k-kill you, too! I don’t want to. You’re a nice girl, but what else can I do?”

Jaymie’s stomach twisted as she watched the woman, unsure how to defuse this moment. “You can just walk away. I don’t know anything at this point. Let me just get Amos and Austin some help, and just . . . walk away.”

“I wish I could,” she sobbed.

Jaymie took a deep breath, trying to calm her heart rate and breathing. “Erla, think this through. You can’t bash all of us dead and leave us.” Her voice was trembling despite trying to steady it as she evaluated how best to tackle the woman. Having been in similar predicaments in the past, she knew to keep the woman talking while trying to figure out an escape plan. How to keep them all safe and take out Erla?

She was weeping now, tears running down her seamed face, her nose running. “Why did you have to ruin everything?” she sobbed, her voice clogged with tears. “Nosy parker! You, and him, and Amos . . . why can’t you all leave it alone? Evan was a jackass. Everyone hated him! This was his own fault.”

Jaymie readied herself; if Erla kept crying and got more emotional it might be possible to tackle her. She didn’t have a gun, she had a pudding mould, for heaven’s sake. Austin gazed up at Jaymie, tears welling in his blue eyes behind the glasses, askew on his face. She shook her head slightly. Stay down, she mouthed. “Erla, please, let us go. You could get away, you could—”

“And go where?” she cried. “Where?” The word was ragged, edges torn, her voice guttural, a cry of despair.

Jaymie tried to get to her feet and yet stay in a crouch, so she’d be ready.

“This is the only home I have, the only one I’ve ever had. And that man . . . that woman . . . those two . . . they were going to . . .” Erla shook her head and straightened, taking in a deep breath, glaring down at Jaymie and gripping the heavy crockery pudding mould in one strong hand. She was calmer, and that was not a good thing. “Even before Evan died, that witch, Bella, was forcing me to retire. She wanted a younger woman, she said, to take care of her house. No pension, no nothing.”

Blast it; the murdering housekeeper loomed over her, a bad position from which to tackle her. The moment had passed. She would have to create another before Erla summoned the fury to attack Jaymie.

“What does Bella wanting you to retire have to do with you killing Evan?” Jaymie asked bluntly, but even as she said it, she realized . . . it was money.

“Shut up. Just . . . shut up! You don’t know what I’ve been through!” She was beginning to cry again.

Erla was worried about money and her time of influence was running out at the Nezer residence. It was all about the codicil and Finn’s inheritance! Erla didn’t care about her son getting his master’s—which would have required Evan to be alive—she cared about his inheritance. If she left the house, Evan, without her to influence him, could have changed the will back at any time. And for Finn to gain the money from the will, Evan Nezer had to be dead. There was, Jaymie realized, another possible reason it couldn’t wait, or at least . . . this was the moment to discover if her sudden supposition was true.

She shivered, the cold seeping into her bones and her thighs burning from crouching. The ground was frigid, and poor Austin was beginning to shudder. Jaymie needed to find a way to finish this. “Finn isn’t Evan’s son, is he?” she said softly.

The housekeeper stared at her, worry in her eyes, her mouth stretched in a grimace. “It doesn’t matter. Finn is in the will now. They can’t take that away from him.”

Jaymie wasn’t so sure about that. If Evan’s inheritors discovered the truth after his death, and they could prove that the codicil was only in effect because of presumed paternity, there would surely be a legal challenge. “But Evan would have changed it if he knew the truth, right? As a lawyer he started to get suspicious. Did he add up dates finally, all this time later, after so many years had passed? Did he finally figure out what I did, that there is no way a two-months premature baby would be eight and a half pounds?”

She watched the woman, who had consternation on her face as tears dried in sticky trails on her cheeks. Erla shook her head but remained silent.

Time had seemed to slow, and Jaymie’s thinking clarified. Images flashed through her mind: the pudding mould on the shelf in the kitchen, cleaned up and put back in place, and what Johnny and Amos had seen, the envelope passing from the pastor to Erla. And she remembered something else: the Nezers had their mail rerouted to the college for the time being. Who worked at the college besides Evan? Pastor Vaughn Inkerman. “It wasn’t possible years ago, but did he . . .” Jaymie’s eyed widened. “Evan got a DNA test done, didn’t he? Their mail was still being routed to the college, so the results were sent there and Pastor Inkerman intercepted them for you.”

“You shut up,” Erla said, her voice shaking, and the heavy pudding mould in her hand shaking too. Her face was shadowed by the diorama walls, so she had become just a raw, fury-filled voice. “You shut up. You do not know the crap I had to put up with for years from that man: the put-downs, the criticism. And I took it all because Evan said someday he’d make sure Finn was taken care of. And then he went and got him ejected from the master’s program! Finn was crushed, and all ’cause Evan had to be right. Even if he wasn’t right, he had to be right. Even if he had to cheat to make it seem so.”

She was getting herself wound up, anger taking over from fear and anguish. Jaymie eyed Austin, who was progressing from frightened to terrified. Amos was paler, the scourge of hypothermia upon him. What was she going to do? The falling snow was thickening, blowing into the enclosure. How could she end this? If she screamed, would anyone hear her? Not likely. There’d be no windows open this time of year, and the diorama walls muffled sound.

Maybe someone would pass by and she could shout. Where were all the dog walkers and health nuts when you needed them? The housekeeper was prowling back and forth, mould still firmly in hand. Jaymie was younger and possibly stronger, but there had to be a better way to end this than rushing her and risking worse injury to the two men and herself.

Keep her talking. “But, Erla, Evan was going to help get Finn reinstated into the master’s program, right?”

“Hah! Not even high-and-mighty Nezer could do that. I heard those folks talking that night, the night of the party. They didn’t know, but I heard ’em ’cause they came into the back hall to whisper and plot. Evan had talked to them all right, like he said he would, but Mrs. Belcher didn’t want none of that. She said the college would look tainted if it did so, and she had other fish to fry. She’d been in trouble before, but this time was different. She said she was going to find some way of diplomatically telling Evan it was a no-go. He didn’t really care, she said, not about Finn Fancombe.”

She swayed on her feet, swinging the heavy pudding mould. “She was right about that. Evan never cared for anyone but himself. That woman, President Belcher . . . she wanted some high muckety-muck fellow from some organization that wanted a place to put some kind of tank . . . I don’t know what that meant, but it had something to do with money and the economy and . . . I don’t know. But they weren’t about to let Finn back in to stain their reputation.” She spat the last words, but then took a deep breath, steadying. “So that’s when I knew. I had thought Evan might have to die because of the codicil and the DNA test; I couldn’t delay indefinitely. But I knew for sure that night. And it was perfect, so many folks peeved at Evan.”

Jaymie shivered. She had been in trouble before, but here she was backed into the diorama with walls on three sides, two wounded fellows and a crazy lady in front of her wielding the unlikeliest of weapons. It would be funny if it wasn’t so frightening. And she didn’t know what to do.

She edged forward, away from Austin. “I can’t figure out how you did it, though. I mean, I know how you killed him—the pudding mould over the head—and you staged it here, in the diorama. How did you know about that?” Her gaze darted around. Was there something in the diorama she could use to clunk Erla over the head with or throw at her?

“You think I don’t know everything going on? People talk in this town, and I listen. I overheard Amos telling that Johnny fellow about your little scene. I guess he heard it from Bill Waterman, who always gave Amos coffee and food and cigarettes for helping him around the shop. They shifted your diorama in the shed after he painted it, and Bill explained what it was. When it was set up, I knew all about it, and knew exactly how it worked. I always loved that story, you know, A Christmas Carol. Loved the old black-and-white movie, with that Sims fellow, so I read it once, too.” She loomed into a ray of light that came through a crack in the diorama. She smiled, an awful, angry smile. “You know, Ben was in the play at school. So was Finn. Finn played Bob Cratchit, but Ben played Scrooge. Hah! His dad never showed up to the play, though. Evan Nezer Scrooge, I called him once.”

A nervous giggle burst from Jaymie. “I thought of that too!”

“Yeah, so it was perfect.” She stilled, and her eyes unfocused. “An hour after the party I was still in the kitchen, working. Of course. Cleaning up other folks’ mess like I’ve done my whole life. They never cared or even noticed how hard I worked. Evan came downstairs after a fight with missy Bella Butter Wouldn’t Melt in Her Mouth and wanted some hot milk. He had indigestion after all that rich catering food, and he didn’t trust no one but me to get it for him. Not after Miss Bella giving him sleeping stuff a coupla times so she could sneak out!”

“Sneak out?”

“Sure. She had a boyfriend or two on the side. What woman her age wouldn’t with that old fool in her bed? He figured it out and found the sleeping stuff in her bedside table. She swore up and down it was for her, but . . . he had his suspicions. I knew all about it. Shoulda heard the fights those two had.”

There was malicious glee in her tone. That, then, was what Erla had meant when she said to Bella that she knew what the supposed mistress of the house was doing behind her husband’s back.

“Anyway, I knew it was time,” Erla mused. “It was perfect, like a gift from God telling me I was in the right.” There was a reverent hush in her tone as she pondered the universe’s instructions. “I was gonna take him up a warm drink, and then have to haul him all the way down the back stairs, but instead he just . . . delivered himself to me. So, good old faithful servant Erla fixed him some milk with a good dose of Bella’s sleeping pills crushed into it. I had ’em ready, see. He went to sleep right there in the kitchen, just dropped to the floor. I dragged him out the back door and bashed him over the head with the pudding mould until he was dead. I had a wheelbarrow ready and trundled him through the trees to your dio-whatchamacallit. Easy from there to plant him with that decorative pudding mould over his head.”

And hammer a stake of holly through his heart. So cold, so calculated. “You planned it ahead of time. You got the holly from my backyard.”

She chuckled. “Bella was talking about it to Evan . . . making fun of you, you know, copying you offering holly to anyone who wanted it. She was trying to jolly him up lately. Making fun of the lower orders, as he called you all, was one way to entertain him. It wasn’t hard to find your house, and even easier to slip down that alley and steal the holly.”

Jaymie, despite the danger, was thinking things through. “But, Erla, why the fire? Why set the cider booth ablaze.”

She swayed into the sliver of light once more, her face twisted in anger. “I never did that, you know,” she said, her voice gritty with anger. “Those cops . . . they questioned me about it, but I never did it.”

“But Amos said . . .” Ah . . . aha! Amos said it was Erla because of the coat and gray hair. But anyone could don a gray wig and borrow a coat. She had a sudden thought. “Bella did that, didn’t she? Whoever did it used your coat, and she’s the only one who could, other than Evan, and I’m pretty sure he would have taken credit for the arson if he did it.”

Erla was startled. “That’s why my coat smells of smoke!” she said, taking the lapel with her free hand and pulling it up to her nose. She smiled, an eerie look still. “Well, she won’t be a problem anymore. Maybe she’ll even get the blame for all of this!” She brightened. “Yes! That works out!”

“You think she’ll stand for that? She’ll tell the cops the truth, and you’ll be up for it. C’mon, Erla, you know she won’t let an accusation . . .” Jaymie trailed off as she saw the triumph on the woman’s face. “Oh, no; what have you done to Bella?”

She nodded, then shook her head. “No, you don’t understand . . . poor Bella. She did it all, you see, even this! Oh, my goodness!” She giggled, a squawky sound. “It’s all so perfect. Thank you for pointing that out. The note she wrote . . . her suicide . . . I wanted to shut her up and get her out of the way, but this will all work out.”

Jaymie started shaking, remembering Bella threatening Erla with DNA testing and a court challenge; now Bella was about to pay for that threat with her life! Erla was hell-bent on her path. There was no way out of this alive, not unless Jaymie did something soon. Was there any human kindness left in Erla Fancombe? At first she had seemed not to want to hurt them. Could Jaymie appeal to that side of the housekeeper? “Erla, please, let us go!” Jaymie said, clasping her hands together in prayerful pleading. “I don’t know what else to say, but I don’t think you’re really a killer, not ingrained. You were pushed into it by years of abuse from Evan Nezer.”

“Don’t make me over into a victim,” she growled. “I’m no victim,” she said, raising the pudding mould over her head. “I will survive—”

“Tell that to Miss Gloria Gaynor!”

There was a thump, and Erla dropped to her knees and keeled over as an arc of blood sprayed the diorama walls. Jaymie looked up to see Valetta standing triumphantly—if wavering a little—behind her, holding a shovel in her hand, a tool no Michigander who drove would be without in their car in the winter months.

“Yes!” Jaymie said, bolting to her friend and hugging her, as Austin leaped to his feet and pulled off his coat, draping it over poor Amos.

“We need the police,” she said, snatching up Austin’s cell phone. “This madwoman has done something to Bella Nezer.”