Bree stifled a frustrated groan and volunteered to answer the door. As she darted into the house, Minnie withdrew a set of dentures from the pocket of her puffy jacket and inserted them into her mouth.
“I hate wearing my teeth,” she told me, after poking them into position, “but I can’t chew properly without them.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I confined myself to a sympathetic nod. Bess had switched from the lid-on, lid-off game to the bang-a-lid-on-a-random-saucepan game. The noise seemed to delight Minnie, but I found her toothy grin faintly menacing.
I was beginning to think that Bree had gotten lost on her way to the front door when she returned, trailed by three elderly women, each of whom walked at a snail’s pace with the aid of a three-pronged metal cane. Like Minnie, the newcomers were dressed as if they were on a polar expedition, though their jackets were noticeably shabbier than hers. When they caught sight of Bess, they began slowly but surely to converge on her.
“They love to play with saucepans,” one of the women observed in a quavering voice, and the other two croaked their agreement.
When Bess saw three three-pronged canes and six legs moving toward her, she let out a cry of alarm. I jumped to my feet, skirted the oncoming traffic, lifted her from the ground, and introduced her to the ancient trio. Freed from the fear of being simultaneously trampled and skewered, Bess accepted their praise with aplomb until the tasty treats on the table reminded her—and me—that lunchtime was nigh.
“Minnie,” I said to our hostess, “I’m afraid Bess needs her lunch. I don’t mean to be unsociable, but would you mind if she ate it in the kitchen? She’ll be too distracted to eat if I feed her out here.”
“You go ahead.” Minnie tilted her head toward the three old ladies. “It’ll take a while to organize this lot. They don’t get out much.”
“Bring the pram, will you, Bree?” I said, giving her a meaningful look. “Bess can nap in it after she has her lunch.”
Bree took her cue and wheeled the pram into the kitchen. I gently withdrew Bess from her circle of admirers and followed in Bree’s footsteps, making sure to close the door behind me. I didn’t want to run the risk being overheard again.
Bess sat in my lap to gorge herself on the buffet I’d packed for her, but Bree prowled the room like a caged tiger, talking sometimes to herself and sometimes to me.
“Did you see the staircase, Lori?” she asked. “Did you see the hallway? Annabelle could have hauled a morgueful of corpses into the garden without breaking a sweat. How did Minnie know you’d spoken with Hayley Calthorp? How did Susan know we’d come here? How did she know our names? What’s with the tea party? Who are those old ladies? The van from the local nursing home dropped them off, but I don’t know why they’d want to meet us. What’s going on?”
“Are you done?” I asked when she stopped prowling.
“For the moment,” she answered, and sank into the chair opposite mine.
“I admit that Sunnyside’s layout makes Mrs. Craven’s story seem less bonkers than it did before,” I conceded, “but I still don’t think we should jump to any conclusions.”
“The jump’s getting shorter and shorter,” Bree muttered.
“As for how Susan knew our names . . .” I filled her in on Minnie’s spy network, concluding with Bob Nash’s pithy description of us as “a daft Yank and a clueless Kiwi.”
Bree chuckled in spite of herself. “Perfect! We should print business cards for ourselves: The Daft and Clueless Detective Agency.”
“Wouldn’t it send the wrong message to our clients?” I asked.
“Probably not,” she said. “I’m still clueless about the old ladies.”
“My guess is that they’re the women Hayley Calthorp talked about,” I said, “the ones she called Minnie’s cronies. I’ll bet Minnie invited them here for moral support. She knows we’ve heard Hayley’s side of the story and she wants us to hear hers. She must be desperate to convince us—or anyone else who will listen—that she’s been right about Annabelle all along.”
“But why have a tea party?” Bree asked.
“Kindness?” I replied, catching a wheat cracker before it hit the floor. “Didn’t you notice? Every treat on the tea table is easy to chew. It seems to me that Minnie made them because she and her chums have the same dental challenges. And you heard what she said. Her friends don’t get out much.”
Bree nodded gravely. “A nursing home tea party probably isn’t as much fun as a tea party at a friend’s house.”
“Probably not,” I said.
Bree lapsed into silence, then said quietly, “It’s a lot to take in.”
“No kidding,” I said. “And there’s more to come. If I’m right, we’re about to hear the gospel according to Minnie.”
—
After her busy morning, Bess didn’t need much encouragement to fall asleep in her pram. I wheeled her close to the kitchen doorway, where I could keep her in view and at the same time insulate her from the hubbub of conversation and cackling laughter in the garden.
At least one of Minnie’s cronies must have been strong enough to lift the big teapot because the tea party was well under way. By the time Bree and I resumed our seats at the glass-topped table, the ladies had dispatched half of the sandwiches, most of the plum cake, and, to my disappointment, every last one of the Melting Moments. Their speedy demolition of Minnie’s offerings made me wonder if they got enough to eat at the nursing home.
Minnie waited for us to be seated, then took charge of the introductions. The woman wearing a fine hair net over her sparse white curls was Mildred Greenham. The woman with a bulky hearing aid in each ear was Mabel Parson. The woman with the hunched back was Myrtle Black.
“Mildred,” “Mabel,” and “Myrtle,” I recalled, were the names Annabelle preferred to her own. I wondered if these were the girls who’d teased her in the school yard because her mother had wanted her to stand out from the other children.
“I told my chums about your friendship with Annabelle Craven,” Minnie informed us.
“Minnie rang us yesterday,” said Mildred, “after Bob Nash, Giles, and Tina rang her.”
“You don’t want to believe everything Hayley Calthorp tells you,” Mabel advised. “We came along to set the record straight.”
Myrtle chuckled. “I’ll bet Hayley had some choice things to say about you, Minnie.”
“I’m sure she did,” Minnie said unflappably. She was clearly the queen bee in her small circle. “But it’s not her fault. She’s only parroting what her gran told her, and her gran was as gullible as a newborn babe.”
The cronies nodded, and Minnie turned her head to face us.
“What I’m about to tell you is God’s own truth,” she said solemnly. “Hayley Calthorp believes differently, but I know what I saw.”
“It was a moonless night,” said Myrtle.
“I’ll tell my own story, thank you very much,” Minnie snapped. “You’ll have your turn later.”
“Get on with it, then,” Myrtle retorted, transferring a thick slice of Victoria sponge to her plate. “At the rate you’re going, we’ll be here until Christmas.”
“My story begins before the moonless night,” Minnie explained, turning her back on Myrtle and fastening her attention on Bree and me. “It began before the children came along, a few months after my husband and I were married. We thought it would be nice to live next door to another pair of newlyweds, but it wasn’t. The Trotters weren’t the kind of neighbors we’d hoped for.”
“No one would want to live next door to Zach Trotter,” said Mildred, unknowingly echoing Hayley Calthorp’s comment about living next door to Minnie Jessop.
“He was a bad lot,” Minnie stated firmly, “a liar, a drinker, and a brawler. My husband and I got used to hearing him come home at all hours, drunk as a lord. He never raised his hand to Annabelle, but he raised his voice, and the things he said to her don’t bear repeating.”
The cronies nodded sadly.
“No one would have blamed Annabelle for leaving him,” Minnie opined, “but she stuck by him until—”
“The moonless night,” Myrtle put in excitedly.
“Yes, Myrtle, it was a moonless night,” Minnie said, glaring at her old friend. She gathered herself, then went on. “My husband and I were in the front parlor, drinking a cup of cocoa before bed. We were just finishing up when we heard Zach Trotter come home. We could tell by the way he fumbled with his latch key that he was sozzled.”
“As usual,” Myrtle mumbled through a mouthful of Victoria sponge.
“We heard him go upstairs,” Minnie went on, “and a little while later, we heard a dreadful noise—a sort of bump-thud-rumbling noise. We were sure Zach had fallen down the stairs.”
“Why not Annabelle?” I asked.
“Annabelle was a slip of a girl,” said Minnie. “If she’d fallen down the stairs, she wouldn’t have made half as much noise as a big chap like Zach.”
“Makes sense,” Bree allowed.
“Of course it does,” Minnie said irritably. “It’s what happened.”
“What did you do after you heard the terrible noise?” I asked, to keep Minnie from biting Bree’s head off.
“Nothing,” Minnie answered. “We reckoned that if Zach was bad hurt, Annabelle would ring for the doctor. If he wasn’t, we’d see him all bruised the next day.”
“And serve him right!” Mabel said fiercely.
“We waited up for a bit,” Minnie continued, “to see if the doctor would come. When he didn’t, my husband went up to bed and I took our empty cups to rinse in the kitchen. I was in the back garden when I heard—”
“Why were you in the back garden?” Bree interrupted.
The cronies tittered. Minnie gave them a withering look, then turned toward Bree.
“Why do you think I was in the back garden?” she asked tartly. “We didn’t have modern conveniences in those days.” She pointed to the kitchen’s rear wall. “The WC used to be right there, behind the scullery. We got rid of it when we expanded the kitchen—after we installed the indoor loo.”
“Oh, I see,” said Bree, blushing crimson. “Sorry.”
“As I was saying,” Minnie resumed, “I was in the back garden when I heard a queer sound coming from over the wall.” She waved a mittened hand at the brick wall separating her garden from Dovecote’s. “I was afraid it might be burglars, so I stood on an upturned bucket to take a look. And what do you think I saw?”
Her cronies seemed to hold their collective breath.
“Not much,” Bree said irrepressibly. “It was a moonless night.”
Myrtle sniggered, but Minnie ignored her.
“The stars were plenty bright enough to see by,” she assured Bree. “And I saw Annabelle, plain as day, in her dressing gown and gum boots, tipping a rolled-up rug into the trench she’d dug for her roses.”
An unpleasant sense of recognition made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. Minnie’s description of the rolled-up rug and the trench matched Annabelle’s exactly.
“It was the rag rug she made special for her foyer, wasn’t it, Minnie?” said Mildred.
“It was,” Minnie confirmed. “She shoveled a bit of soil into the trench to cover up the rug, then went back into the house. The next morning, she planted her roses. When I called on her later in the day to borrow a cup of sugar, the rag rug was nowhere to be seen. She made up some tale about Zach abandoning her, but she and I knew what she’d done.” Minnie took a deep breath and concluded dramatically, “Like I told the police: I heard Zach Trotter come home that night, but I never saw him leave.”
Bree, who was much braver than I, said, “Hayley Calthorp believes Annabelle’s story.”
“Did Hayley see what I saw?” Minnie demanded. “No, she did not! Her gran had a soft spot for Annabelle, and Annabelle took advantage of it, just like she took advantage of that bird-witted constable who came to question her. Why they sent such a dunderhead to investigate a murder, I’ll never know. He couldn’t see past her blue eyes and blond curls.”
“Be fair,” Myrtle protested. “The police had their hands full with the robbery at St. Leonard’s.”
“The robbery that never happened,” Minnie scoffed. “It was a false alarm, but it kept the police from sending their best men to look into Zach Trotter’s murder. I told that fool of a constable what I saw, but he seemed to think the rag rug walked away by itself. He didn’t even open his notebook, much less dig up the roses. He let Annabelle twist him round her little finger. Just like the others.”
“The others?” Bree and I chorused. Bree’s arrested expression told me that she, too, remembered Francesco’s mysterious words.
“There were bound to be others,” said Minnie. “A curse came upon her the moment she pushed her husband down the stairs. The only way she could free herself from it was to stop pretending that she was a helpless, abandoned wife and to confess that she was a widow—a self-made, murderous widow.”
“Which she never did,” said Myrtle.
“The widow’s curse blackened her heart and twisted her mind,” Minnie continued. “Annabelle may have had the face of an angel, but she had the soul of a devil.” After an ominous pause, Minnie pointed at Mildred and said affably, “Your turn, dear.”