by Lee Hollis
“I’ll be there, ma’am,” he said, and then he got in the truck and backed out of the driveway as Hayley, Liddy, and Sabrina all watched with rapt attention until he drove off and disappeared around the bend toward town.
“‘Ma’am’? Not only is he magnificent to look at, he’s polite too!” Sabrina gushed. “See you girls later!”
Sabrina hopped in her Mustang and peeled away.
“I’ll bet anything she’s following him to the pier hoping to get her hooks into him,” Liddy cracked.
“You really think so?” Hayley asked.
“Sure. It’s exactly what I would do if I wasn’t about to get married.”
“Enough about AJ! He’s half your age!” Mona barked. “What brings you two here?”
“Timmy Blanchard,” Hayley said.
“What about him?” Mona asked, a distasteful look on her face.
“We found an email he wrote to Lisa right before she died, and it wasn’t exactly a love letter. In fact, it was rather menacing.”
Mona shook her head. “I don’t doubt it. Timmy’s a miserable hothead. When he worked for me, he would spout off all the time about this guy looking at him the wrong way or that guy disrespecting him. He was always picking a fight with somebody. I was the only one he didn’t dare tangle with, because the little bugger knew I would eat him alive.”
“Why did he leave?” Hayley asked.
“Because I fired him. He was lazy and unreliable and I didn’t like his attitude. He only worked for me for a few weeks, but that was enough for me to know I didn’t like him.”
“He was dating Lisa at the time he worked for you, is that right?” Liddy asked.
“Yup. I overheard him a couple of times talking to her on his phone when he was supposed to be working behind the counter taking orders from customers. He was constantly screaming and yelling at her about something. Believe me, it was not a healthy relationship.”
Hayley gulped. “Do you think he might be capable of—?”
Mona interrupted her before she could even finish. “Yup. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it turned out he was the one who spiked the cake that killed Lisa.”
Chapter 16
When Hayley and Liddy pulled up in front of Lisa’s shop, they saw that the police had finally removed the yellow tape from around its perimeter. It was now safe to rummage through Lisa’s office for any important documents related to the business that they would need in order to execute her wishes as stated in her last will and testament. Liddy had obtained the key to the bakery from Lisa’s house, but waited until she was given the all clear by Sergio before showing up and possibly disturbing the crime scene. Again, she recruited Hayley for emotional support. Plus, if they had to clear out or clean up the place, she certainly wasn’t prepared to do that on her own. Her housekeeper was on vacation in Fort Lauderdale, so that pretty much left Hayley.
Liddy slipped the key into the lock on the front door and turned it. She tried to push the door open, but it wouldn’t budge.
“That’s strange,” Liddy said.
“Maybe it’s stuck. Here, let me try,” Hayley said.
Liddy stepped back, and Hayley pressed her right shoulder against the door and thrust her body against it, but to no avail. That’s when she noticed the thick steel lock in the small crack between the door and the doorjamb.
“It’s been bolted shut from the inside,” Hayley said.
Liddy withdrew the key. “Well, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe one of the investigating officers locked the door from the inside and left out the back. Come on,” Hayley said, heading around the side of the building.
As she rounded the corner, she stopped cold. “Liddy, look . . .”
One of the windows on the side of the building had been smashed. Shards of glass were scattered all over the ground.
Liddy gasped.
Hayley cautiously approached the window, ducking just underneath it before taking a deep breath and slowly raising her head up to peek inside. She couldn’t see anything, just a glass case full of dried-out bakery goods, but she heard someone in the back office foraging through drawers and closets.
Hayley waved at Liddy to follow her, and they continued around to the back door. Liddy handed her the key, and as quietly as she could, Hayley inserted it into the lock, turning it until it disengaged and the door slowly creaked open. Whoever had broken into the bakery must have climbed through the window and bolted the front door from the inside to make certain no one came in to surprise him or her, but had forgotten all about the back door.
Hayley crept inside with Liddy close behind her. Liddy gripped Hayley’s arm so tightly it hurt. When they rounded the corner and had a full view of Lisa’s office, they caught sight of Timmy Blanchard rifling through Lisa’s expensive-looking mahogany desk.
“Hold it right there, Timmy!” Liddy barked, as if she was armed and sporting a police badge, which was not the case. In Hayley’s mind, it had been a dumb move to call attention to themselves when they weren’t sure if Timmy was packing and in a dangerous frame of mind.
Timmy popped his head up and spun around, a slight look of relief washing over his face when he realized it wasn’t the cops. “Jesus, you two nearly gave me a heart attack!”
“What the hell are you doing here, Timmy?” Liddy demanded to know.
Timmy dropped a file stuffed with paperwork on the desk. “That’s none of your business.”
“It is most certainly my business, because Lisa made me executor and principal heir of her will, so this is technically my property now,” Liddy huffed.
“I find that hard to believe,” Timmy scoffed, scratching the three-day scruff on his face.
“Frankly, so do I, but she did,” Liddy said. “Isn’t that right, Hayley?”
Hayley whipped out her cell phone. “I’m calling the police to report a breaking and entering.”
“Wait! Hold on!” Timmy begged, suddenly panicked. “Don’t do that! I wasn’t here to steal anything. I just came over here to pick something up that was mine to take, I swear on my life!”
Hayley kept her finger hovering over the 9 button on her phone, ready to dial 911 at any moment, but she was not going to complete the call just yet. Not until she heard what Timmy had to say. “Go on . . .”
“Lisa had a cash flow problem recently and had to borrow some money from me . . .”
“That doesn’t sound remotely plausible. Lisa was worth a fortune,” Liddy argued.
“Yes, on paper, but she sometimes came up short when she needed to buy baking ingredients, and so she just happened to catch me on a day when we weren’t fighting, and I was feeling generous, so I wrote her a check for three hundred dollars.”
Hayley shook her head, disgusted. “So you smashed a window and were combing her office for any money she might have had lying around because she’s no longer alive to pay you back?”
“No! Lisa called me the day before she died to tell me she had an envelope for me with the money she had borrowed, plus interest. She said I could stop by anytime to pick it up, but I was busy that day and told her I would swing by the next day. Unfortunately, by then, she was dead and the police wouldn’t let anyone near this place. So I waited until things died down.”
“That’s still breaking and entering,” Hayley reminded him.
“I just came here to get what’s rightfully mine! Honest!” he whined.
“Did you find the envelope?” Liddy asked.
“Not yet. Hey, would you two mind helping me look?”
“Yes, we would mind, Timmy! You have ten seconds to get out of here before I call the police!” Hayley warned.
“Please, ladies, I’m dead broke and could really use the cash,” he pleaded. “I lost a lot last week playing the slots in Bangor.”
“If we come across the envelope with your name on it, we’ll make sure you get it!” Hayley said.
“There should be three hundred and thirty bucks in it—that includes t
he ten percent interest!” Timmy said, smiling.
“Out!” Hayley screamed.
Timmy nodded and slowly moved away from the desk, his hands up in the air. But before he could reach the back door, Liddy stopped him. “Wait! Was it you, Timmy? Did you kill Lisa?”
Timmy froze in his tracks. “What? Me? No, of course I didn’t! We may have had our problems, but I would never do anything so drastic! Why would I do that?”
“Maybe a crime of passion?” Liddy suggested. “Maybe you never got over Lisa breaking up with you.”
“I broke up with her, not the other way around!” Timmy wailed.
“It’s no secret that you two had a number of screaming matches on the phone and in person all the time,” Hayley said. “I bet if we ask Chief Alvares, he could drum up one or two reports of being called out to Lisa’s house during one of your knock-down, drag-out slugfests!”
“Once! It happened once! But I didn’t kill her! We barely saw each other anymore, and when we did, everything was cool between us. We were better as friends than we were as a couple, and we both knew it! Like I already told you, I even lent her money when she needed it!”
Timmy, his eyes wide with worry at the suggestion that he’d had anything to do with Lisa’s murder, lowered his hands and continued, in a quiet, calm voice. “Listen, ladies, I read all the details in Bruce Linney’s column about the murder. He said Lisa was poisoned by some very rare, hard-to-get poison. Look at me. Where would I get my hands on anything like that?”
The kid had a point.
But Liddy was still not convinced. “You better hope you had nothing to do with my beloved cousin’s murder, because if I find out otherwise, I will hunt you down like an animal and shoot you between the eyes without giving it a second thought! And that’s a promise!”
Timmy stared at Liddy, his mouth agape, paralyzed with shock. Not because Liddy was threatening to snuff out his life, but because she had just called Lisa her “beloved cousin.”
It was obvious to Hayley, based on Timmy’s dumbfounded expression, that Lisa’s not-too-bright, ill-tempered ex-boyfriend may be a jerk, but he didn’t have much of a motive to kill Lisa. Now Liddy on the other hand, who was at the moment in real time busy rewriting history when it came to her fractured relationship with her now “beloved” cousin, had cause to worry because so far she was the only one with a solid, indisputable motive to commit murder.
Island Food & Cocktails
BY HAYLEY POWELL
I was rummaging through my refrigerator for something to snack on a few days ago when I spied a plastic-wrapped bowl of leftover Roma tomatoes from the previous weekend when I made a big pot of my homemade spaghetti sauce. I grabbed those tomatoes, because I suddenly had a eureka moment—I had a taste for bruschetta. I even had a baguette on the counter that was still soft and fresh and some goat cheese chilling in the fridge.
You can make bruschetta with just about anything, but I had my own special recipe, one I hadn’t served in quite a while. Not since I made it for a friend’s wedding reception a few years back, and let me tell you, it was divine!
I’ll never forget that wedding. It all started when my BFF Liddy’s real estate firm’s business was booming, and she decided she needed some extra help. Well, much to everyone’s shock, she wound up hiring a young, newly licensed realtor, who was, in the words of my brother Randy, “runway ready,” which meant she looked like a supermodel!
All of our friends were downright flabbergasted when Liddy so kindly took this knockout under her wing and generously became her mentor in the Bar Harbor real estate world.
Now don’t get me wrong, Liddy has always been the utmost professional. She runs a tight ship and is a definite stickler for following all real estate and office protocol. However, as we all know, she can be a bit competitive (sorry, Liddy, I love you, but you know it’s true), and she was never one to go out of her way to give another person a slight edge against her, especially if it threatened to kick her out of her number one spot of Top Downeast Real Estate Seller of the Year!
And the fact that the new girl in her office was a twenty-five-year-old, drop-dead gorgeous, blue-eyed blonde named Megan was even more stupefying! I could hardly believe how beautiful this young woman was when Liddy brought her to lunch for me to meet soon after she started working at the office. And the two got along like long lost twins, smiling at each other and giggling at each other’s jokes. And just to make things even more puzzling, I noticed Megan wasn’t wearing a wedding ring! She was single too! Liddy made a point of never fraternizing with young, pretty, single women. She considered all of them predators invading her territory in a town that wasn’t exactly flush with single, eligible bachelors. (This was long before that fateful day when Liddy met the man of her dreams, Sonny Lipton.)
While gabbing over a plate of fried clams at my brother’s bar, Drinks Like a Fish, I was dying to ask Liddy what her game was. There had to be some ulterior motive for her to cultivate such an unlikely alliance. When Megan stood up to go to the ladies’ room and had to stop to fend off the advances of a lovesick lobsterman by the bar, I had my chance.
“What is going on here, Liddy? This is not like you at all!”
“Patience, Hayley, patience,” Liddy said, raising her eyes from the menu and smiling sweetly.
After Megan returned to the table, we finished placing our orders with the waitress and were chatting among ourselves when a well-dressed young man stopped by our table to say hello to Liddy. She introduced him as Todd, a loan officer at Bar Harbor Banking and Trust. We all politely said hello and went back to our conversation. He just stood there, a little reluctant to leave, but soon moved on since none of us was paying any more attention to him. Not a minute later, two more handsome young men whom I recognized from when they came by the newspaper office recently to place ads for their new summer scooter rental business also stopped by to casually say hello to me, and I introduced them to Liddy and Megan.
The pair lingered longer than was comfortable, but finally got the hint to move on when we downright ignored them. Then yet another young man stopped by to say hello, and that’s when the light bulb finally went off in my head!
I had it all figured out. Liddy had befriended the stunning and quite honestly funny and charming Megan for a reason. Liddy knew every man in town would be sniffing around for an introduction, and having Megan in close proximity to herself would just mean Liddy could also benefit from being around lots of young, studly, available men too! And it worked like a charm. Liddy enjoyed all the attention and later called our time with Megan our “Twenties Do-Over Summer”!
As it turned out, Megan was really a fun, caring, and smart girl, and the three of us enjoyed going out together on the weekends for cocktails at all the local hot spots, and like clockwork, Megan would attract men like bees to honey. Even though I knew they weren’t there to impress me, I enjoyed all the free cocktails the men would buy for us while vying for Megan’s undivided attention.
Liddy was another story. She would flirt shamelessly with all of these young men, some nearly half her age, to the point where I was slightly embarrassed by her behavior. But Megan would just laugh it off, because she truly adored Liddy and considered her a dear friend.
Unfortunately all good things must come to an end, and much to Liddy’s dismay, by the fall of that year Megan had met a bright, good-looking young man who worked at First National Bank and was on the fast track to a VP position. Liddy made noises about Megan being too young to settle down and still needing time to play the field, but it soon became obvious, even to Liddy, that Megan had met her soul mate, and so a wedding date was set.
Luckily, Megan’s fiancé was a cool guy and secure enough in his relationship with Megan that he had no problem with her still going out for cocktails with me and Liddy, knowing the men at the bar would fawn over her and, by osmosis, us too. So Liddy managed to hold on to a little bit of glory. That is, until Megan’s fiancé finally got the VP promotion, but at anot
her branch of the bank, in Bangor. Megan applied for a job at Bangor Real Estate Agency to be closer to her groom-to-be, and though distraught at losing her best Realtor and close pal, Liddy magnanimously wrote a glowing letter of recommendation.
As they hugged goodbye on Megan’s last day as Liddy’s employee, I saw Liddy actually tearing up. She really did love the girl. Before they parted, Megan whispered something in Liddy’s ear, and as she wiped away her tears, she lit up with a big smile on her face.
As Megan got in the car and drove away, I had to ask Liddy what she had said. Liddy turned to me, and with a big grin on her face, said, “Megan’s mom lives in California and won’t be around to help with the wedding, so she wants me to help her plan everything, which means lots of trips to Bangor, where there are lots of bars and restaurants and single men—way more than here in little ole Bar Harbor!”
I just had to shake my head and laugh as Liddy’s imagination exploded with all kinds of possibilities.
By the way, Megan’s wedding was absolutely beautiful, and since Megan’s husband is from a large Italian family, that meant the reception was filled with scrumptious Italian flavors, including my homemade bruschetta, as well as this yummy, simple cocktail, which started the festivities off with a bang!
LIMONCELLO PROSECCO COCKTAIL
1 ounce Limoncello
1 chilled bottle of Prosecco
Pour Limoncello into a champagne glass. Top off with chilled Prosecco and hand the cocktails out to your guests. Make a toast and enjoy!
TOMATO, BASIL, AND GOAT CHEESE BRUSCHETTA
2 cups Roma tomatoes, chopped
2 cloves fresh garlic, finely minced (more, if you love garlic like I do)
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
½ cup chopped fresh basil
Kosher salt and ground pepper to taste
