Dying to Read (16 page)

“Like what?”

“Maybe Radford really was in love with Amelia. Maybe Texie knows that he knows Texie killed her. So now Texie figures he’s out to get her. And maybe he is.”

“Sounds possible.” Mitch sounded, if not approving of the new perspective, grudgingly impressed that she’d come up with it. “What about the other woman she mentioned, Doris?”

“Doris McClelland. I have no idea what Texie was talking about, the money thing. Maybe I’ll ask Doris.”

“Brilliant,” Mitch muttered. It was not a compliment.

Cate again ignored him. Texie’s suspicions about Doris now put a different spin on both Doris’s words and actions. Doris’s willingness to go upstairs when the other women were not. Maybe that was because she already knew Amelia was dead and couldn’t object to the intrusion. Doris’s quickness to tell the police she and Cate had found the door open, and her suggestion about a heart attack. The way Doris had mentioned that the other Whodunit women might tell Cate that Doris and Amelia had exchanged harsh words. A preemptive strike, so if Cate heard about the arguments, she wouldn’t think Doris was hiding something because Doris had already mentioned the confrontations herself.

But Doris was hiding something. She hadn’t said anything about a hostile money connection with Amelia.

“Cate, stay out of this.” Mitch’s tone suddenly grew urgent. “You have no idea what’s going on with these people, who did what or who’s after who. But if Amelia’s fall really was murder, not an accident, sooner or later you
are
, if you haven’t already, going to meet up with a killer. And I might not be there.”

Cate touched a hand to her chest. “Oh my, poor, helpless little ol’ me.” She gave a melodramatic sigh. “Whatever will I do if I don’t have a big, strong man around to rescue me?”

The facetious comment drew an exasperated grunt from Mitch. He reached over and turned on the radio as if he wanted to drown her out. She burrowed in the litter bag hanging from a knob until she found a discarded plastic sack, dug the last of the rocks out of her pockets, and dumped them in the sack.

Mitch snapped the radio off. “You aren’t going to try to find this Radford guy, are you?”

“If I am—”

“I know,” he growled. “None of my business.”

They exchanged only a few excessively polite words on the remainder of the drive back to Eugene. At the house, he gathered up her oversupply of gear and carried it to the door.

“Thank you. I can manage from here,” she said politely.

“Okay.” He glanced at what now felt like an avocado-sized lump at the edge of her hairline. She resisted probing it with her fingertips again. “How’s your head?”

Cate’s head pounded like the stereo system Coop had offered to install in her car, and the emotional aftereffects of encountering a woman with a gun were beginning to catch up with her. That stray bullet
could
easily have hit her. But all she said was a stiff, “I’m fine. Thank you for driving your car and all your help today.”

He didn’t squeal tires when the SUV pulled away from the curb, but his foot was definitely heavy on the gas pedal.

Cate and Rebecca went to the first service at church the following morning, and afterward Rebecca headed for the hospital. Cate’s head was still tender from the impact with Texie, and the lump was now eggplant purple, noticeable enough to draw curious glances at church, but it was painful only when she touched it. Cate had given Octavia an investigator-to-client report on her day at the coast, but the cat had been more interested in batting at the beach rocks Cate had given her.

Cate was thinking about spending the afternoon in a lounge chair in the backyard, but soon after Rebecca left the house, Willow called. She said she was back at Amelia’s house now. She’d found another big sack of cat food in a cupboard, and Cate might as well have it for Octavia.

“C’mon over and get it any time.”

Cate briefly thought about Mitch’s earlier plan to clean the gutters on the garage this afternoon, but after their icy parting the day before, that wasn’t going to happen. The knight had downsized his shining armor and put his white horse out to pasture. So, now that she had new questions for Willow about the Whodunit ladies, she said, “How about this afternoon?”

“Great! I need to run over to Nicole’s house and pick up the rest of my stuff, and you can come along.”

“Am I being drafted as an assistant mover?”

“Well, yeah,” Willow admitted. “But I’ll make peanut butter cookies afterward.”

“Okay. See you in a few minutes.”

Cate changed from her church clothes to denim shorts and a tank top. Cheryl’s silver BMW stood in the driveway when she arrived at the house, Willow’s Corolla beside it. Cate parked down on the street so she wouldn’t block the steep driveway, and Willow, waiting for Cate in the car, zoomed down the short hill. Cate hopped into the car.

Willow did a double take when she spotted Cate’s face. “Hey, what happened to you?”

Cate echoed Mitch’s statement from yesterday. “Just another day in the life of a private investigator.” Which reminded her: someday she was going to ask Uncle Joe exactly how he got that limpy leg. And what made the Buick blow up. Now she decided she didn’t want to go into the subject of yesterday’s ill-fated excursion and how she’d acquired the eggplanty lump. “Confidential stuff.” She made a quick change of subject as she fastened her seat belt. “Everything going okay at the house?”

“Cheryl’s treating me like a long-lost best friend. She and Scott are there going through stuff today. She said if I wanted any of Amelia’s clothes, I was welcome to them. They’re probably miles too big for me, of course, but I thought that was nice of her. I told her you were coming over, and she said she wanted to talk to you before you left.”

“Talk to me? About what?”

“She didn’t say. Maybe she wants to thank you for, you know, finding Amelia’s body or something. Or contacting me for them.”

At the house on Lexter Street, they loaded household things Willow had stored in the garage. Apparently Coop had been right about her taking anything not nailed down. She must have made several trips when she moved out of the cabin she’d shared with him. They wrestled the TV into the backseat of the Corolla and piled silverware and dishes, plus a toaster, blender, and waffle iron around it.

“What’re you going to do with all this stuff?” Cate lifted the straps of her tank top off her sweaty back. “You don’t need it there at Amelia’s house.”

“It’s mine,” Willow replied, as if that were explanation enough. “Coop didn’t have any right to it. I can sell it or give it away or something. I’ll store it in the garage at Amelia’s house for now.”

Apparently the important thing was that she’d gotten the stuff away from Coop. Perhaps not the most admirable attitude, but Cate was relieved to hear it. Willow had several times sounded dangerously nostalgic about Coop, as if she might be remembering the good times and forgetting the bad, but Cate didn’t hear any lingering affection for him in this sharp statement.

Cate paused to bend over and stretch her back after they managed to stuff a coffee table partway into the trunk. “How long do you think this house-sitting job will last?”

“Cheryl will get rid of the house as soon as she can. That’s what she said when I first talked to her about the job. But I get the impression now that there may be some complication.”

“What kind of complication?”

“Who knows?” Willow giggled. “Maybe Amelia’s will says they have to preserve it as a monument to her. Bring that big portrait of her in the bedroom down to the living room and curtsy every time they pass it.”

“Maybe she left the house to Radford instead of them, and they just found out.”

“You suppose? Wouldn’t that rain on their parade, as my grandma says. A real downpour, actually. I think the place is probably worth a bundle, even in these hard times. It’s a huge piece of land, for right here in town.”

Cate would guess Cheryl knew to the penny what the property was worth long before Amelia’s demise. Which kept her firmly on Cate’s suspect list. Radford was at the top, but Texie and Cheryl, and now Doris too, were jostling him for position. Willow wasn’t up there with them, but she definitely hadn’t disappeared from the list. After they packed sheets and towels around the coffee table, they took a break to go into the house for cold drinks and Cate found an opening to ask about the reading club.

“Do you know anything about the women in the Whodunit Club losing money in some way that involved Amelia?”

“I remember one time after lunch they played cards instead of talking about books.” Willow laughed. “I thought it was bridge or pinochle, but when I went in, there they were, all these old ladies, huddled over their cards like gamblers in some old Western saloon. Playing poker!”

“Gambling?”

“Oh yes. Using buttons instead of chips, but dead serious about it. I think Amelia was pretty good at it. I saw her rake in a whole mountain of buttons. But I don’t think the stakes were very high.”

So maybe that was all Texie was talking about. A game of poker where Amelia had taken all her friends’ buttons. But surely not enough of a loss to motivate murder. Although gamblers had been shot at poker tables . . . Had one of the Whodunit women used a shove instead of a gun in some outburst of poker vengeance?

“But there may have been something else,” Willow added. She pressed a glass of ice water against her cheek. “I think they were all in some investment thing together. But they weren’t losing money. When I first started working for Amelia, they had a Whodunit meeting at the house and someone, Krystal, I think, brought a bottle of champagne to celebrate some big dividend or payoff or something they’d all gotten.”

“An investment Amelia was involved with?”

“That’s what it sounded like. I had to uncork the champagne for them, and they all made this big fuss toasting her. They were talking about using their profits to take a cruise together. I was wishing I could have gotten in on it.” Willow hesitated and then gave a little laugh. “Actually, I looked around in Amelia’s files to see if I could find out what it was, but I never found anything. Not that it mattered, I suppose, since I couldn’t have scrounged up more than $1.98 to invest.”

A great investment that went sour? And the Whodunit women, especially Doris, who’d lost the most, blamed Amelia and were unhappy, maybe murderously unhappy, with her?

Now Cate realized her head was pounding again. Probably lugging stuff from garage to car in the unseasonably hot sun wasn’t the smartest move for someone with a head bump that now felt the size of a cantaloupe. But, thankfully, Willow decided they had a big enough load for today, and they tied the trunk lid in a half-open position to hold the coffee table safely inside, and headed back to the house.

Not one but two BMWs stood side by side in the driveway now, silvery clones, and behind them was a red Mustang. With the driveway already full, Willow parked her car behind Cate’s on the street, and they both slid out.

“We can unload the stuff later,” Willow said. “I wonder what ol’ shyster Radford is doing here? That’s his car.”

Cate wondered too. Shouldn’t Radford be running for the border now? The front door of the house flew open, and a big, dark-haired guy stormed out to the Mustang. Cate was glad she wasn’t standing in his way. He looked capable of mowing down a team of Superbowl winners. The Mustang shot down the driveway and past them, and Cate caught a glimpse of a jaw that looked chiseled in concrete. Then, to her surprise, the vehicle shot back just as fast, and the guy jumped out. He walked up to Willow.

“You’re Amelia’s—” He paused as if undecided what to call her. “Helper, aren’t you?”

“I was. She let me go shortly before her death. Her niece has hired me to caretake the house now.”

He had the anger under better control now, the set of his jaw no longer hard enough to smash atoms. He was more than good-looking, Cate realized. A twenty-first-century Rhett Butler. Tall and rugged, tanned, dark hair, and amazingly green eyes. Blue Dockers and a lighter blue polo shirt emphasized an impressive acreage of muscles. A real lady-killer type. Maybe in more ways than one, unfortunately for Amelia.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Radford said. “Not good for the place to be sitting here empty. Amelia wouldn’t want her house to be neglected.” Radford gave Cate a passing glance, then a sharp second look, as if startled by the similarities in appearance between the two women. Or maybe it was the bump, like a purple headlight on her forehead.

“This is Cate Kinkaid,” Willow said. “She’s a pri—”

Oh no! Willow was blithely going to tell him Cate was a private investigator. Or that Cate had found Amelia’s body. Cate hadn’t time to consider why, but both facts were information she’d prefer Radford not know. She whacked her foot against Willow’s ankle.

Willow gave her a blank look, then apparently got the meaning of the whack and took off on a wild tangent. “A real prima donna tree climber,” she said, effectively turning the “pri” beginning into something different. Although odd. “Right to the top.” She swooshed a hand over her head to emphasize the height of Cate’s climbing abilities.