When exactly had I last seen it?
I struggled to bring images of Friday night to mind. The party, serving food and cleaning up. Keeping one eye on Charles. Chatting to Bertie’s guests, everyone laughing about how much the world of libraries had changed. Everyone except Helena, who I hadn’t heard laugh once all night.
The letter opener had been on the table when she’d been admiring the display. I was sure of it.
Well, almost sure anyway. If it had been missing when we were showing the exhibit to an important guest, I would have noticed. Charlene told Sam Watson it had been in place when she showed Helena the display, meaning the letter opener had been on the table when Helena saw the withdrawal slip with Jeff Applewhite’s name written on it. She’d been shocked by something she’d seen or remembered and turned and walked away.
What had she done then? She’d moved into the crowd, and I lost track of her until it was time to leave for the walk, when the party was over and most of the guests had left.
Could there have been two Helena Sanchezes in the library that night? Might Tina have somehow slipped into the party? Helena had left from Tina’s house, so Tina would have known what her sister was wearing. I hadn’t seen anything striking or individual about the brown cape. It had been a warm night, the library heating up under the press of bodies, but Helena hadn’t removed the cape. Was it her habit to keep her coat on indoors? Did she feel cold, never mind the weather? Did her twin sister know that?
The reunion group didn’t know Helena well or at all. Even those who’d worked with her claimed not to have seen her in years. No one seemed to like her all that much, so no one other than Bertie sought out her company at the party.
I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to everyone; one or two of the women went outside now and again, presumably for a cigarette or some fresh air or to make a phone call. Had Tina come inside, dressed like her sister, taken the letter opener, and slipped out again?
If so, the question was why.
Not why Tina would want to kill her sister—she had a monetary reason to do that, never mind decades of resentment—but why go to the trouble of potentially being seen at the library and stealing the letter opener?
Unless the letter opener had some significance to Tina, the only reason she would do that would be if she wanted to frame one of the partygoers for the murder. One of the partygoers, or the library staff.
The police had asked Sheila, Ruth, Lucinda, and Mary-Sue not to leave Nags Head. Did that mean those four women were under suspicion? It must. What about Bertie herself? I knew Bertie hadn’t killed anyone, but she’d had as much opportunity as the others did. Come to think of it, so had Louise Jane, Ronald, and me.
I threw off the covers and got out of bed, much to Charles’s displeasure, but he made the most of it, and ran for his food bowl.
I sat at the kitchen table and thought.
I’d been assuming Helena’s death was somehow related to the withdrawal slip and Jeff Applewhite’s name. Which, considering the significance of the date he’d checked out the book, must have had something to do with the theft of the Blackstone necklace and Jeff’s disappearance. Now, I had to consider that the killing had nothing at all to do with Jeff or Rachel’s diamonds.
If Tina had killed Helena for her inheritance or in memory of past grievances, the necklace, the book, and Jeff were nothing but a coincidence.
If Tina had taken the letter opener to frame one of the reunion crowd, then, unless she was totally off her rocker, she had to have had a reason to do so.
I’d not considered that Tina might know one or more of Bertie’s friends. I grabbed a pad of paper and a pen and wrote down the four women’s names in one column, and then Tina’s in another, and Helena’s in a third. I drew lines to connect the four women to Helena, and another to join Helena and Tina.
And that was all. My page looked mighty empty.
If Tina had pretended to be Helena, could it be possible someone had killed Helena mistaking her for Tina?
Rachel Blackstone had known Tina, and she’d been aware of Helena, although, according to Rachel, they’d not been friends. If she suspected one or the other of the twins of stealing her family’s necklace, might she have killed out of revenge? I wrote her name down and drew a strong line between it and “Tina” and then a light one to “Helena.”
I scratched them out again.
Bertie, Charlene, Ronald, and I knew Rachel. If she’d come into the library during the party, one of us would have seen her. If Rachel wanted to kill Tina or Helena in revenge for the theft of the Blackstone necklace and the Rajipani Diamond, she’d had twenty-five years to do it and a great many better opportunities.
I leaned back with a groan.
My head was hurting.
If Tina had been hoping to frame someone, she wasn’t doing a very good job of it. No other evidence, as far as I could see, had turned up to point to one of us. Perhaps all she wanted was to throw suspicion off herself. Helena died in the marsh, at night, in the presence of a limited circle of suspects, while Tina was apparently far away.
Tomorrow was Wednesday and I had the day off. I might take the opportunity to pay a call on some of the “suspects.”
This time I thought it best to phone ahead. Sometimes people talk better in a neutral, comfortable environment. I fed Charles and let him out of the Lighthouse Aerie (Charles never got a day off from being the library cat), made a pot
