A Deadly Bridal Shower (The Pink Cupcake Mysteries Book 2)

by Harper Lin

  Her tone made Amelia jerk back just slightly.

  “It was completely by accident.”

  Her nails were a bright orange color, but Amelia couldn’t help noticing there were three severe gashes on her right index finger.

  “My gosh,” Amelia gasped. “What happened to your hand?”

  “You are very interested in my well-being, Miss Harley, for someone who never met me before.” Mrs. O’Toole’s jaws pulsed like she might have been chewing gum, but Amelia didn’t think people with dentures usually chewed gum.

  “I’m sorry. They just look like very deep cuts and…”

  “You said your son had photos of me.” Amelia was sure Mrs. O’Toole sneered as she said the word “son.”

  “He didn’t take pictures of you. You were accidentally caught in the frame. Just the top of your head, really, in the corner of one of the pictures he took at the Twisted Spoke.”

  Mrs. O’Toole sat straight and still, all the while staring at Amelia.

  “Well, what I wanted to ask you was, did you see this man go into the ladies’ room there?” Amelia retrieved the picture from her purse. “I mean, it’s fine if you didn’t. No one else noticed him, either, but I thought since you were so close that maybe you caught a glimpse of him.”

  Still Mrs. O’Toole stared, and for a few seconds, Amelia thought she was having some kind of seizure or episode.

  “You know the Fosters live next door to me.” Mrs. O’Toole finally spoke, letting Amelia hang there with the picture in her hand.

  Amelia’s eyes widened.

  “Why, no. I had no idea. Well, that is weird, isn’t it?”

  Mrs. O’Toole smirked, imitating Amelia’s surprised reaction.

  “That little girl of theirs was rotten from the word go.”

  “I hate to say that I’ve heard a lot of that over the past few days.” Amelia tried to sound lighthearted, but it wasn’t working at all. Her voice was betraying her by cracking and wavering, and her mouth had gone completely dry.

  “Mrs. Harley, do you have money?”

  “What?”

  “What am I saying? I see your car out there. Obviously not. You work at that food truck stand.”

  “I own it,” Amelia corrected. Insulting her finances was one thing, but insulting her business…that was another.

  “Your cupcakes are okay.”

  “I noticed you ate two of them.” Amelia tried to smile her nerves away, but Mrs. O’Toole made sure they stayed taut and trembling.

  “You see, Mrs. Harley, when you have money like I do, there is always someone sniffing around who feels they are entitled to some of it.”

  “I can assure you, Mrs. O’Toole, I don’t want your money. In fact, I think I’ve wasted enough of your time.” Amelia stood from the sofa, stuffing the picture back into her purse then wringing her hands.

  “Sit down, Mrs. Harley, or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

  “Shoot me?” Amelia breathed the words as she watched Mrs. O’Toole pull a small revolver out from behind one of the cushions on the love seat she was sitting on.

  “Yes, shoot you! Are you deaf as well as dumb?” Mrs. O’Toole instantly changed in front of Amelia. She became a dangerous beast, completely unpredictable and terrifying.

  Amelia clutched her purse.

  “It’s funny how you come here with a picture in your hand you want me to look at. Just like that girl did.”

  “What girl?” Amelia shook her head. “Mrs. O’Toole, I can assure you that I have no idea what you’re talking about, but if you put down the gun, we can get you some help. We could go out on the porch and call whoever you like and…”

  “You’re just like her. She thought I was just some senile old coot, too.” Mrs. O’Toole stood up, still pointing the gun at Amelia. She had become a monolith casting Amelia in a very dark shadow. “Suffering from dementia.” She grinned wildly, pulling her lips back so her teeth and gums were glistening in the afternoon light.

  “Mrs. O’Toole, I’m not here to hurt you.”

  “Of course you’re not,” she hissed. “That was what Dana said to me, too, the day she sauntered into my home, wearing a skirt so short she might as well not have worn anything, and showed me the pictures she had taken!”

  “What pictures, Mrs. O’Toole?”

  “Why, the pictures of my husband, of course.”

  Swallowing hard, Amelia looked around, half expecting Mr. O’Toole to come skulking around a corner with some look of madness on his face, too.

  “Don’t worry. He’s not here.”

  Maybe he wasn’t crazy. Maybe if she could keep Mrs. O’Toole talking, Mr. O’Toole would come home from whatever game of golf or cocktail hour he was at and help get her out of this mess. But Mrs. O’Toole was reading her mind.

  “Well, he’s here in the basement, but he won’t be coming up,” Mrs. O’Toole said. “He died some time ago.”

  Amelia’s head spun and her stomach lurched as her mind tried to make sense of the nonsense she was hearing.

  “That was what that horrible beast wanted to show me.” Mrs. O’Toole clenched her teeth. “Dana Foster had taken pictures through my basement window.”

  Mrs. O’Toole’s hand began to tremble with rage as she told Amelia about that horrible day.

  Dana Foster had come to the door with pictures of Mr. O’Toole’s dead body just propped up in a corner of the basement. She told Mrs. O’Toole she was planning on robbing her, breaking in through one of the basement windows to steal whatever she could, maybe find a gold bar or two buried in the walls, but she thought why steal when she could just have Mrs. O’Toole give her money when she wanted.

  “She said she’d go to the police if I didn’t pay her one hundred thousand dollars…for starters.”

  Amelia found herself almost laughing as she pondered who was worse, Mrs. O’Toole for leaving her dead husband in the basement or Dana for knowing he was there and asking for money not to tell anyone.

  “I’m sure you’re wondering why my husband is down there,” Mrs. O’Toole snapped.

  Amelia suddenly felt like a thousand spiders were crawling up her legs as she thought of Mr. O’Toole’s decaying body lying somewhere beneath her in the darkness of the basement. She shivered, and it made Mrs. O’Toole giggle with insane glee.

  “He hadn’t done a thing. I was just tired of him,” she snarled. “Every day he did the same things, wore the same clothes, talked about the same topics, and was always the expert. Do you know this room had been all white for over thirty-five years because he refused to allow me to change it? All white for all those years made me feel like I was in an institution. See what some color can do? You, yourself, just complimented me on it.”

  That must have scored some kind of brownie point because Mrs. O’Toole seemed to puff with pride.

  “Mr. O’Toole was much larger than me. However, he wasn’t larger than a monkey wrench to his head. It was rather anticlimactic, to tell the truth. He just crumpled to the ground. End of story.” She let out a sigh. “So, I thought if it were good enough for my husband of over forty years, it was better than that little hussy deserved.”

  Amelia’s mouth had gone slack. She sat stone still, feeling a cold sweat develop down her spine and under her arms, but she didn’t dare tremble.

  “It’s rather funny,” Mrs. O’Toole said, more to herself than Amelia. “She was so absorbed in her phone that she didn’t even see me come up behind her. The woman who had been paying her over five thousand dollars a week for the past several months and she doesn’t even look up.”

  “You slit her throat and stabbed her, too,” Amelia muttered, surprised she could even find her own voice. “That’s how you cut your fingers.”

  “I’ll admit I got a bit carried away. I didn’t expect the opportunity to arise the way it did.” She looked at Amelia like she was a piece of meat. “Just like this one.”

  “Mrs. O’Toole, please.” Amelia put her hands out defensively. “I have child
ren. They need me.”

  “You should have just run out the door, then, because now that you know everything, I can’t let you live. They’ll get over it.” Mrs. O’Toole cocked the pistol. “It’s a shame I have to use a gun. We’ve shared so much, it feels, I don’t know, cold.”

  “People know I’m here, Mrs. O’Toole! They’ll come looking for me! They’ll see in the basement even if they don’t figure out what you did to Dana!”

  “What? I’ll tell them you were here.” Mrs. O’Toole became a fragile, sweet old lady in front of Amelia’s eyes. “Yes, Amelia Harley. She stopped by. Pretty woman, about forty, with a short haircut. Yes, she came by, and we chatted about some man in a picture she was asking me about. Then she left. Why, has something happened to her?”

  Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, she morphed into the heartless hag again.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Harley. You should have tended your own yard.”

  Knock, knock, knock.

  Amelia held her breath. Mrs. O’Toole froze, her lips drawing down at the corners into a fierce growl.

  “Don’t move.” She mouthed the words.

  Immediately Amelia lunged for the side table next to her, grabbed a Capodimonte figurine of a cherub-faced boy climbing up a tree, and whipped it against the wall. It shattered into a million pieces, echoing like thunder through the house as it crumbled onto the hardwood floor.

  “Help!” Mrs. O’Toole cried. “Oh, help me!” She thrust the gun deep into her right pocket and, without a moment’s hesitation, threw herself violently to the floor, causing the paintings on the wall to rattle.

  Before Amelia could dash to the door, it came crashing in. She recognized the shoe.

  Out of breath and alert, Dan burst into the home, his gun drawn.

  “Police!” His voice was a choir of angels to Amelia, who froze and put her hands up. Mrs. O’Toole writhed on the floor.

  “Stop her!” Mrs. O’Toole whimpered. “She’s trying to hurt me.”

  Tears streamed down Mrs. O’Toole’s face. She huddled close to the wall, crying like a dog that had been beaten.

  “What in the world is going on?” Dan kept his gun drawn, unsure if he should keep it on Amelia or the old woman or if there was someone else in the house.

  “Dan, don’t let her go! She killed Dana and her own husband!”

  “What?” Dan barked.

  “She’s got a gun!” Amelia cried just as Mrs. O’Toole was reaching inside her pocket.

  “Don’t move!” Dan yelled at Mrs. O’Toole.

  “But I need my pills,” she gasped.

  “She doesn’t have pills, Dan! She’s got a gun!” Amelia charged in front of Dan just as Mrs. O’Toole withdrew her pistol and got one shot off.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Amelia woke up in a beige room and heard a steady beeping in her left ear. Fluttering her eyes open wide, she was hit with a massive headache. When she tried to push herself up, her left arm stung like a swarm of fire ants were giving her a go.

  “Ouch.” She gritted her teeth.

  “You’re awake.”

  Clutching her heart with her right hand, Amelia let out a yelp of surprise.

  “Dan. Geez, where am I?”

  “You’re in the hospital.”

  “What for?”

  “Well, first, you got shot. Luckily it was just a graze on your left forearm. The doctor sewed you up in about three minutes.”

  “And second?” She rubbed her head and winced at the giant goose egg that was there. “Ouch!” She gritted her teeth again.

  “You fell and hit your head against an oak side table. The doctor wanted to keep you here for observation.”

  “My gosh!” Amelia almost began to cry. “My kids! Lila! Oh, they are going to be freaking out! I have to get home!” She tried to get up, but somewhere a giant crane tilted the room and gave it a good spin, sending her back to the pillow.

  “Hold on.” Dan stood up, his phone in his hand while he looked down quickly, texting something to someone. “They know where you are and that you’re all right.”

  “How? Who told them? How did you get to Mrs. O’Toole’s?”

  “Well, you have a very concerned friend who gave me a call and told me what you were doing.”

  “Lila.” Amelia sighed. Her face twisted into an embarrassed grin.

  “Yes.” Dan’s voice was a whole octave lower. Amelia felt a lecture coming on. “Do you have any idea how dangerous it was for you to go over there?”

  “I know.” Amelia touched her head delicately with her finger. “Normally killers are so friendly and accommodating. Mrs. O’Toole had terrible manners.”

  “I mean it.” Dan sat down on the edge of the bed. “You’ve got a family to think about. Not to mention all the people who eat your cupcakes.” He patted his stomach.

  “Gosh. How am I going to get to work in time tomorrow?” She sighed again. “I did make a mess of things.”

  “Actually, Miss Bergman gave me a message to give to you. She said not to worry, she hired a temp to take up the slack while you’re off tomorrow.”

  Amelia’s mouth fell open.

  “Who?”

  Dan shrugged but was smiling.

  “Oh, I don’t care.” Amelia pouted, folding her arms across her chest. Peeking up from beneath her lashes, she looked at Dan. “So, where is Mrs. O’Toole now?”

  Dan admitted to Amelia that the old woman hadn’t even been on the police department’s radar until he looked up her address.

  As Mrs. O’Toole had mentioned, she had been neighbors with the Fosters for a couple of decades. Still, she was old and frail, or so they thought.

  Dana’s parents had been traveling abroad and had just arrived home within the last couple of days. Dan made a trip to their house yesterday not only to offer his condolences but also to question them, to look in Dana’s room, to try to get an idea of who might have done this to her.

  “At first I was sure it had to do with some jilted fellow,” Dan admitted. “But then I found her stash of pictures.”

  “Stash?”

  Dana had pictures of herself with several young men, and not-so-young men, from around town that their significant others would not approve of. She also had pictures of spouses behaving badly. And then there were the pictures from Mr. O’Toole’s basement.

  “Dana’s parents had tried to cut her off. They tried disciplining her, giving her a tight allowance, but she would always find a way to get money. The Fosters had assumed it was the old-fashioned way,” Dan said, giving Amelia a raised-eyebrow look.

  “The oldest profession?”

  Slowly he nodded his head.

  “Turned out not to be the case. She was blackmailing half the people on her own block.”

  “You mean she wasn’t the floozy everyone thought she was?” Amelia stuttered.

  “No, she was. Most definitely,” Dan said, standing up from the bed. “She just made sure no one got something from her for nothing.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Mrs. O’Toole proved to be an even bigger player than Dana.” Dan loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his collar. “When you have the beauty of youth going up against plain old-fashioned experience, I put my money on experience every time.”

  Dana thought she had Mrs. O’Toole wrapped around her finger. The idea that Mrs. O’Toole was, in fact, a cold-blooded killer didn’t seem to sink in to Dana’s pretty head.

  To her, knowing such a big secret about one of the richest people in town— one who had one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel—made Dana feel she was in charge. She just didn’t think of the reality that if Mrs. O’Toole had killed the man she married, why would she care about killing some girl who was too big for her britches and who was hated by most everyone around town?

  “Did you know it was Mrs. O’Toole?”

  “We didn’t at first, but thanks to that guy, Rusty, who kept the crime scene clean, we were able to find one perfect footprint left behi
nd by the killer.”

  “What luck!” Amelia shook her head in awe.

  “Well, a lot of times, that’s what this business is.” Dan walked over to the window and opened up the curtains. The sun was setting, and the colors looked pretty to Amelia, who winced again as she scooted up in the bed. “The footprint was in a style of shoe not worn by the majority of women who attended the party. You know, those flat, thick-soled athletic shoes. There was only one other person who might wear them, but we ruled her out immediately.”

  “Who was that?”

  “You.”

  “Me?” Amelia laughed out loud then rubbed her aching head.

  “Yeah.” Dan gave Amelia a wink. “Then Darcy went through the guest list with me, letting me know who she thought could have been wearing a comfortable shoe like that. Mrs. O’Toole was the most likely.”

  Dan went on to say that after Amelia knocked herself out, they subdued Mrs. O’Toole and made a search of the house. Not only did they find the shoe with Dana’s blood on it but they also found a monkey wrench that had dried blood on it.

  “That would be her husband’s.” Amelia sighed.

  “Not that we need the murder weapon. In the search for the shoes, we found his body in the basement.”

  “My gosh. What kind of a person does that?” Amelia’s mind couldn’t comprehend it. She decided she didn’t even want to try. The thought that she could have ended up down in that desolate, sad basement, too, was too close. “How long had he been down there?”

  “If I had to guess, it was about ten months, maybe a year.”

  “Dan, the smell. The bugs. All of that so she could put wallpaper up?”

  “What?” Dan leaned against the ledge of the window, crossing his arms.

  Amelia went on to tell him the story Mrs. O’Toole had shared with her about the white walls and the wrench.

  “I hate to say this, but I don’t know which one of them was worse, Dana Foster or Mrs. O’Toole.”

  “Well, Mrs. O’Toole will be facing her judgment soon enough. I see this as a slam dunk.”

  Amelia thought that Dana was also facing her judgment. It made her shiver.

  Before either of them could speak again, the phone rang. Amelia went to reach for it, squinting her eyes as if that somehow could ease the pain.