Holly and Homicide

by Leslie Caine

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks.” We rushed into the kitchen. I raced toward a woman wearing a caterer’s uniform—black slacks and a white Oxford shirt—standing at the double sink. She was rinsing out a pair of glasses and slipping them into hot, soapy water. “Damn it all,” I grumbled.

  “Is there a problem?” the woman asked.

  “Did you pour out a full glass of eggnog just now?”

  “I …think so. Why?”

  “Let me see if the sink smells funny.”

  “Excuse me?” she asked, although she stepped aside.

  The water was on full force and there were no traces of the creamy dregs of my drink in the rinsing half of the double sink. I shut off the water. No odor.

  I reached into the scalding-hot sink, grabbed a glass, and lifted it to my nose. “Damn! It just smells like dishwashing liquid!”

  “Are you with the department of health or something?” the woman asked.

  Ignoring the question, I asked: “When you were handling leftover glasses of eggnog, did you smell almonds?”

  “No. Why?”

  “It’s too late, then. It doesn’t matter. Thanks anyway.”

  Steve was speaking in low tones to Audrey, who must have followed us into the kitchen. She shook her head sadly at me.

  I walked over to them. “I don’t know what to do.” I looked at Steve. “Should we stop the party? Tell everyone they need to get tested, in case anyone else’s glass was poisoned?”

  “Maybe we should,” he replied.

  “Are you absolutely certain your drink was poisoned, Erin?” Audrey asked.

  “It smelled wrong … like bitter almonds. But I suppose I’m only ninety-nine percent sure.”

  Audrey drummed her fingers against her upper arm. “There’s nothing wrong with the batch that’s in the punch bowl. I was drinking some just now. Let’s end the party now, without spreading panic. If we let everyone know they might have been poisoned, that’s going to put a swift end to our hopes of opening a bed-and-breakfast here anytime within this decade.”

  “More importantly,” I said, “I think there’s zero chance that anyone was spiking more than my glass alone with poison. Let’s face it—for whatever reason, I always seem to be a prime target for murder attempts.” I mentally ran through a list of suspects who could have killed Angie and perhaps believed that I’d unknowingly seen something from my rooftop perch that evening—Mikara, Ben, Wendell, Chiffon, or Henry.

  Audrey glanced at the clock on the stove, and I followed suit. It was eight twenty-two. Originally we weren’t going to wind things down till ten. “I’m going to have the waitstaff put away all the unserved munchies and beverages,” she said, “starting with the eggnog. Then I’ll get everyone to leave the house. Nicely, of course.”

  “How are you going to manage that feat?” Steve asked.

  “Easy.” She grabbed the phone and started dialing. “I’ll announce that my TV show is about to arrive to film a segment on snow sculptures. And I’ll get a crew out here immediately by chipping in a hundred-dollar bonus for each of them. Then we’ll have the partyers wave at the cameras from behind their creations. And once everyone’s outside and the filming’s complete, we’ll thank all our guests for coming.”

  Over the phone, Audrey told her producer that this was “a personal emergency,” and she needed a cameraman and van within fifteen minutes. She explained that “someone may or may not have slipped poison into a friend’s drink,” so she needed to get the police out here—without causing our guests to panic.

  Once she hung up, Steve said, “That’s an ingenious plan, Audrey.”

  “Thanks.” She patted his arm. “Having a camera crew at the ready is one of the fringe benefits of my job. I just wish I’d had my own show when my sons were teenagers. You can get all sorts of speedy results by promising to produce a television camera.”

  “Let’s go do our civic duty,” Steve said to me, “and make sure Mackey doesn’t manage to ruin everything and get himself on TV.”

  While Audrey made her announcement, Steve and I grabbed our coats, slipped out the back door, and drove to the sheriff’s station at the jail. The tiny boxlike structure had been built according to recent stringent town ordinances, which required wooden siding painted from a range of light hues and using two complementary colors for the trim. The effect was more like an ice-cream shop than town jail, inside and out. A long counter delineated the front room. Behind the counter, Sheriff Mackey and the sad-sack deputy who seemed to serve as his driver sat behind fake-wood Formica desks, separated by a partition that was arranged so that Mackey had twice the area as the deputy did.

  “Aw, jeez,” Mackey said in the deputy’s direction as we entered. “It’s the decorators.” He sneered at us. “You got some more info for us? ’Cuz otherwise we’re closed. We already got the state investigators riding our asses and have enough on our hands.” The deputy, meanwhile, stared at us blankly.

  “Can you give us that number?” I asked Mackey. “We’d be happy to talk directly to them.”

  “That depends,” he replied, smoothing his greasy hair back against his scalp, looking and sounding more than ever like Jack Nicholson. “Are you here to confess?”

  “Someone tried to poison Erin tonight,” Steve said.

  The deputy maintained his blank stare, but Mackey regarded me with an increasingly haughty expression. “Come on in and tell me all about it.”

  Sullivan opened the half-door in the counter and held it for me. Mackey gestured at one of the two molded plastic chairs in front of his desk. I took a seat, and Sullivan sat down beside me.

  Mackey stared at me for a long moment. “You look all right to me. How close did this poisoner come to succeeding, Miss Gilbert?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that. We were hosting an open house at the inn for the neighborhood. I had to desert my glass of eggnog for several minutes, and when I returned to it, there was a strange odor … bitter almonds.”

  “This was eggnog, you say?” Mackey asked.

  “It was cranberry eggnog, to be precise,” I replied.

  “Cranberries? Mixed with yellow eggs? Eww. Doesn’t that make it orange?”

  “No, slightly pink, but that’s really beside the point.”

  “So do you still use the, uh …” He glanced toward the top of the partition. “Hey, Penderson? What’s that brown seasoning stuff they put on top of eggnog?”

  “Nutmeg,” the three of us answered in unison.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Maybe they ran out of nutmeg in your kitchen, and someone threw in some ground-up almonds instead. Hey, Penderson? Do you know if nutmeg is made from powdered nuts?”

  “Doubt it. I don’t think ‘meg’ means powdered, or else they’d call it gun-meg and dusting-meg. I bet nutmeg is a weed of some kind.”

  I concentrated on tapping my toe in an attempt to keep from losing my patience. “I’d been drinking from that same glass of eggnog till I was pulled away. It smelled fine until I picked up my glass a second time.”

  “Someone slipped poison into Erin’s cup when nobody was looking,” Steve said firmly. “There were fifty or sixty adults at the party, and it could have been any one of them.”

  “Did your eggnog taste like almonds, too?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t actually drink any, because I know that cyanide smells like bitter almonds.”

  “So, where’s the glass? You did bring it, didn’t you?”

  I shook my head. “One of the caterers at the party must have picked it up.”

  “Or,” Sullivan added, “whoever tried to poison her grabbed it when she ran to the bathroom, and he or she realized the murder attempt had failed.”

  “I got an upset stomach,” I explained, “when I realized I almost drank poison.”

  “You puked, eh?” Mackey said with a grin. “You must’ve been the life of the party.”

  “All I cared about at the time was not to die at the party,” I retorted.

 
; Mackey rocked back in his chair, looking contemptuously at us both. “This story strikes me as far-fetched. Poisoning somebody at a party? Running off with the glass? Sounds to me like you just got yourself an overripe cranberry or a rotten egg.”

  “No, Sheriff, my drink smelled specifically like bitter almonds! Not rotten eggs. Or stale cranberries.”

  “Did any of your guests who were also drinking eggnog start puking their guts out? Or suddenly start to get spooked about being poisoned?”

  The phone rang.

  “Penderson? You got that?”

  “We’re not suggesting that the entire punch bowl was laced,” Sullivan replied, his voice far more patient than mine. “Erin’s glass was poisoned.”

  “And why’s that? Have the two of you been trying to spread that gingerbread décor from—”

  “Sheriff?” Penderson interrupted. “It’s Wendell Barton on the line for you again.”

  The sheriff winced. “Tell him I’m busy,” he said with false bravado.

  “He says it can’t wait.”

  Mackey snorted, his cheeks turning red. “Speaking of the devil, was Wendell Fat Cat Barton at the party tonight?”

  My warning flags rose. Mackey was at Wendell’s beck and call. The sheriff was now trying to cover for himself by acting like a big shot and bad-mouthing Wendell.

  “Barton left the party early,” Sullivan replied.

  Sullivan’s remark jogged my memory. “He walked through the room right when I was arguing with the mom of the kids who’d broken the curtain rod.” Steve and Mackey both looked puzzled, and I explained. “Wendell was nearby just when I’d deserted my glass, and immediately before it smelled like poison.”

  “Huh. So Barton might have done it.” Mackey gave a rueful shake of his head, then picked up the phone and said, “Yeah?” by way of a greeting. My thoughts raced. His gruffness felt like an act; I suspected that he and Wendell Barton had much more cordial a relationship than the sheriff wanted to let on. Sheriff Mackey wasn’t inept; he was corrupt!

  Steve and I exchanged glances, and I knew he’d picked up on the same thing. Mackey followed up his greeting with a series of “yeahs” and “nos.” He then looked at me and said into the phone, “I’m going to nab Angie Woolf’s killer. No matter what it takes. I’m taking this personally.” He continued to hold my gaze, his own eyes blazing with intensity. “Nobody comes into my town and acts above the law.” He slammed the phone down in a childish fit of pique and shifted his eyes toward Steve. “Barton thinks he’s an important man. His money may give him special privileges at the spa, but not here. Not as long as I’m town sheriff.”

  Was it just a coincidence that Wendell was calling the sheriff, right after I’d nearly been poisoned? Could he be planting the idea that I, having killed Angie, had made up the story about poison in order to divert suspicion from himself?

  My mouth felt dry as my imagination started to run away with me. If the sheriff was in Wendell Barton’s pocket, and Wendell was, in fact, guilty, not only would Angie’s killer never be brought to justice, but an innocent person would very likely be framed for Angie Woolf’s murder: me.

  Chapter 13

  Sheriff Mackey leaned his elbows on his desk and shifted his gaze from me to Steve and back. “Now. Where were we? We got no eggnog to test for toxins, no glass for fingerprints, and fifty or so suspects. Right?”

  And a chief investigator who’s on the take. I nodded, my feelings of helplessness only deepening.

  “Any witnesses? Did your fellow partyers see anyone handling your glass?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Penderson?” Mackey called over the partition. “Looks like we’re in for even more overtime. We gotta go to a party at the mayor’s mansion and ask if anyone saw anyone carrying around little bottles with a skull and cross-bones on ’em.”

  “Everybody will have left by now,” I said. “The party ended a few minutes ago.”

  Mackey rolled his eyes. “That’s gonna make this even harder to investigate. You got a list of the invites?”

  “There weren’t any invitations,” Steve explained. “It was a come one, come all type of thing for the neighbors.”

  “This gets better and better, Penderson,” Mackey called out again. “We’ll be doing a door-to-door.”

  Door-to-door questioning by the police would be a disaster for the inn’s reputation, and, if anything, would amp up the killer’s sense of urgency. I had to put a stop to this right now. “Never mind,” I said, rising. “I’m withdrawing my complaint. Or my claim. Whatever.” In the corner of my vision, I saw Sullivan’s eyes widen in surprise. “You can’t possibly catch whoever did it at this point, and it’s just not worth the effort.”

  “You sure?” Mackey said. “I don’t want you claiming this office ignored an attempted murder.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Steve muttered, “Thanks,” and followed me out the door. We got into his van. He started the engine and pulled out of the space, neither of us saying a word. After a lengthy silence, he asked, “Why did you make such a hasty exit?”

  “Because I needed to think. If Mackey is Wendell’s lackey, and Wendell killed Angie and tried to poison me, I’m a sitting duck.”

  “But why would Wendell poison you?”

  “Maybe he thinks I know more than I do. We had a strange conversation earlier. He was pretty drunk. He made a remark about the Woolf sisters … my being approximately their height. Maybe he panicked afterward and thought he incriminated himself somehow. Or maybe somebody made a comment at the party that led him to believe I’d seen something when I was hanging Christmas lights on the roof.”

  Sullivan said nothing for a minute or two. “You should head back to Crestview, Erin. Let me finish up at the inn by myself.”

  “No. If I am being set up, that’s only going to make me look guilty. And it’s not as if Sheriff Mackey is ever going to find the real killer.”

  “Isn’t it more important that the killer doesn’t succeed in making you the second victim, Erin?”

  “Of course. But if Wendell Barton’s the killer, I’m no longer in his crosshairs. Because I’ve just inadvertently turned myself into his perfect patsy. It now seems I made up a story about a poisoning so that I can look like I escaped the killer’s clutches myself … when, all the while, I killed Angie.”

  Although we were within a mile of the inn, Steve pulled over. He shut off the engine and turned toward me. “Erin. I know you’re not going to want to hear this, but you have to listen to me anyway.”

  With an introduction like that, I was steeling myself. I hoped if I waited long enough to answer, Steve would just say: On second thought, never mind. “What?”

  “Wendell calls Cameron his fix-it man. That’s a euphemism for the guy who does all the boss’s dirty work. That’s what I was trying to get at earlier at the party.”

  “You seriously believe that Wendell Barton is a Mafiastyle kingpin, and that Cameron Baker is his hired hit man? Because if so—”

  “No! I’m not implying that they’re underworld criminals! But they aren’t scrupulous businessmen, either. Those two are perfectly willing to cut corners, regardless of the law. You already said as much yourself … the sheriff is in Wendell’s pocket. I’m certain that Wendell bribes other officials, probably with Cameron as his go-between. And who’s to say where those two draw the line? Maybe they figure that Angie Woolf’s life was insignificant, compared with their financial goals for expanding the resort.”

  “You’re telling me you think it’s possible that my ex-boyfriend strangled Angie Woolf and slipped cyanide into my eggnog?” The charge was outrageous and insulting to me, and I couldn’t keep the anger from my voice.

  Steve sighed and raked his fingers through his light brown hair. He returned his hands to the steering wheel and sat and stared through the window for what felt like a full minute or two. “Yeah, Erin. That’s precisely what I think. I think Cameron handles the sleazy parts of Barton�
�s jobs and could have killed Angie over her stonewalling the inn’s remodel. And if you can’t at least acknowledge the possibility, you really are a sitting duck.”

  “But again, Sullivan, I was with Cameron the night of Angie’s murder!”

  “You were with him for a couple of hours. Before that, you were hanging lights on the roof! Your back would have been turned at least half the time, and the evergreens block the view to the footbridge where she was killed. I checked when I was helping Ben install Chiffon’s painted scallops.”

  “So you’re saying that Cameron strangled Angie, drove up to the inn immediately afterward, invited us to dinner, then chatted with me over our meal as if he hadn’t a care in the world. And that I never sensed anything was wrong. That simply is not possible! I know the man!”

  “If you knew him so well, why were you so shocked that he was here in Colorado?”

  “We’d lost touch years ago!”

  “Yet you’re certain he hasn’t turned monstrous in the meantime?”

  “Fine! I acknowledge that there’s a one-in-a-million chance that Cameron’s guilty. I appreciate the fact that you’re trying to protect me, and I’ll keep your suspicions about him in mind. Now let’s please drop the subject!”

  Sullivan and I might as well have slept in separate bedrooms that night, we took such care not to acknowledge each other, and I still hadn’t cooled off much the following morning. I couldn’t seem to get past the thought that Sullivan had so little faith in my ability to judge people’s character that he believed my ex not only was a murderer, but would actually make an attempt on my life. It was almost as absurd as suggesting that Audrey was guilty.

  Granted, I’d read statistics, and ex-lovers were prime suspects in homicides for very good reason. But we’d been separated for ten years and then had a coincidental reunion! Besides which, the entire notion of Cameron Baker as a murderer was insane! A ruthless businessman, yes. He was all about personal accumulation—wealth and all its trappings. We hadn’t been able to sustain our feelings for each other when he put an ocean between us by accepting a position in London after graduating from Columbia. But the more I thought about it, the more certain I was that an ocean had already been forming between us. Even if he’d stayed in New York and remained faithful to me, our relationship would never have lasted much longer than it did.