Murder on Old Main Street (Kate Lawrence Mysteries) (23 page)

After what seemed like an eternity, but was probably only a few minutes, the footsteps resumed, but not in the direction of the back door as I had supposed. Instead, they were headed for the front of the building, away from the listening tube. He must truly be mad to make his exit in full view of that crowd. Smoke would have to be billowing by now, and when he threw open the front door, the draft of air would accelerate the fire enormously. I left my chair and put my ear to the crack of the door, hoping to hear him exit. A sudden banging on the door startled me so that I fell backward and narrowly missed hitting my head on the edge of the vanity.

“I know you’re in there,” he growled fiercely, pounding the door again for emphasis. “You won’t be getting up to any more of your mischief, Missus. It’s done now, all done, you hear me?” A final smack.

Then I heard him dragging the coat rack away from the door. Already full of adrenaline, my heart racing, I braced myself to fight for my life. If he knew about the reading room, he must know how to get into it. I probably wouldn’t win, but I’d go down fighting, I promised myself. I’d want Emma and Joey to know that I fought like hell.

But the door didn’t open. Instead, I heard Delahanty grunting with effort as he heaved and pushed something very heavy through the coatroom and jammed it against my door. My god, he was barricading the door with Jenny’s desk. I was going to burn to death in this tarted-up bathroom unless I could find some way to attract the attention of the crowd just outside the building.

“Help!” I screamed futilely, unable to fight the hysteria that rose in my chest. “Please help me somebody!” I pounded on the door, the walls, any surface I could reach, on the chance that part of the wall was hollow enough for sound to penetrate. “You’ve got to help me. I’m trapped in the Law Barn!”

In desperation, I began tearing books from the shelves next to the chair. Maybe the wall was thinner behind them. I peered between the empty shelves and saw something that resembled a doorbell. I must be delusional as well as hysterical. With absolutely nothing to lose, I pushed it. With a protesting groan of long un-oiled hinges, the entire set of shelves popped open on one side and slowly swung open, revealing what looked like a shallow closet. Cold night air huffed in from the plank wall beyond, which must have been a door at one time. Instinctively, I moved toward it and put my mouth against a crack.

“Help me!” I screamed again, my voice hoarse and failing. Once more, I pounded on the wall.

To my astonishment, my plea was answered almost immediately. The voice was young, male, and all business. “Wethersfield Police, Miz Lawrence. We’re going to get you out of there, but we have to break through this siding to do it. Get as far back from the wall as you can, and cover your head and face.”

The shock of being answered changed quickly to relief and concern for the officers outside.

“It’s Mort Delahanty,” I yelled through the crack. “He’s crazy. He set the Law Barn on fire,” I added unnecessarily as I heard the wail of fire engines rapidly approaching.

“Momma!” Emma yelled from farther away. “Just do it. Do what he says!”

I scrambled to obey and hunkered down against the far wall with my arms over my head. “Okay, I’m away from the wall.”

Immediately, the siding was battered by what sounded like a platoon of axes, and I was cheered by the sound of old wood cracking and yielding. Within moments, a large hand reached through the hole that had been created and tore away the jagged planking. I put down my arms and looked up to see Officer Ron Chapman crashing through the man-sized opening, followed closely by Rick Fletcher. The grim expressions on both young men’s faces relaxed when they spotted me huddled against the far wall, and I felt tears welling alarmingly.

“Well, hello again, Miz Lawrence,” Rick said. He handed his axe to Ron and crouched down beside me. His kind young eyes searched my face. “My partner here got the idea that you might be having kind of a rough day, so we thought we’d come and see if we could help you out.” From behind him came a cacophony of voices and machines engaged in crowd control and fire fighting. Having correctly assessed my condition as shaky but functional, he stood up and held out a steadying arm as he had only days before on the sidewalk in front of Blades.

I tried to thank Rick but couldn’t seem to force words through my suddenly chattering teeth as once again, he hauled me to my feet. I stood for a moment, swaying uncertainly. “Delahanty?” was all I managed to get out.

Ron Chapman spoke up. “Got away from us in the crowd,” he said tersely, “but don’t worry. There’s an all point bulletin out for that black Trans Am. We’ll get him.” He stepped back through the hole in the wall and vanished into the confusion outside.

Rick guided me to the opening and placed a sheltering hand over my head as I eased through the shattered planking. Once again, I found myself the center of attention at a crime scene. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I observed in a feeble attempt at humor. “How did you know where to find me? Over all that noise outside, I’m amazed that anyone could hear me yelling.

“We didn’t,” Rick grinned. “We knew where you were because we’ve had you under close surveillance since Glastonbury PD informed us about your little adventure this morning. We knew Delahanty would turn up again, and we didn’t want to take any chances. We just didn’t figure on your barricading the Law Barn with him inside it. When we couldn’t reach you by phone, we figured something must be very wrong in here. We got to Emma, and she knew right away where you’d be hiding. In fact, it was all we could do to keep her from breaking down the wall herself.”

At that moment Emma herself shoved under the crime scene tape and shook off assorted official hands attempting to restrain her. “Get away from me,” she advised, holding up her hands in a
back off
gesture. “That’s my mother, and if I have to drag every last one of you with me, I’m going to her right now.” Silent signals passed among the assemblage, and tacit permission was granted to let her through to where I stood awaiting my scrappy daughter. “Momma?”

Rick turned away discreetly. He really was the nicest young man, I thought again with an inward sigh, but Ron Chapman seemed a decent sort, too. “I’m just fine, Emma, or at least I will be, but I’m afraid I can’t say the same for your cell phone. I dropped it on the tiles in there, and …” I turned my palms up and shrugged bleakly.

“I knew it,” she said. “I knew you’d find some way to destroy my cell phone. I can’t believe I trusted you with it. You are so lame.” She rolled her eyes and shook her head in mock disgust. Then she hugged me fiercely.

Twelve

In the end, a compromise measure was passed that established a limited number of designated, outside smoking areas and banned smoking anywhere else in the historic district. Nobody was completely happy with the measure, but then, as Margo had so correctly pointed out, that’s the nature of compromise.

It turned out that Mort Delahanty had served in Viet Nam with Frank Wainwright—had, in fact, saved Frank’s life and had the Purple Heart and the post-traumatic stress syndrome to prove it—which is why Frank and Abby gave Mort a job and even shared their home with him for a while when he fell on hard times years later. Following Frank’s death, Mort’s gratitude for their kindness had turned into an obsessive need to protect Abby, and when Prudy Crane threatened her well-being, Mort stepped over the edge into madness. He never considered how his chosen method of disposing of Prudy set Abby up for the murder. That realization drove him still further into insanity, and, well, we had pretty much figured out the rest.

Ironically, although it had been the entries in her diary that tipped me to Mort, the business with Harriett Wheeler turned out to be of little consequence. Her incessant complaints over several years to the powers that be about Abby’s immoral living arrangements had merely earned Harriett the label of eccentric, and thus unworthy of serious attention. In 2002, just before Mort moved into an apartment of his own and bought the infamous Trans Am, Harriett had apparently hired a couple of local teenagers to glue what she felt were appropriate passages from the Bible, condemning adultery and fornication and what have you, to the front door of the Diner, believing that once customers were aware of the owners’ sinfulness, business would drop off sharply. Unfortunately for Harriett, Abby and Frank came to work so early that the public never saw her messages, which they had removed long before the doors opened.

“Even if they had,” Abby assured me with the first chuckle I had heard from her in a very long time, “they would have rightly attributed them to the work of a crackpot.”

I hoped she was right.

Emma never did tell me who she was covering for when she was seen making that blackmail payment to Prudy, and I finally had to accept the fact that she was all grown up now and entitled to her privacy. I let it go, knowing she must have had an awfully good reason for doing what she did. In return, she didn’t scold me overly about destroying her cell phone, which I replaced with the very latest model. It does everything but drive for her, but I’m sticking with my faithful little flippy, which the Wethersfield PD finally allowed me to retrieve from their evidence locker. Emma and Ron Chapman seem very well suited to each other, and I enjoy seeing her have some fun with a nice young man, even if it isn’t Rick Fletcher. If Emma and Joey have their way, I am never going to hear the end of that one.

The news that the murder charges against Abby Stoddard had been dropped, and Mort Delahanty was sought in connection with the investigation, spread like wildfire. No one has seen him since the night of the hearing, but the dragnet is being tightened in the northwestern Massachusetts area where Mort apparently has ties to other View Nam War veterans. It wouldn’t be much longer before he would be apprehended. Despite everything, Abby is anxious that Mort get the help he needs. He saved Frank’s life under the worst possible circumstances, and God knows that war messed up the heads of thousands of good men. As Abby put it, “Maybe killing Prudence Crane was an act of sanity compared to the insanity of being ordered to murder hundreds of innocent civilians,” and in that context, I see her point.

The trunk of my Altima, which had been parked in the service alley behind the Law Barn, had been levered open with a crowbar or some such implement. All of the diaries were gone. I didn’t miss them.

Margo didn’t even want her leather tote bag back and donated it to the Goodwill. She and John Harkness and Rhett Butler were becoming a threesome around town, especially on the weekends when they took long strolls. Abby had taken to stocking a bag of dog cookies behind her counter, and their standard order was two coffees and a doggie treat to go. I liked the way they looked together.

The fire damage to the Law Barn had been minimal. My assumption about the bonfire on the sofa had been accurate, but I had underestimated the fire retardant qualities of the upholstery, which had stubbornly resisted the flames. When Mort’s pile of paper had been consumed, the fire simply died. The damage had been caused primarily by smoke and the water trained on the smoldering remains by the firefighters who had been summoned from the station only a block down Old Main Street. As part of the redecorating, we demystified the reading room by adding an actual knob to the door and ditching the big coat rack that had concealed it. We turned the coatroom into a small conference room and now entertain first-time visitors with a tour of the previous owner’s eccentricities. I, for one, have had enough of secrets to last me a very long time.

As it turned out, the reading room wasn’t all that much of a secret anyway. Any number of locals knew about it, including old Mr. Hitchcock, who came to patch up the exterior wall. He remembered the Viet Nam vet he had taken on “in the summer of ’99, I believe it was,” at the urging of Frank Wainwright, giving him a few weeks of carpentry and plumbing work on the Picture Palace, his term for the Law Barn during Mr. Watercolors’s tenure.

“Fella who owned it then was crazier ‘n a bedbug, but hey, work was work. He wanted a secret room, so we built him one. It was kinda fun, to tell you the honest truth.”

All things considered, I had a lot of news for Strutter, when she finally dragged herself away from her honeymoon, but mostly, I wanted to talk to her about Armando.

“First I was mad, and then I got scared.” We were sitting in the late fall sunshine. Strutter’s usual attractiveness was unfairly enhanced, I thought meanly, by two weeks of Jamaican frolicking with her new hubby. Charlene “Strutter” Putnam,
nee
Tuttle, was quite simply the most stunning black woman I have ever seen. Soft brown curls fell to her shoulders, her skin was the color of milk chocolate, and her figure was simultaneously slim and curvaceous. Her warm smile was charmingly framed in dimples.

We occupied one of the four curved benches that surrounded a small fountain to one side of the Keeney Memorial. Although she wasn’t due back in the office for another two weeks, I had asked her to meet me for coffee. She hadn’t even asked why, just abandoned her honeymoon and showed up an hour later at La Dolce Bakery, where we ordered two cinnamon coffees and took them back out into the glorious morning. Now we sat side by side, faces tilted to the sun, eyes closed. “Mm hmm” had been her only comment thus far. Maybe I hadn’t gotten through to her. I opened my eyes and tried again.