Chapter Seventeen

“Cilla is safely tucked away in the secure psychiatric ward awaiting full assessment,” Brian said, as he resumed his seat in the conservatory where the group had gathered two days after Cilla’s arrest.
    After extensive questioning, Honey’s former friend had unravelled somewhat, causing her lawyer to request an evaluation.
“You don’t think she’ll get off on an insanity plea, do you?’ Honey asked, her hazel eyes revealing both concern and anger.
Brian shook his head. “I doubt it. I wouldn’t say that the woman is entirely sane, but my guess is she knew what she doing, knows that difference between right and wrong, and that a plea like that won’t hold water.”
“Good,” Honey said. “What she did was evil.”
“Yes, it was,” Diana added. “I hope she goes away for a million years.”
“Unlikely, but she has had plenty to say, and I think she’ll be looking at a long, long time.” Dan grinned.
“Thanks to our illustrious chief,” Brian said serenely.
“Hey, what?” Trixie demanded.
“He’s organizing another press conference,” her brother explained. “To announce not just the confession of a killer, but the solving of a high-profile case and reassuring the public that with him in charge the community is in safe hands.”
“Kill me now!” Trixie said disgustedly.
“And start all this rigmarole again?” Eloise snorted. “No thanks.”
“Do any of us need to get back to the station?” Dan asked.
 “Not until after we’ve eaten,” Trixie begged. “There’s only so much a woman can stand.”
    “Good idea,” Mart said brightly. “Didn’t Honey say something about lunch?”
Trixie snorted. “Straight to the important stuff, that’s my brother.”
“Actually,” Jim said from beside her on the cane love seat, “I’m kind of hungry myself.”
“Well, we can’t have that, can we?” Honey got to her feet. “I’ll go grab the food. I figured platters to share would be the easiest.”
“I’ll help,” Di offered, rising to join her friend.
“Me, too.” Brian took Honey’s hand in his and the three left the conservatory. 


Although they had spoken to one another in the aftermath of Cilla’s arrest, it was the first time they had all been able to get time together to really go over everything that had happened. Dan and Eloise were on call, but they were hoping for a quiet afternoon on Bluff Point.
“Are you sure about selling this place?” Mart asked, as he piled a variety of edibles onto his plate. Honey’s announcement regarding her plans to move had taken several of her guests by surprise. Mart hesitated, waving the chicken leg in his hand, before adding, “It’s not exactly chopped liver.”
“Just as well,” Trixie said. “You’d try and eat it if it were.”
Mart made a face, but the others laughed.
“I am sure, Mart,” Honey smiled at him and then at Brian who sat by her side. “I’ve never liked it, really. I tried to hide away in it, but you’re right, it’s a beautiful house for someone, just not us, I mean me.” She blushed and Jim shot her an affectionate look.
“I kind of like the sound of us,” he said. He could see the way Brian Belden was with Honey and was fairly sure his almost sister had made a good choice this time.
“You’re not going to live in Brian’s apartment, are you?” Trixie asked with customary bluntness. “It’s okay and everything, but kind of on the small side.”
“Translated, that means, ‘Where would we all sit or hang out when we come round for free meals’,” Dan offered helpfully.
“What is it with you cops and free food?” Eloise demanded. “Your salaries aren’t that lousy.”
“May I remind you that you are practically a cop, too?” Dan raised his dark brows.
“No, you may not.” Eloise replied, but she flashed him a smile and Trixie and Brian exchanged grins of their own. 
“I think moving is a brilliant idea,” Diana said, nestling a little closer to Mart and reaching across the end table to squeeze Honey’s hand.
“Well, you’ll make a killing on this,” Mart observed, glancing around him.
Honey shook her head. “My parents bought us this house as a wedding gift, and it was sort of under false pretences. The money will go into Don’t Look Away.”
“That’s a great idea,” Trixie enthused.
“It’s like it’s meant to be.” Diana picked up the brochure Honey had showed her before the others had arrived. “The very house you fell in love with, for sale again.”
“And Brian loves it too,” Honey said with a smile.
“It’s a great house.” Brian had seen the way her face had lit up as they’d walked around the cottage earlier that day. He was pretty sure he could visit or even live in a tent if it made her look like that. “And it will make a great home.”
“If Di helps me out with the decorating,” Honey reached for her friend’s hand.
Diana squeezed back and nodded. “You don’t need my help or my advice—you have great taste—but I love playing in other people’s houses as you well know.”
“I am very fortunate to have you for a best friend.” Honey beamed.
“Well she sure is a whole lot nicer than your other best friend,” Eloise observed wryly.
“Excuse me!” Honey exclaimed. “There was never any competition. Cilla was a friend, I suppose, but more out of habit and proximity than anything else. I didn’t connect with her the way I do with Di or confide in her the way I have with Trixie.” She shot the other woman an affectionate look. “I think in a way I always kept my guard up around Cilla, was wary about letting her in. That sounds mean.”
“Sounds smart to me. She was a nut job,” Mart said. “Of course, no one could compare with my fair Diana in any arena, so you won’t get an argument from me there.”
“Even your husband saw through her in the end,” Dan said to Honey.
“And it cost him his life,” Honey replied sadly.
“I really think that was down to him falling in love, really in love with someone else,” Trixie mused. “From what she’s said, he tried to hide it, tried to let her down easy, but she was smart—crazy and evil— but smart.”
“I never liked her,” Diana said.
“You didn’t?” Honey looked at her best friend in surprise.
 “No.”
“You were always so nice to her.”
“Because you liked her, and I love you. Of course I was nice to her.”
Honey laughed at this and all eyes fell on her.
“I thought you liked her. That’s why I went out of my way to include her in things.”
“Women,” Mart said, shaking his head.
“Always letting their emotions take control,” Dan added.
“Don’t you two have anything to contribute?” Trixie demanded, looking from Brian to Jim.
The two exchanged glances and shook their heads.
“We’re a little older and wiser than our friends here,” Jim said sagely.
“Plus, we’d like our body parts to remain in their current locations,” Brian batted his long dark lashes.


“He is the smartest Belden,” Eloise said.  She saw the smug look on Dan’s face and continued, “Smartest man in the room, actually.” 
“Oh, don’t,” Trixie begged. “He’s always been the golden boy. And now…”
“And now, he’s back in the good books at work,” Mart finished.
“Back at work,” Brian corrected. “Good books is stretching it a bit.”
“Still, as of now I am the only unemployed Belden. A life of leisure is not agreeing with me as I imagined it would.” Mart sighed.
“Listen to him, he makes it sound as if he’d been twiddling his thumbs for months instead of days.” Trixie snorted.
“He comes from hard-working stock,” Diana said with a smile for her man.
“I can’t help it,” Mart admitted. “Nature and nurture are both working against me. I want a job.”
“I’m so glad to hear it,” Honey said, flashing him a smile.  “Because my father has a job for you if you want it.”
“Really?” Mart’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t want a hand out, you know. I’d rather mow lawns than take a pity offer.”
“Hey, there is no such thing as a non-real job with Wheeler International,” Jim chided. “If you take it, you’ll earn your salary.”
“What is it, Honey?” Mart asked eagerly.
“He needs a sub-editor for a new paper he recently purchased for our media arm.”
“In New York?” Mart asked. Another job at a paper would be great, a sub-editor position even greater, but not if it meant leaving the state, or Diana.
 “Actually, it is in New York state. It’s a smaller paper,” Honey explained, her wide eyes blinking. “But it has a decent circulation.”
 Diana turned to stare at her friend. “You didn’t?”
“Who? Me?” Honey returned with a grin. “What possible influence could I have over WMI?”
“I’m lost,” Mart admitted.
“I’m not.” Trixie sported a grin too. “I knew I liked your dad, Honey.”
“And the job is local, Mart. My life would not be worth living if something I did made you leave town.”
“That is so true,” Diana said, squeezing her friend’s arm affectionately.
Mart looked from one woman to the other, understand slowly dawning. “Oh, look, Honey, I really appreciate the idea of your dad getting my job back, but he didn’t have to do it. I’m not at all sure the Sentinel’s journalistic style is my kind of thing.”
“And my father agrees with you, so he hopes that you, along with Vivian Clark, the new editor-in-chief, will do something to change that.”
“Your dad’s hired Vivian Clark? She is awesome,” Mart’s blue eyes danced. “Innovative, experienced, hard-hitting when she has to be, but never exploitive. Honey, this would be a dream come true.”
“You’ll have to work your butt off, and you do need to have a sit down with Vivian, but I’m sure you’ll ace it.”
“Wow, this is just fantastic.” Mart beamed. “What a great week.”
Several pairs of eyes fixed on him, and he fixed his own on Honey. “Sorry, that came out wrong.”
“I knew what you meant, Mart,” Honey returned with a grin.


“So, as I’m a woman who likes to dot her ‘i’s and cross her ‘t’s help me out here,” Eloise said, spreading pate on rye bread.  “Cilla, the whack job, is our murderer. That much is clear.  And using Honey’s medication and dropping those oh-so-helpful hints about Honey’s mental state was obviously meant to steer the investigation in her direction. Honey’s, I mean. But she, Cilla, must have known that we would talk to other people about her, I mean Honey’s, mental state. But didn’t she, Cilla, that is, realise we’d need much more than that to lay charges? I mean she, Cilla, is a lawyer for cripes sake.”
“Can you quit qualifying your pronouns? You’re doing my head in,” Dan begged. 
“Cilla was probably smart enough to know not to make the evidence link too closely to Honey,” Trixie said. “Cilla couldn’t be sure exactly what Honey had been doing and when. Cilla needed to be careful.”
“See,” Dan said. “All you have you do is use just the names. It’s not that hard.”
“I have a name or two for you if you’d like to hear them,” Eloise observed sweetly.
“Shut up! Both of you,” Brian begged. “Just for three, maybe four minutes. Not a lifetime. The universe doesn’t like me that much.”
“The problem was I didn’t do as I was told.” Honey shook her dark gold head. “Cilla had been reminding me not to overdo it and I promised that night to have a relaxing evening—read a book, maybe take a bath—but absolutely no work. She even called me to check in. I am so dumb.”
There was a chorus of protests.
“And then you wound up writing emails and checking on the project,” Diana said, with a smile for her friend.
“Which in itself wasn’t definitive,” Trixie explained. “But there were multiple emails, back and forth, all time and date stamped. As well as several internet sites accessed. One of them was a mystery book site, so in that sense, you were relaxing, Honey.  Good choices, by the way. Anyway, there was sufficient activity to make Honey going downstairs and shooting her husband unlikely.”
“But Cilla didn’t know about that?” Mart asked.
Honey gave a half laugh. “Like I said, I’d promised her that I wouldn’t work during the evenings. In the days before Craig’s murder, she kept saying she was worried about me. Concerned that I was having a relapse, which, I might add, was due to her drugging me in the first place. Not the relapse, because I didn’t actually have one, but the first time when I was a little befuddled. Not, I repeat again, my fault, but—”
“Honey, I beg you!” Dan held up his hand. “Have a heart. Try and keep the narrative linear.”
“I’m not having any trouble following her,” Eloise said pointedly. “Then again, I’m not…” She caught Brian’s warning look and trailed off. “I’m not here to cause problems,” she added. “I’ll just have another glass of that delightful non-alcoholic champagne. Who knew it could taste so good?”
“I’ll have another beer,” Trixie said, with a slight wrinkle of her pert nose before she continued her own narrative. “Anyway, although, as I said, Honey’s timeline alibi wasn’t exactly airtight, it, coupled with the fact that she allowed us complete access to both her and the house, more than suggested she didn’t do it—especially when we didn’t find anything.”
“Plus, anyone with a brain would have figured that out, anyhow! It was obvious that someone wanted us to think it was Honey.” Brian declared.
“There speaks my brother, the logical scientist.” Trixie smiled at said brother.
“I don’t know if I’d go all the way to obvious,” Dan observed. “But there were some inconsistencies for sure.”
“I’m just lucky I had the best investigative team in the world assigned to the case,” Honey said.
Eloise barely contained a snort as Dan and Trixie exchanged satisfied glances.
“You’re one of that team,” Honey added, addressing the other woman directly.
“Right,” Eloise said. “I guess I am. Awesome team.”
“You did do the PM,” Brian reminded her.
“Just as well, considering what you got up to,” his colleague returned. “No offense,” she added, throwing Honey a look of apology.
“None taken,” Honey said. “He did behave rather unprofessionally, I’m glad to say.”
“Getting back to the actual case,” Trixie said briskly. “Due to many factors, including evidence, instinct and the unprofessional behaviour of my esteemed sibling, we were inclined to look elsewhere for our killer. Personally, I found Ford a little too devoted at the beginning, but his alibi was solid and put him out of the frame. Then, we turned our attention to Craig’s business interests, and when they collided with his private life, we thought….”
“Bingo!” Dan supplied.
“Unoriginal, yet accurate.” Eloise observed with a smile.
“We…ll,” Trixie drawled. “The truth is we weren’t exactly sure what we were looking at. Richter is a slime ball, but careful to keep his hands clean, and while there were connections between him and Craig, they weren’t convincing, until we worked out that Craig was involved with Kayla.”
“But you said it felt like a feminine crime,” Honey puzzled. “Surely that made it look more like me than Kayla?”
“Superficially, maybe,” Trixie allowed. “But for reasons both practical and instinctive, we didn’t see you as the killer. And don’t forget, Craig wasn’t around to confirm his feelings for anyone. That was all hearsay.”
“I’m just glad it was you who pointed the finger at a woman,” Dan observed. “Because if it had been me…”
“But what made you think that?” Jim asked.
Trixie shrugged. “The scene, the way he died…it felt personal, and after digging into his life, it seemed women were his weakness. And while we know he and Honey had agreed to a divorce, he’d kept that quiet, and it must have been for a reason. Add to that, that it seemed the killer was able to arrive quietly…I mean Honey didn’t hear a car, or the doorbell, so either Craig knew who was coming and let them in or they arrived on foot, leaving their car somewhere, and let themselves in, and both of things, in my mind, narrowed the suspect pool. Coming to the house makes no sense for a hit or some kind of professional gripe. I mean, most people would expect a house like this to have a full-on surveillance system, and—while there’s security codes and an alarm system—it doesn’t.”
“I hate feeling that I’m being watched, scrutinized all of the time.” Honey shuddered.
“I’m with you,” Trixie agreed. “But we were kind of surprised that there wasn’t more video monitoring here and that made me think that unless someone knew you or Craig personally—knew this house—that they wouldn’t risk killing him here.”
“That makes lots of sense,” Mart said, shooting his sister an admiring look.
“You don’t have to sound quite so surprised,” Trixie returned.
“Sure I do.” Mart grinned at her. “You’d be worried if I just sounded proud.”
“True,” she admitted.     


“Anyway,” Jim spoke up. “All of a sudden, Trixie was talking about it feeling personal and feminine, and Dan was saying that someone had gone out of their way to make Honey look guilty, and then Mart called saying that Diana had a bad feeling and….”
“And at the same time,” Mart put in, “I’d finally got that call from that PI and the name of the person who’d hired him.”
“So you all came to the same conclusion at the same time.” Eloise nodded her dark head. “Impressive.”
“Not really,” Dan said. “If it hadn’t been for Honey, Brian would probably be dead, and while I’m sure we’d have arrested her with everything we’d worked out…”
“I still would have been dead,” Brian supplied. “Not my favourite state.”
“But you’re so good at dead,” Eloise said sweetly and they all laughed.
“On that note,” Jim said, raising his glass, “let’s drink to a future free of dead people.”
“Some kind of fantasy, then?” Mart quipped. “Where we all live forever.”
“A future free of murdered dead people,” Jim amended.
Dan coughed. “We’ll, Trix and I are cops, and Brian and El work for the M.E.’s office, so…”
Jim glared at him as the others snickered. “Murdered dead people we know?”
“I’ll drink to that,” Honey said and they all raised their glasses.
 Brian sat back next to the woman who had turned his world upside down, and then he surveyed his friends. It was a fitting toast, a hopeful toast, but was it realistic? His gaze shifted from one person to the next and settled on his sister. There was a knowing gleam in her blue eyes and Brian couldn’t quite suppress a smile.  Was it realistic? Only time would tell.

TBBH:MAIN


Author's Notes: So, finally. I am so grateful for all of those who have stuck with me on this sooo slow process—sorry, my head has been all over the place. Never a good thing. Thanks as ever to my dear friend Dana who puts up with me and my tendency to forget what I should have already learned. I love her very much and she always improves whatever I put on the page. Vivian Clark is named for, well, our Vivian, who is super awesome. There is a pic on my home page of Honey's dream cottage. I know a lot of my readers worked out my killer early on, but hey, they are the smartest people around, so I am good with that. Jix is truly a very special place and I'm honoured to be a part of it. Trixie Belden et al belong to Random House and not to me or Jix (another universal injustice) no profit is being made for these scribblings.