Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 2: Books 4-6

by Emily James

  But telling him no and making him stand around while Eddie checked Ahanti’s alarm system would be selfish. “Go ahead. I’ll text you when we’re done.”

  Eddie had arrived a few minutes before me. By the time Ahanti buzzed me in and I climbed the stairs, he already had her keypad panel pulled apart.

  This morning, Ahanti’s face had the long appearance of someone who hadn’t slept, and before I left for church, I’d noticed she wore the same clothes as yesterday. She also hadn’t wanted to talk and had declined my offer of breakfast out at IHOP, even though her favorite indulgent breakfast was their cupcake pancakes.

  I hadn’t thought she could possibly look worse, but she did. She still wore yesterday’s outfit, and she had the fidgety quality of someone who’d had twice the amount of caffeine that was healthy.

  She tilted her head to the side in a follow me gesture, and then practically pulled me into the bathroom. She turned on the tap like we were in some sort of spy movie. “I asked Eddie to check the panel for a bug too. I couldn’t stop thinking about it last night. If this guy got in here once, he could have been in here before. He might know what I’m saying because he’s listening in.” Her bottom lip sagged, and she glanced up at her light fixtures, then quickly away. “What if he has cameras, too?”

  My own stomach corkscrewed, and I pulled her into a hug to hide any reaction.

  She could be right. I should have thought of it sooner. We’d thought up a lot of ways her stalker could have knowledge of private communications. We’d talked about keystroke trackers and tapped phones. She couldn’t remember where she was when she made the overheard call or wrote the compromised email, so we’d considered her stalker was in Skin Canvas and overheard the call. Perhaps they sneaked a look at her computer while she had the email open and half written, and left it unattended.

  Now that we knew they had access to her apartment, we couldn’t cross off the idea that they’d had access all along.

  What that meant they’d seen…the room spun slightly, and I held Ahanti tighter. “We’ll figure this out. I swear it.”

  How was I ever going to come good on that promise? The one consolation was that her stalker clearly didn’t want to share her and so they wouldn’t post any still shots from a video around the internet.

  For the first time in a long time, I wanted my dad. I wanted him to take over and fix this somehow.

  My brain played a trick on me, conjuring my dad into the apartment. It sounded like Eddie was talking to another man out in the main room, but Ahanti hadn’t buzzed anyone else in, and there was no way Eddie would have done it without asking.

  Ahanti yanked away from me and lost so much color from her face you would have thought she’d donated blood three times in one day.

  She’d heard the second male voice as well.

  15

  Eddie didn’t sound upset, but no one else should be here. Even though I struggled to hear the voice clearly over the running water, I could tell it didn’t belong to either Geoff or Mark.

  I touched two fingers to Ahanti’s shoulder in a stay here gesture.

  Terrance stood next to Eddie, a set of keys still dangling from his hand.

  He glanced in my direction, and his too-white-to-be-natural smile split his face. “Hey. I was just telling Eddie I didn’t expect anyone to be back here. Ahanti said she was staying with you for a bit. Thought I’d stop in and water her plants.”

  It sounded reasonable. Sort of. Ahanti did have a collection of orchids and other high-maintenance plants along her window sills. When I was living next door, I’d been her designated waterer whenever she went out of town. She tended to leave more detailed instructions for her plants than most people left for their pets or children.

  On one hand, Terrance was thoughtful to think about them and how upset Ahanti would be if one of them died before she came back.

  On the other hand, it was kind of weird for him to come back to the scene of a former break-and-enter without permission. For all he knew, the police weren’t even done fingerprinting the place yet. She only got the call this morning.

  I caught a movement of color in my peripheral vision. Now that she’d turned off the tap, Ahanti must have recognized Terrance’s voice and felt safe enough to emerge.

  I was starting to wonder if that was the right call. I couldn’t get past the fact that he had a key, which meant easy access to her apartment anytime he wanted.

  Ahanti moved up beside me. Her gaze flickered from Eddie to Terrance to the keys in Terrance’s hand. “Did you ever leave those lying around?”

  Terrance flipped the keys up into his palm and closed his fingers around them. “Of course not. I’m not stupid. I got my car and apartment keys on here too.”

  My heart beat so fast and hard in my chest that it almost felt like it was hitting my ribs. Terrance’s motives for coming here might be as innocent as he wanted them to sound, but they might not. I needed to defuse this situation. Fast.

  Because if he were her real stalker, ticking him off right now was the worst possible thing we could do. Her stalker had left her what they clearly felt was a lovely present. They’d protected her. Ingratitude after that type of action could be a trigger for further violence.

  I brushed my fingers against Ahanti’s arm. “I’m sure he keeps his keys in his pocket like Mark does. He’d know if anyone snagged them from there.” I directed my mouth into a smile. If I thought hard enough about my mom, maybe I could manage one that looked as real as hers did even when I knew they were fake. “We’re going to stop in and take care of the plants, but I’ll make sure she’s never here alone. Thanks, though. Ahanti was just telling me how big a help it is to know that you’ve got the studio covered while she takes a few days off.”

  Ahanti and I hadn’t actually talked about her taking a few days off, but I didn’t want her going back to work alone with Terrance, given my newly born suspicion.

  And giving him that responsibility sounded reasonable while still stroking his ego. If he were the stalker, it should be enough to keep him from doing anything else crazy until we could find some evidence to hand over to the police. Hopefully enough evidence to get a warrant for his fingerprints and kitchen knives.

  His eyebrows twitched in a way that made me think he was deciding whether or not to frown.

  Ahanti shifted beside me, almost leaning against me as if her legs were fighting to keep her upright. “I don’t feel well.”

  Her face was still pale, but I couldn’t tell if she was saying that for show because I’d mentioned her taking a few days off or if she really felt unwell.

  I slid an arm around her waist and moved her toward the couch.

  Terrance raised a hand in the universal see-ya wave. “Take as long as you need. I can even call your clients and reschedule if you want.”

  He backed out the door.

  I helped Ahanti lower to the couch. When I looked up, Eddie towered right next to us. He still held the front of the alarm panel in his hand.

  My breath caught in my throat, and I coughed. Ahanti wasn’t the only one getting jumpy.

  “Are you alright?” he asked Ahanti.

  She’d slumped her whole body back against the couch cushions. She moved her head in an almost imperceptible shake.

  “Maybe you could come back and finish the check another time?” I said.

  He looked between us. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  Ahanti opened her eyes. Barely. They were still more like slits. “Thank you, but no. I have Nicole.”

  He held up the alarm panel. “I’ll put this back then.”

  I waited for him to finish and leave. As soon as the door clicked shut, I went and threw the deadbolt into place. This time I added the chain as well, since Terrance had the keys. We didn’t need any more surprise visitors.

  Ahanti had both hands resting on her chest when I got back. “Could this be about something else?”

  Her voice had a breathless quality to it, like she’d
been running. I’d been hoping she’d been putting on a show for the guys, but it didn’t seem like it. “What do you mean?”

  “Like maybe the person who sent the obsessive messages and the person who threatened Geoff aren’t the same person. Maybe that’s why we can’t make it all fit.”

  I hadn’t caught anything that would suggest we were dealing with separate people, but she must have figured out something I hadn’t. It wouldn’t be the first time I was looking in one direction and the real culprit was hiding in another. “You’ll have to explain that to me a little more.”

  She lowered her hands to her sides and shifted to face me. She kept her cheek leaned against the back of the couch. “Terrance…he and Geoff never…sometimes I’d loan Terrance money and he wouldn’t always pay it back.” Once she got going, she spit the words out fast. “Geoff didn’t like it. It was the only thing we really argued about. Terrance probably guessed that I’d eventually give in to what Geoff wanted and stop loaning him cash.”

  Ahanti stopped talking so suddenly that I jerked forward, afraid she’d passed out, but her eyes were still open. She didn’t seem to want to state the final conclusion. I’d caught up anyway.

  Maybe the recent events were about breaking up her marriage rather than stalking her. I didn’t want to ask how much she’d been loaning him. It had to be quite a bit or Geoff wouldn’t have objected so strongly. He wasn’t a stingy man. I knew he gave generously to the American Cancer Society and No Kid Hungry.

  So the fact that Terrance had been borrowing a lot of money from Ahanti and that he had access to her apartment raised a whole new battery of questions. “Do you have any idea why he might have killed Cary?

  She went pastier than someone with her skin tone should have been able to.

  “Assuming he did,” I hastily amended.

  “He might have owed Cary money, too. It’s not like either of them would have told me if he did.”

  We could sort out the motive for Cary later if we found a clear connection between Terrance and the burned photo of Geoff. What we needed now was evidence one way or the other. Otherwise, how was Ahanti ever supposed to comfortably return to working alongside him?

  We could start with whether we could see a difference in what we knew the real stalker sent and what might have been done by Terrance. I pulled out my phone and brought up my photos. One thing I could say for my dad—he’d trained me well. I was happy to pass along the stalker’s communications to the police because I’d already made my own records.

  I pulled up the photo of the message about Geoff. Unlike all the others, the sender had written this message in red marker rather than the generic blue ink of the earlier missives.

  Ahanti leaned in. “Why change to red marker? That could mean it was written by someone else.”

  “It could also mean the stalker didn’t have a pen handy or that he intentionally chose the marker because it seemed more threatening.”

  I flipped back to the other photos. The writing looked sort of the same but it was hard to tell. The writer clearly wasn’t used to trying to write clearly with a fat marker. We’d need the eyes of a handwriting expert to be sure. Back home, I could have turned to Erik or some other member of the Fair Haven police department to call on an expert. Here, Detective DeGoey wasn’t going to share his results with me.

  But my parents had resources I didn’t.

  I texted my mom, asking if she could recommend someone, even though she wouldn’t write back while at coffee with Mark. One of my mom’s mantras was never divide your attention because it will always halve your results. That, and she found it rude when people paid more attention to their cell phones than the person they were with.

  I zoomed in on the handwriting on the note about Cary. It was written on one of Ahanti’s old pieces of scrap paper using a green pencil crayon she’d left laying out. The stalker truly must have expected to find her in her apartment and to be able to deliver his token of affection to her.

  That meant he was escalating to the point where he was ready to make open contact with her. It was a dangerous moment in this kind of situation. I’d already told Ahanti that if she did come face to face with her stalker, she needed to play along with his delusion until she could get safely away. Hopefully Ahanti was able to do that.

  I swiped back to one of the notes Ahanti received at the studio. They looked to be by the same hand as whoever left the knife.

  “The new note about Cary looks like a match for your original stalker.”

  Ahanti touched my phone’s screen, moving back and forth between the two. “That’s a little hope at least. Isn’t it? I mean, I’ve known Terrance for like a decade. I can see him pulling some crap, trying to break Geoff and me up, but he’s no killer.”

  Having a copy of her key didn’t mean he put the note in her apartment. Correlation, as my dad loved to say, isn’t the same as causation. Just because people who smoked also tended to have high levels of alcohol consumption didn’t mean that smoking caused those people to drink more alcoholic beverages.

  “Has he tried anything else to break you two up?”

  She stroked her fingers through her hair, like the feel of it soothed her. “Yeah. It didn’t seem like a big deal before, but he liked to make nasty comments about Geoff not even letting me give him a tattoo and how it wasn’t supportive. Stuff like that.”

  Frustration built inside me until I wanted to throw my phone across the room. If Terrance had sent the single message because he didn’t want his money fountain to dry up, then he might have unintentionally escalated her real stalker. Her stalker only killed Cary because he seemed like a growing threat to Ahanti and her happiness.

  The real problem was, the evidence we had could be interpreted two ways, and we couldn’t know which was correct without knowing if the handwriting on the threat against Geoff matched all the rest. I’d compared handwriting samples before and been able to tell when they matched, but the different writing tools, different colors, and closeness of the styles meant I couldn’t be sure this time.

  My mom still hadn’t texted me back, but the coffee shop she’d suggested to Mark was about a fifteen-minute walk from here. “Why don’t we meet up with my mom and Mark? I’m hoping she’ll know someone we can take these handwriting samples to for some answers. Are you feeling up to a walk?”

  Ahanti nodded. “Whatever it takes. I can’t handle much more of this.”

  Just in case, we double-checked that all her windows were locked and that the door was secure behind us.

  Ahanti also pushed the apartment building exterior door shut behind us. There’d always been a notice reminding residents to do so, warning them not to allow anyone they didn’t know into the building. I know I hadn’t been as careful about it as I should when I lived there. I couldn’t have been the only one.

  “I know it’s Sunday,” a girl’s voice said behind us, “but I just wanted to talk to you for a minute and see if you’d change your mind.”

  Ahanti and I turned like we were synchronized swimmers. The young woman Ahanti had turned away from Skin Canvas the other day waited on the sidewalk.

  Ahanti pressed both palms into the line where her forehead met her hair. “I’m not going to change my mind until you turn twenty-five, Jana. If you want a sleeve tattoo that badly that you don’t want to wait, I’m sure you could find another artist with different rules.”

  Jana folded her hands into a praying pose. “I know I could, but I don’t want another artist. I want you to do it. I’ve loved your art since the first time I saw some of your designs online. I even printed them off and have them on my walls.”

  If I’d been Ahanti, I might have given in, but I’d always been a soft touch.

  “Nikki,” Ahanti’s voice had a struggling-to-breathe quality to it. “I need help.”

  My first thought was that Terrance had come back with a knife. Or that she was about to give in to Jana’s request, and she didn’t want to.

  Then I turned to face h
er.

  She had one hand up to her chest. “I feel funny. I need to—”

  She sank to the ground.

  A jolt shot through my chest, and I dropped to my knees hard, reaching for her to keep her head from hitting the pavement if she passed out. Pain careened through my knee caps.

  Jana stared down at us, both hands pressed to her mouth.

  “Call 911,” I said. It actually might have been more like a bark, but I had bigger things to worry about than hurting her feelings.

  I helped Ahanti lean back into me. Her skin was stickier than it should have been, even given the summer heat. We’d just stepped out of the air conditioning. “What’s going on? Talk to me.”

  She took so long to answer that I wasn’t even sure she was still conscious. “My hands. Numb. And chest hurts. Can’t catch my breath.”

  She was too young and fit for a heart attack. Could someone have poisoned her?

  Mentally I ran through everything she’d touched since I joined her. I’d touched all of it as well except for her tap, and someone couldn’t have poisoned a tap. But we hadn’t had breakfast or lunch together. If she’d eaten or drank anything, her stalker might have been able to sneak something into her food. For all we knew, her stalker was the takeout guy, and she’d gone back to the same place.

  No, that couldn’t be it. Her stalker wouldn’t try to kill her without first attempting to make contact. In his fantasy world, he loved her and she belonged with him. Ahanti hadn’t yet rejected him.

  Then what was going on? And where was the stinking ambulance? If only Mark were here, he’d know the best way to stabilize her until the paramedics arrived. “Help’s coming.”

  I looked up at Jana for confirmation. She still had the phone to her ear, talking to the dispatcher, obviously trying to describe what was happening. She nodded.

  They were on the way, but as hard as I strained, I didn’t hear sirens. I had to do something. “Try to take deep breaths with me.”

  16

  Mark and Geoff had met up with me at the hospital by the time the doctor came to speak with me.