A Life for a Life by Lynda McDaniel (win 10 ebook reader .txt) 📕

We were all sitting round the woodstove inside the store—me and Cleva, Alex and Della. I was just taking a break from some stocking, and Alex was drinking coffee, explaining how he’d found out all that stuff on Kitt. 

“That evening at the Inn at Jonas Mountain, she said something that gave her away. She told me, and I don’t think she realized her slip, that something I’d said reminded her of all the old people she worked with in Atlanta. That’s when everything just clicked for me. I knew she’d done it, but we had to prove it. I started my search with Kitt Scanlon. Nothing except for a North Dakota business license dated last year,” Alex told us, rocking in his chair as though he were born to it. “So then I decided to play with the idea that she might be related to Blanche Scoggins, after you’d discovered their connection, Abit. Nothing for Kitt Scoggins, but hey, Kitt’s usually a nickname.”

“Like Kit Carson was really Christopher Houston Carson,” Della said. A frown from Alex had her adding real quick-like, “Sorry, Sherlock, proceed.”

“So I tried Kathleen Scoggins, and I found some folks in Montana and Tennessee who didn’t match our Kitt. But then Katherine Scoggins, and bingo! The proud bouncing baby of Blanche and Dick Scoggins in Asheville, N.C., December 29, 1956.”

“I guess that’s why I saw them hugging,” I said.

“Yeah, but it gets even more interesting,” Alex said. “When I searched further on Katherine Scoggins, I found a reference to a Katherine Scott in Atlanta, Georgia—which is where Kitt Scanlon told me that night at the inn that she’d moved from, not Raleigh. Not sure why that came up in my search, but that’s LexisNexis for you. Sometimes I think it has artificial intelligence. Anyway, she was featured in an article about working with the homeless. Doing good works to help them manage their meager finances, mostly through Social Security. The woman in the picture was a dead ringer for Scanlon/Scoggins/Scott—and she was posing with a woebegone man named Roberto Sanchez.”

“That’s Lucy’s last name. Were they related?” I asked.

“Lucy’s father. Who, as we now know, Kitt Scoggins/Scanlon/Scott stole from and abused, overtly and covertly, causing his death. I doubt they can pin his murder on her, but there are enough other charges to keep her locked away for years.”

He went on to explain that she’d set up what Lucy’s sister had called oatmeal factories, houses offering down-and-out folks a bed and hot meal—mostly oatmeal. Ugh! I get the shivers just thinking about that.

According to Alex, Kitt was stealing from old folks while living in Atlanta, and later from up here. She used the gallery and her mama’s laundry to run the money through. She kept taking trips back to Atlanta, so she could connect with what she called “her artists,” but Alex said she was connecting with the two con artists—guys running her operation down there. They’d been arrested in Georgia.

Nobody knows exactly how she got Lucy out in the woods. Kitt wasn’t talking. She may have just switched the poisoned syringe in her case—or she might have taken a walk with her, pretending to want to talk things out but really getting her far away from help. And the detectives found enough evidence in the back of her art store to nail her, including a wax kit for making key impressions.

That was when Della said something about how Kitt was using a belt and suspenders. I finally figured out she meant that Kitt faked the suicide note and, just in case that didn’t work, framed the guy Della called Tattoo Man. When Della’s investigation heated up and Tattoo Man didn’t take the fall, Kitt faked a romance with Gregg to help her set him up. While they were dating, she made a wax copy of his office key so she could get inside his office and plant those traced notes. Whew! That was some conniving. And we figured she’d learned her forging skills while faking signatures on all them government checks. She was really good at being bad.

“Thing is,” Alex said, “she says she hated paying taxes to the government, but that’s exactly how she got so much money out of those poor sods—thanks to their government checks. And even though I can’t prove it, I believe her association with the Green Treatise was a lot more involved than that peace-making crap she told you, Della.”

“Wonder what they think of all this?” Della asked. “I bet they’ve disowned her. Or maybe they admire her ripping off the gov’ment. And poor ol’ Gregg. She just used him to deflect suspicion from her and frame him—a gov’ment man.” She said it like them. I wanted to laugh, but it weren’t the time or place.

Earlier, we’d all seen Brower walking round with a black eye. He’d had to get stitches where those pickles of Cleva’s hit him. I swear Cleva was getting a kick out of that, nice as she was. Then I asked what happened to that tattletale Cassie.

“She’s at work—with Gregg,” Della said, while Alex poured each of us a fresh cup of coffee. Della looked up at him and added, “I told you he was a nice guy—he didn’t even fire her. I wished I’d thought to ask her who she called when the computer wouldn’t reboot. Turns out it was none other than Kitt. She’d told Cassie she was a computer whizz and to call her if she ever had any trouble. While Gregg was out of town, Kitt threw the circuit breaker at Gregg’s office and went home to wait for the call. Damn, that woman is a setup artist. It just didn’t pay off the way she wanted.”

“So will Blanche Scoggins go to the slammer, too?” Cleva asked, opening some of her now-famous pickles. No one else seemed to want any. I’d eat just about anything, but even I didn’t think pickles and coffee were a good combination. Cleva munched away, kinda nervous-like as she listened to all these bad things Kitt did.

“We’re not sure,” Della said. “She really didn’t know what Kitt was up to, though she freely confessed to helping her hide her