Wicked in Wonderland: Strawberry Éclair Murder

by Lotta Smith

  “Rest assured, we’ll handle this situation,” Jess promised her, taking the tray and spoon, and then went out from the sliding glass door. Kylie and Beverly joined her.

  The glass door opened to the small backyard. I noticed the yard was devoid of plants. No flowers, no vines, not even weeds or dead leaves. It could have been described as pristine if only the ground was covered by something like terra cotta tiles, but the bare soil was visible.

  “Holly, what kind of herbicides are you using?” I said. “My parents’ home has this really small garden, but a little soil is always enough to be a farm for ugly weeds. They’d love, love, love it if they could get rid of the nasty little plants.”

  “I’d love to know the brand of the herbicides, too,” Fiona chimed in. “I grew up in the country, and I have a feeling that I might go back to country living sometime in the future. But the wild, unruly weeds and other unwanted plants are a part of the biggest headaches in the country. I’d love to know if there’s something like a magic potion to get rid of them.”

  “Gotcha!” Jess’s voice was heard from outside, and everyone’s attention was captured by her and the naughty rabbit.

  “Good thing he’s secured,” Rick said. For some unknown reason, a hint of a wicked grin was threatening to appear at a corner of his lips. I wondered if he was the one who helped the rabbit escape, even though I wasn’t sure if he had the opportunity to let the animal loose. “Still, why do you lock him in the work studio? You’ve got the custom rabbit doors and everything.”

  “That’s because right now, the house is completely packed with the flowers,” Holly explained. “Framboise loves playing with them, and sometimes he ends up nibbling them here and there. Some plants can be toxic for rabbits, and I don’t want to risk his life.”

  “So that’s why he’s being kept in that room.” Rick nodded.

  “Right.” Holly let out a small sigh. “The work studio is the biggest room without a rabbit door. Perhaps I should assign him to some other room, but he likes to hop around, and he loves to have company.”

  Jess came back inside with Framboise in her arms. Despite the reputation of hating to be held, the rabbit was unmoving. Eyes closed and ears flattened, he seemed to be asleep. “I’m going to move him back to the work studio.” She went out of the salon.

  “He’s tired, I guess,” Kylie cooed.

  “Of course.” Beverly nodded. “It’s been more than a week since he’s been imprisoned, and the first exercise in forever is the most tiresome.”

  “So, Holly, what’s your secret for keeping the garden free of weeds?” Rick changed the subject.

  “Oh no, there’s no secret.” Holly shook her head. “The only method that works like magic is the mixture of patience and diligence, topped with hard work.”

  “Seriously? Holly, that’s a lot of work.” Fiona rolled her eyes. “Do you manually remove unwanted plants from the garden?”

  “Yes I do. But that’s something learned from a past failure. Last year, I didn’t tend to the garden, especially in the backyard, but I freaked out when I found the place literally covered by chameleon plants.”

  “Wow, if I were you, I’d definitely outsource the garden projects.” Fiona winked.

  “That has definitely crossed my mind, but maintaining this house in pristine condition is one of the important tasks for the manager.” Holly offered a gentle smile. “Outsourcing has crossed my mind, and of course using herbicides has. Then again, the garden is our little guy’s hunting ground, so I decided to be his groundkeeper.”

  While she talked, Rick intensely studied the garden. “Interesting… very interesting,” he muttered.

  “Excuse me?” Holly seemed to be puzzled, but Rick stood up.

  “Let me take a look at it,” he said and went outside. Brian, Fiona, and I followed him.

  CHAPTER 10

  As soon as Rick went out in the garden, he walked straight to the corner Framboise was heading for a few minutes earlier.

  “Hmm… I’ve never seen a garden kept so devoid of weeds and so on,” Brian commented.

  “Exactly,” Rick replied. “Having lost her sibling just a week ago, she should have been busy with the funeral arrangements and a lot more, yet she bothered to take care of the garden.” He picked up the metal spoon Jess had left lying on the ground.

  “Are you going to dig up the garden?” My eyes widened. I could assume his intention was to use the spoon as some kind of scoop, but I couldn’t help asking. Besides, I’d been watching too much bad TV, and whenever someone dug up the garden, I had this wild expectation and fear of finding a corpse in the ground.

  “Of course,” he said, squatting. “Obviously there’s some reason that she doesn’t want the weeds to pop out from the soil.”

  “Or maybe it’s about the weeds popping up in an uneven manner.” Brian found a small shovel under the garden table and joined Rick with digging.

  “Exactly,” Rick said matter-of-factly. “So, we interviewed Eve before coming here, but her story and the situation here never really matched.”

  “What do you mean?” Brian furrowed his eyebrows. “You mean she was lying and covering up for someone?”

  “Not really,” Rick and I said in unison.

  “All right, Mandy. Go ahead,” Rick offered.

  “Okay,” I said, recalling my conversation with the ghost. “I didn’t think she was lying, but there were way too many discrepancies between the story about her personality and the relationships with others she’d described and what appear to be the facts. The gap between her story and the perceptions from others was too big, as if they were talking about totally different people. Eve was determined that her assistants, Frank the editor, and Kathryn Anderson hated her guts to the point of wanting to kill her, but when we met them, they didn’t seem to hate her that much. On the contrary, everyone seemed to have sort of liked her in their own ways.”

  “Right,” Rick agreed. “And there was this comment from the deceased about ‘having no one I can believe and rely on, except for my own family.’ Then again, assuming from the track record of her misperceptions and everything, that could just be her opinion and no one else’s.”

  “Hey, Rick, is that why you let Framboise escape from the work studio?” I asked.

  “Who, me?” He tilted his head to the side in mock confusion. “All I did was forget to keep the door shut for a little while when the assistants were focused on talking to you.”

  “All right. It was sensible to have the rabbit escape from the door rather than from the window on the second floor.” I shrugged.

  “If you chose the upstairs window, the scenario would have changed,” Fiona said.

  “What do you mean?” I turned back at her.

  “Rabbits are notorious for getting fractures all the time. Their bones are so vulnerable, and they often break a leg or two just by jumping off the furniture or something lower onto the hard floor. So, if he’d jumped to the ground from the upstairs, he might be more suitable for something like rabbit stew rather than a pet.”

  “Oh my God, seriously?” I gasped. “By the way, please don’t look at him like food. Okay, so his name is Framboise, which means raspberry, but he’s not food.”

  “I know, I know.” She flashed a wide grin.

  “And Alicia and I used to beg my parents to buy a rabbit for us as a pet,” I went on. “Still, considering the vulnerability of the creature, it’s for the best that Mom always dismissed our request. Had we actually had a rabbit, we would have been so excited and it probably would have died in a day or two. That’s terrible, you know. Besides, we had this nasty tendency to forget about our responsibilities. When we had a pet turtle—”

  Brian cleared his throat. “Okay, I can almost picture the poor turtle, but what else triggered you to free the rabbit?”

  “That’s the rabbit’s toilet,” Rick replied.

  “The toilet? Where was it?” I said, feeling awkward to learn that I visited the room with a rabbit
’s toilet. I was slightly germaphobic, and I was not comfortable staying in the same room with animal toilets. I thought cats and dogs were adorable, but whenever I imagined how to take care of their urine and stools, I got depressed and gave up on the idea of having pets in the first place.

  “You didn’t see that?” Rick said, smoothing the frown between my eyes with the tips of his fingers. “Perhaps it wasn’t visible from where you were. The toilet was set up underneath the desk Eve used. Can you believe that? Having the toilet in the same room where the assistants work.”

  “Eww,” I groaned. “In retrospect, the work studio smelled like something foul.”

  “I don’t mean to be a spoilsport, but is it even possible to toilet train a rabbit?” Fiona asked.

  “I don’t know, but assuming from the presence of the toilet with the rabbit poop, I think some of them could be trainable,” Brian replied.

  “Exactly,” Rick agreed. “Holly mentioned having the rabbit door on the bathroom door, which means that the rabbit toilet used to be set up in the bathroom.”

  “Yeah, people with cats tend to have the kitty toilet in their bathroom,” Brian said. “Personally, I don’t feel comfortable sharing the toilet with someone belonging to a different species.”

  “You mean like the alien?” Rick interjected.

  “No. I’m talking about the cats.”

  “Okay. Anyway, that’s why I started wondering why the rabbit was kept in the work studio,” Rick concluded.

  “All right then, so having lots of flowers all over the house wasn’t the real reason,” I muttered.

  “Of course not.” Rick shook his head. “The flowers in the entrance overflowing to the stairs looked massive, but they could be stored in one of the rooms, like Eve’s bedroom. But she chose to keep the flowers in the entrance, for the purpose of having a plausible reason to keep the rabbit in the work studio. Is that right, Holly?” he asked, not even looking up as he continued to dig.

  Without a word, she stood by the sliding glass door. Her face was unreadable, but she looked pale.

  “So, what are we digging for in the first place?” Brian asked. “I have the feeling that I’m getting closer to something bloody. Hey, don’t tell me you’re looking for another corpse. I can live with discovering a skeleton, but finding a corpse with his or her flesh still decomposing isn’t high on my to-do list.”

  “Come on, we’re not dealing with a serial killer.” Rick snorted.

  As they kept digging, Jess came back from upstairs. “What are they doing?” she questioned.

  “Well,” Frank began, but he stopped short. After a few seconds of silence, he glanced at Beverly, but even she couldn’t provide any help.

  “It’s complicated,” Kylie muttered, furrowing her eyebrows.

  Rick went on. “In case the killer happens to be one of the residents here, the murder weapon should be still here. Her purse wasn’t found at the crime scene, but Eve was almost immediately ID’d, which means the killer might not have had enough time to get rid of the weapon and the ID. Under normal circumstances, it could have taken a day or two to identify her as Eve had no criminal record, and her phone and ID were missing. But unfortunately, she was clutching the bakery bag, and the police ID’d her immediately. And—” At the sound of his spoon hitting something that made a rustling sound, he stopped talking and reached for his jacket pocket.

  Gesturing for Brian to stop digging, he put on a pair of plastic gloves and brushed away the soil surrounding that special something coming from the ground.

  “What’s this?” Brian leaned in to take a better look, but he kept his hands away so as not to contaminate the potential evidence with his fingerprints.

  It was a black plastic bag, like the ones used by grocery stores, and as Rick opened it, a ball of navy fabric came out.

  “Voila,” he said and spread it open, revealing a dark, huge stain that covered one side, smudging the sleeves of a raincoat.

  “That’s Eve’s!” Jess gasped, and then she covered her mouth with both hands.

  Then Rick picked up a kitchen knife with brown stains, along with a little Valentino purse with dark brown stains.

  I wasn’t carrying luminol spray, but I was certain the dark stains came from blood.

  Beverly muttered, “Oh my God,” for the first time, not sounding nonchalant. And Kylie looked up at the sky as if she didn’t believe her eyes.

  Holly stared at the garden as Rick pulled out the purse’s contents. Her eyes were vacant. After a while of silence, she crumpled to the floor.

  Rick took out a phone and a wallet. From the wallet came a credit card under the name of Evelyn Wellington.

  “Holly…? Why…?” Frank said hoarsely. His voice was trembling, and he looked as if he had been stabbed in the heart. “Why didn’t you…?”

  Holly seemed to be attempting to say something with her trembling lips, but she didn’t. Clenching her hands into fists, she shook her head in silence.

  “It’s getting colder. Let’s get inside,” Rick said, placing the evidence by the hole he’d dug with Brian.

  * * *

  Just a few minutes after Rick made a call to the NYPD CSI, officers in uniform and the detectives in charge of the case arrived. It was late at night, but they were busily working in the garden.

  “Why don’t you all go back to work?” Rick suggested, prompting the assistants and Brian to go upstairs.

  Blankly looking outside from the window, Holly sat in silence.

  While Captain Stevens, who was in charge of the case, was being filled in as to the circumstances of finding the evidence from Rick, one of the CSI people came by.

  “The assistants confirmed that one of the kitchen knives is missing from the collection,” she said.

  “All right.” The captain stood up and went for the kitchen with the CSI tech.

  Multiple officers and detectives went past Holly, but I doubted if her eyes saw anything at all.

  With the evidence located and the most plausible suspect identified, Rick and I could have left, but we were still hanging around. We were clueless about the motive of killing Eve, and I couldn’t tell Eve what had happened to her without having the slightest idea about why. Courtesy of the detective handling the case, we were allowed to stay and talk to Holly.

  Rick approached her as she sat on the floor, looking blankly at nothing. “Can you tell us the reason you did this?”

  As he spoke to her, her shoulders twitched a little, and then she looked at him. I came by their side as a gesture that I was listening, too.

  “I’m having a hard time coming up with possible motives for killing your sister,” Rick said. “You’re too smart to kill her for money.”

  Holly shut her eyes, then opened them. When she started to speak, she was back to her well-composed Holly.

  “I knew she was coming home with a strawberry éclair for me as a gift, as a token for ‘Look, I’m sorry about what I said.’ Whenever we argued, she always came home with one. Even when it was past midnight, she used to come home with my favorite treat—or rather, what she believed was something I couldn’t resist—fully knowing that the pastry has an extremely short shelf life.”

  “Okay.” Rick nodded encouragingly.

  “I got a text from her, telling me she was on her way home,” Holly continued. “So I calculated the time of her arrival, and then I went to that alley. I was lurking behind one of the buildings, waiting for her to come by…”

  As she explained in a calm voice devoid of emotion, I recalled it was raining that night. In my head, I pictured Holly waiting for her little sister, clutching a kitchen knife. Like her, I had a little sister, but I couldn’t imagine myself lurking in the darkness with a firm will to murder her. Perhaps that must have something to do with the fact that I loved her, and I didn’t want my young nieces to lose their mother.

  Rick was silent as she spoke. Except for occasional small nods to indicate he was listening, he was using his silence quite effectively
.

  Once she started to speak, something seemed to have snapped inside her.

  When the silence stretched for about a minute, she took a deep breath and whispered, “I… couldn’t take it anymore. I was… tired of being the invisible shadow behind my talented, millionaire sister.”

  “I think I can understand a little bit about your feelings,” I said. “I have a little sister named Alicia. We’re different types of people, but it’s absolutely normal to have some sort of sibling rivalry.”

  “You don’t understand.” Holly shook her head. “It’s not like I was jealous. I was really glad for her success. She used to be a wimpy kid, often being bullied, but now she was the hottest graphic novelist. I congratulated her—not just superficially but from the bottom of my heart. Except there was a teensy little issue: she had to keep me as her manager.”

  “Oh?” Rick tilted his head to the side.

  “Under the fancy job title, my tasks have been keeping the house clean, laundry, cooking for not only just the two of us but for the assistants, managing the receipts, keeping the garden free of weeds, and cleaning that fucking rabbit’s toilet,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “Couldn’t you just ask her to hire someone else for the job?” Rick asked calmly.

  “I did.” She let out a deep sigh. “Eve wasn’t comfortable outsourcing each task to multiple vendors, like a chef for the cooking, a laundromat for the laundry, and a handyman for grounds keeping. She believed in assigning everything for an all-around player. Actually, she’d once tried someone else, by referral from a person she’d trusted, but within a year the new manager embezzled something like a million dollars or so and got away to Costa Rica or somewhere just as exotic and devoid of extradition treaty. You haven’t seen her, and you might not know her naivete, but she was a kind of person who wouldn’t notice embezzlement before the amount snowballed into that much.”

  “Okay.” Rick nodded. He didn’t say, “She definitely sounds like that,” mostly because we weren’t supposed to know her sister.