by Mary Hughes
The deputy had apparently been hiding around the corner. Gosh shucky darn it, should’ve listened to my husband’s intuition and trusted his nose.
Parker’s gun was in his hand but thankfully pointed at the ground. So we weren’t to the wanted-dead-or-alive stage yet.
Behind us, all three trolls were snickering. Julian’s jaw clenched.
“How did you get here?” I blurted. “We heard you drive away.”
A corner of the deputy’s mouth tilted up. It made him seem more human, less Law. “When we got to the end of the driveway, the commissioner flipped on his siren and drove away. I parked the cruiser and hoofed it back.”
“Tricky.” I nudged Julian.
“You’re not here to take me,” he said.
“But I’m not.” The deputy looks mildly surprised.
“Wait, what?”
“You aren’t?” Julian said.
“I’m not here to arrest Mr. Emerson,” Parker repeated, and it wasn’t compulsion making him say that.
What made it real was when the trolls stopped snickering. “Hey,” the truck said. “Then why’d we bother calling you to tell you he was here?”
I turned my back to the troll…and scratched my spine with my middle finger.
Julian said, “Why are you here, then?”
“I got a courtesy call,” Parker said. “From the Meiers Corners police department. Apparently a Detective Strongwell has new evidence, but she’s only sharing it with you. I want that information. But the only way I could get it was finding you.”
“So you lured us out of hiding.”
Tricky indeed. “Why should we share?” I said. “What’ll stop you from arresting Julian right after we tell?”
He turned his quick, dark eyes on me. “Preliminary DNA analysis came back on the blood under the vic’s fingernails. It’s female.”
Not Julian, yay—but also not the annoying trolls. Serious boo-ness.
But of my suspects, only two were female, the ex-wife and Bessy.
Or, considering the deputy’s black gaze, there was a third suspect. Me.
Julian got it before I did, or as he’d probably say “realized the implications”, because he released my elbow to flare bigger in front of me, glaring at Parker. “My wife did not do this.” His tone was heated.
His face was starting to look a little heated too. Angry, yes, but also too long in the sun.
The trolls renewed chortling didn’t help.
Since I couldn’t come right out and say, “Hey deputy, my hubby’s about to burst into flames, so unless you want to break out the marshmallows, can we take this inside?” I had to quick think of another excuse.
“Julian, I’m getting dehydrated. Maybe we can do this in our cabin, over a glass of OJ?”
My husband was instantly solicitous. “Of course. I should have thought of it myself.” He retook my elbow and steered me toward our cabin.
“Stop them,” the truck said to the deputy. “You can’t let them get away.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job.” Parker gave him a stern look. “Maybe it’s time for you to bring out that special license for me to see in the daylight.”
“Um…”
“I didn’t think so.” Parker jogged after us, catching up as we crossed the bridge. “Most of the slashing was premortem. Frankly, your wife is too small to have done that much damage.”
I was between being relieved and insulted when my phone tweedled, the theme from Dragnet—what can I say, I’m on a retro kick.
“Speaking of Detective Strongwell. Just a mo’”. I pulled out my phone as we walked. “Elena, ’sup?”
“Liese called me about the cage. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Sorry, yeah. Things got a little tight, but we managed. Parker says you have some 411?” Some info. “Why’d you call him, not me?”
“Because he put out an APB on Julian. I have an alert when anything goes out on one of our guys. I phoned Parker to find out what was going on and to maybe give him a reason not to shoot you both on sight.”
We got to our cabin. Julian let us in.
“It worked,” I said. “Though Parker’s already pretty convinced it’s not us. What’s your info?”
“The ex, Emma Caldwell. DMV puts her at five-one, one-ten, blond. And get this. She’s beneficiary for Caldwell’s life insurance.”
“Thanks.”
As Julian got down three glasses—Bruce was hiding out in the bedroom—I relayed the info to Parker. As I talked Julian took pitchers of juice and water from the refrigerator and poured refreshments, his color already faded back to normal.
“Good work,” Parker said. “I knew Bessy was Caldwell’s ex, but we hadn’t gotten the beneficiary info yet.”
My spine iced. “Bessy?”
“Full name Emma Elizabeth Caldwell.”
Julian stopped pouring, one eyebrow raised in query.
I shook my head. “I met her. I liked her. Having met Caldwell too, I’d guess it was self-defense.”
“Tell the deputy your look-alike theory.” Julian finished pouring my juice and handed me the glass.
“You do look like her.” Parker gazed at me with shrewd eyes. “And your husband argued with Caldwell because Caldwell was threatening you. You think he attacked Bessy thinking she was you?”
“It’s a theory.” I sipped juice.
“So she has not one, but two possible motives.” Parker started for the door. “I’ll want to have a word with her.”
“Wait,” Julian said in his v-voice. “We’ll come along.”
Parker paused.
“We can help. Besides, she may need a lawyer.”
“Good idea,” I said. “But can I have breakfast first? John-Paul George Ringo Emerson is starving.”
Julian’s head turned to me, that weird liquid swivel that’s all vampire. “We are not weighing our child down with four names.”
“Nickname, ‘Beatles’?” I grinned. “Get it?”
He knew the vampy voice didn’t work on me and was just using it to show how annoyed he was, and frankly, he was super cute when annoyed.
“Nixie, please.” He briefly closed his eyes.
“I suppose it won’t hurt to have you along,” Parker said. “Got any coffee?”
“I’ll start it.” I filled the pot with water and started scooping coffee into the filter. “You like Freddy Mercury better?”
“I like Parker,” Parker said.
“You rejected Ethelred,” Julian muttered as he got eggs, milk, butter and green pepper from the fridge and started an omelet.
“Because you rejected Spike.” I paused on scoop five. “Hey, Deputy Parker. Do you like your coffee strong enough to peel paint, or strong enough to conquer galaxies?”
“Keep scooping until your arm gets tired.”
“Got it.”
After breakfast Parker took the lead in the cruiser, and Julian and I followed in our shielded sedan, me driving. The fledgling stayed behind.
I was surprised Olyeo didn’t lead the charge for the potential bust, or even show up, considering the political currency he could’ve gained. Maybe the terror of having a suspected murderer alone with him in his car had soured him on the whole law-and-order thing.
Bessy lived in an old farmhouse converted into a duplex, her brother Roy on the other side.
She had the front door open before we even got out of the car. She invited us in, wiping her hands on a bright chicken-covered dishtowel, oddly conventional in contrast to the nose stud and tats. “I know what you’re here for. Keep your voices down. I don’t want to wake the kids.”
This north woods punker successfully dealt with kids, plural? Maybe there was hope for me yet.
Julian was staring at her. I nudged him.
He shook his head as if coming back from someplace weird. “She looks so much like you.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Parker stood in that stiff-legged cop stance, the one that’s
full of authority but Elena tells me is just balancing the weight of the duty belt. “Bessy Caldwell. I have questions about the murder of your ex-husband.”
“Jack Parker, shame on you.” She planted fists on hips in defiant return. “What, you think because he said I killed our marriage, that I killed him for real?”
That triggered a memory for me. Caldwell said that Guns and Polkas had something good and strong, and that I’d killed it. Understanding dawned. What if it wasn’t Caldwell mistaking Bessy for me?
What if it was the other way around?
Caldwell may have been angry about me and the band—but he was more angry about Bessy and his marriage. I was a convenient target.
“You knew the jerk, Jack.” She didn’t say jerk. “It was only a matter of time before someone did this to him.”
“I knew him.” Parker’s tone softened. “But how I feel about the deceased doesn’t matter. My job is to find who killed him. You wanted him dead.”
“A lot of people did,” she muttered.
“That’s as may be. I have to ask you, Bessy—where were you yesterday between one and five p.m.?”
“Yesterday afternoon? My kids were at a sleepover, so I made lunch plans with a friend at the Thunder Tap. I waited there, but my friend called and asked to change it to dinner. We had dinner and sat drinking until closing. You can ask any regular. I was there from noon straight through to two a.m.”
I nearly pumped air. My twin had an alibi.
My fist slowly dropped. But the woman who’d canceled lunch plans didn’t. “What time did Scowly finally get to the tavern?”
Bessy gave me a puzzled glance. “You mean Suelle? Before dinner. I guess around five…oh shipwreck.” She didn’t say shipwreck either.
“Suelle Connfry?” Parker’s voice was sharp.
Her gaze whipped to his. “Suelle couldn’t have done it. Not my friend. She’d have no reason to kill Caldwell.”
Suddenly I had what Julian calls an epiphany and I call an ahah! “Bessy, who is Scowly’s—I mean Suelle’s baby’s father?”
Bessy turned her gaze on me, eyes full of fire, ready to do battle for her friend.
But as my question penetrated, the fire died. “I…I don’t know.”
Chapter Fifteen
Bessy shook her head. “I don’t know who fathered Suelle’s baby. But it can’t be who you’re thinking.”
“Sure it can,” I said. “If you and Caldwell had kids…” I left it hanging. Her kids were proof Caldwell had been physically capable of fatherhood, although it didn’t say jack shizzle about his fitness as a dad.
“She heard me talk about him while we were still married. She wouldn’t have made the mistake of falling for the jerk.”
Parker said, “Caldwell did have a reputation with the ladies.”
“She’s my friend,” Bessy said stubbornly.
Bessy was loyal. I liked that about her. But since I was the only other “viable candidate” as my lawyerly hubby might say, we needed to push past loyalty to truth. “Look, just answer me one question, as honestly as you can. Could Caldwell be Suelle’s baby’s father or not?”
“Well…” Bessy looked away, her face drawn with reluctance. “She does act strangely whenever I talk about him.” Her gaze came back to Parker, and it was almost pleading. “But that doesn’t mean he’s the father. Even if he is, it doesn’t mean she killed him. Do you have to arrest her?”
Parker shook his head. “I have to talk to her. Don’t worry, Bessy. I’m just after the truth. If she’s innocent, I won’t arrest her.”
Bessy didn’t look relieved.
We followed Parker to his cruiser. As the deputy opened his car door, Julian said, “Wait.”
Parker blinked and turned a blank face to us.
Julian said to me, “Did you want to return to the cabin?”
“Now?” I reared back in surprise. “Don’t you want to see what happens? Find out if she did it?”
“Neither of us is a viable suspect any longer. We don’t need to see how it plays out.”
Which didn’t answer my questions. “I want to, and I’m the driver. Driver gets to pick both destination and radio station. No joust.” It wasn’t a case of gawking at an accident. This was personal. I needed to be there at the final showdown.
Besides, Julian really wanted to see how it played out too, because he hadn’t really tried to stop me. He can’t voice me, but he doesn’t have to. He knows me. He has hundreds of ways to change my mind, including and especially sex, and he didn’t use any of them, including and especially.
“Right.” Julian turned to Parker. “Wait here five minutes. Then follow us.”
Parker got in the cruiser and sat there.
Julian took me by the elbow and steered me to our car.
“Why did you do that?” I started the engine while he hunkered in the passenger’s seat and cooled off from the sun.
“Just a hunch.” He played with his phone. Then he pointed right. “That way.”
“You know where we’re going?”
“Only one Connfry in the area. It’s few miles along that road.”
I drove down the driveway and hung a right. “I thought you didn’t even want to go there. Now you’re saying we should get there before the law?”
“I didn’t want to go precisely because of the law.” He tapped clawtips against the upholstery. “Arrests can get violent, and I can’t use the full range of my abilities to defend you when there are witnesses. This way we can get the answers you crave without putting you in danger.”
“And you had a hunch.”
“That too.”
A few miles later we came to a series of driveways cut into the wall of woods. The third one read, “Connfry”.
I turned in. A long dirt drive led to an unexpectedly large house, two newer cars parked in the open garage.
Scowly, looking younger when she wasn’t scowling, dozed in a chaise lounge in the yard’s only patch of sun. She wore a twig’s idea of a swimsuit. Well, twelve weeks wasn’t very far along. But it was far enough for me to raise eyebrows at the couple open cans of beer in the matted grass by her chair, one standing upright, the other saluting empty on its side.
“Suelle Connfry?”
Her eyes opened—and narrowed at me in hate. If she looked at everyone this way, that line-inducing scowl would become permanent. “Yeah?”
I pointed at the beer. “As one expectant mom to another, should you be drinking that stuff?”
“Mind your own fucking business.”
Her unexpectedly vicious response caught me with my baby filter off.
“Hey.” She stabbed a finger at my heart. “You’re the stupid cunt who ran into me at the bar.”
I barred Julian with my arm, anticipating his surge forward. Normally he lets me fight my own battles, but he doesn’t tolerate aggression toward me in any form. I’d make it up to him later. “Sorry about bashing into you,” I said to Suelle. “Baby weight makes me clumsy.” I kept my voice mild. This was going to be charged enough. “Look, I just wanted to ask you a couple questions about Melvin Caldwell. We were talking with Bessy and—”
“That interfering c***. She was Melly’s beneficiary! I was having his baby and he left his money to her.”
Yay, I had my filter back on.
But that answered that—Caldwell was indeed the father. Now, if I wanted to find out if she’d murdered him, much less why or how, I had to play it cool. “The, um, bizatch. How unfair. How’d you know?”
I meant how she knew Caldwell’s beneficiary. She thought something else.
“He came to Chipmunk Lake for me. Or I thought he did.” Scowling, she threw her feet to the ground and sat up. “I told him about the baby. He said he was visiting here for the week. I thought it was to plan our wedding. I made him a nice romantic lunch, a whole ham and a real nice wine.” She flung her hands around, the words boiling out like from an overstressed kettle. “But instead of proposing, instead of even pay
ing attention to me, the f***er was playing with his phone the whole time.”
Okay, apparently I didn’t have to play it cool to get information. Apparently all I had to do was be a set of ears.
“He’d only come north to be near some sort of tattoo guy, can you believe it? The s***. When I complained, he said I was stupid to get pregnant, and he wouldn’t marry me if I was the last c*** on earth!”
Julian, his expression Pure Sympathy #1 said, “So who stabbed him?” The trap in his tone was plain to me.
She didn’t hear it. She blinked big eyes at him and I could see the exact instant she decided to try to play him. “I-i-it was an accident. I was carving the ham and the knife slipped.”
“Three or four times,” I murmured.
“You poor thing.” Julian nudged me.
Maybe wanting me to play along, but I’d heard enough. Hey, we could do good cop, bad cop. Besides, she already hated me.
I said, “Then how do you explain the whack to the neck?”
She flashed me a red glare. “What did you say your name was?”
“Nixie Emerson.”
“Nixie? Nixie?” Her eyes widened, then narrowed slyly. “I know you. Melly told me about you. About your band.”
I stopped breathing. How much did she know? Could Caldwell have told her how he nearly shamed me into quitting Guns and Polkas?
Julian was still doing good cop. “I’m sure you have an explanation. About the slash to the neck.”
Her gaze fled back to him, pleading prettily. “I do. I was so distressed. Flailing. Maybe I cut him a few times. But he finally started paying attention to me.” She put her hands together. “Please, you can see I needed to do it, right? My baby deserved his daddy’s name. I just wanted Melly to take me seriously.”
“I understand.” Julian’s head cocked like he heard something.
“Thank you. I’m so glad I can count on you.” Suelle stood and put out a palm toward his chest, as if she was going to lean up for a big smooshy one.
He stepped back before she could touch him.
She hitched, caught her balance, and substituted puppy eyes. “It’s so important for a baby to have a daddy. I’m not going to let my baby grow up without a daddy.”
