Chapter 15
CHAPTER 15
Nick and I pretended to have tickets to a late show at the movies, while Vero stayed at home to keep an eye on Mrs. Haggerty and the kids. Nick drove us out of the community, checking his rearview mirror through the first few turns, making sure Mike Tran hadn’t assigned an unmarked car to stake out my house. Once he was satisfied we hadn’t been followed, he took another entrance into South Riding and parked on the street behind Mrs. Haggerty’s house.
We cut through the neighbors’ backyards on foot, past a line of tall hedges that hid us from view. Nick knelt at the base of Mrs. Haggerty’s fence.
“Should you really be doing this?” I asked as he laced his fingers together.
“Would you rather go in the front door?”
The last thing either of us needed was for Mrs. Haggerty to look out my bedroom window and see us breaking into her house.
Nick gave me a boost and I scrambled over the fence, freezing as I waited for a set of motion-sensing security lights to expose us before I remembered Mrs. Haggerty’s power was still out. Nick landed on his feet on the damp grass beside me. He took my hand, leading me around the gaping hole at the edge of Mrs. Haggerty’s rose garden. I watched the neighbors’ windows while he used Mrs. Haggerty’s key to unlock her back door.
The house was pitch-black inside.
“Why are we starting here?” I asked as I waited for my eyes to adjust. “The police already searched the whole place. And they already determined that Mr. and Mrs. Haggerty didn’t know the victim. Maybe we should be starting somewhere else.” Like Brendan Haggerty’s condo.
“I’m not buying it,” Nick said, leading me deeper into the house. “If neither of them knew the victim, why’d the killer bury the body here?”
“Probably because her garden was an easy place to dump it.”
I could just make out the shake of his head. “There’s nothing easy about hauling a two-hundred-pound corpse into the backyard of a house in a residential neighborhood without being seen, Finn. Especially when the property lines are less than thirty feet apart. Someone went to a lot of work to bury Dupree here, and I’m betting they did it for a reason. Either the Haggertys knew him or they knew the person who killed him.”
“What about Brendan?” I suggested, latching on to the opportunity to point Nick in the right direction. “He’s strong enough to move a body. And he would have had access to this house.”
“Tran already ruled him out as a suspect.”
“He ruled out Mr. and Mrs. Haggerty, too, but we’re here, aren’t we?”
Nick didn’t look convinced. “Whoever it was, there might be something here the investigators missed.” Nick pulled his penlight from his breast pocket, careful not to let the beam veer too close to the windows as he passed it to me. “You start inside. I’ll check the garage.”
He took a small flashlight from his belt and disappeared through the kitchen. There was a soft click as the service door closed behind him.
I looked around Mrs. Haggerty’s first floor, unsure exactly what I was supposed to be looking for. I moved through the living room, fanning my light over her end tables and bookshelves as I slid picture frames and knickknacks aside to search behind them.
I pulled the cigar box on the mantel closer to the edge. It felt heavier than it looked, or at least heavier than a box of cigars was likely to weigh. I tried to peek inside it, but the lid was sealed shut. I aimed my penlight at the engraving on the gold plate. A pair of dates was etched below a set of initials. A framed photo of Mrs. Haggerty’s husband had been placed behind the box.
I shook out my hand and wiped my palm on my jeans as I realized what (or, more accurately, who) was in the box.
I remembered very little of Owen Haggerty. Only that he had been about as pleasant as his wife and that he had passed of a heart attack around the same time Delia had been born. He had been fit for his age when the photo had been taken. And tall, with eyes like Paul Newman’s, that gathered deep smile lines from the sun. I studied the cigar box with sick fascination. It seemed impossible that such a large man could be reduced to fit into such a tiny vessel. I wondered if there was more of him, scattered somewhere else.
I backed away, nearly tripping over a cardboard box on the floor. I knelt and lifted the lid. It was filled to the brim with family memorabilia and photo albums, all carelessly tossed inside. A sticker on the side of the box declared it was evidence—Property of LCPD. The investigators must have found nothing of value in the old photo albums and returned them after their search.
I dug through a handful of loose pictures, uncovering a stack of spiral notebooks at the bottom of the box. Their covers had been labeled with dates in Mrs. Haggerty’s shaky handwriting. I thumbed one open, recognizing it immediately as one of her neighborhood watch diaries.
My heart skipped a beat. I glanced around the corner to the kitchen, making sure Nick was still in the garage as I removed them from the box and read the dates on the covers.
They were all more than six months old.
I checked them again, searching for her entries since October, but the one diary I needed wasn’t there.
The rest of the notebooks went back five years, the earliest dated just after Mrs. Haggerty’s husband had passed away. I wondered if there was a correlation there. If she had become so obsessed about the safety of her neighborhood because she was an elderly widow living alone, or if there had been some other reason she had chosen to become so vigilant then. After all, that had also been around the same time Gilford Dupree had been buried in her yard.
I thumbed through the notebooks. They contained what I had expected, a litany of minor offenses she’d gone out of her way to record: teenagers who drove too fast, cars that played their music too loud, Girl Scouts who came to the door to sell cookies without parental supervision, door-to-door solicitors who’d been rude, and the occasional odd noises that had apparently come from my bedroom window…
My stomach turned as I spotted Steven’s name, and I realized with a stinging pang that his infidelities with our real estate agent had dated back much further than I’d known. Mrs. Haggerty had become obsessed with documenting his “suspicious behaviors,” including any time he’d come home in the middle of the workday while the children and I had been out.
Only on closer inspection, not all of the surreptitious meetings at our home had been with Theresa.
He had met someone else there, too. Not once, but on several occasions. I counted at least four visits by a man in an unmarked van, none of which had occurred while I had been at home. Each time, Steven had unloaded several bags of mulch from his truck and loaded them into the back of the man’s van. But why have his buyer pick up mulch at our home? Why not deliver it to the man’s house? Or have him pick it up at the farm?
I jumped out of my skin as a hand came down on my shoulder. “Find anything?” Nick asked.
I closed the notebook and dropped it in the box. Nick had plenty of lingering suspicions about Steven’s truthfulness in all this, and I didn’t see any reason to add more fuel to that fire.
“Just a bunch of old photo albums and some journals the police already searched.”
“Journals?”
“Nothing useful. Just Mrs. Haggerty’s neighborhood watch diaries. Community drama mostly. You know, which neighbors are cheating on their clueless wives, how often, and with whom. That and her weekly grocery lists.” I rolled my eyes, if only to hide the fact that they’d begun watering.
Nick pulled me in for a hug. He rested his chin on my head. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
“It’s fine,” I insisted, eager to change the subject. The diary I was looking for wasn’t in the box, and I doubted any of the other neighbors even knew these journals were here. I was certain they would have all been stolen and destroyed (or sold to the highest bidder), depending on which neighbor had found them. Which meant the missing one I was looking for was either in Mrs. Haggerty’s possession or in Mike Tran’s. I hoped to god it wasn’t the latter. “Did you find anything?” I asked Nick.
He shook his head. “The garage was empty. So was the basement. Looks like Mike Tran took just about everything. If you’re finished down here, we could try upstairs. But I’ll understand if you want to go.”
“No.” I tossed the lid back on the box. “If you’re stupid enough to commit a B&E to help me, we might as well be thorough about it.”
“It’s not a B&E if she gave you her key,” he reminded me. He took my hand and led the way upstairs, winding us around the chairlift that took up one side of Mrs. Haggerty’s stairwell. I’d always wondered why she had one. She’d seemed pretty spritely for her age when she’d been kicking my ass on the police academy training course, though that was mostly due to the fact that Brendan was her partner and he was in excellent shape. And she’d certainly had no problem climbing the stairs in my house when she’d staked her claim to my bedroom. I could only assume the chairlift had been her husband’s.
Nick aimed his flashlight into the first room at the top of the stairs. A set of twin beds bookended one wall. Framed photos hung behind them. The photos were mostly of Brendan. While Brendan hadn’t grown up in this house, this room had clearly been where he stayed when he visited.
Nick and I moved through it in tandem, searching drawers and closets, but it was as tidy and spare as Brendan’s condo.
“Nothing,” Nick said, emerging from the closet. “You?” He came up behind me, putting his hands gently on my waist as he looked over my shoulder.
I shut the desk drawer a little too hard. “Nothing that screams, ‘I murdered Gilford Dupree.’ I swear, Brendan is involved in this somehow.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He was supposed to pick up his grandmother two days ago, but he’s not returning my calls, and I’m pretty sure he’s skipped town. When I told Mike Tran, he completely ignored me. And I didn’t see much about Brendan in that file in your apartment,” I pointed out.
“You never saw that file,” Nick reminded me. “And be careful before you go throwing accusations around. Brendan’s a big supporter of local law enforcement. He’s got a solid shot at a seat on the city council and he’s in tight with some very big donors—”
I opened my mouth to point out that his political standing had no bearing on his capacity to commit murder, but Nick beat me to it.
“—I know, I know. I’ll look into him. Quietly,” he added.
“If you find him, tell him to pick up his grandmother.”
We moved down the hall, door by door, until we reached Mrs. Haggerty’s bedroom. I searched the dresser. Nick checked her closet. The contents were disheveled where police had already searched them: clothes organized by season, rolls of yarn, an assortment of knitting needles and sewing supplies.
I opened Mrs. Haggerty’s nightstand. A collection of dog-eared, yellowing paperbacks was tucked inside the drawer, along with a bottle of hand cream, an eyeglass repair kit, and several ballpoint pens. I picked up the stack of books to look beneath them and tossed them on the bed. One slipped off the edge. A folded piece of stationery fell out of its pages.
Curious, I opened it. It was written in the kind of crisp, careful script they used to teach in schools before the advent of computers.
Dearest Maggie,
You’ll never know how sorry I am. I know I can’t take back what I’ve done, but I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. It was all my fault. You shouldn’t harbor any guilt for that night. I take full responsibility.
Yours always,
Owen
There was no date on the letter. The paper hadn’t yet yellowed, but the stationery had been pressed flat for so long, it was impossible to tell how old the note really was. Which begged the question: What happened on the night Owen had written about, and what was he taking responsibility for?
I looked over my shoulder for Nick. His light bobbed inside the closet.
“That file you showed me at your apartment,” I called out to him.
“What file?” he reminded me.
“The one I never saw and doesn’t exist,” I called back. “Did it say why Owen Haggerty was ruled out as a suspect?”
“Age and poor health. He would have been almost eighty when Dupree was murdered. The notes said Owen was being treated for hypertension and chronic back problems. Guess Tran figured it was unlikely that Owen could lift two hundred pounds of deadweight and dig a hole big enough to bury a man.”
“What do you think?”
Nick grunted as if he was lifting something heavy. “I think desperate people who want something badly enough are capable of all sorts of things. Why?” he asked, dusting off his hands as he emerged from the closet.
“What do you make of this?” I showed him the letter.
He wiped sweat from his brow and frowned as he read it. “I don’t know. It may be nothing, but I’ll run a background check on Owen and see what I can find.” He took a photo of it with his phone, folded the letter, and handed it back to me. I tucked it inside the cover of one of the books. Between Penny’s anonymous tip, Brendan’s suspiciously timed trip to Florida, Steven’s bizarre mulch deliveries, and this strange letter from Owen, I wasn’t sure what to make of any of this. There were too many clues, and none of them seemed connected.
“Hey,” Nick said behind me, resting his hands on my shoulders. “You okay? You’ve been a little quiet since you found those journals downstairs.”
“I’m fine.”
He turned me to face him. “We don’t have to do this. Steven’s lied to you so many times, Finn. No one would blame you for doubting him.”
“He didn’t sleep with Penny,” I said sharply. “And he didn’t murder Gilford Dupree. You don’t have to believe me.” After all the lies I’d told over the last five months, I wouldn’t blame Nick if he second-guessed me either. But I was right about this.
I stepped out of his arms and dropped down on my knees beside the bed, ducking to look beneath it.
Nick knelt behind me. “I do believe you,” he said close to my ear. “If your gut says he didn’t do it, we’ll keep looking.” He reached around me to grab the mattress. The muscles in his arms strained as he lifted it so I could slide an arm underneath.
“Anything?” he asked.
“There’s nothing here.”
He let the mattress fall, but his arms stayed around me. He was warm and solid, his body heat chasing away the chill in the room. “This is almost as much fun as that night we went looking for evidence in the dumpster behind Feliks’s restaurant,” he murmured into my hair. “Only you smell better.” He nipped my earlobe when I laughed. “You know, we don’t have to go back to your place just yet.”
“I’m not getting naked with you in Mrs. Haggerty’s bed.”
He nuzzled my neck as he unzipped my coat. “How about on the floor?”
“It’s freezing in here.”
“I can fix that, too.” He turned my face to his and kissed me. And in that moment, I was pretty sure he could fix anything. He pulled me against his chest and my knees turned to Jell-O.
Why not? I told myself. Mrs. Haggerty had been doing god knows what in my bedroom for the last four days. If I wanted to feel guilty for something, I had plenty of other sins to choose from.
Nick laid me back on the carpet, his hands finding me under all my layers. I turned my head as he moved down my body, kissing a trail down my neck. One of Mrs. Haggerty’s dog-eared paperbacks lay on the floor beside me, the peeling spine label caught in the beam of Nick’s flashlight. The title of the book pinged something in my brain.
Goose bumps rippled over my body as I recognized the collection of Miss Marple stories.
It was the same book I’d seen in Penny Dupree’s closet.
Detective Tran was right. You could tell a lot about a person by their taste in books.
I just hadn’t paid enough attention to Penny Dupree’s.