By The Howling by Olivia Stowe Page A

and used her medical knowledge to murder them without suspicion until she had done it so often that the people at GML began to put her face to different, similar large payouts. When she learned that an investigator had come into the area from GML, which was one of the companies she had taken hard in her black widow scheme, she assumed that Todd had blown the whistle on her, and she tried to kill him by pushing him off the ladder while he was cleaning his gutters.”
    “But she was there; she was giving him medical attention.”
    “Yes, she was the first one there—the very first one. She practically admitted it at the time, and I wasn’t listening. And did you notice how irritated she was that I had called the rescue squad? She wanted to get him into her clinic where she could finish the job. That alone raised signals at the time—and then there was Sam, which brought it together for me. I just didn’t know why yet, and I wanted to know why. I was being a bit self-indulgent.”
    “Sam? You did mention Sam, didn’t you?”
    “Yes, Sam’s our real sleuth here,” Charlotte said. And, hearing his name spoken, Sam raised up on his haunches and put his muzzle in Charlotte’s lap. She took a moment to pet him down and rub her nose on his hairy cheek, which he thoroughly enjoyed. “Not just our sleuth; he was our key witness all along, and we weren’t appreciating that well enough.”
    “Key witness?”
    “Yes. His howling in the night timed the murder. And then, when you brought him to the B&B when everyone was gathered around Todd on the ground, perhaps no one else noticed, but when he set off on his howling there, he was face to face with Rachel. And the look on Rachel’s face was as precious as it was damning. Sam was there, in the woods by your house, when Pamela Smith was murdered, murdered because Rachel had learned Smith was closing in on her. And Susan Purcell was there, too. That’s why she ran. She saw Rachel at the murder scene—and she panicked and let loose of Sam’s leash and stumbled back out to the road and took the first escape route she saw. She took Pamela Smith’s blue sedan and drove all of the way to Easton. She didn’t leave altogether right away, though, as she was still in the middle of what she was here for.”
    “Which was to steal us blind, right?”
    “Right. She was pilfering from local houses—taking advantage of her knowledge from her early life of who here had what and of our quaint local custom of not locking our doors. My Japanese porcelain tea set had the misfortune of being put in my dining room window where she could easily see it. And with Susan’s art training, she knew what was worth going for. Of course she was here primarily to steal those paintings from the Barnes. Her whole effort to get the arts center gallery established was focused on that scheme.”
    “An altogether unpleasant young woman—but I’m sorry to say that I can see Joyce in her.”
    “Yes, I feel a responsibility for what happened to her. I led Rachel to her, and my rustiness off the mark at least contributed to her death. Of course, Rachel had been looking for her from the moment she’d stumbled on Rachel doing away with Pamela Smith.”
    “How can you say you contributed to Susan’s death? And this is the second time you’ve indicated that Rachel had knowledge of the investigation. What—?”
    “The sheriff. Sheriff Wainwright. He didn’t do it intentionally, of course. But Rachel used him. She had been doing so for some time. It was part of her protection plan and it worked like a charm.”
    “I don’t under—”
    “David Burch fell into this first. He’s as cautious as I am, but if he had told me what he suspected when he suspected it, he might have saved himself a trip to the hospital. When I suggested that someone was keeping tabs on the investigation and staying one step ahead of us, he immediately thought of Rachel. He knew that the sheriff and Rachel were an item but were