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CHAPTER ONE

EDMONDS, WASHINGTON

MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2023

8:30 A.M.

That Monday morning, Donna Jean Plummer pulled her Toyota RAV4 into the driveway and used her clicker to open the garage door. Both of her employers’ cars were parked inside—Mr. Brewster’s sleek black BMW and Mrs. Brewster’s red Camaro. Mrs. Brewster used her car so seldom these days that it was covered with a layer of dust, but Donna Jean was surprised to see the BMW. That was usually gone long before she arrived.

Donna Jean worked for the Brewsters two days a week. Mr. Brewster had turned sixty over the weekend, and they’d had a big celebration on Sunday. Donna Jean had spent most of Friday getting the house ready for the festivities. Mrs. Brewster wasn’t much of a cook, so the party had been professionally catered. Nonetheless, since Mrs. Brewster wasn’t any better at tidying up than she was at cooking, Donna Jean expected that the place would be an ungodly mess.

With that in mind, Donna Jean glanced at her watch. Monday morning was garbage day in Edmonds, Washington, and one of Donna Jean’s duties was making sure the trash containers were all moved out to the curb before the trucks showed up. She wanted to have today’s garbage loaded into the bins in time to be hauled away.

Donna Jean paused in the garage long enough to break down the accumulated assortment of shipping boxes and put them into the recycle bin. Mrs. Brewster had two major hobbies—drinking and shopping online. The booze came from a local liquor store that delivered her standing order to the front porch every Monday afternoon.

Mrs. Brewster spent a fortune each month on stuff she never used. Once it came into the house, Donna Jean usually hauled it upstairs to the master bedroom where Mrs. Brewster spent the bulk of her time. Once the shipping boxes were empty, Donna Jean took them down to the garage.

As for whatever Mrs. Brewster bought? When she was done with an item, it was banished to one of the other bedrooms on the second floor. At this point, all three were packed wall-to-wall with junk, most of it brand-new. As a result, what had once been a four-bedroom home was now essentially a one-bedroom. Donna Jean had no idea why Mr. Brewster put up with his wife’s shopping nonsense, but she kept her mouth shut. After all, it was none of her business.

With the boxes broken down and in the recycling bin, Donna Jean used her key to let herself into the house via a door from the garage that opened into the laundry room. She expected the alarm to sound, but it didn’t. That wasn’t surprising, because Mrs. Brewster for sure, and maybe even Mr., had tied one on during the party. Once their guests took off, neither of them had bothered to reset the alarm.

As expected, the place was disgusting. Not as bad as the aftermath of a fraternity party, but close. The kitchen counter was loaded with the caterer’s collection of disposable bamboo serving trays and platters, along with all the leftover food. Dirty dishes—Mrs. Brewster’s collection of delicate china and crystal glassware, all of which would need to be hand-washed—were scattered on every flat surface throughout the ground floor.

Expecting Mr. Brewster to come downstairs at any moment, Donna Jean started a pot of coffee. Then, glancing at her watch, she grabbed some clean trash bags from under the kitchen sink and began her search-and-destroy mission. She began by clearing the kitchen counter of the caterer’s leavings. Just the mess in the kitchen was enough to fill two trash bags. Armed with a third, she made her way through the rest of the house collecting trash, then went out onto the patio, where, along with gathering more trash, she emptied a number of overflowing ashtrays.

The leavings in some of the ashtrays told Donna Jean that some of the previous evening’s guests hadn’t limited their smoking choices to cigars and cigarettes. She had reason to believe that, with or without Mr. and Mrs. Brewster’s knowledge, a certain amount of recreational drug use had been added to the party’s agenda, but Donna Jean’s job was to clean up the mess, not to point fingers.

By the time she managed to get all the accumulated trash out of the house and loaded into the bins, she dragged them down to the curb just as the garbage truck was turning onto the street.

Back in the house, as she collected dirty dishes and glassware, there was still no sign of Mr. Brewster. It was unusual for him to sleep so late. But then again, he did a good deal of traveling. Maybe he had been called out of town unexpectedly and had taken a limo or an Uber to the airport. That would explain why his car was still in the garage. As for Mrs. Brewster? She generally didn’t show her face until around noon, when she finally would venture downstairs for what passed for breakfast—usually coffee and toast and maybe some cold cereal.

Not wanting to let that fresh pot of coffee go to waste, Donna Jean decided to take her morning coffee break early. After having a cup, she set about washing dishes, many of which had been soaking in the sink. Then, on her next pass through the downstairs and out onto the patio, Donna Jean collected all the soiled linens, which would need to be washed, ironed, and returned to their assigned drawers.

As she brought the last of the dirty linens in from the patio, she attempted to latch the slider. For some reason, the door wouldn’t close properly. On her second try, she noticed that the cork from a wine bottle had somehow ended up in the track of the slider between the patio and the family room. Clutching her load of linens in one arm, she bent down, retrieved the errant cork, and dropped it into the pocket of her apron. Then, with the slider properly closed and latched, she headed for the laundry room.

As Donna Jean washed, dried, stacked, and put away all of Mrs. Brewster’s prized china and crystal, she found herself humming under her breath. Creating order out of chaos was something she found immensely satisfying, and being able to do so without a homeowner under foot and getting in the way was even better. Mr. Brewster was never a problem on that score, but Mrs. Brewster? When she was around, she tended to issue orders left and right, and nothing was ever done quite to her satisfaction.

Donna Jean had just moved the load of linens from the washer to the dryer when her cell phone rang. Extracting the phone from her apron pocket, she spotted her daughter’s smiling face on the screen.

“Hey, Amy,” she said. “How’s it going?”

“I wanted to be sure that you’re still good with picking up Jacob’s birthday cake from Safeway on your way home tonight.”

Today was her grandson’s sixth birthday. A joint party with one of his friends from school would be on a Saturday later in the month, but this evening’s celebration would be family only—his folks, his baby sister, and his grandmother—gathering for dinner and dessert.

“Of course,” Donna Jean replied. “No problem at all.”

Still, with afternoon traffic between Edmonds and Seattle, Donna Jean reminded herself that she’d need to finish work in time to head out a few minutes early.

Back in the kitchen, she was in the process of wiping down the countertops when she noticed for the first time that one of the knives—the largest one in fact—was missing from the knife block. For someone whose cooking consisted mostly of heating food in the microwave, Mrs. Brewster was exceptionally fussy about her knives. If one of those had disappeared, Donna Jean knew there would be hell to pay.

She did a quick search through all the utility drawers, thinking someone from the catering company might have mistakenly put the missing knife away in the wrong place, but after a thorough search, she realized there was no such luck. The knife was gone, and no matter who had misplaced it, Donna Jean knew she was the one Mrs. Brewster would hold responsible.

By eleven the downstairs was squeaky clean. As Donna Jean started on the ironing, she was beginning to worry that if Mrs. Brewster didn’t wake up pretty soon, Donna Jean would be hard-pressed to have the master bedroom done before it was time for her to do the family’s weekly grocery shopping, which she did every Monday afternoon. Fortunately, since the other bedrooms were packed full of junk, the master bedroom was the only one she had to deal with upstairs. Donna Jean was a dozen or so napkins into the ironing process when she heard a bloodcurdling scream.

Heart pounding in her throat, she abandoned the ironing board and raced toward the horrific sound. Halfway through the living room, she looked up the stairs and skidded to a stop. Mrs. Brewster stood on the landing at the top of the stairway screeching wordlessly at the top of her lungs. That was bad enough, but the woman’s ghastly appearance took Donna Jean’s breath away. Her nightgown was covered with blood. So were both hands, one of which held a bloodied knife.

“What happened?” Donna Jean demanded as she clambered up the stairway.

“It’s Chuck,” Mrs. Brewster managed, speaking intelligibly for the first time. “I must have stabbed him. He’s dead.” With that, she collapsed onto her knees, sobbing but still holding the knife.

Pausing halfway up the stairs, Donna Jean grabbed the phone out of her pocket and somehow managed to dial 911.

“What is the nature of your emergency?” the operator asked.

“Someone’s been stabbed,” Donna Jean replied. “He may be dead.”

“Is he breathing?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him. He’s in the bedroom. I’m outside on the stairs.”

“What is the address?”

Donna Jean reeled it off.

“First responders are on their way to your location.”

“Thank you,” Donna Jean said.

Reaching the top of the stairs, Donna Jean dropped to her knees next to the distraught woman who was sobbing brokenly.

“How could this have happened?” Mrs. Brewster demanded, frantically waving the bloodied knife in the air. “How could I have done this?”

Afraid the woman might accidentally harm herself, Donna Jean gently eased the weapon out of the her hand and slid it safely out of reach. At that point Donna Jean realized that the blood she was seeing on both the nightgown and the knife was completely dry.

“It’s going to be okay,” Donna Jean murmured over and over. “It’s going to be okay.”

That wasn’t true, of course, because nothing was going to be okay, but she didn’t know what else to say.

At that point Mrs. Brewster folded herself over until her forehead was touching the hardwood floor. That’s when Donna Jean saw something red come streaking out through the bedroom door and onto the landing. It took a moment for her to make sense of what she was seeing. The guided missile turned out to be Mrs. Brewster’s precious kitty, a snow-white longhaired cat named Pearl. Now as bloodstained as her mistress, Pearl raced across the landing and dove under Mrs. Brewster’s heaving chest where the animal vanished from view.

In all the years Donna Jean had worked for the family, that was the first time she’d ever seen Pearl emerge from the master on her own. That’s where the cat lived—in the bedroom suite. On those rare occasions when she’d had to visit the vet or go to the groomer, she was always transported through the rest of the house in a cat carrier. Obviously the poor animal was as frantic and traumatized as her owner.

Mrs. Brewster continued to sob. “It’s all right,” Donna Jean murmured again and again. “I called 911. Cops and EMTs are on their way.”

“It’s too late for EMTs,” Mrs. Brewster managed. “They won’t be able to save him. Chuck’s dead. I must have killed him.”

The next hours were a nightmare. The EMTs and uniformed officers showed up almost simultaneously, but the EMTs were forced to wait outside until the cops came through, clearing the house to make sure the killer was no longer inside.

Eventually Donna Jean was escorted to a patrol vehicle, where she was placed in the back seat and questioned in detail by one of the first officers on the scene. Some amount of time later, still from that vantage point, she watched as a man and a woman—detectives most likely—led Mrs. Brewster from the house, still wearing her nightgown and with her hands cuffed behind her back. A blanket had been tossed over her shoulders, presumably to hide the bloodstains, but as she moved, Donna Jean still caught glimpses of red. By then a large crowd had gathered out on the street. No doubt everyone there saw the bloodstains, too.