Chapter 52
LILY-ANN
“We brainstormed a little before you arrived,” Lily-Ann told CJ.
“I—I can see that.” CJ glanced nervously at Ocean, then at the whiteboard. “That’s a lot of questions.”
“Don’t worry, dear,” Mrs. B said, as CJ helped her into a chair. “We’re in this together. And we’ve cracked harder cases in the past.”
“Cases?” Nicholas asked.
“Case,” Sophie corrected. “We’ve cracked a harder case in the past.”
Mrs. B tsked at them but Lily-Ann kept watching CJ, wondering about her.
She certainly didn’t come across as a flight risk, wearing an oversized stripy sweater and jeans.
Her signature eyeliner was missing, but she did have on red lipstick.
She didn’t look like a killer either, but the jury was still out about that.
Ocean handed CJ a glass of tolerable Malbec and said, “I’m glad you’re back.”
“Thank you,” she replied.
There was a pause, or perhaps Lily-Ann imagined the pause, as the two of them looked at each other. So she said, “We have a few questions.”
“I noticed.” CJ gave an uncharacteristically timid smile. “But first I want to thank you. All of you. I already thanked Mrs. B for, um…”
“It’s nothing, darling,” Mrs. B said.
That was such an obvious lie that Lily-Ann almost spoke up.
Using her property as collateral for this near-stranger was absolutely not nothing.
CJ owed her a debt that she’d never repay, and Lily-Ann wanted to ensure that she understood that—that they both understood that.
However, before she could open her mouth, she was struck by the notion that if Anthony were there he’d give her a look, so she didn’t say anything.
“I’m a little horrified that Mrs. B bailed me out,” CJ continued, looking to each of them in turn. “But mostly grateful. This was the worst week of my life and—and Mrs. B told me you’re trying to prove my innocence, and I can’t thank you enough.”
“Now that is genuinely nothing,” Mrs. B told her. “Everyone needs a hobby, and I never had a knack for pottery. We positively enjoy investigating.”
Lily-Ann frowned at CJ. “Even if we find you guilty.”
“Which we won’t!” Mrs. B blurted. “Because you’re not.”
“Of course not,” Sophie said.
“Still,” Ocean told CJ, “Lily-Ann’s right to warn you. ‘Investigating’ sounds good, but ‘gossiping, meddling, and prying’ not so much.”
Mrs. B pointed her glass of rosé at Ocean. “Stop tormenting her, you ungrateful child.”
“I’m just saying there’s no telling what we’ll do, because we don’t know what we’re doing.”
“We might even find evidence against her,” Lily-Ann said, trying to move things along.
“There is no evidence against her,” Mrs. B said, “because she’s not guilty.”
“The police found fifty-five thousand dollars in cash in a bag with her name on it.”
Mrs. B blinked. “Pardon? Fifty-five thousand what?”
Lily-Ann caught CJ’s gaze. “Were you aware of that?”
“Yes, I—the detective told me.”
Lily-Ann didn’t speak, waiting for the silence to become oppressive, to increase the pressure on CJ. She personally never minded an extended silence—in fact, she found them restful—but she knew that was a minority opinion.
However, Sophie spoke first. “So what do you know about the cash?”
“Nothing,” CJ said, looking at her hands. “Like I told the police, Frank might’ve wanted to surprise me. He was generous, and he liked to make the occasional grand gesture. He never did anything like that before though, and cash wasn’t really his style so … I don’t know.”
Nicholas asked, “Did he often keep that kind of cash around the house?”
“No. Never. Not that I saw.”
“And you would’ve seen?”
“Absolutely.” She tilted her chin up slightly.
“I worked for him but we were partners. Well, he paid me, he was my employer, but my job wasn’t to assist him, not really.
My job was to act as an extension of him.
And to do that, I needed to know what he wanted.
Not what he said he wanted, what he really wanted. ”
“That’s a lot of trust,” Sophie said.
CJ gave a quick little smile. “I was very good at my job.”
“Did your job change as he got older?” Ocean asked, an echoing smile appearing for an instant on her face. “In my experience, caretakers sometimes think they know better than their elderly charges—and they’re absolutely right.”
“Ha!” Mrs. B said.
“It changed a little the past few years,” CJ admitted. “As Frank’s world shrank.”
“Karina thinks he was paying you to keep quiet about your affair,” Lily-Ann lied, to see how CJ responded.
“No, she doesn’t!” CJ scoffed. “Not even if she said she does. She knows that’s a lie.”
“Hm,” Lily-Ann said, and doodled fifty thousand in her notebook because she wanted CJ to worry about what she was writing.
“You didn’t know he was withdrawing money from an ATM?” Ocean asked.
“No, which is odd. That he didn’t tell me. Also, he never used cash. And if he did, he wouldn’t use an ATM, a concierge would’ve delivered it.”
“A bank concierge?” Hamilton asked.
“When you have Frank’s kind of money, the bank comes to you.”
“So you know nothing about the cash,” Lily-Ann said. “Not even where Karina found it?”
CJ shook her head. “The officer didn’t mention that.”
“How about the searches on your laptop, for ways to murder an old man? The easiest ways to kill a man in Frank’s position?”
“That’s not my laptop!” Red spots appeared on CJ’s cheeks. “It’s a household laptop.”
Nicholas spoke more gently. “Did anyone use it besides you and Frank?”
“Not that I ever saw. No. But anybody could have.”
“Was it password protected?” Hamilton asked.
“No. No.”
Lily-Ann tapped her pen against her notebook. “Did you search for ways to kill a man in his condition?”
“To kill Frank?” CJ asked.
“Is that a yes?”
“No! No, that’s not a yes.”
“So you think that between four and six months ago, Frank himself searched how to painlessly murder an old man?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what Frank searched.”
“Who else has access to the laptop,” Nicholas asked, “other than you and Frank?”
“Karina. The cleaners, the gardeners. Anyone we ever invited into the house.”
“We?” Lily-Ann asked, then tapped a quick message on her phone.
“They. We. I did a lot of the inviting. Anyone could’ve used the laptop.”
“Anyone could have,” Sophie said, “but who would have?”
“I don’t know. Nobody.” CJ started crying silently. “Ev … everyone loved him.”
Apparently that was too much for Ocean. She crossed the room, slipped onto the sofa beside CJ, and put her arm around her.
CJ buried her face in Ocean’s shoulder and sniffled. “Everyone loved Frank.”
“Possibly not everyone,” Lily-Ann said, because the moment called for rationality, not sympathy.
Mrs. B tsked. “Lily-Ann!”
“Unless you think he tripped?”
CJ raised her head. “Of course I think he tripped!”
“Well, I think you’re lying about the online searches.”
“Why?” Mrs. B demanded. “Why would you think that?”
“Anything else is too bizarrely unlikely. Four months ago, someone else used CJ’s work computer to search for ways to kill her boss? And did you see how she reacted?”
“Like a person! There’s no reason to attack her.”
“We’re not here to attack CJ, Mrs. B,” Nicholas said. “We’re here to help her. However…”
“We can’t help her if she doesn’t tell the truth,” Hamilton continued, looking up from the group text Lily-Ann had sent, telling everyone to press CJ.
“That’s true.” Sophie’s sweet smile turned sympathetic. “I’m sorry, CJ, but he’s not wrong.”
“Very not wrong,” Nicholas said.
Sophie put her hand on Nicholas’s arm. “We’re the only people who won’t assume you’re guilty. It’s us or nobody. And we don’t care what’s legal, we only care about what’s right.”
“Is that—” CJ sniffled. “Is that true?”
“Yeah,” Ocean said. “All too true.”
“We don’t judge,” Lily-Ann told CJ. “None of us is in a position to judge. For example, I’ve searched for ways to poison Anthony.”
“You have? Why?”
“Curiosity,” Lily-Ann said.
CJ’s teary gaze flicked to Ocean. “Um…”
“No, I haven’t searched ways to get rid of Mrs. B,” Ocean said, giving her arm a squeeze, “but only because I already ordered an anvil from Acme.”
The joke eased the tension more than Lily-Ann liked, so she said, “And I’m not the only one with a problematic search history. Hamilton searched for commercially available drones able to deliver a package of C4 and a detonator.”
“What on earth?” Mrs. B sputtered.
“You did not!” Sophie said.
“I’m interested in the future of asymmetrical warfare,” Hamilton lied, surprisingly adept, considering that Lily-Ann had just invented that.
“Then there’s Nicholas,” Lily-Ann said. “However, in the interest of decorum, I won’t share the contents of a young man’s search history.”
“I like big toes and I cannot lie,” Nicholas said, at which Sophie tucked her feet more tightly beneath her on the couch.
“So you searched for ways to painlessly kill Frank,” Lily-Ann told CJ. “So what? That’s normal curiosity. We’re a morbid species.”
CJ fiddled with the cuffs of her overlarge sweater. She looked at Ocean, closed her eyes, then finally said, “Six or seven months ago, Frank started getting worse again. Tired and unhappy. Just … terribly unhappy. There was nothing acute, it was the combination of everything.”
“Getting old isn’t easy,” Mrs. B said.
“Yeah. His joints ached, he struggled to dress himself. He was getting brain fog. He took no joy in anything. Just discomfort. For a few months, things looked pretty dire.”
“That’s so tough,” Nicholas said.
“He was uncomfortable and confused,” CJ continued, “but not so confused that he didn’t know he was confused, which made it so much worse. The good news was, they adjusted his medications, his potassium … and he bounced back.” She smiled wistfully. “Frank was full of surprises.”
“Which leads us to the laptop?” Ocean prompted, her voice gentle.
CJ spoke so softly that Lily-Ann barely heard. “Frank didn’t want to linger. He told me a hundred times that nothing scared him more than spending the end of his life bedridden and confused. And with his money, they’d never let him die. They’d keep him alive even when there was no him left.”
“You wanted to help him.”
“I didn’t! I didn’t want to help him, not with that. But I owed him.”
Mrs. B reached out from her seat to pat Ocean’s knee. “We all need someone in our life who we can trust to do terrible things.”
“So you searched online for ways to help,” Lily-Ann said. “Doing your job for him, as always.”
“Exactly, yes,” CJ said, as if surprised that Lily-Ann understood. “That’s it exactly.”
Lily-Ann let her gaze skim the whiteboard as the conversation focused on Frank’s health and CJ’s emotions.
She was starting to suspect that she understood the basics of the murder.
However, she still struggled to link the facts she knew, the connections she suspected, and the as-yet-unresolved questions.
Primarily Sunny Wheeler, but also the money, the liquor bottle.
Still, nothing was tidy about human lives: even if she solved the primary riddles, she’d end up with pieces left over, with edges that didn’t quite fit together.
Her attention returned to the group when Ocean asked, “CJ, do you think you’re being framed?”