Chapter 11

Lily looked up from her folder and announced, "It seems like I was at the airport with the intention of leaving town. There was no luggage found by the body, so it looks like I was in a real hurry. Maggie…ummm, I'm an unwed mother of a four year old boy. In the last four years the two of us have lived in three different cities."

When Lily paused in her story LaVon raised her hand. Max grinned at her and said, "You don't have to raise your hand, darling. If you have something relevant to say, you can just speak up."

"Well, it says here that Maggie's sister wasn't found until later, but she had information as to why Maggie moved around so much."

"Go ahead and tell us…ummm, what is your name?" Woody questioned.

"I'm LaVon, Woody," she answered with a confused look since they had met several times.

"I think he means your character name, Mrs. Trask," Nigel offered.

"Oh! I'm Magnolia's sister, Petunia Orly. Why in the world would parents do that to their children? Such awful names!"

With a sigh, Lily said, "I understand completely! At least I got a reasonably non-noxious flower name."

"Oh Lily! I didn't mean to insult you!"

"You didn't," she grinned. "But please tell us what you were going to about Maggie moving around so much."

LaVon nodded and looked down at her file again. "It seems that when Max and Steve came to see Petunia…me, my sister had already been dead five days."

"That was probably because it took quite a while to identify a person thirty six years ago," Bug interjected. "In fact, I'm surprised that they had her fingerprints on file at all!"

"She had been fingerprinted because she was a bank teller. It was probably part of her security check," Max reported.

"Ah, that explains it," Nigel chimed in; he nodded at LaVon to continue.

"Well, it says that my sister was a bank teller in New York when she got pregnant. That was when she stopped calling her sis…me for a while. When her baby was six months old, she moved to Washington DC. After a few months there she called…me, to tell me that the father of her child had been hitting her. She was afraid of him hurting the baby so they moved away in the hopes he would leave her alone. She called her son Clematis even though that was not the name his father insisted on putting on the birth certificate. It took him eighteen months to find her. Maggie kept watching for a chance to get away and took it when it did. This time she moved here to Boston to be closer to me. I lived on a small farm thirty minutes from the city. Because all Maggie knew how to do was be a bank teller, she needed to be in the city. I got a call from her on the day I later learned was that she died, saying she had seen Ellery in town and she was going to have to run away again. The next think I knew, Detective Cavanaugh and Jenkins were at my door with the news of her death and Clematis's kidnapping."

"Ellery? Do we have a last name for this guy? I'm guessing he is the kid's father?" Garret questioned.

LaVon looked at her notes and then at Max. He shook his head, "That was all Maggie had ever said to her sister about him."

"Okay, we have a murder and kidnapping at the airport, weren't there any witnesses?" Nigel asked.

"Yeah, and where do I come in?!" Woody wanted to know.

To be continued…