Murder on Old Main Street (Kate Lawrence Mysteries) Read online

  Murder on Old Main Street

  by

  Judith K. Ivie

  A Kate Lawrence Mystery from

  Mainly Murder Press, LLC

  PO Box 290586

  Wethersfield, CT 06109-0586

  www.mainlymurderpress.com

  Mainly Murder Press

  Copy Editor: Jennafer K. Sprankle

  Cover Designer: Patricia L. Foltz

  All rights reserved

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Mainly Murder Press

  www.mainlymurderpress.com

  Copyright © 2009 by Judith K. Ivie

  ISBN 978-0-615-27167-5

  Published in the United States of America

  Mainly Murder Press

  PO Box 290586

  Wethersfield, CT 06109-0586

  Dedicated with Appreciation to:

  Laura, Ed, Jay, Heather, Emily and all of

  the others who make Blades such

  a joy to patronize

  and

  Janice, Sherri, Kathy, Marianna

  and everyone else who makes

  breakfast at the Town Line Diner

  so much fun

  Books by

  Judith K. Ivie

  In the Kate Lawrence Mystery Series:

  Waiting for Armando

  Murder on Old Main Street

  A Skeleton in the Closet

  Drowning in Christmas

  Nonfiction:

  Calling It Quits:

  Turning Career Setbacks to Success

  Working It Out:

  The Domestic Double Standard

  Explanations and Acknowledgments

  I have no fear that residents of Old Wethersfield will mistake my fictitious portrait of our town for the real thing, and those who live elsewhere won’t be troubled. Still, there are enough similarities to warrant an explanation, so here it is: While I have appropriated the geography of Wethersfield’s Historic District, Murder on Old Main Street is entirely a work of fiction. No character is based on a real individual, whether living or dead, known to me or unknown, and any likeness to a real individual is entirely coincidental.

  Further, while I have shamelessly mentioned by name some of my favorite landmarks and business establishments along Old Main Street and elsewhere in Wethersfield, I have created others simply to facilitate the story.

  Those of you who are familiar with the structure formerly known as the Law Barn may be disappointed to learn that the back story I’ve provided about it is also pure fiction. Sorry, but there is no secret room, to my knowledge. I did run across something like it years ago in an old brownstone on Beacon Street in Boston. The building had been turned into a rooming house, and a friend who rented space on the first floor showed me a hidden door in the parlor paneling that opened into a tiny powder room. I was enchanted with the idea of a hidey-hole, and the memory stuck with me.

  I am most grateful to my daughter, Jennafer Sprankle, for her help with the details of real estate transactions, as well as for her advice throughout the writing of Murder on Old Main Street. Thanks for the crash course, Dearie.

  Chief James Cetran of the Wethersfield Police was extraordinarily generous with his time while setting me straight on the department’s investigative procedures, as was Chief Thomas Sweeney of the Glastonbury Police Department. Gentlemen, I am indebted to you both and hope I have portrayed both departments with the respect and accuracy they deserve.

  Judith K. Ivie

  March, 2007

  One

  It’s not that I don’t understand why people smoke. I do. I myself enjoyed cigarettes for some twenty years, on an off. The “off” part was during the two pregnancies that had produced my son Joey and daughter Emma, so obviously, I always knew that smoking was an unhealthy indulgence. But it took the sudden and untimely deaths of my father and mother, both lifelong smokers, to get me to lay that lighter down for good.

  First Dad, a pack-a-day man since World War II, suffered a massive coronary at the age of sixty-three. After lunch one day, he just fell to the floor of the warehouse he managed, and the paramedics abandoned their attempts to resuscitate him after half an hour. A few years later, Mother’s heart gave out as she was clearing snow from the sidewalk in front of the house where I grew up. The exertion triggered the attack, said the nice young resident whose job it had been to break the news that Mother hadn’t survived emergency surgery, but the real damage had been done over the previous decades, one cigarette at a time.

  “That’s what people your mom’s age can’t seem to get,” he said sadly. “Every time she lit a cigarette, she was holding a gun to her head. It just takes longer for the bullet to kill you.”

  My decision to quit wasn’t a conscious one. I simply holstered my lighter and never had another cigarette after that day. My habit had been moderate. I had smoked only half a dozen cigarettes a day, so quitting wasn’t really a big deal. I was one of the lucky ones who hadn’t become physically or psychologically addicted, which made it all the more incomprehensible that I had ever taken it up. But I did, and then I lost my parents, and then I stopped. End of story, right?

  Fast forward seventeen years. It’s a new millennium, and the war between smokers and nonsmokers is in full spate. There’s no avoiding the issue; you have to choose a side. Because of the overlapping rights of both groups, there’s no middle ground to occupy, no way to live and let live. The obese woman shoveling down a banana split at the next table is endangering only her health, not yours, so it’s her life, her choice. The smoker who’s dangling his Marlborough out the window of the car in front of you is a different story, however. It’s his choice to inhale the deadly toxins, but the secondhand smoke he huffs out the window pollutes your air almost as lethally. His rights have to end where yours begin. That was at least part of the reason underlying the local business association’s recent proposal. Smoking inside eating establishments was already prohibited by law throughout Connecticut. The business association now proposed to ban smoking anywhere in the historic district of Old Wethersfield, indoors or out, as of October fifteenth.

  “Why do smokers do that anyway?” choked my partner Margo, waving away the fumes emanating from the Bronco idling in front of us at the light.

  I had collected Margo and her constant companion, a chocolate Labrador retriever named Rhett Butler, at the dealership where her ancient BMW had been left for servicing. Rhett accompanied Margo nearly everywhere, asking nothing more than to be allowed to walk adoringly by her side. He had been enjoying the morning breeze through an open window, but now Margo raised it. He whined in protest and flopped full-length across my back seat, which meant he took up all of it.

  “I know, Sugar, but what can I do?” Margo told him. “If that silly Yankee wants to smell disgustin’, let him roll up his windows and keep the smoke all to himself, but I just had this suit dry-cleaned, thank you.”

  I could understand Margo’s concern. The understated Donna Karan in shades of taupe and black set off her southern belle good looks to a fare-thee-well. Definitely worth not stinking up. I, on the other hand, could safely drop my easy-care Susan Gravers into the washer and dryer.

 
I’m Kate Lawrence … well, Sarah Katherine Lawrence, actually, but who wants to go through life tagged as an Ivy League institution? Margo Farnsworth is one of my business partners, as well as my dearest friend, and we were on our way to work on a crisp, late September Monday. In the year since we had opened our new real estate brokerage in historic Wethersfield Village, where we shared office space with my daughter Emma and her lawyer boss in a renovated barn on Old Main Street, business had grown steadily. It hadn’t been easy, but we hadn’t expected it to be, and the problems had been far outweighed by the excitement of launching a business of our own. That was the point, after all: to create something that was our own.

  The temporary absence this month of our third partner, Charlene “Strutter” Tuttle Putnam, was a small setback. In a classic case of bad timing, from Margo’s and my perspective anyway, the Jamaican beauty had fallen madly in love with a mortgage broker who turned out to be wooing more than our referral business, but hey, what are you going to do? She and her young son Charlie deserved a good man like John Putnam in their lives, and things at the office would get back to normal as soon as they returned from their extended honeymoon.

  Fortunately, the real estate market was red hot, and business was booming. Margo and Strutter had been on the road from one end of the day to the other, checking out new listings, showing properties, and holding open houses for the slow movers on weekends. For my part, it was all I could do to keep up with the phone, which rang constantly. I also managed all the sale documents, the preparation of which I was happy to hand off to Emma and her boss, real estate lawyer Jimmy Seidel, and coped with the myriad administrative details that were part and parcel of running any business.

  Emma and Jimmy occupied the Law Barn’s loft area along with another young lawyer, Donatella Puccini, and two more paralegals. More often than not, Jimmy or “Pooch” represented our clients at the closings, and Emma and her assistants shepherded them through the maze of pre-closing paperwork. The entrance area of the building was presided over by pretty Jenny Morris, a law student by night and our receptionist by day. Jenny answered all of our phones when we could not, took prodigious messages, placated nervous clients, and somehow managed to get everything properly filed before dashing off to her evening classes.

  The remaining Law Barn office was occupied by Millicent Haines, a middle-aged mortgage broker who had rented the small, first-floor room off the area where our copier and fax machine were housed. Having relocated from California this past July, Millie spent most of her days on the phone or out of the office, so the noise of the machines didn’t bother her. She seemed pleasant enough, on the few occasions our paths crossed, and the clients we referred to her for help with their financing seemed well pleased.

  As hectic as our days were, it never occurred to us to complain. MACK Realty was ours. No more strutting, egotistical bosses to humor, as we had endured at the law firm where Margo, Strutter and I had been legal assistants until last summer. As Margo put it so well in the honeyed Georgia drawl that kept the northern fellows hanging on her every word, “No more arrogant, demanding bosses for us to placate, Sugar, not for us spirited, not to mention gorgeous, business women.”

  Strutter had concurred dryly, “Yessirree, it’s nothing but arrogant, demanding clients to placate from now on!”

  Things were going well for me on other fronts, too. Following a bumpy settling-in period, during which my neighbors and I had snarled regularly at each other as we chafed under the rules and regulations of condominium living, I was enjoying life in my spacious unit at The Birches. Situated on the acreage of one of Wethersfield’s oldest farms, the freestanding Colonial homes were beautifully landscaped and backed by EPA-protected woods and wetlands, which gave Jasmine and Simon, my feline housemates, plenty of visual entertainment from their sunny windowsills.

  Perhaps best of all, things were going swimmingly with my longtime love interest, Armando Velasquez, so swimmingly, in fact, that we were considering what both of us had sworn never to consider again: sharing a roof. My roof, to be precise, since home for Armando was a one-bedroom efficiency in a pet-free building in West Hartford. But after luxuriating in our individual spaces for more than a decade following our respective, amicable divorces from our respective, amicable ex-spouses, cohabiting was not something to be entered into lightly. We weren’t kids anymore, and while our attraction to each other was undeniable, we were no longer slaves to the hormones that had driven us at a younger age into marriage. Still, we had been going together for more than five years. Although the idea of marriage still made us both skittish, we were at least beginning to consider combining residences.

  So I had plenty to think about on the way to work that morning. I drove down Wells Road and crossed the Silas Deane Highway, Wethersfield’s commercial thoroughfare. A mere hundred yards farther along, a wooden sign pronounced quaintly that I was entering the Village of Wethersfield, “Ye Most Ancient Towne,” established in 1633-34. One long curve to the left, and suburban Connecticut circa 2006 gave way to the New England ambience of earlier centuries. The 25 m.p.h. speed limit seemed entirely appropriate to the venerable elms and oaks shading stately homes, set well back and interspersed with more contemporary dwellings, on Old Main Street. As always, I enjoyed the transition, noting the spreading colors in the sumac of the hedges and the sugar maples. In late September, the school buses had been on the roads for several weeks already. The two family farm stands on the Broad Street Green were still open for business, but apples and mums had joined the late tomatoes and the last of the sweet corn offered for sale, and pumpkins would soon appear. A third farm around the corner was beginning to offer hayrides. It was my favorite time of year, since I was not fond of Connecticut’s humid summers, but my enjoyment was bittersweet, knowing that the cold rains of November would soon be with us.

  In a week, the Autumn Festival would be in full swing with local businesses and nonprofits awaiting the formal judging of the annual Scarecrows Along Main Street competition, in which entries could be almost anything, so long as they were at least partially constructed of straw. Up and down the length of Old Main Street, dozens of whimsical displays already adorned front yards and porches, with dozens more under construction. Some were perennial favorites, welcomed back as old friends, such as the overall-clad farmer holding a lapful of corn as he sat on a sunny bench outside the museum. Many were the work of first-timers, like this year’s “Baby Broomers,” a motley collection of brooms with faces propped against a white picket fence. The “Ghoul-Aid Stand” on the corner of Garden Street gave everyone who passed a chuckle. Old and new, we all enjoyed the collective creative effort.

  I pulled the Altima into my favorite space just south of the Law Barn’s driveway. Margo checked her make-up in the visor mirror and winked at herself. “Sugar, nobody would take either one of us for a day over forty,” she pronounced with satisfaction.

  “Well,” I demurred, “forty-two maybe …”

  “… but a great forty-two!” we chorused, ending our standard gag.

  I waved so long as Margo and Rhett disappeared into the building while I stayed in the car to wait for my daughter. At least twice a week, I met Emma before work, and we power-walked to the cove at the end of Old Main Street and back. The exercise cleared the cobwebs from our sleep-fogged heads. It also gave us a chance to catch up with each other’s lives before the demands of the clients we shared crowded into the day. On the return leg of our walk, we stopped into the Village Diner for coffee to go, then sipped and chatted as we completed the circuit at a more leisurely pace.

  I laced my feet into white Avias as I waited for Emma. Just thinking of her made me smile, as did the thought of my son Joey, who at the age of 28 was on the road seeing the country as a long-distance trucker. The tractor cab of his “reefer,” which was trucker lingo for the refrigerated trailer he hauled, was better-appointed than most of his friends’ apartments, and he was enjoying the adventure of his gypsy existence. Emma, at 27, preferred he
r snug loft apartment and job as a residential real estate paralegal, at which she excelled. Both my kids were bright, strong, and funny as hell, and I was proud of them both. Better yet, they seemed to like me, despite all of my parenting mistakes, and to seek out my company without inordinate prodding from me. The same went for their relationship with their father, who had remarried happily a few years back.

  Life was good, I congratulated myself on this September morning. Promising shafts of sunlight pierced the low fog that rolled off the nearby Connecticut River, and it looked to be another glorious day. Despite the early hour, I noted a number of cars parked in front of other business establishments, whose owners were also attempting to get a jump on the day. As I waited, I admired the scarecrow in front of the Law Barn, which had been the brainchild of Emma and her colleagues. A stern-faced black crow in a judge’s robe sat behind his bench made of hay bales. Before him stood a braying ass clad in a suit and tie fashioned entirely of writs, deeds, subpoenas, wills and other legal documents. An overflowing briefcase leaned against his left foreleg. The exhibit was entitled, “Lawsuit.” Biased though I was, I thought it might just be a winner.

  “Hey, Mamacita!” Emma greeted me, using the nickname she had assigned to me following a long-ago semester of high school Spanish. She flashed me a dazzling smile and U-turned in the empty street to pull her silver Saturn up to the bumper of the Altima. Her face was free of make-up, and she efficiently wound her long hair, which was the same shade of ash blonde as my own short mop, into a casual knot and secured it firmly to the top of her head before hopping out of the car. Within minutes, we were stumping past the small shops, bed-and-breakfasts, and private residences, most with a creative scarecrow out front, that lined the street. “So give with the latest on you and the Colombian,” she said, making reference to Armando’s South American roots.