by Logan, Kylie
As someone who depended on the tourist trade for a living just like Levi did, I knew if my business had been disrupted, I would have been upset. But Levi took it in stride.
I wondered why.
I gave him a careful look. “Bad timing, what with the weekend cranking up. You’re losing a lot of business.”
He considered this, but only for a moment. “I’ll live.”
“More than we can say for Richie.”
“Yeah.” His gaze wandered to the memorial, then back again to me. “Plenty of people have been by this morning. Even people who are just visiting the island. A murder creates quite a buzz.”
“Poison.” The word sent a shiver up my back. “It seems—”
“Impossible. And very—”
“Creepy.”
There wasn’t anything Levi could say to add to that, so he didn’t say anything at all. Instead, he moved out of the way of a group of tourists heading into the shop and leaned back against the building, his long legs stuck out in front of him, his arms crossed over the green and white plaid cotton shirt he wore with butt-hugging jeans. Yeah, I know . . . not exactly the outfit of an avenging Norse god, but he looked plenty delicious anyway.
“You don’t have any harebrained ideas about doing something about it, do you?” he asked.
I admit it, I was a tad touchy that morning. Then again, with everything that had been going on, I had an excuse. After all, I’d found a body just the night before, the Charles Dickens impersonators were piling up like leaves in an autumn windstorm, and my ears still rang with the not-so-harmonious melodies of Guillotine. I had a perfectly good excuse for flinching in reaction to Levi’s question as if I’d been sucker-punched.
His use of the incendiary harebrained didn’t exactly help.
I managed to control the spurt of anger that raced through my veins like wildfire. As for the sarcasm boat, that sailed the moment that one telltale word was out of his mouth. “Do I think I can do something about it? You mean, do I think it’s even vaguely possible for me to find out what really happened? That sounds like a challenge to me.”
“Challenge?” He laughed like he never thought of what he’d said as anything more than a matter-of-fact comment designed to point out that I might have the desire to investigate, but in no way did I have the smarts.
And that only made me madder.
I pulled back my shoulders. “I did a pretty good job solving the case when Peter was murdered.”
His smile disappeared. “You did,” he admitted, and I was ready to forgive him until he added, “except for the part there near the end when you almost got bumped off by the murderer.”
It was true, and not something I liked to think about because when I did, it gave me the heebie-jeebies. Naturally, the only practical way to deal with it was to get defensive. “Almost being the operative word in that sentence.”
“All right, all right.” He pushed off from the wall and stepped toward me. I stepped back. “I didn’t mean to make you mad, I just thought that I should remind you that investigating crimes can be serious business. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think a woman moves from Manhattan to an island in the middle of Lake Erie because she’s looking to make her life more dangerous.”
If only he knew how right he was!
Rather than point it out, I clamped my lips shut, and I guess he realized he wasn’t going to get anything out of me because Levi went right on.
“Handling the bad guys, that’s what the police are for. It’s their business.”
I agreed. Of course, I agreed. I’d said practically the same thing to Chandra not that long before. That didn’t stop me from shooting back, “And why is it your business to think you need to remind me about police business? Or my business, for that matter.”
He scraped a hand through his honey-colored hair. “Wow, I can’t say anything this morning without stepping in it. Can we start again?”
I folded my arms over my chest and forced myself to take a deep breath.
It wasn’t Levi’s fault that Richie was dead and that I knew if I didn’t try to figure out what happened, I’d feel as if I betrayed a fellow human being.
It wasn’t Levi’s fault I had difficult and demanding guests at the B and B and that I anticipated a week of running and fetching.
The electricity that zapped through my body every time Levi was around? Okay, so yeah, that was pretty much his fault.
His fault, and my problem, so really, it wasn’t fair to take it out on him.
I sucked in another breath to still the frantic beating of my heart and gave in with as much good grace as I could manage.
“We can start again,” I told him, then just so he didn’t get the wrong message, I added, “depending on what you’re going to say this time.”
“I’m going to say . . .” Levi scrubbed his hands over his face. “I’m going to say that you were probably busy at the B and B this morning and I’d bet anything that you need another cup of coffee.”
He was right, but he didn’t give me a chance to admit it. He grabbed my arm. “If I invite you up to my place for some of my world-famous espresso, I’m afraid you’ll bite my head off, so come on. The bakery has decent coffee and it’s my treat.”
I ignored the heat that built where skin met skin and scrambled to keep up with him all the way to the park, then down the street from there to the bakery. It was close to the lunch hour and busy with the regatta that day and the weekend right around the corner, but we found a table outside in the shade and Levi went for the coffee. A couple minutes later, he was back and he set a to-go cup in front of me and took the chair across from mine.
With thumb and forefinger, he flipped the top off his own cup of coffee. “Look,” he said, “here’s what I meant to say and I did a lousy job of it. I know you’re an ethical person. You care about the truth, and about justice, and that’s all really admirable. And I know you’re smart, too. You proved that when you solved Peter’s murder. You’ve got a good brain. You look at a situation from all the angles, and you consider all the possibilities. You think of things that even the cops don’t consider. You’re creative, and imaginative. That’s all terrific.”
“But . . . ?”
He didn’t bother with a tiny sip; he took a big drink of the coffee. “But like I said, murder is serious business. You don’t need me to tell you that. All right, so I hardly know you. But like I said, you’re a decent person, and from what I could tell when I stayed at your place last spring when the electricity was out on the island, you’re a heck of a businesswoman, too. You came here to escape the rat race of the big city, right? Well, it would be a heck of a shot of irony if that came back to bite you. Truth is, I don’t want anything to happen to you. You shouldn’t want anything to happen to you. And if you go poking your nose—”
“Somewhere where it doesn’t belong . . .”
“That’s right.” He didn’t put sugar or sweetener in his coffee, but apparently he remembered I did because he brought along a couple packets of sweetener and two plastic stirrers from the counter where he’d picked up the coffee. He pointed across the table to my coffee with one of the stirrers. “Drink it before it gets cold.”
I wanted to tell him I’d make up my own mind about when to drink my coffee, thank you very much, but the coffee smelled nice and strong—just the way I like it—and he was right about my need for caffeine. With all that had happened back home that morning, I hadn’t had nearly as much coffee as I needed. I added creamer and sweetener, stirred and sipped.
I didn’t want to defend myself. Heck, I didn’t even need to, but I guess the coffee mellowed me because I suddenly felt conciliatory. Even if I wasn’t inclined to tell the whole truth and nothing but. “I never said I was going to investigate.”
True, because I really had never said it.
At least not to Levi.
“But you did go to see Alice and Margaret this morning.”
“What, I don’t look like a knitter?”
Since neither one of us apparently knew what a real, honest-to-gosh knitter looked like, Levi chose to ignore the question.
“You know . . .” I leaned forward, wondering if he knew the not-so-secret secret. “The Defarge sisters keep a pair of binoculars right by the front window.”
“Do they really?” He sat up, clearly taken by surprise. “I guess I’d better make sure I behave behind the bar. And at home. My bedroom faces the front of the building.”
This was something I so didn’t want to think about!
“They knew all about what happened to Richie,” I said, and damn it, my voice was a little too breathy for my liking. “I wasn’t surprised.”
Levi lifted one golden eyebrow. “And last night . . . what did the sisters see?”
“Nothing.” I hadn’t realized how much I’d been depending on the Defarge sisters for information until that very moment. I sighed. “By the time we were all outside watching the fireworks—”
“The shop was closed. So for once, when we needed the sisters to be looking out the window to see what they could see—”
“Margaret was already in the garden setting out the lawn chairs and Alice was out getting cotton candy.”
Levi sat back. “So even though nobody said anything about investigating . . .” He took a drink of coffee, the better to give me time to eat my own words. “It sounds like you questioned the sisters.”
I folded my hands on the table in front of me. “I didn’t need to. Alice offered the information. Besides, one morning of visiting neighbors does not an investigation make.”
“Which isn’t to say you’re not investigating. You know, one of these days . . .” Again, he pointed with the stirrer, but this time at me. “You’re going to poke the wrong person.”
“I’ll take my chances,” I assured him, then went ahead and took chance number one by asking, “What did you see last night?”
Now, this might seem like a perfectly ordinary and reasonable question, but believe me, I knew I was treading on not-so-solid ground. What Levi had—and hadn’t—told the police about the night of Peter’s murder had landed Levi in hot water for a while. See, that snowy night when Peter was killed, Levi did see something from across the street, but he kept that something a secret. As it turned out, he had his reasons and they were good ones, but they made him look like a suspect and even landed him in jail for a night.
Did that stop me from asking what he saw? Obviously not, and just to prove it, when Levi didn’t answer quickly enough I asked again. “You were behind the bar all night, Levi. At least until the fireworks started. And Richie was there all night, too. He helped you before the show, didn’t he? I heard he was bringing up cases of beer from the basement, and refilling the ice. Do you think Richie is the one who tampered with the guillotine?”
“I don’t think anything, because I don’t know anything.”
“So you’re telling me you never saw Richie go near the stage.”
He cupped both his hands around his coffee. “I’m telling you that Hank was at the bar until the wee hours of the morning and I went over everything with him. A couple times, as a matter of fact. He came by again this morning and we talked about it all again.”
“And you’re telling me that if you had anything to say, you already told it to Hank.”
“I am.”
“And while you’re at it, you’re telling me to mind my own business.”
“I’m telling you what I’ve already told you. I don’t want to see you get mixed up in anything you can’t handle.”
“You don’t know me well enough to know what I can handle and what I can’t handle.”
“Whose fault is that?”
Suddenly, we weren’t talking about Richie or Hank or investigating anymore.
And I wasn’t one little bit comfortable with it.
I pushed back my chair. “Thanks for the coffee,” I told Levi, and headed back toward where I’d parked the car.
Did I say I didn’t know much about Levi? I guess I knew enough to expect him to be persistent, because it didn’t surprise me at all when he was suddenly at my side. I gave him the briefest of glances before I decided to show him I could be plenty persistent, too.
“Dino says he doesn’t know who Richie is,” I said.
No comment.
“But after that watermelon got whacked, Dino looked into the audience. Right at Richie.”
More silence.
“You have to admit, it’s intriguing. If Dino thought Richie wanted to hurt him, Dino might have decided to strike back.”
I guess there’s only so long even a Norse god can play the strong, silent type. Levi tossed his hands in the air. “So you’re going to . . . what? March back over to your B and B, corner Dino, and beat him with a wet brioche until you get him to talk?”
Apparently I wasn’t the only one feeling just a tad sarcastic that morning. “I had planned on talking to him. The brioche is a new thought. Thanks.”
“Always willing to help.”
“You know, I can be subtle.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
I didn’t spare him a look. But then, I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was smiling, and I preferred not to be caught by the gleam in his eyes.
“Mike Lawrence left the bar early,” I said, changing the subject oh-so-smoothly.
“So you think he looks fishy, too.”
“I know he was behind the bar when we walked outside to see the fireworks. And I know he left the building just as the fireworks show ended.”
“You’re wasting your time on that front. Mike called this morning to explain. He said he knew I’d be right back in so he didn’t feel bad about leaving. His wife called right as the fireworks show was ending. One of the kids was really sick and she asked him to come home. No mystery there.”
“If it’s the truth.”
I heard him mumble a word I didn’t quite hear but could pretty much figure out. “You don’t trust anyone, do you?”
Rather than explain that I had my reasons, I stuck to the subject at hand. “Mike has motive galore. He lost his business because of Richie. And his home. And his reputation. Richie gets poisoned, Mike leaves the scene of the crime. You can see where this is headed.”
We were back in front of Levi’s bar and Chandra was nowhere around. Too bad. This was the perfect opportunity for a graceful exit.
I guess Levi knew I was planning my escape because he put a hand on my arm. Fortunately for both my equilibrium and his safety (I took self-defense classes back in New York when I was being stalked by a crazy guy), he knew better than to leave it there. “Bea, just because there’s a mystery to solve—”
“Doesn’t mean I should be the one to solve it. That’s what you’re going to say, right?”
Though it made plenty of sense when I told Chandra the same thing, it grated on my nerves now, and I knew exactly why. It was that darned photograph of Richie, the one taken when he was a kid, and try as I might, I couldn’t help but take another look at it.
Though there were plenty of people who probably didn’t believe it, I did have a heart, and I swear, just looking at the cute, goofy-looking kid in the picture made it break in two. Like all kids’ lives, Richie’s contained an endless amount of possibilities. No, he may not have lived up to them. At least as far as anybody knew. But that didn’t mean his death didn’t send ripples through his community.
I guess that’s what I was feeling, those ripples that flickered over my skin like the touch of a skeleton’s hand, cold and dry; I shivered.
I guess that’s also why I lifted my chin and defied what I knew to be Levi’s unarguable logic with a look that told him that if I wasn’t dead-set on investigating before, I sure was now. “Like I said before, nobody said anything about investigating. So who says I’m looking to solve Richie’s murder?”
Levi didn’t take the bait. In fact, all he did was look in the direction of the grocery store. “When Chandra left here earlier, she
was smiling.”
“So?”
“So I know Chandra. Of all your friends, she’s the one who’s bound to bug you the most about investigating. She’s an excitement junkie. You know that. Chandra is a drama queen. And in her own way, she’s as nosy as the Defarge sisters. But this morning, like I said . . .” He pointed to his own mouth, though I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anyone on the island who would have mistaken his grimace for a smile. “Smiling. Chandra was smiling. That means she’s not mad at you. And that means she’s not upset. And that means you caved and agreed to investigate. And that explains what you were doing over at the knitting shop before you walked over here.”
“Maybe you should be the detective.”
One corner of his mouth twitched. “Maybe. And maybe you should mind your own business.”
“Maybe.”
Chandra or no Chandra, I turned and went to the car. I didn’t bother to add the rest of what I wanted to say to Levi, but then, the stormy look in his eyes told me he probably caught the subtext.
Maybe I would mind my own business.
Right when Hell froze over.
9
I would apologize to Chandra later for not waiting around for her.
Then again, she was the one who’d abandoned me in the first place, so maybe I wouldn’t even bother.
If I ever made it home.
I grumbled and pounded my steering wheel. With the sailing regatta scheduled to start in just a little while I should have anticipated heavy traffic in the downtown area, and when I left Levi’s I should have gone not toward the lake, but away from it.
Talk about symbolism! I’m pretty sure this said something not-so-good about the way the man turned my brain around.
And boiled my blood.
“Poking my nose where it doesn’t belong,” I muttered. “Minding my own business. He’s got a lot of nerve and—”
A couple teenagers stepped off the curb in front of the SUV, and I slammed on the brakes and grumbled a word I only use when I’m alone. They were oblivious to my death-ray looks, so once they were on the other side of the street, I eased my foot off the brake and joined the rest of the traffic that crawled toward the yacht club hosting the day’s event. This wasn’t just a boat race; it was a daylong extravaganza that included a craft show, musical entertainment, and vendors of all things nautical. Nearly to a street where I might be able to turn to get out of the island equivalent of rush hour, I stopped the SUV to allow three elderly women to cross from the Smoky Joe’s Ribs food truck on one side of the street to the Sweet Sushi truck on the other.
