A Taste of Trickery (Japanese Tea Garden Mysteries Book 3)

by Blythe Baker

  Then, just when I thought my adventure was over, a miracle happened. The spider, sensing something moving that was a lot bigger than itself, decided to alter its course. Within seconds, it had scurried past my feet and disappeared into the shadows.

  Behind me, I felt the cart jiggle as the trespasser removed something from inside it. Then, following the spider’s lead, he too began moving in the opposite direction.

  I didn’t know I’d been holding my breath for so long until I let it out. My lungs tingled with the fresh air I quietly sucked in. My knees were throbbing when I finally lowered them to the ground so my thighs could rest. Cautiously, I crawled on my hands and knees around the hitch side of the cart. It had a gate that was open and dirt was spilling out of it. There had to be something in the soil that this person was collecting. Could there be gold or some kind of valuable stone or mineral? That seemed ridiculously far-fetched but what else could it be?

  With my hands filthy from edging across the ground, I reached up and took hold of the cart. When I pulled my head up to peer inside, I was sure I was seeing a trick of the light. It was pitch black outside. The only lights came from the tractor that was facing the opposite direction. I reached into my pocket where I had stashed my pen light and shined it into the back of the cart.

  What I saw was worse than the brown tarantula. It was worse than being caught by the trespasser. It was so bad, I screamed.

  21

  My first instinct was to get away as quickly as possible. With legs that had transformed into weak rubbery appendages, I staggered backward into a tree. Thank goodness it was there or I was afraid I would have fainted. But before I could collect myself I realized I’d just made my presence known.

  “You!” The voice was low like tires across a gravel surface. In that one angry cry, the trespasser ceased being a shadow or specter and became Mr. Seeton. There was no time to be startled at his identity.

  I pointed to the open cart.

  “There’s a dead body in there,” I gasped. “What have you done?”

  “Shut up!” He scowled. “You should have tumbled off that bell tower!” He took a step closer to me. I watched his left hand clench while the right held tightly to his shovel. “I thought you’d be in the hospital a lot longer. At least long enough to let me work in peace!”

  “Work? What the heck kind of job is this?” I swallowed hard. I hadn’t brought any weapons with me. No gun. No knife. No pepper spray. Nothing.

  “Just a little digging, Maddie. I needed to retrieve something that was mine.” He stepped closer, the lights of the tractor stretching in a diagonal direction behind him. I could see his profile and he was no longer the innocent, eccentric bird-watcher I’d seen so often on my grounds. He had morphed into a desperate animal that was cornered.

  “You say this is yours? No kidding! It sure isn’t mine!” I looked at the corpse in the back of the cart. “You can’t hide this, Mr. Seeton. You can’t.”

  “But I can,” he growled at me. “I did. It was lovely. This piece of worm food didn’t deserve any better.”

  “Of course they did,” I insisted while I tried to think of how to get out of the mess I was in. “Who appointed you judge, jury and executioner? And you used my land to cover it up. You’ve involved me in this, Mr. Seeton.”

  “If you’d just done as I asked.”

  “Done what? Fall off the Mission bell tower?”

  “I told you to leave.” He took the shovel in both hands. He planted his feet about three yards from me. “If you would have just stayed out of the garden I could have taken what was mine and been long on my way.”

  “Taken it? Where?”

  “Anywhere.” He grinned. “You see, Maddie. I was ready to transplant my little seedling there to a nice, pristine piece of land. That was why it ended up here to begin with. The old woman who used to own this garden wasn’t keeping it up very well. There was no reason to think anyone would look in this far corner. But you did. You took over and started digging. People with their dogs started pulling up things from the past. Things that deserved to stay buried.”

  My mind emptied. Thoughts were racing through it so fast it offered me nothing but a blank screen. Should I run? Should I fight? Should I scream? Did I even have a chance of getting away?

  To stall, I tried to keep Mr. Seeton talking. “The severed hand that dog found belonged to this man?”

  “If you want to call him a man. I’d call him a disgrace. A liar and a cheat. Worthless from the word go.” Mr. Seeton started to sway a little. His eyes glazed over as he began to describe the situation that brought him and this person together.

  “Have you ever decided you’d had enough, Maddie?” he asked.

  I didn’t know if I should answer or not. The bark of the tree at my back was pushing through my shirt as I tried to get an inch, a millimeter further away from Mr. Seeton. He had looked unhinged when he had first pulled back his hood. But he looked downright frenzied now.

  “It’s a truly liberating feeling when you’ve decided that you just aren’t going to take anymore guff from anyone. You see my brother, he was a taker.”

  “That’s your brother?” The words croaked out my dry throat.

  “Please don’t give him sympathy. He doesn’t deserve any.”

  “What could he have done, Mr. Seeton, that was so bad? What did he do that he deserved to be left like this?” I pointed to the heap in the back of the cart.

  The parts of the body were hard to tell from the mounds of dirt. But I could see it. The skull was unmistakable as it stared out from muddied sockets, the jaw open in a permanent cry. But the shoulders were awkwardly positioned, jutting out at unnatural angles, indicating the spine had been bent or even broken at some time. There were two arms but one side was missing the hand. The skin had been devoured a long time ago by maggots and other tiny parasites, leaving behind only dried sinewy strands of muscle. The boney fingers of the remaining hand hung over the dirt that most of the body and bones were still encased in.

  “What did he do? Ha! What didn’t he do should be your question.” Mr. Seeton threw the shovel down at his feet. “Let’s see. He was a violent alcoholic for starters, as well as a thief. He once took my own gun, aimed it at me, and pulled the trigger. I guess it was just blind luck I had taken the bullets out of it when I first found out he was sneaking into my house. The only time I got any peace was when he was locked up. He’d sober up behind bars. At least, that’s what he said that last time he was in the joint for domestic abuse. Got himself sixty days in County. Wouldn’t you know, the woman he beat showed up once a week, every visitor’s day? Isn’t that sweet?”

  “Mr. Seeton, I’m sure it was difficult but you…”

  “You’re sure it was difficult? Are you now? That’s mighty big of you. But you see, if I hadn’t killed my brother, he surely would have killed me. Even after I gave him a place to live for a while. Before he nearly wrecked the place. I gave him money but it was always wasted. Then, when I told him no more, he put me in the hospital. When I was released, I went and got a gun.”

  All the while I listened to his story, my mind raced, trying to find a way out of my predicament. A man who could kill his own brother would have no problem doing me in. That was especially obvious after his having tried twice before to kill me at the Mission and at the market.

  Mr. Seeton continued on. “But the problem with using a gun that’s been registered to you is that it’s distinct. Even the bullets fired from it have unique striations—and that’s assuming you remember to wipe away your fingerprints while loading them, something easily forgotten in the heat of the moment.” He chuckled.

  Courage was desperately trying to bubble up inside me and force me into some kind of action. I wanted to bolt into the darkness. I wanted to get back to the house where my phone was, where Mamma Jackie was. Where there were lights and doors with locks on them. But I was petrified. Mr. Seeton was losing his footing. Soon he’d tumble into that insanity that had caused him t
o shoot his brother. Except it wasn’t his brother but me he’d be putting a bullet in.

  “Mr. Seeton, let me help you.” I tried to sound sincere but my voice sounded more frightened than anything else. There was no disguising it. “You don’t need to shoot me.”

  “That’s good because I wasn’t going to shoot you. Haven’t you been listening? I don’t like shooting. The unique bullets lodged in my brother’s chest would have brought the police right to my front door, if I hadn’t found him first and dug him up to move him to a safer place. Funny how hard it is, after some years, to remember exactly where you’ve buried a body. It took me lots of nights digging to find the exact spot again.” He shook his head, as if shaking aside the thought, and continued. “If that dog hadn’t dug up the hand and started the police search for the rest of the corpse, we wouldn’t be here. But you disturbed my brother’s final resting place. This is your fault. So, you need to disappear too.”

  He reached into his hoodie pocket and pulled out a knife. In the light from the tractor headlights I saw the serrated edges that looked like the jagged, razor sharp points of shark’s teeth.

  “Don’t worry, Maddie. I’ve got a piece of land already picked out for both you and my brother. You won’t have many visitors. That’s just how it has to be.”

  “It doesn’t have to be…”

  “Yes it does!” he screamed, suddenly losing his temper. His body began to shake with rage. “For some reason, I get the feeling you think I don’t really want to do this. Do you think it’s hard for me to kill you? You are a nosy, annoying, patronizing person who doesn’t deserve to have people know where you’ve gone!”

  My eyes widened. A fresh wave of sweat spread over my body and the slight breeze sent a chill over my skin, making it rise in goose bumps.

  He continued, “I just needed a few more days to find where I’d buried my brother but you wouldn’t stop snooping around! I hate you for this! I hate you for getting in my way and for making me dig two graves this time instead of one!”

  I swallowed but said nothing.

  “I gave you so many chances,” he went on. “I rigged the pagoda and the tree branch. I even faked my own injury to make it look like someone from the outside had it in for you. You fell for that completely. I saw the inspectors you summoned. I followed them. It got a little nerve-wracking when they searched this particular area. Thank goodness they were typical city workers not willing to do much beyond the bare minimum. Later, the big brute with the old lady ran around snapping pictures. I could have killed both of them with a blow to the back of their heads from my shovel. But he would have been very hard to drag out of sight.”

  I hated how he was talking about Drake and Mamma Jackie, like they were nothing but expendable bags of bones. Trash to be buried and forgotten about.

  “Well, I’ve wasted enough time. You should take one last look around, Maddie. At least you have beautiful surroundings to close your eyes to. My brother didn’t have that luxury.”

  Mr. Seeton took a step toward me.

  As I saw my death approaching, it was as if adrenaline and rocket fuel had suddenly been pumped into my veins. Without thinking, I bolted for the opposite side of the cart and took off running.

  Behind me, I could hear Mr. Seeton following clumsily in the darkness. He might have been getting closer but then a thud and a groan told me he’d tripped over a root or maybe one of the stones jutting out from the path.

  I knew my own tea garden better than Mr. Seeton did. Even in the dark I had a good memory of where the trees and shrubs were positioned. For a brief while, my legs were stretching, my feet landing firmly where I knew the ground would be level. But then I was slowed down by the sudden appearance of fallen logs and brambles.

  In my panic, I had run away from the smooth paths of the garden, leaving the manicured lawn, and bolting into the unfamiliar, overgrown area stretching toward my house. Somewhere, I knew there was an old path around here, a shortcut leading behind the street and straight to my backyard. Only that patch of ground had been so long abandoned that it was wild and choked with weeds and brush. I searched blindly, losing precious seconds, until I stumbled onto a row of old paving stones leading the way. Following the uneven stones, I sped onward, toward home. My lungs soon felt scorched as I gasped for air.

  In the distance, I could see the glow of the house lights up ahead. My backyard came into view. I was almost there when the branch of a towering tree appeared out of nowhere, clotheslining me. My feet flew out from underneath me. The back of my head contacted the grassy ground with a thud. Looking up, I saw stars exploding in front of my eyes.

  The cool grass was tickling the back of my neck. When the sparks cleared and my vision came back I saw the tree branches reaching up into the starry sky and the silhouette of Mr. Seeton towering over me.

  “Time’s up, Maddie Morgan,” he said.

  Screaming came easier than I thought it would. The strong sound of my own voice gave me courage. I began to kick and scratch and swat at anything I thought was his hand descending with the knife. I felt it slice across my arm once but I couldn’t stop for the pain. Any hesitation, any second that he could get a hold of me could be the end.

  “Mr. Seeton! You don’t have to do this!” I screamed his name as loud as I could. “Mr. Seeton! Please! Mr. Seeton, stop!”

  I twisted and tried to scoot out of the path of his knife but one second was all it took. One second and he had me by the collar of my shirt.

  That was when I heard the other voice.

  “I said let her go! Seeton! Let Maddie go or I’ll shoot! Do you hear me? I will shoot you!”

  My heart leapt at the familiar sound of Michael’s voice, but I was in no position to look around for him. Every muscle inside me was wound tight when I felt Mr. Seeton’s grip on me loosen. He was distracted.

  I pulled a leg back and swung it outward with all my might until it contacted his shin. The kick was so hard I was sure I’d broken my toe.

  But it worked. Mr. Seeton dropped the knife, yowled in agony and loosened his grip enough for me to tear myself away and crawl to my feet. I staggered toward Michael, who stood nearby with his gun raised.

  “Seeton, it’s all over. Don’t make this any harder than it has to be,” Michael instructed.

  Mr. Seeton’s face was a maze of angry creases and folds, exaggerated in the moonlight. His eyes stared at Michael while his tongue darted in and out of his mouth, licking dry lips.

  All around us, a cool breeze kicked up, fresh and chilly. As it washed over us, it seemed to take Mr. Seeton’s rage with it. His shoulders slumped and his legs went weak at his knees, causing him to stumble backward a few steps before he raised his hands and hung his head in surrender.

  Michael hadn’t come alone. Now the uniformed police who had ranged around in the shadows rushed Mr. Seeton. After taking him to the ground and kicking his legs far apart, they wrenched his arms behind his back and slapped cuffs on him.

  “Are you all right?” Michael stepped up to me.

  I had waded through the last of the weeds, crossed my backyard, and taken refuge on the back porch next to Mamma Jackie.

  “You’ve gone a little too far this time to get the attention of a man,” Mamma Jackie harrumphed at me before waddling back into the house.

  I looked at Michael with my mouth hanging open.

  “She’s right, you know,” he said.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “How did you even know to show up here? If you hadn’t arrived when you did I’d be sharing a dirt room with Mr. Seeton’s brother.”

  “What?” Michael looked confused.

  I explained the story that Mr. Seeton had told me, ending with, “You’ll find the brother, or what’s left of him, in a cart by the area being landscaped back in the garden.”

  Michael said, “I hate to say it but you should probably thank Mamma Jackie for my showing up here.”

  “Thank Mamma Jackie?” I pulled my head back like I’d just smelled a skunk
.

  “She called me. She said you’d left a message on my voicemail earlier this evening and how dare I not call you back. I tried to explain I’d been busy. The threatening note slipped into your purse reminded me of a cold case from when I first joined the force here in Little River. Now, it makes perfect sense.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “The cold case involved a man named Everett Seeton. He had been a thief and junkie, with some domestic abuse thrown in for good measure. He disappeared. It wasn’t really looked at because junkies disappear all the time.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “It is. But, we’d found a couple of threatening notes in the motel where he’d last been seen. They had no prints on them. No names other than Everett’s. So we knew that he knew the person. But it all dried up from there. Until you were attacked all these years later and I recognized the type of writing used in those old notes was the same writing used again in the threat against you.”

  “So it was just a lucky break that I got that threat against my life?”

  “It was. Now, we’ve got two mysteries solved.”

  “Wow.” I put my hands on my hips. “I think you’re right.”

  “About what?”

  “That we do make a pretty good team.”

  Michael slipped his arm around my waist and pulled me closer.

  “I’ve been saying that for some time. You’re finally ready to listen?”

  “I guess.” I cozied up to him.

  “Well, I think we’ll need to have a talk about all these close calls you keep having. We might have to scale your investigative work back.”

  “I can’t help it if crazies find me attractive. Of course, I don’t know what that says about you.” I elbowed him playfully in the ribs.

  “I mean it.” Michael turned me to face him. “If you’re going to insist on keeping up your snooping habit, just do me one favor. Tell me first. Give a guy a little advance warning.”

  I laughed, but it was a promise I was pretty sure I could keep.