Holly leaned forward, her still-impressive bosom all but heaving out of her dress. Vincent’s eyes lifted toward the ceiling.
“And your best bet is looking at aging film stars?” Holly asked. “I have arthritis. Lenora probably did too. Even if we wanted to try and push each other over the staircase, or however she died, it would take agility and coordination that we don’t have.”
Jill kept her face impassive, but damned if she didn’t agree just a little bit with Holly’s assessment. This whole case was starting to feel like a farce.
A geriatric version of Clue.
“Who do you think did it then?” Jill asked.
Holly sat back with a wave of her hand. “The help? Maybe the driver felt underpaid, or the housekeeper got sick of having to pick up Lenora’s dentures from the coffee table. Someone young and angry, not someone old and tired.”
“I don’t think you’re quite so indifferent to old grudges as you’d have us believe,” Vincent said.
Holly’s hand froze in the process of sliding up his thigh. “Oh?”
Vin flicked his gaze to Jill, who picked up on the cue and reached into her bag. Pulled out a Ziploc bag.
She held it out to Holly, who hesitated briefly. “What’s this?”
“A letter you sent to Caroline Jones four months ago. One in which you said if any of the old crew deserved an early death, it was Lenora.”
Holly touched the bag only for a moment before letting it flutter to the table. The corner dipped into the tea and Vincent plucked it back out again, wiping the moisture away before holding it up to the older woman’s face.
“This is your handwriting, yes? Your signature?”
“That bitch,” Holly breathed.
“Careful now,” Vin said easily. “If Caroline Jones ends up dead, you’re going to wish you hadn’t said that in front of two homicide detectives.”
She gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “All I’m trying to say is maybe you should look a little harder at the woman who gave you that letter.”
“She’s not the one that wished an early death on Lenora Birch.”
“How do you know?” Holly shot back. “Do you have her side of the correspondence?”
Vin and Jill exchanged a glance. She had a good point.
“Do you have it?” Holly pressed. “Well, of course not,” she huffed. “Her letters are rambling and boring. I throw them out after I skim them. But I can assure you there’s plenty of ranting about Lenora on her end as well.”
Jill subtly blew out a breath without showing Holly how frustrated she was. Not that she’d put a lot of stock in the letter. Caroline Jones had called their office about a half dozen times with “crucial information to the case,” and had been just a tad too eager to send over Holly’s letter.
It smelled more of aging, petty rivalry than it did useful evidence, but in a case that seemed to be nothing but aging, petty rivalries, they couldn’t afford not to act on it.
Holly slapped her palms slightly against her thighs. “Oh, I almost forgot… I have something for you.”
Holly brushed needlessly against Vincent as she stood, and he shot Jill another exasperated look. She grinned widely at him as Holly went to a small writing desk in the corner.
Vin was just starting to stand—no doubt to move to safety—when Holly returned waving an envelope. “Here we go!”
Jill watched Vincent’s face as he accepted the already-open envelope, his eyes scanning the return address with a slight frown before pulling out the paper inside.
His jaw tensed as he read it, and when he lifted his eyes to Jill, she knew then… knew that whatever was in that letter meant that any hope they had of Holly Adams breaking down and admitting guilt had just gone out the window.
He handed it across the coffee table to Jill.
“You didn’t think to mention this last time?” he asked Holly.
Holly sat down beside him once more, crossing her legs and blinking innocently up at him. “Well, you’ll pardon me if I’m unaccustomed to being questioned in a murder investigation. I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly.”
Jill scanned the contents of the letter, taking in the seemingly official logo, the cookie-cutter phrasing of the letter that indicated it was a form letter, which in this case, made it all the more believable.
The pages that followed sealed the deal.
Jill looked up. “You called the cable company the night Lenora Birch was murdered.”
“The Wi-Fi wasn’t working,” Holly said, almost proudly. She pronounced “Wi-Fi” just a bit too precisely, the way someone unfamiliar with the technology would be.
Vincent pinched the bridge of his nose. “And all calls are recorded.”
“Yup,” Holly said, sounding quite pleased with herself. “I wrote them a letter asking if they could provide a transcript of the conversation, and that’s what you see there.”