After a pit stop at the parish rectory, I headed toward the Grabinskys’ house. All the way there I hoped I was wrong about Noreen. I liked to think I had a good sense about people, and she’d struck me as the decent sort.
The sort that needed a makeover, but a decent sort nonetheless.
Even though Kevin had warned me to mind my own business and let him handle Noreen, I couldn’t let it go.
I’m not sure why, so I just accepted it as a character flaw.
It was all there, plain as day now that I knew what I’d been looking for. Noreen had access to the Grabinskys’ typewriter; she knew what was going on at Growl; she hated Russ. She’d been working the morning he’d gone home sick.
Perfect time to poison his soup. Above all else, she had loved her sister and wanted her to be happy.
By having her backyard redone. By getting rid of a jerky husband.
How much had Greta known? Had she been in on it all along?
I checked my dashboard clock. Almost noon now. Was Noreen waiting for that money transfer? To leave town?
237
Emergency vehicles lined the street in front of the Grabinsky house. Paramedics roamed the yard. Patrol officers were roping off the sidewalk to keep gawkers at bay.
Meredith Adams stood along the fringe. “What’s going on?” I asked her, not having a good feeling about this at all.
She stuck her nose in the air, sniffed, and said, “This neighborhood was perfectly respectable until you came along.”
Yeah, it was all my fault. “So, I shouldn’t buy the Lockharts’ house?”
Her eyes went wide, her mouth dropped open. “You wouldn’t.”
“I might,” I lied.
She turned on her heel, stomped away.
A body covered with a white cloth was being carried out of the house on a stretcher.
It was a lumpy body. Potato-shaped. “Oh no.”
Weaving and bobbing my way through the crowd, I finally found Kevin. He pulled me aside, to a quiet corner of the driveway. I handed him the blackmail letter and he slipped it into a plastic evidence bag.
“Suicide,” he said. “Left a detailed note. Couldn’t live knowing she was responsible for Greta’s death. She knew Greta had successfully blackmailed Hathaway and thought she’d try her hand at it with Bill. She knew about the mushrooms. Left us names and dates to help put him away. She ad-mitted to putting the death cap in Russ’s soup. She hoped his death would look like a heart attack brought on by the makeover. That no one would be suspicious. That there’d be no autopsy. She hadn’t counted on Greta being so grief-stricken.”
“So Greta didn’t know about the makeover?”
“Apparently not.”
“Who was the money for?” I asked.
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Heather Webber
“Greta’s daughter. To pay off HOA’s fees.”
“What’s going to happen to Bill?”
“The prosecutor’s building a case against him.”
I looked over to the Lockhart house, saw Lindsey on the front porch. I thought back to why I’d taken on the makeover in the first place, just to learn more about Kevin’s first wife.
I’ll admit I was still curious, but it was time to let the past go. For good.
“You have a place to stay tonight?” Kevin asked.
“My mother offered.”
“That desperate?”
“Getting there.”
“I better get back.” He walked away, then stopped. “We never did find those pictures Greta used to blackmail Dale Hathaway. You don’t happen to know anything about that, do you?”
“Not a thing.”
One of his eyebrows rose. He nodded once and disappeared into the Grabinskys’ house.
I made a stop at the truck, then worked my way through the crowd over to Dale Hathaway, who was sitting on his front porch.
“I can’t believe it,” he said.
“It’s terrible.” And rather ironic since Russ went and died on his own, making all the blackmailing and murder
