The Case Of The Cupid Caper

Chapter 9

After I left the newspaper, I decided to stop by the post office and speak to Wilma about Ms. Cupid. It was true that I had casually brought the subject up in the past, and she’d laughed off the suggestion, but it wouldn’t hurt to bring it up again, and maybe I could even find a way to engage her in a dialogue about the articles I’d been publishing. If I got her into more of a discussion, maybe she’d slip up and say something revealing.

“Morning, Wilma,” I said as I approached the service counter.

“Callie. How can I help you today?”

“I just need stamps.”

She took some out of the drawer, and I handed her my credit card.

“How’s the newspaper business been treating you?” she asked as she rang me up.

“It’s going well. I just turned in my second Ms. Cupid story. Dex wants me to figure out who might be behind the service, and I think I might know.”

She raised a brow. “Really? Who?”

“Doris Jenner.”

Willa paused as the credit card machine processed my purchase. “Doris? I guess she does know a lot of people, but I wonder if she’s clever enough to do what Ms. Cupid has been doing.”

“What do you mean clever enough?”

Wilma handed my card back to me after the purchase processed. “Doris is a very sweet woman who has been a staple in the community for a lot of years. She knows a lot of people, so from that standpoint, I can see why you might consider that she might be the one behind the matches, but figuring out who would best be suited to be matched with applicants is a skill that, if done right, would require a good amount of intuition and insight.”

I slowly bobbed my head. “I get what you’re saying. While Doris is sweet as pie, she isn’t the sort that strikes you as being overly bright. You think I’m looking for someone with a superior intellect. Someone who is more observant than others. Maybe someone who can read subtle clues and recognize patterns.”

“In a nutshell, yes.”

“Someone like you.” I pointed out.

“Yes, someone like me, but I can assure you that I’m not the person you are looking for.”

“If you were the person I was looking for, would you tell me?”

“Absolutely not.” She smiled.

So based on this exchange, it was still equally likely that Wilma was both Ms. Cupid and not Ms. Cupid. “Any idea who Ms. Cupid might be if, in fact, it’s not you?”

Wilma paused; I imagined to consider the question. “Actually, I might need to think about this for a while. Offhand, however, the Cunningham sisters come to mind.”

“I thought of them as well. They’ve lived in the community forever, they know a lot of people, and they are both very intelligent. I did consider the fact that neither are married, so I’m not sure they have the background they might need in matters of the heart to make the pairings.”

“That is true,” Wilma admitted. “I honestly can’t remember if either of the sisters has even dated seriously. Like I said, the question of who might be matching up all the single people in our community is a complex one, and I’ll need to think about for a bit. If I come up with anything, I’ll text you if you want to leave me your number.”

I jotted down my cell number and pushed it across the counter.

“Do you know if Cass has figured out what happened to Dale Conover?” Wilma asked, effectively changing the subject. “Most everyone who stops in has something to say about it, but no one seems to know what’s really going on.”

“I know he’s working on it, but I haven’t seen him or talked to him in any depth since Tuesday. I guess if he figures it out, we’ll know.”

“Quite a few of my customers think that the person who burned down the man’s house with him in it was an acquaintance of the romantic sort. Probably an ex.”

“So, Dale dated frequently?” I asked. I’d never met or even heard of the guy before his name popped up as part of my Ms. Cupid research.

Wilma chuckled. “Like a dog in heat. And he wasn’t the sort to keep time with one woman at a time. I was surprised to hear that he was one-half of one of the matches. I really can’t imagine why he would have applied with Ms. Cupid when he clearly wasn’t the settling down type.”

I thought back to the brief discussion I’d had with Lissa. I’d heard about the Dale and Lissa match through another party who’d been told by Lissa that she’d first met Dale after Ms. Cupid had matched them. I called and spoke to Lissa, who confirmed this, which is when I arranged to meet with her on the day of the fire. I normally would have called and spoken to Dale as well, but in this case, I hadn’t. Lissa had insisted that it would be best if she made all the arrangements and that we met at his residence, which was where he worked. That had sounded fine to me, so I left it at that, but now that I thought about it, I really had no evidence that Dale had even been a client of Ms. Cupid. I guess I just assumed as much, but not every match was between two clients. Could it have been that Dale was matched with Lissa, but had never actually applied? I realized this might be worth looking into. I really didn’t have any evidence that Lissa and Dale had been a Ms. Cupid match other than the verbal assurance from Lissa that she had indeed been paired up by the somewhat famous matchmaker.

“I should get going,” I said to Wilma. “I have interviews to get to before my volunteer shift at the shelter this afternoon.”

“I heard you were doing that. Good for you. It’s really something special Naomi is doing with those animals she takes on.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I’ve been thinking of adopting a small dog. One who I can bring to work with me. Of course, I’d need a well-behaved non-barker. I can’t have a dog who would bother the customers who came in. I don’t suppose any of the dogs you work with come to mind?”

“How large a dog would you like?”

“Maybe midsize. I know I said small, but now that I think about it, I wouldn’t want a dog so small that I had to carry it everywhere. I also wouldn’t want one of those monster dogs that wouldn’t fit in the passenger seat of my car.”

“There is an older golden retriever named Maggie, who might work for you. She’s a quiet dog whose elderly owner adopted when she was just a pup. The owner had to go into assisted living, so she was forced to find a new home for Maggie. Naomi is being very particular about who she chooses to adopt the dog. She’s looking for a mature woman with a quiet home. Someone who likes to walk, since Maggie enjoys a daily stroll, and someone who won’t leave her home by herself a lot of the time.”

“She sounds perfect for me. I sound perfect for her. Is she well behaved?”

“Very. If you’re interested, you should call Naomi right away. I think she is going to choose a new mom for Maggie very soon.”

“I’ll call her right now. Maggie, you said. I think Maggie and I will get along just fine.”

I thought so as well and suspected that Naomi would agree.

After I left the post office, I headed toward Cass’s office. If he was in, maybe he’d have a few minutes to discuss the thoughts that had run through my mind while speaking to Wilma. I know that on some level he considered Lissa to be a suspect in Dale’s death simply because while she called him incessantly, it didn’t appear that he’d called her much at all after the first few weeks of going on their first date. At this point, I had to wonder if Dale and Lissa had even been matched by Ms. Cupid. Could Lissa have been lying about that?

Luckily, Cass was in his office when I arrived. I asked if he had a few minutes, and he said he did, so I sat down across the desk from where he was sitting.

“I was just at the post office speaking to Wilma, and she said something that got me to thinking.” I then launched into the explanation of how I’d first learned that Lissa and Dale had been a Ms. Cupid match and how since I’d never actually spoken to Dale, I only had Lissa’s word on that. “This led me to question the whole thing,” I said. “It was Lissa who suggested that I allow her to talk to Dale rather than contacting him personally, and it was Lissa who suggested we meet at his house.”

“So you think she may have orchestrated the meeting to provide an alibi of sorts for Dale’s murder?” Cass asked.

I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t know. I guess that seems sort of farfetched. But we’ve both felt that things seem off for some reason. Wilma told me that Dale was a player who dated often and usually dated more than one woman at a time. He doesn’t seem the sort who would sign up for Ms. Cupid, nor does he appear to be the type Ms. Cupid would match with someone who had come to her looking for love everlasting. And then there’s the fact that after a brief period as a couple, Dale stopped calling Lissa while she continued to call him. What if Lissa met Dale through some other means than Ms. Cupid? What if my intel was incorrect and they hadn’t been a Ms. Cupid pairing? What if when I called Lissa, she jumped at the chance to make their connection out to be something more than it was, so when I brought up Ms. Cupid, she went with it?”

“So again, are you saying that you think Lissa used the setup and the meeting you had planned as a way of diverting suspicion away from herself after she’d decided to kill the man who probably had already moved on from her?”

I shrugged. “It’s a theory. I can’t say that it’s a good theory, but it is a theory.”

“It’s actually not a bad theory,” Cass agreed. “I’ll look into it further. It has been in the back of my mind all along that there was something off about the relationship between Lissa and Dale. I even looked into Lissa’s background a bit. It seems she was in therapy after her parents died in a house fire when she was twelve.”

“That seems significant. Who raised her after her parents died?”

“Her brother, who is eight years older than her. I suspect that he’s the reason she moved to Foxtail Lake in the first place. I don’t have all the details yet, but I do plan to dig around some more.”

“Call on line two,” Gwen had poked her head in through Cass’s office door, scowled at me, and then delivered her message.

Cass picked up the phone. “Deputy Wylander here.”

I watched his face as he listened to whoever was on the other end of the line. I could tell right off that the news he was receiving wasn’t of the pleasant sort. After a minute, he thanked the caller and then hung up. He looked at me. “There has been another house fire and according to an anonymous source, another death by fire.”

“Who?” I gasped.

“Mayor White.”