Diane Davidson - Chopping Spree

But it was not Tom. A timid knock at the front door only intensified the dogs’ howling. I checked the peephole, then opened the door.

Ellie McNeely, her trim figure still swathed in the trench coat and scarf in which I’d seen her earlier in the evening, gave me an apologetic look. Her hands fidgeted as she struggled for words. What was she sorry about? The unannounced visit? The late hour? The fact that she had not answered my calls?

Her hands finally came to rest on her lapels. She smoothed her coat and tossed her bangs off her forehead.

She said, “We need to talk.”

“I’ve been trying to get hold of you.”

“Please, Goldy. I need you to come with me. I feel… awful.” A zigzag of emotional pain twisted her lovely face. “The cops suspect me. They told me not to leave town. They say I need to be clearer about my relationship with Barry. What about the cuff links? What about this? What about that? They want me to give a minute-by-minute accounting of where I was Monday night. I told them, I went home with a friend. Why don’t they believe me? Are they going to let Julian out and send me to jail instead?” Her voice cracked. “If you don’t help me, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

CHAPTER 12

Come with you where?” I asked, bewildered. If we needed to talk, why couldn’t we do so in my snug kitchen?

“For a drive,” she replied enigmatically. She looked up and down our street. A chilly whip of wind slashed through the evergreens. Ellie turned back to me, stamped her boots, and pulled her gloved hands into fists. “Please. It would help me so much to talk to you. But… it just has to be the two of us.”

“It’s almost ten o’clock, Ellie. And there’s no one here but my son. Why don’t you come inside? I’ll make you some hot—”

“ Please , Goldy!”

I pressed my lips together, then nodded. Ellie was my friend from both St. Luke’s and Elk Park Prep. In fact, she was one of the only school parents who’d ever even been nice to me. Plus, she seemed distraught. And if I was going to help Julian, I needed to find out what Ellie knew. If that meant taking a drive, so be it.

“Let me run tell Arch I’m leaving.”

I sprinted up the stairs and informed Arch that Ellie McNeely was here, and we were going out for a bit. I’d put the pets to bed, I assured him, and Tom would be home soon.

“I don’t need a babysitter , Mom.”

OK, it was official. I had had enough. “You know, Arch, I wish you would try to be a bit nicer to me. Even a tiny bit would do.”

“Sorry, Mom. But you are always bugging me.”

How was telling him I was going out “bugging him”? I didn’t know. Lately, it seemed as if there were lots of things I didn’t know. I asked, “Do you want the animals up here with you?”

“I suppose.” He threw off his quilt, revealing his standard nighttime wear of sweatshirt and sweatpants. “That way I can take care of the puppy, in case he gets scared.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and paused, hunched over. He struggled for words. “Good idea, Mom,” he mumbled.

I’d had a good idea? Where were the Guinness people when you needed them?

While I donned my snow boots, mittens, down jacket, and scarf—with the temperature in the single digits, the wind chill was bound to be horrific—Arch shepherded the two dogs up to his room. Scout the cat, not surprisingly, decided to stay put.

Ellie sat waiting for me in her new SUV, a silver BMW that was the twin of Marla’s. The car was lovely, but in its interior light, Ellie didn’t look very good. Her expensively colored hair had turned waxy, probably from being repeatedly raked by her manicured nails. Her face, usually flawlessly made up, was puffy and still wrought with worry. The whites of her eyes were dark pink. From crying?

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard how somebody or somebodies are trying to smear me?” she demanded as I slid into the cold leather passenger seat.

“I’ve heard some things. That’s why I’ve been trying to call you.”

She revved the engine that she’d kept running while I was getting ready. “I suppose you heard the story about my Lexus being stolen and rammed into Barry’s car.”

“Yeah. But that was a while ago, wasn’t it? Barry took me out for espresso at The Westside Buzz in his new Saab. He loved having a fancy new car, and didn’t seem too upset about losing his old Mercedes.”

“Well, somebody’s upset about it.” She flipped on the overhead light and handed me a typescript clipped to several photographs. “I’ve got a friend who works on the Mountain Journal. She got her hands on copy they’re planning to run tomorrow.”

As she piloted her tanklike vehicle toward Main Street, I peered at four blown-up, grainy photos. The first featured Ellie, clad in a tailor-made suit, which made her look stern and manageresque. The second and third showed Barry. In one, he was smooching the cheek of a beaming Pam Disharoon, whose pigtails bobbed enthusiastically. The third photograph of the bunch showed Pam whispering in Barry’s ear, while he sported an impish, cat-who-swallowed-the-canary grin. The fourth photo was a blurry shot of the county coroner’s van. I turned back to the typescript. The caption read: The Man Who Loved Too Much?

How had the Mountain Journal , which demanded that I submit my ads two weeks in advance, put together a background article so quickly? But I knew the answer to that. Gossip, easily obtained in Aspen Meadow, sold copy. In our small town, it didn’t take long to call dozens of sources and put together a smutty article—full of “alleged’s”—that masqueraded as news. And with computers speeding up typesetting, you could gather enough garbage the day after a murder to put together a story and still meet press deadline.

I hastily skimmed the palaver, with its repeated references to a “love triangle.” The fact that Julian had been arrested for Barry’s murder was glossed over, and for this, at least, I was thankful. I guessed the Mountain Journal brains, such as they were, had figured a detained caterer’s assistant wasn’t as sexy as two women smitten with the same man.

In the Man Who Loved Too Much article-to-be, two incidents were detailed, beginning with: “Last month, witnesses claimed an unidentified woman shoved Barry Dean into a ditch on the mall construction site,” followed by “Mrs. McNeely’s allegedly stolen purse” and her “allegedly stolen Lexus keys,” which had ended up with “the Lexus belonging to Ellie McNeely somehow getting smashed into Barry Dean’s classic Mercedes. The Mercedes was totaled.” The paper proceeded to have a field day with the cuff links ordered by Ellie to be engraved for Barry being found in the out-of-control truck that had almost killed him earlier the previous day, only hours before he was brutally murdered. Who had been their sources on this? How I wished I knew.

“It’s unbelievable,” Ellie said, her voice just above a whisper. Her tone was resigned, despondent. “My boyfriend-who-wasn’t-quite-my-fiancé was infatuated with a lingerie lady. Now he’s dead, and I’m implicated. I can’t even grieve, because the cops are showing up on my doorstep, at my office, you name it. They ask things like, ‘After you picked up the cuff links, Mrs. McNeely, how did you get them into the truck?’ And worse, ‘Have you had medical or military training, Mrs. McNeely? Did you learn how to stab someone so that they’d be certain to die?’”

“Oh, no.”

“I’m going nuts! I think they’re just holding Julian Teller until I crack! Then they’ll arrest me!”