Murder in the Marigolds by Dale Mayer (best young adult book series .txt) 📕

that we couldn’t put it out. Now I’m running for my life, and I’m sure he is hunting for me—and maybe for good reason.

Part of being in the dark criminal shadows is that I can look for information I can sell. Then I sell it to somebody else, who takes care of it, and they pay me a cut. I’m not telling you who that is. It doesn’t matter because obviously I won’t be giving them any more information if I’m dead.

But you need to look at Mathew. He will be the one who kills me, and his ex-wife is likely to be his next target. And that’s possibly my fault too. If I am heading to God to be accountable for my sins, then I need to be honest. It will be because of me that Mathew goes after Doreen. When he accused me several times of looking for information and stealing from him, I said that probably Doreen had taken the information.

I was also instrumental in their divorce and in Doreen getting nothing for a settlement. And I do feel bad about that. The trouble is, she is one of those sweet-as-sunshine bright songbirds of the world, and I am one of the ravens in the dark. I could have eaten her for breakfast, and honestly I more or less did. I didn’t have any remorse, until I realized what it was like to be hunted myself. And now I know just how wrong what I did to her was. If I manage to survive, and nobody reads this, then I’ll try to turn a page and to become a better person. But, if you are reading this, it’s already too late. Remember. Go after Mathew.

Doreen slowly sat down and stared at Mack. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

He nodded. “That’s quite a confession letter. She doesn’t really state what she did to you, except that she cheated you out of your proper settlement and marital rights in the divorce.”

“Right,” she said, staring at the letter. “No wonder he wanted that. It directly points to Mathew as being her killer.” And she stopped, shook her head, and said, “But that’s not right. It wasn’t him.”

“You really don’t think so?”

She shook her head. “No, I really don’t think so. I mean, he is flummoxed and angry, and he wants to know who killed her, so he can get a hold of the guy himself. More or less to find out if he got any information from her and then to kill him.”

“Interesting. So somebody got to her first.”

“And I wonder if it wasn’t the one she was feeding the blackmail information to.”

He looked at her in surprise. “Why would he do that? That would be like killing the golden goose.”

She leaned forward and tapped the bottom lines of the letter. “But here she says she will try to turn over a new leaf. What if she would refuse to get more information? What if she had suddenly grown a conscience?”

“Did she sound like she’d grown a conscience, when she was throwing her fit on your porch?”

“She sounded terrified,” Doreen replied. “She was angry, frustrated, and really scared.”

“Well, she had reason to be. Because eight hours after seeing you, she turned up dead.”

“And we still don’t know who killed her.”

“No,” he said.

“Hey, what’s in the will?”

He quickly scrolled through it, without giving her a chance to read anything. When he got to the last couple pages, he said, “It’s actually very simple.”

But an odd tone was in his voice. “So, what does it say? Come on. Here’s a different theory for you. Whoever stands to inherit is probably the one who killed her.”

Mack looked at her, and his lips twitched. “You might want to watch what you say.”

“Why is that?”

“Because she left everything to you,” he said quietly.

Doreen burst out laughing at the joke, but the expression on his face didn’t change. She stared and then pulled the laptop toward her, so she could flick through the pages herself, and there it was. “I leave everything in my bank accounts, all my property, and my complete estate to the woman who was my friend and who I screwed over at the very end. I am fully responsible for her not receiving any marital assets. No alimony or anything else from the more than 100 million dollars her husband raised throughout their marriage. It felt good at the time to trick her into signing away her rightful settlement, but then I realized what a madman Mathew was and what I’d done, and, for that, I am very sorry. The only thing I can do is make restitution in this way.”

Doreen stopped and stared at him. “You know the courts will think I did it,” she said helplessly.

He nodded. “But I did find the key. It’s not like you put it there,” he said, as he looked at her, one eyebrow raised.

She immediately shook her head. “No, I didn’t. What if my ex had found that? That doesn’t bear thinking about.”

Mack nodded. “What I don’t know is whether that version of her will has actually been filed.”

“Meaning, it’s not legal?” she asked.

“That’s what we have to figure out. But it is witnessed, although I don’t know who the witnesses are.” Then he laughed and said, “It’s actually digitally signed online here in Kelowna. This is a copy of the original, so we’ll find out who the witnesses were.”

“And in Kelowna?”

“What do you want to bet that’s who she was meeting?”

She shook her head. “But this is just too unbelievable.”

“Well, as I’m searching her holdings online,” he said, “what you won’t believe is the amount of money that she left you.”

“Meaning?” she said. When he didn’t say anything, she added, “Does that mean I need to hand out the thousand résumés I printed off yesterday?”

He looked at her, then at the stack of papers she pointed to on her desk, and started to laugh.

“What does that mean? Why are you laughing?”

“Well, let’s just say,