A floorboard squeaked, and I looked over my shoulder.
We were alone in the living room.
I shook my head, pushing away my disquiet. It was an old house and was only settling. I didn’t know why I was spooked.
“But what?” she asked.
“But all her husbands’ deaths seemed natural—or at least accidental. Devon’s death was murder. Someone shot him. Even if Marla was a ruthless killer, that’s not her MO.”
“Unless she got one of those sharpshooters to help her. Plugging people full of lead is their modus operandi.”
“They shoot tin cans and paper, not people,” I said. “But let’s take a look at them.”
Impatient, I shifted on the couch while Charlene surfed the Internet. She turned up a slew of articles mentioning the three sharpshooters as party entertainment, but nothing nefarious. Larry was all over the web advertising his used cars, but we didn’t find any personal information.
Charlene gave a low whistle. “Take a look at this.” She handed me the laptop.
On the screen was an article about a late-night attack on a donut shop in central California. Curly had gotten drunk, tried to shoot through the hole of the giant rotating donut sign, and missed. Repentant, he’d waited in the parking lot to get arrested.
“He’s got a drinking problem,” she said.
If I kept imbibing Charlene’s “special” root beer, I was going to have a drinking problem. “Do you think Ewan knows about the arrest?”
“If that bartender did, he could have been blackmailing Curly.”
“I thought you were convinced Marla did it.”
She raised her nose. “I am. But it gives Curly a motive to work as her accomplice.”
Riiight. “Gimme.” I took the laptop from Charlene and typed in Ewan’s name.
“What are you doing?” Charlene asked.
“Seeing what I can find on Ewan and Bridget.”
She slammed shut the lid of the laptop, plunging us deeper into darkness.
I yelped and yanked away my fingers.
“He didn’t kill that bartender, and neither did Bridget.” She removed her glasses, letting them drop to her chest.
“We can’t be sure,” I said. “Bridget was right there in the saloon. And if Marla could have used an accomplice or rigged a gun to go off to make her look innocent, Bridget and Ewan could have done the same. I’ll bet they know their way around a handgun.”
She snatched away the laptop. “It’s a waste of time. The killer was Marla, working with one of those three sharpshooters.”
My gaze flicked to the front window. Light from the street lamp filtered through the curtains, turning the living room gray. “I know you’ve got some hundred-watt bulbs stashed away. Where are they?”
“I’m saving them.”
“For what?”
“You never know.”
I stretched, pressing my body deeper into the flowered sofa cushions. “Fine. You know Bridget and Ewan better than I. What makes you so sure they’re innocent?”
“I was friends with his wife before she died,” she said in a strained voice. “Poor Ewan raised Bridget alone. Ewan’s a straight arrow. He had some wild days in the military, before he married, but that’s what you get for stationing men in a beach town.”
“Beach town?”
“San Diego. Once he met Beth though, he flew straight.”
“Did he marry late in life?” I asked.
“Why?”
“Bridget’s what? Late thirties? Early forties?” Ewan had to be in his seventies.
“Ewan and Beth married in their midthirties, and Bridget came along not long after.”
Midthirties seemed awfully late to figure out it was time to stop catting around. But what did I know about the transformative power of love?
“How did Beth die?” I asked.
“Cancer,” she said shortly.
My limbs grew heavy. Unwanted images flashed in my own head of my mother’s failed battle with cancer. Her confusion. The pain. Her body shrinking, collapsing into the bedsheets, even while the tumors grew. “How old was Bridget when it happened?”
“She was only a little girl, but old enough to realize what she was losing.” She grimaced. “Bridget and my daughter used to play together. Looking back, I wish I’d done more for them.”
And I wasn’t sure if she meant more for Ewan and Bridget, or more for Bridget and her own daughter. But I wouldn’t ask. Charlene rarely spoke about her daughter.
Yawning, I rose. I’d had enough root beer and speculation for one night. “I’m going to drive home and hit the hay.” And maybe do some more Internet research on my own. I hoped Charlene was right about Ewan and Bridget—she obviously cared about them both. But we had a limited pool of suspects, and the Bar X owner and his daughter were in the mix.
Expression taut, Charlene trailed me to the door. “It can’t be Ewan or Bridget, don’t you see? If it was one of them, it would kill the other.”
Or kill Charlene.
Chapter Twelve
Charlene closed the door behind me, and I walked slowly down her three porch steps. Wraiths of ground fog twisted through Charlene’s darkened garden, twined through her picket fence. I couldn’t see a reason why Ewan or Bridget would have killed Devon—at least not yet. I hoped they were innocent, but I wasn’t willing to rule them out as suspects.
Stars glittered in the night sky, and in the distance the mountains loomed, black waves of earth. A night bird skimmed the rooftops.
Yawning, I placed my hand on the gate.
A shriek broke the stillness, and my hand clenched on the damp wood.
I whirled, heart slamming against my ribs. The shout had come from Charlene’s house.
I raced down the brick path and leapt the steps to the porch. I rattled the knob.
Locked.
I pounded on the door with my fist. “Charlene! Are you all right?”
A crash. A woman’s scream. A gun blasted, rattling my eardrums. Glass shattered.
“Charlene!” Black fear swept through my veins. I grabbed a flower pot from the porch railing and hurtled it through the front window. “Charlene! I’m coming!”
Breaking out the shards of glass in the sill, I clambered through the filmy curtains.
Frederick streaked past, a blur of white.
“Charlene!”
“In the kitchen!”
Mouth dry, I raced through the living area and into the homey kitchen. Charlene sagged against the black granite countertop, a shotgun in her hand. Shards of glass and pottery lay scattered on the tile floor. A splintered hole yawned in one of her white-painted cabinets.
“What happened?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
“Someone broke in.” Hand shaking, she set the shotgun on the granite counter. “Frederick cornered him in the kitchen. I took a shot at him, and he ran off.”
“Him? You saw him?” I moved toward the kitchen door to give chase, then jerked away. What was I thinking? I licked my lips, tasting sweat and fear.
“The light was off. I only saw the back of him, running through the door.” She pointed to the door, open to the yard. “He was all in black, like a cat burglar.” Charlene gazed mournfully at the cabinet. “I’m going to have to get that replaced.”
If she’d only seen the rear of the intruder, that meant she’d taken a shot at him when he was running away. Not exactly sporting, but she’d shot wide. Besides, when an intruder’s in your house, all bets are off.
She braced both hands on the counter and lowered her head, exhaled. “We should call the police before the neighbors do.”
“Charlene, this can’t be a coincidence.” I gripped the edge of the work island. The attacks on me, Ray’s hit and run, a break in . . . We were being targeted. The root beer concoction I’d drunk threatened to reverse its course.
She walked to a seventies-era, wall-mounted phone—jarring in the otherwise modern kitchen—and dialed. After a muttered conversation, she hung up.
“We need to find Frederick,” she said. “I think I scared him with the gun.”
“I thought he was deaf,” I said, trying to shake my anxiety by switching to a topic I could understand. I was pretty sure Frederick’s hearing was fine, but I didn’t want to upset the applecart. The cat had done a maestro’s job wrapping Charlene around his paws.
She raised her chin. “He felt the vibration.”
“Oh, that makes sense.” In a comic-book universe.
We found Frederick cowering beneath the coffee table in the living room.
Charlene pulled the white fur ball from his hidey-hole. “Oh, you poor . . .” She gaped at the shattered front window. “What the hell?”
“Um. Sorry.” My fingers curled. “The door was locked and—”
“You broke my window? Do you have any idea how much those cost?” She petted Frederick with quick, hard strokes. “It’s double paned!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll pay for it.”
“I’ll add it to your rent. What were you thinking?”
“You were screaming! There was a gunshot—”
“And so, you came barreling into a gunfight? What if the burglar had been the one with the gun? And I wasn’t screaming. I told you, Frederick attacked the burglar.”
A siren wailed in the distance.
She set her reading glasses on her nose. Walking to a table lamp near the kitchen door, she extended one of his paws beneath the shade. “Look! DNA evidence!”
Relieved she’d been diverted from the broken window (what had I been thinking?), I drew closer. There was a trace of red on Frederick’s extended claws, and a tiny piece of black fabric.
“Have you got a pair of tweezers?” I asked. “We should get those threads before Frederick loses them.”
“Upstairs, in the bathroom’s medicine cabinet.”
I hurried up the narrow steps to the antique bathroom and returned with tweezers. Carefully, I collected the threads and deposited them in a plastic baggie from the kitchen.
“You’re right,” Charlene said. “The burglar had to have been our killer. This is a good neighborhood. A break-in at my house is too much of a coincidence.” Gleeful, she hugged Frederick to her chest. “Someone’s trying to kill me too.”
“And that makes you happy?”
“Don’t you see? The reason someone’s been going after you isn’t because of you. It’s because of our investigation. We’re getting close.” Her voice lowered dramatically. “Too close.”
A stiff ocean breeze flowed through the broken window, and I shivered.
A sedan pulled up to the sidewalk, and a black and white squad car stopped behind it. Gordon stepped from the sedan.
“He must get a call every time one of our names comes through the dispatcher.” My face warmed.
“I’ll deal with this.” Charlene opened the front door and disappeared onto the porch. “Detective Carmichael! What a lovely surprise.”
I sank onto the saggy floral-print couch. Oh, boy.
His rumbly voice floated through the broken window. “Hi, Charlene. Frederick. I heard you had some trouble out here.”
“Can I make you some cocoa?” she asked him. “I have a special recipe.”
“I’ve heard about your special recipes. Maybe some other time. What happened?”
“A break-in. Frederick and I scared him off with my shotgun.”
“Where?”
“The kitchen.”
“What happened to the window?”
“Val.”
A masculine sigh. “Where is she?”
“Inside. Come in, come in.”
She walked into the living room pursued by Gordon and two uniformed officers I recognized as customers from Pie Town.
I waved limply. “Hi.”
Gordon turned to Charlene and pulled a notepad from the inside pocket of his navy suit jacket. “All right. Tell me what happened. Step by step.”
“We’d been watching Stargate, like we always do,” Charlene said. “Season five. Teal’c has a new haircut. I don’t like it, even though his skin is less shiny.”
“And then?” Gordon prompted.
“Val had just left. I was returning to the kitchen when I heard someone yell and Frederick howling. I grabbed my shotgun—”
“From where?” Gordon asked, taking notes.
“From behind the couch cushions.”
I jerked forward. “You keep a loaded gun here?” I’d spent a lot of time on that couch.
“A gun’s no good if you can’t get to it fast,” she said.
He nodded. “Okay. So, you got your shotgun, and then what?”
“Then I ran into the kitchen. It was dark, but I saw him, a tall figure in black.” She frowned. “At least I think it was black. It was dark, like I said. And Frederick was all over him. I couldn’t shoot the burglar, because Frederick was in the way. So, I aimed high, to scare him. He took off through the kitchen door and into the yard.”
“Were you able to get a sense of his build?” he asked.
“Big.”
“Big tall? Big wide?”
“Tall. And wide. Or maybe not. Sort of average. Maybe on the thin side. Things moved very quickly.”
“How did he compare to Officer Barry?” he pointed to a bulky officer.
“Maybe a little bigger,” she said. “Or smaller.”
I cradled my skull in my hands. Charlene’s description was little better than Ray’s.
“The kitchen’s that way?” Gordon asked, pointing.
“Yes,” she said, “right through there.”
“Go ahead, guys,” he said to the two officers.
They nodded and strode into the kitchen.
“Did Ray give you a description of the scoundrel who tried to run Val over?” Charlene asked. “Maybe it’s the same person.”
Gordon stared at her. One beat. Two. He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “He drew me a picture.” He handed the paper to Charlene.
Her brow crumpled. “This is it?”
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
She passed me the paper.
I cocked my head. The drawing was a circle and a line—the top half of a stick figure. But it was more detailed than the “blobby” description he’d given us. “Seriously?” I asked.
“Ray drew it himself,” Gordon said. “The department can’t afford a sketch artist.”
“So basically, all you know is the driver has a head,” Charlene said.
Expressionless, he turned to me. “Can you confirm the head?”
“I think I’m detecting a touch of sarcasm, but . . . no-o.”
“So, the driver may or may not have had a head,” Gordon said.
“Hey, all I saw were headlights.” I noticed Gordon wasn’t taking notes.
“Right.” He turned to Charlene. “How exactly did your window get broken, Mrs. McCree?”
She gestured halfheartedly. “Val panicked. The front door was locked, so she broke the window and came inside that way.”
He rubbed his forehead. “Val, of all the idiotic—”
“Charlene was in trouble!”
“Why didn’t you call the police?” he asked. “You have a cell phone.”
“Things were happening kind of fast,” I mumbled.
“Have you got any plywood or sheets of plastic?” he asked Charlene.
“In the garage.”
“Why don’t you show me? I’ll help you clean this up.” The two walked outside, leaving me by my lonesome.
The cops in the kitchen gave me permission to remove a broom and dustpan, and I got to work sweeping the broken glass into a pile. Did I say pile? I meant mountain range. I swept the hardwood floor and vacuumed the living room rug. Charlene and Gordon returned, the latter carrying two large, square pieces of plywood. Charlene held a roll of thick plastic beneath her arm, and carried masking tape and what looked like a nail gun.
“Can I help?” I asked, meek.
After refurbishing Pie Town, I well knew the cost of windows.
Gordon pressed one of the plywood boards over the hole, adjusted it, and cocked his head. “Yeah. Hold this.”
I pressed the board against the wall, and Gordon shot nails through it into the window frame. He took the second board and laid it over the first, covering the remaining gap along the left side, and we repeated the process.
One of the cops, Officer Barry, emerged from the kitchen. “We took prints around the door, but we’ll need Mrs. McCree’s and Val’s prints for comparison.”
“No, we don’t,” Gordon said, taping the plastic around the plywood. “We’ve already got their prints at the station.”
I hunched my shoulders. Having prints on file at the local cop shop just wasn’t normal.
“Sure thing,” Officer Barry said. “Then I think we’ve got everything we can. We checked the backyard. It’s pretty dry out there, so we didn’t see any footprints. The gate is open though. Looks like whoever broke in might have run out that way.”
“Did you notice any vehicles driving away?” Gordon asked us.
We shook our heads. I’d been too relieved Charlene was alive to notice much beyond that.
“Okay, guys,” Gordon said, “why don’t you do a sweep of the neighborhood, and we’ll call it a night. Val? A word?” He jerked his head toward the front door. I followed him into the garden. We watched the two officers cruise off in their black-and-white.
He blew out his breath.
“Okay,” I said. “Running into Charlene’s house might not have been the smart thing, but she could have been bleeding out for all I knew. I should have called nine-one-one first, and then jumped through the window.”
Gordon raked his hand through his thick hair and growled. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Do you have any idea how terrifying you are?”
“Terrifying?”
He grasped my shoulders, and I caught a faint whiff of his cologne. My stomach fluttered.
“What do I have to do to keep you safe?” he asked. “Arrest you?”
“Your cousin Petronella would kill me if she got stuck managing Pie Town on her own.”
His arms dropped to his sides. “I give up. You and Charlene are out of my control. I’ve said what I have to say. You know what the dangers are. You’re both adults.”
Bleeding Tarts Page 13
