by Ali Brandon
Darla had been prepared to read anything in that return message—anything, that is, except for the few brief sentences that popped up on her screen and hit her like a figurative punch. Disbelief swept her, and she reread them a second time, and a third. But multiple perusals didn’t change what the message said.
That’s ok, I forgive you. So, was business any better today? I still plan to come in tomorrow unless you want to pay me to stay home, ha ha. See you tomorrow. Lizzie. P.S. How did you get this email address?
TWENTY-THREE
MR. CATS-CAN-BE-VANDALS-TOO WAS BACK IN THE CLASSICS area doing his book snagging thing. But unlike the previous times, this morning Darla actually had caught the wily feline in the act as she’d slipped in the side door. Her victory was a hollow one, however, distraught as she had been since the previous night over more important concerns. Namely, that her very own employee, Lizzie, was in actuality the same Scarf Lady who had masterminded the Lone Protester’s campaign against Valerie Baylor.
She had stared at the incriminating email for a good quarter of an hour before snatching up the phone and calling Jake. After explaining how she’d managed to uncover the same email address that Janie already had supplied Reese, Darla reminded Jake that Lizzie fancied herself a fair mimic when it came to southern accents.
“It all fits, Jake. Lizzie has to be the Scarf Lady. What do we do about it?” she had asked in true dismay.
The ex-cop had given her swift instructions not to do anything about the message until Reese had been informed. A bit later, after Darla had closed the shop and numbly made her way back to her apartment, Jake had phoned her back and outlined their plan for this morning. She’d also revealed something more; that, just that afternoon, someone in the precinct’s IT group with a bit of spare time finally had traced that same email address back to Lizzie. That had been what Reese’s earlier call to her had been about, Jake had explained.
Darla had considered berating Jake about not telling her right off the day before that the police knew the email belonged to Lizzie, but then thought better of it. Doubtless Reese had asked Jake to keep the matter confidential, and she’d simply complied.
Darla sighed now as she considered her own responsibilities as Lizzie’s employer. She didn’t relish what was to come when the woman arrived in another half hour to start her shift. Cliché as it seemed, it was true that you never truly knew what a person was capable of doing, until they up and did it. Still, she had never expected that, one day, someone of her acquaintance might turn out to be a cold-blooded killer.
“Might be,” she reminded herself. “The two things might not even be connected.”
To distract herself, she began picking up the volumes that Hamlet had pulled down from the classics shelves, idly lecturing him when she noticed one of the volumes was one of the more sensational biographies of the Roman emperor Caligula.
“Much too gory reading for a cat, and half the claims aren’t even historically proven,” she declared. Firmly closing it, she put that book back on the shelf and picked up a second one.
“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” she said and nodded her approval. Glancing at the page where it was open, she went on, “Here’s a bit of wholesome reading for you. Huck and Jim are on the run. And see, this is the chapter where Huck disguises himself like a—”
She looked up from the page she was reading to see the cat in midyawn. With a frown at him, she snapped the book shut again and stuck it on the shelf. “I try to give you a little culture, and you act bored. But you’re right, we don’t have time for this now. Jake and Reese will be here any minute.”
Barely had she said the words when a knock sounded. Grabbing up the last of the books from the floor, she left them on the counter by the register and hurried to the front door. Through the hazy glass, she could see the detective and Jake standing on the stoop. Since it wasn’t yet ten, the door was still locked and the sign still proclaimed that the store was closed.
“We’ll wait off to the side and out of sight,” Reese said without preamble once she’d opened the door and he and Jake had slipped past her. As she shut the door after them, he added, “We don’t want to tip our hand until she’s safely inside. I don’t feel like another sprint, if you know what I mean.”
“Did you call her last night and make sure she was coming in?” Jake wanted to know as they walked toward the register.
Darla nodded, and glanced at the clock on the far wall. Nine forty-five. “I told her exactly what you said. She promised to be here on time.”
“You don’t have to stick around,” Reese said, taking note of her distress. “All I want to do is question her at this point. Even if she was the one who placed the ad that Janie answered, technically she didn’t do anything illegal. I won’t arrest her unless there’s reason to believe she was the one who pushed your author in front of that van.”
“Thanks, but I’m not going anywhere until I know what her involvement was in all this.”
Darla grabbed up the books she’d set on the counter and marched over to the classics shelf again, needing to channel her nervousness in movement. Soon enough, she’d know the truth about what happened to Valerie Baylor . . . or, at least, have a better idea of what had set the tragedy into motion.
It was five minutes before the hour when the bells on the front door jingled, the usually pleasant tinkle sounding ominous under the circumstances. Darla wiped her sweat-dampened hands on her denim skirt and started toward the front. Reese and Jake had taken up position on the other side of the register, so that they were partially blocked from view. The deception would need to last only a few moments, just long enough for their suspect to move clear of the doorway.
“Hi, Darla,” Lizzie greeted her, closing the door behind her with another chiming of the bells. The smile she turned on Darla was bright, if a trifle crooked as a result of her careless application of pink lipstick.
Juggling her usual oversized tote bag with the ever-present manuscript-in-process bulging from its top, she slipped out of her beige cardigan to reveal sensible brown slacks and a pink blouse printed with tutu-wearing brown poodles. She glanced about the store, her smile brightening as she noticed Jake and Reese. They had left their posts and quietly circled around back of Lizzie. The move reminded Darla of one of those National Geographic specials, where the lions cut a weak gazelle from the rest of the herd.
Except in this case, the gazelle was a plump middle-aged woman who was unknowingly turning a friendly look on her lions.
“Oh! Hi, Jake, Detective Reese. I didn’t expect to find you here again,” she said, not sounding particularly guilty of anything . . . at least, not to Darla’s ears. “I saw that big pile of flowers was still out on the sidewalk. I guess you’re here to keep an eye on things, with all those kids and those crazy protesters coming around, right?”
“Actually, Ms. Cavanaugh,” Reese replied, “I’m here to ask you a few questions about one of those protesters. Maybe you’d like to take a seat.”
He gestured her toward one of the chairs reserved for browsing customers. Lizzie glanced from him to the chair, and then back to him again. Her expression tightened, while a faint air of defensiveness emanated from her as she crossed her arms over her chest. “Questions?” she echoed. “I can answer them standing up. What do you want to know?”
“It’s about that protester with the sign who was hanging around the Valerie Baylor autographing . . . except, she wasn’t protesting because she believed in a cause. It seems someone paid the girl to stand there and hold her sign.”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded page.
“She claims she answered an ad on TheEverythingList—you know, one of those online classified services. We checked it out and found the ad in question. I’ve printed it out.”
He paused and held out the paper. “Would you mind taking a look and telling me if you recognize the email address on it?”
Lizzie reached out a reluctant hand, as if he were proff
ering a rattlesnake instead of a single sheet of twenty-pound bond. She took a look, barely long enough to read the few lines, and then thrust it back at him, her manner one of defiance now.
“No, no, I don’t recognize it.”
“You might want to rethink that answer, ma’am. Your employer”—he glanced at Darla—“says that she sent a message to that same email address, and you replied. And my department traced it back to your home address.”
The belligerence seeped from the woman like a bicycle tire going flat. She let her bag and sweater drop to the floor while she turned a pleading look on Darla. “I tried to tell you before what Val did to me. Back in college, she stole my first manuscript—the one about the girl who goes to the police academy and then arrests her ex-fiancé—and she published it as hers.”
“The Lady Cop and the Collar,” Jake exclaimed with a snap of her fingers, causing Darla and Reese to stare at her in surprise. “I read that one. You mean to say it was really your book and not Valerie Baylor’s?”
Lizzie nodded, seemingly intent on reviving her previous air of bravado. “She stole it . . . I mean, literally stole my manuscript out of my bag one night after class,” she explained, sniffling. “I had it packed up in a Bloomingdale’s box, ready to mail it out the next day. Valerie suggested we all stop for a drink after class to celebrate, but she left before I did. I didn’t even know the manuscript was gone until I went to pay my tab. Everyone told me it must have been someone in the club who thought there was something valuable in the Bloomie’s box, but I knew the truth. I should have been the famous author, not that—that thief. So I called her on it. What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong,” Jake went on in a firm yet sympathetic tone, “is that Valerie Baylor is dead, and we have what might be video evidence showing someone shoved her off the sidewalk and into the van’s path. And, unfortunately, you had the motive and the opportunity to do it.”
“But I didn’t!” Lizzie wailed, bravado forgotten as tears pooled in her brown eyes. “I wouldn’t murder anyone. What about that girl I paid? How do you know she didn’t push Valerie just because?”
“Reese has spoken to her already, and he has cab company records and statements from witnesses that put her away from the scene before the accident.”
“But I was inside the store the whole time during the autographing. Darla, you saw me helping James. Tell them I was here in the store when Valerie was killed! Tell them I wouldn’t have shoved her,” she pleaded.
Darla didn’t hesitate. “Of course you couldn’t kill anyone, Lizzie. I don’t believe that for a moment.”
And she didn’t. True, she’d known Lizzie for only a few months and had often found her prone to melodrama, but she had never seen any indication of malice in the woman. But could she say with any certainty that Lizzie had never left the store?
Now, she did pause. She herself had been in and out several times during the event, and with the glut of black capes it had been difficult to distinguish anyone. And during the time that Valerie had vanished on her supposed smoke break, she had noticed that a few other people had been missing as well. Had Lizzie been one of them? She simply couldn’t recall.
“I’m sorry, Lizzie,” she finally answered, feeling equally as deflated as her employee, “but if I had to testify in a court of law, I couldn’t say with one hundred percent certainty that you were inside when Valerie Baylor was hit.”
The other woman’s features crumpled, and she bent her head, shoulders shaking. Silent tears trickled down her cheeks, catching in the gently swaying edges of her sleek brown bob. Staring at her, Darla felt like weeping, too. She turned to Reese.
“Are you going to arrest her?” she asked, choking a little over the words.
“I’d like to take her down to the station for questioning. Ms. Cavanaugh, will you come with me?”
Lizzie gave a soft wail by way of response but nodded. Darla hurried over to the counter and pulled a business card out from her Rolodex, and then rushed back to where Lizzie stood.
“This is the number for a criminal attorney who was a friend of Great-Aunt Dee,” she said, pressing the card into the woman’s limp hand. “If you don’t want to answer the cops’ questions, tell them you have a right to ask for a lawyer, and then call him.”
“Don’t worry, Darla,” came Reese’s dry response from behind her.
She turned to see him hanging up his cell phone. He added, “I don’t know how they do it back in Texas, but here we’re pretty good about reading people their rights and all that official stuff. Right now, this is all informal, and Lizzie is coming in of her own free will. If for some reason we get beyond that point, and she decides she needs an attorney, she’ll get one.”
“Oh, right,” she mumbled, having forgotten for a moment that he was one of the cops in question. She gave the woman a quick hug and stepped back to let Reese take her by the arm.
His expression had morphed back into the same neutral mask he’d worn while acting as security for the autographing. His grip on Lizzie, however, was firm, and Darla recalled his comments about not wanting to take part in another sprint. He nodded in her direction.
“I put a call in for a car. Take a look outside and see if it’s here yet.”
Darla did as instructed. Sure enough, a patrol car had pulled up to the curb, and the officer already had the rear passenger door open to the sidewalk.
“It’s here,” she said with a nod and opened the shop door.
Jake had already grabbed up Lizzie’s abandoned cardigan and purse, tucking the former into the latter before hanging the bag from the woman’s free shoulder. Reese walked her toward the front.
And so the lion captures his prey, Darla told herself, though the realization brought dismay rather than satisfaction. Lizzie kept her gaze downcast, not acknowledging her as the pair passed by and then started down the steps. She waited until Reese had safely loaded the woman into the backseat and then climbed in up front beside the officer. Then, with a sigh, she shut the door and turned to Jake.
“I still can’t believe it. Do you really think that Lizzie could shove Valerie Baylor into traffic like that?”
“She admitted to placing the ad, and she disguised herself so that Janie wouldn’t recognize her,” Jake reminded her. “That’s a lot of trouble to go to, if all she wanted to do was prove a point.”
“But murder!?”
Darla sank into Jake’s favorite beanbag chair and shook her head. “As far as the protester, I guess that makes sense. I’m sure she was afraid I’d fire her if she went out and held up the signs herself.”
“And would you have?”
“No . . . yes . . . maybe,” she replied in frustration, realizing as she did so that she was echoing her words to Reese about her little poltergeist problem. “All I know is that I have to fire her now, damn it.”
“Listen, Darla,” Jake told her, “I’ve seen people kill other people over a five-dollar bet. I once arrested a guy who stabbed his wife to death because his steak wasn’t cooked right. They didn’t plan to do it—at least, that’s what they all swore—but their victims were dead, all the same. Something about impulse control . . . some people just don’t have it.”
Darla frowned, trying to recall if she’d ever seen Lizzie lash out at anyone but unable to think of an example. On the other hand, Lizzie had been married to a womanizing control freak for twenty years. No doubt she harbored resentment on that front. And Darla had seen her flash of anger the day of the ill-fated autographing as they’d watched the Lone Protester doing her thing . . . which had turned out to be Lizzie’s thing. Given all that, was it possible that she had impulsively taken revenge on her former college classmate when the opportunity presented itself?
The front door jangled again, and Darla realized in dismay that she’d forgotten to relock it. A customer finally had decided to stop by, with her in no mood to play ye olde shopkeeper. But it wasn’t a customer after all, she saw as she struggled out of the beanbag�
�s squishy embrace. It was Mary Ann.
The elderly woman rushed toward her, her maroon shirtdress flapping about her bony knees. “Thank God you’re here, Darla,” she gasped. “I happened to glance out my window and saw Lizzie being put into a police car by that nice Detective Reese. Why, it looked like the poor girl was under arrest!”
“She’s just going into the station to answer a few questions,” Jake assured her before Darla could reply. “I’m sure she’ll be home again in a couple of hours.”
“Questions?” Mary Ann echoed, eyes wide. “Oh my gracious, surely this doesn’t have anything to do with that terrible accident the other night, does it?”
“We might as well tell her,” Darla said before Jake could toss out another evasive answer. “It turns out that Lizzie was the one who orchestrated having that girl holding up the signs and protesting Valerie Baylor’s appearance here. Now the police are trying to figure out if she’s also the one who shoved Valerie in front of the van.”
“Oh my gracious!”
Mary Ann clutched the bodice of her dress in the clichéd be-still-my-heart gesture that Darla had always associated with old ladies in television melodramas. Mary Ann, however, appeared genuinely distressed, so much so that Darla pulled out one of the stools from behind the counter and set it beside her.
“Sit down a minute,” she urged, helping the woman onto the seat. “The police haven’t arrested her—”
“Not yet anyhow,” Jake interjected.
“—and it’s probably all a formality,” she finished with a dark look at her friend, who merely shrugged. “That whole protest thing was pretty darned stupid on her part, but it doesn’t mean Lizzie is a cold-blooded killer by any stretch of the imagination.”
Then another thought occurred to her. “Mary Ann, you were there at the counter the entire time. Do you recall seeing Lizzie leave the store, especially when Valerie disappeared that last time?”
The old woman gave her hands a helpless flutter.
“Lord, there was so much going on at the register, I didn’t have time to keep up with everyone else. I know I looked over at the signing table a couple of times and saw her helping James, but that doesn’t mean she was there every single second.”
