fourteen

The first thing Francine did when he closed the door was check the time. It was twelve thirty. Charlotte ought to be home from church. She headed next door.

Her knock was rapid, frantic. “Charlotte! It’s me, Francine.” She was cold, but mostly she wanted to get inside to share what just happened. Had she gone too far? Why was she doing this? She was sincere in wanting to help Eric with the funeral arrangements for Camille, but she had definitely crossed over into sleuth territory again.

Charlotte swung the door open as though she’d been waiting for her, which Francine gathered she had. She held a large pair of Army green binoculars in one hand. “Come in, Francine. I thought you’d never get here.”

Charlotte was dressed in a zippered red knit sweater with a snowflake design on it. Her wig of silver curls wasn’t quite straight, as usual. Francine eyed the binoculars.

“Where did you get those?” she asked. She stepped in and felt the temperature difference immediately. The warmth was wonderful. Charlotte tended to keep her house a little toastier than most of the group.

“They were on sale at the Gander Mountain in Avon,” she said. “These babies’ll let you zoom in on a target half a mile away. Deer hunters use them.”

“Must have cost you a pretty penny.” Francine took off her coat and hung it on a coat stand in the hallway.

“Black Friday sale, but it would have been worth every cent even at the regular price. I can see into the Plums’ front room once the sun goes behind their rooftop, which happens about five thirty this time of year. You know they’re smoking marijuana.”

“You have proof ?”

“I’ve watched them. If I could figure out how to rig a camera to the lenses, I’d take pictures to prove it.”

In many ways, Francine was relieved Charlotte was mostly
technology-challenged. “Have you been spying on the Ledfelter house next door?”

Charlotte shut the front door. “Naturally. Though I can’t see into any of the bedrooms. Camille always kept the blinds closed and the drapes drawn, which takes out the two bedrooms on this side. I think Eric moved into one of them.”

Francine mentally reviewed her brief tour of the Ledfelter home. Eric’s bedroom did face Charlotte’s house. “You’re right, from what I saw when I was in there.”

“Let’s talk about what you saw.” Charlotte scooted behind Francine and gave her a push toward the library room down the hall. “How about a little nip while we do that? It’s cold out, and nothing takes the chill out like a little brandy.”

Francine cringed. She wasn’t fond of Charlotte’s rotgut brandy, but she could stomach the cheap liquor if she had to. “How nice,” she said.

The room Charlotte had converted into a library was the twin of the room Camille had turned into an office. But where Camille’s office had been a barren, utilitarian space, Charlotte’s was filled with her character. Solid wooden bookcases were filled with her eclectic choices in books. They went from floor to ceiling. There was even a feeling of antiquity to the room as light streamed in the window revealing dust motes floating through the air. That was one area Charlotte and Camille were similar: they weren’t housekeepers. “The only problem with this room,” Charlotte said, pouring each of them a finger of brandy in a crystal sherry glass, “is that it faces the wrong direction. I can’t snoop very well.”

“You can see next door to Father William’s house.” Francine looked out the window. “Especially this time of year with the barren trees. You can see right through the branches.” An Episcopal priest and his wife lived on the other side of Charlotte.

“I suppose you’re right, but what good is it? He and Betty are so well-behaved they could give purity lessons to Ivory soap.” She handed one of the sherry glasses to Francine. “Here. Drink up!”

Francine examined at the syrupy amber liquid in the glass. She swirled it for a second, put her nose to the glass and breathed in. While she was no connoisseur when it came to spirits, she knew the type of brandy Charlotte usually bought, and this was not it. This was lighter, more transparent, and had a smooth viscosity to it. It smelled of apple and vanilla. “Is this your usual brandy?” she asked. She took a sip. “It seems more refined.” It still burned on her throat but had a caramel finish to it that the fruit-based brandy never had.

“You’re good, you know that?” Charlotte picked up the bottle and handed it to her. “It’s not brandy. It’s cognac.”

Cognac, the stuff of William Churchill and Dr. Dre, Francine thought. She checked the label. “Charlotte! This is a Prunier Cognac!”

“That explains why it spoke to me in a French accent,” Charlotte cracked. “I thought maybe it was because I had too much of it when I opened it yesterday.”

Francine studied the bottle. It was a VSOP, which the label said meant “Very Superior Old Pale.” While she wasn’t sure how much it cost, she knew it was much pricier than what Charlotte usually bought. “Where did you get this?”

“Camille gave it to me on New Year’s Day. At first I thought it might be a gift, but then she put her house on the market the next day, so I took it to be a bribe instead. Sort of like, ‘please don’t interfere with my sales attempt.’ As though I would start up my irrigation system when a buyer was in the house.” She rolled her eyes. “Like I would do that in the winter.”

Implying you would do it if it were summer? Francine thought. She hoped not, but you could never be sure.

“And anyway,” Charlotte continued, “my system never did produce the racket in her house that she claimed it did. The guys from DPW told me that privately, but since she was President of the Town Council they knew better than to contradict her. They just kept quiet and didn’t say one way or the other.”

Francine took another sip. She was beginning to appreciate the burn in her throat. She’d have to visit Charlotte more often in the afternoon, at least until the cognac ran out. “This doesn’t strike me as the kind of thing Camille would buy though, especially not as a gift. I wonder how much it cost.”

“You could look it up on that phone of yours.” Charlotte eased herself in her favorite chair, an apricot-colored recliner that also rocked. She leaned back in it. “This stuff makes me feel all warm and tingly inside.” She put the glass to her lips. “I don’t need my blanket when I drink it.”

“Promise me you won’t make a hot toddy out of it. It’s too good for that.”

“Not even tempted. Now tell me what you learned from Eric. He’s in there, isn’t he?” She began rocking in the chair.

Francine took her usual chair across from Charlotte, a wooden rocking chair. It had a multicolored crocheted blanket draped over it that provided a bit of padding against the hard back. “Eric wants me to come back tomorrow. He wants you and me to go through Camille’s photos and press clippings and whatever else we can find to put together something visual for her funeral. He wanted time to clean up her office, though, before he let us in.”

Charlotte rubbed her chin in thought. “Why? What’s in her
office?”

“Financial records, for one thing,” she said. It slipped out before she had really thought about it. She didn’t want to admit to Charlotte that she’d been snooping. It might come back to bite her sometime if she tried to discourage Charlotte from doing the same.

Charlotte pounced on the gaffe. “You sound like you’ve seen them.” Her rocking picked up speed.

“I may have gone into the room by mistake when I was looking for the restroom.”

Charlotte practically snorted. “I’ve been in her house. There’s no mistaking the restroom. Besides, it’s the first room on the left down the hall. Just like mine. For you to have gone past it, you’d …”

“… have to have been trolling for information. Okay, I admit it.”

“So, what financial information?”

“I didn’t know what to make of it, really. Bank account information for Tricky Dick, Vince, Fuzzy, and Janet. Might have been related to pay for being on the Council, but I’m not certain. I didn’t have much chance to examine it before Eric and Toby came upstairs from working out in the basement.”

Charlotte’s rocking continued at the faster pace. “That’s probably something Eric will clean up. We may not see that again.”

“She had a big stack of files on her desk. Those were the top files. I figured she must have been looking at them recently.”

“Or Eric was looking at them.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” Francine sipped the cognac again and contemplated the records she’d seen. “I wonder how much access Eric had to Camille’s finances. He said she made him a partner. He lived with her for what, a year?”

“He moved back to Brownsburg before Christmas, so it’s actually been a year and a few months. I could check my calendar.”

Francine frowned at her. “You keep track of stuff like that?”

“I record little things that go on in the neighborhood. You violate the privacy of dead women by rifling through their financial records when their next of kin isn’t looking. I don’t see that you have any moral superiority here.”

Francine could trot out a litany of Charlotte’s violations of privacy over the years, but that wouldn’t be productive. “Let’s get back to Eric and Camille. Eric seemed surprised earlier when he admitted that Camille had banked two million dollars. He obviously knew about it, but he said it with a kind of amazement like he’d just discovered it or still hadn’t quite grasped it.”

“You think he didn’t know where it came from or you think he was surprised at the amount?”

“I hadn’t given it any thought until now. I had guessed it was just the amount. If he knew where it came from, would he have been surprised?”

“Maybe so, if he just discovered it.” Charlotte slowed her rocking and picked up her glass of cognac. She used it to gesture at Francine as she talked, like Sherlock Holmes using his pipe to gesture at Watson. “Do you think there might have been something illegal as to how she obtained the money?” Charlotte asked.

Well, in the last couple of days I’ve learned she essentially blackmailed you and also attempted to bribe you. She did it subtly, but
neither reveals what I’d consider a trustworthy person. Francine leaned forward. “It’s possible. Though we are talking about a respected Council member here. Council President, in fact. Would she chance that?”

“She’s dead, Francine. Someone killed her. She did something someone didn’t like. Of course it could have been illegal. When have politicians ever not been susceptible to temptation?” Charlotte thought a moment. “Or I suppose it’s possible the person who killed her did something illegal and she discovered it.”

And tried to use it to her advantage. That may be more like it, Francine thought. “Camille was not the sort of person who got along with everyone.”

“Exactly. Look at her and me. We were neighbors for a long time, and then I had this irrigation system installed and suddenly I’m a pariah. She fabricated a story about the noises she was hearing and tried to get everyone against me.”

“And yet she gave you this bottle of cognac.” Francine mused about that as she took another sip.

“And now we have the chance to put together a retrospective of her life for her funeral.” Charlotte stopped rocking and looked Francine in the eye. “We’re helping out her nephew and at the same time helping ourselves to information that may solve the mystery of her death. What could be better? We’re being helpful! How could Jud object to that? If he knew. Which we’ll probably tell him once we have the information that will help him solve this case.”

Francine wished she could be as optimistic. “What other motives could there be besides money? Maybe we’re focusing too much on the money aspect because we’re surprised she had more than we thought. It might have nothing to do with her death.”

“Stabbing her and deflating her lung is dramatic. I can’t think of many reasons to do that if we exclude money.”

The image of Camille crumpled on the floor with the hilt of a knife sticking out of the side of her dress surged into Francine’s mind. Such a horrible thing. She belted down the remaining drab of cognac in her glass.

Charlotte stood as though she could read Francine’s mind. “Makes one want to drink, doesn’t it? Let’s have another finger.” She took the glass from Francine and shuffled over to the wet bar, passing by the window as she went. “That looks like Jud’s car that just went by. I think it pulled in at Camille’s.”

“Where?” Francine used her arms to push herself out of the rocking chair she’d sunk into, propelling herself toward the window. The view of the street from the side window wasn’t good, and if a car had gone by, it wasn’t visible now.

“Let’s go to the front window. When they come out, we’ll be able to see what happens.”

The women watched for five long minutes. At the end of that time, Jud came out carrying the stack of files Francine had seen on the desk. He also had a computer Francine hadn’t seen before.

Charlotte pointed. “I saw them take one computer out yesterday. Wonder how they missed this one.”

“I didn’t see it in the office. But those look like the files that were stacked on the desk. Not sure we’ll get much information now.”

“Dang that Jud. He’s one step ahead of us.”

Francine felt the same disappointment, but had to remind herself Jud was doing his job. “Maybe it’s for the best. Now we can really focus on doing what Eric asked, putting together a retrospective of Camille’s life.”

“I hope she’s got other files to pull from. With her two computers gone and that stack of files, there may not be much left.”

“I guess we’ll know tomorrow.”

Charlotte headed back to fill their glasses.

“I don’t think I need any more cognac,” Francine said, “In fact, I need to be getting home to get supper started.”

“Don’t forget bingo tonight. You’re going, aren’t you?”

“What time is the bingo?”

“Warm-up games start at six. The regular games begin at seven.”

Francine almost laughed. “You have to warm up to play bingo?”

Charlotte set the bottle of cognac down. She flared her elbows out at her side, working her arms. “Exactly. You have to get the eye-hand coordination going. Those numbers come fast, you know.”

“I won’t be there for the warm-ups,” she said, knowing she would prefer to enjoy dinner with Jonathan. They’d planned an early dinner. “But I should be able to make the regular bingo.”

Charlotte put the bottle away. “I could bring the cognac over
to Eric’s tomorrow. Maybe a little afternoon warmth will help our
creativity.”

“Camille’s life was interesting enough. I’m not sure we need creativity to do it justice. But if you want to bring it, please do.”

“We’ll toast Camille, since I got the bottle from her. A salute to her philanthropy, even if it didn’t show up much during her lifetime.”

Francine left Charlotte’s house contemplating Charlotte’s last words. What had caused Camille’s change of heart in recent months? Not that she’d been evil or anything, but she hadn’t been known for her charitable work. Yet in her last months, she’d given Charlotte a bottle of relatively expensive cognac and spearheaded the fund-raiser for the Parks Department.

Curious.