Vanilla Vices (6 page)

Chapter 6

I
t was Belinda Carson, maybe
the last single woman in April Springs I would have ever imagined dating Dan Billingham.

“It’s
you
?” I asked her incredulously. “
You
were the one dating Dan in the dark?” Belinda Carson was always dressed impeccably, and she practically oozed a Southern genteel demeanor. It was hard to imagine her with the junk man, but I had no reason to doubt her, especially given what she’d gone through to keep her identity a secret.

“I know. It’s not easily explained, but then again, is attraction ever simple to understand?”

“Sometimes it’s not,” I admitted.

“Dan had a rustic charm about him, but most of all, he made me laugh,” Belinda said. “I was so stubborn about upholding my precious standing in the community that I wouldn’t let him tell anyone about us. The truth is that I was ashamed of him, and it kills me to admit it now. My pride wouldn’t allow me to flaunt how I felt about the man, and as you can imagine, it severely limited the time we could be together. What a fool I was.” She cried gently, and I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t know how to do it. After all, Belinda was right. She’d let her status in the community keep her from being happy. What good was that doing her now? In a way, she was still letting it happen. Her rules for speaking with me proved that. I didn’t doubt that she’d cared for Dan on some level, but it was just as clear that she’d cared more for her reputation, and she obviously still felt that way after he was gone, no matter what she might say to me now.

“Belinda, if you really knew him that well, could you shed a little light on who might have wanted to kill him?” I asked.

“Do you mean to say that it wasn’t some random robbery after all?” she asked me.

“It very well might turn out to be just that, but Grace and I are working on the premise that it was someone Dan knew, a person who had a motive to want to see him dead.”

“I take it your husband doesn’t agree with your theory.”

“It’s not his case anymore,” I explained patiently. Why was everyone so concerned about what Jake thought? He was the acting chief of police, as well as my husband, but that didn’t mean that my views always had to match his.

“Oh,” she said softly.

Had I been a little too harsh in my response? I decided to soften my tone a little. “The state police are treating this as one in a string of other crimes, so it doesn’t do any of us any good to try to duplicate their work. Grace and I are playing the game of What If.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it. What if Dan’s murder wasn’t random? What if there was a motive we don’t know yet behind the killing? I’m talking about things like that.”

“Let me think. We didn’t discuss his business very much, but I knew that he was angry with two men he dealt with: Benny Flint and William Jecks. They were both unhappy with him, and I can assure you that the feeling was mutual.”

“Did he ever say anything about Jeffrey Frost to you?”

“Just that he wouldn’t leave Dan alone, always pestering him to sell his land to him. I don’t know that there was any animosity there, though, at least not on Dan’s part.”

“Is there anyone else that you can think of?” I asked her.

“No, not off the top of my head.”

Apparently that line of inquiry was dead with her. My questions weren’t over though, not by any means. “Can you think of anything Dan had that someone else might want enough to kill him for?”

“I can’t imagine what it would be. All Dan had was his junk and the land his shop sat on.”

“Land the developer coveted,” I reminded her.

She looked surprised by the implication. “Would someone actually kill another person for something they owned?”

“It happens all of the time, all over the world,” I assured her. “If it wasn’t the land, could it be something in Dan’s shop? Is there anything of value there that you know of?”

“You’ve seen the place, Suzanne. It’s chock full of worthless junk. I’d be willing to bet that his entire inventory isn’t worth over two hundred dollars.”

“I know this theory is farfetched, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t pursue it. If it wasn’t anything he owned, could it have been because of something he knew?”

“Meaning?”

“What if Dan saw or knew something that someone else desperately wanted to hide?” It was a stab in the dark, and there had been nothing premeditated about my question.

Evidently Belinda didn’t feel that way. She decided to take it personally. “What are you implying, Suzanne? Or do I even have to ask?”

“What do you mean?” I was honestly baffled by her reaction.

She looked at me fiercely for a moment before she spoke again. “I trusted you, and this is how you repay me, by slinging accusations at me?”

“Belinda, I honestly don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.” How had I struck a nerve with her so divisively?

“Don’t play ignorant with me.”

“I only wish that I really were playing,” I answered in complete and utter honesty.

“Gabby!” Belinda called out.

I wasn’t at all surprised when the ReNEWed owner showed up immediately. When I’d begun questioning Belinda, Gabby had stepped back into her shop, but clearly she hadn’t gone very far.

“What’s wrong, Belinda?”

“I’d like Suzanne to leave,” she said stiffly.

Gabby looked quizzically at me, but all I could do was shrug. “All I can say is that if I offended you in any way, I apologize.”

“Belinda?” Gabby asked hesitantly. She was clearly as confused by the situation as I was.

“It’s too little, too late,” Belinda said firmly.

Gabby nodded, and then she turned to me. “I’m truly sorry, but I’ll have to ask you to leave, Suzanne.”

I considered protesting, but what good would it do me? It was obvious this particular question-and-answer session was over. I thought about apologizing again, but I refused to do it. Belinda wasn’t the only one in the room with a streak of stubborn pride. I’d asked her a random question, and I’d gotten my head nearly bitten off in return. Or had it felt that random to Belinda? It suddenly dawned on me why she was so upset. She’d taken my generic question and had made it specific and directed at her. In her mind, I was implying that she’d killed Dan to protect the secret of their relationship. I hadn’t even considered that possibility, at least not until she’d so graciously pointed it out to me. As I let Gabby lead me to the door, I turned back to Belinda and said, “Thank you. You’ve been more helpful than I’m sure you even realize.”

That caught her off guard. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what it seems to,” I answered smugly.

Clearly Belinda didn’t like that at all, but I didn’t care. If she had killed Dan to protect her secret, then I was going to uncover the truth and let the entire town know about the relationship she still guarded so fiercely.

“Sorry about this,” Gabby said softly to me as she started to close the back door in my face.

“You don’t have anything to apologize for, and neither do I,” I said. “Thanks for making this happen.”

“I hope it helped,” she said.

“Let me put it this way: it didn’t hurt,” I answered.

After the door was closed and I heard the deadbolts slide into place, I stood there a moment trying to process what I’d just learned. There was one thing that still bothered me about the scenario in which Belinda had killed Dan in order to keep his mouth shut. If she’d murdered the man, why had she been so willing to speak with me at all? On the surface of it, it didn’t make any sense. But what if someone else already knew about their tryst? Was she hedging her bets by coming to me before I found out about it from another source? If she suspected someone else might tell me about her relationship with Dan, she might have been trying to get in front of it and put her best spin on it while she could. Playing the part of the remorseful lover might have worked at that if she hadn’t slipped up by letting her temper show through her ruse. Then again, maybe she was justified in her anger. If she truly believed that I’d been taking a shot at her, and she’d loved Dan after all, then she had a right to be outraged. Had she overplayed it, or was her ire legitimate? I honestly couldn’t say. All I knew was that Belinda Carson had just made it onto our list of suspects.

Whether or not she was the real killer still remained to be seen.

Maybe Grace would have a better take on things once I shared everything that had happened with her. I headed straight to her house, not only so we could talk about my interview with Belinda but so we could go grab some lunch, too.

Detective work made me hungry, but to be fair, so did just about everything else.

Grace was on the phone when I knocked on her front door. She held up one finger toward me as she said, “Valerie, what’s your schedule look like this afternoon? Okay. Good. Why? I might be in your area, so I want to know how I can find you if I decide to pop in on you. Great. Bye.”

“Are you working this afternoon after all?” I asked her as she hung up.

“No. Why do you ask?”

I looked at her oddly for a moment before I spoke. “It just sounded as though you were making plans to meet up with one of your reps this afternoon.” Grace’s position as supervisor allowed her an open schedule as long as her team was producing, which it usually was.

“I said that I
might
be in her area,” Grace replied with a grin. “Goodness knows I have no problem with my people skipping out of work now and then as long as they get their work done, but I’ve got it on good authority that Valerie has been slacking off entirely too much lately. Before you say anything, I realize that I’ve played fast and loose with standard working hours myself, but my work never suffered because of it. It just so happens that I’m a highly organized individual who doesn’t need eight hours every day to accomplish my set tasks at work.”

“I’m not about to say a word,” I replied. “Your system works for you, and as an added bonus, you can spend time detecting with me. It’s a win in my book any day of the week.”

“Speaking of detecting, how did it go? Who did this mystery woman turn out to be? Please tell me that it wasn’t your mother, Suzanne. I don’t think my heart could take it.”

I was shocked by the mere hint that Momma might be cheating on her husband. “What makes you even say something like that? I’m still not entirely sure why, but Phillip Martin seems to make my mother happy, and that’s good enough for me.”

“Thus the secrecy,” Grace said. “That’s a relief. Still, I’m willing to bet that she’s married to
some
poor unsuspecting fellow.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She hid the affair. Isn’t it that simple?”

“Sorry to burst your bubble, but she happens to be single.”

“Then why all of the secrecy? Wait. Don’t tell me. She was ashamed of dating Dan. That means she’s not someone we’d naturally suspect would be with him. Since we’ve ruled your mother out, along with all of the rest of the taken female population of April Springs, I’d say that it’s most likely either Belinda Carson or Samantha Longstreet.”

“That’s amazing,” I said.

“Am I right? Which one was it, then? It’s Belinda. No, I’m changing my vote to Samantha. Definitely Samantha.”

“It’s Belinda,” I told her.

“I knew it!”

“You just said that it was Samantha.”

“I was just testing you,” Grace said. “I knew that it was Belinda all along. I’m curious about something, though.”

“What’s that?”

“If she was so ashamed of dating Dan, why did she want to see you to reveal the news? Wouldn’t she want that particular secret to die with her lover?”

“I wondered about that myself,” I said as I started to explain my reasoning.

Grace beat me to the punch. “Unless she is remorseful about hiding their relationship, and now that he’s gone, she wants vengeance for his murder.”

“You’re really good at this, Grace. I’m beginning to think sometimes I don’t give you enough credit.”

“Do you mean that I’m right about that, too?”

“That’s what she claimed.”

Grace studied me for a moment before she spoke again. “But you don’t believe her.”