Juniper Grove Cozy Mystery Box Set 2

by Karin Kaufman

  “Julia’s right,” Holly said. “I don’t think it’s Sonya, but we can’t eliminate her from our investigation at the start. We have to consider her, go over the evidence thoroughly and honestly, and eliminate her based on the evidence alone.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “You’ve been watching crime shows on TV.”

  Julia giggled.

  “Very funny, you two.”

  “No, you’re right, Holly,” I said. “We have six suspects. In Micah’s case, we know he was killed by . . .”

  “A cookie?” Julia said. “It was a cookie, wasn’t it?”

  I could have smacked my own forehead. “We’re missing a very important piece of information. What was the poison that killed Micah?” I glanced from Julia to Holly. “Was it a common poison? Was it something difficult to obtain? Was it liquid? Or was it a pill or some kind of powder?” Suddenly incapable of sitting still, I poured myself some coffee and paced the kitchen floor. “I didn’t think to ask. Not that Gilroy would have told me. Though Underhill probably would have. But the type of poison makes all the difference.” I halted. “What if it was a pill, like prescription medication? You can’t put that in a syringe.”

  “You can grind it to a powder and add water to make it a liquid,” Julia said.

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “Micah wouldn’t eat a cookie with a hard pill in it,” Holly added.

  “Can we look at this from a different angle?” I asked. “Who had a motive for killing two of the Four Santas?” I was about to recite my own ideas about motive when the phone rang. It was Gina Peeler, a friend I’d met last October, telling me she wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t come, not wanting to be “Typhoid Mary,” as she put it, and infect everyone at my party. My heart sank as I hung up. I’d been looking forward to seeing her again. “Gina can’t come,” I said.

  Trying to cheer me up, Holly pointed out that there would now be more food for the rest of us. Under normal circumstances, surrounded by so many of Holly’s cookies and pies, that would have buoyed me, or at least made me chuckle, but not tonight.

  “How many are coming?” Julia asked sweetly. She knew it wasn’t many.

  I lifted my eyes to the ceiling, mentally counting each guest. It didn’t take long. “A grand total of five. Six if Sonya comes, but she won’t.”

  “That’s lovely,” Julia said.

  “The perfect party size,” Holly added. “If it was six or seven, we’d be pushing the limit on the food. I for one intend to eat a royal boatload. So does Peter.”

  “What counts is that Chief Gilroy will be here,” Julia said.

  “James,” Holly corrected.

  I shuffled to the table and dropped to my chair. “I should have invited Ellen Lambert.”

  Julia let go with a laugh. “Oh, and have us all poisoned? Thank you very much, but no. I want to live to see Christmas.”

  “You know, I never feel comfortable at large parties,” Holly said, getting up to grab a clean cup from the counter. “I like small, friendly gatherings. Food, conversation, quiet music. I stopped attending big parties in my twenties, and believe me, I do not want to go back.”

  I smiled and managed not to go all soppy and hug them both. “Thanks, guys.”

  Holly thrust out her hand. “Hey, your Christmas tree.”

  “It’s still bare,” I said. “It has lights, but only a few ornaments.”

  “We haven’t got very long,” Julia said. “But between the three of us—”

  “We can do it,” Holly finished.

  In the living room, we each took command of one ornament box, and a startling fifteen minutes later, the tree was done. It was a masterpiece Officer Turner could never appreciate. Elegant. Understated but glimmering in shades of white, gold, silver, and red. I plugged it in, switched on its mini white lights, and stepped back.

  “It’s fantastic,” Holly said.

  “It looks and smells like Christmas in here,” I said, grinning like a kid, I was sure. “I’m going to light a fire.”

  Standing next to me, nodding her approval of the tree, Julia said, “In the fireplace, I hope.”

  THREE HOURS LATER, Holly and Peter, who had stayed long past their bakers’ bedtime, grabbed their coats from my upstairs office and apologized for leaving. Holly looked at me like I was a homeless puppy, and I told her to stop it. “It’s almost ten o’clock,” I said. “You have to be up in six hours.”

  “I know it didn’t turn out like you wanted it to, but I had a really good time,” Peter said, leaning sideways to give me a peck on the cheek. “I mean it. This is my kind of party.”

  “Mine too,” Holly said. “I had a great time.”

  “Go,” I said, a lump growing in my throat. “Have you got enough leftovers?”

  “We’ve got enough,” Holly said, her hand on the doorknob. “But we left plenty for you and Julia. It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow, so no guilt about eating cookies and pies all day long.” She shot a quick look at Julia and then crooked her finger, calling me to the door. “Let her vent all she wants,” she whispered. “I know that look. She’s ready to explode. It’ll do you good to listen to her and add some venting of your own.”

  Julia, who had been watching wood turn to coals in the fireplace, looked up. “I’m not deaf, Holly.”

  “Good. So have at it,” Holly said, opening the door. “Don’t hold back. I can promise you, the next time I see that man, I won’t hold back.”

  I followed them to the porch. “Thanks, you two. And Holly, the food was amazing. Did I ever tell you you’re the best baker in Colorado?”

  I watched as they descended the porch steps, and then I shut the door, flicked off the icicle lights, and joined Julia on the couch.

  After a moment’s silence, she said, “I no longer like him. I’ve made up my mind. He’s persona non grata with me.”

  “We don’t know why he didn’t come,” I said. “It could be anything. He does work in law enforcement. He probably has a very good reason.”

  Julia sighed and looked at me. “There are these things called telephones. He’s even got one in his pocket. I know because I’ve seen it. What did Officer Turner say again?”

  “He had no idea where Gilroy was, but he wasn’t expecting him to stop by the station until late, before he goes home.”

  “You sure you don’t want to call his cell?”

  “Positive.”

  “Officer Underhill didn’t stay very long.”

  “He felt uncomfortable. He knew I was upset.”

  “But even so.”

  “Yeah, even so.” It was all I could think of to say. What a disaster my first Juniper Grove party had been.

  “Can I leave my leftovers here tonight and come over tomorrow to pick them up?”

  “You mean come over to check on me.”

  “Is that so wrong?”

  I smiled for the first time in over an hour. “No, it’s not. Look, Julia, I’ll be fine. I’m tired right now, that’s all. Gilroy didn’t do this on purpose. That’s not the man I know. Something came up and he couldn’t get away—or call.”

  “You’re giving him more credit than he deserves,” she said, grunting a little as she struggled from the couch. “Why couldn’t he call? He knew how important this was to you.”

  “Important enough for me to wear a skirt I haven’t worn since Boston. I’d say that’s earthshakingly important.”

  My joke fell flat with Julia. “Tell him he’s persona non grata with me,” she said. “The man couldn’t even stop to make a ten-second phone call.”

  “I promise I’ll tell him. Using those exact words. Persona non grata.”

  Just as Julia was putting on her coat, I heard my phone ring.

  “Oh, I bet that’s him,” she said, following me as I scrambled for the kitchen. “I knew he wouldn’t forget. I knew it.”

  I checked the screen as I snatched the phone from the table. “The station,” I said, smiling.

  It was Officer Under
hill, asking me if Gilroy had shown up. The hopeful, pleading tone in his voice frightened me. “What do you mean? You know he didn’t come.”

  Julia drew closer. I listened as Underhill told me that Gilroy had said he would call or stop by the station before going home. And he never, ever forgot to call in when he said he would. They couldn’t find him, Underhill said, and he wasn’t answering his phone. He hadn’t been answering it for quite some time, but Turner had thought little of it, figuring Gilroy had finally made it to my house and shut off his phone.

  “Where was he going before heading to my house?” I asked.

  Underhill had no idea.

  I hung up and turned to Julia, my heart pounding. “James is missing.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “You’ll wear a path in the floor,” Julia said.

  I had rushed upstairs to change into my jeans and hiking boots, and now I was pacing my kitchen from the door to the table and back again, over and over. Where had Gilroy planned to go before coming to my house at seven? And why didn’t Underhill know that? What kind of police officer was he? And then there was Turner, the newbie. He’d just assumed Gilroy turned off his phone. Since when? Gilroy was police chief, for crying out loud. He would never do that—and Turner should have known. “So sloppy,” I mumbled.

  “What?”

  I came to a stop. “I can’t just sit here, Julia. Something bad happened to him. I feel it.”

  “Maybe he ran out of gas.”

  “Where? Wyoming? You can run out of gas anywhere in Juniper Grove and walk to a gas station in half an hour.” I resumed my pacing, but this time I grabbed my coat and car keys when I reached back door.

  “You can’t go out there, Rachel. It won’t help him if you get into a car accident.”

  “Then I’ll be careful not to.”

  “What are you going to do, drive in circles?”

  “All I know is I can’t sit here. If I have to drive in circles, I will.”

  Julia unhooked her coat from the back of her chair. “Well you’re not going to do it alone.”

  I thrust out my hand, palm first. “You stay here, Julia. It’s late and it’s freezing cold. I’ll call you if I find out anything.”

  Glaring defiantly at me, she jammed her arms into her coat sleeves. “If I have to tell you and Holly one more time, I’m going to explode. I’m in my sixties, not my nineties.” She marched for the door and flung it open so hard the knob struck the wall. I knew when to stop arguing with her.

  I eased the Forester onto Finch Hill Road, testing my brakes on the snow as the heater blasted cold air at our legs. “The road’s not bad,” I said. “I can feel the tires gripping.” I almost wished they were bad. Then I might have believed that Gilroy had slid off the road into a ditch outside of town and had gone for help to pull it out. Something as simple and harmless as that.

  “Where are we going first?” Julia asked.

  I braked. Think. “Where would he have gone before coming to my house? What was his last stop?”

  “Maybe he talked to one of the suspects,” Julia offered.

  “That makes sense. He was still working both cases. That’s why he wasn’t going to stay long.”

  “But which suspect?”

  I pulled my phone from my coat pocket, dialed the station, and told Underhill I needed to know if the autopsy had come in on Farley Brewer. “Don’t clam up on me, Underhill,” I said for good measure. I could be as stubborn as Julia.

  As it turned out, Underhill had no intention of clamming up. He was the same garrulous man on the phone with me as he usually was in the bakery talking to Holly. He said Farley had been murdered—and by the same poison that had killed Micah. It was in a Christmas cookie, probably, since almost everything they found in Farley’s stomach was a cookie. They had tested the small amount of cider in his cup, and no poison was found there. The poison was something called palytoxin. Underhill told me that in all his years of police work, that was a new one on him. He’d never heard of the stuff. Neither had Gilroy.

  When I demanded that Underhill call me if he heard anything, he said he would be heading out to search for Gilroy as soon as Turner came back to the station. He would tell Turner to call first him and then me with any news. I felt a little less panicky by the time I hung up.

  “Turner’s going to stay at the station and Underhill’s going to look for Gilroy,” I told Julia, handing her my phone.

  “I would certainly hope so.”

  I saw headlights in my rearview mirror as a car turned the corner onto Finch Hill. The first car I’d seen since braking and stopping in the middle of the road. The rest of Juniper Grove was at home on this night before Christmas Eve. I pushed down on the gas pedal, my rear tires slipping slightly as I accelerated. A block later, the impatient driver passed me.

  “If I knew where to go, I could speed up,” I said.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Julia staring straight ahead through the windshield, her nervous fingers twisting the top button on her coat. I braked again, pulled to the curb, and took back my phone.

  “What are we doing now?”

  “Looking up the poison that killed the two Santas. I’ve never heard of it before, and you can bet Gilroy looked it up as soon as the autopsy came in. It’s the only thing that might tell us where he went.”

  I soon had my answer. Palytoxin, one of the most deadly substances known to man, could be found in sardines, crabs, smoked fish, and even the common coral found in home aquariums. A jolt ran through me. “Symptoms develop rapidly,” I said, reading from the screen. “In large enough amounts, palytoxin kills soon after inhaling or ingesting it.”

  “Goodness alive,” Julia said. “Who would have such a poison?”

  “It’s commonly found in coral. So the answer is people who own saltwater aquariums.”

  The penny dropped. “Sonya Quinn? It’s not possible. That child wouldn’t kill anyone.”

  “She’s not a child, Julia. And she owns an aquarium.”

  “Do you think she’d go after Chief Gilroy?”

  “Poison James? No, he’d never let that happen.” I refused to believe it. He was too smart. He knew one of the people at the wreath-making party was a killer. He wouldn’t accept a cookie or a cup of coffee or anything else from any of them. He would never take a chance with his life. It was a long shot that she would even talk to me, but I dialed Ellen Lambert’s number. The moment she heard my voice she let loose with a blistering attack, letting me know it was far too late for phone calls and telling me Sonya had disappeared again and I was the reason why. And then she hung up.

  “That’s enough of that,” I said. I called Sonya, letting the phone ring a dozen times, but there was no answer. Tossing the phone to Julia’s lap, I swung once more into the road. “We’re going to talk to Ellen. You can stay in the car if you want.”

  “I’ve never thought Ellen was a killer,” Julia answered. “Anyway, you need me. She’ll never let you in the house without me there.”

  My Forester’s back end shimmied again as I pressed down on the gas, but to her credit, Julia didn’t tell me to slow down. This was no time to poke along the roads. Or make polite inquiries of women who hid crucial evidence in a murder investigation.

  I slid to a curb-bumping stop outside the Lambert house, alerting everyone inside to my arrival, I was sure. Julia and I marched side by side up the porch steps. I stretched out my arm and hit the doorbell.

  A shadow passed over the door’s rippled glass. A few exasperating seconds passed before Ellen decided to allow us in. She ignored me but greeted Julia with a smile and led her through the living room, where the elusive Michael Lambert sat reading, into the dining room. By the looks of the dining table, she’d been poring over recipes in every Christmas party book she owned.

  “Please excuse us for showing up unannounced so late at night,” Julia said. “We wouldn’t dream of doing it if it weren’t so important.”

  I was glad Julia was being the solicitous
one. Right then, I didn’t have the patience for patience. My only thought was to find James.

  “Have a seat. If it wasn’t Christmastime, my husband and I would be in bed right now,” Ellen said, shooting me a look.

  “Chief Gilroy is missing,” Julia said, getting right to the point.

  Ellen frowned. “How can the police chief be missing?”

  “We don’t know how, but he is,” I said. “The station hasn’t heard from him in hours, and he won’t answer his phone.”

  Ellen raised her eyebrows. “What do you want me to do about it? My concern is Sonya, who you invited to your Christmas party.”

  “When was the last time you saw Chief Gilroy?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. This afternoon sometime. He stopped by the house.”

  “What did he talk to you about?” Julia said.

  “He asked me again where everyone was when Micah died and what I saw at the caroling festival. And he asked me about Oliver.” She shot me another look.

  I was done tap-dancing around the subject. “Did he ask you if Sonya or anyone else you know has an aquarium?”

  Ellen froze like a deer in December headlights. “Why?”

  “Did he?” I repeated. “And do you know anyone else besides Sonya who owns an aquarium?”

  Michael Lambert poked his head into the dining room. “Did I hear something about Sonya’s aquarium? What’s this interest in aquariums all of a sudden?”

  “Sonya was here for dinner, and so was Oliver,” Ellen said.

  “Ellen, that doesn’t answer our question,” Julia said.

  I twisted in my chair to face Michael. “Are you saying Chief Gilroy was asking you about aquariums?”

  He folded his arms and leaned nonchalantly on the wall. “Yes, but he wouldn’t say why.”

  “Michael, stop,” Ellen said.

  “What’s the big secret? I guess it has to do with Micah’s murder, but you’ve got me how. He didn’t drown.”

  “Michael, please.”

  Michael studied his wife’s face with growing concern. Circling around the table, he sat next to her and took her hand. “Why does this have you so upset? I’ve never seen you like this. It’s an aquarium, Ellen. Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?” He looked back at me. “Did I hear you right? Chief Gilroy is missing?”