The Corpse in the Camellias

A Lola, Iris, & Archie Mystery

By K. B. Thomas 

All Rights Reserved

For Dorothy Sayers, with Apologies

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I’d known Lola and Iris for years before I learned that they were sisters. My own sister, who had met both of them on numerous occasions, was not surprised. 

Only relatives, she insisted, could find nothing but fault with you while simultaneously smothering you with love.

“Like a toothpick hidden in a marshmallow,” Morgana insisted. She was a family counselor for the Tri-City Mission Ministries outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  “I see it all the time.” 

“I always thought they were friends who actually can’t stand each other,” I said. “Friends only because they live on the same street and are both nearing seventy.”

It was my birthday. Morgana and I were having Sunday brunch together on my back patio. The spring weather was without a hint of the humidity that would oppress us in North Carolina during the summer months. My neighbor Hugh, two doors down, had just mowed his lawn and the scents of cut grass and gasoline hovered over the table.  

“Lola wanted me to take some of her old kitchen stuff to Goodwill for her last week,” I explained. “She explicitly told me to not tell Iris or let her see the boxes in my car. Some of it had belonged to their mother and she didn’t want to hear any crap from Iris about getting rid of it.”

The interior of Iris’s house was a jumble of brick-a-brack, momentos, crocheted afghans in hues of orange and green spilling off easy chairs and ottomans. Paperback copies of old Rex Stout and Agatha Christie mysteries filled the bookshelves that flanked the fireplace; more were stacked in the guest bedroom. A few clues to Iris’s past dotted the landscape: a wedding photo showing a young Iris and her husband, now long dead. Photos of her son, Kevin, a real estate agent in Orlando. 

Lola’s house was austere in comparison, with polished granite kitchen counters, stainless steel appliances and wooden plaques on the walls painted with encouraging words like Hope and Happiness and Friends, none of which Lola seemed to have in abundance. Glossy home and travel magazines were neatly displayed in the living room. Lola was what my parents’ generation would have labeled a ‘divorcee.’ She was brassy, with a shadowy past. Not a single personal photo could be found in her house. It was as crisp and impersonal as an expensive vacation rental. 

“You know Iris would have just taken whatever was in those boxes and crammed it into her kitchen,” Morgana said. “This may be the first time I’ve ever agreed with Lola.”

I poured the last of the half bottle of champagne into our mimosas. I had made a one pan scramble of potato, bacon and eggs, paired with a fresh fruit salad. We were eating off of my mother’s Wilton china service, the ‘Theodore Aynsley’ pattern, which I only used for special occasions. 

We were celebrating my thirty-ninth birthday for the third year in a row.

With Hugh’s lawn mower now silent we could hear birdsong from the small wooded grove that sat behind my house on Briarcliff Road. About twenty homes lined the street, which was actually a cul-de-sac that ended at the bottom of a hill. There was enough of a grade that children playing at the top of Briarcliff Road had to keep a sharp eye on basketballs and soccer balls lest they roll easily down to the bottom of the street and disappear under the thick, untrimmed camellias that stood sentry in Iris’s front yard. 

Another, extremely apt way to look at it, was to think of Lola’s house at the very top of the road, her sister Iris’s at the bottom, and me squashed between the two. 

“Let’s go over to Chapel Creek Park this afternoon,” Morgana suggested. She mopped up the last of her eggs with a corner of toast. “It’s gorgeous out.”

“Okay, but we have to take Archie.” 

Morgana pursed her lips and gave me one of her Really, Cassandra? looks that expertly mixed disbelief, disgust, and sourness in equal parts. 

“You like Archie,” I reminded her. “He loves the park. Plus, I told Iris I would walk him after lunch.” 

“If you’re walking Iris’s dog then what are you doing for Lola?”

“Nothing today.” I’d taken Lola to the CVS pharmacy drive-through the day before. 

“Cassandra, it’s your birthday so I’m…”

“My thirty ninth,” I interrupted.

Morgana called me Cassie when she was pleased or amused by me. ‘Cassandra’ was reserved for moments of irritation.

She tapped three times on the table with a nicely manicured nail. “Your third thirty ninth birthday. So I’m not going to lecture you once again on what boundaries are, and how important it is to have them so neighbors like Iris and Lola don’t take complete advantage of you.” 

Morgana could absolutely lecture me on boundaries because she was so very good at them. 

“They’re alone and they’re old. I help them out from time to time.”

“They have each other and they’re not even seventy. Seventy is the new forty,” Morgana said. 

I waved away her concern for me. “Don’t you think it’s just crazy that they’re sisters, one living at the top of Briarcliff Road and one at the bottom?”

Morgana doesn’t like the word ‘crazy.’ She went to school and internalized an entire professional vocabulary so she doesn’t have to say it. She also doesn’t like generalizations, or inexactitude in conversations or writing, but she lets me introduce her as my older sister even though she’s just a squeenchy little bit older and only half a sister. 

Five years ago my father died. Years before that my college boyfriend, whom I had assumed I would marry, died of a heart attack during a track and field meet. He was twenty-four years old, a Georgia Tech star, an Olympic hopeful. His heart failed. Mine broke. 

It’s not overly dramatic to say that if I had been religious I might have disappeared into a convent. 

Then my mother died, and my father. I was alone, and lonely.

Four months after my father’s death I received a letter through his probate lawyer from Morgana Owen of Trinity, North Carolina. 

‘My Dear Cassandra,’ the letter began. ‘I am your half sister. My name is Morgana Owen. I would very much like to meet you.’

She wrote that she was not contacting me because she wanted money, which was good because there wasn’t any. I had used it to buy my house. What she wanted was to know more about me, because we had grown up only fifteen miles apart from each other, because she had no other siblings, but most of all because she felt that there was a hole in the fabric of her life. 

A hole in the fabric of her life. 

That sentence was a pure echo of my own heart. A dovetail. A beginning.

“Are Lola and Iris full or half sisters?” she asked as we finished my birthday brunch served on my mother’s Wilton china service. If Morgana’s mother had kept special china, Morgana never mentioned it. 

“I assume full, though they’re the complete opposite of each other.”

Where I was light, in hair and complexion, Morgana was dark. Where I was almost allergic to confrontation, Morgana was intense and an adherent of what she called keeping it real. I had height and heft and Morgana was small. 

Lola and Iris were about alike as Morgana and myself were alike. Which is to say, not alike at all. 

*****************************************

The homes that lined Briarcliff Road in Avalon, North Carolina, were small, two or three bedrooms with no basement, ‘open’ kitchen plans, a one car garage, shallow covered front porches and postage sized front and back yards.  The color palette of the neighborhood ranged from muddish beige to orangish brown, with daring peeks of white semi-gloss trim surrounding entryways and dining room windows. My house was sited on the southern side of the street, almost exactly at the midpoint between top and bottom. 

Morgana insisted on washing the brunch dishes while I went to pick up Archie. “I don’t want you hand washing these,” she said, nodding at the chef’s knives I had used for dicing. It was a sweet gesture that spoke both of a loving protection and sheer pragmatism; I worked from home as a medical transcriber and damage to my hands was a particular nightmare of mine.

My professional specialty was blood. Specifically, Coags – Coagulation Studies – and stem cell research. My clients were the Fordham Clinical Trials Center and the UNC Hanover Labs at Chapel Hill. A group of approximately a dozen doctors and researchers who would have appreciated Morgana’s concern and care of me, had they known.

“Take your time,” she told me, plunging her hands into the hot, soapy water. She had swept her black curly hair into a ponytail, a sign that she was prepared to do some serious scrubbing. “Give my love to Iris.”

This was Morgana at her most ironic; both Iris and Lola annoyed her. 

“Iris is kindhearted,” I said, defending her.  

“Whatever,” Morgana answered. 

I tried to think of something positive to say about Lola. I thought for a moment, then left her at the sink and walked down the hill. 

*****************************************

I didn’t bother knocking on Iris’s door. When she was alone she seldom wore her hearing aids. The air inside was smoldering; Iris was always cold, just as Lola was always too warm. If I walk into Iris’s house I can expect a blast of heat, and when entering Lola’s house I wouldn’t be surprised to find her wearing a tank top and shorts, fanning herself in front of her open refrigerator. 

Archie greeted me. He’d heard my footsteps and was waiting, ears forward, mouth open in a wide smile. Technically he was a schnoodle, a cross between a miniature schnauzer and miniature poodle. He was a good natured lover of life, his hearing was excellent, and he looked like a cuddly stuffed toy, the way koalas do. In many ways he was the exact opposite of Iris.

“Iris!” I called from the foyer, “I’m taking Archie to the park.” 

Iris was sitting in her easy chair in the living room. She was watching the American Movie Classics channel with the sound off. There was a spiral bound New York Times Sunday crossword book balanced on the arm of her chair. As expected, her hearing aids were next to her on the black laquered TV tray.

I waved the leash at her. She waved back. You would expect someone who was always cold to be on the thin and meagre side, but she was bulky; even more so under a knit sweater with a sweatshirt under it. 

“Cassie. About time you came by. What are we going to do about that toilet?” Because her hearing aids weren’t in she pretty much yelled this across the room.

It was my third thirty-ninth birthday. All I wanted was a nice walk with Archie and Morgana at the park. I didn’t want sewer trouble or backed up toilets or having to call Roto-Rooter on a Sunday. Iris’s house had a full bath on the second floor and what we in North Carolina called a ‘powder room’ on the first. If one toilet was out of commission it wasn’t a complete emergency.

“Is your toilet not working?” I quasi-yelled back at her, not wanting to be pulled into a conversation, which would have been impossible at any rate. 

“If it’s not gone by Tuesday I’m calling the city nuisance line,” she said, and I had no answer. If indeed there was a bigger story here, something that needed immediate and interested attention, I wanted nothing to do with it.

“We’ll be back in two hours,” I called, clipping the leash to Archie’s collar and escaping with him out the door. He immediately peed on the low branches of the camellias in the front yard and then happily trotted next to me up the hill towards my house. 

“Chapel Creek Park,” I told the delighted dog. “Morgana is going with us.” He looked adoringly at me and then sniffed along the sidewalk with his black button nose. We were almost at my house when he insisted on pulling me across the street so he could mark a toilet that sat abandoned along the parking strip. It was placed next to a dogwood that was beginning to bloom. The faded pink seat and lid matched the delicate petals exactly. 

*****************************************

The afternoon of my birthday Chapel Creek Park was filled with nine-year-olds beginning a season of league soccer, their parents, and a small but rowdy contingent of grandparents. Morgana, Archie and I walked the paths along the park’s boundaries. 

We talked about the toilet.

“I’m sure the homeowner or the plumber will remove it from the parking strip,” Morgana said. “It might even be gone when we get back to your house.”

“Every dog on the street is going to mark it,” I said. “Which is sad news for Archie. He thinks it’s his very own spot.”

Archie stopped to examine a mouldy pile of leaf debris, nose deep in the compost.

“If it’s still there in a few days just knock on the front door and ask when they’re removing it,” Morgana said.

I looked at her. 

“Or you could leave a note,” she amended. 

“I could.” We both knew there was no way I was going to knock at the door. She might, but I wouldn’t. 

“Do you know who owns the house?” she asked. 

I had no idea. “I’ve never paid attention to that house before.” There had never been a reason to. I knew most of my neighbors because of our Fourth of July block party, and the usual power tool/wheelbarrow/load of mulch barter and exchange economy that we participated in. We shared recipes and occasionally traded baked goods. We dutifully bought Girl Scout cookies. We didn’t spy on each other.

She laughed. “Listen to us. Talking about a toilet.”

Archie pulled me in the direction of a squirrel who was scampering at the base of an oak tree. 

Morgana took the leash from my hand and raised her voice in song, which embarrassed me to pieces, as she well knew.

“Happy! Birthday! Cassandra! Happy birthday to you!” 

An inner, ticking part of me said: This is what Morgana is always going on about, being in the moment. Full and pure acceptance, without judgment. 

I tried, and failed. I promised myself that I would try again the following year, on my fourth thirty-ninth birthday. 

*****************************************

That evening, after I had dropped Archie back with Iris and walked up the hill past the still abandoned toilet, I sat in my dining room with the lights off and watched the street from behind my lace curtains. I thought about how fast weekends, even years go by, about how empty Sunday nights felt when everyone in the neighborhood was inside, preparing for Monday morning, for school and work. I thought about Archie’s pure canine joy when he was chasing a squirrel or riding in the car on his way to the park. 

There was a flicker of movement as a man stepped out of the front door of the House of the Abandoned Commode. He was tall and slim, and was probably around thirty years old. He had closely cut black hair and was clean shaven. The tailoring of his clothing was both familiar and yet so strange; the first words that came to mind when I considered his wardrobe were cravat and tailcoat.

He stepped off the front porch and followed the front walkway to the sidewalk, then the sidewalk to the driveway, instead of cutting across the grass. 

He was wearing a cravat, a complicated wrap of linen which ended in an ornate flourish directly under his chin. The crisp fabric glowed a brilliant white. He was wearing a frock coat, with tails that reached the top of calves, which were encased in a pair of shiny tall boots. 

Was he dressed for a costume party? I wondered. A Regency play? A Hallmark movie? Did he think of himself as a poet, a Lord Byron, a Romantic? How bonkers did you have to be to dress like that?

There was a quote, drifting through my mind, shadowy yet rhythmic, a smoky hangover from a sophomore level lit class.

Something, something something…

I was in bed later, caught between reason and sleep, when the words came to me. Lady Caroline Lamb’s words describing George Gordon, Lord Byron. 

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. 

A tailcoat, I wondered. Where would you even get one? 

*****************************************

Monday afternoon I was working, hip deep in haema, drowning in platelets, awash with albumen. That’s when Lola and Iris knocked. 

Anyone who has worked from home knows this: others don’t value your time. They don’t think working from home is ‘working.’ They will invade your space if you don’t have a drawbridge, they will make demands of you that they wouldn’t dream of if you were sequestered in a downtown office building instead of holed up in your two bedroom one car garage suburban castle. 

I didn’t have a drawbridge. 

Lola’s hand was raised to knock on the door again when I opened it. She was tall and slim and could even occasionally be called elegant. She was wearing a clingy rayon dress with pleats at the hips and a silk scarf hugging her upswept hennaed hair. She wore oversized sunglasses the color and texture of melted caramel and a pair of open toe, black suede slingbacks with kitten heels. 

Iris was behind her, dressed as usual in loose jeans with a stretchy waist, and a baggy grey sweatshirt. Archie sat at her feet. 

Lola made a kiss/pout/smooch gesture near my face. Her heels clicked through my tiled entry into my open plan kitchen and put a large-ish rectangular cardboard box on the counter. I could make out a shipping label with a barcode printed under an address, and a marketer’s dream photo of a very happy, very homogenized, very young couple. 

Iris and Archie followed Lola into the kitchen.

“Cassie,” Lola said. “Don’t let us bother you,” which was so completely a Lola thing to say, as they already had. “I need to borrow a screwdriver.”

I hesitated, thinking at first of the vodka infused orange juice highball instead of the very commonly used hand tool. This was Lola, after all.

Lola pointed at the box. “I was at Panera’s getting a spinach salad and the line was so long I had time to just pop into the home store,” Lola said.

“You bought this at Walgreens,” Iris interrupted.

Lola ignored her. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” she asked me. “It’s exactly what I’ve wanted for ages.”

For some reason Lola had latched onto the idea that I was a technology genius. Maybe because I helped her set up her IPhone, complete with thumbprint security, and configured her FitBit. Maybe because I listened to digital files and typed on a computer all day for a living – who knows? She was fixated enough on the Cassie/Technology coalescence that my not telling her about whatever was in that box was somehow a betrayal of trust. 

 “Do you need a Phillips or regular screwdriver?” I asked. I kept my father’s Stanley toolbox in the garage. 

Iris held up the box to read the blurb on the back. Whatever was in there was called a Front Door Genie ™ and I had the sudden feeling that whatever a Front Door Genie ™ was, Lola shouldn’t own one.

“Bring both,” Iris suggested. 

*****************************************

I brought all four of my screwdrivers, a roll of black electrical tape and a hammer, just in case, up to Lola’s house at the top of the hill. The Front Door Genie was a doorbell camera, complete with 1080p resolution, a 155° field of vision, noise cancelation, and night vision. Facial recognition could be added later. It interfaced with her IPhone, could produce video evidence admissible in court, both criminal and civil, and took over two hours to install though the box and instruction pamphlet promised ‘no fuss installation in minutes.’

Before I was allowed to leave, Lola made Iris and I stand on the front porch for twenty minutes so Lola could take pictures of us with the Front Door Genie and her IPhone for the facial recognition software she was going to order online. Front, profile, and back of head. It was like having my mugshot taken for the OSS. 

“Now for a voice recording,” Lola insisted once the photos were done, holding her IPhone horizontally on her palm, the microphone hovering near my mouth. 

I resisted the urge to bat her hand away and instead told her we’d do that part later; I was hours behind in my work and had to get back.

I could hear Morgana in my head: Boundaries, Cassandra. They’re yours to set, they’re yours to keep.

*****************************************

Iris and Archie walked with me down the hill back to my house. 

“It’s really nice of you to help Lola out,” Iris said, which was really very nice of her, I thought. Lola hadn’t bothered to thank me. 

“When you buy a Front Door Genie I can probably install it  in under a half hour, now that I’ve had practice.”

Iris smiled. “No need. I’ve got Archie.” 

I leaned down to pet his schnoodle head. 

“That toilet’s still there,” Iris noted, looking across the street. The pink seat and lid didn’t make it any more attractive. 

“Do you know who lives there?” I asked. 

“Not now. It’s always been a rental. Usually visiting professors and their families rent for a semester.”

I was about to tell her about Lord Byron but I was afraid my description – cravat, tailcoat, shiny boots – would be too strange to be believed. 

“Have you noticed lights on over there at night?” she asked. “They might be on a timer, though. You could jot down when the lights are on or off and check for a pattern.”

I thought of my one night of surveillance, of which I was just a touch ashamed. 

“That sounds kind of invasive, Iris,” I told her. “People deserve their privacy.”

“Not when they leave a toilet on the curb for days and days.” Her gaze swept from one side of the street to the other. “Quite a few neighbors are getting their steam up because of this,” she said.

The street was perfectly quiet. Peaceful.

“They are?” I asked.

She and Archie stepped off the porch. “Come by later for dinner. I’ve got a stockpot of bean soup simmering.”

Bean soup with Iris was hardly a night out. “Maybe tomorrow,” I called to her as she and Archie walked across the street. He led her straight to the toilet, which he interrogated with his nose with great concentration. Messages sniffed and understood, he dutifully added his own, then trotted next to Iris down the hill. 

*****************************************

For the next five nights I tracked the times as lights were turned on and off at Lord Byron’s house. On at 7:15, out at 11:30. The kitchen and front porch lights were synched, and must have been on a timer. Lord Byron appeared to drive a new-ish American made sedan, glossy black, which he always parked in the garage, never in the driveway. 

Because I didn’t spend every waking moment peering from behind my curtains and he never let his car sit outside if he was home, I couldn’t be certain of his precise schedule. Every day I woke with the hope that the toilet would disappear; every night I went to bed disappointed.

“The toilet hasn’t moved?” Morgana asked me over the phone. We were planning to meet for a Sunday morning walk along the Piedmont Environmental Center’s acres of trails. 

“I’m going to leave a note over there tonight,” I told her. 

Though in my professional life I worked with words, I was a typist, not a wordsmith. The note consisted of four sentences and took me ages to write. 

I read it to Morgana over the phone. 

Dear Neighbor
I have noticed that you are having trouble getting your common household fixture to the community dump. If you do plan on getting rid of it, do you need help? There are many people in this neighborhood who own pickup trucks and might help you. There are also reliable hauling services who will remove it for a small fee. 
Yours, 
Cassandra Leigh (across the street and two houses up the hill)

“Common household fixture?” Morgana asked. 

“You think he won’t understand what I’m talking about?”

“I think he won’t care about what you have to say because you’re obviously a pushover. Watch out or you’ll be the one taking it to the dump and paying the dump fee.”

“I’m going to go over tonight and put it in his mailbox.” Close to midnight, when he would be asleep, but I didn’t share that fact. 

“You’re sure you want to sign your name and tell him which house is yours?” she asked. “Neighborhood squabbles can exacerbate existing mental health issues.”

My neighbor routinely dressed in a cravat, tailcoat and polished boots. “What mental health issues?”

“Anger issues.”

“Anger is normal,” I told her.

“Normal anger is normal,” she said. “Explosive anger is not. Then there are fixation issues to consider.”

I held the phone away from my ear and counted to five. 

“It’s a very polite note,” I said. “You should hear what Iris wants to say to him.”

“Some days I think the whole world needs professional counseling,” Morgana said, “and there’s just not enough of me to go around.”

*****************************************

When I stepped outside at a quarter to midnight the House of the Abandoned Commode was dark. I was on the porch before I even considered whether or not there might be a Front Door Genie recording my every move. 

There wasn’t a doorbell, just a black iron knocker. A shallow mailbox was mounted next to the door and I carefully lifted the top flap only to have a shower of paper – mailers, ads printed on glossy stock, linen stationery, yellow legal paper, squares of crumpled cocktail napkins – drop, flutter and fall to my feet. 

I hurried to scoop up the mess and tried to arrange it so all of it would fit back into the box. My eyes had adjusted to the dark and while I didn’t mean to read any of the notes, I couldn’t help but read them. The handwritten notes were the worst. Most of the swear words were spelled correctly but some of the verb conjugation was problematic. Several of the suggestions were physical impossibilities.

Iris had warned me that the neighbors were ‘getting their steam up.’ 

The air was getting colder and I could smell the approaching rainstorm. I crammed all of the notes, along with my own, into the mailbox, and hurried past the lurking ceramic whiteness of the ‘common household fixture’ that was to blame for all of this. Should I move it myself? I wondered, briefly, and considered how it might be done. Truth be told, I didn’t want to touch it. In the end I jogged quickly back to my house, just as the first raindrops started to fall. 

*****************************************

The next morning I went down to Iris’s house early to pick up Archie. Morgana and I wanted to get to the Environmental Center while there was still parking; by ten in the morning on a nice Sunday all the spaces were sure to be taken.

The street and sidewalks were just beginning to dry after the night of rain. The smallest of the early spring buds had been stripped from trees and shrubs by the wind and lay along front walks and in yards. 

Archie was waiting for me, as usual, in the front hall. I found Iris at her kitchen table huddled over the book of crosswords and a cup of tea.

Iris did her crosswords with a pen. “What’s a four letter word ending in ‘n’? The clue is ‘drops on ground’.”   

“I have no idea. Can I have Archie for a few hours?”

“Go, go,” she said, waving her pen in the direction of the front door. 

I clipped Archie’s lead to his collar and we stepped out into the sunshine. He immediately pulled me towards Iris’s overgrown camellias next to the front stoop. 

The camellias were in bloom and heavy with flowers. Pink and white petals decorated the grass around the plants and some of the larger blooms had fallen off entirely. The plants were in desperate need of pruning and I stepped back to consider whether or not I could do a fair job of it or if I should encourage Iris to hire someone with actual skills. 

“Come on,” I said to Archie, pulling lightly on the leash. I stepped onto the soggy grass and looked under the camellia to see if the lead was wound around a branch, thinking that Archie was stuck. 

He wasn’t stuck. He was busy marking a man’s shiny calf high boot. The toe was pointed at the ground, and there was a man’s leg inserted in it, and the leg was wearing black broadcloth trousers, which were partly covered by the tails of a frock coat. Everything under the camellia was sprinkled with damp pink and white petals, Archie included. I absurdly thought of birthday cake and frosting. 

I kneeled and dug my fingers into the man’s shoulder and rolled him over. I checked his neck for a pulse. Bits of mulch and grass cuttings and even small pieces of gravel were stuck to his face and everything about him was damp and cold from the rain. 

*****************************************

When the police arrived I was at Iris’s kitchen table, sipping scotch. Two officers in uniform joined me in the kitchen when they had finished interviewing Iris in the living room. 

The older one, rather stout and probably within sight of retirement, sat in a chair next to me while the younger leaned against the counter near the sink. 

“Now then,” said the officer, opening a small spiral notebook. His leather holster creaked and groaned and he was wearing a bulletproof vest over his shirt. “Ms. Leigh. Are you able to answer a few questions?” 

The scotch had warmed my insides. “Of course.”

“You’re the one who found the body?”

“Archie did.”

He wrote the name in his notebook.

“Archie is Iris’s dog,” I explained. “I thought he was tangled up under the camellia and when I looked under the branches that’s when I found the body.” No way I was going to call the body Lord Byron while speaking with a police officer. 

“Do you remember what you did next? Did you touch anything?”

Images were jumbled in my brain. The shiny boot, toe down. The cravat, normally white with bleach, now pink. Black hair, slick with rain and blood. 

“I must have kneeled on the ground and turned him over. I wanted to check to see if he was just passed out. He always wore a white cravat and I remember that I tried to put my fingers under it. I wanted to check the carotid artery to find a pulse.” The first thing I did when I re-entered the kitchen was to wash blood from my hands.

“That’s right,” he said. “He was laying on his back when we arrived.”

Everyone knew from every television show and movie ever that the crime scene should not be touched. “I’m sorry.”

The officer was quick to reassure me. “Don’t you worry about that. We just need to know if you did touch anything.”

I immediately ratted out my partner in crime. “Archie peed on him. On his left boot.”

The officer wrote that down in his notebook and then took my full name, address and telephone number. He gave me his card, “Officer E. Baker,” and told me to call him if I remembered anything else, no matter how small a detail it might seem. He also cautioned me not to discuss this with anyone. 

“Are you able to walk home? Would you like Officer Williams to drive you?” he asked, indicating the younger policeman. I insisted that I was okay. I could hear Iris talking in the back bedroom. 

When I stepped out of the front door the entire neighborhood was there, gathered behind a line of police tape that kept gawkers pooled in the street, off the sidewalk, and out of Iris’s yard. The police had set up canvas screens around the camellias and an ambulance sat in the driveway, lights flashing. 

Morgana was at the back of the crowd. I ducked under the police tape and joined her.

“Is Iris okay?” she immediately asked. “Is Lola with her? People are saying that someone died,” she told me. 

I still held Officer Baker’s card in my hand. “The neighbor with the troublesome toilet.”

“I wondered. The cops were cordoning off that house when I got to yours an hour ago.”

I looked up the street and could just make out the strands of yellow tape tied to the trees in front of the House of the Forgotten Commode. I realized I no longer knew what time it was. Hours had collapsed into minutes. 

“How did it happen?” she asked. 

“I can’t say.”

“You can’t say because you don’t know or because you’re not allowed to tell anyone?”

“I’m not supposed to talk about it.” I slipped Officer Baker’s card into the back pocket of my jeans. “Also I have no idea what happened.”

Morgana took my hand and pressed it. “In the library with the candlestick?” she asked, half smiling. “Or in the conservatory with the revolver?”

I hadn’t played Clue in thirty years but I could easily remember the rooms, the secret passageways, the instruments of murder. 

“Under the camellias with the lead pipe is my guess.”

We walked together up the hill to my house. Morgana stood with me by my front door for a bit, looking across the street. Lord Byron’s house and entire yard were guarded by crime scene tape.

“I wonder what happened,” she mused. “Why it happened.”

I didn’t tell her about the angry notes in his mailbox, the threats. Why seemed obvious. I had already moved past why to the next question. 

Who?

Morgana and I did go walking at the Environmental Center later that day. She insisted that I needed fresh air and she was right. Iris was holed up with Archie at Lola’s house. The toilet was removed from the parking strip by the police late Sunday night and the sidewalk was cleared of yellow tape barriers early Monday morning. The house itself was considered still a part of an active investigation and was off limits to anyone but the police. 

*****************************************

On Monday Officer Baker called me to say that the case had been assigned to Detective Matthew Noonan and would I please come to the precinct headquarters for a follow up interview on Tuesday? With identification. Thank you. 

Iris called me Monday night. The police wanted to talk to her again and she asked to ride with me to the station when I went the following day. 

“Pick me up at Lola’s house,” she instructed. “Archie and I are staying with her.” 

Poor Iris, I thought. A dead man in the camellias must have her shaken.

“Lola’s a wreck,” she said. “One corpse in the neighborhood and she falls apart, though I hardly know why. He was in my yard,” she said, a note of pride in her voice. 

“Will she be okay on her own while we’re downtown?” I asked.

“We’ll take Lola with us. What could be safer than a police station?”

Iris sounded so calm and reasonable. Maybe it was the multiple hundreds of mysteries she’d read. She’d been through all of this before, by proxy. “Do you think we need a lawyer?”

“Did you kill him?” Iris asked.

“No.” 

“Then what do you have to worry about?” she asked, then hung up.

*****************************************

I knew I was nervous about the interview and detective and police station because early Tuesday morning when I was transcribing I couldn’t spell autologous and my fingers tripped over immunomodulatory and even mesenchymal stem cells, which usually caused me no trouble at all.

I picked up Iris and Archie and Lola early because Lola usually insisted on a last minute change of some part of her wardrobe before getting into the car, but all three of them were ready when I pulled into the driveway. 

Iris had dressed a bit nicer than usual in black slacks and a red sweater. She fussed with the fresh batteries in her hearing aids and continually smoothed out the fabric of a blue and black plaid bow tie she’d clipped to Archie’s collar. 

“Are you taking the dog into the station?” I asked when we had parked. 

“He’s a witness,” she said, which was a point I couldn’t argue. 

The police station had bare concrete floors and cream colored walls. The waiting area was an alcove furnished with hard moulded plastic chairs and a water cooler with hot and cold taps. Paper cups and a few stale tea bags sat on a card table. 

“Ask where the bathroom is,” Iris whispered to me, indicating the sergeant who sat at a high podium near a cluster of desks. 

I checked in with the sergeant, got directions to the bathroom, and lied about Archie being a service dog so they wouldn’t make me put him back in the car. 

Iris and Archie were called first. Lola, unusually subdued, didn’t complain about the plastic chairs or the lack of a Starbucks kiosk. She didn’t get her makeup mirror out of her bag to inspect the lines around her eyes, which she’d had ‘work’ done on the year before, or redo her lipstick just to ask me if her lips were ‘plump enough’ or perhaps ‘too plump.’ 

She didn’t whine about being hungry or whisper to me that the police station had black mold in the ceiling, because she could always tell, and she was risking her health just by being there. 

When Iris and Archie returned they were both smiling. 

“Nothing to it,” Iris said. “We went over my statement and I signed it. He asked a lot of questions about Archie,” she told us, obviously pleased. “Like did he bark early Sunday morning or did he seem upset.”

Something in Lola stirred. “It was a dead man under your camellias, not a squirrel,” she said. “He’s not a trained guard dog.”

“I didn’t see you objecting to Archie staying at your house,” Iris replied. “He’s more useful than your doorbell camera.”

“We’ll see about that,” Lola said, looking directly at me. “What I don’t like,” she continued, “is that he sheds. My vacuum is going to be gummed up with his fur.”

“The poodle half does not shed,” Iris told her. “The Schnauzer part only sheds a little bit.”

“Miss Leigh,” called the sergeant, “the detective is ready for you.”

Oh thank God, I thought. 

In the interview room Detective Matthew Noonan greeted me at the door. Six feet tall, thick black hair showing just the right touch of grey, blue eyes, strong jaw. Firm handshake. Nicely dressed in charcoal grey slacks, white dress shirt, blue-ish tie that enhanced his eyes. 

No wonder Iris had come back to the waiting room with a smile. 

I sat across from him at a small Formica topped table. There was a digital recorder in the middle and after we exchanged pleasantries he pressed ‘record.’

He smelled faintly of pine scented soap. Woodsy, sort of, but not wet wood smoky woodsy. Clean, like snow. Snow that had just fallen in a forest of fir trees.

He placed two sheets of paper in front of me. “This is the statement written by Officer Eric Baker after his encounter with you at the home of Mrs. Iris Maclean. Please read it and tell me if you have anything to add.”

I read over the statement. “I’ve nothing to add,” I said. The report was straightforward. I and Archie left the house through the front door. Archie disappeared under bushes. I bent down to find Archie, found a body instead. Checked to see if he had a pulse. Screamed. Iris phoned the police. Archie and I stood sentry in the front yard until they arrived.

Detective Noonan smiled. He had dimples. “I really enjoyed meeting your friend Iris,” he said, handing me a pen and indicating the places I should sign and date the papers. “She doesn’t seem too shaken by what happened,” he commented.

“No, but her sister Lola is. This scared her.” I noticed he didn’t ask if I was shaken, or upset.

“We’re working on finding the next of kin. Do you know anything about Mr. Kovac’s family that could help us?”

I slid the pen and papers to his side of the table. “Who?”

“Dimitri Jagos Kovac,” he said. “The deceased. I was under the impression that you knew him.”

The beautiful, snow encrusted forest suddenly turned scary and cold. 

“I didn’t know him. He lived in my neighborhood. I saw him around a few times.”

Detective Noonan picked up my signed statement. “‘He always wore a white cravat.’ That’s what you told Officer Baker about the deceased.”

“Well, yes. I don’t know about ‘always’ but every time I saw him that’s what he was wearing. With a tailcoat. He didn’t really blend in.”

“How many times did you see him?”

I tried to remember. “Three?” 

“Did you ever speak with him?”

“No. Never.” 

He backed away from that line of questioning and pivoted. “Here’s another quote from your statement. ‘I wanted to check the carotid artery to find a pulse.’”

And? Isn’t that what anyone would do? “I didn’t know him well enough to check the femoral.”

He didn’t blink or blush. “Are you a physician or first responder?”

“Medical transcriber.”

He tapped the pen absently against the table top. 

“I specialize in blood related fields,” I explained. “Coagulation, hematopathology, pluripotent stem cells.” 

Was he squeamish? He looked almost queasy. 

“Plasma, platelets, erythrocytes.” I was just warming up. “Erythropoietin.”

He scratched a few words at the base of my statement.

“I can spell them for you if you’d like.”

“‘Possesses a professional medical vocabulary pertaining to blood.’” He showed me the notation he’d written. He stood up. 

Interview over. 

*****************************************

The three of us and Archie went to Panera’s for lunch. This time Iris lied and said that Archie was a therapy dog and they let us take him with us to the outside patio. Iris and I had grilled chicken sandwiches while Lola chose tuna salad. Under the table Archie had a little bit of everything. 

“Handsome,” Iris said.

“Boy, don’t he know it,” I agreed. 

“Who’s handsome?” Lola asked. 

Iris ignored her. “I liked him. He was very sympathetic.”

Sympathetic. “You know he was trying to catch one of us in a lie, right?”

“Cassie, what do I have to lie about?” Iris wondered. “I was in my house, asleep. Maybe I had the opportunity to kill him, I mean he was found in my front yard, but where’s the motive? Three elements must be involved in a murder: motive, means, and opportunity.”

“You said you wanted to kill him plenty of times,” Lola reminded her. “‘I could strangle him,’” she quoted. “‘I’m so mad I could shoot him.’”

“That was hyperbole.”

I was thinking about the pile of threatening notes in his mailbox. The police had those, now, and presumably Detective Matthew Noonan had read all of them. Presumably he had read mine. Why hadn’t he questioned me about it? 

“What about the social media posts?” Lola asked Iris. “Those will be investigated.”

“What social media posts?” I asked.

“There was a lot of chatter on MyNeighbor,” Iris explained. “Very hostile about the toilet.”

Lola interrupted. “It’s an online forum. Iris and I look at it every now and then.”

“Come on, Lola,” Iris said. “It’s strictly for busy bodies and you look at it on your phone six times a day.”

“I’m not the one who digitally streams the police and fire calls,” Lola shot back.

“Ladies, please!” I said. “We’re here to eat lunch, not to brawl.”

Lola set her fork down and picked up her purse. “I’m going to the washroom. Excuse me.”

“Is there any subject you two can discuss without getting into a fight?” I asked Iris after Lola had gone.“Because I would love to know what that is.”

Iris carefully dropped a morsel of chicken to the ground for Archie. “Well, we never fight about her ex-husband, Roger. But that’s only because I never, ever mention him around her. He divorced her, not the other way around, no matter what story Lola chooses to tell.”

“Oh.” I knew that Lola had been married but no other information had ever been offered and I hadn’t asked.

“He broke her heart.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, sweetie, I’m sorry that Lola and I bicker like that. You shouldn’t have to listen to it.” She smiled and reached over to pluck a garlic and cheese crouton from Lola’s salad. “But here’s what you have to remember when it comes to Lola – you don’t get your heart broken by keeping it close. You get your heart broken by giving it away.” She dropped the crouton for Archie. 

I thought about this. “That sounds like one of those drippy sayings that’s embroidered on throw pillows,” I told her. “The ones that are sold on home shopping channels.”

“I wish you could have met Roger,” she said, genuinely wistful. “A real snake. But easy on the eyes.”

“Do you really listen to police calls?”

She dropped the gauzy, far away look. “Sometimes. It’s not illegal.”

“Surveillance seems kind of your thing. Your’s and Lola’s.”

“It doesn’t hurt to know what’s going on.”

“Dimitri Jagos Kovac,” I pressed. “Ever heard of him?”

“The corpse in the camellias. Detective Noonan told me his name.”

“Did you ever threaten him in writing? On paper or online?” I asked.

“Never got around to it,” she said. “I’m a procrastinator.”

Lola returned to the table. I asked her the same question.

“I really didn’t care about that stupid toilet. Not enough to threaten someone. I mean, I couldn’t see it from my house, anyway,” she said, which was pretty much on brand for Lola. 

The phone in Lola’s purse chirped. “Sorry.” She fished for it in the depths of her bag and carefully pressed her thumb against the screen. She twisted her torso away from us so we couldn’t look when she punched in her six digit security code. 

Iris rolled her eyes.

“It’s a MyNeighbor post,” she said. She typed in another passcode.

“What now?” asked Iris.

Lola waved her hand at us and continued to read the small type on the screen. “It’s Hugh. He’s really mad. He has to go to the police station tomorrow to answer questions. Apparently he left what he describes as an ‘emotionally charged’ message in Kovac’s mailbox.”

Hugh was the neighbor who kept an immaculate yard. His wife had just retired after teaching elementary school for thirty years and he was looking forward to his own retirement from the local electric utility this fall. 

Iris threw her napkin on the table in disgust. “Hugh won’t even put down poison for the moles. You won’t convince me that he cut someone’s throat.”

Lola’s phone was now chirping like a box of baby chicks. She continued to poke at the screen with her index finger. 

“Who ever said there was a cut throat?” I asked. 

Lola continued: “Carla and Tom Simmonds, Phil Putnam, Rita Sanders – they’ve all posted on MyNeighbor about being asked to make a statement for the police.”

“‘Cut throat’ is just an expression,” Iris said. “I certainly don’t know how the man died.”

“Hand me that phone,” I said to Lola. I muted it for her. 

“Be glad you’re not a ‘person of interest’,” Iris said to Lola. 

“Who says I’m not?”

“You’ve no motive, no method, and no opportunity. Be thankful he didn’t end up dead in your yard.”

Lola slipped her phone back into her purse. I expected an argument of some sort from her, but she merely resumed eating, and we finished lunch in peace.

*****************************************

The rest of the week was quiet. Small groups of neighbors gathered on the sidewalks, some looking pointedly at the House of the No Longer There Toilet. I avoided them. I didn’t want to know who had been contacted by the police, or why. I didn’t want to know but was certain that Lola and Iris would tell me, just as soon as they found out. 

Sunday morning I checked the local news online and didn’t see anything about the case. I did my grocery shopping before church was out and had just parked in my garage when my cell phone rang. It was Lola.

I ignored the phone. 

I had put everything away and was contemplating the fact that I’d bought nothing I really wanted to eat when Morgana called to say she was bringing over lunch for us from Bubba ‘N Blu’s, a hugely popular takeout place on Route 109 outside of Trinity. 

“My treat, but you have to tell me everything about what happened at the police station when they interviewed you,” she said. “Word on the street is that your now deceased neighbor was foreign and Interpol is involved. I’ve also heard that he was a vampire.”

“Bring cornbread,” I told her. 

There was a knock at the front door. It was Lola. 

She was dressed in pale blue linen slacks, a foamy white off-the-shoulder blouse, and was wearing the chunkiest gold statement necklace I had ever seen. She held a small cardboard box in her hand. 

“I am so excited, Cassie,” she said. “This finally arrived and you are going to be my wingman.”

She held the box up for my inspection. I knew what a wingman was and I was certain that  I didn’t want to be one. 

“I just need your help setting it up. It won’t take more than ten minutes.”

“Good,” I said, “because Morgana’s coming over in just a bit.” 

She pursed her lips, but even the threat of Morgana couldn’t muffle Lola’s enthusiasm. “I can’t wait to show this to you,” she said, sweeping past me, through the entry and into the kitchen.

Lola sat at the table and removed a padded jewelry box from the outer cardboard one. She opened the clamshell cover. Inside was a cloisonne cuff bracelet in dark blue, gold and lime green tones. 

“Lovely,” I said. 

She secured it on her wrist and looked at it admiringly. “The directions left me a little confused but I’m sure you’ll understand,” she said, taking a small stapled pamphlet from the cardboard box and handing it to me.

Dazzle 
Personal Security Meets Personal Style

Lola was beaming. “It’s a security bracelet.”

“Is this in case you fall down at home and you’re by yourself?” I asked, impressed. Perhaps the bracelet was a good idea.

“Oh, no. I mean, it can dial 911 if you press here and here,” she explained, pointing to a black plastic console on the back of the bracelet, “but it’s also a GPS tracker.”

“Lola, your IPhone is a GPS.”

“If I press down here, it makes my phone ring and then I can pretend there’s an emergency and leave wherever I am in a hurry. Lastly, if I press here, you get a text saying I need you to come and get me. It sends you my GPS coordinates. But first we have to set it up with your phone number.”

“Lola, this is for coeds out on questionable dates,” I said. “Dates with drunk frat boys or with drunk married professors.”

“It is for anyone out on a questionable date,” she retorted, and I immediately suspected that a questionable date was one of her new life goals.

I pointedly took out two plates from the cupboards, and two place settings from the silverware drawer and began to set the table. “Can I help you with this after I have lunch with Morgana? I’ll come up to your house after she leaves.”

I’d no sooner ushered Lola and her Dazzle out of the front door than Iris and Archie knocked. 

Iris held a yellow legal pad in one hand and Archie’s leash in another. 

“I’ve got a million dollar idea,” she said, following me into the kitchen and sitting down at the table. She pushed the plate and utensils aside. “You and I are going to write a mystery series.”

How could I object to that? 

“Right after lunch,” I promised. 

“This whole thing,” she said, waving her hands in the air in an effort to encompass the events of the past week, “has inspired me. Mr. Kovac has inspired me. ‘The Corpse in the Camellias.’ It’s a perfect title for a mystery.”

Archie was lying on the kitchen floor, not asking me for anything, so I got down the box of Friendli-Bones from the cabinet and gave him one. 

“Of course we can’t start with the letter ‘C’,” she said. “So the first book in the series is going to be called ‘Asphyxiation in the Asters’. Then we move to ‘The Body in the Bougainvillea’.” In her enthusiasm she resembled her sister Lola. There was a sort of reckless and aspirant disregard for reality that shined through. 

“Then ‘The Corpse in the Camellias’?” I asked. It was easy to see where this was headed.  

“‘Death in the Daffodils’ is one of my favorites,” she said, checking her notes on the legal pad. “Of course we could use ‘Daphne’ or ‘Delphiniums’ if we like.” 

“It’s a wonderful idea, Iris,” I told her. “But it’s your idea, and I don’t think that I would be of any help to you. I don’t read mysteries and you’ve read almost all of them, so I won’t have much to contribute.”

My lack of qualifications didn’t matter to Iris. “There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. Even if we manage to churn out two of these per year that’s over a decade of work. I might not be around for the letter ‘S’, let alone ‘M’.” She pointed to a line on the pad.

Murder Under the Magnolia

“We’ll make a lot of money for a little bit of work,” she promised. 

What I knew about publishing could fit in a thimble but to me it sounded like the inverse – a lot of work for a little bit of money. 

“I’m offering to split the proceeds fifty-fifty,” she said, which was generous, because if this was Lola’s idea I’d be offered seventy-thirty. 

“I just don’t see how the premise can be sustained. Not all the way to ‘Z’.”

She tapped her list of titles with her pen. “Some of the letters are problematic,” she agreed. “But the characters! The ‘mature’ lady sleuth, the plucky younger sidekick, the handsome detective…”

“To say nothing of the dog,” I added, handing Archie another treat.

In the end I promised to read through her first rough outline for Asphyxiation in the Asters and escorted her and Archie to the front door, only to find an unmarked Ford Interceptor parked in my driveway, Detective Noonan standing next to it. 

*****************************************

I didn’t invite him into my house. He and Iris exchanged pleasantries and he patted Archie. I spoke with him alone, in the driveway, even though I could practically feel the curtains twitching in neighboring houses. Why did police insist on driving unmarked Ford Interceptors? Who did they think they were fooling?

“I really can’t chat,” I told him. “My sister is coming over for lunch.”  

“I’ll leave before she gets here,” he promised. 

I suddenly wished I had a Dazzle bracelet. I’d sic Lola on him in a flash. 

He turned to face the street, looking in the direction of Mr. Kovac’s house. “We’re getting a clearer picture of the situation,” he said, and for the hundredth time I wished I’d never seen the angry notes left in Dimitri Kovac’s mailbox. 

“Just about everyone on this street was furious with him. No one wants an abandoned toilet sitting on the curb for weeks on end.”

Detective Noonan continued gazing across the street.

“You believe that Mr. Kovac is dead because of a toilet?”

“It’s hardly an excuse for killing someone,” I clarified. 

“What is an excuse for killing someone, in your opinion?” he asked.

“Imminent physical danger,” I said. “Which is something I try to stay out of.”

“Self defense is notoriously difficult to prove in court.” He reached through the open driver’s side window of his car to grab a manila folder. “Do you recognize this person?” He held up a piece of glossy paper. 

Of course I did. It was a copy of my employee photo, taken from the identification badge I wore whenever I had to be on site at the Fordham Clinical Trials Center. 

“We found it in Mr. Kovac’s house,” he explained. “Along with other interesting items – lock picks, voice activated recording devices, a large number of handguns.”

I felt like his words were bouncing off of me and shattering on the pavement. I didn’t understand. 

“He had prescription drugs, too. Some in quantity, others in small amounts. Xanax, Oxycontin, Percodan,” He referenced the folder again. “Antipyretics and analgesics.”

Here were words I did understand. “Is acetaminophen on that list?”

“Hold on,” he said, running his index finger down the piece of paper. “It’s not alphabetized.”

“Let me see.”  There it was: Tylenol. “This looks like a shopping list.”

“We contacted all of the pharmacies and medical centers within fifty miles. Not one has been burglarized.” 

Now I understood what he was doing in my driveway. “You think I was colluding with him to steal these drugs. I don’t have access to the pharmacies on campus. My work badge doesn’t even get me preferred parking.”

He shut the folder and casually tossed it into the car. “There are easily one hundred people with pharmacy access he could have targeted, if that was his plan. Why bother with you?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” I replied, wishing he would either arrest me or go away. 

“I do,” he said, not in a dark or menacing way, but then again he didn’t leave me any room for questions. “Be at the station at nine tomorrow morning and I’ll share my theory with you.” He slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

“Your wish is my subpoena,” I said, wanting to get under his skin, but he only smiled and asked what we were having for lunch.

“Bubba ‘N Blu’s.”

“Oh, my. Cornbread?” 

“Cornbread, catfish, maybe some pie, but I don’t know what kind.” The daily pie specials at Bubba ‘N Blu’s were dependent upon seasonal ingredients and the mood of the rather quixotic dessert chef. 

He reached for the microphone of his police radio and quickly spoke into it. He put the SUV into reverse and started to back down the driveway. The radio spat and squawked. 

“Today’s specials are lemon chess and apple,” he called to me. “Not a bad selection but my favorite is sweet potato.” He smiled at me. “Someone on patrol always knows the pie specials.” 

“Protect the donuts and serve the pie,” I quoted, maligning the phrase “Protect and Serve” stenciled on the county police cars, but he only laughed, and waved as he drove at a polite 20mph up the hill.

*****************************************

“But why?” Morgana asked as I finished my portion of the cornbread and baked beans she had brought. Two oversized pieces of apple pie were keeping warm in the oven. “Why would he have your picture?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Detective Noonan wants me to answer his questions but won’t answer mine.”

“Do you want me to stay with you?” Morgana asked.

“No need,” I replied, hoping I sounded lighthearted and unconcerned. “My stalker, if he was a stalker, has been rendered harmless.”

“Rendered into a coroner’s van, you mean. What was he doing in Iris’s front yard? What’s his connection to her? Why isn’t Iris the one the police want to talk to?” she asked, frustrated. She hadn’t eaten any of the cornbread and had only picked at the fried catfish. 

I had no answers for her. None of it made sense. All of it was troubling. 

“Are you too upset to eat your cornbread?” I asked.

She smacked my hand away. “I’m not that upset.”

“Let’s apply Occam’s Razor to this puzzle,” I suggested. “The answer is the easiest, most straightforward and obvious solution.”

“You go first,” Morgana said.

“Okay.” I helped myself to another piece of catfish from the take out container. 

“I’m ready,” she said. “Go right ahead.”

“Straightforward. Obvious.”

“Yes.” 

“I’ve got nothing,” I admitted. 

“Let me try? Dmitri Kovacs was infatuated with you, followed you everywhere, and stole a copy of your research campus id from a yet undiscovered online source.  The toilet at the curb was a signal to the Chapel Hill Young Criminals Association so they could more easily find his house when it was his turn to host a meeting. He was found in Iris’s yard at the bottom of the street because he rolled down the hill like a soccer ball after he was killed.”

“Stop,” I laughed. “I’m going to choke.”

“All we need is another corpse,” Morgana said. 

“I forgot to tell you that Iris is writing a murder mystery series. Twenty-six books. That’s a lot of dead bodies.”

“I’m quite done with corpses,” Morgana said, with finality. “And so are you.”

*****************************************

I renewed my acquaintance with the sergeant at the front desk of the police station the next morning at nine. 

“Where are your friends?” he asked, obviously a fan of Lola, Iris and Archie. 

“I was the only one invited back,” I told him. 

“Guess you passed the first audition,” he said. “Congratulations.”

In the interview room Detective Noonan was waiting with the usual recording device, but this time there were bear claws and coffee, and his sapphire blue tie couldn’t have done more for his eyes. I wondered who had bought it for him.

“Hospitable of you,” I acknowledged, tucking into the pastry. 

He opened a slim folder with my name inked on the tab. “Here’s what your neighbors say about you,” he began. “You’re well liked, you keep your yard neat, no noise complaints, no cars or trucks parked on your front lawn, no drunken fights with boyfriends.”

The bland trajectory of my life in one succinct description. 

“A model citizen,” he continued. “Yet your picture was found in the house of someone who had weapons, drugs, listening devices, tracking devices, burglary equipment and multiple passports in different names. His door locks had been changed from Yale to Rabson. Ever heard of a Rabson lock?”

I shook my head. 

“They’re so rare that we had to call Quantico before we could find anyone who could open them. It took the FBI agent over two hours to pick the lock on the front door. We almost gave up and were about to break a window to get in, which we never want to do in case it ruins any of the evidence.”

He looked at me as if the FBI agent, the locks, the evidence was somehow my fault. 

“Your neighbor Dmitri Jagos Kovac was an interesting guy. Obviously involved in some dark stuff. So when I get to thinking about finding your photo in his house, I have to ask myself ‘What’s the most interesting thing about Cassandra Leigh?’”

Easy. “There is nothing ‘interesting’ about me.”

“But there is. You told me, very graphically, in our first interview. It’s blood. It’s your connection to highly regarded and well funded research groups.”

He handed me a single, official looking piece of white legal paper that had a header of ‘Ninth Circuit Court’ and a judge’s signature at the bottom.

“You’re taking my laptop?” I asked, bewildered. “But you can’t do that.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and I believed he was. “If my theory is right then it’s important evidence.”

“It has information on it that doesn’t belong to me. I’m not allowed to travel with it, or leave it with anyone. The research centers I work for are very serious about security.”

“I know. That’s why I didn’t ask for it yesterday. I was waiting for the court order.”  

“They can fire me for this,” I said. Yesterday he had been sweet, chatting about cornbread and pie, but today he was putting my job in danger.

“You receive audio files for transcription from two research groups. How long do you keep those files after you send back the typed copy?” he asked. 

“Three months for Coags.”

“‘Coags’ is coagulation studies?” he clarified.

“Yes. But I only keep files for two weeks for stem cell research. Those files are deleted automatically.”

“You use security software?”

“Yes. It’s installed by the IT group at Chapel Hill. They monitor for online data breaches.” 

Once again he referred to the papers in front of him. “What can you tell me about your neighbor, Mrs. Lola Cooper?” 

What could I tell him about Lola? Altogether too much.

“She’s a size seven. If she could wear the clothing tags on the outside of her dresses, she would. Maybe she goes heavy on the henna, but match that shade of hair with a blue Halston silk scarf and the effect is fabulous. Once she went on a fruit smoothie diet and had an allergic reaction to mango and I had to take her to the emergency room. Hives everywhere. Also, she’s a Scorpio in the worst possible way.”

Was that what he looked like when he was amused but shouldn’t be?

“She’s Iris’s sister,” I added. “They both live on my street.”

“Would you say that Mrs. Cooper is technically savvy?”

“Not even if you put a gun to my head. Why the questions about Lola? Iris is the one who had the corpse in her yard.”

“Mrs. Cooper, or Lola, rather, called me this morning to say she had important evidence in this case. She clearly stated that I’m the only one she’ll talk to.”

Of course she did. 

“Lola has an aversion to playing second fiddle,” I explained. “Iris and Archie were getting a lot of attention and Lola is probably jealous.”

“Would she manufacture evidence?” he asked. 

Would she? “Hard to say. I don’t think she would forge anything, because I doubt she has the skills, but her version of an event could be highly prejudiced.”

He sighed. “If she has information she needs to be straightforward about it.”

“Can you flirt?” I asked. I knew he could, of course, even if I hadn’t yet seen him try. “A little bit will go a long way with Lola. My advice is to lay it on strong.”

He stood and scooped the papers from the table. “I’ll get the laptop from your house and then I’ll stop at Mrs. Cooper’s.”

“I’ll be your wingman if you promise to get my computer back to me in three days,” I offered, inspired. “I’ll extricate you.”

“I can call on the entire Landon County police force,” he said. “I don’t need a wingman.”

“You’re in for fifteen minutes and then I knock on her door. Deal?”

“I’m sure I don’t need your help.”

“I’m sure you don’t know Lola,” I said. “Let’s go.”

*****************************************

That night Lola didn’t bother to call before coming over.  She had taken great care with her makeup and her lips were done in a pale coral shade and she had used blue liner and shadow around her eyes. 

“I made tea for Detective Noonan, real oolong. I fix up a nice plate of butter cookies and bam, there you are.”

“I’m your wingman, Lola. What am I supposed to do when I get a text from your Dazzle bracelet? Just ignore it?”

She shook a bony, bare wrist at me. “I wasn’t even wearing it.”

“It’s new technology.  You always buy cutting edge electronics and they never work right. Remember your IPhone 2G?”

Lola pursed her coral tinted lips and said nothing.

“The electric martini maker?”

She walked past me into the kitchen and took a seat at the table. “You and Iris thought you were going to keep him to yourselves.”

I sat across from her. “Lola, he’s the police. You can get into serious legal trouble if you lie to him.” 

“Pictures don’t lie. Video doesn’t lie.” 

The Front Door Genie. Lola, perched at the top of Briarcliff Road, at the only point of ingress or egress from the neighborhood, had a motion activated digital video camera.

“Lola, what have you -” I began, but was interrupted by another knock at the door. 

It was Iris and her notepad and pen, with Archie.

“I’ve made some important decisions about our books,” Iris announced. “How familiar are you with Edwardian London?”

I pointed to the kitchen. “Lola is here. Detective Noonan was at her house this afternoon.”

“Oh? I wish I was surprised.” Iris and Archie stepped past me to the kitchen. I trailed behind. “Hello Lola,” she said. “You’re painted up all trollopy, aren’t you?”

“I was hosting a gentleman at my home,” Lola said. 

“He’s a detective, not a gentleman,” Iris clarified, “and he’s probably happy to grab whatever crumb of gossip you have to offer.”

“I don’t call video evidence a ‘crumb’,” Lola said, her posture approaching something regal. 

“Whatever you’ve got I hope it helps Hugh. He shouldn’t have left Kovac that angry note. Turns out Hugh was once arrested for menacing,” Iris informed us. “I also found out that Phil Putnam’s stepson Martin has a record. Maybe he’s involved.”

Lola waved away Iris’s meager offering of suspects. 

“Time, tides and trains.” Iris flipped through her notepad. “A meticulous combing through of the evidence will reveal the culprit. For example, it rained .40 inches per hour on the Sunday morning we found the body, from two to six am. I checked the airport weather data online.”

“The body was very damp,” I confirmed. “He had gravel and flower petals stuck to him.”

“Trains and rain and flower petals,” Lola scoffed. “Who cares? I have video of someone driving into the neighborhood that Sunday morning at one-fifteen am, and leaving at one-thirty-two.”

“Someone who made a wrong turn on their way to I-40,” suggested Iris. 

“You’re no Miss Marbles,” Lola said. 

“Marple.” Iris and I corrected Lola in unison; Iris moved her right hand as if to cross herself.

Lola didn’t care. “It was Morgana.”

My stomach dropped to the floor.

“But there’s no motive,” Iris objected, appalled by this assault on the Golden Rule. 

“There’s no ‘means’,” I said. Morgana armed with a gun or knife or lead pipe was an impossible construct. 

“There’s, what do you call it – opportunity,” Lola informed us. “Which is why the police are questioning her right now.”

*****************************************

The desk sergeant on duty that night let me stay in the waiting room when I explained why I was there, but he couldn’t give me any additional information.

Morgana walked out of the interview room and down the hall at 10:30pm. The fluorescent lights weren’t kind. 

I hugged her. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. Stupid, loyal, plucky sister. It was a plot twist worthy of Nancy Drew. “You know how this must look…”

“Sshhh,” she cautioned. “Let’s go outside.”

We stood by her car in the parking lot under the bright white light from the overhead lamp. 

“Your detective seemed to believe my explanation.”

“He’s not ‘my’ detective.” 

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “That night, I was thinking of you going to that house and putting a note in his mailbox. So I drove over to check on you.”

“You took my note.” Which was why Detective Noonan never questioned me about it. 

She nodded. “It was right on top of the others. Everyone was mad about that toilet.”

“Now you’re a murder suspect.”

Morgana laughed. “That sounds so ridiculous.”

I looked past her to the flat roofed, concrete box that was the police station. “I’m beginning to really hate this place.”

Morgana sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. “I’m tired and so are you. We both have to work in the morning. Go home.”

I wasn’t tired, not at all. I didn’t have to work in the morning. I couldn’t. My computer was in an evidence locker. Its semiconductors and secrets might have already been laid bare to the forensic technicians. 

“He had guns in that house, Morgana. Kovac could have shot you when you were on his front porch.”

“He could have shot you just as well,” she said. “‘Could have’ is s stupid game to play. He ‘could have’ paid twenty dollars to someone to haul that damn toilet away and then we wouldn’t be standing in the police parking lot at midnight.”

“Did you see Kovac?” I asked. “Did you speak to him?”

“Now you sound just like Detective Noonan,” she replied. “Nothing but questions.”

Lola had said that Morgana drove into the neighborhood at one fifteen, and drove out at one thirty two. Seventeen minutes to retrieve a note from a mailbox.

She pressed the ‘unlock’ button on her key fob. “I’m going home. Tomorrow I have to listen to other people bitch and moan about their miserable lives and I have to try and help them. This might sound unbelievable but I don’t always love being a family counselor.”

We parted and she drove out of the parking lot and turned left in the direction of Trinity and I turned right, headed to Avalon. There was no traffic and all the lights were green so there was nothing to keep me from thinking about how Morgana purposefully evaded my question about Dimitri Kovac, and the seventeen minutes that passed while she was somewhere on Briarcliff Road. 

*****************************************

Tuesday afternoon Detective Noonan phoned to say he was bringing my laptop back. He also gave me explicit instructions about not taking it out of the evidence bag and keeping it close at all times. When I started to object – what was the point of having it back but not being able to use it? – he pointed out that he was making good on our deal that he return it within three days. 

“You said you needed it back, not that you needed to use it,” he said. “The forensic team has finished with it, but I haven’t, so it stays wrapped in the evidence bag. Agreed? More importantly, other avenues of information have shaken loose.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I told him. “Is that good?”

“I’ll explain when I drop off your laptop. There’s paperwork for you to sign.”

An hour later I was making tea for him in my kitchen. “Just Earl Grey, nothing fancy like at Lola’s,” I clarified. My laptop was on the table, wrapped in a clear bag with red stickers holding the edges closed. EVIDENCE DO NOT TAMPER was printed in black on the stickers. 

He laid out the multiple copies of release paperwork on the kitchen table. 

I had noticed that he hadn’t parked in the driveway but had instead opted to leave his ‘unmarked’ car on the street in front of my house, pointed uphill. 

“Did you call in your location?” I asked. “There’s a radio code for that, isn’t there?”

“‘10-20’,” he said. “It’s been called in.”

I took down a seldom used tray from my cupboard and set four mugs on it, with napkins, spoons, and four small dessert plates. I placed a handful of Friendli-Bones on a saucer and set it on the tray. 

“It’s so nice out. Let’s go to the back patio,” I suggested. 

He raised an eyebrow at the dog biscuits. 

“Liver flavor,” I said. “Trust me.”

I carried the tray and he brought my laptop and set it down on the patio table as if it was a centerpiece. We sat opposite each other.

“When I said…” he began.

“Wait.” I interrupted him, holding up my hand. “I don’t want you to have to repeat anything. The kettle’s ready – I’ll be right back.”

The whistle of the tea kettle couldn’t drown out the knocking on my front door. 

 “Lola,” I said, genuinely surprised. I had thought Iris and Archie would beat her to my door. “How good to see you. And you brought me cookies,” I added, acknowledging the plate covered in plastic wrap that she held in her hands; a blush pink Amelia knockoff handbag hung at her elbow. “How lovely.”

“Oatmeal raisin,” she said, nearly standing on her toes to try and see around me into the front hall. “They’re out of a box but I think the plate adds a homey touch.”

“He’s on the back patio,” I said, stepping aside to let her in. 

“Iris will be just a minute,” she explained. “Her feet are swollen today.”

Lola sashayed past me in her pumps. I waited at the open front door for Iris and Archie. They made pretty good time up the hill from Iris’s house even though Iris was wearing light blue terry cloth house slippers. 

“Couldn’t get my Hush Puppies on,” she said. 

“Lola brought cookies,” I said. “Go out back and I’ll get the kettle.”

I poured the hot water while Lola fussed over the cookies and Detective Noonan fed Archie bits of Friendli-Bone. 

“Now,” I said when we had all settled in. “Detective Noonan has an update on the case.”

“I hadn’t expected an audience,” he protested. “But here’s where things stand as of this afternoon. One – As you can see, Miss Leigh’s laptop is back in her possession after a quick but thorough search by the police forensic unit.”

Lola and Iris smiled and murmured their approval. 

“Two – the autopsy results have been filed.”

Lola, Iris and I glanced significantly at each other. 

“Three – the DA has decided not to prosecute.”

“Well, slap me silly,” said Iris. “This is a surprise.”

“That’s horse doo and you know it,” said Lola. For a moment I thought she was going to throw a cookie at him. “What about my video evidence?”

“What about the body in my shrubbery?” Iris insisted. 

“What about the drugs and guns?” I asked. “What about Kovac having a copy of my employee photo?”

Detective Noonan raised his hands in defence. “It’s all about the autopsy and what politicians call ‘resources.’”

“Time and money, which is all they care about,” Iris interjected, a bitter note in her voice. “No surprise there.”

“There’s an element that we’re missing, and it’s important,” he continued. “Time of death. The coroner can’t fix it within a ten hour window. The problem is, there’s no livor mortis, and body temperature versus ambient temperature is not a reliable factor in this case.”

“There’s no what?” asked Lola, who was no student of Ngaio Marsh or Dorothy Sayers or even tv’s beloved Jessica Fletcher.

“Pooling of blood,” I explained. “Gravity takes hold of the blood after the heart stops circulating it and the red blood cells sink. It causes a distinct reddish-purple tone to the skin.”

“Why isn’t there any of this livor mortis?” asked Lola, who was, I suspected, beginning to understand that without a fixed time of death her Front Door Genie video of Morgana entering and leaving the neighborhood wasn’t as important as she had thought. 

“Because there was no blood,” Detective Noonan said, leaning back in his chair, holding his hands towards us, palms up, a magician’s gesture. Ta da!

No blood. 

Archie sighed under the table and lay down on the hard flagstone floor, waiting patiently for the next Friendli-Bone to drop.

“There was nothing but blood,” I objected. “On his neck. I had to wash it off my hands after I checked for his pulse. His neck thing, his cravat, was pink with blood.” It was, in fact, almost the exact shade of pink as Lola’s handbag.

Lola, always sensitive to colors and their possibilities, asked “Why pink and not red?”

“Rain,” answered Iris, who had done her research. “We had almost two inches of it that morning.”

He had bled out, and the downpour had washed it away. 

Detective Noonan made a cutting motion with his left hand to the back of his head. “The scalp was cut by something sharp, right about here. There was bleeding in his brain, a hemorrhage, which would have left him dazed. He might have been conscious for twenty minutes before he died.  It’s not clear whether to assign the cause of death to the scalp wound, or the hemorrhage.” 

I was thinking of the list of drugs kept at Kovac’s house, the antipyretics and analgesics, otherwise known as pain relievers and anti-inflammatories. 

“Normal people don’t die from scalp wounds,” I said.

“No,” agreed the detective. “But Dmitri Kovac wasn’t normal, from a medical perspective. He was a haemophiliac.”

*****************************************

I sat, staring at Lola’s pink handbag. All five of us were quiet for what seemed like a very long time. 

“There’s no murder case, but that doesn’t mean that the mystery has been solved,” I said. “Tell us everything, detective.”

“We found out that Kovac had enrolled in the ‘Effactor VIII’ clinical trials at the Fordham Center, testing the new Effactor injections. That’s why he was living here in Avalon.”

Effactor VIII was a huge biotech innovation. It was a new injectable medication that could produce proteins that engendered blood clotting, most importantly appropriate clotting; the first clinical trials were beginning in August. 

Detective Noonan continued. “He was from Montenegro, in the Balkans. Statistically, a male from that region is thirty percent more likely to be a haemophiliac than a male from, let’s say, Bosnia or Romania. As you know, women carry the x-linked recessive gene.” 

“I’m impressed,” I admitted. “I doubt you knew this much about haemophilia last week.”

“Does this explain why Kovac had Cassie’s photo from her work i.d?” Iris asked. 

The detective nodded. “It looks like she was a target. He had a professional array of lock picks. If he could repeatedly enter this house and download files from the Coags research group,” here he tapped the laptop at the center of the table for emphasis, “and sell the information, he could be very rich. Of course being part of the clinical trials would give him even more access to top secret data. The good news is that our forensics team tells me the Coags files on Cassandra’s computer haven’t been touched.”

“Oh, ho,” Iris said. “Now his strange attire begins to make sense. If any of us saw him dressed normally we’d never associate him with the neighbor who always wore a topcoat with tails. He could have put on khakis and a golf shirt and none of us would have looked at him twice.”

Detective Noonan regarded her with undisguised admiration. 

“Iris reads a lot of mysteries,” I explained.

Lola, for once, didn’t want to talk about clothes. “Can we get back to his head and the blood?”

“Not all the blood was pumped out of the body, of course,” the detective told us. “From the small amount left, the coroner reported a blood alcohol level of .08 percent. That’s the legal limit to drive.”

“Not good for someone about to have their head banged on something sharp,” I said. Alcohol thins the blood, which is a world of trouble for a haemophiliac. 

“The coroner suggested a garden trowel might have been the weapon used. Maybe the edge of a shovel. But the damage done to the skull points to something heavier. No, not heavier. Something with more bulk.”

 An inebriated haemophiliac of Montenegrin ethnicity stumbling on the sidewalk in the dark during a rainstorm. 

“He hit his head on the toilet,” I said. 

“That’s what I’m forced to conclude,” agreed the detective.

“How gauche,” said Lola.

“Gauche hardly covers it,” said Iris. “Death by toilet is not an elegant ending.”

“But how did he end up under the camellias in Iris’s yard?” I asked.

“With the bleeding in his brain, he might have walked part of the way down the hill. Or, he might have collapsed in the middle of the street and then rolled down. This steepest part of this street is just below his house.”

Iris reached over and put a hand on Detective Noonan’s arm. “If this isn’t technically a murder case any longer, how will the unfortunate expiration of Mr. Kovac be classified?”

“Officially it’s called ‘death by misadventure’,” he said. 

“Tell me that isn’t the most perfect mystery title ever. Too bad it’s been used so many times,” Iris said.

“Iris plans to write a series of mysteries,” I explained. 

“‘Misadventure Under the Mistletoe’,” Iris said, clearly inspired. “A perfect holiday themed title. Publishers love that Christmas-y tripe. Did I bring my notebook? I have to write this down before I forget.” 

I got up to get Iris a sheet of paper and a pen and Detective Noonan was offering her a piece of notepaper torn from a small spiral bound pad and Archie was scrambling to his feet thinking that all of the bustle probably meant a walk was imminent when Lola spoke.

“Stop,” she said. “There’s something about this that doesn’t work.”

We froze. She pointed a finger at Detective Noonan. “How could he have cut his head on the toilet when a toilet doesn’t have any sharp edges?”

“She’s right,” said Iris, sitting back down. “It’s really the last place you would want anything sharp.”

Detective Noonan was unperturbed. “He fell back against the edge of the exposed tank. There are five photos from the crime scene shoot. Let me show you,” he said, bringing his smartphone from the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

He swiped at the screen and passed the phone to Iris, who poked at the screen to make the images larger. “Hmm,” she said, and passed the phone to me. 

The police photographer was a professional, resisting, as was proper, any urge to be artsy, or humorous. The photos were all fact. One white ceramic toilet, with pink seat and seat lid, lacking the heavy ceramic tank cover that usually serves to gather dust or hold jars of potpourri or rolls of extra toilet paper.

I handed the phone to Lola, who dutifully swiped through the series of all five pictures before handing the detective’s phone back.

“This, ladies, is where we part,” he said, standing. “Thank you all for your time, and your enthusiasm,” Detective Noonan said, and shook hands with both of them.

I walked with him to the front door. 

“One question,” he said, pausing at the threshold. “How did you know those two were going to show?”

“Three,” I corrected. “You have to count Archie. It was simple. You drove past Lola’s on the way here, then based on how you parked your car I could tell that you went to the bottom of the hill and passed Iris’s house. Also, Iris streams the police radio.”

When I returned to the patio Lola and Iris were deep in conversation. 

“Every time Archie dragged me over to that house the tank lid was not missing,” Iris said as I sat back down at the table. 

“Something isn’t right,” I agreed. “The tank lid was there the night I dropped my note in his mailbox. Hours later, Kovac was dead in Iris’s yard.” There was a thread, metaphorically, that I was pulling at, loosening, unraveling in my mind. 

“Here’s what I don’t like about his theory,” said Lola. “Bodies are lumpy. I mean, we’ve got arms that are probably all floppy after we’re dead and our legs probably are, too. How does a body just roll down the hill and get stuck under Iris’s camellias?”

Lola was pulling at the thread now. 

“Ladies,” I said, “we need to make a plan.”

It was time to call Morgana. 

*****************************************

She came over straight after work because I told her that we had something important to talk about. I had locked the front door but she had a key to my house and let herself in.

I was at the stove, stirring a boiling pot of bow-tie noodles for dinner and luckily I heard her come into the kitchen, or I wouldn’t have seen her react to the sight of my laptop on the table, sealed in the evidence bag. 

She didn’t move or speak as she looked at the scene I had staged. My laptop was on the kitchen table, sealed in the evidence bag, my copy of the signed release form next to it.

“I made sauce with lots of mushrooms,” I said, turning to stir the boiling pot. 

“The police took your computer?” 

“They did, but I got it back today. They wanted to look at some files.”

She walked over to the table and touched it like it was a snake with two heads. “The police called me at work this afternoon. They’ve decided the guy across the street died accidentally.”

“I know. Isn’t it great? I mean, it’s not great that he’s dead.” I was nervous. I couldn’t help it. “It’s great that the case has been shut.”

Morgana sat down at the table. “Nice bracelet,” she said, watching as I moved the pot from the stove to the sink. “It’s pretty. What are these papers?” She prodded the pile of documents I’d asked Lola to print for me off of the county courthouse web page. 

I took a deep, calming breath. “Here’s the thing. There are steps we can take so we can legally be sisters. I mean, we don’t even have hospital visitation rights for each other. The lawyer who took care of our father’s probate can help us, but I need your signature so they can view your birth certificate.” 

I took a serrated knife from a drawer to cut a baguette.

Morgana didn’t say anything for a time. She didn’t object to me using such a sharp knife, or tell me to be careful or even offer to do the slicing herself.

She was thinking. 

“I mean,” I continued, “it might be morbid to bring this up, but if I put you in my will, which I am going to do, our relationship should be cemented -”

“What if I don’t want to be in your will?” she asked, her voice hard, on the edge of anger. “You don’t need my birth certificate.”

I turned around. My back was to the sink and I kept the knife in my hand. “I do need it. I should have asked for it five years ago when we first met. But I was devastated after my father died. Remember?”

“I’ll get you a copy of it this week.”

“No.” I shook my head. “My lawyer will get a certified copy from the courthouse. You don’t have to do anything except sign that release form. There’s a pen on the table.”

She said nothing. She made no move to sign the paper.

“What’s your blood type, Morgana?” I asked. “My father was type O. My mother was AB. I’m type A. Your mother, who has been dead for over ten years and so her birth certificate is public record, and available online, was type A.”

She didn’t answer.

“Did you push him down the hill?”  

Her head snapped up and for the first time since she came into the kitchen her eyes met mine. “Push who?”

“Kovac. After you killed him.”

“We just discussed this. His death was accidental.”

“You accidentally brained him with the toilet tank lid.”

“He was drunk. We argued.”

I slid a piece into the puzzle. “He didn’t like finding on his front porch going through his mail, did he?”

She pressed her palms to her temples and ran her fingers through her hair. “We argued. I defended myself but I never hit him. I threatened him with the tank lid.”

“‘Self defense is notoriously difficult to prove in court’,” I said, quoting Detective Noonan.

“Right. Kovac and I danced around on the sidewalk, me holding the tank lid like a baseball bat. He wouldn’t let me get past him to my car. He was a bully. I lunged at him and he fell backwards and knocked himself out on the toilet.” She pointed to the sink. “If you don’t drain that pasta it will overcook.”

I wasn’t going to turn my back to her. It was time to summon help with Lola’s Dazzle bracelet, worn on my left wrist, but I didn’t want to move the knife from my right hand. 

“You’re lying,” I said. “You’ve lied about being my sister for years and I don’t believe what you’re saying now.”

“He fell over and hit his head. I never thought he was going to die because of it.”

“He was a haemophiliac,” I said, trying to both hold the knife and press the correct button on the back panel of the bracelet. “He bled to death.”

“I wondered,” she said, and I could so clearly remember her prodding me the morning I found him in Iris’s yard: In the library with the candlestick? Or in the conservatory with the revolver?

“I didn’t push him down the hill. I never touched him. When I got back in my car I saw him stand up. He was alive when I drove away and you can’t prove otherwise.” She picked up her car keys. “What are you going to do now? Stab me with the bread knife?”

“No,” I said, looking past her to the doorway that connected the kitchen to the living room. “Iris is going to hit you with a fireplace poker.”

She might not have believed me but then she saw Lola in the front hallway, armed with a Donna Karan hobo bag in black leather and her phone, set to ‘video.’

“We were getting worried,” Lola said to me. “You should have texted five minutes ago.”

I tapped the Dazzle bracelet lightly with the handle of the knife. “This is more difficult to use than you would think.”

This was where Morgana should have exclaimed Aha! I would have gotten away with stealing pharmaceutical secrets from Cassie’s laptop if it weren’t for her meddling friends or My scheme has been foiled! but she simply brushed past Lola and walked out the front door.

“You let her get away,” complained Iris. 

“It’s not my job to apprehend criminals,” said Lola.

“She isn’t much of a criminal,” I said. “I mean, she says didn’t kill Kovac.”

“She didn’t render aid to an injured person,” Iris pointed out. “That’s not nice.”

I removed Lola’s Dazzle bracelet and placed it on top of my computer.

“It probably is a crime to impersonate someone’s sister,” Iris said. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

Lola was in the dining room peering from behind the lace curtains. “One police car. No, two police cars and one unmarked SUV.”

“She never did tell me her blood type,” I said. 

“It will come out at her trial,” Iris said, leaning her fireplace poker against the wall. 

“They’ve got her in cuffs,” announced Lola.

“I suppose we’ll all have to testify,” Iris said, and it was impossible not to catch the note of joy in her voice.

“Her blood type is either B or AB. That’s why she absolutely would not let me have a copy of her birth certificate. She’s not my sister and I’m all alone again,” I said. I was exhausted. 

“Nonsense,” Iris consoled me. “You have me, Archie, and Lola.”

“I think that’s a news van,” Lola said, so caught up in the drama that was unfolding outside that she didn’t object to being listed third, after the dog. “I need to check my face.” 

I turned to Iris. “Why were the police waiting for her?”

“Well, that’s the thing, sweetie. The forensic people found out that someone had been stealing stem cell research files from you, and Detective Noonan figured it had to be someone close to you, you know, with easy access to your house because none of it was done over the internet. So it was either me, or Lola, or Morgana. Then he decided it wasn’t me or Lola because we didn’t react at all when we saw that your computer had been dissected by the police.”

“Morgana reacted. It’s like she became a different person.”

“I called him to say that you were going to confront Morgana tonight and that Lola and I were your wingmen and he said that probably wasn’t a good idea because the police were already following her.”

“Looking for one crime, he found another.” 

“Yes, well, he said it was like a locked room mystery, stuffed inside an enigma. He also told me that we should stay out of it and let the professionals do their jobs.”

I considered this. “Iris, does the detective read mysteries?” I asked.

“He does,” she confirmed. “I might let him borrow some of my G. K. Chesterton.”

Lola emerged from the powder room, her lipstick freshened and her hair smartly up-doo’d and fastened with a jumbo tortoise shell clip. “It’s W.K.A.T.Z. Channel 8. I’ll meet you out there.”

I took the box of Friendli-Bones from the cabinet. “Where’s Archie?” I asked.

“Just out back,” Iris said, and she went to get him from the patio, where he’d been tethered to the table. She returned with him and pulled a somewhat flattened plaid bow tie from her jeans pocket and clipped it to his collar. 

“C’mon then,” she said to me. “Cry if you want. The end of a good mystery is always difficult. You’re both glad that the criminal has been caught and sad that the adventure has ended. But then you reach for the next one and begin again.”

“That sounds like a blurb from the back cover of a book club selection,” I said, heading for the powder room for a handful of tissue to blot my eyes. “A really bad blurb.”

“It might be used for one of my mysteries, one day,” Iris replied, and she and I and Archie followed Lola outside to where the police and neighbors and news crew had gathered, at the part of the street where the hill was the steepest, which the four of us would always and forever refer to between ourselves as ‘the scene of the crime.’