.
Right near the typewriter.
I studied the font on the letters and envelopes. That’s why it had been so unusual. It had been made by a typewriter. An old-fashioned one.
One just like Greta and Russ’s.
And since I knew Russ’s penchant for blackmail, I had to wonder if Bill had been blackmailed by Russ himself.
Twenty-One
Tuesday morning I sat at my desk, trying to massage the crick out of my neck. So far, no luck.
True to her word, the night before Ana had come over with some desperately needed ice cream. I’d stayed up too late fielding her morbid questions about Greta Grabinsky, and gotten a lousy night’s sleep on my sleeper sofa.
With all the construction in the bathroom, my room was currently unusable.
Tuesday was normally my day off, but the thought of the bathroom demo had driven me from my house and into my office.
The choice between Brickhouse and remodeling was a close one, but I had work to catch up on, namely a hummingbird garden I was designing as a mini for the Alonzos.
Rich Alonzo was a novice birdwatcher, and his wife Lena wanted to surprise him.
No matter how hard I tried, or how much I threw myself into my work, I couldn’t help but think of Bill Lockhart.
With my theory about Bill and Lindsey purposely plotting Russ’s heart attack shot to pieces thanks to those letters, I didn’t know what to think.
184
Heather Webber
They hadn’t planned for him to have a heart attack. Hadn’t wanted him dead.
Maybe my Clue-playing skills weren’t as good as I’d thought.
Yet, someone was blackmailing Bill. Which meant he was doing something he wanted to keep secret . . .
Had it been Russ blackmailing Bill?
He’d been blackmailing Dale Hathaway. Why not expand?
I played with different scenarios.
Russ, with a lawsuit looming, needed to have his backyard cleaned up, cleared out.
Maybe he’d heard Riley talk about TBS at work?
Being as cheap as he was, he certainly wouldn’t want to pay my lofty fees himself, so he blackmails Bill into paying them for him.
Brilliant, actually.
And Bill, desperate to keep his secret, has Lindsey call me, setting the whole thing into motion.
Grabbing a red-colored pencil from the mason jar on my desk, I shaded blooms on a carnival weigela—a red, white, and pink flowering shrub hummingbirds loved—as one thought continued to nag at me.
Why then had Russ seemed so surprised to find my crew and me at his house if he’d planned the whole thing?
I chewed on the end of the pencil. Had his reaction been orchestrated too? Part of the grand scheme?
The pencil fell from my fingers.
It fit!
Russ finds us there, pitches a fit, and a lawsuit follows.
Not only is his yard done free of charge, but he also possibly gets money from me, in addition to Bill and Lindsey, to settle a lawsuit.
Except he went and died, ruining everything.
185
Almost everything. Greta still threatened to sue. Almost immediately, as if it had been on her mind all along.
Which left me to believe that Greta had been in on it all.
I finished coloring the weigela and reached for the purple pencil for the perennial salvia.
Russ and Greta had been in it together. And if Greta knew about Russ blackmailing Bill, she must have known about Russ blackmailing Dale.
Had someone else figured this out? And decided to end the scheming for good by killing Greta since Russ had already conveniently died?
