Chapter 17
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When Doreen woke the next morning and got her morning routine completed, she phoned Uncle Zev, who had contacted her in the first place.
“What?” he snapped.
She waited for a moment and then replied, “That’s an interesting greeting. I wasn’t expecting the hostility.”
“Nothing good is happening in my world right now,” he declared, “so, if you’re looking for a good and happy reception, you missed the mark.”
“I understand that life has gotten pretty rough for you,” she began. “I was hoping that maybe you and your niece would be willing to talk to me.”
“Talk about what?” he asked. “Since we moved here, it’s been nothing but a disaster.”
She winced and added, “I did hear that, and I’m so very sorry.”
“You might be sorry, but it doesn’t change anything,” he snapped, as his voice roughened. “Jillian’s really suffering right now.”
“I’m sure she is, but maybe, if she would talk to me, I could possibly get a different take on all this.”
“She’s already talked to the cops. I mentioned you, but she doesn’t want to talk to you again, at least she didn’t before.”
Just then a voice came through the phone, angry, yet obviously in pain, as Jillian said, “Let me talk to her.”
Immediately the phone switched hands, and a young woman spoke up. “I’ll meet you for lunch, although I won’t be eating anything.”
“Then why don’t I come to wherever you are?” Doreen offered. “You won’t have to go anywhere.”
After a moment of hesitation, she agreed. “Fine.” She provided the address.
Doreen asked, “When do you want me there?”
“Better sooner than later, before I change my mind. I won’t be talking very long.”
When the phone was handed back to her uncle, Zev said, “I’m amazed she wants to talk to you at all. She’s really hurting. I will not take it kindly if you hurt her too.”
“I’m not here to hurt her,” Doreen stated, trying to keep her tone calm. “All I want to do is get answers for her.”
“We definitely need those,” he muttered. “So, come on over, I guess.”
With that she ended the call, looked down at the animals, and said, “I guess we’re heading out pretty quick then.”
She got up and bustled around, getting everybody into leashes and harnesses, gathering her things, then headed out to the vehicle.
She wasn’t at all sure what she expected, but when she drove up to a middle-class home in Glenmore, with the Crown land rising up behind them and a big hill, she was quite surprised at how nice it was.
And yet there wasn’t any reason to be surprised.
There were a lot of these houses around, and they were all quite nice.
Yet somehow Doreen had expected them to be poor, considering the lack-of-customers complaint that Doreen kept hearing.
As she got out of her car with her animals, she walked up to the front door. Thaddeus poked his head out so he would be the first for anybody to see.
Doreen groaned. “Jillian didn’t say I could bring the animals.” When he just squawked at her, she shrugged. “I know. She didn’t say I couldn’t bring the animals either. It just feels as if we’re pushing the line.”
As it was, when the door opened, Zev saw the animals and stared at her, his eyebrows rising, and then he shrugged. “Who knows? Your pets might make Jillian feel better.”
“They are very comforting,” Doreen murmured.
She stepped inside and saw a young woman, early- or maybe mid-twenties, her face swollen and blotchy, as if she had spent the last week crying, which she most likely had.
Doreen smiled, introduced herself and then her animals.
Jillian bent down to give Mugs and Goliath cuddles, and both appreciated it.
“If you don’t mind,” Doreen added, when she stood up with a half laugh, “please say hello to Thaddeus, as well.”
At that, Thaddeus poked his head out from behind the fall of her hair and said, “I’m Thaddeus.”
She gasped and laughed. “Oh my, they are a sight for sore eyes. I used to have a dog, but we lost him about a year ago,” she murmured.
“It was one of the reasons I felt as if nothing was holding me there in Alberta, so there was no reason to stay any longer, and Barry was willing, so we just picked up and finally made the move. We’d both lived in Kelowna and Alberta, but we needed to settle on one location,” she murmured.
“Now, it’s one of those times when you have to look at life and the choices you made and wonder why all this would have happened. ”
Doreen smiled and nodded. “I’m sorry. Nothing like trying to come up with answers when there aren’t any to be had.”
“But this really doesn’t make any sense,” she whispered.
She led the way into a sitting-room-style living area, but it was very sparsely furnished.
“I’m staying here with my uncle. After my fiancé was killed, I just couldn’t stay in our small apartment without Barry.
Yet it is just around the corner from the restaurant, so it was close enough that we could walk back and forth to work, but not so close that we would be on top of each other. ”
“I doubt that being on top of each other would have been all that much of an upset either,” Doreen suggested. “It’s nice to have family around.” Jillian’s eyes welled up, and Doreen nodded. “Can you tell me what happened that night?”
“The same thing that I’ve told you and the detectives over and over again,” she wailed, “and nobody seems to believe me.”
“Can you go through it one more time and tell me?”
Shrugging, Jillian began, “Barry and I were there at the Rocking Horse, working on catering stuff, both tired and really worn out. We’d been working very long days, both of us.
Sometimes we wondered whether the move to BC was a good idea or not.
We talked about whether we should have just chucked it all and gone back home to Alberta again, even though we had jobs and were working and living and whatnot here in Kelowna.
It’s just that my Aunt Alice wasn’t the easiest person to work with,” she admitted, sliding a glance over at her uncle.
He nodded and agreed. “No, she wasn’t.”
“So, Barry and I wondered if we were in the right place,” Jillian murmured. “We had all kinds of plans for the restaurant. We could have done some really great things here,” she said, “but it just didn’t seem to matter what we suggested. … My aunt hated everything.”
“And was it that she hated the suggestions, or did she just hate change?” Doreen asked.
Uncle Zev interrupted, “My sister Alice has always hated change, so even having Barry and Jillian there to help her would already have been something she struggled with.”
“But she’s the one who invited us,” his niece protested. “She needed us as she was barely keeping her head above water.”
He nodded. “I know that, and I’m so sorry she struggled so much with it because I know how good you guys are.”
“Were,” she corrected. “I don’t think I ever want to work in a kitchen again.”
With that, the uncle winced, then looked back at Doreen and added, “This is obviously very difficult for her. Are you sure you need to be here?”
“Need to? Maybe not,” Doreen conceded, “but any information I can gather is a help.”
“I just can’t believe that anybody would think they could do something when the police haven’t been able to,” Jillian pointed out, looking at her.
“I work with the police as well,” Doreen said, “and we have solved an awful lot of cases recently, but it does take people talking and opening up in order to find out who’s hiding the truth.”
“I’m not hiding anything,” she declared, sitting up straighter.
“I’m not saying you are,” she murmured. “And I know this will be a difficult question, but do you have any idea who would want your fiancé dead?”
Immediately Jillian’s eyes filled with tears, and she shook her head. “I wouldn’t have thought for a moment that anybody would be against him. He’s just a big teddy bear.”
Doreen glanced over at the uncle, who was nodding. “Barry was a really nice young man.”
“Okay, so here’s another question. Is there any chance it was a case of mistaken identity?”
Jillian eyed her in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“I just mean that, if Barry had his hair up, maybe from the back he looked like somebody else.”
Her eyes widened. “You mean, like Aunt Alice?”
“It is something to consider, isn’t it? Alice was murdered right afterward, and maybe it was a case of the killer coming back to finish the job because he messed up the first time.”
Jillian sagged back and stared at Doreen. “I hadn’t considered that,” she whispered. “God, to think that Barry might have been killed by accident makes it even worse.”
“There’s no good way to die,” Doreen noted, “not like this. But it is something we have to consider. So, then you went to the bathroom.”
“Yes, Barry and I were working. It was late. I was tired, and I had to go to the bathroom. Barry and I had had a bit of an argument, and I was just fed up. I wanted to go home and to go to bed, but Aunt Alice had insisted we work late, get everything ready for the catering job set for lunch the very next day. To be honest, the catering was our thing. I told her how we could have done it all in the morning, but she didn’t want us to leave it to the very end. ”
Doreen didn’t say anything for a long moment. “And what was the catering job?”
“A lunch for thirty at the restaurant the next day in one of the back rooms,” she explained.
“It was an arrangement the restaurant had on an irregular basis with some of the local companies. They would bring in their employees, and everybody would have a business meeting over lunch,” she murmured.
“It was good money for my aunt, and it helped keep the restaurant going when times were tight, I guess,” she murmured.
“We didn’t have much choice, so we agreed. ”
Doreen nodded but didn’t say anything, hoping Jillian would say more.
“Let’s get real. I didn’t want to stay, but it was necessary. What wasn’t necessary were Aunt Alice’s constant negative comments.”
Doreen kept that little nugget in the back of her head. “Okay, so you were tired.”
“Yeah, we were both really tired, and I just wanted to go home. Aunt Alice said we had to finish, but I wanted to leave it for morning. I was pissed off at my aunt, which just seems so petty now,” she admitted.
“And after that?”
“After that, I needed a minute, so I just had to regroup in the bathroom,” she explained.
“When I came out of the bathroom, I headed down the hall to see Barry, anxious to apologize and to help, so we could go home, and that’s when I got hit.
When I woke up, I was on the floor in the hallway outside the bathroom.
I didn’t know what had happened and was pissed off and upset, thinking I must have tripped or something.
It didn’t occur to me that I had been attacked until I went around the corner to the kitchen, yelling for Barry and wondering what had happened to him. ”
“And then you saw him?”
“Yeah, he was on the floor.” Her tears welled up once again. “So, it’s not as if anybody else was there. I could tell because the place was empty. It was just us.”
“And you called the police?”
“Yes, I called the police immediately.” Then she shook her head.
“No, wait, not immediately. I went to him to see if I could help him—give him CPR or something. But then I saw the blood pooling around him on the floor. … Oh God,” she muttered.
“And I looked around the kitchen. I had been cutting up watermelon, had left the knife on the counter beside it. But when I returned, the bloody knife had been stabbed into the watermelon. It was the knife I had been using just minutes before.”
“Ah,” Doreen murmured.
“I didn’t kill him,” she cried out, the tears streaming down her face.
“I didn’t say you did, though I’m sure it was one of the things the cops would have picked up on pretty quickly. And when you say that you couldn’t do anything for him, what did you do then?”
“Sat there in shock, bawling. I called the cops somewhere along the line, but, before you ask, I don’t remember when or how, and that was it,” she said.
“They came, and I gave a statement. I was let go, and then they brought me back in the next day for questioning. Then the next day and the next day, and now I don’t even know where I’m at,” she wailed, her voice starting to fade with fatigue.
“Okay, so now that you’ve had a chance to think it over and to look back on it, does anything stand out to you?”
She stared at her and shook her head. “No, I’ve gone over it time and time again.”
“So, when you were in the bathroom, you didn’t hear anything.”
She winced. “No, but I had my phone with me. I had put on some music and was scrolling through social media, just trying to get my head back together. I was pissed off and needed to get back on track, so I could get out there and help Barry.”
“How much time do you think you spent in there?”
“Ten minutes or more, but, when I came back out, I went down, and I don’t know how long I was out. And somewhere along the line, somebody killed Barry,” she whispered, her eyes welling up once more.
Doreen considered asking a few more questions, but that was about all that came to mind.
Jillian muttered, “Now you’re probably just like the police and think I did it.”
“Not at all. We also have to look at your aunt’s murder, which came right afterward.”
“I know, and that’s another reason everybody was so pissed off. As if it wasn’t bad enough that one of us was killed, either that killer or another killer came back to finish the job of killing Aunt Alice.”
“I can’t imagine there being two killers,” Doreen shared. “Still, stranger things have certainly happened, but I really can’t see it. My guess is a single killer.”
“But that makes no sense,” Jillian cried out. “My aunt may have had some enemies around here, but they wouldn’t have any reason to kill Barry.”
“Maybe not,” Doreen acknowledged, “but the fact is, somebody did, and, until we can get to the bottom of this, we don’t have any answers.”
“I don’t expect you’ll find any answers either,” she declared bitterly, “and I don’t think the cops are looking any further than me.”
“I think they are, but they certainly won’t tell you that.”
“You think so?” she asked, looking at Doreen hopefully.
“Yes, I do. They will look at everybody, and, when they finally get some evidence to point in one direction or another, then they’ll move forward with charges. Until then, we need to do what we can to get to the bottom of this ourselves.”