touch of the steel only made me more anxious. I sure hoped Scott and Quinn were paying attention.
“Give me the letter,” Nick growled.
“You are the rightful owner. I mean, being Marjorie’s only living relative and all.” I threw out this morsel in an attempt to wheedle a confession out of Nick, just the way Scott and Quinn had instructed me to. “Why not just go home and work on proving you own it. That way you can walk in here, take rightful possession, and do anything you want with the stupid letter.”
“I can’t take that chance.” Another step closer. I held my breath. “What if there’s no way to prove it’s mine? It’s worth too much.”
“Was it worth killing Marjorie to get?”
“What?” In his surprise, Nick forgot all about his goofy disguised voice, and hearing him sound genuinely shocked, I spun around. I found him with his mouth hanging open, and yeah, the lights were dim and the shadows edged in on us from every side, but I swear, in that one instant before he stuck his right hand in his pocket, I saw what I saw, and what I saw was that his hand was empty. The second he stuck it in his pocket, though, it looked like he had a gun in there.
Or like he was pointing a finger, pretending it was a gun.
The tension washed out of me and I tossed my head. “Oh, come on, Nick. That’s just about as lame as it gets. You don’t have a gun.”
He made a face. “I figured you’d give me the letter if you thought I did.”
“Is that what you told Marjorie that morning you came here to the memorial? That you had a gun? That she had to turn over the letter or else?”
Even with the shadows, I could tell his face went ashen. “I tried to reason with her,” he said, his voice squeezed thin. “Aunt Marjorie was not a reasonable woman.”
That was neither here nor there. I stuck to my case. “So when she wouldn’t hand over the letter so you could sell it, you tossed her over the balcony.”
“No. I didn’t. I swear.”
He started to shake, and seeing it, I got a fresh dose of courage. I took a step toward Nick. “I know you were here that day, Nick. You took the brownies.”
All the gray washed out of his face and left him as white as a sheet. Nick staggered back and swallowed hard. “How . . . how did you know?”
“Because of what Bernadine said. She said you were nervous about the wedding and your tummy was acting up. But it wasn’t nerves, was it? It was the brownies. Gloria Henninger put Ex-Lax in them.”
All that pale skin was suddenly shot through with a color that reminded me of blood. “I’ll sue!” Nick yelled. “That woman is a menace. This certainly proves it. She . . . she tried to kill me.”
“But here you are, alive and well.” I let this comment settle before I added, “But Marjorie isn’t, is she?”
Nick whirled around, then spun back to me. He tugged at his hair, his voice choked and desperate. “Yes, I was here that morning. Yes, when I left, I took the brownies. I love chocolate, you see, and I figured it would serve Aunt Marjorie right to not get any of the brownies. She was . . .” Looking for the right word to describe a woman who was indescribable, he blubbered.
“She was impossible! For once, I wanted to get the best of her, so when I arrived here that morning, I told Aunt Marjorie something she didn’t know. A couple weeks earlier, after she showed me the letter for the first time, I smuggled it out of her house and showed it to Ted Studebaker. You know, so that he could value it. I should have sold it to him right then and there, Aunt Marjorie be damned. But no!” He was so overwrought, his voice gained an octave.
“I had to be the good nephew. Just the way I’ve always been. I had to give in to Aunt Marjorie’s whims. Just the way I always have. I returned the letter to her along with the good news about how much it was worth. She said she’d consider selling it and that I should come here to the cemetery and we’d talk about it further.”
“And when you did?”
“When I did, she laughed in my face.” Nick’s eyes were rimmed with red. He swigged his nose. “She told me I was stupid if I ever thought she’d sell that letter, that it was the most wonderful thing in the world and that she’d never part with it. I felt like a little kid all over again, always being corrected by Aunt Marjorie, always being told by her that I wasn’t smart enough, that I didn’t care enough about family history. She made me so angry . . .” Nick’s hands curled into fists. “I wanted to . . . I wanted to—”
“Kill her?”
Nick went motionless and the only sounds in the rotunda were the echoes of his rough breathing. “I . . .” He drew in a breath and it stuttered out of him on the end of a sigh. “I didn’t kill her. I swear I didn’t kill her. We fought, yes. We yelled. We screamed. But when I left here, Aunt Marjorie was alive.”
I wasn’t about to believe him, not without proof, anyway. “You were the only one here that morning, Nick,” I said.
“Well, obviously not. Someone threw Aunt Marjorie over that balcony. But it wasn’t me.” He wiped the tears from his cheeks and threw back his shoulders, and suddenly, his voice was as calm as it had been distraught only moments before. “Now you’ll need to give me that letter, Pepper. I may not have a gun, but I am a man, and stronger than you. I’m not leaving here without the letter. Even if it means I have to hurt you to get it.”
Before I could decide if he was bluffing, Nick darted toward me, and honestly, I think I could have taken him if not for the fact that all the lights came on in the place and Scott and Quinn showed up out in the entryway. I was distracted, watching as they jockeyed for position, each trying to be the first into the rotunda. All they managed to accomplish was to trip over each other.
In the meantime, I lost precious seconds, and in those seconds, Nick closed in on me and I stepped back and bumped into the table. Before I had a chance to figure out which way to run, his hands had already closed around my neck.
“Give me that letter!” he said, his voice deadly serious. And even though I struggled to breathe at the same time I fought to loosen his hold, I recognized the important word there.
He was stronger than any IT geek had a right to be. He shook me like a ragdoll. “It’s mine. Give me the letter. Now.”
Never let it be said that Pepper Martin isn’t willing to oblige. I was getting nowhere trying to pry Nick’s hands away from my neck so I groped for the framed letter. Once I had a hand on it, I swung. Hard.
When the frame and the glass shattered on Nick’s head, the noise was as loud as a gunshot.
I guess that got Quinn and Scott’s attention. They untangled themselves from the doorway and scrambled over just as Nick’s eyes rolled to the back of his head and he crumpled to the floor.
“Nick Klinker, you’re under arrest—”
They did it again. Started talking at the same time.
Quinn and Scott exchanged cutting looks. But maybe Scott is the smarter of the two. Or maybe he just knew that the case was officially Quinn’s and there was no way he was going to scoop it, anyway. He stepped back and Quinn cuffed Nick and called for the paramedics.
What did I do while all this was going on?
Well, I still had a hold of what was left of the frame, and I looked down at the letter, but I couldn’t really see it clearly. That’s because my hands were trembling.
“You OK, Pepper?” Scott asked. He put a hand on my arm.
“I’m fine,” I lied, but only because Quinn looked up, anxious to see how I was going to answer.
“I’ll just . . .” My knees were mushy, and I figured it would be more graceful to sit down in the office than to fall down on the floor, so I headed that way. “I’ll wait inside the office.”
This, too, was a good plan.
Or at least it would have been, if Nick Klinker hadn’t been telling the truth about Marjorie’s murder, and the real murderer wasn’t lying in wait for me.
I had already slumped down into the chair behind the desk when the office door swung shut, clicked, and locked. Too late, I realized someone had been standing behind it.
“Thank goodness for Nick causing all that commotion. I never could have gotten in here unnoticed if your two cops friends hadn’t been so busy trying to one-up each other.” Ted Studebaker stepped out from the shadows. Good
