Lye In Wait: A Home Crafting Mystery Part 7

My Walter? The phrase-and the way she'd said it-evoked an image that made my mind reel.

"He drank it," Meghan said.

Jacob's brow wrinkled. "What was it?"

"Lye," was my short reply.

"He drank Drano? OhmyG.o.d." Debby wrapped her pale arms around herself again and rocked back and forth. The sofa b.u.mped gently against the wall. "I can't believe it. He'd say that, sometimes, but I never thought he'd do it."

"Do it?" I looked at Jacob. His eyes were red and his hands trembled. "Do what?"

He looked down at the woman. Took a wobbly breath. "Kill himself. With Drano."

"He told you he was planning to drink drain cleaner?" Meghan asked.

Jacob patted Debby's shoulder. "Nah. Not like you mean. He used to joke about it. You know, like when someone says 'If suchand-such happens I'm just gonna shoot myself,' only he said he'd drink Drano. We never thought he was serious."

"Especially now," Debby said, almost too low for us to hear. She fumbled in her purse, extracted an orange prescription bottle. Suddenly Jacob changed his mind about the water. He hurried into the kitchen, came back with a gla.s.sful, and helped her to hold it steady as she gulped down the little white pill. Liquid sloshed down her chin, but she didn't seem to notice.

"Why especially now?" I asked.

Debby sniffed, a horrible gurgling sound, and stuck out her hand like a paw to be shaken. On her third finger, a sizeable diamond glittered amid a circle of smaller ones.

"We were gonna get married."

TEN.

HOLY cow. As I tried to wrap my head around that one, Meghan walked over to admire the ring. Debby thanked her and snorted wetly.

"It must have been expensive," Meghan said.

I joined them. Up close, I saw Debby was older than I had first thought, probably in her late fifties. Hard to tell with the mascara streaking down her face. She'd kept most of her figure, but her blue-black hair came from a bottle, and the years had engraved a healthy set of lines. The extreme pallor seemed to be her natural coloring, and I wondered for a moment whether her real hair color had been red or even a whiter blonde than my own.

"Yeah," I said. "That's a nice ring. Must have set Walter back a bit."

Debby nodded. "He said he wanted to get me a big diamond, and then he went and actually did it." She said it like she wasn't used to people following through on what they said.

"Well, at least you got that, Debs. You got that t' remember him by." Jacob's words had a bitter edge to them. His face held sorrow, but as he gazed at the woman beside him on the sofa there was something else as well. He reached out and brushed a strand of hair out of her face. She pushed his hand away.

"We're so sorry," Meghan said.

He nodded and fished a crumpled bandana out of his pocket, handed it to Debby. She honked into it.

"I don't know how to ask this," I said, "so I'll just come right out with it. Do you know anything about the investment Walter made that turned out so well?"

"Investment? Oh!" Jacob's smile looked tired. "The money. He'd call it that sometimes, if he talked about it at all."

Meghan and I waited.

"OF Walter won the lottery a few years back. So's I guess the investment he told you 'bout would be the ticket."

"Well, it's nice he spent some of it on that beautiful ring," I said, trying to bring Debby back into the conversation. All it earned me were fresh sobs, which Meghan's glare told me I deserved for trying to extract information from a grieving fiancee.

"He spent precious little, I dare say. Gave it all away to strangers, when he coulda done some good with it amongst people right here." Jacob looked at Debby as he spoke.

She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes and hiccupped. "He didn't like anyone to tell him what to do with his money."

"How much did he win?" Meghan asked. Okay for her to do it, I guess.

"Don't know for sure. A whole s.h.i.+tload. And then he went and started giving it all away," Jacob said.

"All of it? Wow," Meghan said.

He looked away and shrugged, his eyes darting to the woman beside him again. "Don't know if he was sc.r.a.pin' bottom yet, but he was workin' on it."

"Any idea why?" I asked.

Debby turned her wet face to me. "What do you care?"

"Just surprised, I guess. He still did work for us on a regular basis and for other people in the neighborhood. From what I can tell, he didn't really have to, or he wouldn't have had to if he'd kept his winnings."

Neither of them spoke. The silence lengthened. Meghan broke it.

"There will be a memorial service at Crane's Funeral Home on Monday at two o'clock."

A stubborn expression crossed Debby's face. "Moved kinda fast, didn't you?"

Meghan sat down beside her on the sofa. Our eyes met and an unspoken understanding pa.s.sed between us. "Not really. He died on Thursday. We didn't know you'd want to be involved, and his mother wanted to go ahead with the service."

Debby snorted. "His mother. Right. Didn't care much when he was alive, did she?"

"Will you come?"

"'Course we'll come," Jacob responded for them both. "Debby here's just a little overwhelmed by all this. We wouldn't miss Walter's send-off for nothin'."

Meghan scanned the woman's pale face. "Debby?"

"I'll be there. It would have been nice to have a say in things, is all, seeing as how I was his fiancee"

"Well, there are a few details to work out yet. For example, we haven't chosen hymns yet, and no one has selected a cinerary urn.

"Hymns. Right. Like I know anything about hymns. And what's a ciner ... cin ... whatever you said?"

"It's where you keep the ashes after someone is cremated."

"Oh. So the old bat wants to burn him up, is that it? Figures. She always said he was going to h.e.l.l."

I doubted those were her exact words, but perhaps Tootie had understated the schism between Walter and herself.

"She said he was claustrophobic as a child and wouldn't want to be buried," I said.

"Oh. I didn't know that." She looked around. "But you can't just come in here and take all his stuff."

Meghan said, "Right now we're just boxing up some things for the Salvation Army, and whatever mementos we thought his mother might want to keep. Is there anything here you want?"

Debby got up and walked to the set of shelves we hadn't started on yet. She picked up the signed baseball and turned it in her hand. Her face crumpled. Jacob scurried to her side.

Meghan said, "This'll wait. We can put it all on hold until after the funeral." "

I think that'd be best," Jacob said and led Debby to the door. She went through, fingering the leather of the ball and sniffing loudly, but he turned in the doorway. "I want to know how you knew who we were."

"The barista down at Beans R Us told us you were friends of Walter's," Meghan said.

"Oh," he said, and looked to his left, into the kitchen. "That where he did it?"

I tried not to sigh. "No. Not there."

He looked hard at me. "Where then?"

"In my workroom." I swallowed. "Across the alley."

"Jacob?" Debby's tiny voice drifted in from the front sidewalk.

He licked his lips, like he wanted to say more, then suddenly turned on his heel and walked out. Meghan closed the door, looking grim.

"I know, I know," I said. "But what did you want me to do? I couldn't lie, and besides, I didn't want to. Walter didn't have very many friends, and I'm not going to lie to the few he did have just because the truth is uncomfortable for me."

"Well, it's not like how Walter died is a secret."

"At least now we know where Walter's money came from. And that he had a fiancee-can you believe it?"

"She's something, isn't she?"

"I noticed you didn't exactly warm up to her," I said.

"I was nice."

"You were very nice. You're always very nice. But something struck you funny about her, didn't it?"

"Something, yeah. It did you, too. Something about the lottery money?"

"I'm not sure. I got kind of mixed signals from her."

"Not the best time to try and get a read on someone, right after they learn their fiance has died," Meghan said.

"And we know of one possible problem Walter could have had besides the money."

"What're you talking about?"

"Jacob, of course. Walter's rival for Debby's affections."

Meghan looked skeptical "Didn't you see the way he looked at her?"

"That doesn't mean he was a rival."

"Doesn't mean he wasn't, though, does it?"

"You don't have to look so happy about it."

"Sorry. Have we done enough for now? It's almost time for Sparrow, isn't it?"

Looking at her watch, Meghan ran her fingers through her curls. "You're right. I have to get back" She looked around the room. "We said we'd leave it until Debby could help, anyway."

And the paperwork was already over at our house. I had two or three days to sort it out for Tootie, though I had to wonder how helpful it would be if I couldn't find a will. I'd hoped to discover where Walter's money was coming from, but now we knew. Still, the boxes might contain an insurance policy or other financial information. And I wanted to take another look at those donation receipts.

I hesitated, then grabbed the open carton of mementos I'd collected so far. Tootie should look at them first and decide what she might want to keep, since I was here at her request. Debby could have second crack at them. Meghan locked Walter's door, and we walked back across the alley to our house.

ELEVEN.

THE LIGHT ON THE answering machine blinked; Detective Ambrose had returned my call. As I punched in the number for the police department, Meghan laughed.