CHAPTER 16

Relishing the warmth of my bed and reluctant to leave it, I pulled the comforter under my chin and listened to Julia bang around in my downstairs kitchen, opening and closing drawers, rummaging around in my pots and pans cabinet. The sun was up, but I had no intention of rising. After all, I hadn’t gone to bed until just past three o’clock. Julia had succumbed at the same time, but we left the lights burning. I turned on my side and drew my knees to my chest.

A minute later, curiosity got the best of me and I took a peek at my alarm clock. It was just after nine. Good grief.

I threw off my comforter and sat on the edge of my bed, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. My first fully coherent thought was that two women had been murdered in the space of two days. My second was that it was Valentine’s Day. I slipped on jeans and a sweater, headed downstairs, and mumbled a good morning to Julia.

“We have investigating to do,” she said, working scrambled eggs around a pan. “No more slouching. If we had solved this earlier, Anika would still be alive.”

I shuffled over to the counter and got a pot of coffee going. The coffee-stained paper towel in the sink, leftover from Anika’s spill the night before, reminded me how irritated she had been with me. Guilt whispered in my ear, but I refused to give in to it. Maybe she’d been telling the truth about the phone call to Wayne, but she hadn’t been aboveboard with me or the police. She’d known more than she’d been willing to let on, and it had cost her her life. “Don’t go down that road, Julia. We’re not responsible for her death.”

“It bothers me that she was here, alive and well, minutes before she was killed. I keep thinking, what if we’d stopped her from leaving?”

“How? We didn’t know she was about to be murdered.”

“I know that.”

“I’m not going to let you blame yourself, not one tiny bit. Don’t forget that she was here in her own self-interest, just like the first time she showed up at my house, when she threw suspicion on Wayne.”

“Either Charlie or Wayne killed her,” Julia said, “and I think it was because one of them was afraid of what she’d say. She was a talkative woman.”

“Trouble was, she talked to all the wrong people. Everyone but the police.”

“The first thing we should do is find out exactly how she died.”

“That should be easy enough. Gilroy doesn’t mind telling me the basics. Our first stop is the station.”

Julia plated our eggs and grabbed forks from a drawer while I poured coffee and took our cups to the table. I suddenly realized that I didn’t have to wait to talk to Gilroy. If Underhill or Turner had made an early morning donut run to Holly’s Sweets, Holly had already heard the medical examiner’s preliminary report. Neither one of them would’ve been able to resist telling her. The warmth and aroma of that bakery loosened the tongues of everyone who entered it, but particularly those who were predisposed to being gabby.

I phoned Holly’s Sweets. Though Holly was busy making more heart-shaped cookies for the night’s dance, Peter filled me in. Turner had been especially talkative early this morning, he said, and Holly had doled out extra donuts to keep him talking until he divulged all he knew.

“Peter says Anika was stabbed by something similar in shape to a screwdriver,” I said a minute later, taking a seat at the table. “The ME has to complete his report, but that was his first observation. The police think she was killed in her car and the murderer grabbed what was handy, which means it was a spur-of-the moment crime, not planned.”

“So someone got into the car with her, got angry with her, went into the glove compartment or whatever—”

“Glove compartment, yes. She had a tool kit in there—something Charlie would have known about. Probably Wayne too, considering he and Anika were having an affair. I’m sure he’s been in her car.”

I washed down a mouthful of scrambled egg with my coffee, turning the whole sordid case over in my mind. Two couples, both of them cheating. Had Charlie had an affair with Brigit to get back at Anika and Wayne? Or had Wayne cheated to get back at Brigit and Charlie? Did it matter who had cheated first?

Momentarily I entertained the idea that Wayne had murdered Brigit and Charlie had murdered Anika. There was a satisfying symmetry to that solution, but my instincts were telling me that Anika had been murdered out of desperation and in direct response to Brigit’s murder. Anika hadn’t been a target from the start. The murderer had come to see her as a threat.

“I’m sure Anika knew who murdered Brigit,” I said. “Why wouldn’t she tell us or the police? Was she protecting her lover or her husband?”

“First one and then the other,” Julia said.

“She knew from the start who killed Brigit, but something changed. Something that made her switch from protecting Charlie to protecting Wayne.”

“Was she afraid of Charlie?”

“Maybe,” I said, lost in thought. I knew I had to go back to the beginning, and that meant figuring out why Brigit had broken protocol, so to speak, and publicly accused Wayne of cheating on her. They were all cheating, so why play the put-upon wife and go after Wayne?

“Well, we’re not going to solve this sitting in your kitchen. Pick me up in front of my house in three minutes. I need fresh clothes.”

Julia set her plate and cup in the sink and marched out my front door. What a strange Valentine’s Day, I thought as I cleared the table. The two of us should have been eating scones and cream puffs, waiting for doorbell rings that signaled bouquets of roses at our doors, and here we were trying to solve the murders of two women who had been killed by either a husband or a lover.

The second Julia got into my Subaru, my phone rang. It was Holly, sounding rather breathless as she told me that Peter had neglected an important piece of information: Gilroy had found the weapon that killed Brigit under the snow in the Gundersens’ backyard. “You won’t believe it,” she said. “It was one of the metal poles they had in their front yard. The ones they attached wood hearts to. The ends were pointed so Wayne could drive the pole into the frozen ground. It was a Valentine’s Day decoration, Rachel.”

I couldn’t imagine a more vicious, or more personal, murder. Thankfully, Brigit had probably died instantly.

After our breakfast, Julia and I stopped at Town Hall and found Cassie hanging the last section of paper-flower garland to a hook on the boardroom’s wall.

“Oh yeah, Brigit and Anika were frenemies,” she told us. “I don’t know why they bothered to pretend they had a friendship. They competed over everything, they didn’t have much in common, and they didn’t like each other. Same could be said of Charlie and Wayne.” She stood back, examining her work. Pleased with what she saw, she sighed with satisfaction. “I can’t believe we made all those flowers. Think of how many hours that garland represents.”

“All I know is I’m not doing it next year,” Julia said.

“Me neither. But I’ll bet Royce and Charlie will. For men, they sure love to decorate.” Cassie bent to retrieve a fallen flower and then tied it to the garland. “The funny thing is, if those four had met before they were married, Wayne would have married Anika and Charlie would have married Brigit. They married the wrong people, and they’ve been miserable ever since.”

“And now two of them are dead,” I said.

“Why didn’t they just divorce?” Cassie asked. “That’s what normal people do. Instead they had affairs and pretended to be friends. And why did Brigit have to make that big scene with the flyers? I’ll never understand that.”

“When we find the answers to those questions, they’ll have to do with money,” Julia said. “It always comes down to money.”

“And Wayne has a lot more of it than Charlie,” Cassie said, her expression solemn. “I hate gossiping about the dead, but when I had lunch with Anika and Brigit the day after Christmas, they compared their husbands’ salaries right in front of me. Not in exact figures, but they may as well have. They talked about their prospects for the future, too, like who was going to do even better in the years ahead and who could take early retirement if they wanted to. Brigit looked like the cat that ate the canary. She was all ‘Yeah, I know my husband is a success and yours is a failure’ on Anika. They forgot I was there.”

A solution to the whole puzzle was beginning to take shape in my mind, like a phantom taking on solid form. I knew I had something, but I couldn’t yet take a firm hold of it. “Did Anika agree that Charlie made less money, or did she argue with Brigit?” I asked.

“She wasn’t thrilled about what Brigit was saying, but she couldn’t disagree. It’s obvious to anyone with eyes who has more money. Or had, I guess. It doesn’t matter now, does it? Anyway, Anika must have compared Brigit’s house to hers every time she was there, and working in Town Hall she probably saw the Gundersens’ property taxes and other financial stuff.”

“What sort of friends argue about how much money they have?” I asked.

“Frenemies,” Cassie corrected. “And Brigit wasn’t the only nasty one. Anika got nasty too. She made more money than Brigit at Town Hall and she knew accounting, so I think she felt secure in that. Just before we all went home, she said something like, ‘A plan for the future is more important, and I’ve got a plan worth more than any bank account.’ And then Brigit got super serious and said, ‘Yeah, I know you do. But what’s it worth if you don’t know my plan?’ Something like that. It was weirder than usual.”

Plan. The word sent a chill up my spine. It was the word Brigit had used when I’d told her that plastering Main Street with flyers wasn’t a good idea. They’re not an idea, they’re a plan. And a very clever one. Brigit hadn’t been babbling with whiskey-loosened lips, as I’d assumed. She’d had an actual plan, and the flyers were part of it.

“Do you know if Wayne and Charlie ever argued about money?” I asked.

“Not that I heard, but I’m pretty sure Charlie was envious,” Cassie replied.

“With Anika for a wife, how could he not be?” Julia said. “She must have pestered him all the time to make more money.”

“I do know that Wayne bragged all the time about his new car last summer,” Cassie said, “and Charlie changed the subject every time he started to talk about it.” She grinned. “Of course, we all did that. I don’t know how many times he talked about the genuine leather seats.”

I heard a rustle behind me and saw Royce enter the boardroom. Julia turned too, but an instant later she swung back to Cassie and reached up to finger the garland she had just hung on the wall, pretending great interest in it. “One of these days I’ll learn to make flowers as pretty as these other ones,” she said.

“Royce thinks you’re a great student,” Cassie said.

The hint of a frown crossed Julia’s face. “Oh, does he?”

“Don’t take it wrong. I just meant, you know, I don’t mean student in a bad way.”

“Other people have an artistic eye, not just Royce.”

“Including you and Charlie.”

I leaned in and whispered, “Speaking of which, do you know if Charlie’s at home?”

No doubt puzzled as to why my question required privacy, Cassie gave me a questioning look. “Royce left to pay his condolences,” she said with a nod toward her father-in-law, who was now taping construction-paper hearts to the wall. “He just got back, so I’m sure he knows if Charlie’s there. Royce, can you come here for a second?”

I turned quickly to Julia. “Did you want to wait in my car? We’re about to leave for Charlie’s house.”

Julia stiffened her spine. She wasn’t going anywhere. “I’m fine right here on this very spot.”

Goodness knows what Cassie thought of the pair of us—me whispering, Julia huffing and puffing.

“I didn’t want to interrupt ladies talking,” Royce said, beaming as he strode up to our little group. “My wife used to say that men do that all the time without thinking. When you see ladies huddled, she’d say, don’t interrupt. Julia, how are you? Are you looking forward to tonight?” The second he addressed Julia, she averted her eyes and focused once more on the garland. “You should be proud of that,” he said. “We couldn’t have done it without your help. I can look at that garland and point to every one of the flowers you made.”

“Because they’re not perfect?” Julia said.

The way I saw it, Royce was being kind. But Julia’s take on it? I could almost see her hackles rising.

“They’re not meant to be perfect,” Royce said. “They’re meant to look real.” As a polite afterthought, he pivoted ever so slightly my way. “And how are you, Rachel?”

“Rachel wanted to know if Charlie’s at home,” Cassie broke in.

“Yes, I just talked to him,” Royce replied, “and I think he could use a little company at the moment if you’re planning on visiting him. He’s by himself and probably will be until tonight.”

But I didn’t intend to offer Charlie company. I was going to demand that he answer my questions, in spite of his grief. My phantom solution was taking shape by the second, but for the flimsiest reason: I had a hunch. I felt in my bones that I was onto something. But what I needed was hard proof, and for that, I had to talk to Charlie—and bluff my way to him giving me that proof.