Pumpkin Roll (32 page)

“Do you think the reporter who wrote about the voyeurism is going to call you back?” Sadie asked, determined to change the subject.

Jane nodded. “Oh, yeah,” she said with her trademark arrogance. “When someone follows up on your stories, you’re always hoping to get another tidbit that will resurrect the thing. It’s good journalism to call me back and see what I know. And the guy’s got a good reputation—I always check—so I’ll be hearing from him. I guarantee it.”

“Do you think we could track down the girl Mr. Forsberk was bothering?” Sadie asked. “Maybe she would have some details about him that would better prepare us for when we meet with him later.”

Jane nodded. “Possible,” she said. “I think it would just take a stop into the Quincy store. All this went down just a year ago, so I bet there’s someone there who would know where she was transferred to. And one of those interviewees I wanted to talk to today for my article is down in Milton, so it wouldn’t be hard for me to do both.”

Sadie nodded, relieved that they had given up talking about phantoms and were making a concrete plan of action. “Great. Why don’t you work on Mr. Forsberk, and I’ll get the landlord info from Shawn so I can learn more about Mrs. Wapple’s history.” This was always the hard part for Sadie. Only one of these lines would likely pan out, which meant a lot of their efforts would be wasted, and yet without knowing which line had the big fish on the end of it, there was really no choice but to cast them all.

All?
She questioned herself. Was she really going to explore them
all
? Or was she picking and choosing by leaving Pete out? Ugh! Pete didn’t do anything—why couldn’t she let it go?

Jane twisted her arm so she could look at her watch, which was hidden between the two dozen black plastic bracelets on her wrist. “It’s almost eleven. What if we plan to meet up at one? A friend of mine told me about a great little place called Wonder Spice here in JP. It’s Thai. Do you like Thai?”

“I like everything,” Sadie said. “And that sounds like a good timeline.”

“If I have time, I’ll try to get to the hospital and take a little peek at our witch—see how she’s doing and if the sister’s been around. We don’t want to lose sight of the sister amid our new information.”

“Oh, right,” Sadie said. “We can’t rule her out just yet, but I don’t know if it’s safe for you to go to the hospital either. People saw you at the police station; they think you’re my daughter.”

“They didn’t pay any attention to me,” Jane said, chuckling slightly. “They didn’t even ask for my ID to prove who I was. Plus, I’ve got my wig.”

“Wig?”

“It’s a perfectly boring, shoulder-length, mousy brown thing that makes me look like the proverbial soccer mom.”

Sadie looked at Jane’s bright purple fingernails and the shirt she was wearing, all black except for the yellow Ms. Pac-Man and red words that said “Man Eater.”

“Not to mention my journalistic wiles, which are secondary only to my feminine ones.” She batted her eyelashes. “Don’t worry, I know how to do this kind of thing, and I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think there was something to be learned that made it worthwhile.”

Sadie nodded, albeit reluctantly. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll meet up at one o’clock and compare notes. I might end up with some leads after I talk to the landlord, so this will give me time to follow up on them.”

“Good,” Jane said, slapping the table. “I think you and me make a killer team, Sadie.”

Sadie smiled even though she didn’t like Jane’s use of the word
killer.
“Let’s hope so.”

Sadie gathered the ingredients for the filling—buttercream since Heather didn’t have any marshmallow creme—and pulled out the second pan of cakes from the oven while Jane used the restroom. She’d just started mixing the filling when Jane returned.

“I guess I’m off to Quincy,” she said, picking up her bag from where she’d left it next to the chair.

“Good luck,” Sadie said with a smile. Jane nodded and let herself out the front door. Sadie finished the filling and put it in the fridge, then scribbled a note for Heather in case she came to the house, explaining that she’d be back for the whoopie pies that afternoon—she needed only four or five for Mr. Forsberk; the boys could have the rest. She didn’t really have anywhere to go, but she wasn’t up to staying and answering questions when Heather arrived.

She remembered passing a library on Sedgwick, and Sadie headed in that direction since she couldn’t think of any better place to go. After locking the doors to the house, though it was beginning to feel more and more silly to do so, she took a long look at the house that still held so many questions. Was it safe for Heather to come back here? She made a note to talk to Pete about it, which reminded her that although Pete had an appointment with the police, she still hadn’t been called back in. Had he taken their attention so much that she—the woman covered in red paint who discovered Mrs. Wapple—was no longer a concern? Poor Pete. She hoped things would go okay for him.

The sun was out and the snow from yesterday was long gone, but it didn’t put a spring in her step or raise her spirits much as Sadie made her way toward the library. She had work to do, and it was hard to pay attention to anything else.

Her phone rang, making her jump, and she pulled off to the side of the road when she saw it was Shawn. He was on his way to class, he said, but quickly gave her the landlord information and then said how awesome it was that she and Jane were working together. Sadie scribbled down the information, thanked her son, and promised him an update later before pulling back into traffic and finishing her trek to the library.

She parked near the back of the lot and immediately jotted down a list of questions, or rather topics, she hoped to be able to discuss with the landlord. Then she dialed the landlord’s number. The list was in her lap with her pen poised and ready to take notes.

“’Ello,” the man said on the other end of the line.

“Oh, uh, hi. Is this Martin Delecorte?”

“The very same. How cun I help ya?” His accent wasn’t Boston, more of a rural Oklahoma.

“Well, I’m looking for some information on one of your previous tenants—Delores Wapple. She lived with her dad, Timothy, in a rental you own up in Lowell, Massachusetts.”

“Good renters, good folk. How can I help ya?”

“Well,” Sadie said, not quite knowing what to do since he was making it so easy. “I’m trying to get a sense of the family and their connections. Did you know them at all?”

“I lived across the street. It used to be my dad’s house; now it supplements my blasted social security checks, which don’t go up nearly as quick as the price of cable television.”

Chapter 28

Oh,” Sadie said, sitting up straighter. “Well, that’s wonderful.”

“How’s Delores doin’? Can’t say I haven’t worried about her since she left.”

“Actually, she’s in the hospital, that’s why I’m calling. We don’t have much of a history on her and are trying to find people who knew her. Everyone here knows her as Mrs. Wapple, but it seems that Wapple is her maiden name, so it’s created some confusion.”

“Well, she ain’t no missus, just Delores up around these parts, so I don’t know about that. She’s down in Boston these days, right?”

“Yes, a suburb of Boston—Jamaica Plain.”

“I worried about them takin’ her so far away. She likes things to be just so. What’s she in the hospital for?”

Sadie briefly explained and was gratified to hear Mr. Delecorte offer a quick prayer under his breath. “Well, that’s a shame,” he finished. “Granted, she was a mite strange, especially in the beginning, what with the singing and the cats and all that, but I hate hearing she’s had such a bad time of it.”

“Singing?” Sadie said.

“Oh, she had a horrible voice, she did, but she would go out back and sing and sing and sing. Maybe that’s what brought the cats in.”

Sadie couldn’t help but smile; she liked thinking of Mrs. Wapple singing to kitties. “She didn’t do either of these things here,” she said. “She yelled at neighbors and had issues with dogs.”

“Oh, yeah, she don’t like dogs. One here in the neighborhood got to one of her cats a few years back. Come to think of it, I didn’t hear her sing much after that. Her dad said she took the loss hard, real hard. When her mother died, she about fell apart and that was the beginning of things that led to her needing to live with her father. You wouldn’t think a dead cat would be that upsettin’, ’specially since she had half a dozen of ’em, but she didn’t come out for, well, it was a few weeks. She and Tim kept a wonderful garden; in fact they filled all the front flower beds with vegetables that were downright beautiful the way they had them arranged.”

“Did they, by chance, plant potatoes out front?”

Mr. Delecorte laughed. “In fact they did—real nice foliage, for a vegetable. I probably would have said something about squash or tomatoes, but they were mindful of the way things looked.”

“It sounds like you were good to the family.”

“Ah, they were a good sort. I had my Jimmy; he wasn’t quite right either. Didn’t live past his twenty-first birthday—hit by a car back in ’59. Tim and I could relate to one another, that’s all.”

Sadie wrote furiously and glanced at her list of topics so as to keep the conversation moving. “Did you know the sister—Gabrielle?”

“Never met her ’til Tim was sick, then she came around a bit but was always rather pinched for time. When Tim ended up goin’ quicker than any of us thought, she came in, swept out Delores, and had the furniture put into storage. Don’t get me wrong, she was nice enough, but, well, it seemed as though she’d grown out of her family, if ya know what I mean, and didn’t know quite what to do with ’em. Her dad was sure proud of her, though, talked about her ’complishments all the day long. Right pretty thing too, if you don’t mind my sayin’.”

“Quite lovely,” Sadie said. “I agree. But she wasn’t much involved with the family?”

“Nope, like I said, she wasn’t like them—more highfalutin.”

Sadie moved to another topic. “Did Delores ever have headaches that you noticed?”

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Delecorte said. “She’d do fine for awhile and then get struck somethin’ awful. Sometimes she’d go to bed for days at a time. When she felt good, she was always tending to the garden, so if my wife and I didn’t see her for a few days, we’d check in with Tim to see if we could do anything to help out.”

Sadie was running out of questions and frantically searched for some more. When did she ever get someone so happy to talk to her? “I understand she didn’t like doctors much.”

“Not particularly, no, but Tim had a friend who was a doctor and would come visit without her knowin’ what he was about. She just thought they was visitin’. Tim gave Delores her medicine but called ’em vitamins. She was fine with vitamins but not medicine, ya know. Part of her funny ways is all.”

Vitamins?
Sadie’s mind flashed back to the night she’d helped Mrs. Wapple dig for potatoes. Mrs. Wapple had said potatoes had vitamin C. Had she made a connection to having felt better when she’d been on her “vitamins” and tried to find whatever solution she could think of with her fractured mind?

“Do you know what her medicine was called? I mean, what she was being treated for?”

“That’s schizo-phrenia,” he said. “Done been affectin’ her since she was a young lady tryin’ to go to college. Ain’t nothin’ she’d get cured of, ya know, but so long as she had the medicine she did okay, slept more and stayed calm. I don’t know the name of the doctor-fella who was comin’, though, and I a’course don’t know what the medicine was called or nothin’ like that. Ya know, my other boy, Dave, he lived up in Cambridge for awhile, everyone said that livin’ in the city was as safe as anywheres, but he had a break-in that first month. They took off with his TV and his Mac Apple computer. Was probably done by the same guys who told him it was so safe, if ya ask me. Cryin’ shame that Delores suffered under the hands of them city thugs.”

“It sure is,” Sadie said. “I only hope the doctors will be able to get her some help. I don’t think she’s been taking her ‘vitamins,’ and her headaches are pretty intense.”