Schooled In Lies (19 page)

“What did you tell her?” I asked, sitting back down next to her. She wiped at her eyes and I gave her another tissue.

“I guess it doesn’t matter now,” she said, looking down at the floor.

“I’d really like to know.” I tried hard not to sound like I was pleading but I could tell she picked up on my anxiousness. Dangling a juicy piece of information in front of a nosy person’s face was like teasing a tiger with lamb kabob. I waited. She sighed heavily.

“I read an article about her in the paper last year. It made me so sick to think that she was the principal of a high school, while my brother spent his whole adult life in prison. I went to see her. I told her that confession was good for the soul and that she needed to tell the truth about what happened to Maurice Groves. She told me to go to hell.” She stopped to catch her breath before continuing.

“I figured if she wasn’t going to tell the truth, then everyone in her life needed to know what kind of person she really was. I started following her. I saw her with a handsome young black fella. I could tell he must be her boyfriend, even though she was almost old enough to be his mother. I found out who he was and called him and told him all about her past,” she said indignantly.

“How’d he take the news?”

“I couldn’t tell if he believed me or not. He was very polite and thanked me for calling but asked me to please not call him again.” Poor Julian. He must not have known what the hell to think.

“Did you tell anyone else?”

“No,” she said, shoulders slumping. “I found out he died in an accident a few days later and I got scared thinking maybe he confronted her and she killed him. I felt so horrible I decided to just let it go. My pastor had been telling me all along that vengeance belongs to the Lord. I didn’t listen and that poor man’s death could be my fault.”

I put a comforting arm around her and she gave me a teary smile.

“I’ve still got problems with letting my anger get the best of me because when I found out my brother’s cancer had spread, and he probably wouldn’t get to enjoy much of his freedom, I got so angry over the unfairness of it all that I called Alice again and told her that she had up until the day Calvin Lee was released to set the record straight or I was going to the newspapers and the TV stations. I know there’s no proof of what she did, but the attention alone would have ruined her.”

“What did she say to that?”

“First, she offered me money to keep quiet. When I didn’t bite, she said she needed time to get her affairs in order and find a good lawyer.” We both knew she had no intentions of confessing to anything.

“And you weren’t scared she might come after you? If she did kill her boyfriend, then getting rid of you, too, wouldn’t have been any big deal.”

“I slept with my husband’s pistol underneath my pillow. I don’t know if I would have been able to use it if it came to that, but it sure helped me sleep a whole lot better.”

There wasn’t much more to say. I sat with her until her pastor, a ruddy-faced man with a bushy grey beard, arrived then said my good-byes.

On the way home I stopped at Young’s Dairy and got a large strawberry sundae, made with strawberry ice cream and loaded with whipped cream. I sat outside at one of the wooden picnic benches to eat it. I needed something to do to calm my jumpy nerves and help sort out my thoughts. Some people knit when they need to calm down, others clean, some take a drive, or get a drink. I eat. It has yet to fail me. This time was no different.

Ivy Flack, formerly Alice Rivers, had been a fraud. As a teen she’d run around with a smarmy, racist, older man that her parents had forbade her to see. She’d lashed out at poor Maurice Groves, the innocent man she thought might blow the whistle on her, with deadly results. Thirty years hadn’t changed her much. She was still conniving and dangerous. She hadn’t been trying to fake her own death because she feared Calvin Lee Vermillion. She’d been trying to get out of town because his sister was about to tell the world about her, and she was going to lose everything, possibly even her freedom because immunity can always be revoked and she could still be tried for Maurice Groves’s murder.

I thought about everything that had happened during the time the committee had started meeting: the accidents, the messages, and everyone’s reluctance in getting the police involved. Why? Then the image of Ms. Flack’s bank statement lying on her dresser popped into my head. She had twenty thousand dollars in her account with several large deposits made recently. Then I remembered running into her on campus the day she’d had flyers for her campaign made and how she talked about how broke she was because of home repairs and having to buy a new car. Where had the twenty thousand dollars come from? She’d told me she’d received the letter about Vermillion’s release last month, meaning she’d known for at least a month prior to her death that Mildred Perry was going to go to the press about her past. How had she been planning to finance her new life in Mexico?

And then it hit me. Why hadn’t I seen it before? The messages she sent to the reunion committee had said: “You will pay for what you did”. I’d been thinking the messages had meant
pay
with our lives. But they’d meant
pay
as in money. Ms. Flack hadn’t been stalking the reunion committee at all. She’d been blackmailing us to get money to go into hiding before Calvin Lee was released and Mildred Perry blew the whistle on her. I didn’t really know in what order the messages and accidents occurred. She must have sent the messages first then caused the accidents to prove she was serious. That’s why none of the other committee members had wanted the police involved.

She must have contacted them again and they must have paid her, which meant that Audrey, Gerald, Dennis, and Cherisse all had something to hide that they were willing to pay to keep quiet. I’d received a message, too. Only I wasn’t contacted again because I was the only one who’d called the police. I don’t have anything to hide and no money to pay anyone off if I did. That told me she must have just been fishing. Hoping that, like her, we all had something we wouldn’t want anyone to know about, and would be willing to pay to keep quiet. That must have been what she’d been referring to during our last conversation when she’d said, everyone had secrets but some people were better than others at hiding them. And she’d been right. They’d paid her, and in turn, she’d paid with her life because her killer thought she’d really known their secret.

She must have been able to keep her identity secret from the people she was blackmailing. However, I’d been able to figure out she was behind it all. Someone else on the committee must have, too. There was certainly a karmic justice in Ms. Flack’s death. I wondered why I even cared who killed her. To be honest, I don’t think I did. But she had remained free for a crime she should have gone to prison for. Whoever killed her should go to prison as well. Now, the next question was, which one of my fellow reunion committee members killed her? And how was I going to find out?

Chapter Fourteen

LATER THAT EVENING, A surprise rainstorm brought some relief from the relentless heat. Instead of being out someplace enjoying the cooler weather, I was sitting in the Coffee Break Café with, of all people, Detective Trish Harmon. I’d called her to talk about Ms. Flack and my suspicion that she had been a blackmailer, and was subsequently killed for it. She was on her way home and said she had a little time to talk and suggested we meet for coffee. The cool air must have been having a positive affect on her because she was not only listening to me but wasn’t treating me like I was a bad rash. I also noticed she was dressed a little better than usual in a slim khaki skirt and a peach colored V-neck shirt that brightened her complexion and made her look almost ten years younger. But cool air or not, she still wasn’t convinced Ms. Flack had been murdered.

“That’s one hell of a theory. You honestly believe that Ivy Flack was murdered because she was blackmailing the reunion committee? But she was bluffing about actually knowing their secrets? That’s pretty ballsy.”

“She was desperate, Detective Harmon, she needed money to get out of town and start a new life.”

“But we still haven’t found any evidence pointing to Ivy Flack having been murdered. There was no bruising on the body, no skin under her fingernails, no ligature marks, nothing to suggest a struggle of any kind. The dirt on the carpet underneath her bedroom window was also found on the bottoms of a pair of her sandals that were found near the bed. The only fingerprints we found on the open window in her bedroom were hers. We didn’t find any other evidence of a forced entry.”

“All that means is that she knew her attacker. She must have let the person in.”

“Or it means she wasn’t murdered,” she countered.

“Well, I bet you found a large amount of money in her bank account, right?” Harmon didn’t confirm or deny it; she just looked at me with her thin eyebrows arched in surprise.

“Don’t you wonder where it came from? Isn’t that proof that someone paid her off?”

Harmon took a sip of her iced cappuccino, grimaced, and added a pack of sugar to it. “They never make this sweet enough for me.” I waited for her to answer my question, which she didn’t do until she’d taste tested her drink for the correct amount of sweetness.

“There’s a perfectly good reason for the large amount of money in her account.”

“Which is?”

“She cashed out a teacher’s retirement fund she had from a previous job in Illinois. A teaching job she got right after college a couple of years before she started working for Springmont High. We found the check stub in her purse and checked it out.”

“Okay,” I said, unwilling to concede defeat. “That accounts for one of the large deposits I saw on her bank statement. What about the others?”

Harmon’s cappuccino stopped halfway to her mouth. Her face tightened slightly and I realized I’d ruined the brief rapport that we’d been enjoying.

“You did go snooping through her room after you found the body, didn’t you?”

“And this surprises you how?” I asked. She took a sip of her drink and then looked at her watch.

“I’ll tell you what, Miss Clayton,” she stood up and slung her purse over her shoulder. ”If you can come up with any evidence at all to prove that Ivy Flack was blackmailing anyone, I’ll look into it. I promise. Normally, I wouldn’t condone you conducting your own investigation. But I know you’ll just do what you want anyway, and I honestly don’t think you’re going to find anything. All those other deposits to her account that you’re so suspicious of were cash and therefore untraceable.” She turned to walk away, and I called out one last question before she got out the door.

I called in sick to work the next day. I lay in bed trying to figure out what to do next. I kept picturing that shit-eating grin on Harmon’s face last night and desperately wanted to wipe it off. I was also trying to figure out what I was going to tell Carl. He’d asked me not to keep him waiting too long for an answer to his marriage proposal. Luckily, he was going to be tied up in a trial the rest of the week and I wouldn’t see him until the weekend. What was I going to tell him? I wondered what my life would be like married with children. I had a sneaking suspicion it would involve me needing a lot of chocolate. My best friend, Lynette, who’d gotten married back in May, was so busy these days with her job, two kids, a new house, and new husband that I hardly ever got to see her.

Marriage and motherhood made me think of Audrey Grant, married mother of five, who, according to Joy Owens, was also gay. I had to admit it did look like a lover’s spat I’d witnessed between her and that woman at Estelle’s last week. But just because Joy knew Audrey’s kid’s names doesn’t mean she wasn’t lying about seeing her kissing another woman. A lot of straight people go to gay bars. If it were true, however, keeping something like that secret from her husband, who might divorce her and try and take her kids away, would be something she might be willing to kill for. I guess I knew how I was going to be spending my morning. I was going to pay Audrey a little visit.

Audrey answered the door of her red, brick, two-story Colonial looking tired, harassed, and covered in what looked like dried puke. She had a runny-nosed, blonde boy, who looked about a year old, perched on one hip, while another crying tow-headed little girl of about four clung to her leg and wailed. I looked past Audrey into the house and saw the only child of hers that I’d met, Cassidy, sitting on the steps of a circular staircase coloring in her Barney pajamas. Another little boy, who looked older than the one on Audrey’s hip, but younger than his still wailing sister, was running down the hallway wearing a juice-stained undershirt, and nothing else, because he’d taken off his diaper and put it on his head. I only saw four kids, but the fifth one made its presence known when the loud angry cry of an infant came from somewhere in the back of the house.