Cremas, Christmas Cookies, and Crooks

by Harper Lin

  I nodded at the women. “That’s interesting about Gwen. I hadn’t heard all that before.”

  “So you’ll look into it?” Mrs. Crawford asked.

  “Not that we want to get Gwen in any trouble, but—” Mrs. Bayless turned her hands palms up, as if to say that they couldn’t help it.

  “But you want to help Ann Crowsdale,” I finished for her.

  They glanced at each other and nodded.

  I took a deep breath. “While we’re on the subject, was there anyone else on the staff who had particular trouble with Veronica Underwood?”

  “Particular trouble?” Mrs. Bayless asked. “Well, no, not as far as I could say. They all had some trouble with her, but Gwen was really the one who had the worst of it.”

  “And Ann, of course,” Mrs. Crawford said.

  “But that’s because she had to work so closely with her on the play, you know,” Mrs. Bayless clarified, seemingly both to Mrs. Crawford and me.

  “Of course, of course. Everyone else could avoid her.”

  “So no one else on the staff.” I paused and got ready to watch their faces to gauge for their reaction. “What about any of the students?”

  They looked at each other for a long moment then back at me.

  “Well, dear, is there anyone in particular you’re asking about?” Mrs. Bayless asked.

  I decided to play dumb. “No, not in particular. I was just thinking that the staff could avoid her, but the students couldn’t. Maybe she had some conflicts with one of them.”

  They looked at each other again.

  “Is there something you’ve heard?” Mrs. Bayless asked.

  I tried to look innocent and unsuspecting. I shrugged. “Just that she and Brett Wallace got into some kind of screaming match at the play practice right before she died.”

  They exchanged another glance. I was starting to wonder if there was something they knew. But if they did, I had no idea whether it was something they were trying to hide from me or waiting for me to guess.

  “That’s true,” Mrs. Bayless said.

  I waited for a few seconds in hopes that she would volunteer more information, but she didn’t. “Did any other students have trouble with her like that?”

  Fortunately, they didn’t look at each other this time, because I probably would have said something about it if they had. Mrs. Bayless just answered on her own. “No, and we would have heard about something like that if it had. Veronica wasn’t shy about sending students to the office who disagreed with her, even if it was just about the color pen they were using.”

  “Seriously?” I asked. That seemed pretty crazy, even for someone as irascible as Veronica Underwood.

  “Oh yes. That sweet Amanda who works for you got sent to the office for using a purple pen instead of black.”

  “On her own notes!” Mrs. Crawford added.

  “The poor thing was in tears. I didn’t even send her in to talk to Marcus. I just let her sit and calm herself down and then sent her on to her next class when the bell rang.”

  I tried to picture Amanda getting in trouble. I couldn’t even begin to. The girl was a model employee and quiet as a church mouse—I’d never had to so much as remind her to smile when she took a customer’s order. For her to get in trouble for something as minor as using the wrong color pen on her own notes, Veronica must have been even worse than I thought. But Brett was apparently the only kid who had ever yelled back. “So Brett is the only one who ever really got into a confrontation with her?”

  The ladies both nodded.

  “That boy has no fear,” Mrs. Crawford said.

  Well, that left only one thing to ask. “Do you think he could have…?” I trailed off and let them fill in the gap, which they readily did, demonstrating the fact with another look between them.

  “Brett certainly puts effort into projecting a very—” Mrs. Bayless paused “—shall we say, aggressive persona.”

  “Projecting?”

  Mrs. Bayless gave me a look that I assumed was supposed to communicate something, but I wasn’t sure what. All she said was, “Brett is a complex young man.”

  I looked at Mrs. Crawford, who seemed to be the more blunt of the two, but she was studying her coffee. I decided to leave the question of Brett at that. I picked up one of the gingerbread men and bit his head off.

  “Marian, do you think—” Mrs. Crawford started, looking up from her coffee at Mrs. Bayless. “The young lady—” They looked at each other for several seconds before Mrs. Bayless turned to me.

  “Veronica did have a young lady come looking for her the day before she died,” Mrs. Bayless said.

  “She did? Who was it?” I asked.

  “I can’t recall her name at the moment, but I can look it up in the visitor log for you tomorrow.”

  “That would be great, thank you. Do you know what the woman wanted?”

  They did their meaningful-look thing again before Mrs. Bayless answered. “She said she was a friend of Veronica’s, but she didn’t seem very friendly.”

  “She seemed angry,” Mrs. Crawford interjected.

  I wondered why it had taken so long for them to bring this up. They’d readily thrown Gwen Blarney’s name out there, but I had been about to excuse myself when they mentioned this new woman. Either they really didn’t like Gwen, or they really suspected her of killing Veronica Underwood. Whichever it was, I was interested in finding out more about Veronica’s visitor. “Do you know what she was angry about?”

  “No, but she was even more upset when Veronica refused to see her,” Mrs. Bayless said.

  “What did she do?”

  “She left.”

  “She left?” I had been expecting something much more dramatic. An angry friend of Veronica’s should have thrown a temper tantrum, yelled, broken some things. Compared to what I was expecting, leaving was kind of disappointing.

  “Stormed out,” Mrs. Crawford said.

  “Do you know if she ever found Veronica?”

  Mrs. Crawford raised her eyebrows at me with a pointed look. “That’s a very good question.”

  I looked at Mrs. Bayless. She didn’t seem to disagree, but it still seemed odd that she hadn’t thought to volunteer the information about Veronica’s visitor until Mrs. Crawford prompted her. Had it just slipped her mind? She was getting up there in years, after all. A memory lapse here and there was to be expected. Or was she really that sure Gwen Blarney was involved?

  And then another possibility entered my mind. Gwen Blarney could just be a convenient scapegoat to get the much-beloved Ann Crowsdale off the hook. Or worse, perhaps she was being set up to go down for the crime as a result of some personal grudge Mrs. Bayless had against her. She didn’t seem like the type to scheme to put an innocent woman in jail, but maybe I was letting her grandmotherly looks and persona cloud my vision. I had a lot to think about. But first—“Is there anything else either of you can think of?”

  They shook their heads in unison.

  “And you’ll find the woman’s name for me?” I asked Mrs. Bayless.

  “First thing tomorrow,” she replied.

  I nodded and got ready to excuse myself, but Mrs. Bayless stopped me before I could stand.

  “Don’t go yet! We’ve talked all about that awful Veronica but not at all about you! We want to know all about how you’ve been since you graduated! You’re seeing that nice Matt Cardosi, aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “Well, we want to hear all about it!”

  I sat with them for nearly another hour, answering all their questions about my life from the time I went away to college up through my recent trip to Italy with Matt. By the time they declared that it was time to go to their homes to fix dinner for their husbands, I was all talked out for, by my best guess, the next week or so. But I did have one more thing I knew I needed to talk to someone about—or ask them, anyway.

  I managed to catch Sammy just before she went out the door. “Could you do me a favor? It’s a pretty
big one.”

  “You want me to open and close the café tomorrow?” she asked with a grin.

  “I wish it were that easy,” I said.

  Her gaze grew suspicious. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Mike told me there’s video evidence of Ann Crowsdale murdering Veronica Underwood. But Mrs. Bayless said the school’s camera that points that way is broken.” I took a deep breath. “I need you to find out from Ryan exactly what the police have and what it shows.”

  Sammy stared at me for an uncomfortably long moment. I was asking her to take advantage of her mostly unacknowledged relationship with Ryan to get inside information on a police investigation. But it was an investigation she herself had asked me to get involved with.

  After a long enough pause that I’d begun to assume the answer was no, she nodded. “I’ll do it. Whatever I have to do to help Ann.”

  I could only hope it would help Ann. The other possibility was that it would prove to all of us—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that she was guilty.

  Chapter 17

  FIRST THING THE NEXT MORNING, I headed to Cape Bay High for my meeting with Principal Marcus Varros. Walking down the hall past the already-full classrooms, I felt the same ridiculous missing-hall-pass anxiety as I had the week before when I’d gone to the school to see Veronica Underwood. I wondered how many visits it would take to get over it. Not that I particularly planned to be visiting the high school on a regular basis. Especially not on murder-related business.

  “Good morning, Franny!” Mrs. Bayless chirped as I opened the office door.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Bayless!”

  “Good morning, Franny!” Mrs. Crawford’s voice came from somewhere in the back.

  “Good morning!” I called back.

  “I’ll just let Marcus know you’re here, and then you can go back,” Mrs. Bayless said. She stood up from her desk and went back to the open door behind her. “Franny Amaro is here for you, Marcus.”

  I cringed just a little at her calling me Franny. Not that I minded her calling me that—I just hoped the principal didn’t think that was the name I usually went by.

  It was.

  “Franny, come in!” the man boomed from somewhere I couldn’t see.

  I sighed then plastered on a big smile and headed for his office.

  As I passed Mrs. Bayless, she shoved a piece of paper in my hand. “The information you asked for,” she said.

  I nodded. Veronica’s angry visitor. “Thank you.”

  I stepped into Varros’s office, and Mrs. Bayless closed the door behind me.

  “Good to meet you, Franny. Marcus Varros.” Varros stood up from behind his desk and stuck out his hand for me to shake. “Have a seat.”

  I sat down in one of the chairs across the desk from him and immediately felt tiny in comparison to him. Was the chair lower than a normal chair? Was his extra tall? Were my two-decade-old anxieties about being sent to the principal’s office messing with my head and making me imagine that he was looming over me when he wasn’t?

  “So what can I do for you today, Franny?” he asked.

  “Uh, Fran,” I said. “You can call me Fran.”

  He chuckled good-naturedly. “Fran it is. Now what can I do for you?”

  I gave him the same line I’d given Mrs. Bayless about needing some forms filled out for my taxes since I was donating the refreshments for the play.

  “Not a problem,” he said, and I handed him the basic, vaguely official-looking documents I’d cobbled together the night before. “I can go ahead and fill these out for you if you don’t mind waiting here a few minutes.”

  “That would be perfect!” I said. And it would be. It would give me time to try to engage him in conversation about Veronica Underwood’s murder. I waited for several seconds while he got started filling out the first form in hopes that he’d be focused enough on that to not pay too much attention to what I was talking about. “I was sorry to hear about Veronica’s murder,” I finally said. “It must be quite a loss to the school community.”

  “Mm, terribly unfortunate,” he mumbled.

  “She was a new hire this year, right?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  This wasn’t going well. “When I made my appointment, Mrs. Bayless said that the play was being taken over by a, uh—” I pretended Gwen Blarney’s name wasn’t on the tip of my tongue. “What was her name again?”

  “Gwen. Gwen Blarney.”

  “That’s right! Is she new to the school also?”

  “No, Gwen’s been here.” He wasn’t even looking up.

  “Oh, well, that should make it easier on her. What does she teach?”

  “English.”

  His simple answers were starting to frustrate me, but maybe he was just that focused on the paperwork. Or maybe I was asking the wrong questions. “That’s a big job, stepping into a play right before it opens like that. Do you think she’s going to do okay?”

  “She was our play director before Veronica.”

  “Oh really? Was she looking for a change?”

  He looked up at me slowly. “What exactly are you trying to get at, Fran?”

  I looked up at him from my maybe-too-low chair and smiled. “Just making conversation.”

  He put his pen down. “It seems like you’re doing more than trying to make conversation.”

  “Oh, I, um—” I stalled to think of something that wasn’t quite the truth. I figured it wouldn’t go so well to tell him I was trying to get the charges dropped against one of his teachers at the expense of putting another in jail. Of course, there was also that woman who had come to visit Veronica. The secretaries hadn’t said that he knew anything about her, but maybe they’d just failed to mention it—as they’d nearly failed to mention her visit at all. But still, I didn’t feel that it would do to show my hand too soon. “I’m just curious, I guess,” I said with a shrug.

  His eyes narrowed. “You’re one of the people who thinks Ann couldn’t possibly have done it, aren’t you?”

  I tried to seem uninterested. “I’ve only met her once. She seemed nice, but what do I know?” I waited a few seconds while he appraised me. “What do you think? I mean, you must not be too thrilled about losing two of your teachers in one go. And both of the play directors, right?”

  Varros nodded then leaned back in his large leather chair, making it rock. It had to be on the maximum height. I’d seen the man standing up just a few minutes before, and he hadn’t been a giant. There was no way he was that tall. He tented his fingers and drummed them against each other. “Yes, they were our two directors.” He shook his head. “One dead and the other arrested for her murder. It’s hard to believe.”

  I waited to see if he’d say anything else. He didn’t, so figuring I had nothing to lose, I decided to push the question. “Do you believe it?”

  He sighed heavily and put his hands on the back of his head. “I don’t know what I believe. The police certainly believe it was Ann, don’t they?”

  “They seem to.”

  “But it doesn’t seem like anyone else in the town does, do they?”

  “No, they don’t.”

  He rocked forward again and folded his hands on his desk. “You know, I’ve racked my brain, ever since it happened, trying to picture Ann killing someone, and I have to admit, I can’t imagine it. She’s such a good, kind person, you know?”

  I nodded as though I had a longer history with her than I did.

  “But the police wouldn’t have arrested her if they didn’t have evidence, so…” He turned his palms up and shrugged.

  I couldn’t let him skirt the issue. “But what if they made a mistake? I hate to think about it, but it’s possible. You seem to have known Veronica better than maybe most of the people in town—” Before I could finish my sentence, he cut me off.

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked sharply.

  I instinctively pulled away from him. “Just that—I mean, you hired her—”

  Varros
relaxed back in his chair. He chuckled. “Oh, that. Whew! For a second there, I thought you were accusing me of murder.”

  I laughed along with him, good-naturedly, to keep him on my side. It was a PR trick I’d been taught my first week on the job—mirror the client to make them feel connected to you. “Oh no, no, no, not at all! I just thought you’d have more insight than someone who didn’t know her as well.”

  “Of course, of course.” He stared into the distance over my head. “Who else might have killed Veronica?” He tented his fingers and drummed them again. I wondered if it was something he did—along with the extra-high chair—to seem imposing. “You know, as I understand it, there was a young lady here the other day looking for her. From what Marian told me, she was very upset even before Veronica refused to see her.”

  I played dumb. “Do you know who she was? Or what she wanted?”

  “Her name was Kristin. Kristin Mansmith. I’m not sure what she wanted, though.”

  I looked down discreetly at the paper Mrs. Bayless had passed me on my way in. It was a photocopy of a Rhode Island driver’s license, and sure enough, the name on it was Kristin Mansmith. “You said she was upset—do you think she was upset enough to kill Veronica?”

  “Well, I didn’t speak with her, so I don’t know. But she was very upset when Veronica wouldn’t see her. She threatened to wait outside, but Marian told her she wouldn’t be able to do that, and we’d have to call the police if she did. Not that we like doing that, of course, but it’s a safety issue. We can’t have people not associated with the school just hanging around the parking lot.”

  “Of course not.”

  He leaned in toward me across the desk. “Can I tell you something in confidence?”

  I nodded, wondering what it could be that was supposed to be a secret but that he was comfortable telling a virtual stranger.

  “It’s in confidence because I don’t think the police have released this piece of information, but I think it’s relevant.”

  I nodded again. “My lips are sealed.”