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THE NEXT MORNING, ARDEN stepped out of the church and into the bright morning sun humming to herself as she walked down the sidewalk towards the parking lot. She started to reach into her purse for her car keys, but stopped when she noticed Savannah standing in the parking lot talking to a police officer.
Arden probably wouldn’t have thought anything about it if it weren’t for the suspicious way they were acting. They stood next to Savannah’s car, each looking over their shoulders as they huddled close together. Arden’s eyes widened as the officer slipped a manila envelope to Savannah who quickly stuffed it into her purse.
Paige and her family slowed to a stop next to Arden. Shielding her eyes from the sun, she stared out across the parking lot with a frown on her face. “I wonder what that’s about.”
“I don’t know,” Arden said, biting her lip. “Do you think Savannah is in some kind of trouble?”
“What?” Paige followed Arden’s gaze. “Not her. Her,” she said pointing to a figure standing in the graveyard beyond the rows of cars lined up along the grassy bank in the distance.
Wendy, draped head to toe in black, stood alone among the tombstones staring up at a giant oak tree.
“I’m surprised Duncan isn’t with her,” Arden said.
Paige shook her head. “He goes to a different church.”
The officer let out a large belly laugh earning a look of disgust. Planting one hand on her hip, she gave the officer a withering look until the laughter stopped.
Paige lightly touched her husband’s arm. “Sweetie, I think I’m going to stick around here for a little bit. Arden can give me a ride back home.”
“Are you sure?” Patrick asked.
“I’m sure.” Standing on her tiptoes, she gave her husband a kiss on the cheek before sending him off with their daughter. By the time they were done saying goodbye, Savannah was skipping across the parking lot towards them, the enveloped clutched to her chest.
“I’ve got it,” Savannah whispered as soon as she reached their side.
Paige softly clapped her hands together. “Yay!”
Arden glanced from Paige to Savannah. “Got what? What are you talking about?”
Spotting a group of people coming toward them, Savannah inclined her head to the side then led the two to a bench in the graveyard. Once seated, she glanced around to make sure they were alone, before slipping the envelope out of her purse and handing it to Arden who was sitting in the middle. “There are some perks to being the former mayor.”
Arden slipped the papers out of the envelope and gasped. “The Oakley investigation.”
“Pictures, interviews, the whole shebang.” Savannah glanced over her shoulder. “I hope that woman doesn’t catch us.”
“Wendy?” Arden asked glancing toward the tree to see if Wendy was still around.
“No, my daughter-in-law. If she finds out Spencer slipped this to me she will have his badge.” She smiled, clearly pleased with herself. “It’s nice to know I still have some influence left in this town.”
“Did you tell the police what we suspect?” Arden asked. “Does this mean they finally believe us?”
Savannah blew out her breath in annoyance. “For some reason, they refuse to believe that an 89 year old man, who liked to tell tall tales and who had a list of aliments a mile long and didn’t have very much longer to live, might have been poisoned because someone, may have possibly, overheard him telling you that a girl, who no one thinks is dead, was murdered.”
“Well, when you put it like that . . .” Paige said ruefully.
Arden frowned. “What do you mean he didn’t have long to live? My great-grandmother lived to be ninety-nine and she had a host of health problems too.”
“I bet they weren’t anything like Bruce’s problems,” Paige said. “Patrick was his doctor. He told me that Bruce had been living on borrowed time for quite a while.”
Savannah scowled. “The police won’t even entertain the idea that he might have been murdered. They’re convinced he had a heart attack.”
“But what about the person in my yard?” Arden sputtered. “The oleander? The fact that Wendy is rushing to cremate him and that no one has seen Ivy Kent since she supposedly left town?”
Savannah rolled her eyes. “Spencer said that there could be a perfectly logical explanation for all of it and that we should turn off the soaps and stop creating drama where there isn’t any. Then he laughed at me when I insisted the old man was murdered.” She pursed her lips together. “If it weren’t for the fact that I was in a church parking lot when he said that, you’d be visiting me in jail for assaulting a cop right now.” She lifted her eyes up to the heavens and smiled wistfully. “I could just imagine my daughter-in-law’s face if she found out I had been arrested right before her big election.” She glanced back towards the parking lot. “I wonder if Spencer is still around.”
Before Savannah could give into any dark impulses she might have, Arden opened the file and said, “Well, hopefully we’ll find something in here that will help us.”
“You know,” Savannah said thoughtfully, “there is another option we haven’t considered.”
“What?” Arden asked.
“Well, I was just thinking that there is one of us,” Savannah said giving Paige a meaningful look, “that has access to a potential piece of evidence that would definitely prove whether Bruce was poisoned or not.”
Paige’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“Bruce’s body is sitting in your father-in-law’s morgue,” Savannah pointed out.
Arden’s mouth dropped open as Savannah added, “What if Patrick or his dad just saved a little piece of Bruce’s stomach?” She held up her hands as Arden eyes widened and Paige’s mouth moved in wordless shock and horror. “Now don’t say no right off the bat. Just think, we could send that piece to the lab then we’d have proof whether old Bruce was murdered or not. I remember filming an episode where my character broke into a funeral home one night and bribed Morty the Mortician to do an impromptu autopsy on some guy.”
“Eww,” Paige said.
Savannah smiled happily in remembrance. “We found a great clue and we solved the case.”
“It was the county morgue,” Arden pointed out. “And the victim was Miss Fowler the chemistry teacher and the mortician’s name was Henry. The autopsy never happened because the killer found out what Sunny was up to and tried to kill her at the morgue. While Clay was fighting him, Sunny found a ticket stub which proved that the killer was the principal.” At Savannah and Paige’s look, Arden said a bit defensively, “What? I have a good memory.”
Savannah thought about it for a moment, and then shook her head. “Still, it’s a great idea.” She glanced at Paige. “Someone here should try it.”
“Have you lost your ever-loving mind?” Paige asked when she finally found her voice. “I’m not going to ask my father-in-law to do that. He could get into a lot of trouble. Besides, he believes Bruce died of old age too.” Paige's lips pursed together in a thin line. “He and Patrick were laughing about our little theories last night. What I wouldn’t give to prove them wrong.” She glanced over Arden’s shoulder. “What does the police report say?”
Arden turned her attention back to the police report. There wasn’t much about Ivy and her relationship with their neighbors in the file, but what was there was very telling.
“A few days after Ivy disappeared,” Arden read, “the police found her car abandoned in a bus station three hours from here.”
Paige tucked her hair behind her ears as she read over Arden’s shoulder. “And it says that the last person that saw Ivy the day she disappeared was Bruce. Maybe he did know something after all.” She tapped a pink fingernail against the paper in Arden’s hand. “Look at this. He watched her cleaning up the yard and house from eleven to two o’clock Sunday. He talked to her for a few minutes, and then he went inside and took a nap. By the time he woke up a couple of hours later, she was gone and the Oakley’s house was dark.”
Arden flipped through the pages, stopping at a picture of the smashed coffee table. “Cleaning up? This doesn’t look like she cleaned up anything.”
Savannah pointed to the corner of the picture. “Look at that thing there in the corner of the room. Doesn’t that look like an empty trash bag? What if she cleaned up like Bruce said but the killer came back and trashed the place again?”
“Why?” Paige asked. “What would be the point of trashing the Oakley’s home?”
“To cover up her murder?” Arden mused. “After all, what thief goes to the trouble of cleaning the house before robbing it? The killer may have wanted to make her look as bad as possible.”
“But the police knew she cleaned everything up,” Paige said. “Bruce told them.”
Savannah lightly snorted. “They were probably well aware of Bruce’s reputation and ignored his statement.”
Paige sighed as she turned her attention back to the report. “Did anyone else see her that day?”
Arden flipped back to the witness statements. “Julie told the police that she saw her that morning before she left for college. She told me the same thing yesterday after you all left. Said she saw a giant welt on Ivy’s face as if someone had hit her.” She frowned down at Julie’s statement. “That’s not in her statement. I wonder why she didn’t tell the police about that.”
“Maybe she forgot,” Paige said.
Arden bit her lip. “Or maybe she was protecting someone.”
Paige suddenly stood. “Wendy left. I’m going to go over and see what was so special about that tree. Be right back.”
While Paige skipped through the graveyard, Arden and Savannah continued pouring over Julie’s statement. “Look at this,” Arden said, “Julie told the police that Ivy stole her grandma’s wedding ring.”
“When?” Savannah asked.
“A few days before Ivy disappeared. She wanted to call the police right then but her uncle told her that he’d handle it himself.”
“That sounds ominous.”
Arden flipped back through the police report. “Duncan didn’t make a statement about the theft. Doesn’t look like they even spoke to him.”
Paige hurried back. “Did I miss anything?”
“Just that Ivy stole Julie’s grandmother’s wedding ring,” Savannah said, “and Duncan was kind enough not to report her.”
“I don’t buy that for a second,” Paige said. “One of his employees stole twenty dollars from him and he called the cops on the guy.” She glanced at Savannah. “Who is Diana McCallum?”
“Bruce’s wife. She died about ten years ago. Why?”
“Her grave is by that tree,” Paige said. “She’s underneath one of those husband and wife stones, which makes it seem like at some point Bruce planned on being buried next to his wife. Seems kind of strange that they’re going to cremate Bruce and not bury him with his wife.” She glanced down at Wendy’s police statement. “Oooh, it appears Wendy’s ruby ring went missing while Ivy was working for her. She couldn’t prove that Ivy was the one who took it but she suspected she had and fired her.”
Arden pursed her lips together. “That wasn’t the reason she fired Ivy.”
“You know something we don’t?” Savannah asked.
Arden raised her eyebrows. “Let’s just say Wendy discovered Ivy taking better care of her husband than her grandfather.”
Paige gasped. “That’s our motive then. Wendy killed Ivy because she was sleeping with Wendy’s husband and then she killed her own grandfather because he knew about the murder.”
“Wendy wouldn’t know an oleander bush from a rose bush,” Savannah said. “That might be an exaggeration but not by much. As for Ivy, she wasn’t the first girl that Wendy caught sleeping with her husband and they’re all still alive as far as I know. No, I don’t think we can immediately assume Wendy killed her grandfather. It seems to me that it would be less risky to kill him at home. A pillow over the face. A push down a flight of stairs.”
Paige cringed. “Savannah!”
Savannah nodded to herself. “I think the killer took a risk because he or she had no other opportunity to get to him. At least not quickly enough before he blabbed any more than he already had. If you ask me, Duncan is just as likely a killer as Wendy.”
“Duncan?” Paige frowned. “But why would he kill Ivy?”
“Because Ivy was a jewel thief.” Savannah tapped a fingernail against the police report. “She stole Julie’s grandmother’s wedding ring, and then when he found out about it, he decided not to call the police. He told Julie that he’d handle it. Perhaps, he confronted Ivy about the ring, got angry and killed her. Then he overheard Bruce talking about the murder and realized he had to kill him too.”
Something Max said the night of the party came back to Arden just then and she chuckled. “Do you remember the stories Bruce used to tell? According to Max, Bruce accused Duncan of being the jewel thief, not Ivy.”
Savannah snorted. “Crazy old man. He used to tell everyone that my father was a mad scientist who performed freakish experiments in our cellar. I offered to take him down there once but he wouldn’t go.”
Arden flipped through the insurance pictures of Gladys Oakley’s missing jewelry until a familiar looking butterfly pendant caught her eye. “This looks familiar. Wendy was wearing it yesterday morning,” Arden added with a meaningful look.
Savannah took the report and held it up closer to her eyes. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” Arden said. “The question is where did she get it? According to this report, Ivy was the one who stole it.”
“See!” Paige crowed. “I was right. That proves Wendy is the killer. She killed Ivy and then took a little memento home with her.”
“I think you might be right,” Arden said, a thrill of excitement racing through her. “Wendy has motive, means and opportunity.”
“But how are we going to prove it?” Savannah asked. “Bruce is scheduled to be cremated tomorrow and we’re running out of time.”
Arden stuffed the report back into the envelope and handed it to Savannah. “You know, I think we’ve been derelict in our Christian duties.”
“How so?” Paige asked.
Arden rose to her feet. “I think it’s high time we visit the bereaved.”
