A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery) (23 page)

“Was Doug there when you shot her?”

“No,” she answered firmly. “To this day he doesn’t know.” Her tone held a note of warning.

Joshua recalled something he read in Dorothy’s statement in the former sheriff’s case file. “Trish’s mother says both you and Doug were out in the front yard when she got home.”

“He was in his room.”

“He didn’t hear the shot?”

She responded with certainty. “No.”

“What did you do after you shot Trish?”

“I left.”

“When you shot her, did she fall on the sofa or did you lay her down on it?”

Phyllis looked at her lawyer. “I don’t remember everything. It was so long ago and I was really mad.”

Ruth spoke for the first time. “My client did say she was distraught at the time she killed her.” There was her defense.

“She wasn’t distraught at the time she killed Gail Reynolds,” Joshua pointed out. “She admits that she planned and executed it.” He turned back to Phyllis. “Tell us about Lou Alcott.”

“What about him?”

“He was your boyfriend. He tried to kill Dr. MacMillan. Did he know about the murders?”

“Doc MacMillan said that he was going to find out who killed Gail. Lou thought that if he killed him, then he wouldn’t find out it was me. I didn’t ask him to do it.”

Phyllis swallowed. Her face twisted before she took a deep breath and continued in a surprisingly strong voice, “Lou was a good man. He really loved me.”

After Phyllis was taken to the holding cell, Ruth Majors followed the county prosecutor into the sheriff’s office to barter for a deal for her client in exchange for a guilty plea. It was an exercise in futility, considering that Phyllis Rollins had confessed to killing two people. She was destined to spend the rest of her life in jail.

Curt waited until Ruth left to ask why the prosecutor stopped short of getting a confession from Phyllis for the murders of Rex Rollins and his landlady. “Why did you stop? Why didn’t you question her about Rex’s murder? I thought we agreed that Lou killed Rex for her.”

“Because she had nothing to do with their murders,” Joshua answered, before Tad knocked on the door and stepped inside without waiting for an invitation. “Plus, my gut is telling me that she didn’t kill Gail or Trish.”

“Your gut is having an off day,” the sheriff said. “She admitted to it.”

“She says she went out the back door.”

“What was that all about anyway? So she went out the back door?”

“I locked the front door. Karl said that he couldn’t get in the front door because I locked it, but it was unlocked and opened when Jan went there three days later. Plus—Phyllis didn’t make any mention of seeing Karl, who admits he was there!”

Tad interjected, “I’m sorry to interrupt this celebration at the closing of this case, but there’s a matter of a man out here in need of a guardian.”

“What are you talking about, Doc?” Sheriff Sawyer said with a hint of annoyance.

“Social services can’t find a halfway house for Doug to stay at.”

“Isn’t he over eighteen?” Curt asked Joshua in a rhetorical manner.

It was Tad’s turn to respond with irritation, “Doug’s parents had him declared incompetent after his second stay in the mental hospital. When they were killed in that accident, Phyllis became his guardian.” He pointed to Joshua. “It is your responsibility to have the family court appoint Doug Barlow a new guardian. In the meantime, Jan and I are taking him back to his house. I’ll stay with him tonight. I would appreciate it if you would address this matter first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Jan?” Curt looked out the door to see her sitting with Doug and making notes on her notepad. She appeared to be interviewing their latest defendant’s brother.

“The Review has hired her as their news editor.” Tad turned back to Joshua, “I guess you didn’t read the retraction in today’s Vindicator that has reinstated you as the valley’s golden boy.”

“I stopped reading that paper weeks ago.” Joshua assured him, “I will find a guardian for Doug.”

“Can you pick up Dog on your way home?”

Joshua groaned. He held his easygoing cousin’s untrained pet responsible for teaching his own dog bad habits, like sneaking up on the sofa.

Curt chuckled after Tad left. “He certainly goes out of his way for his patients.”

“That’s what makes him a good doctor.”

Curt returned to the matter of Rex Rollins’ murder. “You don’t think Alcott killed Rex because he was going to blow the whistle on Phyllis?”

Joshua shook his head. “Nah, Rex’s book wasn’t about Phyllis.”

“Don’t you think he knew about her killing Wheeler?”

“By all reports I’ve heard, she didn’t ever love Rex. He worked out at her parents’ farm. I think he knew about the murder. Then, he blackmailed her into marrying him.”

“So she killed Tricia.” Curt said. “Then, after she divorced Rex, he wrote his book about her killing the cheerleader who broke her brother’s heart.”

“That falls into the category of who cares.”

“I care,” the sheriff stated in his most authoritative tone.

“Curt,” Joshua said, “you knew Rex. I knew Rex. We are also men of the world and have been around. Do you really think any publisher is going to care about a village drunk’s little book about a farm girl who blows away the local cheerleader for breaking her brother’s heart?”

“Now you are saying that his book was not the motive for his murder, which, I might add, blows the wind out of our sails about it being the motive for his landlady’s murder.”

“Oh, it’s the motive for his murder,” Joshua mused. “It is also the motive for Bella Polk’s murder. It just wasn’t about Tricia Wheeler’s murder. Her murder was small potatoes compared to the murder he was writing about.”

“Whose murder would that be?”

“I’m thinking that Rex knew something about Margo. Herb Duncan has had a string of good luck ever since Rex’s murder, and I think his fairy godmother is Margo Connor.”

Joshua retired to his study where Doc Wilson’s folder containing his report on Tricia Wheeler’s murder lay in the center of the desk. He tossed it into his IN box.

Time to concentrate on Margo Sweeney Boyd Connor’s dirty dealings.

He concluded that it was best to start at the beginning . . . with the murder of her first husband, which put her on the road to prosperity.

That night, after his children had gone to their separate corners to do their homework, he built a fire in the fireplace. Admiral and Dog wandered in to take up what had become their customary spots on the carpet in front of the flames. The domesticated beasts lay like a couple of lion statues at the gate of a grand city to stare into the blaze and imagine themselves as creatures in the wilderness bringing down their food in the glory of bloodlust.

A frosted beer mug at his elbow, Joshua sat back in his recliner with his feet up to read Dr. Dan Boyd’s case file, which he had borrowed from the Columbiana County Sheriff’s Department in Ohio.

According to the copy of the notes in the folder, the case had not been looked at in years, despite letters sent annually from Gregory Boyd, the victim’s son, to request that the murder not be forgotten.

He noted the return address on the envelope of the last letter. It was Ohio State University. Dan Boyd’s son was now a first-year law student. His father had been dead for eighteen years. He was four years old when his father died and he still had not given up hope for justice.

Dr. Dan Boyd was thirty-eight when his throat was slashed while working late in his dental office on a Thursday night. Meanwhile, his wife was giving a dinner party in their home.

The murder was estimated to have happened shortly after seven o’clock. The dentist had sent his receptionist home at six o’clock. He was the only one at the office because he had a seven o’clock appointment with a new patient.

The appointment book had “canceled” written across the last appointment for the day. The receptionist said the patient had not canceled when she left. The name of the patient was Harry Smith. The phone number proved to be a phony.

Joshua studied the crime-scene photos. Dan had put up a fight. He had defense wounds on his hands and arms.

Blood squirted everywhere from his severed jugular vein: in his examination room where the struggle seemed to have started, in his office, and in the reception area where the cleaning crew found his body under the receptionist’s desk the next morning.

When he studied the pictures with his magnifying glass, Joshua could see the bloody fingerprints all over Margo’s wedding picture on his desk in his office. It appeared as if he had grabbed it.

Immersed in studying the crime-scene pictures, Joshua leapt in his seat when the phone rang. Even the dogs were startled out of their fantasies. He pried himself out of the chair to go pick up the phone on the desk.

“Hey, sailor,” Hank greeted him.

Guilt washed over him. “Hey. I take it that your flight back to Hawaii was uneventful?” He sat down in his chair.

She assured him that it was.

Silence.

He tried to recall if ever he and Hank had suffered from awkward silence between them before.

She finally asked, “I wanted to know how things were going on finding out who killed that cheerleader friend of yours?”

“We got a confession, but my gut isn’t buying it.” He opened the medical examiner’s folder for Tricia Wheeler and flipped through the pages.

“Your gut is a perfectionist.”

“But it is usually right.”

“Who confessed?”

“Phyllis Barlow, the girl next door.”

“The sister of the guy Tricia had ditched for a dance?”

“Yeah.” He picked up the crime-scene picture of Tricia laid out on the sofa.

Phyllis said she did not remember if she laid her out on the sofa or not. The position suggested whoever did it was someone who cared about her. That contradicted his assessment of the relationship between the two girls. He would describe their relationship as one of bitterness.

The next picture was a close-up of the gun on the floor at the end of the sofa.

Phyllis said the gun was her father’s old army pistol.

“What is bothering you about her confession?” Hank was asking.

“So far I have come up with nothing but questions.”

The next picture was a full-length picture of Tricia on the medical examiner’s table, before the examiner had cut through her flesh with his scalpel. She was naked in order to capture any injuries or evidence on film.

Joshua tried not to stare at how beautiful she was—even in death.

“I think we should talk about us,” Hank said.

There was a thin gold strand around Tricia’s neck. It looked like a necklace. There was a design at the well of her throat.

Knowing that there would be a close-up of her face, he flipped to the next picture. He was right.

“Josh?”

He gazed at the image of Tricia’s face. It was a head and shoulder shot. His eyes fell to the gold band around her neck.

“Josh? Are you still there?”

What is that at the end of her necklace?

He held the picture under his desk lamp to make sure he saw what he thought he saw.

She begged, “Josh, please say something.”

It was a chain from which hung two gold hearts held together by a diamond in the center. He stared at the necklace like a subject trying to hypnotize himself.

Where—what—who was it that said something about someone giving Tricia a necklace with two hearts?

“Excuse me, Hank,” Joshua said. “But I have to make a phone call. Can I call you back?”

While he worked out in his mind the only scenario that fit, he sank back into his chair to study the hearts in the picture.

He dug through his notebook until he found Cindy’s number and punched it into the phone while praying she’d be home. When she answered, he took a minimal amount of time for pleasantries before he asked her, “Is there any chance that Tricia took back Doug’s necklace?”

“. . . and so then the Sunday school teacher told Grandmamma Frieda to take Josh home and never to bring him back to church again.”

Doug laughed.

In spite of the circumstances, the evening had turned out to be comfortable. Jan prepared dinner out of what she found in the fridge: burgers and a salad, milk, and a block of cheddar cheese while Doug showed off his rock collection to Tad. The genius was fascinated with geology and the acre and a half that they lived on along a hillside had quite an assortment of interesting rocks.

Jan concluded that he would make a good feature for the paper: the life of a certified genius suffering from mental illness.

After their meal, they sat back in their chairs at the table in the great room and sliced off bites of the cheese with a butcher knife Jan had found in the kitchen drawer.

“Did they ever let Josh go back to Sunday school?” Doug wondered.

“Oh, yes, but the Cunninghams never let him play with any of their kids again.” Jan added with a giggle, “Nowadays, they could have sued Josh for punching out their son over that slingshot.”

Doug failed to see her humor. He looked at the doctor with wide eyes. “Is he a good lawyer?”

Tad said, “One of the best.”

“Is he going to send Phyllis to jail?”

Jan took their empty plates to the sink. She felt sorry for him.

Like an adult explaining a grown-up situation to a child, Tad told him, “That’s up to a jury to decide. All Josh will do is present the people’s case against her.” Tad wondered if he knew that Phyllis had confessed.

“I was going to be a scientist.”

Referring to his rock collection, Tad said, “And I’m sure you could have been a good one.”

“But I got sick.” Doug stated it like a scientific fact.

Tad and Jan exchanged sympathetic expressions when she came back to the table for an armload of condiments to return to the refrigerator.

“Well, you know, Doug,” she said, “you don’t have to let your illness prevent you from achieving any dreams you might have.”

“I can’t have my dream until after I die.”

Frightened by his reference to death, she stepped back behind Tad’s chair.

The doctor squinted at him. “Why is that?”

“Trish and I couldn’t be together here in life because they wouldn’t let us. So, we’re going to have to get together on the other side.”

Fear formed a lump in Jan’s throat that made it difficult for her to swallow. She grasped Tad’s shoulder for courage. Doug cut off another slice of cheese with the butcher knife and nibbled at it like a rat savoring a tasty find while the cat was away at the vet’s office.

Tad’s voice was steady. “Don’t you have any dreams for here in your lifetime?”

“No.” Doug continued to gnaw at the cheese and gazed at him with eyes that looked as innocent as a child talking about Santa Claus. “That’s why I keep trying to kill myself, so that I can go be with her. But they keep stopping me because they don’t want us to be together.”

“Who are they, Doug?” Jan choked out.

“Them.” He indicated with a nod of his head the unseen enemy that consisted of the populace who had victimized him during the course of his lifetime. “All those people who kept telling Tricia that I wasn’t good enough for her, and that we were hicks, and that she could do better. She only pretended to be stuck-up and not like me. She really did love me, and it hurt that we couldn’t be together. It hurt so much that she finally had to kill herself.”

Tad swallowed and phrased his next question carefully. “Doug, were you there when Trish died?”

“That was when we decided that the only way we could be together was to go to the other side where they couldn’t hurt us anymore.”

“Was that when she told you that she loved you?”

“Yeah, that was when she gave me this.” Doug reached down inside his shirt and pulled out a gold chain at the end of which hung a woman’s class ring with a sapphire stone in it.

Jan gasped at the sight of the ring. She recalled Tricia grabbing it from Randy’s neck hours before she was killed. She imagined how Doug had come to possess it.

Their host leaned across the table to let his guests examine the ring he wore around his neck.

While he fingered the jewel, Tad read the engraving inside. It read “TRW.” Tricia Rose Wheeler. He glanced up at Jan and silently answered her unspoken query with a nod of his head. Yes, it was the ring Tricia had taken from Randy, the same one that her mother assumed had been stolen from her dead body by a morgue attendant.

“Trish gave it to me because she loved me,” Doug leaned back in his seat. “And she’s waiting for me on the other side where we will be together forever.”

In the midst of devising a plan to call Joshua, Jan leapt for the phone when it rang.

Enthralled with his fantasy about the love he shared with Tricia, Doug continued to eat his cheese.

Tad kept a watchful eye on him.

“Tad—” Joshua blurted out when Jan picked up the phone.

“Hey, am I glad you called!” Jan said with exaggerated brightness. “We were just talking about you.”

“You found out that Doug killed Tricia,” Joshua told her.

“Yep!”

“Are you okay?”

“I think so.” Her voice squeaked. She watched Doug slice through the cheese and offer the slice to Tad from off the point of the butcher knife.

“You stay on the phone with Donny, and I’ll go have Curt run out there to take him into custody.”

Tad accepted the slice of cheese.

“Well, I don’t know if I can remember that far back,” she said into the phone. “You know my memory is not as good as it used to be.”

Laughing, she offered Doug an excuse to stay on the phone. “Josh’s son has to write a paper. They want me to remember when his great-grandmother started a family feud by having the outhouse hauled out to the dump without her mother-in-law’s permission.”

Doug nodded his consent for her to continue the conversation and stabbed the block of cheese with the knife. His face was emotionless when he got up from the table and went down the hallway to the bathroom.

Tad followed.

Doug closed the door in his face.

At the Thornton house, on his cell phone, Joshua ordered the sheriff to get out to the Barlow house.

“Why?”

“Doug killed Tricia and now Tad and Jan are out there alone with him in that holler.”

“But Phyllis confessed to killing Wheeler.”

“My gut said there was something wrong with that confession!” Joshua yelled. “I should have listened to it! She confessed to protect her brother. She’s been doing that her whole life!” Furious with his own stupidity, he slammed his fist onto the top of his desk. “Damn it! I knew she confessed too easily!”

“Did she kill Gail?”

“No! Doug killed Gail. He was afraid that she was going to defame Tricia in some way in her book—or maybe he was sane enough to think that she was going to find out that he killed Trish! We assumed the grounds on the scene had been on Phyllis’s hands. Damn! I was sitting right there in their house when Doug told me to my face that he ground the coffee.” He pounded his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Now, get a deputy out there, and we’ll sort this all out later. Right now that lunatic is out there alone with Tad and Jan, and there is no telling what he’ll do!”

“Okay! I’ve got a deputy out in that area now. He should be there in three minutes.”

Curt observed the name on the roster of who was patrolling Birch Hollow and rubbed his face. It was Andrew Jones, a rookie of two weeks.

Jan kept an eye on the bathroom door while she talked fast into the phone. “—so then your great-great-grandmother sees the outhouse is missing and goes ballistic!”

Tad knocked on the bathroom door. “Doug? Are you okay?”

The doorknob turned and the door opened.

Tad stepped back.

Jan held her breath.

Doug came out of the bathroom. He seemed to be in a dazed state of consciousness.

Jan rattled on, “You see, Agnes Thornton had this thing about change. She never bought a dress that was made after 1926.” Her mind raced while she tried to think of a smooth way of conveying to Donny the object Doug held down at his side when he strolled into the center of the living room.

Tad shielded her.

“Donny,” her voice cracked in her vain effort to sound calm. “I need to speak to your father. Now.”

Donny tapped Joshua on the arm and handed him the phone while he held the cell phone to his other ear. “Jan needs you.”

Joshua put the other phone to his ear. “Yeah, Jan?”

“Doug has a gun,” Jan said.

“What’s he doing with it?”

She whispered to Tad, “What’s he going to do with that?”

Tad shot his host a nervous smile. “Doug, what are you doing with that gun?”

The gun still at his side, Doug looked at Tad with a face filled with anticipation. “It’s time.”

“Time for what?”

“I’m going to go be with Trish.”

Jan hissed into the phone, “I think he intends to kill himself.”

Tad asked him, “Why now?”

“Because you’re going to try to stop me. You don’t want us to be together, either.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because you’re one of them. Phyllis said so, but I didn’t believe her. But I saw she was right when I showed you this.” Doug held up the ring to show him. “I should have known. You’re going to steal this and say that Trish didn’t give it to me, and that she didn’t love me, and that I killed her, and that I stole this.”