Murdered by Superstition Read online

  She and Judy got out and walked past Nicole’s car on their way up the steps to the front door. Judy knocked lightly on the door and waited. “If it was me and someone had been scaring me with voodoo dolls,” she said, turning to Liz, “I’d leave the porch light on, but each to their own.” They stood there for several minutes, but no one came to the door.

  “It looks like she didn’t draw the blinds on the front window,” Liz said, looking around. “I’ll walk over and see if there’s a light on in the back of the house.” She walked the length of the porch and screamed as she turned the corner. “Judy, come here. Is this Nicole?”

  Judy came rushing over and looked to where Liz was pointing. “Oh no!” Her hand flew up to her mouth. “Yes, that’s her. Do you think she’s alive?” They were both looking at the body of a woman lying on the porch, a piece of wire tightly wrapped around her neck. Liz bent down and put her fingers on the woman’s cold wrist. She looked up at Judy with a sad shake of her head. “There’s no pulse and her skin is cold and clammy. I think she’s been dead for several hours.”

  “It’s all my fault,” Judy exclaimed. “I should have gone home with her. I’m probably the last person to see her alive, because I walked her out to her car.”

  Liz straightened up. “Judy, there’s no way you could have known what was going to happen. No one would have done anything other than what you did. And, you’re not the last person to see her alive. That would be the killer.”

  Judy saw something a few feet from Nicole’s prostrate form and walked past the body, pointing to the ground. “Liz, look at this. It’s a doll, just like the one I showed you earlier, the one that fell out of her locker.” She opened her purse and took out the doll, so she could compare it with the one lying on the porch next to Nicole’s body.

  Liz walked over to where Judy was standing and looked down at the doll in her hand. She turned to Judy and said, “When I was getting ready for my trip and researching New Orleans, there was a lot of information about voodoo dolls, and these sure look like what I saw. As much as it pains me to do this, I need to call Seth, the chief of police. I don’t think he’ll have a clue what a voodoo doll is, but since it’s here at the scene of the crime, I think we better leave it alone.”

  She raked a hand through her hair. “Unfortunately, that little voice I heard was right. Someone definitely had it in for poor Nicole. I find the voodoo doll connection really interesting. Like I said, I doubt if Seth will know anything about it, and I doubt that many people here would know about it either. I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t done so much research on New Orleans.” She looked down at the little wooden doll on the porch, noticing that it had a piece of wire wound around its neck.

  “Judy, the doll that you have in your hand, the one that fell out of Nicole’s locker, has pins in its neck, right?”

  “Yes, why?”

  Liz bent down to view the doll better, without touching it. “Look closer at this one. It has a piece of wire wound around its neck and there aren’t any pins. Wonder if the pins were a warning, and when the murder was complete, whoever did it used the same wire on the doll that was used on Nicole.”

  Judy shivered. “I have no idea. This is all completely new to me, and probably will be to pretty much everyone else. Isn’t Seth the guy you think is a complete idiot?”

  “You’ve got that right.” Liz chuckled softly. “He’s the chief of police of Red Cedar, or more accurately described as a bumbling idiot who cares more about giving out speeding tickets than solving murders, but like it or not, he is the chief of police, duly elected by the citizens of Red Cedar.”

  Liz took off her coat and placed it over Nicole’s lifeless form. She didn’t know why but it felt like the right thing to do. Then she placed a call to Seth. A moment later he answered, “Chief of Police Seth Williams here, how may I help you?”

  “Seth, it’s Liz. I’m standing next to a woman who’s been murdered. Here’s the address.” She reeled it off.

  “Lady,” Seth said, “seems like every time I talk to you there’s been a murder. Who is it this time?”

  “A woman by the name of Nicole,” she looked at Judy who mouthed the word ‘Rogers’. “Her last name is Rogers. When will you be here?”

  She could hear Seth huffing and puffing on the other end of the line. “Well, I was fillin’ out some pretty important forms for the city council on how many speedin’ tickets we handed out this week. They’ll be reviewin’ my salary at their meeting this comin’ week, and I wanna’ look good, but I suppose a murder is more important.”

  “I would think it would be, especially to the victim,” Liz said drily.

  “My deputy and me oughta’ be there in about ten minutes. Just hang tight ‘til we get there.”

  “Seth, I wasn’t planning on doing anything else.” She ended the call with a roll of her eyes.

  Judy had been listening to the conversation and shook her head. “You were right. The guy does sound like an idiot.”

  Nearly twenty minutes later Seth and his deputy arrived, followed a few minutes later by an emergency medical services ambulance and a coroner’s van. In the meantime, Seth took Liz and Judy’s statements. When he started to pick up the voodoo doll, Liz put her hand on his arm. “Seth, that may have some fingerprints on it. You probably shouldn’t pick it up. It could be evidence.”

  “Liz,” he said as he pushed out his chest and pulled his pants up over his spreading belly, “I’m the expert here, if you don’t mind me sayin’ so, not you. This ain’t nothin’ but a little doll. Don’t mean nothin’ at all. Probably was some good luck charm she carried, and it fell outta’ her purse. Here, you’re so hot and bothered about it, you take it.” He handed it to Liz who exchanged a silent look with Judy and put it in her purse.

  Seth’s deputy cordoned off the area with yellow tape and took photos. When he was finished the coroner took the body to the city mortuary. An off-duty deputy arrived to dust for fingerprints and gather DNA evidence.

  “Liz, you and yer’ friend can take off,” Seth barked in an officious tone of voice. “Better leave this to people who know what they’re doin’. Shouldn’t take too long. Probably some guy she turned down. That’s usually what these things are, just a domestic dispute that got out of hand, or neck, in this case.” He laughed, a heartless roar that grated Liz’s nerves. “Get it, Liz, neck, not hand?”

  Liz looked at him without responding and walked to her car, Judy right behind her.

  CHAPTER 3

  Liz and Judy were in a somber mood on their drive back to the lodge.

  “Judy, why don’t you come to the lodge with me before you go to your cottage. I’ll give you the information about the cooking school, and quite frankly, I’m curious about Nicole. If we’re going to look into voodoo dolls, I think I should know more about her. And I can practically guarantee you that whatever we do will be more than Seth is going to do. The only thing he wants to do is get back to filling in those traffic violation forms, so he can get his pay raise.”

  Liz parked her car, and together the two women walked into the lodge. “I’ll make some coffee,” Liz said. “I think we could both use a cup, unless you’d like something stronger.”

  “As a matter of fact, I would. There’s something about seeing dead people that gives me the jim-jams.” Judy shuddered. “How about a little brandy? As much of a gourmet cook as you are, I’m sure you’ve got some around here somewhere.”

  “I do, and I’ll get you some, but the jim-jams? What is that?” Liz asked, bemused.

  “It’s kind of like the heebie-jeebies, but I like the term better. While you’re getting the brandy, I’ll see if I can make a plane reservation.” Judy reached into her purse and looked back up at Liz. “I left my phone in my cottage. Be back in a minute.”

  A few minutes later, Judy walked into the great room, smiling broadly. “Well, if the cooking school will have me, I’ll be in business. I was able to make a reservation on your flight, but they only had one seat
available and it was in first class, so I took it.”

  “Here’s a snifter of brandy, Judy.” Liz handed a wide glass containing a healthy measure of brandy to Judy. “I guess that means I won’t see you from the time we take off from San Francisco until we get off the plane in New Orleans. Right?”

  “That’s right.” Judy took a sip of the brandy and grinned. “I’ll be up in the front of the plane drinking champagne with wealthy, handsome men and eating gourmet food. It’s a tough life, but someone has to do it. Hope you enjoy your peanuts and pretzels. I might even save a snack for you,” Judy said in a teasing voice.

  “Thanks, Judy, but I think I’d rather save the stomach space for beignets and pralines when I get to New Orleans,” Liz said laughing. There was a pause before Liz broached the subject about the elephant in the room. “To something far more serious. What do you know about Nicole?”

  Judy thought for a moment. “We met at the gym and had never gotten beyond the usual chitchat, apart from when we had lunch one day at Gertie’s Diner, when she opened up to me. From what she told me, she’d had a pretty tough life, but had really turned it around in the last year or so. That’s when she came to Red Cedar from a small town outside of New Orleans.”

  “That’s probably why I didn’t know her. Although I don’t know everyone in town, still, it is a small town. Even if I didn’t know her, you’d think I would have recognized her, but I didn’t,” Liz said, wincing at the recollection of Nicole’s body sprawled on the porch.

  “Nicole told me she’d been fat when she lived in the South,” Judy said, “and she’d decided to have surgery to get rid of it. Think she called it a stomach-stapling procedure. She said her surgeon insisted she go to a psychiatrist to make sure she was psychologically healthy enough to go through with the surgery.

  “The way she described it, her father had left her mother and instead of letting her feelings go, she stuffed her feelings inside while at the same time she was stuffing her face with food. She said her mother, sister, and her had no money, and they were dirt poor. Her mother worked two jobs just to feed her sister and her. She said part of her weight gain came from the cheap take-out food they ate all the time.”

  Judy took another sip of her brandy, and Liz waited for her to continue.

  “Nicole told me she was smart and even though they were dirt poor,” Judy went on, “she’d been able to get a scholarship to Tulane University in New Orleans. She told me it was kind of surreal. She’d ride a bus for an hour to get to Tulane, be with a lot of wealthy students, and then take the bus back to some little town.”

  “Poor thing,” Liz said thinking of how easy she and Joe, her previous husband who had died from a heart attack, had made life for their children. She had a lot of admiration for people who had made it through adverse circumstances to make a different life for themselves.

  “Fortunately for her,” Judy continued, “after she graduated from Tulane, she was able to get a very good job at a bank in New Orleans. She stayed with them for quite a few years and eventually worked her way up to manager. About the time she was debating having the surgery, she noticed in a trade journal there was an opening for a bank manager in Red Cedar, which would be available in six months.”

  “I think I remember seeing something in the newspaper last year about one of the bank managers retiring,” Liz said.

  Judy nodded. “Right. Nicole told me that the bank seldom listed openings that far in advance, but they thought no one would want the job in a town as small as Red Cedar, so they listed it with lots of lead time. She didn’t want to stay in New Orleans and have everyone notice her weight loss and have to deal with people talking about her, so she applied for the job, was hired, and had the surgery.”

  “It must have been hard for her to leave her sister and her mother, after all they’d been through,” Liz surmised.

  “I got the feeling that wasn’t the case. She told me that her mother had died from cancer, and she mentioned that she and her sister were not close at all. She said her sister really resented her going to college and getting a good job. Evidently her sister never finished high school and was very jealous of her. She got married when she was very young, and her husband was unemployed most of the time. Her sister supported them by working in a small gumbo diner.”

  Liz set her glass down on the side table. Several sips of brandy were enough to relax her, but she didn’t want the rest of it, and wished she’d stuck with her first choice for a nightcap, coffee with a splash of milk. “Nicole sounds like she was a very interesting person. How did you meet her?”

  “Every time I’ve come to stay at your spa for the last couple of years, I go to that fitness place I joined here. I met her when I was here last year. She’d only been in Red Cedar a few weeks, and she was still a little heavy. She told me the hardest thing she ever did, next to having the surgery, was to walk into a workout facility with a lot of gym rats. I admired her, and we became friends after that.”

  “Poor thing. I can’t imagine anyone going through what she must have gone through, and on her own, without any support from friends or family. It seems hard to believe that someone can make those changes. Yeah, listen to me. As you know, when my husband Joe died unexpectedly several years ago, I had to make some major changes in my life, so scratch what I just said. Guess sometimes we’re given new beginnings, and sometimes they’re forced on us. Mine were forced. She made her own, but that doesn’t always make it any easier,” Liz said.

  “Well, I for one, was pretty happy to see you back among the living. Particularly after you met and married Roger. Nice to know you had a second chance,” Judy said, swirling the remains of her brandy around in her glass, “but it looks like Nicole didn’t.”

  “Judy, it sounds like her life was going well up until now. What do you make of the doll and the skull and cross bones, as well as the pins and then the wire? Did she ever mention whether or not she had any enemies?”

  “No.” Judy shook her head emphatically. “She told me she was pretty much of a loner because of her weight. She even said she didn’t have enough friends to have any enemies. I thought that was a pretty sad statement. She seemed baffled by why she’d gotten the dolls. Having lived in the New Orleans area where voodoo dolls are pretty common, she was aware of what they meant. She said that someone must have wanted to harm her. I just remembered that she gave me the doll she found on her front porch last week. Let me get that one for you as well.” She opened her purse and a moment later, handed a doll to Liz.

  Liz spent some time looking at the doll. She turned it over, noting its resemblance to a mummy. The doll’s head appeared to be a Styrofoam ball wrapped with yarn. Two sticks in the form of a cross formed the body with yarn and twine wrapped around it for clothing. The eyes were buttons which had been glued on. It looked like something a child would make in a pre-school or kindergarten art class.

  A small piece of paper with a picture of a skull-and-crossbones had been glued on it, and the word “Babalou” had been written across the top of the paper in block letters with what appeared to be a heavy black marker.

  Liz raised her head and looked at Judy. “I don’t know what to make of this. I’ve heard of voodoo dolls and things like that, but I really know nothing about it. When I was researching New Orleans, I ran across an article about a museum in New Orleans that specializes in that type of thing. Since we’ll be staying in the French Quarter, and that’s where the museum is located, I think we need to go there and see what we can find out. We definitely should take these dolls with us.”

  “I agree. Like I told you when we were on Nicole’s porch, I went to a museum that sounds a lot like the one you just described when I was a child with my parents. Maybe it’s the same one.” Judy gazed at Liz. “To change the subject, Liz, you look like you’re deep in thought. What is it?”

  “Well, from what little I’ve read, it seems that anything related to voodoo is almost always done by someone who knows the person that receives a voo
doo doll. From what Nicole told you that would pretty much be the bank people and her sister.”

  Judy paused while she considered what Liz had said. “I think she told me she hadn’t talked to her sister in over five years. She said they had absolutely nothing in common. Nicole mentioned that her sister was quite beautiful, and she thought her sister was embarrassed to have a sister like Nicole who was so fat and unattractive. Why, do you think her sister could be behind this?”

  “I have no idea. I’m simply trying to come up with people who might want to harm her. If her sister was beautiful, as Nicole told you, maybe she felt threatened by Nicole losing weight and becoming attractive. I wonder if she’s been to Red Cedar. You probably don’t know her name, and I have no idea how we’d even begin to go about finding it…”

  She was interrupted by Judy, “Actually, I do remember her name because everyone knows that name. Nicole and I even talked about it. Her name is Marie Laveau. That’s the name of the 19th century woman who was the voodoo queen of New Orleans.”

  “Judy, that’s downright bizarre. Why would anyone name their daughter that?” Liz asked.

  “From what Nicole told me, that wasn’t her given name. When her sister became eighteen she legally changed her name to Marie Leveau.”

  Liz exhaled. “This whole thing seems a little too convenient for me. Nicole finds voodoo dolls, and her sister has taken the name of a voodoo queen. Then Nicole is murdered. I’m not discounting that it could be her sister, but I don’t think anyone whose name is Marie Leveau would leave a trail that easy to follow. Almost sounds to me like someone wanted people to think that.”

  Judy sat up with a jolt. “Liz, I remember something else she told me. She was concerned because she had to fire a woman shortly after she became the manager of the Red Cedar bank branch. She told me the woman was very angry about it and blamed Nicole, even though the manager before Nicole, as well as Nicole, had found her to be totally incompetent.” She tilted her head before continuing.