“I hear you,” Doreen agreed, “and that is a valid point.”
“Of course it is,” she confirmed.
At that, Richie’s voice came through the phone again. “Aha, Cassandra Mason,” he said in a triumphant voice. “Now, now you go do your thing, Doreen.” He added, “And track down that nasty little nephew who stole everything.” And, with that, he hung up the phone.
Chapter 7
Wednesday Morning
Doreen woke up and rolled over and stared across the end of her bed out the window at the gray weather. “Kelowna never has gray weather,” she muttered.
But obviously, nearing fall—if one could count August as fall, which of course it wasn’t; it wasn’t even close—definitely some weather changes were happening. And that was okay. Doreen was totally okay to not have the crazy-hot weather that they’d had for some days. A few cool days would be nice.
She got up, had a hot shower, headed downstairs, feeding all the animals, and then putting on her coffee. She wondered if she would get to drink the whole pot herself while it was still fresh or if something would disrupt it.
As she settled at the kitchen table with her first cup of joe, her gaze landed on the notepad from last night. She pulled it closer and studied the last couple notes she had written down. She’d done a search on the two people related to Chrissy, using the names she had been given: Cassandra Mason and Peter Riley. Not a whole lot had come up. Doreen wasn’t exactly sure how to do much in terms of who had inherited from Chrissy’s will. What she needed was somebody close to the family, who might have known something.
Doreen did get the idea that Cassandra and Peter were both still in town—or at least nearby. With that thought, she quickly checked to see if either of their names were mentioned in the phone book. Nope. A quick search of the internet gave Doreen a single hit. She got a mention of a Cassandra at the Rutland pub, but it didn’t tell Doreen much. She wandered outside onto her deck, with her cup of coffee and her animals, and then down to the bench by the river. Surely there would be a little bit more information available somewhere.
Hearing her weird neighbor’s voice close by, she called out, “Richard.”
She got a harrumph for an answer.
“Do you happen to know anything about Chrissy from the Rosemoor home? She passed away a few months back, said she was being poisoned.”
Doreen heard a bang, as something was put against the fence that separated their properties, and then Richard’s head popped up over the top.
“I know Peter Riley,” he replied, “if that’s who you’re asking about.”
She stared at him. “Okay. I understand he inherited everything from his aunt.”
At that, Richard nodded. “He’s a good guy.” Richard paused. “Whereas his cousin, that Cassandra woman,” he added, “wow. She’s one of those women.”
Doreen stared at him. “What does one of those women mean?” she asked.
“You know? She works at that bar there in Rutland.” Still not understanding what he was saying, Doreen frowned. “Like you know, like a girly bar. A sports bar.” Doreen shook her head. He added, “Where they let things hang out.”
“A stripper bar?”
“Yeah, exactly that,” he confirmed, with a headshake. “She was always a little bit on the loose side of life.”
“Interesting,” Doreen murmured. “She apparently didn’t inherit any of Chrissy’s estate.”
“What estate?” he asked, raising both hands. “That woman was broke.”
“So you did know her.”
“We went to school together,” he noted. “She was a few years older, but they were from, you know, the wrong side of the tracks, and they were always broke. She married a handyman, and they stayed broke. The only good one in that family is Peter.”
“Well, lack of money doesn’t make someone bad though,” she noted in a dry tone.
“No, not at all, but Chrissy was always a little bit, you know, kind of off in her head. All her life she was always saying that people were doing things to her.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged. “In school she used to say things, like her daddy was touching her all the time.”
At that, Doreen’s mouth opened.
“Yeah, exactly,” he agreed. “And yet apparently, no abuse was to be found. She used to make up stories about Cassandra being a bad little girl too. We never quite understood, but it was that family you avoided.”
“That’s so sad,” Doreen replied quietly. “Maybe Chrissy needed some mental health assistance.”
“Oh, she needed that plus,” he stated, with an eye roll. “Just before she died, she was telling everybody that she was being poisoned.”
“Exactly,” Doreen cried out. “Do we have any idea if she was?”
He stared at her. “Did you hear what I just said? She made up stories all the time.”
“So, in other words, she was the kind of person who cried wolf?”
“Right. And, even if she was being poisoned at that point,” he added, “no way anybody would have listened to her.”
“And that’s sad too,” she replied quietly.
He shrugged. “But why poison her? No real reason to. She didn’t have any money. It was all she could do to pay her Rosemoor bill. From what I heard, her government assistance money and her husband’s disability pension went to pay for everything. Or at least, that’s what Peter had said. And he had to top it up quite a bit too. So, I mean, if anything were to come his way at the end of the day, well, he was due,” Richard stated. And he waved at her and added, “Go find some other family to torment.”
“Torment?” she asked.
He shot her a gimlet look. “Yeah, torment,” he repeated, with an eye roll. “Haven’t you bothered the rest of us enough?”
“No, I haven’t done anything to you.”
He just snorted and hopped down from whatever he was standing on.
She settled back with her cup of coffee and pondered such a small town where they all went to school together and knew each other and kept tabs on everybody’s goings-on around them while they grew up and went their separate ways.
She called out over the fence. “I wonder what Chrissy would have said about you?” At that, Doreen heard a harsh bang against the fence, and she snickered. “I guess not something you want to necessarily have me hear about, huh?”
Soon the back door of his house slammed shut.
Her presence alone had chased him inside. Still, her heart went out to Chrissy, who obviously could have used some support, maybe some professional counseling over the years. It wasn’t an easy thing to always be mocked or laughed at or belittled. And Doreen understood.
Chances were very good that maybe Chrissy had had much less than an ideal life, and, as a result, maybe she’d made up stories in order to get attention? But would she have continued to do that at the end of her life? And then Doreen thought about it and realized that the end of life was often very similar to the beginning of life. Sometimes you were surrounded by people who you loved, and sometimes you weren’t. Sometimes you had the advantage of good people to look after you, and sometimes it was more of a caregiver situation, which is how Chrissy ended up later in her life. And maybe in all of it, she was once again starved for attention and was making up stories.