A Match Made for Murder Iona Whishaw (pride and prejudice read .TXT) 📖

be leaving this house after school for the rest of her natural life!”

“Mr. Finch, can we have a word with you on your own?”

“Now what? Get up to your room,” Finch said to his daughter. He waited till she was out of the room and part- way up the steps and then turned back to the policemen. “What?”

“We understand you had a violent disagreement with Watts at your workplace. Is that true?” Ames asked.

“What of it?” Finch said truculently. “People get into arguments all the time.”

“Yes, but you were overheard to say something along the lines of ‘stay away from her’. It suggests that you knew he had designs on your daughter. So it shouldn’t have been such a big surprise that he might have been going to run away with her. Can you tell us where you were Tuesday afternoon?”

“I was home, sick.”

“Can anyone verify that?” Ames tried to keep his voice mild.

“My bloody wife can verify it. What the hell are you driving at? I didn’t do anything to him. Believe me, though, if he’d managed to get her away, I wouldn’t answer for my actions! I’m not surprised he’s dead!”

“Whew!” Terrell said, navigating down the narrow street after this stormy interview. “That poor kid. I used to think it would be fun to have a daughter, but I’m not so sure now. There’s just too much awful stuff that can happen to them. I’m inclined to believe him, by the way. Of course, his wife will just confirm he was sick at home.”

“And would a man with a short fuse like that go to all this trouble with poisoned handkerchiefs? He’d much more likely shoot him in a fit of rage. Still, he’s on our list. The question of the clothes is puzzling me. What do we have? According to her, the clothes weren’t for her, but maybe they were. Maybe her father was right: Finch intended to dress Ada up, try to make her look older so as not to arouse suspicion if they were planning to run away somewhere.”

“If Ada gave Watts her own clothes, where are they now?”

“Keep driving. Let’s stop at the train station and see if he kept another locker or something. I can’t imagine that he’d risk bringing a bunch of teenager’s clothes to his place of work, but they weren’t in the car or at his house. At least, Mrs. Watts didn’t mention them,” Ames said.

The foreman at the station shook his head. “Just the empty one you saw.”

Back at the police station, Terrell handed Sergeant O’Brien, the deskman, the keys to the car and said to Ames, “Look, sir, why don’t I pop out to the dress shops with this stuff and see if I can find out who bought it. I think it’s pretty obvious, but at least we could dot that i, as it were.”

Ames nodded, but he didn’t tell Terrell what he was going to spend the next hour doing because, he realized later in the file room, he was slightly embarrassed about it.

“Hello, darling,” Lane said, when her husband’s shadow loomed across her deck chair. There were two children splashing about in the pool while their mother sat on the edge with her feet in the water, calling out to them not to go to the deep end.

Darling took off his hat, pulled a nearby deck chair closer, and sat down. “I’ve heard a most extraordinary story,” he said.

“Do tell,” she said, smiling. The shade from her sun hat fell becomingly across her face, but he firmly ignored that.

“I went down to the Tucson police station, as you know, to tell Martinez and Galloway about Chela seeing Meg’s older male friend’s mug shot in the paper. Martinez took it seriously and Galloway pooh-poohed it. Then Galloway asked me to stay back for a word. Can you guess what that word was?”

“Haven’t the foggiest,” she said.

“He told me his wife had checked out of the hospital on her own and disappeared. He wondered, don’t you know, if she’d seemed all right to us on our little trip to the mission. I confess, I was stymied. For one thing I had to pretend I didn’t know she’d been in the hospital, and for another I wasn’t sure what confidences she could have shared that would be in any way connected to her later hospitalization and disappearance. Did she confide in you, perhaps while you two were sitting in the shade of the mission garden?”

“That’s interesting, because you know, there was a moment when I thought she might confide in me. In fact, I tried to encourage it, but she gave an artificial little laugh and brushed me off. I wasn’t very convinced. And when it comes down to it, I don’t think I was that surprised to learn he’d put her in the hospital.”

“I can’t tell you how little I enjoyed pretending I knew nothing about her disappearance from that hospital.”

Terrell trudged through a barrage of sleety rain to the three main dress shops in town and was relieved to have some luck at the third.

“Yes, those are from our shop. The dresses, I mean, not the underwear. It happens I do remember because I myself really liked that blue dress. I asked the lady who bought it if she was going on vacation and she said she was. She said they were driving down to California.”

“Do you remember her name or anything about her? Or the day they were purchased?”

“Oh.” The saleswoman stopped and frowned. “I’d have to go through my sales slips to find the exact date, but I would say within the last month? I didn’t get her name, but I do remember her. A pretty blonde with very curly hair. In her early thirties or late twenties perhaps, but quite young looking for all that. Yea high.” She held her hand up at Terrell’s chin level. “These are size 16 R. They were meant for quite