“You mean while you go out and play detective?” Carolyn asked. “That’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it?”
“I just need to talk to a couple of people. It won’t take long.”
Eve and Carolyn both turned to Sam. Eve said, “Sam, can’t you talk some sense into her?”
Sam held up both hands, palms out. “My job’s to keep Roy entertained this afternoon,” he said. “Other than that, I’m stay-in’ out of it, ladies.”
Carolyn said, “Actually, I don’t mind doing the work. There’s really not much left to do at all. But you shouldn’t let these things consume you like this, Phyllis.”
“It was on my front porch,” Phyllis said. “Someone came across my yard, up my steps, and onto my front porch to kill one of my friends.”
Eve said, “I’m sorry about that, but Georgia will be just as dead after Christmas. After New Year’s and the wedding, for that matter. And maybe by then the police will have caught whoever killed her.”
They wouldn’t,
Phyllis thought. She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but she did. It was true that she didn’t have all the information she needed to solve the case, but maybe the police didn’t, either. She was haunted by the idea that maybe there was one fact out there, just one, that would make everything else fall into place.
“I’m sorry, Eve,” she said. “I’ll be back before lunch, and everything will be fine.”
Eve looked like she wanted to frame some angry retort, but with a visible effort she controlled her temper. She looked at Sam again and said, “Will you at least go with her, so we can be sure that nothing happens to her?”
“Now, that I can do,” he replied with a smile and a nod.
Phyllis hadn’t asked him to come along, but she would be glad for his company. They worked well together.
When she was dressed after breakfast, Phyllis avoided the living room, where Eve and Carolyn were talking about the shower, and went to the kitchen to wait for Sam. He came in a few moments later wearing jeans and a denim jacket.
“We’re takin’ my pickup again?” he asked.
“If that’s all right.”
“Sure,” he said. As they went out through the garage, he continued, “It doesn’t feel much like Christmas Eve, does it?”
“That’s because we’ve had this hanging over our heads the whole time,” Phyllis said. “Last night was the first time since the night of the tour that I really felt like I had the Christmas spirit . . . and even then, it didn’t last.”
“Where are we goin’?” Sam asked as they got into the pickup.
“The Bachmann house. I want to talk to Holly Bachmann again, if she’s home. Who in the world has a tooth-whitening emergency?”
A dubious frown appeared on Sam’s face as he pointed the pickup toward the street where the Bachmanns lived, only a few blocks away. “I’m pretty sure Detective Latimer said he talked to the lady’s dentist. She was where she said she was.”
Phyllis sighed. “I know. I’m grasping at straws, aren’t I?” Suddenly she felt ridiculous. She was neglecting her friends and her other responsibilities in order to chase after some elusive hunch. Was it just vanity? Was she starting to believe the things people said about her, to the extent that her pride was wounded because she hadn’t been able to solve this murder? Surely she wasn’t that shallow . . . as shallow as a woman who would have to go and get her teeth whitened on the night when a whole tour full of people were coming to her home.
“Turn around, Sam,” she said with a sigh. “This is crazy. Let’s just go home and let the police do their job.”
Sam looked over at her and frowned again. “That doesn’t sound like you, Phyllis.”
“Maybe not. But maybe I don’t like what I’m becoming.”
“You’re still who you always were,” Sam said, his voice firm with conviction. “I don’t know what else is eatin’ you all of a sudden, but you haven’t done anything wrong.” He brought the pickup to a halt at the curb. “Anyway, we’re here.”
It was true. They were parked in front of the Bachmann house. On this gloomy morning, the multitude of decorations didn’t look nearly as festive and cheerful as they had the last time Phyllis and Sam had been here.
“We might as well go talk to the lady, since we’re here,” Sam went on.
“You’re right,” Phyllis said. “But this is the end of it. I have more important things to do.”
“We’ll see.”
The man Phyllis had seen with Holly Bachmann at Georgia’s funeral answered the door. He smiled at Phyllis and Sam but obviously didn’t have any idea who they were. “Can I help you?” he asked.
“Mr. Bachmann?” Phyllis asked.
“That’s right. I’m Dan Bachmann.”
“My name is Phyllis Newsom, and this is Sam Fletcher. We were here and spoke with your wife a few days ago—”
“Holly’s not here,” Bachmann interrupted. “What’s this about?”
“We collected some money for a flower arrangement for Georgia Hallerbee’s funeral,” Phyllis explained.
Bachmann’s slightly suspicious expression cleared. “Oh, sure,” he said. “I thought you looked a little familiar. You were at the funeral, weren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, come on in, out of the wind,” Bachmann said as he stepped back and held the door open. “Holly’s gone to get her hair done. She paid you our part on the flowers, right? It wasn’t like a pledge or anything like that?”
Phyllis smiled as she and Sam went into the house and Dan Bachmann closed the door. “No, we’re not here to collect any more money,” she said. “But we were thinking about putting together some sort of memorial for Georgia, something that would tie in with next year’s Jingle Bell Tour.”
She had come up with that off the top of her head, but Bachmann nodded eagerly and said, “I think that’s a great idea. Georgia worked on putting those tours together for a long time. There must be something we can do that would honor her. Come on in and sit down. Would you like some coffee or something else to drink?”
“No, that’s fine, thank you, and we really can’t stay,” Phyllis said. “We’ll start putting together the details later. Right now we’re just checking with everyone to find out who wants to be involved when the time comes.”
“Well, count us in, for sure. We thought the world of Georgia.”
“Is that so?”
Bachmann nodded. “Yeah. That’s why Holly wanted to look her best on the night of the tour.” He smiled. “Although, let’s face it, you’ve met her, so you know that Holly’s the sort of woman who always wants to look her best. I don’t know how I got so lucky as to land somebody like her.”
Something nibbled at the edges of Phyllis’s brain, some instinct that told her not to leave just yet. Instead she said, “She was at the dentist on the night of the tour, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah.” Bachmann shook his head ruefully. “Boy, nothing worked out right that night, did it? All Holly could think about was looking good for the people who showed up on the tour, and then she wasn’t even here for it because Georgia never got a chance to rearrange the order of the stops.”
“What’s that?” Phyllis asked. “Georgia was going to rearrange the tour?”
Bachmann nodded. “Yeah. Our house was before yours, and she was going to ask you if she could switch them around since we live so close together. That would have given Holly time to get back from the dentist’s office. But then . . . well, you know what happened to Georgia. She didn’t get a chance to even speak to you about it, did she?”
“No,” Phyllis said. “She didn’t. That’s why she was coming to my house before the tour?”
“That’s right. I heard Holly talking to her on the phone. Georgia said she would stop by your place to see if you were ready and wouldn’t mind swapping places with us. But as it turned out, the tour never even got to your house, did it?”
Phyllis’s pulse thundered in her head as the implications of what Dan Bachmann had just told her soaked in. “No,” she managed to say. “The tour never got to my house.”
And with that, she knew what she had overlooked before. The missing piece slipped into place.
Sam looked at her intently as he put a hand on her arm. “I think we’d better be goin’ now,” he said to Bachmann. He held out his other hand and shook with the man. “We’ll be back around to talk to you later on.”
“Don’t forget, we want to be part of whatever you do to honor Georgia,” Bachmann said.
“We won’t forget,” Sam promised.
Phyllis was grateful for his strong hand on her arm as they left the house. By the time they got back in the pickup, she was breathing a little harder than usual as her thoughts raced.
“I’ve seen that look before,” Sam said as he reached for the key. “You’re gonna honor Georgia Hallerbee by catchin’ the lowlife who killed her, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Phyllis said, “I am.”
And this time she knew it was the truth.
Chapter 28
“ D
rive to Georgia’s office,” Phyllis told Sam as she took her cell phone out of her purse. She didn’t dial 911 but punched in the regular police number instead. That wasn’t a number that most people had memorized, but she had called it enough over the past few years that it was stuck in her head.
“You think Laura Kearns will be there?” Sam asked. “It’s Christmas Eve, after all. Place could be closed.”
“We’ll find out.” The operator at the police station answered, and Phyllis asked to be connected to Detective Warren Latimer. When she was told he wasn’t there, she said, “Can you give him a message? This is Phyllis Newsom. I need for him to meet me at Georgia Hallerbee’s office. It’s very important . . . Thank you.”
As she hung up, Sam asked, “You think Latimer will really show up?”
“I hope so. If nothing else he’ll want to yell at me for getting mixed up in the case again and tell me to butt out.”
Sam grinned. “He’s about to learn better, isn’t he?”
“We’ll see,” Phyllis said. Even though she was confident in this new theory, more so than she had been in either of the others, a small, nagging doubt remained.
Some of that doubt vanished when they pulled into the shopping center parking lot and she recognized two of the cars parked in front of Georgia’s office, even though the CLOSED sign was up on the door. One of the vehicles belonged to Laura Kearns. The other was the car Carl Winthrop had gotten into at the cemetery, after Georgia’s graveside service.
“He’s here,” Phyllis said.
“Who?”
“Carl Winthrop. He killed Georgia.”
Sam frowned as he guided the pickup into a parking space in the lot’s back row. “How could he? He was with the tour that night.”
“Who told us Winthrop was there the whole time?” Phyllis asked. She provided her own answer. “Laura Kearns.”
“But if she lied—”
“Then she was part of it, just like I thought before.”
“But her husband didn’t go out on that AAA call . . . Wait a minute. This doesn’t have anything to do with that, does it?”
Phyllis shook her head. “Joe Henning’s connection to the case, the fact that he had a flat tire, the fact that the garage Rusty Kearns works for handles emergency calls for AAA, Margaret’s generosity in giving Laura that business loan . . . All of those things were coincidences that just muddled things. The key—one of the keys—to the case is that Carl Winthrop told me Georgia was upset and wanted to see me about some sort of crime, because of my reputation for solving them.”
“While Dan Bachmann said she just wanted to switch around the order of the tour.”
Phyllis nodded. “So if Bachmann is telling the truth, and as far as I can see he wouldn’t have any reason to lie about that, then Winthrop had to be lying to me about why Georgia was coming to the house.”
“What about the Cochran kid?” Sam wanted to know. “I thought we figured that was why Miz Hallerbee wanted to talk to you.”
“They led us into thinking that,” Phyllis said with a note of grim anger in her voice. “They manipulated me into believing that’s what the case was all about, and look what happened. Chris Cochran is really the only suspect the police have right now. They’re not even considering Winthrop and Laura. They
used
me to make the police believe that Chris is guilty.”
Sam frowned in thought. “You mean the reason the kid claims he never attacked Laura is because it never happened?”
Phyllis nodded. “That’s right. Again, we had only Laura’s word for it. Georgia couldn’t confirm or deny any of it because she’s dead.”
“But if you’re right and Winthrop and the Kearns woman are in it together,” Sam said, “they were trying to frame Chris for the murder, or at least throw enough suspicion on him that the cops wouldn’t go after anybody else. How did they know he wouldn’t have an ironclad alibi for that night?”
“I don’t know yet,” Phyllis admitted.
“I’m not tryin’ to throw cold water on your idea,” Sam said. “Not after what happened before. But why would they want to kill Miz Hallerbee in the first place?”
Phyllis shook her head. “I don’t know that, either. But here’s the thing that’s been bothering me for several days now, the thing I knew was wrong but could never quite figure out. It all comes back to the gingerbread man.”
Sam stared at her.
“I know, that makes it sound like I’m crazy,” Phyllis said. “But when we were at the cemetery, Carl Winthrop mentioned the killer using the gingerbread man as a weapon.
That wasn’t in the newspaper stories.
The police held back that detail.”
“And the cops closed off the whole block and didn’t let anybody near the house until after everything was cleaned up,” Sam mused. “Nobody knew about the gingerbread man except the folks in the house, the cops, and . . .”
“And the killer,” Phyllis finished for him. “When Dan Bachmann told us the real reason Georgia showed up at the house before the tour started, and I asked myself whether it was him or Winthrop who lied—because one of them had to be lying—I remembered what Winthrop said at the cemetery. I didn’t put it together then, but now it seems clear.”