Mary McGill set her coffee mug on the church kitchen counter and stared at Dan Dunham, chief of Santa Louisa’s small police force and her nephew-in-law. ‘You can’t mean that.’
‘I’m afraid I do.’ Dan had never looked so glum. ‘Miss Emilie was strangled.’
‘Oh.’ Mary let her breath out slowly, trying to come to terms with what Dan said. She thought back to the sight of Miss Emilie, sprawled on the wooden chair, and shivered. ‘I saw her bathrobe cord on the floor but I never thought someone might have … I thought at first maybe she’d had a stroke, like her sister, Miss Eloise had. It wasn’t until later I realized … Why would someone deliberately …’ Mary’s voice was faint and she knew it. She felt faint. Strangled. That harmless old lady. Who could have done such a thing? Why? Miss Emilie was no threat to anyone. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t a stroke or something?’
Dan looked uncomfortable. ‘There are some other things that happen in strangulation.’
‘Like what?’
‘You don’t want to know. Just rest assured, she was old, didn’t struggle and probably died very quickly.’
Mary stared at him. So did Millie, who sat as close to Mary’s side as she could get. Finally Mary picked back up her coffee mug and, with hands that still trembled more than she liked, lifted the coffee to her lips, took a sip and once more let the sight of little old Miss Emilie float in front of her. She’d never seen anyone who’d died of strangulation, but she’d never seen anyone who’d died from a stroke, either. Dan was right. She probably didn’t want to know how you could tell. ‘I can’t get my head around any of this. Why was she even here? How did she get in? She must have been with someone, but who? And who could possibly want to kill her?’
‘Good questions. Let’s start with how she got in.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that. Dan, the door was unlocked when I got here this morning and the light over the door was off. I left it on when I left last night, I’m sure I did.’
‘I assume that means you were the last one out of here. Did you lock the door?’
‘Yes. When I found it unlocked, I thought maybe somehow I’d forgotten, but I didn’t. Forget, I mean. I remember having a hard time getting the key in the lock because I had Millie’s leash and she wanted to … find a grassy spot. So we went over under that old oak before I got in the car. The light over the door was visible from there. I remember because I knew it would be dark when I got here this morning.’
‘What time did you leave here?’
‘It was a little after ten.’
‘Who besides you has a key?’
‘Les, of course. I don’t know who else.’
‘I’ll ask him. Probably a lot more of them floating around than there should be.’
He walked over to the now-open counter window, leaned on the counter and looked out at the activity overflowing the church hall. Mary followed. The paramedics were trying to get Miss Plym onto a gurney, but she’d been on that chair awhile. Bending her was proving to be a bit difficult. Mary gulped, set her coffee down on the counter and turned to watch a couple of uniforms cordon off the room with crime-scene tape. A couple of people not in uniform, one a woman in jeans and a sweatshirt, were taking pictures of the chair Miss Plym had sat on, the old bedspread and the entire dressing area. Two uniformed officers, both members of the crime-scene team Dan had been training, set out what looked like miniature white cones with large black numbers on each one. The woman took pictures of each one as the officers scribbled something in a large notebook. One lone man stood in the doorway of the little hallway, seemingly staring toward the bathrooms. At what, Mary didn’t know.
She didn’t know what the police hoped to find, either. The hall had been full of people all day yesterday. It was a popular place to hold events, and the annual spring rummage sale was one of the most popular. It took a lot of volunteers a couple of days, all working in the hall, to put it together. Finding any useful forensic evidence wasn’t going to be easy. She supposed they had to go through the motions. If this turned out like the CSI programs she sometimes watched, they’d come up with a vital clue.
‘Dan. Dan Dunham. Mary. Will you please tell this young man we can come through?’ Pat Bennington and her husband, Karl Bennington, the local small animal vet, and Dan’s and Ellen’s best friends. Pat was hailing him from the front door.
Dan waved at the young officer at the door and Pat walked into the room, closely followed by Joy Mitchell, Mary’s most loyal and dependable volunteer. They had identical expressions of foreboding as they approached.
‘What’s going on?’ Pat stopped in front of Dan, who leaned on his elbows on the counter. He started to answer Pat but was interrupted by a loud gasp. The activity around Miss Plym was hidden from most of the room by the makeshift curtains still pulled across much of the dressing-room area. The curtains near the kitchen pass-through were pulled back, giving a full view of the paramedics and Miss Plym. They had finally secured her onto a gurney, almost totally encased in a large black bag which they were trying to pull up over her shoulders. Her face was in full view.
‘That can’t be Emilie Plym. Can it?’ Disbelief, horror and a small gagging sound replaced Joy’s usual slightly disapproving but monotone voice.
It startled Pat enough that she wheeled around, almost losing her balance. She was just in time to catch a glimpse of Miss Plym’s gray face and white hair before the black bag swallowed her body entirely.
‘Oh, my God.’ Her hands flew to her face, covering her mouth as if to smother the gasp that escaped. ‘It is Miss Plym. What happened to her?’
Mary stared into her white coffee mug which she held tightly with both hands. Joy’s reaction had brought her eyes back to the gurney and the body bag on it. ‘Someone killed her. In here. Sometime last night.’ She managed to make her hands stop trembling by clutching the mug tighter but couldn’t quite clear the tremor out of her voice. ‘Come in the kitchen. Half the town is going to start pouring in here in …’ she checked her watch, ‘… a little less than an hour, and we have to figure out how to stop them.’
Dan nodded. ‘You’re right. Half the town wandering through my crime scene isn’t going to happen.’ He pulled himself back from the pass-through and disappeared into the kitchen.
Mary picked up her mug and straightened. ‘Coffee’s ready. The kitchen doesn’t seem involved, so Dan let me make it. That and it’s early and he hadn’t had any yet.’
‘Coffee’s essential at a crime scene,’ he called out, his voice devoid of emotion.
Pat and Joy hurried through the doorway, firing questions at Mary and Dan as they went. ‘You mean she was actually killed? On purpose? It wasn’t an accident of some kind?’
The sight of poor old Miss Emilie leaving so ignominiously seemed to have shaken the usually unflappable Pat. Either that or she hadn’t had her coffee, either.
Joy was more to the point. ‘I’ll bet she came back looking for her blasted dog.’ She walked through the kitchen toward the large coffeemaker, pulled a white mug off the tray beside it, ladled sugar into the mug then filled it with coffee. She turned.
Three faces – four if you counted Millie – stared at her.
‘What dog?’ Mary glanced at Millie, who moved in closer and sat on her foot. ‘Emilie didn’t have a dog.’
‘She used to.’
All eyes turned toward Pat.
‘Willis. A Shih Tzu. I’m told she’s had several over the years and they were all named Willis.’
‘I’d forgotten that,’ Mary said slowly, ‘but the last Willis has been dead for years. Why would she come looking for him here, in the middle of the night?’
‘Yesterday …’ Pat took a sip. She made a face, put the mug back on the counter and fanned her mouth. ‘Hot. She was in here yesterday with Lorraine Duxworth. You know, she and her husband, Caleb, work for the Plyms. Where that niece of hers was or why she allowed Lorraine to drag her down here when we’ve got so many of her family things her niece donated, things she might actually remember, I don’t know.’ She paused and looked at her mug as if considering whether to pick it back up before she went on. ‘I can never remember her name.’
‘Whose name?’ Joy paused in her stirring and turned to face her.
‘The niece. The one who came out to arrange Miss Eloise’s funeral and wanted to put Miss Emilie in Shady Acres.’
‘Cassandra, and we don’t know that they were going to. Only that they were looking into it.’
‘What do you mean “they”?’ Pat turned toward Mary, a blank look on her face.
‘Her brother came out with her. Richard.’
‘I thought Richard was the twin’s father, the original Mr Plym.’ Evidently Joy’s coffee was stirred enough because she set the spoon in the sink and leaned back against it to stare at Mary. Her hair was twisted into a severe bun, her dress faded from too many washings and her sweater bulky and shapeless. Joy’s approach to life was one of no nonsense, good cooking and clean living. She had the clean living down pat, but Mary often thought she didn’t need to put quite so much stress on the no-nonsense part. That said, she was one of Mary’s most reliable volunteers.
‘They’re all Richard. The twin’s father, their brother, and now their nephew.’
‘That makes him Richard the third.’ Pat grinned.
Mary ignored her. ‘The Richard who was Emilie and Eloise’s younger brother was in high school with my husband, Samuel. They were good friends. Why, I never understood. They had almost nothing in common. Richard went to college in the East somewhere and stayed. He married a girl from Baltimore and opened a furniture store, like his father had here, only I heard he was even more successful. He only came back a few times – once to be Samuel’s best man at our wedding. I don’t think he ever brought his family. The last time he came was for Samuel’s funeral. He was a pall bearer. He had a heart attack and died not too long after. The first time I met Cassandra was last year at Eloise’s funeral. She’d called and asked what she should do, said I was the only one in town she’d ever heard her father mention. I helped her make all the arrangements. Oh, dear. Now she’ll have another funeral to arrange. Well, I dare say we’ll all pitch in.’
‘You’ll see to it. You always do.’ Pat smiled, but her smile faded as Dan spoke.
‘What happened when they got here yesterday?’ Dan had little frown lines across his forehead and around his eyes. That he wasn’t interested in the Plym family tree was obvious, but what happened when Miss Emilie visited the rummage sale and why she was there interested him a great deal.
‘I don’t know,’ Pat told him. ‘I was leaving to meet one of the rescue people when they came in and I noticed Miss Emilie looked upset. She started walking up and down the tables, looking for something, but I had to go and don’t know what happened.’
‘Joy, you saw them?’ Mary watched Dan out of the corner of her eye. He knew the Plym twins, of course. Everyone who’d grown up in Santa Louisa knew the Plyms. He’d been called out, along with the paramedics, when Miss Eloise collapsed in the grocery store a little over a year ago. It was Dan who’d gone to the old Victorian house on Cherry Street to break the news of Miss Eloise’s stroke to her sister and Lorraine and Caleb Duxworth, who’d worked for the twins for years. Miss Eloise had lingered on, staying at home under the care of Gloria Sutherland, a home health nurse, for a couple of months before another stroke took her, leaving Miss Emilie all alone in that Victorian museum. Dan had returned her home more than once when she wandered into town, her big black purse over her arm, her stuffed dog under it. He’d laughed about it, but he’d worried about her. No wonder his face looked like a thundercloud. He must have felt protective of her – so had everyone who knew her.
Joy shrugged. ‘Like I said, I think she was looking for something – that stuffed dog she carried all the time. For some reason, she thought it was here. Then she saw her little white clock and that really upset her. It was her mother’s, and I guess it had been in her room. She couldn’t understand why it was here. But it was Willis she was looking for. She was sure he was here somewhere.’
‘I haven’t seen her without that dog in her lap or under her arm for years. How could it have gotten here? Did anyone see it?’
Joy looked at her, then down into her mug, then up at all of them and stated in her usual brusque voice, ‘I did. That blasted dog was in the box of donated items from the Plym house. I knew I had to get it back to her, so I took it out and put it in my car. Thought I’d drop it by her house and I forgot about it.’ She paused and shook her head slightly. ‘I was on my way to that meeting we had about the music for Easter Sunday when they came in, and I never even thought about the dog. It never crossed my mind they were looking for it. It was only later … If it had I would have gotten it for her right then.’
No one said anything for a minute. Mary couldn’t. This was all so sad and so senseless. Who could possibility want to … unless someone was already in the hall looking for something when Miss Emilie came in? Only, what? There was nothing in that hall worth stealing and certainly nothing worth murdering someone.
‘You’re saying Lorraine brought Miss Emilie here yesterday, looking for her stuffed dog?’ Dan’s eyebrows narrowed and he shook his head as if this was an idea he was having trouble believing.
Joy shrugged. ‘As I said, I was on my way to that meeting. I saw them come in but I was in such a rush it didn’t register they were looking for the dog.’ She paused. ‘I never thought about it again until this morning.’
‘They were looking for something,’ Pat said. ‘I came through the back door to fill my water bottle after getting the dog one of the rescue people brought settled and saw them. They were standing in front of one of the tables and Miss Emilie seemed distraught. I had someone else from animal rescue on my cell phone and two other people waiting for me in the parking lot, so I didn’t stop. But it looked as if Lorraine had her hands full.’
Joy indicated one of the tables. ‘Humph. One of those tables is full of stuff from the Plym house. I’ll bet that poor little thing couldn’t understand why her family things were here. I wondered about it myself.’
Mary looked toward the table and nodded. ‘There must have been three or four boxes. But what I saw was mostly old clothes.’
‘There was one box that wasn’t clothes. Some of those things were old Mrs Plym’s, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some were her mother’s before her. Antiques, I shouldn’t wonder. Wouldn’t the Plym trust have something to say about putting things like that in a rummage sale? Miss Eloise’s clothes I can understand, but that pretty little clock … Why would she give that away?’
‘The white porcelain one with painted flowers and a lot of gold on it?’ That one had caught Mary’s eye. It was pretty but hardly an antique. Her mother had one like it that Mary and her sisters had given her for Christmas one year. They’d bought it at Hallmark.
‘That’s the one. It was old Mrs Plym’s. She had it in her room until she died. Then Emilie took it into hers. Or that’s what Gloria Sutherland told me, and she should know. She took care of Eloise those last two months. I’m sure she was all over that house.’
Joy’s look of disapproval wasn’t nearly as severe as Mary’s. Gloria was difficult and didn’t always act … but she was a good nurse. At least, Mary thought she was. And even though Joy was probably right, and Gloria was known to go snooping, they didn’t know she had.
‘Where is it now?’ Dan obviously wasn’t interested in Gloria Sutherland’s snooping or lack of it and only mildly in the clock.
Joy bobbed her head toward the big room. ‘I put it on the table with the nicer things, the ones that might break. It’s on the table up against the wall.’
Mary walked over to the serving opening and leaned forward a little to look at the tables with the breakables. They sat along the wall, just to the right of the window, close enough so she could see most of them clearly. She looked carefully before she turned. ‘Where did you say you put it?’
‘On that end table, in the back. I pushed it back there so it wouldn’t fall off.’ Joy set her coffee mug down and got to her feet. ‘It’s right there.’
Mary shook her head. ‘It’s not there now.’
Joy gave Mary a look that plainly said she didn’t know what she was talking about and marched out of the kitchen, followed by Mary and Pat. Joy stopped at the end table and her expression changed from irritation to puzzlement. ‘That clock was there when I left. I know it was. I remember pushing it toward the back.’
There was no clock on the table.
‘Do you suppose Miss Emilie took it?’ Pat looked around the room at the other tables.
The clock wasn’t on any of them, at least not on any table nearby.
‘She didn’t have it with her when I found her.’ Mary spoke with certainty. Miss Emilie had carried no purse last night, and there was no place to put a clock in that nightgown.
‘Maybe she took it home with her yesterday afternoon.’ Joy sounded doubtful, but there didn’t seem to be any other explanation.
‘I’m not so sure.’ Pat turned slowly. ‘Lorraine seemed to be trying to get her out of here. She wasn’t carrying anything that I remember.’
‘Do you think she could have hidden it somewhere, meaning to come back for it?’ Joy started toward the tables lined up down the middle of the room.
Many had piles of clothes that could easily hide a clock, or it could be behind a toaster, or even in one of the strollers. If Miss Plym had hidden it, it could be anywhere.
Mary doubted that’s what happened. Lorraine had been with her the whole time. Surely she would have seen her if she’d tried to hide the clock. Besides, Miss Emilie couldn’t always remember where she lived. She certainly wouldn’t remember she’d hidden a clock and where. Or why. But where had it gone? Someone had taken it. Was it whoever had killed poor little Miss Plym?
Dan’s voice broke her train of thought. ‘Ladies, I hate to break this up, but this is a crime scene. I doubt the missing clock is important, but you not disturbing anything right now is.’ Dan stood in the kitchen doorway, coffee mug in hand, watching them. ‘Besides, Pat needs to get out in the parking lot and turn all those people with dogs away. You need to turn everybody away.’
Pat’s cell rang. She fumbled for it, pulled it out of her pocket and answered. ‘Tell them to wait. I’ll be right out.’ Her face was creased with worry lines and frustration as she hung up. ‘Some of them just arrived. Now what do I do?’
‘But we need to …’ Joy’s face was creased with anger. ‘I don’t like that things are going missing.’
‘I’ll tell my people we have a missing clock and make sure they keep an eye out for it. Right now, we’ve got dogs and cats coming with no place to put them and what are you going to do about all the people who’ll be here in about …’ he checked his watch and raised an eyebrow before resuming, ‘… way too soon. I really don’t want half the town trying to get into this building to find a bargain, ruining what’s already a pretty darn difficult crime scene. And as much as I’d love to see you place all those animals, they can’t come in here and they can’t go in the parking lot, either.’
‘The basketball court.’
‘What?’ Dan and Pat stared at Mary.
‘The basketball court. It’s on the other side of the church, next to the Sunday school building. It can’t be part of the crime scene, can it?’ She looked expectantly at Dan, who slowly shook his head.
‘No, it’s not.’
‘Good. We’ll set up the adoption center there. That way it will only be the rummage sale we have to postpone. But we better get busy.’ She looked around. ‘Where’s Millie?’
‘Right where she always is. Next to your ankle.’ Pat smiled.
Mary looked down. Millie looked up at her. ‘So she is.’
Mary, Pat and Millie left by the back door, stopping only long enough to pick up Millie’s bed. Mary was already on her cell, talking to the radio station. ‘Phil, I need you to put out a bulletin. Yes, it’s an emergency. We’ve had a problem at Saint Mark’s and the rummage sale is canceled, but we’ll still hold the pet adoption. In the basketball court. Yes, please start announcing it now.’ She listened for a moment. ‘It’s Miss Emilie Plym. She died in the church hall. No, I don’t know any more than that. I have no idea how she got in, but the police are there now, trying to find out. That’s all I know. Don’t mention that on the radio until the police make the announcement. Just say there was an accident. I don’t know when the rummage sale will be rescheduled but rest assured it will be. Can you announce that now? Thanks, Phil.’
That should stop an influx of early birds arriving to rummage through the tables looking for bargains. Everyone in town listened to WQXV in the morning. Hopefully it wouldn’t keep people from coming out to find a new pet.
As for the clock, Mary thought she could put that out of her mind, at least for the moment. That it wasn’t where Joy had left it was clear, and she was almost positive it wasn’t going to be found anywhere in the building. Who had taken it and where it was now was a problem to be solved at a later time.
She hit speed dial on her phone and Bart’s rentals answered. ‘Is this Bart? Mary McGill here. We’ve had a change of plans. Can you bring the tent …?’