“Can’t you think of something brilliant, Max? You always do.”
“If Jayme is guilty, Dooley, there’s nothing you or I or anyone else can do about that.”
“But what if she is innocent, and someone is getting away with murder?”
I shook my head.“I very much doubt that that’s the case. All the other suspects, apart from Danny, have alibis, and so far we haven’t found anything to conclusively tie him to the murder. And let’s not forget that Jayme has the most powerful motive of alclass="underline" a very large fortune that was coming her way, unless Veronica managed to put a stop to it. And if you look at things from Jayme’s perspective, murdering Dave may have been the only way to vouchsafe what she must have accepted as what was rightfully hers.”
“Money will make people do dumb things,” Dooley said, slumping a little.
“And lots of money will make them do even dumber things.”
Chapter 25
We were back in Odelia’s office, and in front of her, Hester Liffs was seated, pressing a paper tissue to her eyes and looking very unhappy indeed.
“It’s impossible,” said Jayme’s grandmother. “Jayme couldn’t possibly be guilty. I talked to her just now on the phone, and she said she doesn’t understand. She never even met Dave and now she’s supposed to have killed him? It’s all just so surreal.”
“There’s no way she could have known about the inheritance?” asked Odelia.
Hester shook her head decidedly.“Jayme and I have no secrets from each other. If she’d known about that new will she would have told me, I’m absolutely certain of that.”
“Maybe she kept it to herself, in case you wouldn’t approve.”
“And why wouldn’t I approve?”
“Because of your history with Dave?”
“Our history wouldn’t have made me jeopardize Jayme’s future. If Dave had decided she had the talent to follow in his footsteps, I would have been the first to congratulate her and to thank him from the bottom of my heart.”
“So there was no bad blood between you and Dave?”
“Oh, no, absolutely not. It happens, you know, that people lose their memories and forget all about the people they knew and loved. Just recently I read an article about a woman who was in a car accident and forget about her husband and her kids, even though she’d been married for years. It’sawful for the family, and it must be awful for her, but it’s not something you can blame her for. It just happens.” She looked up with tear-filled eyes. “Life deals us blows sometimes, Mrs. Kingsley, but you just learn to roll with the punches and move on. And that’s what I did. For heaven’s sake, it’s been fifty years. If I were still bearing a grudge after all this time I’d be a very unhappy person, wouldn’t you say? No, life has blessed me, and has compensated for the mishaps with moments of joy, like when Jayme came into my life, and then when her parents died it dealt me another blow, but it also gave me the opportunity to raise Jayme as my own. And that’s the balance of life, isn’t it? Sometimes it just knocks you down, and other times it lifts you right up. And that’s why I’m sure that even now, with Jayme, something will happen to make things right again. Because this is an injustice. A big injustice that’s being perpetrated here.”
“I’m sorry,” said Odelia. “I really am. I just wish there was something I could do.”
“I just wish I’d kept Jayme with me Monday night. But dogs need to be walked, and who would have thought that the monster who killed Dave would try to pin the murder on her?”
“So you think the person who killed him put that paper in Dave’s hand?”
“Of course. How else would Jayme’s name have come up in the investigation? She’s the scapegoat. That’s obvious.”
“If what you’re saying is true, then the killer must have known about Dave’s relationship with Jayme.”
“What relationship? I’m telling you, Jayme had no relationship with Dave. Only I did.” She shifted in her seat, and pressed the tissue to her eyes once more. “Besides, if Jayme was the culprit, don’t you think you’d have found that turtle in our house? Or the murder weapon? God knows your people searched long enough. It took me hours to clean up the mess they made.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“I know you are.”
The two women were silent for a moment, then finally Hester got up to leave, and shook Odelia’s hand. “I just want to thank you for all that you’ve done.”
“I wish I could have done more. But I’m afraid my hands are tied.”
“I know you did your best, and that’s all anyone can ask.”
After Jayme’s grandmother had left, Odelia sat there thinking for a moment, then glanced over to me. “You’ve been awfully quiet, Max. You don’t happen to have an idea, do you?”
“Not really,” I had to admit. “The case seems open and shut.”
She nodded.“She’s a juvenile, so she won’t be tried as an adult. At least there’s that.”
I felt bad for Jayme, and her grandmother, but the case against her was strong. Except that the murder weapon still hadn’t been found. “There was nothing in Eddie’s house?”
“Nothing,” said Odelia as she leaned back and stretched her arms. “Not a thing.”
“So Danny is in the clear?”
“Looks like. Though that kid…” Her face took on a hard look. “If there’s anyone I think might be capable of this, it would definitely be him, not Jayme.”
“We can’t pick and choose our suspects,” I reminded her. “All we can do is follow the evidence wherever it leads.”
“So what will happen now?” asked Dooley.
“Now Hester will need to find a lawyer for Jayme. And if they can’t afford one, they can get a public defender instead. And because she’s still only seventeen Jayme will then be tried as an adolescent offender and her case will appear in Youth Court before a judge. If sentenced she’ll serveher sentence in a special facility for youthful offenders.”
“And in the meantime?”
“She’ll be held in a separate wing of a secure juvenile detention facility to await trial.”
“Let’s hope she’ll be allowed to spend the pretrial period at home with Hester,” I said.
“I doubt it,” said Odelia. “This is murder, Max. Even though she’s a minor, they don’t allow murderers to go home. They’re considered a threat to society.”
“So Jayme will go to an actual jail? But that’s terrible!” said Dooley.
“I know,” said Odelia.
Dooley turned to me.“You have to do something, Max. You have to work that big brain of yours and come up with something.”
“I’ll try, Dooley,” I said.
“For Jayme.”
“For Jayme.”
I didn’t want to give him false hope, but he was looking at me so desperately I didn’t want to dash his last hope either. And so there I found myself, between a rock and hard place: I had no idea how to prove that Jayme didn’t kill her benefactor, and I didn’t want to give up either.
Ugh.
Chapter 26
That evening I wasn’t myself. It was a more subdued version of Max who spent time with his family and friends. My big brain, as Dooley had called it, was working hard, trying to connect up the many elements in this most confounding case, and so far nothing was percolating.
And so when Gran invited Dooley and me to participate in yet another shoot for her comic strip, it was with extreme reluctance that I joined the others and subjected myself to be squashed by Brutus or to be on the receiving end of prickly comments from Harriet.
The location of the shoot was Gran’s own bedroom, and when we entered she’d already closed the curtains.
“What’s the scene?” asked Harriet excitedly.
Scarlett was there as well, of course, playing her part as scriptwriter-slash-script girl, and as she read from the script, telling the others where they needed to be and what they should expect, my mind wandered off again and returned to the case. But no matter from which angle I looked at it, twisting and turning the elements in my head, I simply couldn’t exculpate Jayme.