“None for me, thank you,” Nelson said. “It keeps me awake.”
Keep him talking.
“All right. You killed Margaret, but why Joey Madsen? I assume you did, right?”
Nelson nodded. “I may not have shared Margaret’s passion for ornithology, but I agree about Beecher’s Bog. The man’s plans were reprehensible.”
“You killed him to save the bog?”
“No, of course not. I killed him because he was blackmailing me.”
Faith poured herself a cup of coffee she didn’t want. Even if she threw the scalding liquid at his face, he’d still be able to get her before she could reach the door—if not by racing after her, then with his gun.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” She hoped this new appeal to his reference librarian’s inherent sense of order would work.
He looked at his watch.
“A synopsis. You know Margaret was feeling incensed about Alefordiana Estates. I realized I could capitalize on that fervor, and we began to plan little forays into the bog to drill, as it were, should it become necessary to confront the developers head-on, disable their equipment, whatnot. You surprised us one day and were no doubt surprised yourself by our uniforms. Margaret thought they lent verisimilitude. I was able to convince Margaret that Joey was writing those anonymous letters and that the threat to the land was increasing. In fact, I wrote the letters myself. The library was getting rid of a great many of its outdated magazines and it was quite easy to find the appropriate means.”
Nelson had always taken pride in his work. Faith remembered the way he’d shown her and Miss Lora the finished shelves and storage areas he’d built for the school.
“We decided that we had to send a strong warning to the Deanes, and burning down the new house appealed to Margaret. I’m afraid I fanned the fires of her conviction a bit, overriding her objections with some of Machiavelli’s old arguments. Margaret had never been a part of the radical movement, since I’d been in the army and she thought it would be disloyal. She always thought she’d missed out on something. She certainly entered into my plans with gusto. We were going to destroy their excavator together, but it didn’t work into my schedule. I was sorry she missed it.” All Faith’s prior sympathy for the man plummeted, leaving a leaden weight in the pit of her stomach.
Poor Margaret, duped to death.
“We took the gas can to the house and as she was pouring it, I hit her on the back of the head with a wooden cudgel one of her ancestors had brought back from an Amazonian adventure. I made sure to place it in a pool of gas, and presumably it was destroyed in the flames.”
Along with your wife, you bastard, Faith said to herself. All the while Nelson had been talking, she’d been surreptitiously glancing about the kitchen, seek-ing a means of escape.
“So, Joey saw you at the house?”
“No, I was very careful. I disposed of my clothes—they smelled of gas and smoke—in the small pond on the way back to our house, taking the shortcut. No one saw me. Who would be about at that hour? I took a bath and went to sleep. Joey didn’t see me the night of the fire; he watched me take the chloral at the Minuteman breakfast. He figured things out after I was stricken.” It was on the tip of Faith’s tongue to ask why Madsen hadn’t gone straight to the police, but she had her answer. Joey needed money, a lot of money. Blackmailing Nelson was going to help pay for Alefordiana Estates. Simple—and Joey would have gotten a kick out of the whole thing, too. Making Nelson foot the bill for something he abhorred.
“Margaret had been having trouble sleeping a number of years ago and the doctor prescribed chloral hydrate. I substituted cherry cough syrup and an over-the-counter sleeping pill. It wasn’t as effective and the doctor kept giving her the chloral in greater strengths. I was able to put quite a bit aside. My plan was to kill her with it, but then Alefordiana Estates and POW! came along. Really much better.” Faith was confused. “But weren’t you afraid that you might overdose yourself?”
“I
As I mentioned, I had been able to put plenty aside, so I ran a few tests. To get the timing right.”
“But how did you manage to get it into the breakfast? The police searched the trash at the church and all the bins on the green. There wasn’t a bottle or other container, and there wasn’t any chloral in your flask. And how could you have taken it right under the eyes of the state police?”
Nelson permitted himself a self-congratulatory smile. Most murderers were extremely egotistical, Faith had heard, and Nelson was no exception.
“I filled a sturdy balloon with the dose and carried it in my shot pouch. My flask simply held water, as it might have on that famous day. Before leaving for the green, I told my bodyguard I had to relieve myself.
Then I went into the bathroom, where I quaffed the chloral, then flushed the empty balloon down the toilet.” Nelson seemed to be reverting to 1775 speech. “I also drank two nips of vodka to help the chloral work faster. I was sure the police would not find those out of the ordinary, although I did not see any other liquor bottles in the trash at the time. And it worked perfectly. Except, unbeknownst to me, Joey Madsen was in one of the stalls, watching.”
It hadn’t worked perfectly for Margaret, or for Joey.
And not now for Faith.
It still seemed like an enormous amount of trouble to go through to get rid of someone who perhaps nagged too much. What were those references to marriage and things changing last fall?
Nelson was still reminiscing about Patriots’ Day. “I felt a bit groggy, but I knew that everything would be all right. If I died, then it would be God’s will and my love would not have proved as pure and holy as I had believed.”
At some point soon, he would be coming around to her side of the counter to knock her out, with the pistol butt probably. He wouldn’t expect her to put her own head in the oven. There was a smoke alarm. It was hooked up to the alarm company. If she could set it off, help would arrive quickly, but perhaps not fast enough. And setting it off would involve starting some sort of fire. Nelson would not stand idly by while she burned some newspaper and held it to the alarm.
“I love the reenactment. It’s one of my favorite days of the year. She looked so lovely in the morning mist. A goddess.”
The only possibility was to get to Nelson before he got to her. It would have to be when he came near.
Faith had often thought what an ideal setting a kitchen would make for murder.
“It was a shock when Joey called me and said he’d figured out that I had killed my wife and staged the attack on myself. But I wasn’t too worried. I played along and gave him three thousand dollars in cash to start. He was to collect another seven and we arranged to meet at the bog. I’d been keeping some cash on hand for some years. You see, I wasn’t sure exactly what I might need. I was glad I had been so foresighted, because this has been rather expensive. I had to give five hundred dollars to POW! Anonymously, of course. The last thing I wanted was for the group to disband due to lack of funds. Then Joey’s blackmail money, although I didn’t even bother to bring the second payment. I used that for the ring.”
“The ring?” Faith was paying close attention now.
But Nelson was off on his own tangent.
“Blackmail. A terrible thing. And if a man can’t have privacy in the bathroom, where can he, I ask you!” It was a rhetorical question and he did not pause for an answer; although at this point Faith would have agreed with anything the man said just to keep him talking.
“He had such a smug expression. I expect he thought he could bleed me dry. I’d have had to sell my house, although I do hope to move. Sauntered down the path to meet me. ‘Got something for me, Nelson, old buddy?’ he said. As if we could ever be friends. I grabbed his hand—he’d actually had the nerve to extend it in greeting—then inserted the knife. The library had a wonderful medical text I was able to study at length. I had never realized that you could employ a knife with such a relatively short blade—one a little over four inches, and we happened to have
