Sentenced to Death bm-5

by Lorna Barrett

  “Don’t you think I know that?” came Angelica’s voice. She sighed, and softened her voice. “Come on over to the café. I’ve made soup.”

  Although the day was warm, soup was Angelica’s second-favorite comfort food—after ice cream, of course. It wasn’t surprising she’d turned to cooking for consolation.

  Two minutes later, Tricia found herself sitting on a stool at the counter in Booked for Lunch. She usually ate lunch at Angelica’s café, but today she hadn’t had the time or the inclination. Now the aroma of something heavenly took her back to her childhood.

  “Deborah was my first friend here in Stoneham. I just can’t believe she’s gone,” Tricia said, pressing a tissue to her leaky left eye. She had a feeling the tears might be about to make a return visit.

  “And what a way to go,” Angelica agreed, shaking her head. “Squashed like a bug.”

  “Oh, Ange!” Tricia admonished. “Deborah was my friend!”

  “I’m sorry,” Angelica said, and she truly did sound it. “She was my friend, too. But you have to look at it this way. It was quick. She never saw it coming, and she never suffered.”

  No. Not like their grandmother. That unhappy experience would haunt Tricia for the rest of her life. “But it’s so unfair.”

  “Yes, she was just starting to turn a profit on the shop,” Angelica agreed.

  “I’m sure that wasn’t the only thing topping her bucket list. She’d have much rather lived to see her son grow up, get married—and enjoy her grandchildren.”

  “Grandchildren?” Angelica wailed. “Her son wasn’t even two years old—I’m sure she hadn’t even considered grandchildren.” She stepped behind the double doors that separated the tiny kitchen from the dining room, and came back with a bowl. She set it on the counter, pushed it in front of Tricia, and handed her a spoon. “Eat. You’ll feel better.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “It’s Grandmother’s chicken soup recipe. I made it myself,” Angelica said, her voice taking on a singsong cadence on the last words.

  Tricia knew their grandmother had never written down this particular recipe. In fact, she rarely worked from a recipe. She boiled a chicken carcass for hours and tossed in whatever veggies she had on hand, and added salt and pepper to taste. It always tasted delicious and it never tasted the same.

  Angelica placed a napkin and a couple of packets of saltines on the counter and handed Tricia a spoon. She dutifully plunged it into the bowl, fished out a chunk of chicken and a piece of green bean, brought the spoon to her lips, and burned them. “Hey!”

  “Oh, I guess I should have warned you. It’s hot.”

  “No kidding.” Tricia put her spoon down on the paper napkin beside her bowl. She hadn’t planned on mentioning Antonio Barbero—but in a fit of pique, decided to do just that. “Ginny’s boyfriend came around just before she and Mr. Everett left for the day.”

  As predicted, Angelica winced at the reference to the man. “Don’t tell me. He’s already fishing to buy Deborah’s store.”

  “He denied it, but from all the gossip going around the village, you just know that’s what’s going to happen.”

  “Do you think David would sell?”

  “Not if Elizabeth has anything to say about it. But that’s the trouble—she probably won’t. I’m sure Deborah left everything to David in her will. Isn’t that what most married people do? That’s what Christopher and I did.”

  “My last two marriages had prenups—neither Drew nor Gary were taking any chances. But then I made sure I was covered and did okay, anyway.” Angelica leaned both elbows on the counter, resting her head on her hands. “And now that you’re divorced, to whom have you left everything?” she inquired sweetly, and even batted her eyelashes.

  Tricia frowned, but answered honestly anyway. “You—and a couple of charities.”

  Angelica’s smile was beatific. “Me? You are my dear sweet sister. Have I mentioned lately how much I love you?”

  Tricia’s gaze narrowed. “I read a lot of murder mysteries where people are killed for inheritances, so don’t suddenly invite me to go sailing in Portsmouth Harbor or anything else nefarious.”

  “Me, nefarious?” Angelica rolled her eyes. “If it makes you feel any better, I have left all my worldly possessions to you, too. And . . . maybe a few charities.”

  Maybe?

  Tricia blew on her soup before commenting. “Great minds must think alike, after all.”

  The door to Booked for Lunch opened, and Bob Kelly stepped inside. “Am I interrupting anything, baby?”

  Angelica sighed. Since she’d found out Bob had cheated on her earlier in the summer, her ardor had cooled considerably. But they still occasionally went out to dinner, and Bob tried unsuccessfully to mooch lunch off of her on a regular basis. Tricia turned back to her soup. By the look on Bob’s face, he was about to start whining.

  “What a day,” he said, and took the stool next to Tricia. He sniffed the air. “Boy, that soup sure does smell good.”

  Angelica ignored the hint for a freebie. “What’s up, Bob?”

  “This has to be the worst day ever for Stoneham,” he said, shaking his heard wearily.

  “I’d say so,” Tricia said, taking a spoonful of soup.

  “I can’t stop contemplating the slew of lawsuits that’ll come from this mishap.”

  “Mishap?” Tricia asked. “There are two dead people—one of them my friend—and all you can call it is a mishap?”

  “And all you can worry about are the lawsuits?” Angelica asked, just as incredulous.

  “There’s the whole bad PR angle to consider as well,” Bob added, and reached for one of Tricia’s packets of saltines on the counter. She slapped his wrist, taking back her crackers.

  “I don’t think you realize the position I’m in,” Bob went on. “I hired that pilot. I suggested we hold the Founders’ Day celebration. That leaves the Chamber of Commerce, the Board of Selectmen, and the whole village at risk of litigation.”

  “Who do you think will do the suing?” Angelica asked.

  “David Black, for one. There’s already talk that he’s seen a lawyer.”

  “What?” Angelica asked. “His poor wife’s only been dead a few hours.”

  Bob shrugged. “That’s what I heard.”

  “Has anyone seen David?” Tricia asked. He wasn’t her favorite person, but at the very least, she needed to offer her condolences.

  Bob’s gaze was intent upon her soup. “Not so far. At least he wasn’t at the . . .” He paused, hesitating. “Accident scene.”

  “Some accident,” Angelica said. “I’ve been wondering, why didn’t the plane explode on impact?”

  “That’s the crazy thing. It looks like it was out of fuel.”

  “You’re kidding,” Tricia said.

  Bob shook his head. “The firefighters were all set to hose down the area, expecting there to be a gas leak, but there wasn’t any fuel on the ground.”

  “The plane ran out of gas,” Angelica repeated, as though she couldn’t believe such stupidity.

  “Who was the pilot? Was he local?” Tricia asked.

  “Monty Capshaw. He flew out of a grass airstrip north of Milford.”

  “Monty Capshaw,” Angelica repeated. “Sounds like a movie star from the silent era. Did he wear a leather helmet and a bomber jacket?”

  Bob shrugged. “He had on grease-stained coveralls the last time I saw him. Can I buy a bowl of soup from you, honeybun?”

  Angelica’s expression was bland. “Sorry, Bob, Tricia got the last bowl.”

  A flat-out lie. Still, Tricia took another spoonful of broth and closed her eyes, savoring the flavor. “Mmm-mmm, good.”

  Tricia left Booked for Lunch, intending to go straight home, but up ahead on the sidewalk she saw her friend Captain Baker from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department. Unfortunately, he was speaking to Russ Smith. Still, Tricia decided to plunge ahead and picked up her pace to intercept them.

&
nbsp; Fire and rescue trucks, and half the Sheriff’s Department cruisers, lights still strobing madly, along with TV vans from Manchester and Nashua, still surrounded the village square. Ray Dempsey’s lunch truck was also still in evidence, and by the crowd around his shiny chrome vehicle, it looked like business was booming.

  Captain Baker looked up, saw Tricia approach, and the corners of his mouth quirked up.

  “Hello, Grant,” she said in greeting, ignoring Russ.

  Baker sobered. “I’m so sorry about your friend, Tricia.”

  “Thank you.” That he’d even remembered she and Deborah were friends said something about him. No wonder she liked him so much.

  “They’ve taken the bodies away,” Russ volunteered.

  Not something Tricia was interested in knowing. She turned her attention back to Captain Baker. “Mr. Everett said you probably wouldn’t head the investigation.”

  Captain Baker nodded. “We’re glad to help with crowd control and the cleanup, but it’ll be up to the National Transportation Safety Board to determine the cause of the crash. From what witnesses have said, the plane’s engine had shut down. There was no explosion, no fire. From the looks of it, the pilot simply ran out of gas.”

  “Can I quote you on that?” Russ asked.

  Baker frowned. “No.”

  Again, Tricia ignored Russ. “That’s pretty much what Bob Kelly said. I don’t understand how that could have happened.”

  “It’s a known fact,” Russ said. “More light aircraft crashes are attributed to lack of fuel than any other cause, including pilot error—although if you ask me, not filling the gas tank is the biggest error a pilot could make.”

  Nobody asked you, Tricia was tempted to blurt, but thought better of it. Russ was really beginning to irritate her.

  Tricia looked back to the fire and rescue trucks that blocked her view of the carnage. From where she stood, the gazebo wouldn’t be in sight, anyway. Would she ever be able to walk past the once-charming park without thinking of Deborah and the terrible way she’d died? Unbidden tears began to form in Tricia’s eyes, and she swallowed hard to keep them from spilling over.

  “Mr. Smith tells me you witnessed the crash,” Baker said, his voice soft.

  Tricia nodded, and lowered her gaze so she didn’t have to meet his eyes. “It was . . . horrible.”

  “Did you notice anything out of the ordinary before . . . ?” He let his words hang.

  Tricia shook her head. “Only that the plane kept buzzing the crowd. I suppose so everyone would see the banner behind it.”

  “Have they tracked down the pilot’s wife yet?” Russ asked.

  “I wouldn’t be at liberty to say,” Baker said.

  Russ shrugged. He’d find out somehow. Probably make nice with the reporters and crew from the TV stations—buy them coffee and plead that his weekly was hardly a threat to their up-to-the-minute coverage.

  If Mrs. Capshaw was smart, she’d tell every member of the press “no comment” and take an extended vacation until the whole thing blew over. Then again, what would she have to tell him? If what Russ said was true, these kinds of crashes happened all the time. That fact brought Tricia no comfort—nor, she suspected, Deborah’s survivors, either.

  Baker looked back toward the crash site. One of his deputies signaled him. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, and jogged toward the park again.

  Russ waved a hand in front of Tricia’s face, to pull her attention away from Baker’s retreating form and back to him. “Tough day,” he said.

  “Very tough,” she agreed.

  “You should spend the evening with friends. How about me? I’ll take you to dinner. It doesn’t have to be here in town.”

  “No, thank you.” He was the last person on the planet she wanted to be with. “I think I’ll just go home to my cat and lose myself in a good book.”

  Russ nodded toward Haven’t Got a Clue, where several people stood clustered around the entrance. “It doesn’t look like you’re going to get a quiet evening, after all.”

  Tricia recognized the women standing in front of her shop and barely said good-bye to Russ before jaywalking across the street. Before she even made it to her doorstep, Frannie Mae Armstrong lunged forward and burst into tears. “She’s dead. Oh, Tricia, Deborah’s dead!”

  Tricia found herself patting Frannie’s bony back, as the other women clustered around her. Nikki Brimfield, owner of the Patisserie, and Julia Overline hurried close, and Tricia found herself in the middle of a group hug, with much snuffling and wiping of eyes with damp tissues. The three women were all members of Haven’t Got a Clue’s Tuesday Night Book Club, as Deborah had been—not that she managed to make it to many meetings. But the women—and Mr. Everett—had shared a lot in the past two years. It was only natural they’d come together in their grief as well.

  After what seemed like a full minute, Tricia managed to extricate herself from the warm, weepy mass of women and jangled her keys. “Come on inside and we’ll commiserate.”

  Frannie tried to pull herself together, and the women waited for Tricia to open the door, turn on the lights, and usher them inside.

  “Coffee, anyone?” she called.

  Nikki raised a hand. “I’ll make it.” She’d done it before on nights when either Mr. Everett or Ginny had been unable to attend the club meetings, and Tricia let her. Tricia led the other two women to the reader’s nook. Miss Marple had been sleeping on a pile of magazines. She raised herself, stretched, and began to purr as Frannie and Julia took their seats.

  “I just can’t believe it,” Frannie said, and another tear seeped from her eye. Tricia was determined not to start crying, but just in case, she figured she’d better retrieve the box of tissues she kept under the cash desk.

  “Now, now,” Julia said, trying to comfort Frannie. “Deborah wouldn’t want you tearing yourself up like this.”

  “I spoke with her only yesterday,” Frannie said. When she was upset, her Texas twang grew more pronounced. “It was about the Founders’ Day ceremony. I apologized because I couldn’t be there. Now I’m so glad I wasn’t. I don’t think I could live with the memory.”

  Tricia winced. She was going to have to learn to live with that particular memory, and the thought of hashing it out again and again held no appeal, and she said so.

  “Oh, Tricia, I had no idea,” Frannie apologized, and Tricia took the third of the chairs, flopping into it. Immediately, Miss Marple crept across the table and arrived on her lap, giving her chin a friendly head butt, and revving her purrs into overdrive. Tricia petted the cat, wishing she could just go upstairs to her apartment, pour herself a glass of wine, and stop thinking about the day’s events.

  “I was in the Happy Domestic just this morning,” Julia admitted. “I bought the cutest little decoupage waste basket, and a book on organizing the home.” She sighed. “Poor Deborah. She was in such a state.”

  Nikki reappeared from the washroom with a pot full of water for the coffeemaker. “Why was she upset?”

  Julia shrugged. “She was on the phone when I got there. I didn’t hear much of the conversation—although she was whispering really loudly into the phone. And then she slammed down the receiver. She was so flushed, I thought for a moment she might faint, but when I asked if she was okay, she said she just needed a glass of water. She went in the back of the store and stayed there for the longest time. There were a couple of customers that needed to be waited on, and I found myself trying to help them find what they wanted. Finally, I had to call Deborah from the back room to take care of them. I wouldn’t have felt right trying to use her cash register.”

  “What did she say when she finally came back into the store?” Tricia asked.

  Julia shrugged. “Something about having to take care of the baby. But you know, I didn’t hear him back there. And I could’ve sworn after I left that I saw Deborah’s mother with the stroller walking up Main Street.”

  “That’s odd,” Frannie said, and looked thoughtful
.

  “Could you tell if it was a man or a woman she was talking to?” Tricia asked, curiosity getting the best of her.

  Julia shook her head. “Deborah had her back to me through most of the conversation, and of course I didn’t want her to think I was eavesdropping.”

  Tricia stifled a laugh. Knowing Julia, she must have been straining to hear every word.

  “Do you remember anything she said?” Frannie asked. “It could be important.”

  Julia frowned, her brow furrowing in concentration. “Seems to me she said something about a gate. I have no idea what that would have meant.”

  That didn’t make sense to Tricia, either.

  “Tricia, I thought I saw you outside the Patisserie when it . . . when it happened,” Nikki said, and choked on the last word. “You had little Davey, so you must’ve spoken to Deborah before the accident. Did she seem okay to you then?”

  Tricia frowned. “She seemed nervous. I figured it was because she had to give a speech in front of half the village and a bunch of tourists. But maybe she was upset about her phone call. I guess we’ll never know.”

  Nikki brought a tray with Haven’t Got a Clue’s paper cups that Tricia supplied for customers, some packets of sugar and sweetener, some nondairy creamer, and stir spoons. She set the tray on the nook’s large square table, and passed out cups to everyone, before taking the only empty seat. “How about a toast to Deborah?”

  The others nodded and looked toward Tricia to do the honors.

  I will not cry. I will not cry.

  She lifted her paper cup, and the others followed suit. “To Deborah. We didn’t know her as long as we would have liked—or as well. But she was our friend, and she will be terribly missed.”

  The others nodded, touched cups, and then drank.

  They were silent for a long time, each of them mourning Deborah in her own way.

  Tricia kept thinking about what Julia said. A gate. Why on earth would Deborah be talking about a gate, and why was she so angry?

  Sadly, they would probably never know.

  Three