Stabbed In The Solarium
A Moorecliff Manor Cat Cozy Mystery Book 2
Leighann Dobbs
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
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About the Author
Chapter One
Sometime after midnight:
The solarium was kind of creepy at night. The plants of all shapes and sizes were mere shadows in the dark, lurking in every corner of the large room. The air was heavy with humidity and the scent of moist earth. A cricket had gotten inside, and he chirped mechanically in the corner.
Vines had grown up along the tall arched windows that made up three of the walls. There were so many vines and plants that one could hardly even see outside. Still, a sliver of moonlight had managed to filter in, and Shirley could see the stars through the tops of the ten-foot-tall windows.
It was an odd place to meet. Shirley took a sip of her margarita for liquid courage. Not that she needed courage; she was used to clandestine meetings.
The door creaked open, and Shirley swung around, sloshing the margarita over the rim of her glass. “Ha! So you came!”
The figure stayed in the shadows, giving Shirley pause. Was it the person she had been expecting or someone else? Why didn’t they say something?
She leaned forward and squinted, trying to make out who it was. “Did you bring the money?”
The person didn’t answer. Shirley took another sip of her drink. It didn’t really matter who it was. Any money was good money, and she’d discovered most would pay plenty of it to keep their secrets. And Shirley knew a lot of secrets.
“Why are you lurking in the shadows? No one can see in here. The windows are covered with vines and leaves.” Shirley gestured around the room, sloshing more of her drink. “Just give me the money, and let’s get this over with.”
The person stepped forward, and Shirley could see who it was. “Oh! It’s you. You sent me the note?”
“Yes, it was me.”
“Okay, well get on with it, then.”
The person lifted their arm, and Shirley wondered for a split second if they were going to go on a long tirade. She hoped not—she wasn’t really up for it, and she should be getting to bed. But then she saw the moonlight glinting off the blade of the knife.
Too late, she tried to dodge the blade arcing down toward her chest. The margarita glass slipped out of her hand and smashed to the floor. Shirley quickly followed it. The last thing she heard was the solarium door banging shut as her killer fled out into the woods.
Chapter Two
The next morning…
Moorecliff Manor was a hive of activity, filled with out-of-town guests, waitstaff, and friends who had all come to attend the memorial celebration for Archibald Moorecliff. Archie’s funeral had been a small affair for close family only, and his widow, Daisy, had spent weeks planning the celebration so the rest of the large Moorecliff family and out-of-town friends could pay their respects.
Araminta Moorecliff, Archie’s octogenarian aunt, had dressed in her finest neon-pink outfit especially for the occasion. She’d even topped it off with a bright-pink wide-brimmed sun hat and added a lime-green sash, which she had tied around her neck, to finish the perfect celebratory ensemble most suited for the day’s outing: the reveal of a new memorial garden Daisy had had created in honor of her late husband.
At the moment, however, Araminta was seated at one of the small round tables the staff had set up in the dining room to help accommodate the large number of guests staying at Moorecliff Manor, enjoying a light breakfast with a handful of others from the Moorecliff family.
Arun and Sasha, her Siamese cats, were winding their way around the room, slinking under tables and skulking against walls. They were smart enough to seek only the attention of those in the Moorecliff clan who actually liked cats, accepting a gentle petting here and a morsel of food there. Their intelligent blue eyes scanned the room for their next victim as they darted from table to table.
Daisy, who was dressed impeccably in an off-white linen designer suit, her ebony hair tucked back in a chignon at the base of her neck, sat at the head of the main table. Her stepdaughter, Stephanie, was seated at her right. Steph had had a hard time accepting Daisy as a stepmother, and Araminta hoped this could be a time of healing for both of them. She truly wished that her grandniece would come to see that Daisy really had married her father for love and not for his money, as many in the family had assumed, and that she would come to think of Daisy as family.
Poor Stephanie did look a little under the weather, the dark circles under her hazel eyes giving away the strain of the past few weeks. Araminta saw a rare smile on Stephanie’s face as she bent to pet the cats, her hand gliding over the silvery fur on Arun’s back and giving a few scratches between his mink-brown ears. She hoped the girl had found her own sense of closure these past weeks since her father’s unexpected death. She’d spent almost every waking hour in the gardens with Yancy, helping him—and the crew of locals he’d called in to help with the undertaking—to create a special corner of the grounds that would remind future generations of Moorecliffs of Archibald’s existence.
Poor Reginald, Archie’s son. He hadn’t been as involved in the creation of the garden to honor his father’s memory as his sister had, and he would not be taking part in today’s unveiling, but he was taking a step in the right direction. Out of gratitude for his stepmother’s help with saving him from the harsh repercussions of doing business with Tony “the Fist” Romano, Reggie was attending a special three-day seminar for Gamblers Anonymous and would not be home until the day after the memorial’s unveiling. The timing was unfortunate but couldn’t have been avoided.
Despite the seriousness of the matter, the scamp was likely thrilled to have escaped having to deal with the Moorecliff family en masse. A few members at a time, he could handle, but when the aunts and cousins from several generations descended upon the manor at one time, he’d always found a convenient excuse to make himself scarce. Looking around at the motley crew, Araminta couldn’t much blame him.
Today, however, Araminta knew he would have preferred to be in attendance. He missed his father a great deal, though he dealt with his own grief in a way quite different from his sister. While Stephanie had thrown herself into helping create the memorial garden, Reggie had thrown himself into learning as much as he could about the day-to-day workings of the family business.
Araminta was proud of her great-nephew for applying himself. He would become a valuable asset to the business in the future. For the moment, however, her late nephew had left everything in the capable hands of his father’s widow.
“I knew she was a gold digger from the moment I met her!” someone at the table next to Araminta’s whispered. There was a sting of envy edging the woman’s tone. Araminta almost turned to correct the woman, because she knew Daisy better than any of them. But then there was more…
“She’s not even a Moorecliff! What was Archibald thinking to leave her in charge of the entire company?”
Araminta heard a low chuckle, and then, “Don’t worry. Shirley said she’ll fix her, good and proper. She knows something about her past. Something truly horrid. And she knows the trut
h about Reginald. You’ve all noticed he isn’t here, but Shirley says it’s not because he got stuck in the Himalayas with his skiing buddies, like we’ve been told.”
“Wait—Shirley has dirt on Daisy? Ooh!”
“Shirley has dirt on everyone. She even told me she knew Bernard was embezzling from Moorecliff Motors for years!”
Bernard Moorecliff was the reason a special memorial was needed to begin with. For years, he’d controlled operations of the West Coast division of Moorecliff Motors, while Archie was CEO of the entire company and took care of things on the East Coast. But he’d gotten greedy and wanted everything to himself. So he’d poisoned his brother and landed himself in prison for the murder—but not before Daisy discovered he was also stealing from the company. The courts had added another crime to his lifelong sentence: embezzlement.
“Where is Shirley, anyway? I could have sworn she said she’d be here early this morning.”
One of the guests snorted into her orange juice. “Probably sleeping it off in her room upstairs. She was drunk last night. Too drunk, if you ask me. She was trying to hold court but losing ground and started threatening to spill all the family secrets.”
“Do you think there are more? After embezzlement and murder, you’d think there wouldn’t be much to top those,” someone said.
“I’ll bet she’s with that gardener guy. They had a fling years ago, you know. She had it bad, our Shirley. I heard she used to sneak the poor fellow upstairs in the dumbwaiter!”
A round of giggles followed the revelation.
“Maybe we should look for her in there? Shirley was so drunk last night, she may have passed out on the way down to retrieve her lover.”
“Oh, but Shirley isn’t the only one who went a little crazy for the Moorecliff gardener,” another whisperer chimed in. “I hear Charlotte, Betty, and Anastasia had a thing for him too…”
Araminta was about to step in, to stop their gossip before things got out of hand, when the cats caught her eye. They were over by the window, looking out as if they’d seen something. Wait, they had! Someone was lurking around outside the windows. After the conversation she’d just heard, she wondered if it was Yancy helping Shirley sneak back to her room before anyone decided to join them outside. Or maybe they’d decided to have another go this morning?
Whichever may have been the case, Araminta decided she did not want to see whatever the two of them might be up to. Instead, she turned her attention back to her breakfast, but she made a mental note to caution Yancy. In this family, it paid to be discreet when one decided to… do whatever they were doing together.
A short while later, Daisy signaled an end to breakfast. It was time for everyone to head out to the gardens!
Araminta headed out with the rest of the crowd, but then something else drew her eye.
Oh, no. This could not be a good sign.
Sasha and Arun had raced ahead to the solarium, then they drew up quite suddenly. After a few turns back and forth with their tails straight up in the air, Araminta became worried. She knew their actions meant they’d found something that begged her attention. The last time they’d acted that way, there had been a murder. But that couldn’t be the reason now. What were the odds of that happening at Moorecliff Manor again in such a short period of time?
Breaking away from the rest of the crowd, she hurried toward the solarium. She would just have a quick peek inside, to make sure all was as it should be before rejoining the others. But as she opened the door, she knew all was not as it should be.
A margarita glass lay smashed on the floor amid a pool of blood. The air was tinged with a coppery smell. The tables so carefully draped in white linen cloths were spattered with red. And if those things didn’t indicate that the memorial luncheon that Daisy had worked so hard on was about to be ruined, then the body lying in the middle of the room left no doubt.
“Oh, dear,” she whispered as she backed out, closing the door behind her. “I guess Shirley isn’t going to make it to Archie’s memorial.”
Chapter Three
After stationing herself before the doors of the solarium, Araminta borrowed a cellphone from one of the younger Moorecliffs in residence and placed the call to 911 herself. There would be havoc aplenty once the police arrived, but she wanted none of it now. She needed to secure the area.
Luckily, the solarium was filled with lush plants this season. Yancy had really outdone himself. There were tall flowers, bunches of decorative grasses, and vines obscuring most of the interior view from the windows.
On the lawn, most of the guests were loitering behind, listening to the excitement pouring from the currently reigning Moorecliff matriarch as she led the group toward the special garden section she’d had created in remembrance of the wonderful man who had been her husband.
Poor Daisy, she thought. Araminta knew this was going to break her heart. She had worked so hard to set up a memorial to celebrate her late husband’s life. Now here they were, about to face yet another murder.
Half an hour later, she was speaking with Detective Ivan Hershey—the same detective who had handled the investigation of Archie’s murder. Word had gotten out about Cousin Shirley, and an anxious crowd had gathered. As Araminta had guessed from the amount of blood, Shirley had been stabbed, but there was no murder weapon at the scene.
However, Arun had zipped straight into the solarium the moment the cops opened the doors, with Sasha right behind him. One of them had found an important clue: a bloodied gardening glove.
“Oh, my! The gardener’s glove?” someone whispered. “But… wasn’t she having a thing with him?”
“No, that was years ago,” someone else replied.
“I heard as soon as they saw each other again, the whole relationship was rekindled.”
Ivan looked at Araminta, and she knew without a doubt that he, too, had heard the whispered conversation. He turned to Daisy. “We need to speak to the gardener, Ms. Moorecliff. Can you have him come down here?”
She lowered her gaze then shook her head. “Yancy isn’t here this morning, I’m afraid. He requested the day off, and I gave it to him since—well, since the work in the memorial garden was done. But he couldn’t possibly be involved…”
Araminta handed her a handkerchief. “Of course he isn’t involved. And his absence is not an admission of guilt. No one expected what happened here, Daisy. Especially given the reason we are all here—we are in mourning, for heaven’s sake! What could the killer have been thinking?”
“To shut her up, maybe,” came another whisper from the crowd, catching Ivan’s attention.
“Shirley talked a lot?” he asked, his pen hovering over the little paper tablet he held in his hand. Araminta bit back a smile. Unlike the other cops, apparently, Ivan preferred a good old-fashioned paper and pen to electronics. It must have been something he learned from his grandfather, who had come to stand beside him.
Jacob Hershey was retired from the police force now, but he and Araminta had gone a few rounds over investigations back in the day. Old-school, Jacob would call it, and he wasn’t wrong. When he was on the force, paper and pen were all they’d had—or pencil, now that she thought about it. That, and a telephone.
“Of course she talked a lot, boy! Shirley was the gossip of the family, and she never learned to curb that tongue of hers, if there’s truth to what I’ve been hearing,” Jacob Hershey said then nodded to the ladies. “Hello, Daisy. I am sorry about what happened to Archie. He was a good man. Better than most. Sad he can no longer be with us.”
To Araminta, he said nothing. Instead, he directed his comments to Ivan. “Keep your eye on this one, boy. She likes to butt her nose in. To interfere.”
His voice was gruff, and Araminta knew the grit in his tone was not owing entirely to his age. His gaze was cautious, though he continued to stand his ground, even after Araminta’s eyes narrowed. She wouldn’t stand for his aspersions against her character, not now, but she didn’t mind casting one against his. �
��Wouldn’t have to if you did your job, Jacob. How many clues would you have missed if I hadn’t been there?”
Ivan stepped in before their discussion could become heated. “Ms. Moorecliff is a lovely woman, Grandfather. I’d be delighted to have her assistance—especially after the help she provided in solving the late Mr. Moorecliff’s murder. Now, if you’ll excuse us, I have more questions for Araminta.”
He held out his arm for her, and Araminta took it, but not before shooting a victory smile over her shoulder at Jacob. “I am happy to assist, Detective, in whatever manner I can.”
“Tell me about Shirley Moorecliff. Talk says she knew a bit about everyone’s habits. What do you know of hers?”
Araminta sighed. “It has been a while since we’ve spent time together, as you might have guessed. The Moorecliff clan is pretty large these days. It takes something momentous or equally horrid to bring us all together.”
“She was a cousin?” he asked as they walked toward the house.
Araminta noticed he kept looking around as if searching for something. “Detective, I believe Miss Stephanie went back inside the house as soon as we left Daisy.”
He flushed but neither affirmed nor denied her guess that he was looking for Stephanie. “Shirley had a sister. Olive, I believe. I spoke to her earlier.”
“Yes.” Araminta nodded. “Olive and Shirley are Walter’s children. The pair of them used to stay at the manor, and even then, they got into all sorts of mischief.”
“And did that mischief include the gardener?”
Araminta hesitated. She didn’t want to be the one to point fingers at Yancy, but she couldn’t lie. “If memory serves, Shirley did have a thing for Yancy. But there were quite a few cousins—and even Shirley’s sister, Olive—that had flirtations with him. He was quite the thing back then.”
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