The Gingerbread Bump-Off (20 page)

“He may have an alibi,” Sam pointed out. “He could have been on the phone with that fella in Japan at the same time Miz Hallerbee was attacked.”

Phyllis nodded. “He may have been. I don’t see how we can find out about that.”

“Detective Latimer probably could.”

“Yes, he could,” Phyllis admitted, “and I plan to tell him about it.”

“And when you do, he’s gonna fuss at you for gettin’ mixed up in the investigation.”

“Probably,” Phyllis said. “That’s why I think it would be a good idea to find out as much as I possibly can before I talk to him about it. The more information I can give him, the less likely he is to be really upset.”

Sam thought about that for a moment and nodded. “I suppose that makes sense. What about the Cochran kid?”

“The same holds true for him,” Phyllis said. “I’d like to know more about what made him act the way he did before I talk to Detective Latimer about him.” She thought for a moment and then added, “Luckily, I know someone I think I can ask about both of them.”

Chapter 19

“ I
don’t want to talk about it,” Laura Kearns said as she looked across her desk at Phyllis. “I don’t want to talk about either of those things.”

Sam had gone to the Trafford house and the Cochran ranch on Friday, and the office of Georgia Hallerbee’s accounting and tax preparation company had been closed over the weekend, so Phyllis had had to wait until Monday morning to pay the place a visit and talk to Laura. That was all right, because she had spent the weekend working on plans for Eve’s bridal shower, which was coming up quickly. The invitations had already been sent out, but now that the RSVPs were coming in, she had a better idea of how many people were coming. She and Carolyn worked out the snacks and games. Phyllis shopped for all the things they would need.

She and Sam had also managed to visit the other homes on the Jingle Bell Tour. The excuse of collecting money for flowers for the funeral had come about by accident, but they continued it and had enough to pay for two beautiful arrangements.

Since it was the weekend, people who were working during the week were home, and although it had taken a few return visits, they had caught up with everyone else on the list . . . and crossed them off the list of possible suspects as well. All of them had been home on the night of the tour, getting ready for the visitors they expected, so none of them could have been on Phyllis’s front porch, bashing Georgia over the head with that ceramic gingerbread man.

Unless someone was lying or had cleverly managed to make it appear they were home when they really weren’t, and Phyllis’s instincts told her that wasn’t the case.

Which left them with three people connected to the tour who couldn’t be accounted for at that particular time: Holly Bachmann, Joe Henning, and Alan Trafford. Holly and Trafford might have alibis that Phyllis didn’t know about. Joe Henning claimed an alibi, but it was shaky.

Then there was Chris Cochran. Phyllis didn’t know if he had been at his parents’ home the night of the tour, but maybe Laura could tell her, she had thought.

Only now it appeared that Laura didn’t want to tell her anything.

Laura had smiled and seemed friendly enough when Phyllis first came into the office. “I thought about not even coming in today, since the funeral is this afternoon,” she’d said. “But I thought that doing a little work might take my mind off it for a while, and that would be a good thing. Besides, we had quite a few returns we were in the middle of preparing. I owe it to our clients to finish those up, and then I’ll talk to Georgia’s sister and figure out what to do from there.”

“Is the sister Georgia’s heir?” Phyllis had asked.

“That’s right. At least I assume she is. That’s what Georgia told me. Of course, I never saw her will, so I don’t suppose I know for sure.” Laura had sighed. “I think she’ll want to sell the business. Georgia’s sister, I mean. I’ll have to look for another job.”

“Why don’t you buy it?” Phyllis had suggested. “You’re certified to do this sort of work, aren’t you?”

“Sure,” Laura had answered with a nod. “But I don’t have the kind of money I’d need to take over the business. My husband has a pretty good job as a mechanic, thank God, but even between the two of us we don’t make enough to buy a business.”

“Well, I’m sure things will work out,” Phyllis had told her. “In the meantime, I was wondering about a couple of the families whose homes were on the tour. I visited them while I was collecting money for flowers for the funeral, and I was puzzled about a few things.”

“Which families?”

“The Traffords and the Cochrans.”

That was when Laura’s formerly friendly and helpful attitude had started to cool off. Her eyes had narrowed and her lips had thinned as she pressed them together. She hadn’t said anything, so Phyllis had continued. “I heard there was some trouble—”

That was when Laura had broken in and flatly refused to talk about it.

Phyllis wasn’t going to give up that easily, though. She said, “I know there was a problem with the Traffords’ tax return—”

Laura interrupted her again. “There are privacy laws, Mrs. Newsom. I can’t discuss anything about Mr. and Mrs. Trafford’s taxes with you.”

“Not the specifics, certainly. I probably wouldn’t understand them, anyway. I’ve never been able to make much sense out of all those forms. But if there were hard feelings involved between, say, Mr. Trafford and Georgia, that’s something the police need to know about, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh, my God,” Laura said, her eyes widening now. “You think Mr. Trafford is the one who killed Georgia!”

Phyllis shook her head. “I don’t have any reason to think that. I was just wondering if he held some sort of grudge against Georgia because of business.” She paused. “I know he thought that Georgia made a mistake that cost him quite a bit of money—”

“No.” Laura was on a roll today when it came to interrupting. She looked stricken now. “Georgia didn’t make the mistake.
I
did.”

“You?”

Laura nodded and bit her lip for a second before saying, “It was my mistake. I overlooked a form that should have been included and wasn’t. Of course, Georgia signed off on it, and the business belongs to her so she took responsibility for it, but I was really to blame for what happened.” She looked across the desk at Phyllis and went on, “You don’t really think that Mr. Trafford . . . that he could have . . . because of what I did . . .”

Laura’s determination not to talk about the matter had vanished in an upswelling of guilt and despair. Phyllis felt bad about that, but all too often, getting to the bottom of an ugly truth involved upsetting people.

“I don’t know, Laura,” she said. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”

“But . . . but isn’t that the police detective’s job?”

“Of course. But it was my front porch, and I can’t help but take it personally. I want to do everything I can to help bring Georgia’s killer to justice.”

Laura managed to nod. “I understand. I feel the same way.”

“So Alan Trafford
was
upset with Georgia?”

“That’s right. Some of the money involved, he actually owed to the IRS to start with as taxes, but the penalties and interest they levied added up to about fourteen hundred dollars.”

“That’s all?” Phyllis asked, thinking about what Sam had told her about the Traffords’ house and the fact that Alan Trafford worked at a bank and made quite a bit of money. “Only fourteen hundred dollars?”

“That’s a lot to some people.” Laura shrugged. “Not to Mr. Trafford, I guess, but he was still really upset about it, anyway. Georgia was, too. She offered to reimburse him half of the amount, but he thought she should be responsible for all of it. He was so stubborn that in the end she didn’t pay him anything. He talked about suing her, but he never did.”

Phyllis shook her head and said, “Wait a minute. If there was that much bad blood between them, why in the
world
would the Traffords agree to let their home be part of the Jingle Bell Tour?”

“Well, that was mostly Brenda’s doing, I think. That’s Mrs. Trafford. She tried to stay friendly with Georgia. I’m sure she’s the one who persuaded her husband to just drop the whole thing. And to be honest, the few times I talked to Mr. Trafford since then, he seemed friendly enough, and even a little sheepish, like he’d gotten over being mad and was sorry the whole thing ever happened.”

“I suppose that could be the way he felt,” Phyllis said. “People do get over being mad sometimes.”

But sometimes they held on to a grudge, she reminded herself, still nursing it even when those feelings were no longer apparent, until finally something just snapped . . .

Alan Trafford wasn’t the only reason she was here. She went on, “What about the Cochrans? What were they angry about?”

“It wasn’t the Cochrans who were angry, at least not at first,” Laura said. “It was Georgia. And
that
was because of me, too.”

She looked like she was about to cry now. In hopes of avoiding that, Phyllis asked quickly, “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

For a moment Phyllis thought Laura wasn’t going to say anything else. Then the distraught-looking young woman drew in a deep breath and started talking.

“It . . . it didn’t really have anything to do with the tour. That was already all set up. Dr. and Dr. Cochran . . . My, that’s awkward, isn’t it, having to call them Dr. and Dr. instead of Mr. and Mrs.? . . . Anyway they had already agreed to let their home be part of the tour, and since the place wasn’t right here in town, Georgia thought it would be a good idea to print up a little map to give to the people who signed up, in case they got lost trying to find it. Just as a precaution, you know. Georgia didn’t want . . . didn’t want anything to go wrong that night.”

Emotion made Laura’s voice catch. She had to stop and look down at the desk for a moment before she could go on.

“So she fixed up the map, and she wanted Dr. Cochran—Charles Cochran—to look at it and approve it before she printed a bunch of them. But she was really busy with other things that day, so she asked me to run it out there and get him to look at it. She had talked to him earlier and he said he would be there. But he wasn’t. When I got there, nobody was home but his son, Chris. He told me that his father had been called in to the hospital for an emergency.”

Laura stopped again and visibly struggled with what she was trying to say. Phyllis had a bad feeling about what was coming next. She had never met Chris Cochran, but Sam had told her enough about the boy that she feared the worst.

“I gave the map to Chris,” Laura finally went on, “and asked him to show it to his father, who could let us know if it was all right. Then I was going to leave, but . . . he didn’t want me to. He asked me to stay for awhile and said his father might come back. He said that would save me another trip out there. I tried to explain to him that I wouldn’t have to come back anyway, that Dr. Cochran could just call us or e-mail us to let us know, but Chris wouldn’t listen. He tried to give me a beer—he’d already been drinking; I’m sure of that—and when I didn’t want it, he . . . he grabbed my arm . . .”

“You don’t have to go on,” Phyllis said as Laura’s voice trailed off miserably.

“Oh, he didn’t . . . didn’t rape me or anything like that. He might have . . . but I got away from him and made it to my car. He followed me out there, stumbling a little, yelling at me and calling me names. He said if I ever came out there again, he’d set those awful dogs on me. I had some bruises and my blouse was torn a little, but that was all. Still, it was enough to make me upset.”

“Of course it was,” Phyllis said. “You should have reported him to the police for assault. Or did you?”

“No, I came straight back here. I figured it was an unpleasant incident, but it was over and no real harm was done. I wasn’t going to say anything to anybody, not even Georgia, but she was really observant. She noticed that my blouse was torn and could see that something was bothering me. She made me tell her what happened.”

Phyllis had a hunch that Laura had really wanted to reveal everything to Georgia, in spite of what she said now. It was hard to make somebody say something he or she didn’t want to. And Phyllis couldn’t blame Laura for wanting to share her fear and anger, either.

“How did Georgia react?” Phyllis asked.

“Well, she was furious, of course. She couldn’t stand to see anyone taken advantage of or threatened. She wanted to call the police, but I talked her out of that. The whole thing was . . . embarrassing, you know? I didn’t want to have to go through it again with the police. Then she wanted to go right back out there and confront Chris Cochran. I talked her out of that, too. She was like, I don’t know, a fire-breathing dragon or something. But after a while she calmed down, and I thought that would be the end of it.” Laura took another deep breath. “But the next day she called Dr. Charles Cochran. She told him that his son had tried to . . . tried to attack me. Dr. Cochran didn’t believe it. He was angry, too, only he was mad at Georgia and me. Georgia said he sounded like he thought we were trying to drum up the grounds for a lawsuit, and she said that didn’t sound like a bad idea.”

“All of this going on, and the Cochrans didn’t drop out of the tour?”

“It was the day of the tour,” Laura explained. “It was too late to change anything, and anyway, Dr. Cochran said that people could still come, since it was for a good cause. He’s really a . . . a nice man. You can’t blame him for taking his son’s side.”

Phyllis shook her head. “I suppose not, but he should have wanted to get to the truth.”

“As far as he was concerned, he did. Chris denied it ever happened, and Dr. Cochran believed him.”

If anybody had ever accused Mike of wrongdoing, Phyllis thought, she probably would have taken his word for it if he had said he was innocent, too. That was just what parents did.