Not a Chance in Helen Read online

  Helen forced her own gaze downward.

  “Eleanora?” she tried to say, but the name caught in her throat.

  The familiar white hair that was always so perfectly coiffed looked tousled. Her head was propped up by a rolled kitchen towel, eyes wide and fixed ceiling-­ward. Her features were contorted like a Halloween mask, the drooping skin carved with lines that crossed her cheeks and brow.

  “Good God,” Helen breathed, taking a step back and turning to Biddle. “Is she dead?” she asked, though she realized what he’d say before he said it.

  The sheriff had removed his hat and tucked it under his arm. Grimly, he nodded. “I’m afraid so, ma’am.”

  She felt her stomach knot. “What,” she sputtered, “what happened? Was it a heart attack or stroke?”

  “That’s why I called Doc,” was all he’d tell her.

  Footsteps sounded beyond the swinging door, and Amos Melville appeared, leather satchel in hand. White hair fell over his wrinkled brow, nearly reaching the arch of his bushy brows. His spectacles perched low on his nose, and his eyes peered above them, alert and anxious.

  The sheriff jumped right in, explaining, “I figured she might just be unconscious, but I checked her out myself, Doc. I put an ear to her chest to see if she was still breathing. I even stuck a spoon under her nose, but it didn’t cloud up a bit. Even CPR couldn’t have saved her since it was clear she was already gone.”

  “Where is she?” Amos asked.

  Sheriff Biddle gestured over to where Eleanora lay on the floor. Helen stepped aside, but Zelma wasn’t as willing to move away. She shook her head when Doc tried to guide her to her feet.

  Biddle started walking over to help, but Helen lifted a hand, stopping him with a stern gaze. She set aside her purse and turned to Zelma, talking softly to the woman, telling her that Doc was there to help Eleanora, not to hurt her. Finally, with a great sigh, Zelma came up off the floor, and Helen put an arm around her thin shoulders, leading her aside so Doc had room enough to work.

  He plunked down his bag and reached for Eleanora, gently probing at her neck and then her wrists for a pulse. He pulled a stethoscope from the satchel, hooked it in his ears, and pressed it to several spots on her chest and throat. With a click of tongue on teeth, he put away the device. Then he checked Eleanora’s eyes with his penlight, asking without looking up, “How long did you say she’s been like this?”

  Biddle shifted on his feet. “Ten minutes at least.”

  “And before you arrived?” Doc wanted to know as he lifted each of Eleanora’s hands to study her fingernails, then prodded her abdomen and thereabouts.

  Zelma sniffled loudly before she spoke up in a quavering tone, “Miss Nora took a snack back with her to the library while I fixed her supper. It was about an hour ago, I’d guess. She came to get me a few minutes after, moaning about her head and her stomach. I figured she’d eaten something that’d disagreed with her. Miss Nora had a sensitive digestive tract. I tried to watch her diet for her.”

  Zelma hiccupped, and Helen tightened her hold on the woman. The housekeeper calmed down enough to further explain, “I left her there”—­she pointed to the oak table and surrounding chairs, one of which had tipped onto its side—­“and I went after the Pepto. I couldn’t have been gone for more than a minute. But when I got back, she was doubled over, hollering for help. She fell to the floor and started twitching.” Zelma shuddered and twisted the hem of her apron, as if remembering was too unbearable. “Oh, dear, but it was horrible to watch. I tried to hold her still to make her stop.”

  Doc nodded, and gently lifted Eleanora’s head to take the towel from beneath. He unfurled the checkered terry cloth and covered the dead woman’s face.

  Though Doc Melville was near her own age, Helen thought he looked a dozen years more than that now. Like her, he’d known the Duncans for years, and being too late to do anything for poor Eleanora couldn’t have sat easy with him.

  He quietly closed up his bag and stood. He put his satchel on the counter and looked at Biddle. “If you don’t mind, Sheriff, I’d like to give Ed Drake a call, have him take the body into Jerseyville.”

  Dr. Drake, Helen knew, was the medical examiner for Jersey County. She felt her heart race, understanding what it meant for him to be summoned.

  “You think she was murdered?” Biddle asked the very thing Helen had been wondering herself. He turned his hat around in his hands and went on, “I’m only bringing it up because of her nearly getting run down this morning. Maybe someone was trying to get even with her.”

  “Sheriff, please,” Helen scolded, looking at him sideways. Somehow it didn’t sit right for him to be speculating out loud about murder when Eleanora was a few feet away on the floor and Zelma near enough to hear every word.

  “You said it yourself, ma’am,” the sheriff said, not letting go. “The car came out of nowhere. And ­people like Mrs. Duncan, well, sometimes all that money and power make for plenty of enemies.”

  Helen glared at him, wishing he’d hush up, as Zelma had started to shake all over again.

  Doc went to the sink and washed his hands, talking over the flow of the water. “I’m not about to make any judgments one way or the other, not yet anyhow. It could very well have been something Eleanora ate. She might’ve had some allergy none of us were aware of. Old age does funny things to us all, which is why I don’t like to second-­guess in this type of situation.”

  He turned off the tap and shook his hands as he glanced around him, though the only towel in evidence was the one he’d used to cover Eleanora’s face. He ended up wiping his palms on his trousers, leaving wet streaks on the tan. Then he pushed the hair back from his brow and quietly said, “No, I’d hate to speculate, no matter what my suspicions. So I won’t. Not till after Drake’s done an examination.”

  “There’ll be an autopsy?” Zelma spoke up, as if only then realizing what all the talk meant. She looked first at Helen, then at Doc and Biddle. “Oh, dear, they’re not gonna cut into Miss Nora like a side of roast beef?”

  The sheriff cleared his throat and stared down at his shoes.

  Amos seemed similarly at a loss for words.

  Helen gently turned Zelma so that she faced her. “Dr. Drake will take very good care of her, I’m sure. He just needs to determine what caused”—­she glanced toward the body, dishtowel draped like a shroud over the face—­“what caused this to happen,” she finished.

  Though Zelma whimpered, she appeared to accept Eleanora’s fate.

  A quiet mewing noise drew Helen’s attention toward the door leading in from the pantry. There on the threshold stood Lady Godiva.

  Round copper eyes looked up, and the plump tail twitched. Then the cat tiptoed into the kitchen and headed straight toward Eleanora. She paused and sniffed at the dishtowel, circling the body once before lifting her head and howling mournfully.

  Zelma burst into tears.

  The sheriff and Amos both stared at Helen.

  “C’mon, dear, let’s go sit down in another room,” she told Zelma, glad for the chance to leave the kitchen and the horrid sight of Lady crying over Eleanora.

  As Helen urged Zelma through the rear pantry, she saw Doc pick up the phone. “This way,” she said as they followed the hallway and ducked into the first open door.

  “I can’t believe it,” Zelma sobbed as Helen sat her down on a settee in a yellow-­walled living room. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  Helen patted her hand, whispering words meant to soothe, all the while thinking of what Biddle had said a moment ago: that Eleanora’s near accident was, perhaps, no accident. That someone might have wanted Eleanora Duncan out of the picture for good.

  Chapter Five

  BIDDLE POKED HIS head into the room not ten minutes after.

  “Boys from the medical examiner’s are here,” he said, standing stiffly near the doo
rway. He had his shoulders squared, and his belly overlapped his gun belt.

  Helen nodded at him from the velvet-­covered settee, all the while patting Zelma’s knee.

  “It shouldn’t take long to get things, uh, bagged up,” Biddle added, though Helen wished he’d put it more delicately.

  The housekeeper tensed at his words. Her eyes, red and swollen behind her round lenses, stared down at the twisted tissue she gripped with trembling fingers.

  “Uh, Miss Burdine.” The sheriff took a few steps in, paused, and hiked up his pants. “The forensics team . . . they need to know what Mrs. Duncan was eating before she got sick. You said she had a snack in the library?”

  Zelma dabbed at her nose. “Yes, that’s right,” she said, her voice soft and ragged. “She fed the cat before getting something from the fridge for herself.” The housekeeper stared down at her feet. “She got a box of wafers from the cabinet. Said she’d missed lunch because of what happened this morning.”

  “Mind if we gather up a few things, ma’am?” Biddle asked.

  Zelma shook her head, her eyes downcast. “Take whatever you need.” She shredded the tissue into half a dozen pieces. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters.”

  The sheriff scratched his jaw, looking as uncomfortable as Helen had ever seen him. He opened his mouth as if to say something more but seemed to reconsider and ducked out of the room instead.

  Helen glimpsed him passing the room a moment later with another man in tow.

  “Don’t worry, Zelma, everything will be fine, you’ll see,” she said, hardly believing a word of it herself. “The sheriff and Doc Melville will take care of everything. They’ll find out what happened to Eleanora soon enough. And then you can start getting your life back to normal.”

  Zelma raised her chin, the loose skin of her neck quivering as she met Helen’s eyes head-­on with her Coke-­bottle stare. “Back to normal?” she repeated, her voice a mere squeak. “Normal, you say?” Tears swam down cheeks already blotched pink by her crying. “You don’t seem to understand. She was all I had, Mrs. Evans. I don’t have kin of my own. I never married,” she added, whispering, “Miss Nora always told me she was all the family I’d need.”

  “I’m sorry, Zelma. Truly I am,” Helen apologized, feeling like a heel, not having realized until then how much Eleanora Duncan had meant to the woman. Helen had known Eleanora as well as anyone, in the way that those in a small town know who everyone is and what they’re up to. None of the Duncans, save for Jim, had ever been easy to get close to. Eleanora and Marvin had seemed to prefer keeping to themselves. When Eleanora had lost her husband and, soon after, her son, she’d seemed to draw even more tightly into her cocoon, emerging only when she’d felt obligated to attend a committee meeting. After what had happened this morning—­the near miss that Sheriff Biddle seemed to think was suspicious—­and after Zelma’s confession, Helen suddenly realized how little she truly knew of Eleanora beyond the local gossip and their brief encounters at luncheons and whatnot.

  “Tell me something, Zelma,” she said and lowered her voice to the same soothing tone she’d used on grandchildren with skinned knees, “did Eleanora have any other accidents before the one this morning? Any other close calls?”

  “Close calls?” Zelma reared her head, her brow squishing up like an accordion. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  Helen thought of telling Zelma what Eleanora had said to her earlier. I think somebody’s trying to kill me had been her exact words. But she reconsidered, asking only, “Had she been threatened?”

  “Threatened?” Zelma’s blotchy face drained of all color. “Why, you don’t really believe someone meant to harm Miss Nora?”

  Helen sighed, setting her hands in her lap. “I honestly don’t know,” she said. But Eleanora had obviously felt that the driver of the car had meant to run her down. Her passing this evening could most certainly have been caused by old age itself. But Amos Melville’s hesitation at pronouncing a cause of death made Helen reluctant to dismiss Biddle’s remarks altogether. Doc knew his business as well as any general practitioner from here to Joplin. For him to call for an autopsy of an eighty-­year-­old widow who’d died in her own kitchen must mean that he, too, felt something was amiss or at least worth looking into.

  “It shouldn’t have happened,” Zelma murmured, her sobs cutting off her words now and again like hiccups. “She shouldn’t have died on me.”

  Helen absently patted Zelma’s hand, all the while looking around her at the richly appointed room with its intricate crown molding and limestone fireplace. She gazed at oil paintings in gilded frames hung upon the dramatic canary-­colored walls, at shelves filled with leather-­bound books, and rich cherry tables topped with Tiffany lamps and assorted crystal pieces. Everything she saw looked of museum quality.

  And suddenly she found herself wondering who would inherit the substantial fortune of an old woman whose husband and son had predeceased her.

  She heard footsteps and glanced toward the open door to catch another fellow in dark clothes with a black bag going in the same direction the sheriff and a crime scene investigator had gone earlier.

  Helen swallowed. Her throat felt tight. It seemed unbelievable to even consider that there might have been foul play involved in Eleanora’s demise.

  “Miss Nora hired me when I was just sixteen. She hadn’t even gotten married yet. Did you know that, ma’am?” Zelma asked, breaking through Helen’s thoughts.

  She turned to Zelma and smiled gently. “I’m afraid I didn’t, no.”

  The housekeeper pushed up from the settee. She collected the bits of torn tissue from her lap and stuck them in her apron pocket. She shuffled over to the mantel, where a host of silver-­framed photographs perched, and picked out the largest from the bunch. Helen glimpsed a black-­and-­white shot of a baby with a spit curl. Zelma let out a cry and hugged it to her bosom.

  “Mr. Jim . . . he was such a good boy,” she said. “Miss Nora doted on him. It near to killed her when he died. She never forgave Miss Jean. She blamed her till the end.”

  Helen sighed. “That I do know, yes.”

  “Miss Jean came by today and brought all that food, but Miss Nora wouldn’t even give her the time of day.”

  So Jean had mentioned at the diner, Helen recalled, knowing how much courage it had taken for Jean to come to Eleanora like that, and what a slap in the face it must have been when Eleanora had turned her away. Forgiveness didn’t always come easily.

  Only now it was too late for them to make up, wasn’t it?

  With a clatter, Zelma set the picture of Jim back amidst the others then walked slowly about the room. She touched a bronzed statuette, wiped a bit of dust off the corner of a table with the hem of her apron, and brushed at the cushion of a Queen Anne wing chair as though out of habit. Then she broke down again.

  Helen got up and went to her, turning her around and settling her down into the chair.

  “Oh, dear,” Zelma murmured between sobs. “What’ll become of her?”

  Helen patted her shoulder. “Please, try not to worry about Eleanora. Amos will keep tabs on her.”

  “No.” Zelma toyed with her tearstained apron. “No, I mean what’ll happen to Lady Godiva?”

  “Oh, the cat,” Helen said, having nearly forgotten about her. The way the poor Persian had wailed when she’d found Eleanora there on the kitchen floor. . . . Helen shuddered at the picture. She remembered how withdrawn Amber had been after Joe’s death, and she figured it would be much the same with Lady Godiva. No one could convince her that animals didn’t sense distress in the ­people around them, didn’t actually feel emotion themselves.

  “She loved that cat as if she were a child,” Zelma said, weeping. “Pampered her like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Nothing will happen to Lady Godiva,” Helen assured her, trying hard not to smile at
the turn the conversation had taken. “After all, she’s got you to look after her, hasn’t she?”

  Zelma pulled the tattered tissue from her apron pocket and blew her nose.

  Helen took her by the hand and drew her up from the chair. “Come now, dear,” she said and directed the woman toward a scroll-­armed sofa quite large enough for Zelma to lie down on. “Why don’t you just relax for a while, take off your shoes—­that’s right—­and put up your feet.” She wedged a tapestry pillow beneath Zelma’s head, and the housekeeper let out a weary sigh. “Here, let me have those,” Helen said and reached for Zelma’s heavy glasses, gently removing them, though the housekeeper made little noises of protest. “It’ll do you good to close your eyes for a moment,” Helen assured her, suggesting after, “how about if I get you a cold compress? Or make some tea? That’ll calm you down, I promise.”

  “All right,” Zelma murmured, already sounding sleepy, “if you’re sure it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Nonsense.” Helen patted her shoulder.

  She started to turn, but surprisingly strong fingers caught at her hand.

  “You said they might’ve been out to get her. Well, maybe you’re right.”

  Helen paused, facing Zelma.

  The hand released hers.

  “She was always telling me, ‘Zelma, when you’re rich as Midas, everyone wants a piece of you,’ ” the housekeeper murmured and fiddled with the hem of her apron. She turned her stockinged feet toes in. “Even today, they wouldn’t leave her alone,” Zelma whispered. “That awful Mr. Baskin came by, and Miss Winthrop and Stanley.”

  “Hush now,” Helen told her. “Shut your eyes and try to think of something pleasant. I’ll be back in a jiffy.” Sneakers squishing on the Aubusson rug, she left the yellow room and closed the door.

  The sheriff and the men from forensics were just coming down the hallway from the library when she emerged.

  “Well, did you find anything?” she asked, pausing so she blocked their path. “Anything that looked unusual?”