Muffin But Murder (A Merry Muffin Mystery)

by Victoria Hamilton

  “No. Joe only comes in on Saturday to sign paychecks,” she said, slipping behind the counter and grabbing an almost empty coffeepot.

  That was good, because she was the one I wanted to talk to. I took the cup of coffee, though I could tell it was old, burned, and awful, with a visible oily sheen on the surface. I cradled it in my hands; at least it was hot, and I was cold. “My name is Merry, and I bake muffins. I was wondering,” I said, eying the glass cake cover with a pile of sugary donuts under it, “do you think the owner would sell my muffins here?”

  It was a simple question, but she stared at me like I had asked if he would sell crystal meth if I cooked some up. “I don’t know.”

  “Can I have Joe’s phone number? I’ll just ask him, okay?”

  She readily agreed to that and wrote his name and phone number down on the back of an order slip. I stuck it in my purse, then sipped some of the wretched coffee, choking it down with difficulty. “You lived here long?” I asked, setting the cup down and pushing it away. “Susan,” I added, glancing at her name tag.

  “All my life.” She was starting to get more comfortable with me.

  “I came here a couple of weeks ago looking for the Party Stop, remember?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you know a girl named Juniper Jones? She’s working in Autumn Vale now, but said she worked at the Party Stop before moving on.”

  Susan rolled her eyes. “I know her. She’s a special kind of crazy, I’ll say that.”

  I kept my expression blank but felt a little jiggle of excitement in my stomach. Had Juniper, seen arguing with Davey, killed him for reasons unknown? Had she known him before coming to Autumn Vale? “Crazy how?”

  “Crazy as in cah-razy!” Susan said, eyes crossed and twirling her finger around one ear. Eyes wide, she leaned over the counter and whispered, “She threatened a girlfriend of mine at the pool hall one night just for laughing.”

  “Laughing?”

  “Yeah. Said she’d cut her pretty face into ribbons.”

  “That sure is a special kind of crazy,” I said. Cut her pretty face into ribbons, eh? Sounded fairly psychopathic, and also like she’d be handy with a straight razor. “How long was she in town?”

  “A few weeks, I guess.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “I have no idea. I mean, who would purposely move to this town?”

  I couldn’t disagree with her. “What about Les Urquhart; what do you know about him?”

  “He went to school with my uncle Reg. Reg says Les is a sleazoid.”

  “In what way?”

  She leaned over again and whispered, “I heard he sells drugs out of the back of the Party Stop. He went to jail for dealing, you know.”

  That confirmed my guess about Les’s side business. Maybe it was more than just pot, though. “So why did he hire Juniper Jones?”

  “Who knows? He’s got all kinds of weirdos hanging out at that place. I wouldn’t step foot in there, even if the Party Stop is the only place in town to buy a Halloween costume!”

  “What kind of weirdos?”

  “Lately, there was this guy hanging around that no one saw except at night,” she said, glancing around as if there were a crowd trying to listen in on the gossip. “He was a skinny dude—tall, lanky, long hair. Everyone joked he was some kind of vampire, like . . . he only came out at night!”

  I asked a few more questions, but that’s about all she had to offer. “Well, thanks, Susan,” I said, laying a five dollar bill on the counter and waving off change as I stood and hoisted my purse up on my shoulder.

  “Anytime. It’s nice to talk to someone from the outside world,” she said wistfully, staring past the lone customer out the window to the gloomy streetscape.

  “Have you ever thought of leaving Ridley Ridge?” I asked.

  “Where would I go?” she said with a hopeless shrug.

  Into the wide, wide world, I wanted to say; a waitress can waitress anywhere, even New York City or LA. But it was her business if she was so defeated by life in the twilight burg that she couldn’t even see a place beyond the town line of Ridley Ridge. I got into Shilo’s car and headed to the Party Stop. The parking lot was surprisingly full, so I was forced to use on-street parking. The car idled for a moment before stopping, making a knock-knock sound that was not the beginning of a joke, I hoped. When I entered, it was to the noise of kids racing up and down the gloomy aisles while their mothers screeched at them to shut up as they surveyed racks of ready-to-wear Halloween costumes. Les sat at the cash desk still reading Moby-Dick and ignoring the chaos.

  “It’s Halloween tonight, isn’t it?” I said by way of a greeting. I had forgotten. That had to be the result of some kind of blockage in my brain. My mind boggled at the thought of Halloween in Ridley Ridge.

  He looked up and nodded. “Busiest day of the freakin’ year.” He sighed and put the novel down, splaying it out on the counter. “So how did your shindig turn out the other night?”

  “It went pretty well, all things considered,” I said with crossed fingers. I supposed a murder at your party, if you didn’t find out about it until after the end, didn’t devalue the whole experience, right?

  “Heard about your little trouble after. Sure am sorry for you.” He stood and rang up one brood, a woman with three kids, one a baby on her hip. She bought a witch costume, a mad doctor, and a pumpkin outfit for the baby.

  “Thanks. It was a horrible thing to happen, even though I didn’t know the guy.”

  Once the woman had exited, he leaned across the counter, swiped lanky hair out of his eyes, and said with a smirk, “I heard he was the twin brother of that other guy who got murdered out at your place. You seem to have your share of troubles.”

  Apparently the Ridley Ridge Record had made quite a bit out of the “rash” of murders at my place. They made it sound like I was the Autumn Vale Slasher. No wonder I was getting a reputation, even though the killings had nothing to do with me. “I don’t even know why he was there, that’s the thing,” I said.

  A dad with a sulky teenage son and younger daughter came up to the counter with an armload of costumes. He gave me a friendly smile, and I smiled back; definitely not a native Ridley Ridger. He fished out his wallet, complained about the price, argued with his son, and finally left.

  “Les, I’m checking something out for a friend. Did you employ a girl named Juniper Jones?”

  His look became guarded. “Why? What’s she done now?”

  Taken aback, I said, “Nothing that I know of. She got a job at a friend’s shop in Autumn Vale, but she left work this morning and didn’t come back. Have you seen her?”

  He shook his head.

  “What can you tell me about her?”

  “She was trouble from the get-go,” he said. “I felt sorry for her. She just rolled into town on the Greyhound, nowhere to go, nothing to do, so I gave her a job straightening up the stock for the holiday season. She did squat of the diddly variety and caused trouble all over town, so I let her go.”

  That corroborated the waitress’s story of a troublesome Juniper. I was afraid of that. “Maybe it’s a good thing if she’s taken off from Binny’s place.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “I’d better get going.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I’m just going to have a look around first.”

  His expression changed, and he looked shifty again, like he had the first time I’d seen him. “Uh, nothing new since last time, you know.” His gaze flitted to the back and then back to me.

  “I’ll look, nonetheless,” I said, my determination hardened by his worried look. Would I find Juniper hiding in the stock area, perhaps? I headed toward the back, past a startled mom dragging her twins from costume to costume in desperation.

  I wove through the place, then around one last long shelf f
illed with dusty plastic totes. The back was empty, except for piles of boxes near a loading-dock door that was open, letting the cool autumn air waft in. There, sitting up on a stack of the boxes like a princess on a cardboard throne, was Zoey Channer.

  “Well, hello,” she said, taking a drag on a cigarette and blowing the smoke out. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “Zoey! So, did your dad ever connect with you?” I asked, examining her exaggerated Cleopatra makeup and frizzy blonde updo. My voice echoed strangely in the cavernous storage area of the Party Stop. “Or are you still avoiding him?”

  I heard a rustle behind me, and Les came screeching out from the aisles and skidded to a stop, eying us both. He was dressed in sagging cargo pants and an Ed Hardy T-shirt; it was hard to see what the attraction would be for a girl like Zoey Channer, but maybe that was the point. Her father would hate Les Urquhart.

  “I’ll take from the silence that you haven’t let your father know where you are yet.”

  “Daddy dearest can kiss my ass,” she said, and tossed the cigarette down on the cement floor.

  “How many times I gotta tell you, butt it out,” Les said, hopping over and stomping on the glowing cigarette end.

  “Did he not fund your partying properly, or did he make the mistake of wishing you wouldn’t spend so much time in jail and around jail rats?” Silence. “So, why did you crash my party?” I asked her. “I know you were there.”

  She shrugged, fished in her purse, extracted a package of cigarettes, and pulled a fresh one out of the pack. “I was bored to tears. Thought Daddy might show up at the party looking for me, and I wanted to see what he’d do.”

  Les nervously looked from her to me and back. “Zoey, why don’t you take off? You, too, lady. I got customers to look after.”

  Despite his wish to get me out of the way, I wasn’t going anywhere until I found out where Zoey was staying so I could sic the police on her. She may have seen something, given that she smoked and would have had reason to be out on the smoking terrace. “It was a wild night,” I said. “Did you enjoy the party? You were following around those two local girls. I saw you.”

  “Fancy you recognizing me with the costume on,” she said, giving Les a look. “Told you I should have gone as a vampire.”

  Vampire. There had been a surfeit of vampires that night, not all of them accounted for. “Did you come, too?” I asked him, wondering if he was one of the random Draculas.

  He shook his head but didn’t say anything. Oh, I was definitely going to send Virgil Grace their way. I couldn’t think of any reason why they’d kill Davey Hooper, but I didn’t know everything about these two and what, if any, relationship they had with Hooper. I was confused; Les must be the guy Zoey had met through a cell mate, I figured. Or was he? Davey Hooper had been seen arguing with/talking to Zoey Channer, so he could have been the guy she’d met, her jailbird boyfriend. Was she the bewigged person Sonora Silvio had seen in a car with the cowboy? Had they come to the party together?

  One thing I felt sure of: Davey Hooper must have been the vampiric night crawler Susan the suddenly chatty waitress reported to have been staying with Les. My head swam with possibilities but no certainties, dizzying me as random threads and thoughts zipped around in my brain. I hate when that happens, especially when I don’t have time to sit down and think things through. I gave myself a shake and still stared at Zoey, who was making faces at Les. Ultimately, once I had pointed Virgil in their direction, it would be none of my business. I couldn’t think of any reason to keep probing, except an insatiable curiosity and a desire to find anyone to pin the murder on other than Pish.

  Ignoring Les’s antsiness—he kept glancing over his shoulder toward his shoppers, who I could hear rummaging in the shelves and dropping things, kids shrieking and mothers yelling—I asked Zoey, “Did you see anything that night? Out on the smoking terrace, for example?”

  “Are you kidding me?” she asked. She lounged back and puffed on her cigarette—such an attractive look for a young woman—and smirked.

  “Why would I kid?”

  “Oh, I just thought you were. I don’t do smoking terraces to smoke, that’s all. I smoke wherever I damn well please.”

  “Such a rebel,” I said mildly, sure she would not get the intended sarcasm. Les did, though, and glowered at me. I eyed him and thought, He’s trying to get in good with this girl because her daddy is Percy Channer of Channer Hotels International. How would that feel, I wondered briefly, to know that guys would try to date you just because of who you were? Not great, I concluded. Not great at all.

  I heard a rustling sound, and someone called from the cash register, “Hey, does anyone work here? Or should I just damn well help myself to these (expletive) overpriced nasty-ass costumes for my (expletive) nasty kids?”

  Must be a true townie, I concluded, just happy to be alive and living in lovely Ridley Ridge.

  “I’ll be back,” Les said, and waggled his finger at Zoey. “You behave yourself.” He took off at a lope around the shelf and disappeared.

  Good, a chance at Zoey alone and unhindered. “Which one is the fella of the moment, Les or Davey Hooper?”

  “Davey who?” she asked, blowing a smoke ring toward the ceiling.

  So that’s how she was going to play it. “You came to my party just to see if your dad showed up, you say. Then why were you watching my place originally? Are you the lookout for some particularly stupid band of crooks?”

  “Who do you think you are to talk to me like that?” she said, suddenly snapping out of her nonchalance. She glared at me, her face pinched into an angry expression. “What gives you the right?”

  “What gives me the right? Oh, that’s good. Let’s see . . . first, how about finding you skulking around in my woods and having your father come to my place looking for you while pretending to want to buy the castle? Oh, and then?” I glared at her and spoke very precisely and succinctly. “And then, how about finding a man dead and covered in blood, his throat slashed ear to ear . . . on my terrace?”

  Her face paled and she was silent. I couldn’t read her expression, which had gone blank, but it looked to me like she was trembling. Now that I had at least managed to wipe the smirk off her face, I would try again. “Did you at any time see the fellow dressed as a cowb—” I was interrupted by someone hurtling through the open back door and running toward us.

  Zoey cried out, and the girl—Juniper Jones, I quickly realized—flew at her, screeching, with a knife in her hand. I was stunned for a moment as the two girls fell in a heap behind the boxes, screaming and wailing. Juniper was shrieking what sounded like a steady stream of “Ihateyou! Ihateyou! Ihateyou!”

  “Stop! Stop it . . . Juniper!” I raced toward them and tried to pull Juniper off Zoey, but she kept slipping from my grasp. Her dark makeup was streaked all down her face, but there was a look of such hatred there as she attacked Zoey, whose clothes were beginning to look like ribbons from the slashing of the knife. Blood oozed and splattered, soaking into the fabric of her sleeves.

  “Call nine-one-one!” I yelped over my shoulder, my hands getting slippery from blood. I tried to grab Juniper’s hair, but she whirled and fended off my hand, then returned to her victim.

  Les was suddenly there. He leaped on the wailing girl, grappling her into a headlock, but Juniper, wildly powerful, struggled out of it like a greased pig. By this point I was in full panic mode; not much does that to me, but I don’t do well with physical conflict. I’m sorry to report that I was jumping up and down, flapping my hands like a useless chicken. A teenage customer—clearly with a better head on her shoulders than I—came running back, cell phone in hand, dialing and then babbling into it about a stabbing at the Party Stop.

  And then everything paused for one moment, like a still from a movie. Juniper, blood on her face, knife still in her hand, stared at me, her expression full of wonder and pain. She di
d not seem to know how she had gotten there, nor what she was doing. She looked at Zoey, and then at the knife in her bloody hand. She dropped it, and it clattered on the cement floor and skidded under a box, but she didn’t appear to notice. Her expression crystallized into hatred, and she spat on Zoey, then ran out the back door, leaped off the loading dock platform, and disappeared.

  Les, bloodied by the conflict, galloped after her as I thumped down on the floor on my knees and grabbed a costume another customer was holding to stanch Zoey’s bleeding wound. She was sobbing, rolling around on the floor, and wailing that it hurt, not so cool now that she was in trouble.

  Police erupted into the place, and I babbled out that the assailant had taken off, and Les, the store owner, was chasing her. An ambulance arrived and paramedics took over my nursing duties, as Les came limping back. Apparently his own leg had been slashed by the mad delinquent as they had grappled on the floor.

  It was going to be a long day in Ridley Ridge.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I SPENT THE REST of the afternoon in the Ridley Ridge Police headquarters being interviewed by the local sheriff, Ben Baxter, who was a lot older and not nearly as good- looking as Virgil Grace. Not that that mattered. They called Virgil for a character reference, but when the sheriff came back from the conversation, it seemed that Virgil had not been completely complimentary. Baxter implied that he had heard I was an interfering sort.

  I walked the sheriff through my impulsive decision to head to the Party Stop, what I had said to Zoey Channer, and what had happened next. He asked a lot of questions, and I answered as best I could. I had a lot to think about, but my brain was not processing by the time I was done with the hamster wheel of questions, each one asked multiple times in different ways. Why had I come to Ridley Ridge that day? Who had I spoken to? Why had I asked the waitress at the café about Les Urquhart and the Party Stop? Was there a particular reason I had decided to come to Ridley Ridge that day? Were they to believe that I had just happened to find Zoey Channer in the back of the store and that was exactly when Juniper Jones attacked her? Had I been in contact with Juniper?