Unti Susan McBride #2 Page 5

  But then Grace Simpson seemed to have a lot of folks worked up these days, didn’t she?

  A rush of air from off the river ruffled Mattie’s hair, but it wasn’t just the wind that gave her goose bumps.

  She heard the popping of tires on gravel and turned her head to catch Sheriff Biddle’s mud-­speckled black-­and-­white coming around the corner. With a squeal of brakes, it stopped in front of Grace’s yard.

  Oh, no, Mattie thought, hoping Grace hadn’t called the sheriff when the girl had let herself into the house. Hadn’t Grace caused Nancy embarrassment enough? Would she have the girl arrested, too?

  Mattie watched as the sheriff and another man—­a distinguished fellow in a dark blue suit—­emerged from the squad car and headed up to Grace’s front door.

  “This is all very odd,” Mattie murmured, “very odd indeed.”

  She pressed herself back into the shadows of the porch and waited.

  Just as the sheriff and his companion reached the top of the whitewashed steps, the front door flew wide open and Nancy Sweet raced out the door, clutching something in her hands.

  Mattie squinted, wishing she’d thought to put on her glasses when she’d come out for the paper. What was it Nancy carried? Was it a broom or a stick?

  Even without her horned-­rims she could see the girl’s face was white as bones.

  “Whoa now!” the sheriff said and grabbed the girl’s arm, forcing her to drop the stick to the ground.

  Nancy raised her hands in the air. They appeared muddied to Mattie’s unfocused eyes, although the mud around here was brown, not red.

  “Help, oh, God, help her, please!” Nancy began to scream so loudly that Mattie felt battered by her voice. “I shouldn’t have come. I shouldn’t have come,” she ranted over and over, and her slim body heaved so that the sheriff had to hold her steady.

  The fellow in the dark suit just stood by and gaped.

  “She’s dead, she’s really dead!” Nancy sobbed and slumped against Biddle’s chest.

  And Mattie did the only thing she possibly could have done after witnessing such a scene: she ran inside, dropped the newspaper, grabbed her phone, and dialed her friend Bertha Beaner.

  Chapter 9

  “WHAT DO YOU mean you’re holding Nancy for questioning?” Helen asked, putting a protective arm around her granddaughter. She glared at Sheriff Biddle across his desk. “You must know that she could no more have killed Grace Simpson than I could.”

  Biddle sighed, his gaze shifting from the pale face of the girl back to Helen. “Come now, Mrs. Evans. You’ve got to realize that I’m only doing my job. We found Nancy at the murder scene, holding a bloody bat.”

  “What you assume is the murder scene,” Helen replied and tightened her grip on the girl. Nancy had barely uttered a word since Helen had arrived at the sheriff’s office, and Helen was worried that her granddaughter had gone into some state of posttraumatic shock.

  “Look here,” Biddle said and gesticulated wildly, “I’m nearly one hundred percent certain Grace Simpson was killed where we found her. There was no sign she’d been moved, no indication of a struggle or forced entry. Her car was parked outside her kitchen door. Her body was found on her bedroom floor. The blood from her head wounds left stains on the carpet and, of course, the baseball bat that Nancy brought out of the house with her. Doc Melville accompanied the body to the county morgue in Jerseyville. When they’ve done forensics testing, we’ll know more. But until then, Nancy’s a person of interest.”

  Helen pressed her lips together and looked at her granddaughter. Nancy’s face was positively bloodless, and her eyes looked glazed over. The girl needed to be taken home and put to bed, not grilled by River Bend’s sole lawman. “Sheriff, please, she’s had a great fright, stumbling upon Grace like that. I’ll keep her with me if you’re worried she’ll leave town.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t let her go yet,” the sheriff responded. “I need to find out why she was there this morning.”

  “How is it you showed up at Grace’s this morning?” Helen asked. She’d heard only that Mattie Oldbridge saw Biddle show up in his squad car with a well-­dressed man just before Nancy ran out of Grace’s house with blood on her hands. “Who was the man you said was with you?”

  “I didn’t say anything about him.” Biddle leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “You must’ve heard that news elsewhere.” He gave her a knowing look. “Besides, I’m supposed to be asking the questions—­”

  “Just as soon as you answer mine,” Helen cut him off, patting Nancy’s hand all the while. “The man?” she prodded.

  Biddle sighed. “That was Harold Faulkner. He’s Grace’s publisher from the scholarly press in St. Louis. He claims she was supposed to meet him for dinner last night at Tony’s in St. Louis. He was expecting her to deliver a copy of that book everybody’s been gossiping about.” The sheriff raised his bushy eyebrows. “You probably heard that news elsewhere already, too, huh?”

  Helen scoffed. “Who hasn’t?”

  “Faulkner got worried when Grace didn’t show,” Biddle continued. “He tried calling her half the night and left messages on voice mail at her office and on her cell. He came into town first thing this morning and knocked on her door. When she didn’t answer, he showed up on my doorstep. He was waiting here when I got to work. We went over to Grace’s together,” the sheriff said and shifted his gaze from Helen to her granddaughter.

  “That’s when you ran into Nancy,” Helen said, squeezing the girl’s hand as Nancy made a tiny whimper.

  “More like she ran into me,” Biddle corrected. “She had the bat in her hands. She dropped the thing at my feet, ma’am.”

  Helen bristled. “That hardly means Nancy killed her.”

  “Tell me, Mrs. Evans, what am I supposed to think?”

  “That she was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Biddle jerked his chin at Nancy. “I’d rather she explain it herself.”

  Helen started to open her mouth.

  “In her own words,” the sheriff butted in.

  Helen turned to Nancy and crooked a finger beneath her drooping chin. “Sweetheart,” she said quietly, “can you talk about what happened this morning at Grace’s?”

  Nancy’s pale eyes blinked. She looked numbly at Helen and then across the desk at Sheriff Biddle. She picked up the handkerchief in her lap that Helen had given her earlier, and she began twisting it into a knot.

  “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” she whispered hoarsely.

  “Nancy?” Helen’s concern grew tenfold.

  “Go on,” the sheriff urged and leaned forward, seeming to watch the girl as closely as he listened.

  Nancy ran her tongue across dry lips. “I didn’t intend for Mrs. Beaner to get a hold of those notes. I tried to be so careful about everything. But Grace wouldn’t even give me a chance to explain.” She lifted her head, her eyes wide as she stared right at Biddle. “I waited for her at work, and when she didn’t come, I thought something happened to her.” Nancy faltered for a moment. “I still had a key to her house, so I went over and let myself in.” Her voice rattled as she spoke, and her shoulders shook, as if she had palsy. “She wasn’t downstairs, so I went up. Her room was dark, and I stumbled over the bat, so I picked it up.

  “I didn’t think twice.” Nancy shook her head, glancing down at her hands. “Grace kept a baseball bat in her bedroom. I’d seen it there a dozen times before when I was over at her house, taking care of things. She was paranoid about living alone, just like she was paranoid about everything else.” The girl lifted her chin, though her voice quivered. “I didn’t notice the blood until I”—­she stopped and sucked in a breath—­“until I went into the bedroom, turned on the light, and saw her on the floor. I knew she was dead, and I flipped out.”

  “That’s enough,” He
len snapped, unable to sit a moment longer and watch her granddaughter be put through such torture. She got onto her feet and urged Nancy up. She wrapped a strong arm around the girl’s shaking shoulders. “Nancy’s not fit to do this, Sheriff. Even you must see that. I’m taking her home. She needs rest, not the third degree.”

  The sheriff raised a hand in protest. “Now wait a minute,” he started to say, but Helen ignored him.

  “Let’s go, sweetheart,” she told Nancy and guided the stricken young woman toward the door. “I’ll be in touch,” she said over her shoulder. Then, without another word, she led Nancy from his office and was gone.

  Chapter 10

  FRANK BIDDLE HIKED up his belted pants and started after them. He got as far as the door before he stopped himself with a shake of his head.

  Helen Evans might be an occasional thorn in his side, sticking her nose where it didn’t belong, but she was right about one thing: Nancy Sweet was in no condition to answer the questions he needed to ask her.

  He went back to his desk and picked up the file on Grace Simpson. The facts in the case seemed simple enough. The psychotherapist had apparently been murdered in her own home, killed by a blow to the head. The time of death was likely before eight o’clock last evening, when she was supposed to have met her publisher in St. Louis. Doc’s cursory exam at the scene showed rigor mortis had fully set in. The autopsy should help clear up any unanswered questions about the condition of the body.

  But those results would take time, Frank knew. So, for now, what did he have?

  Motives.

  He tapped a pencil against the legal pad on his desk.

  First and foremost was the book that Grace was to have delivered to Harold Faulkner. The whole town was up in arms about it. Anyone and everyone who’d been a client of Grace’s seemed afraid they’d be turning up inside its pages, and that included Frank’s own wife, Sarah. He’d seen how upset folks had been when they’d confronted Ms. Simpson at LaVyrle’s last night. Frank couldn’t help wondering if any had been furious enough about the impending publication to actually want Grace dead.

  He chewed on the pencil.

  What if one of those folks had gone to Grace’s house and gotten into a hellacious argument with her? Then, in a moment of fury, had picked up the bat and slugged her hard enough to cause her death?

  It was possible, he decided, and jotted down the thought. When he stopped scribbling, he let out a slow breath, his focus shifting back to Nancy Sweet. He knew little about the young woman except for the fact that she was Helen Evans’s granddaughter. Nancy seemed a decent enough sort, but you could never tell how a person would react until push came to shove.

  Take Lizzie Borden, he thought and pictured her friends’ and neighbors’ comments after the “forty whacks” she gave her mother and the “forty-­one” her father. She was such a nice girl, he could imagine them saying and shaking their heads. Who would have guessed she had it in her to do that?

  It happened all the time, Biddle mused with a sigh: a seemingly average person goes berserk and commits a most heinous crime.

  Not that Frank was an expert on murder. This case involving Grace Simpson was only the second in River Bend, an occasional dead dog or deer notwithstanding.

  But Frank knew enough about crime from his days on a city police force to realize that felons came in all shapes, sizes, and colors.

  If Nancy Sweet had murdered Grace Simpson out of revenge for a job lost, she surely wouldn’t be the first.

  “THANKS FOR STICKING around, Mr. Faulkner.”

  “You’re finished with the young woman, then?”

  “For now.” Frank sighed. “They take care of you over at the diner?”

  “Good coffee, yes. I had half a pot, I think.”

  Frank flushed at the intimation he had kept the man waiting that long. “Take a seat, please, and we’ll get on with the interview.”

  Grace’s publisher took a gander at his phone before shoving it into his coat pocket. “I’m not sure where you want me to start,” he said as he lowered himself into the chair Nancy Sweet had vacated not ten minutes before.

  “Wherever you want to begin is fine with me.”

  Faulkner nodded, pausing as he laced his fingers in his lap. “Grace didn’t arrive for our dinner last night, as you already know. While I waited for her, I had a ­couple of drinks at the bar and then at our table. I started to get angry, and I guess I got a little drunk as well. I’m a busy man, you understand, Sheriff. I don’t have time to wait on writers who can’t read the clock.”

  “I understand, Mr. Faulkner,” Frank told him.

  The man smiled. “Please, call me Harold.”

  Biddle studied the gray-­haired fellow who fidgeted in the chair across his desk. He had lines about his mouth and eyes and creases in his brow that revealed a life well-­lived. His suit looked nicely cut but was likely off the rack. The shoulders were a bit too wide, the cuffs an inch too long. Frank had looked up the scholarly press Faulkner ran, which was associated with a small-­time university in the city. The titles they produced seemed too obscure to sell widely. No wonder the fellow was so anxious to get Grace Simpson’s book. If it made readers outside River Bend as curious as the ones inside it, it might be the kind of hit that would push Faulkner’s press well into the black.

  “Every time I’d dealt with Grace by phone, Skype, or email, she was always prompt,” Faulkner said, crossing his legs, then uncrossing them. “So it seemed out of character for her to be late, though I didn’t have any cause to expect she’d met with such, er, grave misfortune,” he went on.

  Misfortune? Frank had to bite his cheek to keep from snorting. Was that how academics thought of murder?

  “I waited a full hour before I gave up on her.” Faulkner set his palms on his knees and fixed narrowed eyes on Biddle. “Grace Simpson might have been a lot of things, Sheriff, ill-­tempered, impatient, pig-­headed, but she’d never missed any kind of appointment, at least not with me. Never.”

  “So Ms. Simpson was punctual but a pain in the butt,” the sheriff said, which is how he translated the publisher’s statement. “The two of you didn’t get along?”

  Faulkner’s eyes widened, and his fingers began to fiddle with the buttons on his jacket. “I wouldn’t say that, Sheriff.”

  “So you did get along?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that either.” Faulkner turned his graying head this way and that, as if examining the walls of Biddle’s office. He seemed particularly interested in a ­couple of notices about an upcoming farm auction in Jerseyville, Saturday’s Grafton flea market at the old boatyard, and next week’s River Bend town meeting.

  Biddle cleared his throat and tried again. “You were saying that Ms. Simpson was tricky to deal with?”

  “Ah, yes, Grace was quite her own woman,” Faulkner replied, finally facing Biddle again, though now he played with the knot of his necktie. “She did things the way she wanted, and there was no room for argument. But she was innovative, too,” he added, nodding to himself. “Her proposal for a nonfiction book about psychotherapy practiced in a county full of small towns caught my editor’s attention and mine as well.”

  Biddle didn’t interrupt. He jotted down notes as Faulkner spoke.

  “We saw the potential for commercial appeal in Grace’s premise. You can imagine that we don’t hit the New York Times list often with academic tomes. We usually concentrate on titles by experts in various fields of education and science. Their work is often very dry.” He tapped his fingers on the arms of the chair. “The subject matter doesn’t make for a huge profit, of course, but we get by through sales to libraries and universities for the most part. Still,” he paused, and his eyes visibly brightened, “I must admit I’ve always dreamed someday of publishing a bona fide best seller.”

  Faulkner let out a nervous laugh. “But then who in my field doesn’
t? I honestly believe Grace Simpson’s manuscript has that potential. It contains elements of society’s dark side, for want of a better description, which seem to engage the public. I’m saying this based on her proposal, as she refused to let my editor or me take a look during the writing process.” His gray brows knitted. “Grace apparently wrote by hand and had her secretary transcribe. From what I understand, the manuscript wasn’t even ready until sometime yesterday afternoon.”

  “So was this a deadline specified in her contract or just an arbitrary date?” Biddle asked, not sure of how things worked.

  “Everything with Grace seemed a bit arbitrary,” Faulkner replied with a snort. “As I said before, she was a tough woman to deal with, very temperamental.” He tapped a polished oxford on the floor. “She believed this book would be her big break, and I think she sensed I felt the same for Faulkner Press.”

  “So did she cause trouble?” Biddle was finding this all very interesting. “Did she threaten not to deliver if she didn’t get her way?”

  “Oh, she threatened a variety of things,” the man told him, nodding. “We argued quite a bit over her contract initially. She wanted a larger advance and cover approval, but all authors do.” He waved a hand dismissively. “She didn’t like the idea that we had the first right of refusal on her next nonfiction book.”

  Biddle rubbed his pencil against the side of his nose. “So, she got under your skin, huh?”

  Faulkner grimaced. “Grace was hardly a favorite of mine, but I knew she wouldn’t let me down.”

  “Until last night,” Biddle said and ceased taking notes. “So you never got the manuscript?”

  “No.” Faulkner scooted forward in the chair, peering anxiously at the sheriff. “Would you happen to know where it is? If you wouldn’t mind, Sheriff, I’d like to get a hold of it as soon as possible. There’s such a hot market for nonfiction right now that the prime window for publication is sooner rather than later.”