Book Clubbed

“Joelle mentioned Betsy had a daughter who died. Can you get in?” Tricia asked.

Angelica shook her head. “I don’t think so. I can’t see a bed, or any toys or books, just more piles of crap.”

Tricia caught up with her and looked inside. Other than the color of the wall, there was no indication the room had ever belonged to a child. It was filled with more of what they’d found in the rest of the house. “Do you think Betsy was trying to replace her dead child and the husband who left her with piles and piles of rubbish as some weird way of filling the voids in her life?”

“It doesn’t make sense to me, but after the death of a child, heaven only knows how deep her grief ran.” Angelica craned her neck. “There’s another door across the way.” She sidled past more boxes and stood before an open doorway. “This might be it.” She reached inside the room, found and flipped a switch. Yet another dusty bulb illuminated the littered space.

Angelica waited for Tricia to catch up before she entered the room. At least this space wasn’t quite as cluttered. A small area had been cleared and Tricia saw a dirty Berber carpet covered with coffee and food stains. A computer desk piled high with papers, dirty coffee cups, and a thick layer of dust was crammed into a corner next to a double bed. Half the bed was piled with clothes, leaving only a narrow sleeping area with grimy sheets and blankets.

Tricia swallowed hard, disgusted. What a difference from her lovely, uncluttered home—where she fervently wished she was at that moment. “How could anyone live like this?”

“It’s a disease,” Angelica said with sadness. “Poor Betsy couldn’t relate well to people, so she must have spent her free time collecting stuff that comforted her. I’ll bet she valued all this rubbish over the people who remained in her life.”

“And maybe her hoarding was responsible for her failed marriage,” Tricia said. “Joelle mentioned how she and her husband fought over their assets. Maybe she couldn’t find them in all this junk to satisfy a judgment.”

Angelica picked through the stack of papers on the computer desk. “Looks like mostly old bills. I’ll bet she paid them electronically.”

“That would save on stamps,” Tricia agreed.

“And maybe she paid them as they came in so they wouldn’t get lost.” Angelica hit the computer’s power button and they waited for it to boot up. Unfortunately, the first screen up demanded a password. “What do you think Betsy would use?” she asked.

“I have no idea. Maybe her maiden name?” Tricia suggested. “What if it’s her mother’s maiden name? That’s what the banks always seem to want as a security check.”

“Do you have to be such a pill?” Angelica accused. She turned back for the keyboard. “Lowercase? Initial caps? All caps? We’ve only got three tries before we’re locked out.”

“We’re as good as locked out now,” Tricia pointed out.

Angelica sat on the grubby office chair, stared at the dust-covered, grimy keyboard for a long moment, and then removed her gloves.

“You’ll leave fingerprints,” Tricia warned.

“I can’t type with them on. And I can always dust the keyboard off when I’m done. It certainly needs it.” She rested her fingers on the home-row keys, but paused. “What’s Betsy’s unmarried sister’s last name?”

“Morrison.”

“I’ll try initial caps.” Angelica tapped the keys and got a warning message to try again. She tried all lowercase letters and got the same warning. “One last time,” she said, hit the caps lock key, and tried again. Sure enough, the sign-on screen morphed into the desktop display, which was as littered with files as the room was cluttered with junk. “Oh, boy. Where do we start?”

Tricia noticed an open container of recordable CDs peeking out from under a soiled towel. “Copy all the files onto these CDs and we can peruse them at our leisure.”

“Who has time for leisure?” Angelica asked, but she accepted an empty disk from Tricia and proceeded to copy all the desktop files. After that, she dug deeper into the documents file and copied everything there before starting on a third disk.

The task took a good twenty minutes, and as each minute passed Tricia’s anxiety level rose. “That’s got to be enough,” she said. “We’ve got to get out of here before someone finds us here.”

Angelica popped the final CD from the read/write drawer and added it to the others in her pocket. Then she pulled out a pocket container of hand sanitizer and squirted some into her palms, working it in before she pulled her gloves on again. She grabbed a towel from the pile overhead, squirted sanitizer on it, and wiped down the keyboard.

Tricia began to make her way through the house, aiming for the kitchen with Angelica following, switching off lights as she went.

A loud bang reverberated through the house and Tricia stopped dead.

“What was that?” Angelica whispered.

“There’s someone else in the house!” Tricia practically squealed.

“Hide!” Angelica said.

“Where?”

But they had no time, because a voice from the kitchen doorway demanded, “What the hell are you doing here?”

TWELVE

Tricia felt her mouth go dry, but managed a nervous laugh. “Hi, Joelle. What a surprise to see you here.”

“It’s an even bigger surprise to find the two of you in my sister’s house. Did you kick in the back door?” she demanded.

“No, we found it that way,” Tricia said.

“We were going to use Betsy’s keys,” Angelica said and pulled them out of her jacket pocket, dangling them for Joelle to see.

“You have no right to be here. I’m going to call the cops,” she said, and began to dig into the purse hanging from her shoulder.

“Wait—please don’t,” Tricia said. “We came here tonight to try to figure out why Betsy was killed.”

“That’s a job for the police,” Joelle said.

“Did you know that Tricia has assisted the Sherriff’s Department and the Stoneham Police Department in solving several local murders?” Angelica said.

“Yes,” Joelle grudgingly admitted. “After Stan was killed.”

“You do want your sister’s murderer to be found sooner rather than later, don’t you?” Angelica asked. “I know I would.”

Tricia shot her an a

Joelle waved a hand before her, taking in the mess. “As you can see, Betsy really had nothing worth stealing.”

“When did she start hoarding?” Tricia asked.

“Betsy never was a neatnik, but she didn’t start collecting papers, clothes, and other junk until after her daughter, Amy, died. That was ten years ago. In the last five years—since her husband, Jerry, left—she became much, much worse.”

“She accumulated all this in only five years?” Angelica asked.

Joelle nodded. “For the most part. Her collections, as she called them, became more important to her than any of the people in her life. She lost all of her friends, and her husband, because of them. I was the only one left who’d have anything to do with her, and sometimes she was so mean to me, I think she deliberately tried to drive me away.”

“So you two were no longer close?” Tricia asked.

Again Joelle nodded. “I guess I tried one too many times to get her some help, but she just got angry. She told me she was going to change her will. I had been her beneficiary since the divorce, but she said she knew I’d throw all her treasures in the trash before her body was cold.” She looked around the dump that had been Betsy’s living room. “She had that right.”