I texted back that my plans were in flux but I would let her know as soon as I could nail down my travel arrangements.
The folders from the storage room all looked reasonably new, and none of them were labeled. I wondered if they were just rest stops for papers until Willis got around to putting them in their permanent homes, whichever beat-up folder in one of the dustier file cabinets that might be.
I opened one folder. Inside I found two pieces of paper. One contained a phone number for a man named Carlo, with the words New Rotary Pres. written beside it. The second was a receipt for a rather substantial donation Willis had made to a Rotary service project supporting hospitals in underserved communities. Laudable, but of no use in my search for murder suspects.
I didn’t find anything useful in either of the next two folders. I was getting frustrated and decided that I would look in one more folder before I would go to the kitchen in search of a cup of tea.
The next folder yielded half a dozen pieces of paper held together by a binder clip. The top page was a blank sheet torn from a legal pad, as if to protect the other pages from prying eyes. A phone number was scribbled in pencil on the inside of the folder. Apparently, in spite of his neatly kept telephone books, jotting down phone numbers in odd places was something Willis did fairly often.
I pressed open the binder clip and the blank page from the legal pad slipped away. The second page looked like a legal document, typed in single space, signed and witnessed at the bottom.
I looked at the signatures. Willis Nickens and Randall Carbonetti. The third signature was from a notary public signing as witness.
The page was number four of a document and it was stapled to page two, which had a few paragraphs and a short list of names. One name was highlighted in yellow. Thomas Blomquist.
Pages one and three were missing. As I read the two pages in my hand, it was evident that Tom Blomquist and the other people on the list owed money in some way to Mr. Carbonetti and that Willis had bought the loans.
I wondered if this was more of the practice I kept hearing about, that of families lending money to one another to keep the old houses in the hands of the even older families.
So it wasn’t just a matter of Tom and Candy wanting to borrow money from Willis to modernize Jessamine House. Even without a new loan, they were already indebted to him for an undisclosed amount, and I had a feeling it wasn’t a small sum. The final pages were also torn from a legal pad. There were all sorts of math calculations scattered around, which made them look like scrap papers from an exam in basic accounting.
After what I considered to be my big find, the last folder was extremely disappointing. The only page was a list of telephone extensions for the employees of a company called Available Options. It meant nothing at all to me, and I was about to drop it back into the folder when a name caught my eye. Randall Carbonetti.
Now the question was, did Willis buy the company, buy a subsidiary, or perhaps just buy some free-falling assets? And I knew just the person who could tell me.
I grabbed my phone and punched in Randall Carbonetti’s number. On the third ring a young woman answered.
“Hello. I’m Mrs. Fletcher, special assistant to Mrs. Willis Nickens, calling for Mr. Carbonetti.” I was hoping she would hear “Mrs. Willis Nickens, calling for Mr. Carbonetti” and lose my name, as had happened when I called Mr. Holmes’s office.
Luck was with me. The next thing I heard was a deep voice. “Mrs. Nickens, Randall Carbonetti here. I must tell you how sorry I was to hear about the untimely loss of your husband. If there is anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to ask.”
“Actually, Mr. Carbonetti, there is something you can do. My name is Jessica Fletcher and I am calling on Mrs. Nickens’s behalf.”
“Oh, I . . . guess I misunderstood.” He was trapped and he knew it. “What can I do to assist Mrs. Nickens?”
“In going through Willis’s papers we found a folder that had some information about Available Options and a notarized document signed by you and by Willis. Unfortunately several pages are missing, so it’s unclear—did Willis buy the company from you?”
“What kind of scam are you running, lady? Why would I sell my company to anyone?”
I hurried to explain before he hung up. “Please, this isn’t a scam; it is merely a matter of lost pages from a contract you and Willis signed. Mrs. Nickens cannot decipher exactly what Willis bought.”
Mr. Carbonetti drew a sharp breath. “What pages do you have? Is there a date visible?”
“Let me see. Yes, I have a signature page. You and Mr. Nickens both signed and dated it, as did the notary.”
Once I told him the date he immediately let his guard down. “Hold on a second—let me check.”
I listened to computer keys clicking, and then he was back. “Okay, I have it. You say you lost part of the paperwork?”
“Well, I only have pages two and four . . .”
He sniffed. “That sounds like a photocopy error. Should have copied both sides, and with pages one and three missing I guess the document doesn’t make much sense.”
“No,” I agreed, “it doesn’t.”
“Well, how’s this for a solution? I will explain exactly what the paperwork represents, and then I’ll messenger a complete copy to Mrs. Nickens first thing in the morning.”
“That sounds perfect.”
“How much do you know about Available Options, if I may ask?”
“Not a thing,” I confessed. I was getting more curious by the minute. I wished he would get to the point.
“We are
