Murder in Wonderland (11 page)

              "Get out," said Del, covering her mouth almost instantaneously. "Get out," she said again in a whisper. "How did you know that would be there? In that book?"

              "I told you. I know my own kind. Plus, I got to thinking when I saw the code on the queen of hearts in the deck. Tori must have identified with the queen—you know, she's the queen and all? The top dog? And her last name. Cardinal? Red? I don’t know. This stuff runs through my mind so quickly I don’t have time to analyze how it happens. It all just fits together and I get a picture."

              "You’re a genius!"

              "No, just bored. C'mon, let's get out of here."

              Leaving the place was tricky. It would just have to be vandals that were responsible for this mess. Vandals, or thrill-seekers, or whatever. It was an abandoned bit of property, for all anyone knew, open to intruders. Let the cops worry about how they subverted the security system.

#

              In the car on the way home, Allie was thinking about the playing card.

              "It occurred to me that because the 'croquet mallet' text wasn't addressed to anyone, she must have meant it for someone in that room. Who else but yours truly?"

              "Ok," said Del. "You know, you really need to send up a flag when you’re going to start a conversation so I can be ready. Alright, so let me ask you this: How do you know she didn’t write the text first then...you know...dropped...before she got a chance to write the address?"

              "That would have been my guess before this. But I think it's obvious by now that I was meant to discover the meaning of that message. She wanted me, and only me, to discover it."

              "And how do you figure that?"

              Her friend's skepticism was beginning to annoy her. "Tori Cardinal knew only I would notice the deck of cards and the red queen connection. Only I would think to look in
that
book and find the letter there. Don’t you see? She left clues to her murder. And left them in
Alice
. For me. I was the only one in that room she could trust to figure it out. She knew she was going to die. And here's the reason." She held up the letter and shook it for emphasis.

              "Ok," said Del. "I know I'm not the brightest bulb in the pack, but I think you may be grasping at straws. What does that letter really prove?"

              "Listen, I know I'm onto something here. Isn’t this a little bit too much of a coincidence? Her leaving this letter inside
Alice
? A reference to her will? Then giving the deck of cards to June and not Jill? She had to know Jill wanted her dead."

              "And so Jill then
does
kill her and tries to frame you."

              "It looks like it. Only she's not so good at it. The police don’t suspect me."

              "You sure?"

              She looked at her friend incredulously. "Yeah."

              "Ok, I'm just saying. Home?"

              "Please."

              A light rain was beginning to fall. She was still damp from her alcohol bath and beginning to shiver slightly, achy from her fall, her head reeling with questions and more questions, a pit in her gut that was there and now was back; Del was right. There wasn't much evidence, but there was some. What if...?

              When she got home and walked in, Dinah was waiting for her.

              "Oh you poor baby! I forgot about your shot, my fat little munchkin." The cat nuzzled her leg, gave a stern, short lecture on tardiness in cat language, and rubbed vigorously against her. "Alright! Let Mommy get her shoes off already. It's raining out and I'm leaving tracks all over—"

              She said the
word
again.

              Her
word
ing tracks.

              Her and Del. Alcohol plus dirt plus whatever.

             
How could I be so stupid?
she thought, and sat down on the floor to think while the cat gave not the barest concern for the storm that was coming.

              And that's when a text from Ben came through.

              "
Did you hear? June Brody is missing.
"

              The words burned through her eyes. She had to read them a few times, as every read-through was another attempt to absorb the frightening possibility that June's paranoia was actually valid.

              A creeping fear came over her. She reached over to give Dinah a squeeze on the nape of the neck, but the little head suddenly picked up and she darted off into the bedroom, terrified.

              Sgt. Beauchenne was coming up the walkway.

              She had to answer the door. It seemed like a mile-long trip to get there.

              "Hello, Sergeant. Good to see you again."

              "May I come in?"

              She stepped aside and allowed him to pass. She felt her knees giving way and concentrated on steadying them.

              The sergeant removed his hat and held it in his hand like a gentleman. "Ma'am, there's no need for you to be afraid, but I have reason to believe someone might be after you."

              "Really," she said, folding her hands together to hide their trembling.

              "I can see you're nervous."

              So much for hiding it, she thought. And she sat down on her couch, trying hard not to look down onto the floor at the very spot where Tori Cardinal's dead body lay not more than two weeks ago.

              "Well, of course I'm nervous, Sergeant. Wouldn’t you be?"

              He stroked his salt-and-pepper hair. "We'll have someone stationed outside for your protection."

              "Can I ask what’s going on?"

              "A little while ago I drove past your house and saw someone snooping around your property." He waited a moment, apparently attempting to gauge her reaction. "Ms. Griffin, is there anything you haven’t told us about this case?"

              She thought about it. Should she tell him anything in light of June Brody's disappearance? If there was any merit to June's story about a corrupt police force, what did it matter to this case? On the flip side, why would someone be snooping around her house, except maybe to deliver another note?

              She decided in the end that she literally had nothing to lose by telling the truth.

              She told him of all of her evidence against Jill Metzger, save for the letter—a piece of paper obtained illegally, which would never be admissible; and the part about Jill and Jenny benefitting from the estate—information she wasn't supposed to have been privy to; and the croquet mallet note, which hinted at Tomlin building a case against her. When she was through, she realized she had little to offer without those pieces.

              "Apple seeds," she said.

              "What?"

              "Apple seeds. You can grind them up and make cyanide out of them. There are a ton of resources on the internet."

              "I realize that, but—"

              "The pies. Jill made these apple pies for the war widows charity event. She had to have a ton of apple seeds. Check her compost heap. Look at her coffee grinder and the edges along her kitchen sink drain. Surely there'll be traces."

              "Ma'am, that's all well and good, but we'd need probable cause for that, and I just don’t see that here."

              Images of June Brody detained in some cold bunker underneath the police station came to her and she shuddered.

              "Can I ask you a question?" said Beauchenne. "Why do you keep focusing on Jill Metzger as the alleged murderer?"

              "Because she's the only one in my book club...I think...who had a reason to kill Tori Cardinal. That's why. I think she killed her right in this house and I think I know how she did it. There could be traces of it still lingering in my carpet."

              "Ma'am, she wasn't killed in this house."

              Allie might as well have been hit by lightning. It was a moment or two before she could form the words. "I don’t understand."

              "She made have died in this house, but she wasn't poisoned here. That happened at least two hours before she got here."

              All her work. All her fitting together of broken and missing pieces. All was dissolving before her eyes.

              "But Tomlin... didn’t he say five minutes?"

              "Five minutes what?

              "He said she died five minutes after exposure to the poison."

              "That's the first I'm hearing of that. I can tell you that if he said five minutes, he was wrong. Between the two of us, Ms. Griffin, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Detective Tomlin misspoke in that case. He does that sometimes."

              "You're very careful with your words. I don’t work with the man so I can say it: he's pretty awful at his job."

              "As a department, we’re all stretched a bit thin. All covering each others' duties. Those are the perils of operating within a small town police unit."

              Allie bit at the sides of her fingernails. "Sergeant, you need to check into something."

              She showed him the playing card. Laid out the columnar cipher grid and then told him about the text.

              "'Croquet mallet' is a code word for 'flamingo.' It's from
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
. We were reading it for the book club. I think it's some sort of message directed at me personally. Only I would have made the connection to figure out what it meant."

              Beauchenne took the card. "I really wish you’d brought this to our attention back when you first received it," he said sternly.

              "Ok, I'm sorry, but does 'flamingo' mean anything to your investigation?"

              "I don’t know. But I really wish you’d brought this to us sooner. We have to look into everything." He gave her a severe look. "You forgot to give this to us. You hear me?"

              "I hear you."

              "You kept it in your pocketbook, and because you were stressed out, you forgot to give it to us."

              "Yes, sir."

              He nodded. "Flamingo, eh?"

              Allie folded her arms. "I'm pretty sure of it."

              "We'll look for both. A croquet mallet and a flamingo. I have work to do. There's a man in a car outside keeping watch for tonight."

              "Sergeant?"

              "Yes, ma'am?"

              "What happened to June Brody?"

              Beauchenne bit the inside of his lip. "We got an anonymous tip that she went missing. I'm sure you know her husband went missing recently. It's raised more than a couple of flags. We're stretched very thin, you know."

              "You said that. Good bye, Sergeant, and thank you."

              "Goodbye, ma'am." He replaced his hat and left.

              He was a nice man, she thought. Courteous, old school. Nothing like a snarling detective who snooped along her every move. Hard to believe she had anything to distrust about this man, or the force he worked for.

              However, she thought, I'm still a prisoner in my own home.

              She called for Dinah. That cat would be awhile under the bed.

              She went to open her mail. Mixed in with the stack was a blank envelope. Within, a typed note:

                            Not missing.Hiding.

                            Trust no one.

                            Water works.Meet me here at 8.

              She read it two more times.

              Then a picture began in Allie Griffin's mind.

              It was a picture of none other than June Brody. She pictured how the woman looked, talked, her thin lips, how she smelled...

              She sniffed at the letter and caught a faint whiff of Chanel. June wore Chanel often. She'd worn it that fateful day of Tori's murder.

              She went into her bag and pulled out the croquet note. Gave it a sniff. Then two more. Fainter, but it was definitely there.

             
"Curiouser and curiouser," she said aloud, quoting her favorite book once again. So June had written the croquet note. And she had written this one, pretending to be Bryant. And she was supposedly missing. Supposedly gone the way of her husband.

              If her husband really was gone.

              Allie began to pace her house. What if, she thought, June had made up the story of her husband's supposed abduction? If so, then why couldn’t she just pass the written info to Allie in person like she'd done in the library? After all, both notes basically conveyed the same warning that June did that day in the library: Don’t trust the police. So why choose to convey this same sentiment two more times in the anonymity of two unsigned notes?

              The answer came quickly: the info conveyed in all three cases wasn't about anything other than instilling in Allie a fear of the cops. June must have thought that she, alone, talking police conspiracy could be easily dismissed, and she was right. She would need another source. So she invented an anonymous one. It did tend to give things a mysterious, ominous tone, one that would bolster the wild-eyed tale of what Allie thought now was a pretty decent actress after all.

              She suddenly felt as light as chiffon and began pacing her house more frantically than ever.

              Sgt. Beauchenne had been quick to correct his illustrious detective, and had thereby absolved Allie of murder. Where was she two hours before the book club meet? Out buying a tablecloth. Somewhere in the bowels of the Walgreens digital archives was a copy of her receipt to prove it, and security camera footage to back it up. 

              An amazing feeling, this. To feel as though one was no longer a suspect, indeed, that one was never a suspect to begin with.

              Perhaps she should call the good sergeant and offer up this new evidence, and the "anonymous" notes. So far pretty much all she'd given him was apple seeds.

              Apple seeds.

              Her legs were trembling, not out of fear this time, but out of excitement, and she paced continuously to burn off the freshly churning energy.

              She began to mumble to herself: "Apple seeds...cyanide...June Brody...cyanide..."

              And then she remembered her experiment with the dice, when she allowed her subconscious mind to dictate what each suspect represented to her. For June Brody, she'd written down 'jewelry.'

              "...cyanide...June Brody...jewelry...cyanide..."

              She went to her laptop and typed in the search engine, her fingers jittering so much she kept hitting the wrongs keys, cursing her
word
ing hands to no end.

              She found what she was looking for in a cat's twitch.

              It was ten minutes to eight.

#

              The screened-in porch in the back of the house had a window she'd used on more than one occasion to break into the house when she'd forgotten her key. It adjoined the balcony. All that was required to get in was a sturdy foot and a bit of upper-body strength. To get out, a six-foot leap to the ground.

              Tonight was to be a night of repeated tests of her agility.

              The rain was light. But it was good cover. She threw her bag over first, then carefully climbed over the balcony and jumped into the wet dirt below.

              She cursed the rain and the chilly night air and the mud and her confusion and everything else. Then she sneaked through three of her neighbors' yards before heading out into the street and up to Main.

              The water works were about a mile down.

              She walked so fast her legs actually broke into a trot. Her mind raced along with them, fitting together the pieces of the puzzle. Three mentions of croquet: June's anonymous note, Tori Cardinal's texting, dying fingers, and the encoded message on the cards. June had held those very same cards. She gave them to Ben. What if she didn’t know what 'croquet mallet' referred to after all? Allie laughed out loud. Did
anyone
bother to read that book?

              Even the dead woman's words spoke to her loud and clear now.
My will shall be done.
Not her will. Her
will
. Tori Cardinal was a strong-willed woman if nothing else. She reveled in the exhilaration that only solving the previously-thought unsolvable could bring.

              And as the pieces came together, so did fear assemble itself into the jigsawn picture before her.

              What in the name of the Hatter was she doing here in the abandoned water works, all by herself, with the roar of the falls drowning out all noise? A scream in this place would tumble into the foam and be lost forever.

              Her fear gave way to panic, and she turned.

              And there was June Brody.

              Fear seized her, took away her thoughts for the moment. "June, I can’t believe this," was all she could muster up.

              "Allie, please understand. I had to get you to be afraid of the police, but you don’t understand."