A Tale of Two Tabbies (4 page)

“I kind of think it was a last-minute thing. It sounded like she hadn’t really been planning to come home, and I got the feeling she hadn’t talked to her mom lately.”

“I wonder if she had a falling out with her mom. That would explain why she moved from the island so suddenly and never once came back to visit.”

“I guess. Did the new shipment of books we ordered ever come in?”

“Yeah, they arrived yesterday as well. I figured we’ll unpack them after the midday crowd thins out a bit.”

By the time we got the supplies ready the ferry had debarked and the store became crowded. Tara and I worked in perfect synchronicity as we served drinks, rang up purchases, and chatted with tourists, friends, and neighbors. Given the fact that our primary source of revenue came from travelers coming to and from the ferry, our customers tended to come in waves.

I smiled at Felicity as she entered the store and made her way to the counter.

“We were just talking about you,” Tara said as she came around the counter and gave her a hug. “I’m so glad you finally came home for a visit.”

“It’s been hard to get away. It’s hard to believe it’s been more than two years. And I can’t believe how much has changed. I heard Destiny Paulson had a baby.”

“A little boy, just before Christmas,” Tara confirmed.

“It’s so strange to think of Destiny with a baby. I used to babysit her and her sisters. It seems like yesterday she was running around in that little pink ballerina dress she used to love so much.”

“I remember that dress.” I laughed. “She wore it to church every Sunday for months.”

“Is she doing okay? I heard the dad isn’t in the picture.”

“She is,” Tara confirmed. “She’s living with me and working at the bookstore while she finishes high school through a homeschool program. She has plans to go to college in the fall. I think she’s going to do just fine with single motherhood.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I always did like Destiny.”

“So what can I get you to drink?” Tara asked.

“A latte would be great.”

I noticed Felicity’s smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“Did you get your business taken care of?” I asked.

She nodded. “Do you think we could talk?” Felicity looked around the room. “Somewhere private?”

The crowd had mostly thinned, so it appeared Tara could handle the rest on her own. “Sure. Let’s go into the cat lounge. There’s no one in there right now except for the cats.”

Felicity accepted her beverage from Tara and then followed me into the glassed-in room. As soon as we got there she began to pace nervously.

“What can I do for you?” I sat down on one of the sofas and two of the cats jumped into my lap. I’d been on my feet for hours; it felt good to take a break.

“I take it you haven’t checked your e-mail recently?”

“No. Not since first thing this morning. Why?”

“I think I might be in trouble.” Felicity sat down next to me.

I frowned. “What kind of trouble?”

“When you check your e-mail you’ll find that you’ve received a video that was sent to me and copied to you.”

“A video? I’m confused. What video?”

“One of me arguing with Theresa Lively shortly before she was murdered.”

“You didn’t do it, did you?”

“No.” Felicia took a deep breath. She looked around the room, as if trying to gather her thoughts. She looked more nervous than I’d ever seen her. “Of course not, but we did argue, and when I saw the video I realized it was going to make me look guilty.”

“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” I suggested.

“Theresa was blackmailing me. She had been for more than two years. I decided I’d finally had enough, so I came to the island to confront her.”

“Blackmailing you? For what?”

“I really can’t say, but the why isn’t as important as the fact that she was, and I figure I’m going to be blamed for a murder I didn’t commit.”

“Okay, tell me about the video.”

“After I checked into the hotel I called Theresa and told her we needed to talk. She said she would, but rather than meeting at her home she wanted to see me at the church the following afternoon. I agreed to meet her there. We argued, I threatened her, and then I left. She was very much alive at the time, I swear. When Mom told me this morning that Theresa had been murdered I freaked out, but I didn’t start to panic until I checked my e-mail. Someone sent me a video of my conversation with Theresa, and I noticed they sent a copy to you too.”

I decided to take a moment to try to process everything Felicia had told me. Theresa didn’t seem at all the type to be a blackmailer, but I guess you never really knew what went on behind the closed doors of another person’s life.

“How much did you pay Theresa?”

“Five hundred dollars a month for the past twenty-eight months.”

I thought back to the notebook. One of the pages did have a list of five-hundred-dollar payments. I’d have to check my file when I got home, but I was willing to bet there were twenty-eight of them. “How exactly did you pay Theresa?”

“She has a dummy website. It appears as if she’s selling jewelry. Every month she sends me a link and I log on to the site and buy something for five hundred dollars.”

“Do you have the address for this website?”

“No. I don’t know how to access the site other than using the link.”

“Do you have the link with you?”

“I have last month’s link on my laptop, but I doubt it will work. There’s a new link every month.”

I jotted down my e-mail address. “Can you forward any links you still have to me?”

“I can, but what am I going to do about the video?”

I paused to consider the situation. There was really only one possible answer. “The person who sent the video may send it to others as well. I recommend you tell Finn what you just told me. Maybe he’ll believe you if you go to him before he finds out about the blackmail some other way.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.” Felicity got up from the sofa. “I’ll forward the last link as soon as I get back to my hotel room. Thanks for listening.”

“Did you happen to go over to Theresa’s house after you argued? Perhaps to look for whatever evidence she had on you?”

“No. I went back to the hotel and tried to watch a movie. Why do you ask?”

“Because someone trashed Theresa’s place. It looked as if whoever did it was looking for something.”

“Do you think they found what they were looking for?”

“I have no idea.”

Felicity paled. “What if they found the evidence Theresa used to blackmail me?”

“If the person who vandalized Theresa’s house was looking for this sort of evidence and found it, I suppose you may have another problem altogether.”

Felicity closed her eyes and tilted her head toward the ceiling.

“I don’t know what Theresa had on you, but maybe you should just come clean. If you do, the thing that’s been hanging over your head all this time will no longer have the power to hurt you.”

“It’s bad. Really bad. The sort of thing you confess to your maker but no one else.”

I couldn’t imagine what Felicity had done, but she looked terrified.

I returned to the bookstore side of Coffee Cat Books after Felicity left. It occurred to me that if she was being blackmailed and the payments she made to Theresa were being recorded in the small black notebook I’d found, the other pages might represent payments made by other victims. If Theresa was blackmailing other people on the island, there was a very good chance one of her other victims also had decided to stop the money drain.

“What was that all about?” Tara asked after the last customer left.

“Felicity wanted my help.” I shared the gist of my conversation with Tara.

“Blackmailing? For what?”

“Felicity didn’t say, but if she was willing to fork over fourteen grand to keep it quiet her secret must be a doozy.”

“I’ll say. Now I’m curious.”

I grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator and twisted off the cap. “Me too. I can’t imagine what sort of information Theresa must have had that would be worth all that money, but what I do know is that, in spite of Felicity’s assurance that she didn’t kill Theresa, I can’t help but consider her a suspect.”

“She certainly does have a motive,” Tara agreed.

I went to the Coffee Cat Books’ computer and logged into my e-mail. I found the video that showed Theresa standing on the altar of the church arguing with Felicity. Felicity was correct; their argument did look damaging. She could clearly be heard threatening to kill Theresa if she leaked the information she had on her. Whoever had filmed the argument had stopped recording before either party left, so there was no way to know definitively what had happened next.

“Wow; she really does look guilty,” Tara commented.

“Yeah, she does. Finn will have little choice but to arrest her if he sees this. She said she was being blackmailed and I have a feeling there may be others. I need to run home to pick up my laptop. I found a notebook in Theresa’s bedroom last night and I think it might have been the log where she kept a record of her blackmail income. I gave Finn the pad, but I kept photos of all the pages that had writing on them. If what Felicity told me matches up with one of the pages, I think we can assume the others represent the income from other blackmail victims. It seems important to work on figuring out the rest of the notes. Will you be okay alone for a bit?”

“Yeah. It’s slow, and now that the rain is back I don’t anticipate foot traffic will pick up. Take as much time as you need.”

“Great. I shouldn’t be long.”

When I pulled up in front of my cabin the first thing I noticed was a white cat sitting on my porch swing. “Lucie, I assume,” I greeted the cat, figuring it was the second feline sleuthing partner Tansy had mentioned to me. I twisted the knob, opened the door, and let us both inside. Max trotted over to greet me while Sydney hissed at the new arrival.

Lucie hunched her back and growled in return.

“Look, I don’t have time for kitty theatrics. Tansy mentioned you wouldn’t get along, but I don’t have time for a cat fight. I’ll be back later this afternoon, and in the meantime I need the two of you to try to get along.”

Neither cat answered, not that I expected them to, but at least they stopped hissing at each other. I let Max out for a few minutes while I logged onto my computer. I quickly opened it to the file with the five-hundred-dollar deposits and verified that there were indeed twenty-eight of them, dating back twenty-eight months. The payments must have started just before Felicity moved to Seattle.

Across the top of the page was a header with letters and numbers: FDB239-362419.

The FD must stand for Felicity Danielson. This was useful information; now I could assume the first two letters in each code were the blackmail victim’s initials, which narrowed things down a bit. Of course I didn’t actually know that the other pages represented other victims. It was entirely possible I was barking up the wrong tree.

I watched as Lucie jumped up onto the counter to hiss at Sydney, who looked ready to pounce from his perch on the back of the sofa. I wondered if it was safe to leave them alone in the cabin with no one other than Max around to referee. I could take one of them over to the cat sanctuary, but Tansy did say they needed to work together, so perhaps it would be better to let them get used to each other.

“What exactly is the problem?” I asked aloud.

Lucie jumped from the counter onto the bookshelf, knocking a photo of me standing in front of my first car onto the floor. Normally I would pay attention to such a sign, but I couldn’t imagine what a photo of me standing on the side of the highway near the cliff at Shell Beach would have to do with anything.

I picked Lucie up and took her up to the bedroom. I wanted the cats to get along, but I didn’t want them to destroy the cabin in my absence, so I decided it was best to separate them for the time being. I already had a cat box and food and water dish set up for Sydney downstairs, so I set Lucie up with her own conveniences upstairs and made sure all the windows were firmly closed. I then begged Lucie not to destroy my bedroom and closed the door behind me. When I returned home that evening I’d get the cats together for a little kitty couples counseling.

Max came back from his romp and I gave him fresh water, then packed up my laptop and headed back to the bookstore. Maybe Tara could help me make sense of the rest of the code written across the top of the pages in the notebook. If not during business hours, perhaps I’d have her and Cody over that evening after the planning meeting for a good old-fashioned brainstorming session. It had been a while since we’d had to assemble the gang to create a murder board. I was pretty sure Siobhan would want to join us as well, if she wasn’t busy with Finn.

“Maybe the HS represents another person involved in the same blackmail,” Tara suggested later that afternoon, after the store had cleared out and we had a break. “Or maybe the subject of the blackmail. How does it compare to the other pages?”

I made a list of the headers for each of the five pages, which I then put on the counter in front of us.

FDB239-362419

VWSP126

CMCC312

MHMB241-0668

TOSB

“There really doesn’t seem to be a pattern other than that there are letters followed in most cases by numbers, but the last one doesn’t even have any numbers,” Tara observed. “It’s going to be hard to figure out without a frame of reference.”

“Yeah, even if the first two letters are initials I don’t see how we can narrow it down without further information.”

“CM could be Cicely Michaels,” Tara speculated.

“Yeah, but TO could be Tara O’Brian,” I pointed out.

“True. We really have nothing. What are we going to do?”

I paused to consider Tara’s question. To be honest, I had no idea how to proceed. If we could figure out the first one, I thought maybe we could see a pattern of some sort. “Do you want to come over and brainstorm after the meeting at the church?”

“Will Danny be there?”

“No. He hasn’t been around a whole lot lately.”

Danny is my second oldest brother. He and Tara used to date. Sort of. Anyway, they’d realized it wasn’t working out, so they’d split. Danny had moved on the next day, but Tara was having a harder time of it. She seemed fine most of the time, but I didn’t think she was ready to spend much time with him in an intimate situation such as the sort that can be created when a group of people work toward a common goal.

“Okay,” Tara agreed. “I’m in.”

“I’m going to ask Cody as well. If Finn and Siobhan aren’t busy I’m going to ask her. I would ask Finn, but I’m afraid he’ll be less than happy that I took photos of the pages in the notebook before I gave it to him.”

Tara and I continued to discuss the various possibilities a while longer but were really getting nowhere. We were about to call it a day when Destiny walked in.

“Hey, guys. Whatcha doin’?”

“Trying to figure out a puzzle,” I answered.

“I’m good at puzzles. Can I help?”

I explained about the notebook I’d found in Theresa’s house and the codes it contained. I also filled her in on the fact that Felicity Danielson had confessed to the fact that she was being blackmailed and we were pretty sure the FD in FDB239-362419 referred to her.

“We have no idea what the rest of it means,” Tara added.

“You said she was being blackmailed. What if the rest, or at least part of the rest, refers to a place?”

“A place?” I asked.

“I might be way off, but B239 reminds me of a locker location. When I went to the high school my locker number was B260 because my locker was located in the B building.”

“Why would Theresa have a locker at the high school?” Tara asked. “She hasn’t gone to high school for quite some time. Neither has Felicity.”

“My locker was just down from the music room. B239 would probably be about as close as you could get to the music room door. Mrs. Lively helped out with the music program at the school. Maybe she was assigned a locker to keep her music and stuff in.”

I glanced at Tara. “Destiny’s theory makes sense.”

“It’s slow today. I guess you could go check it out. We’ll need to convince the school administration to let us into the locker.”

“I can go,” Destiny offered. “I’m on campus all the time anyway to use the science lab.”

“You’ll need the combination,” I pointed out.

Destiny looked at the code once again. “My combination was 32-46-13. How much do you want to bet that 26-24-19 will open locker B239?”

I shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”

I drove Destiny to the high school but waited in the car while she went inside. Although she was being homeschooled by Sister Mary so she could have both a flexible schedule, so she could work and take care of her son, and could graduate a year early, she still did her science work in the school lab. While my being on campus might draw attention, her being there was a regular occurrence.

Ten minutes after she went into the building she emerged again.

“So?” I asked.

“The combination opened the locker, which was filled with sheet music. I did find this taped to the top of the locker, though.” Destiny held up a thumb drive.

“Maybe that holds the evidence Theresa was using to blackmail Felicity,” I suggested.

“There’s only one way to find out.”

We returned to the bookstore and I logged on to my laptop and inserted the thumb drive. There was only an audio file on it. My mouth dropped open as I listened to Felicity’s voice.

It was an accident. We didn’t mean to hurt anyone. We were just messing around after a party. It seemed like he came out of nowhere. One minute we were singing to the radio and the next we saw this car coming right at us.

Felicity stopped talking, but I could tell she was crying. It felt like maybe someone was responding to her words, but we couldn’t hear what was being said.

Eventually Felicity began speaking again.
I know we should have stopped, but we panicked when we realized we’d swerved into the other lane and caused the accident. We totally freaked and drove away. The next morning when I heard the old guy had drowned I was devastated, but it was too late to do things differently.

Again Felicity stopped talking, as if she were listening to someone. She was sobbing loudly by this point. I listened carefully to see if I could make out a second voice, but all I heard was static.

I can’t tell you. It won’t do any good. My telling won’t bring the old guy back. Besides, I promised I wouldn’t tell, and you can’t either. Right?

The tape ended.

“Wow,” Tara said. “What do you think that was all about and who do you think she was talking to?”

“Maybe Theresa?” Destiny speculated. “That could be how she knew.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. It seemed odd that we could only hear Felicity’s voice and not the voice of the person she was speaking to.

“What accident do you think she’s talking about?” Tara asked.

I thought about it. The payments had begun twenty-eight months ago. The accident had to have occurred prior to that. I picked up my phone and called Cody. The prior owner of the newspaper hadn’t digitized anything, and while Cody was working on the upgrade, there was still a lot of information to upload. I asked Cody to look at the news articles that were written between twenty-eight and thirty-two months ago. I was willing to bet the conversation we’d heard had taken place shortly after the accident.

“A sixty-eight-year-old man named Homer Woodford drowned after his car was run off the road near Shell Beach,” Cody informed me. “He was alone in the car and they never found out what it was that caused him to veer from his lane and go over the cliff.”

“I think I know,” I answered. “Can you come over tonight?”

“I was planning to. I’ll bring pizza.”

I hung up and looked at Tara and Destiny. “It seems Felicity and whoever the other half of the
we
she was referring to were responsible for the death of a motorist who drowned off Shell Beach.”

“I remember that,” Tara contributed. “They never did find out what happened.”

“I guess we know. We should call Finn. I hate to turn Felicity in, but she was responsible for a man’s death.”

“Yeah,” Tara agreed. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Later that evening I sat with Cody, Tara, Finn, and Siobhan as we ate pizza and discussed Theresa’s murder. When Finn had gone to the hotel Felicity had said she was staying in, he found out she had already checked out. Personnel confirmed she was on the last ferry of the day to the mainland. We assumed she was heading home, so Finn called Seattle PD to follow up.

“So who do you think she was talking to?” Siobhan asked. “The tape sounds odd. Like she was talking to someone in a soundproof room. And the fact that we can’t hear the response of the other person is sort of creepy.”

“The tape could have been edited if Theresa didn’t want anyone to know who the other person was,” Tara suggested.

“Of course that would assume Theresa would think someone other than herself might listen to it,” Cody pointed out.

“The thing that’s strangest is that Felicity said she never told anyone what happened and had no idea how Theresa knew what she found out,” I added. “I’m not sure why she would say that if it wasn’t true.”

“Well, she obviously told someone,” Siobhan commented.

“Her maker,” I shouted. “Felicity said she’d never told anyone other than her maker.”

“She was talking to God?” Tara asked.

“Indirectly,” I theorized. “She said something about confessing to her maker.”

“The confessional,” Siobhan caught on. “Theresa bugged the confessional.”

Oh, God. I quickly thought back to the juicy tidbits I’d confessed over the years. I supposed there was nothing too scandalous.

“How did Theresa manage to bug the confessional?” Finn asked.

“She’s at the church all the time,” I told him. “She not only played the organ and piano for both the children’s and adult choirs but she was part of the women’s group that helps out with light cleaning and maintenance.”

“So she’s been listening in on the confessions of her neighbors and using the juiciest ones to blackmail people,” Cody summarized.

“It would seem. And it would seem that one of the people she was milking had had enough and killed her,” I said. “Locking the cat in the confessional must have been symbolic.”

“Question is, which of Theresa’s victims killed her?” Tara asked.