A Real Pickle (17 page)

“I have work to do, real work,” she said.

“Will you be able to do it from here?” I asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“It will help if we have access to all of you in case we need to talk to you,” I said.  “We’re taking Curtis’s last request to us quite seriously.”

“Just as you should,” Jeffrey said.  “I’m sure that everyone will be delighted to continue to cooperate with you both.”

“Of course we will,” Charlotte said as she shot Jeffrey a quick glare.

I was bracing myself for his reply when Humphries appeared with a familiar face in tow.  “Ms. West has arrived,” he said, and Renee stepped forward.

“I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to interrupt your breakfast,” she said.  “I can come back later.”

“Nonsense,” Jeffrey said with a grin.  “I was finished, anyway.  I’m afraid that it’s just going to be the two of us, though.”

“What happened to Crane?” she asked with a frown.

“That’s what we’re still trying to determine,” he replied.  “Come on, I’ll explain on the way.”

She nodded in my direction and smiled, and then she did the same with Moose as she and Jeffrey walked away.

“If you’ll excuse us as well,” I said as I stood.

“Of course,” Charlotte replied.

We all left the dining room then, my grandfather and me in one direction, the brother and sister leaving together in another, and Charlotte heading off to who knew where by herself.

That just left my grandfather and me.

It was time to start digging anew.

Chapter 18

“Where should we start today?” I asked Moose as we walked out into the foyer together.

“The first thing that I need to do is call Deb Pence at Joshua’s,” he said as he reached for his cellphone.  

He looked frustrated a few seconds later.  

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“I can’t get a signal here,” he said.  “I’m going to walk out onto the porch and see if I can do any better there.”

I was about to walk out with him when I saw Humphries lingering behind the stairs.  I was certain that he thought that he was out of my line of sight, but he’d shifted at precisely the wrong moment, and I’d spotted him.

“I’ll be right there,” I whispered.

Moose raised an eyebrow, and I pointed toward where the butler was hiding.  He nodded, and then my grandfather stepped outside alone.

I walked straight to Humphries’s hiding place.  “Are you lurking?” I asked him with a smile.

He didn’t even look embarrassed by being caught eavesdropping.  “It’s my job to be invisible, but available at all times.”

“Wow, that must be tough to do,” I said.

“It can be challenging at times.  Is there something I can do for you?”

I nodded.  “You can answer a question for me.  What do
you
think happened to Crane?”

He looked surprised to hear me ask him.  “I’m sure that I don’t know.”

“That’s the thing.  
None
of us know, but I have a hunch that you have an
opinion
.”

The butler looked uncomfortable.  “I’m not accustomed to being directly asked my opinion about anything.”

“Then think of this as your lucky day,” I said.

He thought about my question, and then Humphries said, “I think he left of his own volition.”

“That’s interesting.  Why do you say that?”

“If he were dragged away,
someone
would have heard him,” Humphries said.  “I’m not the only one listening in to the heartbeat of this house.”

“Who else might have heard something?” I asked.

“It’s well known that Ms. Trane has insomnia,” he said softly.  “She doesn’t miss much.”

“You don’t care for her a great deal, do you?”

Humphries took a step back.  “I’m sure that I don’t know what you mean.  She is a delight.”  The stone expression on his face made me realize that I’d overstepped my boundaries with him this time.  There was a fine line between having a confidential conversation and showing loyalty to his employers, and though Charlotte wasn’t his boss directly, she was still Curtis Trane’s sister.

“I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to say that.  Forgive me.”

Humphries looked surprised.  “There’s no need to apologize.”

“Clearly there is,” I said.  “If it were you, how would you go about finding Crane?”

“I’m sure that I wouldn’t know.”

There was a barrier that was up now in full force, and I wasn’t having any luck breaking through it, at least not at the moment.  He’d been more open to talking with me before I’d asked him about Charlotte Trane, but that door had slammed shut.  I’d try him again later, or maybe even have Moose make a run at questioning the butler, but for now, Humphries was just another dead end.

I was still trying to come up with something to break the ice again when Moose walked in and the door closed loudly behind him.  “Sorry about that.”  He spotted me talking to Humphries and walked over toward us.  “There you are,” he said.

Before Moose could reach us, the butler said, “If you’ll excuse me, I must go.”

“We’ll chat again later,” I called out after him hopefully, but he didn’t even look back.

“Wow, what did you
say
to him, Victoria?”

“We were getting along just fine, and then I asked him how he felt about Charlotte Trane, and he turned to stone on me.”

Moose shook his head.  “Of course he did.  She’s the only reference here that he has left.  It’s going to be tough enough finding another high-end servant’s job for him as it is, given his history.  Humphries can’t afford to have any bad comments coming from a member of the Trane family.”

“Maybe you can pump him for more information later yourself,” I said.

“Sure, but let’s give him a little time.”

“What did Deb have to say?”

Moose frowned.  “I never got her.  She’s not due in until three this afternoon.”

“I wouldn’t mind having those hours,” I said.

“Not me.  She probably works until after midnight, and I for one like my beauty sleep,” Moose said with a grin.

“We can both use all of
that
we can get,” I answered.  “So, I suppose that we’ll have to wait to find out who Curtis ate with the night before he died.”

“If Deb even knows,” Moose said.  “There’s a chance that no one noticed, or even if they did, they might not be able to identify his dining companion.”

“Worse yet, even if someone at the restaurant can name names, there are no guarantees that it even had anything to do with his murder.”

My grandfather smiled.  “That’s just part of the joy of investigating, isn’t it?”

“You like it.  Admit it.”

“I love the challenge of it,” my grandfather admitted, “but I hate that we don’t get involved unless we lose someone who has touched our lives.”

“It’s what motivates us, though,” I said.  “I’m guessing that we’re not going to sit around waiting for Deb to call you back.”

“Hardly, but where does that leave us?”

I thought about it, and then I said, “I think we should speak directly with the lawyer who amended Curtis’s will,” I said.  “I’d love to know what changes he was going to make before someone stopped him.”

“Whoever it is, he’s not going to tell us anything.”

“That might be true, but he’ll tell Jeffrey, don’t you think?” I asked as I started for the library.

“There’s only one way to find out,” Moose said.

We found the chauffeur sitting at the table studying a document in front of him.  Renee was leaning over his shoulder, touching him lightly, as she peered at it as well.  There was no hint of impropriety, but that didn’t keep her from jerking up and away from him when we walked in.  Was Jeffrey blushing a little?

“What can I do for you?” Jeffrey asked as he shuffled a few papers on the library table.

“Have you seen the will?” I asked him.

“It’s here somewhere,” Jeffrey said as he nodded.  Renee helped him search, and a few seconds later, she pulled a thick document from the pile.  “Got it.”

“May we see it?” I asked Jeffrey.

“Of course,” he said.

I took the will and saw that it was dated two years before.  I started scanning through it, searching for beneficiaries.  When I found the right section, I found that Charlotte inherited half the money, while Tristan and Sarah split the other half.  I showed it to Moose, who was still reading it as I asked, “Is there any chance we can find out what Curtis’s new will said, the one he hadn’t signed yet?”

“I don’t know,” Jeffrey said.  “I’m not sure that he’ll tell me.”

“Of course he will,” Renee said.  “You’re the estate executor.  There’s a great deal of power associated with that.  I’m certain that if you call and ask, he’ll tell you anything that you want to know.”

“Honestly?” Jeffrey asked.  “That’s all that it will take?”

“Jeffrey, your position is to act as Curtis’s representative.  This is not the time to be timid.”

“Let me give him a call then,” Jeffrey said.

As he made the phone call, I said softly to Renee, “How’s it going?”

“Slowly but surely,” she said with a smile.  “I don’t know whether to thank you or curse you for bringing me in on this.”

“It’s your own fault, you know,” I said with a grin of my own.

“What makes you say that?”

“If you didn’t want to me to call you, you shouldn’t be so good at what you do.”

“Guilty as charged,” she said.  “Honestly, though, it is fascinating.  Curtis Trane left an amazingly complex estate behind.”

“It’s hard to believe that it all started with pickles,” I said, remembering my late friend’s penchant for giving away little plastic pickles.

“It may have started that way, but he’s a long way from that now.  The estate owns an interest in the Charlotte football team, did you know that?”

“I didn’t have a clue,” I said.

“It’s in here, and so is his minority ownership in the North Carolina Philharmonic.  The man had his fingers in dozens upon dozens of pies in the state.  It’s going to take years to straighten it all out.”

“You just smiled as you said that,” I said.

“What can I say?  I’ve always loved a challenge.”

I looked over at Jeffrey, whose face had gone white all of sudden as the telephone dropped out of his hands.  

“Are you okay?” I asked him softly, concerned for the man’s health.

Jeffrey shook his head from side to side, nodded, and then he shook his head again.  What was that supposed to mean?  As he picked the telephone back up and continued to speak, he grew more and more ashen, and I was beginning to wonder if we should call a doctor for him.  It was quite cryptic trying to make sense of the conversation based strictly on his part of it, and when he finally hung up, I was even more concerned about him.

“Is it really all that bad?” I asked him.

“I need some water,” he croaked out.

I reached for the pitcher, but Renee was quicker.  She poured some hastily and handed him the glass.  Jeffrey’s hands were shaking as he took it, and after gulping some of it down, he promptly started choking.  Moose patted him hard on the back, a move I wondered about, but it cleared up soon enough.

“Are you all right?” Renee asked.

“I think so,” he said, his voice a little hoarse from his recent ordeal.

“What did he say that shook you up so much?” I asked him.

“I don’t even know where to begin,” Jeffrey said.

“I’ve always found that the beginning is as good a place to start as any,” Moose said.

“It appears that Curtis signed a new will after all just before he was murdered,” Jeffrey said ominously.

Chapter 19

“Oh, no,” I said.  “Are you out as the executor now?”

“No, as a matter of fact, the only thing in the entire document that Curtis changed was his list of beneficiaries,” Jeffrey said.

“I didn’t think he had time to change it,” Moose said.

“That’s what everyone thought, but the attorney came by late the night before Curtis was murdered and brought a few witnesses with him.  I
wondered
why he sent me out for a quart of black cherry ice cream.  He must not have wanted me to know about it.”

“Why would he hide it from you?” Renee asked.

“Evidently because I’m in the new will,” Jeffrey said.

“That’s sweet of him to remember you,” I said.  “You were a good friend to him all the way to the end.  It should give you some real comfort knowing that he thought just as fondly of you as you did of him.  Will it be enough to make a difference in your life?”

“You could say that,” Jeffrey said.  “He left me everything.”

Chapter 20

“He did what?” I asked.  “Are you serious?”

“Evidently it’s true,” Jeffrey said.  “I can’t
believe
that he did that.”

Was it possible that the chauffeur was
upset
about the latest twist?  “Jeffrey, aren’t you
happy
about it?” I asked him.

“It’s no wonder that he sent me out and kept this from me.  If he’d breathed one word of it to me beforehand, I would have left on the spot.”

“Why would you do that?” Moose asked.  “It’s what he wanted, after all.”

“You don’t understand.  The three of us were the only people in his life that he considered his real friends, not people bought and paid for,” Jeffrey said.  “He tried to triple my salary three weeks ago, and I flatly refused.  As a matter of fact, I made him give me a cut in pay, or I threatened to go on strike,” Jeffrey added with a grin.  “It wasn’t about the money, not in the past year, anyway.”

“You could just give it all away if you wanted to,” Renee said, her first input into the conversation since Jeffrey first dropped the bombshell.

“Is that what you think I should do?” he asked her intently.

“Hang on a second here,” I said.  “Let’s not make any crazy decisions just yet.”

Renee stopped me with an icy glare.  “Victoria, I believe that Jeffrey just asked me a question, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to answer it.”

“Sorry,” I said.  It wasn’t really any of my business.  I just hated seeing him throw away such a vast fortune just to make a point of his loyalty to his late employer.