Rhubarb Pie Before You Die

by Gin Jones

  Mabel dropped her phone into the barn coat’s oversized pocket with the key, switched the piece of sidewall support to her right hand, and headed across the smaller greenhouse and into the back yard.

  A woman’s scream from the back yard caused Mabel to pick up her pace and grip her makeshift weapon more tightly. Once she reached the back door, she paused to look through the glass walls to prepare herself for whatever was outside. Danny was a dozen yards away about halfway along the rhubarb beds that took up most of the back yard. He was dragging Lena toward a small shed attached to the house, from which wisps of smoke emanated.

  Lena, to Mabel’s surprise, was resisting with considerable success for someone who looked like physical battles, as opposed to legal ones, were completely foreign to her. She alternately kicked, twisted, and dug in her slippered heels with more skill than Mabel herself possessed.

  Mabel raced through the door, shouting, “Hey!” in the hope that the mayor would give up now that he knew he had a witness. He turned to look at her, and his expression wasn’t that of someone who knew he’d lost. He almost looked pleased to see Mabel. With barely a pause, he merely adjusted his grip on Lena’s wrists and resumed dragging her toward the shed where the smoke was thickening.

  “I already called the police,” Mabel lied, even as she was dialing 911 surreptitiously, her hand inside the voluminous barn coat pockets. “It’s over.”

  Danny laughed. “They won’t respond to a call to this address. You can thank Lena for that.”

  From her pocket came the distant sound of a voice saying, “Fire, police, or ambulance?” Mabel gave up on hiding what she was doing, pulled the phone to her face and said, “All three. Graham Winthrop’s house is on fire and there are people inside.” A slight exaggeration, but she was confident they wouldn’t take the risk of not responding to something that serious.

  Besides, if they didn’t hurry, her words would come true.

  Mabel dropped the phone and raced to intercept Danny before a second person died on Graham’s land.

  Chapter 25

  Mabel skidded to a stop just out of Danny’s reach. She raised the length of broken sidewall support to her shoulder like a baseball bat. “Let her go. You can’t fight us both.”

  “I don’t have to,” Danny said. “I just need to make sure Lena can’t talk to anyone about what she saw on Monday morning.”

  “Why bother?” Mabel asked. “You said yourself that no one ever believes her.”

  A look of outrage crossed Lena’s face. “Why wouldn’t anyone believe me? I’m the president of the homeowners’ association.”

  Danny laughed. “Only because no one else wants the job. But the thing is, thanks to Mabel’s meddling, I’ve got a totally credible scapegoat in Sam Trent. As long as you two don’t give his attorneys any information that would raise reasonable doubt.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Lena said. “I’m well-respected in this community. More than you are, certainly.”

  “I know people only tolerate me for my father’s sake,” Danny said. “I’m okay with that. It’s better than being a laughingstock.”

  Lena struck out in rage, elbowing him in the stomach and then turning to kick him in the shin. Startled, Danny loosened his grip and Lena was able to pull free. She stopped beside Mabel to say, “You’re done, Danny Avila. We’ll see who the laughingstock is now. Your father is going to be rolling in his grave.”

  Danny slumped, and Mabel lowered the scrap of sidewall support, saying, “It’s over, Danny. Let’s go out front to wait for the police.”

  “I don’t hear any sirens,” he said uncertainly.

  “They’re on the way,” Mabel said, although she wasn’t entirely confident. There was a long history of calling wolf at this address.

  Danny closed the distance between them to grab for the hand holding the length of sidewall support. He missed, but on his second try, he caught her other arm.

  What was he up to? He couldn’t control both her and Lena.

  And then the sound of the greenhouse door slamming shut made her realize that Lena wasn’t beside her any longer. Lena wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  “I’m not outnumbered now,” Danny said. “I’ll just lock you in the shed and then I can find some other way to get rid of Lena.”

  “You don’t have to kill anyone else,” Mabel said, swatting at Danny with the length of sidewall support. He grunted and pulled the makeshift weapon out of her grasp, scraping her hand as she tried to hold onto it.

  “I can’t take the risk that one of you will talk.”

  “You could run,” Mabel said, dropping to the ground to curl up in a ball so she’d be a dead weight and harder to drag. “You still have time before the police arrive. Just disappear. Make a new life for yourself.”

  He caught her other wrist so he had both of them and dragged her about six feet, despite her resistance, before he had to stop for a break. Apparently his exercise routine of morning walks hadn’t done much for his upper body strength.

  Mabel felt a glimmer of hope that her ploy to delay him was working. If only the police would hurry up and arrive.

  “I can’t leave West Slocum,” Danny said while he adjusted his grip on her wrists. “If I could have, I’d have left as soon as Graham provoked me into killing him. But I belong here. It’s my destiny to be the mayor, just like my father. I can’t let anything get in the way of my destiny.”

  “I totally understand that,” Mabel lied. “I’m destined to be an app developer, and I would never give that up.”

  “It’s not the same thing,” Danny snapped. “The work I do is important. Not just being a mayor, but the history books I write too.”

  “Of course,” Mabel soothed. “But what I don’t understand is why you’d risk your destiny by killing Graham.”

  “It was his fault,” Danny said. “You know how irrational he was. Wouldn’t listen to anyone. I had to do something about the mess he’d made of his house. Everyone knew Lena had asked me to take care of it, and she was telling everyone how incompetent I was since I couldn’t even handle something this minor. She was even going to finance a campaign for someone to run against me.”

  “You could have used legal means to deal with him,” Mabel said. “You didn’t have to kill him.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I was there to tell him he’d been given his last warning, and I was going to have the board of health inspect the property, which would undoubtedly lead to its being condemned. But then he started talking about when he represented my mother when she divorced my father, and I couldn’t let him live. Not with the way he’d been spilling secrets lately.”

  “What could have been so bad that Graham needed to die?”

  Danny dragged her another foot. “It would have destroyed me.”

  “No one would hold your parents’ actions against you.”

  Danny laughed. “Of course they would. I know I’m only mayor because of him, because of the respect everyone had for him. I’d be voted out if anyone found out he wasn’t really my father. I couldn’t let that happen.”

  “Is your job really worth a man’s life?” Mabel asked.

  “It was self-defense,” Danny insisted. “My job is my life. Without it, I might as well be dead. So it was him or me.”

  Mabel loved her work, and she’d miss it terribly if she had to give it up to keep her aunt’s farm going, but she wouldn’t consider her life to be over. She wanted to tell Danny it was crazy to think that way, but now wasn’t the time for her usual bluntness.

  “If it was self-defense,” she said, “why did you make it look like he’d eaten the rhubarb leaves? That seems more like something done in anger, not in fear.”

  “I was angry. If it hadn’t been for Graham’s stupid obsession with rhubarb and then his foolish experiments with eating the leaves, he never would have lost his mind and threatened m
e with the disclosure of secrets that should have been protected by attorney-client privilege. In retrospect, it was also useful in confusing the police. Just like your dying in a fire will, and Lena’s dying in an accident.”

  “But if Graham’s death was self-defense, you can explain it to the police. You don’t need to kill anyone else.”

  Danny shuddered. “I can’t do that. To prove self-defense, I’d have to explain about my father not being my father.” He adjusted his grip on her arms. “I’m sorry, but now you’re the threat, and I’ve got to defend myself.”

  He resumed dragging her, and she tugged and twisted against his pull until her arms felt like they were going to pop out of the shoulder joint. At least it was slowing him down and tiring him out. He’d only gone about three feet before the next time he had to stop.

  Mabel considered twisting around and kicking at him while they were stopped, but she wasn’t sure it would actually get him to release her. He’d be prepared for an attack after Lena had surprised him into releasing her. But if she could lull him into complacency and wait for the right moment, he might drop his guard. For now, all she could do was to distract him from time passing by getting him to talk about what he’d done instead of dragging her closer to the shed. Every second they stayed in one spot was more time for the police to arrive.

  “What about the fire at my aunt’s farm?” Mabel asked, lying still to conserve her own energy until she had a chance of escaping. “I thought it was Porter, but now I’m wondering if it was you.”

  “Of course it was me,” Danny said with a distinct note of pride in his voice. “Porter gave me the idea, talking about how he’d bought up other farms that had experienced fires. It was supposed to get you motivated to sell. And as a nice side benefit, I thought it would distract you from investigating Graham’s death.”

  Mabel heard distant sirens and could only hope they were responding to her call. Danny looked in the direction the sound had come from before adjusting his grip on her wrists.

  She had to distract him, focusing his attention on her words and not on the approaching police. Making him angry might work. “You’re as bad at arson as you are at being the mayor. Your father would have revealed that you’re not his son himself if he knew how incompetent you’d be.”

  He let go of one wrist to slap her face. Her head snapped to the side and she felt blood dripping from her nose. Perhaps she’d gone a little too far in provoking him. She’d better be right about imminent help from the police.

  Her ears were ringing, but over that sound, she heard the sirens, which were definitely heading toward her. Even better, she heard Lena Shaw shouting to someone, “They’re in the back yard! Go through the greenhouses.”

  Danny redoubled his efforts to drag Mabel toward the smoking door, while she screamed once and then twisted to kick at the man’s shins. She managed to land a solid blow finally, startling Danny into releasing one wrist, right before her peripheral vision caught movement at the back door of the smaller greenhouse. Charlie Durbin stood there, scanning the back yard.

  “Over here,” she shouted and kicked Danny again, freeing her second wrist. She scooted away from him on her butt as Charlie raced up to stand between her and Danny.

  The mayor tried to go around Charlie to get to Mabel again, so Charlie punched Danny in the stomach. The mayor grunted and fell down.

  He didn’t stay down though. He got to his feet faster than Mabel would have expected, and reached for Charlie’s neck as if to strangle him.

  “Stop it,” Mabel shouted, trying to think of something that would get through his irrational thoughts. “You’re the mayor. You can’t kill all of your constituents.”

  Danny hesitated. “Not all of them. Just you two. And Lena.”

  Lena’s voice in the distance was repeating what she’d said to Charlie before. “They’re in the back yard. Through the greenhouse.”

  “That’s the police,” Mabel said as she got to her feet and went to stand beside Charlie. “You can’t kill your own police officers.”

  Danny looked over his shoulder to see two officers racing through the greenhouse door. He took a step back and tugged on the bottom of the sleeves of his blazer before waving his arm to invite the cops over to his side.

  “Arrest them,” he said. “They were trying to kill me.”

  Chapter 26

  The small-town police might not have had a lot of experience with murders, but they had plenty of experience dealing with people telling contradictory stories. They knew better than to let anyone go, even when one of the parties was the mayor, before getting all the facts. They took everyone involved to the police station. Everyone was quietly resigned to the experience, except for Lena Shaw, who seemed to revel in finally being taken seriously. Once at the station, everyone was placed in separate interview rooms. Mabel’s was only about ten feet square, with nothing but a metal table in the center, and four matching straight-back chairs.

  Detective O’Connor popped in briefly to demand an explanation for why she’d tried to kill the mayor.

  “You can’t possibly believe I did that,” Mabel said. “Have you talked to Lena Shaw yet? Or Charlie? They’ll tell you what really happened.”

  “More likely they’ll tell me what you asked them to tell me,” O’Connor asked. “You could have coached them before the police arrived.”

  She’d been too busy fighting for her life at that point, but she doubted O’Connor would believe her. “In that case, I want to talk to the state detective. I’m not saying anything else until she arrives.”

  “I don’t need her help.”

  He would never admit to his own incompetence, but maybe she could convince him it was to his benefit to have the more experienced detective present. “You don’t need to convince me, but wouldn’t you like to show the state detective how good you are? Especially with a case that’s going to get a lot of media attention with the mayor involved?”

  He managed to giggle thoughtfully. “You might be right. I’ll call her.”

  He left, and Mabel wished the uniformed officers hadn’t confiscated everyone’s cell phones, so she could get some work done while she settled in for what she expected would be a long wait.

  It was two long, boring hours later before the state detective, Deanna Cross, came through the door with O’Connor behind her. She looked like she could have been his mother, about thirty years older than he was, short and thin like he was, with red hair that looked natural. The big difference though was what looked like a perpetual scowl on her face instead of the junior detective’s false cheerfulness.

  “I’m told you won’t talk to anyone but me.” Detective Cross dropped into a chair on the opposite side of the table, while O’Connor remained standing behind her like a bodyguard. “So what have you got to say about what happened today?”

  Mabel gave her a quick rundown of how the mayor had tried to kill Lena Shaw because she had information that implicated him in a murder, and when she’d eluded him, he’d tried to kill Mabel while confessing to Graham Winthrop’s murder. She ended with, “The other witnesses will confirm what I said.”

  Cross looked over her shoulder at O’Connor. “Well? What did the others say?”

  “Lena Shaw said pretty much the same thing, but everyone knows she’s crazy. Charlie Durbin said he was stopping the mayor, not attacking him, but he’s a friend of Skinner’s, so of course he’d say they were innocent,” O’Connor said. “What the mayor told me was just so much more credible. He’s respected around here, unlike the others.”

  Mabel forced herself not to defend herself and Charlie.

  The skeptical expression on Detective Cross’s hard face suggested O’Connor wasn’t impressing her with the way he’d handled the matter. “So what did this paragon of a politician tell you that was so persuasive?”

  “That he was just having a conversation with Shaw, who wa
s always making impossible demands on him, so she became agitated, and then Skinner suddenly attacked him with the assistance of Charlie Durbin.”

  “Did he say why they attacked him?” Cross asked.

  “No, but he’s the mayor. Why would he lie?”

  “Everyone lies,” Cross growled again. “So you’ve got one purported victim who can’t explain why he was attacked. And you’ve got another purported victim, Ms. Shaw, who has a solid reason for why she was attacked, and she corroborates Ms. Skinner’s and Mr. Durbin’s statements, right?”

  “I suppose, but it’s the mayor disagreeing with the others,” O’Connor insisted.

  “All the more reason to get it right,” Cross said. “I understand two uniformed officers responded to the scene. What did they tell you?”

  “Just that Shaw was waiting for them and sent them into the back yard where the mayor and Durbin were facing off, and Skinner was on the ground behind Durbin.”

  “So it’s consistent with what three witnesses claimed happened, and yet you’re determined to believe the one person with a different story, just because he’s in a position of power.” Cross sighed and turned back to Mabel. “I’m sorry. I’m going to have someone come take your official statement, and once you sign it, you can leave.”

  O’Connor laughed heartily as if he’d just heard a hilarious joke.

  Cross turned and growled at him, and his laughter faded.

  “What?” he asked. “Are you serious?”

  “I was just about to ask you the same thing about how you’ve treated the witnesses,” Cross said. “I’m guessing you haven’t yet asked Ms. Shaw about what she knew that might incriminate the mayor in a murder. I’m pretty sure that when you do, you’ll finally understand what a big mistake you’ve made. And maybe then you’ll apologize to Ms. Shaw, as well as Ms. Skinner and Mr. Durbin, for your treatment of them.”

  “But—”

  Cross’s renewed growl cut him off. “Go do your job.”