Murder, Money, and Moving On Read online

  “What is this?” I asked, speaking as much to Jasper as myself. “Some sort of intervention?” I laughed lightly because I was worried I had stumbled on something resembling the truth. This better not have anything to do with my gutters.

  “What’s going on?” I asked when I finally reached my shop. There was police tape around it. If I’d wanted to keep the whole thing quiet, I was out of luck.

  Tess, the owner of the bakery across the road, was the first one to speak up. “We are calling an impromptu business owners’ meeting,” she said.

  I decided to try and lighten the mood. “I suppose Lleyton won’t be joining us.” They all glared at me. “Quite right,” I said, glancing down at Jasper, who was also judging me. “Too soon.”

  Les was quiet, hanging back from the group. It surprised me, seeing as he had been the one to call me. He seemed to be taking Les’s death the hardest of the lot. “Will Brenda be joining us?” He asked it in a tone that seemed to dare me to say yes.

  “Brenda isn’t an owner,” I pointed out. Also, this meeting wasn’t exactly ‘official.’ She’d probably still be in bed sleeping, blissfully unaware of what was happening. “And it is her day off, anyway.”

  Les shrugged a little. Sounding unimpressed. “Never stopped her from joining in before.”

  He was right—Brenda did sometimes attend the meetings, either on my behalf or alongside me. She acted more like an owner than I did, at times. Part of it was due to the fact that she had actually wanted to buy my shop before I had swooped into town and stolen it off her. That was her interpretation of events, not mine.

  But she wasn’t there that day, and I couldn’t tell if Les was annoyed or relieved.

  Les unlocked the back door to his store and I winced at the smell of the bait, trying not to gag. How anyone worked in that store was a mystery to me. How anyone enjoyed fishing was also a mystery to me. I’d rather be indoors, warm and dry, curled up with a glass of red wine.

  Les had a few chairs out in back for us to sit on. There were fishing magazines strewn around his office and an ancient computer that was still running Windows 95.

  I took a seat uneasily and wished I actually had Brenda there for moral support. Not that she was the warm and fuzzy type, but she would at least defend me and the shop from any accusations that would come flying my way. And I knew that they were about to come flying.

  There was a tense and awkward silence. I started to fiddle with my thumbs. Someone just speak. No one said it straight out—at least not at first—but it soon became clear that the informal group informally blamed me for Lleyton’s death. Tess from the bakery was the first one to say it. “Of course, it just happened to be your roof that he slipped off of.” She raised her eyebrows so that they popped right over the top of her black rimmed glasses. “A pure coincidence, I’m sure.” She said it in a way that made it clear she did not think it was a coincidence at all.

  Well, hang on a minute, wasn’t that rather unfair?

  “He shouldn’t have been up on the roof in the first place,” I said, then immediately regretted it. Maybe I was right. It just wasn’t the right time to say it. They all turned to me sharply like a pack of jackals—they had been waiting to pounce the very first time I tried to defend myself.

  “Surely you are not blaming Lleyton for his own death,” Tess said, aghast. She held a bony hand to her chest. I always thought she was far too bony for someone who owned a bakery. It made me wonder if the food could possibly be any good.

  “Not blaming...just pointing out that it was his choice to be up on the roof last night. Not mine.”

  I was only opening myself up to more blame by going that route. “Isn’t the only reason Lleyton was even out here that night because he was doing YOU a favor?” Les said, glaring at me.

  I grimaced. Small town. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. Of course Les already knew about the burst pipe and the late-night phone call about it.

  “It’s still not my fault he was up on the roof,” I muttered quietly. I wanted this meeting to be over. As I looked around the room, I realized I had half a dozen faces to draw on my dry erase board. My hands and feet were itching to get going. If this crew wanted answers from me, or a confession of guilt, they weren’t going to get it. I knew something they didn’t know. But I remembered Ryan’s words and bit my tongue. Time to leave before I bit right through it and started bleeding.

  But Tess was still not done. She was like a dog with a bone. “Well, maybe if you had cleaned those gutters after we all asked you to at the owners meeting…” She sat back in her chair and looked at me like she had me cornered. Maybe she was the one who had pushed Lleyton. She was very quick to throw judgment.

  I crossed my arms. “Lleyton hardly died because of a few leaves.” I even let out a little scoff.

  Tess did not find it funny. She thought she had the answer.

  “He might have slipped on them!” She grew more and more indignant. “In fact, I am sure that is what happened! Now, thanks to your negligence, George, we have a man dead!”

  “He didn’t slip actually,” I said, angry, standing up and pushing my chair back. It wasn’t usually easy to rile me up. I’m usually the chilled, take life as it comes type. But being accused of something like this overrode my usual instincts. “It wasn’t an accident at all! He was pushed!”

  Oh, shoot. Had I really just said that?

  There was a chilling silence in the room.

  I sat back down.

  “Well, haha, I don’t know that for certain,” I said, straightening my spine. I tried to shrug it off. Make it look like my outburst was just a result of a very disturbed sleep and a lack of caffeine. “He very well could have slipped. Why, yes, you are all correct, I really should take a look at those gutters.” I stood up and grabbed Jasper’s leash. “In fact, why don’t I go and do that right now? Stop this from happening to anyone else.” The room was still in stunned silence. But Les finally spoke in a low tone.

  “Georgina, sit back down.”

  I gulped and took a seat.

  “Is this true, George?” Tess whispered and leaned forward. She no longer sounded indignant. She sounded scared.

  “I…I, um.” I looked around at the worried faces. I wasn’t sure I had the heart to tell them that it was true. And it had nothing to do with the promise I had made to Ryan. I didn’t want to scare the heck out of them.

  It seemed as though my silence had spoken for me.

  “Of course it’s true,” Les muttered. He wasn’t looking at me. He started to talk about me as though I wasn’t even there. “She is buddy-buddy with that cop. He probably tells her all about all his cases.”

  “No, Ryan only tells me…”

  Great. I was just digging a bigger and bigger hole. I decided just to shut up. Sure, Ryan had occasionally let a few things slip, but he was still more loyal to the force than he was to me. He’d never do anything to jinx his job. I was sure that what he’d let slip that morning was also just an accident. Or, he was doing me a favor—telling me to watch my back. That there was potentially a maniac out there. Someone who looked to push people off roofs.

  Tess had started to get hysterical. “So someone in here is guilty then! One of us is a killer!”

  Huh. Interesting. “No one is saying that…” I said slowly, glancing around at the sea of guilty faces.

  Tess picked up her bag and stormed out. I raised an eyebrow and glanced at Les. “So, am I free to go or am I being charged with something?” I asked wryly. I strolled out the door, calling for Jasper to follow me.

  But once I was outside, some of my bravado left me. Was Tess right? Was someone I knew the killer?

  “What are we going to do now, Jasper?”

  3

  The truck seemed to be stuck in first gear, grunting as I tried to navigate it through the town. “They all seemed pretty guilty,” I said to Jasper as I gripped the wheel and tried to make a left-hand turn out of town and toward the mountains that led to the town
of Mornington. Jasper started whimpering nervously and jumped up on the seat, pressing his face to the window like he needed to get out to use the bathroom. Or maybe he just needed to get out. My driving wasn’t exactly the best.

  “Sorry,” I said, pulling over to the side of the road. “I guess I am a little rusty.”

  Jasper was one of the rare dogs who didn’t like car rides. I had no idea why, but I assumed it had something to do with whatever had happened to him in his previous life. Before I had adopted him, I mean. I had no idea where Jasper had lived before he had been left at the shelter, and no idea who his previous owner had been.

  None of that mattered anyway. Jasper was with me now and he was the happiest dog you could ever hope to see.

  I had been borrowing my ex-husband’s truck for the day while I picked up cleaning supplies for the store. I had decided that an old rusty mop was not going to do it. Mostly because it had snapped in my hand when I’d tried to use it. There was a giant home and hardware supply shop in between the two towns on the highway. I let Jasper use the bathroom then forced the truck back into second and managed to hit the hardware store. One mop and bucket and industrial-sized space heater later and we were ready to go again. I turned to Jasper. “Do you want to take a drive to the mountains while we’re here?” It was unusual for me to be out this far from town—I didn’t own a car—and I figured we should make the most of it, let Jasper run around in the fresh air for a bit. But he seemed nervous. When I turned the car in the direction of the mountains, he whimpered and whined again. He wanted me to turn the car around. When I finally did, he relaxed a little, but still clawed at the door. The bathroom again? Already? Boy, he really was a nervous pooch that day.

  I was a good distance from home, but it was a beautiful day. And I couldn’t stand to see poor Jasper so anxious. Surely Adam wouldn’t mind if I left his truck out here. I’m sure he had friends who could help him get it back. “Well, why don’t we walk back to the store,” I said, opening the door for him. He hopped out and started running before I even had the chance to clip the leash to his collar. “Hey!” I said, sprinting after him, my heart racing. We were parked on the side of the highway with the busy road to one side and the mountains and forest to the other. I didn’t like Jasper’s chances in either. I caught him right before he disappeared into the trees, and that was only because he had stopped to do his business.

  “Jasper!” I said, exasperated. “It was very naughty to run away like that, do you hear me?” I leaned down and turned his head around so that he could see that I was really cross. But really, I was more frightened than angry.

  He could have been hit by a car, or he could have gone into the woods and been attacked my coyotes, or he could have gotten lost. I don’t know what I would do if I ever lost him.

  I hugged him tightly. I could feel that my heart was still racing.

  “Come on,” I said, standing up and making sure this time, his leash was firmly on his collar before we drove back after all. “Let’s go back to the store!”

  Ryan had told me to stay away from both the store and the scene of the crime while they were still collecting evidence. He didn’t know that I had been inside that morning to clean, and he didn’t know I was back there again that afternoon. I wheeled the mop in and wished that Adam’s big green truck was a tad less conspicuous. The giant fan was a lot more difficult to drag in on my own. It almost slipped out of my hands and smashed on the concrete. I glanced down and waddled my way to the back door. At least Lleyton had fallen onto soft carpet, I thought. Then I shook my head. What was I thinking? That hadn’t saved him at all.

  I shot one last glance at the concrete. But at least it had saved me the gore of seeing it.

  I had promised Ryan I would stay away. But I figured that what he didn’t know couldn’t possibly hurt him. I stepped over the police tape and put down the fan. Cleaning up was only one reason I was at the store that afternoon. Most of the water was already gone. I had something far more serious to attend to.

  I walked out the back door. I had to see what was up there. I needed clues, evidence—something that would tell me who the second person on the roof that night had been.

  I walked over slowly to my best friend and gave him a treat. It was quiet in the neighborhood that afternoon. Les had hung a ‘closed till further notice’ sign in his front window and Tess had already shut the bakery down for the afternoon. “Now, Jasper, it is your job to keep watch, do you understand?”

  He gave me a little nod like he understood, and wagged his tail before he sat down and began to keep a close eye, munching on his dog bone. I knew that he would bark loudly if there were any interruptions. I was well-covered.

  I leaned the ladder against the wall and shook it a little. Eek. A little unsteady. When I stood on the first rung, it kind of sagged underneath me. That was my fault for only keeping an old wooden ladder that could sustain water damage, rather than a steel one. Now, why didn’t you get a new one at the hardware store, Georgina? I thought, using my full name to berate myself.

  “Oh well,” I said, taking a deep breath before I started to climb onto the next rung. It was too late to go back now. I had come this far. And I only had so long before someone came along and noticed what I was doing. I had to get to the top of the roof before that happened.

  “I did it!” I called out proudly, then remembered to keep my voice down. I was supposed to avoid attracting attention and instead, I was calling out for the whole neighborhood to come out and witness my victory.

  Jasper glanced up at me before returning to his post. And his bone.

  I took in a deep breath and looked over the whole town. It was already a very small place, a population of only 1500 people, but from up there, Pottsville seemed even smaller. And it looked very peaceful. Hard to imagine that so much murder and mayhem took place down there. I shook my head, wondering where the murderer was. I was literally looking down on them.

  “Now, what do we have up here?” I said, remembering that my victory was only half-complete. Until I actually found something on the roof that could help me, it wasn’t much of a victory at all. I turned around a little, being careful to avoid the gaping hole that was still there in the center. I crept over to both sides, trying to find something there that I could take back down as a clue. But the police had done a thorough job, even in the dark. You couldn’t always say that about the Pottsville Police Department. They’d missed plenty of things in the past.

  But not this time. The roof was empty. I’d climbed all the way up and risked my neck for nothing. I looked down. Jasper had just about finished his bone.

  “Okay, Jasper, I’m about to come back down,” I called to the ground, defeated. This had all been a giant waste of time. I started to head to the ladder when, buried amongst the leaves in the gutter, something small, blue, and fluffy caught my attention. I carefully walked over, keeping my balance so that I wouldn’t slip.

  “What is this?” I asked, bending over to pick it up. I had to dig my hand into the pile of wet, soggy leaves.

  A small, blue cat.

  Maybe not cleaning my gutters hadn’t been such a bad thing after all. I turned the cat over and looked at it. It was impossible to tell how long it had been up there. But it hadn’t been buried too far into the leaves. So it was possible it had only been there a few days. And after all, how often were people climbing up onto my roof? Well, there were those naughty neighborhood kids who got up there quite regularly. But I doubted any of them were carrying around baby’s toys—they were all teenagers.

  I felt my foot give way underneath me for a moment.

  “Woah,” I said, taking a step back and catching my breath. I’d just about gone right through the same hole that Lleyton had. My heart was beating extra hard.

  I gulped. Right. Now it was really time to get off that roof.

  The ladder was wobbling as soon as I took the first step down the rungs. Uh-oh. I tried to steady it, but the ladder was too wobbly. Just take it sl
ow, I told myself, trying not to look at how far below the ground was. Just one step at a time.

  Jasper started barking wildly. Great. We had company. No time to go slow.

  And it was worse than just regular company. I could see blue flashing lights and I panicked, trying to climb down before the car reached the store.

  But the ladder was wobbling wildly underneath me, and I couldn’t keep it still or catch my footing.

  The louder Jasper barked, the more panicked I got and the quicker I tried to climb down.

  The ladder fell from beneath me and I tried to reach for the edge of the roof, trying to hold onto the gutters. But they were too slippery from all the wet, collected leaves and I couldn’t get a grip. It was no use. I was in a freefall. I saw the ground coming toward me, and that was all I saw.

  Smack. I was out cold.

  4

  “You’ll have to order her meals for her. I’ll be by in a little bit to pick up the card. Just check off whatever you think she’d like…”

  Those were the words I heard as I opened my eyes. The voice was cheery. Female. Where was I? A restaurant? Why were there people beside me talking about what food I wanted to eat? I frowned and blinked a few times as the two people came into focus. One of them had dyed blonde hair tied up in a spiky ponytail, and she wore bright pink lipstick that was on a little too thick and spilled over the edge of her lips. The other was a young man with dark hair. Good-looking. They were both wearing uniforms. One, a nurse uniform; the other, a police officer’s.

  “Georgina! You are awake!” The perky nurse grinned at me with her large pink lips. “Oh, this is wonderful news.” She told me that she would let the doctor know and that she’d be back with something for me to eat soon. “But make sure you fill in your orders for the next two days, all right?”

  The man beside her came into focus and I felt a warm, fuzzy feeling in my stomach. But my head was throbbing. And then I realized that I couldn’t move my arm. At first, I panicked. Then I noticed it was suspended in what seemed to be mid-air, hooked up to a sling. There was a plaster cast around it.