A Seamless Murder (22 page)

I wondered about my Cassidy charm and if I’d just seen it in action. Georgia had been flirtatious with Will earlier,
but now she was playful with her husband. Maybe her deepest desire had been to strengthen their connection. And Randi had been happy as a clam leaving with Jeremy. I’d lay money down that her hopes and desires centered on finding a soul mate. Jeremy could be it. My suspicions about him could be completely off base.

Cynthia, Bennie, and their husbands left next, followed by Pastor Kyle and Sherri. “I’ll see that she gets home,” the pastor said. Like the other men, he led Sherri down the walkway, past the
RADCLIFFE FOR MAYOR
sign, past the Aggie flag and the twinkling lights, but he kept his hands to himself, instead walking slightly ahead of her so she’d follow.

Nana had slipped away out the back door. Her property backed up to my yard, and the Mobleys’. I peeked out the back window and saw her shadowy form trekking through the darkness, Thelma Louise trotting in front her.

Only Mama, Coco, and Delta’s family—minus Anson, of course—remained. “I’ll stay and help clean up,” I told Megan.

Mama slid her arm through mine, and we followed the others to the kitchen. “We both will. My husband’ll be here in just a little bit to pick me up.”

I turned to look at her. She’d been driving since she was thirteen, starting with a hardship license back when Nana and Granddaddy were barely making ends meet with their goats and she’d had to help by driving to the next town for farm supplies. Mama and her pickup truck were about as inseparable as my granddaddy and his cowboy hat. Which is to say they were rarely apart. Something was fishy, and I suspected it had to do with my mother wanting Sheriff Hoss McClaine to be in close proximity in case Delta’s murderer decided to
take out another victim. Not that that made a lick of sense, but Mama often didn’t operate using logic. She felt her way through life using flowers and plants as her guide. Hoss kept her feet rooted even when she tried to flit away like an impatient butterfly.

Will had reappeared, nodding to me. I breathed a sigh of relief. The envelope was back where I’d found it. “Scotch?” Todd asked him. When Will agreed, they went back into the dining room.

“Aren’t you going to help?” Megan called after him, but he didn’t answer. Which was fine with me. I was happy for Will to keep him distracted while I dug a little deeper about Delta and the Red Hat ladies. Rebecca and Todd stayed in the back of my mind.

If Delta had actually believed Sherri and questioned them, could one of them have killed her to keep their secret quiet?

But I shook my head, not believing that motive. Why would Todd marry Megan only to continue a relationship he’d already had going on with Rebecca? No, Sherri had to be mistaken. There had to be something I was missing. Some clue about someone that would crack everything wide open and let me see it in a new way.

“You don’t have to help clean up at a party you didn’t attend, Tessa,” Jessie Pearl said.

Mama waved her hand like she was flitting the words right out of the air. “I’m not one to sit around when there’s work to be done,” she said.

Jessie Pearl held her crutches out in front of her where she sat at the kitchen table. “That’s a good quality,” she said, sending a pointed glance toward the dining room where Todd and Will had gone. “A mighty good quality.”

“Come on, Granny,” Megan said. “Todd worked hard all week doing up the yard, helping out around here, sorting through the antiques.”

“I’m sure Granny doesn’t disagree,” Coco said, “but the point is, we’re not done.”

Megan’s chin quivered. “That’s not fair.”

“He needs to find himself a lawyering job,” Coco said.

Megan just shook her head. “He’d rather work with his hands.”

“Waste of an education, if you ask me,” Jessie Pearl said. “Three years in law school, how ever many in that culinary place, and he wants to do yard work.”

As I listened, something Wayne Emmons had said to Georgia out on the back porch came back to me. I’d been spinning in circles since Delta died, focusing on each of the people in her life, but not really understanding what she might have done to propel someone into killing her. But what if I looked at things from a different perspective? What if
she
had been trying to watch over someone, and she’d gotten in that person’s way?

The only people she’d protect were her family members, and once again, I thought the most likely was Megan.

Mama had parked herself at the sink and had her arms submerged in soapy water as she washed the coffee cups and dessert plates. Megan brought in the rest of the treats from the dining room and Coco packaged up the leftovers. Jessie
Pearl sat at the table watching the movement around her, a deep frown pulling the sides of her mouth down.

I felt a tingle at my hairline where the tuft of blond sprouted, and my skin pricked with apprehension. The threads were tangled and knotted, but the answer was there. For the first time since Delta died, I knew I was close to learning the truth, if only I could grab hold of an end thread and pull it free.

Mama flinched, bringing her arm up to her head and pressing her bicep against her hairline. Just like me, she had a streak of blond. It was a touchstone between us, all the Cassidy women.

She tossed a questioning look over her shoulder. In response, I straightened my glasses and darted a glance at Megan. I didn’t know what Delta might have been protecting her from, or what trouble she might have encountered. And other than coming right out and asking her, which didn’t seem like a good idea if she’d killed her mother over it, the only way to get answers was through her husband.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, and I scurried off in search of Will.

Will and Todd were in the living room, each cradling a tumbler of scotch, the bottle on the table between them. I sat next to Will, and he took my hand, leaning close to give me a kiss on the cheek. “He’s pretty buzzed,” he whispered.

If Todd was on his second, or even his third, maybe his tongue would wag a little more loosely than normal and I could find out if Megan had some sort of problem she was trying to deal with. From the investigator’s report, her days all followed the same pattern. Yoga or running, classes at the university, helping at the church tag sale or running errands, then home with her family. Could she have suspected something between Todd and Rebecca? An old fling? I thought back to the flirtatiousness. Rebecca called Todd “George” because he reminded her of a blond George Clooney.

A thought tickled at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t pull it forward. Not yet anyway, but I’d keep trying. George . . .

Will and Todd finished their conversation about college sports teams. They were rivals, Will a Texas Longhorn and Todd an Aggie, but they kept the conversation civil. “I can fit in anywhere,” Todd said, taking another drink. “Ask Delta.” He sputtered, half laughing as he realized what he’d said.
“Well, you can’t actually ask her, but if you could, she’d have told you that I’m like a chameleon. I blend in.”

“That’s a good trait,” I said, glad that Todd was a happy drunk and not an angry one. “It’ll serve you well.”

He raised his glass. “It already has,” he said. “I can go from the garden to the church, to the city, to a law office and fit in at each of them.”

“Are you still looking for a law firm to join?”

“Nah. Plenty to do with all Megan’s antiques,” he said, his words slurring just slightly. “Delta had a good collection of her own. And Jessie Pearl? There’s a fortune in the curio cabinet alone.”

“After all that schooling and taking the bar exam, don’t you want to practice law?” Will asked.

Megan came in and perched on the arm of his chair as Todd shrugged. “I’ll just stay here and be a kept man.”

He nudged her leg and she smiled. “I don’t mind that.”

He tilted his head back to look up at her. “Your mother did.”

“You can be a bookkeeper or a lawyer or a gardener or a garbage man. It doesn’t matter to me. She’s not here anymore to judge.”

I held my breath, squeezing Will’s hand. It was hardly a confession, but the conversation had just taken a turn in the right direction. “You didn’t get along with Delta?” I asked Todd.

He lifted his shoulders again. “Eh. It doesn’t matter.”

“She didn’t understand why you didn’t practice law, that’s all,” Megan said. “Todd’s got, what, three degrees?”

He nodded, and she continued. “But it’s a tough economy. Hard to find a job right now.”

He nudged her again, and she threw her hands up. “What? It’s not like you haven’t tried. It’s not a secret, is it? I’m proud of you.”

“Three degrees is impressive,” I said. And it explained why he’d been taking a statistics class at the local university when he already had a law degree and who knew what else. “What are they in?”

He looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole, but he answered. “Political science. An MBA. History.”

“And the culinary certificate,” Megan added.

“And the law degree,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s a crazy world when someone like you can’t get a job.”

“He applied to Reynolds, Childs, and Briggs law office in town,” Megan said. “Turned out they didn’t have any openings, but—”

Todd threw back the rest of his scotch and interrupted her. “It’s doesn’t bother me. I like what I’m doing.”

“My mother really tried to help him,” Megan said. “She passed his resume around to everyone she knew.” She squeezed his shoulder. “Something’ll work out.”

“I don’t need charity,” he snapped, but he quickly relaxed, correcting himself. “I like the antique business. There’s a ton of money in it. People don’t realize.”

“Rebecca sure did,” she said. To me, she added, “They knew each other a few years back when they both were in Plano. How long ago was that?”

But Todd waved the question away.

I pressed the subject, anyway. “How did you meet Rebecca?” I asked, going off what Sherri had just told me a short while ago.

“At the college here. What, about a month after I met you, right?” she asked Todd.

“Sounds right,” he agreed, but even through his glassy eyes, his gaze had turned dark, and I could tell something was off. “But she bailed. We had a good business going, and she just up and left.”

This time, Megan’s eyes teared. “Why would she leave like that?”

Like a bulldozer in my mind, one of my conversations with Jeremy Lisle suddenly came back to me. He’d been the one to tell me about Anson having an affair, but something surfaced that I hadn’t thought of before. Pastor Kyle had told him, but Delta had told Pastor Kyle. The way he’d relayed it stuck with me.
Some husbands can’t be trusted.

I suddenly felt as if I were an egg cracked open, spilling a million pieces of confetti, the bits forming a kaleidoscope of color. The feeling was deep in my bones. My stomach dropped and I stared at Todd. Could she have been talking about her son-in-law, and not Anson?

I remembered something else. Delta had been searching through the church files. I hadn’t given it a second thought when Pastor Kyle mentioned it, but now I wondered. Was it about Todd? Megan had just said that Delta had passed his resume around. Had she noticed something amiss?

Todd’s gaze flashed to Megan, but then he focused on me and Will again so quickly that I wondered if I’d really seen the look of concern on his face that I imagined I had. The scotch had loosened his tongue, and he wasn’t holding back. I forged ahead, asking the next obvious question. “I had no idea antiques were so profitable.”

Todd nodded. Megan had her hand on his shoulder,
rubbing it in circles for encouragement. “Oh yes, very. When I first met Rebecca and she told me what she did, I was floored. Aunt Sherri and my mom used to go to dealers and shows, but who knew?”

Aha, so that explained how Sherri may have seen Rebecca in Plano.

Coco appeared in the archway to the living room, beckoning me. She still wore the ruffled denim apron I’d made her, and like I had with the other women, I wondered what her deepest want was, and if the apron would help it come true.

Reluctantly, I left Will with Megan and Todd, following Coco back into the dining room. “I wanted to thank you for trying to help us,” she started, but her voice faded away as the threads of clues began separating in my mind, pulling apart before braiding together in some semblance of order.

“Hang on,” I told her, then I pulled out my cell phone and texted Madelyn, asking her the question in the forefront of my mind.
When we met with Mayor Radcliffe, he stopped to talk to his secretary about someone. Do you remember who?

She texted me back not five seconds later.
No.

It was a lawyer.

If you say so, love. I was busy getting my camera ready.

I waited. Madelyn was a self-proclaimed paranormal junkie and a crime aficionado. I knew she was racking her brain to come up with the answer to my question. My phone pinged and her text appeared.
Max? No, Lou? Something about a resume not checking out.

That’s exactly how I’d remembered it, but I had to be sure. All his degrees. All the universities he’d attended. Did they all check out?

My blood suddenly turned cold and I froze. “Oh my God.”

Coco stared at me. “What?”

I grabbed her arm. “I’ve been looking at this all wrong.”

She tapped the frame of her glasses, pushing them up into place. “Looking at what wrong?”

My mind flew back to the pictures in the investigator’s file. I’d assumed that each one had been focusing on a different member of the family. Anson hadn’t even been in the pictures, something I hadn’t realized until this very second. But more than that was the fact that both Megan and Todd were in several of the pictures. The one with Delta had him in the background, and the flag of his alma mater front and center. The one I’d thought had been just about Megan had also shown Todd, Coco, and Sherri at the tag sale. Even the shot with Jessie Pearl had them both working in the yard.

Boyd Investigations hadn’t followed each family member—there was one common denominator.

“Delta wasn’t ever investigating Anson,” I said.

Coco looked baffled. “She wasn’t?”

I looked toward the living room, not liking the direction of my thoughts, but sure that I was finally on the right track. “It was Todd,” I said softly, as if he’d be able to hear me accusing him from two rooms away. “He was the husband who couldn’t be trusted. He was the one whose college background she didn’t believe,” I said.

The resume came back to mind, followed by something Mayor Radcliffe had said. He’d told me Delta had been investigating someone, sure they hadn’t gone to the college they’d claimed. We’d assumed she’d been talking about Jeremy Lisle, but I knew that wasn’t true. Jeremy and Delta had both attended Texas A&M. She knew his background.

Of course she knew her own daughter’s history. She was still in college right here in town. But what about Todd? Three degrees, he said. Political Science, an MBA, and a history degree. Had she suspected, given his inability to find or keep a job, that he wasn’t on the up and up? Had his interest in antiques given him away? Had Delta been digging for information about him and found some contradiction in his background? Or had she tried to help him and discovered the truth?

I thought about the photograph with Rebecca. The kaleidoscope of confetti pieces rearranged in my mind. Rebecca called Todd by the name George. Not because he looked like George Clooney, but because it was his real name. They’d known each other before. Had the investigator figured this out? No wonder she’d been so strange on the phone, telling me that Anson wasn’t an adulterer and that she’d never heard of Jeremy Lisle. Because she’d only been investigating Todd Bettincourt.

Bigger fish to fry, Delta had said, and she’d tossed the investigator’s report to Todd.

Had it been a warning or a threat?

Probably both, I thought, but most of all, it had been a motive for murder.

I texted Hoss McClaine with lightning speed.
Mayor Radcliffe got a call from someone named Lou saying that a resume didn’t check out. I think it was Todd Bettincourt’s. And I think it’s a motive for murder.

I hit
SEND
and tucked my phone away. It would take the sheriff a little while to track down the answer to my question. In the meantime, I kept processing through what I knew,
telling Coco my suspicions. “What if he doesn’t have those degrees and she figured it out? She’d want him away from Megan, right?”

“But he’s married to her,” Coco whispered, “and they adore each other.”

I considered this. If he really did adore Megan, then he wouldn’t want her finding out about his past with Rebecca and his falsehoods. Was
that
motive for murder? We both kept our voices low, afraid that someone else in the house would hear. “She would have gotten proof before breaking Megan’s heart with the truth,” I said.

Coco raised her gaze to the ceiling. “Maybe that’s why they arranged to meet in the cemetery. She planned to confront him, away from the house and Megan, but things turned deadly.”

My phone vibrated with a new text coming in. Hoss had been fast. I pulled it out of my pocket long enough to read the message. It was what I expected.
Lou Childs with Reynolds, Childs, and Briggs. Definitely Todd Bettincourt’s. Lou checked the references and the degrees. Falsified.
He followed up with a second message.
Be there in 2 minutes
.

Coco inhaled sharply, just figuring out what I’d already concluded. “She gave that investigator’s report right to him, didn’t she?”

“Which was a threat. It told him that she knew everything.” It had to have been his name blacked out on the sheet Will and I looked at on the back porch. Unease crept through me. He’d doctored the file to make it look as if Anson had been the target of the investigation.

We heard someone approach from behind us, and then a
man’s slurred voice said, “She wanted me to leave Megan. She didn’t understand that I love her. I really love her.”

Coco and I both jumped. Coco yelped, and my heart lodged in my throat.

Todd edged closer, but there was no murderous look in his eyes. Instead he just looked tired. More tired than he had just minutes ago. Dark circles ringed his eyes. His lips were cracked, and his shoulders hunched.

Will and Megan appeared behind him, but he didn’t notice. He just stared past Coco and me, his whole body swaying. The scotch he’d had with Will had taken its full effect. His words were garbled, and I strained to make out what he said. “I didn’t mean to kill her. I just wanted to talk. To get her to back off. I might not have always done things the right way, but I couldn’t lose Megan.” He leaned forward. “I can’t lose her.”

Briefly I met Will’s eyes, then refocused on Todd. “You met her at the church that morning?”

His chin dropped toward his chest and he nodded. “I thought I could explain.”

Suddenly Megan lunged at him from behind. He swung around as she careened into him. “Explain what?” she exclaimed. “That you’ve been lying to me this whole time?”

He reached for her. “No, Megs, it’s not like that.”

“I heard you,” she said, her voice returning to calm but laced with a hard edge. “I heard everything you said.” The questions flew from her mouth. “Did you even graduate from A&M? Did you actually go to law school? That’s why you can’t get a job, right?” She threw her hands up, spitting out a
harsh laugh. “And Rebecca? You
knew
her? Were you actually playing me?”

“Megs . . .” His eyes fluttered and his body swayed.

She shoved him away. “Why did you marry me?”

He stumbled back, finally managing to right himself. “Because I love you. I never meant to hurt anyone, but then Rebecca showed up, and your mother kept pushing.”

“Did you give Delta your resume to pass out?” I asked.