The Gift of the Magpie Page 22

  “Any exciting plans for tomorrow?” Michael asked as we settled into bed.

  “Continuing to sort Harvey’s papers,” I said. “And supervising any other Helping Hands projects that haven’t already knocked off till after Christmas. And you? More manure?”

  “No, the forecast is for rain on and off all day,” he said. “The boys and I are going down to Trinity to help with the shelter photography project. They’re moving on to the cats.”

  “Awesome,” I said. Or maybe I just thought the word. Fine either way. Michael was already uttering his not-quite-snoring noises, and I could feel myself sinking into slumber.

  Chapter 26

  Wednesday, December 23

  When I arrived at the furniture store the next morning, already soaked from rain blowing in under my umbrella, I found the chief and Aida already there, poking around.

  “Nothing wrong, I hope,” I said as I shed my rain gear.

  “Everything seems okay now,” Aida said. “But someone set off the security system three times last night, all between one and four a.m.”

  “Yikes,” I said. “You’d think they’d learn their lesson the first time.”

  “It might not have been the same would-be intruders,” the chief said. “And there’s also the possibility that they were hoping we’d decide the alarm was malfunctioning and turn it off.”

  “No sign that anyone actually got in, though,” Aida said. “All the stuff seems to be exactly the way we left it.”

  “I will be interested in finding out if any of my suspects have alibis for last night,” the chief said. “But I’m not optimistic. Most of the folks on Beau Street would have been fast asleep at that hour. And Mr. Brimley and Mrs. Gudgeon both keep their cars in their garages, so unless someone happened to get up and glance outside at the exact moment they were coming or going, we won’t get anything there.”

  “What about Tabitha?” I asked. “Is she still in town?”

  “She has taken refuge in the Clay County Motel,” the chief said. “A place with a long history of turning a blind eye to suspicious behavior. I’m not expecting any particularly reliable information on her movements. They claim she was in her room all night, both last night and the night of Mr. Dunlop’s murder—”

  “Wait—she was in town already Monday night?”

  “Yes.” The chief shook his head. “And while your nephew Kevin hasn’t yet found any conversations between her and Harvey, he can’t prove that they never talked. And she seems to know things she could only have gotten from Harvey. So she’s still very much a suspect, both for the murder and last night’s attempted break-ins.”

  “And the Haverhills?” I asked. “Is there some reason they’re not at the top of your list?”

  The chief sighed.

  “I took a close look at the Haverhills,” he said. “Particularly Morris, since he was the one who hung around the longest the day before Mr. Dunlop was killed. After I’d been interviewing Morris for a while, he got a little excited, said how dare I suspect him, and after quite a bit of useless vituperation, he finally said something useful—that he’d left Caerphilly at four in the afternoon and driven straight home, although it took him longer than usual because of the traffic, and did I want to inspect his thingie to prove what time he went through all those tollbooths around Richmond.”

  “His thingie?” I echoed. “He means his E-ZPass transponder, I suppose. Can you inspect those to find out where someone’s been?”

  “Not that I know of,” the chief said. “But you can request the records on a particular transponder. Which I did—and that confirmed his story. He left here early enough to hit a series of tollbooths in the Richmond area between five fifteen and five forty-five. And didn’t return here until the following morning. While I was at it, I got the records on his brother and sister. Both of them went home even earlier than he did and came back later the following day. And remember the Chinese delivery Mr. Ernest Haverhill made such a point of mentioning?”

  “Because they were hoping it gave them an alibi.”

  “Yes.” He chuckled. “I called the restaurant and got an earful about the Haverhills. Apparently, when the driver arrived, Ms. Haverhill was short on cash, so she started yelling for her brothers to find her some. First one brother then the other comes running up to empty his wallet, and they finally had to raid their spare change jar to make the last couple of dollars. No tip, of course, though apparently that’s not unusual. So we have pretty solid confirmation that they were all there in Farmville at ten thirty p.m.”

  “Which doesn’t help with their alibis, since Dad thinks he was killed between five and seven thirty in the morning,” I said. “One of them could have driven back any time after the deliveryman left and got here in plenty of time to kill Harvey. Taking a roundabout way here to avoid the toll readers. Or taken the transponder out of their car.”

  “Possibly,” the chief said. “But the Chinese restaurant owner steered me to a neighboring doughnut shop that can alibi them for the morning. Apparently after I called to notify them, they dropped by for three coffees to fuel their trip down here, and were, in the words of the doughnut shop owner, “even nastier than usual” over a slight mistake in their order. If the autopsy shows that Harvey was killed a little earlier than your father’s preliminary estimate, it might just be possible for one of them to have done it and gotten back to Farmville in time—but only just.”

  “A pity,” I said. “I think they’re the least likable suspects you’ve got, and considering the competition, that’s saying something.”

  “Yes.” The chief shook his head. “So if any evidence comes up to invalidate their alibis, I will gladly move any of the Haverhills back to the top of my suspect list. For the moment, Ms. Fillmore and Mr. Dunlop’s neighbors are looking much more plausible.”

  Just then the bell over the door opened and Judge Jane and Dad strode in.

  “There you are,” Judge Jane said to the chief. “Debbie Ann thought you’d be down here. Ellie and I have been up since dawn, working on the information we found in that ledger—about people who might hold a grudge against Harvey because of their family losing money in the Farmers and Mechanics Bank failure.”

  “A fascinating bit of local history,” Dad said, with great enthusiasm.

  “But does it have anything to do with my murder case?” the chief asked.

  “No idea,” Judge Jane said. “I can tell you who’s still around here whose family was damaged by the Dunlops’ bank failure. If this murder had happened back in the thirties, you’d have your suspects.”

  “But it happened yesterday, and the bank failure was more than eighty years ago.” Chief Burke had raised one eyebrow as if to express doubt.

  “Yes, and I agree that it might be a little farfetched, someone still holding a grudge after so long.”

  “This is Virginia,” Dad said. “There are people still arguing over who did what to whom in the Civil War.”

  “True,” Judge Jane said. “At any rate, no idea if the bank failure had something to do with the murder. But if it did, we can tell you some of the people you’d need to look at.”

  “Only some of the people?” The chief didn’t look happy at that.

  “The ledger contained twenty-three names representing nineteen individuals or families,” Judge Jane said. “Ten of them still have descendants in town.”

  “What happened to the other nine?” the chief asked. “People don’t just disappear.”

  “For all practical purposes, some of these did,” Judge Jane said. “We’re talking eighty-four years, remember? In four cases the family died out. The other five just drop out of the town records over the years. Two of them right after the bank failure, so I’m betting they’re people who lost everything they had and went elsewhere in search of work. Anyway, we’re going to keep looking and see what we can find out about those missing five. Here’s the scoop on the ten who are still around.”

  She handed the chief a sheet of pape
r and he studied it for a few moments.

  “Some pretty respectable families here,” he said.”

  “Who probably had nothing to do with Harvey’s demise,” Judge Jane said. “Which means this probably isn’t going to do a thing to help solve your case—unless we come across some sign that one of these folks has been bad-mouthing the Dunlops or making threats or … whatever.”

  The chief nodded.

  “Sorry, Henry,” Judge Jane said. “I know so far all I’ve done is add to your workload. We’ll keep looking. If there’s something useful, we’ll find it. I have to admit, though, this is pretty interesting. Ellie and I are thinking we might write a little local history book about this, once we finish researching it. Those were interesting times. We could add in the Feds seizing everybody’s gold. That had some interesting local ramifications.”

  “Seizing everybody’s gold?” The chief looked curious. “For real? I thought they mostly seized moonshine.”

  “That, too.” She chuckled. “Apparently the economists figured out that one of the things causing the Depression—or maybe making it worse—was people hoarding gold. Don’t ask me how—I’m no economist. But there probably was a lot of gold hoarding—people squirreling away gold coins because they didn’t trust that their paper money would still be worth anything if things got any worse. So about the time he closed the banks, Roosevelt told the U.S. Treasury to stop minting gold coins, and he sent out an order that anyone who had more than a token number of gold coins had to turn them in for paper money.”

  “I can’t imagine that being popular,” the chief said.

  “It certainly wasn’t,” Judge Jane agreed. “The bank closure didn’t hit my family too hard, because there weren’t but a few of us high-falutin’ enough to have a bank account. Most of the old-timers, at least in my family, liked to be able to put their hands on their money at a moment’s notice. And none of this paper nonsense. But then when the government made everyone turn in their gold—well, I had an uncle who did hard time because of that.”

  “For hoarding gold coins?” I asked.

  “Well, that and taking a potshot at the Fed who came to arrest him.” She shook her head. “The Feds take a dim view of such goings-on. And—”

  Evidently her phone had buzzed. She glanced at it, then did a double take and looked at it more closely over her glasses.

  “Now this is interesting,” she said. “Ms. Ellie found an article from ten years ago about the Farmers and Mechanics Bank closure.”

  “I don’t remember seeing anything about it,” the chief said. “And I tend to read the Clarion pretty closely.”

  “It wasn’t in the Clarion.” Judge Jane shook her head. “The Caerphilly Historical Society’s newsletter.”

  “Well, that explains it,” I said. The now-defunct society, which locals had nicknamed the Pruitt Mutual Appreciation Society, had been more about social status than history, and had fallen apart when the Pruitts had been ousted from power and left town.

  “Hardly anyone actually read the Historical Society’s newsletter,” I said. “Not even their members.”

  “I didn’t know they even had one,” Dad said.

  “I’ve never seen it before, myself,” Judge Jane said. “Then again, if this is anything to go by, we weren’t missing much. I’ll send you a copy.”

  My phone dinged and I pulled it out to look at what she’d sent. I saw Dad and the chief doing the same.

  If the article was typical of the literary output of the Caerphilly Historical Society then she was right—it was no surprise that their newsletter went largely unread. The article was wordy, convoluted, and occasionally even ungrammatical. It was marred by racism, anti-Semitism, misogynism, classism, and every other ism I could think of. The author—a Pruitt, of course: Mrs. J. R. Pruitt—was clearly fighting a futile rearguard battle against Roosevelt and the New Deal. For that matter, she was arguably still touting Robert E. Lee for sainthood. But I’d have just rolled my eyes and muttered “consider the source,” except for a little bombshell hidden in the last few sentences.

  “‘Who knows where the millions local citizens lost after the Farmers and Mechanics Bank closed went?’” I read aloud. “Ugh.”

  “Badly constructed sentence, I agree,” the chief said.

  “And she conveniently fails to mention all the money people lost when the Pruitts’ own bank closed,” I pointed out.

  “And there’s no way the Dunlops’ bank had millions,” Judge Jane said. “It was a small backwater bank in a small backwater county. No offense, but we are. The Pruitts’ bank was much larger, and I don’t even think it had millions to lose.”

  “And yet she goes on to say ‘Are Wilberforce Dunlop’s descendants still squatting on wealth stolen from the hardworking citizens of Caerphilly?’” Dad quoted. “You’d think she was trying to stir people up against Harvey.”

  “Doesn’t actually name him,” Judge Jane said.

  “Doesn’t have to,” I replied. “It mentions the Dunlops, and he’s the only one in town. Everyone knew who they meant.”

  “Who knows the whereabouts of the millions local citizens lost in the closure of the Farmers and Mechanics Bank?” the chief said. “Sorry; that sentence really bothered me. Getting back to the business at hand—yes, I can see that the article would have been inflammatory. But it was published—and largely ignored—ten years ago. Why would it inspire someone to kill Harvey now?”

  The same question had occurred to me, and I was texting a question to Ms. Ellie.

  “Good point,” Judge Jane said. “If I thought someone had stolen millions from my family, I wouldn’t brood over it for ten years and then bean them with a spittoon. I’d go over and have it out with them. So I’m not sure I buy the revenge angle. But greed works. Doesn’t have to be someone whose family lost money. Anyone who thinks there’s loot for the taking might go after it.”

  “Aha!” I said. “The Historical Society newsletters were only added to the library’s collection a few weeks ago. A bequest from a Mrs. Wilhelmina Pruitt Blaine, who died earlier this year.”

  “It would be a Pruitt,” Judge Jane muttered.

  “Were there any Blaines on your list of people who lost money to the Dunlops?” I asked.

  Judge Jane nodded. The chief suddenly sat up straight.

  “I remember her,” he said. “Old Mrs. Blaine, I mean. Up until a couple of years ago, when she went downhill, she used to sneak out of the nursing home regularly and shoplift decorating magazines from the drugstore. Architectural Digest and Better Homes & Gardens, mostly. And now I remember where I’ve seen Mrs. Gudgeon before. She’s the old lady’s daughter. We used to have her down at the station right regularly, picking up her mother and taking her back home.”

  “So maybe Mrs. Gudgeon was brought up believing the Dunlops ruined her family,” Dad said. “That would give her a motive.”

  “More probably she only found out about it when she cleared out her mother’s belongings and took the newsletters to the library,” I suggested.

  “Either way, she had a reason to hate Mr. Dunlop, and it could explain the timing.” The chief looked happier. In fact, his expression reminded me of the way Lurker and Skulker, our barn cats, looked when they’d finally pounced on a particularly elusive mouse. “Convey my compliments to Ms. Ellie. I think I’ll drop by the library right now to take a look at these newsletters in person and get the specifics about when the library took possession of them. And then I’ll go have another chat with Mrs. Vera Blaine Gudgeon.”

  He left, looking more cheerful. Judge Jane, Dad, and I settled in to get some work done on Harvey’s papers.

  “I’m only going to do a little of this,” Judge Jane said. “I’m hosting the big family Christmas Eve all-day potluck and barbecue, and I need to get home in time to clean up a bit.”

  “And Christmas Eve is tomorrow.” I looked at the boxes still left and shook my head. “I can’t stay too long, either—Michael and I are helping chaperone the m
iddle-school sleepover at church. I need to get home and pack for the four of us.”

  “If I weren’t here I’d be trying to make peace between Rose Noire and your grandfather,” Dad said. “I can put in as many hours as you want.”

  “Mother would object if you stayed out too long,” I said. “Let’s put in a few solid hours and then knock off till Boxing Day.”

  They both agreed, and we buried our noses in the file folders.

  “I’ve found something!” Dad exclaimed, leaping up and almost knocking over Judge Jane’s card table.

  Chapter 27

  “Must be darned exciting,” Judge Jane grumbled, although she also hurried over to see what Dad had found.

  “Here.” Dad held out a sheet of yellowed paper for us to read.

  “A threatening letter,” I said.

  “An unsigned threatening letter,” Dad corrected. “Although I think we can guess who sent it from this part: ‘I want the money you owe me—my mother’s share of the money your father stole.’”

  “Not for certain.” Judge Jane shook her head. “Always possible it could be from someone who lost money in the bank failure. But given the wording, my money would be on the Haverhill’s father. From the research Ellie and I did, Aristede Senior only had the one sister, Irma. She married a man named Buford Haverhill and left town.”

  “A pity the Haverhills are alibied,” I said.

  “They could have hired someone to knock off Harvey,” Dad said. He pointed to part of the letter. “Look at that bit—where it says ‘I know someone who can make you sorry you ever crossed me.’”

  “Sinister,” I agreed. “But wouldn’t that take a lot of money?” I asked.

  “Hiring one of those suave assassins who leaves no clue behind and takes his secrets to the grave would take a lot of money,” Judge Jane said. “Wouldn’t cost very much to find a thug to lean on someone—you might even know someone who owes you a favor. But dolts like that aren’t usually very good at getting away with murder, and they don’t have a lot of incentive to keep their traps shut.”