Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Two days later, I had the flu. Stuffed up nose, chills, body aches, fatigue.
You know the drill. I told my grandmother I wasn’t feeling well, went back upstairs, and took an Oxy.
Okay, two. I mean, I hadn’t had one for days.
Edward treating me like I was a raging addict took the fun out of things.
But now that I was sick, it made no sense to abstain since I knew I could just sleep my symptoms away.
Anyway, that’s why it took me three days to set up a visit with Ivy Greene behind bars.
That, and the fact that the Wyandot County Jail had this weird, unnavigable phone system that I tried to use to schedule a half-hour visit.
It took two hours to get an appointment for that Thursday at eleven in the morning.
I told my grandmother I was going to Meijer over in Traverse but drove to the Wyandot Municipal Center instead. I wasn’t entirely sure where the jail was exactly, but I believed it was attached to the sheriff’s office in some way.
It made sense to stop off and see Detective Lehmann for a minute. He could direct me to the jail afterward. I wasn’t especially surprised when he looked up from his desk, and asked, “What are you doing here?”
“I scheduled an appointment with Ivy Greene in about fifteen minutes.”
“Well, that’s interesting. We let her out this morning.”
“You what?”
“We can only hold someone for seventy-two hours. The prosecutor declined to charge her.”
“But she didn’t have an alibi. And she has a motive. What about Carl?”
“We let him go, too.”
“How could you do that?”
“They lied about their whereabouts and they have motives, but that’s all we have. We don’t have a murder weapon. We can’t place them at the scene. I brought them in to see if either of them would talk, but they had a lawyer here within the hour. Neither of them said a word.”
“Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“I can’t charge them with silence. Not to mention, I really don’t know what to charge them with.
Maybe Carl killed his stepfather and his mother is helping him cover it up.
Or maybe it’s the other way around. Or maybe they planned it together.
So murder, aiding and abetting, conspiracy to murder those are all possible. But I don’t know which goes where.”
“How are you going to figure it out?”
“Without one of them turning on the other, I don’t know. I need witnesses; people they might have confided in, or better yet, the murder weapon.”
I wondered for a moment why he was being so forthcoming to me. He usually wasn’t. Then he asked, “You’re friendly with that Opal girl…”
“I’m not sure friendly is the right word.”
“Has she said anything about Carl’s relationship with his stepfather?”
“Only that she’s convinced he’s not the murderer.”
“If she says anything, let me know.”
“Sure,” I said, though honestly I wasn’t sure she’d want to talk to me ever again. And even if she did, I doubted she’d talk to me about Carl.
I walked out of the Municipal Center feeling kind of bummed.
I had questions I wanted to ask Ivy. Now I wouldn’t be able to ask them.
Actually, that wasn’t true. I knew where she lived.
I could just drive to her house. She was just as likely to answer my questions there as she would have been to answer them in jail.
Fifteen minutes later, I was pulling into Ivy’s driveway.
I walked down the boardwalk to the fake chalet and knocked a couple of times on the awkward basement door but got no answer.
I started back to the driveway but noticed Ivy down by the water.
Following a nearly invisible path, I made my way down the sloping lawn.
She wore a pair of long cutoffs and a pink T-shirt. She was smoking a cigarette. When she heard me approaching, she turned and looked at me without reacting. It was almost as if she expected me.
Turning back to look out at the bay, she said, “I don’t smoke. It just seemed the right thing to do after being accused of murder.” She tossed the cigarette into the messy garden.
“I have a couple of questions,” I said.
“Of course, you do. Opal tells us you’re the one who figured out Chris didn’t order the pizza himself. That he was probably already dead.”
I nodded my head. “You ordered the pizza from the pay phone at Main Street Café, didn’t you?”
“On the advice of my attorney, I’m not going to answer that.”
“That makes it sound like you did fake your alibi. And if you faked the alibi, for you and Carl, it makes it seem like one of you killed your husband.”
“Yes, I understand that.” She kept staring out at the bay. It was calm. Calmer than she was. “I wish my lawyer had let me say that yesterday. I wanted to. He doesn’t think I’ll be believed. Or maybe he doesn’t believe me. Or maybe he’s just trying to run up his bill.”
She stopped and seemed to think about what she wanted to say. “Chris and I had been fighting. I’d found out what he was up to. And apparently, you have too.”
I nodded.
“That night, I went over to the church. I’d finally worked up enough nerve to catch him in the act.
He was there. Dead. I thought— I assumed Carl had done it.
That he’d found out what was happening. I had to protect him.
He was already at Opal’s house. I hurried over to Main Street Café, said hello to a few people then I used the pay phone and Chris’s credit card number to order a pizza. ”
“Dinah was sure it was a man.”
“I lowered my voice and spoke through my sleeve. And I pretended to have a cold.”
Something about what she was saying made me ask, “You thought Carl killed your husband, but you don’t think that anymore?”
“No. I actually got an attorney before we were arrested. I brought Carl with me. He was shocked that I thought he’d killed Chris.
He admitted he knew about Chris and Denny, but he said he wouldn’t have done it, couldn’t do it.
I could see he was telling the truth. I should have just called the police when I found the body.
Now it looks very much like one of us killed him. ”
“When you found the body, did you see anything that could have been used to kill him?”
“No. I looked. But I didn’t find anything.”
“How exactly did you find out Reverend Hessel had a problem with drugs?”
“A few weeks before he died, a man approached me at Main Street Café. He said he was an old friend of my husband’s.
That he’d grown up in Fife Lake, but met Chris while they were both in prison at Stateville over in Illinois.
He told me they’d shared a cell. And he told me why. The drugs and everything.”
That made sense. Reverend Hessel had said he had family in the area. But he didn’t. He’d come because of his prison buddy. He probably had a place to stay in Fife Lake for a short while. Before he began his long con.
Ivy had paused to think about what she was saying and what she’d say next.
“I think I’ve been very na?ve. As soon as Chris became our pastor, he began telling me he was seeing constituents in the evening.
He’d come home excited by the work, energized, unable to sleep.
Of course, he wasn’t seeing anyone. I mean, not anyone who went to our church, at least. He was seeing young men he found on the Internet. ”
She took a deep cleansing breath.
“When I found out what was really happening, I confronted him. He promised to stop, said he wouldn’t do it anymore. Still, I cut off his allowance.”
“You gave him money?” I asked, even though I kind of already knew the answer.
“The church doesn’t pay much. I thought he might stop if he didn’t have money. I hoped he would. But he didn’t. He’d say he had to meet someone in the evening. He’d come home excited. Except now I knew. He wasn’t excited, he was high.”
“Why did you think Carl had killed his stepfather?”
“One time, when Chris said he was seeing someone, I waited about a half an hour then I drove past the church. I recognized Denny’s red Thunderbird. I should have confronted him then, but I didn’t—”
“You knew how Carl felt about Denny?”
“Yes, of course. He’s my son. I knew it was only a matter of time until he found out.”
“After you cut him off, how do you think Reverend Hessel was paying for his drugs?”
“I don’t know. I really thought he’d stopped. For a while.”
“Did you know about Reverend Hessel blackmailing Reverend Wilkie and Sue Langtree in order to get their positions?”
“No. I… this is the first I’ve heard of it. I suppose I should have guessed.”
“Do you think he could have been blackmailing someone for money?”
“I suppose. It makes sense.”
“Did you try to poison me?”
She blushed before she said, “I’m afraid I did. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“That’s really up to my grandmother. She’s the one who ended up in the hospital.” I fidgeted for a moment and then said, “You should tell all this to Detective Lehmann. I think your lawyer was wrong to tell you not to.”
“Oh, well, in that case…” she said, sarcastically.
Maybe it was the wrong advice, I don’t know. It was free though. So, there’s that.
Driving away from Ivy Greene’s I was fairly convinced that Reverend Hessel had tried to blackmail someone else for money and they’d killed him.
By the time I got to Masons Bay Village, I’d decided that the best way to find out who Reverend Hessel had tried to blackmail was to talk to someone who’d been blackmailed by him before.
I turned off Main Street and cut over to Murdock. When I pulled up in front of her house, Sue Langtree was on her hands and knees in the front yard. Weeding. Seeing me, she stood up and waved.
“I know why you’re here,” she called out when I stepped onto the sidewalk.
“You do?”
“Of course. And the answer is yes. I’ll happily give you singing lessons.”
“Um, no.”
She looked confused for a moment and then seemed to decide not to be. “You missed choir rehearsal again. Are you here to apologize?”
“I’m not joining your choir.”
“Is there something wrong with Emma?”
“I’d like to ask you some questions about Reverend Hessel. I know he blackmailed you into stepping down as choir director.”
Her smiled didn’t break. She said, “I suppose you should come inside. How about I make some lemonade?”
“That sounds nice,” I said, following her up the walkway and into the house. She stopped at a coat rack and took off the men’s flannel shirt she’d been wearing to garden.
“It was my husband’s,” she explained as she brushed it gently with one hand. “I still have most of his clothes. They make me feel close to him.”
As she walked through the living room toward the kitchen, she said, “I’ve been wondering if you’d come around. People tell me you’ve been asking questions about Reverend Hessel. I was beginning to feel left out. Make yourself comfortable, I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
Without a room full of people, her décor seemed even more combative.
After she left, I focused on small areas, one at a time.
I looked over her figurines and then the blue-and-white vases.
It was when I was looking at her collection of paperweights kept in a glass table in front of the window—one filled with a flower, another with bits of glass that looked like candies, one filled with a rocking horse—that I realized… that I knew something was wrong.
I picked one up. It was as wide as my hand, clear glass, heavy, inside it held musical notes.
Had I seen it before? Was it in the photograph of Reverend Hessel sitting at his desk?
Was it the same paperweight or one just like it?
I thought back to the box of Hessel’s things in his old office.
I didn’t remember seeing a paperweight in there, so maybe this was the same one.
Sue came into the living room with a tray of lemonade and cookies, setting them on the coffee table. As she did, I wracked my brain trying to remember her alibi. And then I realized something I should have known all along.
“Dawson’s Creek is on Wednesdays.”
“Yes, I know. I watch it with my granddaughter, Bekah. We just love it.”
“She told me that’s what you were doing the night Reverend Hessel was murdered. He was killed on a Thursday.”
“I suppose we were watching something else then,” she said. Then she glanced down at the musical paperweight I still held in my hand. “They’re worthless, you know. People don’t really use paperweights anymore. We don’t use paper the way we once did. The one you’re holding is my favorite.”
“You gave one that looked like this to Reverend Hessel.”
“I did. How remarkable that you noticed.” She took it from me and caressed it like it was a pet of some sort. “We were friends, you see. When Chris first arrived. He was very helpful with the choir—at first. I gave him this one as a gift.”
“He gave it back to you?”
“No. I killed him with it. There’s a certain sort of irony in that, I suppose.
It was sitting on his desk. I had brought the cash he wanted.
Five thousand dollars. Well, not really.
I had two one-hundred-dollar bills and I cut up some newspaper—anyway, that’s not all that interesting.
I dropped it, you see. I thought… I knew he’d pick it up.
I was right. He wanted the money so much.
He bent over and that’s when I took the paperweight off his desk and hit him on the back of the head.
I did it again. And again. Until he fell to the floor.
It was much easier than I’d have thought. ”
“You should be confessing to Detective Lehmann.”
“Oh, I’m not going to do that.” She turned and picked up a glass of lemonade to hand to me. “Would you like a cookie? I made them this morning.”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll tell Lehmann what you said?”
“Not really. No.”
“But I will tell him.”
“You won’t. If you do, everyone will find out that my granddaughter was raped. And that we… did what was necessary. It will hurt innocent people. Like my Bekah. She’s a sweet girl, isn’t she?”
“Not telling will hurt innocent people, too. Ivy Greene and her son were in jail. People will think they did it.”
“But they didn’t do it. That’s why they were released. There wasn’t enough evidence. Reverend Wilkie and I have started a legal defense fund for them. Just in case. You don’t need to worry. They’ll be fine.”
Lehmann knew he didn’t have much on them. Since they didn’t do it, I doubted he’d be able to find any more evidence.
“You’re too young to know this, but the longer you live the more important it becomes to do good in this world. Sometimes good is not what you expect it to be.”
“You think you did good by killing Reverend Hessel?”
“Oh yes, without a doubt.”