Secrets and Stilettos (Murder In Style Book 1)

by Gina LaManna

  “Um,” I hesitated. “How did you know we were here?”

  “Matt texted me to let me know the change in plans.”

  “Ah, good. Glad y’all are coordinating intel on my whereabouts,” I said. “What brings you here?”

  “Thought I’d give you both an update and check on the happy couple this morning,” Cooper said. “There were tire tracks in Becky’s driveway last night like she said, and she had an alibi during the break-in yesterday. Patty was at the bar and had an alibi during the break-in as well, so I am somewhat back to the drawing board. It’ll be a long day of checking out dark vehicles.”

  As if on cue, Matt scooped the rest of the eggs onto a plate and slid it to the far end of the table. Cooper and I took it as a sign that we were to eat while the food was hot.

  I pretended that eating breakfast with both men wasn’t awkward at all. It was difficult. There is a reason I’m not an actor, and it’s because I suck at acting. So, after an unbearably quiet breakfast, I finally wiped my hands and stood, grateful to hear tires crunching out front.

  “Well, I’m off to the shop, so I’ll see you two later,” I said. “Lock the door on your way out, please.”

  With that, I fled the house and scurried into the warm safety of my mother’s truck.

  “Is that Cooper’s cruiser?” my mother asked. “If you were entertaining him, I can come back later.”

  “Nah, he’s got entertainment,” I said. “He’s hanging out with Matt. How about we head to the store? The faster the better.”

  My mother cleared her throat and gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles. “People will talk, you know. A pretty thing like you acquiring a plethora of male friends and not taking a romantic interest in any of them...”

  “Drive, please,” I said through gritted teeth. “I love you, mom, but stay out of my romantic life.”

  “Fine,” she said. “I just hope you find someone who makes you as happy as Sid makes me. Marriage is really the very best thing I’ve ever done.”

  “Mmm,” I murmured. “For me, shoes seem to do the trick just fine.”

  I COULDN’T DROP MY mother off fast enough. I would’ve let the wheels of the truck keep on rolling if it had been up to me, but my mother insisted I pop my head into the store for a few minutes.

  I hadn’t actually intended to go to the store. I had a few things I wanted to check up on with regards to the case, but it hadn’t seemed like a bright idea to tell Matt about it. He would have told Cooper, and they would have nixed the idea without asking my opinion first. And I didn’t intend on waiting around for the next attack.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” Allie chirped happily as I dropped the boots I’d borrowed from her on the counter. She pretended as if last night hadn’t happened at all. “Oh, thanks for returning the boots so quickly. I’ll get your shoes back soon, I promise.”

  “Sure,” I said, unsurprised to glance down and find my red high heels firmly planted on Allie’s feet. They were mismatched horribly with some odd looking green patterned pants and a matching sweater. But her scrunchie was the exact same shade as the shoes, and according to the Instagram influencers, scrunchies were coming back in style, so I supposed that was something. “Whenever you remember them would be great.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” she said, and grinned wider. “Are you sticking around today? I could use some help organizing the sweaters, and maybe you could tell me how you get your nails to look so nicely polished. It looks like I hit my fingers with a hammer.”

  Sure enough, Allie had tried to match her nails to my shoes, and her fingers looked to be a bloody mess with red polish streaks. I winced. “The only cure for that is a lot—and I mean a lot—of nail polish remover,” I advised. “I’ll show you some other time—I have some business to take care of this morning first.”

  “Are you going hunting for more murder clues?” Allie whispered. “I heard something about a break-in yesterday at your place. Is that true?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Say, what color is your mother’s car?”

  “Um, green,” she said. “Lime green. One of those weird boxy sorts of cars. Why?”

  “No reason,” I said. “I was just looking for someone from bingo yesterday. I found a stray mitten and was looking for its owner. Dark-colored car is all I saw.”

  “Might be Mr. Duvet,” Allie said easily. “He has a dark car—he left around the same time as me from bingo, but I think his wife might have stayed back with the bridal party. He was alone getting in the car.”

  “Mr. Duvet—Lana’s dad?”

  “That’s the one. Is it a man’s mitten?”

  “Mitten?” I already had forgotten my cover story. “Oh, yes. A man’s. In fact, I’m going to run it over to him right now, and then I’ll be back to help with the nail polish.”

  “Oh, great,” she said. “I’ll get started taking this mess off. I think I’ve been scaring away customers.”

  I bid her a distracted goodbye as I hurried away from the register and shouted a ‘be back soon’ to my mother. She was with a customer and therefore couldn’t respond, which was just perfect. For all I knew, Matt or Cooper might have gotten in touch with her and explained that I needed a chaperone—which would be detrimental to my plans.

  As I drove toward the Duvet house, an address Allie had quickly rattled off when asked, I dialed Cooper and put him on speaker. “Come on, answer,” I muttered, but he obviously didn’t hear me. I got his voicemail.

  I quickly left a message for the chief and then dialed Matt to the same result. Apparently, both were busy at work. It would take Cooper all day to get through his list of cars and event attendees, so I figured I might as well take a quick peek in the Duvet garage, and if I found a dark car that was the approximate shape and size, I could point Cooper in the right direction and spare everyone a lot of time and effort.

  And if Allie had been wrong and there was no dark car—well, no big deal. It was a five-minute detour for me, and I needed the break from people anyway.

  William and Brenda Duvet had moved into a much more modest house than the one he’d shared with the former Mrs. Duvet. Now, Will and Brenda lived in an average, newly-built, suburban-style house that had a cookie cutter feel, save for the slight clutter of pots strewn across the front lawn. Most of them were still under several feet of snow, giving the yard a somewhat lumpy appearance that was a stark contrast to the rest of the straight lines and sheer white exterior of the house. I came to a stop and parked across the street.

  As luck would have it, the garage door was open.

  Wide open.

  It was a two-car garage, and one space was empty. There were fresh tracks in the snow, which told me someone had just left. The other space was taken up by a white SUV.

  With a sigh, I realized my attempts to speed the investigation along had gone nowhere fast. The car definitely hadn’t been white. While the Duvets might own a second car that fit the description, there was no saying when Mr. or Mrs. Duvet would return with it. It’d be a waste of time to sit around and wait, so I figured I’d head back to the store and try again later.

  I was just putting the car in drive when the rev of an engine startled me to attention. I glanced up in time to see a car—a dark car—careen around the corner and fly up the Duvet’s driveway and into the garage.

  My heart pounded as the driver of the vehicle threw it into park. I didn’t need Encyclopedia Brown to confirm that this might be the vehicle that’d come close to running me down the previous evening. I took a few deep breaths, waited for the garage door to close, and forced my tight knuckles from the steering wheel.

  Once the garage door had closed, I dialed Cooper and Matt one more time each, but again, I got no answer from either. While hanging up from a second attempt to reach Cooper, the Duvet’s garage door inched up again. The same black car backed out of the driveway and headed off in the opposite direction. Mr. Duvet was in the driver’s seat.

  “Interesting,” I muttered, wondering wh
y he’d needed to stop home for all of five seconds. “Very peculiar.”

  A sudden urge caused me to kick open the door and climb out of my mother’s truck. Before I could fully register what was happening, I’d climbed the front steps to the Duvet house and knocked on the door. I needed to ask Mrs. Duvet a few quick questions to see if I could find out if her husband had an alibi for the time of Grant’s murder.

  “Hello, Jenna,” Brenda said, pulling the door open with a smile. “What a lovely surprise. Come inside. What can I do for you?”

  “Wow,” I said, startled. “I’m surprised you remembered my name. That’s pretty good for only meeting me once.”

  “Yes, well, you’ve become somewhat famous around the Duvet house these days,” Brenda said with a tight smile. “I’ve heard your name tossed around a few times.”

  My smile must have frozen on my face. “Right, disaster queen. I’m sorry about the bachelorette party.”

  “Oh, I got a good laugh over the spillage. I’m not exactly a family favorite with Lana and Eliza and Bridget, so believe me, I understand how you feel as an outsider.” The new Mrs. Duvet gestured for me to come further inside. “I just made some cookies. Would you like one?”

  “I never say no to a cookie,” I said as we wound our way to a small living room with a view of a neat, square garden that was currently under mounds of white, but would be a pretty little view in the spring. “Thanks.”

  Before heading into the kitchen, she paused in the doorway and leaned against it. “I feel like I’m being rude again, but we didn’t have an appointment, did we? Am I forgetting something?”

  “No, not at all. I just have a few quick questions to ask you.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” I said. “But I’m sort of helping the police a bit with the Grant Mark murder, and I’m in charge of gathering alibis. I don’t suppose you could give me one for your husband on the day of Grant’s murder?”

  She frowned. “That was... Friday?”

  I nodded.

  “I imagine he was at work, but you’d have to ask his secretary. He left at eight thirty in the morning as usual and arrived home around six thirty. I didn’t think anything of it.” She stepped closer into the room. “Do the police suspect him of something?”

  “Like I said, I’m just the help,” I lied. “I don’t know all that much except they’re trying to get the alibis of everyone who might have known Grant.”

  “Ah, ok,” she said. “Though I don’t think my husband knew Grant all that well, but I imagine the police are just being thorough.”

  “Yes, exactly.” I hesitated, then blurted out my next question. “Did your husband drive to bingo last night?”

  Her hands folded across her chest, her lips pursing in thought. “Yes, why?”

  “Just wondering. Were you with him?”

  “At the event, yes.”

  “In the car, I mean, after the event.”

  “No—we took separate cars. He had to come straight from the office. It’s a busy season, so he works some weekends.”

  “Where was your husband this morning?”

  “This morning? Nowhere. He worked from home for an early morning meeting and just left to go to the office.”

  “Ah. Were you home all morning?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I just walked in the door,” she said. “I was at the grocery store. Let me quickly grab those cookies for you while they’re hot.”

  I frowned, realizing that the person who I’d seen pulling into the driveway wasn’t Mr. Duvet as I’d thought. It was Brenda squealing into the garage in her husband’s car—or the car they shared. My shoulders stiffened.

  Something was wrong.

  Brenda had offered me hot cookies—cookies fresh from the oven—yet there was no scent of recently baked anything. No melting chocolate chips, no gooey dough, no sugary scent of melting butter and goodness drifting in the air. My nose was never wrong.

  And the cookies, I realized, were the least harmful of Brenda’s lies.

  I scrambled for my pepper spray as the pieces clicked into place, then remembered my purse was sitting in the passenger’s seat of the truck. It had been Brenda who’d tried to run me over last night, and Brenda who’d picked up the bag of shoes from behind the register—she must have been at my mother’s shop that day with the bridal party, only nobody had thought to mention her presence. There was still a tiny chance I was wrong about all of this, but I doubted it. Everything felt right.

  Or rather, wrong. Very, very wrong.

  The best I could do for a weapon was a small perfume bottle and a can of shimmer powder in my pocket. While excellent for accenting cheekbones and casting a light, floral scent around my body, neither of those items felt exactly like a weapon of choice. I stood and made my way toward the hallway, trying to discreetly thumb through my recent contacts to ring Cooper.

  “That’s not a cookie,” I said at the sight of a gun in Brenda’s hand. “What’s wrong? Put that thing down.”

  “I know you’re figuring things out as I speak,” she said. “You might have come to find my husband, but I can’t have you leaving.”

  “How did you know Grant?” I still clasped the perfume bottle in one hand and the powder in the other, and my fingers rested on my phone. I dared not move to complete a call just yet, for fear she’d take the phone away. She seemed too focused on the gun to have noticed the phone. “I don’t understand what your motive was to kill Grant.”

  “There wasn’t one,” she said, her hands shaking as she held the gun on me. “I didn’t want to kill him. At least, I didn’t intend to—not that he didn’t deserve what he had coming to him.”

  “He might have been a creep, but that doesn’t give you the right to kill him,” I said. “What did he do to you?”

  “Nothing to me, but to Eliza and Lana. He was ruining Lana’s wedding, and she complained about it nonstop.” Brenda gave a huge eye roll. “And the whole town knows that the marvelous Bridget Duvet gives her girls whatever they want. How am I supposed to compete with that?”

  “What does Grant have to do with Duvet family issues?”

  Brenda took a step further into the room, the gun wobbling dangerously as she kept it trained on me. “I thought if I could just meet up with Grant and give him a talking to, get him to step down from the wedding, maybe the girls would actually like me.”

  “This is about getting the Duvet girls to like you?”

  “I’m their stepmother! I’ve loved and cared for them for years, and I get nothing in return. Lana didn’t give me a single role in her wedding. Everything that my husband and I do for the girls is always: ‘Oh, thank you, Daddy!’ But what about me? Am I not part of the family now, too? I married their father!”

  “I’m sure it takes time,” I said. “We all know you’re not a killer, Brenda. If it was an accident, we can get you help. We’ll work with the police and everything will be okay. How did you get the shoes?”

  “The shoes were a complete coincidence,” Brenda said. “I bought a cute picture frame at your mother’s shop, and it was in the same size bag as the shoes. I grabbed the shoes on accident, and I didn’t realize it until I got home. I was actually on my way back to your mother’s store when I met up with Grant.”

  “And you had the shoes in the bag.”

  “Yes. A shame,” she said, “because I really liked that picture frame.”

  “What happened when you ran into Grant?”

  “I had asked Grant to meet in private. When we reached the rendezvous point, it turned out he thought I was interested in him.” Brenda shuddered. “When I turned down his romantic gestures, he started saying nasty things about the girls, and I just got so angry!”

  I could see the fury in Brenda’s eyes. It was clear she was sliding toward unhinged.

  “I took out the shoe because it was the only thing I had in my hand,” she said. “Then I swiped at him. I thought if I could just scare him enough, he might back o
ut of the wedding. I’d only meant to threaten him, not kill him—but...”

  “But you didn’t stop in time,” I said quietly. “And the heel landed in Grant’s throat.”

  Brenda’s eyes hardened. “After that, it became easier to cover things up rather than confess. I knew about the notes Patty wrote to Grant because she talks when she drinks too much, and nobody notices me anyway. It was a simple matter to take those notes from her purse and plant them in Grant’s hotel room. I just rented a room at the Blueberry Hotel and waited around until that bozo at the front desk left the master key unattended.”

  “And the shoe in my house,” I said. “That was you, too. And last night’s attempt to run over me.”

  “I knew you would put things together. Your suspicion of Becky, combined with her obvious distrust of you, was a nice distraction for a while, but I knew in time that would fade.” Brenda took another step closer. “I wish I didn’t have to do this.”

  “Brenda, you’re not a killer.”

  “I am now!” She hissed. “And I’ll kill again if it means I won’t be caught.”

  “Don’t do anything you’ll regret. Right now, you can claim Grant’s murder was an accident. But if you kill me with that gun, it’s no accident.”

  “Drop your phone and kick it over to me.”

  I did as she asked. But while I moved, I was finally able to hit the dial button on Cooper’s number. Flipping the phone upside down, I kicked it across the room after stalling for as long as possible.

  “Brenda, you already killed one man,” I repeated, loudly enough for Cooper to hear if he answered the phone. “Don’t make it two bodies.”

  “You already said that,” Brenda said, and then froze at the sound of a voice. A male voice, tinny and distant. Her face paled as we both glanced down at the phone on the floor. “What did you do?”

  Cooper had picked up!

  Brenda bent to retrieve the phone, and her concentration lapsed for the briefest of seconds. As soon as the gun’s barrel left the kill zone on my chest, I quickly uncapped the bottle of perfume and leapt sideways, away from the gun. I charged toward Brenda, tossing the sweet-smelling liquid straight at her eyes.