Copycat Killing

12

Roma and Maggie insisted on washing the dishes for me. I was too restless to sleep after they left. I tidied up the kitchen and set the table for breakfast. I’d told Roma I’d take her turn out at Wisteria Hill in the morning.

I was hoping I’d get a chance to talk to Marcus. I knew it would be a while before he could piece together what had happened to Thomas Karlsson, so there really wasn’t anything I could do for Roma, other than be there for her. But maybe Marcus would have some insight into what had motivated Christian Ellis to turn himself into Jaeger Merrill.

Maybe it was nothing more than looking for a new start. On the other hand, maybe Maggie was right. Maybe Jaeger—Christian—had been up to something. Now that Marcus and I didn’t seem to be at odds so much with each other, maybe he could tell me something, anything that would put Maggie’s mind at ease. She already had enough to deal with.

Hercules and Owen were both upstairs in the bedroom. I crouched beside them, groaning a little because my ankle really didn’t want me to get down so close to the floor.

I kissed Owen’s head and scratched under his chin. “That was such a nice thing you did for Roma,” I said. “I’ll make an extra batch of crackers for you this weekend.” I stroked Hercules’s fur with my other hand. “You, too,” I said. “And I promise I’ll figure out how to tell Maggie you are not a boot person.”

Getting up again was harder than getting down to the cats’ level had been. Rebecca’s box was still on top of the chest of drawers. I moved it over to the table by the window, sat in the big chair, and took the lid off once more.

I set the bound book full of sketches and notes aside and lifted out one of the journals. The pages were yellowed, covered with the same tight, neat handwriting as the sketches.

October 19, 1960

Spent the day making apple pies with Anna. Must have peeled two baskets’ worth of apples. Decided I was sick of apples. Had a slice of the first pie out of the oven. Decided I was wrong.

I could see where Rebecca’s sense of humor came from. I flipped back a few pages.

May 17, 1960

Ladies Knitting Circle meeting at the library. Anna still prefers yarn from western Canada but Mary-Lee wants to try a mill from back east. Sammy drove me up the hill. He’s such a sweet boy, nothing like his father. Thank heaven.

“The Ladies Knitting Circle?” I said to Hercules. “Remind me to ask Rebecca about them. Or Mary. And do you think Sammy is the mayor, Sam Ingstrom?”

Abigail—with some input from Maggie—was already working on a display about the various groups that had met in the library over the years. My favorite so far was the Young Women’s Deportment Society from the early sixties. Abigail had unearthed five or six photos of several teenage girls walking through the stacks wearing white gloves and balancing books on their heads. She’d admitted, with pink cheeks and a self-deprecating laugh, that one of them was her.

I yawned. Suddenly all my restless energy was gone. My ankle was throbbing again, my head hurt, and pretty much everything else ached. I pushed myself up before I got too comfortable in the upholstered chair. “I’m going to take a bath,” I said to Hercules.

I filled the tub with hot water. Maggie had given me a packet, made of cheesecloth and tied with string, and told me to add it to my bathwater. It smelled of chamomile and roses. I tossed it in.

I soaked until the water cooled, then spread Rebecca’s salve on my ankle and wrapped it carefully with the cotton strips that had been in the bag. When I went back into the bedroom, wrapped in my oversized blue robe, I found Hercules sitting in the wing chair, his black-and-white head bent over the journal I’d forgotten to put away. It almost looked as though he was reading.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He looked up and meowed.

“Find anything interesting?”

He lifted a paw and gently patted the book.

“Careful,” I warned, bending over to look at my scabby forehead in the mirror. I had no idea that there were so many variations of blue-black.

Herc meowed again, more insistently this time. Translation: Look at this now.

I crossed over to the chair. The cat had his paw on the open spine of the journal where the pages came together. “What is it?” I said.

He dug at the inside edge of the page and then looked at me. If he could have talked he would have said, “See?” He had that kind of expectant expression on his face.

I picked up the diary. He watched me intently. At first I didn’t see anything. Then as I turned the book toward the light I saw a tiny sliver of cut paper.

“Are there pages cut out of this book?” I asked Hercules.

I moved the journal closer to the lamp on the table and ran my finger along the spine where the pages came together. Two pages had been cut from the book, very carefully with what I was guessing was some kind of thin blade. The remaining tiny scraps of paper were sharp edged—there was no feathering of the cuts as far as I could see in the dim light. It looked as if the pages had been cut out recently.

“That’s odd,” I said. Hercules looked at me unblinkingly. I flipped slowly through the rest of the journal. There were at least three other places where pages had been removed. “Do you think Rebecca did this?” I asked. Hercules didn’t so much as twitch.

No, that didn’t make sense. If there were things in Ellen’s diary that Rebecca didn’t want anyone to read, she just wouldn’t have given them to me in the first place. Secrets had kept Rebecca and Everett apart for most of their lives. If she had found something embarrassing written in her mother’s diary she wouldn’t keep it hidden, no matter what it was.

Hercules stood on his back legs and put his front paws on the edge of the cardboard box that held the rest of Ellen’s things. The extra weight made it tip over. The carton bounced off the edge of the chair and landed on the floor, spilling the other three bound books onto the rug. Hercules landed beside them, sheepish and disheveled.

I looked at him, slowly shaking my head. “Please tell me you didn’t damage those other journals,” I said.

He looked at the books, and then he looked at me and murped.

“You better be right,” I warned, reaching down to gather up everything.

Hercules held out his left paw and gave a pitiful meow.

“You’re not hurt,” I said.

He ducked his head and looked sideways at me around his whiskers, his paw still extended.

I laid the diaries on the bed and picked up the cat, setting him on my lap. “You’re such a wuss. Let me see.”

I gently felt all over his paw. He didn’t so much as wince. “I think you’ll live,” I told him.

I ran a hand over the closest leather-covered book. “Do you think there are pages missing from any of these other books?”

He reached over with his “injured” paw—which didn’t seem to be hurt anymore—and lightly scraped the cover.

“Good idea,” I said.

Two of the remaining journals had at least a few missing pages. I’d have to look at all of them in better light in the morning to be sure. I put Hercules on the floor, gathered everything back in the box, and set it up on the chest again.

Someone had taken a great deal of care to cut pages out of Ellen Montgomery’s journals. It wasn’t something I could see Rebecca doing.

So who else would care about what was written in some old diaries? Everett? That didn’t seem likely. He wasn’t the kind of person who worried about what other people thought. He’d let Wisteria Hill sit empty and neglected for a long time now while people in town speculated about his reasons.

Lita? She was one of the few people who had access to the old house. What reason would she have to remove pages from Ellen’s journals?

Could Everett’s granddaughter, Ami, have done it? I wasn’t sure Ami had ever even been inside the house at Wisteria Hill.

Yawning, I put the lid back on the carton. “I guess it doesn’t matter, anyway,” I said to Hercules who had started washing his face. “I’ll call Rebecca tomorrow and tell her. Maybe this is just another one of the mysteries of Wisteria Hill.”