“Would you all like some tea or coffee?”
Freddie and I jolted.
“God, yes,” he replied to the woman standing behind us. “But make mine decaffeinated.”
Mr. Carver and I declined. We waited for the woman to leave before we resumed our huddle.
“Now, as far as I’m aware, there was never trouble between Olivia Ramsbottom and the twins before Mick came to town.” Mr. Carver tapped the table with a shaky finger. “Everybody knew he was trouble. Worked at the mill for Olivia’s father. Good looking. Had all the girls in a tizzy.”
Freddie turned and gave me an excited shrug.
“But Twyla, your Tweety, was the only one who could keep him on his toes,” he said, looking back and forth between us. “Mick was shameless in his pursuit of her. Mainly, I think, because she wanted nothing to do with him at first. But that didn’t stop him. Oh no. He’d be yanking flowers from people’s gardens to give her. Reciting terrible poetry in the town square. Flashy stuff. More about him than her if you ask me.”
“But he won her over, though, right? We were told they were engaged.”
“Oh yes, they got engaged. Too quickly in my opinion. He had only been in town a couple of months.” Mr. Carver dabbed at his nose again with his hankie.
“So what happened?”
“Olivia Ramsbottom happened,” he said, leaning to tuck his hankie back into his pocket. “She saw herself as the lady of that house her daddy built … and in that vision, she saw Mick at her side.”
“But Mick wanted Tweety.”
He nodded. “They both wanted the person they couldn’t really have,” he said, shaking his head. “You see, ever since she was a little girl, Olivia Ramsbottom could charm the pants off a snake. People were just bedazzled by the idea of this perfect little girl sitting on her big pile of money. And I swear … butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Never an unkind word. Never a misstep. So everyone just did things for her. Gave her anything she wanted … except for Mick. He was just so blinded by Twyla’s vigor that he never gave Olivia a second look.”
“So,” Freddie said, leaning in closer. “What did Olivia do?”
Mr. Carver shrugged. “Nobody knows. One minute Mick was head over heels for Twyla, the next he was engaged to Olivia. Didn’t seem overly happy about it, though. Lost his zest. A man like that doesn’t appreciate a woman who’s willing to fawn all over him, and Olivia did that. Although he did seem to enjoy driving that fancy convertible around town.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I said, closing my eyes and waving my hands out in front of me. “You think he dumped Tweety for a car?”
“Well, maybe not just the car. The lifestyle.” Mr. Carver moved his head side-to-side as though weighing all the possibilities. “Certainly didn’t have to work in the textiles mill after he took up with her.”
“Wow,” I said under my breath. “Poor Tweety. She must have been ticked! I mean, not ticked enough to murder him fifty years later, but, you know what I mean.”
Mr. Carver nodded. “Well, again, everybody in town tried to warn her what kind of man he was. Katherine—Kit Kat—hated him. That woman couldn’t hide an emotion if her life depended on it.”
“Okay,” I said, straightening up. “So I get what happened with Tweety and Mr. Masterson, but—” I stopped to take a breath. I didn’t even want to say the words. “Marg Johnson implied that Kit Kat and Mr. Ramsbottom had—” I stopped, searching for the right words. “That there was something going on between the two of them.”
“Marg Johnson is a nasty busybody of the highest order. She wanted to be Olivia Ramsbottom so badly, she didn’t know what to do with herself … other than lick that woman’s boots every chance she got.”
“That’s not the only thing she licked of Olivia’s,” Freddie muttered under his breath.
I slapped his arm then asked, “So there was nothing going on between Kit Kat and Mr. Ramsbottom, Olivia’s father?”
“Well, no. I didn’t say that.”
I ran a hand over my face. “Really?”
“Well, now, I don’t know the truth,” Mr. Carver said, waving a hand of deniability at us. “But there were rumors. In the man’s defense, his wife was long dead.”
“What kind of rumors?” Freddie asked.
Mr. Carver looked at us both in turn. “A few people claimed to have spotted them having private meetings.” He sighed. “Couldn’t quite see it myself. Although Mr. Ramsbottom was not a bad-looking man, and, of course, there was the obvious attraction.”
“You can’t mean the money,” I said already shaking my head. “Kit Kat’s not like that.”
“I tend to agree with you, but she never did give a good explanation for what she was doing with Mr. Ramsbottom in that tent right before he died.”
“She was with him? Right before he died?”
He nodded.
Freddie cleared his throat and shot me a nervous glance before he said, “Marg also insinuated that at the time, people suspected Mr. Ramsbottom didn’t die of natural causes, and that maybe Kit Kat had something to do with…” Freddie’s sentence withered under my glare.
“A few people did,” Mr. Carver said, nodding. “But Mr. Ramsbottom was not a young man, or a thin one for that matter. Most people just figured the simplest explanation was a heart attack.”
“And the others who didn’t?” I asked more sharply than I intended.
“It wasn’t just the fact that Kit Kat wasn’t talking that made her look so suspicious.”
“Okay.”
“It was the speculation about her motive.”
“What motive?” I couldn’t stop myself from cringing a little. “Lovers’ spat?”
“Nope.” Mr. Carver frowned, face nearly disappearing into the folds of his wrinkles. “Not exactly.”
“Then what?”
He scratched his chin for a moment considering me. “There was another rumor going around. It was a little crazy, though. The scandal would have been terrible.”
“What?”
“Well, rumor had it, Mr. Ramsbottom was intending to marry Kit Kat, and he was none too pleased with his daughter’s infatuation with Mick, so some say he called his lawyer in.”
“Lawyer?” I asked trying to sort it all through. “Why?”
“To change his will.”
Freddie gasped. “You don’t mean…?”
“He was planning to leave everything—Hemlock Estate and all the money—to Kit Kat.”