Hot Cider and a Murder

by Kathleen Suzette

  “Can I tell you something?” she leaned forward and asked in a near whisper.

  I thought she’d never ask. “Please do,” I said, leaning forward.

  “A while back I saw Daphne at a bar with her boss, Alex Stedman. I guess that sounds like gossip, but I was so surprised. Wasn’t she dating Jack Farrell for a long time?”

  “Yes, that’s what I heard. I don’t know how long they were together, but I think they’ve been broken up for a while now.”

  “Oh, then that must explain it,” she said thoughtfully and reached around behind her to the credenza and turned on the candle warmer. “They may have already been broken up when I saw her and Alex. My mother and Alex’s mother were friends years ago. I can still remember when Alex was born. He was such a cute baby.”

  “Explain what?” I asked, puzzled.

  She shrugged. “I saw them at a table in the corner at the bar. It just seemed kind of, you know, unusual.”

  “What do you mean unusual?” I wasn’t sure what she was getting at here, but I wanted to know exactly what she had in mind.

  “It seemed intimate,” she said, whispering the last word. She nodded her head and looked at her hands as if the word frightened her.

  I bit my bottom lip, thinking. “Really? You don’t think it could have been just an evening out after work? Sometimes co-workers do that to unwind after a long day.”

  She shook her head, looking up at me. “No. It didn’t seem that way at all. And I guess it was unimportant until she was murdered.” She shrugged. “Maybe I’m making more of it than there is. But I saw him reach across and put his hand on hers.”

  This was interesting. Alex had told me he had fired Daphne, but now they were spending what appeared to be an intimate evening together? Georgia had seen them at a ball game together, but Jack Farrell had said Alex was putting pressure on her to date him. “Can you remember when that was?”

  She thought about it a moment and then flipped over the pages of a calendar on her desk. “If I remember right, it was back in April. Silas and I had gone out to celebrate—well, just to celebrate.” Her eyes watered at the memory, making me feel sorry again that I had asked her if she had killed Silas.

  Alex had said he had let Daphne go in June, and it made me wonder. Had Daphne and Alex had a relationship before she was fired? Why would she have been willingly spending her free time with Alex if he had been pressuring her to date him? It didn’t make sense. And if they were actually seeing one another, it would have been a terrible blow for her when he fired her.

  “That’s something to think about,” I said carefully. I didn’t want to give away too much. “When I see Cade again, I’ll mention it. Alex was at the party the night she died, but so were a lot of other people.”

  “I don’t know Alex well, but I heard he was a ladies’ man,” she said, nodding. “I suppose that’s just gossip, but I heard he cheated on the last two women that he dated.”

  “Really? I went to school with Alex, and I didn’t think he was that kind of person.” Alex had always been friendly and open, but I couldn’t remember him ever being the flirtatious type. For him to cheat didn’t seem to be in his nature. For some reason it made me feel a little defensive. Alex had been a friend at one time.

  She shrugged. “Like I said, maybe it’s just gossip. Sometimes breakups don’t go well, and maybe it’s just bitterness coming from those women.”

  I nodded. Alex always seemed like an upstanding person, and I didn’t like the thought of him possibly murdering Daphne. But I hadn’t been in contact with Alex for years. People changed, and I really didn’t have insight into his life at this point.

  “You know how small towns are,” I said lightly. “Everybody seems to know something about everyone else. Maybe it was just an innocent evening out.”

  She nodded, but I don’t think she believed it. “Well, I just thought I would mention it. I would hate to keep quiet about it if it ended up being something important.”

  “I’m glad you told me, Karen,” I assured her. “You never can tell when something is important. And it’s better to have too much information than not enough.”

  She nodded and smiled. “Did you hear Gina Richards was opening up a flower shop?”

  I stared at her. “No. I hadn’t heard that.” My mother owned the only flower shop in Sparrow after her business rival had met an untimely demise several months earlier. I hadn’t heard so much as a whisper about a new flower shop opening up.

  She nodded. “I thought you knew. It’s on Fifth Avenue, not two blocks from your mother’s shop.”

  “Really?” I felt the color drain from my face. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that someone would eventually open a flower shop, but for some reason, it shocked me.

  She nodded. “I drove by yesterday, and they were hanging the sign up out front. Didn’t your mother know about it? Not that it matters. Your mother is the best florist around and everyone loves her.”

  I nodded numbly. If my mother knew about it, she would have mentioned it. If the new flower shop was on Fifth Avenue, that meant it was around the corner from my mother’s shop and she probably never drove down that street. We considered the Richardses to be friends. I would have thought they would have mentioned it at some point, but with Daphne dying, I suppose it was the furthest thing from their minds. But planning a new business would have been in the works for months.

  “Maybe she forgot to mention it,” I said. “I’ve been so busy since I moved out of her house and into mine. There’s so much to do, I haven’t had the time to stop by and visit with her like I should.”

  She nodded sympathetically. “How’s the new article going?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “I’ll have it finished before I leave today. I was hoping there’d be enough room to run a couple of recipes along with it. I think people would appreciate having them.”

  “Well, Calvin Hodges is in charge of that so you better ask him. I think it would be a great idea.”

  I brightened. Writing about food was my specialty. “I’m excited about this job, Karen, and I just can’t thank you enough for hiring me on. I owe you one for that.” I still wanted to smooth things over so that things would be a little easier between the two of us. I really did like Karen. She lived two doors down from my mother, and I had known her for a long time.

  “I’m glad that you’re on board,” she said, avoiding eye contact. “Well, I don’t want to keep you from that article. I’m sure you’re eager to get at it.”

  I got to my feet. “I am really excited about it,” I said. “Let me know if you hear anything else, Karen.”

  I returned to my desk and sat down and texted Cade. I didn’t know if what Karen had told me would amount to anything, but I didn’t want to be the one who was sitting on information in case it was important.

  Chapter Eleven

  The idea of a new flower shop in town ate at me the entire time I was at work. I got my article written quickly and added three quick and easy fall recipes, including the fall punch I had made for the party. I came up with the easiest recipes I had that embodied fall and added those to the article. I figured if Calvin Hodges, our editor, didn’t like them or didn’t have enough room, he could remove them, but I hoped they stayed. It really spruced up the article.

  I hadn’t bothered texting my mother to ask about the new flower shop. If she knew about it, she would have told me immediately. I didn’t think my mother would feel threatened by the competition because she had so many years of experience as a florist. And Karen was right—people really liked my mother, in spite of her sometimes-smart-alecky mouth. But something about the situation didn’t sit well with me, and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to stop by and see how things were going.

  I pulled up and parked in front of the new flower shop. Gina had named it Happy Petals. I sighed. It was cute. I got out of my car and peered in the window. Things weren’t quite set up for business yet, but I went to the front door and pushed it o
pen. Gina was squatted down, wiping the glass front doors of a large refrigerated case. She turned to look when she heard the door open.

  She smiled, blond hair shining beneath the fluorescent lights. “Hi, Rainey, how are you today?”

  I gave her a smile back. I wasn’t going to let on that I was surprised about the shop. “I’m doing great, Gina. How are you?”

  “I’m doing wonderfully well. As you can see, I’m getting ready to open for business.” She lit up at the mention of the shop.

  I nodded. “A new florist shop? I guess Sparrow was due one since The Perfect Flower Shop closed.”

  “And that was exactly when I decided to open up my shop. I meant to stop by and speak to your mother about it, but things have been so busy. When I told Tim about my idea for the flower shop, he was so excited, you should have seen him. He has helped me so much with this, and we’re both ecstatic about this opportunity.”

  “New businesses are a lot of work,” I said, nodding and walking closer to her, looking at the display case she was working on. It looked like it was used but in good condition. “It takes an awful lot of time and energy to get it started, doesn’t it?”

  “I had no idea how much work this would be,” she said and laughed. “But I’m always up for a challenge. This whole thing has been such fun!”

  “Gina, how are Bryan and Lana doing? And Mark and Tim?”

  She rolled her eyes, catching herself in the middle of it. “Oh, they’re fine. You know how it is; they’ll grieve for a while but life goes on. They’re strong people.”

  Life goes on? I could hardly believe she had just said that. “Well, it was their only daughter and sister who died,” I pointed out.

  She snorted. “You know what? That girl was trouble ever since I met her. Her drinking was completely out of control, and she caused her family so much heartache. I’m not saying it’s a good thing that she died, because nobody wants that. But you don’t know how bad things had been in the family for so long because of her.”

  “I’m sure addiction causes a lot of problems in families.”

  “You want to know something else?” she asked, not looking at me.

  “What?” I asked, folding my arms across my chest. I didn’t know what she had to tell me, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be nice.

  “I wasn’t the only one in the family who was tired of her drama.” She stood and looked at me, waiting for me to ask who else was tired of Daphne’s drama.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Mark could hardly stand her. There was so much competition between the two of them,” she said. “Family get-togethers were miserable. They were always trying to one-up each other. It was kind of sad and pathetic, if you want to know the truth.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said with a sigh. Gina was wearing on me. “I can see where things would be hard with her drinking being out of control.”

  She nodded. “You know that job she had with Alex Stedman?” she asked, turning away from the refrigerated display case. “She took that job away from Mark.”

  “What do you mean she took that job away from Mark?” Alex had said Mark applied for the job after he let Daphne go.

  “What I mean is, Mark had gone down there and interviewed for the job. It looked like Alex Stedman was going to hire him. But when Daphne heard that he was about to be hired on there, she ran down there and sweet-talked her way into Alex Stedman’s business. And most likely his personal life, but you didn’t hear that from me.” She lifted an eyebrow when she said the last part.

  I looked at her, taking this in. “Maybe Alex never had any intention of hiring Mark?” Alex had told me Mark applied for a job after Daphne was fired, but he left off the part where Mark had applied for the job in the beginning and hired Daphne instead. Had he applied two different times?

  She shook her head. “No way. He’d already made Mark an offer, but he had a business meeting to attend before finishing things up. When he got back from the business trip, he told Mark that there were serious financial considerations and he would be unable to hire anyone at that point. A month later he hired Daphne.”

  I looked at her wide-eyed. “Well, that would really stink, wouldn’t it? Losing out on a job only to have your sister hired for the same position you thought you were going to get.”

  She nodded. “You better believe it. When Mark found out, he was livid. He wouldn’t speak to Daphne for six months, and the only reason he began speaking to her again was because their silence tore his parents up. Lana and Bryan hated to see any kind of trouble between the kids, but they sure didn’t try to stop the trouble when it was Daphne who started it.”

  If what Gina was saying about Daphne was true, I could see the ways in which life in that family had to have been pretty miserable. “That’s a real shame. It really would make life difficult having to live with that kind of thing.”

  She nodded. “I don’t know why Bryan and Lana put up with her shenanigans like they did. Honestly, if they would have put their foot down earlier in Daphne’s life, she might still be alive now. Her drinking might not have been so completely out of control.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked her. It seemed like Gina jumped to conclusions quickly. She’d be a real peach to be around for any length of time.

  “They spoiled her. Being the only girl, and especially being daddy’s little girl, she got whatever she wanted. You would’ve thought that with Mark being the baby in the family, it would have been him to get all the attention. But it wasn’t; it was Daphne. She got away with anything she wanted. When we were in school, she was constantly being called into the principal’s office because she had no respect for authority and was always disrupting class. Of course her parents shrugged it off. Daphne never got into trouble.”

  “That sounds like a nightmare,” I said.

  “That’s exactly the word for it. Look, it’s not like I didn’t like Daphne. She had her moments. One time, right after Tim and I got married, I had made a really big mistake when I was paying our bills. I was a newlywed and had never had the responsibility of balancing the checkbook and making sure the bills were paid, and somehow I messed up my checkbook. Well, I told Daphne what I had done, and she loaned me fifteen hundred dollars so the checks wouldn’t bounce.”

  “That’s really nice of her, considering you all didn’t get along well,” I said.

  She shrugged. “She could be nice when she wanted to be. And it’s not like I enjoyed not getting along with her. I would have loved to have had her be my friend, but all she did was stir up trouble.”

  “What a shame that everybody couldn’t get along,” I observed, hoping she would go on. She was moving right up the ranks of people I thought might have killed Daphne.

  She nodded. “You want to know something else? She got me fired from my job at the grocery store. She went and told the manager that I was rude to her, without telling him that she was my sister-in-law.”

  “Really? Didn’t the manager ask for her name?”

  “She gave him a phony one. After I got fired, she told me what she had done and laughed about it,” she said. Her cheeks turned pink as she spoke, and I thought that Gina probably hadn’t forgiven Daphne for what she had done. But I did have to wonder why a store manager would fire an employee with just one complaint.

  “So how was your job going before she did that? I mean, were there other complaints?”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “No, I didn’t have any other complaints against me. But I was still in my ninety-day probationary period. And that manager, let’s just say he was known for being a jerk. From what the other employees told me, he loved to write people up, and if he got the chance to fire someone, he jumped on it. And of course, since I was still on probation, I was easy pickings.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry that happened,” I said. I wondered if things really happened the way she was saying they did. It seemed extreme that anyone, even a bad boss, would just fire someone from one complaint,
especially when that complaint had come from someone whose identification he hadn’t even gotten.

  “Well, I better get back to work. I’ve got so many plans and so much to do,” she said shrugging and smiling again, having recovered from her anger at the memory of Daphne’s betrayal.

  “When are you going to open the shop?” I asked.

  “It’ll probably be at least a month. I had hoped to be open sooner than this, but Tim’s parents wouldn’t loan us the money at first.” She rolled her eyes. “If it had been Daphne asking for the money, you can bet they’d have ponied it up real fast.”

  “Opening a new business is expensive,” I agreed.

  “Yeah, it is. But we finally got them to see things our way. Sparrow needs another flower shop, and I have so many great ideas. At least we’ll be open before Christmas.”

  “The Christmas season is an important time of year for a flower shop to be open,” I said, pushing down the feelings of resentment. I knew I had nothing to worry about where my mom was concerned, but the fact was, I was annoyed about the prospect of another flower shop opening up.

  We talked for a few more minutes and then I left. Gina left me with more questions than answers. All she had done was complain about Daphne and her family, and it made me wonder about her. Tim’s parents had come up with the money for the new business but only after Gina had worked on them for a while. It took a lot of nerve to pester your in-laws for money they didn’t want to give. It made me wonder if some of that family trouble she talked about was because of her own actions and had nothing to do with Daphne.

  Chapter Twelve

  “What have you got for us today, Rainey?” Sam asked as I pulled a pan out of the oven. “I smell cinnamon.”

  I set the cake pan on a rack, inhaling the wonderful scent of cinnamon and nutmeg. “You got it right. Cinnamon, plus a liberal dose of nutmeg. I made a cinnamon crumb cake.”