Collared For Murder

by Annie Knox

  Rena snorted and I winced. It had to chafe just a bit that a gang of amateurs had beaten the police at their own game, not once but twice in the past year. Jack never mentioned our sleuthing in those terms, but I’d heard others make cracks about Merryville’s new homemaker homicide division.

  “You’ve gotten lucky,” Jack said.

  “Hey!” Rena, Dolly, and I protested in unison.

  The look on Jack’s face, the look of a man who’s just realized he’s the only man in a roomful of women, would have been comical if he hadn’t just dismissed the hard work I’d put into solving those crimes. He looked to the floor where Packer sat wiggling in anticipation of a savory morsel falling to the floor, apparently seeking some sort of solidarity. “I mean,” Jack backpedaled, “that you’ve gotten lucky that you haven’t been hurt. Besides, I understand why you were so motivated to snoop in Merryville’s last two murders, given Rena and Dolly’s involvement”—my friends and family had a terrible knack for looking like killers—“but Pris is hardly part of your inner circle.”

  “The man has a point,” Rena said. “Pass the pepper, please.”

  Echoes of Phillip Denford’s early-morning threats filled my ears. I didn’t realize I’d stopped breathing until my lizard brain took over, and I sucked in a gasp of air. Jack was wrong about my desire to get involved in this investigation. It wasn’t just about protecting Pris. I had a powerful reason for wanting to hunt for evidence of the real killer—whether that person turned out to be Pris or someone else—but I wasn’t prepared to share that reason with my cop boyfriend just yet.

  It felt like a betrayal. If we had a solid relationship, it had to be built on trust. I should trust Jack with the information I had about Denford’s unethical practices; it might actually help with his investigation. But it would also point a blazing orange arrow at my head, identifying me as a possible suspect. One of the very reasons I admired Jack so much was his sense of honesty and integrity. He would have to take the information to the rest of the police department. He might even have to recuse himself from the investigation. Trusting Jack with my story meant trusting the entire Merryville Police Department with my story, and they weren’t all dating me.

  “I know there’s little love lost between me and Pris. That’s why I promise I won’t get us involved in any crazy shenanigans. Just a little active listening.”

  My mother set her own plate on the table and plopped down in her chair. “I don’t see what good it can do. Poor Pris looks guilty as sin, and if you go poking around, you’re just going to antagonize these cat people whom you want to woo. You can’t help Pris, but you can sure do some damage to your business prospects.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. McHale,” Jack said with a self-satisfied smile.

  “Not so fast, young man,” she scolded, one finger raised in a motherly assertion of power. Her tone made Packer whine. “I appreciate you caring about my daughter and trying to keep her safe, but don’t go thinking you can tell her what to do. My Izzy has a mind of her own, and she can make her own decisions. And her own mistakes,” she added pointedly, staring at the sauce-covered noodle I was casually lowering for Packer. I was a wildly indulgent pet parent, and both Packer and Jinx had the poor manners to prove it.

  “Mother!” I hissed.

  “Well, it’s true. I don’t care that your sisters and all your school friends called you Dizzy Izzy,” she said, managing to brighten my blush even more. “You’re a smart girl and always have been. Just look at what you’ve done with this business. We all thought you were crazy.”

  “Mother!”

  “Izzy. Clothes for cats?”

  “And dogs,” Rena added helpfully.

  “Right,” my mom continued. “You have to admit it sounds like a crazy business, especially for a normal little town like Merryville, but you’ve actually managed to make it work. We all doubted you—me, your dad, and your sisters—everyone except Aunt Dolly, and look at how wrong we were. I just won’t stand for anyone else giving you short shrift.”

  “I . . . I just—”

  Jack raised a hand to halt my flustered response. “Mrs. McHale, I promise you that I would never underestimate Izzy’s intelligence. I just worry about the size of her heart. The softy who gives illicit noodles to her dog is the softy who may inadvertently run up against some very bad guys . . . and not realize they’re bad guys until it’s too late. I want to protect her from that.”

  “Enough of the smushy-mushy stuff,” Rena said. “I just don’t think Pris did it.”

  We all stopped midchew and turned to face her. Rena seemed like the last person on earth to champion Pris’s cause.

  “What?” Rena said, a forkful of hotdish hovering near her mouth. “Look, Pris is a witch with a capital B and she has fallen on hard times, but what good is stealing a fancy cat ornament going to do her? Where’s she going to sell something like that without people asking questions?”

  Jack raised his eyebrows. “You seem to have given this a lot of thought.”

  Rena grinned. “Like Dolly said, we’ve got some mad investigative skills at this table.” She reached out to exchange a fist bump with Dolly, who was cackling like a guinea fowl. “And thanks to my dad’s love affair with the bottle, I’ve met some pretty sketchy people in my time.”

  “What about poor Mr. Denford’s death?” my mom asked. I’d filled her in on the big fight between Denford and Pris the night before. “Stealing the collar ornament may have been out of Pris’s comfort zone, but it sounds like she had a real bone to pick with Denford. Between needing money and her public display of animosity toward Phillip Denford, she seems like a prime suspect.”

  “The murder means Pris definitely isn’t the bad guy,” Rena said. “Pris never would have killed Denford that way.”

  “I don’t know,” Dolly responded. “That Pris Olson is a tough cookie. I can see her whacking someone without batting an eye.”

  My practical mother gave her fanciful sister a gentle nudge on the arm. “Dorothy. Whacking? You need to stop it with the true-crime television shows.” She frowned. “But you make a good point about Pris having enough mean in her to kill someone.”

  “True,” Rena said. “I didn’t mean that Pris was above committing murder, but not in the way someone killed Phillip. I don’t see scissors as Pris’s weapon of choice. Too up close. Too bloody. Pris would pick poison. Or shoot someone from far away. Maybe even conk someone over the head with a heavy object. But she wouldn’t get her hands all bloody by stabbing someone.”

  Jack shook his head. “This is all very clever, Rena. But I’ve been doing this for ten years now, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: when a person is desperate enough, they can do just about anything.”

  * * *

  Rena, Jack, Dolly, and my mom all headed for their respective homes. With the doors locked and the dishes done, I pulled out my trusty Singer and sat back at the red table for a sewing session. My mind buzzed with thoughts about Pris, Phillip Denford, and all the horrible things I’d seen that day, and sewing always calmed me.

  The talk that evening had inspired me to craft a deerstalker hat for dogs, one that would keep the whole head warm while still allowing for ear mobility. Scraps of corduroy and a sherpa fleece I’d used for snug coats the winter before quickly took shape. I had just run the last seam on my prototype and was debating whether to raid the freezer for a pint of cherry chip or go straight to bed when I heard quiet rapping on the glass portion of the front door.

  I looked up, and the warm glow of the porch light revealed Sean Tucker.

  I quickly backstitched three or four stitches to hold my seam, snipped the thread that tethered the hat to the machine, and—as I shuffled to the door—plopped the hat on a dog-shaped mannequin perched on a shelf near the front of the store.

  “Sean! What brings you out so late at night? Do you want some ice cream?”

>   “Is that a trick question?” Sean’s face lit up with his lopsided grin as he stepped into the store. “I always want ice cream.”

  It was true. Sean Tucker’d had a raging sweet tooth since I’d first met him in the third grade. I always gave him the trick-or-treat candy that no one in the family wanted—the Mary Janes, the Laffy Taffies, and the Bit-O-Honeys. The remarkable thing is that he could hoover up all that sugar and remain whippet thin. Even now, he was in his early thirties, and his waistline hadn’t caught up with his candy addiction.

  He followed me into the first-floor kitchen. As I scooped us dishes of ice cream, I studied him out of the corner of my eye. Sean, Rena, and I had been best friends in both middle and high school, our tight bond broken only when Sean decided to declare his love for me and woo me away from my high school sweetheart, Casey Alter. In retrospect, I realized that he’d been right that stormy night, but at the time I was fixated on the happily-ever-after that Casey and I had planned. The event drove a wedge between us that wasn’t removed until nearly a year earlier, when we’d collaborated in solving a murder.

  I considered him one of my closest friends again, but the line between romance and friendship was a little fuzzy for us. First I’d thought that his high school passion could serve as the basis for a grown-up relationship, but we’d just never seemed to find our way back to that path. Then, when I started dating Jack, he and Sean had become hostile toward each other, acting like romantic rivals. Because we were friends, it wasn’t unusual for Sean to stop by at odd hours, sometimes just to chat, but I never knew if he might suddenly decide that we should be—that we were—more than friends. And I had no idea what Jack would think if he knew that Sean and I were hanging out in the wee hours.

  “Haven’t you been home yet?” His tie was gone, but Sean still wore the suit he’d worn through a day of lawyering.

  “No. You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had.”

  “Back at you.” I handed him his bowl of ice cream.

  “I heard you found Denford’s body?”

  I nodded.

  “That must have been horrible for you. Are you okay?”

  I froze. No one—not even dear, dear Jack, not even my own mother—had asked if I was okay with what I’d seen. And, frankly, I’d thought I was doing just fine. After all, it was my third body. I should have been used to death by then.

  But the moment the words came out of Sean’s mouth, I realized I’d been holding my emotions in all day. Yes, I’d seen dead people before, people I’d known better and liked more than Denford. Still, this was different. More brutal. More real. Phillip’s murder scene was by far the most viscerally violent scene I’d ever witnessed.

  And once Phillip’s meeting with me the morning of his death came to light, I might find myself a suspect. There was no question that I couldn’t keep my secret forever. . . . Thus far I’d only been staving off the inevitable. I had no idea how anyone—especially Jack—would react when the truth eventually came out.

  I felt wobbly inside and could feel tears welling in my eyes.

  Sean took the ice cream from my hands and placed both dishes on the counter, then pulled me into his embrace. The sound of his heart thumping beneath my ear made me lose it. I started sobbing in earnest and wrapped my arms tightly around Sean’s neck. He held me gently, whispering a steady stream of calming nonsense into my hair.

  The storm was hard but quick. I don’t know what possessed me, but as my tears subsided, I straightened in Sean’s arms, looked him dead in the eye, and kissed him.

  It was a nice kiss. No fireworks, no sparks, but a soothing warmth spread through my veins. For his part, Sean stood perfectly still. He didn’t lean in to the kiss or hold me tighter, but he didn’t step away, either. Rather, I was the one who, after just a few short seconds, jumped back as though I’d been teetering on the soft edge of a cliff.

  “Oh God. I’m so, so sorry,” I muttered as I wiped the lingering tears from my face. “That was horrible.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Sean said, his lips quirking up in a wry smile.

  “Oh, no . . . I didn’t mean to . . . Oh heavens. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “You’re apologizing for kissing me. No apology necessary.” I opened my mouth, but he cut me off. “Before you say another word, I know you were overwrought and that you weren’t thinking clearly. I won’t hold you to it. Let’s just pretend it never happened.” He was letting me off the hook, but there was an impatient edge to his voice, one that made me feel small, like I was being a drama queen by thinking the event even merited an apology.

  For the most part, I was overwhelmingly relieved by his comment. But somewhere in the darkest, most shameful corner of my heart, his reaction stung. He was so matter-of-fact about it. The kiss had been spontaneous on my part, the result of an overabundance of emotion in general rather than emotion about Sean specifically. And I did love Sean as one of my oldest and dearest friends, so I didn’t want him to suffer. But his apparent ability to blow it off was a bit of a hit to my ego.

  “Well,” Sean said, picking his bowl back up, “I’ve been retained by Pris Olson. So far she’s been charged only for the theft, but Jerry in the county attorney’s office made it clear they were looking hard at her for the murder, too.” He took a bite of his ice cream, and his eyes fluttered shut as he slipped the spoon from between his lips. “Dang. That hits the spot. Anyway, it took all day, but Hal Olson finally convinced Judge Rancik to arraign Pris after hours and set her bail so she could go home tonight. I feel like I’ve been at the courthouse for a week rather than a single day.”

  “You must be exhausted.”

  “Yeah, but I still wanted to see you. Pris is so wound up about the arrest and the indignity of spending hours in a holding cell that she couldn’t think straight. The only information I got, I got from the cops and the prosecutors; talking to Pris was like talking to a wall. But I want to do some damage control on this ASAP. I want to point the police in a different direction before they get around to indicting my client for murder. So I wanted to talk to someone who was actually there today, actually at the scene of the crime.”

  “I don’t know what I can tell you. Denford must have been killed sometime before everyone arrived this morning. I mean, his body was in the middle of a crowded room. But the jewels were on display before the lights went out. I’d been admiring Jolly’s handiwork not fifteen minutes earlier. It was only after the lights came back on that I noticed they were missing . . . and no one else reported seeing anything amiss before then, either.”

  “That’s helpful. So the murder and the theft weren’t committed at the same time. Maybe not even by the same people.”

  “No one will believe that,” I said. “The two crimes were committed in such physical and temporal proximity, everyone will assume that there’s only one perpetrator.”

  He leaned back against the counter, ankles crossed, and stared into the middle distance for a while. “What about Pris?”

  “What about her?”

  “Well, was she acting funny this morning?”

  “She had some sort of blowout with Phillip yesterday afternoon, but I didn’t see her in the ballroom at all this morning. At least, not until the lights came back on. I was a few minutes late to the opening of the show. Rena said she saw Pris before I got there, but by the time I arrived, I couldn’t find her anywhere. And I was looking for her, because we had business to discuss. If she was in the ballroom at all before the blackout, she’d left by the time I got there.”

  “Really? She insists she was in the room, at her station, the whole morning.”

  “Well, that’s weird. Why would she insist she was at the scene of the crime—a statement that makes her look guilty—when I’m mighty sure she was gone?”

  “Her being gone when you got to the ballroom doesn’t exactly get her off the hook, especially if Phillip was killed bef
ore the masses started showing up this morning. But still, you’re right that she’d want to distance herself as much as possible from the location, if only to provide an alibi for the theft of the dangle.”

  “I feel like I know Pris pretty well, but I don’t always understand why she does the things she does. The woman moves in mysterious ways.”

  “Well, you certainly know Pris a lot better than I do. Is she capable of these crimes?”

  “Rena made a pretty good case at dinner that the crimes aren’t Pris’s style. She’s more subtle. She would have found a way to embezzle money from someone, or helped Hal with one of his many scams, rather than steal an actual thing out from under everyone’s noses. But Pris has been under pressure lately, and so who knows?”

  “But does she have it in her to break the law? Ignoring how the crimes were committed, does she have it in her to steal and kill?”

  “There are times when I actually enjoy Pris’s company, but I’m always aware that her moral compass is a bit askew. Under the right circumstances, I could see her as a killer.”

  Sean sighed. “Yeah, that’s the impression I got, too. And whatever happens, I can’t let her get in front of a jury. She’s so . . . so . . .”

  “Superior? Dismissive? Snide?” I offered.

  He laughed. “Yes. That. All of that.”

  “Listen,” I said, “I know our friendship took a real blow that night of the storm.” The night an eighteen-year-old Sean Tucker pledged his love to me and begged me to dump my boyfriend. The night I shot him down and told him I didn’t love him. The night he rode his bike off into the darkness and the rain and commenced a fifteen-year stretch of silence between us.

  “It did,” he conceded.

  “But we’re still friends, right? We’ve gotten past that bitterness?”

  He blinked, considering. “I’m not sure I’ll ever be totally past that, Izzy, but yes, we’re still friends.”

  I sighed in relief. “Then I have a major favor to ask. As your friend. If you haven’t really talked with Pris about the theft and the murder, could you still back out of representing her?”