by Dana Moss
“I don’t see why she’d keep anything from me.”
“To protect her friend?”
“I’m her friend too.”
Taffy set the empty coffee mugs on the counter. She said, “Maria said Macy was seen standing over Blake with the bloody knife. It must have been Lorne who saw her. He’s the only other one who went back to the ship after drinks.”
“So it was just Macy, Cher, Lorne, and Blake on the boat?”
“Yes. Wait…” Taffy had forgotten about Einer, the engineer hunched over at the bar. She didn’t know if he’d gone back to the yacht or stayed at the hotel along with Anya, who’d said that Blake had booked several rooms. She mentioned that to Ethan, and then she said, “We should find out what happened to him. And I’d really like to talk to Lorne about what he saw.”
Ethan put the coffee mugs Taffy had abandoned on the counter into the dishwasher. “Don’t go getting involved in this mess, Taffy.”
“You can’t think I’m going to stand by while my friend is suspected of murder?”
He sighed. “That’s particularly why it’s important to step back. When someone you care about is caught up in a situation like this, it’s hard to be objective.”
Taffy frowned. “And you’re saying that if I was suspected of murder you’d just stand by and do nothing?”
“That’s different.”
“It’s not and you know it.”
He sat back down at the table. “For one thing, you wouldn’t be in such a situation.”
“You never know.”
“And for another, I’d have no choice but to let the professionals do their job.”
“You wouldn’t do whatever you could to help uncover the truth?”
“Within reason, I suppose. But that’s not your strong suit.”
Taffy huffed.
“Seriously, though,” Ethan said gently. “What happens if you discover a truth you don’t like?”
Taffy crossed her arms. “You actually think Macy did this?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what I think. It’s not my place to make conjectures. It’s up to the police to gather the facts, and then we’ll see.”
Taffy narrowed her eyes. “She’s innocent until proven guilty.”
“Of course she is. And the last thing I’d want is for her to be guilty. But people can surprise you with what they’re capable of. I don’t want you to be hurt if the truth isn’t what you expect.”
Taffy brushed off his rationale. “Some men are creeps. Some are downright scoundrels. But no friend of mine would do something so rash, so irrevocable, so brutal, no matter how despicable the behavior.”
“A person pushed too far can do almost anything. And somebody did this, Taffy. Somebody, friend or not, killed a man in cold blood.”
Taffy shivered. “I just can’t believe it was Macy.”
“Then let’s hope you’re right.”
But Taffy wasn’t going to leave all this to hope.
“I’m going to head over to the resort and see what I can find out from Lorne and Anya.” She reached for her purse.
“Taff—”
“What?”
But he just stood leaning against the sink and shaking his head. “Nothing. Never mind.”
“I should be back before she wakes up, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
He sighed. “What about work? Don’t you have to stop in at the candy factory? You’ve been gone four days already, and you’ve taken this morning off too.”
“Ellie can handle it all for one more day. Right now, this is more important.”
Ethan just nodded and hung up the dishtowel.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ethan was right. She’d been gone four days and needed pick up her responsibilities. On the drive over to the resort, Taffy called Ellie at the factory to check in.
Ellie had been managing the Sweet Abandon Candy Factory flawlessly lately. Her new initiative of setting up tours and other forms of community outreach had paid off in reputation expansion and increased sales. Regardless of Mayor Gifford’s personal criticism of Taffy, the candy factory was playing its part to aid his precious tourism plan.
Taffy felt confident letting Ellie run things now. This allowed Taffy to do more things she wanted to do, like the recent trip to New York with Maria and helping with the wedding plans.
Not long after she hung up, Taffy pulled up in front of the Castle Rock Resort and Country Club.
Getting out of the car, she decided not to walk through the main entrance doors and instead took the side walkway around the building past the kitchen entrance until she came to the edge of the swimming-pool deck. From there, a set of stairs and a path led down toward the docks. The yacht was still cordoned off and a yawning uniformed officer stood by the dock ramp keeping anyone from getting aboard. There was no point going there without clearance from Maria.
Off to Taffy’s right, lounge chairs were arranged around the pool. Chairs encircling tables topped by umbrellas filled a patio between the pool and the dining-room terrace. At one of these tables, she saw two people sitting close together in intense discussion. They happened to be the very two she was looking for.
A pot of coffee and a jug of fresh-squeezed orange juice sat on the table between Lorne and Anya.
As Taffy approached, she heard him say to her, ““I can’t believe all this, Mary Ann. What are we going to do now?”
“Nothing. We just have to—”
Taffy’s shoe scuffed, and Anya turned toward the sound. She put on a smile when she saw Taffy, but the strain of the recent events showed in her face.
Pulling up a chair to join them, Taffy said, “I guess none of us got much sleep last night?”
“Not after the sirens started wailing.” Anya poured a third cup of coffee. “I had no idea that young girl was such a ticking time bomb.”
Taffy took the offered coffee. “She didn’t do it. She isn’t capable of that kind of thing. She’s got to be innocent.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“Not yet, she’s still at the police station, but I know her. She couldn’t do something like that.”
Lorne and Anya shared a look. “How can you know for sure?” Then Anya said, “She’s your friend, of course. I was being insensitive.”
Lorne shook his head. “Let’s call a spade a spade. I found her with the knife in her hand. They’d been fighting minutes before I walked in on her screaming and waving a bloody knife over his body.”
“You saw her ‘waving’ the knife?”
He paused. “She was definitely screaming, and I saw her holding the knife, for sure. Like this.” He held up his left hand. The gesture made Taffy think of the movie Psycho. She couldn’t picture Macy like that.
“That’s what I told the police,” he said.
“But what if she just picked up the knife. What if she found him… that way?”
“Found him with his throat cut? Then just picked up the knife and started waving it and screaming and crying? I was there. It seemed pretty obvious that she did it.”
Anya was nodding in agreement.
“But hadn’t she just been swimming? Cher said she and Macy went swimming late last night. Did they?” She turned to Anya, who shrugged. “I was in my room at the resort. I don’t know anything about that.”
Taffy turned to Lorne. “Yeah, they’d gone swimming after… uh…” He scratched his chin. “I guess it was pretty obvious what Blake wanted to do last night, wasn’t it?”
Anya rolled her eyes. “He liked to call it ‘rocking the boat’.”
Taffy nodded. “Cher told me Blake was a bit of sex addict. Is that true?”
Lorne rolled his eyes. “So he was enthusiastic about sex. Big deal.”
Anya crossed her arms and gave him a look. “You know it was more than that.”
Lorne ignored her and turned back to Taffy. “To finish answering your first question, yeah, they did go swimming. Skinny-dipping.” He grinned.
“I guess I heard them more than saw them. They giggle a lot.”
“So Cher waited until after, um, the boat rocked, and then the two of them went swimming?”
“Yeah, and Blake was crashed out.”
“Then later you heard them fighting?”
Lorne scratched his chin. “Uh-huh, after the swimming.”
Taffy tapped her chin and thought out loud. “So between finishing up ‘rocking the boat’ and you running into the stateroom after hearing screaming, someone snuck in and killed Blake, rather dramatically.”
“You mean Macy?”
“No.” Taffy frowned. “It could have been someone else. That’s my point.”
“Who?”
“Do either of you know what happened to Einer last night?”
Blake and Anya looked at each other and shook their heads.
“Do you know where he is now?”
Lorne glanced at the yacht. “He’s usually where he’s supposed to be when the ship is underway. I’ve never had to wonder where he is in the meanwhile.” He scrunched up his eyebrows. “Wait. You’re thinking quiet old Einer could have done this?” He turned to Taffy. “You’re actually thinking of pointing the finger at him?”
Anya laid a hand on his arm. “Try to understand. Macy is one of her best friends. She can’t believe she’d do something like this.” She turned to Taffy. “I’d feel the same way if a friend of mine got mixed up in a murder.”
Taffy appreciated Anya’s understanding, but she was a bit irked at Lorne’s attitude and his fixation on Macy as the killer.
“How long have you all been working together? You two and Einer.”
Lorne scratch his chin. “Only about a year and a half.”
“Two years,” Anya corrected.
“And neither of you know much about Einer?”
Anya said, “He doesn’t say much, and he doesn’t do much. Just his job. But he does that well.”
Lorne added, “I think he came with the boat.”
“Do you know if he had any unresolved issues with Blake?”
Lorne said, “None I knew of.” Then he shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. It had to be Macy.”
“But we don’t know much about Einer, like we said,” Anya added. She looked to Lorne. “What if he did have some old grievance with Blake? I’d never thought of that before, but it could be possible.”
Taffy said, “Did Einer stay at the hotel last night, or did he go back to the ship?”
Neither of them knew.
But Lorne leaned back in his chair and said, “I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. It was Macy. Or that crazy friend of hers.”
“Cher?” Taffy didn’t think Cher was any more capable of that type of violence than Macy, but she’d already admitted to Taffy she hadn’t thought much of Blake.
Anya stirred more cream into her coffee. “Blake hadn’t been too keen on having her join us for the trip, but Macy insisted she be allowed to bring her.”
Lorne added, “Blake resented Cher’s presence, but he tolerated it.”
“They didn’t get along?”
“Cher was jealous, I think,” Anya said. “Of Blake’s demands on Macy.”
“Such as?”
Anya gave Lorne a pointed look and said, “They’d fit under the heading ‘enthusiastic about sex’.”
Lorne cleared his throat. “Okay, fine. So my old friend had a few vices.”
Taffy looked to Anya for clarification.
Anya said, “He was addicted to porn. Things Macy didn’t particularly like.”
Taffy knew Macy wasn’t exactly virginal, and she’d had roving-eye boyfriends before. “Is that what they’d been fighting about? I can see that making her angry, but it wouldn’t drive her to violence.”
Lorne scratched his chin again. “Some of it was kind of kinky.”
Anya leaned forward. “And she said if she caught him at it again, she’d do something drastic.”
“I caught her saying that on video,” Lorne said. “One morning at breakfast,” he added.
Anya looked at him. “I don’t remember you having your camera out.”
“It’s small, and besides, you were busy making crepes.”
“You filmed that, too?”
Taffy interrupted.
“So you’ve seen the kind of stuff that Macy was upset about?”
Lorne shrugged and Anya shook her head and said, “We’re just the help. We only overhear things.”
“You’re making assumptions then?”
Anya pursed her lips. “I suppose we are. She’s right, Lorne. We don’t really know what happened.”
“I guess I wasn’t exactly an eyewitness to the actual event, but what else could have happened? It had to have been a crime of passion. Tension had been building.”
“But wasn’t that just temporary? I thought they were happy. In love. Weren’t they?”
Anya leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “I don’t know much about love, but I’m not sure that was it.”
Lorne said, “Listen, I’ve known Blake a long time, since boarding school, and he’s had a zillion infatuations, but this was love for him. That’s what love looked like for him anyway. In spite of his flaws, his occasionally volatile personality, he told me he was planning to propose to Macy.”
Anya shot him a surprised look.
“He told me himself,” Lorne explained. “He even had a ring. But maybe he changed his mind, and that’s why she freaked out.”
“And where’s this ring now?” Taffy asked.
Lorne shrugged. “Don’t know. He only showed it to me once. But it was a big rock—a boat-rocking kind of rock, if you know what I mean.” He winked.
“Have you told Detective Salinas all this?” Taffy asked Lorne.
“Most of it. Not about the ring. Do you work with the police or something?”
Taffy bit her lip. “Not exactly…”
“I get it,” Anya said. “They’re your friends. You’re loyal to them. You want them to be innocent. You don’t believe they could do this. I don’t blame you.”
“At the very least I think we need to find Einer and ask him a few questions.”
Anya agreed. Lorne shrugged his shoulders.
Taffy stood up, anxious track down Einer. “If you see him or think of where he might have gone off to, let me know.” Taffy wrote down her phone number on a napkin and then left Anya and Lorne to finish their coffee and orange juice. It would be easy enough to find out if Einer had stayed in a resort room last night.
* * *
At the front desk of the resort, a young man whose name tag said Greg confirmed that there was a room in Einer’s name reserved by Blake Stanton Reese. Taffy asked to see the room, and was only allowed to when she explained she was concerned he might be ill because no one had seen him since the night before. Greg escorted her to the room saying only he could enter it, but Taffy peeked in at the threshold and saw that the bed hadn’t been slept in. Greg confirmed that the room was empty and no towels had been used either.
So if Einer hadn’t been at the resort last night, where had he been?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Leaving the resort, Taffy noticed a commotion by the front doors. Several resort employees were blocking the entrance as she was trying to exit. They let her pass, and she was shocked to see a couple of television vans in the parking lot and a bevy of journalists on the front step. Someone stuck a long microphone in front of her face. “Are you the fiancée? How did he die? Was there foul play? Who’s going to inherit the money?”
A nearby flash temporarily blinded her as she stumbled to her car mumbling, “No comment.”
In addition to reporters and camera crew, a small band of lookie-loos had started to gather. How had that happened so fast?
As she drove slowly through the gathering crowd, Taffy activated her car phone and called Maria.
“The press is swarming the
resort.”
“I heard. We’ve got some support on the way to help get them off the property.”
“How did word get out so soon?”
“Probably a social-media leak. Not hard to guess who initiated it. It was a mistake to give Cher her phone back.”
Taffy was mildly insulted on her friend’s behalf. “You don’t know for—“
“Hold on.” There was a muffled conversation on Maria’s end and then she came back on the line. “Yep, the first post was traced to Kyla Connolly. Cher must have contacted her after she left the station.”
Taffy sighed heavily. Did these girls not fully comprehend the mess they were in?
“I’ll speak to Cher about it.”
“The damage is done, but do ask her not to add fuel to the fire if she can help it.” Maria didn’t sound all that confident that she could help it.
“Don’t worry,” Taffy assured her. “It won’t happen again.” If she had to, she’d take Cher’s phone away. “Hey, have you spoken to the ship’s engineer? Nobody knows where he was last night. I was just talking to Lorne and Anya about—”
“You’ve been talking to witnesses?”
“Uh, well. I just happened to run into them at the resort.”
Maria sighed. “Because you ‘just happened’ to be down at the resort today of all days?”
Taffy ignored Maria’s tone and tried to show her she was only trying to be helpful. “Did they tell you about Blake’s penchant for porn?”
“They did. And Cher mentioned her opinion that he was a sex addict.”
“Yeah, she told me too.”
“Thing is, Macy didn’t explain it that way.”
“What did she say?”
“She can tell you herself later today.”
“I can see her now?”
“The judge said if she makes bail, she can’t leave the state, but she can reside with a trusted citizen in town. I figured you’d volunteer.”
“Of course I will! What do I have to do?’
“Go home, sit tight. I’ll send Officer Peck over.”
“She has to be innocent, Maria.”
“She’s still a suspect, Taffy. And I’m still on the hunt for a murderer. Keep that in mind.”
