We could hear drawers being opened and shut, and office closets, and finally we could hear muffled cursing.
“Where is that damn thing!” suddenly the person grunted in extreme agitation.
Chase and Odelia now snuck out of Cher’s office, and emerged in the door to Neda’s, blocking the intruder’s escape route. “Looking for this?” suddenly Chase piped up.
The intruder froze, and slowly turned to the cop, who was waving a diary.
“I…” said Titta Riding, for it was her, then sank down on the chair which had belonged to her big sister, and said, dejectedly. “I walked straight into a trap, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did,” said Chase. He and Odelia stepped into Neda’s office. “And this?” he added, throwing the diary onto the desk. “Is a fake.”
Titta picked it up and leafed through it.“Figures,” she said as she discovered that the diary was empty—not a single page covered by writing. “So what happens now?”
“Now I’m placing you under arrest for the murder of your sister,” said Chase simply.
“How did you figure out it was me?” asked Titta.
“We talked to Neda’s lawyer,” said Odelia as she also took a seat at the desk. “He told us how when your father cut all ties with you, he also cut you out of his will.”
“He didn’t even have the decency to tell me,” Titta scoffed. “I had to find out from that same lawyer after my dad died that Neda had inherited the entire estate: all of Dad’s many millions, the house, everything. As if I never even existed.” She shrugged. “But I didn’t care, you know. I was happy doing what I was doing. I didn’t lie to you about the orphanage. It has become my life, and so whatever was going on over here seemed like a different world—a world I never belonged in, and frankly didn’t want to belong in.”
“But you needed money,” said Odelia. “Or at least your orphanage needed money. So you figured that since Neda had plenty, it wouldn’t hurt to ask her to share some of it with you.”
A hard look had come over the young woman’s face. “I called her, out of the blue, and told her I was going to be in the country for a couple of weeks, talking to potential donors, and could we meet. She didn’t sound happy about it, but obliged me. So yesterday I came over to see her, and asked if she wanted to be a donor. I was sureshe’d be interested, since over the years I kept reading how she donated to this foundation and that charitable institution. So why not my orphanage? You know what she said?”
Odelia shook her head.
“Over my dead body. She said she owed me nothing, and she wasn’t going to waste her money on some third-world orphans. I told her I was practically an orphan myself, the way Dad had cast me out, but she said I only had myself to blame for that. So we argued. I told her a couple of home truths that she didn’t appreciate, and finally she decided to rub it in and said Dad had claimed I wasn’t even his—that Mom must have had an affair with the plumber or the milkman, because I looked nothing like him. He said I was my mother’s daughter—that she’d been a disappointment and a failure, just like me, and that her death had been a blessing, and he’d been glad to be rid of me, too.”
“Your sister said that?”
Titta nodded.“And a lot of other stuff, too. She really unloaded on me, you know, as if she’d been waiting a long time to get this stuff off her chest. So finally I couldn’t take it anymore, and gave her a pretty hard shove. She landed badly, hit her head against the fireplace and the rest of the story you already know.”
She stared down at a framed picture of her sister for a moment, then picked it up to study it.“You know, when I came to Hampton Cove, I really did so with an open and a hopeful heart. I was actually excited finally to meet my big sister again, eager to recreate a bond that probably only existed in my imagination. I already saw us working together, with her providing the funds, and me out there on the ground, maybe setting up more orphanages in other parts of the country, or the world.” She replaced the frame. “I always thought Dad hated me for my teenage shenanigans, and if only Neda and I could reconnect, I’d find a sister, and maybe even a friend.” She grimaced. “How wrong I was.”
Epilogue
We were out in the backyard of Marge and Tex’s house, and even more than usual, the doctor was giddy with excitement. He was manning his grill again, just like old times, and he was doing it in his own backyard—of the house they were about to move into!
The house wasn’t completely ready for human habitation yet, but that was only a matter of time. With Gran’s unfortunate interior decorator having been struck down on the battlefield and carted off, the road was clear for more sensible minds to figure out how to repopulate the house with the kind of stuff that turns a house into a home.
And Marge and Tex had decided to wrest control away from Gran, and to do whatthey wanted for a change, and Gran had reluctantly decided to let them. She’d even dropped her plans to turn the house into a show home, where hordes of visitors would come shuffling through on a daily basis, preventing a normal existence for the Pooles.
So the new house would have some old stuff making a comeback, and some new stuff to appear onto the scene, sourced from the visits Odelia’s parents planned to pay to the many furniture stores and home decoration shops that festoon our neck of the woods.
“So how did you do it, Max?” asked Harriet as we all sat side by side on the porch swing, which had been dragged from the storage facility where the Pooles had kept their stuff until the house was ready. “How did you figure out that Titta killed her sister?”
“Well…” I said as I marshaled my thoughts. “I think I first started putting two and two together when I saw that missing photo album.”
“What missing photo album?”
“You’ll remember that when Neda’s house was burgled a second time—or seemingly a second time, since it was never burgled the first time—that the only thing that was found missing was a photo album. At the time I thought it was odd that the missing album would look completely different than the other ones. I mean, Neda had a dozen or so of them, and they were all expensive ones. Fancy, you know. But this? This was a small album, and looked as if it was handmade. It looked… Oriental. So that made me think.”
“Why would anyone want to steal a photo album?” asked Brutus.
“Unless it held a clue to the identity of Neda’s killer,” I pointed out. “Which it did. That photo album belonged to Titta. It contained pictures of the orphanage she wanted to show to her sister—the orphans she cared so much about, and for whom she was making a plea with Neda to donate money.”
“Which Neda wanted nothing to do with,” said Harriet, nodding.
“Exactly. And then of course there was the witness on the red bike.”
“What witness? What red bike?”
“Well, the morning Neda was killed, a traffic accident happened just down the road from where she lived. Head-on collision. And one of the drivers had seen a person pass by on a red bike—a potential witness. And since they couldn’t come to an agreement on who was to blame for the accident, one of the drivers desperately wanted to get in touch with that witness to support their statement. They had no idea if it was a man or a woman since the witness was wearing a hoodie, but they knew they were on a red bike.”
“One of those rental bikes,” Dooley explained.
“Yes, Titta had come down to Long Island on the Jitney and had rented a bike from one of the rental agencies that rent to tourists. So I suddenly put two and two together and wondered if this witness could possibly be connected to our murder case.”
“And she could,” said Dooley.
“Odelia contacted the rental agency, and showed them a picture of Titta, which they recognized. Turns out she’d been in town the morning Neda died, and not in Brooklyn with her friend Kirstin as she claimed. Chase got in touch with Titta’s friend again, and this time she admitted she had no idea where Titta had been. Titta said she’d been in a traffic accident, and could her friend tell the police, in case they called, that she was in Brooklyn, since she didn’t need the aggravation. So Kirstin did, as a favor to her friend.”