I’d been wondering how to gently ask Tina what she knew about her sister’s death. Obviously I needn’t have bothered.
She bit into her Danish. “The cops have been nosing around my house. Asking questions. Always questions about my relationship with Helena. They were interested when they found out I’m the only one mentioned in her will. I asked them how bad their family relationships are if they think leaving everything to your twin sister is suspicion for murder.”
“Uh …”
“That went down about as well as you’d expect. That cop, the not-bad-looking older one, he doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.”
“You mean Detective Watson?”
“Yeah, him.” She chewed and shrugged. “He wanted to know why my mother had left everything to Helena and how much that had been. I told him my family relationships were none of his business, but if he must know, my mother and I didn’t get on. We never did. She always favored Helena over me. As for what sort of an inheritance that was, our mother had barely a cent left after her debts were paid. Let him ask his questions and poke around in my private affairs. What do I care? I didn’t kill Helena, although at various times in our lives I might have wanted to, and now I’m off to Mount Dora as soon as I can go. I’m not going to wait until my house is sold. Do you want to buy a house?”
“Me? No.”
“What about you?” she asked Josie.
“Not in the market at the moment, thanks.”
“I know you didn’t kill her”—I studied Tina’s face carefully as I talked—“because you weren’t in the library during the party.”
“Right. I’ve never been in that library. I wasn’t going to go there when Helena worked there, now was I? I’ve had no reason to go since. Besides, everyone knows Louise Jane McKaughnan has staked it out as her area of expertise.”
“She has?”
Tina shrugged. “You can tell the police that.”
She might be lying. She might not be.
“Someone killed your sister,” I said.
“Helena and I never got on, as I told you. Our parents, our mother in particular, didn’t like me much, for some reason I never understood. Helena was the one they fussed over. Helena was always the first, and sometimes the only.” She finished her Danish in record time and began tearing the paper napkin into shreds. “But, despite that, I never wanted to see her dead. She was my sister, and since our parents’ deaths, my only living relative.”
She stared at the pile of paper on the table in front of her. I looked at Josie, and she shook her head, her big cornflower-blue eyes full of sadness. Neither of us would be able to understand what Tina and Helena had meant to each other. I have three brothers and several nieces and nephews. Neither of Josie’s brothers are married, but her extended family is vast—as we discovered when trying to pare down her wedding guest list. Both sets of parents are alive and well and cheerfully interfering, or trying to, in our lives.
“I don’t know why anyone would have wanted to kill Helena,” Tina said at last. “I told the cops that. I don’t know anything about her life. Funny, isn’t it? I’m going to get the keys for her house and walk right into that life. If she knew I was coming, she’d have cleaned the place up. But she didn’t know, did she?”
“No,” Josie said.
“Your sister wasn’t in the class of women who’d gathered for the reunion,” I said, “but she knew several of them. Did she ever talk about them?”
“I don’t think she knew who was going to be at that party. She said Bertie James invited her, and she wanted to see Bertie and check out how the library was doing. She liked Bertie—I knew that. She told me before she left for Mount Dora when she retired she was confident the library was in good hands.”
“It is,” I said.
She shrugged again. I was getting tired of that shrug. Tina obviously was getting equally tired of my company. She downed the last of her coffee and started making getting-up movements. Maybe all I’d learned was that Tina hadn’t killed her sister and didn’t know (or care) who had. I believed Tina. There had been a lot of anger in their family—hatred maybe—but the time for settling scores had long passed.
“I saw you at the Ocean Side Hotel on Saturday evening,” I said.
Tina nodded. “What of it?”
“I was there with Bertie’s college class.”
“I saw you.”
“Can I ask what you were doing there, watching us?”
“None of your business,” Tina said.
“I know that. I’m only trying to understand what happened the night your sister died.”
She hesitated. “Okay. It doesn’t matter. A friend of mine works in the kitchen there. He’d heard that my sister died at the Lighthouse Library, and he called to tell me a bunch of library people were in the bar, laughing and having a great time. As though a woman hadn’t died the day before.”
“That’s not entirely fair,” I said. “Some of those women came a long way for their weekend, and Helena wasn’t part of the reunion group. Most of them had never met her before Friday. I’d never met her before Friday.”
Tina shrugged. “Fair enough. I didn’t expect sackcloth and ashes and weeping and wailing. I thought I’d check them out, that’s all, in case I recognized anyone. From Helena’s past I mean. I didn’t. No reason I should. I never met anyone she worked with.”
“You didn’t introduce yourself.”
She looked genuinely surprised. “Why would I do that?”
“No reason.”
“I have to go. I have packing to do.”
“I’ve never been to Mount Dora,” Josie said, “but I’ve heard it’s nice. I hope you like it.”
Tina picked her bag off the floor. “I’ll like it well enough. I would have liked Hawaii better, but that didn’t work out for her. Ha. I knew she was just
