by Jessica Beck
“You didn’t hear any of that?” she asked.
“No, that’s why I’m asking. Listen, if you’d rather not say, I’m fine with that.”
“As a matter of fact,” she said a bit guiltily, “we were fighting about you.”
“About me?” I asked, stunned by the revelation. “Why were you fighting about me?”
“I didn’t like the way she treated you, and I told her so. I won’t stand idly by and let my friends be attacked by anybody, but I’m afraid I just made things worse.”
I smiled at her and patted her hand. “I appreciate you defending me.”
“For all the good it did either one of us,” she said a little morosely.
“As far as I’m concerned, it really is the thought that counts,” I told her. “You shouldn’t lose any sleep over this. It’s going to be all right.”
“Do you really think so?” she asked, the hope aching in her voice.
“I choose to believe it,” I said with a gentle smile. “Besides, there’s really nothing we can do about it either way, is there?”
“I suppose not,” Paige said as she stood. “Well, I won’t keep you any longer. I just wanted to see a friendly face.”
“I’m glad you came by, and remember, this face is always there for you,” I said, “and the rest of me, too.”
“Thanks. Right back at you.”
“I’m curious about something. Overall, business seems strong,” I said. “How are you managing to do it in this Internet age when everybody seems to buy their books online?”
“Not everybody, thankfully,” she said. “I like to think most folks appreciate a knowledgeable bookseller who has actually read a lot of the books they want to know about, or at the very least, some of the author’s works. I can usually give pretty solid advice on what someone might like and something they might steer away from.”
“That’s fascinating. How on earth can you do that?”
“Well, take you, for example. I know a great deal about you simply based on the books you’ve bought from me in the past. I know for a fact that you love cozy mysteries, but you wouldn’t touch a slasher novel on a bet. You like contemporary romance, but you don’t care for Regency. You enjoy a good biography, no matter what the time period, but you wouldn’t touch a war novel with a ten-foot pole if I were giving them away. Based on all of that, I can usually come up with a fairly safe reading list you might like. I’m not saying that you don’t enjoy a Stephen King novel now and then, but it’s not your bread-and-butter reading material. How close am I?”
“Probably a little too close for comfort,” I admitted. “That’s fascinating. I had no idea you were paying that close attention.”
“My entire business plan is based on knowing my customers and my offerings,” she said.
“Do someone else,” I suggested, fascinated by the process.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t do that, not even for you. I respect the privacy of my customers too much. I’m not sure I would even divulge anyone else’s reading list with a court order. There are some things worth going to jail for.”
“I can respect that. So, that’s enough to keep you afloat?”
“Well, I also host as many book clubs as I can, and I’m trying to get more author signings, but it’s getting tougher and tougher to book those these days.”
“Maybe we should have a Books and Donuts Festival. We could call it Knead and Read,” I suggested purely in jest. “Between the two of us, we’d bring folks in from miles around.”
“If you’re at all serious, I’m in if you are,” she said. “It might just provide the boost we both need. What do you say?”
She’d caught me a little off guard with her enthusiasm, but it was true. I could certainly use the customers. “After this murder business is cleared up, let’s talk more about it.”
“You’ve got a deal,” she said. “I’m glad I came here this evening. I feel loads better.”
“I’m glad I could help,” I said, and then I caught a sudden movement on my front porch. Who was out there now, and more importantly, what did they want?
Chapter 6
“Grace, is that you? What are you doing lurking out here on my front porch?” I asked her as Paige and I stepped outside together. I had to admit that I felt a lot braver having the bookstore owner with me, though I suspected she wasn’t armed with anything more than a nail file, just like me. Still, there was safety in numbers, or at least it felt that way to me.
“I didn’t want to interrupt. I saw you had company,” Grace said, clearly deflated about her meeting with Stephen. And why shouldn’t she be? She hadn’t been gone nearly long enough to have a meaningful conversation with her beau.
“I was just leaving,” Paige said. “You’ve got yourself a terrific best friend there,” she told Grace happily.
“Don’t I know it,” Grace replied with a slight smile.
After Paige was gone, I asked her, “So, what happened?”
“He wouldn’t even see me,” she said, her words tumbling out in a rush.
“Take a deep breath and tell me all about it,” I said. “Are you sure it wasn’t ‘couldn’t see you’ instead of ‘wouldn’t’?”
“It’s pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?” Grace asked.
“You know how he gets when he’s working,” I said. “Jake is the same way. It’s not that they don’t care for us, it’s just that there are more pressing things on their minds. To be fair, we get that way sometimes ourselves.”
“Are you actually defending him?” Grace asked me, clearly ready for an argument if I was interested in participating.
“Hang on a second. I’m on your side, remember? Now, tell me exactly what happened.”
“I never even got to speak with him. He left standing orders that short of the presence of blood, he wasn’t to be disturbed. He’s still locked up in the interrogation room with Leanne.”
“Which we suspected. Take it easy, Grace. Did you at least leave him the pot pie and a nice note?”
“Well, I did half of that,” she said with a shrug.
“Which half?”
“I left the pie. Let him figure out who it was from.” After a moment, she shrugged. “I don’t know why I let that man get under my skin like that.”
“Maybe it’s because you care about him,” I suggested.
“Yeah, maybe. Suzanne, are you dead set on going right to sleep?”
I glanced at the clock. While it was true that I could probably have nodded off, it felt as though Grace wanted to chat. “I’m wide awake at the moment. Do you want to talk about what happened this evening?”
My friend chuckled, but there was no joy in it. “That’s actually the last thing I want to do. I suspect I was a bit of a petulant brat earlier, so we don’t need to revisit that.”
“Then what did you have in mind?”
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to have a look at that pie shop,” she said.
“So would I, but it’s probably got crime scene tape around it now,” I answered.
“Maybe, but I’d still love to have a look at the building itself. Am I just being silly?”
“Not at all,” I said as I grabbed my keys. “Let’s go.”
“Thanks for indulging me,” she said.
“Hey, what are friends for?”
On the short drive over to the pie shop, or what had been promised to be a pie shop, at any rate, Grace got a call on her cell phone. “It’s Stephen,” she said. “What should I do?”
“I don’t know. Here’s a crazy thought. Why don’t you answer it?”
She laughed, the tension suddenly broken. “Yeah, that sounds like a plan to me.”
“Do you want me to pull over so you can have some privacy?” I offered as we neared Donut Hearts. That was one of the great things about my bus
iness; it was literally a stone’s throw away from my cottage, which made my daily commute, if you could even call it that, a dream.
“No, you’ve been there for it all, including the bumps along the way. You might as well hear this, too.”
“Then you’d better answer your phone before he gives up,” I suggested.
At least she didn’t put it on speaker, so I didn’t have to hear his responses as well. Somehow it felt a little less like eavesdropping that way.
“Yes, it was from me. Of course I baked it myself. Yes, Suzanne helped, too. You’re welcome. How’s the case going?” she asked as she winked at me. “Really? Wow, that’s hard to believe. Yes. Okay. Tomorrow night. Yes, I’ll pencil it in. Thanks for calling. You’re welcome,” she repeated before hanging up. I couldn’t tell in the darkness, but was she actually blushing a little at the end?
“That went well, didn’t it? I can’t believe you nearly blew it asking about the case,” I chided her as I continued to drive the short way to the pie shop site.
“Hey, I sensed an opening, and I took it.”
When no more details were forthcoming, I asked her, “So, are you going to share what you learned, or are you going to keep it to yourself?”
“As suspected, the poison was in the pills. More specifically, it was on them. Have you ever heard of vanalaxis macromium?”
“No, not that I can recall. What is it?”
“Apparently it’s a common additive to a great many household cleaning products, and it’s pretty toxic stuff when it’s distilled down to a concentrated form. Over half of the pills they found on the scene were doused with the stuff in some pretty high concentrations. It turns out that Maggie Moore was playing a rigged game of Russian Roulette every time she took her meds.”
“Wow, that’s crazy, isn’t it?”
“I’ll say. Why would anybody do it that way?” Grace asked me.
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
“Well, if I were going to poison someone, I would have either coated just one pill or the entire lot of them. That way I’d either make the police think it was some kind of random act of violence, or they’d have to struggle to find what killed her.”
“I never realized you had such a devious mind,” I said as I shook my head. “That would have never even occurred to me.”
“That’s why there are two of us,” she said with a smile. “Unfortunately, the poison is used in a great many things, though someone had to know how to reduce the liquid to the point where it was fatal.”
“That might narrow the list down a little,” I said, “but the problem is that with the Internet, you can find out how to do just about anything these days.”
“Or in a book,” Grace said a little ominously.
“You’re not thinking about Paige again, are you?” I asked.
“No, but she could have sold a book about poison to someone in town. We could at least ask her.”
“We could, but I know for a fact that she wouldn’t tell us. She takes her customers’ privacy very seriously.”
“Even when it comes to murder?”
“Even then,” I replied.
We turned left onto Viewmont Avenue and headed toward the crime scene. Just down the road from the building my father had left me was the pie shop, or at least the place where the pie shop would have been. Who knew if it would ever get off the ground now? I looked over at the police station/jail combination building and saw that it was still a busy place, even given the hour of night. Well, it probably wasn’t that late for most folks, but for me, it was getting awfully close to bedtime. I’d try to stretch it a bit since Grace and I were working on a case, but I had to get at least six hours of sleep a night if I could manage it. Any less and I’d be nearly worthless the next day, and with the hot oil and some of the other things I dealt with on a regular basis, it was probably a good idea to be sharp and on my game.
“I hope she goes ahead with it,” Grace said as I pulled in back of the building. There was decent parking there, and my Jeep wouldn’t advertise our presence, either. After all, there was no sense broadcasting to all of April Springs that we were snooping around, even though I knew that most folks wouldn’t be all that surprised to learn that we were digging into the murder. Unfortunately, over the years, Grace and I had developed reputations for doing just that sort of thing.
I grabbed my heavy-duty flashlight and got out. “Let’s have a look around, shall we?”
As we walked toward the rear entrance of the building, I thought I saw something, or someone, in the shadows. After shining my light, though, I couldn’t see anyone or anything.
“Did you just see something, too?” Grace asked me.
“I thought I might have. Was it a person, or was there any chance that it could it have been a dog or a cat?”
“If it was somebody’s pet, it was an awfully big one. If you ask me, it had to be a person,” she said. “Come on. Let’s go check it out.”
Before I could stop her, Grace headed off on the path that led around to the front of the building and, more importantly, Viewmont Avenue, which was much closer to the police station than I really wanted to be.
“Wait for me,” I said as I hurried to catch up with her.
As we hurried around the building, I noticed something that I’d missed on my previous visit. Was that another way into the building? It was easy enough to overlook it, especially in the daylight hours, since there was a huge clump of overgrown bushes hiding it from view. Only the reflected beam of my flashlight had given me any idea that it might even be there. For such a compact building, it had quite a few doors. The front door was clearly for the public, while the back one served as an employee and delivery entrance, so what was the side door for, originally? I’d want to take a look at it, but not until we figured out who had been creeping around the building when they shouldn’t have been there. I knew there was a bit of irony there, since we weren’t exactly invited guests either, but I couldn’t help myself.
By the time we got to the front of the pie shop, whoever had been there was gone.
Grace looked miffed. “We missed them.”
“Do you think there was more than one of them?” I asked her.
“No, I just meant that whoever was there managed to get away,” she said as she looked up and down the avenue. “Should we keep looking?”
“Not unless you want to take a chance on being seen here ourselves,” I said. “Come on back out of view. There’s something I want to check out.”
Grace glanced at the police tape over the front door and shrugged. “I might as well, because it’s clear we’re not going to get inside this way.”
She walked right past the overgrown bushes. Only when I stopped in my tracks did she hesitate. “Suzanne, what are you doing?”
“There’s something behind those bushes,” I said as I played the beam of light over what I’d seen earlier.
“I can’t imagine what it might be,” she said as she peered into the foliage as well.
Taking a deep breath, I worked my way into the living mass, hoping that the bushes at least weren’t prickly and scratchy.
Unfortunately, that hope was in vain.
“Ouch,” I said as a particularly vicious stem caught my arm. It had to have drawn blood, but I was committed. I had to see for myself if there really was a door there after all or if it was just a product of my overactive imagination.
“Would you come out of there before you hurt yourself?” Grace asked.
“Too late. I made it,” I said. There was indeed a door hidden away from sight! How often it had been used in the past forty years, though, I couldn’t say. The doorknob looked to be rusted, and most of the small window in the side of the frame was coated with dirt and grime. Only a small patch of glass level with the lock reflected any light at all. In fact, it looked as though it had recent
ly been cleaned!
Taking an edge of my shirt, I tried the doorknob with little hope that it would open.
To my surprise, the door gave way easily.
One small step through the threshold, and I was inside the pie shop!
Man oh man, was it dark! I was glad I still had my flashlight. I was about to take another step into the darkness when I realized that Grace was still talking to me outside. Flashing my light around before I turned to leave, I took in my surroundings.
It felt as though I had somehow managed to sneak into some kind of coffin, the space was so tight and forbidding! I poked my head back outside just as she was finishing.
“…so I really think that’s what we should do.”
“I agree with you completely,” I said. “Only I don’t know what you just said. I was already inside the building. Are you coming?”
“I just said that I tried to get through too, but it was too hard without the light. Would you mind shining it my way so I can see how to get through that infernal scrub pile of bushes that are in the way?”
“Oh, I can do that,” I said as I did as she suggested. “There, does that help?”
“Oh, yes. I can see you just fine now,” a familiar man’s voice said from outside the space I was currently in. “Come on back out, Suzanne. We need to have ourselves a little chat.”
Evidently our visit to the pie shop hadn’t gone completely unnoticed by the police after all unless the chief had just gotten lucky finding us there.
“Do I have to come back out through the bushes?” I asked. “I got scratched up pretty good coming in.”
“Sorry, but I can’t take a chance on you contaminating the crime scene any more than you already have,” he said.
“But I took just one step inside, and I used my shirt to open the door so I wouldn’t get any fingerprints on it,” I protested.
“I’m willing to concede the point, but you could have smudged any fingerprints that might have been there in the first place,” he said. “Come on. Let’s go. I don’t have all night.”
