Dairy-Free Death

by P. D. Workman

  “Leave it there,” Mackie ordered. “Don’t move anything.”

  “I can’t take it with me? It looks okay. It hasn’t been damaged.”

  “Leave it there. It will keep until the scene has been released. Until then, we can’t let you touch or remove anything.”

  Erin nodded and withdrew her hand. They headed back to the stairs. Mackie swept the flashlight toward the stairs, and Erin jumped when she saw an animal lying beside them.

  “Oh!” She laughed. “The cat’s fur.”

  “What?” Mackie looked at it closely. “The cat’s…?”

  “It’s fake fur. He found it in the sewing room and dragged it up here,” Erin said. “Scared the heck out of me because I thought he caught a rat. Or a weasel.”

  Mackie chuckled. “I can see why.”

  They left it there, and Erin followed Mackie’s lead back out of the house to where Vic was waiting. Terry was a short distance away, leaning tiredly against his car, writing down whatever notes or statements he had to file.

  “It’s not too bad,” Erin told Vic. “I think we’ll be able to move back in there, once it’s been cleaned up a bit. There’s damage, but I think… I don’t think we have to knock the whole thing down. And we’ll be able to save most of the important things. The living room and kitchen are the worst.”

  Orange Blossom stuck his head out of Vic’s blanket and meowed plaintively at Erin.

  “Oh, I know,” Erin said. She held her hands out, and Vic transferred the warm, furry body into her arms. “I know, you want to go back into the house and go to sleep now that it’s almost morning. But you can’t.” She cuddled him against her cheek, and he started to purr like a motor. “You were a good kitty to wake me up. Better than a watchdog.”

  “He woke you up?” Mackie repeated.

  “Yeah. He did. And then I got Vic up, and we all got out of the house without getting hurt. I don’t know if either of us would have woken up if it wasn’t for him.”

  “Can we get some things out of the house for him?” Vic asked. “And for us? Clothes? Toothbrushes?” She scratched Orange Blossom’s ears. “Toys?”

  Erin thought of the piece of fur up in the attic. She would have picked it up for the cat if she’d been allowed to take anything. But Mackie had said she couldn’t touch anything, and she assumed that applied even to a random piece of fur.

  “Holy crap!”

  Everyone looked at Erin in surprise. Mackie, Vic, even Terry looked up from his writing.

  “What?” Vic asked.

  “Joelle!”

  “Joelle?”

  “Joelle! She wasn’t… Terry! I think you need to… I should have noticed!”

  Terry walked over. Vic and Mackie tried to make sense of Erin’s incoherent exclamations.

  “What is it?” Terry was frowning. “What about Miss Biggs?”

  “She’s a fake!”

  “Okay… a fake what?”

  “She’s not a vegan.”

  Vic and Terry just stared.

  “She was wearing leather at the funeral. And fur. And her sandals at the Founders’ Day Fair. Leather again.”

  “So…?”

  “If she’s vegan for ethical reasons, she wouldn’t wear leather and fur. She’d avoid anything that came from animals. Not just food, but her clothes too.”

  “Maybe it’s nothing to do with ethics,” Vic said. “Sometimes it’s just for health. Not animal rights.”

  “No,” Erin shook her head. “She was talking about the bees, remember? She was concerned about animal-based food colorings and coatings. Someone who’s just avoiding meat, eggs, and dairy for health reasons doesn’t worry about all of those little things. She was only pretending to be vegan. She’s running some kind of con.”

  Terry shrugged. “It’s not illegal to pretend to be vegan. Annoying, maybe, but not illegal.”

  “But murder is.”

  He raised his brows. “Murder?”

  “If she was only vegan for her health, then she wouldn’t care about every last ingredient. She would just accept that something labeled vegan didn’t have any eggs or dairy in it and not need to look at the other ingredients.”

  They still didn’t get it. Erin took a deep breath in and released it slowly.

  “Unless there was another ingredient she was looking for.”

  Terry’s eyes riveted on her, suddenly connecting to her train of thought. “You mean like soy products?”

  Erin nodded.

  Vic stared at Erin wide-eyed. “You’re saying that she was looking for something that had soy in it?”

  “And the best bet was to ask for something dairy-free or vegan.”

  “Why would she want to kill Trenton?” Terry demanded. “She was his girlfriend.”

  Erin closed her eyes and saw Joelle arm in arm with Davis at the funeral, coming with him to the bakery, and Joelle and Alton Summers arguing at the Founders’ Day fair.

  “No, she wasn’t. She’s Davis’s girlfriend.” She opened her eyes and looked at them.

  “Davis’s!” Terry looked at her like she was crazy.

  Vic shook her head and opened her mouth to speak.

  “She was,” Erin said firmly. “They must have planned the whole thing. Davis knew he wasn’t getting anything under his mother’s will. It was all going to Trenton. If he wanted to get anything, he had to get Trenton out of the way. He knew about Trenton’s allergy. They arranged for Trenton and Joelle to meet and get involved.”

  “They’ve only known each other for a couple of months,” Vic mused. “The timing is right.”

  “Joelle arranges for Trenton to ‘accidentally’ eat something with soy in it. He didn’t carry an auto-injector, so she didn’t have to worry that he was going to be able to inject himself and recover.”

  “It’s a pretty big jump,” Terry said. “From deciding she’s not an ethical vegan because she wears leather and fur to fingering her for the murder of her boyfriend. There’s no proof. One of them would have to confess, and there’s not even an open investigation into Trenton’s death.”

  “Talk to Alton Summers.”

  “Alton Summers,” Terry echoed.

  “Who’s he?” Vic demanded.

  “That guy who came by the bakery.”

  “The one who was trying to—” Vic cut herself off suddenly, looking at Terry.

  Erin licked her lips and swallowed hard. With her teeth gritted, she filled Terry in with the vital information. “The one who was trying to blackmail me,” she said. “He even followed me all the way to the city and tried again.”

  “Trying to blackmail you? Why didn’t you come to me with this?”

  “I don’t know… I didn’t want to have to talk to you about it. I told him to get lost. Told him I would report him if he kept it up.”

  “How do you know Alton Summers? How did he know anything about you to try to blackmail you with? Was it something to do with Angela’s death?”

  Erin cuddled Orange Blossom and scratched his ears and chin. K9 sat beside Terry, his eyes on the lump under Erin’s blanket.

  “Summers was the detective who tracked me down after Clementine died. He was hired by her estate lawyers. That must be how he knew Davis and Joelle too. Angela’s estate lawyers hired him to find Trenton. He tracked down Davis first and set everything in motion. So, he knew that Joelle was Davis’s girlfriend, not Trenton’s.”

  Terry turned away from Erin abruptly. He went over to his car and leaned in to pick up his radio. Erin heard him snapping out orders to the dispatcher. He gave instructions for Tom Banks to find Alton Summers right away and bring him in for questioning. No, it couldn’t wait until Tom was up. He needed to be paged immediately.

  When Terry returned to where Erin and Vic were standing, his face looked tired and worn. Like he’d aged ten years in a few minutes.

  “Why would they try to burn your house down?” he asked. “If nobody guessed about Joelle poisoning Trenton, and you believed Davis when he told you th
at his father abandoned them, then why come after you now? Is there something you’re not telling me? What happened since Davis approached you at the restaurant?”

  Erin shook her head. “I don’t know… Nothing.”

  “You haven’t talked to him since then?”

  “No.”

  “Or Joelle?”

  “I talked to her at the Founders’ Day Fair. But only for a minute, and it wasn’t anything about Adam Plaint.”

  “Did you talk to anyone about him while you were at the Founders’ Day Fair? Anybody at all?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “Somebody could have overheard you. A place like that, things get so chaotic, you don’t know who might have heard what.”

  Erin remembered looking around in Naomi’s tent to make sure they couldn’t be overheard. But she’d been able to hear someone else talking about sheep through the tent wall, which meant someone outside the tent might be able to hear her. Erin shook her head. She hadn’t talked to Naomi about Trenton or Davis or their father. She had only been talking about Clementine and her own family.

  “Something must have happened,” Terry said, his voice low. “But maybe it wasn’t something you did. Maybe it was Alton Summers approaching Joelle. Maybe they decided at that point to wipe out any threats.” He licked his lips. “I just hope we don’t find Summers dead and Joelle and Davis gone.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  ERIN AND VIC HAD both doubled their usual coffee intake by the time they opened the bakery, and they each had RC colas under the counter as they worked.

  “We should work in shifts,” Erin had suggested. “You could go sleep while I work, and then we could switch.”

  Vic shook her head. “I can manage.” She studied Erin. “Do you really want to?”

  “No,” Erin admitted. “I want to know that we’re all here, safe and sound.”

  Orange Blossom was shut in Erin’s office, a tiny room, which he didn’t like, but he had quieted after a while and gone to sleep. It had been a tiring night for him, too.

  So, they agreed they would both work together as usual, and if they had to close early, they would pack up and go back to the Inn. While the hotel didn’t technically allow pets, Erin got the impression that they would look the other way for a few days.

  Mary Lou came by mid-morning with a new case of Jam Lady jars. Erin accepted them with thanks.

  “The sample table seemed to be keeping up a pretty brisk business at the fair,” Erin observed. “I think everybody knows how good the Jam Lady products are by now. You must be keeping busy with them.”

  “Yes, it’s going really well,” Mary Lou agreed. “And thank you for doing your part and carrying them here.”

  “They pair so well with artisan breads. It’s a good up-sell.”

  “It works well for us both,” Mary Lou agreed.

  Vic took another sip of her RC and put it down again. “I know who The Jam Lady is,” she offered.

  Mary Lou looked at her sharply. Erin perked up. “You do? How did you figure it out?”

  “Well, like I said, Mary Lou is the only distributor, the only one who knows where they come from.”

  “Right…?”

  Mary Lou took a quick look around the store. The last customer had left, and they were alone for the moment. “That doesn’t mean anything,” she dismissed.

  “It does,” Vic insisted. “You’re not getting them from the city. They’re coming from somewhere in town.”

  Mary Lou didn’t answer.

  “Mary Lou said it isn’t her,” Erin reminded Vic.

  “I’m not saying it is. The amount of product that she’s selling, it would take someone working almost full-time to produce. And she couldn’t do that and work at the General Store.”

  Mary Lou nodded. “That’s right. It isn’t me.”

  “But they come from your house.”

  There was silence in the bakery.

  “You buy the jars and take them home.”

  “I…”

  Erin looked at Vic. She hadn’t thought anything of it when Vic had said that she could find out who The Jam Lady was. Erin hadn’t been aware of any investigating that Vic had been doing but, obviously, she had been subtly watching and asking questions, below Erin’s radar. She looked back at Mary Lou, whose face was growing pink. Mary Lou again turned and looked toward the door, worried another customer would walk into the conversation.

  “Okay,” she said in a low voice. “But you have to swear secrecy. I don’t want word getting around. The Jam Lady is anonymous. The mystery is part of why it is selling. Everyone wants to taste it and speculate on who is making it.”

  Erin nodded. “I won’t say a word. I have a vested interest in it selling too.”

  Mary Lou looked over at Vic. “Fine. Tell her.”

  “It’s her husband! Mr. Mary Lou.”

  “Roger,” Mary Lou amended. She dabbed at her forehead with the back of her wrist. “Swear you won’t tell anyone. He would be so embarrassed, and The Jam Man just wouldn’t sell as well!”

  “Your husband makes these?” Erin demanded, her voice rising a few notes. “Really?”

  “It’s the first thing he’s had any interest in since… he got sick. He enjoys doing it, and it’s the first time he’s felt productive and capable. You can’t take that away from him.”

  “No,” Vic and Erin both said simultaneously. They looked at each other, grinning.

  “We won’t,” Erin declared. “I won’t say a word. The pronoun ‘he’ will never leave my mouth. I promise you.”

  Vic nodded.

  Mary Lou looked at Vic and then down at the floor. “Trust the other man masquerading as a lady in this town to be the one to figure it out.”

  A few seconds of uncomfortable silence ticked by. Erin had no idea how to respond to the comment. Mary Lou wouldn’t raise her eyes to look at Vic. Vic stood with her mouth open, no words coming out. It was some minutes before she spoke.

  “Your husband is no less of a man for making jams,” Vic said in a slow, measured way. “And I’m still a woman, no matter how I was raised or how society labeled me.”

  “Can we just call a truce?” Erin begged. “Mary Lou, you don’t have to agree with Vic, but does that mean you have to argue with her? Can’t you just call her by the name and pronoun she prefers, and let it go at that? If one of your boys decided to… dye his hair bright pink or get a tattoo, you wouldn’t want people to shun him, would you?”

  “I don’t know how you can make the comparison. We’re not talking about Vic’s hair.”

  “You’d still love him, wouldn’t you? Isn’t the whole Christianity thing supposed to be about showing people love? The sinners, the lepers, the outcasts?”

  Mary Lou nodded at this. “Yes,” she admitted, finally raising her eyes to look at Vic.

  “But you’re not. You wouldn’t want to be on the same side as people who threaten to kill people like Vic, would you? There is all kinds of violence against them in the name of Christianity.”

  “No. I don’t agree with that. Violence is not the answer.”

  “Then maybe love is.”

  Erin was feeling a little more human after having had a nap. A knock on the hotel door woke her up, and she knew even before Vic answered it who it would be. Vic opened the door and let Terry Piper into the room. K9 stuck to his side. The dog’s nose quivered as he looked around and spotted Orange Blossom sleeping on one of the twin beds. Terry laid a hand on his head just as he started to bark, and K9 quieted obediently. Orange Blossom opened one eyelid to stare at the dog but didn’t twitch another muscle.

  “Come sit down.” Erin motioned to one of the chairs and sat in the other. Vic sat down on the nearest bed.

  Erin knew that Terry had taken a break after his all-nighter at Clementine’s house, but he still looked exhausted. He had probably been unable to get any sleep, still worried about the case and the happenings in his town.

  “How did it go?” Erin asked eagerl
y. “Did Alton Summers talk? Did you get Joelle and Davis?”

  “Summers wasn’t particularly inclined to be cooperative, but he admitted that Joelle was Davis’s girlfriend originally, not Trenton’s. That’s not enough in itself to charge either of them with anything. But it was enough to bring them in for questioning.”

  “And they hadn’t run?” Vic demanded. “They all just sat around waiting to be arrested?”

  “I guess they were pretty confident we wouldn’t tie them to the arson. I’m sure they probably had a plan to get rid of Summers, but they hadn’t put anything in motion yet. I need to know whether you are willing to charge him with blackmail.”

  Erin shook her head. “I just want him to get out of here. Leave me alone.”

  “You want to just let him walk?”

  “He’s not the one who killed Trenton. Unless you think he was in on it too.”

  “There’s no love lost between them. If he was ever part of the plan, I suspect they cut him out. They wanted the whole pot for themselves.”

  Erin dreaded what was coming. “You’re charging them with murder, aren’t you? And arson?”

  “Unless Joelle turns on Davis, I don’t think I’m going to be able to pin anything on him. Joelle was the one who took up with Trenton, knew about his allergy, looked at the ingredients, and bought the cupcakes. We’ll charge her with murder, but she’ll contend that it was an accident. Even if she admits to knowing about his allergy, she bought him cupcakes that were safe. She’s the only one who knows whether she offered him hers, or he just had a couple while she was gone.”

  “You can’t charge Davis?”

  “Davis wasn’t even in town until after Trenton’s death. His story is that Joelle left him. She was a gold digger and switched allegiance when she heard that Trenton had inherited substantial assets and Davis was getting nothing.”

  “What about his father’s death and the arson?”

  “There’s nothing to implicate him in Adam Plaint’s disappearance or possible death except for your note. And even if he took your note as an accusation, we both know it was never intended as one. You didn’t have any evidence the boys were involved in their father’s death. You didn’t have any witnesses to question.”