Wedding Day of Murder

by Vanessa Gray Bartal

  “Good questions,” Mr. Middleton said. He looked equally disturbed.

  “I bagged the water bottle, but I’m not likely to lift any prints off it. Even if I do, what would they tell me? Unless whoever might have taken her has a prior, but what are the chances of that? I know everyone in town except the protesters.” One of them was now dead. Was it possible that one of the protesters had taken Lacy? If so, why? He ran his fingers through his hair, thinking. The whole situation was a mess.

  “Lacy Steele.” Jason and Mr. Middleton looked up when a nurse spoke. “She’s ready,” she added after catching their eye.

  “Mind if I pop in and check on her? I’m going to go home after,” Mr. Middleton said. “It’s been a long day.”

  “The longest,” Jason agreed. “Go ahead.”

  Mr. Middleton only stayed a few minutes. When he emerged, he waved to Jason and left. Jason walked to her room with some trepidation, not sure how to tell her that a cronut wouldn’t be forthcoming anytime soon. But when he entered, he saw her sitting up, looking lucid with an IV line attached to her arm. He vaguely remembered a nurse in the ER saying they were going to pump her full of fluids, antibiotic, and pain reliever.

  “Yayshon,” she beamed, smiling as best she could through enormously swollen cheeks.

  “How are you doing?” he asked. He leaned over the bed, looking for a spot to kiss and at last settled on her forehead. It appeared to be the only part of her cranium not doubled in size.

  “Weawwy well,” Lacy said.

  He perched on the bed and took her hand. “You scared me today.”

  “I’m sowwy,” she said. “I’m fine, weawwy.”

  “Lacy, do you remember what happened?”

  “Yesh.”

  “I need you to tell me everything. Start from the moment you left the house and go until I found you. This is very important, okay?”

  She nodded solemnly. “I wemember evewyfing,” she said.

  “Good. What happened?”

  “I had a fight wif my mom,” she said.

  “You did? She didn’t tell me about that.”

  Lacy nodded again. “It was pwetty howwible. We bof said fings. I went to my woom, but when I woke up, I didn’t know where I was.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Well, my woom wooked da same, but when I walked outside, evewyfing was diffwent. I walked for a while, den I met dis talking scarecwow. He was weawwy nice, so we walked togedder for a while, and den we found dis fowest.”

  “Let me guess,” Jason interrupted. “You found a talking lion.”

  Her jaw fell, and she winced. “How did you know dat? Did I teww you dis stowy befowe?”

  “No, but I’ve seen the movie. Sweetheart, that’s not your story. It belongs to Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Dat would expwain all da dancing dwarves. I fought dat part was odd.” She lay back and stared at the ceiling. “It was a good dweam, wots of singing. Evewyfing wooked wike candy.”

  Jason had been hoping that she could tell him what had happened to her, but how could he maintain his frustration when she was so cute and funny? “Did you sing and dance?”

  “I was spectacuwar,” she declared, straight-faced.

  “Yeah? Lay it on me. Sing something.” He expected her to sing, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” but he should have known Lacy would never do anything predictable. She began to belt, “If I Were King of the Forest,” and soon he was laughing too hard to breathe. Perhaps what was most funny was that she was completely serious and undaunted by the temporary speech impediment. Jason wished he had a recorder, but he had left his phone in the car. Someday when she was lucid, she would enjoy hearing herself sing, “If I were king of da fowest.”

  She finished the rendition on a yawn. Jason was still laughing. “Ah, Red, you keep me from being a grumpy, lonely mess, you know that?”

  She blinked sleepily and tried to smile. He leaned forward and pressed a gentle kiss to her lips; when he pulled back, she was asleep. The day’s stress and anxiety were gone. Both had a way of magically disappearing, when he was with her. He was exhausted, but he stayed for a long time, assuring himself that she was really okay.

  The next morning came too soon. Not even a run and a shower helped him wake up. He made two travel mugs of coffee before remembering he wouldn’t be taking one to Lacy like usual. On most days, he stopped by the Stakely building before work and took her some coffee. There were five places to get coffee in the Stakely building, including Lacy’s office, but they had come to enjoy the few minutes they spent together in the morning. The evenings often disintegrated into craziness with work commitments for him and family or friend commitments for her. Setting aside a few minutes every morning just for them was quickly becoming a necessary aspect of their relationship. He took the second coffee anyway. Maybe Lacy was with it enough this morning to take a few sips.

  A peek in her window at the hospital quickly dispelled that notion, however. She was still sound asleep. He wanted to see her, but it would be selfish to wake her. Instead, he waited in the hall until the nurse had finished taking her vitals.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “You’ll have to ask the doctor,” the nurse said. “He’s the only one allowed to update on her condition.” The frustration in her tone told him that she was no fan of the policy.

  “Off the record, how is she?” Jason asked, adding his most charming smile. Just because he wasn’t a flirt didn’t mean he didn’t know how.

  “Off the record, she’ll be fine. She has dry socket and an infection. A few days of rest, fluid, and some antibiotics, and she’ll be back to normal. Unless normal for her is sneaking out of her room to hold the crash cart hostage until we double her pudding rations.”

  “She didn’t,” he said.

  “She did,” the nurse said. “We would have given her the pudding anyway, but she gave us a laugh.”

  “That’s my girl,” he said. “I don’t suppose I could ask you to tell her I was here when she wakes up.”

  “For you, handsome, I’d get a tattoo where the sun don’t shine,” she said.

  He supposed he should have found the statement creepy coming from someone twice his age, but he didn’t. “We’ll start with the message and see where it goes.”

  She was chuckling when she left him; he hoped that would translate into extra care for Lacy. Over the years of being a cop, he had learned to play nice with nurses. They were the power players in a hospital, and they were also the ones who always knew what was going on. Doctors swept in and out; nurses were there all the time. They heard things. They saw things. And if they didn’t like you, they could make it hurt the next time you needed medical attention.

  His good mood lasted exactly until he arrived at the office. That was when he remembered they were in the chaotic early stages of a possible murder investigation. It wasn’t that he had forgotten, exactly, just that his concern for Lacy had shoved it to a far corner of his mind. Usually when he compartmentalized things, the reverse happened and he forgot the real world in favor of work. Forgetting work for a while was welcome relief. As soon as he walked in the door, however, it all came crashing back with the appearance of Arroyo.

  “Tox screen came back,” he announced.

  “You’re kidding,” Jason said. “Who’d you bribe?”

  “Let’s not look a miracle in the mouth. Anyway, it turns out our vic was murdered with cleaning solution.”

  “Cleaning solution,” Jason repeated.

  “Common everyday cleaning solution, the kind probably found under every bathroom cabinet in America. Either our killer used what was at hand or he’s some kind of clean freak with a fetish.” He eyed Jason. “Wasn’t you, was it?”

  In addition to giving him a hard time about not drinking, his coworkers liked to razz him about his love of cleaning. When he was a rookie, they used to torture him by leaving sticky messes in his cruiser. He got them back by calling them in th
e middle of the night to play Justin Beiber songs. The pranks ended for a long time after that.

  “I wouldn’t use poison,” Jason said. “Too uncertain.” Poison left the possibility of survival, however gruesome that survival might be. It could also take a long time to work. Had Carl Whether’s death been instant or slow and painful? Did the killer jab and dump, or did he stand around to watch? Why had he used cleaning solution? Was it premeditated or was that what was on hand? “Did you bring up any hits on the method?”

  “Nothing,” Arroyo said. “If our killer’s hit before, he hasn’t made a habit of using this method.”

  “Great,” Jason said. Basically, they had nothing.

  “Did you get anything from Joan Baez yesterday?” Arroyo asked.

  “A headache from the incense fumes. According to her, ‘Forest’ liked naps.”

  “Who’s forest?”

  “That was her name for Carl Whethers. She had known him all of three days. How about the others? Did you get anything from them?”

  “Nah. They might be worth another look, though.” Especially because we have nothing else. The unspoken thought hovered between them. “I heard you had some trouble with your girlfriend last night.”

  “I wouldn’t say trouble,” Jason said.

  “What would you say?” Arroyo asked. “I heard she disappeared for hours and you had to do a search.”

  “That’s pretty much the gist of it,” Jason said. He was uncomfortable with Arroyo knowing too much about Lacy or their relationship. “She had her wisdom teeth out yesterday and had a bad reaction to the medication. She’ll be fine.”

  “Good, glad to hear it,” Arroyo said with no conviction.

  “Have you talked to the vic’s employer?” Jason asked, happy to change the subject back to work and away from his personal life.

  “Carl Whethers was a stringer. When he wasn’t working toward a Pulitzer, he mowed lawns for cash. The paper never had any idea what he was working on ahead of time, but they did say that he dug deep whenever he was on a story, enmeshing himself completely until he had all the material he wanted. The trailer yielded nothing? No clues?”

  Jason’s phone rang, providing a distraction while he thought of a way out of the tricky situation. Fortunately the call turned out to be an informant who was helping him on a prescription ring involving a doctor the next town over. Jason had been working closely with the neighboring sheriff’s department for months, trying to track the doctor’s activity. The problem was that his informant was also a user and therefore not reliable. He waved to Arroyo to let him know the call would take a while. Arroyo gave him an upward nod and ambled away.

  The call finished, and Jason went to the evidence room to re-inspect the photos of Lacy. Why had Carl Whethers had them? Why were they in chronological order unless the story he was working on was about Lacy? That was possible; Lacy’s rags-to-riches story was intriguing, as was her single-handed revitalization of their once decaying downtown. If he were being objective, he would continue to believe that Lacy was his prime suspect. If Carl Whethers had been writing an in-depth article about her, he might have discovered something she didn’t want made known. Jason knew that she didn’t want the media to grab hold of the facts surrounding her inheritance, mostly because her mother didn’t know she was adopted. But would the desire to keep a secret be reason enough to kill someone? The answer to that depended on the secret.

  Even if he looked at things objectively, he couldn’t see any way the secrecy of Frannie’s adoption was worth killing for. If revealed, the worst that would happen was that it might cause a family rift. Lacy was protective of her family, but not to the point of murdering to keep them from arguing.

  A truly objective observer might point to the fact that perhaps Carl Whethers’ digging uncovered something more nefarious than Frannie Steele’s adoption. Jason knew, however, that there was nothing else hidden in Lacy’s past, especially nothing sinister. A clever prosecutor could make things look very bad, however. How do you know your girlfriend had nothing else hidden in her past? If she did, do you think she would have told you? He could almost hear the prosecutor speaking at Lacy’s trial.

  Jason stuffed the photos back in the bag and tucked them at the back of the shelf, locking the door behind him. He knew what he needed to do, but he had no idea how to go about it. In addition to finding the real murderer, he needed to prove that Lacy had nothing to do with the case. He supposed the best way to do that was to do what Carl Whether’s had done—immerse himself in the story and start asking questions.

  Chapter 9

  If Carl Whethers had made a timeline of Lacy’s life, then Jason would do the same. To do that, however, he needed to start at the beginning with the people who had known her longest.

  Her grandmother, Mrs. Craig, answered the door wearing an apron and an eye patch. “Oh, Jason, how nice to see you,” she said, smiling. She held a spatula in one hand like some sort of baking pirate. “I was making some snacks for Lacy. She’ll be hungry when she’s able to eat again.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Craig. How are you feeling? How is your eye?”

  “Goodness, it’s fine,” she said, waving the spatula dismissively in front of her face. Lacy had once told him that if her grandmother’s leg fell off, she would pick it up and carry it to the kitchen—both so no one would notice and so she could keep cooking.

  “Can I offer you something to eat? I only started a little while ago, but I’m sure I can round something up,” she said. He followed her to the kitchen and saw two types of cupcakes fanned out to cool on the table. The counter had a plate of cookies and Lacy’s favorite prune cake.

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “Lacy said you don’t care for sweets,” she said. Her tone held a hint of puzzlement. Jason was afraid this was a ding against him, and he tried to make amends.

  “I have to keep in shape,” he said. “And now that I no longer wrestle with criminals on a nightly basis, I have to be especially careful about my intake.”

  “Oh, you kids and your obsession with calories. In my day, we ate what we wanted, and it was real food, too. None of these factory bi-products dressed up to resemble food. You know the other day, I thought I was buying my favorite butter and realized it had been blended with margarine. They said it was for softness, but I don’t buy that. Who doesn’t soften their butter before they bake? I couldn’t pronounce what half the ingredients were. In butter, for goodness sake. The ingredients on back of the label should have had one word: cream.” She thumped a mound of dough with a rolling pin. He had never heard her say so much or be so vehement before. Lacy’s close relationship with food began to make a little more sense.

  “That must have been frustrating,” he said.

  She smiled sweetly at him. “Well, it’s these eyes. They make me misread things. I’m sure things will pick up now that I’ve had surgery.” She dusted her hands on a cloth and poured him a cup of coffee. He was jittery after having drunk Lacy’s coffee in addition to his own, but he couldn’t refuse her again. Under her watchful supervision, he added heaping amounts of sugar and real cream. With her, he wasn’t sure how to get the ball rolling with questions about Lacy. How did he ask the world’s most innocent and sweetest woman if there might be any dark secrets in her granddaughter’s past, especially when he was certain that there weren’t?

  At that moment, Frannie stumbled in. She wore a bathrobe, but her hair was perfectly coiffed, her unmade face wrinkle free. Once again he had the feeling that he was seeing Lacy in thirty years, and he had no idea why that should make him so uncomfortable. Something about seeing an older version of Lacy’s pretty face on the woman who was so vastly different was disconcerting. Was he afraid Lacy would magically turn into her mother someday? Not likely. She was far more likely to turn into the sweet and plump Lucinda Craig. He could just see her ranting and raving about sneaky butter tactics.

  “You look happy this morning,” Frannie observed.

  He realized he
was smiling and took a sip of his coffee to cover. “The day is off to a better start than yesterday,” he commented after he swallowed his coffee.

  “Mom’s boyfriend said Lacy’s coming home today,” she said.

  “You heard Tom when he was here?” Lucinda said.

  “How could I not, Mother? Between your loud chatter and all the baking noise, I couldn’t sleep a wink.”

  Lucinda winced and returned to her dough with a nervous flounce. Jason thought maybe Lacy wasn’t the only one who was ready for Frannie to go back to Florida. The woman acted as though she owned the place when it was Mrs. Craig who owned it and Lacy who lived there. She had even forced Lacy out of her bedroom, claiming back problems as a way to get the bigger bed and bigger room. Lacy had uncomplainingly taken half of her wardrobe to the Stakely building and now showered there on most days. Easy, he warned himself, trying to uncurl some of the coiled agitation in his gut. This wasn’t his mom, and these weren’t his issues. If Lacy wanted to confront her mother, then she would. She didn’t need him to stick his foot in things.

  “I was hoping to talk to you about Lacy,” he said.

  Frannie sank to a chair. “Are you going to propose? Is this you asking permission?”

  “I…uh…we’ve only been dating…”

  “Frannie, you’re scaring the poor boy,” Lucinda said, standing up to her daughter for once. She refilled Jason’s barely touched coffee mug and gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Go on, dear, we’re listening.”

  He had some trouble reeling his mind in after that. “I had a few questions about Lacy.” They gave him blank stares. “When she was younger, specifically in high school and beyond.” The pictures had started in high school. Was that significant or was that as far back as Carl Whethers had been able to find photographic evidence?

  “I thought you knew her in high school,” Frannie said.

  “I did, but not well. We knew each other by name only. We had different friends.” How did one explain to his girlfriend’s mother that her child hadn’t been cool enough to be part of his social circle back then? It was a lifetime ago, and he barely understood it himself. Everything was a blur from that time except for football and his miserable home life.