Cooking Spirits: An Angie Amalfi Mystery (Angie Amalfi Mysteries)

by Joanne Pence

Kellie raised her eyebrows a moment. “I know just the veil that will go perfectly with that dress. And I’ve got a small comb of fake diamonds to give you an idea of how it’ll look.” She dashed off to the back room.

  “She’ll need a diamond necklace with the dress,” Bianca said. “I have one she can borrow.”

  “And I’ll get her a blue garter,” Frannie said with a wink.

  Kellie came out with the veil and put it on Angie.

  “I’ll have to pin my hair back,” Angie said.

  “Of course,” Cat replied. “The crowning glory, literally.”

  Angie had to agree. The dress was both demure because of its traditional lines, yet cut low enough, with material that clung close enough, to be sexy.

  “It works. How much does the dress cost?” she asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” Serefina said. “But Papà will be sure he paid for a quality dress for you.”

  Angie twisted and turned, tried walking, danced around the room by herself…everything was perfect. She loved everything about it, and couldn’t remember ever seeing a dress so beautiful. “I love it. I want it!”

  Cat looked at Kellie. “Sold. Also, my sister will need wedding shoes—four inch heels, platform soles, and why don’t we have them custom made? I think white satin with lace hand embroidery would be excellent.”

  “Of course,” Kellie said with a swallow. “I’ll fit Angie for the shoes now.”

  “They’ll be ready on time?”

  “It should be no problem at all!” Kellie said.

  “You’re making this too easy,” Angie said.

  “It’s hardly rocket science,” Cat said.

  The shoe fitting complete, Cat told Kellie all the sisters would be back in a few days to pick out the bridesmaids dresses.

  Kellie struggled to find a smile and could only produce a sickly, “How wonderful.”

  Even Angie felt a bit sorry for her, knowing what the woman was going to have to deal with.

  As they all stepped out of the store, Cat looked at Angie. “I have no idea why you were fussing so much about finding a dress. It was simple. You’re such a drama queen, Angie!”

  o0o

  Finding the right wedding dress filled Angie with renewed energy and joie de vivre. She and her mother and sisters went out to lunch to discuss bridesmaid’s dresses, and as Angie expected, each had a different opinion regarding color and style. Fun days ahead.

  After lunch, Angie went home. She knew she should look at wedding invitations and party favors, table decorations and so forth, but she didn’t feel like sitting.

  No matter what she told herself she “should” do, she only wanted to do one thing. Finally, she gave into temptation.

  She changed into a business-like gray Donna Karan suit with black Prada shoes and a black Gucci handbag. With them, she wore gold earrings, a necklace, and bracelet. She wanted to look like someone the administrator of Restful Gardens, where Carol Steed lived, would have no problem allowing inside to meet with a patient.

  The administrator was a friendly, older woman. Angie stood straight, head high, and hoped the administrator would realize she wasn’t there to try to scam anyone and handed her the note from Enid Norbel.

  “I would gladly allow you to see Mrs. Steed,” the administrator said. “But she isn’t here at the moment. She’s on home leave. She stopped in at eight a.m. for her pills, and will be here again at eight p.m. But other than that, she’s home.”

  “She has that much freedom?” Angie asked.

  “As long as she checks in with us every twelve hours to take her meds, which keep her every bit as healthy as you and I, and has a home care nurse with her at night, there’s no reason not to allow her to go wherever she wants. This isn’t a prison. Our residents have their rights.”

  Angie drove straight to 60 Clover Lane.

  An elderly woman, tall, medium build, with short gray hair, opened the door and gave Angie a quick once-over. “I guess you Jehovah’s Witnesses are coming up in the world,” she said. “I’m an atheist.” She stepped back to swing the door shut.

  “Wait, please!” Angie put out her hand to stop the door. “This isn’t about religion, and I’m not selling anything! My name is Angelina Amalfi. Are you Carol Steed?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I spoke to your daughter, Enid, and she told me it would be all right to ask you about the house across the street.”

  Carol didn’t smile. Her face sagged and her eyes were piercing. “Why? It’s not for sale.”

  Uh oh, Angie thought. “I…I’ve heard some interesting things about it, that’s all.”

  Carol snorted. “I imagine you have. People tried to lock me up because of that house. They say I see things.” She moved closer and dropped her voice. “They say I see ghosts in it. If I were you, unless you want everyone saying you’re crazy the way they do me, forget you ever saw it.”

  The words were disturbing, but Angie reminded herself the woman was mentally ill. “I understand you once lived there. I’d like to talk to you about it if you have time.”

  “I don’t mind, but I didn’t live there for very long. Come on in.” She led Angie to the living room.

  The house was as tiny inside as it appeared from the street. The windows faced the ocean, providing a view that was the house’s best feature.

  As soon as they sat, Carol started talking again. “After Edward’s mother passed away, we moved into the house. Edward had some remodeling done. Made it nicer. More modern.”

  “But then Edward died?”

  Her mouth clamped shut a moment before she said, “Yes, he died.”

  “And you moved out of the house?”

  Carol scowled. “How did you—?”

  “Let’s talk about what happened back then,” Angie interrupted. “You rented it out, right?”

  She thought a moment, then smiled. “To Eric. He loved it very much, you see. Loved the view. He said it was worth a million dollars just for the view. But I wouldn’t sell it. No, sir!”

  “And then?” Angie asked, doing her best to keep her voice and her expression soft, gentle, and encouraging—a veritable Diane Sawyer handling a delicate interview. “Your baby was born, right?”

  Carol nodded. “Yes. Enid was born.”

  Angie drew in her breath. “What happened next?”

  Carol’s lips turned downward, and even after all these years, Angie saw the emotion the memories caused her. “Eric brought home a wife. He had to marry her, he said. She pressured him, you know. He was very sorry. He told me that.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “It was long ago.”

  “You didn’t like it that he brought another woman into your house, did you?”

  She shrugged. “It wasn’t my business. That’s what she told me—that his marriage wasn’t my business. The tart!”

  “I can imagine how you must have felt,” Angie said. “You must have hated her.”

  She watched the light go out of Carol Steed’s eyes, as if she were shutting down. She tried a new tact. “Can you tell me anything about the house?”

  “It’s a beautiful house. Eric lives there.” Then her eyes took on a crafty look, and she put her fingers up to her mouth. “Or…he did,” she whispered.

  “Things seem to move around strangely in that house. Did you ever see anything like that?”

  She stared at the floor. “Of course not.”

  Angie leaned close and practically whispered, “You can trust me, Mrs. Steed. I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  “No! I’ve never seen anything!”

  “But you used to tell people you saw ghosts.”

  “Me? Never!”

  “What do you remember about the Flemings?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you ever see any problem around them, see anyone threatening them, or anything like that?”

  Carol remained still, not answering or moving.

  Angie asked gently, “Did Edward ever
haunt the house?”

  “Edward? Did you say Edward? My husband?” Carol chortled. “He wouldn’t have the balls.”

  “Who do you think is haunting it?”

  Carol’s gaze turned cold and black, and Angie had the feeling the madness had lifted and all that remained was pure malice. “No one, of course. There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  “But if someone were to, who would it be?”

  “I suppose it would be Eric. He loved the house.”

  “Not his wife?”

  “Wife! She was no wife to him! She had no business being with him! She never understood or loved him.”

  “Didn’t they have a good marriage?”

  Carol cocked her head. “If they had, he wouldn’t have killed her, would he? She was a bitch in this life, I hate to think she’s still making him miserable in the afterlife.”

  “I believe I’ve seen things moving around in the house where they lived,” Angie said softly. “Haven’t you seen such things, too?”

  Carol’s gaze hardened, and her lips spread into a creepy grin. “Oh? And have you also seen a unicorn in the garden?”

  Angie decided it was time to leave. She considered leaving her phone number, but then a better thought struck. She reached into her purse, pulled out the small metal case that held her name and address cards—she had had them created for job interviews and still had a lot left. She handed it to Carol. “My business cards are inside if you’d like one. You can call me and we can talk.”

  Carol handed it back. “We’ve talked quite enough.”

  Angie dropped the case back into her purse. “Good-bye, Mrs. Steed.” With that, she hurried from the house, glad to get away.

  o0o

  Angie went straight to Homicide to see Paavo. She hadn’t wanted to involve him in ‘her’ murders, as she called them. But now, as far as she was concerned, she couldn’t keep it to herself any longer.

  “The murderer has to be Carol Steed, the owner of the Clover Lane house,” Angie said as soon as she sat down. She was glad to find Paavo still at work. “She had access, opportunity, and motive. Everyone who knew Eric back then said he was quite the charmer as well as being smart and rich. He had lots of women around him. One of them was Carol Steed! They had an affair and she got pregnant. She gave her daughter a picture of Eric and said he was her father.”

  “Hold on, Angie,” Paavo said. “I take it this is about Eric and Natalie Fleming?”

  “Of course it is!” she said. “The motive was the hard part, but now it all makes sense. Carol Steed got rid of her husband of fourteen years. Maybe it can never be proved that she killed him, but even news reports of the time wrote that bad luck caused his head to hit a rock in just the way to cause a fatal injury. I suspect Carol hit him in the head—maybe with a rock or a brick or a swing of a shovel. Then he either fell off the cliff or she pushed him off.”

  “Wait…” He regarded her with a frown. “You’re suggesting this Carol Steed actually killed three people?”

  “Yes! That’s what I’m trying to explain,” Angie cried. Yosh heard this and turned around to listen. “Then, after Carol Steed killed her husband, she moved Eric Fleming into her house, probably expecting to live there with him,” Angie said, summarizing the story. “But it never happened. Instead, Eric got married and stopped using drugs and drinking. That was bad enough, but I suspect Carol went completely over the edge when she learned that Eric and Natalie were moving to a house they were having built. Soon after that, they were both dead.”

  “So you’re saying Carol Steed killed them out of jealousy,” Paavo said.

  “I think she did.”

  Paavo nodded. It all fit together. “Once the murder-suicide idea started to be pushed, it became a domestic dispute, and a low priority since both parties were dead. I imagine money was tight, and other, more pressing cases probably took over for attention. But the detectives were bothered enough that they put the case in the cold files, even though they had no physical proof of a third party being involved.”

  “That’s what I suspect,” Angie said. “I also wonder if that was why Carol named her child Enid. People might have thought she named her in honor of Edward, but the name is just as close to Eric. Oh—I almost forgot!” She carefully lifted her business card case from her purse and put it on Paavo’s desk. “Carol’s fingerprints are on this case, along with mine, in case you need them.”

  “I’ll need a set of your prints before you leave,” Paavo said, “to make it easier on the crime lab.”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve turned into quite the investigator, Angie.” Paavo used his handkerchief to lift the case into an evidence bag. “The lab can run these prints against whatever they might have from the original crime scene. Sounds like it’s time to talk to Carol Steed. She’s old and mentally unstable, but if she’s also a murderer, she took away the lives of two young people who thought they had finally found happiness, and possibly her husband’s as well. It’s tragic.”

  “Yes,” Angie said, “my thoughts, exactly.”

  “But unless we get a confession from Carol it’s unlikely we’ll be able to arrest her, let alone have the DA prosecute. Even then, a good defense lawyer would make mincemeat of a confession from an elderly, diagnosed schizophrenic. Absent physical evidence, she’s home free.”

  “She’ll get away with triple murder,” Angie said in a grim voice. “Although, I think being mad is a terrible kind of punishment in itself.”

  Chapter 25

  AS PAAVO WENT back to investigating the Wyndom and Bedford murders, he also thought about Angie’s conviction that Carol Steed killed the Flemings out of jealousy. It was a plausible motive and a common one.

  What made his murder cases strange was that the lovers, Marilee and Taylor, weren’t the ones murdered. Instead, Gaia was a victim, which made no sense.

  Clearly, Marilee and Gaia didn’t like each other, but if every family member who didn’t get along with others killed them, the country would be awash in blood.

  Even if Marilee killed Gaia, he saw no reason for her to have killed Taylor. Marilee loved him. Gaia was the jealous one.

  And he didn’t believe two different murderers were involved.

  He flipped through the case’s files when something jumped out at him from Yosh’s interview with the bartender.

  He sat down at Yosh’s desk to discuss his thoughts with his partner. Yosh agreed with the premise, but so far it was pure conjecture. They had no proof.

  Before long, Yosh left for home. Paavo stayed to bring Angie’s business card case to the crime scene unit along with her set of fingerprints and the old case file from the Fleming murders. He explained to the crime scene technician that once he eliminated Angie’s prints, those remaining belonged to Carol Steed.

  The tech needed to see if Steed’s prints had been found at the Fleming crime scene.

  As he headed back to Homicide, he passed the forensics laboratory, which gave him an idea.

  Before doing anything, he called Ray Larson in Jenner. The old man had been pretty proud of his observation skills. Paavo put them to a test.

  Larson gave Paavo a quick answer.

  Paavo then turned his step toward the Medical Examiner’s office. Evelyn Ramirez was still at work. She seemed to put in even more hours on the job than he did.

  He asked Ramirez to pull samples of Gaia’s hair from hair brushes found in her house, and then samples of what had been determined to be Gaia’s hair from the freezer.

  The DNA of identical twins, like everything else about them, was essentially identical. Hair, however, was an exception. Hair was made from protein, metabolized amino acids from the foods eaten. As hair grew, it became a record of the amino acids that had been used in its creation.

  In that way, the protein in hair gave a history of the diet of the person whose hair was studied. Not only could foods from a marine vs. a terrestrial environment be identified, but also the kinds of terrestrial plants, complex
proteins and meats eaten could be determined.

  “I’m desperate, Evelyn,” he said. “I’d like a forensic hair analysis on follicles from both samples.”

  “Why?” Ramirez asked.

  “Gaia was a vegetarian. I’ve been told her sister was not.”

  Ramirez raised her eyebrows. “I see. It’s worth a try.”

  She agreed to get on it right away. She warned him that the analysis might take some time to complete.

  Back at his desk, Paavo leaned back in his chair, hands intertwined behind his head. Both Gaia Wyndom and Carol Steed were loners, intelligent, unhappy with their lives, and potentially mentally ill. People around them knew they needed help, but didn’t know how to give it to them without their consent. They hadn’t done anything illegal as far as others knew—even though some may have held the unspoken suspicion that Gaia had been behind her parents’ deaths, and Carol behind her husband’s.

  Because of their intelligence, they were able to come up with plans that allowed them to get away with murder…almost.

  Years ago, before his job took away most of his free time, Paavo had been a voracious reader. He thought now of the first line from Anna Karenina, which he read as a young man trying to understand families and women since he grew up pretty well isolated from both. It said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

  And those were both very unhappy families.

  o0o

  The next day, a little before noon, Paavo received the results of the analysis from Dr. Ramirez. She must have stayed up all night running the test. He owed her, big time.

  He and Yosh drove to Marilee’s cabin in Lagunitas.

  Marilee let them into the house and immediately began to scoop up the cats from the great room.

  “You don’t have to shut them away,” Paavo said. “Those are Gaia’s cats, aren’t they?”

  “No,” Marilee said.

  “Gaia loved her cats. Everyone said so. Her vet told us they were two little gray and white tuxedo cats, brothers, eight-years old. She wouldn’t have left them alone and unfed even if she had committed suicide. She never would have hurt them, and I can’t see her giving them away.”