A Late Frost Read online

  As Douglas led the way down the dark hallway, Art said, “I think we may have a problem.”

  “I think you’re right, Art.”

  11

  “What now?” Art said in a quiet voice.

  Meg felt out of her depth, but they were here and Douglas was hurting. “We have to talk to him to get a sense of what his problem is, although I’d be willing to guess it’s Alzheimer’s or dementia—I don’t know enough about either to tell them apart. And the fact that he doesn’t seem to remember that his wife is dead suggests that this isn’t new. Unless the news gave him some sort of short-term amnesia.” In which case, Meg decided, she didn’t want to be around when he came to his senses and realized Monica was gone. Did that make her a shallow and uncaring person? She hoped not, but she wasn’t responsible for Douglas Whitman’s well-being.

  When they reached the door to the kitchen, both Meg and Art stopped in their tracks. The room was a mess, with most horizontal surfaces covered with plates of half-eaten food, some of which looked as though they dated back for more than one day. Despite the fact that it was midwinter, a few flies hopped from plate to plate. The smell was appalling, and Meg quickly saw that the trash had not been emptied in some time. How could energetic, organized Monica have let things get into this state?

  “I apologize for the mess,” Douglas said. “My wife usually takes care of the dishes. I cook,” he added proudly.

  “Why don’t you let me take care of those dishes, Mr. Whitman?” Meg asked. “May I call you Douglas? Can I get you some coffee? Tea?” Assuming she could find the fixings somewhere in this mess.

  “Coffee would be wonderful, thank you. I think Monica keeps the coffee in one of those cupboards.” Douglas waved vaguely at the cabinets over the stove.

  “It won’t take me long at all,” Meg told him. “Art, why don’t the two of you chat while I make the coffee?”

  “Uh, sure, I guess.” Art turned back to Douglas. “So, tell me, Douglas, how long have you and Monica been married?”

  Meg turned her back on them and tried to decide where to start. Coffee: she’d promised coffee. If she could find something to boil water in, and the coffee—instant?—it would be one small step forward. She started opening cupboards until she found a jar of coffee, then rinsed out the cleanest pot she could see, filled it with water, and set in on a stove burner, flinching at the film of grease. She turned the burner on and went back to the larger issue of the dirty dishes.

  She had to remove stacked dirty dishes from the sink to find dish soap and fill the sink with water. Then she started shifting the piles of dishes and pots. As she worked, she thought, Monica was home—here!—yesterday morning. She’d been hospitalized yesterday evening, and had died early this morning. That was a pretty tight timeline. But looking at the rotting remains in the kitchen, Meg wondered if she might have contracted whatever it was well before the fair—there had to be enough bacteria in the kitchen to fell an ox. Were there rubber gloves anywhere in the kitchen? she wondered. She was reluctant to immerse her hands in the scummy water and greasy pans, but in the end she had no choice.

  Meg tried to keep the noise down so she could listen to Art talk quietly with Douglas. She had to admit that Art was handling the poor man with sensitivity. Not that she’d doubted Art had it in him, but this hardly seemed his “policeman” side. Douglas seemed to be replying courteously and coherently, with the glaring exception that he didn’t acknowledge that his wife was dead. Had Monica told anybody of his problems? Meg seemed to remember Monica saying that she had told the town assemblymen that her husband had retired before the move to Granford. Monica had been so eager to make friends in her new town, to fit in. How long could she have kept Douglas’s problems a secret? And wouldn’t she want or need the community’s help in taking care of him?

  Why was she dead? Meg had finished washing the plates and cups, and started in on the greasy pots and pans. The state of the kitchen raised a new possibility—that she’d died because of some nasty bacterium in her own kitchen. But Monica had always appeared neat and well dressed when Meg had seen her. How could she have let her home reach this state? And if this bacterium had struck her down so quickly, why wasn’t Douglas showing any effects? He looked to be a solidly built man, with no outward appearance of poor health, apart from the normal signs of age. Meg felt vaguely ashamed of her earlier thought, that maybe husband Douglas had poisoned his wife to get rid of her and her endless chatter. Unless Douglas was an amazing actor, that seemed highly unlikely.

  Another ten minutes and the dishes were done. Meg wiped down the countertops, then the sink. The water had boiled, so she spooned coffee crystals into clean mugs, and returned with them to join the two men. “All done,” Meg said brightly, in a tone that sounded false even to her. Douglas didn’t seem to notice. “Douglas, do you and Monica have any children?”

  Art quirked an eyebrow at her but didn’t comment. Douglas answered with what seemed like an oft-repeated line. “No, we weren’t blessed with children, although we would have loved to have some. It wasn’t meant to be, it seems.” He paused, looking around in confusion. “Where is my wife? Have you seen her?”

  Meg looked at Art. “What now?” she mouthed.

  Art shrugged. “Douglas, do you know if your wife had seen a doctor lately around here?”

  “No, she hasn’t gotten around to that yet. She keeps saying she means to do it, but she’s been so busy. She really likes it here, you know.”

  “Does she take any medicines?” Art pressed.

  “Yes, a few, and some vitamins. We aren’t as young as we used to be. I take some, too. We muddle along together, just like we always have.”

  “You said you did most of the cooking?” Meg asked.

  “Well, it’s more like we share it, kind of. We have our own favorite dishes that we like to make. She’s a good cook—she says that natural food is the best thing to put in your natural body.”

  “It must be working—she certainly has a lot of energy,” Meg said.

  “She does indeed! I’m a lucky man.” Douglas sat back and smiled cheerfully at them.

  Meg hated to burst his happy bubble, but it was unavoidable. “Art, we have to do this.”

  Art sighed. “I know. I hate this part of the job.” He turned to face Douglas. “Do you remember going to the hospital last night?”

  Douglas looked bewildered. “I’m not sick. Why would I go to the hospital?”

  “It was your wife, Monica, who had to go. She got very sick to her stomach last night.”

  “I . . .” Douglas began, then he looked down at his mug. “Oh. I remember. I went with her—I don’t drive anymore—Monica does all the driving now—but she wasn’t well, so she called for an ambulance and they let me stay in it with her.”

  Meg tried to convey a silent message: Take it slow, Art.

  “Do you remember what happened when you got there, Douglas?” Art prompted gently.

  “They took her away on a—what do you call it? That bed thing on wheels—it’s got a funny name. They wouldn’t let me stay with her while the doctors were looking at her.”

  “What then?”

  “After a while somebody came out and said that Monica would have to stay overnight at the hospital. Somebody arranged to bring me home here. Oh, and they asked me to look for some insurance papers. Monica usually handles all that.”

  “Did anyone come to talk to you this morning?”

  “You mean, here? Uh, maybe. But it could have been yesterday. When will Monica be home?”

  Meg’s heart ached for the poor man, but he needed to know—if he could process the information. “Douglas, Monica won’t be coming home. She died at the hospital.”

  Douglas shut his eyes, and for a moment his expression seemed to show that he understood what Meg had just told him. But when he opened them his expression shifted to childlike confusion.
“But she has to make my lunch.”

  Meg looked quickly at Art. “What do we do now?”

  “It’s pretty clear we can’t leave him alone here, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone nearby to look after him, and no kids to call. I’m going to have to call in a service of some kind—I’ll have to check with my office and see who we’re using these days.”

  “We’ll need to stay here until you get that sorted out.”

  “That’s my responsibility, Meg—you’ve done enough.”

  Would it be wrong of her to admit she was relieved that Art felt that way? “I can stay for a while. And I can call Seth to come pick me up here.”

  “Okay. You stay with Doug while I make a couple of calls.” Art fished out his cell phone and walked back toward the front of the house to call.

  “How did you and Monica meet?” Meg asked Douglas.

  He smiled fondly. “We met all the way back in high school, in Ohio, and we were a couple right away. Oh, we went to different colleges—we figured we needed to see more of the world before settling down. But there was never any doubt that we’d end up together. She lit up a room just by walking into it.”

  “When did you get married?”

  “In 1984, I think it was. It was a nice small wedding. And since then we’ve lived all over the place. That was for my job, you see. Monica worked sometimes—she was a teacher, or maybe it was a classroom assistant in a school, for a while. But I made enough money to keep us, so she didn’t really need to.”

  “When was your last job?”

  Douglas looked blank. “I . . . uh, right before we moved here?”

  Meg wondered if his medical insurance had lapsed if he wasn’t working anymore. Meg hoped that efficient Monica had taken care of it somehow. “How did you choose Granford? Did you have family here?”

  “Monica picked it. We’d always wanted to live in New England, and she was looking for a place that was kind of in the country, and where we could make new friends. She loves to meet people.”

  Meg noted that Douglas had consistently used the present tense to talk about Monica. Maybe his deep denial was a good thing, for now. Maybe his subconscious brain knew that he needed time to process such a shattering event.

  Art reappeared and said tersely, “Someone’s coming over. You might want to get out of here while you can—my office is on half-staff today, but somebody took a message from the state police, and you can probably guess what that means.”

  “I’m afraid so. I’ll give Seth a call.”

  Like Art before her, Meg left the kitchen to make her call. Seth didn’t pick up, on either his cell or the landline, but she left a brief message, saying mainly “I need a ride home.” She’d just hung up when there was a heavy rapping at the front door. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do—after all, it wasn’t her house—and she was relieved when Art came out and opened the door.

  Damn. State Police Detective William Marcus, her not-favorite person, stood on the other side, looking very official, albeit surprised to see Meg at the house. “Preston,” he said curtly. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I was concerned about Mr. Whitman’s well-being, so I thought I’d come by and check on him.”

  “And Meg here had the same idea?” the detective said.

  “No, I asked her to accompany me here. I thought a woman’s presence might be a good idea.”

  Marcus made a “humph” sound that stayed barely on the side of polite. “The man is here?”

  “He is. But I think you need to know that he appears to be suffering from some form of dementia. He doesn’t seem to recall that his wife is dead. What’re you doing here?”

  Marcus stood up straighter than before. “Monica Whitman’s death has been declared a homicide. I’m here to interview Mr. Whitman, and to examine a potential crime scene.”

  “How’d you decide it was a homicide?” Art asked. “Have you identified the cause of death?”

  “I’ll tell you, as a professional courtesy, but I ask that neither of you spreads this information around. You understand?”

  Meg and Art nodded obediently.

  “We have reason to believe that the woman was poisoned, and we’ve narrowed down the substance to a particular type, although we don’t have a final answer.”

  “It looked a lot like food poisoning,” Art said. “What made you change your mind? And who called you in?”

  “The coroner. The initial symptoms were consistent with gastroenteritis or a virus, but the total collapse of the kidneys and liver in such a short period pointed to something else. Our forensic team is on their way over now.”

  Alarm bells went off in Meg’s head, but she knew she had to say something. “Uh, detective? When we arrived, the kitchen was a mess, full of rotting food. I washed the dishes and cleaned up a bit.”

  Marcus’s expression turned even colder, something Meg would not have thought possible. “You tampered with a crime scene?”

  “It wasn’t a crime scene then,” Art pointed out. “The place was unsanitary and potentially dangerous to Mr. Whitman. Look, you’d better talk to Douglas yourself. He has a kind of shaky grasp on reality right now, and he seems to be waiting for his wife to come home and fix his lunch. I can’t see him killing anyone, much less the woman who manages his life for him.”

  “That’s for me to decide. You two might as well go home. If I have any questions, in particular about what you cleaned up, I’ll be in touch. Did you remove any garbage from the house?”

  “No, it’s still in the kitchen,” Meg said.

  “Oh, one more thing: do either of you have a prior relationship with either of the Whitmans?”

  “No,” Meg spoke first. “Today was the first time I met him. I spoke with Monica a few times, and saw her yesterday at the fair. That’s all.”

  “Same here,” Art added.

  “Then you may go.”

  Art said quickly, “One more thing—someone from social services will be arriving shortly to assess Doug’s condition and make arrangements for him for tonight, at least. He shouldn’t stay here alone.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that. Thank you for your efforts on his behalf.” Marcus turned his back on them and strode toward the kitchen: they were dismissed.

  12

  When Meg and Art walked out the front door of the Whitman house, they found Seth waiting in the driveway.

  “I saw Marcus’s car and I was trying to make up my mind whether to stay out here or come in and rescue you. You okay, Meg?”

  “I’ll survive. I’ll tell you in the car. Art, are you leaving?”

  “I think I’ll hang around until social services arrives—I’m worried about Douglas, and our favorite detective is somewhat lacking in sensitivity.”

  “Carefully put,” Meg told him. “Okay, let me know if you need anything else from me, or if I should flee the country.”

  “Will do. Thanks for your help, Meg.”

  “I’m glad I could help, and I hope you can get Douglas sorted out—and keep him out of jail.”

  “My thoughts exactly. Bye, lovebirds.”

  Meg climbed into Seth’s car and buckled herself in. Seth slid into his seat and did the same, then turned on the engine. “Home?” he asked.

  “Please.”

  “I gather there’s a story? I didn’t expect to see Marcus.”

  “Of course there’s a story. Marcus was there because based on the physical evidence the coroner observed, Monica’s death has been declared a homicide. Talking to the husband is the obvious first step, but I don’t think Marcus was ready for what he found.”

  “Which is?” Seth asked.

  “Let’s wait until we get home. It’s complicated, and I don’t have any idea what to do, or what the best outcome would be. And Marcus isn’t exactly happy with me.”

  The ride w
as short, and they were back in the kitchen in minutes. Meg went straight to the kettle and filled it for hot water: she wanted tea. Something comforting. Cookies might be good, too, but she couldn’t remember if they had any.

  Seth sat down and waited patiently while she went through the process of making the tea.

  “You want a cup?” she asked him.

  “Sure. I’ve already had enough coffee for the day.”

  Meg searched out two clean mugs, and filled a small pitcher with milk. She set everything on the kitchen table, then brought over the teapot, bundled in a cozy, and set it down. “There.” She sat.

  Seth was watching her with a slightly amused expression. “Are you ready to talk now?”

  “I guess. I’m sad and mad and confused. I hope talking about it will help.”

  “Go for it.”

  “Let me start at the back end: Marcus is ticked off at me because I messed up a crime scene. Although it wasn’t officially a crime scene when I messed it up.”

  “You’re going to have to explain that.”

  So Meg did, starting from her arrival at the Whitman house with Art, and the discovery that Douglas Whitman was not competent to care for himself, at least at the moment, through her need to clean up the kitchen so Douglas wouldn’t inadvertently make himself sick with spoiled food. It had never occurred to her that she might be destroying evidence. Her main concern had been to protect poor Doug. Marcus was right: the crime scene was irreversibly changed. But he should be able to understand why she had done it, with only good intentions.

  “And Art called social services or something, because no way should Douglas be left by himself. I don’t know how Marcus is going to react to that.”

  “He may not be the world’s warmest person, but if what you say about Douglas is true, he should see it pretty quickly.”

  “I hope so. The idea of Marcus dragging Douglas off to Northampton and browbeating him about who could have killed his wife makes me feel sick. Of course being taken somewhere unfamiliar by someone he doesn’t know isn’t much better.”