Telling Tails

Chapter 20

That wasn’t how I had planned things.

Everything seemed to happen next in slow motion. I moved toward Nicole, and at the same time she snatched the knife off the plate on the coffee table and grabbed Rose, pressing the serrated knife edge to the older woman’s neck. I came up short, one hand out in front of me in a stop motion.

“Don’t do this,” I said hoping she couldn’t see my arm shaking. I shouldn’t have let Rose and Mr. P. come with me. I should have taken a taxi. Or walked. Or tried to wrestle both of them out of the SUV.

“Back off,” Nicole said. Her voice was flat and cold.

I took a step backward and then another one, keeping my eyes locked on Rose’s face. She looked completely calm.

“I’m sorry, dear,” she said, reaching up to gently pat the arm that was pinning her tight to her captor’s body. “I shouldn’t have blurted that out. It was rude.”

I let my arm drop and tried to calculate whether I could rush Nicole before she could stab that knife into Rose’s neck. The math wasn’t in my favor.

“Do you mind if I ask about your grandmother?” Rose said. “You said she raised you.”

“Yes,” Nicole said.

“She must have loved you very much to take on that kind of responsibility.” She turned her head a little. “I have a grandson,” she continued. “The light of my life, and if anything happened to his mother and father I’d do the same thing. I couldn’t stand thinking about him being raised by strangers.”

Nicole’s eyes flicked away from my face for a moment. “That’s what Nana said. She said we were family and family sticks together.” Her face darkened and she tightened the arm around Rose’s chest.

“Your brother left when she died.”

I saw Nicole swallow hard. “I hate him,” she said, her voice suddenly raspy.

Rose sighed softly. “What did he do?” she asked.

She really wanted to know, I realized. She wasn’t stalling, trying to buy time. She really wanted to know what had driven Nicole Cameron to murder her brother and his wife.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Nicole said, so quietly I almost missed the words.

“It matters to you,” Rose said.

We stood frozen in place for what seemed like a very long moment. Then Nicole spoke again. “I had to go on a course, away, just for a few days, and Jeff said he would be around. Nana was taking beta-blockers for an irregular heartbeat but she was fine. She could have lived for a long time.”

“Oh, child,” Rose whispered.

“The doctor said she thought Nana had forgotten to take her pills.” A tear trailed down the younger woman’s cheek and she swiped it away with her free hand. “She wouldn’t have forgotten. There was nothing wrong with her memory.” She pressed her lips together for a moment. When she spoke again her voice was stronger. “The day she died, Jeff said she gave him some money and told him to go out and enjoy his life. But . . . but I know she wouldn’t have done that. She’d told me that it was time for Jeff to stand on his own two feet. And I knew she didn’t have any money. I think . . . think he replaced her pills with something else.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

“It took me more than a year to settle everything,” Nicole continued. “I had to borrow money to have a funeral. I had student loans. I couldn’t keep the house. And I didn’t even know where Jeff was.” She was staring right at me, but it was as if she didn’t even see me. “He didn’t even show up for the funeral.” Her mouth moved and she swallowed. “It wasn’t until I was cleaning out the house that I found out about the money.” She looked at me. “You know about the money, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It was gone. Every penny of it.”

“You’d been waiting a long time to get justice for your grandmother.” Nothing in Rose’s voice suggested she was in any kind of distress.

“I pretended I didn’t suspect anything,” Nicole said, and for the first time there was a hint of a smile on her face. “I pretended I was just happy to see Jeff when he came back. Nana always said patience is a virtue. When he told me he was planning on leaving Leesa, I knew it was time.”

“You set her up.” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and managed to move a couple of inches closer to Rose.

“Do you have a dog?” Nicole asked.

I shook my head. “I have a cat. Elvis.” It seemed to have been the right answer.

“Dogs love you no matter what you do,” she said. “You kick them; you don’t feed them. They still love you. Leesa was like that—all blind loyalty to someone who didn’t deserve it.”

“It was you in the pink hoodie,” Rose said.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“What did you use for the body? I know it actually wasn’t your brother.”

A hint of the smile again. “A first aid mannequin I borrowed from the hospital. I’m strong. It was easy to pull it across the floor.”

“And easy for you to move Jeff,” I said. “When you did kill him for real.”

“You set me up to see the whole thing,” Rose said.

Nicole shifted a little, leaning forward so she was in Rose’s line of sight. I took advantage of her shift in attention to move a step closer to them.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “Jeff told me the story about you and your friend’s granddaughter and the cell phone. When he said he was having the candlesticks delivered—kind of a screw-you to Leesa—and was leaving her that night, I knew you showing up without a cell phone would help the plan. I told him not to hit you hard. I knew the methohexital would knock you out long enough for us to leave. I help out at a clinic once a month at a nursing home in Rockport. The dentist uses it with some of the seniors. I thought it was pretty smart of me to take some instead of something from the hospital. I didn’t mean for you to get hurt.”

“I know you didn’t,” Rose said.

It felt as though we were doing good cop/bad cop, with Rose in the role of good cop, except really she was just being herself.

“You came up with the plan to frame Leesa,” I said. I moved my feet a couple of inches closer. If I could get near enough to them, I was hoping I could knock the knife away from Rose’s neck.

“I told Jeff it would buy him some time and then in a few days he could get in touch with someone.”

“Leesa really was with you the night of the so-called murder.”

Nicole nodded, and it seemed to me she relaxed her grip on Rose just a little. “I put something in her coffee, and when she fell asleep I went over to the cottage.”

“You signed in to the hospital’s server from your laptop here and used a remote-access app on your phone to connect to the laptop.” Mr. P. had explained the process to me.

Yes.” Nicole nodded again.

“I don’t understand,” Rose said. “If you were setting up Leesa for your brother’s murder, why did you give her an alibi?”

“Because it also gave you an alibi,” I said, keeping my eyes locked on Nicole’s face. “In case anyone questioned whether or not it was actually you doing that refresher course.”

“And I needed everyone to think he was alive so I could figure out where he’d stashed Nana’s money. I needed to look around the cottage to see if I could find a clue,” Nicole said. “But his body turned up sooner than I’d planned for, and somehow Leesa started putting the pieces together.” She looked at me. “What was I supposed to do? I had to kill her.”

Silence hung between us for a moment. Nicole spoke first. “How did you figure it out?”

“Leesa was training to run a half marathon to surprise your brother.”

Nicole shook her head and gave me a wry smile. “She was always trying to do things to make him happy. He wasn’t worth it.”

“She called the trainer’s house looking for him that night. His wife said it was during the show Gotta Dance, but there were two episodes for the show that night—one early and one late, at the show’s regular time. She was half-asleep when the phone rang and she mixed up the times. When I realized she didn’t know there had been two episodes of the show, I remembered you saying that you and Leesa were watching a rerun of Murder Ink.”

“It wasn’t on.”

“No.” I shifted my weight again and managed to edge forward a little more. Then from the corner of my eye I saw something move in the hallway beyond the living room, a flutter of something pale yellow. Mr. P.’s golf shirt. Good Lord, what was he doing?

All I could think was to keep talking, to keep Nicole Cameron’s attention focused in my direction. I pointed at the front window. “The kids across the street were making a movie. In a couple of shots I could make out your sister-in-law’s car in the driveway. You drove it over to your brother’s house. The thing is, when you came back, you turned the front wheels hard to the right, the way you always do with your own.”

“I didn’t even notice,” she said. “We lived on a hill when I first learned to drive. It’s a habit I can’t seem to break.”

Directly behind Rose and Nicole, there was an opening to the hallway, right in my line of sight. Mr. P. appeared there carrying a large glass mixing bowl. He looked at the hand holding the knife to Rose’s neck. Then he looked at me. He held up three fingers.

It was crazy and foolish and dangerous and a whole lot of other words. I gave what I hoped was an almost imperceptible nod. Mr. P. held up one finger.

“I’m sorry I had to kill her,” Nicole said.

“We know that,” Rose said.

“She figured it out. She said she smelled antiseptic on her hoodie and I was the only person she knew who smelled like that.” Just the way I’d figured out that it was Jeff Cameron, not Leesa, who had attacked Rose because he smelled like the muscle rub, like licorice.

Mr. P. held up a second finger.

Nicole shook her head. She looked a little sad. “It was her or me and I picked me,” she said. “And I’m picking myself now.”

Mr. P. held up three fingers and launched himself forward, raising the glass bowl in the air. At the same time I lunged at Nicole. I grabbed the hand holding the knife as the mixing bowl made contact with the side of her head.

She swayed and I yanked the knife free and threw it across the room. Nicole’s eyes rolled back in her head and she crumpled to the floor. Mr. P. dropped the bowl and wrapped his arms around Rose.

Her scarf had fallen to the floor. I picked it up, hands shaking, knelt down and tied Nicole Cameron’s hands together behind her back using pretty much every knot I knew. I checked to be sure she was breathing and had a pulse. She did.

I got to my feet. My knees were trembling. “Good aim,” I said to Mr. P.

“You, too, my dear,” he said.

“Are the police on their way?” I asked.

He nodded. “They should be. I told Debra to call them if I wasn’t back in five minutes.”

I put a hand on Rose’s arm. “Are you all right?” I said.

“Of course I am,” she said, her smile encompassing both Mr. P. and me. “I told you everything would work out.”