Granny's Got a Gun (Secret Agent Granny Book 1) Page 3

  Martin got up and gave me a big hug.

  “Sorry you lost your friend, Grandma.”

  I buried my face in his unruly golden locks and hugged him back. He squeezed me harder. He was getting tomato sauce on my blouse, but I didn’t mind at all.

  Chapter 4

  Later that evening, I had the perfect excuse to start my investigation. Evon called me in a tizzy, saying she was suffering heart palpitations. She knew I was trained in first aid—one of the few details I give out about my training because it’s good for everyone to know who can help in an emergency—and Evon wanted me to come over right away.

  Of course I did, but not because I was worried over her health. She did enough of that for the both of us. No, Evon wasn’t having heart palpitations any more than she had come down with thyroid cancer after Charles’s wife died. That was just her hypochondria kicking in. On some level she knew that, too, because she hadn’t called the doctor. Every physician, nurse, emergency medical technician, and veterinarian in Cheerville had told her the same thing—you are remarkably healthy for your age, and you have no dangerous conditions or illnesses. That wasn’t what she wanted to hear, and they weren’t giving her what she really wanted—sympathy. I could provide that, plus a visit would give me a chance to grill her.

  Evon lived alone in a cute little cottage not far from my son’s house. As I knocked on the front door, I caught a whiff of disinfectant. The doorknob gleamed brightly in the setting sun, and I could see telltale streaks that showed it had been wiped recently. I bent over and gave it a sniff. Yes, disinfectant.

  “Barbara, is that you?” Evon’s voice came from behind the door.

  I stood up abruptly, my back giving another angry twinge. The peephole was dark. She’d seen that I had been bent over. Would she wonder why?

  The door opened, and the smell of disinfectant became stronger.

  That wasn’t unusual. Evon feared germs the way the CIA used to fear communists. They were invisible, sneaky, deadly, and everywhere.

  Evon clutched her chest and looked at me sorrowfully.

  “Thank the Good Lord you made it in time. I feel like I’m dying!”

  At our age, aren’t we all? I thought. I kept that to myself. Speaking it aloud might push her over the edge. The Cheerville Active Readers’ Society didn’t need two murderers.

  “So what’s the problem?” I asked as I followed her into the living room. Everything looked scrupulously clean, as usual. An aspirin bottle and a large bottle of mineral water sat open on the coffee table. Evon slumped down on the couch, and I took out my first aid kit, which I always kept in my car.

  “Let me have a listen,” I said.

  I had a stethoscope in the kit. I wasn’t really qualified to use it, but I didn’t use it for listening to heartbeats anyway. A good stethoscope works wonders for listening at doors and walls.

  I warmed up the stethoscope as well as I could by rubbing it against my palm—the stethoscope my doctor had used during my last checkup was so frigid that it nearly gave me a heart attack of my own—and listened to the faint thump thump thump of Evon’s seventy-two-year-old heart.

  Timing her heartbeat with my watch, I found it a bit elevated but suspected that with a chronic worrier like her, it was always elevated. I didn’t hear anything else amiss.

  That was not what Evon wanted to hear, of course. She wanted to be the center of attention and worry. I had to make more of a show of this.

  “I’ll check out a few other things,” I said. “Let me listen to your lungs.”

  Evon removed her blouse like a professional. No, not that kind of professional. I mean a professional patient. I suspected she loved to have her lungs listened to. Who knows how many times she caught pneumonia and bronchitis in a single week? And then there was that new strain of tuberculosis that was resistant to all medication. She loved that one.

  “Take a deep, slow breath,” I told her.

  I needn’t have bothered—she was already doing it like she had done it a million times before for a million exasperated doctors.

  Her lungs sounded fine.

  “I feel weak and dizzy,” she said.

  “Maybe you need to eat something.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t eat a bite, not after what happened.”

  Poor Evon. That part, at least, I understood. I decided to give her the full treatment and took her blood pressure, too.

  “I have terrible blood pressure, very high. Actually, life threatening.”

  Actually, she did have high blood pressure, hardly surprising given her nature. But life threatening? No.

  “Well, it does seem your blood pressure is a tad higher than normal—”

  “I knew it!” she said, falling back on the couch with a satisfied groan.

  “But your heart rate and lungs are fine.”

  “Nonsense! I’m at death’s door. My whole body feels off kilter.”

  “You’re just distraught over what happened to Lucien. We all are. I’m sure my blood pressure is up, too.”

  Evon’s eyes widened. “You want me to check yours?”

  “I’m sure I’m fine.”

  The last thing I wanted was to become her sister in misery.

  “What do you think killed him?” she asked, worry stamped on her face. “Could it be that new form of tuberculosis going around? It’s mutated and immune to all known medicines.”

  I knew that was coming. I was tempted to reply that it might be Ebola, but that would be cruel. Hilarious, but cruel.

  “Lucien wasn’t coughing. If he’d had tuberculosis, he would have been coughing.”

  “I heard him cough once or twice,” Evon said defensively.

  “He’d have to cough a lot more than that. Lucien didn’t die of tuberculosis. He died of a heart attack.”

  I said this last bit to catch her off guard.

  “Just like I’m going to die of a heart attack! What am I to do? I take aspirin every day like you’re supposed to and get regular checkups, but the doctors are all quacks and say there’s nothing wrong with me. I know there is, Barbara. Maybe I have a heart murmur.”

  “You don’t have a heart murmur.”

  Actually, I wasn’t qualified to say that, but since none of her army of physicians had detected one, I felt I was on safe ground.

  “Do you want some mineral water?” she offered. “It’s good for purifying the system.”

  “I’m fine,” I replied, resisting the urge to edge away.

  I wasn’t going to eat or drink anything from any member of the reading group until I cracked this case.

  She poured herself a tall glass and gulped it down.

  “Poor Lucien,” she murmured.

  I studied her. She had a look of relief on her face. Why? Because Lucien hadn’t died of something she could catch? Or because I had pretended to be fooled about the murder?

  I needed to dig deeper.

  “Yes, poor Lucien. Everybody loved him,” I said with unaffected grief.

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Evon replied.

  Now we’re getting somewhere.

  “What do you mean?” I said in mock surprise.

  “Well, you know some husbands were a bit jealous. All the men our age are wasting away, catching the most horrible things because they let their immune systems decay by drinking beer and sitting on the sofa all day. I don’t even like to be around men our age. I’ll catch something for sure. But not Lucien. He was the picture of health. I always envied him that. That’s why it’s so worrying that he just up and died. It came out of nowhere.”

  I thought for a moment. Jealous husbands? I’d noted that before, and it was the most likely motive, but we didn’t have any jealous husbands in our group, unless Charles could have discovered something between Lucien and his late wife. That seemed a bit thin but worth following up on.

  “I never heard of men resenting Lucien,” I said, faking surprise. Playing the new woman in town could come in handy. I’d been in Che
erville for a year, but it was the kind of small town where you’re considered a newcomer for a lot longer than that.

  “Oh yes, they grumble and grouse all the time just because he is healthier than they are, or at least he was.”

  “Charles too? I’ve never heard him say anything!” I said, pretending to be scandalized.

  “He was one of the only ones who didn’t,” Evon replied, putting her forefinger and middle finger on her wrist to check her pulse. “He always respected Lucien, and you know how Charles doted on Laura, especially after she fell sick. I’m glad he’s taking care of the funeral arrangements and not that new place. I suspect he’ll be burying me soon. I’ve already arranged for a lovely casket and floral arrangement. I’ll look better than I have in decades.”

  This last was said with a sigh and a swoon. I found it interesting that Charles had already cornered the market on Lucien’s corpse.

  Evon looked at me suddenly. “Would you mind hosting the next reading club meeting?”

  I blinked in surprise. “Um, I suppose I could. Why?”

  Immediately, I cursed myself. I had already half said yes to something when I didn’t know what it was all about. It would bring a poisoner into my home. Or was that Evon’s intention?

  “It’s just that if there really is something floating in the air in Gretchen’s home, I don’t want us all to catch it.”

  “There’s nothing floating in the air,” I replied, realizing that my words came out sounding like a scoffing doctor. She’d heard that attitude a million times before.

  No invisible microbes had killed Lucien. One of his friends had. So who did it? Could it have been this trembling wreck in front of me? I found it hard to believe that she could summon the courage to poison anyone. Her hypochondria wasn’t a front. Pauline had complained that Evon had been like this since she was a kid. When everyone got the chickenpox in fifth grade, Evon had been convinced it was smallpox and had taken it upon herself to call the Centers for Disease Control. Why they listened to a ten-year-old girl was anyone’s guess, but an entire isolation unit had shown up at her house. Evon’s parents had been mortified.

  “So will you host the meeting?” she asked again.

  “Well, I don’t know if there will be a meeting next week considering what happened.”

  “No, I suppose not, but we’ll start meeting again soon enough, and I don’t want to risk going back into that house.”

  “Well, you have a lovely home, why not—”

  “Out of the question! It’s hard enough keeping this place clean without having a lot of people coming and going. Oh, I don’t mean to offend, Barbara. You take care of yourself. But there’s Charles handling all those bodies, and Pearl at death’s door, and Pauline has never taken care of herself, and even you could catch something from that grandson of yours. Kids these days are so filthy. I don’t know how I ever survived being a schoolteacher. I’m sure it undermined my health.”

  “I’m surprised you can bear going to PTA meetings.”

  Evon was still quite involved in the school district. Like me, she resented the inactivity of retirement.

  “I take a good, thorough shower every time I come home from one. Volunteering at the library is even worse. Those books. Ugh! Who knows where they’ve been? That’s not the worst, though. You know the kids are catching viruses from computers now?”

  “Evon, I know you retired from teaching quite some time ago, but surely you know the difference between a computer virus and an actual virus.”

  “I’m not talking about computer viruses! Just think of those keyboards and the mouse! All those grubby fingers touching them. Do you know how many germs are in the average booger?”

  “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I’ll think about hosting. Perhaps one of the other members will volunteer.”

  It didn’t look like I was going to get any further that evening, so I bade Evon good-bye, leaving her with her complexes and simplexes and fatal conditions. It hadn’t been as useful a visit as I had hoped, but it was a start.

  Chapter 5

  The next morning, I woke bright and early as usual. I’d gotten into the habit when I was in the field doing CIA work and never got out of it. People fantasized that when they retired, they would sleep until noon every day. I knew that would never happen with me. I’m just not that kind of person. There was too much life to be lived and not enough time in which to live it.

  People also fantasized about having a peaceful, quiet time for their remaining years. After all I’ve been through, I had been kind of hoping for that too. Now it looked like that wasn’t going to happen. I had a murder investigation fall into my lap, and the murderer was someone close to me. I had to proceed with caution. If they thought I was snooping around, they might try to poison me, too.

  I practically leapt out of bed. “Practically,” I say, because leaping isn’t something I do as well as I once did. But I did haul myself out of the sack with a fair amount of enthusiasm. A peaceful retirement wasn’t my style. The year-long snoozefest I’d endured since moving to Cheerville was over. I finally had something interesting in my life.

  The question was: what to do next? I needed to talk to Gretchen as soon as possible. Being the victim’s spouse, she was the prime suspect. I couldn’t think of any real reason why she would want to kill Lucien, but I was playing the odds based on decades’ worth of homicide statistics. Spouses kill each other; it’s a sad fact.

  I checked the clock. 6:10 a.m. Too early to call. Gretchen was a senior citizen and had strange sleep patterns like most people our age, and she probably hadn’t slept a wink anyway whether she was guilty or innocent, but calling at six in the morning was rude even by septuagenarian standards. I ate my breakfast and showered with impatience. I hated inactivity.

  I didn’t have to hate it for long. My phone rang at 6:40.

  I picked it up.

  “Hello, Barbara? This is Pearl.”

  I held the phone away from my head. Pearl’s hearing hadn’t weathered the past ninety-six years too well, and she always shouted.

  “Hello, Pearl. How are you?”

  “Better than Lucien. Have you talked with Gretchen yet?”

  “No, why?”

  “She wants me to go over there. Can you drive me?”

  Bingo.

  I was at Pearl’s house within minutes. She already stood at the door waiting for me. Like all people I’ve met in their nineties, Pearl wanted her way all the time, right this instant. I suppose that’s natural when you’re four years shy of a century. Procrastination is a bad idea for anybody; for someone like her, it’s the same thing as saying you’re not going to do something at all.

  Unlike Charles, who used a cane, and Pauline with her walker, Pearl didn’t need any assistance except someone to lean on. That someone was Fatima, a Nicaraguan nurse who lived in Pearl’s spare room. Fatima was a smiling, professional woman in her thirties who dressed in an immaculate white nurse’s uniform and spoke good but heavily-accented English.

  “Now Ms. Pearl, I could have driven you myself,” she was saying as she led her patient down the two steps from her front porch to the walkway.

  “Nonsense!” Pearl barked. “Do they even have driver’s licenses in Mexico?”

  “I’m from Nicaragua, Ms. Pearl, and yes, they do.”

  “Probably get them out of cereal boxes. Do you have cereal boxes in El Salvador?” Pearl grumbled.

  “Nicaragua. We go to a government office just like you do. And I have an American driver’s license too.”

  “You do? How could you read the exam?”

  Fatima didn’t respond to that. Well, actually she did, by muttering some very coarse and unladylike phrases under her breath in Spanish. Pearl, being nearly deaf, didn’t hear a thing.

  I, being fluent in Spanish thanks to fighting communist guerrillas in Fatima’s home country, understood every word.

  I tried to hide my blushing. I didn’t want Fatima or anyone else to have any hints abou
t my past. Besides, listening to Fatima cussing out her patient was one of my favorite parts of the day.

  Fatima helped Pearl into my car, and I thanked her. Pearl didn’t.

  “You should really be kinder to Fatima,” I said as we pulled away. “She’s always very nice to you.”

  “Oh, she’s all right. Makes a good cup of tea and remembers my medicine. But you can’t trust these Ecuadorians to drive. Did you hear about that fifteen-car pileup they had down there? It was all over the news.”

  “Fatima is from Nicaragua.”

  “Yes, and they had a fifteen-car pileup down there. It was all over the news.”

  I rolled my eyes and changed the subject.

  “So how is Gretchen holding up?”

  “How should I know? That’s why we’re going over there to check.”

  I raised my eyebrow. It was barely past seven, and there were few cars on the road. Monday-morning rush hour, or what passed for rush hour in Cheerville, was still an hour away.

  “You didn’t talk to her this morning?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “I thought you said she wanted you to come over.”

  “Of course she wants me to come over. Her husband just croaked.”

  Oh dear. We were going to show up uninvited in the early morning at the house of a grieving widow. Well, at least we’d catch her off guard. That wasn’t such a bad idea, and I could always blame Pearl for the mix-up. Everyone in town was accustomed to Pearl’s pushiness.

  We passed through Cheerville’s downtown. While the town was small, it had a decent little shopping district in the center that served the town and the surrounding villages and countryside. A large, triangular village green edged with old oak trees took up the center. To one side stood a splendid old Colonial church that General Washington supposedly had prayed in as he took a break from one of his marches in the War of Independence. It was a fine structure of whitewashed wood with a tall steeple and one of the best preserved in the state. That brought in some tourists, who poked around the church and the eighteenth-century graveyard next to it before stopping off at the little one-room schoolhouse on the opposite side of the village green. All the local schoolkids took fieldtrips there to learn how their ancestors had been taught. Martin had proclaimed it “boring.” Next to it stood a Colonial-era courthouse that now served as the home of the Cheerville Historical Society.