A Sticky Inheritance: Maple Syrup Mysteries

by Emily James

  I cringed. Right. Small town. Most people knew each other, and Mark’s connection to Cavanaugh Funeral Home probably meant more people knew him than didn’t. I might have had a better chance if I had come alone.

  Time for a new tactic. I extended my hand. “Nicole Fitzhenry-Dawes. I just moved to town, and I’m trying to familiarize myself with all the local establishments.”

  Jason let fly a few choice curse words. “Dawes. Like Stan Dawes?”

  I guess that answered the question of whether they’d ever met. “I’m his niece.”

  “I oughtta throw you out. I’ll be lucky if I can keep from going bankrupt thanks to your uncle.”

  A lawyer needs to be adaptable, my father always said. You won’t know for sure how a witness will react on the stand until it happens.

  Jason’s open hatred for Uncle Stan certainly wasn’t what I’d expected. My read on him was that if I defended Uncle Stan at all or sounded too much like I was grilling Jason to explain himself, he probably would kick us out. I’d leave knowing animosity existed, but not what caused it and whether Jason could have killed him.

  The other tactic would leave me feeling like I needed a shower. I might be terrible at flirting, but I could do false sympathy like nobody’s business.

  “I didn’t realize.” I crossed the space between us and placed my hand on Jason’s upper arm. I gave him my best remorseful look. “I’m really sorry my uncle caused problems for you. Everyone’s been telling me about how much the tourists love your beers. It’d be a shame if you closed.”

  Jason flashed me a smarmy grin, and I caught a glimpse of the player he must have been back in high school. “I’ve been thinking of making up signs with my new slogan. Best buzz you can get without getting arrested.”

  Fay had said that was why the tourists bought Jason’s beer, but to hear it openly pitched that way made me want to gag.

  Mark poked a six-pack on a shelf. The bottles inside clinked. “What, exactly, goes into this buzz-inducing beer?” His voice sounded the exact opposite of my ingratiating simper. His expression was stiff.

  Jason stalked over to him and steadied the six-pack. “I have multiple recipes, but that’s proprietary information, man.”

  Proprietary? That was an awfully big word for someone who Liz described as a harmless idiot.

  He’d given himself away. At least to me. He was the type who could have pulled all A’s in high school but chose to smoke outside the gym and get high on Friday nights instead. And that combination of intelligence and a willingness to circumvent the law made him dangerous.

  He and Mark were still staring each other down like stags about to lock horns.

  I wedged myself in between them. “But you said it’s a legal buzz. Why would my uncle have a problem with that?”

  The innocent baby-doll voice was straining my vocal cords, but I was clearly going to get further with him keeping it up than using Mark’s unhelpful brute-force approach.

  Jason slipped an arm around my waist and led me toward the door in the back that he’d come through when we first arrived. Up close, he had a sickeningly sweet smell not completely covered up by his cologne. “Stan got everyone all worked up about the caffeine content in my beer. He said it was high enough to cause heart problems even in people with healthy hearts. Something about spiking their heart rates. It was a load of bull.”

  My skin crawled under his touch. Literally crawled. I don’t know how he couldn’t feel it twitching. “But the police believed him.”

  “Yeah.” He pushed open the door to the back room. Most of the shelves were empty. “They shut me down and confiscated a lot of my product. They even took containers of my ingredients for sampling, my hops, my caffeine powder. Then I got a call a few weeks later saying they’d cleared me. I’d told them all along—my beer’s no more dangerous than a Jägerbomb.”

  If he’d been cleared, it diluted his possible motive some, but not entirely. He’d still been unable to earn a living from his business for however long, he was out the money for the product the police took, plus he’d be behind on his stock. That might be enough to send his business under even though he’d been cleared.

  “Why are you still closed if you’ve been cleared?” Mark asked.

  I jumped. I’d been so focused on trying to put the pieces together that I almost forgot he was there watching it all.

  “I’m waiting for my liquor license to renew. The police are always out here checking to make sure I’m not illegally making sales before I have it.” Jason glared at him. “It lapsed while they had me closed down, and I wasn’t going to pay for months I wasn’t using.”

  He might be a sleaze, but the more he talked, the more convinced I became that he was savvy as well. He had a motive. He’d probably found out about Uncle Stan’s heart condition sometime during the accusations and investigation. And his beer was used as part of the murder weapon.

  That last part didn’t quite fit with the rest of the carefully planned crime, but maybe it was a Vizzini-like switch. He knew that anyone would assume he couldn’t have been the killer because who would be stupid enough to use their own brand of beer? But did he know that I knew that he knew?

  “I can see why you would have been angry with my uncle. If it’d been me, I would have wanted payback.”

  Jason pulled me in closer. “I’ll let you make it up to me if you’d like. I wouldn’t want the guilt to eat you up the way it looks like it did him.”

  Was that a come-on or a threat?

  Mark made a noise in his throat that was somewhere between a choke and a growl.

  I’d had enough of this, too. I twisted out of Jason’s grip and tucked in close enough to Mark that my arm brushed his. “So where were you the night Stan died?”

  Jason’s eyes flashed from warm to cold. He clearly wasn’t used to women playing him or turning him down. “Who cares where I was? The old man killed himself.”

  Now that he was angry, he was harder to read. I couldn’t tell if his surprise was genuine or faked. “He’s been murdered and the investigation into his death is back open.”

  Jason’s fists clenched. “What is it with your family and wanting to shut me down? Is this some sort of a Baptist anti-drinking conspiracy?”

  Did Uncle Stan go to a Baptist church? I didn’t know all the denominations or what they stood for. Either way, I wasn’t about to let him sidetrack me by trying to make this religious. Uncle Stan’s faith had nothing to do with it. “All you have to do to get rid of me is tell me where you were that night.”

  “I was down at Hops, talking to Kevin Franklin about carrying my beer.”

  I gave him a syrupy-sweet smile. “Thank you.” Jerk.

  As soon as Mark and I were back out in the parking lot, I pulled out my phone and dialed Chief Wilson.

  “For a lawyer, you’re willing to make some pretty big leaps,” Chief Wilson said. “You know that’s not enough to arrest him on.”

  “Of course not.” I climbed into the truck with Mark. “I’m not asking you to. I’m just hoping you’ll check out his alibi.”

  “That’s reasonable. If it falls through, it’ll be a reason to dig a little deeper.”

  One thing had been eating at me. Chief Wilson might be the person who could give me the answer. “My uncle wasn’t the type of man to run around making accusations that could hurt people without evidence. Do you know why he was so convinced Jason’s beer was dangerous?”

  “Russ had a scare with his heart, and you know how Stan liked to help people. Russ didn’t want to point fingers, but he finally told your uncle that he’d been drinking Beaver’s Tail beer when it happened.”

  That must have been before their falling out. It wasn’t likely the two were connected, but Russ wasn’t exactly forthcoming about the details around his argument with Uncle Stan. “Thanks, Chief.”

  “Yeah, yeah. But Nicole?”

  “Yes.”

  “You got to stop trying to investigate this. That gas leak at your hous
e last night was most likely a warning. I don’t want to see you get yourself killed.”

  If Jason turned out to be the killer, there wouldn’t be much more to investigate. “Let me know if Jason’s alibi holds up. If it doesn’t, I might not need to investigate anymore.”

  We ended the call, though Chief Wilson’s grumbled goodbye made it clear he wasn’t happy with my answer. I snuggled back in Mark’s seat. I shot him a triumphant smile, but it faded out almost before it hit my lips.

  His hands gripped the wheel like he was trying to strangle it. And he looked angry.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mark’s death-hold on the steering wheel turned his knuckles white. “What was that about?”

  He was right. I shouldn’t have antagonized Chief Wilson. “I know I should have told him I’d stop nosing around, but that would have been lying.”

  “Not that.” He squeezed the words out between gritted teeth. “The flirting.”

  He didn’t think…I laughed. “That wasn’t flirting. I’m the world’s worst flirt.”

  “You looked pretty good at it to me.”

  “I’m telling you, that wasn’t flirting. That was plying a witness. With someone like Jason, it’s the only way to get the information you want.”

  He looked at me sidelong and quirked an eyebrow in an I’m-not-buying-it expression.

  I fisted my hands on the seat beside my legs. Why was I even arguing this with him? It’s not like he was my boyfriend. I could darn well flirt with whoever I wanted. He had zero right to be jealous, especially given the wedding ring on his hand.

  And I hadn’t even been flirting!

  We drove in silence for five minutes while I scowled out the window. We passed The Chop Shop for the second time.

  “Why are we driving in circles?”

  Mark’s hands loosened on the wheel. “Because I was a jerk, and I’m trying to figure out how to apologize before I drop you off. I’m not good at this stuff.”

  We were both speaking English, but it felt like different dialects. “At apologizing?”

  “At women. At people, really. Grant was always the people person. I’m better with data and facts. There’s a right and a wrong answer with numbers. It’s one of the reasons I became an ME rather than a GP or a surgeon. Cadavers don’t care about your people skills.”

  I smoothed my palms out onto my thighs and chewed on my bottom lip. He seemed so self-assured that I’d assumed he was equally confident inside. “Well, how about I give you a little lesson then?”

  “It’s a trap,” he said softly in a passable imitation of Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars.

  I cracked up, and we’d passed The Chop Shop a third time before I caught my breath. “No trap. Promise.” I crossed my heart.

  He still looked skeptical. “Go ahead.”

  “This doesn’t apply to all women, but if I were flirting, you’d know it because it would bear a frightening resemblance to a duck trying to perform slapstick comedy. I can work a witness because it’s like acting. It’s not the real me. But flirting needs to be genuine, and it does not come naturally to me.”

  He turned both his dimple and his eyebrow quirk on me this time, and heat flooded my veins.

  “I think you underestimate yourself,” he said. “You had Jason pretty enthralled.”

  I shrugged. “One of the few parts of being a lawyer that I’m good at is reading people and convincing them to open up to me. It’s too bad that’s such a small part of the job.”

  “I have a hard time imagining you weren’t good at all parts of your career.”

  Since he’d bared his vulnerable underbelly to me, it seemed only fair I share as well. “I appreciate the vote of confidence, but there’s a reason I’ve never been allowed to take the lead on any case, even though I work for my parents. If you asked them, they’d probably say something diplomatic like I ‘fail to inspire confidence in the jury.’ The truth is I get queasy and start to stutter and repeat myself when I have to speak in front of a crowd. I even tried Toastmasters to practice my public speaking, and my nerves got worse. You notice I didn’t speak at Uncle Stan’s funeral?”

  Mark nodded.

  “Well, now you know why.”

  Instead of turning down the road leading to The Chop Shop again, Mark went straight this time, heading toward The Sunburnt Arms.

  I wasn’t quite ready to head back yet. “Could you take me out to Sugarwood instead? It’s still early enough that I want to talk to Russ about a few things.”

  Mark pulled a U-turn at the next intersection. “Do you think he can give you a ride back, or do you want me to wait?”

  I’d rather he waited, but it wasn’t because Russ wouldn’t offer me a ride back. It was because I liked spending time with him, argument aside. And that was precisely the reason I shouldn’t ask him to stay.

  Besides, I wanted to ask Russ about Uncle Stan’s run-in with Jason the brewer, and I wasn’t sure he’d open up if Mark stayed. Russ was so worried about rumors spreading around this town. I wasn’t a member of the town, so I wasn’t part of the small town gossip chain. Mark might be—I didn’t know.

  The only problem with meeting with Russ alone was whether it was safe and smart. As much as I thought Jason was the best suspect for Uncle Stan’s murder, he did claim to have an alibi. If his alibi held, all signs would point back to Russ once again.

  So what was I more afraid of—Russ turning out to be the killer and “silencing” me or spending more time with Mark, putting my heart at risk with a man who wasn’t available?

  I’d suffered having my heart stomped on before, and it was still beating. I couldn’t say the same for what would happen if I ended up in the sights of Uncle Stan’s killer all alone. “It’d be nice if you could stay.”

  I filled him in on what Chief Wilson told me about Russ’ connection to the Uncle Stan–Jason showdown.

  Mark tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “Russ is a good man. I can’t see him killing Stan, not for anything.”

  “I don’t think so, either, but even if he isn’t, his side of the story might add to Jason’s motive or provide other information that would help us figure out who did kill my uncle.”

  “I’ve been Sancho Panza to your Don Quixote this long. I might as well see it through.” He reached over and brushed my hair with his fingertips. “I like the new look, by the way.”

  A warm feeling cuddled inside my chest. I loved the way he made film and book references the same way I did and the way he looked at me made me actually feel beautiful. I growled at myself silently. You’d think I was a moony teenager with how impossible it seemed to be to keep myself from wanting more than friendship with him.

  “Does that mean you think I’m tilting at windmills?” I said. Hiding behind flippancy seemed like a good way to go since my heart was still beating a little too fast.

  Mark chuckled. “How about Tonto to your Lone Ranger then?”

  “I like the sound of that much better.”

  I called Russ and made sure he was home, then told him I was going to pick up something for dinner and bring it by to thank him for supper the other night. Mark recommended we pick up three fish-and-chips dinners from A Salt & Battery since he’d eaten there with Russ before. He even paid, waving away my objections with the notion that he wanted to make up for snapping at me earlier.

  The only way to describe Russ when he opened the front door for us was haggard. He waddled out of the way, his barrel-frame rocking a bit more than usual. Mark went into the dining room to lay out the food, but I touched Russ’ arm.

  “Are you sure you’re up to having us by?”

  The smile he gave me was still as warm as the first time we met. “It’s nothing a good night’s sleep won’t cure. I was up last night worrying about a sick friend.”

  In any crime show, a “sick friend” was almost a cliché, but I believed it of Russ. I hadn’t told him yet about my adventure last night. I opened my mouth to catch him up, then clamped my lips s
hut again. He claimed worry over a sick friend, but sabotaging my gas line then waiting around in the woods to see what happened would explain his fatigue all the same. Or his sleepless nights could be born of guilt out of killing his best friend and trying to kill me.

  A shiver trailed down my body. Maybe it was a good thing I brought Mark after all. Just in case. I’d deal with my rampant paranoia later if I were imagining it all.

  Between my newfound concern, Russ’ fatigue, and Mark’s lack of social skills showing themselves a bit more, dinner was fairly quiet.

  When Russ pushed aside his empty take-out container, I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. And this time I was simply going to come at it directly. We’d had enough talks about whether or not Uncle Stan had enemies that Russ shouldn’t think anything of it when I brought up Jason.

  “I wanted to talk to you about something we found out today.” I popped my take-out container closed. “We took a ride out to Beaver’s Tail Brewery.”

  The smile faded from Russ’ face, and the skin under his eyes sagged down into folds. “And Jason made your uncle sound like a lunatic, I’d guess. Don’t let anything he said bother you.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me to question whether Uncle Stan had sound reasons for going after Jason. I knew him too well to think otherwise, but Russ wouldn’t know that. After all, I’d never been down to visit while Uncle Stan was alive.

  The idea of how to move this conversation forward hit me almost immediately. Sometimes I hated myself for how my brain worked, and this was one of those times. Russ handed me an easy way to open up the conversation about what really happened, and I knew myself well enough to know that I was going to exploit it. Perhaps I was more like my dad than like Uncle Stan after all.

  I twisted my fingers together on top of the table. “I don’t understand why he would have made those accusations. Chief Wilson said he personally investigated Uncle Stan’s claims and couldn’t find anything to support them. Jason’s beer is safe for anyone without a pre-existing heart condition.”

  Mark shot me a glance. He had to know exactly what I was up to this time.