Bleeding Tarts

by Kirsten Weiss

  “Devon, the bartender,” Charlene said.

  “He’s dead.” Moe grasped the low wall of one of the stalls and sagged sideways.

  “No kidding,” Charlene said. “We know he’s dead.”

  Moe’s legs folded beneath him, and he thudded to the ground. “Oh, my God.”

  “Are you all right?” I approached him slowly. Moe didn’t look good; his chin sunk to his chest.

  He bowed forward, his stomach bulging beneath his blue, checked shirt.

  “I’ve seen this before,” Charlene said. “He’s left the denial stage about the murder. Funny, it usually doesn’t take this long for reality to set in, but everyone reacts differently to tragedy.”

  Curly led his horse into the carriage house. Between his bulky form and sunburned face, he looked like a fireplug in cowboy boots. “Larry finally shoed Prince, and we’re back in business.” He stopped short, staring at his partner. “What are you doing on the floor?”

  Moe pointed a shaking finger toward the open stall.

  Frowning, I walked to the compartment.

  Inside it, Larry lay on the straw. He stared, openmouthed, at the beamed ceiling. Blood covered his face, darkened the hay.

  “Charlene!” Shaky, I dropped to my knees and grasped Larry’s wrist. The flesh was warm, but I couldn’t find a pulse. Not again. I swayed, dizzy, and rose, backing from the horse stall and bumping into Charlene.

  “What happened?” Curly rubbed his broad hand across his jowls.

  “Another man’s been murdered.” Charlene pulled a cell phone from the pocket of her violet tunic and dialed. “I’m calling the police.”

  “What? But . . .” He looked to Moe. “What happened?”

  Moe shook his head. “The stall door was open,” he croaked. “I looked in and saw him. I thought Larry was alive, messing around, but he’s not.”

  Charlene walked past the coach to the open carriage house door and spoke low into the phone.

  “Curly,” I said, trying to get a grip, “why don’t you go to the main house? You can tell Ewan what’s happened, and that Charlene is calling the police.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Moe, are you all right?”

  Moe swallowed. “I’m fine. Go ahead. I’m fine.”

  Curly didn’t budge.

  Charlene returned with a checked, wool blanket. “You’re in shock.” She draped the blanket over Moe’s shoulders. “The police will be here in fifteen minutes.”

  Another body. Another murder. My breath turned shallow. Larry had been near the saloon when Devon had been killed. He must have seen something.

  I’d also been near the saloon, near enough to get a pie shot out of my hands. Did the killer think I’d seen something too? “But I didn’t see anything,” I blurted.

  Charlene patted my shoulder. “It’s okay. I didn’t see Larry either when we first looked into the carriage house. We didn’t search the stalls. Why would we have? Larry was probably lying here the whole time. If we’d noticed sooner . . .” She sighed. “No, it’s no use thinking that way. This isn’t your fault, Val.”

  “Maybe it was an accident,” Moe said. “That was his horse’s stall. The horse could have kicked him in the head and bolted.”

  “Under the circumstances, I doubt that’s likely,” Charlene said. “Don’t you?”

  “I should find his horse.” Moe rose, and the blanket cascaded from his shoulders to the straw. “It’s got to be panicked. Could be hurt.”

  “Curly, go with him,” Charlene said, stern. “Then get Ewan.”

  “Right,” Curly said. “Sure.” He and Moe wandered from the carriage house.

  “Do you think Moe’s okay?” I asked.

  “Quick, search for clues before the cops arrive.” She snapped pictures of the body with her cell phone.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “We shouldn’t go inside the stall. We’ll contaminate evidence.”

  “You’ve already been in the stall,” she said.

  “Because I’d thought he might still be alive.” I rubbed the back of my neck, my muscles jumping. If I’d really been thinking, I would have known immediately he was dead.

  “Fine. We’ll play it your way.” She raised her camera high over her head and shot down into the stall, then paced the carriage house, taking more photos.

  I walked to the open wooden doors and leaned heavily against their rough frame. Another man dead, and someone I slightly knew. I tried to swallow, couldn’t. A breeze tossed the tops of the eucalyptus trees in a silent wave.

  “Is it a coincidence,” I said, “that all the suspects are at the Bar X again? Marla, you, me, Ewan, Bridget, Curly, and Moe?”

  “And Larry.” She glanced at the body. “Don’t forget him.”

  Forget Larry? The image of his broken body was burned into my brain. I couldn’t forget if I wanted to.

  And I wanted to.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Gordon strode into the carriage house. A phalanx of uniformed police officers followed, their movements quick, decisive.

  Relief unspooled inside me. Though it had only taken him ten minutes to get to the Bar X, it had seemed an eternity. I had to force myself not to hurtle into his arms for a comforting hug. Someone had killed again, killed someone I knew, and a sick, creeping malaise hung over us all.

  Gordon stopped short and stared.

  Moe held the bridle of a palomino mare. Ewan stood, expression grim, one hand braced on the coach. Marla peeked over the ghost town owner’s left shoulder, her hands clamped on his arm. Curly slumped against a closed stall. I tried to look inconspicuous and edged behind Charlene.

  One of us was a killer.

  Gordon zeroed in on me. “Why aren’t I surprised? Wait, let me guess.” He raised his index finger. “You thought a stroll through the carriage house would be fun and just happened to stumble across a body. No, hold it. You were on the hunt for the Bar X Phantom, and a corpse threw itself into your path.”

  I winced. It wasn’t as if we’d been looking for a body.

  Charlene stuck her nose in the air. “We were invited here for a carriage ride.”

  Ewan cleared his throat. “I did invite them both. I’d meant to give them a ride the other day, but then the coach got loose and, uh, nearly ran down Val.” His gaze cut sideways.

  “Where is Mr. Pelt?” Gordon asked.

  Ewan nodded toward the open stall door.

  Gordon stalked to it and studied the corpse. “Someone’s missing.”

  “Pardon?” Ewan asked.

  “It looks like everyone’s here but—”

  “What’s going on?” Bridget halted inside the carriage house’s tall, open doors, her eyes wide. Backlit by the sun, her long shadow writhed across the straw-covered floor.

  “And now we’ve got a full house,” Gordon said. He jerked his chin toward the uniformed officers. “Secure the scene. Separate the witnesses. You know the drill. Miss Harris, you’re with me.” He walked into the sunlight without waiting to see if I followed.

  After a worried glance at Charlene, I trotted after him. We stopped in the shade of the carriage house.

  Gordon stared down the dusty street. “Why does it always have to be you?”

  “I didn’t find the body. Moe did. Charlene and I walked into the carriage house right after he found Larry.”

  “What were you doing here in the first place?”

  “We really were invited for a coach ride.”

  His gaze turned flinty.

  “And I might have asked Bridget about Devon’s lawsuit,” I admitted.

  “So, you found out about that, did you?”

  “It must have been uncomfortable for them both, with Devon suing the boss’s daughter for stalking. Do you think her father knew?”

  A muscle jumped in his jaw.

  I jammed my hands in my jeans pockets and told myself to shut up. But the words kept flowing, a nervous prattle. “It sounds bogus to me. Outside of Fatal Attraction, I can’t imagine there ar
e a lot of women stalkers.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You have no idea. Women do it all the time, and it’s even easier now with the Internet.”

  “Seriously?” My muscles relaxed. We were talking again. I couldn’t blame him for being irritated, but it wasn’t an emotion I’d hoped to evoke.

  “I worked a case recently where an old girlfriend went after her ex’s new girlfriend. She messed with her college application, the works. It wasn’t hard to catch the stalker, but it made a mess of the new girl’s life.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said. “Is the world getting stranger, or am I imagining things?”

  “Definitely stranger.” He ran his hand over his crewcut. “Are you all right?”

  I nodded, a long way from all right.

  “What happened here?” he asked, all business.

  I could be professional too. “I can’t tell you much beyond what I already have. Charlene and I did look inside the carriage house when we first arrived, around ten o’clock. We didn’t see anyone, but we only stuck our heads in. If Larry was already lying dead in that stall, we wouldn’t have noticed his body.”

  “What were you looking for in the carriage house?”

  “The doors were open, and we’d planned a coach ride.” I nodded toward Charlene’s yellow Jeep, parked beside the chapel. “We thought Ewan might be inside,” I fudged.

  “Was anyone hanging around the carriage house?”

  “No,” I said, determined to be helpful. And not just because of the promised date, which I really shouldn’t have been thinking about at a murder scene. In my defense, there was something appealing about Gordon’s take-charge attitude. “Bridget was in her photography studio.” I pointed down the road to the small, wooden shack. “Marla showed up there as well, and Bridget and I stepped outside to chat while Charlene and Marla, er, caught up. I didn’t notice anyone going into or out of the carriage house.” I bit the inside of my cheek. “But there are two entrances—front and back—and both were open. I only had a view of the former.” The carriage house was a big, two-story building that housed horses and a coach. Someone could have easily entered and exited through the rear, and I would never have noticed.

  “Did you see anyone else around the Bar X?”

  “No, only the people you saw in the carriage house.”

  “What time did you and Charlene find Moe and the body?”

  “I guess about twenty minutes ago.” A good detective wouldn’t have to guess, because she’d have checked her watch.

  “What was Moe doing when you found him?”

  “Hyperventilating. He seemed stunned, disoriented.”

  Gordon drew a notepad from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “That’s to be expected. He and Larry knew each other well, didn’t they?”

  “They’d had a falling out, but I guess you already knew that. According to Larry, it was a misunderstanding. Curly’s confirmed that.”

  “Did you go inside the stall?” He made a notation.

  I tugged at the collar of my T-shirt. “At first, I wasn’t sure if Larry was dead or hurt, so I went inside to check his pulse. Aside from that, I didn’t touch anything.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Charlene called the police from her cell phone. Moe looked shaky. Curly showed up—”

  “Did either of them go inside the stall?”

  “Not that I saw,” I said. “Anyway, Moe was worried about Larry’s horse, because it was missing from its stall. So, he and Curly went to look for it. They must have found it, because Ewan, Moe, and Curly led that palomino into the carriage house right before you arrived.”

  “How did Ewan come on the scene?”

  “I’m not sure. We’d asked Curly to let him know what had happened and that Charlene was calling the police. Then Curly and Moe went off to search for the horse.”

  “Anything else?” he asked. “Anything that struck you as odd or interesting?”

  I shook my head. “I was too focused on Larry’s body, and then on Moe.” In spite of the summer warmth, I shivered and rubbed my arms. Poor Larry. He’d seemed like a decent guy, and I wondered if he had any family aside from his nephew.

  “All right. You can go. If I have any more questions, I’ll be in touch.”

  I nodded and went to lean against the Jeep and wait for Charlene.

  White cat draped over her shoulder, she emerged from the carriage house fifteen minutes later.

  I straightened off the car. “How’d it go?”

  She raised a finger. “Not here.”

  I zipped my lips and got into the passenger side of her Jeep.

  We drove out of the Bar X. I rolled down the window. We passed a long ridge of high, brown grasses, and I held out my hand, letting the fronds tickle my palm. There was something strangely comforting in their feathery touch.

  Charlene leaned forward, peering over the steering wheel. “Now we know who Marla’s accomplice was.”

  “Who? You mean Larry?”

  “That’s why he was at the saloon—to kill Devon. Marla took the photo of him for blackmail purposes. And then when he pointed out that she had as much to lose if the truth came out, she killed him.”

  “Maybe,” I said, noncommittal, and adjusted the Jeep’s sun visor. The road dipped down, coiling through the hills, and my shoulder grazed the car door. “Did you ask her about her photographs with Devon?”

  “What’s to explain?”

  “Maybe she cared about Devon. Maybe that’s why she’s investigating.”

  Charlene shot me a look, and the Jeep swerved toward a barbed wire fence.

  “Watch it,” I said.

  She yanked the wheel, and we hit a pothole.

  My skull banged the roof. “Ow!” I bent double, elbows on knees, and gripped my throbbing head.

  “Whoopsy-daisy!”

  I breathed through the pain and straightened up. “We know Marla had a relationship with Devon. Maybe she has some insight into who might have wanted him dead.”

  “We know who wanted him dead. Marla.”

  “We’ve got no evidence. I think we should return to Larry’s car dealership tomorrow.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because the police will be all over it today, and because Larry was killed for a reason. Maybe there’s a clue why at his office. Unless you know where he lives?”

  She shook her white curls. “That’s no good. I’ve been doing research too. He lives in a condo up the coast. I’ll never be able to get my hands on his spare key.”

  “A condo? Did he live there alone?”

  “Yep. Never married.”

  Somehow, that made me feel worse about his death.

  After Charlene dropped me at the car, I spent the rest of the day running errands and laying low at home. I tried not to think about Larry, his life cut short. I tried not to think about the fact that someone at the Bar X was a killer. I tried not to think about Gordon. And I failed on all counts.

  * * *

  When Tuesday morning finally rolled around, I immersed myself in baking. Berries were in season, and today I was experimenting with a ginger-lime peach and blueberry pie. Ginger seemed to work with both peaches and blueberries, and I’d found a recipe for a ginger-lime peach and blueberry crisp. It was easy enough to convert to a pie recipe. Besides, my customers seemed to enjoy my experiments. I promoted them as “limited-time-only” specials and gauged the reactions. The winning recipes got a regular spot on the menu.

  At the metal counter, I grated ginger into a giant metal bowl piled with sliced peaches and blueberries marinating in sugar.

  While I worked, Abril deftly removed steaming strawberry-mascarpone hand pies from the big oven using a long-handled paddle. You could turn off the oven’s rotating racks to remove the pies, but Abril didn’t bother. She was that good.

  Light streamed through the skylight, sparkling off the industrial refrigerator and countertops. The kitchen smelled of baking fruit, and I hummed to myself, the hor
ror of Larry’s murder dissipating.

  Then I realized I was humming an old western song and clenched my fist. The peeled ginger shot from my fingers like a wet bar of soap, struck a ceramic stand of kitchen utensils, and came to rest on the counter. Abashed, I picked up the ginger, washed it, and set it aside. I shifted gears and zested a lime.

  Charlene emerged from the flour-work room and stretched, reaching for the white-painted ceiling. “Done!” She sniffed, peering at the tray of circular hand pies Abril slid onto a cooling rack. We’d used a cookie cutter to punch little stars out of the top crust, and the effect was très patriotic. “What did you add to those strawberry hand pies?”

  “Mascarpone and a hint of lemon.” Abril adjusted the net over her knotted black hair. “It’s the perfect ménage à trois of flavors.”

  Charlene eyed her askance. “I meant those star holes in the crusts. How much of my crust was wasted?”

  “None,” I said, nodding to a stack of piecrust stars. “We’re layering the stars on the top crust for these new ginger-lime peach and blueberry pies.”

  Charlene shook her head. “Awfully fancy for San Nicholas.”

  “A little egg wash,” Abril said, “and they’ll be a sensual, succulent Nirvana.”

  “Abril, you need to get a boyfriend.” Charlene drew me into the hallway between the kitchen and the restaurant. “And you should ask her to write our next menu,” she said to me in a low voice.

  “I just printed new menus!”

  “What’s going on with that girl? Is she boy crazed?”

  “She’s a poet.” I’d mainly hired her because I’d been bedazzled by her vocabulary.

  “A poet? How do you know? She didn’t say anything to me.”

  “She asked if we could host a poetry slam next month.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It doesn’t affect you. You’re usually gone before noon, and the slam will be in the evening.”

  “Well, I hope it’s bakery themed. There once was a pie from Nantucket—”

  “Family restaurant, family restaurant!” I angled my head toward the dining area.

  She harrumphed and exited out the front door, her shift over and out.

  I returned to the kitchen. Adding vanilla and cornstarch to the peaches and blueberries, I mixed the filling and loaded it into prepped pie tins. I folded the top crusts over the fruit, cementing the stars with the egg wash. Abril loaded the pies into the ovens, set the timer, and I cleaned up. Then I restarted the process, switching to savory and mixing the fillings for chicken potpies.