Juniper Grove Cozy Mystery Box Set 2

by Karin Kaufman

  “Come on up,” I said, waving her inside. I wanted to thump her too. Showing up unannounced two days in a row? What was she up to?

  I took her through to the kitchen, told her to sit, and handed her a cup of decaf. “Why are you here? Is this about the phone conversation Julia overheard?” If she was going to be rude, I was going to be blunt.

  “You know about that?” she said.

  “You know I do, Anika.”

  Anika gave me a long, icy look, abandoning piece by piece her jolly persona, and then turned to Julia. “I know you heard what I said, or part of it, and I wanted to explain.”

  It struck me that Anika had very much wanted to talk to Julia alone, supposing—wrongly—that my neighbor was a naive pushover who would buy anything she was selling. My presence was causing her to improvise.

  Julia, every bit my equal in bluntness, said, “I think it’s plain you were talking about Brigit’s murder.”

  “Not . . . well, not really, because I was talking to Wayne, and he didn’t murder her, so, you know, not murder.”

  “Who’s setting Wayne up?” I asked. “Charlie?”

  Anika spent a moment in silent agitation, glaring at me, then said, “I think he is. But this is not your business. I’m talking to Julia.”

  Julia guffawed. “It’s as much hers as mine, Anika. If you were going to tell me, you can tell Rachel. We’re talking about murder. The time for secrets is long past.”

  I ignored Anika’s piercing stare and continued. “So you think Charlie is setting Wayne up to take the blame for Brigit’s murder? How’s he doing that? Have you talked to Chief Gilroy about this?”

  Anika pushed her cup away, sending coffee sloshing over the cup. “I can see this was a very bad idea.”

  I wasn’t finished. “Charlie’s your husband. Why are you trying to protect Wayne at his expense?”

  Anika stood abruptly and literally looked down her nose at me. “You know the answer to that too.”

  “Yes, I think I do.” I stood. “Chief Gilroy already knows what Julia heard, so there’s no need to tell him. I’m sure he’ll be contacting you soon.” It was a little white lie, but if it kept Julia safe, I was willing to tell it. “In the meantime, if you, Charlie, or Wayne have more to say, say it to the police. Don’t come here again and don’t go to Julia’s house.”

  “You can’t tell me—”

  “I second that,” Julia said. “Good manners dictate that you call first.”

  Together we showed Anika the door, but I wasn’t convinced I’d seen the last of her on Finch Hill Road.

  CHAPTER 15

  The moment Anika sped off, I dialed Gilroy and told him everything. He insisted Julia and I stay put and wait for him. First he wanted to talk to Anika, he told me, and then he’d stop by my house.

  “Anika’s a con artist,” Julia said, following me to the living room. “She’s not genuine in anything she says. If she killed Brigit herself, it wouldn’t surprise me.”

  I put another log on the fire and plopped down onto the couch again, feeling bone tired though it wasn’t yet nine o’clock. “Anika’s primary concern is Anika,” I replied. “Now I wonder if she ever cared about Brigit or Charlie.”

  “Let me tell you, Rachel, I’m looking at Brigit in a new light. Maybe she wasn’t as bad as Anika made her out to be.”

  “Funny Anika would drive out here again.”

  “It’s rude, that’s what it is.”

  “I’m asking myself what she had to gain by it. Yesterday she implicated Wayne by telling me Brigit told her he was becoming violent, then tonight she implicated Charlie. It’s almost as if she’s trying to muddy the waters.”

  Julia exhaled with a groan. “They’re muddy enough as it is. I don’t know about you, but I’m no closer to an answer than I was yesterday.”

  I sat straight and scooted to the edge of my seat. “We have to ignore everything Anika has told us and start again. Want some regular coffee? The good stuff?” I set out for the kitchen, the mad idea that I needed to solve Brigit’s murder before tomorrow’s dance playing in my mind. I didn’t want Gilroy distracted—or worse, working the case—on our first Valentine’s Day as a couple, and I wanted Julia to have a fun time at the dance, even if it had to be as a punch server.

  Julia was on my heels. “Are we making a night of it?”

  I swung to face her. Judging by her expression, she was as eager as I was to solve Brigit’s murder, perhaps partly to get her mind off Royce Putnam. “Since you’re staying here tonight, why not?” I continued to the kitchen and pulled the real coffee from a cabinet.

  “I don’t think Anika will dare come back,” Julia said hopefully. “Do you?”

  “Let’s see what Gilroy thinks,” I said, spooning coffee into a fresh filter. “He might say it’s okay for you to go home. I only wish Holly was here too. We could use her input.”

  “She and Peter have been working overtime.”

  “She told me once that only Christmas and Thanksgiving are busier than Valentine’s Day.”

  Julia wandered over to my kitchen table and sank to a chair, looking glum at the mention of the holiday. “I suppose I could eat myself into a sugar stupor when I get home from the dance. Everyone else is overdoing it on Valentine’s, aren’t they? A night in front of the television with a box of raspberry scones.”

  I needed to detour her train of thought before she got stuck, and I knew from past conversations that Gilroy’s name often did the trick. “Did I tell you? Gilroy says he’s off sugar.”

  Julia was appalled. “Why on earth would he say that? He loves Holly’s Sweets. He, Turner, or Underhill are there every morning.”

  “Maybe that’s why,” I answered with a shrug. “Donuts every morning, donuts every afternoon. I think he eats more donuts than I do cream puffs, and that’s not easy to do. I haven’t had a chance to find out why he’s boycotting sugar, but you know I will.”

  “Madness. He’ll lose his mind trying to do that. Police departments are fueled by sugar and caffeine.”

  “Officer Turner would agree with you.” I put away the coffee jar, turned, and leaned against the counter, my thoughts speeding by some strange, oblique route from Gilroy to Anika’s phone call. “You’re not that quiet when you walk, Julia, and footsteps echo in that place.”

  “Is that supposed to make sense, dear?”

  “Anika was working after six o’clock? I doubt it. I don’t care if she’s the only one in the Records Section now. What if she knew you were listening to her? She might have been playing you.”

  Julia nodded and her eyes widened as I laid out reasons for my suspicion. First, it didn’t make sense for Anika to turn away from her office door to make a secretive phone call. Any sensible person would have shut the door—or made the call elsewhere. Second, it was clear to me that Anika had paid Julia a visit to make sure Julia thought what she was supposed to think about what she had overheard. And third, why was Anika throwing Charlie under the bus the day after doing the same to Wayne? The sudden flipflop smacked of self-interest and self-preservation. It was the sort of thing you’d do if you saw the tide turning on you.

  Julia looked like she was about to fully agree with me when the doorbell rang, startling both of us. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, you’d think we were children,” she said with a laugh. “That must be Chief Gilroy.”

  But instead I found a tired and a slightly rumpled Officer Underhill on my porch, looking as though Gilroy had roused him from an early date with his bed. He must have seen something akin to terror on my face, because he instantly thrust out his hands. “Chief Gilroy’s fine, he’s fine. He asked me to check on you, that’s all.”

  After Gilroy’s brush with that murderous driver on a lonely canyon road last December, I was more than a little sensitive to Underhill or Turner appearing at my door when I was expecting Gilroy, but Underhill knew that. He had seen me at the hospital the night Gilroy was brought there. It was a night neither of us would forget.

&nb
sp; Underhill peered over my shoulder into the living room at Julia, who had moved to the couch nearest the fireplace. “I’m supposed to tell you the chief won’t be here tonight, and he says Mrs. Foster should stay with you, just to be on the safe side.”

  “It’s freezing out there,” I said, trying to usher him inside. “I’ve got fresh coffee and a Thermos you can take with you.”

  “That’s tempting, but no thanks.”

  “Did Gilroy talk to Anika Mays?”

  Underhill grimaced. “Oh, man. He didn’t get the chance. He found her car parked outside her house with her in it. Unfortunately, she’s dead.”

  Julia sprang from the couch like a woman on fire. “Officer Underhill, she was just here! We just talked to her!”

  “The chief told me that, Mrs. Foster. I’m off to the scene now.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder.

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  “Gilroy thinks she was stabbed, but he’ll know more later. The medical examiner is on the way. Sorry, but I have to go, ladies.”

  Underhill hurried down the steps to his squad car. I shut the door and leaned against it, gaping at Julia, who looked every bit as stunned as I felt. “This changes everything. Forget what I said about Anika making a phony call. She may have been telling the truth.”

  “About Charlie?” Julia asked, returning to her seat.

  “Then again, what about her driving all the way to my house to tell me Brigit was afraid of Wayne?” I dropped to the couch and raked my fingers through my hair. “Oh, I don’t know anymore! There are so few suspects but so many motives.”

  “What if she was killed because of her phone call?”

  “That would mean Wayne killed her. She was talking to him.”

  “If Anika was telling us the truth.”

  “We keep going back to that, don’t we? They’re all liars.”

  “Cheaters and liars,” Julia added. “We can’t trust any of them to be truthful. Could we have missed a suspect?”

  I thought about the murder scene, the brutality and intimacy of it, the lack of defensive wounds on Brigit’s hands. “It was Wayne or Charlie. Someone she was expecting, or someone she wasn’t surprised to see walk into the house. Someone she allowed to walk right up to her while her back was turned. It’s almost strange that she wasn’t expecting to be killed. Do you know what I mean? She was taken completely by surprise.”

  Julia shivered. “All I know is I’m glad I’m staying here tonight. If Anika was killed over that phone call, and she told Wayne or Charlie that I was there . . .”

  “You’re safe now, and we’ll keep all the lights on. No one will know if we’re awake of sleeping.”

  “Is the back-door light on?”

  “Yup.”

  “I won’t be sleeping much tonight, that I’ll tell you, Rachel. I’ve never been so glad for my insomnia.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Relishing the warmth of my bed and reluctant to leave it, I pulled the comforter under my chin and listened to Julia bang around in my downstairs kitchen, opening and closing drawers, rummaging around in my pots and pans cabinet. The sun was up, but I had no intention of rising. After all, I hadn’t gone to bed until just past three o’clock. Julia had succumbed at the same time, but we left the lights burning. I turned on my side and drew my knees to my chest.

  A minute later, curiosity got the best of me and I took a peek at my alarm clock. It was just after nine. Good grief.

  I threw off my comforter and sat on the edge of my bed, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. My first fully coherent thought was that two women had been murdered in the space of two days. My second was that it was Valentine’s Day. I slipped on jeans and a sweater, headed downstairs, and mumbled a good morning to Julia.

  “We have investigating to do,” she said, working scrambled eggs around a pan. “No more slouching. If we had solved this earlier, Anika would still be alive.”

  I shuffled over to the counter and got a pot of coffee going. The coffee-stained paper towel in the sink, leftover from Anika’s spill the night before, reminded me how irritated she had been with me. Guilt whispered in my ear, but I refused to give in to it. Maybe she’d been telling the truth about the phone call to Wayne, but she hadn’t been aboveboard with me or the police. She’d known more than she’d been willing to let on, and it had cost her her life. “Don’t go down that road, Julia. We’re not responsible for her death.”

  “It bothers me that she was here, alive and well, minutes before she was killed. I keep thinking, what if we’d stopped her from leaving?”

  “How? We didn’t know she was about to be murdered.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’m not going to let you blame yourself, not one tiny bit. Don’t forget that she was here in her own self-interest, just like the first time she showed up at my house, when she threw suspicion on Wayne.”

  “Either Charlie or Wayne killed her,” Julia said, “and I think it was because one of them was afraid of what she’d say. She was a talkative woman.”

  “Trouble was, she talked to all the wrong people. Everyone but the police.”

  “The first thing we should do is find out exactly how she died.”

  “That should be easy enough. Gilroy doesn’t mind telling me the basics. Our first stop is the station.”

  Julia plated our eggs and grabbed forks from a drawer while I poured coffee and took our cups to the table. I suddenly realized that I didn’t have to wait to talk to Gilroy. If Underhill or Turner had made an early morning donut run to Holly’s Sweets, Holly had already heard the medical examiner’s preliminary report. Neither one of them would’ve been able to resist telling her. The warmth and aroma of that bakery loosened the tongues of everyone who entered it, but particularly those who were predisposed to being gabby.

  I phoned Holly’s Sweets. Though Holly was busy making more heart-shaped cookies for the night’s dance, Peter filled me in. Turner had been especially talkative early this morning, he said, and Holly had doled out extra donuts to keep him talking until he divulged all he knew.

  “Peter says Anika was stabbed by something similar in shape to a screwdriver,” I said a minute later, taking a seat at the table. “The ME has to complete his report, but that was his first observation. The police think she was killed in her car and the murderer grabbed what was handy, which means it was a spur-of-the moment crime, not planned.”

  “So someone got into the car with her, got angry with her, went into the glove compartment or whatever—”

  “Glove compartment, yes. She had a tool kit in there—something Charlie would have known about. Probably Wayne too, considering he and Anika were having an affair. I’m sure he’s been in her car.”

  I washed down a mouthful of scrambled egg with my coffee, turning the whole sordid case over in my mind. Two couples, both of them cheating. Had Charlie had an affair with Brigit to get back at Anika and Wayne? Or had Wayne cheated to get back at Brigit and Charlie? Did it matter who had cheated first?

  Momentarily I entertained the idea that Wayne had murdered Brigit and Charlie had murdered Anika. There was a satisfying symmetry to that solution, but my instincts were telling me that Anika had been murdered out of desperation and in direct response to Brigit’s murder. Anika hadn’t been a target from the start. The murderer had come to see her as a threat.

  “I’m sure Anika knew who murdered Brigit,” I said. “Why wouldn’t she tell us or the police? Was she protecting her lover or her husband?”

  “First one and then the other,” Julia said.

  “She knew from the start who killed Brigit, but something changed. Something that made her switch from protecting Charlie to protecting Wayne.”

  “Was she afraid of Charlie?”

  “Maybe,” I said, lost in thought. I knew I had to go back to the beginning, and that meant figuring out why Brigit had broken protocol, so to speak, and publicly accused Wayne of cheating on her. They were all cheating, so why play the put-upon wife
and go after Wayne?

  “Well, we’re not going to solve this sitting in your kitchen. Pick me up in front of my house in three minutes. I need fresh clothes.”

  Julia set her plate and cup in the sink and marched out my front door. What a strange Valentine’s Day, I thought as I cleared the table. The two of us should have been eating scones and cream puffs, waiting for doorbell rings that signaled bouquets of roses at our doors, and here we were trying to solve the murders of two women who had been killed by either a husband or a lover.

  The second Julia got into my Subaru, my phone rang. It was Holly, sounding rather breathless as she told me that Peter had neglected an important piece of information: Gilroy had found the weapon that killed Brigit under the snow in the Gundersens’ backyard. “You won’t believe it,” she said. “It was one of the metal poles they had in their front yard. The ones they attached wood hearts to. The ends were pointed so Wayne could drive the pole into the frozen ground. It was a Valentine’s Day decoration, Rachel.”

  I couldn’t imagine a more vicious, or more personal, murder. Thankfully, Brigit had probably died instantly.

  After our breakfast, Julia and I stopped at Town Hall and found Cassie hanging the last section of paper-flower garland to a hook on the boardroom’s wall.

  “Oh yeah, Brigit and Anika were frenemies,” she told us. “I don’t know why they bothered to pretend they had a friendship. They competed over everything, they didn’t have much in common, and they didn’t like each other. Same could be said of Charlie and Wayne.” She stood back, examining her work. Pleased with what she saw, she sighed with satisfaction. “I can’t believe we made all those flowers. Think of how many hours that garland represents.”

  “All I know is I’m not doing it next year,” Julia said.

  “Me neither. But I’ll bet Royce and Charlie will. For men, they sure love to decorate.” Cassie bent to retrieve a fallen flower and then tied it to the garland. “The funny thing is, if those four had met before they were married, Wayne would have married Anika and Charlie would have married Brigit. They married the wrong people, and they’ve been miserable ever since.”