A Killer Read (10 page)

L
izzie slept through her radio alarm the next morning and had to skip her run in favor of a bracing shower. She pulled a breakfast tortilla out of the freezer, nuked it and ate standing at the kitchen counter. She was booked to observe another class at nine and would just make it. She dressed in a gray pencil skirt, black blouse and lightweight tweed jacket, her no-thinking-required outfit, and pulled her thick chestnut-colored hair into a ponytail while slipping her feet into black pumps

As she locked the front door, she spotted a large manila envelope sticking out of the mailbox. The white label had her name typed on it. No address and no return information. She stuffed it into her tote and forgot about it until later in the morning when writing up her notes in the staff room. She opened the envelope and pulled out three chapters of a manuscript. Untitled. No name. Intrigued, she started reading. The lunch bell rang, but she continued reading until she
finished. She looked up, surprised the staff room had filled so quickly.

Sally-Jo wandered over. “What’s so fascinating?”

“Take a look at this.” Lizzie handed her the papers. “It looks like the first three chapters of a manuscript.”

Sally-Jo scanned the pages while Lizzie dug into her tote for her sandwich.

“That’s what it looks like, but what’s it about and where did you get it?”

“It reads like the setup to a mystery. I found it in my mailbox this morning with my name on the envelope but no return address.”

“Maybe one of your literacy students dropped it off?” Sally-Jo suggested.

“Could be, but none that I know of are writing at this level. I’d better give it a more thorough read though, just in case.”

“Heard anything further about the murder?”

“No, nothing new. But I was thinking, what if we drop over to Stephanie Lowe’s later today? I had the strong impression she’d seen Telford before. We need to get her to talk about him, if that’s the case.”

“You may be right, but I’m betting she won’t like it.”

T
hey took Lizzie’s car and went directly after school, hoping Stephanie might be home. To their surprise, Andie answered the door.

“Oh, hey. Steph’s in the can. Want to come in and wait?”

“Sure. Good to see you, Andie,” Lizzie said. “I didn’t know you and Stephanie were friends.”

“We got to talking while waiting the other night, and she said I should borrow her Janet Evanovich books. Said I’d like them a lot more than Shakespeare. So, here I am.” Andie stretched and casually pulled her tummy-hugger T-shirt
back down. This one was a mass of miniature black skulls on a white background. Her low-rise jeans were a size too small; fuchsia flip-flops completed the look. Lizzie fleetingly wondered if they could work on her wardrobe once they got her reading.

“Are you okay after what happened?” Lizzie asked.

“Sure thing. It was way cool. I don’t know anyone who’s been involved in a murder before.”

Sally-Jo shuddered. “‘Involved’ may be too strong a word, Andie. At least, I hope it is.”

“Whatever.” She dropped onto a faded green armchair, obviously Goodwill stock, and flung her legs over the worn padded arm.

“Did you tell your mama about what happened, Andie?” Lizzie asked, worried about the reaction on the home front.

“Uh-nuh. I didn’t see her later that night. They went out to a meeting at the golf club and didn’t get back till after I’d crashed. My mama never makes it up in time for breakfast, and my daddy’s left for the office by the time I make it downstairs. And she never said a word about it. So I never told.”

She sounds so nonchalant about it all
, Lizzie thought. She wondered what the family dynamics were like at other times of the day.

Lizzie glanced around the room. She’d met Stephanie when she’d registered for the winter term at the Words for Change Literacy Center, and knew she had moved to town last spring, gotten a job real quick at the Oasis Diner and lived alone. But Lizzie had never visited her home. The tattered chair and sofa were at odds with the bright yellow walls and fresh white trim. A chest of drawers, also white, and a small brown wooden table with two fold-up chairs, a rectangular coffee table with marred top, and a fifteen-inch TV on the kitchen counter rounded out the bachelor apartment. Tiny but tidy.

“Yo, Steph, you’ve got visitors,” Andie yelled as a door closed in the hall.

Stephanie rounded the corner and looked pleased to see them. “Oh, hi there. It’s nice of you to stop by. I’m afraid I don’t really have anything to offer you, though, just some lemonade and Oreos.”

“That’s okay, Stephanie,” Sally-Jo said. “We don’t need anything and can’t stay long anyway.”

“I wanted to drop off the assignment from last night’s class,” Lizzie said, handing over an envelope, wondering what Stephanie would think of it and even more, what she would write. It might work out better than trying to get her to talk about it.

“Why, thank y’all. That’s such a big help to me. I’m sorry I didn’t make it to class, but I worked a full shift and got so tired and my back was aching.”

“That’s understandable and you’re welcome. We also wanted to ask you a question about the night of the murder. Is that okay?” Lizzie asked.

Stephanie hesitated and then nodded as she eased herself onto the tattered mint-flecked sofa.

“We both noticed that you seemed startled at seeing the stranger in the room, almost uneasy. He’s been identified as Frank Telford. Did you know him?”

Stephanie grabbed her knitting from a plastic Winn-Dixie bag on the floor next to the sofa and started a new row before answering. “No, the name means nothing to me.” She didn’t look up.

“Well, sometimes when you see someone out of context, in a totally different setting, it’s hard to tell. Could he have been someone from your hometown?” Sally-Jo asked.

Stephanie flinched but answered, “Of course not. I’d know if I knew him, wouldn’t I?” She glanced at Sally-Jo, almost glaring. “No, for sure. Now, how about that lemonade?” She set her knitting aside and made to push up off the sofa.

Lizzie glanced over at Andie, who sat watching the exchange intently. “No, don’t trouble yourself. We should
be going. I hope we’ll see you both at the special book club meeting on Thursday?”

Both girls nodded.

“Do you think we hit a nerve or what?” Sally-Jo asked once back in the car.

L
izzie’s first appointment on Wednesday at school had been cancelled. She’d planned to administer a series of tests to a sixth-grade student reading at well below his expected level. She knew the child’s father had arrived home from an extended tour in Afghanistan the night before, so she wasn’t too surprised the child had taken the day off. She thoroughly agreed with the family’s priorities.

That left one student, Danny Beecham, before lunch and two after. She already had an idea of what might work with twelve-year-old Danny; she just needed to confirm her suspicions. She’d been allocated the vice principal’s office for the day, so she set up her laptop, arranged the visuals, a series of cards, on the desk so they’d be facing Danny, then clicked open her Internet browser.

She planned to make good use of the few minutes before Danny appeared. Lizzie wanted to do a Web search on Molly and Claydon Mathews, a fact she thought better kept to herself. She wanted to see if Frank Telford’s name
appeared. Why Telford had chosen Molly’s house was gnawing away at her. Was there a connection from the past? One that Molly might be unaware of or, heaven forbid, unwilling to mention?

The hits on Molly Mathews went on for pages, not surprising with all her philanthropic works and her family’s long roots in Ashton Corners. Lizzie lingered over an article mentioning Molly and her own grandmama, Beata Turner, when they had founded a soup kitchen at the Methodist church in the mid-1960s. It gave her a thrill to see her grandmama’s name in print, and it added another valuable piece of information to her own family history. But no mention of Frank Telford anywhere on these pages.

Even though Claydon Mathews had died so many years prior, he had too many mentions for her to check in one sitting. She scanned the first few pages for “Telford” but had to give it up when her student arrived. She shut down the Internet connection and clicked to open her testing papers.

Despite growing up in an upper-middle-class home in the well-heeled Guilleford area, Danny read at a fourth-grade level. Lizzie took him through the visuals, the cards on the desk, had him read a short paragraph in the textbook, then asked him a series of questions related to the reading. She set her face in an encouraging smile, trying not to show young Danny how poorly he’d done.

Then she pulled a newly published graphic novel, very similar to what he’d just read about the American Civil War, from her tote bag. Danny devoured the graphic novel, scoring high on comprehension when retested forty minutes later. Mission accomplished. She found it easy to smile this time as she sent Danny back to class. She’d send a reading list of relevant graphic novels to his parents and secretly bet he’d be reading along with his classmates before the spring break.

She made some notes about Danny as she ate her lunch at the desk. She barely noticed the tuna salad sandwich she’d thrown together that morning. After downing a bottle of
apple-pomegranate juice, she switched back to the Internet and read through several more pages about Claydon Mathews. She’d known he was a well-respected businessman in Ashton Corners, owning and running the local General Motors dealership for many years as well as having stakes in several other area businesses. He, too, had a reputation as a philanthropist and had held memberships in almost every fraternal organization in town.

A knock at the door interrupted her, and she absently called out, “Come in.”

“You’re a hard woman to track down, Miss Turner,” Mark Dreyfus said, closing the door behind him.

Lizzie switched off and closed her laptop. “I do like to work, Chief Dreyfus. It gives me a paycheck, you know.” She smiled and motioned to the chair Danny had recently vacated.

Mark sat, then shifted, trying to get comfortable. The charcoal gray uniform pants looked to be straight from the dry cleaner’s. He wore a short-sleeved lighter gray shirt, even though the morning temperature had sent Lizzie back inside for a heavy sweater. She wondered if, on the cooler evenings, he missed having the warmth of hair covering his head. No way she’d ask that question, though. “I never did enjoy being sent to the principal’s office,” he said.

“Did that happen often?”

“Let’s just say, we got to know each other real well. Now, it’s going to be gratifying but embarrassing if I ever have to give him a speeding ticket.” He chuckled.

Lizzie smiled. “Is that what you’re here to do, give me a speeding ticket?”

“You might just have enough pull with the chief to have it knocked down to a warning.” He was clearly trying for a straight-faced delivery, but his face crinkled around his eyes, giving him totally away.

“I’ll remember that.”
So what does he want?
She’d let him take the lead.

“I just need to ask if you know anything about Stephanie Lowe’s background. She won’t tell us a thing about where she’s from or about her family.”

“Your guess is as good as mine. I’ve chatted with her a lot since she moved here. But she doesn’t do personal. She’s in my literacy group, and now that she’s in the book club, too, I’ll be seeing more of her, so that may change. Why do you need to know? Do you think she has a connection with Telford? That maybe they’re from the same place and knew each other?”

“That could be, or they might be from the same place with no direct connection, but she might be able to shed some light on him. And of course, there’s her reaction when she first saw him in the room, something you neglected to tell me about.”

Lizzie felt her cheeks glow red. “I guess, with everything going on, I forgot about it.”

“Even though I specifically asked about people’s reactions?”

“Even though.” Lizzie checked her watch. “Was there anything else?”

“Not really, but it makes me wonder if there’s something else you’ve not told me.” He tipped his chair back, balancing on the back two legs.

“I’d think you should be talking more to Bob Miller. He’s the trained eye in the book club. He would be the one to notice all these little nuances.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, former Chief Bob Miller and I aren’t exactly best buddies.”

Lizzie leaned her elbows on the desk. “Tell me about that.”

“Trying to sidetrack me?” Mark’s eyebrows punctuated the question. “Let’s just say, I saw a bit more of him, too, than I should have back in my youth. Those were not my proudest moments. I think he remembers the boy and won’t accept a change in the man.”

Lizzie shook her head. “That’s too bad, for you both. Boy, I’m getting a whole new picture of you… not the Mark Dreyfus I thought I knew in school.”