by Lynn Bohart
“Okay, he’s not bad looking,” I said. “But so what? Right now he thinks I’m a killer.”
She chuckled. “I doubt it. But just the same, let him know about Ms. Jenkins and anyone else who saw you wrap the box.”
“I will,” I said.
“Okay,” April said. She picked up the empty plate and started for the kitchen. On her way back, she happened to glance at the Hello Kitty phone next to my chair. “Why is your mother’s phone out?”
She scooped it up, and I tensed.
“Uh… I was just going through a drawer and found it.”
“There are a lot of nonprofits that collect these, you know? They can make money off them. You could give it to one of them.”
“No,” I said quickly, grabbing it out of her hand. “I’m going to keep it.”
She paused, staring at me.
“Okay, what’s going on?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “You’re exuding enough nervous energy to power a mini-mall. Something has happened. Something having to do with your mother, apparently.”
I took a deep breath, wondering if I should tell her the truth. I busied myself with brushing imaginary crumbs off the table into my hand, giving myself time to think. The thought of admitting that my mother was calling me on her cell phone made me dizzy, but if anyone would believe me, it would be April. As I got up and pretended to throw the crumbs into the trash, she interrupted my thoughts.
“Yes, you should tell me the truth.”
I spun around. “You know how spooky that is, don’t you? How do you do that anyway? You’ve never told me.”
“Don’t change the subject. What’s up?”
She narrowed her eyes, scrutinizing me, and then tilted her head as she seemed to listen to some inner voice. Then her eyes grew wide.
“Oh, my God, you’ve been talking to your mother!”
My heart almost jumped into my throat. “Okay, I give up,” I said, slumping into the chair again. “Between you and my mother, I’ll never have any secrets again.”
April began to laugh. “Well, at least now you’ll understand a little bit of what I go through. So, tell me, what happened?”
I related the activity on my mother’s phone and what she’d said. April didn’t seem surprised at all, other than the fact that my mother had chosen to contact me on her cell phone. She thought that was pretty creative.
“How do you feel about it?” she asked me.
“What?”
“Having your mother…your dead mother…contact you.”
“Well… it’s really weird and kind of creepy, if in fact it really was her. But if it was her, it’s kind of nice, too. I mean, how many people actually talk to someone they loved after they’ve died…or, for that matter, anyone after they’ve died?”
“Consider yourself lucky,” April said. “Maybe now you’ll finally get rid of her.”
I gasped. “What do you mean?”
She laughed. “I mean get rid of her ashes, along with all the dead dogs and cats you have out in the garage.”
All my friends teased me about the fact that I had stored the ashes of two of my past dogs and one cat in the garage, along with my mother. Truth be told, my mother had always wanted to be buried in Illinois next to her sister; I just hadn’t had the time to take her ashes back there, yet. And I had always planned on planting a special garden just for the animals. But I hadn’t done that yet, either.
“Do you think that’s why she’s still here, because I have her ashes?”
“No. But if we’re talking about weird and creepy, having her ashes in the garage is all that.”
“She’d think it was funny, you know,” I said with a smile. “She’d throw back her head and let out that cackle of hers.”
Suddenly, there was a catch in my throat as I heard my mother’s throaty laugh in my mind. April picked up on it immediately and changed the subject.
“Well, at least you’re only hearing from one individual. It’s more difficult when you hear from many.”
I quickly wiped a tear away. “Is that what it’s like for you?”
April paused a moment and then seemed to make a decision. “That’s a conversation for another time,” she said, standing up.
She’d only shared bits and pieces of her gift with me over the years. Instead I usually just watched from a distance as she seemed to know things that no one else knew. Sometimes it only surprised me, but many times it freaked me out. At least now that I’d had my own experience, I had someone who understood what I was going through.
“Don’t fight it,” she said. “Your mom will have your best interests at heart. And who knows, she might be able to help.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got to get going. I won’t see you until Monday, but I’ll call José and Crystal tomorrow. You ought to talk to Sybil.”
“Lucky me,” I said with a sneer.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was early Sunday morning when I climbed out of bed, my body protesting loudly. Life was weighing me down and I felt it in my bones.
I got dressed and then decided to charge my mother’s phone, just in case. I plugged it in and was about to make breakfast when my landline rang.
“Julia, you need to get over to the barn!”
It was April.
“What do you mean? What’s happened?”
“Someone’s broken into the warehouse.”
She was breathing hard and her voice was shaking.
“It’s… it’s awful.”
“I’ll call the police and be right there,” I said.
I hung up and stopped, staring at the wall. How could this be happening? I took a deep breath and quickly called 911 to report the incident. Then I ran out the door and around the north end of the inn, up the garden steps, and across the drive to the old carriage barn.
I used the side door to come directly into the antique storeroom. What I found stopped me in my tracks. The room was 1,000 square feet, with a cement floor and a row of horse stalls we’d left in place on the far wall to store small things like collectibles, antique utensils and old hand tools, all waiting to be displayed inside the inn at some point. The hay loft above was used to store extra lumber and rods. The major portion of the room was used for furniture, which we stored in rows, some stacked on top of one another.
Every table in the room had been tipped over, and any that had drawers in them had been pulled out and tossed aside. Dining room tables, writing tables, side tables, even library tables. In addition, two large bookcases along the left wall that held antique books had been swept clean, leaving fragile, decades-old books piled on the floor, many of them with their spines broken.
It took me a good minute to finally move from the doorway into the room. April sat in a straight-back chair and looked up when I stepped inside.
“Julia,” she said, starting to rise. “I’m so sorry.”
I stopped, because I was speechless. I swallowed and then said, “The police will be here in a minute. Why don’t you go call José and then wait out front for them?”
She left me to wander around by myself, my breath catching every few feet as I came upon another dismal scene. Beautiful pieces had been marred, cracked, or broken. Others, like turn-of-the-century beds or flour mills had been left alone. I weaved my way up and down the aisles, mentally calculating the damage. When I made my way back to where we actually refinished furniture, what I found stopped me. I wondered if April had even been back this far.
Across the room, the office door had been broken open and the small enclosure trashed. Papers were strewn across the floor. The drawers from the small desk had been pulled out and emptied. The shelf above the desk had also been swept clean. But before I could even get to the office, I stopped to survey Martha’s table, which Mr. Garth had begun work on only the day before. There wasn’t much left. It had been a beautiful ebony-stained drop-leaf table with two leaves that could be raised for extra sea
ting. But it wasn’t beautiful anymore. It had been smashed to pieces. Not merely turned over or broken like the other tables. It had been utterly demolished.
Before I could move, I felt someone at my shoulder and turned to find April.
“Who would do this?” she said.
She leaned over and lifted up the pink inventory slip that had been taped to the table. It was marked with the date, Martha’s name and address, and the price I paid for it. We attached them to all the furniture until we had them logged in for inventory purposes. April held it in her hand. Then she lifted her eyes to the office across the room.
“What’s going on, Julia? What’s this all about?”
“I don’t know.” I reached out and took the inventory slip from her hand and looked down at it. “But, I’m beginning to get an idea.”
José appeared behind us with Detective Franks. José glanced around nervously, shifting his weight as if I might accuse him of something. Detective Franks was dressed more casually in jeans and a Seahawks jacket. He’d gotten there so quickly, I wondered if he lived close by. A single uniformed police officer stood to the side.
“What happened?” Detective Franks asked, surveying the scene.
“April found it this way when she came in this morning.”
“Do you think this was the same person at the house the other night, Ms. Applegate?” Jose asked, his eyes roaming across the damage. “The one who attacked you?”
Detective Franks threw a suspicious look at José.
“And where were you during all of this?”
José looked up at him. “I went out with friends last night,” he said a bit defensively.
“You were gone all evening?”
“Yes,” he said, glancing at me.
“And you didn’t see anything suspicious before you left?” Detective Franks asked.
José shook his head, his dark eyes darting back and forth to me and then to April.
“No,” he said. “And I didn’t see anything.”
“What about that?” Detective Franks said, pointing to the wall behind us.
We all turned around.
“What?” My hand flew to my mouth.
Spray painted on the wall was “X3” in graffiti bubble writing.
“Looks like someone tagged your wall,” Detective Franks said. “Know anything about that, young man?”
Sweat was beginning to glisten on José’s forehead.
“No, sir.”
Detective Franks eyed him carefully.
“You can wait outside, but I’m going to want to talk to you later.”
José left, while Detective Franks turned to the other officer.
“Keep an eye on him.”
The officer nodded and left.
April touched my shoulder.
“I’ll be in the bakery.”
She left as Detective Franks wandered past the table to the office door and glanced inside. Then he surveyed the pile of books on the floor. “Do you have any idea why someone would do this?” he asked quietly.
“I had an idea,” I exhaled, shaking my head. I was close to tears and was straining to hold it together. “Until that,” I said, indicating the graffiti.
“What do you mean?” he asked, his eyes holding mine.
I showed him the inventory tag.
“This tag was taped to this table,” I said, nodding to the pile of rubble at my feet. “It’s the only one completely destroyed. And it was Martha’s. I picked it up the other night from her home. Mr. Garth, the man who refinishes our furniture, set it up and began to work on it yesterday.”
He glanced down at the table. “But why would the table be significant?”
I looked down and used my toe to sift through the debris. A brass drawer pull caught my attention, and I leaned over and picked it up.
“Maybe because it had a drawer,” I said, showing him the drawer pull. “Probably a hidden drawer. That’s not unusual in these old pieces of furniture. Maybe there was something in the drawer.” I looked back at some of the other furniture that had been turned over. “It seems like whoever did this came in through the side door and worked their way back, looking for tables with drawers in them. If you’ll notice, all the drawers have been pulled out. They didn’t know which table was Martha’s, until they found this tag,” I said, holding up the tag again.
“And then they struck gold,” he said.
“But if they found the drawer and whatever was in it,” I said with a frown, “why did they destroy the table and bother with the bookshelves and the office?”
Detective Franks followed my gaze towards the bookcases.
“My guess is that they didn’t find what they wanted in the drawer,” he said. “And they thought maybe you had.”
He shifted those gorgeous brown eyes my way.
“That can’t be good,” I said with a slight tremor to my voice.
“No,” he agreed. “But the graffiti may change all of that. It could be gang-related. Or maybe your maintenance man has some enemies. Do you know much about his background?”
“No,” I shook my head. “Other than he grew up in Southern California. But, Detective, he doesn’t belong to any gang. I’m sure of it.”
“You wouldn’t be the first one to be fooled, you know. We’ll have to do a thorough background check on him, and frankly, everyone else. But right now, let’s see if anything was stolen and how they got in. Then we can try to figure out what, if anything, this has to do with Mrs. Denton’s death or local gang activity.”
Just then, April appeared at the back door to the bakery.
“What is it?” I asked, seeing the stricken look on her face.
“You’d better come with me,” she said to both of us. “They also broke into the bakery.”
We followed her into the back of the bakery, passing shelves that stored ingredients, a large refrigerator, set of commercial sinks, a commercial oven, and two counters. So far, everything looked normal–until we got to her office. April had a floor-to-ceiling bookcase filled with cookbooks in her office—or, she used to. Now the majority of the books had been thrown to the floor. Her desk had also been swept clean and the drawers emptied. Her office looked hauntingly similar to what’s left behind after a hurricane, minus the water damage. And April looked like she was ready to supply the water. Tears were streaming down her face.
“What in the world would anyone want with my cookbooks?”
Detective Franks was glancing around the small enclosure, then out to the commercial kitchen.
“You’re the cook?” he said to April.
She flashed a look in his direction.
“She’s my partner,” I corrected him. “April runs the bakery, and yes, she does much of the cooking.”
“So you normally come in first thing in the morning and start cooking.”
He was scrutinizing April as if he thought he was about to catch her in a lie.
“Normally, yes,” she said.
“So why didn’t you notice this when you came in?” He nodded to the office mess.
So, there it was. He really did suspect she was hiding something and, unfortunately, April didn’t look like she was going to be much help in clearing it up. Her eyes kept darting over to me, and her expression looked like she’d inadvertently swallowed a fly.
“I…uh…I went into the warehouse first this morning, looking for an old cookbook I saw in there. I was thinking of duplicating a recipe.”
That sounded perfectly reasonable to me. I glanced Detective Frank’s way, wondering what he thought, but Sybil’s foghorn of a voice split through the growing tension in the room.
“Julia, are you okay?” she called from the warehouse.
Before I knew it, my nosey neighbor had waltzed her way past the ovens and was at my elbow, her eyes wide.
“Oh my stars! What happened? I saw the police car pass my house and thought maybe someone had died again. But this is tragic. All of your antiques…”
“T
he bakery and the warehouse were broken into last night,” I said, barely controlling my temper. “We’ve lost a lot of the antiques, and we’re just trying to find out if anything was stolen. We’re kind of busy…”
“Why would anyone want to steal anything from in here?” she said, hands on her hips. “It’s just a bunch of…”
“Sybil!” April barked at her.
Sybil stopped mid-sentence, those marble blue eyes staring out from behind her glasses.
“We need to finish here,” April said.
April’s message was clear. She wanted Sybil to leave. So, of course, Sybil didn’t. She turned to me and merely shifted gears.
“Why don’t I go and get the puppies, Julia? You have too much to deal with here. I’ll just take them to my place and you can get them in the mornin’. Then you can tell me all about it.”
I had to admit, I thought that was a good idea since I hadn’t even fed them, yet.
“That would be great. Thanks. You know where their dog food is. They haven’t eaten.”
“Oh, stars,” she waved me away. “Don’t worry about that. I have plenty of food and Pepsi will be thrilled.”
Pepsi was her Chihuahua. I hate Chihuahuas.
“Call me if you need me. Mornin’, Libby.”
As she exited out the front, I saw that Libby had arrived.
“Julia, Mr. Stillwater just said he’ll be leaving, and Ms. Jenkins is in the breakfast room…” She stopped and her eyes grew wide when she saw April’s office.
I turned to April, who seemed to have left this planet for a moment. Her eyes were glazed over as she just stared at her office. I gave her arm a squeeze, bringing her out of her reverie.
“Okay if we take some pastries over from the bakery for breakfast? You can stay here with the police and I’ll be back over as soon as I can.”
“Of course,” she said numbly.
“C’mon, Libby,” I said, steering her away. “Let’s load up on some stuff.”
Her eyes lingered on the mess in April’s office as we moved to the display cases. Libby and I gathered up the pastries and a load of donuts and put them into a big box. Before we headed back to the inn, I glanced back at April, who looked like she was about to cry again. I thought if we didn’t solve this mystery soon, I could start losing staff and business partners as fast as I seemed to be losing guests.
