Lemon Tart

by Josi S. Kilpack

  “What?” he countered.

  “I—” She paused and looked back at his hand. “I didn’t know you still wore your wedding ring.”

  He looked down at his hand but he said nothing. After a few more seconds of silence, he headed for the front door.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, taking two steps toward him.

  “Sadie,” he said quietly, now too far away for her to see his expression as he turned to face her. “Ron’s a good man and I know he truly cares about you. I know no one understands this, but I never stopped loving Carrie.”

  Chapter 24

  Sadie didn’t know how long she stood there before she heard footsteps in the hall. Carrie stood in the doorway of the kitchen and Sadie looked at her. “What’s going on?” Sadie asked.

  “Nothing to concern yourself with,” Carrie said in a voice far too calm for what Sadie had just heard. “Go back to bed, Sadie. Things will be better in the morning.” She turned and went back to her room.

  Sadie stayed rooted to her place in the middle of the kitchen, brownies in hand. Did Carrie know? But she couldn’t mentally go down that path for long before bigger thoughts yanked her mind back to her brother. She couldn’t ignore it any longer. Could Jack be Trevor’s father?

  Sadie refused to accept it. She had misunderstood. She was putting together clues in the wrong order. Jack was helping Ron. That had to be it. That’s all he was doing, all he had done. But what did that have to do with never having stopped loving Carrie?

  Almost trancelike she went back downstairs, put the brownies on the dresser, turned off the lights, and climbed into bed. She stared at the darkened ceiling with the covers pulled up to her chin. She was awake when dawn inched its way into her room, that is, if she ever slept—she wasn’t sure. She hadn’t had such a horrible night’s sleep since the first few weeks after Neil’s death. Why couldn’t Neil be here now? Even after nineteen years she missed him most when she had big decisions to make. How she had loved to ask his opinion over biscuits and gravy, just talk about life, and have someone to line her thoughts up with.

  Since Ron had entered her life it hadn’t hurt so bad to be alone, but right now she ached for the man she’d loved so much, the father of her children, the person she had trusted most in the whole world. She dressed slowly in the clothes she had packed the night before, listening for any sounds of movement upstairs. It was silent. She padded up the stairs, anxious to get back home. Maybe things would make more sense over there.

  Carrie was still asleep or gone—either way Sadie was relieved not to have to talk to her. She was sick over the thoughts still coursing through her mind. The living room windows revealed that, just as she’d expected, the mildness of yesterday had given way to a flurry of snow and wind. She scowled, remembering she hadn’t brought a coat. She’d packed everything else. She wrote a quick note, thanking Carrie for letting her stay and put it on the kitchen counter.

  At the front door she took a deep breath, pulled her bag close to her chest and hurried out into the blizzard-like conditions. She didn’t look at the other houses in the circle, she didn’t see if there were any cars at Anne’s. She didn’t want to know. All this meddling had left her sick to her stomach.

  It felt good to be home, but the pit in her stomach was still there. She brushed the snow from her hair, knowing it was frizzed out and horrid-looking now that she’d slept on it. She vowed to style it later and then went about making herself some hot cocoa, still processing everything she’d heard last night.

  Jack’s words, “I never stopped loving Carrie,” rang through her ears and she shuddered. There was no way Jack could be the one! And yet, Jack had been the intruder at Anne’s house last night. He must have come from the back field. She’d seen his truck leave when she was hiding in the vacant lot. He must have gone to the far end of the fields and walked up from the back, waiting for the police to go by just like she had. And then he’d driven back to the house a few minutes later. Could he have done the same thing the night before? Could he have killed Anne?

  “Slow down,” she told herself. Then she grabbed a pad of paper and started making a list of everything she learned yesterday—and what was left to be followed up on. When she finished she had a whole list of things she could look into. Only now, she wasn’t looking for proof it was Ron, she was looking for proof it wasn’t Jack. And Trevor. Her stomach clenched like a fist. Where on earth was Trevor? It had been twenty-four hours.

  She was still looking at the list, trying to think of anything she’d missed, when the phone rang, making her jump. She took a deep breath and read the caller ID. It was a blocked number. Did she dare answer it?

  Unfortunately, she didn’t know what else she had to lose.

  “Mrs. Hoffmiller?” Detective Cunningham said into the phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Could you come down to the station? We have some questions and we need to ask you for an official statement.”

  Sadie nodded, even though he couldn’t see her, but her stomach sank. They’d never asked her to come into the station for questions and it validated the changes that had taken place since yesterday. Everything was worse now. “I’ll be right there,” she said. “Is there any particular reason I’m coming down?”

  “We have the coroner report back from the autopsy, and you were right about the time cook on the oven. Anne was killed sometime between 2:00 and 5:00 am. And the body was moved. We need to ask some specific questions in regards to some other things we found . . . and we’ve . . . had a confession.”

  Chapter 25

  It took exactly eight minutes for Sadie to reach the police station and run inside. Detective Cunningham and Detective Madsen were waiting for her and led her to an office rather than the mirrored rooms she’d seen on cop shows. The office was on the small side, with a window running the length of one wall, allowing them to look into the inner workings of the police station.

  “Did you find Trevor?” she asked, choosing her focus.

  Cunningham shook his head but said nothing. She tried not to give Detective Madsen a dirty look, but it was hard not to. He just rubbed her wrong at every turn. Detective Cunningham sat down in the chair behind the desk, and Detective Madsen stood by the side of the desk near the door as if making sure she didn’t run out. As if she would do something so undignified!

  Cunningham began by asking her if he could record the conversation. She agreed, at which point he turned on a tape recorder and began with many of the same questions they had asked her yesterday. She answered with absolute honesty and tried to ignore her growing curiosity about the confession he’d told her about on the phone. She wondered for a moment if he’d only said that to get her down here.

  “The coroner has made some determinations in regard to the murder weapon,” Detective Cunningham said.

  Sadie swallowed. Ron and Jack’s faces appeared in her mind, but she forced Jack’s away. She knew she was ignoring facts, that she was being completely subjective, but her mind would not allow anything different.

  “I wonder if you could describe the missing tieback for me? In detail,” Cunningham asked.

  “Um, like I told you before, the pattern was floral. I’d actually used it for a quilt we made for a young woman at church—she was getting married. When Anne lamented being able to find a suitable tieback in the store, I went through my fabric—I’ve got quite a collection you know—and found it. I was thrilled to—”

  Detective Madsen cut her off from where he stood with his back against the wall. “We need size and shape. We don’t care what it looked like or how you found it.” He gave the impression that he had no interest being there at all and was simply waiting for permission to leave.

  She scowled at Detective Madsen. She did not like him one little bit, but did as he said and got right to the details. “It was just under a yard long—36 inches of fabric—but you lose some length when you sew the seams. It was about three inches wide, with a pressed seam on the interior.” />
  “A pressed seam?” Detective Madsen asked. She noticed a look pass between the two men.

  “Yeah, I made the tieback by sewing a six-inch wide piece of fabric in half the long way, then I pressed it so the seam was on the inside. It’s very unflattering to have the seam on the outside, where people can see it. If people would understand the part that seams play in the finished product, they would realize how imperative an iron is to the overall process of getting the right lines when it comes to even basic sewing.”

  Detective Madsen pulled out a notebook and began making furious notes; she wondered if he was a closet seamstress at heart. Cunningham just looked at her oddly. Then he nodded and let out a breath. It took a few seconds before she registered his expression. She thought back to yesterday, when she’d wondered if Anne had been strangled. Sadie clenched her eyes shut, but that just put the imagined scene in her head. She forced them open. “She was murdered with my tieback?”

  “Your tieback?” Madsen repeated, leaning forward slightly, pen poised above his paper.

  Detective Cunningham glowered at the other man before looking at her again. “We’re not sure,” he said. “But there are other considerations we need to understand. Did you see Anne on Monday?”

  “I watched Trevor while she was working,” Sadie said.

  “And she was okay? Uninjured?”

  “Uninjured?” Sadie repeated. “What do you mean?”

  Cunningham continued to stare at her. “Her body showed signs of trauma, a bad fall maybe, or someone having been violent with her.”

  “Don’t tell her that!” Madsen spat, shaking his head and turning away from them as if trying to get control of himself. He put his hands on his hips, and the sides of his suit jacket fanned out like wings. He let out a deep breath. Both Cunningham and Sadie ignored him completely.

  “No,” Sadie said slowly, picturing Anne’s body in the field again. Twisted and contorted. “She was fine when I saw her. She borrowed a lemon. . . . I guess for the lemon tart she made that night. She’d forgotten to pick one up from the produce section after work.” She wondered again what that tart was for. “Lemon zest makes all the difference.”

  Madsen turned back toward them and they all went quiet as Sadie swallowed and looked at her hands. “You said there was a confession,” she continued, steeling herself to hear it. Please let it be Ron, she said to herself.

  “Yes,” Detective Cunningham said. “I’m very sorry. The man who confessed to the murder of Anne Lemmon is Jack Wright.”

  Sadie remained frozen and tested out the words in her mind. “The man who confessed to the murder of Anne Lemmon is Jack Wright.”

  Nope, it didn’t take.

  There wasn’t one part of her that could even consider such a thing. Madsen’s eyes were dancing, as if he loved every minute of this. She refused to look at him anymore.

  “It can’t be Jack,” she said resolutely with a sharp shaking of her head to emphasize the implausibility. “It’s just not possible.”

  “Why not?” Detective Cunningham asked, leaning forward and seemingly genuine in his interest.

  “Because . . .” She stopped. “Because I love him and trust him and he just wouldn’t do this!” It sounded naïve and brimming with nepotism, but it was true. Jack couldn’t have killed Anne.

  Detective Madsen rolled his eyes. “Oh, please,” he said in a long-drawn-out grunting voice. “This is so ridiculous!” He turned to look at his partner. “Get her out of here, we’re finished with her anyway.”

  Cunningham slowly met his partner’s gaze. “We’re not finished.”

  Madsen groaned again. “Well, do what you want. I’m going to file the paperwork on this thing.” He stomped to the door—really, he stomped like a child—and left the room.

  Detective Cunningham made no reaction to his partner’s tantrum, but his face seemed to relax just a little bit once he’d left. He leaned back in his chair. “Mr. Wright confessed, Mrs. Hoffmiller. There isn’t much argument in that.” But his voice wasn’t hard and militant as it had been last night. In fact, Sadie sensed a kind of challenge behind his words.

  “Let me talk to him,” she said with a crisp nod. “I’ll get the truth from him. He didn’t do this.”

  There was a tapping on the glass to their left. Sadie looked toward it and saw Madsen and another man gesturing to Cunningham.

  “Just a minute,” Cunningham said as he stood up and left the room. Once alone she put her fingers to her temples. Think, she told herself. There had to be a way to prove Jack didn’t do this. There had to be something she could do.

  Larue! She fumbled in her coat pocket for her cell phone and was almost surprised to find it, but although the police had taken her purse they hadn’t searched her before leading her into this room. She quickly dialed directory assistance. She usually called a free service since she was charged seventy-five cents for every directory assistance call, but the free service was full of ads and she didn’t have time to be frugal.

  “I need the Garrison office of Riggs and Barker.”

  They transferred her and she asked for Larue Adams.

  “Larue,” she breathed, grateful that though their acquaintance was limited, she had made it a point to get to know Jack’s receptionist. “I need to ask you a few questions about the convention this week—questions about Jack.”

  “What for?” Larue asked, trying to laugh it off.

  “Something . . . horrible happened Monday night and I need to know if you know anything about where Jack was that night.”

  Detective Cunningham came in and scowled at her. She held up one finger and listened, asked a few more questions, and then nodded. “Thank you, Larue, now I need you to tell that exact same information to Detective Cunningham. Here he is.”

  It only took a minute for Detective Cunningham to learn what Sadie had just found out. He finished by asking Larue to come into the office and make an official statement. Then he hung up the phone and handed it back to Sadie.

  “You can’t stay out of this, can you?” he nearly growled.

  She ignored his question. “Jack couldn’t have done this, and she just verified it.”

  Detective Cunningham shook his head. “He confessed.”

  “Then why were you asking me so many questions about how Anne looked, and what the tieback was like? Surely a confession would make all those points moot. Please let me talk to him. I can get the truth out of him, I swear it.”

  He clamped his lips together, telling her without any words that he wasn’t as convinced by the confession as he wanted her to believe. He held her eyes for a long time but she refused to blink. Finally he stood up. “I’ll be back.”

  More waiting. She wished she’d had her purse and the book hiding in it, but then she looked at the giant window on the wall and realized she wouldn’t want anyone to see her reading it. The waiting, however, was horrendous.

  Finally Cunningham entered the room.

  “Did you get permission for me to talk to him?” she asked, standing up, her nerves making her completely on edge.

  “Yes,” Cunningham said, leading her out of the room. “But we’ll be watching and listening to everything. He’s being brought up right now, and he’s been told that it’s all being recorded. Only his legal counsel gets to talk to him privately.”

  Sadie thanked Cunningham before following him further down the hall. They stopped in front of a very ugly door. It’d had at least two shades of gray paint slapped on it sometime in the last forty years. It looked awful. She turned to look at the detective.

  “I owe you an apology,” she said nervously. She licked her lips though her whole mouth had suddenly gone dry as she imagined Jack on the other side of that door. Why was he doing this?

  “You already apologized for e-mailing the Boston office and poking your nose in too many places.”

  She shook her head. “That was for what you knew I’d found.” She swallowed and forced herself to hold his eyes. “There’s more.�
� It came out as more of a squeak. “And when I’m in there I might say stuff that gives it away so I want you to know first of all, that I’m really sorry—I really, really am. And that I’ll explain everything when I get out. Okay?”

  His face was hard and she had no doubt he wanted to bop her on the head for doing this to him. Finally, he nodded. A female officer stepped forward and told Sadie to remove her coat and put her arms out.

  “Why?” Sadie asked though she did as requested, her coat hanging from one hand.

  “You’re meeting with a confessed murderer,” Cunningham said, taking the coat. “We need to make sure you’re not giving him anything.”

  She held her arms out. “What, like a weapon? You think I’m . . . packing?”

  The left side of Cunningham’s mouth pulled up in a grin, and Sadie flinched as the woman patted her in places that made Sadie blush. She felt horribly violated, even more so to go through this with Cunningham watching, but she told herself it was the woman’s job and that not everyone who came into a police station was the kind of upstanding citizen Sadie was.

  The woman finished and stepped back. “She’s clean,” she told Cunningham and headed back down the hallway. For a moment Sadie thought the woman meant she had showered, then realized it meant she didn’t have any switchblades hiding in the waistband of her underwear.

  “Okay,” Cunningham said, nodding toward the door. “You can go in.”

  Chapter 26

  Sadie straightened her shirt and turned back to the badly painted door. She wondered why people didn’t pay more attention to details and just repaint the thing all one color—surely she wasn’t the only person who’d noticed.

  Once inside the room, however, all thoughts of paint and other people’s attention to detail were forgotten. Jack sat at the table in the center of the cinder-block room, dressed in what looked like bright green hospital scrubs. His hands were cuffed in front of him and he stared at the top of the Formica-covered table. The office she’d been questioned in was imposing, but this room was downright dreary. Sadie let the door shut behind her and tried to repress a shiver. It was cold in here and she wished Detective Cunningham hadn’t taken her coat away.