“Why did she care so much about a grandmother she’d never known?”
Mona took a deep breath, perhaps deciding it was time to tell it all. “The Clinger family had money. It was Fran’s failure at her career that drove her to suicide. Her money went to Mandy’s mother with a proviso that any children of hers would receive a large sum on their twenty-first birthday. When Mandy turned twenty-one her mother told her the story and Mandy decided the Quilters were somehow to blame.”
“What were the Quilters?” Simon asked quietly.
But Mona Emberry shook her head. “You’ll have to get that from someone else. I’ve told you too much already.”
I assumed we’d be visiting Kate Brady next, but Simon had something else in mind. “That young woman came to the Quilters last night to confront Grace Merrit and the other old-timers from the original group. If she really wanted some sort of vengeance for her grandmother’s suicide, she might have been carrying a weapon of some sort.”
“She had a weapon, Simon. A scythe about six feet long. You overlooked the obvious.”
“You underestimate me,” he said with that slight smile of his. “I felt the scythe blade. It was rubber, covered with silver paint and a dab of red for blood. It was Veronica’s costume, remember, used for these appearances.”
So we drove over into town and found Sergeant Mason. “There was no weapon,” he assured Simon. He produced a large evidence bag from a filing cabinet and spread the contents on his desk. “Purse, handkerchief, makeup, keys, address book, pencil, wallet, cell phone, cigarettes. We’re contacting her family in California now.”
“Any pictures in the wallet?”
“Girlfriends from high school, no guys. The usual things: California driver’s license, a couple dollars in change, eighteen dollars in bills, a key card for her hotel room in White Plains. No drugs or pills of any sort.”
“What about her return plane ticket?”
“We found that in the room with her suitcase. She was planning to fly back Monday.”
Our next stop was the home of Kate and Wayne Brady. Their house was big and lived-in, with a basketball hoop over the garage door attesting to one or more sons. The children were all gone now, though pictures of two boys and a girl decorated the piano, and larger wedding photographs stood behind them.
“Grace phoned to warn me you’d probably be coming,” Kate said, showing us inside. “She worried about what I might say.”
Wayne Brady offered glasses of white wine and we both accepted. Then Simon asked, “What was it that you might say?”
“Oh, about California and the Quilters.”
“And Dr. Faraway?”
“You know about him?” she asked, surprised.
“I have heard stories.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Then suppose you tell me what it was, so we can stop suspecting your husband of murder.”
“What?” The blood drained from Wayne Brady’s face. “What in hell are you talking about?”
“My friend here tells me you were in the kitchen with him when Mandy Snider arrived in her costume. She mentioned she’d almost gone off the road in the dark. And later, when Shelly handed her a beer, you supplied the glass. The knockout drops could have been in the bottom of that glass, unnoticed by any of us.”
“Why would I kill her?”
“To protect the secret of the Faraway Quilters.”
“There is no secret!” Kate insisted. “I don’t know why Grace and Mona wanted to dig up that name from a half-century ago.”
“Tell us about it,” Simon urged.
She sighed and looked down, shaking her head. “You have to realize times were different then. Today actresses have all sorts of cosmetic surgery without anyone blinking an eye. Back in the forties we stopped getting work with the first sign of a facial wrinkle. They didn’t need us. There were plenty of eighteen-year-olds ready and willing to take our places. Today it’s called the ‘Q’ or quality factor — that indefinable something that makes someone attractive to people. How an actor or singer or politician rates in Q-factor polling can determine their future exposure to the public. They talked quietly about Qs back in the nineteen forties, too, and it could spell the end of an actress’s career. It was the Q that gave Grace the idea for the Quilters. We would quilt and play cards, and the studio executives would never suspect that a former doctor named Faraway came to the meetings with his little black bag and injected our faces with all sorts of untried youth potions. They worked wonderfully on Grace for several years. They were a terrible disaster for poor Fran Clinger.”
“So she killed herself,” Simon Ark said, half to himself.
“She killed herself. Dr. Faraway is long dead, too, but Fran’s granddaughter inherited that money when she turned twenty-one and came East to somehow avenge her grandmother.”
“But why should one of you kill her?”
“We didn’t!” Kate Brady insisted. “And neither did Wayne. Do you think any of us would carry knockout drops around with us in case there was an opportunity to use them? And they work so quickly that the poor girl would have been on her face before she ever reached the car.”
“Come, my friend,” Simon Ark said quietly. “We must not make another mistake.”
Veronica Brand was painting her living room wall when we arrived, making some fiery additions to the dragon’s breath. “Do you like it?” she asked, stepping back to admire her work. We’d come in after announcing ourselves through the screen door, and she was startled to suddenly realize that Sergeant Mason was with us.
“Perhaps they’ll let you decorate your cell,” Simon told her, “when you go to prison for killing Mandy Snider.”
“You’re crazy! I barely knew her!”
“Strangers kill strangers all the time, especially for money. You didn’t let her borrow that car. You drove her to Shelly’s house and waited outside in the dark. When she came out and told you about the confrontation you gave her a quick drink of something laced with chloral hydrate that knocked her out. Then you took what you wanted from her and steered the car off the road, making sure she died in the apparent accident. If foul play was suspected, you figured the Quilters would be blamed. You probably called a cab to take you home.”
“What did I take from her?”
“Money, a great deal of money. When she paid you a thousand dollars cash to substitute as Miss Death you must have known there was lots more. She’d foolishly brought a portion of her inheritance with her.”
“You think you can prove that? There was a houseful of people who could have drugged her.”
“We saw her take the fifty-dollar fee from Shelly and place it in her wallet. It wasn’t there after the accident. Someone must have been in the car with her, to drug her and take the money, and you were the most likely possibility. You took all the big bills, but you took one too many.”
Sergeant Mason came over and recited her rights. It was as if she didn’t hear him. “It was only a few thousand dollars,” she grumbled. “Not even enough to pay for a new SUV.”
“You won’t be needing a car for a good long time,” he told her.
Copyright © 2002 by Edward D. Hoch.
The Hunchback and the Stammerer
by Edward Marston
Under his real name, Keith Miles, Edward Marston has already contributed several stories to EQMM. Like other work published under the Marston byline, this new story is historical, though it is set much earlier than the Elizabethan novels usually associated with the name. The sixth book in the Marston series featuring Elizabethan stage manager Nicholas Bracewell came out last August. Look for The Bawdy Basket (St. Martin’s).