Murder on Old Main Street (Kate Lawrence Mysteries) (21 page)

By the time the ibuprofen worked its magic on my headache, I had slogged through three years of the same sort of petty complaints and was no closer to finding a solution to Abby Stoddard’s dilemma. I decided to reward myself with a little nap before taking on 1999’s entries and fell asleep almost instantly to the continuing chants of the demonstrators outside the Law Barn, which seemed to be escalating in intensity.

When I awoke much refreshed an hour or so later, I picked Harriett’s diary back up to return to my reading. Immediately, the name “Abigail Stoddard” leaped off the page. I pushed myself fully upright and peered closely at the shaky handwriting. The date of the entry was September 16, 1999, almost exactly six years ago. Frank Wainwright had still been alive then and running the Village Diner.

It has become apparent that F.W. and tacky little Abigail Stoddard are living in sin in that man’s abode. This comes as no surprise. One can hardly blame the man in these circumstances, men being the weak creatures that they are. What is terribly surprising is the involvement of M.D. in an apparent ménage a trios, something of which I would not have thought even Abigail capable. How best to deal with this news? Surely there is a town ordinance against so many unrelated people living under the same roof. Perhaps an anonymous letter to the mayor’s office will put an end to this unorthodox and thoroughly offensive establishment. If not, more drastic measures may be required.

I paused to consider who M.D. might be. A physician? Someone with those initials? The only person who came to mind was Miriam Drinkwater, the part-time curator of the Keeney Memorial, but I simply could not get my mind around the possibility of meek, self-effacing Miriam involved in a love triangle with Abby and Frank. Beyond the local business owners here in Old Wethersfield, I was acquainted with only a few dozen of the town’s residents. Perhaps the telephone book would provide some clues. I put my ear to the listening tube to try to determine Jenny’s location, but silence reigned. I eased out of the reading room and went in search of Margo, a phone book, and food, not necessarily in that order. Suddenly, I was starving.

Carrying the diary with me, I headed for the MACK Realty office on the other side of the lobby, but before I got there, Jenny burst through the front door of the Law barn, bringing a wave of chanting voices and honking horns with her.

“Food!” she called cheerfully, undoing the shoulder straps of her backpack and dropping it on her desk. With her usual resourcefulness, she had realized that we were all pretty much trapped in the Law barn until the crowds eased, helped herself to petty cash, and hiked down the street to the diner, returning with an assortment of overstuffed sandwiches and side salads. Margo and Emma materialized instantly, and we fell upon the food like wolves, washing it down with bottles of Snapple and soda from the office refrigerator.

After several minutes of intense chewing and swallowing, Margo, Emma and I sat in a row on the lobby sofa and made sounds of contentment. With our heartfelt thanks ringing in her ears, Jenny scraped together the empty wrappings and trundled a full trash bag out back to add to Fat Squirrel’s pickings for the evening and say hello to Rhett Butler. I took advantage of her absence to show Margo and Emma the diary entry that had captured my attention.

“So what do you think? Who is M.D.?” I asked after each of them had frowned over the entry for a minute. “The only name I can come up with is Miriam Drinkwater, but surely there must be a hundred people in town with those initials. And of course, nothing says the person has to be from Wethersfield.”

“Except that Harriett Wheeler knew this person, and Harriett rarely left her house, let alone Wethersfield,” Margo pointed out reasonably enough.

I could see the wheels turning in Emma’s head. “Just because that awful Wheeler woman assumed there was some sort of kinky threesome going on doesn’t mean there actually was, you know. All we can assume from what we see here is that the three of them were living in the same house. Maybe they had a roomer to help with expenses, or maybe Abby or Frank had a cousin or another relative staying with them for some reason. There are a dozen perfectly proper explanations for the arrangement.” She stopped and looked from one to the other of us. “Don’t you think?”

Margo chuckled. “This child of yours does all right in the logic department, I’m thinkin’. Must have gotten those genes from her daddy.”

I threw my Snapple cap at her. “Well, the only sure way to learn the identity of M.D. is to ask Abby who was living with her and Frank in the fall of 1999, and that’s what I plan to do right now. Emma, did you find anything in the diary you’re reading yet?”

“Nothing, and believe me, I read every nauseating word. What a loser that woman was! I can’t believe she wrote romance novels. There wasn’t an ounce of romance in her soul. She was judgmental and vindictive.” She shook herself and got to her feet. “Anyway, I don’t think any of us has a prayer of getting our cars out of here tonight. The police have their hands full trying to keep a lid on the crowd until the hearing begins at seven.”

“Crowd?” Margo and I asked simultaneously. We all got up and went to the big front doors, which Emma pulled open with a flourish. To our astonishment, the parking area out front was jammed with badly parked cars of every description, and the sidewalk now teemed with angry citizens, all of whom seemed to be yelling. A harassed young officer attempted to reason with two elderly demonstrators who were in each other’s faces, one burly hand flat against each of the men’s chests to hold them apart.

“That looks like Rick Fletcher’s partner from the other night,” I said. “Officer Chaplain or something. I cannot believe how young these policemen are getting to be.”

“Ron Chapman,” Emma said, “and he’s thirty-one. I think I’ll go say hello when he gets these old coots separated. We haven’t had a chance to talk since last night.”

“Last night? You mean this is who you were out with last night, the hot date, if I recall your message correctly? I was sure it was Rick Fletcher.”

Both Emma and Margo gaped at me for a two-count, then collapsed into hysterical laughter. “She thought it was Rick Fletcher,” Margo gasped, holding her sides and wiping her eyes. Emma wasn’t much better off.

“Rick Fletcher!” she hooted, leaning on the nearest car for support. “Wait until I tell Joey that you thought I was on a date with Rick Fletcher.”

“I folded my arms across my chest. “And what’s wrong with Rick Fletcher? I always thought he was an exceptionally nice young man. Obviously, I thought you did, too,” I said, a little miffed and more than a little puzzled.

Finally, Emma took pity on my perplexity. “You really don’t know, do you?” she gasped when she could breathe again. I remained silent but raised one eyebrow. Emma looked at Margo for support. “You tell her. I don’t have the heart.”

Margo straightened out her face and came to give me an apologetic hug. “You poor darlin’, you are absolutely right. Rick Fletcher is a delightful young man and has the makings of an extraordinary police officer, John tells me. He is also gayer than springtime, Sugar.” She gave me a pitying look, then threw up her hands and hooted with laughter all the way back through the lobby to our office.

“Sorry, ‘Cita,” Emma comforted me. “I think it’s a generational thing. Women of your age just don’t seem to have the same radar we do now, although come to think of it, Margo picked up on it right away. Oops! Sorry again.” She gave me a hasty pat and headed out into the crowd.

“Ask Officer Macho there what’s going on with the Wheeler house break-in,” I yelled after her. “The Copelands are getting anxious.” Emma waved in acknowledgment and was gone into the crowd. I went back inside and pulled the doors firmly shut. At this rate we’d have half the town traipsing through the office looking for a bathroom.

At some point during the afternoon, the phones stopped ringing. Emma had never returned from her visit to the good looking Officer Chapman, and Margo had collected Rhett Butler and made her way, however Margo managed these things, to the Copelands’ house on Wolcott Hill Road to review their situation and find out what she could about the investigation. That left Jenny and me holding the fort.

Shortly after five o’clock, I finished volume four of The Wheeler Chronicles where I still sat on the lobby couch and closed the cover. I had found only one additional entry concerning Abby Stoddard and the mysterious M.D., but it was particularly vitriolic. In late November, 2002, Harriett had written,

It has been more than three years, and that filthy harlot continues to live with two men without benefit of marriage to either one. Why this immoral living arrangement is tolerated in a supposedly Christian community, I cannot understand. Now that the Blue Laws that protected us from this sort of thing have vanished along with our sacred day of rest, no decent person can consider herself safe from such abhorrent influences. My continued protests have fallen on deaf ears. I must take matters into my own hands.

There were no entries for the remainder of that year and a good part of the next. When they resumed in late 2003, they were in handwriting so shaky as to be almost illegible and consisted primarily of complaints about her deteriorating health and the general incompetence of the medical profession. By then, Harriett must have been experiencing symptoms of the illness that had claimed her life two years later.

I stood up and stretched luxuriously, working the kinks out of my shoulders and neck. What action had she taken in 2002, I wondered, and who was M.D.? There was only one sure way to find out. I would have to ask Abby.

“Jenny,” I said as she was extracting a windbreaker and her sneakers from her backpack preparatory to leaving, “when you were at the diner earlier, did you happen to see Abby Stoddard?”

Jenny thought about it as she tied her shoes. “I didn’t actually see her, but she was there, back in the kitchen. Deenie had her hands full trying to take orders and cover the cash register and take-out and everything else, and Abby was trying to help out with the cooking. As a matter of fact, I’m going back there now to give Deenie a hand. She must be whipped by now, and there’s no point in my trying to catch a ride out of Old Wethersfield until that hearing starts at seven, and people move inside off the street.”

That’s good of her,
I thought. “Couldn’t Mort help out at the register or something? I know Abby has had a tough time trying to hire a replacement for Prudy, but surely Mort must be able to do something around there besides sweep up and fill saltshakers.”

“I didn’t see Mort today,” Jenny said, getting to her feet and heading for the back door. “Guess he couldn’t make it in with all this traffic. He wouldn’t want to risk getting a scratch on that precious Trans Am of his. I’m going out the back way and cut down the service alley. See you in the a.m.” She hitched her backpack over one shoulder and was gone, completely unaware of the lightning bolt she had tossed at me so casually.

For a few seconds I was too stunned to move. Then I sank back down to the sofa, my head reeling. Mort … Mort … What was his last name? And then I had it. Mort Delahanty. M.D.
 
This could not possibly be a coincidence. The initials in Harriett’s diary, the fact that he owned a Trans Am, were all connected, but how? I wished that Margo and Emma were around so I could hash this all out with them. I needed to make some sense of it before I brought the diary to the police.

Mort Delahanty had been at the diner for as long as I could remember, which admittedly wasn’t all that long. His role was unclear. My impression was that he suffered from some sort of mental handicap, but I had no idea what that might be. He just seemed sort of slow-witted, but I was too busy wondering why Abby tolerated Prudy Crane’s surliness and inefficiency to wonder why she kept Mort Delahanty employed, as well. I had never heard him in conversation with Abby or anyone else, for that matter, but then, why would I have? Whenever I was in there, it was to pick up something quick to take back to the office. I really had no inkling of Mort’s relationship with Abby or with Prudy Crane either. Still, he had access to the premises, including the chlordane and the kitchen knives, and he might very well have known about Prudy’s extracurricular activities. Maybe he was her partner in crime and did away with her to keep all the blackmail money to himself. Or maybe he had known that Prudy was blackmailing Abby, as well, and had killed her out of some kind of obsessive loyalty to his kind employer.

The only thing I was certain of was that it had been Mort Delahanty in that Trans Am this morning, Vignettes of theh past few days popped into my aching head: Mort’s face when I had appeared at the diner to talk with Abby at her request. The open windows in Mavis Griswold’s sitting room and Millie Haines’s office, under which anyone might have been lurking and listening. Mort waiting at the cash register in Marsh’s Pharmacy while Ephraim ranted behind the far-from-soundproof partitioning. He had probably been following me for days, but why? If he had been listening at the door outside Abby’s office and heard enough to know that she had asked for my help, he would know that’s what I’d been trying to do. But if he had heard only a few words at a time, an out-of-context phrase or two, he might easily have misconstrued the situation and thought I meant to do Abby harm. That was, after all, how rumors got started. A small distortion here, a slip of the tongue there, and you had a full-blown scandal in next to no time.