Chapter Nineteen
Myrtle grabbed her pepper spray at the same moment the back door creaked open. She carefully peeked around the kitchen door and saw the intruder entering her bedroom—clearly someone who’d become familiar with her house from previous break-ins.
She thought about picking up the phone to dial Red…or Miles, but knew there wouldn’t be enough time. Those pillows in her bed wouldn’t fool Hugh Bass for very long.
There was a slashing sound coming from her bedroom and Myrtle’s breath caught in her throat. It sounded like stabbing.
There was a frustrated cry and Hugh Bass bolted from her bedroom…and saw Myrtle on the other side of the kitchen island. He held up his knife and charged at her. Myrtle waited, blood pounding in her head, until he came close. Then she lifted the bottle of pepper spray and directed a steady stream right at his face.
With a howl of pain, Dr. Bass dropped to his knees, digging at his eyes with his fingers. Myrtle quickly grabbed the knife and threw it across the room. She desperately looked around her—looking for something that she could use to knock the dentist unconscious before he charged her again.
Then she jerked open the freezer, pulling the fifteen pound, rock-hard ham to the very edge of the bottom freezer shelf with some difficulty. Then she dropped it right on Dr. Bass’s head.
It was a knockout punch.
Myrtle ended up calling Miles next. She still had so much adrenaline coursing through her that apparently whatever she said to him was quite garbled. He interpreted it as, “Call Red and come over,” which is exactly what he did.
It was good, for once, that Red lived so close to Myrtle. That’s because Dr. Bass started stirring after only a few minutes. She retrieved her cane from the living room and perched on a kitchen stool, ready to strike with the cane if he should stop being groggy and start attacking her again.
But once Red and Miles ran in, she decided that she’d take to her favorite chair in the living room. She appeared to have a case of the shakes. She poured herself a sherry—just to steady her nerves. As an afterthought, she brought the bottle with her into the living room.
The state police weren’t far behind. There were pictures taken in the kitchen and samples of things taken outside. They found a key to Myrtle’s door in Dr. Bass’s pocket, where he’d hastily stuck it before entering Myrtle’s bedroom. Myrtle told the police where they could find the knife he’d tried to kill her with. Then, of course, there was the fact that Dr. Bass was curiously dressed completely in black, even with a black cap and black gloves.
None of those things would have pointed to evidence that Dr. Bass had broken into Myrtle’s house. But fortunately, something had loosened Dr. Bass’s tongue. He might have been tired of his secrets and relieved to tell them—or it might have been that the frozen ham had made him temporarily lose his mind. At any rate, he was confessing to the police, who hastily informed him of his rights.
Miles was drinking sherry out of one of Myrtle’s bathroom cups, since the kitchen was occupied by police. “I guess we miscalculated when Dr. Bass would arrive. By the way, were you expecting him? I mean—had you already figured out that he’d killed Charles and Lee Woosley?”
“It was,” admitted Myrtle reluctantly, “a miscalculation. It’s lucky I was prepared for trouble the way I was. I was expecting Dr. Bass, yes. But I didn’t realize he was coming by boat. If I’d thought about it, then I’d have pushed back the time that you were to join me. Oh—and Dr. Bass didn’t kill Charles.”
Miles’s mouth gaped open and closed. It wasn’t an attractive look for Miles.
Myrtle wasn’t sure which part of her statement he was reacting to. “You see, Dr. Bass also lives on the lake. He wouldn’t want to risk being seen approaching my house from the street, then cutting through someone’s backyard. He did that one time and all Erma’s motion detector lights went off. By arriving in a small boat, he just quietly pulled up to my dock and came up through the woods, directly to my backyard.”
Miles had finally regained his speech. “Okay, I’ve got that. But…Dr. Bass didn’t kill Cousin Charles?”
“Oh no. Lee Woosley killed Charles. Then Dr. Bass killed Lee Woosley.”
“But why? I mean, I understand why Lee would murder Charles—he’d treated his daughter horribly in the past and was treating her just as poorly when he returned to town. I just can’t see why Dr. Bass would want to kill Lee, though,” said Miles.
“I’ll tell you what I think happened, Miles. Then Red will be able to confirm my deductions, since it sounds like Dr. Bass is confessing to everything he can think of in there. Peggy Neighbors had tried to get Charles back in a relationship with her. She told him about their daughter. He wanted nothing to do with Peggy or his daughter. His daughter is finishing up high school and Peggy probably needs the financial help to get her through college. That’s exactly the kind of problem that Charles wouldn’t have wanted. Peggy was upset and told her father what happened…I guess she must have phoned him. Lee decided to confront Charles,” said Myrtle.
Miles nodded. “That all makes sense. But where does Dr. Bass come in?”
“I’m getting there! So Lee has an argument with Charles out on the dock. Wanda saw it with her own eyes. In the course of the argument, he tells Charles that Peggy doesn’t need him anyway—he’s not good enough for Peggy. Peggy is, in fact, going to start dating the most eligible bachelor in town…Dr. Hugh Bass.”
Miles looked doubtful at this. “Peggy Neighbors and Dr. Bass? I don’t really see the two of them together. Peggy is very nice, but….”
“Exactly. So Charles’s reaction to this, when the two men are down at the dock having this discussion, is to laugh. He not only laughs at Peggy’s prospects with Dr. Bass, but he laughs at the fact that Lee thinks he’s so eligible. Charles would have sneered at that, telling Lee that Dr. Bass was actually a former convict and even had his dental license revoked.”
Miles nodded. “So the men, as you mentioned, are down at the dock. They’re arguing. How does Charles end up dead in your yard?”
“At some point, Charles walks away. His plan is to talk to you about some kind of scheme he wants you to invest in. He’s been drinking a lot remember. So he staggers off to your yard, although he ends up in mine. Lee follows him up, still furious at the entire situation and enraged by what Charles has told him. Charles is an expert at enraging people,” said Myrtle.
“And he bashes Charles over the head with your Viking gnome,” said Miles.
Myrtle said, “Breaking it with the force. It was the only heavy object available to him at the time. I think Peggy even saw her father there—she must have, since she was following Charles. I bet she’ll end up telling Red and the state police what she saw.”
Miles took a thoughtful sip of his sherry, draining the bathroom cup. “So, let’s see. This means that somehow Lee talked to Dr. Bass. Almost immediately. Did he try to blackmail the dentist, do you think? Squeeze some money out of him? I’m sure that, as a handyman, he couldn’t have been bringing in much income. He probably helped support Peggy and his granddaughter, too.”
Myrtle shook her head. “Well, I don’t know for sure. Red might, since Dr. Bass is spilling everything in there. But I can’t imagine Lee Woosley caring about money enough to blackmail. He was sort of a softie, I think. And old-fashioned. I think he was affronted that Dr. Bass was practicing dentistry in Bradley after what he’d done in West Virginia. I believe he approached Dr. Bass about it, the day before he was murdered. Maybe he even gave him an ultimatum—get out of town or I’m going to tell Red about this.”
Miles said slowly, “Then Lee returned to your house during the funeral to finish up the job he’d started for you before everyone came by for the reception.”
“And Dr. Bass followed him there. No one was around, after all—the whole town was at the funeral. It was the perfect time to get rid of Lee Woosley. Dusty had even conveniently left him a shovel outside to beat him over the head with. T
hen he really just had to stay out of the way and act as he normally did. Except he couldn’t resist coming back to see if he’d accidentally left some clue behind or if he’d been discovered. Elaine snapped a picture of him in the area.”
Miles said, “I can definitely see him doing all of that. But I don’t understand what he was doing throwing eggs at your house. And messing around with your things.”
“I think Dr. Bass was trying to shake me up and rattle me so much that I would stop nosing around in the case. Peggy even mentioned that he ran with a crowd in high school that liked playing pranks—rolling trees and egging houses and that kind of thing. As far as his breaking into my house, I think there were a couple of different things he was trying to do. He has to drive right past my house to get from his house to his office. He obviously must have noticed Puddin putting the key away at some point and took it…probably thinking that he might need to silence me for good at some point.”
“Makes sense. But you told me that someone had been inside your house during the daytime. And Dr. Bass works during the day.”
“He does. But you told me he’d taken a couple of days off and you’d had to go to your dentist in Simonton. One of those days was when my house was broken into. I’d guess he was also trying to figure out what progress I was making on the case—he knew I was investigating. He might have looked for notebooks where I wrote about the murders or for a journal. To top it all off, he put things in weird places while he was in here just to make me doubt myself,” said Myrtle.
“Good thing it didn’t work,” said Miles.
Myrtle didn’t answer. She didn’t want to admit that Dr. Bass had made her start wondering if she was losing her memory.
Miles gave a satisfied sigh. “This is actually a very satisfactory end to the case, Myrtle. Justice for everyone. Lee Woosley paid for Charles’s life with his own. Hugh Bass has been arrested and will pay for murdering Lee and for operating a dental office without a license. Everything is back to normal again.”
As Dr. Bass was driven away, Myrtle had to agree.
Actually, thought Myrtle the next morning, everything was better than normal. She put her feet up on an ottoman as Puddin demurely cleaned her house, putting some real elbow grease into the process for once.
Dusty was mowing the grass…again. Although it really didn’t need it. He’d even trimmed her bushes this morning.
Crazy Dan and Wanda had returned, and Crazy Dan was deftly replacing the locks on Myrtle’s doors. Wanda had already reminded her to turn her motion detector lights back on.
The icing on the cake had really come when Miles’s Aunt Connie insisted on giving Myrtle the reward for information on her son’s death. Myrtle had put up some modest attempts at turning down the check, but had rapidly been convinced she needed to take it. She used some of the money to buy a new camera for Elaine.
Myrtle’s front-page story for the Bradley Bugle, covering the attempted attack on her life and the arrest of the killer was a spectacular success and a top-selling issue for the newspaper. It even got picked up on the AP wire. Elaine’s picture of Dr. Bass talking with Lee Woosley accompanied the story and gave it the finishing touch it needed.
Red was talking to a contractor about putting a privacy fence in her backyard. He decided he needed to prevent her yard from becoming a popular crime spot in the future. The privacy fence meant that Erma would no longer be gaping at her when Myrtle was trying to have a quiet moment outside.
Best of all might have been the moment, a few minutes ago; when Miles knocked on her door…bearing a smile, his tape of the latest Tomorrow’s Promise, and a brand-new Viking gnome.
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