Murder Has a Sweet Tooth Page 18

  Tyler held up a hand to stop me. “Are you saying she was blackmailing him about soccer? It’s that important?”

  “To these people it is. It all is. Where they live and who they know and what their kids have accomplished. Or not accomplished. Do you think Edward could have killed Beth?”

  “Can’t say. It’s way too early to tell.” He looked like he wished he could say more. “But I’ll let my friend on the force here know what’s been going on. I’ll tell him to check out Monroe’s alibi. And the whole blackmailing angle. I don’t suppose you have any proof that Beth was telling the truth about that?”

  “Not a shred. She did say she mentioned it to Edward and he acted like he didn’t know what she was talking about. So she wrote him a note. She tucked it in a sympathy card she sent after Vickie’s death.” The look I gave him was hopeful. “I don’t suppose—”

  “That he kept it? Nobody’s that stupid.” Tyler looked disappointed that it was true. He stood. “That doesn’t mean the local guys can’t check it out. In fact—”

  He stopped midsentence when a car sped into the driveway. Its driver, Michael, slammed on the brakes, then got out and raced over to the nearest police officer.

  “Someone called me at my club,” Michael stammered. “They said something was wrong. What happened? It’s not . . . one of the kids? Beth?”

  A detective who was standing nearby took Michael by the arm and walked him over nearer to where we waited. They spoke quietly, but I knew what they were saying. I watched, my heart breaking, as the news registered. Michael’s face went ashen. His eyes glazed over. “No!” The word dissolved into an anguished cry. “It can’t be true,” he sobbed. And then he said something else, something I didn’t quite catch, but something that sounded a whole lot like—

  I told myself not to get carried away. I remembered the whole mix-up about Alex and dead and head. I warned myself that same sort of thing might very well be what was happening here: I was hearing one thing and thinking it was something else. That had to be it. It was the only thing that made any sense. Still . . .

  I know for certain that I saw Michael stare at the open front door of his house and all that smashed glass that lay just beyond. And I was just as sure I heard him mumble something, something that sounded a whole lot like “This wasn’t supposed to happen yet.”

  REAL OR NOT, THE COMMENT SENT MY IMAGINATION into overdrive. I didn’t dare bug Michael about it that day. I mean, he’d just found out that his wife was dead. There didn’t seem to be much use in trying to talk to him, and it would have been cruel besides. I bided my time, and I did manage to catch up on my work at Bellywasher’s, but only because I went in on Sunday and stayed until every last check was paid and every last account was balanced.

  That left me free to attend the calling hours for Beth on Monday.

  Of course Celia and Glynis were there and of course they looked shell-shocked, as might be expected. Losing one friend is hard enough. Having two die and in such short succession . . . well, I’d barely known Beth, and I hadn’t known Vickie at all, and even I was bursting into tears at the drop of a hat. We hugged, and talked, and I made my way toward the tasteful urn displayed on a table and surrounded by photos and mementos. Since I didn’t want to cause a fuss, I made sure to stay clear of Edward. He was over in one corner, talking quietly to Scott. I scanned the room, looking for Chip, Glynis’s husband, and found him sitting in another corner by himself. He was weeping.

  I wasn’t heartless enough to disturb his grief, so like the dozens of other people there before me, I waited in a long receiving line to pay my respects and extend my condolences to Michael. Unlike any of the others, I had an ulterior motive. After I told Michael how sorry I was and how much I was going to miss Beth (both true), I made my move.

  “I don’t know if you remember, Michael, and I can certainly understand if you don’t. But I was the one who found Beth on Saturday. I stopped by, and I saw her through the front window. I’m the one who called 911.”

  “Yes, of course.” Behind his Coke-bottle glasses, Michael blinked as if he was trying to replay the scene in his head and find where I fit in. “You were there. On the front porch when I arrived home. It never registered.”

  “You had other things to think about.”

  He nodded. “Maybe it’s just that I wasn’t all that surprised to see you. These days, you always seem to be around when bad things happen.”

  It was hard to deny, even if it was a little hard to take. I swallowed down a reply that was a little too terse for the occasion. “I happened to be listening when the police talked to you,” I said, “and you said something curious. I’ve been wondering about it ever since, and I’ve just got to ask. When they told you Beth was dead, you said, ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen yet.’”

  “Did I? I honestly can’t remember.” There was that blink again. Michael reminded me of an agitated owl. He shook his head as if to clear it and looked past me to the next person in line, dismissing me as easily as that.

  Not to worry, I wasn’t about to be brushed off so quickly. I pretended to be oblivious and I kept my place. “It just seems so odd. I can only imagine what you must have been feeling. And I think at a time like that, I might say something like oh, no or please, tell me it’s not true. Even this wasn’t supposed to happen makes sense to me, because of course, it wasn’t. Beth was loved by her friends and her family. She’s going to be missed. What happened to her shouldn’t happen to anyone. But it’s that one little word. That yet . . .”

  Michael blanched. I was pretty sure he was going to roll up in a ball and crumple to the floor until something behind me caught his eye. I turned to see that Edward Monroe was looking our way. When I turned again to Michael, he pulled back his shoulders and lifted his chin.

  “Of course it wasn’t supposed to happen yet,” he snapped. “Beth and I were supposed to live a long life together. We were going to grow old together, retire together, watch our great-grandchildren grow up. You understand that, don’t you, Annie? It wasn’t supposed to happen yet.” He drew out the word so I had plenty of time to think about it. “No one’s supposed to die that young.”

  “Of course.” What else could I say? With another smile tinged with just enough sympathy to be sincere but not too cloying, I backed away.

  And headed straight for the door.

  Did I believe Michael? Sure, everything he told me made sense, but that didn’t mean I was going to take it all at face value. This was my perfect opportunity not only to do a little digging, casewise, but to do what I’d gone to McLean on Saturday to do in the first place.

  I left the funeral chapel and within a couple minutes, I was parked around the corner from Beth and Michael’s house, the better to make sure my car wasn’t spotted. I hurried up the driveway and peeked in the windows. There was no one around.

  And remember, there was a hide-a-key.

  The tantalizing thought flitted through my brain, teasing and tempting me. I glanced around the yard, trying to put myself in Beth’s place, and in Celia and Glynis’s, too, since they said they all kept keys hidden outside their homes. Under those fake rocks seemed a little too obvious. So did under the mat. (I know, because I looked and there was nothing there.) That left . . .

  I stepped down from the porch and looked over the house, trying to think like a detective. If all the women had hidden keys, and each of them knew where the others’ were, then it would make sense if they were all in the same sort of place. I had never been to either Vickie’s or Glynis’s house, but I’d driven by. Each house was as different and individual as each woman. Beth’s was modern, Celia’s was cottagey-cute. Vickie’s was a sturdy Colonial much like the one I imagined for myself, and Glynis’s was a sprawling monstrosity that looked more like a medical building than a house. In fact, there was only one thing each of the homes had in common.

  My gaze lit on the Welcome Friends sign with the moose and the bear, and I knew my instincts were right on. As it turned out
, there was a little door in the back of the sign, and inside that—

  “The front door key!” I held it up triumphantly, but I knew I couldn’t waste time. The calling hours at the funeral home wouldn’t last forever. I raced inside the house. Ignoring the broken shelves that had once held Michael’s glass collection and the smudges of dark color that still stained the floor tiles, I headed straight for the kitchen. The envelope with the Girl Scout cookie money in it was still in my purse and I pulled it out and looked for a place to put it. If I left it out on the kitchen countertop, it would be too obvious. I needed something more subtle, someplace Michael would think Beth had put the envelope and forgotten about it.

  I found the perfect solution in the desk just outside the laundry room. Feeling as relieved as if I was dropping a weight from my shoulders, I slid open the top drawer, popped the envelope into place, and breathed a sigh of guilt-free relief.

  That taken care of, I thought about what other kind of snooping I could do since I was already in the house, and wondered if perhaps Michael had a home office. The thought firmly in mind, I was just about to close the desk drawer when something under a pile of papers in it caught my eye. I reached for it, pulled it out, and found myself holding a small round coaster made of heavy card stock. The coaster featured a sepia-toned photograph of the sign that hung above the front door of the establishment it came from.

  Swallows.

  Fourteen

  THE NEXT DAY, EVE AND I WERE AT THE GROCERY store. She was being a good sport and hanging out with me on her lunch hour simply because I asked her to. And me? I was multitasking. The wedding was just four days away, my investigation was getting nowhere, and I hadn’t had a spare moment to decide on a Scottish dish to serve at our wedding dinner. It all needed to be taken care of, so in my own perfectly logical way, I decided the best way to get it all done was to do it all at once.

  I’d been so intrigued by the Swallows coaster I found in the kitchen desk at Beth’s, I’d forgotten to return the cooking magazine that I had every intention of putting back along with the Girl Scout cookie money. The way I saw it, that was a sign. Eventually, I’d make copies of all the Scottish recipes in the magazine, then pop the whole thing (anonymously, of course) in the mail. Until then, I figured some higher power somewhere intended me to use the magazine. I’d grabbed it from my kitchen counter that morning on my way out my door.

  I’d stuck a sticky note on the page where the article about Scottish foods began. Now, standing in the middle of the dairy aisle, I flipped open the magazine, closed my eyes, and stabbed a finger on the page. “I’m going to make whatever recipe I’m pointing to,” I told Eve, and since it was something she would have done herself—say, to choose between two dresses she wanted in the newest issue of Vogue—she never questioned my decision process. I opened my eyes and read the heading above the recipe where my finger rested.

  “Crappit heid.” I cringed, closed my eyes, and tried again. This time, at least I didn’t point to a recipe we’d already considered—and rejected. I read out loud, “Haggis, the most Scottish of dishes.”

  It sounded promising, at least from the headline. I can only attribute my lack of reading comprehension to that and the fact that I was in a hurry, and feeling stressed. Jim and I were supposed to have our final, wrap-everything-up meeting with the florist that evening, and I had the final fitting for my wedding dress in just forty-five minutes, so I gave the recipe the most cursory of scans and pushed the grocery cart toward the back of the store, stopping along the way to load the proper ingredients into my cart.

  “Cinnamon, nutmeg, coriander, pepper. Oh, salt, too,” I read and tossed, and because the next ingredient on the list was oatmeal and I knew I’d find it two aisles over, we zipped over in that direction.

  “Beef or lamb. That’s what we need next. It says we can choose which we want to put in, beef or lamb.” We were on the move, and Eve was reading over my shoulder, so I didn’t question her. We rolled toward the meat department and while we were on our way there, I decided it was time to start killing those two birds with that one proverbial stone.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said, getting back to what I’d wanted to talk about in the car on the way over, only Eve had been driving, and traffic was heavy. I was so busy hanging on for dear life, we hadn’t gotten any further than me finally owning up to accidentally purloining the Girl Scout cookie money and telling her what I found in the desk in Beth’s kitchen the night before. We simply hadn’t had enough time to draw any conclusions. “Why would Michael have a Swallows coaster?”

  “He picked it up as a souvenir?” Leave it to Eve to be literal.

  “Well, he did. He must have. Or Beth did.” This was a new thought, and while I considered it, we arrived at the meat department and I consulted the recipe again, carefully this time. I read out loud. “One sheep’s stomach, cleaned thoroughly, scalded, turned inside out, and soaked overnight in salted water. The heart and lungs from one lamb. Stock made from boiling the lungs.” I didn’t have to look at Eve. I knew she had turned as green as I was. In an uncharacteristic move, I left the grocery cart right where it was and, side by side, we raced out of the store.

  WE DUBBED IT THE HAGGIS INCIDENT, AND VOWED never to speak of it again.

  Keeping the thought firmly in mind, just a little while later I was standing in front of the full-length mirror at Marie’s, the bridal shop where I’d bought my dress, and we were talking about everything but. It wasn’t hard. I was pleased to death with my dress. It fit like a dream and thinking about what Jim would say when I walked into Bellywasher’s on my dad’s arm and Jim saw me in the dress for the first time, I grinned.

  But of course, I had other things on my mind, too. Things other than boiling sheep lungs in saltwater and (gulp!) what’s actually involved in turning a scalded stomach inside out.

  Like that coaster from Swallows. That was something we needed to discuss.

  “Here’s the thing . . .” I turned this way and that, checking myself out in the mirror and deciding that I’d definitely made the right decision by choosing the peach-colored dress. It was plain enough to satisfy the pragmatic me, and the beaded collar of the bolero added just enough bling to make it a special occasion dress. “Doesn’t it seem a little odd that he’d have it? One of his wife’s best friends had just been killed there, and according to what Tyler found out, Michael never told the police anything about going to Swallows or even knowing where it was.”

  Eve was more interested in the hemline on my dress than she was in the investigation. She stepped back, eyeing it carefully to make sure it was even. “Maybe he forgot.”

  I wasn’t buying it. “The coaster was hidden.”

  “It was under a pile of papers. That’s what you said. That doesn’t exactly mean it was hidden. Maybe it was just forgotten.”

  “Maybe.” I frowned. “Maybe Beth wasn’t the only one who knew that Vickie was meeting Alex over at Swallows. Maybe Michael knew it, too. But if he did, why would he care?”

  I might have gotten an answer—of any sort—from Eve if she hadn’t heard someone walk by outside the dressing room and chosen that moment to stick her head out the door. One of the clerks had a load of dresses in her arms; I saw a flash of rhinestones and a shimmer of color.

  “Oh!” Caught by the sparkle and splendor, Eve stepped into the hallway. “I’d like to try that one, and that one, and that one,” I heard her say. “In a six. Unless you think that might be a little snug on me.”

  I pictured the clerk looking Eve up and down before she said, “It might be just a tad too big,” and because, of course, that was exactly what Eve wanted to hear, she was smiling when she stepped back into the dressing room.

  “You look really pretty, honey,” Eve said. “That color is perfect on you.”

  “I don’t know.” I checked the mirror again. “I love the color, but maybe white or ivory—”

  “Good gravy, Annie! White or ivory is for first weddings. And old frumps. Thi
s is a celebration, honey. What you need is a really pretty party dress. And that—”

  I spun in front of the mirror and smiled back at my reflection. “It’s a really pretty party dress, isn’t it? In fact, it’s perfect!”

  It was, and I was grateful that the dress was truly comfortable, and I wouldn’t have trouble moving, or dancing, or raising one of those champagne glasses to toast while I was wearing it. “I had ivory for my first wedding. This is different. It’s understated, but it’s special, too. You think Jim will like it?”

  Her raised eyebrows said it all.

  Mine rose just as far when the clerk brought an armful of dresses in the room for Eve. She still hadn’t decided on a dress to wear for the wedding, but seeing the wash of bright colors, I cringed. I had been thinking something nice and conservative and understated for my maid-of-honor. What Eve was thinking was anybody’s guess.

  The first dress was red velvet and just long enough to maybe hit the knees of someone half Eve’s height. There were ostrich feathers around the hemline. I caught my breath while Eve held it at arm’s length to look it over, and I let go a covert sigh of relief when she set the dress down.

  The second dress was a pretty color, deep sapphire blue, but a little too dramatic for my taste. Then again, I was pretty sure it was a little too dramatic for anything except maybe a little theater production of Gone with the Wind. The gown was strapless, and it had a bodice just dripping with rhinestones and a wide skirt that was ruched up all over so that it looked like frothy little mounds of blue whipped cream. That one, too, Eve set aside.

  The third dress—

  When Eve held it up to look it over, I hardly dared to move or breathe. The dress was chiffon with a swingy skirt and it had a halter-type top, but like mine, it was a tasteful little number, knee-length and dressy without being flamboyant. Yes, there were rhinestones, but not too many, just a sprinkling of them at the waist and down one side of the skirt. Not too overdone. Not too dazzling. And not so sparkly that the dress would blind anyone when Eve walked down the makeshift aisle we were planning to set up from the front door of Bellywasher’s to the bar. The best part? The dress was peachy, just a couple shades darker than mine.